OSnews

Thanks toaseriesofcommitsby Jonathan Gray (jsg@), -current now has support for microcode (updates) forAMD(amd64 and i386) processors. It's great to see support for theAMDside gaining equivalence with that for Intel (for which support wasaddedin 2018). Good news for OpenBSD users.

A lot of the cost of a video terminal was the screen. Yet nearly everyone had a TV, and used TVs have always been fairly cheap, too. That's where Don Lancaster came in. His TV Typewriter Cookbook was the bible for homebrew video displays. The design influenced the Apple 1 computer and spawned a successful kit for a company known as Southwest Technical Products. For around $300 or so, you could have a terminal that uses your TV for output. The wild West days of home computing must've been an absolutely fascinating time to live through. I know we have quite a few old-timers in the audience here, so there's bound to be folks here who used this. Amazing

One of the coolest things to come along in the 68K Mac homebrew community is the ROM Boot Disk concept. Classic Macs have an unusually large ROM that contains a fair bit of the Mac OS, which was true even in the G3 New World Mac era (it was just on disk), so it's somewhat surprising that only one Mac officially could boot the Mac OS entirely from ROM, namely the Macintosh Classic (hold down Cmd-Option-X-O to boot from a hidden HFS volume with System 6.0.3). For many Macs that can take a ROM SIMM, you can embed a ROM volume in the Mac ROM that can even be mirrored to a RAM disk. You can even buy them pre-populated. How's that for immutability?Well, it turns out Apple themselves were the first ones to implement a flashable Mac OS ROM volume in 1994, but hardly anyone noticed - because it was only ever used publicly in a minority subset of one of the most unusual of the Macintosh-derived systems, the Apple Interactive Television Box (a/k/a AITB or the Apple Set Top Box/STB). And that's what we're going to dig into - and reprogram! - today. I had never heard of this obscure Apple product, so I was like a kid in a candy store reading this. Great weekend material.

Lately I've been spending quite a bit of time learning Rust, and as any sane person would do, after writing a few 100 lines programs I've decided to take on something a little bit more ambitious: I have written a Java Virtual Machine in Rust. With a lot of originality, I have called it rjvm. The code is available on GitHub. I want to stress that this is a toy JVM, built for learning purposes and not a serious implementation. Toy or not, this is ambitious and impressive.

The Dolphin project has broken the silence regarding their legal tussle with Nintendo and Valve, giving a far more detailed elaboration of what, exactly happened. First things first - Nintendodid notsend Valve or Dolphin a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) section 512(c) notice (commonly known as a DMCA Takedown Notice) against our Steam page. Nintendo has not taken any legal action against Dolphin Emulator or Valve. What actually happened was that Valve's legal department contacted Nintendo to inquire about the announced release of Dolphin Emulator on Steam. In reply to this, a lawyer representing Nintendo of America requested Valve prevent Dolphin from releasing on the Steam store, citing the DMCA as justification. Valve then forwarded us the statement from Nintendo's lawyers, and told us that we had to come to an agreementwith Nintendoin order to release on Steam. Considering the strong legal wording at the start of the document and the citation of DMCA law, we took the letter very seriously. We wanted to take some time and formulate a response, however after being flooded with questions, we wrote afairly frantic statementon the situation as we understood it at the time, which turned out to only fuel the fires of speculation. So, after a long stay of silence, we have a difficult announcement to make. We are abandoning our efforts to release Dolphin on Steam. Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for software to appear on it. But given Nintendo's long-held stance on emulation, we find Valve's requirement for us to getapprovalfrom Nintendo for a Steam release to be impossible. Unfortunately, that's that. The post also goes into greater detail about the Wii Common Key that's been part of Dolphin's codebase for 15 years. This key was originally extracted from the GameCube hardware itself, and a lot of people online claimed that Dolphin should just remove this key and all would be well. After consulting with their lawyers, Dolphin has come to the conclusion that including the key poses no legal risk for the project, and even if it somehow did, the various other parts of the Dolphin codebase that make emulation of original games possible would pose a much bigger legal threat anyway. So, the team will keep on including the key, and the only outcome here is that Dolphin will not be available on Steam.

Seven companies-including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic, and Inflection-have committed to developing tech to clearly watermark AI-generated content. That will help make it safer to share AI-generated text, video, audio, and images without misleading others about the authenticity of that content, the Biden administration hopes. It's currently unclear how the watermark will work, but it will likely be embedded in the content so that users can trace its origins to the AI tools used to generate it. And how easy will it be for bad actors to just remove the watermark? If we live in a world where these tools can create new content out of stealing everybody else's content, what's stopping anyone from developing a tool to remove these watermarks? This feels more like lip service than a real solution.

