We've had a lot of fun with VTech's computers in the past on this blog. Usually, they're relatively spartan computers with limited functionality, but they did make something very interesting in the late 80s. The Socrates is their hybrid video game console/computer design from 1988, and today we'll start tearing into it. Leaded Solder web log Now we're in for the good stuff. A weird educational computer/game console/toy thing from the late '80s, by VTech. I have a massive soft spot for these toy-like devices, because they're always kind of a surprise - will it be a stupidly simple hardcoded device with zero input/output, or a weirdly capable computer with tons of hidden I/O and a full BASIC ROM? You won't know until you crack it open and take a peek! VTech still makes things like this, and I still find them ever as fascinating.
Apparently, the Bcachefs people are having problems with case-folding, and Linus Torvalds himself is not happy about it. Torvalds holds the only right opinion in this matter, which is that filesystems should obviously be case-sensitive. Case-insensitive names are horribly wrong, and you shouldn't have done them at all. The problem wasn't the lack of testing, the problem was implementing it in the first place. Dammit. Case sensitivity is a BUG. The fact that filesystem people still think it's a feature, I cannot understand. It's like they revere the old FAT filesystem so much that they have to recreate it - badly. Linus Torvalds on the LKML It boggles my mind that a modern operating system like macOS still defaults to being case-insensitive (but case-preserving), and opting to install macOS the correct way, i.e. with case-sensitivity, can still lead to issues and bugs because macOS isn't used to it. In 2025. Windows' NTFS is at least case-sensitive, but apparently Win32 applications get all weird about it; if you have several files with identical names save for the case used, Win32 applications will only allow you to open one of them. I'm not sure how up to date that information is, though. Regardless, the notion that Readme.txt is considered the same as readme.txt is absolutely insane, and should be one of those weird relics we got rid of back in the '90s.
As much as I'm a fan of breaking up Google, I'm not entirely sure carving Chrome out of Google without a further plan for what happens to the browser is a great idea. I mean, Google is bad, but things could be so, so much worse. OpenAI would be interested in buying Google's Chrome if antitrust enforcers are successful in forcing the Alphabet unit to sell the popular web browser as part of a bid to restore competition in search, an OpenAI executive testified on Tuesday at Google's antitrust trial in Washington. Jody Godoy at Reuters OpenAI is not the only AI" vulture circling the skies. Perplexity Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko said he didn't want to testify in a trial about how to resolve Google's search monopoly because he feared retribution from Google. But after being subpoenaed to appear in court, he seized the moment to pitch a business opportunity for his AI company: buying Chrome. Lauren Feiner at the Verge Or, you know, what about, I don't know, fucking Yahoo!? Legacy search brand Yahoo has been working on its own web browser prototype, and says it would like to buy Google's Chrome if the company is forced by a court to sell it. Lauren Feiner at the Verge If the courts really want Google to divest Chrome, the least-worst position it could possibly end up is in some sort of open source foundation or similar legal construction, where no one company has total control over the world's most popular browser. Of course, such a construction isn't exactly ideal either - it will become a battleground of corporate interests soaked with the blood of ordinary users - but anything, anything is better than cud peddlers like OpenAI or whatever the hell Yahoo! even is these days. As users, we really should not want Google to be forced to divest Chrome at this point in time. No matter the outcome, users are going to be screwed even harder than if it were to stay with Google. I hate to say this, but I don't see an option that's better than having Chrome remain part of Google. The big problem here is that there is no coherent strategy to deal with the big technology companies in the United States. We're looking at individual lawsuits where judges and medieval nonsense like juries try to deal with individual companies, which, even if, say, Google gets broken up, would do nothing but strengthen the other big technology companies. If, I don't know, Android suddenly had to make it on its own as a company, it's not users who would benefit, but Apple. Is that the goal of antitrust? What you really need to deal with the inordinate power of the big technology companies is legislation that deals with the sector as a whole, instead of letting random courts and people forced to do jury duty decide what to do with Google or Amazon or whatever. The European Union is doing this to great success so far, getting all the major players to make sweeping changes to the benefit of users in the EU. If the United States is serious about dealing with the abusive behaviour of the big technology companies, it's going to need to draft and pass legislation similar to the European Union's DMA and DSA. Of course, that's not going to happen. The United States Congress is broken beyond repair, the US president and his gaggle of incompetents are too busy destroying the US economy and infecting children with measles, and the big tech companies themselves are just bribing US politicians in broad daylight. The odds of the US being able to draft and pass effective big tech antitrust regulations is lower than zero. OpenAI Chrome. You feeling better yet about the open web?
The Steam store and desktop client will soon be able to help players find games that feature accessibility support. If your game has accessibility features, you can now enter that information in the Steamworks edit store' section for your app. Steam announcements page I have a lot of criticism for the Steam client application - it's a overly complex, unattractive, buggy, slow, top-heavy Chrome engine wrapped in an ugly user interface - but this is a great change and very welcome addition to Steam. Basically, with this, game developers can indicate which accessibility features their game has, allowing users to specifically search for those features, create filters, make sure they can play the game before buying, and so on. The client-side part of the feature is not yet available - it seems Valve is giving developers some time to fill in the necessary information - but once it is, you'll be able to tell at a glance what accessibility a game has. Such information on the store page of games tends to be a great marketing tool, with reviews quickly pointing out if certain expected features are not present. Any game that lacks support for the Steam Deck or Proton, for instance, will often have a few reviews at the top mentioning as such, and games with invasive DRM can't get away with that either without reviews on Steam pointing it out. I wouldn't be surprised if these accessibility feature listings well quickly become another thing users will simply expect to be there. Regardless, this is great news for people who rely on such features, but even if you don't specifically - accessibility features are often just useful features, period.
Welcome to a photo-driven tour of the IBM z17. I've scoured the image library to pull dig deep inside these machines that most people don't get an opportunity to see inside, and I'll share some of the specifications gleaned from the announcement and related Redbooks. Elizabeth K. Joseph at the IBM community website These IBM mainframes don't have to be beautiful, but they always are. I wish I could see a z17 up close - hopefully IBM will release a detailed video walkthrough of one of these at some point, including taking one apart and putting it back together.
