Today, Amaon said it will be upgrading almost every plug-in Echo smart speaker to support Matter, a cross-platform open-source standard coming later this year. This includes most Echo and Echo Dot speakers and every Echo Studio, Echo Show, Echo Plus, and Echo Flex. "In fact, the only Echo smart speakers that won't get upgraded to Matter are the first-gen Echo, first-gen Echo Dot and Echo Tap," reports The Verge. From the report: While the company doesn't provide a timeline for those upgrades, the general idea is that Matter will launch by late 2021, so it shouldn't be long until Amazon's newest and / or more popular devices receive the capability. A bigger question is whether any of them will work as Matter hubs. Google announced in May that in addition to upgrading its Nest devices to Matter, it would allow its devices that support the Thread protocol (like the Nest Wi-Fi, Nest Hub Max, and second-gen Nest Hub) to double as connection hubs for Matter, too, not simply as a voice assistant to control Matter gadgets. But while Amazon's Eero routers were early to adopt Thread, Amazon's Echo smart speakers were not.

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm shares a blog post from Stockfish announcing a lawsuit against ChessBase: The Stockfish project strongly believes in free and open-source software and data. Collaboration is what made this engine the strongest chess engine in the world. We license our software using the GNU General Public License, Version 3 (GPL) with the intent to guarantee all chess enthusiasts the freedom to use, share and change all versions of the program. Unfortunately, not everybody shares this vision of openness. We have come to realize that ChessBase concealed from their customers Stockfish as the true origin of key parts of their products (see also earlier blog posts by us and the joint Lichess, Leela Chess Zero, and Stockfish teams). Indeed, few customers know they obtained a modified version of Stockfish when they paid for Fat Fritz 2 or Houdini 6 -- both Stockfish derivatives -- and they thus have good reason to be upset. [ChessBase released Fat Fritz 2, described on their website as the "new number 1" chess engine "with a massive new neural network, trained by Albert Silver with the original Fat Fritz." They advertise Fat Fritz 2 as using novel strong ideas compared to existing chess engines, but in reality Fat Fritz 2 is just Stockfish with a different neural network and minimal changes that are neither innovative nor appear to make the engine stronger.] ChessBase repeatedly violated central obligations of the GPL, which ensures that the user of the software is informed of their rights. These rights are explicit in the license and include access to the corresponding sources, and the right to reproduce, modify and distribute GPLed programs royalty-free.

In the past four months, we, supported by a certified copyright and media law attorney in Germany, went through a long process to enforce our license. Even though we had our first successes, leading to a recall of the Fat Fritz 2 DVD and the termination of the sales of Houdini 6, we were unable to finalize our dispute out of court. Due to Chessbase's repeated license violations, leading developers of Stockfish have terminated their GPL license with ChessBase permanently. However, ChessBase is ignoring the fact that they no longer have the right to distribute Stockfish, modified or unmodified, as part of their products. Thus, to enforce the consequences of the license termination, we have filed a lawsuit. This lawsuit is broadly supported by the team of maintainers and developers of Stockfish. We believe we have the evidence, the financial means and the determination to bring this lawsuit to a successful end. We will provide an update to this statement once significant progress has been made.

Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column shares an update on Amazon's ongoing battle with scalable data search solution ElasticSearch: Earlier this year, AWS completed its fork of ElasticSearch with the first release of OpenSearch. If you haven't followed along, the whole affair was a bit of a tug of war between AWS and Elastic, with AWS eventually coming out seemingly on top. After Elastic changed the licensing on ElasticSearch in an attempt to prevent AWS from selling a service based on the then-open-source project, AWS forked the project to release OpenSearch under Apache 2.0, effectively preserving its open source status.

Now, OpenSearch has reached 1.0, which AWS says not only "marks the first production-ready version of OpenSearch," but also introduces "multiple new enhancements," such as data streams, trace analytics span filtering, report scheduling and more. The 1.0 release also involved quite a bit of code cleanup, removing proprietary code and marks, and adds the ability to upgrade from ElasticSearch to OpenSearch as if you were performing a normal upgrade of ElasticSearch.

