But today we got our hands on LPCAMM2 for the first time, and this looks like the future to us. LPCAMM2 is a totally modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops, using the latest LPDDR chips for maximum speed and efficiency. So instead of overpaying (or under-speccing) based on guesswork about your future memory needs, you'll hopefully be able to buy your next laptop and then install more RAM as needed. Imagine that! Carsten Frauenheim LPDDR memory, used in modern laptops, has been difficult - or impossible - to upgrade because its low power nature means it needs to be located as close to the processor as possible with short traces, since the longer the traces, the more power is needed to maintain signal integrity between the processor and RAM. This would defeat the entire purpose of low-power DDR memory to begin with. Originally developed by Dell and eventually adopted by JEDEC and the wider industry, LPCAMM2 solves this problem by using screw-down RAM modules located right next to the processor. These modules can, like regular memory modules, be replaced and upgraded when needed or desired. This is a great leap forward, and I really, really hope we're going to see quick, widespread adoption.
GCC 14.1 has been released, and it should come as no surprise that the new features are not exactly something I, someone who doesn't program, can properly parse. So, here's the three items GCC itself thought were important to list first. The C frontend when targeting standards newer than C89 now considers many non-standard constructs as errors that were previously only warnings. See https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-14/porting_to.html#warnings-as-errors for more details. C23 _BitInt Bit-precise integer types are now supported, for now only on IA-32, x86-64 and AArch64. The C++ frontend now implements several C++26 features, some missing C++23 bits and defect report resolutions. Diagnostics involving C++ templates now quote source from the instantiation context. The libstdc++exp.a library now includes all symbols for the Filesystem TS and the experimental symbols for the C++23 std::stacktrace class, so -lstdc++exp can be used instead of -lstdc++fs. The libstdc++_libbacktrace.a library is not longer installed. Improved experimental support for C++20, C++23, and C++26. Updated parallel algorithms that are compatible with oneTBB. GCC 14.1 release announcement GCC 14.1 is available for download, of course, but most of us will get it once it hits our distribution's package repositories.
We're all aware of Stack Overflow - it's a place where programmers and regular users can ask technical questions, and get answers from anyone who thinks they know the answer. Stack Overflow has become so ubiquitous among programmers and developers, the concept of I just copied the code off Stack Overflow" has become a consistent meme to indicate you don't fully grasp how something works, but at least it works. If you've ever contributed answers to Stack Overflow, you might want to consider deleting them, altering them, or perhaps even go as far as request a GDPR removal if you're in the European Union, because Stack Overflow has just announced a close partnership with AI" company OpenAI (or, more accurately, Open" AI"). Stripped of marketing speak, the gist is exactly as you'd expect: OpenAI will absorb the questions and answers on Stack Overflow into its models, whether their respective authors like it or not. As much as you may want to try and delete your answers if you're not interesting in having your work generate profit for OpenAI, deleting popular questions and answers is not possible on Stack Overflow. The other option is altering your answers to render them useless, but it seems Stack Overflow is not going to allow you to do this, either. Ben Humphreys tried to alter his highest-rated answers, and Stack Overflow just reverted them back, and proceeded to ban him from the platform. Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community. So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message. Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days. Ben Humphreys Now that they've made what is most likely an incredibly lucrative deal with OpenAI that's going to net Stack Overflow's owners boatloads of money, they obviously can't let users delete or alter their answers to lower the monetary value of Stack Overflow's content. Measures to prevent deletion or alteration are probably one of the clauses in the agreement between Stack Overflow and OpenAI. So there's likely not much you can do to not have your answers sucked into OpenAI, but you should at least be aware it's happening in case of future answers you might want to contribute.
I want to run GoToSocial on some *BSD system. Because I am who I am, I went for using NetBSD 10.0 . And because my hypervisor is running bhyve on OmniOS , you get the title of this blog post. Don't get too anxious, it is quite straightforward. So let the journey begin. Joel Carnat Bhyve is a hypervisor originating from FreeBSD, while OmniOS is a distribution of illumos, a continuation of the last open source Solaris release from Oracle. GoToSocial, meanwhile, is an ActivityPub social network server, so it belongs in the same family as Mastodon, Glitch, Akkoma, and countless others. This guide makes this whole process look like a piece of cake, so if you've ever been interested in running your own ActivityPub server - read on. On a slightly related sidenote, there's no OSNews AT instance, partly because I don't want to deal with the moderation and costs, and partly because I'm incredibly happy being a member of Exquisite, a Glitch instance running on OpenBSD, managed by OpenBSD enthusiasts. Never say never, of course, but the odds of seeing an OSNews AT instance in the future are very slim.
The grabber in Windows 3.1 was improved to save and restore the index register as well, but it does not attempt to restore the flip-flop state, which is significant. The problem with the VGA emulation was that it erroneously applied the flip-flop state to reads from port 3C0h, and Windows 3.1 would save the wrong index register value... but only the second time through, because the flip-flop state was different at that point. That is to say, the Windows 3.1 standard mode grabber read from port 3C0h to query the attribute controller index register state, but the emulation returned the currently selected data register contents instead. And then, when restoring the attribute controller index register the next time around, the register would be restored to the wrong value which didn't have bit 5 set, causing the screen to go blank. Michal Necasek It's not every day that you learn how an aspect of the workings of VGA causes a blank screen under very specific circumstances when running Windows 3.1 in Standard mode under emulation, and that this specific aspect of the workings of VGA was implemented to maintain backwards compatibility with EGA. Absolutely bonkers.
In addition to Linux 6.10 expected to drop support for very old DEC Alpha processors (EV5 and earlier), it looks like the PowerPC 40x (early PowerPC 400 series) processor and platform support will be retired too. Back in 2020 was a proposal for dropping PowerPC 40x support from the Linux kernel given that the code was orphaned for a long time with no apparent users. The PowerPC 40x processors were found in thin clients, set-top boxes, and other devices during the 90's. Finally now it looks like that the PowerPC 40x removal is set to happen. Michael Larabel Spring cleaning in the hardware support department. I wonder what has more users - Windows on ARM, or Linux on PowerPC 40x.
Windows 11 supports a variety of ARM processors from Qualcomm. According to the official documentation, you need a computer with the Snapdragon 850 processor inside or newer to run the current operating system officially. However, customers with PCs powered by the Snapdragon 835, the original Windows on ARM chip from 2016, can bypass hardware requirements and install Windows 11 at their own risk. Sadly, those days will be ending soon. Starting with Windows 11 version 24H2, Microsoft's operating system requires ARM v8.1 to run. An attempt to boot it from a device with an ARM v8.0-based processor results in system crashes. For reference, the Snapdragon 835 from 2016 is a chip with Kryo 280 cores, which are derivative of ARM's Cortex-A73 cores. Taras Buria at Neowin I'm sure all three Windows on ARM users are devastated.
Snikket is a FOSS project for creating private chat spaces for small groups, such as families, friends, or clubs. It doesn't depend on a phone number, doesn't upload address books anywhere, and doesn't sell data to advertisers. It supports all the features you expect, including media and voice messages, audio and video calls, end-to-end encryption, group messaging, and more. Use it from multiple devices at once with the official apps, or even with unofficial, third-party apps. Snikket is easy to self-host, and professional managed hosting is also available. Our previous sponsor, JMP, opted to donate a free week's sponsorship to Snikket, which any paying OSNews sponsor can opt to do. This is our very small way of giving something back to the countless open source and/or smaller projects out there. Thank you Snikket for sponsoring OSNews!
