Purism, maker of the security-focused Librem laptops, announced that it has
partnered with Nitrokey to create Purekey, "Purism's own OpenPGP security
token designed to integrate with its hardware and software. Purekey embodies
Purism's mission to make security and cryptography accessible where its
customers hold the keys to their own security." You can purchase a Purekey by
itself or as an add-on with a laptop order. According to Purism's CSO Kyle
Rankin, "By keeping your encryption keys on a Purekey instead of on a hard
drive, your keys never leave the tamper-proof hardware. This not only makes
your keys more secure from attackers, it makes using your keys on multiple
devices more convenient."
Vim 8.1 is now available. The major new feature of this release is that you
now can run a terminal in a Vim window, which allows you to do things like
run a command (like make) while editing in other windows or "use the new
terminal debugger plugin for debugging inside Vim".
AsteroidOS 1.0, the open-source operating system for smartwatches, is finally
available after four years in the works. As posted on the AsteroidOS
website,
"AsteroidOS is built on standard Linux technologies including OpenEmbedded,
opkg, Wayland, Qt5, systemd, BlueZ, and PulseAudio. This makes it the ideal
platform to build any sort of wearable project you can imagine. Do you want
to run Docker on your watch? AsteroidOS can do it. Do you want to run Quake
on your watch? AsteroidOS can do that too. The sky is really the limit! Our
community welcomes anyone interested in playing with a smartwatch project."
It's here! Firefox 60 "Quantum" is available for download! Now with
Client-Side Decorations (CSD) and much more!
Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu 18.10 will be called Cosmic
Cuttlefish. He also stressed that he is focusing on security, saying "If I
had one big thing that I could feel great about doing, systematically, for
everyone who uses Ubuntu, it would be improving their confidence in the
security of their systems and their data."
There's a new automation framework called Brigade, which is written in
Python. According to the Networklore post, "You could describe it as the
automation framework for Pythonistas. This might strike you as something
wonderful, or it could trigger your spider-sense. Writing code? Isn't that
just for programmers?"
Android P is finally addressing a privacy issue by restricting apps from
monitoring your network activity (although this only affects apps that target
Android P). xda
reported recently that currently, "apps on Android can gain
full access to the network activity on your device—even without asking
for any sensitive permissions. These apps can't detect the content of your
network calls, but they can sniff any outgoing or incoming connection via
TCP/UDP to determine if you are connecting to a certain server."
Mozilla announced its new privacy-conscious approach to sponsored content.
Earlier this year Mozilla began experimenting with showing a sponsored story
occasionally in Pocket. The company is preparing to go live with it with the
Firefox 60 release. Mozilla stresses that this new approach must not
sacrifice user privacy: "All personalization happens on the client-side,
without needing to vacuum up all of your personal data or sharing it with
others." It also promises quality content, user control and transparency.
After six years of development, a new
stable version of GIMP has been
released. Version 2.10.0 has a new default Dark theme and supports HIDPI
displays and the GEGL image processing library. GIMP 2.10.0 also includes new
tools, better file format support and an upgraded user interface, among other
things. See the release notes for all the details.
