Linux fréttir

Take the M3 exit to offline mail and calendar shenanigans

It's been a while coming, but browser maker Vivaldi has finally released a public preview of its long awaited email client.…

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission affirmed its decision to designate ZTE as a national security threat over concerns telecommunications gear made by the Chinese company could be used for spying. From a report: The action shows that the FCC remains determined to drive ZTE and fellow Shenzhen-based manufacturer Huawei Technologies Co. from the U.S. market, where small rural carriers rely on their cheap network equipment. The agency at its Dec. 10 meeting is to consider rules for listing prohibited gear, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said in a Nov. 18 blog post that identified Huawei as a threat. The FCC has said ZTE and Huawei pose a risk of espionage, an allegation each company denies. The agency has increasingly scrutinized Chinese companies amid tensions between Beijing and Washington over trade, the coronavirus and security issues. The FCC is considering banning three Chinese telephone companies, and last year barred China Mobile from entering the American market. The FCC on June 30 designated both companies national security threats, and ZTE asked the agency to reconsider its listing. The company said it supplies safe and secure equipment and is "clearly and fully dedicated to complying with all applicable laws in the United States."

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Local US carriers to remain unable to buy its kit with federal funding

The US Federal Communications Commission has rejected a petition [PDF] from controversial Chinese teleco kit maker ZTE asking the agency to reconsider whether it should be deemed a national security threat.…

Microsoft is in the early phases of rolling out its xCloud streaming service on mobile devices, but TVs are the next logical step. From a report:In an interview with The Verge, Xbox chief Phil Spencer has revealed we'll likely see an Xbox app appear on smart TVs over the next year. "I think you're going to see that in the next 12 months," said Spencer, when asked about turning the Xbox into a TV app. "I don't think anything is going to stop us from doing that." Spencer previously hinted at TV streaming sticks for Microsoft's xCloud service last month, and this latest hint suggests we might see similar hardware or an Xbox app for TVs during 2021. Microsoft is currently working on bringing xCloud to the web to enable it on iOS devices, and this work would naturally allow xCloud to expand to TVs, browsers, and elsewhere. Microsoft was previously working on a lightweight Xbox streaming device back in 2016, but it canceled the hardware. Microsoft has been testing the idea of streaming and TV sticks ever since the company originally demonstrated Halo 4 streaming from the cloud to Windows and Windows Phones all the way back in 2013.

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'It's like being in my own bubble back here'

Though taxis can do a lot of things, like getting one from A to B, emptying out bank accounts, and even transporting BSODs, we suspect that preventing the spread of COVID-19 is not one of them.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Elon Musk's year of dizzying ascents hit a new apex Monday as the Tesla co-founder passed Bill Gates to become the world's second-richest person. The 49-year-old entrepreneur's net worth soared $7.2 billion to $127.9 billion, driven by yet another surge in Tesla's share price. Musk has added $100.3 billion to his net worth this year, the most of anyone on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the world's 500 richest people. In January he ranked 35th. His advance up the wealth ranks has been driven largely by the electric automaker, whose market value hit $500 billion after Tesla shares rallied further on Tuesday. About three-quarters of his net worth is comprised of Tesla shares, which are valued more than four times as much as his stake in Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX. Musk's milestone marks only the second time in the index's eight-year history that Microsoft Corp. co-founder Gates has ranked lower than number two. He held the top spot for years before being bumped by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos in 2017.

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'While Bob never got to play on the big stage, he always followed the band around and got to ride on the bus'

One anniversary unlikely to be marked within the bowels of Redmond is that of Microsoft Bob. However, a retired engineer has taken to YouTube to confirm that the unloved interface did indeed enjoy a second life as digital ballast for Windows XP.…

Lawyers for fined firm make eyebrow-raising claim to irate ex-customer

Ticketmaster is claiming that the ICO's £1.25m data breach fine clears it of any responsibility for its network being infected by card-skimming malware, according to correspondence seen by The Register.…

Quis custodiet ipsos bork-es?