If you're interested in learning where the project is going, head on over to the public roadmap to learn more.

"By 2030, technology will have advanced to the point that even the idea of owning objects might be obsolete," argues a thought-provoking new piece by Gizmodo's consumer tech reporter: Back in 2016, the World Economic Forum released a Facebook video with eight predictions it had for the world in 2030. "You'll own nothing. And you'll be happy," it says. "Whatever you want, you'll rent. And it'll be delivered by drone...."

In some ways, not owning things is easier. You have fewer commitments, less responsibility, and the freedom to bail whenever you want. There are upsides to owning less. There's also a big problem... The reality is when you buy a device that requires proprietary software to run, you don't own it. The money you hand over is an entry fee, nothing more. When everything is a lease, you also agree to a life defined by someone else's terms... When hardware is merely a vessel for software and not a useful thing on its own, you don't really get to decide anything. A company will decide when to stop pushing vital updates. It might also decide what you do with the product after it's "dead...." The power has shifted so that companies set the parameters, and consumers have to make do with picking the lesser of several evils...

You can trace much of this back to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which basically makes it illegal to circumvent "digital locks" that protect a company's proprietary software... One day in the future, if you buy a physical house, you will likely have to rent the software that operates it. You won't really have a say in the updates that get pushed out, or the features that get taken away. You'll have less of a say in when you renovate or upgrade, even if you want to continue using the house as is. You might not even have the right to do DIY repairs yourself. Just because you've bought a smart washing machine, doesn't mean you'll be allowed to repair it yourself if it breaks — or if you'll be allowed to pick which repair shop can fix it for you. You only have to look as far as John Deere, Apple, and General Motors. Each one of these companies has argued that people who bought their products weren't allowed to repair them unless they were from a pre-approved shop.

The scary thing is that only sounds terrible if you have the mental energy to care about principles.

Making decisions all the time is difficult, and it's easier when someone else limits the options you can choose from. It's not hard to turn a blind eye to a problem if, for the most part, your life is made a little simpler. Isn't that what every tech company says it's trying to do? Make your life a little simpler? Life is hard enough already, and living in a home that maintains itself so long as you hand over control — well, by 2030, who's to say that's not what we'll all want?

"We're building a chip. A fast chip. A safe chip. A trusted chip," explains the web page at Libre-SOC.org. "A chip with lots of peripherals. And it's VPU. And it's a 3D GPU... Oh and here, have the source code."

And now there's big news, reports long-time Slashdot reader lkcl: Libre-SOC's entirely Libre 180nm ASIC, which can be replicated down to symbolic level GDS-II with no NDAs of any kind, has been submitted to IMEC for fabrication.

It is the first wholly-independent Power ISA ASIC outside of IBM to go Silicon in 12 years. Microwatt went to Skywater 130nm in March; however, it is also developed by IBM, as an exceptionally well-made Reference Design, which Libre-SOC used for verification.

Whilst it would seem that Libre-SOC is jumping on the chip-shortage era's innovation bandwagon, Libre-SOC has actually been in development for over three and a half years so far. It even pre-dates the OpenLane initiative, and has the same objectives: fully automated HDL to GDS-II, full transparency and auditability with Libre VLSI tools Coriolis2 and Libre Cell Libraries from Chips4Makers.

With €400,000 in funding from the NLNet Foundation [a long-standing non-profit supporting privacy, security, and the "open internet"], plus an application to NGI Pointer under consideration, the next steps are to continue development of Draft Cray-style Vectors (SVP64) to the already supercomputer-level Power ISA, under the watchful eye of the upcoming OpenPOWER ISA Workgroup.

"The Rust for Linux project, sponsored by Google, has advanced..." reported the Register earlier this week: A new set of patches submitted to the Linux kernel mailing list summarizes the progress of the project to enable Rust to be used alongside C for implementing the Linux kernel. The progress is significant.

