Month: October 2018

The Galaxy S10 is widely expected to feature an in-display fingerprint sensor, a feature Samsung has been working on for a few years now. The Galaxy S8 was first rumored to get it, but Samsung kept delaying the launch of a flagship with an in-screen fingerprint sensor on account of various development issues. A series of reports have said in recent months that up to two of the three Galaxy S10 models launching next year will feature in-display sensors, and now we have more evidence Samsung is indeed working on such screens.
A Samsung patent application titled Electronic Device Comprising Biometric Sensor, filed in April with WIPO and published on Thursday (via GalaxyClub), describes technology that would allow Samsung to include a fingerprint sensor within the layers of the display.
The following image shows a device that looks a lot like the Galaxy S9, complete with an Infinity Display design and curved edges. What’s interesting about the diagram is that it shows a display that folds beneath itself to connect to the logic board. That’s an ingenious design trick that Apple used on the iPhone X phones to eliminate the bottom bezel. Samsung, of course, is aware of the design, given that it makes iPhone X/XS displays for Apple and Apple was the first company to do this in a widely available smartphone. Also interesting is the fact that the device still features a bottom bezel.
The drawing, however, doesn’t necessarily tell us what the Galaxy S10 will look like. What’s important in these images is the fingerprint sensor that’s placed under the screen near the bottom of the device.
The image above shows that an optical fingerprint sensor and an image sensor would be stacked under the display. The text specifically says that the device may read fingerprints with the help of an optical sensor. That’s the most popular type of in-display fingerprint sensor for smartphones right now. But recent reports said the Galaxy S10+ might feature a more advanced ultrasonic sensor, which is a sensor that reads a fingerprint using sound waves instead of optics. The patent application does mention that the display may include an ultrasonic touch panel, but that’s about it, focusing mostly on optical sensors.
While not all the technology described in patents ends up in commercial products, it’s likely that Samsung will add an in-display fingerprint sensor to the Galaxy S10 series next year. The alternative is falling behind competitors that are getting more dangerous than ever.

Snapdragon 850 is Qualcomm’s first chip explicitly for PC form factors.
Samsung today announced the Galaxy Book2 (sic; the company has not put a space between the word and the number), a 2-in-1 tablet running Windows 10, powered by a Snapdragon 850 processor.
The first generation of Windows 10-on-ARM machines were roundly criticized for the performance of their Snapdragon 835 processors. The second generation of machines, however, uses the Snapdragon 850, a variant of the Snapdragon 845 that’s designed for the bigger batteries and higher power dissipation of laptops and tablets. This is widely hoped and expected to bring performance up to respectable levels.
This new tablet follows Microsoft’s Surface Pro design: a tablet with a kickstand, a detachable keyboard, and a pen. Similarity extends to the screen, too: the 12-inch AMOLED display uses the same 3:2 aspect ratio as Microsoft does, with a resolution of 2160×1440. The internals are the real point of this machine, though. There’s a Snapdragon 850 (quad 2.96GHz cores plus quad 1.7GHz cores) with 4GB RAM, a Snapdragon X20 LTE modem supporting up to 1.2 Gbit/s download and 150 Mbit/s upload, 802.11ac, and 128GB storage. There’s an 8MP rear camera, a 5MP front-facing camera, a microSD slot, and two USB Type-C slots. Biometric authentication is supported with a fingerprint reader.
The big point of interest for these ARM machines is that they’re intended to offer smartphone-like battery life and connectivity. Even when idle or in standby, they can be online enough to retrieve emails, instant messages, and similar materials, they have long battery life (20 hours according to Samsung), and they transparently switch between Wi-Fi when available and LTE when necessary to ensure that they’re always online.
The new Galaxy Book2 system ships with the pen and keyboard as standard and will cost $1000 from AT&T, Microsoft, and Samsung on November 2. Later in November, it will also ship from Verizon and Sprint.

The latest round of fixes comes on week after the monthly Patch Tuesday updates.
Microsoft today pushed out another set of cumulative updates, bringing a large number of fixes to a trio of currently support Windows 10 releases. While there are no new updates for either the October 2018 or April 2018 updates, the three preceding versions are in line for today’s fixes (via Neowin).
Here’s a look at all of what’s new for each version.

