Volume 17, Issue 32 Atari Online News, Etc. August 28, 2015 Published and Copyright (c) 1999 - 2006 All Rights Reserved Atari Online News, Etc. A-ONE Online Magazine Dana P. Jacobson, Publisher/Managing Editor Joseph Mirando, Managing Editor Rob Mahlert, Associate Editor Atari Online News, Etc. Staff Dana P. Jacobson -- Editor Joe Mirando -- "People Are Talking" Michael Burkley -- "Unabashed Atariophile" Albert Dayes -- "CC: Classic Chips" Rob Mahlert -- Web site Thomas J. Andrews -- "Keeper of the Flame" With Contributions by: Fred Horvat Henk Robbers To subscribe to A-ONE, change e-mail addresses, or unsubscribe, log on to our website at: www.atarinews.org and click on "Subscriptions". OR subscribe to A-ONE by sending a message to: dpj@atarinews.org and your address will be added to the distribution list. To unsubscribe from A-ONE, send the following: Unsubscribe A-ONE Please make sure that you include the same address that you used to subscribe from. To download A-ONE, set your browser bookmarks to one of the following sites: http://people.delphiforums.com/dpj/a-one.htm Now available: http://www.atarinews.org Visit the Atari Advantage Forum on Delphi! http://forums.delphiforums.com/atari/ =~=~=~= A-ONE #1732 08/28/06 ~ Atari Coldfire Project ~ People Are Talking! ~ Atari AHCC v5.2! ~ Facebook PA Called 'M'! ~ Pirate Sites Ban Win10 ~ Email Here To Stay! ~ PlayStation Plus Offer! ~ Get Hacked? Get Sued! ~ Next Firebee Update! ~ Twitter and Free Speech ~ Hillary's Fake Support ~ XCOM 2 Gets Delayed! -* Assassin's Creed Syndicate! *- -* Final Atari Sale Is No Urban Legend *- -* Twitter Shuts Down "Deleted Tweets" Sites! *- =~=~=~= ->From the Editor's Keyboard "Saying it like it is!" """""""""""""""""""""""""" Well, let's try it again this week and see how well we do with every "type" of A-ONE edition. We added a couple of PCs to our family of computers over the past couple of weeks - adding a tower system to my office. Now there is a [fairly] new iMac and now a new PC. I still don't have the PC loaded with all of the software that I want/need, but hopefully I have enough of the former software that I was using to get A-ONE out [more] regularly. I don't have my copy of WinZIP replaced yet, so please let me know if you're running into problems uncompressing the archive that's currently going out. Like every year, I can't believe that Labor Day weekend is almost upon us again! I feel like we just finished that horrible winter and we're starting to get geared up for a nice Spring and Summer! Where does the time go?? Well, I guess I better get cranking on getting in more grilling time; it's time to load up on a few more steaks and beer! So, now that I'm getting closer to getting back to "normal," let's wrap up this week's issue and get it out the door to you! Until next time... =~=~=~= AHCC v5.2 By Henk Robbers There is a new version available on my home page (see sig). Changes: august 23 2015    v5.2    Shell:      Compare folders:        Mismatch display order of filenames reversed.        Double clicking 'Mismatch': first file is left on top.      Compare files: (^2)        flipflop between red and green according to equality        of selected lines. (red: unequal, green : equal).    Compiler:      Small code improvements (no effects).      Small improvements in the optimizer.      Nicer display of options with -v.      fixed spurious denying of duplicate typ definitions      in some cases.    Library ahccgem:      Added function vq_vgdos in vdi_wstn.c    Calc:      (type Esc in journal)      Prompt '>'.    Assembler:      Deny operands of the form symbol.w .      shift Dn  interpreted as shift #1,Dn (like Pure Asm).      Implement Local statement for labels in macros.      accept .w on swap instruction. -- Groeten; Regards. Henk Robbers. http://members.chello.nl/h.robbers Interactive disassembler: Digger;  http://digger.atari.org A Home Cooked C compiler:   AHCC;  http://ahcc.atari.org The Atari Coldfire Project The Atari Coldfire Project is proud to announce the new Web Site firebee.org and is now accepting pre-orders for the 2nd Series FireBee Computer System. The FireBee is a new Atari-compatible computer. A FireBee is similar to an Atari Falcon and works very much like one. It will run most of the Atari compatible software that would run on a Falcon. Different to older Ataris and their clones, the FireBee is a modern computer that supports almost everything you'd expect from a today's machine, like USB ports, Ethernet, SD-card reader and more. Technical Specifications: ColdFire-Processor with 264 MHz. Powerful FPGA with 128 MB Graphics- and Special-RAM, 512 KB SRAM and 8 MB Flash-Memory (ROM) for the Operating System. Firmware Updates are easily available via software. Single Tasking operating system FireTOS (based on the Falcon-TOS 4.04) and the Open-Source operating System EmuTOS inside the Flash-ROM. 512 MByte DDR SD-RAM. DVI-I Monitor Connector (VGA per Adapter possible). 