OSnews

AI code assistants have emerged as powerful tools that can aid in the software development life-cycle and can improve developer productivity. Unfortunately, such assistants have also been found to produce insecure code in lab environments, raising significant concerns about their usage in practice. In this paper, we conduct a user study to examine how users interact with AI code assistants to solve a variety of security related tasks. Overall, we find that participants who had access to an AI assistant wrote significantly less secure code than those without access to an assistant. Participants with access to an AI assistant were also more likely to believe they wrote secure code, suggesting that such tools may lead users to be overconfident about security flaws in their code. To better inform the design of future AI-based code assistants, we release our user-study apparatus and anonymized data to researchers seeking to build on our work at this link. Neil Perry, Megha Srivastava, Deepak Kumar, and Dan Boneh I'm surprised somewhat randomly copying other people's code into your program - violating their licenses, to boot - leads to crappier code. Who knew!

Since the last article on the text-based IDEs of old, I've been meaning to write about the GCC port to DOS, namely DJGPP. As I worked on the draft for that topic, I realized that there is a ton of ground to cover to set the stage so I took most of the content on memory management out and wrote this separate post. This article is a deep dive on how DOS had to pull out tricks maximize the use of the very limited 1 MB address space of the 8086. Those tricks could exist because of the features later introduced by the 80286 and the 80386, but these were just clutches to paper over the fact that DOS could not leverage the real improvements provided by protected mode. Julio Merino The DOS memory story is a string of hacks upon hacks that somehow managed to work - and that still work today.

Google has detailed more of the changes it's implementing to comply with the European Union's Digital Markets Act. We already covered the changes to linked services, but Google is also changing how results related to shopping and booking results are displayed. We will introduce dedicated units that include a group of links to comparison sites from across the web, and query shortcuts at the top of the search page to help people refine their search, including by focusing results just on comparison sites. For categories like hotels, we will also start testing a dedicated space for comparison sites and direct suppliers to show more detailed individual results including images, star ratings and more. These changes will result in the removal of some features from the search page, such as the Google Flights unit. Oliver Bethell Google is also releasing its promised Google Takeout API, allowing developers to programmatically deal with users wanting to take their data out of Google to another service. This one in particular I'm interested in, since I'm curious if, say, a competing email service will make it easier and automatic to move away from Gmail.

Made to run natively on all modern operating systems and browsers, Ruffle brings Flash content back to life with no extra fuss. Ruffle website It's using Rust and WASM, making it supposedly safer than the real Flash PLayer ever was, and of course, it's open source too. Their most recent progress report details just how far along this project already is.

Recently, the oldest known versions of DOS were uploaded to the internet, and Michal Necasek dove into the floppy images. Even after more than 40 years(!), old software releases and pre-releases can still surface. In the case of 86-DOS 0.11 and 0.34 it's practically a miracle, since there were probably never very many copies in existence. For the first time since the early 1980s, FAT formatted floppies with the primordial 16-byte directory entry format have come to light. The old 16-byte directory entries were gone by 86-DOS 1.0 in April 1981 and of course never appeared in any public PC DOS release. These prehistoric versions of 86-DOS allow us to fill in further missing pieces in the puzzle of DOS origins. It is fascinating to follow how DOS developed from almost nothing to a multi-million dollar business in the course of just a few years. Michal Necasek It started out so humbly. Yet, here we are, in 2024, and variants of DOS still have their uses in certain niches. An incredible legacy, for sure.

We show that content on the web is often translated into many languages, and the low quality of these multi-way translations indicates they were likely created using Machine Translation (MT). Multi-way parallel, machine generated content not only dominates the translations in lower resource languages; it also constitutes a large fraction of the total web content in those languages. We also find evidence of a selection bias in the type of content which is translated into many languages, consistent with low quality English content being translated en masse into many lower resource languages, via MT. Our work raises serious concerns about training models such as multilingual large language models on both monolingual and bilingual data scraped from the web. Brian Thompson, Mehak Preet Dhaliwal, Peter Frisch, Tobias Domhan, Marcello Federico As a translator myself, this is entirely unsurprising. Translating is a craft, a skill, and much like with any other craft, you get what you pay for. If you pay your translator(s) a good rate, you get a good translation. If you pay your translator(s) a shit rate, you get a shit translation. If you pay nothing, you get nothing. I'm definitely seeing more and more people in my industry integrate machine translations, but so far, it's not been an actual issue - I have no qualms about accepting a job where I take a machine-translated text and whip it into shape and turn it into a human-readable, quality translation... As long as people pay me a reasonable rate for it. Working from a machine translation is often quicker and easier, so the going rate obviously reflects that. The quality of machine translations is absolutely atrocious, however, and the idea of relying on it for texts other people - customers, clients, employees, etc. - are actually supposed to read and work from is terrifying. Google Translate is an effective tool for personal use, but throwing, I don't know, your product's manual at it and dumping the unedited result onto your customers is borderline criminal. Pay nothing, get nothing.

