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You heard it here first folks: systemd is coming to postmarketOS! As a mobile oriented OS, our main goal has always been to work for everyone. From technical folks to casual users. postmarketOS should have all the benefits you expect from a Linux based distribution, such as being free software, respecting your privacy, getting updates until your device physically breaks, respecting your attention and not shoving advertisements in your face. Your phone should be a tool you use, not the other way around. This is of course not an easy task, one of the main blockers we found as we collaborate more closely with KDE and GNOME developers is that they have a hard time with our OpenRC-based stack. In order to get KDE and GNOME working at all, we use a lot of systemd polyfills on top of OpenRC. So while we are technically not using systemd", in practice we already do use a large chunk of its components to get KDE and GNOME running, just different versions of those components. While we are very grateful for everybody who works on these polyfills, we must point out that most aren't a full replacement, and take additional effort to support and maintain. As much as we might want to romanticise the idea of spending 6, 12, 24 months attempting to come up with an even vaguely competitive alternative to systemd, we would quite simply rather be working on making postmarketOS better. postmarketOS blog This is the sensible choice to make, and I'm glad they made it. It makes no sense for a relatively small project that already has to deal with the difficulties of supporting smartphones to also have to deal with shoehorning the smartphone variants of GNOME and KDE into an init system they're not at all made for.

Every day, people turn to Search to find the best of what the web has to offer. We've long had policies and automated systems to fight against spammers, and we work to address emerging tactics that look to game our results with low-quality content. We regularly update those policies and systems to effectively tackle these trends so we can continue delivering useful content and connecting people with high-quality websites. Today we're announcing key changes we're making to improve the quality of Search and the helpfulness of your results. Elizabeth Tucker on the official Google blog Low-quality SEO spam has been a problem on Google for years, but the recent advent of AI" tools has wreaked absolute havoc in the search results. It's a damn blood bath out there. It's now up to Google to fix its own mess, so let's wait and see if these changes will do anything to reverse the downward spiral Google Search has been in for years now.

FreeBSD 13.3 has been released, and as this is a point release of the stable branch, it's not a major shake-up or overhaul of the platform. We've got the usual updated versions of LLVM, clang, OpenSSH, and so on, and there's a number of stability fixes to native and LinuxKPI-based WiFi drivers. Of course, there's much more, so head on over to the release notes for the full details.

According to my sources, AI Explorer is the blockbuster AI experience that will separate AI PCs from non-AI PCs. It's described as an advanced Copilot" with a built-in history/timeline feature that turns everything you do on your computer into a searchable moment using natural language. It works across any app and allows users to search for previously opened conversations, documents, web pages, and images. For example, you could type, Find me that list of restaurants Jenna said she liked," and Windows can bring up the exact conversation you were having when Jenna mentioned those restaurants. Even vague prompts should work, like Find me that thing about dinosaurs," Windows will pull up every word, phrase, image, and related topic about dinosaurs that you've previously opened on your computer. The AI Explorer app can also understand context, help jumpstart projects or workflows, and even suggest tasks based on what's currently on screen. For example, suppose you're looking at an image in an app. In that case, the AI Explorer will automatically show an edit image" button that lets you type out your criteria, such as remove this image's background using the Photos app." Zac Bowden Windows, for all your AI" and ads.

Well, that was a short run. Announced with much fanfare in 2021, Microsoft has announced it's already killing Windows Subsystem for Android, Microsoft's solution to run Android applications on Windows 11. Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for AndroidTM (WSA). As a result, the Amazon Appstore on Windows and all applications and games dependent on WSA will no longer be supported beginning March 5, 2025. Until then, technical support will remain available to customers. Customers that have installed the Amazon Appstore or Android apps prior to March 5, 2024, will continue to have access to those apps through the deprecation date of March 5, 2025. Please reach out to our support team for further questions at support.microsoft.com. We are grateful for the support of our developer community and remain committed to listening to feedback as we evolve experiences. Microsoft's Learn website Whenever Microsoft offers a way or an API to run and/or develop applications for Windows, and it isn't Win32, you can be certain they're going to kill it within a few years.

I owned a C64 and was familiar with the C128, but this one was odd. It wasn't running any games, color graphics or playing music. Instead, it was connected to a monochrome monitor which always displayed either a weird command line prompt or what seemed to be some boring professional writing software. I soon came to find that it was running CP/M and WordStar, one of the first word processors for microcomputers. My daily obsessive visits to the computer shop led to some friendship with the owner, to the point that he'd let me in and play with the machines. So, I played with CP/M and learned how to use WordStar. Well, in case you didn't notice, I own a C128DCR now. This blog is about how I got CP/M, WordStar, and other fun ancient software apps running on it. Celso Martinho CP/M, of course, was the primary influence of DOS.