5x USB 2.0 (4x external and 1x internal). Ethernet 10/100, High Speed-Serial port. Compact Flash- and SD-Card-Slot. Sound: Line in, Line out, Mic (mono). Atari-compatible connectors: 2 TT/Falcon IDE-Busses, ST/TT Floppy, Atari-Keyboard with Mouse, Printer Port parallel, RS-232 serial, MIDI in/out/thru. Operating Systems currently capable of running on a FireBee : FireTOS – Atari based single tasking TOS OS. EmuTOS - Open Source single tasking TOS OS. uClinux – Linux for Microcontrollers. FreeMiNT – Popular Atari Open Source highly customizable GEM based multitasking OS. When purchasing the optional CF Card with FreeMiNT preinstalled about 50 programs are included such as Web Browser, FTP Client, Image Viewer, PDF Viewer, Help System, Development Software and more. High quality aluminium custom mini-cases are availaible in 4 different colours as optional addon. As the software, the entire hardware is Open Source, all construction files are availaible for the public. For more information on the FireBee computer and how to pre-order please go to: http://firebee.org/ Firebee Update In my last article I was discussing the things I like and disliked on the FireBee and forgot one of the most import benefits of the FireBee, RAM and plenty of it! With 512MB of RAM I cannot see myself ever running out of RAM. By today’s standard 512MB of RAM is barely anything with a modern Operating System. Most Atari applications use very little RAM. So 512MB is a huge amount. My main TT was a 4ST/4TT RAM machine and I rarely ran into problems. My Falcon was 14MB and again I rarely ran into problems. Granted that was 20 or so years ago and today’s Atari programs such as Operating Systems, Web Browsers, and Media players require more RAM that my old TT or Falcon may have needed additional RAM but not 512MB. This submission is going to be extra short this week. Tonight I am getting ready for the ACEC Swap Meet in Columbus Ohio. I will be bringing the FireBee for people to try out. For more information : http://www.angelfire.com/oh4/acec/acec.html =~=~=~= ->In This Week's Gaming Section - PlayStation Plus Free Games! """"""""""""""""""""""""""""" Assassin's Creed Syndicate Date! 'XCOM 2' Delayed Until 2016! =~=~=~= ->A-ONE's Game Console Industry News - The Latest Gaming News! """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" PlayStation Plus Free Games of September 2015 for PS4, PS3, and Vita Sony has revealed the six free games that PlayStation Plus members can download for free in September, one of which Plus members had a hand in choosing. As a result of the Vote to Play initiative, Grow Home will be one of the PS4's free games next month. It's making its debut on PS4 in September and will be free right out of the gate for Plus members. The other two games that Plus members were able to vote for, Armello and Zombie Vikings, will each be 30 percent off from September 1-15. Thanks to Cross-Buy support, PS4 owners get a total of four games in September, while PS3 and Vita owners get two each. PlayStation 4: Grow Home Super Time Force Ultra Teslagrad Xeodrifter PlayStation 3: Teslagrad Twisted Metal PlayStation Vita: La Mulana EX Xeodrifter Assassin's Creed Syndicate PC Release Date Announced Ubisoft, the company behind Assassin's Creed Syndicate has confirmed that the game will be coming to PC on November 19. It's coming to Xbox One and PlayStation 4 (PS4) almost a month earlier on October 23. The delay is inevitable considering how poorly the last entry in the series, Assassin's Creed Unity, performed on the PC. "We have introduced several new improvements to our production pipeline and validation process, which allowed us to focus on polishing, stabilizing and optimizing the PC version very early on in the project," said Sam Kovalev, Studio Production Manager at Ubisoft Kiev on Ubisoft's blog. "This has been one of the top priorities for the production team this year." "The additional four weeks are for us to really bear down and finalise all of the polish and optimisation, to make sure the game and all of its systems are stable when it launches, so it runs smoothly for all players starting on day one," he explained further. While the final PC requirements have not been announced, there will be no limit in terms of frame-rate or resolution the company confirmed. The game's recommended system specifications will target a 1080p resolution and 30 frames per second. In the past, the company has delayed games for a variety of reasons ranging from adding DRM to extra testing across a variety of hardware. And though Ubisoft had earlier said the PC version of Assassin's Creed Syndicate will be delayed, it's good to know when it would exactly hit. 'XCOM 2' Delayed Until February 2016 XCOM 2 was supposed to launch in November, but apparently planet-wide alien invasions are tricky to schedule. Firaxis has pushed XCOM 2's release date back to February 5, 2016, noting that the game isn't up to the studio's standards quite yet. "We've set a high bar for the sequel and the entire team has been working hard to make sure we deliver a great follow-up to Enemy Unknown," a short blog post reads. "We just need a little more time to make it the best possible game." Firaxis wants XCOM 2 to have "more depth, more replayability and more investment in your soldiers," the post continues. XCOM 2 is a sequel to 2012's widely acclaimed strategy game, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and it's a continuation of the strategy franchise that began in 1993. In XCOM 2, Earth is overrun by hostile alien forces and players are part of a guerrilla resistance squad attempting to take back the planet. There's still no word on a console or mobile launch for the new game. Delays are a common sight in the video game universe, and just this week we asked one developer why his game was pushed back two whole years after receiving a ton of early attention. The short answer? "It's complicated." =~=~=~= ->A-ONE Gaming Online - Online Users Growl & Purr! """"""""""""""""""" Final Atari Sale Is No Urban Legend It's been a year and a half since Atari's infamous E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial has been unearthed from the Alamogordo landfill. Gamers and collectors from around the country made a pilgrimage to Alamogordo to see if the gaming world's biggest urban legend was true. One man, who knew Atari's deepest darkest