News briefs for March 15, 2018. Linus Torvalds bashes CTS Labs' AMD chip report, calling it "more like stock manipulation than a security advisory", ZDNet reports. He went on to criticize the security industry for making inflammatory reports: "security people need to understand that they look like clowns because of it. The whole security industry needs to just admit that they have a lot of sh*t going on, and they should use -- and encourage -- some critical thinking."

News briefs for March 14, 2018. The new Raspberry Pi 3B+ has arrived, just in time for Pi Day. New features include "a more powerful CPU, now running at 1.4 GHz on all its four cores. The ethernet port has also been updated to a Gigabit port, an oft requested feature, although due to pre-existing limitations it maxes out at about 350 megabits." See the specs and benchmarks are here, and you can get one for $35 via the Product page.

News briefs for March 13, 2018. Mozilla's Firefox 59 is available for download. See the wiki for more information on its new features, including the "option to stop websites from asking to send notifications or access your device's camera, microphone, and location".

News briefs for March 12, 2018. Eric Raymond has started a new project after ranting about the state of the Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) market, as The Register reports. The Upside project is hosted on GitLab and "is currently defining requirements and developing a specification for a 'high quality UPS that can be built from off-the-shelf parts in any reasonably well-equipped makerspace or home electronics shop'." You can read Eric's original UPS rant here.

News briefs for March 9, 2018. Purism announced yesterday that it's collaborating with cryptography pioneer Werner Koch "to integrate hardware encryption into the company's Librem laptops and forthcoming Librem 5 phone. By manufacturing hardware with its own software and services, Purism will include cryptography by default pushing the industry forward with unprecedented protection for end-user devices."