One of my old home automation boards running ebusd is still using Raspberry PI 2 B SoC. FreeBSD is still perfectly supporting this hardware, however, due to being a Tier-2 platform, binary updates freebsd-update are not supported. Of course, one can download the new image, but this will mean re-installing and reconfiguring all the software, which is time-consuming and painful. Also, the traditional build from source" way will probably take forever on this tiny board and also could potentially destroy the SD card. So the obvious alternative was cross-compilation. If you're in this very specific niche - you're very happy this guide exists.

I've been going through my collection of PDAs over the last few weeks for, among other OSNews things, my Pixelfed account, and while playing around with various old applications, I came across the Google Maps application for Palm OS. As it turns out - this official Google application, last updated in 2008, still fully and completely works today, in 2023! I shot a quick video using the application, and uploaded it to the new (and not fully set-up yet, so forgive the lack of avatars, descriptions, banner images, and so on - it's late in my time zone) OSNews PeerTube account, embedded below for your convenience. Navigation still works. You can pan around in both map and satellite view. And, as the video shows, you can zoom in quite far and get some incredible detail on that old Palm TX display (you can zoom in further). That's some impressive API backwards compatibility.

About a small town's worth of people pointed me to this on Mastodon, so here it goes: In an IMAX theater, the m130's job is to control the quick turn reel unit, or QTRU for short. (For many years, it appears, a non-emulated m130 sat holstered in most theaters.) The QTRU's job is to control the platters, which are those large horizontal shelves where all of a film's many reels are stitched together, stored, and then quickly spun out to and from the projector. TheIMAX 1570 projectormoves film at a little under six feet per second, so it's all happening really fast. The m130 is apparently crucial to keeping the thing humming - PALM PILOT MUST BE ON ALL THE TIME," reads a notice above an image of a different m130 that has since been passed around the internet -but doesn't often need to be used. I've never had to interact with the Palm Pilot," says one person familiar with the technology. It's really just a status screen." Its job is to keep the QTRU moving at a consistent speed and to help keep the film's video in sync with its audio. This doesn't surprise me one bit. In environments like these, if something works, and has been working reliably for decades, there's really no reason to change any of it. This application is probably quite simple, but since there's only a very small number of theaters out there even capable of showing 70mm film, and it doesn't look like it's a format on the up and up.

USA readers may wonder why I was waiting for the release of a game already published. While Street Fighter II made it to the Super Famicom on June 10, 1992 in Japan and July 15, 1992 in North America, France had to wait until December 17, 1992 to get a PAL version. As I waited, I saw ads in French magazines offering imported cartridges of my Holy Graal. To make them work on a European Super Nintendo, one had to buy an adapter. The combo cost almost as much as the console (595F + 199F vs 1290F). Needless to say I couldn't afford it. But I always wondered how Nintendo seemingly controlled the regions and how tinkerers had managed to circumvent that protection. A detailed look at how the 10NES sysyem worked.

Apple says it will remove services such as FaceTime and iMessage from the UK rather than weaken security if new proposals are made law and acted upon. The government is seeking to update the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) 2016. It wants messaging services to clear security features with the Home Office before releasing them to customers. The act lets the Home Office demand security features are disabled, without telling the public. Under the update, this would have to be immediate. I wonder if Apple would actually follow through with something like this, or if they're only looking for a token concession so they can claim they're still in the clear and do nothing. Interesting, though, that when the Chinese government comes calling, Tim Cook drops his privacy is a fundamental human right" shtick real quick, but when the government of a western country comes calling, it's a lot of rah-rah. A spine is clearly not very expensive.

A few weeks ago I embarked on a somewhat crazy side project: Make the Open Watcom debugger work on OS/2 1.0. This project was not entirely successful, but I learned a couple of things along the way. I love these stories.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the techniques described in Let's Go Whaling bear comparison to some of those thatbookmakers and casinos have long deployed, capitalising on deep understanding of psychology. The big difference, of course, is that the gamer can never win money, only prestige or progress in a virtual game. The very uncomfortable truth for Apple and Google: much - 70-75% - of App Store and Play Store revenue comes from exploitative casino games, mostly expertly designed to target the most vulnerable among us, like gambling addicts, children, people with mental issues like depression, and so on. It's seedy, disgusting, predatory, and should be deeply, deeply illegal. Left or right, can't we all agree we should ban these practices?

