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Google has declined to remove from its app store a Saudi government app which lets men track women and control where they travel, on the grounds that it meets all their terms and conditions. Google reviewed the app — called Absher — and concluded that it does not violate any agreements, and can therefore remain on the Google Play store. Western companies talk a lot about morals and values back home, but overseas, these very same companies drop those morals and values left, right, and centre – whether it’s Apple ignoring all its privacy chest-thumping in China, or in this specific case, Google having zero qualms about hosting and spreading an application that Saudi-Arabian ‘men’ use to opress and abuse women.

At WWDC 2018 Apple gave us a ‘sneak peek’ at perhaps one of the most impactful developments on macOS since the transition to Mac OS X: UIKit apps running on the desktop. Today, I’m going to detail a special tool I built, called marzipanify, to get started with UIKit on the Mac early, and start the initial bringup of your iOS app on macOS. Amazing work by Steven Troughton-Smith.

GUIs are bloatware. I’ve said it before. However, rather than just complaining about IDEs I’d like to provide an understandable guide to a much better alternative: the terminal. IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment. This might be an accurate term, but when it comes to a real integrated development environment, the terminal is a lot better. In this post, I’ll walk you through everything you need to start making your terminal a complete development environment: how to edit text efficiently, configure its appearance, run and combine a myriad of programs, and dynamically create, resize and close tabs and windows. I don’t agree with the initial premise, but an interesting article nonetheless.

The only place in San Francisco still pricing real estate like it’s the 1980s is the city assessor’s office. Its property tax system dates back to the dawn of the floppy disk. City employees appraising the market work with software that runs on a dead programming language and can’t be used with a mouse. Assessors are prone to make mistakes when using the vintage software because it can’t display all the basic information for a given property on one screen. The staffers have to open and exit several menus to input stuff as simple as addresses. To put it mildly, the setup “doesn’t reflect business needs now,” says the city’s assessor, Carmen Chu. San Francisco rarely conjures images of creaky, decades-old technology, but that’s what’s running a key swath of its government, as well as those of cities across the U.S. Politicians can often score relatively easy wins with constituents by borrowing money to pay for new roads and bridges, but the digital equivalents of such infrastructure projects generally don’t draw the same enthusiasm. “Modernizing technology is not a top issue that typically comes to mind when you talk to taxpayers and constituents on the street,” Chu says. It took her office almost four years to secure $36 million for updated assessors’ hardware and software that can, among other things, give priority to cases in which delays may prove costly. The design requirements are due to be finalized this summer. This is a problem all over the world, and it’s more difficult than one might think to replace such outdated systems. Existing data has to be transferred, a new system has to be designed, staff has to be retrained – and, of course, since it’s not a sexy subject politicians can flaunt, it has to be done with impossible budgets that inevitably balloon, often leading to doomed projects. It’s easy to laugh at these outdated systems still in use today, but often, replacing them simply isn’t an option.

The dominance of Chrome has a major detrimental effect on the Web as an open platform: developers are increasingly shunning other browsers in their testing and bug-fixing routines. If it works as intended on Chrome, it’s ready to ship. This in turn results in more users flocking to the browser as their favorite Web sites and apps no longer work elsewhere, making developers less likely to spend time testing on other browsers. A vicious cycle that, if not broken, will result in most other browsers disappearing in the oblivion of irrelevance. And that’s exactly how you suffocate the open Web. When it comes to promoting this mono-browser culture, Google is leading the pack. Poor quality assurance and questionable design choices are just the tip of the iceberg when you look at Google’s apps and services outside the Chrome ecosystem. Making matters worse, the blame often lands on other vendors for “holding back the Web”. The Web is Google’s turf as it stands now; you either do as they do, or you are called out for being a laggard. Without a healthy and balanced competition, any open platform will regress into some form of corporate control. For the Web, this means that its strongest selling points—freedom and universal accessibility—are eroded with every per-cent that Chrome gains in market share. This alone is cause for concern. But when we consider Google’s business model, the situation takes a scary turn. An excellent article on just how dangerous the Chrome monoculture has become to the open web. I switched away from everything Chrome recently, opting instead to use Firefox on my laptop, desktop, and mobile devices.

MWC Barcelona 2019 is well underway, and among the big companies such as Samsung, Huawei, LG, and Xiaomi are smaller start-ups. One of those start-ups is the UK-based F(x)tec, a company which intends to bring back well-loved features from the smartphones of old. The F(x)tec Pro 1 is their first device, and it features a sliding QWERTY keyboard inspired by the Nokia E7 and N950. I got to meet the team and get hands-on time with the device to gather my thoughts on it. Meet the F(x)tec Pro 1, a slider phone with a QWERTY keyboard that will launch in July. This Android device ticks so many boxes, yet it’s the price that has me concerned. The starting price of $649 isn’t actually that steep when compared to the devices Samsung and Apple put on the market, but for lower prices you can get comparable and better-specced phones from OnePlus or PocoPhone. I’m not sure if I’m comfortable spending that much money on an unproven company with possible update issues.

