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Patents are thought of by some as hardware focused and used by the big guys to intimidate with petty lawsuits. In reality, of course, patents are used for much more. They are used to help secure financing, attract M&A interest, create partnerships, and more. From 2007 to 2011, a particularly interesting patent lawsuit took place that showcases just how strategic patents can be. i4i Limited, a Canadian company, sued Microsoft over a patent it owned relating to custom XML encoding, which Microsoft used in Word. In the end, Microsoft lost and had to pay $200 million in damages and was nearly restricted from selling Word over a feature used by almost none of its users. It is a fascinating tale of how software patents used to work, especially as they are coming back into vogue. I mean, I won't shed a tear for Microsoft in this case, but it does highlight just how ridiculous software patents are.

This month, more than three dozen victims allegedly terrorized by stalkers using Apple AirTags have joined a class-action lawsuit filed in a California court last December against Apple. They alleged in an amended complaint that, partly due to Apple's negligence, AirTags have become one of the most dangerous and frightening technologies employed by stalkers" because they can be easily, cheaply, and covertly used to determine real-time location information to track victims." Since the lawsuit was initially filed in 2022, plaintiffs have alleged that there has been an explosion of reporting" showing that AirTags are frequently being used for stalking, including a spike in international AirTags stalking cases and more than 150 police reports in the US as of April 2022. More recently, there were 19 AirTags stalking cases in one US metropolitan area-Tulsa, Oklahoma-alone, the complaint said. Consequences have been as severe as possible: multiple murders have occurred in which the murderer used an AirTag to track the victim," their complaint alleged. One plaintiff from Indiana, LaPrecia Sanders, lost her son after his girlfriend allegedly used an AirTag to track his movements and then followed him to a bar and ran him over with her car, killing him at the scene." It's almost as if selling cheap trackers and turning every iPhone into a tracking device was a terrible idea. If only the creators had talked to any woman, ever.

Summarising Ubuntu 23.10 in just one word is tricky, but refinement' feels an apt choice. GNOME 45 brings a bevvy of buffs to the core desktop experience; improved window tiling; a sharper-looking web-browser; a pair of brand-new Flutter-based apps; and a colossal change to the amount of software preinstalled in new Ubuntu installations. Foundationally, Ubuntu 23.04 runs on Linux kernel 6.5, ships Mesa 23.2 graphics drivers (with in-distro access to proprietary NVIDIA drivers for those who need them), and updates the tooling, toolchains, and programming packages devs need. The distribution you won't be using directly.

Linux is an operating system, similar to Windows, but with many different versions due to the nature of being open source and fully customizable. To install Linux, you must choose an install method and choose a Linux distribution. So that's a thing.

System76, the leading US-based Linux computer and keyboard manufacturer, made several new changes to their desktop line in order to optimize AI workloads and other fields reliant on heavy component use. The main focus: An airflow optimization that prevents throttling, putting their desktops at the top of performance charts. A new starter desktop, Thelio Spark, will also debut as a productivity desktop for everyday users. System76 seems to have redesigned the thermal solution on the machines, and judging by the various photos I've seen on Mastodon, they look good. System76 also sells the cases for the Thelio separately - they're slightly different, though - and the company is sending me that case for review, and I'm curious to finally take a closer look. The Thelio Spark, the new kid in town, brings the Thelio line to a more affordable audience, with more affordable specifications. Of course, you're always going to be paying a prebuilt tax, as well as the custom case tax, but if you want to ensure a plug-and-play Linux experience that isn't just parts in a random case you can get anywhere else, there aren't a lot of other options in the market.

Cold War-era computing has a poor reputation. The picture is one of a landscape littered with uninspired attempts to copy American IBM PCs, British ZX Spectrums, and other Western computers. But then there was Yugoslavia's Galaksija, a very inspired bid to put a computer into the hands of regular comrades. The Galaksija is a Z80-based, 8-bit DIY machine, cleverly designed so that its bill of materials meshed exactly with what a Yugoslavian was able to import from Western Europe. During its brief heyday, thousands were built, leading to commercially assembled Galaksijas finding their way into homes and schools across the country. And now you can try this scrappy machine for yourself. There's a huge world of computing to discover in former USSR countries, former USSR satellite states, and other countries that delicately straddled the west and east such as former Yugoslavia, many of which most people in the west have never heard of. While many of them may not have been competitive with what the Americans and Europeans were building, that doesn't mean they're not interesting or that there's nothing to learn from the approaches the engineers took.

