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.
VisiCalcon the Apple II.Lotus 1-2-3on the IBM PC.Aldus PageMakeron the Macintosh.Deluxe Painton the Amiga. The computer industry loves a killer app," that unique piece of software that compels consumers to purchase new computer hardware just for the privilege of running it. I can personally attest toDeluxe Paintas it compelled even my technophobic mother to buy into its potential. Christopher Drum Even though I knew what Deluxe Paint for the Amiga was, I never really delved any deeper into what, exactly, it was capable of. Drum does a great job setting up an emulated Amiga environment to go back in time to his childhood, and see what it's like to use Deluxe Paint today, in 2025. It turns out it can do things I never thought it could, like create 3D perspective effects, with optional antialiasing even (even though the latter takes multiple minutes to render). In fact, it even has tools to create animations, allowing you to brush across different frames automatically, or even create movement paths in a 3D space by defining start and endpoints for a brush movement. Combine all of these tools, and you can create things like animated doors opening and closing with a clear 3D effect. It's quite neat. It's no secret the Amiga was far ahead of its time, but it's still awe-inspiring to see it in action like this.
With careful observation and a little knowledge of the startup sequence of an Apple silicon Mac, you can learn a lot about what can and can't happen during that sequence. This article explains how, with examples from the log of a Mac mini M4 Pro. Howard Oakley Short and sweet.
This year, 2025, the KDE Community held its yearly conference in Berlin, Germany. On the way I reinstalled FreeBSD on my Frame.work 13 laptop in another attempt to get KDE Plasma 6 Wayland working. Short story:yes, KDE Plasma 6 Wayland on FreeBSD works. Adriaan de Groot Adriaan de Groot is a long-time KDE developer and FreeBSD package maintainer, and he's published a short but detailed guide on setting up a KDE Plasma desktop on FreeBSD using Wayland instead of X11. With the Linux world slowly but finally leaving X11 behind, the BSD world really has little choice but to follow, especially if they want to continue offering the two major desktop environments. Most of KDE and GNOME are focused on Linux, and the BSDs have always kind of tagged along for the ride, and over the coming years that's going to mean they'll have to invest more in making Wayland run comfortably on BSD. Of course, the other option would be the KDE and GNOME experience on the BSDs slowly degrading over time, but I think especially FreeBSD is keen to avoid that fate, while OpenBSD and NetBSD seem a bit more hands-off in the desktop space. FreeBSD is investing heavily in its usability as a desktop operating system, and that's simply going to mean getting Wayland support up to snuff. Not only will KDE and GNOME slowly depend more and more on Wayland, Xorg itself will also become less maintained than it already is. Sometimes, the current just takes you where it's going.
If you need to reinstall Windows 11, you're most likely going to need to do a hell of a lot of post-install work to make Windows 11 somewhat manageable. There's countless tools to make this process a little bit easier, and one of them, Flyoobe, just got a major update to aid in removing all the AI" nonsense Microsoft is forcing down the throats of its users. Starting off with version 1.7, people who hate the way Microsoft has been stuffing AI features into Windows 11 will be pleased to know that there is an OOBE view that allows you to discover and disable all AI and Copilot features after the installation of the OS. Moreover, the OOBE view that handles bloat removal has been enhanced too, and now allows presets ranging from Minimal to Full, along with the ability to load custom presets from GitHub. Usama Jawad at Neowin If Microsoft actually cared about the users of its Windows operating system, they would simply include an advanced options view during installation, in which you could customise your installation. Instead, users have to rely on what are essentially hacks to get to a point where their operating system installation can serve their needs, which is batshit insane to me. I'm glad projects like Flyoobe exists, but they shouldn't have to.
Three years ago, the incredibly popular Android launcher Nova Launcher was acquired by Branch, a mobile links and analytics company. Understandably, people were worried this would spell the end of the launcher, as it would certainly become a vessel for tracking and mobile advertising. Weirdly enough, this never actually happened - instead, Nova just kind of fizzled out. First, virtually the entire Nova team was laid off two years after the acquisition, save for Nova's original founder, Kevin Barry, who was not let go. Development had come to a halt already at that point, and ever since, it's been quiet. Until this weekend. Barry posted on his blog that he left Branch, and thus is no longer working on Nova Launcher. You'd think this would be the final nail in the coffin for this once rather ubiquitous launcher, but that's actually not the case, as Barry explains. For the past several months I have been preparing the Open Source release of Nova Launcher. This work included cleaning up the codebase, reviewing licenses, removing or replacing proprietary code, and coordinating with legal to ensure a proper release. When Branch acquired Nova in 2022, Branch then-CEO and founder Alex Austin made several public commitments to the community about Nova's future, including statements about open sourcing: However I was ultimately asked to stop working on Nova Launcher and the open sourcing effort. Kevin Barry Basically, one of the reasons Barry felt comfortable selling Nova to Branch was a contractual agreement - backed up by public statements from then-CEO of Branch, Alex Austin - that if Barry were to leave Branch, he would be allowed to release Nova as open source. It seems that this promise is not being honoured by the new CEO, for unclear reasons, leaving what was arguably one of the best launchers for Android in limbo. Nobody's working on it anymore, and a contractual agreement is not being honoured, for whatever reason. One of the people who used to work on Nova but was part of that first round of layoffs, Cliff Wade, is now trying to raise awareness of this stalemate. He's trying to talk to former colleagues at Branch, and trying to put some pressure on Branch to honour their contractual obligations and public promises. I'm fully behind this effort, because up until the institutional neglect set in, Nova was one of the very best Android applications, clearly made by people who truly understood what Android enthusiasts wanted out of a highly configurable launcher. Branch needs to honour its word, and allow Barry to continue preparing the release of Nova as open source. Head on over to Branch's contact page, and let them know they need to release Nova as open source - in a polite, constructive manner, of course. The people working at Branch are just ordinary folk like you and I, and I will not stand for anyone being aggressive, insulting, or otherwise committing harassment towards Branch and its employees.