That's right: it's PowerPC, the most unloved of the architectures CE ever ran on - in fact, this is the first PowerPC Windows CE device I've ever found, and I'm the self-described biggest pro-PowerPC bigot in the world. Here's an unusual form factor Windows CE device, running on the operating system's least used CPU, from a storied computer company near the end of its run, intended for medical applications, produced in very small numbers and cancelled within months. What are we going to do with it? Well, what do you think we're gonna do with it? We're going to program it, so that we can finally have some software! And, of course, since this wacky thing was there at the bitter end, we'll talk more about the last days of Data General and what happened next. Cameron Kaiser I knew Windows CE supported PowerPC, but I never knew any PowerPC-based Windows CE devices ever actually shipped and made it to market. Only Windows CE 2.0 seems to have supported the architecture, and it seems to have been eliminated in 3.0 and 4.0, so it's not surprising there weren't many PowerPC Windows CE devices out there. The device that's the subject of this article, too, only lasted on the market for a few months, so it's definitely a rarity.
Still rocking your Palm OS device, but mutter under your breath every time you need to log into a website or service with two-factor authentication? Sick of carrying around an Android or iOS device just so you can log in on your Palm PDA? Worry no more, your prayers have been answered, you can finally throw that Android or iOS garbage into the sun. Get your 2-factor codes on your Palm, just like Google Authenticator. Unlike Hotpants (an old port of a J2ME phone app), this version takes up much less space and supports all Palm OS versions. Nathan Korth You can now generate 2FA codes on your Palm device. This is wild, and I absolutely love it. I might if set it up on one of my dozens of Palm OS devices and just put it next to my keyboard for easy access. There's no cooler way to handle 2FA than this.
We'd like to thank this past week's sponsor JMP for sponsoring OSNews. As a reminder, JMP is a fully FOSS service providing a way to get a real phone number that operates over the internet using XMPP. They provide numbers in the USA and Canada with everything you need to access SMS/MMS/etc. and voice calls using your XMPP (or SIP) clients of choice across all your devices. They are committed to growing the use of open communications technology such as XMPP, ultimately working to help people move their communication off the unencrypted telephone network and onto the federated, encrypted, and diverse Jabber network. Once again, thanks to JMP for sponsoring OSNews!
But the biggest differential factor between BSDs and GNU/Linux is the way it is structured. In Linux, all components are designed to work together, but are completely separate. You've got the kernel, init systems, multimedia daemons, userland, bootloader, virtualization and containerization mechanisms, package managers, and so on. They are all separate projects with their own goals and are operated by separate entities. This is why we've got different Linux Distributions instead of Operating System. Everyone can take the kernel, start adding components on top of it, and a few minutes later the DistroWatch is even harder to keep up with. Each BSD on the other hand is designed as single system. All components are created and developed together. Things work together perfectly, because they are designed, coded, tested and released as one. Micha Sapka As I've mentioned here and there over the past few weeks, I've been exploring the world of BSD lately, and after bouncing of FreeBSD I've found a very happy home on OpenBSD. Now, this doesn't mean I'm now a full-time OpenBSD user or anything like that - Linux is the main operating system on my gaming PC, my laptop, and my workstation, and that's not going to be changing any time soon. However, after installing, exploring, and using OpenBSD on a machine cobbled together from spare and older parts, I can definitely see the appeal. OpenBSD feels more coherent than a Linux distribution - I use Fedora KDE, if that matters - and the various lower-level systems seem to talk to each other in ways that make more intuitive sense than the individually developed systems in a Linux distribution do. Diving into the command-line interface of a Linux distribution can sometimes feel confusing because different tools use different conventions, because they're developed by entirely different people and projects, with different ideas about how flags should work, how output should be presented, and so on. On OpenBSD, it seems much easier to carry over something you learn from one tool to the next. I simply feel more secure and knowledgeable, even if it's still the same idiot me. The documentation plays a big role here. They're in one place, written in a consistent style, and reference each other left and right, making it easy to find your way around to other commands or tools you haven't yet considered using. On Linux, you're going from one project's documentation to another project's documentation, and not only will the style change, the quality will also vary greatly. That's not to say everything's perfect on OpenBSD - it's clearly a hardened server operating system, and its focus on security will definitely throw up annoying hurdles if you're just trying to do workstation things. Firefox, for instance, is hobbled by strict security rules through unveil, which makes perfect sense for what OpenBSD is first and foremost trying to be, but if you're just a regular user like me, it's annoying that Firefox can only access ~/Downloads, or that it can't set itself as the default browser so unless you disable that check, Firefox will keep complaining about it. Diving into Firefox and unveil is on my list, though, because you should be able to fix' this. Furthermore, while every piece of software, or an equivalent, is pretty much always available for Linux, on OpenBSD it's more hit and miss, and it seems to take a bit longer for new releases of especially bigger software packages to get updated. I mean, there's obviously no Steam on OpenBSD, but smaller, less well-known projects generally also don't support OpenBSD, so you're either going to be compiling things yourself or hope someone packages it up for OpenBSD. Then there's the various vanity things we've come to expect from modern Linux distributions, like slick, fully graphical boot and shutdown sequences, detailed graphical tools for managing your packages, graphical firmware and driver managers, and so on. OpenBSD has none of these things, and while that's no issue for me, I can see how it would throw other people off. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and the few others often kind of get lost in all the Linux, Windows, and macOS violence, and to be quite honest - I feel like many people in the BSD community seem mostly okay with that. If you've never spent any serious time using any of the BSDs, but you're interested in operating systems and don't mind spending a few hours learning how to manipulate your system through CLI tools - dive in. There's a ton of fun to be had, and things to learn. For now, I'm continuing my exploration of OpenBSD, and if things keep going as well as they are, I may consider at least switching over the workstation in my office from Fedora KDE to OpenBSD - but I highly doubt it'll ever make its way to my gaming desktop or my laptop.
Game of Trees (Got) is a version control system which prioritizes ease of use and simplicity over flexibility. Got is still under development; it is being developed on OpenBSD and its main target audience are OpenBSD developers. Got uses Git repositories to store versioned data. Git can be used for any functionality which has not yet been implemented in Got. It will always remain possible to work with both Got and Git on the same repository. Game of Trees website OpenBSD is developing Game of Trees because they want a version control system that adheres to OpenBSD coding conventions, implements various OpenBSD security practices, and uses nothing but BSD-licensed code. It's important to note, as its developers make very clear, that GoT is not in any way intended as a replacement for git.
The big question - does all this have a future? The good news is that all new hardware has generic support in X. Someone writes either a modesetting kernel driver or a classical wsdisplay kernel driver and they will be automatically supported by the associated drivers in X. The bad news is that to have applications running we require access to a larger open source ecosystem, and that ecosystem has a lot of churn and is easily distracted by shiny new squirrels. The process of upstreaming stuff to X.Org is an ongoing process, but it's likely we'll run into things that will never be suitable for upstream. Nia Alarie on the NetBSD blog I had no idea NetBSD did such heavy customisations of its X.Org implementation, many of which have never made their way upstream. The project also maintains support for several older GPUs, uses its own input driver, and more - it's quite impressive.
