OSnews

It turns out Apple, Facebook, and Google were not as clever with their malicious compliance with the European Union's DMA as they thought they were, as the European Commission has opened investigations into their compliance plans. Especially Apple, who has been most public about its malicious compliance, seems to be the target. Today, the Commission has opened non-compliance investigations under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) into Alphabet's rules on steering in Google Play and self-preferencing on Google Search, Apple's rules on steering in the App Store and the choice screen for Safari and Meta's pay or consent model". The Commission suspects that the measures put in place by these gatekeepers fall short of effective compliance of their obligations under the DMA. In addition, the Commission has launched investigatory steps relating to Apple's new fee structure for alternative app stores and Amazon's ranking practices on its marketplace. Finally, the Commission has ordered gatekeepers to retain certain documents to monitor the effective implementation and compliance with their obligations. European Commission press release This is entirely unsurprising. Google's and Facebook's compliance plans were less scrutinised in the press, but all still raised questions about whether they would pass mustard. Apple's plans, meanwhile, were universally seen as deeply malicious and not compliant, and it seems the European Commission agrees. Apple's continuous wild, flailing attacks on the EU and the DMA certainly aren't helping, either. There's no denying Apple's behaviour has been deeply unprofessional and anti-European Union, which contrasts strongly with how Apple and Tim Cook operate in China, where they face much stricter rules than they do in the EU. Tim Cook is currently in China praising and buttering up to the Chinese totalitarian regime, while the company has been attacking the European Union and DMA almost non-stop for months now. It really shows where Apple's priorities lie. Meanwhile, Facebook's pay-for-privacy model was always going to be a hard sell at 10 a month, and as such, the company already announced it was going to cut that cost in half. Google's plans are a bit more nebulous, since it's a bit more difficult to see tangible results from things like search rankings, but it seems here, too, the European Commission has its worries about compliance. The European Commission intends to complete its investigations within a year, and if found in violation of the law, companies can be fined for up to 10% of their worldwide turnover, which can grow up to 20% for repeated infringements.

Update: a short notice on the blog post now reads that Floorp's code is now fully public again." It seems the developer has reversed course, which is good news. The original article continues below. Recently, a few people suggested I give the browser Floorp a try, a Firefox fork with some additional UI changes and additions. Since it was based on Firefox ESR, however, I saw no point in even trying it, because I prefer to be on the latest Firefox release. It seems I accidentally made the right choice, since yesterday the developers behind Floorp decided to take their modifications closed source. The appearance of Floorp forks - which, may I remind you, is a fork itself - seems to be the cause. I know it's not nice of me to say, but Floorp has been in too much demand. It am surprise to me that companies and organizations would fork a fork that I had created when I was still a teenager, and at first I was happy about it, but it was not beneficial to me, and on the contrary, it was mentally draining. There were forks that wanted to hide the fact that they were Floorp forks, forks that did not want to contribute to Floorp at all, forks that used the code for life and just changed the name of Floorp, and many other forks were born. Floorp blog It seems the developer of Floorp is rather young, and started the project as a teenager, and as such, I don't think we should be too harsh on them - I did some dumb things as a teenager - but complaining about forks of your own fork seems a bit disingenuous, regardless of how young and inexperienced you are. I understand seeing your work forked into competing browsers can be frustrating, but it's a core part of the open source world, especially if you yourself owe your product to forking, too.

While app icons will likely remain locked to an invisible grid system on the Home Screen, to ensure there is some uniformity, our sources say that users will be able to arrange icons more freely on iOS 18. For example, we expect that the update will introduce the ability to create blank spaces, rows, and columns between app icons. Joe Rossignol at MacRumors It's 2024 and iOS' Springboard is slowly catching up to the Palm OS launcher. I'm drowning in the innovation here.

For the past week I have been configuring hyprland and using it as my daily driver. Coming from major Desktop Environments like KDE or Gnome, this was definitely quite challanging, specially when implementing features that we take it for granted on these DEs, like screen sharing or screenshot annotating. In this post I will be going through all the tools and scripts I have been creating to configure this amazing Window Manager to my liking. xd1.dev Like I mentioned in my MNT Reform review, I'm not a fan of these build your own desktop environment" window managers and related tools, but there's no denying they're quite popular. This article is a good introduction to hyprland, one of the more popular window managers of this genre.

I saw this on a Linus Tech Tips video today, and it's pretty neat: the Khadas Mind is a tiny computer powered by an Intel Core i5-1340P or Core i7-1360P, but it has a souped-up PCIe connector at the bottom that allows you to hook it up to all kinds of other devices, like a graphics card, a dock, and so on. It looks slick and quite user-friendly, and according to the LTT video, the company intends to release the specs for the connector so that third parties can hook into it as well, but a promise is just that - a promise. It's way too early to tell if this will go anywhere - past attempts would suggest that sadly, it won't - but that doesn't mean it's not an incredibly awesome and seemingly workable implementation of the modular PC idea.

I hope what you take away from this post is that while Apple Pay is a great way to pay for things and that Apple did a great job mainstreaming digital wallets like this, what they do is not unique in the industry. DPANs are great for making it harder to track one person's purchases across multiple merchants and they make customers less at risk in the event of a data breach of payment card info. Matt Birchler The gist of the article is that all the things Apple claims are unique about Apple Pay are really not unique at all, and quite a few things Apple touts are just flat-out lies, such as merchants being unable to know what you buy or people being unable to track you when you use Apple Pay. Other digital wallets, from Google, Samsung, and others, work in the exact same way Apple Pay does, and even banks and similar companies implement their payment systems the way Apple Pay does. It's a case study in how Apple's marketing and PR bloggers manage to perpetuate a myth solely because so many people just assume it must be true. Apple wouldn't lie, right?

