Google has announced that E2EMail, an experimental end-to-end encryption system, has now been given to the open-source community with no strings attached. Whether you are concerned about government surveillance and spying, man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacks by threat actors or you are an enterprise player with the need to keep communications as secure and private as possible, end-to-end encryption is viewed as a method to prevent snooping.
Microsoft has announced a major feature update for the Mail and Calendar apps in Windows 10, including the highly anticipated and a little overdue Focused Inbox. Focused Inbox for the Windows 10 Mail app introduces a feature that automatically sorts out important email in the cloud and places them in a Focused tab while everything else lands in the Other tab. It was a key feature of the Accompli email app, which became Outlook for iOS and Android after Microsoft acquired the company in 2014.
In 2016, Linux turned 25. When it began, it was a student project. Today, Linux runs everything. From smartphones to supercomputers to web servers to clouds to the car, it's all Linux, all the time. Even the one exception, the end-user, is moving to Linux. Android is now the most popular end-user operating system.
Google announced that it has acquired Qwiklabs, a hands-on learning platform for those who want to become more familiar with operating cloud environments and writing applications that run on them. Qwiklabs, which launched in 2012, has only focused on teaching skills for Amazon’s AWS platform so far. Given AWS’ dominance in the marketplace, that made perfect sense. Amazon even uses Qwiklabs as its go-to service for offering self-paced labs for developers on its platform.
As The Walking Cat discovered by taking a peek into the public preview of SQL Server on Linux released last week, Microsoft seemed to be using the Microsoft Research "Drawbridge" technology to bring SQL Server to Linux. Drawbridge is an adaptation of the Library OS concept on which Microsoft Research has been working for the past several years. It's a form of virtualization specifically for application sandboxing. Drawbridge played a role in getting the Bash shell to run on Windows 10, too.
Google has snapped up Eyefluence, a startup focused on developing eye-tracking technology. As first spotted by Mattermark, Eyefluence quietly announced the purchase on Monday. On the Milpitas, CA-based firm's blog, Eyefluence thanked its partners, investors and advisors for getting the company this far on its town, but since becoming established in 2013, the firm has caught Google's eye.
Apple will use next week's media event to release a new 13-inch MacBook, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and 15-inch MacBook Pro, according to Ming-Chi Kuo at KGI Securities. Likely the headliner of the event, the 15-inch MacBook Pro will feature a Retina display, Touch ID, an OLED function row above the keyboard, and upgraded internals, according to rumors. It's not clear what upgrades the 13-inch version of the MacBook Pro will see.
Microsoft looks to be set to add more new and seemingly small-business-focused applications to its Office 365 Business Premium subscription. There's a sign-up page for "business apps for Office" that I saw via MSPowerUser.com that touts a handful of apps, including MileIQ, Bookings, Invoice, Spend, Point, and Presence. The apps listed seem to be supplementary to Microsoft's existing Office app suite, and also seem to be mobile-first and cross-platform.
A majority of Mozilla users were served encrypted pageloads for the first time yesterday, meaning their web browsing data was secured from snoopers and hackers while in transit. The HTTPS milestone was tweeted by Josh Aas, head of the Let’s Encrypt initiative which has been working to help smaller websites switch to encrypting their web traffic.
Apple will release iOS 10 on September 13, which means that you have a few days to get your hardware ready for the big upgrade. Here's what you need to do to make sure that things go smoothly for you. Before you do anything major such as upgrading your device you need to make sure that you have a backup just in case things don't go smoothly. You can either back up your data to iCloud, or if you don't have enough space you can take the old-school road and connect your iPhone or iPad to a PC and do the backup through iTunes.