An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Dropbox said its digital-signature product, Dropbox Sign, was breached by hackers, who accessed user information including emails, user names and phone numbers. The software company said it became aware of the cyberattack on April 24, sought to limit the incident and reported it to law enforcement and regulatory authorities. "We discovered that the threat actor had accessed data related to all users of Dropbox Sign, such as emails and user names, in addition to general account settings," Dropbox said Wednesday in a regulatory filing. "For subsets of users, the threat actor also accessed phone numbers, hashed passwords, and certain authentication information such as API keys, OAuth tokens, and multi-factor authentication."

Dropbox said there is no evidence hackers obtained user accounts or payment information. The company said it appears the attack was limited to Dropbox Sign and no other products were breached. The company didn't disclose how many customers were affected by the hack. The hack is unlikely to have a material impact on the company's finances, Dropbox said in the filing. The shares declined about 2.5% in extended trading after the cyberattack was disclosed and have fallen 20% this year through the close.

An anonymous reader shares that IPv6rs has debuted a new one-click self hosting system: Everyone seemed like they were talking about self hosting, but we didn't understand why it wasn't more prolific. Thus, we conducted a survey to hear reasons. It turned out the two most common reasons were:

1. Lack of an external IP address 2. Too difficult to setup and maintain

Our service already solves the first issue. We set out with a self-hostathon to figure out what the blockers were in setting up and running a self-hosted server. ... writes IPv6rs on their blog. We needed to make things easier, so we created Cloud Seeder, a one click installer that instantly launches a fully encapsulated server appliance that is externally reachable.

At the time of launching, the current version of Cloud Seeder supports 20+ different appliances - from Mastodon which federates with Meta's Threads to Nextcloud which provides an enterprise-level, self-hosted alternative to the big-name collaboration suites.

It also automatically handles updates/maintenance.

We hope this will bring a new era to self hosting and, in turn, will bring the decentralized internet forest back. Is the self hosting era making its return?

Maciej Pocwierz, a senior software engineer Semantive, writing on Medium: A few weeks ago, I began working on the PoC of a document indexing system for my client. I created a single S3 bucket in the eu-west-1 region and uploaded some files there for testing. Two days later, I checked my AWS billing page, primarily to make sure that what I was doing was well within the free-tier limits. Apparently, it wasn't. My bill was over $1,300, with the billing console showing nearly 100,000,000 S3 PUT requests executed within just one day! By default, AWS doesn't log requests executed against your S3 buckets. However, such logs can be enabled using AWS CloudTrail or S3 Server Access Logging. After enabling CloudTrail logs, I immediately observed thousands of write requests originating from multiple accounts or entirely outside of AWS.

Was it some kind of DDoS-like attack against my account? Against AWS? As it turns out, one of the popular open-source tools had a default configuration to store their backups in S3. And, as a placeholder for a bucket name, they used... the same name that I used for my bucket. This meant that every deployment of this tool with default configuration values attempted to store its backups in my S3 bucket! So, a horde of misconfigured systems is attempting to store their data in my private S3 bucket. But why should I be the one paying for this mistake? Here's why: S3 charges you for unauthorized incoming requests. This was confirmed in my exchange with AWS support. As they wrote: "Yes, S3 charges for unauthorized requests (4xx) as well[1]. That's expected behavior." So, if I were to open my terminal now and type: aws s3 cp ./file.txt s3://your-bucket-name/random_key. I would receive an AccessDenied error, but you would be the one to pay for that request. And I don't even need an AWS account to do so.

Another question was bugging me: why was over half of my bill coming from the us-east-1 region? I didn't have a single bucket there! The answer to that is that the S3 requests without a specified region default to us-east-1 and are redirected as needed. And the bucket's owner pays extra for that redirected request. The security aspect: We now understand why my S3 bucket was bombarded with millions of requests and why I ended up with a huge S3 bill. At that point, I had one more idea I wanted to explore. If all those misconfigured systems were attempting to back up their data into my S3 bucket, why not just let them do so? I opened my bucket for public writes and collected over 10GB of data within less than 30 seconds. Of course, I can't disclose whose data it was. But it left me amazed at how an innocent configuration oversight could lead to a dangerous data leak! Lesson 1: Anyone who knows the name of any of your S3 buckets can ramp up your AWS bill as they like. Other than deleting the bucket, there's nothing you can do to prevent it. You can't protect your bucket with services like CloudFront or WAF when it's being accessed directly through the S3 API. Standard S3 PUT requests are priced at just $0.005 per 1,000 requests, but a single machine can easily execute thousands of such requests per second.

