The next version of the world's most popular desktop Linux operating system (that's Ubuntu, for those playing dumb) comes with fewer apps available out-of-the-box. Daily builds of Ubuntu 23.10 now ship with just a super-slim set of default software. These are designed to cover basic computing needs only. For anything else, the idea is that we, the user, fire up the Software Store (though the new one isn't included in daily builds yet) and install what we want for ourselves. As an idea, it's not without merit. But in practice, I think it's a potential misstep. Basically, Ubuntu will no longer ship with LibreOffice, an email client, Shotwell, or a host of other applications and tools. While there's certainly a market for slim distributions that install a lean and mean base installation for the user to expand into exactly the installation they desire, I doubt users opting for such an approach are interested in using Ubuntu, of all distributions (use Void. It's the only Linux distribution with the official OSNews Seal of ApprovalTM). In other words, this seems like an odd choice for a distribution aimed at relative newcomers to the Linux world. But then again, Fedora is a better choice for those people anyway.
Adding screen savers to Wayland is not simply a matter of port the XScreenSaver daemon", because under the Wayland model, screen blanking and locking should not be a third-party user-space app; much of the logic must be embedded into the display manager itself. This is a good thing! It is a better model than what we have under X11. But that means that accomplishing that task means not just writing code, but engaging with whatever passes for a standards body or design committee in the Wayland world, and that is... how shall I put this... not something that I personally feel highly motivated to do. However, as I am the world's foremost expert on screen savers on Unix-like operating systems, here are a few simple admonitions for young and old. Jamie Zawinski imparts his wisdom.
The other day I had a pressing need" to examine the behavior of Adaptec 154x and compatible SCSI HBAs and their DOS drivers. I found the hard way that the AHA-154xB does not work with Adaptec's last DOS drivers from circa 1999. That includes the drivers still available for download (ASPI4DOS.SYS version 3.36), as well as the driver shipped with OEM versions of Windows 98SE (ASPI4DOS.SYS version 3.36S). The error message is far from enlightening; effectively the driver acts as if there were no HBA at all. It turns out it's an incredibly interesting story.
GNOME is going to change the way extensions are loaded in GNOME 45, and that's going to be a bit of a nuisance for both users and developers. Extensions that target older GNOME versions will not work in GNOME 45. Likewise, extensions that are adapted to work with GNOME 45 will not work in older versions. You can still support more than one GNOME version, but you will have to upload different versions to extensions.gnome.org for pre- and post-45 support. I guess the upgrade from GNOME 44 to 45 is going to be even more of a hassle than GNOME upgrades normally are due to broken extensions. Outstanding.
Floppy disk drives are curious things. We know them as the slots that ingest those small almost-square plastic floppy disks" and we only really see them now in Computer Museums. But there's a lot going on in that humble square of plastic and I wanted to write down what I've learned so far. Exactly what it says on the tin.
Take a look at this watch, it's just some boring watch for runners, right? Nope, I think this might be the best ultra-low power consumer digital watch ever produced! Let me explain... This device certainly should entice some of you.
This pedestrian bridge crosses I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport. It connects Bloomington to Richfield. I drive under it often and I wondered: why is it there? It's not in an area that is particularly walkable, and it doesn't connect any establishments that obviously need to be connected. So why was it built? There's no possible way to tie this to OSNews, but it's such a fun and well-written story it's worth breaking character for. I'm not even making a smug comment about being Dutch and being used to the world's best infrastructure and... Damnit. I failed.
Cutler and his team had nearly zero experience with either OS/2 or with PCs. They did, however, have ample experience with both portable code and with varied hardware platforms. Similar to his experience at DEC, Cutler was very quickly placed as the lead of the NT project. NT needed to have some compatibility with MS-DOS, OS/2, and UNIX (all systems Microsoft supported, sold, and developed at some level at the time ). As a result, NT was a fully 32 bit microkernel operating system with paged virtual memory and the win32 API operating in protected mode with fully pre-emptive multitasking. It also had the NTVDM for MS-DOS compatibility, the win16 WOW system for older Windows compatibility, an OS/2 compatibility subsystem, and a POSIX subsystem for UNIX compatibility. For Cutler and his team, WNT" was the working name for the OS (increment each letter by one from VMS). The similarities between VMS and NT are striking. The VMS Interrupt Priority Level became the Interrupt Request Level in NT, the Asynchronous System Trap became the Asynchronous Procedure Call, a Fork Procedure became the Deferred Procedure Call, while some other terminology was copied verbatim. NT and VMS share similarities in many ways, but unlike VMS, NT processes can contain more than one thread of execution, NT uses access control lists for object security, NT uses its own NTFS, and NT uses the registry (a centralized hierarchical configuration database) allowing the configuration of computers over a network, among many other major differences. Dave Cutler has had such a massive impact on the world of computing, yet relatively few people know his name or are aware of his accomplishments. He still works at Microsoft today, and has worked on both Azure and Xbox One's hypervisor.
