Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi was the second-largest smartphone maker in the second quarter, overtaking Apple, according to analyst firm Canalys. CNBC reports: Xiaomi had a 17% share of global smartphone shipments, ahead of Apple's 14% and behind Samsung's 19%. "Xiaomi is growing its overseas business rapidly," Canalys research manager Ben Stanton said in a press release, noting shipments increased 300% year on year in Latin America and 50% in Western Europe. The Chinese smartphone maker posted year-on-year smartphone shipment growth of 83% versus 15% for Samsung and 1% for Apple. Stanton noted, however, that Xiaomi phones are still skewed toward the mass market, with the average selling price of its handsets 75% cheaper than Apple's.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet, written by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Microsoft now has its very own, honest-to-goodness general-purpose Linux distribution: Common Base Linux, (CBL)-Mariner. And, just like any Linux distro, you can download it and run it yourself. Microsoft didn't make a big fuss about releasing CBL-Mariner. It quietly released the code on GitHub and anyone can use it. Indeed, Juan Manuel Rey, a Microsoft Senior Program Manager for Azure VMware, recently published a guide on how to build an ISO CBL-Mariner image. Before this, if you were a Linux expert, with a spot of work you could run it, but now, thanks to Rey, anyone with a bit of Linux skill can do it. CBL-Mariner is not a Linux desktop. Like Azure Sphere, Microsoft's first specialized Linux distro, which is used for securing edge computing services, it's a server-side Linux. This Microsoft-branded Linux is an internal Linux distribution. It's meant for Microsoft's cloud infrastructure and edge products and services. Its main job is to provide a consistent Linux platform for these devices and services. Just like Fedora is to Red Hat, it keeps Microsoft on Linux's cutting edge. CBL-Mariner is built around the idea that you only need a small common core set of packages to address the needs of cloud and edge services. If you need more, CBL-Mariner also makes it easy to layer on additional packages on top of its common core. Once that's done, its simple build system easily enables you to create RPM packages from SPEC and source files. Or, you can also use it to create ISOs or Virtual hard disk (VHD) images. As you'd expect the basic CBL-Mariner is a very lightweight Linux. You can use it as a container or a container host. With its limited size also comes a minimal attack surface. This also makes it easy to deploy security patches to it via RPM. Its designers make a particular point of delivering the latest security patches and fixes to its users. For more about its security features see CBL-Mariner's GitHub security features list. Like any other Linux distro, CBL-Mariner is built on the shoulders of giants. Microsoft credits VMware's Photon OS Project, a secure Linux, The Fedora Project, Linux from Scratch -- a guide to building Linux from source, the OpenMamba distro, and, yes, even GNU and the Free Software Foundation (FSF). To try it for yourself, you'll build it on Ubuntu 18.04. Frankly, I'd be surprised if you couldn't build it on any Ubuntu Linux distro from 18.04 on up. I did it on my Ubuntu 20.04.2 desktop. You'll also need the latest version of the Go language and Docker.

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To friends who read this blog, esp people from ye olde tech industry in Calif -- I think you'll enjoy this podcast conversation with my old and good friend Guy Kawasaki. Just like a Hobee's breakfast, Siam Garden dinner, or Buck's Woodside, back in the day.

We're in for an information revolution.Engineers in Japan just shattered the world record for the fastest internet speed, achieving a data transmission rate of 319 Terabits per second (Tb/s), according to a paper presented at the International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications in June. From a report: The new record was made on a line of fibers more than 1,864 miles (3,000 km) long. And, crucially, it is compatible with modern-day cable infrastructure. This could literally change everything. Note well: we can't stress enough how fast this transmission speed is. It's nearly double the previous record of 178 Tb/s, which was set in 2020. And it's seven times the speed of the earlier record of 44.2 Tb/s, set with an experimental photonic chip. NASA itself uses a comparatively primitive speed of 400 Gb/s, and the new record soars impossibly high above what ordinary consumers can use (the fastest of which maxes out at 10 Gb/s for home internet connections).

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I just listened to Guy Kawaski's interview of yours truly. It's great to have a friendship that spans so much time, I think that really comes through. I hope you listen.

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker signed a new bill into law Thursday barring police from lying to underage kids during interrogations. From a report: Commonly used interrogation tactics, such as promising leniency or insinuating that incriminating evidence exists, are banned when questioning suspects younger than 18 under the new law, which goes into effect Jan. 1. According to the Innocence Project, an organization focused on exonerating wrongly convicted people, those types of interrogation methods have been shown to lead to false confessions. They've also played a role in about 30% of all wrongful convictions later overturned by DNA. Illinois once was called the "False Confession Capital of the United States," the organization said, because of a number of high-profile exonerations of people who falsely confessed to crimes they didn't commit. "In Illinois alone, there have been 100 wrongful convictions predicated on false confessions, including 31 involving people under 18 years of age," said Lauren Kaeseberg, legal director at the Illinois Innocence Project.

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The United States on Friday took a new stab at Russia's cybersecurity industry, restricting trade with four information technology firms and two other entities over "aggressive and harmful" activities -- including digital espionage -- that Washington blames on the Russian government. From a report: A Commerce Department posting said the six entities were sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in April, which targeted companies in the technology sector that support Russian intelligence services. Their addition to the Commerce Department's blacklist means U.S. companies cannot sell to them without licenses, which are seldom granted. The announcement follows April's sanctions, which were aimed at punishing Moscow for hacking, interfering in last year's U.S. election, poisoning Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny and other alleged malign actions - allegations the Kremlin denies. They come as the United States is responding to a drumbeat of digital intrusions blamed on Russian government-backed spies and a spate of increasingly disruptive ransomware outbreaks blamed on Russian cybercriminals.

