The past few weeks have rattled the desktop Linux community.
Popular tech YouTuber Linus, not Torvalds but Sebastian, decided to use Linux on desktop for a month. Linus Sebastian wanted to see if Linux has gotten to the point where it is user friendly enough that any tech nerd can pick it up and run? His focus was also on gaming on Linux because PC gaming is an area Sebastian covers a lot.
That’s an interesting concept and many in the Linux community got excited because it was free publicity for desktop Linux to a wider tech audience.
A Russian distro teaches some of us a valuable lesson, plus the great email client debate, and your thoughts on documenting and discarding collections.
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we are going on a TREASURE HUNT in Jill’s Computer Museum because the community’s most loved segment is back! Then we’re going to discuss iconic open-source software. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
It's very rare that I find myself using Text to speech on linux but when I do it's usually through espeak, sadly espeak doesn't come with the best tts package so how about we try something else, that something else being festival tts also known as festvox
In this video, we are looking at how to install Telegram on Elementary OS 6.0.
The mixture of performance and efficiency CPUs in Intel’s 12th-gen Core processors, code-named Alder Lake, hasn’t just been causing problems for some Windows gamers – it almost led to complications for Linux.
Phoronix’s Michael Larabel noticed a performance hit in the kernel a fortnight ago – in a work-in-progress release candidate, we should stress – and a fix for the scheduling code landed a little later. It turned out the kernel suffered on Alder Lake chips due to a performance-enhancing tweak for another Intel processor family: the multiple-Atom-core-based Jacobsville.
This year, Intel officially canned its Lakefield chips. These consisted of a performance core called Sunny Cove as well as Atom-class efficiency cores dubbed Tremont. Crucially, there are still multi-Tremont-core embedded processors out there, such as Snow Ridge. These are server and infrastructure-oriented components with up to 24 cores.
The first proposed cut of kernel 5.16, specifically 5.16-rc1, contained a revision to the scheduler that makes it aware that some clusters of cores share a block of L2 cache – as seen in Snow Ridge and Jacobsville.
I do a lot of testing with the kernel cephfs client these days, and have had a number of people ask about how I test it. For now, I’ll gloss over the cluster setup since there are other tutorials for that.
As part of David Howells of Red Hat long-term work on improving the caching code used by network file-systems, he today posted a big patch series rewriting the fscache and cachefiles code as the latest significant step on that adventure.
Howells posted a set of 64 patches for rewriting the kernel's fscache and cachefiles code. Linux's fsache is a general purpose cache used by network file-systems while cachefiles is for providing a caching back-end for mounted local file-systems. The Red Hat engineer has been working on this rewrite for more than the past year.
Graphically monitoring the system resources may not be the best experience on Linux. The system monitoring tool that comes baked in with your desktop environment might limit the details.
For instance, GNOME’s system monitor does not display the CPU frequency and temperatures.
In addition, the default system monitor applications available for Linux usually aim for simplicity instead of providing detailed insights.
Gantt chart is the simplest way to assign resources, manage timelines, and visualize dependencies.
It helps you to avoid confusion and cut unproductive events.
With a glance, you can have all activities, allocated assets, and the scheduled dates of each.
While a Gantt chart is a must for any complex project, in general, you need this project management tool...
Deepin is a desktop Linux distribution with roots in China. It is based on Debian, but ships with its own graphical interface called Deepin Desktop Environment and a set of Deepin-developed tools to go with it. The last version I installed was from 2015, so since I’m gradually coming back to writing for this blog, I decided to test drive the latest edition – Deepin 20.3, which was released on Nov. 25.
For me that means installing it in a virtual environment using VirtualBox. For such installations I typically assign the virtual disk 20GB of disk space. And so it was with Deepin 20.3. But that didn’t end well because at some point the installation failed, with the message shown in Figure 2: “You need at least 64 GB of disk space to install Deepin. To get better performance, 128 GB.”
Work through this Linux fundamentals checklist to make sure you're ready for whatever comes your way at home, at work, or on certification exams.
This article is the first in a series of articles to cover Bash Scripting. More articles will follow which will build on each other, so make sure you look over each article. It is preferable to read the articles in order (which is why I will number them).
Scripting is a very useful ability for someone using Linux. Making scripts is especially useful for Administrators. Everyone should benefit from Bash Scripting.
