Less than a year ago, I posted a serie of articles "Leaving Apple & Google..." to announce that I was planning to create a smartphone OS. A new OS that would:

• be free from Google (no Google services, no Google search, no Google Play store, etc.)
• be far more respectful of user’s data privacy
• be attractive enough so that Mom and Dad, children and friends would enjoy using it even if they aren't technophiles or geeks

Today we release a first beta of what we have done so far to make the initial vision a reality.

On Wednesday, Apple announced that its new iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max will use an eSIM - a purely electronic SIM that allows users to maintain a secondary phone line in a single device. That line could be a secondary domestic line (say you're a journalist and don't want to have separate personal and work iPhones), or the phone could have an American and Canadian number (if you travel across the border frequently).

These handsets will have a new "dual SIM dual standby" option, one of which will be a nano SIM. In other words, they will have two distinct phone numbers. (Chinese models will have two SIM slots instead of the eSIM option.)

It's not just Washington. Even in Silicon Valley, people have started wondering: where's Larry? Page has long been reclusive, a computer scientist who pondered technical problems away from the public eye, preferring to chase moonshots over magazine covers. Unlike founder-CEO peers (Mark Zuckerberg comes to mind), he hasn't presented at product launches or on earnings calls since 2013, and he hasn't done press since 2015. He leaves day-to-day decisions to Pichai and a handful of advisers. But a slew of interviews in recent months with colleagues and confidants, most of whom spoke on condition of anonymity because they were worried about retribution from Alphabet, describe Page as an executive who's more withdrawn than ever, bordering on emeritus, invisible to wide swaths of the company. Supporters contend he's still engaged, but his immersion in the technology solutions of tomorrow has distracted him from the problems Google faces today. "What I didn't see in the last year was a strong central voice about how going to operate on these issues that are societal and less technical," says a longtime executive who recently left the company.

That bar of excellence has been crushed through to the uppermost level by FrontPage 98 and few website HTML programs have the means or inspiration to meet that new watermark of exquisite elegance in creating websites.

Microsoft FrontPage 98 proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Web Creation and Site Manipulation can, finally and without excuse or caveat, be friendly while providing hardcore functionality in the same brilliant stroke.

Apple today in California officially announced the "iPhone Xs" and "iPhone Xs Max", the latest iPhone models coming this year. The company confirmed that both models will come in Space Gray, Silver, and Gold color options, with Gold being the new addition to the iPhone Xs lineup this year.

The iPhone Xs models have the same design as the iPhone X from 2017, with an edge-to-edge OLED display, greatly reduced bezels, and a "notch" that houses the front-facing TrueDepth Camera system. The iPhone Xs is the direct iPhone X successor and measures in at 5.8 inches, while the XS Max is Apple's biggest iPhone yet at 6.5 inches.

It's iPhone launch day today, which I would usually greet with some meditation on the expected features or design of the new device and how it fits into the wider competitive field. This year, however, I want to zoom out rather than in. Because no matter how much or how little the iPhone changes today, no matter how awful its new naming scheme, we can all be certain that Apple will sell tens of millions of its 2018 iteration before the year is through. It's this apparent inevitability to Apple's commercial success that I find fascinating.

A coming revision to Chrome OS will enable Windows-compatible network browsing by default. This means that Chromebooks will be able to connect with Windows PCs just as easily as other Windows PCs do today.

Back in 2016, security researcher and developer Jonathan Zdziarski released a tool called Little Flocker that could protect Macs at the file level. Much as a firewall analyzes and blocks network traffic, Little Flocker locked down the file system and allowed only authorized applications access to only approved files.

Little Flocker was too complex to manage for average users, but it quickly became a darling among Mac security experts.

When Zdziarski took a job at Apple in 2017, he sold Little Flocker to the security vendor F-Secure, which released it as Xfence. Zdziarski's job change started the clock ticking on when we might see similar capabilities built into macOS. With macOS 10.14 Mojave, Apple has added file-level protections, plus some additional security enhancements. And you know what? Mojave is running into the same usability issues that users of Little Flocker endured.

The "monitor ROM" of an Apple 1 fit in one page (256 bytes). This is my attempt to take the disassembled code, give names to the variables and routines, and try to document how it worked.

It's been two and a half years since Qualcomm last released a major new smartwatch chip, and in the time since, Android smartwatches have languished. But in the coming months, they could finally start seeing some meaningful improvements: Qualcomm is releasing a new processor for watches, called the Snapdragon Wear 3100, that's meant to extend battery life, enhance always-on displays, and offer more versatility when it comes to sports devices and fitness sensors.

During preparation for a workshop at DEF CON in August on locating privacy leaks in network traffic, we discovered a number of applications on both iOS and Android that were broadcasting precise location data back to the applications' developers - in some cases in unencrypted formats. Research released late Friday by Sudo Security's Guardian mobile firewall team provided some confirmation to our findings - and demonstrated that many apps are sharing location data with firms that market location data information without the users' knowledge.

And so I've placed a bet on Go. It is just as conceptually simple as C, sports a friendly BSD-style license, and already has its own parallel ecosystem. No stinky LLVM, in fact no traces of C at all! It's an overlooked revolution! I can follow symbols through packages however deep I want to and I always end up in Go or its assembly. Well, so long as nothing ugly uses Cgo.

Right, now that I've embraced the garbage collector, how do I make an interface that doesn't look like it dates back to the '80s? And can I avoid Cgo?

"People have a really hard time understanding URLs," says Adrienne Porter Felt, Chrome's engineering manager. "They're hard to read, it's hard to know which part of them is supposed to be trusted, and in general I don't think URLs are working as a good way to convey site identity. So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone - they know who they're talking to when they're using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs. We want to challenge how URLs should be displayed and question it as we're figuring out the right way to convey identity."