Google Removes RISC-V Support From Android Common Kernel, Denies Abandoning Its Efforts

Mishaal Rahman reports via Android Authority: Earlier today, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google who, according to their LinkedIn, leads the Android Systems Team and works on Android’s Linux kernel fork, submitted a series of patches to AOSP that “remove ACK’s support for riscv64.” The description of these patches states that “support for risc64 GKI kernels is discontinued.”

ACK stands for Android Common Kernel and refers to the downstream branches of the official kernel.org Linux kernels that Google maintains. The ACK is basically Linux plus some “patches of interest to the Android community that haven’t been merged into mainline or Long Term Supported (LTS) kernels.” There are multiple ACK branches, including android-mainline, which is the primary development branch that is forked into “GKI” kernel branches that correspond to a particular combination of supported Linux kernel and Android OS version. GKI stands for Generic Kernel Image and refers to a kernel that’s built from one of these branches. Every certified Android device ships with a kernel based on one of these GKI branches, as Google currently does not certify Android devices that ship with a mainline Linux kernel build.

Since these patches remove RISC-V kernel support, RISC-V kernel build support, and RISC-V emulator support, any companies looking to compile a RISC-V build of Android right now would need to create and maintain their own fork of Linux with the requisite ACK and RISC-V patches. Given that Google currently only certifies Android builds that ship with a GKI kernel built from an ACK branch, that means we likely won’t see certified builds of Android on RISC-V hardware anytime soon. Our initial interpretation of these patches was that Google was preparing to kill off RISC-V support in Android since that was the most obvious conclusion. However, a spokesperson for Google told us this: “Android will continue to support RISC-V. Due to the rapid rate of iteration, we are not ready to provide a single supported image for all vendors. This particular series of patches removes RISC-V support from the Android Generic Kernel Image (GKI).” Based on Google’s statement, Rahman suggests that “there’s still a ton of work that needs to be done before Android is ready for RISC-V.”

“Even once it’s ready, Google will need to redo the work to add RISC-V support in the kernel anyway. At the very least, Google’s decision likely means that we might need to wait even longer than expected to see commercial Android devices running on a RISC-V chip.”

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13.4 Million Kaiser Insurance Members Affected by Data Leak to Online Advertisers

Kaiser Permanente is the latest healthcare giant to report a data breach. Kaiser said 13.4 million current and former insurance members had their patient data shared with third-party advertisers, thanks to an improperly implemented tracking code the company used to see how its members navigated through its websites. Dark Reading reports: The shared data included names, IP addresses, what pages people visited, whether they were actively signed in, and even the search terms they used when visiting the company’s online health encyclopedia. Kaiser has reportedly removed the tracking code from its sites, and while the incident wasn’t a hacking event, the breach is still concerning from a security perspective, according to Narayana Pappu, CEO at Zendata.

“The presence of third-party trackers belonging to advertisers, and the oversharing of customer information with these trackers, is a pervasive problem in both health tech and government space,” he explains. “Once shared, advertisers have used this information to target ads at users for complementary products (based on health data); this has happened multiple times in the past few years, including at Goodrx. Although this does not fit the traditional definition of a data breach, it essentially results in the same outcome — an entity and the use case the data was not intended for has access to it. There is usually no monitoring/auditing process to identify and prevent the issue.”

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T2 Linux 24.5 Released

ReneR writes: A major T2 Linux milestone has been released, shipping with full support for 25 CPU architectures and several C libraries, as well as restored support for Intel IA-64 Itanium. Additionally, many vintage X.org DDX drivers were fixed and tested to work again, as well as complete support for the latest KDE 6 and GNOME 46.

T2 is known for its sophisticated cross compile support and support for nearly all existing CPU architectures: Alpha, Arc, ARM(64), Avr32, HPPA(64), IA64, M68k, MIPS(64), Nios2, PowerPC(64)(le), RISCV(64), s390x, SPARC(64), and SuperH x86(64). T2 is an increasingly popular choice for embedded systems and virtualization. It also still supports the Sony PS3, Sgi, Sun and HP workstations, as well as the latest ARM64 and RISCV64 architectures.

