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Following its investigation, the EDPS has found that the European Commission (Commission) has infringed several key data protection rules when using Microsoft 365. In its decision, the EDPS imposes corrective measures on the Commission. European Data Protection Supervisor You often hear people state that EU rules and regulations are designed exclusively to harm non-EU companies. The massive amounts of fines and corrective actions handed out to EU companies in all kinds of sectors already disprove this notion, and here's a case where even the European Commission itself gets a slap on the wrist for violating its own rules and regulations - rules and regulations, we're often told by especially American corporatists, are designed specifically to target poor American businesses. Not that corporatists have any use for reality and facts, but still.

Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 66 is now available via pkg update' from the support repository or by downloading the SRU from My Oracle Support Doc ID 2433412.1. Highlights of the changes in this release are given in the release announcement and important information to read before installing it is provided in the Readme linked from the above support document. This blog post provides more details about selected new features and interface changes in this SRU, as well as some preparation work for changes coming in future SRUs. Alan Coopersmith and Jan Pechanec Oracle is still developing Solaris. I still find it very difficult to care after Oracle's bullshittery.

Roku customers are threatening to stop using, or to even dispose of, their low-priced TVs and streaming gadgets after the company appears to be locking devices for people who don't conform to the recently updated terms of service (ToS). This month, users on Roku's support forums reported suddenly seeing a message when turning on their Roku TV or streaming device reading: We've made an important update: We've updated our Dispute Resolution Terms. Select Agree' to agree to these updated Terms and to continue enjoying our products and services. Press * to view these updated Terms." A large button reading Agree" follows. The pop-up doesn't offer a way to disagree, and users are unable to use their device unless they hit agree. Scharon Harding at Ars Technica The best part of this story? And by best I mean worst? You have to send a letter - a paper one, with stamps and everything, like in the before times - to Roku's lawyer in California containing the names of all the people opting out, the devices and services in question, and a damn purchase receipt. They're one step away from wanting your passport and your firstborn child.

On Wednesday, Midjourney banned all employees from image synthesis rival Stability AI from its service indefinitely after it detected botnet-like" activity suspected to be a Stability employee attempting to scrape prompt and image pairs in bulk. Midjourney advocate Nick St. Pierre tweeted about the announcement, which came via Midjourney's official Discord channel. Benj Edwards So AI" companies are allowed to ingest whatever data they want, but as soon as someone ingests their data, it's suddenly a problem? Seems like a sound business model.

Highlights of Linux kernel 6.8 include LAM (Linear Address Masking) virtualization and guest-first memory support for KVM, a basic online filesystem check and repair mechanism for the Bcachefs file system introduced in Linux kernel 6.7, support for the Broadcom BCM2712 processor in Raspberry Pi 5, AMD ACPI-based Wi-Fi band RFI mitigation feature (WBRF), zswap writeback disabling, fscrypt support for CephFS, a new Intel Xe DRM driver, and a multi-size THP (Transparent Huge Pages) sysfs interface. Marius Nestor at 9to5Linux There's way more going on in this new release, of course, such as further Rust support, for instance in the Loongson architecture, additional support for tons of newer Intel processors , specific support patches for various laptops, and so, so much more.

From the beginning, time zone rules were a component in Mainline, called Time Zone Data or tzdata module. This integration allowed us to react more quickly to government-mandated time zone changes than before. However until 2023 tzdata updates were still bundled with other Mainline changes, sometimes leading to testing complexities and slower deployment. In 2023, we made further investments in Mainline's infrastructure and decoupled the tzdata module from the other components. With this isolation, we gained the ability to respond rapidly to time zone legislation changes - often releasing updates to Android users outside of the established release cadence. Additionally, this change means time zone updates can reach a far greater number of Android devices, ensuring you as Android users always see the correct time. Almaz Mingaleev and Masha Khokhlova This is equal parts boring and equal parts amazing. The amount of work developers have to put into making sure timezones work is astonishing, and the fact that a large chunk of it is done by volunteers is even more impressive.

GTK 4.14 brings various improvements on the accessibility front, especially for applications showing complex, formatted text; for WebKitGTK; and for notifications. Emmanuele Bassi Excellent improvements that, if you listen to those that need these improvements, are sorely needed in GTK 4.

Here you can find everything there is to know about the first version of Windows. David Simuni And they truly mean everything. This is an exceptional amount of information about Windows 1.0.

