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Updated 2025-10-02 19:17
A Google breakup is on the table, say DOJ lawyers
Next up in my backlog of news to cover: the US Department of Justice's proposed remedies for Google's monopolistic abuse. Now that Judge Amit Mehta hasfound Google is a monopolist, lawyers for the Department of Justice have begun proposing solutions to correct the company's illegal behavior and restore competition to the market for search engines. In a new32-page filing(included below), they said they are considering both behavioral and structural remedies. That covers everything from applying a consent decree to keep an eye on the company's behavior to forcing it to sell off parts of its business, such as Chrome, Android, or Google Play. Richard Lawler at The Verge While I think it would be a great idea to break Google up, such an action taken in a vacuum seems to be rather pointless. Say Google is forced to spin off Android into a separate company - how is that relatively small Android, Inc. going to compete with the behemoth that is Apple and its iOS to which such restrictions do not apply? How is Chrome Ltd. going to survive Microsoft's continued attempts at forcing Edge down our collective throats? Being a dedicated browser maker is working out great for Firefox, right? This is the problem with piecemeal, retroactive measures to try and correct" a market position that you have known for years is being abused - sure, this would knock Google down a peg, but other, even larger megacorporations like Apple or Microsoft will be the ones to benefit most, not any possible new companies or startups. This is exactly why a market-wide, equally-applied set of rules and regulations, like the European Union's Digital Markets Act, is a far better and more sustainable approach. Unless similar remedies are applied to Google's massive competitors, these Google-specific remedies will most likely only make things worse, not better, for the American consumer.
Internet Archive hacked and victim of DDoS attacks
Internet Archive's The Wayback Machine" has suffered a data breach after a threat actor compromised the website and stole a user authentication database containing 31 million unique records. News of the breach began circulating Wednesday afternoon after visitors to archive.org began seeing a JavaScript alert created by the hacker,stating that the Internet Archive was breached. Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach? It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!," reads a JavaScript alert shown on the compromised archive.org site. Lawrence Abrams at Bleeping Computer To make matters worse, the Internet Archive was also suffering from waves of distributed denial-of-service attacks, forcing the IA to take down the site while strengthening everything up. It seems the attackers have no real motivation, other than the fact they can, but it's interesting, shall we say, that the Internet Archive has been under legal assault by big publishers for years now, too. I highly doubt the two are related in any way, but it's an interesting note nonetheless. I'm still catching up on all the various tech news stories, but this one was hard to miss. A lot of people are rightfully angry and dismayed about this, since attacking the Internet Archive like this kind of feels like throwing Molotov cocktails at a local library - there's literally not a single reason to do so, and the only people you're going to hurt are underpaid librarians and chill people who just want to read some books. Whomever is behind this are just assholes, no ifs and buts about it.
Goodbye Windows 7
I finally seem to be recovering from a nasty flu that is now wreaking havoc all across my tiny Arctic town - better now than when we hit -40 I guess - so let's talk about something that's not going to recover because it actually just fucking died: Windows 7. For nearly everyone, support for Windows 7 ended on January 14th, 2020. However, if you were a business who needed more time to migrate off of it because your CEO didn't listen to the begging and pleading IT department until a week before the deadline, Microsoft did have an option for you. Businesses could pay to get up to 3 years of extra security updates. This pushes the EOL date for Windows 7 to January 10th, 2023. Okay but that's still nearly 2 years earlier than October 8th, 2024? The Cool Blog I'd like to solve the puzzle! It's POSReady, isn't it? Of course it is! Windows Embedded POSReady's support finally ended a few days ago, and this means that for all intents and purposes, Windows 7 is well and truly dead. In case you happen to be a paleontologist, think of Windows Embedded POSReady adding an extra two years of support to Windows 7 as the mammoths who managed to survive on Wrangel until as late as only 4000 years ago. Windows 7 was one of the good ones, for sure, and all else being equal, I'd choose it over any of the releases that cam after. It feels like Windows 7 was the last release designed primarily for users of the Windows platform, whereas later releases were designed more to nickle and dime people with services, ads, and upsells that greatly cheapened the operating system. I doubt we'll ever see such a return to form again, so Windows 7 might as well be the last truly beloved Windows release. If you're still using Windows 7 - please don't, unless you're doing it for the retrocomputing thrill. I know Windows 8, 10, and 11 are scary, and as much as it pains me to say this, you're better off with 10 or 11 at this point, if only for security concerns.
OS/2 TCPBEUI name resolution
Sometimes I have the following problem to deal with: An OS/2 system uses NetBIOS over TCP/IP (aka TCPBEUI) and should communicate with a SMB server (likewise using TCPBEUI) on a different subnet. This does not work on OS/2 out of the box without a little bit of help. Michal Necasek My 40 fever certainly isn't helping, but goes way over my head. Still, it seems like an invaluable article for a small group of people, and anyone playing with OS/2 and networking from here on out can refer back this excellent and detailed explanation.
KDE Plasma 6.2 released
Entirely coincidentally, the KDE team released Plasma 6.2 yesterday, the latest release in the well-received 6.x series. As the version number implies, it's not a groundbreaking release, but it does contain a number of improvements that are very welcome to a few specific, often underserved groups. For instance, 6.2 overhauls the Accessibility settings panel, and ads, among other things, colourblindness filters for a variety of types of colourblindness. This condition affects roughly 8-9% of the population, so it's an important new feature. Another group of people served by Plasma 6.2 are artists. Plasma 6.2 includes a smorgasbord of new features for users of drawing tablets. OpenSystem Settingsand look forDrawing Tabletto see various tools for configuring drawing tablets. New in Plasma 6.2: a tablet calibration wizard and test mode; a feature to define the area of the screen that your tablet covers (the whole screen or a section); and the option to re-bind pen buttons to different kinds of mouse clicks. KDE Plasma 6.2 release announcement Artists and regular users alike can now also enjoy better colour management, more complete HDR support, a tone-mapping feature in Kwin, and much more. Power management has been improved as well, so you can now manage brightness per individual monitor, control which application block going to sleep, and so on. There's also the usual array of bug fixes, UI tweaks, and so on. Plasma 6.2 is already available in at least Fedora and openSUSE, and it will find its way to your distribution soon enough, too.
Why I use KDE
Over the decades, my primary operating system of choice has changed a few times. As a wee child of six years old, we got out first PC through one of those employer buy-a-PC programs, where an employer would subsidize its employees buying PCs for use in the home. The goal here was simple: if people get comfortable with a computer in their private life, they'll also get comfortable with it in their professional life. And so, through my mother's employer, we got a brand new 286 desktop running MS-DOS and Windows 3.0. I still have the massive and detailed manuals and original installation floppies it came with. So, my first operating system of choice' was MS-DOS, and to a far lesser extent Windows 3.0. As my childhood progressed, we got progressively better computers, and the new Windows versions that came with it - Windows 95, 98, and yes, even ME, which I remarkably liked just fine. Starting with Windows 95, DOS became an afterthought, and with my schools, too, being entirely Windows-only, my teenage years were all Windows, all the time. So, when I bought my first own, brand new computer - instead of old 386 machines my parents took home from work - right around when Windows XP came out, I bought a totally legal copy of Windows XP from some dude at school that somehow came on a CD-R with a handwritten label but was really totally legit you guys. I didn't like Windows XP at all, and immediately started looking for alternatives, trying out Mandrake Linux before discovering something called BeOS - and despite BeOS already being over by that point, I had found my operating system of choice. I tried to make it last as long as the BeOS community would let me, but that wasn't very long. The next step was a move to the Mac, something that was quite rare in The Netherlands at that time. During that same time, Microsoft released Windows Server 2003, the actually good version of Windows XP, and a vibrant community of people, including myself, started using it as a desktop operating system instead. I continued using this mix of Mac OS X and Windows - even Vista - for a long time, while having various iterations of Linux installed on the side. I eventually lost interest in Mac OS X because Apple lost interest in it (I think around the Snow Leopard era?), and years later, six or seven years ago or so, I moved to Linux exclusively, fully ditching Windows even for gaming like four or so years ago when Valve's Proton started picking up steam. Nowadays all my machines run Fedora KDE, which I consider to be by far the best desktop operating system experience you can get today. Over the last few years or so, I've noticed something fun and interesting in how I set up my machines: you can find hints of my operating system history all over my preferred setup and settings. I picked up all kinds of usage patterns and expectations from all those different operating systems, and I'd like to enable as many of those as possible in my computing environment. In a way, my setup is a reflection of the operating systems I used in the past, an archaeological record of my computing history, an evolutionary tree of good traits that survived, and bad traits bred out. Taking a look at my bare desktop, you'll instantly pick up on the fact I used to use Mac OS X for a long time. The Mac OS X-like dock at the bottom of the screen has been my preferred way of opening and managing running applications since I first got an iBook G4 more than 20 years ago, and to this day I find it far superior to any alternatives. KDE lets me easily recreate a proper dock, without having to resort to any third-party dock applications. I never liked the magnification trick Mac OS X wowed audiences with when it was new, so I don't use it. The next dead giveaway I used to be a Mac OS X user a long time ago is the top bar, which shares quite a few elements with the Mac OS X menubar, while also containing elements not found in Mac OS X. I keep the KDE equivalent of a start menu there, a button that brings up my home folder in a KDE folder view, a show desktop button that's mostly there for aesthetic reasons, KDE's global menubar widget for that Mac OS X feel, a system tray, the clock, and then a close button that opens up a custom system menu with shutdown/reboot/etc. commands and some shortcuts to system tools. Another feature coming straight from my days using Mac OS X is KDE's equivalent of Expose, called Overview, without which I wouldn't know how to find a window if my life depended on it. I bind it to the top-left hotcorner for easy access with my mouse, while the bottom-right hotcorner is set to show my desktop (and the reason why I technically don't really need that show desktop button I mentioned earlier). I fiddled with the hot corner trigger timings so that they fire virtually instantly. Waiting on my computer is so '90s. It's not really possible to see in screenshots, but my stint using BeOS as my main operating system back when that was a thing you could do also shines through, specifically in the way I manage windows. In BeOS, double-clicking a titlebar tab would minimise a window, and right-clicking the tab would send the window to the bottom of the Z-stack. I haven't maximised a non-video window in several decades, so I find double-clicking a titlebar to maximise a window utterly baffling, and a ridiculous Windows-ism I want nothing to do with. Once again, KDE lets me set this up exactly the way I want, and I genuinely feel lost when I can't manipulate my windows in this
OpenBSD 7.6 released
OpenBSD 7.6, the release in which every single line of the original code form the first release has been edited or removed, has been released. There's a lot of changes, new features, bug fixes, and more in 7.6, but for desktop users, the biggest new feature is undoubtedly hardware-accelerated video decoding through VA-API. Or, as the changelog puts it: Imported libva 2.22.0, an implementation for VA-API (video acceleration API). VA-API provides access to graphics hardware acceleration capabilities for video processing. OpenBSD 7.6 release announcement This is a massive improvement for anyone using OpenBSD for desktop use, especially on power-constrained devices like laptops. Problematic video playback was one of the reasons I went back to Fedora KDE after running OpenBSD on my workstation, and it seems this would greatly improve that situation. I can't wait until I find some time to reinstall OpenBSD and see how much difference this will make for me personally. There's more, of course. OpenBSD 7.6 starts the bring-up for Snapdragon X Elite devices, and in general comes with a whole slew of low-level improvements for the ARM64 architecture. AMD64 systems don't have to feel left out, thanks to AVX-512 support, several power management improvements to make sleep function more optimally, and several other low-level improvements I don't fully understand. RISC-V, PowerPC, MIPS, and other architectures also saw small numbers of improvements. The changelog is vast, so be sure to dig through it to see if your pet bug has been addressed, or support for your hardware has been improved. OpenBSD users will know how to upgrade, and for new installations, head on over to the download page.
