Monthly Archive:: March 2019
The Genode project released the fourth version of their Sculpt operating system, subtitled as “Community Experience”. The background of this slogan is the project’s ambition to remove the need for any middleman between developers and users. In contrast to today’s mainstream OSes, which rely on trusted distributions or app stores, Sculpt works completely federated. The integrity of the installed software is protected by digital signatures of the respective software providers while each piece of software is sandboxed both at installation time and at runtime. This way, users don’t need to be faithful but enter a position of ultimate control. This is capability-based security at work! As explained in the accompanying blog posting, Sculpt CE features an new user interface to integrate software into the running system and to reveal the trusted computing base of each component. Without a middleman between software providers and users in Sculpt OS, there is the obvious question: How can a user find software? The Genode project tries to answer this question with their community blog called Genodians.org started earlier this year. It gives Genode developers a way to announce new software while users can share their perspectives and ideas. Just like Sculpt OS, the content of Genodians.org is managed in a federated fashion. Sculpt CE is available as a ready-to-use disk image bootable from a USB stick. The release is accompanied with comprehensive documentation that covers both the use the system and the philosophy behind it.
A few weeks back I managed to pick up an incredibly rare laptop in immaculate condition for $50 on Kijiji: a Tadpole Technologies SPARCbook 3000ST from 1997 (it also came with two other working Pentium laptops from the 1990s). So, what makes this the coolest laptop of the 1990s? I used to long for a Tadpole SPARC laptop about 15 years ago, when they came with dual processor models. Amazing technology.
As Apple continues to fight legislation that would make it easier for consumers to repair their iPhones, MacBooks, and other electronics, the company appears to be able to implement many of the requirements of the legislation, according to an internal presentation obtained by Motherboard. According to the presentation, titled “Apple Genuine Parts Repair” and dated April 2018, the company has begun to give some repair companies access to Apple diagnostic software, a wide variety of genuine Apple repair parts, repair training, and notably places no restrictions on the types of repairs that independent companies are allowed to do. The presentation notes that repair companies can “keep doing what you’re doing, with … Apple genuine parts, reliable parts supply, and Apple process and training.” This is, broadly speaking, what right to repair activists have been asking state legislators to require companies to offer for years. At this point, Apple’s fight against right to repair is basically just out of spite and pettiness. Apple must be such a sad, sad place to work.
Nop, I havn’t fogottn how to wit. No did my dito go on vacation. You s, to sha th pain of using an Appl laptop kyboad that’s faild aft fou months, I could only think of on ida: tak all th bokn ltts out of my column. Thn I alizd that would mak th whol thing unadabl. So to… Why is th baking of my MacBook Ai kyboad so insanly maddning? Lt’s tak a tip down Mmoy Lan… Work of art by Joanna Stn.
There’s another mobile operating system on the rise, but this one is special for a few reasons. First, it’s not necessarily trying to unseat iOS and Android — it’s designed to run on feature phones. It also has received significant investment from Google, and in most cases, Assistant and other Google applications are preinstalled. The operating system in question is ‘KaiOS,’ and it’s already shipping on a handful of phones, including the 4G version of the Nokia 8810 and the Jio JioPhone. I’ve been using KaiOS for a while on the Maxcom MK241, and while it’s definitely better than the average feature phone, it still has rough edges. A KaiOS device is definitely on my list of devices, since it’s a popular operating system I haven’t yet had the chance to try. I like the idea of having a more focused, less capable device, with better battery life and less distractions.
A user by the name of grem75 has uploaded two screenshots of KDE 0.1 to imgur, and they offer a very intriguing look at just how far we’ve come. I’ve only found this RPM, no source unfortunately. This is installed on Red Hat 4.1 with Qt 1.33. Impressive amount of progress for being so early in development. The project had been announced in October 1996, this package was built in February 1997. There really were no complete desktop environments available for Linux at the time, most distros shipped with FVWM and some assortment of applications from various toolkits. Gnome didn’t start until August of 1997. XFCE existed, but was just a panel for FVWM. I’ve recently made the jump from Windows 10 to KDE Neon on my laptop, and after so many rocky years through KDE 4.x, I have to say the KDE desktop environment currently exists in an incredibly polished and attractive state, striking a perfect balance between attractiveness, usability, and customisability. KDE is currently an absolute pleasure to use for me, and I can’t wait to see what else they’ve got coming up (preferably a lot of work on either reworking or replacing Kmail with a smaller, more focused email application). In any event, this is the first time I’ve felt at home on a desktop environment on Linux since the glory days of GNOME 2.x and KDE 3.x, and I couldn’t be happier. These two KDE 0.1 screenshots remind me of just how far we’ve come.
