Daily Archives: 2021-10-20

FDA OKs Moderna and J&J boosters, plus ‘mix and match’ approach

Source: The Week: Most Recent Home Page Posts

Article note: Because I spend so much time helping students in instructional labs, I've been eligible for a booster for a while, but have been holding off hoping this would happen because the early mix study results looked so promising. Now to see if I can coax UK to let me mix.

FDA OKs Moderna and J&J boosters, plus 'mix and match' approach

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KiCad Team Releases Warning Regarding Domain Name

Source: Hack a Day

Article note: Oof. An early member defecting with IP that never made it to the larger organization is a pretty regular problem for projects that make it, but it's always ugly. Really good on DigiKey for procuring and donating kicad.org. I'm always sort of surprised by how well-behaved and community-aware the big electronics distributors are. And, since we're talking about EDA tools, I re-taught myself basic board design a couple years ago and was _really_ happy with KiCAD, and highly recommend it.
an image of kicad's homepage

On October 19th, [Seth_h] from the KiCad Project posted on the KiCad forums that the project’s original domain name kicad-pcb.org has been unexpectedly sold to a third party, and urged members of the community to avoid any links to this old website.

KiCad has used the domain kicad-pcb.org since 2012 as the official source for information on and downloads of their popular open-source electronics design software. Unfortunately, the original domain name was purchased before KiCad was formalized as an organization, so it was not directly under their control. This all came to head when the old domain name was unexpectedly sold to an unnamed third party that was not affiliated with the project. Currently, the old domain is just a website covered in ads, but the KiCad team fears that it may be used maliciously in the future.

With KiCad’s popularity, thousands of tutorials, articles, and project guides over the years have included links to the old KiCad domain. A Google search in October 2021 found more than 19,000 instances of the old domain spread across the internet. [Seth_h] has called upon the community to make every effort possible to update old links, reducing the chance that people stumble across the wrong website.

[Editor’s Note: We think we got ’em all, let us know if we missed any.]

Luckily, Digikey has swooped in to help save the day. They purchased a new domain, kicad.org, from squatters and donated it to the KiCad Project. [Seth_h] explains in his post that a number of safeguards have been put in place to prevent this from happening in the future, including not having the domain name owned by a single person, and having all KiCad trademarks registered to the Linux Foundation.

There’s a good reason why KiCad has gotten so popular, it is packed full of great features for PCB design. Check out our coverage of some of the new features we are most excited for in KiCad 6.0 here.

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