If 2023 was the tech industry's year of the A.I. chatbot, 2024 is turning out to be the year of A.I. plumbing. From a report: It may not sound as exciting, but tens of billions of dollars are quickly being spent on behind-the-scenes technology for the industry's A.I. boom. Companies from Amazon to Meta are revamping their data centers to support artificial intelligence. They are investing in huge new facilities, while even places like Saudi Arabia are racing to build supercomputers to handle A.I. Nearly everyone with a foot in tech or giant piles of money, it seems, is jumping into a spending frenzy that some believe could last for years.

Microsoft, Meta, and Google's parent company, Alphabet, disclosed this week that they had spent more than $32 billion combined on data centers and other capital expenses in just the first three months of the year. The companies all said in calls with investors that they had no plans to slow down their A.I. spending. In the clearest sign of how A.I. has become a story about building a massive technology infrastructure, Meta said on Wednesday that it needed to spend billions more on the chips and data centers for A.I. than it had previously signaled. "I think it makes sense to go for it, and we're going to," Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's chief executive, said in a call with investors.

The eye-popping spending reflects an old parable in Silicon Valley: The people who made the biggest fortunes in California's gold rush weren't the miners -- they were the people selling the shovels. No doubt Nvidia, whose chip sales have more than tripled over the last year, is the most obvious A.I. winner. The money being thrown at technology to support artificial intelligence is also a reminder of spending patterns of the dot-com boom of the 1990s. For all of the excitement around web browsers and newfangled e-commerce websites, the companies making the real money were software giants like Microsoft and Oracle, the chipmaker Intel, and Cisco Systems, which made the gear that connected those new computer networks together. But cloud computing has added a new wrinkle: Since most start-ups and even big companies from other industries contract with cloud computing providers to host their networks, the tech industry's biggest companies are spending big now in hopes of luring customers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report published last week by Physics World: Researchers at the Dutch quantum institute QuTech in Delft have announced plans to build Europe's first 100-quantum bit (qubit) quantum computer. When complete in 2026, the device will be made publicly available, providing scientists with a tool for quantum calculations and simulations. The project is funded by the Dutch umbrella organization Quantum Delta NL via the European OpenSuperQPlus initiative, which has 28 partners from 10 countries. Part of the 10-year, 1 billion-euro European Quantum Flagship program, OpenSuperQPlus aims to build a 100-qubit superconducting quantum processor as a stepping stone to an eventual 1000-qubit European quantum computer.

Quantum Delta NL says the 100-qubit quantum computer will be made publicly available via a cloud platform as an extension of the existing platform Quantum Inspire that first came online in 2020. It currently includes a two-qubit processor of spin qubits in silicon, as well as a five-qubit processor based on superconducting qubits. Quantum Inspire is currently focused on training and education but the upgrade to 100 qubits is expected to allow research into quantum computing. Lead researcher from QuTech Leonardo DiCarlo believes the R&D cycle has "come full circle," where academic research first enabled spin-off companies to grow and now their products are being used to accelerate academic research.

Alphabet has reported first quarter results that topped analysts' estimates with soaring profits in its cloud division. It also announced its first-ever dividend. CNBC shares the results: Earnings per share: $1.89 vs. $1.51 per share expected by LSEG
Revenue: $80.54 billion vs. $78.59 billion expected by LSEG

Wall Street is also watching several other numbers in the report:

YouTube advertising revenue: $8.09 billion vs. $7.72 billion expected, according to StreetAccount.
Google Cloud revenue: $9.57 billion vs. $9.35 billion expected, according to StreetAccount.
Traffic acquisition costs (TAC): $12.95 billion $12.74 billion expected, according to StreetAccount.

Alphabet's revenue increased 15% from $69.79 billion a year earlier, the fastest rate of growth since early 2022. Alphabet said its board approved a cash dividend of 20 cents per share to be paid on June 17, to stockholders of record as of June 10. The company said it "intends to pay quarterly cash dividends in the future."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Late January, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a notice of proposed rulemaking for establishing new requirements for Infrastructure as a Service providers (IaaS) . The proposal boils down to a 'Know Your Customer' regime for companies operating cloud services, with the goal of countering the activities of "foreign malicious actors." Yet, despite an overseas focus, Americans won't be able to avoid the proposal's requirements, which covers CDNs, virtual private servers, proxies, and domain name resolution services, among others. [...] Under the proposed rule, Customer Identification Programs (CIPs) operated by IaaS providers must collect information from both existing and prospective customers, i.e. those at the application stage of opening an account. The bare minimum includes the following data: a customer's name, address, the means and source of payment for each customer's account, email addresses and telephone numbers, and IP addresses used for access or administration of the account.