Ars Technica: Antitrust enforcers released adraft update outlining new rulestoday thatofficials saywill make it easier to crack down on mergers and acquisitions that could substantially lessen competition in the US. Now the public has 60 days to review the draft guidelines andsubmit commentsto the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) before the agencies' September 18 deadline.A fierce debate has already started between those in support and those who oppose the draft guidelines. Any corporation should be serving the democratically elected government of a country - not the other way around. If a merger or acquisition is deemed harmful to the competitive landscape, and thus to consumers, a government should be able to just stop it. The same applies to corporations who grow too large, too rich, too powerful - if a company's actions start to dictate significant parts of the market or even economy, they are a threat to the stability and functioning of the society it's claiming to be a part of, and as such, they should be able to be split up or their actions otherwise remedied to protect society. In other words, any steps the Us FTC and DOJ take to take control over runaway corporations are positive.

Starting in Windows 11, version 22H2,Enhanced Phishing Protection in Microsoft Defender SmartScreenhelps protect Microsoft school or work passwords against phishing and unsafe usage on sites and apps. We are trying out a change starting with this build where users who have enabled warning options for Windows Security under App & browser control > Reputation-based protection > Phishing protection will see a UI warning on unsafe password copy and paste, just as they currently see when they type in their password. This actually seems like a cool and useful feature. The basic gist - which is a bit unclear from the short blurb above - seems to be that if, e.g., a child using a school account copies and pastes that school account password to use somewhere else, this feature will warn them about it. Usefulness of warning dialogs aside, I can see this being quite useful in large organisations.

Turns out Intel's NUC line is not going to die after all. Today, Intel announced it has agreed to a term sheet with ASUS, a global technology solution provider, for an agreement to manufacture, sell and support the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) 10th to 13th generations systems product line, and to develop future NUC systems designs. If you're into Intel NUCs, Asus is the way to go now.

The contractors are the invisible backend of the generative AI boom that's hyped to change everything. Chatbots like Bard use computer intelligence to respond almost instantly to a range of queries spanning all of human knowledge and creativity. But to improve those responses so they can be reliably delivered again and again, tech companies rely on actual people who review the answers, provide feedback on mistakes and weed out any inklings of bias. It's an increasingly thankless job. Six current Google contract workers said that as the company entered a AI arms race with rival OpenAI over the past year, the size of their workload and complexity of their tasks increased. Without specific expertise, they were trusted to assess answers in subjects ranging from medication doses to state laws. Documents shared with Bloomberg show convoluted instructions that workers must apply to tasks with deadlines for auditing answers that can be as short as three minutes. That's the reality of artificial intelligence" - the same reality it always seems to be in Silicon Valley: thousands and thousands of exploited workers behind the scenes running around like ants keeping the illusion of futurism alive for meager pay.

Together with the open source software community, GitHub has beenworking to supportEU policymakers to craft the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). The CRA seeks to improve the cybersecurity of digital products (including the 96 percent that contain open source) in the EU by imposing strict requirements for vendors supplying products in the single market, backed by fines of up to 15 million or 2.5% of global revenue. This goal is welcome: security is too often an afterthought when shipping a product. But as written it threatens open source without bolstering resilience. Even though the CRA, as part of a long-standing line of EU open' strategy, has an exemption for open source software developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity, challenges in defining the scopehave beenthe focusof considerablecommunity activity. Three serious problems remain with the Parliament text set for the industry (ITRE') committee vote on July 19. These three problems are set out below. Absent dissent, this may become the final position without further deliberation or a full Parliament plenary vote. We encourage you toshare your thoughts with your elected officials today. The three problems are substantial for open source projects. First, if an open source project receives donations and/or has corporate developers working on it, it would be regulated by the CRA and thus face a huge amount of new administrative rules and regulations to follow that would no doubt be far too big a burden for especially smaller projects or individual developers. On top of that, the CRA, as it currently stands, also intends to mess with the disclosure process for vulnerabilities in a way that doesn't seem to actually help. These three problems are big, and could have far-reaching consequences for open source.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, one of the biggest names in online advertising, held some sort of corporate event or whatever in January of this year, and the IAB CEO, David Cohen, held a speech there to rally the troops. Apparently, those of us who are fighting back against the online advertising industry? We're extremists". Extremists are winning the battle for hearts and minds in Washington D.C. and beyond.We cannot let that happen.These extremists are political opportunists who've made it their mission to cripple the advertising industry and eliminate it from the American economy and culture. This guy, who uses double spaces after a period and hence is already on my shitlist, just gave us an amazing creed.