- ARM and RISC-V architectures are now supported, thanks to work on rustc_codgen_gcc, which is a GCC codegen for rustc. This means that rustc does the initial compilation of Rust code but GCC (the GNU Compiler Collection) does the backend compilation, enabling support for the architectures that GCC supports...

- Overall, "the Rust support is still to be considered experimental. However, as noted back in April, support is good enough that kernel developers can start working on the Rust abstractions for subsystems and write drivers and other modules," continued project leader Miguel Ojeda, a computer scientist at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, now working full time on Rust for Linux...

There is substantial support for the project across the industry. Google said in April "we feel that Rust is now ready to join C as a practical language for implementing the kernel" and that it would reduce the number of potential bugs and security vulnerabilities. Google is sponsoring Ojeda to work full time on the project for a year, via the ISRG (Internet Security Research Group), which said last month that it is part of "efforts to move the internet's critical software infrastructure to memory safe code," under the project name Prossimo. The ISRG is also the nonprofit organisation behind Let's Encrypt free security certificates. Ojeda also mentioned that Microsoft's Linux Systems Group is contributing and hopes to submit "select Hyper-V drivers written in Rust." Arm is promising assistance with Rust for Linux on ARM-based systems. IBM has contributed Rust kernel support for its PowerPC processor.

More detail is promised at the forthcoming Linux Plumber's Conference in September. In the meantime, the project is on GitHub here.
"In addition, we would like to announce that we are organizing a new conference that focuses on Rust and the Linux kernel..." Ojeda posted. "Details will be announced soon." And for context, the Register adds: Linus Torvalds has said on several occasions that he welcomes the possibility of using Rust alongside C for kernel development, and told IT Wire in April that it is "getting to the point where maybe it might be mergeable for 5.14 or something like that."

Over the Fourth of July weekend, a number of news outlets, including Slashdot, ran stories warning that the free and open-source audio editor Audacity may now be classified as spyware due to recent updates to its privacy policy. Ars Technica's Jim Salter looked into these claims and found that that is not the case. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from his report: FOSS-focused personal technology site SlashGear declares that although Audacity is free and open source, new owner Muse Group can "do some pretty damaging changes" -- specifically meaning its new privacy policy and telemetry features, described as "overarching and vague." FOSSPost goes even further, running the headline "Audacity is now a possible spyware, remove it ASAP." The root of both sites' concern is the privacy policy instigated by new Audacity owner Muse Group, who already published open source music notation tool MuseScore. The privacy policy, which was last updated on July 2, outlines the data which the app may collect [...]. The personal data being collected as outlined in the first five bullet points is not particularly broad -- in fact, it's quite similar to the collected data described in FOSSPost's own privacy policy: IP address, browser user-agent, "some other cookies your browser may provide us with," and (by way of WordPress and Google analytics) "your geographical location, cookies for other websites you visited or any other information your browser can give about you." This leaves the last row -- data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities' requests (if any)." While that's certainly a broad category and not particularly well-defined, it's also a fact of life in 2021. Whether a privacy policy says so or not, the odds are rather good that any given company will comply with legitimate law enforcement requests. If it doesn't, it won't likely be a company for long. The final grain of salt in the wound is a line stating that Audacity is "not intended for individuals below the age of 13" and requesting people under 13 years old "please do not use the App." This is an effort to avoid the added complexity and expense of dealing with laws regulating collection of personal data from children.

