Monthly Archive:: June 2018

Apple tries to stop developers sharing data on users’ friends

Apple changed its App Store rules last week to limit how developers use information about iPhone owners' friends and other contacts, quietly closing a loophole that let app makers store and share data without many people's consent.

The move cracks down on a practice that's been employed for years. Developers ask users for access to their phone contacts, then use it for marketing and sometimes share or sell the information - without permission from the other people listed on those digital address books. On both Apple's iOS and Google's Android, the world's largest smartphone operating systems, the tactic is sometimes used to juice growth and make money.

I've always found it quite easy to spot applications that would try to abuse permissions like this - weather applications don't need access to telephony, a notes application doesn't need access to my contact list, and so on. It's good to see Apple cracking down on this practice for those among us who aren't as observant.

AT&T cleared to buy Time Warner

AT&T Inc. was cleared by a judge to take over Time Warner Inc. in an $85 billion deal that will fuel the mobile-phone giant’s evolution into a media powerhouse and could spark a wave of new mergers.

U.S. District Judge Richard Leon on Tuesday rejected the Justice Department’s request for an order blocking the Time Warner acquisition, saying the government failed to make its case that the combination would lead to higher prices for pay-TV subscribers. The judge put no conditions on the deal.

More consolidation in the US tech and media landscape. This doesn't bode well for American internet users and TV/movie fans.

KDE Plasma 5.13 released

Members of the Plasma team have been working hard to continue making Plasma a lightweight and responsive desktop which loads and runs quickly, but remains full-featured with a polished look and feel. We have spent the last four months optimising startup and minimising memory usage, yielding faster time-to-desktop, better runtime performance and less memory consumption. Basic features like panel popups were optimised to make sure they run smoothly even on the lowest-end hardware. Our design teams have not rested either, producing beautiful new integrated lock and login screen graphics.

Read the entire release announcement for more details.

Looking for life on a flat earth

For days now, I've been pondering whether or not to post a link to this story, but after a talk with my closest friends about how much we despise anti-vaxxers - they just had their first baby - I feel like the story in question highlights a very uncomfortable truth we have to face.

If we can agree on anything anymore, it's that we live in a post-truth era. Facts are no longer correct or incorrect; everything is potentially true unless it's disagreeable, in which case it's fake. Recently, Lesley Stahl, of "60 Minutes", revealed that, in an interview after the 2016 election, Donald Trump told her that the reason he maligns the press is "to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you". Or, as George Costanza put it, coming from the opposite direction, "It's not a lie if you believe it".

This is an article by Alan Burdick, who decided to investigate the "flat earth movement" by going to a flat earth conference and speaking with the attendees and speakers. It's a revealing piece that makes it clear flat earth crackpots are deeply intertwined with virtually every other crazy conspiracy theory, with the "flat earth theory" serving as an umbrella to all other conspiracy theories. Add in large doses of antisemitism, creationism, and Christian extremism, and you've got the general feel of the flat earth movement.

The uncomfortable truth we have to face is not that the earth is flat - don't worry - but that insanity like this used to remain confined, isolated, and harmless. Thanks to the internet, however, this insanity is free to spread and infect others, causing real harm to real people. Whether it's believing that the government is spreading dangerous chemicals through the air in form of "chem trails" or abusing, harming, and even murdering your and other people's children by not vaccinating them - it's the internet that allows this dangerous insanity to spread and cause real harm.

The internet is one of the greatest inventions of mankind, but it's also having dark, unsettling effects on our society that we need to address. I don't have any solutions, but we better start doing a better job of arming ourselves against the constant barrage of attacks on science, or we risk our society descending into chaos.

Classic Amiga assembler tutorial

If you want to write Assembly programs for the Amiga you can either work directly on a real system or use a cross-compiler. I prefer to work on my Linux system because, as much as I like retro architectures, I also like the power of a good Unix system and a modern editor.

Cross-compiling is a very simple concept: instead of compiling source code and creating binaries for the architecture you are running the compiler on, you create binaries for a different architecture. In this case the host architecture is Linux/amd64 and the target architecture is Amiga.

As this is not the only project I am following at the moment, I created a directory to host everything I need for the Amiga development: compiler, documentation, scripts.

Exploring assembly on the Amiga, part 1, part 2, and part 3.

The US net neutrality repeal is official.

It’s official. The Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules, which had required internet service providers to offer equal access to all web content, took effect on Monday.

The rules, enacted by the administration of President Barack Obama in 2015, prohibited internet providers from charging more for certain content or from giving preferential treatment to certain websites.

Great news. This will enable honest, trustworthy, transparant, and customer-focused companies like Comcast to take control of the internet. This can only mean good things for American consumers, and will ensure that they remain free of the confusing and heavy burden of ISP choice. In turn, the "market" will remain carved up by at best two large monopolies, which is clearly the best type of market in the universe.