The Framework Laptop 16,available for preorder todaystarting at $1,699 prebuilt, is one of themost exciting notebookswe've ever seen. When it ships in Q4, the modular computer company's first gaming laptop will let you swap practically every component - not just memory and storage, but each and every individual port, the motherboard, the battery, the speakers, you name it. Framework seems to be making it, despite the ridicule. There's more and more companies taking repairability seriously, and the EU, too, is flexing its legal muscle in this area. We're getting there. Slowly.

The biggest changes last month were a series of commits by waddlesplash, all related to theuser_mutexAPI and the consumers of it. This API is the kernel portion of the implementation of basically anything related to mutexes or locks in userland, includingpthread_mutex,pthread_cond,pthread_barrier, unnamed semaphores (viasem_open), rwlocks, and more. It bears some resemblance in concept to Linux'sfutexAPI, but is very different in both design and implementation. This month's activity report contains a detailed description of what these commits actually entail, but as OSNews regulars will know, I'm not at all qualified to tell you what it all means. Other changes this month that my limited brain can actually comprehend are work done to make Haiku partially buildable using gcc 13, more RISC-V and ARM improvements, and a whole lot more.

There's a specter looming over the realm of Mastodon, and it's the ghost of computing's past. A loose group of retro computing hobbyists have taken it upon themselves to build Mastodon clients for various operating systems. Developing web clients using the technology of the 80's and 90's is a challenge, but the following projects have proven that their devs are up to the task! Should we find ourselves in the unlikely scenario where an apocalypse happens, people can still post to Mastodon using retro PCs. This is an impressive list, and demonstrates the skill and dedication you can find in the retrocomputing community.

Android 14 introduces a number ofnew features for app stores, including an update ownership" API that lets an app store claim ownership over an app it installs. If any other app store tries to push an update to that app, Android will throw up a dialog asking you what they want to do. The dialog asks you if you want to update this app from " since this app normally receives updates from " and warns that by updating from a different source, you may receive future updates from any source on your phone." You can choose to cancel or update anyway, which is good since it means one app store can't lock you out of getting app updates from somewhere else. When taken in isolation, I think this dialog is a good addition to Android - I personally see no issues with informing users of the very valid risk that come with installing applications from outside the Play Store, especially ones coming from random websites (and not from APKMirror or F-droid or similar, more well-known sources). There are real risks associated with doing so, and it's a good idea to warn people of this in the highly unlikely event they both accidentally download a random APK and open it to install it. However, the when' clause is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Google has been slowly locking Android down for years now, and it's not unreasonable to assume that this is simply yet another stop along the way in that process. I don't think Google will ever fully remove sideloading from Android, but they sure will do whatever they can to make it as hard, cumbersome, annoying, and frustrating as possible.

The availability of support for various apps and drivers (for various hardware and software) is crucial for the general adoption of anygeneral purpose operating systemlike Redox OS. Some of us developers are working on improving thecoreof Redox OS (like the Kernel), which should create a solid base on which high quality native drivers and apps can be created with ease. Some others are working on porting (and adapting) various open source drivers and apps (written for other OSes) such that they can work with Redox OS. This work is super important and helps Redox OS progress forward. But in the meanwhile, there's apotential shortcut to enablingwide driver and app supportfor Redox OS, without having to manually port and adapt drivers to Redox OS. (which can be helpful, both today and in the future). The shortcut, in simple words, is to use our Host machine running Redox OS, to run a Virtual Machine with another OS (Linux/Windows) as the guest, and thencleverly use the drivers and apps that can run on that guest OS to help coverup the missing drivers and apps on Redox OS. This is not a novel solution, but it is quite clever and ingenious. I'm wondering how this would impact performance, and if stability suffers from going through several layers like this. There'll be a more detailed post with technical details of the implementation later on, so keep an eye out for that one.

A year ago, wecompiled a model list of Macs spanning over two decades, complete with their launch dates, discontinuation dates, and all the available information about the macOS updates each model received. We were trying to answer two questions: How long can Mac owners reasonably expect to receive software updates when they buy a new computer? And were Intel Macs being dropped more aggressively now that the Apple Silicon transition was in full swing? The answer to the second question was a tentative yes," and now that we know the official support list for macOS Sonoma, the trendline is clear. The only thing this article makes clear is that if Apple truly cared about its customers, it would post exactly how much longer each Mac is planned to be supported.

Collapse OS (which we talked about 4 years ago) has a successor. Dusk OS is a 32-bit Forth and big brother toCollapse OS. Itsprimary purposeis to be maximally useful during thefirst stage of civilizational collapse, that is, when we can't produce modern computers anymore but that there's still many modern computers still around.

