An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Volvo's entire car lineup will be fully electric by 2030, the Chinese-owned company said on Tuesday, joining a growing number of automakers planning to phase out fossil-fuel engines by the end of this decade. "I am totally convinced there will be no customers who really want to stay with a petrol engine," Volvo Chief Executive Hakan Samuelsson told reporters when asked about future demand for electric vehicles. "We are convinced that an electric car is more attractive for customers." The Swedish-based carmaker said 50% of its global sales should be fully-electric cars by 2025 and the other half hybrid models.

Owned by Hangzhou-based Zhejiang Geely Holding Group, Volvo will launch a new family of electric cars in the next few years, all of which will be sold online only. On Tuesday it unveiled the first of those models, the C40, a fully electric SUV, which will have an initial battery range of around 420 kilometers (261 miles). Volvo will include wireless upgrades and fixes for its new electric models -- an approach originally pioneered by electric carmaker Tesla Inc. This means the C40's range will be extended over time with software upgrades, Chief Technology Officer Henrik Green said. Volvo said it will "radically reduce" the complexity of its model line-up and provide customers with transparent pricing. The carmaker's global network of 2,400 traditional bricks-and-mortar dealers will remain open to service vehicles and to help customers make online orders.

M.I.T. researchers have devised a virtual-reality technique that lets them read old letters that were mailed not in envelopes but in the writing paper itself after being folded into elaborate enclosures. From a report: In 1587, hours before her beheading, Mary, Queen of Scots, sent a letter to her brother-in-law Henry III, King of France. But she didn't just sign it and send it off. She folded the paper repeatedly, cut out a piece of the page and left it dangling. She used that strand of paper to sew the letter tight with locking stitches. In an era before sealed envelopes, this technique, now called letterlocking, was as important for deterring snoops as encryption is to your email inbox today. Although this art form faded in the 1830s with the advent of mass-produced envelopes, it has recently attracted renewed attention from scholars. But they have faced a problem: How do you look at the contents of such locked letters without permanently damaging priceless bits of history?

On Tuesday, a team of 11 scientists and scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other institutions disclosed their development of a virtual-reality technique that lets them perform this delicate task without tearing up the contents of historical archives. In the journal Nature Communications, the team tells of virtually opening four undelivered letters written from 1680 and 1706. The dispatches had ended up in a wooden postal trunk in The Hague. Known as the Brienne Collection, the box contains 3,148 items, including 577 letters that were never unlocked. The new technique could open a window into the long history of communications security. And by unlocking private intimacies, it could aid researchers studying stories concealed in fragile pages found in archives all over the world.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: /e/ OS, the "open-source, pro-privacy, and fully degoogled" fork of Android, is coming to Canada and the USA. Of course, you've always been able to download the software in any region, but now (as first spotted by It's Foss News) the e Foundation will start selling preloaded phones in North America. Previously, /e/ only did business in Europe. Like normal, the e Foundation's smartphone strategy is to sell refurbished Samsung devices with /e/ preloaded. In the US, there are only two phones right now: the Galaxy S9 for $379.99 or a Galaxy S9+ for $429.99. North Americans still have reason to be jealous of Europe, where you can get /e/ preloaded on a Fairphone, which is also Europe-exclusive. These Samsung phones are used devices, but the site says the devices have "been checked and reconditioned to be fully working at our partner's facilities." The phones have a one-year warranty and are described as "Good-as-New" with "no surprises." An /e/ device means you'll be getting a fork of Android 10, and for ongoing support, the e Foundation says, "We aim to support with at least 3 years of software updates and security patches."

/e/ OS was founded by Gael Duval, the creator of Mandrake Linux, and the project describes itself as a "non-profit project in the public interest." /e/ is built a lot like a Linux distribution, in that it takes a curated collection of other open source projects, merges them into a single product, and does its best to fill in the remaining gaps. In this case, /e/ is based on LineageOS, the Android community's open source, device-ready version of Google's Android source code. The primary contribution of /e/ is filling in all the gaps left by the lack of Google apps, so there's an /e/ app store, an /e/ cloud storage and account system, and various Google-replacement apps like a Chromium-based browser, a fork of K-9 Mail for email, contacts, search, photos, etc. The company is even trying to build a Google Assistant replacement. Actually getting regular Android apps to run on a forked version of Android is a challenge. Google Play Services is built into many apps for things like push notifications, and there's a good chance that functionality won't work on /e/ OS. These apps will at least run on /e/ OS instead of exiting outright, thanks to the inclusion of MicroG, an open source project that hijacks Google API calls.

