News..............................
There’s a new Android out, but if you’re not a fan of Google’s walled garden then a kickstarter has launched for an open source alternative.
Not interested in Android 8 on your mobile? Then check out the Librem 5 project. Plus, sites beating the adblockers and 3D game dev talk.
Google has revealed the next version of its mobile operating system: Android 8.0. While the yearly update of a mobile OS isn’t the most exciting news, with Android being the most popular mobile operating system in the world, it’s likely that many readers own an Android device.
So what can we expect from this upcoming release, called Oreo? For starters, devices running Android 8.0 will benefit from Picture in Picture mode, enabling people to minimise apps, such as YouTube, to a corner of the screen while using another app.
Another feature restricts background apps and manages the functions they use while in the background, which should help improve battery life. Google is also claiming that it has introduced machine learning into its press-to-hold gestures, so when you select certain items by pressing and holding your finger on the touchscreen, context-sensitive options will appear.
A post on the Android Developers Blog ( http://bit.ly/2iIXYa1) by Sami Tolvanen, senior software engineer, Android Security, goes into detail about some of the more advanced securityfocused updates of Android 8.0. One such move is the further hardening of the kernel in an attempt to reduce the frequency and impact of security bugs within it.
In the blog post, Tolvanen highlights four new security features that have been backported from upstream Linux. These are hardened usercopy functions, which adds bounds checking to help developers spot malicious use or bugs, and Prevailed Access Never (PAN) emulation, which brings the feature found in ARM v8.1 devices to other hardware. According to the blog, hardened usercopy and PAN emulation has helped to find and fix bugs in four kernel drivers in Pixel devices.
The other two new security features for the kernel is kernel address space layout randomisation (KASLR), which helps avoid kernel vulnerabilities by randomising the location where kernel code is loaded on each boot, and post-init read-only memory, which creates a memory region that becomes read-only after the kernel has been initialised. This protects data that needs to be written during initialisation, but then should not be modified afterwards.
Android 8.0 is out now, however, as with previous releases the newer Google devices, such as the Pixel, Pixel XL/C and Nexus 6P/5X, will get the update first, with the myriad of Android device makers implementing Oreo over (a long) time. For a full list of new features, see http://bit.ly/2wy5ZEb.
If you’re sick of waiting for these yearly updates to grace your smartphone, or you’re no fan of Google’s walled garden approach to Android, then there are plenty of truly open source alternatives. While Ubuntu Phone has bitten the dust (see LXF224), a new crowd-funded open source phone, called the Librem 5, is currently raising funds ( https://puri. sm/shop/librem-5). This phone will run on free and open source software, with no hint of Android’s restrictions. It runs on the Debian-based PureOS (or it can install any Linux distro where all the source code is available), and the team behind the phone, Purism, states that the Librem 5 phone will be the world’s first ever IP-native mobile handset, using end-to-end encrypted decentralised communication.
The phone has a five-inch screen, camera, microphone, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (plus hardware killswitches for instantly disabling them) and works with 2G/3G/4G, GSM, UMTS, and LTE networks. Pledging $599 will get you a handset, with an estimated delivery of January 2019. Some people on nonGoogle devices may even have received the Android O update by then.
“The Librem 5 phone will be the world’s first ever IP-native handset”