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At CES 2024, ASUS unveiled a new standard for motherboards, graphics cards, and cases. Called BTF (short for Back-to-The-Future), it offers much cleaner cable management with power connectors at the back of a motherboard. More importantly, it fully ditches the ill-fated 12VHPWR plug in favor of a much tidier (and probably safer) 600W PCIe connector. ASUS claims computers with BTF components are easier to assemble since all plugs and connectors are located at the back side of the motherboard tray without other components obstructing access to power, SATA, USB, IO, and other connectors. Therefore, you won't have to reach as far into the depth of your chassis to plug things in." BTF should also make cable management much more elegant, resulting in a tidy, showcase-ready build. Taras Buria at NeoWin The interior of PCs effectively hasn't changed since the '80s, and it feels like it, too. Many of the connectors and plugs are unwieldy, in terrible places, hard to connect/disconnect, difficult to route, and so on. A lot more needs to be done than putting the connectors on the back of the motherboard and integrating GPU power delivery into the PCIe slot, but even baby steps like these are downright revolutionary in the conservative, change-averse, anti-user world of PC building. I don't say this very often, but basically, look at the last Intel Mac Pro. That's what a modern PC should look and work like inside.

inally we're seeing another handheld vendor jump in with Linux. The AYANEO NEXT LITE was announced today and much like the Steam Deck, they plan to ship it with SteamOS! AYANEO are one of the top brands when it comes to PC handhelds, so it's really interesting to see them be one of the first to jump in like this. If Linux is a success for them, no doubt they will do more and other vendors will follow along. Liam Dawe It was inevitable for SteamOS to spread beyond just the Steam Deck, but an important note to make here is that Ayaneo is not working together with Valve. Instead, they're using HoloIso, one of the community-maintained variants of SteamOS anyone can use and install. I'm a bit surprised by this, since moving SteamOS beyond just Valve products in an official capacity seems like a no-brainer for Valve; they're not really in it for the hardware money, after all, and instead earn their money from Steam game sales. I'm fairly convinced this isn't the last time we're seeing a non-Valve product with SteamOS, but I'd rather have Valve involved in the process before spending any money on one of these.

Happy 2024, folks! Just when we thought we'd seen it all, an npm user named PatrickJS, aka gdi2290, threw us a curveball. He (along with a group of contributors) kicked off the year with a bang, launching a troll campaign that uploaded an npm package aptly named everything. This package, true to its name, depends on every other public npm package, creating millions of transitive dependencies. The everything package and its 3,000+ sub-packages have caused a Denial of Service (DOS) for anyone who installs it. We're talking about storage space running out and system resource exhaustion. But that's not all. The creator took their prank to the next level by setting up http://everything.npm.lol, showcasing the chaos they unleashed. They even included a meme from Skyrim, adding some humor (or mockery, depending on your perspective) to the situation. Feross Aboukhadijeh I know this is a bad thing, you shouldn't do this, it harms a lot of people, etc., etc., but let's be honest here - this is a hilarious prank that showcased a weakness in a rather playful way. Sure, there were real consequences, but it doesn't seem like any of them caused any permanent damage, data loss, or compromised systems. What's worse, it seems this isn't even the first time stuff like this happened, so I find it baffling people can still do this. What are they doing over there?

The smallest PNG file is 67 bytes. It's a single black pixel. Here's what it looks like, zoomed in 200*: The rest of this post describes this file in more detail and tries to explain how PNGs work along the way. There's a big twist at the end, if that excites you. But I hope you're just excited to learn about PNGs. Evan Hahn I know way too much about PNGs now, information I won't ever need but am glad to have.

We may have been using APFS for nearly seven years, but some of its features remain thoroughly opaque. On Christmas Day, I posed the puzzle of 60 TB of snapshots being removed from a 2 TB disk. While we all accept that may be technically correct", for ordinary users it makes no sense. Suggestions that they should be educated" miss the point that the Finder has to be accessible to all users, whether or not they have a degree in Computer Science. If my eleven year-old granddaughter can't make sense of it, then the Finder is a failure. Today I turn to another thorny issue raised by the ingenuity of APFS: the size of its special file types, sparse and clone' files. As usual, I start with a practical demonstration. Howard Oakley I feel like I should ring a little bell while posting a link to this article.