I'm sure this won't make anybody mad, and we can all have a reasonable discussion about this. A change proposal for Fedora suggests Fedora should drop the X11 GNOME session from Fedora 43, moving GNOME's target of removing X11 in GNOME 50 to the Fedora release carrying GNOME 49. Fedora 43 will be released in roughly six months. The reasoning behind the proposal should be no surprise. This Change effectively implements the GNOME 50 target in GNOME 49 because there is no one to support any issues with GNOME X11 upstream. The X11 session is already quite buggy, with serious unfixed issues in Mutter (like rhbz#2179566 and glgo#GNOME/mutter#3868) and recently Phoronix could not benchmark GNOME X11 vs Wayland because GNOME on X11 wasn't even working due to bugs". Dropping the GNOME X11 session now allows us to reconcile with reality that the GNOME X11 session is simply not supported anymore (either by us or upstream GNOME). Fedora change proposal If you're still using legacy X11 on Fedora GNOME for some reason, upgrading to Fedora 43 would mean being moved to Wayland. If you would want to continue using X11, you'd need to install a different login manager than GDM, and a desktop environment that still supports X11 (like Cinnamon or Xfce). Since all of this is the plan anyway, what this proposal effectively does is move the removal of X11 from Fedora GNOME ahead by six months. Do note that this is only a change proposal for now, and it will have to be voted on and agreed upon before it becomes official policy. This is just yet another nail in the coffin of X11 on Linux, as more and more distributions and desktop environments move to eliminate it entirely from their installations and stacks in favour of Wayland. Big concerns here for some X11 users are definitely accessibility, where tools are still relatively young, and to a lesser degree NVIDIA users, whose GPU drivers are a bit of a mess when it comes to Wayland. To this day, NVIDIA with Wayland can be very hit or miss. Regardless, we all know which way the wind's blowing.
TacOS is a UNIX-like kernel which is able to run DOOM, among various other smaller userspace programs. It has things like a VFS, scheduler, TempFS, devices, context switching, virtual memory management, physical page frame allocation, and a port of Doom. It runs both on real hardware (tested on my laptop) and in the Qemu emulator. TacOS GitHub page TacOS - great name - is written in C, and explicitly a hobby and toy project. The code's licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0.
The headline sets the stage, and the article delivers. This was the most interesting bug I've encountered for a while. I initially had a hard time believing that a bug like this would directly tie to a specific OS release, but I was proven completely wrong. At the end of the day, it was a simple bug in San Andreas and this function should have never worked right, and yet, at least on PC it hid itself for two decades. This is an interesting lesson in compatibility: even changes to the stack layout of the internal implementations can have compatibility implications if an application is bugged and unintentionally relies on a specific behavior. This is also not the first time I encountered issues like this: regular visitors might remember Bully: Scholarship Edition which famously broke on Windows 10, for very similar reasons. Just like in this case, Bully should have never worked properly to begin with, but instead, it got away with making incorrect assumptions for years, before changes in Windows 10 finally made it run out of luck. Adrian Zdanowicz Incredible story.
One of the strong points of Linux has always been how solid the experience of installing and managing software is. Contrarily to what happens in the Windows and macOS world, software on Linux is obtained through something called a package manager, a piece of software that manages any piece of software the user installs, as well as its dependencies, automatically. Luca Brame at Libre.News It truly is. I can't imagine using any operating system that relies (almost) exclusively on me going out to individual websites to download random installers or disk images, all with their own unique update mechanisms I need to keep track of, that eat up resources and interrupt my workflow. The combination of Fedora's repository's with the odd Copr or Flatpak package - all managed transparently through KDE's Discover - is effectively perfect. I never have to manually install anything, nor do I ever have to rely on tarballs like back in the dark ages. Dealing with a Windows or macOS machine is a nightmare compared to this. Managing applications on those operating systems feels hopelessly archaic and outdated, and I have no idea how users tolerate that kind of nonsense. They've got a dozen or more updaters running in the background, cluttering up the system tray and eating resources, or whenever they open an application they get an annoying popup interrupting their work to ask them to update. It's barbaric and user-hostile, and nobody should be dealing with that in 2025. It's also highly unlikely things will ever improve for Windows or macOS users, since any attempt to bolt a package manager into them invariably fails. The official Windows and macOS application stores have been abject failures in more ways than one, and tools like winget are just glorified download managers that run regular installers in silent mode - incredibly crude and only really good for batch-downloading some installers. The Linux world is far from perfect, but they nailed application management early on, and the competition has basically sat still ever since.
The fines weren't the only Digital Markets Act news coming from this fine continent today. The European Commission also closed its investigation into Apple's user choice obligations under the DMA, and while Apple has made good progress in a few areas, the EC states Apple is still acting illegally in a variety of others. First, the good news for Apple: the European Commission is happy with Apple's changes regarding browser choice, the ability to remove preinstalled iOS applications, and the ability to change a whole bunch of default settings that are all locked outside of the EU. These are valuable and welcome changes, and I'm glad the European Union, the European Parliament, and the Commission have forced Apple to become less hostile to European consumers. Second, there's the bad news for Apple. Under the DMA, Apple is obligated to allow for third-party application stores, and the ability for users to download and install applications directly from the internet. In this area, Apple is still breaking European Union law. The Commission takes the preliminary view that Apple failed to comply with this obligation in view of the conditions it imposes on app (and app store) developers. Developers wanting to use alternative app distribution channels on iOS are disincentivised from doing so as this requires them to opt for business terms which include a new fee (Apple's Core Technology Fee). Apple also introduced overly strict eligibility requirements, hampering developers' ability to distribute their apps through alternative channels. Finally, Apple makes it overly burdensome and confusing for end users to install apps when using such alternative app distribution channels. European Commission press release This outcome was entirely expected, and pretty much everyone - except Apple's PR attack dogs - knew Apple's malicious compliance, fees, and onerous hurdles were going to be a hard sell. I'm glad the European Commission seems unimpressed with Trump's sabre-rattling about the EU's consumer protection laws, and is continuing to whip US tech companies in line, making sure they stop violating our consumer protection laws. Since these are the outcomes of a preliminary investigation, Apple now has the chance to argue its case.
The European Commission has levied fines against both Apple and Facebook for violating the Digital Markets Act. Apple has to pay a 500 million fine, and Facebook a 200 million fine. Apple is breaking EU law by not allowing application developers to inform users of other offers outside the App Store. The Commission found that Apple fails to comply with this obligation. Due to a number of restrictions imposed by Apple, app developers cannot fully benefit from the advantages of alternative distribution channels outside the App Store. Similarly, consumers cannot fully benefit from alternative and cheaper offers as Apple prevents app developers from directly informing consumers of such offers. The company has failed to demonstrate that these restrictions are objectively necessary and proportionate. European Commission press release Not only is Apple ordered to pay the 500 million fine, they also have to remove any and all of the illegal restrictions they put in place. Facebook, meanwhile, was fined for not offering an equally functional services but without combining user data from different services. The company did offer a choice between paying and not paying - whereby the latter involved data collection and combination - but this model violated the DMA. The Commission found that this model is not compliant with the DMA, as it did not give users the required specific choice to opt for a service that uses less of their personal data but is otherwise equivalent to the personalised ads' service. Meta's model also did not allow users to exercise their right to freely consent to the combination of their personal data. European Commission press release Facebook did later amend their model to make it compliant with the DMA, and so the fine only covers the few months Facebook was violating EU law. Fun additional note: the EC also mentions that the Facebook Marketplace is no longer a gatekeeper service under the DMA, since its user numbers has dropped below the threshold. Facebook seems to be having some engagement issues in Europe, and you love to hear it. Both companies are required to pay and comply within 60 days, or further periodic penalty payments will be levied.
