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WinRAR has a massive security hole that's still being actively exploited, and it's one of many Windows applications that do not auto-update. The developer boasts of more than 500 million WinRAR installations around the world, so it's likely that hundreds of millions of PCs are vulnerable to malicious ZIP files today. How is it that, in 2023, the world's most popular desktop operating system doesn't provide an easy way to update your installed applications? It baffles me that Windows and macOS users still have to manually keep track of and update each and every one of their applications individually, like it's 1997 or something. Stay safe. It's the wild west out there for some of you.

Google engineers on Wednesday posted an initial request for comments" set of patches that re-implement Android's Binder code within the Linux kernel in the Rust programming language rather than C. Binder remains a critical piece of Android's software stack and for increasing the robustness and security, Google is pursuing a rewrite of the C code in Rust. Binder is responsible for inter-process communication (IPC) and other tasks on Android while replacing it with memory-safe Rust code should be a big step-up for system security. Rust is everywhere.

Update 2: At a staggering 176% of the original goal within 2 days, I think it's time to end this crazy ride. Rests me to thank all of you - donor or not - for the incredible support and generosity. This will enable me to go far beyond mid-tier" and build something that's going to set me for close to a decade. I'm absolutely stunned. Update: I did not expect this to take off, but within a few hours we've already reached the goal! Thanks, everyone - I'm stunned and at a loss for words, which, I can assure you, is a rather rare occurrence. The goal sits at 110% now, and I'll leave it up for the night so this story doesn't suddenly stop making sense (it's 02:26 where I live). I'll also contact the two largest donors privately and work out the details with them. Since we started our more visible push for donations to ensure we can keep OSNews running as an independent technology news website without having to resort to SEO spam, ad overload, and worse, a number of people have expressed interest in donating to specific goals instead of donating generically. A possible goal for this has recently come up, so I'm stepping out of my comfort zone (this whole thing terrifies me): you can now donate specifically towards a much, much-needed upgrade for my PC - and troll me along the way. Read on! After almost 8 years of loyal service, my PC, with a 7700K and GTX 1070, is starting to show some serious signs of old-age and constant use. This machine is the main computer I have, used for both my work on OSNews as well as gaming, and it's getting long in the tooth. As such, I'm planning a relatively conservative, mid-tier upgrade for the machine, retaining as many parts as possible to keep costs down. I will retain the case, power supply, CPU cooler, and the various SSDs and hard drives. My intention is to purchase the following parts: In Sweden, this would add up to SEK 10900 (incl. all applicable taxes), or 921/$978, so I set the goal at an even 1000. With the state of the world as it is, as well as having a family with two young children, investments like this simply aren't something I can do out of pocket, and that's why people have been suggesting for months to take this step. However, I want to make things a bit more interesting, and provide you lovely nerds with some ways to troll me. As such, I will give the two largest combined donations (as in, you can donate multiple times and it'll count) some extra perks, designed to give you the opportunity to mess with me: Obviously, there are some ground rules here - no pornography, no hateful stuff like racism, no gore, stuff like that. We're all adults here, and I'm pretty sure we all instinctively know what I mean. Other than that - anything goes! Any required stickers I'll buy myself, as long as you can provide me a link. Any donation made through our Ko-Fi will count towards this goal, and you can keep track of the progress there as well. Since I have absolutely no idea how this will go (like I said, I'm terrified), I haven't set a time limit on the goal. So, hop on over to our Ko-Fi page and donate away! In the meantime, I'm going to curl up in a corner because I have no clue how anyone is going to respond to this.

Bruce Lawson writes: This week, I've had the pleasure to read the post-modernist triumph that is CASES DMA.100013 Apple - online intermediation services - app stores, DMA.100025 Apple - operating systems and DMA.100027 Apple - web browsers (PDF), which details some of Apple's attempts to avoid being regulated. I call it a post-modernist triumph" because its prose is almost as incomprehensible as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and it is so full of preposterous lies and contradictions that it can only be sanely read as a metatextual joke like the Illuminatus! Trilogy. In order to avoid having Safari being deemed a Core Platform Service (and thus falling under the remit of DMA), Apple argues Look, those Safaris on iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, TvOS, WatchOS are TOTALLY DIFFERENT PRODUCTS and none of them have enough users in the EU for you to even think about regulating us, alright? We're a tiny start-up! Will nobody think of the children?!?". (I paraphrase somewhat). Entirely unsurprisingly, Apple's legal contortions did not work - the EU basically tossed this nonsense out right away, using Apple's own marketing claims about Safari against them.