A powerful House committee advanced a bill on Thursday that could lead to a nationwide ban against TikTok on all electronic devices, renewing lawmakers' challenge to one of the world's most popular social media apps and highlighting unresolved fears that TikTok may pose a Chinese government spying risk. The measure that sailed unanimously through the House Energy and Commerce Committee would prohibit TikTok from US app stores unless the social media platform -used by roughly 170 million Americans -is quickly spun off from its China-linked parent company, ByteDance. Brian Fung at CNN TikTok obviously needs to be banned. It's an extension of a genocidal, totalitarian government that has no place on our our phones. Yes, I understand Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft also collect vast amounts of data, but at least they are (nominally) beholden to our legal systems, and while there is, of course, a vast power imbalance between us as individuals and them as megacorporations, it's still nowhere even close as to being an arm of a totalitarian government - they're just not comparable. China's state surveillance tools have no place on our devices.

When this command line option is used with curl on macOS, the version shipped by Apple, it seems to fall back and checks the system CA store in case the provided set of CA certs fail the verification. A secondary check that was not asked for, is not documented and plain frankly comes completely by surprise. Therefore, when a user runs the check with a trimmed and dedicated CA cert file, it will not fail if the system CA store contains a cert that can verify the server! This is a security problem because now suddenly certificate checks pass that should not pass. Daniel Stenberg Absolutely wild that Apple does not consider this a security issue.

Every window system has windows, as an entity. Usually we think of these as being used for, well, windows and window like things; application windows, those extremely annoying pop-up modal dialogs that are always interrupting you at the wrong time, even perhaps things like pop-up menus. In its original state, X has more windows than that. Part of how and why it does this is that X allows windows to nest inside each other, in a window tree, which you can still see today with xwininfo -root -tree. One of the reasons that X has copious nested windows is that X was designed with a particular model of writing X programs in mind, and that model made everything into a (nested) window. Seriously, everything. In an old fashioned X application, windows are everywhere. Buttons are windows (or several windows if they're radio buttons or the like), text areas are windows, menu entries are each a window of their own within the window that is the menu, visible containers of things are windows (with more windows nested inside them), and so on. Chris Siebenmann This is wild.

Fedora Workstation has long defaulted to using GNOME's Wayland session by default, but it has continued to install the GNOME X.Org session for fallback purposes or those opting to use it instead. But for the Fedora Workstation 41 release later in the year, there is a newly-approved plan to no longer have that GNOME X.Org session installed by default. Michael Larabel Expect more and more of the major distributions to abandon X.org completely. For the KDE version of Fedora, X.org will be dropped entirely in Fedora 40 already, so one release earlier.

Just before the end of 1989, Microsoft made available the first pre-release version of the long promised 32-bit OS/2 2.0, which was intended to be the first mass-market 32-bit PC operating system. This was accompanied by a press release detailing the $2,600 OS/2 2.0 Software Development Kit (SDK). Unfortunately, the December 1989 pre-release of OS/2 2.0 may not have survived to the present day. But in June 1990, Microsoft shipped the second pre-release of the OS/2 2.0 SDK. And that version has now turned up, after twenty years of searching, and nearly a quarter century after its release! Michal Necasek at OS/2 Museum OS/2 is one of the biggest what-ifs in tech, and the whole origin story and demise of the platform is worthy of a big budget drama series. It also happens to be one of my favourite retrocomputing platforms of all time, so I may be biased.

The European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA) comes into force this week for companies who have been designated. Today, we are sharing some more details about the changes we are making to comply, following product testing we announced earlier this year. Oliver Bethell on the official Google blog This is Google's overview of the changes it's implementing to comply with the DMA, some of which the company already announced months ago. Google's changes don't have as much of a direct, noticeable impact as some other company's changes, mostly since a lot of the more impactful consequences of the DMA, such as allowing sideloading and alternative application stores, were already allowed on Android. Other changes, like to Search, will take longer to be noticed. The one thing that stands out is the tone - compared to Apple's communication around the DMA. Whereas Apple sounds like a petulant whiny toddler, Google sounds constructive, to the point, and, well, like an adult. That doesn't mean Google's post isn't also full of shit in places, but at least they're being grown-ups about it.