The Linux From Scratch community is pleased to announce the release of LFS Version 12.0, LFS Version 12.0 (systemd), BLFS Version 12.0, and BLFS Version 12.0 (systemd). This release is a major update to both LFS and BLFS. The LFS release includes updates to binutils-2.41, gcc-13.2.0, and glibc-2.38. In total, 38 packages were updated since the last release. The Linux kernel has also been updated to version 6.4.12. One day, after I'm done with learning Nix and NixOS, I'll perform a Linux from Scratch installation.
Are you a fervent user of WordPad? Are your company's finances run through a document only WordPad can deal with? Do you run your Kinder egg smuggling side hustle through WordPad? You better find an alternative, because WordPad has just been deprecated. WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt. A moment of silence for WordPad. It has been included in Windows since Windows 95, as a replacement for Microsoft Write, which was included in Windows from Windows 1.0 until Windows NT 3.51. Definitely a long history, but one has to wonder if this deprecation will actually affect anyone.
Getting into Nix & Nix flakes can be a challenge. You may have have heard of Nix's fame for reproducibility or Nix flake's composability, but weren't sure where or how to start. While some folks seem to settle for a devShell when it comes to Nix, going just a bit deeper, Nix can fulfill more project architecture requirements than merely delivering tooling. In this post we will follow journey of requirements from environment setup, to building, testing, & distributing a Hello World" Vim plugin as the guide for learning the Nix flakes's API. One day, when my kids moved out, I'll dive into NixOS.
Today I read Wayland breaks your bad software, which is in large part an inventory of how Wayland is technically superior to X. I don't particularly disagree with Wayland's general technical merits and improvements, but at this point I think that they are mostly irrelevant. As such, I don't think that talking about them will do much to shift more people to Wayland. (Of course, people have other reasons to talk about Wayland's technical merits. But a certain amount of this sort of writing seems to be aimed at persuading people to switch.) I say that the technical merits are irrelevant because I don't believe that they're a major factor any more in most people moving or not moving to Wayland. There's always multiple angles to things like this, and I would prefer to highlight them when I can.
Domain names ending in .US" - the top-level domain for the United States - are among the most prevalent in phishing scams, new research shows. This is noteworthy because .US is overseen by the U.S. government, which is frequently the target of phishing domains ending in .US. Also, .US domains are only supposed to be available to U.S. citizens and to those who can demonstrate that they have a physical presence in the United States. The answer is GoDaddy.
Having used a wide range of field device communications busses from simple 4-20mA, classic serial busses like UART and Modbus, and more modern CAN bus, native USB, and Ethernet options I'm always playing with different transports and protocols to see what solutions make sense in my grab-bag of designs for hardware projects. I first became aware of Single Pair Ethernet when I was mindlessly browsing Sparkfun's new products announcements a while ago, but didn't jump in because I felt the real utility was the ability to power devices over the same cable. More than a year later, Sparkfun's Single Pair Ethernet Design Challenge gave me the excuse to create the hardware I originally wanted, offering a power budget that can handle non-trivial hardware with data rates to match. Some light reading for the weekend.
With the introduction of the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro back in 2021, Google also announced a new subscription service called Pixel Pass. This Pixel Pass would allow you to pay a monthly fee to cover the newest Pixel phone, your YouTube Premium subscription, storage with Google One, and Google Play Pass. Today, Google quietly discontinued the Pixel Pass (effective August 29), so I hope you weren't expecting to take advantage with the Pixel 8 series in a couple of months. So, Google launches a subscription service for Pixel phones, and cancels it right before their new Pixel phone launches. Scummy, and potentially scammy. I am getting a new phone this October. I'm incredibly hesitant to spend any money on the Pixel 8 because what if Google gets bored of it and just cancels the whole thing two months from now? Samsung has been doing a great job keeping recent Galaxy devices up to date, so I'm not entirely sure what the Pixel even offers anymore at this point.
