News briefs for April 12, 2018.
Mozilla recently published its annual Internet Health Report[1]. Its three major concerns are:
- "Consolidation of power over the Internet, particularly by Facebook, Google, Tencent, and Amazon."
- "The spread of 'fake news,' which the report attributes in part to the 'broken online advertising economy' that provides financial incentive for fraud, misinformation, and abuse."
- The threat to privacy posed by the poor security of the Internet of Things.
(Source: Ars Technica's "The Internet has serious health problems, Mozilla Foundation report finds"[2])
Idle power on some Linux systems could drop by 10% or more with the Linux 4.17 kernel, reports Phoronix[3]. Evidently, that's not all that's in the works regarding power management features: "performance of workloads where the idle loop overhead was previously significant could now see greater gains too". See Rafael Wysocki's "More power management updates for v4.17-rc-1" pull request[4].
Google's "not-so-secret" operating system named Fuchsia that's been in development for almost two years has attracted much speculation, but now we finally know what it is not. It's not Linux. According to a post on xda[5], Google published a documentation page called "the book"[6] that explains what Fuchsia is and isn't. Several details still need to be filled in, but documentation will be added as things develop.
Instagram will soon allow users to download their data, including photos, videos and messages, according to a TechCrunch report[7]: "This tool could make it much easier for users to leave Instagram and go to a competing image social network. And as long as it launches before May 25th, it will help Instagram