Microsoft to face new antitrust scrutiny in Germany

Germany's competition watchdog is set to look into whether Microsoft should come under the scope of new rules that allow the country to rapidly prohibit anti-competitive conduct, according to people familiar with the matter. Two individuals close to the matter told POLITICO that the German Cartel Office has prepared a draft decision to launch proceedings under Section 19a of the German Competition Act. The move will attempt to determine whether Microsoft should be designated as having “paramount significance for competition across markets.” If it is designated under the scope of the rules, Germany’s competition regulator will be able to intervene rapidly to ban certain anti-competitive conduct — including self-preferencing abuses and the pre-installation of services. Read on

today's leftovers

• Hacking Starlink - Schneier on Security

  This is the first—of many, I assume—hack of Starlink. Leveraging a string of vulnerabilities, attackers can access the Starlink system and run custom code on the devices.

• NSA’s Kubernetes Hardening Guidelines and Pod Security [Ed: NSA is a proponent of back doors, not security]

  I previously asked (and answered) the question, What Are the NSA K8s Guidelines and Why Should You Care? I suggested that the first step to compliance is to understand your Kubernetes environment. The next step is to review the five categories and start somewhere!

• In Other BSDs for 2022/08/06

• Cleaning up a HAMMER drive

  Predrag Punosevac has some notes on how he cleaned up some HAMMER drives and freed up half his disk space.

• Midichlorians in the blood: Summer Releases

  The first two applications, kmetronome and kmidimon, are now over fifteen years old and are only available for Linux. These two new versions are simply bug fixes, with no new features. But it is interesting to note that in FlatHub they are already based on Qt6 and supporting both Wayland and X11, although the packages in AppImage format still use Qt5. The chances of finding these applications in the official repositories of Linux distributions are slim. In fact, kmidimon was removed from the official Debian repositories with some lame excuse, and it is unlikely to be included again. I can't do anything about it, so please: direct complaints where they belong. Or use the new available distribution formats or the unofficial repositories, like Debian Multimedia, which includes the three mentioned applications and many others. The other app, dmidiplayer, is much newer and cross-platform. It is the successor to Kmid2, the KDE karaoke application that I rewrote many years ago. In this new version the most remarkable new feature is the persistent configuration of the songs. This is a feature that was already present in the old Kmid2 and that allows you to store the tempo, general volume, pitch transposition, and MIDI channel settings for each song, which will be applied when it is played again in the future. The other novelty is the individual volume adjustment for each MIDI channel, something that was not possible in Kmid2.

• DreamWorks Open Sources In House Renderer MoonRay - Invidious

  Even if they're not tools that I use it's always awesome to see amazing projects go FOSS and today is no different when DreamWorks decided to licence there in house renderer MoonRay under Apache 2.0

PostgreSQL 14.5, 13.8, 12.12, 11.17, 10.22, and 15 Beta 3; PostgreSQL Partition Manager (pg_partman) v4.7.0

• PostgreSQL 14.5, 13.8, 12.12, 11.17, 10.22, and 15 Beta 3 Released!

  The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has released an update to all supported versions of PostgreSQL, including 14.5, 13.8, 12.12, 11.17, and 10.22, as well as the third beta release of PostgreSQL 15. This release closes one security vulnerability and fixes over 40 bugs reported over the last three months.

• PostgreSQL: pg_partman 4.7.0 released

  PostgreSQL Partition Manager (pg_partman) v4.7.0 has been released. IMPORTANT REQUEST: A topic has been opened on the github page to discuss the future development of pg_partman and support for trigger-based partitioning. A plan is currently in place to begin dropping trigger-based support upon the EOL for PostgreSQL 10 on November 10, 2022. Feedback is requested for use-cases that could potentially change these plans and continue supporting trigger-based partitioning until native partitioning better supports them.

Raspberry Pi Projects in the Home

• Raspberry Pi Unlocks Door Automatically with Facial Recognition | Tom's Hardware

  Automating your smart home with a Raspberry Pi is a popular idea in the Raspberry Pi community and there are plenty of unique ways to implement the SBC into various designs. Today we’re sharing another home automation-based project created by maker and developer Dillon McCardell who’s using a Pi to operate a door locking system using facial recognition known as AuraLock. The system works just as you would expect—it uses a camera to capture images of potential faces. If a recognized and approved face is detected, the Pi will trigger the deadbolt to unlock. Once the deadbolt has been unlocked, users can enter the room and either manually lock the door or do so using the corresponding mobile application.

• Raspberry Pi Home Assistant Runs on Old Sony TV-511 | Tom's Hardware

  If there’s one thing a Raspberry Pi is good for, it’s enhancing hardware with more features than you can shake a stick at. This project, created by Telefrag Entertainment, does just that. It’s using a Raspberry Pi to power his custom home assistant system (opens in new tab) using Jarvis—a Python-based voice assistant application that integrates artificial intelligence to interpret commands. This home assistant project stands out as it uses an old Sony TV-511 television for video output. This old TV is both small and big at the same time. Having been released in the 1970s, the Sony TV-511 is not a large TV, but it’s much thicker than TVs you’ll find today. According to Telefrag Entertainment, he picked it up on eBay before turning it into this home assistant display.

• How to Build Your Own 3D Printed Raspberry Pi Robot (Updated) | Tom's Hardware

  Building your own robot is one of the most satisfying things you can do. It combines mechanical, electrical, and programming skills together in a way few projects do. I’ve been building robots for a couple of years now and love to expand my knowledge and skills by using different controller boards, motors, wheels, and sensors to detect the world around the robot.