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History Of VLC
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Feb '21

15 Feb '21

Found this <https://www.protocol.com/vlc-history-open-source> linked from a report on the new version of VLC, describing the history of the project back to its beginnings. Once upon a time there was “VideoLAN Server” and “VideoLAN Client”, but today everything has been rolled into a single “VLC” program. Of course it’s been in the sights of Intellectual Property lawyers for a long time: VLC's success also put it on the radar of patent lawyers, who started to send the VideoLAN team a growing number of legal threats, looking to extract licensing fees. Over the years, the VLC team received hundreds such legal threats over alleged patent violations. Virtually all of them were without merit, according to Kempf. Many were based on U.S. software patents that weren't easily enforceable in Europe. Others were citing technology that VLC was using even before companies tried to patent it. "No one is checking whether these patents are valid," Kempf said. "It's a complete mafia; it's protection money." The open-source x264 codec implementation was also an offshoot of VLC. And Jean-Baptiste Kempf says he could have done those software-bundling deals where unwary users get all kinds of things installed on their PCs in addition to the package they thought they were installing, and thereby earned tens of millions of dollars, but he didn’t want to. The project gets money from donations, but also from companies employing developers to build custom implementations for their set-top boxes.

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Why NVidia Really Wants To Buy ARM
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 13 Feb '21

13 Feb '21

From <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/nvidia-wants-to-buy-cpu-designer-ar…>: Owning Arm outright would also allow Nvidia much greater leeway to innovate upon the design. We've spoken to several vendors who described the sort of innovation that the RISC-V architecture allows as effectively impossible with Arm; the vendors have said "they just won't let you" make changes, like adjustments to the instruction set. If Nvidia owns Arm, it will no longer face such restrictions. And it will be the only company in such a position with respect to ARM. That may make it more competitive with RISC-V, but it will likely just drive other vendors away from ARM ... and towards RISC-V.

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Hauwei router source code.
by Ian Stewart 10 Feb '21

10 Feb '21

Hi, I recently searched for the User Manual for a Huawei Model HG253s V2 Home Gateway. I found the document which is dated 2015. Google also found the HG253s V2 open source code.zip file from February 04, 2015 @117MB. Featuring the Linux kernel version 2.6.30 this file was available from huawei.com at... https://consumer-tkb.huawei.com/weknow/servlet/download/public?contextNo=S1… So, based on what I've heard from the CIA, MI6, GCSB and Five-Eyes, I'm now looking through the source code for the functions that send the messages back to the mothership in China 😉 ...Haven't found any code that does this so far ! In summary. I was surprised that Huawei release their source code. Admittedly it's for a device that's at least five years old and, for all I know, it may be the same code that OpenWRT use. I guess I'll still have to wait a while for the source code for the Huawei 5G routers. cheers, Ian.

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Most Anti-Zoombombing Measures Are Futile
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 05 Feb '21

05 Feb '21

How do you keep unwanted busybodies out of your videoconference meetings? This analysis <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/02/zoombombing-counterm…> concludes that common measures like password-protected meetings and waiting rooms are ineffective because they guard against the wrong threats. One thing that does help is giving each invited participant a unique join link. Ideally this link can only be used once. But even if not, it still allows organizers to identify the source of a leak to a zoombomber.

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Firefox 85 Hammers the Final Nail Into the Adobe Flash Coffin
by Peter Reutemann 03 Feb '21

03 Feb '21

'With Mozilla's release of Firefox 85 on Tuesday, Adobe's once ubiquitous Flash technology is really gone for good. The software had been widely used to expand gaming, video and animation on the web, though Adobe stopped supporting it at the end of 2020. Firefox was the last major browser to support Flash. From a report: Apple, whose late boss Steve Jobs helped sink Flash by banning it from iPhones and iPads, ditched Flash with Safari 14 in September 2020. Google Chrome, the most widely used browser, completely excised it on Jan. 19 with version 88. Microsoft's Edge 88 followed suit on Jan. 21. The schedule of removals shows just how hard it is to advance technology foundations as widely used as the web. Browser makers for years wanted to remove Flash, replacing it with more advanced standards built directly into the web. Jobs' "Thoughts on Flash" letter in 2010 solidified the opposition, and Adobe started recognizing the software's doom by scrapping the Android version of Flash in 2011. It's taken years of effort to drop Flash completely. Adobe took until 2017 to announce that Flash would be completely unsupported at the end of 2020, and still some are willing to jump through lots of hoops to keep Flash around a little longer.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/01/26/1618254 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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ActiveX All Over Again?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 02 Feb '21

