OSnews

GestureX enables you to control your Linux PC using hand gestures. You can assign specific commands or functionalities to different hand gestures, allowing for hands-free interaction with your computer. GestureX GitHub page I personally see no use for any of this, but I'm sure there are some interesting accessibility uses for technology like this, which in and of itself make it a worthwhile endeavour to work on. Do note, though, that this is all beta, so there's bound to be issues.

If you've read my first post aboutSpatial Video, the second aboutEncoding Spatial Video, or if you've used mycommand-line tool, you may recall a mention of Apple's mysterious fisheye" projection format. Mysterious because they've documented aCMProjectionType.fisheyeenumeration with no elaboration, they stream their immersive Apple TV+ videos in this format, yet they've provided no method to produce or playback third-party content using this projection type. Additionally, the format is undocumented, they haven't responded to anopen question on the Apple Discussion Forumsasking for more detail, and they didn't cover it in their WWDC23 sessions. As someone who has experience in this area - and a relentless curiosity - I've spent time digging-in to Apple's fisheye projection format, and this post shares what I've learned. Mike Swanson There is just so much cool technology crammed into the Vision Pro, from the crazy displays down to, apparently, the encoding format for spatial video. Too bad Apple seems to have forgotten that a technology is not a product, as even the most ardent Apple supporterts - like John Gruber, or the hosts of ATP - have stated their Vision Pro devices are lying unused, collecting dust, just months after launch.

After several days testing the latest Express 1M2 enclosure from OWC, I have changed my recommendations for the best external SSDs. Previously I had chosen the relatively reliable Thunderbolt 3 up to 3 GB/s, even though few drives ever seemed capable of achieving that up to. If you're still needing good performance with an Intel Mac, that makes sense. But if you need best performance with an Apple silicon Mac, you're far better off with a high-quality USB 40Gbps enclosure such as OWC's Express 1M2, which should reliably return over 3 GB/s even through a compatible hub. I much prefer the word over to up to. Howard Oakley If you have an Apple Silicon Mac, and you're looking for an external drive - this is some good advice to follow.

Going through my usual scanning of all the -next" Git subsystem branches of new code set to be introduced for the next Linux kernel merge window, a very notable addition was just queued up... Linux 6.10 is set to merge the NTSYNC driver for emulating the Microsoft Windows NT synchronization primitives within the kernel for allowing better performance with Valve's Steam Play (Proton) and Wine of Windows games and other apps on Linux. Michael Larabel The improvements to performance of games running under Proton this new driver will bring are legitimately insane. We're looking at a game-changing addition to the Linux kernel here, and it's no surprise, then, to see this effort being spearheaded by companies like Valve and CodeWeavers.

Kate, KDE's programming-focused text editor, is, of course, a Qt application, and is also available on a variety of other platforms. Christoph Cullmann, one of the developers of Kate, published a short blog post with screenshots of Kate running on the three biggest platforms - Linux/BSD, Windows, and macOS. Sadly, while Haiku gets a mention, there's no screenshot of the Haiku version of Kate. Still, it's interesting to see the family resemblance.

VMS Software, the company developing OpenVMS, has announced some considerable changes to its licensing program for hobbyists, and the news is, well, bad. The company claims that demand for hobbyist licenses has been so high that they were unable to process requests fast enough, and as such, that the program is not delivering the intended benefits". Despite this apparent high demand, contributions from the community, such as writing and porting open-source software, creating wiki articles, and providing assistance on their forums, has not matched the scale of the program". Now, I want to stop them right here. The OpenVMS hobbyist program was riddled with roadblocks, restrictions, unclear instructions, restrictive licensing, and similar barriers to entry. As such, it's entirely unsurprising that the community around a largely relic of an operating system - with all due respect - simply hasn't grown enough to become self-sustainable. The blame here lies entirely with VMS Software itself, and not at all with whatever community managed to form around OpenVMS, despite the countless restrictions. So, you'd expect them to expand the program, right? Perhaps embrace open source, or make the various versions and releases more freely and easily available? No, they're going to do the exact opposite. To address not getting enough out of their community, they're going to limit that community's options even more. First, they're ending the community program for the Alpha and Itanium (which they call Integrity, since it covers HP's Integrity machines), effective immediately, so they won't be granting any new licenses for these architectures. Existing licenses will continue to work until 2025. Effective immediately, we will discontinue offering new community licenses for non-commercial use for Alpha and Integrity. Existing holders of community licenses for these architectures will get updates for those licenses and retain their access to the Service Portal until March 2025 for Alpha and December 2025 for Integrity. All outstanding requests for Alpha and Integrity community licenses will be declined. VMS Software announcement This sucks, but with both Alpha and Itanium being end-of-life, there's at least some arguments that can be made for ending the program for these architectures. Much less defensible are the changes to x86-64 community licensing, which basically just come down to more bureaucracy for both users and VMS Software. For x86 community licenses, we will be transitioning to a package-based distribution model (which will also replace the student license that used to be distributed as a FreeAXP emulator package). A vmdk of a system disk with OpenVMS V9.2-2 and compilers installed and licensed will be provided, along with instructions to create a virtual machine and the SYSTEM password. The license installed on that system will be valid for one year, at which point we will provide a new package. While this may entail some inconvenience for users, it enables us to continue offering licenses at no cost, ensuring accessibility without compromising our sustainability. VMS Software announcement The vibe I'm getting from this announcement is that by offering some rudimentary and complicated form of community licensing, OpenVMS hoped to gain the advantages of a vibrant open source community, without all the downsides. They must've hoped that by throwing the community a bone, they'd get them to do a bunch of work for them, and now that this is not panning out, they're taking their ball and going home. That's entirely within their right, of course, but I doubt these changes are going to make anyone more excited to dig into OpenVMS. All of this feels eerily similar to the attempts by QNX - before being acquired by BlackBerry - to do pretty much the same thing. QNX also tried a similar model where you needed to sign up and jump through a bunch of hoops to get QNX releases, and the company steeped it in talks of building a community, but of course it didn't pan out because people are simply not interested in a one-way relationship where you're working for free for a corporation who then takes your stuff and uses it to sell their, in this case, operating system. This particular mistake is made time and time again, and it seems VMS Software simply did not learn this lesson.

