Here’s a motherboard Intel very quickly wanted to forget about. It’s the Intel CC820—or Cape Cod—desktop board, a product that was late to market (not unusual) and within a few months, the subject of a recall (quite unusual). As the CC820 designation suggests, the board was built on the ill-fated Intel 820 ‘Camino’ chipset. Fascinating story.
We’ve included many reliability improvements in Nuuksio especially targeting Email, Calendar synchronisation and VPN settings. In addition to reliability improvements, the Email app now has enhanced support for handling HTML formatted messages. Audio routing for Android apps has been improved on Android app support 8.1, fixing issues with applications such as WhatsApp calls and Youtube. The operating system now supports hardware MPEG2, VP9 and h.265/HEVC video decoding (the exact support depends on the device). The detailed release notes are also available.
Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers. We all know this is happening, yet there’s very little we can do about it – save for living far away in the woods, disconnected from everything. There’s cameras everywhere, anything with any sort of wireless connection – from smartphone to dumbphone – is tracked at the carrier level, and even our lightbulbs are ‘smart’ these days. Yet, despite knowing this is happening, it’s still eye-opening to see it in such detail as discovered by The New York Times.
Linking to The Verge, because the original report is stuck behind a paywall: Facebook is developing its own operating system that could one day reduce the company’s reliance on Google’s Android, according to a new report by The Information. Development is currently being led by Mark Lucovsky, a Microsoft veteran who co-authored the Windows NT operating system. The report provides a limited amount of information about how the new operating system could be used, but it notes that both Facebook’s Oculus and Portal devices currently run on a modified version of Android. According to one of Facebook’s AR and VR heads, Ficus Kirkpatrick, “it’s possible” that Facebook’s future hardware won’t need to rely on Google’s software, which would reduce or remove entirely the control Google has over Facebook’s hardware. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.
Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance today announced a new working group that plans to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet. Zigbee Alliance board member companies such as IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian are also onboard to join the working group and contribute to the project. This really was about damn time. I’d love to add more smart devices to our home, but the varying standards and questionable security has always made me think twice. A royalty-free, secure, and interoperable standard that everyone can use and adhere to sounds like music to my ears.
Back in October, Wladimir Palant, developer of the popular AdBlock Plus browser extension, published a blog post outlining how extensions from security company Avast/AVG were collecting massive amounts of data from users. In a somewhat-belated response, Google has now removed some of Avast’s extensions from the Chrome Web Store. I’m so surprised.
It’s well known that if you drag a file from Finder and drop it into Terminal, the full path of the file will output in Terminal. The same behavior occurs with copy and paste too. This has always been a very convenient but innocuous operation… until macOS 10.15 Catalina. I’ve discovered that on Catalina, pasting a file from Finder not only outputs the file path in Terminal, it also invisibly and permanently grants Terminal access to the file, bypassing any macOS privacy protections! This is such a weird bug… Or feature?
Remember when the organization in charge of .org domain names traditionally used by non-profits decided to sell itself to a for-profit company? It surprised everyone because up to that point, there was little indication that the Internet Society (ISOC) was shopping the Public Interest Registry (PIR) for sale. Among those surprised, it appears, was ICANN, the organization that oversees the internet’s top-level domains, which now says it is “uncomfortable” with the lack of transparency around the deal and wants ISOC to pump the brakes. “ICANN’s role is to ensure that the .org top-level domain remains secure, reliable, and stable under the proposed acquisition of Public Interest Registry (PIR) by Ethos Capital,” Göran Marby, ICANN President and CEO, said in a statement to The Verge. “We also urge transparency, which is why we sent the 9 December correspondence to PIR and the Internet Society (ISOC).” This whole saga is a stark reminder that the internet and world wide web are mostly under corporate control, in a thick and complicated web of government agencies and private interests.
CP/NC is a CP/M-compatible operating system for the Amstrad NC100 Notepad Computer. It is based on Russell Marks’ ZCN operating system, but focuses more on CP/M compatibility and makes the computer “feel” more like an old-fashioned CP/M box. While ZCN is a rather playful system that adopts lots of features and external programs from DOS and Unix, CP/NC goes back to the roots: you will find a rather minimal CCP and the usual external commands, such as DUMP, PIP, STAT, and SYSGEN. CP/NC also changes the layout of the LCD console from 120×10 characters to a more readable 80×8. Here is a summary of what CP/NC is and is not as well as a list of differences between CP/NC and ZCN. This is such an oddly specific operating system.
