Last weekend, we noticed that an attempt to download Google Chrome using Microsoft Edge results in the latter opening its sidebar with a poll, asking you to explain to Microsoft how you could dare try downloading Google Chrome. Of course, the exact wording is more tame, but you get the idea. Now, besides dismissing several banners and a full-size ad injected on the Chrome website, Edge wants you to answer a questionnaire with the following options. Frequently bought together.
Apple is releasing a slew of updates for its latest operating systems today, including iOS and iPadOS 17.1, macOS Sonoma 14.1, watchOS 10.1, and others. The company is also releasing security updates for a few previous-generation operating systems, so that people who aren't ready to upgrade (and older devices that can't upgrade) will still be protected from new exploits. If you have a bunch of Apple devices, it's going to be a busy day. You might also want to take a look at your Apple subscriptions, because the company massively increased its prices across the board without advance notice.
A director from the White House announced that Apple plans to significantly expand access to device repairs for independent repair shops and consumers across the United States. The move is part of the Biden administration's push for right to repair" reforms. According to a statement by National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard (via Reuters), Apple will make parts, tools, and documentation needed for repairs available to independent repair shops and consumers nationwide. This will allow third-party technicians and do-it-yourselfers to fix Apple products at fair and reasonable prices quickly. There's going to be a gotcha. With Apple, there always is.
State attorneys general in 41 states and the District of Columbia sued Meta today. The move comes after the conclusion of a multistate probe launched in 2021, where a bipartisan coalition of state enforcers began examining how Facebook and Instagram features are designed to allegedly addict and harm kids. Back in 2021, the Massachusetts attorney general's office led the multistate probe investigating Instagram's impacts on young people" after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed that Facebook knew Instagram was toxic" to teen girls but downplayed risks to the public. In a press release today, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell accused Meta of deliberately" exploiting young users' vulnerabilities for profit." Everyone liked that.
The big question coming up is how Google's focus on AI will impact that core business. Google's AI-powered Search Generative Experience is still only available on an opt-in basis, so we don't yet know how much it'll impact the company's ad business. Google is already moving to head off that problem. On Google's earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company would be experimenting with new formats native to the way SGE works - the company has already shown off some ideas - so perhaps we'll start to see some of those formats debut in the coming weeks and months. Later in the call, chief business officer Philipp Schindler added that it's extremely important to us that in this new experience, advertisers still have the opportunity to reach potential customers along their dsearch journeys." This is not news.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was interviewed by Business Insider, and when asked about his greatest strategic mistake, the answer was obvious. The decision I think a lot of people talk about - and one of the most difficult decisions I made when I became CEO -was our exit of what I'll call the mobile phone as defined then. In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones. Microsoft's failures to anticipate the mobile market is legendary at this point, but I don't think I've ever heard a Microsoft CEO state they should've tried harder and stuck with it. I was a huge fan of Windows Phone 7 and 8, and even imported the first devices running those platforms from the US, because the platforms were not available in The Netherlands at the time. However, Windows Phone was a dead end. Even regular Windows has a big application problem, and it was a millions of times worse on Windows Phone. I doubt any amount of money or development resources would've changed the fate of Windows Phone. It would've been good for the industry as a whole had Microsoft not failed, but the reality of it is that Android and iOS were already so far ahead it was impossible for anyone, even someone as large and wealthy as Microsoft, to catch up. Add to that the countless terrible business and technological decisions the company made with Windows Phone, and it just wasn't meant to be. I understand that Nadella pines for the slice of the money pie they've could've had, but I doubt he sincerely thinks things could've turned out any differently.
For years, Qualcomm has been making Snapdragon chips for Windows PCs, and for years, those chips' performance have failed to dislodge Intel's or AMD's chips to any significant degree. Its latest Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (and the closely related Microsoft SQ3) appears in just two consumer PCs, the cumbersomely named Microsoft Surface Pro 9 with 5G and Lenovo's ThinkPad X13s Gen 1. But that may be changing. Nearly three years ago, Qualcomm bought a company called Nuvia for $1.4 billion. Nuvia was mainly working on server processors, but the company's founders and many of its employees had also been involved in developing the A- and M-series Apple Silicon processors that have all enabled the iPhone, iPad, and Mac to achieve their enviable blend of performance and battery life. Today, Qualcomm is formally announcing the fruit of the Nuvia acquisition: the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is a 12-core, 4 nm chip that will compete directly with Intel's Core processors and AMD Ryzen chips in PCs-and, less directly, Apple's M2 and M3-series processors for Macs. We've heard a lot of these claims over the years, and to be honest, I'm a little tired of promises. Show me the goods. Apple did.