Building on top of recent improvements like grouping recently installed apps and showing your frequently used apps, we are now trying out recommendations to help you discover great apps from the Microsoft Store under Recommended on the Start menu. This will appear only for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel in the U.S. and will not apply to commercial devices (devices managed by organizations). This can be turned off by going to Settings > Personalization > Start and turning off the toggle for Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more". As a reminder, we regularly try out new experiences and concepts that may never get released with Windows Insiders to get feedback. Should you see this experience on the Start menu, let us know what you think. We are beginning to roll this out to a small set of Insiders in the Beta Channel at first. Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc The Start menu, August 24, 1995 - April 12, 2024. You made it almost 30 years, buddy.

For quite a while now, you might have noticed various people recommending a search engine called Kagi". From random people on the internet, to prominent bloggers like John Gruber and David Pierce, they've all been pushing this seemingly new search engine as a paid-for alternative to Google that respects your privacy. Over the past few months to a year, though, more and more cracks started to appear in Kagi's image, and I've been meaning to assemble those cracks and tie a bow on them. Well, it turns out I don't have to, because lori (I'm not aware of their full name, so I'll stick to lori) already did it for me in a blog post titled Why I lost faith in Kagi. Even though I knew all of these stories, and even though I was intending to list them in more or less the same way, it's still damning to see it all laid out so well (both the story itself, as well as the lovely, accessible, approachable, and simple HTML, but that's neither here nor there). Lori's summary hits on all the pain points (but you should really read the whole thing): Between the absolute blase attitude towards privacy, the 100% dedication to AI being the future of search, and the completely misguided use of the company's limited funds, I honestly can't see Kagi as something I could ever recommend to people. Is the search good? I mean...it's not really much better than any other search, it heavily leverages Bing like DDG and the other indie search platforms do, the only real killer feature it has to me is the ability to block domains from your results, which I can currently only do in other search engines via a user script that doesn't help me on mobile. But what good is filtering out all of the AI generated spamblogs on a search platform that wants to spit more AI generated bullshit at me directly? Sure I can turn it off, but who's to say that they won't start using my data to fuel their own LLM? They already have an extremely skewed idea of what counts as PII or not. They could easily see using people's searches as being anonymized" and decide they're fine to use, because their primary business isn't search, it's AI. lori at lori's blog The examples underpinning all these pain points are just baffling, like how the company was originally an AI" company, made a search engine that charges people for Bing results, and now is going full mask-off with countless terrible, non-working, privacy-invasive AI" tools. Or that thing where the company spent one third of their funding round of $670,000 on starting a T-shirt company in Germany (Kagi is US-based) to print 20,000 free T-shirts for their users that don't even advertise Kagi. Or that thing where they claimed they forgot" to pay sales tax for two years and had to raise prices to pay their back taxes. And I can just keep on going. To make matters worse, after publication of the blog post, Kagi's CEO started harassing lori over email, and despite lori stating repeatedly they wanted him to stop emailing them, he just kept on going. Never a good look. The worst part of it, though, is the lack of understanding about what privacy means, while telling their users they are super serious about it. Add to that the CEO's trust me, bro" attitude, their deals with the shady and homophobic crypto company Brave, and many other things, and the conclusion is that, no, your data is not safe at Kagi at all, and with their primary business being AI" and not search, you know exactly what that means. Do not use Kagi.

There was a time when it thought that Alexa would yield a robust ecosystem of apps, or Alexa Skills, that would make the voice assistant an integral part of users' lives. Amazon envisioned tens of thousands of software developers building valued abilities for Alexa that would grow the voice assistant's popularity-and help Amazon make some money. But about seven years after launching a rewards program to encourage developers to build Skills, Alexa's most preferred abilities are the basic ones, like checking the weather. And on June 30, Amazon will stop giving out the monthly Amazon Web Services credits that have made it free for third-party developers to build and host Alexa Skills. The company also recently told devs that its Alexa Developer Rewards program was ending, virtually disincentivizing third-party devs to build for Alexa. Scharon Harding at Ars Technica I've never used Alexa - Amazon doesn't really have a footprint in either The Netherlands or Sweden, so I never really had to care - but I always thought the Skills were the reason it was so loved. It seemingly makes no sense to me to start killing off this feature, but then, I'm assuming Amazon has the data to back up the fact people aren't using them. It sucks, I guess? Can someone who uses Alexa fill in the blanks for me here?

Discord has shut down the Discord servers for the Nintendo Switch emulators Suyu and Sudachi and has completely disabled their lead developers' accounts - and the company isn't answering our questions about why it went that far. Both Suyu and Sudachi began as forks of Yuzu, the emulator that Nintendo sued out of existence on March 4th. Sean Hollister at The Verge This is exactly what people were worried about when Nintendo and Yuzu settled for millions of dollars. Even though it's a settlement and not a court ruling, and even tough the code to Yuzu is entirely unaffected by the settlement and freely shareable and usable by anyone, and even though emulators are legal - the chilling effect this settlement is having is absolutely undeniable. Here we have Discord going far beyond its own official policy, without even giving the affected parties any recourse. It's absolutely wild, and highlights just how dangerous it is to rely on Discord for, well, anything. I wish that for once, we'd actually see a case related to console emulation go to court in either the EU or the US, to make it even clearer that yes, unless you distribute copyrighted code like game ROMs or console firmware, emulators are entirely legal and without any risk. You know, a recent court ruling we could point to to dissuade bullies like Nintendo from threatening innocent developers and ruining their lives because of entirely legal activities. And let me reiterate: don't use Discord as for anything other than basic chat. This platform ain't got your back.

DwarFS is a read-only file system with a focus on achieving very high compression ratios in particular for very redundant data. DwarFS also doesn't compromise on speed and for my use cases I've found it to be on par with or perform better than SquashFS. For my primary use case, DwarFS compression is an order of magnitude better than SquashFS compression, it's 6 times faster to build the file system, it's typically faster to access files on DwarFS and it uses less CPU resources. DwarfFS GitHub page DwarfFS supports both Linux, macOS, and Windows, but macOS and Windows support is experimental at this point. It seems to have higher compression ratios at faster speeds than various alternatives, so if you have a use case for compression file systems - give DwarfFS a look.

