News Briefs

• 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.

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