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Now here's a blast from the (somewhat recent) past: the Trinity Desktop Environment. TDE is a fork of the last available release of the KDE 3.x series, coming into existence in 2008. The project's been under steady development ever since, and the most recent release is R14.0.3. since this is just a maintenance release, it might be more fitting to look at the release notes for R14.0.0, the base release, from december 2014.Unlike previous releases TDE R14.0.0 has been in development for over two years. This extended development period has allowed us to create a better, more stable and more feature-rich product than previous TDE releases. R14 is brimming with new features, such as a new hardware manager based on udev (HAL is no longer required), full network-manager 0.9 support, a brand new compositor (compton), built-in threading support, and much more!Honestly, I have no idea how many people still see value in a maintained KDE 3.x desktop, but since I've personally always been a fan of KDE 3 (KDE 4 never really managed to convince me), I'm glad his project is still around offering the option for those among us who want to use KDE 3.

Apple announced on Thursday that it was working with the entertainer Will.i.am and two veteran TV executives, Ben Silverman and Howard T. Owens, on a new show that will spotlight the app economy."One of the things with the app store that was always great about it was the great ideas that people had to build things and create things," Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of Internet software and services, said in an interview.So a series about overworked, stressed out, underpaid, barely getting by developers who are at the mercy of Apple's approval and rejection process, and who worry about Apple stealing their idea, banning them, and then implementing said idea in iOS+1?So a drama, then. I'm sure 2009, when apps still mattered, is going to love this.

Two high-profile companies are shutting down development for two platforms this week. First, Facebook has announced it is ceasing development of the Facebook and WhatsApp applications for BlackBerry OS.The app landscape continues to evolve, and in ways that are not always within our control. Recently, Facebook made the decision to discontinue support of their essential APIs for BlackBerry and WhatsApp announced they would end support for BlackBerry 10 and BBOS at the end of 2016.In addition, Twitter announced it is ceasing development of its only application for desktop Windows, TweetDeck.To better focus on enhancing your TweetDeck experience, we'll no longer support a standalone Windows app. If you use Windows, you'll still be able to visit TweetDeck on the web - nothing is changing about TweetDeck itself, just where you access it from. This change will take effect on April 15th.TweetDeck was the only desktop Twitter client the company ever supported (it bought TweetDeck several years ago), and while it is far from perfect, it's the only desktop Twitter client that was halfway decent. Twitter never created a proper Win32 client, and neither did anyone else. They do have a Metro client developed by a third party, but it's pretty terrible and a horrible user experience on a desktop machine.Unlikely as it is, I'm still stubbornly holding out hope somebody creates a nice and elegant Win32 Twitter client, because with the shutdown of TweetDeck, I don't have any options for using Twitter on the computing platform I use the most (i.e., Windows).

As a follow-up to Genode's 16.02 release, the project just published an in-depth article describing the experience with the RISC-V architecture and the steps taken to enable Genode on this platform.The article is targeted at enthusiasts interested in the practical use of RISC-V and can also be used as a guideline on how to bring Genode to a different CPU architecture.

Yesterday, the government made a surprising retreat in the San Bernardino encryption case, after an unnamed source revealed a new method of breaking iPhone lockscreen protections. After a hastily assembled conference call, the parties agreed to put the court order on hold until it could be determined whether Apple's help was still necessary.But excerpts from a court transcript of that proceeding, published here for the first time, show the government was far less prepared for the new method than some have assumed. "We only learned about this possibility today, this morning," Assistant US Attorney Tracy Wilkison told the judge in the conference call. "We have a good faith basis at this point in order to bring it up." That timeline is consistent with recent court filings, which show the first successful demonstration of the method coming that Sunday.What a weird story. Jonathan Zdziarksi has a theory about the supposed hack.

Vizio, the successful American TV maker, has created a very interesting solution to the smart TV problem. Instead of building yet another smart TV platform or using Android TV, the company has worked very closely with Google these past two years to integrate Chromecast - renamed today to just Google Cast - right into the TV. Vizio then ships a pretty good Android tablet alongside their TV, with all the Google Cast stuff you already know from Chromecast built right in.The company's solution is the Vizio Tablet Remote, which isn't a remote at all: it's a six-inch tablet running stock Android Lollipop on an eight-core Snapdragon processor with a very nice 1080p screen, a soft-touch back, dual speakers, and a wireless charging cradle. It lacks any dedicated buttons to control the TV - it only turns into a "remote" when you open Vizio's new SmartCast app or kick off a streaming session from another app that supports Cast, like Hulu or Netflix.But you don't have to cast anything to the TV at all - after all, it's just an Android tablet. You can go ahead and watch Netflix on the Smart Remote if you want. You can download apps from the Play Store. You can cast Netflix to the TV and use the tablet to check Twitter. You can let a kid play games on the tablet and control the entire TV with the SmartCast app on your iPhone. The tablet is basically another small TV.This is exactly what a smart TV should be. I have a Chromecast - the current hockey puck model - and it's probably one of the best technology products I've ever owned. It's so simple and elegant, and it just works. Now that I have it, I can't imagine ever having gone without it. Instead of shoving yet another ugly box underneath my TV or learning and installing apps on yet another platform, I can just use the damn phone in my pocket. Why would I want it any other way?Vizio and Google have been smart about this whole thing too. The Google Cast portion of the TV is isolated from everything else, and updates comes straight from Google, so it's always up to date and in line with any other Google Cast device.The big upsaide for both Vizio and consumers? They don't have to worry at all about getting deals with content creators and owners.But by dropping any desire to put apps on the TV itself, Vizio completely sidesteps the platform war entirely. Every app in the Android and the iOS app stores that supports Google Cast is a P-Series app. And iOS and Android apps are the apps developers care about most, so they're often the best apps from a given service.That means when Netflix and Hulu update their Android and iOS apps, they're also updating the P-Series experience. Vizio doesn't need to beg HBO and ESPN to support its TVs anymore, because they already support Google Cast - and thus the P-Series. There's no NFL Sunday Ticket app for the Apple TV, but the iOS and Android apps support Cast, so P-Series owners can pay to stream football.Brilliant, and the future of smart TVs. These silly anachronistic glorified settop boxes like Android TV and the Apple TV? They are relics, old-world thinking. A TV should be a dumb screen ready to receive input from my phone or tablet, and Vizio built just that.All they need to do now is ship to Europe.

