Monthly Archive:: March 2019

Readers of this august website may recall that a year ago, I lauded Firefox and its progress toward becoming a genuine alternative to Google’s dominant Chrome browser. As much as I liked where Firefox was going, however, I couldn’t stick with it over the long term. It wasn’t compatible with everything the way Chrome was, its extensions were different, and, for my way of using a browser, it was slower and less responsive. So I returned to Chrome after a few weeks of Firefox, but the urge to decouple my browsing habits from Google remained. This year, I’m pretty sure I’ve found the ideal Chrome alternative in the Brave browser. If your reasons for sticking with Chrome have been (a) extensions, (b) compatibility, (c) syncing across devices, or (d, unlikely) speed, Brave checks all of those boxes. What’s more, it’s just one of a growing number of really good options that aren’t made by Google. I first used Edge for a while on my desktop and laptop while using Chrome on my phone, but recently I’ve switched everything over to Firefox, and it’s been a delight.

Google employees have carried out their own investigation into the company’s plan to launch a censored search engine for China and say they are concerned that development of the project remains ongoing, The Intercept can reveal. Late last year, bosses moved engineers away from working on the controversial project, known as Dragonfly, and said that there were no current plans to launch it. However, a group of employees at the company was unsatisfied with the lack of information from leadership on the issue — and took matters into their own hands. The group has identified ongoing work on a batch of code that is associated with the China search engine, according to three Google sources. The development has stoked anger inside Google offices, where many of the company’s 88,000 workforce previously protested against plans to launch the search engine, which was designed to censor broad categories of information associated with human rights, democracy, religion, and peaceful protest. I wonder how many times corporations like Google and Apple have to actively aid the Chinese government in its brutal regime of oppression, torture, concentration camps, and executions before the collective tech press and bloggers stop treating them like golden magic prodigies of democracy and freedom.

LineageOS, the successor to CyanogenMod, has released version 16 of their custom Android ROM. This new release is based on Android Pie, and will serve as the base for countless other ROMs. The project was first launched to the public with LineageOS 14.1, which was based on Android 7.1 Nougat and, by itself, was not much more than just a fork of the existing CyanogenMod 14.1 source code. It then started evolving and taking a slightly different path with LineageOS 15.1, based on Android 8.1 Oreo, maintaining their premise of a community-centered project above everything while adding a number of useful, widely-requested features such as a system-wide dark mode as well as privacy-focused improvements like the Trust interface. Today, that evolution continues with LineageOS 16.0, the newest and latest version of the incredibly-popular custom ROM, as announced on the team’s blog post. As is the norm, with a version number change comes a big platform update. LineageOS has been re-based on the latest Android Pie source code. And with this comes all of Android Pie’s new features and improvements, including the renewed Material Theme redesign, the new navigation gestures, and more. While initially LineageOS 16 officially supports about 24 devices, unofficial support will cover more devices, and over the coming weeks and months, more and more devices will become officially supported.

In the history of information technologies, Gutenberg and his printing press are (understandably) treated with the kind of reverence even the most celebrated of modern tech tycoons could only imagine. So perhaps it will come as a surprise that Europe’s literacy rates remained fairly stagnant for centuries after printing presses, originally invented in about 1440, started popping up in major cities across the continent. Progress was inconsistent and unreliable, with literacy rates booming through the 16th century and then stagnating, even declining, across most of Western Europe. Great Britain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy all produced more printed books per capita in 1651–1700 than in 1701–1750. Then came the early 19th century, which saw enormous changes in the manufacture of paper and improvements on the printing press. These changes both contributed to and resulted from major societal changes, such as the worldwide growth increase in formal education. There were more books than ever and more people who could read them. For some, this looked less like progress and more like a dangerous and destabilizing trend that could threaten not just literature, but the solvency of civilization itself. There’s obviously a comparison to be made here to television, videogames, the internet, and smartphones – all new inventions that took the world by storm that many consider to be a threat to society. It’s always interesting to look at similar stories and fears from centuries ago.

Ever since Microsoft recently began testing Windows 10 20H1 – its Windows 10 feature update that isn’t expected to start rolling out to mainstream users until April 2020 – there’s been lots of speculation about why Microsoft is doing this so early. Microsoft’s Windows Insider team has made some vague references to some things being worked on requiring a longer lead time. But I’m hearing from my contacts the real reason is much more mundane: It’s about aligning schedules between Azure and Windows engineering. Sometimes, the real story is just… Boring.

Google has declined to remove from its app store a Saudi government app which lets men track women and control where they travel, on the grounds that it meets all their terms and conditions. Google reviewed the app — called Absher — and concluded that it does not violate any agreements, and can therefore remain on the Google Play store. Western companies talk a lot about morals and values back home, but overseas, these very same companies drop those morals and values left, right, and centre – whether it’s Apple ignoring all its privacy chest-thumping in China, or in this specific case, Google having zero qualms about hosting and spreading an application that Saudi-Arabian ‘men’ use to opress and abuse women.