The End of 2025 is the End of HP-UX

As of the end of 2025, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) will no longer support their proprietary Unix, HP-UX.

According to Stromasys:

It was the pioneering Unix operating system that introduced access-control lists for file access permissions. It provides an alternative to the traditional Unix permission system. Additionally, HP-UX OS was one of the early Unix systems to integrate a built-in logical volume manager.

Adafruit Speaks Out Against Mamdani RPi Ban

New York-based Adafruit, a legendary company in the maker and electronics-education industry, has posted about the Flipper Zero and Raspberry Pi ban at the inauguration for NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Raspberry Pi is a general-purpose single-board computer. It shows up in classrooms, newsrooms, accessibility rigs, art installations, and civic tech demos. Flipper Zero is a consumer electronics testing tool, but its functional territory overlaps heavily with laptops, smartphones, radios, and microcontrollers that remain perfectly legal to carry. If the concern is electronic interference, signal disruption, or hacking, the policy does not say that. It gestures vaguely by naming a couple of gadgets and hoping the implication sticks. Curiosity is now contraband.

FFmpeg project issued a DMCA takedown of a Rockhhip Linux repo, after 2 years of violation. They are defending opensource code as per LGPL-2.1-or-later and GPL-2.0-or-later etc.

Repo https://github.com/rockchip-linux/mpp

More on https://xcancel.com/FFmpeg/status/2004599109559496984

Rockchip copied lots of code from ffmpeg to its mpp video acceleration lib and applied another license over the code. They refused to give credit and remove that code etc. That is the gist of it.

Qualcomm Buys RISC-V Chip Designer

Qualcomm has purchased, Ventana, a RISC-V chip design firm aimed at the datacenter-class processor market.

Ventana holds 48 patents on processor designs, leading to speculation that Qualcomm is interested in IPR defense as they strength their datacenter-class products.

Given Qualcomm’s ongoing legal battle with Arm Limited, this may also signal the company’s pivot away from an unencumbered CPU architecture.

System76 Ships the COSMIC Desktop

System76 has signaled that the COSMIC Desktop has now reached its first stable version, dubbed the COSMIC Desktop Environment Epoch 1, with its inclusion in Pop_OS! 24.04 LTS.

System76 notes that development of the COSMIC Desktop was funded entirely through sales of System76 hardware.

COSMIC is also written in #Rust, giving certain reactionary segments of the tech community another reason to shake their fists at the sky.

Campbell’s Fires Whistle-blower, CISO Epically Screws Up

Campbell’s, the soup company, fired an IT analyst for reporting derogatory and racist remarks made by the company’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).

From KTVU:

In the recording, a voice alleged to be Bally’s can be heard criticizing Campbell’s products and mocking its consumers.

“We have s— for f—ing poor people. Who buys our s—? I don’t buy Campbell’s products barely anymore,” the voice allegedly belonging to Bally can be heard saying.

“Bioengineered meat — I don’t wanna eat a piece of chicken that came from a 3-D printer,” Bally allegedly says, belittling Campbell’s soup ingredients.

He also allegedly made derogatory comments about Indian coworkers and – according to the recording – claimed he sometimes came to work under the influence of marijuana.

“F—ing Indians don’t know a f—ing thing,” the voice on the recording says. “They couldn’t think for their f—ing selves.”

According to the Washington Post, Campbell’s Company has now fired their CISO after the recordings were made public from a law suit by the fired whistle-blower and IT analyst.

#it #ciso #whistleblower

GrapheneOS Exiled From France

The GrapheneOS project has announced that they have moved all their server infrastructure (e.g. Mastodon, Matrix) out of France for fear of government prosecution, and that developers for the project should no longer travel to France to avoid arrest. This comes as a reaction to the French interpretation of the European Union Chat Control

#grapheneos #france

Massive NPM Worm Attack

GitLab has discovered an NPM worm that is impacting a massive number of Git repositories and npm projects, ex-filtrating sensitive data such as cloud API keys and other security credentials.

According to Wiz, the scope of the attack is massive:

• 27% of code and cloud environments
• 700 npm packages
• 25,000 git repositories
• 500 GitHub users
• 775 compromised GitHub access tokens
• 373 AWS credentials
• 300 GCP credentials
• 115 Azure credentials

#npm #javascript #git

BentoPDF

The release notes for BentoPDF v1.7.4 contain trojan horse API keys to the OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini platforms that link to a RickRoll.

The ZBT-2

Home Assistant has released the Home Assistant Connect ZBT-2, the successor to the ZBT-1. The ZBT-2 has a USB adapter and a precisely tuned antenna for connecting Zigbee, Thread, or Matter networks to Home Assistant. It is available immediately at a cost for $49.