UserLAnd Now Available on F-Droid, New Darktrace Cybersecurity Company, France Is Dumping Google, KDE Bug Day Focusing on Okular November 27th and SuperTux Alpha Release

News briefs for November 21, 2018.

UserLAnd is now available on F-Droid. With UserLAnd, you can run full Linux distributions or specific apps on top of Android, and you can install and uninstall it like a regular app—you don't need root. This version requires Android 5.0 or newer, and UserLAnd recommends that you install the F-Droid client to build it rather than download the APK.

A new cybersecurity company called Darktrace has developed a tool in collaboration with the University of Cambridge that uses machine learning to detect internal security breaches. According to FossBytes, Darktrace created an algorithm that "recognizes new instances of unusual behavior". This technique is "based on unsupervised learning, which doesn't require humans to specify what to look for. The system works like the human body's immune system."

France is dumping Google. Wired reports that to "avoid becoming a digital colony of the US or China", the French National Assembly and the French Army Ministry "declared that their digital devices would stop using Google as their default search engines. Instead, they will use Qwant, a French and German search engine that prides itself for not tracking its users."

KDE is holding a Bug Day November 27, 2018 that will focus on Okular. You can join the event at any time that day. See the Bug Triaging Guide to learn how to confirm and triage bugs, and join the #kde-bugs IRC channel on Freenode to chat with KDE in real time. For more information, go here.

Classic open-source game SuperTux is heading toward a new release. GamingOnLinux reports that the game is on the third alpha release of the 0.6.0 update. The game features several new highlights, including a "complete revamp of the rendering engine"; it now "supports OpenGL 3.3 Core as well as OpenGL ES 2.0, thus allowing SuperTux to be run on the Raspberry Pi, and potentially WebGL"; and the forest worldmap has been redesigned. You can download it from GitHub.

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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