OSnews

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.

Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. Google, widely regarded as the leader in the field, has been testing its fleet for several years, and Tesla Motors offers Autopilot, essentially a souped-up cruise control that drives the car on the highway. Earlier this week, Ford announced plans for an autonomous ride-sharing service. But none of these companies has yet brought a self-driving car-sharing service to market.Uber's Pittsburgh fleet, which will be supervised by humans in the driver's seat for the time being, consists of specially modified Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicles outfitted with dozens of sensors that use cameras, lasers, radar, and GPS receivers. Volvo Cars has so far delivered a handful of vehicles out of a total of 100 due by the end of the year. The two companies signed a pact earlier this year to spend $300â¯million to develop a fully autonomous car that will be ready for the road by 2021.The robotisation of transportation - personal, professional, commercial, and industrial - will be one of the most far-reaching and uprooting developments in recent human history. Transportation is a relatively large part of the workforce, and over the coming decades, many of those jobs will disappear - putting a huge strain on the economy and society.On top of that, car ownership will start to slow down, and since automated cars will make more efficient use of available road surface, we'll eventually get to the point where we need to rethink our entire infrastructure and the way we design our living space - only 60-70 years after the last time we completely rethought our living space.We've talked about this before, but The Netherlands completely redesigned (at least the western half of) the country for two things: one, to maximise agricultural production, and two, to prepare the environment for mass car ownership. We succeeded at the former (The Netherlands is the second largest exporter of agricultural products, after the US, but before Germany - despite our tiny surface area), but we only partially succeeded at the latter (traffic jams are a huge problem all over the country).As an aside: when I say "redesigned the country", I literally mean that the entire map was redrawn. This map should illustrate really well what the Dutch government, the agricultural sector, and industry agreed upon to do; the 'messy' part is the swampy, irregularly shaped way it used to look, while the straight and clean part is what they turned it into. Gone are the irregularly shaped, inefficient patches of farmland only navigable on foot and in boats, and in their place we got large, patches of land, easily reachable by newly drawn roads to make way for cars and trucks (still countless waterways though; they are crucial for making sure the entire western half of the country doesn't flood).My parents and grandparents lived through this massive redesign, and according to them, it's very difficult to overstate just how massive the undertaking really was.It's unlikely said redesign will be undone on a massive, regional scale, but at the local level, I can foresee countless pro-car infrastructure and landscaping changes being undone because it's simply not needed anymore. For instance, many towns in my area - including my own - used to have a waterway (like so) running alongside their Main Street (generally 'Dorpsstraat' in Dutch), but in order for a Main Street to be ready for cars, people had to walk elsewhere; the waterways were often filled up and turned into footpaths or sidewalks, so cars could drive on Main Street.Over the coming decades, I can definitely see such changes being undone in certain places - especially more tourist-oriented towns such as my own. With fewer and fewer cars on the roads, we can start giving space back to people, and while this may not be a big deal in a spacious country like the United States, it will be a revolution here in The Netherlands, the most densely populated western country (that isn't a city state), and in classic cities like, say, Rome or Amsterdam.All I'm trying to say is that self-driving car technology will, inevitably, have side-effects that many people simply haven't even considered yet. All of us consider cars a normal aspect of our everyday lives and environment, to the point where we've forgotten just how much space we've conceded to the things. Once the dominance of cars starts to come down like a house of cards, our environment will, quite literally, change. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

I am extremely excited to share that PowerShell is open sourced and available on Linux. (For those of you who need a refresher, PowerShell is a task-based command-line shell and scripting language built on the .NET Framework to help IT professionals control and automate the administration of the Windows, and now Linux, operating systems and the applications that run on them.) Iâm going to share a bit more about our journey getting here, and will tell you how Microsoft Operations Management Suite can enhance the PowerShell experience.

In their own side event this week, AMD invited select members of the press and analysts to come and discuss the next layer of Zen details. In this piece, we're discussing the microarchitecture announcements that were made, as well as a look to see how this compares to previous generations of AMD core designs.AnandTech - so the only article you'll need to read on Zen.