Huawei’s rotating chairman Guo Ping has gone on the offensive this week at Mobile World Congress, following continued pressure on US allies to drop the Chinese telecoms giant over national security fears. In a strident on-stage speech and a Financial Times editorial, Guo is escalating Huawei’s side of the story by explicitly calling out the NSA, which Edward Snowden has shown to have hacked Huawei in the past, while presenting his company as a more secure option for the rest of the world. “If the NSA wants to modify routers or switches in order to eavesdrop, a Chinese company will be unlikely to co-operate,” Guo says in the FT, citing a leaked NSA document that said the agency wanted “to make sure that we know how to exploit these products.” Guo argues that his company “hampers US efforts to spy on whomever it wants,” reiterating its position that “Huawei has not and will never plant backdoors.” This war of words and boycotts will continue for a long time to come, but Guo makes an interesting point here by highlighting the fact the NSA hacked Huawei devices and email accounts of Huawai executives. I personally do not believe that devices made in China for other brands – Apple, Google, whatever – are any safer from tampering than devices from a Chinese brand. These all get made in the same factories, and I can hardly fault the Chinese government for doing what all our western governments have been doing for decades as well. It’s not a pretty game, and in an ideal world none of it would be necessary, but we should not let blind nationalism get in the way of making sound decisions.

HyperCard is a new kind of application-a unique information environment for your Apple Macintosh computer. Use it to look for and store information-words, charts, pictures, digitized photographs-about any subject that suits you. Any piece of information in HyperCard can connect to any other piece of information, so you can find out what you want to know in as much or as little detail as you need. The original, complete manual for Apple’s HyperCard.

The Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition announced the creation of a task force dedicated to monitoring competition in U.S. technology markets, investigating any potential anticompetitive conduct in those markets, and taking enforcement actions when warranted. This is music to my ears, but only time will tell if this new task force has any teeth. The current US administration is held together by string and spit and barely able to even stumble out the door in the morning, so one has to wonder how effective any FTC actions can even be.

The boot process, in computer hardware, forms the foundation for the security of the rest of the system. Security, in this context, means a “defense in depth” approach, where each layer not only provides an additional barrier to attack, but also builds on the strength of the previous one. Attackers do know that if they can compromise the boot process, they can hide malicious software that will not be detected by the rest of the system. Unfortunately, most of the existing approaches to protect the boot process also conveniently (conveniently for the vendor, of course) remove your control over your own system. How? By using software signing keys that only let you run the boot software that the vendor approves on your hardware. Your only practical choices, under these systems, are either to run OSes that get approval from the vendor, or to disable boot security altogether. In Purism, we believe that you deserve security without sacrificing control or convenience: today we are happy to announce PureBoot, our collection of software and security measures designed for you to protect the boot process, while still holding all the keys. Good initiative.

USB 3.2, which doubles the maximum speed of a USB connection to 20Gb/s, is likely to materialize in systems later this year. In preparation for this, the USB-IF—the industry group that together develops the various USB specifications—has announced the branding and naming that the new revision is going to use, and… It’s awful. I won’t spoil it for you. It’s really, really bad.

Security researchers at the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium in San Diego are announcing the results of some fascinating research they’ve been working on. They “built a fake network card that is capable of interacting with the operating system in the same way as a real one” and discovered that Such ports offer very privileged, low-level, direct memory access (DMA), which gives peripherals much more privilege than regular USB devices. If no defences are used on the host, an attacker has unrestricted memory access, and can completely take control of a target computer: they can steal passwords, banking logins, encryption keys, browser sessions and private files, and they can also inject malicious software that can run anywhere in the system. Vendors have been gradually improving firmware and taking other steps to mitigate these vulnerabilities, but the same features that make Thunderbolt so useful also make them a much more serious attack vector than USB ever was. You may want to consider ways to disable your Thunderbolt drivers unless you can be sure that you can prevent physical access to your machine.

My software setup has been surprisingly constant over the last decade, after a few years of experimentation since I initially switched to Linux in 2006. It might be interesting to look back in another 10 years and see what changed. A quick overview of what’s running as I’m writing this post. A detailed overview of a terminal-oriented Linux software setup. There’s obviously countless setups like this, but this post is quite detailed and possibly contains some ideas for others.

