News briefs for July 9, 2018.
Oasis Labs raises $45 million to create a privacy-first blockchain cloud computing platform. According to the Venture Beat post[1], the Oasis Labs' goal for the platform is to "overcome the performance, security, and privacy limitations that have hampered blockchain adoption to date. The aim is to make blockchain, a distributed secure ledger that powers cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum, more useful to a broader set of companies."
Firefox 61.0.1, the first minor maintenance update for Firefox 61, has been released, Softpedia News reports[2]. The update includes performance improvements and bug fixes, and you can download it from here[3].
The Elisa music player team recently announced the release of version 0.2[4]. This update brings new music browsing views as well as an improved interface and performance improvements. The team notes their goal is "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." See the Change Log[5] for all the details.
The Rust programming language team has issued a security advisory for its rustdoc plugins[6]. Here's the rundown: "The problem was in rustdoc's obscure plugin functionality, consisting of its loading plugins from a path that is globally writable on most platforms, /tmp/rustdoc/plugins. This feature permitted a malicious actor to write a dynamic library into this path and have another user execute that code. The security issue only happens if you're actively using the feature, and so this behavior will be removed from rustdoc in the near future, with patches landing for each channel over the next week."
The Unitary Fund, which was created with "personal donations from founder of security firm Lookout, John Hering, and developer of quantum integrated circuits Rigetti