Apple's new iPad Pro is the twelfth iPad to be released since the original debuted back in 2010, and it borrows features from two of Apple's existing tablets. The new iPad Pro has the size and weight of the iPad Air 2 - 9.7-inches, which Apple notes is by far the most popular of its three iPad size choices - while bringing over the power and accessories of the 12.9-inch iPad Pro launched last year. (Yes, the new iPad Pro and the existing iPad Pro have the same name - you'll have to get used to identifying them by size.)Apple's event today was one of the most telling events it has held in years, and I specifically chose the new iPad Pro 9.7" to focus on. As far as products and announcements go, the event wasn't all that monumental; it was the tone and wording that really set this event apart from all others. This wasn't Apple talking about new products today - this was Apple talking about how it sees the future of personal computing.On several occasions during the event, Apple referred to the iPad Pro - both the new 9.7" model and the old 12.9" model - as their vision for the future of personal computing, and Tim Cook referred to the 12.9" model as a "giant step" toward the "future of computing".Read between the lines of today's event, and you could clearly see the writing on the wall: after letting the Mac and specifically OS X languish since the release of iOS, and after internal struggles about which of the two - or both - platforms to focus on going forward, it seems like Apple is letting the world know that it finally made a choice, and that choice is iOS.I'm not basing this solely on today's event, of course, but also on the lack of development on OS X, the lack of consistent Mac hardware updates over the years, and insights I'm getting from people who... Know Apple things better than we do. I already mentioned it in the previous news item, and I'm going to state it plainly and bluntly again to drive the point home: as far as Apple is concerned, the Mac and OS X are the past. Their eventual death won't be sudden or clear-cut, but the gradual decline of the platform's importance in Apple has been ongoing for a long time now, and will only accelerate from here on out.I'm not saying this is either good or bad - those of you who follow me on Twitter and are intimately aware of my 'life' with iOS can guess in which camp I belong - I'm just spelling out what's pretty obvious between the lines. I'll leave it up to you if this makes you happy or sad.We've got an interesting number of years ahead.

As a major update to the iOS 9 operating system, iOS 9.3 introduces several new functions, important bug fixes, and feature refinements. Perhaps the biggest change is the introduction of Night Shift mode, designed to reduce the amount of blue light iOS users are exposed to in the evening by shifting the iPhone or iPad display to a warmer (yellower) color spectrum.Still the only major upside for me to switching from Android to iOS: I already have iOS 9.3 installed.

We'll get to the instructions, but first let's talk about what's actually here. Freeform Window Mode is just what we imagined. It's a dead ringer for Remix OS - multiple Android apps floating around inside windows - and might be the beginnings of a desktop operating system. It works on Android N phones and tablets, and once the mode is enabled, you'll see an extra button on thumbnails in the Recent Apps screen. To the right of the "X" button that pops up after a second or two, there will be a square shape - the same ugly placeholder art Google used for the split screen mode in the Android M Developer Preview.Press the square symbol for an app and you'll be whisked away to a screen showing that app in a floating window that sits on top of your home screen wallpaper. The windows aren't floating above the Android desktop; it's just a blank wallpaper without any of your icons or widgets. The floating apps all have title bars like in Recent Apps. You can drag the apps around by the title bars or use the close and maximize buttons. Apps can be resized exactly how you would expect - press or hold on the edge of and all and move your finger, and you'll see the app change shape. Just like in split screen mode, apps will auto-switch between their tablet and phone layouts (with some apps dealing with this better than others). You can only resize in one direction at a time though; there doesn't seem to be a corner hotspot that will let you adjust the width and height.It's honestly kind of amazing that we get to see both Apple and Google work on scaling up their mobile operating systems for desktop use, with the eventual end goal of replacing Chrome OS and OS X (get used to it, people - OS X is on its way out), and unify everything from desktop, to laptop, to tablet, to phone, in a single user interface that scales from top to bottom.It's what Microsoft tried to do by scaling down, which honestly didn't pan out very well. We'll see if scaling up is a better approach, but exciting and interesting as it is to see this take shape before our very eyes, I still have my considerable doubts.

What's inside a counterfeit Macbook charger? After my Macbook charger teardown, a reader sent me a charger he suspected was counterfeit. From the outside, this charger is almost a perfect match for an Apple charger, but disassembling the charger shows that it is very different on the inside. It has a much simpler design that lacks quality features of the genuine charger, and has major safety defects.Fascinating article, and much like his teardown of a real MacBook charger, filled with interesting information. It also comes with a warning: don't use counterfeit chargers. You may save a few euros, but it could easily cost you much more than that if things go bad.

Redox is a general purpose operating system and surrounding ecosystem written in pure Rust. Our aim is to provide a fully functioning Linux replacement, without the bad parts.We have modest compatibility with Linux syscalls, allowing Redox to run many Linux programs without virtualization.We take inspiration from Plan9, Minix, and BSD. We are trying to generalize various concepts from other systems, to get one unified design. We will speak about this some more in the Design chapter.Redox runs on real hardware today.

Technology companies could face civil penalties for refusing to comply with court orders to help investigators access encrypted data under draft legislation nearing completion in the U.S. Senate, sources familiar with continuing discussions told Reuters on Wednesday.