Baldur Bjarnason has written an excellent piece to explain why, exactly, companies like Apple seem wholly incapable of working with the EU, instead of against it. He argues - quite effectively - that Apple, and US tech punditry in general, simply do not understand the EU, nor are they willing to spend even 10 minutes to understand it, which is really all you need. The core premise of the EU, its very primary function, is to enable and protect the single market. A great example of this is the ban on roaming charges - mobile phone carriers in EU are not allowed to charge extra for using mobile voice and data services in another EU country. From the EU's perspective, taking action to prevent private parties from fragmenting and taking private control over the single market simultaneously grew the economy and increased consumer surplus. This is the operating theory behind much of the actions the EU takes regarding market regulation and product standardisation: a single market built on standards is more profitable for both businesses and consumers. Baldur Bjarnason And because Apple and its tech punditry refuse to try and understand the party they are dealing with, they get caught looking like childish idiots every time they open their mouths about it. Normally when the EU regulates a given sector, it does so with ample lead time and works with industry to make sure that they understand their obligations. Apple instead thought that the regulatory contact from the EU during the lead time to the DMA was an opportunity for it to lecture the EU on its right to exist. Then its executives made up some fiction in their own minds as to what the regulation meant, announced their changes, only to discover later that they were full of bullshit. This was entirely Apple's own fault. For months, we've been hearing leaks about Apple's talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks were not negotiations even though Apple seems to have thought they were. Talks like those are to help companies implement incoming regulations, with some leeway for interpretation on the EU's side to accommodate business interests. Remember what I wrote about electrical plugs? The EU is pro-business - often criticised for being essentially a pro-business entity - and not in favour of regulation for regulation's sake. If Apple had faced reality and tried to understand the facts as they are, they would have used the talks to clarify all of these issues and more well in advance of the DMA taking effect. But they didn't because they have caught the tech industry management disease of demanding that reality bend to their ideas and wishes. Baldur Bjarnason What a lot of people - both inside and outside the EU - do not grasp is that while we all know the EU has shortcomings and issues, in general, the EU is uncharacteristically (for a government agency) popular among EU citizens, no matter the country of origin. That's because we, as EU citizens, and especially as EU citizens who do anything international, know just how ridiculously beneficial the EU has been for trade, business, the economy, travel, and so much more. Apple can keep acting like a whiny trust fund boy who thinks the world owes them everything, but they'll have to deal with the consequences. Continued violation of the DMA can lead to fines of up to 10% of revenue. That's 38 billion dollars. I secretly hope Apple keeps this childish behaviour up. It's deeply entertaining.

The European organisation for crash testing and car safety, Euro NCAP has announced that starting in 2026, cars will need physical controls in their interiors to gain the highest safety ratings. The overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, with almost every vehicle-maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens, obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes," said Matthew Avery, Euro NCAP's director of strategic development. New Euro NCAP tests due in 2026 will encourage manufacturers to use separate, physical controls for basic functions in an intuitive manner, limiting eyes-off-road time and therefore promoting safer driving," he said. Jonathan M. Gitlin at Ars Technica Excellent news, and it's taken regulators and safety organisations way too long to long to adapt to the growing menace of touch screens in cars.

Embedded software is used in safety-critical systems such as medical devices and autonomous vehicles, where software defects, including security vulnerabilities, have severe consequences. Most embedded codebases are developed in unsafe languages, specifically C/C++, and are riddled with memory safety vulnerabilities. To prevent such vulnerabilities, RUST, a performant memory-safe systems language, provides an optimal choice for developing embedded software. RUST interoperability enables developing RUST applications on top of existing C codebases. Despite this, even the most resourceful organizations continue to develop embedded software in C/C++. This paper performs the first systematic study to holistically understand the current state and challenges of using RUST for embedded systems. Our study is organized across three research questions. We collected a dataset of 2,836 RUST embedded software spanning various categories and 5 Static Application Security Testing ( SAST) tools. We performed a systematic analysis of our dataset and surveys with 225 developers to investigate our research questions. We found that existing RUST software support is inadequate, SAST tools cannot handle certain features of RUST embedded software, resulting in failures, and the prevalence of advanced types in existing RUST software makes it challenging to engineer interoperable code. In addition, we found various challenges faced by developers in using RUST for embedded systems development. Ayushi Sharma, Shashank Sharma, Santiago Torres-Arias, Aravind Machiry Some light reading.

