OSnews

Last month, I sat down and decided to at the very least attempt to fix our XHCI (USB 3 host controller) bus driver. Issues with it have been the most significant problem users have been facing, as most hardware made post-2012 has an XHCI chip as the system’s primary USB chip, and most hardware made post-2014 (or so) has exclusively an XHCI chip and no EHCI (USB 2.0) or prior chipsets (which we do support very well.) Well, just under a month (and ~40 commits) later, virtually all those issues have been resolved. There’s a good bit of work that remains to be done, but at least all (!) the kernel panics are resolved, devices (largely) don’t lock up without an explanation (there are a few exceptions, but not many), performance is greatly improved (40MB/s with random 1-2s-long stalls, to 120MB/s on some USB3 flash drives and XHCI chipsets), and XHCI-attached keyboards can even be used in KDL! This is a major step forward for Haiku. Interesting, too, that Haiku’s developers note that they hope Haiku’s driver can serve as a more useful reference to other operating system developers than the driver of Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, which are, according to them, “so badly organized that it’s often hard to tell exactly what is going on vs. what the spec says should happen”.

Blizzard added DirectX 12 support for their award-winning World of Warcraft game on Windows 10 in late 2018. This release received a warm welcome from gamers: thanks to DirectX 12 features such as multi-threading, WoW gamers experienced substantial framerate improvement. After seeing such performance wins for their gamers running DirectX 12 on Windows 10, Blizzard wanted to bring wins to their gamers who remain on Windows 7, where DirectX 12 was not available. At Microsoft, we make every effort to respond to customer feedback, so when we received this feedback from Blizzard and other developers, we decided to act on it. Microsoft is pleased to announce that we have ported the user mode D3D12 runtime to Windows 7. This unblocks developers who want to take full advantage of the latest improvements in D3D12 while still supporting customers on older operating systems. Let that sink in: Microsoft backported Direct X 12 to Windows just for World of Warcraft. I guess World of Warcraft is just as important as SimCity.

Microsoft is starting to test updates to its Your Phone app for Windows 10 this week, allowing Android users to mirror a phone screen directly to a PC. The “phone screen” feature will be available for Windows Insiders this week, and it requires the latest test builds of Windows 10 and the Your Phone app. Microsoft previously demonstrated the phone screen mirroring feature in Your Phone at the company’s Surface event in October. The app works by mirroring a phone screen straight onto Windows 10, and it provides a list of your Android apps. You can tap to access them and have them appear in the remote session of your phone that’s mirrored to your PC. My 2018 Dell XPS 13 came with a Dell application that offered the same kind of functionality, and other than 5 minutes of messing around with it, I’ve never used it. I’m quite curious who this functionality is for, and if anyone will use it beyond the mere curiosity that is seems to be. I’d say Windows has more pressing issues to address.

Last week, Microsoft made a major update to the Web version of its Skype client, bringing HD video calling, call recording, and other features already found on the other clients. And as if to prove a point, the update works only in Edge and Chrome. Firefox, Safari, and even Opera are locked out. In the past, the Skype team has pointed to codec issues as the reason for inconsistent browser support. But that shouldn’t be a concern these days, as both the H.264 and VP8 video codecs are supported in Edge, Chrome, and Firefox. Google Hangouts and Google Meet support plugin-free video calling in Firefox, for example, as have other online services. For a long time, Apple refused to support WebRTC—the underlying browser technology used for real-time voice and video chatting—in Safari. But even that feature gap doesn’t exist any more, and Safari should now support everything required. The trend is clear: Chrome is becoming the new Internet Explorer 6.

One of the traditional rites of the (northern hemisphere) spring is the election for the Debian project leader. Over a six-week period, interested candidates put their names forward, describe their vision for the project as a whole, answer questions from Debian developers, then wait and watch while the votes come in. But what would happen if Debian were to hold an election and no candidates stepped forward? The Debian project has just found itself in that situation and is trying to figure out what will happen next. Fascinating article about the minutiae of Debian governance.