Three years ago (has it really been that long?), I published a quite detailed (and at times, mildly emotional) retrospective article on the history of Palm and the Palm OS, which I still think is a pretty decent read. For a different perspective on the matter, there's now an excellent article series at LowEndMac.Palm Computing was largely the creation and vision of one man, Jeff Hawkins. Palm first brought tablet computing to consumers in the form of PDAs (but was beaten by Apple and its scions). The later - and more momentous - goal was to bring consumers to PDAs through simple and very fast user interfaces. This second goal brought us the original Pilot and an entirely new form-factor that millions embraced.It was only until the introduction of multimedia-rich smartphones that Palm stumbled, though it was one of the leading manufacturers.An excellent different and detailed perspective on the history of Palm.

In light of our discussion a week ago about how computers have trouble with non-standard dialects and accents, it's interesting to note that according to Quartz, Google is recruiting Scottish people - through a third party company called Appen - to record their own voice.The tech giant is on the hunt for people with a Scottish accent to record a set of phrases to help improve its speech recognition software. An employee from speech technology company Appen - which has been contracted by Google - started the search by posting on Reddit, in hopes of finding Scots who will record their voices in return for £27 ($36). The task, which takes up to three hours, involves participants recording phrases such as "Indy now" or "Google, whatâs the time?"That's one way of doing it, I guess - but I just don't see how this will make any meaningful dent in broader terms. Getting relatively standard Google Now commands to better recognise people with Scottish accents is very welcome for our friends in the beautiful country of Scotland, but I don't think this will scale very well beyond a limited set of standard Google Now commands (I didn't call Siri and Google Now "slow and cumbersome command line interfaces" for nothing), let alone other English accents and dialects or those of other languages. Unless, perhaps, Google is planning on doing this for numerous dialects and languages, at which point I wish them good luck - they might be done with English by the time the sun explodes.

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update has begun rolling out for Windows 10 Mobile. The Anniversary Update includes additional features and improvements for your Windows 10 phone. To manually check for the update, on Start, swipe over to the All apps list, then select Settings > Update & security > Phone update > Check for updates. Note that availability may vary by manufacturer, model, country or region, mobile operator or service provider, hardware limitations and other factors.In other words, it'll be a crapshoot if and when Windows Phone users actually get the update. Not that it matters - most Windows Phone users have already had to move to different platforms due to Microsoft's horrid mismanagement of an otherwise incredibly promising operating system.

Intel has entered into a new licensing agreement with competitor ARM to produce ARM-based chips in Intel factories. The deal, announced today at the Intel Developer Forum, is a strategic move from the Santa Clara, CA company to offer its large-scale custom chip manufacturing facilities, which include 10-nanometer production lines, to third-parties, including those using its rival's technology.I have a ton of Intel ARM devices already. Perhaps Intel could call these new chips "XScale". Just thought that up. I'm kind of proud of it.

The Note 7 is Samsung's best device ever, and arguably the best big phone ever made. If that's all you're looking to know, then you can stop reading right now and go place your order. It will cost you $849 or more, depending on carrier, and can be preordered now. It will be available in stores starting on August 19th.But it's interesting to explore why the Note 7 is the best big phone ever. Samsung has more experience with big phones than any other company, and it is leveraging that to improve the big phone experience. It's the only company that's saying a big phone doesn't have to feel like a big phone or be saddled with compromises often associated with them. Samsung wants you to have your cake and eat it too, and that cakeâs flavor is the Note 7.I tried a big phone for the first time. I bought a Nexus 6P, set my iPhone 6S aside. While Android is without a doubt the superior platform compared to iOS, the Nexus 6P just isn't the right phone for me - it's just too big. Big phones are heavy phones, and the whole experience just left my frustrated and annoyed. So for now, I'm back to the iPhone 6S, because despite the inferior software, the smaller size is just a lot more pleasant.So, I gave the big phone so many people swear by a shot, and it didn't work out for me.

ReactOS 0.4.2 has been released, as part of the project's new, faster release cycle.Beyond the usual updates to external dependencies such as Wine and UniATA, much work has gone into refining the experience of using ReactOS, especially with respect to the graphical shell and the file explorer. Perhaps the most user visible change however is the ability now to read from and write to several Unix filesystems, namely ext family, ReiserFS, and UFS. Native built-in support for these filesystems should make for considerably easier interoperability than the current out-of-box experience provided by Windows, and there is more to come in the future.