What qualifies as an IaaS is surprisingly broad: "Any product or service offered to a consumer, including complimentary or "trial" offerings, that provides processing, storage, networks, or other fundamental computing resources, and with which the consumer is able to deploy and run software that is not predefined, including operating systems and applications. The consumer typically does not manage or control most of the underlying hardware but has control over the operating systems, storage, and any deployed applications. The term is inclusive of "managed" products or services, in which the provider is responsible for some aspects of system configuration or maintenance, and "unmanaged" products or services, in which the provider is only responsible for ensuring that the product is available to the consumer."

And it doesn't stop there. The term IaaS includes all 'virtualized' products and services where the computing resources of a physical machine are shared, such as Virtual Private Servers (VPS). It even covers 'baremetal' servers allocated to a single person. The definition also extends to any service where the consumer does not manage or control the underlying hardware but contracts with a third party for access. "This definition would capture services such as content delivery networks, proxy services, and domain name resolution services," the proposal reads. The proposed rule, National Emergency with Respect to Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities, will stop accepting comments from interested parties on April 30, 2024.

Jeff Lawson, the cofounder of cloud computing company Twilio, appears to have purchased the satirical news website The Onion from G/O Media. Business Insider reports: A trust linked to Lawson is behind a San Francisco-based company called Global Tetrahedron, which shares the name of a fictional evil megacorporation in a long-running Onion gag, business records show. G/O Media CEO Jim Spanfeller confirmed the sale of The Onion to Global Tetrahedron in an email Thursday to staff, first reported by New York Times journalist Katie Robertson.

"This company is made up of four digital media veterans with a profound love for The Onion and comedy based content," Spanfeller wrote. "The site's new owners have agreed to keep The Onion's entire staff intact and in Chicago, something we insisted be part of the deal." When asked about the purchase, Lawson replied: "What's The Onion?" Then, "What's a Tetrahedron?"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Almost all keyboard apps used by Chinese people around the world share a security loophole that makes it possible to spy on what users are typing. The vulnerability, which allows the keystroke data that these apps send to the cloud to be intercepted, has existed for years and could have been exploited by cybercriminals and state surveillance groups, according to researchers at the Citizen Lab, a technology and security research lab affiliated with the University of Toronto.

These apps help users type Chinese characters more efficiently and are ubiquitous on devices used by Chinese people. The four most popular apps -- built by major internet companies like Baidu, Tencent, and iFlytek -- basically account for all the typing methods that Chinese people use. Researchers also looked into the keyboard apps that come preinstalled on Android phones sold in China. What they discovered was shocking. Almost every third-party app and every Android phone with preinstalled keyboards failed to protect users by properly encrypting the content they typed. A smartphone made by Huawei was the only device where no such security vulnerability was found.

In August 2023, the same researchers found that Sogou, one of the most popular keyboard apps, did not use Transport Layer Security (TLS) when transmitting keystroke data to its cloud server for better typing predictions. Without TLS, a widely adopted international cryptographic protocol that protects users from a known encryption loophole, keystrokes can be collected and then decrypted by third parties. Even though Sogou fixed the issue after it was made public last year, some Sogou keyboards preinstalled on phones are not updated to the latest version, so they are still subject to eavesdropping. [...] After the researchers got in contact with companies that developed these keyboard apps, the majority of the loopholes were fixed. But a few companies have been unresponsive, and the vulnerability still exists in some apps and phones, including QQ Pinyin and Baidu, as well as in any keyboard app that hasn't been updated to the latest version.

Hartley Charlton reports via MacRumors: Apple is said to be developing its own AI server processor using TSMC's 3nm process, targeting mass production by the second half of 2025. According to a post by the Weibo user known as "Phone Chip Expert," Apple has ambitious plans to design its own artificial intelligence server processor. The user, who claims to have 25 years of experience in the integrated circuit industry, including work on Intel's Pentium processors, suggests this processor will be manufactured using TSMC's 3nm node.

