ArchieBunker writes: The OpenBSD project has turned 25 years old and is celebrating this with release 6.8.

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Apple has launched Apple Music TV, a free 24-hour curated livestream of popular music videos that will also include "exclusive new music videos and premiers, special curated music video blocks, and live shows and events as well as chart countdowns and guests," according to the announcement. From a report: Apple Music TV will be available to U.S. residents only on the Apple Music app and the Apple TV app. It can be found at apple.co/AppleMusicTV and in the browse tab in the Apple Music and Apple TV app. The service premiered Monday morning with a countdown of the top 100 all-time most-streamed songs in the U.S. on Apple Music. On Thursday (October 22), it will celebrate the upcoming release of Bruce Springsteens's "Letter to You" album with an "all day Bruce takeover" featuring music-video blocks of his most popular videos, an interview with Zane Lowe, anchor of Apple Music's radio station, and a special livestream fan event.

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The European Union aims to spend up to 10 billion euro ($11.7 million) over the next seven years to help build up a homegrown cloud computing sector that could rival foreign corporations such as Amazon, Google and Alibaba. From a report: Twenty-five EU countries signed a joint declaration last week pledging public money to power up the cloud sector and establishing the "European Alliance on Industrial Data and Cloud," a partnership geared toward facilitating such projects. The alliance -- whose funding is to be drawn from existing EU programs and hoped-for pledges from industry and national capitals -- will be launched by the end of the year. Cyprus and Denmark were the only EU member countries not to sign the declaration due to "technical reasons." The declaration "is a foundation stone for the establishment of European cloud technology, which will be very high performing," said Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, following a meeting of European telecoms ministers organized by the German government, which currently holds the EU's rotating Council presidency. "Contrary to the prejudices, we are not late [on cloud development]. We are the first to get involved in the industrial cloud," he added.

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The US Department of Justice has unsealed charges today against six Russian nationals believed to be part of one of Russia's most elite and secretive hacking groups, universally known as Sandworm. From a report: US officials said all six nationals are officers in Unit 74455 of the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), a military intelligence agency of the Russian Army, DOJ officials said today. Under orders from the Russian government, US officials said the six (believed to be part of a much larger group) conducted cyber-attacks on behalf of the Russian government with the intent to destabilize other countries, interfere in their internal politics, and cause havoc and monetary losses. Their attacks span the last decade and include some of the biggest cyber-attacks known to date: Ukrainian Government & Critical Infrastructure (between December 2015 to December 2016), French Elections (April and May 2017), Worldwide Businesses and Critical Infrastructure (aka NotPetya; June 2017), PyeongChang Winter Olympics Hosts, Participants, Partners, and Attendees (December 2017 through February 2018), PyeongChang Winter Olympics IT Systems (aka Olympic Destroyer; 2017 through February 2018), Novichok Poisoning Investigations (April 2018), and Georgian Companies and Government Entities (a 2018 spearphishing campaign targeting a major media company, 2019 efforts to compromise the network of Parliament, and a wide-ranging website defacement campaign in 2019.)

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Marvel Entertainment has announced that it is halving the wait time for fans choosing to read releases on its digital subscription Marvel Unlimited, with titles now appearing on the service just three months after print release. The change takes effect immediately. From a report: Marvel Unlimited launched in 2007, and offers access to the publisher's digital library of titles -- currently numbering more than 27,000 issues -- for either a monthly or annual subscription fee. The service is available as an iOS, Android and web app.

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It will become illegal for anyone in the UK to pick up and use their mobile phone while driving, under new legislation to be enacted next year. From a report: The change will end a loophole that can allow drivers to escape punishment for using a hand-held phone to take a photo or play a game. Mobiles will still be able to be used to pay for a drive-through takeaway. And drivers will still be able to use devices hands-free under the plans, the Department for Transport said. At present, making phone calls and sending text messages are banned while driving. Ministers have rejected calls to also ban the use of hands-free function, for example using a sat-nav in a phone cradle. Roads minister Baroness Vere said hand-held phone use behind the wheel was "distracting and dangerous" and that "for too long risky drivers have been able to escape punishment." The change in law would apply across the UK and is expected to come into effect early next year, depending on the outcome of the consultation.

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The Raspberry Pi Foundation is launching a new product today -- the Compute Module 4. From a report: If you've been keeping an eye on the Raspberry Pi releases, you know that the flagship Raspberry Pi 4 was released in June 2019. The Compute Module 4 features the same processor, but packed in a compute module for industrial use cases. A traditional Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer with a ton of ports sticking out. Compute Modules are somewhat different. Those system-on-module variants are more compact single-board computers without any traditional port. It lets you create a prototype using a traditional Raspberry Pi, and then order a bunch of Compute Modules to embed in your commercial products. "Over half of the seven million Raspberry Pi units we sell each year go into industrial and commercial applications, from digital signage to thin clients to process automation," Eben Upton wrote on the Raspberry Pi blog. Some things are strictly similar between the Raspberry Pi 4 and the Compute Module 4, such as the 64-bit ARM-based processor with VideoCore VI graphics. This is going to represent a huge upgrade for previous Compute Module customers. In particular, you get much better video performance with 4Kp60 hardware decode for H.265 videos, 1080p60 hardware decode for H.264 videos, 1080p30 hardware encode of H.264 videos. You can also take advantage of the dual HDMI interfaces to connect up to two 4K displays at 60 frames per second.

