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We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine. Although Perplexity initially crawls from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity in an attempt to circumvent the website's preferences. We see continued evidence that Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing their sourceASNsto hide their crawling activity, as well as ignoring - or sometimes failing to even fetch -robots.txtfiles. The Internet as we have known it for the past three decades israpidly changing, but one thing remains constant: it is built on trust. There are clear preferences that crawlers should be transparent, serve a clear purpose, perform a specific activity, and, most importantly, follow website directives and preferences. Based on Perplexity's observed behavior, which is incompatible with those preferences, we have de-listed them as a verified bot and added heuristics to our managed rules that block this stealth crawling. The CloudFlare Blog Never forget they destroyed Aaron Swartz's life - literally - for downloading a few JSTOR articles.

It's not every day you stumble upon an X11 desktop environment you've never hard of, but today's one of those days. The Orbitiny Desktop Environment is a one-person project, consisting of an entirely custom desktop environment written in Qt. Version 1.0 Pilot 4 was just released. Built from the ground up usingQtand coded in C++,Orbitiny Desktopis a new, 100% portable, innovative and traditional but modern looking desktop environment for Linux.Innovativebecause it has featuresnot seen in any other desktop environment beforewhilekeeping traditional aspects of computing alive(desktop icons, menus etc). Portable because you can run it on any distro and on any live CD and that's because everything gets saved inside the directory that gets created when the archive is extracted (this can be changed so that the settings go to $HOME/.config/orbitiny). Orbitiny Desktop Environment Gitea page It's got all the usual amenities like a desktop, panels, and so on, and a custom file manager. It's also replete with a ton of small features that you don't see very often, like full mouse gesture support on the desktop and a device managerthat can enable/disable devices without blacklisting kernel modules. When you cut or copy a file, its icon will get a little emblem to indicate it's on the clipboard, you can append and prepend files using simple drag-and-drop operations, you can set individual desktop directories for each virtual desktop, and much more. Now, it's technically not a full desktop environment, because it doesn't have things like a session manager, power manager, various hardware configuration panels, and so on, but it can be run on top of existing desktop environments. While it has basic Wayland support, not all components work there, so X11 is the main focus for now. Considering it's a one-person project, you can't expect a bug or issue-free experience, but that doesn't mean it's any less damn impressive. I honestly feel like there's something valuable and interesting here, and I'd love for more people to get involved to see where this can go. There's clearly a ton of love and dedication here, and the various unique features clearly set it apart from everything else. If you have the skills, consider helping out.

Solene Rapenne, who writes a lot about and contributes to operating systems like OpenBSD and Qubes OS, has published a primer about what, exactly, Qubes OS is. I like to call Qubes OS a meta operating system, because it is not a Linux / BSD / Windows based OS: its core is Xen (some kind of virtualization enabled kernel). Not only it's Xen based, but by design it is meant to run virtual machines, hence the name meta operating system" which is an OS meant to run many OSes make sense to me. Solene Rapenne Rapenne explains the various ways in which isolated virtual machines are used in Qubes OS, and it's easy to see just how secure Qubes OS' way of doing things is. At the same time, it seems quite cumbersome to me as a regular user, and I don't think I'm up for dealing with all of that. If you do security research, handle private or classified data, are a whistleblower or an investigative journalist, thoug, Qubes seems like a natural choice. Interesting to note is that Rapenne used to use OpenBSD for her security work, but moved to Qubes OS because its virtual machine infrastructure is far more robust, and hardware support is better, as well.

In October 1997 you could have bought a PowerBook 3400c running up to a 240MHz PowerPC 603e for $6500 , which was briefly billed as the world's fastest laptop, or you could have bought this monster new to the market, the RDI PrecisionBook running up to a 160MHz (later 180MHz) PA-7300LC starting at $12,000 . Both provided onboard Ethernet, SCSI and CardBus PCMCIA slots. On the other hand, while the 3400c had an internal media bay for either a floppy or CD-ROM, both external options on the PrecisionBook, the PrecisionBook gave you a 1024*768 LCD (versus 800*600 on the 3400c), a bigger keyboard, at least two 2.5'' hard disk bays and up to 512MB of RAM (versus 144MB) - and HP-UX. And, through the magic of Apple's official Macintosh Application Environment, you could do anything on it an HP PA-RISC workstation could do and run 68K Mac software on it at the same time. Look at the photograph and see: on our 160MHz unit we've got HP-UX 11.00 CDE running simultaneously with a full Macintosh System 7.5.3 desktop. Yes, only a real Power Mac could run PowerPC software back then, but 68K software was still plentiful and functional. Might this have been a viable option to have your expensive cake and eat it too? We'll find out and run some real apps on it (includingthatgame we must all try running), analyze its performance and technical underpinnings, and uncover an unusual artifact of its history hidden in the executable. Cameron Kaiser at Old Vintage Computing Research I actually have Apple's Macintosh Application Environment installed and running on my PA-RISC machines, and it's incredible just how well-made and complete it really is. You get a full Mac desktop and its applications, excellent integration with the host, file sharing between host and client, and so much more. Running it on newer versions of HP-UX than it was originally intended for does lead to the odd issue here and there, but due to HP-UX' excellent backwards compatibility, it all just works. It has created this odd situation that my 2004 HP c8000 machine, with two of the fastest dual-core PA-RISC processors ever made, will most likely be the fastest machine I'll ever officially run classic Mac OS on. Sure, you can use other emulators not created and blessed by Apple and run classic Mac OS on much faster hardware, but if you want to stick to official, supported methods of running the classic Mac OS, it doesn't get much faster than this.

AWS: Not even once. This prominent Ruby developer lost his entire test environment - which, ironically, was pivotal to AWS' own infrastructure - because of a rogue team within AWS itself that apparently answers to no one and worked hard to cover up a dumb mistake. On July 23, 2025, AWS deleted my 10-year-old account and every byte of data I had stored with them. No warning. No grace period. No recovery options. Just complete digital annihilation. This is the story of a catastrophic internal mistake at AWS MENA, a 20-day support nightmare where I couldn't get a straight answer to Does my data still exist?", and what it reveals about trusting cloud providers with your data. Abdelkader Boudih Nightmare scenario doesn't even begin to describe what happened here.

