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Back when I was working on my article about PA-RISC, HP-UX, and UNIX workstations in general, I made extensive use of OpenPA, Paul Weissmann's invaluable and incredibly detailed resource about HP's workstation efforts, HP-UX, and tons of related projects and products. Weissmann's been doing some serious digging, and has unearthed details about a number of essentially forgotten operating system efforts. First, it turns out HP was porting Windows NT to PA-RISC in the early '90s. Several magazine sources and USEnet posts around 1993 point to HP pursuing a PA-RISC port to NT, modified the PA-RISC architecture for bi-endianess and even conducted a back-room presention at the '94 Comdex conference of a (modified HP 712?) PA-7100LC workstation running Windows NT. Mentions of NT on PA-RISC continued in 1994 with some customer interest but ended around 1995. Paul Weissmann at OpenPA The port eventually fizzled out due to a lack of interest from both customers and application developers, and HP realised its time was better spent on the future of x86, Intel's Itanium, instead. HP also planned to work together with Novell to port NetWare to PA-RISC, but the work took longer than expected and it, too, was cancelled. The most recent secretive effort was the port of HP-UX to x86, an endeavour that took place during the final days of the UNIX workstation market. Parts of the conversation in these documents mention a successful boot of HP-UX on x86 in December of 2009, with porting efforts projected to cost 100M+ between 2010 and 2016. The plan was for mission-critical x86 systems (ProLiant DL980 and Superdome with x86) and first releases projected in 2011 (developer) and 2012 (Superdome and Linux ABI). Paul Weissmann at OpenPA I'm especially curious about that last one, as porting HP-UX to x86 seems like a massive effort during a time where it was already obvious Linux had completely obliterated the traditional UNIX market. It really feels like the last death saving throws of a platform everybody already knew wasn't going to make it.

As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss - ie spending more than we've been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual income, we can preserve our core operations while we work on new funding sources. We've now hit the buffers" of this reserves policy, meaning the Board can't approve any more deficit budgets - to keep spending at the same level we must increase our income. Robert McQueen Learning that the GNOME Foundation can barely scrape by financially makes me irrationally angry. As much as I've grown to dislike using GNOME and thus switched all my machines over to KDE, GNOME is still the most popular desktop environment and used extensively by pretty much all the big corporate Linux distributions. How is it possible that this hugely popular and important open source project has to beg individual users for donations like they're running an independent tech website or something? Where's all the financial support from Red Hat, IBM, Oracle, Canonical, and so on? If not even an insanely popular project like GNOME can be financially stable, what hope is there for the countless small, unknown open source projects that form the basis of our entire computing world?

In February last year I wrote about running a FreeBSD desktop, and concluded that sometimes you need to give yourself permission to tinker. Well recently I've started tinkering with Alpine Linux! It's been recommended to me for years, so I'm finally getting around to checking it out. There's a lot to like if you come from BSD, which we'll dig into here. Ruben Schade Just a quick look at this unexpectedly popular Linux distribution that really has its own identity.

The Genode project has released Sculpt OS 24.04, the general purpose desktop operating system based on the Genode OS Framework. This release is absolutely jam-packed with new features, improvements, and changes, and it's hard to know where to begin. One of the biggest new features is support for suspend/resume, an experimental feature for now, for which the developers also made starting and stopping drivers and related components easier straight from the user interface. In addition, NVMe, AHCI, and Intel GPU drivers will resume automatically after a resume. Sculpt OS 24.04 also ships with a brand new audio framework, which brings support for pluggable drivers, arbitrary sample rates, and the flexible routing and mixing of audio signals", but the audio driver does need to be manually restarted after a resume. This release also adds support for 4K displays and I2C touchpads, underlining that yes, Sculpt and Genode developers dogfood their operating system on real hardware. Do note that at least for now, the I2C touchpad driver needs to be started manually, so an external mouse will initially be needed. Various images are available for download from the download page.

Microsoft is about to go even more hog-wild with AI" in Windows, as it intends to start recording everything you do on your Windows computer so AI" features can find stuff for you. According to my sources, AI Explorer will run in the background and capture everything you do on your computer. It will document and triage everything it sees, no matter what apps or interfaces you're looking at, and turn them into memories that you can recall at a later point. For example, you can have a conversation with a friend in the WhatsApp app for Windows, and AI Explorer will record and remember the content that was on-screen and process it with AI for you to recall later. AI Explorer can also summarize conversations, emails, web pages, and general UI surfaces just by asking for it during or after the fact. I'm told that much of this experience is rendered on-device and does not reach out to the cloud to process information. This is important for privacy reasons, but also for performance reasons. To reduce latency, AI Explorer will rely on NPU silicon to process content that has been recorded. I also understand that users will be able to filter out specific apps from being recorded by the AI Explorer process, or disable AI Explorer entirely. Zac Bowden at Windows Central Is this really something people wan to devote constant resources and thus battery life to?Setting aside the privacy implications of something like this, do people really want to have a permanent record of everything they've done on their machine? Maybe I'm just the odd one out here, but nothing about this appeals to me in any way, shape, or form. In fact, it's quite the opposite - something like this would make make me run for the hills, looking for an alternative to the operating system I'm using. And the weasel words much of this experience is rendered on-device" definitely did not go by unnoticed. This wording makes it very clear at least some data will be sent to Microsoft for processing, and over time, that amount will only increase. No data company has ever reduced the amount of data it captures, after all.

Regarding the release of the MS-DOS 4.00 source code, Michal Necasek makes an excellent point about how just dumping the code in git is a terrible and destructive way to release older source code. It's terrific that the source code for DOS 4.00/4.01 was released! But don't expect to build the source code mutilated by git without problems. Historic source code should be released simply as an archive of files, ZIP or tar or 7z or whatever, with all timestamps preserved and every single byte kept the way it was. Git is simply not a suitable tool for this. Michal Necasek at OS/2 Museum The problems caused by dumping the code in git are quite real. Timestamps are not preserved, and the conversion to UTF-8 is deeply destructive, turning some parts of the code to literal gibberish. It's a bit of a mess, and the people responsible for these release should be more careful and considerate.