Do any of you remember the browser Dillo? The project's been through a rough few years after the main developer of the layout engine sadly passed away, the lead developer disappeared from the project, the dillo.org domain was lost and taken over by spammers - but now there's new people at the helm, and the browser just released it first new version since 2015. Dillo 3.1.0 brings a whole host of new features and improvements. Dillo is open source, uses the FLTK toolkit, and runs on Linux, BSD, MacOS, Windows (Cygwin), and more.
To support Zero Trust deployments trying to lock down devices to only access approved network destinations, we are announcing the development of Zero Trust DNS (ZTDNS) in a future version of Windows. ZTDNS was designed to be interoperable by using network protocols from open standards to satisfy Zero Trust requirements such as those found in OMB M-22-09 and NIST SP 800-207. ZTDNS will be helpful to any administrator trying to use domain names as a strong identifier of network traffic. ZTDNS integrates the Windows DNS client and the Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) to enable this domain-name-based lockdown. First, Windows is provisioned with a set of DoH or DoT capable Protective DNS servers; these are expected to only resolve allowed domain names. This provisioning may also contain a list of IP address subnets that should always be allowed (for endpoints without domain names), expected Protective DNS server certificate identities to properly validate the connection is to the expected server, or certificates to be used for client authentication. Tommy Jensen on the Microsoft blog If you think I know nothing about programming - wait until you hear me talk about networking. I consider it to basically be arcane magic, and my knowledge doesn't extend much beyond plug in cable to make light blinky" and unplug from power to fix light no blinky". Network administrators are the real heroes in my eyes. Anyway, what I do get from painfully reading this announcement over and over again until my eyes started bleeding is that ZTDNS will give network administrators more finegrained control over which DNS servers and domains are accessible, and perhaps more importantly, it will encrypt traffic between clients and the DNS server. I have no idea if this is unique, or if it even makes any sense to do so, but it seems like a good idea, especially for corporate and government networks. I'm struggling here, y'all. Please help me out.
The notice was filed on developer platform GitHub, which Nintendo claimed housed repositories that offer and provide access to the Yuzu emulator or code based on " which illegally circumvents Nintendo's technological protection measures and runs illegal copies of Switch games." GitHub said it contacted the owners of the repositories to provide an opportunity to make changes" before taking down the repositories, in addition to providing legal resources and information on how to file counter notices. Sophie McEvoy at GamesIndustry.biz The legal troubles around Yuzu are a little nebulous to deal with, as there's a lot of chatter online that Yuzu contains, or at least used, code from leaked Switch SDKs. If that is indeed true - I haven't seen any definitive proof yet - then it makes Nintendo's aggressiveness a lot more understandable, even for someone like me who believes emulation should be 100% legal and accessible.
FreeBSD is working on a graphical installer. Finally. The first hurdle to overcome when testing a new Operating System is to get it installed. What is more, the first impression new users gather from an Operating System is its installation process. The state of the art for Operating System installers nowadays definitely involves a graphical process. This is the case for mainstream systems but also for other UNIX systems comparable to FreeBSD: RedHat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux, or even Devuan GNU+Linux Regardless of the technical level of the actual user, this is how the platform will be compared in the public eye. Instead, with knowledge of the current bsdinstall(8) and bsdconfig(8) utilities, I envisioned a BSD-licensed replacement for Xdialog(1). Just like when invoking bsdconfig with the -X switch for graphical mode, it could be dropped in instead of bsddialog(1) and allow graphical installation - while sharing the infrastructure of the current installer. To avoid confusion with the current implementation of Xdialog from the x11/xdialog port, I have named its replacement gbsddialog(1). It also has to be said that Xdialog is quite obsolete (latest release in 2006) and this shows visually too. Pierre Pronchery in the FreeBSD status report I can't believe it's taken FreeBSD this long to both consider and build a graphical installer. Currently being enveloped in the world of OpenBSD, there's clearly so much the BSD world has to offer to desktop users such as myself, but at the same time, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that the various BSDs can address to make the experience just that little bit more pleasant. They obviously don't have to - not every project is aiming at desktop use - but it just makes onboarding so much nicer. The next step - perhaps in 2037 - would be to offer a desktop-oriented installation image, with a default desktop environment and settings optimised for desktop use. Right now, a lot of fiddling and optimisation for this use case is left to the user, and for newcomers such as myself this means a lot of reading, making sense of contradictory advice and suggestions, wading through endless, often outdated, online guides, and so on. Now, I don't particularly mind doing this, but I'm sure it's chasing people away who could end up making meaningful contributions. Meanwhile, after trying out FreeBSD for a while a few weeks ago but it not being a good fit for me, I'm now exploring and using OpenBSD and it's been a great experience. Although unlikely, I hope OpenBSD, too, can perhaps consider making some minor affordances to desktop users - because as I've learnt, OpenBSD feels right at home on a desktop, more so than I ever expected.
COSMIC Desktop Environment (DE) is a new project by System76, the company behind the popular Linux distribution Pop!_OS. In this tutorial, we will give you an overview about COSMIC DE and its features, and then we will walk you through the steps to install COSMIC Desktop Environment in the latest Fedora 40 Linux system. Senthilkumar Palani at OSTechNix A very easy way to try out the current pre-alpha state of COSMIC. I'll definitely be waiting on a more official release later this year, but man, does COSMIC ever seem way more polished and complete than it has any right to be at this point in time.
Microsoft is making security its number one priority for every employee, following years of security issues and mounting criticisms. After a scathing report from the US Cyber Safety Review Boardrecently concludedthat Microsoft's security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul," it's doing just that by outlining a set of security principles and goals that are tied to compensation packages for Microsoft's senior leadership team. Tom Warren at The Verge The devil is in the details regarding tying executive pay to security performance, but it we take it at face value and assume good intent - which is a laughable assumption in our corporatist world, but alas - I would like to see more of this. It's high time executives start paying - literally and figuratively - for the failings of the companies and teams they claim to run.
This is, in a way, a mature OS with an ecosystem and an aftermarket. (Which, we feel we must explicitly spell out, means that quite a few of those third-party applications and drivers will cost you money.) There are emulators that will let you run 20th century Acorn apps that you can find online, but this isn't an emulated vintage environment like Amiga Forever. It's not meant for running games from thirty years ago. This is a native bare-metal OS, built on 1980s roots but updated for 21st century hardware. It's also not an experimental project with little practical use, like Redox OS or Serenity OS, interesting though those are. Liam Proven at The Register I grew up with RISC OS and still run a RISC OS machine to this day. As Liam Proven explains affectionately in this article, while as an operating system it's missing many features we now take for granted (memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, compositing), some of the user interface ideas it implements still manage to feel advanced compared to modern-day desktops (no need for menu bars, no clunky file dialogues, elegant mouse button assignments). The fact it's found a home on the Raspberry Pi and continues to support an active community is testament to its enduring appeal and the amazing work of the RISC OS Open project. Some additional notes from Thom: this new release supports 7 ARM platforms, most notably the Raspberry Pi Zero, 1, 2, 3 and 4 (but not the 5), and it even supports WiFi on the 3 and 4, which is an absolutely incredible achievement. The number of fixed bugs and addressed issues is massive, and there's even more to come later during the year, as The Register's article notes. I was waiting on this release to spur me on to buy a new Raspberry Pi (my only other Pi is our Pi-Hole), so I'll definitely be on the lookout for a good deal. This release deserves my full attention for OSNews.
Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe. Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades. Benj Edwards at Ars Technica Even I have used BASIC in the past, when I was a child and discovered QBasic (or possibly GW-BASIC, I'm a bit hazy on the details) and started messing around with it. My experiences with BASIC didn't lead to a path of ever more complex programming languages, but for huge numbers of people, it did - it's wild just how many people over a certain age got their programming start with BASIC in the 8 bit home computer era. I mean, 30 GOTO 10 is such a widespread morsel of knowledge it made its way into all kinds of popular media, such as a few Easter egg jokes in Futurama. BASIC has effectively achieved immortality.
Qualcomm's Adreno 6xx architecture has been superseded Adreno 7xx, but it's still used in countless devices, including the current-gen Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3. Here, I'll be looking at the Adreno 640 GPU in the Snapdragon 855. Zarif98 on Reddit kindly provided a OnePlus 7 Pro, and I'll be using that to check out Adreno 640. Compared to the older Snapdragon 821's Adreno 530, Adreno 640 dramatically increases compute throughput while still working within a very constrained power and thermal envelope. Process node improvements help, and TSMC's 7 nm process should be far better than the 14 nm Samsung node used in the Snapdragon 821. But cell phone SoC constraints meant Qualcomm couldn't go around copy-pasting basic GPU building blocks and call it a day. Chips and Cheese Chips and Cheese with another deep dive.
Years of accumulated security debt at Microsoft are seemingly crashing down upon the company in a manner that many critics warned about, but few ever believed would actually come to light. Microsoft is an entrenched enterprise provider, owning nearly one-quarter of the global cloud infrastructure services market and, as of Q1 last year, nearly 20% of the worldwide SaaS application market, according to Synergy Research Group. Though not immune to scandal, in the wake of two major nation-state breaches of its core enterprise platforms, Microsoft is facing one of its most serious reputational crises. David Jones at Cybersecurity Dive It's almost like having the entire US government dependent on a single vendor is a bad idea. Just spitballing here.
With 14.9, Vanguard, Riot's proprietary Anti-Cheat system will be deployed and active in League of Legends. This means that active enforcement of Vanguard will be in effect and working hard to make sure your queues are free from scripters, botters, and cheaters! We recently released a blog detailing the why" behind bringing Vanguard to League that you can check out here. It's a bit of a long read, but it does have some pictures. Lilu Cabreros in the League of Legends patch notes The basic gist is that Vanguard is a closed-source, kernel-level rootkit for Windows that runs at all times, with the supposed goal of detecting and banning cheaters from playing League of Legends. This being a rootkit designed specifically to inject itself into the Windows kernel, it won't work on Linux, and as such, the entire League on Linux community, which has been playing League for years now and even at times communicated with Riot employees to keep the game running, is now gone. Interestingly enough, Riot is not implementing Vanguard on macOS, which League of Legends also supports - because Apple simply doesn't allow it. This is probably the most invasive, disturbing form of anticheat we've seen so far, especially since it involves such a hugely popular game. It's doubly spicy because Riot Games is owned by Tencent, a Chinese company, which means a company owned and controlled by the Chinese government now has rootkits installed on the roughly 150 million players' computers all over the world. While we're all (rightly, in my opinion) worried about TikTok, China just slipped 150 million rootkits onto computers all over the world. One really has to wonder where these increasingly invasive, anti-privacy and anti-user anticheat measures are going from here. Now that this rootkit can keep tabs on literally every single thing you do on your Windows computer, what's going to be the next step? Anticheat might have to move towards using webcams to watch you play to prevent you from cheating, because guess what? The next level of cheating is already here, and it doesn't even involve your computer. Earlier this year, hardware maker MSI showed off a gaming monitor that uses AI" to see what's going on on your monitor, and then injects overlays onto your monitor to help you cheat. MSI showed off how the monitor will use the League of Legends minimap to follow enemy champions and other relevant content, and then show warnings on your screen when enemies approach from off-screen. All of this happens entirely on the monitor's hardware, and never sends any data whatsoever to the computer it's attached to. It's cheating that literally cannot be detected by anything running on your computer, rootkit or not. So, the only logical next step as such forms of cheating become more advanced and widespread is to force users to turn on their webcams, and point them at their displays. I fired up League of Legends today on my gaming computer - which runs Linux, of course - and after the League client installed" the rootkit, it just got stuck in an endless loop of asking me to restart the client. I've been playing League of Legends for close to 14 years, and while I know the game - and especially its community - has a deservedly so bad reputation, I've always enjoyed the game with friends, and especially with my wife, who's been playing for years and years as well. Speaking of my wife - even though she runs Windows and could easily install the rootkit if she wanted to, she has some serious doubts about this. When I explained what the Vanguard rootkit can do, her mouse pointer slowly moved away from the Update" button, saying, I'm not so sure about this..."
Anyone who has spent any time recently using non-GNOME GTK desktop environments, like Cinnamon, MATE, or Xfce, has had to deal with the unfortunate reality of a lot of GTK applications becoming GNOME applications instead, using GNOME's own libadwaita. These applications are hard to theme, and do not integrate at all with the proper GTK applications non-GNOME desktop environments ship with. With how popular GNOME is, this has meant that the number of non-GNOME GTK applications has been dwindling. Linux Mint, the popular Linux distribution that also develops the Cinnamon desktop environment, has long made a bundle of GTK applications called XApps - basically forks of various core GNOME 3.x applications to ensure they would have access to non-GNOME GTK applications. With GNOME effectively forking GTK into its own, unique, GNOME-specific style (like libaidwaita), other GTK environments have suffered, and XApps were intended to close that gap. That hasn't really happened though, as XApps remained mostly a Mint-only thing, managed by Mint, as part of the Mint/Cinnamon GitHub projects. Other distributions and GTK desktop environments, such as Xfce, MATE, Budgie, and so on, didn't really pick them up. The Linux Mint project intends to change that, and will spin off' the XApps into its own, dedicated, independent project to facilitate cross-distribution and cross-DE collaboration, decision-making and development, all in an effort to ensure the long-term viability of non-GNOME GTK desktop environments. They also intend to fork a lot more of the GNOME 3 applications, for the same reason I mentioned earlier: GNOME applications are no longer GTK applications, but GNOME applications - they look and feel horribly out of place in environments that don't use the GNOME-specific libadwaita. As such, Celluloid, GNOME Calculator, Simple Scan, Baobab, System Monitor, GNOME Calendar, File Roller, and Zenity were recently downgraded in Linux Mint to their last GTK 3 versions, and will most likely be forked in the near future. In addition, the Adwaita theme, the default GNOME/GTK theme, will be removed from the list of available themes in Cinnamon 6.2. Adwaita, too, has become increasingly GNOME-only, and thus, increasingly broken on non-GNOME desktop environments. Flat-our removing Adwaita altogether is not possible, since it's a GTK dependency, but hiding it from the theme selector is not an issue, of course. As project lead Clement Lefebvre writes: libAdwaita is for GNOME and GNOME only. We can't blame GNOME for this, they've been very clear about it from the start. It was made specifically for GNOME to have more freedom and build its own ecosystem without impacting GTK. We want to send a strong signal upstream and towards other projects. We cannot and will not support applications which do not support our users and environments. We can't promote applications to our users which don't support our users. The software manager will be vigilant towards that going forward and list compatible software by default. Clement Lefebvre All of this is great news to hear. I've been making extensive use of Xfce on OpenBSD lately, and on the Fedora Xfce spin in the weeks before that, and the situation has become almost comical. If you install any GNOME application on Xfce, theming just breaks down completely, as most themes are either not made to support the massive headerbars GNOME uses, or they do support it but still look horribly out of place compared to the more sane titlebar plus menubar plus toolbar layout of traditional desktop environments like Xfce. I've long been saying that the non-GNOME GTK desktop environments need to work together to formulate an answer to the onslaught of libadwaita and the GNOME-ification of GTK, because each of them risks becoming entirely tied to whatever GNOME and libadwaita decides to do, for better or worse. It seems the Linux Mint team has finally realised this as well, and I really hope - and strongly suggest - Xfce, MATE, and others join them as well. If they don't, there won't be an Xfce in a few years. What's the point in developing Xfce if you're at the mercy of whatever choices GNOME makes?
