From a support article by WhatsApp, one of the – if not the – most popular messaging app in the world: If you received an in-app message stating your account is “Temporarily banned” this means that you’re likely using an unsupported version of WhatsApp instead of the official WhatsApp app. If this is the case, you must download the official app to continue using WhatsApp. Unsupported apps, such as WhatsApp Plus and GB WhatsApp, are altered versions of WhatsApp. These unofficial apps are developed by third parties and violate our Terms of Service. WhatsApp doesn’t support these third-party apps because we can’t validate their security practices. With how important messaging platforms like WhatsApp are in many countries – including my own – they’ve basically become an intrinsic part of the fabric of society, and as such, I really feel like we need to do something about the kind of behaviour as highlighted in this support article. Do we really want to leave a core aspect of our communications up to Facebook, of all companies? I’m not sure what we can do about this, exactly. Suggesting alternatives like Signal is pointless, since that’s like suggesting all your friends and family learn a specific language just to communicate with you. Government intervention should definitely be an option, but I have no idea in what shape or form. Whatever happens, though, I see little difference between concerns about Huawei’s networking equipment and Facebook’s WhatsApp. If you’re concerned about one, you should be just as concerned about the other.
The internet consists of tiny bits of code that move around the world, traveling along wires as thin as a strand of hair strung across the ocean floor. The data zips from New York to Sydney, from Hong Kong to London, in the time it takes you to read this word. Nearly 750,000 miles of cable already connect the continents to support our insatiable demand for communication and entertainment. Companies have typically pooled their resources to collaborate on undersea cable projects, like a freeway for them all to share. But now Google is going its own way, in a first-of-its-kind project connecting the United States to Chile, home to the company’s largest data center in Latin America. Not the most in-depth article, but still a fun read.
Here at Microsoft, we are always looking to engage with open source communities to produce better solutions for the community and our customers . One of the more useful debugging advances that have arrived in the last decade is DTrace. DTrace of course needs no introduction: it’s a dynamic tracing framework that allows an admin or developer to get a real-time look into a system either in user or kernel mode. DTrace has a C-style high level and powerful programming language that allows you to dynamically insert trace points. Using these dynamically inserted trace points, you can filter on conditions or errors, write code to analyze lock patterns, detect deadlocks, etc. ETW while powerful, is static and does not provide the ability to programmatically insert trace points at runtime. Starting in 2016, the OpenDTrace effort began on GitHub that tried to ensure a portable implementation of DTrace for different operating systems. We decided to add support for DTrace on Windows using this OpenDTrace port. We have created a Windows branch for “DTrace on Windows” under the OpenDTrace project on GitHub. All our changes made to support DTrace on Windows are available here. Over the next few months, we plan to work with the OpenDTrace community to merge our changes. All our source code is also available at the 3rd party sources website maintained by Microsoft. Microsoft is continuing its effort to draw developers to Windows by implementing features developers actually seem to want, instead of trying to push in-house features that are unique to Windows that nobody is asking for.
Elizabeth Warren, Democratic presidential candidate for the 2020 elections, has said that she intends to break up the big technology companies. Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy. They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. And in the process, they have hurt small businesses and stifled innovation. I want a government that makes sure everybody — even the biggest and most powerful companies in America — plays by the rules. And I want to make sure that the next generation of great American tech companies can flourish. To do that, we need to stop this generation of big tech companies from throwing around their political power to shape the rules in their favor and throwing around their economic power to snuff out or buy up every potential competitor. That’s why my administration will make big, structural changes to the tech sector to promote more competition — including breaking up Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Warren later added that Apple, too, should be broken up. Another Democratic presidential candidate, Amy Klobuchar, suggests taxing companies who profit off user data, and of course, there’s people like Bernie Sanders, who wants to limit the power of corporations in American politics in general. This poses an interesting conundrum for the American tech giants: they always pretend to be quite left-wing, and up until recently, that’s been an easy thing to do. Now, though, public support for Democrats might actually be to their own detriment. Let’s see how long these companies can maintain their left-wing dog and pony show.
The idea that a bicycle might need an OS might seem silly, but 30 years ago may gearheads wouldn’t have anticipated that cars would become rolling supercomputers. Hammerhead crowdfunded its first product, the H1, and subsequently built Karoo, a “cycling computer” that supports navigation and training. But Morgan told me his ambitions are bigger than that.After all, he sees a future where electric bikes need smart range projections, where bike-share fleets need to be managed, where social training programs like Strava can pull data from the bike itself and where any bicycle should come with theft and crash alerts. Calling it an OS is probably a stretch. It seems to be an Android OS with cycling-specific constellation of apps, originally designed specifically for their own hardware but eventually intended to be licensed to other vendors.
David Balaban says, “There are plenty of operating systems aimed at achieving online anonymity. But how many of them are really good?” He highlights five candidates: Tails OS, Whonix, Kodachi, Qubes, and Subgraph. He concludes that Kodachi is the best OS to preserve anonymity. Have any OSNews readers evaluated any of these OSes? Do you agree with his conclusion?
