OSnews

macOS 10.13.4, released to the public yesterday afternoon, introduces official support for eGPUs (external graphics processors) on Thunderbolt 3 Macs. Alongside the release, Apple has published a detailed support document that outlines how eGPU support works and provides graphic card and chassis recommendations for use with your Mac.External GPUs seem like an incredibly clunky solution to a problem I doubt many people actually have. If your workload relies heavily on GPU power, you're probably not using Apple laptops anyway.

The following article is a historical look at the era that spawned the first raytracers for home computers, a predecessor to Blender among them. It's possible thanks to the fact, that, for the first time, the program and source code of said predecessor are publicly available.Today Blender is one of the industry leaders, but it started quite small, three decades ago. If you ever wondered when and where some of the most iconic Blender conventions like "right-click select" or 3D cursor originated, it's then, in the Amiga era, even before Blender was born.

After starting with Ubuntu, Microsoft has added a number of Linux distributions to its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) Linux runtime environment. A Windows machine can simultaneously offer an Ubuntu, SUSE, Debian, and Kali "personality," providing users with a choice of the different distributions' preferences and package management.But if your distribution isn't yet available or if you want a Linux installation that's customized just the way you like it, there's now an answer: Microsoft has an open source tool for building your own Linux package. The tool is aimed at two groups: distribution owners (so they can produce a bundle to ship through the Microsoft Store) and developers (so they can create custom distributions and sideload them onto their development systems).Neat.

A US federal court has overturned the jury's decision in favour of Google from 2016.Google's use of Java shortcuts to develop Android went too far and was a violation of Oracle's copyrights, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Tuesday. The case - first filed in 2010 - was remanded to a federal court in California to determine how much the Alphabet Inc. unit should pay. Oracle had been seeking $8.8 billion, though that number could grow. Google expressed disappointment and said it's considering its next steps in the case.The dispute, which could have far-reaching implications for the entire software industry, has divided Silicon Valley for years between those who develop the code that makes software steps function and those who develop software programs and say their "fair use" of the code is an exception to copyright law."It's a momentous decision on the issue of fair use," lawyer Mark Schonfeld of Burns & Levinson in Boston, who's been following the case and isn't involved. "It is very, very important for the software industry. I think it's going to go to the Supreme Court because the Federal Circuit has made a very controversial decision."This could be one of the absolute worst legal decisions in technology history.

New to Android Studio 3.1 is a C++ performance profiler to help troubleshoot performance bottlenecks in your app code. For those of you with a Room or SQLite database in their your app, we added better code editor support to aid in your SQL table and query creation statements. We also added better lint support for your Kotlin code, and accelerated your testing with an updated Android Emulator with Quick Boot.

The MorphOS development team is proud to announce the immediate availability of MorphOS 3.10, which represents one of the biggest updates in its history yet. This brand new version introduces support for AmigaOne X5000 systems as well as A-EON X5000 mainboards, and it greatly expands the general hardware compatibility by adding numerous new drivers for graphics cards, scanners, network cards, SATA controllers, and USB audio devices.Furthermore, MorphOS 3.10 brings Flow Studio, which is an integrated development environment that offers features such as a built-in source level debugger and seamless MorphOS shell access.In addition to many bug fixes and general performance improvements, MorphOS 3.10 also provides varied user interface and usability improvements. This release includes modern themes, new fonts, and support for vector graphics, such as SVG icons, as well as time zones via Coordinated Universal Time.This is a huge update, and it contains so many improvements I don't even know where to start. The massive list of hardware compatibility improvements is incredibly welcome, as are the brand new themes which make MorphOS look a bit less dated. Be sure to read the full, detailed list of changes.This is definitely the release that finally pushed me to get a PowerBook G4 to run MorphOS on (preferably the 17" 1.67Ghz with DDR2), since this release really reaffirms that the team is 100% dedicated to the operating system. I can't wait to go used PowerBook shopping this week.

