is ghostscript open source

• ABOUT GNU
• = SOFTWARE =
• HELP GNU
• AUDIO & VIDEO
• GNU ART
• GNU'S WHO?
• SOFTWARE DIRECTORY

GNU Ghostscript

Table of contents.

• Introduction to GNU Ghostscript

Obtaining GNU Ghostscript

Documentation, mailing lists/newsgroups.

• Request an Enhancement
• Report a Bug
• Development

Additional Information

Ghostscript is the name of a set of software that provides:

• An interpreter for the PostScript language and the PDF file format,
• A set of C procedures (the Ghostscript library) that implement the graphics capabilities that appear as primitive operations in the PostScript language, and
• A wide variety of output drivers for various file formats and printers.

Ghostscript was originally written by Peter Deutsch.

The original Ghostscript program is maintained by a group of developers from Artifex Software Inc. Henry Stiles and Ray Johnston are the main developers.

GNU Ghostscript is maintained by a team of GNU programmers. The GNU version of the software is a distribution of the Ghostscript project from Artifex Software.

GNU Ghostscript is known to run on the following platform families:

• A wide variety of Unix systems using X Window version 11, release 4, 5, and 6, including Sun-3, Sun-4, Sun-386i, and Sun SPARCStation; generic machines running GNU/Linux, 386/ix, ISC Unix, SCO Unix, and Solaris; H-P 9000/300 and 9000/800; DECStation 2100 and 3100; VAX running Ultrix and OSF/1; Sequent Symmetry; Convex C1 and C2; Tektronix 4300; SGI Iris Indigo;
• Sun workstations (Sun-3, SPARC, Sun-386i) running SunView;
• VAX or AXP systems running VMS with X11R4/5 and DEC C or gcc.

GNU Ghostscript is a copyrighted work; it is distributed under the GNU General Public License . You can get the current version of GNU Ghostscript by Internet FTP from ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ghostscript from any of the GNU distribution sites ; likely, alpha versions may be available on alpha.gnu.org/gnu/ghostscript .

The Ghostscript source code distribution requires the jpeg library, the zlib compression library, optionally the libpng image format library, Jasper (for JPEG2000 format support), expat, freetype, jbig2dec, lcms and tiff. The versions eventually included in the distribution sources contain some modifications essentials to Ghostscript and not included upstream for the moment.

GNU Ghostscript documentation is distributed with the source packages.

• <[email protected]> ( subscribe ) ( archive )

Discussion about GNU Ghostscript and Ghostview can be found in the USENET gnu.ghostscript.bug newsgroup.

Getting involved

Please remember that development of GNU Ghostscript is a volunteer effort, and you can also contribute to its development. For information about contributing to the GNU Project, please read How to help GNU .

• GV allows to view and navigate through PostScript and PDF documents on an X display by providing a user interface for the ghostscript interpreter.

“The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom. We defend the rights of all software users.”

Please send general FSF & GNU inquiries to <[email protected]> . There are also other ways to contact the FSF. Broken links and other corrections or suggestions can be sent to <[email protected]> .

Please see the Translations README for information on coordinating and submitting translations of this article.

Copyright © 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

This page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

Copyright Infringement Notification

Updated: $Date: 2016/05/28 15:29:59 $

Critical RCE found in popular Ghostscript open-source PDF library

Bill toulas.

• July 12, 2023

Ghostscript, an open-source interpreter for PostScript language and PDF files widely used in Linux, has been found vulnerable to a critical-severity remote code execution flaw.

The flaw is tracked as  CVE-2023-36664 , having a CVSS v3 rating of 9.8, and impacts all versions of Ghostscript before 10.01.2, which is the latest available version released three weeks ago.

According to  Kroll's analysts , G. Glass and D. Truman, who developed a proof of concept (PoC) exploit for the vulnerability, code execution can be triggered upon opening a malicious, specially-crafted file.

Considering that Ghostscript is installed by default in numerous Linux distributions and used by software such as LibreOffice, GIMP, Inkscape, Scribus, ImageMagick, and the CUPS printing system, opportunities to trigger CVE-2023-36664 are abundant in most cases.

Kroll also comments that the problem affects open-source apps on Windows, too, if those use a port of Ghostscript.

The Ghostscript flaw

The CVE-2023-36664 flaw is related to OS pipes, which allow different applications to exchange data by passing outputs from one as inputs to another.

The issue arises from the "gp_file_name_reduce()" function in Ghostscript, which appears to take multiple paths and combines and simplifies them by removing relative path references for efficiency.

However, if a specially crafted path is given to the vulnerable function, it could return unexpected results, leading to overriding the validation mechanisms and potential exploitation.

Additionally, when Ghostscript attempts to open a file, it uses another function called "gp_validate_path" to check if its location is safe.

However, since the vulnerable function changes the location details before that second function's check, it's trivial for an attacker to exploit the loophole and force Ghostscript to deal with files in locations that should be off-limits.

Kroll's analysts created a PoC that is triggered by opening an EPS (Embedded Postscript) file on any application using Ghostscript.

In the following demonstration video, the researchers showcase the exploit in Inkscape on Windows, performing actions such as opening the calculator or displaying dialogs to the user.

It is recommended that Linux users upgrade to the latest version of Ghostscript, 10.01.2, using their distribution's package manager.

If the latest Ghostscript has not been made  available yet  on your distribution's software channels, it is recommended to  compile it from the source code .

Unfortunately, open-source software on Windows that use ports of Ghostscript will naturally require more time to move to the latest version of the tool. Hence extra caution is advised with installs in Windows.

To help detect CVE-2023-36664, Kroll has shared Sigma rules on  this GitHub repository .

Related Articles:

Millions of Exim mail servers exposed to zero-day RCE attacks

Thousands of Juniper devices vulnerable to unauthenticated RCE flaw

ASUS routers vulnerable to critical remote code execution flaws

Exploit released for Juniper firewall bugs allowing RCE attacks

WinRAR flaw lets hackers run programs when you open RAR archives

• Ghostscript
• Open Source
• Remote Code Execution
• Vulnerability
• Previous Article
• Next Article

h_b_s - 3 months ago

I think it's worth mentioning that there's likely other RCEs in Ghostscript, as it is an interpreter in its own right. Both postscript (PS) and portable document format (PDF) are computer languages with some very dubious features from a security stand point. Any document viewer or printer capable of displaying them is necessarily going to be an interpreter. By definition interpreters execute computer code.

JohnC_21 - 3 months ago

Per the CVE: Artifex Ghostscript through 10.01.2 mishandles permission validation for pipe devices (with the %pipe% prefix or the | pipe character prefix). So does this mean 10.01.2 is also affected? Per Debian dated Jul 3 2023 https://www.debian.org/security/2023/dsa-5446 For the oldstable distribution (bullseye), this problem has been fixed in version 9.53.3~dfsg-7+deb11u5. For the stable distribution (bookworm), this problem has been fixed in version 10.0.0~dfsg-11+deb12u1.

Post a Comment Community Rules

You need to login in order to post a comment.

Not a member yet? Register Now

You may also like:

Ubuntu discovers 'hate speech' in release 23.10 — how to upgrade?

Signal says there is no evidence rumored zero-day bug is real

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware

Windows Repair (All In One)

McAfee Consumer Products Removal tool

Everything Desktop Search

Help us understand the problem. What is going on with this comment?

• Abusive or Harmful
• Inappropriate content
• Strong language

Read our posting guidelinese to learn what content is prohibited.

• Open Source

The story of Ghostscript.NET, an open-source tool that got acquired after 10 years of solo development

Antonija Bilic Arar

Ghostcript.NET Github repository has recently been acquired by Artifex Software Inc ., the creators of Ghostscript, extending Ghostscript support to the .NET and C# developer communities. Ghostscript.NET is a popular and loved C# wrapper for Ghostscript with over 1.6 million downloads.

We spoke to its creator, a UK-based developer Josip Habjan , who will join Artifex as a freelance collaborator to ensure continuity in the project’s maintenance and development.

Inspired by Ghostscript

Josip created Ghostscript.NET in 2013. He had some free time, was inspired by the Ghostscript library and its immense capabilities, and wanted to build an IDE to make working and utilizing it easier for developers. The rest is, he says, a tale of developer’s determination, creativity, and love for technology.

I wanted to build an IDE that would provide a user-friendly interface for working with Ghostscript.

As I delved deeper into the project, I realized that two distinct components needed attention: the visual part, which would become the IDE, and the integration with the native Ghostscript library. So I decided to separate the project into two parts.

Habjan poured all his knowledge and creativity into designing and building the IDE and was closer to creating what he had envisioned with every line of code he wrote. The second part, though, proved to be a little more complex.

To bridge the gap between the C# programming language and the native Ghostscript library, I began crafting a wrapper. This wrapper, which I named Ghostscript.NET, would serve as the intermediary, allowing seamless communication between the two worlds . It was an ambitious undertaking, but I was determined to see it through.

It took more time and work than he expected – he started in early January and released the first public version in September of that year. Josip admits he had many challenges along the way, but every hurdle just made his enthusiasm grow stronger.

Ghostscript.NET became a robust and reliable bridge, empowering developers to harness the full potential of the Ghostscript library within their C# projects .

It was a testament to my passion for programming and my desire to contribute something valuable to the open-source community.

Developers experience + community = win

It soon gained a significant user base thanks to its excellent developer experience – user-friendly design, clear documentation, simplicity, and Habjan’s active engagement in developer communities.

But being the creator of a popular open-source project is equally a curse and a blessing. The curse being – maintaining the project in free time and for free.

Time was the main challenge, and I had to do a lot of planning and prioritization to make time to dedicate to this project. It required a lot of juggling.

The other significant challenge was keeping up with the releases and updates of the native Ghostscript library. And, of course, user-reported bugs required thorough analysis and debugging to provide effective resolutions and maintain the stability of Ghostscript. NET.

Still, assisting users in resolving concerns, ensuring a smooth user experience, and improving the library’s performance was rewarding for me.

More resources for future development

The Artifex acquisition will help address all those challenges, as Habjan will no longer be alone and maintaining the repository in his free time. He will provide technical support during the handover and remain an active member and contributor to the Ghostscript.NET community.

