Devices/Embedded Hardware

• 3.5-inch SBC features Comet Lake-S

  Aaeon’s 3.5-inch Linux-ready “GENE-CML5” SBC supplies an up to octa-core 10th Gen Core CPU plus up to 64GB DDR4, 2x SATA, 2x GbE, 2x USB 3.2 Gen2, DP, VGA, M.2 M-key, and PCIe x4. Aaeon has posted a preliminary product page for what appears to be the first 3.5-inch SBC built around Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake-S. In fact, this is one of the first Comet Lake SBCs of any kind, following a few early entries like Portwell’s WADE-8212 Mini-ITX board.

• Play your retro console on a modern TV

• Olimex RP2040-PICO-PC “computer” to feature RP2040-Py Raspberry Pi Pico compatible module

  We previously wrote it was possible to create a Raspberry Pi RP2040 board with HDMI using DVI and programmable IOs to output video up to 640×480 at 60 Hz with the microcontroller’s Cortex-M0+ cores clocked at 252 MHz. At the time, we also noted Olimex was working on such a board with RP2040-PICO-PC designed to create a small Raspberry Pi RP2040 computer with HDMI/DVI video output. The Bulgarian company has now manufactured the first prototype, but due to supply issues with the Raspberry Pi Pico board, they also designed their own RP2040-PICO module since they’ve got a reel of Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontrollers.

• Our most complex Open Source Hardware board made with KiCad – the octa core iMX8 Quad Max – Tukhla is completely routed and now on prototype production

  We started this project June-July 2020. Due to the Covid19 the development took 10 months although only 6 month of active work was done, due to lock downs, ill developers and so on troubles.

  Now the board is completely routed and has these features: [...]

Programming Leftovers

• Open Source Software Leader the Eclipse Foundation Launches the Adoptium Working Group for Multi-Vendor Delivery of Java Runtimes for Enterprises

• AWS's Shane Miller to head the newly created Rust Foundation

  Miller, who leads the Rust Platform team for AWS, has been a software engineer for almost 30 years. At AWS, Miller has been a leader in open-source strategic initiatives and software engineering and delivery. Miller's Rust Platform team includes Rust language and compiler maintainers and contributors and developers on the Tokio runtime for writing reliable asynchronous applications with Rust. Under Miller's leadership, the AWS Rust team is crafting optimizations and tools for the features that engineers will use to build and operate services which take full advantage of Rust's performance and safety.

• Inkscape compiled in OpenEmbedded

  Cross-compiling can be a challenge with some packages, and some of the big ones, such as SeaMonkey, LibreOffice and Inkscape, I have compiled in a running EasyOS (with the "devx" SFS loaded). I have previously compiled LibreOffice in OE, see the Pyro series. But it was a lot of work.

• Felix Häcker: New Shortwave release

  Ten months later, after 14.330 added and 8.634 deleted lines, Shortwave 2.0 is available! It sports new features, and comes with the well known improvements, and bugfixes as always. [...] Shortwave has always been designed to handle any screen size from the beginning. In version 2.0 we have been able to improve this even further. There is now a compact mini player for desktop screens. This still offers access to the most important functions in a tiny window.

• 5 signs you're a groff programmer

  I first discovered Unix systems in the early 1990s, when I was an undergraduate at university. I liked it so much that I replaced the MS-DOS system on my home computer with the Linux operating system. One thing that Linux didn't have in the early to mid-1990s was a word processor. A standard office application on other desktop operating systems, a word processor lets you edit text easily. I often used a word processor on DOS to write my papers for class. I wouldn't find a Linux-native word processor until the late 1990s. Until then, word processing was one of the rare reasons I maintained dual-boot on my first computer, so I could occasionally boot back into DOS to write papers. Then I discovered that Linux provided kind of a word processor. GNU troff, better known as groff, is a modern implementation of a classic text processing system called troff, short for "typesetter roff," which is an improved version of the nroff system. And nroff was meant to be a new implementation of the original roff (which stood for "run off," as in to "run off" a document).

Security Leftovers

• ClamAV 0.103.2 Is Released With Security Fixes For Four Vulnerabilities

  The free software anti-virus scanner ClamAV has, ironically, made a security release fixing four vulnerabilities. Two of them could cause it to crash, one could cause it to enter a endless loop and a Windows-specific vulnerability could lead to privilege escalation. ClamAV has 8,532,858 virus signatures it can scan for in its database.

• Why the U.S. Shouldn’t Play Games With Cyberwarfare as Its Power Declines

  In the SolarWinds hack, a backdoor in one of the components was downloaded to the systems of 18,000 organizations, including the U.S. Treasury and Commerce departments, the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department.

  In the Microsoft Exchange Server hack, an estimated 250,000 machinesworldwide might have been affected by a vulnerability that allowed hackers to control the machines and even infect other systems in the internal network of the targeted companies. Four major vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server were reported to Microsoft in early January. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until early March that Microsoft released patches, according to ZDNet. These vulnerabilities were used by the hackers during the period that Microsoft had either not released the patches, or companies had not upgraded their systems and installed the patches.

 

• LinkedIn denies data leak after two-thirds user base is compromised

                   

                     

  Personal data of 500 million LinkedIn users, two thirds of its user base, has been scraped and is for sale online, according to a report from Cyber News.

                     

  The data up for sale on a popular hacker platform includes account IDs, full names, email addresses, workplace information and links to social media accounts of users hosted on the platform.

                   

• Linkedin data leak: Major breach exposes 500 million users on Microsoft platform [details]

                       

                         

  While people are yet to digest the huge Facebook data leak of 533 million users (including 6.1 million Indians), Microsoft-owned professional networking platform LinkedIn is now facing a massive data leak of 500 million users that is allegedly being sold online.

                         

  An archive with data purportedly scraped from 500 million LinkedIn profiles has been put for sale on a popular [cracker] forum, with another 2 million records leaked as a proof-of-concept sample by people behind the [crack].