OSnews

Intel today launched a barrage of new products for the data center, tackling almost every enterprise workload out there. The company’s diverse range of products highlights how today’s data center is more than just processors, with network controllers, customizable FPGAs, and edge device processors all part of the offering. The star of the show is the new Cascade Lake Xeons. These were first announced last November, and at the time a dual-die chip with 48 cores, 96 threads, and 12 DDR4 2933 memory channels was going to be the top spec part. But Intel has gone even further than initially planned with the new Xeon Platinum 9200 range: the top-spec part, the Platinum 9282, pairs two 28 core dies for a total of 56 cores and 112 threads. It has a base frequency of 2.6GHz, a 3.8GHz turbo, 77MB of level 3 cache, 40 lanes of PCIe 3.0 expansion, and a 400W power draw. AnandTech has more information on these technologies, which few of us will ever get to work with.

A trending and vastly expanding GitHub database where Chinese developers have been airing their workplace grievances may be at risk of censorship. A number of internet users in China are reporting seeing their access to the database cut off when using browsers offered by companies like Tencent, Alibaba, Xiaomi, and Qihoo 360, as first spotted by Abacus. There’s no indication yet that these censorship efforts may have originated from government orders. And as a reminder: western technology companies, most prominently Apple, is working very closely with the Chinese government, giving them access to user data of Chinese users to aid the China’s totalitarian surveillance state.

Google just dropped the second Android Q beta for all three generations of Google Pixel smartphones, but they also released system images that will allow for any Project Treble-compatible smartphone to flash Android Q! Yes, Google has finally released generic system images (GSIs) of the latest Android version. That means non-Pixel smartphones can test the latest Android version, too. Finally a benefit of Treble is showing up. A small benefit though, because these GSIs only work for devices that launched with Android 9 Pie.

I am pleased to announce a significant change in Mer and Sailfish OS which will be implemented in phases. As many of you know Mer began many years ago as a way for the community to demonstrate “working in the open” to Nokia. This succeeded well enough that Mer eventually closed down and shifted support to MeeGo. When MeeGo stopped – thanks to its open nature – we, Carsten Munk and I, were able to reincarnate Mer as an open community project and continue to develop a core OS and a suite of open development tools around it. Over time a number of organisations used the Mer core as a base for their work. However, there was one that stood out: Jolla with Sailfish OS which started to use Mer core in its core and they have been by far the most consistent contributors and supporters of Mer. Once again, Mer has served its purpose and can retire. To clarify that this will be the official ‘working in the open’ core of SailfishOS we’re going to gradually merge merproject.org and sailfishos.org. Just another line in the footnote that is Maemo/Meego/Sailfish/etc.

After 4 months of waiting, that is the response I got from Widevine, Google’s DRM for web browsers. For the last 2 years I’ve been working on a web browser that now cannot be completed because Google, the creators of the open source browser Chrome, won’t allow DRM in an open source project. The web sure seems to be healthy

I always wondered what it would be like to write my own operating system, but I never took it seriously. Until now. I’ve grown tired of cutesy and condescending software that doesn’t take itself or the user seriously. This is my effort to bring back the feeling of computing I once knew. Roughly speaking, the goal here is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix. This is a system by me, for me, based on the things I like. Seriously impressive work, as you can see in the demo video of the current state of the operating system.

During a virtual launch event today, Microsoft announced that Visual Studio 2019 is now generally available. The new IDE contains a number of new features, such as making it easier to clone a Git repo, and there are improvements for template selection. There’s also a new feature called Live Share. Live Share lets you collaborate with other developers in real time. Announced at Build 2018 last year, it’s been in preview ever since. Since then, Microsoft has added support for languages like C++ and Python, and it’s started allowing guests to start debugging sessions. Live Share works with both Visual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio Code. This release includes Visual Studio for the Mac.

