Podcasts about Synaptics

In this episode, we sit down with Vineet Ganju, Vice President of Wireless Connectivity Products at Synaptics, a global leader in advanced sensing solutions that enhance human-device interaction. Vineet shares his expert insights on the rapidly evolving world of wireless connectivity technologies, from Wi-Fi 7 and 8 to Bluetooth innovations, Zigbee, Thread, and Ultra-Low Energy (ULE) solutions. We dive into the trends and challenges shaping the future of connected devices, the critical role of security in wireless networks, and how Synaptics is driving the next wave of Edge AI connectivity advancements for consumer electronics, wearables, smart home products, and more. Let's talk with Vineet.

Welcome to a brand new season of AI with Sally, an EE Times podcast that brings you inside my conversations with luminaries of the AI chip industry. Today's episode is brought to you by our sponsor, Synaptics. Synaptics has recently partnered with Google to add an open-source AI accelerator core that Google developed to Synaptics' next generation of its Astra line of IoT chips. 

The industry revolves around two types of AI, namely research AI versus production AI. I wasn't sure what these terms meant and their differences, so I asked an expert to join me on this week's Embedded Executives podcast. John Weil is the Vice president and General Manager of Synaptics' IoT Business Unit. After setting me straight, John talks about the last 20% of a design that the customer needs to figure out for themselves, amongst other things.

En el episodio de hoy, Miguel Muñoz y Eugenio Garibay analizan las empresas que han comenzado el 2025 con fuerza, explorando casos como la colaboración entre Synaptics y Google en Edge AI, el "momento nirvana" de Nvidia, el impacto de la desaceleración económica en las acciones chinas, y el resurgimiento de las acciones relacionadas con criptomonedas. También destacan las mejoras significativas en empresas como Cloudflare y RTX, además de los movimientos estratégicos en la lista de compras de Goldman Sachs. Simplificando términos complejos y ofreciendo contexto histórico, presentan una visión clara de las tendencias económicas y tecnológicas actuales, ayudando a los oyentes a entender cómo estos eventos podrían influir en el mercado este año.

With all the focus on AI and machine learning these days, we sometimes take other facets of design for granted, some of which are vital, like the wireless component. Synaptics' Veros architecture fits the bill for state-of-the-art wireless communications with high throughput, low power consumption, and top-notch security. If you're designing an AI-based platform using the company's latest AI platform, Veros has built-in hooks to attach the two subsystems seamlessly. To understand what that means and how it works, I spoke with Venkat Kodavati, Synaptics' SVP and GM for the company's Wireless Products Division, in this week's Embedded Executives podcast.

In this Electropages podcast, host Robin Mitchell talks to Nebu Philips from Synaptics about their innovative AI and IoT solutions. Nebu explains how Synaptics is addressing the challenges of integrating AI into IoT devices with their new Astra and SL series processors. The discussion covers low-power, efficient AI at the edge, optimising user experiences, and the expanding role of AI in consumer, enterprise, and industrial applications. Learn how Synaptics is advancing the future of AI-driven IoT with scalable, power-efficient solutions.

Today we are joined by top physicist and inventor of the microprocessor & touch screen, Federico Faggin, for an intriguing conversation into the nature of reality. Federico once had a materialistic scientific perspective on consciousness and reality until one day a spontaneous spiritual awakening changed his perspective forever.  In this episode he shares that very experience and how it has shaped his current view on reality. With this deeper knowing, he spent decades researching reality, today he shares his findings. He reveals why computers can never be conscious, who we are our essence, what carries on after death, and our unbreakable connection to something larger than ourselves. He also discusses the very real force of love that underlies all things, the secret to spiritual growth, and why humans can never be replaced by artificial intelligence. Seed:  Go to https://seed.com/knowthyself and use code 25KNOWTHYSELF for 25% off your first month of Seed LMNT: https://www.DrinkLMNT.com/KnowThyself Get a FREE Sample pack with any order André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ 0:00 Intro 2:55 His Spontaneous Spiritual Awakening 15:03 Defining Consciousness: Classical vs Quantum View 23:00 Can computers be Conscious? 28:20 How Truth Transcends Theory 33:24 Seed: Save 25% off your first month 34:38 Idealism vs Monad Theory  37:00 Our Deepest Desire: To Know Ourselves  39:33 Satiety vs Soul  44:55 Individuality & What Carries Over After Death 48:00 We Are All Part of One Whole 54:15 How Emotion & Meaning Impacts Reality 1:02:29 LMNT Electrolytes: Get a FREE Sample pack with any order 1:04:02 Suffering as a Catalyst for Growth 1:09:54 Taking Responsibility for Our Lives & Spiritual Growth  1:16:14 The Very Real Force of Love 1:22:47 Where Physics & Spirituality Meet 1:27:58 Distinguishing Free Will & Unconscious Habits 1:35:10 Reincarnation & NDEs Explained  1:37:51 How Much We Currently Understand about Reality 1:43:30 Shifting From the Mind to the Heart  1:45:27 Facing the Future of Artificial Intelligence 1:50:40 Collective Consciousness & Evil vs Good 1:56:00 Competition vs Collaboration  1:59:58 Are Aliens Real? 2:02:30 Conclusion ___________ Federico Faggin is a physicist, inventor, and entrepreneur. Born, raised, and educated in Italy, he immigrated to the US in 1968. He is credited with designing the world's first commercial microprocessor, the Intel 4004 in 1971, and he went on to invent dozens of other integrated circuits. Before that, in 1968 while working at Fairchild Semiconductor, he created a technology that made possible dynamic memories, non-volatile memories, image sensors, and the microprocessor. Faggin started several successful high-tech companies (Zilog, Cygnet Technologies, and Synaptics) that introduced significant products and technologies, including the touchpad and touchscreen that revolutionized the way we communicate with our personal devices. Among the honors Faggin has received are the 2009 National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Obama and the 2014 Enrico Fermi Prize. Through the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation, Faggin now supports research programs at US universities and research institutes to advance the understanding of consciousness through theoretical and experimental research. Newest Book “Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature": https://a.co/d/bjZ56gH Website: https://www.federicofaggin.com/ ___________ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/

רותם וגדי עוסקים בנושאים שונים בתחום הסייבר והאבטחה, כולל חדשות עדכניות ונושאים מעמיקים:התמודדות עם אבטחת מידע בעסק קטן: רותם מספר על אתגרי האבטחה והתמודדות עם אוטומציה בעסק הסוכרת של בתאל אישתו, כולל פתרונות שהוא מיישם להבטחת המידע.שרת קוד פתוח חושף 4 חולשות משמעותיות: דיון על חולשות קריטיות בשרת ownCloud והמלצה להסירו מהרשת.בורסת הקריפטו המבוזרת עברה פריצה וגניבת כל הנכסים של החברה, ועכשיו הוא רוצה לעשות את זה רשמי.ניתוח של חולשות בקוראי אצבעות של חברות כמו Goodix, Synaptics, ו-ELAN, שמותקנים בכל החברות הכי גדולות בעולם והשלכותיהן על אבטחת המידע.דיון על פעילות ורווחי קבוצת התקיפה BlackBasta.הפרק כולל דיון מעמיק על השלכות נושאים אלה על עולם הסייבר וחשיבות ההגנה על מידע אישי וארגוני. נושאים נוספים כוללים שיחה על השלכות פרצות אבטחה ומודעות לסיכונים בעולם הדיגיטלי.מגיש: רותם ברפאנליסט: גדי עברון

On this episode of Embedded Insiders, we're discussing cyber resiliency with Eric Sivertson, VP of Security at Lattice Semiconductor, specifically highlighting how organizations can benefit from implementing a personalized data security plan and how FPGAs can help. Next, Rich and Vin are back with a DevTalk discussing the difference between emulation and simulation, and Vin deep dives into the background of how these meanings came to be.But first, The Insiders are here to talk about recent and upcoming trips. Rich is back from visiting with Infineon, NVIDIA, and Synaptics, and Ken is headed to the RISC-V Summit. 

On this episode of the Moor Insights & Strategy Insider Podcast, host Patrick Moorhead is joined by Venkat Kodavati, Senior VP & GM, Wireless Products, and Vikram Gupta, Chief Product Officer and Senior VP & GM, IoT Processors, at Synaptics. The Intelligent IoT, with its combination of AI-infused sensing, processing, and connectivity, is changing industries, from the smart home and security to mobile devices, automotive, the enterprise, and industrial automation. With the change comes an opportunity for innovation, such as the appropriate application AI at the Edge, where designers must strike the right balance of functionality, power consumption, performance, cost, time to market, privacy, and ease of use to ensure an exceptional user experience. During their conversation, Patrick, Venkat, and Vikram discuss the opportunities, challenges, and suitable architectural approaches to accelerate next-generation Intelligent IoT devices. This is a conversation you don't want to miss!

Episode #537 vom 17.01.2023 Indien will 1.200 E-Loks von Siemens. Die Börse will weniger Kosten bei Hypoport. Die chinesische Regierung will mehr Nutzer auf Didi und Tencent verdoppelt sich. Der reichste Mensch der Welt setzt auf Luxus. Der Amundi S&P Luxury ETF (WKN: A2H565) ebenfalls. Oder nicht? Was haben Touchpads auf Laptops und Click-Wheels auf alten iPods gemeinsam? Synaptics (WKN: 529873) hat's erfunden. Jetzt erfindet sich auch die Firma neu und sieht dabei ziemlich günstig aus. Diesen Podcast vom 17.01.2023, 3:00 Uhr stellt dir die Podstars GmbH (Noah Leidinger) zur Verfügung. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Karthee Madasamy, founder and managing partner at MFV Partners, talks about how deep tech is affecting and transforming traditional industries. Karthee shares important lessons for deep tech founders to help them move from proving the underlying technology to building scalable businesses. He also explains the MFV Partners investment philosophy and what founders can expect when they work with MFV.In this episode, you'll learn:[1:45] Genuine continuous fascination with new technology is crucial to success in deep tech.[10:23] Fundamental questions that any investor would ask when assessing the business model of a deep tech startup.[13:40] Showing that you clearly understand what the problem is and how you're going to solve it is a sure way of getting to a second meeting with the investor.[23:44] Deep tech founders need investors who appreciate the technology and who can help them to prepare for the next stage in their journey.[25:52] How can more transparency around how to invest in VC funds help the VC ecosystem?About Guest SpeakerKarthee Madasamy is the founder and managing partner at Mobile Foundation Ventures (MFV) Partners. Karthee invests in frontier-tech startups in robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Computing,Autonomous Platforms, and Internet of Things. Before MFV, Karthee spent 11 years as a Managing Director at Qualcomm Ventures where he invested across the US, Israel, and India. He started Qualcomm Ventures' investment activities in both Israel and India. Some of his notable investments include Waze (acquired by Google), Validity Sensors (acquired by Synaptics), and BORQS (NASDAQ IPO), among others. Before Qualcomm Ventures, Karthee led technical and product marketing roles in three semiconductor and wireless startups in Silicon Valley.About MFV PartnersMFV Partners is a Silicon Valley-based early-stage deep tech venture fund based. Founded in 2018, MFV backs visionary deep tech entrepreneurs aiming to transform large industries like Auto, Manufacturing, Energy, Agriculture and Healthcare. Subscribe to our podcast and stay tuned for our next episode. Follow Us:  Twitter | Linkedin | Instagram | Facebook

Power inverter for car (for laptop), touch pad (Synaptics), Zip file compression (does not work on compressed files), 3D printer operation (use slice CAM model), keeping Chrome from saving passwords, Profiles in IT (Mark Dean, co creator of IBM PC), open vs closed computer architecture (Mac vs PC), Windows 3.1 30 years old, and mushrooms communicate with each other (using hyphae threads, mimic human language). This show originally aired on Saturday, April 9, 2022, at 9:00 AM EST on WFED (1500 AM).

Power inverter for car (for laptop), touch pad (Synaptics), Zip file compression (does not work on compressed files), 3D printer operation (use slice CAM model), keeping Chrome from saving passwords, Profiles in IT (Mark Dean, co creator of IBM PC), open vs closed computer architecture (Mac vs PC), Windows 3.1 30 years old, and mushrooms communicate with each other (using hyphae threads, mimic human language). This show originally aired on Saturday, April 9, 2022, at 9:00 AM EST on WFED (1500 AM).