Today, in partnership with IBM and in the spirit of open innovation, we're releasing the source code to MS-DOS 4.00 under the MIT license. There's a somewhat complex and fascinating history behind the 4.0 versions of DOS, as Microsoft partnered with IBM for portions of the code but also created a branch of DOS called Multitasking DOS that did not see a wide release. Scott Hanselman Not only did they release the source code to MS-DOS 4.00, they also released disk images of a very early version of Multitasking DOS, which did not see a wide release, as the article states. I've only vaguely heard of MT-DOS over the decades, so I had to do some minor reading and research to untangle what, exactly, MT-DOS really is. Much of this information is probably table stakes for the many older readers we have, but bear with me. MT-DOS, which has the official name MS-DOS 4.0 (often further specified by adding multitasking" in brackets after the version number) was a version of MS-DOS developed by Microsoft based on MS-DOS 2.0, whose headlining feature was pre-emptive multitasking, which allowed specifically written applications to continue to run in a special background mode. Interestingly enough, it had to perform this multitasking with the same 640k memory limitation as other versions of DOS. Very few OEMs ended up licensing it, and most notably IBM wasn't interested, so after one or two more OEM-specific versions, it was quickly abandoned by Microsoft. MS-DOS 4.0 (multitasking) is entirely unrelated to the real" versions 4 of MS-DOS that followed later. The actual version 4 was called MS-DOS 4.00, and it's the source code to this specific version that's being released as open source today. MS-DOS 4.00 was quickly followed by 4.01 and 4.01a, but apparently OEMs would confusingly still label 4.01 disks as MS-DOS 4.0". The whole MS-DOS 4 saga is quite convoluted and messy, and I'm probably oversimplifying a great deal. Regardless, this code joins the open source releases of MS-DOS 1.25 and 2.0 that Microsoft released years ago.

William Brown, developer of webauthn-rs, has written a scathing blog post detailing how corporate interests - namely, Apple and Google - have completely and utterly destroyed the concept of passkeys. The basic gist is that Apple and Google were more interested in control and locking in users than in providing a user-friendly passwordless future, and in doing so have made passkeys effectively a worse user experience than just using passwords in a password manager. Since then Passkeys are now seen as a way to capture users and audiences into a platform. What better way to encourage long term entrapment of users then by locking all their credentials into your platform, and even better, credentials that can't be extracted or exported in any capacity. Both Chrome and Safari will try to force you into using either hybrid (caBLE) where you scan a QR code with your phone to authenticate - you have to click through menus to use a security key. caBLE is not even a good experience, taking more than 60 seconds work in most cases. The UI is beyond obnoxious at this point. Sometimes I think the password game has a better ux. The more egregious offender is Android, which won't even activate your security key if the website sends the set of options that are needed for Passkeys. This means the IDP gets to choose what device you enroll without your input. And of course, all the developer examples only show you the options to activate Google Passkeys stored in Google Password Manager". After all, why would you want to use anything else? William Brown The whole post is a sobering read of how a dream of passwordless, and even usernameless, authentication was right within our grasp, usable by everyone, until Apple and Google got involved and enshittified the standards and tools to promote lock-in and their own interests above the user experience. If even someone as knowledgeable about this subject as Brown, who writes actual software to make these things work, is advising against using passkeys, you know something's gone horribly wrong. I also looked into possibly using passkeys, including using things like a Yubikey, but the process seems so complex and unpleasant that I, too, concluded just sticking to Bitwarden and my favourite open source TFA application was a far superior user experience.

Gentoo, the venerable Linux distribution which in my headcanon I describe as classy', has banned any use of AI". A proposal by Gentoo Council member Micha Gorny from February of this year banning its use has been unanimously accepted by the Gentoo Council. The new policy reads: It is expressly forbidden to contribute to Gentoo any content that has been created with the assistance of Natural Language Processing artificial intelligence tools. This motion can be revisited, should a case been made over such a tool that does not pose copyright, ethical and quality concerns. Micha Gorny We'll have to see how this policy will be implemented, but I like that Gentoo is willing to take a stand.

It wasn't too long ago that new Ubuntu releases were major happenings in the Linux world, as it was the default Linux distribution for many, both old and newcomers, in the desktop Linux space. These days, Ubuntu release hit a little different, with Canonical's focus having shifted much more to the enterprise, and several aspects of the distribution being decidedly unpopular, like the snap package management system. Still, Ubuntu is probably still one of the most popular, if not the most popular, distributions out there, so any new release, like today's Ubuntu 24.0 LTS, is still a big deal. Ubuntu Desktop brings the Subiquity installer to an LTS for the first time. In addition to a refreshed user experience and a minimal install by default, the installer now includes experimental support for ZFS and TPM-based full disk encryption and the ability to import auto-install configurations. Post install, users will be greeted with the latest GNOME 46 alongside a new App Center and firmware-updater. Netplan is now the default for networking configuration and supports bidirectionality with NetworkManager. Utkarsh Gupta on ubuntu-announce Of course, all the various other Ubuntu editions have also seen new releases: Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Cinnamon, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, Ubuntu Unity, and Xubuntu. Yes, that's a long list. They all mostly share the same improvements as Ubuntu's main course, but paired with the latest versions of the respective desktop environments instead. Except for Kubuntu. Unlike just about any other major distribution released over the last few months, such as Fedora 40 only a few days ago, Kubuntu does not ship with the new KDE Plasma 6, opting for Plasma 5.27.11 instead. There simply wasn't enough time between the release of Plasma 6 and the Ubuntu feature freeze, so they made the - in my opinion - understandable call to stick to Plasma 5 for now, moving Plasma 6 to the next release later this year.