Nvidia and AMD could sell PC chips as soon as 2025, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Nvidia and AMD would join Qualcomm, which has been making Arm-based chips for laptops since 2016. At an event on Tuesday that will be attended by Microsoft executives, including vice president of Windows and Devices Pavan Davuluri, Qualcomm plans to reveal more details about a flagship chip that a team of ex-Apple engineers designed, according to a person familiar with the matter. Nvidia is such a natural partner for Microsoft when it comes to ARM chips, I'm surprised it's taking them this long to jump back into the ring after the failed Surface RT. AMD making ARM chips is fascinating and surprising, though, but I guess they don't feel they can compete on performance-per-watt with x86.
Dave Cutler is a seminal figure in computer science, renowned for his contributions to operating systems. Born in 1942, he played pivotal roles in the development of several OSes, most notably VMS for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Windows NT for Microsoft. Cutler's design principles emphasize performance, reliability, and scalability. His work on Windows NT laid the foundation for many subsequent Windows versions, solidifying its place in enterprise and personal computing. A stickler for detail and a rigorous engineer, Cutler's influence is evident in modern OS design and architecture. He's a recipient of the Computer History Museum's Fellow Award for his unparalleled contributions. I don't often link to videos, but when I do, it's a good one.
At midnight US Pacific Time tomorrow, Windows Embedded Compact 2013 - or perhaps better colloquially referred to as Windows CE 8.0 - will slip from history as it exits is Extended Support Phase with Microsoft and it, as well as the entire history of Windows CE, becomes an unsupported, retired former product. Windows CE 8.0 was released on 11th August 2013 and slipped into the end of its mainstream support on 9th October 2018. Yet few even noticed either occurrence. As a product CE 8.0 release failed to gain much of any traction or fanfare. Even here in the Windows CE community, most people disregard Windows Embedded Compact 2013 as a complete non-starter. As with Windows CE 7.0 before it. Few, if any devices were ever released on the platform and as a result most people - myself included - have never even seen a physical CE 8 device. I've used and own a lot of Windows CE-based devices over the years, and contrary to most people's opinions, I absolutely adore Windows CE. Back when Apple was still busy not dying, and Android was barely a blip on anyone's radar, Windows CE-based devices were incredibly powerful, versatile, and capable. Platforms like PocketPC and Windows Mobile may not have been the most graceful platforms, but they were so far ahead of anyone else when it came to pure functionality and capabilities it wasn't even close. I was streaming Futurama episodes from my Windows XP machine to my PocketPC, while checking my email and browsing with Pocket IE - in the early 2000s. No other platform could do this in a PDA form factor - not even Palm OS. I hope, against my own better judgment, that Microsoft will do the right thing and publish the source code to Windows CE on Github. The number of Windows CE devices out there is immense, and giving the community the option of supporting them going forward would save a lot of them from the trash heap.
One of the most distinctive features of Apple silicon chips is that they have two types of CPU core, E (Efficiency) cores that are energy efficient but slower than the P (Performance) cores, which normally run much of the code in the apps we use. Apps don't decide directly which cores they will be run on, that's a privilege of macOS, but they register their interest by setting a Quality of Service, or QoS, which is then taken into account when they're scheduled to run. With the introduction of Game Mode in Sonoma, CPU scheduling can now work differently, with E cores being reserved for the use of games. This article looks at another atypical situation, when running a macOS virtual machine (VM) assigned a set number of virtual cores. How does macOS Sonoma handle that? Exactly what is says on the tin.
TalosSpace has more details on the upcoming, recently announced OpenPOWER machines from Raptor. I asked Timothy Pearson at Raptor about the S1's specs, and he said it's a PCIe 5.0 DDR5 part running from the high 3GHz to low 4GHz clock range, with the exact frequency range to be determined. (OMI-based RAM not required!) The S1 is bi-endian, SMT-4 and will support at least two sockets with an 18-core option confirmed for certain and others to be evaluated. This compares very well with the Power10, which is also PCIe 5.0, also available as SMT-4 (though it has an SMT-8 option), and also clocks somewhere between 3.5GHz and 4GHz. S1 embeds its own BMC, the X1 (or variant), which is (like Arctic Tern) a Microwatt-based ISA 3.1 core in Lattice ECP5 and iCE40 FPGAs with 512MB of DDR3 RAM, similar to the existing ASpeed BMC on current systems. X1 will in turn replace the existing Lattice-based FPGA in Arctic Tern as Antarctic Tern," being a functional descendant of the same hardware, and should fill the same roles as a BMC upgrade for existing Raptor systems as well as the future BMC for the next generation systems and a platform in its own right. The X1 has integrated 100% open root of trust" as you would expect for such a system-critical part. This all sounds like exactly the kind of things I wanted to hear, and these details make me sufficiently excited about the near future of Raptor's OpenPOWER workstations. The only little bit of less pleasant news is that the machines won't be available until late 2024, so we've got a little wait ahead of us.