What were the biggest headlines of the year for investors? Who made the most questionable comments? Why were Ford Motor, Bath & Body Works, and Synaptics such surprising stocks in 2021? What makes the underlying businesses of Roku, Axon Enterprise, and Twilio better than their recent stock performances? Motley Fool analysts Andy Cross, Ron Gross, and Jason Moser answer those questions and share why Arkadiy Dobkin (EPAM Systems), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), and Marvin Ellison (Lowe's) get their votes for CEO of the Year. Plus, the guys share investing discoveries they made in 2021 and three stocks on their radar (Chipotle, Costco, Crocs) that have a common trait among them.   Want to share your thoughts about our new daily show? Click the link to take our 4-question survey! https://www.foolinsights.com/se/04BD76CC18830996

In this episode, we talk with Muffi Ghadiali. Muffi is the Founder of CEO of Electriphi which was recently acquired by Ford and now is the Head of Ford Pro Charging. Electriphi is a fleet electrification company at the forefront of the EV industry. They developed a fleet and charging management platform designed to simplify fleet electrification, save energy costs, and track key operational metrics like real-time status of vehicles, chargers and maintenance services. Muffi shared what it was like to build Electriphi from the ground up and through the acquisition by Ford, how his focus on mission helped give the company an edge, and what he thinks is ahead for the EV industry. Prior to Electriphi, Muffi has 20 years of product experience at companies such as ChargePoint, Amazon, Ouya and Synaptics. Mission Driven is a conversation about startup founders on a mission to address the world's biggest challenges and how they leverage their social mission for competitive advantage. If you liked this episode, please share, follow/subscribe and tag us on Twitter! @BetterVentures @muffig @electriphi

The world's undergoing a serious chip shortage, and its having a negative impact on businesses everywhere. Automakers like Toyota are cutting their production forecasts by 40% based on the tightness of supply. Appliance makers like Whirlpool are claiming "the perfect storm" of supply issues have caused them to slash projections by around 10%. And Internet of Things providers like Synaptics are bringing in customers and quite literally begging to fulfill their existing customer orders. The extreme tightness of supply, coupled with the growing demand of high-performance chips, is serving as a catalyst of epic proportions. The semiconductor industry is undergoing one of the most significant expansion phases in decades. Intel, Samsung, Taiwan Semiconductor, and several other manufacturers are plowing tens of billions of dollars into expanding their chipmaking capacity. What should investors make of all of this? Is this an opportunity to bank on a wave of upcoming new semiconductor business? Or is this simply too-much, too fast -- in what's already known as a highly cyclical industry? To answer those questions, we've brought in a semiconductor expert. Robert Quinn has worked for decades in providing capital equipment to the semiconductor industry. He is now a high-performance contributor to LinkedIn, where he posts four times per days and his articles have been read nearly 2 million times year-to-date. In this exclusive interview, 7investing CEO Simon Erickson and Robert describe why Intel is so ambitiously expanding its chipmaking capacity within the United States and what its new contract with the Department of Defense could mean for its business. Robert also explains why Samsung might be building a new fab in Austin, what Taiwan Semiconductor's price hike will mean for consumer electronics, and how much longer investors should expect the supply shortage to last. The two also discuss several new chip designs and process technology improvements, such as the RISC-V open-source architecture, single nanometer nodes, FGPAs, and quantum computing. Robert also shares his thoughts about wafer fabrication equipment manufacturers, and why the status quo will greatly benefit Applied Materials. Publicly-traded companies mentioned in this interview include AMD, Apple, Applied Materials, Intel, Samsung, and Taiwan Semiconductor. 7investing's advisors or its guests may have positions in the companies mentioned. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/7investing/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/7investing/support

The stock market hits a record high on a stronger-than-expected jobs report. Square buys Australian fintech company AfterPay for $29 billion in stock. Etsy tumbles on earnings. And Weber Grill makes its public markets debut. Motley Fool analysts Ron Gross and Jason Moser discuss those stories and weigh in on the latest from Cloudflare, CVS Health, Mercadolibre, Wayfair, and Draftkings. Our analysts share two stocks on their radar: Synaptics and 10x Genomics. Plus, we revisit our July interview with Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman and talk about the future of work.  

The Dow gained 448 points today and Jim Cramer's getting you ready for next week with his game plan. Then, as tech stocks flirt with new highs, Cramer's looking at Synaptics with the CEO, Michael Hurlston to learn more about the company and its prospects. And, with hyper-growth stocks making a comeback, Cramer's joined by Lightspeed CEO, Dax Dasilva to learn where the technology play could be going. And, Cramer‘s revisiting Tether and telling you all you need to know about Stablecoins.

Federico Faggin has led what he calls four lives: as a physicist, engineer and inventor, entrepreneur, and author. He developed the MOS silicon gate technology at Fairchild (1968) and designed the world's first microprocessor at Intel (1971). Faggin also founded and led Zilog, Synaptics, and other high-tech companies. The Zilog Z80 microprocessor (1976), and the Z8 microcontroller (1978) are still in volume production in 2021. At Synaptics he pioneered the Touchpad (1994) and the Touchscreen (1999), - solutions that have revolutionized the way we interface with mobile devices.Federico has received many prizes and awards in the United States, Europe, and Japan. These include the Marconi Prize (1988), the Kyoto Prize for Advanced Technology (1997), and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation (2009), from President Barack Obama. In 1996, Faggin was inducted in the National Inventor's Hall of Fame. He has also received many honorary degrees in Computer Science and Electronic EngineeringFederico is currently president of the Federico and Elvia Faggin Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the scientific study of consciousness, an interest that has become a passionate full-time activity. In 2019, Federico published his autobiography SILICON, through Mondadori, Italy's premier book publisher, where it has been a bestseller. Imaginal Inspirations is hosted by David Lorimer, Programme Director of the Scientific and Medical Network and Chair of the Galileo Commission, an academic movement dedicated to expanding the evidence base of a science of consciousness.scientificandmedical.net galileocommission.orgbeyondthebrain.org Works and links mentioned:Federico and Elvia Faggin FoundationSilicon: From the Invention of the Microprocessor to the New Science of Consciousness by Federico Faggin.Godel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas HofstadterThe Enniads by Plotinus Production: Martin RedfernArtwork: Amber HaasMusic: Life is a River, by Magnus Moone

Jeff Bezos announces he’s stepping down as CEO, with Andy Jassy (the head of AWS) named to take over. Amazon also reports a $125 billion quarter. Activision Blizzard, Alphabet, PayPal, and Pinterest rise on earnings. Chipotle and Unity Software fall on earnings. And Uber surges after it announces plans to buy alcohol-delivery company Drizly. Motley Fool analysts Ron Gross and Jason Moser discuss those stories and share two stocks on their radar: Scotts Miracle-Gro and Synaptics. Plus, Chad Millman, Chief Content Officer at The Action Network, talks about the big business of Super Bowl betting.

Peloton revs up on earnings. Chewy wavers. RH Holdings hits a new all-time high. Lululemon tumbles. Citigroup makes history with a new CEO.  And investors refuse to cut Slack any slack. Motley Fool analysts Ron Gross and Jason Moser discuss those stories and weigh in on the latest from Kroger and Dave & Buster’s. Plus, our analysts share two stocks on their radar: Editas and Synaptics. And Motley Fool retirement expert Robert Brokamp talks portfolio allocation, dividend aristocrats, and how to grow your most important moneymaking asset.

Synaptics just made a hefty acquisition if you’re a player or follower of the IoT space. The company acquired the Wireless Connectivity division of Broadcom. To understand what that means and how it can affect the embedded space, I invited Vineet Ganju, a Vice President at Synaptics as my guest on this week’s Embedded Executives podcast. The biggest takeaway for me is that this space is about to get a little more interesting.

Excited to speak with Stephen Schultis and Tyson Mikuni from Synaptics to discuss the role that "force" may play in facilitating thinner laptop designs and create innovate new usage models in the venerable touchpad.

The Weekly Briefing podcast: Conversations with ace auto market analyst Egil Juliussen on the pandemic-related recession in the automotive market, Michael Hurlston, the CEO of Synaptics, about smartphones, vehicles, and consumer electronics, and how we interact with our stuff.

Walmart reports strong e-commerce growth but has problems with fun and games. Dropbox surprises investors and aims for profitability by the end of 2020. Domino’s delivers again. And McDonald’s introduces Quarter Pounder-scented candles. Motley Fool senior analysts Ron Gross and Jason Moser, and Jeff Fischer of 1623 Capital, discuss those stories and weigh in on the latest from Amazon, Boston Beer, Stamps.com, Texas Roadhouse, and Virgin Galactic. Plus, the guys share three stocks on their radar: Pinterest, Synaptics, and Hasbro. And toy expert Chris Byrne analyzes the current state of the industry and the business of Baby Yoda.   Click here to take our brief listener survey, and thanks for helping us out!