As expected, Microsoft today launched HoloLens 2, the company’s second-generation augmented reality (AR) headset. The new hardware addresses what were probably the two biggest issues with the first-generation device: the narrow field of view, and the comfort when wearing the device. I’d love to experience AR and VR devices like these, but for now, I just can’t justify the investment. The killer app for home use seems to not have been invented yet, and I’d just end up with a fun gimmick that serves to entertain the odd guest a few times a year. I understand my own personal enjoyment is not exactly high on the list for the makes of these devices – they’re obviously more interested in professional use – but in order to build a sutainable, long-term business around AR and VR, they really ought to start thinking about reasons for ordinary consumers to start buying these.

The Opportunity Rover, also known as the Mars Exploration Rover B (or MER-1), has finally been declared at end of mission today after 5,352 Mars solar days when NASA was not successfully able to re-establish contact. It had been apparently knocked off-line by a dust storm and was unable to restart either due to power loss or some other catastrophic failure. Originally intended for a 90 Mars solar day mission, its mission became almost 60 times longer than anticipated and it traveled nearly 30 miles on the surface in total. Spirit, or MER-2, its sister unit, had previously reached end of mission in 2010. And why would we report that here? Because Opportunity and Spirit were both in fact powered by the POWER1, or more accurately a 20MHz BAE RAD6000, a radiation-hardened version of the original IBM RISC Single Chip CPU and the indirect ancestor of the PowerPC 601. There are a lot of POWER chips in space, both with the original RAD6000 and its successor the RAD750, a radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC G3. What an awesome little tidbit of information about these Mars rovers, which I’m assuming everybody holds in high regard as excellent examples of human ingenuety and engineering.

On Monday, Google and the FIDO Alliance announced that Android has added certified support for the FIDO2 standard, meaning the vast majority of devices running Android 7 or later will now be able to handle password-less logins in mobile browsers like Chrome. Android already offered secure FIDO login options for mobile apps, where you authenticate using a phone’s fingerprint scanner or with a hardware dongle like a YubiKey. But FIDO2 support will make it possible to use these easy authentication steps for web services in a mobile browser, instead of having the tedious task of typing in your password every time you want to log in to an account. Web developers can now design their sites to interact with Android’s FIDO2 management infrastructure. Good move.

Huawei Technologies Co. would deny any Chinese government request to open up “back doors” in foreign telecommunications networks because they aren’t legally obliged to do so, the company’s chairman says. Liang Hua, speaking to reporters in Toronto on Thursday, said the company had received an independent legal opinion about its obligations under Chinese law and said there is nothing forcing companies to create what he called “back doors” in networks. He said they’d never received any such request, but would refuse it if they did. At this point, it seems silly to assume such backdoors do not already exist in one form or another – if not at the device level, then at the network level. This isn’t merely a Chinese thing either; western governments are doing the same thing, draped in a democratic, legal veneer through secret FISA-like courts and similar constructions.

Late last year, Linux OEM System76 unveiled the Thelio, its custom Linux-focused workstation. The computer is now shipping to consumers, meaning the first reviews are starting to roll in. Leonora Tindall wrote up her experience with System76’s latest workstation, concluding: System76’s new “open hardware” desktop, is a small, beautiful, and powerful desktop computer that hits every high point anyone could have expected, faltering only in the inherent limitations of its small size. It’s pretty, it’s tiny, it’s fast, it’s well cooled, and the software support is top-tier. Despite being somewhat noisy and lacking front I/O, it’s certainly a good machine for any Linux user who can swallow the 18% – 22% upcharge for assembly and custom engineering. It must be difficult to sell highly customisable Linux workstations like these, since virtually anyone using Linux is most likely more than capable and willing to build their own computer. Still, I commend the effort, and it can serve as a halo product for System76’s Linux laptops, which probably cover a wider net of possible consumers.

We’re very grateful to this week’s (and our inaugural) sponsor: OPS is a new free open source tool that allows anyone including non-developers to run existing Linux applications as unikernels. Long predicted to be the next generation of cloud infrastructure, unikernels have remained inaccessible to developers because of their low level nature. OPS fixes that. Please visit their website to learn more: https://ops.city OPS is a new free open source tool that allows anyone includingnon-developers to run existing linux applications as unikernels. If you want to cut to the chase goto https://ops.city – download and youcan be building and running your own unikernels in a few clicks. Ifyou’re the type that wants to build from source go tohttps://github.com/nanovms/ops . Unikernels have long been predicted to be the next generation of cloudinfrastructure but have remained in-accessible to developers because oftheir low level nature. OPS fixes that. But what is a unikernel? A unikernel is the synthesis of a singleapplication and the operating system bits it actually needs to work intoa small light-weight secure virtual machine. How small? Sometimes theycan be measured in the kilobyte size. Being a single process system withno support for running multiple processes or support for users or shellsallows them to run much faster and much more secure. Unikernels are a breath of fresh air compared to the 15M LOC in a linuxkernel or the 50-200M LOC found in modern distributions. They are alsodesigned to reflect how developers actually deploy software in 2019 –not 1969. Get started quickly: curl https://ops.city/get.sh -sSfL | sh Now put this into a hi.js: console.log(“hello from inside the machine!\n”); Now let’s run it: ops load node_v11.15.0 -a console.js What this does is build a disk image out of your code and rather thanboot into linux than your init manager it boots straight to yourapplication and starts running immediately. OPS implements a thinwrapper around qemu to orchestrate locally but it can be deployed onvarious hypervisors. So checkout https://github.com/nanovms/ops – download it, fork it, starit and let us know what you build!

