The next time you open up a new Apple computer, go to the App Store to start downloading apps, and type in "Microsoft Office," you'll actually get something. From a report: Until now, anyone who wanted to use Microsoft Office and its popular Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote apps had to do so by going to Microsoft's website and downloading it all from there. Now, the are available on the Mac App Store as well, making it even easier for people to download and use.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Sean Gallagher: 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). 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.

I got a demo of AMS from Juran at Shmoocon in Washington, DC, this past weekend. He showed me an early attempt at getting the game LoadRunner to work with the emulator -- it's not yet interactive. A version of the project, downloadable from Github, includes a "Welcome" screen application (a sort of Mac OS "hello world"), Mac Tic-Tac-Toe, and an animation of NyanCat. Applications are launched from the command line for now and are executed by the emulation software, which interprets the system and firmware calls. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of work to be done. While AMS works on Mac OS X up to version 10.12 -- both on Intel and PowerPC versions of the operating system -- the code currently won't compile on MacOS Mojave. And the Linux implementation of AMS does not yet support keyboard input. I was unable to get the front end to execute at all on Debian 9 on Intel.

"Google engineers have proposed changes to the open-source Chromium browser that will break content-blocking extensions, including various ad blockers," reports The Register. "The drafted changes will also limit the capabilities available to extension developers, ostensibly for the sake of speed and safety. Chromium forms the central core of Google Chrome, and, soon, Microsoft Edge." From the report: In a note posted Tuesday to the Chromium bug tracker, Raymond Hill, the developer behind uBlock Origin and uMatrix, said the changes contemplated by the Manifest v3 proposal will ruin his ad and content blocking extensions, and take control of content away from users. Manifest v3 refers to the specification for browser extension manifest files, which enumerate the resources and capabilities available to browser extensions. Google's stated rationale for making the proposed changes is to improve security, privacy and performance, and supposedly to enhance user control.

But one way Google would like to achieve these goals involves replacing the webRequest API with a new one, declarativeNetRequest. The webRequest API allows extensions to intercept network requests, so they can be blocked, modified, or redirected. This can cause delays in web page loading because Chrome has to wait for the extension. In the future, webRequest will only be able to read network requests, not modify them. The declarativeNetRequest allows Chrome (rather than the extension itself) to decide how to handle network requests, thereby removing a possible source of bottlenecks and a potentially useful mechanism for changing browser behavior. The report notes that Adblock Plus "should still be available" since "Google and other internet advertising networks apparently pay Adblock Plus to whitelist their online adverts."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Apple security expert Jon Callas, who helped build protection for billions of computers and smartphones against criminal hackers and government surveillance, is now taking on government and corporate spying in the policy realm. Jon Callas is an elder statesman in the world of computer security and cryptography. He's been a vanguard in developing security for mobile communications and email as chief technology officer and co-founder of PGP Corporation -- which created Pretty Good Privacy, the first widely available commercial encryption software -- and serving the same roles at Silent Circle and Blackphone, touted as the world's most secure Android phone.

As a security architect and analyst for Apple computers -- he served three stints with the tech giant in 1995-1997, 2009-2011, and 2016-2018 -- he has played an integral role in helping to develop and assess security for the Mac and iOS operating systems and various components before their release to the public. His last stretch there as manager of a Red Team (red teams hack systems to expose and fix their vulnerabilities) began just after the FBI tried to force the tech giant to undermine security it had spent years developing for its phones to break into an iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters. But after realizing there's a limit to the privacy and surveillance issues technology companies can address, Callas decided to tackle the issues from the policy side, accepting a two-year position as senior technology fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union. Callas spoke to Motherboard about government backdoors, the need for tech expertise in policymaking, and what he considers the biggest challenge for the security industry.