Another month, another detailed report about the progress made in Redox, the Rust-based operating system. A major improvements this month is support for USB HID, allowing USB keyboards and mice to work on Redox, but the project does note USB hubs are still problematic and might not work properly. Thanks to these USB improvements, Redox' desktop environment Orbital now also ran on ARM64 in Qemu for the first time, which is a great step towards running it on real ARM64 hardware. A massive documentation pass has also taken place, fixing various errors and improving and simplifying the writing. More programs have been ported, of course, and various lower-level improvements and fixes, along with a number of other fixes and changes across the operating system.
Humans speak countless different languages. Not only are these languages incompatible, but runtime transpilation is a real pain. Sadly, every standardisation initiative has failed. At least there is someone to blame for this state-of-affairs: God. It was him, after-all, who cursed humanity to speak different languages, in an early dispute over a controversial property development. However, mankind can only blame itself for the fact that computers struggle to talk to each other. And one of the biggest problems is the most simple: computers do not agree on how to write letters in binary. Cal Paterson For most users, character encoding issues are not something they have to deal with. Programmers and other people who deal with the lower levels of computing, however, deal with this way more often than they should.
Over 35 years ago, these problems with software portability led to the emergence of the first POSIX standard in 1988. The acronym was coined by Richard Stallman, who added X" to the end of Portable Operating System Interface. It's meant to provide a specification of the interface that different Unix operating systems should have in common, including programming languages and tools. It's important to note that the interface is portable, and not the implementation. vorakl While POSIX certainly isn't perfect, and support for it in various operating systems claiming to support POSIX even less so, there's no denying its success. Even if the dream of 100% source code portability isn't possible under POSIX for applications that are a little more complex than basic CLI tools, there's enough portability that platforms like Linux, the various BSDs, macOS, and others, can share quite a bit of code. One of my favourite things about POSIX is that it shows up in the most unexpected of places. Windows, for instance, has had various options for POSIX compatibility, some of which straight from Microsoft itself, like the currently well-known Windows Subsystem for Linux, but also mostly forgotten options like the Microsoft POSIX subsystem that shipped with Windows NT until Windows 2000, or the very rudimentary POSIX compatibility in the Windows C Runtime Library and Windows Sockets API. OS/2 had POSIX compatibility as well, through EMX (Eberhard Mattes eXtender). It gave OS/2 - and MS-DOS - a POSIX API, and even provided access to native OS/2 APIs as well, and could run 32bit applications. You'd be surprised by how many more operating systems offered forms of POSIX compatibility, either out of the box or through first or third party add-ons.
Although Google has shown significant progress in recent weeks in improving RISC-V support in Android, it seems that we're still quite a bit away from seeing RISC-V hardware running certified builds of Android. Earlier today, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google who, according to their LinkedIn, leads the Android Systems Team and works on Android's Linux kernel fork, submitted a series of patches to AOSP that remove ACK's support for riscv64." The description of these patches states that support for risc64 GKI kernels is discontinued." Mishaal Rahman Google provided Android Authority with a statement, claiming that Android will continue to support RISC-V. What these patches do, however, is remove support for the architecture from the Generic Kernel Image, which is the only type of kernel Google certifies for Android, which means that it is now no longer possible to ship a certified Android device that uses RISC-V. Any OEM shipping a RISC-V Android device will have to create and maintain its own kernel fork with the required patches. This doesn't seem to align with Google's statement. So, unless Google intends to add RISC-V support back into GKI, there won't be any officially certified Android devices running on RISC-V. Definitely an odd chain of events here.
JMP is a fully FOSS service providing a way to get a real phone number that operates over the internet using XMPP. They provide numbers in the USA and Canada with everything you need to access SMS/MMS/etc. and voice calls using your XMPP (or SIP) clients of choice across all your devices. They are committed to growing the use of open communications technology such as XMPP, ultimately working to help people move their communication off the unencrypted telephone network and onto the federated, encrypted, and diverse Jabber network. We thank JMP for sponsoring OSNews this week, and they even offer a discount code for OSNews readers who sign up for the service. Use the code OSNEWS for one free month after paying for your account initially.
There's a new 9front release! So, what exactly is 9front, you may ask? Well, after it became clear that Bell Labs wasn't doing much with plan9, a group of developers took matters into their own hands and created 9front, a fork of plan9. Their latest release is called DO NOT INSTALL, and brings things like more USB audio support, DNS over TLS, WiFi support for the Raspberry Pi, I2C support, and much more. I'm not particularly well-versed in the world of plan9, and more often than not it feels like a form of high-level programming performance art that I'm just not smart enough to understand. The whole community and its associated web sites have a very unique feel to it, and I always feel like I'm just not cool enough to be part of it. That's not a dig at the plan9 community - it's more of an indictment of my lack of coolness. Which really shouldn't come as a surprise.
