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Have you ever wanted to do more with your phone, like setting up a Webserver or a Node.js server and running a web app directly on your phone? Or doing some coding on the go? Yes, I have too. With Termux, you can run a full Linux Desktop on your Android device, and here's how. Even without resorting to a full X desktop, Termux is oretty great. I'm not really a terminal user, so for me it's just for the novelty of it all, but it certainly seems to work very well on my Galaxy S21.

Microsoft Edge has slowly crept its way up as one of the more popular web browsers people use every day, especially onWindows 11. In 2022, it even overtook Safari as the second-most-popular browser in the world behind Chrome (although it has sincedropped back to third). Despite running on Chromium, the same engine as Chrome, it has a lot of features even Chrome lacks, like collections and shopping features that can help you save money. And, of course, there's the recent rise ofBing Chat. There's a reason why I use it every day on some of thebest laptopsI review, And even with all this popularity, it still feels like Microsoft is trying too hard with Edge. The company has gotten way too aggressive with its web browser recently, and it's very concerning to see this behavior. Microsoft really wants you to try the browser no matter what, so it puts it in so many areas of Windows 11. The concept of my operating system pushing" anything on me, as is the norm on Windows and macOS, is entirely foreign to me these days. Fedora or Linux Mint aren't advertising their services in the settings application, or pushing their browser through pop-ups or by secretly changing the default browset setting, or whatever other sleazeball tactics Microsoft and Apple are up to these days. I don't understand how people put up with that nonsense.

Windows has some pretty amazing backwards compatibility. In many cases, you can run ancient 32-bit Win32 applications just fine on your current system. However, there's one issue: If you ever tried to run a 16-bit application from the Windows 3.x days, any 64-bit Windows version (starting from Windows XP) will refuse to run the application with an error message indicating that you should ask the vendor for a compatible version. On the other hand, the modern 32-bit versions of Windows run these applications just fine. Thanks to two amazing open-source projects, you can bring back 16-bit compatibility to the 64-bit Windows era. This one's from 2022, but apparently, I never mentioned it here on OSNews.

Speaking of fun little tools: Paginator is a desktop pager for EWMH-compliant X11 window managers. Paginator provides a graphical interface displaying the current configuration of all desktops, allowing the user to change the current desktop or the current active window with the mouse. Exactly what it says on the tin, and adds some usability to the desktop pager concept to something like Window Maker.

You know neofetch, the little tool that shows you some nicely formatted system information in your terminal? Even though I find Archey 4 vastly superior, neofetch is still cool and often serves as an inspiration for people to create similar fun tools for other platforms. In this case - DOS, through dosfetch. That's really all there's to it - it's just a fun little toy for a classic operating system.

Originally conceived as an alternative firmware for the TS100, this firmware has evolved into a complex soldering iron control firmware. The firmware implements all of the standard features of a smart' soldering iron, with lots of little extras and tweaks. I highly recommend reading the installation guide fully when installing on your iron. And after install just explore the settings menu. An alternative operating system for your soldering iron. Good times.

UBPorts has released the second update for the Ubuntu Touch version based on Focal Fossa. In this new version, the System Settings application has been improved in various places, the physical camera button now works (on devices that have one, I presume), and a whole load of bugs have been fixed. Device support has also improved, with the F(x)tec Pro1 X, Fairphone 3, and Vollaphone X23 now being supported by the Focal releases.

Overall, the Authority found the commitments proposed by Google to be adequate to address the competition concerns. The group, in fact, presented a package of three commitments, two of which envisage supplementary solutions to Takeout - the service Google makes available to end users for backing up their data - to facilitate the export of data to third-party operators. The third commitment offers the possibility to start testing, prior to its official release, a new solution - currently under development - that will allow direct data portability from service to service, for third-party operators authorised by end users who so request, in relation to data provided by the users themselves or generated through their activity on Google's online search engine and YouTube platform. The Italian competition authority has effectively forced Google to improve its Google Takeout tool, making it easier for users to not only take out their data, but also to migrate it to other services without having to manually export and import. If, in the near future, wherever you may live, you discover it's become easier to move away from Google services, tank this case (and many others). This case is based on the GDPR, the Europan Union privacy law corporatists (and Facebook advocates) want you to equate to cookie popups, to scare you into thinking privacy laws - any laws, really - that target big companies are scary, ineffective, and out to hurt you. However, almost all of the cookie popups you see today are universally not in compliance with the GDPR, and are not mandated by the GDPR at all. The best way for a website or company to avoid cookie popups (even compliant ones), is to... Not share user data with third parties. Whenever you see a cookie popup (even a compliant one) don't blame the EU or the GDPR - blame the website or company for shipping your data off to some ad provider or analytics service. Stop and think about why your data is being shared with third parties. And yes, that includes us, this website, OSNews.