Huawei plans to expand its native HarmonyOS smartphone platform worldwide, despite coming under US-led sanctions that have deprived it of access to key technologies. The Chinese tech megacorp released its own phone platform in 2019, the same year that US sanctions blocked Huawei from having further access to Google's Android software to power its devices. More recently, the company saw its Mate 60 Pro smartphone become the top selling device in China's huge consumer market, displacing rivals such as Apple's iPhone. It also has a newer device, the Pura 70, that could pose a bigger threat to Apple sales in the country. Dan Robinson at The Register If there is one company that has the capabilities and will to truly offer a third alternative, it's Huawei with HarmonyOS. This company has the full might of the Chinese state behind it, and it clearly has the drive to prove itself after the various sanctions levied against it in recent years that barred it from using Google's Android. It's obviously already experiencing major success in its home market, but now the company intends to go global, country by country, to positino HarmonyOS alongside iOS and Android. Huawei basically takes a brute-force approach, explaining that they identify the 5000 most popular applications, which they claim cover 99% of users' time with their smartphones, and port those over first. I'm not entirely sure how they convince developers to port over their applications, but I'm guessing money is involved. Fair play, I would say - it's not like anything else is going to break the stranglehold Apple and Google have over the mobile application market. We haven't really spent much time talking about HarmonyOS in the west in general, and on OSNews in particular, which is a bit of a shame because it has some interesting characteristics. For instance, it has a multi-kernel design, where it uses the Linux kernel on more powerful devices like smartphones and tablets, and the RTOS LiteOS kernel on lower power IoT devices. DSoftBus is another interesting part of the operating system, which allows multiple devices to kind of join together and share data, applications, and control seamlessly. HarmonyOS supports both Android and true HarmonyOS applications, the latter of which are marked with a little logo in the corner of the application icon, but the unique features of HarmonyOS, like DSoftBus, are only accessible to true HarmonyOS applications. Developing these native applications can be done in DevEco Studio, which is built atop IntelliJ IDEA, using ArkUI. Huawei even went so far as to develop its own browser engine for HarmonyOS, which it recently released as open source, called ArkWeb. While HarmonyOS currently still supports running Android applications, this will soon no longer be the case as the company is working on HarmonyOS NEXT, which will remove Android compatibility to focus entirely on true HarmonyOS applications instead. NEXT also does away entirely with the multikernel approach, ditching both the Linux and LiteOS kernels for a new HarmonyOS microkernel, and uses Huawei's own Cangjie programming language for application development. HarmonyOS NEXT is currently being tested on a variety of Huawei devices, with a beta and final release planned for later this year. It's just our luck that the only potentially viable competitor to Android and iOS is a party closed-source operating system from China, which will surely bring with it a whole host of security concerns in the west. It's really difficult at the moment to ascertain just how much of HarmonyOS - and specifically, HarmonyOS NEXT - is available as open source, which is a major bummer. I don't think I'd ever want to use a (partly) closed source Chinese operating system for anything major in my life, but if it's open source we could at least see non-Chinese forks that I'd find easier to trust. The road of iOS and Android competitors is littered with the bodies of failed attempts - Symbian, the various iterations of Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Sailfish, Ubuntu Touch, the GNOME/Plasma attempts that just can't grow beyond proof of concepts - and there is no way to know if Huawei can pull off outside of China what it did with HarmonyOS inside China. Western markets are incredibly weary of anything related to Huawei, and for all we know, this operating system won't ever even be allowed inside the US and the EU in the first place. Regardless of international politics and the CCP's brutal, totalitarian, genocidal regime, HarmonyOS NEXT seems like a very interesting platform with fresh ideas, and I'd love to at least try it out once it hits international markets with proper localisation into English. I'll take a problematic Chinese smartphone operating system competitor over no competitor at all - even if I won't use it myself, it'll be at least some form of competition both Apple and Google desperately need.

But just as smartphones would do, PDAs offered a dizzying array of operating systems and applications, and a great many of them ran Palm OS. (I bought my first Palm, an m505, new in 2001, upgrading from an HP 95LX.) Naturally, there's no way we could enumerate every single such device in this article. So in this Ars retrospective, we'll look back at some notable examples of the technical evolution of the Palm operating system and the devices that ran it-and how they paved the way for what we use now. Cameron Kaiser at Ars Technica This sure takes me back to my own in-depth Palm retrospective from - checks notes - 11 years ago (!). It turns out all the images from that article no longer load, so I should set aside some time to fix that up.

While Firefox and Safari phased out third party cookies years ago, it's taking Chrome a bit longer because, well, daddy Google got ads to sell. As such, Google has been developing a complicated new alternative to third party cookies that it calls Privacy sandbox", a name in the vain of Greenland". This process has not exactly been going well, because Google has had to postpone phasing out third party cookies several times now, and today, they had to postpone it again. This time, however, it's because the UK competition authority, the CMA, still has some questions. We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem. It's also critical that the CMA has sufficient time to review all evidence including results from industry tests, which the CMA has asked market participants to provide by the end of June. Given both of these significant considerations, we will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4. We remain committed to engaging closely with the CMA and ICO and we hope to conclude that process this year. Assuming we can reach an agreement, we envision proceeding with third-party cookie deprecation starting early next year. Google's Greenland blog Making a browser good enough to take over almost the entire browser market was an absolute master stroke by Google. Now can you all please switch over to Firefox or like Lynx or something?

While it's still yet to debut, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite is looking like a big deal for ARM-powered Windows machines and, now, it's getting a more affordable cousin in the Snapdragon X Plus. Announced today, Snapdragon X Plus is based on the same Oryon CPU as Snapdragon X Elite, just with a bit less power. The chip has 10 cores to the Elite's 12, and is also clocked down from the Elite's 3.8GHz to 3.4GHz. Ben Schoon at 9To5Google It really seems like it's finally happening - ARM computers for the general public (that aren't from Apple). I really hope that Qualcomm can deliver on its promises, and that Microsoft's involvement means these computers will be fairly standardised so it's easier for non-Windows platforms to support them. I've seen quite a few rumblings from people invited to Qualcomm's press events for these new ARM chips that the company is delivering Linux support alongside Windows support, so that's at least a good start. Whenever we talk about ARM coming to the generic PC market, people rightfully point out the lack of standardisation in the ARM space, so that really is the deciding factor here for people like us, who tend to not be all too interested in locked-down platforms. If every one of these machines is different enough that supporting them is a nightmare - like the world of smartphones - ARM for PCs will be dead on arrival for me because I have zero interest in buying Windows-only hardware. One thing Microsoft tends to be good at is getting at least some standardisation to stick in the PC market, and I hope they're going to that here, too - Microsoft probably isn't relishing supporting each individual ARM machine in Windows by hand' either. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

A bill that would force China-based company ByteDance to sell TikTok -or else face a US ban of the platform - is all but certain to become law after the Senate passed a foreign aid package including the measure. It now heads to President Joe Biden, who already committed to signing the TikTok legislation should it make it through both chambers of Congress. The House passed the foreign aid package that includes the TikTok bill on Saturday. Lauren Feiner at The Verge I hope the EU follows.

In iOS 17.4, Apple introduced a new system called eligibilityd. This works with countryd (which you might have heard about when it first appeared in iOS 16.2) and the Apple ID system to decide where you physically are. The idea is that multiple sources need to agree on where you are, before giving you access to features such as those mandated by the Digital Markets Act. Adam Demasi The way Adam Demasi managed to convince Apple his very much Australian iPhone in Australia was, in fact, a European Union iPhone in the European Union was by making sure not a single wireless signal managed to escape the device. He had to disable location services, insert an Italian SIM, set up a pfSense Wi-Fi router using the regulatory country of Italy, and go into his basement where there's no mobile signal. Between all these steps, the phone was reset multiple times. And then, and only then, did the iPhone think it was in the European Union, with all the benefits that entails. Demasi has no idea which of these steps are actually needed, but the process of figuring this all out is ongoing, and more information is sure to be discovered as smart people sink their teeth into the process by which Apple determines where an iPhone is from.