Having re-discovered my love for FreeBSD on the desktop for the past month or so, I embarked in yet another adventure with it: creating a portable installation of it a USB drive so I could carry it with me on the go. This would be a great addition to my everyday carry, and would also again put the OS in test against many situations I have not had faced yet with it. Klaus Zimmermann Always a useful tool to have.

The introduction of the Copilot key marks the first significant change to the Windows PC keyboard in nearly three decades. We believe it will empower people to participate in the AI transformation more easily. The Copilot key joins the Windows key as a core part of the PC keyboard and when pressed, the new key will invoke the Copilot in Windows experience to make it seamless to engage Copilot in your day to day*. Nearly 30 years ago, we introduced the Windows key to the PC keyboard that enabled people all over the world to interact with Windows. We see this as another transformative moment in our journey with Windows where Copilot will be the entry point into the world of AI on the PC. Yusuf Mehdi on the official Windows blog Your next laptop will come with an AI" key next to the spacebar. Yes, Microsoft and Windows OEMs are really going to be doing this. Your laptop will come with a dedicated copyright infringement key that will produce utter nonsense and misinformation at the push of a key. This is pure and utter insanity.

When the AXP64 build tools for Windows 2000 were discovered back in May 2023, there was a crucial problem. Not only was it difficult to test the compiled applications since you needed an exotic and rare DEC Alpha machine running a leaked version of Windows, it was also difficult to even compile the programs, since you needed the same DEC Alpha machine to run the compiler; there was no cross-compiler. As a result, I began writing a program conceptually similar to WOW64 on Itanium (or WX86, or FX-32), only in reverse, to allow RISC Win32 programs to run on x86. CaptainWillStarblazer People with this much skill just exist.

Maestro is a lightweight Unix-like kernel written in Rust. The goal is to provide a lightweight operating system able to use the safety features of the Rust language to be reliable. Maestro's GitHub page The state of this project is actually kind of amazing - roughly 31% of Linux systemcalls are more or less already implemented, and it also comes with a daemon manager, a package manager, and can already run musl, bash, various core GNU utilities, and so on. It has kernel modules, a VGA text mode terminal, virtual memory, and a lot more.

I wanted to share a list of hardening you can do on your OpenBSD workstation, and explaining the threat model of each change. Feel free to pick any tweak you find useful for your use-case, many are certainly overkill for most people, but depending on the context, these changes could make sense for others. Solene Rapenne Writte by OpenBSD developer Solene Rapenne.

Facebook recently rolled out a new Link History" setting that creates a special repository of all the links you click on in the Facebook mobile app. You can opt out if you're proactive, but the company is pushing Link History on users, and the data is used for targeted ads. As lawmakers introduce tech regulations and Apple and Google beef up privacy restrictions, Meta is doubling down and searching for new ways to preserve its data harvesting empire. The company pitches Link History as a useful tool for consumers with your browsing activity saved in one place," rather than another way to keep tabs on your behavior. With the new setting you'll never lose a link again," Facebook says in a pop-up encouraging users to consent to the new tracking method. The company goes on to mention that When you allow link history, we may use your information to improve your ads across Meta technologies." The app keeps the toggle switched on in the pop-up, steering users towards accepting Link History unless they take the time to look carefully. Thomas Germain at Gizmodo As more and more people in the technology press who used to be against Facebook have changed their tune since the launch of Facebook's Threads - the tech press needs eyeballs in one place for ad revenue, and with Twitter effectively dead, Threads is its replacement - it's easy to forget just what a sleazy, slimy, and disgusting company Facebook really is.

The Wayland ecosystem had a phenomenal year from much better NVIDIA proprietary driver support, Firefox ending out the year shipping with Wayland support enabled by default, KDE Plasma 6.0 will default to Wayland following many improvements on the KDE side, the Wine Wayland driver upstreamed in its initial form, XWayland continuing to be enhanced, and a lot of other software from desktop environments to apps continuing to embrace Wayland. Michael Larabel at Phoronix This train ain't stopping. Dare I say 2024 will be the year of Wayland on the desktop?