Microsoft is testing an incredibly welcome feature in Notepad. With this update, Notepad will start automatically saving your session state allowing you to close Notepad without any interrupting dialogs and then pick up where you left off when you return. Notepad will automatically restore previously open tabs as well as unsaved content and edits across those open tabs. Saved session state does not impact any of your files, though, and it is still your choice whether to save or discard unsaved changes to files anytime you close a tab. You can turn this feature off in app settings if you would prefer to have a fresh start every time you open Notepad. I'm not exactly impressed by Microsoft's handling of Windows as of late, but the few things they are doing right are the more frequent, sometimes constant updates to core applications like Notepad, the terminal, and so on. Features like these are table stakes in better-managed platforms like GNOME or KDE, but it's welcome to see Windows play catch-up, if at least when it comes to a notepad application.
X11 is, to put it simply, not at all fit for any modern system. Full stop. Everything to make it work on modern systems are just hacks. Don't even try to get away with well, it just works for me" or but Wayland no worky". Unless your workflow (and hardware) comes from 20+ years ago, you have almost no reason to stick with Xorg, especially as it continues to get worse and worse when the user experience relies on newer and newer features. Almost everything that didn't work even two months ago works now, and tons of progress is being made so it works for almost everyone - yes, even you, NVIDIA users. With that being said, let's get on with it. Expect me to be blunt, and wordy. I'll also be a bit technical. Probably going to devolve into some crying after seeing just how horrible X is. Sticking to legacy, unmaintained software like X.org because it contains some niche feature not yet working in a Wayland environment is entirely valid. Claiming Wayland is crap and X.org is better? That's utter nonsense, and this article explains in great detail why that is so. Wayland is better. No ifs and buts about it.
As part of updates to the older file-system drivers for Linux 6.6, the ReiserFS file-system is no longer marked as Supported" but is officially treated as Obsolete" within the Linux kernel. The linux-fs merge for the Linux 6.6 cycle now treats ReiserFS as obsolete, the file-system long ago used by default on the likes of SUSE Linux. Last year with Linux 5.18 ReiserFS was deprecated and now with it being obsolete, it will likely be dropped from the mainline Linux kernel within the next two to three years. Last year openSUSE Tumbleweed also ended ReiserFS support as one of the few distributions supporting it as an option. The story of ReiserFS is a sad one - its creator, Hans Reiser, was charged with and convicted of the murder of his wife. The successor to ReiserFS, Reiser5, is still seeing sporadic development, but most likely won't be mainlined any time soon.
Last month, the European Commission announced that it had opened a formal investigation regarding Microsoft's bundling of Microsoft Teams with Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites for business customers. As we said at the time, we will continue to cooperate with the Commission and remain committed to finding solutions that will address its concerns." Today we are announcing proactive changes that we hope will start to address these concerns in a meaningful way, even while the European Commission's investigation continues and we cooperate with it. These changes will impact our Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites for business customers in the European Economic Area and Switzerland. They are designed to address two concerns that are central to the Commission's investigation: (1) that customers should be able to choose a business suite without Teams at a price less than those with Teams included; and (2) that we should do more to make interoperability easier between rival communication and collaboration solutions and Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites. Simply the threat of litigation is enough to get these massive corporations to fall in line. This will once again only benefit customers in the EU/EEA, so consumers in the US and elsewhere will still be forced to pay more for the inclusion of Teams, even if they don't want it.
The Regolith Desktop 3.0 has been released for Ubuntu Focal, Jammy, Lunar, and Debian Bullseye and Bookworm. A new Wayland-based session is available (for Jammy, Lunar, and Bookworm) as well as the existing X11 session. Regolith Desktop is a keyboard-focused, tiling desktop environment, and this new release comes with tons of new features even aside from the Wayland work. There's now fractional scaling for resolutions higher than 1920*1080, as well as a whole boatload of fixes and changes.
Multiplix is a small operating system serving as the foundation for some research projects in operating systems. It is currently designed as a monolithic kernel plus a special kernel monitor that runs at a higher privilege level. Multiplix is very much in-progress. The current status is that Multiplix can boot all cores, enable virtual memory and interrupts, supports multiple user-mode processes with a limited set of system calls, and has a simple Unix-like file system. Current work is focused on expanding the system call interface to support a shell and a basic user-mode environment. Two experimental operating systems on a single day - it must be OSNews Christmas.
