OSnews - Exploring the Future of Computing

On hacking microSD cards

Submitted by 2014-01-01 Privacy, Security 37 Comments

Remember when I wrote about how your mobile phone runs two operating systems, one of which is a black box we know and understand little about, ripe for vulnerabilities? As many rightfully pointed out in the comments - it's not just mobile phones that have tiny processors for specific tasks embedded in them. As it turns out, memory cards have microprocessors though - and yes, they can be cracked for remote code execution too.

Today at the Chaos Computer Congress (30C3), xobs and I disclosed a finding that some SD cards contain vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution - on the memory card itself. On the dark side, code execution on the memory card enables a class of MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks, where the card seems to be behaving one way, but in fact it does something else. On the light side, it also enables the possibility for hardware enthusiasts to gain access to a very cheap and ubiquitous source of microcontrollers.

There's so much computing power hidden in the dark.

The Mac Pro review

Thom Holwerda 2014-01-01 Apple 15 Comments

All in all the new Mac Pro is a good update to its aging predecessor. Apple did a great job with the new chassis and build a desktop that's extremely dense with compute. When I had to dust off the old Mac Pros to prepare them for this comparison I quickly remembered many of the reasons that frustrated me about the platform. The old Mac Pro was big, bulky, a pain to work on and was substantially behind the consumer Macs in single threaded performance. The new Mac Pro fixes literally all of that. If you have a workload that justifies it and prefer OS X, the Mac Pro is thankfully no longer just your only solution, it's a great solution.

The only Mac Pro review that matters. Still want one. Won't buy one - but want one.

Jacob Applebaum: To protect and infect

Thom Holwerda 2013-12-30 Privacy, Security 18 Comments

Jacob Applebaum's detailed technical 30c3 talk about the NSA's tools. Just watch this. Naming and shaming of just about every major technology company. This will blow your mind.

Xiaomi’s Hugo Barra details China’s insane technology market

Thom Holwerda 2013-12-30 In the News 40 Comments

If you ever wondered why many people say the US and Europe are irrelevant targets for new and existing technology companies compared to China, just watch this Le Web interview with Hugo Barra - who recently left Google's Android team to join Chinese device maker Xiaomi. In it, he compares China's most popular internet services with their western counterparts - and 'our' services pale in comparison to China's.

The most impressive number? China now has 500 million smartphone users. Six months ago, it was 'only' 250 million. That's the scale and growth we're talking about here. I often hear people say "yeah, but China is mostly poor people with a few rich ones on top" - well, these figures prove otherwise. And the growth is far, far from over.

That's why I always chuckle whenever a major western company only highlights US figures. It just means they missed that huge, fat, Chinese boat.

Guest post by fran 2013-12-30 Haiku 43 Comments

In a blog post from Haiku developer Pawel Dziepak he describes the work he has been doing on improving processor support. Most notably removing the 8 processor limit. From the blog post:

The main scheduler logic has been completed and now I am concentrating mainly on bug fixes, adjusting tunables and some minor improvements. I also removed gSchedulerLock, a spinlock I mentioned in my last post, and replaced it with more fine grained locking. An new interfaces for cpufreq and cpuidle modules has been created together with a cpufreq module for Intel Sandy Bridge or newer cores and cpuidle module for all processors that support C-states and invariant TSC. Furthermore, IRQs (including MSI) can be now directed to an arbitrary logical processor. Implementation of inter-processor interrupts has been improved so that it avoids acquiring any lock if it is not necessary and supports multicast interrupts. And, last but not least, 8 processor limit has been removed.

Documents reveal top NSA hacking unit

Thom Holwerda 2013-12-30 Legal 35 Comments

The German newspaper Der Spiegel has unveiled a whole bunch of stuff about the NSA and its tools that defy belief. Their tools and actions go way beyond what we already knew; we're not just talking passive information gathering through cables and such, but way, way more.

For instance, the NSA can divert shipments of purchased computers and equipment to their own secret workshops, where malware and spying hardware is added to these products before they are then shipped onward to the buyers. They also intercept Windows crash reports as they are sent from users' computers to Microsoft's servers. Worse yet, they can reportedly add special hardware to drones that can wirelessly infect computers from up to 8 kilometres away.

