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In 2019, a startup called Nuvia came out of stealth mode. Nuvia was notable because its leadership included several notable chip architects, including one who used to work for Apple. Apple chips like the M1 drew recognition for landing in the same performance neighborhood as AMD and Intel's offerings while offering better power efficiency. Nuvia had similar goals, aiming to create a power efficient core that could could surpass designs from AMD, Apple, Arm, and Intel. Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in 2021, bringing its staff into Qualcomm's internal CPU efforts. Bringing on Nuvia staff rejuvenated Qualcomm's internal CPU efforts, which led to the Oryon core in Snapdragon X Elite. Oryon arrives nearly five years after Nuvia hit the news, and almost eight years after Qualcomm last released a smartphone SoC with internally designed cores. For people following Nuvia's developments, it has been a long wait. Chips and Cheese Now that the Snapdragon X Elite and Pro chips are finally making their way to consumers, we're also finally starting to see proper deep-dives into the brand new hardware. Considering this will set the standard for ARM laptops for a long time to come - including easy availability of powerful ARM Linux laptops - I really want to know every single quirk or performance statistic we can find.

For the uninitiated, what are we looking at? Could it be the Moire Error from Doom? Well, no. You are looking at (part of) the boot up screen for the X Window System, specifically the pattern it uses as the background of the root window. This pattern is technically called a stipple. What you're seeing is pretty important and came to symbolize a lot for me as a computer practitioner. Matt T. Proud The X bootup pattern is definitely burnt onto my retina, as it probably is for a lot of late '90s, early 2000s Linux users. Setting up X correctly, and more importantly, not breaking it later, was almost an art at the time, so any time you loaded up your PC and this pattern didn't greet you, you'd get this sinister feeling in the pit of your stomach. There was now a very real chance you were going to have to debug your X configuration file, and nobody - absolutely nobody - liked doing that, and if you did, you're lying. Matt T. Proud dove into the history of the X stipple, and discovered it's been part of X since pretty much the very beginning, and even more esoteric X implementations, like the ones used by Solaris or the various commercial versions, have the stipple. He also discovered several other variants of the stipple included in X, so there is a chance your memory might be just a tiny bit different. The stipple eventually disappeared at around 2008 or so, it disappeared as part of the various efforts to modernise, sanitise, and speed up the Linux boot process on desktops. On modern distributions still using X, you won't encounter it anymore by default, but in true X fashion, the code is still there and you can easily bring it back using a flag specifically designed for it, -retro, that you can use with startx or your X init file. There's a ton more information in Proud's excellent article, but this one paragraph made me smile: I will remark that in spite of my job being a software engineer, I had never spent a lot of time looking at the source code for the X Server (XFree86 or X.Org) before. It's really nuts to see that a lot of the architecture from X10R3 and X11R1 still persists in the code today, which is a statement that can be said in deep admiration for legacy code but also disturbance from the power of old decisions. Without having looked at the internals of any Wayland implementation, I can sympathize sight unseen with the sentiments that some developers have toward the X Window System: the code is a dead end. I say that with the utmost respect to the X Window System as a technology and an ecosystem. I'll keep using X, and I will be really sad when it's no longer possible for me to do so for one reason or another, as I'm extremely attached to it quirks. But it's clear the future is limited. Matt T. Proud We all have great - and not so great - memories of X, but I am really, really happy I no longer have to use it.

Palestinians living abroad have accused Microsoft of closing their email accounts without warning - cutting them off from crucial online services. They say it has left them unable to access bank accounts and job offers - and stopped them using Skype, which Microsoft owns, to contact relatives in war-torn Gaza. Microsoft says they violated its terms of service - a claim they dispute. Mohamed Shalaby and Joe Tidy at the BBC Checking up on your family members to see if they survived another day of an ongoing genocide doesn't seem like something that should be violating any terms of any services, but that's just me.

A global internet sweep that examined the websites and mobile apps of 642 traders has found that 75,7% of them employed at least one dark pattern, and 66,8% of them employed two or more dark patterns. Dark patterns are defined as practices commonly found in online user interfaces and that steer, deceive, coerce, or manipulate consumers into making choices that often are not in their best interests. International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network Dark patterns are everywhere, and it's virtually impossible to browse the web, use certain types of services, or install mobile applications, without having to dodge and roll just to avoid all kinds of nonsense being thrown at you. It's often not even ads that make the web unusable - it's all the dark patterns tricking you into viewing ads, entering into a subscription, enabling notifications, sharing your email address or whatever, that's the real reason. This is why one of the absolute primary demands I have for the next version of OSNews is zero dark patterns. I don't want any dialogs begging you to enable ads, no modal windows demanding you sign up for a newsletter, no popups asking you to enable notifications, and so on - none of that stuff. My golden standard is your computer, your rules", and that includes your right to use ad blockers or anything else to change the appearance or functioning of our website on your computer. It'd be great if dark patterns became illegal somehow, but it would be incredibly difficult to write any legislation that would properly cover these practices.

I try to keep tabs on a huge number of operating system projects out there - for obvious reasons - but long ago I learned that when it comes to the world of Amiga, it's best to maintain distance and let any important news find its way out of the Amiga bubble, lest one loses their sanity. Keeping up with the Amiga world requires following every nook and cranny of various forums and websites with different allegiances to different (shell) companies, with often barely coherent screeching and arguments literally nobody cares about. It's a mess is what I'm trying to say. Anyway, it seems one of the many small companies still somehow making a living in the Amiga world, AmigaKit, has recently released a new device, the A600GS. It's a retrogaming-oriented Amiga computer, but it does come with something called AmiBench, that's apparently a weird hybrid between bits of Amiga OS 4 and AROS, so it does also support running a proper desktop and associated applications, but only AmigaOS 3.x applications (I think? It's a bit unclear). It has HDMI at up to 1080p, and even WiFi and Bluetooth support, which is pretty neat. Wait, Wifi and Bluetooth support? What are we really dealing with here? Once again the information is hard to find because AmigaKit is incredibly stingy with specifications - I had to read goddamn YouTube comments to get some hints - but it seems to be a custom board with an Orange Pi Zero 3 stuck on top doing most of the work. In other words, the meat of this thing is just an emulator, which in and of itself isn't a bad thing, it's just weird to me that they're not upfront and direct about this. While this answers some questions, it also raises a whole bunch more. If this is running on low-end Allwinner ARM hardware from 2022, how is this AmiBench desktop environment (or operating system?) a fork of OS4 with AROS code in it? AmigaOS 4 is PowerPC-only, which may explain why AmigaKit only mentions AmigaOS 3.x and 68K compatibility, and not AmigaOS 4 compatibility. And what's AROS doing in there? I mean, this is an interesting product in the sense that it's a relatively cheap turnkey solution for classic Amiga enthusiasts, but a new Amiga this is definitely not. At about 130, this is not a bad deal, but other than hardcore fans of the classic 68K Amiga, I don't see many people being interested in this. The Apollo Standalone V4+ piques my interest way more, but at 700-800, it's also a lot more expensive, but at least they're much clearer about what the Apollo is, what software it's running, and that they're giving back their work to AROS.