I wanted to experiment with Non-Unix OS ideas. Exo-kernels are interesting, but it is mostly a theory. This project helps me understand the challenges involved in that pattern. OS development is extremely hard, Rust makes it more bearable. There's some fascinating ideas in this experimental project.
Haiku developer PulkoMandy has released a new version of the BFS Windows driver, fixing some problems. In case you need to access your BFS (and possibly SkyFS, but I can't test that) partitions from Windows, I just fixed some problems in and made a binary available. With Haiku becoming increasingly useable on a day-to-day basis, tools like these to make the cross-platform life just a bit easier are essential, so I'm glad the Haiku developers are dedicating some time to things like this as well.
I was having an email conversation with Stoo Cambridge, and he mentioned that he was having trouble making his Linux machine display thumbnails of Amiga IFF/ILBM files. It turns out I have a solution for him, so I am sharing it here to help anyone else. The number of people to whom this is relevant must be minute, but that's exactly what why it's perfect OSNews material.
Currently, in Windows 11, links contained in Windows system components, like, say, in the Settings application, are always opened in Edge, completely disregarding your default browser setting. Well, thanks to the European Union's new Digital Services Act, this is going to change - but only for users in the European Economic Area. The latest Insider Preview changelog states: In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows system components use the default browser to open links. It's remarkable how quickly things can change when the full might of the EU's and member states' legal systems can come bearing down on you if you don't comply. We're already seeing the first few signs of users in the EU getting a better experience than users elsewhere.
The Fairphone 5 is official and full of surprises. As you might expect, it's the usual repairable phone from Fairphone, with parts available to order and easily installable with just a screwdriver. A new phone means faster components and a more modern design. What you might not expect is Fairphone opting entirely out of Qualcomm's consumer upgrade cycle thanks to its choice of an industrial IoT" SoC that promises longer support times. With a longer window from Qualcomm and a commitment from Fairphone to keep going even after Qualcomm's industrial support cycle, Fairphone says this device will end up with a jaw-dropping 8-10 years of OS support. The Fairphone 5 is not for sale in the US. Europeans, though, can get the device for 699 euros (~$753), with preorders starting today and a ship date of September 14. For the basic specs, we have a mid-range loadout, starting with a 6.46-inch, 90 Hz, 2770*1224 OLED display. There's 8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, a side fingerprint reader, and a microSD slot. For rear cameras, it offers a 50 MP Sony IMX800, an anonymous 50 MP wide-angle sensor, and a time-of-flight sensor. The front cam is a 50 MP Samsung JN1. Such a support cycle should be legally mandated for every OEM.
The Linux 6.6 modules infrastructure is changing to better protect against the illicit behavior of NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver. Luis Chamberlain sent out the modules changes today for the Linux 6.6 merge window. Most notable with the modules update is a change that better builds up the defenses against NVIDIA's proprietary kernel driver from using GPL-only symbols. Or in other words, bits that only true open-source drivers should be utilizing and not proprietary kernel drivers like NVIDIA's default Linux driver in respecting the original kernel code author's intent. Here's a wild idea, NVIDIA: just release your driver code as open source.
By far, the most popular so-called DOS Extender in the early 1990's was DOS/4GW. MS-DOS game compatibility occupied a very large portion of my time during Windows 95 development, so I saw a lot of DOS Extender banners, most frequently the DOS/4GW banner. Now, you might wonder, How did these games even run in Windows 95 if they came with a DOS Extender? Wouldn't the extender try to enter protected mode and fail, because Windows was already managing protected mode?" When Raymond Chen speaks, we listen. That's the rules.
From Google's Workspaces Blog: Today we're making Duet AI for Google Workspace generally available, and you can get started now with a no-cost trial. With over 3 billion users and more than 10 million paying customers who rely on it every day to get things done, Google Workspace is the world's most popular productivity tool. Our pioneering technology makes collaborating with people easy, fun, and ubiquitously available. With the introduction of Duet AI, we added AI as a real-time collaborator. Since its launch, thousands of companies and more than a million trusted testers have used Duet AI as a powerful collaboration partner that can act as a coach, source of inspiration, and productivity booster - all while ensuring every user and organization has control over their data. None of this stuff even remotely interests me, but to be fair - I don't work in a large organisations with dozens of meetings to remember, endless emails to read, and countless shared documents to keep track of. I have no idea if these features make any of those tedious things any easier, or if it's just something users who do live the office, collaborative life shove to the side as a nuisance.