Dread' has been featured many times on Indie Retro News, as with every new update the Amiga 500 version looked better than ever with fabulous new textures and new zones to visit. Well if you're looking for more gaming news on this upcoming first person shooter, we have not only been informed that a new demo has been made available, but the latest footage and detailed press release shows that John is true to his word in bringing a Doom-like experience to the Amiga as the holy-grail of Amiga gaming! So without further-ado, here's the latest blurb about this incredible looking game. I can't believe they manage to squeeze this out of an A1200, let alone an A500. This is some serious wizardry.

Jason Snell: It's incredibly frustrating. This is my software, running on my computer, yet there are moments when it feels like Apple thinks it's really in charge. It needs to back off. He's so close.

Microsoft has announced it's removing VBScript from future Windows releases. VBScript is being deprecated. In future releases of Windows, VBScript will be available as a feature on demand before its removal from the operating system. VBScript has been part of Windows for almost 30 years, first shipping in 1996. VBScript has a long history of serving as a vector for malware, which probably explains its removal from Windows.

Debian Bookworm itself is mostly made up of incremental updates of the software that was in the previous Debian Bullseye release. There are a few small changes - have a look here for the list - but they mostly won't affect Raspberry Pi users. So Bookworm itself really hasn't resulted in many changes. However, for the last year or so we have been working on some major architectural changes to the Raspberry Pi Desktop, and these are launched for the first time in the Bookworm release. And this is where you might notice some differences. With this new release, Raspberry Pi OS moves to Wayland and a Wayfire desktop, but it looks and feels exactly the same as what came before with X.Org. It now also comes with Pipewire, as well as an up-to-date version of Firefox that has been modified in cooperation with Mozilla to make better use of the hardware features found in the Pi.

Happy fifth birthday to SerenityOS! The alternative operating system project just posted its fifth birthday summary covering the preceding year, and it's been yet another good one. The number of contributors keeps rising, and interest remains solid. The Serenity browser, spun out as a cross-platform browser project called Ladybird, has picked up considerable funding and even a few employed developers. SerenityOS itself went 64-bit-only this year, and added support for VP9, WebP, JPEG, JPEG XL, and TinyVG. The post also contains several short stories from Serenity developers, so head on over to give it a read.

This means the next time you sign in to your account, you'll start seeing prompts to create and use passkeys, simplifying your future sign-ins. It also means you'll see the Skip password when possible" option toggled on in your Google Account settings. To use passkeys, you just use a fingerprint, face scan or pin to unlock your device, and they are 40% faster than passwords - and rely on a type of cryptography that makes them more secure. But while they're a big step forward, we know that new technologies take time to catch on - so passwords may be around for a little while. That's why people will still be given the option to use a password to sign in and may opt-out of passkeys by turning off Skip password when possible." I just don't know how to feel about this universal, cross-corporate push from tech companies towards passkeys. I feel like when making the switch to passkeys, you're giving something up. Something about it just doesn't sit well with me, and for now, I'm going to be sticking to my trust password manager.

That second agent proved quite capable, not only agreeing that the situation was strange, but also looking into issues on Apple's side. Which led to the somewhat bizarre conclusion of this story: after perhaps 20 minutes on the phone, he seemed to hit on something. I heard him laugh and say something along the lines of that explains it" and then, with my consent, put me on hold. When he came back, he said-and I'm not exactly quoting, but close enough: I'm sorry, I can't tell you any more than this, but all your services should be back up pretty much exactly 12 hours after they went down." Cloud computing is bizarre. Cloud computing at Apple - doubly so.