Linux on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE use the s390x hardware architecture to run various Linux distributions, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and Ubuntu. Tens of thousands of software packages are tested and distributed through these projects, and various community distributions. Elizabeth K. Joseph at the IBM community website Various Linux distributions are available for the s390x architecture, but physical access to such hardware from IBM is, of course, relatively limited. As such, it's great that IBM tests a variety of open source packages for Linux on s390x, and details the results. If you go to this table, you'll find the detailed list of tested packages, which mostly focuses on development and enterprise software. IBM also offers virtual machine access to s390x hardware, and you can get such access for free for 120 days, allowing you to test Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE. This could definitely make for a fun weekend project to mess around with.
Remember the odd inetpub folder that seemingly randomly appeared on people's root drives after installing a Windows 11 update? Everybody assumed it was something left over from an update script, and that the folder was safe to remove. Well, it turns out that's not the case, as the empty folder is actually a crucial part of a security fix for a serious vulnerability. Initially undocumented in the official release notes, the empty and seemingly inactive inetpub folder led to user speculation about whether it was a leftover artifact from development or a bug. Microsoft has since clarified that the folder is intentional and part of a critical security improvement. The change addresses CVE-2025-21204, a vulnerability that allowed local attackers to exploit symbolic link (symlink) attacks via Windows Update, potentially granting unauthorized access to protected system files or directories. As part of the fix, the system pre-creates certain directories - including C:\inetpub - to harden the update process and mitigate such attacks. Cyberdom If you've already removed the folder, you can reinstall the April 2025 cumulative update to restore the folder, or you can wait for next month's update roll-up, which will also restore the folder. This lone, empty folder at your Windows PC's root is apparently a crucial part of the security of your computer, but since it took Microsoft a while to publish release notes, nobody knew where it was coming from. The idea that a random, empty folder usually associated with IIS could be part of a vulnerability mitigation didn't cross anybody's mind at the time, especially since random folders appearing at a Windows PC's root aren't exactly uncommon or out of the ordinary. The consensus seems to be that creating this folder is a pretty clever form of mitigation, despite feeling so hacky. I'm assuming Microsoft's engineers are capable, and that making the folder in question impossible to delete or somehow hidden is simply not an option and would break the vulnerability mitigation, but that doesn't change the fact that this looks like a really crude hack that should be solved in a more elegant way.
Ars Technica took a look at how the current version of Windows Recall works, including the improvements Microsoft made since the initial security nightmare of a rollout, and concludes: Recall continues to demand an extraordinary level of trust that Microsoft hasn't earned. However secure and private it is-and, again, the version people will actually get is much better than the version that caused the original controversy-it just feels creepy to open up the app and see confidential work materials and pictures of your kid. You're already trusting Microsoft with those things any time you use your PC, but there's something viscerally unsettling about actually seeing evidence that your computer is tracking you, even if you're not doing anything you're worried about hiding, even if you've excluded certain apps or sites, and even if you know" that part of the reason why Recall requires a Copilot+ PC is because it's processing everything locally rather than on a server somewhere. Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica Way back in 1996, Mercedes-Benz unveiled the A-Class, a small, practical car that purported to be more premium than cheaper, similarly-sized cars from other brands. The car had a big problem, though - it was unusually narrow and tall, and because of it, it famously failed spectacularly at the moose test", in which a car has to suddenly swerve around a moose" on the road. The car simply toppled over, and after initially denying the problem, Mercedes recalled every single A-Class sold and added a variety of mitigations like electronic stability control and suspension changes. As far as I can recall, it fixed the issue. To this day, however, I cannot look at an A-Class, even the modern ones which look like normal hatchbacks and bear effectively zero resemblance to the original, quirky A-Class from 1996, and not think of the failed moose test and the recall. I know the modern A-Class won't fail that test, and I know it's an infinitely safer car than the original one, but my brain still makes that connection every time I see one. A lot of people my age, whether they're into cars or not, seem to remember this recall, because the original A-Class was such a unique and recognisable vehicle at the time, especially coming from Mercedes. My point is - Recall will face this same issue. No matter how secure Microsoft makes it, no matter how much they claim and prove it only runs locally, no matter how hard they try and hammer on the fact data never leaves your PC, people will always think of that initial botched rollout, and all the accurate reporting that Recall was a nightmare. And it just so happens that the skepticism is warranted, and hopefully keeps people from using this corporate Trojan horse.
We'd like to thank our outgoing sponsor, Nova Custom, for sponsoring OSNews! Nova Custom, based in The Netherlands, makes laptops focused on privacy, customisation, and freedom. Nova Custom laptops ship with either Linux, Windows, or no operating system, and they're uniquely certified for Qubes OS (the V54 model will be certified soon), the ultra-secure and private operating system. On top of that, Nova Custom laptops come with Dasharo coreboot firmware preinstalled, which is completely open source, instead of a proprietary BIOS. Nova Custom can also disable the Intel Management Engine for you, and you can opt for Dasharo coreboot+Heads for the ultimate in boot security. Nova Custom offers visual customisations, too, including engraving a logo or text of your choice on the metal screen lid and/or palmrest and adding your own boot logo. They also offer privacy customisations like removing the microphone and webcam, installing a privacy screen, and more. A small touch I personally appreciate: Nova Custom offers a long, long list of keyboard layouts, as well as the option to customise the super key. Nova Custom products enjoy 3 years of warranty, as well as updates and spare parts for at least seven years after the launch of a product, which includes everything from motherboard replacements down to sets of screws. Nova Custom laptops can be configured with a wide variety of Intel processor options, as well as a choice between integrated Intel GPUs or Nvidia laptop GPUs. Thanks once again to Nova Custom for sponsoring OSNews - for a little longer than anticipated due to our weird RSS/captcha issues.
Only a few weeks ago, I linked to Cameron Kaiser's excellent deep dive into the DEC Professional 380 running PRO/VENIX, and now we have a follow-up. Fortunately, today we have AI we have many more excellent and comprehensive documents on the subject, and more importantly, we've recently brought back up an oddball platform that doesn't have networking either: our DEC Professional 380 running the System V-based PRO/VENIX V2.0, which you met a couple articles back. The DEC Professionals are a notoriously incompatible member of the PDP-11 family and, short of DECnet (DECNA) support in its unique Professional Operating System, there's officially no other way you can get one on a network - let alone the modern Internet. Are we going to let that stop us? Cameron Kaiser No. The answer is always no. If you've ever wanted to know what's involved in setting up a custom TCP/IP stack using serial on a 40 year old UNIX workstation, your very specific desires are hereby met.