The Pixel 8 hardware (Tensor G3) supports the ARM Memory Tagging Extension (MTE), and software support is available both in Android userspace and the Linux kernel. This feature is a powerful defense against linear buffer overflows and many types of use-after-free flaws. I'm extremely happy to see this hardware finally available in the real world. You can enable this feature in both Android and the kernel, as the post explains. Sadly, the post does not explain if there's any downsides to enabling this extension, and I'm certainly not the right person to investigate that. Does anyone in our audience know?

I was yet again spectacularly wrong in speculating that we had another eight months to wait before Apple would release the first Macs with M3 chips. Another few days and the first will be upon us, and the fortunate few will start bragging or moaning about their performance. That has suddenly grown more complex: the number of each CPU core type has diversified with the M3 Pro in particular. This article looks at some of the factors involved in comparing CPU performance across Apple's expanded range of M-series chips. As Apple's line-up of processors grows, it's becoming harder to keep track of all the details. This article does a good job of highlighting some of the changes coming inside M3-based Macs.

Google has announced it's going to drop the Web Environment Integrity proposal - the controversial proposal that set the internet on fire a few months ago. Instead, the company intends to offer a much more limited version of the proposal that only targets Android WebViews embedded in applications, targeting only media streams running inside Android applications. We've heard your feedback, and the Web Environment Integrity proposal is no longer being considered by the Chrome team. In contrast, the Android WebView Media Integrity API is narrowly scoped, and only targets WebViews embedded in apps. It simply extends existing functionality on Android devices that have Google Mobile Services (GMS) and there are no plans to offer it beyond embedded media, such as streaming video and audio, or beyond Android WebViews. I might be ye of little faith, but this feels a lot like a case of proposing something overtly horrible first, to pave the way for something that now seems benign in comparison. On top of that, that scope might be limited now, but does anyone have any faith left that Google won't just... Widen the scope later, once we're all not looking?

Facebook has unveiled the prices it's going to charge European users who want to have an ad-free experience on Facebook and Instagram. People in these countries will be able to subscribe for a fee to use our products without ads. Depending on where you purchase it will cost 9.99/month on the web or 12.99/month on iOS and Android. Regardless of where you purchase, the subscription will apply to all linked Facebook and Instagram accounts in a user's Accounts Center. As is the case for many online subscriptions, the iOS and Android pricing take into account the fees that Apple and Google charge through respective purchasing policies. Until March 1, 2024, the initial subscription covers all linked accounts in a user's Accounts Center. However, beginning March 1, 2024, an additional fee of 6/month on the web and 8/month on iOS and Android will apply for each additional account listed in a user's Account Center. That's a high price to pay to read your racist uncle's rants and see the heavily photoshopped photos of some random influencer peddling vitamin pills.

This week, Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker rose as a key figure in Google's defense against the Justice Department's monopoly claims. Providing a video deposition for the landmark trial, Baker testified that Mozilla's popular browser Firefox tried to switch from using Google as a default search engine but reverted back after a failed" bet on Yahoo made it clear that Google was Firefox users' preferred search engine. That fits in a long string of similar claims - namely, that defaulting to anything but Google is impossible, because nothing else is even remotely as good as Google Search, because none of the others are the default, meaning they don't get the amount of queries needed to improve search quality, and on the spiral goes. What's spicy here is that this trial could potentially turn out to be Mozilla's downfall, since Google's search deals with, among others, Mozilla, are up for debate. Desktop Linux' Firefox problem could explode sooner than we might think.

In recent years the Itanium support in the Linux kernel has went downhill with not many users left testing new kernels on aging Itanium servers. There also hasn't been any major active contributors to the Itanium code for keeping it maintained and making any serious improvements to the architecture code. On and off for months there's been talk of retiring Itanium from the Linux kernel and now it's finally happened. With Linux 6.6 expected to be this year's Long-Term Support (LTS) kernel version, there was the proposal recently to drop Itanium in Linux 6.7 and indeed it's successfully happened. This is a complete outrage, and a sign Torvalds has completely lost the plot. Itanium is the future, and dropping it from the Linux kernel will be its death knell. I'm going back to DOS.

The European data regulator has agreed to extend a ban imposed by non-EU member Norway on behavioural advertising" on Facebook and Instagram to cover all 30 countries in the European Union and the European Economic Area, it said on Wednesday. Meta runs the risk of getting fined up to 4% of its global turnover, the Norwegian data regulator said. Sure, the European Union isn't perfect - no government is - but the Union's fight against the utter dominance of tech giants, as well as standing up for citizen privacy, is commendable.