This is a version of the Oberon System 3 (also known as ETH Oberon), compatible with the Oberon+ compiler, IDE and runtimes and the OBX Platform Abstraction Layer (PAL), and thus truly cross-platform (runs on all platforms where LeanQt is available). The migration is still work in progress, but sufficiently complete and stable to explore the platform. The latest commit is tested on both the Mono CLI and as a native executable built with the generated C code. I have to admit that while I'm aware of the Oberon System, I know far too little about it to make any meaningful statements here.
There are few things more frustrating than paying for high-speed PC components and then leaving performance on the table because software slows your system down. Unfortunately, a default setting in Windows 11 Pro, having its software BitLocker encryption enabled, could rob as much as 45 percent of the speed from your SSD as it forces your processor to encrypt and decrypt everything. According to our tests, random writes and reads - which affect the overall performance of your PC - get hurt the most, but even large sequential transfers are affected. While many SSDs come with hardware-based encryption, which does all the processing directly on the drive, Windows 11 Pro force-enables the software version of BitLocker during installation, without providing a clear way to opt out. (You can circumvent this with tools like Rufus, if you want, though that's obviously not an official solution as it allows users to bypass the Microsoft's intent.) If you bought a prebuilt PC with Windows 11 Pro, there's a good chance software BitLocker is enabled on it right now. Windows 11 Home doesn't support BitLocker so you won't have encryption enabled there. Nothing like buying a brand new PC and realising you're losing a ton of performance for something you might not even need on a home PC.
Well, this is a pleasant surprise and a massive coincidence. Besides that BMC-focused press release, Raptor Computing Systems tweeted out that they are working on next generation of high performance, fully owner controlled systems! Built using the open POWER ISA 3.1, these new machines will be direct upgrades for existing POWER9 systems." Power ISA 3.1 aligns with new functionality IBM introduced in Power10. This is fantastic news, and it seems they're sidestepping the IBM POWER10 binary blobs issue by relying on a different chip vendor altogether, Solid Silicon, who announced an OpenPOWER CPU that will be used in Raptor's upcoming systems, the S1. It seems unlikely to me that the S1 will be an entirely new, unique processor, so perhaps it's a slightly modified IBM POWER10 design without the binary blobs. I'm incredibly excited about this news, and can't wait to hear what they're planning.
The Intel 14th Gen Core series is somewhat of a somber swansong to the traditional and famed Core i series naming scheme, rounding off what feels like the end of an era. With the shift to their upcoming Meteor Lake SoC, the impending launch of the new naming scheme (Core and Core Ultra) branding, and what Intel hopes to be a groundbreaking mobile chiplet-based architecture. The crux of the analysis is if you're upgrading from an older and outdated desktop platform, the Intel 14th Gen series is a solid performer, but there's still value in current 13th Gen pricing. Those must be considered in the current global financial situation; some users may find a better deal. If you already have 12th or 13th Gen Core parts, then there's absolutely no reason to upgrade or consider 14th Gen as a platform, as none of the features (mainly software) justify a sidegrade on which is ultimately the same platform and the same core architecture. AnandTech always delivers. Unlike Intel.
Speaking of POWER - well, PowerPC - what about OS/2 Warp for PowerPC? What was OS/2 Warp, PowerPC Edition like? An unfinished product, rough around the edges but simultaneously technically very interesting and advanced and showing promise. Even though the OS/2 PPC release wasn't called beta, it is obvious that this is a beta level product (if even that in some respects). Many features are unfinished or completely missing (networking in the first place). The kernel level code doesn't look much like production build and prints out quite a lot of debugging output on the serial console. The HPFS support was very unstable, and the stability of Win-OS/2 left a lot to be desired. There were too many clearly unfinished parts of the product (documentation, missing utilities etc.). On the other hand a large portion of the system worked well. The user interface and graphics subsystem in general didn't exhibit any anomalies. Multitasking was reliable and all things considered, responsiveness quite good for a 100MHz CPU and code that was not likely to have been performance tuned. The multimedia subsystem worked much better than I expected. Many things were much improved compared to Intel OS/2 - internationalization, graphics subsystem, updated console API and so on. The system seemed to have enough raw power, even if it wasn't harnessed too well. Boot time was rather long but once up and running, the system was snappy (with some exceptions, notably the CD-ROM driver). To reach true production quality, the OS would have needed at least additional six months of intense development, probably more. I'm a tad bit jealous some people manage to find the right hardware to run OS/2 for PowerPC, since it's incredibly high on my list. At least I have this great article to read through every now and then, until the day I manage to get lucky myself.
