Dithering Digest 21 - Weekly Tech News Roundup

Welcome to issue #21 of the Dithering Digest Weekly Tech News Roundup.

Microsoft announce Extended Support pricing for Windows 10 as German state announce they are moving away from Windows entirely.

Enjoy the links!

Apple announces WWDC 2024 for 10th June

Apple’s annual World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) will take place the week beginning the 10th June. The logo for this year looks like an image designed by AI complete with a glitch in the two W’s being merged.

It is expected this will be a large update year with rumours of a major redesign for iOS 18, lots of AI sprinkled throughout the OS (hopefully improving Siri!) and there could well be some changes aimed at heading off any further anti-trust cases!

🔗 WWDC Announced

Malicious backdoor in key Linux package - narrow escape

In what could have been a massive problem for companies worldwide, a backdoor has been found and fixed in the very popular xz linux package.

It seems it was snuck into the code by a helper on the project as part of a planned campaign. Luckily it was caught before it made it into the major distributions like Ubuntu and Debian otherwise the results could have been catastrophic.

🔗 Ars Technica

Another massive Home Assistant update

The level of productivity from the Home Assistant team is just incredible. Every month almost without fail they deliver major new features and quality of life upgrades to the project. And all for free to users!

This month sees a lot of effort put into enabling users to better organise and tidy large installations with hundreds of devices.

I know one person who has many many dashboards that this will be useful for ;)

🔗 Home Assistant Blog

Pi5 powered NAS tutorial

Jeff Geerling again! This time he is giving the Radxa Penta SATA Hat a whirl on the Pi 5 building a very efficient NAS.

As always the build log is detailed and there are many many speed tests and comparisons to pore over.

🔗 Jeff Geerling

German state switches to Linux and LibreOffice

The German state of Schleswig-Holstein are now enacting a plan to move to open source for their local government business. Initially stating the expensive move to Windows 11 as a reason, they have decided that moving to Libre Office, Linux and then moving all of their email servers, telephony systems etc to open source means they will be “independent, sustainable and secure”.

🔗 The Register

Microsoft announce extended Windows 10 support pricing

Hot on the heels of the German announcement that Windows 11 upgrading would be too expensive, and following a lot of backlash at the prospect of hundreds of thousands of PCs ending up in landfill as a result of the Windows 10 support cutoff, Microsoft have announced pricing to allow businesses to continue to receive support.

$61 per PC for the first year, with prices doubling each year ($122 2nd year, $244 third year etc) may buy some businesses a little more time to make the switch and either upgrade their fleet to support Windows 11 or move to Linux.

Schools will only have to pay $1 per machine in the first year which should be a huge relief to an already financially squeezed education sector.

🔗 Ars Technica

ChatGPT now available without signing in

If you have been waiting to try ChatGPT now is the time. The only catch is that the free version is using ChatGPT 3.5 which is an older and less capable version than the current 4.0.

But if you just want to have a play around then it will still give you a feel for what these systems are capable of.

Computer Joke of the Week

My Xbox, PS4 and Switch all broke on the same day… I was inconsolable.

If you have any cool projects or tinkering you are doing, let us know and we will feature it in future issues of the digest. I would love to hear what you are all dithering on!

Until next week, happy dithering!