News briefs for April 13, 2018.
The Elisa music player, developed by the KDE community, debuted[1] yesterday, with version 0.1. Elisa has good integration wtih the Plasma desktop and also supports other Linux desktop environments, as well as Windows and Android. In addition, the Elisa release announcement notes, "We are creating a reliable product that is a joy to use and respects our users' privacy. As such, we will prefer to support online services where users are in control of their data."
Mozilla released Firefox 11.0 for iOS yesterday, and this new version turns on tracking protection by default[2]. The feature uses a list provided by Disconnect to identify trackers, and it also provides options for turning it on or off overall or for specific websites.
The Zenroom[3] project, a brand-new crypto-language virtual machine, has reached version 0.5.0. Zenroom's goal is "improving people's awareness of how their data is processed by algorithms, as well facilitate the work of developers to create and publish algorithms that can be used both client and server side." In addition, it "has no external dependencies, is smaller than 1MB, runs in less than 64KiB memory and is ready for experimental use on many target platforms: desktop, embedded, mobile, cloud and browsers." The program is free software and is licensed under the GNU LGPL v3. Its main use case is "distributed computing of untrusted code where advanced cryptographic functions are required".
ZFS On Linux, recently in the news for data-loss issues, may finally be getting SSD TRIM support[4], which has been in the works for years, according to Phoronix.
System76 recently became a GNOME Foundation Advisory Board member. Neil McGovern, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, commented "System76's long-term ambition to see free software grow is highly commendable, and we're extremely pleased that they're coming on