OSnews

The Verge has an excellent write-up of Satya Nadella's day in court during the Google antitrust trial today. The power of defaults is one of the central questions of the entire US v. Google case and will continue to come up. (The witness after Nadella is former Neeva CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, who has also said his search engine was crushed in part because overcoming Google's default status was so difficult.) Nadella is in the rare position to have seen both sides - what it's like to be the default and what it's like to contend when you're not - and argued resolutely that defaults are the only thing that truly matters. Google, on the other hand, says that building the best product is the only thing that truly matters and that Bing has never come close to doing that. Which side of that debate Judge Mehta agrees with may be the story of this entire trial. It's an excellent and at times even funny read.

One aspect of the jailbreak scene that always seemed like black magic to me, though, was the process of jailbreaking itself. The prospect is pretty remarkable: take any off-the-shelf iPhone, then enact obscene rituals and recite eldritch incantations until the shackles drop away. The OS will now allow you to run any code you point at it, irrespective of whether the code has gone through Apple's blessed signing process, paving the way for industrious tweak developers like myself. A few weeks ago, I got a hankering to remove this shroud of mystery from jailbreaks by writing my own. One caveat: the really juicy work here has been done by my forebears. I'm particularly indebted to p0sixninja and axi0mx, who have graciously shared their knowledge via open source. The fact this isn't a switch to flip in iOS somewhere is idiotic and will soon come to an end thanks to the EU, but at least it enticed some very creative and gifted souls to learn and experiment.

All Chromebook Plus laptops offer faster processors and double the memory and storage, giving you the power to get more done, easily. All Chromebook Plus laptops also come with a Full HD IPS display - which means you get a full 1080p HD experience when watching streaming content, and crisp, clear viewing for reading, creating content or editing photos and videos. Finally, there's a 1080p+ webcam with temporal noise reduction for smoother, more lifelike video calls. So basically, because the Chromebook market is dominated by cheap crap, Google has had to create a new category of Chromebooks that are slightly less crap, so that buyers who don't want crap but instead want slightly less crap can distinguish the slightly less crap from the crap so they end up buying the crap they want. Like gaming Chromebooks, I give this like two years before Google sees something shiny and this whole Chromebook Plus thing is dead and gone.

A lot has changed in 20 years. In 2003, the main question was: what encoding is this? In 2023, it's no longer a question: with a 98% probability, it's UTF-8. Finally! We can stick our heads in the sand again! The question now becomes: how do we use UTF-8 correctly? Let's see! Everything you ever wanted to know about how Unicode works, and what UTF-8 does. Plus some annoying website design tricks, for which In apologise, even if it's obviously not our site we're linking to.

Budgie 10.8.1 is the first minor release in the 10.8 series of our Budgie Desktop environment. This release adds dark style preference support, squashes some bugs around our new StatusNotifierItem implementation, adds keyword support for search, and more! The Budgie Desktop renaissance continues.

The X220 ThinkPad is the greatest laptop ever made and you're wrong if you think otherwise. No laptop hardware has since surpassed the nearly perfect build of the X220. New devices continue to get thinner and more fragile. Useful ports are constantly discarded for the sake of design". Functionality is no longer important to manufacturers. Repairability is purposefully removed to prevent users from truly owing" their hardware. It's a mess out there. But thank goodness I still have my older, second-hand X220. I don't agree with the author, but he's also not wrong. Luckily, things do seem to be improving somewhat, thanks to Framework being a decent success. Other OEMs are starting to make some noise about repairability, as are lawmakers around the world. We might be getting a new X220.

I picked pico-8 as the engine simply because I know I work better with constraints and the limited size and capabilities of it would ensure I would not attempt perfection since I know I do not have the skills to reach it anyway. I have been a professional developer for 10+ years so code syntax is not my biggest issue, but knowing how to architect things, deal with the art and sound. By sticking within what pico-8 provides I thought I could achieve this, where I had previously failed with tools like Game Maker. Pico-8 really seems like a great first experience with game development.