Security isn't exactly a strong point of X11, and improving it is one of the main reasons why Wayland is such a vast improvement over X11. Just one of the many examples of X11 being inherently insecure is that keyloggers are entirely trivial on X11, because keylogger functionality is effectively built into it. Of course, this isn't exactly news, and as Peter Hofmann details, there is an old X11 extension that adds somewhat rudimentary security to X11: theX11 SECURITY extension. This extension is part of every X.org installation, but it hasn't seen any meaningful work in a long, long time. What it does is allow you to do is set X11 clients as trusted" and untrusted", where untrusted clients cannot interact with tusted ones. This provides some basic security - it actually prevents keylogging! - but only very basic, as Hoffman notes: The thing is that it's immediately clear that this extension -in its current state- is not the answer to X11 is insecure": You only have two classes, trusted and untrusted. That's not enough. For example: When you run your browser as untrusted, you can't simultaneously run some sandboxed program (Snap, Flatpak, ...)in a meaningful way, because those two clients can spy on each other again. You want a proper per-client isolation instead. Sandboxing plays an important role here. If you run programs the traditional way" (i.e., full access to the filesystem and network), then an attacker can do all kinds of things and X11 keylogging is just one of a million concerns. Peter Hofmann but it also happens to break a lot of things, and many applications simply don't work with it at all. Oddly enough, Firefox has no issues with it, and will happily run in untrusted mode. The biggest problem, however, is that untrusted clients only have access to exactly two other X11 extensions, which leads to a whole host of problems, like no scaling, broken keyboard layouts, no 3D acceleration, and so on. On top of all of that, it breaks clipboard functionality, as anything copied in an untrusted client cannot be pasted anywhere else. As such, Hoffman concludes: In its current state, I'd say the SECURITY extension is somewhat useful", but more work would have to be done. Both in X.Org and in the clients. You would have to come up with a new clipboard protocol, for example. And the list goes on. (See where I'm going with this?) It's not that simple. Peter Hofmann Since pretty much nobody adopted it when this extension came out in the '90s, and it hasn't seen much work since, the amount of work that would be required to bring it up to modern standards would be astronomical, and trying to get clients to adopt it would probably prove fruitless considering Wayland already exists, and offers all of the potential security benefits and then some. People often claim it would be easy" to modernise X11, but just this one particular issue - security, kind of important - shows just how quickly the X11 house of cards comes crashing down if you try to do anything to drag it out of its '80s and '90s mindset.

Patchworkis a 64-bit monolithic NON-POSIX operating system for the x86_64 architecture that rigorously follows a everything is a file" philosophy. Built from scratch in C it takes many ideas from Unix, Plan9, DOS and others while simplifying them and sprinkling in some new ideas of its own. PatchworkOS GitHub page Patchwork is a surprisingly advanced operating system considering it's a hobby project. It has multithreading with aconstant-time scheduler, fully preemptive mutitasking, SMP, file-based IPC (includingpipes,shared memory,socketsand Plan9 inspired signals" callednotes), and much more. It also uses a Linux-style VFS and has a custom C standard library. On top of that, there's a modular window manager that supports themes, in which everything is a window, and so much more. It supports x86_64, but only supports running in RAM. It's licensed under the MIT license.

Claude Code has considerably changed my relationship to writing and maintaining code at scale. I still write code at the same level of quality, but I feel like I have a new freedom of expression which is hard to fully articulate. Claude Code has decoupled myself from writing every line of code, I still consider myself fully responsible for everything I ship to Puzzmo, but the ability to instantly create a whole scene instead of going line by line, word by word is incredibly powerful. Orta Therox Oh sweet Summer child. As a former translator, I can tell you that's how it starts. As time goes on, your clients or your manager will demand more and more code from you. You will stop checking every line to meet the deadlines. Maybe you just stop checking the boilerplate at first, but it won't stay that way. As pressure to be more productive" mounts, you'll start checking fewer and fewer lines. Before you know it, your client or manager will just give you entire autogenerated swaths of code, and your job will be to just go over it, making sure it kind of works. Before long, you realise there are fewer and fewer of you. Younger and less-skilled developers" can quickly go over autogenerated code just as well as you do - but they're way cheaper. You see the quality of the code you sign off on deteriorate rapidly, but you have no time, and not enough pay, to rewrite the autogenerated code. It works, kind of, and that will have to be enough. The autogenerated codebases you're supposed to be checking and fixing are so large now, you're no longer even really checking anything anymore. Quick, cursory glances, that's all you have time for and can afford. Documentation and commenting code went out the window a long time ago, and every line of code scrolling across your screen is more tech debt you don't care about, because it's not your code anyway. And then it hits you. There's no skill here. There's no art here. You're no longer a programmer. There's no career prospects. Scrolling past shitty autogenerated code day in, day out, without the time or pay to wrangle it into something to be proud of, is the end of the line for you. Speak up about it, and you'll be replaced by someone cheaper. The first time I was given a massive pile of autotranslated text to revise, without enough time and pay to ensure I was delivering a quality product, I quit and left the translation industry instantly. Like programming, translating is part skill, part art, and I didn't get two university degrees in language and translation just to deliver barely passable trash. I took pride in my work, and I wasn't going to let anyone put my name under a garbage product. Programmers, you're next. Will you have the stones to stand by your art?

Wayback has been barely announced, and the first version 0.1 has barely left git, but it's already time for version 0.2. It won't surprise you to find out this isn't some massive release, and you'd be right. It really only addresses a few very small bugs, while the developers also take the opportunity to highlight Wayback is now available on Gentoo GURUand Nixpkgs.