With the recent release of OpenBSD 7.5, I decided to run through my personal OpenBSD installer" for laptop/desktop devices. The project is built off of the dwm tiling window manager and only installs a few basic packages. The last time I updated it was with the release of 7.3, so it's been due for an minor rework. While making these minor changes, I remembered how incredibly easy the entire install process for OpenBSD is and how cozy the entire operating system feels. All the core systems just work out the box. Yes, you need to patch" in WiFi with a firmware update, so you'll need an Ethernet connection during the initial setup. Yes, the default desktop environment is not intuitive or ideal for newcomers. But the positives heavily outweigh the negatives (in my opinion). Bradley Taunt OpenBSD has a very dedicated community, and I've noticed they tend to be very helpful and friendly. It's making me curious about trying it out, and both this article and the helpful posts it links to will be a great way to start.

After two months of developer previews, Google has finally released Android 15 Beta 1. While the beta usually offers more user-facing changes, Google is still pretty light on details with this build, giving us only a few more details on what we can expect. Instead, the company is pointing to Google I/O for more details, which will take place on May 14 this year, basically confirming that this is when we will get the second beta with more features. Manuel Vonau There's very little of interest in this beta, so unless you're really into Android development, I'd wait out installing any betas until after Google I/O.

Hurd, the kernel that is supposed to form the basis of the GNU operating system, is perpetually a research project that doesn't get anywhere close to being a replacement for Linux, but that doesn't mean the project doesn't make progress and has a place in the world of operating systems. Their most recent major improvement has been porting GNU Hurd to AArch64, spearheaded by Hurd developer Sergey Bugaev. Since then, however, I have been (some may say, relentlessly) working on filling in the missing piece, namely porting GNU Mach (with important help & contributions by Luca D.). I am happy to report that we now have an experimental port of GNU Mach that builds and works on AArch64! While that may sound impressive, note that various things about it are in an extremely basic, proof-of-concept state rather than being seriously production-ready; and also that Mach is a small kernel (indeed, a microkernel), and it was designed from the start (back in the 80s) to be portable, so most of the buisness logic" functionality (virtual memory, IPC, tasks/threads/scheduler) is explicitly arch-independent. Despite the scary WIP proof-of-concept" status, there is enough functionality in Mach to run userland code, handle exceptions and syscalls, interact with the MMU to implement all the expected virtual memory semantics, schedule/switch tasks and threads, and so on. Moreover, all of GNU Mach's userspace self-tests pass! Sergey Bugaev On top of all this, glibc works on the AArch64 port, and several important Hurd servers work as well, namely ext2fs, exec, startup, auth, and proc, as a do a number of basic UNIX programs. This is an exceptional effort, and highlights that while people tend to make fun of Hurd, it's got some real talent working on it that bring the platform forward. While we may not see any widely usable release any time soon, every bit of progress helps and is welcome. Speaking of progress, the progress report for GNU Hurd covering the first quarter of 2024 has also been published, and it lists a number of other improvements and fixes made aside from the AArch64 port. For instance, the console will now use xkbcommon instead of X11 for handling keyboard layouts, which reduced code complexity a lot and improved keyboard layout coverage, to boot. The port of GDB to the 64 bit version of Hurd is also progressing, and SMP has seen a ton of fixes too. Another awesome bit of news comes from, once again, Sergey Bugaev, as he announced a new Hurd distribution based on Alpine Linux. Work on this project has only recently begun, but he's already had some success and about 299 Alpine packages are available. His reasons for starting this new project is that while Debian GNU/Hurd is a great base to work from for Hurd users and developers, Debian is also a bit strict and arcane in its packaging requirements, which might make sense for Debian GNU/Linux, but is annoying to work with when you're trying to get a lot of low-level work done. For now, there's no name yet, and he's asking for help from the Hurd community for name ideas, hosting, and so on. That's a lot of GNU Hurd progress this quarter, and that's good news.

I didn't want to spend too much time on this thing, but I feel like we can all use a good laugh at a stupid product hyped only by the tech media. The Verge reviewed the Humane AI pin, and entirely predictably, it's a complete and utter trashfire. But until all of that happens, and until the whole AI universe gets better, faster, and more functional, the AI Pin isn't going to feel remotely close to being done. It's a beta test, a prototype, a proof of concept that maybe someday there might be a killer device that does all of these things. I know with absolute certainty that the AI Pin is not that device. It's not worth $700, or $24 a month, or all the time and energy and frustration that using it requires. It's an exciting idea and an infuriating product. AI gadgets might one day be great. But this isn't that day, and the AI Pin isn't that product. I'll take my phone back now, thanks. David Pierce at The Verge It takes dozens of seconds to reply to any query, the battery is severely lacking, the answers you get are mostly wrong or useless, sending text messages is effectively broken, and tons of promised features don't work because they're not implemented. In another video review, MrMobile also shows the device overheating all the time, a problem that's common to all of the devices. I don't think trashfire is harsh enough to describe this junk.

We are about 18 months away from the end of mainstream Windows 10 support, but Microsoft thinks it is time to start nagging warning Windows 10 users about the inevitable. Users on Reddit report spotting a new full-screen ad with a notification that Windows 10 is about to reach its end of life in October 2025, even though it is still getting new features (there are even rumors about Microsoft re-opening the Windows Insider Program for Windows 10). Taras Buria at Neowin I mean, I have a long history of crying foul over Windows being adware now, but I don't think warning users that their operating system is losing support and that they should upgrade to a new version really constitutes an ad. Sure, technically it does, but I think we can all agree that such a warning is useful and informative.

The classic Win32 ListView supports incremental search: You can start typing the name of an item to search for it. But it's a bit more complicated than that. Raymond Chen Gather 'round, children, Mr Chen is telling a story.