Windows 10 Mobile devices will be officially unsupported starting on December 10, 2019. As a result, Microsoft is recommending users move to an Android or iOS device instead. Mac Rumors reports: Microsoft made the recommendation in a Windows 10 Mobile support document (via Thurrott) explaining its plans to stop offering security updates and patches for Windows 10 Mobile: "With the Windows 10 Mobile OS end of support, we recommend that customers move to a supported Android or iOS device. Microsoft's mission statement to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more, compels us to support our Mobile apps on those platforms and devices." All customers who have a Windows 10 Mobile device will be able to keep using it after December 10, 2019, but no further updates will be available.

An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet: German authorities have asked the public for help in surfacing more details and potentially identifying the owner of a MAC address known to have been used by a bomber in late 2017... The MAC address is f8:e0:79:af:57:eb. Brandenburg police say it belongs to a suspect who tried to blackmail German courier service DHL between November 2017 and April 2018. The suspect demanded large sums of money from DHL and threatened to detonate bombs across Germany, at DHL courier stations, private companies, and in public spaces. [The bomb threats were real, but one caught fire instead of exploding, while the second failed to explode, albeit containing real explosives.]

Investigators called in to negotiate with the bomber managed to exchange emails with the attacker on three occasions, on April 6, 2018, April 13, 2018, and April 14, 2018. One of the details obtained during these conversations was the bomber's MAC address, which based on the hardware industry's MAC address allocation tables, should theoretically belong to a Motorola phone... Now, they're asking router owners to check router access logs for this address, and report any sightings to authorities. Investigators want to know to what routers/networks the bomber has connected before and after the attacks, in order to track his movements and maybe gain an insight into his identity.

Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC's Mad Money host Jim Cramer that the company will announce new "services" this year, suggesting that Apple might be planning to launch its long-awaited TV service in the first half of 2019. "While Cook didn't say what kind of services -- Cramer was asking whether Apple had any tricks up its services sleeve, including healthcare or mobile payments -- it's the long-awaited TV service that has recently seen all the pieces fall into place," notes The Verge. From the report: Here at CES 2019, there's been a series of surprise announcements from TV manufacturers that are suddenly supporting Apple's AirPlay 2 and HomeKit features to allow you to cast content directly from your iPhone, iPad and Mac -- including TVs running rival operating systems from Google and Samsung. New TVs from rival Samsung will actually support iTunes, too, letting you access your movies and TV shows there as well. It wouldn't be a stretch to think Apple might be priming the pump with those hardware manufacturers for the upcoming TV service, too.

Then, there's content: We reported last June how Apple has been spending over $1 billion on original TV content with no obvious place for users to watch it. Another report suggested that some of those original shows were slated to debut as soon as this March. And another still claimed that those shows might be free for people who own Apple devices. But even if the TV service is one of the "services" Cook mentioned, it's not clear what other services Apple might be talking about.

Albums sold on vinyl and cassette both saw a growth in sales according to BuzzAngle Music's End-Year Report profiling U.S. music industry consumption for 2018. From a report: Vinyl sales grew by just shy of 12% from 8.6 to 9.7 million sales, while cassette sales grew by almost 19% from 99,400 to 118,200 copies sold in the US, The Verge reported. Sixty-six percent of those vinyl sales were of albums that are more than three years old and feature classic bands like The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, and Pink Floyd, reported BuzzAngle. Cassettes saw popularity in newer releases. CDs on the other hand have declined by 18.5% in popularity leading to a total decline in physical album sales of over 15%, reported The Verge. Meanwhile, audio streaming saw an increase of 41.8%, the largest of all music consumption.

