Monthly Archive:: October 2023

Have you ever wanted to read 69 pages of in-depth information about the security frameworks in Android, past to present to future? Now’s your chance. To share and document the latest Android security capabilities, we’ve published an update to the Android Security Paper. The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the platform’s built-in, proactive security across hardware, anti-exploitation, Google Security Services and the range of management APIs available for businesses and governments alike. You might want some coffee to prevent dozing off.

It doesn’t have a name yet, but Qualcomm says it’s developing a “RISC-V Snapdragon Wear” chip in collaboration with Google. The company says it plans to “commercialize the RISC-V based wearables solution globally including the US.” For Google and Qualcomm, this chip represents everyone’s first swing at a commercial RISC-V Android project, and as far as we can tell, it’s the first announced mass-market RISC-V Android chip ever. Qualcomm says the groundwork it and Google lay out “will help pave the way for more products within the Android ecosystem to take advantage of custom CPUs that are low power and high performance.” This is the biggest endorsement of RISC-V yet, and could catapult the platform to mainstream popularity pretty quickly. I do hope Qualcomm isn’t going to wrap their chip in a load of proprietary nonsense making them needlessly complex to support now and in the future, but I won’t be surprised if that hope turns out to be futile.

But thanks to all those other cyberdogs, Apple’s own Cyberdog — a seemingly ordinary web browser and Internet suite with some unusual capabilities — has since slid into search engine obscurity. Apple had some big plans for it, though, and even wanted to give developers a way to develop their own components they could run inside of it. Not just plugins, either: we’re talking viewers, UI elements and even entire protocol handlers, implemented using Apple’s version of OpenDoc embedding. The Apple of the ’90s is a treasure trove of weird stuff and random nonsense that never made it anywhere, and I’m always here for it.

Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.” He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”. Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology. Anyone who has tried to find anything on Google in recent years knows that Suleyman is 100% correct. Google’s search results have become so bad because website makers play the SEO game, and that means creating content that Google’s algorithm likes – but, and here’s the kicker, what Google’s algorithm likes, is not really what people like. Writing an article to please a computer is entirely different from writing an article to please a human. There are very clear and well-understood and thoroughly studied rules about writing in a way that makes things easy to read, but Google’s algorithm doesn’t optimise for that. And now “AI” is being trained on this crap content, so that they will also produce crap content. We’re not far away from a future where bots are writing content for other bots that teach other bots to write content for bots. In fact, that future may already be here, judging by some of the style of writing I’ve been seeing even on otherwise venerable outlets. This is also why so many websites have started posting basic, simple how-to articles. You see stuff like “How do I move my apps on an iPhone?” or “How do I delete a folder in Windows?” or “The best neckband headphones of 2023” all over the place now, even on websites where they clearly don’t belong and don’t fit the audience, not just on content farms – these articles are not designed for readers, they’re designed to catch Google search queries and generate traffic. It must be absolutely soul-crushing and mind-numbing to write stuff like that and optimise it for SEO, but you know – fish’ gotta swim, bird’s gotta eat. Here’s a little inside hockey for you: on several occasions over the past year or so, both OSNews as a whole, and me individually, have been approached by serious parties to effectively turn OSNews into one of those content farms. Some have even tried to get me to write such “content” for their own content farms. Clearly, we’ve never accepted such offers – I’m no cheap date – but the pressure is there, and not everyone can resist. It’s why so many tech websites that used to have a clear identity and tone have become so much more bland and repetitive. They are all tiny cogs in massive content networks now, with their original stated goals and interests shoved to the wayside – all to chase the SEO. We’ve clearly not yet fallen victim to this – OSNews is still just me posting news – but that also means we’re not making any money in the ways other tech websites do, and in fact, why we’re not making enough to keep things going without OSNews’ owner footing the bill out of his own pocket. That’s why I’ve been more active and persistent in promoting our Patreon, Ko-Fi, merch store, and Liberapay, since it allows us to not worry about the financials as much. It always feels awkward to do, but I also realise that if I want OSNews to keep going for another 25 years, that’s really the only thing I can do. Because Google has thoroughly ruined every other avenue for websites like ours to make money. I’m so sorry for the headline.

In case you’re wondering why you can’t download the latest Ubuntu desktop version that was released earlier this week – it seems to have a bit of a rogue translation issue. A community contributor submitted offensive Ukrainian translations to a public, third party online service that we use to provide language support for the Ubuntu Desktop installer. Around three hours after the release of Ubuntu 23.10 this fact was brought to our attention and we immediately removed the affected images. After completing initial triage, we believe that the incident only impacts translations presented to a user during installation through the Live CD environment (not an upgrade). During installation the translations are resident in memory only and are not propagated to the disk. If you have upgraded to Ubuntu Desktop 23.10 from a previous release, then you are not affected by this issue. That’s the difference between volunteer translations nobody checks, and proper translations that go through an extensive review process. As a translator – pay for your translations, and shit like this does not happen. Period.

Suppose, hypothetically, that you have some DNS servers that are exposed to the Internet behind an OpenBSD PF-based firewall. Since you’re a sensible person, you have various rate limits set in your DNS servers to prevent or at least mitigate various forms of denial of service attacks. One day, your DNS servers become extremely popular for whatever reason, your rate limits kick in, and your firewall abruptly stops allowing new connections in or out. What on earth happened? It’s a quirk of PF in OpenBSD, and this post provides more details and possible mitigations.