OSnews

I was at Microsoft's campus in Redmond a week before the Build developer conference, and I wanted to know what was going on with Windows after a reorg split the team into different divisions. Was Microsoft really preparing itself for a world without Windows? Nadella was ready to tell me that Windows isn't going away - of course Windows isn't going away - but he also wanted to explain his latest buzzwordy vision for the future of the Microsoft: AI, Intelligent Cloud, and Intelligent Edge.Windows might still be here, but after talking to Nadella, I did get the sense that Windows is no longer as central to the company's future plans as it once was. Instead of trying to make everything run on Windows (as his predecessor Steve Ballmer was trying to do), Nadella wants to ensure that everything can work with Windows.The decline of Windows is definitely overblown in the media, but Microsoft did miss the next big thing by a thousand miles, and mindshare-wise, this has had enormous consequences. It hasn't hurt Microsoft much financially though, and you can be sure Windows isn't going anywhere any time soon.

Tomorrow at Google I/Oâs developers keynote, we will see the official launch of Flutter Beta 3. This beta is an important step towards the 1.0 build for Flutter, with a heavy focus on solidifying the improvements that Google has been working since they launched the initial Flutter Beta.First and foremost among those improvements is the implementation of the Dart 2 programming language. The second version of Dart was designed specifically with the challenges that early Flutter builds ran into in mind, and brings some substantial changes, including strong typing, cleaner syntax, and an updated developer tool chain.Flutter and Dart are also important parts of Fuchsia. And on that note, might I point out that Fuchsia is getting support for ART, the Android Runtime?

Android Things is Google's managed OS that enables you to build and maintain Internet of Things devices at scale. We provide a robust platform that does the heavy lifting with certified hardware, rich developer APIs, and secure managed software updates using Google's back-end infrastructure, so you can focus on building your product.After a developer preview with over 100,000 SDK downloads, we're releasing Android Things 1.0 to developers today with long-term support for production devices. Developer feedback and engagement has been critical in our journey towards 1.0, and we are grateful to the over 10,000 developers who have provided us feedback through the issue tracker, at workshop events, and through our Google+ community.Google is promising three years of security updates, straight from Google itself.

This has been bugging me for a while - definitely since iOS 11 was unveiled last June and probably before then. I have no clue what Apple's strategy is with their iOS app icon sets, other than to resign myself to the truth that there isn't one. For simplicity, I'm focusing on just the share icon in this post (what Apple formally calls the 'action' button) but these criticisms apply much more widely.iOS is, indeed, an inconsistent mess when it comes to user interface design. Every application looks and feels different, which trips me up all the time. Android is a little bit better in this regard thanks to Material Design, but that's really not saying much.And you know what? I'd rather have misaligned ports I never see at the bottom of my phone than inconsistent UI design I look at multiple times a day.

A years-old privacy flaw will finally be coming to an end on Android. It's an issue you've probably never heard of, but one that you should absolutely be concerned about. Currently, apps on Android can gain full access to the network activity on your device - even without asking for any sensitive permissions. These apps can't detect the content of your network calls, but they can sniff any outgoing or incoming connection via TCP/UDP to determine if you are connecting to a certain server. For instance, an app can detect when another app on your device connects to a financial institutionâs server. Donât believe me? Just download one of the many netstat apps on the Play Store and see for yourself.I had no idea this was an issue at all. Good to see it fixed, and since it'll probably be part of a monthly security update, it'll propagate to most Android devices.

So the objective here was to take a C64 breadbin case and keyboard and put a Raspberry Pi 3 into it; keeping the keyboard and joystick ports working, but also giving me HDMI, USB controller support, and modem emulation. While I still have 2 real Commodore 64s (and an Ultimate64 on the way!), I like using the RPi and Vice to play 64 games.These mounts do not require you to drill or cut your C64 case! The 3D files are provisioned under the creative commons license so they are FREE to use, distribute, modify, or even sell.Just a fun project.

