Month: June 2021

Enlarge / Filmmaker Steven Spielberg appears at 2017's Comic-Con. (credit: Gage Skidmore / Flickr)

Amblin Partners, the production company founded and chaired by director and producer Steven Spielberg, has signed a multiyear deal with streaming platform Netflix.

In a press release on Netflix's website, the two companies announced that the partnership will result in "multiple new feature films per year."

Some might see it as an unexpected turn from Spielberg's company, given the director's past stances on streaming movies. Two years ago, an Amblin spokesperson publicly announced that Spielberg intended to support changes to the Academy Awards that would reclassify Netflix films as TV movies, ineligible for Oscars like Best Picture.

Enlarge / No, not that kind of Rust. (credit: Heritage Images via Getty Images)

The Internet Security Research Group—parent organization of the better-known Let's Encrypt project—has provided prominent developer Miguel Ojeda with a one-year contract to work on Rust in Linux and other security efforts on a full-time basis.

What’s a Rust for Linux?

As we covered in March, Rust is a low-level programming language offering most of the flexibility and performance of C—the language used for kernels in Unix and Unix-like operating systems since the 1970s—in a safer way.

Efforts to make Rust a viable language for Linux kernel development began at the 2020 Linux Plumbers conference, with acceptance for the idea coming from Linus Torvalds himself. Torvalds specifically requested Rust compiler availability in the default kernel build environment, to support such efforts—not to replace the entire source code of the Linux kernel with Rust-developed equivalents, but to make it possible for new development to work properly.