Netscape Composer was my first introduction to web development. As a kid, I created my first web pages using it. Those pages never made it online, but I proudly carried them around on a floppy disk to show them off on family members' and friends' computers. This is likely how I got the understanding that websites are just made of files. Using Netscape Composer also taught me basic web vocabulary, such as page" and hyperlink". Of course, the web landscape has evolved immensely since then. I was curious to try out that dated software again and see what its limitations were, and what the code it produces looks like from a 2024 perspective. The first thing I needed was a goal. I decided to try and reproduce the home page of my personal website as closely as the application allowed it. That seemed like a sensible aim as my website has a rather minimalistic design, with very little that should be completely out of reach for an antiquated tool. Pier-Luc Brault What a fun exercise.

I recently bought a Macbook because more and more people are asking me how to use Nix in certain situations under MacOS. In this article, we walk through installing Nix on MacOS and see how pleasant the experience is these days. After that, we show how to go declarative on MacOS with nix-darwin to enable compilation for Linux and Intel Macs, as well as some other nice features. Jacek Galowicz You can't click on a single link without tripping over people talking about nix.

As a platform, we strive to help developers responsibly build new businesses and reach wider audiences across a variety of content types and genres. In response to strong demand, in 2021 we began onboarding a wider range of real-money gaming (RMG) apps in markets with pre-existing licensing frameworks. Since then, this app category has continued to flourish with developers creating new RMG experiences for mobile. Karan Gambhir, director of Global Trust and Safety Partnerships" at Google Real-money gaming" is the most obvious and blatant rebranding of gambling" I have ever seen. Google, this is gambling. You're making it easier for scumbags to target the poor and swindle them out of the little money they have. This is a shameless attempt at increasing Google's revenue by making it easier to scam people into gambling. Everything about this post - and (mobile) gambling - is disgusting.

In contrast to that minimal experience, Google was seemingly working to bring the full might of Chrome to Fuchsia. To observers, this was yet another signal that Google intended for Fuchsia to grow beyond the smart home and serve as a full desktop operating system. After all, what good is a laptop or desktop without a web browser? Fans of the Fuchsia project have anticipated its eventual expansion to desktop since Fuchsia was first shown to run on Google's Pixelbook hardware. However, in the intervening time - a period that also saw significant layoffs in the Fuchsia division - it seems that Google has since shifted Fuchsia in a different direction. The clearest evidence of that move comes from a Chromium code change (and related bug tracker post) published last month declaring that the Chrome browser on fuchsia won't be maintained." Kyle Bradshaw at 9To5Google Up until a few years ago, every indication was that Google had big plans for Fuchsia, from workstation" builds to porting Chrome to developers using Fuchsia for Google Meet calls, and lots of other improvements, changes, and additions that pointed squarely at Fuchsia being prepped for use on more than just the Nest Hub devices. We're about a year later now, and everything has changed. The workstation builds have been discontinued, the Fuchsia team was hit harder by the Google layoffs than other teams, and now the Chrome port has been deprecated. All signs now point to Fuchsia being effectively a dead end beyond its use on Hub devices. At least Google had the decency to kill this before it released it.

