In the Cyanogen OS 12.1.1 update, we are excited to introduce Microsoft Cortana. What makes this such an exciting partnership is that by having Cortana's voice command capability deeply integrated into the Cyanogen ecosystem, we're opening the door to future capabilities that don't currently exist.

Jide Technology has released Remix OS 2.0 as a free download available on January 12th designed to run on the majority of Intel and AMD devices such as PC and Mac. The company which was founded by three ex-Google employees has developed the OS thanks to a partnership with the Android-x86 project enabling it to run on almost any PC.

The days between last Christmas and New Year were actually clouded by the sad fact that the source code of AmigaOS 3.1 and additional content dating back to 1994 was published and widely spread without permission of the rights-holder. Note that no code of AmigaOS 4.x was released or distributed.

While this would be already more than enough of a reason to care about the unauthorised disclosure and distribution, it is also the very same settlement agreement which made all of this possible in the first place, which contractually requires Hyperion to enforce and protect any intellectual property rights associated with AmigaOS including the AmigaOS 3.1 source-code.

The Dutch government has formally opposed the introduction of backdoors in encryption products.

A government position paper, published by the Ministry of Security and Justice on Monday and signed by the security and business ministers, concludes that "the government believes that it is currently not appropriate to adopt restrictive legal measures against the development, availability and use of encryption within the Netherlands."

The conclusion comes at the end of a five-page run-through of the arguments for greater encryption and the counter-arguments for allowing the authorities access to the information.

Let me start by saying that beautiful websites come in all sizes and page weights. I love big websites packed with images. I love high-resolution video. I love sprawling Javascript experiments or well-designed web apps.

This talk isn't about any of those. It's about mostly-text sites that, for unfathomable reasons, are growing bigger with every passing year.

While I'll be using examples to keep the talk from getting too abstract, I'm not here to shame anyone, except some companies (Medium) that should know better and are intentionally breaking the web.

The general plan for the OS is to create a micro-kernel based design with sufficient drivers that a basic user-mode interface can be created. The user-mode interface will include a basic tablet or laptop user interface with the ability to start user mode applications. The final goal is to develop a web-browser application to demonstrate the power of the OS.

Google is replacing the Java application programming interfaces (APIs) in Android with OpenJDK, the open source version of Oracle's Java Development Kit (JDK). The news first came by a "mysterious Android codebase commit" from last month submitted to Hacker News. Google confirmed to VentureBeat that Android N will rely solely on OpenJDK, rather Android’s own version of the Java APIs.

"As an open-source platform, Android is built upon the collaboration of the open-source community," a Google spokesperson told VentureBeat. "In our upcoming release of Android, we plan to move Android’s Java language libraries to an OpenJDK-based approach, creating a common code base for developers to build apps and services. Google has long worked with and contributed to the OpenJDK community, and we look forward to making even more contributions to the OpenJDK project in the future."

Generation Amiga has reported today a tweet from Hacker Fantastic saying that the Amiga OS source has been leaked, including both Kickstart and Workbench. Looking at the @hackerfantastic's tweet, there is another user with the handle @TheWack0lian that offers a link to download the OS in a 130MB tar file which expands to 540MB of source code.

Apparently the source code is really related to Amiga OS. The tar file name refers to OS 3.1 but folders from the source code refers to version 4, which could mean the source code is pretty much up to date.

All of Apple's products this year were just fine. You could settle yourself totally within the Apple ecosystem and use Apple Music and Apple News on your iPhone while taking Live Photos and you would be just fine. You wouldn't have the best time, but you wouldn't have the worst one, either. It would just be fine.

And that's really the issue. We're not used to Apple being just fine. We're used to Apple being wildly better than the competition, or sometimes much worse, but always being ahead of the curve on some significant axis. But what we got in 2015 was an Apple that released more products than ever, all of which felt incomplete in extremely meaningful ways - ways that meant that their products were just fine, and often just the same as everyone else's.

Google's next move for Glass is clearly into the enterprise, and the device that Google is using to make this move, appropriately dubbed "Enterprise Edition," has improved internal hardware, and a new look built around a button-and-hinge system made for working environments. As you can tell, the device doesn't look all too different than the previous Google Glass: Explorer Edition, but foldability was one of the previous version’s most-requested features - and now it's part of the design.

This year, CEO Tim Cook did a lot of interviews by Apple standards, from this month's "60 Minutes" episode to 20 minutes with BuzzFeed in the back seat of a Cadillac Escalade. He "crashed" a coding party - conveniently while a Mashable editor was in attendance - and "wrote a message" to CNBC's Jim Cramer. You might even say he likes the attention.

Meanwhile, Jony Ive, Apple's chief design officer, participated in an FT profile and received the New Yorker treatment earlier this year, inviting a journalist into his Bentley. To the media, a "rare look inside Jony Ive's design lab" seems to be the prized new "rare look inside North Korea." (And similarly staged.)

It's the middle of Steam's big winter sale, which means a huge number of people are browsing, buying, and playing games right now on the platform. Some of them, however, seem to have tripped into a major security hole. A variety of users on Twitter, NeoGAF, and Reddit have noted that they can see other users' account information - including addresses and credit card data - instead of their own details.

It's the end of 2015, and one fact about the internet is quickly becoming clear this year: Americans' freedom to access the open internet is rapidly dissolving.

Broadband access is declining, data caps are becoming commonplace, surveillance is increasing, and encryption is under attack.

This is not merely my opinion. The evidence is everywhere; the walls are closing in from all sides. The net neutrality victory of early this year has rapidly been tempered by the fact that net neutrality doesn't matter if you don't have solid access to said 'net.

Linux Mint 17.3 is the final Mint 17 release and should put to rest any worries about Mint's plan to stick with Ubuntu LTS releases for its base. Mint has done what it set up to do, namely improve the Cinnamon desktop to the point that it not only matches, but in many places far exceeds the user experience found in other options like GNOME, and especially, Unity.

Indeed, it's hard to look at Mint 17.3 without comparing it to its upstream base. While Mint has been continually working hard on the desktop and cranking out release after release, Ubuntu has stagnated. If Ubuntu wants to leapfrog past some of its pain points, its developers would do well to look downstream. Mint's package management tools are simpler, more comprehensive, and easier to use than anything Ubuntu offers. Mint also manages to do all this without anything even remotely close to the resources Ubuntu enjoys.