Windows is changing the way apps can access your Microsoft account. Currently, when you sign in to Windows 11 or 10 with your Microsoft account, most apps automatically use that Microsoft account for in-app sign-in. The tech giant plans to change this behaviour by allowing you to decline access to Microsoft accounts in installed apps. Mayank Parmar at Windows Latest This change, like so many others that are making Windows ever so slightly less of a trashfire, is EU-only.

As I work on moss and research modern processor design patterns and techniques, I am also looking for patterns and techniques from the past that, for one reason or another, have not persisted into our modern machines. While on a run this week, I was listening to an old Oxide and Friends episode where Bryan, Adam, and crew were reminiscing on the SPARC instruction set architecture (ISA). SPARC is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems, with the first machine, the SPARCstation1 (a.k.a. Sun 4/60, a.k.a Campus), being delivered in 1987. It was heavily influenced by the early RISC designs from David Patterson and team at Berkeley in the 1970s and 1980s, which is the same lineage from which RISC-V has evolved. Given the decision to base moss on the RISC-V RV64I ISA, I was interested to learn more about the history and finer details of SPARC. Daniel Mangum The sad thing is that SPARC is pretty close to dead at this point, with the two major players in the high-end - Oracle and Fujitsu - throwing in the towel half a decade ago. There's some lower-end work, such as the LEON chips, but those efforts, too, seem to be going nowhere at the moment. Definitely sad, since I've always been oddly obsessed with the architecture, and hope to still somehow get my hands on the last UltraSPARC workstation ever built (the Sun Ultra 45, which is, sadly, incredibly expensive on the used market). There's also a whole boatload of servers on the used market with fancier, newer SPARC processors, but as far as I know, none of those support any form of even barely usable graphics, making them useless for weird people like me who want to run a desktop on them.

SteamOS 3 (Holo") is the Arch-based Linux distribution built for the Steam Deck, Valve Software's portable PC gaming device. It's a very interesting Linux distribution even when you only focus on how it updates itself: updates are performed atomically by downloading a new read-only root filesystem to an inactive partition, then rebooting into that partition. But consumers can also run steamos-devmode to unlock the root filesystem, put the pacman database in working order, and give them a working Linux distro with a normal package manager. This A/B atomic updates system is pretty standard for OSes these days, but there's a lot going on in SteamOS that makes them work even with heavy customization by the end-user. I wanted to explore that while still being able to make changes to the root filesystem images. steamos-devmode is the easy way out; I wanted to make a proper fork. Here's how I did it. iliana etaoin This article has sparked my interest to build a living room PC for Steam gaming for my wife and I, so we can play couch coop Steam games on an actual couch instead of behind our PC desk. Very detailed and in-depth, this article also teaches a lot about how SteamOS works under the hood.

This is the precursor to MS-DOS and is likely the oldest known version to survive. (I had previously uploaded Version 0.34, which was at the time thought to hold that honor.) Archive.org The longer we wait, the harder it's going to be to archive and preserve software like this.

NetSurf, the small and efficient browser for RISC OS, Haiku, AmigaOS 4, and obscure platforms you've probably never heard of like Linux" and macOS" has seen a new release - version 3.11. NetSurf is written in C and has its own browser engine - it's not based on Google's browser engines, Chromium and Firefox' Gecko/Quantum. NetSurf 3.11 features improved page layout with CSS flex support. It also features many other optimisations and enhancements. NetSurf's official website It's an obvious upgrade for everyone who uses NetSurf, since if you're using NetSurf, odds are the platform you're using it on doesn't really offer many alternatives.

I grew up learning to program in the late 1980s / early 1990s. Back then, I did not fully comprehend what I was doing and why the tools I used were impressive given the constraints of the hardware we had. Having gained more knowledge throughout the years, it is now really fun to pick up DOSBox to re-experience those programs and compare them with our current state of affairs. This time around, I want to look at the pure text-based IDEs that we had in that era before Windows eclipsed the PC industry. I want to do this because those IDEs had little to envy from the IDEs of today-yet it feels as if we went through a dark era where we lost most of those features for years and they are only resurfacing now. If anything, stay for a nostalgic ride back in time and a little rant on bloat". But, more importantly, read on to gain perspective on what existed before so that you can evaluate future feature launches more critically. Julio Merino Fast forward to today, and the most popular text editor among programmers is a website running in Chrome in a window. No wonder most popular applications are Electron trashfires now. Times sure have changed.

