News briefs for September 25, 2018.

Whitewater Foundry[1] recently launched WLinux, a Linux distribution optimized for use on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Because the distro is created specifically for WSL, it has "sane defaults" and also allows for "faster patching of security and compatibility issues". You can download it from the Microsoft Store[2], and it's currently on sale for $9.99.

openSUSE announced[3] that it's accepting proposals to host the openSUSE 2020 conference. The "Call for Hosts" is open until April 15, 2019. See the Conference How to Check List[4] and the Conference How to bid[5] wiki pages if you're interested.

Security researcher Sabri Haddouche has discovered a new Firefox bug that causes your browser and sometimes your PC (on Linux, Mac and Windows) to crash. In an interview with ZDNet[6], Haddouche explained, "What happens is that the script generates a file (a blob) that contains an extremely long filename and prompts the user to download it every one millisecond". See also the bug report[7] for more information.

In other Firefox news, the browser evidently is collecting telemetry data via hidden add-ons, ITWire reports[8]. The ITWire post also quotes Mozilla's Marshall Eriwn, director of Trust and Security: "...we will measure Telemetry Coverage, which is the percentage of all Firefox users who report telemetry. The Telemetry Coverage measurement will sample a portion of all Firefox clients and report whether telemetry is enabled. This measurement will not include a client identifier and will not be associated with our standard telemetry."

Creative Commons released a significant update to its beta of the CC Search project[9] yesterday. This iteration "integrates access to more than 10 million images across 13 content providers". It also features AI image tags generated from Clarifai

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