News briefs for September 7, 2018.
Tor Browser version 8.0[1] was released this week. This is the first stable release based on Firefox 60 ESR, and it includes "a new user onboarding experience; an updated landing page that follows our styleguide; additional language support; and new behaviors for bridge fetching, displaying a circuit, and visiting .onion sites." You can download it from here[2].
On September 12, the EU votes on the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market[3]. Of particular concern are Article 13 upload filters, "which would scan all content uploaded to online platforms for any copyrighted works and prevent those works from going online if a match is discovered", and Article 11, which would require "anyone using snippets of journalistic content to first get a license or pay a fee to the publisher for its use online". See The Creative Commons[4] for information on the issues. If you're in the EU, make your voice heard[5].
Indico, "provider of Enterprise AI solutions for intelligent process automation", announced a new open-source project named Finetune[6] this week that enhances "the performance of machine learning for natural language processing". According to the press release, this project "offers users a single, general-purpose language model which can be easily tuned to solve a variety of different tasks involved in text and document-based workflows". See also the Indico blog[7] for more background information.
Linux Mint announces that the 19.1 release[8], code-named Tessa, is scheduled for November or December 2018. The upcoming version will be supported until 2023.
KDE's Akademy 2018 videos[9] are now all online. You can download them from the repository[10] or view the YouTube Playlist[11].
Jill Franklin is an editorial professional