I love a good bug hunting story, and this one is right up there as a great one. Way back in 2018, Doug Brown discovered that after installing Ubuntu MATE 18.04, if he launched Firefox from the icon in the default panel arrangement to install Chrome from the official Chrome website, the process was broken. After downloading the .deb and double-clicking it, GDebi would appear, but after clicking Install", nothing happened. What was supposed to happen is that after clicking Install", an authentication dialog should appear where you enter your root password, courtesy of gksu. However, this dialog did not appear, and without thinking too much of it, Brown shrugged and just installed the downloaded Chrome .deb through the terminal, which worked just fine. While he didn't look any deeper into the cause of the issue, he did note that as the years and new Ubuntu releases progressed, the bug would still be there, all the way up until the most recent release. Finally, 2.5 years ago, he decided to dive into the bug. It turned out there were lots of reports about this issue, but nobody stepped up to fix it. While workarounds were made available through wrapper scripts, and deeper investigations into the cause revealed helpful information. The actual error message was a doozy: Refusing to render service to dead parents", which is quite metal and a little disturbing. In summary, the problem was that GDebi was using execv() to replace itself with an instance of pkexec, which was intended to bring up an authentication dialog and then allow GDebi to run as a superuser. pkexec didn't like this arrangement, because it wants to have a parent process other than init. Alkis mentioned that you could recreate the problematic scenario in a terminal window by running gdebi-gtk with setsid to run it in a new session. Doug Brown Backing up a few steps, if the name gksu" rings a bell for you, you might have already figured out where the problem most likely originated from. Right around that time, 2018, Ubuntu switched to using PolicyKit instead, and gksu was removed from Ubuntu. GDebi was patched to work with PolicyKit instead, and this was what introduced the actual bug. Sadly, despite having a clear idea of the origin of the bug, as well as where to look to actually fix it, nobody picked it up. It sat there for years, causing problems for users, without a fix in sight. Brown was motivated enough to fix it, submitted the patch, but after receiving word it would be looked at within a few days, he never heard anything back for years, not helped by the fact that GDebi has long been unmaintained. It wasn't until very recently that he decided to go back again, and this time, after filling out additional information required for a patch for an unmaintained package, it was picked up, and will become available in the next Ubuntu release (and will most likely be backported, too). Brown further explains why it took so long for the bug to be definitely fixed. Not only is GDebi unmaintained, the bug also only manifested itself when launching Firefox from the panel icon - it did not manifest when launching Firefox from the MATE menu, so a lot of people never experienced it. On top of that, as we all sadly know, Ubuntu replaced the Firefox .deb package with the SNAP version, which also doesn't trigger the bug. It's a long story for sure, but a very interesting one. It shows how sometimes, the stars just align to make sure a bug does not get fixed, even if everyone involved knows how to fix it, and even if fixes have been submitted. Sometimes, things just compound to cause a bug to fall through the cracks.

Android, like many other operating systems, uses the open-source Linux kernel. There are several different types of Linux kernel releases, but the type that's most important to Android is the long-term support (LTS) one, as they're updated regularly with important bug fixes and security patches. Starting in 2017, the support lifetime of LTS releases of Linux was extended from two years to six years, but early last year, this extension was reversed. Fortunately, Google has announced that moving forward, they'll support their own LTS kernel releases for four years. Here's why that's important for the security of Android devices. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority I fully support the Linux kernel maintainers dropping the LTS window from six to two years. The only places where such old kernels were being used were embedded devices and things like smartphones vendors refused to update to newer Android releases, and it makes no sense for kernel maintainers to be worrying about that sort of stuff. If an OEM wants to keep using such outdated kernels, the burden should be on that OEM to support that kernel, or to update affected devices to a newer, supported kernel. It seems Google, probably wisely, realised that most OEMs weren't going to properly upgrade their devices and the kernels that run on them, and as such, the search giant decided to simply create their own LTS releases instead, which will be supported for four years. Google already maintains various Android-specific Linux kernel branches anyway, so it fits right into their existing development model for the Android Linux kernel. Some of the more popular OEMs, like Google itself or Samsung, have promised longer support life cycles for new Android versions on their devices, so even with this new Android-specific LTS policy, there's still going to be cases where an OEM will have to perform a kernel upgrade where they didn't have to before with the six year LTS policy. I wonder if this is going to impact any support promises made in recent years.

Among them, Byron Jourdan, Senior Director, Product Management of Mozilla, under the Reddit username ComprehensiveDoor643 revealed that Mozilla plans to support Firefox on Windows 7 for longer. When asked separately about whether it also included Windows 8 and 8.1 too, Jourdan added that it was certainly the plan, though for how long the extended support would last was still undecided. Sayan Sen at Neowin Excellent move by Mozilla. I doubt there's that many new features and frameworks in Windows 10 or 11 that are absolutely essential to Firefox working properly, so assuming it can gracefully disable any possible Windows 10/11-exclusive features, it should be entirely possible to use Firefox as an up-to-date, secure, and capable browser on Windows 7/8.x. Windows 7 and 8.x users still make up about 2.7% of Windows users worldwide, and with Windows' popularity, that probably still translates to millions and millions of people. Making sure these people have access to a safe and secure browser is a huge boon, and I'm very happy Mozilla is going to keep supporting these platforms as best they can, at least for now. For those of us who already consider especially Windows 7 a retrocomputing platform - I sure do - this is also great news, as any retro box or VM we load up with it will also get a modern browser. Just excellent news all around.

Most people are familiar with GRUB, a powerful, flexible, fully-featured bootloader that is used on multiple architectures (x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le OpenFirmware). Although GRUB is quite versatile and capable, its features create complexity that is difficult to maintain, and that both duplicate and lag behind the Linux kernel while also creating numerous security holes. On the other hand, the Linux kernel, which has a large developer base, benefits from fast feature development, quick responses to vulnerabilities and greater overall scrutiny. We (Red Hat boot loader engineering) will present our solution to this problem, which is to use the Linux kernel as its own bootloader. Loaded by the EFI stub on UEFI, and packed into a unified kernel image (UKI), the kernel, initramfs, and kernel command line, contain everything they need to reach the final boot target. All necessary drivers, filesystem support, and networking are already built in and code duplication is avoided. Marta Lewandowska I'm not a fan of GRUB. It's too much of a single point of failure, and since I'm not going to be dual-booting anything anyway I'd much rather use something that isn't as complex as GRUB. Systemd-boot is an option, but switching over from GRUB to systemd-boot, while possible on my distribution of choice, Fedora, is not officially supported and there's no guarantee it will keep working from one release to the next. The proposed solution here seems like another option, and it may even be a better option - I'll leave that to the experts to discuss. It seems like to me that the ideal we should be striving for is to have booting the operating system become the sole responsibility of the EUFI firmware, which usually already contains the ability to load any operating system that supports UEFI without explicitly installing a bootloader. It'd be great if you could set your UEFI firmware to just always load its boot menu, instead of hiding it behind a function key or whatever. We made UEFI more capable to address the various problems and limitations inherent in BIOS. Why are we still forcing UEFI to pretend it still has the same limitations?

Despite being live since 1997, OSNews has had fairly few redesigns in the grand scheme of things. If my memory serves me correctly, we've had a grand total of 6 designs, and we're currently on version 6, introduced about 5 years ago because of unpleasant reasons. It's now 2024, and for a variety of reasons, we're looking to work towards version 7 of our almost 30 year old website, and we need help. I have a very clear idea of what I want OSNews 7 to be like - including mockups. The general goals are making the site visually simpler, reducing our dependency on WordPress extensions, and reducing the complexity of our theme and website elements to make it a bit easier for someone like me to change small things without breaking anything. Oh and a dark mode that works. Note that we're not looking to change backends or anything like that - WordPress will stay. If you have the WordPress, design, and developer skills to make something like this a reality, and in the process shape the visual identity of one of the oldest continuously running technology news websites in the world, send me an email.

Graham's TWM page has been around for like two decades or so and still isn't even remotely as old as TWM itself, and in 2021 they published an updated version with even more information, tips, and tricks for TWM. The Tab Window Manager finds its origins in the lat 1980s, and has been the default window manager for the X Windowing System for a long time, now, too. Yet, few people know it exists - how many people even know X has a default window manager? - and even fewer people know you can actually style it, too. OK, so TWM is fairly easy to configure but alot of people, upon seeing the default config, scream Ugh, thats awful!' and head off to the ports tree or their distro sources in search of the latest and greatest uber desktop environment. There are some hardcore TWM fans and mimimalists however who stick around and get to liking the basic feel of TWM. Then they start to mod it and create their own custom dekstop. All part of the fun in Unix :). Graham's TWM page I'll admit I have never used TWM properly, and didn't know it could be themed at all. I feel very compelled to spend some time with it now, because I've always liked the by-now classic design where the right-click desktop menu serves as the central location for all your interactions with the system. There are quite a few more advanced, up-to-date forks of TWM as well, but the idea of sticking to the actual default X window manager has a certain charm. I almost am too afraid to ask, because the answer on OSNews to these sorts of questions is almost always yes" - do we have any TWM users in the audience? I'm extremely curious to find out if TWM actually has a reason to exist at this point, or if, in 2024, it's just junk code in the X.org source repository, because I'm looking at some of these screenshots and I feel a very strong urge to give it a serious go.

