News briefs for July 11, 2018.
The Xen Hypervisor 4.11 was released[1] yesterday. In this release "PVH Dom0 support is now available as experimental feature and support for running unmodified PV guests in a PVH Container has been added. In addition, significant chunks of the ARM port have been rewritten." Xen 4.11 also contains mitigations for Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities. For detailed download and build instructions, go here[2].
There's a new text-based browser called Browsh, Phoronix reports[3]. Browsh can render anything a modern browser can, and you can use it from a terminal or within a normal browser to reduce bandwidth and increase browser speed. For more info and to download, see the Browsh project website[4].
Facebook to be fined the maximum (500k euros), and the UK's privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), has published a report called "Democracy Disrupted? Personal information and political influence"[5] that outlines policy recommendations for how personal information is used in connection with political campaigns. According to the TechCrunch article[6], the report "calls directly for an 'ethical pause' around the use of microtargeting ad tools for political campaigning" and specifically "flags a number of specific concerns attached to Facebook's platform and its impact upon people's rights and democratic processes..."
Sirin Labs to launch the $1,000 Finney cryptocurrency smartphone this fall, Engadget reports[7]. The Finney (named after Bitcoin pioneer Hal Finney) is a "state of the art mobile device for the blockchain era" and runs on a forked version of Android. It has a slider on the back where "you'll find a secondary display, called the Safe Screen, that's only used for crypto transactions....The slider also activates the cold storage wallet that is designed to hold a significant number of different cryptocurrencies."