Google must crack open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge
Late last year, Google's Play Store was ruled to be a monopoly in the US, and today the judge in that case has set out what Google must do to address this situation. Today, Judge James Donato issued his final rulinginEpic v. Google, ordering Google to effectively open up the Google Play app store to competition for three whole years. Google will have to distribute rival third-party app storeswithinGoogle Play, and it must give rival third-party app stores access to the full catalog of Google Play apps, unless developers opt out individually. Sean Hollister at The Verge On top of these rather big changes, Google also cannot mandate the use of Google's own billing solution, nor can it prohibit developers from informing users of other ways to download and/or pay for an application. Furthermore, Google can't make sweetheart deals with device makers to entice them to install the Play Store or to block them from installing other stores, and Google can't pay developers to only use the Play Store or not use other stores. It's a rather comprehensive set of remedies that will remain in force for three years. Many of these remedies are taken straight from the European Union's Digital Markets Act, but they will be far less effective since they're only applied to one company, and only for three years. On top of that, Google can appeal, and the company has already stated that it's going to ask for an immediate stay on these remedies, and if they get that stay, the remedies won't have to be implemented any time soon. This legal tussling is far from over, and does very little to protect consumer choice. A clear law that simply prohibits this kind of market abuse, like the DMA, is much fairer to everyone involved, and creates a consistent level playing field for everyone, instead of only affecting random companies based on the whims of something as unpredictable as juries. In other words, I don't think much is going to change in the United States after this ruling, and we'll likely be hearing more back and forths in the court room for years to come, all while US consumers are being harmed. It's better than nothing in lieu of a working Congress actually doing, well, anything, but that's not saying much.
macOS 15.0 now UNIX 03-certified
You have to wonder how meaningful this news is in 2024, but macOS 15.0 Sequoia running on either Apple Silicon or Intel processors is now UNIX 03-certified. The UNIX 03 Product Standard is the mark for systems conforming to Version 3 of the Single UNIX Specification. It is a significantly enhanced version of the UNIX 98 Product Standard. The mandatory enhancements include alignment with ISO/IEC 9989:1999 C Programming Language, IEEE Std 1003.1-2001 and ISO/IEC 9945:2002. This Product Standard includes the following mandatory Product Standards:Internationalized System Calls and Libraries Extended V3,Commands and Utilities V4,C Language V2, andInternationalized Terminal Interfaces. UNIX 03 page The questionable usefulness of this news stems from a variety of factors. The UNIX 03 specification hails from the before time of 2002, when UNIX-proper still had some footholds in the market and being a UNIX meant something to the industry. These days, Linux has pretty much taken over the traditional UNIX market, and UNIX certification seems to have all but lost its value. Only one operating system can boast to conform to the latest UNIX specification - AIX is UNIX V7 and 03-certified - while macOS and HP-UX are only UNIX 03-certified. OpenWare, UnixWare, and z/OS only conform to even older standards. On top of all this, it seems being UNIX-certified by The Open Group feels a lot like a pay-to-play scheme, making it unlikely that community efforts like, say, FreeBSD, Debian, or similarly popular server operating systems could ever achieve UNIX-certification even if they wanted to. This makes the whole UNIX-certification world feel more like the dying vestiges of a job security program than something meaningful for an operating system to aspire to. In any even, you can now write a program that compiles and runs on all two UNIX 03-certified operating systems, as long as it only uses POSIX APIs.
“Lost” 1983 programming language bought on eBay
A YouTube channel hasresurrected a programming languagethat hadn't been seen since the 1980s - in a testament to both the enduring power of our technology, and of the communities that care about it. But best of all, Simpsonuploaded the language to the Internet Archive, along with all his support materials, inviting his viewers to write their own programs (and saying he hoped his upstairs neighbor would've approved). And in our email interview, Simpson said since then it's already been downloaded over 1,000 times - which is pretty amazing for something so old." David Cassel It's great that this lost programming language, MicroText for the Commodore 64, was rediscovered, but I'm a bit confused as to how lost" this language really was. I mean, it was discovered" in a properly listed eBay listing, which feels like cheating to me. When I think of stories of discoveries of long-lost software, games, or media, it usually involves things like finding it in a shed after years of searching, or someone at a company going through that box of old hard drives discovering the game they worked on 32 years ago. I don't know, something about this whole story feels off to me, and it's ringing some alarm bells I can't quite place. Regardless, it's cool to have MicroText readily available on the web now, so that people can rediscover it and create awesome new things with it. Perhaps there's old ideas to be relearned here.
Mozilla “is going to be more active in digital advertising”
In ancient Greek mythology, Kassandra, priestess of Apollo and daughter ofKingPriamand QueenHecuba of Troy, was granted the gift of prophecy by Apollo, in return for favours". When Kassandra then decided to, well, not grant any favours", Apollo showcased that as a good son of Zeus, he did not understand consent either, and cursed her by making sure nobody would believe her prophecies. There's some variations to the story from one author or source to the next, but the general gist remains the same. Anyway, I've been warning everyone about the fall of Mozilla and Firefox for years now, so here's another chapter in the slow decline and fall of Mozilla: they're now just flat-out stating they're an online advertising company. As Mark shared inhis blog, Mozilla is going to be more active in digital advertising. Our hypothesis is that we need to simultaneously work on public policy, standards, products and infrastructure. Today, I want to take a moment to dive into the details of the product" and infrastructure" elements. I will share our emerging thoughts on how this will come to life across our existing products (like Firefox), and across the industry (through the work of our recent acquisition,Anonym, which is building an alternative infrastructure for the advertising industry). Laura Chambers Pretty much every one of my predictions regarding the slow downfall of Mozilla are coming true, and we're just waiting around now for the sword of Damocles to drop: Google ending its funding for Mozilla, which currently makes up about 80% of the former browser maker's revenue. Once this stream of free money dries up, Mozilla's decline will only accelerate even more, and this is probably why they are trying to get into the online advertising business in the first place. How else are you going to make money from a browser? In the meantime, the operating system most reliant on Firefox existing as a privacy-respecting browser, desktop Linux, still seems to be taking no serious steps to prepare for this seeming inevitability. There's no proper Firefox fork, there's no Chromium variant with the kind of features desktop users expect (tab sharing, accounts, etc., which are not part of Chromium), nothing. There's going to be a point where shipping a further enshittified Firefox becomes impossible, or at the least highly contentious, for Linux distributions, and I don't see any viable alternative anywhere on the horizon. I'm sure things will turn out just fine.