The goal is to be able to drag an icon from a background window without immediately raising that window and obscuring the drop target window when using the click-to-focus mode. This is a barebones description of what needs to happen. It assumes familiarity with code, protocols, etc. as needed. Quod Video The articles describes how to get there using both X and Wayland, and it's clear there's still quite a bit of work to do. At least on my KDE Wayland setups, the way it works now is that when I click to drag an icon from a lower Dolphin window to a higher one, it brings the lower window forward, but then, when I hover for a bit over the other window, it brings it back up. Of course, this only works if the destination window remains at least partially visible, which might not always be the case. For usability's sake, there needs to be an option to start a drag operation from one window to the next without altering the Z-order.

If there was ever a will they, won't they?" love story in mobile computing, it's definitely Google's on and off again relationship with Android's desktop mode. There have been countless hints, efforts, and code pertaining to the mythical desktop mode for Android, but so far, Google has never flipped the switch and made it available. It's 2024, Android 15 development is in full swing, and it seems Google and Android's desktop mode are dating again. This past spring, Google added DisplayPort support to the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro in a Feature Drop update, allowing for easy wired connections to external monitors. Then, tinkering in Android 14 QPR3 Beta 2.1, Mishaal Rahman was able to get a new desktop interface up and running, complete with Android apps running in resizeable floating windows. It's not confirmed that Android 15 will ship with a built-in desktop mode, but the bones are there. It does make me wonder, though: why? What would a desktop interface add to Android? Taylor Kerns at Android Police I'm actually fairly convinced Android could, indeed, serve as an excellent desktop operating system, but without any official backing by Google, it's always been a massive hack to use Android with a mouse and keyboard. It's not so much the hardware support - it's all there - but rather the software support, and the clunky way common Android UI tasks feel when performing them with a mouse. I've installed Android desktop distributions' countless times, and the third-party hacks they use, like clunky taskbars and custom menus and so on, make for a horrid user experience. Samsung DEX seems to be the only somewhat successful attempt at adding a desktop mode to Android, but it can't be installed on any regular PC or laptop, and requires cumbersome cabling or expensive docks, making it more of a curiosity than a true desktop mode in the sense most of us are thinking of. This feature needs to come from Google itself, and it needs to be something third parties can use in their ROMs and x86 builds so we can truly use Android on a desktop. I don't believe that's going to happen, though. It's clear Google is more interested in pushing Chrome OS for desktop and laptop use, and it seems more likely that any desktop mode that gets added to Android is going to be similar in nature to DEX - something you can only use by hooking up your phone to a display and configuring wireless input devices. Cool, but not exactly something that will turn Android into a desktop contender.

I've just confirmed with, well, myself, that comment editing on OSNews finally works again. We're finally free. Our trying times are behind us, and we can begin to rebuild. Stay safe out there, and be kind to each other.

To evolve Fuchsia beyond smart home devices, Google has been working on projects such as Starnix to run unmodified Linux binaries on Fuchsia devices. In addition, since late April of this year, Google has been working on a new project called microfuchsia" that aims to make Fuchsia bootable on existing devices via virtualization. Microfuchsia, according to Google, is a Fuchsia OS build that targets virtual machines and is designed to be bootable in virtualization solutions such as QEMU and pKVM. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority The goal here might be, according to Mishaal Rahman, might be to use this new microfuchsia thing to replace the stripped-down Android version that's currently being used inside Android's pKVM to run certain secured workloads. Relevant patches have been submitted to both the Fuchsia and Android side of things for this very purpose. At this point, it really seems that Google's grand ambitions with Fuchsia simply didn't survive the massive employee culling, with leadership probably reasoning that Android and Chrome OS are good enough, and that replacing them with something homegrown and possibly more suited - speculation, of course - simply isn't worth the investment in both time and money. It probably makes sense from a financial standpoint, but it's still sad.

A few weeks ago, I broke the news that Mozilla had removed several anti-censorship Firefox extensions from its store in Russia, and a few days later I also broke the news they reversed course on their decision and reinstated the extensions. Perhaps not worthy of a beauty prize, as a Dutch saying goes, but at least the turnaround time was short, and they did the right thing in the end. Well, let's see how Apple is going to deal with the exact same situation. Novaya Gazeta Europe reports that bowing under pressure from the same Russian censors that targeted Mozilla, the company has removed a whole slew of VPN applications used by Russians to evade the stringent totalitarian censorship laws in the warmongering nation. Apple has removed several apps offering virtual private network (VPN) services from the Russian AppStore, following a request from Roskomnadzor, Russia's media regulator, independent news outlet Mediazona reported on Thursday. The VPN services removed by Apple include leading services such as ProtonVPN, Red Shield VPN, NordVPN and Le VPN. Those living in Russia will no longer be able to download the services, while users who already have them on their phones can continue using them, but will be unable to update them. Novaya Gazeta Europe Apple has a long history of falling in line with the demands from dictators and totalitarian regimes, and Russia is no stranger to telling Apple what to do. Earlier this year, Apple was ordered to remove an application developed by the team of the murdered opposition figure Alexey Navalny, and of course, Apple rolled over and complied. Much like Apple's grotesque suck-up behaviour in China, This stands in stark contrast to Apple's whining, complaining, and tantrums in the European Union. It seems Apple finds it more comfortable to operating under dictators than in democracies.

We talked about Psion last week, and we're talking about Psion again this week. This time, Kian Ryan highlights a very important capability of Psion's devices, a capability that's entirely absent from today's mobile devices: a built-in IDE and dedicated programming language so you can write code and build applications, including ones with a graphical user interface, right on the device. All Psion devices could run OPL, either preinstalled on the device or via a DATAPAK memory card. It's a BASIC-esque programming language, and while you could develop OPL programs on your PC in DOS, Psion devices also shipped with an IDE preinstalled so you could get just as much done on the device itself. Back then, this wasn't particularly unique, but these days, mobile devices have become so locked-down and dumb that developing applications on-device is basically a non-starter. Which can't be said about my current mobile. My mobile is a great device to consume content on, but it has no built in tools to extend its functionality. If I want to build an application for it, I have to use another computer to download a build environment, build the application, sign it, and then transfer the packaged app to my phone. On the Psion, all the tools are right there, on my home screen. It does feel like we're missing an opportunity here. Kian Ryan They're entirely right, of course. Our current mobile devices are faster and technically more capable than ever, but extending the functionality of your smartphone using the smartphone itself by writing and compiling code on it is far more cumbersome than it was in the past. Even my Psion Organiser II LZ64, from 1986, has OPL on it, and if I took the time to relearn the basic BASIC I once knew, I could probably still program something useful on it today, almost 40 years later, without being gatekept by anyone, and without needing any other device. That's something quite magical that we've lost, and that's sad.

I've been working on a bunch of small projects involving microcontrollers. Currently a lot of them are based around the Raspberry Pi Pico boards because I like the development experience of those a lot. They have a decent SDK and cheap hardware to get started and the debugger works with gdb/openocd so it just integrates in all IDEs that support that. One of my current projects is making a fancy hardware controller for a bunch of video equipment I use. The main things that will be controlled are two PTZ cameras (those are cameras that have motors to move them). One stationary camera and the video switching equipment that that's hooked up to. Martijn Braam There's more to building something like this than connecting up hardware components - there's also software that needs to be taken care of. In this case, the author is weighing several real-time operating systems for use in the project, namely FreeRTOS, NuttX, and Zephyr. If you're working on a similar project, this article may help in choosing the RTOS that's right for you.