Rather than serving up platitudes about innovation, the man charged with saving former unicorn Evernote says his priority this year is addressing the long list of user complaints. From a report: Despite some progress, Evernote continued to struggle last year, cutting 15 percent of its staff and losing many top executives.So what doesn't work? Lots of stuff, much of it very basic, new CEO Ian Small says: "Frankly, it's a bit disingenuous for me to try to get our most dedicated users all fired up about inventing the future of Evernote when exactly those same people are the ones who know best that sync doesn't always work right. Or that Evernote on Windows is a bit tired, and is missing features that are found on the Mac version. Or that each version of Evernote seems to work slightly differently, and exhibits its own unique collection of bugs and undesirable behaviors. Or that Evernote on mobile devices sometimes feels like a pared-down version of a powerful desktop app, instead of a mobile-first view into a powerful cloud-enabled productivity environment." Small says these problems have lingered for years and were well-known, but he didn't want to get into why they weren't fixed sooner. Instead, he promises the main focus of 2019 will be dealing with these and numerous other issues.

Glenn Fleishman, writing for MacWorld: It seems like it was only yesterday that I first used BareBones Software's BBEdit, but in actuality, yesterday is so far away -- 25 years, in fact. With all the twists and turns across more than two decades of Apple as a company, Mac hardware, and the underlying operating system, you might think that BBEdit stands alone as a continuously-developed app shepherded largely or exclusively by the same independent developer -- an app without a giant company behind it. As it turns out, BBEdit is one of several apps that's been around the block more than a few times.

The longevity of indie apps is more extraordinary when you consider the changes Apple put the Mac through from the early 1990s to 2018. Apple switched from Motorola 680x0 processors to PowerPC to Intel chips, from 32-bit to 64-bit code, and among supported coding languages. It revved System 7 to 8 to 9, then to Unix across now 15 major releases (from 10.0 to 10.14). That's a lot for any individual programmer or small company to cope with. Bare Bones's head honcho, Rich Siegel, and the developers behind three other long-running Mac software programs shared with me their insight on development histories for over 25 years, what's changed the most during that time, and any hidden treasures users haven't yet found. You can hear more on BareBones Software's in this recent episode of The Talk Show, a podcast by DaringFireball's John Gruber.

Apple has for years been a premium brand that rarely, if ever discounted products. Every year, the company could raise prices on products, and consumers would not only happily pay, but stand in long lines for the privilege of doing so. From a report: So when Apple started putting misleading, but seemingly consumer-friendly posters in front of Apple Stores at the end of 2018 offering a new iPhone model for $300 off (with trade-in of your current phone), you know something different happened for the company this year. Consumers fought back. Many analysts have reported that in the wake of poorer-than-expected sales for this year's crop of iPhones, Apple cut back on production, including on the $1,100 iPhone XS Max, the $999 iPhone XS and the XR, the "budget" model that replaced the previous entry-level new phone, the $349 SE. The price for the XR (the one Apple is hawking discounts for): $749.

"This should be a wakeup call for Apple," says Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. "They swung, and they really missed." The prices on the new phones are "far too high," says Terry Walton, a tourist from Auckland, New Zealand. He has an iPhone 7 and didn't even consider any of the X-series iPhones because it still works just fine. Upgrading "didn't enter my mind at all," he says. It wasn't just iPhones that got price hikes. Apple also upped the cost of the top-of-the-line iPad to $1,000 as well (or over $2,800 for a loaded model) and added $300 to the cost of the Mac Mini and new MacBook Air computers.

Tim May, co-founder of the influential Cypherpunks mailing list and a significant influence on both bitcoin and WikiLeaks, passed away in mid-December at his home in Corralitos, California. The news was announced last Saturday on a Facebook post written by his friend Lucky Green. Long-time Slashdot reader SonicSpike quotes Reason: In his influential 1988 essay, "The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto," May predicted that advances in computer technology would eventually allow "individuals and groups to communicate and interact with each other" anonymously and without government intrusion. "These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation [and] the ability to tax and control economic interactions," he wrote... Running 497 words, it was his most influential piece of writing... May became convinced that public-key cryptography combined with networked computing would break apart social power structures...