This account of Anthem’s development, based on interviews with 19 people who either worked on the game or adjacent to it (all of whom were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about Anthem’s development), is a story of indecision and mismanagement. It’s a story of technical failings, as EA’s Frostbite engine continued to make life miserable for many of BioWare’s developers, and understaffed departments struggled to serve their team’s needs. It’s a story of two studios, one in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and another in Austin, Texas, that grew resentful toward one another thanks to a tense, lopsided relationship. It’s a story of a video game that was in development for nearly seven years but didn’t enter production until the final 18 months, thanks to big narrative reboots, major design overhauls, and a leadership team said to be unable to provide a consistent vision and unwilling to listen to feedback. Perhaps most alarming, it’s a story about a studio in crisis. Dozens of developers, many of them decade-long veterans, have left BioWare over the past two years. Some who have worked at BioWare’s longest-running office in Edmonton talk about depression and anxiety. Many say they or their co-workers had to take “stress leave”—a doctor-mandated period of weeks or even months worth of vacation for their mental health. One former BioWare developer told me they would frequently find a private room in the office, shut the door, and just cry. “People were so angry and sad all the time,” they said. Said another: “Depression and anxiety are an epidemic within Bioware.” This makes two incredibly high-profile BioWare flops as a result of severe mismanagement and gross negligence by executives, harming the lives of countless hardworking developers in the process. Once, BioWare was one of the greatest game development studios, but now, it’s barely a shadow of its former self, a running internet meme, and a studio whose upcoming games are not met with anticipation and excitement, but with rolling eyes and distrust. I’m deeply worried about the studio’s future.

A few years ago, I was out at the W6TRW swap meet at the parking lot of Northrop Grumman in Redondo Beach, California. Tucked away between TVs shaped like polar bears and an infinite variety of cell phone chargers and wall warts was a small wooden box. There was a latch, a wooden handle, and on the side a DB-25 port. There was a switch for half duplex and full duplex. I knew what this was. This was a modem. A wooden modem. Specifically, a Livermore Data Systems acoustically coupled modem from 1965 or thereabouts. Turn down the lights, close the curtains, and put on some Barry White. You’re going to need it.

Google’s Android security team has published its yearly report on the state of Android security, and it’s filled with detailed information. The broadest statistic for measuring device hygiene is how frequently a full-device scan detects Potentially Harmful Applications (PHAs). Google Play Protect, Android’s built-in defense mechanism, is incredibly effective at keeping PHAs out of Google Play, but malicious apps can still be downloaded from other sources. These apps endanger not only the device but also threaten the sanctity of the Android environment. This is why Google Play Protect scans all apps installed on a device regardless of the source. In 2018 only 0.08% of devices that used Google Play exclusively for app downloads were affected by PHAs. In contrast, devices that installed apps from outside of Google Play were affected by PHAs eight times more often.Compared to the previous year, even those devices saw a 15% reduction in malware due to the vigilance of Google Play Protect. Over the years, I’ve come to accept that tech media is easily fooled by security stories – in the olden days, when the desktop reigned supreme, it was baseless story after baseless story about macOS and security (usually sponsored and/or pushed by antivirus peddlers), and now that mobile reigns supreme, they aim their FUD at iOS and Android. Don’t fall for it. With normal use, iOS and Android are incredibly safe operating systems to use.

The Genode project released the fourth version of their Sculpt operating system, subtitled as “Community Experience”. The background of this slogan is the project’s ambition to remove the need for any middleman between developers and users. In contrast to today’s mainstream OSes, which rely on trusted distributions or app stores, Sculpt works completely federated. The integrity of the installed software is protected by digital signatures of the respective software providers while each piece of software is sandboxed both at installation time and at runtime. This way, users don’t need to be faithful but enter a position of ultimate control. This is capability-based security at work! As explained in the accompanying blog posting, Sculpt CE features an new user interface to integrate software into the running system and to reveal the trusted computing base of each component. Without a middleman between software providers and users in Sculpt OS, there is the obvious question: How can a user find software? The Genode project tries to answer this question with their community blog called Genodians.org started earlier this year. It gives Genode developers a way to announce new software while users can share their perspectives and ideas. Just like Sculpt OS, the content of Genodians.org is managed in a federated fashion. Sculpt CE is available as a ready-to-use disk image bootable from a USB stick. The release is accompanied with comprehensive documentation that covers both the use the system and the philosophy behind it.

A few weeks back I managed to pick up an incredibly rare laptop in immaculate condition for $50 on Kijiji: a Tadpole Technologies SPARCbook 3000ST from 1997 (it also came with two other working Pentium laptops from the 1990s). So, what makes this the coolest laptop of the 1990s? I used to long for a Tadpole SPARC laptop about 15 years ago, when they came with dual processor models. Amazing technology.