Running macOS virtual machines (VMs) on Apple silicon Macs may not seem popular, but it has long been one of Apple's important goals. Yet, if you do use a virtualiser on an M-series Mac, you'll know how different it is from those that virtualise macOS and other operating systems on Intel Macs. This article explains why virtualisation is so important, and how it has become so different. Howard Oakley Excellent read, as always from Howard Oakley.

20 months since the initial release, Rust9x is back, whether you like it or not! I've spent the last couple of days migrating the changes from Rust 1.61-beta to Rust 1.76-beta, and filling some of the holes in API support on the way. Dennis Duda Yes, this is Rust ported to Windows 9x, and this new releases comes with a lot of the benefits in 1.76, but also adds backtrace support, thread parking support, and initial work on adding 64bit support for 64bit Windows XP and newer.

Until some time, SUSE shipped with a default desktop environment calledKDE3, and even today, openSUSE is the only distribution, for whichKDE3packages are still available. In contrast to the forkTDE(Trinity Desktop Environment), these are the original KDE3 packages, which have also been used in earlier versions of SUSE Linux, and they were merely adapted to run under modern Linux systems. In the following tutorial, you are going to learn how to set up a current openSUSE system, with the look and feel of the original SUSE versions. Lioh Moller at SpaceFun An absolutely great idea, as it makes it much easier to see what the main desktop environments were like many moons ago. I hope similar tutorials spring up for GNOME and other desktop environments.

This December, if there's one tech New Year's resolution I'd encourage you to have, it's switching to the only remaining ethical web browser, Firefox. According to recent posts on social media, Firefox's market share is slipping. We should not let that happen. Roy Tanck I mean, yes, obviously, but how depressing is it that the only choice we have is between a browser made by Google, and a browser kept afloat by Google money? Where's the real sustainable alternative?

You probably all know Gentoo Linux as your favourite source-based distribution. Did you know that our package manager, Portage, already for years also has support for binary packages, and that source- and binary-based package installations can be freely mixed? To speed up working with slow hardware and for overall convenience, we're now also offering binary packages for download and direct installation! For most architectures, this is limited to the core system and weekly updates - not so for amd64 and arm64 however. There we've got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker. Gentoo stable, updated daily. Enjoy! Gentoo's official news This is not as big of a deal as I feel like it should be. Gentoo is special, unique, and exists outside of the usual realm of distribution competition. Gentoo offering a binary method of installation makes perfect sense, I doubt anyone will complain, and nothing much will change. Yet, it feels like it should be a bigger deal?

Pink-haired Aitana Lopez is followed by more than 200,000 people on social media. She posts selfies from concerts and her bedroom, while tagging brands such as hair care line Olaplex and lingerie giant Victoria's Secret. Brands have paid about $1,000 a post for her to promote their products on social media-despite the fact that she is entirely fictional. Aitana is a virtual influencer" created using artificial intelligence tools, one of the hundreds of digital avatars that have broken into the growing $21 billion content creator economy. Christina Criddle for Ars Technica While there's a ton of questions to be asked about where, exactly, this could lead, and what AI" will mean for especially women having their likeness recreated as AI" avatars for people to sleaze over, or worse, the concept of having AI" influencers doing fairly mundane and harmless things like promote a brand or show some fake photos of their apartments seems fairly benign and even interesting and beneficial to me. Of course, I say this with all the caveats that this is incredibly early days, we have no idea if there are any shady businesses behind these new AI" influencers, and so on, and so forth. We've all seen what technology such as this can be used for, and it ain't pretty.

We're hearing more about this recently because the transition is picking up steam. X11's maintainers have announced an end to its maintenance. Plasma is going Wayland by default, following GNOME. Fedora is dropping X11 support entirely. We're in the part of the transition where people who haven't thought about it at all are starting to do so and realizing that 100% of the pieces needed for their specific use cases aren't in place yet. This is good! Them being heard is how stuff happens. I wish it had happened sooner, but we are where we are, and there are a lot of recent proposals and work around things like remote control, color management, drawing tablet support, and window positioning. There will probably be an awkward period before all of these pieces are in place for all of the people. And for the those who really do suffer from showstopping omissions, I say keep using X11 until it's resolved. No one's stopping you. Nate Graham at Pointie Stick Will all the people who both can and want to work on X.org please raise their hands? Oh, no hands? What a shame.