If there's one thing Microsoft is good at, it's creating weird variants of Windows with odd names that tech media talk about for like a day, after which everyone, especially Microsoft, forgets they even exist. Usually, these weird Windows variants are the result of either legal requirements, or, more commonly, of perceived threats to Windows' dominance on the desktop. An example of the former are the various N" editions of Windows, while an example of the latter is the one we're talking about today: Windows 11 SE. I honestly had completely forgotten Windows 11 SE existed, and most likely you did, too. Windows 11 SE was (one of) Microsoft's response(s) to the growing popularity of Chromebooks in schools, and as such, this Windows variant omitted a bunch of features for performance and distraction reasons, stored files in OneDrive instead of locally, was locked down so only administrators could control which applications could be used, and so on. In fact, unless specifically whitelisted, Windows 11 SE would not run any Win32 or UWP applications - everything had to be either a PWA or a website. Notably, it was only available in combination with a few specific devices. The past tense in the preceding paragraph should be a dead giveaway of what's happening. Yes, Microsoft just cancelled the whole thing, after being on the market for only a few years. Microsoft will not release a feature update after Windows 11 SE, version 24H2. Support for Windows 11 SE-including software updates, technical assistance, and security fixes-will end in October 2026. While your device will continue to work, we recommend transitioning to a device that supports another edition of Windows 11 to ensure continued support and security. Windows 11 SE support document In other words, if your school fell for Microsoft's sales pitch for Windows 11 SE, you're kind of screwed after October 2026, because Windows 11 SE only shipped on specific, low-cost, low-powered devices. You'd think other variants of Windows 11 will more or less run on those, too, but if not - or far too slowly - your school is now sitting on a pile of e-waste. Anybody want to run a betting pool for the Windows variant Microsoft will cancel next?

Late last year, we talked about Bismuth, a virtual machine being developed by Eniko Fox, one of the developers of the awesome game Kitsune Tails. Part of a operating systems development side project, Bismuth is a VM (think Java Virtual Machine, not VMware) on top of Fox' custom kernel, designed specifically to run programs in a sandbox. The first article detailed the origins of Bismuth, and the second article delved into memory safety, sandboxing, and more. We're a few months down the line now, and Fox recently published another article in the series, this time explaining how a hello world-program works in Bismuth. This is the third in aseries of postsabout a virtual machine I'm developing as a hobby project called Bismuth. I've talked a lot about Bismuth, mostly on social media, but I don't think I've done a good job at communicating how you go from some code to a program in this VM. In this post I aim to rectify that by walking you through the entire life cycle of a hello world Bismuth program, from the highest level to the lowest. Eniko Fox There's a ton of detail here, and at the end you'll have a pretty solid grip on how Bismuth works.

Servo is unique for a few other reasons, too. It's managed by theLinux Foundation Europewith decisions made by a technical steering committee, not a big tech company. One of the main goals is to be an embeddable web rendering engine," meaning it's not just for browsers-it could be a replacement forElectronor theAndroid WebView. Servo is also the first completely new browser engine in decades, so it's taking lessons learned from mainstream browsers while building a new foundation. Corbin Davenport At the moment, as Davenport notes, Servo is far from ready to be a daily driver browser engine. Tons of websites' rendering is broken and some crash the browser altogether, and performance is nowhere near that of the other browser engines. This makes perfect sense, as Servo is still in heavy development, and there's no massive corporation with endless money (and ulterior motives) backing it. Still, out of all the various attempts at wrestling control away from Blink and WebKit, I feel like Servo's the one with the most promise in the long term.

Getting hardware to run AmigaOS 4.1 or MorphOS on isn't always easy, cheap, or even possible in the first place. Luckily, there's now an incredibly easy and straightforward way to emulate these two operating systems: Kyvos, developed by George Sokianos. Kyvos is a user-friendly frontend for Qemu, designed to streamline the creation of AmigaOS 4 and MorphOS emulated environments on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Pronounced kee-vos," this name is inspired by the Greek word ," meaning cube, symbolizing these virtual systems running within the host OS. Setting up an AmigaOS 4 or MorphOS system is effortless with Kyvos-just a few clicks, and you're ready to go. A helpful wizard guides users in locating or downloading necessary dependencies, including Qemu and 7zip binaries. George Sokianos Of course, nothing is stopping you from following guides online to build your own Qemu virtual machine and associated complex command to start it, but Kyvos takes all that work out of your hands and makes it incredibly easy, all wrapped in a nice graphical user interface. It's available for Linux, Windows, and macOS. All you need is Kyvos - which is free, but Ko-Fi donations are appreciated - and a copy of either AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition or MorphOS. Based on a toot by Hyperion, the developers of AmigaOS 4.1, you need the version for the AmigaOne board specifically, which will set you back about 30 for a boxed copy (I've asked if there are any download versions for sale as well). A copy of MorphOS costs about 79, and can be bought from inside MorphOS after installation. Note that you can also use MorphOS without a license, but it will slow down its performance after about 30 minutes until you reboot. I'm stoked to try this out, as I've been wanting to review both of these operating systems again, since my previous reviews of Amiga OS 4 (from 2009) and MorphOS (also from 2009) are horribly outdated at this point. MorphOS on old Apple PowerPC hardware just doesn't cut it - believe me, I've tried - and AmigaOS 4 hardware is quite expensive and outdated at this point. Until - and let's face it, if - the Mirari comes out, easy emulation through Qemu might be an option.

Stuck at the bottom of NVIDIA's announcement of its latest graphics driver update is a section about the company's plan for Windows 10 support. As we all know, Windows 10 will become end-of-life in October of this year, and like so many others, NVIDIA needs to deal with this. Before we get to Windows 10, though, NVIDIA also reminds users that a few very popular GPU generations will no longer receive driver updates after October of this year. The company notes that GPUs based on the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta architectures will Game Ready Driver in October 2025, after which they'll only get quarterly security updates for another three years. These three architectures roughly correspond to the GeForce GTX 7xx, 9xx, and 10xx series and their mobile counterparts, as well as a few other higher-end cards from the same generations. The full list is available to see if your GPU will receive its last driver update in a few months. As for Windows 10 support, the company notes: Also, we're extending Windows 10 Game Ready Driver support for all GeForce RTX GPUs to October 2026, a year beyond the operating system's end-of-life, to ensure users continue to receive the latest day-0 optimizations for new games and apps. Andrew Burnes at nvidia.com Considering half of Windows users are still using Windows 10, this is probably the correct policy by NVIDIA. Ideally this support would last even longer than just that one year, but with a company like NVIDIA you kind of have to take what you can get, because generous they are not.

BlueOS kernel is written in Rust, featuring security, lightweight, and generality. It is compatible with POSIX interfaces and supports Rust's standard library. BlueOS kernel GitHub page This is the kernel for the BlueOS operating system, developed by Vivo, a Chinese consumer electronics company. Sadly, all of the websites and documentation for BlueOS are written in Mandarin, making it virtually impossible to really get a grip on what they're developing, and I certainly don't trust Google Translate or whatever enough to give me a proper, trustworthy, and accurate translation. I hope the company either hires some translators, or perhaps enthusiasts with the right skillset can provide some more insight over the coming years. It seems similar to Huawei's HarmonyOS Next, and it's apparently shipping on one of Vivo's smartwatches.