We've only seen the tip of the iceberg here. The fact that no heads are rolling in Washington over this illustrates just how corrupt and undemocratic the US government has become.

Sailfish updated yet again

Thom Holwerda 2013-12-27 Wireless 21 Comments

Jolla promised another big bugfix update before the year was over, and they delivered. Version 1.0.2.5 brings a whole boatload of bugfixes and stability improvements, but also brings in a few new features - such as one-way Google Calendar synchronization, camera support for Android applications, and a few more. Bigger new features are expected to arrive in January.

The update rollout itself was a bit of a disaster - the servers became overloaded (at least, that's what it looked like), so many people couldn't download the update, or would have the download hang halfway through. As far as I know, the update seems to be rolling out fine now, but having this process go wrong when the userbase is as small as it is means they've got some work to do on this one.

In the meantime, Christmas was packed with gifts for Sailfish users when it comes to applications. For instance, Sailfish has its own, native WhatsApp client now - and it works perfectly, and looks great. There's also a video player, and a native Facebook client - Friends - is getting daily updates. Then there's TinyWebBrowser; started out as a test project, but is already getting more useful than the stock browser, mostly because it supports landscape (a feature the stock browser will supposedly get in January).

All in all, the rate of new applications, new versions to existing applications, and operating system updates is all very promising, especially if you take into the account the very small userbase (I would guess several thousands at this point). Let's hope they can keep it up. For what it's worth - thanks to the new applications, I already uninstalled the Android compatibility stuff from my Jolla.

The CDC 6600 architecture

Thom Holwerda 2013-12-27 Hardware 10 Comments

The CDC6600 and its family members are part of the computer industry history. A decade before the Cray 1, the members of the CDC6000 family were not only expensive and the most powerful systems at the time of introduction. They were also lean and wonderful architectures ! The elegance was also conveyed in several publications (many by CDC), where all the necessary knowledge was explained from the ground up. All you needed to know was supplied, clearly laid out, not just hints for efficient programming. Basically, you could rebuild your own computer by reading these books. 50 years later, they are invaluable reminders and tools, we can see where the computer industry comes from and realise that it is not that hard to do it ourselves, too.

Via HackerNews. This is an amazing resource.

Google sues Apple, Microsoft-backed patent troll Rockstar

Thom Holwerda 2013-12-27 Legal 57 Comments

Google has decided to fight back against the Apple and Microsoft-backed patent troll Rockstar. It has filed a lawsuit, asking the court to state that the Android platform does not infringe any of the patents the patent troll is asserting against Android, Google, and Android OEMs. Google describes Rockstar's trolling in no uncertain terms.

Rockstar produces no products and practices no patents. Instead, Rockstar employs a staff of engineers in Ontario, Canada, who examine other companies' successful products to find anything that Rockstar might use to demand and extract licenses to its patents under threat of litigation.

A very interesting tidbit is found further down in the legal documents - Google claims that Rockstar actually contacted companies that use Android, asking them to... Stop using Android.

On information and belief, Rockstar contacted and met with these California-based companies in order to discourage them from continuing to use Google's Android platform in their devices, and to interfere with Google's business relationships.

This Apple and Microsoft shell company is way, way dirtier than we already knew.

BlackBerry posts disastrous quarterly results

Thom Holwerda 2013-12-24 Wireless 13 Comments

BlackBerry's new interim chief John Chen has just got a rude wake-up call: the company shipped only 1.9 million smartphones to retailers in Q3 compared to 3.7 million last quarter, and lost $4.4 billion. Most of the phones shipped were lower-priced BB7 models, and it lost a massive $2.6 billion on unsold BlackBerry 10 devices and other associated BB10 charges. Retail channel sales (of phones already shipped) during the period also showed the scale of the drop in its upmarket phones: of 4.3 million devices sold to end-users, only 1.1 million were BB10 handsets.

I feel terrible for the people working at RIM. This is the news they have to hear just days before Christmas.

