Month: September 2018

Enlarge / iOS 12 on an iPhone X. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Apple's iOS 12 software update is available today for supported iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices, and on the surface, it looks like one of the smallest new iOS releases Apple has pushed out.

This isn't a surprise; Apple said earlier this year that iOS 12 would be more about performance and stability than adding new features. Some major additions that were originally planned—like an overhauled home screen—were reportedly delayed to a later release.

And it's also not a bad thing. Frankly, iOS 11 had some problems. Apple released several small updates in late 2017 and throughout 2018 to fix those problems, all while battling some frustrated customers' perceptions that the company was deliberately making older devices obsolete to encourage new sales as overall smartphone sales slowed their growth industry-wide.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai with his oversized coffee mug in November 2017. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

California's attempt to enforce net neutrality rules is "illegal" and "poses a risk to the rest of the country," Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said in a speech on Friday.

Pai's remarks drew an immediate rebuke from California Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), who authored the net neutrality bill that passed California's legislature and now awaits the signature of Governor Jerry Brown.

California's net neutrality rules are "necessary and legal because Chairman Pai abdicated his responsibility to ensure an open Internet," Wiener said in a press release.

Enlarge / This picture, taken on September 14, 2018, shows the Spiez Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute for NBC-Protection (nuclear, biological, chemical), in Spiez, 40km from the capital Bern, as Swiss newspapers reported that two Russian agents suspected of trying to spy on the laboratory were arrested in the Netherlands and expelled early this year. At the time, Spiez was analyzing data related to poison gas attacks in Syria, as well as the March 4 attack using the nerve agent Novichok on Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, Swiss newspapers reported. (Photo by Fabrice COFFRINI / AFP) (credit: FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images)

Last Friday, Dutch officials revealed that they had arrested and expelled two alleged Russian intelligence agents who were caught attempting to hack into the Spiez Laboratory, a Swiss national laboratory that is home to the Swiss Federal Institute for NBC (Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical) Protection.

The Spiez lab was testing two sets of samples that were of interest to the Russian government on behalf of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW): the "Novichok" agent used in an attack in the UK against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia and samples from a poison gas attack in Syria. The OPCW's headquarters is in The Hague in the Netherlands, which may explain why the attack on the Spiez lab was launched from there.

The incident, reported both by Joep Dohmen of the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad and by Thomas Knellwolf and Titis Plattner of the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeiger, occurred this spring. The circumstances of the arrests were not shared. An investigation carried out jointly by the two papers found that the pair were arrested as the result of a joint operation by multiple European intelligence services in Europe, including the Dutch Military Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD). The Swiss intelligence service, the NDB, issued a statement confirming a "case of Russian spies discovered in The Hague and then expelled."

Enlarge / Buying this innocuous-looking Overwatch loot box could be considered a form of gambling.

Thus far, the fight to regulate video game loot boxes has been a piecemeal effort moving forward in very different ways in different jurisdictions. Today, though, an international group of regulators from 15 European regulation bodies and Washington state in the US signed a declaration stating their increasing concern "with the risks being posed by the blurring of lines between gambling and other forms of digital entertainment such as video gaming."

The declaration identifies four specific areas of concern:

• Skin betting—Third-party sites that allow users to wager money or in-game items for a chance at earning better items. Valve has already faced pushback from Washington State regulators for Steam's role in "facilitating" such skin-gambling schemes.
• Loot boxes—In-game purchases that offer randomized rewards. Some loot boxes have already been ruled as illegal in the Netherlands and Belgium, and there have been some attempts to do the same from some US lawmakers.
• Social casino gambling—Apps like Big Fish Casino in which users can optionally spend money on virtual gambling chips if they don't feel like waiting for the in-game currency to replenish. A US District court ruled Big Fish Casino constituted illegal gambling earlier this year, and there are multiple active lawsuits surrounding other such games.
• "The use of gambling themed content within video games available to children."—In addition to the above, this would seemingly apply to games with poker or slot-machine-style minigames (or, uh, Casino Kid for the NES).

The declaration says that the types of games and services listed above have "similar characteristics to those that led our respective legal frameworks and authorities to provide for the regulation of online gambling." But the signatories don't commit to any specific actions against such games for now, beyond "working together to thoroughly analyze the characteristics of video games and social gaming." The declaration also notes that there are different frameworks for gambling regulation in different countries.

Linus Torvalds flips off Nvidia. (credit: aaltouniversityace)

Linux creator Linus Torvalds has apologized for years of rants, swearing, and general hostility directed at other Linux developers, saying he's going to take a temporary break from his role as maintainer of the open source kernel to learn how to behave better.

For many years, Torvalds has been infamous for his expletive-filled, aggressive outbursts on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), chewing out developers who submit patches that he believes aren't up to the standards necessary for the kernel. He's defended this behavior in the face of pushback from other developers, insisting that people being nice to one another was an American ideology.

But that may be coming to an end. In a lengthy email posted to the LKML on Sunday night, Torvalds expressed a change of heart. Taken to task over attacks that he recognizes were "unprofessional and uncalled for," he says he now recognizes that his behavior was "not OK" and he is "truly sorry." He's going to step back from kernel development for a while—something he's done before while developing the Git source control system—so that he can "get help on how to behave differently."

Enlarge / OnePlus' last phone, the OnePlus 6. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Here's an unexpected news item that popped up over the weekend: OnePlus, the Android smartphone maker, wants to start making televisions. OnePlus CEO Pete Lau made an announcement on the company forums that a smart TV was on the way. "We are building a new product of OnePlus’ premium flagship design, image quality, and audio experience to more seamlessly connect the home," Lau said. "We call it: OnePlus TV."

OnePlus made a name for itself in the smartphone space by shipping high-end, quality smartphones at a low price. There are other Chinese firms, like OnePlus rival Xiaomi, that are also using price as a big differentiator, but OnePlus does business in Western markets like the US and Europe that Xiaomi won't touch. There have been some bumps along the way, and OnePlus raises its prices every year, but the company's products are still a good value.

Building a TV certainly seems to be in the realm of possibility for OnePlus. The company has already released eight smartphones in five years, and it broke into the Western market with zero brand recognition. OnePlus didn't do this on its own. The company won't say that Oppo (owned by Chinese smartphone giant BBK) is its parent company, but the two companies are very close. The official line is that OnePlus "leases Oppo’s manufacturing line," "shares part of the supply chain," and "shares common investors" with Oppo. This close relationship with Oppo has allowed the company to survive the cutthroat world of launching a new smartphone brand. Consider the companies that have crashed and burned in the US smartphone market around the same time OnePlus was succeeding: products from Amazon, Facebook, Blackberry, Essential, LeEco, and Nextbit are all dead. Huawei and Xiaomi can't get a sustained US presence off the ground, and ZTE's misdeeds in the US have nearly killed the company. Somehow, OnePlus just keeps going.