Month: June 2016

When Apple runs through its operating system announcements at WWDC, the OS X part of the show is pretty much the only instance when the company spends any time talking about a product name.

The Mac has long since ceased to be Apple's most important product, but the company has kept up the tradition of slapping a secondary name on each OS release, something separate from the version number and the "OS X" or "Mac OS X" branding. Often, those names are used to set expectations about the release. Snow Leopard is a refinement of Leopard. Mountain Lion is a refinement of Lion. El Capitan is a refinement of Yosemite.

It's tempting to read the "macOS" rebranding as some grand statement about the Mac, but, truth be told, "Sierra" is more indicative of what we're getting. The name comes from a mountain range that encompasses Yosemite and El Capitan rather than moving away from them. It's another year of building on Yosemite's foundation, another year of incremental change, and another year of over-saturated mountain wallpapers.

Today, Microsoft announced Azure Information Protection (AIP), a new system to help protect sensitive data even as it moves between applications and organizations. AIP builds on the existing Azure Rights Management (RMS) system to add data labelling and classification to ensure that the right protection policies are applied to sensitive data at the time it is created, to help restrict data leaks.

Azure RMS provides a cloud-based system for performing rights management of sensitive information. With RMS, documents are encrypted and restricted in various ways; opening them requires authentication against Azure Active Directory (AD), allowing the usage of the documents to be tracked and recorded. Once opened, the documents can have their usage restricted to prevent, for example, printing or editing.

Unlike a traditional password-protected document, where knowing the password is sufficient to give permanent access to the file, the online authentication used by RMS means that access can be controlled on a more continuous basis. Accounts showing suspicious behavior such as impossible travel (where logins are made from different places around the world faster than one could travel between those places) can be locked out, blocking access to protected data.

In a new study, researchers describe observations of a distant galaxy, far enough away to be seen as it was a mere 700 million years after the Big Bang (As of this writing, it’s been about 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang). These observations turned up both the most distant oxygen ever observed and new clues about the cosmic phase shift known as reionization.

Early in the Universe’s history, there were no stars and little of any elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. When the first stars began to appear, they made two changes in the Universe around them. First, they began to create some of the heavier elements. Second, they started ionizing the hydrogen gas, stripping the electrons off it and leaving it electrically charged.

This second process is called reionization, since hydrogen started out ionized after the Big Bang, and only turned neutral after the Universe cooled. We don't fully understand the reionization era of the Universe’s history, making it a major point of study.

The luxurious $290 Kindle Oasis moves out of the spotlight so another Amazon e-reader can be highlighted today. Amazon announced a new, more-affordable Kindle that's just $80 and will be available in white and black. The new model replaces the cheapest version of the e-reader that has been available for a while, and it doubles the memory, bringing it up to 512MB.

In addition to the extra memory, the $80 Kindle will have a slightly thinner, lighter, and more rounded design than its predecessors. It will have a touchscreen display as well, but it won't be the 300 PPI screen that the $120 Kindle Paperwhite has (it will sport a 167 PPI display instead). Some reports also suggest that the new Kindle will come with Bluetooth support so blind readers can hook up a pair of wireless headphones to listen to books, along with a note-sending feature that will let you send yourself messages and highlights, which can be exported as PDFs or spreadsheets.

Amazon has not provided an exact battery life estimate, but it did say the new device will last "weeks" on a single charge. What will really set the $80 e-reader apart is Bluetooth support, as other Amazon Kindles do not have that capability (at least, not yet). If you don't need the Bluetooth features right away, the Kindle Paperwhite still offers a sharper (and backlit) display.

How HTC makes mixed reality VR. (video link)

Just how do you show people what virtual reality is like? Valve, along with the help of some games developers and skilled video producers came up with an answer earlier this year: using a green screen and some video know-how, it transposed players from the real world into the virtual world, displaying the results onto a separate monitor. With mixed reality, it's possible for onlookers to see what it's like to blast drones inside Space Pirate Trainer, or pet a robotic dog inside The Lab—the results are hugely impressive.

And yet, despite looking rather difficult in the Valve video, doing this sort of production work yourself is not only possible, it's surprisingly easy. At E3 2016, HTC showed off its own mixed reality solution, one that's been developed specifically for showcasing VR at events. That means it's portable, easy to set up, and relatively cheap, showing everyone the wonder of immersive VR without necessarily having to put a headset on.