I often see a lot of confusion with regard to OpenBSD, either assimilate as a Linux distribution or mixed up with FreeBSD. Let's be clear, OpenBSD is a stand alone operating system. It came as a fork of NetBSD in 1994, there isn't much things in common between the two nowadays. While OpenBSD and the other BSDs are independant projects, they share some very old roots in their core, and regularly see source code changes in one being imported to another, but this is really a very small amount of the daily code changes though. Just like OSNews (more information about the OSNews Gemini capsule), this article is also available on Gemini.

A circuit called the flip-flop is a fundamental building block for sequential logic. A flip-flop can hold one bit of state, a 0" or a 1", changing its value when the clock changes. Flip-flops are a key part of processors, with multiple roles. Several flip-flops can be combined to form a register, holding a value. Flip-flops are also used to build state machines", circuits that move from step to step in a controlled sequence. A flip-flops can also delay a signal, holding it from from one clock cycle to the next. Intel introduced the groundbreaking 8086 microprocessor in 1978, starting the x86 architecture that is widely used today. In this blog post, I take a close look at the flip-flops in the 8086: what they do and how they are implemented. In particular, I will focus on the dynamic flip-flop, which holds its value using capacitance, much like DRAM. Many of these flip-flops use a somewhat unusual enable" input, which allows the flip-flop to hold its value for multiple clock cycles. More in-depth chip content. This type of content has been coming up a lot lately.

Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 will end onOctober 10, 2023. After this date, these products will no longer receive security updates, non-security updates, bug fixes, technical support, or online technical content updates. If you cannot upgrade to the next version, you will need to use Extended Security Updates (ESUs) for up to three years. ESUs are available for free in Azure or need to be purchased for on-premises deployments. Windows Server 2012 was the first release of Windows Server to entirely remove the Windows classic UI, if I recall correctly and my quick research today didn't fail me. Meaning, if you want the latest version of Windows that still carries the classic user interface, you're going to have to go all the way back to Windows Server 2008.

It seems the new iPhone 15 Pro is having overheating issues, and while I normally don't really care and don't mention this sort of nonsense, I found Apple's response to the issue... Peculiar. Furthermore, Apple tells 9to5Mac that recent updates to certain third-party apps are causing them to overload the system. The company says it's working directly with those developers to fix the issues. According to Apple, some of the apps overloading the iPhone CPU and causing devices to overheat are Asphalt 9, Instagram, and Uber. Instagram issued a fix for the problem on September 27, Apple says. Apple designs and builds the SoC, the thermal system, the outer casing, the operating system, the APIs, and is the gatekeeper for every application that runs on an iPhone - and yet the company still blames third party developers? How is it even possible that any of these applications can cause unexpected overheating in the first place, and how, if the App Store review process is put in place to protect users, did nobody at Apple catch this during the review process? If they can't even detect and stop applications that can physically damage your iPhone, how on earth can anyone trust them to stop malware, spyware, and other crapware? I can't believe people still fall for this.

Earlier this week, Microsoft started rolling out the Moment 4 update for Windows 11. The update also included Windows Copilot, a generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) that replaces Cortana and offers to perform certain tasks for the users. However, if you are not interested in having additional bloatware on your system then there are ways to remove or disable Windows Copilot on Windows 11. The steps will depend on whether you have Windows 11 or Windows 11 Pro. As far as I can tell, this only hides Copilot - it doesn't actually remove it. If you want to actually remove Copilot, go here or here and follow the instructions.

Twenty years ago, a group of friends shot a Matrix fan film on a limited budget. Sharing their creation with the rest of the word initially appeared to be too expensive, but then they discovered a new technology called BitTorrent. Fast forward two decades and their Fanimatrix" release is the oldest active torrent that's still widely shared today. That's amazing. When reading the headline, I assumed it'd be some copyrighted blockbuster - not something the creators actually wanted to share via BitTorrent.