I've got two bits of related news that will affect the future of OSNews. The first bit of news kind of led to the second bit of news. You don't have to care much about former, but the latter will be important for where OSNews will be going from here on out. First, after 14 years, I've effectively quit my job as a translator - I am self-employed so there's no dramatic clearing of my desk of being led out by security, which is probably a little bit of a letdown to some of you. The translation industry is in the process of collapsing - you know why - and I've been feeling the squeeze for a while now, and I like going out on my own terms. I've known this day would come, and I'm not sad about it. My motto: it is what it is. Of course, this meant I had to think of what to do next. Well, I have decided to work on OSNews full-time. This is risky, scary, and I'm absolutely terrified of what this will mean. Right now, my OSNews income - ads plus Patreon - does not even remotely come close to what I earned as a translator, and as any translator will tell you, translating isn't exactly a cornucopia either. This means I've got some serious work ahead of me to change that. After talking things over with David, OSNews' owner who takes care of the commercial/advertisement side, we've already taken a few steps. First, we've switched hosting providers and saved considerably on our hosting costs in the process. Second, David changed advertising partners to one that will most likely yield us some better rates, but since I don't know much about that side of OSNews - as it should be - I can't comment much on it. There are two main ways in which I can increase OSNews' revenue, and that is by growing our readership, and by giving people more reasons to become a Patreon, make individual donations, or buy our merch. In other words, you can expect more original articles so that people will want to keep coming back, and possibly support me financially because they like what I do. A third avenue for revenue I'm exploring is sponsorships - this is a longer-term project, and I'm approaching and talking to several (tech) companies about this. If you happen to work for a company who would be a good fit for an OSNews weekly sponsorship, feel free to contact me for more information. The end goal: have OSNews be entirely funded by readers and sponsors, and remove all regular advertising. This all sounds great, but there is a dark side to this news, too. If all of this fails, if I am unable to attract more readers and make my work for OSNews financially sustainable, I'll have to find work elsewhere - and that would mean the end of OSNews. I'm not trying to be alarmist or scare you; I just want to be as honest and realistic as possible about where we stand. Anyway, this is a big deal for me. I've really only ever had one job, and that's being a translator, a job I am trained for with two university degrees to show for it. My only other job was a teenage thing where I worked at a hardware store (think hammers and screws, not computers) for eight years. I don't like taking risks with these sorts of matters, so I'm absolutely terrified, and while I believe there's a sustainable income hiding in this ol' website, it's not always clear how to get at it. Anyway, want to become a Patreon? Or a sponsor? Pretty please? Now would be kind of a really good time to do so.

The foundational tenet of the Cult of Mac" is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur. Call it Apple exceptionalism" - the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which allows for endless goal-post shifting by members of the Cult of Mac when Apple's sins are made manifest. Cory Doctorow An absolutely brilliant response to the DoJ lawsuit from Cory Doctorow. You notice this Apple exceptionalism" a lot right now because of the new laws in the EU and now the lawsuit by the US DoJ. Apple products being better is posited as a fact, a law of the universe, and as such, any claims, either through lawsuits or legislation, that Apple is doing something wrong, illegal, or anticompetitive are by definition false. Things that, according to them, make Apple products superior" can simply not be illegal. You also notice this a lot when it comes to the existence of Android. People who don't like being locked in or have issues with Apple's behaviour can just switch to Android, right? The thought that there are real, monetary costs to switching from iOS to Android - costs driven up by Apple's very behaviour - is irrelevant to them, because in the eyes of the tech pundit, everyone's rich. What we'll be discovering over the course of the DoJ lawsuit - a course that will take us years - is that the general public cares a lot less about Apple as a company than Apple tech pundits think it does. People have iPhones not because they love Apple, but because their previous phone was an iPhone, because of network effects, or a bit of both. I doubt the average (in this case) American gives a rat's ass about Apple, and are much more worried about the fact they have to live paycheck-to-paycheck in a dysfunctional shell of a democracy while being told the economy is doing just great.

The Department of Justice's antitrust division has come into its own, having filed its third tech monopoly lawsuit in four years. The accumulated experience shows up in the complaint, according to antitrust experts who spoke with The Verge about the complaint filed Thursday accusing Apple of violating antitrust law. The DOJ describes a sweeping arc of behaviors by Apple, arguing that it adds up to a pattern of illegal monopoly maintenance. Rather than focusing on two or three illegal acts, the complaint alleges that Apple engages in a pattern of behaviors that further entrench consumers into their ecosystem and make it harder to switch, even in the face of high prices and degraded quality. Lauren Feiner at The Verge It's been somewhat entertaining seeing Apple fanatics claim the complaint is bad, horrible, has no merit, has no chance in court, and that the DoJ has zero clue what it's doing - while actual experts are actually positively surprised by how the complaint seems better than they expected. I wonder whose judgement to trust more.

Federal investigators have ordered Google to provide information on all viewers of select YouTube videos, according to multiple court orders obtained by Forbes. Privacy experts from multiple civil rights groups told Forbes they think the orders are unconstitutional because they threaten to turn innocent YouTube viewers into criminal suspects. Thomas Brewster at Forbes United States law enforcement has been asking Google who watches certain YouTube videos, covering as many as 30,000 people per video. They wanted names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google accounts who had watched a video within a certain week's timeframe, and the IP addresses of everyone who watched the video without a Google account. That's an absolute crapton of data, all because they suspected one person of a money-laundering scheme. And this is just one example. Forbes could not determine if Google complied with the requests, but it does highlight the dangers of having so much data on one place.

So looking back, it is obvious that neither Atari or Commodore would really be able to succeed in the long-term, although perhaps one of them could have become the 3rd also-ran". For a while, Atari really thought they could be that third choice and some of their late-model computers have some impressive innovations. With that preamble over with, let's talk about the last Atari computer: the Falcon030. Paul Lefebvre In my mind, Atari is a game and console company, not a computer company - I don't have any sale figures, but I feel like the Atari general computers weren't quite as popular in The Netherlands as they were in some other places.

Picotron is a Fantasy Workstation for making pixelart games, animations, music, demos and other curiosities. It has a toy operating system designed to be a cosy creative space, but runs on top of Windows, MacOS or Linux. Picotron apps can be made with built-in tools, and shared with other users in a special 256k png cartridge format. Picotron website Picotron is very similar to PICO-8, but more powerful and with a few additional features - it's actually made by the same people as PICO-8. It also contains a small, toy' operating system to serve as a workspace, everything makes use of Lua, and any applications made with it can be shared using a special 256k PNG cartridge format. It's currently in alpha, and cost $11.99, and uses the early Minecraft model of a one-time purchase for access to all future updates. The FAQ has tons more information. It looks incredibly neat. I don't have much use for it, but I'm interested to see what people with actual skills will make with it.