The first thing to point out is that neither the privacy policy nor the in-app telemetry in question are actually in effect yet -- both are targeted to an upcoming 3.0.3 release, while the most recent available version is 3.0.2. For now, that means there's absolutely no need for anyone to panic about their currently-installed version of Audacity. [...] Although FOSS-focused media outlets including FOSSPost and Slashgear reported negatively on this issue over the holiday weekend, the contributors and commenters active on the project's Github seem to have been largely satisfied by the May 13 update, which declared that Muse Group would self-host its telemetry sessions rather than using third-party libraries and hosting. The same day the second pull request went live, Github user Megaf said, "Good stuff. As long as the data is not going to [third party tech giants] we should be happy. Collect the data you really need, self-host it, make it private, make it opt-in, and we shall help." It's a small sample, but the sentiment seems broadly supported, with 66 positive and 12 negative reactions. Reaction to Megaf's comment reflects user reaction to the updated pull request itself, which currently has 606 positive and 29 explicitly negative reactions -- a marked improvement over the original pull request's 4,039 explicitly negative reactions and only 300 positive reactions. We believe that the user community got it right -- Muse Group appears to be taking the community's privacy concerns very seriously indeed, and its actual policies as stated appear to be reasonable.

Anyone deciding to download the free and open-source audio editor Audacity is being warned that the software may now be classified as spyware due to recent updates to its privacy policy. From a report: Audacity has been around for over 21 years and classes as the world's most popular audio editing software. On April 30, the Muse Group acquired Audacity with the promise that the software would "remain forever free and open source." However, as FOSS Post reports, last week the Audacity privacy policy page was updated and introduced a number of personal data collection clauses. The data collected includes OS version and name, user country based on IP address, the CPU being used, data related to Audacity error codes and crash reports, and finally "Data necessary for law enforcement, litigation and authorities' requests (if any)." The personal data collected can be shared with Muse Group employees, auditors, advisors, legal representatives and "similar agents," potential company buyers, and "any competent law enforcement body, regulatory, government agency, court or other third party where we believe disclosure is necessary (i) as a matter of applicable law or regulation, or (ii) to exercise, establish or defend our legal rights."
UPDATE: Ars Technica's Jim Salter disagrees, pointing out that "neither the privacy policy nor the in-app telemetry in question are actually in effect yet," and that the company now plans to self-host its telemetry sessions rather than using third-party libraries and hosting.

The Free Software Foundation shared an update on its "series of actions to strengthen and modernize the foundation's governance structure and processes." After a series of interviews with various firms, the board has retained a professional consultant to help the FSF devise and execute the changes needed to optimize the impact of the board and the organization.

During an initial six-month engagement, the firm will work with board members and FSF stakeholders to devise a range of systems and infrastructure that lead to:

- A transparent community-supported process for identifying new board members and evaluating current board members;

- A board member agreement that clearly outlines the responsibilities of all board members;

- A code of ethics that articulates the values of the FSF and conveys a set of principles to guide its decision making and activities, as well as the behavior of its board members, officers, employees, and volunteers; and,

- More focused and streamlined board processes that encourage consistent attention on FSF's most pressing needs .In addition, FSF executive director John Sullivan has begun recruiting candidates to succeed him as the organization's chief employed officer...

The board is also evaluating the first proposed changes to its bylaws since 2002. The goals of these revisions are to ensure that user freedom cannot be compromised by changes in the board, members, or hostile courts, with particular focus on the future of the various GNU General Public Licenses (GPL); to codify the implementation of the staff seat created on March 25, 2021; and, to align the bylaws with the outcomes of the ongoing effort to modernize the foundation's governance structure and processes.

As FSF continues to pursue its mission, the board believes these collective efforts will strengthen the organization's governance, ensuring that it is transparent, accountable, and professional for current and future board members, associate members, staff, and the broader free software movement. These efforts also underscore the board's recognition of the need to attract a new generation of activists for software freedom and to grow the movement.

Since most ebook readers run some version of the kernel Linux (with some even run the GNU/Linux operating system), "This puts ebook readers a few steps closer to freedom than other devices," notes a recent call-to-action in the Free Software Foundation Bulletin.

But with e-ink screens and DRM-laden ebooks, "closing the gap will still require a significant amount of work." Accordingly, as we announced at the LibrePlanet 2021 conference, we've decided this year to prioritize facilitating the process for an ebook reader to reach the high standards of our Respects Your Freedom (RYF) hardware certification program, whether this means adapting an existing one from a manufacturer, or even contracting its production ourselves...