Sharing from one app to another has been a mainstay of Android for years and years. It was one of the features that first drew me to Android: no more copying and pasting, no more having to open Twitter or WhatsApp to send a picture I just saw in my Gallery. Apps could talk to each other and the experience felt more cohesive and seamless.But with time, the Share UI in Android has languished, stuck with the same features and same problems. It switched from a vertical list to a horizontal one, it added direct share in Android 6.0 and app pinning in Android 7.0, yet these felt like putting lipstick on a pig: the Share UI remains slow, bloated, convoluted, and if you pay close attention to it, one of the most inconsistent experiences on Android to date. Android P, like Oreo before it, appears to bring no improvements to the Share interface, but that's a big oversight in our opinion. It's high time Google gave it the attention it deserved and fixed its many issues.The share sheet on Android is, indeed, a mess. It's odd how such an important aspect of one of Android's major strong points - inter-application communication - is being left to rot.

RISC OS 5.24 has been released.The headline features see previously neglected areas of RISC OS dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, with JPEG support, monitor EDID support, handling of larger hard drives, and the network stack being upgraded. The bounty system is delivering some really worthwhile enhancements into the software. USB and network stack improvements are a massive undertaking, and ROOL broke each into several stages to make them more manageable.There are also some genuine improvements to user features such as clipboard improvements and new features in Paint. Lots of applications have received little tweaks such as unicode and fancy fonts in Chars, improved dialogs in Printers, tweaks to HForm, DosFS, Maestro, more secure LanmanFS which can connect to Windows 8 and 10, etc.RISC OS 5.24 is freely available for Raspberry Pi machines.

By far, the worst part of working on beets is dealing with filenames. And since our job is to keep track of your files in the database, we have to deal with them all the time. This post describes the filename problems we discovered in the project's early days, how we address them now, and some alternatives for the future.

Following Facebook's acknowledgement that it had let a political ad targeting firm scrape the personal data of 87 million users, I rushed to see what kind of personal data the social network and Google had gathered on me. Both had more information, reaching back longer, than I had envisioned. So Apple was next. I use an iPhone, iPad and two Mac computers, and Apple also offers data downloads in the privacy section of its website. It's hard to find, and once you do make the connection, you can expect a hefty wait to get the results.But don't expect to stay up all night reading what Apple has on you.Hint: it ain't much.

Iâve been a professional Free Software developer in the GNU/Linux area for 14 years now, and a hobbyist developer and user for much longer. For some reason that never extended much to the smartphone world, beyond running LineageOS on my older phones (my current Sony Xperia is still under warranty and Iâm fine with the officially supported Android), and various stabs at using the Ubuntu phone (RIP!).On a few long weekends this year it got a hold of me, and I had a look over the Google fence to see how Free Software is doing on Android and how to reduce my dependency on Google Play Services and Google apps. Less because I would actually severely distrust Google, as they have a lot of business and goodwill to lose if they ever majorly screw up; but more because of simple curiosity and for learning new things. I want to note down my experience here for sharing and discussing.I started experimenting on my old Nexus 4 by completely blanking it and installing current LineageOS 14.1 without the Google apps. This provides a nice testing ground that is completely free of any proprietary Google stuff. From that I can apply good solutions on my "production" Xperia.One of those topics not particularly suited for most smartphone users, but among OSNews readers, there are sure to be quite a few people who are interested in this.

But if we can't change our behaviors, maybe we can change our devices. Enter the minimalist phone: a phone that does less. Over the course of a few weeks, I tried out four different phones - the Unihertz Jelly, the Nokia 3310 3G, the Punkt MP01, and the Light Phone - in an effort to curb how much time I spend needlessly scrolling and refreshing. Not every one of these phones is intentionally minimalist, but each came with unique limitations, built-in throttles that would effectively discourage anyone from wallowing in the stupor of infinite feeds. I was looking for a change. I was looking for salvation.But when it was all over, I came crawling back to my iPhone.It shouldn't be this hard to find a good feature phone. I'm pretty sure we have more readers longing for a good feature phone than most websites, and those of you who have that longing should be able to pick up a good feature phone - not some crappy fashion statement that is frustrating to use.

