Month: April 2024

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There's a new Linux distro on the scene today, and it's a bit specialized. Its development was led by the automotive electronics supplier Elektrobit, and it's the first open source OS that complies with the automotive industry's functional safety requirements.

One of the more interesting paradigm shifts underway in the automotive industry is the move to software-defined vehicles. Cars have increasingly been controlled by electronic systems during the past few decades, but it's been piecemeal. Each added new function, like traction control, antilock braking, or a screen instead of physical gauges, required its own little black box added to the wiring loom.

There can now be more than 200 discrete controllers in a modern vehicle, all talking to each other through a CAN bus network. The idea behind the software-defined vehicle is to take a clean-sheet approach. Instead, you'll find a small number of domain controllers—what the automotive industry is choosing to call "high performance compute" platforms—each responsible for a different set of activities.

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For almost a decade, Nick Roy has been scanning North Korea’s tiny Internet presence, spotting new websites coming online and providing a glimpse of the Hermit Kingdoms’ digital life. However, at the end of last year, the cybersecurity researcher and DPRK blogger stumbled across something new: signs North Koreans are working on major international TV shows.

In December, Roy discovered a misconfigured cloud server on a North Korean IP address containing thousands of animation files. Included in the cache were animation cells, videos, and notes discussing the work, plus changes that needed to be made to ongoing projects. Some images appeared to be from an Amazon Prime Video superhero show and an upcoming Max (aka HBO Max) children’s anime.