I love the Kate Text editor. I use it for pretty much all the programming projects I do. Kate has been around for long time now, about 20 years! At least earliest blog post for it I could find was written in 2004. I wanted to go over my workflow with it, why I like it so much and hopefully get more people to try it out. Akseli Lahtinen Programmers and developers tend to be very set in their ways and have their preferred workflows - which profession doesn't, honestly - and since there's such a wide variety of developer and programming tools out there, it feels like every single developer's workflow and setup is entirely unique. Akseli Lahtinen, KDE developer and allround awesome person, details his setup using Kate, the venerable and feature-rich text editor from the KDE project. As someone who can't program, I can't really compare his workflow to my own, but what I found interesting while reading his post is that there's quite a bit of overlap between my previous work as a translator and his work as a developer. While the contents of each individual view inside his Kate window are obviously different, the setup of windows and tools I had when translating looked very similar. This shouldn't be surprising to me - after all, both translating and developing requires multiple work surfaces, language plugins, formatting tools, tons of keyboard shortcuts, and a whole load of browser tabs, PDF files, and other documents to find just the right translation or the perfect term, as well as a ton of background to make sure you understand the topic you're translating about. Y'all have no idea how much I know about the deepest complex inner-workings and processes of some of the largest organisations in the world, just because I needed to study them and had access to their internal documentation and software. I also read and studied way too many complex contracts, European law, and technical studies into medicine and healthcare treatments, and I guess developers and programmers do the same thing - just focusing on different subjects. What's the best way to do this thing in the programming language I'm using? How does this library I want to integrate work? What are the API endpoints for this service I want to use? It's really not that different from translating, and that never really dawned on me until now.
Synology-branded drives will be needed for use in the newly announced Plus series, with plans to update the Product Compatibility List as additional drives can be thoroughly vetted in Synology systems," a Synology representative told Ars by email. Extensive internal testing has shown that drives that follow a rigorous validation process when paired with Synology systems are at less risk of drive failure and ongoing compatibility issues." Without a Synology-branded or approved drive in a device that requires it, NAS devices could fail to create storage pools and lose volume-wide deduplication and lifespan analysis, Synology's German press release stated. Similar drive restrictions are already in place for XS Plus and rack-mounted Synology models, though work-arounds exist. Kevin Purdy at Ars Technica I'm honestly surprised it's taken Synology this long to start nickle-and-diming its users. I'm sure the Synology-branded" drives will carry substantial markups over regular drives, despite the drives being otherwise identical. Charging insane markups for expansion options is a tried-and-true way to increase your margins, with Apple being the classic example of charging insane prices for basic RAM or SSD upgrades. I think most of us here on OSNews could easily build our own NAS, as it's not a particularly complex project. The various software options could be a bit more complicated to navigate, but I don't think it's insurmountable for most of us. Normal, average people, though, would most likely do best to just buy an off-the-shelf NAS for their storage and local back-up needs, and it's those kind of people who Synology is aiming this policy at. They'll be easily fooled into thinking Synology-branded drives are somehow special, and not just a generic drive with a fancy sticker. This is how the world works, but that doesn't make it any less unpleasant.
Only a few weeks ago we talked about Blue95, a Fedora-based distribution focused on bringing the Windows 95 look to the Linux world by integrating a set of existing Windows 95 Xfce themes. Since Fedora 42 has just been released, the Blue95 project also pushed out a new release, called Blue95 Topanga. It brings with it all the improvements from Fedora 42, but also goes a step further be integrating new applications to further add to the Windows 95 vibe. First, there's Winblues Paint, a faithful recreation of Windows 95's Paint, using jspaint.app. Second, they've recreated the classic Plus! experience with Chicago95 Plus!, a tool that allows you to take any existing Windows 95/98/ME/XP theme and apply it as-is on Xfce. Topanga also further improves the theming experience with custom Windows 95 icons for LibreOffice as well as custom themes for Audacious and Flatpost, a desktop-agnostic Flatpak client. I adore that this project aims to be more than just a vessel for the existing Chicago95 theme, and in fact goes so far as to create its own applications. I hope this continues from here on out and doesn't fizzle out.
LXQt, the Qt-based alternative to KDE as Xfce is the GTK-based alternative to GNOME, has released version 2.2.0. LXQt is in the middle of its transition to Wayland, and as such, this release brings a number of fixes and improvements for Wayland, like improved multi-display support and updated compatibility with Wayland compositors. Beyond all the Wayland work, LXQt Power Management now supports power profiles, text rendering in QTerminal and QTermWidget has been improved, the file manager PCManFM-Qt has received a whole slew of new features, and there's the usual smaller bug fixes and changes.
Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, adding to legal troubles that could reshape the $1.86 trillion company and alter its power over the internet. Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a 115-page ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely invisible system of technology that places advertisements on pages across the web. The Justice Department and a group of states had sued Google, arguing that its monopoly in ad technology allowed the company to charge higher prices and take a bigger portion of each sale. David McCabe at The New York Times Google has come under fire from all sides in the United States, being declared an abusive monopoly in two different court cases covering search and now online advertising. In this case, Google controls 87% of the online advertising market in the US, which clearly confers monopoly power onto the company. No actual remedies have been proposed yet in this case, though, but breaking up the company is on the table. Google isn't the only company facing antitrust court cases in the US, as Amazon and Apple, too, have the US government breathing down their necks. All three of these companies have overtly been trying to buy the favour of the new regime in Washington, but so far, without any success. I doubt we'll get as far as a breakup, but I definitely think that's the only real way we'll ever get proper market forces at work again in the technology market. Not that any of us are really consumers" in this online ad business, but of course, monopoly pricing still affects us through higher prices for the goods being advertised. If companies are forced to accept Google's higher pricing for online ads, those costs will definitely be offloaded to consumers. As such, even breaking up a monopoly that doesn't seem to affect us personally can still improve our lives by lowering prices.
ActiveX is a powerful technology that enables rich interactions within Microsoft 365 applications, but its deep access to system resources also increases security risks. Starting this month, the Windows versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Visio will have a new default configuration for ActiveX controls:Disable all controls without notification. Zaeem Patel at the Microsoft 365 Insider Blog Be honest: did any of you know ActiveX was still a thing? Heck, when was the last time you even thought of ActiveX? This technology acted a replacement for Windows' COM and OLE 2.0, and was used to make controls in a whole slew of Microsoft applications. ActiveX controls from one application could also be embedded into another, like showing a toolbar from Word inside an image editor. ActiveX has several major downsides, the two biggest of which are its relative lack of portability, and most of all, its atrocious security record. I'm genuinely surprised it's taken them this long to actively, fully disable the technology by default.
