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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.

During my daily web crawl I encountered a very interesting gif that I haven't seen in a long time. It was a hack of an unspecified version of Windows 95, which showed how to bypass the login screen with the help of the menu and printing dialog. However, after a brief check, I found a fair amount of people stating that just hitting the cancel" button would do the same. Sharp-eyed viewers would notice that it was the very first action taken in the picture. In order to find out if the hack is real at all, I decided to reproduce it and document it for the good of the internet. David Polakovic So this hack is actually a lot more involved than I thought it was going to be, and yet, it still feels utterly insane that operating systems were this easy to get into, passwords were this easy to decrypt, and security settings were this trivial to disable. Anyway, the gif is sort-of real, in that yes, you can hack' Windows 95's login security through the printing and help subsystems. Things were different back then, man. I vaguely remember that my high school used to lock us out of the desktop, File Explorer, the Control Panel, and so on, making it impossible for us to access DOS or the games built into Windows 9x. I don't remember the exact things we used to do, but most of us were aware and used several different methods of bypassing the school lockdowns just to mess around. We never did anything malicious - this is pre-internet, and we just wanted to play some Solitaire or Pinball - but anybody with malicious intent surely could've.

New TVs that launch with Android TV 14 or later on Linux kernel 5.15 or higher will be required to meet Google's Generic Kernel Image (GKI) requirements in order to pass certification! This means that GKI is now enforced on all major Android form factors with AArch64 chipsets: handhelds, watches, automotive, & televisions. Mishaal Rahman What this means is that all the major Android form factors will be running kernels that adhere to the GKI requirements, which means SoC and board support is not part of the core kernel, but instead achieved through loadable modules. This should, in theory, make it easier to provide long-term support.

All weekend, I've been mulling over a recent blog post by Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller, which he wrote and published on behalf of the Fedora Council. Fedora (the KDE version) is my distribution of choice, I love using it, and I consider it the best distribution for desktop use, and not by a close margin either. As such, reading a blog post in which Fedora is announcing plans to make extensive use of AI" was bound to make me a feel a little uneasy. Miller states - correctly - that the AI" space as it stands right now is dominated so much by hyperbole and over-the-top nonsense that it's hard to judge the various technologies underpinning AI" on merit alone. He continues that he believes that stripped of all the hyperbole and techbro bullshit, there's something significant, powerful", and he wants to make Fedora Linux the best community platform for AI". So, what exactly does that look like? In addition to the big showy LLM-based tools for chat and code generation, these advances have brought big jumps for more tailored tasks: for translation, file search, home automation, and especially for accessibility (already a key part of our strategy). For example, open source speech synthesis has long lagged behind proprietary options. Now, what we have in Fedora is not even close to the realism, nuance, and flexibility of AI-generated speech. Matthew Miller Some of these are things we can all agree are important and worthwhile, but lacking on the Linux desktop. If we can make use of technologies labelled as AI" to improve, say, text-to-speech on Linux for those who require it for accessibility reasons, that's universally a great thing. Translation, too, is, at its core, a form of accessibility, and if we can improve machine translations so that people who, for instance, don't speak English gain more access to English content, or if we can make the vast libraries of knowledge locked into foreign languages accessible to more people, that's all good news. However, Fedora aims to take its use of AI" even further, and wants to start using it in the process of developing, making, and distributing Fedora. This is where more and more red flags are starting to pop up for me, because I don't feel like the processes and tasks they want to inject AI" into are the kinds of processes and tasks where you want humans taken out of the equation. We can use AI/ML as part of making the Fedora Linux OS. New tools could help with package automation and bug triage. They could note anomalies in test results and logs, maybe even help identify potential security issues. We can also create infrastructure-level features for our users. For example, package update descriptions aren't usually very meaningful. We could automatically generate concise summaries of what's new in each system update - not just for each package, but highlighting what's important in the whole set, including upstream change information as well. Matthew Miller Even the tools built atop billions and billions of euros of investments by Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Facebook, and similar juggernauts are not exactly good at what they're supposed to do, and suck at even the most basic of tasks of providing answers to simple questions. They lie, they make stuff up, they bug out and produce nonsense, they're racist, and so on. I don't want any of that garbage near the process of making and updating the operating system I rely on every day. Miller laments how AI" is currently a closed-source, black box affair, which obviously doesn't align with Fedora's values and goals. He doesn't actually explain how Fedora's use of AI" is going to address this. They're going to have to find ethical, open source models that are also of high quality, and that's a lot easier said than done. Sourcing doesn't even get a single mention in this blog post, even though I'm fairly sure that's one of the two major issues many of us have with the current crop of AI" tools. The blog post also completely neglects to mention the environmental cost of training these AI" tools. It costs an insane amount of electricity to train these new tools, and with climate change ever accelerating and the destruction of our environment visible all around us, not mentioning this problem when you're leading a project like Fedora seems disingenuous at best, and malicious at worst. While using AI" to improve accessibility tools in Fedora and the wider Linux world is laudable, some of the other intended targets seem more worrisome, especially when you take into account that the blog post makes no mention of the two single biggest problems with AI": sourcing, and its environmental impact. If Fedora truly intends to fully embrace AI", it's going to have to address these two problems first, because otherwise they're just trying to latch onto the hype without really understanding the cost. And that's not something I want to hear from the leaders of my Linux distribution.

Framework puts a lot of effort into making its hardware easy to fix and upgrade and into making sure that hardware can stay useful down the line when it's been replaced by something newer. But supporting that kind of reuse and recycling works best when paired with long-term software and firmware support, and on that front, Framework has been falling short. Framework will need to step up its game, especially if it wants to sell more laptops to businesses-a lucrative slice of the PC industry that Framework is actively courting. By this summer or fall, we'll have some idea of whether its efforts are succeeding. Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica A very painful read, and I'm disappointed to learn that the software support from Framework has been so lacklustre - or non-existent, to be more accurate. Leaving severel security vulnerabilities in firmware unpatched is a disgrace, and puts users at risk, while promising but not delivering updates that will unlock faster Thunderbolt speeds is just shitty. They have to do better, especially since their pitch is all about repairability and longevity. This article has made me more weary of spending any money on Framework - not that I have the money for a new laptop, because reasons - and I feel more people will feel this way after reading this.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the ROCK 5 ITX coming soon and since then, samples of the Rockchip RK3588-based Radxa ROCK 5 ITX have been landing on doorsteps (or service points, screw you, UPS) of a lucky group of people and somehow I was one of those, so here's a first look at Radxa's latest Single Board Computer in a Mini ITX form-factor! It's going to be a photo-heavy post and I make no apologies for that, it's a very nice-looking PCB, with the black and gold colour scheme looking very stylish. I imagine that was a very conscious decision seeing as, as expected, they're marketing this as a low-power desktop option and you probably don't want a plain Jane motherboard taking pride of place in your new system, right? Bret Weber Now this - this, my friends, is exactly what the doctor ordered. I can't wait for standard, ATX motherboard sporting ARM processors to become more common and readily available, hopefully standardised better than what we're used to from the ARM world. I want my next (non-gaming) machines to be ARM-powered, and that means we're going to need more of these ATX ARM boards, spanning wider performance levels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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