If you want to learn more about how to run existing Linux applications as unikernels, visit their website. If you know of someone who might be interested in being a sponsor, please let us know.

OSNews reader Rui Caridade brought our attention to a YouTube channel with retrospectives about various computing devices from the past 40 years or so that would be interesting to our readers, such as RISCy Business – The Acorn RiscPC – ARM in a desktop, NeXTSTEP on a 486 Packard Bell, and The World’s First Laptop – Epson HX-20 / HC-20.

At Mozilla, we are always committed to people’s security and privacy. It’s part of our long-standing Mozilla Manifesto. We are continually looking for new ways to fulfill that promise, whether it’s through the browser, apps or services. So, it felt natural to graduate one of our popular Test Pilot experiments, Firefox Send. Send is a free encrypted file transfer service that allows users to safely and simply share files from any browser. Additionally, Send will also be available as a an Android app in beta later this week. Now that it’s a keeper, we’ve made it even better, offering higher upload limits and greater control over the files you share. Neat feature, because sending files is still a messy and unpleasant experience. I trust Mozilla to do this right.

From a support article by WhatsApp, one of the – if not the – most popular messaging app in the world: If you received an in-app message stating your account is “Temporarily banned” this means that you’re likely using an unsupported version of WhatsApp instead of the official WhatsApp app. If this is the case, you must download the official app to continue using WhatsApp. Unsupported apps, such as WhatsApp Plus and GB WhatsApp, are altered versions of WhatsApp. These unofficial apps are developed by third parties and violate our Terms of Service. WhatsApp doesn’t support these third-party apps because we can’t validate their security practices. With how important messaging platforms like WhatsApp are in many countries – including my own – they’ve basically become an intrinsic part of the fabric of society, and as such, I really feel like we need to do something about the kind of behaviour as highlighted in this support article. Do we really want to leave a core aspect of our communications up to Facebook, of all companies? I’m not sure what we can do about this, exactly. Suggesting alternatives like Signal is pointless, since that’s like suggesting all your friends and family learn a specific language just to communicate with you. Government intervention should definitely be an option, but I have no idea in what shape or form. Whatever happens, though, I see little difference between concerns about Huawei’s networking equipment and Facebook’s WhatsApp. If you’re concerned about one, you should be just as concerned about the other.

The internet consists of tiny bits of code that move around the world, traveling along wires as thin as a strand of hair strung across the ocean floor. The data zips from New York to Sydney, from Hong Kong to London, in the time it takes you to read this word. Nearly 750,000 miles of cable already connect the continents to support our insatiable demand for communication and entertainment. Companies have typically pooled their resources to collaborate on undersea cable projects, like a freeway for them all to share. But now Google is going its own way, in a first-of-its-kind project connecting the United States to Chile, home to the company’s largest data center in Latin America. Not the most in-depth article, but still a fun read.

Here at Microsoft, we are always looking to engage with open source communities to produce better solutions for the community and our customers . One of the more useful debugging advances that have arrived in the last decade is DTrace. DTrace of course needs no introduction: it’s a dynamic tracing framework that allows an admin or developer to get a real-time look into a system either in user or kernel mode. DTrace has a C-style high level and powerful programming language that allows you to dynamically insert trace points. Using these dynamically inserted trace points, you can filter on conditions or errors, write code to analyze lock patterns, detect deadlocks, etc. ETW while powerful, is static and does not provide the ability to programmatically insert trace points at runtime. Starting in 2016, the OpenDTrace effort began on GitHub that tried to ensure a portable implementation of DTrace for different operating systems. We decided to add support for DTrace on Windows using this OpenDTrace port. We have created a Windows branch for “DTrace on Windows” under the OpenDTrace project on GitHub. All our changes made to support DTrace on Windows are available here. Over the next few months, we plan to work with the OpenDTrace community to merge our changes. All our source code is also available at the 3rd party sources website maintained by Microsoft. Microsoft is continuing its effort to draw developers to Windows by implementing features developers actually seem to want, instead of trying to push in-house features that are unique to Windows that nobody is asking for.