Even though Android is open source, virtually every Android device sold outside of China contains a chunk of closed code from Google in the form of Google Play Services and the GApps. These two deeply related software packages turn a rather stale mobile operating system into the full-on Google Android most of us know. There aren't a whole lot of Android users (again, outside of China) who aren't using these.Since these packages aren't open source, custom Android ROMs ship without them; you have to sideload them manually after installing your ROM image. Luckily for us, Google has always allowed this, but it's always been a bit tenuous. It's about to get a whole lot more tenuous, since Google appears to be blocking GApps from running on uncertified Android devices - but thankfully, they're allowing custom ROM users to register their Android device to get an exception.Earlier this week, we received an anonymous tip from a person claiming to be within the industry. This person, who said they worked for an OEM/ODM, notified us that Google has started entirely locking out newly built firmware from accessing Gapps. This change apparently went into effect March 16th and affects any software builds made after this date (Google Play Services checks ro.build.fingerprint for the build date apparently).You can register your device to get an exception, and you can register up to 100 devices per user - which should be enough for virtually everyone, I assume.

I stumbled upon an absolute gem of a website over the weekend - Sophie Haskins' Pizza Box Computer. On this site, Haskins details a number of ancient non-x86 workstations. All of the posts on the site are fun and interesting reads, so let's pick one of her machines - a DEC Multia running Windows NT for Alpha - The Multia was an attempt by Digital to make a lower-cost Alpha workstation for running Windows NT. There were Alpha and Intel Pentium models, and they use a lot of off-the-shelf PC components rather than custom Digital ones (hence its later name, the "Universal Desktop Box"). It's quite tiny - so much so that it has laptop PCMCIA slots for expansion!The latest post details getting Windows NT up and running on the Multia, and is certainly worth a read - like the rest of the site.

Feature updates are the bigger updates to Windows 10, released twice a year, that are probably more akin to the service packs of yore than regular updates or full releases. Microsoft is improving the process of installing these larger updates.The Windows Fundamentals team focuses on the underlying technologies that are used to install feature updates as well as a host of other things. We've heard your feedback about the lengthy amount of time your PC is unusable during a feature update installation, and we've been working on ways to decrease this time. Today, I am excited to share more details about the improvements we've made to the feature update experience.For as much as Windows has problems, I really like that Microsoft is working on improving things like this. It would be very easy for them to set low-level work like this aside in favour of flashy stuff that's easy to show off in an ad blurb, so I appreciate the effort put in addressing less sexy problems like this.A faster, less invasive update process is always welcome.

LineageOS is an operating system for everyone: from the average user to the advanced developer. While users have a giant playground in their hands with many customization options, we also want to make LineageOS a fun place for developers. The standards for official builds help ensure developers that their app will not end up in a bad state because of inappropriate Android API changes or broken hardware support, but this is not enough for us; we're announcing some new APIs that will allow your apps to do more when they're running on a LineageOS-powered device.The Lineage platform SDK (LineageSDK for short) is a powerful resource that allows us to both keep our features out of the core Android frameworks (for better security and easier bringup processes) and expose some extra functionality to app developers.We'll have to wait and see if developers are willing to add some code to their Android applications for the features in this SDK.

After days of silence, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded to the controversy over the 2014 leak of private Facebook user data to a firm that went on to do political consulting work for the Donald Trump campaign in 2016.Cambridge Analytica got the data by paying a psychology professor, Aleksandr Kogan, to create a Facebook personality quiz that harvested data not only about its own users but also about users' friends. Kogan amassed data from around 50 million users and turned it over to Cambridge.Zuckerberg says that when Facebook learned about this transfer in 2015, it got Kogan and Cambridge to certify that they had deleted the data. But media reports this weekend suggested that Cambridge had lied and retained the data throughout the 2016 presidential campaign.This whole thing should make everyone think twice about how - and if - they should keep using Facebook. I've personally always been incredibly careful about what data I put on Facebook and I've rarely - if ever - used any Facebook 'apps', but in the end, you don't even need to feed Facebook any data for them to figure out who you are and what you're interested in. It's actually remarkably easy to extrapolate a whole lot about you from simple things like the times you're online, or which sites with Facebook social trackers you visit, and so on.I trust Google with such forms of data, but not Facebook. If it wasn't for my friends, I'd delete my Facebook account in a heartbeat. My hope is that this story - which has certainly permeated beyond tech media into the mainstream media - will push more and more of the people around me to consider leaving Facebook.