I always like it when I can link to an article written by an OSNews, and this time it's even relevant to me as I'm exploring OpenBSD myself. OSNews reader and silver Patreon supporter Morgan has written an article about using OpenBSD as a daily driver. OpenBSD is forever tied in first place with Void Linux as my favorite desktop OS. This is particularly funny because OpenBSD isn't just a desktop OS"; in its purest form, the base installation without any installed packages, it makes for an excellent Ethernet router, firewall, or web server. It even ships with its own fork of X11 called Xenocara, along with fvwm2 and its own calm window manager, so there's a rudimentary desktop OS in there too. With that said, in 2024 there is no such thing as a fully functioning desktop computer or workstation without at least a web browser of some kind, and if you're adding packages you may as well build a full desktop system to suit your needs. So how do you go from the amazing but unfortunately limited base install to a daily driver" workstation operating system? There are many ways to do this, and I will present a couple of paths I take depending on the hardware and use case involved. Before I do that, a bit of prep is necessary to get OpenBSD into more of a desktop OS mode. Morgan I'll be using this guide over the coming days to make sure I end up with something usable. I still haven't decided on what desktop environment I want to go for - I'm not interested in running GNOME or KDE, so Xfce is probably the most likely option. I'd also love to try out LXQt, but it seems the version OpenBSD has in its repositories is very, very outdated (1.0.0 from years ago, when 2.0.0 was just released). There's a small chance I might suck it up and use one of those build your own desktop environment" options, but I have no idea which one I should go for.

Did you know there's one surefire way to know when a technology has truly jumped the shark? When they start adding it to computer mice. In today's fast-paced, technology-enabled world, everyone is learning to work differently with breakthroughs in Generative AI. Mastering prompt building enhances your efficiency and creativity. That's why we developed the Logi AI Prompt Builder, a time and click-saving solution. Rephrase, summarize, and create custom-made prompt recipes with ChatGPT faster, with virtually no disruption to your workflow. Logitech's AI" thing page Logitech mice users were surprised to find out that after the latest mouse software update, it now contains an AI" prompt builder tool, so that you can click anywhere and have a little pop-up appear that taps into ChatGPT. I'm done.

These emails - which I encourage you to look up - tell a dramatic story about how Google's finance and advertising teams, led by Raghavan with the blessing of CEO Sundar Pichai, actively worked to make Google worse to make the company more money. This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy - the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company's intentions to get the service you want. Edward Zitron Quite the read.

It's a big day for Fedora users such as myself - and especially for Fedora KDE users, also such as myself. Fedora 40 has been released today, and while the main focus is always on the GNOME release - although not everyone is happy about that - the various other spins, in Fedora parlance, have also seen major updates. Most prominently among them is the KDE spin, which ships with KDE's recent megarelease, KDE Plasma 6. Starting at the top, Fedora 40 Workstation comes with the latest GNOME release, 46, which we covered when it was released earlier this year. It also comes with IPV4 Address Conflict Detection to resolve duplicate IPV4 addresses in the same physical network, and the PyTorch machine learning framework is now in the Fedora software repositories for easier installation and implementation by developers - a harbinger of what's to come. The KDE spin comes, as already mentioned, with KDE Plasma 6, and inherits the non-GNOME improvements and fixes as well, of course. There's also countless other spins covering pretty much every desktop environment and window manager under the sun, and Fedora 40 is also the first release to implement the new naming scheme for Fedora's various immutable editions - the Atomic Desktops.

Hot on the heels of NetBSD 10.0 comes NetBSD 9.4, a minor release in the previous release branch. NetBSD 9.4 is primarily a bug and security fix release, however, there are some new features, such as support for more MegaRAID controllers, ZTE MF112 and D-Link DWM222 USB 3G modems, and improved CPU feature detection for newer AMD/Intel devices. All users of netbsd-9 should upgrade if they are not following the stable branch. NetBSD 9.4 release announcement A very important note here is that the version of OpenSSL in NetBSD 9.4 is no longer supported unless you have a support contract with OpenSSL. They suggest upgrading to NetBSD 10.0, or to use OpenSSL from pkgsrc.

Tribblix, the unique ilumos distribution - think Solaris - has a new SPARC milestone. It's one of the few platforms still actively supporting SPARC, so even if the amount of users might be slim, I think it's an important contribution to the ecosystem. The application software here roughly corresponds to m34 on x86 systems, although the underlying illumos is still closer to m25/m26. Note that there are no functional illumos changes from the m28 sparc release - if that release didn't work on your system, this one won't either. Peter Tribble I'm still looking for my mythical, unobtanium Sun Ultra 45, a goal farther away now than it's ever been (Patreon maybe? One-time donation? Help me out after I took OSNews full-time?), and the SPARC version of Tribblix would be my first go-to.

There is something about surprising interfaces: clapping to switch on lights is more fun than a flipping a switch. Pressing a panic-button to order a pizza is more fun than ordering via an app. Recently I came across this surprising interface: a flute controlled mouse cursor for a first person shooter. I recognize a good idea when I see one, and immediately wanted replicate the idea and make it freely available. So I got to work. Joren Six I don't think I have ever seen something quite so unique.

A misconfigured North Korean Internet cloud server has provided a fascinating glance into the world of North Korean animation outsourcing and how foreign companies might be inadvertently employing North Korean companies on information technology (IT) projects. The incident also underlines how difficult it is for foreign companies to verify their outsourced work is not potentially breaking sanctions and ending up on computers in Pyongyang. Martyn Williams at 38 North What an absolutely wild story.