ObjFW is a portable, lightweight framework for the Objective-C language. It enables you to write an application in Objective-C that will run on any platform supported by ObjFW without having to worry about differences between operating systems or various frameworks you would otherwise need if you want to be portable. It supports all modern Objective-C features when using Clang, but is also compatible with GCC >= 4.6 to allow maximum portability. ObjFW version 1.0 has just been released, which is, of course, a major milestone for any project. In this case, it also means ObjFW now has a stable API and ABI. ObjFW is available on a variety of platforms, from macOS and Windows to more exotic ones like the Amiga and Nintendo (3)DS.
In this article, I describe my journey creating a barely functional rust backend enabling compilation for the .NET runtime (Usually used to run C# and F#). It is currently in the proof-of-concept stage, but I believe it still may be of some interest. Rust is everywhere.
Turns out that installing the Steam client from the Ubuntu repos on a new Ubuntu 23.04 install doesn't work - and barely anyone noticed. Which is kind of surprising given the popularity of Steam, but also kind of not - and I'll get to why in a second. So what's the rub? This whole saga seems to illustrate that most Steam users on Linux install Steam from Valve itself, instead of using the packaged version. Interesting.
Microsoft has just paused Bing ads targeting Chrome users who have set Google as the default search engine. Windows 11 (and 10) users are seeing more Bing and Edge of late, and the most recent ad appears on top of games as the tech giant trying to push folks to use Bing rather than Google search in Chrome. As I reported on Sunday, Microsoft aggressively pushed Bing to Chrome users with Google or other search engine as default. This campaign involved a pop-up on the desktop's lower right side, hovering above all apps and games. The advert reminded users of the benefits of using Bing, such as AI chat and Microsoft Rewards. People will keep using this garbage, so why would Microsoft no spam Windows users with ads? It's not like Windows users care.
I recently released a big update for my Mac ROM SIMM Programmer software which is written using Qt for cross-platform compatibility. As part of the update I wanted to release the Mac build as a universal x86_64/arm64 binary so that M1/M2 Mac users would be able to run it natively. It doesn't currently compile for Qt 6, although I think I can fix that in the future without too much effort. However, Qt 5.15.9 and later do support creating universal binaries out of the box, so I decided to figure out how to set it all up. Even though I think I have pretty decent Google-fu, it was difficult to piece everything together to accomplish this goal. I'm hoping this post can serve as a reference for people in the future. These instructions are based on Qt 5.15.10 because that is the latest version that is currently open source. I did this on an M2 Mac Mini running macOS 13.5.1 Ventura. Useful information for those that need it. I'm not one of those, but I'm sure some of you are.
Google officially went online later in 1998. It quickly became so inseparable from both the way we use the internet and, eventually, culture itself, that we almost lack the language to describe what Google's impact over the last 25 years has actually been. It's like asking a fish to explain what the ocean is. And yet, all around us are signs that the era of peak Google" is ending or, possibly, already over. There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate, as competent, as dedicated to search as it once was. The rise of massive closed algorithmic social networks like Meta's Facebook and Instagram began eating the web in the 2010s. More recently, there's been a shift to entertainment-based video feeds like TikTok - which is now being used as a primary search engine by a new generation of internet users. Google has consistently been getting worse in both user experience and search results for years now, but the frustrating thing is that Google has been - and still is - so incredibly dominant, that there really isn't any viable competition. DuckDuckGo is nice, I guess, and I use it, but in the end it's just Bing with extra steps, and it shows in its own rather dismal search results. Everything else barely deserves a mention. While I hear good things about Kagi, their business model just is not suited for someone like me who relies on searching the web more than most people do - I'm a translator, and we have to be effectively experts in so many fields that I almost spend more time searching and cross-referencing terminology in all kinds of fields than I do actually writing down the definitive translations. Add to that the various topics I need to cover for OSNews, and even their 1000 searches a month for $10 is not enough, and paying $25 per month for their unlimited tier - or $300 a year - is absolutely bonkers expensive. And we all know those prices are only going to go up. So, online search is in a bad spot right now, and I don't think adding AI" to it is going to make it any better - in fact, it's probably only going to make it worse. There's definitely a massive opportunity here for someone to make an actually good, no-nonsense search engine, but crawling and indexing the web is prohibitively expensive, so even the pricey stuff like Kagi relies on Google and others for its results. I wish Google would just focus their search efforts on making a good search engine, sprinkled with some ads in the sidebar or occasionally interspersed inside the results, clearly marked. They have the data, they have the index - why are they making search worse, instead of better? I hate this headline.
