Summary of the week of April 19, 2021

[cobito]

Firefox gets rid of FTP

A few days ago, the file transfer protocol turned 50 years old. To this day, it has become obsolete due to the security problems it has, mainly linked to the lack of encryption. For a year now, Firefox has had FTP support disabled and in Firefox 90, the browser will be clean of the code related to the protocol.

Looking for hidden instructions

Someone has created a program that is used to find hidden instructions in x86 processors. Some of these instructions are used to debug the CPU but others are half-finished implementations or Easter eggs. In reality, they have been there since the first CPUs and those who work on retro emulators know that despite not being documented, they must include them so that all games work as they did on the original machine.

Nvidia's purchase of ARM halted

As usually happens in this type of operation, the British government is studying the acquisition of the ISA developer by the graphics processor manufacturer.

Firefox 88 comes with improvements in PDF

The improvements consist of the viewer now being able to interpret JavaScript, so that forms and other interactive functions will now be available in documents opened with the browser. Apart from that, Mozilla continues with its policy of removing features and this time it has affected the access to View Page Information.

BSC works on an open processor

The national supercomputing center and more specifically, the BSC, is working on an open RISC-V processor whose objective is to create a CPU developed completely in Europe for high-performance computing.

Microsoft presents DirectStorage

DirectX has incorporated a new API intended for storage. The idea is to optimize the use of storage in NVMe SSD units along with the functioning of the GPU. In essence, they want to improve the flow of data that goes from the SSD to the graphics card.

The tragedy of the commons

Greg Kroah-Hartman, Torvalds' right-hand man in Linux development, has given his opinion on how not to trust that a company that needs Linux will participate in the development of a feature that it uses because it expects another company to end up doing it.

Youtube's new encoders

Google has started using cards that encode Youtube video hardware. Each card has two Argos Gen2 processors and each of them comes with 10 hardware encoders. Each of these chips encodes videos between 22 and 30 times faster than a conventional server.

Students try to demonstrate the insecurity of the kernel

Two doctoral students from the University of Minnesota have been sending fake patches for the Linux kernel to try to demonstrate that free software in general is insecure. The monumental anger of Greg KH can be read in the mailing lists.

Ubuntu 21.04 comes with AD during installation

Apart from the typical software updates, this version of the distro comes with the possibility of using an Active Directory domain so that a system administrator can establish policies in an organization.