Independent browser companies in the European Union are seeing a spike in users in the first month after EU legislation forced Alphabet's Google, Microsoft and Apple to make it easier for users to switch to rivals, according to data provided to Reuters by six companies. The early results come after the EU's sweeping Digital Markets Act, which aims to remove unfair competition, took effect on March 7, forcing big tech companies to offer mobile users the ability to select from a list of available web browsers from a choice screen." Supantha Mukherjee and Foo Yun Chee I can't believe this is even remotely surprising. A lot of especially Apple fans and people from outside of the European Union complained left, right, and centre about the choice screen and how it was ugly, unnecessary, and would just confuse users. These are interesting claims, considering the fact that setting up a modern smartphone such as the iPhone takes the user through 40-50 setup screens chockful of confusing choices to make, so adding one more surely wouldn't make a difference. Of course giving users the option to choose a different default browser would lead to an increase in browsers other than Safari (iOS) or Chrome (Android) being set as the default. I'm pretty sure quite a few users learned, through the choice screen, for the first time, that there even are different browsers to choose from, and that some of those might offer features and benefits they didn't even know they could enjoy. That's the whole point of this endeavour: informing users that they have a choice, something Apple, Google, and others would rather you either do not have, or at least not know about. It's far too early to tell if these spikes are a one-off thing, or if the rise in browsers other than Safari on iOS and Chrome on Android is more structural. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the latter, and even if the numbers remain in the single digits or low double digits, it will still lead to an increase in competition, and a more vibrant mobile browser market. Good news, regardless.

Microsoft recently held a streaming event in which it detailed a lot of the new features and changes coming in Windows server 2025, and has now followed that up with a blog post, as well. There's a lot to go over here, and I'm anything but a Windows Server specialist, so I'll highlight some of the thing I'm certain will be welcomed by Windows Server administrators. First and foremost, the biggest improvement: hot-patching. Security updates can be installed without having to reboot, because Server 2025 will modify code in memory without restarting the processes in question. Quarterly updates, however, will still require reboots. Hot-patching will be free on all versions of Server 2025. Microsoft also promises a massive performance boost for NVMe drives - the company claims a 70% improvement going from Server 2022 to Server 2025. Microsoft's other file system, ReFS, is also seeing improvements, and Storage Replica's compression will be available in all editions of Windows Server 2025. A major improvement in Hyper-V is the ability to partition GPUs, so you can use one GPU to power multiple virtual machines. As far as licensing goes, the most important news here is that you'll still be able to buy a normal, regular, run-of-the-mill perpetual license for Windows Server 2025, so even though there's various more modern' options, you can also just opt for the way it's always been.

The company is seemingly contemplating on whether to add a new Recommended" button on the Taskbar. Interestingly, it is unfinished at the moment, or perhaps Microsoft is just not sure if it should proceed with this button at all. Sayan Sen at Neowin The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Well, this is something I never knew. Over on the retrocomputing section of StackExchange, someone asked why the second phase of the Windows 98 installation looked decidedly different from the third phase, even though they're both graphical phases (the first phase is textual). The answer turns out to be both surprising, and entirely predictable. The first phase is a DOS program called DOSSETUP.BIN, which is the infamous blue part of the installation. The second part, however, is what we're interested in here, and if the first phase is DOS, and the third phase is Windows 98 itself... What do you think the second phase is running? Yeah, exactly. Basically, because it is running under Windows 3.1 at that point. The second uses this minimal Windows 3.1 to run a Windows 3 program, W98SETUP.BIN (specified as the shell" in SYSTEM.INI). This starts by copying more files to support all the information-gathering during setup, and various other niceties including the 3D look shown in your screenshot (the contents of the PRECOPY CABs); it ends by copying most of Windows 98, setting the system up so that it will boot Windows 98 from the target drive, and rebooting. Stephen Kitt So, in order to install Windows 98, you first run DOS, followed by Windows 3.1, ending in Windows 98. I have no idea why this is so funny to me, especially since it fits entirely within expectations of how Microsoft does things.

A few weeks ago we talked about how iXsystems, the company behind TrueNAS CORE and SCALE, has all but confirmed that its FreeBSD-based CORE product will be put in maintenance mode, while the Linux-based SCALE product will get all the attention and focus from here on out. In an interview with Blocks & Files, the company gave more insight into this choice. We had a huge chunk of our engineering staff spending time improving FreeBSD as opposed to working on features and functionalities. What's happened now with the transition to having a Debian basis, the people I used to have 90 percent of their time working on FreeBSD, they're working on ZFS features now ... That's what I want to see; value add for everybody versus sitting around, implementing something Linux had a years ago. And trying to maintain or backport, or just deal with something that you just didn't get out of box on FreeBSD." It's not knocking against FreeBSD. We love it. That's our heritage. That's our roots, I was on the CORE team elected twice. So believe me, if I felt like I could have stayed on FreeBSD for the next 20 years, I would have absolutely preferred to do that ... But at some point, you gotta read the writing on the wall and say, well, all the the vendor supported-innovations are happening on the Linux side these days." BSD aficionados don't like this change. Moore said: Talk is cheap and complaints are free. You know, everyone loves to complain about it. But ... if people wanted to push FreeBSD forward for the last 15 years, they would have." Chris Mellor at Blocks & Files Above all else, my personal north star is choice, especially in technology, and as such, I want iXsystems to keep focusing on FreeBSD so that not everyone is using Linux for server- and server-like workloads. The fact that TrueNAS was a FreeBSD-based product for this long was amazing, and I would definitely have preferred if it stayed that way for many, many more years to come. However, I don't think the people of TrueNAS are saying anything wrong or outrageous here. They've got employees to feed, and the money is in Linux, not FreeBSD. If they spend more money, time, and resources on getting FreeBSD on par with features Linux has had for ages than on actually developing their own product - TrueNAS - then they're fighting a losing battle. Honestly, I'm surprised it's taken them this long to take this controversial step. All we can hope for is that the things they work on, the features they develop, will make it to FreeBSD regardless.

The HP 200 LX was a successful palmtop computer introduced in 1994. HP continued to sell it through 1999, an unusually long run for a 1990s computer model. In this blog post, we'll dig into this largely forgotten form factor and why it became such a quiet success. Dave Farquhar These devices are incredibly cool, but I disagree that they disappeared, as the blog post states. Just recently I reviewed my main laptop, a very small Chuwi MiniBook (2023) with the N100, and in that article I also listed some other similar options that are still being made and sold today, from companies like GPD and OneNetbook.