Akademy 2025, KDE's yearly developer and community event, this year held in Berlin, Germany. Amid all the various talks and informal meetings, the KDE project also officially unveiled the first alpha release of KDE Linux, a project they've been working on for a while now. KDE Linux will serve as a reference implementation" of KDE Plasma and official KDE applications, for use by developers and regular users alike. KDE Linux will have a quick update cycle, to ensure its users always have the latest releases of KDE Plasma and various other KDE applications and related technologies. It may, however, not be as optimised as other KDE distributions, and the intent of KDE Linux is not to compete with or replace other distributions. The goal is to show other distributions how KDE itself intends for its software to be presented. So, what is KDE Linux based on? KDE Linux is an immutable base OS" Linux distro with a core created using Arch Linux packages - but it should not be considered part of the Arch family of distributions. Some very fundamental Arch technologies (like the pacman package manager!) have been removed. KDE software is then built on top of this core using KDE's homegrown development tools and Flatpak. KDE Linux leans on Systemd for a great deal of functionality. Updates are atomic and image-based, with the last 5 OS images cached on disk for safety. Only the Wayland session is supported. Apps primarily come from Flatpak and Snap. KDE Linux' website The overview of the KDE Linux' architecture provides some more details. I like that it eschews GRUB in favour of systemd-boot (GRUB should be retired in this, the year of our lord 2025) and relies on systemd-sysupdate for operating system updates. Of note is that the mention of Snap is merely for convenience's sake as an option; Snap is not a requirement, nor are any Snap packages installed by default. Since this is the first alpha release, expect bugs and issues, and don't use it on any production machines until they're a few more releases in.
The European Commission today fined Google 2.95 billion for abusing its dominant position in the advertising technology market, despite the threat of trade retribution from U.S President Donald Trump. The American tech giant is alleged to have distorted the market for online ads by favoring its own services to the detriment of competitors, advertisers and online publishers, the EU executive said in a press release. Jacob Parry at Politico Not only does Google have to pay a pretty hefty fine - for corporate standards, as it's still peanuts when looking at Google's revenue, because class justice is real - the company also has to submit a plan within 60 days detailing how it's going to end the illegal behaviour. Of course, Google is going to contest the fine, but the company is also running to daddy to cry and whine about how those damn Europeans won't let it engage in illegal behaviour. Last night, all the big US technology CEOs gathered for a dinner with Donald Trump, each taking turns gratuitously thanking and praising the big man for his amazing achievements during these first few months of his administration. Tim Cook, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and many more were all bending the knee and kissing the ring in what can only be described as a borderline pornographic display of fealty. Among them was, of course, the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, one day after Google laughed its way out of the courtroom. Well you had a very good day yesterday," Trump said, calling on Pichai at the Thursday evening dinner. Google had a very good day yesterday. Do you want to talk about that big day you had yesterday?" I'm glad it's over," Pichai responded to Trump, causing an eruption of laughter from the other table guests. It's a long process," Pichai said. Appreciate that your administration had a constructive dialogue, and we were able to get it to some resolution." Jennifer Elias at CNBC Mind you, several of those other table guests" are also being investigated by a variety of arms of the US government for monopoly abuse and antritrust violations, and I'm sure their laughter was almost entirely self-serving. If Google of all monopolies can slime its way out of any serious consequences, what hope does that leave that the other tech giants will ever have to face the consequences of their abuse? At least the European Union seems to be mostly holding its head high so far, but one can't help but wonder how long the Phoenician princess can hold off the bull. The fact of the matter is that the European and US economies are heavily intertwined, and we let ourselves become utterly dependent on the US for our defense, too, and with Trump not deterred by Pyrrhic victories, a fallout is definitely not out of the question.
We're all being told that AI" is revolutionizing programming. Whether the marketing is coming from Cursor, Copilot, Claude, Google, or the countless other players in this area, it's all emphasizing the massive productivity and speed gains programmers who use AI" tools will achieve. The relentless marketing is clearly influencing both managers and programmers alike, with the former forcing AI" down their subordinates' throats, and the latter claiming to see absolutely bizarre productivity gains. The impact of the marketing is real - people are being fired, programmers are expected to be ridiculously more productive without commensurate pay raises, and anyone questioning this new corporate gospel will probably end up on the chopping block next. It's like the industry has become a nunnery, and all the nuns are meowing like cats. The reality seems to be, though, that none of these AI" programming tools are making anyone more productive. Up until recently, Mike Judge truly believed AI" was making him a much more productive programmer - until he ran the numbers of his own work, and realised that he was not one bit more productive at all, and his point is that if the marketing is true, and programmers are indeed becoming vastly more productive, where's the evidence? And yet, despite the most widespread adoption one could imagine,these tools don't work. My argument: If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware?We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps - we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam. Mike Judge He proceeded to collect tons of data about new software releases on the iOS App Store, the Play Store, Steam, GitHub, and so on, as well as the number of domain registrations, and the numbers paint a very different picture from the exuberant marketing. Every single metric is flat. There's no spike in new games, new applications, new repositories, new domain registrations. It's all proceeding as if AI" had had zero effect on productivity. This whole thing is bullshit. So if you're a developer feeling pressured to adopt these tools - by your manager, your peers, or the general industry hysteria - trust your gut. If these tools feel clunky, if they're slowing you down, if you're confused how other people can be so productive, you're not broken. The data backs up what you're experiencing. You're not falling behind by sticking with what you know works. If you're feeling brave, show your manager these charts and ask them what they think about it. If you take away anything from this it should be that (A) developers aren't shipping anything more than they were before (that's the only metric that matters), and (B) if someone - whether it's your CEO, your tech lead, or some Reddit dork - claims they're now a 10xer because of AI, that's almost assuredly untrue, demand they show receipts or shut the fuck up. Mike Judge Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence just isn't there. The corporate world has an endless list of productivity metrics - some more reliable than others - and I have the sneaking suspicion we're only fed marketing instead of facts because none of those metrics are showing any impact of AI" whatsoever, because if they did, we know the AI" pushers wouldn't shut the fuck up about it. Show me more than meowing nuns, and I'll believe the hype is real.
