JanOS is an operating system designed to run on the chipset of mobile phones. It runs without a screen, and allows you to access all phone functionality, from calling to the camera, through JavaScript APIs.

Why?

Current development boards for Internet of Things solutions have one big problem: they are very expensive. Boards like the Raspberry Pi or Arduino have a limited feature set and simple extensions, like a GSM shield, can cost $80. That is a shockingly high price when a full smartphone can be available for just $30. Why not break out the mainboard from a mobile phone and use that to develop embedded projects? Cheaper and more powerful.

In past years Apple has said it's cracking down on the manipulation of App Store rankings through bot programs, but a recent image from Chinese social media site Weibo suggests the trade is alive and well using actual iPhones. The photo is captioned "hardworking App Store ranking manipulation employee," and shows a young woman sat in front of a bank of around 50 iPhone 5cs, all hooked up with a nest of cables. There's an identical bank of iPhones on her right and what looks like two more smartphone-laden desks facing away from her on the other side of the room.

On some sites, the photo is being paired with an alleged price list for the services (above), with Tech in Asia reporting that it will cost customers RMB 70,000 ($11,200) to get into the top ten free apps (that's the option at the top), while keeping it there will cost RMB 405,000 ($65,000) each week. The third column reportedly shows the monthly price for these services, while the fourth gives potential customers a contact number on QQ - a popular messaging app run by Chinese internet giant Tencent.

Over 720,000 Android Wear devices shipped in 2014 out of a total of 4.6 million smart wearable bands. Though the Moto 360 remained supply constrained through Q4, Motorola was the clear leader among Android Wear vendors. LG’s round G Watch R performed significantly better than its original G Watch, while Asus and Sony entered the market with their own Android Wear devices. Pebble meanwhile shipped a total of 1 million units from its 2013 launch through to the end of 2014.

Today, Microsoft released their latest Patch Tuesday. This Patch includes a fix for vulnerability CVE-2015-0057, an IMPORTANT-rated exploitable vulnerability which we responsibly disclosed to Microsoft a few months ago. As part of our research, we revealed this privilege escalation vulnerability which, if exploited, enables a threat actor to complete control of a Windows machine. In other words, a threat actor that gains access to a Windows machine (say, through a phishing campaign) can exploit this vulnerability to bypass all Windows security measures, defeating mitigation measures such as sandboxing, kernel segregation and memory randomization.

Interestingly, the exploit requires modifying only a single bit of the Windows operating system.

Tim Cook spoke at length during today's Goldman Sachs conference on Apple's insane first quarter, China, the Apple Watch, and so much more. Here's a transcript of his remarks, with occasional interjection by the Goldman Sachs interviewer.

This release adds support for btrfs scrubbing and fast device replacement with RAID 5&6, support for the Intel Memory Protection Extensions that help to stop buffer overflows, support for the AMD HSA architecture, support for the debugging ARM Coresight subsystem, support for the Altera Nios II CPU architecture, networking infrastructure for routing and switching offloading, Device Tree Overlays that help to support expansion busses found on consumer development boards like the BeagleBone or Raspberry Pi, support for hole punching and preallocation in NFSv4.2, and the Android binder has been moved from the staging area to stable; it also adds new drivers; and many other small improvements.

This is, in my mind, orthogonal to the systemd question. I used to be able to say Linux was clean, logical, well put-together, and organized. I can't really say this anymore. Users and groups are not really determinitive for permissions, now that we have things like polkit running around. (Yes, by the way, I am a member of plugdev.) Error messages are unhelpful (WHY was I not authorized?) and logs are nowhere to be found. Traditionally, one could twiddle who could mount devices via /etc/fstab lines and perhaps some sudo rules. Granted, you had to know where to look, but when you did, it was simple; only two pieces to fit together. I've even spent time figuring out where to look and STILL have no idea what to do.

systemd may help with some of this, and may hurt with some of it; but I see the problem more of an attitude of desktop environments to add features fast without really thinking of the implications. There is something to be said for slower progress if the result is higher quality.

Today Swift 1.2 was released as part of Xcode 6.3 beta. This beta release includes a significantly enhanced Swift compiler, as well as new features in the Swift language itself. For the complete list of changes, read the release notes. This blog post will focus on the highlights.

For 2015, iOS 9, which is codenamed Stowe (after the ski resort in Vermont), is going to include a collection of under-the-hood improvements. Sources tell us that iOS 9 engineers are putting a "huge" focus on fixing bugs, maintaining stability, and boosting performance for the new operating system, rather than solely focusing on delivering major new feature additions. Apple will also continue to make efforts to keep the size of the OS and updates manageable, especially for the many millions of iOS device owners with 16GB devices.

Microsoft has been heavily focused on low-end Windows Phone hardware over the past two years to grow market share, but its upcoming Windows 10 update won’t be finely tuned for these devices with low specifications. Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore revealed on Twitter yesterday that the software maker is working on Windows 10 for phones with 512MB of RAM, but that "features may vary."

If we're ever to see Tizen on a high-end phone, with a proper global marketing push behind it, chances are it'll look drastically different to what we see on the Samsung Z1 today. For now, what Samsung has is a lower-cost, slightly more modern replacement for its older Bada devices, not a potential successor to its vast Android lineup.

Similar to when Samsung started making modern smartphones, its first swing at building an OS boils down to a lesser copy of the market leader. Tizen is just a less mature version of Android with no apps and no major ecosystem player supporting it. The OS feels like it's straight out of that Dilbert comic where the Pointy-Haired Boss suggests "If we work day and night, we can match our competitors' features within twelve months." Tizen seems to have done a good job copying an OS from several years ago, but it never evolved while its competitors did. For now, the conclusion of any Tizen-based smartphone review will always say "this would have been a better product if it ran Android."

The Ubuntu handset can run apps written in either the HTML5 web programming language or its own native QML code.

However, its operating system effectively hides them away. Instead of the traditional smartphone user interface - featuring grids of apps - it uses themed cards that group together different facilities.

Canonical calls these Scopes, and they are reminiscent of the swipe-based card system used by the Google Now personal assistant.