Last year we wrote about how moving native code in Android from C++ to Rust has resulted in fewer security vulnerabilities. Most of the components we mentioned then were system services in userspace (running under Linux), but these are not the only components typically written in memory-unsafe languages. Many security-critical components of an Android system run in a bare-metal" environment, outside of the Linux kernel, and these are historically written in C. As part of our efforts to harden firmware on Android devices, we are increasingly using Rust in these bare-metal environments too. One day I'm going to wake up to my wife looming over me, and with an expressionless face she'll say our children are now written in Rust".

Nightcap lets you run old Windows screensavers under XScreenSaver, using wine. That's it. That's the Github description.

Today marks the 6th time we are releasing new functionality in the Qt 6 series, with small and large additions that make both UI and backend development more productive and fun. Several of the new features come as technology previews, and we are looking forward to your feedback so that we can get everything in tip-top shape for the next LTS release! Lots of new goodies for Qt developers.

This week, Windows 11 marked its second anniversary and the end of the initial release, version 21H2, which was infamous for its lack of polish and certain features. However, Windows 11 also introduced new things, such as a redesigned File Explorer, which later received tabs support and plenty of modernized UI elements and features. The Windows 11 Moment 4 update Microsoft released to the general public in late September brought one of the biggest updates to File Explorer since the initial release. In February, we published an article detailing the top 10 features and changes Windows 11 users want Microsoft to add to File Explorer. Now, it is time to compare the requests with what Microsoft delivered. It's not looking good.

To the surprise of absolutely nobody, Apple's macOS gaming policy of only offering a proprietary, Apple-only API isn't exactly paying off. One of the most popular online games in history, CS:GO, is removing support for macOS, and it won't be coming back. From here on out, the game will only be available on 64-bit Windows and Linux. That cycle played out again in Valve's recent Counter-Strike 2 update, which removed the Mac support already present in the outgoing Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Today, a Valve support document for CS2 confirmed that Mac support had been removed and wasn't likely to be re-added, along with support for ancient DirectX 9-class GPU hardware and legacy 32-bit operating systems. Fret not, though, Mac gamers - there's always Super Tux Kart.

ECC support has been standard on Ryzen processors, but with the recent introduction of the Ryzen 7000 series and the new AM5 socket, any mention of ECC was dropped from specification pages and similar documentation. It turns out, though, that there's more to this story. A couple months ago I came across a topic on the ASRock forums talking about ECC support on AM5 motherboards, in which a user called ApplesOfEpicness said that they'd worked with an AMD engineer to get ECC RAM going within AMD's AGESA firmware. They'd claimed to have tested it on an ASRock motherboard with an updated UEFI, by shorting ground and data pins, and seeing errors be reported up to the OS. I was intrigued by this! Even though I didn't have the same motherboard that ApplesOfEpicness did, I had chosen an ASRock board (the B650E PG Riptide)-I had figured that if ECC was possible on any AM5 board at all, it would be supported on ASRock. So based on the forum post, last week I ordered a pair of 32 GB server-grade ECC sticks from v-color. I updated my motherboard's UEFI to the latest version (version 1.28 with AGESA 1.0.0.7b), and then replaced my existing RAM with the new sticks. I started up the system, and after a very long link training process... it booted up! It boots, but does it actually work? This may seem like a simple question to answer, but it turns out it's a lot harder to verify working ECC than you might think. Excellent investigative work by the author, Rain.

A set of merge requests were opened that would effectively drop X.Org (X11) session support for the GNOME desktop and once that code is removed making it a Wayland-only desktop environment. Going along with Fedora 40 looking to disable the GNOME X11 session support (and also making KDE Plasma 6 Wayland-only for Fedora), upstream GNOME is evaluating the prospect of disabling and then removing their X11 session support. This surely won't be controversial.

