Yahoo, bucking industry, scans emails for advertising

The U.S. tech industry has largely declared it is off limits to scan emails for information to sell to advertisers. Yahoo still sees the practice as a potential gold mine.

Yahoo's owner, the Oath unit of Verizon Communications Inc., has been pitching a service to advertisers that analyzes more than 200 million Yahoo Mail inboxes and the rich user data they contain, searching for clues about what products those users might buy, said people who have attended Oath's presentations as well as current and former employees of the company.

The biggest news in this story is not that Verizon is a scummy company - but that 200 million people still use Yahoo's email service.

wideNES: peeking past the edge of NES games

Well, it's been over 30 years since the NES was released, and while those classic games have aged well, the same can't be said for the hardware they ran on. With a screen-resolution of just 256x240, the NES didn't give games all that much screen real-estate to work with. Nevertheless, intrepid game developers squeezed amazing, iconic worlds into NES games: the maze-like dungeons of The Legend of Zelda, the sprawling planet of Metroid, or the colorful levels of Super Mario Bros.. And yet, due to the NES's hardware limitations, gamers only ever experienced these worlds a single 256x240 viewport at a time...

Until now.

Introducing: wideNES. A new way to experience NES classics.

What an awesome and innovative project to add an extra dimension of gameplay to old NES classics.

A little bit of the one-time macOS version still lingers in ZFS

Once upon a time, Apple came very close to releasing ZFS as part of MacOS. Apple did this work in its own copy of the ZFS source base (as far as I know), but the people in Sun knew about it and it turns out that even today there is one little lingering sign of this hoped-for and perhaps prepared-for ZFS port in the ZFS source code. Well, sort of, because it's not quite in code.

I love stories like this - digital archeology focusing on the relatively recent past.

An oral history of ‘GoldenEye 007’ on the N64

The Nintendo 64's GoldenEye 007 - or GoldenEye 64, as it's often known - is seen as one of the system's all-time classics. Aug. 25, 2018, will be the game's 21st birthday (allowing Bond to finally taste one of his revered cocktails), so we reached out to the people who played, reviewed and created the game to see how it all came together, way back in 1997. From the multiplayer being added as an afterthought to the game almost having every Bond actor ever, the game you and your buddies logged hours on - paintballing in the Stack or shooting Boris in the balls - was almost something very, very different.

I, too, played this game a lot when it came out - specifically, the multiplayer. It's one of those games that defined a console generation.

The first Android Fortnite Installer had a serious vulnerability

Google has just publicly disclosed that it discovered an extremely serious vulnerability in Epic's first Fortnite installer for Android that allowed any app on your phone to download and install anything in the background, including apps with full permissions granted, without the user's knowledge. Google's security team first disclosed the vulnerability privately to Epic Games on August 15, and has since released the information publicly following confirmation from Epic that the vulnerability was patched.

In short, this was exactly the kind of exploit that Android Central, and others, had feared would occur with this sort of installation system.

Everybody rang the alarm bells about Epic distributing its Fortnite game outside of the Play Store, asking users to enable installation from untrusted sources, and here we are - the warnings were justified. Incredible.

Don't install this garbage unless you know what you're doing. It's clear Epic cares more about its bottom line than its - often very young - players.

The MRISC32: a vector-first CPU design

In essence, it's a 32-bit RISC ISA designed from a holistic view on integer, floating point, scalar and vector operations. In addition there is a hardware implementation of a single issue, in order, pipelined CPU. The hardware implementation mostly serves as an aid in the design of the ISA (at the time of writing the CPU is still incomplete).

As happens with some articles I post here, this one's definitely a bit over my head.

Intel convinced Microsoft not to choose ARM for Surface Go

Microsoft launched its new Surface Go device earlier this month with an Intel Pentium Gold processor inside. It's been one of the main focus points for discussions around performance and mobility for this 10-inch Surface, and lots of people have wondered why Microsoft didn't opt for Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors and Windows on ARM. Paul Thurrott reports that Microsoft wanted to use an ARM processor for the Surface Go, but that Intel intervened.

Intel reportedly "petitioned Microsoft heavily" to use its Pentium Gold processors instead of ARM ones. It's not clear why Microsoft didn't push ahead with its ARM plans for Surface Go, but in my own experience the latest Snapdragon chips simply don't have the performance and compatibility to match Intel on laptops just yet. Microsoft has been working hard to improve this though, despite Intel's threats it would sue competitors like Qualcomm if they attempt to emulate Intel's x86 instruction set architecture.

The chip world is in serious disarray - not only is ARM making inroads into traditional x86 strongholds, RISC-V is putting the thumb screws on ARM as well.

Internet chat system IRC turns thirty

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) was born at the Department of Information Processing Science of the University of Oulu 30 years ago. Jarkko Oikarinen developed the internet chat system back in 1988 in addition to his summer job. Today, people are still using IRC.

I used to spend a lot of time on IRC, and a good IRC client was an absolute must for any aspiring operating system back in the early 2000s. I haven't used IRC in years - maybe in a decade - but it's good to see this technology still going strong.

Verizon throttled data of California firefighters

A Northern California fire department says Verizon slowed its wireless data speeds to a crawl last month, rendering some of its high-tech tracking equipment almost useless as firefighters battled the largest wildfire in state history.

In an August 20 court filing, Santa Clara County Fire Chief Anthony Bowden said his department relies on internet services to keep track of fast-moving fires and coordinate resources and efforts among emergency personnel.