Many years ago (in 2015), I told you about my Xbox 360 development kit, based on a Power Mac G5. And I finally managed to make it work. Let’s summarize the story. We are in 2003 and Microsoft plans to release its Xbox 360 console in 2005. It is based on a new PowerPC processor (the Xenon, derived from the Cell but that’s another story) and an AMD graphics card. And initially, to provide test machines to the developers, Microsoft has an issue: the processor does not exist yet. The solution, quite pragmatic, to solve the problem while waiting for the first prototypes of consoles consists in using the most common mainstream PowerPC platform: a Macintosh. These PowerMac G5s used by Microsoft for Xbos 360 development couldn’t really be used for anything but running Mac OS X, since the Xbox 360 development software and operating system had all been wiped. As luck would have it, though, this software was released on the internet last year, including the Xenon OS. It also includes an early version of the Xbox 360 dashboard. An absolutely fascinating piece of history.

Millions of smartphone users confess their most intimate secrets to apps, including when they want to work on their belly fat or the price of the house they checked out last weekend. Other apps know users’ body weight, blood pressure, menstrual cycles or pregnancy status. Unbeknown to most people, in many cases that data is being shared with someone else: Facebook. The social-media giant collects intensely personal information from many popular smartphone apps just seconds after users enter it, even if the user has no connection to Facebook, according to testing done by The Wall Street Journal. The apps often send the data without any prominent or specific disclosure, the testing showed. At this point, none of this should surprise anyone anymore. Still, this particular case involves applications without any Facebook logins or similar mechanisms, giving users zero indiciation that their data is being shared with Facebook. These developers are using Facebook analytics code inside their applications, which in turn collect and send the sensitive information to Facebook. Other than retreat to a deserted island – what can we even do?

Responding to a forum post on upcoming ARM server offerings, Linus Torvalds makes a compelling case for why Linux and x86 completely overwhelmed commercial Unix and RISC: Guys, do you really not understand why x86 took over the server market? It wasn’t just all price. It was literally this “develop at home” issue. Thousands of small companies ended up having random small internal workloads where it was easy to just get a random whitebox PC and run some silly small thing on it yourself. Then as the workload expanded, it became a “real server”. And then once that thing expanded, suddenly it made a whole lot of sense to let somebody else manage the hardware and hosting, and the cloud took over.

When we re-launched the site at the beginning of the year, I mentioned that I’d considered shuttering OSNews as a response to needing such a major overhaul, since conventional advertising was no longer sufficient for covering expenses. A few weeks ago, I decided to experiment with offering a sponsorship, wherein a patron pays a fee to be the exclusive sponsor of the site for a week. It was all just a pipe dream until someone agreed last week to be our first sponsor. So we’re cautiously optimistic that this may be a viable way to keep the site running and maybe even expand. It won’t work, though, unless we can fill our pipeline with sponsors. I doubt we’ll be able to do that just by putting up a shingle and hoping people contact us. So I wanted to reach out to you, beloved readers, to see if you could help. If you know someone, maybe your employer, who offers a product or service that might be interesting to OSNews readers, see if they’ll be willing to sponsor the site. We’re open to ideas on how to structure the sponsorship program. If you were to sponsor the site, what would you want to get in exchange for your money? We’d love feedback on the terms of the sponsorship. Do you know of any ways that we might be able to publicize the availability of sponsorships? Would you be interested in acting as a salesperson and reaching out to firms to solicit sponsorships? Let me know. And finally, sponsorships will be desirable if OSNews itself is popular and vibrant. You can do your part by reading the site, commenting, submitting news, and contacting us if you’re interested in writing a feature.

The Nintendo Switch is Nintendo’s latest console/handheld, and it’s doing really well for itself in terms of sales and appeal. It also marks a change in attitude from Nintendo as well, as the device is not only powered by an Nvidia Tegra system-on-chip, but the company even reportedly wanted to employ the now-defunct Cyanogen Inc. to develop their operating system. Since the discovery of the Fusée Gelée vulnerability, Switch modding has really taken off in the community. Users have theorized for a long time now whether it would be possible to port Android to the Switch. After all, Linux has been ported to it and the device uses the Tegra X1 SoC for which there is documentation to refer to. All that’s left is the blood, sweat, and tears of developers interested enough in porting Android. One developer by the name of ByLaws is taking the challenge of turning a Nintendo Switch into an Android tablet. The Switch is such a perfect formfactor and device for retro gaming. It’s really too bad that such things break warranties and/or block device and game updates, because otherwise I’d get emulators running on my Switch in a heartbeat.

