The Brave web browser has carved out a niche over the past few years as an alternative to Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and other mainstream web browsers. Some of that has come from its marketing as a privacy-preserving web browser, and it has also been repeatedly evangelized by cryptocurrency enthusiasts. If someone recommends Brave to you, you should ignore them, because they are wrong. Brave Browser is a mess of a software project, and the company building it is even worse. Do not use Brave. It's a Chrome skin from a slimy company peddling crypto schemes, building an ad network, hijacking the URLS you type to get affiliate money, ran by a homophobe. There are so many better and less sleazy alternatives. Use those instead.
TheGNU/Hurdis the Sagrada Familia of the Software World: having started to develop in 1990, the GNU/Hurd has yet to reach version 1.0. The Linux kernel, on the other hand, began development in 1993 and was initially considered a kludge" until the Hurd was completed. It is now matured and widely used. Like the Loch Ness Monster, many believe that GNU/Hurd is vaporware and does not exist. Itdoesexist and continues to evolve, albeit at a slow pace. Just recently, theDebian GNU/Hurd 2023has been released. You can use the GNU/Hurd right now. This article takes a look at what it's like to use Debian GNU/Hurd in a virtual environment in the cloud, to sidestep the lack of driver support, and highlights some of the unique features of this platform.
After three years, there's a new Window Maker release - version 0.96.0 - and it's got some useful new features. First, the NeXTSTEP-inspired window manager now supports hot corners, so you can send your mouse to a corner of your display and have it execute a command. Second, you can now set keyboard shortcuts for various functions related to taking screenshots, which is a very welcome addition. On top of these, there's a few smaller new features as well.
Which is precisely how it feels usingusing the Beepy from SQFMI. The handheld device, which wasformerly known as the Beepberrybefore its creators received an all-to-predicable formal complaint, is unabashedly designed for Linux nerds. Over the last couple of weeks playing with this first-run hardware, I've been compiling kernel drivers, writing custom scripts, and trying (though not always successfully) to get new software installed on it. If you're into hacking around on Linux, it's an absolute blast. There's a good chance that you already know if the Beepy is for you or not, but if you're still on the fence, hopefully this in-depth look at the hardware and current state of the overall project can help you decide before SQFMI officially starts taking new orders for the $79 gadget. This isn't for me, but it surely is one hell of a cool device. The pricing is low enough I might still nab one, though, as it's almost in impulse buy territory.
The latest version of Intel Arc GPU Graphics Software introduced an interesting change that isn't reflected in the Release Notes. The installer of the 101.4578 beta drivers add a Compute Improvement Program" (CIP) component as part of the typical" setup option that is enabled by default. Under the custom" installer option that you have to activate manually, you get to select which components to install. The Compute Improvement Program can be unchecked here, to ensure data collection is disabled. The benignly named CIP is a data collection component that tracks your PC usage and performance in the background (not just that of the GPU), so Intel can use the data to improve its future products. Intel created adedicated webpagethat spells out what CIP is, and what its scope of data collection is; where is says that CIP does not collect your name, email address, phone number, sensitive personal information, or physical location (except for country)." NVIDIA's and AMD's drivers also contain telemetry collection software, and only AMD tries to be as transparent as possible about it by offering a check box during installation, whereas Intel and NVIDIA hide it behind the custom" option. Needless to say, Linux users don't have to worry about this.
I've never used Zoom or similar tools, but I know it's extraordinarily popular in the business world. You'd make a good one if you informed whomever is responsible for IT at your company that using Zoom puts your company's data at risk.
Today, we're announcing some important new features in Google Search to help you stay in control of your personal information, privacy and online safety. There's improved tools to remove results about yourself, such as those containing phone numbers and such, as well as easier ways to remove explicit content about yourself, such as photos. Of course, tools such as these merely remove the results from Google Search - they don't actually remove them from the web.
The DisplayPort altmode is semi-proprietary, but it can absolutely be picked apart if we try. Last time,we found a cool appnote describing the DisplayPort altmode in detail, switched the FUSB302 into packet sniffing mode and got packet captures, learned about PD VDMs (vendor-defined messages), and successfully replayed the captured messages to switch a USB-C port into the DisplayPort altmode. Today, we will go through the seven messages that summon the DisplayPort altmode, implement them, and tie them all into a library - then, figure out the hardware we need to have DisplayPort work in the wild. USB-C might have its problems, but it's also incredibly cool and versatile.
In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on thevergeof forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of theSREN Billwould force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list. Such a move will overturn decades of established content moderation norms and provide a playbook for authoritarian governments that will easily negate the existence of censorship circumvention tools. France wants to outdo everyone else for the worst tech policy ideas in history.