At IDF in San Francisco today, Microsoft's Terry Myerson said that the Windows Holographic experience, including the shell used on the HoloLens hardware, will be made available as an update to the standard Windows 10 desktop operating system some time next year.Currently, the HoloLens runs a specialized variant of Windows. Desktop Windows offers many of the same APIs as the HoloLens, but the 3D user interface that mixes existing 2D apps with new 3D ones is only available on the augmented reality headset. Next year's update will make it available to all, opening it up not just to Microsoft's standalone device but also to hardware such as the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive that provide tethered virtual reality.Virtual reality and Microsoft's HoloLens stuff seems like great products for professional applications, but I'm still not sold on the current crop of devices having any broader appeal. Maybe five years from now.

I'm covering the topic of FreeRTOS and interrupts in my university lecture material. But I have seen so many wrong usage of interrupts with the RTOS that I think it deserves a dedicated article. The amazing thing I see many times: even if the interrupts are configured in a clearly wrong way, surprisingly the application 'seems' to work, at least most of the time. Well, I think everyone agrees that 'most of the time' is not good enough. Because problems with interrupts are typically hard to track down, they are not easy to fix.

Motorola and Element14 have launched a development kit for creating add-on modules for the new modular Moto Z smartphone, including an adapter for RPi HATs.We donât usually cover smartphones here at HackerBoards because most donât offer much opportunity for hardware hacking. Yet, Lenovoâs Motorola Mobility subsidiary has spiced up the smartphone space this week by announcing a modular, hackable âMoto Modsâ backplate expansion system for its new Android-based Moto Z smartphones.In addition, Motorola has teamed up with Element14 to offer a $125, hardware-based Moto Mods Development Kit for building custom Moto Mods. Using this, developers can build their own Moto Mods add-ons for applications such as infrared cameras, e-ink displays, game controllers and printers to metal detectors, inventory tag readers, blood pressure monitors, and air pollution sensors, says Element14.

The average selling price of a smartphone in India is just $132, half that of China, so the market for low-end smartphones is brisk. On top of that, there are many languages spoken in india, and support for them in Google's Android and iOS is limited. This created an opening for an Indus OS, which has its own app store with 30,000 Android apps, most available in two or more local languages. Its installed based is currently around 4 million.

A step-by-step guide on how to download, install, and start using Tails, the world's most secure platform.Tails, an encrypted and anonymous OS that bundles widely used open source privacy tools on a tiny device, is one of the most secure operating systems in the world. The Linux distribution rose to popularity when it was revealed Edward Snowden relied on Tails to secure his identity while sharing NSA secrets with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. In the past half decade, Tails has been embraced as an essential security suite by journalists, hackers, and IT workers.

A step-by-step guide on how to download, install, and start using Tails, the world's most secure platform.

On the eve of launch of the latest generation of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 we are reminded once again of Microsoft's failed Courier project, which was one of the first to propose a pen-first operating system.

On the eve of launch of the latest generation of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 we are reminded once again of Microsoftâs failed Courier project, which was one of the first to propose a pen-first operating system.

Unlike the last major update, which added support for remote streaming to Macs and PCs, the 4.00 firmware beta (codenamed Shingen) is mostly focused on tweaking the PS4âs user interface. One of the biggest changes is the ability to create folders to organize your games and apps, instead of relying purely on Sonyâs existing organizational tools. Another is that instead of taking over the whole screen, the Share and Quick menus will open as windows that donât entirely cover your current game or app, and youâll be able to add and remove items from the Quick menu to customize it.

Unlike the last major update, which added support for remote streaming to Macs and PCs, the 4.00 firmware beta (codenamed Shingen) is mostly focused on tweaking the PS4âs user interface. One of the biggest changes is the ability to create folders to organize your games and apps, instead of relying purely on Sonyâs existing organizational tools. Another is that instead of taking over the whole screen, the Share and Quick menus will open as windows that donât entirely cover your current game or app, and youâll be able to add and remove items from the Quick menu to customize it.