A few months ago I introduced you to one of the more notable Apple pre-production units in my collection, a late prototype Macintosh Portable. But it turns out it's not merely notable for what it is than what it has on it: a beta version of System 6.0.6 (the doomed release that Apple pulled due to bugs), Apple sales databases, two online services - the maligned Mac Prodigy client, along with classic AppleLink as used by Apple staff - and two presentations, one on Apple's current Macintosh line and one on the upcoming System 7. Now that I've got the infamous Conner hard drive it came with safely copied over, it's time to explore its contents some more. Old Vintage Computing Research I wonder just how rare it is to find old internal presentations from a company like Apple. It seems like something that doesn't happen very often, so it's great to see this archived and documented.

NixBSD is an attempt to make a reproducible and declarable BSD, based on NixOS. Although theoretically much of this work could be copied to build other BSDs, all work thus far has been focused on building a FreeBSD distribution. NixBSD Github page It was only a matter of time before someone would try and build this.

Modern browsers don't really support older versions of Windows anymore, so anyone running Windows XP, 2003, Vista, and even Windows 7 and 8 are losing access to secure and capable browsers. While running those older versions of Windows on production machines isn't exactly advised, they're still great fun as retrocomputing platforms and to keep older Windows games accessible using period-correct hardware. As such, there's some awesome news: there is now a fully up-to-date variant of Chromium for these older versions of Windows called Supermium. It tracks current Chromium, supports extensions, sandboxing, Aero Glass, Google Sync, and even Widevine on Windows 7 and higher. Micheal MJD just published a video showing Supermium in action in case you're curious. You'll need at least Windows XP SP3 and an Intel Pentium 4 with SSE2 in order to run it, and Windows 2000 support is in the works, too.

Redox has published the summary of development covering February, and there's quite a few interesting leaps forward this month. First and foremost, the operating system got a major file read/write speed boost by implementing records in RedoxFS. The migration to UNIX-format paths is ongoing, Boxedwine is currently being ported, and more and more programs are getting ported, including complex applications like Audacity, Celestia, KiCad and Neothesia. There's a lot more this month, so be sure to read the whole report.

Following the release of the second beta version of iOS 17.4, it emerged that Apple had restricted the functionality of iOS web apps in the EU. Web apps could no longer launch from the Home Screen in their own top-level window that takes up the entire screen, relegating them to a simple shortcut with an option to open within Safari instead. The move was heavily criticized by groups like Open Web Advocacy, which started a petition in an effort to persuade Apple to reverse the change, and it even caught the attention of the European Commission. Now, Apple has backtracked and says that Home Screen web apps that use WebKit in the EU will continue to function as expected upon the release of iOS 17.4. Hartley Charlton at MacRumors A welcome move, but they will still be restricted to opening using WebKit instead of any other engine Europeans will be allowed to install. With criticism of Apple's DMA plans mounting, and pressure on the European Commission to not approve Apple's plans increasing, all of this might change over the coming months, still.

So far in this series, I have looked in broad terms at how the CPU cores in Apple silicon chips work, and how they use frequency control and two types of core to deliver high performance with low power and energy use. As I hinted previously, their design also relies on specialist processing units and co-processors, the subject of this article. Howard Oakley Another excellent read from Howard Oakley.

Questions like Which browser should I use?" regularly come up on the r/browsers subreddit. I sometimes respond to these posts, but my quick replies usually only contain one or two points. To be honest, until recently I wasn't even sure myself why I use Firefox. Of course it's a pretty good browser, but that doesn't explain why I've stubbornly stayed loyal to Firefox for more than a decade. After giving it a bit more thought, I came up with the following reasons. ime Vidas There's really no viable alternative to Firefox for me. I wish we had more choice, more competition, and more vibrancy in the browser space, and I'm definitely anxious about the future of Firefox, but with every other browser being either Chrome, possibly with skin, or Safari, there's really nowhere else to go.

Rooting an Android phone is no longer as popular as it was a few years ago. Plus, if you root your phone now, you will run into several issues, like Google Wallet and banking apps not working, as the device will fail the Play Integrity API test. It makes sense for Google to block banking apps and payment functionality on rooted phones for safety and security reasons. But the company is now taking things a step further and has started blocking RCS from working in Google Messages on rooted or bootloader unlocked Android devices. Rajesh Pandey Entirely expected, but no less unconscionable. Banking applications, government ID services, and now even messaging platforms - all entirely crucial functions in the very fabric of society and government that we're just handing over to two ruthless abusive companies. It's simply no longer possible to function in many modern societies without having either a blessed Android device, or an iPhone, since any other platform will often lock you out of crucial functionality that you need to function in today's world. If there was ever anything the European Union should be fighting against, it's this.