In September 1992, May and his friends Eric Hughes and Hugh Daniels came up with the idea of setting up an online mailing list to discuss their ideas. Within a few days of its launch, a hundred people had signed up for the Cypherpunks mailing list. (The group's name was coined by Hughes' girlfriend as a play on the "cyberpunk" genre of fiction.) By 1997, it averaged 30 messages daily with about 2,000 subscribers. May was its most prolific contributor. May and Hughes, along with free speech activist John Gilmore, wore masks on the cover of the second issue of Wired magazine accompanying a profile by journalist Steven Levy, who described the Cypherpunks as "more a gathering of those who share a predilection for codes, a passion for privacy, and the gumption to do something about it...."

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was an active reader and participant on the list, contributing his first posts in 1995 under the name "Proff."
The article notes that May "recently expressed disgust with the current state of the cryptocurrency community, citing its overpriced conferences and the advent of 'bitcoin exchanges that have draconian rules about KYC, AML, passports, freezes on accounts and laws about reporting 'suspicious activity' to the local secret police.'"

In his last published interview he told CoinDesk "I think Satoshi would barf."

theodp writes: "Have you ever made something wonderful but were too afraid to share it?" asks Apple's heartwarming "Share Your Gifts" 2018 holiday ad, which features a girl who keeps her creations secret, until they're let out into the world by her dog and enjoyed by everyone around her. Arguably deserving writing credit for the ad is the late Steve Jobs, who thirty-five years ago preached a similar "Real Artists Ship" message to the original Mac team as he led them on a holiday "death march" to get their creation out into the world.

Andy Hertzfeld recalls: "The software team worked hard over the Christmas break of 1983. [...] By the first week of January, the software team was working around the clock, testing and fixing problems that were found. [...] Randy Wigginton brought in a gigantic bag of chocolate covered espresso beans, which, along with medicinal quantities of caffeinated beverages, helped us forgo sleep entirely for the last couple of days." Seeing Apple spin "Real Artists Ship" into "Share Your Gifts" -- which Adweek honored as the 9th Best Commercial of 2018 -- would no doubt be appreciated by master of Reality Distortion Jobs.

Four months after a mysterious group was outed for a digital espionage operation that used novel techniques to target Mac users, its macOS malware samples continued to go undetected by most antivirus providers, a security researcher reported on Thursday. Ars Technica reports: Windshift is what researchers refer to as an APT -- short for "advanced persistent threat" -- that surveils individuals in the Middle East. The group operated in the shadows for two years until August, when Taha Karim, a researcher at security firm DarkMatter, profiled it at the Hack in the Box conference in Singapore. Slides, a brief description, and a report from Forbes are here, here and here, respectively.

On Thursday, Mac security expert Patrick Wardle published an analysis of Meeting_Agenda.zip, a file Karim had said installed the rare Mac malware. To Wardle's surprise, results from VirusTotal at the time showed that only two antivirus providers -- Kaspersky and ZoneAlarm -- detected the file as malicious. Wardle then used a feature that searched VirusTotal for related malicious files and found four more. Three of them weren't detected by any AV providers, while one was detected by only two providers. The reason the findings were so surprising is that Apple had already revoked the cryptographic certificate the developers used to digitally sign their malware. That meant Apple knew of the malware. In fairness, the control servers the malware contacts are no longer available on the Internet. That means any infected computers aren't in danger of being surveilled. Also in fairness, the number of detections has slowly risen in the day since Wardle published his analysis.

A reader shares a report from Ars Technica's Peter Bright: With Microsoft's decision to end development of its own Web rendering engine and switch to Chromium, control over the Web has functionally been ceded to Google. That's a worrying turn of events, given the company's past behavior. Chrome itself has about 72 percent of the desktop-browser market share. Edge has about 4 percent. Opera, based on Chromium, has another 2 percent. The abandoned, no-longer-updated Internet Explorer has 5 percent, and Safari -- only available on macOS -- about 5 percent. When Microsoft's transition is complete, we're looking at a world where Chrome and Chrome-derivatives take about 80 percent of the market, with only Firefox, at 9 percent, actively maintained and available cross-platform.