A 20th anniversary is a milestone worthy of celebration in its own right, but even more so when describing a computer. Few technology products boast such a feat in an industry where changing customer preference and exponential technical advancement can quickly obsolete even the most well-considered plans.This Sunday, Apple's iMac line joins the 20-year club. Its ticket to entry is two decades of valuable lessons and ideas that tell the recent history of the personal computer industry and reveal Apple's priorities and values. The iMac's timeline tells many stories - some of reinvention and business strategy, others of software and hardware.Perhaps none are more significant than the iMac's design story. Explorations of color, form, material, and miniaturization have marked significant breakthroughs throughout the years. On this anniversary week, we'll take a look at the design evolution of the iMac.The iMac G4 is definitely my favourite iMac. I've owned all types of iMac - the G3, G4, G5, and various Intel models - and the latest incarnation, the iMac Pro, is definitely on my list of things I'd love to buy if I win the lottery.

When you set a password for your Twitter account, we use technology that masks it so no one at the company can see it. We recently identified a bug that stored passwords unmasked in an internal log. We have fixed the bug, and our investigation shows no indication of breach or misuse by anyone.Out of an abundance of caution, we ask that you consider changing your password on all services where you've used this password. You can change your Twitter password anytime by going to the password settings page.I like how the story is titled "Keeping your account secure".

Your devices are tracking you all the time. You just donât know it yet.When you consent to sharing your data with many popular apps, youâre also allowing app developers to collect your data and sell it to third parties through trackers that supply advertisers with detailed information about where you live, work, and shop.In November 2017, Yale Privacy Lab detected trackers in over 75% of the 300 Android apps it analyzed. A March 2018 study of 160,000 free Android apps found that more than 55% of trackers tried to extract user location, while 30% accessed the deviceâs contact list. And a 2015 analysis of 110 popular free mobile apps revealed that 47% of iOS apps shared geo-coordinates and other location data with third parties, and personally identifiable information, like names of users (provided by 18% of iOS apps), was also provided.These are particularly nasty trackers, since it's generally more difficult to block them.

Given all of these changes, we wanted to explore how the T2 coprocessor was being used by Apple and how it currently fits into the larger system security model, as well as how this may evolve in the future. What follows is the first part of this exploration where we describe how the T2 coprocessor is used to implement Secure Boot on the iMac Pro, as well as comparing and contrasting this Secure Boot approach to those that have been present in Appleâs iDevices for a number of years.Detailed exploration of the T2 coprocessor in the new iMac Pro.

A coalition of Silicon Valley tech giants has doubled down on its criticism of encryption backdoors following a proposal that would give law enforcement access to locked and encrypted devices.The group, which focuses on efforts to reform government surveillance, said in a statement that it continues to advocate for strong encryption, and decried attempts to undermine the technology.The coalition consists of, among others, Google, Microsoft, and Apple.

In an exclusive piece of research, Check Point Researchers have carried out a revealing investigation into North Korea's home-grown anti-virus software, SiliVaccine. One of several interesting factors is that a key component of SiliVaccine's code is a 10-year-old copy of one of Trend Micro's, a Japanese company, software components.It also contained a piece of malware, so not much different from western anti-virus.

I've decided to write up a little history of ispc, the compiler I wrote when I was at Intel. There's a lot to say, so it'll come out in a series of posts over the next few weeks. While I've tried to get all the details right and properly credit people, this is all from my memory. For anyone who was around at the time, please send an email if you see any factual errors.The above links to the first part in the series - there's a table of contents for the entire series.

Regulation (EU) 2016/6791, the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation ('GDPR'), regulates the processing by an individual, a company or an organisation of personal data relating to individuals in the EU.It doesn't apply to the processing of personal data of deceased persons or of legal entities.The rules don't apply to data processed by an individual for purely personal reasons or for activities carried out in one's home, provided there is no connection to a professional or commercial activity. When an individual uses personal data outside the personal sphere, for socio-cultural or financial activities, for example, then the data protection law has to be respected.A complete guide and overview of the new GDPR going into effect in the EU later this month. It's a very comprehensive set of privacy regulations that virtually all technology - and others - will have to comply with.