MenuetOS has released two new versions recently, version 1.49.60 on 5 February, and 1.50.00 on 1 March. Aside from the usual bugfixes and updates, these two new versions bring, among other things, new screensavers, a musical chord calculator, and support for UEFI booting thanks to Easyboot. MenuetOS is a small operating system written entirely in assembly, available in both 32bit and 64bit versions for x86.

Remember last year, when we reported that the Red Ventures-owned CNEThad been quietly publishing dozens of AI-generated articles that turned out to be filled with errors and plagiarism? The revelation kicked off a fiery debate about the future of the media in the era of AI - as well as an equally passionate discussion among editors of Wikipedia, who needed to figure out how to treat CNET content going forward. Gerard's admonition was posted on January 18, 2023, just a few days after our initial story about CNETs use of AI. The comment launched a discussion that would ultimately result in CNET's demotion from its once-strong Wikipedia rating of generally reliable." It was a grim fall that one former Red Ventures employee told us could put a huge dent in their SEO efforts," and also a cautionary tale about the wide-ranging reputational effects that publishers should consider before moving into AI-generated content. Maggie Harrison Dupre Excellent response by Wikipedia. Any outlet that uses spicy autocomplete to generate content needs to be booted off Wikipedia.

We're thrilled to announce DirectSR, our new API designed in partnership with GPU hardware vendors to enable seamless integration of Super Resolution (SR) into the next generation of games. Super Resolution is a cutting-edge technique that increases the resolution and visual quality in games. DirectSR is the missing link developers have been waiting for when approaching SR integration, providing a smoother, more efficient experience that scales across hardware. This API enables multi-vendor SR through a common set of inputs and outputs, allowing a single code path to activate a variety of solutions including NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution, AMD FidelityFXTM Super Resolution, and Intel XeSS. DirectSR will be available soon in the Agility SDK as a public preview, which will enable developers to test it out and provide feedback. Don't miss our DirectX State of the Union at GDC to catch a sneak peek at how DirectSR can be used with your games! Joshua Tucker at the DirectX Developer Blog If this aides in making sense out of the confusing mess of terminology and marketing terms surrounding this technology, I'm all for it.

HP launched a subscription service today that rents people a printer, allots them a specific amount of printed pages, and sends them ink for a monthly fee. HP is framing its service as a way to simplify printing for families and small businesses, but the deal also comes with monitoring and a years-long commitment. Prices range from $6.99 per month for a plan that includes an HP Envy printer (the current model is the 6020e) and 20 printed pages. The priciest plan includes an HP OfficeJet Pro rental and 700 printed pages for $35.99 per month. Scharon Harding at Ars Technica Can I pay them not to put a printer in my house?

One of the limitations of AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver has been the inability to implement HDMI 2.1+ functionality on the basis of legal requirements by the HDMI Forum. AMD engineers had been working to come up with a solution in conjunction with the HDMI Forum for being able to provide HDMI 2.1+ capabilities with their open-source Linux kernel driver, but it looks like those efforts for now have concluded and failed. Michael Larabel So dumb.

KDE Plasma 6 has been released - and this is an important release with two massive low-level stack upgrades. With Plasma 6, our technology stack has undergone two major upgrades: a transition to the latest version of our application framework, Qt, and a migration to the modern Linux graphics platform, Wayland. We have done our best to ensure that these changes are as smooth and unnoticeable to the users as possible, so when you install this update, you will see the same familiar desktop environment that you know and love. But these under-the-hood upgrades benefit Plasma's security, efficiency, and performance, and improve support for modern hardware. Thus Plasma delivers an overall more reliable user experience, while paving the way for many more improvements in the future. Aside from this, there's so much in this release it's hard to know where to begin. My favourite is the overhaul of KDE's default Breeze theme, which now uses far, far fewer frames, meaning there's fewer borders-on-borders. Spacing has also been made more consistent within Breeze. Both of these efforts make KDE applications and UI elements look a bit less cluttered and busy, which, while easily missed if you don't look for it, certainly cleans things up nicely. Another important improvements is the addition of support for HDR displays and colour management. Plasma on Wayland now has partial support for High Dynamic Range (HDR). On supported monitors and software, this will provide you with richer and deeper colors for your games, videos, and visual creations. Set an ICC profile for each screen individually and Plasma will adjust the colors accordingly. Applications are still limited to the sRGB color space, but we are working on increasing the number of supported color spaces soon. To improve Plasma's accessibility, we added support for color blindness correction filters. This helps with protanopia, deuteranopia or tritanopia. Of course, this release is accompanied by updates to a large number of KDE applications, and several default settings in KDE have been changed as well to better suit what most users would expect. Plasma Search has been overhauled as well, making it faster and less resource-intensive, and giving users the ability to better control how search results are displayed. There's a lot more here, so be sure to dive into the release announcement, KDE Plasma 6 will find its way to your distribution or operating system of choice over the coming weeks and months.

