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Meanwhile, a young programmer named Larry Ellison had formed a company called Software Development Laboratories, originally to do contract work, but quickly decided that selling packaged software was a far better proposition: doing the work once and reselling it multiple times was an excellent way to get rich. They just needed a product, and IBM effectively gave it to them; because the System R team was being treated as a research project, not a commercial venture, they happily wrote multiple papers explaining how System R worked, and published the SQL spec. Software Development Laboratories implemented it and called it Oracle, and in 1979 sold it to the CIA; a condition of the contract was that it run on IBM mainframes.In other words, IBM not only created the conditions for the richest packaged software company ever to emerge (Microsoft), they basically gave an instruction manual to the second.

We have confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from the companyâs network in late 2014 by what we believe is a state-sponsored actor. The account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the vast majority with bcrypt) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers. The ongoing investigation suggests that stolen information did not include unprotected passwords, payment card data, or bank account information; payment card data and bank account information are not stored in the system that the investigation has found to be affected. Based on the ongoing investigation, Yahoo believes that information associated with at least 500 million user accounts was stolen and the investigation has found no evidence that the state-sponsored actor is currently in Yahooâs network. Yahoo is working closely with law enforcement on this matter.That's a big hack.

Remember when Google said they wouldn't store messages in one of the company's new chat applications, Allo? Yeah, no.The version of Allo rolling out today will store all non-incognito messages by default - a clear change from Googleâs earlier statements that the app would only store messages transiently and in non-identifiable form. The records will now persist until the user actively deletes them, giving Google default access to a full history of conversations in the app. Users can also avoid the logging by using Alloâs Incognito Mode, which is still fully end-to-end encrypted and unchanged from the initial announcement.Like Hangouts and Gmail, Allo messages will still be encrypted between the device and Google servers, and stored on servers using encryption that leaves the messages accessible to Google's algorithms.For this reason alone, don't use Google Allo. But wait, there's more! There's also the backwards way it handles multiple devices and phone numbers - another reason to not use Google Allo. Sadly, even if you don't have Allo installed, you may still be forced to deal with it at some point because of some 'clever' tricks by Google Play Services on Android. If someone sends you an Allo message, but you don't have Allo installed, you'll get a special Android notification.The notification lets you respond through text along (as opposed to stickers, photos or anything like that), or alternatively ignore it altogether. There's also a button taking you straight to the Play Store install page for Allo.How can Google do this? The notification is generated by Google Play Services, which is installed on just about every Android phone, and updates silently in the background.Don't use Google Allo.

There's a story going round that Lenovo have signed an agreement with Microsoft that prevents installing free operating systems. This is sensationalist, untrue and distracts from a genuine problem.With that solved, let's get to the real root cause of the problems here:The real problem here is that Intel do very little to ensure that free operating systems work well on their consumer hardware - we still have no information from Intel on how to configure systems to ensure good power management, we have no support for storage devices in "RAID" mode and we have no indication that this is going to get better in future. If Intel had provided that support, this issue would never have occurred. Rather than be angry at Lenovo, let's put pressure on Intel to provide support for their hardware.As someone who tried to move his retina MacBook Pro to Linux only a few weeks ago - I can attest to Intel's absolutely terrible Linux drivers and power management. My retina MacBook Pro has an Intel Iris 6100 graphics chip, and the driver for it is so incredibly bad that even playing a simple video will cause the laptop to become so hot I was too scared to leave it running. Playing that same video in OS X or Windows doesn't even spin up the fans, with the laptop entirely cool. Battery life in Linux measured in a 2-3 hours, whereas on OS X or Windows I easily get 8-10 hours.

ProDOS 2.4 is barely out the door, and we already have a point release that fixes a number of bugs and adds support for a bunch of Apple II clones - ProDOS 2.4.1 has been released.

macOS Sierra brings Siri to the Mac, allowing users to conduct voice searches to find files, look up information, and more, with the ability to pin searches to the Notification Center for continual monitoring. There are new Continuity features including an "Auto Unlock" option for unlocking a Mac with an Apple Watch, and a "Universal Clipboard" option for copying text on one Apple device and pasting it on another. MacOS being in maintenance mode, this isn't the most significant update the operating system's ever seen. But hey, it's free, so go get it.

