News briefs for May 30, 2019.

Dell announces its Precision 5540, Precision 7540 and Precision 7740 developer edition laptops, the next in the line of Dell's Ubuntu-based Precision mobile workstations. From the announcement: "What started 5+ years ago as a blog post explaining how to get Ubuntu up and running on the Precision M3800 soon became a line of mobile workstations. With today's announcement, project Sputnik's Ubuntu-based mobile workstation line is now in its 4th generation. What's next for project Sputnik? Stay tuned..." See the announcement for specs and further details.

Mozilla's Alan Davidson, Vice President of Global Policy, Trust and Security, testified yesterday before the International Grand Committee on Big Data, Privacy and Democracy. Alan's testimony focused "on the need for better product design to protect privacy; getting privacy policy and regulation right; and the complexities of content policy issues. Against the backdrop of tech's numerous missteps over the last year, our mission-driven work is a clear alternative to much of what is wrong with the web today." See the Mozilla blog for more details, or read Alan's statement here.

Canonical yesterday announced the release of Multipass 0.7.0 beta. The announcement notes that "the big part is that we added a preview of VirtualBox support for Windows and macOS!" Highlights include improved concurrency, a new primary instance feature and more, along with several bug fixes. See the announcement for download links and how to provide feedback.

GParted (GNOME Partition Editor) has reached the 1.0 milestone after 15 years of development, now requiring gtkmm3 instead of gtkmm2. Softpedia News reports that this version features "support for the F2FS file system to read disk usage, grow, and check, the ability to enable online resizing of extended partitions, better refreshing of NTFS file systems, and port to Gtkmm 3 (GTK+3) and GNOME 3 yelp-tools." See the release notes for all the details.

Researchers have discovered new strain of malware targeting Linux machines. According to ZDNet, it "appears to have been created by Chinese hackers and has been used as a means to remotely control infected systems. Named HiddenWasp, this malware is composed of a user-mode rootkit, a trojan, and an initial deployment script." The ZDNet article quotes Nacho Sanmillan, a security researcher at Intezer Labs, "Unfortunately, I don't know what is the initial infection vector. Based on our research, it seems most likely that this malware was used in compromised systems already controlled by the attacker."