Google is killing its one-click app to run Chrome OS in a VM on Android devices
Remember earlier this year, when Android Authority discovered Google was experimenting with letting you run full Chrome OS on your Android device? In case you were wondering if that particular piece of spaghetti was sticking to the wall, I'm sorry to disappoint you it isn't. Despite creating the Ferrochrome launcher app, which would've made the whole thing a one-click affair, Google has just removed the whole concept from the Android code base altogether. Unfortunately, though, Google has decided to kill its Ferrochrome launcher app. This was revealed to us by a code change recently submitted to the AOSP Gerrit. The code change, which hasn't been merged yet, removes the entire Ferrochrome launcher app from AOSP. Google's reason for removing this app is that it doesn't plan to ship it or maintain its code. It seems that Google is shifting towards using the Linux-based Debian distro instead of Chrome OS as its testbed for AVF development. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority I'm not really sure if people were really asking for something like this, and to Google's credit - for once - the company never even so much as hinted at releasing this to the general public. Still, the idea of carrying just your phone with you as your primary computer, and plugging into a display and input devices as the need arises, remains something a lot of people are fascinated with, and putting Chrome OS on your Android phone would've been one way to achieve this goal. Despite decades of attempts, it seems not even the smartest people in Silicon Valley can crack this nut. Perhaps they should ask Gemini to solve it for them? It doesn't involve pizza's, glue, or rocks, so who knows - it might surprise them!
How can we make FreeBSD more attractive to new users?
For nearly 15 years, FreeBSD has been at the core of my personal infrastructure, and my passion for it has only grown over time. As a die-hard fan, I've stuck with BSD-based systems because they continue to deliver exactly what I need-storage, networking, and security-without missing a beat. The features I initially fell in love with, like ZFS, jails, and pf, are still rock-solid and irreplaceable. There's no need to overhaul them, and in many ways, that reliability is what keeps me hooked. My scripts from 20 years ago still work, and that's a rare kind of stability that few platforms can boast. It's not just me, either-big names like Netflix, Microsoft, and NetApp, alongside companies like Tailscale and AMD, continue to support FreeBSD, further reinforcing my belief in its strength and longevity (you can find the donators and sponsors righthere). Yet, while this familiarity is comforting, it's becoming clear that FreeBSD must evolve to keep pace with the modern landscape of computing. gyptazy It's good to read so many articles and comments from long-time FreeBSD users and contributors who seem to recognise that there's a real opportunity for FreeBSD to become more than just' a solid server operating system. This aligns neatly with FreeBSD itself recognising this, too, and investing in improving the operating system's support for what are not considered basic laptop features like touchpad gestures and advanced sleep states, among other things. I've long held the belief that the BSDs are far closer to attracting a wider, more general computing-focused audience than even they themselves sometimes seem to think. There's a real, tangible benefit to the way BSDs are developed and structured - a base system developed by one team - compared to the Linux world, and there's enough disgruntlement among especially longtime Linux users about things like Wayland and systemd that there's a pool of potential users to attract that didn't exist only a few years ago. If you're a little unsure about the future of Linux - give one of the BSDs a try. There's a real chance you'll love it.
Samsung is porting Tizen to RISC-V
In case you missed it at the 2024 Samsung Developer Conference today, our partners at Samsung Visual Display discussed the work they have been doing to port the Tizen operating system to RISC-V. Tizen is an open-source operating system (OS) that is used in many Samsung smart T.V.s and it makes sense that they would look to the fast growing, global open-standard RISC-V to develop future systems. The presentation showed the results of efforts at both companies to expand the capabilities of the already robust Tizen approach. At the event they also demonstrated a T.V. running on RISC-V and using a SiFive Performance P470 based core. John Ronco The announcement is sparse on details, and there isn't much more to add than this, but the reality is that of course Samsung was going to port Tizen to RISC-V. The growing architecture is bound to compete with the industry standard ARM in a variety of market segments, and it makes perfect sense to have your TV and other (what we used to call) embedded operating systems ready to go.
Redox’ progress in September 2024
Hot on the heels of releasing Redox 0.9.0, the team is back with yet another monthly update. Understandably, it's not as massive of an update as other months, but there's still more than enough here. There's the usual bug fixes and small changes, but also more work on the port to RISC-V, the QEMU port (as in, running QEMU on Redox), a bunch of improvements to Relibc, and a lot more.
Windows 11 version 24H2 is now available for download
Windows 11 2024 Update, also known as version 24H2, is now publicly available. Microsoft announced the rollout alongsidethe new AI-powered featuresthat are coming soon to Windows Insiders with Copilot+ PCs andCopilot upgrades. Unlike recent Windows 11 updates, version 24H2 is a full operating system swap," so updating to it will take more time than usual. What is going as usual is the way the update is being offered to users. Microsoft is gradually rolling out the update to seekers" with Windows 11 versions 22H2 and 23H2. That means you need to go to the Settings app and manually request the update. Taras Buria at Neowin I've said it a few times before but I completely lost track of how Windows releases and updates work at this point. I thought this version and its features had been available for ages already, but apparently I was wrong, and it's only being released now. For now, you can get it by opting in through Windows Update, while the update will be pushed to everyone later on. I really wish Microsoft would move to a simpler, more straightforward release model and cadence, but alas. Anyway, this version brings all the AI/ML CoPilot stuff, WiFi 7 support, improvements to File Explorer and the system tray, the addition of the sudo command, and more. The changes to Explorer are kind of hilarious to me, as Microsoft seems to have finally figured out labels are a good thing - the weird copy/cut/paste buttons in the context menu have labels now - but this enhanced context menu still has its own context menu. Explorer now also comes with support for more compression formats, which is a welcome change in 2007. To gain access to the new sudo command, go to Settings>System>For developers and enable the option. For the rest, this isn't a very impactful release, and will do little to convince the much larger Windows 10 userbase to switch to Windows 11, something that's going to be a real problem for Microsoft in the coming year.
Nobody knows what happened within the MMC Association in 1998
In 1999, some members from the MMC Association decided to split and create SD Association. But nobody seems to exactly knowwhy. sdomi's webpage I don't even know how to summarise any of this research, because it's not only a lot of information, it's also deeply bureaucratic and boring - it takes a certain kind of person to enjoy this sort of stuff, and I happen to fit the bill. This is a great read.
FreeBSD to invest in laptop support
FreeBSD is going to take its desktop use quite a bit more seriously going forward. FreeBSD has long been a top choice for IT professionals and organizations focused on servers and networking, and it is known for its unmatched stability, performance, and security. However, as technology evolves, FreeBSD faces a significant challenge: supporting modern laptops. To address this, the FreeBSD Foundation and Quantum Leap Research has committed $750,000 to improve laptop support, a strategic investment that will be pivotal in FreeBSD's future. FreeBSD Foundation blog So, what are they going to spend this big bag of money on? Well, exactly the kind of things you expect. They want to improve and broaden support for various wireless chipsets, add support for modern powersaving processor states, and make sure laptop-specific features like touchpad gestures, specialty buttons, and so on, work properly. On top of that, they want to invest in better graphics driver support for Intel and AMD, as well as make it more seamless to switch between various audio devices, which is especially crucial on laptops where people might reasonably be expected to use headphones. In addition, while not specifically related to laptops, FreeBSD also intends to invest in support for heterogeneous cores in its scheduler and improvements to the bhyve hypervisor. Virtualisation is, of course, not just something for large desktops and servers, but also laptop users might turn to for certain tasks and workloads. The FreeBSD project will be working not just with Quantum Leap Research, but also various hardware makers to assist in bringing FreeBSD's laptop support to a more modern, plug-and-play state. Additionally, the mentioned cash injection is not set in stone; additional contributions from both individuals and larger organisations are obviously welcome, and of course if you can contribute code, bug reports, documentation, and so on, you're also more than welcome to jump in.
IBM PC 5150 model numbers
Recently I came across a minor mystery-the model numbers of the original IBM PC. For such a pivotal product, there isremarkablylittle detailed original information from the early days. Michal Necasek Count me surprised. When I think IBM, I think meticulously documented and detailed bureaucracy, where every screw, nut, and bolt is numbered, documented, and tracked, so much so in fact this all-American company even managed to impress the Germans. You'd expect IBM, of all companies, to have overly detailed lists of every IBM PC it ever designed, manufactured, and sold, but as it turns out, it's actually quite hard to assemble a complete list of the early IBM PCs the company sold. The biggest problem are the models from before 1983, since before that year, the IBM PC does not appear in IBM's detailed archive of announcements. As such, Michal Necasek had to dig into random bits of IBM documentation to assemble references to those earlier models, and while he certainly didn't find every single one of them, it's a great start, and others can surely pick up the search from here.
Arch Linux and Valve deepen ties with direct collaboration
When Valve took its second major crack at making Steam machines happen, in the form of the Steam Deck, one of the big surprises was the company's choice to base the Linux operating system the Steam Deck uses on Arch Linux, instead of the Debian base it was using before. It seems this choice is not only benefiting Valve, but also Arch. We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers. Levente Polyak This is great news for Arch, but of course, also for Linux in general. The work distributions do to improve their user experience tend to be picked up by other distributions, and it's clear that Valve's contributions have been vast. With these collaborations, Valve is also showing it's in it for the long term, and not just interested in taking from the community, but also in giving, which is good news for the large number of people now using Linux for gaming. The Arch team highlights that these projects will follow the regular administrative and decision-making processes within the distribution, so we're not looking at parallel efforts forced upon everyone else without a say.