Bork!Bork!Bork! Join us on a jaunt to an Australian shopping centre, where Windows 7 rules the roost and the digital signage, it seems, might be watching your every move.…

Famed director dispenses a reality check for wannabe Martians

Film-maker Werner Herzog has upended the scorn bucket over billionaire electric car and space firm mogul Elon Musk's plans to create a city on Mars.…

Amazon announced a joint operation with the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) on Tuesday, focused on stopping counterfeit goods from entering the US. The Verge reports: The partnership will rely on intelligence gathered from Amazon's Counterfeit Crimes Unit, logistics company DHL, and US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to proactively stop the sale of counterfeit products. "Operation Fulfilled Action" relies on Amazon's dominant positioning as both a distributor and marketplace for products. Because of the amount sold on Amazon's various storefronts, IPR Center and Amazon have shared information previously, even collaborating on a crackdown on fraud related to COVID-19. This new operation marks a more long-term partnership, however. Prior to Amazon's involvement, IPR Center's focus on "securing the global supply-chain" might be unfamiliar to the average person, but you've actually seen a bit of the Center's work before -- the government warning that plays before every DVD and Blu-ray was created by the organization. As far as counterfeit products are concerned, Amazon says it already investigated and removed potentially fraudulent offenders. A partnership with these new agencies should allow the company to go further and "stop counterfeits at the border, regardless of where bad actors were intending to offer them" said Dharmesh Mehta, vice president of customer trust and partner support at Amazon.

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This must have cost a packet...

MongoDB has just found out what it can spend the marketing budget on, if not the usual fodder of canapés and international flights.…

According to a new study published in the journal Computers In Human Behavior, smartphone users initiate 89% of the interactions, with only 11% initiated by a notification. "This is at odds with previous academic literature and news reports which commonly claim that smartphone notifications are ruining your life, ruining productivity, and so on," reports PsychNewsDaily. From the report: "The perceived disruptiveness of smartphones is not mainly driven by external notifications," the study's authors write, "but by an urge of the user to interact with their phone that seems to occur in an almost automatic manner, just as a smoker would light a cigarette." [...] The researchers explain that many users felt compelled to check their phones even when they had switched off notifications. "Seeing this has made me realize that I don't even remember picking it up," one of the subjects said in a subsequent interview with the study's authors. The study also found that the average duration of a smartphone interaction was 64 seconds. About 50% of the interactions were 23 seconds or less. The most common activity users engaged in when using their phones was checking WhatsApp, which accounted for 22% of interactions. [...] The second most common interaction, at 17% of the total, was a "lock screen check," which means briefly unlocking the phone to check for new notifications. In third place was interacting with Instagram (16%). Facebook and Facebook messenger together accounted for 13% of the interactions, e-mail for 6%, web browsing 4%, music 3%, Snapchat 2%, and photos 2%. Phone calls -- these devices are phones, after all -- only comprised about 1% of the interactions. The participants generally considered e-mail notifications the most important. Likewise, they largely considered group chats a "source of distress," and found most group-chat messages unimportant. Smartphone interactions were longer when users were alone versus with others, and were also longer at home versus at work. Likewise, these interactions were shorter when participants received notifications, compared to when they "self-disrupt." This indicates that smartphone use is more purposeful when users receive notifications, and more "distraction-seeking" when they check their phones themselves. The researchers also found that the scrolling features on apps like Instagram and Facebook led to the longest interactions.