Google is finally ending forced arbitration for its employees. These changes will go into effect for both current and future Google employees on March 21. While Google won’t reopen settled claims, current employees can litigate past claims starting March 21. While it’s nice of Google to end this policy, forced arbitration for employees should clearly be illegal in the first place.

Ina Fried, for Axois, about Apple’s expected plan to move Macs to its own in-house ARM chips: Although the company has yet to say so publicly, developers and Intel officials have privately told Axios they expect such a move as soon as next year. I’m quite excited about this move. Apple has sway in the industry, and anything that lights a fire under Intel and the x86 archicture in general can only be seen as a good thing – more competition is always better.

Fast-forward nearly six years. Steam Machines puttered out as an idea, though Valve hasn’t dropped its support for Linux. It maintains a Linux Steam client with 5,800 native games, and just last August, Valve unveiled Proton, a compatibility layer designed to make every Steam title run open-source-style. With Proton currently in beta, the number of Steam titles playable on Linux has jumped to 9,500. There are an estimated 30,000 games on Steam overall, so that’s roughly one-in-three, and Valve is just getting started. However, the percentage of PC players that actually use Linux has remained roughly the same since 2013, and it’s a tiny fraction of the gaming market — just about 2 percent. Linux is no closer to claiming the gaming world’s crown than it was six years ago, when Newell predicted the open-source, user-generated-content revolution. While that is undeniably true, it’s now at least definitely more viable to play games on Linux, even if it’s generally nowhere near the kinds of performance levels possible on Windows – assuming the titles run on Linux at all, of course.

Apple Inc. wants to make it easier for software coders to create tools, games and other applications for its main devices in one fell swoop – an overhaul designed to encourage app development and, ultimately, boost revenue. The ultimate goal of the multistep initiative, code-named “Marzipan,” is by 2021 to help developers build an app once and have it work on the iPhone, iPad and Mac computers, said people familiar with the effort. That should spur the creation of new software, increasing the utility of the company’s gadgets. This seems more of a repitition of what we already knew than truly new information.

Samsung first teased its foldable phone back in November, and at the company’s Galaxy Unpacked event today it’s further detailing its foldable plans. Samsung’s foldable now has a name, the Samsung Galaxy Fold, and the company is revealing more about what this unique smartphone can do. Samsung is planning to launch the Galaxy Fold on April 26th, starting at $1,980. There will be both an LTE and 5G version of the Galaxy Fold, and Samsung is even planning on launching the device in Europe on May 3rd, starting at 2,000 euros. The technology is definitely amazing and futuristic, but this device is clearly more of a very expensive tech demo than a real, mass-market product. There’s nothing wrong with that – I like having crazy technology available, even if it’s at high prices – but a monumental shift in the market this is not. Yet.

Samsung has been very slowly rolling out its Android 9 update to a very small selection of its phones, and with it, the company is introducing a fairly radical redesign of the user interface it slaps on top of Android. It’s called One UI, and it seems like people are… Actually really positive about it? Since I – and many others with me – have treated Samsung’s UIs and skins as a punching bag for almost a decade now, it seems only fair to also highlight when they seem to be doing something right. First, Dieter Bohn at The Verge: I’ve been testing One UI on a Galaxy S9 for the past week or so and thus far I really like it. In some ways, I like it better than what Google itself is shipping on the Pixel 3. If it weren’t for the fact that I don’t yet trust Samsung to deliver major software updates quickly, I would be shouting about One UI from the rooftops. As it is, I just want to point out that it’s time for us to stop instinctively turning our noses up at Samsung’s version of Android. There are still some annoying parts of One UI, but they don’t ruin what is otherwise a full-featured, coherent, and (dare I say) thoughtful version of Android. This is not the conventional wisdom about Samsung software. Second, Abhay Venkatesh at NeoWin: Samsung’s One UI is a huge step in the right direction. The fresh, fluid UI makes it a joy to use, and the addition of smart UI elements, dark mode, and other nifty improvements make for a great experience. The navigation system combines the best of either world and in true Samsung fashion, provides users with an abundance of options. The company’s efforts to continually improve its software and strike a balance between excess customization and usability is evident. However, a lot of the remnants remain from the years that have passed, and it will be interesting to see how Samsung moves the design language forward. I’m glad to see Samsung improve its software, since that will benefit a lot of people all over the world, and it’s always refreshing to have your preconceived notions challenged.