PureOS has laid the foundation for future applications to run on both the Librem 5 phone and Librem laptops, from the same PureOS release, in contrast, they say, to Google and Apple’s ecosystems which still have separate OSes for mobile and desktop. Now, Google and Apple seem to be intent on converging their mobile and desktop platforms, leading to fear and consternation from desktop OS power users, who assume that the move will dumb down desktop OSes. While this technical aspects of the PureOS team’s accomplishment are interesting and laudable, I’d suspect that the bigger challenge for any mainstream platform will actually be a user experience challenge, especially bridging familiar UI elements between mobile and desktop user environments.
The RetroHQ Lynx SD cartridge for the Atari Lynx lets you play homebrew games and backed up ROMs on your Lynx simply by copying them to an SD card, plugging it into the Lynx SD cartridge and then plugging that into your Lynx. It’s a great idea and follows on from many similar EverDrive type units on other retro consoles. The only gripe with the Lynx SD has been its very functional, but simplistic menu loader. Well that’s no more. Atari Gamer has created a whole new menu loader system with many exciting features that will blow the original loader out of the water. This new loader will be the default shipped with all future preorders too! So let’s check it out. It’s remarkable how active the communities around old hardware really are. I never would’ve guessed people are still hard at work on the Atari Lynx, of all mobile consoles.
Microsoft is working on a new version of Edge that’s based on the open-source Chromium project, a move that shocked many. The company has internally been working on the browser for months now and, according to our sources, currently maintains two channels for the browser: a Dev channel updated weekly and a Canary channel that’s updated daily. We were recently able to get our hands on some screenshots of the browser in its current state, as well as some images of the new Microsoft Edge Store which will showcase the many extensions Microsoft can now boast as a result of the move from EdgeHTML to Chromium for its browser. Clearly still in a very early stage.
The Nintendo Switch has a pretty serious hardware vulnerability that leaves it open to all kinds of exploits, and we’ve previously seen it running Linux thanks to the work of some hackers. Meanwhile, since Microsoft introduced Windows 10 on ARM, developers have been working to port it to unsupported ARM devices, including the Lumia 950. So, it would seem that it’s only a matter of time until these two paths intersect, and that seems to have happened now. A Twitter user by the name of @imbushuo has posted pictures of attempts to install the ARM version of Microsoft’s operating system on Nintendo’s hybrid console. The developer has noted some issues and documented many of the problems he encountered on Twitter, but progress is being made. The latest status update simply shows the Windows boot logo on the screen, with imbushuo noting that some work still needs to be done, specifically in regards to memory regions. I’m not entirely sure just how useful it would be to run Windows 10 on the Switch, but that doesn’t make it any less of an impressive effort.
Ars Technica reports: Fulfilling its 2017 promise to make Thunderbolt 3 royalty-free, Intel has given the specification for its high-speed interconnect to the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), the industry group that develops the USB specification. The USB-IF has taken the spec and will use it to form the basis of USB4, the next iteration of USB following USB 3.2. Yes, it’s called USB4, which will exist alongside USB 3.2 Gen 1, USB 3.2 Gen 2, and USB 3.2 Gen 2×2. I don’t even know what to say.
Microsoft is preparing a new lightweight version of Windows for dual-screen devices and Chromebook competitors. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the software maker is stripping back its Windows user interface with dual screens in mind. This new hardware could launch as early as later this year, depending on chip and PC maker readiness. This would be the fifth attempt in recent years to create a new version of Windows designed for smaller and mobile devices – Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone 8 and up, Windows RT, and Windows 10 on ARM – and I just don’t see how this time it’ll all be different.
Readers of this august website may recall that a year ago, I lauded Firefox and its progress toward becoming a genuine alternative to Google’s dominant Chrome browser. As much as I liked where Firefox was going, however, I couldn’t stick with it over the long term. It wasn’t compatible with everything the way Chrome was, its extensions were different, and, for my way of using a browser, it was slower and less responsive. So I returned to Chrome after a few weeks of Firefox, but the urge to decouple my browsing habits from Google remained. This year, I’m pretty sure I’ve found the ideal Chrome alternative in the Brave browser. If your reasons for sticking with Chrome have been (a) extensions, (b) compatibility, (c) syncing across devices, or (d, unlikely) speed, Brave checks all of those boxes. What’s more, it’s just one of a growing number of really good options that aren’t made by Google. I first used Edge for a while on my desktop and laptop while using Chrome on my phone, but recently I’ve switched everything over to Firefox, and it’s been a delight.
Google employees have carried out their own investigation into the company’s plan to launch a censored search engine for China and say they are concerned that development of the project remains ongoing, The Intercept can reveal. Late last year, bosses moved engineers away from working on the controversial project, known as Dragonfly, and said that there were no current plans to launch it. However, a group of employees at the company was unsatisfied with the lack of information from leadership on the issue — and took matters into their own hands. The group has identified ongoing work on a batch of code that is associated with the China search engine, according to three Google sources. The development has stoked anger inside Google offices, where many of the company’s 88,000 workforce previously protested against plans to launch the search engine, which was designed to censor broad categories of information associated with human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest. I wonder how many times corporations like Google and Apple have to actively aid the Chinese government in its brutal regime of oppression, torture, concentration camps, and executions before the collective tech press and bloggers stop treating them like golden magic prodigies of democracy and freedom.