There's an alternative universe where we decided to teach the kernel about every piece of hardware it should run on. Fortunately (or, well, unfortunately) we've seen that in the ARM world. Most device-specific simply never reaches mainline, and most users are stuck running ancient kernels as a result. Imagine every x86 device vendor shipping their own kernel optimised for their hardware, and now imagine how well that works out given the quality of their firmware. Does that really seem better to you? It's understandable why ACPI has a poor reputation. But it's also hard to figure out what would work better in the real world. We could have built something similar on top of Open Firmware instead but the distinction wouldn't be terribly meaningful - we'd just have Forth instead of the ACPI bytecode language. Longing for a non-ACPI world without presenting something that's better and actually stands a reasonable chance of adoption doesn't make the world a better place. Matthew Garrett with the usual paragraphs of wisdom.

This project allows old x86 computers using a classic BIOS to boot from modern NVMe storage attached via PCI(e). It's a heavily modified version of iPXE (which usually allows for booting from the network), but instead of the network, this code uses a port of the SeaBIOS NVMe implementation to talk to a local NVMe drive. What a useful idea.

In short, after a Linux kernel update (6.5.8-200.fc.x86_64 on Fedora KDE), I can't use the top button of my pen on my tablet. This is really affecting my digital painting workflow! Right-clicking on the pen is an essential part of my workflow. Right-click on a layer in Krita to get the menu, right-click while using the Transform tool to get the transformation options, right-click on the canvas to get the pop-up palette! ...And I'm not even talking about how difficult it is to handle files and the D.E. without right-clicking. And if that makes you smile, imagine someone hardcoding the behaviour of your main device like the right-click on your mouse or touchpad (or anything else you have been using for more than 20 years) to something completely useless, and pushing it through kernel updates. And the icing on the cake, they left you with no user tool to change it back. I now have that same feeling or rage mixed with hopelessness that you feel when dealing with pointless government bureaucracy.

During his testimony, Pichai revealed a tidbit on how Google operates that gives a better look behind the curtain and could help explain users' frustration with Android phones not seeing security updates. According to Pichai, Google financially incentivizes OEMs to update their phones. Companies that keep phones current with the latest security patches see a higher revenue share from Google services than those that don't. In other words, the amount of money an OEM makes from you using Google products on its device is correlated to how often it keeps that device up to date with security patches. This means Google intentionally strongarms OEMs to be better about updating phones, which is something we didn't know before. We knew that Google mandates two years of updates for any Android phone and strongly encourages more extended support than that, but we didn't realize there were financial incentives involved. I'm honestly not entirely sure if this wasn't known before, but this is an interesting approach for Google to take. If it's not financially interesting for OEMs to update their Android devices, why not give them a bigger slice of the Google revenue pie to incentivise them? I'd prefer proper update windows be legally mandated - I wouldn't be surprised if the EU is working on that somewhere - but in the meantime, I'll take this rare case of Google's interests lining up with consumers' interests.

Tom's Hardware reports: MyDrivers has published a review of Loongson's 3A6000 quad-core CPU, confirming that the chip's IPC improvements are real. Benchmarks reveal that the 3A6000 enjoys an impressive 60% performance uplift in single-core performance and an even more impressive 2x performance multiplier in multi-core performance over its 3A5000 predecessor. With these improvements, the 3A6000 features performance comparable to a Core i3-10100F, with the IPC performance of a Zen 3 chip. Of course, both Intel's Comet Lake 10th Gen architecture and AMD's Zen 3 architecture are now coming up on three years old. They're nowhere near the top of our list of the best CPUs for gaming or other purposes. But it still represents a step in the right direction. Chinese chipmakers are improving quite fast, but unless they can somehow get access to the latest machinery from the Dutch company ASML, which makes virtually all of the machines capable of producing the chips with the smallest nanometers and is the linchpin in the entire semiconductor industry, they won't be able to overtake or even match what TSMC and Intel are doing. That being said, I love weird processors, and I'd love to get my hands on one of these to play around with.

I've recently been working on putting together a CI system for postmarketOS that will allow us to do proper automated integration testing. That is to say - when someone opens a merge request that modifies our initramfs (for example), we should be able to click a button and some minutes later know that this change doesn't break any of our important usecases. QEMU absolutely can (and will) get us most of the way there, but at some point we need to just run the same software that we're running on end user devices. Furthermore, QEMU can't tell us anything about changes in the kernel that might affect our devices, and manually testing during kernel upgrades, frankly, sucks. So we need a fancy board farm, this is one of those things where folks with the right technical background could build something over the course of a week. But for someone like me it's full of trial and error and hidden complexity... It's easy enough to do this with one device - just hack something together, but to be successful we need something reliable and adaptable, that we can adjust to fit our needs in the future, and the wide range of devices we support. Now this is an article you won't come across very often, as the number of people setting up something like this who can actually talk openly about it - someone doing this for a closed company probably can't - is probably quite small. A great read.

