• Justice Department Sues Monopolist Google For Violating Antitrust Laws

  oday, the Department of Justice — along with eleven state Attorneys General — filed a civil antitrust lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to stop Google from unlawfully maintaining monopolies through anticompetitive and exclusionary practices in the search and search advertising markets and to remedy the competitive harms. The participating state Attorneys General offices represent Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina, and Texas.

  “Today, millions of Americans rely on the Internet and online platforms for their daily lives. Competition in this industry is vitally important, which is why today’s challenge against Google — the gatekeeper of the Internet — for violating antitrust laws is a monumental case both for the Department of Justice and for the American people,” said Attorney General William Barr. “Since my confirmation, I have prioritized the Department’s review of online market-leading platforms to ensure that our technology industries remain competitive. This lawsuit strikes at the heart of Google’s grip over the internet for millions of American consumers, advertisers, small businesses and entrepreneurs beholden to an unlawful monopolist.”

• Mozilla Reaction to U.S. v. Google

  Like millions of everyday internet users, we share concerns about how Big Tech’s growing power can deter innovation and reduce consumer choice. We believe that scrutiny of these issues is healthy, and critical if we’re going to build a better internet. We also know from firsthand experience there is no overnight solution to these complex issues. Mozilla’s origins are closely tied to the last major antitrust case against Microsoft in the nineties.

  In this new lawsuit, the DOJ referenced Google’s search agreement with Mozilla as one example of Google’s monopolization of the search engine market in the United States. Small and independent companies such as Mozilla thrive by innovating, disrupting and providing users with industry leading features and services in areas like search. The ultimate outcomes of an antitrust lawsuit should not cause collateral damage to the very organizations – like Mozilla – best positioned to drive competition and protect the interests of consumers on the web.

• DOJ May Force Google To Sell Chrome To Settle Antitrust Case: Report

  he U.S. Department of Justice may force Google to sell its Chrome browser. The development came after the US Congress’ antitrust report on big tech companies.

  It is also told that the DOJ is targeting Google’s advertising business as well. The prosecutors aim at breaking Google’s monopoly on the $162 billion digital advertising market. Politico reported the development via anonymous sources.

Google Coral SBC was the first development board with Google Edge TPU. The AI accelerator was combined with an NXP i.MX 8M quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor and 1GB RAM to provide an all-in-all AI edge computing platform. It launched for $175, and now still retails for $160 which may not be affordable to students and hobbyists.

[...]

The board runs Debian based Mendel Linux distribution developed by Google for Coral boards and supports TensorFlow Lite and AutoML Vision Edge with the latter enabling “fast, high-accuracy custom image classification models”.

• CrossOver 20 for Chrome OS uses the Linux container to enable Windows app support on Chromebooks

  Over the past several years, Google has slowly turned Chrome OS into a more powerful computing platform, allowing people to use Progressive Web Apps, Android apps, and even Linux apps. While Google is working on its own means of bringing Windows app support to Chrome OS, third-party companies like CodeWeavers have released solutions that Chromebook users can take advantage of today. Today, CodeWeavers released CrossOver 20, bringing Windows app support out of beta for Chrome OS.

• Google adds WireGuard VPN to Android 12's Linux Kernel 5.4 Tree

  With remote work becoming the norm at many businesses thanks to COVID-19, it’s more important than ever to secure network connections with a virtual private network, or VPN. There are multiple VPN tunneling protocols that services can make use of, but a relatively new implementation called WireGuard has taken the tech world by storm. As we’ve explained before, WireGuard is a next-gen VPN protocol that embraces modern cryptography standards and has a secure, auditable code base. After its inclusion in Linux Kernel 5.6, Google is now adding support for the protocol to Android 12’s Linux Kernel 5.4 tree.

  Google forks each Linux Kernel release to include “patches of interest to the Android community that haven’t been merged onto mainline or Long Term Supported (LTS) kernels.” These kernels are called Android Common Kernels and they form the basis of the Linux kernel release that ships on each and every Android device on the market today. For each Android release, Google supports a handful of Linux kernel releases; for Android 11, that’s currently Linux Kernel versions 4.14 and 4.19, while for Android 12, it’ll be versions 4.19 and 5.4.

• Android 12 Appears To Support Using WireGuard - Phoronix

  WireGuard has long been available as an app on the Google Play store for those wishing to use this cross-platform, open-source secure VPN tunnel solution on Google's mobile operating system. But for Android 12 it appears there will be a form of official support.

  With WireGuard 1.0 marked by the kernel module being upstreamed in Linux 5.6, it looks like Google is now more comfortable in shipping WireGuard for their Android kernel.

 

• Google Set to Unleash Knative - SDxCentral

  Google is set to give up most control over the Knative Project by electing a steering committee to oversee the direction of the Kubernetes-based serverless project. The decision comes on the heels of Google taking a more controversial approach with the Istio service mesh project.

  Protocol first reported on Google’s plans for the Knative Project late last week.

  In a blog post, Paul Morie, writing on behalf of the Knative Steering Committee, explained that it had recently constructed a new steering committee charter that will include an upcoming election for five steering committee members. The plan calls for the five members to serve as individuals and not representing their employer. The plan also states that no vendor will be allowed to have a majority of seats on the steering committee.

  The project will also set up a new Knative Trademark Committee to deal with trademark issues. That committee will initially include members from Google, IBM/Red Hat, and VMware.

   

• Using eBPF Monitoring to Know What to Measure and Why - Container Journal

  eBPF enables users to trace application activity down to a very low level for better performance analysis

  Let’s say you’re a doctor. You know that the human body is tremendously complex, with multiple systems operating and interacting simultaneously. You also understand that sometimes things can go wrong and a person gets sick. Or there might be symptoms that history suggests are potential signs of trouble. How do you determine what is going on? What metrics can you collect that will reveal medically valuable information? And what tools are available to do that?

  The same issue that has challenged physicians for centuries is one that IT professionals now face: When you’re troubleshooting a complex system, what diagnostics do you measure, how do you measure them and what do you do with your findings?

  [...]

  eBPF programs run inside the kernel; they are attached to a code path and whenever that code path is traversed, the program executes. This decoupling of the kernel and eBPF program increases the development time as the developer doesn’t have to recompile the kernel each time the eBPF program is changed. eBPF is useful for both packet processing as well as performance analysis and monitoring, as eBPF programs can be attached to tracepoints, kprobes and even perf events. As you may have already guessed, attaching user-space programs inside the kernel can cause serious security and stability issues; thus, a series of tests are performed on each eBPF program before it’s loaded.

 

• Kubernetes Blog: Announcing the 2020 Steering Committee Election Results

  The 2020 Steering Committee Election is now complete. In 2019, the committee arrived at its final allocation of 7 seats, 3 of which were up for election in 2020. Incoming committee members serve a term of 2 years, and all members are elected by the Kubernetes Community.

  This community body is significant since it oversees the governance of the entire Kubernetes project. With that great power comes great responsibility. You can learn more about the steering committee’s role in their charter.