I recently removed all advertising from OSNews, and one of the reasons to do so is that online ads have become a serious avenue for malware and other security problems. Advertising on the web has become such a massive security risk that even the very birthplace of the world wide web, CERN, now strongly advises its staff to use adblockers. If you value your privacy and, also important, if you value the security of your computer, consider installing an ad blocker. While there is a plethora of them out there, the Computer Security Office's members use, e.g.uBlock origin (Firefox)orOrigin Lite (Chrome),AdblockPlus,GhosteryandPrivacy Badgerof the US-based Electronic Frontier Foundation. They all come in free (as in free beer") versions for all major browsers and also offer more sophisticated features if you are willing to pay. Once enabled, and depending on your desired level of protection, they can provide another thorough layer of protection to your device - and subsequently to CERN. CERN's Computer Security Office I think it's high time lawmakers take a long, hard look at the state of online advertising, and consider taking strong measures like banning online tracking and targeted advertising. Even the above-board online advertising industry is built atop dubious practices and borderline criminal behaviour, and things only get worse from there. Malicious actors even manage to infiltrate Google's own search engine with dangerous ads, and that's absolutely insane when you think about it. I've reached the point where I consider any website with advertising to be disrespectful and putting its visitors at risk, willingly and knowingly. Adblockers are not just a nice-to-have, but an absolute necessity for a pleasant and safe browsing experience, and that should be an indicator that we need to really stop and think what we're doing here.
As if Francesco P. Lovergine heard my prayers, he wrote an article detailing his experiences with using Guix. Considering he's a longtime Debian developer, we're looking at someone who knows a thing or two about Linux. In the last few months, I have installed and upgraded my second preferred GNU/Linux system, GNU Guix, on multiple boxes. Regarding that system, I have alreadywritten a few introductory postsin the recent past. This is an update about my experiences as a user and developer. I still think Guix is a giant step forward in packaging and management, in comparison with Debian and other distributions, for elegance and inner coherence. Francesco P. Lovergine Lovergine found some problems with Guix, most notably those stemming from a lack of manpower. It's not a hugely popular package management system and associated distribution, so the team of developers behind it is relatively small, and this leads to issues like outdated packages, problems arising from updates, and possible security issues. There's no specific security team, for instance, but at least it's easy to roll back updates due to the nature of Guix. Another problem, partially related to the lack of manpower, stems from the fact that the GNU Guix System uses some unusual systems, most notably GNU Shepard. This init system is an alternative to the widely-used systemd, alongside other alternatives like runit (which I use through Void Linux), but due to its relative lack of popularity, it can take some time for more complex packages to be made compatible with it. Especially some packages - like GNOME - that depend more and more on systemd are going to lag behind on Guix. For anyone with decent Linux experience and a willingness to tinker, I don't think any of these issues - and the others Lovergine mentions - are dealbreakers. Sure, you might not want to deploy the GNU Guix System on a production system or anything that requires solid, strong security, but for personal and enthusiast use it seems like an interesting and somewhat unorthodox Linux distribution.
This assembly language source code represents one of the most historically significant pieces of software from the early personal computer era. It is the complete source code forMicrosoft BASIC Version 1.1 for the 6502 microprocessor, originally developed and copyrighted by Microsoft in 1976-1978. Microsoft BASIC Version 1.1 GitHub page An amazing historical artifact to have, and I'm glad we now have the source code available for posterity. I hope Microsoft gets on with it, though, as I think it's high-time we get official open source releases of things like Windows 3.x, 95, earlier Office releases, and so on.
Microsoft has been working on allowing driver developers to write Windows drivers in Rust, and the company has published a progress report detailing this effort. In the windows-drivers-rsGitHub repository you'll find a bunch of Rust crates for writing Windows drivers in Rust. Using these crates, driver developers can create valid WDM, KMDF, and UMDF driver binaries that load and run on a Windows 11 machine. Drivers written in this manner still need to make use of unsafe blocks for interacting with the Windows operating system, but can take advantage of Rust's rich type system as well as its safety guarantees for business logic implemented in safe Rust. Though there is still significant work to be done on abstracting away these unsafe blocks (more on this below), these Rust drivers can load and run on Windows systems just like their C counterparts. Nate Deisinger at the Windows Driver Developer Blog As mentioned above, there's still work to be done with reducing the amount of unsafe Rust code in these drivers, and Microsoft is working on just that. The company is developing safe Rust bindings and abstractions, as well as additional safe structs and APIs beyond the Windows Driver Framework, but due to the complexity of Windows drivers, this will take a while. Microsoft states that it believes memory-safe languages like Rust are the future of secure software development, but of course, in true Microsoft fashion, the company doesn't want to alienate developers writing traditional drivers in C either.
In 9front, we host almost all parts of our development process on 9front - the git repositories, the mailing list, the ci/cd, the web site, and everything else. (The exception is #cat-v IRC) We use the system regularly, both when hacking on the system and in our personal use. Personally, I write most of my code on Plan 9, read my emails there, and often drive Linux from there. I run my home network off of a 9front CPU server, and host my websites off it. I know other people around 9front do similar. Ori Bernstein It clearly shows, too. If you dive into the 9front community, you'll quickly realise everything runs on 9front, and that does create a sense that the operating system is capable, and that its developers have confidence and pride in their work. Exploring 9front myself, it feels awesome to see that all the documentation I'm reading is being hosted on 9front machines. I'm going to relaunch the OSNews Gemini capsule, this time hosted on 9front, and since countless 9front users host their own Gemini capsules on 9front, I feel confident that I've got people to talk to when I need help. I just need the time to actually sit down and figure out the minutiae of 9front, because it truly is unique.