David Rosenthal, one of the primary contributors to the X Windowing System, has published an awesome blog post about the recent 40 year anniversary of X, full of details about the early days of X development, as well as the limitations they had to deal with, the choices they had to make, and the environment in which they were constrained. Once at Sun I realized that it was more important for the company that the Unix world standardized on a single window system than that the standard be Sun's NeWS system. At C-MU I had already looked into X as an alternative to the Andrew window system, so I knew it was the obvious alternative to NeWS. Although most of my time was spent developing NeWS, I rapidly ported X version 10 to the Sun/1, likely the second port to non-DEC hardware. It worked, but I had to kludge several areas that depended on DEC-specific hardware. The worst was the completely DEC-specific keyboard support. Because it was clear that a major redesign of X was needed to make it portable and in particular to make it work well on Sun hardware, Gosling and I worked with the teams at DEC SRC and WRL on the design of X version 11. Gosling provided significant input on the imaging model, and I designed the keyboard support. As the implementation evolved I maintained the Sun port and did a lot of testing and bug fixing. All of which led to my trip to Boston to pull all-nighters at MIT finalizing the release. David Rosenthal They were clearly right. During those days, the UNIX world was using a variety of windowing systems, all tied to various companies and platforms. Standardising virtually the entire UNIX world on X aided in keeping UNIX compatible-ish even in the then-new graphical era, and X's enduring existence to this very day is evidence of the fact they made a lot of right choices early on. Rosenthal also explains why one of the main alternatives to X, Sun's PostScript-based NeWS, which was also co-developed by Rosenthal, didn't win out over X. It had several things working against its adoptions and popularisation, such as Sun requiring a license fee for the source code, its heftier system requirements, and the fact it was more difficult to program for. After trying to create what Rosenthal describes as a ghastly kludge" by combining NeWS and X into Xnews, Sun eventually killed it altogether. Of course, this wouldn't be restrospective of X without mentioning Wayland. We and Jobs were wrong about the imaging model, for at least two reasons. First, early on pixels were in short supply and applications needed to make the best use of the few they were assigned. They didn't want to delegate control to the PostScript interpreter. Second, later on came GPUs with 3D imaging models. The idea of a one-size-fits-all model became obsolete. The reason that Wayland should replace X11 is that it is agnostic to the application's choice of imaging model. David Rosenthal This is about as close to a blessing from the original X Windowing System developers you're ever going to get, but Rosenthal does correctly note that XWayland is a thing, and since not every application is going to be rewritten to support Wayland, X will most likely be around for a long time to come. In fact, he looks towards the future, and predicts that we'll definitely be celebrating 50 years of X, and that yes, people will still be using it by then.

It seems the dislike for machine learning runs deep. In a blog post, Cloudflare has announced that blocking machine learning scrapers is so popular, they decided to just add a feature to the Cloudflare dashboard that will block all machine learning scrapers with a single click. We hear clearly that customers don't want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly. To help, we've added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots. It's available for all customers, including those on the free tier. To enable it, simply navigate to the Security > Bots section of the Cloudflare dashboard, and click the toggle labeled AI Scrapers and Crawlers. Cloudflare blog According to Cloudflare, 85% of their customers block machine learning scrapers from taking content from their websites, and that number definitely does not surprise me. People clearly understand that multibillion dollar megacorporations freely scraping every piece of content on the web for their own further obscene enrichment while giving nothing back - in fact, while charging us for it - is inherently wrong, and as such, they choose to block them from doing so. Of course, it makes sense for Cloudflare to try and combat junk traffic, so this is one of those cases where the corporate interests of Cloudflare actually line up with the personal interests of its customers, so making blocking machine learning scrapers as easy as possible benefits both parties. I think OSNews, too, makes use of Cloudflare, so I'm definitely going to ask OSNews' owner to hit that button. Cloudflare further details that a lot of people are blocking crawlers run by companies like Amazon, Google, and OpenAI, but completely miss far more active crawlers like those run by the Chinese company ByteDance, probably because those companies don't dominate the AI" news cycle. Then there's the massive number of machine learning crawlers that just straight-up lie about their intentions, trying to hide the fact they're machine learning bots. We fear that some AI companies intent on circumventing rules to access content will persistently adapt to evade bot detection. We will continue to keep watch and add more bot blocks to our AI Scrapers and Crawlers rule and evolve our machine learning models to help keep the Internet a place where content creators can thrive and keep full control over which models their content is used to train or run inference on. Cloudflare blog I find this particularly funny because what's happening here is machine learning models being used to block... Machine learning models. Give it a few more years down the trajectory we're currently on, and the internet will just be bots reading content posted by other bots.

The article's from 2021, but I think it's still worth discussing. A hard reality of C and C++ software development on Windows is that there has never been a good, native C or C++ standard library implementation for the platform. A standard library should abstract over the underlying host facilities in order to ease portable software development. On Windows, C and C++ is so poorly hooked up to operating system interfaces that most portable or mostly-portable software - programs which work perfectly elsewhere - are subtly broken on Windows, particularly outside of the English-speaking world. The reasons are almost certainly political, originally motivated by vendor lock-in, than technical, which adds insult to injury. This article is about what's wrong, how it's wrong, and some easy techniques to deal with it in portable software. Chris Wellons As someone who doesn't know how to code or program, articles like these are always difficult to properly parse. I understand the primary problem the article covers, but what I'm curious about is how much of this problem is personal - skill issue - and how much of it is a widely held belief by Windows developers and programmers. I know there's quite a few of you in our audience, so I'd love to hear from you how you feel about this. The author also authored his on fix, something called libwinsane, which I'm also curious about - is this the only solution, or are there more options out there?

Another month, another report from the Redox team. The Rust-based operating system saw another active month, including getting a whole bunch of new funding deals for specific features, such as adding UNIX-style signals to Redox, as well as the further development of Termion, a Redox project that is a pure Rust, bindless library for low-level handling, manipulating and reading information about terminals". Furthermore, the default user interface Orbital got a small makeover with new colours and a new default wallpaper, and there's the usual documentation and website improvements. More substantial are doubling the performance of RedoxFS by improving the speed of block reads and writes, and changes in how the xHCI drivers works to drastically reduce CPU usage. The PCI/PCIe and x86 VirtIO drivers has also been improved, and you can now do userspace debugging using the GNU Debugger from outside the VM. There's a lot more, so head on over to read the whole thing.

The impact printer was a mainstay of the early desktop computing era. Also called dot matrix printers," these printers could print low-resolution yet very readable text on a page, and do so quickly and at a low price point. But these printers are a relic of the past; in 2024, you might find them printing invoices or shipping labels, although more frequently these use cases have been replaced by other types of printers such as thermal printers and laser printers. The heart of the impact printer is the print head. The print head contained a column of pins (9 pins was common) that moved across the page. Software in the printer controlled when to strike these pins through an inked ribbon to place a series of dots" on a page. By carefully timing the pin strikes with the movement of the print head, the printer could control where each dot was placed. A column of dots might represent the vertical stroke of the letter H, a series of single dots created the horizontal bar, and another column would create the final vertical stroke. Jim Hall at Technically We Write Our first printer was a dot matrix model, from I think a brand called Star or something similar. Back then, in 1991 or so, a lot of employers in The Netherlands offered programs wherein employees could buy computers through their work, offered at a certain discount. My parents jumped on the opportunity when my mom's employer offered such a program, and through it, we bought a brand new 286 machine running MS-DOS and Windows 3.0, and it included said dot matrix printer. There's something about the sound and workings of a dot matrix printer that just can't be bested by modern ink, laser, or LED printers. The mechanical punching, at such a fast rate it sounded like a tiny Gatling gun, was mesmerising, especially when paired with continuous form paper. Carefully ripping off the perforated edges of the paper after printing was just a nice bonus that entertained me quite a bit as a child. I was surprised to learn that dot matrix printers are still being manufactured and sold today, and even comes in colour. They're quite a bit more expensive than other printer types these days, but I have a feeling they're aimed at enterprises and certain niches, which probably means they're going to be of considerably higher quality than all the other junk printers that clog the market. With a bit more research, it might actually be possible to find a brand new colour dot matrix printer that is a better choice than some of the modern alternatives. The fact that I'm not contemplating buying a brand new dot matrix printer in 2024, even though I rarely print, is a mildly worrying development.

