Summary: We solved privacy in the natural world with clothing, shelter, manners and laws. So far in the digital world, we have invisibility cloaks and the GDPR. The fastest way to get the rest of what we need is to recognize that privacy isn't a grace of platforms or governments. It starts as a grace of our own agency and the tech we use to express it.

The Librem 13—"the first 13-inch ultraportable designed to protect your digital life"—ticks all the boxes, but is it as good in real life as it is on paper?

Richard Stallman will love the new GDPR. It's not every day that a new law comes into force that will have major implications for digital industries around the globe. It's even rarer when a such law will also bolster free software's underlying philosophy. But the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will be enforced from May 25, 2018, does both of those things, making its appearance one of the most important events in the history of open source.

Most people simply are unaware of how much personal data they leak on a daily basis as they use their computers. Enter our latest issue with a deep dive into privacy. After working on this issue, a few of us on the Linux Journal team walked away implementing some new privacy practices--we suspect you may too after you give it a read. In This Issue:

Efforts to work around serious hardware flaws in Intel chips are ongoing. Nadav Amit posted a patch to improve compatibility mode with respect to Intel's Meltdown flaw. Compatibility mode is when the system emulates an older CPU in order to provide a runtime environment that supports an older piece of software that relies on the features of that CPU. The thing to be avoided is to emulate massive security holes created by hardware flaws in that older chip as well.