Wear OS smartwatches have a dual-chipset architecture inclusive of a powerful application processor (AP) and ultra low-power co-processor microcontroller unit (MCU). The architecture has a powerful AP capable of handling complex operations en-masse, and is seamlessly coupled with a low power MCU. The Wear OS hybrid interface enables intelligent switching between the MCU or the AP, allowing the AP to be suspended when not needed to preserve battery life. It helps, for instance, achieve more power-efficient experiences, like sensor data processing on the MCU while the AP is asleep. At the same time, the hybrid interface provides a seamless transition between these states, keeping a rich and premium user experience without jarring transitions between power modes. Kseniia Shumelchyk on the Android Developers Blog The new OnePlus Watch 2 is the first to use this new architecture, and the most interesting part is that it runs not one, but two operating systems: Wear OS, which is Android, running on the AP", and a smaller RTOS that runs on the MCU". In the case of the OnePlus Watch 2, the AP" is a Snapdragon W5, while the MCU" is a BES 2700, an ultra low power microcontroller. I can't seem to find any information on this RTOS", but I'd really love to know what it's based on.

Speaking of collecting data, here's another major content player signing a deal to sell your content to AI" companies. The owner of Tumblr and WordPress.com is in talks with AI companies Midjourney and OpenAI to provide training data scraped from users' posts, a report from 404 Media alleges. The report, based on an anonymous source inside the company, says that deals between Automattic and the two AI companies are imminent." It follows nebulous rumors that have spread on Tumblr over the past week, suggesting a deal with Midjourney could provide a new revenue stream for the site. Adi Robertson at The Verge We use WordPress for OSNews, but it seems this only applies to content hosted at WordPress.com, not on WordPress installations hosted elsewhere. If you host a site at WordPress.com, you might want to go to your admin panel and opting-out of this nonsense real fast.

Meta will soon begin collecting anonymized data" from users of its Quest headsets, a move that could see the company aggregating information about hand, body, and eye tracking; camera information; information about your physical environment"; and information about the virtual reality events you attend." In an email sent to Quest users Monday, Meta notes that it currently collects the data required for your Meta Quest to work properly." Starting with the next software update, though, the company will begin collecting and aggregating anonymized data about... device usage" from Quest users. That anonymized data will be used for things like building better experiences and improving Meta Quest products for everyone," the company writes. Kyle Orland at Ars Technica Is it just me, or is the idea of Facebook collecting this type of data in particular just exceptionally creepy? I mean, browsing history or whatever is one thing - already bad enough - but hand, body, and eye movements, and camera information? Of course, this was the only expected course for Quest owners, but now that the time is here, it still feels just as creepy as when we first imagined it when Facebook bought Oculus.

If there's one thing Windows users hate about Windows, it's Windows updates interrupting your workflow or gaming session with a popup asking you to restart your PC finish installing the latest security update. It happens at least once a month, because that's how often Microsoft rolls out security updates to Windows PCs. This may soon be a thing of the past, as the company is now testing an update method called hot patching" for Windows 11 PCs. Hot patching is already in use on some Windows Server editions, as well as Xbox, and now it appears the company is preparing to bring it to devices running Windows 11. Zac Bowden at Windows Central A welcome, good improvement every Windows user is going to benefit from. This is the kind of improvements Microsoft should really be focusing on, instead of adding more ads or useless AI" features.

It's one of those anachronisms that is deeply embedded in modern technology. From cloud operator servers to embedded controllers in appliances, there must be uncountable devices that think they are connected to a TTY. I will omit the many interesting details of the Linux terminal infrastructure here, as it could easily fill its own article. But most Linux users are at least peripherally aware that the kernel tends to identify both serial devices and terminals as TTYs, assigning them filesystem names in the form of /dev/tty*. Probably a lot of those people remember that this stands for teletype or perhaps teletypewriter, although in practice the term teleprinter is more common. J. B. Crawford I remember first using Linux in like 2000 or 2001, and running into the abbreviation tty, and not having a single clue what that meant since I came from a DOS and Windows background. Over time I gained a lot more understanding of the structure of modern UNIX-like systems, but it's still great to read such a detailed history of the concept.

In this blog post, you will learn about some OpenBSD features that can be useful, but not widespread. They often have a niche usage, but it's important to know they exist to prevent you from reinventing the wheel. Solene Rapenne Written by Solene Rapenne, who also happens to be an OpenBSD developer, so a great source for information like this.