Just as IBM was posting future" processor compiler patches in 2019 for what ended up being early POWER10 enablement, they are once again repeating their same compiler enablement technique with sending out PowerPC future" patches for what is likely to be POWER11. The PowerPC future" patches sent out today are just like before - complete with mentions like This feature may or may not be present in any specific future PowerPC processor...Again, these are preliminary patches for a potential future machine. Things will likely change in terms of implementation and usage over time. If this is indeed a sign that POWER11 is on its way, I really hope IBM learned from its mistake with POWER10. POWER9 was completely open, top to bottom, which made it possible for Raptor Computing Systems to build completely open source, auditable workstation where every bit of code was open source. POWER10, however, contained closed firmware for the off-chip OMI DRAM bridge and on-chip PPE I/O processor, which meant that the principled team at Raptor resolutely said no to building POWER10 workstations, even though they wanted to. I firmly believe that if IBM tried even the littlest bit, there could be a niche, but fairly stable market for POWER-based workstations, by virtue of being pretty much the only fully open ISA (at least, as far as POWER9 goes). Of course, we're not talking serious competition to x86 or ARM here, but I've seen more than enough interest to enable a select few OEMs to build and sell POWER workstations. Let's hope POWER11 fixes the firmware mess that is POWER10, so that we can look forward to another line of fully open source workstations.
This paper reflects work done in late 2022 and 2023 to audit for vulnerabilities in terminal emulators, with a focus on open source software. The results of this work were 10 CVEs against terminal emulators that could result in Remote Code Execution (RCE), in addition various other bugs and hardening opportunities were found. The exact context and severity of these vulnerabilities varied, but some form of code execution was found to be possible on several common terminal emulators across the main client platforms of today. Additionally several new ways to exploit these kind of vulnerabilities were found. This is the full technical write-up that assumes some familiarity with the subject matter, for a more gentle introduction see my post on the G-Research site. Some light reading for the weekend.
Threat actors are known for impersonating popular brands in order totrick users. In a recent malvertising campaign, we observed a malicious Google ad for KeePass, the open-source password manager which was extremely deceiving. We previously reported on how brand impersonationsare a common occurrence these days due to a feature known as tracking templates, but this attack used an additional layer of deception. The malicious actors registered a copycat internationalized domain name that uses Punycode, a special character encoding, to masquerade as thereal KeePass site. Thedifference between the two sites is visually so subtleit will undoubtably fool many people. We have reported this incident to Google but would like to warn users that the ad is still currently running. Ad blockers are security tools. This proves it once again.
The Verge reports: The New York Times reports that along with concerns about some of the guests booked to be on The Problem With Jon Stewart, Stewart's intended discussions of artificial intelligence and China were a major concern for Apple. Though new episodes of the show were scheduled to begin shooting in just a few weeks, staffers learned today that production had been halted. According to The Hollywood Reporter, ahead of its decision to end The Problem, Apple approached Stewart directly and expressed its need for the host and his team to be aligned" with the company's views on topics discussed. Rather than falling in line when Apple threatened to cancel the show, Stewart reportedly decided to walk. Props to Stewart for telling Apple to shove it, but this once again highlights that Apple and Tim Cook are nothing but propaganda mouthpieces for the Chinese Communist Party.
Today, we are making Google Play Protect's security capabilities even more powerful with real-time scanning at the code-level to combat novel malicious apps. Google Play Protect will now recommend a real-time app scan when installing apps that have never been scanned before to help detect emerging threats. Scanning will extract important signals from the app and send them to the Play Protect backend infrastructure for a code-level evaluation. Once the real-time analysis is complete, users will get a result letting them know if the app looks safe to install or if the scan determined the app is potentially harmful. This enhancement will help better protect users against malicious polymorphic apps that leverage various methods, such as AI, to be altered to avoid detection. There's a lot you can say about these kinds of security tools, but with how much access our smartphones have to our data, banking information, credit/debit cards, and so on - I don't think it's unreasonable at all for Google (and Apple, if they are forced to enable sideloading by the EU) to employ technologies like these. As long as the user can still somehow bypass them, or disable them altogether, possibly through some convoluted computer magic that might scare them, I don't see any issues with this. ...that is, assuming it won't be used for other ends. The step from scanning for malware" to scanning for unapproved content" like downloaded movies or whatever isn't that far-fetched in today's corporate world, and if totalitarian regimes get their hands on stuff like that, it could get a lot worse.