Lennart Poettering, main developer of systemd, has announced run0, a systemd-based replacement for the well-known sudo command that fixes many of he inherent issues with the widely used tool to gain temporary elevated privileges. There are various problems with sudo, which basically come down to that it's a large SUID binary, meaning it consists of privileged code that unprivileged users can run from their own context. This makes sudo a fairly large attack surface, and why OpenBSD uses doas instead; while doas suffers from the same main problem, it's much smaller and reduces the attack surface considerably. SUID processes are weird concepts: they are invoked by unprivileged code and inherit the execution context intended and controlled by unprivileged code. By execution context I mean the myriad of properties that a process has on Linux these days, from environment variables, process scheduling properties, cgroup assignments, security contexts, file descriptors passed, and so on and so on. A few of these settings the kernel is nice enough to clean up automatically when a SUID binary is invoked, but much of it has to be cleaned up by the invoked suid binary. This has to be done very very carefully, and history has shown that SUID binaries are generally pretty shit at that. Lennart Poettering Poettering wants to address this problem, and has come up with run0, which behaves like sudo, but works entirely differently and is not SUID. Run0 asks the services manager to create a shell or command under the target user's ID, creating a new PTY, sending data back and forth from the originating TTY and the new PTY. Or in other words: the target command is invoked in an isolated exec context, freshly forked off PID 1, without inheriting any context from the client (well, admittedly, we *do* propagate $TERM, but that's an explicit exception, i.e. allowlist rather than denylist). One could say, run0" is closer to behaviour of ssh" than to sudo", in many ways. Except that it doesn't bother with encryption or cryptographic authentication, key management and stuff, but instead relies on the kernel's local identification mechanisms. run0 doesn't implement a configuration language of its own btw (i.e. no equivalent of /etc/sudoers). Instead, it just uses polkit for that, i.e. how we these days usually let unpriv local clients authenticate against priv servers. Lennart Poettering This approach addresses a whole slew of attack vectors on sudo, and it comes with fun additional features like being able to give your terminal a different background tint when using it, or displaying a little red dot in the terminal window title to further indicate you're using elevated privileges. It will ship as part of the upcoming release of systemd 256.
Well, this was a wild goose chase of a read. J. B. Crawford dove into the history of something I've never heard of - Microsoft At Work - and came away with a story that' while clearer thanks to his research, is still frustratingly nebulous. I'm still not entirely sure what Microsoft At Work really was, but I think it had the goal of running Windows on communications devices like faxes, to make it easier to share and work on documents across various devices. Crawford did a lot of digging, and eventually settles on what he thinks might be a description of what MAW really consisted of. I am being a bit dismissive for effect. MAW was more ambitious than just installing Windows on a grape. The effort included a unified communications protocol for the control of office machines, including printers, for which a whole Microsoft stack was envisioned. This built on top of the Windows Printing System, a difficult-to-search-for project that apparently predated MAW by a short time, enough so that Windows Printing System products were actually on the market when MAW was announced-MAW products were, we will learn, very much not. MAW devices like the Ricoh IFS77 ran 16-bit Windows 3.1 with a new GUI intended to appear more modern while reducing resource requirements. Some reporters at the time noted that Microsoft was cagey about the supported architectures, I suspect they were waiting on ports to be completed. The fax machine was probably x86, though, as there's little evidence MAW actually ran on anything else. J. B. Crawford The '90s were a wild time, especially as Microsoft, and this MAW project seems to have '90s written all over it, but I'd still love to learn a lot more about this. I hope this article will bring out some former Microsoft execs or employees who can give us more details, and possibly even some code. I want to know how this works and what it did.
This is a virtual DEC PDP-1 (emulated in HTML5/JavaScript) running the original code of Spacewar!", the earliest known digital video game. If available, use gamepads or joysticks for authentic gameplay - the game was originally played using custom control boxes". Spacewar! was conceived in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen. It was first realized on the PDP-1 in 1962 by Stephen Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, and Martin Graetz, together with Alan Kotok, Steve Piner, and Robert A Saunders. Norbert Landsteiner It's wild to me that even for the very first video game, they already made what are effectively controllers anyone today could pick up and use. Note that this emulator can run more than just Spacewar!.
Back when I was working on my article about PA-RISC, HP-UX, and UNIX workstations in general, I made extensive use of OpenPA, Paul Weissmann's invaluable and incredibly detailed resource about HP's workstation efforts, HP-UX, and tons of related projects and products. Weissmann's been doing some serious digging, and has unearthed details about a number of essentially forgotten operating system efforts. First, it turns out HP was porting Windows NT to PA-RISC in the early '90s. Several magazine sources and USEnet posts around 1993 point to HP pursuing a PA-RISC port to NT, modified the PA-RISC architecture for bi-endianess and even conducted a back-room presention at the '94 Comdex conference of a (modified HP 712?) PA-7100LC workstation running Windows NT. Mentions of NT on PA-RISC continued in 1994 with some customer interest but ended around 1995. Paul Weissmann at OpenPA The port eventually fizzled out due to a lack of interest from both customers and application developers, and HP realised its time was better spent on the future of x86, Intel's Itanium, instead. HP also planned to work together with Novell to port NetWare to PA-RISC, but the work took longer than expected and it, too, was cancelled. The most recent secretive effort was the port of HP-UX to x86, an endeavour that took place during the final days of the UNIX workstation market. Parts of the conversation in these documents mention a successful boot of HP-UX on x86 in December of 2009, with porting efforts projected to cost 100M+ between 2010 and 2016. The plan was for mission-critical x86 systems (ProLiant DL980 and Superdome with x86) and first releases projected in 2011 (developer) and 2012 (Superdome and Linux ABI). Paul Weissmann at OpenPA I'm especially curious about that last one, as porting HP-UX to x86 seems like a massive effort during a time where it was already obvious Linux had completely obliterated the traditional UNIX market. It really feels like the last death saving throws of a platform everybody already knew wasn't going to make it.
As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss - ie spending more than we've been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual income, we can preserve our core operations while we work on new funding sources. We've now hit the buffers" of this reserves policy, meaning the Board can't approve any more deficit budgets - to keep spending at the same level we must increase our income. Robert McQueen Learning that the GNOME Foundation can barely scrape by financially makes me irrationally angry. As much as I've grown to dislike using GNOME and thus switched all my machines over to KDE, GNOME is still the most popular desktop environment and used extensively by pretty much all the big corporate Linux distributions. How is it possible that this hugely popular and important open source project has to beg individual users for donations like they're running an independent tech website or something? Where's all the financial support from Red Hat, IBM, Oracle, Canonical, and so on? If not even an insanely popular project like GNOME can be financially stable, what hope is there for the countless small, unknown open source projects that form the basis of our entire computing world?
In February last year I wrote about running a FreeBSD desktop, and concluded that sometimes you need to give yourself permission to tinker. Well recently I've started tinkering with Alpine Linux! It's been recommended to me for years, so I'm finally getting around to checking it out. There's a lot to like if you come from BSD, which we'll dig into here. Ruben Schade Just a quick look at this unexpectedly popular Linux distribution that really has its own identity.
The Genode project has released Sculpt OS 24.04, the general purpose desktop operating system based on the Genode OS Framework. This release is absolutely jam-packed with new features, improvements, and changes, and it's hard to know where to begin. One of the biggest new features is support for suspend/resume, an experimental feature for now, for which the developers also made starting and stopping drivers and related components easier straight from the user interface. In addition, NVMe, AHCI, and Intel GPU drivers will resume automatically after a resume. Sculpt OS 24.04 also ships with a brand new audio framework, which brings support for pluggable drivers, arbitrary sample rates, and the flexible routing and mixing of audio signals", but the audio driver does need to be manually restarted after a resume. This release also adds support for 4K displays and I2C touchpads, underlining that yes, Sculpt and Genode developers dogfood their operating system on real hardware. Do note that at least for now, the I2C touchpad driver needs to be started manually, so an external mouse will initially be needed. Various images are available for download from the download page.