I frequently write about Windows, Edge, and other Microsoft-adjacent technologies as part of my day job, and I sign into my daily-use PCs with a Microsoft account, so my usage patterns may be atypical for many Ars Technica readers. But for anyone who uses Windows, Edge, or both, I thought it might be useful to detail what I'm doing to clean up a clean install of Windows, minimizing (if not totally eliminating) the number of annoying notifications, Microsoft services, and unasked-for apps that we have to deal with. Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica Five pages of nonsense you have to go through to make Windows 11 somewhat less of a trashfire. I can't believe we've reached a point where this is normal and accepted, and often even defended by Windows users, here on OSNews as well. I know just install Linux" generally isn't a helpful comment, but at what point is installing Linux the path of least resistance compared to whatever the hell this is? Especially now that most work is done online in the browser anyway?

I wrote different boot managers. Three boot managers are available as download. The Plop Boot Manager 5, PlopKexec and the new boot manager PBM6. The new boot manager is under development. Elmar Hanlhofer I had never heard of the three Plop boot managers, written by Elmar Hanlhofer, but they seem like quite the capable tools. First, Plop Boot Manager 5 is the most complete version, but it's also quite outdated by now, with its last release stemming from 2013. That being said, it's incredibly feature-packed, but since it lacks UEFI support, its use case seems more focused on legacy systems. PBM6, meanwhile, is the modern version with UEFI support, but it's not complete and is under development, with regular releases. Finally, PlopKexec is exactly what the name implies - a boot manager that uses the Linux kernel. I've never encountered these before, but they seem quite interesting, and if it wasn't for how much I do not like messing with bootloaders, I'd love to give these a go. Have any of you ever used it?

The first Power11" patches were queued today into the PowerPC's next" Git branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle. The first of many IBM Power11 processor/platform enablement patches are beginning to flow out for the Linux kernel for enabling the next-generation Power processors. This shouldn't be too surprising given that a few months ago IBM began posting PowerPC Future" patches for the GCC compiler with speculating at the time it was for Power11 just as IBM previously called their future" CPU target in GCC for Power10 prior to those processors officially debuting. Michael Larabel I really hope IBM learned from the POWER10 fiasco and will make sure POWER11 is properly and fully open again, because POWER9's openness made it unique among the other options out there. Without it, there's really no reason for an enthusiast community to developer around POWER11 as it did around POWER9, and that would be a shame. Again.

US chip company Intel will make high-end semiconductors for Microsoft, the companies announced, as it seeks to compete with TSMC and Samsung to supply the next generation of silicon used in artificial intelligence for customers around the world. Chief executive Pat Gelsinger said at a company event on Wednesday that Intel is set to rebuild Western manufacturing at scale," buoyed by geopolitical concerns in Washington about the need to bring leading-edge manufacturing back to the US. Michael Acton Having our entire advanced chip industry built atop one Dutch company and one company on an island China would love to invade is not exactly the recipe for a stable supply chain. I think it's a great idea to build capacity in the US and Europe, and if Intel's the one to do it - with lavish government funding, I might add - then so be it. We'd all love for it to be more diverse than that, but the sad reality is that building advanced chip factories is really hard and really expensive, and very few companies have both the knowledge and money to do so.

A customer was developing an automated test that required the system to suffer a blue screen crash. They configured their test systems to crash when the ScrollLock key is pressed twice while holding the Ctrl key, and they wrote a simple program that ran as administrator and injected the appropriate keystrokes. But no crash occurred. What did they do wrong? Raymond Chen Does anyone here not love a Raymond Chen mystery?

Android introduced support for Seamless Updates quite a long time ago at this point and, while it's seen adoption from most, Samsung stubbornly refuses to move its devices to the A/B system. Android is now moving towards a future where A/B Seamless Updates are the only supported update mechanism, but that may not be enough to stop Samsung. Ben Schoon at 9To5Google The fact Samsung hasn't embraced Seamless Updates yet is utterly baffling. It's better in every single way, and there's little to no downsides one can think of. I hope this little nudge gets them to finally get their act together.

This is the (work in progress) SunOS jdk builder. The aim is to attempt to download, patch, and build any relevant jdk tag, and do so for SPARC and x86, and for illumos and Solaris 11.4. It has currently been spot-tested on current illumos/x86 (specifically Tribblix m32). It is dependent on the jdk-sunos-patches repository, which holds all the patches for each tag. Peter Tribble Built by Peter Tribble, the same person behind Tribblix, and he's published a blog post with more details about this project. I've definitely been seeing an uptick recently in interest in Solaris, which is great to see. It's gotten me interested in installing Tribblix on my dual-Xeon workstation to see just how much I've been missing since last using Solaris like 15-20 years ago.