The mobile story has stronger representation from Safari, thanks to the iPhone, but overall tells a similar story. Chrome has 53 percent directly, plus another 6 percent from Samsung Internet, another 5 percent from Opera, and another 2 percent from Android browser. Safari has about 22 percent, with the Chinese UC Browser sitting at about 9 percent. That's two-thirds of the mobile market going to Chrome and Chrome derivatives. In terms of raw percentages, Google won't have quite as big a lock on the browser space as Microsoft did with Internet Explorer -- Internet Explorer 6 peaked at around 80 percent, and all versions of Internet Explorer together may have reached as high as 95 percent. But Google's reach is, in practice, much greater: not only is the Web a substantially more important place today than it was in the early 2000s, but also there's a whole new mobile Web that operates in addition to the desktop Web. Google has deployed proprietary technology and left the rest of the industry playing catch-up, writes Peter. The company has "tried to push the Web into a Google-controlled proprietary direction to improve the performance of Google's online services when used in conjunction with Google's browser, consolidating Google's market positioning and putting everyone else at a disadvantage."

YouTube has been a particular source of problems. One example Peter provides has to do with a hidden, empty HTML element that was added to each YouTube video to disable Edge's hardware accelerated video decoding: "For no obvious reason, Google changed YouTube to add a hidden, empty HTML element that overlaid each video. This element disabled Edge's fastest, most efficient hardware accelerated video decoding. It hurt Edge's battery-life performance and took it below Chrome's. The change didn't improve Chrome's performance and didn't appear to serve any real purpose; it just hurt Edge, allowing Google to claim that Chrome's battery life was actually superior to Edge's. Microsoft asked Google if the company could remove the element, to no avail."

Joshua Bakita, a former software engineering intern on the Edge team at Microsoft, says one of the reasons why Microsoft had to ditch EdgeHTML rendering engine in Edge browser and switch to Chromium was to keep up with the changes (some of which were notorious) that Google pushed to its sites. These changes were designed to ensure that Edge and other browsers could not properly run Google's sites, he alleged. Responding to a comment, he wrote: "For example, they may start integrating technologies for which they have exclusive, or at least 'special' access. Can you imagine if all of a sudden Google apps start performing better than anyone else's?" This is already happening. I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn't keep up.

For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail (should now be fixed in Win10 Oct update). Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome's dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life. What makes it so sad, is that their claimed dominance was not due to ingenious optimization work by Chrome, but due to a failure of YouTube. On the whole, they only made the web slower.

Now while I'm not sure I'm convinced that YouTube was changed intentionally to slow Edge, many of my co-workers are quite convinced -- and they're the ones who looked into it personally. To add to this all, when we asked, YouTube turned down our request to remove the hidden empty div and did not elaborate further. And this is only one case.

Last week, Samsung introduced its latest smartphone, the Galaxy A8s. Not only is it the first phone of theirs with a laser-drilled hole in the display for the front-facing camera sensor, but it is also their first phone to ditch the headphone jack. Slashdot reader TheFakeTimCook shares a report from Mac Rumors that takes a closer look at the move and the hypocrisy behind it: [The A8s] is also Samsung's first smartphone without a headphone jack, much to the amusement of iPhone users, as Samsung has mocked Apple for over two years over its decision to remove the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 in 2016, a trend that has continued through to the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR. While on stage unveiling the new Galaxy Note 7 in 2016, for example, Samsung executive Justin Denison made sure to point out that the device came with a headphone jack. "Want to know what else it comes with?" he asked. "An audio jack. I'm just saying," he answered, smirking as the audience laughed. And earlier this year, Samsung mocked the iPhone X's lack of a headphone jack in one of its "Ingenius" ads promoting the Galaxy S9. Samsung isn't the first tech giant to mock Apple's decision to remove the headphone jack, only to follow suit. Google poked fun at the iPhone 7's lack of headphone jack while unveiling its original Pixel smartphone in 2016, and then the Pixel 2 launched without one just a year later.