Elizabeth Warren, Democratic presidential candidate for the 2020 elections, has said that she intends to break up the big technology companies. Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation. I want a government that makes sure everybody — even the biggest and most powerful companies in America — plays by the rules. And I want to make sure that the next generation of great American tech companies can flourish. To do that, we need to stop this generation of big tech companies from throwing around their political power to shape the rules in their favor and throwing around their economic power to snuff out or buy up every potential competitor. That’s why my administration will make big, structural changes to the tech sector to promote more competition — including breaking up Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Warren later added that Apple, too, should be broken up. Another Democratic presidential candidate, Amy Klobuchar, suggests taxing companies who profit off user data, and of course, there’s people like Bernie Sanders, who wants to limit the power of corporations in American politics in general. This poses an interesting conundrum for the American tech giants: they always pretend to be quite left-wing, and up until recently, that’s been an easy thing to do. Now, though, public support for Democrats might actually be to their own detriment. Let’s see how long these companies can maintain their left-wing dog and pony show.

The idea that a bicycle might need an OS might seem silly, but 30 years ago may gearheads wouldn’t have anticipated that cars would become rolling supercomputers. Hammerhead crowdfunded its first product, the H1, and subsequently built Karoo, a “cycling computer” that supports navigation and training. But Morgan told me his ambitions are bigger than that.After all, he sees a future where electric bikes need smart range projections, where bike-share fleets need to be managed, where social training programs like Strava can pull data from the bike itself and where any bicycle should come with theft and crash alerts. Calling it an OS is probably a stretch. It seems to be an Android OS with cycling-specific constellation of apps, originally designed specifically for their own hardware but eventually intended to be licensed to other vendors.

David Balaban says, “There are plenty of operating systems aimed at achieving online anonymity. But how many of them are really good?” He highlights five candidates: Tails OS, Whonix, Kodachi, Qubes, and Subgraph. He concludes that Kodachi is the best OS to preserve anonymity. Have any OSNews readers evaluated any of these OSes? Do you agree with his conclusion?

PureOS has laid the foundation for future applications to run on both the Librem 5 phone and Librem laptops, from the same PureOS release, in contrast, they say, to Google and Apple’s ecosystems which still have separate OSes for mobile and desktop. Now, Google and Apple seem to be intent on converging their mobile and desktop platforms, leading to fear and consternation from desktop OS power users, who assume that the move will dumb down desktop OSes. While this technical aspects of the PureOS team’s accomplishment are interesting and laudable, I’d suspect that the bigger challenge for any mainstream platform will actually be a user experience challenge, especially bridging familiar UI elements between mobile and desktop user environments.

The RetroHQ Lynx SD cartridge for the Atari Lynx lets you play homebrew games and backed up ROMs on your Lynx simply by copying them to an SD card, plugging it into the Lynx SD cartridge and then plugging that into your Lynx. It’s a great idea and follows on from many similar EverDrive type units on other retro consoles. The only gripe with the Lynx SD has been its very functional, but simplistic menu loader. Well that’s no more. Atari Gamer has created a whole new menu loader system with many exciting features that will blow the original loader out of the water. This new loader will be the default shipped with all future preorders too! So let’s check it out. It’s remarkable how active the communities around old hardware really are. I never would’ve guessed people are still hard at work on the Atari Lynx, of all mobile consoles.

Microsoft is working on a new version of Edge that’s based on the open-source Chromium project, a move that shocked many. The company has internally been working on the browser for months now and, according to our sources, currently maintains two channels for the browser: a Dev channel updated weekly and a Canary channel that’s updated daily. We were recently able to get our hands on some screenshots of the browser in its current state, as well as some images of the new Microsoft Edge Store which will showcase the many extensions Microsoft can now boast as a result of the move from EdgeHTML to Chromium for its browser. Clearly still in a very early stage.