Bash is the most common shell interpreter on Linux systems. When you open a Terminal, you are in an interactive shell environment. To verify that your system is using the Bash shell using the command: 'echo "$SHELL"'.
Exposed and Published container ports are two different but related concepts in Docker. Exposed ports are defined in your Dockerfile as simple metadata. You must publish them when your container starts if you want to enable outside access.
Do you have a high refresh rate monitor? Are you running Linux? Can’t quite figure out how to change the refresh rate? We can help! Follow along with this guide as we go over how to change the refresh rate on popular Linux desktop environments!
In this tutorial guide, I will be taking through the installation of pgAdmin 4 version 6.2 on CentOS 8
pgAdmin 4 is a free and open-source management tool for Postgres. Its desktop runtime written in NWjs allows it to run standalone for individual users, or the web applications code may be directly deployed on a web server for use by the web browser.
pgAdmin 4 is a complete rewrite of pgAdmin, built using Python and Java.
Ubuntu MATE is a more retrospective version of Ubuntu, one that largely lets you continue using Ubuntu in the way it functioned over a decade ago. But despite how things may look, updates do continue to roll out for the MATE desktop environment that is Ubuntu MATE's namesake.
The latest iteration is MATE 1.26. Here's how you can update the MATE desktop in Ubuntu 21.04 to the latest version.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to change the shell of a user in Linux.
The shell is a program that accepts and interprets commands. there are several shells such as bash, sh, ksh, zsh, fish and many other lesser known shells available on Linux.
Bash is a Unix shell and command language for the GNU Project as a free software replacement for the Bourne shell. First released in 1989,it has been used as the default login shell for most Linux distributions.
“Shutdown” refers to the process of stopping and shutting down a computer or server. This involves cutting the power to the main components of the system using a controlled process. Applications are closed, active processes and protocols are saved to the hard drive, device drivers are removed, and user settings are saved in the process.
There are several options to do so, including scheduling a shutdown at a specific time, shutting down immediately, broadcasting a unique message, and so on.
MySQL is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS), it’s widely used and part of the popular LAMP/LEMP stacks. The data is organized in one or more tables in which the data types may be related to each other and MySQL uses SQL Structured Query Language to manage its data.
Considering its part of the LAMP/LEMP stack it is used by many database-driven web applications such as WordPress, Magento, Drupal, and Joomla.
Today we will install MySQL on our server and create a database and user with chosen permissions on this database, let’s get started!
In this video, I am going to show how to install deepin 20.3
The G-Boy kit revolutionized the subculture around building portable home consoles, allowing an entire Wii to be crammed into a form factor the size of a original Game Boy. [Chris Downing] is no stranger to the field, and sourced a G-Boy kit of his own to build it to the best of his abilities. (Video embedded after the break.)
However, he wanted to step up above the FDM-printed parts of the original kit. Thus, he contacted the kit developer Gman, who provided him with the 3D model files so he could attempt a higher-quality SLA print himself. [Downing] had some experience with SLA printing in the past with the Form 2, but found some unique challenges on this build with the Form 3.
Hi folks,
I’m thrilled to announce that we have released CrossOver 21.1 for macOS, Linux and Chrome OS!
In addition to a suite of fixes for a variety of applications, CrossOver 21.1 also includes some pretty cool enhancements. We’re very excited about them, and we hope you will be too.
Our big reveal for this release is much-awaited support for Grand Theft Auto V (including GTA Online) on both macOS and Linux. Starting with CrossOver 21.1, you can now run Grand Theft Auto V via either the standalone Rockstar Games Launcher or Steam.
CodeWeavers is kicking off the new week by releasing CrossOver 21.1 for Linux, macOS, and Chrome OS users wanting to enjoy Windows games and applications.
CrossOver 21.1 finally has working Grand Theft Auto V support (GTA Online is working as well) for both Linux and macOS. GTA V could already work with Steam Play's Proton but hadn't worked with CrossOver or upstream Wine. This CrossOver support works both via Steam or the standalone Rockstar Games launcher.
CrossOver 21.1 also has a number of macOS-specific improvements, including support for macOS 12 "Monterey" and getting more Windows games working nicely on macOS.
On November 20, a Rainbow Six Siege fan shared a post on the Ubisoft discussion board asking about the possibility of Proton support for the game when the Steam Deck releases, as it runs a Linux-based operating system.
