Rumors Archive

The security benefits of keeping a system's trusted computing base (TCB)small has long been accepted as a truism, as has the use of internal protection boundaries for limiting the damage caused by exploits. Applied to the operating system, this argues for a small microkernel as the core of the TCB, with OS services separated into mutually-protected components (servers) - in contrast to "monolithic" designs such as Linux, Windows or MacOS. While intuitive, the benefits of the small TCB have not been quantified to date. We address this by a study of critical Linux CVEs, where we examine whether they would be prevented or mitigated by a microkernel-based design. We find that almost all exploits are at least mitigated to less than critical severity, and 40% completely eliminated by an OS design based on a verified microkernel, such as seL4.

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.

Shortly after I published my Cartography Comparison last June, I noticed Google updating some of the areas we had focused on.

Coincidence or not, it was interesting. And it made me wonder what else would change, if we kept watching. Would Google keep adding detail? And would Apple, like Google, also start making changes?

So I wrote a script that takes monthly screenshots of Google and Apple Maps. And thirteen months later, we now have a year's worth of images.

Enter the message bots. As 2016 dawns, there's a sense in Silicon Valley that the decades-old fantasy of a true digital assistant is due to roar back into the mainstream. If the trend in past years has been assistants powered by voice - Siri, Alexa, Cortana - in 2016 the focus is shifting to text. And if the bots come, as industry insiders are betting they will, there will be casualties: with artificial intelligence doing the searching for us, Google may see fewer queries. Our AI-powered assistants will manage more and more of our digital activities, eventually diminishing the importance of individual, siloed apps, and the app stores that sell them. Many websites could come to feel as outdated as GeoCities pages - and some companies might ditch them entirely. Nearly all of the information they provide can be fed into a bot and delivered via messaging apps.

Over the past few weeks - following an important-but-barbed talk from Apple CEO Tim Cook - the rhetoric has turned to privacy and security and data and how only products you pay for are good and any sort of free services are inherently bad and basically whore out what's left of your post-Snowden soul.

It's an important discussion to have. And one we'll continue to have. But it's not one-sided. It's not binary.

And, actually, it's interesting to see how the rhetoric has changed recently.

The real issue that Apple is trying to address is not really privacy, but rather security. Though Google has all of my data, it is still private. Google does not sell access to my data; it sells access to my attention. Advertisers do not get my information from Google. So as long as I trust Google's employees, the only two potential breaches of my privacy are from the government or from a hacker. If we accept this as a fact, the fundamental privacy question changes from, "Do you respect my privacy?" to "Is the user experience improvement worth the security risk to my private information?"

For a show overrun with various visions of smart drones and smarter homes for the future, the present of CES was remarkably uniform. I saw more iPhones in the hands of CES attendees than I did Android phones across the countless exhibitor booths. From the biggest keynote event to the smallest stall on the show floor, everything was being documented with Apple's latest smartphone, and it all looked so irritatingly easy. I don't want an iPhone, but dammit, I want the effortlessness of the iPhone's camera.

Microsoft's Windows Store is a mess. It's full of apps that exist only to scam people and take their money. Why doesn't Microsoft care that their flagship app store is such a cesspool?

It's now been more than two years since Windows 8 was released, and this has been a problem the entire time, and it is getting worse. If Microsoft was trying to offer a safe app store to Windows users, they've failed.

Flappy Bird wasn't the first game to spawn an entire ecosystem of me-too clones, nor will it be the last. And now that the developer of the insanely difficult but addicting game has released the even more insanely difficult and even more addicting (is that even possible?) Swing Copters, well, we're seeing it again.

There were two striking pieces of business news this week from America's leading technology brands. On the one hand, Google unveiled a prototype of an autonomous car that, if it can be made to work at scale, promises to end mass automobile ownership while drastically reducing car wreck fatalities and auto-related pollution. Meanwhile, Apple bought a company that makes high-end headphones.

Which is to say that Apple's playing checkers while Google plays chess.

This map showing the locations of 280 million individual posts on Twitter shows a depressing divide in America: Tweets coming from Manhattan tend to come from iPhones. Tweets coming from Newark, N.J., tend to come from Android phones.

If you live in the New York metro area, you don't need to be told that Manhattan is where the region's rich people live, and the poor live in Newark. Manhattan's median income is $67,000 a year. Newark's is $17,000, according to U.S. Census data.

Stuff such as United's new offering generally arrives on Android sooner or later, and there are whole categories of apps - such as alternative keyboards - that are Android-only.

Much of the time, I'm an Android user myself, so I'm happy when something is available for Google's operating system and sorry when it isn't. But despite the fact that iOS's market share is much smaller than that of Android, and has been for years, Apple devices are still nearly always first in line when a major company or hot startup has to decide where to allocate its development resources. That's a dynamic that pundits keep telling us makes no sense - but it's happening, and its an enormous competitive advantage for Apple. 'Sounds like a victory to me.

In the past two months, Microsoft and Google have been bickering over one central issue: HTML5. The Verge has learned that Google is forcing Microsoft to build its YouTube Windows Phone app in HTML5, despite its own Android and iOS versions using superior native code. Although Microsoft has offered to build ad support along with making other tweaks as Google has requested, a full HTML5 app isn't currently possible on the platform.