The market for virtual and augmented reality products has developed slower than expected, but Microsoft is seeking to accelerate the sector by making it much easier for people to connect from different locations and with different kinds of devices. From a report: The ultimate goal of the new effort, dubbed Microsoft Mesh, is to allow, for example, a person in an office in New York using Facebook's Oculus VR headset to collaborate with a person in Seattle using Microsoft's HoloLens 2 glasses. Using Mesh-compatible hardware and software, the two people would be able to see virtual representations of each other appearing in their offices, talking and moving in real time as if they were present. And both would be able to see a common view of virtual charts or digital objects projected before them that they could change or manipulate. At least that's the vision that Microsoft demonstrated for the first time in public at its Ignite conference on Tuesday. Ultimately, Mesh could be used to connect users on a variety of VR gadgets, PC and Mac computers, and smartphones.

But getting all the various hardware makers to agree to use Microsoft's standards may not be as easy as the company hopes. And while Microsoft's HoloLens and popular collaboration software like Teams and Office will be compatible with Mesh, other software developers also may be wary of depending on the company for such critical functionality. "This has been the dream for mixed reality, the idea from the very beginning," Alex Kipman, a Microsoft technical fellow working on the project, explained at the demonstration. "You can actually feel like you're in the same place with someone sharing content or you can teleport from different mixed reality devices and be present with people even when you're not physically together."

For years, tech companies have touted blockchain technology as a means to develop identity systems that are secure and decentralized. The goal is to build a platform that could store information about official data without holding the actual documents or details themselves. Instead of just storing a scan of your birth certificate, for example, a decentralized ID platform might store a validated token that confirms the information in it. Then when you get carded at a bar or need proof of citizenship, you could share those pre-verified credentials instead of the actual document or data. Microsoft has been one of the leaders of this pack -- and is now detailing tangible progress toward its vision of a decentralized digital ID. From a report: At its Ignite conference today, Microsoft announced that it will launch a public preview of its "Azure Active Directory verifiable credentials" this spring. Think of the platform as a digital wallet like Apple Pay or Google Pay, but for identifiers rather than credit cards. Microsoft is starting with things like university transcripts, diplomas, and professional credentials, letting you add them to its Microsoft Authenticator app along with two-factor codes. It's already testing the platform at Keio University in Tokyo, with the government of Flanders in Belgium, and with the United Kingdom's National Health Service. "If you have a decentralized identifier I can verify, say, where you went to school and I don't need you to send me all of the information," says Joy Chik, corporate vice president for Microsoft's cloud and enterprise identity division. "All I need is to get that digital credential and because it's already been verified I can trust it."

Microsoft will release a software development kit in the coming weeks that organizations can use to start building applications that issue and request credentials. And long-term the company says it hopes the system could be used around the world for everything from renting an apartment to establishing identity for refugees who are struggling without documents -- a dream of virtually all decentralized identification efforts. In the NHS pilot, for example, healthcare providers can request access to professional certifications from existing NHS health care workers, who can in turn choose to allow that access, streamlining a process for transferring to another facility that previously required a much more involved back and forth. Under Microsoft's set-up, you can also revoke access to your credentials if the recipient no longer needs access.

Stacey Higginbotham: If you own a 2013 SmartThings hub (that's the original) or a SmartThings Link for the Nvidia Shield TV, your hardware will stop working on June 30 of this year. The device depreciation is part of the announced exodus from manufacturing and supporting its own hardware and the Groovy IDE that Samsung Smartthings announced last summer. SmartThings has set up a support page for customers still using those devices to help those users transition to newer hubs. That transition will also include a discount for users of the affected devices if they want to purchase the latest Aeotec version of the SmartThings hub. If you're still using either of the older devices you should expect an email that will provide a discount code to buy the Aeotec hub through TheSmartestHouse.com. That discount will be available until April 15.

