Vivaldi, Opera and Chrome

• Vivaldi Browser Adds Privacy-Focused Search Engine Qwant as New Search Option

  Vivaldi Technologies informed Softpedia today that they've added a new search engine to the growing list of search options of their Chromium-based Vivaldi web browser. We're talking about Qwant, a search engine designed from the ground up by a French-based company to respect users' privacy when searching the World Wide Web for anything that interest them every single day. Qwant achieves its privacy goal by not storing any cookies, nor your search history.

• Vivaldi's New Qwant Privacy-Focused Search Engine, Microsoft Makes PowerShell Core a Snap, Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.6 Now Available, Apache Software Foundation's Annual Report and More

  Vivaldi Technologies has added a new privacy-focused search engine called Qwant to its Vivaldi web browser. Qwant doesn't store cookies or search history. Softpedia News quotes CEO and co-founder of Vivaldi Jon von Tetzchner: "We believe that the Internet can do better. We do not believe in tracking our users or in data profiling." You need version 1.15 of Vivaldi in order to enable Qwant.

• Opera 55 Web Browser Enters Beta with Support for Installing Chrome Extensions

  The Chromium-based Opera web browser continues development with two upcoming versions, Opera 55 and Opera 56, and the former recently entered beta testing with a bunch of goodies. Based on Chromium 68.0.3440.42, Opera 55 beta introduces a revamped settings page that promises to help users better and easier configure their favorite web browser by splitting the settings into two categories, namely basic and advanced. Also, users will now be able to search for specific settings via the integrated search bar.

• Google Chrome on Android will stop background tabs after 5 minutes to improve performance

  What once was dominated by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Google Chrome has done a great job at dominating the overall web browser market. Various reports project Chrome’s usage numbers between 50% to just over 62%, and this has actually been both a blessing and a curse. Google has been under the investigation from both Russia and Europe for their actions and their practices just may have to change in the near future. Still, even with the popularity of the Chrome browser, users have a number of complaints. Google engineers have been working on improving these lately and Chrome for Android will soon stop background tabs after 5 minutes of inactivity.

• Google Chrome To Stop Background Tab Loading After 5 Mins Of Inactivity

Openwashing of Surveillance Giants

• Facebook open-sources its ‘oomd’ tool for data center memory management

  Facebook Inc. is doling out yet another open-source software tool, this time aimed at data center operators that struggle with system outages from applications trying to consume more memory resources than are available to them. The software in question is called oomd, which Facebook describes as a “faster and more reliable” solution for the “out-of-memory situations” that sometimes occur after a configuration change or software update relating to its information technology infrastructure.

• Open sourcing oomd, a new approach to handling OOMs

  As our global community has grown to more than 2.2 billion people, Facebook’s infrastructure has grown to span News Feed, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and a range of other products. These products and the systems powering them run on millions of servers spread across multiple geo-distributed data centers. As our infrastructure has scaled, we’ve found that an increasing fraction of our machines and networks span multiple generations. One side effect of this multigenerational production environment is that a new software release or configuration change might result in a system running healthily on one machine but experiencing an out-of-memory (OOM) issue on another. Facebook runs Linux as the host operating system on its machines. The traditional Linux OOM killer works fine in some cases, but in others it kicks in too late, resulting in the system entering a livelock for an indeterminate period. We have developed oomd, a faster, more reliable solution to common out-of-memory (OOM) situations, which works in userspace rather than kernelspace. We designed oomd with two key features: pre-OOM hooks and a custom plugin system. Pre-OOM hooks offer visibility into an OOM before the workload is threatened. The plugin system allows us to specify custom policies that can handle each workload running on a host.

• Open sourcing oomd, a new approach to handling OOMs

  Over on the Facebook code site, Daniel Xu announces the release of oomd under the GPLv2. Oomd is a user-space "out of memory" killer that was mentioned in our recent article on the block I/O latency controller and it uses the pressure stall information covered in an even more recent article.

• Big News: Big Internet Platforms Making It Easy To Move Your Data Somewhere Else [Ed: Pentagon-connected surveillance giants to let you duplicate your data among themselves ('move')]

  So, just last week we had a post by Kevin Bankston from the Open Technology Institute arguing for some basic steps towards much greater data portability on social media. The idea was that the internet platforms had to make it much easier to not just download your data (which most of them already do), but to make it useful elsewhere. Bankston's specific proposal included setting clear technical standards and solving the graph portability project. In talking about standards, Bankston referenced Google's data transfer project, but that project has taken a big step forward today announcing a plan to let users transfer data automatically between platforms. The "headline" that most folks are focusing on is that Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter are all involved in the project (along with a few smaller companies), meaning that it should lead to a situation where you could easily transfer data between them. As it stands right now, the various services let you download your data, but getting it into another platform is still a hassle, making the whole "download your data" thing not all that useful beyond "oh, look at everything this company has about me." Making a system where you can easily transfer all that data to another platform without having to manage the transition yourself or being left with a bunch of useless data is a big step forward -- and a huge step towards giving users much more significant control over their data.

• Introducing Data Transfer Project: an open source platform promoting universal data portability

  In 2007, a small group of engineers in our Chicago office formed the Data Liberation Front, a team that believed consumers should have better tools to put their data where they want, when they want, and even move it to a different service. This idea, called “data portability,” gives people greater control of their information, and pushes us to develop great products because we know they can pack up and leave at any time.

• Google/Microsoft/Twitter/Facebook Announce The Open-Source Data Transfer Project

  Google in cooperation with Microsoft, Twitter, and Facebook have announced the open-source Data Transfer Project to promote universal data portability. The multi-vendor Data Transfer Project initiative is to enable consumers to transfer data directly from one server to another, without the need for downloading/uploading of the content.

• Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter partner for ambitious new data project [Ed: misusing terms like “open”, “free” and “choice”]

• Working Together to Give People More Control of Their Data

• Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter launch open-source initiative to free users’ data

• Tech Heavyweights Create Open Source Project to Transfer Data

• Open source project allows data transfer among Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook

Apple's Service and Quality

• Apple fans are returning their new MacBook Pros that cost a minimum of $2,800 because they can't reach the advertised performance speeds

  You'll have to put the brand spanking new 2018 MacBook Pro with the Core i9 processor option in a freezer to get the advertised 2.9GHz speeds. At least, that's what Dave Lee from the Dave2D YouTube channel did to get the most out of his 2018 MacBook Pro with a Core i9 processor. Before putting it in the freezer, Lee's 2018 MacBook Pro with a Core i9 actually performed worse than a 2017 MacBook Pro running a Core i7. "This i9 in this MacBook can't even maintain the base clock speed," Lee said in his video.

• Apple Fans Are Returning New 15-inch MacBook Pro Due To Heating Issues

• Apple Probably Fixed the MacBook Pro Keyboard Problem, But Can’t Tell You That

  According to documents obtained by MacRumors, the silicone membrane that the new keyboard features underneath the key caps is designed to “prevent debris from entering the butterfly mechanism.” This would seem to suggest that this membrane—which was not present in previous versions of the MacBook Pro keyboard—is meant to fix the dust problem, not to make the keyboard “quieter” as Apple has advertised.

Open Source Music Tagger MusicBrainz Picard Has a New Major Release After Six Years

You can automatically clean and improve your local music files with music tagger MusicBrainz Picard. The latest release of Picard brings some much-needed improvements to the already awesome application.