If you've ever heard someone refer to a TV remote as a clicker," it's because of Robert Adler's 1956 creation. The elegantStar Trek-esque gadget pioneered a durable, clicky action for controlling gadgets and a simplicity of form that has since been naively abandoned. When Zenith first started experimenting with wireless remote controls, it used beams of light that the television could receive to communicate a command, eventually debutingthe Flash-Maticin 1955. It only took a year in the market for this idea to be abandoned due to its sensitivity to full-spectrum light from the sun and lightbulbs. So Zenith's engineers tried an even simplerapproach that didn't require batteries at all, using sound instead of light. This is from well before my time - and I have no idea if devices like this even ever made it to The Netherlands, where I'm originally from - but this is such a cool solution to the technical problem they were facing. I had no idea early remote controls were sound-based.

Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles. Alice psykose" who is easily responsible for the highest number of commits per author over the past year has decided to step down from maintaining her packages. This could be a massive hit to Alpine Linux. This distribution is definitely quite popular in its niche, and it always has way better package support than you'd expect from a small distribution like this. I wish Alice all the best, though, and hope for the project itself that the workload can be spread out among other maintainers.

One of the interesting and odd thing Google does is roast itself (and others) over security issues. In this year's Year in Review of 0-days exploited in-the-wild, Google took particular aim at the Android ecosystem for being so bad at getting patches on users' devices that Android doesn't even need 0-days to be exploited in the first place. These gaps between upstream vendors and downstream manufacturers allow n-days - vulnerabilities that are publicly known - to function as 0-days because no patch is readily available to the user and their only defense is to stop using the device. While these gaps exist in most upstream/downstream relationships, they are more prevalent and longer in Android. This is a great case for attackers. Attackers can use the known n-day bug, but have it operationally function as a 0-day since it will work on all affected devices. The Android update problems are not just limited to devices not receiving updates to new major Android versions - it also extends to the monthly Android security patches that somehow need to make it to users' devices. My Galaxy S21 has been getting these updates consistently, sometimes even before Pixel devices get them, but many, many devices never get these at all, or only sporadically. The Android update problem is by far the biggest problem in the Android ecosystem, and despite Google and OEMs promising to do better every year, we're still far, far from where we should be.

31 years agoTetris Maxfor the Macintosh was born, an improved clone of Tetris, and it became an insanely popular Mac game during the 1990s. I may or may not have had some involvement in its development. Macintosh System 6 was the current OS version at the time of the game's release, but System 7 was introduced shortly afterwards. It's recently come to my attention that the final version of Tetris Max (v2.9.1) may not work when running System 6 on certain Mac hardware, even though the game was advertised as System 6 compatible. I haven't yet been able to fully verify this myself, but there's aMacintosh Garden bug reportfrom ironboy36 in 2022, and more recently a detailed bug reportcomplete with video(thank you James!). Obviously I need to fix this stuff ASAP - 31-year-old bug be damned. And I need your help! Consider this a group debugging effort. This is such a cool story. If anyone can contribute to fixing this - please help them out.

The Blue Lightning CPU is an interesting beast. There is not a whole lot of information about what the processor really is, but it can be pieced together from various scraps of information. Around 1990, IBM needed low-power 32-bit processors with good performance for its portable systems, but no one offered such CPUs yet. IBM licensed the 386SX core from Intel and turned it into the IBM 386SLC processor (SLC reportedly stood for Super Little Chip"). Later on, IBM updated the processor to support 486 instructions. It is worth noting that there were still the SLC variants available-nominally a 486, but with a 16-bit bus. The licensing conditions reportedly prevented IBM from selling the SLC processors on the free market. They were only available in IBM-built systems and always(?) as QFP soldered on a board. A very unique processor from the days Intel licensed others to make x86 chips, even allowing them to improve upon them. Those days are long gone, with only AMD and VIA remaining as companies with an x86 license.

Mobile work phones running in the cloud: safe & instantly available smartphones for your team. Complete with a phone number, accessible from your browser. I find the pricing a bit steep, but the concept in and of itself is pretty cool: it's an Android VM in the cloud running /e/OS. I'm not entirely sure what I'd use it for, but something about it I find intriguing.

For KDE Plasma 6, the KDE team intends to remove a number of old features and bits of code that haven't been touched in ages or simply don't make sense to keep around. Most of it is truly stuff few will use, but there's some interesting ones in there that might make some users a little sad. First, they intend to remove the icon view from the settings application, leaving only the sidebar view that's been the default for a while now. This one bugs me, because I only use the icon view - it's what I use on every other platform, too. The sidebar view might be more modern, but I find it difficult to find anything in there. The reasoning behind its removal is that the code has simply not been touch in a while, and features like search highlighting aren't even available in icon view. Second, they're removing Unsplash integration, which kind of sucks. The reason? AI. This one is quite sad, as no one wanted to remove it. Alas, we had to because Unsplash changed their terms of service to preclude Plasma's usage of it, as a way of fighting automated data scrapers for AI training models. With a heavy heart, we removed it. So the next time anyone asks you what AI can do for humanity, now you have a concrete answer: prevent Plasma 6 from shipping an Unsplash Picture of the Day wallpaper plugin. Thanks, AI! Third, and I love this one, they're finally fixing the weird issue where the selected Plasma style would overwrite some of the icons from the system-wide icon theme. This feature originally served the purpose of allowing monochrome icons to be set in Plasma, but this is simply no longer needed and only leads to confusion. There's a lot more that's being cleaned up and removed, so take a peek at the list to see if your favourite obscure feature is getting cut. Of course, as Nate Graham notes, if you wish for some of these features to stay - you can pick up the code and work on it.