Being announced today by AMD for a November 21st launch, this morning AMD is taking the wraps off of their Ryzen 7000 Threadripper CPUs. These high-end chips are being split up into two product lines, with AMD assembling the workstation-focused Ryzen Threadripper 7000 Pro series, as well as the non-pro Ryzen Threadripper 7000 series for the more consumer-ish high-end desktop (HEDT) market. Both chip lines are based on AMD's tried and true Zen 4 architecture - derivatives of AMD's EPYC server processors - incorporating AMD's Zen 4 chiplets and a discrete I/O dies. As with previous generations of Threadripper parts, we're essentially looking at the desktop version of AMD's EPYC hardware. With both product lines, AMD is targeting customer bases that need CPUs more powerful than a desktop Ryzen processor, but not as exotic (or expensive) as AMD's server wares. This means chips with lots and lots of CPU cores - up to 96 in the case of the Threadripper 7000 Pro series - as well as support for a good deal more I/O and memory. The amount varies with the specific chip lineup, but both leave Ryzen 7000 and its 16 cores and 24 PCIe lanes in the dust. I'm hoping these will eventually find their way to eBay, so that around five years from now, I can replace my dual-Xeon workstation with a Threadripper machine.
This is a native port of Digital Research's seminal 1977 operating system CP/M to the 6502. Unlike the original, it supports relocatable binaries, so allowing unmodified binaries to run on any system: this is necessary as 6502 systems tend to be much less standardised than 8080 and Z80 systems. (The systems above all load programs at different base addresses.) Currently you can cross-assemble programs from a PC, as well as a working C toolchain with llvm-mos. For native development, there's a basic assembler, a couple of editors, and a BASIC. You need about 20kB to run the assembler at all, and of course more memory the bigger the program. The usefulness of this project is debatable, but that doesn't make it any less cool.
Debian 12 had aimed to have a merged /usr" file-system layout similar to other Linux distributions, but The Debian Technical Committee earlier this year decided to impose a merged-/usr file movement moratorium. But now with Debian 12 having been out for a few months, that moratorium has been repealed. In hoping to have the merged /usr layout ready in time for Debian 13 Trixie", yesterday that moratorium was repealed. I love Debian's bureaucratic processes and procedures. I imagine all the Debian people working in a giant nondescript grey building with very few windows, somewhere along a generic highway at the edge of a boring suburb of a forgetable town.
Google cut dozens of jobs in its news division this week, CNBC has learned, downsizing at a particularly sensitive time for online platforms and publishers. An estimated 40 to 45 workers in Google News have lost their jobs, according to an Alphabet Workers Union spokesperson, who didn't know the exact number. A Google spokesperson confirmed the cuts but didn't provide a number, and said there are still hundreds of people working on the news product. I'm no expert in personnel management and human resources, but with the state of the world such as it is, it seems like an incredibly inopportune time to decimate your news department, especially when you're a tech company, who already have an absolutely abysmal track record when it comes to dealing with news and misinformation.
Google is proposing a new mseal() memory sealing system call for the Linux kernel. Google intends for this architecture independent system call to be initially used by the Google Chrome web browser on Chrome OS while experiments are underway for use by Glibc in the dynamic linker to seal all non-writable segments at startup. The discussion is ongoing, so you can read the original proposed patchset and go from there.
We're excited to announce that Windows has taken a significant step forward in accessibility by supporting the use of hearing aids equipped with the latest Bluetooth(R)Low Energy Audio (LE Audio)technology. Customers who use these new hearing aids are now able to directly pair, stream audio, and take calls on their Windows PCs with LE Audio support. This feature is available on Windows devices with our recently announced Bluetooth(R) LE Audio support, which will be a growing market of devices in the coming months. In upcoming flights, we will be introducing additional capabilities to the hearing aids experience on Windows, such as controlling audio presets directly within Windows settings.Stay tuned for more details about these new capabilities as they roll out. Excellent news for people who manage their hearing problems with hearing aids. The fact it's taken the industry this long to realise the potential of connecting hearing aides to computers and phones is surprising, but regulation and Bluetooth's reputation probably played a role in that. Regardless, this is a great step by Microsoft, and I hope other platforms follow suit.