The release contains a total of 5,140 changesets, including approximately 5,314 package updates, 564 issues fixed, 317 packages or features added and 163 removed, and around 53 improvements. Usually most packages are up-to-date, including Linux 6.8, GCC 13, LLVM/Clang 18, as well as the latest version of X.org, Mesa, Firefox, Rust, KDE 6 and GNOME 46!

More information, source and binary distribution are open source and free at T2 SDE.

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Tether Buys $200 Million Majority Stake In Brain-Computer Interface Company

Crypto company Tether announced Monday that it has invested $200 million to acquire a majority stake in brain-computer interface company Blackrock Neurotech via its venture capital division Tether Evo. [The firm is not related to the asset management giant BlackRock.] CoinDesk reports: Blackrock Neurotech develops medical devices that are powered by brain signals and aims to help people impacted by paralysis and neurological disorders. The investment will fund the roll-out and commercialization of the medical devices and also for research and development purposes, the press release said. Tether is the company behind USDT, the largest stablecoin with a market cap of $110 billion. Recently, Tether established four divisions to expand beyond stablecoin issuance. “Tether has long believed in nurturing emerging technologies that have transformative capabilities, and the Brain-Computer-Interfaces of Blackrock Neurotech have the potential to open new realms of communication, rehabilitation, and cognitive enhancement,” Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, said in a statement.

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The EU Will Force Apple To Open Up iPadOS

As reported by Bloomberg (paywalled), Apple’s iPadOS will need to abide by EU’s DMA rules, as it is now designated as a gatekeeper alongside the Safari web browser, iOS operating system and the App Store. “Apple now has six months to ensure full compliance of iPadOS with the DMA obligations,” reads the EU’s blog post about the change. Engadget reports: What does Apple have to do to ensure iPadOS compliance? According to the DMA, gatekeepers are prohibited from favoring their own services over rivals and from locking users into the ecosystem. The software must also allow third parties to interoperate with internal services, which is why third-party app stores are becoming a thing on iPhones in Europe. The iPad, presumably, will soon follow suit. In other words, the DMA is lobbing some serious stink bombs into Apple’s walled garden. In a statement published by Forbes, Apple said it “will continue to constructively engage with the European Commission” to ensure its designated services comply with the DMA, including iPadOS. “iPadOS constitutes an important gateway on which many companies rely to reach their customers,” wrote Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President in charge of competition policy at the European Commission. “Today’s decision will ensure that fairness and contestability are preserved also on this platform.”

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A Coal Billionaire is Building the World’s Biggest Clean Energy Plant – Five Times the Size of Paris

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:

Five times the size of Paris. Visible from space. The world’s biggest energy plant. Enough electricity to power Switzerland. The scale of the project transforming swathes of barren salt desert on the edge of western India into one of the most important sources of clean energy anywhere on the planet is so overwhelming that the man in charge can’t keep up. “I don’t even do the math any more,” Sagar Adani told CNN in an interview last week.

Adani is executive director of Adani Green Energy Limited (AGEL). He’s also the nephew of Gautam Adani, Asia’s second richest man, whose $100 billion fortune stems from the Adani Group, India’s biggest coal importer and a leading miner of the dirty fuel. Founded in 1988, the conglomerate has businesses in fields ranging from ports and thermal power plants to media and cements. Its clean energy unit AGEL is building the sprawling solar and wind power plant in the western Indian state of Gujarat at a cost of about $20 billion.

It will be the world’s biggest renewable park when it is finished in about five years, and should generate enough clean electricity to power 16 million Indian homes… [T]he park will cover more than 200 square miles and be the planet’s largest power plant regardless of the energy source, AGEL said.

CNN adds that the company “plans to invest $100 billion into energy transition over the next decade, with 70% of the investments ear-marked for clean energy.”

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Bezos, Other Amazon Execs Used Signal – a Problem for FTC Investigators

Pursuing an unfair business practices case against Amazon, America’s Federal Trade Commission has now “accused” Amazon of using Signal, reports the Seattle Times:

The newspaper notes that the app “can be set to automatically delete messages, to hide information related to the FTC’s ongoing antitrust investigation into the company.”