Apple's M2 Ultra powered Mac Pro is the final step in their Apple Silicon transition. But without GPU support or meaningful expansion, is it worth nearly double the price of a comparable Mac Studio? It really seems like high-end computing is simply no longer possible whatsoever on the Mac. The Mac Pro is a joke, the memory limits on the M2 chips make them useless for high-end uses, there's not enough PCI-e lanes, the integrated GPUs are a joke compared to offerings from AMD and NVIDIA, and x86 processors at the higher end completely obliterate the M2 chips. At least ARM Macs use less power, so there's that. But then, if you have to wait longer for tasks to finish - or can't perform your tasks at all - does that really matter on your stationary, high-end workstation?

I have been readingDoom Guyby John Romero. It is an excellent book which I highly recommend. In the ninth chapter, John describes being hit by lightning upon seeing Adaptive Tile Refresh (ATS). That made me realize I never took the time to understand how this crucial piece of tech powers the Commander Keen (CK) series. During my research I was surprised to learn that ATS only powered the first CK trilogy. The second trilogy turned out to use something far better. I've played all the Commander Keen games as a child over and over again, but being quite young at the time (I'm from 1984, so do the math), it never dawned on me just how much of a technological marvel these games really were.

While most of us are used to this system and its quirks, that doesn't mean it's without problems. This is especially apparent when you do user research with people who are new to computing, including children and older people. Manually placing and sizing windows can be fiddly work, and requires close attention and precise motor control. It's also what we jokingly refer to asshit work: it is work that the user has to do, which is generated by the system itself, and has no other purpose. Most of the time you don't care about exact window sizes and positions and just want to see the windows that you need for your current task. Often that's just a single, maximized window. Sometimes it's two or three windows next to each other. It's incredibly rare that you need a dozen different overlapping windows. Yet this is what you end up with by default today, when you simply use the computer, opening apps as you need them. Messy is the default, and it's up to you to clean it up. There are a lot of interesting ideas in what GNOME is working on to address these issues, and it includes a lot of new thinking and new approaches to windowing. I have a lot of reservations, though. I do not like it when windows do something out of their own volition. A window should be where I put it, and manipulating one window should not make any changes to the shape or position of other windows, unless I'm specifically asking the window manager to do so (e.g. using the side-by-side snap feature, which I never do). There's nothing I hate more than my UI deciding what's best for me. Windows should be where I put them - until I explicitly instruct my window manager to put them somewhere else. I also do not understand this obsession with fullscreen windows. I just don't get it. Unless it's a video or a game, none of my windows ever go fullscreen, whether it be on a small 13'' laptop display, or on my 28'' 4K desktop monitor. I find fullscreen claustrophobic, and it almost never makes any sense anyway since virtually no application actually makes use of all that space. You just end up with tons of wasted space. Designing a UI with fullscreen as a corner stone absolutely baffles me. As such, some of these ideas for GNOME worry me a tiny bit, since they go against some of the core tenets I hold about my UI. I'll see how it works out when it ships, but for now, I'm cautiously worried.

In myprevious article, I described how I managed to install Windows 2000 in DOSBox-X. Even though this experiment was successful, I was not really with the results. While I got Windows 2000 working, I didn't want to stop there. The final goal for the project was to get Windows XP running instead. However, after multiple attempts I gave up, thinking that Windows XP was impossible to use. Well - I was wrong. I can't believe this works.

You can become a Patreon, make a one-time donation through Ko-Fi, and now, by popular demand, we have a third option to support OSNews: merch! We've just launched our new merch store, currently selling three items - two T-shirts and a coffee mug. First, we have a plain logo T-shirt. It's a crew (round) neck T-shirt available in Night Sky Navy' or Herb Green', with our logo printed top-left on the chest. Second, we have the same logo T-shirt in the same two colours, but with an additional quote printed below it for those of you who really long for the olden days when Eugenia ran this place. This second shirt is a limited edition, and will eventually be replaced by a shirt with a different quote, so get it while supplies last. Both T-shirts are made of 100% organic cotton for that extra soft feel. Each shirt costs $29.99 and ships worldwide. Third, there's a coffee mug with a logo and a quote for people who are kind of sick of my shit. It's a mug. It holds coffee (or tea, or gasoline). It's white. It sells for $19.99 and also ships worldwide. Since I want to be transparent about this - we're working with a third party store from Richmond, Virginia, US, who produces the shirts and mugs, since we obviously can't produce them ourselves. The pricing has been carefully set so that for each item sold, OSNews gets about $8. Do note that the items are made-to-order, so shipping takes a little longer than in-stock items from regular stores. I intend to add more items and maybe more colour options in the future (lighter colours are hard with our current logo), but we all have to start somewhere. As always, thanks for all your support - whether it be monetarily or just by being here. It means a lot.

