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Bradford Morgan White has published an excellent retrospective of QNX, the realtime microkernel operating system focused on embedded use cases. The final paragraph made me sad, though. QNX is a fascinating operating system. It was extremely well designed from the start, and while it has been rewritten, the core ideas that allowed it survive for 45 years persist to this day. While I am sad that Photon was deprecated, the reasoning is sound. Most vendors using QNX either do not require a GUI, or they implement their own. For example, while Boston Dynamics uses QNX in their robots, they don't really need Photon, and neither do SpaceX's Falcon rockets. While cars certainly have displays, most vehicle makers desire their screen interfaces to have a unique look and feel. Of course, just stating these use cases of robots, rockets, and cars speaks to the incredible reliability and versatility of QNX. Better operating systems are possible, and QNX proves it. Bradford Morgan White at Abort Retry Fail Way back in 2004, before I even joined OSNews properly, I wrote about QNX as a desktop operating system, because back then I went through a short stint where I used QNX and its amazing Photon MicroGUI as my primary desktop. Back then, there was a short-lived but very enthusiastic community using QNX on desktops, sharing tips and findings, supported by one or two QNX employees who tried their best to support this fledgling community in the face of corporate indifference. Eventually, these QNX employees left the company, and QNX started making it clearer than ever that they were not, in any way, interested in people using QNX on desktops, and in all honesty, they were most likely correct. However, I still think we had something special there, and had QNX' management decided to help us out, it could've grown into something more sustainable. An open source QNX and Photon could've had an impact. Using QNX on the desktop back then was much easier than you might imagine, with graphical package managers, capable browsers and email clients, a massive pile of open source packages, pretty great performance, and little to no need to ever leave the GUI and use a CLI. If your hardware was properly supported, you could have a great experience. One of the very small what-ifs" form the early 2000s.

Can these months please stop passing us by this quickly? It seems we're getting a monthly Redox update every other week now, and that's not right. Anyway, what have the people behind this Rust-based operating system been up to this past month? One of the biggest changes this month is that Redox is now multithreaded by default, at least on x86 machines. Unsurprisingly, this can enable some serious performance gains. Also contributing to performance improvements this month is inode data inliningfor small files, and the installation is now a lot faster too. LZ4 compression has been added to Redox, saving storage space and improving performance. As far as ports go, there's a ton of new and improved ports, like OpenSSH, Nginx, PHP, Neovim, OpenSSL 3.x, and more. On top of that, there's a long list of low-level kernel improvements, driver changes, and relibc improvements, changes to the main website, and so on.

Every single vibe coding is the future," the power of AI," and AI job loss" story written perpetuates a myth that will only lead to more regular people getting hurt when the bubble bursts. Every article written about OpenAI or NVIDIA or Oracle that doesn't explicitly state that the money doesn't exist, that the revenues are impossible, that one of the companies involvedburns billions of dollars and has no path to profitability,is an act of irresponsible make believe and mythos. Edward Zitron The numbers are clear. People aren't paying for AI", and those that do, are using up way more resources than they're actually paying for. The profits required to make all of this work just aren't realistic in any way, shape, or form. The money being pumped around doesn't even exist. It's a scam of such utterly massive proportions, it's easier for many of us to just assume it can't possibly be one. Too big to fail? Too many promises to be a scam. It's going to be a bloodbath, but as usual when the finance and tech bros scam entire sectors, it's us normal folk who will be left to foot the bill. Let's blame immigrants some more while we implement harsh austerity measures to bail out the billionaire class. Again.

Your lovely host, late last night: Google claims they won't be sharing developer information with governments, but we all knowthat's a load of bullshit, made all the more relevant afterwhatever the fuck this was. If you want to oppose thegenocidein Gaza or warn people of ICE raids, and want to create an Android application to coordinate such efforts, you probably should not, and stick to more anonymous organising tools. Thom Holwerda Let's check in with how that other walled garden Google is trying to emulate is doing. Apple hasremoved ICEBlock, an app that allowed users to monitor and report the location of immigration enforcement officers, from the App Store. We created theApp Storeto be a safe and trusted place to discover apps," Apple said in a statement to Business Insider. Based on information we've received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock, we have removed it and similar apps from the App Store." Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert, Peter Kafka, and Kwan Wei Kevin Tan for Business Insider Oh. Apple and Google are but mere extensions of the state apparatus. Think twice about what device you bring with you the next time you wish to protest your government's actions.

Google has been on a bit of a marketing blitz to try and counteract some of the negative feedback following its new developer verification requirement for Android applications, and while they're using a lot of words, none of them seem to address the core concerns. It basically comes down to that they just don't care about the consequences this new requirement has for projects like F-Droid, nor are they really bothered by any of the legitimate privacy concerns this whole thing raises. If this new requirement is implemented in its current form, F-Droid will simply not be able to continue to exist in its current form. F-Droid builds the applications in its repository themselves and signs them, and developer verification does not fit into that picture at all. F-Droid works this way to ensure its applications are built from the publicly available sources, so developers can't sneak anything nefarious into any binaries they would otherwise be submitting themselves. The privacy angle doesn't seem to bother Google much, either, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. With this new requirement, Android application developers can simply no longer be anonymous, which has a variety of side-effects, not least of which is that anyone developing applications for, say, dissidents, can now no longer be anonymous. Google claims they won't be sharing developer information with governments, but we all know that's a load of bullshit, made all the more relevant after whatever the fuck this was. If you want to oppose the genocide in Gaza or warn people of ICE raids, and want to create an Android application to coordinate such efforts, you probably should not, and stick to more anonymous organising tools. Students and hobbyists are getting the short end of the stick, too, as Google's promised program specifically for these two groups is incredibly limited. Yes, it waves the $25 fee, but that's about the only positive here: Developers who register with Google as a student or hobbyist will face severe app distribution restrictions, namely a limit on the number of devices that can install their apps. To enforce this, any user wanting to install software from these developers must first retrieve a unique identifier from their device. The developer then has to input this identifier into the Android Developer Console to authorize that specific device for installation. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority Google does waive the requirement for developer certification for one particular type of user, and in doing so, highlights the only group of users Google truly cares about: enterprise users. Any application installed by an enterprise on managed devices will not need to have its developer certified. Google states that in this particular use case, the enterprise's IT department is responsible for any security issues that may arise. Isn't it funny how the only group of users who won't have to deal with this nonsense are companies who pay Google tons of money for their enterprise tools? The only way we're going to get out of this is if any governments step up and put a stop to this. We can safely assume the United States' government won't be on our side - they're too busy with their recurring idiotic song-and-dance anyway - so our only hope is the European Commission stepping in, but I'm not holding my breath. After all, Apple's rules and regulations regarding installing applications outside of the App Store in the EU are not that different from what Google is going to do. While the EU is not happy with the details of Apple's rules, their general gist seems to be okay with them. I'm afraid governments won't be stepping in to stop this one.

And here we have yet another case of the EU's consumer protection legislation working in our favour. Dutch privacy and consumer rights organisation Bits of Freedom sued Facebook over the company's little trick of disregarding a user's settings under a variety of circumstances, such as when a user opts for a chronological, non-profiled timeline, only to have Facebook reset itself to the profiled timeline upon a restart. The judge states that Meta is indeed acting in violation of the law. He says that a nonpersistent choice option for a recommendation system runs counter to the purpose of the DSA, which is to give users genuine autonomy, freedom of choice, and control over how information is presented to them." The judge also concludes that the way Meta has designed its platforms constitutes a significant disruption of the autonomy of Facebook and Instagram users." The judge orders Meta to adjust its apps so that the user's choice is preserved, even when the user navigates to another section or restarts the app. Bits of Freedom press release This is good news, of course, but I really wish we would take this a step further: a complete ban on targeted advertising and timeline manipulation based on harvested user data. I just don't believe these business models and ragebait machines offer anything of value to society, and in fact, do far more harm than good. I am convinced that our world would be a better place without these business models. We restrict of outright ban dangerous substances or activities all the time. This should be among them.