American ISPs are almost cartoonishly evil.

Windows 95 running in a downloadable Electron application

Windows 95 as an Electron application? Sure, why not. Of course, this is a VM running Windows 95, but it's a simple downloadable package you can install and run on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Nothing groundbreaking, but still a fun application of Electron. It's pretty much a joke according to the developer, the code quality is "accordingly", and it's probably deeply illegal since it's not approved by Microsoft at all.

Aqua screenshot library

While sometimes it can be hard to see from single release to single release, Apple has steadily been refining the Aqua user interface since first introducing it.

Of course, there have been highs and lows. Pin stripes and Brushed Metal and Linen and Rich Corinthian Leather. Transparency and Vibrancy. At times, Apple had led the way into new design trends, and at other times, they have fallen behind the rest of the industry.

Over 1500 screenshots of every Mac OS X/macOS release. A fantastic archive to browse through while enjoying a nice cup of coffee or tea.

Apple and Google face growing revolt over app store ‘tax’

A backlash against the app stores of Apple Inc. and Google is gaining steam, with a growing number of companies saying the tech giants are collecting too high a tax for connecting consumers to developers’ wares.

Netflix Inc. and video game makers Epic Games Inc. and Valve Corp. are among companies that have recently tried to bypass the app stores or complained about the cost of the tolls Apple and Google charge.

Grumbling about app store economics isn't new. But the number of complaints, combined with new ways of reaching users, regulatory scrutiny and competitive pressure are threatening to undermine what have become digital goldmines for Apple and Google.

The end result will be special deals for major players, further destroying the last few vestiges of smaller indie developers that somehow have managed to survive until now.

Despite being shunned in the US, Huawei flourishes in Europe

When major smartphone manufacturers talk about growth, they generally target three different markets: China, which is the biggest; the United States, which is highly influential and profitable; and the rest. India will soon rise from the latter pile, but until it does, Europe might be the most interesting battleground for the respective companies dominating the US and Chinese spheres. Until very recently, Western Europe looked a lot like the United States, with Samsung commanding more than a third of the market, Apple in a close second spot, and minnows picking up the scraps. But IDC's latest data, as provided to The Verge, shows China's Huawei enjoying a meteoric rise since the start of 2017. Yes, the same Huawei that the US government advises its citizens to avoid.

Huawei is marketing quite aggressively over here, but I still haven't seen any of their phones in the wild. It's exclusively Samsung and Apple, so far.

Valve forks Wine to Proton

n 2010, we announced Steam Play: a way for Steam users to access Windows, Mac and Linux versions of Steam games with a single purchase. More than 3000 of the games that have been added to Steam after that point have included Linux support, with more titles being added every day. Since then, we've continued to look for ways to make more titles easily accessible to Linux users.

So, two years ago, we started an effort to improve the quality and performance of Windows compatibility solutions for Steam games. A lot of our work has been in the form of supporting Wine and other existing compatibility projects. We have also been integrating these tools into the Steam client to provide the same simple plug-and-play experience offered by regular Linux games.

As a result of this work, today we are releasing the Beta of a new and improved version of Steam Play to all Linux users! It includes a modified distribution of Wine, called Proton, to provide compatibility with Windows game titles.

Proton is available as open source on GitHub.

Haiku R1/beta1 is finally actually really close now

At last, R1/beta1 is nearly upon us. Only two non-"task" issues remain in the beta1 milestone, and I have prototype solutions for both. The buildbot and other major services have been rehabilitated and will need only minor tweaking to handle the new branch, and mmlr has been massaging the HaikuPorter buildmaster so that it, too, can handle the new branch, though that work is not quite finished yet.

So essentially all that stands between us and the release itself is a lot of testing, and more testing, and polishing all the little bits and pieces we've neglected along the way. I've already begun drafting the release notes, and the i18n translation tools have been synchronized with master, so even though the string freeze hasn't happened yet, the bulk of the translation work can begin.

I'm excited.

ArcaOS 5.0.3 released

The OS/2-derived ArcaOS is now up to version 5.0.3. This latest release appears to be mainly bug fixes and hardware compatibility enhancements.

ArcaOS 5.0.3 is (again) the result of many hours of collaborative work to keep up-to-date and to further refine ArcaOS 5.0. Post-install fixes are included, and these will be made available for separate download as part of the ArcaOS 5.0 Support & Maintenance subscription. In the interim, a full download of the refreshed media image is required to obtain all of these fixes and updates.

ArcaOS 5.0.3 includes over 40 updates and fixes since 5.0.2. The USB stick image package (available as a separate download for ArcaOS licensees with current support and maintenance subscription) has also been updated to incorporate the latest changes in ArcaOS 5.0.3.

NVIDIA RTX 2080 Ti, 2080, 2070 officially released

NVIDIA announced its new Turing video cards for gaming today, including the RTX 2080 Ti, RTX 2080, and RTX 2070. The cards move forward with an upgraded-but-familiar Volta architecture, with some changes to the SMs and memory. The new RTX 2080 and 2080 Ti ship with reference cards first, and partner cards about 1-3 months after that, depending on which partner it is. The board partners did not receive pricing or even card naming until around the same time as media, so expect delays in custom solutions.

A major upgrade, and pricing - starting at $599 for the 2070 - is entirely reasonable for a new generation. Might finally be time to upgrade my 1070 once EK Waterblocks releases waterblocks for these new cards.