Apple's purported move toward developing a specialist AI server processor is reflective of the company's ongoing strategy to vertically integrate its supply chain. By designing its own server chips, Apple can tailor hardware specifically to its software needs, potentially leading to more powerful and efficient technologies. Apple could use its own AI processors to enhance the performance of its data centers and future AI tools that rely on the cloud. While Apple is rumored to be prioritizing on-device processing for many of its upcoming AI tools, it is inevitable that some operations will have to occur in the cloud. By the time the custom processor could be integrated into operational servers in late 2025, Apple's new AI strategy should be well underway.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a deal for IBM to acquire HashiCorp could materialize in the next few days. Shares of HashiCorp jumped almost 20% on the news.

UPDATE 4/24/24: IBM has confirmed the deal valued at $6.4 billion. "IBM will pay $35 per share for HashiCorp, a 42.6% premium to Monday's closing price," reports Reuters. "The acquisition will be funded by cash on hand and will add to adjusted core profit within the first full year of closing, expected by the end of 2024." HashiCorp's shares continued to surge Tuesday on the news. CNBC reports: Developers use HashiCorp's software to set up and manage infrastructure in public clouds that companies such as Amazon and Microsoft operate. Organizations also pay HashiCorp for managing security credentials. Founded in 2012, HashiCorp went public on Nasdaq in 2021. The company generated a net loss of nearly $191 million on $583 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending Jan. 31, according to its annual report. In December, Mitchell Hashimoto, co-founder of HashiCorp, whose family name is reflected in the company name, announced that he was leaving.

Revenue jumped almost 23% during that period, compared with 2% for IBM in 2023. IBM executives pointed to a difficult economic climate during a conference call with analysts in January. The hardware, software and consulting provider reports earnings on Wednesday. Cisco held $9 million in HashiCorp shares at the end of March, according to a regulatory filing. Cisco held early acquisition talks with HashiCorp, according to a 2019 report.

Just as Google, Samsung and Microsoft continue to push their efforts with generative AI on PCs and mobile devices, Apple is moving to join the party with OpenELM, a new family of open source large language models (LLMs) that can run entirely on a single device rather than having to connect to cloud servers. From a report: Released a few hours ago on AI code community Hugging Face, OpenELM consists of small models designed to perform efficiently at text generation tasks. There are eight OpenELM models in total -- four pre-trained and four instruction-tuned -- covering different parameter sizes between 270 million and 3 billion parameters (referring to the connections between artificial neurons in an LLM, and more parameters typically denote greater performance and more capabilities, though not always).

[...] Apple is offering the weights of its OpenELM models under what it deems a "sample code license," along with different checkpoints from training, stats on how the models perform as well as instructions for pre-training, evaluation, instruction tuning and parameter-efficient fine tuning. The sample code license does not prohibit commercial usage or modification, only mandating that "if you redistribute the Apple Software in its entirety and without modifications, you must retain this notice and the following text and disclaimers in all such redistributions of the Apple Software." The company further notes that the models "are made available without any safety guarantees. Consequently, there exists the possibility of these models producing outputs that are inaccurate, harmful, biased, or objectionable in response to user prompts."

Nvidia, in a blog post: To help customers make more efficient use of their AI computing resources, NVIDIA today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Run:ai, a Kubernetes-based workload management and orchestration software provider. Customer AI deployments are becoming increasingly complex, with workloads distributed across cloud, edge and on-premises data center infrastructure.

Managing and orchestrating generative AI, recommender systems, search engines and other workloads requires sophisticated scheduling to optimize performance at the system level and on the underlying infrastructure. Run:ai enables enterprise customers to manage and optimize their compute infrastructure, whether on premises, in the cloud or in hybrid environments. The deal is valued at about $700 million.

The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses now feature support for multimodal AI -- without the need for a projector or $24 monthly fee. (We're looking at you, Humane AI.) With the new update, the Meta AI assistant will be able to analyze what you're seeing, and it'll give you smart, helpful answers or suggestions. The Verge reports: First off, there are some expectations that need managing here. The Meta glasses don't promise everything under the sun. The primary command is to say "Hey Meta, look and..." You can fill out the rest with phrases like "Tell me what this plant is." Or read a sign in a different language. Write Instagram captions. Identify and learn more about a monument or landmark. The glasses take a picture, the AI communes with the cloud, and an answer arrives in your ears. The possibilities are not limitless, and half the fun is figuring out where its limits are. [...]