That active and numerous community of users and maintainers was one of the main reasons behind Artifex’s acquisition. Artifex had created their C# wrapper, but it didn’t get as much traction as Habjan’s.

By working with Artifex, we can further enhance the library’s functionality, address existing issues, and explore new possibilities. I firmly believe in the importance of supporting and nurturing the growth of this valuable resource. I am thrilled to contribute my insights and assist in driving the project’s future direction.

When he started ten years ago, he couldn’t dream about this happening, says Habjan:

I just wanted to contribute to the open-source community and leave some trace/legacy.

Sarcastic newsletter headline, but funny enough for developers to sign up for it

Written by people, not robots - at least not yet. May or may not contain traces of sarcasm, but never spam. We value your privacy and if you subscribe, we will use your e-mail address just to send you our marketing newsletter. Check all the details in ShiftMag’s Privacy Notice

More articles

On open-source as a public good, licensing missteps, and community building with an open source champion agency co-founder.

How to contribute to open-source projects with Eddie Jaoude of EddieHub

Is Terraform still open-source? Yes, but…

• Documentation
• Performance

Which license is right for me?

Ghostscript is available under both an Open Source AGPL license and Commercial license. Please visit artifex.com/licensing/ to understand the differences in these licensing agreements, or to acquire a commercial license.

NOTE: The Linux binaries are for testing/evaluation purposes only, they do not come as installers or installable packages.

Old releases available here: https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/ghostpdl-downloads/releases/

How to build Ghostscript from source code

Table of contents.

General overview How to acquire the source code Ghostscript source code Third-party library source code How to unpack the source code How to unpack compressed tar files generally How to unpack zip files generally How to unpack Ghostscript itself How to unpack the third-party libraries How to check for post-release bug fixes How to prepare the makefiles Changes for your environment Selecting features and devices Precompiled run-time data GNU readline Setting up "makefile" Invoking "make" Cross-compiling How to build Ghostscript from source (PC version) Borland/Inprise environment Microsoft environment Making self-extracting executables Watcom environment Cygwin32 gcc Intel C/C++ compiler How to build Ghostscript from source (MacOS version) Traditional MacOS MacOS X How to build Ghostscript from source (Unix version) The multi-architecture makefile Setting up "makefile" Shared object Tool-specific issues gcc 2.7.* GNU make OS-specific issues 386 Unix BSDI Digital Unix (Alpha) FreeBSD Linux NeXTSTEP / OpenSTEP SCO Unix/Xenix SVR4 Unix System V Unix platforms Unixware Hardware-specific issues Alpha with gcc H-P Apollo AT&T 7040 R3 Convex DECStations with Ultrix H-P RISC workstations Intergraph Clipper MIPS NCR 3550 Pyramid MIServer-S IBM RS/6000 with AIX Silicon Graphics Sun SunOS Solaris VAX with Ultrix How to build Ghostscript from source (OS/2 version) How to build Ghostscript from source (OpenVMS version) Building with GNU make on OpenVMS Building with MMK or MMS on OpenVMS Other environments Environments lacking multi-threading Plan 9 QNX

General overview

How to acquire the source code, ghostscript source code.

ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/AFPL/ gs###

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/

ghostscript- #.## .tar.gz ghostscript-fonts-std- #.## .tar.gz ghostscript-fonts-other- #.## .tar.gz

gs ### fn * .zip gs ### sr * .zip

Third-party library source code

Third-party libraries: authoritative sources JPEG     ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/jpeg/ jpegsrc.v6b.tar.gz ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/msdos/graphics/ jpegsr6b.zip PNG   http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/src/ libpng-#.#.#.tar.gz http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/src/ lpng###.zip ftp://swrinde.nde.swri.edu/pub/png/src/ libpng-#.#.#.tar.gz ftp://swrinde.nde.swri.edu/pub/png/src/ lpng###.zip zlib (latest)   ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/zlib.tar.gz ftp://ftp.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/zlib.zip http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/zlib.tar.gz http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/zlib/zlib.zip

How to unpack the source code

How to unpack compressed tar files generally.

gzip -d MyArchive.tar.gz tar -xf MyArchive.tar

gzip -d -c MyArchive.tar.gz | tar -xf -

tar -zxf MyArchive.tar.gz

How to unpack zip files generally

http://www.info-zip.org/pub/infozip/UnZip.html

Extracting zipped files Command      Preserves directory structure pkunzip MyArchive.zip   Does NOT pkunzip -d MyArchive.zip   DOES (note the -d switch) unzip MyArchive.zip   DOES

How to unpack Ghostscript itself

2-step:     gzip -d ghostscript- #.## .tar.gz tar -xf ghostscript- #.## .tar Pipe:   gzip -d -c ghostscript- #.## .tar.gz | tar -xf - GNU tar :   tar -zxf ghostscript- #.## .tar.gz pkunzip :   pkunzip -d gs ### sr1.zip pkunzip -d gs ### sr2.zip ... unzip :   unzip gs ### sr*.zip

Source subdirectories Subdirectory      Contents src/   C source code and makefiles lib/   PostScript files and scripts used when running Ghostscript doc/   Documentation man/   Unix man pages examples/   Sample PostScript files

How to unpack the third-party libraries

3d-party software subdirectories Package      Possible original name      Rename to JPEG   ./jpeg-6b   ./jpeg PNG   ./libpng- #.##   ./libpng zlib   ./zlib- #.#.#   ./zlib

How to check for post-release bug fixes

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ghostscript

How to prepare the makefiles

Platform-specific makefiles Makefile      Used for bcwin32.mak   MS Windows with Borland/Inprise compilers msvc32.mak   MS Windows with Microsoft Visual C++ version 4.n or 5.n openvms.mak   OpenVMS os2.mak   OS/2 with the gcc/emx compiler unix-gcc.mak   Unix with gcc unixansi.mak   Unix with ANSI C compilers other than gcc unixtrad.mak   Unix with "traditional C" compilers watc.mak   DOS with Watcom compilers watcw32.mak   MS Windows with Watcom compilers   Platform-independent makefiles contrib.mak   Contributed device drivers devs.mak   Maintained device drivers gs.mak   Documentation and miscellany int.mak   Main makefile for the PostScript & PDF interpreter jpeg.mak   JPEG library lib.mak   Graphics engine libpng.mak   PNG library version.mak   Version and release date zlib.mak   zlib library

Changes for your environment

Selecting features and devices.

FEATURE_DEVS= {list of features} DEVICE_DEVS * = {list of devices}

FEATURE_DEVS=$(PSD)level2.dev

FEATURE_DEVS=$(PSD)level2.dev $(PSD)pdf.dev

DEVICE_DEVS=$(DD)x11.dev

DEVICE_DEVS1=$(DD) {dev11} .dev ... $(DD) {dev1n} .dev DEVICE_DEVS2=$(DD) {dev21} .dev ... $(DD) {dev2n} .dev

Precompiled run-time data

COMPILE_INITS=0

GNU readline

Setting up "makefile", invoking "make", cross-compiling.

make clean make obj/arch.h obj/genconf obj/echogs

make CC=: CCLD=:

nmake clean nmake obj\arch.h obj\genconf.exe obj\echogs.exe

nmake CC=rem LINK=rem

How to build Ghostscript from source (PC version)

PC makefiles Makefile    Construction tools    For environment bcwin32.mak   Borland/Inprise C++ 4.x   32-bit MS Windows 3.1 + Win32s, 95, 98, NT msvc32.mak   Microsoft Visual C++ 4.x or 5.x   MS Windows 32-bit watc.mak   Watcom C/386 or C++   MS-DOS 32-bit (extended) watcw32.mak   Watcom C/386 or C++   MS Windows 32-bit unix-gcc.mak   Cygnus gcc   Cygnus gnu-win32

make begin make

zip -l CVTEMP.zip *.bat *.c *.h      (Letter "l", not the digit "1") unzip -o CVTEMP.zip   (Rewrite all the same files correctly) del CVTEMP.zip   (Delete the temporary zip file)

Borland/Inprise environment

echo !include "src\bcwin32.mak" >makefile

* .bat   (a variety of batch files used in the build process)

ftp://ftp.borland.com/pub/borlandcpp/devsupport/patches/bc4_5/

ftp://ftp.borland.com/pub/borlandcpp/devsupport/patches/bc4_5/bc45xp1.zip

Microsoft Environment

Using microsoft developer studio.

nmake -f src/msvc32.mak DEVSTUDIO= DEBUG=1 GS_LIB_DEFAULT="./lib/;./font;$(GSROOTDIR)/lib;$(AROOTDIR)/fonts"

Using the command line

nmake -f src\msvc32.mak

nmake -f src\msvc32.mak MSVC_VERSION=6 DEVSTUDIO="C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio"

Making self-extracting executables

Watcom environment.

For     Give the command DOS   echo !include src\watc.mak >makefile MS Windows   echo !include src\watcw32.mak >makefile

Cygwin32 gcc

http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/

Intel C/C++ environment

http://www.intel.com/vtune/

How to build Ghostscript from source (MacOS version)

Traditional macos.

ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/AFPL/gs700/

Copy src/macos-mcp.mak to the top-level directory and rename it makefile . Then run 'make' in that directory, either from within Terminal.app or through Project Builder. This will set up the generated code required for the build and run a shell script to generate ghostscript.mcp.xml . Launch Metrowerks Codewarrior, and select 'Import Project...' from the File menu, and open the xml project file. When asked, save the results as ghostscript.mcp in the same directory and you should be ready to build the shared library component.

How to build Ghostscript from source (Unix version)

The multi-architecture makefile.

This makefile allows you to execute make `hostname` on any machine on a network, without having to examine the Makefile for a specific target name. Also, some of the targets in the Makefile incorporate special changes in compiler options for certain files, to work around compiler bugs that Ghostscript has been so good at exposing. Having that special handling written down in a Makefile proves very convenient. I don't do "make install" until I've done cd ...build-directory.../gs-x.yz cd lib ../bin/gs ../examples/tiger.ps and verified that the famous tiger can be correctly displayed. Also, the "make install" step is careful to first remove any existing $(BINDIR)/gs , then install a new gs there with a hard link to gs-x.yz. That way, each installation makes gs a synonym for the latest release, but earlier ones remain in place in case backtracking is needed, which I've fairly often wanted to do when investigating changed behavior, or a suspected bug. When I've been experimenting with a new feature, such as GNU readline support, I change the setting of GS from gs to ngs (new gs), so as not to break any existing programs by the installation of an experimental version.