Out of 72 benchmarks ran in total on both operating systems with the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4, Ubuntu 23.10 was the fastest about 64% of the time. If taking the geometric mean of all the benchmark results, Ubuntu 23.10 comes out to being 10% faster than the stock Windows 11 Pro install as shipped by Lenovo for this AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U laptop. I recently bought a laptop, and the stock Windows installation - free of OEM crapware, which was a welcome surprise - opened applications and loaded webpages considerably slower than Fedora KDE did. This has not always been the case, and I'm pleasantly surprised that while the desktop Linux world has focused a lot on performance, Microsoft was busy making Windows even less pleasant than it already was. I wouldn't be surprised if across all price/performance levels, Linux is faster and snapper than Windows - except maybe at the absolute brand-new high-end, since AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA entirely understandably focus on Windows performance first.
Today we're rolling out new accessibility features and updates that make accomplishing daily tasks faster and easier - like taking selfies, getting walking directions or searching the web. We recently launched Lookout image Q&A mode and accessibility updates on Android 14 and Wear OS 4. Now we have even more accessible features across our products that are built with and for people with disabilities. Accessibility is so often overlooked, or underreported, and I hope I can start changing that a little bit by paying more attention to it.
Frasier Fantasy is a loving tribute to the show, Frasier," in turn-based RPG form. Filled with Easter Eggs and callbacks, this is the game for anyone wondering if Eddie ever blinked first. Yes, a fan-made Game Boy Color game where you play as Frasier Crane. I can't believe someone went through the arduous process of making this, but I'm glad they did. This is absolutely brilliant.
Have you ever wanted to read 69 pages of in-depth information about the security frameworks in Android, past to present to future? Now's your chance. To share and document the latest Android security capabilities, we've published an update to the Android Security Paper. The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the platform's built-in, proactive security across hardware, anti-exploitation, Google Security Services and the range of management APIs available for businesses and governments alike. You might want some coffee to prevent dozing off.
Storing data on glass might sound futuristic, but it's a concept that dates back to the 19th century when single photographic negatives were preserved on panes of glass. Fast forward to today, technology has remarkably expanded the storage capabilities of this sustainable material. A small sheet of glass can now hold several terabytes of data, enough to store approximately 1.75 million songs or 13 years' worth of music. Elire, a sustainability-focused venture group, has collaborated with Microsoft Research's Project Silica team to harness this technology for their Global Music Vault in Svalbard, Norway. Using silica-based glass plates, they're creating a durable archive that is not only resistant to electromagnetic pulses and extreme temperatures but also environmentally friendly. This vault will complement repositories like the Global Seed Vault and the Arctic World Archive, offering a comprehensive sanctuary for musical heritage-from classical operas to modern hits and indigenous compositions. Looking to the future, Elire plans to expand this enduring musical repository by establishing accessible locations worldwide, inviting the public to interact with this extensive and ever-growing archive. There are so many avenues of study and research that we haven't fully explored yet, that could lead to revolutions, big and small, in how we do even relatively basic things like store data. This project reminds me of the data rods the Cardassians use, making this yet another example of reality chasing Star Trek.
It doesn't have a name yet, but Qualcomm says it's developing a RISC-V Snapdragon Wear" chip in collaboration with Google. The company says it plans to commercialize the RISC-V based wearables solution globally including the US." For Google and Qualcomm, this chip represents everyone's first swing at a commercial RISC-V Android project, and as far as we can tell, it's the first announced mass-market RISC-V Android chip ever. Qualcomm says the groundwork it and Google lay out will help pave the way for more products within the Android ecosystem to take advantage of custom CPUs that are low power and high performance." This is the biggest endorsement of RISC-V yet, and could catapult the platform to mainstream popularity pretty quickly. I do hope Qualcomm isn't going to wrap their chip in a load of proprietary nonsense making them needlessly complex to support now and in the future, but I won't be surprised if that hope turns out to be futile.
Many developers believe creating apps for Windows on Arm is difficult, but developing for Arm is easier than you think, and Microsoft is here to help! It is my pleasure to announce a new App Assure Arm Advisory Service to help developers build Arm-optimized apps. This service is in addition to our existing promise: your apps will run on Windows on Arm, and if you encounter any issues, Microsoft will help you remediate them. Most apps just work under emulation, and developers can port their apps to run natively with minimal effort. Anything to increase the adoption of ARM by Windows so that we finally get the ARM laptops Linux OEMs seem incapable or unwilling to make.