Another week of KDE Plasma 6 big smashing and new features, and it's a long list of good stuff. The biggest news this week: The Overview and Desktop Grid effects have been merged together into one, with fluid and natural-feeling touchpad gestures to transition between all states. It's really awesome work, and also fixed a ton of open bug reports! There's quite a few other things in here, such as indicators for when the camera is in use in the system tray, fixes for floating panels, improved systemd integration so killing processes when logging out should be less buggy, and a whole lot more.

A collection of modern/faster/saner alternatives to common UNIX commands. Quite a few of these are written in Rust - if you want more Rust alternatives to existing popular tools, there's a list for that, too.

So, what's in the document that Google didn't want to get out? The document in question contains meeting notes that Google's vice president for finance, Michael Roszak, created for a course on communications," Bloomberg reported. In his notes, Roszak wrote that Google's search advertising is one of the world's greatest business models ever created" with economics that only certain illicit businesses" selling cigarettes or drugs" could rival." Beyond likening Google's search advertising business to illicit drug markets, Roszak's notes also said that because users got hooked on Google's search engine, Google was able to mostly ignore the demand side" of fundamental laws of economics" and only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales." This was likely the bit that actually interested the DOJ. We could essentially tear the economics textbook in half," Roszak's notes said. Juicy documents from an abusive monopolist are always a fun read.

With today's release of kmod 31, Linux's modprobe utility for loading kernel modules can finally allow arbitrary paths to allow loading new kernel modules from anywhere on the file-system. Surprisingly it took until 2023 for allowing Linux's modprobe to accept loading kernel modules from any arbitrary path. Rather than just specifying the module name and then looking up the module within the running kernel's modules directory, modprobe can now allow passing a path to the module. Relative paths are also supported when prefixed with ./" for the path to the desired module. Finally.

I recently got my hands on an ordinary-looking iPhone-to-HDMI adapter that mimics Apple's branding and, when plugged in, runs a program that implores you to Scan QR code for use." That QR code takes you to an ad-riddled website that asks you to download an app that asks for your location data, access to your photos and videos, runs a bizarre web browser, installs tracking cookies, takes sensor data," and uses that data to target you with ads. The adapter's app also kindly informed me that it's sending all of my data to China. Just imagine what kind of stuff is happening that isn't perpetrated by crude idiots, but by competent state-sponsored actors. I don't believe for a second that at least a number of products from Apple, Dell, HP, and so on, manufactured in Chinese state-owned factories, are not compromised. The temptation is too high, and even if, say, Apple found something inside one of their devices rolling off the factory line - what are they going to do? Publicly blame the Chinese government, whom they depend on for virtually all their manufacturing? You may trust HP, but do you trust the entire chain of people and entities controlling their supply chain?

We describe a model for multiple threads of control within a single UNIX process. The main goals are to provide extremely lightweight threads and to rationalize and extend the UNIX Application Programming Interface for a multi-threaded environment. The threads are intended to be sufficiently lightweight so that there can be thousands present and that synchronization and context switching can be accomplished rapidly without entering the kernel. These goals are achieved by providing lightweight user-level threads that are multiplexed on top of kernel-supported threads of control. This architecture allows the programmer to separate logical (program) concurrency from the required real concurrency, which is relatively costly, and to control both within a single programming model. The introduction to a 1991 USENIX paper about SunOS' multithread architecture. Just the kind of light reading material for an Autumn weekend.

In March, Microsoft began injecting ads into Bing Chat conversations to generate revenue from this new platform. However, incorporating ads into Bing Chat has opened the door to threat actors, whoincreasingly takeoutsearch advertisements to distribute malware. And in case you're thinking, whatever, I don't use these online chatbots anyway", just remember that all this stuff is now built right into Windows and Microsoft Office, so one wrong click and you're right in the thick of it. Excellent.

But come 2020, a new round of talks opened between Apple and Microsoft. Bloomberg reports that Microsoft executives met with Apple's Services VP Eddy Cue to discuss the possibility of acquiring Bing." These talks were reportedly exploratory" and never reached an advanced stage," Bloomberg says. The revenue generated from its deal with Google was a key reason" Apple's talks to acquire Bing never advanced beyond that stage. The company also had concerns about Bing's ability to compete with Google in quality and capabilities," today's report explains. Apple Bing sounds like something from hell. Imagine being forced to use Bing on every Apple device you own. That has to be one of the circle of hell Dante decided to not tell us about.