In August, word leaked out that The New York Times was considering joining the growing legion of creators that are suing AI companies for misappropriating their content. The Times had reportedly been negotiating with OpenAI regarding the potential to license its material, but those talks had not gone smoothly. So, eight months after the company was reportedly considering suing, the suit has now been filed. The Times is targeting various companies under the OpenAI umbrella, as well as Microsoft, an OpenAI partner that both uses it to power its Copilot service and helped provide the infrastructure for training the GPT Large Language Model. But the suit goes well beyond the use of copyrighted material in training, alleging that OpenAI-powered software will happily circumvent the Times' paywall and ascribe hallucinated misinformation to the Times. John Timmer at Ars Technica OpenAI and similar companies are giant copyright infringement machines, and tools like GitHub Copilot are open source license violations at an industrial scale never before seen. They need to face a reckoning for their illegal behaviour, and need to start asking creators - of journalism, of art, of code - for permission to use their works, just like anybody else needs to do. AI" needs to play by the rules, or get steamrolled by the justice system.

A new Windows Update feature could be a game-changer for those scared of losing files or pictures when attempting to reinstall or recover their Windows 11 installations. The new feature, Fix Problems using Windows Update," lets you reinstall Windows 11 using Windows Update. The idea is to repair the existing Windows installation by downloading a fresh copy of the OS from Windows Update. And the best part? It won't remove any files, settings, or apps, according to a support document from July 2023. Mayank Parmar for Windows Latest If it works as advertised, it sounds like a useful feature. I wouldn't trust Windows Update with anything more valuable than a used toothpick, but if you're already using Windows, that ship sailed anyway, in which case this is better than nothing.

Pastel cities trapped in a timeless future-past. Empty apartments drenched in nostalgia. Classic convertibles speeding into a low-res sunset. Femme fatales and mutated monsters doing battle. Deep, dark dungeons and glittering star ships floating in space. All captured in a eerie palette of 4096 colours and somehow, you're sure, from some alternate 1980s world you can't quite remember... Biz Davis The PC-98 is exotic, and a little bit mysterious. Of course, thanks to the internet, abundant emulation options, detailed YouTube videos, and more, all the information is out there - but I still find that the PC-98 carries with it an air of mystery.

In the November 1980 issue of BYTE, the publication reported that Microsoft signed an agreement with Western Electric for the rights to develop and market UNIX from Bell Laboratories. The version of UNIX from Microsoft was to be specifically for the PDP-11, the Intel 8086, the Zilog Z8000, and the Motorola 68000, and its name was XENIX. Its major selling points were that it was supposed to be available for 16 bit microcomputers and that it would have MS BASIC, FORTRAN, and COBOL which were already widespread. Bradford Morgan White The story of Xenix, Microsoft's UNIX.

Japan is preparing regulations that would require tech giants like Apple and Google to allow outside app stores and payments on their mobile operating systems, Nikkei has learned, in a bid to curb abuse of their dominant position in the Japanese market. Legislation slated to be sent to the parliament in 2024 would restrict moves by platform operators to keep users in the operators' own ecosystems and shut out rivals, focusing mainly on four areas: app stores and payments, search, browsers, and operating systems. Ryohei Yasoshima and Riho Nagao for Nikkei Asia All around the world, the walls are closing in on these big tech monopolies. It's a Christmas miracle.

The split between /bin and /sbin is not useful, and also unused. The original split was to have important" binaries statically linked in /sbin which could then be used for emergency and rescue operations. Obviously, we don't do static linking anymore. Later, the split was repurposed to isolate important" binaries that would only be used by the administrator. While this seems attractive in theory, in practice it's very hard to categorize programs like this, and normal users routinely invoke programs from /sbin. Most programs that require root privileges for certain operations are also used when operating without privileges. And even when privileges are required, often those are acquired dynamically, e.g. using polkit. Since many years, the default $PATH set for users includes both directories. With the advent of systemd this has become more systematic: systemd sets $PATH with both directories for all users and services. So in general, all users and programs would find both sets of binaries. Proposal on the Fedora wiki I think Arch already made this move a while ago, and it seems to make sense to me. There's a lot of needless, outdated cruft in the directory structure of most Linux distributions that ought to be cleaned up, and it seems a lot more distributions have started taking on this task recently.