Bram Molenaar, the original author, maintainer,release manager, andbenevolent dictator for lifeof vim has passed away today. His family announced his passing through a message using Molenaar's account. :q
Pixel Binary Transparency responds to a new wave of attacks targeting the software supply chain-that is, attacks on software while in transit to users. These attacks are on the rise in recent years, likely in part because of the enormous impact they can have. In recent years, tens of thousands of software users from Fortune 500 companies to branches of the US government have been affected by supply chain attacks that targeted the systems that create software to install a backdoor into the code, allowing attackers to access and steal customer data. One way Google protects against these types of attacks is by auditing Pixel phone firmware (also called factory images") before release, during which the software is thoroughly checked for backdoors. Upon boot, Android Verified Boot runs a check on your device to be sure that it's still running the audited code that was officially released by Google. Pixel Binary Transparency now expands on that function, allowing you to personally confirm that the image running on your device is the official factory image-meaning that attackers haven't inserted themselves somewhere in the source code, build process, or release aspects of the software supply chain. Additionally, this means that even if a signing key were compromised, binary transparency would flag the unofficially signed images, deterring attackers by making their compromises more detectable. I'm sure thus greatly benefits the six people who have a Pixel phone.
Google resistedpleasto extend the lifetime of Chromebooks set to expire as of this June and throughout the summer. Thirteen Chromebook models have met their death date since June 1 and won't receive security updates or new features from Google anymore. But that hasn't stopped the Chromebooks from being listed for sale on sites like Amazon for the same prices as before. Take the Asus Chromebook Flip C302. It came out in 2018, and on June 1-about five years later-it reached its automatic update expiration (AUE) date. But right now, you can buy a new," unused Flip C302 for $550 fromAmazonor $820 viaWalmart's Marketplace(providing links for illustrative purposes; please don't buy these unsupported laptops). That's just one of eight Chromebooks that expired since June while still being readily available on Amazon. The listings don't notify shoppers that the devices won't receive updates from Google. Completely and utterly unacceptable. Not only should these Chromebooks be supported for much longer than just a measly five years, they obviously should not be sold as new past their expiration date. I hope mandated long software/update support timelines are next on the European Union's consumer protection shopping list, because the way these megacorporations treat the hardware they sell is absurd.
Arm is facing down its biggest competition ever, with the up-and-coming RISC-V architecture threatening to unseat it as the CPU at the center of almost every portable device. Now, one of Arm's biggest customers is trying out RISC-V, as Qualcomm isgetting involvedin a joint venture dedicated to the architecture. The joint venture doesn't have a name yet, but Qualcomm, NXP, Nordic Semiconductor, Bosch, and memory giant Infineon are all teaming up to form a new company that Qualcomm's press release says is aimed at advancing the adoption of RISC-V globally by enabling next-generation hardware development." At first, the group will be focused on automotive uses, with an eventual expansion" to IoT and mobile, Qualcomm's biggest market. Statements of intent are easily written, so let's hope this is more than a fart in the wind.
While casually looking for updates in the Microsoft Store, I noticed a new update for Cortana after a long time. But, instead of improving things, the latest update caused the app to stop working on Windows 11. This shouldn't surprise anyone, considering that Microsoft's assistant hasn't received a single feature update in the past two years Microsoft has finally killed Cortana on Windows 11 - its Windows Phone-era assistant that debuted on desktop with Windows 10. Cortana app was the tech giant's response to Siri in 2014, and Microsoft published a series of advertisements targeting Apple's powerful assistant. Did anyone even use this feature? It always felt like an awful me too!" feature trying to be edgy.
A chrultrabook is a modified Chromebook designed to run Windows, Linux, or even macOS by utilizing MrChromebox coreboot firmware. The purpose of this site is to provide comprehensive and user-friendly documentation on hardware, firmware, and operating systems. This is a cool project to make it easy to run Windows, regular desktop Linux, or even macOS on your Chromebook. Excellent documentation, too.
Supporting the open web requires saying no to WEI, and having Google say no as well. It's not a good policy. It's not a good idea. It's a terrible idea that takes Google that much further down the enshittification curve. Even if you can think of good reasons to try to set up such a system, there is way too much danger that comes along with it, undermining the very principles of the open web. It's no surprise, of course, that Google would do this, but that doesn't mean the internet-loving public should let them get away with it. Fin.
Microsoft has accidentally leaked its internal StagingTool" app that is used by employees to enable secret unreleased Windows 11 features. The software giant typicallytests experimental or hidden Windows 11 featuresin public builds of the operating system, but Windows enthusiasts have until now had to rely on third-party tools to get access to secret features that Microsoft hasn't yet enabled for all testers. StagingTool is a command line app that lets you toggle feature IDs that enable certain unreleased parts of Windows 11. It's particularly useful for when Microsoft uses A/B testing for features, where only a small subset of Windows Insiders will get access to a feature before Microsoft rolls it out more broadly to testers. Useful, but similar third-party tools already exist, such as ViVe.