Lennart Poettering has been working on a new systemd feature called systemd-storagetm that is inspired by the Apple macOS Target Disk Mode" feature. This is similar to Apple's Target Disk Mode as a boot option on Macs that allows other systems to then easily access it as an external device. The systemd intent with this Storage Target Mode is to make it easier to debug a broken system with very few dependencies while being able to access the raw block device of the broken system via the network. This may also make it easier to migrate from one system to the next. By having access to the raw block device via NVMe-TCP, it can be easy to use the dd" command or similar for copying the drive. Target Disk Mode has long been one of those amazing Mac features that should've come to PCs decades ago, so I'm incredibly glad Poettering is working on it. This will make it so much easier to troubleshoot, get files off a broken system, and so on, without having to move hard drives around or boot into live CDs.

In a world where constant change is the norm, finished software provides a breath of fresh air. It's a reminder that reliability, consistency, and user satisfaction can coexist in the realm of software development. So the next time you find yourself yearning for the latest update, remember that sometimes, the best software is the one that doesn't change at all. While this is a nice sentiment, the reality is that software has become so complex, competition to cutthroat, and operating systems so changeful, that finishing" software just doesn't seem like a realistic and attainable goal anymore. The example used in the article, WordStar 4.0 for DOS, can only be finished" because DOS doesn't change anymore.

Support for RISC-V in Android is taking another step forward. The latest update that we have is that now not only are we accepting patches, but we have begun to mature support for RISC-V in Android. RISC-V is a modular ISA, meaning that there are a large number of optional extensions. We have also determined an initial set that we feel is critical to ensure that any CPU running RISC-V will have all of the features we expect to achieve high performance. This set includes the rva22 profile as well as the vector and vector crypto extensions. Excellent news.

The initial support was posted on October 25th 2023 on the Linux kernel mailing lists for review by the Linux developers community. With the set of patches released by Linaro engineers, it is also possible to boot an AOSP image with Graphics Software Rendering using Google's SwiftShader. Since 2014, Linaro Engineers have been working closely with Qualcomm Engineers to enable Snapdragon platforms to work with Mainline Linux. Running a recent upstream Linux kernel immediately after the announcement of a new SoC is a significant achievement, and is a testimony to the close working partnership between Qualcomm and Linaro. Interestingly enough, during the recent announcement of the PC-focused X Elite SoC, Qualcomm also highlighted that Linux will be fully supported by the platform, and to underline that point, the company showed off X Elite laptops running both Windows and Linux. While it'll take more to convince me that Qualcomm now actually cares about properly supporting its SoCs and the open source community, they're at least positive signs.

MicroTCP is a TCP/IP network stack I started building as a learning exercise while attending the Computer Networking course at the Universita degli Studi di Napoli Federico II. It's just a hobby project and is intended to just be a minimal, yet complete, implementation. At this moment MicroTCP implements ARP (RFC 826, complete), IPv4 (no fragmentation), ICMP (minimum necessary to reply to pings) and TCP (complete but not stress-tested). Note that complete" should not be intended as fully compliant" but just as a measure of progress on all of the major features. For instance, it's complete enough to handle HTTP traffic on a local network. People like this usually end up writing a simple operating system, so it's interesting to see a TCP/IP stack instead. While clearly a hobby project, small, portable TCP/IP stacks can potentially be useful for very specific use cases, like bringing connectivity to ancient operating systems or other small hobby projects.

About a year or so ago, the Asahi Linux people told me I was being paranoid about Apple's macOS or firmware updates bricking or otherwise negatively affecting Asahi Linux installs, and that you shouldn't rely on Linux on Apple M devices for anything serious. They told me Apple explicitly supports alternate operating systems on ARM Macs and that Apple can be fully trusted and relied upon. ...so anyway bugs in Sonoma are making Macs with Asahi installed unbootable. macOS Sonoma and macOS Ventura 13.6 were released with multiple serious bugs in their upgrade and boot process. Combined, these bugs can create conditions where a machine always boots to a black screen, no matter what power button press combination is used. This leaves users stuck, and the only solution is to use DFU recovery. Apple obviously doesn't care about anyone running anything but macOS on M Macs, and unsurprisingly nobody at Apple even thought to test for this so of course this happened. I'd say I told you so" but I'm tired of warning people about Apple's behaviour because apparently people just love endlessly banging their bloodied head against a wall.