The Nintendo Switch has a pretty serious hardware vulnerability that leaves it open to all kinds of exploits, and we’ve previously seen it running Linux thanks to the work of some hackers. Meanwhile, since Microsoft introduced Windows 10 on ARM, developers have been working to port it to unsupported ARM devices, including the Lumia 950. So, it would seem that it’s only a matter of time until these two paths intersect, and that seems to have happened now. A Twitter user by the name of @imbushuo has posted pictures of attempts to install the ARM version of Microsoft’s operating system on Nintendo’s hybrid console. The developer has noted some issues and documented many of the problems he encountered on Twitter, but progress is being made. The latest status update simply shows the Windows boot logo on the screen, with imbushuo noting that some work still needs to be done, specifically in regards to memory regions. I’m not entirely sure just how useful it would be to run Windows 10 on the Switch, but that doesn’t make it any less of an impressive effort.

Ars Technica reports: Fulfilling its 2017 promise to make Thunderbolt 3 royalty-free, Intel has given the specification for its high-speed interconnect to the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the industry group that develops the USB specification. The USB-IF has taken the spec and will use it to form the basis of USB4, the next iteration of USB following USB 3.2. Yes, it’s called USB4, which will exist alongside USB 3.2 Gen 1, USB 3.2 Gen 2, and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2. I don’t even know what to say.

Microsoft is preparing a new lightweight version of Windows for dual-screen devices and Chromebook competitors. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the software maker is stripping back its Windows user interface with dual screens in mind. This new hardware could launch as early as later this year, depending on chip and PC maker readiness. This would be the fifth attempt in recent years to create a new version of Windows designed for smaller and mobile devices – Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone 8 and up, Windows RT, and Windows 10 on ARM – and I just don’t see how this time it’ll all be different.

Readers of this august website may recall that a year ago, I lauded Firefox and its progress toward becoming a genuine alternative to Google’s dominant Chrome browser. As much as I liked where Firefox was going, however, I couldn’t stick with it over the long term. It wasn’t compatible with everything the way Chrome was, its extensions were different, and, for my way of using a browser, it was slower and less responsive. So I returned to Chrome after a few weeks of Firefox, but the urge to decouple my browsing habits from Google remained. This year, I’m pretty sure I’ve found the ideal Chrome alternative in the Brave browser. If your reasons for sticking with Chrome have been (a) extensions, (b) compatibility, (c) syncing across devices, or (d, unlikely) speed, Brave checks all of those boxes. What’s more, it’s just one of a growing number of really good options that aren’t made by Google. I first used Edge for a while on my desktop and laptop while using Chrome on my phone, but recently I’ve switched everything over to Firefox, and it’s been a delight.

Google employees have carried out their own investigation into the company’s plan to launch a censored search engine for China and say they are concerned that development of the project remains ongoing, The Intercept can reveal. Late last year, bosses moved engineers away from working on the controversial project, known as Dragonfly, and said that there were no current plans to launch it. However, a group of employees at the company was unsatisfied with the lack of information from leadership on the issue — and took matters into their own hands. The group has identified ongoing work on a batch of code that is associated with the China search engine, according to three Google sources. The development has stoked anger inside Google offices, where many of the company’s 88,000 workforce previously protested against plans to launch the search engine, which was designed to censor broad categories of information associated with human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest. I wonder how many times corporations like Google and Apple have to actively aid the Chinese government in its brutal regime of oppression, torture, concentration camps, and executions before the collective tech press and bloggers stop treating them like golden magic prodigies of democracy and freedom.

The entire experience of vinyl helps to create its appeal. Vinyl appeals to multiple senses—sight, sound, and touch—versus digital/streaming services, which appeal to just one sense (while offering the delight of instant gratification). Records are a tactile and a visual and an auditory experience. You feel a record. You hold it in your hands. It’s not just about the size of the cover art or the inclusion of accompanying booklets (not to mention the unique beauty of picture disks and colored vinyl). A record, by virtue of its size and weight, has gravitas, has heft, and the size communicates that it matters. Anyone who says vinyl sounds objectively better – using the same amplifier and speaker hardware as modern media – can hardly be taken seriously, but that doesn’t mean vinyl can’t sound subjectively better. When it comes to older music from the ’60s and ’70s, I enjoyed listening to it on vinyl records (I don’t have a record player at this moment), but that had nothing to do with sound quality, and everything to do with the more archaic, unique experience of listening to a vinyl record.