To me, it's the mix of a familiar form factor and decent execution that makes the AI workable on these glasses. Because it's paired to your phone, there's very little wait time for answers. It's headphones, so you feel less silly talking to them because you're already used to talking through earbuds. In general, I've found the AI to be the most helpful at identifying things when we're out and about. It's a natural extension of what I'd do anyway with my phone. I find something I'm curious about, snap a pic, and then look it up. Provided you don't need to zoom really far in, this is a case where it's nice to not pull out your phone. [...]

But AI is a feature of the Meta glasses. It's not the only feature. They're a workable pair of livestreaming glasses and a good POV camera. They're an excellent pair of open-ear headphones. I love wearing mine on outdoor runs and walks. I could never use the AI and still have a product that works well. The fact that it's here, generally works, and is an alright voice assistant -- well, it just gets you more used to the idea of a face computer, which is the whole point anyway.

Google has fired another 20 workers for participating in protests against its $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, according to an activist group representing the workers. From a report: In total, the company has now fired around 50 employees over sit-in protests held in Google offices last week that were part of yearslong discontent among a group of Google and Amazon workers over claims that Israel is using the companies' services to harm Palestinians. Google has denied those claims, saying Project Nimbus, the cloud-computing contract, doesn't involve "highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services," and that Israeli government ministries that use its commercial cloud must agree to its terms of services and other policies.

No Tech For Apartheid, the group representing the workers, claimed in a statement that Google is attempting to "quash dissent, silence its workers, and reassert its power over them." "That's because Google values its profit, and its $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli government and military, more than people. And it certainly values it over its own workers," it said. The group said it will continue organizing until Google cancels Project Nimbus. Further reading: Google To Employees: 'We Are a Workplace'.

Data scientist Antoine Mayerowitz, PhD, applied Vilfredo Pareto's (the early 20th-century Italian economist) theories to Mario Kart 8 Deluxe to determine the best racer combinations. "When you break down the build options (including driver stats and various vehicle details) in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, there are over 700,000 possible combinations," notes Engadget. "But once you eliminate duplicates that differ only in appearance, you can narrow it down to 'only' 25,704 possibilities." From the report: Pareto's theories, most notably the Pareto front, help us navigate the complexities of choice. They can pinpoint the solutions with the most balanced strengths and the fewest trade-offs. Pareto's work is about efficiency and effectiveness. [...] Mayerowitz's Pareto front analysis lets you narrow your possibilities down to the 14 most efficient. And it turns out the game's top players were onto something: One of the combinations with the most ideal balance of speed, acceleration and mini-turbo is Cat Peach driving the Teddy Buggy, roller tires and cloud glider -- one already favored among Mario Kart 8 competitors.

Of course, if that combination isn't your cup of tea, there are others that allow you to stay within the Pareto front's optimal range. As Eurogamer points out, Donkey Kong, Wario (my old standby, mostly because he makes me laugh) and Princess Peach are often highlighted as drivers, and you can use Mayerowitz's data fields to find the best matching vehicles. Keep in mind that others have identical stats, so racers like Villager (female), Inkling Girl and Diddy Kong are separated only by appearances.

To find your ideal racer, you can head over to Mayerowitz's website. There, you can enter your most prized stats and view the combos that give you the best balance (those highlighted in yellow), according to Pareto's theories.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Home Assistant, until recently, has been a wide-ranging and hard-to-define project. The open smart home platform is an open source OS you can run anywhere that aims to connect all your devices together. But it's also bespoke Raspberry Pi hardware, in Yellow and Green. It's entirely free, but it also receives funding through a private cloud services company, Nabu Casa. It contains tiny board project ESPHome and other inter-connected bits. It has wide-ranging voice assistant ambitions, but it doesn't want to be Alexa or Google Assistant. Home Assistant is a lot.

After an announcement this weekend, however, Home Assistant's shape is a bit easier to draw out. All of the project's ambitions now fall under the Open Home Foundation, a non-profit organization that now contains Home Assistant and more than 240 related bits. Its mission statement is refreshing, and refreshingly honest about the state of modern open source projects. "We've done this to create a bulwark against surveillance capitalism, the risk of buyout, and open-source projects becoming abandonware," the Open Home Foundation states in a press release. "To an extent, this protection extends even against our future selves -- so that smart home users can continue to benefit for years, if not decades. No matter what comes." Along with keeping Home Assistant funded and secure from buy-outs or mission creep, the foundation intends to help fund and collaborate with external projects crucial to Home Assistant, like Z-Wave JS and Zigbee2MQTT.