A new OpenBSD release means a ton of new features, and OpenBSD 7.4 is no different. It adds a VirtIO GPU driver, built-in leak detection for malloc, support for AMD processor microcode updates, and a whole lot more. If you want the really detailed list of changes, hop on over to the changelog, and OpenBSD users will already know how to update.
But thanks to all those other cyberdogs, Apple's own Cyberdog - a seemingly ordinary web browser and Internet suite with some unusual capabilities - has since slid into search engine obscurity. Apple had some big plans for it, though, and even wanted to give developers a way to develop their own components they could run inside of it. Not just plugins, either: we're talking viewers, UI elements and even entire protocol handlers, implemented using Apple's version of OpenDoc embedding. The Apple of the '90s is a treasure trove of weird stuff and random nonsense that never made it anywhere, and I'm always here for it.
The build has added a new separate System Components" section in the Windows 11 Settings under the System" menu. When one launches this System Components option, all the system applications appear under this section. This is a nice change, as it will make it easier to remove some of the garbage that comes with Windows.
In certain versions of Windows 10, you may receive a notification with a warning about Microsoft-verified apps when you run the Firefox installer. This is just so transparently anti-user.
Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: The business model that Google had broke the internet." He said search results had become plagued with clickbait" to keep people addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible". Information online is buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff", Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can sell more adverts", fuelled by Google's technology. Anyone who has tried to find anything on Google in recent years knows that Suleyman is 100% correct. Google's search results have become so bad because website makers play the SEO game, and that means creating content that Google's algorithm likes - but, and here's the kicker, what Google's algorithm likes, is not really what people like. Writing an article to please a computer is entirely different from writing an article to please a human. There are very clear and well-understood and thoroughly studied rules about writing in a way that makes things easy to read, but Google's algorithm doesn't optimise for that. And now AI" is being trained on this crap content, so that they will also produce crap content. We're not far away from a future where bots are writing content for other bots that teach other bots to write content for bots. In fact, that future may already be here, judging by some of the style of writing I've been seeing even on otherwise venerable outlets. This is also why so many websites have started posting basic, simple how-to articles. You see stuff like How do I move my apps on an iPhone?" or How do I delete a folder in Windows?" or The best neckband headphones of 2023" all over the place now, even on websites where they clearly don't belong and don't fit the audience, not just on content farms - these articles are not designed for readers, they're designed to catch Google search queries and generate traffic. It must be absolutely soul-crushing and mind-numbing to write stuff like that and optimise it for SEO, but you know - fish' gotta swim, bird's gotta eat. Here's a little inside hockey for you: on several occasions over the past year or so, both OSNews as a whole, and me individually, have been approached by serious parties to effectively turn OSNews into one of those content farms. Some have even tried to get me to write such content" for their own content farms. Clearly, we've never accepted such offers - I'm no cheap date - but the pressure is there, and not everyone can resist. It's why so many tech websites that used to have a clear identity and tone have become so much more bland and repetitive. They are all tiny cogs in massive content networks now, with their original stated goals and interests shoved to the wayside - all to chase the SEO. We've clearly not yet fallen victim to this - OSNews is still just me posting news - but that also means we're not making any money in the ways other tech websites do, and in fact, why we're not making enough to keep things going without OSNews' owner footing the bill out of his own pocket. That's why I've been more active and persistent in promoting our Patreon, Ko-Fi, merch store, and Liberapay, since it allows us to not worry about the financials as much. It always feels awkward to do, but I also realise that if I want OSNews to keep going for another 25 years, that's really the only thing I can do. Because Google has thoroughly ruined every other avenue for websites like ours to make money. I'm so sorry for the headline.
This is a big shift from the Google of old. People in this industry talk, even when they work for the companies that make these products. Previously, Google was very cautious about doing anything that would create a rift between itself and all the vendors that made Android what it is today. Very little was held back because Google needed to keep Samsung happy, and Samsung wouldn't be happy if a cool new Android thing didn't work on the next Galaxy phone. Now Google is building all these cool things but calling them Pixel features. Features that will probably never come to a Galaxy phone or any other brand of phone. And it's building the hardware to make them even better and to unleash even cooler things in the future. Things that are Pixel features. Things that will never be on a Galaxy phone. You can't even really call Android an open source mobile operating system anymore at this point, and it seems the latest few Pixels are really starting to drive the point home that for Google, Android is not really their mobile brand anymore - it's Pixel. We'll see how far they're willing to take this, but I wouldn't be surprised if they've barely even started. What's the life expectancy of AOSP?