As Apple continues to fight legislation that would make it easier for consumers to repair their iPhones, MacBooks, and other electronics, the company appears to be able to implement many of the requirements of the legislation, according to an internal presentation obtained by Motherboard. According to the presentation, titled “Apple Genuine Parts Repair” and dated April 2018, the company has begun to give some repair companies access to Apple diagnostic software, a wide variety of genuine Apple repair parts, repair training, and notably places no restrictions on the types of repairs that independent companies are allowed to do. The presentation notes that repair companies can “keep doing what you’re doing, with … Apple genuine parts, reliable parts supply, and Apple process and training.” This is, broadly speaking, what right to repair activists have been asking state legislators to require companies to offer for years. At this point, Apple’s fight against right to repair is basically just out of spite and pettiness. Apple must be such a sad, sad place to work.

Nop, I havn’t fogottn how to wit. No did my dito go on vacation. You s, to sha th pain of using an Appl laptop kyboad that’s faild aft fou months, I could only think of on ida: tak all th bokn ltts out of my column. Thn I alizd that would mak th whol thing unadabl. So to… Why is th baking of my MacBook Ai kyboad so insanly maddning? Lt’s tak a tip down Mmoy Lan… Work of art by Joanna Stn.

There’s another mobile operating system on the rise, but this one is special for a few reasons. First, it’s not necessarily trying to unseat iOS and Android — it’s designed to run on feature phones. It also has received significant investment from Google, and in most cases, Assistant and other Google applications are preinstalled. The operating system in question is ‘KaiOS,’ and it’s already shipping on a handful of phones, including the 4G version of the Nokia 8810 and the Jio JioPhone. I’ve been using KaiOS for a while on the Maxcom MK241, and while it’s definitely better than the average feature phone, it still has rough edges. A KaiOS device is definitely on my list of devices, since it’s a popular operating system I haven’t yet had the chance to try. I like the idea of having a more focused, less capable device, with better battery life and less distractions.

A user by the name of grem75 has uploaded two screenshots of KDE 0.1 to imgur, and they offer a very intriguing look at just how far we’ve come. I’ve only found this RPM, no source unfortunately. This is installed on Red Hat 4.1 with Qt 1.33. Impressive amount of progress for being so early in development. The project had been announced in October 1996, this package was built in February 1997. There really were no complete desktop environments available for Linux at the time, most distros shipped with FVWM and some assortment of applications from various toolkits. Gnome didn’t start until August of 1997. XFCE existed, but was just a panel for FVWM. I’ve recently made the jump from Windows 10 to KDE Neon on my laptop, and after so many rocky years through KDE 4.x, I have to say the KDE desktop environment currently exists in an incredibly polished and attractive state, striking a perfect balance between attractiveness, usability, and customisability. KDE is currently an absolute pleasure to use for me, and I can’t wait to see what else they’ve got coming up (preferably a lot of work on either reworking or replacing Kmail with a smaller, more focused email application). In any event, this is the first time I’ve felt at home on a desktop environment on Linux since the glory days of GNOME 2.x and KDE 3.x, and I couldn’t be happier. These two KDE 0.1 screenshots remind me of just how far we’ve come.

News content is a sensitive topic in China. The government exercises a significant degree of control over information sources so it is unsurprising that Apple would choose to not support News there. However, instead of simply being locked behind a hardware feature gate, Apple chose to disable it much more forcefully. If you enter China with a US iPhone (e.g. one purchased in the US from a US carrier or at a US Apple Store), using a US carrier, with your phone set to the US region, and with location services disabled for the News app, you will still receive this message upon opening News: To accomplish this censorship Apple is using a form of location fingerprinting that is not available to normal applications on iOS. It works like this: despite the fact that your phone uses a SIM from a US carrier it must connect to a Chinese cellular network. Apple is using private APIs to identify that you are in mainland China based on the name of the underlying cellular network and blocking access to the News app. This information is not available via public APIs in iOS1 specifically to improve privacy for users. This censorship occurs despite the fact that when in China a cell phone using a foreign SIM is not subject to the firewall restrictions (all traffic is tunneled back to your provider first), so Google, Twitter, Facebook, et al all work fine on a non-mainland China SIM even though you’re connected via China Mobile or China Unicom’s network. I had no idea Apple went to such great lengths to please the totalitarian Chinese government. Fascinating, though.

