Apple is expanding its Windows Migration Assistant in macOS 10.14 Mojave with a handful of new features that will make switching from Windows to macOS a much more seamless experience.
As spotted by a user on Twitter, for macOS 10.14 beta 6, the Setup Assistant and Migration Assistant will be able to migrate more data than ever before such as accounts, documents, email, contacts, and calendar.
The BASIC Engine is a very low-cost single-board home computer with advanced 2D color graphics and sound capabilities, roughly comparable to late-1980s or early-1990s computers and video game consoles. It can be built at home without special skills or tools and using readily available components for under 10 Euros in parts, or mass-produced for even less.
What a fascinating little device, and a great idea to boot - BASIC is a great programming language to use as first steps into programming.
For decades, the district south of downtown and alongside San Francisco Bay here was known as either Rincon Hill, South Beach or South of Market. This spring, it was suddenly rebranded on Google Maps to a name few had heard: the East Cut.
The peculiar moniker immediately spread digitally, from hotel sites to dating apps to Uber, which all use Google's map data. The name soon spilled over into the physical world, too. Real-estate listings beckoned prospective tenants to the East Cut. And news organizations referred to the vicinity by that term.
The swift rebranding of the roughly 170-year-old district is just one example of how Google Maps has now become the primary arbiter of place names. With decisions made by a few Google cartographers, the identity of a city, town or neighborhood can be reshaped, illustrating the outsize influence that Silicon Valley increasingly has in the real world.
The Detroit neighborhood now regularly called Fishkorn (pronounced FISH-korn), but previously known as Fiskhorn (pronounced FISK-horn)? That was because of Google Maps. Midtown South Central in Manhattan? That was also given life by Google Maps.
I never thought about this, but now it seems obvious - Google Maps is so widespread it's basically become the authority on maps. This isn't some new phenomenon, though - cartography has a long history of phantom islands that would appear on maps for decades, sometimes even centuries, even though they weren't real at all.
The South Korean government is planning on taxing Google, Apple, Amazon, and other major international technology companies for the sales they generate inside the country.
The government will move quickly to impose taxes on Google, Apple, Amazon and other global IT companies. This follows policymakers and lawmakers paying greater attention to growing criticism that the firms earn billions of dollars in sales here annually but pay no taxes. Naver, Kakao and other domestic companies have been complaining for years about "an uneven playing field," arguing their foreign rivals should pay corporate income tax on the revenue they generate in Korea.
Corporate taxation has basically been a well-orchestrated sham of loopholes over loopholes put in place through corruption (under the euphemism of "lobbying") that has gone on so long that most - if not all - multinationals pay little to effectively zero taxes, while smaller, local companies and individuals pay their full taxes. This clearly has to end - if my own small translation company has to pay - say - 20% in taxes over the revenue it generates, so should Apple, Google, and whomever else over the revenue they generate here.
This house of cards has to come tumbling down.
With the last version of the Android P Developer Preview released, we're quickly heading toward the final build of another major Android version. And for Android P - aka version 9.0 - battery life is a major focus. The Adaptive Battery feature will dole out background access to only the apps you use, a new auto brightness scheme has been devised, and the Android team has made changes to how background work runs on the CPU. All together, battery life should be batter (err, better) than ever.
To get a bit more detail about how all this works, we sat down with a pair of Android engineers: Benjamin Poiesz, group product manager for the Android Framework, and Tim Murray, a senior staff software engineer for Android. And over the course of our second fireside Android chat, we learned a bit more about Android P overall and some specific things about how Google goes about diagnosing and tracking battery life across the range of the OS' install base.
I like these technical interviews with Android developers. They provide great insight into the current goings-on of the operating system.
Google is reportedly planning to re-launch its search engine in China, complete with censored results to meet the demands of the Chinese government. The company originally shut down its Chinese search engine in 2010, citing government attempts to "limit free speech on the web". But according to a report from The Intercept, the US tech giant now wants to return to the world's biggest single market for internet users.
According to internal documents provided to The Intercept by a whistleblower, Google has been developing a censored version of its search engine under the codename Dragonfly since the beginning of 2017. The search engine is being built as an Android mobile app, and will reportedly "blacklist sensitive queries" and filter out all websites blocked by China's web censors (including Wikipedia and BBC News). The censorship will extend to Google's image search, spell check, and suggested search features.
In the same vein as before, Google cares about freedom of expression and providing access to information. Unless you're Chinese - then you're shit out of luck.
Facebook announced on Tuesday that it has identified a coordinated political influence campaign, with dozens of inauthentic accounts and pages that are believed to be engaging in political activity around divisive social issues ahead of November's midterm elections.
