Author: Peter Bright

While the Chrome browser is extremely popular, it has gained something of a reputation. What hippos are to little plastic balls, Chrome is to memory: hungry, hungry.

Chrome 45, released earlier this week, should make Google’s browser a little lighter. The company described some improvements yesterday that should reduce the browser’s footprint.

Perhaps the most significant change for tab hoarders such as myself is new behavior when reloading all your tabs when you first launch the browser. Chrome 45 does a couple of things differently. First, it loads the tabs from most to least recently used. This should mean that the tabs you’re most interested in and want to use first will be the first to load. Second, if your system is low on memory, it will stop restoring tabs in the background. Clicking the tab to view it will, of course, load it, but otherwise it’ll remain dormant.

When I used Skype Translator in December last year, it was breathtaking. I held a conversation with a native Spanish speaker in spite of not speaking a word of Spanish.

Since then, Skype Translator has added more languages—it now speaks Mandarin and Italian in addition to English and Spanish—and in instant messaging it handles many more, some fifty in total, including Klingon.

Until now, the preview has had only limited availability; interested parties had to sign up specially and could not get immediate access. That limitation ends today. The preview is now freely downloadable (Windows Store link) and available to anyone using Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 preview.

Microsoft launched today a shiny new code editor for Windows, OS X, and Linux: Visual Studio Code. It’s a smart looking text editor with IntelliSense support, git integration, and a few other bits and pieces that developers will enjoy.

What Microsoft didn’t say when announcing the new editor was how it built Visual Studio Code. In a move that might seem a little surprising, given the regular animosity between the two companies, the editor is built on top of Chromium, the open source version of Google’s Chrome browser.

The app is built using an open source desktop application framework developed by GitHub called Electron. Electron uses HTML5, JavaScript, and other Web technologies, using Chromium for presentation, and io.js (a fork of node.js) to tie it all together. GitHub has an Electron-based editor called Atom, and Visual Studio Code is based on it.

SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft announced a four-pronged effort to bring developers and their apps to Windows at its build conference today. One of these prongs—a way for Web developers to present their sites as apps—was already announced at Mobile World Congress earlier in the year.

The second prong is logical but not altogether surprising. In Windows 10, developers will be able to specially prepare existing Windows apps, whether Win32, .NET WinForms, .NET WPF, or any other Windows development technology, and sell them through the Windows Store. Unlike the “traditional” Windows application installation experience, these apps will be guaranteed to install, update, and uninstall cleanly—one of the important things that Store apps do to ensure that users feel confident trying apps out and removing them if they don’t like them. Behind the scenes, virtualization technology will be used to provide this isolation and robustness.

Islandwood and Astoria

The next two prongs are the more surprising: Microsoft is going after Android and iOS developers. With Project Islandwood, iOS developers will be able to take their iOS apps and build them for Windows. Microsoft has developed an Objective C toolchain and middleware layer that provide the operating system APIs that iOS apps expect. A select group of third parties have been using the Islandwood tools already, with King’s Candy Crush Saga for Windows Phone being one of the first apps built this way. King’s developers had to change only a “few percent” of the code in order to fully port it to Windows Phone.

Google Code is to join the long list of Google projects that have been consigned to the dustbin of history. The open source project hosting service will no longer be accepting new project submissions as of today, will no longer be accepting updates to existing projects from August 24, and will be closed entirely on January 25, 2016.

A few recent actions by the company in the past months may have been harbingers of the closure. In December, Google moved its libphonenumber project for parsing phone numbers from Google Code to GitHub. Last month, the company released a new library for building distributed applications named grpc, and this too used GitHub, not Google Code.

For actively maintained projects, there should be ample time to migrate to alternative platforms. Exporting to GitHub is probably easiest, as Google has an export-to-GitHub tool. SourceForge has an import-from-Google Code feature, and there are also standalone tools for migrating to Bitbucket.

The Guardian last year made headlines with a multitude of claims about anonymous social media platform Whisper. In its reporting, it claimed that Whisper tracked even those users that had opted out of its location tracking, shared personal data with suicide prevention groups, and stored personal data in non-US servers. Further, the newspaper claimed that Whisper was updating its terms of service and privacy policy as a reaction to its reporting.

A lengthy correction published today acknowledges that much of this was untrue or misleading. The newspaper now says that Whisper was working on its new ToS and privacy policies months before any reports were published, and that it doesn’t store data on non-US servers.

Critically, the Guardian also clarified that Whisper cannot ascertain either the identity or location of Whisper users unless those users explicitly choose to share that information. Whisper does know users’ IP addresses, but the correction notes that this is a “very rough and unreliable indicator of location.” This undermines the Guardian‘s most significant claim: that Whisper tracked the location even of users who have opted out of its location feature, and that the latitude and longitude of such users was both available to technical staff, and shared with Whisper executives. This isn’t possible with IP addresses alone.

Today’s bumper crop of updates for Windows and other Microsoft products doesn’t just fix a new version of the Stuxnet shortcut attack. It also provides fixes to two serious flaws, one in the operating system’s handling of secure connections and the other in Internet Explorer.

First up is a fix for the FREAK attack that lets miscreants trick software into using crackable encryption. Windows was initially believed to be immune to the attack, but a couple of days after it was publicized, Microsoft announced that its software was vulnerable, though the company did not explain what it had learned or why Windows was initially believed to be safe.

Today the company issued a patch for SChannel, the Windows component that’s responsible for handling the details of SSL and TLS connections. This sheds a little light on why Windows might have been overlooked at first; it suggests that Windows can be tricked into using weak encryption even after agreeing to use strong encryption. The update fixes the hole and, accordingly, software that uses SChannel. This category includes Internet Explorer and most built-in Windows features, but it excludes Chrome and Firefox, which have their own SSL and TLS code.

BitTorrent Inc. has been accused of loading its popular µTorrent BitTorrent client with cryptocoin miners that install silently and then harvest the processor power of unwitting torrenters.

Users of the software created a thread on the official µTorrent forum to complain about a high processor load when the computer is idle. The culprit was a program called Epic Scale, installed alongside µTorrent.

Epic Scale is a distributed computing client from a company that claims it wants to harness “unused processing power to change the world.” The website says that it uses the processors of machines with the software to solve “math problems for weather prediction, physics simulations, cryptography (including cryptocurrency mining) and more,” and this computation is monetized. Currently, it appears that the software is mining the Litecoin cryptocurrency.