Oh, benchmarks.Benchmarks of computer hardware have their uses. Especially if you have a relatively narrow and well-defined set of calculations that you need to perform, benchmarks are great tools to figure out which processor or graphics chip or whatever will deliver the best performance - scientific calculations, graphics processing (e.g. video games), these are all use cases where comparisons between benchmarks of different hardware components can yield useful information.A different way to put it: benchmarks make sense in a situation where "more power" equals "better results" - better results that are noticable and make a difference. A GTX 1080 will result in better framerates than a GTX 1070 in a modern game like The Witcher 3, because we've not yet hit any (theoretical) framerate limit for that game. A possible future GTX 1090 will most likely yield even better framerates still.Where benchmarks start to fall apart, however, is in use cases where "more power" does not equal "better results". Modern smartphones are a perfect example of this. Our current crop of smartphones is so powerful, that adding faster processors does not produce any better results for the kinds of ways in which we use these devices. Twitter isn't going to open or load any faster when you add a few hundred megahertz.In other words, modern smartphones have bottlenecks, but the processor or RAM certainly isn't one of them. Before you can even reach the full potential of your quad-core 2.4Ghz 6GB RAM phone, your battery will run out (or explode), or your network connection will be slow or non-existent.As a result, I never cared much for benchmarking smartphones. In 2013, in the wake of Samsung cheating in benchmarks, I wrote that "if you buy a phone based on silly artificial benchmark scores, you deserve to be cheated", and today, now that Apple is leading (in one subset of processor) benchmarks with its latest crop of mobile processors, the same still applies.So when John Gruber posted about Apple A10 Fusion benchmarks...Looking at Geekbench's results browser for Android devices, there are a handful of phones in shouting distance of the iPhone 7 for multi-core performance, but Apple's A10 Fusion scores double on single-core....I snarked:Funny how just like in the PPC days, benchmarks only start mattering when they favour [insert platform of choice].Setting aside the validity of Geekbench (Linus Torvalds has an opinion!), this seems to be the usual pointless outcome of these penis-measuring contests: when the benchmarks favour you, benchmarks are important and crucial and the ultimate quanitification of greatness. When the benchmarks don't favour you, they are meaningless and pointless and the world's worst yardsticks of greatness. Anywhere in between, and you selectively pick and choose the benchmarks that make you look best.I didn't refer to Apple's PowerPC days for nothing. Back then, Apple knew it was using processors with terrible performance and energy requirements, but still had to somehow convince the masses that PowerPC was better faster stronger than x86; claims which Apple itself exposed - overnight - as flat-out lies when the company switched to Intel.When I use my Nexus 6P and iPhone 6S side-by-side, my Nexus 6P feels a lot faster, even though benchmarks supposedly say it has a crappier processor and a slower operating system. Applications and operations seem equally fast to me, but Android makes everything feel faster because it has far superior ways of dealing with and switching between multiple applications, thanks to the pervasiveness of activities and intents or the ability to set your own default applications.Trying to quantify something as elusive and personal as user experience by crowing about the single-thread performance of the processor it runs on is like trying to buy a family car based on its top speed. My 2009 Volvo S80's 2.5L straight-5 may propel the car to a maximum speed of 230km/h, but I'm much more interested in how comfortable the seats are, all the comfort options it has, if it looks good (it does), and so on. Those are the actual things that matter, because the likelihood of ever even approaching that 230km/h is very slim, at best.I bought an iPhone 6S and Apple Watch late last year and used them for six months because I feel that as someone who writes about every platform under the sun, I should be using them as much as (financially and practically) possible. I used the iPhone 6S as my only smartphone for six months, but after six months of fighting iOS and Apple every step of the way, every single day, I got fed up and bought the Nexus 6P on impulse.Not once during those six months did I think to myself "if only this processor was 500Mhz faster" or "if only this thing had 4GB of RAM". No; I was thinking "why can't I set my own default applications, because Apple's are garbage" or "why is deep linking/inter-application communication non-existent, unreliable, broken, and restricted to first-party applications?" or "why is every application a visual and behavioural island with zero attention to consistency?".iOS could be running on a quantum computer from Urbana, Illinois, and it wouldn't solve any of those problems.The funny thing is - Gruber actually agrees with me:I like reading/following Holwerda, because he's someone who I feel keeps me on my toes. But he's off-base here. I'm certainly not saying that CPU or GPU performance is a primary reason why anyone should buy an iPhone instead of an Android phone. In fact, I'll emphasize that if the tables were turned and it were Android phones that were registering Geekbench scores double those of the iPhone, I would still be using an iPhone. In the same way that I've been using Macs, non-stop, since I first purchased a computer in 1991. Most of the years from 1991 until the switch to Intel CPUs in 2007, the Mac was behind PCs in performance. I never argued then that performance didn't matter - only that for me, personally, the other benefits of using a Mac (the UI design of the system, the quality of the third-party apps, the build quality of the hardware, etc.) outweighed the performance penalty Macs suffered. The same would be true today if Apple's A-series chips were slower than Qualcomm's CPUs for Android.So, he'd be buying iPhone even if the benchmark tables were turned, thereby agreeing with me that when it comes to phones, benchmarks are entirely meaningless. Nobody buys a smartphone based on processor benchmark scores; at this point in time, people mostly buy smartphones based on the smartphone they currently have (i.e., what platform they are currently using) and price.That being said, there is one reason why benchmarks of Apple's latest mobile processors are quite interesting: Apple's inevitable upcoming laptop and desktop switchover to its own processors. OS X (or macOS or whatever) has been in maintenance mode ever since the release and success of the iPhone, and by now it's clear that Apple is going to retire OS X in favour of a souped-up iOS over the coming five years.I know a lot of people still aren't seeing the forest through the trees on this one, but you can expect the first "iOS" MacBook within 1-2 years. I put iOS between quotation marks because that brand of iOS won't be the iOS you have on your phone today, but a more capable, expanded version of it.Vlad Savov:It sounds wild, but the A10 looks to have the power and efficiency to handle the workload of a full PC. This coalescence of mobile and desktop PCs is driven by forces on both sides: mobile chips are getting more potent at the same time as our power needs are shrinking and our tasks become more mobile. If you think your workplace isn't changing much because there are a bunch of weathered Dell workstations sitting next to frumpy HP printers, consider just how much more work every one of your officemates is doing outside the office, on their phone. And all those grand and power-hungry x86 applications that might have kept people running macOS - Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom being two key examples - well, they're being ported to iOS in almost their full functionality, having been incentivized by the existence of Apple's iPad Pro line, last year's harbinger for this year's performance jump.Unlike Windows, whose x86 reliance is tied to its dominance of the lucrative PC gaming market, Apple really has very few anchors locking it down to macOS. The Cupertino company has been investing the vast majority of its development time into the mobile iOS for years now, and that shows in the different rates of progress between its two pieces of software. macOS is, in many ways, legacy software just waiting for the right moment to be deprecated. Itâs getting a fresh lick of paint now and then, but most of its novelties now relate to how it links back to Apple's core iOS and iPhone business.This is where benchmarking and the performance of Apple's A10 Fusion processor do come into play, because even in the constrained environment of a smartphone, it seems to be reaching performance levels of laptop and desktop processors.That "iOS" MacBook is closer than you think. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

It's taken a while, but Visopsys 0.8 has been released. The GUI appearance has been updated, the infamous icons have all been replaced, and touch support has been added. There are a few new utilities, and in addition to all of the usual under-the-bonnet improvements, they've added OHCI (USB 1) support, completing the set of USB host controller drivers. There's a full changelog is and new screenshots.