The venerable Enlightenment project has pushed out a new release, one mainly focused on bug fixes. There are a few new features, too, however, such as a watchdog thread, enabled by default, to detect mainloop hangs, bigger task previews, an API to play sounds for notifications, a DDC option in backlight settings, and a lot more.

However, there was a secret weapon hidden in ANS AIX most of us at the time never knew about. Built-in to the operating system was a fully Unix-native AppleTalk stack and support for receiving and sending Apple Events, surfaced in the form of Apple's disk administration tools and AppleShare. But Apple had a much more expansive vision for this feature: full server-client symbiotic" applications that could do their number-crunching on the ANS and present the results on a desktop Mac. Using the Program-to-Program Communication Toolbox (PPCToolbox"), and because AIX's throughput far exceeded anything the classic Mac OS ever could ever handle, an ANS could augment a whole bunch of Macs at once that didn't have to stop to do the work themselves. Well, today we're going to write one of those symbiotic" applications doing something this little Mystic Color Classic could never efficiently do itself - accessing and processing a JSON API over TLS 1.3 - and demonstrate not only how such an client application looked on the Mac side, but also how the server component worked on the AIX side. If you're lucky enough to have an ANS running AIX too, you can even compile and run it yourself. But before we do that, it might be a little instructive to talk about how the Apple Network Server came to run AIX in the first place. I had no idea the ANS could do this. That's an incredibly cool feature, and clearly fits in the whole the network is the computer" idea that dominated the late '90s.

Remember when we linked to David Revoy's story about how his drawing pen's buttons stopped working properly due to a Linux kernel update? Well, it turns out that Linux kernel developers took this one up, and a fix is already being tested. This solution is still W.I.P. and I still have some homework to send more data about my tablets after this blog post, but in overall I'm already using a newer kernel (Linux workstation 6.5.10-200.fc38.x86_64) and I don't have the problem with the eraser mode on the top button of my XPPen Artist 24 Pro and XPPen Artist 16 Pro Gen2 styluses. The buttons are also now perfectly customisable via xsetwacom CLI tool. Yay! That's why I wanted to share this blog-post as soon as possible. Be sure to read the whole article for an in-depth explanation of what's being done to fix this.

Microsoft steals access data" - When the well-known German IT portal Heise Online" uses such drastic words in its headline, then something is up. If Microsoft has its way, all Windows users will have to switch to the latest version of Microsoft Outlook. But: Not only can the IMAP and SMTP access data of your e-mail account be transferred to Microsoft, but all e-mails in the INBOX can also be copied to the Microsoft servers, even if you have your mailbox with a completely different provider such as mailbox.org. They're going to use it for AI, I'm assuming. In any event, don't use the new Outlook - it's a web app anyway and there's better clients for Windows. I think. I'm not sure people are still developing e-mail clients for Windows.

Yep you read that right, we've decided to throw the lever and go Wayland by default! The three remaining showstoppers are in the process of being fixed and we expect them to be done soon-certainly before the final release of Plasma 6. So we wanted to make the change early to gather as much feedback as possible. Excellent news. Of course, distributions will still be able to opt for the unmaintained, deprecated X.org if they want to, but most distributions will opt for Wayland, as all the major ones have been doing for a while now.

The year was 1983. Microsoft was slowly becoming a well-known tech company in the PC space. Two years before, in 1981, Its MS-DOS operating system would be installed in the first IBM PC. It launched its first-word processing program, Word, earlier in 1983, along with its first Microsoft Mouse product. It even made Mac and PC hardware expansion cards. However, 40 years ago today, on November 10, 1983 at a press event in New York City, Microsoft first revealed its plans to launch an all-new graphical user interface-based PC operating system. The company called the OS Windows. If you've ever used Windows 1.0 - either because you're old and remember it as new, or in a VM - you'll know just how limited and useless Windows 1.0 really was. Still, it set the stage for one of the most successful tech products of all time, and few products in tech can boast about being on the market for four decades. That being said, I'm not exactly sad Windows seems to be in its twilight years.