Magic Lantern is a software enhancement that offers increased functionality to the excellent Canon DSLR cameras. We have created an open framework, licensed under GPL, for developing extensions to the official firmware. Magic Lantern is not a “hack”, or a modified firmware, it is an independent program that runs alongside Canon’s own software. Each time you start your camera, Magic Lantern is loaded from your memory card. Our only modification was to enable the ability to run software from the memory card. ML is being developed by photo and video enthusiasts, adding functionality such as: HDR images and video, timelapse, motion detection, focus assist tools, manual audio controls much more. What a fascinating project. I knew you could put custom ROM images on digital cameras, but this seems like a far safer and less warranty-breaking way of extending and improving the functionality of your camera.

NetBSD, the highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system known for its platform diversity, has gained hardware-accelerated virtualization support via an improved NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor (NVMM). A virtualization API is provided in libnvmm, that allows to easily create and manage virtual machines via NVMM. It’s always nice to see the major BSD distributions gain expanded hardware and software support. It will come as no surprise to anyone that we believe that competition is always a good thing when it comes to operating systems.

It appears that Sailfish, the Operating System by Finnish company Jolla, will now power 8 million+ devices for the Russian government. Renamed AuroraOS, at least in Russia, it has the Android compatibility layer stripped away. Last year, Russian company Rostelecom bought three quarters of the open mobile platform that developed Sailfish. Rostelecom is one of the foremost Russian telecommunications companies. It’s also a leading provider of broadband, IPTV, landline subscriptions in Russia. After the production woes of the last few years, it’s nice to see Sailfish finding a footing, even if it is in reduced form and exclusive to Russia.

Apple has moved its modem chip engineering effort into its in-house hardware technology group from its supply chain unit, two people familiar with the move told Reuters, a sign the tech company is looking to develop a key component of its iPhones after years of buying it from outside suppliers. Understandable move by Apple, both from a business perspective, and from a security perspective. The open source world really needs to build open source baseband processors at some point.

While it’s clear that the most significant opportunities for RISC-V will be in democratising custom silicon for accelerating specific tasks and enabling new applications — and it’s already driving a renaissance in novel computer architectures, for e.g. IoT and edge processing — one question that people cannot help but ask is, so when can I have a RISC-V PC? The answer to which is, right now. The result is a RISC-V powered system that can be used as a desktop computer and thanks to the efforts of Atish Patra at Western Digital, installing Fedora Linux is a breeze. This is obviously not exactly commodity hardware, but it does show that the ingredients are there and the combination provides a powerful development platform for anyone who might want to prototype a RISC-V PC — or indeed a vast array of other applications which stand to benefit from the open ISA. This has me very excited. Over the last few decades, virtually all competitors to x86 slowly died out – SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS, etc. – which turned desktop computing hardware into a rather boring affair. Recently we’ve been seeing more and more ARM desktop boards, and now it seems RISC-V is starting to dabble in this area too. Great news.

One of the things about having a pretty nice work laptop with a screen that’s large enough to have more than one real window at once is that I actually use it, and I use it with multiple windows, and that means that I need to use the mouse. I like computer mice in general so I don’t object to this, but like most modern laptops my Dell XPS 13 doesn’t have a mouse, it has a trackpad (or touchpad, take your pick). You can use a modern touchpad as a mouse, but over my time in using the XPS 13 I’ve come to understand (rather viscerally) that a touchpad is not a mouse and trying to act as if it was is not a good idea. There are some things that a touchpad makes easy and natural that aren’t very natural on a mouse, and a fair number of things that are natural on a mouse but don’t work very well on a touchpad (at least for me; they might for people who are more experienced with touchpads). Chris Siebenmann makes some good points regarding touchpads here. Despite the fact that touchpads on Windows and Linux have gotten better over the years, they’re still not nearly as good as Apple’s, and will never beat a mouse. I feel like mouse input on laptops is ripe for serious innovation.

«System Beeps» is a music album in shape of an MS-DOS program that features original music composed for PC Speaker using the same basic old techniques like ones found in classic PC games. It follows the usual retrocomputing demoscene formula — take something rusty and obsolete, and push it to eleven — and attempts to reveal the long hidden potential of this humble little sound device. You can hear it in action and form an opinion on how successful this attempt was at Bandcamp, or in the video below. The following article is an in-depth overview of the original PC Speaker capabilities and making of the project, for those who would like to know more. What an amazing work of art, and I love the detailed description of how it was made using nothing but the PC speaker. This article is quite detailed, and the project itself is released under the CC-BY license.