As many of you will know from personal experience, there is a longstanding issue with VoiceOver on Mac where Safari will frequently become unresponsive with VoiceOver repeatedly announcing the message Safari not responding." When this issue occurs, the user's Mac may become unusable for up to several minutes at a time. Sometimes it can be resolved by switching away from Safari. Sometimes restarting VoiceOver can resolve the issue. However, far too often, the user is unable to switch away from Safari or turn VoiceOver off, instead having to simply wait for their Mac to become responsive again. This Safari not responding" behaviour when using VoiceOver dramatically impacts productivity and overall usability of Macs for blind and low vision users. Furthermore, it appears that the issue extends beyond just Safari - many other common applications that utilise Apple's WebKit browser engine can also be affected by the not responding" problem. I'm not highlighting this to make Apple look bad - for once - or to fill some quota. The fact of the matter is that in the blind and vision-impaired community, the Mac and iPhone are immensely popular for their accessibility features other platforms just cannot match. If you've ever seen a blind person use an iPhone, you know just how different their way of using it is from sighted people. As such, having a major bug like this is a huge deal. It impacts people who really have nowhere else to go, technology-wise, since switching to other platforms really isn't a viable option in most cases. This issue must be fixed, and can't be left by the wayside because it only impacts a relatively small number of people. Blind and vision-impaired folks have placed their trust in Apple because they've got nowhere else to go, and Apple needs to step up and take this seriously. Now.

ZFS was promised, and didn't arrive. In fact, there were about 4 of us on the beta program who saw the original zfs implementation, and it was quite different from what we have now. What eventually landed as zfs in Solaris was a complete rewrite. The beta itself was interesting - we were sent the driver, 3 binaries, and a 3-line cheatsheet, and that was it. There was a fundamental philosophy here that the whole thing was supposed to be so easy to use and sufficiently obvious that it didn't need a manual, and that was actually true. (It's gotten rather more complex since, to be fair.) Peter Tribble - long-time Solaris expert and creator of Tribblix - gives a gimpse into the earliest versions of ZFS, and just how different it was from the shipped release.

Running a 16K page size kernel implies some userspace applications that assume that the page size is 4K will break. While the Asahi Team did an amazing work fixing many of them, there's little anyone can do (at least, at a scale) to fix applications that ship in binary form. And the prime example of this are x86_64 (a 4K page size platform) games. While it's technically possible to run Apple Silicon devices with a 4K page size kernel, that would require a number of (potentially controversial upstream) changes in the kernel and will probably have a significant impact on the performance. A better approach would be running the host with a 16K kernel, and use a 4K kernel in a VM for those problematic workloads, as long the performance of the VM was good enough for the use case. When Eric first asked me about this, my first reaction was well, we would need to import virtio-gpu, but even then the performance wouldn't be good enough for gaming". But, what if we could bring Rob Clark's DRM native context to Asahi? While I'm not a fan of buying locked-down, proprietary hardware that can change its capabilities to run non-approved operating systems at a moment's notice, there's absolutely no denying there's a lot of cool stuff going in the Asahi Linux world, and this is just one of many. Now, can we please - please! - get capable ARM machines from someone other than Apple?

Most MiniDisc aficionados are aware of unit hacking to gain access to new features. The unit that perhaps benefits the most from this is the Sony MZ-N510, which also comes in the N520 and NF610 variants. The 2001 model R700 can be hacked to add many features of its upscale brother, the R900, as well as the Type-R codec, which renders the R700 capable of performing real-time SP recordings with Sony's last evolution of ATRAC1. I bet the market for hacking the best music format of all time is small these days, but this is still incredibly cool.

In this guide, we'll build a very tiny Linux kernel, weighing in at 789 K, and requiring no MMU support. We'll write some userspace code and this will be deployed on a virtual RISC-V 64-bit machine, without MMU, and we'll run some tiny programs of our own. As a reminder, please go through the guide for a micro Linux distro to understand the concepts behind what we're doing today: building the kernel, initramfs, etc. This guide is basically a continuation of that one and an exercise in making an absolutely minimal Linux deployment for (in theory) extremely cheap hardware. This follows up on the mentioned earlier article.

Debian is a large, complex operating system, and a huge open source project. It's thirty years old now. To many people, some of its aspects are weird. Most such things have a good reason, but it can be hard to find out what it is. This is an attempt to answer some such questions, without being a detailed history of the project. The fact that Debian is a relatively slow-acting, complex democracy is probably why it has survived for so long, and why it's become the bedrock for so many derivative distributions.