The free software community has made some good strides in the area of freeing ebooks. Denis "GNUToo" Carikli has composed a page on the LibrePlanet wiki documenting the components of ebook readers and other single-board computers; this has laid the groundwork for our investigation into releasing an ebook reader, and is one of the wiki's more active projects. Also, earlier in the year, a user on the libreplanet-discuss mailing list documented their project to port Parabola GNU/Linux to the reMarkable tablet, thereby creating a free ebook reader at the same time. It's steps like these that make us feel confident that we can bring an ebook reader that respects its user's freedom to the public, both in terms of hardware and the software that's shipped with the device...

If the FSF is successful in landing RYF certification on an ebook reader, which I fully believe we will be, we can ensure that users will have the ability to read digitally while retaining their freedom.

It's up to all of us to make sure we have the right to read, by avoiding ebook DRM in each and every case, and celebrating free (as in freedom) resources like Wikibooks and the Internet Archive, bridging the divide between the movement for free software and the movement for free culture, empowering both readers and computer users around the globe.
The article also warns that ebook DRM has gotten more restrictive over the years. "It's common for textbooks to now require a constant and uninterrupted Internet connection, and that they load only a discrete number of pages at a time... Even libraries fell victim to 'lending' services like Canopy, putting an artificial lock on digital copies of books, the last place it makes sense for them to be."

Reactions are starting to come in for GitHub's new Copilot coding tool, which one site calls "a product of the partnership between Microsoft and AI research and deployment company OpenAI — which Microsoft invested $1 billion into two years ago." According to the tech preview page: GitHub Copilot is currently only available as a Visual Studio Code extension. It works wherever Visual Studio Code works — on your machine or in the cloud on GitHub Codespaces. And it's fast enough to use as you type. "Copilot looks like a potentially fantastic learning tool — for developers of all abilities," said James Governor, an analyst at RedMonk. "It can remove barriers to entry. It can help with learning new languages, and for folks working on polyglot codebases. It arguably continues GitHub's rich heritage as a world-class learning tool. It's early days but AI-assisted programming is going to be a thing, and where better to start experiencing it than GitHub...?"

The issue of scale is a concern for GitHub, according to the tech preview FAQ: "If the technical preview is successful, our plan is to build a commercial version of GitHub Copilot in the future. We want to use the preview to learn how people use GitHub Copilot and what it takes to operate it at scale." GitHub spent the last year working closely with OpenAI to build Copilot. GitHub developers, along with some users inside Microsoft, have been using it every day internally for months.

[Guillermo Rauch, CEO of developer software provider Vercel, who also is founder of Vercel and creator of Next.js], cited in a tweet a statement from the Copilot tech preview FAQ page, "GitHub Copilot is a code synthesizer, not a search engine: the vast majority of the code that it suggests is uniquely generated and has never been seen before."

To that, Rauch simply typed: "The future."

Rauch's post is relevant in that one of the knocks against Copilot is that some folks seem to be concerned that it will generate code that is identical to code that has been generated under open source licenses that don't allow derivative works, but which will then be used by a developer unknowingly...
GitHub CEO Nat Friedman has responded to those concerns, according to another article, arguing that training an AI system constitutes fair use: Friedman is not alone — a couple of actual lawyers and experts in intellectual property law took up the issue and, at least in their preliminary analysis, tended to agree with Friedman... [U.K. solicitor] Neil Brown examines the idea from an English law perspective and, while he's not so sure about the idea of "fair use" if the idea is taken outside of the U.S., he points simply to GitHub's terms of service as evidence enough that the company can likely do what it's doing. Brown points to passage D4, which grants GitHub "the right to store, archive, parse, and display Your Content, and make incidental copies, as necessary to provide the Service, including improving the Service over time." "The license is broadly worded, and I'm confident that there is scope for argument, but if it turns out that Github does not require a license for its activities then, in respect of the code hosted on Github, I suspect it could make a reasonable case that the mandatory license grant in its terms covers this as against the uploader," writes Brown. Overall, though, Brown says that he has "more questions than answers."
Armin Ronacher, the creator of the Flask web framework for Python, shared an interesting example on Twitter (which apparently came from the game Quake III Arena) in which Copilot apparently reproduces a chunk of code including not only its original comment ("what the fuck?") but also its original copyright notice.