Last week-end, I was invited to theUNIX Social CampinDijon, Franceto talk about the reasons I still use OpenBSD these days and why should others do so; or at least, have a look atOpenBSD. Joel Carnat Here's my short pitch as to why you should use OpenBSD: it's the closest you'll get to a traditional, classic UNIX, while still using a modern and maintained operating system. OpenBSD just makes sense, and every time I run into some issue or I want to know how something in OpenBSD works, the answers always make me go well that makes sense". That's rare in modern computing, and we need to cherish it.

Are you still using LinkedIn, the website where failed tech startup entrepreneurs go to die and AI" influencers try to sell you on the latest version of the chatbot Florpium like a Utah mom trying to sell leggings that are totally not an MLM? If you are, and the other ten thousand reasons not to use the website incarnation of an ad for a personal injury lawyer along I-11 in Henderson, Nevada, weren't enough, Microsoft just handed you another one. LinkedInremovedtransgender-related protections from its policy on hateful and derogatory content. The platformno longer lists misgenderingor deadnamingof transgender individuals" as examples of prohibited conduct. While content that attacks, denigrates, intimidates, dehumanizes, incites or threatens hatred, violence, prejudicial or discriminatory action" is still considered hateful, addressing a person by a gender and name they ask not be designated by is not anymore. Similarly, the platform removed race or gender identity" from its examples of inherent traits for which negative comments are considered harassment. That qualification of harassment is now kept only for behaviour that is actively disparaging another member's perceived gender", not mentioning race or gender identity anymore. Matti Schneider at the Open Terms Archive Microsoft joined the chorus of pathetic, spineless US tech companies bowing to far-right extremism long ago, and this is just another sign that Microsoft, like so many other US tech companies, is pulling an IBM. They did learn from the best, after all, and it doesn't surprise me one bit that all of these CEOs click their heels like the good little brownshirts that they are. Anyway, LinkedIn has no value to anyone with even a gram of self-respect, and Microsoft's other products are such utter trash they basically have to make you upgrade at the barrel of a gun. For those using their products - do you hate yourself that much? You deserve so much more.

Adjusted for the inevitable progress of time, the Common Desktop Environment or CDE is the best desktop environment of all time, and no, I will not be taking question at this time. OpenBSD wasn't yet graced by CDE's presence, but this is currently changing as the first commit for porting CDE to OpenBSD has appeared. It's still rough around the edges and very slightly tested. I wouldn't use is as a daily driver, it's old unsecure code but it's fun if you want to bring back memories. Antoine at the openbsd-ports mailing list On top of that, this being the initial commit also means there's probably bugs and other issues lurking in the code, so caution is definitely advised.

Microsoft is finally changing the way Task Manager reports CPU utilisation to make it consistent across the different tabs. So apparently this has been gradually rolling out to the 34 different Windows 11 beta dev preview testing alpha release candidate service pack 4 channels since early this year, but then stopped the roll-out to fix some issues. These issues seem fixed now, as the roll-out restarted this week. It"s an important change that I think y'all will care about. From the original announcement of the change back in February: We are beginning to roll out a change to the way Task Manager calculates CPU utilization for the Processes, Performance, and Users pages. Task Manager will now use the standard metrics to display CPU workload consistently across all pages and aligning with industry standards and third-party tools. For backward compatibility, a new optional column called CPU Utility is available (hidden by default) on the Details tab showing the previous CPU value used on the Processes page. Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc at the Windows Blogs Before this change, Task Manager's Processes tab didn't take the number of processor cores into account when calculating PCU usage, so you could see a process at 100% CPU usage even if it was only using one core. These new changes standardise CPU usage reporting across all tabs, taking the number of CPU cores into account properly. Rejoice.

RISC-V has been supported in the upstream Linux kernel since 2017. But without a common hardware baseline, ensuring compatibility across builds and distros hasn't been easy. The ecosystem was in need of a compelling, clearly defined hardware target - something both software and hardware teams could rally around to produce silicon capable of running stable, enterprise-grade software. This target arrived in October 2024 with the ratification of the application-class RVA23 Profile - RISC-V-speak for a baseline configuration, similar to microarchitecture feature levels in x86. The culmination of years of progress, RVA23 brings together the work done to shape the ISA and standardize key extensions such as vector, bit manipulation and hypervisor. James De Vile at RISC-V International's blog Such a standard, stable baseline is incredibly welcome, and RISC-V working to have everything part of the upstream Linux kernel is crucial. Having to deal with out-of-tree patches and drivers and specific builds for specific boards is a nightmare - look at Linux on ARM - and hinders adoption of RISC-V.

This release includes some Ext4 performance improvements; XFS support for large atomic writes; support for USB audio offload; support for zero-copy send TCP payloads from DMABUF memory; various futex improvements; initial support for Intel Trusted Domain Extensions; automatic weighted interleaved memory allocation policy; support for sending coredumps over an AF_UNIX socket, and make easier to build your kernel optimized for your local CPU. As always, there are many other features, new drivers, improvements and fixes. KernelNewbies: Linux 6.16 You'll get it eventually, usually when the first few point releases iron out any troubling issues.

The European Union is in the process of testing an age-verification application, which people can use to verify their age in a privacy-preserving manner (in theory, of course). There's countless important discussions to be had about whether or not age verification, privacy-preserving or not, is even something we should want, but that's a topic for another time and for people smarter than I. For now, several member states are currently testing the application on a voluntary basis, and the application itself is open source, with the code hosted on GitHub. Aside from the obvious concerns about just how private such an application can even be, and concerns about whether or not we should even want something like this, there's another major problem: the application intends to make use of and require application and device verification by using the proprietary tools for such functionality from Google and Apple, built into Android and iOS, respectively. Listed as future features": App and device verification based on Google Play Integrity API and Apple App Attestation The application's GitHub page This is a massive problem. For reasons that should be obvious to anyone with at least six functioning neurons, the European Union, as well as countless other countries, are trying to reduce their dependency on US technology companies. As such, it's indefensible to then require anyone who needs to use age verification in the European Union to use an application that will only work on Google-approved Android devices and even then, only when installed from the Google Play Store, with the only alternative being, of all things, Apple's iOS. This means that the EU will require anyone who needs age verification to have either a Google or an Apple account, and can only use Google-approved Android or iOS. This application would not work on, say, GrapheneOS or any other non-Google-approved Android ROM - in fact, even if you were to compile the application yourself, you wouldn't be able to actually use it because it wouldn't be installed from the Google Play Store. Of course, any mobile operating other than Android or iOS need not apply either. The danger of tying age verification to Google and Apple did not go by unnoticed, and a GitHub issue raised the issue a few weeks ago. I would like to strongly urge to abandon this plan. Requiring a dependency on American tech giants for age verification further deepens the EU's dependency on America and the USA's control over the internet. Especially in the current political climate I hope I do not have to explain how undesirable and dangerous that is. TheLastProject in the GitHub issue The comment thread attached to the issue is long, but during the two weeks since the issue was raised, nobody from the application's team has answered or even acknowledged people's concerns, which doesn't exactly inspire confidence in this being taken seriously. I just hope that with this entire project being in the early testing phases, at least someone manages to realise tying this to Google and Apple is one of the dumbest ideas in a long, long time.