Home Assistant's ambitions don't stop with money and board seats, though. They aim to "be an active political advocate" in the smart home field, toward three primary principles:

- Data privacy, which means devices with local-only options, and cloud services with explicit permissions
- Choice in using devices with one another through open standards and local APIs
- Sustainability by repurposing old devices and appliances beyond company-defined lifetimes

Notably, individuals cannot contribute modest-size donations to the Open Home Foundation. Instead, the foundation asks supporters to purchase a Nabu Casa subscription or contribute code or other help to its open source projects. Further reading: The Verge's interview with Home Assistant founder Paulus Schoutsen

In a huge move for the mixed reality industry, Meta announced today that it's opening the Quest's operating system to third-party companies, allowing them to build headsets of their own. From a report: Think of it like moving the Quest's ecosystem from an Apple model, where one company builds both the hardware and software, to more of a hardware free-for-all like Android. The Quest OS is being rebranded to "Meta Horizon OS," and at this point it seems to have found two early adopters. ASUS's Republic of Gamers (ROG) brand is working on a new "performance gaming" headsets, while Lenovo is working on devices for "productivity, learning and entertainment." (Don't forget, Lenovo also built the poorly-received Oculus Rift S.)

As part of the news, Meta says it's also working on a limited-edition Xbox "inspired" Quest headset. (Microsoft and Meta also worked together recently to bring Xbox cloud gaming to the Quest.) Meta is also calling on Google to bring over the Google Play 2D app store to Meta Horizon OS. And, in an effort to bring more content to the Horizon ecosystem, software developed through the Quest App Lab will be featured in the Horizon Store. The company is also developing a new spatial framework to let mobile developers created mixed reality apps.

North Korean animators have been secretly working on major international TV shows, including an Amazon superhero series and an upcoming HBO Max children's anime, according to a report by cybersecurity researchers. The findings, detailed in a report by the Stimson Center think tank's 38 North Project and Google-owned security firm Mandiant, provide a glimpse into how North Korea can use skilled IT workers to raise funds for its heavily sanctioned regime.

Researcher Nick Roy discovered a misconfigured cloud server on a North Korean IP address in December, containing thousands of animation files, including cells, videos, and notes discussing ongoing projects. Some images appeared to be from Amazon's "Invincible" and HBO Max's "Iyanu: Child of Wonder." The server, which mysteriously stopped being used at the end of February, likely allowed work to be sent to and from North Korean animators, according to Martyn Williams, a senior fellow on the 38 North Project. U.S. sanctions prohibit companies from working with North Korean entities, but the researchers say it is unlikely that the companies involved were aware of the animators' origins. The report suggests the contracting arrangement was several steps removed from the major producers.

It's "the new generation of Tablet for simplicity and privacy..." according to its Kickstarter page. "Top-tier performance, lightweight design and completely Google-free." And it's already reached its funding goal of $53,312 — climbing to over $75,000 from 115 backers with another 26 days still to go. 9to5Linux reports: Volla, the maker of the Volla Phone smartphones, has launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for their first tablet device, the Volla Tablet, which will also support the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS.

Featuring a 12.3-inch Quad HD display with 2650Ã--1600 pixel resolution, the Volla Tablet uses a powerful MediaTek Gaming G99 8-core processor, 12 GB RAM, and 256 GB internal storage. It also comes with a long-lasting 10,000 mAh battery, 2G/3G/4G cellular network support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and a 13+5 MP main camera.

By default, Volla Tablet ships with Volla OS 13, Volla's in-house operating system based on the free Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but users will be able to buy the tablet with Ubuntu Touch featuring built-in convergence and support for Android apps with WayDroid container.
"Users will also be able to use desktop apps like Firefox or LibreOffice thanks to the help of the Libertine container," according to the article. ("Volla says that Volla Tablet with Ubuntu Touch is ideal for Linux enthusiasts and minimalists seeking a simplified, efficient, and familiar operating system experience.")

Its Kickstarter page points out the tablet even offers options like "hide.me VPN" and private speech recognition that's "cloud-independent for secure, confidential interactions."

("For U.S. users, please note that only roaming SIM cards from abroad can be used.")