With Google closing up Android at a rapid pace, there's some renewed interest in mobile platforms that aren't either iOS or Android, and one of those is Ubuntu Touch. It's been steadily improving over the years under the stewardship of the UBports Foundation, and today they released Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0. Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0 is the first release of Ubuntu Touch which is based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, a major upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04. This might not be as big compared to our last upgrade from Ubuntu 16.04 to 20.04, but this still brings newer software stack to Ubuntu Touch (such as Qt 5.15). Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0 release announcement In this release, aside from the upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, there's now also a light mode for the shell, including experimental support for switching themes on the fly. Applications already supported a light theme since the previous releases, so adding support for it in the main shell is a welcome improvement. We've also got experimental support for encrypting personal data, which needs to be enabled per device, which I think indicates not all devices support it. On top of that, there's some changes to the phone application, and a slew of smaller fixes and improvements as well. The list of supported devices has grown as well, with the Fairphone 5 as the newcomer this release. The list is still relatively small, but to be fair to the project, it includes a number of popular devices, as well as a few that are still readily available. If you want to opt for running Ubuntu Touch as your smartphone platform, there's definitely plenty of devices to choose from.

Microsoft is reorganising the Windows teams. Again. For those unaware, the Windows organization has essentially been split in two since 2018. Teams that work on the core of Windows were moved under Azure, and the rest of the Windows team (those that focused on top level features and user experiences) remained under the Windows org. That is finally changing, with Davuluri saying that the Windows client and server teams are now going to operate under the same roof once again.This change unifies Windows engineering work under a single organization ... Moving the teams working on Windows client and server together into one organization brings focus to delivering against our priorities." Zac Bowden at Windows Central I mean, it's obviously far too simplistic to attribute Windows' many user-facing problems and failures on something as simple as this particular organisational split, but it sure does feel like it could be a contributing factor. It seems like the core of Windows is mostly fine and working pretty well, while the user experience is the ares that has suffered greatly in recent years, pressured as the Windows team seems to have been to add advertising, monetisation, tons of sometimes dangerous dark patterns, and more. I hope that bringing these two teams back together will eventually lead to an overall improvement of the Windows user experience, and not a deterioration of the core of the platform. In other words, that the core team lifts up the user experience team, instead of the user experience team dragging the core team down. A Windows that takes its users seriously and respects them could be a fine operating system to use, but it reorganisations like this take a long time to have any measurable effect. Of course, it could also just have no effect at all, or perhaps the rot has simply spread too far and wide. In a few years, depressing as it may seem, Windows 11 might be regarded as a highlight.

This article is intended to be acomprehensiveguide to writing your first GNOME app in Lua using LuaGObject. The article assumes that you already understand Lua and want to get started with building beautiful native applications for GNOME. I also assume you know how to use a command line to install and compile software. Having some knowledge of the C programming language, as well as the Make, Gettext, and Flatpak software will be helpful, but shouldn't be required to understand this guide. Victoria Lacroix Exactly what is says on the tin.

Have you ever heard of the Encore 91 computer system, developed and built by Encore Computer Corporation? I stumbled upon the name of this system on the website for the Macintosh like virtual window manager (MLVWM), an old X11 window manager designed to copy some of the look and feel of the classic Mac OS, and wanted to know more about it. An old website from what appears to be a reseller of the Encore 91 has a detailed description and sales pitch of the machine still online, and it's a great read. The hardware architecture of the Encore 91 series is based onthe Motorola high-performance 88100 25MHz RISC processor.A basic system is a highly integrated fully symmetrical singleboard multiprocessor. The single board includes two or four88100 processors with supporting cache memory, 16 megabytes of shared main memory, two synchronous SCSI ports,an Ethernet port, 4 asynchronous ports, real-time clocks,timers, interrupts and a VME-64 bus interface. The VME-64 bus provides full compatibility with VME plus enhancements for greater throughput. Shared main memory may be expanded to 272 megabytes (mb) by adding up to four expansion cards. The expansion memory boards have the same high-speed access characteristics as local memory. Encore computing 91 system The Encore 91 ran a combination of AT&T's system V.3.2 UNIX and Encore's POSIX-compliant MicroMPX real-time kernel, and would be followed by machines with more powerful processors in the 88xxx series, as well as machines based on the Alpha architecture. The company also created and sold its own modified RISC architecture, RSX, for which there are still some details available online. Bits and bobs of the company were spun off and sold off, and I don't think much of the original company is still around today. Regardless, it's an interesting system with an interesting history, but we'll most likely never get to see oe in action - unless it turns up in some weird corner of the United States where the rare working examples of hardware like this invariably tends to end up.

The consequences of Google requiring developer certification to install Android applications, even outside of Google's own Play Store, are starting to reverberate. F-Droid, probably the single most popular non-Google application repository for Android, has made it very clear that Google's upcoming requirement is most likely going to mean the end of F-Droid. If it were to be put into effect, the developer registration decree will end the F-Droid project and other free/open-source app distribution sources as we know them today, and the world will be deprived of the safety and security of the catalog of thousands of apps that can be trusted and verified by any and all. F-Droid's myriad users will be left adrift, with no means to install - or even update their existing installed - applications. F-Droid's blog post A potential loss of F-Droid would be a huge blow to anyone trying to run Android without Google's applications and frameworks installed on their device. It's pretty clear that Google is doing whatever it can to utterly destroy the Android Open Source Project, something I've been arguing is what the rumours about Google killing AOSP really mean. Why kill AOSP, when you can just make it utterly unusable and completely barren? Sadly, there isn't much F-Droid can do. They're proposing regulators the world over look at Google's plans, and hopefully come to the conclusion that they're anti-competitive. Specifically the European Union and the tools provided by the Digital Markets Act could prove useful here, but in the end, only if the will exists to use them can these tools be used in the first place. It's dark times for the smartphone world right now, especially if you care about consumer rights and open source. iOS has always been deeply anti-consumer, and while the European Union has managed to soften some of the rough edges, nothing much has changed there. Android, on the other hand, had a thriving open source, Google-free community, but decision by decision, Google is beating it into submission and killing it off. The Android of yesteryear doesn't exist anymore, and it's making people who used to work on Android back during the good old times extremely sad. Jean-Baptiste Queru, husband of OSNews' amazing and legendary previous managing editor Eugenia Loli-Queru, worded it like this a few days ago: All the tidbits of news about Android make me sad. I used to be part of the Android team. When I worked there, making the application ecosystem as open as the web was a goal. Releasing the Android source code as soon as something hit end-user devices was a goal. Being able to run your own build on actual consumer hardware was a goal. For a while after I left, there continued to be some momentum behind what I had pushed for. But, now, 12 years later, this seems to have all died. I am sad... Jean-Baptiste Queru And so am I. Like any operating system, Android is far from perfect, but it was remarkable just how open it used to be. I guess good things just don't survive once unbridled capitalism hits.

Unite is an operating system in whicheverythingis a process, including the things that you normally would expect to be part of the kernel. The hard disk driver is a user process, so is the file system running on top of it. The namespace manager is a user process. The whole thing (in theory, see below) supports network transparency from the ground up, you can use resources of other nodes in the network just as easily as you can use local resources, just prefix them with the node ID. In the late 80's, early 90's I had a lot of time on my hands. While living in the Netherlands I'd run into the QNX operating system that was sold locally through a distributor. The distributors brother had need of a 386 version of that OS but Quantum Software, the producers of QNX didn't want to release a 386 version. So I decided to write my own. Jacques Mattheij What a great story. Mattheij hasn't done anthing or even looked at the code for this operating system he created in decades, but recently got the urge to fix it up and publish it online for all of us to see. Of course, resurrecting something this old and long untouched required some magic, and there's still a few things which he simply just can't get to work properly. I like how the included copy of vi is broken and adds random bits of garbage to files, and things like the mouse driver don't work because it requires a COM port and the COM ports don't seem to work in an emulated environment. Unite is modeled after QNX, so it uses a microkernel. It uses a stripped-down variant of the MINIX file system, only has one user but that user can run multiple sessions, and there's a basic graphics mode with some goodies. Sadly, the graphics mode is problematic an requires some work to get going, and because you'll need the COM ports to work to use it properly it's a bit useless anyway at the moment. Regardless, it's cool to see people going back to their old work and fixing it up to publish the code online.