Android 15 adds UI elements to ensure a consistent user experience across the satellite connectivity landscape." A system-level Auto-connected to satellite" notification conveys how You can send and receive messages without a mobile or Wi-Fi network" with a shortcut to Open Messages" or get more information. Meanwhile, note the status bar icon at the right. Speaking of Google Messages, Android 15 provides support for SMS/ MMS applications as well as preloaded RCS applications to use satellite connectivity for sending and receiving messages." Other apps will also be able to detect when a device is connected to a satellite, giving them more awareness of why full network services may be unavailable." Abner Li at 9To5Google 9To5Google also has a list of all the new features in this Developer Preview with copious amounts of screenshots.

The nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox web browser said today it is winding down its new partnership with Onerep, an identity protection service recently bundled with Firefox that offers to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites. The move comes just days after a report by KrebsOnSecurity forced Onerep's CEO to admit that he has founded dozens of people-search networks over the years. On March 14, KrebsOnSecurity published a story showing that Onerep's Belarusian CEO and founder Dimitiri Shelest launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active data broker called Nuwber that sells background reports on people. Onerep and Shelest did not respond to requests for comment on that story. Brian Krebs It's good that Mozilla has immediately responded properly to this discovery, but it does make one wonder - how did this happen in the first place? It seems like a service provider like this would be thoroughly vetted, especially considering Mozilla's stated mission and types of users. My worries about Firefox' future are no secret, and this gaffe certainly doesn't help reduce my worries. It's clear something went horribly wrong here, and my hope is that it's a random fluke, and not a sign of more structural problems in Mozilla's vetting process for potential partners.

Haiku published its latest monthly activity report, and this one is a veritable grab bag of a whole bunch of small fixes, improvements, and changes - there's really no tent pole features or major improvements this month. Going through the list, the items that jump out at me are updated ping and traceroute applications and work on improving FFmpeg, but there's so much more in there, so be sure to read the whole thing. At the end of the report, the Haiku project states about a possible fifth beta release: A few more tickets in the milestone were fixed, including the ICU upgrade" one, but a few were also added (some migrated from HaikuPorts that turned out to be regressions in Haiku or its buildtools, etc.). Haiku Activity and Contract Report, February 2024 So, beta 5 is not quite ready for prime time just yet, but it feels like it's getting closer.

Switch emulator Suyu-a fork of the Nintendo-targeted and now-defunct emulation project Yuzu-has been taken down from GitLab following a DMCA request Thursday. But the emulation project's open source files remain available on a self-hosted git repo on the Suyu website, and recent compiled binaries remain available on an extant GitLab repo. While the DMCA takedown request has not yet appeared on GitLab's public repository of such requests, a GitLab spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the project was taken down after the site received notice from a representative of the rightsholder." GitLab has not specified who made the request or how they represented themselves; a representative for Nintendo was not immediately available to respond to a request for comment. Kyle Orland at Ars Technica Self-hosting the code repository and binaries is probably the only way the Switch emulator can continue to reasonably exist. The issue with Switch emulation seems to be that the device is current, popular, and still makes endless amounts of money for Nintendo; it's very different from SNES or Mega Drive emulation, to name a few examples. While I personally don't think that should make Switch emulation off-limits or any less valid than emulating older systems, I can see how it would draw the ire of Nintendo more readily.

In a 2024 Game Developers Conference session titled Windows on Snapdragon, a Platform Ready for your PC Games," Qualcomm engineer Issam Khalil drove home that the unannounced laptops will use emulation to run x86/64 games at close to full speed. Those laptops may be coming fast. Qualcomm has confirmed it will launch Snapdragon X Elite systems this summer, and unannounced consumer versions of the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 are expected in May with those chips, sources told The Verge. Sean Hollister at The Verge I'm genuinely curious to see if they can fulfill this promise. I really want widespread availability of ARM laptops. My hope is that we end up with a more standardised ARM landscape, making it easier for operating systems to support these new machines.

For many years, Apple has built a dominant iPhone platform and ecosystem that has driven the company's astronomical valuation. At the same time, it has long understood that disruptive technologies and innovative apps, products, and services threatened that dominance by making users less reliant on the iPhone or making it easier to switch to a non-Apple smartphone. Rather than respond to competitive threats by offering lower smartphone prices to consumers or better monetization for developers, Apple would meet competitive threats by imposing a series of shapeshifting rules and restrictions in its App Store guidelines and developer agreements that would allow Apple to extract higher fees, thwart innovation, offer a less secure or degraded user experience, and throttle competitive alternatives. It has deployed this playbook across many technologies, products, and services, including super apps, text messaging, smartwatches, and digital wallets, among many others. Apple's conduct also stifles new paradigms that threaten Apple's smartphone dominance, including the cloud, which could make it easier for users to enjoy high-end functionality on a lower priced smartphone-or make users device-agnostic altogether. As one Apple manager recently observed, Imagine buying a Android for 25 bux at a garage sale and it works fine ... And you have a solid cloud computing device. Imagine how many cases like that there are." Simply put, Apple feared the disintermediation of its iPhone platform and undertook a course of conduct that locked in users and developers while protecting its profits. Critically, Apple's anticompetitive conduct not only limits competition in the smartphone market, but also reverberates through the industries that are affected by these restrictions, including financial services, fitness, gaming, social media, news media, entertainment, and more. Unless Apple's anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct is stopped, it will likely extend and entrench its iPhone monopoly to other markets and parts of the economy. For example, Apple is rapidly expanding its influence and growing its power in the automotive, content creation and entertainment, and financial services industries-and often by doing so in exclusionary ways that further reinforce and deepen the competitive moat around the iPhone. DoJ antitrust lawsuit vs. Apple The United States Department of Justice is filing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple.