GNU gcc:      ln -s src/unix-gcc.mak makefile Non-gcc ANSI C compiler:   ln -s src/unixansi.mak makefile "Traditional" C compiler:   ln -s src/unixtrad.mak makefile

Devices included as distributed Type    Devices Display   X Windows Printers   H-P DeskJets, LaserJets, and color DeskJets and PaintJets; Canon BubbleJets File formats   Group 3 & Group 4 fax; JPEG; PCX; PBM, PGM, PKM, & PPM; TIFF; PostScript images; PNG; distilled PDF, PostScript, and EPS; PCL XL ("PCL 6")

#define D_MAX_BLOCKS_IN_MCU 64

Shared object

Tool-specific issues, os-specific issues.

STDLIBS=-lm XINCLUDE=-I/usr/X11R6/include XLIBDIRS=-L/usr/X11R6/lib XLIBS=Xt SM ICE Xext X11

Digital Unix (Alpha)

Henri Gomez [email protected] Russell Lang [email protected] Cristian Gafton [email protected] Preston Brown [email protected]

rpm -ba ghostscript-N.NN.spec rpm -ba ghostscript-fonts-N.NN.spec

RPMS/i386/ghostscript-N.NN-1.i386.rpm RPMS/noarch/ghostscript-fonts-N.NN-1.noarch.rpm SRPMS/ghostscript-N.NN-1.src.rpm SRPMS/ghostscript-fonts-N.NN-1.src.rpm

ftp://ykbsb2.yk.psu.edu/pub/ghost/GS-5.10/ ftp://ykbsb2.yk.psu.edu/pub/ghost/GS-5.10-Extra/

NeXTSTEP / OpenSTEP

Sco unix/xenix, system v unix platforms, hardware-specific issues, alpha with gcc, at&t 7040 r3, decstations with ultrix, h-p risc workstations, intergraph clipper, pyramid miserver-s, ibm rs/6000 with aix, silicon graphics, vax with ultrix, how to build ghostscript from source (os/2 version), how to build ghostscript from source (openvms version).

/*#define OLD_VMS_C*/

#define OLD_VMS_C

$ FEATURE_DEVS = "$(PSD)psl3.dev $(PSD)pdf.dev $(PSD)dpsnext.dev $(PSD)ttfont.dev $(PSD)ccfonts.dev"

$ ccfonts1 = "Courier Courier_Oblique Courier_Bold Courier_BoldOblique"

$ ccfonts1 = "Courier Courier_Oblique Courier_Bold Courier_BoldOblique" $ ccfonts2 = "Times_Roman Times_Italic Times_Bold Times_BoldItalic"

Building with GNU make on OpenVMS

make -fopenvms.mak "DECWINDOWS= [ 1.2 ] "

Building with MMK or MMS on OpenVMS

###/descrip=[.src]openvms.mmk/macro=("DECWINDOWS1_2= { 0 , 1 } ")

http://www.madgoat.com/mmk.html

Other environments

Environments lacking multi-threading.

CC=cc GCFLAGS=-D_BSD_EXTENSION -DPlan9

#include <sys/param.h>

#if defined(__QNX__) #include <unix.h> #endif

#include "time.h"

#if defined(__QNX__) #include <sys/time.h> #endif

#  if defined(Plan9) ||

#  if defined(__QNX__) || defined(Plan9) ||

# lpsrvr # # Defines the print queues and their devices # # Queues # ink-jet: Ghostscript interpreter for mono DeskJet - LaserJet works # better than DeskJet! [ij-monops] ta=lpt1 co=/usr/local/bin/gs -q -sDEVICE=laserjet -sOutputFile=- -dNOPAUSE $(spfile) quit.ps | cat > $(device) # Devices [-lpt1] dv=/dev/par1 [-lpt2] dv=/dev/par2

Ghostscript

About Ghostscript

Ghostscript pricing.

Each Artifex commercial license is crafted based on your individual use case.

Free trial: 

Free version: 

Ghostscript Reviews

Overall rating, ratings breakdown, secondary ratings.

Ease-of-use

Customer Support

Value for money

Functionality

5/5 out of 1 Reviews

Most Helpful Reviews for Ghostscript

Verified reviewer

Information Technology and Services , 11-50 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

OVERALL RATING :

EASE OF USE

VALUE FOR MONEY

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

FUNCTIONALITY

Reviewed May 2022

Impressive Feature-Set and Flexibility! Highly recommended

Within our research driven open projects, Ghostscript is known as a high-performance solution allowing a common understanding and a common way to handle documents across multiple development environments and across multiple operating systems. We can highly recommend the use of Ghostscript in document driven scenarios for achiving high-quality output.

We have noticed Ghostscript as a very handy and flexible tool for handling PDF challenges today and we have been impressed by Ghostscripts feature set and flexibility. As a de-facto standard, Ghostscript provides help in handling PDF based documents which shortens the development cycle, and which also ensures a high compatibility of the output documents. The dual license model allows the use of Ghostscript in many scenarios.

No cons - we very satisfied with the over-all service and product.

The Ultimate Guide to Installing Ghostscript

In this article we explore how to install Ghostscript on numerous different platforms and operating systems.

What is Ghostcript? Why install it?

What is Ghostscript, and why would we want to install it? To understand this we should first learn about Postscript.

Postscript is a page description language geared towards desktop publishing documents.

If you want really professional-looking typesetting, layout, and graphics in your documents, desktop publishing software is what you use.

It was first created at Adobe Systems starting in 1982. As a language, it is similar to Python in that documents contain human-readable and writable commands in the language that can be parsed by an interpreter to get something done.

In the case of Python, text files containing Python commands can be parsed by the Python interpreter to create any kind of program imaginable.

In the case of Postscript, files containing Postscript commands can be parsed by a Postscript interpreter to render professional-looking documents, either to the screen or to a printer.

In addition, the PDF format is an extension of the Postscript language which adds more functionality and is now one of the most commonly used document formats.

Ghostscript

Ghostscript is a free open-source interpreter to render Postscript and PDF documents.

One of the reasons you might want to install it is to use a program that requires it.

Even without a program that needs it, installing Ghostscript can be useful:

⭐ Ghostscript can be used to modify PDF documents, such as converting PDF to images, or extracting text, among other things.

Even better, since Ghostscript provides a language-binding API, Ghostscript functions can be implemented in other languages, allowing us to write our own programs for modifying PDF documents. Supported languages are C#, Java, and Python.

Checking if Ghostscript is Already Installed

You may already have Ghostscript installed – your system may have come with it, or it may have been installed in support of a program you have installed. So save yourself some effort and check first.

Checking for Ghostscript on Windows

• Press Windows+R to open the “ Run ” box.   
• In the “ Run ” box type “ cmd ”.   
• A command line window opens.   
• In the command line window type “ GSWIN64 -h ” if your system is 64 bit (most machines these days), or “ GSWIN32 -h ” if your system is 32 bit (older machines). If Ghostscript is installed you will see Ghostscript help information. If you see an error then Ghostscript is not installed.   
• Type “ exit ” to close the command line window.

Checking for Ghostscript on Mac

• In the Finder, open the /Applications/Utilities folder, then double-click Terminal .   
• In the terminal window type “ gs -h ”. If Ghostscript is installed you will see Ghostscript help information. If you see an error then Ghostscript is not installed.       
• In the Terminal app on your Mac, choose Terminal > Quit Terminal .

Checking for Ghostscript on Linux

• Open a terminal window. How to do this varies depending on which distribution of Linux you are using.   
• In the terminal window type “ gs -h ”. If Ghostscript is installed you will see Ghostscript help information. If you see an error then Ghostscript is not installed.

Installing Ghostscript on Windows

• Go to the Ghostscript download page at https://www.ghostscript.com/releases/gsdnld.html    
• There are two license versions available: Affero GPL (AGPL), and commercial. Review the license information at https://artifex.com/licensing/ . For casual use most users will chose AGPL.   
• Choose 64 bit or 32 bit depending on your system.   
• Download your choice by clicking on the chosen link.   
• The installer program will download.   
• The downloaded program will be gsxxxxw64.exe or gsxxxxw32.exe . The ‘ xxxx ’ will be numbers indicating the release version. The most current version as of this writing is 9.55.0 , so the installer program would be gs9550w64.exe for the 64 bit version.   
• Double-click the downloaded installer program.   
• Follow the prompts to do the installation.

Installing Ghostscript on Unix

Use this for any UNIX-based machine, so this should work for Mac or Linux.

Most UNIX systems have much easier ways of installing Ghostscript, so you will almost certainly not need to do this.

However, if you have trouble with those easier approaches you might try this as a backup.

This method usually works, but sometimes it does not, and then you need to do some troubleshooting to figure out why (the configure file might not be configured properly for your system, for example).

Also note that you will need to make sure that compiling software for Linux or Mac is installed on your system, which is beyond the scope of this article. So choose this approach as a last resort.

• Go to the Ghostscript download page and download the source code version. As of this writing this file is ghostscript-9.55.0.tar.gz   
• Move this file to some folder where you want to work.   
• Unarchive the downloaded file. Usually your system will be configured to do so by double-clicking the file. If not, you can unarchive using this command in the terminal: tar -xzf ghostscript-9.55.0.tar.gz . The file will unpack into sub-directories and files.   
• In the terminal go to the top unpacked sub-directory.   
• Run the configure file by typing ./configure in your terminal. This will review your system and get ready to compile the code.   
• Compile the code by typing make in your terminal.   
• Install the compiled code by typing this: sudo make install

Here are the commands for ease of copy&paste:

Installing Ghostscript on Mac

The easiest way to install Ghostscript on Mac is to use the Homebrew or Macports systems. These are package management systems for Mac that make available to the Mac the wide world of Unix open-source software.

In these systems, much of the configuring is done for you by others so that downloading and installing software is as easy as a single command, just like downloading an app for the Mac is as simple as clicking an icon in the Mac App Store.