Some time ago, I described Windows 3.0's WinHelp as a program for browsing online help files." But Windows 3.0 predated the Internet, and these help files were available even if the computer was not connected to any other network. How can it be online"? Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing I doubt this will be a conceptual problem for many people reading OSNews, but I can definitely understand especially younger people finding this a curious way of looking at the word online". You'll see the concept of online help" in quite a few systems from the '90s (and possibly earlier), so if you're into retrocomputing you might've run into it as well.

What if you have a PC-98 machine, and you want to run Linux on it, as you do? I mean, CP/M, OS/2, or Windows (2000 and older) might not cut it for you, after all. Well, it turns out that yes, you can run Linux on PC-98 hardware, and thanks to a bunch of work by Nina Kalinina - yes, the same person from a few days ago - there's now more information gathered in a single place to get you started. Plamo Linux is one of the few Linux distributions to support PC-98 series. Plamo 3.x is the latest distribution that can be installed on PC-9801 and PC-9821 directly. Unfortunately, it is quite old, and is missing lots of useful stuff. This repo is to share a-ha moments and binaries for Plamo on PC-98. Plamo98 goodies The repository details upgrading" - it's a bit more involved than plain upgrading, but it's not hard - Plamo Linux from 3.x to 4, which gives you access to a bunch of things you might want, like GCC 3.3 over 2.95, KDE 3.x, Python 2.3, and more. There's also custom BusyBox config files, a newer version of make, and a few other goodies and tools you might want to have. Once it's all set and done, you can Linux like it's 2003 on your PC-98. The number of people to whom this is relevant must be extraorinarily small, but at some point, someone is going to want to do this, only to find this repository of existing work. We've all been there.

I've been working on developing an operating system for the TI-99 for the last 18 months or so. I didn't intend this-my original plan was to develop enough of the standard C libraries to help with writing cartridge-based and EA5 programs. But that trek led me quickly towards developing an OS. As Unix is by far my preferred OS, this OS is an approximation. Developing an OS within the resources available, particularly the RAM, has been challenging, but also surprisingly doable. UNIX99 forum announcement post We're looking at a quite capable UNIX for the TI-99, with support for itssound, speech, sprites, and legacy 9918A display modes, GPU-accelerated scrolling, stdio (for text and binary files) and stdin/out/err support, a shell (of course), multiple user support, cooperative tasks support, and a ton more. And remember - all of this is running on a machine with a 16-bit processor running at 16MHz and a mere 16KB of RAM. Absolutely wild.

A few months ago, Microsoft finally blinked and provided a way for Windows 10 users to gain free" access to the Windows 10 Extended Security Update program. For regular users to gain access to this program, their options are to either pay around $30, pay 1000 Microsoft points, or to sign up for the Windows Backup application to synchronise their settings to Microsoft's computers (the cloud"). In other words, in order to get free" access to extended security updates for Windows 10 after the 25 October end-of-support deadline, you have to start using OneDrive, and will have to start paying for additional storage since the base 5GB of OneDrive storage won't be enough for backups. And we all know OneDrive is hell. Thanks to the European Union's Digital Markets Act, though, Microsoft has dropped the OneDrive requirement for users within the European Economic Area (the EU plus Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein). Citing the DMA, consumer rights organisations in the EU complained that Microsoft's OneDrive requirement was in breach of EU law, and Microsoft has now given in. Of course, dropping the OneDrive requirement only applies to consumers in the EU/EEA; users in places with much weaker consumer protection legislation, like the United States, will not benefit from this move. Consumer rights organisations are lauding Microsoft's move, but they're not entirely satisfied just yet. The main point of contention is that the access to the Extended Security Update program is only valid for one year, which they consider too short. In a letter, Euroconsumers, one of the consumer rights organisations, details this issue. At the same time, several points from our original letter remain relevant. The ESU program is limited to one year, leaving devices that remain fully functional exposed to risk after October 13, 2026. Such a short-term measure falls short of what consumers can reasonably expect for a product that remains widely used and does not align with the spirit of the Digital Content Directive (DCD), nor the EU's broader sustainable goals. Unlike previous operating system upgrades, which did not typically require new hardware, the move to Windows 11 does. This creates a huge additional burden for consumers, with some estimates suggesting that over 850 million active devices still rely on million Windows 10 and cannot be upgraded due to hardware requirements. By contrast, upgrades from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10 did not carry such limitations. Eurconsumer's letter According to the group, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that Microsoft is much more aggressive in phasing out support for Windows 10 than for previous versions of Windows. Windows 10 is being taken behind the shed four years after the launch of Windows 11, while Windows XP and Windows 7 enjoyed 7-8 years. With how many people are still using Windows 10, often with no way to upgrade but buying new hardware, it's odd that Microsoft is trying to kill it so quickly. In any event, we can chalk this up as another win for consumers in the European Union, with the Digital Markets Act once again creating better outcomes than in other regions of the world.

The contributions of Sun Microsystems to the world of computing are legion - definitely more than its ignominious absorption into Oracle implies - and one of those is NFS, the Network File system. This month, NFS more or less turned 40 years old, and in honour of this milestone, Russel Berg, Russ Cox, Steve Kleiman, Bob Lyon, Tom Lyon, Joseph Moran, Brian Pawlowski, David Rosenthal, Kate Stout, and Geoff Arnold created a website to honour NFS. This website gathers material related to the Sun Microsystems Network File System, a project that began in 1983 and remains a fundamental technology for today's distributed computer systems. The core of the collection is design documents, white papers, engineering specifications, conference and journal papers, and standards material. However it also covers marketing materials, trade press, advertising, books, swag", and personal ephemera. We're always looking for new contributions. NFS at 40 There's so many amazing documents here, such as the collection of predecessors of NFS that served as inspiration for NFS, like the Cambridge File Server or the Xerox Alto's Interim File System, but also tons of fun marketing material for things like NFS server accelerators and nerdy NFS buttons. Even if you're not specifically interested in the history of NFS, there's great joy in browsing these old documents and photos.

If you download YouTube videos, there's a real chance you're using yt-dlp, the long-running and widely-used command-line program for downloading YouTube videos. Even if you're not using it directly, many other tools for downloading YouTube videos are built on top of yt-dlp, and even some media players which offer YouTube playback use it in the background. Now, yt-dlp has always had a built-in basic JavaScript interpreter", but due to changes at YouTube, yt-dlp will soon require a proper JavaScript runtime in order to function. Up until now, yt-dlp has been able to use itsbuilt-in JavaScript interpreter"to solve the JavaScript challenges that are required for YouTube downloads. But due torecent changes on YouTube's end, the built-in JS interpreter will soon be insufficient for this purpose. The changes are so drastic thatyt-dlp will need to leverage a proper JavaScript runtime in order to solve the JS challenges. Yt-dlp's announcement on GitHub The yt-dlp team suggests using Deno, but compatibility with some alternatives has been added as well. The issue is that the interpreter" yt-dlp already includes consists of a massive set of very complex regex patterns to solve JS challenges, and those are difficult to maintain and no longer sufficient, so a real runtime is necessary for YouTube downloads. Deno is advised because it's entirely self-contained and sandboxed, and has no network or filesystem access of any kind. Deno also happens to be a single, portable executable. As time progresses, it seems yt-dlp is slowly growing into a web browser just to be able to download YouTube videos. I wonder what kind of barriers YouTube will throw up next, and what possible solutions from yt-dlp might look like.