A decade ago, I published a book on privacy Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance." In the book, and since then, in articles and speeches, I have been dispensing advice to people on how to protect their privacy. But my advice did not envision the moment we are in - where the government would collaborate with a tech CEO to strip-mine all of our data from government databases and use it to pursue political enemies. In the parlance of cybersecurity, I had the wrong threat model," which is a fancy way of describing the risks I was seeking to mitigate. I had not considered that the United States might be swept into the rising tide of what scholars call competitive authoritarianism" - authoritarian regimes that retain some of the trappings of democracy, such as elections, but use the power of the state to crush any meaningful dissent. Julia Angwin Democracy is not nearly as much of a given as many people think, and in this day and age, where massive amounts of Americans' data and personal information are collected and stored by the very corporations supporting the Trump regime, Americans have to think very differently about where digital threats actually come from. Nothing protects any American - or anyone visiting America - from ending up in an El Salvadorian concentration camp. Plan accordingly.
I'm not entirely sure how to link to this properly, but what we have here is a simple, to-the-point text file describing some of the benefits of Slackware, the oldest still maintained Linux distribution. It's still run by Patrick Volkerding, and focuses on conservative choices and simplicity over ease. I doubt I have to explain the benefits of Slackware to the average OSNews reader, but this simple little text file does serve as a great marketing tool. The fact it's a simple little text file is so very Slackware. I love it.
CISA says the U.S. government has extended MITRE's funding to ensure no continuity issues with the critical Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program. The announcement follows a warning from MITRE Vice President Yosry Barsoum that government funding for the CVE and CWE programs was set to expire today, April 16, potentially leading to widespread disruption across the cybersecurity industry. Sergiu Gatlan at BleepingComputer Elect clowns, live in a circus.
As some of you may have noticed, we've been having some issues with captchas. The powers that be - which isn't me, I don't know anything about web development - are looking into it, and once we've pinpointed the problem we'll get it fixed. It's annoying us too, so we want this resolved as quickly as possible. OSNews readers just trying to visit the site to read some tech stuff should not be subjected to selecting squares with buses or crosswalks. Our apologies for the annoyance, and I'll update this post once the issue's been resolved.
Fedora 42 has been released, bringing with it a major policy change: the Fedora KDE version now has the same status as the GNOME version. This means that Fedora KDE will be getting the same promotion, website space, and potential blocker status as the GNOME version. For now, the naming is a bit weird - Fedora Workstation for GNOME, Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop for KDE - but they intend to fix this down the line. Feodra 42 also brings with it a brand new installation interface, which replaces the old one with a newer, step-by-step wizard-style interface. Anaconda is now also a native Wayland application, instead of running in Xorg. This release also marks the official availability of the Fedora COSMIC spin, bringing System76's Rust-based COSMIC desktop on the same footing as Xfce, LXQt, and others. Another cool addition is FEX for those of us running Fedora on ARM. Fedora now provides FEX, a fast emulator that allows one to run x86 and x86-64 binaries on an AArch64 Linux host. FEX requires a number of supporting components, including a RootFS image, and integration with muvm to support 16k page-size hosts. The purpose of this Change is to integrate FEX itself and its supporting components into Fedora Linux, to provide a delightful out-of-box experience for users that want to run x86 and x86-64 binaries on their aarch64 systems. This also includes integration into the AArch64 Fedora KDE spin as a non-blocking component of the spin. Fedora 42 release notes You can download and install Fedora 42, or if you're already a Fedora user, you can upgrade through your graphical update utility or the command line using DNF.
EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager) is a full-featured tiling X window manager for Emacs built on top of XELB. exwm GitHub page It supports both tiling and stacking windows, dynamic workspaces, RandR, a system tray, and a lot more. XELB stands for X protocol Emacs Lisp Binding, and it's a pure Elisp implementation of X11 protocol based on the XML description files from XCB project".
Isaac Marovitz, the developer of Whiskey, a frontend for Apple's Game Porting Toolkit and Wine, has decided to throw in the towel. The developer is advising users to buy CrossOver instead, which provides the same service. The reasoning behind their decision seems sound, and are actually quite noble and considerate. First and foremost, it's the usual problem lone developers run into: they lost interest in the project, and to make matters worse, they're only a student and simply lack the time to keep working on a project they're simply not really into anymore. Running a complicated project like this on your own, unpaid, while also having to study is hard at the best of times, and if you're also not interested in it anymore it quickly becomes a massive burden. The second reason is that originally, Whiskey was just supposed to be a frontend for Wine on the Mac, without actually making any changes to Wine itself. The release of Apple's Game Porting Toolkit changed the game, though, and all of a sudden Whiskey ended up shipping not just a nice frontend, but also custom versions of Wine. Marovitz states he doesn't have the required knowledge and expertise to work on Wine, and as such, can't contribute back to Wine and CrossOver, which feels bad. By contrast, Whisky is based on CrossOver, but we don't produce any bespoke fixes. I, quite frankly, do not have the requisite skills or time to do so. As a result, the amount that Whisky as a whole contributes to Wine is practically zero. This is not a fair trade, and continuing this parasitic relationship could easily harm CrossOver's continued profitability and the existence of Wine on Mac as a whole. Isaac Marovitz Wine, of course, has a ton of funding behind it these days, especially from Valve, but Valve's interest lies solely and exclusively on Linux. While all of Valve's funds and the work of Wine developers does benefit the Mac, much of the Wine on Mac work is done by CrossOver. I find it incredibly honest and respectful of Marovitz to make it clear he doesn't want to leech off other people's work without providing anything in return. So, Whiskey is no more, but for the few Mac users who want to play Windows games on their Mac, CrossOver exists as a refuge that should work just fine.
There's a small house ( ) in the middle of IBM's infamous character set Code Page 437. Small house"-that's the official IBM name given to the glyph at code position 0x7F, where a control character for Delete" (DEL) should logically exist. It's cute, but a little strange. I wonder, how did it get there? Why did IBM represent DEL as a house, of all things? Heikki Lotvonen Don't waste any time here, and go read the article. It's immediately become one of my favourite reads of all time.
Over 15 years ago, I wrote about the launch of a Paint.NET clone for Linux, called Pinta, written in GTK. That was merely version 0.1, and over time, it's become somewhat of a staple for many Linux users. The project just released version 3, which is a major revision, moving the application over to GTK4 and Libadwaita. Built on the robust GTK 4 toolkit and the sleek Libadwaita, Pinta 3.0 brings a redesigned user interface that's faster, more responsive, and more efficient than ever. Linux users will also benefit from improved system utility integration. On top of all this, new effects and the return of add-ins-previously disabled due to technical constraints-promise to bring even more creative possibilities. Pinta 3.0 release announcement Aside from the new user interface and return of add-ins, virtually every aspect of the application seems to have been touched in one way or another. We've got improved performance for both the UI and the application's functionality, better gesture and touch support, redesigned and adaptive toolboxes, improved keyboard support, new effects, and much, much more. Like its original inspiration Paint.NET, Pinta sits between a basic image editor like Microsoft Paint and much more advanced tools like Photoshop and GIMP, and it seems this new release sticks to that position in the market. You can download Pinta 3.0 for Linux, Windows, and macOS, and it will surely find its way to your distribution's repository soon enough.