What programs are available depends on what has been prepared by others for the system.

Fortunately, Ghostscript is available for these systems.

Setting up these systems is beyond the scope of this article. This page has a nice summary of those systems (and of the Fink system, another package management system). Follow their respective links to learn more about each system.

Install Ghostscript using Homebrew using the following command:

Install Ghostscript using Macports using the following command:

Installing Ghostscript on Ubuntu

It is often most intuitive to install software on Ubuntu using the GUI-based software application.

This accesses the repositories of extensive software available for Ubuntu.

However, it is often the fastest to do a command line install. Do so for Ghostscript as follows:

Installing Ghostscript on Other Debian-based Distributions

There are many distributions that, like Ubuntu, are based on Debian.

Many also have GUI applications for installing software, and often these can be used to install Ghostscript. But like Ubuntu, it is often the fastest to use the command line install.

The command is still the same:

Installing Ghostscript on Centos 7, and Other Red Hat/ Fedora-based Distributions

Centos 7 is a free version of the Red Hat Linux distribution, without Red Hat branding or technical support from Red Hat.

Fedora is the “bleeding-edge” freely available distribution in the Red Hat family of distributions that serves as the development foundation for the more robust and stable Red Hat distribution.

Since these are all in the same distribution family, they are all most quickly updated by the same command. The many other distributions in this family are also most quickly updated by the same command.

The command is:

Installing Ghostscript for Anaconda

If you are a data scientist more comfortable with data analysis in Anaconda than you are comfortable with OS management, you can still make sure you have ghostscript through Anaconda.

Open the Anaconda command line interface and enter the following command to install Ghostscript:

Installing Ghostscript in Google Colab

Ghostscript can even be installed in Google Colab.

Cells in Colab are in-effect like the Python shell. Therefore users can use the exclamation mark to submit OS shell commands, then enter the command to install Ghostscript.

The OS behind Colab operates like Ubuntu, so the installation command mirrors that of Ubuntu. Therefore, to install Ghostscript enter the following command in a Colab cell:

Ghostscript is a free open-source interpreter that renders Postscript and PDF documents either to the screen or to a printer.

Ghostscript can also be used to process or modify such documents.

Even better, because Ghostscript includes a language-binding API, programmers can use it to write programs in other languages to modify PDF documents.

Supported languages are C# , Java , and Python .

As you can see, Ghostscript is available on many different platforms and operating systems. We have exhibited commands to install Ghostscript on many of these various platforms.

We hope you have found this helpful, and we wish you happy coding!

Which license is right for me?

Ghostscript is available under both an Open Source AGPL license and Commercial license. Please visit artifex.com/licensing/ to understand the differences in these licensing agreements, or to acquire a commercial license.

Old releases available here: https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/ghostpdl-downloads/releases/

Ghostscript, Ghostview and GSview

This was the home page for Ghostscript, an interpreter for the PostScript language and for PDF, and related software and documentation.

The ghostscript home page is now https://www.ghostscript.com/

• Ghostscript Downloads
• Ghostscript Documentation
• Artifex GSView 6 - a previewer for MS-Windows, Linux and Apple OS X
• Ghostgum GSview 5 - an old previewer for MS-Windows. There is no further development planned for this version. For any enquires about this software contact Ghostgum Software
• epstool for adding and removing DOS EPS previews
• RedMon - Redirect a Windows printer port to Ghostscript.

Open source isn't ready for generative AI. How stakeholders are changing this light bulb together

Without open source, there is no AI . It's that simple. But, those same licenses have been showing their age: The  Gnu General Public License (GPL) , Apache License , and Mozilla Public License don't fit well with software-as-a-service or cloud services. AI poses even larger problems. The open-source licenses, with their copyright law foundations, aren't a good fit for AI's large language models (LLM )s.

This isn't just some theoretical techno-legal issue, either. It's already showing up in the courts. 

Also: Open source is actually the cradle of artificial intelligence. Here's why

In J. Doe 1 et al. vs GitHub , the plaintiffs allege that Microsoft, OpenAI , and GitHub  -- via their commercial AI-based system, OpenAI's Codex and GitHub's Copilot  --  stole their open source code . The class action suit claims that code "suggested" by AI often consists of near-identical strings of code scraped from public GitHub repositories -- but without the required open-source license attributions. 

Special Feature

The Intersection of Generative AI and Engineering

The surge of generative AI can harness tremendous potential for the engineering realm. It can also come with its challenges, as enterprises and engineers alike figure out the impact of AI on their roles, business strategies, data, solutions, and product development. What does the future roadmap look like for bringing generative AI into the software fold? ZDNET decodes from all angles.

On a related issue, two groups of writers, including George R.R. Martin, Michael Chabon, and John Grisham, are suing Microsoft and OpenAI for taking their work and using it in their LLMs. Copyright, the legal foundation of open source, is at the heart of this issue.  

But this isn't simply a Microsoft problem.

As Sean O'Brien, Yale Law School lecturer in cybersecurity and founder of the Yale Privacy Lab , told my ZDNET colleague David Gewirtz: "I believe there will soon be an entire sub-industry of trolling that mirrors patent trolls , but this time surrounding AI-generated works. A feedback loop is created as more authors use AI-powered tools to ship code under proprietary licenses. Software ecosystems will be polluted with proprietary code that will be the subject of cease-and-desist claims by enterprising firms."

Others, like German researcher and politician Felix Reda, claim that all AI-produced code is public domain . 

US attorney Richard Santalesa, a founding member of the SmartEdgeLaw Group , told Gewirtz that there exist both contract and copyright law issues -- and they're not the same thing. Santalesa believes companies producing AI-generated code will "as with all of their other IP, deem their provided materials – including AI-generated code – as their property." Besides, public domain code is not the same thing as open-source code .

Also: Red Hat's new rule: Open source betrayal?

So, what's to be done? Simply claiming your AI is open source is a nonstarter. Meta, for example, claims Llama 2 is open source.  It's not. 

As Erica Brescia, a managing director at RedPoint , the open source-friendly venture capital firm, asked on Twitter : "Can someone please explain to me how Meta and Microsoft can justify calling Llama 2 open source if it doesn't actually use an OSI [Open Source Initiative]-approved license or comply with the OSD [Open Source Definition]? Are they intentionally challenging the definition of OSS [Open Source Software]?" 

Here's the short explanation: Meta is using open source as a marketing term, not a legal one. That usage won't fly once the lawsuits mount up

The problem with Llama 2 specifically is that it blocks extremely profitable companies from using it. According to Stephen O'Grady, open-source licensing expert and RedMonk co-founder, the problem is that they won't work in open source.  " Imagine if Linux was open source unless you worked at Facebook ,"  

At the same time, as  OpenUK  CEO Amanda Brock observed, "I don't think we're going to see going forward any LLM or any significant AI being able to be licensed as open source, because the key to open source is the Open Source Definition ."  

And the road to that Definition was a long and bumpy one.

The  first free software licenses  began In the early 1980s when MIT Lab programmer Richard M. Stallman couldn't get an early laser printer, the Xerox 9700, to produce error messages. The problem? Stallman couldn't read or change its source code. At the time, this was a new development. Although we now think of proprietary software as the default, it wasn't then. 

So, Stallman created the  GNU General Public License (GPL) . While not the  first  Free Software license (that honor belongs to the  Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) license ), GNU would prove to be very influential. In no small part, that's because Linus Torvalds chose to use the GPLv2 as Linux's license.

The GPL is based on two principles. First, software code can be copyrighted. Second, anyone is free to read and edit the code so long as these freedoms aren't taken away from anyone else.

Also: A look back at 40 Years of GNU and the Free Software Foundation

By 1985, Free Software was becoming popular, but it also had become clear that the word "free" was too ambiguous. After  Netscape released Mozilla's source code  -- which became the basis of the Firefox web browser -- several leading Free Software luminaries, including Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, Michael Tiemann, Jon "Maddog" Hall, and Christine Peterson, coined the phrase  open source  to describe this kind of license. In 1998, Perens and Raymond went on to  found the OSI , which drafted the  Open Source Definition (OSD)  and used this as the general guide to defining all open-source licenses. 

All open-source licenses must comply with the OSD. For AI and LLMs, that's much easier said than done. 

True, there are open LLMs such as Falcon , FastChat-T5 , and OpenLLaMA . But most LLMs contain proprietary, copyrighted, or simply unknown information that their owners won't tell you about. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it well: "Garbage In, Gospel Out."  

We've seen this problem coming for a while. At Open Source Europe in Bilbao, Spain, last month, I spoke with Stefano Maffulli, executive director of the  Open Source Initiative (OSI) , the organization that defines and manages open-source licenses. "The process started two years ago when GitHub Copilot came out," Maffulli told me. "It was a watershed moment. All of a sudden, code you wrote as a human for humans, everything we have produced and put on the Internet was being harvested for machine learning."

Also: The best AI chatbots: ChatGPT and alternatives

So, what can we do? Maffulli and other open-source and AI leaders are working on combining AI with open-source licenses in sensible ways. 

Maffulli observed that combining AI with open-source licenses is as hard, if not harder, than when software copyright was first applied to source code in the 1980s (when Free Software and open-source were first defined). True, open-source AI programs -- such as  TensorFlow ,  PyTorch , and  Hugging Face  -- work well with old-style licenses. But old-style software isn't the problem. It's where software and data mix that the existing open-source licenses begin to break down. Specifically, it's where all that data and code merge together in AI/ML artifacts -- such as datasets, models, and weights -- that's where trouble emerges. "Therefore," said Mafulli, "we need to make a new definition for open-source AI." 

This must be a definition that all stakeholders can agree upon and work with. Free software and open source are no longer just matters for developers. The goals of open-source savvy programmers and lawyers aren't the same as those of AI companies. To address this, Maffulli, together with Google, Microsoft, GitHub, Open Forum Europe, Creative Commons, Wikimedia Foundation, Hugging Face, GitHub, the Linux Foundation, ACLU Mozilla, and the Internet Archive, are working on a draft for defining a common understanding of open-source AI. In other words, all the AI players are working on the definition.  