secret, uncovered it's concrete tomb with the help of a film crew who documented the entire process. That man was Operational Consultant Joe Lewandowski, who is regarded as Alamogordo's Indiana Jones. Lewandowski announced the grand total from the Atari dig sale on eBay to City Commissioners at their regular City Commission meeting Tuesday. The final sale results totaled a staggering $107,930.15. The city of Alamogordo will receive $65,037.78 and the Tularosa Basin Historical Society will get $16,259.44. Expenses like shipping fees totaled $26,632.93. Lewandowski said there's still 297 cartridges left that he's holding in an archive. What's to become of them is still unknown at this time. "There's 297 we're still holding in an archive that we'll sell at a later date when we decide what to do with them," he said. "I might sell those if a second movie comes out but for now we're just holding them. The film company got 100 games, 23 went to museums and we had 881 that we actually sold. They were sold in 45 states and 14 countries." The Atari cartridges made their way to several museums around the world such as the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, the Hamilton Toy Museum in Ontario, Canada, and the Deutsches Film Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. Out of the 881 games that were sold, six games were sold to Brazil and Australia, three in Singapore, 22 in France, 54 in Canada and over 752 in the United States alone just to name a few. The highest Atari 2600 E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial cartridge went for $1,535. Over 60 titles were sold on eBay including Asteroids, Missile Command, Warlords, Defender, Star Raiders, Swordquest, Phoenix, Centipede and Super Breakout. Based on Steven Spielberg's blockbuster film, Atari's E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial was released in 1982 after only 34 days of development. It quickly became known as one of the worst video games ever created, and is considered by many the final blow that collapsed Atari. Though the game sold well during the holidays, E.T. The-Extra-Terrestrial did not live up to its financial expectations as was told in the documentary "Atari: Game Over" directed by Zak Penn. In a previous Daily News article, Lewandowski stated that he is still planning on making a second film but has not made anything official. "I have a bunch of stories in this story book I hope to use some day and I have all their addresses and contacts. If it works out it would be fun to cruise around with a movie camera and film all these people," he said. Lewandowski said he does not have a title for the film yet but is also looking for the ripple effect of the Atari burial. "I'm hoping that if the second movie ever comes out, I can release some more games," he said. "It would increase their value for the city." Lewandowski also said that he would like to come before the City Commission again on Sept. 22 to discuss recommendations on what to do with the money. "I would like to come back on Sept. 22, I have some recommendations that I would like to present with the money," he said. "The $65,000 is yours you can do what you want with it but I don't want to see it go to pot holes or sewer lines." City Commissioner Nadia Sikes thanked Lewandowski for his hard work and what the sale means to the city. "I just want to take a moment to thank Joe Lewandowski for all the hard work. I wouldn't consider myself a real nay-sayer of what was going to transpire with the sale of the games but I have to say I am so impressed with what you've done," Sikes said. "Under no circumstances did I ever think you were going to sell over $60,000 worth of games." Lewandowski said he was more surprised than anyone but was proud for what he was able to do and to call Alamogordo E.T.'s final resting place. =~=~=~= A-ONE's Headline News The Latest in Computer Technology News Compiled by: Dana P. Jacobson Court Says The FTC Can Slap Companies for Getting Hacked For companies like the dating site Ashley Madison or the health insurer Anthem, financial loss, customer anger and professional embarrassment aren’t the only consequences of getting massively gutted by hackers. Now a court has confirmed that there’s a three-letter agency that can dish out punishment, too. In a decision published Monday, a U.S. appellate court ruled that the Federal Trade Commission has the authority to sue Wyndham Hotels for allowing hackers to steal more than 600,000 customers’ data from its computer systems in 2008 and 2009, leading to more than $10 million in fraudulent charges. The ruling more widely cements the agency’s power to regulate and fine firms that lose consumer data to hackers, if the companies engaged in what the FTC deems “unfair” or “deceptive” business practices. At a time when ever-more-private data is constantly getting breached, the decision affirms the FTC’s role as a digital watchdog with actual teeth. The FTC originally sued Wyndham in 2012 over the lack of security that led to its massive hack. But before the case proceeded, Wyndham appealed to a higher court to dismiss it, arguing that the FTC didn’t have the authority to punish the hotel chain for its breach. The third circuit court’s new decision spells out that Wyndham’s breach is exactly the sort of “unfair or deceptive business practice” the FTC is empowered to stop, sending Wyndham back to face the FTC’s lawsuit in a lower court. “A company does not act equitably when it publishes a privacy policy to attract customers who are concerned about data privacy, fails to make good on that promise by investing inadequate resources in cybersecurity, exposes its unsuspecting