Apple has been under pressure in the European Union as the Digital Markets Act antitrust legislation requires the company to allow users to sideload apps outside the App Store to increase competition. 9to5Mac has now found evidence in the iOS 17.2 beta code that the company is indeed moving towards enabling sideloading on iOS devices. The meat of the story here is not that Apple is going to allow sideloading - they were always going to if they want to keep operating in the EU/EEA - but that apparently, they intend to region-lock it to countries in the European Union and European Economic Area. This would mean that consumers in the US would, once again, not be able to benefit from consumer protection laws enacted in the EU.

Will SteamOS ever become generally available straight from Valve, instead of the community builds you can try out right now? We're hoping soon, though, it is very high on our list, and we want to make SteamOS more widely available. We'll probably start with making it more available to other handhelds with a similar gamepad style controller. And then further beyond that, to more arbitrary devices. I think that the biggest thing is just, you know, driver support and making sure that it can work on whatever PC it happens to land on. Because right now, it's very, very tuned for Steam Deck." Valve also just unveiled a new and updated Steam Deck, with an OLED display, more efficient processor, and a few other nips and tucks, including making the devices easier to repair, not harder - made available for the same price as the previous model it replaces.

Some of the x86 microcode loading improvements in Linux 6.7 include not loading microcode on 32-bit before paging has been enabled to avoid a variety of issues, reworked late-loading of CPU microcode, late-loading microcode is now CPU hotplug safe, and the notion of a minimum microcode revision for determining when late microcode loading is deemed safe. Considering how crucial microcode loading is, it makes sense to improve it as much as possible.

It's about a legal battle between Intel and NEC in the 1980s over the microcode of the 8086 processor. But whilst it may be about events a long time ago, the themes are still familiar today. Whilst writing it, I couldn't help but think about the ongoing lawsuit between Qualcomm and Arm. About how the future of both companies, and indeed others, including Intel, may be crucially affected by the results of a ruling on intellectual property protection. The court case we'll discuss today would also have important implications for Intel, the US semiconductor industry, its Japanese competitors and for intellectual property law in general. Lawsuits. Lawsuits never change.

As AMD is now well into their third generation of RDNA architecture GPUs, the sun has been slowly setting on AMD's remaining Graphics Core Next (GCN) designs, better known by the architecture names of Polaris and Vega. In recent weeks the company dropped support for those GPU architectures in their open source Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK, and now we have confirmation that the company is slowly winding down support for these architectures in their Windows drivers as well. Under AMD's extended driver support schedule for Polaris and Vega, the drivers for these architectures will no longer be kept at feature parity with the RDNA architectures. And while AMD will continue to support Polaris and Vega for some time to come, that support is being reduced to security updates and functionality updates as available." What's odd is that AMD is still selling these as integrated GPUs to this day, and they, too, are getting this treatment. That's a pretty shitty deal for people buying these products today.

Amazon has been working on a new operating system to replace Android on Fire TVs, smart displays and other connected devices, I have learned from talking to multiple sources with knowledge of these plans, as well as job listings and other materials referencing these efforts. Development of the new operating system, which is internally known as Vega, appears fairly advanced . The system has already been tested on Fire TV streaming adapters, and Amazon has told select partners about its plans to transition to a new application framework in the near future. A source with knowledge of the company's plans suggested that it could start shipping Vega on select Fire TV devices as early as next year. Is it a Linux distribution? Amazon's new operating system is also based on a flavor of Linux, and is using a more web-forward application model. App developers are being told to use React Native as an application framework, which allows them to build native apps with Javascript-powered interfaces. Of course it's a Linux distribution.