You heard it here first folks: systemd is coming to postmarketOS! As a mobile oriented OS, our main goal has always been to work for everyone. From technical folks to casual users. postmarketOS should have all the benefits you expect from a Linux based distribution, such as being free software, respecting your privacy, getting updates until your device physically breaks, respecting your attention and not shoving advertisements in your face. Your phone should be a tool you use, not the other way around. This is of course not an easy task, one of the main blockers we found as we collaborate more closely with KDE and GNOME developers is that they have a hard time with our OpenRC-based stack. In order to get KDE and GNOME working at all, we use a lot of systemd polyfills on top of OpenRC. So while we are technically not using systemd", in practice we already do use a large chunk of its components to get KDE and GNOME running, just different versions of those components. While we are very grateful for everybody who works on these polyfills, we must point out that most aren't a full replacement, and take additional effort to support and maintain. As much as we might want to romanticise the idea of spending 6, 12, 24 months attempting to come up with an even vaguely competitive alternative to systemd, we would quite simply rather be working on making postmarketOS better. postmarketOS blog This is the sensible choice to make, and I'm glad they made it. It makes no sense for a relatively small project that already has to deal with the difficulties of supporting smartphones to also have to deal with shoehorning the smartphone variants of GNOME and KDE into an init system they're not at all made for.

Every day, people turn to Search to find the best of what the web has to offer. We've long had policies and automated systems to fight against spammers, and we work to address emerging tactics that look to game our results with low-quality content. We regularly update those policies and systems to effectively tackle these trends so we can continue delivering useful content and connecting people with high-quality websites. Today we're announcing key changes we're making to improve the quality of Search and the helpfulness of your results. Elizabeth Tucker on the official Google blog Low-quality SEO spam has been a problem on Google for years, but the recent advent of AI" tools has wreaked absolute havoc in the search results. It's a damn blood bath out there. It's now up to Google to fix its own mess, so let's wait and see if these changes will do anything to reverse the downward spiral Google Search has been in for years now.

FreeBSD 13.3 has been released, and as this is a point release of the stable branch, it's not a major shake-up or overhaul of the platform. We've got the usual updated versions of LLVM, clang, OpenSSH, and so on, and there's a number of stability fixes to native and LinuxKPI-based WiFi drivers. Of course, there's much more, so head on over to the release notes for the full details.

According to my sources, AI Explorer is the blockbuster AI experience that will separate AI PCs from non-AI PCs. It's described as an advanced Copilot" with a built-in history/timeline feature that turns everything you do on your computer into a searchable moment using natural language. It works across any app and allows users to search for previously opened conversations, documents, web pages, and images. For example, you could type, Find me that list of restaurants Jenna said she liked," and Windows can bring up the exact conversation you were having when Jenna mentioned those restaurants. Even vague prompts should work, like Find me that thing about dinosaurs," Windows will pull up every word, phrase, image, and related topic about dinosaurs that you've previously opened on your computer. The AI Explorer app can also understand context, help jumpstart projects or workflows, and even suggest tasks based on what's currently on screen. For example, suppose you're looking at an image in an app. In that case, the AI Explorer will automatically show an edit image" button that lets you type out your criteria, such as remove this image's background using the Photos app." Zac Bowden Windows, for all your AI" and ads.

Well, that was a short run. Announced with much fanfare in 2021, Microsoft has announced it's already killing Windows Subsystem for Android, Microsoft's solution to run Android applications on Windows 11. Microsoft is ending support for the Windows Subsystem for AndroidTM (WSA). As a result, the Amazon Appstore on Windows and all applications and games dependent on WSA will no longer be supported beginning March 5, 2025. Until then, technical support will remain available to customers. Customers that have installed the Amazon Appstore or Android apps prior to March 5, 2024, will continue to have access to those apps through the deprecation date of March 5, 2025. Please reach out to our support team for further questions at support.microsoft.com. We are grateful for the support of our developer community and remain committed to listening to feedback as we evolve experiences. Microsoft's Learn website Whenever Microsoft offers a way or an API to run and/or develop applications for Windows, and it isn't Win32, you can be certain they're going to kill it within a few years.

I owned a C64 and was familiar with the C128, but this one was odd. It wasn't running any games, color graphics or playing music. Instead, it was connected to a monochrome monitor which always displayed either a weird command line prompt or what seemed to be some boring professional writing software. I soon came to find that it was running CP/M and WordStar, one of the first word processors for microcomputers. My daily obsessive visits to the computer shop led to some friendship with the owner, to the point that he'd let me in and play with the machines. So, I played with CP/M and learned how to use WordStar. Well, in case you didn't notice, I own a C128DCR now. This blog is about how I got CP/M, WordStar, and other fun ancient software apps running on it. Celso Martinho CP/M, of course, was the primary influence of DOS.