We've already covered the end of life of Windows CE, but Ars has a short but interesting look back at the history of this undeservedly unloved operating system. It was a proto-netbook, it was a palmtop, it was a PDA, it was Windows Phone 7 but not Windows Phone 8, and then it was an embedded ghost. It parents never seemed to know what to do with it after it grew up, beyond offer it up for anybody to shape in their own image. And then, earlier this month, with little notice, Windows CE was no more, at least as a supported operating system. I will never forget Windows CE.

In this release, the FreeBSD base system and kernel have been updated to 1302508, and it contains software updates, some improvements to Update Station, and new features to NetworkMgr. Also, os-generic-userland-devtools has been removed from the default installation to downsize the live system image. GhostBSD is an excellent option if you want a more turnkey FreeBSD-based desktop.

The goal of this post is to share how we, at the Browser Company, have made it possible to use Swift to build a modern Windows application. There is no UI framework for Windows written in Swift, and Windows itself is written in C++ - so that may leave you wondering, how can I build my app on Windows"? Modern Windows applications use WinRT, a technology built on top of COM, which can interop really well with Swift, as we presented in our previous post. To be able to build idiomatic UI for Windows in Swift, we have built a language projection tool which creates idiomatic Swift language bindings for WinRT, and today we are open sourcing it at https://github.com/thebrowsercompany/swift-winrt. Swift/Winrt is based on Microsoft's code generators for C++ (github.com/microsoft/cppwinrt) and C# (github.com/microsoft/cswinrt), and thus is written in C++. Cool stuff.

Since May, uBO has been in a cat-and-mouse game with YouTube. And they've shown incredible resilience, especially when you consider that there are only two people on the uBO team dealing with YouTube. The uBO team members are all volunteers. They've gone above and beyond to meet every little request from their users. But there's a limit to how much they can take. At some point, the constant demands become too much, and they will leave uBO for good. It's one thing to play cat and mouse with YouTube. It's quite another to deal with a wave of angry users. Maybe that's how YouTube will win this war of attrition. If you use YouTube enough, YouTube Premium is a great deal - albeit it a deal that's steadily getting worse as Google increases its price.

Apple released their first Quicktake camera, the Quicktake 100, in 1994, ten years after the Apple //c. On the box, they very boldly wrote: Requirements: 386, 486 or superior; 2MB of RAM, 10MB of free hard disk space; an 1.44MB floppy drive; a VGA, SVGA or superior card". But was this true? No. They were just being lazy, or trying to get you to upgrade a perfectly functional 8-bit, 1MHz computer with 128kB of RAM and 140kB floppies. In fact, it was absolutely possible to do digital photography on an Apple //c. Useless projects are the best projects.

Modern PCs provide plenty of metering and power-management options. Version 23.10 of the Genode-based Sculpt operating system makes these features available via an interactive user interface. One can watch the temperature of each CPU core, monitor the individual CPU frequencies, switch between power profiles, and reveal details about power draw. Go to the download page to get started with Sculpt OS. It's used as the day-to-day operating system by Genode developers, so it's quite capable.

The Trinity Desktop Environment, the KDE 3 fork, has released a new version. R14.1.1 comes with the ability to drag and tile windows to the display's borders and corners, adds several improvements to keyboard shortcuts settings, a few new wallpapers, better support in SunOS/Illumos/DilOS and support for libxine2's logarithmic volume settings. It also has some important fixes for tdepowersave's display brightness control, arts sound server start up crash, TQt3's recursive mutexes and for the high CPU usage detected on some RPM distros with R14.1.0. Behind the scenes, an effort to clean up and enhance TQt3 and tqtinterface code has started and will be going on across multiple releases. You can update to the latest version through your package manager, or install TDE for the first time using the project's instructions.

When I first heard about Be My AI-a new collaboration between Open AI and Be My Eyes, an app that connects sighted volunteers with blind people who need help via video call-I didn't let myself get too excited. Be My AI promised to allow blind people to receive an A.I.-generated description of any photo we uploaded. This was a tantalizing prospect, but it wasn't the first time a tech company had promised to revolutionize the way people with disabilities access visual content. Microsoft had already given us Seeing AI, which in a very rudimentary way provided a rough idea of what was going on in the images we shared, and which allowed us-again, in a fairly basic way-to interact with information contained in written texts. But the details were missing, and in most cases we could know only that there was a person in the picture and what they were doing, nothing more. Be My AI was different. Suddenly, I was in a world where nothing was off limits. By simply waving my cellphone, I could hear, with great detail, what my friends were wearing, read street signs and shop prices, analyze a room without having entered it, and indulge in detailed descriptions of the food-one of my great passions-that I was about to eat. I like to make fun of AI" - those quotes are there for a reason - but that doesn't mean it can't be truly useful. This is a great example of this technology providing a tangible, real, and possibly life-altering benefit to someone with a disability, and that's just amazing. My only gripe is that, as the author notes, the images have to be uploaded to the service in order to be analysed. Cynical as I tend to be, this was probably the intent of OpenAI's executives. A ton of blind people and other people with vision issues will be uploading a lot of private data to be sucked up into the Open AI database, for further AI" training. But that's easy for me to say, and I think blind people and other people with vision issues will argue that's a sacrifice they're totally comfortable making, considering that they're getting in return.

