Free Software: Offline Navigation System, Floccus, And Google's KataOS (UPDATED)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 16, 2022,
updated Oct 17, 2022

• Navit: Offline Navigation System for Android and Windows

  Navit is an open-source free car navigation system for Android and Windows devices that support offline maps. It comes with a vector maps with many formats for routing and rendering.

  [...]

  Navit is written in the C programming language and it is released under the GPL-2.0 (Only) License.

• Sync and Backup your Mega Bookmark collections with Floccus

  Here, we introduce you Floccus, which is a handy tool to sync and backup your bookmark collections from different browser and devices. Furthermore, it is completely free and open source.

• Google grows data cloud capabilities for data management

  The tech giant brings open source Apache Iceberg table format support to its BigLake data lake as it extends BigQuery support for unstructured data and Apache Spark.

• Announcing KataOS and Sparrow

  As we find ourselves increasingly surrounded by smart devices that collect and process information from their environment, it's more important now than ever that we have a simple solution to build verifiably secure systems for embedded hardware. If the devices around us can't be mathematically proven to keep data secure, then the personally-identifiable data they collect—such as images of people and recordings of their voices—could be accessible to malicious software.

  Unfortunately, system security is often treated as a software feature that can be added to existing systems or solved with an extra piece of ASIC hardware— this generally is not good enough. Our team in Google Research has set out to solve this problem by building a provably secure platform that's optimized for embedded devices that run ML applications. This is an ongoing project with plenty left to do, but we're excited to share some early details and invite others to collaborate on the platform so we can all build intelligent ambient systems that have security built-in by default.

• Google launches KataOS [LWN.net]

  Google has announced the existence of yet another new operating system, called KataOS, aimed at the creation of secure embedded systems.

UPDATE

Liam Proven today:

• Google reveals another experimental operating system: KataOS • The Register

  Google, one of very few tech companies willing to experiment with new operating systems, has unveiled KataOS for embedded machine learning devices.

  KataOS was announced along with Sparrow on the Google Open Source blog. KataOS is the operating system design and Sparrow is the reference implementation, as the Weston display server is the reference implementation of Wayland.

  The plan is that KataOS will be "a provably secure platform that's optimized for embedded devices that run ML applications." Google is working with Antmicro, which created the seL4-sys crate. Currently the OS is being developed on the Arm64 instruction set, but the plan is to run it on openTitan, which uses RISC-V.