If you haven't already heard of Beeper, welcome! Beeper is a universal chat app for Android, iOS and desktop. Our goal is to build the best chat app on earth. Beeper is built on an open source chat protocol called Matrix. Over time, we'll help people migrate from proprietary, siloed chat networks to an open standard for chat. If you're interested in learning about this, we've written more about our intentions. Beeper team Beeper is just great. Because I'm European and have ties to two different countries with vastly different chat preferences, as well as a number of friends living all over Europe and the US, I've always had to deal with at least four different instant messaging applications. Beeper, and especially the recent completely redesigned Android version, is so good and seamless that I no longer need to use the individual applications at all. It's not perfect - the new Android version (the iOS version is old and outdated compared to the Android one) still has some issues. If you receive a video and play it, it doesn't maximise unless you perform a very delicate zoom in pinch. Sometimes, sending video fails. Some emoji replies on some services look huge and pixellated. I'm sure these are all relatively low-hanging fruit types of bugs that'll get fixes over the coming weeks and months now that the application is out of beta. However, the actual core of the application has been working amazingly well for me. Beeper also has another major announcement. I'm excited to announce that Beeper has been acquired by Automattic. This acquisition marks the beginning of an exciting new chapter as we continue our mission to create the best chat app on earth. Eric Migicovsky Automattic is the company behind WordPress, Tumblr, Pocket Casts, and a whole load of other products and services. Beeper seems like a good fit, since Automattic recently also acquired Texts.com, another multi-platform messaging client.

Yesterday, I posted an item about the updated Find My Device network Google launched for Android, but I forgot to link to an additional blog post by Google about the various security and privacy precautions they've taken. One aspect in particular stands out as something new that Apple's Find My network doesn't do (yet): This is a first-of-its-kind safety protection that makes unwanted tracking to a private location, like your home, more difficult. By default, the Find My Device network requires multiple nearby Android devices to detect a tag before reporting its location to the tag's owner. Our research found that the Find My Device network is most valuable in public settings like cafes and airports, where there are likely many devices nearby. By implementing aggregation before showing a tag's location to its owner, the network can take advantage of its biggest strength - over a billion Android devices that can participate. This helps tag owners find their lost devices in these busier locations while prioritizing safety from unwanted tracking near private locations. In less busy areas, last known location and Nest finding are reliable ways to locate items. Dave Kleidermacher In addition, when you're at home, your devices won't contribute any information either. There's a whole bunch of other things in there, too, so head on over if you're curious.

Exactly ten years ago, on April 8, 2014, Microsoft released the final security patch for Windows XP. The day marked the end of the road for one of the most iconic Windows versions ever released. Taras Buria at Neowin I never liked Windows XP. Compared to the operating systems I was using at the time - BeOS, Mandrake Linux 8.x - Windows XP felt kind of like a bad joke I wasn't in on. It looked ridiculous, didn't seem to offer anything substantial, and it didn't take long for major security incidents related to Windows XP to start dominating the news. It wasn't until several service packs had been released that Windows XP came into its own, but by that point, I had already found a much better alternative for my Windows needs at the time. I'm of course talking about Windows Server 2003, the better Windows than Windows XP. Today though, I do have an odd fondness for Windows XP, as I grow older and XP has become something from my teenage years. The look and feel of Windows XP - the classic theme, not that horrendous Fisher Price nonsense - the sound set, the wallpaper of course - has become iconic, warts and all, and whole generations of people will feel instant feelings as soon as they see Bliss or hear that iconic startup sound. Windows XP with a few service packs now belongs to the small group of Windows releases that I would call the peak of the platform, together with Windows 95 and Windows 7 (and perhaps Server 2003, but that's more of a personal thing and not a consumer operating system). Everything else has not exactly been great or even aged well, and I doubt Windows 10 and 11 will suddenly get good, either.

Built using the Arm NeoverseTM V2 CPU, Axion processors deliver giant leaps in performance for general-purpose workloads like web and app servers, containerized microservices, open-source databases, in-memory caches, data analytics engines, media processing, CPU-based AI training and inferencing, and more. Axion is underpinned by Titanium, a system of purpose-built custom silicon microcontrollers and tiered scale-out offloads. Titanium offloads take care of platform operations like networking and security, so Axion processors have more capacity and improved performance for customer workloads. Titanium also offloads storage I/O processing to Hyperdisk, our new block storage service that decouples performance from instance size and that can be dynamically provisioned in real time. Amin Vahdat on the Google blog Fancy new ARM processors from Google, designed explicitly for the data centre. In other words, we'll never get to play with it unless one makes its way to eBay in a few years.

I've been talking about Servo, the Rust browser engine project originally started at Mozilla, for a while now, and while the project's still got a long way to go, it's definitely a serious contender to become a competitive browser engine in the future. It seems it's starting to get some traction already, as The KDAB Group is working on bringing Servo to Qt. At KDAB we managed to embed the Servo web engine inside Qt, by using our CXX-Qt library as a bridge between Rust and C++. This means that we can now use Servo as an alternative to Chromium for webviews in Qt applications. Andrew Hayzen and Magnus Gro They're already showing off a basic QML application rendering websites using Servo, which is pretty cool. It goes to show that Servo can definitely eventually fulfill the role that Chromium, WebKit, and Gecko fulfill now.

Intel and AMD both tried to ship iGPUs fast enough to compete with low end discrete cards over the past 10 years with mixed results. Recently though, powerful iGPUs have been thrown back into the spotlight. Handhelds like Valve's Steam Deck and ASUS's ROG Ally demonstrated that consumers are willing to accept compromises to play games on the go. AMD has dominated that market so far. Valve's Steam Deck uses AMD's Van Gogh APU, and the ROG Ally uses the newer Phoenix APU. Unlike Van Gogh, Phoenix is a general purpose mobile chip with both a powerful CPU and GPU. Phoenix doesn't stop at targeting the handheld segment, and threatens Intel's laptop market share too. In response, Meteor Lake brings a powerful iGPU to the party. It has the equivalent of 128 EUs and clocks up to 2.25 GHz, making it modestly wider and much faster than Raptor Lake's 96 EU, 1.5 GHz iGPU. Raptor Lake's Xe-LP graphics architecture gets replaced by Xe-LPG, a close relative of the Xe-HPG architecture used in Intel's A770 discrete GPU. At the system level, Meteor Lake moves to a GPU integration scheme that better suits a chiplet configuration where the iGPU gets significant transistor and area budget. I'll be testing Meteor Lake's iGPU with the Core Ultra 7 155H, as implemented in the ASUS Zenbook 14. I purchased the device myself in late February. Chips and Cheese I'm absolutely here for the resurgence in capable integrated GPUs, both for PC gaming on the go and for better graphics performance even in thinner, smaller laptops. I would love to have just a bit more graphics power on my thin and small laptop so I can do some basic gaming with it.