California’s new law forces digital stores to admit you’re just licensing content, not buying it
California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed a law (AB 2426) to combat disappearing" purchases of digital games, movies, music, and ebooks. The legislation will force digital storefronts to tell customers they're just getting a license to use the digital media, rather than suggesting they actually own it. When the law comes into effect next year, it will ban digital storefronts from using terms like buy" or purchase," unless they inform customers that they're not getting unrestricted access to whatever they're buying. Storefronts will have to tell customers they're getting a license that can be revoked as well as provide a list of all the restrictions that come along with it. Companies that break the rule could be fined for false advertising. Emma Roth at The Verge A step in the right direction, but a lot more is definitely needed. This law in particular seems to leave a lot of wiggle room for companies to keep using the purchase" term while hiding the disclosure somewhere in the very, very small fine print. I would much rather a law like this just straight up ban the use of the term purchase" and similar terms when all you're getting is a license. Why allow them to keep lying about the nature of the transaction in exchange for some fine print somewhere? The software industry in particular has been enjoying a free ride when it comes to consumer protection laws, and the kind of malpractice, lack of accountability, and laughable quality control would have any other industry shut down in weeks for severe negligence. We're taking baby steps, but it seems we're finally arriving at a point where basic consumer protection laws and rights are being applied to software, too. Several decades too late, but at least it's something.
COSMIC alpha 2 released
System76, the premiere Linux computer manufacturer and creator of the COSMIC desktop environment, has updated COSMIC's Alpha release to Alpha 2. The latest release includes more Settings pages, the bulk of functionality for COSMIC Files, highly requested window management features, and considerable infrastructure work for screen reader support, as well as some notable bug fixes. system76's blog The pace of development for COSMIC remains solid, even after the first alpha release. This second alpha keeps adding a lot of things considered basic for any desktop environment, such as settings panels for power and battery, sounds, displays, and many more. It also brings window management support for focus follows cursor and cursor follows focus, which will surely please the very specific, small slice of people who swear by those. Also, you can now disable the super key. A major new feature that I'm personally very happy about is the adjust density" feature. COSMIC will allow you to adjust the spacing between the various user interface elements so you can choose to squeeze more information on your screen, which is one of the major complaints I have about modern UI design in macOS, Windows, and GNOME. Being able to adjust this to your liking is incredibly welcome, especially combined with COSMIC's ability to change from 'rounded' UI elements to square' UI elements. The file manager has also been vastly, vastly improved, tons of bugs were fixed, and much, much more. It seems COSMIC is on the right path, and I can't wait to try out the first final result once it lands.
Tcl/Tk 9.0 released
Tcl 9.0 and Tk 9.0 - usually lumped together as Tcl/Tk - have been released. Tcl 9.0 brings 64bit compatibility so it can address data values larger than 2 GB, better Unicode support, support for mounting ZIP files as file systems, and much, much more. Tk 9.0 gets support for scalable vector graphics, much better platform integration with things like system trays, gestures, and so on, and much more.
Notice
Just want to let y'all know that my family and I have been hit hard with bronchitis these past two weeks, and especially my recovery is going quite slowly (our kids are healthy again, and my wife is recovering quite well!). As such, I haven't been able to do much OSNews work. I hope things will finally clear up a bit over the weekend so that I can resume normal service come Monday. Enjoy your weekend, y'all!
Eliminating memory safety vulnerabilities at the source
The push towards memory safe programming languages is strong, and for good reason. However, especially for bigger projects with a lot of code that potentially needs to be rewritten or replaced, you might question if all the effort is even worth it, particularly if all the main contributors would also need to be retrained. Well, it turns out that merely just focusing on writing new code in a memory safe language will drastically reduce the number of memory safety issues in a project as a whole. Memory safety vulnerabilities remain a pervasive threat to software security. At Google, we believe the path to eliminating this class of vulnerabilities at scale and building high-assurance software lies inSafe Coding, a secure-by-design approach that prioritizes transitioning to memory-safe languages. This post demonstrates why focusing on Safe Coding for new code quickly and counterintuitively reduces the overall security risk of a codebase, finally breaking through the stubbornly high plateau of memory safety vulnerabilities and starting an exponential decline, all while being scalable and cost-effective. Jeff Vander Stoep and Alex Rebert at the Google Security Blog In this blog post, Google highlights that even if you only write new code in a memory-safe language, while only applying bug fixes to old code, the number of memory safety issues will decreases rapidly, even when the total amount of code written in unsafe languages increases. This is because vulnerabilities decay exponentially - in other words, the older the code, the fewer vulnerabilities it'll have. In Android, for instance, using this approach, the percentage of memory safety vulnerabilities dropped from 76% to 24% over 6 years, which is a great result and something quite tangible. Despite the majority of code still being unsafe (but, crucially, getting progressively older), we're seeing a large and continued decline in memory safety vulnerabilities. The results align with what we simulated above, and are even better, potentially as a result of our parallel efforts to improve the safety of our memory unsafe code. We firstreportedthis decline in 2022, and we continue to see the total number of memory safety vulnerabilities dropping. Jeff Vander Stoep and Alex Rebert at the Google Security Blog What this shows is that a large project, like, say, the Linux kernel, for no particular reason whatsoever, doesn't need to replace all of its code with, say, Rust, again, for no particular reason whatsoever, to reap the benefits of a modern, memory-safe language. Even by focusing on memory-safe languages only for new code, you will still exponentially reduce the number of memory safety vulnerabilities. This is not a new discovery, as it's something observed and confirmed many times before, and it makes intuitive sense, too; older code has had more time to mature.
What happened to the Japanese PC platforms?
The other daya friendasked me a pretty interesting question: whathappenedto all those companies who made those Japanese computer platforms that were never released outside Japan? I thought it'd be worth expanding that answer into a full-size post. Misty De Meo Japan had a number of computer makers that sold platforms that looked and felt like western PCs, but were actually quite different hardware-wise, and incompatible with the IBM PC. None of these exist anymore today, and the reason is simple: Windows 95. The Japanese platforms compatible enough with the IBM PC that they could get a Windows 95 port turned into a commodity with little to distinguish them from regular IBM PCs, and the odd platform that didn't use an x86 chip at all - like the X68000 - didn't get a Windows port and thus just died off. The one platform mentioned in this article that I had never heard of was FM Towns, made by Fujitsu, which had its own graphical operating system called Towns OS. The FM Towns machines and the Towns OS were notable and unique at the time in that it was the first operating system to boot from CD-ROM, and it just so happens that Joe Groff published an article earlier this year detailing this boot process, including a custom bootable image he made. Here in the west we mostly tend to remember the PC-98 and X86000 platforms for their gaming catalogs and stunning designs, but that's like only remembering the IBM PC for its own gaming catalog. These machines weren't just glorified game consoles - they were full-fledged desktop computers used for the same boring work stuff we used the IBM PC for, and it truly makes me sad I don't speak a single character of Japanese, so a unique operating system like Towns OS will always remain a curiosity for me.
OpenBSD now enforcing no invalid NUL characters in shell scripts
Our favorite operating system is nowchangingthe default shell (ksh) to enforcenotallowing invalid NUL characters in input that will be parsed as parts of the script. Undeadly.org As someone who doesn't deal with stuff like this - I rarely actively use shell scripts - it seems kind of insane to me that this wasn't the norm since the beginning.
Microsoft deprecates Windows Server Update Services, suggests cloud services instead
As part of our vision for simplified Windows management from the cloud, Microsoft has announceddeprecation of Windows Server Update Services (WSUS). Specifically, this means that we are no longer investing in new capabilities, nor are we accepting new feature requests for WSUS. However, we are preserving current functionality and will continue to publish updates through the WSUS channel. We will also support any content already published through the WSUS channel. Nir Froimovici What an odd feature to deprecate. Anyone with a large enough fleet of machines probably makes use of Windows Server Update Services, as it adds some much-needed centralised control to the downloading and deployment of Windows updates, so you can do localised partial rollouts for testing, which, as the CrowdStrike debacle showed us once more, is quite important. WSUS also happens to be a local tool, that is set up and run locally, instead of in the cloud, and that's where we get to the real reason WSUS is being deprecated. Microsoft is advising IT managers who use WSUS to switch to Microsoft's alternatives, likeWindows Autopatch,Microsoft Intune,andAzure Update Manager. These all happen to run in the cloud, giving up that control WSUS provided by running locally, and they're not free either - they're subscription services, of course. I mean, technically WSUS isn't free either as it's part of Windows Server, but these cloud services come on top of the cost of Windows Server itself. Nobody escapes the relentless march of subscription costs.
Disable Sequoia’s monthly screen recording permission prompt
Thewidely-reportedfoo is requesting to bypass the system private window picker and directly access your screen and audio" prompt in Sequoia (which Apple has moved fromdailytoweeklyto nowmonthly)can be disabledby quitting the app, setting the system date far into the future, opening and using the affected app to trigger the nag, clicking Allow For One Month", then restoring the correct date. tinyapps.org blog Or, and this is a bit of a radical idea, you could use an operating system that doesn't infantalise its users.