Pretty big news out of LG - they're releasing their variant of webOS - the TV and smartwatch one - as open source.webOS is a web-centric and usability-focused software platform for smart devices. The operating system has constantly evolved, passing through its journey from Palm to HP, and most recently to LG Electronics. Now, we are releasing webOS as an open source project, named webOS Open Source Edition (OSE).This marks the second time webOS has been released as open source. It's released under the Apache License, version 2, and there's instructions for getting it to run on a Raspberry Pi 3.We are a truly open project. You will see us working in the open like any community member, so you can see what we're doing in real time. We operate using typical open practices: the Project uses the Apache 2.0 license, is hosted on GitHub, and accepts contributions via a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) approach. As the community grows and individuals and organizations emerge who make significant contributions, it is our intention to invite them into the governance of the Project.It seems like a truly open project, but at the same time, one has to wonder what this means for webOS' commercial future at LG. The cold and harsh truth is that moves like this generally mean the end of commercial viability, not the beginning. This isn't necessarily a problem though - at least this move ensures the code and operating system will continue to exist.

Can two programmers who are accustomed to making games for modern computers with gigabytes of RAM and high-color HD displays port one of their games to MS-DOS? Neither of us had any experience developing on such old hardware, but since working within artificially limited systems is something of a Zachtronics game design specialty, we felt compelled to try!

For Windows Insiders in the Skip Ahead ring, we will begin testing a change where links clicked on within the Windows Mail app will open in Microsoft Edge, which provides the best, most secure and consistent experience on Windows 10 and across your devices. With built-in features for reading, note-taking, Cortana integration, and easy access to services such as SharePoint and OneDrive, Microsoft Edge enables you to be more productive, organized and creative without sacrificing your battery life or security.I'm one of those weird people who actually really like the default Windows 10 Mail application, but if this absolutely desperate, user-hostile move - which ignores any default browser setting - makes it into any definitive Windows 10 release, I won't be able to use it anymore.As always, we look forward to feedback from our WIP community.Oh you'll get something to look forward to alright.

If you blink during Appleâs latest iPhone ad, you might miss a weird little animation bug. Itâs right at the end of a slickly produced commercial, where the text from an iMessage escapes the animated bubble itâs supposed to stay inside. Itâs a minor issue and easy to brush off, but the fact itâs captured in such a high profile ad just further highlights Appleâs many bugs in iOS 11.The fact Apple's marketing department signed off on this ad with such a bug in it is baffling.

As our technology and partnerships have evolved, so have our users. In 2017, one out of three new Android Wear watch owners also used an iPhone. So as the watch industry gears up for another Baselworld next week, weâre announcing a new name that better reflects our technology, vision, and most important of all - the people who wear our watches. Weâre now Wear OS by Google, a wearables operating system for everyone.If a company changes the name of one of its operating system, but nobody cares - has the name really been changed?

There exists a global community, a loosely knit consciousness of individuals that crosses boundaries of language and artistic disciplines. It resides in both the online and physical space, its followers are dedicated, if not fervent. The object and to some extent, philosophy that unites these adherents, is a computer system called the Commodore Amiga. So why does a machine made by a company that went bankrupt in 1994 have a cult like following? Throughout this essay I will present to you, the reader, a study of qualitative data that has been collected at community events, social gatherings and conversations. The resulting narrative is intended to illuminate the origins of the community, how it is structured and how members participate in it. Game industry professionals, such as the person interviewed during the research for this paper, will attest to the properties, characteristics and creative application of the machine, and how this creativity plays a role in the sphere of their community. I will examine the bonds of the society, to determine if the creative linage of the computer plays a role in community interactions.The Amiga community is probably one of the most fascinating technology subcommunity out there. Lots of infighting, various competing Amiga operating systems, incredibly expensive but still outdated hardware, dubious ownership situations - it's all there. Yet, they keep going, they keep pushing out new software and new hardware, and they're in no danger of falling apart.Amazing.

Spotify is finally gearing up to go public, and the companyâs February 28th filing with the SEC offers a detailed look at its finances. More than a decade after Spotifyâs launch in 2006, the worldâs leading music streaming service is still struggling to turn a profit, reporting a net loss of nearly $1.5 billion last year. Meanwhile, the company has some weird lawsuits hanging over its head, the most eye-popping being the $1.6 billion lawsuit filed by Wixen Publishing, a music publishing company that includes the likes of Tom Petty, The Doors, and Rage Against the Machine.So, what happened here? Did Spotify really fail to pay artists to the tune of a billion dollars all the while losing money? Is digital streaming just a black hole that sucks up money and spits it out into the cold vacuum of space?The answer is complicated.The answer involves something called "player pianos". You can't make this stuff up.