Have a Samsung phone (outside of the United States), and want to unlock the bootloader? Well, soon you won't be able to do so anymore, as Samsung seems to be removing this option from their phones - including already sold models being upgraded to One UI 8. Bootloader unlocking is a popular way to breathe new life into older devices, by loading unofficial software onto a device, like custom ROMs, gaining root access, custom kernels, etc. This option will be taken away from users withOne UI 8. This means not only is the OEM Unlock not visible in Settings anymore, but the bootloader doesn't even contain any of the code required to unlock itself. This means a workaround to brute force it open is not possible at all, unless Samsung updates the bootloader to add this logic back in. Josh Skinner at SammyGuru And so, the ongoing process of locking down Android to a point where it becomes nigh-on indistinguishable from iOS' locked-down, anti-user nature continues unabated. Samsung is the default choice for Android users in a lot of places around the world, and seeing them, too move ever closer to fully locking down their phones is terrible news for consumers. We should be striving for less restrictive computing, not more. Combined with persistent rumours that Google is looking into effectively taking Android closed source, leaving only a stub AOSP behind, the future of Android as an least somewhat open" platform looks quite grim indeed.

Becoming friendlier to desktop users is one of the goals of the FreeBSD project at the moment, as we recently saw with the new ability to install a full KDE Plasma desktop environment during FreeBSD's initial installation. This is just one small piece of a larger effort, though, to improve, modernise, and possibly even replace the current FreeBSD installer entirely. As such, Pierre Pronchery, a Security Engineer for the FreeBSD Foundation and member of their team as a Userland Software Developer, published a blog post today with more information around this effort. The article goes into great detail to compare the installation procedures of other operating systems to that of FreeBSD, and the conclusion is that FreeBSD is lagging behind in quite a few areas. Among other shortcomings, the FreeBSD installer has no support for different languages, very little accessibility features, no niceties like progress bars or lists of steps, and most notably, no graphical mode. Some of these are already being addressed. The current FreeBSD installer (a combination of bsddialog, bsdconfig, and bsdinstall) consists of a number of shell scripts with some small C programs here and there, and the downside of this is that this is really only suitable for creating very basic steps and user interfaces. As an example, Pronchery mentions values during network setup, like network mask, DNS server or gateway, can't be prepopulated with the most likely values, which puts quite a burden on the user. This specific issue is being worked on by one of the original creators of bsddialog, and the solution they settled on is adding Lua scripting, which would give developers an avenue to fix some of these shortcomings. As far as a possible graphical installer goes, Pronchery looked at the various options out there, both from the Linux world and the few graphical installers that exist for a few desktop-oriented FreeBSD distributions, but for a variety of reasons, none of them proved to be particularly suitable for FreeBSD. As such, Pronchery created a quick proof-of-concept for a graphical installer by implementing bsddialog as a GTK+ application which he calls gbsddialog. It's important to note that this proof-of-concept is not suitable for FreeBSD, as GTK+ is licensed under the LGPL, but it does illustrate that by simply" reimplenting bsddialog using a graphical toolkit, you can get quite a long way to a usable FreeBSD installer that mimics the traditional installer quite well. The article covers a number of other topics, such as setting up a development environment to make it more straightforward and easier to work on the FreeBSD installer, as well as various steps that need to be taken to improve the accessibility of the installer. It concludes with a mention of the possibility of a complete rewrite of the installer, but such decisions are of course not made by a single person and require a lot more discussion and input. Regardless, the amount of work being done to improve FreeBSD for generic desktop use is exciting, as we need a viable, competitive alternative to that other open source desktop operating system.

This article will explain in details about the fundamental issues that held back accessibility in GNOME Calendar since the very beginning of its existence, the progress we have made with accessibility as well as our thought process in achieving it, and the now and future of accessibility in GNOME Calendar. Hari TheEvilSkeleton" Rana You'd think it would be easy to make a simple" calendar application properly accessible, but boy would you be wrong. In this article, Hari TheEvilSkeleton" Rana details just how much work had to be done in order to turn GNOME Calendar from entirely inaccessible into an accessible application, and considering the length of the article, you can see it wasn't a weekend effort. There were apparently two primary reasons why making GNOME Calendar accessible was so hard. First, maximising GNOME Calendar's performance optimisations had significant negative implications for accessibility, and two, the effectively endless flexibility a calendar needs to offer makes it very difficult to create a usable accessibility tree. Both the events on a calendar as well as the zooming view of a calendar lead to a ton of complexity in creating this tree. GNOME Calendar uses a ton of custom widgets, and these all needed specific, individual solutions to be made accessible. As an example, the article mentions that while it was possible to use the keyboard to create an event, it was not possible to use the keyboard to select created events. Obviously, even this one shortcoming alone effectively makes the entire application inaccessible to anyone relying solely on keyboard navigation. The article goes into great detail how both the above widget and countless other widgets were changed to make them accessible to both the keyboard and screen reader. If you're working on GTK applications, or even applications using other toolkits, Rana's article is a great resource to start to understand the complexities and creative thinking needed to implement accessibility in software properly.

You've seen them everywhere, especially on older computer equipment: the classic 9-pin serial connector. You probably know it as a DB9. It's an iconic connector for makers, engineers, and anyone who's ever used an RS232 serial device. Here's a little secret, though: calling it a DB9 is technically wrong. The correct name is actually DE9. Christo-boots with the-pher at Sparkfun Electronics I honestly had no idea, and looking through the Wikipedia page, it seems this isn't the only common misnomer when it comes to D-sub connectors.