Baldur Bjarnason has written an excellent piece to explain why, exactly, companies like Apple seem wholly incapable of working with the EU, instead of against it. He argues - quite effectively - that Apple, and US tech punditry in general, simply do not understand the EU, nor are they willing to spend even 10 minutes to understand it, which is really all you need. The core premise of the EU, its very primary function, is to enable and protect the single market. A great example of this is the ban on roaming charges - mobile phone carriers in EU are not allowed to charge extra for using mobile voice and data services in another EU country. From the EU's perspective, taking action to prevent private parties from fragmenting and taking private control over the single market simultaneously grew the economy and increased consumer surplus. This is the operating theory behind much of the actions the EU takes regarding market regulation and product standardisation: a single market built on standards is more profitable for both businesses and consumers. Baldur Bjarnason And because Apple and its tech punditry refuse to try and understand the party they are dealing with, they get caught looking like childish idiots every time they open their mouths about it. Normally when the EU regulates a given sector, it does so with ample lead time and works with industry to make sure that they understand their obligations. Apple instead thought that the regulatory contact from the EU during the lead time to the DMA was an opportunity for it to lecture the EU on its right to exist. Then its executives made up some fiction in their own minds as to what the regulation meant, announced their changes, only to discover later that they were full of bullshit. This was entirely Apple's own fault. For months, we've been hearing leaks about Apple's talks with the EU about the Digital Market Act. Those talks were not negotiations even though Apple seems to have thought they were. Talks like those are to help companies implement incoming regulations, with some leeway for interpretation on the EU's side to accommodate business interests. Remember what I wrote about electrical plugs? The EU is pro-business - often criticised for being essentially a pro-business entity - and not in favour of regulation for regulation's sake. If Apple had faced reality and tried to understand the facts as they are, they would have used the talks to clarify all of these issues and more well in advance of the DMA taking effect. But they didn't because they have caught the tech industry management disease of demanding that reality bend to their ideas and wishes. Baldur Bjarnason What a lot of people - both inside and outside the EU - do not grasp is that while we all know the EU has shortcomings and issues, in general, the EU is uncharacteristically (for a government agency) popular among EU citizens, no matter the country of origin. That's because we, as EU citizens, and especially as EU citizens who do anything international, know just how ridiculously beneficial the EU has been for trade, business, the economy, travel, and so much more. Apple can keep acting like a whiny trust fund boy who thinks the world owes them everything, but they'll have to deal with the consequences. Continued violation of the DMA can lead to fines of up to 10% of revenue. That's 38 billion dollars. I secretly hope Apple keeps this childish behaviour up. It's deeply entertaining.

The European organisation for crash testing and car safety, Euro NCAP has announced that starting in 2026, cars will need physical controls in their interiors to gain the highest safety ratings. The overuse of touchscreens is an industry-wide problem, with almost every vehicle-maker moving key controls onto central touchscreens, obliging drivers to take their eyes off the road and raising the risk of distraction crashes," said Matthew Avery, Euro NCAP's director of strategic development. New Euro NCAP tests due in 2026 will encourage manufacturers to use separate, physical controls for basic functions in an intuitive manner, limiting eyes-off-road time and therefore promoting safer driving," he said. Jonathan M. Gitlin at Ars Technica Excellent news, and it's taken regulators and safety organisations way too long to long to adapt to the growing menace of touch screens in cars.

Embedded software is used in safety-critical systems such as medical devices and autonomous vehicles, where software defects, including security vulnerabilities, have severe consequences. Most embedded codebases are developed in unsafe languages, specifically C/C++, and are riddled with memory safety vulnerabilities. To prevent such vulnerabilities, RUST, a performant memory-safe systems language, provides an optimal choice for developing embedded software. RUST interoperability enables developing RUST applications on top of existing C codebases. Despite this, even the most resourceful organizations continue to develop embedded software in C/C++. This paper performs the first systematic study to holistically understand the current state and challenges of using RUST for embedded systems. Our study is organized across three research questions. We collected a dataset of 2,836 RUST embedded software spanning various categories and 5 Static Application Security Testing ( SAST) tools. We performed a systematic analysis of our dataset and surveys with 225 developers to investigate our research questions. We found that existing RUST software support is inadequate, SAST tools cannot handle certain features of RUST embedded software, resulting in failures, and the prevalence of advanced types in existing RUST software makes it challenging to engineer interoperable code. In addition, we found various challenges faced by developers in using RUST for embedded systems development. Ayushi Sharma, Shashank Sharma, Santiago Torres-Arias, Aravind Machiry Some light reading.

A few months ago I introduced you to one of the more notable Apple pre-production units in my collection, a late prototype Macintosh Portable. But it turns out it's not merely notable for what it is than what it has on it: a beta version of System 6.0.6 (the doomed release that Apple pulled due to bugs), Apple sales databases, two online services - the maligned Mac Prodigy client, along with classic AppleLink as used by Apple staff - and two presentations, one on Apple's current Macintosh line and one on the upcoming System 7. Now that I've got the infamous Conner hard drive it came with safely copied over, it's time to explore its contents some more. Old Vintage Computing Research I wonder just how rare it is to find old internal presentations from a company like Apple. It seems like something that doesn't happen very often, so it's great to see this archived and documented.

