Microsoft is testing a number of Windows 10 upgrades to a small number of testers, including changes to the Alt-Tab function and a new Start menu design. The Verge reports: "We are freshening up the Start menu with a more streamlined design that removes the solid color backplates behind the logos in the apps list and applies a uniform, partially transparent background to the tiles," explains Microsoft in a blog post. Essentially, the reduction in the color of the blocky tiled interface on the Start menu will simplify it slightly and make it easier to scan for the apps you use on a daily basis. It's a subtle change, but it certainly makes the Start menu look a little less chaotic and avoids many tiles sharing a similar blue color.

Alongside an updated Start menu, the latest Windows 10 build includes some big changes to Alt-Tab. "Beginning with today's build, all tabs open in Microsoft Edge will start appearing in Alt-Tab, not just the active one in each browser window," explains Microsoft. This seems like a change that might be a little confusing for veteran Windows users, but Microsoft is thankfully allowing you to switch back to the classic Alt-Tab experience.

Microsoft is also making some smaller changes with this new Windows 10 build. The default taskbar appearance will also now be more personalized with the Xbox app pinned for Xbox Live users or Your Phone pinned for Android users. This will be limited to new account creation on a PC or first login, so existing taskbar layouts will remain unchanged. Notifications now include an X in the top right corner to allow you to quickly dismiss them, and Microsoft is also improving its Settings app in Windows 10. Links that would typically push you toward the system part of the legacy Control Panel system page will now direct you to the About page in Settings. This will now house the more advanced controls typically found in that system section of the Control Panel, and Microsoft is promising "there will be more improvements coming that will further bring Settings closer to Control Panel."

ZDNet reports: Car manufacturer Mercedes-Benz and chipmaker Nvidia have partnered to build a software-defined computing infrastructure and system that enables vehicles to receive over-the-air software updates to ensure they are equipped with the latest autonomous features. "Together, we're going to revolutionise the car ownership experience, making the vehicle software programmable and continuously upgradeable via over the air updates," Nvidia CEO and founder Jensen Huang said.

The pair will build the software-defined architecture based on Nvidia's Drive AGX Orin system-on-chip (SoC) platform, and it will be a standard feature in the next fleet of Mercedes-Benz vehicles from 2024... "Nvidia's AI computing architecture will help us streamline our journey towards autonomous driving," said Ola Källenius, chairman of the board of management of Daimler and Mercedes-Benz. "These new capabilities and upgrades will be downloaded from the cloud, improving safety, increasing value, and extending the joy of ownership for all Mercedes-Benz customers...."

The pair said the new system would enable level two and three driving autonomy, as well as automated parking functions of up to level four. This would mean, according to the two companies, vehicles would have the ability to "automate driving of regular routes from address to address".
Barron's reports: Nvidia and Mercedes are, in some respects, playing catch-up. Something the rest auto industry is used to these days regarding Tesla. Almost every other auto maker around the globe is pursuing an Electrical Vehicle (EV)-centric strategy nowadays, something unthinkable a few years ago. Tesla CEO Elon Musk deserves a lot of credit for the shift. Tesla led in EV development, and now it's leading in software too...
And Forbes adds this telling quote from NVIDIA's senior director of automotive. "Revenues can be realized at the point of sale, as well as any time during the life of the vehicle. New features may be free of charge, single charge, pay by use, or subscription-based. Customers have shown that when they see the value, they are more than willing to pay for new apps and services."

CNN reports that Apple could announce "a long-rumored switch" from Intel chips to its own ARM-based chips for Macs at its WWDC conference Monday -- citing a report from Bloomberg.

Then they consider the possible advantages: When that does happen, the major changes Mac users are likely to see include better battery life and sleeker devices. Apple's in-house chips have a smaller architecture and are more efficient because they are designed for smartphones, according to David McQueen, research director at ABI Research... "Moving to ARM-based chips can bring efficiencies and better battery life without sacrificing performance," McQueen said. "It may also help to cut out some size issues, possibly allowing Macs to be made thinner, while also negating the need for fans," he added.

McQueen says having the same chips running on iPhones, iPads and Macs would also make it easier to standardize the user experience across all three devices. "It will allow all Apple devices to work more seamlessly together," he said. "It should also make it much easier for developers to create apps that are capable of running across Apple devices." There's another big potential benefit to using the same chips for iPhones and Macs, particularly with the growth of 5G networks. "Although Apple has given no indication that it is looking to do so, this switch does also open the doors for Apple to launch MacBooks with cellular connectivity capabilities," Mardikar said.