What if the kind of laptop you're looking for just isn't available from any of the major or even minor manufacturers? You know exactly what you want out of a laptop, and while quite a few fulfill many of your requirements, the requirement that matters most just isn't being made. It's not a case of too expensive" or too cheap" - simply nobody will sell it to you. From HP, Dell, Apple, down to smaller and local OEMs, none of them can serve your particular set of needs. For me, that particular requirement, that particular need is that of the laptop with an 8'' to 10'' screen size. Even the most portable laptops sold by well-known brands today stop at 13'', often even 14'', with nowhere to go but up. I currently have a 13.3'' laptop - an otherwise excellent XPS 13 9370 with a gorgeous 4K display - but as much as I love it, it's just too big and heavy for me. I want something smaller, no bigger than roughly 10''. Why? Well, I use my laptop in exactly two locations: on the couch in one of our two living rooms, or in bed (okay that's technically three locations). That's it. I work from home on my workstation, I play games on my gaming PC, so I don't need big performance on the road, nor do I need a big portable display to make working on the go bearable. On top of all this, I have two small kids running around the house, so a laptop that is easier to quickly close and put out of harm's way is very welcome. And considering the most intensive workload it'll ever have to contend with is playing YouTube video, I don't need the latest Core i7 or Apple M3 either. Why not a tablet, then? First and foremost, I want to use a desktop operating system, not Android or iOS, since writing OSNews posts or doing a quick translation for my job are not fun experiences on mobile operating systems. On top of that, a tablet with a keyboard accessory often makes use of a kickstand and flappy keyboard, which are cumbersome to use on the couch, in bed, or on your lap. The exception here would be the iPad with a Magic Keyboard, but that's an incredibly expensive affair and an Apple product, so obviously a no-go. Luckily, while the kind of small laptop I'm looking for is not available from one of the major OEMs, there are a small number of specialised OEMs that do focus on making small laptops. Roughly, the devices they make fall into one of three pricing categories. First, there's the high-end - these usually start at around 800 or so and get well over 1000, and have a decent set of specs, often focused on gaming by opting for AMD APUs. A major player in this market is GPD, who've been offering products in this segment for years, and are actually a decently well-known brand at this point, even being featured on major YouTube channels like Linus Tech Tips. Then there's the very low end, a market segment drowning in the exact same 7'' laptop priced at 250 or so, sold under a variety of brand names, sporting the same low-end Celeron chip and rather crappy display. It's also quite thick, made out of cheap plastic, and every review I've seen of these are not particularly positive. Unless you know what you're getting into, do not buy these. They're e-waste trash. In recent times, however, a middle segment has slowly started to take shape, coming in price points in between the low and high end, with reasonable specifications and build quality, without going overboard. This was exactly what I was looking for. Aside from price and specifications, mini-laptops also come in a variety of different input layouts. Being smaller than other laptops, some compromises will have to be made, and it's this particular aspect that will most likely play a major role in which models appeal to you. The gaming-focused mini laptops will often come with dual joysticks and face buttons, while other models will come with a more traditional keyboard and trackpad, and the smallest laptops in this category ditch the trackpad in favour of a little sensor pad in the top-right of the keyboard, or a ThinkPad-style nipple. Having kept and eye on this market for years now, I knew exactly what I was looking for: I wanted a traditional keyboard and touchpad layout, with medium specifications, a capable display, and all-metal construction, for no more than roughly 400-500. Clearly, the time to strike was now, as the small, budget-oriented OEM Chuwi had just updated its 10'' mini laptop with Intel's latest low-power processor, the N100. The Chuwi Minibook X (2023), as it's called, has an all-aluminium construction, and comes with quite decent specifications, and I managed to snag a new model through their eBay store for a mere 320 (I asked them for a discount down from 400 , and they gave it; I did not mention who I was or that I run OSNews). It has the aforementioned Alder Lake Intel N100 - released earlier this year, it's an Intel 7 processor with 4 cores and 4 threads (so no hyperthreading) with a maximum turbo frequency of 3.4 Ghz, with a TDP of just 6 W. It's not going to compare well to the various Core i3/i5/i7 processors, of course, but considering the type of device, it makes perfect sense to opt for something like the N100. Furthermore, this device is packing 12 GB of LPDDR5 RAM running at 4800 Mhz, and my model comes with a 512 GB SSD. The display is a 10.3'' panel with a native resolution of 1920*1200, with a refresh rate of only 50Hz (although some people managed to reach 60Hz and even 90Hz), and support for touch. Ports-wise, it has two USB-C ports (one marked as compatible with charging - I haven't dared

GNOME46 has been released, and its packs a ton of new features and improvements. One of the headline improvements is the new global search feature. Files comes with a new global search feature in GNOME 46. The feature is simple: activate it by clicking the new search button, or by using the Ctrl+Shift+F shortcut, then enter your query to search all your configured search locations. Global search is a great way to jump directly into search, without having to think about where the items you want are located. The new feature also leverages GNOME's existing file search capabilities, including the ability to search the contents of files, and filter by file type and modification date. GNOME 46 release notes GNOME 46 also brings experimental support for variable refresh rate in Mutter, GNOME's window manager, the Files application has seen a lot of work to drastically improve performance, the Settings application has been reworked, OneDrive support has been added to online accounts, and much more. Remote login has also been greatly improved. GNOME's remote desktop experience has been significantly enhanced for version 46, with the introduction of a new dedicated remote login option. This allows remotely connecting to a GNOME system which is not already in use. Connecting in this way means that the system's display can be configured from the remote side, resulting in a better experience for the remote user. GNOME 46 will make it to your distribution of choice over the coming weeks and months.

Java 22 ships the final versions of the Foreign Function and Memory API as well as the Unnamed Variables and Patterns API. Plus Java 22 brings region pinning for the G1 garbage collector, statements before super(...) are in preview phase, a class-file API preview, support to launch multi-file source code programs, the latest work on the Java Vector API, Stream gatherers in preview, the second preview for structured concurrency programming, and various other additions. Michael Larabel at Phoronix You can find the GPL-licensed OpenJDK builds at the OpenJDK website.

