TLDR 2021-04-23

Google Fi is celebrating its sixth year by launching a new plan with unlimited calls and texts in the US, plus unlimited data and texting in the US, Canada, and Mexico. The Simply Unlimited plan has free international calls to more than 50 countries, with international data in more than 200 destinations. It includes 100GB of Google One cloud storage.

Russian hacking group REvil is targeting Apple in a $50 million ransomware attack. The group stole engineering and manufacturing schematics from Quanta, a company that manufactures products for Apple. It has already begun posting the stolen data. REvil is hoping that Apple will pay the ransom by May 1. Quanta refused to pay the ransom, saying that the hack did not impact the company's business operations. The data that has been leaked so far seems legitimate.

China has launched a large-scale experimental network to test the future of internet technology. It connects 40 of the country's leading research universities with huge bandwidth and far lower latency than the existing internet. The network will connect to almost everything for seamless communications in an AI-driven society. China launched a massive effort to replace Western hardware in its information infrastructure after it was revealed how Western technology was riddled with back doors.

SBI Holdings and the Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG) have partnered together to build the Osaka Digital Exchange (ODE), a blockchain-based stock exchange to compete against the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The exchange will allow investors to trade digital securities using blockchain technology. SBI and SMFG will set up the ODE in March. The exchange will start trading digital securities in 2023.

TETRIS-OS is an operating system that only plays Tetris. It runs a fully custom bootloader, with a custom music track runner and fully hardcoded Tetris theme. The OS displays double-buffered 60 FPS graphics at 320x200 pixels with a custom 8-bit RGB palette. A 23-minute video explaining the development process behind TETRIS-OS is linked.

DbGate is a database manager that supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server, and MongoDB. It features multiple DB connections, NoSQL database support, plugins, a SQL generator, and more. DbGate works on all platforms and is based on standalone NPM packages that can be run without DbGate.

Software supply chain attacks have become an important issue since the Solarwinds security breach. Students from the University of Minnesota tried to put a vulnerability into the Linux kernel for a study, which resulted in the university being banned from all future contributions to the project. The group had previously published a paper on submitting buggy patches and had a history of submitting purposefully buggy code. Introducing vulnerabilities into open-source code on purpose can be extremely dangerous, especially in the case of the Linux kernel codebase.

Turkish cryptocurrency exchange Thodex abruptly ceased operations on Wednesday. The exchange announced that it would be closed for five days as the company finalized an investment deal. Numerous local news outlets reported that Thodex's CEO fled to Thailand with $2 billion worth of digital assets. Its 400,000 users have been unable to access their accounts. The CEO made a statement on Thursday saying that he plans to return to Turkey and that the losses of users will be compensated. Turkey banned the use of cryptocurrencies last week. Citizens can hold crypto, but can't use it to make payments for goods or services.