Last year the European Union introduced legislation to greatly improve the transparency around political advertising, specifically on social media and websites. The law mandates a few very basic requirements that tend to already apply to many other forms of political advertising, like clearly labeling who paid for the ad and how much was spent, which election or referendum they're about, and which targeting techniques were used. In addition, data used for targeting may only be collected from the person being targeted, and the person targeted has to give explicit permission specifically for political advertising. Furthermore, a whole slew of data types are not allowed to be used, such as data that may reveal ethnic or racial origin or political opinions. Lastly, an obvious one: starting three months before an election of referendum, third country sponsorsare banned from advertising. It seems these rather basic, elementary requirements are too much for Facebook, as the company today announced it's going to stop offering political advertising in the European Union altogether in October of this year. The company cries on its blog: Despite extensive engagement with policymakers to share these concerns, we have been left with an impossible choice: alter our services to offer an advertising product which doesn't work for advertisers or users, without guarantee that our solution would be viewed as compliant, or stop allowing political, electoral and social issue ads in the EU. We'renot the only companyto have been forced into this position. Once again, we're seeing regulatory obligations effectively remove popular products and services from the market, reducing choice and competition. Sad Facebook As the link in Facebook's above lament points out, Google has also decided to stop offering political advertising in the European Union, for the exact same reasons. Facebook and Google are clearly trying to frame this as bad", but the only people the removal of hyper-targeted political advertising is bad for are threat actors trying to unduly and illegally influence elections, and of course, for the bottom line of Facebook and Google. Neither of these are of any relevance to the proper execution of fair and free elections, and people all across the European Union will be better off without these two advertising giants providing an easy avenue for shady organisations and foreign entities to unduly influence our elections. Basically, cry me a river Zuck. Nobody likes you.

TheLinux Terminal appthat Google introduced earlier this year is one of the most exciting new features in Android, not for what it currently does but for what it can potentially do. The Terminal app lets you boot up an instance of Debian in a virtual machine, allowing you to run full-fledged Linux apps that aren't available on Android. Unfortunately, the current version of the Terminal app is limited to running command line programs, but that's set to change in the near future. In the newAndroid Canarybuild that Google released today, the Terminal app now lets you run graphical Linux apps. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority It comes with Weston, the reference implementation of a Wayland compositor, allowing you to run a basic graphical environment and accompanying applications. It won't be long before you can take your Pixel, connect a display, and run KDE. Neat, but so many devils are in so many details here, and there's so many places where this can fall apart entirely if the wrong decisions are made.

I have stumbled upon the most Microsoft support document of all time. Support for the Microsoft Store installation type of Microsoft 365 Apps is ending. New feature updates will stop in October 2025 and security updates will end in December 2026. If you have the Microsoft Store installation type of Microsoft 365 Apps, you must upgrade to the Click-to-Run installation type for continuing new features and security updates. The following steps show how you can upgrade the installation type of Microsoft 365 products on a PC from the Microsoft Store to Click-to-Run. End of support for the Microsoft Store installation type of Microsoft 365 Apps There is so much to unpack here. First, if you're not neck-deep in Microsoft lore, you might not even know what Microsoft 365 Apps even are. Remember Office 365, the subscription version of Microsoft Office? It's called Microsoft 365 now, for some inexplicable reason, but you probably haven't noticed because it is a stupidly confusing, nondescript name that nobody out in the real world uses. Adding to the confusion, in 2022, Microsoft announced it would phase out the Office name in favour of calling both the subscription version and the regular, buy-once-run-forever version Microsoft 365", but then changed their mind a year later, and as such, the regular, buy-once-run-forever version is now still called Office. Oh and there's also the Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)" (at Office.com?) which I think is what used to be called the mobile iOS/Android Office application, which existed alongside the individual mobile Office applications on these platforms (because that was a thing, too - maybe still is?)? I don't know man, I merely have two university degrees, which clearly isn't enough to understand any of this 4D office suite chess. Anyway, the Microsoft 365 Apps (so the subscription version of what was temporarily formerly known as Microsoft Office) can be installed either through the Microsoft Store, which is the application store bundled with Windows that you never use, or through something called Click-to-Run. Apparently, Microsoft is discontinuing the Microsoft Store version of the Microsoft 365 Apps, and is urging everyone to move to the Click-to-Run version of the Microsoft 365 Apps. Alright, we're getting really, really deep into the very darkest crevices of the Microsoft Cinematic Universe lore now. The Microsoft Store version of the Microsoft 365 Apps is almost entirely identical to the Click-to-Run version of the Microsoft 365 Apps, except for one tiny part: the exact packaging method of the applications. Whereas the Microsoft Store version is packaged and delivered in Microsoft's Appx packaging format (designed for the Universal Windows Platform or UWP), the Click-to-Run version is packaged and delivered through, well, Click-to-Run. So, what is that, exactly? Click-to-Run is an entirely custom application streaming technology specifically designed for and exclusively used by Microsoft Office. You download a very small installer, which then proceeds to download the various Microsoft 365 applications like Word, Excel, and so on, which you can then start using well before the entire download is finished. The technology is similar to Microsoft App-V. It's actually remarkably difficult to find detailed documentation about Click-to-Run, which is odd considering Microsoft is usually quite decent at providing documentation for its technologies. So what Microsoft is announcing in this support document is that if you have Microsoft 365 Apps installed through the Microsoft Store, you're going to have to switch to the Click-to-Run version. You can check which installation type you're using by going to File>Account(it might be called Office Account, because everything is made up and nothing is real) - under Product information locate the About button, where it'll list the installation type. If your installation type is Microsoft Store, you need to switch to the Click-to-Run version to keep receiving updates. To do so, download the Click-to-Run installer and run it, which will automatically remove the Microsoft Store version of the Microsoft 365 Apps and replace them with the Click-to-Run versions. The reason they're making you do this is that the Click-to-Run version offers enterprises and corporate customers more control over deployment, update schedules, configuration options, and so on. The Microsoft Store version is more suited for normal consumers, but Microsoft doesn't care about those, and never has, and never will. Why is Microsoft?