NixBSD is an attempt to make a reproducible and declarable BSD, based on NixOS. Although theoretically much of this work could be copied to build other BSDs, all work thus far has been focused on building a FreeBSD distribution. NixBSD Github page It was only a matter of time before someone would try and build this.

Modern browsers don't really support older versions of Windows anymore, so anyone running Windows XP, 2003, Vista, and even Windows 7 and 8 are losing access to secure and capable browsers. While running those older versions of Windows on production machines isn't exactly advised, they're still great fun as retrocomputing platforms and to keep older Windows games accessible using period-correct hardware. As such, there's some awesome news: there is now a fully up-to-date variant of Chromium for these older versions of Windows called Supermium. It tracks current Chromium, supports extensions, sandboxing, Aero Glass, Google Sync, and even Widevine on Windows 7 and higher. Micheal MJD just published a video showing Supermium in action in case you're curious. You'll need at least Windows XP SP3 and an Intel Pentium 4 with SSE2 in order to run it, and Windows 2000 support is in the works, too.

Redox has published the summary of development covering February, and there's quite a few interesting leaps forward this month. First and foremost, the operating system got a major file read/write speed boost by implementing records in RedoxFS. The migration to UNIX-format paths is ongoing, Boxedwine is currently being ported, and more and more programs are getting ported, including complex applications like Audacity, Celestia, KiCad and Neothesia. There's a lot more this month, so be sure to read the whole report.

Following the release of the second beta version of iOS 17.4, it emerged that Apple had restricted the functionality of iOS web apps in the EU. Web apps could no longer launch from the Home Screen in their own top-level window that takes up the entire screen, relegating them to a simple shortcut with an option to open within Safari instead. The move was heavily criticized by groups like Open Web Advocacy, which started a petition in an effort to persuade Apple to reverse the change, and it even caught the attention of the European Commission. Now, Apple has backtracked and says that Home Screen web apps that use WebKit in the EU will continue to function as expected upon the release of iOS 17.4. Hartley Charlton at MacRumors A welcome move, but they will still be restricted to opening using WebKit instead of any other engine Europeans will be allowed to install. With criticism of Apple's DMA plans mounting, and pressure on the European Commission to not approve Apple's plans increasing, all of this might change over the coming months, still.

So far in this series, I have looked in broad terms at how the CPU cores in Apple silicon chips work, and how they use frequency control and two types of core to deliver high performance with low power and energy use. As I hinted previously, their design also relies on specialist processing units and co-processors, the subject of this article. Howard Oakley Another excellent read from Howard Oakley.

Questions like Which browser should I use?" regularly come up on the r/browsers subreddit. I sometimes respond to these posts, but my quick replies usually only contain one or two points. To be honest, until recently I wasn't even sure myself why I use Firefox. Of course it's a pretty good browser, but that doesn't explain why I've stubbornly stayed loyal to Firefox for more than a decade. After giving it a bit more thought, I came up with the following reasons. ime Vidas There's really no viable alternative to Firefox for me. I wish we had more choice, more competition, and more vibrancy in the browser space, and I'm definitely anxious about the future of Firefox, but with every other browser being either Chrome, possibly with skin, or Safari, there's really nowhere else to go.

Rooting an Android phone is no longer as popular as it was a few years ago. Plus, if you root your phone now, you will run into several issues, like Google Wallet and banking apps not working, as the device will fail the Play Integrity API test. It makes sense for Google to block banking apps and payment functionality on rooted phones for safety and security reasons. But the company is now taking things a step further and has started blocking RCS from working in Google Messages on rooted or bootloader unlocked Android devices. Rajesh Pandey Entirely expected, but no less unconscionable. Banking applications, government ID services, and now even messaging platforms - all entirely crucial functions in the very fabric of society and government that we're just handing over to two ruthless abusive companies. It's simply no longer possible to function in many modern societies without having either a blessed Android device, or an iPhone, since any other platform will often lock you out of crucial functionality that you need to function in today's world. If there was ever anything the European Union should be fighting against, it's this.

MenuetOS has released two new versions recently, version 1.49.60 on 5 February, and 1.50.00 on 1 March. Aside from the usual bugfixes and updates, these two new versions bring, among other things, new screensavers, a musical chord calculator, and support for UEFI booting thanks to Easyboot. MenuetOS is a small operating system written entirely in assembly, available in both 32bit and 64bit versions for x86.