In the years that followed, the future seemed obvious. The number of Gopher users expanded at orders of magnitude more than the World Wide Web. Gopher developers held gatherings around the country, called GopherCons, and issued a Gopher T-shirt - worn by MTV veejay Adam Curry when he announced the network's Gopher site. The White House revealed its Gopher site on Good Morning America. In the race to rule the internet, one observer noted, "Gopher seems to have won out."Well, things turned out a little differently. Sadly, we tend to only remember the victors, not the ones lying in a ditch by the side of the road to victory.

Update: interesting summary of the repository - "So, the stack seems to be: Dart is the language for GUI apps, Flutter provides the widgets, and Escher renders the layers." Something intriguing: a new open source operating system from Google, Fuchsia, has found its way to Google's repositories. There's pretty much no information anywhere about this, and maybe I'm making way too much of this, but until we know more - anybody care to speculate?There's a Fuchsia file that just reads "Pink + Purple == Fuchsia (a new Operating System)", so that's not much help. There's documentation on the kernel, Magenta, which may be of more use - it reads, among other things, "Magenta targets modern phones and modern personal computers with fast processors, non-trivial amounts of ram with arbitrary peripherals doing open ended computation." There's probably a lot more documentation in the repository, but I don't have the proper background to infer too much from what's going on.Another very, very intriguing piece of information: it turns out several big names from the operating system industry (is that even a thing?) are involved - people who worked on NewOS, BeOS, Danger, iOS, and Palm's webOS, such as Travis Geiselbrecht and Brian Swetland.This could be "just" a research project, or something more. Very interesting.

Microsoft has inadvertently demonstrated the intrinsic security problem of including a universal backdoor in its software after it accidentally leaked its so-called "golden key" - which allows users to unlock any device that's supposedly protected by Secure Boot, such as phones and tablets.The key basically allows anyone to bypass the provisions Microsoft has put in place ostensibly to prevent malicious versions of Windows from being installed, on any device running Windows 8.1 and upwards with Secure Boot enabled.I am out of snarky remarks. Yes, it's possible.

There's a lot of words being written about the release of No Man's Sky, a long-awaited video game set in a procedurally generated universe with an effectively endless number of planets and lifeforms. The game has been in development by a relatively small team of developers for years, and the hype around the game reached epic proportions - to a point where it just became insane and crazy, with people clearly expecting way, way more of the game than it could ever deliver.Ars has taken a look at the course of the hype train, and this is the key paragraph for me:When Murray and Hello Games (as well as console publisher Sony) actually did show and talk about No Man's Sky, though, they were actually relatively restrained and realistic about what they were promising. Unlike Spore and Black and White - both of which saw saturation PR campaigns that promised revolutionary and industry-changing gameplay features that mostly didn't end up working out - it's hard to find many concrete promises made by No Man's Sky's developer and publisher that haven't ended up being true (with the possible exception of the multiplayer issue discussed above).And that's all she wrote, for me. I've been following the development for this game for years, and it's always been crystal clear for me what this game would offer: collecting resources, discovering new worlds and species, expanding the basic capabilities of your ship and tools, rinse and repeat, until eventually reaching the centre of the universe. That's what the developers promised, and that's what I'm expecting tomorrow when the PC version unlocks.All the additional hype around No Man's Sky comes from people themselves, and from stupid journalists hyping the game through the stratosphere without ever having played it. Had you stuck to what the developer and publisher have said over the course of the past number of years, instead of letting yourself get strung along the hype train by the press and Reddit, you'd know exactly what to expect tomorrow.

Adobe Flash Player played a pivotal role in the adoption of video, gaming and animation on the Web. Today, sites typically use technologies like HTML5, giving you improved security, reduced power consumption and faster page load times. Going forward, Chrome will de-emphasize Flash in favor of HTML5. Here's what that means for you.Today, more than 90% of Flash on the web loads behind the scenes to support things like page analytics. This kind of Flash slows you down, and starting this September, Chrome 53 will begin to block it. HTML5 is much lighter and faster, and publishers are switching over to speed up page loading and save you more battery life. You'll see an improvement in responsiveness and efficiency for many sites.Finally.