If all goes well, we can expect to see the fruits of their labor as early as this month. And while this will only be the first draft of the AI Open Source Definition, I expect that it will be finalized as quickly as possible. Everyone involved knows that AI is advancing rapidly and the sooner we get an open-source framework around it, the better.

Artificial Intelligence

Generative AI will far surpass what ChatGPT can do. Here's everything on how the tech advances

Open source is actually the cradle of artificial intelligence. Here's why

How to use ChatGPT to write code

Search code, repositories, users, issues, pull requests...

Provide feedback.

We read every piece of feedback, and take your input very seriously.

Saved searches

Use saved searches to filter your results more quickly.

To see all available qualifiers, see our documentation .

• Notifications

Releases: ArtifexSoftware/ghostpdl-downloads

Ghostscript/ghostpdl 10.02.0.

This release (10.02.0) marks the final demise of the PostScript based PDF interpreter.

• ghostpcl-10.02.0-win32.zip 9.67 MB 2023-09-13T08:23:42Z
• ghostpcl-10.02.0-win64.zip 10.2 MB 2023-09-13T08:23:47Z
• ghostpdl-10.02.0.tar.gz 93.6 MB 2023-09-13T08:22:16Z
• ghostpdl-10.02.0.tar.xz 70.1 MB 2023-09-13T08:22:33Z
• ghostscript-10.02.0.tar.gz 84.9 MB 2023-09-13T08:21:45Z
• ghostscript-10.02.0.tar.xz 64.8 MB 2023-09-13T08:22:02Z
• ghostxps-10.02.0-win32.zip 3.74 MB 2023-09-13T08:23:52Z
• ghostxps-10.02.0-win64.zip 4.27 MB 2023-09-13T08:23:54Z
• gs10020w32.exe 50.3 MB 2023-09-13T08:23:01Z
• gs10020w64.exe 61.7 MB 2023-09-13T08:23:16Z
• Source code (zip) 2023-09-13T08:19:50Z
• Source code (tar.gz) 2023-09-13T08:19:50Z
• Show all 15 assets
• 🎉 4 reactions

Ghostscript/GhostPDL 10.01.2

• 👍 8 reactions

Ghostscript/GhostPDL 10.02.0 Release Candidate 2

Second release candidate for the 10.02.0 release. This release marks the final demise of the PostScript based PDF interpreter.

• 👍 2 reactions

Ghostscript/GhostPDL 10.02.0 Release Candidate 1

Release candidate for the 10.02.0 release. This release marks the final demise of the PostScript based PDF interpreter.

Ghostscript/GhostPDL 10.01.1

This 10.01.1 release removes the "-dNEWPDF=false" command line option to fall back to the deprecated, old PDF interpreter.

• 👍 3 reactions
• 😄 2 reactions
• 🚀 5 reactions

Ghostscript/GhostPDL 10.01.0

This 10.01.0 release removes the "-dNEWPDF=false" command line option to fall back to the deprecated, old PDF interpreter.

• 👍 4 reactions
• 🎉 2 reactions

Ghostscript/GhostPDL 10.0.0

This release officially deprecates the old Postscript implementation of PDF, we will not be updating or maintaining that code moving forward. The option to use the old PDF implementation will be removed in the next full release (10.01.0)

• 👍 5 reactions

Ghostscript/GhostPDL 10.01.0 Release Candidate 2

Please test on your setup and we welcome feedback either at either https://bugs.ghostscript.com/ or our Discord: https://discord.gg/H9GXKwyPvY

Ghostscript/GhostPDL 9.56.1

Important: This release includes the new PDF interpreter (implemented in C rather than PostScript). It is both integrated into Ghostscript (now ENABLED by default), and available as a standalone, PDF only, binary. See https://ghostscript.com/pdfi.html for more details. This also bundles the latest zlib (1.2.12) which addresses a security issue ( CVE-2018-25032 )

(2022/04/12) The Windows installers have been updated to also install the (now required) VisualC++ Redistributable package. No changes to the Ghostscript sources, etc.

Ghostscript/GhostPDL 10.0.0 Release Candidate 2

In this release, we consider the old (PostScript implemented) PDF interpreter to be fully deprecated and unsupported. It is still there, and still accessible via "-dNEWPDF=false" but please treat that as for emergency use only. If you encounter problems with the new interpreter, please report them.

The open-source alternatives to GPT-4 Vision are coming

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on LinkedIn

VentureBeat presents: AI Unleashed - An exclusive executive event for enterprise data leaders. Network and learn with industry peers . Learn More

The landscape of generative artificial intelligence is evolving rapidly with the advent of large multimodal models (LMM). These models are transforming the way we interact with AI systems, allowing us to use both images and text as input. OpenAI’s GPT-4 Vision is a leading example of this technology, but its closed-source and commercial nature can limit its use in certain applications. 

However, the open-source community is rising to the challenge, with LLaVA 1.5 emerging as a promising blueprint for open source alternatives to GPT-4 Vision.

LLaVA 1.5 combines several generative AI components and has been fine-tuned to create a compute-efficient model that performs various tasks with high accuracy. While it’s not the only open-source LMM, its computational efficiency and high performance can set a new direction for the future of LMM research.

How LMMs work

LMMs typically employ an architecture composed of several pre-existing components: a pre-trained model for encoding visual features, a pre-trained large language model (LLM) for understanding user instructions and generating responses, and a vision-language cross-modal connector for aligning the vision encoder and the language model.

AI Unleashed

An exclusive invite-only evening of insights and networking, designed for senior enterprise executives overseeing data stacks and strategies.

Training an instruction-following LMM usually involves a two-stage process. The first stage, vision-language alignment pretraining, uses image-text pairs to align the visual features with the language model’s word embedding space. The second stage, visual instruction tuning, enables the model to follow and respond to prompts involving visual content. This stage is often challenging due to its compute-intensive nature and the need for a large dataset of carefully curated examples.

What makes LLaVA efficient?

LLaVA 1.5 uses a CLIP (Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training) model as its visual encoder. Developed by OpenAI in 2021, CLIP learns to associate images and text by training on a large dataset of image-description pairs. It is used in advanced text-to-image models like DALL-E 2.

LLaVA’s language model is Vicuna, a version of Meta’s open source LLaMA model fine-tuned for instruction-following. The original LLaVA model used the text-only versions of ChatGPT and GPT-4 to generate training data for visual fine-tuning. Researchers provided the LLM with image descriptions and metadata, prompting it to create conversations, questions, answers, and reasoning problems based on the image content. This method generated 158,000 training examples to train LLaVA for visual instructions, and it proved to be very effective.

LLaVA 1.5 improves upon the original by connecting the language model and vision encoder through a multi-layer perceptron (MLP), a simple deep learning model where all neurons are fully connected. The researchers also added several open-source visual question-answering datasets to the training data, scaled the input image resolution, and gathered data from ShareGPT, an online platform where users can share their conversations with ChatGPT. The entire training data consisted of around 600,000 examples and took about a day on eight A100 GPUs, costing only a few hundred dollars. According to the researchers, LLaVA 1.5 outperforms other open-source LMMs on 11 out of 12 multimodal benchmarks. (It is worth noting that measuring the performance of LMMs is complicated and benchmarks might not necessarily reflect performance in real-world applications.)

The future of open source LLMs

An online demo of LLaVA 1.5 is available, showcasing impressive results from a small model that can be trained and run on a tight budget. The code and dataset are also accessible, encouraging further development and customization. Users are sharing interesting examples where LLaVA 1.5 is able to handle complex prompts.

GPT-4-Vision has a new open-source competitor, LLaVA v1.5. And it's REALLY good. More examples: pic.twitter.com/UfxgrC3E2w — Matt Shumer (@mattshumer_) October 6, 2023

However, LLaVA 1.5 does come with a caveat. As it has been trained on data generated by ChatGPT, it cannot be used for commercial purposes due to ChatGPT’s terms of use, which prevent developers from using it to train competing commercial models. 

Creating an AI product also comes with many challenges beyond training a model, and LLaVA is not yet a contender against GPT-4V, which is convenient, easy to use, and integrated with other OpenAI tools, such as DALL-E 3 and external plugins.

However, LLaVA 1.5 has several attractive features, including its cost-effectiveness and the scalability of generating training data for visual instruction tuning with LLMs. Several open-source ChatGPT alternatives can serve this purpose, and it’s only a matter of time before others replicate the success of LLaVA 1.5 and take it in new directions, including permissive licensing and application-specific models.

LLaVA 1.5 is just a glimpse of what we can expect in the coming months in open-source LMMs. As the open-source community continues to innovate, we can anticipate more efficient and accessible models that will further democratize the new wave of generative AI technologies.

VentureBeat's mission is to be a digital town square for technical decision-makers to gain knowledge about transformative enterprise technology and transact. Discover our Briefings.

AMD to Acquire Open-Source AI Software Expert Nod.ai

— Nod.ai to accelerate deployment of optimized AI solutions on AMD high-performance platforms and bolster AMD open-source software strategy ꟷ

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 10, 2023 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Nod.ai to expand the company’s open AI software capabilities. The addition of Nod.ai will bring an experienced team that has developed an industry-leading software technology that accelerates the deployment of AI solutions optimized for AMD Instinct™ data center accelerators, Ryzen™ AI processors, EPYC™ processors, Versal™ SoCs and Radeon™ GPUs to AMD. The agreement strongly aligns with the AMD AI growth strategy centered on an open software ecosystem that lowers the barriers of entry for customers through developer tools, libraries and models.

“The acquisition of Nod.ai is expected to significantly enhance our ability to provide AI customers with open software that allows them to easily deploy highly performant AI models tuned for AMD hardware,” said Vamsi Boppana, senior vice president, Artificial Intelligence Group at AMD. “The addition of the talented Nod.ai team accelerates our ability to advance open-source compiler technology and enable portable, high-performance AI solutions across the AMD product portfolio. Nod.ai’s technologies are already widely deployed in the cloud, at the edge and across a broad range of end point devices today.”

“At Nod.ai, we are a team of engineers focused on problem solving — quickly – and moving at pace in an industry of constant change to develop solutions for the next set of problems,” said Anush Elangovan, co-founder and CEO, Nod.ai. “Our journey as a company has cemented our role as the primary maintainer and major contributor to some of the world's most important AI repositories, including SHARK, Torch-MLIR and OpenXLA/IREE code generation technology. By joining forces with AMD, we will bring this expertise to a broader range of customers on a global scale.”