Magnetic tape drives have long occupied the role that hard drives have shifted toward since the emergence of SSDs - cost-effective cold storage. Although they're too slow for most users, recent developments allow magnetic drives to carry hundreds of gigabytes per square inch of tape. This week, IBM's offerings in the space took another step forward. The company's new TS1170 drive can store 50TB of uncompressed data per tape cartridge using the new JF media type. Employing 3:1 compression expands the capacity to 150TB. The technology represents a 250 percent increase over the TS1160 drive and JE media, which reached 20TB uncompressed and 60TB compressed. Additionally, the TS1170 manages a native data rate of 400 MB/s, increasing to 900 MB/s when handling compressed data. I've toyed with the idea of getting a used tape drive so I can use it to back up data - but mostly just to play with the technology. They're not that expensive on eBay, but there's quite a few different types and offerings, and it's difficult to get a grasp on what would be a good option for a tinkerer to go for.
In a first for any OS/2-based distribution, ArcaOS 5.1 supports installation on the latest generation of UEFI-based systems, and includes the ability to install to GPT-based disk layouts. This enables ArcaOS 5.1 to install on a wide array of modern hardware. ArcaOS 5.1.0 can be used for new installs or to upgrade any prior version of ArcaOS 5. If installing from USB stick, the USB install stick may be created using any major operating system at hand (Windows, Linux, MacOS, and of course, OS/2, eComStation, and ArcaOS). Once built, the USB stick can be inserted into any USB port in the target system to boot into the ArcaOS installer/updater in either UEFI or traditional BIOS mode (alternatively, the DVD image may be burned to physical media and also booted to either UEFI or traditional BIOS systems). This release, and the support for UEFI and GPT-based drives in particular, is a massive achievement by the ArcaOS team. They're most likely a rather small team, serving a small market, and I'm not even sure how much access they really have to the source code of the various parts that make up OS/2 - is anything known about the license between Arca Noae and IBM? - and this release has taken them quite a few years. However long it took, and however much work was involved, ArcaOS can now be used on modern hardware for a long time to come.
We have been in charge of maintaining one legacy Android app for our customer. It is an app, which is used by end-customers in production, but it does not have any active development going on because it's been ready for years now. If it would be up to us, then we would not touch that app and would let it live its life happily ever after. Of course, there is no happily ever after when closed application stores are involved, so everything went south from here. It amazes me that a lot people only seem to be waking up now to the realities so many of us warned about when closed application stores took over from freely distributable applications over a decade ago. What do you get for that 30% cut of your revenue? Delays, nonsense rejections, no people to contact, and so much corporate bureaucracy it would turn Ayn Rand socialist. This is the reality of doing business with monopolists.
The EU Digital Services Act went into effect last Friday, and since there's an insane amount of misinformation from big tech astroturfers about what the DSA means, it's time to list what the DSA really does for people in the EU. People in the 27-nation European Union can alter some of what shows up when they search, scroll and share on the biggest social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook and other tech giants like Google and Amazon. That's because Big Tech companies, most headquartered in the U.S., are now subject to a pioneering new set of EU digital regulations. The Digital Services Act aims to protect European users when it comes to privacy, transparency and removal of harmful or illegal content. Here are five things that will change when you sign on. All of these are excellent improvements and gives us as consumers more sticks to fight with. The EU is far from perfect - just like any other government - but as far as consumer protection goes, they're leading the charge. Never forget who would not want consumers to have more protections.
The mess I'm describing - end-to-end encryption but with certain exceptions - may be a healthy balance of your privacy and our safety. The problem is it's confusing to know what is encrypted and secret in communications apps, what is not and why it might matter to you. To illuminate the nuances, I broke down five questions about end-to-end encryption for five communications apps. This is straightforward and good overview of what, exactly, is end-to-end encrypted in the various chat and IM applications we use today. There's a lot of ifs and buts here.
But does it run Linux?" can now be finally and affirmatively answered for the Commodore C64! There is a catch (rather: a couple) of course: It runs extremely slowly and it needs a RAM Expansion Unit (REU), as there is no chance to fit it all into just 64KiB. It even emulates virtual memory with an MMU. Insanity. A real C64 would take about a week (!) to boot Linux.