In a world of rapidly changing technologies, few have lasted as long is as unaltered a fashion as the mouse. The party line is that the computer mouse was invente d by Douglas Engelbart in 1964 and that it was a one-button wooden device that had two metal wheels. Those used an analog to digital conversion to input a location to a computer. But there's a lot more to tell. Englebart had read an article in 1945 called “As We May Think” by Vannevar Bush. He was in the Philippines working as a radio and radar tech. He'd return home,. Get his degree in electrical engineering, then go to Berkeley and get first his masters and then a PhD. Still in electrical engineering. At the time there were a lot of military grants in computing floating around and a Navy grant saw him work on a computer called CALDIC, short for the California Digital Computer. By the time he completed his PhD he was ready to start a computer storage company but ended up at the Stanford Research Institute in 1957. He published a paper in 1962 called Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework. That paper would guide the next decade of his life and help shape nearly everything in computing that came after. Keeping with the theme of “As We May Think” Englebart was all about supplementing what humans could do. The world of computer science had been interested in selecting things on a computer graphically for some time. And Englebart would have a number of devices that he wanted to test in order to find the best possible device for humans to augment their capabilities using a computer. He knew he wanted a graphical system and wanted to be deliberate about every aspect in a very academic fashion. And a key aspect was how people that used the system would interact with it. The keyboard was already a mainstay but he wanted people pointing at things on a screen. While Englebart would invent the mouse, pointing devices certainly weren't new. Pilots had been using the joystick for some time, but an electrical joystick had been developed at the US Naval Research Laboratory in 1926, with the concept of unmanned aircraft in mind. The Germans would end up building one in 1944 as well. But it was Alan Kotok who brought the joystick to the computer game in the early 1960s to play spacewar on minicomputers. And Ralph Baer brought it into homes in 1967 for an early video game system, the Magnavox Odyssey. Another input device that had come along was the trackball. Ralph Benjamin of the British Royal Navy's Scientific Service invented the trackball, or ball tracker for radar plotting on the Comprehensive Display System, or CDS. The computers were analog at the time but they could still use the X-Y coordinates from the trackball, which they patented in 1947. Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff and Kenyon Taylor had seen the CDS trackball and used that as the primary input for DATAR, a radar-driven battlefield visualization computer. The trackball stayed in radar systems into the 60s, when Orbit Instrument Corporation made the X-Y Ball Tracker and then Telefunken turned it upside down to control the TR 440, making an early mouse type of device. The last of the options Englebart decided against was the light pen. Light guns had shown up in the 1930s when engineers realized that a vacuum tube was light-sensitive. You could shoot a beam of light at a tube and it could react. Robert Everett worked with Jay Forrester to develop the light pen, which would allow people to interact with a CRT using light sensing to cause an interrupt on a computer. This would move to the SAGE computer system from there and eek into the IBM mainframes in the 60s. While the technology used to track the coordinates is not even remotely similar, think of this as conceptually similar to the styluses used with tablets and on Wacom tablets today. Paul Morris Fitts had built a model in 1954, now known as Fitts's Law, to predict the time that's required to move things on a screen. He defined the target area as a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target. If you listen to enough episodes of this podcast, you'll hear a few names repeatedly. One of those is Claude Shannon. He brought a lot of the math to computing in the 40s and 50s and helped with the Shannon-Hartley Theorum, which defined information transmission rates over a given medium. So these were the main options at Englebart's disposal to test when he started ARC. But in looking at them, he had another idea. He'd sketched out the mouse in 1961 while sitting in a conference session about computer graphics. Once he had funding he brought in Bill English to build a prototype I n 1963. The first model used two perpendicular wheels attached to potentiometers that tracked movement. It had one button to select things on a screen. It tracked x,y coordinates as had previous devices. NASA funded a study to really dig in and decide which was the best device. He, Bill English, and an extremely talented team, spent two years researching the question, publishing a report in 1965. They really had the blinders off, too. They looked at the DEC Grafacon, joysticks, light pens and even what amounts to a mouse that was knee operated. Two years of what we'd call UX research or User Research today. Few organizations would dedicate that much time to study something. But the result would be patenting the mouse in 1967, an innovation that would last for over 50 years. I've heard Engelbart criticized for taking so long to build the oNline System, or NLS, which he showcased at the Mother of All Demos. But it's worth thinking of his research as academic in nature. It was government funded. And it changed the world. His paper on Computer-Aided Display Controls was seminal. Vietnam caused a lot of those government funded contracts to dry up. From there, Bill English and a number of others from Stanford Research Institute which ARC was a part of, moved to Xerox PARC. English and Jack Hawley iterated and improved the technology of the mouse, ditching the analog to digital converters and over the next few years we'd see some of the most substantial advancements in computing. By 1981, Xerox had shipped the Alto and the Star. But while Xerox would be profitable with their basic research, they would miss something that a candle-clad hippy wouldn't. In 1979, Xerox let Steve Jobs make three trips to PARC in exchange for the opportunity to buy 100,000 shares of Apple stock pre-IPO. The mouse by then had evolved to a three button mouse that cost $300. It didn't roll well and had to be used on pretty specific surfaces. Jobs would call Dean Hovey, a co-founder of IDEO and demand they design one that would work on anything including quote “blue jeans.” Oh, and he wanted it to cost $15. And he wanted it to have just one button, which would be an Apple hallmark for the next 30ish years. Hovey-Kelley would move to optical encoder wheels, freeing the tracking ball to move however it needed to and then use injection molded frames. And thus make the mouse affordable. It's amazing what can happen when you combine all that user research and academic rigor from Englebarts team and engineering advancements documented at Xerox PARC with world-class industrial design. You see this trend played out over and over with the innovations in computing that are built to last. The mouse would ship with the LISA and then with the 1984 Mac. Logitech had shipped a mouse in 1982 for $300. After leaving Xerox, Jack Howley founded a company to sell a mouse for $400 the same year. Microsoft released a mouse for $200 in 1983. But Apple changed the world when Steve Jobs demanded the mouse ship with all Macs. The IBM PC would ;use a mouse and from there it would become ubiquitous in personal computing. Desktops would ship with a mouse. Laptops would have a funny little button that could be used as a mouse when the actual mouse was unavailable. The mouse would ship with extra buttons that could be mapped to additional workflows or macros. And even servers were then outfitted with switches that allowed using a device that switched the keyboard, video, and mouse between them during the rise of large server farms to run the upcoming dot com revolution. Trays would be put into most racks with a single u, or unit of the rack being used to see what you're working on; especially after Windows or windowing servers started to ship. As various technologies matured, other innovations came along to input devices. The mouse would go optical in 1980 and ship with early Xerox Star computers but what we think of as an optical mouse wouldn't really ship until 1999 when Microsoft released the IntelliMouse. Some of that tech came to them via Hewlett-Packard through the HP acquisition of DEC and some of those same Digital Research Institute engineers had been brought in from the original mainstreamer of the mouse, PARC when Bob Taylor started DRI. The LED sensor on the muse stuck around. And thus ended the era of the mouse pad, once a hallmark of many a marketing give-away. Finger tracking devices came along in 1969 but were far too expensive to produce at the time. As capacitive sensitive pads, or trackpads came down in price and the technology matured those began to replace the previous mouse-types of devices. The 1982 Apollo computers were the first to ship with a touchpad but it wasn't until Synaptics launched the TouchPad in 1992 that they began to become common, showing up in 1995 on Apple laptops and then becoming ubiquitous over the coming years. In fact, the IBM Thinkpad and many others shipped laptops with little red nubs in the keyboard for people that didn't want to use the TouchPad for awhile as well. Some advancements in the mouse didn't work out. Apple released the hockey puck shaped mouse in 1998, when they released the iMac. It was USB, which replaced the ADB interface. USB lasted. The shape of the mouse didn't. Apple would go to the monolithic surface mouse in 2000, go wireless in 2003 and then release the Mighty Mouse in 2005. The Mighty Mouse would have a capacitive touch sensor and since people wanted to hear a click would produce that with a little speaker. This also signified the beginning of bluetooth as a means of connecting a mouse. Laptops began to replace desktops for many, and so the mouse itself isn't as dominant today. And with mobile and tablet computing, resistive touchscreens rose to replace many uses for the mouse. But even today, when I edit these podcasts, I often switch over to a mouse simply because other means of dragging around timelines simply aren't as graceful. And using a pen, as Englebart's research from the 60s indicated, simply gets fatiguing. Whether it's always obvious, we have an underlying story we're often trying to tell with each of these episodes. We obviously love unbridled innovation and a relentless drive towards a technologically utopian multiverse. But taking a step back during that process and researching what people want means less work and faster adoption. Doug Englebart was a lot of things but one net-new point we'd like to make is that he was possibly the most innovative in harnessing user research to make sure that his innovations would last for decades to come. Today, we'd love to research every button and heat map and track eyeballs. But remembering, as he did, that our job is to augment human intellect, is best done when we make our advances useful, helps to keep us and the forks that occur in technology from us, from having to backtrack decades of work in order to take the next jump forward. We believe in the reach of your innovations. So next time you're working on a project. Save yourself time, save your code a little cyclomatic complexity, , and save users frustration from having to relearn a whole new thing. And research what you're going to do first. Because you never know. Something you engineer might end up being touched by nearly every human on the planet the way the mouse has. Thank you Englebart. And thank you to NASA and Bob Roberts from ARPA for funding such important research. And thank you to Xerox PARC, for carrying the torch. And to Steve Jobs for making the mouse accessible to every day humans. As with many an advance in computing, there are a lot of people that deserve a little bit of the credit. And thank you listeners, for joining us for another episode of the history of computing podcast. We're so lucky to have you. Now stop consuming content and go change the world.

This week on the Friday News Update: - Elephone announces the incredible U Pro budget smartphone, with a curved AMOLED Full HD+ screen, dual cameras and facial recognition (coming soon via an update) and more... for just £200-300. Wow. - Vivo announces the X20 Plus UD, the first ever phone with a fingerprint sensor under the screen. Plus they could be working on a phone with 10GB of RAM and up to 512GB of storage - Red announces more information about their Hydrogen holographic smartphone - Google Play has started selling audiobooks - A Chrome OS tablet by Acer has been spotted at an education event - Google I/O will take place between the 8th and the 10th of May this year - An examination of the Google app reveals that you'll soon be able to change the 'OK, Google' wake word - OnePlus have introduced iPhone X-like gestures in the latest OnePlus 5 and 5T beta - Nokia have released a 4G version of the 3310 - Samsung will release the Galaxy X this year - iOS 12 won't introduce many new features, but Apple will introduce support for iPad apps on macOS - Surface Pro 4 owners are reporting a screen flickering issue that can only be (temporarily) fixed by putting the laptop in a freezer - Galaxy S9 will get 'Intelligent Scan' unlock method and 'stickers with depth control' are coming to the S9+, plus photos of the phones and camera samples emerge online Get every episode of the Friday News Update with the Friday News Update Alexa Flash Briefing

CES 2018 is done. It’s in the books. Kaput. And besides a little rain, a little flooding and a little power outage, it appears that most of us in the tech media have gotten out with little to no scarring. So, to congratulate ourselves, we took to a room high up in the Mirage on the Las Vegas strip and talked for about an hour on the biggest advancements that were brought out at the show. From an experimental laptop named Linda to fingerprints going where they never gone before, we five techies chat about it all on episode 287 of the Pocketnow Weekly! Watch the video recorded from 6:30pm Eastern on January 10th, or check out the high-quality audio version right here. You can shoot your listener emails to podcast@pocketnow.com for a shot at getting your question read aloud on the air the following week! Pocketnow Weekly 287 RSS Feed Apple Podcasts Google Play Music Spotify Direct Download Recording Date January 10, 2018 Host Jules Wang Special Thanks Myriam Joire (Mobile Tech Podcast) With Jaime Rivera Nicole Scott (MobileGeeks) Nick Gray (High Tech Traveler) Michael Fisher (Mr. Mobile) Agenda ~3:00 | The themes of CES 2018 ~4:30 | vivo and Synaptics release an under-glass fingerprint sensor ~12:30 | Razer's Project Linda is mind-blowing ~22:00 | LG's rolling TV, Samsung's "Wall" and old projectors ~28:00 | As they are mobile devices, drones! Also, DJI! ~38:30 | Planet Gemini is more than just a PDA in a galaxy ~46:30 | Eve V has a great keyboard ~50:00 | Lenovo Miix 630 mixes with a Snapdragon 835 ~58;30 | Dell XPS 13 (2018) comes in with all USB-C ~1:01:00 | Alcatel has phones • See you soon! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On this episode of the Droid Life Show, we're recapping CES and talking about our Best of CES 2018 picks! We loved the fun stuff that Nanoleaf showed off (Remote and new touch-sensitive lights), NVIDIA's Big Format Gaming Displays (BFGD), Synaptics in-display fingerprint readers, and the fact that Google Assistant was everywhere, including new display smart speakers. We'll also just share any other fun stories from this year's show!

You know that we always start with a bunch of random stuff. This week for some reason it's Titanic. Thanks, Wes. Anyways, on to tech.   Microsoft: - Foldable phone patents get an artist rendering. - iTunes in the Microsoft store being pushed back to sometime next year. - Mixer is now fully available on Android and iOS.    Apple: - iMac Pro is now available. - App developers can now set up preorders in the App Store.   General Tech: - Disney wants to buy 21st Century Fox. - Facebook is allowing you to snooze people. Saving relationships. - LastPass now has support for Edge on Android. Coming to iOS soon. - AOL Instant Messenger is officially dead. - Samsung is working on a Bixy-powered smart speaker.   Google: - OnePlus 5T has an awesome easter egg. - Synaptics announced an in-display fingerprint reader. - Amazon is once again selling Chromecast and Apple TV. - Project Tango is shutting down.   Gaming: - You can check your past years Xbox stats here. - Lots of Xbox Deals going on right now. - Indie Game SALES Spotlight of the week: GOG.com - Astroneer is out of pre-alpha. - Feral Interactive has ported Deus Ex: Mankind Divided over to the Mac. - Mobile Game Spotlight of the Week: Super Mario Run, 1 year anniversary event. Android, iOS - Landen is getting better at Minecraft.   www.callingallplatforms.com Contact: podcast@callingallplatforms.com Social: Facebook Twitter YouTube   Subscribe on iOS Subscribe on Android TuneIn

