The big news from the usual sources is the new iPhone 8. After reading some of the specs and comparisons with the Samsung S8 and Note 8, I am a bit confused. Reviewers crow about facial recognition for the new iPhone, but the S8 range already has it. They go on about the edge-to-edge screen, but Samsung has had that for a few models now. In fact, almost point by point the Samsung range already has all the features of the iPhone 8 but at a lower price point, and that's before the Note 8 comes out.
Once again Apple has brought out an incremental update that is all about playing catch-up with the competition, be it Samsung, Huawei or others. The good old innovation days seem to be long gone. That said, the new phone is a good one in the sense that it is like many at the top of the pack and has all the expected features. Apple lovers will of course upgrade, but unless you have the iPhone 5, an upgrade is not much of a change, especially for the smaller-screen crowd. The iPhone 8's all glass back and front will be interesting the first time the phone is dropped. The new iPhone is the market leader in price, with the most expensive phones to date.
Sometimes phone makers are stupid. Take the latest versions of the Samsung's Android. In the past, to flag a number to be blocked was simple: click on the number and then select block or Add To Block List. Thanks to the Samsung user interface, now you need to write down the number, navigate a series of menus and then manually type that number into the list, remembering also to add it. Stupid.
The Note 8 is available and it is basically an S8+ with a few extra features, like a stylus and 2x optical zoom on the camera. Both devices also pack an 8MP front camera and 12MP rear. The CPU is the Exynos 9 Octa 8895 chip set, with Android Nougat, a higher-than-iPhone 8 IP68 waterproof rating and a Super Amoled screen. The Note gets 6GB of RAM, two more than the S8+, but its 3300 mAh battery is 200mAh down from the S8+'s. There are apps that use the stylus, and early reports put the handwriting detection at excellent. The smaller battery would be to allow space for the stylus, which you can put underwater. This begs the question: can you write underwater?
Stop the presses. The Swiss-based bank for the world's central banks has suggested that there are several benefits to a decentralised cryptocurrency solution for consumers. The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) didn't go for an official policy recommendation, but did admit that there were obvious privacy advantages of peer-to-peer transaction systems in central banks.
Demonstrating that cryptocurrencies are like other currencies, the ordering by China that all cryptocurrency exchanges were to cease trading by the end of business on Sept 22 triggered a 20-40% drop in value worldwide. Like any currency, however, it may have rebounded by the time you read this.
Can you trust an organisation's software without checking? The short answer is no, as 2.27 million Avast CCleaner 32-bit users found out. CCleaner is a PC tune-up utility that was shipped with a Trojan in the last update. The lesson in the story is to always run a scan on anything you download, though your antivirus tool should be doing that already.
The Linux operating system is still moving along quite nicely, and version 4.14 was quietly released by Linus Torvalds recently, a day before the 26th anniversary of the first 0.01 version came out. There are a few virtual machine improvements, support for Zstd file compression, and a host of other new changes. Zstd is a real-time compression system that you can read about at www.zstd.net.
If you own an HP and performed the Sept 12 update then you may have seen a black screen for somewhere up to 10 minutes after booting. According to Microsoft, "some OEM factory images create incorrect registry keys during image creation" that "conflict with the app readiness service". There is info in help item 4043345 that requires you wait for a fix or edit the registry yourself.
Remember when Google told us that the retention of search logs was "to improve our search algorithms for the benefit of users"? According to a new paper from Lesley Chiou and Catherine Tucker of the Occidental College and MIT Sloan School of Management, they found that "long periods of data storage do not confer advantages in search quality, which is an often-cited benefit of data retention by companies". In other words, keeping all that data doesn't really improve search results, but may have other benefits for search engine organisations like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. This is probably not news to many readers.
James Hein is an IT professional of over 30 years' standing. You can contact him at jclhein@gmail.com.