Today, we're delighted to announce the launch of Raspberry Pi 5, coming at the end of October. Priced at $60 for the 4GB variant, and $80 for its 8GB sibling (plus your local taxes), virtually every aspect of the platform has been upgraded, delivering a no-compromises user experience. Raspberry Pi 5 comes with new features, it's over twice as fast as its predecessor, and it's the first Raspberry Pi computer to feature silicon designed inhouse here in Cambridge, UK. While I personally think there are more interesting alternatives to the Pi, there's no doubt the Pi is the most compatible and most popular of these small board computers, and a big upgrade like this is definitely welcome - assuming they can actually stock these at fair prices at the end of October, when the fifth iteration of the Pi actually launches.

Microsoft's free upgrade offer for Windows 10/11 ended July 29, 2016. The installation path to obtain the Windows 7/8 free upgrade is now removed as well. Upgrades to Windows 11 from Windows 10 are still free. All good (?) things must come to an end. Maybe Windows 11 will end some day too.

COSMIC, the Rust-based desktop environment System76, makers of Pop!_OS are working on, has seen another month of work, and it turns out that it's already being used daily by the COSMIC team, which is always an important milestone. For instance, COSMIC continues its focus on keyboard users: Pop!_OS and COSMIC DE are built to stay out of your way so you can focus on getting things done. With Auto-tiling, new windows arrange themselves automatically on your screen to reduce the hassle. It's important, then, that rearranging tiled windows manually feels as seamless as possible. COSMIC's new window-swapping mode helps facilitate this seamlessness with, as the name suggests, an easy way to swap windows with your keyboard. They're also added dynamic settings - meaning, changing a setting applies it right away, instead of having to hit apply - as well as gesture support for touchpads. Furthermore, settings for panels have been implemented, so you can arrange and change your panels to your heart's content. Of course, there's more, so be sure to read their monthly update.

I encountered yet another discussion about OpenBSD PF versus FreeBSD PF. For those who are new to the discussion: OpenBSD developers created PF in 2001, and it rapidly improved to become the most approachable open source packet filter. FreeBSD ported PF over to its kernel in 2004, with occasional updates since. Today a whole bunch of folks who don't program echo cultish wisdom that one or the other version of PF has fallen behind, not kept up on improvements, or otherwise betrayed their community. My subtler comments have been misinterpreted, so let's try this. These claims are garbage. Contrary to what the peanut gallery of open source thinks, in general, the rule is that open source teams work together all the time, more often than not across project lines. Of course the OpenBSD developers are working together and sharing code when it comes to things like PF - they most likely share a lot of features and code, and while one of the two versions of PF might get a certain feature first, it will make its way to the other soon enough. These are professionals - not forum posters.

Caml Light is implemented as a bytecode compiler which made it highly portable. It is possible to create executables using the CAMLC.EXE command, but please be aware that the resulting binaries are not standalone when using the default linking mode, and the runtime system (CAMLRUN.EXE) is required to run them. The latest available release of Caml Light for DOS is version 0.7 released in 1995. Here's a fun project for the weekend.

Google is rolling out ChromeOS 117, and it's a very big update for Chromebooks that adds Material You, as well as other usability enhancements. A pretty big update to ChromeOS, and the Material You is definitely welcome - perhaps it fixes up some of the issues I had with ChromeOS when I reviewed it a few months ago. The quick settings panel has been completely redesigned, too, this update adds specific colour correction settings for people with certain eye conditions, and a whole lot more. The update will roll out over the coming days.