The U.S. government claimed that turning American medical charts into electronic records would make health care better, safer, and cheaper. Ten years and $36 billion later, the system is an unholy mess: inside a digital revolution gone wrong. It seems to be a recurring theme all over the world that governments are absolutely terrible at doing anything related to the digital world. I’m sure insane bidding requirements set by special interests play a huge role in this problem, but that doesn’t mean politicians tend to be terrible at properly understanding the digital world.

Redox OS 0.5.0 has been released. It has been one year and four days since the last release of Redox OS! In this time, we have been hard at work improving the Redox ecosystem. Much of this work was related to relibc, a new C library written in Rust and maintained by the Redox OS project, and adding new packages to the cookbook. We are proud to report that we have now far exceeded the capabilities of newlib, which we were using as our system C library before. We have added many important libraries and programs, which you can see listed below. Redox OS is a UNIX-like operating system written in Rust, built around a microkernel.

LLVM 8.0 has been released. This release contains the work on trunk up to Subversion revision r351319, plus work on the release branch. It’s the result of the LLVM community’s work over the past six months, including: speculative load hardening, concurrent compilation in the ORC JIT API, no longer experimental WebAssembly target, a Clang option to initialize automatic variables, improved pre-compiled header support in clang-cl, the /Zc:dllexportInlines- flag, RISC-V support in lld. And as usual, many bug fixes, optimization and diagnostics improvements, etc.

Vlad Savov, always ready with the eloquent takes: Or, maybe, you only give off the appearance of wealth. This being a credit card, the Apple Card is also a symbol for the United States’ addiction to debt, both at the national and personal level. Acquiring and using one may sink you deeper into debt, and any bank that issues a credit card relies on its users’ financial tardiness or illiteracy to generate exploitative interest on unpaid balances. There’s something fundamentally un-Apple-like about trying to profit from people’s weaknesses. Apple is conspiring with Goldman-Sachs to earn money by preying on the weak and indebted. I don’t like using this line, but there’s no chance in hell that Steve Jobs would’ve signed off on an Apple credit card, especially not one with such predatory interest rates. And the lock-in is already underway: Effective immediately, Apple Pay Cash in iOS 12.2 and watchOS 5.2 will not allow sending person to person funded by credit cards other than the Apple Card. Time is cyclical.

The European Parliament has given final approval to the Copyright Directive, a controversial package of legislation designed to update copyright law in Europe for the internet age. Members of parliament voted 348 in favor of the law and 274 against. A last-minute proposal to remove the law’s most controversial clause — Article 13 or the ‘upload filter’ — was narrowly rejected by just five votes. The directive will now be passed on to EU member states, who will translate it into national law. The United States Congress doesn’t have a monopoly on stupid decisions – especially when you take into account that said five vote difference was… A mistake. A group of left-leaning MEPs voted in favour… By accident.

Swift 5 is a major milestone in the evolution of the language. Thanks to ABI stability, the Swift runtime is now included in current and future versions of Apple’s platform operating systems: macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS. Swift 5 also introduces new capabilities that are building blocks for future versions, including a reimplementation of String, enforcement of exclusive access to memory during runtime, new data types, and support for dynamically callable types. You can test the new features and changes in an Xcode playground.

Apple has released iOS 12.2 and macOS 10.14.4. Both are minor releases, but at least macOS 10.14.4 has some nifty changes for Safari: macOS Mojave 10.14.4 includes support for Safari AutoFill using Touch ID and it offers automatic dark mode themes in Safari. If you have Dark Mode enabled in Mojave, when you visit a website that has an option for a dark theme after installing the update, it will be activated automatically. Every one of you using iOS devices or PCs running macOS know exactly where to get the updates.

At Apple’s “show time” services event today, it announced a new Apple Card credit card, promising to improve things about the credit card experience with simpler applications, no fees, lower interest rates, and better rewards. Instead of a points-based reward program, Apple Card gives cash back rewards in the form of Daily Cash, which is applied straight to your Apple Card to spend or put toward your purchases. Apple is offering 2 percent cash back on purchases made through Apple Pay using an Apple Card, and purchases from Apple will get 3 percent cash back. Purchases made through the physical card will get just 1 percent cash back, though. I can’t shake the image of those shady “cash-4-gold” stores with a dude spinning an arrow sign outside out of my head. Is this really what Apple’s been reduced to? A credit card company?

Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge follow-up has leaked, and The Verge took a look at it. For an early version of Edge built on Chromium, Microsoft’s new browser feels very polished. It’s also very fast to launch and browse around with. If Microsoft can keep up this good work and keep Edge optimized in the future, I can’t see a reason to need to use Chrome on Windows anymore. I would never have recommended Edge before as it was often slow, clunky, and didn’t always work with websites properly. This new Edge feels entirely different, thanks to its Chromium backend. That’s odd, since one of the main reasons I used Edge for a long time was just how fast it was compared to Chrome. I’m not so sure I like the idea of Edge with Google’s Blink.

I became fascinated by what is happening in the RISC-V space just by seeing it pop up every now and then in my Twitter feed. Since I am currently unemployed I have a lot of time and autonomy to dig into whatever I wish. RISC-V is a new instruction set architecture. To understand RISC-V, we must first dig into what an instruction set architecture is. This is my learning technique. I bounce from one thing to another, recursively digging deeper as I learn more. Some more RISC-V information. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more RISC-V articles and even hardware to buy over the coming years.

Intel will not develop new Compute Cards, the company has confirmed to Tom’s Hardware. Compute Cards were Intel’s vision of modular computing that would allow customers to continually update point of sale systems, all-in-one desktops, laptops and other devices. Pull out one card, replace it with another, and you have a new CPU, plus RAM and storage. “We continue to believe modular computing is a market where there are many opportunities for innovation,” an Intel spokesperson told Tom’s Hardware. “However, as we look at the best way to address this opportunity, we’ve made the decision that we will not develop new Compute Card products moving forward. We will continue to sell and support the current Compute Card products through 2019 to ensure our customers receive the support they need with their current solutions, and we are thankful for their partnership on this change.” I’ve always been fascinated by the Compute Card’s concept, but it never seemed to receive much support from partners, stores, or even Intel itself. I’m not surprised they’re cancelling the product line.

When Wave Computing acquired MIPS, “going open source” was the plan Wave’s CEO Derek Meyer had in mind. But Meyer, a long-time MIPS veteran, couldn’t casually mention his plan then. Wave was hardly ready with the solid infrastructure it needed to support a legion of hardware developers interested in coming to the MIPS open-source community. To say “go open source” is easy. Pulling it off has meant a huge shift from MIPS, long accustomed to the traditional IP licensing business. MIPS will compete with and exist alongside RISC-V. The future of truly open source hardware is getting more and more interesting.

HMD Global, the Finnish company that sublicensed the Nokia smartphone brand from Microsoft, is under investigation in Finland for collecting and sending some phone owners’ information to a server located in China. In a statement to Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, the company blamed the data collection on a coding mistake during which an “activation package” was accidentally included in some phones’ firmware. HMD Global said that only a single batch of Nokia 7 Plus devices were impacted and included this package. Why does stuff like this keep happening? It seems like such a simple thing to not preinstall dodgy stuff on factory-set smartphones.

Hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees — in some cases going back to 2012, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Facebook says an ongoing investigation has so far found no indication that employees have abused access to this data. Facebook is a criminal enterprise that needs to be broken up into its constituent parts sooner rather than later.

As a little side-project, I have been working on putting the artificial neural networks of AI Gigapixel to the test and having them upscale another favorite thing of mine… Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (DS9). Just like Final Fantasy 7, of which I am upscaling the backgrounds, textures, and videos in Remako mod, DS9 was also relegated to a non-HD future. While the popular Original Series and The Next Generation were mostly shot on film, the mid 90s DS9 had its visual effects shots (space battles and such) shot on video. While you can rescan analog film at a higher resolution, video is digital and can’t be rescanned. This makes it much costlier to remaster this TV show, which is one of the reasons why it hasn’t happened. Fascinating methodology, and the results speak for themselves. Amazing work.