So the top brass at Samsung Electronics Co., including phone chief D.J. Koh, decided to accelerate the launch of a new phone they were confident would dazzle consumers and capitalize on the opportunity, according to people familiar with the matter. They pushed suppliers to meet tighter deadlines, despite loads of new features, another person with direct knowledge said. The Note 7 would have a high-resolution screen that wraps around the edges, iris-recognition security and a more powerful, faster-charging battery. Apple's taunts that Samsung was a copycat would be silenced for good.Then it all backfired. Just days after Samsung introduced the Note 7 in August, reports surfaced online that the phone's batteries were bursting into flame. By the end of the month, there were dozens of fires and Samsung was rushing to understand what went wrong. On Sept. 2, Koh held a grim press conference in Seoul where he announced Samsung would replace all 2.5 million phones shipped so far. What was supposed to be triumph had turned into a fiasco.Pretty damning report.

Nearly two weeks after Samsung recalled the Galaxy Note 7 due to the risk of explosion, the device is still being used just as frequently by its owners. This is according to data from Apteligent, a mobile analytics company that claims "usage rate of the phone among existing users has been almost the exact same since the day of the recall."It seems not even exploding batteries can tear users away from their smartphones, but the apparent reticence of users to get rid of their faulty devices is not being helped by Samsung's mismanagement of the recall process. Swapping 2.5 million smartphones is certainly no easy task, but the South Korean firm has not helped the situation by issuing confusing information to consumers. The longer the situation goes on, the more damage it does to the company's brand.A few notes about the Note 7 problems. First, this is no laughing matter. There's a reason not even Apple made fun of Samsung's problems during the iPhone event (something Apple normally revels in), because they, too, know that such manufacturing defects in which real people can get hurt can actually happen to anyone. Battery technology effectively comes down to stuffing highly flammable and dangerous liquids and chemicals in pressurised containers in your pockets, and lithium-ion batteries have a long history of catching fire and exploding.Second, unlike the doom and gloom you read everywhere, this whole story will be out of the media and out of the public's eye (if it's even been in the latter's eye to begin with) a few months from now, and nobody will care. This will do far, far less to damage Samsung's brand than people think (or hope).Third, that being said, Samsung is indeed not handling the recall very well. There should've been a quicker response, a clearer response, a more pervasive response. These things pose a real danger to people, and should've been taken off the street much, much quicker than this.I hope we won't have to read about people dying because of this.

I just spent like an hour searching for an OSNews story about this, because I was sure we posted about this, only to realise I was confused with this year-old story. Anyhow, this story is kind of similar in that John Brooks has released ProDOS 2.4 for the Apple II, fixing bugs, and adding features. I like Jason Scott's take:Next is that this is an operating system upgrade free of commercial and marketing constraints and drives. Compared with, say, an iOS upgrade that trumpets the addition of a search function or blares out a proud announcement that they broke maps because Google kissed another boy at recess. Or Windows 10, the 1968 Democratic Convention Riot of Operating Systems, which was designed from the ground up to be compatible with a variety of mobile/tablet products that are on the way out, and which were shoved down the throats of current users with a cajoling, insulting methodology with misleading opt-out routes and freakier and freakier fake-countdowns.The current mainstream OS environment is, frankly, horrifying, and to see a pure note, a trumpet of clear-minded attention to efficiency, functionality and improvement, stands in testament to the fact that it is still possible to achieve this, albeit a smaller, slower-moving target. Either way, itâs an inspiration.Mr. Scott...

Mic.com has obtained a long list of e-mails from primarily female Apple employees (but also a few male employees), detailing a sexist culture inside the company that nobody seems to want to address. The 50 pages of e-mails were handed to Mic by an Apple employee, and obviously, all people involved have been anonymised."With such love for a company that does so much good, it is with a heavy heart that I declare my resignation from Apple," a former employee wrote in an email obtained by Mic. "Despite all attempts to seek justice within this corporation, the cries of several minority employees about the toxic and oppressive environment have gone unanswered. I have witnessed the complete and utter disenfranchising of the voices of men and women of color and the fault lies not only in the direct management staff but in the response of those tasked with protecting employee rights. I write this letter hoping to highlight the areas that these departments have failed to properly support employees and as such have hence left Apple, Inc. culpable for various EEOC and ethical violations."According to Claire*, "several people" who have quit, citing a "white, male, Christian, misogynist, sexist environment," were not given exit interviews. "Their departure is being written up as a positive attrition," she told Mic.This obviously - but sadly - doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Silicon Valley is an inherently toxic environment dominated by white males, and despite all the talk from Tim Cook and various company bloggers, Apple is not the special diversity flowerchild farting rainbows and puking unicorn dust it claims to be. I mean, this is a company who considers having a Canadian speaking on stage during an event as "diversity".From these emails, a picture emerges of a company culture actively trying to get women to leave, actively preventing them from getting into mid-level and top-level leadership positions. From everything I've ever heard about Silicon Valley culture - this is par for the course, no matter the company.

Three months after v2.1.2 release, we've built a little update which fixes some of the issues found with applications and introduces some new ones as well. Almost no system file has been updated, but with this release you'll find a brand new version of Mapparium (which now allows to compute routes), a new, more secure build of OWB with upgraded openssl to 1.0.1t, the latest version of SimpleMail and PortablE (which was unluckily left-out by mistake in version 2.1.2). But this is not just a "refresh" update, it also includes some new applications like the FinalBurnAlpha emulator, meteMP3 player and, why not, the ColorCLI scripts, which will help customizing your system a little more.Icaros Desktop is an AROS distribution - by lack of a better term - which is pretty easy to try out.

Time stands still for some in the smartwatch market.With Apple set to release "Series 2" of its Watch and Samsung prepping its Gear S3 timepiece, many of the biggest players that have embraced Google's Android Wear software have decided to hit pause on their own efforts.It seems like only Apple and Samsung are willing - and capable - of propping up what is at best a lukewarm product segment.

It's release day for all Apple users among us! iOS 10, watchOS 3, and that other one everybody always forgets, tvOS 10. Since iOS 10 probably matters the most to you:iOS 10 features a redesigned Lock screen experience with 3D Touch-enabled notifications, a more easily accessible camera, and a widgets screen. A revamped Control Center also offers 3D Touch support along with new controls for music and HomeKit devices. Raise to Wake, a new feature for the latest devices, wakes up the iPhone without bypassing notifications.Have fun updating.