Submitted by M.Onty 2013-12-24 In the News 58 Comments

"His later life was overshadowed by his conviction for homosexual activity, a sentence we would now consider unjust and discriminatory and which has now been repealed," said Mr Grayling.

"Turing deserves to be remembered and recognised for his fantastic contribution to the war effort and his legacy to science. A pardon from the Queen is a fitting tribute to an exceptional man."

Finally.

Submitted by JRepin 2013-12-23 KDE 82 Comments

Plasma 2 Technology Preview demonstrates the current development status. The Plasma 2 user interfaces are built using QML and run on top of a fully hardware accelerated graphics stack using Qt5, QtQuick 2 and an OpenGL(-ES) scenegraph. Plasma 2 is a converged workspace shell that can run and switch between user interfaces for different formfactors, and makes the workspace adaptable to a given target device.

Plasma 2 is not a complete rewrite; it's a port to a new graphics system (a fully hardware accelerated OpenGL(ES) scenegraph).

Sooner prototype dropped “well before the iPhone announcement”

Thom Holwerda 2013-12-20 Google 55 Comments

In light of the recent The Atlantic article, Arnoud Wokke, editor at the popular Dutch technology site Tweakers.net, pointed me to an interesting OSNews comment by Dianne Hackborn, former Be engineer (that's still major street cred right here), former Palm engineer, and Android engineer at Google since early 2006. Her recollection of the story regarding the cancellation of the BlackBerry-esque 'Sooner' prototype and the touchscreen 'Dream' prototype is entirely different from what Vogelstein states in his article.

From a software perspective, Sooner and Dream were basically the same -- different form-factors, one without a touch screen -- but they were not so different as this article indicates and the switch between them was not such a huge upheaval.

The main reason for the differences in schedule was hardware: Sooner was a variation of an existing device that HTC was shipping, while Dream was a completely new device with a lot of things that had never been shipped before, at least by HTC (new Qualcomm chipset, sensors, touch screen, the hinge design, etc). So Sooner was the safe/fast device, and Dream was the risky/long-term device.

However the other factor in this was the software. Work on the Android we know today (which is what is running in that Sooner) basically started around late 2005 / early 2006. I got to Google at the beginning of 2006, and it was around that time we started work on everything from the resource system through the view hierarchy, to the window manager and activity manager that you know today. Some work on stuff we have today (like SurfaceFlinger) was started a bit earlier, but also after Google acquired Android.

Even if there was no iPhone, there is a good chance that Sooner would have been dropped, since while it was a good idea to get Android out quickly from a hardware perspective, the software schedule was much longer. I don't recall the exact dates, but I believe the decision to drop Sooner was well before the iPhone announcement... though we continued to use it for quite a while internally for development, since it was the only semi-stable hardware platform we had. If nothing else, it helped remove significant risk from the schedule since software development could be done on a relatively stable device while the systems team brought up the new hardware in parallel.

This is very different from the somewhat internally inconsistent story Vogelstein tells. I'm very curious to find out where, exactly, the truth lies.

Submitted by Hiev 2013-12-20 General Development 71 Comments

Google believes Dart speeds up both developers and the programs they write, but skeptics worry that it fragments Web programming and undermines the industry's focus on better JavaScript. So far, it's been a largely academic debate, but that will change in coming months.

That's because Google right now is building Dart technology directly into Chrome.

Does anyone here use Dart?

“The day Google had to ‘start over’ on Android”

Thom Holwerda 2013-12-20 Google 18 Comments

Fred Vogelstein, writing for The Atlantic, on what happened with the Android team after the iPhone was unveiled:

Within weeks the Android team had completely reconfigured its objectives. A phone with a touchscreen, code-named Dream, that had been in the early stages of development, became the focus. Its launch was pushed out a year until fall 2008. Engineers started drilling into it all the things the iPhone didn't do to differentiate their phone when launch day did occur.