If you're still running old versions of Windows from Windows 2000 and up, either for restrocomputing purposes or because you need to keep an old piece of software running, you've most likely heard of Legacy Update. This tool allows you to keep Windows Update running on Windows versions no longer supported by the service, and has basically become a must-have for anyone still playing around with older Windows versions. The project released a fairly major update today. Legacy Update 1.12 features a significant rewrite of our ActiveX control, and a handful of other bug fixes. The rewrite allows us to more easily work on the project, and ensures we can continue providing stable releases for the foreseeable future, despite Microsoft recently breaking the Windows XP-compatible compiler included with Visual Studio 2022. Legacy Update 1.12 release notes The project switched sway from compiling with Visual C++ 2008 (and 2010, and 2017, and 2022...), which Microsoft recently broke, and now uses an open-source MinGW/GCC toolchain. This has cut the size of the binary in half, which is impressive considering it was already smaller than 1MB. This new version also adds a three-minute timer before performing any required restarts, and speeds up the installation of the slowest type of updates (.NET Frameworks) considerably.

It's no secret that Google wants to bring Android to laptops and desktops, and is even sacrificing Chrome OS to get there. It seems this effort is gaining some serious traction lately, as evidenced by a conversation between Rick Osterloh, Google's SVP of platforms and devices, and Qualcomm's CEO, Christiano Amon, during Qualcomm's Snapdragon Summit. Google may have just dropped its clearest hint yet that Android will soon power more thanphonesand tablets. At today's Snapdragon Summit kickoff, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon and Google's SVP of Devices and Services Rick Osterloh discussed a new joint project that will directly impact personal computing. In the past, we've always had very different systems between what we are building on PCs and what we are building on smartphones," Osterlohsaid on stage. We've embarked on a project to combine that. We are building together a common technical foundation for our products on PCs and desktop computing systems." Adamya Sharma at Android Authority Amon eventually exclaimed that's he's seen the prototype devices, and that it is incredible". He added that it delivers on the vision of convergence of mobile and PC. I cannot wait to have one." Now, marketing nonsense aside, this further confirms that soon, you'll be able to buy laptops running Android, and possibly even desktop systems running Android. The real question, though, is - would you want to? What's the gain of buying an Android laptop over a traditional Windows or macOS laptop? Then there's Google's infamous fickle nature, launching and killing products seemingly randomly, without any clear long-term plans and commitments. Would you buy an expensive laptop running Android, knowing full well Google might discontinue or lose interest in its attempt to bring Android to laptops, leaving you with an unsupported device? I'm sire schools that bought into Chromebooks will gradually move over to the new Android laptops as Chrome OS features are merged into Android, but what about everyone else? I always welcome more players in the desktop space, and anything that can challenge Microsoft and Apple is welcome, but I'm just not sure if I have faith in Google sticking with it in the long run.

Apple's first desktop operating system was Tahoe. Like any first version, it had a lot of issues. Users and critics flooded the web with negative reviews. While mostly stable under the hood, the outer shell - the visual user interface - was jarringly bad. Without much experience in desktop UX, Apple's first OS looked like a Fisher-Price toy: heavily rounded corners, mismatched colors, inconsistent details and very low information density. Obviously, the tool was designed mostly for kids or perhaps light users or elderly people. Credit where credit is due: Apple had listened to their users and the next version - macOS Sequoia - shipped with lots of fixes. Border radius was heavily reduced, transparent glass-like panels replaced by less transparent ones, buttons made more serious and less toyish. Most system icons made more serious, too, with focus on more detail. Overall, it seemed like the 2nd version was a giant leap from infancy to teenage years. Rakhim Davletkali A top quality operating systems shitpost.

GrapheneOS is a security and privacy-focused mobile operating system based on a modified version of Android (AOSP). To enhance its protection, it integrates advanced security features, including its own memory allocator for libc:hardened malloc. Designed to be as robust as the operating system itself, this allocator specifically seeks to protect against memory corruption. This technical article details the internal workings of hardened malloc and the protection mechanisms it implementsto prevent common memory corruption vulnerabilities. It is intended for a technical audience, particularly security researchers or exploit developers, who wish to gain an in-depth understanding of thisallocator's internals. Nicolas Stefanskiat Synacktiv GrapheneOS is quite possibly the best way to keep your smartphone secure, and even law enforcement is not particularly amused that people are using it. If the choice is between security and convenience, GrapheneOS chooses security every time, and that's the reason it's favoured by many people who deeply care about (smartphone) security. The project's social media accounts can be a bit... Much at times, but their dedication to security is without question, and if you want a secure smartphone, there's really nowhere else to turn - unless you opt to trust the black box security approach from Apple. Sadly, GrapheneOS is effectively under attack not from criminals, but from Google itself. As Google tightens its grip on Android more and more, as we've been reporting on for years now, it will become ever harder for GrapheneOS to deliver the kind of security and fast update they've been able to deliver. I don't know just how consequential Google's increasing pressure is for GrapheneOS, but I doubt it's making the lives of its developers any easier. It's self-defeating, too; GrapheneOS has a long history of basically serving as a test best for highly advanced security features Google later implements for Android in general. A great example is the Memory Tagging Extension, a feature implemented by ARM in hardware, which GrapheneOS implements much more widely and extensively than Google does. This way, GrapheneOS users have basically been serving as testers to see if applications and other components experience any issues when using the feature, paving the way for Google to eventually, hopefully, follow in GrapheneOS' footsteps. Google benefits from GrapheneOS, and trying to restrict its ability to properly support devices and its access to updates is shortsighted.

Why does Space Station 14 crash with ANGLE on ARM64? 6 hours later... So. I've been continuing work on getting ARM64 builds out for Space Station 14. The thing I was working on yesterday were launcher builds, specifically asingledownload that supports both ARM64 and x64. I'd already gotten the game client itself running natively on ARM64, and it worked perfectly fine in my dev environment. I wrote all the new launcher code, am pretty sure I got it right. Zip it up, test it on ARM64, aaand... The game client crashes on Windows ARM64. Both in my VM and on Julian's real Snapdragon X laptop. PJB at A stream of consciousness Debugging stories can be great fun to read, and this one is a prime example. Trust me, you'll have no idea what the hell is going on here until you reach the very end, and it's absolutely wild. Very few people are ever going to run into this exact same set of highly unlikely circumstances, but of course, with a platform as popular as Windows, someone was eventually bound to. Sidenote: the game in question looks quite interesting.

I had the pleasure of going to RustConf 2025 in Seattle this year. During the conference, I met lots of new people, but in particular, I had the pleasure of spending a large portion of the conference hanging out with Jeremy Soller of Redox and System76. Eventually, we got chatting about EFI and bootloaders, and my contributions toPostmarketOS, and my experience booting EFI-based operating systems (Linux) on smartphones usingU-Boot.Redox OSis also booted via EFI, and so the nerdsnipe began. Could I run Redox OS on my smartphone the same way I could run PostmarketOS Linux? Spoilers, yes. Paul Sajna The hoops required to get this to work are, unsurprisingly, quite daunting, but it turns out it's entirely possible to run the ARM build of Redox on a Qualcomm-based smartphone. The big caveat here is that there's not much you can actually do with it, because among the various missing drivers is the one for touch input, so once you arrive at Redox' login screen, you can't go any further. Still, it's quite impressive, and highlights both the amazing work done on the PostmarketOS/Linux side, as well as the Redox side.