The reasons some Mac lovers stick with OS 9 are practically as numerous as Apple operating systems themselves. There are some OS 9 subscribers who hold out for cost reasons. Computers are prohibitively expensive where they live, and these people would also need to spend thousands on new software licenses and updated hardware (on top of the cost of a new Mac). But many more speak of a genuine preference for OS 9. These users stick around purely because they can and because they think classic Mac OS offers a more pleasant experience than OS X. Creatives in particular speak about some of OS 9's biggest technical shortcomings in favorable terms. They aren't in love with the way one app crashing would bring down an entire system, but rather the design elements that can unfortunately lead to that scenario often better suit creative work.If OS 9 had modern applications and - even moderately - modern hardware, I would be using it. No question. I have an iBook G3 fully working and running OS 9, including important software, within arm's grasp (I used to have an iMac G3 for the same purpose). It's difficult to explain, but the reason for me is Platinum, the user interface. OS 9's Finder, the graphical and behaviourial aspects of the user interface, the speed, the BeOS-like quirkiness - it all adds up to an operating system with a personality that is incredibly pleasant to use, regardless of the hodgepodge house-of-cards internals.And personality is, unfortunately, what Windows, desktop Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android sorely, sorely lack.

Recent events have rocked the mobile computing world to its core. OpenBSD retired the zaurus port, leaving users in desperate need of a new device. And not long before that, Microsoft released the Anniversary Update to Windows 10, but increased the free space requirement needed to install the update to exceed what's possible on devices with only 32GB, leaving users with cheap 32GB eMMC equipped devices such as the HP Stream series searching for a new operating system. With necessity as both mother and father, the scene is set for a truly epic pairing. OpenBSD on the HP Stream 7.The HP Stream line is a series of budget computers in a couple form factors. The Stream 11 is a fairly typical netbook. However, the Stream 7 and 8 are tablets. They look like cheap Android devices, but inside the case, theyâre real boys, er PCs, with Intel Atom CPUs.To install OpenBSD on such a device, we need a few parts.

Expecting a company that sells tablets to also provide tablet-oriented interfaces for the OS and major apps isn't unreasonable. But Google hasn't shown it is willing to provide those interfaces. My Android tablet advice still stands - I'll take Android tablets seriously once Google does.All the interface regressions since Honeycomb still make Android tablets feel like an afterthought. While the Pixel C is a great demonstration of these problems, it's still not a great productivity device compared to the competition.The side-by-side comparisons between Honeycomb and Nougat are damning. "Regression" isn't an adequate enough word for what's happening here.

Loki is the newest version of elementary OS, a design-oriented and open source Linux-based operating system for desktops and laptops. It succeeds Freya which was released in April of 2015.[...]ts and implemented over 20 blueprints. Altogether, these represent stability and security improvements, better internationalization, new features and options, and much more.A great team doing great work. Elementary OS isn't exactly a good fit for the "I compile my own kernel every morning"-type Linux users, but for the more turnkey people among us, it's certainly worth a try.

This release continues to improve the Sailfish OS 2.0 experience. Storage settings allow users to format, and safely eject memory cards. It also provides access to the files on the device and on memory cards. Cloud support continues to evolve with a support of VK and with backup support for OneDrive and DropBox. With release 2.0.2 Sailfish OS adds support for Intex Aqua Fish and Jolla C devices. New hardware features of the devices, like FM radio and Dual SIM are now supported.Sailfish users know where to get the update. There's also a much more detailed changelog.

Fifty years ago today, on 8 September 1966, Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek appeared on television for the first time - and forever changed the world. There's an endless string of articles all over the web, but as one of those Deep Space Nine fanatics the rest of the Trek world rather not talk about, this great article by Annalee Newitz really struck a cord with me.Without this stubborn nugget of hope at its core, DS9 would be more like the 2000s version of Battlestar Galactica - a story about space mysticism and war that's laced with a fatalism about humanity. Ron Moore was an executive producer on DS9 and the creator of BSG, so the overlap makes sense. But on DS9, we are immersed in a world where our faith in the basic decency of intelligent beings can remain unshaken. Whether solid or liquid, most of the creatures who live on the space station always do the right thing. And most importantly, the good guys prevail not just because they are good, but because they are able to put their ideals to practical use. More than TNG and Voyager, DS9 helps us understand how humans got from the Bell Riots to social democracy in space. Our heroes do it by resisting imperialism and inequality and by allying themselves with other people who do. That's why the Federation has struck a deal with the Bajorans rather than the Cardassians."Do you think they'll be able to save us?" The best scene in all of Star Trek (this one's a close second).Thank you, Mr. Roddenberry.

The EFF on Apple's removal of the 3.5mm jack:The reasons for Apple abandoning the analog jack may be innocuous. Apple is obsessed with simple, clean design, and this move lets the company remove one more piece of clutter from the phone's body. It advertises that the move helps make the phone more water-resistant. And certainly, many people prefer a wireless listening experience. But intentionally or not, by removing the analog port, Apple is giving itself more control than ever over what people can do with music or other audio content on an iPhone. It's also opening the door to new pressures to take advantage of that power.Meanwhile, over at BuzzFeed, Apple's Phil Shiller addresses the DRM and vendor lock-in concerns (bookmark the following quote for future reference):Schiller thinks it's a silly argument. "The idea that there's some ulterior motive behind this move, or that it will usher in some new form of content management, it simply isnât true," he says. "We are removing the audio jack because we have developed a better way to deliver audio. It has nothing to do with content management or DRM - that's pure, paranoid conspiracy theory."Thankfully, I don't have to write a reply to Schiller, because Nilay Patel already did so - and eloquently to boot, outlining exactly why the worries over DRM and vendor lock-in are more than warranted. After listing seven pieces of evidence of current and possible upcoming cases of vendor lock-in and DRM, he concludes:Now, these are all just dots - there's no line connecting them yet. But they are dots that Apple has put into the world, and when the most powerful company in technology creates as many dots around a single subject, it's not a conspiracy theory to suggest that they might one day be connected into the shape of a DRM audio scheme. It's simply pointing out the obvious.Phil Schiller and Tim Cook want us to believe them on their blue eyes. I obviously don't - if you can blatantly lie several times over in open letters and press interviews about your illegal tax evasion, how on earth am I supposed to believe them on this?