Does anybody care about Android 14? This year's release of the world's most popular operating system feels like one of the smallest ever, bringing just a handful of new features. Even during the Android portion of Google's big I/O keynote, Google spent most of its time showing off a new generative AI feature that creates wallpapers for you, as if there aren't enough wallpapers in the world. Last year's Android 13 release felt small, but that was because it was the second major Android OS release that year. Android 12L-the big tablet and foldable release-came out earlier. What's Android 14's excuse? We're not really sure. We still have a few things to go over, though, like new lock screen customizations, genuinely exciting changes to the way the back button works, and a pile of under-the-hood changes. Android 14 is definitely the smallest version number update I remember from Android history. I'm not entirely sure why this wasn't called Android 13.1.

In 2021, at the height of cryptocurrency mining, Nvidia released the Nvidia CMP 170HX. Designed as a compute-only card to accelerate Ethereum's memory-hard Ethash Proof-of-Work mining algorithm with its 1500 GB/s HBM2e memory bus, Nvidia implemented the hardware using the GA100 silicon from their Ampere architecture. Thus, the CMP 170HX is essentially a variant of the all-mighty Nvidia A100, Nvidia's top-performing datacenter GPU at that time. Naturally, the existence of the CMP 170HX raised many questions, including its potential in applications beyond mining. Today, following the discontinuation of Ethash, these $5000 GPUs from closed mining farms are sold on second-hand markets for $400-$500 in China. It's time to answer these questions. This article contains a basic performance overview, a hardware teardown, a watercooling installation guide, and a repair log. I'm glad smart people are at least trying to turn otherwise useless hardware designed for one of the most brazenly useless applications in human history into something potentially useful.

We have written articles in the past year about some of Microsoft's different product launches, like how its first real hardware device was an add-in card for the Apple II, or its not-so-smartwatch platform, SPOT. However, many people may not be aware that Microsoft had a small involvement in a movement to create a standardized PC platform that evolved into a huge video game platform in Japan. The platform is called MSX, and on October 21, 1983, just over 40 years ago, the first such PC that used the platform went on sale in Japan, the Mitsubishi ML-8000. The launch price for the PC was 59,800 yen or close to $400. One of my oldest computer memories is using an MSX with a friend at his parents' house. I must've been 7 years old or something like that. The MSX was weirdly popular in The Netherlands due to Philips building quite a few of them.

Do you know that the modern web browser can access real musical instruments? With the help of Web MIDI API, we can create a web application that can access MIDI devices connected to our computer. In this article, I will explain how I use Google Sheets as a music sequencer for composing and playing ambient music with a hardware synthesizer. Next thing you tell me browsers have an API for gamepads and joysticks connected through the game port.

Arm has traditionally targeted the low end of the power and performance curve, but just as Intel has been looking to expand into the low power market, ARM is looking to expand into higher power and performance segments. The Cortex X series is at the forefront of this effort. Here, we'll be looking at the Cortex X2 as implemented in the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1. This SoC features a single X2 core, alongside four Cortex A510 and three Cortex A710 cores. The Cortex X2 in this SoC typically runs at 2.8 GHz, although lscpu indicates its clock speed can range from 787.2 MHz to 3.187 GHz. An in-depth look at this performance ARM core.

Chip companies like Qualcomm, Nvidia, and AMD are all either planning or said to be planning another attempt at making Arm chips for the consumer PC market. Qualcomm is leading the charge in mid-2024 with its Snapdragon X Elite and a new CPU architecture called Oryon. And Reuters reported earlier this week that Nvidia and AMD are targeting a 2025 release window for their own Arm chips for Windows PCs. If these companies successfully get their chips into PCs, it would mostly come at Intel's expense. But Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger doesn't seem worried about it yet, as he said on the company's most recent earnings call. The biggest issue for Windows on ARM will be, as always, application compatibility. ARM applications haven't exactly been pouring in for Windows, and translation layers in Windows haven't been earth-shattering either. As long as this problem remains, Intel indeed has little to worry about. I'm just excited there's finally some movement in ARM laptops, because Linux is exceptionally well positioned for the transition to ARM. Every major distribution has a fully functional ARM version, with pretty much full package repository support. There really is very little difference in running desktop Linux on ARM (or even POWER9, for that matter). The power of open source.