Wayback, the recently announced tool that will allow you to run a legacy X11 desktop environment on top of Wayland, has just announced its first release, version 0.1. As the version number implies, there be dragons here, but the developers state some of them already use Wayback on a day-to-day basis. Still, there's no multi-monitor support yet, quite a few X.org options are just stubs for now, there's no mouse-locking, and so on. Since the initial announcement and the first progress report a few weeks ago, Wayback has become an official part of FreeDesktop.org, which indicates the wider desktop Linux community is definitely interested in what Wayback has to offer. It's also been split into several different parts to mimic X.org's structure, several distributions have picked it up and packaged it already, and ton more changes have been made. It definitely seems like Wayback has a good chance of becoming a simpler, more straightforward replacement for X.org, greatly reducing the maintenance burden of Linux distributions. Not having to keep the full legacy X.org stack around alongside Wayland is going to save a lot of people a lot of time.

The work towards making the 64bit version of AROS a viable choice is continuing, as is the work on AROS' web browser, and developer Krzysztof deadwood' miechowicz gave an update a few days ago detailing the progress that's been made - and it's extensive. First, the beta version of Odyssey 3.0, the web browser for AROS, can now load a whole slew of important websites, like YouTube, Google Docs, and Discord, which is a big deal for an alternative operating system like AROS. Odyssey uses Apple's WebKit as its browser engine, and it's obviously important to make sure it runs on the 64bit version of AROS. Speaking of 64bit, more and more applications are being recompiled to add 64bit support, with the stated goal being to have at least the best application in each category available in 64bit. A major issue is that certain pieces of hardware that work in 32bit do not yet work in 64bit. As a temporary solution, they're going to make use of the virtualisation route AROS Portable uses to plug the gaps in 64bit hardware support until such support is realised. AROS Portable is basically a Linux distribution that runs a virtual copy of the 32bit version of AROS. It's clear that a lot of work is happening in the 64bit space for AROS, which is crucial for the long-term viability of the project. AROS is still the easiest and most accessible way to get a taste of an Amiga-like experience since it runs on plain x86 hardware, so it's important to keep that dream alive.

One of the things lacking from the FreeBSD installation routine is the easy installation of a full desktop experience, from X11 all the way up to a login manager, desktop environment, and its applications. It seems this might finally change for FreeBSD 15.0, as the FreeBSD Foundation's Laptop Support and Usability Improvements project is working on adding support for this to bsdinstall, the FreeBSD installer. Based on a goal set out in this GitHub issue, the way this will work is that through a set of dialogs (which you can check out on GitLab) in the FreeBSD installer, the user can select to install KDE, which will then guide the user through installing the correct graphics driver and adding users to the video group. Once the installation is finished, the computer will reboot and load directly into SDDM, allowing you to log into the installed KDE Plasma desktop environment. For FreeBSD 15.0, our goal is to extend the FreeBSD installer to offer a minimal KDE-based desktop as an install option. The initial concept is a low-interaction installation process that, upon completion, brings the user directly to a KDE graphical login screen. FreeBSD Foundation Laptop Update - June 2025 Future plans for desktop users in the FreeBSD installers are more elaborate, and will include additional desktop environments to choose from, the ability to install sets of desktop applications during FreeBSD's installation, and yes, even opting for Wayland instead of X11, because FreeBSD developers know which way the wind is blowing. This is excellent news, and will make installing a FreeBSD-based desktop a lot easier for a ton of people. Work isn't fully completed just yet, but even if the developers miss their FreeBSD 15.0 target, it'll just move on to one of the follow-up releases.

Ever wanted Windows to monitor what's on your screen continuously and ask it to do stuff for you? Well, have I got news for you: Copilot Vision, as this feature is called, is now rolling out to users in the US. Copilot Vision on Windows, now available in the U.S., is a new way to engage with your Windows 11 PC. When you enable it, it can see what you see on your device and talk to you about it in real time. It acts as your second set of eyes, able to analyze content, help when you're lost, provide insights and answer your questions as you go. Whether you're browsing, working or deep in a project, Copilot Vision offers instant insights and answers. The Windows Experience Blog team Do note that Copilot Vision will not keep its data on your device, instead sending it off to Microsoft. So, if you ever wanted to give Microsoft even more insight into exactly what you're doing with your Windows installation, now's your chance. Well, if you're in the US, that is, and some its capabilities are only available on Snapdragon PCs, not on Intel or AMD machines. In the same blog post, Microsoft also highlights a few actually useful features coming to Windows, like a colour picker in the screenshot tool, the ability to change the lighting in photos, or having the area selector in the screenshot tool snap to what it thinks is the important part you wish to actually take a screenshot of. However, Microsoft is also adding nonsense like sticker generators in Paint, text generators in Word, and stuff related to Teams that makes me even happier than I already am that I'm self-employed and work alone. If you're in the US, you can get these features now if you wish through Windows Update.

Earlier this year, we talked about a peculiar oddity concerning Flatpaks and Fedora: unlike just about any other distribution, Fedora maintains its own Flatpak repository, while everyone else just defaults to Flathub. While there's a few technical differences between Fedora Flatpaks and Flathub Flatpaks, the main gist is that the Fedora ones are built using Fedora's own RPMs, while Flathub's are built using different means. This is an odd situation, since it does not reflect what users really want - users seem to greatly prefer Flatpaks from Flathub, since they have fewer bugs, are packaged by the applications' creators, and bugs in Flathub Flatpaks can be reported to the actual developers, whereas bugs in Fedora Flatpaks generally cannot. As such, Fedora users are often surprised to learn that the Flatpak they installed came from Fedora instead of Flathub. Now, since Fedora's long-term goal is to make their immutable, Flatpak-focused variants the default, this situation needs to be addressed. As such, Fedora and GNOME developer Michael Catanzaro has published an incredibly detailed article outlining all the issues and possible solutions and courses of action. The basic gist is that before Fedora can consider switching from its own Flatpak repository to Flathub, a number of shortcomings in Flathub must be addressed: Some of these points are fairly obvious, but let's go over them anyway. A lot of binaries on Flathub are pre-built in that they are not built using Flathub's infrastructure, and as such, you don't know if anything has been done to the code between, say, the code's release on GitHub and the Flatpak you install on your computer. This obviously needs to change, and ideally, all Flatpaks on Flathub should be reproducible. End-of-life runtimes should obviously also not be a thing, for entirely obvious reasons. Currently, a little under a third of applications on Flathub use end-of-life runtimes, meaning the runtimes they use are not receiving any security updates. The same applies to external dependencies packaged inside Flatpaks; they can be outdated too, but many Flatpaks do not use the designated tool to deal with this issue. Obviously, holes in the Flatpak sandbox should not exist either, again for entirely obvious reasons. Catanzaro proposes a number of solutions to all of these problems, which require work from both Fedora and Flathub to be implemented. On top of that, even once these issues are satisfactorily addressed, there's a debate to be had over the exact way in which both the traditional and immutable variants of Fedora move on over to Flathub - the variant I personally like the most is where the core applications installed by default remain in control of Fedora, while everything else gets installed from Flathub. Of course, this is not of much relevance to people who prefer plain, traditional RPMs - such as myself - to whom Flatpaks are more of a if all else fails" option than a default. While the immutable, Flatpak-based variants of Fedora are definitely on their way to become the default option, the traditional RPM variants will not be going anywhere, and will remain an option as well. I think defaulting new users to the immutable variants is the way to go, even if I personally won't be using them.

