Today at Google I/O the company held a session entitled "Voiding your Warranty" where employees demonstrated how to root Google Glass and install Ubuntu
on it. What you're seeing above is a screenshot from a laptop running a
terminal window on top and showing the screencast output from Glass on
the bottom -- here running the standard Android launcher instead of the
familiar cards interface. The steps involve pushing some APKs (Launcher,
Settings and Notepad) to the device using adb, then pairing Glass with a
Bluetooth keyboard and trackpad. After this, it's possible to unlock
the bootloader
with fastboot and flash a new boot image to gain root access. From there
you have full access to Glass -- just like that! Running Ubuntu
requires a couple more apps to be installed, namely Android Terminal
Emulator and Complete Linux Installer.
The latter lets you download and boot your favorite linux distro
(Ubuntu, in this case). You're then able to use SSH or VNC to access
Ubuntu running right on Glass. We captured a few screenshots of the
process in our gallery. Follow the links below for more info -- just be
careful not to brick your Glass okay?
Google I/O didn't give us the Android update we were expecting—or did it??
Andrew Cunningham
Google covered a lot of ground in its three-and-a-half-hour opening
keynote at Google I/O yesterday, but one thing it didn't announce was
the oft-rumored next version of Android. However, persistent rumors insist
that the elusive Android 4.3 is still coming next month—if that's true,
why not announce it at I/O in front of all of your most enthusiastic
developers?
The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a
fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without
adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the
platform. By focusing on these changes and not the
apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is
showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update
problem.
Consider the full breadth of yesterday's Android-related
improvements: you've got an update to the Android version of Google
Maps, due this summer, that incorporates some of the features of the iOS version and the new desktop version. There's a WebGL-capable version of Chrome for Android and an entirely new gaming API. A shotgun blast of improvements are coming to the Google Play Services APIs. And that's to say nothing of the products that affect Google's services across all supported platforms: Google Play Music All Access (say that five times fast), Hangouts, and Search improvements.
In iOS, most of these changes would be worthy of a point update, if
not a major version update. With few exceptions, making major changes to
any of the core first-party iOS apps requires an iOS update. This
method works for iOS since all supported iOS devices get their updates
directly from Apple on the same day (device-specific updates like iOS 6.1.4 notwithstanding).
This is not true of Android. Here, we've seen apps like Gmail and
services like those provided by Google Play gradually decouple from the
rest of the OS. This makes it possible for Google to provide major
front-facing updates without actually relying on its notoriously unreliable partners
to incrementally up the Android version number on their devices. Many
of the new things announced yesterday are coming to your Android device
whether you're running a Nexus 4 or a Galaxy S 4 or a Sony Xperia ZL or an HTC Thunderbolt.
And therein lies a partial solution to the platform's fragmentation problem. The abject failure of the Android Update Alliance
announced at I/O 2011 made it clear that getting Android hardware
partners to fall in line with respect to device updates would be a
Herculean (or, perhaps, Sisyphean) task. So Google has in essence done
what newcomers like Firefox OS
are proposing to do: apply more device updates at higher layers of the
operating system, layers that don't need to be customized by OEMs and
verified by carriers.
Enlarge/ The state of Android updates. The picture isn't pretty.
If this week's announcements are any indication, there are three
kinds of things that Google is going to be able to update without
actually updating the core of Android: their back-end services (things
like Knowledge Graph
improvements), first-party apps like Gmail and Google Maps, and the API
layer (the single sign-in improvements, Google game services). This
doesn't cover every part of the OS, but it does cover the vast majority
of the user-facing features. The Google Play Services changes reach all
the way back to Android 2.2, a necessity if Google wants all of its
users to benefit (as of this writing, the Android developer dashboard reports that only 1.8 percent of the installed base is using an older version).
This is probably the right way for Google to move. Baking any of
these features into a hypothetical Android 4.3 would have limited their
rollout to the Nexus devices for at least a few months. A small subset
of devices would've waited months or even years after that. Consider
that Android 4.1, which was introduced at Google I/O last year, is only
installed on 26.1 percent of all Google devices a year later. Last
November's Android 4.2 update is only installed on 2.3 percent of
devices. Obviously, if Google wants most of its users to have access to
new features, the core of Android is not the best place to introduce
them.