Should web developers use pixels or ems/rems for accessible fonts? It's an emotionally-charged question because there are a lot of conflicting opinions out there, and it can be overwhelming. Maybe you've heard that rems are better for accessibility. Or maybe you've heard that the problem is fixed and pixels are fine? The truth is, if you want to build the most-accessible product possible, you need to use both pixels and ems/rems. It's not an either/or situation. There are circumstances where rems are more accessible, and other circumstances where pixels are more accessible. Joshua Comeau The linked article isn't just an explanation of why, but also a tutorial.

On Friday, Bloomberg reported that Reddit has signed a contract allowing an unnamed AI company to train its models on the site's content, according to people familiar with the matter. The move comes as the social media platform nears the introduction of its initial public offering (IPO), which could happen as soon as next month. Reddit initially revealed the deal, which is reported to be worth $60 million a year, earlier in 2024 to potential investors of an anticipated IPO, Bloomberg said. The Bloomberg source speculates that the contract could serve as a model for future agreements with other AI companies. Benj Edwards at Ars Technica Properly paying for the content you're feeding into your AI" model is a huge improvement over just taking it without users' consent, but it does add yet another area of concern for users of all kinds of platforms. Whatever you write, create, or post might be fed into AI" models without you ever realising it, and while the platform you use gets paid for that, you aren't. In any event, OSNews is not selling your comments to an AI" company, but with how old we are, there's no doubt both your comments and our stories have already found their way into countless AI" black holes.

This new release is based on FreeBSD 14.0-STABLE. Update Station got a significant change to upgrade to a major FreeBSD version, allowing upgrading GhostBSD from 13.2-STABLE to 14.0-STABLE. Also, a major change to the installer is the user created is an admin, and the root user gets the same password as the admin. If the admin password is changed after the installation, the root password will not change. GhostBSD's website GhostBSD is a user-friendly, desktop-first distribution' of FreeBSD - a project which, in my humble view, should be part of the FreeBSD project-proper. With some old-time Linux feeling a sense of disenfranchisement towards Linux due to things like Wayland and systemd, FreeBSD could serve as an excellent alternative, and an official desktop-first ISO could play a role in that. Of course, that's not exactly core to FreeBSD's mission, and they really shouldn't be listening to idiots like me, but I think it's an idea worth pondering.

This site contains reconstructed source code for Lander, David Braben's epic game for the Acorn Archimedes, with every single line documented and (for the most part) explained. Lander was the very first game to be released for the ARM processor, and it is both a milestone and a masterpiece. My hope is that this site will be useful for those who want to learn more about Lander and what makes it tick. It is provided on an educational and non-profit basis, with the aim of helping people appreciate the second classic game from this legend of 3D coding (the first classic being Elite, of course). Mark Moxon An incredibly valuable resource.

I remember using DJGPP back in the 1990s before I had been exposed to Linux and feeling that it was a strange beast. Compared to the Microsoft C Compiler and Turbo C++, the tooling was bloated and alien to DOS, and the resulting binaries were huge. But DJGPP provided a complete development environment for free, which I got from a monthly magazine, and I could even look at its source code if I wished. You can't imagine what a big deal that was at the time. But even if I could look under the cover, I never did. I never really understood why was DJGPP so strange, slow, and huge, or why it even existed. Until now. As I'm in the mood of looking back, I've spent the last couple of months figuring out what the foundations of this software were and how it actually worked. Part of this research has resulted in the previous two posts on DOS memory management. And part of this research is this article. Let's take a look! Julio Merino Having access to tools such as this, including the source code, must've been a huge deal to a lot of people, even if ti was strange, slow, and huge" as the author notes.

We're releasing the first Developer Preview of Android 15 today so you, our developers, can collaborate with us to build a better Android. Android 15 continues our work to build a platform that helps improve your productivity while giving you new capabilities to produce superior media experiences, minimize battery impact, maximize smooth app performance, and protect user privacy and security all on the most diverse lineup of devices out there. Dave Burke on the Android Developers Blog This being the first Android 15 Developer Preview, the tentpole features it would contain are not here yet. We're looking at a lot of under-the-hood features most users will never actively notice, but are still very welcome. The Privacy Sandbox has been updated, it adds Health Connect, a secure place to store health data, partial screen sharing, and a lot more.