Two unusual companies, Valve Software and Igalia, are working together to improve the Linux-based OS of the Steam Deck handheld games console. The device runs a Linux distro called Steam OS 3.0, but this is a totally different distro from the original Steam OS it announced a decade ago. Steam OS 1 and 2 were based on Debian, but Steam OS 3 is based on Arch Linux, as Igalia developer Alberto Garcia described in a talk entitled How SteamOS is contributing to the Linux ecosystem. Valve's contributions to desktop Linux cannot be understated. Aside from Proton, the company also does a lot of work on graphics, as well as stuff like mentioned in the article. Without Valve, there would be no gaming on Linux - and it's gaming that's driving the recent surge in popularity of desktop Linux. Of course, it's still small compared to Windows and macOS, but the growth is undeniable.

Dotfiles are important. We use them every day for storing configuration for all kinds of applications, knowingly or otherwise. You know the ones, hidden in your $HOME directory, ~/.ssh/ for your ssh keys, or ~/.Xauthority (whatever the heck that does). Something you may not know is these are legacy locations for configuration. Please do not copy their behaviour. Your application's configuration may be the most important thing on a user's machine. There are now standardised locations on major platforms for applications to store user-specific configuration. Your application should not be dumping random files into an unconfigurable location in the user's home directory. This speaks to my soul.

We've shipped an update for Windows Subsystem for Android on Windows 11 to the Windows Subsystem for Android Preview Program. This update (2309.40000.2.0) includes improvements to platform reliability and functionality improvements. It updates the Chromium WebView to version 117, allows .cer files to be shared to Android, contains various Android 13 platform updates, and more. The Windows Subsystem for Android is available in the Windows Store.

Philips Hue products are about to get a whole lot worse - even the ones you already own. Their latest round of stupidity pops up a new EULA and forces you to take it or, again, you can't access your stuff. But that's just more unenforceable garbage, so who cares, right? Well, it's getting worse. It seems they are planning on dropping an update which will force you to log in. Yep, no longer will your stuff Just Work across the local network. Now it will have yet another garbage cloud" integration" involved, and they certainly will find a way to make things suck even worse for you. This should be illegal.

sysclean(8) is a system tool designed for help system administrator to keep their OpenBSD clean after upgrade. It walks the installed system and compare to a reference system, reporting to the user additional things in the installed system. The purpose is to point any elements that wouldn't be present if a fresh install was done, instead of an upgrade. This seems like a useful tool.

Whenever Apple releases a major OS update, as it did last Monday with iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and watchOS 10, developers - both large but especially indie - release a slew of day one updates to support the latest platform features. I understand how the Android update model is inherently different from Apple's. Namely, updates start out only on Google's Pixel phones, which have a relatively small market share, while Samsung's lion's share of Android phones are typically weeks or months behind. Third-party Android developers don't have an incentive to update on day one as the majority of their users won't be getting the new OS for quite some time. It really depends on what kind of applications you're looking at. Yes, the popular applications from big players like Facebook or Spotify are terrible at adopting new Android features, but there's definitely a vibrant community of developers who care these days, and it's entirely possible to use only applications that follow the latest features and visual style of Android. It's definitely not as good as it is on iOS, and it surely takes a bit longer, but it's also not nearly as bad as some make it out to be.

Apple released macOS 14.0 Sonoma today, and what's the best way to celebrate the new release? Why, the Ars Technica review, of course. So macOS Sonoma is a perfectly typical macOS release, a sort of Ventura-plus" that probably has one or two additions that any given person will find useful but which otherwise just keeps your Mac secure and avoids weird iCloud compatibility problems with whatever software is running on your phone. You probably don't need to run out and install it, but there's no real reason to avoid it if you're not aware of some specific bug or compatibility problem that affects the software you use. It's business as usual for Mac owners. Let's dive in. You can download and install it from the usual place if your Mac supports it.

Microsoft is releasing one of its biggest updates to Windows 11 today. It includes access to the new Windows Copilot, AI-powered updates to Paint, Snipping Tool, and Photos, RGB lighting support, a modernized File Explorer, and much more. Windows(R) 11 with ClippyTM 3.0 is yours for the taking.

The Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general today sued Amazon.com, Inc. alleging that the online retail and technology company is a monopolist that uses a set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly power. The FTC and its state partners say Amazon's actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon. I have been told that water is wet, but that it's very difficult to legally prove that water is wet.