Through the advent of Meltdown and Spectre, there is a heightened element of nervousness around potential security flaws in modern high-performance processors, especially those that deal with the core and critical components of company business and international infrastructure. Today, CTS-Labs, a security company based in Israel, has published a whitepaper identifying four classes of potential vulnerabilities of the Ryzen, EPYC, Ryzen Pro, and Ryzen Mobile processor lines. AMD is in the process of responding to the claims, but was only given 24 hours of notice rather than the typical 90 days for standard vulnerability disclosure. No official reason was given for the shortened time.Nothing in technology is safe. As always, my advice is to treat any data on a phone or computer as potentially compromisable.

President Trump on Monday blocked Broadcom's $117 billion bid for the chip maker Qualcomm, citing national security concerns and sending a clear signal that he was willing to take extraordinary measures to promote his administrationâs increasingly protectionist stance.In a presidential order, Mr. Trump said "credible evidence" had led him to believe that if Singapore-based Broadcom were to acquire control of Qualcomm, it "might take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States." The acquisition, if it had gone through, would have been the largest technology deal in history.This US administration would eventually stumble onto doing the right thing - infinite monkeys and all that - so here we are. To explain why this is a good move, Ben Thompson's article about this issue is a fantastic, must-read explainer.There is a certain amount of irony here: the government is intervening in the private market to stop the sale of a company that is being bought because of government-granted monopolies. Sadly, I doubt it will occur to anyone in government to fix the problem at its root, and Qualcomm would be the first to fight against the precise measures - patent overhaul - that would do more than anything to ensure the company remains independent and incentivized to spend even more on innovation, because its future would depend on innovation to a much greater degree than it does now.The reality is that technology has flipped the entire argument for patents - that they spur innovation - completely on its head. The very nature of technology - that costs are fixed and best maximized over huge user-bases, along with the presence of network effects - mean there are greater returns to innovation than ever before. The removal of most technology patents would not reduce the incentive to innovate; indeed, given that a huge number of software patents in particular are violated on accident (unsurprising, given that software is ultimately math), their removal would spur more. And, as Qualcomm demonstrates, one could even argue such a shift would be good for national security.

TrueOS, formerly PC-BSD, has a desktop environment called Lumina. It's getting a big overhaul for Lumina 2.0, and this short interview gives some more details about what's coming.With Lumina Desktop 2.0 we will finally achieve our long-term goal of turning Lumina into a complete, end-to-end management system for the graphical session and removing all the current runtime dependencies from Lumina 1.x (Fluxbox, xscreensaver, compton/xcompmgr). The functionality from those utilities is now provided by Lumina Desktop itself.[...]The entire graphical interface has been written in QML in order to fully-utilize hardware-based GPU acceleration with OpenGL while the backend logic and management systems are still written entirely in C++. This results in blazing fast performance on the backend systems (myriad multi-threaded C++ objects) as well as a smooth and responsive graphical interface with all the bells and whistles (drag and drop, compositing, shading, etc).

We often see people funneling their passion into keeping beloved devices in operation long past their manufacturerâs intent. These replacement Thinkpad motherboards [Chinese] bring old (yet beloved) Thinkpads a much desired processor upgrade. This is the work of the user [HOPE] on the enthusiast forum 51nb. The hack exemplifies what happens when that passion for legendary gear hits deep electrical expertise and available manufacturing. This isnât your regular laptop refurbishment, [HOPE] is building something new.This is incredible. I wish someone could do this with an iBook G4 or a 12.1" PowerBook.

Google has released the first preview for Android P - again, apologies for the late coverage - and it contains some interesting improvements. Here's a few things that jumped out at me:To better ensure privacy, Android P restricts access to mic, camera, and all SensorManager sensors from apps that are idle. While your app's UID is idle, the mic reports empty audio and sensors stop reporting events. Cameras used by your app are disconnected and will generate an error if the app tries to use them. In most cases, these restrictions should not introduce new issues for existing apps, but we recommend removing these requests from your apps.This is a very good move, and I doubt anyone will have any objections.In line with these changes, Android P will warn users with a dialog when they install an app that targets a platform earlier than Android 4.2 (targetSdkVersion less than 17), and future platform versions will continue to increment that lower bound.Expect scary warning dialogs when installing older applications. This should encourage developers to update their applications as users complain in the review sections of the Play Store. Hopefully.You can now access streams simultaneously from two or more physical cameras on devices running Android P. On devices with either dual-front or dual-back cameras, you can create innovative features not possible with just a single camera, such as seamless zoom, bokeh, and stereo vision. The API also lets you call a logical or fused camera stream that automatically switches between two or more cameras.Definitely neat.There's a lot more stuff in this preview release, and more features will certainly follow over the coming months.