The Android KitKat (KK) platform was first released ~10 years ago and since then, we've introduced many innovative improvements and features for Android, which are unavailable on KK. As of July 2023, the active device count on KK is below 1% as more and more users update to the latest Android versions. Therefore, we are no longer supporting KK in future releases of Google Play services. KK devices will not receive versions of thePlay Services APKbeyond 23.30.99. It's time.

Last year at Google I/O, we shared somebig changescoming to the Play Store for large screen devices. Since then, we've seen even more people using large screens for work and play, across millions of active Android devices. Apps and games play a critical role in shaping the on-device experience, so we've redesigned the Play Store to help users get the most from their tablets, Chromebooks, and foldables. Today, we're introducing four major updates to help users find high-quality large screen apps on Play: refreshed app listing pages, ranking and quality improvements, streamlined store navigation, and a split-screen search experience. I'm glad Google seems to be finally doing the things it need to do to make Android applications feel more at home on larger displays. While I believe the problem has been somewhat overblown by tech media, there's no denying iPadOS has a wider and more optimised tablet application offering, and Google's got a lot of work to do to catch up.

9to5Google reports: Last year, we reported that Google's Fuchsia team hadrenewed its effortsto support smart speakers. Long story short, the team had experimented with a single speaker, ditched that effort, then restored" it later on. More importantly, the Fuchsia team was found to be working on multiple speakers, the most notable of which was anas-yet-unreleased speaker equipped with UWB. In a newly postedcode change, the Fuchsia team formally marked all of its speaker hardware as unsupported" and altogether removed the related code. Among the hardware now unsupported by Fuchsia, you'll find the underlying SoCs for the Nest Mini, Nest Audio, Nest Wifi point, a potentially upcoming Nest speaker, and some Android Things-based smart speakers. The Fuchsia team hasn't shared a reason why its smart speaker efforts were discontinued. One issue that potentially played a role is that the Amlogic A113L chip used in Clover" - an unknown device that we suspect may be the Pixel Tablet dock -does not meetFuchsia's strict CPU requirements. Amlogic's engineersattempted to work aroundthis issue, seemingly to no avail. It also doesn't help Google fired about 20% of the 400 people working on Fuchsia. Since its discovery about six years ago, Fuchsia has been on an upward trajectory, but the massive layoffs and now the end of the smart speakers project, one has to wonder what the future of Fuchsia is going to be. Everything seemed to point at Fuchsia one day taking hold in Android and Chrome OS, but that seems farther away now than ever.

Intel has announced two new x86-64 instruction sets designedto bolster and offer more performance in AVX-based workloads withtheir hybrid architecture of performance (P) and efficiency (E) cores.The first of Intel's announcements is their latest Intel Advanced Performance Extensions, or Intel APX as it's known. It is designed to bring generational, instruction set-driven improvements to load, store and compare instructions without impacting power consumption or the overall silicon die area of the CPU cores. Intel has also published a technical paper detailing their new AVX10, enabling both Intel's performance (P) and efficiency (E) cores to support the converged AVX10/256-bitinstruction set going forward. This means that Intel's future generation of hybrid desktop, server, and workstationchips will be able to support multiple AVX vectors, including 128, 256, and 512-bit vector sizesthroughout the entirety of the cores holistically. The basic gist is that these two new instruction sets should bring more performance at lower energy usage.

There's been a lot of concern recently about theWeb Environment Integrityproposal, developed by a selection of authors from Google, and apparently being prototyped in Chromium. There's good reason for anger here (though I'm not sure yelling at people on GitHub is necessarily the best outlet). This proposal amounts to attestation on the web, limiting access to features or entire sites based on whether the client is approved by a trusted issuer. In practice, that will mean Apple, Microsoft & Google. Of course, Google isn't the first to think of this, but in fact they're not even the first to ship it. Apple already developed & deployed an extremely similar system last year, now integrated into MacOS 13, iOS 16 & Safari, called Private Access Tokens. Ten bucks this bad thing Apple is already shipping will get far less attention than a proposal by Google.

octox is a Unix-like operating system inspired by xv6-riscv. octox loosely follows the structure and style of xv6, but is implemented in pure Rust. It's a learning project, so no lofty goals of world domination here.