Little did we realise then that Sierra was going to change all that, and by Mojave we'd be enduring 4,000 and more log entries in a second, when our Macs were feeling loquacious. That was because Apple introduced the Unified log, with its entries written not in plain text but compressed binary format. This was the death-blow for the casual reader of logs: for a start, the replacement Console app was unable to access any log entries made in the past, and its tools were, and remain, woefully inadequate for tackling the increasing torrent of log entries. Despite its many great strengths, the Unified log has suffered two problems that are limiting its usefulness in Sonoma: its diminishing period of coverage, and censorship. This article highlights some real problems with the logs in macOS. Logs are so crucial in finding out why something is happening to a system so having them limited or restricted would drive me nuts.

When it comes to famous operating systems for the Z80 and similar Zilog processors, the first and maybe only one to come to mind is CP/M, which was even made its presence known on the dual-CPU (8502 and Z80) Commodore 128. Yet Zilog also developed its own operating system, in the form of the comprehensively titled Z80 Operating System with Relocatable Modules and I/O Management (Z80-RIO for short). With limited documentation having survived, Ralf-Peter Nerlich has set out to retain and recover what information he can on RIO and the associated Programming Language Zilog (PLZ) after working with these systems himself when they were new. Catchy name, and awesome work to try and recover as much about it as possible.

In just a few days, Microsoft will end support for Windows Server 2012 after over 11 years on the market. Ironically, the launch of the server OS in 2012 was also the official end for another server product from Microsoft that had first gone on sale on October 10, 2007, nearly 16 years ago. It was called Windows Home Server, and it was an effort to expand Microsoft's home operating systems beyond just PCs. Windows Home Server was, in my opinion, a genius product that didn't have an audience. The idea of a very simple to set up and effectively forgettable PC with lots of storage somewhere down in the basement or the attic where the entire family backs up their important data and stores less important data is simply an excellent idea - but an idea that nobody wants. It's boring, people just opt for cloud storage instead, and it's yet another bag of money you have to spend on technology. I still like the idea, though. Even in the era of cloud storage, I would love to be able to buy a relatively simple PC with tons of storage that I can store my files and back-ups on. However, you can take it a step further - if friends and family you trust also have such a device, you can build a private network of cloud" storage devices to duplicate each other's back-ups for improved resilience and on-the-go accessibility. Everything would have to be encrypted, of course, but in such a way people could build their own little private clouds - away from the prying eyes of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others. Now, all the technologies exist to build something like that, but it would require quite a bit of technical knowledge and active maintenance, and is anything but easy. If plug-and-play boxes existed that did this - I wouldn't hesitate to buy a few and set them up at our home and those of my parents and parents-in-law.

I don't necessarily agree. These new editing tools in smartphones are nothing a semi-decent Photoshop user can't do in an afternoon, and editing photos is as old as photography itself. All these tools do is further democratise photo editing, and this was always going to happen, smartphones or not. Adding watermarks or other markers is never going to work, since even if it's entirely unfalsifiable - a big if - the vast majority of people encountering edited photos would not go and look at the metadata or whatever to check of the photo is real or not. If people still fall for obvious bullshit like antivax talking points or flat earth hoaxes, a bunch of technobabble metadata isn't going to stop them.

The VAX served DEC well throughout the '80s and into the '90s, but as the latter decade went on, DEC began to face stiff competition from UNIX vendors, particularly Sun Microsystems. DEC struggled to change with the times, and the company ultimately failed. In 1998, DEC was acquired by Compaq, and in 2001, Compaq was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. The DEC line, including the VAX/VMS system, was discontinued and faded from the market. And yet it lives on today. Here's how. Getting a DEC Alpha machine has been on my list for a long time, but they're in very high demand, and extremely expensive. It's quite impressive to see DEC's continuing legacy laid out like this.