I came down with a nasty cold last week and this weekend, so I'm a bit behind on some of the stories that made the rounds last week. In other words, forgive the tardiness here.Whether youâre a developer who's working on mobile apps, or just someone enjoying the millions of apps available for your phone, today is a very special day. It's the ten year anniversary of the original iPhone SDK.I don't think it's an understatement to say that this release changed a lot of people's lives. I know it changed mine and had a fundamental impact on this company's business. So let's take a moment and look back on what happened a decade ago.The smartphone revolution - caused by the iPhone - came in two big waves, in my view; the iPhone itself, and, followed a year or so later, by the release of the iPhone SDK. It's easy to forget just how limited the original iPhone really was in terms of software, and I honestly doubt it would've been as big of a hit had it not been for the SDK.

The just released version 18.02 of the Genode OS Framework features the first version of Sculpt, which is a Genode-based general-purpose operating system. To our knowledge, it is the first usable open-source general-purpose OS that facilitates capability-based security from the ground up.Being currently targeted at users that are close to the project, this initial version is named Sculpt for Early Adopters (EA). It is accompanied with detailed documentation that covers everything needed to install Sculpt on a real machine. The topics include the creation of the boot image, disk preparation, wireless networking, storage, software installation and deployment, and virtualization. Along the way, many concepts that are unique to Genode are explained.Without any doubt, most topics of Genode 18.02 were motivated by the work on Sculpt. Most importantly, the release introduces new infrastructure for installing, updating, and deploying software from within a running Genode system. The underlying concepts are very much inspired by Git and the Nix package manager, enabling the installation of multiple software versions side by side, or the ability to roll back the installation to an earlier state. Also the on-target tooling breaks with the traditional notion of package management. Instead of executing package-management steps with vast privileges, each single step, for example extracting downloaded content, is executed in a dedicated sandbox.Besides Sculpt, the Genode release 18.02 also includes many other noteworthy improvements. E.g., the user-level networking stack received a lot of attention, the Nim programming language can now be used for implementing Genode services, there are new tracing facilities, and improved drivers support for NXP i.MX hardware. Furthermore, many 3rd-party software packages received updates. All the improvements are covered by the detailed release documentation.

Microsoft is once again tackling privacy concerns around Windows 10 today. The software giant is releasing a new test build of Windows 10 to Windows Insiders today that includes changes to the privacy controls for the operating system. While most privacy settings have been confined to a single screen with multiple options, Microsoft is testing a variety of ways that will soon change.There have been some concerns that Windows 10 has a built-in âkeylogger,â because the operating system uses typing data to improve autocompletion, next word prediction, and spelling correction. Microsoftâs upcoming spring update for Windows 10 will introduce a separate screen to enable improved inking and typing recognition, and allow users to opt-out of sending inking and typing data to Microsoft.I doubt any of these changes will reassure people who refuse to use Windows because of privacy concerns.

As of Chrome 64, Chrome for Windows is compiled with Clang. We now use Clang to build Chrome for all platforms it runs on: macOS, iOS, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Windows. Windows is the platform with the second most Chrome users after Android according to statcounter, which made this switch particularly exciting.

In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic, and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1), and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing.I've always wondered why every user agent string starts with Mozilla, and now I know. Fun read, too.

Iâve been coming to Mobile World Congress for close to a decade now, and Iâve never seen the iPhone copied quite so blatantly and cynically as I witnessed during this yearâs show. MWC 2018 will go down in history as the launch platform for a mass of iPhone X notch copycats, each of them more hastily and sloppily assembled than the next. No effort is being made to emulate the complex Face ID system that resides inside Appleâs notch; companies like Noa and Ulefone are in such a hurry to get their iPhone lookalike on the market that they havenât even customized their software to account for the new shape of the screen. More than one of these notched handsets at MWC had the clock occluded by the curved corner of the display.I have an iPhone X, and the notch doesn't bother me at all. Face ID works reasonably well - not as good as Touch ID, but good enough - and thus, gives the notch a reason to exist in the first place. I don't feel particularly strongly towards either Samsung's small chin/forehead solution, or Essential's/Apple's notch solution, and I'm glad it at least creates some visual difference between phones. However, if you decide to go with a notch, don't just copy Apple's shape while not actually putting anything underneath it.I can't believe this is truly going to be a thing.

While Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows Phone 8.1 more than six months ago, there are some users that still utilize the platform as their daily driver. Although the company's overall mobile initiative isn't faring too well either, most users on older platforms are still there because they prefer it over the competition or weren't offered an upgrade path to Windows 10 Mobile.However, it now appears that Windows Phone 8.1 users are facing some unforeseen problems with the Store - and no, it isn't regarding the dearth of apps. According to reports, people on the platform have been unable to download apps from the Store since yesterday.While I'm sure this particular case is just some weird bug, it does highlight a real problem - what happens to a perfectly fine phone phone running a walled garden platform when its creator ceases to offer application store services? In an ideal world, such a platform would be opened up and set free, but I highly doubt that's going to happen here.The reality will be that a lot of perfectly fine phones will end up in the trash.

After months of speculation, France's economy minister Bruno Le Maire announced in an interview with the JDD that Europe's new tax model for tech giants is happening. The plan will be unveiled in the next few weeks.This is long overdue, but I have little faith that it won't be riddled with new loopholes and vague exceptions only accessible to a selec few.

Mobile World Congress is happening this week, and we're slowly getting a better picture of what Google's new "Android Go" initiative will look like. Android Go is a special configuration of Android 8.1 (with a selection of special "Go" apps) that targets low-end devices with 1GB of RAM or less.MWC has seen a ton of manufacturers sign up for the program and announce phones shipping with the Go config, so it's time for a hardware roundup.We often tend to get tunnel vision and focus on expensive flagships, so here's a roundup of upcoming 100 dollar Android Go phones. These are neat little phones for a decent price.

Should the United States government be able to conduct a search of your emails if they are stored on a server in another country, or does the governmentâs right to examine digital evidence stop at the border?That is a central question in United States v. Microsoft, a case scheduled to be argued on Tuesday before the Supreme Court.Both sides in the case have legitimate concerns. If the court sides with Microsoft and declines to allow searches for data stored in another country, the government will be hampered in investigating crimes like terrorism, child pornography and fraud.If the court sides with the government and rules that it may demand data stored overseas by American companies, those companies will find it much harder to do business abroad. This is because many foreigners fear that United States warrants authorizing such searches will disregard privacy protections afforded by their country. The government of Germany, a country with stringent privacy laws, has already indicated it will not use any American company for its data services if the court decides to allow searches.At this point, I feel like it's just safer to assume all data stored online or sent from one device to the next is essentially not secure in the sense that no one will be able to read if they really wanted to. It's not the way it should be, but I don't think there's a whole lot we can do about it - regardless of the outcome of legal cases such as this one.

Apple is launching a group of health clinics called AC Wellness for its employees and their families this spring, according to several sources familiar with the company's plans.The company quietly published a website, acwellness.com, with more details about its initiative and a careers page listing jobs including primary care doctor, exercise coach and care navigator, as well as a phlebotomist to administer lab tests on-site.This new primary care group - a group of clinical staff that is run independently from Apple but is dedicated to Apple employees - will initially only serve Apple's employees in Santa Clara County, where its headquarters are located. Initially, it has two clinics in the county.Scrip healthcare.This is insanity.

There aren't a whole lot of alternative mobile operating systems of any substance - not even Microsoft and BlackBerry could keep theirs afloat, after all - but there's a few exceptions, and Sailfish OS is one of those. At Mobile World Congress, Jolla, the operating system's parent company, announced not only that Sailfish OS is coming to more devices, but also that Sailfish OS 3 is in the works and scheduled for later this year.Jolla Ltd., the Finnish mobile company and developer of open mobile operating system Sailfish OS today announced Sailfish 3, the third generation of its independent mobile operating system, along with new device support for Sony's XperiaTM XA2, the Gemini PDA, and INOI tablets. Sailfish is now also available for the new era of 4G Feature Phones.Engadget had some hands-on time with Sailfish on the Gemini PDA, and I find it a fascinating combination I'd love to try out. Sailfish OS 3 also seems like a worthwhile upgrade, planned for the third quarter of this year. My own Jolla Phone and quite rare Jolla Tablet are still collecting dust somewhere in a closet, and I'm hoping Sailfish OS 3 gives me enough of a reason to dust them off again - I've had little reason to otherwise.

Today, as part of Mobile World Congress 2018, we are excited to announce the first beta release of Flutter. Flutter is Google's new mobile UI framework that helps developers craft high-quality native interfaces for both iOS and Android. Get started today at flutter.io to build beautiful native apps in record time.