About Chromebooks reports: After covering Google's effort to separate the Chrome browser from ChromeOSfor over two years, it appears more of you will get to experience it.The project is called Lacros, and it uses the Linux browser for ChromeOS instead of the integrated browser. The idea is that browser updates can be pushed quicker to Chromebooks instead of waiting for a full ChromeOS update. Based on recent code changes I spotted,ChromeOS 116 may bring the Lacros browser to more Chromebookswith a wider release. This seems like a no-brainer move, and may help improve the version of Chrome running on Linux.
You've all been waiting for it, many of you have guessed, and now, as announced atFlock To Fedora, it's time to make it official: The new Asahi Linux flagship distribution will be Fedora Asahi Remix! We're confident that this new flagship will get us much closer to our goal of a polished Linux experience on Apple Silicon, and we hope you will enjoy using it as much as we're enjoying working on it. We're still working out the kinks and making things even better, so we are not quite ready to call this a release yet. We aim to officially release the Fedora Asahi Remixby the end of August 2023. Look forward to many new features, machine support, and more! This means Asahi Linux is switching from using Arch to using Fedora. A sound choice - Asahi aims to easy to use, and while Arch and Arch-based distributions are great for advanced users, in the hands of normal users and newcomers they tend to quickly grow a lot of jank. I'm always baffled people advise newcomers to use an Arch-based distribution.
Have you ever wanted to do more with your phone, like setting up a Webserver or a Node.js server and running a web app directly on your phone? Or doing some coding on the go? Yes, I have too. With Termux, you can run a full Linux Desktop on your Android device, and here's how. Even without resorting to a full X desktop, Termux is oretty great. I'm not really a terminal user, so for me it's just for the novelty of it all, but it certainly seems to work very well on my Galaxy S21.
Microsoft Edge has slowly crept its way up as one of the more popular web browsers people use every day, especially onWindows 11. In 2022, it even overtook Safari as the second-most-popular browser in the world behind Chrome (although it has sincedropped back to third). Despite running on Chromium, the same engine as Chrome, it has a lot of features even Chrome lacks, like collections and shopping features that can help you save money. And, of course, there's the recent rise ofBing Chat. There's a reason why I use it every day on some of thebest laptopsI review, And even with all this popularity, it still feels like Microsoft is trying too hard with Edge. The company has gotten way too aggressive with its web browser recently, and it's very concerning to see this behavior. Microsoft really wants you to try the browser no matter what, so it puts it in so many areas of Windows 11. The concept of my operating system pushing" anything on me, as is the norm on Windows and macOS, is entirely foreign to me these days. Fedora or Linux Mint aren't advertising their services in the settings application, or pushing their browser through pop-ups or by secretly changing the default browset setting, or whatever other sleazeball tactics Microsoft and Apple are up to these days. I don't understand how people put up with that nonsense.
Windows has some pretty amazing backwards compatibility. In many cases, you can run ancient 32-bit Win32 applications just fine on your current system. However, there's one issue: If you ever tried to run a 16-bit application from the Windows 3.x days, any 64-bit Windows version (starting from Windows XP) will refuse to run the application with an error message indicating that you should ask the vendor for a compatible version. On the other hand, the modern 32-bit versions of Windows run these applications just fine. Thanks to two amazing open-source projects, you can bring back 16-bit compatibility to the 64-bit Windows era. This one's from 2022, but apparently, I never mentioned it here on OSNews.
Speaking of fun little tools: Paginator is a desktop pager for EWMH-compliant X11 window managers. Paginator provides a graphical interface displaying the current configuration of all desktops, allowing the user to change the current desktop or the current active window with the mouse. Exactly what it says on the tin, and adds some usability to the desktop pager concept to something like Window Maker.
You know neofetch, the little tool that shows you some nicely formatted system information in your terminal? Even though I find Archey 4 vastly superior, neofetch is still cool and often serves as an inspiration for people to create similar fun tools for other platforms. In this case - DOS, through dosfetch. That's really all there's to it - it's just a fun little toy for a classic operating system.
Originally conceived as an alternative firmware for the TS100, this firmware has evolved into a complex soldering iron control firmware. The firmware implements all of the standard features of a smart' soldering iron, with lots of little extras and tweaks. I highly recommend reading the installation guide fully when installing on your iron. And after install just explore the settings menu. An alternative operating system for your soldering iron. Good times.