Netzneutralität in den USA wird abgeschafft Die US-Regulierungsbehörde FCC hat die Abschaffung der Netzneutralität in den USA mit 3:2 Stimmen beschlossen. Mit dem Beschluss werden die Drei Gebote der Netzneutralität sowie die Wohlverhaltensregel für Breitband-ISP abgeschafft. Soweit es die FCC anbelangt, können die Netzbetreiber praktisch tun und lassen, was sie wollen, solange sie es offenlegen oder der FCC mitteilen, die es dann auf ihre Webseite stellt. Befürworter der Netzneutralität haben bereits Klagen angekündigt iPhone mit Anti-Tracking-Funktion beschert Umsatzeinbruch bei Werbefirmen Die Online-Werbefirma Criteo hat ihre Umsatzprognose für 2018 nach unten korrigiert – bedingt durch Apples mit iOS 11 respektive Safari 11 eingeführten Anti-Tracking-Schutz. Man habe dadurch zuerst Umsatzeinbußen in Höhe von 9 bis 13 Prozent erwartet – da das System mit iOS 11.2 aber nochmals verbessert wurde, sei für das kommende Jahr nun sorgar mit einem um “rund 22 Prozent” geringeren Umsatz zu rechnen, teilte die auf Retargeting und personalisierte Banner spezialisierte Firma mit. Synaptics startet Produktion von In-Display-Fingerabdrucksensor Touchpad-Hersteller Synaptics hat den Start der Massenproduktion seines Fingeradrucksensors Clear ID FS9500 angekündigt. Bei dem Sensor handelt es sich um eine In-Display-Lösung, die sich besonders für Smartphones und Tablets mit randlosem Display eignen soll. Anstatt eines Buttons oder Scanners unterhalb des Displays oder an der Gehäuserückseite, ist der neue Sensor als Teil des Bildschirms unter dem Display-Glas verbaut. Das erste Smartphone mit Clear ID wird wohl vom chinesischen Hersteller Vivo kommen. National Geographic kürt die besten Naturfotos Tiere, Landschaften, Unterwasser- und Luftbildaufnahmen: Unter 11.000 Einsendungen hat das Magazin National Geographic die besten Naturfotos des Jahres ausgezeichnet. Das Gewinnerfoto zeigt einen Urang-Utan beim Überqueren eines Flusses auf Borneo. Diese und alle weiteren aktuellen Nachrichten finden sie auf heise.de