The first killer app, VisiCalc, came out in 1979. It turned an ordinary Apple II into a financial planning tool that was more powerful and flexible than anything the world had ever seen. A refined version of this spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3, became the killer app that put IBM PCs in offices and homes around the world. The Macintosh, which floundered in 1985 after early adopter sales trailed off, found a profitable niche in the new world of desktop publishing with two killer apps: Aldus Pagemaker and Adobe Photoshop.To keep up with the Joneses, the Amiga needed a killer app to survive - it found one with the Video Toaster.This series has been running for a long, long time, and is still every bit as great.

When former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was pushing to get a waiver allowing her to use a BlackBerry like President Barack Obama back in 2009, the National Security Agency had a very short list of devices approved for classified communications. It was two devices built for the Secure Mobile Environment Portable Electronic Device (SME PED) program. In fact, those devices were the only thing anyone in government without an explicit security waiver (like the one the president got, along with his souped-up BlackBerry 8830) could use until as recently as last year to get mobile access to top secret encrypted calls and secure e-mail.Despite $18 million in development contracts for each of the vendors selected to build the competing SME PED phones (or perhaps because of it), the resulting devices were far from user-friendly. The phones - General Dynamics' Sectéra Edge and L3 Communications' Guardian - were not technically "smart phones," but instead were handheld personal digital assistants with phone capability, derived from late 1990s and early 2000s technology that had been hardened for security purposes - specifically, Windows CE technology.This is an absolutely fascinating piece of technological history here. Can you imagine using one of these monstrous things?

Today, we're pleased to begin the roll-out of Windows 10 Mobile to select Windows Phone 8.1 devices. There are a lot of great new features in Windows 10 Mobile, like Continuum, Windows Hello and Cortana.The current list is restricted to a subset of Lumia devices, and it seems like the first generation of Windows Phone 8.x devices - such as my HTX 8X - won't be getting the Windows 10 update. Microsoft will also disable insider builds for these first generation devices.

Icaros Desktop 2.1 might be named "the handlers release", but also "the YouTube one", since the best enhancement over the previous versions are the addition of new NTFS and EX-FAT filesystem handlers and the free, read-only version of GoogleDrive handler, a "driver" which allows to mount your Google Drive handler onto AROS as if it was a normal USB stick or a CD-ROM. But that's not the only good news: we've talked bout YouTube because Deadwood did the miracle again, and we can now enjoy HTML5 video as well, playing your favourite contents from YouTube and other sites. But there have been lots of little/big additions, fixed and enhancements.Icaros Desktop is a 'distribution' of AROS, the easiest (and cheapest, as in free) way to get a taste of an AmigaOS-like operating system on generic hardware.

The attack, which was targeted at US users, hit websites including the New York Times, the BBC, AOL and the NFL over the weekend. Combined, the targeted sites have traffic in the billions of visitors.The malware was delivered through multiple ad networks, and used a number of vulnerabilities, including a recently-patched flaw in Microsoft's former Flash competitor Silverlight, which was discontinued in 2013.That's why we have adblockers.

I'm happy to announce that Qt 5.6.0 has been released today! This release has taken a bit longer to finish than we originally expected, mostly because we put a lot of new infrastructure in place, allowing us to make Qt 5.6 a Long Term Supported (LTS) release. With that, Qt 5.6 (LTS) will be receiving patch releases with security updates and bug fixes for the next three years, in parallel to upcoming Qt versions.

Linux 4.5 has been released. This release adds a new copy_file_range() system call that allows to make copies of files without transferring data through userspace; experimental Powerplay power management for modern Radeon GPUs; scalability improvements in the Btrfs free space handling; support GCC's Undefined Behavior Sanitizer (-fsanitize=undefined); Forwarded Error Correction support in the device-mapper's verity target; support for the MADV_FREE flag in madvise(); the new cgroup unified hierarchy is considered stable; scalability improvements for SO_REUSEPORT UDP sockets; scalability improvements for epoll, and better memory accounting of sockets in the memory controller. There are also new drivers and many other small improvements. There are also new drivers and many other small improvements. Here is the full list of changes.

The wall separating "foreign" intelligence operations from domestic criminal investigations has finally, fully collapsed. The FBI is now acting on a rule change initiated by the Bush administration, and finally massaged into actionable policy by Obama: Now, FBI agents can query the NSA's database of Americans' international communications, collected without warrants pursuant to Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act. That law put congress' stamp of approval on the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, which was widely denounced as totalitarian when the New York Times' James Risen exposed it to the world in 2005.Remember when they told us this wouldn't be a slippery slope?Cute.

The major new architectural feature of this release has been the introduction of the Qubes Management infrastructure, which is based on the popular Salt management software.In Qubes 3.1, this management stack makes it possible to conveniently control system-wide Qubes configuration using centralized, declarative statements. Declarative is the key word here: it makes creating advanced configurations significantly simpler. (The user or administrator needs only to specify what they want to get, rather than how they want to get it).

Security update package MS16-023 for Internet Explorer doesn't only contain security patches, but also a few other things, including: "This update adds functionality to Internet Explorer 11 on some computers that lets users learn about Windows 10 or start an upgrade to Windows 10."Ghacks.net writes:Microsoft does not reveal what this means, or what this has to do with Internet Explorer. According to Woody Leonhard over at Infoworld, the update pushes a banner on Internet Explorer 11's New Tab Page advertising the company's new operating system Windows 10.Unfortunately the ads can't be uninstalled without uninstalling the whole security update package.

If you've got access to the Firefox browser, load up the 3DNES emulator right now and witness some actual techno-magic, as ROMs of 2D NES games are transformed into fully 3D experiences. It's half inspiring, half terrifying.Quite fascinating. Do we have any experts in here who could explain how the developer is achieving this?