Early adopters of LED lighting will remember 50,000 hour or even 100,000 hour lifetime ratings printed on the box. But during a recent trip to the hardware store the longest advertised lifetime I found was 25,000 hours. Others claimed only 7,500 or 15,000 hours. And yes, these are brand-name bulbs from Cree and GE. So, what happened to those 100,000 hour residential LED bulbs? Were the initial estimates just over-optimistic? Was it all marketing hype? Or, did we not know enough about LED aging to predict the true useful life of a bulb? I put these questions to the test. Join me after the break for some background on the light bulb cartel from the days of incandescent bulbs (not a joke, a cartel controlled the life of your bulbs), and for the destruction of some modern LED bulbs to see why the lifetimes are clocking in a lot lower than the original wave of LED replacements. Just a good, fun, but also depressing read.

Adiantum is a new form of encryption that we built specifically to run on phones and smart devices that don’t have the specialized hardware to use current methods to encrypt locally stored data efficiently. Adiantum is designed to run efficiently without that specialized hardware. This will make the next generation of devices more secure than their predecessors, and allow the next billion people coming online for the first time to do so safely. Adiantum will help secure our connected world by allowing everything from smart watches to internet-connected medical devices to encrypt sensitive data. (For more details about the ins and outs of Adiantum, check out the security blog.) Encryption should be available on every single Android phone, not just the high-end, expensive models only the lucky few in the world can afford. Good move.

AnandTech has published its review of AMD’s surprise new high-end Radeon VII graphics card, and the results should be cause for some cautious optimism among PC builders. Overall then, the Radeon VII puts its best foot forward when it offers itself as a high-VRAM prosumer card for gaming content creators. And at its $699 price point, that’s not a bad place to occupy. However for pure gamers, it’s a little too difficult to suggest this card instead of NVIDIA’s better performing GeForce RTX 2080. So where does this leave AMD? Fortunately for the Radeon rebels, their situation is improved even if the overall competitive landscape hasn’t been significantly changed. It’s not a win for AMD, but being able to compete with NVIDIA at this level means just that: AMD is still competitive. They can compete on performance, and thanks to Vega 20 they have a new slew of compute features to work with. It’s going to win AMD business today, and it’s going to help prepare AMD for tomorrow for the next phase that is Navi. It’s still an uphill battle, but with Radeon VII and Vega 20, AMD is now one more step up that hill. While not a slam-dunk, the Radeon VII definitely shows AMD can get at least close to NVIDIA’s RTX cards, and that should make all of us quite happy – NVIDIA has had this market to itself for far too long, and it’s showing in the arrogant pricing the company maintains. While neither RTX cards nor this new Radeon VII make me want to replace my GTX 1070 – and its custom watercooling parts – it at least makes me hopeful that the coming years will be more competitive.

Microsoft said last Fall that it would offer paid Windows 7 Extended Security Updates on a per-device basis for big customers willing to pay for them after the company ends Windows 7 support on January 14, 2020. Microsoft officials wouldn’t talk about how much those updates would cost, beyond saying they’d get more expensive over time. However, Microsoft has briefed some of its partners and salespeople about the cost of these Extended Support Updates (ESUs). And, as you’d expect, they’re not cheap, especially for customers who may want to apply them on multiple PCs. They’re even more expensive for customers using the Pro version of Windows than the Enterprise one. These extended security updates are only available to enterprise and educiation users, so no luck if you’re an individual home user.That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these updates make their way into less than legal channels.

VLC 4.0 is on the way, and the VLC developers have listed what they have in store for this major new release. The most obvious new user-facing feature is brand new user interfaces for each platform the media player supports, such as KDE, Gnome, Windows, macOS, and more. Work on the new VLC 4.0 user-interface is progressing, there will be GNOME and KDE adaptations, support for both server-side and client-side decorations, and great support for Wayland as well as X11 — including support for macOS, Windows, etc. With VLC 4.0, they intend to gut out support for Windows XP/Vista as well as bumping the macOS, iOS, and Android requirements. On the Linux front, they intend to require OpenGL acceleration for this media player. There’s no information yet on when this new release will be made available.

Hatari 2.2.0 has been released. Hatari is an Atari ST/STE/TT/Falcon emulator for GNU/Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Windows and other systems which are supported by the SDL library. The Atari ST was a 16/32 bit computer system which was first released by Atari in 1985. Using the Motorola 68000 CPU, it was a very popular computer having quite a lot of CPU power at that time. Unlike many other Atari ST emulators which try to give you a good environment for running GEM applications, Hatari tries to emulate the hardware of a ST as close as possible so that it is able to run most of the old ST games and demos. Hatari is open source software and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). This new release – a year in the making – has a sizeable changelog, but I’m not exactly an Atari expert, so I’m not entirely sure which of the changes are the most exciting.