In a series of briefings on Capitol Hill this week and a public post on Tuesday, the company told lawmakers that it had detected and removed 32 pages and accounts connected to the influence campaign on Facebook and Instagram as part of its investigations into election interference. It publicly said it had been unable to tie the accounts to Russia, whose Internet Research Agency was at the center of an indictment earlier this year for interfering in the 2016 election, but company officials told Capitol Hill that Russia was possibly involved, according to two officials briefed on the matter.
Facebook said that the accounts - eight Facebook pages, 17 Facebook profiles, and seven Instagram accounts - were created between March 2017 and May 2018 and first discovered two weeks ago. Those numbers may sound small, but their influence is spreading: More than 290,000 accounts followed at least one of the suspect pages, the company said.
The reach of Facebook combined with the declining US education system and dreadful media landscape makes it quite easy to influence people. It's very worrying.
VMS doesn't have different OS personalities, as NT does, but its kernel and Executive subsystems are clear predecessors to NT's. Digital developers wrote the VMS kernel almost entirely in VAX assembly language. To be portable across different CPU architectures, Microsoft developers wrote NT's kernel almost entirely in C. In developing NT, these designers rewrote VMS in C, cleaning up, tuning, tweaking, and adding some new functionality and capabilities as they went. This statement is in danger of trivializing their efforts; after all, the designers built a new API (i.e., Win32), a new file system (i.e., NTFS), and a new graphical interface subsystem and administrative environment while maintaining backward compatibility with DOS, OS/2, POSIX, and Win16. Nevertheless, the migration of VMS internals to NT was so thorough that within a few weeks of NT's release, Digital engineers noticed the striking similarities.
Those similarities could fill a book. In fact, you can read sections of VAX/VMS Internals and Data Structures (Digital Press) as an accurate description of NT internals simply by translating VMS terms to NT terms. Table 1 lists a few VMS terms and their NT translations. Although I won't go into detail, I will discuss some of the major similarities and differences between Windows NT 3.1 and VMS 5.0, the last version of VMS Dave Cutler and his team might have influenced.
Another old article, from November 1998 this time, also by Mark Russinovich.
If you've followed any one of the amazing tutorials on how to set up a mainframe on a conventional personal computer, you've probably noticed they end with the login screen as if everything beyond that point will be intuitive and self-explanatory to newbies. I mean... That was my assumption going into this project. I'll figure it out. How hard could it be? Maybe it would take me a few hours. Maybe I'd have to Google some stuff... Read some documentation...
It took me over a week.
Over a week to figure out enough to compile and run a basic program.
In 1978 Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry established the encoding that would later be known as JIS X 0208, which still serves as an important reference for all Japanese encodings. However, after the JIS standard was released people noticed something strange - several of the added characters had no obvious sources, and nobody could tell what they meant or how they should be pronounced. Nobody was sure where they came from. These are what came to be known as the ghost characters.
Fascinating story.
Freeloader is now able to read files and follow symlinks from btrfs partition. One major issue is left here - case sensitivity.
Another step of progress.
On the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude talk about their new documentary, "General Magic", which tells the story of a pioneering tech startup that tried and failed to invent a smartphone in the 1990s. Kara appears in the documentary, as do some of the most important figures from the company's history, such as Andy Hertzfeld, John Sculley and Tony Fadell. Although few people know the name General Magic anymore, Kerruish and Maude say the team's failure paved the way for the Silicon Valley we know today.
Here's the transcript for this interview and podcast, which is quite interesting.
But what's so compelling about RISC-V isn't the technology - it's the economics. The instruction set is open source. Anyone can download it and design a chip based on the architecture without paying a fee. If you wanted to do that with ARM, you'd have to pay its developer, Arm Holding, a few million dollars for a license. If you wanted to use x86, you're out of luck because Intel licenses its instruction set only to Advanced Micro Devices.
For manufacturers, the open-source approach could lower the risks associated with building custom chips. Already, Nvidia and Western Digital Corp. have decided to use RISC-V in their own internally developed silicon. Western Digital's chief technology officer has said that in 2019 or 2020, the company will unveil a new RISC-V processor for the more than 1 billion cores the storage firm ships each year. Likewise, Nvidia is using RISC-V for a governing microcontroller that it places on the board to manage its massively multicore graphics processors.
This really explains why ARM is so scared of RISC-V. I mean, RISC-V might not make it to high-end smartphones for now, but if RISC-V takes off in the market for microcontrollers and other "invisibe" processors, it could be a huge threat to ARM's business model.
Intel has set a concrete deadline for when it'll finally have processors built on a 10nm process in the mainstream market: holiday season 2019.
While the company's 14nm manufacturing process is working well, with multiple revisions to improve performance or reduce power consumption, Intel has struggled to develop an effective 10nm process. Originally mass production was planned for as far back as 2015. In April, the company revised that to some time in 2019. The latest announcement is the most specific yet: PC systems with 10nm processors will be in the holiday season, with Xeon parts for servers following soon after. This puts mainstream, mass production still a year away.