With the second beta of iOS 17.4, Apple disabled much of the functionality of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in the European Union. There was some speculation that it could be a temporary change or a bug related to some of the updates to the app ecosystem in Europe, but Apple has confirmed that PWAs were intentionally removed and won't be returning. Juli Clover at MacRumors When users in the European Union install iOS 17.4, all functionality regarding progressive web apps will be removed from iOS. This means that when you pin a PWA on your iOS home screen, instead of it opening like an application', so without any browser chrome but with additional other odds and ends to make it feel more like a native application, it'll just open inside the full browser instead. It's typical Apple behaviour - vindictive and petty. Their stated reasoning - it was too hard and too much work to implement this for engines other than WebKit - is a bunch of utter nonsense, since Apple had no issues with developing like 600 new APIs and a whole bunch of new complex frameworks and administrative layers just to support their malicious DMA compliance to ensure they wouldn't lose a single cent of protection money when a developer wants to distribute an application outside of the App Store. PWAs were the only way you could get an application-like experience on your iPhone from something not controlled, owned, and monetised by Apple, so it had to go to force developers to choose either of Apple's new, maliciously DMA compliant monetised distribution options in the EU. Every time this company does anything, it's just... Slimy, scummy, sleazy, and anti-user.

Recently, I began a new project - developing a MIPS emulator for Windows. Although Windows NT is commonly associated with x86-based architectures (and more recently ARM64), historically some lesser-known editions were released for other chipsets. MIPS, a RISC architecture, briefly featured on Windows NT 3.51/4.0 alongside the DEC Alpha and PowerPC before being discontinued with the release of Windows 2000. Having been predominantly x86-focused until now, I have no prior experience with MIPS - or RISC architectures in general. As with the Win16 emulator, my plan is not to achieve 100% compatibility with complex software. Instead, I aim to emulate enough core functionality to successfully run some of the built-in Windows games and utilities. I would like to achieve this in the most universal way possible, relying on minimal hardcoded fixes" and hooks. x86matthew A very impressive project, and a fun one, to boot. Do note that the series of articles is split up, and you can move to the next one in the series at the bottom of each article.

The European Court of Human Rights yesterday banned a general weakening of secure end-to-end encryption. The judgement argues that encryption helps citizens and companies to protect themselves against hacking, theft of identity and personal data, fraud and the unauthorised disclosure of confidential information. Backdoors could also be exploited by criminal networks and would seriously jeopardise the security of all users' electronic communications. There are other solutions for monitoring encrypted communications without generally weakening the protection of all users, the Court held. The judgement cites using vulnerabilities in the target's software or sending an implant to targeted devices as examples. EU Reporter Excellent ruling, and it throws up another roadblock to weakening end-to-end encryption in the EU, after the European Parliament also took a stance against such weakening.

Around 1977, Intel released a floppy disc controller (FDC) chip called the 8271. This controller isn't particularly well known. It was mainly used in business computers and storage solutions, but its one breakthrough into the consumer space was with the BBC Micro, a UK-centric computer released in 1981. There are very few easily discovered details about this chip online, aside from the useful datasheet. This, combined with increasing observations of strange behavior, make the chip a bit of an enigma. My interest in the chip was piqued when I accidentally triggered a wild test mode that managed to corrupt one of my floppy discs even though the write protect tab was present! You can read about that here. Can we reverse engineer a detailed understanding of how it works? What wonders will we find? Chris Evans This thing is wild.

We're on approach towards an alpha version of the new COSMIC desktop environment for Pop!_OS and other distros. Meanwhile, COSMIC testing has expanded to more users around the office. This month, we're providing updates to the checklist we published in January on remaining tasks for releasing the alpha. System76's official blog COSMIC is feeling very close now, and this update has a ton of new things and improvements in it, and COSMIC being new, it's a lot of stuff that's table stakes. There's a screenshot utility now, you can tab various windows together, kind of like Haiku can, the design for the on-screen display notifications has been finalised, there's new animations, and so much more. I'm very excited to try this out.

Microsoft, in collaboration with our ecosystem partners, is preparing to roll out replacement certificates that'll set new Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Certificate Authorities (CAs) trust anchors in Secure Boot for the future. Look out for Secure Boot database updates rolling out in phases to add trust for the new database (DB) and Key Exchange Key (KEK) certificates. This new DB update is available as an optional servicing update for all Secure Boot enabled devices from February 13, 2024. SochiOgbuanya This update will replace the Windows 8-era certificates, set to expire in 2026, with new ones.

The robots.txt file governs a give and take; AI feels to many like all take and no give. But there's now so much money in AI, and the technological state of the art is changing so fast that many site owners can't keep up. And the fundamental agreement behind robots.txt, and the web as a whole - which for so long amounted to everybody just be cool" - may not be able to keep up either. David Pierce for The Verge Another thing AI" does not respect.

progman is a simple X11 window manager modeled after Program Manager from the Windows 3 era. progman's GitHub page If that description doesn't pique your interest, nothing will. What more do you people want from me?