Epic Games has announced that they have donated $1.2 million in cash towards the Blender Project, an open source tool to create 3D graphics animation and even entire games. This award is part of the Epic MegaGrants Initiative which Epic Games has committed $100 million. This program was created to help game developers, students, professionals, and creators. [Source: TheOuterHaven]

Oracle security researchers have been working on security feature for Linux kernels that could protect Linux-based systems against attacks that affect Intel’s Hyper-Threading (HT) feature. Multiple side-channel threats the feature’s vulnerable against, including L1TF/Foreshadow and the MDS attacks, have been revealed over the past few months. [Souce: Tom’s Hardware]

Bryden Wood, Cast, and the Mayor of London have launched a new app to speed up the capital’s home building. The freely-available app, titled PRISM, is aimed at the design and construction of high-quality, factory-built homes to address the current demand of 50,000+ houses per year. London will be the first city in the world to make sure of a freely-available app of this kind, sharing precision housing knowledge and leveraging technology to revolutionize the design process. [Source: Arch Daily]

Facebook has released a new open-source JavaScript engine, Hermes, to speed up start times for native Android apps built with Facebook’s own React Native JavaScript framework. Facebook software engineer Marc Horowitz unveiled the new JavaScript engine at the Chain React 2019 conference on Thursday in Portland, Oregon. Hermes is a new tool for developers to primarily improve app startup performance in the same way Facebook already does for its apps, and to make apps more efficient on low-end smartphones. (Source: ZDNet)

Kali Linux is a specialized distribution targeted at security professionals that also shows up on popular TV show, Mr. Robot. Kali Linux is now compatible with the Raspberry Pi 4. Currently, the distro is only available as a 32-bit OS, but the project is planning on releasing a 64-bit version soon. In the meantime, security aficionados who have a spare Raspberry Pi 4 lying around can head over to the Kali Linux site and download the distro image. (Source: NoteBookCheck)

Michael Larabel of Phoronix reports that GNOME developers are planning to disable the Snap plug-in for GNOME Software. Canonical has begun writing their own Snap Store. They don’t plan to use GNOME Software in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and thus have taken their developers away from working on the upstream support. Due to the likelihood that the GNOME Software Snap plug-in will quickly suffer from bit-rot and pose a maintenance burden to GNOME developers with little to no return, it’s certainly reasonable that they would at least disable this plug-in. [Source: Phoronix]

Cloudera has announced changes to its licensing policy that will make its entire product portfolio available under open-source terms, effectively adopting Hortonworks’ business model. The move has important implications for the industry’s ongoing debate about how business models can be built upon a foundation of free software. Although Cloudera is a major contributor to open-source projects, its decade-old business has always been based on selling licensed software.