The entire experience of vinyl helps to create its appeal. Vinyl appeals to multiple senses—sight, sound, and touch—versus digital/streaming services, which appeal to just one sense (while offering the delight of instant gratification). Records are a tactile and a visual and an auditory experience. You feel a record. You hold it in your hands. It’s not just about the size of the cover art or the inclusion of accompanying booklets (not to mention the unique beauty of picture disks and colored vinyl). A record, by virtue of its size and weight, has gravitas, has heft, and the size communicates that it matters. Anyone who says vinyl sounds objectively better – using the same amplifier and speaker hardware as modern media – can hardly be taken seriously, but that doesn’t mean vinyl can’t sound subjectively better. When it comes to older music from the ’60s and ’70s, I enjoyed listening to it on vinyl records (I don’t have a record player at this moment), but that had nothing to do with sound quality, and everything to do with the more archaic, unique experience of listening to a vinyl record.
LineageOS, the successor to CyanogenMod, has released version 16 of their custom Android ROM. This new release is based on Android Pie, and will serve as the base for countless other ROMs. The project was first launched to the public with LineageOS 14.1, which was based on Android 7.1 Nougat and, by itself, was not much more than just a fork of the existing CyanogenMod 14.1 source code. It then started evolving and taking a slightly different path with LineageOS 15.1, based on Android 8.1 Oreo, maintaining their premise of a community-centered project above everything while adding a number of useful, widely-requested features such as a system-wide dark mode as well as privacy-focused improvements like the Trust interface. Today, that evolution continues with LineageOS 16.0, the newest and latest version of the incredibly-popular custom ROM, as announced on the team’s blog post. As is the norm, with a version number change comes a big platform update. LineageOS has been re-based on the latest Android Pie source code. And with this comes all of Android Pie’s new features and improvements, including the renewed Material Theme redesign, the new navigation gestures, and more. While initially LineageOS 16 officially supports about 24 devices, unofficial support will cover more devices, and over the coming weeks and months, more and more devices will become officially supported.
In the history of information technologies, Gutenberg and his printing press are (understandably) treated with the kind of reverence even the most celebrated of modern tech tycoons could only imagine. So perhaps it will come as a surprise that Europe’s literacy rates remained fairly stagnant for centuries after printing presses, originally invented in about 1440, started popping up in major cities across the continent. Progress was inconsistent and unreliable, with literacy rates booming through the 16th century and then stagnating, even declining, across most of Western Europe. Great Britain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy all produced more printed books per capita in 1651–1700 than in 1701–1750. Then came the early 19th century, which saw enormous changes in the manufacture of paper and improvements on the printing press. These changes both contributed to and resulted from major societal changes, such as the worldwide growth increase in formal education. There were more books than ever and more people who could read them. For some, this looked less like progress and more like a dangerous and destabilizing trend that could threaten not just literature, but the solvency of civilization itself. There’s obviously a comparison to be made here to television, videogames, the internet, and smartphones – all new inventions that took the world by storm that many consider to be a threat to society. It’s always interesting to look at similar stories and fears from centuries ago.
In the early 1990s, we had no idea where the computer industry was going, what the next generation would look like, or even what the driving factor would be. All the developers back then knew is that the operating systems available in server rooms or on desktop computers simply weren’t good enough, and that the next generation needed to be better—a lot better. This was easier said than done, but this problem for some reason seemed to rack the brains of one company more than any other: IBM. Throughout the decade, the company was associated with more overwrought thinking about operating systems than any other, with little to show for it in the end. The problem? It might have gotten caught up in kernel madness. Today’s Tedium explains IBM’s odd operating system fixation, and the belly flops it created. I personally really loved using OS/2 over the past ten years or so. There’s something quite elegant and appealing about the operating system, and I consider it the best way to run Windows 3.x software there is – it’s entirely built-in. The world would’ve been a very different place had IBM managed to take the operating system crown for the PC industry – or the Mac, for that matter, through Talingent.
Ever since Microsoft recently began testing Windows 10 20H1 – its Windows 10 feature update that isn’t expected to start rolling out to mainstream users until April 2020 – there’s been lots of speculation about why Microsoft is doing this so early. Microsoft’s Windows Insider team has made some vague references to some things being worked on requiring a longer lead time. But I’m hearing from my contacts the real reason is much more mundane: It’s about aligning schedules between Azure and Windows engineering. Sometimes, the real story is just… Boring.
Google has declined to remove from its app store a Saudi government app which lets men track women and control where they travel, on the grounds that it meets all their terms and conditions. Google reviewed the app — called Absher — and concluded that it does not violate any agreements, and can therefore remain on the Google Play store. Western companies talk a lot about morals and values back home, but overseas, these very same companies drop those morals and values left, right, and centre – whether it’s Apple ignoring all its privacy chest-thumping in China, or in this specific case, Google having zero qualms about hosting and spreading an application that Saudi-Arabian ‘men’ use to opress and abuse women.