If you’ve updated to macOS Catalina 10.15.2 and installed any notarized apps since, you might have noticed that something has gone missing. Do you remember that dialog shown by Gatekeeper when you first open a notarized app, telling you that “Apple checked it for malicious software and none was detected”? Well, that sentence has now vanished. Instead, that dialog now looks very similar to the pre-Catalina dialog for non-notarized apps. I had to read this post twice to fully comprehend what was going on, but once you get it – and most of you will get it without multiple reads because you’re not stupid like me – it’s an interesting look at how seemingly subtle changes in security dialogs – especially undocumented changes – can actually have very serious consequences if you take them at face-value.
My need was seemingly simple: I set up an old ThinkPad 760XL (166 MHz Pentium MMX) running DOS for my son to play 1990s games on, especially but not exclusively Sierra and LucasArts adventures; for that purpose, the laptop is quite suitable, it has a decent ESS sound chip and a CD-ROM. Moving data to the laptop on a CF card with a PCMCIA adapter is not difficult, but it gets old; it would be really handy to have the laptop on the network, accessing the home NAS via either SMB or NFS. The laptop is of course old enough that it has no built-in Ethernet or WiFi, although it has two PCMCIA/CardBus (at least I believe they’re also functional as CardBus) slots. But the laptop is portable, and it’s in a corner of the house where there’s no Ethernet socket nearby. So WiFi would be really great. But is it even possible to get a DOS laptop on a WiFi network in 2019? The short answer is “yes, but”. The long answer follows. That link points to part 1 – part 2 has also been published. Setting up modern wireless networking on older devices or operating systems can be a major stumbling block – there’s not only hardware and its support to consider, but also things like encryption and support for modern wireless security standards. Many of the devices in my Palm OS and PocketPC collection, for instance, have wireless support, but will often lack support for WPA2. Often, the only viable solution is to create a pretty much open guest network, which is not something I’m a big fan of. I’m glad I’m not into MS-DOS like the author is, because I certainly wouldn’t want to tussle with this problem.
Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available for Linux users in public preview, enabling high quality collaboration experiences for the open source community at work and in educational institutions. Users can download the native Linux packages in .deb and .rpm formats here. We are constantly improving based on community feedback, so please download and submit feedback based on your experience. The Microsoft Teams client is the first Microsoft 365 app that is coming to Linux desktops, and will support all of Teams’ core capabilities. Teams is the hub for teamwork that brings together chat, video meetings, calling, and collaboration on Office 365 documents and business processes within a single, integrated experience. I genuinely hope this is the harbinger of the rest of Microsoft Office also finding its way to Linux natively. LibreOffice is workable in a pinch, but for proper compatibility nothing beats the real Office (sadly). I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft has long had Linux versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and so on, much like how Mac OS X has been running on Intel all along before Apple made the switch.
Google has told its Turkish business partners it will not be able to work with them on new Android phones to be released in Turkey, after the Turkish competition board ruled that changes Google made to its contracts were not acceptable. Totalitarian governments are increasingly using their subjects’ smartphones as tools for exerting their totalitarian control. Don’t be surprised if the Turkish government will soon mandate Turkish-made software on smartphones sold in the country, just like Russia mandated not too long ago.
It has been a while since we last heard from Centaur Technology. The company’s last major technology introduction was a decade ago with the Isaiah microarchitecture and the CN core when the company introduced the Via Nano. Since then, the small Austin team refocused its efforts and has been diligently working on its next project – a high-performance data center and edge x86 chip with powerful integrated AI acceleration. Today, Centaur is opening up on its latest core. The consumer market is a thing of the past for Via, and the new focus is the datacenter space.
AnandTech benchmarks the two nearly identical Surface Laptop 3s from Microsoft – one with AMD’s latest mobile processor and GPU, and the other one with Intel’s. They conclude: There aren’t too many ways to sugar coat the results of this showdown though. AMD’s Picasso platform, featuring its Zen+ cores and coupled with a Vega iGPU, has been a tremendous improvement for AMD. But Intel’s Ice Lake platform runs circles around it. Sunny Cove cores coupled with the larger Gen 11 graphics have proven to be too much to handle. That being said, much like the first desktop Ryzen processors being a huge leap forward for AMD without closing the gap with Intel at the time, the Picasso platform seems to repeat the feat in laptops. It was fantastic to see AMD get a design win in a premium laptop this year, and the Surface Laptop 3 is going to turn a lot of heads over the next year. AMD has long needed a top-tier partner to really help its mobile efforts shine, and they now have that strong partner in Microsoft, with the two of them in a great place to make things even better for future designs. Overall AMD has made tremendous gains in their laptop chips with the Ryzen launch, but the company has been focusing more on the desktop and server space, especially with the Zen 2 launch earlier this year. For AMD, the move to Zen 2 in the laptop space can’t come soon enough, and will hopefully bring much closer power parity to Intel’s offerings as well. I can’t wait to see what AMD can offer consumers in the laptop space over the coming years. If it’s going to be a repeat of the desktop space, we’re going to be in for some seriously good times.