Haiku’s latest monthly activity report for the month of January is out. waddlesplash spent a full week doing a major overhaul of the FreeBSD compatibility layer to port iflib, FreeBSD’s new ethernet driver subsystem. (The ipro1000 driver from FreeBSD 12 uses it now, so it had to be done sooner or later.) As a side effect of this work, PCI device probing and attaching for all FreeBSD-ported drivers is significantly faster and less error-prone (this probably trimmed ~half a second, and perhaps even more, off of boot time on all machines), and paves the way for eventual USB support. After overhauling the compat layer itself, waddlesplash finished porting ethernet and then WiFi drivers from FreeBSD 12. Thanks to the refactor, he rewrote the initialization code in the WiFi layer during this effort, which seems to have resulted in all “spontaneous WiFi disconnects” or “no networks shown” tickets tested so far to be reported as fixed! So, if you were experiencing those errors and haven’t retested, please do. This is just one of the many improvements this month, but there’s a lot more in the report.

We know that unsolicited volume can be a great source of distraction and frustration for users of the web. So we are making changes to how Firefox handles playing media with sound. We want to make sure web developers are aware of this new autoplay blocking feature in Firefox. Starting with the release of Firefox 66 for desktop and Firefox for Android, Firefox will block audible audio and video by default. We only allow a site to play audio or video aloud via the HTMLMediaElement API once a web page has had user interaction to initiate the audio, such as the user clicking on a “play” button. Good move, and long overdue. Autplaying video isn’t just a mere annoyance – it’s incredibly rude, obnoxious and desrespectful.

We are no longer in control of our home directories. My own home directory contains 25 ordinary files and 144 hidden files. The dotfiles contain data that doesn’t belong to me: it belongs to the programmers whose programs decided to hijack the primary location designed as a storage for my personal files. I can’t place those dotfiles anywhere else and they will appear again if I try to delete them. All I can do is sit here knowing that in the darkness, behind the scenes, they are there. Waiting in silence. Some of those programmers decided to additionally place some normal files and directories in the same place. Those are clearly visible every time I execute ls in my home directory. It is beyond me why my home directory ended up up containing a node_modules directory, package-lock.json, a yarn.lock file (I have never even consciously used yarn!), some 2 strange log files origination from some Java software clearly using an H2 database, and a Desktop directory. That last one has been created by Steam, which is quite unfortunate as I simply do not have a desktop or a desktop environment on my machine. I dread the day in which I will hear a loud knock on my door and one of those programmers will barge in informing me that he is going to store a piece of his furniture in the middle of my living room, If I don’t mind. The way Linux distributions handle the directory structuce in general is deeply broken and inconcistent – trying to cram a modern desktop operating system in a directory structure designed for punch card machines is lunacy – and this is yet another example of that. It’s not just developers being lazy; it’s also developers simply being unable to count on distributions making sane choices and following the FHS to begin with. UNIX-based operating systems are an outdated mess under the hood, and developers are trying to work around that mess by making an even bigger mess using hidden files and random directories all over the place. Of course, saying this is considered sacrilege, as an operating system designed for mainframes in the ’60s is clearly perfect, and never needs to change or alter or improve its underpinnings in any way, shape, or form.

Ultron OS is an x86 Operating System written in C++. It is able to boot, initialise the GDT and IDT and do a couple of things that operating systems are supposed to do. Exactly what is says on the tin: a high school project to write an operating system.

Intel on Thursday notified its partners and customers that it would be discontinuing its Itanium 9700-series codenamed Kittson processors, the last Itanium chips on the market. Under their product discontinuance plan, Intel will cease shipments of Itanium CPUs in mid-2021, or a bit over two years from now. The impact to hardware vendors should be minimal – at this point HP Enterprise is the only company still buying the chips – but it nonetheless marks the end of an era for Intel, and their interesting experiment into a non-x86 VLIW-style architecture. Itanium has a long and troubled history, but it’s always been something that I’ve wanted to experiment and play with. Maybe the definitive discontinuation of the platform will inject some more stock of machines into eBay.

Today, the Norwegian Consumer Council has filed a complaint against Google. Based on new research Google is accused of using deceptive design and misleading information, which results in users accepting to be constantly tracked. Google tracks users through “Location History” and “Web & App Activity”, which are settings integrated into all Google accounts. For users of mobile phones with Android, such as Samsung and Huawei phones, this tracking is particularly difficult to avoid. Google is processing incredibly detailed and extensive personal data without proper legal grounds, and the data has been acquired through manipulation techniques, says Gro Mette Moen, acting head of unit, digital services in the Norwegian Consumer Council. Is anybody surprised by this?

Last April, Microsoft open sourced the original File Manager that shipped with Windows 3.0, allowing users to make changes and if they want, compile it for use on Windows 10. Now, the firm is making it easier to run the legacy app, as it’s offering the Windows 3.0 File Manager through the Microsoft Store (via Aggiornamenti Lumia) as a UWP app. It’s definitely neat to play with this – and it works wonderfully. It also has a few updated features, but retains its classic look.