New Firefox Add-on Prevents Facebook Tracking, the Linux Foundation Announces the LF Deep Learning Foundation and More

News briefs for March 27, 2018.

Mozilla today announced a new Facebook Container add-on for Firefox that prevents Facebook from tracking you around the web: "Facebook Container works by isolating your Facebook identity into a separate container that makes it harder for Facebook to track your visits to other websites with third-party cookies." See also the Mozilla blog for more on the story.

In other Mozilla news, the Firefox 59.0.2 maintenance update was released yesterday to fix "high CPU/memory churn caused by third-party software on some computers", among other things. See the release notes for all the details.

The Linux Foundation announced the launch of the LF Deep Learning Foundation, "an umbrella organization focused on driving open source innovation in artificial intelligence, machine learning and deep learning", with a goal of making those technologies available to data scientists and developers. In addition, the Linux Foundation also debuted the Acumos AI project, an "open source framework that makes it easy to build, share, and deploy AI apps".

Attention all ZFS users: it looks as if Zstd compression support will be coming to OpenZFS sometime in the very near future This comes on the heals of the Zstandard (Zstd) algorithm being merged into the Linux 4.14 kernel. For more background on this upcoming feature, see Alan Jude's OpenZFS Summit presentation.

ownCloud recently announced the new ownCloud Phoenix, the "rebirth of the ownCloud user interface". Phoenix is a pure web client that "contains only HTML, JavaScript and CSS files" and communicates with the ownCloud Core "only via public APIs such as WebDAV or OCS Share APIs". For more info, see the GitHub thread.

Happy 25th Birthday to Red Hat! Yesterday Red Hat celebrated the 25th anniversary of its incorporation by Bob Young and Marc Ewing. In honor of this occasion, State of North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper and City of Raleigh Mayor Nancy McFarlane declared March 26, 2018, as Red Hat Day across North Carolina and in Raleigh, respectively. See the Red Hat blog for details.

Thanks to Petros Koutoupis for his contribution to this post.

Jill Franklin is an editorial professional with more than 17 years experience in technical and scientific publishing, both print and digital. As Executive Editor of Linux Journal, she wrangles writers, develops content, manages projects, meets deadlines and makes sentences sparkle. She also was Managing Editor for TUX and Embedded Linux Journal, and the book Linux in the Workplace. Before entering the Linux and open-source realm, she was Managing Editor of several scientific and scholarly journals, including Veterinary Pathology, The Journal of Mammalogy, Toxicologic Pathology and The Journal of Scientific Exploration. In a previous life, she taught English literature and composition, managed a bookstore and tended bar. When she’s not bugging writers about deadlines or editing copy, she throws pots, gardens and reads.

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