RIOT powers the Internet of Things like Linux powers the Internet. RIOT is a free, open source operating system developed by a grassroots community gathering companies, academia, and hobbyists, distributed all around the world. RIOT supports most low-power IoT devices and microcontroller architectures (32-bit, 16-bit, 8-bit). RIOT aims to implement all relevant open standards supporting an Internet of Things that is connected, secure, durable & privacy-friendly. Back in my day, we used to call this an embedded operating system.

Yesterday, a worrying and invasive bug that allowed callers to secretly listen in on unknowing recipients through Apple’s FaceTime app quickly made news headlines. It was discovered that people could initiate a FaceTime call and, with a couple short steps, tap into the microphone on the other end as the call rang — without the other person accepting the FaceTime request. Apple said last night that an iOS update to eliminate the privacy bug is coming this week; in the meantime, the company took the step of disabling group FaceTime at the server level as an immediate emergency fix. However, new information suggests that Apple has already had several days to respond; the company was tipped off about it last week. Back on January 20th, a Twitter user tweeted at Apple’s support account clearly outlining the gist of the FaceTime bug: “My teen found a major security flaw in Apple’s new iOS. He can listen in to your iPhone/iPad without your approval.” The parent’s teenager had discovered the problem one day prior on January 19th, according to tech entrepreneur John Meyer, who has been in contact with them. CNET has identified the tipster as Michele Thompson, whose 14-year-old son first encountered the flaw while setting up a group FaceTime call with friends to coordinate strategy during a game of Fortnite. This article is definitely worth a read, since it illustrates very well just how negligent Apple has been with this issue. The mother of the boy who discovered the flaw is a lawyer, and through proper letters and other means, she informed Apple of the major security flaw through all the various channels Apple offers. Apple wasn’t very forthcoming, and despite knowing about the issue, didn’t do anything about it until yesterday, when the company disabled Group FaceTime and promised a fix would come “later this week”.

Ars Technica writes: On Monday, Nvidia took the unusual step of offering a revised Q4 2019 financial estimate ahead of its scheduled disclosure on February 14. The reason: Nvidia had already predicted low revenue numbers, and the hardware producer is already confident that its low estimate was still too high. The original quarterly revenue estimate of $2.7 billion has since dropped to $2.2 billion, a change of roughly 19 percent. A few new data points factor into that revision. The biggest consumer-facing issue, according to Nvidia, is “lower than expected” sales of its RTX line of new graphics cards. This series, full of proprietary technologies like a dedicated raytracing processor, kicked off in September 2018 with the $1,199 RTX 2080 Ti and the $799 RTX 2080. The RTX launch was bungled, and the cryptocurrency hype is way past its prime. It’s not a surprise Nvidia is going to experience a rough year.

Starting with the next major Windows update, Microsoft is going to reserve about 7 GB of disk space on Windows’ root drive for something it calls “reserved storage”, basically a space for updates, apps, temporary files, and system caches. Note that the 7 GB is variable, and will change depending on how you use your system. When apps and system processes create temporary files, these files will automatically be placed into reserved storage. These temporary files won’t consume free user space when they are created and will be less likely to do so as temporary files increase in number, provided that the reserve isn’t full. Since disk space has been set aside for this purpose, your device will function more reliably. Storage sense will automatically remove unneeded temporary files, but if for some reason your reserve area fills up Windows will continue to operate as expected while temporarily consuming some disk space outside of the reserve if it is temporarily full. In the comments under the blog post announcing this change, Microsoft’s Craig Barkhouse explains in more detail how, exactly, this feature is implemented. Instead of opting for VHXD or separate partitions – which would cause a performance hit and compatibility issues due to the files residing in a different file system namespace – the company optied for making use of NTFS. As Barkhouse explains: Instead we designed an elegant solution that would require new support being added to NTFS. The idea is NTFS provides a mechanism for the servicing stack to specify how much space it needs reserved, say 7GB. Then NTFS reserves that 7GB for servicing usage only. What is the effect of that? Well the visible free space on C: drops by 7GB, which reduces how much space normal applications can use. Servicing can use those 7GB however. And as servicing eats into those 7GB, the visible free space on C: is not affected (unless servicing uses beyond the 7GB that was reserved). The way NTFS knows to use the reserved space as opposed to the general user space is that servicing marks its own files and directories in a special way. You can see that this mechanism has similar free space characteristics as using a separate partition or a VHDX, yet the files seamlessly live in the same namespace which is a huge benefit. This functionality will only be activated on fresh installations of the next major Windows update, so existing systems will not be affected.

This release represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that are listed in the release notes below. The main new features in Wine 4.0 are Vulkan support, Direct3D 12 support, game controllers support, and high-DPI support on Android.

This repository is associated with the website of the Virtual AGC project, which provides a virtual machine which simulates the AGC, the DSKY, and some other portions of the guidance system. In other words, if the virtual machine—which we call yaAGC—is given the same software which was originally run by the real AGCs, and is fed the same input signals encountered by the real AGCs during Apollo missions, then it will respond in the same way as the real AGCs did. The Virtual AGC software is open source code so that it can be studied or modified. The repository contains the actual assembly-language source code for the AGC, for as many missions as we’ve been able to acquire, along with software for processing that AGC code. Principal tools are an assembler (to create executable code from the source code) and a CPU simulator (to run the executable code), as well as simulated peripherals (such as the DSKY). Similar source code and tools are provided for the very-different abort computer that resided in the Lunar Module. Finally, any supplemental software material we have been able to find or create for the Saturn rocket’s LVDC computer or for the Gemini on-board computer (OBC) are provided, though these materials are minimal at present. The Apollo moonlanding project is probably one of the greatest – if not the greatest – technological achievement of mankind. Making sure we have all the tools and code necessary to study the code used is a vital project.