One thing I love about Python is how it comes with its very own built-in zen. In moments of tribulations, when I am wrestling with crooked code and tangled thoughts, I often find solace in its timeless wisdom. Susam Pal I can't program and know nothing about Python, but this still made me laugh.
Remember Windows Recall, the Windows feature that would take a screenshot of your desktop every three seconds, stored them in a database, and then let you search through them at later dates? The feature has been hobbled by implementation problems, security issues, and privacy troubles, and has been released in preview and pulled since its original unveiling. Well, it's back in testing now for users of the Release Preview Channel. As you use your Copilot+ PC throughout the day working on documents or presentations, taking video calls, and context switching across activities, Recall will take regular snapshots and help you find things faster and easier. When you need to find or get back to something you've done previously, open Recall and authenticate with Windows Hello. Windows Insider blog The AI" magic (meaning, OCR and image recognition, but with sparkles) runs locally, on device, and supposedly, the collected screenshots and data extracted from them never leave your device - at least, for now. The tech industry has a long history of relegating its promises, so excuse me if I don't have a ton of faith in this data remaining on a Windows PC for too long into the future. Case in point, a related Windows Copilot feature: Copilot Vision. This is very similar to Windows Recall, but instead of taking automating screenshots every few seconds, you can invoke it manually so that Copilot will read" the current contents of your desktop, applications, and so on, allowing you to ask questions, get help, and so on. The kicker, however, is that while the screenshots and resulting data from Recall supposedly remains on your machine, whatever Copilot Vision does is done on Microsoft's servers. In other words, a feature very similar to Windows Recall is already sending your personal, private data to Microsoft. I'm sorry, but I just don't think Windows Recall will remain on-device" for very long. The temptation to hoover that data up into the giant advertising machine is too great, and there's no way in hell Microsoft will be able to resist it.
Yesterday we had SDL2 for the classic Mac OS, today we have modern SSL/TLS for the classic Mac OS. This is a C89/C90 port of MbedTLS for Mac System 7/8/9. It works, and compiles under Metrowerks Codewarrior Pro 4. This is a basic app that performs a GET request on whatever is in api.h, and prints the result out to the text box (with a lot of debug information, of course). The idea of this project was to build an app' of sorts for 640by480, my instagram clone for vintage digital cameras'. The idea would be to login, post images, view images, and read comments. I would need HTTPS for that, so here we are: a port of MbedTLS for the classic mac. MacSSL GitHub page It's remarkable what tenacity can achieve.
I've long lost the ability to keep track of whatever's happening in the Amiga community, and personally I tend to just focus on tracking MorphOS and AROS as best I can. The remnants of the real AmigaOS, and especially who owns, maintains, and develops which version, are mired in legal battles and ownership limbo, and since I can think of about a trillion things I'd rather do than keep track of the interpersonal drama by reading various Amiga forums, I honestly didn't even realise there's been a development in the Hyperion Entertainment situation. Hyperion Entertainment is the Belgian company who has been developing both AmigaOS 4 and 3.1/3.2 for a while now, but the company's largest shareholder, Ben Hermans BV, went bankrupt, causing its shares to be annulled as prescribed under Belgian law. This happened well over a decade ago, but only earlier this year, in January, was the situation resolved for Hyperion: a new director, Timothy De Groote, was appointed by the remaining shareholders, who also instructed Hyperion to continue development of Amiga OS. In addition, a few days ago, Hyperion released Update 3 for AmigaOS 3.2, adding a bunch of fixes and improvements to AmigaOS 3.2.2. It brings various updates to ReAction classes, a new custom menu for TextEditor users can customise with macros, a new KickStart 3.2.3 ROM, and many more smaller updates and fixes. The update is free for existing users. AmigaOS 3.2 is available for classic Amigas.
Well, this you certainly don't see every day. This is a rough draft" of SDL2 for MacOS 9, using CodeWarrior Pro 6 and 7. Enough was done to get it building in CW, and the start of a macosclassic" video driver was created. It DOES seem to basically work, but much still needs to be done. Event handling is just enough to handling Command-Q, there is no audio, etc etc etc. A cast of thousands The hardest part was a video driver for the classic Mac OS, which had to be created mostly from scratch using the QNX driver as a skeleton" because it happened to be the smallest one. It works on both m68k and PowerPC as well as on SheepShaver and Basilisk II, and there's already a few screenshots of it up and running at the link, too. Amazing work, and it opens the door for a whole bunch of especially games to be made available on classic Mac OS.
This month's security updates for Windows 11 create a new empty folder on drive C. It is called inetpub," and it does not contain any extra folders or files. Its properties window shows 0 bytes in size and that it was created by the system itself. Neowin checked a bunch of Windows 11 PCs with the April 2025 security updates installed, and all of them had inetpub on drive C. Taras Buria at Neowin So this folder, inetpub, is most likely coming from Microsoft's Internet Information Services, the company's web server. IIS is part of Windows, but inactive by default, and it seems some buggy update script somewhere forgot to remove the folder or created it by accident. Regardless, it seems you can remove it without any issue, so if you see it on your Windows' root drive, just delete it any be on your merry way. Still though, something about this seems odd, right? Internet Information Services as a core product hasn't been updated since 2018 when version 10 came out, which doesn't necessarily mean specific Windows updates might not have changed it since then, but it doesn't exactly inspire confidence. The Internet Information Services' website also hasn't been updated in ages, and is broken in places, further adding to the feeling IIS seems to be mostly abandoned, only kept going as part of Windows updates because it's, well, part of Windows. I'm not trying to insinuate there's anything nefarious or dangerous going on with this silly folder glitch or anything; I was just surprised to see such an outdated, seemingly abandoned web server suite still being a default part of Windows today.
IBM today announced the IBM z17, the next generation of the company's iconic mainframe, fully engineered with AI capabilities across hardware, software, and systems operations. Powered by the new IBM TelumII processor, IBM z17 expands the system's capabilities beyond transactional AI capabilities to enable new workloads. IBM z17 press release Alongside this brand new behemoth of a computer, IBM also announced z/OS 3.2, the next version of its mainframe operating system, which brings with it even more AI" buzzwords and features. z/OS 3.2 is slated for release later in 2025. It it is highly unlikely any one of us will ever get to interact with any of this hardware or software.
With FreeDOS being, well, DOS, you'd think there wasn't much point in putting out major releases and making big changes, and you'd mostly be right. However, being a DOS clone doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement within the confines of the various parts and tools that make up DOS, and that's exactly where FreeDOS focuses its attention. FreeDOS 1.4 comes about three years after 1.3. This version includes an updated FreeCOM, Install program, and HTML Help system. This also includes improvements to many of the utilities including FDISK, JEMM, 7Zip, FORMAT, FASM, MORE, RUNTIME, and more! FreeDOS website If you're using FreeDOS, you're most likely doing so for a highly specialised task, and racing to upgrade isn't exactly high on your list of priorities. Still, it's great to see FreeDOS moving forward and improving where it can.