A global theme on the KDE third party store had an issue where it executed a script that removed user's data. It wasn't intended as malicious, but a mistake in some shell parsing. It was promptly identified and removed, but not before doing some damage to that user. This has started a lot of discourse around the concept of the store, security and upstream KDE. With the main question how can a theme have access to do this? David Edmundson That some damage' was personal data loss, which is quite something to happen after installing a theme. KDE kind of shot itself in the foot here by having something called global themes', which is a combination of themes for various elements of the desktop, like the application style, icon theme, cursor theme, colour scheme, and so on, but also things like panel layout and even widgets, applets, and other things that can run code. Some of these global themes use shell scripts to implement the more advanced aspects of their themes, and all these things combined means that global themes installed through KDE's own built-in theme installer can cause some serious damage. The problem is getting some attention now, and I hope they can find a way to make this process more transparent for end users, so people know what they're getting themselves into. I'm not advocating for dumbing all this stuff down - this isn't iOS or whatever - but better communication, perhaps clearer labels and warnings are definitely needed.

Did you know we offer sponsorships at OSNews? A weekly sponsorship puts your display ad on our site for a week. We will make an introductory post at the start of the week, and a thank you post at the end of the week, which will both make it to our RSS feed and social accounts. OSNews gets about 450,000 visits per month with more than 32,000 registered users, spread out over North America and Europe. In addition, for any sponsorship you buy, you can opt to give a free weekly sponsorship to any open source and/or small project of your choosing. Does your company make use of an open source project you'd wish to help out? Let us know, and we'll see if they're interested in that free weekly sponsorship. Read our Sponsorship page for more information, or contact Thom Holwerda for sponsorship inquiries.

In order solve that problem, we started looking for some options and the most obvious one was QtQuick. It's a quite powerful framework and it's already used extensively in Plasma. So, in Plasma 5.24, we introduced basic support for implementing kwin effects written in QML and even added a new overview effect. Unfortunately, if you wanted to implement a QtQuick-based effect yourself, you would still have to write a bit of C++ glue yourself. This is not great because effects that use C++ are a distribution nightmare. They can't be just uploaded to the KDE Store and then installed by clicking Get New Effects...". Furthermore, libkwin is a fast moving target with lots of ABI and API incompatible changes in every release. That's not good if you're an effect developer because it means you will need to invest a bit of time after every plasma release to port the effects to the new APIs or at least rebuild the effects to resolve ABI incompatibilities. This has been changed in Plasma 6.0. In Plasma 6, we've had the opportunity to address that pesky problem of requiring some C++ code and also improve the declarative effect API after learning some lessons while working on the overview and other effects. So, enough of history and let's jump to the good stuff, shall we? Vlad Zahorodnii Making it easier to write things like Plasma widgets and Kwin effects is always desirable, and making them easier to distribute is only icing on the cake.

You know those modal screens that interrupt your groove when you are surfing? There are no laws forcing websites to use them. They use them because they choose to. Bite code! Cookie banners are not only not required, they're not even needed, and most implementations you encounter today are illegal anyway. You can use session cookies and anonymous stats cookies without needing any user approval. Companies like to use these cookie banners because they want to make you mad at the law, not at them for tracking you up the wazzoo, and people who actually do know better trot out the cookie banners to enrage you at the government instead of at the corporations exploiting you. EU law only states that if a website wants to track you, they have to let you know. That's it. Seems very reasonable to anyone who isn't a corporatist.

Bad news from BSD land - the oldest vendor of BSD systems is changing direction away from FreeBSD and toward Linux. NAS vendor iXsystems has been busy this year, but apart from some statements in online user communities, it hasn't been talking about the big news. Back in 2022, we covered TrueNAS CORE 13, the new release of its FreeBSD-based turnkey OS for NAS servers, and in that article we mentioned its new product, the Debian-based TrueNAS SCALE, aimed at providing storage for Kubernetes users. Now it seems the company is betting its future on that Linux-based product, meaning the end is in sight for the FreeBSD offering. Liam Proven at The Register Very sad to read, as more monoculture is not exactly great, but at the same time, from a corporate perspective, it's also not entirely unexpected to focus on the server operating system with by far the widest industry support. I hope the fork mentioned in the article gains some steam, because having competition in this space is crucially important.

It's true that latest macOS 14 (Sonoma) still supports the latest generations of Intel Macs and it's very likely that at least one or two major versions will still be compatible. But there's one particular development that is de-facto killing off the Hackintosh scene. In Sonoma, Apple has completely removed all traces of driver support for their oldest WiFi/Bt cards, namely various Broadcom cards that they last used in 2012/13 iMac / MacBook models. Those Mac models are not supported by macOS for few years now thus it's not surprising the drivers are being removed. Most likely reason is that Apple is moving drivers away from .kext (Kernel Extensions) to .dext (DriverKit) thus cleaning up obsolete and unused code from macOS. They did the same with Ethernet drivers in Ventura. Aleksandar Vaci Everybody, especially the small but active Hackintosh community itself, knew full well the writing was on the wall the day Apple switched to ARM, and we're seeing the first signs of the impending end of the community. Sure, enough people will remain who are interested in building Hackintoshes using older, unsupported versions of macOS, kind of like retrocomputing, but the days of running the latest macOS release on non-Apple hardware are coming to an end. As a fun side note, this old OSNews article I wrote in 2009 is one of the most-visited articles on our site of all time. Hackintoshes were way, way more popular than people gave them credit for.

For more than 15 years, Google Safe Browsing has been protecting users from phishing, malware, unwanted software and more, by identifying and warning users about potentially abusive sites on more than 5 billion devices around the world. As attackers grow more sophisticated, we've seen the need for protections that can adapt as quickly as the threats they defend against. That's why we're excited to announce a new version of Safe Browsing that will provide real-time, privacy-preserving URL protection for people using the Standard protection mode of Safe Browsing in Chrome. Jasika Bawa, Xinghui Lu, Jonathan Li, and Alex Wozniak on the Google blog Reading through the description of how this new feature works, it does indeed seem to respect one's privacy, but there could be so many devils in so many details here that you'd really need to be a specialist in these matters to truly gauge if Google isn't getting its hands on the URLs you visit through this feature. But even if all that is true, it doesn't really matter because Google has tons of other ways to collect more than enough data on you to build an exact profile of you are, and what advertisements will work well no you. Any time Google goes out of its way to announce it's not collecting some type of data - like here, the URLs you type into the Chrome URL bar - it's not because they care so much about your privacy, but because they simply don't need this data to begin with.