After researching the first commercial transistor computer, the British Metrovick 950, Nina Kalinina wrote an emulator, simple assembler, and some additional toys" (her word) so we can enjoy this machine today. First, what, exactly, is the Metrovick 950? Metrovick 950, the first commercial transistor computer, is an early British computer, released in 1956. It is a direct descendant of the Manchester Baby (1948), the first electronic stored-program computer ever. Nina Kalinina The Baby, formally known as Small-Scale Experimental Machine, was a foundation for the Manchester Mark I (1949). Mark I found commercial success as the Ferranti Mark I. A few years later, Manchester University built a variant of Mark I that used magnetic drum memory instead of Williams tubes and transistors instead of valves. This computer was called the Manchester Transistor Computer (1955). Engineers from Metropolitan-Vickers released a streamlined, somewhat simplified version of the Transistor Computer as Metrovick 950. The emulator she developed is only" compatible on a source code level, and emulates the CPU, a teleprinter with a paper tape punch/reader, a magnetic tape storage device, and a plotter", at 200-300 operations per second. It's complete enough you can play Lunar Lander on it, because is a computer you can't play games on really a computer? Nina didn't just create this emulator and its related components, but also wrote a ton of documentation to help you understand the machine and to get started. There's an introduction to programming and using the Metrovick 950 emulator, additional notes on programming the emulator, and much more. She also posted a long thread on Fedi with a ton more details and background information, which is a great read, as well. This is amazing work, and interesting not just to programmers interested in ancient computers, but also to historians and people who really put the retro in retrocomputing.

A very exciting set of kernel patches have just been proposed for the Linux kernel, adding multikernel support to Linux. This patch series introduces multikernel architecture support, enabling multiple independent kernel instances to coexist and communicate on a single physical machine. Each kernel instance can run on dedicated CPU cores while sharing the underlying hardware resources. Cong Wang on the LKML The idea is that you can run multiple instances of the Linux kernel on different CPU cores using kexec, with a dedicated IPI framework taking care of communication between these kernels. The benefits for fault isolation and security is obvious, and it supposedly uses less resources than running virtual machines through kvm and similar technologies. The main feature I'm interested in is that this would potentially allow for kernel handover", in which the system goes from using one kernel to the other. I wonder if this would make it possible to implement a system similar to what Android currently uses for updates, where new versions are installed alongside the one you're running right now, with the system switching over to the new version upon reboot. If you could do something similar with this technology without even having to reboot, that would be quite amazing and a massive improvement to the update experience. It's obviously just a proposal for now, and there will be much, much discussion to follow I'm sure, but the possibilities are definitely exciting.

The 1980s saw a flurry of graphical user interfaces pop up, almost all of them in some way made by people who got to see the work done by Xerox. Today's topic is no exception - GEM was developed by Lee Jay Lorenzen, who worked at Xerox and wished to create a cheaper, less resource-intensive alternative to the Xerox Star, which he got to do at DRI after leaving Xerox. His work was then shown off to Atari, who were interested in using it. The entire situation was pretty hectic for a while: DRI's graphics group worked on the PC version of GEM on MS-DOS; Atari developers were porting it to Apple Lisas running CP/M-68K; and Loveman was building GEMDOS. Against all odds, they succeeded. The operating system for Atari ST consisting of GEM running on top of GEMDOS was named TOS which simply meant the operating system", although many believed T" actually stood for Tramiel". Atari 520 ST, soon nicknamed Jackintosh",was introduced at the 1985 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegasand became an immediate hit. GEM ran smoothly on the powerful ST's hardware, and there were no clones to worry about. Atari developed its branch of GEM independently of Digital Research until 1993, when the Atari ST line of computers was discontinued. Nemanja Trifunovic at Programming at the right level Other than through articles like these and the occasional virtual machine, I have no experience with the various failed graphical user interfaces of the 1980s, since I was too young at the time. Even from the current day, though, it's easy to see how all of them can be traced back directly to the work done at Xerox, and just how much we owe to the people working there at the time. Now that the technology industry is as massive as it is, with the stakes being so high, it's unlikely we'll ever see a place like Xerox PARC ever again. Everything is secretive now, and if a line of research doesn't obviously lead to massive short-term gains, it's canned before it even starts. The golden age of wild, random computer research without a profit motive is clearly behind us, and that's sad.

Last night, my wife looks up from her computer, troubled. She tells me she can't log into her computer running Windows 11, as every time she enters the PIN code to her account, the login screen throws up a cryptic error: Your credentials could not be verified". She's using the correct PIN code, so that surely isn't it. We opt for the gold standard in troubleshooting and perform a quick reboot, but that doesn't fix it. My initial instinct is that since she's using an online account instead of a local one, perhaps Microsoft is having some server issues? A quick check online indicates that no, Microsoft's servers seem to be running fine, and to be honest, I don't even know if that would have an effect on logging into Windows in the first place. The Windows 11 login screen does give us a link to click in case you forget your PIN code. Despite the fact the PIN code she's entering is correct, we try to go through this process to see if it goes anywhere. This is where things really start to get weird. A few dialogs flash in and out of existence, until it's showing us a dialog telling us to insert a security USB key of some sort, which we don't have. Dismissing it gives us an option to try other login methods, including a basic password login. This, too, doesn't work; just like with the PIN code, Windows 11 claims the accurate, correct password my wife is entering is invalid (just to be safe, we tested it by logging into her Microsoft account on her phone, which works just fine). In the account selection menu in the bottom-left, an ominous new account mysteriously appears: WsiAccount. The next option we try is to actually change the PIN code. This doesn't work either. Windows wants us to use a second factor using my wife's phone number, but this throws up another weird error, this time claiming the SMS service to send the code isn't working. A quick check online once again confirms the service seems to be working just fine for everybody else. I'm starting to get really stumped and frustrated. Of course, during all of this, we're both searching the web to find anything that might help us figure out what's going on. None of our searches bring up anything useful, and none of our findings seem to be related to or match up with the issue we're having. While she's looking at her phone and I'm browsing on my Fedora/KDE PC next to hers, she quickly mentions she's getting a notification that OneDrive is full, which is odd, since she doesn't use OneDrive for anything. We take this up as a quick sidequest, and we check up on her OneDrive account on her phone. As OneDrive loads, our jaws drop in amazement: a big banner warning is telling her she's using over 5500% of her 5GB free account. We look at each other and burst out laughing. We exchange some confused words, and then we realise what is going on: my wife just got a brand new Samsung Galaxy S25, and Samsung has some sort of deal with Microsoft to integrate its services into Samsung's variant of Android. Perhaps during the process of transferring data and applications from her old to her new phone, OneDrive syncing got turned on? A quick trip to the Samsung Gallery application confirms our suspicions: the phone is synchronising over 280GB of photos and videos to OneDrive. My wife was never asked for consent to turn this feature on, so it must've been turned on by default. We quickly turn it off, delete the 280GB of photos and videos from OneDrive, and move on to the real issue at hand. Since nothing seems to work, and none of what we find online brings us any closer to what's going on with her Windows 11 installation, we figured it's time to bring out the big guns. For the sake of brevity, let's run through the things we tried. Booting into safe mode doesn't work; we get the same login problems. Trying to uninstall the latest updates, an option in WinRE, doesn't work, and throws up an unspecified error. We try to use a restore point, but despite knowing for 100% certain the feature to periodically create restore points is enabled, the only available restore point is from 2022, and is located on a drive other than her root drive (or C:\" in Windows parlance). Using the reset option in WinRE doesn't work either, as it also throws up an error, this time about not having enough free space. I also walk through a few more complex suggestions, like a few manual registry hacks related to the original error using cmd.exe in WinRE. None of it yields any results. It's now approaching midnight, and we need to get up early to drop the kids off at preschool, so I tell my wife I'll reinstall her copy of Windows 11 tomorrow. We're out of ideas. The next day, I decide to give it one last go before opting for the trouble of going through a reinstallation. The one idea I still have left is to enable the hidden administrator account in Windows 11, which gives you password-free access to what is basically Windows' root account. It involves booting into WinRE, loading up cmd.exe, and replacing utilman.exe in system32 with cmd.exe: If you then proceed to boot into Windows 11 and click on the Accessibility icon in the bottom-right, it will open utilman.exe", but since that's just cmd.exe with the utilman.exe name, you get a command prompt to work with, right on the login screen. From here, you can launch regedit, find the correct key, change a REG_BINARY, save, and reboot. At the login screen, you'll see a new adminstrator" account with full access to your computer. During the various reboots, I do some more web searching, and I stumble upon a post on