Fall Creators Update (build 16299.755)

• Addresses the redenomination of local currency that the Central Bank of Venezuela implemented to enter the Bolivar Soberano into circulation.
• Addresses an issue in which searching using Microsoft Outlook’s Social Connector returns nothing, which causes the People’s pane results to always be empty.
• Addresses additional issues with updated time zone information.
• Addresses an issue that prevents the clock and date flyout from appearing when the region format is Spanish (Spain) and the sorting method is Traditional.
• Addresses an issue with navigation from the Decade view in the Japanese calendar. When the user tries to go from the Current era to the next era, navigation does not work properly.
• Addresses an issue to support Microsoft Office events in the “Limit Enhanced” Group Policy setting list.
• Addresses an issue in which applications on systems with more than 4 GB of memory receive Access Denied error code “0x5” when calling CreateProcessWithLogonW().
• Addresses an issue that makes it impossible to disable TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 when the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) mode is enabled.
• Addresses an issue in which the AccountName in the Event Log entry for the Microsoft-Windows-Kerberos-Key-Distribution-Center source and Event ID 7 sometimes appears corrupted.
• Addresses an issue in which applications have handle leaks when using client authentication certificates with the TLS protocol. This issue occurs when the FreeCredentialsHandle call occurs before the DeleteSecurityContext call in application code.
• Addresses an issue that might cause TCP connections opened for an application running on Windows Container to fail sporadically. This occurs when the container runs on a Network Address Translation (NAT) Network provided by Windows Network Address Translation (WinNAT). A SYN timeout occurs after reaching the maximum SYN Retransmit count.
• Addresses an issue that prevents the deletion of Immediate Tasks when their deletion timer occurs, such as when you configure Group Policy preferences for Immediate Task actions.
• Addresses an issue that can cause App-V packages to fail because of a missing file or DLL error.
• Addresses an issue that may cause certain applications to stop responding after installation.
• Addresses an issue that fails to mount a volume when running Mount-SRDestination to bring a destination volume online as part of the Test Failover feature.
• Addresses an issue in which the System.Security.Cryptography.Algorithms reference was not correctly loaded on .NET Framework 4.7.1 after the July 10, 2018 and August 14, 2018 patches.
• Addresses an issue that may cause the system to stop working during the shutdown of some Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) apps because of TaskCanceledException. Apps that are vulnerable to this issue perform work involving weak events or data binding after the Application.Run() function returns values.
• Addresses a race condition in temporary files and some antivirus scanners that causes .NET Framework applications to stop working. The error message is, “The process cannot access the file “.
• Updates the .NET Framework’s support for the formatting of Japanese dates for the first year in the eras. When the format pattern is “y年”, the year format will use the symbol 元 and not use year number 1. Additionally, the .NET Framework will support dates that include 元.
• Updates Venezuela currency information. This will affect the culture of “es-VE” as follows:
  • The currency symbol is “Bs.S”.
  • The English currency name is “Bolívar Soberano”.
  • The local currency name is “bolívar soberano”.
  • The International Currency Code is “VES”.
• Addresses an issue with a dialog box that may appear with a non-applicable message beginning with the words, “Hosted by…” when first starting Microsoft Edge. The dialog box only appears if you have turned on “Block only third-party cookies” in Microsoft Edge and applied certain language packs after installing the October 9, 2018 update.

• Addresses an issue that may cause an application that has a child window to stop processing mouse inputs. This issue occurs when a precision touchpad triggers a WM_MOUSEWHEEL event.

 

Creators Update (build 15063.1418)