Welcome to my comprehensive guide on recording audio and desktop screen on OpenBSD. In this blog post, I'm excited to share my personal setup and approach to efficiently capturing high-quality audio and video on one of the most secure and stable operating systems available. Whether you're a professional content creator, a developer looking to record tutorials, or simply an OpenBSD enthusiast, this guide is tailored to help you navigate the intricacies of screen recording in this unique environment. Alongside this step-by-step tutorial, I've also included a practical YouTube video to demonstrate the quality and effectiveness of the recordings you can achieve with this setup. So, let's dive in and explore the world of audio and video recording on OpenBSD! Rafael Sadowski The BSD world needs more of these kinds of guides and articles. I feel like the various BSDs have so much to offer to desktop users, especially now that there is a reasonable contingent of Linux users who aren't happy with the spread of things like systemd and Wayland, but the fact of the matter is that the BSDs are not as focused on desktop and laptop use as Linux has been. That's not a dig at BSD developers - BSD focuses on different things - but it does mean that people interested in using BSD on desktops and laptops need a bit more assistance.

We are trying out opening Copilot automatically when Windows starts on widescreen devices with some Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel. This can be managed via Settings > Personalization > Copilot. Note that this is rolling out so not all Insiders in the Dev Channel will see this right away. Amanda Langowski, Brandon LeBlanc at the official Windows blog You will use the copyright infringement tool, Windows user.

Chinese authorities recently said they're using an advanced encryption attack to de-anonymize users of AirDrop in an effort to crack down on citizens who use the Apple file-sharing feature to mass-distribute content that's outlawed in that country. According to a 2022 report from The New York Times, activists have used AirDrop to distribute scathing critiques of the Communist Party of China to nearby iPhone users in subway trains and stations and other public venues. A document one protester sent in October of that year called General Secretary Xi Jinping a despotic traitor." A few months later, with the release of iOS 16.1.1, the AirDrop users in China found that the everyone" configuration, the setting that makes files available to all other users nearby, automatically reset to the more contacts-only setting. Apple has yet to acknowledge the move. Critics continue to see it as a concession Apple CEO Tim Cook made to Chinese authorities. Dan Goodin at Ars Technica The most damning aspect of this story is that Apple has been aware of this vulnerability in AirDrop since 2019, and has not addressed it in any way. The use of AirDrop by dissidents in China to spread critique of the Chinese government has been well-known, so it's not entirely unreasonable to conclude that Apple has been weary of closing this security vulnerability in order to not offend China - as further evidenced by the sudden changes to AirDrop as mentioned above. What's going to be interesting now is what Apple is going to do about this. Are they going to finally address this security hole, and thereby risking offending China? Will it fix the hole, but only in non-totalitarian countries? Will it just leave it open? Whatever they do, they'll end up offending someone.

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) is an EU law that takes effect on March 6, 2024. As a result of the DMA, in the EU, Google offers you the choice to keep certain Google services linked. Google's support site So what does linking services really do for you? When linked, these services can share your data with each other and with all other Google services for certain purposes. For example, linked Google services can work together to help personalize your content and ads, depending on your settings. It doesn't seem like unlinking will mean much, but but at least the option is there now - but only for EU/EEA citizens.

This is a Rom Image and hard disc image of RISC OS, built from the open ROOL sources, but compiled up in 26bit compatible mode. It mostly uses code from approx 2000-2002, compiled up with a set of contempory tools. It should be compatible with Acorn RiscPCs, A7000s, A7000+, and the emulator RPCEmu. Peter Howkins I'm not particularly well-versed in the world of RISC OS, but I think this build is targeting older machines that use 26bit ARM processors.

While GNU Hurd predates the Linux kernel, its hardware support has been woefully behind with very limited and dated hardware support compared to modern PC/server hardware. Not only that, its been largely x86 limited but during Q4'2023 the developers involved have made progress on x86_64 support and begun tackling AArch64 porting. Developer Samuel Thibault shared that the GNU Hurd 64-bit port now has enough packages in the debian-ports archive to be able to bootstrap a chroot. A 64-bit Debian + GNU Hurd build daemon is getting setup and the other infrastructure work is coming along. Michael Larabel In addition, work has started to port Hurd to POWER9, and someone is working on bringing the Ladybird web browser to Hurd, for a more modern browsing experience, among many other points of progress.

Happy New Year, and welcome to 2024! We're on the home stretch putting together COSMIC DE, the new desktop environment made for Pop!_OS and other distros. Basically, it's the look, feel, and customizations. The goal for the COSMIC DE alpha is to feel like a complete product, albeit with features still to come. With a more stable alpha, we can better collect feedback on usability and focus on completing the Settings panels. From here, we can work towards an eventual 24.04 release over the summer. System76's blog I'm very excited to try this out once it's available.

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.