Just a random Wednesday in March, and Google releases the first Android N developer preview. The biggest new feature in this Android N developer preview is, as Google promised, multiwindow.Multi-window - A new manifest attribute called android:resizableActivity is available for apps targeting N and beyond. If this attribute is set to true, your activity can be launched in split-screen modes on phones and tablets. You can also specify your activity's minimum allowable dimensions, preventing users from making the activity window smaller than that size. Lifecycle changes for multi-window are similar to switching from landscape to portrait mode: your activity can handle the configuration change itself, or it can allow the system to stop the activity and recreate it with the new dimensions. In addition, activities can also go into picture-in-picture mode on devices like TVs, and is a great feature for apps that play video; be sure to set android:supportsPictureInPicture to true to take advantage of this.As you can see in the video The Verge has up, the multiwindow feature is fairly straightforward, and it looks quite smooth considering it's a beta - see the video on The Verge, or this one for a tablet view. Unlike iOS, the feature is not restricted to just certain tablets; multiwindow on Android N is available on both phones and tablets, in landscape and in portrait.There's a number of other new features as well, such as improvements to the power-saving Doze feature, notification grouping (finally!), direct replies to notifications, several Java 8 language features, and more. Digging a little deeper into the changes, there's an interesting tidbit about future releases possibly bringing an end to unbound background services.You can install the Android N developer preview on a Nexus 5X, 6, 6P, 9, 9G, Player, and the Pixel C. You can also enroll your device in Android's new beta program, allowing you to upgrade your device using over-the-air updates, so you don't lose all your data. This program will go live later today.

The sad news promulgated several days ago that Ray Tomlinson passed away on Saturday, March 5th. Most known for his invention of email, Ray also contributed heavily to ARPANET, TENEX, and many other projects. He was one of the many great pioneers in the early days of digital computing technology who helped shape the world as we know it today. While much of his work and many of his contributions have already passed into obscurity due to the ever expanding, glamorous universe of modern technology, his memory still stands as a testament to what the people in our industry are capable of accomplishing even without any precedents. So long, Ray, and thanks for all the email.One of the stark realities that becomes more clear from Ray's passing is that many of the technological frontiersmen from the 60s and 70s are closer to the end of their lives than they are to their prime. Another decade or so, and the generation that largely laid the foundation upon which western society in many aspects currently rests will no longer be with us.

Today I'm excited to announce our plans to bring SQL Server to Linux as well. This will enable SQL Server to deliver a consistent data platform across Windows Server and Linux, as well as on-premises and cloud. We are bringing the core relational database capabilities to preview today, and are targeting availability in mid-2017.So this is happening. I feel a little cold all of a sudden.

Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering at Apple, penned this opinion piece in the Washington Post.That's why it's so disappointing that the FBI, Justice Department and others in law enforcement are pressing us to turn back the clock to a less-secure time and less-secure technologies. They have suggested that the safeguards of iOS 7 were good enough and that we should simply go back to the security standards of 2013. But the security of iOS 7, while cutting-edge at the time, has since been breached by hackers. What's worse, some of their methods have been productized and are now available for sale to attackers who are less skilled but often more malicious.To get around Apple's safeguards, the FBI wants us to create a backdoor in the form of special software that bypasses passcode protections, intentionally creating a vulnerability that would let the government force its way into an iPhone. Once created, this software - which law enforcement has conceded it wants to apply to many iPhones - would become a weakness that hackers and criminals could use to wreak havoc on the privacy and personal safety of us all.I can't emphasize enough how important it is to stand side-by-side with Apple on this one. In France, they just voted to put technology executives of companies unwilling to decrypt their products in jail.

Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering at Apple, penned this opinion piece in the Washington Post.That's why it's so disappointing that the FBI, Justice Department and others in law enforcement are pressing us to turn back the clock to a less-secure time and less-secure technologies. They have suggested that the safeguards of iOS 7 were good enough and that we should simply go back to the security standards of 2013. But the security of iOS 7, while cutting-edge at the time, has since been breached by hackers. What's worse, some of their methods have been productized and are now available for sale to attackers who are less skilled but often more malicious.To get around Apple's safeguards, the FBI wants us to create a backdoor in the form of special software that bypasses passcode protections, intentionally creating a vulnerability that would let the government force its way into an iPhone. Once created, this software - which law enforcement has conceded it wants to apply to many iPhones - would become a weakness that hackers and criminals could use to wreak havoc on the privacy and personal safety of us all.I can't emphasize enough how important it is to stand side-by-side with Apple on this one. In France, they just voted to put technology executives of companies unwilling to decrypt their products in jail.

On March 4, we detected that the Transmission BitTorrent client installer for OS X was infected with ransomware, just a few hours after installers were initially posted. We have named this Ransomware "KeRanger." The only previous ransomware for OS X we are aware of is FileCoder, discovered by Kaspersky Lab in 2014. As FileCoder was incomplete at the time of its discovery, we believe KeRanger is the first fully functional ransomware seen on the OS X platform.Attackers infected two installers of Transmission version 2.90 with KeRanger on the morning of March 4. When we identified the issue, the infected DMG files were still available for downloading from the Transmission site Transmission is an open source project. It's possible that Transmission's official website was compromised and the files were replaced by re-compiled malicious versions, but we can't confirm how this infection occurred.Fascinating hack - they basically compromised the Transmission website to upload infected installers. And it worked, too.Update: Apple has shut down the exploit by revoking the compromised app's certificate.