“Recently, Steam has announced that BattleEye will work with proton on an opt-in basis from game developers,” said Garlic_Kasparov. “R6: Siege is definitely a game I want to play, but unfortunately can’t as I use Linux. This thread is to express concern and voice support for enabling Proton support for R6 Siege as I would love to see it be done.”
Proton is the compatibility layer that allows Windows games to be run on a Linux device, and as the Steam Deck is Linux-based, Siege and several other games won’t be able to run properly without Proton.
Running applications via Docker in Ubuntu Linux? Dockeye is a free open-source tool to manage your containers and images via a graphical user interface.
Dockeye is written in Rust programming language. It provides a dark UI (light mode is also available) that list Docker containers and images in tabs. For each container, it provides options to control start, stop, pause, and remove operations.
User may also check the detailed information about a container, including ID, image, maintainer, labels, environment, network info, CPU, Memory and other system resource usage. And, app running log is available in tab for debugging purpose.
The NuTyX team is happy to announce the new version of NuTyX 21.10.0 and cards 2.4.138.
The xorg-server graphics server version 21.1.1, the Mesa 3D library in 21.2.5, Gtk4 4.4.0 and Qt 5.15.2.
The python interpreters are en 3.10.0 et 2.7.18.
The XFCE desktop environment is updated to version 4.16.
The MATE desktop environment is a 1.26 version .
The GNOME desktop environment is also updated to version 40.1.1
The KDE desktop environment is available in Plasma 5.23.3, Framework 5.88.0 and applications in 21.08.3.
Available browsers are: Firefox 94.0.2, Chromium 96.0.4664.45, Epiphany 40.3, etc
Many desktop applications have been updated as well like Thunderbird 91.2.0, Scribus 1.5.7, Libreoffice 7.1.5.2, Gimp 2.10.28, etc.
“The deployment of SAP S/4HANA on SLES for SAP Applications is an important step that provides real-time analytics for business insights throughout the enterprise, thereby aiding agile monitoring and decision making.” Eka Suharto Head of IT Adaro Energy.
AWS Graviton is an amazing technology. Custom built 64-bit Arm processors that helps to optimize price performance for a variety of cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2. Compared to general-purpose instances, Graviton delivers major cost savings for scale-out applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, data/log processing and much more.
I’m part of a grassroots team at Red Hat that came up with an idea to solve both problems at once. Introduced in August 2021, the Red Hat workforce development program allows colleges and universities to help non-degree seeking students, who may want to change careers, enter the IT industry via certification or get an IT certification.
The pandemic tested IT teams in entirely new ways and shed new light on the importance of taking care of employees’ very human needs in a difficult time. As former Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly recently wrote for the Harvard Business Review, that attention will shift to higher level needs like clarity, truth, connection, and growth.
Leading and managing teams may take more nuance in this remade work environment, so we’re recommending ten books to help you build stronger teams for the days ahead, from better understanding (and even celebrating) the very human nature of teams to fostering high-performing teams in distributed environments to making the shift from team member to leader.
Software is eating the world and open source has become the default way to build software. Public cloud has accelerated the proliferation of open source technologies, and has led to an adjustment in both the enterprise procurement and monetization of software. After a few years of seismic realignment (the aftershocks are still reverberating through the ecosystem), we have reached a point where there are paths for software vendors to partner with or live in the marketplaces of the hyperscalers, says Jerry Chen, a venture capitalist at Greylock. Chen has a long history with open source - he was on the VMware team that made Cloud Foundry an open source project, and later funded Docker as a VC - and has written a series of articles called Castles in the Cloud. I recently spoke with him as part of Red Hat’s livestreaming show, In The Clouds.
For any digital transformation project to succeed, you need a well-laid-out road map, a clear objective, and bite-sized goals to mark the milestones. And it’s important to put those plans into action and measure their success against the pre-defined relevant metrics.
The pandemic made the pace of digital transformation a key performance metric by making it urgent for enterprises to embrace and accelerate digital. Now it’s time to think beyond speed and measure the success of digital transformation against metrics that align with business goals.
Here are five key digital transformation metrics that hold value for enterprises across industries.
There are hundreds of thousands of tasks required to administer a large fleet of servers. Automation can take some of the more mundane tasks off your plate. As an example, once you have built your Standard Operating Environment (SOE) and need to manage the care and feeding of it, you may want to run this through an automation pipeline to get the grunt work done while you are focused on more critical tasks.