News content is a sensitive topic in China. The government exercises a significant degree of control over information sources so it is unsurprising that Apple would choose to not support News there. However, instead of simply being locked behind a hardware feature gate, Apple chose to disable it much more forcefully. If you enter China with a US iPhone (e.g. one purchased in the US from a US carrier or at a US Apple Store), using a US carrier, with your phone set to the US region, and with location services disabled for the News app, you will still receive this message upon opening News: To accomplish this censorship Apple is using a form of location fingerprinting that is not available to normal applications on iOS. It works like this: despite the fact that your phone uses a SIM from a US carrier it must connect to a Chinese cellular network. Apple is using private APIs to identify that you are in mainland China based on the name of the underlying cellular network and blocking access to the News app. This information is not available via public APIs in iOS1 specifically to improve privacy for users. This censorship occurs despite the fact that when in China a cell phone using a foreign SIM is not subject to the firewall restrictions (all traffic is tunneled back to your provider first), so Google, Twitter, Facebook, et al all work fine on a non-mainland China SIM even though you’re connected via China Mobile or China Unicom’s network. I had no idea Apple went to such great lengths to please the totalitarian Chinese government. Fascinating, though.
The U.S. government claimed that turning American medical charts into electronic records would make health care better, safer, and cheaper. Ten years and $36 billion later, the system is an unholy mess: inside a digital revolution gone wrong. It seems to be a recurring theme all over the world that governments are absolutely terrible at doing anything related to the digital world. I’m sure insane bidding requirements set by special interests play a huge role in this problem, but that doesn’t mean politicians tend to be terrible at properly understanding the digital world.
Redox OS 0.5.0 has been released. It has been one year and four days since the last release of Redox OS! In this time, we have been hard at work improving the Redox ecosystem. Much of this work was related to relibc, a new C library written in Rust and maintained by the Redox OS project, and adding new packages to the cookbook. We are proud to report that we have now far exceeded the capabilities of newlib, which we were using as our system C library before. We have added many important libraries and programs, which you can see listed below. Redox OS is a UNIX-like operating system written in Rust, built around a microkernel.
LLVM 8.0 has been released. This release contains the work on trunk up to Subversion revision r351319, plus work on the release branch. It’s the result of the LLVM community’s work over the past six months, including: speculative load hardening, concurrent compilation in the ORC JIT API, no longer experimental WebAssembly target, a Clang option to initialize automatic variables, improved pre-compiled header support in clang-cl, the /Zc:dllexportInlines- flag, RISC-V support in lld. And as usual, many bug fixes, optimization and diagnostics improvements, etc.
Vlad Savov, always ready with the eloquent takes: Or, maybe, you only give off the appearance of wealth. This being a credit card, the Apple Card is also a symbol for the United States’ addiction to debt, both at the national and personal level. Acquiring and using one may sink you deeper into debt, and any bank that issues a credit card relies on its users’ financial tardiness or illiteracy to generate exploitative interest on unpaid balances. There’s something fundamentally un-Apple-like about trying to profit from people’s weaknesses. Apple is conspiring with Goldman-Sachs to earn money by preying on the weak and indebted. I don’t like using this line, but there’s no chance in hell that Steve Jobs would’ve signed off on an Apple credit card, especially not one with such predatory interest rates. And the lock-in is already underway: Effective immediately, Apple Pay Cash in iOS 12.2 and watchOS 5.2 will not allow sending person to person funded by credit cards other than the Apple Card. Time is cyclical.
The European Parliament has given final approval to the Copyright Directive, a controversial package of legislation designed to update copyright law in Europe for the internet age. Members of parliament voted 348 in favor of the law and 274 against. A last-minute proposal to remove the law’s most controversial clause — Article 13 or the ‘upload filter’ — was narrowly rejected by just five votes. The directive will now be passed on to EU member states, who will translate it into national law. The United States Congress doesn’t have a monopoly on stupid decisions – especially when you take into account that said five vote difference was… A mistake. A group of left-leaning MEPs voted in favour… By accident.
