But that's the incredible thing about the XAC: that it's targeting a particularly fractured audience. Limited mobility is a giant, vague category, after all, with so many physical ailments to account for (let alone psychological ones). And previous answers in the gaming sphere have typically been specialized, one-of-a-kind controllers for single hands, feet, heads, and more.

XAC wins out in an odd way: by leaving some major work in users' hands. This $99 lap-sized device is truly incomplete on its own, as it's designed from the ground up to require add-on joysticks, buttons, and more. As a result, there's no way to fully review the possibilities Microsoft's XAC opens up for disabled gamers. Still, we've put a retail unit through its paces to see what kind of accessibility canvas this revolutionary "controller" opens up - and exactly how it works - to help limited-mobility gamers and their caretakers decide if its functionality, ease-of-use, and practical cost is right for them.

The US, UK, and three other governments have called on tech companies to build backdoors into their encrypted products, so that law enforcement will always be able to obtain access. If companies don't, the governments say they "may pursue technological, enforcement, legislative, or other measures" in order to get into locked devices and services.

Their statement came out of a meeting last week between nations in the Five Eyes pact, an intelligence sharing agreement between the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The nations issued a statement covering a range of technology-related issues they face, but it was their remarks on encryption that stood out the most.

No technology company is arguably more responsible for shaping the modern internet, and modern life, than Google. The company that started as a novel search engine now manages eight products with more than 1 billion users each. Many of those people use Google software to search the repository of human knowledge, communicate, perform work, consume media, and maneuver the endlessly vast internet in 2018. On Tuesday, September 4th, Google turned 20 years old, marking one of the most staggeringly influential runs for any corporation in history.

This site hosts the current version of the retro-B5500 emulator, an implementation of the legendary Burroughs B5500 that runs in a web browser.

Earlier today, Mozilla pushed Firefox 62 for desktop and Android. With the release, Mozilla has introduced an UI refresh for the new tabs page as well as several dialogs like for adding or editing a bookmark, several performance enhancements to speed up browsing, and some security enhancements.

The first change that users will notice is the refreshed new tab page; with Firefox 62 users can now display up to four rows of top sites, Pocket stories and highlights. Currently, you get one row of top sites, and depending on your location you may not even get shown Pocket stories. Another UI changes that you’ll notice is in the menu where you can toggle tracking protection on and off easily.

On the performance side of things, Windows users will now get improved graphics rendering without accelerated hardware using Parallel-Off-Main-Thread Painting. Additionally, support for CSS Shapes allows for richer web page layouts, and CSS Variable Fonts support allows the browser to render "beautiful typography" with a single font file.

18 years ago, Sony launched what would become one of the biggest icons in the gaming industry, the PlayStation 2. The level of popularity of the console is still unmatched to this day, and it remains at the top spot as the best-selling gaming platform of all time.

Perhaps because of that tremendous popularity, Sony kept the PlayStation 2 around for a long time. It was only in 2013 - not long before the PlayStation 4 made its way to the market - that the company decided to stop manufacturing it. Now, it's time for the final nail in the coffin. After a whopping 18 years of providing support and repair services, Sony Japan will no longer service consoles that arrive at the PlayStation Clinic after September 7. Back in June, the company had warned customers that they would have to make any support requests before August 31, and it seems that this is the last week for consoles to be serviced.

Now, of course, I tell computers what to do for a living. All the same, I can't help feeling that I missed out on some fundamental insight afforded only to those that grew up programming simpler computers. What would it have been like to encounter computers for the first time in the early 1980s? How would that have been different from the experience of using a computer today?

This post is going to be a little different from the usual Two-Bit History post because I'm going to try to imagine an answer to these questions.

Among the new hardware launched this week at IFA in Berlin are a couple of premium Chromebooks. Lenovo's $600 Yoga Chromebook brings high-end styling and materials to the Chromebook space, along with well-specced internals and a high quality screen. Dell's $600 Inspiron Chromebook 14 has slightly lower specs but is similarly offering better styling, bigger, better quality screens, and superior specs to the Chromebook space.

These systems join a few other premium Chromebooks already out there. HP's Chromebook x2 is a $600 convertible hybrid launched a few months ago, and Samsung has had its Chromebook Plus and Pro systems for more than a year now. And of course, Google's Pixelbook is an astronomically expensive Chrome OS machine.

These systems should cause ripples in Redmond.

A Z80 computer wirewrapped on perfboard. The wirewrapping technique uses standard IC sockets and PCB header pins, so the components and wiring are on the same side of the board.

For some reason I like small laptops and the constraints they place on me (as long as they're still usable). I used a Dell Mini 9 for a long time back in the netbook days and was recently using an 11" MacBook Air as my primary development machine for many years. Recently Microsoft announced a smaller, cheaper version of its Surface tablets called Surface Go which piqued my interest.

At the heart of this town lies a building that is a veritable temple to the area’s most famous creation, the humble Lego brick. It is filled with complex creations, from a 50-foot tree to a collection of multicolored dinosaurs, all of them built with a product that has barely changed in more than 50 years.

A short walk away in its research lab, though, Lego is trying to refashion the product it is best known for: It wants to eliminate its dependence on petroleum-based plastics, and build its toys entirely from plant-based or recycled materials by 2030.

Anyone who isn't an expert on the internet would be hard-pressed to explain how tracking on the internet actually works. Some of the negative effects of unchecked tracking are easy to notice, namely eerily-specific targeted advertising and a loss of performance on the web. However, many of the harms of unchecked data collection are completely opaque to users and experts alike, only to be revealed piecemeal by major data breaches. In the near future, Firefox will - by default - protect users by blocking tracking while also offering a clear set of controls to give our users more choice over what information they share with sites.

In a move that could prompt more companies to offer paid parental leave, Microsoft is announcing today that it will require all of its U.S.-based suppliers and vendors with more than 50 employees to offer such benefits.

Lenovo is announcing a second ARM-powered Windows 10 laptop this week, and this time it's a Yoga. The Lenovo Yoga C630 WOS (Windows on Snapdragon) is, as you might have guessed, powered by Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 850 processor. It's the first Windows laptop we've seen with the Snapdragon 850, and its a chip that Qualcomm specifically designed for always-connected Windows 10 PCs. This new processor ushers in the latest generation of ARM-powered Windows 10 laptops.

Lenovo is promising 30 percent better performance over its previous Miix 630 Windows on ARM device, and a surprising claim of 25 hours of battery life to match. While the battery life sounds impressive, it's the performance that will matter in a device like this and we’ll need to test this latest range of ARM-powered laptops to see if app compatibility and performance has improved. As this is powered by the Snapdragon 850, there's also built-in LTE support for mobile connectivity on the go.