Microsoft Defender is the endpoint security solution preinstalled on every Windows machine since Windows 7. It's a fairly complex piece of software, addressing both EDR and EPP use cases. As such, Microsoft markets two different products. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud based endpoint security solution that combines sensor capabilities with the advantages of a cloud processing. Microsoft Defender Antivirus (MDA), on the other hand, is a modern EPP enabled by default on any fresh Windows installation. MDA is the focus of this analysis. Retooling If you've ever wanted to know how Microsoft Defender works, this article contains a wealth of detailed information.

R9 is a work-in-progress effort to build a Plan 9 kernel to Rust. It was started a couple years back by the maintainers of the Harvey OS distribution of Plan 9, who threw in the towel after loss of traction". R9 is a reimplementation of the plan9 kernel in Rust. It is not only inspired by but in many ways derived from the original Plan 9 source code. R9OS GitHub page For now, the project is obviously mostly focused on running in virtual machines, specifically Qemu, in which it can be run using a variety of architectures: aarch64, x86-64 (with or without kvm), and RISC-V.

Once upon a time, the IBM PC was released. In the IBM PC BIOS, you could enter characters that weren't present on the keyboard by holding the Alt key and typing the decimal value on the numeric keypad. For example, you could enter n by holding Alt and typing Numpad1 Numpad6 Numpad4, then releasing the Alt key. Raymond Chen Another Raymond Chen story, and this one involves hearts, snowmen, different editing controls, codepages, and more. In other words, just another Tuesday for Chen.

The European Union's Digital Markets Act is the gift that keeps on giving. This time, it's Facebook's turn to be slapped on the fingers with a ruler - a metric ruler, of course - because of its malicious compliance with the DMA. Today, the Commission has informed Meta of its preliminary findings that its pay or consent" advertising model fails to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). In the Commission's preliminary view, this binary choice forces users to consent to the combination of their personal data and fails to provide them a less personalised but equivalent version of Meta's social networks. European Commission press release The European Commission's preliminary conclusion takes issue with Facebook's binary choice between pay for zero ads" and full-on tracking and all the ads". According to the DMA, Facebook must offer users the option of an equivalent experience with less tracking, and the company doesn't offer such an option to users. In addition, Facebook's proposal does not allow users to exercise their right to freely consent to the combination of their personal data". It's important to note that this is not some sort of definitive ruling of finding; it's preliminary, and Facebook now has the opportunity to state its case and formulate its arguments. If the eventual ruling is that Facebook does not comply, the company is liable for fines up to 10% of its yearly worldwide turnover, which can rise up to 20% for repeated infractions.

Well, it seems we've got a better understanding now of why Andreas Kling decided to leave the SerenityOS project to focus entirely on Ladybird, the web browser that grew out of his hobby operating system. They've got some big plans for where to take Ladybird, and I'm saying they" because it's being backed by a big name. They've set up a fancy new website for the project, which makes it all look a bit more presentable to a general audience. The project is aiming for a first alpha release for Linux and macOS in 2026, and Windows or mobile versions are not something they're currently interested in - they want to get the desktop version to be presentable first. It also seems we're not in Kansas anymore - they've got four full-time paid engineers working on Ladybird at the moment, with three more starting soon. Sure, they've got some sponsors, but that seems like a lot of people, so where's the cash coming from? Well, the project also announced its first two board members, and it won't surprise you Andreas Kling himself is one of them. The other name is none other than Chris Wanstrath, and if that name doesn't ring a bell - he's the co-founder and former CEO of GitHub, which he sold to Microsoft in 2018. He also created the Atom text editor and led several other projects. Oh, he also happens to be a billionaire who apparently has donated 1 million dollars to Ladybird. In other words, the Ladybird project is a lot more of a serious, grown-up effort than it may have seemed when Kling first announced his departure from SerenityOS. This means the project has some serious money behind it, an influential name with probably some great networking skills, and, of course, Kling's unique experience working on browser engines for Nokia and Apple in the past. All in all, this is great news.

In this writeup we provide a summary of technical information crucial to evaulate the exploitability and impact of memory safety problems in IBM i programs. As administrators and developers of IBM i aren't supposed to work below MI level" this kind of information is not officially documented by the vendor. The information presented here is thus based on already published reverse engineering results, and our own findings uncovered using IBM's System Sertice Tools (SST) and the POWER-AS specific Processor extensions we developed for the Ghidra reverse engineering framework. Tests were performed on a physical POWER 9 system running IBM i V7R4. Programs were compiled by the default settings of the system in the ILE program model. C language source code will be provided separately. Silent Signal Some light reading.

On the brink of insanity, my tattered mind unable to comprehend the twisted interplay of millennia of arcane programmer-time and the ragged screech of madness, I reached into the Mass and steeled myself to the ground lest I be pulled in, and found my magnum opus. Booting Linux off of a Google Drive root. Ersei That's not... You shouldn't... Why would...

The web browser Vivaldi is taking a firm stance against including machine learning tools to its browser. So, as we have seen, LLMs are essentially confident-sounding lying machines with a penchant to occasionally disclose private data or plagiarise existing work. While they do this, they also use vast amounts of energy and are happy using all the GPUs you can throw at them which is a problem we've seen before in the field of cryptocurrencies. As such, it does not feel right to bundle any such solution into Vivaldi. There is enough misinformation going around to risk adding more to the pile. We will not use an LLM to add a chatbot, a summarization solution or a suggestion engine to fill up forms for you until more rigorous ways to do those things are available. Julien Picalausa on the Vivaldi blog I'm not a particular fan of Vivaldi personally - it doesn't integrate with KDE well visually and its old-fashioned-Opera approach of throwing everything but the kitchen sink at itself is just too cluttered for me - but props to the Vivaldi team for taking such clear and firm stance. There's a ton of pressure from big money interests to add machine learning to everything from your operating system to your nail scissors, and popular tech publishers are certainly going to publish articles decrying Vivaldi's choice, so they're not doing this without any risk. With even Firefox adding machine learning tools to the browser, there's very few - if any - browsers left, other than Vivaldi, it seems - that will be free of these tools. I can only hope we're going to see a popular Firefox fork without this nonsense take off, and I'm definitely keeping my eye on the various options that already exist today.

Straight from the arcade world, the Neo Geo was, without a doubt, the most expensive hardware of the 4th generation. This begs the question: how capable was it and how did it compare with the rest? In this entry, we'll take a look at the result of one company (SNK) setting budget restrictions aside and shipping a product meant to please both arcade owners and rich households. Rodrigo Copetti Rich households, indeed. Back in the '90s, when Nintendo was the only game in town - few people in my area cared one bit about Sega - Neo Geo was a name we only knew of vaguely. It was supposed to be a massively powerful console that was so expensive nobody bought one, and some of us even doubted it was real in the first place. Ah, the pre-internet playground days were wild.