UBPorts has released the second update for the Ubuntu Touch version based on Focal Fossa. In this new version, the System Settings application has been improved in various places, the physical camera button now works (on devices that have one, I presume), and a whole load of bugs have been fixed. Device support has also improved, with the F(x)tec Pro1 X, Fairphone 3, and Vollaphone X23 now being supported by the Focal releases.
Overall, the Authority found the commitments proposed by Google to be adequate to address the competition concerns. The group, in fact, presented a package of three commitments, two of which envisage supplementary solutions to Takeout - the service Google makes available to end users for backing up their data - to facilitate the export of data to third-party operators. The third commitment offers the possibility to start testing, prior to its official release, a new solution - currently under development - that will allow direct data portability from service to service, for third-party operators authorised by end users who so request, in relation to data provided by the users themselves or generated through their activity on Google's online search engine and YouTube platform. The Italian competition authority has effectively forced Google to improve its Google Takeout tool, making it easier for users to not only take out their data, but also to migrate it to other services without having to manually export and import. If, in the near future, wherever you may live, you discover it's become easier to move away from Google services, tank this case (and many others). This case is based on the GDPR, the Europan Union privacy law corporatists (and Facebook advocates) want you to equate to cookie popups, to scare you into thinking privacy laws - any laws, really - that target big companies are scary, ineffective, and out to hurt you. However, almost all of the cookie popups you see today are universally not in compliance with the GDPR, and are not mandated by the GDPR at all. The best way for a website or company to avoid cookie popups (even compliant ones), is to... Not share user data with third parties. Whenever you see a cookie popup (even a compliant one) don't blame the EU or the GDPR - blame the website or company for shipping your data off to some ad provider or analytics service. Stop and think about why your data is being shared with third parties. And yes, that includes us, this website, OSNews.
If you've ever heard someone refer to a TV remote as a clicker," it's because of Robert Adler's 1956 creation. The elegantStar Trek-esque gadget pioneered a durable, clicky action for controlling gadgets and a simplicity of form that has since been naively abandoned. When Zenith first started experimenting with wireless remote controls, it used beams of light that the television could receive to communicate a command, eventually debutingthe Flash-Maticin 1955. It only took a year in the market for this idea to be abandoned due to its sensitivity to full-spectrum light from the sun and lightbulbs. So Zenith's engineers tried an even simplerapproach that didn't require batteries at all, using sound instead of light. This is from well before my time - and I have no idea if devices like this even ever made it to The Netherlands, where I'm originally from - but this is such a cool solution to the technical problem they were facing. I had no idea early remote controls were sound-based.
Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles. Alice psykose" who is easily responsible for the highest number of commits per author over the past year has decided to step down from maintaining her packages. This could be a massive hit to Alpine Linux. This distribution is definitely quite popular in its niche, and it always has way better package support than you'd expect from a small distribution like this. I wish Alice all the best, though, and hope for the project itself that the workload can be spread out among other maintainers.
One of the interesting and odd thing Google does is roast itself (and others) over security issues. In this year's Year in Review of 0-days exploited in-the-wild, Google took particular aim at the Android ecosystem for being so bad at getting patches on users' devices that Android doesn't even need 0-days to be exploited in the first place. These gaps between upstream vendors and downstream manufacturers allow n-days - vulnerabilities that are publicly known - to function as 0-days because no patch is readily available to the user and their only defense is to stop using the device. While these gaps exist in most upstream/downstream relationships, they are more prevalent and longer in Android. This is a great case for attackers. Attackers can use the known n-day bug, but have it operationally function as a 0-day since it will work on all affected devices. The Android update problems are not just limited to devices not receiving updates to new major Android versions - it also extends to the monthly Android security patches that somehow need to make it to users' devices. My Galaxy S21 has been getting these updates consistently, sometimes even before Pixel devices get them, but many, many devices never get these at all, or only sporadically. The Android update problem is by far the biggest problem in the Android ecosystem, and despite Google and OEMs promising to do better every year, we're still far, far from where we should be.
31 years agoTetris Maxfor the Macintosh was born, an improved clone of Tetris, and it became an insanely popular Mac game during the 1990s. I may or may not have had some involvement in its development. Macintosh System 6 was the current OS version at the time of the game's release, but System 7 was introduced shortly afterwards. It's recently come to my attention that the final version of Tetris Max (v2.9.1) may not work when running System 6 on certain Mac hardware, even though the game was advertised as System 6 compatible. I haven't yet been able to fully verify this myself, but there's aMacintosh Garden bug reportfrom ironboy36 in 2022, and more recently a detailed bug reportcomplete with video(thank you James!). Obviously I need to fix this stuff ASAP - 31-year-old bug be damned. And I need your help! Consider this a group debugging effort. This is such a cool story. If anyone can contribute to fixing this - please help them out.
