Monthly Archive:: December 2015

Qubes OS, the security-focused operating system that Edward Snowden said in November he was "really excited" about, announced this week that laptop maker Purism will ship their privacy-focused Librem 13 notebook with Qubes pre-installed.

Built on a security-hardened version of the Xen hypervisor, Qubes protects users by allowing them to partition their digital lives into virtual machines. Rather than focus solely on security by correctness, or hide behind security by obscurity, Qubes implements security by isolation - the OS assumes that the device will eventually be breached, and compartmentalises all of its various subsystems to prevent an attacker from gaining full control of the device. Qubes supports Fedora and Debian Linux VMs, and Windows 7 VMs.

Commander Keen is an episodic video game developed by id Software in the early 1990s. The series focuses on the adventures of Billy Blaze, an 8-year-old boy who travels through space and assumes the secret identity of "Commander Keen". The series was successful at replicating the side-scrolling action of the Nintendo Entertainment System Super Mario Bros. games in DOS. The cartoon-style platform games are notable for their pioneering use of EGA graphics and shareware distribution, and they were some of the first games by id Software (who went on to later develop Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake). The games were also exciting to the PC gaming community of the time because of John D. Carmack's smooth-scrolling graphics game engine, which first allowed smooth side scrollers on PC by only redrawing the elements of the screen that actually changed frame to frame.

I have a Samsung RF4289HARS refrigerator. The Google calendar app on it has been working perfectly since I purchased the refrigerator August 2012. However, with the latest changes in Google Calendar API, I can no longer sign in to my calendar . I receive a message stating "Please check your email in Google Calendar website". I can sign in fine on my home PC and have no problem seeing the calendar on my phone. Perhaps this is a Samsung issue, but I thought I would try here first. Has anyone else experienced this problem and what was the solution?

On December 8, 2015, Microsoft released Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile updates on a global scale testing the Windows as a Service (WaaS) model. Besides the syncing of cumulative OS updates between desktop and phone, the event revealed that carriers seem to be sidelined. Here is why that is and what changed between Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 10 Mobile.

An early preview of the new Android Emulator is now available to try out. As a part of Android Studio 2.0, the latest version of the Android Emulator can help you test your app on a wide range of screens size and configurations beyond the physical Android hardware you use to test.Moreover, using the official Android emulator enables you to test with latest Android versions.

Google's Chromebooks have overtaken Apple products as the most popular devices in American classrooms, but Apple CEO Tim Cook says the company will not be following the search giant's approach to the education market, which has been a stronghold for Apple since the early days of the Mac.

"Assessments don’t create learning," Cook said in an interview with BuzzFeed News Wednesday, calling the cheap laptops that have proliferated through American classrooms mere “test machines."

But the performance issues, the lack of apps, and the lack of split-screen functionality show that, right now, Android isn’t really even trying to participate in that future. Simply put: the Pixel team has mostly delivered something really good, the Android team has not. Android may not be Google’s answer for the next generation of computing on a tablet. Maybe that will have to wait for whatever weird hybrid ChromeOS / Android thing that Google is supposedly working on.

iOS and Windows are both much better suited to a larger form factor device. Maybe some day Google will implement that "experimental" multi-window mode, which will help. However, right now it's selling a $650 tablet/keyboard combo that can display a single app at a time. Even with a hypothetical split screen mode, you'd still have to deal with a sea of phone apps from developers that are reluctant to implement a large-format layout, in part because even Google doesn't take its own tablet platform seriously.

That sounds great, say Google, Microsoft, Comcast, and others, except for one thing. The proposed system, called LTE in Unlicensed Spectrum or LTE-U, which relies on a combination of new, small cell towers and home wireless routers, risks disrupting the existing Wi-Fi access most people enjoy. For several months, the three companies have been among a group lobbying the Federal Communications Commission to delay LTE-U's adoption pending further tests. All three declined to comment for this story, referring instead to an Oct. 23 FCC filing they joined that claims LTE-U "has avoided the long-proven standards-setting process and would substantially degrade consumer Wi-Fi service across the country."

At JSConf in Florida today, Microsoft announced that it is open sourcing Chakra, the JavaScript engine used in its Edge and Internet Explorer browsers. The code will be published to the company's GitHub page next month.

The HTC HD2 began its life unassumingly enough back in 2009 as a simple Windows Phone 6.5-powered smartphone. We highly doubt HTC knew of the legacy the phone would end up carrying. As most of you probably know, we're talking about how dev-friendly and dev-embraced the phone has been over the years, finding various ports of Unix, modern versions of Windows Phone up to 8, Firefox OS, and of course Android.

Over the years, the HTC HD2 has seen Android 2.1, Jelly Bean, KitKat, Lollipop, and now Android 6.0 Marshmallow.

Today we launched the open source Swift project along with the Swift.org website. We couldn't be more excited to work together in an open community to find and fix issues, add enhancements, and bring Swift to new platforms.

Swift is made up of a number of different projects, providing a complete ecosystem for building great software. The Swift compiler project interprets Swift syntax, produces diagnostics to help you write correct code, and employs LLVM to generate machine instructions. The LLDB project is a first-class debugger that includes a REPL for interactive programming. And the Swift standard library project includes all the core types and basic functionality you need to write software in Swift.

Today, we released two additional projects for Swift in open source: the Core Libraries project, and a new Swift Package Manager project.

If the global Internet is going to be warped to suit governments' interests, we must ensure that it isn't broken up into cantonized national networks with less privacy, less efficiency, less commerce and less speech. That means making it easier for foreign governments to get data when that access is justified and harder when it is not.

International agreements are one solution, and America and Britain are rumored to be negotiating such a deal. In the meantime, American technology companies should be free to comply directly with foreign government requests for data, as long as that access is warranted and meets international standards of due process and human rights. If America fails to allow such access, it will happen anyway in a brute and extralegal manner - and the result will be a less secure, less efficient Internet.