The openSUSE project recently announced the second release candidate (RC2) of its Aeon Desktop, formerly known as MicroOS Desktop GNOME. Aside from the new coat of naming paint, Aeon breaks ground in a few other ways by dabbling with technologies not found in other openSUSE releases. The goal for Aeon is to provide automated system updates using snapshots that can be applied atomically, removing the burden of system maintenance for lazy developers" who want to focus on their work rather than desktop administration. System-tinkerers need not apply. The idea behind Aeon, as with other immutable (or image-based) Linux distributions, is to provide the core of the distribution as a read-only image or filesystem that is updated atomically and can be rolled back if needed. Google's ChromeOS was the first popular Linux-based desktop operating system to follow this model. Since the release of ChromeOS a number of interesting immutable implementations have cropped up, such as Fedora Silverblue, Project Bluefin (covered here in December 2023), openSUSE's MicroOS (covered here in March 2023), and Ubuntu Core. Joe Brockmeier at LWN With the amount of attention immutable Linux desktops are getting, and how much work and experimentation that's going into them, I'm getting the feeling that sooner or later all of the major, popular desktop Linux distributions will be going this route. Depending on implementation details, I actually like the concept of a defined base system that's just an image that can be replaced easily using btrfs snapshots or something like that, while all the user's files and customisations are kept elsewhere. It makes intuitive sense. Where the current crop of immutable Linux desktops fall flat for me is their reliance on (usually) Flatpak. You know how there's people who hate systemd and/or Wayland just a little too much, to the point it gets a little weird and worrying? That's me whenever I have to deal with Flatpaks. Every experience I have with Flatpaks is riddled with trouble for me. Even though I'm a KDE user, I'm currently testing out the latest GNOME release on my workstation (the one that I used to conclude Windows is simply not ready for the desktop), using Fedora of course, and on GNOME I use the Mastodon application Tuba. While I mostly write in English, I do occasionally write in Dutch, too, and would love for the spell check feature to work in my native tongue, too, instead of just in English. However, despite having all possible Dutch dictionaries installed - hunspell, aspell - and despite those dictionaries being picked up everywhere else in GNOME, Tuba only showed me a long list of variants of English. After digging around to find out why this was happening, it took me far longer than I care to publicly admit to realise that since the latest version of Tuba is only really available as a Flatpak on Fedora, my problem probably had something to do with that - and it turns out I was right: Flatpak applications do not use the system-wide installed spellcheck dictionaries like normal applications do. This eventually led me to this article by Daniel Aleksandersen, where he details what you need to do in order to add spellcheck dictionaries to Flatpak applications. You need to run the following commands: The list of languages uses two-letter codes only, and the first language listed will serve as the display language for Flatpak applications, while the rest will be fallback languages - which happens to include downloading and installing the Flatpak-specific copies of the spellcheck libraries. Sadly, this method is not particularly granular. Since it only accepts the two-letter codes, you can't, say, only install nl-nl"; you'll be getting nl-be" as well. In the case of a widely spoken language like English, this means a massive list of 18 different varieties of English. The resulting menus are... Not elegant. This is just an example, but using Flatpak, you'll run into all kinds of issues like this, that then have to be solved by hacks or obscure terminal commands - not exactly the user-friendly image Flatpak is trying to convey to the world. This particular issue might not matter to the probably overwhelming English-speaking majority of Flatpak developers, but for anyone who has to deal with multiple languages on a daily basis - which is a massive number of people, probably well over 50% of computer users - having to mess around with obscure terminal commands hidden in blog posts just to be able to use the languages they use every day is terrible design on a multitude of levels, and will outright make Flatpak applications unusable for large numbers of people. Whenever I run into these Flatpak problems, it makes it clear to me that Flatpak is designed not by users, for users - but by developers, for developers. I can totally understand and see why Flatpak is appealing to developers, but as a user, they bring me nothing but grief, issues, and weird bugs that all seem to stem from being made to make developers' lives easier, instead of users'. If immutable Linux distributions are really hellbent on using Flatpak as the the means of application installation - and it seams like they are - it will mean a massive regression in functionality, usability, and discoverability for users, and as long as Flatpak remains as broken and badly designed as it is, I really see no reason to recommend an immutable Linux desktop to anyone but the really curious among us.

When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Microsoft's AI chief Mustafa Suleyman: With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the '90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That's been the understanding. Mustafa Suleyman This is absolute bullshit from the first word to the very last. None of this is true - not even in the slightest. Content on the web is not free for the taking by anyone, especially not to be chewed up and regurgitated verbatim by spicy autocomplete tools. There is no social contract" to that effect. In fact, when I go to any of Microsoft's website, documents, videos, or any other content they publish online, on the open web, and scroll to the very bottom of the page, it's all got the little copyright symbol or similar messaging. Once again, this underlines how entitled Silicon Valley techbros really are. If we violate even a gram of Microsoft's copyrights, we'd have their lawyers on our ass in weeks - but when Microsoft itself needs to violate copyright and licensing on an automated, industrial scale, for massive profits, everything is suddenly peace, love, and fair use. Men in Silicon Valley just do not understand consent. At all. And they show this time and time again. Meanwhile, the Internet Archive has to deal with crap like this: The lawsuit is about the longstanding and widespread library practice of controlled digital lending, which is how we lend the books we own to our patrons. As a result of the publishers' lawsuit, more than 500,000 books have been removed from our lending library. Chris Freeland at the Internet Archive Blogs Controlled lending without a profit motive is deemed illegal, but violating copyright and licensing on an automated, industrial scale is fair use. Make it make sense. Make it make sense.

The Apple ][ is one of the most iconic vintage computers of all time. But since Wozniak's monster lasted all the way until 1993 (1995 if you could the IIe card, which I won't count until I get one), it can be easy to forget that in 1977, it was a video extravaganza. The competitors- even much bigger and established companies like Commodore and Tandy- generally only had text modes, let alone pixel-addressable graphics, and they certainly didn't have sixteen colors. (Gray and grey are different colors, right?) Nicole Branagan If there's ever anything you wanted to know about how graphics work on the Apple II, this is the place to go. It's an incredibly detailed and illustrated explanation of how the machine renders and displays graphics, and an excellent piece of writing to boot. I'm a little jealous.

The Vector Packet Processor (VPP) is a framework for moving packets around at high rates. Its core concept is handling packets in groups known as vectors," which allows for the native use of vector processor instructions for packet classification and processing in different CPU architectures - currently amd64 and arm64. VPP can process packets at incredibly high rates and competes with many dedicated forwarding appliances. This is achieved using userspace networking that bypasses the host's normal network stack. This article describes the porting of VPP to FreeBSD and working with the upstream VPP project to include FreeBSD as a supported target. Tom Jones It's not unusual for me to link to something a little over my head, and this is another example of something I know y'all will like, but I don't really understand fully.

So I learned something new today: there are companies that provide security patches for Windows that aren't Microsoft. I never even considered this could be a thing, but it turns out that a paid service called 0patch seems to have been around for a long time, and the consensus seems to be that not only can it be trusted, it also sometimes provides patches sooner than Microsoft does. Today, 0patch announced it'll also be providing this service for Windows 10 after the end of support next year. With October 2025, 0patch will security-adopt" Windows 10 v22H2, and provide critical security patches for it for at least 5 more years - even longer if there's demand on the market. We're the only provider of unofficial security patches for Windows (virtual patches" are not really patches), and we have done this many times before: after security-adopting Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 in January 2020, we took care of 6 versions of Windows 10 as their official support ended, security-adopted Windows 11 v21H2 to keep users who got stuck there secure, took care of Windows Server 2012 in October 2023 and adopted two popular Office versions - 2010 and 2013 - when they got abandoned by Microsoft. We're still providing security patches for all of these. Mitja Kolsek on the 0patch blog This service implements patching through what it calls micropatches", which are very small sets of CPU instructions injected into running code in memory without modifying - in this case - Microsoft's own code. These micropatches are applied by briefly stopping the offending program, injecting the fix, and continuing the program - without having to close the program or reboot. Of course, they can be unapplied in the same, non-disruptive way. The 0patch service will provide patches for 0days that Microsoft hasn't fixed yet, patches for issues Microsoft won't fix, and sometimes patches for third party code. As the headline clearly states, this service isn't free, but honestly, at roughly 25 dollars plus tax per computer per year, it's not exactly expensive, and definitely cheaper than Microsoft's own Windows 10 Extended Security Update program it's going to offer for Windows 10 after the end of support date next year. Diving a bit deeper into who is providing this service, it comes from a company called ACROS Security, a small company out of Slovenia. The company details its micropatches on its 0patch blog if you want more information on how each individual ones works. I still don't know exactly what to make of this, and I definitely wouldn't rely on something like this for mission-critical Windows computers or servers, but for something like a home PC that can't be upgraded to Windows 11 but still works just fine, or perhaps some disposable virtual machines you're using, this might be a good stopgap solution until you can upgrade to a better operating system, like Linux or one of the BSDs. Are there any people in the OSNews audience who've used 0patch, or perhaps a service similar to it?

KWin had a very long standing bug report about bad performance of the Wayland session on older Intel integrated graphics. There have been many investigations into what's causing this, with a lot of more specific performance issues being found and fixed, but none of them managed to fully fix the issue... until now. Xaver Hugl An excellent deep dive into a very annoying problem KWin on Wayland running on older Intel hardware was facing. It turns out the issue was related to display timings, and older Intel hardware simply not being powerful enough to render frames within the timing window. The solution consisted of a various smaller solutions, and one bigger one: triple-buffering. The end result is a massive performance improvement for KWin on Wayland on older Intel hardware. This detailed post underlines just how difficult it is to simply render a bunch of windows and UI elements on time, without stutters or tearing, while taking into account the wide variety of hardware a project like KDE Plasma intends to run on. It's great to see them paying attention to the older, less powerful systems too, instead of only focusing on the latest and greatest like Apple, and recently Microsoft as well, do.

