News Briefs

• Google rethinks its planned changes to Chrome's extension API that would have broken many ad-blocking extensions. Ars Technica reports that Google has made this revision to "ensure that the current variety of content-blocking extensions is preserved". In addition, "Google maintains that 'It is not, nor has it ever been, our goal to prevent or break content blocking' [emphasis Google's] and says that it will work to update its proposal to address the capability gaps and pain points."
• Kali Linux 2019.1 was released recently. This is the first release of 2019, bringing the kernel to version 4.19.13. This release fixes many bugs and includes several updated packages. The release announcement notes that "the big marquee update of this release is the update of Metasploit to version 5.0, which is their first major release since version 4.0 came out in 2011." You can download Kali Linux from here.
• digiKam 6.0.0 also was released recently. This major release follows two years of intensive development and lots of work from students during the Summer of Code. New features include full support of video file management, raw file decoding engine supporting new cameras, simplified web service authentication using OAuth, new export tools and much more. Go here to download.
• Redis Labs has changed its licensing for Redis Modules again. According to TechCrunch, the new license is called the Redis Source Available license, and as with the previous Commons Clause license, applies only to certain Redis Modules created by Redis Labs. With this license, "Users can still get the code, modify it and integrate it into their applications—but that application can't be a database product, caching engine, stream processing engine, search engine, indexing engine or ML/DL/AI serving engine." The TechCrunch post notes that by definition, an open-source license can't enforce limitations, so this new license technically isn't open source. It is, however, similar to other "permissive open-source licenses", which "shouldn't really affect most developers who use the company's modules".
• The Windows 10 April Update will let you access Linux files from Windows. ZDNet quotes Craig Loewen, a Microsoft programming manager on the updates to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL): "The next Windows update is coming soon and we're bringing exciting new updates to WSL with it! These include accessing the Linux file system from Windows, and improvements to how you manage and configure your distros in the command line."
• 1-terabyte microSD cards are now available. The Verge reports that Micron and Western Digital's SandDisk both announced UHS-I microSDXC products at Mobile World Congress. The SanDisk card will be available in April for $449.00. No information yet on the pricing or availability of the Micron card.
• Mozilla has released Common Voices, the "largest to-date public domain transcribed voice dataset". The dataset includes 18 languages and almost 1,400 hours of recorded voice from more than 42,000 people. From the Mozilla blog: "With this release, the continuously growing Common Voice dataset is now the largest ever of its kind, with tens of thousands of people contributing their voices and original written sentences to the public domain (CC0). Moving forward, the full dataset will be available for download on the Common Voice site."
• KStars v3.1.0 was released, marking the first release of 2019. This release focuses on stability and performance improvements—for example, some bugs in the Ekos Scheduler, Ring-Field Focusing was added to the Focus module, and the LiveView window now enables zooming and panning for supported DSLR cameras. See the Jasem's Ekosphere blog for all the details, and go here for download links and other resources.
• Purism announces that PureOS is now convergent, which means "being able to make the same application code execute, and operate, both on mobile phones and laptops—adapting the applications to screen size and input devices". With PureOS, Purism "has laid the foundation for all future applications to run on both the Librem 5 phone and Librem laptops, from the same PureOS release".
• man-pages-5.00 was released recently. Michael Kerrisk, the man page maintainer, writes: "This release resulted from patches, bug reports, reviews, and comments from around 130 contributors. The release is rather larger than average, since it has been nearly a year since the last release. The release includes more than 600 commits that changed nearly 400 pages. In addition, 3 new manual pages were added." The release tarball is available from kernel.org, the browsable pages are at man7.org, and the Git repo is available from kernel.org.