Month: February 2021

Enlarge / College Football is coming back... but the NCAA trademarks and actual college football players are not. (credit: EA / Twitter)

EA is diving back into the world of college football for the first time since 2013, the publisher announced today. But EA Sports College Football, which is currently in the early stages of development, will be making its return without licenses from the NCAA or the rights to the names and likenesses of actual current college players.

Instead, EA says the new game "will include the rights to more than 100 institutions featuring the logos, stadiums, uniforms, gameday traditions, and more that fans have come to know and love."

The NCAA and many major college football conferences decided not to renew their exclusive contracts with EA Sports back in July 2013, amid legal disputes over whether players could share in the profits from the use of various NCAA trademarks. At the same time, EA was facing a direct lawsuit over the unauthorized use of player names and likenesses in the franchise, eventually leading to a multimillion-dollar settlement.

Enlarge / You might draw a fairly similar schematic diagram to give someone a simplified idea of how a traditional Linux distribution is put together—but it wouldn't be as close to literal accuracy as this Ubuntu Core diagram is. (credit: Canonical)

Canonical released Ubuntu Core 20 today, and it is now available for download. If you're already familiar with Ubuntu Core 20, the standout new feature is added device security with secure boot, full-disk encryption, and secure device recovery baked in. If you're not familiar with Ubuntu Core yet... read on!

The key difference between regular Ubuntu and Ubuntu Core is the underlying architecture of the system. Traditional Linux distributions rely mostly on traditional package systems—deb, in Ubuntu's case—while Ubuntu Core relies almost entirely on Canonical's relatively new snap package format.

Ubuntu Core also gets a full 10 years of support from Canonical, rather than the five years traditional Ubuntu LTS releases get. But it's a bit more difficult to get started with, since you need an Ubuntu SSO account to even log into a new Ubuntu Core installation in the first place.

Enlarge / You might draw a fairly similar schematic diagram to give someone a simplified idea of how a traditional Linux distribution is put together—but it wouldn't be as close to literal accuracy as this Ubuntu Core diagram is. (credit: Canonical)

Canonical released Ubuntu Core 20 today, and it is now available for download. If you're already familiar with Ubuntu Core 20, the standout new feature is added device security with secure boot, full-disk encryption, and secure device recovery baked in. If you're not familiar with Ubuntu Core yet... read on!

The key difference between regular Ubuntu and Ubuntu Core is the underlying architecture of the system. Traditional Linux distributions rely mostly on traditional package systems—deb, in Ubuntu's case—while Ubuntu Core relies almost entirely on Canonical's relatively new snap package format.

Ubuntu Core also gets a full 10 years of support from Canonical, rather than the five years traditional Ubuntu LTS releases get. But it's a bit more difficult to get started with, since you need an Ubuntu SSO account to even log into a new Ubuntu Core installation in the first place.

Enlarge / Jeff Bezos greets a crowd at Amazon's Smbhav event in New Delhi on January 15, 2020. (credit: Getty Images)

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Elon Musk's perpetual rival in the see-saw "world's richest man" contest, today announced he is leaving the CEO post of the Internet giant he has led since 1994.

Bezos will switch from the CEO spot to Amazon's executive chairmanship in Q3 of this year, he told his "fellow Amazonians" in a staff email posted on Amazon's website. Bezos' replacement as CEO will be Andy Jassy, a key player in Amazon Web Services, the company's cloud-computing division.

"This journey began some 27 years ago," Bezos wrote. "Amazon was only an idea, and it had no name. The question I was asked most frequently at that time was, 'What's the internet?' Blessedly, I haven’t had to explain that in a long while."

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)

Google has agreed to a $3.8 million settlement with federal regulators to settle allegations that it both underpaid women software engineers and unfairly passed over women and Asian candidates for software engineering roles.

The settlement breaks down into three pools, the US Department of Labor announced Monday. As part of the agreement, about 2,500 women who currently work in engineering positions for Google will receive a total of $1.35 million, or about $527 per employee.

An additional $1.23 million in back pay, about $414 per person, will go to a pool of just under 3,000 applicants for "software engineering positions not hired." The remaining $1.25 million is reserved for salary adjustments for employees currently working as software engineers based out of Google's offices in California, New York, and Washington state.