• Addresses the redenomination of local currency that the Central Bank of Venezuela implemented to enter the Bolivar Soberano into circulation.
• Addresses additional issues with updated time zone information.
• Addresses an issue that may cause the operating system to stop responding when transitioning from Sleep to Hibernation.
• Addresses an issue with navigation from the Decade view in the Japanese calendar. When the user tries to go from the Current era to the next era, navigation does not work properly.
• Addresses an issue with cloud authentication performance for accounts that create logon sessions very quickly.
• Addresses an issue that makes it impossible to disable TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 when the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) mode is enabled.
• Addresses an issue in which applications on systems with more than 4 GB of memory receive Access Denied error code “0x5” when calling CreateProcessWithLogonW().
• Addresses an issue in which applications have handle leaks when using client authentication certificates with the TLS protocol. This issue occurs when the FreeCredentialsHandle call occurs before the DeleteSecurityContext call in application code.
• Addresses an issue that can cause App-V packages to fail because of a missing file or DLL error.
• Addresses an issue in which the System.Security.Cryptography.Algorithms reference was not correctly loaded on .NET Framework 4.7.1 after the July 10, 2018 and August 14, 2018 patches.
• Addresses an issue that may cause the system to stop working during the shutdown of some Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) apps because of TaskCanceledException. Apps that are vulnerable to this issue perform work involving weak events or data binding after the Application.Run() function returns values.
• Addresses a race condition in temporary files and some antivirus scanners that causes .NET Framework applications to stop working. The error message is, “The process cannot access the file “.
• Updates the .NET Framework’s support for the formatting of Japanese dates for the first year in the eras. When the format pattern is “y年”, the year format will use the symbol 元 and not use year number 1. Additionally, the .NET Framework will support dates that include 元.
• Updates Venezuela currency information. This will affect the culture of “es-VE” as follows:
  • The currency symbol is “Bs.S”.
  • The English currency name is “Bolívar Soberano”.
  • The local currency name is “bolívar soberano”.
  • The International Currency Code is “VES”.
• Addresses an issue with a dialog box that may appear with a non-applicable message beginning with the words, “Hosted by…” when first starting Microsoft Edge. The dialog box only appears if you have turned on “Block only third-party cookies” in Microsoft Edge and applied certain language packs after installing the October 9, 2018 update.

Anniversary Update (build 14393.2580)

• Addresses the redenomination of local currency that the Central Bank of Venezuela implemented to enter the Bolivar Soberano into circulation.
• Addresses additional issues with updated time zone information.
• Addresses an issue in which no error message appears when a blocked app is invoked from the Start menu.
• Addresses an issue in which the AccountName in the Event Log entry for the Microsoft-Windows-Kerberos-Key-Distribution-Center source and Event ID 7 sometimes appears corrupted.
• Addresses an issue with cloud authentication performance for accounts that create logon sessions very quickly.
• Addresses an issue that makes it impossible to disable TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 when the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) mode is enabled.
• Addresses an issue that maps two or more certificates for authentication to the same user. The user receives the message, “Duplicates found” and receives the error, “STATUS_CERTIFICATE_MAPPING_NOT_UNIQUE”.
• Addresses an issue in which applications have handle leaks when using client authentication certificates with the TLS protocol. This issue occurs when the FreeCredentialsHandle call occurs before the DeleteSecurityContext call in application code.
• Addresses memory leak issues on svchost.exe (netsvcs and IP Helper Service).
• Addresses an issue that depletes the storage space on a cluster-shared volume (CSV) because of a Hyper-V virtual hard disk (VHDX) expansion. As a result, a Virtual Machine (VM) might continue writing data to its disk until it becomes corrupted or stops working. The VM might also restart and then resume writing data until a corruption occurs.
• Addresses an issue that causes the promotion of a read-only domain controller (RODC) to fail. This might occur if application partitions are defined, but the DNS name resolution failed with the “Name error”. The errors are “While promoting Read-only Domain Controller, the expected state objects could not be found” and “More data is available” (error code 234).
• Addresses interoperation issues between Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) Extranet Smart Lockout (ESL) and Alternate Login ID. When Alternate Login ID is enabled, calls to AD FS Powershell cmdlets, Get-AdfsAccountActivity and Reset-AdfsAccountLockout, return “Account not found” errors. When Set-AdfsAccountActivity is called, a new entry is added instead of editing an existing one.
• Addresses an issue with navigation from the Decade view in the Japanese calendar. When the user tries to go from the Current era to the next era, navigation does not work properly.
• Addresses an issue that causes the Remote Desktop Services Gateway to stop working effectively in a load balanced scenario after 12 to 24 hours of uptime.
• Addresses an issue that occurs when using multiple Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V clusters. The following event appears in the log:
  • “Cluster Shared Volume ‘CSVName’ (‘CSVName’) has entered a paused state because of ‘STATUS_USER_SESSION_DELETED(c0000203)’. All I/O will temporarily be queued until a path to the volume is reestablished.”
• Addresses an issue that may cause the creation of a single node cluster or the addition of more nodes to a cluster to fail intermittently.

