See the email thread on the misc list for more details.

The OpenBSD project is the incubator for a number of other projects including OpenSSH and OpenSMTPD. If you use these or just want the project to survive, consider making a donation.

This is quite, quite an amazing journey.

ACM Queue posted an article titled "Unikernels: Rise of the Virtual Library Operating System", written by the main developers of MirageOS. The article is a good overview of the motivation and design of Mirage, which is a specialized lightweight hypervisor guest operating system for Xen. It's developed in OCaml and benefits from its features like memory safety, module system and compiler optimisations. It's comparable to OSv on many fronts.

More here.

Mozilla plans to establish an automated process which would verify that binaries contain only the code found in the official source repositories, and not spyware secretly added during the build process at the behest of government intelligence agencies. In a blog post entitled Trust but Verify, CTO Brendan Eich and R&D VP Andreas Gal note that governments "may force service operators to enable surveillance (something that seems to have happened in the Lavabit case)" and pledge to develop systems which will make Firefox resistant to this form of tampering.

Stefano Mosconi (CTO of Jolla) gives a review of the past year, talking about decisions and developments in the company such as changing the SoC manufacturer for their first handset, switching to Wayland with Qt5 for Sailfish and opening their Web store and co-creation site.

Windows has virtually no presence in the two biggest things to hit computing in a long time, and it's starting to show. Microsoft may not be in trouble - but Windows is.

It's opt-out; so it's enabled by default. I don't think Google has ever had a more stupid idea than this. This is just all-around bad - no ifs, no buts, nothing. You must be completely brain-dead to think that implementing this "feature" is in any way, shape, or form, a good idea.

I'll be turning this off right away - I don't want random internet people emailing me any more than they already do. Equally idiotic, when you start typing a name in Gmail's to/cc fields, it will autocomplete to Google+ usernames. I have no idea if you can turn this brain fart off.

I don't like Google+, I don't want Google+ - I just want it to go away. Please.

Don't you just love proper leaks? Nokia's 'Normandy', its rumoured Android phone designed to replace the Asha series, has been leaked in most of its glory. It's a 4", 854x480 phone with a Snapdragon processor, dual-SIM support, and for the rest it's pretty standard, hardware-wise. Most interestingly, the skin Nokia is draping over its version of Android is looks quite restrained, although they did change the on-screen buttons to only show an Asha-like single back button.

There's really no telling what's going to happen with Normandy in the wake of Microsoft buying Nokia's devices division. In my view, Microsoft can only lose if it decides to sell this device; if the Normandy sucks and doesn't sell well, it'll reflect bad on the company. If it's good and sells very well, it will reflect bad on the company too (can you imagine the Normandy becoming the best-selling Microsoft phone? Hilarious!).

I would guess Microsoft would much rather have low-end Lumias like the 520 fulfilling the role of Asha. It's no coincidence that the 520 is the best-selling Windows Phone device by far; it's the best fit for Nokia's traditionally strong markets. With Android already being quite popular there, a Nokia Android device would be an even better fit.

And with Microsoft not being allowed to use the Nokia name at all - only Asha and Lumia - anything can happen.

Quite, quite amazing.

Polygon:

The cold and harsh reality is that six of the top ten games on Steam run on Linux/SteamOS - and with Steam having such a huge base of active subscribers, that's a lot of users covered with just those six games. On top of that, there's almost 300 more Linux games on Steam. In the meantime, the PS4 and Xbox One combined have like 10 games, most of which are available on the Xbox 360/PS3 as well, and the remainder are rushed titles nobody gives two rat's asses about.

The Xbox One and PS4 are sold not on what they offer now, but on what they will offer in the future. I see absolutely no reason why Steam Machines ought to be treated any differently.

Reality check: right now, spending $499 on a Steam Machine gets you access to a lot more games and a lot more functionality than the Xbox One and PS4 offer combined. Of course, a Windows PC will offer even more games (not functionality, Linux has that covered just fine) - but that applies just as well to any console.

I've been baffled these past few days about the attitude of the gaming press towards Steam Machines. The gaming press' reviews of the new consoles was full of "just you wait until the actually good games arrive!/new functionality is added, but here's a 9/10 anyway on that promise!", but for some reason, the same sloppy reviewing is not applied to Steam Machines.

They start at $499, and come in all shapes and sizes.

The same plasticy everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-software products as always from Samsung, but it does make one thing even clearer: stock Android really needs multiwindow.

It looks quite amazing - but I still find it very hard to be excited over a TV.