The pinout of that 68K Game Shifter, however, does not match the Shifter IC in any of the Atari ST computers. But incidentally, the never released Atari Panther was to be a Motorola 68000 based game console. Furthermore, the Panther prototype board features a chip conspicuously marked 4118!So after the cancellation of the Panther development in 1991, I may well be first person for 25 years to be looking at the design of its shifter chip.I'm a sucker for these kinds of stories. Great work!

Apple held its iPhone event tonight, and introduced the

A member of another team told me that there was a leaked build that had a really bad bug in it. I forget exactly what the problem was, but the details aren't important. The team fixed the bug as soon as it was discovered, and they notified all the self-hosters and partners to upgrade to a new build immediately, but that bug was also out there in the leaked builds, ready to destroy computers and networks and most of Western civilization.So how do you get people who are running a leaked build to stop running that build, with urgency?Great story.

People all over the world mail their broken iPhones to microsoldering specialist Jessa Jones. Aided by powerful microscopes and precision soldering irons, experts like Jessa pluck tiny chips off logic boards, swap them for new ones, and resurrect devices over which Apple's Genius Bar would say a eulogy.Jessa can fix practically anything. But these days, she spends most of her time fixing just one thing. Because every single month, more and more iPhone 6 and (especially) 6 Plus devices show up at her shop, iPad Rehab, with the same problem: a gray, flickering bar at the top of the display and an unresponsive touchscreen.Fascinating story. Remember, in the EU, you have a 2 year EU-wide warranty on your iPhone, no matter what Apple (or anyone else, for that matter) might tell you. If you are affected by this issue, Apple is legally obliged to either fix it, or replace your phone with a new one.

Every single GameCube game can at least boot in Dolphin 5.0. Except one. Star Wars: The Clone Wars and its complex way of using the PowerPC Memory Management Unit rendered it unplayable in Dolphin up to this day. But finally as of Dolphin 5.0-540, this challenge has come and gone: Dolphin can finally boot every single GameCube game in the official library.So what makes Star Wars: The Clone Wars so special? To truly understand what's going on, you need to have some knowledge on how the PowerPC's processor handles memory management and how Dolphin emulates it.Some light reading for the Tuesday morning.

Haiku uses a custom vector image format to store icons. This is surprising both because most OSes consider bitmaps to be totally sufficient to represent icons and because there are plenty of vector graphics formats out this (e.g. SVG). The goal of the Haiku Vector Icon Format (HVIF) is to make vector icon files as small as possible. This allows Haiku to display icons as several sizes while still keeping the files small enough to fit into an inode (i.e., inside a fileâs metadata). The goal of keeping the icons in the metadata is to reduce the disk reads needed to display a folder - it also each file to only require one disk read to display.This blog post examines the details of the HVIF format using a hex editor and the canonical parser's source code. In the process of dissecting an example icon, I'll also show you an optimization bug in the icon image editor.Great article.

OpenBSD 6.0 has been released, with tones of improvements. They're listing this one as one of the biggest changes:In their latest attempt to push better security practices to the software ecosystem, OpenBSD has turned W^X on by default for the base system. Binaries can only violate W^X if they're marked with PT_OPENBSD_WXNEEDED and their filesystem is mounted with the new wxallowed option. The installer will set this flag on the /usr/local partition (where third party packages go) by default now, but users may need to manually add it if you're upgrading. More details can be found in this email. If you don't use any W^X-violating applications, you don't need the flag at all.

Project Ara, Google's lofty vision of a modular smartphone with a vibrant third-party hardware ecosystem, is no more.A Google spokesperson confirmed today that the company has suspended its plan to bring the modular smartphone to market after nearly three years of development, following a revealing report from Reuters.I've always liked the idea of Project Ara, but I guess the technological challenges combined with the (I assume) limited consumer interest were too great to overcome.Too bad.

Reports have surfaced indicating that the Galaxy Note 7 launch has been delayed in parts of Europe - Germany in particular - as sales were set to commence this week. The news lands corresponding with multiple reports coming out of Korea that Samsung has plans to issue recalls for phones - anywhere from just some Exynos variants up to all Galaxy Note 7s that have been sold.I suggest free bumpers.

We are proud to announce that the PC-BSD project has evolved into TrueOS: a modern, cutting-edge distribution of FreeBSD focused on security, simplicity, and stability for desktops, servers, and beyond! TrueOS harnesses the best elements of PC-BSD, combines it with security technologies from OpenBSD, and layers it on top of FreeBSD to provide a complete system for modern machines.I'm a little confused - while there is mention of TrueOS on the PC-BSD homepage (it's their server offering), there's no mention of TrueOS being the successor or something along those lines to PC-BSD at all. Weird.

Matt Gardner, the director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, took a look at Tim Cook's terrible letter to EU consumers regarding Apple's tax evasion, and pretty much tears it to shreds.Apple created a complicated web of subsidiaries to avoid taxes, and the Irish government allowed it. Both the company and the country were complicit in this agreement. The idea that Ireland gave Apple guidance on "how to comply correctly with Irish tax law" makes both parties sound less guilty than they are. A better characterization would be that Apple cooked up a tax-dodging scheme, and Ireland allowed it.Further along, Gardner actually opens up a major can of worms, arguing that either Apple provided false figures in its annual report, or Tim Cook is lying in his letter to EU consumers:It doesn't appear to be even remotely truthful based on the numbers they publish in their annual reports. Each year they report that the majority of their profits are earned outside the U.S., with roughly a third (on average, over the past five years) coming from the U.S. When you look at the 10K, the annual report for 2015, you see the company reports earnings of $72 billion worldwide, and just one third of those profits are attributed to the U.S. And yet Cook's statement says that the vast majority of their income is taxed in the U.S.We think that is a very low estimate. It certainly appears that the company is shifting profits out of the U.S. and into tax havens overseas. So one of these things must not be true: Either the numbers presented to shareholders in their annual report are false, or Tim Cook's new statement that the majority of its profits are taxed in the U.S is false. They both can't be true.That's a bold claim to make, but it's hard, if not impossible, to argue with Gardner on this one. Since it's incredibly unlikely Apple is falsifying its annual reports, the most logical conclusion is that Tim Cook is lying in the open letter.Tim - if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