While Ladybird does an okay job with well-formed web content, I thought it would be useful to throw some security research tools at it and see what kind of issues it might reveal. So today we'll be using Domato", a DOM fuzzer from Google Project Zero, to stress test Ladybird and fix some issues found along the way. The way this works is that Domato generates randomized web pages with lots of mostly-valid but strange HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I then load these pages into a debug build of Ladybird and observe what happens. Andreas Kling I have high hopes for Ladybird.

This release marks the last time that Microsoft would release an OS/2 beta to developers, instead with the runaway success of Windows 3.0, Microsoft would remove resources from the constrained OS/2, and refocus both on Windows 3.1, and Windows NT. Thanks to one of my Patrons - Brian Ledbetter, the much-sought Microsoft OS/2 2.0 Pre-Release 2 is now available! So obviously the first thing to do was to re-create the original magical screenshot. neozeed at VirtuallyFun We already talked about this rediscovered release, but this article contains even more detailed information, this time from the person who bought the copy off eBay.

Computing power has emerged as a vital resource for economies around the world. China is no exception, and the country has invested heavily into domestic CPU capabilities. Loongson is at the forefront of that effort. We previously covered the company's 3A5000 CPU, a quad core processor that delivered reasonable performance per clock, but clocked too low to be competitive. Now, we're going to look at Loongson's newer 3A6000 CPU. The 3A6000 is also a quad core 2.5 GHz part, but uses the newer LA664 core. Compared to the 3A5000's LA464 cores, LA664 is a major and ambitious evolution. While Loongson has kept the same general architecture, LA664 has a larger and deeper pipeline with more execution units. To sweeten the pie, LA664 gets SMT support. When properly implemented, SMT can increase multithreaded performance with minimal die area overhead. But SMT can be challenging to get right. Chips and Cheese I'm always fascinated by China's attempts at catching up to Intel and AMD, but at the same time, there's no chance in hell I'd ever use any of it.

Google's Project Zero reports that memory safety vulnerabilities-security defects caused by subtle coding errors related to how a program accesses memory-have been the standard for attacking software for the last few decades and it's still how attackers are having success". Their analysis shows two thirds of 0-day exploits detected in the wild used memory corruption vulnerabilities. Despite substantial investments to improve memory-unsafe languages, those vulnerabilities continue to top the most commonly exploited vulnerability classes. In this post, we share our perspective on memory safety in a comprehensive whitepaper. This paper delves into the data, challenges of tackling memory unsafety, and discusses possible approaches for achieving memory safety and their tradeoffs. We'll also highlight our commitments towards implementing several of the solutions outlined in the whitepaper, most recently with a $1,000,000 grant to the Rust Foundation, thereby advancing the development of a robust memory-safe ecosystem. Alex Rebert and Christoph Kern at Google's blog Even as someone who isn't a programmer, it's impossible to escape the rising tide of memory-safe languages, with Rust leading the charge. If this makes the software we all use objectively better, I'll take the programmers complaining they have to learn something new.

Nanos is a new kernel designed to run one and only one application in a virtualized environment. It has several constraints on it compared to a general purpose operating system such as Windows or Linux - namely it's a single process system with no support for running multiple programs nor does it have the concept of users or remote administration via ssh. Nanos GitHub page The project has a website with more information and instructions, and the code's on GitHub.

There's a channel on YouTube called The Proper People. It's two guys who travel all over the United States (and in a few cases, elsewhere too) exploring abandoned buildings, and recording both the exteriors and interiors for posterity, since many of these buildings suffer from massive decay and are often slated for demolition. These buildings have histories and stories that otherwise would be lost to time. They are incredibly respectful of the buildings they explore, and they will not break open locked doors or windows, and only traverse open and unlocked doors or openings borne out of natural decay. They never take anything from the sites they visit, and abhor what urban explorers call staging", where you move furniture and objects around to invoke or imply stories and things that aren't there. Their videos are also very calm, muted, quiet, and only occasionally use atmospheric music for some of the more artistic shots. As a sidenote, they also happen to have the absolute best intro music of all time. One of the things you quickly notice as you see these buildings, and explore their interiors, is just how solidly made and beautifully detailed they were. Whether they're exploring an 19th century Kirkbride mental asylum, an early 19th century power plant, or a mid-20th century hospital - they all tend to be made not just to serve a function, but also to be beautiful and solid, both inside and out. Walls, ceilings, and doorways are beautifully detailed in masonry or woodwork, light fittings are solid and ornate, and even access corridors or storage basements have gorgeous vaulted ceilings, decorated walls, and ornate pillars. The contrast to modern buildings couldn't be starker. Buildings and workplaces of today are littered with drop ceilings, flimsy dividers, open plans, endless amounts of glass, all in styles so minimalist it just makes spaces feel cold, uninviting, and lacking in human scale. Modern buildings and interiors are temporary, ephemeral, built not for humans, but to a bottom line and some designer's fancy - these old hospitals, factories, and even power plants are permanent, enduring, and made to human scale. They served as much as a status symbol for whatever ruthless capitalist owned the building as they did as a place for that same ruthless capitalist to extract wealth from mistreated workers. This juxtaposition, of the minimalist, soulless, flimsy and cheap-looking exteriors and interiors of modern buildings on the one hand, and the beautifully detailed, skillfully crafted, and human-scale exteriors and interiors from these older buildings on the other, is something that kept creeping back into my mind during my use of the MNT Reform. This is a device built by people who deeply care, who are very opinionated, and know exactly what they want to make - very much the opposite of the cookie-cutter dime-a-dozen laptops that flood the market today. MNT was so kind as to send me a Reform, at some risk to them because I am definitely not the kind of customer the Reform is typically aimed at. Yet, after a few months of use, I can confidently say this is one of the most unique devices I've ever used, and one that's worth every cent. Let's explore why. Brutalist hardware Let's first dive into what, exactly, the Reform is. At its core, it's an ARM-based laptop designed to run Linux, developed and built by a small team of people in Berlin. The Reform is unique in that it is designed to be open hardware, fully repairable and highly modular and upgradeable. It consists of a mainboard with an mPCIe slot, an M.2 slot for NVME SSDs, 16GB eMMC storage, and uniquely, a slot for a System-on-Chip module roughly the size of an SO-DIMM module that contains the processor and RAM. The keyboard and pointing device are internally connected through USB 2.0 and easily replaceable, too. The Reform is defined as much by what it does not have as by what it does have. You won't find any surveillance devices inside the Reform - no webcam, no microphones, nothing. There have been laptops with little privacy switches or sliding covers for the webcam, but I don't think I've seen a modern laptop that eschews cameras and microphones since the late '90s. It's one of the many examples of the Reform's opinionated design choices. The configuration MNT sent me consists of the aforementioned mainboard, coupled with one of the processor modules they offer - in my case, the RCM4 A311D, which sports four 2.2GHz Cortex-A73 cores and two 1.8GHz Cortex-A53 cores, 4GB of LP-DDR4 RAM, and an ARM Mali G52 MP4 GPU that supports OpenGL/ES 3.1 through Panfrost. This module also supports Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 through the integrated RTL8822CS. The A311D is just one of many modules available for purchase for the Reform, and during the writing of this review, MNT also added a brand new SoC module to its lineup - the RK3588, the most powerful option available for the Reform. It packs 4 ARM Cortex-A76 cores (up to 2.4GHz) and 4 ARM Cortex-A55 cores (up to 2.2GHz), 16GB or 32GB of RAM, and 128GB or 256GB of eMMC storage. It also sports an ARM Mali-G610 MP4 4-core GPU. Like with all other modules, the drivers for the A311D in my model are completely open source. When it comes to firmware, however, the A311D is not fully open source; there's closed-source code in the Wi-Fi firmware and the boot/TF-A firmware. The other modules all also have various bits of closed firmware, except for the RKX7 module that uses a Kintex-7 FPGA and hence comes with a hefty price tag. Using the RKX7 module, you can have a fully open source laptop, from operating system down to the firmware, which is, as far as I can tell, unique. However, the amount of closed firmware code for each of the other boards is relatively small, and in some cases - such as with the LS1028A - can be avoided, too. If you care about