Mozilla's Nate Weiner:Content on the web is powerful. It enables us to learn new things, discover different perspectives, stay in touch with what's happening in the world, or just make us laugh. Making sure that stories like these - stories that are worth your time and attention - are discoverable and supported is central to what we care about at Pocket.It's important for quality content like this to thrive - and a critical way it's funded is through advertising. But unfortunately, today, this advertising model is broken. It doesn't respect user privacy, it's not transparent, and it lacks control, all the while starting to move us toward low quality, clickbait content.We believe the Internet can do better. So earlier this year, we started to explore a new model and showed an occasional sponsored story in Pocket's recommendation section on Firefox New Tab. Starting today, we're expanding this work further - now Firefox Nightly and Beta users may also see these sponsored stories. We're preparing for this feature to go fully live in May to Firefox users in the US with the Firefox 60 release.Luckily, you can turn this off.

All those little features add up: The phone is fun and easy to use. And so far, there's no serious downside. I mentioned it above; the experience is simultaneously high-end luxury yet while staying informed and in control of the device. I believe this is a very difficult mix to get right. IMO, Apple's been drifting away from the keep-the-user-in-control value.Maybe this sounds naive, but I'm completely surprised by how the product stands on its own. It's not in the shadow of iOS, not playing catch-up with Apple. I'm continuously seeing common problems solved in new ways.I'm sure we can have a civil, informed, and respectful discussion about this. To facilitate such, I'm going for a walk. With my iPhone 10, AirPods, and Apple Watch.

Today, Microsoft released the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, which adds a number of interesting new features to Windows, and adds even more Fluent Design to the user interface. The Verge lists the 10 biggest new features and changes, while WindowsCentral has a longer, more detailed review of the update.I've been running the final version of this update for a while now on my workstation and my Surface Pro 4, and this is one of those updates that adds nothing but welcome changes and new features. There are two 'features' that really make a huge difference to me, and which have me mildly excited about Windows for the first time in ages.The tentpole feature - Timeline - is really nice, and allows you to easily scroll back in time to look at applications, documents, websites, and more that you opened in the past. It's like the history feature of your browser, but instead of just websites, it also covers apps and documents, while also combining the histories of other Windows machines you own. Timeline will clearly raise a number of privacy concerns, so luckily, it's optional, and you can turn it off.The second 'feature' isn't really a feature per se, but more a clean-up of the Windows UI that's clearly an ongoing process. Microsoft is adding Fluent Design to all of its applications, and it's slowly adding it to core parts of the operating system as well, such as the Start menu and the various applets. Fluent Design adds some much-needed depth and distinctiveness to the otherwise flat user interface, and has nice, unobtrusive animations and highlighting effects that make using such a flat UI a lot less... Cold?It feels like the next big step in the "Fluent Design-ification" of Windows is a big one: Explorer. While Microsoft is replacing more and more old Win32 parts of the operating system with new, modern Fluent Design counterparts, Explorer is the one big holdout that's still fully Win32, looking horribly out of place among all the fast, new, and responsive Fluent Design parts of the operating system. I can't wait for a modern replacement.All in all, this is a no-brainer update that makes Windows better, so unless you have some specific reason to hold out on updates, go ahead and install it.

The billionaire chief executive of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, is planning to leave the company after clashing with its parent, Facebook, over the popular messaging serviceâs strategy and Facebook's attempts to use its personal data and weaken its encryption, according to people familiar with internal discussions.As the most popular messaging application in the world, WhatsApp is one of the largest treasure troves of user data not yet exploited for targeted advertising thanks to its end-to-end encryption. Facebook must be itching to start injecting ads into WhatsApp and to scan messages for optimal targeting.

This build is a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm replica of the NeXT Computer to house a Raspberry Pi computer. I designed and built this specifically with the aim of having it run some basic server tasks on my home network, such as storing revision control repositories etc.The necessary files to make your own are available. What a neat-looking case - I'd love a similar one, but slightly larger so it can house a mini-ITX board. I would love to build a Ryzen II machine in a case like this.

It's that time of year again - Haiku is going to participate in Google's Summer of Code, and this means interesting projects to follow. One of the three projects has the goal to bring XFS support to Haiku, while another wants to implement "an addon for Tracker to support the Git version control system". The last of the three projects aims to develop an SDHCI MMC for Haiku, which, from the description of the project, seems like a massive undertaking to me.Three fascinating projects to follow over the coming months.