"Organizations are beginning to develop, design, and manage their own AI-powered voice assistant systems independent of platforms such as Siri and Alexa," reports VentureBeat: The transition is being driven by the desire to manage the entirety of the user experience and integrate voice assistance into multiple business processes and brand environments, from call centers to stores. In a recent survey of 500 IT and business decision-makers in the U.S., France, Germany, and the U.K., 28% of respondents said they were using voice technologies and 84% expect to be using them in the next year.

To support the evolution, the Linux Foundation launched the Open Voice Network (OVN), an alliance advocating for the adoption of open standards across voice assistant apps in automobiles, smartphones, smart home devices, and more. With founding members Target, Schwarz Gruppe, Wegmans Food Markets, Microsoft, Veritone, Deutsche Telekom, and others, the OVN's goal — much like Amazon's Voice Interoperability Initiative — is to standardize the development and use of voice assistant systems and conversational agents that use technologies including automatic speech recognition, natural language processing, advanced dialog management, and machine learning... It was first announced as the Open Voice Initiative in 2019, but expanded significantly as the COVID-19 pandemic spurred enterprises to embrace digital transformation.

"Voice is expected to be a primary interface to the digital world, connecting users to billions of sites, smart environments and AI bots ... Key to enabling enterprise adoption of these capabilities and consumer comfort and familiarity is the implementation of open standards," Mike Dolan, SVP and general manager of projects at the Linux Foundation, said in a statement. "The potential impact of voice on industries including commerce, transportation, healthcare, and entertainment is staggering and we're excited to bring it under the open governance model of the Linux foundation to grow the community and pave a way forward."
Besides a focus on standards and technology-sharing, the group plans to collaborate with existing industry associations on regulatory/legislative issues — including data privacy."

"Linus Torvalds has just released the Linux 5.13 kernel as stable," reports Phoronix: Linux 5.13 brings initial but still early support for the Apple M1 with basic support but not yet accelerated graphics and a lot more to iron out moving ahead. There are also new Linux 5.13 security features like the Landlock security module, Clang control flow integrity support, and optionally randomizing the kernel stack offset at each system call. There is also AMD fun this cycle around FreeSync HDMI support, initial Aldebaran bring-up, and more. Intel has more work on Alder Lake, a new cooling driver, and more discrete graphics bring-up. There are also other changes for Linux 5.13 around faster IO_uring, a generic USB display driver, and other new hardware enablement.
"5.13 overall is actually fairly large," Linus Torvalds posted on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, calling it "one of the bigger 5.x releases, with over 16,000 commits (over 17k if you count merges), from over 2,000 developers. But it's a "big all over" kind of thing, not something particular that stands out as particularly unusual..."

"When Red Hat killed off CentOS Linux in a highly controversial December 2020 announcement, Gregory Kurtzer immediately announced his intention to recreate CentOS with a new distribution named after his deceased mentor," Ars Technica reported in February.

And this week, "The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation has announced general availability (GA) of Rocky Linux 8.4," reports ZDNet. "It's an important milestone because it's the first Rocky Linux general availability release ever." Huge companies, including Disney, GoDaddy, Rackspace, Toyota and Verizon, relied on CentOS, and they were reportedly not happy about RedHat's decision... It turns out that Kurtzer's decision has been a popular one. Besides quickly building up an army of hundreds of contributors for the project, Rocky Linux 8.4 - which follows the May 18 release of Red Hat's RHEL 8.4 - was downloaded at least 10,000 times within half a day of its release... "If we extrapolate the count to include our other mirrors we are probably at least 3-4x that (if not even way more)!" boasts Kurtzer in a LinkedIn post. "Lots of reports coming in of people and organizations already replacing their CentOS systems (and even other Linux distributions) with Rocky. The media is flying off the hook and business analysts also validating to me personally that Rocky Linux might soon be the most utilized Linux operating system used in enterprise and cloud!"