Nearly one year ago Intel published the X86S specification (formerly stylized as X86-S") for simplifying the Intel architecture by removing support for 16-bit and 32-bit operating systems. X86S is a big step forward with dropping legacy mode, 5-level paging improvements, and other modernization improvements for x86_64. With the Linux 6.9 kernel more x86S bits are in place for this ongoing effort. Michael Larabel I doubt we'll see much fallout from these changes.

Following its investigation, the EDPS has found that the European Commission (Commission) has infringed several key data protection rules when using Microsoft 365. In its decision, the EDPS imposes corrective measures on the Commission. European Data Protection Supervisor You often hear people state that EU rules and regulations are designed exclusively to harm non-EU companies. The massive amounts of fines and corrective actions handed out to EU companies in all kinds of sectors already disprove this notion, and here's a case where even the European Commission itself gets a slap on the wrist for violating its own rules and regulations - rules and regulations, we're often told by especially American corporatists, are designed specifically to target poor American businesses. Not that corporatists have any use for reality and facts, but still.

Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 66 is now available via pkg update' from the support repository or by downloading the SRU from My Oracle Support Doc ID 2433412.1. Highlights of the changes in this release are given in the release announcement and important information to read before installing it is provided in the Readme linked from the above support document. This blog post provides more details about selected new features and interface changes in this SRU, as well as some preparation work for changes coming in future SRUs. Alan Coopersmith and Jan Pechanec Oracle is still developing Solaris. I still find it very difficult to care after Oracle's bullshittery.

Roku customers are threatening to stop using, or to even dispose of, their low-priced TVs and streaming gadgets after the company appears to be locking devices for people who don't conform to the recently updated terms of service (ToS). This month, users on Roku's support forums reported suddenly seeing a message when turning on their Roku TV or streaming device reading: We've made an important update: We've updated our Dispute Resolution Terms. Select Agree' to agree to these updated Terms and to continue enjoying our products and services. Press * to view these updated Terms." A large button reading Agree" follows. The pop-up doesn't offer a way to disagree, and users are unable to use their device unless they hit agree. Scharon Harding at Ars Technica The best part of this story? And by best I mean worst? You have to send a letter - a paper one, with stamps and everything, like in the before times - to Roku's lawyer in California containing the names of all the people opting out, the devices and services in question, and a damn purchase receipt. They're one step away from wanting your passport and your firstborn child.

On Wednesday, Midjourney banned all employees from image synthesis rival Stability AI from its service indefinitely after it detected botnet-like" activity suspected to be a Stability employee attempting to scrape prompt and image pairs in bulk. Midjourney advocate Nick St. Pierre tweeted about the announcement, which came via Midjourney's official Discord channel. Benj Edwards So AI" companies are allowed to ingest whatever data they want, but as soon as someone ingests their data, it's suddenly a problem? Seems like a sound business model.

Highlights of Linux kernel 6.8 include LAM (Linear Address Masking) virtualization and guest-first memory support for KVM, a basic online filesystem check and repair mechanism for the Bcachefs file system introduced in Linux kernel 6.7, support for the Broadcom BCM2712 processor in Raspberry Pi 5, AMD ACPI-based Wi-Fi band RFI mitigation feature (WBRF), zswap writeback disabling, fscrypt support for CephFS, a new Intel Xe DRM driver, and a multi-size THP (Transparent Huge Pages) sysfs interface. Marius Nestor at 9to5Linux There's way more going on in this new release, of course, such as further Rust support, for instance in the Loongson architecture, additional support for tons of newer Intel processors , specific support patches for various laptops, and so, so much more.

From the beginning, time zone rules were a component in Mainline, called Time Zone Data or tzdata module. This integration allowed us to react more quickly to government-mandated time zone changes than before. However until 2023 tzdata updates were still bundled with other Mainline changes, sometimes leading to testing complexities and slower deployment. In 2023, we made further investments in Mainline's infrastructure and decoupled the tzdata module from the other components. With this isolation, we gained the ability to respond rapidly to time zone legislation changes - often releasing updates to Android users outside of the established release cadence. Additionally, this change means time zone updates can reach a far greater number of Android devices, ensuring you as Android users always see the correct time. Almaz Mingaleev and Masha Khokhlova This is equal parts boring and equal parts amazing. The amount of work developers have to put into making sure timezones work is astonishing, and the fact that a large chunk of it is done by volunteers is even more impressive.