Apple had developed the iPhone in secret over those two and a half years, and for many inside the company, the device had only been known by the codenames “M68” and “Purple 2.” Apple was focused on surprising everyone with the iPhone, and that meant that many of the engineers working on the original handset didn’t even know what it would eventually look like. To achieve that level of secrecy, Apple created special prototype development boards that contained nearly all of the iPhone’s parts, spread out across a large circuit board. The Verge has obtained exclusive access to the original iPhone M68 prototype board from 2006/2007, thanks to Red M Sixty, a source that asked to remain anonymous. It’s the first time this board has been pictured publicly, and it provides a rare historical look at an important part of computing history, showing how Apple developed the original iPhone. Amazing exclusive, and a fascinating look at this rare development board.

Google has been hit with a €1.49bn (£1.28bn) fine from the EU for blocking rival online search advertisers. It is the third EU fine for the search and advertising giant in two years. The case accuses Google of abusing its market dominance by restricting third-party rivals from displaying search ads between 2006 and 2016. In response, Google changed its AdSense contracts with large third parties, giving them more leeway to display competing search ads. I’m glad at least someone has the guts to face megacorporations head-on.

There’s an interesting observation in this article that not enough people seem to realise: Probably one of the biggest contributors to Apple’s revenue is the massively popular App Store, which was estimated as of May 2018 to have seen upward of 170 billion downloads in its 10-year history. Most of those aren’t straight-up paid purchases — a massive percentage of the App Store’s revenue comes from in-app purchases in free-to-play games like Fortnite and Candy Crush and subscription apps like Netflix, Tinder, and YouTube. According to App Annie’s latest estimates, every single one of the 50 top grossing apps on the platform is either a major service that relies on subscription fees or a free-to-play game. Even the most popular paid apps like Minecraft or Facetune just don’t make the same kind of money as free apps that rely on in-app purchases, even with in-app purchases to help bolster their numbers. And Apple takes a cut of each of those in-app purchases and subscriptions. As Nilay Patel points out, Apple’s services narrative – the pitch to stockholders that Apple can grow its services revenue – feels rather unpleasant when you realise that most of the App Store revenue is microtransactions in free-to-play and gambling games like Candy Crush. It’s a rather dirty public secret Apple would rather you not focus on too much: Apple’s services revenue comes, in large part, from scummy apps and games trying to trick little kids and less technology savvy people into spending their money on gems or gambling boxes or whatever. Not exactly the kind of world-changing, holier-than-thou stuff Apple usually touts, now, is it? As Patel notes, this is a huge problem for Apple, as the recent Spotify antitrust complaint highlights: There is a clear disconnect between how much money Apple is making by charging a fee for users to take another turn in Candy Crush and how it wants people to think of the “app economy” — no one loves free-to-play games, but all the incentives of the store are aligned around them. So Spotify and Netflix saying the App Store tax is unfair causes a huge problem: if Apple changes the rules and allows alternate payment systems, it will crater App Store revenue because it’s all based on taking a cut of free-to-play games no one really wants to talk about. Tim Cook’s Apple is a bean counter company, a company with no qualms about giving up their Chinese users’ privacy, working closely with the totalitarian Chinese government, or profiting massively from scammy free-to-play games.

After the Commission’s July 2018 decision, we changed the licensing model for the Google apps we build for use on Android phones, creating new, separate licenses for Google Play, the Google Chrome browser, and for Google Search. In doing so, we maintained the freedom for phone makers to install any alternative app alongside a Google app. Now we’ll also do more to ensure that Android phone owners know about the wide choice of browsers and search engines available to download to their phones. This will involve asking users of existing and new Android devices in Europe which browser and search apps they would like to use. Low effort initiative that will only serve to annoy users. I don’t think this addresses the core issue of the power large megacorporations have, but what do I know.

In case you’re out of the loop, Stadia follows last year’s Project Stream test, which Google views as a resounding success. In essence, Stadia is Project Stream, delivering a similar game-streaming service, but done bigger, better, and with more features. Like Project Stream, Stadia will allow you to play AAA games at super-high settings, with silky smooth framerates, at up to 4K resolutions — at least, to start. It works remotely, with the actual game being hosted on Google’s remote servers, as it’s streamed to your home. This all comes without a major investment in specialized gaming gear, too. Google is taking this project quite seriously, as it even relies on custom hardware: Google’s expanded its data centers to better provide an optimized experience, for even “the most demanding games,” and that includes fresh new hardware in those data centers. Stadia’s stack, revealed on the Stadia.dev site, includes a custom 2.7GHz x86 CPU, custom AMD GPUs (rated at 10.7 teraflops), 16GB of RAM, and SSD cloud storage. If there’s one company capable of building the infrastructure capable of making game streaming a reality, it’s Google. However, I remain skeptical for now, and will adhere to the mantra of seeing is believing.