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Google's $2.1 billion deal for Fitbit might go down as the only merger to qualify as both pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. From a report: European Union antitrust regulators have again extended their decision deadline, this time to Jan. 8, 2021. And it could be further complicated by U.S. authorities, who are drawing up a broader antitrust case against Google and/or its parent company Alphabet. The deal was originally announced on Nov. 1, 2019. The delay is about data: Google has always said the acquisition is centered on devices, but that alone hasn't allayed regulator fears over what happens to the information those devices collect. Reuters reports that Google recently offered concessions to the European Commission: It would "restrict the use of Fitbit data for Google ads, facilitate rival makers of wearables seeking to connect to the Android platform and allow third parties' continued access to Fitbit users' data with their consent." These revisions appear to have satisfied the EC, but that could change once analyzed by outside critics. Plus, again, there are those pesky Americans.

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Mega-chain AMC has begun to offer the option through its site, with prices for renting out a theater starting at a surprisingly reasonable $99 (though not in New York, Alaska and Hawaii). Split among ten friends, and you're already paying less than a normal movie ticket. From a report: Attendees can invite as many as 20 people to a screening, which consists of classic titles like Jurassic Park and Halloween-centric fare like The Nightmare Before Christmas. Prices go up from there. New titles like Tenet and The New Mutants, cost up to $349 for a single screening. The former, helmed by blockbuster director Christopher Nolan, was set to be a kind of litmus test for moviegoers' willingness to return to theaters.

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Here's a video that demos how I edit my blog. I created it last October, and thought it might be worth another look. The big deal is fluidity. The user interface hangs on a framework that's designed for writers. Most of what goes into a blog is writing, so it's worth setting it up this way.

As a Roku user, HBO clearly doesn't want my money. I tried getting HBO as part of Hulu and it's awful. There was a program I wanted to watch, the West Wing reunion, but their search only showed the original series. I found it on my iPad, which HBO still has its own app for, so that worked. Later, I cancelled my HBO subscription. Subscriptions are madness. Every service has its own user interface. Three services are locked in for me. 1. Netflix, because it's Netflix. 2. Amazon, because I pay nothing extra for it, so why not. 3. YouTube TV so I can watch cable news and have learned its UI. There are plenty of other brands that have shows that I want to watch and would be willing to pay for, but there's a limit to how many packages I'm going to buy and how many UIs I can learn. Can the people who run these businesses not understand this? There's going to be a huge culling and one or two will remain. Probably Netflix and Amazon. If you don't think so, look around. How many product categories have more than one or two products with any market share?

Every university should be home to an open source development project.

Craig Newmark is becoming the Andrew Carnegie of our era.

Japan will join forces with the United States and Europe to take on any market abuses by the four Big Tech companies, the new head of its antitrust watchdog said on Monday, a sign Tokyo will join global efforts to regulate digital platform operators. From a report: Kazuyuki Furuya, chairman of Japan's Fair Trade Commission (FTC), also said Tokyo could open a probe into any merger or business tie-up involving fitness tracker maker Fitbit if the size of such deals are big enough. "If the size of any merger or business-tie up is big, we can launch an anti-monopoly investigation into the buyer's process of acquiring a start-up (like Fitbit)," he told Reuters. "We're closely watching developments including in Europe." EU antitrust regulators in August launched an investigation into a $2.1 billion deal by Google's bid to buy Fitbit that aimed to take on Apple and Samsung in the wearable technology market. Japan is laying the groundwork to regulate platform operators. Among them are big tech giants dubbed "GAFA" - Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook -- that face various antitrust probes in western nations.

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Microsoft's flagship 2020 game Flight Simulator was supposed to showcase Bing Maps and Azure's streaming capabilities. There's just one small problem: gamers are overwriting Bing's in-game 3D photogrammetry with entire cities ripped from Google Earth. From a report: "When playing the game, you're essentially looking at an extremely high resolution image of the entire globe in 3D -- think Google Earth but of a much higher quality," gushed one Flight Simulator reviewer earlier this summer. It may come as a shock to him and Redmond alike that gamers are importing Google photogrammetry into the simulator to replace the default Bing 3D buildings. Microsoft made a big deal of how Flight Simulator's depiction of the entire world would be powered by Bing Maps and data extrapolated from Bing Maps to create reasonably accurate 3D buildings (stand fast, accidental skyscrapers) in the same places as their real-world counterparts.

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