Remember last year, when we reported that the Red Ventures-owned CNEThad been quietly publishing dozens of AI-generated articles that turned out to be filled with errors and plagiarism? The revelation kicked off a fiery debate about the future of the media in the era of AI - as well as an equally passionate discussion among editors of Wikipedia, who needed to figure out how to treat CNET content going forward. Gerard's admonition was posted on January 18, 2023, just a few days after our initial story about CNETs use of AI. The comment launched a discussion that would ultimately result in CNET's demotion from its once-strong Wikipedia rating of generally reliable." It was a grim fall that one former Red Ventures employee told us could put a huge dent in their SEO efforts," and also a cautionary tale about the wide-ranging reputational effects that publishers should consider before moving into AI-generated content. Maggie Harrison Dupre Excellent response by Wikipedia. Any outlet that uses spicy autocomplete to generate content needs to be booted off Wikipedia.

We're thrilled to announce DirectSR, our new API designed in partnership with GPU hardware vendors to enable seamless integration of Super Resolution (SR) into the next generation of games. Super Resolution is a cutting-edge technique that increases the resolution and visual quality in games. DirectSR is the missing link developers have been waiting for when approaching SR integration, providing a smoother, more efficient experience that scales across hardware. This API enables multi-vendor SR through a common set of inputs and outputs, allowing a single code path to activate a variety of solutions including NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution, AMD FidelityFXTM Super Resolution, and Intel XeSS. DirectSR will be available soon in the Agility SDK as a public preview, which will enable developers to test it out and provide feedback. Don't miss our DirectX State of the Union at GDC to catch a sneak peek at how DirectSR can be used with your games! Joshua Tucker at the DirectX Developer Blog If this aides in making sense out of the confusing mess of terminology and marketing terms surrounding this technology, I'm all for it.

HP launched a subscription service today that rents people a printer, allots them a specific amount of printed pages, and sends them ink for a monthly fee. HP is framing its service as a way to simplify printing for families and small businesses, but the deal also comes with monitoring and a years-long commitment. Prices range from $6.99 per month for a plan that includes an HP Envy printer (the current model is the 6020e) and 20 printed pages. The priciest plan includes an HP OfficeJet Pro rental and 700 printed pages for $35.99 per month. Scharon Harding at Ars Technica Can I pay them not to put a printer in my house?

One of the limitations of AMD's open-source Linux graphics driver has been the inability to implement HDMI 2.1+ functionality on the basis of legal requirements by the HDMI Forum. AMD engineers had been working to come up with a solution in conjunction with the HDMI Forum for being able to provide HDMI 2.1+ capabilities with their open-source Linux kernel driver, but it looks like those efforts for now have concluded and failed. Michael Larabel So dumb.

KDE Plasma 6 has been released - and this is an important release with two massive low-level stack upgrades. With Plasma 6, our technology stack has undergone two major upgrades: a transition to the latest version of our application framework, Qt, and a migration to the modern Linux graphics platform, Wayland. We have done our best to ensure that these changes are as smooth and unnoticeable to the users as possible, so when you install this update, you will see the same familiar desktop environment that you know and love. But these under-the-hood upgrades benefit Plasma's security, efficiency, and performance, and improve support for modern hardware. Thus Plasma delivers an overall more reliable user experience, while paving the way for many more improvements in the future. Aside from this, there's so much in this release it's hard to know where to begin. My favourite is the overhaul of KDE's default Breeze theme, which now uses far, far fewer frames, meaning there's fewer borders-on-borders. Spacing has also been made more consistent within Breeze. Both of these efforts make KDE applications and UI elements look a bit less cluttered and busy, which, while easily missed if you don't look for it, certainly cleans things up nicely. Another important improvements is the addition of support for HDR displays and colour management. Plasma on Wayland now has partial support for High Dynamic Range (HDR). On supported monitors and software, this will provide you with richer and deeper colors for your games, videos, and visual creations. Set an ICC profile for each screen individually and Plasma will adjust the colors accordingly. Applications are still limited to the sRGB color space, but we are working on increasing the number of supported color spaces soon. To improve Plasma's accessibility, we added support for color blindness correction filters. This helps with protanopia, deuteranopia or tritanopia. Of course, this release is accompanied by updates to a large number of KDE applications, and several default settings in KDE have been changed as well to better suit what most users would expect. Plasma Search has been overhauled as well, making it faster and less resource-intensive, and giving users the ability to better control how search results are displayed. There's a lot more here, so be sure to dive into the release announcement, KDE Plasma 6 will find its way to your distribution or operating system of choice over the coming weeks and months.