Microsoft demonstrated prototype hardware a few years ago that promised meeting rooms of the future with automatic speaker identification, transcription, and even translation. Microsoft now claims it's delivering this for real with new Intelligent Speakers, small puck-like devices that can identify up to 10 different voices in a Microsoft Teams meeting. From a report: These speakers will automatically generate a transcript during a meeting, with individual identification of those speaking. They will also help remote attendees follow along and see who's talking in a meeting. Microsoft has teamed up with Yealink and Epos to create the hardware, and it even supports translation if you want to follow a meeting in a different language.

Google Finance now has a dedicated "crypto" field for bitcoin, ether, litecoin and bitcoin cash. CoinDesk reports: Right at the top of the page, where users can "compare markets," crypto is listed among the five default markets, which also includes U.S., Europe, Asia and "Currencies." At the moment, it appears Google Finance only tracks a limited number of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, ethereum, litecoin and bitcoin cash are displayed by default when clicking the crypto tab.

A search for Cardano's ADA, Polkadot's DOT, Stellar's XLM tokens return no results -- for either the protocol or the token's ticker. XRP returned a result for the Ripple XRP Liquid Index, which trades on Nasdaq.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Forty percent of Americans don't trust Facebook and TikTok and Google appears to be winning the trust wars, according to a survey from SeoClarity. SeoClarity surveyed 1,057 American residents to gauge trust in tech companies and found a majority of US citizens think social media companies need more regulation. The findings are notable due to how tech companies are stacking up on trust. Google tops Amazon, Microsoft and Apple on the trustworthy scores. Meanwhile, Facebook and TikTok were the most distrusted. SeoClarity also found that half of Americans think that Websites can control where they land in Google searches.

Linux overlord Linus Torvalds has revealed that inclement weather in the USA meant he recently endured six electricity-free days in his Portland, Oregon, home during which he was unable to tend to the kernel. As a result he therefore pondered adding an extra week to the merge window for version 5.12 of the Linux kernel. The Register reports: "As you can tell, I didn't do that," he said in his State of The Kernel update that announced release candidate one of the new kernel cut. "To a large part because people were actually very good about sending in their pull requests, so by the time I finally got power back, everything was nicely lined up and I got things merged up ok." It wasn't just penguinistas behaving well that helped. Torvalds said this version of the kernel has received around 10,000 commits. That's rather fewer than the 12,000 or 13,000 he usually sees.

In case anyone was inconvenienced by blackout-induced inability to merge, Torvalds said he's open to help any kernel devs for whom his unavailability caused problems but is not open to all late pulls. Torvalds rated the new release as offering "a fair amount of historical cleanup" on account of "removing the legacy OPROFILE support (the user tools have been using the "perf" interface for years), and removing several legacy SoC platforms and various drivers that no longer make any sense." Among the big inclusions in 5.12 are Clang Link-Time Optimizations, which make for better compiler performance, and support for Intel's eASIC NX5 silicon that aims to offer an alternative to FPGAs in edge and cloud applications. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 5G SoC also gains support.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Tattoos are usually considered a form of personal expression, but a team of researchers in Europe have created what they're calling the world's first light-emitting tattoo based on OLED screen technology that, besides presumably looking kind of cool, could also serve as a visible warning about potential health concerns. In a recently published paper in the Advanced Electronic Materials journal, "Ultrathin, UltraConformable, and FreeStanding Tattooable Organic LightEmitting Diodes," scientists from the University College London in the UK and the Italian Institute of Technology detail how their new approach to tattoos relies on the same organic light-emitting diode technology featured in devices like more recent iPhones, as well as the recent crop of mobile devices featuring folding screens. The flexibility of an OLED display is important for this application given human skin is so pliable and flexes and folds as the body moves.

The actual electronics of the light-emitting tattoos, made from an extremely thin layer of an electroluminescent polymer that glows when a charge is applied, measure in at just 2.3-micrometers thick, which, according to the researchers, is about one-third the diameter of a red blood cell. The polymer layer is then sandwiched between a pair of electrodes and sits atop an insulating layer, which is bonded to temporary tattoo paper through a printing process that isn't prohibitively expensive. The tattoos can be easily applied to surfaces using the same wet transfer process that temporary tattoos designed for kids use, and can be easily washed off when no longer needed or wanted using soap and water.