In a court filing this week, the FTC moved to “compel” Amazon to share more information about its policies and instructions related to using the Signal app… The FTC accused Amazon executives of manually turning on the feature to delete messages in Signal even after the company learned that the FTC was investigating and had told Amazon to keep documents, emails and other messages.

Many of Amazon’s senior leaders used Signal, according to the FTC, including former CEO and current chair Jeff Bezos, CEO Andy Jassy, and general counsel David Zapolsky, as well as Jeff Wilke, former head of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business, and Dave Clark, former worldwide operations chief. “Amazon is a company that tightly controls what its employees put into writing,” FTC attorneys said in a court filing Thursday. “But Amazon’s senior leadership also used another channel for internal communications and avoided the need to talk carefully by destroying the records of their messages….”

In the court filing Thursday, the FTC asked Amazon to provide two troves of documents related to its use of Signal: Amazon’s document preservation notices and its instructions about the use of “ephemeral messaging applications, including Signal.” The FTC said Amazon waited for more than a year after it learned of the investigation to instruct its employees to preserve Signal messages. “It is highly likely that relevant information has been destroyed as a result of Amazon’s actions and inactions,” the FTC wrote in court records.

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America’s Commerce Department is Reviewing China’s Use of RISC-V Chips

An anonymous reader shared a report this week from Reuters:

The U.S. Department of Commerce is reviewing the national security implications of China’s work in open-source RISC-V chip technology, according to a letter sent to U.S. lawmakers…

The technology is being used by major Chinese tech firms such as Alibaba Group Holding and has become a new front in the strategic competition over advanced chip technology between the U.S. and China. In November, 18 U.S. lawmakers from both houses of Congress pressed the Biden administration for its plans to prevent China “from achieving dominance in … RISC-V technology and leveraging that dominance at the expense of U.S. national and economic security.”

In a letter last week to the lawmakers that was seen by Reuters on Tuesday, the Commerce Department said it is “working to review potential risks and assess whether there are appropriate actions under Commerce authorities that could effectively address any potential concerns.”

But the Commerce Department also noted that it would need to tread carefully to avoid harming U.S. companies that are part of international groups working on RISC-V technology.

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Cisco Joins Microsoft, IBM in Vatican Pledge For Ethical AI Use and Development

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:

Tech giant Cisco Systems on Wednesday joined Microsoft and IBM in signing onto a Vatican-sponsored pledge to ensure artificial intelligence is developed and used ethically and to benefit the common good… The pledge outlines key pillars of ethical and responsible use of AI. It emphasizes that AI systems must be designed, used and regulated to serve and protect the dignity of all human beings, without discrimination, and their environments. It highlights principles of transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality and security as necessary to guide all AI developments.

The document was unveiled and signed at a Vatican conference on Feb. 28, 2020… Pope Francis has called for an international treaty to ensure AI is developed and used ethically, devoting his annual peace message this year to the topic.

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Russia Vetoes U.N. Resolution On Nuclear Weapons In Space

This week Russia vetoed a UN resolution that proposed banning nuclear weapons in space, CNN reports.

But it all happened “amid U.S. intelligence-backed concerns that Moscow is trying to develop a nuclear device capable of destroying satellites.”

In February, President Joe Biden confirmed the US has intelligence that Russia is developing a nuclear anti-satellite capability. Three sources familiar with the intelligence subsequently told CNN the weapon could destroy satellites by creating a massive energy wave when detonated…

US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Wednesday’s vote “marks a real missed opportunity to rebuild much-needed trust in existing arms control obligations.” A US and Japan-drafted resolution had received cross-regional support from more than 60 member states. It intended to strengthen and uphold the global non-proliferation regime, including in outer space, and reaffirm the shared goal of maintaining outer space for peaceful purposes. It also called on UN member states not to develop nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction designed to be placed in Earth’s orbit….

Experts say this kind of weapon could have the potential to wipe out mega constellations of small satellites, like SpaceX’s Starlink, which has been successfully used by Ukraine to counter Russian troops. This would almost certainly be “a last-ditch weapon” for Russia, the US official and other sources said — because it would do the same damage to whatever Russian satellites were also in the area.

The article notes that in March Russian President Vladimir Putin “told officials that space projects, including the setup of a nuclear power unit in space, should be a priority and receive proper financing.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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