Ichido is a set of experimental search engines and software projects created by Anthony Mancini. The flagship project is the Ichido general purpose search engine, a classic search engine with its own independent index. Now, indexing the web is hard and this is in beta so the search results aren't exactly what you'd call competitive, but I have to say - the user interface for this search engine is downright fantastic. It emulates that late '90s look, and does a very interesting thing where it adds buttons for things like RSS feeds and social accounts for the pages it links to in the results. On top of that, it will list less desirable features of websites - trackers, ads, etc., as red warnings. No, this can't replace DDG or Google - but I love the thought put into the UI.
At some point last year (shortly before I began writing this blog post!) I found reference to a hanafuda video game created in 1998 for the Casio CALEID XM-700 Mobile Navigator on a random old, Japanese website. It turns out this device is a long-forgotten handheld computer that was released in 1997, only in Japan. The device is what you might refer to as a PIM or PDA, roughly equivalent to Apple Newton or Palm Pilot, particularly as it featured handwriting recognition. Not what we would consider powerful in this day and age, but good at running database lookups and any undemanding software written specifically for it. The CPU was Intel 8086 compatible, like other period CASIO handheld personal computers, and an SDK was available. Cost of the device was 47800JPY, which was around 240GBP or 400USD at the time. The game file came with a reference bitmap showing hanafuda scoring, which was just the type of guarantee and encouragement I needed to start hunting. Nothing gets my blood flowing like a handheld device or PDA I've never heard of (my wife is okay with this).
It has been a little while since we shared our vision for Ubuntu Desktop, and explained how our current roadmap fits into our long term strategic thinking. Recently, we embarked on an internal exercise to consolidate and bring structure to our values and goals for how we plan to evolve the desktop experience over the next few years. This post is designed to share the output of those discussions and give insight into the direction we're going. These values form the framework by which we determine our priorities and measure our progress, and hopefully inspire those that want to contribute to this experience to focus their energies in ways that are aligned with our longer term ambitions. I was hoping for more concrete ideas, plans, and ambitions from Canonical here, but this one is a bit of a nothingburger. There's a lot happening in the desktop Linux world, especially around immutability, and I see nothing here about such long-term plans, or even relatively short-term meaningful desktop improvements.
Have you ever wanted a more lightweight version of OSNews? A version that loads more optimally inside a terminal? Well, I've got good news for you: OSNews is now available on Gemini: gemini://gemini.osnews.com. What is Gemini? This is how the project's website describes it: Gemini is a new internet technology supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents. That's not a new idea, but it's not old fashioned either. It's timeless, and deserves tools which treat it as a first class concept, not a vestigial corner case. Gemini isn't about innovation or disruption, it's about providing some respite for those who feel the internet has been disrupted enough already. We're not out to change the world or destroy other technologies. We are out to build a lightweight online space where documents are just documents, in the interests of every reader's privacy, attention and bandwidth. Gemini is effectively a text-based alternative protocol to HTTP, reminiscent of protocols like Gopher. There's some very basic markup available in the form of gemtext, but for all intents and purposes, when you load a Gemini capsule (the Gemini term for website), you're effectively loading nothing more than plain a text file, which happens to also make Gemini capsules ideal for use in terminals. There are various ways to load Gemini capsules - from dedicated graphical clients for a wide variety of platforms, to very basic CLI-based clients. Personally, I use Buran on Android, Lagrange and Castor on Linux, GemiNaut on Windows, and Amfora in the CLI. There's also various extensions for Firefox and Chrome if you want to load Gemini capsules right inside your regular browser. In addition, Gemini's lightweight, simple nature also makes it a great candidate for alternative, classic, or basic operating systems. As far HTTP(S) links go, Gemini clients will generally offer to load these inside your default browser. Due to Gemini's focus on simplicity, there's a few workarounds the OSNews Gemini site had to implement to make it all work. First, you cannot have in-text links such as this - every link needs to be its own line. So, links inside stories are converted to numbered footnotes. Second, while gemtext supports quotes, they, too, can only be on one line. As such, we had to choose between turning multi-paragraph quotes into multiple separate gemtext quotes, or combine quotes into one gemtext quote. We opted for the latter, as it looked the best on most clients I've tried. Third, for simplicity's sake, comments are not available on our Gemini site. Not only would it be hard (impossible?) to let you post comments inside Gemini, it would also be needlessly complex to create multiple scripts to convert comments posted on the regular site into gemtext. As such, every story on the Gemini site will contain an outgoing Comments" link, pointing towards the normal site. Fourth, there's no images. As for how this all works - I'm running the Agate Gemini server from home (meaning the server will be down a few times a week as I install updates on my workstation), and Julien Blanchard (julienxx) did the actually hard work by writing a Ruby script that takes our RSS feed and converts it into a drop-in gemtext page. I simply run this script periodically, and it dumps the gemtext page in Agate's /content directory. I want to deeply thank Julien for writing this script and working out a few small bugs with me - I never could've done this myself, and probably would've had to resort to manually posting the items on Gemini myself. As for the why - well, why not? When I ran across Gemini, I instantly felt it was a great fit for OSNews, and would give you as readers a different, far more optimised way of accessing the site. While I doubt it will see tons of use, I'm sure there's still a few of you out there who would be happy with this version of OSNews.
