Monthly Archive:: September 2014

Samsung Gear S: wearing the most powerful smartwatch yet

Thom Holwerda 2014-09-04 Wireless 17 Comments

Samsung's shown itself to be entirely unafraid when it comes to smartwatches. It's willing to try any size, any spec, any combination of features in an attempt to figure out what consumers want in a wearable. Its latest try, the Gear S, is a combination of Samsung's newest and best ideas - and a couple of ideas it'll soon leave by the roadside as well.

Once the Moto360, the round LG G Watch R, and Apple's supposed entry come out, we will look at these ridiculous Samsung contraptions in the same way we look at these now.

My favourite moment in the video: when the full QWERTY keyboard pops up. Samsung just has no taste.

Galaxy Note Edge: an entirely new kind of curved display

Thom Holwerda 2014-09-03 Wireless 13 Comments

It's IFA in Berlin this week, and as always, most of the new devices announced are iterations on what came before and not particularly interesting. One device stands out, though - and it's a Samsung.

The Note Edge is, on paper at least, only the slightest variation on the new Note 4. It has the same metallic design, a huge improvement on anything Samsung’s done before. It has the same soft-touch back, blissfully without the fake stitching. It has the same 16-megapixel camera, the same heart-rate monitor, the same processor, the same memory, the same software, the same new Multi Window feature, the same everything. It's an incredibly high-end, incredibly powerful phone. It even has a Quad HD, 2560 x 1440 display like the Note 4, though this one is slightly smaller at 5.6 inches rather than 5.7.

But there's more to the Note Edge than its spec sheet.

That 'more' refers to its display. The right edge of the display is curved downward, creating a sort of little side display attached to the big one. This little side display can be used to show additional application controls, a ticker, an alarm clock, and so on. It looks kind of neat, but as always with Samsung, I'm pretty sure their software is going to ruin it and turn it into even more of a gimmick than it already is.

iCloud accounts compromised, but iCloud not compromised

Thom Holwerda 2014-09-02 Apple 58 Comments

We wanted to provide an update to our investigation into the theft of photos of certain celebrities. When we learned of the theft, we were outraged and immediately mobilized Apple's engineers to discover the source. Our customers' privacy and security are of utmost importance to us. After more than 40 hours of investigation, we have discovered that certain celebrity accounts were compromised by a very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that has become all too common on the Internet. None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple's systems including iCloud or Find my iPhone.

So, iCloud accounts were compromised, but iCloud was not compromised.

Ok.

Open webOS renamed to LunaOS, new version released

Thom Holwerda 2014-09-02 Wireless 11 Comments

It's been a long while since we announced our Alpha 2 release back in June of 2013, but today after months of very hard work we are very proud and happy to provide our latest release to the community now named "LuneOS".

The first eye catching change is the new name we'll be using for our project going forward. The distribution will be called "LuneOS" instead of "WebOS Ports Open webOS" because it wasn't very catchy. Lune is the French translation of moon and refers to the user interface we all love so much in legacy webOS, LunaSysMgr, which is named after the Latin/Spanish translation of moon.

The release model for LuneOS is a rolling one where each of the releases will get its own name from a list of coffee beverages. This first release is "Affogato".

It only supports the Nexus 4 and HP TouchPad, for now. Their focus is to provide a stable base for these devices, but they won't try to compete feature-for-feature with the likes of Android and iOS. Essentially, it's webOS for those of us who remember the operating system fondly - hopefully with some of the rough spots ironed out.

Interestingly, it makes use of libhybris, which is a contribution from Jolla's Carsten Munk to the mobile world. It allows Wayland to run atop Android GPU drivers. Open source can be a beautiful thing.

Say hello to those who hate the NSA, but invade women’s privacy

Thom Holwerda 2014-09-01 Internet 73 Comments

Over the weekend someone released hundreds of revealing photos of celebrities that appear to have been stolen from private storage. In response to this, a bunch of anonymous guys on the internet copied them and posted them all over the town square, because the internet is written in ink and if you are ever a victim once in your life the internet will remind you of it forever.

These men are the detritus of human society for whom the internet provides a warm blanket, so let's remove the warm blanket for a minute.

If the NSA spies on us, it's a massive violation of privacy and omg government and #impeachobama. When some (hopefully not for much longer) anonymous hacker breaks into the personal, private accounts of dozens of famous women, steals their most private photographs, and posts them online, these same men shouting from the rooftops about the NSA retreat to their bunkers, share the photos as much as they can, and do much more I'd rather not imagine right now.

Props to The Verge for this article.

FreeRTOS 8.1.0 released

Guest post by Anonymous 2014-09-01 OS News 14 Comments

Version 8.1.0 of FreeRTOS was released a few days ago. Probably the most important feature is support for non contiguous heap space (heap_5.c), needed for allocation of memory (for creation of tasks, queues, semaphores, etc. and also user applications).

AnandTech founder leaves site, joins Apple

Thom Holwerda 2014-09-01 In the News 50 Comments

Anand Lal Shimpi, the editor and publisher of the well-regarded AnandTech site, is going to work at Apple.

An Apple rep confirmed that the company was hiring Shimpi, but wouldn't provide any other details.

Last night, via a post on the site he founded in 1997, Shimpi said he was "officially retiring from the tech publishing world," but didn't say what he was doing next. "I won't stay idle forever. There are a bunch of challenges out there :)", he wrote.

This is great news for him, and after 17 years of some of the best technology journalism in the world, he certainly deserves a change of pace. Still, the rest of us lose a great voice, one of the best technology journalists of all time.

Inside Apple, nobody hears you scream.