Mozilla has announced it's adding easy access to tool like ChatGPT, Gemini, and so to Firefox. Whether it's a local or a cloud-based model, if you want to use AI, we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs. With that in mind, this week, we will launch an opt-in experiment offering access to preferred AI services in Nightly for improved productivity as you browse. Instead of juggling between tabs or apps for assistance, those who have opted-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge, all without leaving their current web page. Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral, but we will continue adding AI services that meet our standards for quality and user experience. Ian Carmichael My biggest worry is not so much Mozilla adding these tools to Firefox - other browsers are doing it, and people clearly want to use them, so it makes sense for Firefox, too, to integrate them into the browser. No, my biggest worry is that this is just the first step on the way to the next major revenue agreement - just as Google is paying Mozilla to be the default search engine in Firefox, what if OpenAI starts paying to be the default AI tool in Firefox? Once that happens, I'm afraid a lot of the verbiage around choice and the ability to easily disable it all is going to change. I'm still incredibly annoyed by the fact I have to dive into about:config just to properly remove Pocket, a service I do not use, do not want, and annoys me by taking up space in my UI. I'm afraid that one or two years from now, AI integration will be just another complex set of strings I need to look for in about:config to truly disable it all. It definitely feels like Firefox is only going to get worse from here on out, not better, and this AI stuff seems more like an invitation for a revenue agreement than something well thought-out and useful. We'll see where things go from here, but my worries about Firefox' future are only growing stronger with Mozilla's latest moves. As a Linux user, this makes me worried.

As cool as the organizer was, it was extremely limited in pretty much every way. Psion had got many things right in the first go, as reviewers were quick to admit, and that made iterating on the design somewhat easy. The Organiser II CM released in 1986 was built on the Hitachi HD6303X (Motorola 6803) clocked at 920kHz with 8K RAM and 32K ROM. The screen was a much improved dot matrix LCD with two lines of sixteen characters. This version also shipped with a little piezo beeper built in, and an expansion slot on the top. The expansion slot could allow for a wired power adapter, a serial cable, a bar code reader, a telephone dialer, and even a USB port. Given the reputation of the first model for ruggedness and the coverage of the same quality in the second model, this particular model sold quite well to companies who needed handheld computers for inventory and other purposes. The Organizer II XP launched the same year, and this model had 32K RAM and a backlit screen while otherwise being the same machine. Given that both of these models had significantly more RAM than their predecessor, the programming capabilities were greatly enhanced with a new language, OPL, which was similar to BASIC. Bradford Morgan White The Psion Organiser II is the very root of all mobile computing today. This may seem like hyperbole - but trust me, it really is. I have an Organiser II LZ64 with a 32k datapak (memory card), and while it may look like a calculator, this little machine from 1986 already contains the very skeleton of the graphical user interface Palm would eventually popularise, and the iPhone and Android would take to extraordinary heights. Turn on an Organiser II, and you're greeted by a home screen with a grid of applications (no icons, though, of course - just labels) with a selector you moved around with the cursor keys. Hit the EXE key, and the application would load up, ready to be used; hit the home button (the ON key if my memory serves) and it would take you back to the home screen. This basic paradigm, of a grid of applications as a home screen you always return to, survives to this day, and is used by billions of people on their Android and iOS devices, both smartphones and tablets. People with little to no knowledge of the history of mobile computing - or people spreading corporate propaganda - often seem to act as if the release of the iPhone was the big bang of mobile computing, and that it materialised out of thin air because Steve Jobs alone willed it into existence. The reality is, though, that there is a direct line from the early Psion devices, through to Palm OS, the iPhone, and later Android. There were various dead end branches along the way, too, like the Newton, like Symbian, like the original Windows PocketPC, and so on - but that direct line from early Psion to that fancy Pixel 8 Pro or whatever you have today is solidly visible to anyone without an agenda. I love my Organiser II. It's approaching 40 years old now, and it still works without a single hitch. There's barely a scratch on it, the display is bright, the pixels are clear, the characteristic sliding cover feels as solid today as it did when it rolled off the factory line. This is where mobile computing began.

In a few days, 29 June, FreeDOS will turn 30. This happens to make it one of the oldest, continuously active open source projects in the world, originally created because Jim Hall had heard Microsoft was going to kill DOS when the upcoming Windows 95 was going to be released. After seeing the excitement around Linux, he decided it an open source DOS would be a valuable time investment. I still used DOS, and I didn't want to stop using DOS. And I looked at what Linux had achieved: people from all over the world shared source code with each other to make this full operating system that worked just like Unix. And I thought If they can do that with Linux, surely we can do the same thing with DOS." I asked around on a discussion board (called Usenet) if anyone had made an open source" DOS, and people said No, but that's a good idea .. and you should do it." So that's why I announced on June 29, 1994, that I was starting a new project to make an open source version of DOS that would work just like regular DOS. Jim Hall For an open source implementation of what was a dead end and now is a dead operating system, FreeDOS has been remarkably successful. Not only are there countless people using FreeDOS on retro hardware, it's also a popular operating system for DOS gaming and running old DOS applications in virtual machines. On top of that, many motherboard makers and OEMs use FreeDOS to load firmware update tools, and some of them even offered FreeDOS as the preinstalled operating system when buying new hardware. With the ever-increasing popularity of retrocomputing and gaming, FreeDOS clearly has a bright future ahead of itself.

The European Commission has informed Microsoft of its preliminary view that Microsoft has breached EU antitrust rules by tying its communication and collaboration product Teams to its popular productivity applications included in its suites for businesses Office 365 and Microsoft 365. European Commission press release Chalk this one up in the unsurprising column, too. Teams has infested Office, and merely by being bundled it's become a major competitor to Slack, even though everyone who has to use it seems to absolutely despise Teams with a shared passion rivaling only Americans' disgust for US Congress. On a mildly related note, I'm working with a friend to set up a Matrix server specifically for OSNews users, so we can have a self-hosted, secure, and encrypted space to hang out, continue conversations beyond the shelf life of a news item, suggest interesting stories, point out spelling mistakes, and so on. It'll be invite-only at first, with preference given to Patreons, active commenters, and other people I trust. We intend to federate, so if everything goes according to plan, you can use your existing Matrix username and account. I'll keep y'all posted.

The transition to Wayland is nearing completion for most desktop Linux users. The most popular desktop Linux distribution in the world, Ubuntu, has made the call and is switching its NVIDIA users over to Wayland by default in the upcoming release of Ubuntu 24.10. The proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver has been the hold-out on Ubuntu in sticking to the GNOME X.Org session out-of-the-box rather than Wayland as has been the default for the past several releases when using other GPUs/drivers. But for Ubuntu 24.10, the plan is to cross that threshold for NVIDIA now that their official driver has much better Wayland support and has matured into great shape. Particularly with the upcoming NVIDIA R555 driver reaching stable very soon, the Wayland support is in great shape with features like explicit sync ready to use. Michael Larabel This is great news for the Linux desktop, as having such a popular Linux distribution defaulting the users of the most popular graphics card brand to X.org created a major holdout. None of this obviously means that Wayland is perfect or that all use cases are covered - accessibility is an important use case where tooling simply hasn't been optimised yet for Wayland, but work is underway - and for those of us who prefer X.org for a variety of reasons, there are still countless distributions offering it as a fallback or as the default option.