Cory Doctorow, nailing it as usual. If you care about how people are treated by platforms, you can't just tell them to pay for services instead of using ad-supported media. The most important factor in getting decent treatment out of a tech company isn't whether you pay with cash instead of attention - it's whether you're locked in, and thus a flight risk whom the platform must cater to. Cory Doctorow I'm sick and tired of the phrase if you're not paying for the product, you're the product", because it implies that if just you pay for a product or service, you're not going to be treated like ass. The problem is, as Doctorow points out, that this simply is not supported by the evidence, and that it isn't whether or not you're paying that makes you have a good or bad experience - it's whether or not you're locked in. If you've got nowhere else to go, then corporations can treat you like ass. There are so, so many free services and products I use where I'm anything but a product". My Linux distribution of choice, Fedora. My web browser, Firefox. The countless open source applications I use on my desktops, laptops, and smartphone. Those are all cases where even though I'm not paying, I know I'm being treated with respect, and I feel entirely comfortable with all of those. And no, you don't get to exclude the open source world just because it's inconvenient for the you're the product" argument. There are also countless services and products where the opposite is true; I'm a paying customer, but I still feel like I'm the product. I pay for additional Google Drive storage. I pay for an Office 364 subscription because I needed it as a translator (I'm working on OSNews full-time now, and could use your help keeping the site going), but I can't cancel it because my wife, my parents, and my parents-in-law use that same subscription. We pay for Netflix and one or two other video services. I don't know if our ISP or wireless provider do anything malicious, but it wouldn't surprise me. And so on. Being a paying customer means nothing. It's how easy it is for you to stop being a customer that matters.

Today we're taking the next step toward our vision for a more open computing platform for the metaverse. We're opening up the operating system powering our Meta Quest devices to third-party hardware makers, giving more choice to consumers and a larger ecosystem for developers to build for. We're working with leading global technology companies to bring this new ecosystem to life and making it even easier for developers to build apps and reach their audiences on the platform. Meta Horizon OS is the result of a decade of work by Meta to build a next-generation computing platform. To pioneer standalone headsets, we developed technologies like inside-out tracking, and for more natural interaction systems and social presence, we developed eye, face, hand, and body tracking. For mixed reality, we built a full stack of technologies for blending the digital and physical worlds, including high-resolution Passthrough, Scene Understanding, and Spatial Anchors. This long-term investment that began on the mobile-first foundations of the Android Open Source Project has produced a full mixed reality operating system used by millions of people. Facebook's blog In summary, Facebook wants the operating system of their Quest series of virtual reality devices - an Android Open Source Project fork optimised for this use - to become the default platform for virtual reality devices from all kinds of OEMs. Today, they're announcing that both Asus and Lenovo will be releasing devices running this Meta Horizon OS, with the former focusing on high-end VR gaming, and the latter on more general use cases of work, entertainment, and so on. Facebook will also be working together with Microsoft to create a Quest inspired by Xbox". The Meta Quest Store, the on-device marketplace for applications and games, will be renamed to the Meta Horizon Store, and the App Lab, where developers can more easily get their applications and games on devices and in the hands of consumers as long as they meet basic technical and content guidelines, will be integrated into the Meta Horizon Store for easier access than before. In addition, in a mildly spicy move, Facebook is openly inviting Google to bring the Google Play Store to the VR Android fork, where it can operate with the same economic model it does on other platforms". The odds of me buying anything from Facebook are slim, so I really hope this new move won't corner the market for VR headsets right out of the gate; I don't want another Android/iOS duopoly. I'm not particularly interested in VR quite yet - but give it a few more years, and I certainly won't pass up on a capable device that allows me to play Beat Saber and other exercise-focused applications and games. I just don't want it to be a Facebook device or operating system.

The maker of Tiny11, a third-party project that aims to make Windows 11 less bloated with unnecessary parts, released a new version of Tiny11 Builder, a special tool that lets you create a custom Windows 11 image tailored to your needs and preferences. The latest release makes it much easier to create a lightweight Windows 11 ISO without worrying about installing a system modified by unknown third parties. Taras Buria at Neowin Perhaps you can make Windows 11 slightly more bearable with this. If there's any interest from y'all, I could build my own debloated Windows 11 install and see if I can make this platform bearable for myself? Let me know in the comments.

One of the remarkable characteristics of the Super Nintendo was the ability for game cartridges (cart) to pack more than instructions and assets into ROM chips. If we open and look at the PCBs, we can find inside things like the CIC copy protection chip, SRAM, and even enhancement processors". Fabien Sanglard When I was a child and teenager in the '90s, the capabilities of the SNES cartridge were a bit of a legend. We'd talk about what certain games would use which additional processors and chips in the cartridge, right or wrong, often boasting about the games we owned, and talking down the games we didn't. Much of it was probably nonsense, but there's some good memories there. We're decades deep into the internet age now, and all the mysteries of the SNES cartridge can just be looked up on Wikipedia and endless numbers of other websites. The mystery's all gone, but at least now we can accurately marvel at just how versatile the SNES really was.

Earlier this year, we talked about Niri, a very unique tiling window manager for Wayland that scrolls infinitely to the right. I've never seen anything quite like it, and while it seems polarising, I think it's absolutely worthy of a dedicated niche. The project's got a major new release out, and there's a lot of improvements here. First and foremost, virtually all animations have been overhauled, and new ones have been added for almost every kind of interaction. The videos on the release page do a really good job of highlighting what they're going for, and I think it looks great, and for the animation-averse, every individual animation can be turned off. Niri now also supports variable refresh rate, and the IPC mechanism has been improved. Among the smaller improvements is a welcome one: when using the touchscreen, the mouse cursor disappears. I really think this one has to be tried before judged, and I'm seriously contemplating setting up a Wayland environment just for this one, to see if it works for me. My window flow", if that makes sense, is already left-to-right, so the idea of having that effectively automated with an infinite canvas sounds very appealing to me, especially on smaller displays. I just need to figure out if it works in reality.

Microsoft is on a roll with updating its app store on Windows 10 and 11. Following the recent release of performance upgrades and improved algorithms, the company announced big changes in how the web version of the Microsoft Store works. Now, every user can download app executables directly from the website using new installers for web." Taras Buria at Neowin Neat.

Lunatik is a framework for scripting the Linux kernel with Lua. It is composed by the Lua interpreter modified to run in the kernel; a device driver (written in Lua =)) and a command line tool to load and run scripts and manage runtime environments from the user space; a C API to load and run scripts and manage runtime environments from the kernel; and Lua APIs for binding kernel facilities to Lua scripts. Lunatik GitHub page I'm not knowledgeable enough to understand what this might be used for, but I figured y'all would be interested in this.