While Qualcomm has become wildly successful in the Arm SoC market for Android smartphones, their efforts to parlay that into success in other markets has eluded them so far. The company has produced several generations of chips for Windows-on-Arm laptops, and while each has incrementally improved on matters, it's not been enough to dislodge a highly dominant Intel. And while the lack of success of Windows-on-Arm is far from solely being Qualcomm's fault - there's a lot to be said for the OS and software - silicon has certainly played a part. To make serious inroads on the market, it's not enough to produce incrementally better chips - Qualcomm needs to make a major leap in performance. Now, after nearly three years of hard work, Qualcomm is getting ready to do just that. This morning, the company is previewing their upcoming Snapdragon X Elite SoC, their next-generation Arm SoC designed for Windows devices. Based on a brand-new Arm CPU core design from their Nuvia subsidiary dubbed Oryon", the Snapdragon X Elite is to be the tip of the iceberg for a new generation of Qualcom SoC designs. Not only is it the heart and soul of Qualcomm's most important Windows-on-Arm SoC to date, but it will eventually be in smartphones and a whole lot more. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. For now let's focus on the Snapdragon X Elite SoC and the Oryon cores underpinning it. Some more in-depth information about Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon X Elite, this time from AnandTech.

My name is Matt Campbell, and I'm delighted to announce that I'm joining the GNOME accessibility team to develop a new accessibility architecture. After providing some brief background information on myself, I'll describe what's wrong with the current Linux desktop accessibility architecture, including a design flaw that has plagued assistive technology developers and users on multiple platforms, including GNOME, for decades. Then I'll describe how two of the three current browser engines have solved this problem in their internal accessibility implementations, and discuss my proposal to extend this solution to a next-generation accessibility architecture for GNOME and other free desktops. No clever quips or snarky nonsense - just read the proposal, and contribute if you can.

A browser(/web) engine essentially takes in a URL(/etc) and gives you it rendered into a window for you to view and interact with. <shadow> does this too, almost entirely from scratch, made in JS. It runs in your browser! Node backend soonTM too? The host browser(/etc) is only used for networking (fetch) and renderer backend (&lt;canvas&gt;). I feel like I have opinions, but I can't express them. This is equal parts genius and madness.

The device looks like a conventional computer monitor but opens up like a clam. The screen itself is a common flat panel liquid crystal display or LCD, a nearly translucent screen that is typically lit from behind by powered lights. For Eazeye, the backing lights are replaced with a bright white carbon fiber panel that can tip backwards up to 45 degrees. The panel bounces ambient light from the monitor's surroundings through the LCD screen, which, under the right lighting conditions, provides enough illumination for the screen to be used like normal. I can see this working quite well in certain environments, like offices and well-lit rooms. It sure is a very interesting idea, and I like the design, too.

Google paid $26.3 billion to other companies to ensure its search engine was the default on web browsers and mobile phones, a top company executive testified during the Justice Department's antitrust trial Friday. The amount of payments Alphabet Inc.'s Google made to other companies for the default status - such as Apple Inc. for placement on the iPhone and other devices - has more than tripled since 2014, according to Prabhakar Raghavan, a senior executive responsible for both search and advertising. Google's search advertising brought in $146.4 billion in revenue in 2021, a number that has also climbed over the same years, Raghavan said. The payments for the default were the company's biggest cost, he added. Utterly bananas. Is it any wonder, then, that nobody can compete with Google? How are you supposed to compete as a search engine when Google shells the entire nominal GPD of Bosnia and Herzegovina every year to be the default everywhere where it matters? And that's 2021 - who knows how much it is now!

The Linux Mint project has announced that they're finally working on bringing the Cinnamon desktop environment over to Wayland. The work started on Wayland. As mentioned earlier this year, this was identified as one of the major challenges our project had to tackle in the mid to long term. Priority had been given to ISO tools and Secureboot over new features for 21.3 already, we felt it was time to invest some resources into Wayland as well. We wanted to have a clear picture of the work involved, so we wanted to start now. In terms of timing we don't think we need Wayland support to be fully ready (i.e. to be a better Cinnamon option for most people) before 2026 (Mint 23.x). That leaves us 2 years to identify and to fix all the issues. It's something we'll continue to work on. Whenever it happens, assuming it does, we'll consider switching defaults. We'll use the best tools to do the job and provide the best experience. Today that means Xorg. Tomorrow it might mean Wayland. We'll be ready and compatible with both. I respect this position. Linux Mint has always been just a bit more conservative than many of the other desktop-focused distributions, and this has earned it a well-deserved reputation for being stable and reliable. I use Linux Mint on my gaming PC for that very reason (albeit with the Xanmod kernel) - during the little time I have to play games, I don't want to deal with issues arising from using bleeding edge software.