For Apple, bringing processor production in-house will likely allow the company to offer better performance upgrades with each generation of devices because it will no longer be tied to Intel's upgrade cycle for new chips. "They also get to control their own product launch cadence," said Jitesh Ubrani, a research manager at IDC. "In the past, they had to really wait on Intel to launch new processors before they could refresh the Mac lineup."

Slashdot reader shirappu writes: For eight years now, the Mars Rover Curiosity has been exploring the surface of Mars. Even now, it's still exploring, and still getting upgrades. According to Tech Crunch, NASA is now looking to interested volunteers to help upgrade the rover's terrain-scanning AI systems by annotating image data of the planet itself.
"The problem is that while there are lots of ready-made data sets of images with faces, cats and cars labeled, there aren't many of the Martian surface annotated with different terrain types..." notes TechCrunch. "Improvements to the AI might let the rover tell not just where it can drive, but the likelihood of losing traction and other factors that could influence individual wheel placement."

shirappu continues: Volunteers go through a short tutorial after which they can label images to help the rover better understand the terrain on which it drives. The system is expected to be used in future planet rover robots, and the project marks an interesting example of open crowd-sourcing to improve machine learning systems, and how it is impacting technology even on other planets.

Click this link for the AI4Mars site link where people can volunteer.

Just like nearly everything else on the internet, streaming services are ruled by recommendation algorithms that are designed to predetermine what people want before they ask for it. WarnerMedia is trying to accomplish the opposite with HBO Max. From a report: The company's new streaming service, which will allow for three concurrent streams, is positing itself as a human-first platform -- the opposite of Netflix's strategy. As streaming becomes more of a centerpiece in people's homes and more platforms find their way to people's television sets, focusing on improving the actual curation system subscribers use is just as important as available content, Sarah Lyons, senior vice president of product experience, told The Verge. CNET adds: Like rivals Netflix and Disney Plus, HBO Max has a sprawling catalog of hit shows and movies, plus a big-budget slate of exclusive originals packed with stars. But HBO Max is the most expensive of the bunch. New subscribers can sign up and pay a simple $15 a month subscription after a week-long free trial, the same price HBO already charges for its linear channel on most pay-TV providers and for its preexisting standalone streaming service, HBO Now. But if you're already paying for HBO in some form, the amount you'll have to pay for Max now, or whether you have to pay anything extra at all... well, it's complicated. "The question is: Does your provider have to deal with us for Max and do you move over? That answer will be fairly simple, and then beyond that it gets a little more complicated," Andy Forssell, the general manager of WarnerMedia's streaming operation, said in an interview last week. "We've got really broad distribution, and ... midnight next Tuesday we'll be where we are -- not that that's an end point, if there any discussions undone." To entice you to give it a try, HBO Max has padded itself with more content than you'll find on either the regular HBO channel or HBO Now.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A Norwegian infosec firm discovered a new Android vulnerability, which they've dubbed Strandhogg 2.0. Security firm Promon says "Strandhogg" is an old Norse strategy for coastline raids and abductions, and today's vulnerability is the "evil twin" of a similar one discovered in 2019. The original Strandhogg used an Android feature called taskAffinity to hijack applications -- by setting the taskAffinity of one of its activities to match the packageName of any other app, then setting allowTaskReparenting="true" in its own manifest, the Strandhogg app would be launched in place of the target app. Strandhogg's 1.0 major weakness was the need to declare taskAffinity in the Android Manifest. The Manifest is a plain XML file and must be included in the package hosted at the Play Store itself -- it can't simply be downloaded later, after the app is installed. This made it relatively simple to scan the Play store for apps with sketchy-looking taskAffinity declarations. Strandhogg 2.0 doesn't require any special settings in a package's Android Manifest -- meaning the attacking code doesn't need to be present on the Play Store to be scanned at all. Instead, the attacker can download the attack code later, once the trojan app or game is already installed on a user's device.