In addition to several new full-screen utilities, like DEFRAG to defragment your hard disk (licensed from Symantec), MSBACKUP to efficiently backup your hard disk (also licensed from Symantec), and MSAV to check for viruses (licensed from Central Point Software), there were a number of new command-line programs, such as CHOICE, DELTREE, MOVE, MSCDEX, and SMARTDRV. But the biggest addition to MS-DOS 6.00 was a new feature called DoubleSpace (dubbed MagicDrive" internally) that automatically compressed everything on your hard disk, providing up to double" the amount of effective disk space - or more, or less, depending on how compressible your files were overall. Despite growing up with MS-DOS since our first computer was a 286 PC in 1990 or so, I never used any of these advanced features. I was 6-7, and just wanted to play games, basically. It's only now that I'm much older that I actually admire the crazy things people have managed to squeeze out of - or into - DOS.

Writing a cycle-accurate emulator for a computer system is more than just understanding all the CPU instruction timings. A computer is a complete system with peripherals, interrupts, IO bus signals, and DMA. All this comes with an array of different timings and quirks. When software like Area 5150 is written that requires perfect cycle timing, it can be a challenge to provide the level of accuracy needed for the software to function. Area 5150 in particular requires precise coordination with the CGA's CRTC chip and timer interrupts to begin the end credits demo effect at precisely the right time. It would be very handy then if we could somehow peek into the operation of the system while it was running and understand how all these parts interact. As it turns out, we can! This process is typically referred to as bus sniffing', and there's a lot of a technical information out there on the topic in general. Sniffing can be done on everything from ethernet networks to vending machines, and you can even bus sniff your car. This article will specifically discuss sniffing the IBM PC 5150. A very in-depth and technical article, and one that can easily lead to another weekend project.

I want to address a controversy that has gripped the Rust community for the past year or so: the choice by the prominent async runtimes" to default to multi-threaded executors that perform work-stealing to balance work dynamically among their many tasks. Some Rust users are unhappy with this decision, so unhappy that they use language I would characterize as melodramatic. What these people advocate instead is an alternative architecture that they call thread-per-core." They promise that this architecture will be simultaneously more performant and easier to implement. In my view, the truth is that it may be one or the other, but not both. A very academic discussion.

Windows users who have installed the preview update may see advertisement when they interact with Copilot. Asking Copilot for the best gaming laptops returns five suggestions, similar to what Bing Chat would provide, and ads at the end of the output. Copilot for Windows has barely shipped and Microsoft is already using it to push ads into the operating system you paid for. AI" is just a fancy autocomplete designed to push ads. Windows is grim.

While this has been a hunch for a while among the Windows enthusiast community, a new leak seems to be further providing somewhat solidifying evidence that it could indeed be the case, that Microsoft's next-gen OS, casually referred to as Windows 12, could be a subscription-based OS. I have no innate issue with the subscription model for software - especially in the mobile world, it makes perfect sense for indie developers, as it's a far more sustainable model than charging the single charge of 0.99 that Apple and Google drove the market down to. I also think it makes sense for more complex desktop software, like an office suite or some of the translation software I use. The subscription pricing usually ends up being cheaper than buying the latest version every few years, anyway. For Windows though - I'm not so sure. Windows is already loaded with ads and adware, and it's only getting worse. Paying a monthly or yearly fee to have ads served to me seems dystopian, at best.

Get ready for the contents of your files in Microsoft OneDrive to be scanned and ingested by Microsoft's AI" efforts. As announced at Build in May and again in September we are bringing Copilot to your files in SharePoint and OneDrive so you can ask open-ended questions related to an individual file or get a summary of the content. And you can do this without opening the file and no matter where it lives, in OneDrive, SharePoint or Teams. We expect Copilot in OneDrive to become available by December for all customers who have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. I have still not used any of these AI" tools, other than like twice to see what the fuss was about. Nothing they can supposedly do entices me, and the amount of nonsense they spew on a daily basis would make a Russian troll farm manager blush. I genuinely feel for all those Windows users who'll have to deal with this nonsense.

Lenovo is forecasting that the vast majority of its devices will be repairable by 2025 - as will the repair parts themselves - but it is not intending to specify where customers should have their kit fixed. On repairability, we have a plan that by 2025 more than 80 percent of the repair parts will be repaired again so that they they enter into the circular economy to reduce the impact to the environment." He added: More than 80 percent of our devices will be able to be repaired at the customer, by the customer or by the channel and we are enabling this with a design for serviceability kind of approach." That's excellent news, and I hope it's a promise they'll keep. The right to repair movement is scoring win after win lately, and it seems the tide has really turned on this one. It's not just nerds anymore - regular people, common media, and even larger companies are beating the drum now.

