Monthly Archive:: August 2015

Windows 8 and Windows 10 contain a surprising feature that many users will find unwelcome: PC OEMs can embed a Windows executable in their system firmware. Windows 8 and 10 will then extract this executable during boot time and run it automatically. In this way, the OEM can inject software onto a Windows machine even if the operating system was cleanly installed.

The good news is that most OEMs fortunately do not seem to take advantage of this feature. The bad news is that "most" is not "all." Between October 2014 and April of this year, Lenovo used this feature to preinstall software onto certain Lenovo desktop and laptop systems, calling the feature the "Lenovo Service Engine."

Oracle's chief security officer is tired of customers performing their own security tests on Oracle software, and she's not going to take it anymore. That was the message of a post she made to her corporate blog on August 10 - a post that has since been taken down.

Ever since Microsoft announced their Bridge technologies at Build 2015 questions about how they work (and how well) have been asked. The tools let developers port over Android apps (Project Astoria), iOS apps (Project Islandwood), web apps (Project Westminster) and classic Win32 apps (Project Centennial) to Windows 10 including phone.

This morning, the actual tools for Project Astoria have leaked onto the web and users can freely (and illegally) download Android APKs and sideload them to their Windows Phone running Windows 10 Mobile. This follows yesterday's leak of the documentation for the project.

We have built and uploaded the first ever working Qubes Live USB image! It's based on the recently released 3.0-rc2 release. Now you should be able to run and try Qubes OS of any laptop without needing to install it anywhere!

Qubes is an open-source operating system designed to provide strong security for desktop computing using Security by Compartmentalization approach. Qubes is based on Xen, the X Window System, and Linux, and can run most Linux applications and utilize most of the Linux drivers.

Windows 10 IoT Core is a new edition for Windows targeted towards small, embedded devices that may or may not have screens. For devices with screens, Windows 10 IoT Core does not have a Windows shell experience; instead you can write a Universal Windows app that is the interface and "personality" for your device. IoT core designed to have a low barrier to entry and make it easy to build professional grade devices. It's designed to work with a variety of open source languages and works well with Visual Studio.

In a few years, after the dust has settled, we're all going to look back at today's web's excesses and abuses as an almost unbelievable embarrassment. Hopefully, the worst is behind us. And it's time to stop demonizing people who use tools to bring that sanity to their web browsers today.

The post-PC era is a term that was made popular by Apple at its introduction of the iPad in 2010, and one that a lot of people took to mean the PC will eventually die and tablets and smartphones will take its place. The PC isn't exactly healthy right now, but it's also nowhere near death, no matter how many stories try to exaggerate its continued decline.

In order to address some of the sources of CPU overhead and provide developers with more explicit control over rendering, w've been working to bring a new 3D rendering API, Vulkan, to Android. Like OpenGL ES, Vulkan is an open standard for 3D graphics and rendering maintained by Khronos. Vulkan is being designed from the ground up to minimize CPU overhead in the driver, and allow your application to control GPU operation more directly. Vulkan also enables better parallelization by allowing multiple threads to perform work such as command buffer construction at once.

The Moto G often feels like the culmination of everything that Motorola has learned in the course of making its other phones. Yes, it's a stripped-down version of Motorola's so-called flagship, the Moto X, but it's by no means an afterthought. It's reason to question what a "flagship" really is. If a flagship is literally the standard-bearer, then it's worth remembering that the Moto G is the Motorola phone that most people are going to use - it's the phone that's going to define Motorola. When you consider that the Moto G is Motorola's "best selling smartphone ever," Motorola's top-of-the-line phones start to seem more like testing grounds than devices designed to take over the market. Given how impressive and popular the Moto G is, it's hard to see it as anything but Motorola's actual flagship.

We're releasing the iOS bridge as an open-source project under the MIT license. Given the ambition of the project, making it easy for iOS developers to build and run apps on Windows, it is important to note that today’s release is clearly a work-in-progress - some of the features demonstrated at Build are not yet ready or still in an early state. Regardless, we'd love for the interested and curious to look at the bridge, and compare what we're building with your app's requirements. And, for the really ambitious, we invite you to help us by contributing to the project, as community contributors - with source code, tests, bug reports, or comments. We welcome any and all participation in building this bridge.

Microsoft first revealed its redesigned Xbox One dashboard back at E3 earlier this year, and now the company is announcing that it will arrive on consoles in November. Powered by Windows 10, the new dashboard includes features that focus on speed and performance, and a design that's a lot more simplified.

As we ask our employees to bring their "A" game to work every day to achieve our mission, we believe it's our responsibility to create an environment where people can do their best work. A key component of this is supporting our employees with benefits that matter most to them. This is why today we're announcing enhancements to our U.S. corporate employee benefits in three areas that employees consistently rank among the most important: having time to renew; saving for the future; and flexibility needed to spend time with new children.

At Netflix, we work hard to foster a "freedom and responsibility" culture that gives our employees context about our business and the freedom to make their own decisions along with the accompanying responsibility. With this in mind, today we're introducing an unlimited leave policy for new moms and dads that allows them to take off as much time as they want during the first year after a child's birth or adoption.

Windows 10, by default, has permission to report a huge amount of data back to Microsoft. By clicking through "Express Settings" during installation, you allow Windows 10 to gather up your contacts, calendar details, text and touch input, location data, and a whole lot more. The OS then sends it all back to Microsoft so that it can be used for personalisation and targeted ads.

That isn't to say you should be happy about this state of affairs, however. If you'd like to retain most of your privacy and keep your personal data on your PC, Windows 10 can be configured in that way. Just be warned that there are quite a few toggles that need to be turned off, and you'll lose some functionality as well (Cortana won't work, for example).