This week on BSD Now, we review the EuroBSDcon schedule, we explore the mysteries of Docker on OpenBSD, and show you how to run PostgreSQL on ZFS. This episode was brought to you by Headlines EuroBSDcon 2017 - Talks & Schedule published (https://2017.eurobsdcon.org/2017/05/26/talks-schedule-published/) The EuroBSDcon website was updated with the tutorial and talk schedule for the upcoming September conference in Paris, France. Tutorials on the 1st day: Kirk McKusick - An Introduction to the FreeBSD Open-Source Operating System, George Neville-Neil - DTrace for Developers, Taylor R Campbell - How to untangle your threads from a giant lock in a multiprocessor system Tutorials on the 2nd day: Kirk continues his Introduction lecture, Michael Lucas - Core concepts of ZFS (half day), Benedict Reuschling - Managing BSD systems with Ansible (half day), Peter Hessler - BGP for developers and sysadmins Talks include 3 keynotes (2 on the first day, beginning and end), another one at the end of the second day by Brendan Gregg Good mixture of talks of the various BSD projects Also, a good amount of new names and faces Check out the full talk schedule (https://2017.eurobsdcon.org/talks-schedule/). Registration is not open yet, but will be soon. *** OpenBSD on the Xiaomi Mi Air 12.5" (https://jcs.org/2017/05/22/xiaomiair) The Xiaomi Mi Air 12.5" (https://xiaomi-mi.com/notebooks/xiaomi-mi-notebook-air-125-silver/) is a basic fanless 12.5" Ultrabook with good build quality and decent hardware specs, especially for the money: while it can usually be had for about $600, I got mine for $489 shipped to the US during a sale about a month ago. Xiaomi offers this laptop in silver and gold. They also make a 13" version but it comes with an NVidia graphics chip. Since these laptops are only sold in China, they come with a Chinese language version of Windows 10 and only one or two distributors that carry them ship to the US. Unfortunately that also means they come with practically no warranty or support. Hardware > The Mi Air 12.5" has a fanless, 6th generation (Skylake) Intel Core m3 processor, 4Gb of soldered-on RAM, and a 128Gb SATA SSD (more on that later). It has a small footprint of 11.5" wide, 8" deep, and 0.5" thick, and weighs 2.3 pounds. > A single USB-C port on the right-hand side is used to charge the laptop and provide USB connectivity. A USB-C ethernet adapter I tried worked fine in OpenBSD. Whether intentional or not, a particular design touch I appreciated was that the USB-C port is placed directly to the right of the power button on the keyboard, so you don't have to look or feel around for the port when plugging in the power cable. > A single USB 3 type-A port is also available on the right side next to the USB-C port. A full-size HDMI port and a headphone jack are on the left-hand side. It has a soldered-on Intel 8260 wireless adapter and Bluetooth. The webcam in the screen bezel attaches internally over USB. > The chassis is all aluminum and has sufficient rigidity in the keyboard area. The 12.5" 1920x1080 glossy IPS screen has a fairly small bezel and while its hinge is properly weighted to allow opening the lid with one hand (if you care about that kind of thing), the screen does have a bit of top-end wobble when open, especially when typing on another laptop on the same desk. > The keyboard has a roomy layout and a nice clicky tactile with good travel. It is backlit, but with only one backlight level. When enabled via Fn+F10 (which is handled by the EC, so no OpenBSD support required), it will automatically shut off after not typing for a short while, automatically turning back once a key is pressed. Upgrades > An interesting feature of the Mi Air is that it comes with a 128Gb SATA SSD but also includes an open PCI-e slot ready to accept an NVMe SSD. > I upgraded mine with a Samsung PM961 256Gb NVMe SSD (left), and while it is possible to run with both drives in at the same time, I removed the Samsung CM871a 128Gb SATA (right) drive to save power. > The bottom case can be removed by removing the seven visible screws, in addition to the one under the foot in the middle back of the case, which just pries off. A spudger tool is needed to release all of the plastic attachment clips along the entire edge of the bottom cover. > Unfortunately this upgrade proved to be quite time consuming due to the combination of the limited UEFI firmware on the Mi Air and a bug in OpenBSD. A Detour into UEFI Firmware Variables > Unlike a traditional BIOS where one can boot into a menu and configure the boot order as well as enabling and disabling options such as "USB Hard Drive", the InsydeH2O UEFI firmware on the Xiaomi Air only provides the ability to adjust the boot order of existing devices. Any change or addition of boot devices must be done from the operating system, which is not possible under OpenBSD. > I booted to a USB key with OpenBSD on it and manually partitioned the new NVME SSD, then rsynced all of the data over from the old drive, but the laptop would not boot to the new NVME drive, instead showing an error message that there was no bootable OS. > Eventually I figured out that the GPT table that OpenBSD created on the NVMe disk was wrong due to a [one-off bug in the nvme driver](https://github.com/openbsd/src/commit/dc8298f669ea2d7e18c8a8efea509eed200cb989) which was causing the GPT table to be one sector too large, causing the backup GPT table to be written in the wrong location (and other utilities under Linux to write it over the OpenBSD area). I'm guessing the UEFI firmware would fail to read the bad GPT table on the disk that the boot variable pointed to, then declare that disk as missing, and then remove any variables that pointed to that disk. OpenBSD Support > The Mi Air's soldered-on Intel 8260 wireless adapter is supported by OpenBSD's iwm driver, including 802.11n support. The Intel sound chip is recognized by the azalia driver. > The Synaptics touchpad is connected via I2C, but is not yet supported. I am actively hacking on my dwiic driver to make this work and the touchpad will hopefully operate as a Windows Precision Touchpad via imt so I don't have to write an entirely new Synaptics driver. > Unfortunately since OpenBSD's inteldrm support that is ported from Linux is lagging quite a bit behind, there is no kernel support for Skylake and Kaby Lake video chips. Xorg works at 1920x1080 through efifb so the machine is at least usable, but X is not very fast and there is a noticeable delay when doing certain redrawing operations in xterm. Screen backlight can be adjusted through my OpenBSD port of intel_backlight. Since there is no hardware graphics support, this also means that suspend and resume do not work because nothing is available to re-POST the video after resume. Having to use efifb also makes it impossible to adjust the screen gamma, so for me, I can't use redshift for comfortable night-time hacking. Flaws > Especially taking into account the cheap price of the laptop, it's hard to find faults with the design. One minor gripe is that the edges of the case along the bottom are quite sharp, so when carrying the closed laptop, it can feel uncomfortable in one's hands. > While all of those things could be overlooked, unfortunately there is also a critical flaw in the rollover support in the keyboard/EC on the laptop. When typing certain combinations of keys quickly, such as holding Shift and typing "NULL", one's fingers may actually hold down the Shift, N, and U keys at the same time for a very brief moment before releasing N. Normally the keyboard/EC would recognize U being pressed after N is already down and send an interrupt for the U key. Unfortunately on this laptop, particular combinations of three keys do not interrupt for the third key at all until the second key is lifted, usually causing the third key not to register at all if typed quickly. I've been able to reproduce this problem in OpenBSD, Linux, and Windows, with the combinations of at least Shift+N+U and Shift+D+F. Holding Shift and typing the two characters in sequence quickly enough will usually fail to register the final character. Trying the combinations without Shift, using Control or Alt instead of Shift, or other character pairs does not trigger the problem. This might be a problem in the firmware on the Embedded Controller, or a defect in the keyboard circuitry itself. As I mentioned at the beginning, getting technical support for this machine is difficult because it's only sold in China. Docker on OpenBSD 6.1-current (https://medium.com/@dave_voutila/docker-on-openbsd-6-1-current-c620513b8110) Dave Voutila writes: So here's the thing. I'm normally a macOS user…all my hardware was designed in Cupertino, built in China. But I'm restless and have been toying with trying to switch my daily machine over to a non-macOS system sort of just for fun. I find Linux messy, FreeBSD not as Apple-laptop-friendly as it should be, and Windows a non-starter. Luckily, I found a friend in Puffy. Switching some of my Apple machines over to dual-boot OpenBSD left a gaping hole in my workflow. Luckily, all the hard work the OpenBSD team has done over the last year seems to have plugged it nicely! OpenBSD's hypervisor support officially made it into the 6.1 release, but after some experimentation it was rather time consuming and too fragile to get a Linux guest up and running (i.e. basically the per-requisite for Docker). Others had reported some success starting with QEMU and doing lots of tinkering, but after a wasted evening I figured I'd grab the latest OpenBSD snapshot and try what the openbsd-misc list suggested was improved Linux support in active development. 10 (11) Steps to docker are provided Step 0 — Install the latest OpenBSD 6.1 snapshot (-current) Step 1 — Configure VMM/VMD Step 2 — Grab an Alpine Linux ISO Step 3 — Make a new virtual disk image Step 4 — Boot Alpine's ISO Step 5 — Inhale that fresh Alpine air Step 6 — Boot Alpine for Reals Step 7 — Install Docker Step 8 — Make a User Step 9 — Ditch the Serial Console Step 10 — Test out your Docker instance I haven't done it yet, but I plan on installing docker-compose via Python's pip package manager. I prefer defining containers in the compose files. PostgreSQL + ZFS Best Practices and Standard Procedures (https://people.freebsd.org/~seanc/postgresql/scale15x-2017-postgresql_zfs_best_practices.pdf) Slides from Sean Chittenden's talk about PostgreSQL and ZFS at Scale 15x this spring Slides start with a good overview of Postgres and ZFS, and how to use them together To start, it walks through the basics of how PostgreSQL interacts with the filesystem (any filesystem) Then it shows the steps to take a good backup of PostgreSQL, then how to do it even better with ZFS Then an intro to ZFS, and how Copy-on-Write changes host PostgreSQL interacts with the filesystem Overview of how ZFS works ZFS Tuning tips: Compression, Recordsize, atime, when to use mostly ARC vs sharedbuffer, plus pgrepack Followed by a discussion of the reliability of SSDs, and their Bit Error Rate (BER) A good SSD has a 4%/year chance of returning the wrong data. A cheap SSD 34% If you put 20 SSDs in a database server, that means 58% (Good SSDs) to 99.975% (Lowest quality commercially viable SSD) chance of an error per year Luckily, ZFS can detect and correct these errors This applies to all storage, not just SSDs, every device fails More Advice: Use quotas and reservations to avoid running out of space Schedule Periodic Scrubs One dataset per database Backups: Live demo of rm -rf'ing the database and getting it back Using clones to test upgrades on real data Naming Conventions: Use a short prefix not on the root filesystem (e.g. /db) Encode the PostgreSQL major version into the dataset name Give each PostgreSQL cluster its own dataset (e.g. pgdb01) Optional but recommended: one database per cluster Optional but recommended: one app per database Optional but recommended: encode environment into DB name Optional but recommended: encode environment into DB username using ZFS Replication Check out the full detailed PDF and implement a similar setup for your database needs *** News Roundup TrueOS Evolving Its "Stable" Release Cycle (https://www.trueos.org/blog/housekeeping-update-infrastructure-trueos-changes/) TrueOS is reformulating its Stable branch based on feedback from users. The goal is to have a “release” of the stable branch every 6 months, for those who do not want to live on the edge with the rapid updates of the full rolling release Most of the TrueOS developers work for iX Systems in their Tennessee office. Last month, the Tennessee office was moved to a different location across town. As part of the move, we need to move all our servers. We're still getting some of the infrastructure sorted before moving the servers, so please bear with us as we continue this process. As we've continued working on TrueOS, we've heard a significant portion of the community asking for a more stable “STABLE” release of TrueOS, maybe something akin to an old PC-BSD version release. In order to meet that need, we're redefining the TrueOS STABLE branch a bit. STABLE releases are now expected to follow a six month schedule, with more testing and lots of polish between releases. This gives users the option to step back a little from the “cutting edge” of development, but still enjoy many of the benefits of the “rolling release” style and the useful elements of FreeBSD Current. Critical updates like emergency patches and utility bug fixes are still expected to be pushed to STABLE on a case-by-case basis, but again with more testing and polish. This also applies to version updates of the Lumina and SysAdm projects. New, released work from those projects will be tested and added to STABLE outside the 6 month window as well. The UNSTABLE branch continues to be our experimental “cutting edge” track, and users who want to follow along with our development and help us or FreeBSD test new features are still encouraged to follow the UNSTABLE track by checking that setting in their TrueOS Update Manager. With boot environments, it will be easy to switch back and forth, so you can have the best of both worlds. Use the latest bleeding edge features, but knowing you can fall back to the stable branch with just a reboot As TrueOS evolves, it is becoming clearer that one role of the system is to function as a “test platform” for FreeBSD. In order to better serve this role, TrueOS will support both OpenRC and the FreeBSD RC init systems, giving users the choice to use either system. While the full functionality isn't quite ready for the next STABLE update, it is planned for addition after the last bit of work and testing is complete. Stay tuned for an upcoming blog post with all the details of this change, along with instructions how to switch between RC and OpenRC. This is the most important change for me. I used TrueOS as an easy way to run the latest version of -CURRENT on my laptop, to use it as a user, but also to do development. When TrueOS deviates from FreeBSD too much, it lessens the power of my expertise, and complicates development and debugging. Being able to switch back to RC, even if it takes another minute to boot, will bring TrueOS back to being FreeBSD + GUI and more by default, instead of a science project. We need both of those things, so having the option, while more work for the TrueOS team, I think will be better for the entire community *** Logical Domains on SunFire T2000 with OpenBSD/sparc64 (http://www.h-i-r.net/2017/05/logical-domains-on-sunfire-t2000-with.html) A couple of years ago, I picked up a Sun Fire T2000. This is a 2U rack mount server. Mine came with four 146GB SAS drives, a 32-core UltraSPARC T1 CPU and 32GB of RAM. Sun Microsystems incorporated Logical Domains (LDOMs) on this class of hardware. You don't often need 32 threads and 32GB of RAM in a single server. LDOMs are a kind of virtualization technology that's a bit closer to bare metal than vmm, Hyper-V, VirtualBox or even Xen. It works a bit like Xen, though. You can allocate processor, memory, storage and other resources to virtual servers on-board, with a blend of firmware that supports the hardware allocation, and some software in userland (on the so-called primary or control domain, similar to Xen DomU) to control it. LDOMs are similar to what IBM calls Logical Partitions (LPARs) on its Mainframe and POWER series computers. My day job from 2006-2010 involved working with both of these virtualization technologies, and I've kind of missed it. While upgrading OpenBSD to 6.1 on my T2000, I decided to delve into LDOM support under OpenBSD. This was pretty easy to do, but let's walk through it Resources: The ldomctl(8) man page (http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man8/sparc64/ldomctl.8) tedu@'s write-up on Flak (for a different class of server) (http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/OpenBSD-on-a-Sun-T5120) A Google+ post by bmercer@ (https://plus.google.com/101694200911870273983/posts/jWh4rMKVq97) Once you get comfortable with the fact that there's a little-tiny computer (the ALOM) powered by VXWorks inside that's acting as the management system and console (there's no screen or keyboard/mouse input), Installing OpenBSD on the base server is pretty straightforward. The serial console is an RJ-45 jack, and, yes, the ubiquitous blue-colored serial console cables you find for certain kinds of popular routers will work fine. OpenBSD installs quite easily, with the same installer you find on amd64 and i386. I chose to install to /dev/sd0, the first SAS drive only, leaving the others unused. It's possible to set them up in a hardware RAID configuration using tools available only under Solaris, or use softraid(4) on OpenBSD, but I didn't do this. I set up the primary LDOM to use the first ethernet port, em0. I decided I wanted to bridge the logical domains to the second ethernet port. You could also use a bridge and vether interface, with pf and dhcpd to create a NAT environment, similar to how I networked the vmm(4) systems. Create an LDOM configuration file. You can put this anywhere that's convenient. All of this stuff was in a "vm" subdirectory of my home. I called it ldom.conf: domain primary { vcpu 8 memory 8G } domain puffy { vcpu 8 memory 4G vdisk "/home/axon/vm/ldom1" vnet } Make as many disk images as you want, and make as many additional domain clauses as you wish. Be mindful of system resources. I couldn't actually allocate a full 32GB of RAM across all the LDOMs I eventually provisioned seven LDOMs (in addition to the primary) on the T2000, each with 3GB of RAM and 4 vcpu cores. If you get creative with use of network interfaces, virtual ethernet, bridges and pf rules, you can run a pretty complex environment on a single chassis, with services that are only exposed to other VMs, a DMZ segment, and the internal LAN. A nice tutorial, and an interesting look at an alternative platform that was ahead of its time *** documentation is thoroughly hard (http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/documentation-is-thoroughly-hard) Ted Unangst has a new post this week about documentation: Documentation is good, so therefore more documentation must be better, right? A few examples where things may have gotten out of control A fine example is the old OpenBSD install instructions. Once you've installed OpenBSD once or twice, the process is quite simple, but you'd never know this based on reading the instructions. Compare the files for 4.8 INSTALL and 5.8 INSTALL. Both begin with a brief intro to the project. Then 4.8 has an enormous list of mirrors, which seems fairly redundant if you've already found the install file. Followed by an enormous list of every supported variant of every supported device. Including a table of IO port configurations for ISA devices. Finally, after 1600 lines of introduction we get to the actual installation instructions. (Compared to line 231 for 5.8.) This includes a full page of text about how to install from tape, which nobody ever does. It took some time to recognize that all this documentation was actually an impediment to new users. Attempting to answer every possible question floods the reader with information for questions they were never planning to ask. Part of the problem is how the information is organized. Theoretically it makes sense to list supported hardware before instructions. After all, you can't install anything if it's not supported, right? I'm sure that was considered when the device list was originally inserted above the install instructions. But as a practical matter, consulting a device list is neither the easiest nor fastest way to determine what actually works. In the FreeBSD docs tree, we have been doing a facelift project, trying to add ‘quick start' sections to each chapter to let you get to the more important information first. It is also helpful to move data in the forms of lists and tables to appendices or similar, where they can easily be references, but are not blocking your way to the information you are actually hunting for An example of nerdview signage (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=29866). “They have in effect provided a sign that will tell you exactly what the question is provided you can already supply the answer.” That is, the logical minds of technical people often decide to order information in an order that makes sense to them, rather than in the order that will be most useful to the reader In the end, I think “copy diskimage to USB and follow prompts” is all the instructions one should need, but it's hard to overcome the unease of actually making the jump. What if somebody is confused or uncertain? Why is this paragraph more redundant than that paragraph? (And if we delete both, are we cutting too much?) Sometimes we don't need to delete the information. Just hide it. The instructions to upgrade to 4.8 and upgrade to 5.8 are very similar, with a few differences because every release is a little bit different. The pages look very different, however, because the not at all recommended kernel free procedure, which takes up half the page, has been hidden from view behind some javascript and only expanded on demand. A casual browser will find the page and figure the upgrade process will be easy, as opposed to some long ordeal. This is important as well, it was my original motivation for working on the FreeBSD Handbook's ZFS chapter. The very first section of the chapter was the custom kernel configuration required to run ZFS on i386. That scared many users away. I moved that to the very end, and started with why you might want to use ZFS. Much more approachable. Sometimes it's just a tiny detail that's overspecified. The apmd manual used to explain exactly which CPU idle time thresholds were used to adjust frequency. Those parameters, and the algorithm itself, were adjusted occasionally in response to user feedback, but sometimes the man page lagged behind. The numbers are of no use to a user. They're not adjustable without recompiling. Knowing that the frequency would be reduced at 85% idle vs 90% idle doesn't really offer much guidance as to whether to enable auto scaling or not. Deleting this detail ensured the man page was always correct and spares the user the cognitive load of trying to solve an unnecessary math problem. For fun: For another humorous example, it was recently observed that the deja-dup package provides man page translations for Australia, Canada, and Great Britain. I checked, the pages are in fact not quite identical. Some contain typo fixes that didn't propagate to other translations. Project idea: attempt to identify which country has the most users, or most fastidious users, by bug fixes to localized man pages. lldb on BeagleBone Black (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arm/2017-May/016260.html) I reliably managed to build (lldb + clang/lld) from the svn trunk of LLVM 5.0.0 on my Beaglebone Black running the latest snapshot (May 20th) of FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT, and the lldb is working very well, and this includes single stepping and ncurses-GUI mode, while single stepping with the latest lldb 4.0.1 from the ports does not work. In order to reliably build LLVM 5.0.0 (svn), I set up a 1 GB swap partition for the BBB on a NFSv4 share on a FreeBSD fileserver in my network - I put a howto of the procedure on my BLog: https://obsigna.net/?p=659 The prerequesites on the Beaglebone are: ``` pkg install tmux pkg install cmake pkg install python pkg install libxml2 pkg install swig30 pkg install ninja pkg install subversion ``` On the FreeBSD fileserver: ``` /pathtothe/bbb_share svn co http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/llvm/trunk llvm cd llvm/tools svn co http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/cfe/trunk clang svn co http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/lld/trunk lld svn co http://llvm.org/svn/llvm-project/lldb/trunk lldb ``` + On the Beaglebone Black: # mount_nfs -o noatime,readahead=4,intr,soft,nfsv4 server:/path_to_the/bbb_share /mnt # cd /mnt # mkdir build # cmake -DLLVM_TARGETS_TO_BUILD="ARM" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="MinSizeRel" -DLLVM_PARALLEL_COMPILE_JOBS="1" -DLLVM_PARALLEL_LINK_JOBS="1" -G Ninja .. I execute the actual build command from within a tmux session, so I may disconnect during the quite long (40 h) build: ``` tmux new "ninja lldb install" ``` When debugging in GUI mode using the newly build lldb 5.0.0-svn, I see only a minor issue, namely UTF8 strings are not displayed correctly. This happens in the ncurses-GUI only, and this is an ARM issue, since it does not occur on x86 machines. Perhaps this might be related to the signed/unsigned char mismatch between ARM and x86. Beastie Bits Triangle BSD Meetup on June 27th (https://www.meetup.com/Triangle-BSD-Users-Group/events/240247251/) Support for Controller Area Networks (CAN) in NetBSD (http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/bx/blosxom.cgi/nb_20170521_0113.html) Notes from Monday's meeting (http://mailman.uk.freebsd.org/pipermail/ukfreebsd/2017-May/014104.html) RunBSD - A site about the BSD family of operating systems (http://runbsd.info/) BSDCam(bridge) 2017 Travel Grant Application Now Open (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/bsdcam-2017-travel-grant-application-now-open/) New BSDMag has been released (https://bsdmag.org/download/nearly-online-zpool-switching-two-freebsd-machines/) *** Feedback/Questions Philipp - A show about byhve (http://dpaste.com/390F9JN#wrap) Jake - byhve Support on AMD (http://dpaste.com/0DYG5BD#wrap) CY - Pledge and Capsicum (http://dpaste.com/1YVBT12#wrap) CY - OpenSSL relicense Issue (http://dpaste.com/3RSYV23#wrap) Andy - Laptops (http://dpaste.com/0MM09EX#wrap) ***