Swift 5 is a major milestone in the evolution of the language. Thanks to ABI stability, the Swift runtime is now included in current and future versions of Apple’s platform operating systems: macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS. Swift 5 also introduces new capabilities that are building blocks for future versions, including a reimplementation of String, enforcement of exclusive access to memory during runtime, new data types, and support for dynamically callable types. You can test the new features and changes in an Xcode playground.
Apple has released iOS 12.2 and macOS 10.14.4. Both are minor releases, but at least macOS 10.14.4 has some nifty changes for Safari: macOS Mojave 10.14.4 includes support for Safari AutoFill using Touch ID and it offers automatic dark mode themes in Safari. If you have Dark Mode enabled in Mojave, when you visit a website that has an option for a dark theme after installing the update, it will be activated automatically. Every one of you using iOS devices or PCs running macOS know exactly where to get the updates.
At Apple’s “show time” services event today, it announced a new Apple Card credit card, promising to improve things about the credit card experience with simpler applications, no fees, lower interest rates, and better rewards. Instead of a points-based reward program, Apple Card gives cash back rewards in the form of Daily Cash, which is applied straight to your Apple Card to spend or put toward your purchases. Apple is offering 2 percent cash back on purchases made through Apple Pay using an Apple Card, and purchases from Apple will get 3 percent cash back. Purchases made through the physical card will get just 1 percent cash back, though. I can’t shake the image of those shady “cash-4-gold” stores with a dude spinning an arrow sign outside out of my head. Is this really what Apple’s been reduced to? A credit card company?
Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge follow-up has leaked, and The Verge took a look at it. For an early version of Edge built on Chromium, Microsoft’s new browser feels very polished. It’s also very fast to launch and browse around with. If Microsoft can keep up this good work and keep Edge optimized in the future, I can’t see a reason to need to use Chrome on Windows anymore. I would never have recommended Edge before as it was often slow, clunky, and didn’t always work with websites properly. This new Edge feels entirely different, thanks to its Chromium backend. That’s odd, since one of the main reasons I used Edge for a long time was just how fast it was compared to Chrome. I’m not so sure I like the idea of Edge with Google’s Blink.
I became fascinated by what is happening in the RISC-V space just by seeing it pop up every now and then in my Twitter feed. Since I am currently unemployed I have a lot of time and autonomy to dig into whatever I wish. RISC-V is a new instruction set architecture. To understand RISC-V, we must first dig into what an instruction set architecture is. This is my learning technique. I bounce from one thing to another, recursively digging deeper as I learn more. Some more RISC-V information. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more and more RISC-V articles and even hardware to buy over the coming years.
Intel will not develop new Compute Cards, the company has confirmed to Tom’s Hardware. Compute Cards were Intel’s vision of modular computing that would allow customers to continually update point of sale systems, all-in-one desktops, laptops and other devices. Pull out one card, replace it with another, and you have a new CPU, plus RAM and storage. “We continue to believe modular computing is a market where there are many opportunities for innovation,” an Intel spokesperson told Tom’s Hardware. “However, as we look at the best way to address this opportunity, we’ve made the decision that we will not develop new Compute Card products moving forward. We will continue to sell and support the current Compute Card products through 2019 to ensure our customers receive the support they need with their current solutions, and we are thankful for their partnership on this change.” I’ve always been fascinated by the Compute Card’s concept, but it never seemed to receive much support from partners, stores, or even Intel itself. I’m not surprised they’re cancelling the product line.
When Wave Computing acquired MIPS, “going open source” was the plan Wave’s CEO Derek Meyer had in mind. But Meyer, a long-time MIPS veteran, couldn’t casually mention his plan then. Wave was hardly ready with the solid infrastructure it needed to support a legion of hardware developers interested in coming to the MIPS open-source community. To say “go open source” is easy. Pulling it off has meant a huge shift from MIPS, long accustomed to the traditional IP licensing business. MIPS will compete with and exist alongside RISC-V. The future of truly open source hardware is getting more and more interesting.
HMD Global, the Finnish company that sublicensed the Nokia smartphone brand from Microsoft, is under investigation in Finland for collecting and sending some phone owners’ information to a server located in China. In a statement to Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, the company blamed the data collection on a coding mistake during which an “activation package” was accidentally included in some phones’ firmware. HMD Global said that only a single batch of Nokia 7 Plus devices were impacted and included this package. Why does stuff like this keep happening? It seems like such a simple thing to not preinstall dodgy stuff on factory-set smartphones.
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