As a follow-up to the story about Eric Lundgren being sentenced to prison, Microsoft published a blog post with "the facts" about the case.In the last few days there have been several stories about the sentencing of Eric Lundgren in a case that began in 2012, and we have received a number of questions about this case and our role in it. Although the case was not one that we brought, the questions raised recently have caused us to carefully review the publicly available court documents. All of the information we are sharing in this blog is drawn from those documents. We are sharing this information now and responding publicly because we believe both Microsoftâs role in the case and the facts themselves are being misrepresented.As a counterpoint to Microsoft's blog post, Techcrunch's Devin Coldewey claims Microsoft is trying to spin "the facts".Earlier this week Eric Lundgren was sentenced to 15 months in prison for selling what Microsoft claimed was "counterfeit software", but which was in fact only recovery CDs loaded with data anyone can download for free. The company has now put up a blog post setting "the facts" straight, though it's something of a limited set of those facts."We are sharing this information now and responding publicly because we believe both Microsoft's role in the case and the facts themselves are being misrepresented," the company wrote. But it carefully avoids the deliberate misconception about software that it promulgated in court.At this point, we've covered all the possible angles on this story.

Eric Lundgren is resigned to doing prison time. After spending his life working on e-waste recycling programs, Lundgren was arrested and charged with "counterfeiting" Microsoft restore discs, part of a controversial, years-long legal fight that ended this week when an appeals court declined to overturn a lower court's decision.This is one of those cases where it's very easy to hide behind the letter of the law, but anybody with more than two independent braincells to rub together should realise this man should not be in prison. Laws exist to serve man; man does not exist to serve laws. Nothing is more dangerous to a society and civilization than people believing law rules over man.

Intel has announced that, once again, mass production of its 10-nanometer "Cannon Lake" chips will be delayed. The company is already shipping the chips in low volumes (though no one knows to whom at this point), but said it "now expects 10-nanometer volume production to shift to 2019 [rather than the end of 2018]." It announced the move in its first quarter earnings report, which saw it collect a record $16.1 billion in revenue and $4.5 billion in profit, a 50 percent jump over last year.Ryzen 2 is kicking butt, and Intel is delaying chips. Must be fun to work at Intel these days.

After the recent news about Linux applications coming to Chrome OS, we now also know what they will look like.The Chrome OS developers have been working out the stylistic elements of what you'll see once you open your first native Linux apps in Chrome OS, and they've opted for Adapta, a popular Material Design-inspired Gtk theme that can be used on many of your favorite GNU/Linux distributions.This project may finally make Linux on the desktop happen.

Apple has officially ended development on its AirPort line of products, which includes the AirPort Express ($99), the AirPort Extreme ($199), and the AirPort Time Capsule ($299).This makes me sad. I have the latest AirPort Extreme, and it's one of those products I have absolutely zero complaints about. It's easy to use, works like a charm, has far better performance than any other router I've ever had, and looks unassuming. If it ever fails. I'll probably take a look at something like Eero.

Downgrade prevention has been a cat-and-mouse game between consumers and companies since the inception of remote updates. The Nintendo Switch adopts a worrisome-strategy of preventing firmware downgrades by permanently modifying your device every time it updates. While this isnât a new concept (the Xbox 360 was doing it back in 2007), it is part of a greater effort to prevent end users from modifying their devices to their liking.The Nintendo Switch use an Nvidia Tegra X1 SoC, which comes with a fuse driver. This allows it to programmatically blow fusesâ-âpermanently modifying the device, making it impossible to revert to a previous state.Despite being used in an anti-consumer manner, the technology is fascinating.

Let's say a machine in your corporate fleet gets infected with malware. How would you detect it? How could you find out what happened on the machine? What did the malware do? Did it steal your browser's passwords? What network connections did the malware make? Was it looking for crypto currency? By having good telemetry and a good host monitoring solution for your machines you can collect the context necessary to answer these important questions.Proper host monitoring on macOS can be very difficult for some organizations. It can be hard to find mature tools that proactively detect security incidents. Even when you do find a tool that fits all your needs, you may run into unexpected performance issues that make the machine nearly unusable by your employees. You might also experience issues like having hosts unexpectedly shut down due to a kernel panic. Even if you are able to pinpoint the cause of these issues you may still be unable to configure the tool to prevent the issue from recurring. Due to difficulties like these at Dropbox, we set out to find an alternative solution.Exactly what it says on the tin.