With the just released version 16.08, Genode makes the entirety of the framework's drivers, protocol stacks, and libraries available on the seL4 kernel. Thereby, the vision of a real general-purpose OS built upon a formally verified kernel suddenly becomes a tangible mission. Further highlights of the new version are the use of the framework to run VirtualBox 4 on the Muen separation kernel, an experimental version of VirtualBox 5 on top of the NOVA kernel, the added support for virtual networking and TOR, profound Zynq board support, and new tools for statistical profiling.The seL4 kernel is universally regarded as the world's most advanced open-source microkernel - not by technical merits alone but by the fact that the kernel is accompanied by formal proofs of its correctness. However, to achieve this high level of assurance, the kernel's responsibilities had to be reduced to an extreme that goes even beyond traditional microkernels. In particular, the kernel leaves the problem of managing kernel memory to be solved at the user level. The problem still exists but it isn't considered the kernel's problem anymore. Consequently, this kernel design makes the creation of a scalable user land extremely challenging. For this reason, most use cases of seL4 remain solely static in nature, or combine static components with virtualization. The real potential of seL4 to scale towards dynamic systems remained untapped so far. Here is where Genode comes into play. Genode is designed as a dynamic user land for microkernels, which addresses the management of memory at the user-level via a unique resource-trading concept. It turns out that this concept is a suitable answer to the kernel-management problem posed by seL4. By completing the implementation of the framework's base mechanisms for this kernel, literally hundreds of existing Genode components become readily available to the seL4 community.The Muen separation kernel is another take on the use of formal methods for assuring the absence of bugs in an OS kernel. In contrast to seL4, Muen applies different technologies (Ada/SPARK) and addresses static partitioned systems. A natural use case is the co-hosting of virtual machines. In a multi-level scenario, each virtual machine hosts a guest OS for editing documents at one security level. The separation kernel enforces the information-flow policy between the virtual machines. In such scenarios, the predominant guest OS is MS Windows. Consequently, Muen had to support the virtualization of such commodity OSes. Genode already solved this problem for another microkernel by making VirtualBox available on top of NOVA. So the idea was born to leverage Genode's version of VirtualBox on top of Muen - essentially using Genode as a runtime environment for VirtualBox. As crazy as it sounds - it works! The release documentation has a dedicated section that tells the full story. Speaking of VirtualBox, the ability to run VirtualBox directly on a microkernel is certainly a key feature of Genode. With Genode 16.08, a first version of VirtualBox 5 becomes available on the NOVA kernel.The anecdotes above highlight the benefits of Genode's cross-kernel portability. The new version pushes this idea even further by attaining binary compatibility across all the supported kernels for a given CPU architecture. In fact, compiled once, an ELF binary of a regular component can be natively executed on kernels as different as seL4 and Linux as long as the component does not rely on a special feature of a particular kernel.At a higher level, the current release extends the framework's library of ready-to-use building blocks in several areas. Most prominently, there are new network-related components for routing traffic, using TOR, and for distributing Genode over the network. Other added components are concerned with improving the use of Genode as a general-purpose OS, or to aid the optimization of components by the means of statistical profiling. Version 16.08 is further complemented with added board support for devices based on Xilinx Zynq, including drivers for GPIO, video DMA, SD cards, and I2C.These and many more topics are covered in detail by the release documentation of version 16.08.

But now, seven years later, Lenovo is introducing a new take on the tablet computer. No, Lenovo didn't make a Courier, but its new Yoga Book might inspire the same reactions. It's about the size and shape of a hardcover children's book, has two panels attached by a hinge, and can be used with your fingers or with its included pen. It even does some tricks with the pen that we've never seen before, like letting you write with real ink and have it all digitized. Lenovo didn't set out to build just another tablet with the Yoga Book - it wanted to make something that was better for getting work done than what is already out there.But in the process, it made a computer that's both futuristic and relatable at the same time, just like the original Courier concept. I wanted to use the Yoga Book from the first time I laid eyes on it, and if you're anything like me, you will, too. And unlike the Courier, you will actually be able to buy the Yoga Book.I have no idea how practical and usable the device will be, but I have to admit it looks really nice and futuristic, without being over the top. I'm definitely going to play with both the Android and Windows versions, because at â¬499, this isn't expensive.

Here's a simple truth we all probably know in the back of our minds - you don't need to get a new version of Android because not much will seem different. The home screen or app drawer may have a tweak or two, and there will be one feature we would like to have, but the apps we use are going to look and function the exact same. The things we do, like messaging or Facebook, won't use any of the new features developers have available for a while, and apps that do include the latest cool developer feature will be few and far between for quite a while.That sucks.Yeah. That really sucks. But there's nothing most of us can do about it since we're not building phone operating systems or apps ourselves. And we can't get mad at the developers who make the apps, because of another simple truth: phones not getting fast updates are hurting the Android platform.Google doesn't care.