customers to substantial financial injury, and retains the profits of their business,” reads the court’s ruling. For consumer privacy watchdogs, the ruling comes as a relief, solidifying another serious legal incentive for companies to invest in protecting their customers’ data, according to Electronic Privacy Information Center attorney Alan Butler. “This a huge victory for the FTC, but also for American consumers,” says Butler, who filed an amicus brief defending the FTC’s authority earlier in the case. “We see services and companies being hacked on an almost daily basis now. Having the FTC out there, bringing actions against companies that fail to protect consumers’ data is a critical tool.” Wyndham Hotels, for its part, vowed to continue its case in the lower court. The company points out that the appellate court ruled on the FTC’s authority, not the specific allegations the agency made against Wyndham, namely that it had failed to adequately protect its customers. “We believe the facts will show the FTC’s allegations are unfounded,” reads a statement from Wyndham spokesperson Michael Valentino. “Safeguarding personal information remains a top priority for our company, and with the dramatic increase in the number and severity of cyberattacks on both public and private institutions, we believe consumers will be best served by the government and businesses working together collaboratively rather than as adversaries.” Even if Wyndham does eventually lose its case against the FTC, it likely won’t be fined, says Berkeley Law professor Chris Hofnagle. Instead, it could face the kind of privacy probation that is a frequent outcome of the FTC’s privacy suits against firms, in which the agency closely oversees its data protection systems for a period as long as 20 years, with the option to later impose fines for any violation of the standards it imposes. But aside from Wyndham itself, the appellate ruling establishes a more important precedent for the legal consequences of a data breach. “Had Wyndham won at the third circuit, it would have called into question the FTC’s ability to police privacy and security,” says Hofnagle, describing that avoided outcome as a “disaster” for the agency. “This is a major deal.” In its original lawsuit, the FTC accused Wyndham of a long litany of privacy fails, from storing credit card information unencrypted to lacking firewalls to using easily-guessed passwords. The agency compared those practices to Wyndham’s published privacy policy — which promised that it did use some kinds of encryption to protect consumer data as well as firewalls and other “safeguards” — and argued that its insecurity amounted to “unfair” business practices. Wyndham had specifically challenged that “unfair” claim, arguing that it hadn’t actually engaged in the “unscrupulous or unethical behavior” that it said the FTC’s standard requires. But the appellate court wasn’t persuaded; It ruled that the alleged mismatches between its data protection and its privacy policy were sufficient to meet that “unfair” standard, without any accusations of “unethical” behavior necessary. The Court also rejected another argument from Wyndham that if the FTC were allowed to punish companies for this sort of data breach, it would be allowed to sue any supermarket that’s “sloppy about sweeping up banana peels,” opening the door to unfair practice claims run amok. On that point, the Court snapped back: “Were Wyndham a supermarket, leaving so many banana peels all over the place that 619,000 customers fall hardly suggests it should be immune from liability.” The appellate ruling doesn’t necessarily grant the FTC new powers so much as dispel legal questions around the power it already possesses to be a data security watchdog, says Berkeley’s Hofnagle. As data breaches increasingly become a source of real suffering for consumers—see the reports of suicides that have already resulted from Ashley Madison’s scandalous data spill — the agency’s mandate more important than ever. “The law has always imposed responsibility on companies for the care of their customers. When you’re in the restaurant you have to be protected against slips and falls or food-borne illness,” says Hofnagle. “Data is just something new that companies have to protect if they want to bear the benefits of collecting it.” Twitter Shuts Down 30 Sites Dedicated To Saving Politicians' Deleted Tweets Twitter has shut down a network of sites dedicated to archiving deleted tweets from politicians around the world. The sites — collectively known as Politwoops — were overseen by the Open State Foundation (OSF), which reported that Twitter suspended their API access on Friday, August 21st. Twitter reportedly told the OSF that its decision was the result of “thoughtful internal deliberation and close consideration of a number of factors,” and that the social media site didn’t distinguish between politicians and regular users. “Imagine how nerve-racking — terrifying, even — tweeting would be if it was immutable and irrevocable?” Twitter reportedly told the OSF. “No one user is more deserving of that ability than another. Indeed, deleting a tweet is an expression of the user’s voice.” The US arm of Politwoops was shut down in June this year, but this new decision affects countries all over the world including Canada, Egypt, India, Ireland, South Korea, Tunisia, Turkey, Norway, and the UK. The Diplotwoops site, dedicated to archiving deleted tweets from diplomats, was also shut down, with the OSF noting that all the accounts had been “extensively used and cited by journalists around the world.” The organization’s director, Arjan El Fassed, commented: “What