Here's all you need to know about Google's year-long secretive development of Linux app functionality in Chrome OS, also known as Project Crostini.In a nutshell, it's a way to run regular Linux applications on Chrome OS without compromising security or enabling developer mode. The (not yet available) official setting states that it's to "Run Linux tools, editors, and IDEs on your Chromebook."Crostini is a culmination of several years of development that enabled the functionality to run securely enough to meet Chrome OS's high-security standards. To understand why it's only just appearing, it's best to look at what came before.This should make easy to manage, safe, and secure ChromeBooks infinitely more attractive to developers.

It was a glorious sunny day in Wakefield and a very upbeat RISC OS show with lots of interesting hardware and software. You can see some show pictures, and here are my show notes if you were not able to attend.A detailed description of the Wakefield 2018 RISC OS show.

Let me preface this by saying that this is a (very) long and medium-rare technical article about the security considerations and minutiae of porting (most of) the Arcan ecosystem to work under OpenBSD. The main point of this article is not so much flirting with the OpenBSD crowd or adding further noise to software engineering topics, but to go through the special considerations that had to be taken, as notes to anyone else that decides to go down this overgrown and lonesome trail, or are curious about some less than obvious differences between how these things "work" on Linux vs. other parts of the world.You know you're getting something good with a preface like this.

Email is a necessity for most of us. We use it to stay in touch with colleagues and friends, keep up with the latest news, manage to-dos at home or at work - we just can't live without it. Today we announced major improvements to Gmail on the web to help people be more productive at work. Here's a quick look at how the new Gmail can help you accomplish more from your inbox.A major redesign of the Gmail web interface is now available for testing.

Nintendo Switch has been hacked, with two similar exploits released in the last 24 hours following a complete dump of the console's boot ROM. The hacks are hardware-based in nature and cannot be patched by Nintendo. The only way forward for the platform holder in fully securing the console will be to revise the Nvidia Tegra X1 processor itself, patching out the boot ROM bug. In the short term, homebrew code execution is possible and a full, touch-enabled version of Linux with 3D acceleration support is now available.I'm a little hesitant to try this out on my own Switch out of fear of messing it up and leaving me with a bricked console, but this is great news for the homebrew community.

Haiku's monthly activity report for March is out has been out for weeks now, and it contains some interesting nuggets as the team moves closer to beta, but one stood out to me:Kalisti5 got the PowerPC build working again. It is still not possible to boot PowerPC images very far, but at least it is now possible to compile them, and our buildbots are now happily doing so.I find it interesting that there's people at Haiku still working on PowerPC support. It'd be interesting if they ever manage to support Apple PowerPC hardware, if only to offer yet another choice besides MorphOS.

Windows 10 Lean appears to live up to its name: an installation is about 2GB smaller than Windows 10 Pro, and it is missing a bunch of things, such as desktop wallpaper, Registry Editor, the MMC management console, and more. Lucan reports that Lean does not seem to apply the same restrictions as S Mode, and as such it is capable of running both Universal Windows Programs from the Store and traditional Win32 applications.The latest build also has some new telephony APIs, which is fueling speculation of a Surface Phone.

Regardless, the Fifth Age of the Macintosh is at hand. We just donât know what form itâll take. The first age began with the original 1984 Mac. The second age was marked by maturity and stability of the environment that came with Mac System Software 6 in 1988. 2001âs OS X did nothing less than save the entire platform. And when Apple finally figured out notebooks - around 2006-2008, with the introductions of the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air - the company brought the sexy back to the Mac.Which brings us to Five.The next major step could be a revolutionary spin on the Mac that goes way beyond merely keeping pace with modern computing and makes the Mac into an influential platform once more. We can even dare to hope that by building its own CPUs, consolidating the Macâs hardware design further, and incorporating iPad manufacturing methods, Apple can finally produce a great Mac that sells for way under $900.Or, it could be equally significant as The Last Version Of MacOS That Apple Ever Ships.I have a distinct feeling - and I've had that feeling for years now - that something big is about to happen to the Mac. I do not believe that the Mac as we know it today will be around for much longer; what form it will take, exactly, is up for debate, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the platform slowly but surely move towards ARM, probably from the bottom (MacBook Air) to the top (Mac Pro). MacOS and iOS aren't going to become unified in the sense they're the same on an iPhone and a Mac, but they will run the exact same applications, just with different UIs depending on the input method (and screen size) used.The upcoming Mac Pro might very well be the last traditional x86 Apple workstation.