• Addresses an issue that occurs when restarting a node after draining the node. Event ID 5120 appears in the log with a “STATUS_IO_TIMEOUT c00000b5” message. This may slow or stop input and output (I/O) to the VMs, and sometimes the nodes may drop out of cluster membership.
• Addresses an issue in which the System.Security.Cryptography.Algorithms reference was not correctly loaded on .NET Framework 4.7.1 after the July 10, 2018 and August 14, 2018 patches.
• Addresses an issue that may cause the system to stop working during the shutdown of some Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) apps because of TaskCanceledException. Apps that are vulnerable to this issue perform work involving weak events or data binding after the Application.Run() function returns values.
• Addresses a race condition in temporary files and some antivirus scanners that causes .NET Framework applications to stop working. The error message is, “The process cannot access the file “.
• Updates the .NET Framework’s support for the formatting of Japanese dates for the first year in the eras. When the format pattern is “y年”, the year format will use the symbol 元 and not use year number 1. Additionally, the .NET Framework will support dates that include 元.
• Updates Venezuela currency information. This will affect the culture of “es-VE” as follows:
  • The currency symbol is “Bs.S”.
  • The English currency name is “Bolívar Soberano”.
  • The local currency name is “bolívar soberano”.
  • The International Currency Code is “VES”.
• Addresses an issue that may cause the addition of nodes to fail intermittently after creating a single node in a Windows Server 2016 Cluster. The error code is, “0x0000001e”.
• Addresses an issue that may cause an application that has a child window to stop processing mouse inputs. This issue occurs when a precision touchpad triggers a WM_MOUSEWHEEL event.

It’s worth noting that the Creators Update and Anniversary Update are no longer supported for most consumers. Only Windows 10 Enterprise and Windows 10 Education Editions running those updates will receive today’s cumulative releases.

Chrome OS has been shaping up to be the all-in-one system, combining the best of Google’s ecosystem, including Android apps, with the power of Linux apps. The latter is still in beta phase with improvements and new features in every update. Today we take a look at some of the features coming soon to Chrome OS Linux apps.
Chrome OS first gained its Linux app support, also known as Crostini, with version 69. While it’s certainly not flawless, the support has been groundbreaking, enabling everything from full photo editors to Android Studio on Chrome OS. With upcoming versions of Chrome OS, Google is working to smoothen the rough edges of Crostini to make it easier to use.
Chrome OS 71 will introduce a variety of these changes, as noted by About Chromebooks. The first is a subtle one, but helpful for debugging. The Linux virtual machine your apps run in will be visible in Chrome OS’s Task Manager. This currently doesn’t break things down by app, nor does it show the RAM usage. All the same, this is still useful for figuring out why your Chromebook may be running slowly.
Speaking of, the update will also include the ability to easily shut down the Linux virtual machine. With a simple right-click of the Terminal app’s launcher icon, a new “Shut Down Linux (Beta)” option appears. Previously, the best way to shut down Linux was to restart your Chromebook, which is certainly a chore by comparison with a two-click procedure.
Chrome OS 71 also introduces an extremely useful feature in the form of folder sharing. This will allow Linux apps access to read and write files in designated Chrome OS folders, instead of only its own separated “Linux files.” The folders shared this way can be managed in the Linux Apps section of Chrome OS Settings.
We’ve discovered that this folder sharing feature is getting a further boost in Chrome OS 72 with Google Drive support. Just like Chrome OS folders, you’ll soon be able to right-click folders in Google Drive and choose to share them with your Linux apps. This will be handy for keeping your work projects synced to and from the cloud.

9to5Google’s Take

I’m very excited for the Google Drive support, so that I can finally keep my folder full of GIMP projects synced between all of my computers.

Pre-orders for the iPhone XR will kick off on Friday, October 19 at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time, allowing customers to purchase the third flagship iPhone in the 2018 iPhone lineup.
Apple is planning to make the new devices available in multiple countries around the world simultaneously, so we’ve created a list of when pre-orders will kick off all around the world.
We haven’t listed every time zone for every country, such as in Canada, Russia, and the United States, nor have we listed every available pre-order country, so make sure to double check your specific time zone so you’re certain you know the exact time that pre-orders will kick off. A time zone converting website is a useful tool for confirming accurate pre-order times.
It’s not yet clear if supplies of the iPhone XR will be constrained, but there have been rumors of production issues that led to a launch delay, so it’s best to pre-order the iPhone XR as soon as possible if you’re aiming to get a new device on release day.
iPhone XR pre-orders will be available on October 19 in Albania, Andorra, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Greenland, Guernsey, Herzegovina, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Isle of Man, Italy, Japan, Jersey, Kosovo, Kuwait, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Malaysia, Mexico, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Oman, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, the UAE, UK, US, and US Virgin Islands.
The first iPhone XR pre-orders will arrive to customers on Friday, October 26, the XR’s official launch date.