Google is still in the process of updating some of its smartwatches to Wear OS 2.2 H, but in a bid to stay ahead of the curve, or totally confuse us, version 2.3 of the wearable operating system is also being rolled out. Go figure!

As part of the update, the Home app has been updated from version 2.20 to 2.21, which has a number of improvements including a slight change of design, improved health coaching and what they call more “proactive” help from Google Assistant.

postmarketOS is aiming for a ten year life-cycle for smartphones, see the all new front page for a short introduction if you are new around here. Today we'll cover what happened during the second half of 2018. Many have been wondering where we've been and why it took us so long to write a real update post. Is the project dead already? Weren't phone calls almost working? What happened?
Development has been going on continuously, so we are not dead. Maybe a little undead though, like some of the old and forgotten phones we are trying to revive, because we have not really gotten any closer to the goal of getting telephony working or turning a phone into a daily driver. The Nexus 5, while booting mainline with accelerated graphics and connecting to the cellular modem all with a free software userspace, still does not have working audio. That is one example, other devices have different problems. However, we have not been sitting idle and doing nothing these past few months!

Also: Google hands out roses to preferred Android MDM vendors

It's been a year since the former leader of the Solus Project, Ikey Doherty, promised us the release of Solus 4, but after many trials and tribulations the team is now stable and ready to continue from where they left off. According to experience lead developer Joshua Strobl, the Solus 4 release is on its way very soon, as soon as Budgie 10.5 desktop environment hits the streets.

"I’m hoping that Budgie 10.5 will be ready for release in the next few weeks, which also means Solus 4 will also be released, finally moving us away from the Solus 3.x release and subsequent ISO refresh and opening the door to our previously announced change in our In Full Sail blog post to how we release new versions of Solus," said Joshua Strobl.

• The National Inventors Hall of Fame Announces Its 2019 Inductees

  Posthumously honored inventors include Lee; UNIX co-creator Dennis Ritchie; thiazide diuretic pioneers John Baer, Karl H. Beyer Jr., Frederick Novello and James Sprague; hand-held electric drill inventors Duncan Black and Alonzo G. Decker of the popular Black & Decker power tool company; Andrew Higgins, the mastermind behind the Higgins Boats used by American troops landing at Normandy on D-Day; and Joseph Muhler and William Nebergall, creators of the cavity-preventing stannous fluoride toothpaste better known today by the brand name Crest.

• National Inventors Hall of Fame honors creators of Unix, power drills and more

• Eric Rescorla Wins the Levchin Prize at the 2019 Real-World Crypto Conference

  The Levchin Prize awards two entrepreneurs every year for significant contributions to solving global, real-world cryptography issues that make the internet safer at scale. This year, we’re proud to announce that our very own Firefox CTO, Eric Rescorla, was awarded one of these prizes for his involvement in spearheading the latest version of Transport Layer Security (TLS). TLS 1.3 incorporates significant improvements in both security and speed, was completed in August and already secures 10% of sites.

  Eric has contributed extensively to many of the core security protocols used in the Internet, including TLS, DTLS, WebRTC, ACME, and the in development IETF QUIC protocol.  Most recently, he was editor of TLS 1.3, which already secures 10% of websites despite having been finished for less than six months. He also co-founded Let’s Encrypt, a free and automated certificate authority that now issues more than a million certificates a day, in order to remove barriers to online encryption and helped HTTPS grow from around 30% of the web to around 75%. Previously, he served on the California Secretary of State’s Top To Bottom Review where he was part of a team that found severe vulnerabilities in multiple electronic voting devices.

• Great, you've moved your website or app to HTTPS. How do you test it? Here's a tool to make local TLS certs painless

  A Google cyrptoboffin is close to releasing a tool that will hopefully make all of us more secure online.

  Now that most web traffic travels over HTTPS and browser features increasingly expect security, developers really should be creating and testing apps in an HTTPS environment.

  Doing so requires installing a TLS/SSL certificate locally, but the process isn't as easy as it might be. With a bit of effort, devs can generate their own certificate, self-signed or signed by the local root, and install it. Various online tutorials offers ways to do so. There are also projects like minica that aim to ease the pain.

  But it could be easier still, along the lines of Let's Encrypt, a tool that lets websites handle HTTPS traffic through automated certificate issuance and installation.