A little over a year ago, DC District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google is a monopolist and violated US antitrust law. Today, Mehta ruled that while Google violated the law, there won't be any punishment for the search giant. They don't have to divest Chrome or Android, they can keep paying third parties to preload their services and products, and they can keep paying Apple 20 billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS. Mehta declined to grant some of the more ambitious proposals from the Justice Department to remedy Google's behavior and restore competition to the market. Besides letting Google keep Chrome, he'll also let the company continue to pay distribution partners for preloading or placement of its search or AI products. But he did order Google to share some valuable search information with rivals that could help jumpstart their ability to compete, and bar the search giant from making exclusive deals to distribute its search or AI assistant products in ways that might cut off distribution for rivals. Lauren Feiner at The Verge Mehta granted Google a massive win here, further underlining that as long as you're wealthy, a corporation, or better yet, both, you are free to break the law and engage in criminal behaviour. The only thing you'll get is some mild negative press and a gentle pat on the wrist, and you can be on your merry way to continue your illegal behaviour. None of it is surprising, except perhaps for the brazenness of the class justice on display here. The events during and course of this antitrust case mirrors those of the antitrust case involving Microsoft, over 25 years ago. Microsoft, too, had a long, documented, and proven history of illegal behaviour, but like Google today, also got away with a similar gentle pat on the wrist. It's likely that the antitrust cases currently running against Apple and Amazon will end in similar gentle pats on the wrist, further solidifying that you can break the law all you want, as long as you're rich. Thank god the real criminal scum is behind bars.
For an operating system that was once incredibly popular and expected to become a standard for a long time to come, it's remarkable how little experience most people have with CP/M. In fact, many conventions and historical limitations you might be aware of - like the 8.3 filename convention of DOS - come straight from CP/M, as it influenced DOS considerably. It's quite easy to emulate CP/M today, but it's just old and different enough that getting into it might be a but confusing, but that's where Eerie Linux's introduction to CP/M comes into play. This article is just what the headline promises: an introduction to the CP/M operating system. No previous knowledge of 1970s and early '80s operating systems is required. However, some familiarity with Linux or a BSD-style operating system is assumed, as the setup process suggested here involves using a package manager and command-line tools. But why explore CP/M in the 2020s? There are (at least) two good reasons: 1) historical education 2) gaining a better understanding of how computers actually work. Eerie Linux This article is a great way to get up and running with CP/M fairly quickly, and I intend to do just that when I find some time to mess around with it. What are some of the core, crucial applications that one should try on CP/M? Things people would be using back when CP/M was properly in use?
My goal with this article is to share my perspectives on the web, as well as introduce many aspects of modern HTML/CSS you may not be familiar with. I'm not trying to make you give up JavaScript, I'm just trying to show you everything that's possible, leaving it up to you to pick what works best for whatever you're working on. I think there's a lot most web developers don't know about CSS. And I think JS is often used where better alternatives exist. So, let me show you what's out there. Lyra Rebane As someone who famously can't program, the one thing I like about CSS is that I find it quite readable and generally easy to figure out how I can change things like colours, fonts, and so on. Of course, anything more complex will still break my brain, but even the more complex elements are still at least nominally readable, and it's often quite easy to determine what a piece of CSS does, even if I don't know how to manipulate it or how to get even close to any desired result. It's like how the fact I learned Latin and French in high school makes it possible for me to nominally understand a text in Spanish, even if I have never spent a single second studying it. JavaScript, on the other hand, is just a black box, incomprehensible gibberish I can't make heads or tails of, which in my mind goes against what the web is supposed to be about. The web is supposed to be an open platform in more ways than one, and the ability to make a website should not be hidden behind complex programming languages or website builder gatekeepers. The fact JavaScript is a resource hog and misused all over the place sure doesn't help, either. If you want to know more about the current state of CSS, the linked article by Lyra Rebane is a great place to start. I wish I had the skills to finally give OSNews a full makeover, but alas, I don't.
Jussi Pakkanen, creator of the Meson build system, has some words about modules in C++. If C++ modules can not show a 5* compilation time speedup (preferably 10*) on multiple existing open source code base, modules should be killed and taken out of the standard. Without this speedup pouring any more resources into modules is just feeding the sunk cost fallacy. That seems like a harsh thing to say for such a massive undertaking that promises to make things so much better. It is not something that you can just belt out and then mic drop yourself out. So let's examine the whole thing in unnecessarily deep detail. You might want to grab a cup of$beveragebefore continuing, this is going to take a while. Jussi Pakkanen I'm not a programmer so I'm leaving this for the smarter people among us to debate.
The months keep slipping through our fingers, during this, our slow but relentless march towards the inevitability of certain death, so it's time for another month of improvements to Redox, the general-purpose microkernel operating system written in Rust. This past month the work to bring various components of system76's COSMIC desktop environment to Redox continues, with COSMIC Reader making its way to Redox. Jeremy Soller, creator of the Redox project and one of its primary engineers, will be using COSMIC Reader running on Redox to hold a presentation about Redox at RustConf. Aside from that important port, this month - in the middle of Summer on in this hemisphere - seems to mostly consist of a ton of smaller bugfixes and improvements. Relibc, Redox' C standard library, has seen a ton of work, as usual, a few ports were fixed and updated, like vim and OpenSSH, Orbital now has fullscreen support, and so, so much more.