Tim Sweeney, co-founder Epic Games and architect of the Unreal engine, isn't happy with Microsoft's new Universal Windows Platform:With its new Universal Windows Platform (UWP) initiative, Microsoft has built a closed platform-within-a-platform into Windows 10, as the first apparent step towards locking down the consumer PC ecosystem and monopolising app distribution and commerce.[...]This isn't like that. Here, Microsoft is moving against the entire PC industry - including consumers (and gamers in particular), software developers such as Epic Games, publishers like EA and Activision, and distributors like Valve and Good Old Games.Microsoft has launched new PC Windows features exclusively in UWP, and is effectively telling developers you can use these Windows features only if you submit to the control of our locked-down UWP ecosystem. They're curtailing users' freedom to install full-featured PC software, and subverting the rights of developers and publishers to maintain a direct relationship with their customers.Microsoft was given the opportunity to respond in another The Guardian article, stating:In response to Sweeney's allegations, Kevin Gallo, corporate vice president of Windows at Microsoft, told the Guardian: "The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store. We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX required."We'll see how this plays out, but Microsoft has a horrible history when it comes to these things.

Today saw the deadline for amicus briefs in the heated iPhone security trial, and several companies and interested parties took the opportunity to make their case before the court.The most significant brief came from Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Evernote, and nine other major firms, which emphasized the severe harm that would come from court-initiated mandate as opposed to a more considered legislative action. "[The signed companies] pride themselves on transparency with the public, particularly with respect to sensitive issues such as disclosing usersâ data," the decision reads. "A boundless All Writs Act could cripple these efforts."Twitter, Reddit, Github, Ebay, and CloudFlare also submitted a brief with 12 other startup companies, emphasizing the values of privacy and transparency in online services. "If the government is able to compel companies to break their own security measures," the companies write, "the users of those companies will necessarily lose confidence that their data is being handled in a secure, open manner."Good. Virtually the entire technology industry is siding with Apple on this one.

File this one under "Obscure problems that could ruin your day." TidBITS reader Randy Singer reports that due to an expired certificate, OS X installers downloaded prior to 14 February 2016 won't work.The Apple Worldwide Developer Relations Intermediate Certificate is required for all apps in the Mac App Store, including OS X installers. When used to sign an app, the certificate enables OS X to confirm that the app has not been corrupted or modified by an attacker. This certificate expired on 14 February 2016, causing error dialogs and preventing some apps from launching. Most apps affected have already been updated with the new certificate. But if you downloaded an OS X installer in case of trouble, you may be in for a surprise the next time you try to use it.Take note.

One question we were dying to ask is he sees a future for the Oculus Rift with Apple computers. When asked if there would ever be Mac support for the Rift, Palmer responds by saying "That is up to Apple. If they ever release a good computer, we will do it."Palmer continues to clarify what he meant by that blunt statement by saying "It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn't prioritize high-end GPUs. You can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro with the top of the line AMD FirePro D700, and it still doesn't match our recommended specs. So if they prioritize higher-end GPUs like they used to for a while back in the day, we'd love to support Mac. But right now, there's just not a single machine out there that supports it."Harsh, but true. This simply isn't a market Apple is serving right now. Note: I'm not saying they should, just that they don't.

Volvo recently conducted a survey and asked consumers about their perceptions of self-driving cars. The question that stood out to me was whether a car company like Volvo or a technology company (Google, unnamed) was best positioned to bring safe self-driving cars to the market. Volvo was obviously fishing for a particular answer, and while they certainly have a vaunted reputation for technical innovation in the service of safety, I'm afraid I can't go along with the answer they're hoping for, partially because safety is only part of the story. In my opinion, no car company working alone is going to be able to produce a self-driving car with the kind of usability that consumers will expect. And for self-driving cars, usability is just as important as safety. In fact, they're inseparable. Read more on this exclusive OSNews article...

iOS developer house Pixite decided to give full access to the entire company to Casey Newton.This past December, Kaneko emailed me out of the blue. He didn't know it then, but I'm a fan of the company's apps: Fragment, which applies prismatic effects to photos, is one of my favorite artistic tools. "As an independent bootstrapped app company, we are struggling," Kaneko wrote. "If things don't turn around, we'll need to lay off half of our staff in the next few months." He invited me to come to San Diego and observe the struggle up close. Kaneko would open up Pixite's books and share every piece of data that I requested while, over the course of two days, his team locked itself in a room and attempted to chart a path forward. Pixite would either figure it out or die.For years now, I've been skeptical here on OSNews about the sustainability of the application store model. After the initial gold rush, Apple (or Google, for that matter) clearly had absolutely no clue what to do with the application store model to keep it sustainable after the gold rush ran out. Even today, after the languishing application store model utterly gutted the independent developer field and has caused tremendous harm to small developers, the two mobile heavyweights still seem utterly oblivious as to what to do going forward.And now that both Apple and Google are trying to scale their mobile operating systems up from Facebook and Candy Crush to actual, serious work, everyone is finally starting to realise what a small number of skeptics warned about so many years ago: there's no more money, incentive, or trust in the application store model for developers to create the kind of applications a scaled-up iOS and Android running on laptops or laptop-like devices would need.This year is going to be incredibly fascinating. I have no doubt that Apple and Google will be able to scale iOS and Android up for work. The real question, though, is if they'll be able to convince weary developers to invest in the application store model again.I think it's too late. Either there's going to be deep, sweeping changes to how we distribute and sell applications on these platforms, or they will be forever confined to consumption.

What follows is an unordered list of things I'd like to see from Apple over the next few years, starting with the easy & obvious things upfront. Most of these have Radars filed against them, but since they're more often than not dupes of existing Radars I won't post the numbers here. Most of this is about iOS, but not all - I'll say upfront that I don't think OS X has a future with the way it's going currently, and has been running on fumes for most of iOS' lifetime.A great wishlist by Steven Troughton-Smith. Mind you, Steven is someone firmly in the camp that sees iOS as the only way forward for Apple - suffice it to say, I have my reservations about that - so it should be no surprise that many things on this list are focused on making iOS more powerful and versatile.