Hola Applelianos, volvemos a nuestra rutina prefierida, el informarlos cada dia sobre el mundo de Apple, hoy como cada dia os traemos las noticias mas relevantes en la actualidad de Apple. aqui os dejamos los enlaces de los temas que tocaremos hoy, siempre a nuestro estilo y con una opinion propia. Informacion de Episodio : https://actualidad.rt.com/actualidad/227562-pareja-eeuu-culpa-apple-muerte-hija http://www.applelianos.com/2017/01/03/22384/ http://www.applelianos.com/2017/01/03/22395/ https://www.applesfera.com/accesorios/el-problema-de-la-bateria-de-los-airpods-se-soluciona-reiniciandolos-para-algunos-usuarios http://www.applelianos.com/2017/01/03/22388/

Hola Applelianos, volvemos a nuestra rutina prefierida, el informarlos cada dia sobre el mundo de Apple, hoy como cada dia os traemos las noticias mas relevantes en la actualidad de Apple. aqui os dejamos los enlaces de los temas que tocaremos hoy, siempre a nuestro estilo y con una opinion propia. Informacion de Episodio : https://actualidad.rt.com/actualidad/227562-pareja-eeuu-culpa-apple-muerte-hija http://www.applelianos.com/2017/01/03/22384/ http://www.applelianos.com/2017/01/03/22395/ https://www.applesfera.com/accesorios/el-problema-de-la-bateria-de-los-airpods-se-soluciona-reiniciandolos-para-algunos-usuarios http://www.applelianos.com/2017/01/03/22388/ Contacto Applelianos : Correo : applelianos@gmail.com Twitter : @applelianos Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/Applelianos Youtube : https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCCcqiu2DKM4eaHWSxhOCqzQ?noapp=1 Página web : http://www.applelianos.com Podcast : http://www.spreaker.com/user/appleamigos Grupo oficial de Applelianos y AlBordeDeLaCama En Telegram : https://telegram.me/ApplelianosPodcast

　　本期我们先来说说逐渐淡出大家视野的黑莓手机，黑莓放弃硬件业务相信关注科技圈的朋友们应该也有所耳闻。不过，黑莓最终的选择并不是静悄悄的跟大家说“拜拜”，而是选择跟中国厂商TCL达成了授权协议。据称，黑莓将把安全软件、服务套装、黑莓名称、Logo和品牌资产全都交付TCL。TCL将负责未来所有黑莓手机的设计、生产、销售和客服。黑莓继续为TCL提供软件支持，而TCL将成立专门的销售团队，负责新款黑莓手机的全球销售。这策略怎么有种似曾相识的感觉，让我想起了近期才爆料不久的诺基亚。　　讲真，诺基亚、黑莓这些历史悠久的品牌能在手机行业中继续生存实属不易，抱有情怀的小编也期待它们未来推出的产品能够拥有更多创新，而不只是贩卖曾经的品牌而已。既然说到创新，Synaptics近日发布了首款光学指纹识别传感器，它可透过1mm盖板玻璃扫描，配置于正面边框底部的盖板玻璃内层（包括2.5D玻璃），实现高性能安全认证，将在2017年第一季度出样，在第二季度大规模量产。那是不是意味着，明年的三星S8要告别Home键了？　　此外，iPhone 6s因意外关机问题又被“通报”了。据外媒报道，韩国技术标准署（KATS）宣布正在考虑对iPhone 6s意外关机问题进行调查。KATS的一位负责人表示，已经了解到一些iPhone存在意外关机问题，并已经与苹果进行了交涉。继三星“爆炸门”之后，苹果大厂的“关机门”同样持续发酵，然而面对庞大的手机市场，越来越多的质量与安全的问题，已成为影响消费者购买的重要因素，在各种“黑科技”、“工业美学”、“低价高配”等等的营销噱头中，如何更好地提升质量，也许又是一件值得厂商们深入思考的问题。　　最后，再来说说两家国产手机厂商在本月互亮大招；拥有超高屏占比的ZUK Edge宣布将于12月20日发布，而采用八曲面屏、支持智慧引擎的荣耀Magic已经在上周五发布，华为Mate9保时捷版更是在刚开卖后不久便售罄，被黄牛炒到2、3万元的高价，另外跳票两个月之久的AirPods也终于开卖了。看来，这2016年的最后一月，还是有很多新品值得我们期待的！

　　本期我们先来说说逐渐淡出大家视野的黑莓手机，黑莓放弃硬件业务相信关注科技圈的朋友们应该也有所耳闻。不过，黑莓最终的选择并不是静悄悄的跟大家说“拜拜”，而是选择跟中国厂商TCL达成了授权协议。据称，黑莓将把安全软件、服务套装、黑莓名称、Logo和品牌资产全都交付TCL。TCL将负责未来所有黑莓手机的设计、生产、销售和客服。黑莓继续为TCL提供软件支持，而TCL将成立专门的销售团队，负责新款黑莓手机的全球销售。这策略怎么有种似曾相识的感觉，让我想起了近期才爆料不久的诺基亚。　　讲真，诺基亚、黑莓这些历史悠久的品牌能在手机行业中继续生存实属不易，抱有情怀的小编也期待它们未来推出的产品能够拥有更多创新，而不只是贩卖曾经的品牌而已。既然说到创新，Synaptics近日发布了首款光学指纹识别传感器，它可透过1mm盖板玻璃扫描，配置于正面边框底部的盖板玻璃内层（包括2.5D玻璃），实现高性能安全认证，将在2017年第一季度出样，在第二季度大规模量产。那是不是意味着，明年的三星S8要告别Home键了？　　此外，iPhone 6s因意外关机问题又被“通报”了。据外媒报道，韩国技术标准署（KATS）宣布正在考虑对iPhone 6s意外关机问题进行调查。KATS的一位负责人表示，已经了解到一些iPhone存在意外关机问题，并已经与苹果进行了交涉。继三星“爆炸门”之后，苹果大厂的“关机门”同样持续发酵，然而面对庞大的手机市场，越来越多的质量与安全的问题，已成为影响消费者购买的重要因素，在各种“黑科技”、“工业美学”、“低价高配”等等的营销噱头中，如何更好地提升质量，也许又是一件值得厂商们深入思考的问题。　　最后，再来说说两家国产手机厂商在本月互亮大招；拥有超高屏占比的ZUK Edge宣布将于12月20日发布，而采用八曲面屏、支持智慧引擎的荣耀Magic已经在上周五发布，华为Mate9保时捷版更是在刚开卖后不久便售罄，被黄牛炒到2、3万元的高价，另外跳票两个月之久的AirPods也终于开卖了。看来，这2016年的最后一月，还是有很多新品值得我们期待的！

Joshua Green, a Bloomberg national correspondent, says Trump's campaign could use their massive list of supporters to build an audience for a possible media venture. Then, Pimm and Lisa discuss the collapse of the Gannett-Tronc deal with Alex Sherman, a Bloomberg deals reporter and host of Bloomberg's Deal of the Week podcast, who says it could be a Harvard case study on how not to do M&A. Rick Bergman, president of Synaptics, says 3D gesture technology would be a natural acquisition for his user interface solutions company. Finally, Laura Blewitt, a Bloomberg oil products reporter, says yesterday's Colonial Pipeline explosion could cause the line to be shut down for weeks, having a huge impact on drivers along the eastern seaboard.