We talked about Chimera Linux before - it's a unique coupling of the Linux kernel with a FreeBSD userland, musl, the package manager from Alpine Linux, and dinit. The project recently entered the alpha stage, and while not ready for everyday use, Wesley Moore still decided to try and give it a go. So far my experience has actually been better than I expected. Since I installed it I have not rebooted back into Arch. This isn'tthe first time I've run a desktop musl systemand I was prepared to encounter incompatible software more often than I did. Flatpak really helps fill the gaps there. As the alpha announcement suggested, I have run into the odd bug here and there but for the most part the system is remarkably polished and stable. I plan to keep using it as the primary OS on my laptop, including itsFramework 13 AMDreplacement that should arrive Q4 2023. That's good news. Chimera is one of the more interesting operating system projects out there, and it's headed by the same person who used to run the Void Linux for POWER hardware project, so there's some real pedigree here.

As a former BeOS user and fan(atic), I consider myself quite knowledgeable on the subject, but as I was watching the latest Micheal MJD video about BeOS, I learned something new I had never heard of before. It's common knowledge that Be actively tried to court x86 OEMs to bundle BeOS alongside Windows in a dual-boot configuration. However, these efforts fell apart as soon as Microsoft caught wind of it and Redmond sent representatives to these OEMs to, shall we say, politely discourage them from doing so. I thought this is where this story ended - the OEMs ghosted Be, and no PC with BeOS preinstalled ever shipped. But in his video, Micheal MJD mentions that at least one OEM did actually ship BeOS preinstalled alongside Windows - Hitachi. However, while the company technically shipped BeOS, it still wanted to appease Microsoft's goons representatives, and so Hitachi just... Disabled the special boot loader that would've allowed users to pick BeOS at boot. BeOS was technically installed and took up a part of the hard drive of every one of these machines shipped, but unless you followed a set of detailed instructions posted by Be online, using a BeOS boot floppy, you wouldn't be able to actually boot into BeOS. Trying to find more information about this, I ended up at the article archive of Scot Hacker, author of, among other things, The BeOS Bible. In 2001, Hacker wrote the post He who controls the boot loader, in response to the news that Be had been acquired by Palm: In the 1998-1999 timeframe, ready to prime the pump with their desktop offering, Be offered BeOSfor freeto any major computer manufacturer willing to pre-install BeOS on machines alongside Windows. Although few in the Be community ever knew about the discussions, Gassee says that Be was engaged in enthusiastic discussions with Dell, Compaq, Micron, and Hitachi. Taken together, pre-installation arrangements with vendors of this magnitude could have had a major impact on the future of Be and BeOS. But of the four, only Hitachi actually shipped a machine with BeOS pre-installed. The rest apparently backed off after a closer reading of the fine print in their Microsoft Windows License agreements. Hitachi did ship a line of machines (the Flora Prius) with BeOS pre-installed, but made changes to the bootloader - rendering BeOS invisible to the consumer - before shipping. Apparently, Hitachi received a little visit from Microsoft just before shipping the Flora Prius, and were reminded of the terms of the license. Be was forced to postdetailed instructions on their web site explaining to customers how tounhidetheir hidden BeOS partitions. It is likely that most Flora Prius owners never even saw the BeOS installations to which they were entitled. So clearly, this information has been out there since at least 2001 - I had just never heard of it. There's countless references to Hacker's article out there as well, so it's not like it's some deeply hidden secret nobody was aware of. I, of course, dove into our own archives and... For the love of KDL, we even linked to Hacker's article. I wasn't working for OSNews at the time - this was about 4-5 years before I came on as Managing Editor - but I find it highly entertaining this was already part of OSNews lore. In any event, I'm wondering if this makes Hitachi the only OEM to have ever shipped a computer with BeOS preinstalled. Several Mac clone makers put a BeOS installation CD in the box of their machines, but I don't think any of them ever shipped machines with BeOS preinstalled. Even if they did, Hitachi would still be the only x86 OEM to have ever shipped BeOS preinstalled, and that, too, is incredibly noteworthy. Of course, I now have to try and find a working example of this Hitachi Flora Prius computer line. They were apparently only sold in Japan, so the odds of finding one anywhere seem slim, at best. It doesn't help that most people who bought one of these had no idea BeOS was installed or what BeOS even was, so the historical significance was lost on them. I also think these weren't particularly noteworthy computers otherwise - most likely one of the many dime-a-dozen beige boxes sold all over the world. Searches on eBay and Japanese auction sites yield no results. We really need to find a working example of a Hitachi Flora Prius with BeOS preinstalled. We need to image its hard drive for posterity on Archive.org, and I want to see it running - either on YouTube or in real life, I don't care. This is a piece of computing history that needs to be preserved.