In addition to the obvious credential-stealing attacks, Strandhogg can be used to trick users into escalating its privileges based on the trust they have for the apps it hijacks. For example, a user tapping Camera is asked if they want to grant it permission to access the camera and microphone -- if the user taps Yes, they've actually given those privileges to the malware app, not the Camera app it covered up on the screen. Strandhogg 2.0 affects all versions of Android prior to 10 -- which translates to roughly 90 percent of the Android userbase. Google rolled out a patch to close the Strandhogg 2.0 vulnerability, CVE-2020-0096, in May's Android Security Update. This is good news for Pixel users -- but as always, carriers and OEMs may delay those upgrades significantly.

Alienware has announced the second generation of its flagship Area-51m gaming laptop, the Area-51m R2. It's largely similar on the outside to the original Area-51m, but the specs are almost completely overhauled on the inside, with 10th Gen Intel processors, new Nvidia GPUs, faster RAM, and better display options. From a report: All of those upgrades will be limited to the new R2 model, though. Despite Alienware's goals for future-proofed upgradable parts, the Area-51m has failed to live up to its potential. One of the biggest draws of the Area-51m was the option for user-replaceable parts. Most modern laptops have nearly all of their internal components sealed in place in an effort to cut down on size. But the Area-51m took a different approach. It was big, easy to disassemble, and made it simple to replace nearly every internal component, from RAM to the CPU to the GPU to even the thermal cooling components. The idea was to make something more portable than any other desktop but more customizable than any laptop. Alienware's parent company, Dell, even built its own system for replaceable GPUs in laptops, called DGFF (Dell Graphics Form Factor) to make it easier to upgrade in the future.

A Forbes contributor notes that Belkin abruptly announced the end-of-life for its Wemo NetCams, which will discontinued on May 29 2020. But that's just the beginning... Unlike many other end-of-life announcements which simply render products ineligible for support or upgrades, Belkin is literally pulling the plug on its Cloud service, rendering its NetCam range of home security cameras as useless beige bricks...

The question of how Belkin are deliberately bricking their products needs to be called out. When the NetCam was released, users had the option to use the Wemo software (which was lousy) or connect to the cameras using ffmpeg with their favourite NVS platform or even with VLC or equivalent. However, in a firmware update a few years back — Belkin disabled this capability. While workarounds do exist, such as the one published by Vladimir Sobolev in 2018, the whole premise of buying a Belkin product is for ease of use and simplicity. Belkin claim to design 'people inspired products'. All customers of Belkin need to look carefully at these words and see how they match up with their deeds?

How many other Belkin products might be switched off on a whim?

The criticism can be applied to cloud-enabled products as a whole, but in the main — vendors understand that to alienate customers by bricking their possessions is not a viable long term strategy to maintain trust...

Forthcoming European legislation forcing technology companies to make their products easier to repair should go some way to address these concerns.
The article points out that even Microsoft gave Windows 7 users five years of warnings about its 2020 end-of-life.

And it also complains property owners now face two difficult choices: "Either leaving their property with no security system and zero surveillance capability, or breaking the quarantine orders in order to install new equipment."

The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), which is the organization that rates the content of video games, announced a new label today to indicate that a game will offer in-game purchases of loot boxes or similar types of items that provide a player with randomized rewards. The Verge reports: "This new Interactive Element, In-Game Purchases (Includes Random Items), will be assigned to any game that contains in-game offers to purchase digital goods or premiums with real world currency (or with virtual coins or other forms of in-game currency that can be purchased with real world currency) for which the player doesn't know prior to purchase the specific digital goods or premiums they will be receiving (e.g., loot boxes, item packs, mystery awards)," according to the ESRB. The label will be applied to "loot boxes, gacha games, item or card packs, prize wheels, treasure chests, and more," the organization said.

The new label will sit below the game's content rating, as seen in the photo above. The ESRB originally introduced the "in-game purchases" label in February 2018, but that label was broad enough that it could be applied to any game that offered any sort of buyable digital good, including non-randomized items like subscriptions, season passes, or upgrades to disable ads.

OnePlus today launched the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro today. Both are powered by Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 865 chipset, but it's the larger OnePlus 8 Pro that comes with the big display and camera improvements. OnePlus worked a 90Hz display into the OnePlus 7 Pro last year, and that's jumping up to 120Hz for 2020. From a report: It's a jump that puts it on par with Samsung's latest Galaxy S20. OnePlus is using a 6.78-inch QHD+ display on the OnePlus 8 Pro, and the 120Hz display will help with smoother animations, scrolling, and general navigation in Android. OnePlus has even added sensors at the front and back of the display for improved automatic brightness. The other big upgrade this year is the new quadruple camera system. OnePlus is using a 48-megapixel main camera, alongside a 48-megapixel ultra-wide lens, a telephoto lens, and a color filter camera. The ultra-wide lens includes a 120-degree angle, and the telephoto supports 3x hybrid, and 30x digital zoom.