This is not a complete solution, obviously. Lower-level,
wider-reaching changes—things like Android 4.2's multi-user support on
tablets, Android 4.1's Project Butter, or Android 4.0's far-reaching UI
overhaul—will still require brand-new versions of Android. The same goes
for many security updates and bug fixes. New Android updates won't
cease to be released if the most recent round of Android 4.3 rumors are
any indication.
But by tying fewer Android feature updates to the OS itself, Google
gains some flexibility. The company can combat the fragmentation problem
without getting into a knock-down-drag-out fight with carriers and
OEMs. The ability to introduce updates through other avenues gives
Google the opportunity to let its partners catch up to the latest
version at their own pace without completely arresting the operating
system's development. It's not a perfect solution, but it's already
doing more for the platform than the Android Update Alliance ever did.
Google today launched version 1.1 of its open source Go programming language. It’s been more than a year
since Google launched version 1.0 of Go. The language, which puts an
emphasis on concurrency and speed, has seen three maintenance releases
since then, but the team has been conservative with bumping up its
version numbers. This new version, however, the Go team writes,
introduces a number of significant performance-related improvements that
warrant the new version number and existing Go code should run
noticeably faster when built with Go 1.1.
Version 1 was meant to show that Go had arrived at a level where
users could expect a certain level of maturity and stability, as well as
compatibility with future releases. Today’s release, the team says,
lives up to this promise. It introduces a number of significant
languages and library changes, but all of these remain
backwards-compatible. “Very little if any code will need modifications
to run with Go 1.1,” the team writes.
Among
the changes in this new version are, “optimizations in the compiler and
linker, garbage collector, goroutine scheduler, map implementation, and
parts of the standard library.”
The new version also introduces method values, makes some changes to return requirements
(which should lead to more succinct and correct programs, Google says),
as well as a new race detector, which can find memory synchronization
errors.
Over the last few months, Go has definitely seen an impressive
increase in developer interest and quite a few companies have now
adopted it as their go-to language for problems that can benefit from
Go’s support for concurrent programming. CloudFlare, for example, uses
it in production to run important aspects of its Railgun software, Bitly uses it to power some parts of its infrastructure, as do Heroku and an increasing number of startups and established companies.
While Dart,
Google’s browser-based replacement for JavaScript seems to have trouble
catching on, the company is clearly on to something with Go and the
language, which was first conceived in 2007, looks to have a bright
future ahead of itself as developers look for a modern language with
built-in garbage collection and concurrency.
One of the worst kept secrets rattling around Microsoft's campus is Windows Blue, the forthcoming update to Windows 8
that addresses users' bugbears about the OS. Now, Microsoft is
officially rechristening the platform, and with a more staid name:
Windows 8.1.
Tami Reller, the CMO and CFO of Microsoft's Windows
Division made the big reveal during JP Morgan's Technology, Media &
Telecom Conference. The upgrade will be free and available from the home
screen when it launches, while a preview version will be opened up to the public on June 26th at the beginning of Build 2013.
Unfortunately, Reller wouldn't get any more specific about a formal
release date, saying simply that it will be delivered "later in the
calendar year." The only clarification she would offer is, "we know when
the holidays are."
As anticipated, the Windows 8.1 update will come to both the full
version of the OS as well as the ARM-friendly RT. While we haven't
officially seen any sub-10-inch slates announced yet, it's been rumored
that 8.1 would enable smaller devices. Reller's comments only backed up
those expectations, when she suggested that Windows 8 is great for
everything from "the smallest tablets" to desktops.
One
of the dreams for security experts is the creation of a quantum
internet that allows perfectly secure communication based on the
powerful laws of quantum mechanics.
The basic idea here is that
the act of measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, always changes
it. So any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to
leave telltale signs of snooping that the receiver can detect. That
allows anybody to send a “one-time pad” over a quantum network which can then be used for secure communication using conventional classical communication.
That
sets things up nicely for perfectly secure messaging known as quantum
cryptography and this is actually a fairly straightforward technique for
any half decent quantum optics lab. Indeed, a company called ID Quantique sells an off-the-shelf system that has begun to attract banks and other organisations interested in perfect security.
These
systems have an important limitation, however. The current generation
of quantum cryptography systems are point-to-point connections over a
single length of fibre, So they can send secure messages from A to B but
cannot route this information onwards to C, D, E or F. That’s because
the act of routing a message means reading the part of it that indicates
where it has to be routed. And this inevitably changes it, at least
with conventional routers. This makes a quantum internet impossible with
today’s technology
Various teams are racing to develop quantum
routers that will fix this problem by steering quantum messages without
destroying them. We looked at one of the first last year. But the truth is that these devices are still some way from commercial reality.