The Blue Lightning CPU is an interesting beast. There is not a whole lot of information about what the processor really is, but it can be pieced together from various scraps of information. Around 1990, IBM needed low-power 32-bit processors with good performance for its portable systems, but no one offered such CPUs yet. IBM licensed the 386SX core from Intel and turned it into the IBM 386SLC processor (SLC reportedly stood for Super Little Chip"). Later on, IBM updated the processor to support 486 instructions. It is worth noting that there were still the SLC variants available-nominally a 486, but with a 16-bit bus. The licensing conditions reportedly prevented IBM from selling the SLC processors on the free market. They were only available in IBM-built systems and always(?) as QFP soldered on a board. A very unique processor from the days Intel licensed others to make x86 chips, even allowing them to improve upon them. Those days are long gone, with only AMD and VIA remaining as companies with an x86 license.
Mobile work phones running in the cloud: safe & instantly available smartphones for your team. Complete with a phone number, accessible from your browser. I find the pricing a bit steep, but the concept in and of itself is pretty cool: it's an Android VM in the cloud running /e/OS. I'm not entirely sure what I'd use it for, but something about it I find intriguing.
For KDE Plasma 6, the KDE team intends to remove a number of old features and bits of code that haven't been touched in ages or simply don't make sense to keep around. Most of it is truly stuff few will use, but there's some interesting ones in there that might make some users a little sad. First, they intend to remove the icon view from the settings application, leaving only the sidebar view that's been the default for a while now. This one bugs me, because I only use the icon view - it's what I use on every other platform, too. The sidebar view might be more modern, but I find it difficult to find anything in there. The reasoning behind its removal is that the code has simply not been touch in a while, and features like search highlighting aren't even available in icon view. Second, they're removing Unsplash integration, which kind of sucks. The reason? AI. This one is quite sad, as no one wanted to remove it. Alas, we had to because Unsplash changed their terms of service to preclude Plasma's usage of it, as a way of fighting automated data scrapers for AI training models. With a heavy heart, we removed it. So the next time anyone asks you what AI can do for humanity, now you have a concrete answer: prevent Plasma 6 from shipping an Unsplash Picture of the Day wallpaper plugin. Thanks, AI! Third, and I love this one, they're finally fixing the weird issue where the selected Plasma style would overwrite some of the icons from the system-wide icon theme. This feature originally served the purpose of allowing monochrome icons to be set in Plasma, but this is simply no longer needed and only leads to confusion. There's a lot more that's being cleaned up and removed, so take a peek at the list to see if your favourite obscure feature is getting cut. Of course, as Nate Graham notes, if you wish for some of these features to stay - you can pick up the code and work on it.
Apple's M2 Ultra powered Mac Pro is the final step in their Apple Silicon transition. But without GPU support or meaningful expansion, is it worth nearly double the price of a comparable Mac Studio? It really seems like high-end computing is simply no longer possible whatsoever on the Mac. The Mac Pro is a joke, the memory limits on the M2 chips make them useless for high-end uses, there's not enough PCI-e lanes, the integrated GPUs are a joke compared to offerings from AMD and NVIDIA, and x86 processors at the higher end completely obliterate the M2 chips. At least ARM Macs use less power, so there's that. But then, if you have to wait longer for tasks to finish - or can't perform your tasks at all - does that really matter on your stationary, high-end workstation?
I have been readingDoom Guyby John Romero. It is an excellent book which I highly recommend. In the ninth chapter, John describes being hit by lightning upon seeing Adaptive Tile Refresh (ATS). That made me realize I never took the time to understand how this crucial piece of tech powers the Commander Keen (CK) series. During my research I was surprised to learn that ATS only powered the first CK trilogy. The second trilogy turned out to use something far better. I've played all the Commander Keen games as a child over and over again, but being quite young at the time (I'm from 1984, so do the math), it never dawned on me just how much of a technological marvel these games really were.