As you may have noticed, I used the wordcopyrightedfor the title of this story. And it's not without reason. I think this story could have been fairly decent even without the copyright part, so before we get to the nitty gritty stuff - I can 100% confirm that Brave lets you ingest copyrighted material through theirBrave Search API, to which they also assign you rights". Time and time again, Brave gets caught doing slimy things. Just don't use Brave. There are far, far better and more ethical alternatives.

This is a list of software and ideas developed or maintained by the OpenBSD project, sorted in order of approximate introduction. Some of them are explained in detail in our research papers. That's an impressive list.

As some of us learned in the last week, it's easy to uninstall a troublesome Rapid Security Response (RSR). Several naturally asked why that isn't possible with a macOS update, pointing out that it was available and worryingly popular between High Sierra and Catalina 10.15.2, since when the ability has been lost. The answer is as straightforward as you'd expect: the updates themselves, as well as the update process, have become more complicated than they used to be, and rollback would be difficult to implement. As such, the advice for those unhappy with a new macOS version is as simple as it is disruptive: For those who decide that they want to roll back a macOS update on an Apple silicon Mac, by far the simplest procedure is to back the Mac up fully, put it into DFU mode, use Configurator 2 to restore the IPSW image for the previous version of macOS including its firmware, then to migrate the backup to that fresh boot disk. That also caters for all problems that may have arisen with the update. Apple always moves forwards, never backwards - even when you might want to.

Onyx Boox has just done something exciting; they have taken a page from the Hisense playbook and released a dedicated e-reader with the familiar candy bar shape as a smartphone, except it is a dedicated e-reader. You can do phone calls with this unit and talk to people on Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp or WeChat with dual microphones. However, it does not support SIM cards or eSim, and you must be on a WIFI connection to do anything useful. The most significant advantage of the Onyx Boox Palma is carrying an e-reader around with you in your pocket; you can't do this with the vast majority of e-readers on the market. The Palma is available as apre-orderfor $249; when it launches, the price will go up to $279.99.Only a small batch of units are available as a first come, first serve basis and will ship out sometime in August 2023. I don't really have a use for something like this, but the price is interesting, and if it can indeed do smooth scrolling as they claim, I might actually be interested out of sheer curiosity. It's kind of like if Apple released an iPod Touch, but with an e-ink display.

Microsoftended Windows Server 2003's Mainstream Support on July 13, 2010, and Extended Support on July 14, 2015. This means it would no longer provide security updates, technical support, or software updates for this server-based operating system. Windows Server 2003 is probably my favourite Windows release. I never liked Windows XP, and Server 2003, with its updated codebase and various fixes compared to XP, provided a more solid alternative at the time. There was this whole cottage industry of people aiding each other in converting Windows Server 2003 into a more desktop-friendly operating system through reactivating services, installing additional components, applying registry changes, and so on. It was a bit of work post-install, but once done, you had a more stable, more solid, and safer version" of Windows XP. At least, that was the theory. I have no idea if this was actually true, or if a fully updated Windows XP installation was, in fact, functionally equivalent and that Server 2003 provided zero material benefit.

In case you missed it,Red Hat announcedthey will no longer be providing the means for downstream clones to continue to be 1:1 binary copies of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Very quickly, bothJackandI sharedsome initial thoughts, but we intentionally took our time deciding the next right step for AlmaLinux OS. After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible. For a typical user, this will mean very little change in your use of AlmaLinux. Red Hat-compatible applications will still be able to run on AlmaLinux OS, and your installs of AlmaLinux will continue to receive timely security updates. The most remarkable potential impact of the change is that we will no longer be held to the line of bug-for-bug compatibility" with Red Hat, and that means that we can now accept bug fixes outside of Red Hat's release cycle. While that means some AlmaLinux OS users may encounter bugs that are not in Red Hat, we may also accept patches for bugs that have not yet been accepted upstream, or shipped downstream. I wonder just how much consumers care about the strict 1:1 with RHEL. With this change to AlmaLinux, we're about to find out.

Today we begin the final phase of this major change where Aptos will start appearing as the new default font across Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel for hundreds of millions of users. And, over the next few months it will roll out to be the default for all our customers. We can't wait for Aptos to be readily available since it was crafted to embody the many aspects of the human experience. A new default font for Microsoft Office is a huge deal. It doesn't sound like it should be, but it really is - over the coming years, millions and documents changing hands within and between companies, organisations, individuals, and more will be typeset in this new font, and you'll come to see it everywhere. And hate it. It's the natural order of things.

