Google open-sources Cardboard to keep ‘no-frills’ VR widely available

Google Open Sources its Cardboard VR Platform

Google Open Sources Cardboard VR

Google open sources Cardboard as it retreats from phone-based VR

Google might have killed Daydream, but it's making Cardboard open source

Google's Cardboard VR Platform Is Now Open Source

Google Cardboard open sourced as active development on Google VR SDK stops

Google open sources Cardboard as it retreats from phone-based VR

Google open-sources Cardboard in wake of Daydream VR's demise

Google launches open-source project for Cardboard VR viewer

Google Cardboard is now open source to keep the mobile VR daydream alive

In 2015, Google launched its formal entry into the world of mobile-powered virtual reality. Cardboard was revolutionary in the way it empowered VR experiences with nothing but, well, a makeshift cardboard headset with special lenses. But while headsets were relatively easy to make, the software behind Cardboard stagnated to the point of being forgotten. Now Google seems to be stirring things up a bit by trying to breathe new life into Google Cardboard, mostly be handing off its upkeep to the open source community.

Google Cardboard Now Open-Source

Google is open-sourcing its virtual reality viewer Google Cardboard. The open-source release of Google Cardboard includes source code, Android and iOS libraries, APIs, and a QR code library. Although usage for the product has significantly decreased since its introduction at Google I/O, and Google is no longer actively building the Google VR SDK, Google believes Google Cardboard provides a great deal of value to the budding VR industry as a low-cost entry point for developers to enter and experiment in the market.

Google Cardboard Goes Open Source

The Google Cardboard is a simple tool that allowed for basically anyone to experience VR, as long as they have a compatible phone. The company has previously open sourced the actual cardboard component of the tech, releasing its measurements for anyone to download. Now, the internet search giant is doing the same for the software as well.

Each day Crunch: Google broadcasts open-source chip mission

The intention of the brand new coalition is to construct reliable chip designs to be used in information facilities, storage and laptop peripherals.

The mission will enable anybody to examine the {hardware} for safety vulnerabilities and backdoors. It comes at a time the place tech giants and governments alike are more and more conscious that hostile nation states try to infiltrate and compromise provide chains in an effort to hold out long-term surveillance or espionage.

Google's Ultra-Secure Chip, a Facebook Facelift, and More

Google Launches OpenTitan Project to Open Source Chip Security

Google’s OpenTitan: A new open source silicon root of trust project debuts

Google looks to open source silicon to solve the root of trust conundrum

The Lounge on Dokku

Mozilla has hosted an enterprise instance of IRCCloud for several years now, and it’s been a great client to use with our IRC network. IRCCloud has deprecated their enterprise product and so Mozilla recently decommissioned our instance. I then saw several colleagues praising The Lounge as a good self-hosted alternative. I became even more interested when I saw that the project maintains a docker image distribution of their releases. I now have an instance running and I’m using irc.mozilla.org via this client and I agree with my colleagues: it’s a decent replacement.

Mozilla Addons Blog: Firefox to discontinue sideloaded extensions

Sideloading is a method of installing an extension in Firefox by adding an extension file to a special location using an executable application installer. This installs the extension in all Firefox instances on a computer.

Sideloaded extensions frequently cause issues for users since they did not explicitly choose to install them and are unable to remove them from the Add-ons Manager. This mechanism has also been employed in the past to install malware into Firefox. To give users more control over their extensions, support for sideloaded extensions will be discontinued.

During the release cycle for Firefox version 73, which goes into pre-release channels on December 3, 2019 and into release on February 11, 2020, Firefox will continue to read sideloaded files, but they will be copied over to the user’s individual profile and installed as regular add-ons. Sideloading will stop being supported in Firefox version 74, which will be released on March 10, 2020. The transitional stage in Firefox 73 will ensure that no installed add-ons will be lost, and end users will gain the ability to remove them if they chose to.

Facebook Is Still Failing at Ad Transparency (No Matter What They Claim)

Yesterday, Jack Dorsey made a bold statement: Twitter will cease all political advertising on the platform. “Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimization of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes. All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale,” he tweeted.

Later that day, Sheryl Sandberg responded: Facebook doesn’t have to cease political advertising… because the platform is “focused and leading on transparency.” Sandberg cited Facebook’s ad archive efforts, which ostensibly allow researchers to study the provenance and impact of political ads.

Chrome 79 Beta Adds The WebXR Device API For VR On The Web

Following last week's release of Chrome 78, Google today promoted Chrome 79 to their beta channel.

The Chrome 79 Beta most notably comes with WebXR Device API support for supporting VR head-mounted displays from the browser. The WebXR Device API will be the cross-browser standard for VR content on the web.

Goodbye, Flash

Google Search will stop supporting Flash later this year. In Web pages that contain Flash content, Google Search will ignore the Flash content. Google Search will stop indexing standalone SWF files. Most users and websites won't see any impact from this change.

Google to stop indexing Flash for search

Minus indexing, searches for Flash content will come up empty. If Google doesn't index it, in other words, does it exist? For the vast majority on the web - analytics vendor Net Applications said Google accounted for 75% of global search activity last month - that would be a no.

The Internet At 50: It Has Enabled Many Wonderful Things, But We Have To Fight To Keep It That Way

Today has been declared the 50th anniversary of the internet, as on October 29th, 1969, a team at UCLA, lead by Leonard Kleinrock, sent a message to a team at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), representing the very first transmission over the then ARPANET, which later became the internet. This seems like a good moment to think about all that the internet has enabled -- but also just how far we may have strayed from its early promise and how far we might still be able to go. On the historical side, Kleinrock himself has posts at both ICANN and the Internet Society, and both are worth reading. The ICANN post is all about that first message transmission...

5 milestones that created the [Internet] 50 years after the first network message

Much more traffic than that travels through the [Internet] these days, with billions of emails sent and searches conducted daily. As a scholar of how the [Internet] is governed, I know that today’s vast communications web is a result of governments and regulators making choices that collectively built the [Internet] as it is today.

Here are five key moments in this journey.

Internet 50 years old today

On 29 October 1969 the first message was transmitted over ARPANET, the forerunner to the Internet. UCLA student programmer Charlie Kline used the University’s SDS Sigma 7 computer to login to an SDS 940 computer at Stanford Research Institute at Stanford University in Silicon Valley.

NextCloud on Pi Adventures

I spent yesterday *finally* setting up a NextCloud instance of my own. It’s been on my todo since I installed fiber at home and got a decent Internet connection.

I started out with Rasbian Lite and combined it with the NextCloudPi install script from ownyourbits. I then used certbot to install certificates from let’s encrypt before migrating the data directory using these instructions.

After that it was happy account creation time, before realizing that I could not upload files larger than ~10kB. Very annoying.

Escape Google!

Being practical most people are going to want to keep using Google services, but at least knowing what the issues are, how you can use privacy-enhanced versions or escape completely with your own services is good to know. While Nextcloud is so slick these days and with pre-packaged options it’s certainly fun just to try out, if not deployed as a full-time personal cloud solution.

But it’s not all worrying about invasion of the privacy snatchers, we’ve plenty of down-to-earth tutorials and projects to keep you busy. We take another look at using Audacity to improve your YouTube audio and create effects, we test out of a bunch of server distros to see which is best for you in Roundup, there’s some lovely retro loving with a look at running ZX Basic and we look at building a wearable webcam from a Pi Zero. Enjoy!