[...] The camera and the screen might be the big upgrades, but OnePlus has also improved the internals. Inside there's up to 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM, up to 256GB of UFS 3.0 storage, and Wi-Fi 6 support. OnePlus is also including an IP68 rating for the OnePlus 8 Pro, meaning it should be dust resistant and be dunked in up to 1.5 meters of water for up to 30 minutes. [...] OnePlus is planning to launch both the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro in the US on April 29th, and April 21st in Europe. The regular OnePlus 8 will be priced at $699 for an 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage model, and $799 for a 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage option. The OnePlus 8 Pro will come in two prices: $899 for 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage or $999 for 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage.

sixoh1 shared this story from the Wall Street Journal: Home internet and wireless connectivity in the U.S. have largely withstood unprecedented demands as more Americans work and learn remotely. Broadband and wireless service providers say traffic has jumped in residential areas at times of the day when families would typically head to offices and schools. Still, that surge in usage hasn't yet resulted in widespread outages or unusually long service disruptions, industry executives and analysts say. That is because the biggest increases in usage are happening during normally fallow periods.

Some service providers have joked that internet usage during the pandemic doesn't compare to the Super Bowl or season finale of the popular HBO show "Game of Thrones" in terms of strain on their networks, Evan Swarztrauber, senior policy adviser to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said this week on a call hosted by consulting company Recon Analytics Inc.Broadband consumption during the hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m . has risen by more than 50% since January, according to broadband data company OpenVault, which measured connections in more than one million homes. Usage during the peak early-evening hours increased 20% as of March 25. OpenVault estimates that average data consumption per household in March will reach nearly 400 gigabytes, a nearly 11% increase over the previous monthly record in January....

Some carriers that use cells on wheels and aerial network-support drones after hurricanes or tornadoes are now deploying those resources to neighborhoods with heavy wireless-service usage and places where health-care facilities need additional connectivity. Several wireless carriers including Verizon, T-Mobile US Inc. and AT&T Inc. have been given temporary access to fresh spectrum over the past week to bolster network capacity.
While Netflix is lowering its video quality in Canada, the Journal reports Netflix isn't as worried about the EU: Netflix Vice President Dave Temkin, speaking on a videoconference hosted by the network analytics company Kentik, said his engineers took some upgrades originally planned for the holiday season near the end of 2020 and simply made them sooner. A European regulator earlier this month asked Netflix to shift all its videos to standard-definition to avoid taxing domestic networks. Mr. Temkin said Netflix managed to shave its bandwidth usage using less drastic measures. "None of it is actually melting down," he said.
And the article also has stats from America's ISPs and cellphone providers:

• AT&T said cellular-data traffic was almost flat, with more customers using their home wi-fi networks instead -- but voice phone calls increased as much as 44%.
• Charter saw increases in daytime network activity, but in most markets "levels remain well below capacity and typical peak evening usage."
• Comcast says its peak traffic increased 20%, but they're still running at 40% capacity.

NASA will spend 11 months upgrading the only piece of its Deep Space Network that can send commands to the prob, which has crossed into interstellar space. From a report: Voyager 2 has been traveling through space for 43 years, and is now 13 billion miles from Earth. But every so often, something goes wrong. At the end of January, for instance, the robotic probe executed a routine somersault to beam scientific data back to Earth when an error triggered a shutdown of some of its functions. "Everybody was extremely worried about recovering the spacecraft," said Suzanne Dodd, who is the Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. The mission's managers on our planet know what to do when such a fault occurs. Although it takes about a day and a half to talk to Voyager 2 at its current distance, they sent commands to restore its normal operations.