Window Maker Live (wmlive) is an installable Linux live CD/ISO, and is based mostly on the recently released Bookworm" branch of Debian Linux. It relies on the extensively preconfigured Window Maker window manager as its default graphical user interface. It can also be considered as an alternative installation medium for Debian/Bookworm. As such, wmlive is fully compatible with the official Debian/Bookworm repositories for security updates and bug fixes. We're not a Linux distribution website, but I do like to highlight the ones that are doing something different. While Window Maker can be installed on pretty much anything that pulsates electricity, I always prefer to have a preconfigured experience with these less popular environments, if only to get a better idea of what veteran users like. Distributions such as these are an excellent way of doing that. So, if you've always wanted to try Window Maker - here's a good option.
In case you're wondering why you can't download the latest Ubuntu desktop version that was released earlier this week - it seems to have a bit of a rogue translation issue. A community contributor submitted offensive Ukrainian translations to a public, third party online service that we use to provide language support for the Ubuntu Desktop installer. Around three hours after the release of Ubuntu 23.10 this fact was brought to our attention and we immediately removed the affected images. After completing initial triage, we believe that the incident only impacts translations presented to a user during installation through the Live CD environment (not an upgrade). During installation the translations are resident in memory only and are not propagated to the disk. If you have upgraded to Ubuntu Desktop 23.10 from a previous release, then you are not affected by this issue. That's the difference between volunteer translations nobody checks, and proper translations that go through an extensive review process. As a translator - pay for your translations, and shit like this does not happen. Period.
Wayland is all the rage those days. Distributions left and right switch to it, many readers of my previous article on writing a X11 GUI from scratch in x86_64 assembly asked for a follow-up article about Wayland, and I now run Waland on my desktop. So here we go, let's write a (very simple) GUI program with Wayland, without any libraries, this time in C. In case you're bored this weekend.
The primary new feature of this latest release is this one: Block cloning is a facility that allows a file (or parts of a file) to be cloned", that is, a shallow copy made where the existing data blocks are referenced rather than copied. Later modifications to the data will cause a copy of the data block to be taken and that copy modified. This facility is used to implement reflinks" or file-level copy-on-write". Many common file copying programs, including newer versions of /bin/cp on Linux, will try to create clones automatically. There's many more new features and fixes, of course, so head on over to the release page for more information.
Suppose, hypothetically, that you have some DNS servers that are exposed to the Internet behind an OpenBSD PF-based firewall. Since you're a sensible person, you have various rate limits set in your DNS servers to prevent or at least mitigate various forms of denial of service attacks. One day, your DNS servers become extremely popular for whatever reason, your rate limits kick in, and your firewall abruptly stops allowing new connections in or out. What on earth happened? It's a quirk of PF in OpenBSD, and this post provides more details and possible mitigations.
Several years ago, Google introduced Discover as a feature of Google Search on mobile devices. This feature populates content related to a user's interests, based on their Web and App Activity. The Google Discover feed is displayed under the search box in Google's mobile apps and on the left-most pane of the Home screens on some Android devices. However, Google has now begun testing the Discover feed on the desktop version of Google.com for a select group of users. The same feed displayed on mobile devices is now appearing below the search box on desktops. The first thing I do whenever I see anything like this is turn it off, run for the hills, or both. Google's home page has always remained fairly the same over the decades, even though it's some of the most prime real estate on the web. Seeing them fill it up with useless news stories and related nonsense seems like just another step along the path towards full Yahooification of Google.
Scrollbars. Ever heard of them? They're pretty cool. Click and drag on a scrollbar and you can move content around in a scrollable content pane. I love that shit. Every day I am scrolling on my computer, all day long. But the scrollbars are getting smaller and this is increasingly becoming a problem. I would show you screenshots but they're so small that even screenshotting them is hard to do. And people keep making them even smaller, hiding them away, its like they don't want you to scroll! Ah", they say, that's what the scroll wheel is for". My friend, not everyone can use a scroll wheel or a swipe up touch screen. And me, a happy scroll-wheeler, even I would like to quickly jump around some time. Hidden, thin scrollbars are one of the many scourges of modern UI design. I'm glad more and more environments are at least giving users the option of enabling persistent scrollbars again, but more work is needed here to swing that pendulum back.
In the release notes for the latest Windows 11 Insider Build, there's more notes about how Windows in the EU/EEA is diverging more and more from Windows for the rest of the world. In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows will now require consent to share data between Windows and other signed-in Microsoft services. You will see some Windows features start to check for consent now, with more being added in future builds. Without consent to share data between Windows and other signed-in Microsoft services, some functionality in Windows features may be unavailable, for example certain types of file recommendations under Recommended" on the Start menu. No recommendations in the Start menu. O, woe is me.
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