While most of us are used to this system and its quirks, that doesn't mean it's without problems. This is especially apparent when you do user research with people who are new to computing, including children and older people. Manually placing and sizing windows can be fiddly work, and requires close attention and precise motor control. It's also what we jokingly refer to asshit work: it is work that the user has to do, which is generated by the system itself, and has no other purpose. Most of the time you don't care about exact window sizes and positions and just want to see the windows that you need for your current task. Often that's just a single, maximized window. Sometimes it's two or three windows next to each other. It's incredibly rare that you need a dozen different overlapping windows. Yet this is what you end up with by default today, when you simply use the computer, opening apps as you need them. Messy is the default, and it's up to you to clean it up. There are a lot of interesting ideas in what GNOME is working on to address these issues, and it includes a lot of new thinking and new approaches to windowing. I have a lot of reservations, though. I do not like it when windows do something out of their own volition. A window should be where I put it, and manipulating one window should not make any changes to the shape or position of other windows, unless I'm specifically asking the window manager to do so (e.g. using the side-by-side snap feature, which I never do). There's nothing I hate more than my UI deciding what's best for me. Windows should be where I put them - until I explicitly instruct my window manager to put them somewhere else. I also do not understand this obsession with fullscreen windows. I just don't get it. Unless it's a video or a game, none of my windows ever go fullscreen, whether it be on a small 13'' laptop display, or on my 28'' 4K desktop monitor. I find fullscreen claustrophobic, and it almost never makes any sense anyway since virtually no application actually makes use of all that space. You just end up with tons of wasted space. Designing a UI with fullscreen as a corner stone absolutely baffles me. As such, some of these ideas for GNOME worry me a tiny bit, since they go against some of the core tenets I hold about my UI. I'll see how it works out when it ships, but for now, I'm cautiously worried.
In myprevious article, I described how I managed to install Windows 2000 in DOSBox-X. Even though this experiment was successful, I was not really with the results. While I got Windows 2000 working, I didn't want to stop there. The final goal for the project was to get Windows XP running instead. However, after multiple attempts I gave up, thinking that Windows XP was impossible to use. Well - I was wrong. I can't believe this works.
You can become a Patreon, make a one-time donation through Ko-Fi, and now, by popular demand, we have a third option to support OSNews: merch! We've just launched our new merch store, currently selling three items - two T-shirts and a coffee mug. First, we have a plain logo T-shirt. It's a crew (round) neck T-shirt available in Night Sky Navy' or Herb Green', with our logo printed top-left on the chest. Second, we have the same logo T-shirt in the same two colours, but with an additional quote printed below it for those of you who really long for the olden days when Eugenia ran this place. This second shirt is a limited edition, and will eventually be replaced by a shirt with a different quote, so get it while supplies last. Both T-shirts are made of 100% organic cotton for that extra soft feel. Each shirt costs $29.99 and ships worldwide. Third, there's a coffee mug with a logo and a quote for people who are kind of sick of my shit. It's a mug. It holds coffee (or tea, or gasoline). It's white. It sells for $19.99 and also ships worldwide. Since I want to be transparent about this - we're working with a third party store from Richmond, Virginia, US, who produces the shirts and mugs, since we obviously can't produce them ourselves. The pricing has been carefully set so that for each item sold, OSNews gets about $8. Do note that the items are made-to-order, so shipping takes a little longer than in-stock items from regular stores. I intend to add more items and maybe more colour options in the future (lighter colours are hard with our current logo), but we all have to start somewhere. As always, thanks for all your support - whether it be monetarily or just by being here. It means a lot.
The Android KitKat (KK) platform was first released ~10 years ago and since then, we've introduced many innovative improvements and features for Android, which are unavailable on KK. As of July 2023, the active device count on KK is below 1% as more and more users update to the latest Android versions. Therefore, we are no longer supporting KK in future releases of Google Play services. KK devices will not receive versions of thePlay Services APKbeyond 23.30.99. It's time.
Last year at Google I/O, we shared somebig changescoming to the Play Store for large screen devices. Since then, we've seen even more people using large screens for work and play, across millions of active Android devices. Apps and games play a critical role in shaping the on-device experience, so we've redesigned the Play Store to help users get the most from their tablets, Chromebooks, and foldables. Today, we're introducing four major updates to help users find high-quality large screen apps on Play: refreshed app listing pages, ranking and quality improvements, streamlined store navigation, and a split-screen search experience. I'm glad Google seems to be finally doing the things it need to do to make Android applications feel more at home on larger displays. While I believe the problem has been somewhat overblown by tech media, there's no denying iPadOS has a wider and more optimised tablet application offering, and Google's got a lot of work to do to catch up.
