Emil Protalinski, reporting for VentureBeat: For more than a decade, I’ve used Net Applications’ NetMarketShare tool to track the desktop browser and operating system markets. The monthly reports have been critical in gauging which browsers and new versions of operating systems are gaining or losing market share. Last week, Net Applications released its final NetMarketShare report. The loss could not come…
Tag: Operating systems
On Older Versions of Android, Many Let’s Encrypt-Secured Sites May Stop Working in 2021
This year Let’s Encrypt announced that it’s issued a billion certificates, and it’s been estimated they’ve made certs for almost 30% of web domains. But Friday they posted that “The DST Root X3 root certificate that we relied on to get us off the ground is going to expire — on September 1, 2021. Fortunately, we’re ready to stand on our…
Chrome Will Soon Have Its Own Dedicated Certificate Root Store
Google has announced plans to run its own certificate root program/store for Chrome, in a major architectural shift for the company’s web browser program. From a report: A “root program” or a “root store” is a list of root certificates that operating systems and applications use to verify the identity of a software program during its installation routine. Browsers like Chrome…
New Chinese Laptop Appears With 14nm Loongsoon Quad-Core 3A4000 CPU
“BDY electronics, a Chinese laptop manufacturer, has unveiled an all-new 13.3-inch laptop sporting Longsoon’s new Dragon Core 3A4000 quad-core 14nm CPU,” reports Tom’s Hardware: The biggest feature of this laptop is the CPU, featuring Longsoon’s latest 14nm quad-core 3A4000 CPU. Longsoon claims the CPU is 100% faster than the previous generation 3A3000 and is comparable in performance to AMD’s “Excavator” cores…
Three npm Packages Opened Remote-Access Shells on Linux and Windows Systems
“Three JavaScript packages have been removed from the npm portal on Thursday for containing malicious code,” reports ZDNet. “According to advisories from the npm security team, the three JavaScript libraries opened shells on the computers of developers who imported the packages into their projects.” The shells, a technical term used by cyber-security researchers, allowed threat actors to connect remotely to the…
‘No, Microsoft Won’t Rebase Windows to Linux’ Argues Canonical’s Manager for Ubuntu on WSL
Last month Eric Raymond suggested Microsoft might be moving to a Linux kernel that emulates Windows. ZDNet contributing editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argued such a move “makes perfect sense”, and open source advocate Jack Wallen even suggested Microsoft abandon Windows altogether for a new distro named Microsoft Linux. It eventually drew the attention of Canonical’s engineering manager for Ubuntu on WSL,…
Google’s Epic Response: Android 12 Will Make It Easier To Install App Stores
Google today announced it will make it easier to install and use third-party app stores with the release of Android 12 next year. From a report: Google also reiterated its existing Payments Policy for in-app purchases of digital goods: Android developers who want to distribute apps and games on Google Play, must use Play’s billing system. Google is offering a 1-year…
Microsoft’s ‘Patch Tuesday’ Includes 129 Security Updates, Mostly to Windows
This week Krebs on Security reported that Microsoft “released updates to remedy nearly 130 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system and supported software.” None of the flaws are known to be currently under active exploitation, but 23 of them could be exploited by malware or malcontents to seize complete control of Windows computers with little or no help from users….
Reviewer Calls Linux-based PinePhone ‘the Most Interesting Smartphone I’ve Tried in Years’
A review at the Android Police site calls Pine64’s new Linux-based PinePhone “the most interesting smartphone I’ve tried in years,” with 17 different operating systems available (including Fedora, Ubuntu Touch, SailfishOS, openSUSE, and Arch Linux ARM): There’s a replaceable battery, which is compatible with batteries designed for older Samsung Galaxy J7 phones. It’s good to know that even if PinePhone vanished…
The Next Step In SSD Evolution: NVMe Zoned Namespaces Explained
FallOutBoyTonto writes: In June we saw an update to the NVMe standard. The update defines a software interface to assist in actually reading and writing to the drives in a way to which SSDs and NAND flash actually works. Instead of emulating the traditional block device model that SSDs inherited from hard drives and earlier storage technologies, the new NVMe Zoned…