Rocky Linux 8.4 took seven months for the newly formed community to release, and is available for x86_64 and ARM64 (aarch64) architecture hardware in various ISOs.
"Sufficient testing has been performed such that we have confidence in its stability for production systems," explains a blog post at RockyLinux.org, adding that free community support is available through the forums as well as live chat avaiable through IRC and Rocky Linux Mattermost. "Paid commercial support is currently available through CIQ..."

"Corporations come and go, their interests as transient as they are self-serving. But a community persists, and that's who we dedicate Rocky Linux to: you." Rocky is more than the next free and open, community enterprise operating system. It's a community. A commitment to an ideal bigger than the sum of its parts, and a promise that our principles — embedded even within our repositories and ISOs — are immutable...

This is just the beginning, and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation is more than just Rocky Linux — it's a home for those that believe that open source isn't just a switch that can be toggled at will, and that projects that many rely on not be subject to the whims of a few. To this point, you can easily find all of our sources, our build infrastructure, Git repositories, and everything else anyone would need to fork our work and ensure that it continues if need be...

When we announced our release candidate, we asked you to come build the next free, open, community enterprise operating system with us. Now we're asking you for more: join us as we build our community.
They also thanked 11 sponsors and partners for contributing "resources, financial backing, software, and infrastructure."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Blender is one of the most important open source projects, as the 3D graphics application suite is used by countless people at home, for business, and in education. The software can be used on many platforms, such as Windows, Mac, and of course, Linux. Today, Ubuntu-maker Canonical announces it will offer paid enterprise support for Blender LTS. Surprisingly, this support will not only be for Ubuntu users. Heck, it isn't even limited to Linux installations. Actually, Canonical will offer this support to Blender LTS users on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

MojoKid writes: AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) PC graphics up-scaling technology is ready for prime-time and the company has allowed members of the press to showcase performance and visuals of the tech in action with a number of game engines. AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is vendor-agnostic and doesn't require specialized hardware to function like NVIDIA DLSS, which relies on Tensor cores on-board NVIDIA Turing or Ampere GPUs to accelerate neural network models that have been specifically trained on game engines. In contrast, AMD FSR utilizes more traditional spatial upscaling to create a super resolution image from a single input frame, not multiple frames. AMD FSR then employs a library of open-source algorithms that work on sharpening both image edge and texture detail. In game testing at HotHardware, frame rates can jump dramatically with little to no perceptible reduction in image quality, and the technology even works on many NVIDIA GPUs as well. There are currently 19 titles that are available or planned with support for AMD FSR, but with the open nature of the technology and cross-GPU compatibility, game developers theoretically should have significant incentive for adoption to breath new performance into their game titles.

"Frank McCourt, the billionaire real estate mogul and former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, is pouring $100 million into an attempt to rebuild the foundations of social media," reports Bloomberg: The effort, which he has loftily named Project Liberty, centers on the construction of a publicly accessible database of people's social connections, allowing users to move records of their relationships between social media services instead of being locked into a few dominant apps.

The undercurrent to Project Liberty is a fear of the power that a few huge companies — and specifically Facebook Inc. — have amassed over the last decade... Project Liberty would use blockchain to construct a new internet infrastructure called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol. With cryptocurrencies, blockchain stores information about the tokens in everyone's digital wallets; the DSNP would do the same for social connections. Facebook owns the data about the social connections between its users, giving it an enormous advantage over competitors. If all social media companies drew from a common social graph, the theory goes, they'd have to compete by offering better services, and the chance of any single company becoming so dominant would plummet.