Today, the all-new Find My Device is rolling out to Android devices around the world, starting in the U.S. and Canada. With a new, crowdsourced network of over a billion Android devices, Find My Device can help you find your misplaced Android devices and everyday items quickly and securely. Here are five ways you can try it out. Erik Kay on the Google blog This old Android feature has basically been updated to be the same thing as Apple's Find My, but with more than just one vendor making the tracking tags. Of course, this means it also comes with the same problems, from its use by stalkers to controlling partners, and everything in between. This is a very problematic technology, one which I think is almost impossible to make safe. Still, I have a Samsung tracker that I don't use anymore - because I bought a Pixel 8 Pro, and don't want to install any Samsung applications - and I do plan on getting a new tracker that's compatible with this new Find My Device network. With two small kids, it's easy to lose track of something like my car keys, and instead of stressing about where they are when we need to leave on time, I can just ping them using our Google Home devices instead. Sometimes, these silly smart technologies really do take just that little bit of stress out of your life - you just have to be really picky and honest with yourself about what you really need.

SmolBSD is a tiny BSD UNIX (NetBSD) system creation tool, primarily aimed at building modern, lightweight, fast micro VMs. SmolBSD can start a service in (way) under a second, giving it the ability to be used as a virtualized container, thus reducing attack surface and actually isolating workflows. SmolBSD website Neat.

There are various ways you can change the default browser and similar defaults on Windows, but oneof the ways many third-party tools do this is by editing the relevant registry strings. It turns out that Microsoft is not particularly happy with this, as they've recently introduced a new driver specifically designed to prevent this from happening, by blocking tools like regedit or PowerShell from editing a number of registry keys for setting default applications. The driver was discovered by Christoph Kolbicz. Microsoft implemented a driver based protection to block changes to http/https and .pdf associations by 3rd party utilities. The rollout was staggered and activated randomly", but in the meantime I got many reports - also from business or education environments (but not Server OS). Microsoft also updated the driver during my tests (from 2.0 to 2.1) and extended the deny list of executables. This means, they can change the behavior almost on the fly and add new tricks or block additional extensions/protocols! Christoph Kolbicz Digging further into what, exactly, this driver can do, Microsoft also made it so that even if you disable the driver, an additional scheduled task will run to re-enable the driver and revert the registry changes. It also seems this is somehow related to the changes Microsoft has to make to comply with the EU's DMA, but the driver is also installed on systems outside of the EU, so it's all a bit unclear at the moment.

Over the GNOME46 cycle, VTE has seen a lot of performance improvements. Christian Hergert mentioned some of them in his blog posts about VTE and about his work in GNOME46. But how much did the performance actually improve? What should you, the user, expect to feel after installing a fresh Fedora 40 update and launching your favorite terminal? Let's measure and find out! Ivan Molodetskikh The short version is that the improvements are definitely noticeable during genera use - for the long version, read the actual article.

Users recently noticed that third-party apps for customizing the user interface no longer work in the upcoming Windows 11 version 24H2. Not only does Microsoft not allow you to run those apps, but it even blocks you from upgrading to newer builds. StartAllBack, a popular tool for tweaking the taskbar and Start menu in Windows 11, was among the first to fail on 24H2. Sadly, it is not the only one. ExplorerPatcher also no longer works in Windows 11 24H2. ExplorerPatcher from Valinet is quite a popular app that lets you bring back the old Windows 10 taskbar in Windows 11, apply additional modifications to make Windows 11 slightly better, and restore some of its missing features. Windows 11 version 24H2 is now flagging ExplorerPatcher as incompatible due to security or performance issues" with the following message. Taras Buria at Neowin I guess the taskbar and Start menu are incredibly important real estate for Microsoft, since it's the absolute prime spot for showing ads. If users replace their taskbar and Start menu with something from a third party, that prime real estate is gone. Major conspiracy vibes, yes, and I know this isn't the reason, but why else would they be blocking these applications? I can't think of anything that makes more sense.

With Microsoft's rollout of the new Outlook for Windows, it appears the company has transformed its email app into a surveillance tool for targeted advertising. Everyone talks about the privacy-washing campaigns of Google and Apple as they mine your online data to generate advertising revenue. But now it looks like Outlook is no longer simply an email service; it's a data collection mechanism for Microsoft's 801 external partners and an ad delivery system for Microsoft itself. Edward Komenda on the Proton blog Now, note that this is an article written by Proton, posted on the company blog, so of course they're not going to be too kind towards their competitors. That being said, the article's not wrong: the new Outlook web application, now the default in Windows, not only shared your data with around 800 partners, it also displays ads inside of the application. On macOS, it will even show yo fake emails that are, in fact, ads. Furthermore, once you add your accounts to this new Outlook web application, you'll also be uploading your username and password to Microsoft, giving them access to your email accounts for advertising and data collection purposes, a shady practice a ton of email clients on mobile devices tend to do as well. Suffice it to say you really shouldn't be using this new Outlook, and you should make sure friends and family don't either. This is yet another nail in the coffin of Windows, now an advertising and data collection platform first, and operating system second.

WinBtrfs is a Windows driver for the next-generation Linux filesystem Btrfs. A reimplementation from scratch, it contains no code from the Linux kernel, and should work on any version from Windows XP onwards. It is also included as part of the free operating system ReactOS. WinBtrfs GitHub page If you're running a distribution that defaults to Btrfs, or you actively choose to use it on other distributions, and you also happen to dual-boot Windows because your boss makes you use some garbage corpo software, this driver will make your setup a bit easier to manage.