But when Apple began making the $3,000 computer in Austin, Tex., it struggled to find enough screws, according to three people who worked on the project and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. In China, Apple relied on factories that can produce vast quantities of custom screws on short notice. In Texas, where they say everything is bigger, it turned out the screw suppliers were not. Tests of new versions of the computer were hamstrung because a 20-employee machine shop that Apple’s manufacturing contractor was relying on could produce at most 1,000 screws a day. Manufacturing at the kinds of scales Apple operates at is infinitely more complex than most people seem to think. It’s easy for a president to spout some rambling nonsense about building iPhones in the US to get people riled up, but if you can’t even produce enough screws for a low-volume product like the Mac Pro, you really have no business in the production of technology products.

In Windows 95 build 302 from 23rd December 1994, you won’t find the Start button you’d expect. Not because it’s gone, but because it’s been renamed to “Ship It!”. There is no serious explanation for this change, and it was already reverted by the time the next leaked build, 311, was made in January 1995. But when you consider the name of the product, Windows 95, and the date when this build was compiled, I hope you can see the obvious joke. I wonder what Matthew and Jennifer have to say about this.

Earlier this week, Apple began selling refurbished versions of the iPhone SE, its nearly three-year-old, 4-inch smartphone modeled after the iPhone 5S, at a $100 discount. It was the second round of recent sales after an initial batch sold out the previous weekend. And like any budget-adverse tech journalist with an impulse buying compulsion, I felt this was the appropriate moment to hop on the backup phone bandwagon. So I bought one. My dad has an iPhone SE, and he loves it. There’s so few – if any – phones out there that combine modern specifications with a small form factor, and the SE, too, is starting to get a bit long in the tooth. I would love for Apple to update the SE with more modern specifications, and for Android phone makers to tap this market, too.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, plans to integrate the social network’s messaging services — WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger — asserting his control over the company’s sprawling divisions at a time when its business has been battered by scandal. The services will continue to operate as stand-alone apps, but their underlying technical infrastructure will be unified, said four people involved in the effort. That will bring together three of the world’s largest messaging networks, which between them have more than 2.6 billion users, allowing people to communicate across the platforms for the first time. Before WhatsApp was owned by Facebook, I was quite glad my – and many other countries – had pretty much standardised on using WhatsApp as the nation’s messaging platform, instead of relying on platforms based on platform lock-in, such as iMessage. These days, however, with WhatsApp being owned by Facebook and the company clearly looking at ways to profit off even end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms, I’m quite furstrated by the fact that I have nowhere else to go. Trying to get literally all your friends and family to move to another platform is like stubbornly trying to get your friends to speak Swahili to you by trying to speak nothing but Swahili to them. It’s rude and will just make people not want to talk to you. All I can hope for is an organic change in how we communicate with one another, or some EU intervention to wrestle control over vital messaging platforms from corporations. I’m not holding my breath for either.

Google’s Kent Walker, SVP of Global Affairs & Chief Legal Officer, in a company blog post: Today we asked the Supreme Court of the United States to review our long-running copyright dispute with Oracle over the use of software interfaces. The outcome will have a far-reaching impact on innovation across the computer industry. Standardized software interfaces have driven innovation in software development. They let computer programs interact with each other and let developers easily build technologies for different platforms. Unless the Supreme Court steps in here, the industry will be hamstrung by court decisions finding that the use of software interfaces in creating new programs is not allowed under copyright law. This is one of those rare cases where pretty much everyone I know stands firmly behind Google. Oracle’s lawsuit is scummy, dirty, destructive, and spiteful – Larry Ellison was one of Steve Jobs’ closest friends, and Oracle’s lawsuit started right around the time Jobs vowed to go “thermonuclear war” on Android. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to put two and two together here. I hope the United States Supreme Court shuts this case down in favour of Google and common sense once and for all.

Windows NT stopped supporting the Intel 80386 processor with Windows 4.0, which raised the minimum requirements to an Intel 80486. Therefore, the Intel 80386 technically falls into the category of “processor that Windows once supported but no longer does.” This series focuses on the portion of the x86 instruction set available on an 80386, although I will make notes about future extensions in a special chapter. As with all the processor retrospective series, I’m going to focus on how Windows NT used the Intel 80386 in user mode because the original audience for all of these discussions was user-mode developers trying to get up to speed debugging their programs. Normally, this means that I omit instructions that you are unlikely to see in compiler-generated code. However, I’ll set aside a day to cover some of the legacy instructions that are functional but not used in practice. Written by Raymond Chen, so you know it’s good stuff. Part 2, part 3, and part 4 are also already available.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine has been blocked in China, rendering yet another Western internet service inaccessible to the world’s largest online population. The search engine, allowed to operate in China because it censors results, became inaccessible to many users Wednesday. The U.S. software giant confirmed Bing could no longer be accessed in China and that it was “engaged to determine next steps.” Any service or company still operational and accessible in China is compromised.

Many of us have seen the videos by now. Developers have figured out how to get full Windows 10 running on a Microsoft Lumia 950 or 950 XL. There’s good news though, as you can now try this out for yourself. There are a few warnings though. For one thing, consider the same warnings that you’d hear when installing a Windows Insider Preview. This is going to be unstable, the performance will be terrible (Windows on ARM is not designed for these chipsets), and you shouldn’t plan on using your phone as your phone. If you’ve got an extra Lumia 950 lying around that you’re not using anymore and want to try a fun project, that’s the optimal use case. There’s really no reason to install full Windows 10 on any Lumia devices, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a fun project to undertake.