9to5Google reports: Last year, we reported that Google's Fuchsia team hadrenewed its effortsto support smart speakers. Long story short, the team had experimented with a single speaker, ditched that effort, then restored" it later on. More importantly, the Fuchsia team was found to be working on multiple speakers, the most notable of which was anas-yet-unreleased speaker equipped with UWB. In a newly postedcode change, the Fuchsia team formally marked all of its speaker hardware as unsupported" and altogether removed the related code. Among the hardware now unsupported by Fuchsia, you'll find the underlying SoCs for the Nest Mini, Nest Audio, Nest Wifi point, a potentially upcoming Nest speaker, and some Android Things-based smart speakers. The Fuchsia team hasn't shared a reason why its smart speaker efforts were discontinued. One issue that potentially played a role is that the Amlogic A113L chip used in Clover" - an unknown device that we suspect may be the Pixel Tablet dock -does not meetFuchsia's strict CPU requirements. Amlogic's engineersattempted to work aroundthis issue, seemingly to no avail. It also doesn't help Google fired about 20% of the 400 people working on Fuchsia. Since its discovery about six years ago, Fuchsia has been on an upward trajectory, but the massive layoffs and now the end of the smart speakers project, one has to wonder what the future of Fuchsia is going to be. Everything seemed to point at Fuchsia one day taking hold in Android and Chrome OS, but that seems farther away now than ever.
Intel has announced two new x86-64 instruction sets designedto bolster and offer more performance in AVX-based workloads withtheir hybrid architecture of performance (P) and efficiency (E) cores.The first of Intel's announcements is their latest Intel Advanced Performance Extensions, or Intel APX as it's known. It is designed to bring generational, instruction set-driven improvements to load, store and compare instructions without impacting power consumption or the overall silicon die area of the CPU cores. Intel has also published a technical paper detailing their new AVX10, enabling both Intel's performance (P) and efficiency (E) cores to support the converged AVX10/256-bitinstruction set going forward. This means that Intel's future generation of hybrid desktop, server, and workstationchips will be able to support multiple AVX vectors, including 128, 256, and 512-bit vector sizesthroughout the entirety of the cores holistically. The basic gist is that these two new instruction sets should bring more performance at lower energy usage.
There's been a lot of concern recently about theWeb Environment Integrityproposal, developed by a selection of authors from Google, and apparently being prototyped in Chromium. There's good reason for anger here (though I'm not sure yelling at people on GitHub is necessarily the best outlet). This proposal amounts to attestation on the web, limiting access to features or entire sites based on whether the client is approved by a trusted issuer. In practice, that will mean Apple, Microsoft & Google. Of course, Google isn't the first to think of this, but in fact they're not even the first to ship it. Apple already developed & deployed an extremely similar system last year, now integrated into MacOS 13, iOS 16 & Safari, called Private Access Tokens. Ten bucks this bad thing Apple is already shipping will get far less attention than a proposal by Google.
octox is a Unix-like operating system inspired by xv6-riscv. octox loosely follows the structure and style of xv6, but is implemented in pure Rust. It's a learning project, so no lofty goals of world domination here.
The enshittification" of social media started around 2016, but it reached new highs in 2023. All chronological feeds and hashtag importance have given way to narrow-AI algorithms and recommendation engines. The result was that reach has become impossible for the common user, and many art creatives lost their livelihoods. Enter the Fediverse. From Wikipedia: The fediverse is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other. This system has some advantages: It is almost impossible for governments to shut down in its entirety. User load can be shared among different servers (instances"). Different instances have different rules, so you join the one you agree best with. Generally no spam and fewer bots. A non-aggressive environment as users get along better. No telemetry or ads. Everything is chronological so there are equal chances to be seen, no weird recommendation engines here. As for the disadvantages: Some instance admins are too twitchy, and can block other servers on a dime (my main gripe with the system). Some users are too sensitive for some topics, and require you to self-censor. The system probably can't sustain more than 10-20 million active users, because not many people have the expertise to run their own instance and pay for the financial costs before donations start rolling in. If your instance goes down, you'll have to migrate and re-acquire all your followers from scratch. Your family and friends aren't on it, and probably never will be. Here are the Fediverse alternatives to the classic options: Alternative to Twitter: Mastodon The biggest federated environment with over 2 million active users. Great for toots", and small-sized blogging. Very actively developed. While there's an official app for it and a third party one called... Shitter, and FediLab, the best way to view it remains the web browser. Alternatives to Mastodon: Pleroma, Diaspora, Misskey/Calckey (they mostly interoperate anyway). Alternative to Reddit: Lemmy Since the latest Reddit shenanigans Lemmy has jumped to become the second most used fediverse service. Still under active development, but it works great and it has all major Reddit features. People there are much nicer too! Alternative to Lemmy: Kbin (they interoperate, so Kbin content is available on Lemmy, and vice versa). Apps: Jerboa, Lemming, LiftOff, Summit, Connect. Alternative to Instagram: Pixelfed A bit slow compared to the other fedi services, but it's unique in getting the original Instagram experience. As an artist, I love it. PixelDroid is the mobile app for it. Alternative to Youtube: PeerTube Well, there's TilVids, and