Intel is in very dire straits, and as such, the company needs investments and partnerships more than anything. Today, NVIDIA and Intel announced just such a partnership, in which NVIDIA will invest $5 billion into the troubled chip giant, while the two companies will develop products that combine Intel's x86 processors with NVIDIA's GPUs. For data centers, Intel will build NVIDIA-custom x86 CPUs that NVIDIA will integrate into its AI infrastructure platforms and offer to the market. For personal computing, Intel will build and offer to the market x86 system-on-chips (SOCs) that integrate NVIDIA RTX GPU chiplets. These new x86 RTX SOCs will power a wide range of PCs that demand integration of world-class CPUs and GPUs. NVIDIA press release My immediate reaction to this news was to worry about the future of Intel's ARC graphics efforts. Just as the latest crop of their ARC GPUs have received a ton of good press and positive feedback, with some of their cards becoming the go-to suggestion for a budget-friendly but almost on-par alternative to offerings from NVIDIA and AMD, it would be a huge blow to user choice and competition if Intel were to abandon the effort. I think this news pretty much spells the end for the ARC graphics effort. Making dedicated GPUs able to compete with AMD and NVIDIA must come at a pretty big financial cost for Intel, and I wouldn't be surprised if they've been itching to find an excuse to can the whole project. With NVIDIA GPUs fulfilling the role of more powerful integrated GPUs, all Intel really needs is a skeleton crew developing the basic integrated GPUs for cheaper and non-gaming oriented devices, which would be a lot cheaper to maintain. For just $5 billion dollars, NVIDIA most likely just eliminated a budding competitor in the GPU space. That's cheap.

All good things come to an end eventually, and that includes support for 32bit Windows in Steam. As of January 1 2026, Steam will stop supporting systems running 32-bit versions of Windows. Windows 10 32-bit is the only 32-bit version that is currently supported by Steam and is only in use on 0.01% of systems reported through the Steam Hardware Survey. Windows 10 64-bit will still be supported and 32-bit games will still run. Steam support article While existing installations will continue to work, they will no longer receive any Steam updates or support. Valve obviously advises the small sliver of users still using 32bit Windows - unbeknownst to them, I'm sure - to upgrade to a 64bit release. Upcoming versions of Steam will only work on 64bit systems.

GNOME 49 has been released, and it's got a lot of nice updates, improvements, and fixes for everyone. GNOME 49 finally replaces the ageing Totem video player with Showtime, and Evince, GNOME's document viewer, is replaced by the new Papers. Both of these new applications bring a modern GTK4 user interface to replace their older GTK3 counterparts. Papers supports a ton of both document-oriented as well as comic book formats, and has annotation features. We've already touched on the extensive accessibility improvements in GNOME Calendar, but other applications have been improved as well, such as Maps, Software, and Web. Software's improvements focus on improving the application's performance, especially when dealing with Flatpaks from Flathub, while Web, GNOME's web browser, comes with improved ad blocking and optional regional blocklists, better bookmark management, improved security features, and more. The remote desktop experience also saw a lot of work, with multitouch input support, extended virtual monitors, and relative mouse input. For developers, GNOME 49 comes with the new GTK 4.20, the latest version of Glib, and Libadwaita 1.8, released only a few days ago. It brings a brand new shortcuts information dialog as its most user-facing feature, on top of a whole bunch of other, developer-oriented features. GNOME 49 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.

It's 2025, and yes, you can still install and run a modern Linux distribution like Debian through a real hardware terminal. While I have used a terminal with the Pi, I've never before used it as a serialconsoleall the way from early boot, and I have never installed Debian using the terminal to run the installer. A serial terminal gives you a login prompt. A serial console gives you access to kernel messages, the initrd environment, and sometimes even the bootloader. This might be fun, I thought. John Goerzen at The Changelog It seems Debian does a lot of the correct configurations for you, but there's still a few things you'll need to manually change, but none of it seems particularly complicated. Once the installation is completed, you have a system that's completely accessible and usable from a hardware terminal, which, while maybe not particularly important in this day and age of effortless terminal emulators, is still quite a cool thing to have.

Another month, another summary of changes in Haiku, the BeOS-inspired operating system. The main focus this past month has been improving the performance of git status, which has been measurably worse on Haiku than on Linux running on similar hardware. This work has certainly paid off, as the numbers demonstrate. The results are clearly more than worth the trouble, though: in one test setup withgit statusin Haiku'sbuildtoolsrepository (which contains the entirety of thegccandbinutilssource code, among other things - over 160,000 files) went from around 33 seconds with a cold disk cache, to around 20 seconds; and with a hot disk cache, from around 15 seconds to around 2.5 seconds. This is still a ways off from Linux (with a similar setup in the same repository,git statusthere with a hot disk cache takes only 0.3 seconds). Performance on Haiku will likely be measurably faster on builds withoutKDEBUGenabled, but not by that much. Still, this is clearly a significant improvement over the way things were before now. Haiku Activity & Contract Report, August 2025 There's more than this, of course, such as initial support for Intel's Apollo Lake GPU in the Intel modesetting driver, improvements to USB disk performance, a reduction in power usage when in KDL, and much, much more.

Some time ago, people noticed that buried in the Windows Bluetooth drivers is the hard-coded name of the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. What's going on there? Does the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 receive favorable treatment from the Microsoft Bluetooth drivers? Is this some sort of collusion? No, it's not that. Raymond Chen So, what is the actual problem? It's a funny one: an encoding mistake. The device local name string for a device needs to be encoded in UTF-8, and that's where the developers of the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 made a mistake. The string contains a registered trademark symbol - (R) - but they encoded it in code page 1252, which not only isn't allowed, but gets rejected completely. So, Windows' Bluetooth drivers have a table that contains the wrong name for a driver, accompanied by the right name to use. This mouse is the only entry.

Java 25 has been released. JDK 25, the reference implementation of Java 25, is now Generally Available. We shipped build 36 as the second Release Candidate of JDK 25 on 15 August, and no P1 bugs have been reported since then. Build 36 is therefore now the GA build, ready for production use. Java 25/JDK 25 release announcement If you want to dive into the details about this new release, feel free to peruse the long, long list of improvements and changes.

It's been a little over a month since OSNews went completely ad-free for everyone. I can say the support has been overwhelming, with the accompanying fundraiser currently sitting at 67% of the 5000 goal! Of course things slowed down a bit after the initial week of one donation after the next, so I'm throwing out this reminder that without your support, OSNews can't exist - doubly so now that I've removed any and all advertising. Help us reach that 100%! So, what can you do to support OSNews? By being entirely free from the corrupting influence of advertising, I have even less desire to chase views, entrap users with slop content, game search engines with shitty SEO spam, or turn on the taps of AI"-generated trash to spew forth as much articles" and thus views as possible. This also means that OSNews is one of the few technology news websites remaining that is not part of a massive corporate media conglomerate, so there's no pressure from corporate" to go easy on advertisers or write favourable stuff about corporate's friends. You'd be surprised to learn how many technology sites out there are not independent. The response to OSNews no longer having any advertising has been overwhelmingly positive - unsurprisingly - and that has taken away any reservations I might have had about taking this step. In a world where so many websites are disappearing, turning into corporate mouthpieces, or becoming glorified content farms, OSNews can keep on doing what it does, independent of any outside influence, thanks to the countless contributions from all of you. Thank you.

It's release day for all of Apple's operating systems, so if you're fully or only partway into the ecosystem, you've got some upgrades ahead of you. Version 26 for macOS, iOS and iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, and HomePod Software have all been released today, so if you own any device running any of these operating system, it's time to head on over to the update section of the settings application and wait for that glass to slowly and sensually liquefy all over your screens. Do put a sock on the doorknob.