It’s 2018 and USB Type-C is still a mess

USB Type-C was billed as the solution for all our future cable needs, unifying power and data delivery with display and audio connectivity, and ushering in an age of the one-size-fits-all cable. Unfortunately for those already invested in the USB Type-C ecosystem, which is anyone who has bought a flagship phone in the past couple of years, the standard has probably failed to live up to the promises.

Other than my Nintendo Switch, my back-up phone (a Galaxy S8), and my old Nexus 6P in storage somewhere, I don't use USB-C at all, so I've been able to avoid all of its problems so far. It seems like a real mess.

The 640K memory limit of MS-DOS

At the beginning of the '90s, the PC platform was often mocked by its rivals. Of course, PCs were much more powerful than, say, an Amiga 500. But the Amiga offered a flat memory address, while a DOS program could only access memory using cumbersome 64 KiB segments. And to add insult to injury, there was this strange 640 KiB memory limitation. No matter how much physical memory you had in your box, the utter most important Conventional Memory was limited to 640 KiB!

The Legend teaches us that Bill Gates once declared that "640 KB ought to be enough for anybody", then designed MS-DOS to enforce this limitation.

The truth is of course a little more complicated than that.

This article brings back so many confusing childhood memories of MS-DOS and memory management - memories I wouldn't wish on my biggest enemies. All kidding aside, this is a great insight into how memory is organised in MS-DOS.

How Android engineers are winning the war on fragmentation

With the launch of Android 8.0 last year, Google released Project Treble into the world. Treble was one of Android's biggest engineering projects ever, modularizing the Android operating system away from the hardware and greatly reducing the amount of work needed to update a device. The goal here is nothing short of fixing Android's continual fragmentation problem, and now, six months later, it seems like the plan is actually working.

There are indeed some small signs of hope, but the reality is that as long as Samsung isn't on board, it's effectively all for naught. I find this article far too positive when you look at the reality of Android updates, but at least there's some progress.

The land before binary

The IRS has a lot of mainframes. And as millions of Americans recently found out, many of them are quite old. So as I wandered about meeting different types of engineers and chatting about their day-to-day blockers I started to learn much more about how these machines worked. It was a fascinating rabbit hole that exposed me to things like "decimal machines" and "2 out of 5 code". It revealed something to me that I had not ever considered:

Computers did not always use binary code.

Computers did not always use base 2. Computers did not always operate on just an on/off value. There were other things, different things that were tried and eventually abandoned. Some of them predating the advent of electronics itself.

Here's a little taste of some of those systems.

I've often wondered why computers are binary to begin with, but it was one of those stray questions that sometimes pops up in your head while you're waiting for your coffee or while driving, only to then rapidly disappear.

I have an answer now, but I don't really understand any of this.

Haiku May monthly activity report

Haiku's latest monthly activity report is out, and it contains a lot of interesting points of progress. Since I can't highlight them all, here's one that I think is vital.

Korli continued his work on 32-bit applications support for x86_64. He now has most of the binary-loading, commpage, signals, and syscall system changes merged, though there are still a lot of pending changes to fix individual syscalls and then start applications in 32-bit mode.

There's also a major new port: LibreOffice has been ported to Haiku.

Apple and Google are heading in the same direction

But I think the reason that this year's WWDC felt a little Googley is that both companies are trying to articulate a vision of computing that mixes AI, mobile apps, and the desktop. They're clearly heading in the same general direction.

It's becoming ever harder to distinguish the two companies. They are clearly trying to work towards the same future, but they're coming at it from different directions. It's fascinating to watch.

Intel “forgot” to mention 28 core, 5 GHz demo was overclocked

Intel's recent demonstration of a 28-core processor running at 5GHz has certainly stirred the pot here at Computex, particularly because the presentation appeared to imply this would be a shipping chip with a 5.0GHz stock speed. Unfortunately, it turns out that Intel overclocked the 28-core processor to such an extreme that it required a one-horsepower industrial water chiller. That means it took an incredibly expensive (not to mention extreme) setup to pull off the demo. You definitely won't find this type of setup on a normal desktop PC.

We met with the company last night, and while Intel didn't provide many details, a company representative explained to us that "in the excitement of the moment," the company merely "forgot" to tell the crowd that it had overclocked the system. Intel also said it isn't targeting the gaming crowd with the new chip.

A lot of people always say "CEO's and companies don't lie because that's illegal, so you can always believe them".

Yeah.

ARM Holdings history: from Acorn to giant tree

The computer industry is full of noble failures. Big ones. Little ones. Ideas that were 10 years too early. Ideas that were 15 years too early. Ideas that were 30 years too early. And concepts that, while fundamental to the way that our computing culture works today, hadn’t yet reached their full potential. Though certainly successful in its early years, the ARM processor very much fits in the latter category. Today, variants of these processors are in just about everything, from tiny computers, to smartphones, to video game consoles, to television sets, and even some servers. But the company that initially forged the processor is almost forgotten at this point, seemingly lost to history (especially outside of Europe) despite being an early icon of British computing. Tonight's Tedium ponders the story of Acorn Computers, the long-departed company whose best idea is probably in the device you're using to read this.