Miracle-wm is a Wayland compositor built atop of Mir, and its core is a tiling window manager like i3 and sway. It intends to offer more features compared to those, though, gunning more for swayfx. The project, led by Canonical's Matthew Kosarek, recently released version 0.2.0, which comes with a bunch of improvements. It supports sway/i3 IPC now, so that it can function in conjunction with Waybar, a very popular tool in the build-it-yourself Wayland window manager space. There's also a new feature where individual windows can live on top (Z-axis wise) of the tiling grid, where they work pretty much like regular windows. Another handy addition is that the configuration can be automatically reloaded when you change it. Miracle-wm comes in a snap package, but rpm and deb will arrive in a few days, as well. As the version number suggest, this project is in heavy development.

Microsoft is not done adding more odd stuff into its operating system. Following the not-so-great reception of new Start menu ads in one of the recent Beta builds, Microsoft is bringing even more ads, which, besides being slightly annoying, come at the cost of existing features. In build 22635.3500, the Sign Out button is now hidden behind a menu with a Microsoft 365 ad. Microsoft calls the new thing Account Manager." In a nutshell, it is a flyout with your existing subscriptions, a Microsoft 365 upsell, and a few account-related notifications, like a prompt to add a backup phone number or enable OneDrive backups. There is now also a link to your Microsoft Account settings. Taras Buria at Neowin The beatings will continue until moral improves.

Genio, the Haiku OS integrated development environment (IDE), is receiving another exciting update in preparation for the upcoming summer release. The update focuses primarily on improving the Language Server Protocol (LSP) stack and introduces a cool new feature: Symbol Outline. Symbol Outline allows Genio to retrieve the list of symbols defined in a source file from the language server. This list can be sorted, nodes can be expanded or collapsed, and now a symbol can be renamed directly from there. Being part of the standard LSP specification, Symbol Outline should be supported by all language servers. The development team has tested it with clangd and OmniSharp. Andrea at Desktop on fire! Improvements to tools to develop truly native Haiku applications are exceptionally welcome, if only to prevent Haiku from becoming a worse way than Linux to run Qt applications.

Linux distributions running on ARM have had to roll their own Firefox builds for the architecture since forever, and it seems that Mozilla has taken this to heart as the browser maker is now supplying binary ARM builds of Firefox. They come in either a tarball or a .deb package installable through Mozilla's apt repository. Do note, though, that Mozilla does not give the same kinds of guarantees for the ARM build of Firefox as they do for the x86 builds. We want to be upfront about the current state of our ARM64 builds. Although we are confident in the quality of Firefox on this architecture, we are still incorporating comprehensive ARM64 testing into Firefox's continuous integration and release pipeline. Our goal is to integrate ARM64 builds into Firefox's extensive automated test suite, which will enable us to offer this architecture across the beta, release, and ESR channels. Gabriel Bustamante These new builds won't mean much for the average ARM Linux user since distributions built Firefox for the architecture already anyway, but it does offer users a direct line to Firefox they didn't have before.

It all started in fall of 2022, when I was watching This Does Not Compute's video on the history of graphing calculator gaming. Around the 5 minute mark, he offhandedly mentions the kind of processors TI's graphing calculator line uses. Most of them use the Z80, the 89 and 92 use the M68K, and the Nspire line uses an ARM-based processor. That really piqued my interest, since I already knew the processors that Sega's retro game consoles used: The Z80 for the Master System, and the M68K for the Genesis. The calcs have a grayscale screen, but I wanted to know if anyone ever tried porting a Sonic game from the consoles to one of the calcs. grubbycoder Right off the bat, after settling on the most appropriate graphing calculator to try and port Sonic 2 to, namely the TI-84+ CE with a 48Mhz eZ80 processor (basically a 24-bit Z80"), 256 KB of RAM and a 320*240 display, the porting process runs into some serious roadblocks before any code's even been written. Unlike the Sega hardware Sonic 2 runs on, the TI-84+ CE has no graphics hardware, the clock speed is effectively crippled at 12-20Mhz, a file format with a size limit of 64KB per file. The rest of the story details the many difficulties that needed to be overcome, but in the end, the port is completed - and yes, you can now play Sonic 2 from the Master System on a TI graphing calculator.

Apple has removed WhatsApp and Threads from its app store in China, following an order from the country's internet watchdog which cited national security concerns. Juliana Liu at CNN Over the recent months, as Apple had to change some of its business practices to comply with the European Union's new Digital Markets Act, a still-ongoing process, Apple fans, spearheaded by John Gruber, have pushed Apple to leave the European Union. They argue that the minor inconvenience of complying with some basic consumer and market protection laws is too great of a deeply unfair financial sacrifice, and that leaving the EU makes more sense. Gruber also goes to bat hard for poor Facebook, arguing that company should leave the EU, too, over the DMA demanding Facebook respects users' privacy. Apple itself, too, has been harshly attacking the European Union aggressively in the media. So anyway, today, Apple did what it has been doing for a very long time: bending over backwards for the totalitarian, genocidal regime in China. China tells Apple to remove applications, Apple complies. Every other of the sixteen hundred times Apple has complied with this horrible regime's demands, Gruber always argued that all poor Apple can do is comply with local Chinese laws and demands, as leaving China over principles and morals would benefit nobody. So, we're left with the rather peculiar situation where the response to some relatively minor consumer and market protection regulations is one of deep hostility, both from Apple as well as its PR attack dogs, whereas the response to the demands from one of the most brutal, totalitarian, genocidal regimes in human history is one of that's life". Such is the way of the Apple corporatist: a democratically drawn up and widely popular law enacted by an incredibly popular government that causes some mild inconvenience for Apple is vilified with populist and nationalist anti-EU rhetoric, while the undemocratic, totalitarian decrees from a vicious genocidal dictator are met with effectively disinterested shrugs since those decrees don't really inconvenience Apple. Corporatism and fascism are two sides of the same coin, from early 20th century Europe, through mid-20th century United States, to the megacorporations of today. Despite yet another decree from China that goes far further in nature than anything the DMA demands, we won't be seeing any pushes from the Grubers of this world for Apple to leave China. We won't be seeing copious amounts of malicious compliance from Apple. We won't be treated to lengthy diatribes from Apple executives about how much they despise China and Chinese laws. All because China's demands don't harm Apple's bottom line, but the DMA might. And for the corporatist, praying at the altar of money, the former is irrelevant, while the latter is sacrilege.

DuckDuckGo AI Chat is a private AI-powered chat service that currently supports OpenAI's GPT-3.5 and Anthropic's Claude chat models. DuckDuckGo's new AI" chat feature I guess I have to find another search engine.