I recently implemented a minimal proof of concept time-sharing operating system kernel on RISC-V. In this post, I'll share the details of how this prototype works. The target audience is anyone looking to understand low-level system software, drivers, system calls, etc., and I hope this will be especially useful to students of system software and computer architecture. Finally, to do things differently here, I implemented this exercise in Zig, rather than traditional C. In addition to being an interesting experiment, I believe Zig makes this experiment much more easily reproducible on your machine, as it's very easy to set up and does not require any installation (which could otherwise be slightly messy when cross-compiling to RISC-V). Uros Popovic This is not the first, and certainly not the last, operating system implemented from scratch as a teaching exercise, both for the creator itself, as well as for others wanting to follow along. This time it's developed for RISC-V, and in an interesting twist, programmed in Zig (no Rust for once!).

And the beatings continue until AI" improves. Except if you live in the European Union/EEA, that is. Windows devices with the Microsoft 365 desktop client apps will automatically install the Microsoft 365 Copilot app. This app installation takes place in the background and would not disrupt the user. This app installation will start in Fall 2025. Microsoft support document Basically, if you have Microsoft 365 desktop applications installed - read my article about some deep Microsoft lore to figure out what that means - Microsoft is going to force-install all the Copilot stuff onto your computer, whether you like it or not. Thanks to more robust consumer protection legislation in the European Union/EEA, like the Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, this force-install will not take place there. Administrators managing Office 365 deployments get an option to opt-out through theMicrosoft 365 Apps admin center, but I'm not sure if regular users can use this method as well. Remember, when you're using Windows (or macOS, for that matter), you don't own your computer. Plan accordingly.

It may be arcane knowledge to most users of UNIX-like systems today, but there is supposed to be a difference between /usr/bin and /usr/sbin; the latter is supposed to be for system binaries", not needed by most normal users. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard states that sbin directories are intended to contain utilities used for system administration (and other root-only commands)", which is quite vague when you think about it. This has led to UNIX-like systems basically just winging it, making the distinction almost entirely arbitrary. For a long time, there has been no strong organizing principle to /usr/sbin that would draw a hard line and create a situation where people could safely leave it out of their $PATH. We could have had a principle of, for example, programs that don't work unless run by root", but no such principle was ever followed for very long (if at all). Instead programs were more or less shoved in /usr/sbin if developers thought they were relatively unlikely to be used by normal people. But relatively unlikely' is not never', and shortly after people got told to run traceroute' and got command not found' when they tried, /usr/sbin (probably) started appearing in $PATH. Chris Siebenmann As such, Fedora 42 unifies /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, which is kind of a follow-up to the /usr merge, and serves as a further simplification and clean-up of the file system layout by removing divisions and directories that used to make sense, but no longer really do. Decisions like these have a tendency to upset a small but very vocal group of people, people who often do not even use the distribution implementing the decisions in question in the first place. My suggestions to those people would be to stick to distributions that more closely resemble classic UNIX. Or use a real UNIX. Anyway, these are good moves, and I'm glad most prominent Linux distributions are not married to decisions made in the '70s, especially not when they can be undone without users really noticing anything.

Google continues putting nails in the coffin that is the Android Open Source Project. This time, they're changing the way they handle security updates to appease slow, irresponsible Android OEMs, while screwing over everyone else. The basic gist is that instead of providing monthly security updates for OEMs to implement on their Android devices, Google will now move to a quarterly model, publishing only extremely severe issues on a monthly basis. The benefit for OEMs is that for most vulnerabilities, they get three months to distribute (most) fixes instead of just one month, but the downsides are also legion. Vulnerabilities will now be out in the wild for three months instead of just one, and while they're shared with OEMs privately", we're talking tends of thousands of pairs of eyes here, so privately" is a bit of a misnomer. The dangers are obvious; these vulnerabilities will be leaked, and they will be abused by malicious parties. Another massive downside related to this change is that Google will now no longer be providing the monthly patches as open source within AOSP, instead only releasing the quarterly patch drops as open source. This means exactly what you think it does: no more monthly security updates from third-party ROMs, unless those third-party ROMs choose to violate the embargo themselves and thus invite all sorts of problems. Extending the patch access window from one month to three is absolutely insane. Google should be striving to shorten this window as much as possible, but instead, they're tripling it in length to create a false sense of security. OEMs can now point at their quarterly security updates and claim to be patching vulnerabilities as soon as Google publishes them, while in fact, the unpatched vulnerabilities will have been out in the wild for months by that point. This change is irresponsible, misguided, and done only to please lazy, shitty OEMs to create a false sense of security for marketing purposes.

We're all aware of the Chinese Great Firewall, the tool the Chinese government uses for mass censorship and for safeguarding and strengthening its totalitarian control over the country and its population. It turns out that through a Chinese shell company called Geedge Networks, China is also selling the Great Firewall to other totalitarian regimes around the world. Thanks to a massive leak of 500 GB ofsource code, work logs, and internal communication records, we now have more insight into how the Great Firewall works than ever before, leading to in-depth reports like this one from InterSecLab. The findings are chilling, but not surprising. First and foremost, Geedge is selling the Great Firewall to a variety of totalitarian regimes around the world, namely Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Myanmar, and another unidentified country. These governments can then ask Geedge to make specific changes and ask them to focus on specific capabilities to further enhance the functionality of the Great Firewall, but what it can already do today is bad enough. The suite of products offered by Geedge Networks allow a client government unprecedented access to internet user data and enables governments to use this data to police national and regional networks. These capabilities include deep packet inspection for advanced classification, interception, and manipulation of application and user traffic; monitoring the geographic location of mobile subscribers in real time; analyzing aggregated network traffic in specific areas, such as during a protest or event; flagging unusual traffic patterns as suspicious; creating tailored blocking rules to obstruct access to a website or application (such as a VPN (Virtual Private Network) or circumvention tool); throttling traffic to specific services; identifying individual internet users for accessing websites or using circumvention tools or VPNs; assigning individual internet users reputation scores based on their online activities; and infecting users with malware through in-path injection. The Internet Coup: A Technical Analysis on How a Chinese Company is Exporting The Great Firewall to Autocratic Regimes Internet service providers participate in the implementation of the suite of tools, either freely or by force, and since the tools are platform-agnostic it doesn't matter which platforms people are using in any given country, making international sanctions effectively useless. It also won't surprise you that Geedge steals both proprietary and open source code, without regards for licensing terms. Furthermore, China is allowing provinces and regions within its borders to tailor and adapt the Great Firewall to their own local needs, providing a blueprint for how to export the suite of tools to other countries. With quite a few countries sliding ever further towards authoritarianism, I'm sure even places not traditionally thought of as totalitarian are lustfully looking at the Chinese Great Firewall, wishing they had something similar in their own countries.

Celebrate classic Psion machines with us, from the originalOrganiser, through theSeries 3andSeries 5, all the way to thenetBook. Get help with yourclassic palmtop computer, or help todevelop software and hardwarethat will bring these devices into the 21st Century. Psion Community website A brand new one-stop shop for everything related to keeping Psion machines going. A library of all the software, lists of all the ROM images, tons of development resources, and much more.

More than three years in the making, with a concerted effort starting last year, my CPU-time profilerlandedin Java with OpenJDK 25. It's an experimental new profiler/method sampler that helps you find performance issues in your code, having distinct advantages over the current sampler. This is what this week's and next week's blog posts are all about. This week, I will cover why we need a new profiler and what information it provides; next week, I'll cover the technical internals that go beyond what's written in the JEP. I will quote theJEP 509quite a lot, thanks to Ron Pressler; it reads like a well-written blog post in and of itself. Johannes Bechberger There's also a third entry detailing queue sizing, and a fourth entry going into the removal of redundant synchronisation.