This introduction is basically clickbait specifically designed for OSNews readers. Well done.

Ubisoft CEO: cloud will replace consoles after next generation

Better start saving up for that PlayStation 5, Xbox Two, or Nintendo Swatch (that last follow-up name idea is a freebie, by the way). That generation of consoles might be the last one ever, according to Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot. After that, he predicts cheap local boxes could provide easier access to ever-evolving high-end gaming streamed to the masses from cloud-based servers.

I think that's a little optimistic, but the trend is clear.

AI at Google: our principles

Sundar Pichai has outlined the rules the company will follow when it comes to the development and application of AI.

We recognize that such powerful technology raises equally powerful questions about its use. How AI is developed and used will have a significant impact on society for many years to come. As a leader in AI, we feel a deep responsibility to get this right. So today, we’re announcing seven principles to guide our work going forward. These are not theoretical concepts; they are concrete standards that will actively govern our research and product development and will impact our business decisions.

We acknowledge that this area is dynamic and evolving, and we will approach our work with humility, a commitment to internal and external engagement, and a willingness to adapt our approach as we learn over time.

It honestly blows my mind that we've already reached the point where we need to set rules for the development of artificial intelligence, and it blows my mind even more that we seem to have to rely on corporations self-regulating - which effectively means there are no rules at all. For now it feels like "artificial intelligence" isn't really intelligence in the sense of what humans and some other animals display, but once algorithms and computers start learning about more than jut identifying dog pictures or mimicking human voice inflections, things might snowball a lot quicker than we expect.

AI is clearly way beyond my comfort zone, and I find it very difficult to properly ascertain the risks involved. For once, I'd like society and governments to be on top of a technological development instead of discovering after the fact that we let it all go horribly wrong.

Microsoft to possibly offer a “Switch to S Mode”

Windows Insider Preview build 17686 includes a hint that Microsoft may soon allow users to "switch to S mode". If true, the software giant may finally reverse on of the worst design decisions in Windows history.

You can see this hint by opening the Settings app and typing S mode. As you can see in the shot above, Settings provides a search hint for a Settings interface called Switch to S Mode.

I would definitely use this switch; I pretty much run only Store Applications on my Surface Pro 4 anyway, and an easy switch to allow classic Win32 applications if the need arises seems useful.

How people used to download games from the radio

An anonymous user sent this one in, and even though it's old - 2014 - I hadn't read it yet, and I don't think it's ever been posted here.

It's a Monday night in Bristol in July 1983. Your parents are downstairs watching Coronation Street while you skulk in your bedroom under the pretence of doing homework. In reality, you're hunched over your cassette recorder, fingers hovering over the buttons in feverish anticipation. A quiver of excitement runs through you as a voice from the radio announces: "and now the moment you've all been waiting for..." There's a satisfying clunk as you press down on play and record simultaneously, and moments later the room is filled with strange metallic squawks and crackles. "SCREEEEEEEEEEE..."

You're listening to the Datarama show on Radio West and partaking in the UK's first attempt to send a computer program over local radio. Joe Tozer, who co-hosted the show, recalls how it all began: "I think it was just one of those 'ping!' moments when you realise that the home computer program is just audio on a cassette, so why not transmit it over air? It just seemed a cool idea."

I have very little experience with using cassettes as a data storage medium, except for that one time, somewhere in the late '80s or early '90s, where a neighbour kid and I loaded Rambo for the C64 from a cassette tape. That's the only time I ever did such a thing, and in hindsight, I'm glad I got to experience this era of computing, even if it was only once.

The future of the Mac comes from iOS apps

Apple made a big splash at WWDC this year when it announced that it would be letting developers port their iOS applications over to the Mac sometime next year - and that Apple had already started the process by bringing over the iOS versions of the Home, Stocks, News, and Voice Memo apps to macOS 10.14 Mojave.

The project - rumored to be codenamed Marzipan - is still in the early stages, and Apple isn't even planning on offering it to developers until 2019. And there's already a fair amount of confusion and outcry over what Apple's doing here: whether or not it will see the death of the traditional Mac app as we know it, exactly how these new kinds of apps will work, whether they'll feel like traditional "native" Mac apps, and even whether or not it's fair to call these apps "ports". So here's what's actually going on.

A fair overview of "Marzipan" and what it could mean for the future of the Mac.

ReactOS GSoC: booting from Btrfs

ReactOS has unveiled its Google Summer of Code project, undertaken by Victor Perevertki.

My project is both simple and complicated. I want to add to ReactOS an option to install on and boot from BTRFS partitions. There are a few little things left to implement this:

  • BTRFS support in bootloader.
  • Fixes in cache controller and memory manager in order to boot with WinBtrfs driver. It is getting better every week, but right now used only with fastfat driver for FAT32.

My primary goal for this internship is implement BTRFS support in FreeLdr - our bootloader.

Another great GSoC project to keep an eye on.