Cory Doctorow: Right to repair has no cannier, more dedicated adversary than Apple, a company whose most innovative work is dreaming up new ways to sneakily sabotage electronics repair while claiming to be a caring environmental steward, a lie that covers up the mountains of e-waste that Apple dooms our descendants to wade through. Why does Apple hate repair so much? It's not that they want to poison our water and bodies with microplastics; it's not that they want to hasten the day our coastal cities drown; it's not that they relish the human misery that accompanies every gram of conflict mineral. They aren't sadists. They're merely sociopathically greedy. Tim Cook laid it out for his investors: when people can repair their devices, they don't buy new ones. When people don't buy new devices, Apple doesn't sell them new devices. A few weeks ago, when news broke that Apple had changed from opposing California's right to repair bill to supporting it, and the entire tech media was falling over itself to uncritically report on it, I instinctively knew something was up. Supporting right to repair was so uncharacteristic of Apple and Tim Cook, I just knew something was off. It turns out I was right. Instead of relying on the lack of right to repair laws, Apple is simply making it so that using any parts not approved by Apple in a repair would make your Apple device not function properly. They do so by VIN-locking, or parts-pairing as it's called in the tech industry, parts, and if the device's SoC detects that an unapproved repair is taking place, the device simply won't accept it, even if genuine Apple parts are being used. Trying to circumvent this parts-pairing violates the DMCA - and the DMCA is federal law, while California's right to repair bill it state law, meaning the DMCA overrules it. Doctorow lists various other things Apple does to limit your ability to repair devices, such as claiming to recycle" devices when you return them to Apple, only for the company to shred them instead to prevent their parts from making it into the repair circuit. Apple also puts tiny serial numbers on every single part, so that even when devices are scrapped for parts, usually in Asia, Apple can work together with US Customs to intercept and destroy these fully working parts when they enter the US. So, Apple supporting California's right to repair bill is entirely and utterly meaningless and hollow. It's all for show, for the optics, to mislead the gullible 20-somethings in the tech media. I knew something was up, and I was right.

Google will send Gmail's basic HTML view sailing into the great beyond starting in January 2024, after which time everyone who uses it will be switched to the service's far more modern Standard" view. The change appears to have been announced around September 19th in a Google support article. Though the vast majority of people use the Standard view on their PCs without question, the HTML version of Gmail has its perks. The stripped-down Gmail experience loads quickly, and users can access it even on very outdated machines or with much slower connections. Its leaner nature makes it useful in situations where the best you can muster is a 3G connection (3G died last year in the US, but still). I'm sure the HTML version also made tracking a lot more difficult.

Projects become unmaintained every day. This is a fact of life, and is not the issue I am taking with The Apache Software Foundation. It is the way the foundation, and its contributors, do not disclose information relating to the lack of substantial updates or changes for nearly a decade, and seems to intentionally mask the lack of development. I sometimes forget Open Office still exists. I have no idea why The Apache Software Foundation would regularly intentionally delete a few whitespaces to make it seem as if Open Office is still actively being developed.

I've always been fascinated by remote island communities, and few places are more remote and more island than St. Helena. They have a wonderful page about communications to, on, and from the island, and it's delightful. However you connect, the Internet on StHelena is slow and expensive! For technical details and pricing information please contact Sure. Assuming you are a visitor you are best to access the Internet via your mobile (cell) Device. Otherwise you will not have a telephone account so will need to use one of the few Internet Kiosks, mostly in Jamestown, which are very expensive. If you are staying longer you can sign up for an Internet access package, billed on your telephone account (this should be available even if you are renting accommodation but check with your landlord). Broadband Internet was introduced in 2007, but be aware that data transfer speeds on StHelena are considerably slower than in most other countries and monthly data transfer limits are very low. None of the above will be surprising. There's tons of information and history on this page, and it's definitely worth a read.