Nod.ai delivers optimized AI solutions to top hyperscalers, enterprises and startups. The compiler-based automation software capabilities of Nod.ai’s SHARK software reduce the need for manual optimization and the time required to deploy highly performant AI models to run across a broad portfolio of data center, edge and client platforms powered by AMD CDNA™, XDNA™, RDNA™ and “Zen” architectures.

About AMD For more than 50 years AMD has driven innovation in high-performance computing, graphics and visualization technologies. Billions of people, leading Fortune 500 businesses and cutting-edge scientific research institutions around the world rely on AMD technology daily to improve how they live, work and play. AMD employees are focused on building leadership high-performance and adaptive products that push the boundaries of what is possible. For more information about how AMD is enabling today and inspiring tomorrow, visit the AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) website , blog , LinkedIn and Twitter pages.

Cautionary Statement This press release contains forward-looking statements concerning Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) such as the expected benefits of AMD’s proposed acquisition of Nod.ai, which are made pursuant to the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are commonly identified by words such as "would," "may," "expects," "believes," "plans," "intends," "projects" and other terms with similar meaning. Investors are cautioned that the forward-looking statements in this press release are based on current beliefs, assumptions and expectations, speak only as of the date of this press release and involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations. Such statements are subject to certain known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are difficult to predict and generally beyond AMD's control, that could cause actual results and other future events to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied or projected by, the forward-looking information and statements. Material factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from current expectations include, without limitation, the following: Intel Corporation’s dominance of the microprocessor market and its aggressive business practices; global economic uncertainty; cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry; market conditions of the industries in which AMD products are sold; loss of a significant customer; impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on AMD’s business, financial condition and results of operations; competitive markets in which AMD’s products are sold; quarterly and seasonal sales patterns; AMD's ability to adequately protect its technology or other intellectual property; unfavorable currency exchange rate fluctuations; ability of third party manufacturers to manufacture AMD's products on a timely basis in sufficient quantities and using competitive technologies; availability of essential equipment, materials, substrates or manufacturing processes; ability to achieve expected manufacturing yields for AMD’s products; AMD's ability to introduce products on a timely basis with expected features and performance levels; AMD's ability to generate revenue from its semi-custom SoC products; potential security vulnerabilities; potential security incidents including IT outages, data loss, data breaches and cyber-attacks; potential difficulties in upgrading and operating AMD’s new enterprise resource planning system; uncertainties involving the ordering and shipment of AMD’s products; AMD’s reliance on third-party intellectual property to design and introduce new products in a timely manner; AMD's reliance on third-party companies for design, manufacture and supply of motherboards, software and other computer platform components; AMD's reliance on Microsoft and other software vendors' support to design and develop software to run on AMD’s products; AMD’s reliance on third-party distributors and add-in-board partners; impact of modification or interruption of AMD’s internal business processes and information systems; compatibility of AMD’s products with some or all industry-standard software and hardware; costs related to defective products; efficiency of AMD's supply chain; AMD's ability to rely on third party supply-chain logistics functions; AMD’s ability to effectively control sales of its products on the gray market; impact of government actions and regulations such as export administration regulations, tariffs and trade protection measures; AMD’s ability to realize its deferred tax assets; potential tax liabilities; current and future claims and litigation; impact of environmental laws, conflict minerals-related provisions and other laws or regulations; impact of acquisitions, joint ventures and/or investments on AMD’s business and AMD’s ability to integrate acquired businesses;  impact of any impairment of the combined company’s assets on the combined company’s financial position and results of operation; restrictions imposed by agreements governing AMD’s notes, the guarantees of Xilinx’s notes and the revolving credit facility; AMD's indebtedness; AMD's ability to generate sufficient cash to meet its working capital requirements or generate sufficient revenue and operating cash flow to make all of its planned R&D or strategic investments; political, legal, economic risks and natural disasters; future impairments of goodwill and technology license purchases; AMD’s ability to attract and retain qualified personnel; AMD’s stock price volatility; and worldwide political conditions. Investors are urged to review in detail the risks and uncertainties in AMD’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings, including but not limited to AMD’s most recent reports on Forms 10-K and 10-Q.

PR Contact: Brandi Martina AMD Communications +1 512-705-1720 [email protected]

Suresh Bhaskaran AMD Investor Relations +1 408-749-2845 [email protected]

Media Contacts

Brandi Martina AMD Communications +1 512-705-1720 [email protected]

Media Library

Find and download the latest AMD corporate and product logos, images, and b-roll footage.

• Main content

Meta made its Llama 2 AI model open-source because 'Zuck has balls,' a former top Facebook engineer says

• Meta released Llama 2 as a mostly open-source AI model in July.
• Llama 2 has become really popular among AI developers. 
• Replit CEO Amjad Masad said Mark Zuckerberg took a big risk making the model open-source.

Since Meta released Llama 2 as a (mostly) open-source project in July, the AI model has become a huge hit. So much so, that some experts are worried this powerful tool might be misused by bad actors. 

Open-source software is free for anyone to use, inspect, update and redistribute back to the community. This approach really took hold in the 1990s and is now the backbone of many tech services. 

While Llama 2 isn't fully open-source , it offers developers an incredibly powerful model that they can use with way more flexibility than the closed models created by OpenAI, Google and other major players in the generative AI field. 

The AI community has embraced the opportunity, giving Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg his next potentially huge platform. The model had been downloaded 30 million times, the company said in late September.

This wouldn't have happened unless Zuckerberg was willing to take a big risk on Llama 2 possibly being used for nefarious purposes, according to a former top Facebook engineer. One example: Llama 2 can give a detailed walkthrough of how to turn anthrax into a biological weapon .

"It takes a certain amount of guts to release an open-source language model, especially with political heat that Meta's getting from that," said Amjad Masad during a recent episode of the No Priors podcast. "And Zuck has balls, right?"

Masad is CEO and founder of developer platform Replit. Before that, he spent almost 3 years at Facebook where he helped create React Native and other popular software development tools.

During the No Priors podcast, Masad said he's been surprised that Meta is the only major tech company so far to go the open-source route for AI models. 

He compared this to Facebook's Open Compute project , which designed data center hardware and made that available for anyone to use and contribute to. 

"It was a huge success. And what I told Zuck at the time was like, 'Hey, why didn't you do that for LLMs?'" Masad said, referring to large language models. "He just kind of nodded his head."

Now that Llama 2 is out in the world, Masad highlighted a key difference between the Open Compute project and the Llama 2 approach. 

"The AI safety angle makes it a little toxic for a lot of companies to touch. They wouldn't want to be associated with something that spews something that is toxic," he said, according to a transcript of the podcast. 

If Meta suddenly decided to stop supporting Llama models as a mostly open-source project, Masad said that would be a blow to the AI community and he worries that other companies would be too timid to take Meta's place. 

"Will there be another player that will emerge?" Masad added. "The problem a lot is that, as you know, there isn't a lot of guts in the industry." A Meta spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

There's the latest Falcon open-source AI model. That is a possible alternative. But that came out of the United Arab Emirates, rather than a tech company.

Watch: Overstock CEO and bitcoin pioneer explains his long-standing crypto play and his philosophy on life

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.

https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/jobs-report-september-economy-unemployment-d9409b8b

Surprisingly Strong Hiring Sends Bond Yields Higher

U.s. employers added more jobs than forecast last month, keeping door open for fed rate increases.

Listen to article

(6 minutes)

Copyright © 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Copyright © 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Mobile Menu Overlay

The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington, DC 20500

Statement from President Joe   Biden on Medicare Open   Enrollment

From day one, I vowed to strengthen Medicare for the millions of Americans that have paid into this program from their very first paycheck. Today, as Medicare open enrollment starts, seniors and their families will be able to see the progress we’ve made in lowering health care costs.   Starting January 1, 2024, thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, prescription drug costs will be more affordable. Seniors and other Part D enrollees with high drug spending will have their out-of-pocket drug costs capped at about $3,500 next year, and all enrollees will have their costs capped at $2,000 in 2025. Low-income seniors and disabled people will be able to get extra help paying for their premiums and cost-sharing through the expanded Low Income Subsidy program. And, many Medicare beneficiaries will continue to save hundreds of dollars on their health care costs because Democrats capped the price of insulin at $35 per month and made recommended vaccines free. I’m proud that Congressional Democrats and I were able to deliver these cost savings for millions of seniors and families, while every single Republican in Congress voted to keep health care costs high, even for their own constituents.   Medicare is a lifeline for millions of seniors, and I will continue the fight to lower health care costs and protect Medicare for generations to come.  

Stay Connected

We'll be in touch with the latest information on how President Biden and his administration are working for the American people, as well as ways you can get involved and help our country build back better.

Opt in to send and receive text messages from President Biden.

• International

October 11, 2023 - Israel-Hamas war news

By Kathleen Magramo , Adam Renton, Christian Edwards, Peter Wilkinson , Aditi Sangal , Dakin Andone , Leinz Vales , Steve Almasy, Elise Hammond , Tori B. Powell , Kaanita Iyer and Maureen Chowdhury , CNN

Our live coverage of the conflict in Israel and Gaza has moved here.

More than 330,000 people have been displaced in Gaza since Israel began its bombardment, UN says

From CNN's Abeer Salman & Kareem El Damanhoury

More than 330,000 people have been displaced in Gaza since Israel began its bombardment of the strip, according to a statement by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) early Thursday (local time).

"The cumulative number of displaced people increased by 30 percent over the past 24 hours, now totaling 338,934, of whom over two thirds are taking shelter in UNRWA schools," the statement read.

OCHA further expressed its concerns over the damage of civilian infrastructure in Gaza. Israel began a blockade of the densely populated enclave, cutting electricity, fuel, and water supplies.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza earlier on Thursday said 600,000 people have no access to water and that some hospitals are relying on water from wells. The ministry added that the death toll in Gaza is nearing 1,200 since Saturday.

Meanwhile, the World Food Programme (WFP) says it is aiming to provide "a critical food lifeline to over 800,000 people."