Eight gigabytes has been the standard RAM load out on new MacBook Pros for the better part of a decade, and in 2023, Apple execs still believe it's enough for customers. With the launch of Apple's M3 MacBook Pros last month, a base 14-inch $1,599 model with an M3 chip still only gets you 8GB of unified DRAM that's shared between the CPU, GPU, and neural network accelerator. In a show of Apple's typical modesty this week, the tech giant's veep of worldwide product marketing Bob Borchers has argued, in an interview with machine-learning engineer Lin YilYi, that the Arm-compatible, Apple-designed M-series silicon and software stack is so memory efficient that 8GB on a Mac may equal 16GB on a PC - so we therefore ought to be happy with it. Eight gigabyte of RAM in and of itself isn't an issue, on a budget machine. Apple is selling incredibly expensive machines labelled as pro" with a mere 8 GB, and charges 200 for another 8, which is highway robbery, plain and simple. I wonder how many people at Apple - at any level - use Macs with 8 GB of RAM. I have a feeling that number is quite low.

Xiaomi also has bad news for MIUI users who wish to unlock their smartphones, saying they won't get updated to HyperOS. Previous operating systems, such as MIUI 14, still retain the ability to unlock, but users will no longer receive any Xiaomi HyperOS updates if they leave their devices in an unlocked state," the company told us. The Chinese brand clarified in a follow-up email that HyperOS updates won't be available if you've unlocked your phone's bootloader, regardless of whether you're on MIUI 14 or HyperOS. However, the company said you'll receive HyperOS updates if you choose to lock your device again. This applies to all Xiaomi devices outside of China. I rarely say this, but with this new HyperOS" skin being the most blatant iOS ripoff I've ever seen, just get an iPhone if you want that experience that badly.

A few weeks ago, we reported an odd discovery in Microsoft Edge: a poll asking users to explain their decision to download Chrome. A similar thing is now haunting OneDrive users on Windows, demanding to answer why they are closing the app. And demanding is a correct word here because Windows will not let you quit OneDrive without answering first. The beatings will continue until morale improves.

I cannot pinpoint the source of this misconception, it could have been a vendor, or long-lost blog post, or one of the many webinars I attended in my early days as a program lead. Regardless of the source, I operated under the wild misconception that all I needed to do was train my teams to do accessibility. Developers, QAs, designers, all they needed was training! This model does not work. Especially for an organization with multiple products, multiple platforms, and multiple development teams. Accessibility is so much more complicated than can be summarised in a mere training. It requires experts, capable programmers, users who actually require said accessbility, and so much more. It's also an ongoing process - it's not a static train once, use everywhere" kind of deal.

A new update for Ubuntu Touch is here - adding Ubuntu 20.04 LTS support for new devices (the PinePhone, PinePhone Pro, PineTab and PineTab 2), and containing a whole slew of bug fixes and new features. It's awesome to see the UBPorts team delivering a steady stream of updates, keeping the Ubuntu Touch platform alive and kicking.

What's happening here is that Migration Assistant has migrated all my apps, and has automatically launched any of them that are listed in Login Items or are set to automatically launch in the background. They all launch, all at once, and every single one of them then prompts me for permission to do all the things they already had permission to do on my previous Mac. In this screen shot, I've dragged them apart, but in reality most of these windows appeared on top of each other. They float above every other window, and most of them want to open various portions of the Settings app. In the background, a few apps have launched with their own alert prompts, requesting that I perform more tasks in order to get the system ready. You will be protected.

Google is hoping regulators will bail it out of the messaging mess it has created for itself after years of dysfunctional product reboots. The Financial Times reports that Google and a few cell carriers are asking the EU to designate Apple's iMessage as a core" service that would require it to be interoperable under the new Digital Markets Act." The EU's Digital Markets Act targets Big Tech gatekeepers" with various interoperability, fairness, and privacy demands, and while iMessage didn't make the initial cut of services announced in September, Apple's messenger is under a market investigation" to determine if it should qualify. The criteria for gatekeeper services all revolve around business usage. The services the EU wants to include would have more than 45 million monthly active EU users and more than 10,000 yearly active business in the EU, a business turnover of at least 7.5 billion euros, or a market cap of 75 billion euros, with the caveat that these are just guidelines and the EU is open to arguments in both directions. When the initial list was announced back in September, the EU said that iMessage actually met the thresholds for regulation, but it was left off the list while it listens to Apple's arguments that it should not qualify. The sooner the various messaging services are forced to interoperate - preferably via completely open specifications anyone can build for - the better. These services should not be locking users in.