In recent years, advances in AI have produced algorithms for everything from image recognition to instantaneous translation. But when it comes to applying these advances in the real world, we’re only just getting started. A new product from Nvidia announced today at GTC — a $99 AI computer called the Jetson Nano — should help speed that process. The Nano is the latest in Nvidia’s line of Jetson embedded computing boards, used to provide the brains for robots and other AI-powered devices. Plug one of these into your latest creation, and it’ll be able to handle tasks like object recognition and autonomous navigation without relying on cloud processing power. Fascinating little device that could be a great boon for the maker community.

Last year I finally bought a Kryoflux, unfortunately in the middle of moving house. Now I’m finally able to use it beyond verifying that it’s not completely broken. After imaging a few dozens of floppies, I can say one thing–Kryoflux is surprisingly difficult to use with PC 5¼″disks. There is a distinct impression that Kryoflux was designed to deal primarily with Amiga and C64 floppies, and although PC floppy formats present absolutely no difficulty for the Kryoflux hardware as such, using the software for archiving standard PC 5¼″ media is very far from simple. Let’s start with the easy part. Imaging 3½″ media is relatively simple because PC 3½″drives are straightforward (well, let’s omit the special Japanese 1.6M media). 3½″ drives always rotate at 300 RPM and usually automatically handle media density based on the floppy itself. But if everything were easy, life wouldn’t be very interesting. Preserving the data on these ancient floppies is crucial, and it’s great to see various types of specialised hardware exist just for this purpose.

Open-source infrastructure and application delivery vendor Suse — the company behind one of the oldest Linux distributions — today announced that it is once again an independent company. The company today finalized its $2.5 billion acquisition by growth investor EQT from Micro Focus, which itself had acquired it back in 2014. I only remember using SUSE well over 15 years ago, and lost track of it after Ubuntu came onto the scene. Good news, though – I prefer open source companies to be independent. It seems to fit their nature better.

Maryland’s legislature is considering a bill to allow computer coding courses to fulfill the foreign language graduation requirement for high school. A similar bill passed the Florida State Senate in 2017 (but was ultimately rejected by the full Legislature), and a federal version proposed by Senators Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, and Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, is being considered in Congress. The animating idea behind these bills is that computer coding has become a valuable skill. This is certainly true. But the proposal that foreign language learning can be replaced by computer coding knowledge is misguided: It stems from a widely held but mistaken belief that science and technology education should take precedence over subjects like English, history and foreign languages. This is silly. Programming is certainly not a replacement for foreign language skills. That being said, it’s somewhat defensible considering this is an American story, and since they speak English as their first or second language anyway, they can get by in the world pretty well as it is.

Plan 9 from Bell Labs comes from the same stable as the UNIX operating system, which of course Linux was designed after, and Apple’s OS X runs on top of a certified UNIX operating system. Just like UNIX, Plan 9 was developed as a research OS — a vehicle for trying out new concepts — with it building on key UNIX principles and taking the idea of devices are just files even further. In this post, we take a quick look at the Plan 9 OS and some of the notable features, before moving on to the construction of a self-contained 4-node Raspberry Pi cluster that will provide a compact platform for experimentation. The post is almost a year old, but it hasn’t ever appeared here, and for that I will not stand. Plan 9 gets little attention and press, and that’s decidedly a shame.

If you’re setting an app to be your default browser or email client, you probably trust it with your data. However, you still have to manually grant it permission for everything. Starting with Android Q, apps set as defaults will be automatically granted permissions based on what they are the default for. Android Q introduces a new function called ‘Roles’, which “allows the OS to grant apps elevated access to system functions based on well-understood use cases”. I’m not entirely sure this is a great idea. I can easily see scammers trying to trick people into setting a malware app as default, granting it easier access to their device.