politicians say in public should be available to anyone. This is not about typos, but it is a unique insight on how messages from elected politicians can change without notice.” The British arm of Politwoops, known by the handle @deletedbyMPs, was among those affected by Twitter’s decision. Jules Mattsson, who runs the account, told The Guardian: “It’s a terrible shame that Twitter has made this decision. Politwoops has been an important new tool in political accountability in the UK and abroad. Politicians are all too happy to use social media to campaign, but if we lose the ability for this to be properly preserved, it becomes a one-way tool.” 53 Times Twitter Violated Free Speech, According to Tweeters At Yahoo Tech, we make no claim to be constitutional scholars. But after just a few minutes scanning hundreds of online rants lamenting that social media services are supressing “free speech,” we’re starting to feel a bit like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. First Amendment outrage buzzed across Twitter earlier this week when it was revealed that the microblogging platform would no longer support Politwoops, a global network of 30 websites that were collecting politicians’ deleted tweets. Twitter had already quit supplying information about deleted tweets to Politwoops’s U.S. site in June. Politwoops’s argument was that the public has a right to know when elected officials erase their public statements; Twitter’s counter-argument was that politicians should have as much right to privacy — including the ability to delete tweets made in haste — as normal humans do. (Twitter won that fight.) Some tweeters saw these as “repressive” moves by Twitter, similar to its attempts to ban hate speech and bullying, allow users to mute or block others, and deactivate accounts at the requests of government bodies. And, naturally, they took to Twitter to complain about it. We won’t go into great detail about how wrong that line of thinking is. The tl;dr version is the First Amendment applies to supression of speech by government entities, not corporations. But we are more than happy to supply you with a slew of rant-tweets covering the topic, solely for your amusement. Consider it our way of celebrating freedom of speech.  Pirate Sites Ban Windows 10 Over Privacy Worries There's been a good amount of privacy freak-out over Windows 10. Concerns have been sparked by things such as the Wi-Fi password sharing feature and the fact that Windows 10 by default shares a lot of your personal information - contacts, calendar details, text and touch input, location data, and what Ars Technica calls "a whole lot more" - with Microsoft's servers. Of late, that paranoia has spiked over the notion that Microsoft plans to keep people from running conterfeit software. The notion came out of Microsoft's new Windows 10 update procedures, which, coupled with the company's Services Agreement, could allow Redmond to block pirated content and unauthorized hardware andreach right out and wipe torrents clean off of people's hard drives. Fear spread that, in the words of one report, "Microsoft has practically baked DRM [digital rights management] into the core of Windows 10". Cooler heads pointed out that this a) wasn't new, seeing that the new service agreement was published on 4 June and took effect August 1, and b) is simply wrong, since the service agreement applies to services, not to Windows 10 - specifically, it looks like it applies only to services provided directly from Microsoft, including Xbox, Xbox Live and Microsoft's Windows Games. In other words, Microsoft can't disable a copy of a third-party software installed on your hard drive. Such clarifications haven't stopped the paranoia about a piracy kill switch. It's gotten to the point where, as TorrentFreak reports, some smaller pirate sites have become so concerned that Windows 10 systems will phone home with too many hints about their users, that the sites' administrators have started blocking Windows users from the BitTorrent trackers hosted on their sites. One of those sites, iTS, released a statement which referred to Windows 10's "outrageous privacy violations", which, it says, include... [sending] the contents of your local disks directly to one of their servers. "Obviously," the administrators continue, "this goes way too far and is a serious threat to sites like ours which is why we had to take measures." Thus, since Thursday, Windows 10 has officially been banned from iTS until "special versions" surface that undo this purported privacy wreckage. The statement also references what iTS calls "one of the largest anti-piracy companies", MarkMonitor. That actually turns out to be a company that Microsoft has worked with for years in areas such as the monitoring of phishing attacks. Other torrent tracking sites are considering following in the footsteps of iTS, including BB and FSC - all of these being smaller pirate sites found on the dark web, as opposed to larger, well-known sites such as The Pirate Bay. TorrentFreak quotes a statement from BB to its users: We have also found [Windows 10] will be gathering information on users’ P2P use to be shared with anti-piracy groups. What's particularly nasty is that apparently it sends the results of local(!!) searches to a well known anti-piracy company directly, so as soon as you have one known p2p or scene release on your local disk … BAM! And similar warnings have gone out from FSC to its users: As we all know, Microsoft recently released Windows 10. You as a member should know, that we as a site are thinking about banning the OS from FSC. That would mean you cannot use the site with the OS installed. Is