With a current applied the OLED tattoos in their current form simply glow green, but eventually could produce any color using the same RGB approach that OLED screens use. However, while the researchers acknowledge that the potential for glowing tattoos is there, taking that art in a whole new direction, they also see even more potential for them as a medical tool. When combined with other wearable technologies the light-emitting tattoos could start flashing when an athlete needs to rehydrate, or change color when applied to foods providing obvious warnings when expiration dates have passed. The researchers note that the OLEDs polymers can quickly degrade when exposed to the air, and "there's an even bigger issue of finding a way to power them using tiny batteries or supercapacitors, as so far in the lab they've been wired to an external power source," adds Gizmodo.

The far-right social media platform Gab says a trove of its contents has been stolen in a security breach -- including passwords and private communications. Wired reports: On Sunday night the WikiLeaks-style group Distributed Denial of Secrets is revealing what it calls GabLeaks, a collection of more than 70 gigabytes of Gab data representing more than 40 million posts. DDoSecrets says a hacktivist who self-identifies as "JaXpArO and My Little Anonymous Revival Project" siphoned that data out of Gab's backend databases in an effort to expose the platform's largely right-wing users. Those Gab patrons, whose numbers have swelled after Parler went offline, include large numbers of Qanon conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and promoters of former president Donald Trump's election-stealing conspiracies that resulted in the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill.

DDoSecrets cofounder Emma Best says that the hacked data includes not only all of Gab's public posts and profiles -- with the exception of any photos or videos uploaded to the site -- but also private group and private individual account posts and messages, as well as user passwords and group passwords. "It contains pretty much everything on Gab, including user data and private posts, everything someone needs to run a nearly complete analysis on Gab users and content," Best wrote in a text message interview with WIRED. "It's another gold mine of research for people looking at militias, neo-Nazis, the far right, QAnon, and everything surrounding January 6." DDoSecrets says it's not publicly releasing the data due to its sensitivity and the vast amounts of private information it contains. Instead the group says it will selectively share it with journalists, social scientists, and researchers.

According to DDoSecrets' Best, the hacker says that they pulled out Gab's data via a SQL injection vulnerability in the siteâ"a common web bug in which a text field on a site doesn't differentiate between a user's input and commands in the site's code, allowing a hacker to reach in and meddle with its backend SQL database. Despite the hacker's reference to an "Anonymous Revival Project," they're not associated with the loose hacker collective Anonymous, they told Best, but do "want to represent the nameless struggling masses against capitalists and fascists." The company's CEO, Andrew Torba, responded in a public statement on the company's blog that "reporters, who write for a publication that has written many hit pieces on Gab in the past, are in direct contact with the hacker and are essentially assisting the hacker in his efforts to smear our business and hurt you, our users."

Companies that sell refrigerators, washers, hairdryers, or TVs in the European Union will need to ensure those appliances can be repaired for up to 10 years, to help reduce the vast mountain of electrical waste that piles up each year on the continent. Euronews reports: The "right to repair," as it is sometimes called, comes into force across the 27-nation bloc on Monday. It is part of a broader effort to cut the environmental footprint of manufactured goods by making them more durable and energy-efficient. Lack of spare parts is another problem, campaigners say. Sometimes a single broken tooth on a tiny plastic sprocket can throw a proverbial wrench in the works.

Under the new EU rules, manufacturers will have to ensure parts are available for up to a decade, though some will only be provided to professional repair companies to ensure they are installed correctly. New devices will also have to come with repair manuals and be made in such a way that they can be dismantled using conventional tools when they really can't be fixed anymore, to improve recycling. German Environment Minister Svenja Schulze said that the next step should see manufacturers forced to state how long a product is expected to work for and repair it if it breaks down earlier. This would encourage companies to build more durable products, she said. In a next step, environmentalists and consumer rights groups want the "right to repair" expanded to include smartphones, laptops and other small electrical devices.

The bloc's ecological design directive -- of which the right to repair requirement is a part -- will also revise existing energy labels that describe how much electricity washers and other household devices consume. The new seven-step scale from A to G will be complemented by a QR code that provides consumers with further information, such as how loud the devices are.

AmiMoJo shares a report: Last month, the Linux Mint team published a post on the organization's official blog about the importance of installing security updates on machines running the Linux distribution. The essence of the post was that a sizeable number of Linux Mint devices was running outdated applications, packages or even an outdated version of the operating system itself. A sizeable number of devices run on Linux Mint 17.x, according to the blog post, a version of Linux Mint that reached end of support in April 2019. A new blog post, published yesterday, provides information on how the team plans to reduce the update reluctance of Linux Mint users. Next to showing reminders to users, Linux Mint's Update Manager may enforce some of the updates according to the blog post.