A seemingly endless string of delays. Things are not looking good for Intel.
Microsoft, Apple and Google are three of the world's most influential tech companies. Billions of people use personal computing platforms, tools, or devices they supply or inspire.
From cloud, AI, smartphones, PCs, apps and more they've created a multi-ecosystem personal computing world that supports an increasingly-interconnected, and overlapping range of computing scenarios.
Personal computing is no longer restricted to desks as a sedentary experience. Nor are users completely liberated from that setting and capable of existing fully in the mobile space. They regularly transition from desktop to mobile and across ecosystems and devices because no single platform and device moves seamlessly with them across contexts. Microsoft, through Windows 10 and Surface, has embraced a platform and hardware philosophy that drives devices that conform to users' contexts. Despite the smartphones success as mobile computing's focus, Microsoft's rivals may be missing an important industry shift.
Their platforms are not mutually exclusive, though - I use Google, Apple, and Microsoft platforms every single day. Take what suits you best from each of the platforms.
In a press briefing just two weeks ago, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein announced that the grand jury assembled by Special Counsel Robert Mueller had returned an indictment against 12 officers of Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian General Staff (better known as Glavnoye razvedyvatel'noye upravleniye, or GRU). The indictment was for conducting "active cyber operations with the intent of interfering in the 2016 presidential election."
The allegations are backed up by data collected from service provider logs, Bitcoin transaction tracing, and additional forensics. The DOJ also relied on information collected by US (and likely foreign) intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Reading between the lines, the indictment reveals that the Mueller team and other US investigators likely gained access to things like Twitter direct messages and hosting company business records and logs, and they obtained or directly monitored email messages associated with the GRU (and possibly WikiLeaks). It also appears that the investigation ultimately had some level of access to internal activities of two GRU offices.
Yet, after a summit meeting with Russia's President Vladimir Putin just days following the indictment, Trump publicly expressed doubt that Russia was involved. The president has said that Putin strongly denied any interference in the election - even as the United States' own director of national Iintelligence, Dan Coats, reiterated the conclusion that Russia was responsible for the attacks. With such rhetoric, Trump has continued to send mixed messages about the findings of his own intelligence and law enforcement teams, while seeming to put more stock in Putin's insistence that the Russian government had nothing to do with any of this.
After digging into this latest indictment, the evidence suggests Trump may not have made a very good call on this matter. But his blaming of the victims of the attacks for failing to have good enough security, while misguided, does strike on a certain truth: the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and DCC were poorly prepared for this sort of attack, failed to learn lessons from history, and ignored advice from some very knowledgeable third parties they enlisted for help.
A detailed look at how Russia attacked the United States election process. Sadly, this being the internet, we probably won't be able to keep the discussion focused on the technical process, but can we all promise to at least try? Regardless of political affiliation, all of us should be worried about the election process of the most powerful country on earth being this easily manipulated by external forces.
Over the past two years, the biggest buzz among the geo chatterati has been Justin O'Beirne's meticulously argued (albeit bizarrely formatted) feature-by-feature comparisons of Google and Apple Maps: their design choices, their data, their production processes.
What fascinates me is how the comparison is implicitly phrased. Apple Maps is fighting on Google Maps' turf, and Justin O'Beirne never questions that. He asks "How far ahead of Apple Maps is Google Maps?". It implies the same direction of travel. They’re going the same place, but Google is getting there quicker.
Meanwhile, OpenStreetMap goes its own way.
I've never actively used OpenStreetMap, but I feel like I should give it a far shot at some point. Are there people in the OSNews audience who use it? What are your experiences?
Looking back at the past three years, React Native has proven to be extremely successful at Discord and helped drive our iOS user adoption from zero to millions!
More specifically, React Native has allowed us to reap the benefits of quickly leveraging reusable code across platforms, as well as develop a small and mighty team.
Meanwhile, we've learned to adapt to its inevitable pain points without sacrificing overall productivity.
We all complain a lot about these non-native, cross-platform frameworks, but it's only fair to also highlight the other side of the coin - in this case, the view from the developers of an incredibly popular application who need to easily support multiple platforms.
When the Spectre and Meltdown attacks were disclosed earlier this year, the initial exploits required an attacker to be able to run code of their choosing on a victim system. This made browsers vulnerable, as suitably crafted JavaScript could be used to perform Spectre attacks. Cloud hosts were susceptible, too. But outside these situations, the impact seemed relatively limited.
That impact is now a little larger. Researchers from Graz University of Technology including one of the original Meltdown discoverers, Daniel Gruss, have described NetSpectre: a fully remote attack based on Spectre. With NetSpectre, an attacker can remotely read the memory of a victim system without running any code on that system.
GCC 8.2 is a bug-fix release from the GCC 8 branch containing important fixes for regressions and serious bugs in GCC 8.1 with more than 99 bugs fixed since the previous release.
Here's the full changelog.
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