there anything to back up this level of fear? As Ars Technica notes, Windows 10 does in fact step up the data collection compared with earlier Windows iterations, due in large part to extra services such as the digital assistant Cortana. Such new services use more data and consequently bloat up the service and privacy agreements with far more verbiage, as Microsoft presumably tries to keep itself out of a Google-esque spot of trouble over unclear privacy policy. But it seems that convenience is the only thing that might keep users locked into this mainlining of data back to Microsoft's servers. You can keep much of your privacy - and your personal data along with it - on your PC, if you have the fortitude to flip quite a few toggles during installation. As TorrentFreak notes, educating users about how to configure the new OS for optimized privacy, as Ars has done, might be a tad more helpful than barring the gates against Windows 10 users. True, if the piracy sites' gates are barred, Windows 10 users might be that much less inclined to avail themselves of pirated games, software or other content that could harbor dangerous malware. But beyond leaving users to the mercy of the moat alligators, barring the gates just doesn't do much to illuminate just what privacy threats are swimming around in those waters or how to properly wrestle with them. Firefox To Support Chrome Extensions Extensions are a popular way to add functionality to your browser, but just like app development, developers often have to make several different versions of their extensions for different browsers. Mozilla wants to cut down on that hassle and allow extensions made for Chrome to also work on Firefox. "We would like add-on development to be more like Web development: the same code should run in multiple browsers according to behavior set by standards, with comprehensive documentation available from multiple vendors," Mozilla said in a blog post. So Mozilla has a new Blink-compatible API in Firefox called WebExtensions, which will allow extensions code for Chrome and Opera (and maybe Microsoft Edge one day) to run on Firefox "with few changes." "WebExtensions will behave like other Firefox add-ons; they will be signed by Mozilla, and discoverable through addons.mozilla.org (AMO) or through the developer's website," the company said. "With this API, extension developers should be able to make the same extension available on Firefox and Chrome with a minimal number of changes to repackage for each platform." WebExtensions is currently available in the Developer Edition of Firefox 42. Details about how to test them are on the Mozilla wiki. Mozilla acknowledged that the move will result in trade-offs. "Developers who already support Chrome extensions will benefit since they will have one codebase to support instead of two," Mozilla said. "Developers of Firefox-only add-ons will have to make changes. Those changes may require considerable development effort up-front, but we feel the end result will be worth that effort for both Firefox's users and developers." Mozilla posted a link to a blog post that it said is a "must-read for people who are concerned about how the add-ons they develop, use, and love will continue to be part of Firefox." Mozilla also provided details on Electrolysis, "which uses a separate operating system process to run Web content." As TechCrunch noted, this means Mozilla will separate browser tabs and the user interface, so a tab crash doesn't crash the entire browser. The final release for Electrolysis will be determined based on user testing, but Mozilla published a rough outline of when it will roll out. Next up: Electrolysis will be available to users as an "opt-in" on the beta channel on Sept. 22. Facebook’s Siri-Like Personal Assistant Is Called ‘M’ Facebook has launched its own personal assistant, and you’ll find it right inside an app you’re already using every day: Messenger. Today marks the introduction of M, which VP David Marcus describes as “a personal digital assistant inside of Messenger that completes tasks and finds information on your behalf. It’s powered by artificial intelligence that’s trained and supervised by people.” Previous rumors indicated there would be a human component to Facebook’s approach. Marcus writes: Unlike other AI-based services in the market, M can actually complete tasks on your behalf. It can purchase items, get gifts delivered to your loved ones, book restaurants, travel arrangements, appointments and way more. So Facebook is positioning M as a step beyond what competing “assistants” like Siri, Google Now, and Cortana are capable of. According to Wired, “a few hundred” Facebook users in the San Francisco bay area will be invited into this first-run test of M. To prevent automated errors, a team of Facebook’s own contractors, known as M Trainers, are responsible for pushing M’s most powerful features through and booking actual reservations, buying products, and so on. But the artificial intelligence at play seems significant, with M responding to your initial queries with follow-up questions and updates as tasks move towards completion. And if you’re worried about privacy or creepy factor, for now M isn’t pulling from your Facebook history to complete any of its functions. This might eventually change though — with permission. (Users are never told whether they’re being assisted by a computer or M’s human helpers, Wired notes.) Marcus notes that M will expand “slowly” over time, but eventually should make its way to all Facebook users — kicking off a new stage of digital assistant competition with Apple, Google, Microsoft, and smaller companies trying their