The enshittification" of social media started around 2016, but it reached new highs in 2023. All chronological feeds and hashtag importance have given way to narrow-AI algorithms and recommendation engines. The result was that reach has become impossible for the common user, and many art creatives lost their livelihoods. Enter the Fediverse. From Wikipedia: The fediverse is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other. This system has some advantages: It is almost impossible for governments to shut down in its entirety. User load can be shared among different servers (instances"). Different instances have different rules, so you join the one you agree best with. Generally no spam and fewer bots. A non-aggressive environment as users get along better. No telemetry or ads. Everything is chronological so there are equal chances to be seen, no weird recommendation engines here. As for the disadvantages: Some instance admins are too twitchy, and can block other servers on a dime (my main gripe with the system). Some users are too sensitive for some topics, and require you to self-censor. The system probably can't sustain more than 10-20 million active users, because not many people have the expertise to run their own instance and pay for the financial costs before donations start rolling in. If your instance goes down, you'll have to migrate and re-acquire all your followers from scratch. Your family and friends aren't on it, and probably never will be. Here are the Fediverse alternatives to the classic options: Alternative to Twitter: Mastodon The biggest federated environment with over 2 million active users. Great for toots", and small-sized blogging. Very actively developed. While there's an official app for it and a third party one called... Shitter, and FediLab, the best way to view it remains the web browser. Alternatives to Mastodon: Pleroma, Diaspora, Misskey/Calckey (they mostly interoperate anyway). Alternative to Reddit: Lemmy Since the latest Reddit shenanigans Lemmy has jumped to become the second most used fediverse service. Still under active development, but it works great and it has all major Reddit features. People there are much nicer too! Alternative to Lemmy: Kbin (they interoperate, so Kbin content is available on Lemmy, and vice versa). Apps: Jerboa, Lemming, LiftOff, Summit, Connect. Alternative to Instagram: Pixelfed A bit slow compared to the other fedi services, but it's unique in getting the original Instagram experience. As an artist, I love it. PixelDroid is the mobile app for it. Alternative to Youtube: PeerTube Well, there's TilVids, and then there's everyone else. TilVids doesn't want to federate with everyone else, but it does have the most interesting videos (particularly of Linux interest). Spectra.Video and Diode.Zone are also great options to move your videos at. Just note that bandwidth is limited in these free services, so it's best to upload in 1080p instead of 4k. There are 3-4 mobile apps for it. Alternative to Medium/Wordpress/SubStack: WriteFreely Not much to say here, a very modern editor that acts as blogging and article publishing service. Secure Messaging and IRC/Discord alternatives: Matrix Matrix is secure messaging end-to-end with Element.io being the main provider. It can also act as a community messaging server. Nostr and Jami are the newest such services on the block, but they're a little bit weird to get into, I still prefer Matrix. Alternative to TikTok: none Thank the Olympian gods! Finally, the best way to deal with some smaller instances going down and losing your account is to get 1-3 different accounts on different instances. I personally have 3 Mastodon accounts, 3 PeerTube ones, and 2 Lemmy/1 Kbin ones. I used an older $70 phone (Moto G5 Plus) where I have installed the free, and very private Murena /e/ OS. It's a totally de-googled Android OS (more so than LineageOS) that uses the iOS UI paradigm. In it, I use three app stores that only carry open source apps: F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid, and Obtainium. I avoid as much as possible from installing from the Aurora or the included App Lounge app stores that use the Google Play Store. The OS uses the open source microG service to replace the Google Play Services. So, I have almost completely left behind the normal social media and moved on to the Fediverse (apart from FB messenger with my mom, and a couple of special-interest subreddits via my laptop). You see, after leaving OSNews 15+ years ago, I became an artist. And social media was the way to get sales back then. I started with Tumblr, and later Instagram and FB. Overall, I had amassed about 340,000 followers across all social media. Sales were good for a while. Then, the enshittification started. The biggest blow was Instagram removing the chronological feed and hashtag importance, and little by little only superstar accounts were pushed by the recommendation engines. By 2020, it was near-impossible to survive online selling your art. Now, I don't have any illusions that the Fediverse can replace the golden era of social media (2010-2020). I have calculated that you need a minimum of 100 million active users for various niche business to survive under a fair social media system. And currently, the whole Fediverse only has about 14.5 million accounts, with only about 2.2 million being active. In fact, I don't expect the fediverse to ever achieve more than 10 million active users... And yet, I prefer to stay on it. It's simply a more fair system. It's not a corporation that changes its policies at a whim, or sells your data. I rather use a lesser" system in terms of reach and maintain my mental health, than battling Instagram's algorithms all day long (no, I don't want to shoot useless vertical short videos"). So, come on and join us on the fediverse. The more the merrier! Note: OSNews is very active on the Fediverse. We have the main OSNews account which posts our stories,

Google's plan is that, during a webpage transaction, the web server could require you to pass an environment attestation" test before you get any data. At this point your browser would contact a third-party" attestation server, and you would need to pass some kind of test. If you passed, you would get a signed IntegrityToken" that verifies your environment is unmodified and points to the content you wanted unlocked. You bring this back to the web server, and if the server trusts the attestation company, you get the content unlocked and finally get a response with the data you wanted. The web mercilessly mocked this idiotic proposal over the weekend, and rightfully so. This is an unadulterated, transparent attempt at locking down the web with DRM-like nonsense just to serve more targeted ads that you can't block. This must not make its way into any browser or onto any server in any way, shape, or form. The less attention we give to this drivel, the better.