After 18 months developing with the Zephyr RTOS, I'm starting to become a strong proponent. In my opinion, one of the key advantages of the Zephyr RTOS is the hardware abstraction. It allows applications to be written for Zephyr that are platform independent and can be moved between different boards including different manufacturers of microcontrollers. In a world still suffering from chip shortages, it has been a breath of fresh air. Zephyr is a small real-time operating system (RTOS) designed for embedded microcontrollers such as the ARM Cortex-M series devices. As a project of the Linux Foundation, it shares many similarities with Linux, including DeviceTree and more recently, Pin Control. This is at the heart of how Zephyr gets its platform independence. It's an article from January of 2023, but with how little we usually hear of these embedded platforms, I'll take everything I can get.
Last year the European Union enacted a new set of regulations known as the Digital Services Act (DSA), designed to harmonize content regulations across the EU and create specific processes for online content moderation. The DSA applies to many different online services - from marketplaces and app stores to online video sharing platforms and search engines. As a result, we have adapted many of our long-standing trust and safety processes and changed the operation of some of our services to comply with the DSA's specific requirements. We look forward to continued engagement with the European Commission and other stakeholders, including technical and policy experts, as we progress this important work. This blog post lists some of the steps Google is taking to comply with the DSA, which mostly come down to more transparency and giving researchers more access to how Google's products work. It seems a tad on the vague and light side, so we'll see if these steps are enough to bring Google in line.
Google is further strengthening its protections around Gmail, and from now on, you'll have to verify it's you through whatever 2FA method you prefer. It covers changing settings related to filters, forwarding, and IMAP access. When these actions are taken, Google will evaluate the session attempting the action, and if it's deemed risky, it will be challenged with a Verify it's you" prompt. Through a second and trusted factor, such as a 2-step verification code, users can confirm the validity of the action. If a verification challenge is failed or not completed, users are sent a Critical security alert" notification on trusted devices. Seems like a good move.
The BitLocker partition is encrypted using the Full Volume Encryption Key (FVEK). The FVEK itself is encrypted using the Volume Master Key (VMK) and stored on the disk, next to the encrypted data. This permits key rotations without re-encrypting the whole disk. The VMK is stored in the TPM. Thus the disk can only be decrypted when booted from this computer (there is a recovery mechanism in Active Directory though). In order to decrypt the disk, the CPU will ask that the TPM sends the VMK over the SPI bus. The vulnerability should be obvious: at some point in the boot process, the VMK transits unencrypted between the TPM and the CPU. This means that it can be captured and used to decrypt the disk. This seems like such an obvious design flaw, and yet, that's exactly how it works - and yes, as this article notes, you can indeed capture the VMK in-transit and decrypt the disk.
In June 2022, I started work on porting FreeBSD to run on Firecracker. My interest was driven by a few factors. First, I had been doing a lot of work on speeding up the FreeBSD boot process and wanted to know the limits that could be reached with a minimal hypervisor. Second, porting FreeBSD to new platforms always helps to reveal bugs - both in FreeBSD and on those platforms. Third, AWS Lambda only supports Linux at present; I'm always eager to make FreeBSD more available in AWS (although adoption in Lambda is out of my control, Firecracker support would be a necessary precondition). The largest reason, however, was simply because it's there. Firecracker is an interesting platform, and I wanted to see if I could make it work. Firecracker is Amazon's virtual machine monitor. This article goes in great detail about the process of porting FreeBSD to run on Firecracker.
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