hand. Hillary Clinton Has More Than a Million Fake Twitter Followers Fake Twitter followers abound among the U.S. presidential candidates as they gear up for the election in 2016. And Hillary Clinton isn’t the only candidate with more than a million of them. GOP frontrunner Donald Trump also has well over a million fake followers. Other candidates have them, too, but not as many (in large part because they don’t have as many followers, period). In fact, almost every person on Twitter has some fake followers. I have them, but since I have relatively few followers compared to real celebrities, I have fewer fake ones. Chances are you have fake followers, too. As far as the election goes, present numbers show Clinton and Trump well ahead of the pack in both presidential polling and Twitter followers — the real and the fake kind. So if we were to consider the size of a candidate’s Twitter following as a kind of crude proxy for political popularity or electability, then questions about what it means to have a large number of fake Twitter followers become even more fascinating. What makes a Twitter follower fake? We found out how abundant fake Twitter users are thanks to a site called TwitterAudit, which analyzes Twitter accounts and then tells you how many of that account’s followers are real and how many are fake. TwitterAudit isn’t the only service that does this. There’s also the StatusPeople site; unlike TwitterAudit, StatusPeople will show you who some of those fake users are, how many it considers actually fake and how many are just inactive. But what, exactly, is a fake follower? Shaking hands, kissing babies, and amassing phony Twitter followers. (Data courtesy of TwitterAudit – Click here to see a larger version) “Fake followers are a mix of inactive Twitter users (who signed up but never log on), completely fake users that are created for the sole purpose of following people, and spam bots that are programmatically set up to tweet ads and malicious content,” explained David Caplan, co-founder of TwitterAudit. Clearly, the definition of a fake follower is open to interpretation. Some of the followers that these services consider fake are actually news collection services that harvest tweets and use them to find and publish news stories; when I tweet about this story after it’s posted, those services will pick up that tweet, and then may put this story on their pages, or include a link back to Yahoo Tech. In other words, fake doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not real followers. It could mean that they’re just not individual users who are constantly following, responding, and adding other followers. The obvious question, then, is: Where do those fake followers come from? As you might expect, there’s an app for that — more precisely, a website called Social Followers that promises to add thousands of new names to your list. It certainly shouldn’t be assumed that any of today’s presidential campaigns would need to use a social media blasting service to gain followers that could be considered fakes. These types of accounts also have a propensity to show up on their own — not so much because they’re really fake, but because they’re lurkers who read Twitter feeds but don’t do a lot of tweeting on their own. In addition, Caplan said that people with a large number of followers — more than a million — seem to have a higher percentage of followers his company considers fake. “For large accounts (1 million+ followers), the percentage of real followers sometimes tends towards 50%,” Caplan said in an email. “This doesn’t necessarily mean the other 50% are fake. It’s more likely that many users are just inactive or use Twitter to occasionally read tweets. For large accounts, if the score is 60% (real followers) then I’d say that is a pretty good score.” Are there downsides to having a lot of fake followers? So should you (or a candidate for president of the United States) worry that a large portion of the “people” reading your tweets are a bunch of fakes? The answer there is a firm maybe. Twitter spokesman Nick Pacilio points to Twitter’s spam policy, which specifically bans the practice of getting fake followers. “Using or promoting third-party services or apps that claim to get you more followers (such as follower trains, sites promising ‘more followers fast’ or any other site that offers to automatically add followers to your account).” Meaning that, if you take advantage of a service that adds fake followers, Twitter could cancel your account. But when asked if this rule is actually enforced, Twitter did not respond. The issue of fake Twitter followers otherwise seems pretty harmless. It boosts your ego to have people think you have a lot of followers, and it might boost your Klout score, but does it cause any harm? “Fake followers aren’t inherently bad,” Caplan said, “they are just a dishonest form of using social media. They can be leveraged to inflate someone’s reputation. People will most likely follow someone who already has many followers, so buying followers is a way to boost your follower count in the future. Fake followers can also be used to commit fraud in the sense that you can inflate the value of your Twitter account for advertising purposes without creating any real value.” The fraud that Caplan mentions refers to celebrities who get paid for things such as product mentions made from their Twitter accounts. So for those select few that can get paid to tweet, fake followers can be deceptive. Otherwise, they’re probably harmless. And since those fake followers probably aren’t registered voters, they don’t really matter to the candidates, either. Love Them Or