Qualcomm wants to buy Intel
On Friday afternoon,The Wall Street JournalreportedIntel had been approached by fellow chip giant Qualcomm about a possible takeover. While any deal is described as far from certain," according to the paper's unnamed sources, it would represent a tremendous fall for a company that had been the most valuable chip company in the world, based largely on its x86 processor technology that for years had triumphed over Qualcomm's Arm chips outside of the phone space. Richard Lawler and Sean Hollister at The Verge Either Qualcomm is only interested in buying certain parts of Intel's business, or we're dealing with someone trying to mess with stock prices for personal gain. The idea of Qualcomm acquiring Intel seems entirely outlandish to me, and that's not even taking into account that regulators will probably have a thing or two to say about this. The one thing such a crazy deal would have going for it is that it would create a pretty strong and powerful all-American chip giant, which is a PR avenue the companies might explore if this is really serious. One of the most valuable assets Intel has is the x86 architecture and the associated patents and licensing deals, and the immense market power that comes with those. Perhaps Qualcomm is interested in designing x86 chips, or, more likely, perhaps they're interested in all that sweet, sweet licensing money they could extract by allowing more companies to design and sell x86 processors. The x86 market currently consists almost exclusively of Intel and AMD, a situation which may be leaving a lot of licensing money on the table. Pondering aside, I highly doubt this is anything other than an overblown, misinterpreted story.
Slowly booting full Linux on the Intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit
Can you run Linux on the Intel 4004, the first commercially produced microprocessor, released to the world in 1971? Well, Dmitry Grinberg, the genius engineer who got Linux to run on all kinds of incredibly underpowered hardware, sought to answer this very important question. In short, yes, you can run Linux on the 4004, but much as with other extremely limited and barebones chips, you have to get... Creative. Very creative. Of course, Linux cannot and will not boot on a 4004 directly. There is no C compiler targeting the 4004, nor could one be created due to the limitations of the architecture. The amount of ROM and RAM that is addressable is also simply too low. So,same as before, I would have to resort to emulation. My initial goal was to fit into 4KB of code, as that is what an unmodified unassisted 4004 can address. 4KB of code is not much at all to emulate a complete system. After studying the options, it became clear that MIPS R3000 would be the winner here. Every other architecture I considered would be harder to emulate in some way. Some architectures had arbitrarily-shifted operands all the time (ARM), some have shitty addressing modes necessitating that they would be slow (RISCV), some would need more than 4KB to even decode instructions (x86), and some were just too complex to emulate in so little space (PPC). ... so ...MIPS again... OK! Dmitry Grinberg This is just one very small aspect of this massive undertaking, and the article and videos accompanying his success are incredibly detailed and definitely not for the faint of heart. The amount of skill, knowledge, creativity, and persistence on display here is stunning, and many of us can only dream of being able to do stuff like this. I absolutely love it. Of course, the Linux kernel had to be slimmed down considerably, as a lot of stuff currently in the kernel are of absolutely no use on such an old system. Boot time is measured in days, still, but it helped a lot. Grinberg also turned the whole setup into what is effectively an art piece you can hang on the wall, where you can have it run and, well, do things - not much, of course, but he did include a small program that draws mandelbrot set on the VFD and serial port, which is a neat trick. He plans on offering the whole thing as a kit, but a lot of it depends on getting enough of the old chips to offer a complete, ready-to-assemble kit in the first place.
Why Apple uses JPEG XL in the iPhone 16 and what it means for your photos
The iPhone 16 family has arrived and includes many new features, some of which Apple has played very close to its vest. One such improvement is the inclusion of JPEG XL file types, which promise improved image quality compared to standard JPEG files while delivering relatively smaller file sizes. Overall, JPEG XL addresses many of JPEG's shortcomings. The 30-year-old format is not very efficient, only offers eight-bit color depth, doesn't support HDR, doesn't do alpha transparency, doesn't support animations, doesn't support multiple layers, includes compression artifacts, and exhibits banding and visual noise. JPEG XL tackles these issues, and unlike WebP and AVIF formats, which each have some noteworthy benefits too, JPEG XL has been built from the ground up with still images in mind. Jeremy Gray at PetaPixel Excellent news, and it will hopefully mean others will follow - something that tends to happen when Apple finally supports to the new thing.
Nintendo and The Pokémon Company file patent lawsuit against maker of hit game Palworld
Nintendo, together with The Pokemon Company, filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court against Pocketpair, Inc. on September 18, 2024. This lawsuit seeks an injunction against infringement and compensation for damages on the grounds thatPalworld, a game developed and released by the Defendant, infringes multiple patent rights. Nintendo press release Since the release of Palworld, which bears a striking resemblance to the Pokemon franchise, everybody's been kind of expecting a reaction from both Nintendo and The Pokemon Company, and here it is. What's odd is that it's not a trademark, trade dress, or copyright lawsuit, but a patent one, which is not what you'd expect when looking at how similar the Palworld creatures look to Pokemon, to the point where some people even suggest the 3D models were simply lifted wholesale from the latest Nintendo Switch Pokemon games. There's no mention of which patents Pocketpair supposedly infringes upon, and in a statement, the company claims it, too, has no idea which patents are supposedly in play. I have to admit I never even stopped to think game patents were a thing at all, but now that I spent more than 2 seconds pondering this concept, of course they exist. This lawsuit will be quite interesting to follow, because the games industry is one of the few technology sectors out there where copying each others ideas, concepts, mechanics, and styles is not only normal, it's entirely expected and encouraged. New ideas spread through the games industry like wildfires, and if some new mechanic is a hit with players, it'll be integrated into other games within a few months, and games coming out a year later are expected to have the hit new mechanics from last year. It's a great example of how beneficial it is to have ideas freely spread, and how awesome it is to see great games take existing mechanics and apply interesting twists, or use them in entirely different genres than where they originated from. Demon's Souls and the Dark Souls series are a great example of a series of games that not only established a whole new genre other games quickly capitalised on, but also introduced the gaming world to a whole slew of new and unique mechanics that are now being applied in all kinds of new and interesting ways. Lawsuits like this one definitely pose a threat to this, so I hope that either this fails spectacularly in court, or that the patents in question are so weirdly specific as to be utterly without merit in going after any other game.
DirectX adopting SPIR-V as the interchange format of the future
As we look to the future, maintaining a proprietary IR format (even one based on an open-source project) is counter to our commitments to open technologies, so Shader Model 7.0 will adopt SPIR-V as its interchange format. Over the next few years, we will be working to define a SPIR-V environment for Direct3D, and a set of SPIR-V extensions to support all of Direct3D's current and future shader programming features through SPIR-V. This will allow developers to take better advantage of existing tools and unify the ecosystem around investing in one IR. Chris Bieneman and Cassie Hoef at the DirectX Developer Blog SPIR-V is developed by the Khronos Group and is anintermediate languageforparallel computingand graphics byKhronos Group". I don't know what any of this means, but any adoption of Khronos technologies is a good thing, especially by a heavyweight like Microsoft.
European Commission to order Apple to take interoperability measures after company refuses to comply with DMA
The European Commission has taken the next step in forcing Apple to comply with the Digital Markets Act. The EC has started two so-called specification proceedings, in which they can more or less order Apple exactly what it needs to do to comply with the DMA - in this case covering the interoperability obligation set out in Article 6(7) of the DMA. The two proceedings entail the following: Thefirstproceedingfocuses on severaliOS connectivity features and functionalities, predominantly used for and by connected devices.Connected devices are a varied, large and commercially important group of products, including smartwatches, headphones and virtual reality headsets. Companies offering these products depend oneffective interoperability with smartphones and their operating systems, such as iOS. The Commission intends to specify how Apple will provide effective interoperability with functionalities such as notifications, device pairing and connectivity. Thesecond proceedingfocuses on theprocess Apple has set up to address interoperability requestssubmitted by developers and third parties for iOS and IPadOS. It is crucial thatthe request process is transparent, timely, and fairso that all developers have an effective and predictable path to interoperability and are enabled to innovate. European Commission press release It seems the European Commission is running out of patience, and in lieu of waiting on Apple to comply with the DMA on its own, is going to tell Apple exactly what it must do to comply with the interoperability obligation. This means that, once again, Apple's childish, whiny approach to DMA compliance is backfiring spectacularly, with the company no longer having the opportunity to influence and control its own interoperability measures - the EC is simply going to tell them what they must do. The EC will complete these proceedings within six months, and will provide Apple with its preliminary findings which will explain what is expected of Apple. These findings will also be made public to invite comments from third parties. The proceedings are unrelated to any fines for non-compliance, which are separate.