To satisfy the true geeks, Western Digital organized a Swerv Deep Dive at the Bay Area RISC-V Meetup. The meetup was well organized (free food!) and attended by roughly 100 people. A Webex recording of this meetup is currently still available here. (The first 53 minutes are empty. The meat of the presentation starts at the 53min30 mark.) Zvonimir Bandic, Senior Director of Next Generation Platform Technologies Department at Western Digital, gave an excellent presentation, well paced, little marketing fluff, with sufficient technical detail to pique my interest to dive deeper in the specifics of the core. I highly recommend watching the whole thing. There was also a second presentation about instruction tracing which I won’t talk about in this post. In this blog post, I’ll go through the presentation and add some extra details that I noted down at the meetup or that were gathered while going through the SweRV source code on GitHub or while going through the RISC-V SweRV EH1 Programmer’s Reference. This goes way beyond my comfort level.

Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into data deals Facebook struck with some of the world’s largest technology companies, intensifying scrutiny of the social media giant’s business practices as it seeks to rebound from a year of scandal and setbacks. A grand jury in New York has subpoenaed records from at least two prominent makers of smartphones and other devices, according to two people who were familiar with the requests and who insisted on anonymity to discuss confidential legal matters. Both companies had entered into partnerships with Facebook, gaining broad access to the personal information of hundreds of millions of its users. Good.

Spotify, the popular music streaming service from Sweden, has filed an official antitrust complaint against Apple at the European Commission. In a blog post announcing the move, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek writes: It’s why, after careful consideration, Spotify has filed a complaint against Apple with the European Commission (EC), the regulatory body responsible for keeping competition fair and nondiscriminatory. In recent years, Apple has introduced rules to the App Store that purposely limit choice and stifle innovation at the expense of the user experience—essentially acting as both a player and referee to deliberately disadvantage other app developers. After trying unsuccessfully to resolve the issues directly with Apple, we’re now requesting that the EC take action to ensure fair competition. Apple operates a platform that, for over a billion people around the world, is the gateway to the internet. Apple is both the owner of the iOS platform and the App Store—and a competitor to services like Spotify. In theory, this is fine. But in Apple’s case, they continue to give themselves an unfair advantage at every turn. I don’t think I have to explain to anyone here why Spotify’s CEO is right. In the App Store, Spotify can only make use of Apple’s payment system, and for every Spotify subscription purchased through the iOS application, the company is forced to hand over 30% to Apple. To make matters worse, Spotify is not allowed to include a link to, say, a website where users can sign up for Spotify, nor can the company include any language even hinting at where users can sign up. On top of this, Spotify also states that Apple has blocked new features Spotify wanted to introduce including “locking Spotify and other competitors out of Apple services such as Siri, HomePod, and Apple Watch”. Furthermore, Apple limits the ways in which Spotify and other App Store developers can communicate with their users. This seems like the perfect moment to go after the big technology giants, and I hope something comes of this complaint. Any handle we can use to limit the power of megacorporations is a handle we should grab with both hands.

Today we’re releasing Beta 1 of Android Q for early adopters and a preview SDK for developers. You can get started with Beta 1 today by enrolling any Pixel device (including the original Pixel and Pixel XL, which we’ve extended support for by popular demand!). Please let us know what you think! Read on for a taste of what’s in Android Q, and we’ll see you at Google I/O in May when we’ll have even more to share. The first beta for Android Q includes a ton of privacy improvements, support for foldable devices, a new share sheet that isn’t slow as molasses, improvements to ART, and much more.

The greatest beneficiary of the update appears to be pro-privacy Google rival, DuckDuckGo, which is now being offered as an option in more than 60 markets, per the GitHub instance. Previously DDG was not offered as an option at all. Good. DDG is a great search engine and has been my default search engine for a while now. I suggest everyone attempt the same – we need more competition, especially since DDG is far more privacy oriented than Google can ever be.

For many years I’ve interacted with my fellow humans, I think perhaps more than any other way, via the medium of Internet chat. But in my chat window, they’re fading, one by one. This problem is technical and personal and I felt it ought not to go unrecognized. What a bittersweet story. Definitely worth a read.

If your computer runs into Windows problems and automatic recovery attempts are unsuccessful, Windows 10 will now automatically remove the botched updates. In a new support document, Microsoft has now detailed an interesting functionality where Windows 10 will automatically remove the installed updates to fix the startup issues and other bugs preventing PC from booting. Neat.