SwiftOnSecurity, regarding Microsoft's switch to Chromium as Windows's built-in rendering engine: This isn't about Chrome. This is about ElectronJS. Microsoft thinks EdgeHTML cannot get to drop-in feature-parity with Chromium to replace it in Electron apps, whose duplication is becoming a significant performance drain. They want to single-instance Electron with their own fork. Electron is a cancer murdering both macOS and Windows as it proliferates. Microsoft must offer a drop-in version with native optimizations to improve performance and resource utilization. This is the end of desktop applications. There's nowhere but JavaScript. John Gruber of DaringFireball: I don't share the depth of their pessimism regarding native apps, but Electron is without question a scourge. I think the Mac will prove more resilient than Windows, because the Mac is the platform that attracts people who care. But I worry. In some ways, the worst thing that ever happened to the Mac is that it got so much more popular a decade ago. In theory, that should have been nothing but good news for the platform -- more users means more attention from developers. The more Mac users there are, the more Mac apps we should see.

The problem is, the users who really care about good native apps -- users who know HIG violations when they see them, who care about performance, who care about Mac apps being right -- were mostly already on the Mac. A lot of newer Mac users either don't know or don't care about what makes for a good Mac app.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple has never made cheap stuff. But this fall many of its prices increased 20 percent or more. The MacBook Air went from $1,000 to $1,200. A Mac Mini leaped from $500 to $800. It felt as though the value proposition that has made Apple products no-brainers might unravel. For some perspective, we charted out the past few years of prices on a few iconic Apple products. Then we compared them with other brands and some proprietary data about Americans' phone purchase habits from mobile analytics firm BayStreet Research.

What we learned: Being loyal to Apple is getting expensive. Many Apple product prices are rising faster than inflation -- faster, even, than the price of prescription drugs or going to college. Yet when Apple offers cheaper options for its most important product, the iPhone, Americans tend to take the more expensive choice. So while Apple isn't charging all customers more, it's definitely extracting more money from frequent upgraders.

[...] Apple says prices go up because it introduces new technologies such as Face ID and invests in making products that last a long time. Yet it has clearly been feeling price discomfort from some quarters. This week, amid reports of lagging sales that took its stock far out of the trillion-dollar club, it dedicated its home page to a used-car sales technique that's uncharacteristic for an aspirational luxury brand. It offered a "limited-time" deal to trade in an old iPhone and get a new iPhone XR for $450, a $300 discount.

With the news earlier today that Microsoft is embracing Chromium for Edge browser development on the desktop, VentureBeat decided to see what the other browser companies had to say about the decision. From the report: Google largely sees Microsoft's decision as a good thing, which is not exactly a surprise given that the company created the Chromium open source project. "Chrome has been a champion of the open web since inception and we welcome Microsoft to the community of Chromium contributors. We look forward to working with Microsoft and the web standards community to advance the open web, support user choice, and deliver great browsing experiences."

Mozilla meanwhile sees Microsoft's move as further validation that users should switch to Firefox. "This just increases the importance of Mozilla's role as the only independent choice. We are not going to concede that Google's implementation of the web is the only option consumers should have. That's why we built Firefox in the first place and why we will always fight for a truly open web." Mozilla regularly points out it develops the only independent browser -- meaning it's not tied to a tech company that has priorities which often don't align with the web. Apple (Safari), Google (Chrome), and Microsoft (Edge) all have their own corporate interests.

Opera thinks Microsoft is making a smart move, because it did the same thing six years ago. "We noticed that Microsoft seems very much to be following in Opera's footsteps. Switching to Chromium is part of a strategy Opera successfully adopted in 2012. This strategy has proved fruitful for Opera, allowing us to focus on bringing unique features to our products. As for the impact on the Chromium ecosystem, we are yet to see how it will turn out, but we hope this will be a positive move for the future of the web."