DistroWatch's Jesse Smith is bringing some attention to an issue I have never encountered and had never heard of, and it has to do with antivirus software on Windows. It seems it's not uncommon for antivirus software on Windows to mark Linux ISOs as malware or otherwise dangerous, and it seems people are reporting these findings to DistroWatch, for some reason. DistroWatch makes it clear they don't host any of the ISOs, and that close to all of these warnings from antivirus software are false positives. Sowhy do multiple Windows virus scanners report that they find malware in Linux downloads? Putting aside the obvious conspiracy theories about anti-virus vendors not wanting to lose customers, what is probably happening is the scanners are detecting an archive file (the ISO) which contains executable code, and flagging it as suspicious. Some of the code is even able to change the disk layout, which is something that looks nasty from a security point of view. It's entirely understandable that a malware scanner which sees an archive full of executable code that could change the way the system boots would flag it as dangerous. Jesse Smith at DistroWatch I wonder how many people curious about Linux downloaded an ISO, only to delete is after their Windows antivirus marked it as dangerous. I can't imagine the number to be particularly high - if you're downloading a Linux ISO, you're probably knowledgeable enough to figure out it's a false positive - but apparently it's a big enough issue that DistroWatch needs to inform its readers about it, which is absolutely wild to me.
Another small release for the IceWM window manager - one of the staples of the open source world. IceWM 3.9.0 seems focused mostly on cursor-related changes, as it adds libXcursor as an alternative to XPM cursors. This means IceWM is no longer dependent on libXpm, and gains the benefits that come with Xcursor. There's the usual few bugfixes and translation updates as well.
I stumbled upon an LWN.net article from 2023, in which Lars Wirzenius, a long-time Debian developer and friend of Linus Torvalds, recalls the very early days of Linux - in fact, before it was even called Linux. There's so many fun little stories in here, like how the Linux kernel started out as a multitasking demo written in x86 assembly, which did nothing more than write As and Bs on the screen, or the fact Linux was originally called Freax before Ari Lemmke, one of the administrators offtp.funet.fi, opted for the name Linux" when uploading the first release. However, my favourite story is about what installing Linux was like during those early days. During this time, people were interested in trying out this new thing, so Linus needed to provide an installation method and instructions. Since he only had one PC, he came to visit to install it on mine. Since his computer had been used to develop Linux, which had simply grown on top of his Minix installation, it had never actually been installed before. Thus, mine was the first PC where Linux was ever installed. While this was happening, I was taking a nap, and I recommend this method of installing Linux: napping, while Linus does the hard work. Lars Wirzenius at LWN.net The entire article is a joy to read, and since it's from 2023, I'm sure I'm late to the party and none of it is news to many of you. On a more topical note, Wirzenius published a short article today detailing why he still uses Debian, after all these decades.
I am a huge fan of myRock 5 ITX+. It wraps an ATX power connector, a 4-pin Molex, PoE support, 32 GB of eMMC, front-panel USB 2.0, and two Gen 3*2 M.2 slots around a Rockchip 3588 SoC that can slot into any Mini-ITX case. Thing is, I never put it in a case because the microSD slot lives on the side of the board, and pulling the case out and removing the side panel to install a new OS got old with a quickness. I originally wanted to rackmount the critter, but adding a deracking difficulty multiplier to the microSD slot minigame seemed a bit souls-like for my taste. So what am I going to do? Grab a microSD extender and hang that out the back? Nay! I'm going to neuralyze the SPI flash and install some Kelvin Timeline firmware that will allow me to boot and install generic ARM Linux images from USB. Interfacing Linux Using EDK2 to add UEFI to an ARM board is awesome, as it solves some of the most annoying problems of these ARM boards: they require custom images specifically prepared for the board in question. After flashing EDK2 to this board, you can just boot any ARM Linux distribution - or Windows, NetBSD, and so on - from USB and install it from there. There's still a ton of catches, but it's a clear improvement. The funniest detail for sure, at least for this very specific board, is that the SPI flash is exposed as a block device, so you can just use, say the GNOME Disk Utility to flash any new firmware into it. The board in question is a Radxa ROCK 5 ITX+, and they're not all that expensive, so I'm kind of tempted here. I'm not entirely sure what I'd need yet another computer for, honestly, but it's not like that's ever stopped any of us before.
If you're of a certain age (and not American), there's a specific corporate font you're most likely aware of. You may not know its exact name, and you may not actively remember it, but once you see it, you know exactly what you're looking at. The font's called Nokia Sans (and Nokia Serif), and it was used by pretty much every single Nokia device between roughly 2002 and 2013 or so, when it was replaced by a very bland font made by Bruno Maag (with help from the person who designed Comic Sans) that they used after that. I can't remember why, exactly, but I got majorly nostalgic for Nokia's characteristic, recognisable font, and decided to see if it would work as a user interface font. Now, the font is still owned by Nokia and I couldn't find a proper place to download it, but I eventually stumbled upon a site that had each individual variant listed for download. I downloaded each of them, installed them using KDE's font installation method, and tried it out as my user interface font. You'll quickly discover you shouldn't use the regular variant, but should instead opt for the Nokia Sans Wide variant. Back in 2011, when Nokia originally announced it was replacing Nokia Sans, the creator of the font, Erik Spiekermann, responded to the announcement on his blog. Apparently, one of the major reasons for Nokia to change fonts was that they claimed Nokia Sans wouldn't work as a user interface font, but Spiekermann obviously disagrees, pointing specifically to the Wide variant. In fact, Spiekermann does not pull any punches. After 10 years it was high time to look at Nokia's typefaces as the dominant visual voice of the brand but whoever decided on a completely new direction was either not aware of what was available or was persuaded by Bruno Maag to start over. Bruno may not create the most memorable typefaces, but he certainly knows how to sell them. And technically, their fonts are excellent. Too bad they didn't have the confidence to work with me on an update. Instead they're throwing out ten years of brand recognition in favour of blandness. Erik Spiekermann I was pleasently surprised by just how nice the font looks when used as a general user interface font. It's extremely legible at a variety of sizes, and has a ton of character without becoming gimmicky or overbearing. What originally started as mere curiosity has now become my UI font of choice on all my machines, finally displacing Inter after many years of uncontested service. Of course, all of this is deeply personal and 95% an issue of taste, but I wanted to write about it to see if I'm just entirely crazy, or if there's some method to my madness. Do note that I'm using high DPI displays, and KDE on Wayland, and that all of this may look different on Windows or macOS, or on displays with lower DPI. One of Inter's strengths is that it renders great on both high and lower DPI displays, but since I don't have any lower DPI displays anymore, I can't test it in such an environment. I'm also not entirely sure about the legal status of downloading fonts like this, but I am fairly sure you're at least allowed to use non-free fonts for personal, non-commercial use, but please don't quote me on that. Since downloading each variant of these Nokia fonts is annoying, I'd love to create and upload a zip file containing all of them, but I'm sure that's illegal. I'm not a font connoisseur, so I may be committing a huge faux pas here? Not that I care, but reading about font nerds losing their minds over things I never even noticed is always highly entertaining.