Microsoft is about to go even more hog-wild with AI" in Windows, as it intends to start recording everything you do on your Windows computer so AI" features can find stuff for you. According to my sources, AI Explorer will run in the background and capture everything you do on your computer. It will document and triage everything it sees, no matter what apps or interfaces you're looking at, and turn them into memories that you can recall at a later point. For example, you can have a conversation with a friend in the WhatsApp app for Windows, and AI Explorer will record and remember the content that was on-screen and process it with AI for you to recall later. AI Explorer can also summarize conversations, emails, web pages, and general UI surfaces just by asking for it during or after the fact. I'm told that much of this experience is rendered on-device and does not reach out to the cloud to process information. This is important for privacy reasons, but also for performance reasons. To reduce latency, AI Explorer will rely on NPU silicon to process content that has been recorded. I also understand that users will be able to filter out specific apps from being recorded by the AI Explorer process, or disable AI Explorer entirely. Zac Bowden at Windows Central Is this really something people wan to devote constant resources and thus battery life to?Setting aside the privacy implications of something like this, do people really want to have a permanent record of everything they've done on their machine? Maybe I'm just the odd one out here, but nothing about this appeals to me in any way, shape, or form. In fact, it's quite the opposite - something like this would make make me run for the hills, looking for an alternative to the operating system I'm using. And the weasel words much of this experience is rendered on-device" definitely did not go by unnoticed. This wording makes it very clear at least some data will be sent to Microsoft for processing, and over time, that amount will only increase. No data company has ever reduced the amount of data it captures, after all.
Regarding the release of the MS-DOS 4.00 source code, Michal Necasek makes an excellent point about how just dumping the code in git is a terrible and destructive way to release older source code. It's terrific that the source code for DOS 4.00/4.01 was released! But don't expect to build the source code mutilated by git without problems. Historic source code should be released simply as an archive of files, ZIP or tar or 7z or whatever, with all timestamps preserved and every single byte kept the way it was. Git is simply not a suitable tool for this. Michal Necasek at OS/2 Museum The problems caused by dumping the code in git are quite real. Timestamps are not preserved, and the conversion to UTF-8 is deeply destructive, turning some parts of the code to literal gibberish. It's a bit of a mess, and the people responsible for these release should be more careful and considerate.
Today, in partnership with IBM and in the spirit of open innovation, we're releasing the source code to MS-DOS 4.00 under the MIT license. There's a somewhat complex and fascinating history behind the 4.0 versions of DOS, as Microsoft partnered with IBM for portions of the code but also created a branch of DOS called Multitasking DOS that did not see a wide release. Scott Hanselman Not only did they release the source code to MS-DOS 4.00, they also released disk images of a very early version of Multitasking DOS, which did not see a wide release, as the article states. I've only vaguely heard of MT-DOS over the decades, so I had to do some minor reading and research to untangle what, exactly, MT-DOS really is. Much of this information is probably table stakes for the many older readers we have, but bear with me. MT-DOS, which has the official name MS-DOS 4.0 (often further specified by adding multitasking" in brackets after the version number) was a version of MS-DOS developed by Microsoft based on MS-DOS 2.0, whose headlining feature was pre-emptive multitasking, which allowed specifically written applications to continue to run in a special background mode. Interestingly enough, it had to perform this multitasking with the same 640k memory limitation as other versions of DOS. Very few OEMs ended up licensing it, and most notably IBM wasn't interested, so after one or two more OEM-specific versions, it was quickly abandoned by Microsoft. MS-DOS 4.0 (multitasking) is entirely unrelated to the real" versions 4 of MS-DOS that followed later. The actual version 4 was called MS-DOS 4.00, and it's the source code to this specific version that's being released as open source today. MS-DOS 4.00 was quickly followed by 4.01 and 4.01a, but apparently OEMs would confusingly still label 4.01 disks as MS-DOS 4.0". The whole MS-DOS 4 saga is quite convoluted and messy, and I'm probably oversimplifying a great deal. Regardless, this code joins the open source releases of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 that Microsoft released years ago.
William Brown, developer of webauthn-rs, has written a scathing blog post detailing how corporate interests - namely, Apple and Google - have completely and utterly destroyed the concept of passkeys. The basic gist is that Apple and Google were more interested in control and locking in users than in providing a user-friendly passwordless future, and in doing so have made passkeys effectively a worse user experience than just using passwords in a password manager. Since then Passkeys are now seen as a way to capture users and audiences into a platform. What better way to encourage long term entrapment of users then by locking all their credentials into your platform, and even better, credentials that can't be extracted or exported in any capacity. Both Chrome and Safari will try to force you into using either hybrid (caBLE) where you scan a QR code with your phone to authenticate - you have to click through menus to use a security key. caBLE is not even a good experience, taking more than 60 seconds work in most cases. The UI is beyond obnoxious at this point. Sometimes I think the password game has a better ux. The more egregious offender is Android, which won't even activate your security key if the website sends the set of options that are needed for Passkeys. This means the IDP gets to choose what device you enroll without your input. And of course, all the developer examples only show you the options to activate Google Passkeys stored in Google Password Manager". After all, why would you want to use anything else? William Brown The whole post is a sobering read of how a dream of passwordless, and even usernameless, authentication was right within our grasp, usable by everyone, until Apple and Google got involved and enshittified the standards and tools to promote lock-in and their own interests above the user experience. If even someone as knowledgeable about this subject as Brown, who writes actual software to make these things work, is advising against using passkeys, you know something's gone horribly wrong. I also looked into possibly using passkeys, including using things like a Yubikey, but the process seems so complex and unpleasant that I, too, concluded just sticking to Bitwarden and my favourite open source TFA application was a far superior user experience.
Gentoo, the venerable Linux distribution which in my headcanon I describe as classy', has banned any use of AI". A proposal by Gentoo Council member Micha Gorny from February of this year banning its use has been unanimously accepted by the Gentoo Council. The new policy reads: It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should a case been made over such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical and quality concerns. Micha Gorny We'll have to see how this policy will be implemented, but I like that Gentoo is willing to take a stand.
It wasn't too long ago that new Ubuntu releases were major happenings in the Linux world, as it was the default Linux distribution for many, both old and newcomers, in the desktop Linux space. These days, Ubuntu release hit a little different, with Canonical's focus having shifted much more to the enterprise, and several aspects of the distribution being decidedly unpopular, like the snap package management system. Still, Ubuntu is probably still one of the most popular, if not the most popular, distributions out there, so any new release, like today's Ubuntu 24.0 LTS, is still a big deal. Ubuntu Desktop brings the Subiquity installer to an LTS for the first time. In addition to a refreshed user experience and a minimal install by default, the installer now includes experimental support for ZFS and TPM-based full disk encryption and the ability to import auto-install configurations. Post install, users will be greeted with the latest GNOME 46 alongside a new App Center and firmware-updater. Netplan is now the default for networking configuration and supports bidirectionality with NetworkManager. Utkarsh Gupta on ubuntu-announce Of course, all the various other Ubuntu editions have also seen new releases: Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Unity, and Xubuntu. Yes, that's a long list. They all mostly share the same improvements as Ubuntu's main course, but paired with the latest versions of the respective desktop environments instead. Except for Kubuntu. Unlike just about any other major distribution released over the last few months, such as Fedora 40 only a few days ago, Kubuntu does not ship with the new KDE Plasma 6, opting for Plasma 5.27.11 instead. There simply wasn't enough time between the release of Plasma 6 and the Ubuntu feature freeze, so they made the - in my opinion - understandable call to stick to Plasma 5 for now, moving Plasma 6 to the next release later this year.
