I’m pretty awful at following tech news. Or, more accurately, I don’t have a very structured approach to following tech news. Therefore, I’m trying something new: Once a month, I’ll list some stories that seem interesting in the scope of this blog, meaning, they’re related to SDR, Open Source, or related to tech in some other way that matters to me.
The selection of news items is somewhat random. I’ll just pick a few stories to highlight, along with why I highlighted them. In particular, I don’t have anything related to the war in Ukraine, which is the biggest news of the month, which I don’t mean in any way to diminish.
Google supports creation of an open FPGA Interchange Format
Source: Google Open Source Blog
Why I care: For Google, FPGAs are a complement, and as such, they aim to commoditize them. This is a boost for the open source FPGA community, as they can now develop their tools with more confidence that they’ll remain compatible with other tools, including proprietary vendor tools. Also, Google seems to prefer the open source tools to the vendor tools, although I might be reading too much between the lines there. In any case, Google is a big player and this will certainly help towards removing dependency on tools like Vivado.
Munich keeps bungling their path towards a sustainable Open Source Strategy
Why I care: I’m a fan of the public-money, public-code movement. Here you can see it failing, but not for great reasons.
Intel moves yet again closer to RISC-V
Why I care: RISC-V is of course a competitor to ARM, and Intel’s x86 is not. This could put Intel back at the top of the game for mobile devices, phones, IoT devices, etc. Is this good for the RISC-V ecosystem? I’m leaning towards yes.
Germany’s Minister for the interior wants software vendors to be liable for damages
Source: golem.de
Why I care: This is a “I-believe-it-when-I-see-it” kind of thing, but as someone who makes software for a living, this could have interesting effects. Also, how does this apply to Open Source? A possible entry-point for regulatory capture, for sure.
US Executive Order Towards Zero Trust Principles
Source: whitehouse.gov, golem.de, https://zerotrust.cyber.gov/
Why I care: There’s some interesting bits in here, such as giving security researchers some leeway (and even introducing bug bounty programs) instead of indicting them, reducing the reliance on passwords, and becoming more paranoid about security in general. The latter makes sense, given that security consultants had a bunch of issues of their own (see Solarwinds).
Regulators terminate ARM-acquisition by Nvidia
Source: nvidia.com, golem.de
Why I care: This was a bit unexpected, I had already assumed this was a done deal. One reason this is interesting is that a big competitor’s of Nvidia, Xilinx, is also a big user of ARM cores.
Huawei “Rip and Replace” Program costs $5.6 billion
The United States bought lots of stuff that they now need to dismantle for $5.6 billion. Something went very, very wrong here.