If you ask anyone who knows me, I'm probably the biggest Apple fan they know. Ask for a suggestion of what computer to get, and I'll almost certainly either tell you the MacBook Pro, or to wait, because Apple is about to update its hardware finally.But recently, I realized I'd gotten tired of Apple's attitude toward the desktop. The progress in macOS land has basically been dead since Yosemite, two years ago, and Apple's updates to the platform have been incredibly small. I'm a developer, and it seems to me Apple doesn't pay any attention to its software or care about the hundreds of thousands of developers that have embraced the Mac as their go-to platform.Something's obviously afoot in Mac land.

There is a borderland between waking life and the uncharted wilderness of sleep that we all traverse each night, but we rarely stop to marvel at the strangeness of this liminal world. If we do, we find that it is full of hallucinations both wonderful and terrifying, a mental goulash of reality and fantasy.Usually we pass through this state of half-wakefulness on our way to deep sleep within minutes. We may experience microdreams during the transition, but the content of these microdreams appear to be random and we usually don't have any memory of them when we wake. A team of researchers led by MIT doctoral candidate Adam Horowitz wants to change that. Horowitz and his colleagues at the MIT Media Lab have developed a relatively simple device called Dormio to interface with this unique stage of sleep. Their hypothesis is that this liminal period between wakefulness and sleep is a fount of creativity that is usually lost in the ocean of sleep. The thinking is that if youâre able to descend into that stage of sleep and return to consciousness without descending deeper into sleep, you will benefit from the intensely associative thinking that characterizes the strange microdreams experienced during the transition to sleep.There's so much we don't know about sleeping, dreaming, and the brain as a whole, that I'd be quite nervous about using devices like these before we have a better understanding of our brain. Still, if it works, this is quite cool.

After porting ObjFW (and at the same time Objective-C) to MorphOS and starting to port it to AmigaOS 4, I thought: It's nice to have Objective-C on a modern Amiga-like operating system. But what if we could have it on the real thing? And thus, I ported it to AmigaOS 3 today.These are cool developments for the Amiga world.

Terminals have a special place in computing history, surviving along with the command line in the face of the rising ubiquity of graphical interfaces. Terminal emulators have replaced hardware terminals, which themselves were upgrades from punched cards and toggle-switch inputs. Modern distributions now ship with a surprising variety of terminal emulators. While some people may be happy with the default terminal provided by their desktop environment, others take great pride at using exotic software for running their favorite shell or text editor. But as we'll see in this two-part series, not all terminals are created equal: they vary wildly in terms of functionality, size, and performance.

The Justice Department has opened an antitrust investigation into potential coordination by AT&T, Verizon and a telecommunications standards organization to hinder consumers from easily switching wireless carriers, according to six people with knowledge of the inquiry.In February, the Justice Department issued demands to AT&T, Verizon and the G.S.M.A., a mobile industry standards-setting group, for information on potential collusion to thwart a technology known as eSIM, said two of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details are confidential.The problem, of course, is that in the US, these carriers bribe corrupt politicians to enact laws to hinder competition, for instance by making community broadband initiatives illegal. I doubt investigations like these will do anything to fix the root cause.But hey, it's a start.

Ars Technica takes a good look at Android Go, and concludes:The best thing about Android Go is that it doesn't force anything on users. If you're like me and find Google Maps Go to be nearly useless, you are totally free to download the full version of Google Maps. Because of this, Android Go is never an "inferior" version of Android. In the current builds, at least, it's purely a lighter, less resource-intensive version of Android. If you can't stand the functionality reduction, you can easily fix it by downloading the full versions of apps.However scattershot the overall package seems, Android Go does succeed in lowering the bar for what it takes to run Android. It's certainly more useful than something like Firefox OS or Tizen. Hardware this is cheap still doesn't result in a user experience I can call "good" though. If you can afford something better, spend the extra money.