Ubisoft has confirmed that it is temporarily suspending accounts it deems to be inactive", preventing players from accessing their game libraries. Players are then sent an email informing them that their suspended account will be deleted in 30 days unless they click the Cancel Account Closure" link. Modern gaming.

Ars Technica has a great article about the IBM mainframe. Mainframe computers are often seen as ancient machines-practically dinosaurs. But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today. If they're dinosaurs, they're T-Rexes, and desktops and server computers are puny mammals to be trodden underfoot. It's estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes in use today. They're used almost exclusively by the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, 45 of the world's top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers, and eight of the top 10 telecommunications companies. And most of those mainframes come from IBM. In this explainer, we'll look at the IBM mainframe computer-what it is, how it works, and why it's still going strong after over 50 years. Whenever I see anything about mainframes, I think of that one time an 18 year old decided to buy a mainframe off eBay to run at home, and did an amazing presentation about the experience.

After many years of effort, I am happy to announce that Debian riscv64 is now an official architecture! This milestone is not the end of the journey but rather the beginning of a new one: the port will need to be rebootstrapped in the official archive, build daemons will have to be reinstalled and handed over to DSA, many bugs will need to be fixed. If everything goes well, the architecture will eventually be released with Trixie. Please note that this process will be long and will span several months. An important step in any architecture's life cycle is becoming an officially supported Debian architecture.

Thanks toaseriesofcommitsby Jonathan Gray (jsg@), -current now has support for microcode (updates) forAMD(amd64 and i386) processors. It's great to see support for theAMDside gaining equivalence with that for Intel (for which support wasaddedin 2018). Good news for OpenBSD users.

A lot of the cost of a video terminal was the screen. Yet nearly everyone had a TV, and used TVs have always been fairly cheap, too. That's where Don Lancaster came in. His TV Typewriter Cookbook was the bible for homebrew video displays. The design influenced the Apple 1 computer and spawned a successful kit for a company known as Southwest Technical Products. For around $300 or so, you could have a terminal that uses your TV for output. The wild West days of home computing must've been an absolutely fascinating time to live through. I know we have quite a few old-timers in the audience here, so there's bound to be folks here who used this. Amazing

One of the coolest things to come along in the 68K Mac homebrew community is the ROM Boot Disk concept. Classic Macs have an unusually large ROM that contains a fair bit of the Mac OS, which was true even in the G3 New World Mac era (it was just on disk), so it's somewhat surprising that only one Mac officially could boot the Mac OS entirely from ROM, namely the Macintosh Classic (hold down Cmd-Option-X-O to boot from a hidden HFS volume with System 6.0.3). For many Macs that can take a ROM SIMM, you can embed a ROM volume in the Mac ROM that can even be mirrored to a RAM disk. You can even buy them pre-populated. How's that for immutability?Well, it turns out Apple themselves were the first ones to implement a flashable Mac OS ROM volume in 1994, but hardly anyone noticed - because it was only ever used publicly in a minority subset of one of the most unusual of the Macintosh-derived systems, the Apple Interactive Television Box (a/k/a AITB or the Apple Set Top Box/STB). And that's what we're going to dig into - and reprogram! - today. I had never heard of this obscure Apple product, so I was like a kid in a candy store reading this. Great weekend material.

Lately I've been spending quite a bit of time learning Rust, and as any sane person would do, after writing a few 100 lines programs I've decided to take on something a little bit more ambitious: I have written a Java Virtual Machine in Rust. With a lot of originality, I have called it rjvm. The code is available on GitHub. I want to stress that this is a toy JVM, built for learning purposes and not a serious implementation. Toy or not, this is ambitious and impressive.

The Dolphin project has broken the silence regarding their legal tussle with Nintendo and Valve, giving a far more detailed elaboration of what, exactly happened. First things first - Nintendodid notsend Valve or Dolphin a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) section 512(c) notice (commonly known as a DMCA Takedown Notice) against our Steam page. Nintendo has not taken any legal action against Dolphin Emulator or Valve. What actually happened was that Valve's legal department contacted Nintendo to inquire about the announced release of Dolphin Emulator on Steam. In reply to this, a lawyer representing Nintendo of America requested Valve prevent Dolphin from releasing on the Steam store, citing the DMCA as justification. Valve then forwarded us the statement from Nintendo's lawyers, and told us that we had to come to an agreementwith Nintendoin order to release on Steam. Considering the strong legal wording at the start of the document and the citation of DMCA law, we took the letter very seriously. We wanted to take some time and formulate a response, however after being flooded with questions, we wrote afairly frantic statementon the situation as we understood it at the time, which turned out to only fuel the fires of speculation. So, after a long stay of silence, we have a difficult announcement to make. We are abandoning our efforts to release Dolphin on Steam. Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for software to appear on it. But given Nintendo's long-held stance on emulation, we find Valve's requirement for us to getapprovalfrom Nintendo for a Steam release to be impossible. Unfortunately, that's that. The post also goes into greater detail about the Wii Common Key that's been part of Dolphin's codebase for 15 years. This key was originally extracted from the GameCube hardware itself, and a lot of people online claimed that Dolphin should just remove this key and all would be well. After consulting with their lawyers, Dolphin has come to the conclusion that including the key poses no legal risk for the project, and even if it somehow did, the various other parts of the Dolphin codebase that make emulation of original games possible would pose a much bigger legal threat anyway. So, the team will keep on including the key, and the only outcome here is that Dolphin will not be available on Steam.