Over the weekend, Nokia released a new feature phone, the 8110 4G - a re-imagining of the phone used in The Matrix. I really like the design of this phone, and at a price of just â¬79, it looks like a steal. The most interesting part of the phone, other than its lovely design, is the operating system it runs. It's called KaiOS, a distant cousin to Firefox OS.KaiOS is not Firefox OS. Our platform is based on the original Mozilla project. We even have people from the original Mozilla team in our engineering and UX departments. But KaiOS has been developed into something much more robust and expanded than the original Firefox OS. Think of us as distant cousins, not siblings nor children.It's a HTML5-based operating system already in use in a whole bunch of phones today - they claim it's already on 30 million phones in India and North America - and on the 8110 4G, it has that traditional, classic Nokia design with a modern touch. I'm really curious to see just how powerful or expandable (maybe even hackable?) this feature phone platform is.

Flaky failures are the worst. In this particular investigation, which spanned twenty months, we suspected hardware failure, compiler bugs, linker bugs, and other possibilities. Jumping too quickly to blaming hardware or build tools is a classic mistake, but in this case the mistake was that we werenât thinking big enough. Yes, there was a linker bug, but we were also lucky enough to have hit a Windows kernel bug which is triggered by linkers!

With Apple moving its Chinese iCloud data to a company partially owned by the Chinese government, it's natural to wonder what this means for the privacy of Chinese Apple users.If Apple is storing user data on Chinese services, we have to at least accept the possibility that the Chinese government might wish to access it - and possibly without Appleâs permission. Is Apple saying that this is technically impossible?This is a question, as you may have guessed, that boils down to encryption.This article is from the middle of January of this year, but I missed it back then - it's a great insight into what all of this means, presented in an easy-to-grasp manner. Definitely recommended reading.

Android users are all around the world, so from the start, our goal has been to bring the Assistant to as many people, languages, and locations as possible. The Assistant is already available in eight languages, and by the end of the year it will be available in more than 30 languages, reaching 95 percent of all eligible Android phones worldwide. In the next few months, weâll bring the Assistant to Danish, Dutch, Hindi, Indonesian, Norwegian, Swedish and Thai on Android phones and iPhones, and weâll add more languages on more devices throughout the year.Weâre also making the Assistant multilingual later this year, so families or individuals that speak more than one language can speak naturally to the Assistant. With this new feature, the Assistant will be able to understand you in multiple languages fluently. If you prefer to speak German at work, but French at home, your Assistant is right there with you. Multilingual will first be available in English, French and German, with support for more languages coming over time.This is a decent improvement, but progress on the multilingual front is still quite slow. I understand this is a hard and difficult problem to solve, but if this issue was in any way related to increasing ad revenue, Google would've cracked it 5 years ago.

If I look back through all of the years we have covered Android, itâs hard to argue that the introduction of Google Play Edition phones wasnât one of the biggest moments. In those early years, the Android skin situation was bad. Those early versions of TouchWiz, MotoBlur, and even HTC Sense, werenât what many of us wanted, to say the least. We wanted Googleâs version of Android, as well as their Nexus update schedules, yet that was tough to get because Google was making average hardware at the time.While Google Play Edition may have failed as a program, I get the feeling that Android One will now act as a proper replacement to it.Stop trying to make timely Android updates happen. It's not going to happen.

You have no idea how much effort went into getting this stupid white square on the screen.If this one hell of a lede doesn't get your attention, nothing will.

There are two major reasons I can think of to hack a game console. The first one is obvious: so you can play cracked copies of games. Thatâs why modern consoles are so difficult to hack, because millions of dollars are on the line.But some people just want to run any software they choose on the hardware they own. And for those people, Linux on the Switch is a huge achievement.I'm surprised it even took this long.

In other words, it's very likely you love Google, or are at least fond of Google, or hardly think about Google, the same way you hardly think about water systems or traffic lights or any of the other things you rely on every day. Therefore you might have been surprised when headlines began appearing last year suggesting that Google and its fellow tech giants were threatening everything from our economy to democracy itself. Lawmakers have accused Google of creating an automated advertising system so vast and subtle that hardly anyone noticed when Russian saboteurs co-opted it in the last election. Critics say Facebook exploits our addictive impulses and silos us in ideological echo chambers. Amazonâs reach is blamed for spurring a retail meltdown; Apple's economic impact is so profound it can cause market-wide gyrations. These controversies point to the growing anxiety that a small number of technology companies are now such powerful entities that they can destroy entire industries or social norms with just a few lines of computer code. Those four companies, plus Microsoft, make up America's largest sources of aggregated news, advertising, online shopping, digital entertainment and the tools of business and communication. They're also among the world's most valuable firms, with combined annual revenues of more than half a trillion dollars.The recent focus on technology companies when it comes to corporate power is definitely warranted, but I do find it a little peculiar that it, at the same time, draws attention away from other sectors where giant corporations are possibly doing even more damage to society, like large oil companies and the environment, or the concentration of media companies.One has to wonder if the recent aggressive focus on tech companies isn't entirely natural.