Blocky Planet is a tech demo I created in theUnity game enginethat attempts to map Minecraft's cubic voxels onto a spherical planet. The planet is procedurally generated and fully destructible, allowing players to place or remove more than 20 different block types. While much of the implementation relies on common techniques you'd expect from your average Kirkland brand Minecraft clone, the spherical structure introduces a number of unique design considerations. This post will focus on these more novel challenges. Bowerbyte What a great read. Turning a flat earth' game like Minecraft into something taking place on a spherical world seems impossible at first, but it seems Bowerbyte managed to do it. If you've ever wondered what it would be like to play a Minecraft-like game on an actual sphere, this is it.
Genode 25.08 is ripe with deeply technical topics that have been cooking since the beginning of the year or even longer. In particular our new kernel scheduler as the flagship feature of this release has been in the works since February 2024. SectionKernel scheduling for fairness and low latencytells its background story and explains the approach taken. Another culmination of a long-term endeavor is the introduction of an alternative to XML syntax, specifically designed for the usage patterns of Genode and Sculpt OS. SectionConsideration of a lean alternative to XMLkicks off the practical evaluation of an idea that gradually evolved over more than two years. Also the holistic storage optimizations presented in SectionBlock-storage stack renovationsare the result of careful long-term analysis, planning, and execution. Genode 25.08 release notes While these are the three tentpole features for this release, there's a whole lot more here, as well. Genode's Linux-based PC device drivers have all been updated to Linux 6.12, there are a ton of fixes related to USB, optional EFI boot support in VirtualBox 6, and tons more.
Open source, the thing that drives the world, the thing Harvard says has an economic value of 8.8 trillion dollars (also a big number). Most of it is one person. And I can promise you not one of those single person projects have the proper amount of resources they need. If you want to talk about possible risks to your supply chain, a single maintainer that's grossly underpaid and overworked. That's the risk. The country they are from is irrelevant. Josh Bressers If the massive corporations that exploit the open source world for massive personal profit don't want to contribute back, perhaps it's time we start making them. I envision an European Economic Area-wide open source contribution tax", levied against any technology corporation operating within the European Economic Area, whether they actually make use of open source code or not, not entirely unlike how insurance works - you pay into it even if you don't make any claims. Such tax could be based on revenue, number of users, or any combination thereof or other factors. The revenue from this open source contribution tax is put into an EEA-wide fund and redistributed to EEA-based open source maintainers in the form of a monetary subsidy. Such types of taxes and money redistribution frameworks already exist in virtually every country for a whole wide variety of purposes and in a wide variety of forms, both in non-commercial and commercial settings. While it may seem complicated at first, it really isn't. The most difficult aspect is definitely figuring out who, exactly, would be eligible to receive the subsidy and how much, but that, too, is a question both governments and commercial entities answer every single day. No, it will never be perfect, and some people will receive a subsidy who shouldn't, and some who should receive it will not, but if that's a valid reason not to implement a tax like this, no tax or insurance should be implemented. The benefits are legion. Of course, there is the primary benefit of alleviating the thousands of open source maintainers who form the backbone of pretty much out entire digital infrastructure, which in and of itself should be reason enough. On top of that, it would also strengthen the open source world - on which, I wish to reiterate, our entire digital infrastructure is built - against the kind of infiltration we saw with XZ Utils. And to put another top on top of that, it would cement Europe, or the EEA more specifically, as the hub for open source development, innovation, and leadership, and would surely attract countless open source maintainers to relocate to Europe. In other words, it would serve the grander European ambition to become less dependent on the criminal behaviour US tech giants and the erratic behaviour of the US government. We can either wait indefinitely for those who exploit the free labour of open source maintainers to contribute, or we make them.