This week on BSDNow, we have some big breaking news about another major switcher to FreeBSD, plus early information about the pending This episode was brought to you by Headlines Leo Laporte tries FreeBSD (http://www.leolaporte.com/blog/a-grand-experiment) Leo Laporte, formerly of TechTV, and now of TWiT.tv, is switching to FreeBSD “The latest debacle over the "forced" upgrade to Windows 10 and Apple's increasingly locked-in ecosystem has got me thinking. Do I really need to use a proprietary operating system to get work done? And while I'm at it, do I need to use commercial cloud services to store my data?” A sometimes Linux user since the mid 90s, Leo talks about his motivations: “But as time went by, even Ubuntu began to seem too commercial to me” “So now for the grand experiment. Is it possible, I wonder, to do everything I need to do on an even more venerable, more robust system: a true UNIX OS, FreeBSD? Here are my requirements” Browsing Email with PGP signing and encryption Coding - I'm a hobbyist programmer requiring support for lisp/scheme/racket, rust, and python (and maybe forth and clojure and meteor and whatever else is cool and new) Writing A password vault. I currently use Lastpass because it syncs with mobile but eventually I'll need to find a FOSS replacement for that, too Photo editing - this is the toughest to replace. I love Photoshop and Lightroom. Can I get by with, say, GIMP and Darktable? I do all of those things on my PCBSD machine all the time “I love Linux and will continue to use it on my laptops, but for my main workhorse desktop I think FreeBSD will be a better choice. I also look forward to learning and administering a true UNIX system.” He got a nice SuperMicro based workstation, with an Intel Xeon E3-1275v5 and an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 GPU I have a server with one of those Skylake E3s, it is very nice “450Mbps Wireless N Dual Band PCI-e Adapter w/ 3x 2dBi Antennas (Yes, sad to say, unless I rewire my house I'll have to use Wi-Fi with this beast. I'll probably rewire my house.)” He plans to have a 4x 1TB ZFS pool, plus a second pool backed by a 512 GB NVMe m.2 for the OS “And I'll continue to chronicle my journey into the land of FOSS here when The Beast arrives. But in the meantime, please excuse me, I've got some reading to do.” Leo went so far as to slap a “Power By FreeBSD” sticker (https://youtu.be/vNVst_rxxm0?t=270) on the back of his new Tesla *** OpenBSD 6.0 to be released on Sept 1st, 2016 (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20160725100831) OpenBSD 6.0 Tenative Released Notes (https://www.openbsd.org/60.html) OpenBSD 6.0 is just around the corner, currently slated for Sept 1st and brings with it a whole slew of exciting new features First up, and let's get this right out of the way.. VAX support has been dropped!! Oh no! However to make up for this devastating loss, armv7 has been added to this release. The tentative release notes are very complete and marks 6.0 as quite an exciting release OpenBSD 6.0 Pre-orders up (http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20160726230851) OpenBSD 6.0 tightens security by losing Linux compatibility (http://www.infoworld.com/article/3099038/open-source-tools/openbsd-60-tightens-security-by-losing-linux-compatibility.html) In related news, infoworld picked up on the pending removal of Linux compat from OpenBSD 6.0. Touted as a security feature, you will soon be unable to run legacy linux binaries on OpenBSD. This has both positives and negatives depending upon your use case. Ironically we're excitedly awaiting improved Linux Compat support in FreeBSD, to allow running some various closed-source applications. (Netflix DRM, Steam, Skype to name a few) *** EuroBSDCon 2016 Schedule released (https://2016.eurobsdcon.org/talks-schedule/) EuroBSDCon 2016 Tutorial Schedule released (https://2016.eurobsdcon.org/tutorials/) EuroBSDCon has announced the list of talks and tutorials for September 22nd-25th's conference! George Neville Neil (Who we've interviewed in the past) is giving the keynote about “The Coming Decades of BSD” *** News Roundup Blast from the past No interview again this week, we're working on getting some people lined up. The Leo Laporte story brought these old gem from TechTV into my youtube playlist: Matt Olander and Murrey Stokey explain FreeBSD on TechTV (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0UsXwRvaIg) Matt Olander and Brooks Davis explain building a cluster with FreeBSD on TechTV (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAsYz5pVwyc) FreeBSD vs Linux Part 1 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91igg2UX7o8) FreeBSD vs Linux Part 2 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oU88fQkwfws) *** Running FreeBSD on the LibreM (https://ericmccorkleblog.wordpress.com/2016/07/16/freebsd-librem-update/) Eric McCorkle (Who has worked on the EFI loader for a while now) has written an update on his efforts to get FreeBSD working properly on the LibreM 13 laptop. Since April the work seems to be progressing nicely Matt Macy's i915 graphics patch works well on the Librem 13, and I personally made sure that the suspend/resume support works. The patch is very stable on the Librem, and I've only had one kernel panic the entire time testing it. The HDMI output Just Works™ with the i915 driver. Even better, it works for both X11 and console modes. Full support for the Atheros 9462 card has been merged in. I've had some occasional issues, but it works for the most part. The vesa weirdness is obviated by i915 support, but it was resolved by using the scfb driver. Some of the outstanding issues still being worked on are support for Synaptics on this particular touchpad, as well as hotkey support for the keyboard, and brightness controls. In addition Eric is still working on the EFI + Geli support, with the eventual goal of getting EFI secure-boot working out of box as well. More OpenBSD syscall fuzzing (http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2016/q3/157) NCC Group's Project Triforce continues its work of fuzzing OpenBSD This time they have found a flaw that allows any user to panic the kernel Attempting to read from the tmpfs_vfsops sysctl tree will panic the system: “attempt to execute user address 0x0 in supervisor mode” This is actually a “good” thing… “Impact: Any user can panic the kernel by using the sysctl call. If a user can manage to map a page at address zero, they may be able to gain kernel code execution and escalate privileges” OpenBSD's default configuration prevents mapping a page at address zero, so the code execution is prevented So while a panic is a bad outcome, it is a lot better than it could have been *** Root privilege escalation on NetBSD (http://akat1.pl/?id=2) This post described a root privilege escalation in NetBSD mail.local is a utility included in the base system for delivering mail to other users on the same system, rather than invoking a mail client and going through the mail server. The mail.local utility contains a ‘time of check / time of use' vulnerability. This means that it checks if a file or permission is valid, and then later accesses that file. If an attacker can change that file between the time when it is checked, and the time when it is used, they may be able to exploit the system by evading the check This is exactly what happens in this case mail.local appends a message to the indicated user's mailbox It first checks if the target user already has an existing mailbox file. If the file exists, but is a link, mail.local exits with an error (to prevent exploits) If the file does not exist, it is created The message is then appended to the file If the file needed to be created, it is chown'd to the owner of the mailbox This is where the problem lies, if mail.local checks and does not find the mailbox, but an attacker then creates a link from the target mailbox to some other file mail.local then appends to that file instead, thinking it is creating the new mailbox Then, mail.local chown's the target file to the user the attacker was trying to send mail to The article explains how this could be used to replace /etc/master.passwd etc, but opts for an easier proof of concept, replacing /usr/bin/atrun, which is run as root every 5 minutes from crontab with a script that will copy the shell to /tmp and mark it setuid The attacker can then run that shell out of /tmp, and be root NetBSD fixed the vulnerability by changing the code flow, separating the cases for opening an existing file from creating a new file. In the case where an existing file is opened, the code then verifies that the file that was opened has the same inode number and is on the same device, as the file that was checked earlier, to ensure it was not a link *** FreeBSD Heap vulnerability in bspatch (https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-16:25.bspatch.asc) An important vuln has been found and fixed in FreeBSD this past week, specifically relating to the ‘bspatch' utility. “Upstream's bspatch.c implementation doesn't check for negative values on the number of bytes to read from the "diff" and "extra" streams, allowing an attacker controlling the patch file to write at arbitrary locations in the heap.” This could result in a crash, or running arbitrary code as the user running bspatch. (Often root) “bspatch's main loop reads three numbers from the "control" stream in the patch: X, Y and Z. The first two are the number of bytes to read from "diff" and "extra" (and thus only non-negative), while the third one could be positive or negative and moves the oldpos pointer on the source image. These 3 values are 64bits signed ints (encoded somehow on the file) that are later passed the function that reads from the streams, but those values are not verified to be non-negative.” “Chrome[OS] has four different implementations of this program, all derived from the same original code by Colin Percival.” Chromium Issue Tracker (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=372525) Patch your systems now! *** Beastie Bits: If you're a BUG member or Organizer, please contact BSD Now (https://twitter.com/q5sys/status/758087886927388673) TedU writes about some interesting localizations to gcc in openbsd, and why they are there (http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/one-reason-to-hate-openbsd) List of Products based on FreeBSD -- Help complete the list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_products_based_on_FreeBSD) Virtualbox v5 hits the FreeBSD Ports tree (http://www.freshports.org/emulators/virtualbox-ose/) Skull Canyon NUC booting FreeBSD 11.0-BETA2 (https://gist.github.com/gonzopancho/b71be467f45594822131f4816d6cb718) 2016 BSDCan Trip Report : Trent Thompson (https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/blog/2016-bsdcan-trip-report-trent-thompson/) August London BSD Meetup (http://mail-index.netbsd.org/regional-london/2016/07/25/msg000542.html) Feedback/Questions Michael Open-Source Alts (http://pastebin.com/eiWbDXTd) Herminio - AP Troubles (http://pastebin.com/w9aCDBut) Jake - Plasma (http://pastebin.com/d15QpVFw) Morgan - Clean DO Droplets (http://pastebin.com/Wj1P7jq8) Chris - Auditd (http://pastebin.com/U9PYEH6K) ***

In Part 1 of our podcast of analysis of Power Integrations' stock, we laid out how we saw it fitting in to stock market trends we've seen in 2016, which have been changing from the pattern followed since the credit crisis of 2008-2009.  This company has suffered from stagnant sales and compressed margins.  However, our methodology is to consider long-term trends and corporate milestones, and we think Power Integrations is beginning another such cycle, even if such episodes have in the past not been extremely robust ever since the company made a splash after its IPO in the late 1990s.  We believe InnoSwitch is the company's first major technological advance since 2008-2009, when it introduced LinkSwitch2.  In Part 2 of this podcast, we describe the strategic aspects of how the other major rapid charging competitor has entered the rapid charging market, and why Power Integrations may have taken the high ground in this intriguing opportunity to make external chargers possibly demanded by the roughly 1.2 billion smart phones being sold annually around the world.  We compare its plight Synaptics, and encourage listeners to also review our stock research podcast of that company.  Synaptics has been a supplier of biometrics and touchscreen integrated circuits to Samsung.

When Synaptics' stock price withered from over $100 per share this summer to the mid-60s, according to Bloomberg a state-backed buyer from China offered to pay $110 per share for the company, and was rebuffed.  What did China see in Synaptics that institutional investors in the U.S. may have missed in this company?  In this podcast, Bill Baker, CFA, tears apart the pieces of the company hidden behind opaque segment reporting and discusses the unique competitive advantages held by Synaptics.

Francis Lee, board chair and former CEO of Synaptics, Inc., spoke on Tuesday, April 23 at Kemper Hall on the UC Davis campus. A 1974 graduate of UC Davis, Lee has led Synaptics' growth into a leading worldwide developer of custom-designed user interface solutions for mobile computing, communications and entertainment devices. Synaptics' mission is to enrich the interaction between users and their intelligent devices. Synaptics products emphasize ease of use, small size, low power consumption, advanced functionality, durability and reliability, making them applicable to a multitude of markets, including mobile phones, notebook computers, PC peripherals, and portable entertainment devices such as MP3 players. Francis Lee Biography: http://engineering.ucdavis.edu/go/50years/innovators/FrancisLee.html

Changes for Hulu, OnLive replaced by OnLive, excited about Synaptics, and more. Hosts: Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Iyaz Akhtar, and Jason Howell Guest: Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-today. Submit and vote on story coverage at technewstoday.reddit.com. We invite you to check out the full show notes for today's episode here. Thanks to CacheFly for the bandwidth for this show. Sponsors: GoToMeeting, promo code: TNT Gazelle

Changes for Hulu, OnLive replaced by OnLive, excited about Synaptics, and more. Hosts: Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Iyaz Akhtar, and Jason Howell Guest: Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-today. Submit and vote on story coverage at technewstoday.reddit.com. We invite you to check out the full show notes for today's episode here. Thanks to CacheFly for the bandwidth for this show. Sponsors: GoToMeeting, promo code: TNT Gazelle

The audio of a call between Joe Liu, a Galleon employee, speaking with Raj Rajaratnam. Prosecutors allege Mr Liu passed along information about Synaptics’s earnings before they were announced in January 2009. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

UC Davis College of Engineering alumnus Francis Lee is the former CEO and current board chair of Synaptics in Santa Clara. The company designs and produces the sensing technology in more than 60 percent of the touch pads in laptops, smart phones, MP3 players and other devices. Lee presents a talk on "A Discussion of 'Human Interface' Technology and Interaction"