Today,
Richard Hughes and pals at Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico
reveal an alternative quantum internet, which they say they’ve been
running for two and half years. Their approach is to create a quantum
network based around a hub and spoke-type network. All messages get
routed from any point in the network to another via this central hub.
This
is not the first time this kind of approach has been tried. The idea is
that messages to the hub rely on the usual level of quantum security.
However, once at the hub, they are converted to conventional classical
bits and then reconverted into quantum bits to be sent on the second leg
of their journey.
So as long as the hub is secure, then the network should also be secure.
The
problem with this approach is scalability. As the number of links to
the hub increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to handle all the
possible connections that can be made between one point in the network
and another.
Hughes and co say they’ve solved this with their
unique approach which equips each node in the network with quantum
transmitters–i.e., lasers–but not with photon detectors which are
expensive and bulky. Only the hub is capable of receiving a quantum
message (although all nodes can send and receiving conventional messages
in the normal way).
That may sound limiting but it still allows
each node to send a one-time pad to the hub which it then uses to
communicate securely over a classical link. The hub can then route this
message to another node using another one time pad that it has set up
with this second node. So the entire network is secure, provided that
the central hub is also secure.
The big advantage of this system
is that it makes the technology required at each node extremely
simple–essentially little more than a laser. In fact, Los Alamos has
already designed and built plug-and-play type modules that are about the
size of a box of matches. “Our next-generation [module] will be an
order of magnitude smaller in each linear dimension,” they say.
Their
ultimate goal is to have one of these modules built in to almost any
device connected to a fibre optic network, such as set top TV boxes,
home computers and so on, to allow perfectly secure messaging.
Having run this system now for over two years, Los Alamos are now highly confident in its efficacy.
Of
course, the network can never be more secure than the hub at the middle
of it and this is an important limitation of this approach. By
contrast, a pure quantum internet should allow perfectly secure
communication from any point in the network to any other.
Another
is that this approach will become obsolete as soon as quantum routers
become commercially viable. So the question for any investors is whether
they can get their money back in the time before then. The odds are
that they won’t have to wait long to find out.
After months of rumors, Microsoft on Monday confirmed that it is readying an update to Windows 8 for later this year.
Code-named Windows Blue, the update will enable Windows to run on a
wider range of devices (read: smaller-screen tablets). In a blog post,
Microsoft said the update will also respond to some criticisms of
Windows 8 and Windows RT, but the company didn’t go into specifics.
“Windows Blue is a codename for an update that will be available
later this year, building on the bold vision set forward with Windows 8
to deliver the next generation of tablets and PCs,” Microsoft’s Tami
Reller said in a blog post.
“It will deliver the latest new innovations across an increasingly
broad array of form factors of all sizes, display, battery life and
performance, while creating new opportunities for our ecosystem.”
In the blog post, Microsoft also said that it has now sold more than
100 million licenses for Windows 8. And, despite the criticism, Reller
said that Microsoft remains pleased with the operating system.
“Windows 8 is a big, ambitious change,” Reller said. “While we
realize that change takes time, we feel good about the progress since
launch, including what we’ve been able to accomplish with the ecosystem
and customer reaction to the new PCs and tablets that are available now
or will soon come to market.”
Microsoft billed Windows 8 as a “no compromise” operating system that
would pave the way for devices that could offer all the benefits of
both a PC and a mobile device. Hybrid designs allow for devices that act
as both tablet and laptop, either through a flip of a swivel, a twist
of the screen or the addition of a keyboard.
However, critics have said that the reality of Windows 8 has fallen
short of its goal amid a lack of top-tier apps and devices that often
force a choice of either limited battery life or limited compatibility
with older Windows software.
PC sales have also not seen a hoped-for bump from Windows 8, as electronics buyers continue to spend money in other categories.
For her part, Reller noted that the number of apps in the Windows 8
storefront is now six times what it was at launch, and rejected the idea
that the PC is past its prime.
“The PC is very much alive and increasingly mobile,” Reller said.
“The PC is also part of a much broader device market of tablets and PCs.
Windows 8 was built to fully participate in this broader and
increasingly mobile device market.”
