Monthly Archive:: July 2016

Twitter has banned one of its most notoriously contentious voices. On Tuesday evening, the microblogging service permanently suspended the account of , a day after he incited his followers to bombard Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones with racist and demeaning tweets.

"People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter," a company spokesperson said in a statement provided to BuzzFeed News. "But no one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others."

If you regularly browse the App Store's Top Charts most of these results would likely serve to confirm what you had already assumed. Most obviously, if you were to randomly pick an app from the Top 200 Grossing charts, chances are extremely high that you would pick a free app with IAPs and it would most likely be a game. But what is particularly suprising is the degree to which free apps with IAP dominate the charts with essentially no paid apps or no apps without IAPs.

You probably don't think of car companies as Linux and open-source supporters. You'd be wrong. Toyota, the world's largest car manufacturer, just joined the Open Invention Network (OIN), the largest patent non-aggression community in history.

OIN was formed by IBM, Sony, Phillips, Red Hat, and Novell in 1995 to defend Linux against intellectual property attacks. OIN's plan, then and now, is to acquire Linux-related patents. It then shares them royalty-free to any organization that agrees not to assert its patents against Linux or its applications.

It's worked.

OIN now has more than 2,000 members. In the last 18 months, with the rise of open source and Linux in all technology businesses, OIN has doubled in size.

In 1992 Tim Berners-Lee created three things, giving birth to what we consider the Internet. The HTTP protocol, HTML, and the URL. His goal was to bring 'Hypertext' to life. Hypertext at its simplest is the ability to create documents which link to one another. At the time it was viewed more as a science fiction panacea, to be complimented by Hypermedia, and any other word you could add 'Hyper' in front of.

There was a fervent belief in 1993 that the URL would die, in favor of the ‘URN’. The Uniform Resource Name is a permanent reference to a given piece of content which, unlike a URL, will never change or break. Tim Berners-Lee first described the "urgent need" for them as early as 1991.

I worked for Lexra, a scrappy CPU company, now out of business. The Lexra story is filled with lessons about the business of selling microprocessors and semiconductor intellectual property. I have found many incorrect statements published about Lexra. I hope to set the record straight.

The latest numbers from market research firm IDC reveal that Mac sales experienced a slight year-over-year decline in the second quarter, dropping to 4.4 million from 4.8 million during the year-ago period.

Hall said there are three key categories of people who use FreeDOS: People looking to run classic DOS games, businesses that need to support legacy applications and developers building embedded systems.

Sure enough, 45 minutes into the 2016 WWDC keynote, Tim Cook - not an SVP, but Tim himself! - unveiled Swift Playgrounds for iPad, "a new way to learn to code." Because I'd been thinking about it, I had my tweet ready: "I personally think a way to learn Swift is not what the iPad needs - it needs a 21st Century HyperCard. But let’s see."

Later, John Gruber (whose Daring Fireball blog is to Apple what BBC Radio 4's Today show is to British politics) provided a glimmer of hope: "Swift Playgrounds = the new HyperCard?"

Well, no, it turns out. It's not.

The source code for Apollo 11's guidance computer has been available for a while (Google hosted it several years ago, for instance), but would you know how to find it or search through it? As of this week, it's almost ridiculously easy. Former NASA intern Chris Garry has posted the entire Apollo Guidance Computer source code on GitHub, giving you a good peek at the software that took NASA to the Moon. As Reddit users point out, it's clear that the developers had a mighty sense of humor -- line 666 of the lunar landing turns up a "numero mysterioso," and there's even a reference to radio DJ Magnificent Montague's classic "burn, baby, burn."

Symantec and Norton are among the most popular security tools, but the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warns of critical flaws that could pose great risks.

A slew of corporate, government and personal computers are protected by Symantec, but are they really protected? Homeland Security believes there's reason to worry, and has issued a warning this week.

"Symantec and Norton branded antivirus products contain multiple vulnerabilities. Some of these products are in widespread use throughout government and industry," notes the alert. "Exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow a remote attacker to take control of an affected system."

A common criticism of free-software projects built for Android is that they all too often rely not just on the frameworks and libraries that are part of the official Android Open Source Project (AOSP), but on the proprietary APIs implemented in various add-ons from Google - such as the Google Maps API or the Google Cloud Messaging message-broker service. Working around these Google-supplied components is not trivial, but there is at least one effort underway to provide a drop-in free-software replacement: microG.

Let me be clear - Pokemon Go and Niantic can now:

• Read all your email
• Send email as you
• Access all your Google drive documents (including deleting them)
• Look at your search history and your Maps navigation history
• Access any private photos you may store in Google Photos
• And a whole lot more

What's more, given the use of email as an authentication mechanism (think "Forgot password" links) they now have a pretty good chance of gaining access to your accounts on other sites too.

Facebook Messenger has started rolling out Secret Conversations, a feature that enables end to end encryption for conversations within Messenger. Secret Conversations is built on Signal Protocol, a modern, open source, strong encryption protocol we developed for asynchronous messaging systems.

Signal Protocol powers our own private messaging app, Signal. The protocol is designed from the ground up to make seamless end-to-end encrypted messaging possible and to make private communication simple. To amplify the impact and scope of private communication, we also collaborate with other popular messaging apps like WhatsApp, Google Allo, and now Facebook Messenger to help integrate Signal Protocol into those products.

Some of my favorite operating system updates are ones that rethink longstanding parts of the user interface in intelligent ways, and iOS 10 seems to be shaping up into that kind of update. The lock screen has been newly modeled around TouchID, which was brand-new three years ago but practically omnipresent in iDevices today. The Today View has been broken up into a bunch of configurable widgets and merged with the Siri suggestions screen. Notifications are more versatile and pleasant to interact with. And Messages' improvements, while they won't be to everyone's taste, bring Apple's built-in app more in line with the current zeitgeist as represented by Slack or Facebook Messenger.

There are more new features in iOS 10 - improvements to core apps like Photos, Music, and Health, tweaks to how the keyboard works, Apple Pay on the web, and a bunch of other minor changes - that we'll have more time to look at in our final review. But so far the majority of the changes are for the better. Old hardware is getting dropped, but that frees developers from worrying about actively supported devices with 512MB of RAM. The iPad isn't getting nearly the amount of love that it got from iOS 9, but in recent years Apple has been happy to dole out feature updates throughout the year in large point releases like it did in iOS 9.3. If performance on older devices and battery life are both up to snuff in the final release, most of my complaints will end up being pretty minor.