The European Commission has concluded that Ireland granted undue tax benefits of up to â¬13 billion to Apple. This is illegal under EU state aid rules, because it allowed Apple to pay substantially less tax than other businesses. Ireland must now recover the illegal aid.That sound you hear? That's the sound of a house of cards tumbling down.There's quite a lot of misinformation on the web about this whole thing. First and foremost, the crux of the matter here is that it's the EU's job to protect the internal market, and to ensure that there's a level playing field between its various member states, and it does this through a number of regulations, laws, and codes that member states must adhere to. Whether you, personally, agree with this goal or not is irrelevant; Ireland is part of the EU single market and signed the dotted line - and this comes with the responsibility of implementing, adhering to, and upholding said regulations, laws, and codes.Second, the EU claims that the special deals the Irish government gave to Apple are a form of illegal state aid; something many other companies have been fined and punished for as well. It's just that with a company the size of Apple, and the extensiveness of the tax-lowering deal Ireland gave to Apple, the illegal state aid easily reaches monstrous proportions.Third, this isn't some EU manhunt or vendetta specifically targeting American companies; European companies have been fined time and time again for shady practices as well. And, just to be pedantic - technically speaking, Apple itself (the American company) isn't paying these taxes; various European shell companies owned and created by Apple are.Fourth, there's a distinct and clear public opinion in Europe - and in the US as well, see e.g. the rise and popularity of Bernie Sanders - that seemingly, laws do not seem to apply to the extremely rich and wealthy. The EU and various member state governments - including my own - are starting to adapt to public opinion, taking concrete steps to end these shady tax deals and tax avoidance schemes that allow large, wealthy companies to pay effectively little to no taxes, while us 'normal' people and small business owners pay our fair share.The main sticking point here is that the EU wants to makes sure that merely being rich and large should not give a company undue benefits that competitors simply cannot compete against. Proper capitalism only works when there's a level playing field where competition is based on merit, and not on who can dangle the biggest sack of money in front of the Irish or Dutch governments.Apple, in response, published a deeply American (i.e., overtly sappy tugging-at-the-heartstrings nonsense) and cringe-inducing open letter to European consumers, and, of course, the ruling will be appealed. I can't wait until Apple is brought to its knees and forced to pay the taxes it owes for participating in the EU single market and the use of our infrastructure.Google, Amazon, Starbucks, and everyone else, wherever from - you're next.

In a sane world, Unix vendors would have either replaced their version of more with the clearly superior less or at least updated their version of more to the 4.3 BSD version. Maybe less wouldn't have replaced more immediately, but certainly over say the next five years, when it kept on being better and most people kept preferring it when they had a choice. This would have been Unix evolving to pick a better alternative. In this world, basically neither happened. Unix fossilized around more; no one was willing to outright replace more and even updating it to the 4.3 BSD version was a slow thing (which of course drove more and more people to less). Eventually the Single Unix Specification came along and standardized more with more features than it originally had but still with a subset of less's features (which had kept growing).This entire history has led to a series of vaguely absurd outcomes on various modern Unixes.

Thor is an operating system created for learning purposes and for fun.It is currently a 64bit OS written mainly in C++, with few lines of assembly when necessary.There are lots of learning-oriented operating systems, and this is one of them. The more, the merrier.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is living at least a few years out ahead of anyone reading this post -- the founding executive told an audience in Rome (via Verge) today that he hopes to demonstrate his homeâs artificial intelligence system, which controls things like air conditioning, lighting and more based on things like face and voice recognition.The TechCrunch article is light on detail, but this project may be more interesting than it sounds at first blush. Zuckerberg isn't the first tech billionaire to sink a bunch of money into a fancy home automation project. Bill Gates famously did the same a couple of decades ago. High end homes all over the world have fancy and expensive home control systems, that provide their rich owners with frustration and hassle and absolutely confound houseguests. But these days, for a few hundred dollars, anyone can buy an Amazon Echo, any one of half a dozen automation hubs, and various switches, thermostats, and lightbulbs, and create a pretty nifty and convenient voice controlled home automation and entertainment system. Someone with the vision and the development budget that Mark Zuckerberg has at his disposal should be able, with readily available, inexpensive hardware, create something pretty amazing.

Computing old timers remember a world where computer games were decidedly lo fi. Linux Links has a list of the 21 best open source ASCII games, with screenshots and descriptions, for your nostalgic pleasure.

It's pretty much a given that the primary announcement will be the iPhone 7, reportedly with no analog headphone jack, possibly no physical home button, and hopefully with 32 GB storage in the base configuration. According to the rumor mill, the primary technological advance for the new iPhone will be a new camera system. There's some speculation that a new Apple Watch will be announced, but in my opinion what the Apple watch needs most is better software (upcoming in the WatchOS 3 release). The Watch has been pretty satisfying as a gadget, but ultimately disappointing as a platform, and a new hardware version is unlikely to reverse that trend. Many Mac fans are hoping that a new Macbook Pro will be announced, but there doesn't seem to be any concrete evidence of that, other than the fact that it's been so long since the last real MPB redesign. The rumors are based, I suspect, on wishful thinking. However, if Apple releases an updated Macbook Pro with an OLED touchscreen and Intel Skylake, people would be lining up to buy them. Apple's custom is to make its primary OS announcements at WWDC and focus on new devices in the fall, but I'm sure we'll get a bit of an update on iOS 10 and possibly WatchOS3.

Researchers discovered that a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) specification implemented in Linux creates a vulnerability that can be exploited to terminate connections and conduct data injection attacks.The flaw, tracked as CVE-2016-5696, is related to a feature described in RFC 5961, which should make it more difficult to launch off-path TCP spoofing attacks. The specification was formulated in 2010, but it has not been fully implemented in Windows, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD-based operating systems. However, the feature has been implemented in the Linux kernel since version 3.6, released in 2012.A team of researchers from the University of California, Riverside and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory identified an attack method that allows a blind, off-path attacker to intercept TCP-based connections between two hosts on the Internet.Researchers noted that data cannot be injected into HTTPS communications, but the connection can still be terminated using this method. One attack scenario described by the experts involves targeting Tor by disrupting connections between certain relays so that users are forced to use attacker-controlled exit relays.

Kaspersky has launched a brand new operating system, built from the ground up for use on routers and other hardware. Very little information is available in English right now, but The Register has a brief summary of what's been released about it in Russian.