Huawei plans to expand its native HarmonyOS smartphone platform worldwide, despite coming under US-led sanctions that have deprived it of access to key technologies. The Chinese tech megacorp released its own phone platform in 2019, the same year that US sanctions blocked Huawei from having further access to Google's Android software to power its devices. More recently, the company saw its Mate 60 Pro smartphone become the top selling device in China's huge consumer market, displacing rivals such as Apple's iPhone. It also has a newer device, the Pura 70, that could pose a bigger threat to Apple sales in the country. Dan Robinson at The Register If there is one company that has the capabilities and will to truly offer a third alternative, it's Huawei with HarmonyOS. This company has the full might of the Chinese state behind it, and it clearly has the drive to prove itself after the various sanctions levied against it in recent years that barred it from using Google's Android. It's obviously already experiencing major success in its home market, but now the company intends to go global, country by country, to positino HarmonyOS alongside iOS and Android. Huawei basically takes a brute-force approach, explaining that they identify the 5000 most popular applications, which they claim cover 99% of users' time with their smartphones, and port those over first. I'm not entirely sure how they convince developers to port over their applications, but I'm guessing money is involved. Fair play, I would say - it's not like anything else is going to break the stranglehold Apple and Google have over the mobile application market. We haven't really spent much time talking about HarmonyOS in the west in general, and on OSNews in particular, which is a bit of a shame because it has some interesting characteristics. For instance, it has a multi-kernel design, where it uses the Linux kernel on more powerful devices like smartphones and tablets, and the RTOS LiteOS kernel on lower power IoT devices. DSoftBus is another interesting part of the operating system, which allows multiple devices to kind of join together and share data, applications, and control seamlessly. HarmonyOS supports both Android and true HarmonyOS applications, the latter of which are marked with a little logo in the corner of the application icon, but the unique features of HarmonyOS, like DSoftBus, are only accessible to true HarmonyOS applications. Developing these native applications can be done in DevEco Studio, which is built atop IntelliJ IDEA, using ArkUI. Huawei even went so far as to develop its own browser engine for HarmonyOS, which it recently released as open source, called ArkWeb. While HarmonyOS currently still supports running Android applications, this will soon no longer be the case as the company is working on HarmonyOS NEXT, which will remove Android compatibility to focus entirely on true HarmonyOS applications instead. NEXT also does away entirely with the multikernel approach, ditching both the Linux and LiteOS kernels for a new HarmonyOS microkernel, and uses Huawei's own Cangjie programming language for application development. HarmonyOS NEXT is currently being tested on a variety of Huawei devices, with a beta and final release planned for later this year. It's just our luck that the only potentially viable competitor to Android and iOS is a party closed-source operating system from China, which will surely bring with it a whole host of security concerns in the west. It's really difficult at the moment to ascertain just how much of HarmonyOS - and specifically, HarmonyOS NEXT - is available as open source, which is a major bummer. I don't think I'd ever want to use a (partly) closed source Chinese operating system for anything major in my life, but if it's open source we could at least see non-Chinese forks that I'd find easier to trust. The road of iOS and Android competitors is littered with the bodies of failed attempts - Symbian, the various iterations of Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Sailfish, Ubuntu Touch, the GNOME/Plasma attempts that just can't grow beyond proof of concepts - and there is no way to know if Huawei can pull off outside of China what it did with HarmonyOS inside China. Western markets are incredibly weary of anything related to Huawei, and for all we know, this operating system won't ever even be allowed inside the US and the EU in the first place. Regardless of international politics and the CCP's brutal, totalitarian, genocidal regime, HarmonyOS NEXT seems like a very interesting platform with fresh ideas, and I'd love to at least try it out once it hits international markets with proper localisation into English. I'll take a problematic Chinese smartphone operating system competitor over no competitor at all - even if I won't use it myself, it'll be at least some form of competition both Apple and Google desperately need.
But just as smartphones would do, PDAs offered a dizzying array of operating systems and applications, and a great many of them ran Palm OS. (I bought my first Palm, an m505, new in 2001, upgrading from an HP 95LX.) Naturally, there's no way we could enumerate every single such device in this article. So in this Ars retrospective, we'll look back at some notable examples of the technical evolution of the Palm operating system and the devices that ran it-and how they paved the way for what we use now. Cameron Kaiser at Ars Technica This sure takes me back to my own in-depth Palm retrospective from - checks notes - 11 years ago (!). It turns out all the images from that article no longer load, so I should set aside some time to fix that up.
While Firefox and Safari phased out third party cookies years ago, it's taking Chrome a bit longer because, well, daddy Google got ads to sell. As such, Google has been developing a complicated new alternative to third party cookies that it calls Privacy sandbox", a name in the vain of Greenland". This process has not exactly been going well, because Google has had to postpone phasing out third party cookies several times now, and today, they had to postpone it again. This time, however, it's because the UK competition authority, the CMA, still has some questions. We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem. It's also critical that the CMA has sufficient time to review all evidence including results from industry tests, which the CMA has asked market participants to provide by the end of June. Given both of these significant considerations, we will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4. We remain committed to engaging closely with the CMA and ICO and we hope to conclude that process this year. Assuming we can reach an agreement, we envision proceeding with third-party cookie deprecation starting early next year. Google's Greenland blog Making a browser good enough to take over almost the entire browser market was an absolute master stroke by Google. Now can you all please switch over to Firefox or like Lynx or something?
While it's still yet to debut, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is looking like a big deal for ARM-powered Windows machines and, now, it's getting a more affordable cousin in the Snapdragon X Plus. Announced today, Snapdragon X Plus is based on the same Oryon CPU as Snapdragon X Elite, just with a bit less power. The chip has 10 cores to the Elite's 12, and is also clocked down from the Elite's 3.8GHz to 3.4GHz. Ben Schoon at 9To5Google It really seems like it's finally happening - ARM computers for the general public (that aren't from Apple). I really hope that Qualcomm can deliver on its promises, and that Microsoft's involvement means these computers will be fairly standardised so it's easier for non-Windows platforms to support them. I've seen quite a few rumblings from people invited to Qualcomm's press events for these new ARM chips that the company is delivering Linux support alongside Windows support, so that's at least a good start. Whenever we talk about ARM coming to the generic PC market, people rightfully point out the lack of standardisation in the ARM space, so that really is the deciding factor here for people like us, who tend to not be all too interested in locked-down platforms. If every one of these machines is different enough that supporting them is a nightmare - like the world of smartphones - ARM for PCs will be dead on arrival for me because I have zero interest in buying Windows-only hardware. One thing Microsoft tends to be good at is getting at least some standardisation to stick in the PC market, and I hope they're going to that here, too - Microsoft probably isn't relishing supporting each individual ARM machine in Windows by hand' either. Let's keep our fingers crossed.
A bill that would force China-based company ByteDance to sell TikTok -or else face a US ban of the platform - is all but certain to become law after the Senate passed a foreign aid package including the measure. It now heads to President Joe Biden, who already committed to signing the TikTok legislation should it make it through both chambers of Congress. The House passed the foreign aid package that includes the TikTok bill on Saturday. Lauren Feiner at The Verge I hope the EU follows.
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