"In some cases the Update Manager will be able to remind you to apply updates. In a few of them it might even insist." Upcoming versions will provide information on the implementation, how the "insisting" part may look like, and whether the installation of updates will be enforced. All of this boils down to a single question: how far should operating system developers go when it comes to updates? BetaNews adds: "And now, it seems the Linux Mint developers are taking a page out of Microsoft's playbook by planning to force some updates on its users. Yes, folks, Linux Mint is becoming more like Windows 10."

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said in an interview that the company supports pornography on its platform, as long as it's not exploitative. From a report: "You can look at [porn] as exploitative. And, indeed, much of it is. And that's not the content that we want on Reddit," Huffman told Axios. "But there's another aspect that's empowering. And these are people sharing stories of themselves, pictures of themselves. And we are perfectly supportive of that. "There are difficult decisions to make in this sphere, but we think they're worth making, as opposed to saying, you know, 'No sex at all,' for example," he said. Huffman also spoke to Reddit's involvement in the GameStop frenzy. He told "Axios on HBO" he was proud of r/WallStreetBets, the forum on Reddit that was largely responsible for making GameStop's stock go haywire. "That community exposed a gap between those who have access to the financial markets and those who are on the outside," Huffman said. "In WallStreetBets you see a community, among many things, that is breaking in or trying to break through into that establishment."

Reuters reports: Bots on major social media platforms have been hyping up GameStop Corp and other "meme" stocks, according to an analysis by Massachusetts-based cyber security company PiiQ Media, suggesting organized economic or foreign actors may have played a role in the Reddit-driven trading frenzy... it is unclear how influential they were in the overall saga...

PiiQ said it identified very similar daily "start and stop patterns" in the GameStop-related posts, with activity starting at the beginning of the trading day, followed by a large spike at the end of the trading day. Such patterns are indicative of bots, said Aaron Barr, co-founder and chief technology officer of PiiQ. "We saw clear patterns of artificial behavior across the other four social media platforms. When you think of organic content, it's variable in the day, variable day-to-day. It doesn't have the exact same pattern every day for a month," he said... The company did not analyze Reddit data, but Barr said he would expect to see a similar pattern of activity on Reddit, indicating bot-like or coordinated management of conversations...

Based on its authenticity scoring system, PiiQ estimates there are tens of thousands of bot accounts hyping GameStop, the meme stocks, and Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency swept up in the frenzy. Thousands of fake accounts can be purchased for as little as $200, it said.
Reuters also reports that Friday America's Securities and Exchange Commission "suspended trading in 15 companies due to unusual trading activity and apparent attempts on social media to artificially inflate their stock prices. That is in addition to six stocks it recently suspended due to suspicious social media activity."

Slashdot reader b-dayyy writes: CrowdSec is a massively multiplayer firewall designed to protect Linux servers, services, containers, or virtual machines exposed on the Internet with a server-side agent. It was inspired by Fail2Ban and aims to be a modernized, collaborative version of that intrusion-prevention tool.

CrowdSec is free and open-source (under an MIT License), with the source code available on GitHub. It uses a behavior analysis system to qualify whether someone is trying to hack you, based on your logs. If your agent detects such aggression, the offending IP is then dealt with and sent for curation. If this signal passes the curation process, the IP is then redistributed to all users sharing a similar technological profile to 'immunize' them against this IP.

The goal is to leverage the power of the crowd to create a real-time IP reputation database. As for the IP that aggressed your machine, you can choose to remedy the threat in any manner you feel appropriate. Ultimately, CrowdSec leverages the power of the community to create an extremely accurate IP reputation system that benefits all its users.

It was clear to the founders that Open Source was going to be one of the main pillars of CrowdSec. The project's founders have been working on open-source projects for decades — they didn't just jump on the train. Rather, they are strong Open Source believers. They believe that the crowd is key to the mass hacking plague we are experiencing, and that Open Source is the best lever to create a community and have people contribute their knowledge to the project, ultimately make it better and more secure.

The solution recently turned 1.x, introducing a major architectural change: the introduction of a local REST API.

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares this report from ProPublica: As Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria in early 2018, Facebook's top executives faced a political dilemma. Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People's Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted.