So let's look at automating the initial publication of our monthly content in Red Hat Satellite.
November brought a full plate of new features written by developers working at Red Hat, and we are here to share the harvest. Keep reading for some of our reader's top picks and a few we really like, including updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Beta and developer guides to choosing your best Java garbage collector, building machine learning models in the cloud, bringing Kubernetes workloads to the edge, and so much more.
With a few weeks having passed since the Fedora 35 debut, more feature work and planning around next spring's Fedora 36 are underway.
Already accepted for Fedora 36 are some of the usual package updates that come as little surprise for living on the bleeding-edge. Among those updates are the likes of Autoconf 2.71, Java OpenJDK 17 as the system JDK, PHP 8.1, OpenSSL 3.0, and others.
Some of the planned changes for Fedora 36 include using DNS-over-TLS where supported, replacing FBDEV kernel drivers with SimpleDRM, DNF/RPM copy-on-write enablement for all variants when running on Btrfs, and more. This Wiki page continues tracking the Fedora 36 changes that have been approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo).
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 711 for the week of November 21 – 27, 2021. The full version of this issue is available here.
This tutorial shows you how to set up a Ubuntu Desktop on Google Cloud. If you need a graphic interface to your virtual desktop on the cloud, this tutorial will teach you how to set up a desktop environment just like what you can get on your own computer.
Sensoper’s 7-inch “SC-PC” HMI panel PC runs Linux on a Raspberry Pi CM4 and supplies GbE, M.2 for NVMe, RS-485, 3x USB, 8x digital inputs, 7x transistor outputs, and 8x analog inputs with a choice of 0-10V or 4-20mA ranges.
Michigan-based Sensoper Controls has launched a 7-inch, industrial panel-PC in two variants: an SC-PC-AV8-TO7 model with 8x 0-10V analog inputs and an SC-PC-AM8-TO7 with 4-20mA analog inputs. The otherwise identical panel PCs run Raspbian (Raspberry Pi OS) Linux with pre-installed Node-RED on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.
Techbase has updated its RPi CM4-based ModBerry 500 CM4 controller with options including a second GbE, 4x USB 3.0 ports, a second M.2 slot for NVMe, double the Excard I/O slots, PoE, and two outdoor enclosures.
Techbase has announced an updated version of its ModBerry 500 CM4 industrial controller, which once again runs Linux on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. Highlights include options for more GbE, M.2, and Excard expansion slots, as well as options for PoE and a 4x USB 3.0 port hub. There are also two new outdoor enclosures, one of which offers IP68 protection.
This is certainly not the first ESP32 thermal printer solution, as there are various implementations including bitbank2 thermal printer Arduino connecting ESP32 and nRF52 boards to the printer over Bluetotoh LE, or a Arduino sketches to print bitmaps over serial or MQTT.
Having the right speaker enclosure can make a big difference to sound quality, so it’s no surprise that customizable ones are a common project for those who treat sound seriously. In that vein, [zx82net]’s Universal Speaker Box aims to give one everything they need to craft the perfect enclosure.
Building basic computers from the ground up is a popular pastime in the hacker community. [Kevin] is one such enthusiast, and decided to whip up a video interface for his retro Z80 machine.
Have you ever tried waving your hand around like a magic wand and summoning a calculator? We would guess not since you’d probably look a little silly doing so. That is unless you had [Andrei’s] cool gesture-controlled calculator. [Andrei] thought it would be helpful to use a calculator in his research lab without having to take his gloves off and the results are pretty cool.
His hardware consists of a PocketBeagle, an OLED, and an MPU6050 inertial measurement unit for capturing his hand motions using an accelerometer and gyroscope. The hardware is pretty straightforward, so the beauty of this project lies in its machine learning implementation.
An email client app is responsible for accessing your email messages on the server from your device.
Mail clients are available for desktop, or can even come in a self-hosted web-based form, which the user can install and use on their own servers local or remote.
We have covered self-hosted email client apps and open-source email servers in previous articles.
MediaCMS is released as an open-source project under AGPL-3.0 License.
We're wrapping up another great week with the following activities from the Apache community...
SQLite is an embedded lightweight database engine, first appeared 21 years ago and was released as an open-source project under the Public domain.