The first English translation of Operation Elop, an examination by Finnish journalists into the final years of Nokia phones, has reignited debate about the fate of what was Europe's largest and most admired technology company.[...]What do we learn?Operation Elop is largely negative about the Canadian CEO's tenure, the first non-Finn to hold the position at the company, but nevertheless comes to his support when the authors find that criticism was unfair. For example, the vilification that Stephen Elop received on receiving a "$26m payoff" was completely unwarranted, the authors conclude, since the figure (and much of the reporting) was wildly inaccurate. If you want an American CEO, they point out, you need to pay an American CEO's compensation. And Elop's time at Nokia cost him his marriage, don't forget.But the collapse of Nokia also cost Finnish communities dear: the details of rising alcoholism, and child social services under strain as thousands of employees were laid off, make for grim reading.Elop's tenure at Nokia and the company's downfall will be studied for decades to come.

Amiga Future has published the first 5 parts of a series of AmigaOS 4 programming tutorials online (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5).We were shocked when we realised that while we've covered several subjects in programming for AmigaOS 4 in Amiga Future there's been no extensive coverage of all of the many aspects. Additionally, since the release of OS4, quite a lot of time has passed by, and during that time new programming treasures have sneaked into the SDK virtually unnoticed. It's been nine years since the authors did a similar series in "Amiga Magazin". So, we're launching a new 15-part series starting with a short peek at the SDK and the available development environments.

This week, however, Microsoft finally published a more complete list of the limitations of Windows 10 on ARM. And that word - limitations - is interesting. This isn't how Windows 10 on ARM differs from Windows 10 on x86-based systems. It's how it's more limited.None of these things really sound all that surprising to me, but you can bet these limitations - which seem technical in nature, not political - will lead to outcries among some people who buy ARM-based Windows 10 machines.

Eric Lundgren is obsessed with recycling electronics.He built an electric car out of recycled parts that far outdistanced a Tesla in a test. He launched what he thinks is the first "electronic hybrid recycling" facility in the United States, which turns discarded cellphones and other electronics into functional devices, slowing the stream of harmful chemicals and metals into landfills and the environment. His California-based company processes more than 41 million pounds of e-waste each year and counts IBM, Motorola and Sprint among its clients.But an idea Lundgren had to prolong the life of personal computers could land him in prison.One of those cases that fills any decent human being with rage.

Facebook is bleeding users, with external researchers estimating that the social network lost 2.8 million US users under 25 last year. Those losses have prompted Facebook to get more aggressive in its efforts to win users back - and the company has started using security prompts to encourage users to log into their accounts.Sometimes, Facebook will send emails to users warning them that they're having problems logging into their accounts, Bloomberg reported last month. "Just click the button below and we'll log you in. If you weren't trying to log in, let us know," the emails reportedly read. Other times, Facebook will ask for a user's phone number to set up two-factor authentication - then spam the number with notification texts.Raise your hand if you're surprised Facebook would do this.

David Pogue has some reservations about the smart speaker comparison test Apple subjected the tech press to.Still, when I tweeted about the test, a couple of people were suspicious of the setup, which of course was entirely controlled by Apple. What was the source material? What was the wireless setup?An Apple rep told me that the test songs were streaming from a server in the next room (a Mac). But each speaker was connected to it differently: by Bluetooth (Amazon Echo), Ethernet (Sonos), input miniplug (Google Home), and AirPlay (HomePod), which is Appleâs Wi-Fi-based transmission system.Since the setup wasnât identical, I wondered if it was a perfectly fair test. (Bluetooth, for example, may degrade (compress) the music itâs transmitting, depending on the source and the equipment.)So I decided to set up my own test at home.I'm not really interested in the HomePod or Google Home Max or any other "smart" speaker, but I love how Pogue basically laments much of the technology press for not questioning Apple's test and test setup. A good read.