Should Facebook ignore the request, as it has done elsewhere, and risk losing access to tens of millions of users in Turkey? Or should it silence the group, known as the YPG, even if doing so added to the perception that the company too often bends to the wishes of authoritarian governments?

It wasn't a particularly close call for the company's leadership, newly disclosed emails show. "I am fine with this," wrote Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's No. 2 executive, in a one-sentence message to a team that reviewed the page. Three years later, YPG's photos and updates about the Turkish military's brutal attacks on the Kurdish minority in Syria still can't be viewed by Facebook users inside Turkey. The conversations, among other internal emails obtained by ProPublica, provide an unusually direct look into how tech giants like Facebook handle censorship requests made by governments that routinely limit what can be said publicly...

Publicly, Facebook has underscored that it cherishes free speech: "We believe freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, and we work hard to protect and defend these values around the world," the company wrote in a blog post last month about a new Turkish law requiring that social media firms have a legal presence in the country. "More than half of the people in Turkey rely on Facebook to stay in touch with their friends and family, to express their opinions and grow their businesses." But behind the scenes in 2018, amid Turkey's military campaign, Facebook ultimately sided with the government's demands. Deliberations, the emails show, were centered on keeping the platform operational, not on human rights. "The page caused us a few PR fires in the past," one Facebook manager warned of the YPG material...
"Facebook confirmed to ProPublica that it made the decision to restrict the page in Turkey following a legal order from the Turkish government — and after it became clear that failing to do so would have led to its services in the country being completely shut down."

"People may scream at me for saying this, but net neutrality is one of America's longest and now most pointless fights over technology." So argues the New York Times "On Tech" newsletter author Shira Ovide, calling the debate "a distraction for our elected leaders and corporations when there are more pressing issues."

Ovide also shares their discussion with Times technology and regulatory policy reporter Cecila Kang: Kang: You can see the appeal of rules that make sure internet providers don't stall web traffic unless it's from their preferred business partners or their own streaming services. However, the debate feels much less urgent now that we're talking about threats of online disinformation about vaccine deployment and elections. The net neutrality debate focused on internet service providers as powerful gatekeepers of internet information. That term now seems better applied to Facebook, Google and Amazon....

Ovide: Internet providers, public interest groups, some tech companies and a bunch of our elected leaders have been screaming holy war about an issue for 13 years without a resolution. Can they reach a middle ground and we'll all move on?

Kang: There probably isn't much of a middle ground. There are either net neutrality rules or there aren't. And the internet service providers see net neutrality as a slippery slope that leads to broader regulation of high-speed internet services or government-imposed limits on prices they can charge. They will fight any regulation. And that's true, too, of the lobbyists who are hired to argue against anything.

ZDNet brings an update about the future of Red Hat Enterprise Linux: When Red Hat, CentOS's Linux parent company, announced it was "shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream," CentOS users were not happy. Now, in an effort to mollify them and to keep its promise to open-source organizations, Red Hat is introducing a new, free RHEL for Open Source Infrastructure. If your non-profit organization, project, standard body, or foundation is "engaged with open source," you can get a free RHEL subscription via this program. Earlier this year, Red Hat introduced no-cost RHEL for small production workloads and for customer development teams...

Jason Brooks, a Red Hat Open Source Program Office Manager explained:

Supporting the open-source software ecosystem is a core objective for Red Hat... We know that we are part of a larger, interdependent ecosystem that we benefit from and which we do our best to foster and support. This support comes in many forms, but often includes helping open source software projects, foundations, and standards bodies access enterprise technologies for development and testing.

We frequently provide no-cost access to RHEL to these groups, but the process isn't as formalized, consistent, accessible, or transparent as we'd like it to be. With the announcement that we will be shifting our resources to CentOS Stream at the end of 2021, we want to make sure that those organizations engaged with open source have access to RHEL as they build and test the future of open-source software...

The GNOME Foundation's executive director Neil McGovern, said:

As a non-profit, we rely on donations to help us achieve our goal of a world where everyone is empowered by technology they can trust. RHEL subscriptions are an essential part of this. With full operating system management and security updates, we can concentrate on the services we provide to GNOME users and developers without having to worry about the underlying systems. Red Hat has generously provided these services to GNOME at zero cost for years, and we look forward to continuing our relationship for a long time to come.

GNOME is also the default desktop in RHEL Workstation.