With version 16.02, the Genode OS Framework moves beyond x86 and ARM CPUs and embraces the emerging open-source RISC-V hardware architecture. Furthermore, the release comes with the new ability to securely assign USB devices to virtual machines, and updates the Muen separation kernel and the seL4 microkernel.Today's x86 and ARM-based commodity platforms have become increasingly opaque and infested with proprietary firmware. With new platforms becoming ever more complex and being equipped with mandatory companion processors like Intel's Management Engine, the trustworthiness of mainstream hardware becomes more and more uncertain. If those parts of the system become compromised, even a perfectly secure OS cannot protect the user's privacy and security. It goes without saying that this development is a strong concern of privacy advocates. The article Intel x86 considered harmful by Joanna Rutkowska substantiates those concerns extremely well.RISC-V is a possible answer to the call for trustworthy hardware. In contrast to the CPUs of current-generation hardware, RISC-V is an open-source CPU architecture. The idea of open-source CPUs is not new. There exist numerous softcore CPUs like LatticeMico32 or OpenRISC. But in contrast to those projects, which are primarily targeted at FPGA platforms, RISC-V is designed to scale from deeply embedded systems to 64-bit general-purpose platforms. The prospect of a scalable and trustworthy hardware architecture motivated the Genode project to take a closer look. In the just-released version 16.02, RISC-V has been added as a supported architecture to Genode's custom base-hw kernel. Since the hardware is still in flux, the scope of the support is still somewhat limited. But Genode is already able to run on the official Spike simulator as well as on RISC-V as a synthesized FPGA softcore.Besides the added RISC-V support, the second highlight of the current release is the new ability to securely assign USB devices to VirtualBox instances running on top of the NOVA kernel. With this feature, Genode becomes able to accommodate many typical desktop-OS work flows like transferring data via USB sticks, or obtaining pictures from a digital camera. Under the hood, the implementation is quite interesting as it successfully transplants the xHCI device model of Qemu to VirtualBox.The third focus of version 16.02 is the update of the Muen and seL4 kernels. The Muen separation kernel has been updated to version 0.7, which greatly improves the interoperability with Genode's tooling. In fact, Muen can now be targeted with the same work flows as employed for all the other kernels. Genode's support for the seL4 kernel is still a rather experimental line of work. In this respect, the update to the kernel version 2.1 posed a number of interesting challenges with respect to the kernel-resource management. This discussion along with details about the many more improvements of the current release is covered in the official release documentation.

Ubuntu's announcement about inclusion of ZFS support in upcoming 16.04 LTS started an important discussion in opensource community: the license incompatibility between GPL and CDDL licenses may be an issue. Being a copyleft license, GPL requires that all works that are derived from GPL-licensed work are also distributed under terms of GPL. CDDL, the license of ZFS code, is also a copyleft license, and as such requires CDDL-licensed work be distributed "only under the terms of [CDDL]." Although Ubuntu's ZFS code comes from OpenZFS project, Oracle is still one of the major copyright holders of the code base, and it does not seem likely to relicense its assets under GPL any time soon.Dustin Kirkland of Ubuntu, the author of the announcement, explained Canonical's position, albeit light on details: The CDDL cannot apply to the Linux kernel because zfs.ko is a self-contained file system module -- the kernel itself is quite obviously not a derivative work of this new file system. And zfs.ko, as a self-contained file system module, is clearly not a derivative work of the Linux kernel but rather quite obviously a derivative work of OpenZFS and OpenSolaris. Equivalent exceptions have existed for many years, for various other stand alone, self-contained, non-GPL kernel modules.Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC), a non-profit with self-assigned mission of carrying on a crusade against GPL violations, quickly pointed out that the "obvious" conclusions of Canonical are not really all that obvious:[I]f ZFS were statically linked with Linux and shipped as a single work, few would argue it was not a "work based on the Program" under GPLv2. And, if we believe there is no legal difference when we change that linking from static to dynamic, we conclude easily that binary distribution of ZFS plus Linux - even with ZFS in a .ko file - constitutes distribution of a combined work.Another non-profit organization - Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) - provides yet another opinion on the matter. Eben Moglen points out that CDDL permits distribution of binaries under other licenses, so in case of Linux module GPL's requirements in case of binary module may be fullfilled by distributing it under GPL. Admittedly, this does not solve the issue of the license incompatibility of the code bases. The proposed solution is basically to ignore the wording of GPL's viral clause:In this specific sense, then, the conduct which falls outside the words of GPLv2 falls within the "equity of the license," or its "spirit." As all Western legal systems have known since Aristotle, literal interpretation of any legal material will sometimes produce unintended unjust results, which can and should be corrected by the invocation of "equity." This present issue is evidently an example in which the tension between literal and equitable interpretation is raised, and it is the consensus of the kernel copyright holders' intention which determines which mode of interpretation is to be employed.The issue of GPL compatibility and kernel modules' licensing arised before. For example, Linus Torvalds already noted that kernel modules are in "gray area" when it comes to the issue of derived worked. Using an example of Andrew filesystem he stated that external code base that was designed on different system and only required minimal porting effort due to interface similarities, in his opinion, was not a derived work of Linux. Even more appropriate example is Nvidia's infamous proprietary Linux driver, which interfaces the kernel via specially-crafted module that abstracts away Linux kernel implementation details, so that Nvidia's binary blob may still considered to be a self-contained work targetting module's interface, not the interfaces of Linux. This driver is widely used and generally tolerated by distributions.The differences in these two positions reveal the two conflicting opinions on Linux copyright situation. SFLC is more concerned about the ability of opensource ecosystem to survive in face of fanatic GPL enforcement: their statements goes into painful details about difficulties that projects with permissive licenses are facing when they need to maintain the ports of their code in GPLed projects. If stictly enforced, GPL could hinder such projects to the point when whole ecosystem comes to net loss. Such situation could be particularly painful in cases like this, when the goals of GPL are met, but the legal mechanism that was chosen by opensource Foundation prevents both Linux and OpenZFS from cross-polination.But on the other hand, making such excuses would open gates for projects that don't really contribute to the opensource, but only use it to their own benefit. While proponents of permissive licenses (myself included) don't find anything wrong with such outcome, GPL was specifically designed to prevent it, and that is why it is one of the most popular opensource licenses out there. Obviously, every concession weakens the position of those seeking GPL enforcement, including SFC, whose mission right now is endangered by both SFLC's and Canonical's views on ZFS integration into Linux. Being a self-styled GPL crusader with several battles already fought, SFC knows that the ZFS inclusion in Ubuntu may come at a price of legal actions lost, and potentially tolanted hackers driven out of opensource by frustration and disappointment.There is another interesting angle to this situation: by now it is common knowledge that Sun Microsystems specifically designed CDDL to be incompatible with GPL, so that ZFS, while being opensource, could not be included with Linux. Shipping ZFS with Ubuntu would defeat this tactics and potentially remove motivation for such unfortunate choice of license for companies like Sun or Oracle, to benefit of all involved sides.And yet another thing to consider: some (most?) jurisdictions explicitly require sticking with literal meanings of laws and contracts. This means that even if SFLC's position is defendable in United States, it might be dismissed in other parts of the world, giving Linux copyright holders ability to sue Canonical over copyright infringement. Given that Oracle holds copyright in both Linux and OpenZFS, and that it already demonstrated willingness to take legal actions against opensource projects, Canonical might still be under significant risk.At any rate, the outcome of this discussion, if any, have potential to settle a long-standing issue in opensource community, and to make legal implications of using GPL more transparent and clear.