But starting on Monday for the next 11 months, they won't be able to get word to the spry spacecraft in case something again goes wrong (although the probe can still stream data back to Earth). Upgrades and repairs are prompting NASA to take offline a key piece of space age equipment used to beam messages all around the solar system. The downtime is necessary because of a flood of new missions to Mars scheduled to leave Earth this summer. But the temporary shutdown also highlights that the Deep Space Network, essential infrastructure relied upon by NASA and other space agencies, is aging and in need of expensive upgrades. On any given day, NASA communicates with an armada of spacecraft in deep space. These long distance calls require the most powerful radio antennas in the world. Luckily NASA has its own switchboard, the Deep Space Network or DSN.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Networking giant Cisco is getting into the coronavirus monitoring and mitigation game with its Webex remote meeting property. The company notes that in the wake of mandates issued to employees to halt travel plans and/or work from home, traffic across its Webex backbone has increased significantly. Webex meeting traffic connecting Chinese users to global workplaces has increased by a factor of 22 since the outbreak began; traffic in other Asian countries is up by 400 percent or more, and free signup rates in impacted countries have increased 700 percent or more. In response, Cisco is offering temporarily unlimited usage (with no time restrictions) in all countries where the service is available (full list here), not just the ones worst hit by coronavirus. The company is also offering free 90-day licenses to businesses that are not currently Webex customers and offering free upgrades to customers whose current plan is insufficient to accommodate increased traffic due to the outbreak.

In the worst affected countries, telepresence and remote work software like Webex is currently the only alternative to a complete shutdown of activities. In its press release, Cisco highlights the Nesbitt Center, an organization working with disabled young adults in Hong Kong. All Hong Kong schools, including the Nesbitt Center, have been required to suspend day programs during the outbreak. Webex videoconferencing has allowed the Nesbitt Center to continue delivering educational sessions despite the lockdown. Ars Technica also recommends Jitsi, a "free and open source software, offering video call and screen sharing capabilities." There's also Jitsi Meet for people "who just need to get something done on-the-fly with no setup at all."

Do you have a favorite remote work software?

Amazon's Ring doorbell cameras just added two new privacy and security features "amid rising scrutiny on the company," reports The Hill, including "a second layer of authentication by requiring users to enter a one-time code shared via email or SMS when they try to log in to see the feed from their cameras starting this week...

"Until recently the company did not notify users when their accounts had been logged in to, meaning that hackers could have accessed camera feeds without owners being aware."

But CBS News reports that the changes appeared "two weeks after a study showed the company shares customers' personal information with Facebook, Google and other parties without users' consent." In late January, an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) study found the company regularly shares user data with Facebook, including that of Ring users who don't have accounts on the social media platform... EFF claims the company shares a lot of other user data, including people's names, email addresses, when the doorbell app was being used, the number of devices a user has, model numbers of devices, user's unique internet addresses and more. Such information could allow third parties to know when Ring users are at home or away, and potentially target them with advertising for services based on that info...

The change will let Ring users block the company from sharing most, but not all, of their data. A company spokesperson said people will be able to opt out of those sharing agreements "where applicable." The spokesperson declined to clarify what "where applicable" might mean.
Evan Greer, deputy director of digital rights organization Fight for the Future, shared a skeptical response with The Hill.

"No amount of security updates will change the fact that these devices are enabling a nationwide, for-profit, surveillance empire. Amazon Ring is fundamentally incompatible with democracy and human rights."

Elon Musk's Tesla technology is far ahead of the industry giants, a new report has concluded. From the report: This is the takeaway from Nikkei Business Publications' teardown of the Model 3, the most affordable car in the U.S. automaker's all-electric lineup, starting at about $33,000. What stands out most is Tesla's integrated central control unit, or "full self-driving computer." Also known as Hardware 3, this little piece of tech is the company's biggest weapon in the burgeoning EV market. It could end the auto industry supply chain as we know it. One stunned engineer from a major Japanese automaker examined the computer and declared, "We cannot do it." The module -- released last spring and found in all new Model 3, Model S and Model X vehicles -- includes two custom, 260-sq.-millimeter AI chips. Tesla developed the chips on its own, along with special software designed to complement the hardware. The computer powers the cars' self-driving capabilities as well as their advanced in-car "infotainment" system.

This kind of electronic platform, with a powerful computer at its core, holds the key to handling heavy data loads in tomorrow's smarter, more autonomous cars. Industry insiders expect such technology to take hold around 2025 at the earliest. That means Tesla beat its rivals by six years. The implications for the broader auto industry are huge and -- for some -- frightening. Tesla built this digital nerve center through a series of upgrades to the original Autopilot system it introduced in 2014. What was also called Hardware 1 was a driver-assistance system that allowed the car to follow others, mostly on highways, and automatically steer in a lane. Every two or three years, the company pushed the envelope further, culminating in the full self-driving computer.