Clark founded Silicon Graphics Inc on the 9th of November in 1981, and he left Stanford early in 1982 to pursue building the company full time with just $25000 in funding (around $85000 in 2024) from a friend and the contents of his own accounts. Accompanying Clark in this adventure were Kurt Akeley, Dave Brown, Tom Davis, Mark Grossman, Marc Hannah, Herb Kuta, Rocky Rhodes, and Abbey Silverstone. While SGI knew they would deal in computers outfitted with a powerful GPU, they did not know precisely what else those computers should feature. As a result, Clark asked potential customers what they'd like to see in a workstation. While at least one potential customer was interested in VMS, NASA's new Advanced Supercomputing division was very interested in UNIX and they were willing to pay. The division's director at the time spoke with Clark, and (verbally) committed to purchasing at least eighteen workstations in their first order. Bradford Morgan White SGI machines are by far the most sought-after and most expensive of the retro UNIX workstation market today, with machines still netting thousands of euros, even for damaged or less than ideal examples. IRIX is probably also the dead UNIX with the most active fanbase, still releasing software and updates to this very day. An SGI machine is high on my list, and writing an article about using IRIX today is something I've been wanting to do for decades. Sadly, the odds of finding one that's both affordable and shippable to the Arctic part of Sweden - especially now that OSNews is my full-time job and I'm dependent on Patreons and donations - are very, very slim.

I made a graphical IRC client that runs in UEFI. It's written in Rust and leverages the GUI toolkit and TrueType renderer that I wrote for axle's userspace. I was able to develop it thanks to the vmnet network backend that I implemented for QEMU. I've published the code here. Phillip Tennen Words are not enough.

One of the things I've always wanted to experiment with on my computers is logging in and authenticating things like sudo requests with a hardware tool - a fingerprint reader, a smart card, or a USB hardware security device like a YubiKey. There's really no solid reason for me to want this other than that it just feels cool and futuristic to me (yes, even in this, the year of our lord 2024). I have no state secrets, no secret Swiss bank accounts, no whistleblower material to protect, and my computers rarely leave the house - I just want it because it's possible and cooler than typing in my password. Due to the flexibility and feature set of the YubiKey, I think it's the best choice to go for. A no-name USB fingerprint reader would probably be ugly, cumbersome to position, and Linux support would be difficult to determine. A USB smart card reader would bring the same issues as the fingerprint reader, and combined with a smart card it seems like it's just a Yubikey with extra steps. I do have to admit the idea of sliding a smart card in a slot and have it authorise you sounds really, really satisfying. Anyway, YubiKeys come in all shapes and sizes, but I want one of the USB-A ones with a fingerprint reader built-in, since I can plug it in at the bottom of my monitor, perfectly positioned to put my thumb on it to authenticate. This way, it's easily accessible to be used to log into my desktop session, authorise sudo requests when I'm configuring things, log into websites with Firefox, and so on. But there's a problem: setting up a YubiKey on Linux seems like it's a huge ordeal. Just look a the official instructions on the YubiKey website, or the instructions on the Fedora website, my distribution of choice. That's absolutely insane, and nobody should be expected to understand any of this nonsense to use what is being marketed as a consumer product. It's important to note that this is not a hardware, software, or driver issue - all the necessary support is there, and Linux can make full use of the functionality tools like the YubiKey offers. The problem is that you're expected to set this up manually, package by package, configuration file by configuration file, PAM module by PAM module. When I first looked into getting a YubiKey, I expected biometric and advanced authentication tools like these to be fully integrated into modern Linux distributions and desktop environments. I figured that once you plugged one of these tools into your PC, additional options would become available in GNOME's or KDE's user account settings, but apparently, this isn't the case. This means that even if you manually set everything up using the official arcane incantations, your graphical user interface won't be aware of any of that, and changing anything will mean you have to go through those official arcane incantations again. This is entirely unacceptable. The moment you plug in an an advanced hardware security tool like a YubiKey, GNOME and KDE should recognise it, and the settings, tools, and setup wizards' relevant to it should become available. All the hardware and software support is there - and in 2024, biometric and advanced security devices like these should not be so complicated and unforgiving to set up. Smart cards and fingerprint readers have been supported by Linux for literally decades. Why isn't this easier? For now, I'm still in doubt about going through with buying a YubiKey. I definitely have the skills to go through with this whole insane setup process, but I really shouldn't have to.

OpenBSD 7.5 has hit the streets (or servers and workstations), and it comes with a metric ton of improvements and new features. Of course, the kernel has been improved in countless ways, from symmetric multiprocessing improvements to a new font usable as a console font. The graphics drivers have been updated to match Linux 6.6.19, and drivers for the Apple display coprocessor were added. Furthermore, a whole slew of additional ARM boards and SoC are now supported, and new drivers for a variety of networking chips, both wired and wireless, were added as well. Of course, that's just a selection of the changes, and the full changelog lists them all for those of you with specific wishes.

A new major release, FFmpeg 7.0 Dijkstra", is now available for download. The most noteworthy changes for most users are a native VVC decoder (currently experimental, until more fuzzing is done), IAMF support, or a multi-threaded ffmpeg CLI tool. This release is not backwards compatible, removing APIs deprecated before 6.0. The biggest change for most library callers will be the removal of the old bitmask-based channel layout API, replaced by the AVChannelLayout API allowing such features as custom channel ordering, or Ambisonics. Certain deprecated ffmpeg CLI options were also removed, and a C11-compliant compiler is now required to build the code. FFmpeg website I don't think many of directly interface with FFmpeg, but we're most likely all using it one way or another. Even Microsoft (heres the referenced bug report).

PCIe 7.0 is is the next generation interconnect technology for computers that is set to increase data transfer speeds to 128 GT/s per pin, doubling the 64 GT/s of PCIe 6.0 and quadrupling the 32 GT/s of PCIe 5.0. This would allow a 16-lane (x16) connection to support 256 GB/sec of bandwidth in each direction simultaneously, excluding encoding overhead. Such speeds will be handy for future datacenters as well as artificial intelligence and high-performance computing applications that will need even faster data transfer rates, including network data transfer rates. Anton Shilov at AnandTech PCIe 7.0 won't hit devices until late 2020s.

Oh boy. Roku has an... Interesting new patent. Thought you could avoid the ads infesting every smart" TV you buy now by using external devices through HDMI? Disclosed herein are system, apparatus, article of manufacture, method and/or computer program product embodiments, and/or combinations and sub-combinations thereof, for ad insertion by a display device coupled to a media device via a high-definition media interface (HDMI) connection, where the media device provides media content and/or a control signal. When the media device pauses the media content, the display device can determine that a pause event has occurred and insert an ad shown on the display device. Further, some embodiments include determining the context and/or content of the media content that is paused, and determining an ad that is customized to the determined context and/or content to be displayed on the display device. In some embodiments, the display device can determine additional information from the control signal that may also be used to determine the ad to be displayed on the display device. Some bullshit patent for a bullshit invention' My eyes are bleeding. I require medical assistance.