02 Feb '21

Is Google repeating history, by pushing new browser features regardless of their security implications, like Microsoft did in the bad old days? This article <https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/01/chrome_89_beta_brings_desktop/> reports on Chrome adding some new capabilities that other browser developers (like Mozilla and Apple) feel are far too dangerous to allow, at least in their current form. The problem is, will most users fail to appreciate the security issues, see this feature omission as a bug in those browsers, and reinforce the dominance of Chrome as a result?

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The End Of Itanium
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 02 Feb '21

02 Feb '21

The latest Linux kernel will no longer include support for Intel/HP’s Itanium processors <https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/01/linux_pulls_itanium_support/>. Of course, prior Linux kernels up to 5.10 from December presumably still include such support, while the last version of HP’s own HP-UX 11i for its Itanium-based Integrity servers was v3 from 2007 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX#Release_history>. The last working version of Microsoft’s Windows Server for that platform, 2008 R2, came out just a couple of years later, and already dropped some features compared to editions for other platforms <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008_R2#Editions>. Intel officially claims to be shipping new Itanium processors up to July this year, but it seems pretty clear the order book is empty. So it looks like the last OS still standing for that platform will be Linux.

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Google Threatens To Remove Search in Australia as Spat Escalates
by Peter Reutemann 01 Feb '21

01 Feb '21

'Google has threatened to disable its search engine in Australia if it's forced to pay local publishers for news, a dramatic escalation of a months-long standoff with the government. From a report: The proposed law, intended to compensate publishers for the value their stories generate for the company, is "unworkable," Mel Silva, managing director for Australia and New Zealand, told a parliamentary hearing Friday. She specifically opposed the requirement that Google pay media companies for displaying snippets of articles in search results. The threat is Google's most potent yet as the digital giant tries to stem a flow of regulatory action worldwide. At least 94% of online searches in Australia go through the Alphabet unit, according to the local competition regulator. "We don't respond to threats," Australia Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Friday. "Australia makes our rules for things you can do in Australia. That's done in our parliament. It's done by our government. And that's how things work here in Australia."' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/01/22/0339236 However, in related news: "Google Agrees To Pay French News Sites To Send Them Traffic" -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/01/21/2316209 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 577-5304 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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TinyPilot KVM Over IP
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 31 Jan '21

31 Jan '21

Just been watching this review <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyEpshm16HY> of the TinyPilot KVM-over-IP box. It’s purchasable from the maker’s website for US$300-plus, which is a fraction of the price of most other KVM-over-IP products. It’s built around a Raspberry π 4, using the camera adapter for HDMI in (no use made of the GPIO connector at all). Of course this means it can only support a connection to a single server machine. The source code is on GitHub if you want to build that yourself. The base product offers insecure HTTP-only access; if you want HTTPS, you have to pay extra for the TinyPilot Pro software licence. For comparison, some reader comments mention an alternative “PiKVM” product -- has anyone heard of this?

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CERN Gets Its Open Hardware Licence Approved By OSI
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 31 Jan '21

31 Jan '21

CERN wanted to come up with the hardware equivalent of open-source software licences. Such licences don’t really work well with hardware, because they use terms (like “linking” and “system libraries”) that aren’t applicable to hardware. So they worked with the Open Source Initiative (the custodians of the Open Source Definition) to come up with a selection of three licences, allowing for a choice of strong copyleft (GPL-equivalent), weak copyleft (LGPL-equivalent, I guess) and no copyleft at all. It seems these licences could actually be used for a combination of both hardware and software. <https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/29/cern_ohl_approved/>

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