It seems the success of the Framework laptops, as well the community's relentless focus on demanding repairable devices and he ensuing legislation, are starting to have an impact. It wasn't that long ago that Microsoft's Surface devices were effectively impossible to repair, but with the brand new Snapdragon X Elite and Pro devices, the company has made an impressive U-turn, according to iFixIt. Both the new Surface Laptop and Surface Pro are exceptionally easy to repair, and take cues from Framework's hardware. Microsoft's journey from the unrepairable Surface Laptop to the highly repairable devices on our teardown table should drive home the importance of designing for repair. The ability to create a repairable Surface was always there but the impetus to design for repairable was missing. I'll take that as a sign that Right to Repair advocacy and legislation has begun to bear fruit. Shahram Mokhtari The new Surface devices contain several affordances to make opening them up and repairing them easier. They take cues from Framework in that inside screws and components are clearly labeled to indicate what type they are and which parts they're holding in place, and there's a QR code that leads to online repair guides, which were available right away, instead of having to wait months to forever for those to become accessible. The components are also not layered; in other words,you don't need to remove six components just to get to the SSD, or whatever - some laptops require you to take out the entire mainboard just to get access to the fans to clean them, which is bananas. Microsoft technically doesn't have to do any of this, so it's definitely praiseworthy that their hardware department is going the extra kilometre to make this happen. The fact that even the Surface Pro, a tablet, can be reasonably opened up and repaired is especially welcome, since tablets are notoriously difficult to impossible to repair.

Microsoft has made OneDrive slightly more annoying for Windows 11 users. Quietly and without any announcement, the company changed Windows 11's initial setup so that it could turn on the automatic folder backup without asking for it. Now, those setting up a new Windows computer the way Microsoft wants them to (in other words, connected to the internet and signed into a Microsoft account) will get to their desktops with OneDrive already syncing stuff from folders like Desktop Pictures, Documents, Music, and Videos. Depending on how much is stored there, you might end up with a desktop and other folders filled to the brim with shortcuts to various stuff right after finishing a clean Windows installation. Taras Buria at NeoWin Just further confirmation that Windows 11 is not ready for the desktop.

Today, the European Commission has informed Apple of its preliminary view that its App Store rules are in breach of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), as they prevent app developers from freely steering consumers to alternative channels for offers and content. In addition, the Commission opened a new non-compliance procedure against Apple over concerns that its new contractual requirements for third-party app developers and app stores, including Apple's new Core Technology Fee", fall short of ensuring effective compliance with Apple's obligations under the DMA. European Commission press release File this in the category for entirely expected news that is the opposite of surprising. Apple has barely even been maliciously compliant with the DMA, and the European Commission is entirely right in pursuing the company for its continued violation of the law. The DMA really isn't a very complicated law, and the fact the world's most powerful and wealthiest corporation in the world can't seem to adapt its products to the privacy and competition laws here in the EU is clearly just a bunch of grandstanding and whining. In fact, I find that the European Commission is remarkably lenient and cooperative in its dealings with the major technology giants in general, and Apple in particular. They've been in talks with Apple for a long time now in preparation for the DMA, the highest-ranking EU officials regularly talked with Apple and Tim Cook, they've been given ample warnings, instructions, and additional time to make sure their products do not violate the law - as a European Union citizen, I can tell you no small to medium business or individual EU citizen gets this kind of leniency and silk gloves treatment. Everything Apple is reaping, it sowed all by itself. As I posted on Mastodon a few days ago: The EU enacted a new law a while ago that all bottle caps should remain attached to the bottle, to combat plastic trash. All the bottle and packaging makers, from massive multinationals like Coca Cola and fucking Nestle to small local producers invested in the development of new caps, changing their production lines, and shipping the new caps. Today, a month before the law goes into effect, it's basically impossible to find a bottle without an attached cap. I don't know, I thought this story was weirdly relevant right now with Apple being a whiny bitch. Imagine being worse than Coca Cola and motherfucking Nestle. Thom Holwerda Apple is in this mess and facing insane fines as high as 10% of their worldwide turnover because spoiled, rich, privileged brats like Tim Cook are not used to anyone ever saying no". Silicon Valley has shown, time and time again, from massive data collection for advertising purposes to scraping the entire web for machine learning, that they simply do not understand consent. Now that there's finally someone big, strong, and powerful enough to not take Silicon Valley's bullshit, they start throwing tamper tantrums like toddlers. Apple's public attacks on the European Union - and their instructions to their PR attack dogs to step it up a notch - are not doing them any favours, either. The EU is, contrary to just about any other government body in the Western world, ridiculously popular among its citizens, and laws that curb the power of megacorps are even more popular. I honestly have no idea who's running their PR department, because they're doing a terrible job, at least here in the EU.

I can't believe this is considered something I need to write about, but it's still a very welcome new feature that surprisingly has taken this long to become available: iOS and iPadOS 18 now allow you to format external storage devices. Last year when I began testing iPadOS 17 betas, I noticed the addition of options for renaming and erasing external drives in the Files app. I watched these options over the course of the beta cycle for iPadOS 17 to see if any further changes would come. The one I watched most closely was the Erase" option for external drives. This option uses the same glyph as the Erase option in Disc Utility on macOS. In Disc Utility on the Mac, in order to reformat an external drive, you first select the Erase" option, and then additional options appear for selecting the new format you wish to reformat the drive with. When I saw the Erase" option added in the Files app on iPadOS, I suspected that Apple might be moving towards adding these reformatting options into the Files app on iPadOS. And I'm excited to confirm that this is exactly what Apple has done in iPadOS 18! Kaleb Cadle It was soon confirmed this feature is available in iOS 18 as well. You can only format in APFS, ExFAT and FAT, so it's not exactly a cornucopia of file systems to choose from, but it's better than nothing. This won't magically fix all the issues a lot of people have with especially iPadOS when it comes to feeling constrained when using their expensive, powerful tablets with detachable keyboards, but it takes away at least one tiny reason to keep a real computer around. Baby steps, I guess.

One of my biggest concerns regarding the state of the web isn't ads (easily blocked) or machine learning (the legal system isn't going to be kind to that), but the possible demise of Firefox. I've long been worried that with the seemingly never-ending downward marketshare spiral Firefox is in - it's at like 3% now on desktop, even less on mobile - Mozilla's pretty much sole source of income will eventually pull the plug, leaving the already struggling browser effectively for dead. I've continuously been warning that the first casualty of the downward spiral would be Firefox on platforms other than Windows and macOS. So, what do we make of Mozilla buying an online advertising analytics company? Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions. Laura Chambers They way Mozilla explains buying an advertising network is that the company wants to be a trailblazer privacy-conscious online advertising, since the current brand of online advertising, which relies on massive amounts of data collection, is unsustainable. Anonym instead employs a number of measures to ensure that privacy is guaranteed, from anonymous analytics to employing differential privacy when it comes to algorithms, ensuring data can't be used to tack individual users. I have no reason to doubt Mozilla's intentions here - at least for now - but intentions change, people in charge change, and circumstances change. Having an ad network integrated into the Mozilla organisation will surely lead to temptations of weakening Firefox' privacy features and ad-blocking abilities, and just overall I find it an odd acquisition target for something like Mozilla, and antithetical to why most people use Firefox in the first place. What really doesn't help is who originally founded Anonym - two former Facebook executives, backed by a load of venture capital. Do with that little tidbit of information as you please.

Windows 3.0 Enhanced Mode introduced the ability to run MS-DOS programs in a virtual machine. This by itself was already quite an achievement, but it didn't stop there. It also let you put the MS-DOS session in a window, and run it on the screen along with your other Windows programs. This was crazy. Here's how it worked. Raymond Chen When Raymond Chen speaks, we all shut up, listen, and enjoy.

Andrew S. Tanenbaum, professor emeritus of Computer Science at VU Amsterdam, receives the ACM Software System Award for MINIX, which influenced the teaching of Operating Systems principles to multiple generations of students and contributed to the design of widely used operating systems, including Linux. Tanenbaum created MINIX 1.0 in 1987 to accompany his textbook, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. MINIX was a small microkernel-based UNIX operating system for the IBM PC, which was popular at the time. It was roughly 12,000 lines of code, and in addition to the microkernel, included a memory manager, file system and core UNIX utility programs. It became free open-source software in 2000. VU Amsterdam website Definitely a deserved award for Tanenbaum, and it's a minuscule bit of pride that VU Amsterdam happens to be my Alma mater. He also wrote an article for OSNews way back in 2006, detailing MINIX 3, which is definitely a cool notch to have on our belt.