Month: January 2019

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  It's not an OS. It's an application.

Want to be able to run classic Mac OS applications compiled for the Motorola 68000 series of processors on your ever-so-modern Mac OS X machine? Or maybe you'd rather run them on a Raspberry Pi, or an Android device for that matter? There's an emulation project that's trying to achieve just that: Advanced Mac Substitute (AMS).

Emulators of older computer platforms and game consoles are popular with vintage game enthusiasts. But emulators also could be attractive to others with some emotional (or economic) attachment to old binaries—like those with a sudden desire to resurrect aged Aldus PageMaker files.

Advanced Mac Substitute is an effort by long-time Mac hacker Josh Juran to make it possible to run old Mac OS software (up to Mac OS 6) without a need for an Apple ROM or system software. Other emulators out there for 64000 Mac applications such as Basilisk II require a copy of MacOS installation media—such as install CDs from Mac OS 7.5 or Mac OS 8. But AMS uses a set of software libraries that allow old Mac applications to launch right within the operating environment of the host device, without needing to have a full virtual hardware and operating system instance behind them. And it's all open source.

Google is planning to change the way extensions integrate with its Chrome browser. The company says that the changes are necessary for and motivated by a desire to crack down on malicious extensions, which undermine users' privacy and security, as part of the company's continued efforts to make extensions safer. The move also means that popular ad blocking extensions such as uBlock Origin and uMatrix will, according to their developer, no longer work.

The plans, called Manifest V3, are described in a public document. Google is proposing a number of changes to the way extensions work. The broad intent is to improve extension security, give users greater control over what extensions do and which sites they interact with, and make extension performance more robust. For example, extensions will no longer be able to load code from remote servers, so the extension that's submitted to the Chrome Web store contains exactly the code that will be run in the browser. This prevents malicious actors from submitting an extension to the store that loads benign code during the submission and approval process but then switches to something malicious once the extension is published. In a bid to discourage extensions from asking for blanket access to every site, Manifest V3 also changes the permissions system, so universal access can no longer be demanded at extension install time.

The problem for ad blockers comes with an API called webRequest. With the current webRequest API, the browser asks the extension to examine each network request that the extension is interested in. The extension can then modify the request before it's sent (for example, canceling requests to some domains, adding or removing cookies, or removing certain HTTP headers from the request). This provides an effective tool for ad blockers; they can examine each request that is made and choose to cancel those that are deemed to be for ads.

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Hawk)

Officials with the widely used PHP Extension and Application Repository have temporarily shut down most of their website and are urging users to inspect their systems after discovering hackers replaced the main package manager with a malicious one.

“If you have downloaded this go-pear.phar [package manager] in the past six months, you should get a new copy of the same release version from GitHub (pear/pearweb_phars) and compare file hashes,” officials wrote on the site’s blog. "If different, you may have the infected file.”

The officials didn’t say when the hack of their Web server occurred or precisely what the malicious version of go-pear.phar did to infected systems. Initial indications, however, look serious. For starters, the advice applies to anyone who has downloaded the package manager in the past six months. That suggests the hack may have occurred in the timeframe of last July, and no one noticed either it or the tainted download until this week.

Enlarge (credit: Amazon)

Amazon said on Wednesday that it will start delivering packages using a six-wheeled sidewalk robot called Amazon Scout.

"Starting today, these devices will begin delivering packages to customers in a neighborhood in Snohomish County, Washington," the company's announcement says—that's just north of Seattle. Amazon says that its robots "are the size of a small cooler and roll along sidewalks at a walking pace."

Amazon is far from the first company to experiment with sidewalk robots. Startups like Starship and Marble have been testing the concept for a few years now. But as the Internet's largest retailer, Amazon has the potential to rapidly make sidewalk delivery robots a mainstream phenomenon.

Enlarge (credit: Amazon)

Amazon said on Wednesday that it will start delivering packages using a six-wheeled sidewalk robot called Amazon Scout.

"Starting today, these devices will begin delivering packages to customers in a neighborhood in Snohomish County, Washington," the company's announcement says—that's just north of Seattle. Amazon says that its robots "are the size of a small cooler and roll along sidewalks at a walking pace."

Amazon is far from the first company to experiment with sidewalk robots. Startups like Starship and Marble have been testing the concept for a few years now. But as the Internet's largest retailer, Amazon has the potential to rapidly make sidewalk delivery robots a mainstream phenomenon.

Enlarge (credit: Rene Schwietzke)

Gene drive is both a promising and disturbing technology. It allows us to engineer a stretch of DNA that, once inserted in a specific location in an organism's genome, will convert other versions of the gene so that they also carry the insert. Once started in a population, gene drive will convert the entire population within a relatively short number of generations.

That's promising, in that it opens the door to editing mosquitos to cause sterility to spread through a population, eliminating the spread of diseases and a fair bit of itching. But it's also a genie that, once out of the bottle, appears to be impossible to put back—and hence is disturbing. But so far, there has been a small consolation: it has only been shown to work in insects.

Now, a large research team at the University of California, San Diego, has managed to get it working in mice. Sort of. It turns out that the efficiency is much lower. While the gene drive DNA is inherited at rates well above normal Mendel-style inheritance, it's nowhere near as effective as in insects, and it's not clear we know how to fix it.