GNOME 47 released with accent colours and completely new open/save file dialogs
The GNOME project has released their newest major version, GNOME 47, and while it's not the most groundbreaking release, there's still a ton of good stuff in here. Two features really stand our, with the first one being the addition of accent colours. Instead of being locked into the default GNOME blue accent colour, you can now choose between a variety of colours, which is a very welcome addition. I use the accent colour feature on all my computers, and since I run KDE, I also have this nifty KDE feature where it'll select an accent colour automatically based on your wallpaper. No, this isn't a groundbreaking feature, but considering GNOME's tendency towards not allowing any customisation, this is simply very welcome. A much more substantial feature comes in the form of brand new open/save file dialogs, and I'm sure even the GNOME developers themselves are collectively sighing in relief about this one. GNOME's open/save dialogs were so bad they became a meme, and now they're finally well and truly fixed, thanks to effectively removing the old ones and adding new ones based on the GNOME Files file manager. GNOME 47 comes with brand new file open and save file dialogs. The new dialogs are a major upgrade compared with the previous versions, and are based on the existing Files app rather than being a separate codebase. This results in the new dialogs having a much more complete set of features compared with the old open and save dialogs. With the new dialogs you can zoom the view, change the sort order in the icon view, rename files and folders, preview files, and more. GNOME 47 release notes And yes, this includes thumbnails. There's tons more in GNOME 47, like a new design for dialog windows that look and feel more like they belong on a mobile UI, tons of improvements to Files, the Settings application, GNOME Online Accounts, Web, and more. GNOME 47 will make its way to your distribution of choice soon enough, but of course, you can always build and install it yourself if you're so inclined.
Intel to spin off its chipmaking business
Intel's woes are far from over. Pat Gelsinger, the company's CEO, has announced that Intel's chipmaking business will be spun off and turned into a separate company. A subsidiary structure will unlock important benefits. It provides our external foundry customers and suppliers with clearer separation and independence from the rest of Intel. Importantly, it also gives us future flexibility to evaluate independent sources of funding and optimize the capital structure of each business to maximize growth and shareholder value creation. There is no change to our Intel Foundry leadership team, which continues to report to me. We will also establish an operating board that includes independent directors to govern the subsidiary. This supports our continued focus on driving greater transparency, optimization and accountability across the business. Pat Gelsinger This is a big move, and illustrated the difficulties Intel is facing. Its foundry business lost $7 billion last year, and it's cutting 15% of its workforce - 15000 people - indicating it needs to do something to turn the ship around. Intel is also pausing construction on two additional plants in Europe, but will continue its expansion efforts in the United States. Bitter note is that Intel received a massive cash injection from the US Biden administration, yet then proceeds to fire 15000 people. Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.
FreeBSD 13.4 released
FreeBSD 13.4 has been released. This is already the fifth release in the FreeBSD 13 series, and contains the usual set of security fixes, driver updates, important updated packages, like openssh, LLVM, clang, and so on. If you're running FreeBSD 13, you already know how to upgrade, and if you want to start using FreeBSD 13, here's the download page.
Things you really should know about Windows Input, but would rather not
Are you developing a game for Windows, and are you working on input handling? At first, it could reasonably be assumed that mouse and keyboard should be the simplest parts of this to deal with, but in reality, they are not - at least if we are talking about Windows. In fact,several extremely popular AAA games ship with severe mouse input issues when specific high-end mice are used, and some popular engines have issues that are still extant. In this article we'll explore a few reasons why that is the case, and end up with a solution that works but is still unsatisfactory. I assume that there is a whole other level of complexity involved in properly dealing with accessories like steering wheels, flight sticks, and so on in simulators, but so far I never had the pleasure of working on a game that required this, and this article will not cover those types of input devices. Peter Durante' Thoman So, what is the problem? Basically, there are two ways to handle mouse input in Windows: if you use batched raw input processing, which is pretty much a requirement, you need to also choose whether or not to keep legacy input enabled. If you keep it enabled, the legacy input will add so much junk to your message queue it can negatively impact the performance of your game quite harshly. If you disable it, however, something really fun happens: you can no longer move the game window... Because the Windows UI uses legacy input. Thoman has a solution that he and his company uses, and he considers it an ugly hack, but they just don't know of a better way to solve this issue. Thoman keeps legacy input enabled, but just limits the number of message queue events per frame that are being processed (they limit it to 5). As far as they can tell, this doesn't seem to have any negative side effects, but it's clearly a bit of an ugly hack that shouldn't be necessary. I found this a rather interesting niche topic, and I wonder how many people have struggled with this before, and what kind of other solutions exist.
A brief history ofQuickTime
We all know about the Desktop Publishing revolution that the first Macs and their PostScript LaserWriter printers brought in the late 1980s, but many have now forgotten the Desktop Video revolution that followed in the next decade. At its heart was support for multimedia in Apple's QuickTime. QuickTime isn't a single piece of software, or even an API in Classic Mac OS, but a whole architecture to support almost any media format you could conceive of. It defines container and file formats for multiple media types, forming the basis for the MPEG-4 standard, extensible encoding and decoding of a wide variety of media using Codecs, and more. Howard Oakley As a Windows users before I switched to the Mac somewhere in 2003 or 2004 or so, I mostly associated QuickTime with an annoying piece of crapware I sometimes had to install to watch videos, despite my Windows installation being perfectly capable of playing a whole slew of video codecs just fine. To make matters worse, Apple eventually started forcing Windows users to also install their auto-update tool that ran in the background, which would occasionally just... Install stuff without your permission. Of course, QuickTime was a whole lot more than that, especially on the Mac, where it was simply a core technology of the Mac operating system and the name of the built-in video player. It also served as underpinnings for a whole slew of related technologies, from movie editors like iMovie to the QuickTime streaming tools included in Mac OS X Server, so odds are that somehow, somewhere, you've used QuickTime in your life time. I'm not entirely ashamed to admit I had to check if QuickTime was still part of macOS today - I haven't actively used macOS since, I think, the Snow Leopard days in 2009 - but it obviously has been sunset quite a while ago in favour of AVFoundation, which macOS still uses today.
Releasing Windows as open source is the only viable way forward for Microsoft, and it’s going happen
Last week, Julio Merino published an article I wish someone had written ages ago: a fair, unbiased look at the differences between Windows NT in its original form and UNIX roughly at the time of the initial releases of Windows NT. Merino, who has a long career in tech and has made contributions to several operating systems, does a great job cutting through the fanboyism and decades' worth of conventional wisdom, arriving at the following conclusion that I think many of us here will share even without diving into the great depth of his article. NT was groundbreaking technology when it launched. As I presented above, many of the features we take for granted today in systems design were present in NT since its inception, whereas almost all other Unix systems had to gain those features slowly over time. As a result, such features don't always integrate seamlessly with Unix philosophies. Today, however, it's not clear to me that NT is truly more advanced" than, say, Linux or FreeBSD. It is true that NT had more solid design principles at the onset and more features that its contemporary operating systems, but nowadays... the differences are blurry. Yes, NT is advanced, but not significantly more so than modern Unixes. What I find disappointing is that, even though NT has all these solid design principles in place... bloat in the UI doesn't let the design shine through. The sluggishness of the OS even on super-powerful machines ispainful to witnessand might even lead to the demise of this OS. Julio Merino You should definitely read the whole thing, and not just the conclusion, as it will give you some great insight into some of the differences between the two approaches, and how the UNIX and Windows NT worlds learned from each other and grew together. It's well-written, easy to read, and contains a ton of information and details about especially Windows NT most people are probably not aware of. Reading through the article helped my crystallise a set of thoughts I've been having about the future of Windows, and in particular, the future of Windows NT as a short-hand for the kernel, lower-level frameworks, and everything else below the graphical layer. I think there's a major change coming to Windows NT, something so big and unheard of it's going to be the most defining moment in Windows NT history since its very first release. There's a few facts that lie at the root of my conclusion. First, ever since the very beginning, Windows NT has been developed in roughly the same way: behind closed doors by a group of specialists inside Microsoft, and every now and then we got a massive dump of new code in the form of a major Windows release. It's only recently that Microsoft has started taking a more rolling release approach to Windows development, with smaller updates peppered throughout the year, with different release branches users can subscribe to. Second, despite many of us almost equating Microsoft with Windows - or perhaps with Windows and Office - the reality of it is that Windows hasn't been the primary driver for revenue for Microsoft for a while now. In Microsoft's fiscal year of 2023, Windows made up just 10% of the company's total revenue that year, which amounts to $22 billion out of a total revenue of $211 billion. Azure alone is almost four times as large at $80 billion, and even LinkedIn - yes, LinkedIn - is good for $15 billion in revenue, making Windows only about a third more profitable than the most soulless social network in human history. Third, despite Windows' decreasing revenue share, the operating system is becoming ever larger in scope. Not only does it need to cover the literally infinite possible combinations of x86 hardware in both the desktop/laptop and server space, it now also needs to cover what is surely going to be a growing market for ARM hardware, starting with laptops, but surely expanding to desktops and servers, too. Microsoft needs to foot the bill for all of this development, and for how much longer can the company justify spending an inordinate amount of money on a massive army of Windows developers, when the revenue they bring in is such a small part of the company, and a part that's decreasing every year, to boot? Fourth, the competition Windows faces is surprisingly strong. Not only are macOS, Chrome OS, and even the Linux desktop doing better than ever, mobile computing is also competing with Windows, and that's a space Microsoft is simply not present in at all. This is especially pressing in the developing world, where often people's first and only computing experience is mobile - through Android, mostly - and Microsoft and Windows simply don't play any role. Given these facts, there's only one reasonable course of action for Microsoft. I think the company is going to address all of these issues by releasing large parts of Windows NT as open source. I base this on a gut feeling bourne out of the above facts, and not on any form of insider information, and there is a 99.9% chance that I am wholly, completely, and utterly wrong. Still, deep down, I feel like releasing Windows as open source makes the most sense considering the challenges the operating system and its parent company are facing. You and I are going to witness Windows NT's source code being published as open source on GitHub by Microsoft within 5-7 years, accompanied by an open governance model wherein contributions are welcomed and encouraged. Even if such a step will not be taken by Microsoft, I am convinced that, in the future, when today's employees and executives write and publish their memoirs, it will contain a lot of discourse on the very serious consideration that took place within the company in the past to do so. You can quote me on this. And then laugh at me when it inevitable turns out I'm wrong.