HoloLens is fully untethered and self-contained. It's the only device that enables holographic computing natively with no markers, no external cameras, no wires, no phone required, and no connection to a PC needed. And it's a Windows 10 device - the interface is familiar, and connected by the power of a unified ecosystem of Windows devices.The device consists of multiple environment understanding sensors and it's powered by a custom-built Microsoft Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) and an Intel 32-bit architecture. The HPU is custom silicon that allows HoloLens to understand gestures and gaze while mapping the world all around you, all in real time.Microsoft today announced that the Microsoft HoloLens Development Edition will start shipping on 30 March, at $3000 a piece. They also offer a look at the hardware powering HoloLens.

The Raspberry Pi is turning four today, and in celebration of this, they've now released the Raspberry Pi 3 - which packs a serious performance punch, at the same low price point.In celebration of our fourth birthday, we thought it would be fun to release something new. Accordingly, Raspberry Pi 3 is now on sale for $35 (the same price as the existing Raspberry Pi 2), featuring:A 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU (~10x the performance of Raspberry Pi 1)Integrated 802.11n wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.1Complete compatibility with Raspberry Pi 1 and 2All the previous Raspberry Pi boards will remain available, as long as the demand for them remains. In addition, over the course of the coming months, the userland of Raspbian will be moved to 64 bit.

No matter how its console business is doing, Nintendo has always been able to lean on healthy portable system sales to prop up its finances. With the Wii U continuing to severely underperform sales expectations, though, it looks like the Nintendo 3DS is failing to pick up the slack as its predecessors once did.Nintendo's going to need a better strategy. Maybe the past 15 years of rehashing the same Mario, Zelda, and Metroid games is finally catching up to them.

The case between Apple and the US government keeps generating a lot of responses, but if there's one thing you really need to see, it's ABC's 30-minute interview with Tim Cook about the matter. It's no secret around here that I am not a particular fan of either Apple (or any other company for that matter) or Tim Cook, but I am genuinely impressed by Cook's spirit, insistence, and conviction displayed in this interview.Meanwhile, Microsoft has firmly and clearly sided with Apple, stating the company will file an amicus brief next week. During a congressional hearing today, Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith pulled out an adding machine from 1912, to drive the point home how old the law is that the FBI is relying upon."We do not believe that courts should seek to resolve issues of 21st Century technology with a law that was written in the era of the adding machine," Smith said.I still think Apple will eventually lose this whole thing, but hearing Tim Cook say they will take it all the way to the Supreme Court at least reassures me he is willing to take it all the way.

The primary weapon manufacturers wield to keep consumers running for the dumpster rather than the screwdriver is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Passed in 1998, its purpose was to bring copyright law into the digital era. Among other things, this law makes it illegal for owners and unauthorized repair people to break technical locks over copyrighted content, including software. Fixers have been fighting for exemptions to the DMCA, and in October 2015 the United States Copyright Office finally adopted a new set, making it legal to unlock carrier-activated phones, tablets, wearables, and mobile hotspots. Owners can also jailbreak phones, tablets, and smart TVs, and modify the software on 3D printers, cars, tractors, and heavy equipment. Nevertheless, software in many electronics, including game consoles, is still protected by the DMCA. At-home modifications or repairs can constitute a copyright violation. At the least, it will void a device's warranty, but it potentially carries up to a $1,000,000 fine and 10 years in prison, and numerous researchers, hobbyists, and companies have been taken to court.Isn't the future fun?

If you're like me, you might have opened up your Windows 10 laptop today only to see a giant ad for Square Enix's Rise of the Tomb Raider plastered across your login screen. This is the work of the "Windows Spotlight" feature in your Personalization settings, and thankfully, you can turn it off for good.Isn't the future fun?