Audio File:  Download MP3Transcript: An Interview with Elaine Wherry Co-founder, meebo.com Date: June 19, 2007 NCWIT Interview with Elaine Wherry BIO: Elaine Wherry is co-founder of meebo.com and responsible for meebo's product development. meebo provides free web-based instant messaging to all of the major network services and records approximately 1.5 million logons per day. Elaine grew up on a goat farm in southwest Missouri and then migrated west to California where she majored in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. After graduating, she became the Manager of the Usability & Design team at Synaptics and joined forces with Seth Sternberg and Sandy Jen in 2005 to co-found meebo.com. Lucy Sanders: Hi. This is Lucy Sanders. And I'm the CEO of The National Center for Women in Information Technology. And this is part of a series that we're doing with just outstanding women IT entrepreneurs. Today we are talking to Elaine Wherry, the co‑founder of Meebo.com. Larry Nelson is here with me from w3w3.com. And Larry why don't you say a minute or two about w3w3. Larry Nelson: Well, just quick I have to congratulate you and your team for gathering together some of the top female entrepreneurs in all of America. And it's our honor at w3w3.com just to participate. We're an online Internet radio show. We archive everything. And we just like to share it with the rest of the folks. Lucy: So, Elaine, I have to ask you this question before we get started with the interview. Meebo, what's it mean? Does it mean anything? It's a very cool website by the way. I've been on there looking around. And I just love the fact that you can do all types of instant messaging from the site. And that it's got community around it and people talking to each other. But then I got very curious to if Meebo meant anything. Elaine Wherry: Yes. That's an excellent question. Actually, the name Meebo came about two years prior to our launch in 2005. And so Seth, Sandy and I were at California Pizza Kitchen. And we had been tinkering away on our weeknights and our free weekend just building different types of projects which eventually led to Meebo.com. But around then we realized that we really needed to put a name to our project. And so we sat down and we were looking for two syllable names. We were looking for something that didn't have any higher meaning. And then I had a preference for things that started with M. And one of our greatest limitations was what names were available. So Meebo was available. And our second choice, if it hadn't been Meebo, was Chiba. C‑H‑I‑B‑A. But Meebo was the one that stuck and that we ended up going with. Lucy: So, now Chiba's very cool. I hope you reserved that domain name as well. Elaine: It was already taken. Lucy: Well, Meebo is great. I loved it... Larry: Me too. Lucy: And I noticed that you've got some good vocabulary going there. Meebo me? Meebo.me? Elaine: There's Meebo.com which allows anybody from anywhere, as long as they have a computer terminal, to be able to get web based instant messaging with all of the major networking protocol at anytime. And then Meebo Me allows you to extend that experience beyond just the Meebo.com website. So, you can take a small snippet of embed code and put that on your website or on your blog. And what we've seen is that allows you to be able to communicate with any people who are visiting your site at that time. And so we've seen a lot of people take their Meebo Me and put it... Small businesses love it because then they can see who's visiting their site. And for instance real estate agents, they really like to know, “Hey is there anything I can help you out with?” We've seen librarians really pick it up. And then we actually use it on our jobs page at Meebo.com. So we like to just have an opportunity to just introduce ourselves and give a little bit more information about the job descriptions on our site. Lucy: That's what you need for w3w3.com. Elaine: Radio stations love it. Lucy: Larry. Larry: Well, you're going to have to check us out and let's work out a deal. Lucy: We really could. Well, I think it's a great company. You guys are on a roll. You just had a Series B of Funding. And so congratulations on a great start. Elaine: Oh, thank you so much. Lucy: I think it's also very cool when Walter Mossberg mentions you in the Wall Street Journal. Larry: That's a fact. Elaine: It's a good day. Lucy: That was a good day. Well in talking about the technology, I know you guys are using a lot of cool technology with Ajax and other things. You know that kind of gets us into our first question. How you first got interested in technology and what technologies you think are really cool today. Elaine: Okay. That's a great question. I think personally I think I would probably be considered kind of a late bloomer. I did not get into computer science or into really a scientific field until I entered college. And I think my freshman year I had a calculus course. And I had to buy a graphing calculator. And so when I was on the plane coming back home I found myself trying to program a graphing calculator to do a simple tic‑tac‑toe program and I just couldn't let it go. And I was trying to figure out how to do it. I remember pinging one my friends and asking them how do you try to do randomness? And they're response was, forget the graphing calculator. You really just need to take an introductory computer science course. And I said OK, that's good advice. So winter quarter I enrolled in my first computer science course at Stanford and it went from there. Larry: Wow. Lucy: Wow. And so as you look out in the technology space today. I love technology. I'm quite knowledgeous myself. And I just think there's so many cool things. What things are you seeing that really catch your eye today? Elaine: Yeah. Absolutely. It's an exciting time. I think that one of the things that's happening right now is you see this movement of taking a typical what used to be download applications and all of that, even things like Photoshop‑like applications, are all moving to the web. That was the idea behind Meebo as well. Was how do you take that instant messaging, typically something that's reserved for a client and move that to a browser experience? I think the other thing that's exciting right now is you're seeing a lot of applications revolve around the community experience. And so if you look at things like Wikipedia and a look at Craig's list. All of these products and these experiences, they don't try to define the user experience. They try and put in enough hooks and enough places where the community can contribute to basically evolve their own product. And I think that's incredibly exciting. And I think the third thing that makes this an exciting time to be an entrepreneur is just that the barrier to creating new technology and the cost of just having servers and that. The initial setup it's definitely reduced. And so this is just an exciting time to be able to do prototype. To be able to kind of get out there and look at the open source community and see what tools are already available. Lucy: Absolutely. And I have to say as a side on this. I'm on commission. I'm with the National Academies looking at the IT ecosystem and how it's changing. And all the things you mention are incredibly important trends in the way technology is getting created. Elaine: Absolutely. Larry: You know, I wonder Elaine, if there are many more young women and young girls that are looking into IT and really looking at getting involved. But then you went on to be an entrepreneur. So what is it that drew you to that? Elaine: You know it probably goes back to that late bloomer technology experience that I was talking about when I first came into school. I really hadn't worked that much with computers before. And I think my mother still has her trusty word processor that she prefers much more to her computer that's sitting in a corner. And so when I was approaching computer science for the first time, I was really approaching it with completely fresh eyes. And I remember seeing things that, how to turn on a computer even seemed foreign to me or how to do simple things, like being able to do cut and copy operations right. And there was also this entire jargon around it. And there was just this expectation that you already knew how things worked. And so for me what was really exciting was trying to figure out, after I had gotten over the initial learning curve and deep into C and CQuest Plus coding, was trying to figure out how to make computers and how to make applications be easier for people who were not as familiar with computers. So I think it's probably having been on both sides of being both an office computer science person and also having more experience with it, and just trying to figure out how to create a compelling user experience. Lucy: Moving on in terms of your career and the influences on you in terms of this career path. It sounds like the graphing calculator certainly had a major impact on your journey down the computer science career path. But from a human perspective, you know, who influenced you? Who were your role models? Elaine: Yeah. That's an excellent question. I think that it probably isn't just one single person. I think it really comes down to, for me personally; it comes down to the entrepreneurial spirit that I found within Stanford University. They do a fantastic job in their computer science and their symbolic systems program of exposing students to fellow entrepreneurs in the area and making you feel like everything is possible. Larry: Well, that's fantastic. I bet you've been through quite a few things. But let me just point this out. My wife Pat and I have been married for over 35 years. And we've been in business together all of that time. One of the toughest experiences I had was migrating from my slide rule that my dad gave me to finally getting on to a computer. What is the toughest thing that you had to try to do in developing your career? Elaine: That's a good question. I think people would expect me to say that the toughest thing in my career was probably deciding to leave my previous employer Synaptics, before we had a completely working product. Before we had an audience, before we had investments. But I actually think that my toughest point in my career probably came when I was 18. And when I was 18 I had a full music scholarship at a local university. And I was en route to become, to pursue music, specifically the violin. And so, about two weeks before I was supposed to enter fall quarter, I had this realization that I wasn't entirely sure if that was really what I wanted to do. I had worked very, very hard in high school; and I told my father that I wanted to take a year off. And that was really difficult, because all of my peers were going to the same university. There was definitely a certain path that I was expected to go down. And, just kind of taking a moment to reflect, I realized hey, I'm not entirely sure what I want to be right now. And even though this is the path that is available to me, I really want to spend some more time thinking about that. So I spent a year doing volunteer work, practicing, applying to different conservatories and also applying to different schools, and just getting out into the world and seeing what things were like outside of the experience before I went into university. Lucy: To me, it sounds like an incredible amount of courage. Too often, people don't put their foot on the brake for just a moment and really consider where they're headed and what they're doing. And hats off to you. I think that it probably won't be the last time you do it in your career. Larry: That's right. Elaine: Absolutely. And I have to give credit to my father, who took me seriously that late evening when I came to him and asked if I could do that. Lucy: I think that's great, and I think it just gives you so much more information about which way to head. And speaking of that, we have a lot of people today who asked us about entrepreneurship and if it's a good path for them. What kind of advice would you give them from where you're sitting now, since you're going down the road with entrepreneurship and Meebo? What kinds of things would you say to them? Elaine: I think the first thing would be, it's really hard to be an entrepreneur by yourself. And so I think the first thing that was really important to me was finding good team members, people that you can work beside, when you initially set up on the project. And it's much easier to be able to set deadlines and hold each other accountable if you have another team member besides you. Sammy and Seth are the two best co‑founders that I could ever imagine. And it's just been absolutely fantastic being able to build Meebo beside them. And I think the second thing, after you've found the team members, would be to have built the product and then focus on the business plan second. Just because I think that, often times when you are thinking about the business plan first, you don't necessarily realize all of the value that your product could hold. And it's more important just to get the product out and get it in front of people and get that feedback so you understand how it's going to be used before you start focusing too much on the business aspect of it. And I think the third thing is, after you have a product and it's something that you've initially shown and you have some early adoption, the third thing, once you have the beginning of a business, is to put excellent hiring practices into place. And just to really focus on that early on. Lucy: I have to tell you I'm pumping my fist in the air because, as a computer scientist myself, I totally subscribe to that. I totally subscribe to that. The best products we ever built were the ones where, will I offend listeners if I say where the market plan was kind of done later? Larry: That's good, yeah. Lucy: And they were early prototype. You get them out in front of people. You get the reaction, and you push the technology. Elaine: Exactly. When we initially launched Meebo.com, we really didn't know how many people had similar problems that we did. It all started from Sandy saying that she was having a difficult time being able to do instant messaging from her home and from the library and when she went to visit her friends. And so we initially launched it. And we thought that the initial audience would be people in Internet cafs. And we were wrong. It turned out to be people in the office environment. Lucy: That's right. And all of a sudden you go, whoa! Larry: Whoa‑ho! Lucy: Even better. And in fact, one of my friends today was telling me he uses Meebo and he says, but the IT guys can't catch it! Larry: That's really good. Elaine: Yeah. Actually, it's beginning to reverse itself. Originally, it was something that people would use in order to be able to get around their IT. But now we're finding that a lot of IT people are realizing that it doesn't require download. It doesn't have the viruses associated with it. And so a lot of IT people are now beginning to promote Meebo within their organizations, which is fantastic. Larry: And they should. Lucy: And they should. Larry: And, by the way, I think it's so fantastic that you've got a great team, and the fact that you really honor and respect and appreciate them. That's even better. But I want to go back to you for a second. What would be your one, or two or whatever, personal characteristics that really has given you the advantage of being an entrepreneur? Elaine: I think resourcefulness, just because you have to think about problems from different areas. When you're being an entrepreneur, it probably means that you're solving problems that other people haven't done before. So it's not as easy as plugging your question into Google or into Yahoo! And seeing if anybody has an answer. It's something that you really just have to be able to figure out and kind of really be able to break down problems and think through everything. And I think the second thing kind of is along the same lines, which is perseverance and just not hiring out. And really liking problems and really maintain a passion all the way through. And the third thing is just the respect for teams, just because being able to work beside two other people has been a fantastic experience. And it's really important just to always make sure that the communication is good. Always make sure that you really value what the other people are contributing as well. Lucy: I would probably add one characteristic that I know you have, because it just shows up so much, is passion. Elaine: Oh. Yeah. Lucy: I mean it's just all over everything you're saying and it's so much fun. In terms of you switching a little bit to you balancing your work life and personal life, what kinds of things do you do to bring balance to your days? Elaine: I have to be honest. I really think that probably I'm the worst person of the three of us to ask about the balance between my personal and my professional life. Just because I really enjoy working on Meebo and that's something that definitely extends into my personal life as well. And I think that what does add balance is having a lot of friends in the same space. So, having a lot of people who are doing startups and contributing to startups, who have similar hours, who know where to get all of the pizza places at 11 P.M. on University Street. Just being able to surround yourself with people who are like‑minded really helps. Lucy: Well, and I think the other thing that's really helping, and I think you said it, is what you're working on at Meebo is so well integrated with your passion that that in itself helps bring balance. Elaine: Absolutely. I think that's really true. Lucy: I think it is, too. And actually, I'm a fan of the word integration, as well, in this space. Elaine: Uh‑huh. Larry: She's a really fan of integration. Lucy: Yeah, I'm a real fan of integration. In fact, I've written a blog or two about that. Larry: Isn't that the truth? Elaine: I think it's telling that our original office was my apartment. And so I still have all of the screens and still have the original setup there. So it's just something that's extended into my personal space as well. Lucy: But we also know that you play the violin. Elaine: I do play the violin. I enjoy reading. I enjoy biking. I do a lot of things on the weekends, just to make sure that I have a little bit of contrast to sitting and programming and leading the team. Lucy: Well, and you've also promised to come out here to Colorado to see us and climb Longs Peak. Elaine: That's right, that's right. Larry: There you go. Elaine: Yeah, I did Longs Peak twice when I was in high school, so Colorado is a favorite place of mine. Larry: That's wonderful. Lucy: OK, so we'll count all those things as balance. Larry: That sounds balanced to me. Lucy: The balance to me. Larry: You know, Elaine, at a young age, you have really accomplished a great deal. And I know you are really in the process, knee‑deep, into moving Meebo to a next level and the next level. But, in addition to that, what's next for you? Elaine: That's a good question. I think my first priority...I'm not going to promise. I don't have all the answers. So I think that right now, my immediate focus is just doing whatever I possibly can to make Meebo as successful as it can be. And I think my secondary focus is just making sure that I meet as many excellent, excellent team members and people that I want to work on, work with, so that if there ever is a project beyond Meebo, that I'd be able to continue on there as well. So I think it's really just about meeting other people and surrounding myself with good team players. Lucy: Well, I have no doubt that Meebo is going to be extremely successful. Elaine: Thank you. Lucy: And that you'll go on to lots and lots of extremely cool, fun things. Elaine: Thank you so much. Larry: Well that's a fact. I couldn't agree more. And Lucy was just getting excited hearing the things you were saying. And this is the type of thing that we have to share with many other people, the young people, with their parents. How about them? Lucy: Us old people. Larry: Why did you look at me? Lucy: Haha, sorry. Larry: Well, and by the way, her answer also gave us a very good excuse for calling her back down the road and following up on that. Lucy: Absolutely. So thank you very much, Elaine. This has been really, really fun. And I just wanted to remind listeners where this is hosted. This podcast will be hosted on the NCWIT website, www.ncwit.org, and also on w3w3.com. Larry: You betcha. Lucy: So thanks very much. We really appreciate it. Elaine: Thank you so much. Larry: Thanks Elaine. Series: Entrepreneurial HeroesInterviewee: Elaine WherryInterview Summary: Elaine Wherry is co-founder of meebo.com, which provides free, web-based instant messaging to all of the major network services. Release Date: June 19, 2007Interview Subject: Elaine WherryInterviewer(s): Lucy Sanders, Larry NelsonDuration: 16:42