Seven companies-including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic, and Inflection-have committed to developing tech to clearly watermark AI-generated content. That will help make it safer to share AI-generated text, video, audio, and images without misleading others about the authenticity of that content, the Biden administration hopes. It's currently unclear how the watermark will work, but it will likely be embedded in the content so that users can trace its origins to the AI tools used to generate it. And how easy will it be for bad actors to just remove the watermark? If we live in a world where these tools can create new content out of stealing everybody else's content, what's stopping anyone from developing a tool to remove these watermarks? This feels more like lip service than a real solution.

One of my old home automation boards running ebusd is still using Raspberry PI 2 B SoC. FreeBSD is still perfectly supporting this hardware, however, due to being a Tier-2 platform, binary updates freebsd-update are not supported. Of course, one can download the new image, but this will mean re-installing and reconfiguring all the software, which is time-consuming and painful. Also, the traditional build from source" way will probably take forever on this tiny board and also could potentially destroy the SD card. So the obvious alternative was cross-compilation. If you're in this very specific niche - you're very happy this guide exists.

I've been going through my collection of PDAs over the last few weeks for, among other OSNews things, my Pixelfed account, and while playing around with various old applications, I came across the Google Maps application for Palm OS. As it turns out - this official Google application, last updated in 2008, still fully and completely works today, in 2023! I shot a quick video using the application, and uploaded it to the new (and not fully set-up yet, so forgive the lack of avatars, descriptions, banner images, and so on - it's late in my time zone) OSNews PeerTube account, embedded below for your convenience. Navigation still works. You can pan around in both map and satellite view. And, as the video shows, you can zoom in quite far and get some incredible detail on that old Palm TX display (you can zoom in further). That's some impressive API backwards compatibility.

About a small town's worth of people pointed me to this on Mastodon, so here it goes: In an IMAX theater, the m130's job is to control the quick turn reel unit, or QTRU for short. (For many years, it appears, a non-emulated m130 sat holstered in most theaters.) The QTRU's job is to control the platters, which are those large horizontal shelves where all of a film's many reels are stitched together, stored, and then quickly spun out to and from the projector. TheIMAX 1570 projectormoves film at a little under six feet per second, so it's all happening really fast. The m130 is apparently crucial to keeping the thing humming - PALM PILOT MUST BE ON ALL THE TIME," reads a notice above an image of a different m130 that has since been passed around the internet -but doesn't often need to be used. I've never had to interact with the Palm Pilot," says one person familiar with the technology. It's really just a status screen." Its job is to keep the QTRU moving at a consistent speed and to help keep the film's video in sync with its audio. This doesn't surprise me one bit. In environments like these, if something works, and has been working reliably for decades, there's really no reason to change any of it. This application is probably quite simple, but since there's only a very small number of theaters out there even capable of showing 70mm film, and it doesn't look like it's a format on the up and up.

USA readers may wonder why I was waiting for the release of a game already published. While Street Fighter II made it to the Super Famicom on June 10, 1992 in Japan and July 15, 1992 in North America, France had to wait until December 17, 1992 to get a PAL version. As I waited, I saw ads in French magazines offering imported cartridges of my Holy Graal. To make them work on a European Super Nintendo, one had to buy an adapter. The combo cost almost as much as the console (595F + 199F vs 1290F). Needless to say I couldn't afford it. But I always wondered how Nintendo seemingly controlled the regions and how tinkerers had managed to circumvent that protection. A detailed look at how the 10NES sysyem worked.

Apple says it will remove services such as FaceTime and iMessage from the UK rather than weaken security if new proposals are made law and acted upon. The government is seeking to update the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) 2016. It wants messaging services to clear security features with the Home Office before releasing them to customers. The act lets the Home Office demand security features are disabled, without telling the public. Under the update, this would have to be immediate. I wonder if Apple would actually follow through with something like this, or if they're only looking for a token concession so they can claim they're still in the clear and do nothing. Interesting, though, that when the Chinese government comes calling, Tim Cook drops his privacy is a fundamental human right" shtick real quick, but when the government of a western country comes calling, it's a lot of rah-rah. A spine is clearly not very expensive.