Remember when Qualcomm promised Linux would be a first-tier platform alongside Windows for its Snapdragon X Elite, almost a year ago now? Well, the Snapdragon X laptop have been out in the market for a while running Windows, but Linux support is still a complete crapshoot, despite the lofty promises by Qualcomm. Tuxedo, a European Linux OEM who promised to ship a Snapdragon X laptop running Linux, has posted an update on its progress, and it's not looking good. While Tuxedo did reach a major milestone last week by sending the laptop's device tree to the LKML, that's where the good news ends. The next step is to support additional components of the ARM notebook within the device tree. This includes all USB functionalities, including USB4, external monitor connectivity via HDMI, and audio features, such as the headset jack. Additionally, driver testing is on the agenda. Unfortunately, a planned collaboration with Qualcomm, the manufacturer of the Snapdragon X Elite, did not materialize. However, we are in contact with the ARM specialists at Linaro and have sent test devices to them. We hope to receive valuable feedback from their developers and the community in the near future. Tuxedo's website This seems to indicate that Qualcomm isn't as interested in Linux support after all, which may be because the Snapdragon X machines haven't exactly taken over the laptop market as Microsoft and Qualcomm had hoped. The market for these things is probably not large enough for Qualcomm to justify investing in Linux support, especially when Windows on ARM is apparently not up to snuff yet either. In case you are unaware of why device trees are such a big thing in ARM land, it's because ARM devices do not have a nice ACPI table for operating systems to read system information from. Whereas x86 devices have their hardware components laid out in a nice ACPI table in UEFI, ARM devices do not, meaning that the Linux kernel needs to know specifically which device you're using so it can load the correct device tree. On x86, this isn't necessary, as the Linux kernel can just read the ACPI table, which works 99% of the time to get it to boot, even if specific components might not be supported (yet). On ARM, without a device tree, the Linux kernel doesn't know what to do. That's one of the major reasons why it's so hard for ARM to take off in the same way x86 once did. It's just not designed to be infinitely intercompatible and interoperable as we've come to expect from the x86 world, and I don't think anybody has any vested interest in changing that. I had hoped Microsoft might throw its weight around here, but it seems that's not happening either. The ARM desktop/laptop revolution seems mostly confined to Apple for now.
Another month, another month of Redox improvements and bug fixes. This month saw a ton of work on process management as part of the NLnet grant, massive improvements to the USB stack, including a USB hub driver, as well as the usual kernel and driver improvements. On top of all this work, there's the usual long list of bugfixes and smaller improvements.
Software gets more complicated. All of this complexity is there for a reason. But what happened to specializing? When a house is being built, tons of people are involved: architects, civil engineers, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, interior designers, roofers, surveyors, pavers, you name it. You don't expect a single person, or even a whole single company, to be able to do all of those. Vitor M. de Sousa Pereira I've always found that software development gets a ton of special treatment and leeway in quality expectations, and this has allowed the kind of stuff the linked article is writing about to become the norm. Corporations can demand so much from developers and programmers to the point where expecting quality is wholly unreasonable, because there's basically no consequences for delivering a shit product. Bugs, crashes, security issues, lack of documentation, horrid localisation - it's all par for the course in software, yet we would not tolerate any of that in almost any other type of product. While I'm sure some of this can be attributed to developers themselves, most of it seems to stem from incompetent managers imposing impossible deadlines downwards and setting unrealistic expectations upwards - you know, kick down, lick up - creating a perfect storm of incompetence. We all know it, we all experience it every day, and we all hate it - but we've just accepted it. As consumers, as developers, as regulatory bodies. It's too late to fix this now. Software development will forever exist as a sort of no man's land of quality expectations, free from regulations, warranties, and consumer protections, and imposing them now after the fact is never going to be accepted by the industry and won't ever make it through any lawmaking process of any country, and we all suffer from it, both as users of software and as makers of it.
Apple's Darwin operating system is the Unix-like core underpinning macOS, iOS, and all of Apple's modern OS platforms. At its heart lies the XNU kernel - an acronym humorously standing for X is Not Unix." XNU is a unique hybrid kernel that combines a Mach microkernel core with components of BSD Unix. This design inherits the rich legacy of Mach (originating from 1980s microkernel research) and the robust stability and POSIX compliance of BSD. The result is a kernel architecture that balances modularity and performance by blending microkernel message-passing techniques with a monolithic Unix kernel structure. We'll go through a chronological exploration of Darwin and XNU's evolution - from Mach and BSD origins to the modern kernel features in macOS on Apple Silicon and iOS on iPhones. We'll follow this with a deep dive into the architectural milestones, analyze XNU's internal design (Mach-BSD interaction, IPC, scheduling, memory management, virtualization), and examine how the kernel and key user-space components have adapted to new devices and requirements over time. Tanuj Ravi Rao Despite its popularity and open source kernel, it's quite rare to see detailed deep-dives into the underpinnings of macOS. It always surprised me that nobody took whatever Apple threw across the fence every macOS release and ran with it - much further than run existing open source desktops but worse" we never got when it comes to Darwin distributions (although this might change) - so perhaps having more approachable articles like these out and about get people interested.
This is a very small blog post about my first reverse engineering project, in which I don't really reverse engineer anything yet, but I am just getting started! A family member asked me to add additional book data to the LeapStart he bought for his son, this is the starting point here. leloubil's blog We've all seen toy, child-focused computers like these, and I always find them deeply fascinating. I'm not buying them for my own kids - they'll get their start on a real" computer I'll set up for them to explore and break - but I see their value, and they're probably a better choice than giving a kid a tablet or whatever (which my wife and I are opposed to for our kids). What fascinates me about them is, of course, what software, and more specifically, what operating system they run. It turns out this one most likely runs on something called C/OS-II, one of the many relatively obscure embedded operating systems you never hear about. C/OS is a full-featured embedded operating system originally developed by Micrim. In addition to the two highly popular kernels, C/OS features support for TCP/IP, USB-Device, USB-Host, and Modbus, as well as a robust File System. C/OS GitHub page The documentation provides a lot more detail about its capabilities, so if you're interested in learning more, that's your starting point.