Building DSNP falls to Braxton Woodham, the co-founder of the meal delivery service Sun Basket and former chief technology officer of Fandango, the movie ticket website... McCourt hired Woodham to build the protocol, and pledged to put $75 million into an institute at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and Sciences Po in Paris to research technology that serves the common good. The rest of his $100 million will go toward pushing entrepreneurs to build services that utilize the DSNP...

A decentralized approach to social media could actually undermine the power of content moderation, by making it easier for users who are kicked off one platform to simply migrate their audiences to more permissive ones. McCourt and Woodham say blockchain could discourage bad behavior because people would be tied to their posts forever...

Eventually, the group plans to create its own consumer product on top of the DSNP infrastructure, and wrote in a press release that the eventual result will be an "open, inclusive data economy where individuals own, control and derive greater social and economic value from their personal information."

Google has open-sourced a collection of C++ libraries for implementing Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) in modern applications. From a report: Fully homomorphic encryption, or simply homomorphic encryption, is a form of data encryption that allows users/applications to perform mathematical computations on encrypted data without decrypting it first, keeping the data's privacy intact. While the concept of homomorphic encryption has been around since 1978, when it was first described at a theoretical level, and 2009, when it was first implemented in practice, it has not been broadly adopted in software due to its complexity, advanced cryptography techniques, and lack of open-source code and public documentation. However, despite this, today, FHE is a hot technology in software design.

FHE allows software vendors to work on encrypted data without sharing the encryption/decryption keys with untrustworthy systems such as client-side apps or publicly-hosted web servers, where the keys could be stolen or intercepted by malware or malicious human operators. FHE allows developers to keep data secure, encrypted, and private, all at the same time, and Google hopes that developers will use its FHE libraries as the first step into adopting this new type of encryption technology within their applications.

KDE Plasma 5.22 is now available, bringing "hugely improved" Wayland support, better performance for gaming, adaptive panel transparency for the panel and widgets, and more. Phoronix reports: There is now support for variable rate refresh (VRR) / Adaptive-Sync on Wayland, vertical/horizontal maximization now working with KWin Wayland, global menu applet support under Wayland, support for activities, and a lot of other general improvements and fixes so the overall Wayland support is much more polished and nearly at par to the X.Org Server support.

The performance for gaming with KDE Plasma on Wayland should also be better with now having direct scan-out support for full-screen windows. Rounding out the graphics fun with this release is also GPU hot-plugging support on Wayland for KWin, such as if using an external GPU or USB display adapter. KDE Plasma 5.22 also delivers on adaptive panel transparency for the panel and widgets, desktop notification improvements, Plasma System Monitor has replaced KSysGuard as the default system monitoring application, and a variety of other improvements. You can view the full changelog for Plasma 5.22 here.

From today's edition of Mike Melanson's "This Week in Programming" column: If you've been using open source software for any amount of time, then you're well aware of the tangled web of dependencies often involved in such projects. If not, there's any number of tools out there that explore just how interconnected everything is, and this week Google has jumped into the game with its own offering — an exploratory visualization site called Open Source Insights that gives users an interactive view of dependencies of open source projects.

Now, Google isn't the first to get into the game of trying to uncover and perhaps untangle the dizzying dependency graph of the open source world, but the company argues that it is more so trying to lay everything out in a way that developers can see, visually, just how, well, hopelessly screwed they really are.

"There are tools to help, of course: vulnerability scanners and dependency audits that can help identify when a package is exposed to a vulnerability. But it can still be difficult to visualize the big picture, to understand what you depend on, and what that implies," they write.

The Open Source Insights tool — currently "experimental" — gives users either a table or graphical visualization of how a project is composed, allowing them to explore the dependency graph and examine how using different versions of certain projects might actually affect that dependency graph. One of the benefits, Google notes, is that it allows users to see all this information "without asking you to install the package first. You can see instantly what installing a package — or an updated version — might mean for your project, how popular it is, find links to source code and other information, and then decide whether it should be installed."

Currently, the tool supports npm, Maven, Go modules, and Cargo, with more packaging systems on the way soon...