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Pocket Casts has a new owner. Automattic, which runs WordPress.com and recently purchased Tumblr, announced today that it's acquired Pocket Casts, the well-regarded podcast app. The blog post announcing the purchase didn't offer much in the way of a preview, but it did tease potential future integrations. From a report: "As part of Automattic, Pocket Casts will continue to provide you with the features needed to enjoy your favorite podcasts (or find something new)," the post states. "We will explore building deep integrations with WordPress.com and Pocket Casts, making it easier to distribute and listen to podcasts." Pocket Casts launched in 2010 and sold to NPR and a group of other public media groups eight years later. It's been well-received, particularly from sites like The Verge, because it's available across platforms. It started monetizing through a program called Pocket Casts Plus, which charges users a monthly subscription fee for features like desktop app access and a standalone Apple Watch app, in 2019.

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The Hubble Space Telescope has powered on once again. NASA was able to successfully switch to a backup computer on the observatory on Friday following weeks of computer problems. From a report: On June 13, Hubble shut down after a payload computer from the 1980s that handles the telescope's science instruments suffered a glitch. Now, over a month since Hubble ran into issues, which the Hubble team thinks were caused by the spacecraft's Power Control Unit (PCU), NASA switched to backup hardware and was able to switch the scope back on. With Hubble back online with this backup hardware, the Hubble team is keeping a close watch to make sure that everything works correctly, according to a statement from NASA.

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I was talking with a developer yesterday and the question came up, what about huge outlines? How does OPML handle those? That gave me a chance to tell the story about how i'm archiving Scripting News, and how "include" nodes work.

First it's basically the same thing that happens when a piece of software gets big -- you break it up into components and link them together in a single document. That makes the code more manageable, and makes it possible to reuse the pieces. Every serious system has to provide for breaking big things up into smaller, reusable bits. For example...

• Node.js has packages. You can include a package in an app, or in another package, with a require call, like this: const fs = require ("fs"); Then you can refer to exported bits from the "fs" package in your app as if they were part of it, because they are.
• The programming language C has the #include statement: #include "standard.h". The C preprocessor reads the file, and replaces the #include with its contents. Includes can contain includes.
• And OPML has include nodes which have a type attribute whose value is include and a url attribute which is the address of an OPML file. When the user expands an include node, the outliner reads the contents of the OPML file and inserts it as subs of the include node. To the user, if the net is sufficiently fast, and the file is a manageable size, they wouldn't even know it was an include node.

An example. I archive my blog, which is written in an outliner, and saved as OPML, at the beginning of every month. I save the previous month in a repository on GitHub, and empty out the outline I edit. The CMS that builds the HTML rendering and the RSS version of my blog is able to jump month boundaries. So I have a convenient-size outline for editing, and everything else just hums along.

But what if I wanted an outline of all my blog posts going back to May 2017? I would do that with include nodes. And just for fun, I did exactly that.

Here's an OPML file that contains includes for each of the months of 2018, 2019 and 2020. If you have an outliner that can expand includes, then you can view all the writing for those years in one outline

The World Health Organization's chief scientist has advised individuals against mixing and matching Covid-19 vaccines from different manufacturers, saying such decisions should be left to public health authorities. From a report: "It's a little bit of a dangerous trend here," Soumya Swaminathan told an online briefing on Monday after a question about booster shots. "It will be a chaotic situation in countries if citizens start deciding when and who will be taking a second, a third and a fourth dose." Swaminathan had called mixing a âoedata-free zoneâ but later clarified her remarks in an overnight tweet. "Individuals should not decide for themselves, public health agencies can, based on available data," she said in the tweet. "Data from mix and match studies of different vaccines are awaited -- immunogenicity and safety both need to be evaluated."

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China has dispatched a team of officials to conduct on-site inspections at Didi as part of a probe into the ride-hailing giant. From a report: Officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China, Ministry of Public Security, Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Natural Resources, as well as the tax, transport and antitrust regulators are beginning an investigation into Didi's data security, according to a statement released by the cyberspace watchdog Friday. Days after Didi's initial public offering in the U.S. on June 30, the CAC announced the probe into Didi and ordered app stores to remove its services within China. The probe into Cheng Wei's ride-hailing firm set off renewed scrutiny over China's tech giants, which had already been under pressure from antitrust regulators over alleged abuses in areas like pricing and forced exclusivity, and expanded Beijing's tech crackdown to include greater oversight over data and foreign IPOs.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Netflix, marking its first big move beyond TV shows and films, is planning an expansion into video games and has hired a formerElectronic Arts and Facebook executive to lead the effort. Mike Verdu will join Netflix as vice president of game development, reporting to Chief Operating Officer Greg Peters, the company said on Wednesday. Verdu was previously Facebook's vice president in charge of working with developers to bring games and other content to Oculus virtual-reality headsets. The idea is to offer video games on Netflix's streaming platform within the next year, according to a person familiar with the situation. The games will appear alongside current fare as a new programming genre -- similar to what Netflix did with documentaries or stand-up specials. The company doesn't currently plan to charge extra for the content, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are private.

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Scientists want a super-computer powerful enough to accurately project the most damaging extremes.

In remote towers, US Forest Service lookouts act as an early warning system for forest fires.