Intel is a newcomer to the world of discrete graphics cards, and the company's Xe architecture is driving its effort to establish itself alongside AMD and Nvidia. We've seen Xe variants serve in integrated GPUs and midrange discrete cards, but Intel's not stopping there. Their GPU ambitions extend to the datacenter and supercomputing markets. That's where Ponte Vecchio (PVC) comes in. Like other compute-oriented GPUs, PVC goes wide and slow. High memory bandwidth and FP64 throughput differentiate it from client architectures, which emphasize FP32 throughput and use caching to reduce memory bandwidth demands. Compared to Nvidia's H100 and AMD's MI210, PVC stands out because it lacks fixed function graphics hardware. H100 and MI210 still have some form of texture units, but PVC doesn't have any at all. Combine that with its lack of display outputs, and calling PVC a GPU is pretty funny. It's really a giant, parallel processor that happens to be programmed in the same way you'd program a GPU for compute. Another great feature from Chips and Cheese. Speaking of Intel - the company also unveiled that Meteor Lake CPUs are coming to the desktop in 2024.

Years later, Todd Mortimer and I developed RETGUARD. At the start of that initiative he proposed we protect all functions, to try to guard all the RET instructions, and therefore achieve a state we call ROP-free". I felt this was impossible, but after a couple hurdles the RETGUARD performance was vastly better than the stack protector and we were able to protect all functions and get to ROP-free (on fixed-sized instruction architecures). Performance was acceptable to trade against improved security. RETGUARD provides up to 4096 cookies per DSO, per-function, but limited to avoid excessive bloat. It is difficult to do on architectures with very few registers. Code was only written for clang, there is no gcc codebase doing it. clang code for some architectures was never written (riscv64). I hope that sets the stage for what is coming next. We were able to enable RETGUARD on all functions because it was fast. Look, I have no clue what any of this means. None at all. However, I do somewhat grasp this is a big deal... I just need OSNews readers to explain in layman's terms why, exactly.

On github, there has been an increasing trend of using Staleness detector bots" that will auto-close issues that have had no activity for X amount of time. In concept, this may sound fine, but the effects this has, and how it poisons the core principles of Open Source, have been damaging and eroding projects for a long time, often unknowingly. I'm not a developer and even I can instantly see such bots would create countless problems. I had no idea such bots were being used.

Microsoft has opened a GitHub repository for a set of tools to create Windows drivers in Rust. This repo is a collection of Rust crates that enable developers to develop Windows Drivers in Rust. It is the intention to support both WDM and WDF driver development models. Note: This project is still in early stages of development and is not yet recommended for commercial use. We encourage community experimentation, suggestions and discussions! So both Linux and Windows are now experimenting with using Rust to write drivers.

The European Commission has fined Intel $400 million (376 million) for hindering competitors' access to the market through naked restrictions between 2002 and 2007. The fine comes after a long-running antitrust court battle dating back to 2009 when the Commission initially fined Intel a record $1.13 billion for abuse of dominance. While some of Intel's actions, like hidden rebates, were dropped on appeal due to lack of evidence of harm, the Commission upheld that Intel paid PC manufacturers to delay or limit products using AMD processors. Specifically, the Commission cited examples where Intel paid HP not to sell AMD-powered business PCs to small and medium businesses through direct channels from 2002-2005. It also paid Acer to delay the launch of an AMD-based notebook from late 2003 to early 2004. Intel also paid Lenovo to push back the launch of AMD notebooks by six months. While it's great that fines are being levied for these crimes, the problem is that the damage is already done and a fine won't actually undo said damage. Of course, there's no way to know exactly what the industry would've looked like had Intel not committed these crimes, but I feel like quite often these fines are more seen as a cost of doing business than as an actual detrimental punishment. It reminds me a lot of speeding tickets - they can be devastating to somebody of lower means, but to the upper classes they're just the cost of driving a car and barely even register. I'd be much more in favour for not just fining companies that violate antitrust, but also going after the people within those companies that enabled and advocated for such behaviour through massive personal fines and jail time. None of the people involved will feel even the slightest bit of sting from their actions, and will do it all over again next time they get the chance.