Good news for Windows users, and for once there's not a hint of sarcasm here: Microsoft has started rolling out Windows Hotpatch to the client versions of Windows. This feature, which comes from the server versions of Windows, allows the operating system to install patches to in-memory processes, removing the need for a number of restarts. Obviously, this is hugely beneficial for users, as they won't have to deal with constant reboots whenever a new bunch of Windows updates are pushed. There are some limitations and other things you should know. First, the way the system works is that every quarter, installations with Hotpatch enabled will receive a quarterly baseline update that requires a reboot, followed by two months of hotpatches which do not require a reboot. Hotpatches can only be security updates; new features and enhancements are rolled up into the quarterly baseline updates. In other words, while this will not completely eliminate reboots, it will cut the number of reboots per year down from twelve to just four, which is substantial, and very welcome in especially corporate environments. The biggest limitation, however, is that Windows Hotpatch will only make it to one client version of Windows, Enterprise version 24H2, so users of the Home or Professional version are out of luck for now. On top of that, you're going to need a Microsoft subscription, use Microsoft Intune, and an Intel/AMD-based system (Hotpatch will come to ARM later). I hope it'll make its way to Windows 11 Home and Professional, too, because I'm fairly sure quite a few of you using Windows would love to set this up on your own machines.
This question was asked during my Boot Camp presentation last fall in Boston, and over the past 35 years dozens of times people have asked, how big is VMS? That translates into how many lines of code are in VMS"? I thought it was time to at least make a stab at pursuing some insight into the answer. I wrote some command procedures to count the number of source lines in .B32, .B64, .C, .MAR, .M64, and .S files. Not counted are blank lines and lines beginning with the standard comment characters and miscellaneous directives for the particular language. Clair Grant As always with the lines of code' metric, there's some real arbitrariness going on, and in this case that means things like excluding networking, which to me seems like a core part of an operating system, but alas, choices need to be made. The final tally for lines of code, as per the definition used in the article, in the most recent version of OpenVMS, version 9.2-3, is almost 1.9 million. Do with that information as you please. What's really fascinating, though, are the deltas between the versions investigated in this article: V6.2 (May 1995, port to Alpha), V7.2 (February 1999, kernel threads, 64-bit APIs, Galaxy, and more), V8.2 (February 2005, port to Itanium), V9.2-3 (december 2024, port to x86). Going from one version to the next, roughly 400000 lines of code were added each time - the article doesn't theorise about the consistency of this number, and I suspect it's mostly just a fun coincidence, but it does jump out.
Microsoft is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and in honour of this milestone, Bill Gates has published a blog post about the first code the company ever wrote. In 1975, Paul Allen and I created Microsoft because we believed in our vision of a computer on every desk and in every home. Five decades later, Microsoft continues to innovate new ways to make life easier and work more productive. Making it 50 years is a huge accomplishment, and we couldn't have done it without incredible leaders like Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella-along with the many people who have worked at Microsoft over the years. Bill Gates There's obviously no denying the impact Microsoft has had on the computer industry and the world as a whole, and a lot of that impact is not exactly what you would call positive. I find the fact that the blog post by Gates is nothing but JavaScript that slows down some browsers and devices, breaks page up/page down navigation for some people, does not allow for text selection, and whose source code is just a bunch of scripts without any of the actual text is a biting metaphor for the role Microsoft has played in the industry. Making today's celebrations even more biting is the fact that Microsoft's role in the ongoing genocide in Gaza is causing a lot of unrest within the company. Twice now today, presentations and talks by Microsoft's current and former CEOs have been interrupted by Microsoft employees protesting Microsoft's contributions to the genocide in Gaza, and before the day's over there will probably be more incidents like these. One of the Microsoft employees who protested, Ibtihal Aboussad, also sent an email to thousands of Microsoft employees, detailing why Microsoft employees are protesting today. My name is Ibtihal, and for the past 3.5 years, I've been a software engineer on Microsoft's AI Platform org. I spoke up today because after learning that my org was powering the genocide of my people in Palestine, I saw no other moral choice. This is especially true when I've witnessed how Microsoft has tried to quell and suppress any dissent from my coworkers who tried to raise this issue. For the past year and a half, our Arab, Palestinian, and Muslim community at Microsoft has been silenced, intimidated, harassed, and doxxed, with impunity from Microsoft. Attempts at speaking up at best fell on deaf ears, and at worst, led to the firing of two employees for simply holding a vigil. There was simply no other way to make our voices heard. Ibtihal Aboussad It goes without saying that Ibtihal Aboussad can probably go and clean out her desk after this, but giving up what must be a high-paying job - and possibly risking worse under the current Trump regime - for standing up and protesting an ongoing genocide is nothing but praise-worthy and noble. It obviously won't stop the genocide or make Microsoft even blink, but it's better than doing nothing, and it does painfully highlight how many other Microsoft employees remain silent while the company they work for does an IBM. I don't really care about Microsoft's 50th anniversary. Look at any of the company's current products - Office, Windows, the AI" stuff - and there's clearly nothing left. They're empty shells of what they used to be, hollowed out, their contents replaced with upsells, dark patterns, cruft, and AI" nonsense nobody wants. But hey, at least Microsoft is creating synergies to make eradicating Gazans easier. Here's your party popper.
The AlphaStation 500 is a workstation from Digital, circa 1996. Mine is a 500 MHz model and has an Alpha 21164A processor (aka EV56). And the way it boots is weird. On your common-or-garden PC, there has always been some kind of ROM chip. It holds a piece of firmware known as the BIOS. This ROM chip is available at a well-known location in the processor's address space (remembering that any PC processor boots up in 16-bit, 8088 compatible mode, with a 1 MiB address space, just like an IBM PC 5150) and the processor just starts executing code in it after reset. The Alpha (or at least this AlphaStation 500 - although I think they mostly worked like this) is different. Jonathan theJPster' Pallant A great read, but a little bit over my head considering I'm anything but a programmer or developer. Still, even I managed to get the basic gist and learn quite a bit from this article, and especially the part about how the AlphaStation uses a little jumper to tell the SROM exactly which stream of boot code to send to the processor is fascinating. I'm not sure just how unusual the Alpha's way of booting is, but I'd at least never heard of it.
There isn't a lot to this story beyond the fact that in around 1990 I helped debug someone's Lotus 1-2-3 set up via fax. But it's a good reminder of how important the Zeroth Law of Debugging is (see below). Without some sort of online connection with these folks, and with transatlantic phone calls being very, very expensive (I was in the UK, they were in the US) fax was the obvious answer. John Graham Honestly, this would still be easier today than some of the bug reporting systems I've seen.
If you're elbow-deep in '90s retrocomputing and maintain a fleet of your own personal seemingly identical but definitely completely different Windows 98 machines, Windows 9x QuickInstall is tailor-made just for you. It takes the root file system of an already installed Windows 98 system and packages it, whilst allowing drivers and tools to be slipstreamed at will. For the installer, it uses Linux as a base, paired with some tools to allow hard disk partitioning and formatting, as well as a custom installer with a custom data packing method that is optimized for streaming directly from CD to the hard disk without any seeking. Windows 9x QuickInstall gitHub page What you end up with is an easily customisable packaged Windows 98 installation that can be installed onto computers (or in virtual machines, I guess) at blazing speeds. It's a relatively simple concept, but its implementation is genius and definitely not simple at all. This is a great tool for the retrocomputing community.
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