It is widely used as a client-side database in the browser, for desktop applications, and mobile apps.
Some web frameworks come with built-in support for SQLite, like Django (Python).
SQLite is famously used by big enterprises like Adobe, Microsoft, Airbus, Apple, Google, and more.
SQLite is part of Android and Google Chrome/ Chromium Web browsers.
Nordic PGDay 2022 will be held in Helsinki, Finland at the Hilton Helsinki Strand Hotel on March 22, 2022. The CfP is open through December 31, 2021 here
Today, 29 November, O'Reilly Germany publishes the book "Ada & Zangemann - A fairy tale about software, skateboards and raspberry ice cream" written by FSFE President Matthias Kirschner and illustrated by Sandra Brandstätter, among other things, character designer for the series "Trudes Tier" from the show "Sendung mit der Maus".
The famous inventor Zangemann lives in a huge villa high above the city. Adults and children alike love his inventions and are desperate to have them. But then something happens: when Zangemann once again wants to take a close-up look at his inventions during a walk through the cityand with a loud thud, a child riding a skateboard hits him in the shin! Enraged, the inventor makes a momentous decision... The clever girl Ada sees through it all. Together with her friends, she forges a plan.
My Singing Monsters is one of those mobile titles that has users play simple games to earn coins and gems in the usual way. [Anykey] found that his son was a fan of the game, but that sometimes it felt a little rigged. Thus, rather than waste time playing themselves, he set up a robot to do the job for them.
I just spent an unspeakable number of days typing to produce something that sounds very un-impressive: an FLTK widget that can display an image. The docs and code live here. The big difference from the usual image-drawing widget is that this one uses OpenGL internally, so after the initial image load, the common operations (drawing, redrawing, panning and zooming) are very fast. I have high-resolution images in my projects, and this will make my tools much nicer.
There are many ways to install software, but you get an option not available elsewhere with open source:
Good news from the FOSDEM organizers: there will be an online Raku DevRoom at FOSDEM 2022. Please stay tuned for more information on how to make sure you can get a presentation in. And of course, this should not prevent you from submitting a presentation to any of the other tracks to spread the word of the Raku Programming Language. Such as the Declarative and Minimalistic Computing track to name but one example.
While reading Arne`s solution for Challenge #140.2, I spotted a nested simple loop.
History is full of stories about technology that makes sense to the designer but doesn’t really fit the needs of the users. Take cake mixes. In 1929, a man named Duff realized that he could capitalize on surplus flour and molasses and created a cake mix. You simply added water to the dry mix and baked it to create a delicious cake. After World War II General Mills and Pillsbury also wanted to sell more flour so they started making cakes. But sales leveled out. A psychologist who was a pioneer in focus groups named Dichter had the answer: bakers didn’t feel like they were contributing to the creation of the cake. To get more emotional investment, the cake mixes would need to have real eggs added in. Actually, Duff had noticed the same thing in his 1933 patent.
It is easy to imagine a bunch of food… scientists? Engineers? Designers?… whatever a person inventing flour mixes in the 1930s was called… sitting around thinking that making a mix that only requires water is a great thing. But the bakers didn’t like it. How often do we fail to account for users?
[Atomic14] bought some wireless LEDs that receive power from a base station. They were very neatly packaged, but — we like it — he took one apart and made his own versions. They may not look as polished, but they work and they are undeniably cool.
The LEDs work by receiving power from an induction coil. Once you have power, lighting up an LED is no big deal. Reverse engineering found the transmitter sends 217 kHz into a 2.2 mH inductor. A capacitor resonates the coil and drives the attached LED.
Some experiments found that the circuit could supply about 2 mA -3 mA of current. [Atomic14] used two LEDs to get work out of each half of the AC waveform. He also dissects the transmitter, so you could roll your own there, too.
Netcraft has to date identified nearly 10,000 websites used in the distribution of the FluBot family of Android malware. As detailed in our previous articles on FluBot, these sites are unwittingly hosting a PHP script that acts as a proxy to a further backend server, allowing otherwise legitimate sites to deliver Android malware to victims. When visited by the intended victim, a “lure” is displayed that implores them to download and install the FluBot malware.