Biden administration official clarifies president, admin have not seen pictures or verified reports of children beheaded by Hamas

From CNN's DJ Judd and Kayla Tausche 

After President Biden’s remarks earlier today, an administration official told CNN neither Biden nor the administration have seen pictures or confirmed reports of children or infants beheaded by Hamas.

The official clarified that the president’s remarks were referring to public comments from media outlets and Israeli officials.

Biden, speaking from the Indian Treaty Room Wednesday, told Jewish leaders, “It matters that Americans see what's happening — I mean, I have been doing this a long time, I never really thought that I would see, have confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children.” 

A spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu  said Wednesday that babies and toddlers were found “ decapitated ” in Kfar Aza, Tal Heinrich. CNN could not independently verify that report, and Hamas said media reports about attacking children were false.

US State Department exploring alternative options for citizens wanting to leave Israel due to limited flights

From CNN's Jennifer Hansler

The US State Department said it's aware of the limited commercial flights available to citizens wanting to leave Israel and is "exploring other contract options by air, land, and sea to nearby countries," a spokesperson said Wednesday.

"The State Department has teams communicating 24/7 with US citizens and providing them assistance through phone calls, an online form and the Smart Traveler Enrollment Program," the spokesperson said. "Our goal is to assist US citizens who want to leave Israel with a safe means of doing so."  

The spokesperson said US citizens are encouraged to take advantage of commercial flights "that involve transiting a third country if they are unable to book a direct flight to the United States." In order to meet high demand for flights, the spokesperson said "we are also exploring other contract options by air, land and sea to nearby countries."

The spokesperson said the department "will continue to provide updates to US citizens who have registered via our online form as information becomes available."

On Wednesday, the department raised  the travel advisory level for Israel to Level 3:Reconsider Travel. 

Israel currently conducting "large-scale strike" on Hamas in Gaza, IDF says

From CNN's Elliott Gotkine

The Israel Defense Forces are "currently conducting a large-scale strike on terror targets belonging to the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip," according to an IDF social media post early Thursday local time.

Here's a brief history of the US support for Israel over the last 75 years

From CNN's Zachary B. Wolf

President Joe Biden’s promise for the US to “stand with Israel” continues a special relationship that dates back to 1948, when President Harry Truman became the first world leader to recognize the Jewish state, moments after its creation.

There’s now a kibbutz named after Truman in Israel, and the US provides billions in military support to Israel each year.

Israel has played an outsized role in US policy, and not just because most recent presidents have tried to play the role of peace maker between Israel and Palestinians and move toward a two-state solution.

Three presidential historians provided context about the US and its relationship with Israel.  Douglas Brinkley  is CNN’s presidential historian and a professor at Rice University,  Julian Zelizer  is a CNN contributor and a professor at Princeton University and  Mark Updegrove  is president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation.

Here's what they had to say about the US relationship with Israel.

President Dwight Eisenhower became infuriated at Israel: Along with France and the United Kingdom,  Israel attacked  Egypt in 1956 in an attempt to seize the Suez Canal and overthrow Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Eisenhower pressured the countries to remove their troops — which they eventually did.

President John F. Kennedy was concerned about Israel’s nuclear ambitions: Kennedy engaged in a quiet  pressure campaign  to let US inspectors into its nuclear sites and halt an Israeli nuclear program. Israel is  thought to have developed nuclear weapons in the 1960s , although it has never formally acknowledged them.

President Lyndon Johnson used the hotline to calm the Soviets during the Six-Day War: Johnson helped supply Israel in the years preceding the Six-Day War, in which Israel seized land from its neighbors. Egypt, as a result, closed the Suez Canal for years. Johnson agreed to sell some military equipment to the Israelis which was a shift in US policy at the time. 

“This was a very much a product of Cold War tension,” said Updegrove, the president and CEO of the LBJ Foundation. “I think there was a great concern that that would escalate beyond Israel, Egypt and Syria to being a much larger battle.”

President Richard Nixon airlifted supplies to Israel and engaged in "shuttle diplomacy": Nixon ultimately supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War of 1973, a key moment that may have saved the country.

“Most historians of that region think that the US munitions support was essential to Israel’s survival at that point,” Zelizer said.

Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s secretary of state, also engaged in so-called “ shuttle diplomacy ,” engineering an end to the war and  ultimately reopening  the Suez Canal under President Gerald Ford.

President Jimmy Carter brokered peace between Egypt and Israel: Carter brought Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat together for the Camp David Accords, which created a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt, its Arab neighbor to the South.

Today, Israel enforces its borders on the Gaza Strip, but so does Egypt. That more than two million Palestinians live in the 140 square-mile strip without the ability to easily leave is why it is today frequently referred to as  the biggest open-air prison on earth .

Read more about the US-Israel relationship throughout the years.

Senior Hamas official says it's too early to exchange Israeli hostages

From CNN's Mohammed Tawfeeq and journalist Ali Younes

Izzat al-Risheq, a senior Hamas official, told CNN Wednesday that it's too early to exchange Israeli hostages while Israel continues to strike Gaza.

"We will only discuss this issue when the Israeli aggression against our people ends," al-Risheq said from Doha, Qatar.

He also denied Hamas had any help from Iran or Lebanon's Hezbollah in executing or planning Hamas' large-scale surprise assault on Israel.

"I say it very clearly that this operation was a 100 percent Hamas operation without any help from any regional party," al-Risheq said.

Some background: Hamas fighters are holding as many as 150 people hostage in locations across Gaza following their raids on southern Israel on Saturday, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations said Monday.

Abu Obaida, the spokesperson of Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, said Monday that Hamas would start executing civilian hostages if Israel targeted people in Gaza without warning.

Hostages held by Hamas are likely underground, IDF spokesperson says

From CNN’s Josh Campbell and Larry Register in Atlanta

Israeli authorities think hostages taken by Hamas are being held underground, Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday.  

“Reason dictates that they are underground,” Conricus said. “Reason also dictates that Hamas, since they planned to launch this attack and they planned to take these people hostage, reason dictates that they planned in advance locations to hide these hostages and keep them safe from Israeli intelligence, and efforts to get them out.” 

The situation with the hostages is an “extremely sensitive and complex topic,” Conricus said. Even though Israel has had “some experience” with hostage situations, they have never dealt with anything like this, he added.

“Not in the scope, not in the magnitude and not in the complexity of where our hostages are, Conricus said.

When asked whether an Israeli ground invasion was imminent, Conricus said he would not telegraph Israel’s schedule or intentions in this conflict .

“It is clear and understandable that what needs to be done is that all of Hamas’ military capabilities need to be taken off the map. How that will happen, by what means, and what tactics, that is a few days in the future, maybe more than that.” 

Hamas fighters are holding as many as 150 people hostage in locations across Gaza following their raids on southern Israel on Saturday, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations said Monday.

Abu Obaida, the spokesperson of Hamas’ Al-Qassam Brigades, on Monday said Hamas would start executing civilian hostages if Israel targeted people in Gaza without warning.

Wave of Israeli airstrikes have killed 51 and injured scores, Gaza health ministry says

From CNN's Kareem El Damanhoury

Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip have left at least 51 people dead and another 281 injured as of early Thursday local time, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

The casualties were in the residential areas of Zeitoun, Sabra, Al-Nafaq, and Tel al-Hawa, it said.

Some of the victims are still under the rubble, according to Deputy Health Minister Yousef Abu Al-Rish, who accused Israeli forces of intending "to cause as much damage and destruction, hence destroying entire residential areas.” 

Abu Al-Rish added that the death toll in Gaza is nearing 1,200 after the latest airstrikes.

The minister described the situation as an “imminent humanitarian catastrophe” after Israel began a blockade of the densely populated enclave, cutting electricity, fuel, and water supplies. 

“More than 600,000 of Gaza’s population are deprived from water, and entire hospitals are deprived from water," he added, urging the world to stop the Israeli aggression. 

Please enable JavaScript for a better experience.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Louisiana Primary Election Results

Louisiana’s open primary system pits all candidates, regardless of political party, against each other in one race. If a candidate receives a majority of the vote, they win the election. Otherwise, the top two candidates will advance to the general election on Nov. 18.

With Gov. John Bel Edwards, the only Democratic governor in the Deep South, limited to two terms, Republicans are eyeing the opportunity to take back the governor’s mansion . In Louisiana’s open primary system, a candidate can win the election if they receive a majority of the primary vote. Otherwise, the top two candidates will advance to the general election on Nov. 18. Read more

Open Primary

race called.

Lieutenant Governor

State legislature, state senate, state house, ballot measures, other races.

Attorney General

Agriculture Commissioner

Insurance Commissioner

Secretary of State

Board of Elementary and Secondary Education

• International

Israel-Hamas war rages as crisis deepens in Gaza

By Tara Subramaniam , Adam Renton, Lauren Said-Moorhouse , Christian Edwards and Dakin Andone , CNN

At least 5 killed and 15 injured in Israeli airstrike in Rafah, Palestinian interior ministry says

From CNN’s Abeer Salman

At least five people were killed and 15 others were injured in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a multi-story house in Rafah in the southern Gaza strip, the Palestinian interior ministry said Monday.

The ministry said the airstrike happened without prior warning from the Israel Defense Forces.

The IDF has not issued any comments about the strike.

US officials are in Ismailia, Egypt — as close to the border with Gaza as conditions allow

From CNN's Jennifer Hansler and Yahya Abou-Ghazala

The US government has officials in Ismailia, Egypt — “as close to the border” between Egypt and Gaza “as conditions permit,” a US official said Monday.

The US has “been trying” to get officials to the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing , but “the Egyptians have told us there are acute security threats there that prevent it,” the official told the traveling press.

The crossing between Gaza and Egypt is the only remaining outlet for supplies, but it has been closed for much of the past week. Humanitarian supplies have been piling up on the Egyptian side of the border, and neither Gazans nor foreign nationals have been able to cross.

Meanwhile, Americans in Gaza who spoke with CNN have had no luck getting into Egypt and the Rafah crossing has remained closed, despite US officials’ comments that it would be reopened.

One family told CNN they have been at Rafah since 9 a.m. local time, and the crossing is still closed.