How much does adding somewhat frivolous animations to an OS matter? I'm not sure, but I do know that users of Windows will be very vocal as Microsoft experiments with adding them to Windows 10.In Windows 10 Redstone 5 (due fall 2018) I expect Microsoft to continue to refine, improve, and make more consistent UI elements in Windows 10. That includes adding more animations to simple behaviors like the Action Center, but I can already see push back.I know that especially among the kind of people who read OSNews, "animations" in UI design tends to be a very dirty word. I very much do not belong to that group of people, since I adore proper, well-thought out use of animations in UI design, such as the fun little touches in Material Design, the pivots and slides in Windows Phone's Metro, and yes, the brand new flourishes in Microsoft's Fluent Design, which is currently making its way to Windows 10 users all around the world.I'm fine with being in the minority here on this one - to each their own.

FFmpeg 4.0 has been released, and it's a major one. Since this particular subject matter - and its changelog - are way beyond the scope of my capabilities, I'll just leave you with the generic description of the project (in case you live under a rock).FFmpeg is the leading multimedia framework, able to decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter and play pretty much anything that humans and machines have created. It supports the most obscure ancient formats up to the cutting edge. No matter if they were designed by some standards committee, the community or a corporation. It is also highly portable: FFmpeg compiles, runs, and passes our testing infrastructure FATE across Linux, Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, the BSDs, Solaris, etc. under a wide variety of build environments, machine architectures, and configurations.

The Verge has a big exclusive - Google has managed to corral carriers into supporting something called the "Universal Profile for Rich Communication Services", or Chat, which basically replaces SMS in every Android phone.top-tier Android phone can cost upwards of a thousand dollars, and for that money, you'll get some amazing features. It will have a stellar screen, top-flight camera, gobs of storage, and an absolutely atrocious texting experience.Most people in the world, whether they buy an iPhone or an Android phone, dump all the preinstalled chat applications into a junk folder, install WhatsApp or WeChat (or Telegram in repressive dictatorships like Russia and Iran), and forget this American obsession with iMessage vs. Google's 238437 chat apps even exists.That being said.Now, the company is doing something different. Instead of bringing a better app to the table, it's trying to change the rules of the texting game, on a global scale. Google has been quietly corralling every major cellphone carrier on the planet into adopting technology to replace SMS. It's going to be called "Chat", and it's based on a standard called the "Universal Profile for Rich Communication Services". SMS is the default that everybody has to fall back to, and so Google's goal is to make that default texting experience on an Android phone as good as other modern messaging apps.Sounds like something they should've done ten years ago, but as you dive further into the details, a whole bunch of huge red flags pop up:But remember, Chat is a carrier-based service, not a Google service. It's just "Chat", not "Google Chat". In a sign of its strategic importance to Google, the company has spearheaded development on the new standard, so that every carrier's Chat services will be interoperable. But, like SMS, Chat won't be end-to-end encrypted, and it will follow the same legal intercept standards. In other words: it won't be as secure as iMessage or Signal.In the current political and societal climate, the lack of end-to-end encryption is absolutely bonkers. Obviously, there's no encryption because carriers (and our governments) want to snoop on our communications, but with end-to-end encrypted options readily available, why even bother going 2-3 years back in time?If you're still trying to wrap your head around the idea that Google won't have a standalone consumer chat app, well, so am I. "The fundamental thesis behind the RCS protocol is it's a carrier service," Sabharwal says. That means that the carriers will be the final arbiters of what Chat can and can't do - and whether it will be successful. The good news is that Google appears to have herded all the carrier cats into a box where their Chat services will actually be interoperable.Isn't the point to get away from under carrier control, not slide back under it?I just don't see how such an archaic service like this will ever gain any traction, when most of the world has already settled on its chat service, mostly dictated by what your friends and family uses. Without end-to-end encryption and while under carrier control, this service seems like a massive step backward - not forward.