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Needed for probe testing how X-59 can break sound barrier without breaking eardrums

NASA has revealed it’s building network cables capable of surviving supersonic flight.…

SaaS revenue tops licences for the first time in solid Q3

VMware has reported Q3 growth that beat guidance offered earlier in its financial year but said results would have been better but for a slowdown in “transformational projects”.…

Authorities warn aliens to get a permit before they do this sort of thing

POLL The Utah Department of Public Safety has found a mysterious metal monolith in a remote corner of the state.…

Programmer Abdullah Diaa has put together a website to help determine if your favorite apps work on Apple Silicon yet. An anonymous reader shares a report from The Next Web: ... [P]lease say hello to Is Apple silicon ready? The idea behind the site is simple: it shows you if specific apps will work on laptops and desktops with Apple's in-house chip. Easy to get your head around, right? It shows you a list of software and, if they have native M1 support, they're given a green tick. Here's an image that shows you what's going on far clearer than lots of words could. As you can see, the site also shows you if the app you're after has Rosetta 2 support. Effectively, Rosetta 2 is an emulator, allowing a large number of apps designed for Intel machines to run on Apple Silicon. If this is supported, you will still be able to use that software on an M1-toting machine. Further reading: Linus Torvalds Would Like To Use An M1 Mac For Linux, But...

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Palo Alto Networks spotted subscriber IDs and MAC addresses on the move

Infosec researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 threat intelligence unit spotted a pair of prominent Chinese apps leaking personal data, and after it informed Google the ad giant dumped the apps from its Play store.…

Yes, Torvalds said he'd love to have one of the new M1-powered Apple laptops, but it won't run Linux and, in an exclusive interview he explains why getting Linux to run well on it isn't worth the trouble. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes via ZDNet: Recently, on the Real World Technologies forum, Linux's creator Linus Torvalds was asked what he thought of the new M1-powered Apple laptops. Torvalds replied, "I'd absolutely love to have one if it just ran Linux." You may think, "what's the problem? Doesn't Linux run on practically every processor on the planet from 80386s to IBM s390x to the ARM family of which Apple's M1 chip is a child?" Well, yes, yes it does. But it takes more than a processor to run a computer. Torvalds would like to run Linux on these next-generation Macs. As he said, "I've been waiting for an ARM laptop that can run Linux for a long time. The new Air would be almost perfect, except for the OS. And I don't have the time to tinker with it, or the inclination to fight companies that don't want to help." Aye, there's the rub. In an exclusive interview, Torvalds expanded on why he can't see porting Linux to the M1-based Macs. "The main problem with the M1 for me is the GPU and other devices around it, because that's likely what would hold me off using it because it wouldn't have any Linux support unless Apple opens up." Still, while Torvalds knows Apple opening up their chipsets "seems unlikely, but hey, you can always hope." Even if that "wasn't an issue," Torvalds continued, "My personal hope would be more cores. Even in a laptop, I don't care about 20-hour battery life (and I wouldn't get it building kernels anyway). I'd rather plug it in a bit more often, and have 8 big cores." As for the Mac's limited RAM -- no more than 16GBs on current models -- he can live with that. "16GBs is actually ok by me because I don't tend to do things that require a lot more RAM. All I do is read email, do git and kernel compiles. And yes, I have 64GB in my desktop, but that's because I have 32 cores and 64 threads, and I do hugely parallel builds. Honestly, even then 32GB would be sufficient for my loads." That said, other developers and power users may want more from the new Macs, Torvalds thinks. "The people who really want tons of memory are the ones doing multiple VMs or huge RAW file photography and video."

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Earlier this year, Twitter started flagging disputed and potentially misleading tweets. Now, it's expanding the feature so that you'll also get a warning if you attempt to "like" a disputed tweet. Engadget reports: Tapping the heart button on a post that's been labeled as misleading will trigger a prompt with a "Find out more" button to pop up. App experimental feature researcher Jane Manchun Wong discovered the expanded function earlier this month. The tweets she tested, which were related to the elections, showed a warning that says "Official sources may not have called the race when this was tweeted." A week after election day, Twitter revealed that it labeled 300,000 tweets as misleading between October 27th and November 11th. Out of all those, 456 were blocked from being retweeted or liked and were hidden behind a warning before they could even be viewed. The company says its efforts have led to a 29 percent decrease in quoted tweets containing misleading information. In other Twitter news, the company said today that it would relaunch its verification process early next year along with brand-new guidelines for users seeking out that small, blue badge.

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