Apple releases iOS/iPadOS 18, macOS 15, and a ton more
It's Apple operating system release day, so if you're in the Apple ecosystem, it's like Christmas morning, but for your devices. The two major platforms are, of course, iOS/iPadOS 18: iOS 18 adds new customization options for theHome Screen, with the option to arrange apps and widgets with open spaces and add new tints to app icons. Control Center has been entirely overhauled with support for multiple pages, third-party controls, and the option to put controls on the Lock Screen and activate them with the Action Button. Juli Clover at MacRumors And macOS 15: macOS Sequoia featuresiPhoneMirroring, which allows you to control and monitor your iPhone right from your Mac. You can use your iPhone's apps and get your iPhone's notifications all while your iPhone is tucked away and locked. Window tiling has been improved to make it easier to arrange multiple windows on your Mac's display, and there are new keyboard and menu shortcuts for organizing your windows. In Safari, Highlights will now show you the information you want most from websites, and there's a new Viewer mode for watching videos without distractions. Juli Clover at MacRumors It doesn't stop there, though, as Apple also released watchOS 11, visionOS 2, tvOS 18, and the most import ant most hotly anticipated out of all of Apple's platforms, HomePod Software 18. It's genuinely kind of staggering how Apple manages to update all of these various platforms at the same time, each coming with a ton of new features and bugfixes, and ship them out to consumers - generally without any major issues or showstoppers. Especially in the case of iOS and macOS, that's definitely a major difference with the Windows and Android worlds, where users are confronted with strict hardware requirements, lack of update availability altogether, or just stick with previous versions because the new versions contain tons of privacy or feature regressions. Do note that Apple's AI/ML features announced during WWDC aren't shipping yet, and that iPhone Mirroring is not available in the EU because someone told Tim Cook no" and he threw a hissy fit.
Chrome on the Mac uses less battery than Safari
It's one of the most pervasive common wisdoms shared all over the web, no matter where you go - it's one of those things everybody seems to universally agree on: Chrome will absolutely devastate your battery life on the Mac, and you should really be using Safari, because Apple's special integration magic pixie dust sprinkles ensures Safari sips instead of gulps electricity. Whether you read random forum posters, Apple PR spokespeople, or Apple's own executives on stage during events, this wisdom is hard to escape. Is it true, though? Well, Matt Birchler decided to do something entirely revolutionary and entirely unheard of: a benchmark. Back in the olden days of yore, we would run benchmarks to test the claims from companies and their PR departments, and Birchler decided to dust off this old technique and develop a routine to put the Chrome battery claims to the test. After 3 days of continuous testing on a freshly installed 14" MacBook Pro with an M2 Pro processor and 16 GB RAM running the latest stable releases of both browsers, Birchler came to some interesting conclusions. In my 3-hour tests, Safari consumed 18.67% of my battery each time on average, and Chrome averaged 17.33% battery drain.That works out to about 9% less battery drain from Chrome than Safari.Yes, you read that right, I found Chrome was easier on my battery than Safari. While I did experience some variability in each 3 hour test run, Chrome came out on top in 5 of the 6 direct comparisons. Matt Birchler His methodology seems quite sound and a good representation of what most laptop users will use their browser for: YouTube, social media, a few news websites, and editing a Google Doc, in a 20 minute loop that was repeated for three hours per test. Multiple of these three hour tests were then ran to counter variability. I highly doubt using different websites will radically change the results, but I obviously am curious to see a similar test ran on Windows and Linux, x86 and ARM, for a more complete picture that goes beyond just the Mac. Conventional wisdom is sometimes wrong, and I think we have a classic case of that here. While there may have been a time in the past where Chrome on the Mac devastated battery life, it seems Chrome and Chromium engineers have closed the gap, and in some cases even beat Safari. Now, this doesn't mean everybody should rush and switch to Chrome, since there are countless other reasons to use Safari over Chrome other than supposed battery life advantages. With Apple PR arguing that alternative browser engines should not be allowed on iOS because Chrome would devastate iOS' battery life, tests like these are more important than ever, and I hope we're going to see more of them. Tech media always just seems to copy/paste whatever manufacturers and corporations claim without so much as a hint of skepticism, and this benchmark highlights the dangers of doing so, in case you didn't already know believing corporations was a terribly idea.
Linux 6.11 released
Linus Torvalds justtaggedthe Linux 6.11 kernel as stable. There aremany changes and new features in Linux 6.11includingnumerous AMD CPU and GPU improvements, preparations for upcoming Intel platforms, initial block atomic write support for NVMe and SCSI drives, the DRM Panic infrastructure can now display a monochrome logo if desired, easier support for building Pacman kernel packages for Arch Linux, DeviceTree files for initial Snapdragon X1 laptops, and much more. Michael Larabel Especially the Snapdragon stuff interests me, as I really want to move to ARM for my laptop needs at some point, and I'm obviously not going to be using Windows or macOS. I hope the bringup for the Snapdragon laptop chips is smooth sailing from here and picks up pace, because I'd hate for Linux to miss out on this transition. Qualcomm talked big game about supporting Linux properly, but it feels like they're - what a surprise - not backing those words up with actions so far.
Haiku R1/beta5 released
It's always a lovely day when it's a Haiku release day - and sadly, those don't come very often. Of course, Haiku's nightlies tend to be rather solid so an official release isn't really a must if you want to use Haiku, but if you were holding out for something more stable: Haiku has just released its fifth beta, Haiku R1/beta5. We've covered most of the new features and changes as they were developed, but since it's been so long since the previous beta, we should cover some of the highlights. One of the collection of improvements that's impossible to put in a screenshot is the performance improvements the successor to BeOS has received since the release of R1/beta4, and there are many. There's a ton of general performance improvements, of course, covering everything from the kernel to applications, including much better throughput in TCP, the network stack, which should lift Haiku's network performance much closer to that of other, more mature operating systems. There's also an overhaul of the user_mutexsystem, and much more. A great many performance optimizations were done to the kernel and drivers, including batching many more I/O operations, avoiding unnecessary locks on application startup, improved pre-mapping of memory mapped files, reduced lock contention in page mapping, batched modification of the global memory areas table (and a different implementation of its underlying data structure), changes to keep page lists in-order to ease allocations, temporary buffer allocation performance improvements in hot I/O paths, support forDT_GNU_HASHin the ELF loader, and more. Haiku R1/beta5 release notes Looking at the end user side of things, the Appearance dialog has been simplified without removing any features or capabilities, and Haiku now also comes with a dark mode. The little power/battery widget in Deskbar has also been overhauled to provide more accurate battery information, and it'll load automatically if a battery is detected in the system. Tracker (the file manager) and Icon-O-Matic have seen improvements, there's a rewritten FAT driver, a brand new UFS2 driver, and much more. There's also a ton of new application ports from the Qt and GTK world, especially if the last time you've tried Haiku was one of the previous betas. Thanks to all of these ports, it's much more realistic now to use Haiku as a daily driver. Haiku now also offers experimental support for .NET and FLTK, which provides further avenues for ports. This is just a small selection, as there is so much more contained in this new beta release. If you've been running the nightlies this new beta won't mean much to you, but if you've been out of the running for a while, Haiku R1/beta5 is a great place to start to see what the platform has to offer.