A long, long time ago, Android treated browser tabs in a very unique way. Individual tabs were were seen as applications', and would appear interspersed with the recent applications list as if they were, indeed, applications. This used to be one of my favourite Android features, as it made websites feel very well integrated into the overall user experience, and gave them a sense of place within your workflows. Eventually, though, Google decided to remove this unique approach, as we can't have nice things and everything must be bland, boring, and the same, and now finding a website you have open requires going to your browser and finding the correct tab. More approachable to most people, I'd wager, but a reduction in usability, for me. I still mourn this loss. Similarly, we've seen a huge increase in the use of in-application browsers, a feature designed to trap users inside applications, instead of letting them freely explore the web the moment they click on a link inside an application. Application developers don't want you leaving their application, so almost all of them, by default, will now open a webview inside the application when you click on an outbound link. For advertising companies, like Google and Facebook, this has the additional benefit of circumventing any and all privacy protections you may have set up in your browser, since those won't apply to the webview the application opens. This sucks. I hate in-application browsers with a passion. Decades of internet use have taught me that clicking on a link means I'm opening a website in my browser. That's what I want, that's what I expect, and that's how it should be. In-application webviews entirely break this normal chain of events; not because it improves the user experience, but because it benefits the bottom line of others. It's also a massive security risk. Worst of all, this switch grants these apps the ability to spy and manipulate third-party websites. Popular apps like Instagram, Facebook Messenger and Facebookhave all been caught injecting JavaScriptvia their in-app browsers into third party websites. TikTok was runningcommands that were essentially a keylogger. While we have no proof that this data was used or exfiltrated from the device, the mere presence of JavaScript code collecting this data combined with no plausible explanation is extremely concerning. Open Web Advocacy Open Web Advocacy has submitted a detailed and expansive report to the European Commission detailing the various issues with these in-application browsers, and suggests a number of remedies to strengthen security, improve privacy, and preserve browser choice. I hope this gets picked up, because in-application browsers are just another way in which we're losing control over our devices.
You already need custom scripts and third-party applications that make custom Windows ISOs to make installing Windows somewhat bearable - unless you enjoy spending hours manually disabling all the anti-user settings in Windows - and now there's another setting to add to the massive, growing list of stuff you have to fix after setting up a new Windows installation. Microsoft has announced that Word will start saving every new file to OneDrive (or another provider if you've installed one) by default. We are modernizing the way files are created and stored in Word for Windows! Now you don't have to worry about saving your documents: Anything new you create will be saved automatically to OneDrive or your preferred cloud destination. Raul Munoz on the Microsoft 365 Insider Blog There's the usual spiel of how this is safer and supposedly more convenient, but I suspect the real reason Microsoft is doing this is listed right there at the end of the list of supposed benefits: this enables the use of Copilot's AI" features right from the beginning. In other words, by automatically saving your new Word documents to OneDrive by default, you're giving Microsoft access to whatever you write for AI" training purposes. The setting can be changed, but defaults matter and few people change them. It's also possible to set another provider than OneDrive as your online storage, but again - defaults matter. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if few people will even realise their Word documents will be stored not on their local PC, but on Microsoft's servers.
We usually at least recognize old computer hardware and software names. But Asianmoetry taught us a new one:Pick OS. This 1960s-era system was sort of a database and sort of an operating system for big iron used by the Army. The request was for an English-like query language, and TRW assigned two guys, Don Nelson and Dick Pick, to the job. The planned query language would allow for things like list the title, author, and abstract of every transportation system reference with the principal city Los Angeles'." This was GIM or generalized information management, and, in a forward-looking choice, it ran in a virtual machine. Al Williams at Hackaday The linked article is a short summary of a YouTube video by the YouTube channel Asianometry, which goes into a lot more detail about Pick OS, where it came from, what it can do, who the people involved were, and where Pick OS eventually ended up. I had never heard of this system before, and it's easy to see why - not only was it used almost exclusively in vertically integrated complete solutions, it was also whitelabeled, so it existed under countless different names. Regardless, it seems the people who actually had to use it were incredibly enthusiastic about it, and to this day you can read new comments from people fondly remembering how easy to use it was. It has always been proprietary, and still is to this day, apparently owned by a company called Rocket Software, who don't seem to actually be doing anything with it.
While Nix and NixOS get all the attention when it comes to declarative package management, there are other, competing implementations of the same general idea. Guix, developed as part of the GNU Project, was originally based on Nix, but grew into its own thing. The project recently announced a major change to how it packages Rust and its countless dependencies and optional crates'. We have changed to a simplified Rust packaging model that is easier to automate and allows for modification, replacement and deletion of dependencies at the same time. The new model will significantly reduce our Rust packaging time and will help us to improve both package availability and quality. Hilton Chain at the Guix blog I hear people talk about Nix and NixOS all the time - I tried it myself, too, but I felt I was using an IBM z17 mainframe to watch a YouTube video - and in fact, Nix has kind of become a meme in and of itself, but you never hear people talk about Guix. With this being OSNews, I'm assuming there's going to be people here using it, and I'm incredibly curious about your experiences. What are the features and benefits that make you use it? If you're curious - the best way to try Guix is probably to install the GNUGuix System, the Linux distribution built around Guix and Shepard, GNU's alternative init system. It's available for i686, x86_64, ARMv7, and AArch64, and can be virtualised too, of course.
The following chart shows how the Adobe Reader installer has grown in size over the years. When possible, 64-bit versions of installers were used. Alexander Gromnitsky Disk space is cheap, sure, but this is insanity.
I recently moved to an area with more internet provider options, all of which werenotsatellite-based. This change allowed me leave my current provider (Starlink) and also freed my network from being locked behind CGNAT. The jump from ~150Mbps to 1Gbps has been fantastic, but the real benefit in this switch has been the ability to overhaul my home network setup. Bradley Taunt OpenBSD is generally the way to go for custom router setups, it seems, and if it wasn't for my own full Ubiquiti setup, I'd definitely consider this too.