Beseiso told CNN in a message on Friday morning that she managed to get through by phone to the US embassy and was told they have all the information for American citizens who filled out the online form and that she should wait for someone to contact them. She was also told to go to the Rafah crossing with her family where they can get through, she said.

"My family and I are very frightened," Beseiso said. "Going to head south now."

Palestinian Authority prime minister urges halt of Israel's airstrikes and blockade

From CNN’s Pierre Meilhan

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh on Monday urged the United States and the international community to intervene to stop Israel’s airstrikes and blockade, according to Palestinian news agency WAFA.

"The international community, mainly the American administration, is required to intervene urgently to stop the aggression, provide protection for the civilians and their homes, and prevent their displacement," the prime minister said.

Shtayyeh also said during a weekly cabinet meeting in the West Bank city of Ramallah that "Israel is targeting civilians, and the goal behind this blockade is mass killing and mass displacement."

WAFA reported that the prime minister called for the immediate opening of safe corridors to facilitate the delivery of food and medical supplies and to evacuate the wounded, since hospitals in Gaza have become overcrowded.

Shtayyeh warned against the further displacement of people in the Gaza strip and creating a new Nakba, or “catastrophe," referring to the period following the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, when roughly 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes in what is now Israel.

“Our people will not leave their land or emigrate from it, no matter how heavy the sacrifices are. They are capable of confronting it and thwarting it just as they thwarted many liquidation and resettlement projects throughout the past times in the struggle,” the prime minister said, according to WAFA.

Americans leave Israel on cruise ship bound for Cyprus

From CNN’s Seb Shukhla in Haifa

A Royal Caribbean cruise ship carrying US nationals has departed the Israeli port of Haifa for Cyprus.

The ship, "Rhapsody of the Seas," can take up to 2,400 passengers — but a CNN team on the ground saw that the ship was well below capacity. People, young, and old, were processed through a check-in system with American flags dotted along the route.

Yehuda Halberg, a professor who emigrated to Israel from Athens, Georgia, in 2004, was with his family, carrying just a few belongings in backpacks. He was insistent that this was not a goodbye to Israel.

“I'm not leaving, so much as getting out of the way. But we'll be back as soon as the school year starts and we'll be here to help out, do what we need to do and rebuild,” he said.

Halberg said that he had come from the center of the country, and for the last week, he was driving soldiers to the front and bringing medical equipment in his small Renault Clio.

Sarah, a mother who was also boarding with her family, stopped to say, “Our hearts are staying here with the people [of Israel]. We’re simply taking some space and getting out of harms way.”

Sarah said she too had been helping out soldiers by cooking. She said they will return when there are “no more swords, only peace.”

Although families are on the move, Sarah’s 14-year-old daughter, Ariella, had reservations about making the trip.

“I think that we should stay in Israel with our nation and with our family. And I think we have to show support. What are we fighting for? We're fighting for our country and for a home to call. A place to call home,” she insisted.

The US Embassy in Israel said Sunday the ship would leave Monday and spend about 10 to 12 hours at sea before arriving at the Limassol port in Cyprus, where citizens will be responsible for arranging their own accommodations and onward travel. The US embassy is providing the passage at a fee, but those boarding have yet to be given the bill.

Israel orders evacuation of 28 villages near Lebanese border in northern Israel

From CNN's Pauline Lockwood

The Israeli government on Monday ordered the evacuation of 28 villages in northern Israel within two kilometers of the country's border with Lebanon.

“The implementation of the plan was approved by Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant," a joint statement by Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the Israel Defense Forces says. "A short while ago, the Northern Command updated the heads of the local authorities on the decision. The plan will be implemented by the heads of the local municipalities, the Ministry of Interior and the National Emergency Management Authority (NEMA) of the Ministry of Defense."

The 28 communities included in the plan are: Ghajar, Dishon, Kfar Yuval, Margaliot, Metula, Avivim, Dovev, Ma’ayan Baruch, Bara’m, Manara, Yiftach, Malkia, Misgav Am, Yir’on, Dafna, Arab al-Aramshe, Shlomi, Netu’a, Ya’ara, Shtula, Matat, Zari’t, Shomera, Betzet, Adamit, Rosh HaNikram, Hanita and Kfar Giladi.

Some context: News of the evacuation comes amid an exchange of fire on the border between Israel and members of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah . On Sunday, Israeli jets struck Hezbollah military targets in Lebanon, in response to nine rockets being fired from Lebanon into Israeli territory earlier in the day, the IDF said.

Blinken speaks with Turkish foreign minister about Israel-Hamas war

From CNN's Jennifer Hansler

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken spoke on Monday with Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan about “diplomatic efforts to prevent the conflict from widening and to minimize the humanitarian costs of the war” in Israel, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said.

A senior Turkish official told CNN last week that Turkey is actively taking part in trying to secure the hostages taken by Hamas .

Biden postpones trip to Colorado for "national security meetings"

From CNN's Donald Judd

President Joe Biden is scrapping a trip to Colorado for “national security meetings,” the White House told pool reporters Monday.

The news comes as CNN reported over the weekend that discussions are underway for a possible visit to the Middle East after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu extended an invitation to Biden.

The White House said Sunday it had no new travel plans to announce at this time.

If Biden were to visit, it would come after high-stakes shuttle diplomacy by his Secretary of State Antony Blinken , who has traveled to several countries in the region over the past few days.

Blinken arrived back in Israel Monday morning to meet with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and opposition leader Yair Lapid, in addition to meetings with Netanyahu and President Isaac Herzog, per a US official.

Reporters are still waiting on an updated schedule for Biden at the White House today.

"The kids are all depressed." Life in the West Bank gets more difficult by the day

From CNN's Ivana Kottasová in the West Bank

Every time Noor Barakat goes shopping for food, the prices are higher. Last week on Tuesday, there was no bread. Now it’s the fuel and water that is becoming a problem. Fruit and vegetables that are normally brought in from the north haven’t been coming.

The 22-year old English teacher lives in the Dheisheh Palestinian refugee camp in the occupied West Bank, an area that has been mostly cut off from the rest of the West Bank. Its residents are not allowed to leave and anyone visiting has to cross the checkpoint at its entrance on foot, leaving vehicles on the other side of the barricade.

The restrictions on movements have been imposed by the Israeli military after Hamas unleashed a terror attack on Israel from Gaza on October 7, killing 1,400 people and kidnapping scores of others.

Checkpoints have been shut and new roadblocks set up at various entry and exit points to the occupied West Bank.

Dheisheh is among the areas in the West Bank that are under Palestinian control, but the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) regularly conduct incursions and raids there.

The worry here is that Israel’s reaction to the Hamas attack will have devastating consequences for civilians in the West Bank.

The camp was first established in 1949 when 3,000 Palestinians settled there after being expelled or fleeing from villages west of Jerusalem. The camp’s population has since grown to more than 18,500 people who are still living in a built-up area of one-third of a square kilometer, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.

“The kids are all depressed. They are not getting enough sleep, the news is on all the time. I tell [the children] we have to be patient and have to pray for, but the life has to go on. I say we can’t stop everything and just think about this,” she said.

UN warns of "abyss in the Middle East" as humanitarian crisis worsens in Gaza. Here’s what you need to know

From CNN staff

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned of a potential "abyss in the Middle East,” as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza deepens ahead of a likely Israeli ground offensive, and the escalating conflict risks spilling over regionally .

In a statement Sunday, Guterres issued urgent appeals to Israel and Hamas. “To Hamas, the hostages must be released immediately without conditions. To Israel, rapid and unimpeded aid must be granted for humanitarian supplies and workers for the sake of the civilians in Gaza.”

By Monday, little progress had been made regarding either of those appeals. Israel reported at least 199 people are being held hostage in Gaza – a sharp upward revision from the previous count of 155. And Palestinian officials said that Israel is still not supplying water to the densely populated enclave.

In the south, all eyes are on the Rafah crossing into Egypt – the last available exit to Gazans. And in the north, all eyes are on the movements of Israel’s Defense Forces ahead of any potential developments on the ground.

Here are the latest developments:

• Rafah crossing: Hundreds of thousands of Gazans have abandoned their homes in the north after Israel warned them to evacuate southwards. Israel has closed its two border crossings with Gaza and imposed a “complete siege” of the territory. That has left the Rafah crossing as the only viable outlet to get people out of the enclave – and supplies into it. After days of speculation, there is still no indication that the crossing will open, despite US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s “promise” on Sunday. Officials in Egypt , Israel and Gaza have all said that there is no arrangement to open the crossing as yet, leaving humanitarian aid to pile up on the Egyptian side of the border.
• Water supply: The director of Gaza’s water authority told CNN on Monday that water supply has not yet been restored to the enclave. “I strongly deny the news of supplying Gaza Strip with water, these are false allegations and lies,” Munther Shublaq said. His comments came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office told CNN that Israel had turned on water to southern Gaza. US national security advisor Jake Sullivan also shared the positive development with CNN – before Shublaq on Monday denied the reports. The UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs has warned that “as a last resort, people are consuming brackish water from agricultural wells.”
• Hostage update: At least 199 people are being held hostage in Gaza, IDF spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said Monday. The previous count had been that 155 people were being held hostage after being taken across the border by Hamas militants during their attack on Israel on October 7. Hamas had previously said that it would start executing hostages if Israel targeted people in Gaza without warning. US President Joe Biden said Friday he had spoken with the families of the 14 Americans who remain unaccounted for in Israel. National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby said a “handful” of those individuals are among those being held hostage by Hamas. Biden pledged to do “everything possible” to ensure the Americans’ return.
• Blinken’s diplomacy: Blinken has been on a whistle-stop tour of the Middle East – with visits to Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan and Qatar – as part of an urgent effort to prevent Israel's war against Hamas and a resulting civilian catastrophe in Gaza from escalating into a regional conflict. Blinken returned to Israel on Monday after an earlier visit last week, to meet with Netanyahu in Jerusalem . Blinken is also scheduled to meet with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and opposition leader Yair Lapid, according to a US official.

Sign up for CNN’s Meanwhile in the Middle East , a three-times-a-week newsletter that explores the region’s biggest stories.

Please enable JavaScript for a better experience.