Loathe Them, Emails Are Here To Stay If seeing an inbox full of hundreds of emails fills you with dread, get used to it, because they are here to stay and will remain a constant in the workplace, according to a survey released on Wednesday. Despite the popularity of instant messaging, texting and social media, the poll showed that email is the top communications tool at work and will grow in importance over the next five years. In the online survey, comprising 400 U.S. white-collar, adult workers, nearly half of the respondents said they think their use of emails for work will increase in coming years. Nineteen percent said it will go up substantially. More than 90 percent of the workers admitted they checked personal emails at work and 87 percent looked at business emails outside of working hours. "Email is and will remain a cornerstone of the workplace culture," said Kristin Naragon, of computer software company Adobe Systems Inc, which commissioned the poll. "Certainly, lots of companies are trying to break into that space with productivity tools, but email is not going anywhere," she added in an interview. The workers questioned in the poll estimated they spend 6.3 hours a day checking emails, with 3.2 hours devoted to work emails and 3.1 hours to personal messages. Naragon said Americans are so concerned about keeping in touch they monitor emails around the clock, in socially unacceptable settings and during potentially dangerous times. Nearly 80 percent said they look at emails before going into the office and 30 percent said they checked their inbox while still in bed in the morning. Half of the respondents also monitored emails during their vacations. The numbers were even higher for 18-34 year olds, with 45 percent opening emails upon waking up. More than a quarter of millennials also admitted checking emails while driving. "Millennials are so addicted to emails that half can't even use the bathroom without checking their email," said Naragon. But she added that people are aware of their addiction and have tried to regain a better life balance. Forty percent said they had tried a self-imposed email detox, of which 87 percent lasted an average of five days. When asked about the most annoying thing about emails, 28 percent said it was scrolling down too far to read the entire message. Nearly 40 percent of workers also said they would prefer to get fewer emails. Start Me Up! Microsoft's Breakthrough OS Windows 95 Turns 20 Exactly twenty years ago Monday, Microsoft launched a new version of its desktop operating system that would end up in the hands of millions as PCs dominated Macs and other, lesser brands in the late '90s. It was, of course, Windows 95. It was a sort of golden age of PC buying: HP, Dell and Gateway were living high on the hog as everyone scrambled to get the most megahertz (no gigahertz in those days) in their processors, and wars were being fought over any number of standards, from discs to hard drives to interfaces. The long-delayed Windows 95 borrowed features from competitors to make computers easy to work and play on — though occasionally you'd have to drop into the DOS command line and type out commands manually. Perhaps the most important addition was the now-iconic Start button, which put your applications, recent documents and important settings all in one place. That Start button has been in every version of the OS ever since — except for a brief absence in Windows 8, about which users complained so much that the feature was restored in the just-released Windows 10. Windows 95 also introduced the Microsoft Network, a rival to AOL that introduced many people to email and the Web. Networking, multiple users and multitasking were also new and improved in the OS. Win 95 dominated the market, driving out rivals like OS/2 and Apple, though the latter would return in force with OS X a few years later. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is televised on a big screen as he introduces Windows 95 during the inaugural presentation of Microsoft's new operating system at the firm's Redmond, Washington campus on August 24, 1995. The presentation, which included demonstrations of the software and a carnival, was attended by 500 journalists, 2000 guests, and 9000 Microsoft employees. You may remember being bombarded with advertisements at the time, or perhaps even seeing the Empire State Building lit up in Windows red, green, blue and yellow — Microsoft famously spent hundreds of millions promoting the OS. And the soundtrack to it all was, of course, the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up," which Microsoft paid handsomely to license. If you want to relive those days — well, you'll have a bit of trouble finding a computer that will run Windows 95 — you can listen to the Stones song: Microsoft has made it a free download for the rest of the day. =~=~=~= Atari Online News, Etc. is a weekly publication covering the entire Atari community. Reprint permission is granted, unless otherwise noted at the beginning of any article, to Atari user groups and not for profit publications only under the following terms: articles must remain unedited and include the issue number and author at the top of each article reprinted. Other reprints granted upon approval of request. Send requests to: dpj@atarinews.org No issue of Atari Online News, Etc. may be included on any commercial media, nor uploaded or transmitted to any commercial online service or internet site, in whole or in part, by any agent or means, without the expressed consent or permission from the Publisher or Editor of Atari Online News, Etc. 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