The first time I learned about UTF-8 encoding, I was fascinated by how well-thought and brilliantly it was designed to represent millions of characters from different languages and scripts, andstill be backward compatible with ASCII. Designing a system that scales to millions of characters and still be compatible with the old systems that use just 128 characters is a brilliant design. Vishnu Haridas On a slightly related note, if you are ever bothered or annoyed by text online rendering as unknown squares, you most likely are just missing the proper fonts to render them. At least on most Linux and BSD systems, all you need to do is install the entire set of Noto fonts, including those for every single non-Latin script. Assuming your package manager has sane naming conventions, it'll most likely come down to something like sudo dnf install google-noto* or whatever your system's install package command is, and after installing a whole slew of font files, your system will now be able to render virtually every script under the sun. After installing this massive font set, you can do things like write and render in hieroglyphics, write Ea-nirs name the way it's supposed to, and render all kinds of other scripts and symbols without ever having to look at one of those blank squares ever again.

I'm not really into the niche of virtual YouTubers" - people who post YouTube videos and/or stream using a virtual avatar - but to each their own, and if this technology enables people to remain anonymous while doing what they love on YouTube or Twitch, I'm all for it. Since these virtual avatars also do things like face-tracking, there's a whole cottage industry of software tools to make this all work, but Adrian asie" Siekierka decided to take a look at where the training data used to make such face-tracking work actually comes from. One day, some years ago, I decided to look at the data used to trainOpenSeeFace. OpenSeeFace is the most popularopen sourceface tracking solution for virtual YouTubers. It is supported by both open source and commercial model rendering tools; in particular,VTube Studioallows using it as an option for webcam tracking. Adrian asie" Siekierka The results of the investigation are not exactly great. Much of the data used by OpenSeeFace comes with serious restrictions on commercial use, and many of the underlying datasets contain images that you would need consent for from the people inside the image to actually use. On top of that, a lot of these data sets seem to have just scraped the internet for images of faces without asking anyone of the people in those images for consent, which raises a whole number of troubling issues. I find this a very interesting topic of discussion, if only because you'd be hard-pressed to argue that the average cartoon-esque virtual avatars even remotely resemble real human faces, so it's not like you're going to suddenly run into your own face somewhere on YouTube or Twitch, but plastered into another person. On the other hand, the underlying datasets still contain a ton of people's faces without those people's consent, and even for those that did give consent, there's often a commercial use restriction which earning revenue on YouTube or Twitch might violate. It's a fascinating microcosm of a whole slew of issues we're dealing with right now, neatly contained in a relatively small niche.

Who doesn't love a desktop-oriented hobby operating system to start off the weekend? SkiftOSis a hobbyist operating system built from the ground up with a focus on modularity, simplicity, and modern design principles. Driven by a dissatisfaction with the fragmented user experiences prevalent in contemporary operating systems, SkiftOS strives for deep integration and a cohesive aesthetic. This project is a labor of love-an artistic pursuit rather than a commercial product. SkiftOS gitHub page Reading through the GitHub page and SkiftOS' actual website, it reminds me so, so much of the desktop-oriented hobby operating systems of the early 2000s, like AtheOS, SkyOS, and others. It has its own microkernel, C++ core library, package manager, reactive UI framework, an entire desktop environment, and even a browser engine. This operating system is remarkably complete in the features that it already offers, especially considering its hobby status. The desktop environment is called Hideo, and it's remarkably beautiful when you consider we're talking about a hobby operating system. It comes with a variety of applications, too, mostly covering the basics we've come to expect from a desktop operating system, like a text editor, archive manager, task manager, image viewer, media player, a file manager, and so on. Meanwhile, the browser engine is called Vaev and is highly experimental, but its existence illustrates just how broad this project really is. I haven't been able to find some time to run it yet, but if you're interested, they advise you to run it using qemu. While running it on real hardware is technically possible, it's not advisable due to the alpha state of the operating system.

One of the most annoying things I encountered while trying out Windows 11 a few months ago was the utterly broken dark mode; broken since its inception nine years ago, but finally getting some fixes. One of the smaller but downright disturbing issues with dark mode on Windows 11 is that when Explorer is in dark mode, it will flash bright white whenever you open a new window or a new tab. It's like the operating system is throwing flashbangs at you every time you need to do some file management. Luckily, it turns out there's a fix, as Neowin details. Windows 11 is turning four in a couple of months, but Microsoft still has not fixed this annoying and, for some people, legitimately life-threatening bug (there is a reason why we have seizure warnings in games, movies, etc). As such, users have to take things into their hands and come up with custom solutions. One such solution is a simple Windhawk mod that fixes what a nearly four-trillion-dollar company still won't figure out. Taras Buria at Neowin This made me check out Windhawk, and it seems like an awesome project for people forced to use Windows. It is basically a package manager for various small mods, fixes, and changes for Windows, allowing you to mix and match exactly what you need. This way, you can easily fix the little niggles that bother you, all from a central location. The list of available mods is quite long already, and browsing through it, I've already seen quite a few things I'd be applying in a heartbeat if I were to be using Windows. Every mod comes with its source code included, ensuring you can check that it does exactly what it says it will do, and of course, you can contribute your own mods as well.

We often focus on Google's detrimental effects on the web, but in doing so, we often tend to forget the other major player who is quite possibly even more damaging to the web than Google can even dream to be. Without a counterweight, network effects allow successful tech firms to concentrate wealth and political influence. This power allows them to degrade potential competitive challenges, enabling rent extraction for services that would otherwise be commodities. This mechanism operates through (often legalised) corruption of judicial, regulatory, and electoral systems. When left to fester, it corrodes democracy itself. Apple has deftly used a false cloak of security and privacy to move the internet, and web in particular, toward enclosure and irrelevance. This post makes the case for why Apple should be considered a corrupted, and indeedincompetent,autocrat in our digital lives. It continues to abusing a unique form of monopoly toextract rents, including on the last remnants of open ecosystems it tolerates. Worse, Apple's centralisation through the App Storeentrenches the positions of peer big tech firms, harming the prospects of competitors in turn.Apple have been, over the course of many years, poisonous to internet standards and the moral commitments of that grand project. Alex Russell at Infrequently Noted I have nothing more to add.

A version of Windows that's often overlooked, and often probably entirely unknown, is Windows/386. When Microsoft released 2.x, they did so in two very different variants: Windows/286 and Windows/386. The former would run on anything from a 8088 and up, but wouldn't make use of any of the new features of the 386, while the latter, as its name implies, was optimised for the 386 and introduced a ton of advanced features to the platform. Windows/386 laid the groundwork for the much more successful Windows 3.x and 9x, but weirdly enough, it's never really been studied all that well to understand how it works and what it's doing under the hood. That has changed now, as Will CaptainWillStarblazer" Klees, whom we already know for his amazing work to allow RISC Win32 applications to run on x86, has delved deep into Widnows/386 with a ton of reverse-engineering to uncover many of its secrets. There's so many amazing findings in here, I honestly have no idea where to even start or what to highlight, so I'm picking two things that I think are quite entertaining. First, Windows/386 does a number of checks to determine if your PC can run it, and one of the checks it does concerns defending against early buggy 386 steppings". It turns out that this exact check for buggy steppings in early 386 processors survived in Windows all the way up until Windows 8.1, which is wild to think about. A second fascinating finding is that a crucial component of Windows/386 finds its origins in an unusual place: Xenix, Microsoft's UNIX implementation. Finally, it begins loading the Virtual DOS Machine Manager (VDMM) into memory from the file WIN386.386. This file is not an OS/2 Linear Executable like the 386 files from later versions of Windows (that format did not yet exist), rather it is the 32-bit x.out executable format from Xenix-386 (thank you, Michal Necasek!), which makes sense as it was the only 32-bit executable format that Microsoft would have a linker for at the time (and interoperated well with Microsoft's OMF-based tools, such as MASM). Will CaptainWillStarblazer" Klees at Virtually Fun There's a fun detail about the 386 version of Xenix: it was ported to the 386 by a company we all came to hate deeply: SCO. The technology world is far smaller than we often seem to think. Apparently Xenix for the 386 was the first fully 32bit operating system for the x86 architecture, illustrating that once, a long, long time ago, SCO was an actually capable, innovative company. The work by Klees and his extremely detailed write-up are a joy to read, so head on over and have some fun.