The recent news of a savvy UAE-based activist thwarting an attempt to compromise his iPhone raises the important issue of state-based surveillance actors and their private sector contractors having sophisticated and effective ways of intercepting communication and using their targets' own devices against them. One problem with modern mobile computing technology is that it's been built around expansive and convenient features, with security and privacy as an afterthought. On the same day I learned about the iPhone exploit, I happened to listen to a re-run of a 2014 Planet Money podcast in which an NPR journalist volunteered to fall victim to his unencrypted internet traffic being captured and analyzed by experts, and what they were able to learn about him, and specifically about the sources and topics of a story he was working on, was alarming. As the podcast mentions, mobile OS vendors and online services are getting a lot better at encrypting traffic and obscuring metadata, and one of the primary reasons for this was Edward Snowden's revelations about the ubiquity and sophistication of the NSA's surveillance, and by extension, the dangers of surveillance from other state agencies, black hat hackers, and legions of scammers. The Snowden revelations hit Silicon Valley right in the pocketbook, so that did impel a vast new rollout of encryption and bug fixing, but there's still a long way to go.As a way of both highlighting and trying to fix some of the inherent vulnerabilities of smartphones in particular, Ed Snowden teamed up with famed hardware hacker Bunny Huang have been working on a hardware tool, specifically, a mobile phone case, that monitors the radio signals from a device and reports to the user what's really being transmitted. They explain their project in a fascinating article at PubPub.Mobile phones provide a wide attack surface, since their multitude of apps are sharing data with the network at all times, and even if the core data is encrypted, a lot can be gleaned from metadata and snippets of unencrypted data that leak through. Journalists and activists generally know this, and often use Airplane Mode when they're worried their location may be tracked. Problem is, when agencies are using spearphishing attacks to remotely jailbreak iPhones and install tracking software, and there are even fears that OS vendors themselves might be cooperating with authorities, Snowden and Huang set out to allow users to monitor their devices in a way that doesn't implicitly trust the device's user interface, which may be hiding the fact that it's transmitting data when it says it's not. The article goes into great detail about the options they considered, and the specific design they've worked down to, and it looks terrific.

Woz sat down with an interviewer from the Australian publication, The Conversation, recently, and discussed various issues around technology and current events. There's a video of the interview, and also a summary. If you're interested in learning more about Wozniak, there's a great interview with him from a few years ago on the Founders at Work site.

Ahmed Mansoor is an internationally recognized human rights defender, based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and recipient of the Martin Ennals Award (sometimes referred to as a âNobel Prize for human rightsâ). On August 10 and 11, 2016, Mansoor received SMS text messages on his iPhone promising ânew secretsâ about detainees tortured in UAE jails if he clicked on an included link. Instead of clicking, Mansoor sent the messages to Citizen Lab researchers. We recognized the links as belonging to an exploit infrastructure connected to NSO Group, an Israel-based âcyber warâ company that sells Pegasus, a government-exclusive âlawful interceptâ spyware product. NSO Group is reportedly owned by an American venture capital firm, Francisco Partners Management.The ensuing investigation, a collaboration between researchers from Citizen Lab and from Lookout Security, determined that the links led to a chain of zero-day exploits (âzero-daysâ) that would have remotely jailbroken Mansoorâs stock iPhone 6 and installed sophisticated spyware. We are calling this exploit chain Trident. Once infected, Mansoorâs phone would have become a digital spy in his pocket, capable of employing his iPhoneâs camera and microphone to snoop on activity in the vicinity of the device, recording his WhatsApp and Viber calls, logging messages sent in mobile chat apps, and tracking his movements.

Already more than a decade old and with roots reaching back half a decade before the World Wide Web itself, the GIF was showing its age. It offered support for a paltry 256 colors. Its animation capabilities were easily rivaled by a flipbook. It was markedly inferior to virtually every file format that had followed it. On top of that, there were the threats of litigation from parent companies and patent-holders which had been looming over GIF users for five long years before the fiery call to action. By Burn All GIFs Day, the GIF was wobbling on the precipice of destruction. Those who knew enough to care deeply about file formats and the future of the web were marching on the gates, armed with PNGs of torches and pitchforks.And yet, somehow, here we are. Seventeen years later, the GIF not only isn't dead. It rules the web.Sometimes, things just work - even if it sucks.

Ars has an in-depth review of Android 7.0 Nougat, so sit back, relax, and have fun.After a lengthy Developer Preview program starting in March, the final version of Android 7.0 (codenamed "Nougat") is finally launching today. The OS update will slowly begin to rollout to devices over the next few weeks. This year, Google is adding even more form factors to the world's most popular operating system. After tackling watches, phones, tablets, TVs, and cars, Nougat brings platform improvements aimed at virtual reality headsets and - with some help from Chrome OS - also targets laptops and desktops.For Android's primary platform (still phones and tablets), there's a myriad of improvements. Nougat brings a new multitasking split screen mode, a redesigned notification panel, an adjustable UI scale, and fresh emoji. Nougat also sports numerous under-the-hood improvements, like changes to the Android Runtime, updates to the battery saving "Doze" mode, and developer goodies like Vulkan and Java 8 support.

It's Android 7.0 Nougat day! Well, for the owners of a small number of Nexus devices, and even then, of a small subset of them, because of the staged rollout - well, for them, it's Android 7.0 Nougat day! If you have a Nexus 6, Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P, Nexus 9, Nexus Player, Pixel C or General Mobile 4G (Android One), you can try checking for updates starting today. Alternatively, you can manually install a factory image once they become available.Since Nougat's been out as a developer preview for a while - I've been running it on my 6P for months - I doubt any of you will be surprised by what Nougat brings to the table. It's a relatively small release compared to some other Android releases, but it still brings a number of interesting refinements and new features - the biggest of which is probably the new multiwindow feature.The Verge's got a review up, and mentions some of the less obvious features that I think are quite important:A lot of what's new in Nougat are features you can't really see. I'm talking about deeply nerdy (but important) stuff like a JIT compiler for ART apps and support for the Vulkan API for 3D graphics. The former should provide some performance gains while the latter will help Android games look way better. Google also fixed up the way Android handles media so that it's more secure, added file-based encryption, and added some features for enterprise users.Another important feature laying groundwork for the future: seamless updates. Starting with Nougat, Android will use two separate partitions so updates can be installed and applied in the background, so that the next time you reboot, it's ready to go.As always - no idea when any of you will get to use Nougat, but it's out there now.