News briefs for March 15, 2018.
Linus Torvalds bashes CTS Labs' AMD chip report, calling it "more like stock manipulation than a security advisory", ZDNet reports[1]. He went on to criticize the security industry for making inflammatory reports: "security people need to understand that they look like clowns because of it. The whole security industry needs to just admit that they have a lot of sh*t going on, and they should use -- and encourage -- some critical thinking."
GNOME 3.28 "Chongqing" is here, with many new features and fixes. According to the release notes[2], "the release incorporates 25832 changes, made by approximately 838 contributors." The new version includes personal organization improvements, new Boxes features, such as automatic downloading of operating systems, and much more.
Google announced[3] the availability of its 2017 Android Security Report this morning, which covers how Google Play Protect, new security features in Android Oreo, security rewards programs and more have increased and contributed to Android security. The full report is available here[4].
The Linux Foundation announced[5] a new embedded reference hypervisor project named ACRN, "This project will provide a framework for industry leaders to build an open source embedded hypervisor specifically for the Internet of Things (IoT)." See the project's home page[6] for more details.
Purism is working on supporting Plasma Mobile on the Librem 5. Read the blog post[7] for more details on the setup and the challenges overcome with enabling Plasma Mobile on the current test boards.