Google's grip on Android keeps tightening. In what will certainly be another step that we will look back upon as just another nail in the coffin, Google is going to require every Android developer to register with Google, even if they don't publish anything in the Play Store. In other words, even if you develop Android applications ad only make them available through F-Droid or GitHub, you'll still have to register with Google and hand over a bunch of personal information and a small fee of $25. Google is effectively recreating Apple's Gatekeeper for macOS, but on Android. It won't come as a surprise to you that Google is doing this in the name of security and protecting users. The company claims that its own analysis found over 50 times more malwarefrom internet-sideloaded sources than on apps available through Google Play", and the main reason is that malware developers can hide behind anonymity. As such, Google's solution is to simply deanonymise every single Android developer. Starting next year, Android will require all apps to be registered by verified developers in order to be installed by users oncertified Android devices. This creates crucial accountability, making it much harder for malicious actors to quickly distribute another harmful app after we take the first one down. Think of it like an ID check at the airport, which confirms a traveler's identity but is separate from the security screening of their bags; we will be confirming who the developer is, not reviewing the content of their app or where it came from. This change will start in a few select countries specifically impacted by these forms of fraudulent app scams, often from repeat perpetrators. Suzanne Freyat the Android Developer Blog This new policy will only apply to certified Android devices", which means Android devices that ship with Google Play Services and all related Google stuff preinstalled. How this policy will affect devices running de-Googled Android ROMs like GrapheneOS where the user has opted to install the Play Store and Google Play Services is unclear. Google does claim the personal information you hand over as part of your registration will remain entirely private and not be shown to anyone, but that's not going to reassure anyone. To its small credit, Google intends to create an Android Developer Console explicitly for developers who only operate outside of the Play Store, and a special workflow for students and hobbyists that waives the $25 fee. First tests will start in October of this year, with an official rollout in a number of countries later in 2026, which will then expand to cover the whole world. The first countries seeing the official rollout will be countries hit especially hard by scams (according to Google's research, at least): Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. Google has been trying to claw back control over Android for years now, and it seems the pace is accelerating lately. None of these steps should surprise you, but they should highlight just how crucially important it is that we somehow managed to come to a viable third way, something not controlled by either Apple or Google.
Earlier this year, I was trying to get actual daily work done on HP-UX 11.11 (11i v1) running on HP's last and greatest PA-RISC workstation, the HP c8000. After weeks of frustration caused first by outdated software no longer working properly with the modern web, and then by modern software no longer compiling on HP-UX 11.11, I decided to play the ace up my sleeve: NetBSD's pkgsrc has support for HP-UX. Sadly, HP-UX is obviously not a main platform or even a point of interest for pkgsrc developers - as it should be, nobody uses this combination - so various incompatibilities and more modern requirements had snuck into pkgsrc, and I couldn't get it to bootstrap. I made some minor progress here and there with the help of people far smarter than I, but in the end I just lacked the skills to progress any further. This story will make it to OSNews in a more complete form, I promise. Anyway, in May of this year, it seems Brian Robert Callahan was working on a very similar problem: getting pkgsrc to work properly on IBM's AIX. The state of packages on AIX genuinely surprises me. IBM hosts arepositoryof open source software for AIX. But it seems pretty sparse compared to what youcouldget with pkgsrc. Anotherwebsiteoffering AIX packages seems quite old. I think pkgsrc would be a great way to bring modern packages to AIX. I am not the first to think this. There are AIX 7.2 pkgsrc packages available atthis repository, however all the packages are compiled as 32-bit RISC System/6000 objects. I would greatly prefer to have everything be 64-bit XCOFF objects, as we could do more with 64-bit programs. There also aren't too many packages in that repository, so I think starting fresh is in our best interest. As we shall see, this was not as straightforward as I would have hoped. Brian Robert Callahan Reading through his journey getting pkgsrc to work properly on AIX, I can't help but feel a bit better about myself not being to get it to work on HP-UX 11.11. Callahan was working with AIX 7.2 TL4, which was released in November 2019 and still actively supported by IBM on a maintained architecture, while I was working with HP-UX 11.11 (or 11i v1), which last got some updates in and around 2005, running on an architecture that's well dead and buried. Looking at what Callahan still had to figure out and do, it's not surprising someone with my lack of skill in this area couldn't get it working. I'm still hoping someone far smarter than I stumbles upon a HP c8000 and dives into getting pkgsrc to work on HP-UX, because I feel pkgsrc could turn an otherwise incredibly powerful HP c8000 from a strictly retro machine into something borderline usable in the modern world. HP-UX is much harder to virtualise - if it's even possible at all - so real hardware is probably going to be required. The NetBSD people on Mastodon suggested I could possibly give remote access to my machine so someone could dive into this, which is something I'll keep under consideration.
The history of Android applications on Windows is convoluted, with various failed and cancelled attempts by Microsoft to allow Windows users to run Android applications behind us. Now that these attempts are well dead and buried, Microsoft is going at it from a different perspective: what if you could continue where you left off on your Android phone, right on your Windows machine, but without having to run an Android applications on Windows? We are beginning to gradually roll out the ability to seamlessly resume using your favorite apps from your Android phone on your Windows 11 PC to Windows Insiders in the Dev and Beta Channels. To start with, you will be able to resume or continue listening to your favorite Spotify tracks and episodes right from where you left off on the Spotify app on your Android phone. First, start listening to one of your favorite songs or episodes in the Spotify app on your Android phone. On your PC (running the latest Insider Preview builds in the Dev or Beta Channels) a Resume alert'will appear onyour taskbar. When you click on that alert, Spotify's desktop app will open and the same track will now continue playing on your PC. Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc So basically, the Spotify application on Windows will know where you left off on the Spotify application on Android, and resume playback. This is table-stakes for most services, and it doesn't seem like it would warrant such a big announcement from Microsoft, and while I don't use Spotify, I assume it was already built into the service anyway. It seems all Microsoft is doing is providing a nice little notification to expose that functionality a little bit more clearly, but it also explains that you need to manually link your device and the Spotify Android application to the Windows PC and Spotify Windows application, which seems like a lot of manual steps. Does this mean every application developer needs to opt into this and add this feature, thereby making it dead on arrival? Well, yes, you'll need to add support on both sides of the equation, which I can guarantee you very few developers will do. Not only does this feature require you to already have a Windows version of your application - which, statistically, you don't - it also requires you to do the work yourself, and manually apply to Microsoft to even gain access to the required APIs and SDKs. The odds of this feature making it beyond a few very big names Microsoft can give money to is slim.
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