Microsoft is starting to roll out new changes to Windows Ink that let you write anywhere you can type in Windows 11. After months of previewing the changes, the handwriting-to-text conversion now works inside search boxes and other elements of Windows 11 where you'd normally type your input. Microsoft has started rolling out the KB5031455 non-security update as a preview to Windows 11 users yesterday. You simply have to head to Windows Update and toggle the Get the latest updates as soon as they're available" setting to get this update before it's available fully in the coming weeks. While my handwriting is not great and I never use it for any computing tasks, stuff like this has always been pretty cool. Microsoft has been working on this since Windows 3.1 for Pen Computing 1.0 from 1992, and the recognition is actually very, very good. Being able to input handwriting straight into text fields will be a boon for artists and note-takers who use Windows on tablets, though, so it's definitely worth installing this update if you belong to that group.

Google quietly planned to put a lid on Apple's search ambitions. The company looked for ways to undercut Spotlight by producing its own version for iPhones and to persuade more iPhone users to use Google's Chrome web browser instead of Apple's Safari browser, according to internal Google documents reviewed by The New York Times. At the same time, Google studied how to pry open Apple's control of the iPhone by leveraging a new European law intended to help small companies compete with Big Tech. Google's anti-Apple plan illustrated the importance that its executives placed on maintaining dominance in the search business. It also provides insight into the company's complex relationship with Apple, a competitor in consumer gadgets and software that has been an instrumental partner in Google's mobile ads business for more than a decade. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and this is clear example of that - a rare case where Google's means line up with consumers' needs to actually own their devices, including the ability to install whatever browser (engine) one wants and set it as default on your phone. That being said - seeing Google squirm over whatever Apple's plans for its own possibly search engine are is highly entertaining and mildly satisfying. Apple switching iOS over to something other than Google will have some major fallout for the ad giant, and that alone would be fun to watch, in a let-it-burn kind of way.

Virtualization of Microsoft Windows 9x systems is a bit problematic due to 2 major bugs: TLB invalidation bug and CPU speed limit bug. This program contains a set of patches to fix these bugs, and can be booted from a floppy on a virtual machine. It either applies the patch to the installed system, or it patches the installation files in order to create (relatively) bug-free installation media. A must-have for your Windows 95/98/ME virtual machines.

But even without filing lawsuits, artists have a chance to fight back against AI using tech. MIT Technology Review got an exclusive look at a new open source tool still in development called Nightshade, which can be added by artists to their imagery before they upload it to the web, altering pixels in a way invisible to the human eye, but that poisons" the art for any AI models seeking to train on it. Excellent. This is exactly the kind of clever thinking we need to stop major corporations from stealing everyone's creative works for their own further gain. I hope we can develop these poisons further, to the point of making these AI" tools entirely useless. Get permission, or get poisoned.

While most X.Org Developers Conference talks are around graphics drivers / infrastructure work itself, one of the other interesting XDC 2023 talks was Alexandros Frantzis around the ongoing work of providing a native Wine Wayland driver so that this open-source project can interact directly with Wayland and so Windows games/applications running under Linux will no longer need to go through XWayland. The entire presentation is available on YouTube.

So you ended up with this JavaScript quirk where it was possible to create unique URLs that ran a bit of JavaScript on whatever page you happened to be looking at. It could even make changes to that page. Move things around. Replace words. Open links. And pretty early on, people realized that these JavaScript URLs were also bookmarkable, just like any other URL. And, crucially, easily shareable as links. I had almost forgotten about these things.

As generative AI models become more widely available, you may be integrating them into your apps. In line with Google's commitment to responsible AI practices, we want to help ensure AI-generated content is safe for people and that their feedback is incorporated. Early next year, we'll be requiring developers to provide the ability to report or flag offensive AI-generated content without needing to exit the app. You should utilize these reports to inform content filtering and moderation in your apps - similar to the in-app reporting system required today under our User Generated Content policies. I like that this will be a system-wide requirement, which will slowly make it a common sight on Android, and thus, something users expect and know how to work with. In the same blog post announcing this new generative AI" policy, Google also announced tighter rules around certain broad application permissions, limiting full-screen notifications, and more/