As part of this commitment I am pleased to announce today that Microsoft has signed an agreement to acquire Xamarin, a leading platform provider for mobile app development.In conjunction with Visual Studio, Xamarin provides a rich mobile development offering that enables developers to build mobile apps using C# and deliver fully native mobile app experiences to all major devices - including iOS, Android, and Windows. Xamarin's approach enables developers to take advantage of the productivity and power of .NET to build mobile apps, and to use C# to write to the full set of native APIs and mobile capabilities provided by each device platform. This enables developers to easily share common app code across their iOS, Android and Windows apps while still delivering fully native experiences for each of the platforms. Xamarin's unique solution has fueled amazing growth for more than four years.

The Aqua Fish is following Jolla's "traditional" design which was found on the Jolla smartphone.The phone sports a namely modest but practically beastly (according to my testings), Quadcore 1.3Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon 212 (don't let the 200-series name fool you. We'll get to that in a moment!), 2GB od DDR3 RAM, 16GB of expandable storage, 5" HD IPS display panel with a resolution of 1280x720, a 2500mAh battery and dual-SIM support, all packaged in a neat package of black and orange plastic.This looks a lot like the phone Jolla should've made halfway 2014 as a successor to the original Jolla phone instead of that silly tablet most of us are still waiting on and that nearly tanked the company. Sadly, this one will only be available in India for now, and there's no word on further availability.I'm glad there's 3rd party interest in Sailfish OS, but I'm afraid the window's already closed on this one.

If there's one thing tech enthusiasts love more than an underdog, it's an underdog with high specs. The Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition is just such a device. It's powered by the same 14nm Samsung Exynos processor as the flagship Galaxy S6. It has a 21-megapixel camera with laser-assisted phase-detect autofocus and a Hi-Fi audio chip from ESS. Clad in an aluminum unibody shell and sporting an AMOLED display, it's as modern and good looking as any smartphone out here at Mobile World Congress. But it runs Ubuntu, and that makes it too much of an underdog.With non-iOS and non-Android smartphone operating systems dropping like flies left and right, it's commendable that Canonical is still trying with Ubuntu. Too bad that even on such powerful hardware, and after years of development and promises, Ubuntu is still slow and cumbersome on smartphones.

As mods, 3rd party applications that were previously isolated can now take advantage of platform APIs to implement unique experiences directly within Cyanogen OS. Users can install a variety of mods to extend the functionality of their devices. For example, through Cyanogen's partnership with Microsoft, a user can install the Skype mod directly into their dialer to add VoIP calling functionality or they can install the Cortana personal assistant mod to power features like voice-activated selfies.Cyanogen OS, which isn't CyanogenMod, is introducing MODs, that plug into Cyanogen OS and CyanogenMod. At this point, they are intentionally muddying the waters, right? This is the system Microsoft is using to integrate its services into Android, and now, everybody can use them. The wording here is a bit strange, though, because one of the core strengths of Android is that applications are not isolated, unlike on iOS, where every application looks, feels, and functions like an island.It's all pretty nifty, and all made possible because of two things: first, Android in and of itself is incredibly extensible, and it contains a ton of APIs for these sorts of things. A lot of this integration can be achieved simply by installing applications from Google Play. Second, it's made possible because Android is open source, so that Cyanogen can make a few changes and claim they're taking Android away from big, bad Google who is giving them Android in the first place, and without whom Cyanogen wouldn't exist, or wouldn't continue to exist.In any case, let's see if other 3rd parties are going to adopt this. It seems like Android as-is is extensible enough, so I don't see much life in this for most developers and users.

Following the letter from Tim Cook, Apple has now published a set of questions and answers regarding the case of the FBI demanding, via a court order, that Apple create a backdoor into iOS for the FBI to use. Overall, I find the questions and answers a strong showing by Apple, but two parts really stood out to me.First, the FBI is apparently a little bit incompetent.One of the strongest suggestions we offered was that they pair the phone to a previously joined network, which would allow them to back up the phone and get the data they are now asking for. Unfortunately, we learned that while the attacker's iPhone was in FBI custody the Apple ID password associated with the phone was changed. Changing this password meant the phone could no longer access iCloud services.This is incredibly cringe-worthy. The agency now asking to weaken the security and harm the rights of all iOS users, is the same agency who made beginner mistakes such as this one. If you are a true cynical, which I am, you might think the FBI changed the password on purpose in order to force this case.The second part that really stood out to me is also by far the weakest part: Apple seems to be contradicting itself regarding the question whether or not it unlocked iPhones for law enforcement in the past.Has Apple unlocked iPhones for law enforcement in the past?No.We regularly receive law enforcement requests for information about our customers and their Apple devices. In fact, we have a dedicated team that responds to these requests 24/7. We also provide guidelines on our website for law enforcement agencies so they know exactly what we are able to access and what legal authority we need to see before we can help them.For devices running the iPhone operating systems prior to iOS 8 and under a lawful court order, we have extracted data from an iPhone.Emphasis mine.So, did Apple unlock iPhones in the past, or not? This is a pretty glaring contradiction, and it makes me feel uneasy about Apple's motives and past and present roles in this case. As with any corporation, of course, Apple is beholden to its shareholders, and if this stance starts to lead to political - and thus, financial - headwinds, shareholders will pipe up, forcing Apple to give in. This contradiction only strengthens this fear for me.

Over the weekend, news broke that Linux Mint's servers were compromised, and ISO images were replaced by compromised versions with a backdoor. Everything was made public, and int responded in the only way they could: disclosure, site taken down.Sadly, it turns out that Linux Mint has somewhat of a bad name when it comes to security.To conclude, I do not think that the Mint developers deliver professional work. Their distribution is more a crude hack of existing Debian-based distributions. They make fundamental mistakes and put their users at risk, both in the sense of data security as well as licensing issues.I would therefore highly discourage anyone using Linux Mint until Mint developers have changed their fundamental philosophy and resolved these issues.Let's hope this issue raises a number of red flags for the Mint team so they can start to take steps to better the situation.