Delivery bottlenecks for IT products threaten well into the year 2021 Graphics cards, game consoles, webcams: many hardware components cannot be bought at the moment, the warehouses are empty. Reasons for this are the strong demand, triggered by the boom in home work and video conferences as well as problems with air freight, writes the computer magazine c’t in its current issue. For example, some of the international air freight is transported on board passenger planes, of which far fewer have been flying since spring. An easing of the delivery situation for hardware components is currently not foreseeable. Because of the global vaccine distribution, transport capacities will also be scarce in the first half of the year 2021.

Fortress against Corona: EU seals itself off against virus variant With flight bans and border closings, Europe is arming itself against a highly contagious one discovered in Great Britain Variant of the coronavirus. According to initial analyzes by British scientists, the mutation has an unusually large number of genetic changes, especially in the spike protein, reports the German press agency. Germany has therefore largely stopped flights from Great Britain, landings from the country are prohibited from midnight. This is based on an order issued by the Federal Ministry of Transport on Sunday, with the exception of pure cargo flights.

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Parcel delivery in favor of inner cities Online retail is the big winner of the Corona crisis. Business in the cities is suffering. To compensate for this, politicians from the CDU and CSU are now proposing a package levy with which an “inner city fund” is to be financed. They advocate introducing a package fee for online trading, “the amount of which is proportional to the order value”. The coalition partner SPD supports the proposal. The FDP and especially the retail sector itself are not very enthusiastic.

Threema apps are now completely open-source The paid messenger Threema becomes open source and thus reveals the source code. “To celebrate we are lowering the app price by 28. December by 50 Percent “, writes the provider in an announcement. Threema already had documentation of the cryptographic process, but now the complete inspection and approval of the code follows. For the time being, it can only be compiled reproducibly under Android.

(sy)