AlphaGo's surprising success points to just how much progress has been made in artificial intelligence over the last few years, after decades of frustration and setbacks often described as an "AI winter." Deep learning means that machines can increasingly teach themselves how to perform complex tasks that only a couple of years ago were thought to require the unique intelligence of humans. Self-­driving cars are already a foreseeable possibility. In the near future, systems based on deep learning will help diagnose diseases and recommend treatments.Yet despite these impressive advances, one fundamental capability remains elusive: language. Systems like Siri and IBM's Watson can follow simple spoken or typed commands and answer basic questions, but they can't hold a conversation and have no real understanding of the words they use. If AI is to be truly transformative, this must change.Siri, Google Now, or Cortana are more like slow and cumbersome command line interfaces than actual AIs or deep learning or whatever - they're just a shell to a very limited number of commands, a number of commands they can barely process as it is due to the terrible speech recognition.Language is incredibly hard. I don't think most people fully realise just how complex language can be. Back when I still had a job in a local hardware store in my area and I spent several days a week among people who spoke the local dialect, my friends from towns only mere kilometres away couldn't understand me if I went full local on them. I didn't actually speak the full dialect - but growing up here and working with people in a store every day had a huge effect on the pronunciation of my Dutch, to the point where friends from out of town had no idea what I was talking about, even though we were speaking the same language and I wasn't using any special or strange words.That breadth of pronunciation within the same language is incredibly hard to deal with for computers. Even though my town and the next town over are only about 1-2 kilometres apart, there's a distinct pronunciation difference with some words if you listen carefully to longtime residents of either town. It's relatively elementary to program a computer to recognise Standard Dutch with perfect AN pronunciation (which I can actually do if I try; my mother, who is from the area where Standard Dutch is from, speaks it naturally), but any minor variation in pronunciation or even voice can trip them all up - let alone accents, dialects, or local proverbs or fixed expressions.The question is, then, one that we have discussed before in my article on Palm and Palm OS:There are several key takeaways from Dimond's Stylator project, the most important of which is that it touches upon a crucial aspect of the implementation of handwriting recognition: do you create a system that tries to recognise handwriting, no matter whose handwriting it is - or, alternatively, do you ask that users learn a specific handwriting that is easier for the system to recognise? This would prove to be a question critical to Palm's success (but it'll be a while before we get to that!).If speech recognition is going to keep sucking as much as it does, today's engineers either have to brute-force it - throw tons of power at the problem - or ask of their users that they speak Standard Dutch or whatever it's called for your language when talking to their computers.I'm not optimistic for the coming 10-20 years.

It's time for a new version of Android, and that means I also get to make my yearly predictions about updates. Fun times!Now, to be sure, unless a manufacturer has already committed to updating an existing phone, these are simply (mostly) educated guesses. We base them on a company's track record, the capabilities of the phone itself, and the number of phones a company makes. It's sort of like a blogger version of reading tea leaves and calling the bookmakers. And it's fun. Even when we get it wrong it's fun.Since we're here because we are interested in Android, and most of us like to have a little fun, let's jump right in and answer the million dollar question - will my phone get updated to Android 7 Nougat?These articles are depressing.

Archive.org is continuing its mission to make a whole bunch of older software available online, in your browser, through emulation, with a whole slew of Amiga software - games, mostly, but also some general software, as well as, of course, a whole bunch of demos.The emulator in question is the Scripted Amiga Emulator, an emulator written in HTML5 and JavaScript. It's based on WinUAE and makes use of AROS' Kickstart replacement.

Fast forward to July 15, 2016 (thereâs that lab journal againâ¦) when, after receiving an email from Google asking me to indicate how exactly I would like them to use my data to customise adverts around the web, and after thinking for a bit about what kind of machine learning tricks I would be able to pull on you with 12 years of your email, I decided that I really had to make alternative plans for my little email empire.Somehow FastMail came up and in one of those impulsive LET'S WASTE SOME TIME manoeuvres, I pressed the big red MIGRATE button!The rest of this post is my mini-review of the FastMail service after almost 3 weeks of intensive use.I'm pretty sure at least some of you are contemplating a similar migration, away from companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple, to something else.