News briefs for May 1, 2019.

CC Search is now out of beta, with more than 300 million images, "a major redesign, and faster, more relevant search". The Creative Commons blog post notes that "CC Search searches images across 19 collections pulled from open APIs and the Common Crawl dataset, including cultural works from museums (the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art), graphic designs and art works (Behance, DeviantArt), photos from Flickr, and an initial set of CC0 3D designs from Thingiverse."

Dell yesterday announced two new mobile workstations, the Dell Precision 3540 and 3541. These new laptops "are budget-friendly machines with a smaller footprint and workstation-level performance". The 3540 is available now, with your choice of Ubuntu 18.04 or Windows 10, and it "comes with the essentials including the latest 4-core Intel Core 8th generation processors, up to 32GB of DDR4 memory, AMD Radeon Pro graphics with 2GB of dedicated memory, and 2TB of storage." The Precision 3541 will be available in late May and will "offer additional power, with 9th generation 8-core Intel Core and 6-core Intel Xeon processor options. It'll be available with next generation NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics with 4GB of dedicated memory. Boasting extreme battery life—quite possibly the longest battery life in its class—the system supports on-the-go productivity. As with the Precision 3540, the Precision 3541 comes with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity and optional features to enhance security such as fingerprint and smartcard readers, an IR camera and our first-ever camera shutter."

NS1 recently released Flamethrower, "a lightweight, configurable open source tool for functional testing, benchmarking, and stress testing DNS servers and networks." According to HelpNetSecurity.com, "Flamethrower supports IPv4, IPv6, UDP, TCP, DNS over TLS, as well as experimental support for DNS over QUIC. It has a modular system for generating the queries used in the tests, allowing for rich and realistic test scenarios that can plug into automation pipelines. It simulates multiple concurrent clients and generates actionable metrics, including send and receive counts, timeouts, errors and data on minimum, maximum and average latency." You can get Flamethrower on GitHub.

Scalyr this week announced its first major GA product launch of the year: PowerQueries. From the announcement: "PowerQueries are a new set of data operations within Scalyr that give users the ability to transform and manipulate data on the fly. They let users seamlessly pivot from facet-based search to complex log search operations for complicated data sets, such as grouping, transformations, filtering and sorting, table lookups and joins, enabling them to create sophisticated data processing pipelines." See also Scalyr Founder Steve Newman's blog post for more information.

A "high-severity hole" in Oracle WebLogic was exploited for nine days before being discovered. Ars Technica reports that "Attackers have been actively exploiting a critical zero-day vulnerability in the widely used Oracle WebLogic server to install ransomware, with no clicking or other interaction necessary on the part of end users, researchers from Cisco Talos said on Tuesday." Oracle released an emergency patch. Patch now.