I had to do some digging into our archives to see if we ever covered GeckOS before, but apparently we haven't - and that's a shame. GeckOS is a pre-emptive multitasking operating system for the Commodore 64 and the PET, and should be easily portable to other 6502-based machines, and offers multithreading, TCP/IP networking, and more. Version 2.1 has just been released, and it adds a ton of new features and bugfixes.

In this article, we'll talk about building up a tiny (micro) Linux distribution" from scratch. This distribution really won't do much, but it will be built from scratch. We will build the Linux kernel on our own, and write some software to package our micro-distro. Lastly, we are doing this example on the RISC-V architecture, specifically QEMU's riscv64 virt machine. There's very little in this article that is specific to this architecture, so you might as well do an almost identical exercise for other architectures like x86. We recently went through the RISC-V boot process with SBI and bare metal programming for RISC-V, so this is just a continuation up the software stack. This is great content, and a very fun exercise for an Autumn weekend.

Cairo 1.18 was released today as the first major stable release to this 2D graphics library in five years. This vector-based graphics library is widely-used for a variety of purposes from GNOME's GTK toolkit to other apps making use of Cairo for targeting different back-ends from PDFs to OpenGL contexts. Mozilla Firefox, WebKit, Mono, and many other open-source projects are notable users of Cairo. Cairo is something most end users don't really have to think about or worry too much about, but it's a crucial part of the open source operating system world. The most interesting change in 1.18 is that it drops support for a variety of old back-ends, most notably Qt 4, BeOS, and OS/2.

The Wayland Color Management protocol has been years in the making and is needed for a client to specify the color space and HDR metadata of a surface. This color management protocol is ultimately needed for getting high dynamic range (HDR) support working out well within Wayland environments. This week an initial merge request was opened for implementing the draft color management protocol with the Weston reference compositor. This is an important part of getting HDR working properly on Wayland, and thus making sure the Linux desktop gets full, proper HDR suport. On a related note, the Wayland Wine driver has also seen some progress, adding basic window management capabilities.

Android and iOS share a common problem: they copied desktop text editing conventions, but without a menu bar or mouse. This forced them to overload the tap gesture with a wide range of actions: placing the cursor, moving it, selecting text, and invoking a pop-up menu. This results in an overly complicated and ambiguous mess-o-taps, leading to a variety of user errors. It's less of a problem if you only do short bursts of text in social media or messaging apps. But doing anything more complicated like an email gets tedious. However, in my user study on text editing, I was surprised to find that everyone had significant problems and rather severe workaround for editing text. With the extremely talented Olivier Bau, together we created a prototype called Eloquent, which offers a much simpler solution. We presented this work at UIST 2021. This is now one of my favourite articles I've ever read. I despise text input and text editing on mobile devices, whether they be Android or iOS. I hate it with the passion of a thousand burning suns, but it seems like nobody else cares. Luckily, the author of this article, Scott Jenson, a man with an impressive career doing UI work at Apple, Google, and others, agrees with me, and together with his colleagues, during his time at Google, he came up with an entirely different, touch-first way of editing text. The end result - be sure to watch the video to see it in action - immediately clicks for me. I want this. Now. This would be a massive usability improvement, and the fact it isn't in Android yet, despite being developed at Google, is further evidence Google has no clue how to make good ideas float to the top. Jenson explains why Eloquent, as they called their new input/editing system, won't ship with Android, while he expresses a bit more optimism Apple might be more open to rethinking mobile text editing: Unfortunately, shipping something like Eloquent would be challenging. First, as too many people mistakenly see text editing as done", there is little appetite to fix it. Second, users have been trained to cope with this error-prone approach for well over a decade. Asking people to change at this point would be hard. But most importantly, fixing text editing isn't seen as important enough in the war between Android and iOS. It's not the flashy feature that shifts your Net Promoter Scores. What I find ironic is that a fundamental change, like fixing text editing, could make people feel much more at ease using their phones and could be an enormous reason to switch. But it would be a slow burn and take years of steady effort. Android just can't think this way. Apple just might. Android needs this.