Beyond the dazzling sea of licensed fireworks and thunderclouds lies a cosmic array of ancient stars. It's within our gaze upon these stars where we find the inspiration for COSMIC DE, our new desktop environment created for Pop!_OS and other Linux distros. Let's get into the updates! COSMIC DE is System76's in-progress Rust-based desktop environment. System76 has done some neat tricks while resizing windows in tiled mode, they're splitting up the notifications subsystems into separate threads, they added fractional scaling, and more.

A few weeks ago we reported that the European Union wanted to force device makers to make batteries user-replaceable, and today it's been confirmed and made official. The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should beremovable and replaceableby the end-user, leaving sufficient time for operators to adapt the design of their products to this requirement. This is an important provision for consumers. Light means of transport batteries will need to be replaceable by an independent professional. Excellent.

Today, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has added 802.11bb as a standard for light-based wireless communications. The publishing of the standard has beenwelcomedby global Li-Fi businesses, as it will help speed the rollout and adoption of the data-transmission technology standard. Where Li-Fi shines (pun intended) is not just in its purported speedsas fast as 224 GB/s. Fraunhofer's Dominic Schulz points out that as it works in an exclusive optical spectrum, this ensures higher reliability and lower latency and jitter. Moreover Light's line-of-sight propagation enhances security by preventing wall penetration, reducing jamming and eavesdropping risks, and enabling centimetre-precision indoor navigation," says Shultz. The technology can work using regular lighting points, but you won't see any flicker or strobing, since it uses infrared. I honestly like the idea of every light fixture in your house being a network access point, but I'm also getting flashbacks to using IrDA to sync PDAs to PCs, and what would happen if you obstructed the line of sight.

Are you an Android developer with applications on the Play Store? Well, you might want to know that Google is about to publish your phone number on the Play Store for everyone to see. We're renaming the Contact details" section on your app's store listing to App support" and adding a new About the developer" section to help users learn more about you. This may show verified identity information like name, address, and contact details. Google is doing this in an attempt to build user trust", but to me it seems rife for abuse. Does this really mean every small indie developer is going to have their personal phone number published for all to see? I also wonder what's going to be displayed under Google's own applications - it's notoriously difficult to get anyone at Google on the phone, so will they be excluded from this new policy? Will they be allowed to link to a recording?

The general trend of macOS releases over the past few years is that it has been moving closer and closer to the look and feel of iOS. The icons have become iOS icons, and their shape has become the iOS shape, and you can now use your iPhone as the Mac's webcam, etc. etc. This occasionally comes at the expense of other functionality (ask me how I feel about the new Settings menu), but it is the direction that Apple has clearly been heading in since (arguably) Big Sur. Every so often, other splashy features are announced (Stage Manager, Universal Control, Quick Notes) that I write a lot about and then never end up using ever again. So, good news for Continuity fans: that's basically what's going on with Sonoma. Ventura looked a heck of a lot like iOS, and Sonoma looks even more like iOS. I turned my office's Mac Studio on after installing the developer beta and thought, for a second, that I might be hallucinating my iPhone's lockscreen. It's remarkably reminiscent. It's crazy how Microsoft always seems to be doing things about 10 years before everyone else catches on, for better or worse. I'm not a fan of the iOS look, and it looks whacky and childish to me when ported to the Mac - especially since macOS has also become almost Windows-like by having so many application frameworks, some from iOS, some from macOS, and some a weird combination of the two. It's making macOS far messier and more inconsistent than it used to be, leaving the Linux desktop as the last bastion of people who value a dekstop-first, consistent interface. If you told me this 10-15 years ago, I'd have called you crazy, but we're now living in a world where a GTK or QT desktop is far more consistent and focused on the desktop than Windows and macOS, which both feel lost in the woods at the moment.

Speaking of beta programs and doing it right - here's how things are going at the other end of the spectrum. Today we're bringing you Android 14 Beta 4, continuing our work on polish and performance as we get closer to the general availability release of Android 14. Beta 4 is available for Pixel Tablet and Pixel Fold, in addition to the rest of the supported Pixel family, so you can test your applications on devices spanning multiple form factors and directly experience the work we're doing to improve the large-screen and foldable device experience. The fact Android betas are only available on an incredibly small subset of Android devices stands in such stark contrast to how Apple does their program. Of course, we all know why that's the case, but that doesn't mean Google gets a pass. I have an Android device running Android 13. I should be able to install Android 14 betas. End of story. Rant aside, how far along the development process for Android 14 are we? Beta 4 is our secondPlatform StableAndroid 14 release, which means that the developer APIs and all app-facing behaviors are final for you to review and integrate into your apps, and you can publish apps on Google Play to devices running Android 14 at the official API level. That indicates we're relatively close to release, meaning most Android users can expect to upgrade somewhere halfway 2024, or when they buy a new device, or not at all.