"Cut back on email if you want to fight global warming," read the headline on a recent article at Bloomberg:
[A]ll those messages require energy to preserve them. And despite the tech industry's focus on renewables, the advents of streaming and artificial intelligence are only accelerating the amount of fossil fuels burned to keep data servers up. Right now, data centers consume about 2 percent of the world's electricity, but that is expected to reach 8 percent by 2030. Moreover, only about 6 percent of all data ever created is in active use today, according to research from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. That means 94 percent is sitting in a vast "landfill" with a massive carbon footprint.

"It's costing us the equivalent of maintaining the airline industry for data we don't even use," said Andrew Choi, a senior research analyst at Parnassus Investments, a $27 billion environmental, social and governance firm in San Francisco. Kirk Bresniker, chief architect of Hewlett Packard Labs, said these server farms use energy both to retain your data and when you use it... And when you empty the email trash, you probably aren't actually erasing the data. Multiple copies of even decade-old emails are stored on servers around the world, still using energy...

Bresniker says the tech industry is "flying blind" when it comes to the true cost of storing data. The picture is clouded by a constant stream of efficiency and memory upgrades, increased renewable power and AI aimed at data-center efficiency. "We don't really understand what the footprint is," he said... The sum of all the world's data in 2018 was 33 zettabytes — 33 trillion gigabytes — but by 2025 it could increase fivefold, to 175 zettabytes, according to International Data Corp. Every day, the world produces about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data... Computing workloads are likely to more than double as more AI comes online, more devices are connected and people do more work in the cloud...

Choi says the problem is getting too big, too fast... Training an AI model emits about as much carbon as the lifetime emissions associated with running five cars.

Shift from radar to GPS should make tracking faster and more accurate, allowing more planes in the air. From a report: Since World War II, air-traffic controllers have used radar to keep track of aircraft. But as of Jan. 1, most planes and helicopters flying in the U.S. must be equipped with transponders that allow their movements to be traced with GPS coordinates. The deadline caused a flurry of upgrades last year as operators who hadn't yet complied with the mandate rushed to equip their aircraft in time. Now, more than 100,000 commercial and general aviation aircraft have the transponders, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, including nearly all commercial aircraft and an estimated 60% of general aviation aircraft that need it.

"If you're flying an antique plane in the middle of Ohio, you don't have to have it," said John Zimmerman, vice president of Sporty's Pilot Shop, an Ohio retailer and flight school. The U.S. controls 29.4 million square miles of airspace, including all of the U.S., large portions of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Gulf of Mexico. The FAA mandate primarily applies to Class A airspace, which is 18,000 feet or more above sea level; Class B airspace, the areas surrounding the nation's busiest airports; Class C airspace, the areas around smaller regional airports; and above 10,000 feet in Class E, the most common airspace. LaGuardia Airport in New York is Class B. Richmond International Airport in Virginia is Class C.

"[A]t the very time that it's become increasingly difficult for anyone to conduct their day to day lives without using the Net, some categories of people are increasingly being treated badly by many software designers," argues long-time Slashdot reader Lauren Weinstein:
The victims of these attitudes include various special needs groups — visually and/or motor impaired are just two examples — but the elderly are a particular target. Working routinely with extremely elderly persons who are very active Internet users (including in their upper 90s!), I'm particularly sensitive to the difficulties that they face keeping their Net lifelines going. Often they're working on very old computers, without the resources (financial or human) to permit them to upgrade. They may still be running very old, admittedly risky OS versions and old browsers — Windows 7 is going to be used by many for years to come, despite hitting its official "end of life" for updates a few days ago.

Yet these elderly users are increasingly dependent on the Net to pay bills (more and more firms are making alternatives increasingly difficult and in some cases expensive), to stay in touch with friends and loved ones, and for many of the other routine purposes for which all of us now routinely depend on these technologies....

There's an aspect of this that is even worse. It's attitudes! It's the attitudes of many software designers that suggest they apparently really don't care about this class of users much — or at all. They design interfaces that are difficult for these users to navigate. Or in extreme cases, they simply drop support for many of these users entirely, by eliminating functionality that permits their old systems and old browsers to function.
He cites the example of Discourse, the open source internet forum software, which recently announced they'd stop supporting Internet Explorer. Weinstein himself hates Microsoft's browser, "Yet what of the users who don't understand how to upgrade? Who don't have anyone to help them upgrade? Are we to tell them that they matter not at all?"

