News briefs for April 11, 2018.

News briefs for April 10, 2018. Feral Interactive today released GameMode, an open-source tool that helps Linux users get the best performance out of their games. According to the press release, "GameMode instructs your CPU to automatically run in Performance Mode when playing games." Rise of the Tomb Raider, which is being released later this month, will be the first release to integrate this tool. GameMode is available now via GitHub.

News briefs for April 9, 2018. Feral Interactive confirms: "Lara Croft is returning to Linux in Rise of the Tomb Raider later this month, shortly after macOS. Specs will be announced closer to launch. In the meantime, gear up for adventure with our Linux livestream tomorrow at 6PM BST / 10AM PDT on Twitch."

News briefs for April 6, 2018. Linux kernel developer, free software activist and Google engineer Matthew Garrett discovered that Symantec is using a Linux distro based on the QCA Software Development Kit (QSDK) project: "This is a GPLv2-licensed, open-source platform built around the Linux-based OpenWrt Wi-Fi router operating system" (if true, this means Symantic needs to share the Norton Core Router's code). So, Garrett tweeted "Hi @NortonOnline the Norton Core is clearly running Linux and the license requires you to distribute the kernel source code so where can I get it?"

News briefs for April 5, 2018. Subutai recently announced that its Subutai Blockchain Router v2.0 is in production: "This broadband cloud router serves as a 'plug-and-play' cryptocurrency wallet and mining device with energy savings of 10x over traditional mining methods, and also allows users to share and rent their idle computer resources by registering their computers with the Subutai Bazaar."

News briefs for April 4, 2018. Richard Stallman writes "A radical proposal to keep personal data safe" in The Guardian: "The surveillance imposed on us today is worse than in the Soviet Union. We need laws to stop this data being collected in the first place."

Mozilla announced Firefox Reality today, "Bringing the Immersive Web to Mixed Reality Headsets". Firefox Reality is the only open source browser for mixed reality and the first cross-platform browser for mixed reality. See The Mozilla Blog for more details.

News briefs for April 2, 2018. Linux 4.16 was released yesterday. Linus says "the take from final week of the 4.16 release looks a lot like rc7, in that about half of it is networking. If it wasn't for that, it would all be very small and calm."

News briefs for March 30, 2018. Happy 20th Anniversary to Mozilla! Mozilla is celebrating its 20th anniversary tomorrow by adding four new topics to the Mozilla Manifesto launched in 2007. To summarize, Mozilla is committed to an internet that "includes all the peoples of the earth", "promotes civil discourse, human dignity, and individual expression", "elevates critical thinking, reasoned argument, shared knowledge, and verifiable facts" and "catalyzes collaboration among diverse communities working together for the common good". You can see the full addendum here, and Mozilla invites you to share your support via Twitter.

News briefs for March 29, 2018. The Qubes security-oriented OS has released version 4.0. Major changes in this version include "fully virtualized VMs for enhanced security", "a powerful new VM volume manager that makes it easy to keep VMs on external drives", "more secure backups with scrypt for stronger key derivation and enforced encryption" and "rewritten command-line tools with new options. See the release notes for more information, and download Qubes here.

The US Court of Appeals has reversed a 2016 jury decision on Google's use of Oracle's Java APIs as fair use. The damages could amount to nearly $9 billion for Google. According to The Register, Corynne McSherry, legal director for the EFF, claims the reversal bodes ill for small software companies, saying "This entire case has been a travesty start to finish."

News briefs for March 27, 2018. Mozilla today announced a new Facebook Container add-on for Firefox that prevents Facebook from tracking you around the web: "Facebook Container works by isolating your Facebook identity into a separate container that makes it harder for Facebook to track your visits to other websites with third-party cookies." See also the Mozilla blog for more on the story.

News briefs for March 26, 2018. Linux Mint recently announced the new MintBox Mini 2. The new Mini is "just as small as the original MintBox Mini and the MintBox Mini Pro but with much better specifications, better performance and a few more features". The new Mini 2 has an Intel 8260 chipset, which provides WiFi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.2. You can upgrade the RAM to 16GB, and the device is easy to open. The front has two USB 3.0 ports, audio and micro jacks and a microSD slot, as well as two LEDs. The MintBox Mini 2 will be around the same price as the original MintBox Mini and is expected to be available worldwide in June 2018.

News briefs for March 23, 2018. The Vivaldi browser has teamed up with DuckDuck Go to offer a more private search experience. According to Jon von Tetzchner on the Vivaldi team blog, "With this update, Vivaldi becomes the first browser to enable a default Private Search, and allows you to set a default search engine exclusively for Private Window browsing. Unlike in other browsers, when you open a Private Window in Vivaldi, you will find DuckDuckGo enabled as your default search engine. When you search using DuckDuckGo, your search history is not tracked in any way."

News briefs for March 22, 2018. Mozilla is accepting applications for its 2018–2019 Internet Fellowships: "Mozilla Fellows are technologists, activists, and policy experts building a more humane digital world." Apply here. Applications are due April 20, 2018 at 5pm EDT.

News briefs for March 20, 2018. GStreamer, the cross-platform multimedia framework, announced a new major stable release yesterday. The new version 1.14.0 has lots of new features and bug fixes, including WebRTC support, "experimental support for the next-gen royalty-free AV1 video codec", Video4Linux encoding support and more. See the release notes for more info.

News briefs for March 21, 2018. Google announced several new security features for its Cloud Platform today, including the Google Security Command Center, VPC Service Controls and Cloud Armor. For more details, see the reports on GeekWire, Wired and TechCrunch.

News briefs for March 19, 2018. Tails 3.6.1 is out, and the release fixes many security holes in 3.6. Update now.

News briefs for March 16, 2018. Private Internet Access announced that it is open-sourcing its software: "We believe that the shift to open source is the right move for a privacy-focused business, and recognise that code transparency is key. We appreciate that our code may not be perfect, and we hope that the wider FOSS community will get involved, provide feedback, feature requests, bug fixes and generally help provide a greater service to the wider privacy movement." You can check out the repo on GitHub and find them at #privateinternetaccess on chat.freenode.net.

News briefs for March 15, 2018. Linus Torvalds bashes CTS Labs' AMD chip report, calling it "more like stock manipulation than a security advisory", ZDNet reports. He went on to criticize the security industry for making inflammatory reports: "security people need to understand that they look like clowns because of it. The whole security industry needs to just admit that they have a lot of sh*t going on, and they should use -- and encourage -- some critical thinking."