Apple is officially releasing the first public betas of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10, and macOS 14 Sonoma today, a little over a month after releasing the first developer betas at its Worldwide Developers Conference. I have to say, Apple is doing a great job with their public beta access. It's easy enough that it's accessible, but not so easy you've got millions of people running unstable software. Considering the number of platforms they have to support - that's no easy feat.

On behalf of the Thunderbird team,Thunderbird Council, our global community of contributors, and our extended Mozilla family, I am incredibly excited to announce the initial launch of Thunderbird 115 Supernova" for Linux, macOS, and Windows! With this year's version, we're delivering much more than just another yearly release. Supernova represents a modernized overhaul of the software - both visually and technically - while retaining the familiarity and flexibility you expect from Thunderbird. This is a massive release, and modernises this venerable e-mail client considerably. I can't wait to test it out once it hits the Fedora repositories - I never liked Thunderbird all that much, but Supernova seems like something that suits me a little better, so I'm curious to see if it can pull me away from Geary. If you want to quickly gauge the changes to the user interface, the Thunderbird team made a very handy page for that.

TodaySUSE, the company behind Rancher, NeuVector, and SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and a global leader in enterprise open source solutions, announced it is forking publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution available to all without restrictions. Over the next few years, SUSE plans to invest more than $10 million into this project. The spicy bit here is that the CEO of SUSE, Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, worked at Red Hat for 18 years before joining SUSE. Excellent.

You could put it this way - DisplayPort has all the capabilities of interfaces like HDMI, but implemented in a better way, without legacy cruft, and with a number of features that take advantage of the DisplayPort's sturdier architecture. As a result of this, DisplayPort isn't just in external monitors, but also laptop internal displays, USB-C port display support, docking stations, and Thunderbolt of all flavors. If you own a display-capable docking station for your laptop, be it classic style multi-pin dock or USB-C, DisplayPort is highly likely to be involved, and even your smartphone might just support DisplayPort over USB-C these days. Back when I bought my current 144Hz 1440p monitor with G-Sync for my gaming PC, DisplayPort was the only way to hook it all up, since HDMI wasn't yet supported. Ever since, out of a baseless sense of caution, I've always preferred DisplayPort for all my PC video connection needs, and as it turns out - yes, DisplayPort is definitely better than HDMI, and this article will tell you why.

The Kelly Rowland/Nelly songDilemmafeatures an infamous scene amongst nerds where Kelly Rowland tries to send a message to Nelly using aNokia 9210 Communicator. Unfortunately, she does this using the built in spreadsheet program and receives no reply. People suggested she might be using the =HYPERLINK() function in Excel, but would that even work?

This ports DoomGeneric NTNative to kernel-mode driver environment. This is bonkers.

Some huge news today. Intel has started to notify its ecosystem saying that it will stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) business. For the handful of STH readers who are unaware, Intel not only makes chips but they also make systems. Earlier this year, we covered that Intel was exiting the server business and selling it to MiTAC. Now its line of PCs is being sunset as well. Luckily, the market for small, powerful computers is more alive than it's ever been, and there are countless OEMs making both AMD and Intel tiny computers these days. My only concern would be that Intel exiting this market might mean the kinds of parts needed for tiny computers like the NUC also become harder to source, but since you can always use laptop parts, I doubt that's going to be an issue.

Liam Dawe at GamingOnLinux: Well, the results are here. In the USA the FTC was trying to block Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard but Microsoft has won the fight. Now Microsoft are one big step closer to actually properly closing the deal, and a rather big consolidation of the gaming industry given how big Activision Blizzard are. I haven't been keeping up with this case very much, but if history's anything to go by, any form of consolidation at this scale tends to work out worse for consumers and the market.

It's been all over the news, so I can't get around posting about it here: the year of the Linux desktop is finally here. According to the - admittedly, troublesome - figures from StatCounter, the market share of Linux on the desktop has reached 7.23%. Other publications do not count Chrome OS installations as part of the Linux share, but I think that's nonsense - they're both clearly Linux desktop operating systems, and should be added up. In the end, it doesn't really matter, and I've mostly stopped reporting on market share figures ages ago, as all they do is invite pointless flamewars and vitriol. Linux on the desktop is doing just fine, and received a major boost thanks to Valve's Proton. We all have our desktop platform of choice, and each of those choices is valid. Still, more than 7% on the desktop and like 90%+ on mobile is not bad for a project developed by a community.