GTK 4.14 brings various improvements on the accessibility front, especially for applications showing complex, formatted text; for WebKitGTK; and for notifications. Emmanuele Bassi Excellent improvements that, if you listen to those that need these improvements, are sorely needed in GTK 4.

Here you can find everything there is to know about the first version of Windows. David Simuni And they truly mean everything. This is an exceptional amount of information about Windows 1.0.

A powerful House committee advanced a bill on Thursday that could lead to a nationwide ban against TikTok on all electronic devices, renewing lawmakers' challenge to one of the world's most popular social media apps and highlighting unresolved fears that TikTok may pose a Chinese government spying risk. The measure that sailed unanimously through the House Energy and Commerce Committee would prohibit TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform -used by roughly 170 million Americans -is quickly spun off from its China-linked parent company, ByteDance. Brian Fung at CNN TikTok obviously needs to be banned. It's an extension of a genocidal, totalitarian government that has no place on our our phones. Yes, I understand Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft also collect vast amounts of data, but at least they are (nominally) beholden to our legal systems, and while there is, of course, a vast power imbalance between us as individuals and them as megacorporations, it's still nowhere even close as to being an arm of a totalitarian government - they're just not comparable. China's state surveillance tools have no place on our devices.

When this command line option is used with curl on macOS, the version shipped by Apple, it seems to fall back and checks the system CA store in case the provided set of CA certs fail the verification. A secondary check that was not asked for, is not documented and plain frankly comes completely by surprise. Therefore, when a user runs the check with a trimmed and dedicated CA cert file, it will not fail if the system CA store contains a cert that can verify the server! This is a security problem because now suddenly certificate checks pass that should not pass. Daniel Stenberg Absolutely wild that Apple does not consider this a security issue.

Every window system has windows, as an entity. Usually we think of these as being used for, well, windows and window like things; application windows, those extremely annoying pop-up modal dialogs that are always interrupting you at the wrong time, even perhaps things like pop-up menus. In its original state, X has more windows than that. Part of how and why it does this is that X allows windows to nest inside each other, in a window tree, which you can still see today with xwininfo -root -tree. One of the reasons that X has copious nested windows is that X was designed with a particular model of writing X programs in mind, and that model made everything into a (nested) window. Seriously, everything. In an old fashioned X application, windows are everywhere. Buttons are windows (or several windows if they're radio buttons or the like), text areas are windows, menu entries are each a window of their own within the window that is the menu, visible containers of things are windows (with more windows nested inside them), and so on. Chris Siebenmann This is wild.

Fedora Workstation has long defaulted to using GNOME's Wayland session by default, but it has continued to install the GNOME X.Org session for fallback purposes or those opting to use it instead. But for the Fedora Workstation 41 release later in the year, there is a newly-approved plan to no longer have that GNOME X.Org session installed by default. Michael Larabel Expect more and more of the major distributions to abandon X.org completely. For the KDE version of Fedora, X.org will be dropped entirely in Fedora 40 already, so one release earlier.

Just before the end of 1989, Microsoft made available the first pre-release version of the long promised 32-bit OS/2 2.0, which was intended to be the first mass-market 32-bit PC operating system. This was accompanied by a press release detailing the $2,600 OS/2 2.0 Software Development Kit (SDK). Unfortunately, the December 1989 pre-release of OS/2 2.0 may not have survived to the present day. But in June 1990, Microsoft shipped the second pre-release of the OS/2 2.0 SDK. And that version has now turned up, after twenty years of searching, and nearly a quarter century after its release! Michal Necasek at OS/2 Museum OS/2 is one of the biggest what-ifs in tech, and the whole origin story and demise of the platform is worthy of a big budget drama series. It also happens to be one of my favourite retrocomputing platforms of all time, so I may be biased.

The European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) comes into force this week for companies who have been designated. Today, we are sharing some more details about the changes we are making to comply, following product testing we announced earlier this year. Oliver Bethell on the official Google blog This is Google's overview of the changes it's implementing to comply with the DMA, some of which the company already announced months ago. Google's changes don't have as much of a direct, noticeable impact as some other company's changes, mostly since a lot of the more impactful consequences of the DMA, such as allowing sideloading and alternative application stores, were already allowed on Android. Other changes, like to Search, will take longer to be noticed. The one thing that stands out is the tone - compared to Apple's communication around the DMA. Whereas Apple sounds like a petulant whiny toddler, Google sounds constructive, to the point, and, well, like an adult. That doesn't mean Google's post isn't also full of shit in places, but at least they're being grown-ups about it.

You heard it here first folks: systemd is coming to postmarketOS! As a mobile oriented OS, our main goal has always been to work for everyone. From technical folks to casual users. postmarketOS should have all the benefits you expect from a Linux based distribution, such as being free software, respecting your privacy, getting updates until your device physically breaks, respecting your attention and not shoving advertisements in your face. Your phone should be a tool you use, not the other way around. This is of course not an easy task, one of the main blockers we found as we collaborate more closely with KDE and GNOME developers is that they have a hard time with our OpenRC-based stack. In order to get KDE and GNOME working at all, we use a lot of systemd polyfills on top of OpenRC. So while we are technically not using systemd", in practice we already do use a large chunk of its components to get KDE and GNOME running, just different versions of those components. While we are very grateful for everybody who works on these polyfills, we must point out that most aren't a full replacement, and take additional effort to support and maintain. As much as we might want to romanticise the idea of spending 6, 12, 24 months attempting to come up with an even vaguely competitive alternative to systemd, we would quite simply rather be working on making postmarketOS better. postmarketOS blog This is the sensible choice to make, and I'm glad they made it. It makes no sense for a relatively small project that already has to deal with the difficulties of supporting smartphones to also have to deal with shoehorning the smartphone variants of GNOME and KDE into an init system they're not at all made for.