Month: March 2016

Climb into the X2-SkyLimo for the ride of your life.

Initially, "Mad" Mike Hughes had planned to jump across the Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas Panhandle this coming Saturday afternoon, April 2nd. However, when Ars spoke with Mad Mike on Monday, he indicated that he was having some last-minute issues with his steam-powered rocket and was racing to get everything ready for Saturday's big leap.

Unfortunately, he's not going to be ready. Mad Mike's final tests on Monday and Tuesday, before he was due to leave his Apple Valley, California-based home, did not go well. “Absolutely brutal. Just brutal," he told the Amarillo Globe-News. "This isn’t a scam. I’m beyond frustrated. Things just compounded."

Mad Mike aspires to become "King of the Daredevils," and Saturday's jump over the yawning Palo Duro Canyon was an important step in the master plan. His X2-SkyLimo rocket is capable of producing 4,000 pounds of thrust at launch, and he intended to rise about 3,500 feet into the air and reach 350mph before descending back to Earth under a parachute. "It’s a bad boy," he said of the rocket in an interview with Ars. "You’re unleashing the devil with this thing. That’s the only way to describe it."

The Safari Technology Preview's icon.

Over the last two or three years, Apple has put an increasingly large amount of its software development out in the open. Early betas of OS X and iOS updates, once locked behind a developer paywall and a bunch of nondisclosure agreements, are now released for the public to download and try out. Swift, Apple's new programming language, is now open source. And today, the company is releasing the first of many Safari Technology Preview builds, a new development snapshot of the browser designed to show off more features while offering more reliability and stability than the nightly WebKit browser builds.

Apple will validate Safari Technology Preview builds for two weeks to verify and improve stability, and the company will sign and validate the software and update it through the Mac App Store (the nightly version uses its own built-in updater). Practically speaking, the biggest benefit of the software signing is that you can sync iCloud data with the Technology Preview, making it easier to use the browser as a daily driver and really kick the tires. Google and Mozilla have offered official developer channels for beta and alpha versions of Chrome and Firefox for a long time now, and it's nice to see Apple following suit.

The Technology Preview offers several new features that are included in the nightly builds of WebKit but not in the stable version of Safari. It offers "one of the most complete implementations of ECMAScript 6," the latest version of the standard behind JavaScript; the B3 JIT JavaScript compiler, a new compiler described specifically for JavaScript; a "revamped IndexedDB implementation that is more stable and more standards compliant;" and support for Shadow DOM.

Yet another harsh lesson for people who click things they shouldn't.

A new type of malware has been described, one that takes crypto-extortion to a new level. While most cryptographic ransomware variants are selective about what they encrypt—leaving the computer usable to make it easier for the victim to pay—this new entry targets the victim's entire startup drive, encrypting the master file table (MFT).

Called Petya, the new ransomware is just the latest ransomware deliberately tailored for victims within organizations with IT support instead of a broader audience. As BleepingComputer's Lawrence Abrams documented, Petya is currently being delivered via Dropbox links in e-mail messages targeting human resources departments at companies in Germany. The links are purported to be to an application to be installed by the HR employee.

Running the attachment throws up a Windows alert; if the user clicks to continue, Petya is inserted into the master boot record (MBR) of the victim's computer, and the system restarts. On reboot, the malware performs a fake Windows CHKDSK, warning "One of your disks contains errors and needs to be repaired," Petya then flashes up an ASCII skull and crossbones on a red and white screen, announcing "You became victim of the PETYA RANSOMWARE!"

Yes, bash is coming to Windows. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft built a Linux subsystem for Windows for Project Astoria, its system for running Android apps on Windows 10 Mobile.

But in February the company confirmed that Astoria was dead, as it rather undermined the Universal Windows Platform concept. At the time, we speculated that portions of Astoria might live on, as portions of it had mysteriously started showing up in Windows Insider Previews. And today, that has come to pass, with Microsoft saying that the Windows 10 Anniversary Update will include the ability to run the popular bash shell from Unix, along with the rest of a typical Unix command-line environment.

We're still trying to get the inside story on what Microsoft has done here, but what we've known for several months now is that the company has developed some Windows kernel components (lxcore.sys, lxss.sys, presumably standing for "Linux core" and "Linux subsystem," respectively) that support the major Linux kernel APIs. These components are not GPLed and do not appear to contain Linux code themselves; instead, they implement the Linux kernel API using the native Windows NT API that the Windows kernel provides. Microsoft is calling this the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (WSL).

Microsoft's Terry Myerson details the WIndows 10 Anniversary Update. (credit: Microsoft)

SAN FRANCISCO—Windows 10 was the focus of Microsoft's day one keynote at its annual Build developer conference. Today, the company announced an update that'll ship this summer called the "Anniversary Update."

The company led by talking about the adoption of Windows 10. After its first eight months on the market, there are now 270 million Windows 10 users. This is immensely fast for a new Windows version, with Microsoft claiming that Windows 10 adoption has outpaced Windows 7 adoption by 145 percent.

Still, Microsoft has a long way to go to hit its target of 1 billion Windows users within two years of launch. Windows 10 will continue to be a free update for Windows 7 and 8 users for another 4 months, after which time anyone on those operating systems will, in principle, be required to pay. We can well imagine that Microsoft will extend the promotion in some way, but the company hasn't announced any plans to do so just yet.

Enlarge / The upgrade arc of Windows 10. (credit: Microsoft)

Over 270 million users have either upgraded to Windows 10 or bought a new Windows 10 PC since the operating system shipped in July of last year, a number that Microsoft says outpaces Windows 7 adoption by 145 percent. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says that the operating system is the "fastest growing version of Windows for both consumers and enterprises," and Windows and Devices group VP Terry Myerson says it has been used for more than 75 billion hours.

Windows 10's adoption rate has been brisk since it was released thanks to positive buzz and the return of the Start menu: there were 14 million upgrades in the first day, 75 million in the first month, 110 million installs by early October, and 200 million by early January. Developers looking to build Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps for the Windows Store should be heartened by these numbers—the install base is already quite large, and it's continuing to grow.

Of course, Windows 10 adoption has also been helped along greatly by the fact that the operating system is available as a free download to all Windows 7 and Windows 8 users (in a handful of cases, it has been installed on systems whether users wanted it or not). The free upgrade is scheduled to end in July barring some extension from Microsoft, so we may see this relatively brisk adoption rate drop off after that.