So he confronted Stack Exchange co-founder Jeff Atwood (who is also one of the co-founders of Discourse) on Twitter — and eventually found himself blocked.

"Far more important though than this particular case is the attitude being expressed by so many in the software community, an attitude that suggests that many highly capable software engineers don't really appreciate these users and the kinds of problems that many of these users may have, that can prevent them from making even relatively simple changes or upgrades to their systems — which they need to keep using as much as anyone — in the real world."

Tuxedo Computers "has teamed up with Manjaro to tease not one, not two, but several" Linux laptops, Forbes reports:
The Tuxedo Computers InfinityBook Pro 15...can be loaded with up to 64GB of RAM, a 10th-generation Intel Core i7 CPU, and as high as a 2TB Samsung EVO Plus NVMe drive. You can also purchase up to a 5-year warranty, and user-installed upgrades will not void the warranty...

Manjaro Lead Project Developer Philip Müller also teased a forthcoming AMD Ryzen laptop [on Forbes' "Linux For Everyone" podcast]. "Yes, we are currently evaluating which models we want to use because the industry is screaming for that," Müller says. "In the upcoming weeks we might get some of those for internal testing. Once they're certified and the drivers are ready, we'll see when we can launch those." Müller also tells me they're prepping what he describes as a "Dell XPS 13 killer."

"It's 10th-generation Intel based, we will have it in 14-inch with a 180-degree lid, so you can lay it flat on your desk if you like," he says.
The Manjaro/Tuxedo Computers partnership will also offer some intense customization options, Forbes adds.

"Want your company logo laser-etched on the lid? OK. Want to swap out the Manjaro logo with your logo on the Super key? Sure, no problem. Want to show off your knowledge of fictional alien races? Why not get a 100% Klingon keyboard?"

In 2018 an associate technology editor at Fast Company's Co.Design wrote an article titled "Why I'm switching from Chrome to Firefox and you should too."

Today shanen shared a similar article from Digital Trends. Their writer announces that after years of experimenting with both browsers, they've also finally switched from Chrome to Mozilla Firefox -- "and you should too." The biggest draw for me was, of course, the fact that Mozilla Firefox can finally go toe-to-toe with Google Chrome on the performance front, and often manages to edge it out as well... Today, in addition to being fast, Firefox is resource-efficient, unlike most of its peers. I don't have to think twice before firing up yet another tab. It's rare that I'm forced to close an existing tab to make room for a new one. On Firefox, my 2015 MacBook Pro's fans don't blast past my noise-canceling headphones, which happened fairly regularly on Chrome as it pushed my laptop's fans to their helicopter-like limits to keep things running. This rare balance of efficiency and performance is the result of the countless under-the-hood upgrades Firefox has rolled out in the last couple of years...

Its Enhanced Tracking Protection framework keeps your identity safe by blocking trackers and cookies that otherwise follow you around the internet and collect sensitive information you probably didn't even know you were giving up. On top of that, Firefox can warn if a website is covertly mining cryptocurrency in the background. Most of these protections kick in by default and you have an exhaustive set of options to customize them the way you want. Firefox also lets you look into just how invasive a website is. It actively updates your personal privacy report so you can check how many trackers it has shut overall and for a specific website...

What really clinched the switch to Mozilla Firefox was the fact that it's the only cross-platform browser that's not running Google's open-source Chromium platform. Microsoft's Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi -- each of these browsers run on Chromium, accelerating Google's dominance over the web even when you're not directly using a Chrome user. Firefox, on the other hand, is powered by Mozilla's in-house Gecko engine that's not dependent on Chromium in any way. It may not seem like as vital of a trait as I make it sound, but it truly is, even though Chromium is open-source. Google oversees a huge chunk of the web, including ads, browser, and search, and this supremacy has allowed the company to pretty much run a monopoly and set its own rules for the open internet...

Mozilla as a company has, despite a rocky journey, often taken bold stances in complex situations. In the Cambridge Analytica aftermath, Mozilla announced it would no longer run Facebook advertisements, cutting off direct marketing to over 2 billion users. In a world of tech companies taking frail, facile shots at protecting user privacy and barely delivering on their commitments, Mozilla is a breath of fresh air and you no longer have to live with any compromises to support it.