The most common lure themes are parcel delivery and voicemail messages, where the user is told to install the malicious app to track a parcel or listen to a voicemail message. One particularly interesting lure took advantage of FluBot’s infamy, by offering a fake “Android security update” that claimed to protect against the malware family. Users installing this “security update” would instead be infected with FluBot.
The Buddi tracker https://www.buddi.co.uk/ is used for tracking elderly and vulnerable people. It’s a GPS/GSM-based clip-on device that reports wearer position to an app via a platform. It means that the wearer can easily be found by their carer or the emergency services, should they become lost and unable to make their own way home. The device also features a panic button that automatically calls their carer and allows the wearer to speak to them.
The device is popular in the care market, allowing the wearer a greater degree of independence and the ability to live independently for longer. The business behind Buddi has recently listed successfully on the UK AIM stock market (AIM:BIG), reflecting significant growth in the tracking markets in both UK and US.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (bluez, icu, libntlm, libvorbis, libvpx, opensc, roundcube, and tar), Fedora (kernel, kernel-headers, kernel-tools, puppet, slurm, stargz-snapshotter, and suricata), openSUSE (netcdf), Oracle (bluez, kernel, kernel-container, krb5, mailman:2.1, openssh, python3, and rpm), Red Hat (samba), and SUSE (xen).
Ikea under phishing attack, evasive JavaScript loader discovered and malware found hiding in Linux calendars.
In this episode of Awesome Linux Tools, the spotlight is on Lynis - a really awesome utility you can use to get a better understanding of the overall security hygiene of your server. In this video, Jay will show you how to install it, and also how to run an audit.
Security researchers have discovered a Linux-based remote access trojan (RAT) that uses an unusual stealth technique to remain out of sight from security products.
The malware, dubbed CronRat, hides in the calendar subsystem of Linux servers (“cron”) on a non-existent day, 31 February, according to a blog post by security researchers at Sansec.
A proposed legislation does not prioritise the rights of Indians over their data in the public and has instead expanded to areas beyond its ambit and without sufficient consultation, senior executives at digital rights organisation Access Now have said.
The Personal Data Protection (PDP) legislation--in the making since 2018—will be tabled in Parliament’s Winter Session beginning Monday. Reports and dissent notes filed by the members of the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) deliberating the Bill suggest several changes from its initial draft in 2019. Social media seems to have been included in the legislation.
“Based on the reports so far and the details shared by MPs involved in the process, it is clear that this is not currently the Privacy and Data Protection law that India needs. The current draft does not adequately protect people's right to privacy and autonomy or enable strict accountability, particularly from the government,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific Policy Director and Senior International Counsel, and Namrata Maheshwari, Asia Pacific Policy Counsel, at Access Now.
On November 3, the United States Department of Commerce announced it was blacklisting the Israeli technology firm, NSO Group. The decision to add the company to a list of entities engaging in activities contrary to US national security or foreign policy interests was momentous.
In its press release on the subject, the commerce department noted: “[there is] evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers. These tools have also enabled foreign governments to conduct transnational repression, which is the practice of authoritarian governments targeting dissidents, journalists and activists outside of their sovereign borders to silence dissent. Such practices threaten the rules-based international order.”
An Indian parliamentary panel has recommended setting up a regulator to oversee social media companies including Facebook (now known as Meta) and Twitter, and make them liable for posts by unverified accounts.
The recommendation comes as Facebook is facing scrutiny over its role in the 2020 Delhi riots, even as new allegations emerge about the company’s troubles in its largest market.
The high-level parliamentary committee made those recommendations on Monday, asking for tighter rules to treat them as publishers, and for personal data to come under better protection, Bloomberg reported.
Earlier this Fall, a Samsung warehouse in South Africa was robbed and the thieves got away with a quantity of smart televisions. Samsung proceeded to implement a little-known feature called “TV Block” which is installed on all of their TV products. The serial numbers of the stolen TV sets are flagged in their servers, and if one of these sets tries to connect the internet in the future, it will recognize that it is stolen and proceed to brick itself, disabling all television functionality.
So while this real-life scenario makes sense, it is a bit alarming to realize the implication of such a feature — the manufacturer can reach into your TV and disable it from afar. One can assume that Samsung won’t abuse this capability, because acting otherwise would harm their reputation. In a press release, Samsung announced that any consumers whose sets were incorrectly bricked can have their sets un-bricked after demonstrating proper ownership.