In this week's Windows 10 Build 19045.4353 announcement blog post, there was this little gem in the changelog. This update starts the rolls out of account-related notifications for Microsoft accounts in Settings > Home. A Microsoft account connects Windows to your Microsoft apps. The account also backs up all your data and helps you to manage your subscriptions. You can also add extra security steps to keep you from being locked out of your account. Windows Insider Program Team It's worded a bit cryptically, but this means there will be banners in the Windows settings application pushing you to switch from using a local account to using an online Microsoft account. The latter aren't exactly preferred by quite a few people - many of you belong to that group, I would presume - and Microsoft is doing whatever it can to get people to stop using local accounts. Luckily, this banner ad is easily removable - if you close it, it won't come back, and you can disable it by going to Privacy > General and toggling Show me suggested content in the Settings app". For now, of course - knowing how Microsoft is treating Windows users these days, these nag-ups will surely increase in both frequency and persistence as time goes on. You've been warned.

We first introduced support for dmabufs and graphics offload last fall, and it is included in GTK 4.14. Since then, some improvements have happened, so it is time for an update. GTK Development Blog This one's for the ones smarter than me.

AI is taking over at Google, and the company is changing in big ways to try to make it happen even faster. Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced substantial internal reorganizations on Thursday, including the creation of a new team called Platforms and Devices" that will oversee all of Google's Pixel products, all of Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, Photos, and more. The team will be run by Rick Osterloh, who was previously the SVP of devices and services, overseeing all of Google's hardware efforts. Hiroshi Lockheimer, the longtime head of Android, Chrome, and ChromeOS, will be taking on other projects inside of Google and Alphabet. David Pierce at The Verge I don't know what to make of this. More often than not, these kinds of reorganisations have little impact on us as mere users, but at the same time, the hype around AI" has grown to such batshit insane proportions that this reorganisation will only lead to even more AI" nonsense being crammed into every single Google product, whether they benefit from it or not. My nightmare scenario is Android becoming so infested with this stuff that the operating system is going to grow into Clippy in my pocket, suggesting and doing things I have zero interest in, taking control away from me as a user and handing it over to some nebulous set of algorithms optimised for some mythical smartphone user I don't look like at all. Using technologies currently labelled as AI" to make translations better, improve accessibility features, stabilise video recording, that sort of stuff - totally fine, and I'm pretty sure most of us have been using AI" in that form for many, many years now. What these companies are trying to do now, though, is turn AI" from a technology into a feature, and I'm just not interested in any of that. It's just not trustworthy, reliable, or usable enough, and I have my doubts it'll ever get there with the current technological threads we're unraveling. I wish we had a third player in the smartphone market.

COSMIC, System76's Rust-based desktop that's going to replace GNOME in Pop!_OS, is nearing its alpha release, and the Linux OEM has published another blog post detailing the latest progress it's made. First and foremost, theming support has been further refined by adding support for theming GTK applications (both GTK3 and 4) and flatpak applications. If the user has enabled global themes, these themes will be applied automatically whenever selecting a theme to apply. Support for custom icon packs has also been added. COSMIC now also has an application store, much like GNOME Software and KDE's Discover, which also takes care of updating installed applications. You can now also drag windows from anywhere inside the window by holding down the super key, which is both a nice addition in general as well as a usability feature. The Settings application has also seen work, and gets a new keyboard settings panel, as well as various other smaller additions. COSMIC also now implements on-screen display toasts for things like changing volume and brightness, and plugging in power. System76 isn't the only one working on COSMIC - community members have implemented things like window snapping, touchpad gestures, thumbnail previews in the dock, and more. The community is also working on things like an emoi picker, and a fan control graphical user interface. There's a lot more in the blog post, so be sure to give it a read. I'm genuinely excited for COSMIC to hit the shelves, because I'm dying to try it out.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan this week publicized some concessions aimed at helping customers and partners ease into VMware's recent business model changes. Tan reiterated that the controversial changes, like the end of perpetual licensing, aren't going away. But amid questioning from antitrust officials in the European Union (EU), Tan announced that the company has already given support extensions for some VMware perpetual license holders. Scharon Harding at Ars Technica I'm linking to the Ars Technica writeup here, because the original blog post from Broadcom's CEO is effectively unreadable to me, as steeped in corpospeak as it is. The basic gist is that the storm of criticism that's been hovering around Broadcom ever since the changes it announced to VMware's licensing strategy isn't going away, and even attracted the attention of the European Union. As such, Broadcom is giving existing perpetual VMware license holders some breathing room, but not much, and their plans will be executed as-is regardless. I doubt Broadcom and VMware are big and crucial enough for the full might of the EU to come down on them, so I don't think we'll see any sudden turnarounds like we did with Apple and Facebook, for instance, but at least some cracks are clearly starting to show. If the aforementioned storm keeps up, pressure from customers might actually force more concessions out of Broadcom.

Linus Torvalds really doesn't like spaces - as in, tabs vs. spaces - and got a little annoyed that a commit removed a hidden tab because it apparently showed breakage in some third-party kernel config parsing tool". So, Torvalds decided to add some hidden tabs to trigger breakages like this, and is threatening to add more hidden tabs if necessary. It wasn't clear what tool it was, but let's make sure it gets fixed. Because if you can't parse tabs as whitespace, you should not be parsing the kernel Kconfig files. In fact, let's make such breakage more obvious than some esoteric ftrace record size option. If you can't parse tabs, you can't have page sizes. Linus Torvalds I'm not a programmer so I'm not going to wade into this debate - I have a personal Mastodon account to state it's obviously tabs - but I did note that it seems like, at least in this commit message, Torvalds uses a double space after a period. Which is objectively the worst thing, right before Fahrenheit.

LXQt, the lightweight Qt desktop environment, has released a major new version, which brings with it a whole slew of very important changes and upgrades, with two main focal point. First and foremost, the desktop environment is now using Qt 6 across the board, meaning the transition from Qt 5 to Qt 6 is now complete. To support themes and the LXQt File Dialog for Qt5-based apps you can install libqtxdg-3.12.0, lxqt-qtplugin-1.4.1, and libfm-qt-1.4.0 alongside the new Qt 6 variants for backwards compatibility. One exception here is QTerminal, whose Qt 6 port ran into some issues, so a separate Qt 6 release will come later. The second major upgrade that's still in progress is support for Wayland. LXQt 2.0.0 brings Wayland support for PCManFM-Qt, LXQt Runner, and LXQt Desktop Notifications, and for LXQt 2.1.0 they plan to make everything else available under Wayland as well. This means that more popular desktop environment like Cinnamon and Xfce are starting to feel a little out of step when it comes to Wayland. One of the major user-facing new features is a new default menu for the panel which supports favourites, a new and improved search feature, and more.