Wear OS smartwatches have a dual-chipset architecture inclusive of a powerful application processor (AP) and ultra low-power co-processor microcontroller unit (MCU). The architecture has a powerful AP capable of handling complex operations en-masse, and is seamlessly coupled with a low power MCU. The Wear OS hybrid interface enables intelligent switching between the MCU or the AP, allowing the AP to be suspended when not needed to preserve battery life. It helps, for instance, achieve more power-efficient experiences, like sensor data processing on the MCU while the AP is asleep. At the same time, the hybrid interface provides a seamless transition between these states, keeping a rich and premium user experience without jarring transitions between power modes. Kseniia Shumelchyk on the Android Developers Blog The new OnePlus Watch 2 is the first to use this new architecture, and the most interesting part is that it runs not one, but two operating systems: Wear OS, which is Android, running on the AP", and a smaller RTOS that runs on the MCU". In the case of the OnePlus Watch 2, the AP" is a Snapdragon W5, while the MCU" is a BES 2700, an ultra low power microcontroller. I can't seem to find any information on this RTOS", but I'd really love to know what it's based on.

Speaking of collecting data, here's another major content player signing a deal to sell your content to AI" companies. The owner of Tumblr and WordPress.com is in talks with AI companies Midjourney and OpenAI to provide training data scraped from users' posts, a report from 404 Media alleges. The report, based on an anonymous source inside the company, says that deals between Automattic and the two AI companies are imminent." It follows nebulous rumors that have spread on Tumblr over the past week, suggesting a deal with Midjourney could provide a new revenue stream for the site. Adi Robertson at The Verge We use WordPress for OSNews, but it seems this only applies to content hosted at WordPress.com, not on WordPress installations hosted elsewhere. If you host a site at WordPress.com, you might want to go to your admin panel and opting-out of this nonsense real fast.

Meta will soon begin collecting anonymized data" from users of its Quest headsets, a move that could see the company aggregating information about hand, body, and eye tracking; camera information; information about your physical environment"; and information about the virtual reality events you attend." In an email sent to Quest users Monday, Meta notes that it currently collects the data required for your Meta Quest to work properly." Starting with the next software update, though, the company will begin collecting and aggregating anonymized data about... device usage" from Quest users. That anonymized data will be used for things like building better experiences and improving Meta Quest products for everyone," the company writes. Kyle Orland at Ars Technica Is it just me, or is the idea of Facebook collecting this type of data in particular just exceptionally creepy? I mean, browsing history or whatever is one thing - already bad enough - but hand, body, and eye movements, and camera information? Of course, this was the only expected course for Quest owners, but now that the time is here, it still feels just as creepy as when we first imagined it when Facebook bought Oculus.

If there's one thing Windows users hate about Windows, it's Windows updates interrupting your workflow or gaming session with a popup asking you to restart your PC finish installing the latest security update. It happens at least once a month, because that's how often Microsoft rolls out security updates to Windows PCs. This may soon be a thing of the past, as the company is now testing an update method called hot patching" for Windows 11 PCs. Hot patching is already in use on some Windows Server editions, as well as Xbox, and now it appears the company is preparing to bring it to devices running Windows 11. Zac Bowden at Windows Central A welcome, good improvement every Windows user is going to benefit from. This is the kind of improvements Microsoft should really be focusing on, instead of adding more ads or useless AI" features.

It's one of those anachronisms that is deeply embedded in modern technology. From cloud operator servers to embedded controllers in appliances, there must be uncountable devices that think they are connected to a TTY. I will omit the many interesting details of the Linux terminal infrastructure here, as it could easily fill its own article. But most Linux users are at least peripherally aware that the kernel tends to identify both serial devices and terminals as TTYs, assigning them filesystem names in the form of /dev/tty*. Probably a lot of those people remember that this stands for teletype or perhaps teletypewriter, although in practice the term teleprinter is more common. J. B. Crawford I remember first using Linux in like 2000 or 2001, and running into the abbreviation tty, and not having a single clue what that meant since I came from a DOS and Windows background. Over time I gained a lot more understanding of the structure of modern UNIX-like systems, but it's still great to read such a detailed history of the concept.

In this blog post, you will learn about some OpenBSD features that can be useful, but not widespread. They often have a niche usage, but it's important to know they exist to prevent you from reinventing the wheel. Solene Rapenne Written by Solene Rapenne, who also happens to be an OpenBSD developer, so a great source for information like this.