When I created the NUKEMAP in 2012, the Google Maps API was amazing.1 It was the best thing in town for creating Javascript mapping mash-ups, cost literally nothing, had an active developer community that added new features on a regular basis, and actually seemed like it was interested in people using their product to develop cool, useful tools. Today, pretty much all of that is now untrue. The API codebase has stagnated in terms of actually useful features being added (many neat features have been removed or quietly deprecated; the new features being added are generally incremental and lame), which is really quite remarkable given that the Google Maps stand-alone website (the one you visit when you go to Google Maps to look up a map or location) has had a lot of neat features added to it (like its 3-D mode) that have not been ported to the API code (which is why NUKEMAP3D is effectively dead — Google deprecated the Google Earth Plugin and has never replaced it, and no other code base has filled the gap). Stories like this often confuse me. Google’s behaviour seems designed specifically to harm the people most enthusiastic and knowledgeable about their products, pushing them away to use competitors’ products or other alternatives. While that won’t harm Google’s bottom line in the short term – and, in fact, might even improve it – in the long term, it strengthens alternatives and teaches people to untangle themselves from Google’s web of products. What’s in it for Google here? Is this just clueless bean counters lead by bottom line-obsessed executives? Or is there some grander plan behind pushing people away?
You’ve never lived until you’ve had to download a driver from an archived forum post on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. You have no idea if it’s going to work, but it’s your only option. So you bite the bullet. I recently did this with a PCI-based SATA card I was attempting to flash to support a PowerPC-based Mac, and while it was a bit of a leap of faith, it actually ended up working. Score one for chance. But this, increasingly, feels like it may be a way of life for people trying to keep old hardware alive—despite the fact that all the drivers generally have to do is simply sit on the internet, available when they’re necessary. This problem is only going to get worse as time progresses. We’ll have to hope random people on the internet are kind enough to upload any drivers they’ve collected and held on to over the years, so users of classic hardware can keep them running.
Yesterday saw the release of the new Mac Pro, finally replacing the trash can and moving back to a tower-based design. It has had a somewhat mixed response, with many people taking issue with the high prices, ranging from $6000 to over $52000. There have been those seeking to defend the prices and write off the complaints, but I don’t believe these arguments take into account the larger picture. All in all, the Mac Pro is a powerful machine. For certain workflows it is even worth the cost. But the problem is that Apple has priced out a huge swathe of the professional market by making its lower end Mac Pros prohibitively expensive for what is frankly underwhelming hardware. The base model Mac Pro is, indeed, a terrible purchase, and some of the upgrade options are downright laughable – to get anything even remotely resembling a decent GPU, you’re asked to spend $2400, which is insane. Anybody who isn’t spending their boss’ money shouldn’t buy this machine. That being said – the interior design and layout of the new Mac Pro is beautiful. I can’t believe that we’re still dealing with kilometers of fiddly cabling and ugly, gamery ATX motherboards that have become ever more cumbersome to deal with, while Apple can design and build such a neat, clean, and tidy system.
Meet the ZedRipper – a 16-core, 83 MHz Z80 powerhouse as portable as it is impractical. If this introductory sentence doesn’t grab your attention because you’re dead inside, maybe this will: In the course of my historical computing hobbies, I stumbled upon something that I thought was very fascinating – relatively early in its history, CP/M supported a ‘networked’ version called CP/NET. The idea behind it was was one that will still feel pretty familiar to most people – that an office might have one or two ‘real’ machines with large disk drives and printers that it shared with ‘thin-client’ style machines that we’re basically just terminals with CPUs and RAM attached. Each user could basically act as if they had their own private CP/M machine with access to large disks and printers. This should give you enough hints as to where the creator and developer took this project. Amazing work.
This article demonstrates some of Magit’s most essential features in order to give you an impression of how the interface works. It also hints at some of the design principals behind that interface. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Magit is a complete interface to Git, which does not limit itself to the “most essential features everyone needs”. I hope that this article succeeds in demonstrating how Magit’s focus on work-flows allows its users to become more effective Git users. Here we concentrate on some essential work-flows, but note that more advanced features and work-flows have been optimized with the same attention to detail. If you would rather concentrate on the big picture, then read the article Magit the magical Git interface instead (or afterwards). As a non-developer, I have no idea if this is a useful tool, but I do like the idea of it.