Me, a few years ago:

Now, does this mean that the iPhone had zero influence on Android's early development? Of course not. Like the iPhone itself was standing on the shoulders of giants (iPhone to PalmOS: hi daddy!), Android stood on the shoulders of giants as well. However, unlike what has already become an accepted truth for some, the infamous photograph of a prototype Android device was not the prototype Android device. In fact, Google was working on touch screen devices alongside that infamous BlackBerry-like device, and the evidence for that is out there, for everyone to see.

Vogelstein's entire article - which is actually adapted from a chapter of a book - is a bit contradictory in nature. It claims, several times, that the Android team had to start over after the release of the iPhone, but at the same time, it states that a full touch phone was already in development.

So, just to reiterate: touchscreen devices had always been part of Android, even during its initial stages at Google. Several different form factors were in development, but after the release of the iPhone, it made little sense to continue to focus on the BlackBerry-like device. Some make it seem as if Vogelstein's article is some sort of massive eye-opener completely rebutting this point, but it seems they may have missed its second-to-last paragraph.

All new Mac Pro available starting tomorrow

Thom Holwerda 2013-12-18 Apple 105 Comments

Apple today announced the all-new Mac Pro will be available to order starting Thursday, December 19. Redesigned from the inside out, the all-new Mac Pro features the latest Intel Xeon processors, dual workstation-class GPUs, PCIe-based flash storage and ultra-fast ECC memory.

This thing is so damn awesome. I don't need it, but I still want one.

‘Windows Phone turned the corner in 2013’

Thom Holwerda 2013-12-18 Windows 128 Comments

2013 was nothing less than a blockbuster success for Windows Phone, which went from industry also-ran to the undisputed third mobile ecosystem, and is poised to challenge iPhone for the number two spot. You didn't think it could get this good? That's OK, neither did I.

Windows Phone seemingly turns a corner with every new application, small operating system update, and new Nokia Lumia. It's turning so many corners it's running in circles.

MorphOS 3.4 released

Thom Holwerda 2013-12-18 Morphos 35 Comments

The MorphOS development team is proud to announce the public release of MorphOS 3.4, which introduces faster R300 graphics drivers, improved video playback on G5-based systems, support for non-native display resolutions on various PowerBooks, screen blanker password protection, and numerous bug fixes and other improvements. For an overview of the included changes, please read our release notes.

Some serious improvements in there. Their market is probably small, but they release new versions at a relatively stable pace. One of the very few alternative operating systems that has managed to survive over the years where so many others fell.

Electrical possibilities of the Jolla Other Half

Thom Holwerda 2013-12-17 Wireless 7 Comments

There's this one other thing about the Jolla phone that sets it apart from the competition. In marketing terms, it's called The Other Half, the backside of the phone, which can be replaced and is 3D-printable. While the two The Other Halfs shipping with the first wave of pre-order customers have tiny RFID chips in them for communication (it instructs the phone to download a matching background and sounds), the Jolla phone also has a set of electrical contacts on the back of the exposed device - I2C.

This is one of the wildcard when it comes to Jolla - there's lots of possibilities here, such as a backplate with an additional battery, or even one with an integrated sliding keyboard. One of Jolla's engineers already added wireless charging to his backplate using I2C, to illustrate what it possible.

I'm really curious what other people are going to come up with - if at all. Right now there's probably little commercial interest to create products for The Other Half, but if Jolla manages to pick up enough steam, we might see some really cool stuff coming out of this.

Sailfish gets its second update today

Thom Holwerda 2013-12-17 Wireless 67 Comments

We just discovered an issue in both 1.0.0.5 and 1.0.1.10 today which causes update of the store token required for accessing store repositories to fail. A fix for that has been pushed a few minutes ago: The update to version 1.0.1.12 you might be seeing on your device soon contains exactly this one fix to keep store access working.

My Jolla arrived this morning, and I've been playing with it all day. It is by far the most exciting device and operating system I've used in a long, long time. When it arrived, the first update to the operating system was already waiting for me to be installed - and only a few hours later, another update is hitting the device. They have promised another large bugfix and stability update before the end of the year, with updates with new features arriving early next year.

These men and women know what they're doing. They're not overselling, and they keep their promises. A very promising start.