LineageOS, the successor to CyanogenMod, has released version 16 of their custom Android ROM. This new release is based on Android Pie, and will serve as the base for countless other ROMs. The project was first launched to the public with LineageOS 14.1, which was based on Android 7.1 Nougat and, by itself, was not much more than just a fork of the existing CyanogenMod 14.1 source code. It then started evolving and taking a slightly different path with LineageOS 15.1, based on Android 8.1 Oreo, maintaining their premise of a community-centered project above everything while adding a number of useful, widely-requested features such as a system-wide dark mode as well as privacy-focused improvements like the Trust interface. Today, that evolution continues with LineageOS 16.0, the newest and latest version of the incredibly-popular custom ROM, as announced on the team’s blog post. As is the norm, with a version number change comes a big platform update. LineageOS has been re-based on the latest Android Pie source code. And with this comes all of Android Pie’s new features and improvements, including the renewed Material Theme redesign, the new navigation gestures, and more. While initially LineageOS 16 officially supports about 24 devices, unofficial support will cover more devices, and over the coming weeks and months, more and more devices will become officially supported.

In the history of information technologies, Gutenberg and his printing press are (understandably) treated with the kind of reverence even the most celebrated of modern tech tycoons could only imagine. So perhaps it will come as a surprise that Europe’s literacy rates remained fairly stagnant for centuries after printing presses, originally invented in about 1440, started popping up in major cities across the continent. Progress was inconsistent and unreliable, with literacy rates booming through the 16th century and then stagnating, even declining, across most of Western Europe. Great Britain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy all produced more printed books per capita in 1651–1700 than in 1701–1750. Then came the early 19th century, which saw enormous changes in the manufacture of paper and improvements on the printing press. These changes both contributed to and resulted from major societal changes, such as the worldwide growth increase in formal education. There were more books than ever and more people who could read them. For some, this looked less like progress and more like a dangerous and destabilizing trend that could threaten not just literature, but the solvency of civilization itself. There’s obviously a comparison to be made here to television, videogames, the internet, and smartphones – all new inventions that took the world by storm that many consider to be a threat to society. It’s always interesting to look at similar stories and fears from centuries ago.

In the early 1990s, we had no idea where the computer industry was going, what the next generation would look like, or even what the driving factor would be. All the developers back then knew is that the operating systems available in server rooms or on desktop computers simply weren’t good enough, and that the next generation needed to be better—a lot better. This was easier said than done, but this problem for some reason seemed to rack the brains of one company more than any other: IBM. Throughout the decade, the company was associated with more overwrought thinking about operating systems than any other, with little to show for it in the end. The problem? It might have gotten caught up in kernel madness. Today’s Tedium explains IBM’s odd operating system fixation, and the belly flops it created. I personally really loved using OS/2 over the past ten years or so. There’s something quite elegant and appealing about the operating system, and I consider it the best way to run Windows 3.x software there is – it’s entirely built-in. The world would’ve been a very different place had IBM managed to take the operating system crown for the PC industry – or the Mac, for that matter, through Talingent.

Ever since Microsoft recently began testing Windows 10 20H1 – its Windows 10 feature update that isn’t expected to start rolling out to mainstream users until April 2020 – there’s been lots of speculation about why Microsoft is doing this so early. Microsoft’s Windows Insider team has made some vague references to some things being worked on requiring a longer lead time. But I’m hearing from my contacts the real reason is much more mundane: It’s about aligning schedules between Azure and Windows engineering. Sometimes, the real story is just… Boring.

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.