Following preliminary objections over Google's data terms, set out back in January by Germany's antitrust watchdog, the tech giant has agreed to make changes that will give users a better choice over its use of their information, the country's Federal Cartel Office (FCO) said today. The commitments cover situations where Google would like to combine personal data from one Google service with personal data from other Google or non-Google sources or cross-use these data in Google services that are provided separately, per the authority. European countries and the EU continue to get shit done when it comes to reigning in big tech.

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has recently been working on further refinements to HAMMER2 for the next DragonFlyBSD operating system release. The latest HAMMER2 activity in the past few days has included improving its CPU performance and adding a new hammer2 recover" directive. The HAMMER2 recover support allows for recovering/undoing single files as well as preliminary support to recover entire directory structures. DragonFlyBSD always feels like the one nobody talks about or uses, with FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD taking the spotlight instead. Are any of you folks using it? How has it been?

Google unveiled the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro phones and the Pixel Watch 2 today, and while I no longer spend too many words on new phone releases on OSNews these days, this new phone does come with a rather major promise by Google. The Pixel 8 will get seven years of Android OS updates with security patches, as well as quarterly Feature Drops. Launching with Android 14, the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro will see updates to Android 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21 - assuming the naming doesn't change before 2030. We'll have to see if Google keeps its promise - not an unreasonable concern - but if they do, this is unprecedented in the Android world, and even surpasses Apple's OS support for the iPhone. This is the kind of meaningful, important dedication I like to see, and I sincerely hope Google sticks to its promise. Regardless, the combination of some of the new camera features - which are great for taking photos and videos of small children, which I have now - and this support promise, as well as my carrier offering a free Pixel Watch 2 with any Pixel 8 Pro purchase, has made it pretty easy for me to choose the Pixel 8 Pro as my next phone when my contract runs out 12 October.

Google has released Android 14 - for Pixel devices, anyway. Android Police's review summarises this rather small release: After months and months of beta testing, Android 14 has finally arrived in stable. There was a tremendous buildup of excitement around this release after the rather lackluster Android 13, which only introduced some small refinements following the big Android 12 design refresh on Pixel phones. Android 14 certainly stays true to the look that Google established with Material You two years ago, but it adds much-needed refinement and customization to the mix. While the beta was buggier than usual, the final release is making up for this long period of bugs with tons of new features, thoughtful design improvements, and a more polished experience all over the place. Google's own release announcement isn't exactly long either, so there isn't that much interesting going on in Android 14, it seems.

Redox OS, the Rust-based operating system aiming to be a general purpose operating system, has detailed its priorities for 2023 and 2024, and there's ambitious stuff in there. First, the project wants to shoe up its support for server tooling so that Redox can host its own website. This will require porting a number of popular server tools, like Apache, Nginx, and so on. Second, they also want Redox to be self-hosting in the sense that it can host its own developer tooling, a project they've basically been working on since day one. Furthermore, a stable ABI is a must before Redox can reach 1.0.0. Before Redox can reach Release 1.0 status, we need to establish a stable ABI. This means that application binaries will be able to run on future versions of Redox without having to be recompiled. Our approach is to make our C library, relibc, the interface for the stable ABI, and to make relibc a dynamic library. This will allow us to make changes at the system call level without impacting the Redox ABI. Applications will just load the latest relibc at run time. Work needs to be done on our dynamic library support, as well as to continue to extend relibc functionality. We will also need to change programs that are currently using Redox system calls directly to use relibc instead. And finally, Redox intends to be able to run COSMIC, the Rust-based desktop environment System76 is working on for their Linux distribution. Redox' main developer works at System76, so there's some strong ties between System76 and Redox. This effort will include porting several applications, but also Wayland, GTK, Qt, and others, which should make porting Linux applications relatively easy. These are a set of ambitious goals, but I doubt they'd set them so specifically if they thought it'd be a fool's errand.