A few weeks ago I embarked on a somewhat crazy side project: Make the Open Watcom debugger work on OS/2 1.0. This project was not entirely successful, but I learned a couple of things along the way. I love these stories.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the techniques described in Let's Go Whaling bear comparison to some of those thatbookmakers and casinos have long deployed, capitalising on deep understanding of psychology. The big difference, of course, is that the gamer can never win money, only prestige or progress in a virtual game. The very uncomfortable truth for Apple and Google: much - 70-75% - of App Store and Play Store revenue comes from exploitative casino games, mostly expertly designed to target the most vulnerable among us, like gambling addicts, children, people with mental issues like depression, and so on. It's seedy, disgusting, predatory, and should be deeply, deeply illegal. Left or right, can't we all agree we should ban these practices?

Ars Technica: Antitrust enforcers released adraft update outlining new rulestoday thatofficials saywill make it easier to crack down on mergers and acquisitions that could substantially lessen competition in the US. Now the public has 60 days to review the draft guidelines andsubmit commentsto the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) before the agencies' September 18 deadline.A fierce debate has already started between those in support and those who oppose the draft guidelines. Any corporation should be serving the democratically elected government of a country - not the other way around. If a merger or acquisition is deemed harmful to the competitive landscape, and thus to consumers, a government should be able to just stop it. The same applies to corporations who grow too large, too rich, too powerful - if a company's actions start to dictate significant parts of the market or even economy, they are a threat to the stability and functioning of the society it's claiming to be a part of, and as such, they should be able to be split up or their actions otherwise remedied to protect society. In other words, any steps the Us FTC and DOJ take to take control over runaway corporations are positive.

Starting in Windows 11, version 22H2,Enhanced Phishing Protection in Microsoft Defender SmartScreenhelps protect Microsoft school or work passwords against phishing and unsafe usage on sites and apps. We are trying out a change starting with this build where users who have enabled warning options for Windows Security under App & browser control > Reputation-based protection > Phishing protection will see a UI warning on unsafe password copy and paste, just as they currently see when they type in their password. This actually seems like a cool and useful feature. The basic gist - which is a bit unclear from the short blurb above - seems to be that if, e.g., a child using a school account copies and pastes that school account password to use somewhere else, this feature will warn them about it. Usefulness of warning dialogs aside, I can see this being quite useful in large organisations.

Turns out Intel's NUC line is not going to die after all. Today, Intel announced it has agreed to a term sheet with ASUS, a global technology solution provider, for an agreement to manufacture, sell and support the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) 10th to 13th generations systems product line, and to develop future NUC systems designs. If you're into Intel NUCs, Asus is the way to go now.

The contractors are the invisible backend of the generative AI boom that's hyped to change everything. Chatbots like Bard use computer intelligence to respond almost instantly to a range of queries spanning all of human knowledge and creativity. But to improve those responses so they can be reliably delivered again and again, tech companies rely on actual people who review the answers, provide feedback on mistakes and weed out any inklings of bias. It's an increasingly thankless job. Six current Google contract workers said that as the company entered a AI arms race with rival OpenAI over the past year, the size of their workload and complexity of their tasks increased. Without specific expertise, they were trusted to assess answers in subjects ranging from medication doses to state laws. Documents shared with Bloomberg show convoluted instructions that workers must apply to tasks with deadlines for auditing answers that can be as short as three minutes. That's the reality of artificial intelligence" - the same reality it always seems to be in Silicon Valley: thousands and thousands of exploited workers behind the scenes running around like ants keeping the illusion of futurism alive for meager pay.

Together with the open source software community, GitHub has beenworking to supportEU policymakers to craft the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). The CRA seeks to improve the cybersecurity of digital products (including the 96 percent that contain open source) in the EU by imposing strict requirements for vendors supplying products in the single market, backed by fines of up to 15 million or 2.5% of global revenue. This goal is welcome: security is too often an afterthought when shipping a product. But as written it threatens open source without bolstering resilience. Even though the CRA, as part of a long-standing line of EU open' strategy, has an exemption for open source software developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity, challenges in defining the scopehave beenthe focusof considerablecommunity activity. Three serious problems remain with the Parliament text set for the industry (ITRE') committee vote on July 19. These three problems are set out below. Absent dissent, this may become the final position without further deliberation or a full Parliament plenary vote. We encourage you toshare your thoughts with your elected officials today. The three problems are substantial for open source projects. First, if an open source project receives donations and/or has corporate developers working on it, it would be regulated by the CRA and thus face a huge amount of new administrative rules and regulations to follow that would no doubt be far too big a burden for especially smaller projects or individual developers. On top of that, the CRA, as it currently stands, also intends to mess with the disclosure process for vulnerabilities in a way that doesn't seem to actually help. These three problems are big, and could have far-reaching consequences for open source.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, one of the biggest names in online advertising, held some sort of corporate event or whatever in January of this year, and the IAB CEO, David Cohen, held a speech there to rally the troops. Apparently, those of us who are fighting back against the online advertising industry? We're extremists". Extremists are winning the battle for hearts and minds in Washington D.C. and beyond.We cannot let that happen.These extremists are political opportunists who've made it their mission to cripple the advertising industry and eliminate it from the American economy and culture. This guy, who uses double spaces after a period and hence is already on my shitlist, just gave us an amazing creed.