Do you administer Windows Server machines, and were you surprised to find a Windows Copilot application on your servers, that neither you nor your users installed? Well, it turns out that Microsoft installed this application alongside an update to the Edge browser - but the company claims this is in error, and the application will be removed in a future update. Updates to Edge browser version 123.0.2420.65, released on March 28, 2024 and later, might incorrectly install a new package (MSIX) called Microsoft chat provider for Copilot in Windows' on Windows devices. Resulting from this, the Microsoft Copilot app might appear in the Installed apps in Settings menu. It is important to note that the Microsoft chat provider for Copilot in Windows does not execute any code or process, and does not acquire, analyze, or transmit device or environment data in any capacity. Windows 11 known issues and notifications The company claims this was an enablement package to prepare some Windows devices for the arrival of Copilot, and that it was unintentionally installed on devices. While it doesn't mean Copilot was actually installed on your PC or server, it's still a chilling reminder of who really controls your PC or server.

Only two days ago we were talking about the software and firmware issues at Framework, and today the company's CEO has announced they're taking some pretty big steps to address these problems. When building products to last, it's not enough to design the hardware to be repairable, upgradeable, and customizable.The overall longevity of devices as complex as modern notebooks also depends on how long the software and firmware continues to be useful. That includes compatibility updates to support newer generations hardware modules, fixes for bugs or compatibility issues found by end users, and especially patches for security vulnerabilities.We recognize that we have fallen short of where we need to be on software updates, and we are making the needed investments to resolve this. We now have a dedicated team of engineers at our manufacturing partner and a set of internal stakeholders focused on ongoing software updates for all of our products, going back to our original Framework Laptop with 11th Gen Intel Core. In the past, we were reliant on ad-hoc availability of engineering time from our suppliers (basically borrowing staffing from whichever new product development we had ongoing).This was inconsistent and resulted in slow progress.With a dedicated team, there is no longer resource contention, and we are able deliver shorter turnaround times from discovering issues to resolving them. Nirav Patel They've also shared exactly how the development, testing, and release process new firmware releases will work, from identifying any issues to the final release to consumers, and they're hiring new employees focused entirely on expediting this process. They also promise to support each device for as long as their upstream silicon vendors will, but they can't give any guarantees on how long that will be since those upstream vendors aren't sharing details like that. All in all, I think this is about as good a response as you can get from an OEM, but as they themselves note, they'll have to show their customers these aren't just mere words. Assuming it pans out the way Framework is promising here, I think it's a fair and customer-friendly process.

Proton is Firefox's new design, starting from Firefox 89. Photon is the old design of Firefox which was used until version 88. Proton's overall feel is good, but there were a few things I didn't like and wanted to improve.That's why this project was born, and Lepton to denote light theme layer. Lepton's photon styled is preserve Photon's feeling while keep Original Lepton's strengths. Firefox UI Fix GitHub page I do not like the current Firefox user interface, because even with the compact' layout re-enabled in about:config, I find it just too bulky and wasteful of my screen real estate. I've been using the above Firefox user interface mod for ages now, and I can't imagine using Firefox without it. The GitHub pages and guides are a bit of a mess and difficult to follow due to the project consisting of several overlapping different styles, but I just use the script listed here, selecting the style 2" when running the script. It won't be for everyone, but for me, it makes Firefox nice and compact, turning it into a mouse-first interface without trying to accommodate touch. This is also by far not the only project with this goal, so if you're using something else - feel free to list them.

So with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS is the ability to continue with a standard EXT4 file-system install, an encrypted file-system using LVM, or using OpenZFS with/without encryption. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS also has the ability to enjoy hardware-backed full-disk encryption with TPM as another new experimental option. Or, of course, the Ubuntu desktop installer continues supporting manual (custom) partitioning as well. Michael Larabel I just use whatever Btrfs setup Fedora automatically recommends when I let it take over a disk - file systems for desktops seems a bit like a solved problem to me personally - but I'm still curious what benefits, for instance, an OpenZFS setup could bring to a desktop user compared to Btrfs or a basic Ext4 setup. Why should a desktop user use OpenZFS?

This is the state of the modern internet - ultra-profitable platforms outright abdicating any responsibility toward the customer, offering not a service" or a portal," but cramming as many ways to interrupt the user and push them into doing things that make the company money. The greatest lie in tech is that Facebook and Instagram are for catching up with your friends," because that's no longer what they do. These platforms are now pathways for the nebulous concept of content discovery," a barely-personalized entertainment network that occasionally drizzles people or things you choose to see on top of sponsored content and groups that a relational database has decided are good for you." Edward Zitron Corporate social media has gotten so bad, they're basically unusable. The rare times I open Facebook to like a picture my mother posted or whatever, I'm just gobsmacked by how utterly unusable it has become. I've never used Instagram, but whenever I accidentally end up there, I have no idea how to navigate that place. YouTube is more ads than video if you don't pay for Premium (which I do, because I use YouTube a lot so I get enough value out of it). Twitter is barely worth a mention - it's no surprise that a social network bought and run by a nazi is now even fuller of nazis than it already was. It's not just social networks, either. The web as a whole feels like it's been looted and plundered, and turned into a flyover state strip mall. Browsing the web is, for me at least, virtually impossible without autoplay blockers, my Pi-Hole, Consent-O-Matic, and settings to permanently block requests for location and notification access. The rise of AI" has only made everything even worse, especially now that the big, wealthy content networks that, yes, own all your favourite technology news websites are also looking into it. Luckily, there's also a countermovement brewing. I've focused OSNews' entire social" strategy on Mastodon (and the various other ActivityPub tools), as it's the only social medium that's usable and enjoyable. With the nazis remaining on Twitter, and all the brands and influencers on Facebook (or Threads or whatever), everyone else interested in technology coalesced around the Fediverse, and it's been a massive boon for a small website like OSNews trying to steer clear from all the SEO enshittification. There's no spam, only relatively small, approachable brands, no influencers, no algorithms - just real, ordinary people, who also care about a usable, fair, and equitable web. I hope that OSNews can eventually be run without any ads at all, but that's going to take a lot more consistent work from me to convince more and more people to support us through Patreon or Ko-Fi, or for companies to become sponsors. However, I am convinced it's a better route to take than trying to chase the SEO dragon, because we all know where that leads to.