Google finally unveils its take on freeform windowing on Android
To empower tablet users to get more done, we're enhancing freeform windowing, allowing them to run multiple apps simultaneously and resize windows for optimal multitasking. Today, we're excited to share that desktop windowing on Android tablets is available in developer preview. For app developers, the concept of Android apps running in freeform windows has already existed with solutions like Samsung DeX and ChromeOS. Updating your apps to support adaptive layouts, more robust multitasking, and adaptive inputs will ensure your apps work well on large screens across the Android ecosystem. Francesco Romano on the Android Developers Blog The long-running saga of Google trying to develop proper freeform windowing support for Android seems to finally be bearing fruit. Countless attempts came and went, usually in developer releases, hidden behind flags, rarely, if ever talked about, but now it's finally not only part of an Android beta release anyone with a Pixel Tablet can install and try out, Google is also openly talking about and touting it as a feature, so we might actually perhaps maybe see this in a non-beta release at some point. The way it works is both surprising and rather unsurprising. Instead of the Apple approach, which seems to entail a deep disdain for traditional windowing, Google is pretty much embracing the things we expect a windowing system to have, from window titlebars with close and maximise widgets, to a traditional dock-like taskbar permanently available at the bottom of the screen. If you click or tap on a little downward arrow on the titlebar, you can choose options like displaying windows side-by-side, much like on Windows. A very welcome feature' is the ability to tear off Chrome tabs and turn them into their own windows, just like in a traditional desktop environment. Google also opted for an interesting approach that reminds me somewhat of the desktop" mode on Windows RT. Since Windows RT was ARM-based and entirely locked-down, the only classic Win32 applications you could run were those bundled with Windows as well as Microsoft Office. To access these, Windows RT would launch a full-screen tablet application that contained the entire traditional Windows desktop, and you'd run your classic Win32 applications in there. Android's new windowing system seems to be doing something similar: once you enter the freeform windowing mode, all future applications will also launch as windows. In the task switcher, however, they're all contained within a single desktop" entry that you can close if you want to. That desktop entry seems to take the shape of a live view of the desktop", including the various windows you have opened. This way, you can have a dedicated desktop" with freeform windows alongside any fullscreen tablet applications you also happen to be running. It's perhaps not the most integrated or elegant approach, but it's dead-simple and easy to grasp. This new windowing environment also provides application developers with the option of allowing multiple instances of a single application to be launched, say launching two text editor windows side-by-side. This seems to be a specific property developers need to enable, though, and considering Android's tablet adoption history, that's anything but a given at this point. Of course, it shouldn't come as a surprise that applications need to be able to resize gracefully, too. If you want to play with it, you'll need a Pixel Tablet running Android 15 QPR1 Beta 2, or just use the simulator. I really hope this takes off and developers support the various APIs for optimal integration (I'm not getting my hopes up), since proper freeform windowing that doesn't feel like an ugly, barely functional hack is something I've been wanting on Android for a long time.
Microsoft vaguely gestures in the general direction of giving security vendors more userspace tools
The consequences of the massive CrowdStrike failure for Windows are slowly coming into focus. Microsoft recently held a security summit with some of the large security software vendors, and the company is making several rather vague promises about what it's going to do to make sure an incident like CrowdStrike never happens again. A key part of these promises is the realisation that security software really shouldn't be running in the kernel, and to make that possible, MIcrosoft will need to add several security features in userspace. Both our customers and ecosystem partners have called on Microsoft to provide additional security capabilities outside of kernel mode which, along with SDP, can be used to create highly available security solutions. At the summit, Microsoft and partners discussed the requirements and key challenges in creating a new platform which can meet the needs of security vendors. David Weston at the Windows Blogs This is easier said than done, as moving things from kernel to userspace tends to incur a performance penalty, as well as making it harder to detect software with bad intentions early enough. Microsoft is going to have do some serious reworking of both the kernel and userspace when it comes to security before it'll be able to completely close up the kernel and make it impossible for security software to mess around in kernelspace. Microsoft doesn't offer any concrete steps or measures quite yet, so we'll have to wait and see just how far they're willing to go. There's really not much else to say at this point - empty platitudes, vague promises, and tons of marketing speak don't secure an operating system, after all.
Android applications can now block being sideloaded
It seems Google is hell-bent on removing anything from Android that makes the platform stand apart from iOS. One of the features of Android and the Play Store that users of rooted and/or de-Googled phones will be familiar with is SafetyNet Attestation, something that Android applications can use to check, among other things, if the device it's running on is rooted or not, and take any action from there based on that information. Notoriously, some banking applications on Android will refuse to work on rooted and/or de-Googled devices because of this. Earlier this year, at Google I/O, the company unveiled the successor of SafetyNet Attestation, called the Google Play Integrity API, and it comes with a whole lot more functionality for developers to control what their application can do on devices based on the status of the device and the application binary in question. Play Integrity will let the developer's application know if its binary has been tampered with, if Google Play Protect is enabled, if the Android device it's running on is genuine", and a whole lot more. Based on that information, the application could decide to warn users when they're about to do something sensitive that their device is rooted, or it could just throw up its hands entirely and refuse to function at all - and there's really not much the user can do about this. A new capability of the Play Integrity API is that developers can now also determine where it came from - i.e., if it was sideloaded or installed through a non-Play application store - and then throw up a dialog allowing the user to switch to the version from the Play Store instead. Doing so will delete the original binary and all its data, and replace it with the Play Store version. The problem here is that the only other option is to cancel, and not have the application load at all. As you can see, the remediation dialog tells you to get this app from Play" in order to continue using it. There's an option to close the dialog, but there's no way to bypass it entirely. If you close the dialog, a response is sent to the app that lets the developer know so they can decide whether to continue blocking access. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority Several applications appear to already be using this new capability, and while it won't mean much for people running Google's, Samsung's, or any other blessed by Google" version of Android on unrooted devices, people running, say, /e/OS, GrapheneOS, LineageOS, or any other de-Googled and/or rooted device is going to be having a very bad time if more and more applications adopt this capability. If you're running a device without Play Services, relying solely on the vast and varied library of applications from F-Droid, for instance, while also sideloading a few applications only available in the Play Store, you could very well be running into problems. We'll have to see just how widespread this capability becomes, but I can already foresee this becoming yet another major headache for anyone trying to use a smartphone that isn't from blessed by Apple or Google. Personally, I'm lucky in that Swedish banking and ID applications worked on de-Googled Android phones, but with the expanding reach of the Play Integrity API, as well as possible let's enable this by default" shenanigans by Google, I'm definitely worried about this remaining so in the future.
‘Holy smokes, I just released a MiniGolf game for Palm OS in 2024’
This summer, I embarked on a side project to create a brand-new Palm OS game, and after less than two months of intermittent coding, I'm excited to announce that it's ready to be released to the public! Captain's Quarters The game in question is a top-down minigolf game, and works on devices running Palm OS 3.5 and higher, in both monochrome and colour, and there's high-resolution support for devices running Palm OS 5.0 and higher. Sadly, my own Palm OS devices were all drained of battery so I couldn't quickly load it up and play it on real hardware in time for this post (rest assured, my T|X is currently charging), but you can play it in your browser if you want to. Like any other top-down minigolf game, it's simple and fun to play. The game's creator, whose real name I can't find so I'll just refer to them by their blog's name Captain's Quarters, also wrote a published a post about the process of developing a Palm OS game in 2024. Especially the section on what is needed to code for Palm OS today is important if you're also interested in picking this up. The best news is that developing a Palm OS game can be done on modern hardware, that saves me a lot of time not having to deal with virtual machines or having to set up an old PC running Linux. For getting a working compiler, I used prc-tools-remix, which is the same old compiler as in the old days, but it's updated to work on a modern day Linux or OS X system. Captain's Quarters People in general are often oblivious to just how advanced and capable both Palm OS and Windows PocketPC PDAs really were - most people never had one - and even more people are oblivious to just how vibrant the gaming scene on Palm OS was. My Palm OS devices were some of the best gaming handhelds I've ever had, and my love for jewel-matching games still goes strong today on Android, but it all started on Palm OS, the original mobile home of the original Bejeweled. Palm OS games got me through quite a few boring lectures and classes in university.
Chrome-based browsers highlight the risks of using third-party Firefox-based browsers
And the hits just keep on coming. After buying an ad tech company and working with Facebook to weaken Firefox' privacy features, Mozilla is now integrating AI chatbots straight into Firefox with the recent release of Firefox 130. People are understandably big mad about this, and as such the calls for switching to alternatives is growing stronger. Considering the only true alternative to Firefox is Chrome and its various skins, those of us looking to send Mozilla a message are kind of relegated to trying out Firefox skins instead. Switching to what are essentially Firefox distros" to collectively try and nudge Mozilla back to making more sensible decisions instead of AI hype chasing is an eminently reasonable one. There's more reasons than just that. Part of the reason I use Firefox-based browsers rather than Chromium browsers is because I want to preserve some choice and diversity in browser engines. The existence of a choice of different Firefox derived browsers may allow space for experimentation in designingbetterbrowsers. In Chromium land,Archas shown that there's an opportunity for quite radically rethinking how browsers work. Same forOrionin Mac/iOS-land. This isn't a detailed review of the different browsers, just a few comments and observations having tried them. Tom Morris I have my reservations about using Firefox skins, mostly because no matter what you do, you're still entirely dependent on the choices Mozilla makes during the development of the venerable browser. If Mozilla keeps deviating from the traditional goals more and more, the amount of work these Firefox skins need to perform to reign the browser back in will start to increase, and who knows if they have the manpower, experience, and skills to do so? More worryingly, will they be able to keep up with Mozilla's release schedule, including important bugfixes and security patches? My worries go beyond those basic things, though. Considerably fewer eyes will be going over any code changes these Firefox-based browsers make, and as recent history has shown us, infiltrating a small, understaffed open source project for nefarious purposes is a thing that happens. Another issue to consider is nebulous ownership of such Firefox versions, as are questions around who financially supports such efforts. Your browser is a massively important and crucial piece of software that holds and has access to a lot of your personal data, and you should be particularly careful about who owns your browser. This is not to say each and every one of them is bad - just that you have to be careful about who you trust. Several Chrome skins, like Brave and Opera, have time and time again shown to be shady, untrustworthy companies pushing crypto bullshit, ripping off websites, have shady owners, and more - don't use Brave, don't use Opera - and there's no guarantees the same won't happen with Firefox skins riding the wave of unhappiness with Mozilla. Please be mindful. I don't have an answer for this issue, either - I just want to caution against throwing the browser out with the bath water and switching to a project you might not know a lot about.
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