I frequently write about Windows, Edge, and other Microsoft-adjacent technologies as part of my day job, and I sign into my daily-use PCs with a Microsoft account, so my usage patterns may be atypical for many Ars Technica readers. But for anyone who uses Windows, Edge, or both, I thought it might be useful to detail what I'm doing to clean up a clean install of Windows, minimizing (if not totally eliminating) the number of annoying notifications, Microsoft services, and unasked-for apps that we have to deal with. Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica Five pages of nonsense you have to go through to make Windows 11 somewhat less of a trashfire. I can't believe we've reached a point where this is normal and accepted, and often even defended by Windows users, here on OSNews as well. I know just install Linux" generally isn't a helpful comment, but at what point is installing Linux the path of least resistance compared to whatever the hell this is? Especially now that most work is done online in the browser anyway?

I wrote different boot managers. Three boot managers are available as download. The Plop Boot Manager 5, PlopKexec and the new boot manager PBM6. The new boot manager is under development. Elmar Hanlhofer I had never heard of the three Plop boot managers, written by Elmar Hanlhofer, but they seem like quite the capable tools. First, Plop Boot Manager 5 is the most complete version, but it's also quite outdated by now, with its last release stemming from 2013. That being said, it's incredibly feature-packed, but since it lacks UEFI support, its use case seems more focused on legacy systems. PBM6, meanwhile, is the modern version with UEFI support, but it's not complete and is under development, with regular releases. Finally, PlopKexec is exactly what the name implies - a boot manager that uses the Linux kernel. I've never encountered these before, but they seem quite interesting, and if it wasn't for how much I do not like messing with bootloaders, I'd love to give these a go. Have any of you ever used it?

The first Power11" patches were queued today into the PowerPC's next" Git branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle. The first of many IBM Power11 processor/platform enablement patches are beginning to flow out for the Linux kernel for enabling the next-generation Power processors. This shouldn't be too surprising given that a few months ago IBM began posting PowerPC Future" patches for the GCC compiler with speculating at the time it was for Power11 just as IBM previously called their future" CPU target in GCC for Power10 prior to those processors officially debuting. Michael Larabel I really hope IBM learned from the POWER10 fiasco and will make sure POWER11 is properly and fully open again, because POWER9's openness made it unique among the other options out there. Without it, there's really no reason for an enthusiast community to developer around POWER11 as it did around POWER9, and that would be a shame. Again.

US chip company Intel will make high-end semiconductors for Microsoft, the companies announced, as it seeks to compete with TSMC and Samsung to supply the next generation of silicon used in artificial intelligence for customers around the world. Chief executive Pat Gelsinger said at a company event on Wednesday that Intel is set to rebuild Western manufacturing at scale," buoyed by geopolitical concerns in Washington about the need to bring leading-edge manufacturing back to the US. Michael Acton Having our entire advanced chip industry built atop one Dutch company and one company on an island China would love to invade is not exactly the recipe for a stable supply chain. I think it's a great idea to build capacity in the US and Europe, and if Intel's the one to do it - with lavish government funding, I might add - then so be it. We'd all love for it to be more diverse than that, but the sad reality is that building advanced chip factories is really hard and really expensive, and very few companies have both the knowledge and money to do so.

A customer was developing an automated test that required the system to suffer a blue screen crash. They configured their test systems to crash when the ScrollLock key is pressed twice while holding the Ctrl key, and they wrote a simple program that ran as administrator and injected the appropriate keystrokes. But no crash occurred. What did they do wrong? Raymond Chen Does anyone here not love a Raymond Chen mystery?

Android introduced support for Seamless Updates quite a long time ago at this point and, while it's seen adoption from most, Samsung stubbornly refuses to move its devices to the A/B system. Android is now moving towards a future where A/B Seamless Updates are the only supported update mechanism, but that may not be enough to stop Samsung. Ben Schoon at 9To5Google The fact Samsung hasn't embraced Seamless Updates yet is utterly baffling. It's better in every single way, and there's little to no downsides one can think of. I hope this little nudge gets them to finally get their act together.

This is the (work in progress) SunOS jdk builder. The aim is to attempt to download, patch, and build any relevant jdk tag, and do so for SPARC and x86, and for illumos and Solaris 11.4. It has currently been spot-tested on current illumos/x86 (specifically Tribblix m32). It is dependent on the jdk-sunos-patches repository, which holds all the patches for each tag. Peter Tribble Built by Peter Tribble, the same person behind Tribblix, and he's published a blog post with more details about this project. I've definitely been seeing an uptick recently in interest in Solaris, which is great to see. It's gotten me interested in installing Tribblix on my dual-Xeon workstation to see just how much I've been missing since last using Solaris like 15-20 years ago.