Earlier this week, Qt 6.7 was released with a whole slew of new features and improvements. Reading through the various highlights, there's further improvements to Qt Graphs, first released with Qt 6.6 and still under active development, better SVG support, variable fonts and icon font support, and much more. There's also a variety of new examples and demo applications, and of course, Qt 6.7 supports all the latest operating system releases. One feature that truly stood out to me as something that I'm assuming will make Qt developers happy is improved support for embedding native controls into Qt applications. On both desktop and mobile platforms, applications often need to combine UI elements from different technologies and frameworks. Qt uses and integrates tightly with the native technologies on each platform to create basic UI elements such as windows, and it has for a long time been possible to use UI elements from other frameworks within a Qt Widgets application. With Qt 6.7, we are now adding support forembedding native windows into a Qt Quick sceneas well. This allows use of native controls such as AppKit's MapView or a Windows media player inside a Qt Quick UI, with correct positioning and stacking. By layering windows, Qt Quick UI elements can be overlaid on top of the native components as well. Volker Hilsheimer Alongside Qt 6.7, Qt Creator 13 has also been released, which comes with its own set of improvements and new features.

One area of AMD's product portfolio that doesn't get as much attention as the desktop and server parts is their Embedded platform. AMD's Embedded series has been important for on-the-edge devices, including industrial, automotive, healthcare, digital gaming machines, and thin client systems. Today, AMD has unveiled their latest Embedded architecture, Embedded+, which combines their Ryzen Embedded processors based on the Zen+ architecture with their Versal adaptive SoCs onto a single board. Gavin Bonshor at AnandTech Machines with these chips will flood the used market a few years from now, and they're going to be great buys for all kinds of fun projects - and because the corporate world buys these machines by the truckload, they show up on eBay at impulse prices within years. Sometimes, you can even buy cheap whole lots of these kinds of boxes. They often tend to be a little weird, and come with features and trinkets normal computers don't come with, which is always good for some weekend fun. Cathode Ray Dude is currently doing a series on these little things on YouTube, and there's always something weird to discover about what kind of odd features and design choices these machines possess. If there's interest from you, our lovely readers, I can see if I can snatch up a few weird ones from eBay and write about what kind of fun projects you can do with these. You can usually run Linux on these, the embedded versions of Windows, and if they're not too weird, they could probably serve as a cheap Haiku box, too.

In May and June 2023, a threat actor compromised the Microsoft Exchange Online mailboxes of 22 organizations and over 500 individuals around the world. The actor-known as Storm-0558 and assessed to be affiliated with the People's Republic of China in pursuit of espionage objectives-accessed the accounts using authentication tokens that were signed by a key Microsoft had created in 2016. This intrusion compromised senior United States government representatives working on national security matters, including the email accounts of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, United States Ambassador to the People's Republic of China R. Nicholas Burns, and Congressman Don Bacon. The Board finds that this intrusion was preventable and should never have occurred. The Board also concludes that Microsoft's security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul, particularly in light of the company's centrality in the technology ecosystem and the level of trust customers place in the company to protect their data and operations. Cyber Safety Review Board's report The Cyber Safety Review Board reviewed the attack on Microsoft Exchange from last year, with Microsoft's cooperation, and it turns out it was kind of a complete and utter shitshow inside Microsoft - a cascade of failures, as the report calls it - and concludes that it was an entirely preventable attack. The report is not kind to Microsoft, and it's a very interesting read if you're into this sort of post mortems of security breaches.

Microsoft is working on a new feature for its Edge browser that will let you limit the amount of RAM it uses. Leopeva64, who is one of the best at finding new Edge features, has spotted a new settings section in test builds of the browser that includes a slider so you can limit how much RAM Edge gets access to. Tom Warren at The Verge Isn't it the operating system's job to manage memory? It seems very archaic to manually set memory limits on an application, or am I totally out of touch?

We've talked about Tribblix before on OSNews - it's a distribution of illumos, built by Peter Tribble. In his latest blog post, Tribble details some of the changes he's made to the live ISO and other images for the most recent release. All along, there's been an overlay (think a group package) called base-iso that lists the packages that are present in the live image. On installation, this is augmented with a few extra packages that you would expect to be present in a running system but which don't make much sense in a live image, to construct the base system. You can add additional software, but the base is assumed to be present. The snag with this is that base-iso is very much a single-purpose generic concept. By its very nature it has to be minimal enough to not be overly bloated, yet contain as many drivers as necessary to handle the majority of systems. As such, the regular ISO image has fallen between 2 stools - it doesn't have every single driver, so some systems won't work, while it has a lot of unnecessary drivers for a lot of common use cases. Peter Tribble Tribble then details how he addressed this issue, which is, unsurprisingly, rather clever. I'm not going to spoil it here, so go on over and read the details.

I work at Red Hat on GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection.For the last five releases of GCC, I've been working on -fanalyzer, a static analysis pass that tries to identify various problems at compile-time, rather than at runtime. It performs symbolic execution" of C source code-effectively simulating the behavior of the code along the various possible paths of execution through it. This article summarizes what's new with -fanalyzer in GCC 14, which I hope will be officially released sometime in April 2024. David Malcolm No matter how many more of you become a Patreon to keep OSNews alive, I'll never be able to really add anything meaningful to articles like these.

The SUSE security team restricts the installation of system wide D-Bus services and Polkit policies in openSUSE distributions and derived SUSE products. Any package that ships these features needs to be reviewed by us first, before it can be added to production repositories. In November, openSUSE KDE packagers approached us with a long list of KDE components for an upcoming KDE6 major release. The packages needed adjusted D-Bus and Polkit whitelistings due to renamed interfaces or other breaking changes. Looking into this many components at once was a unique experience that also led to new insights, which will be discussed in this article. For readers that are new to D-Bus and/or Polkit, the following sections offer a summary to get a better idea about these systems. Matthias Gerstner You don't get these kinds of in-depth looks at how a major new release like KDE 6 gets implemented in a popular distribution like openSUSE. What's especially crazy is that this only really covers D-Bus and Polkit, and those are just two of the countless aspects of openSUSE affected by KDE 6.