When Apple decides to end update support for your Mac, you can either try to install another OS or you can trick macOS into installing on your hardware anyway. That's the entire point of the OpenCore Legacy Patcher, a community-driven project that supports old Macs by combining some repurposed Hackintosh projects with older system files extracted from past macOS versions. Yesterday, the OCLP team announced version 1.0.0 of the software, the first to formally support the recently released macOS 14 Sonoma. Although Sonoma officially supports Macs released mostly in 2018 or later, the OCLP project will allow Sonoma to install on Macs that go back to models released in 2007 and 2008, enabling them to keep up with at least some of the new features and security patches baked into the latest release. OpenCore Legacy Patcher is an indispensable tool for Mac users, since a lot of machines no longer support by Sonoma are perfectly fast and capable enough to run Apple's new release. No longer supporting machines that are only five years old is absolutely bonkers, and should simply not be legal. It's a sad state of affairs people will have to resort to community tools, but at least the option is there.

The basic premise of Microsoft's Arm64EC is that a single virtual address space can contain a mixture of ARM64 code and X64 code; the ARM64 code executes natively, whereas the X64 code is transparently converted to ARM64 code by a combination of JIT and AOT compilation, and ARM64 X64 transitions can happen at any function call/return boundary. I wish Windows on ARM would get more traction, because I want more ARM laptops to run Linux on. It seems clear by now that Linux OEMs are not at all interested in, or capable of, making and selling ARM hardware on their own, despite Linux being in an excellent position to make using ARM on a laptop or desktop almost entirely transparent without even needing to resort to translation layers or similar tools.

As I was preparing the Windows NT RISC exhibit for VCF west, I realized that I'm missing a rather important piece of the history. While I will be showing the potentially last DEC Alpha Windows build ever - AXP64 2210, I don't have anything earlier than NT 3.51. I would be nice to showcase the very first RTM version - NT 3.1. From time perspective, NT did not get popular until the version 3.5 and later. Windows NT 3.1 would be considered rare even on a 386, let alone on a RISC CPU! So what RISC hardware does Windows NT 3.1 run on? The early non-x86 versions of Windows NT are absolutely fascinating, and finding a machine that can run one of these versions has always been high on my list, together with the various Itanium versions of Windows. I can't quite explain what's so exciting and attractive about it, but it feels like you're doing something unholy, something you're not supposed to be doing. Especially the later versions, deeper into the Wintel era, feel like they're illegal.

Microsoft is making the Windows 11 setup process a little more entertaining, at least on some laptops. I unboxed the Surface Laptop Studio 2 yesterday (read Monica Chin's review here) and noticed that Microsoft now prompts you to play the modern version of its SkiFree game while you wait for updates to be applied. A fun little touch.

Meta is preparing to charge EU users a $14 monthly subscription fee to access Instagram on their phones unless they allow the company to use their personal information for targeted ads. The US tech giant will also charge $17 for Facebook and Instagram together for use on desktop, said two people with direct knowledge of the plans, which are likely to be rolled out in coming weeks. The move comes after discussions with regulators in the bloc who have been seeking to curb the way big tech companies profit from the data they get from their users for free, which would be a direct attack on the way groups such as Meta and Google generate their profits. Is anyone really stupid enough to think that even if you pay, Facebook won't monetise your behaviour anyway? Sure, you might not see ads, but paying customer or not, your data is still going to be used for literally everything else Facebook does. I hope people don't fall for this nonsense.

The full-featured, high-precision spreadsheet application for the Pico-8 that nobody asked for has finally arrived! PicoCalc is a feature-complete clone of the 1979 classic VisiCalc, which introduced the world to an entirely new category of business application. Steve Jobs said of VisiCalc, it's what really drove - propelled - the Apple ][. This is a few years old already, but still an amazing piece of work.

Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here's how it works. Say you search for children's clothing." Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for NIKOLAI-brand kidswear," making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren't searching for at all. It's not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don't get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can't escape. This shouldn't surprise anyone, if true (the author used to work at DuckDuckGo). Pushing Google Search users towards stores that also advertise on Google just makes sense for the company. It is yet another contributing factor as to why Google Search has become so bad.