then there's everyone else. TilVids doesn't want to federate with everyone else, but it does have the most interesting videos (particularly of Linux interest). Spectra.Video and Diode.Zone are also great options to move your videos at. Just note that bandwidth is limited in these free services, so it's best to upload in 1080p instead of 4k. There are 3-4 mobile apps for it. Alternative to Medium/Wordpress/SubStack: WriteFreely Not much to say here, a very modern editor that acts as blogging and article publishing service. Secure Messaging and IRC/Discord alternatives: Matrix Matrix is secure messaging end-to-end with Element.io being the main provider. It can also act as a community messaging server. Nostr and Jami are the newest such services on the block, but they're a little bit weird to get into, I still prefer Matrix. Alternative to TikTok: none Thank the Olympian gods! Finally, the best way to deal with some smaller instances going down and losing your account is to get 1-3 different accounts on different instances. I personally have 3 Mastodon accounts, 3 PeerTube ones, and 2 Lemmy/1 Kbin ones. I used an older $70 phone (Moto G5 Plus) where I have installed the free, and very private Murena /e/ OS. It's a totally de-googled Android OS (more so than LineageOS) that uses the iOS UI paradigm. In it, I use three app stores that only carry open source apps: F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid, and Obtainium. I avoid as much as possible from installing from the Aurora or the included App Lounge app stores that use the Google Play Store. The OS uses the open source microG service to replace the Google Play Services. So, I have almost completely left behind the normal social media and moved on to the Fediverse (apart from FB messenger with my mom, and a couple of special-interest subreddits via my laptop). You see, after leaving OSNews 15+ years ago, I became an artist. And social media was the way to get sales back then. I started with Tumblr, and later Instagram and FB. Overall, I had amassed about 340,000 followers across all social media. Sales were good for a while. Then, the enshittification started. The biggest blow was Instagram removing the chronological feed and hashtag importance, and little by little only superstar accounts were pushed by the recommendation engines. By 2020, it was near-impossible to survive online selling your art. Now, I don't have any illusions that the Fediverse can replace the golden era of social media (2010-2020). I have calculated that you need a minimum of 100 million active users for various niche business to survive under a fair social media system. And currently, the whole Fediverse only has about 14.5 million accounts, with only about 2.2 million being active. In fact, I don't expect the fediverse to ever achieve more than 10 million active users... And yet, I prefer to stay on it. It's simply a more fair system. It's not a corporation that changes its policies at a whim, or sells your data. I rather use a lesser" system in terms of reach and maintain my mental health, than battling Instagram's algorithms all day long (no, I don't want to shoot useless vertical short videos"). So, come on and join us on the fediverse. The more the merrier! Note: OSNews is very active on the Fediverse. We have the main OSNews account which posts our stories,
Google's plan is that, during a webpage transaction, the web server could require you to pass an environment attestation" test before you get any data. At this point your browser would contact a third-party" attestation server, and you would need to pass some kind of test. If you passed, you would get a signed IntegrityToken" that verifies your environment is unmodified and points to the content you wanted unlocked. You bring this back to the web server, and if the server trusts the attestation company, you get the content unlocked and finally get a response with the data you wanted. The web mercilessly mocked this idiotic proposal over the weekend, and rightfully so. This is an unadulterated, transparent attempt at locking down the web with DRM-like nonsense just to serve more targeted ads that you can't block. This must not make its way into any browser or onto any server in any way, shape, or form. The less attention we give to this drivel, the better.
Ubisoft has confirmed that it is temporarily suspending accounts it deems to be inactive", preventing players from accessing their game libraries. Players are then sent an email informing them that their suspended account will be deleted in 30 days unless they click the Cancel Account Closure" link. Modern gaming.
Ars Technica has a great article about the IBM mainframe. Mainframe computers are often seen as ancient machines-practically dinosaurs. But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today. If they're dinosaurs, they're T-Rexes, and desktops and server computers are puny mammals to be trodden underfoot. It's estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes in use today. They're used almost exclusively by the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, 45 of the world's top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers, and eight of the top 10 telecommunications companies. And most of those mainframes come from IBM. In this explainer, we'll look at the IBM mainframe computer-what it is, how it works, and why it's still going strong after over 50 years. Whenever I see anything about mainframes, I think of that one time an 18 year old decided to buy a mainframe off eBay to run at home, and did an amazing presentation about the experience.
After many years of effort, I am happy to announce that Debian riscv64 is now an official architecture! This milestone is not the end of the journey but rather the beginning of a new one: the port will need to be rebootstrapped in the official archive, build daemons will have to be reinstalled and handed over to DSA, many bugs will need to be fixed. If everything goes well, the architecture will eventually be released with Trixie. Please note that this process will be long and will span several months. An important step in any architecture's life cycle is becoming an officially supported Debian architecture.
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