Microsoft wants to know why, exactly, Windows 11 is slow, so it's adding a feature in the latest Insider Preview to collect data when a Windows 11 machine is experiencing slowness or sluggishness. As part of our commitment to improving Windows performance, logs are now collected when your PC has experienced any slow or sluggish performance. Windows Insiders are encouraged to provide feedback when experiencing PC issues related to slow or sluggish performance, allowing Feedback Hub to automatically collect these logs, which will help us root cause issues faster. Use theDesktop > System Sluggishnesscategory when filing feedback to allow Feedback Hub to automatically pick up these logs. These logs are stored locally (%systemRoot%\Temp\DiagOutputDir\Whesvc folder) and only sent to Microsoft via Feedback Hub when feedback is submitted. Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc In case you want to solve performance problems with Windows 11, just go here and follow the steps, and your computer will be spry as a Spring chicken in a few minutes. I am very funny.

Is KDE too much for you? GNOME tries to do too much? Xfce still a bit too fancy? Do you need something smaller? Even more minimalist? What about a mere 20 lines of code which provide the absolute barest possible minimum of window management functionality? You need mwm. This is the smallest, actually usable window manager I know about. Even TinyWM is twice as large. However, it doesn't let you launch programs, or assign key bindings.mwmdoes. Mwm's GitHub page It will open a window, and let you switch between windows, that are always fullscreen. No titlebars, no virtual desktops, no menus, no nothing. This is the true minimalist's experience.

The Document Foundation, which developers LibreOffice, is mad at Microsoft for the levels of complexity in the Microsoft 365 document format. They claim Microsoft intentionally makes this format's XML schema as complex and obtuse as possible to lock users into the Microsoft Office ecosystem. This artificial complexity is characterised by a deeply nested tag structure with excessive abstraction, dozens or even hundreds of optional or overloaded elements, non-intuitive naming conventions, the widespread use of extension points and wildcards, the multiple import of namespaces and type hierarchies, and sparse or cryptic documentation. In the case of the Microsoft 365 document format, the only characteristic not present is sparse or cryptic documentation, given that we are talking about a set of documents totalling over 8,000 pages. All the other characteristics are present to a greater or lesser extent, making life almost impossible for a developer trying to implement the schema. Italo Vignoli I feel like this was widely known already, since I distinctly remember the discussions around the standardisation process for the Office Open XML file formats. Then, too, it was claimed that Microsoft's then-new XML file formats were far more complex and obtuse than the existing, already standardised OpenDocument file formats, and that there was no need to push Microsoft's new file formats through the process. These days, you might wonder how relevant all of this still is, but considering vast swaths of the private, corporate, government, and academic world still run on Microsoft Office and its default file formats, it's definitely still a hugely relevant matter. As an office suite, you are basically required to support Office Open XML, and if Microsoft is making that more complex and obtuse on purpose, that's a form of monopoly abuse that should be addressed.

The year before his death in 1994,Gary Kildall-inventorof the early microcomputer operating system CP/M-wrote a draft of a memoir, Computer Connections: People, Places, and Events in the Evolution of the Personal Computer Industry." He distributed copies to family and friends, but died before realizing his plans to release it as a book. This week, theComputer HistoryMuseum in Mountain View, with the permission of Kildall's children, released thefirst portion of that memoir. You can download ithere. Tekla S. Perry at IEEE Spectrum Invaluable writing, and I'm so glad it's getting published.

Why is my burgerblue?" I asked, innocently. Oh! We're making all of our foodblue, all the best restaurants are doing it now." the waiter explained. But I didn't want my burger to beblue. Luna Winters Blue" food isn't food.

In this blog post, I have described how I have been using Linux on my Amiga 4000. I hope this information can be of use to anyone who is planning to run Linux on their Amigas. Furthermore, I hope that the existing documentation on the Linux/m68k homepage gets updated at some point. May be the information in this blog post can help with that. Debian 3.1 works decently for me, but everything is much slower compared to a PC. This is not really surprising if you run an operating system (last updated in 2008) on a CPU from the early 90s that still runs at a 25 MHz clock speed :). Sander van der Burg The blog post in question is from January of this year, but as soon as I saw it I knew I had to post it here. It's an incredibly intricate and detailed guide to running Linux on a 25Mhz Amiga 4000, including X11, networking, internet access, file sharing, and so, so much more - up to running Linux for Amiga inside FS-UAE. There's so much love and dedication in this detailed guide, and I love it. In fact, Van den Burg has a similar article about running NetBSD on the Amiga 4000, with the same level of detail, dedication, and information density. A fun note is that while X11 for Linux on the Amiga can't seem to make use of the Amiga chipset, the X Window System on NetBSD does make us of it. I'm not surprised. Articles like these are useful only for a very small number of people, but having this amount of knowledge concentrated like this will prove invaluable like five years from now when someone else finds an Amiga 4000 in their attic or at a yard sale, and choose to go down this same path. We need more of these kinds of write-ups.

ISO 27001 is like that careful lawyer who never says exactly what they mean - it tells you what needs to be achieved, not how to do it. When it comes to logging, this is particularly telling: Control A.12.4.2 simply states that logging information and logging facilities shall be protected against tampering and unauthorized access." Period. How? That's your problem to solve. Rafael Sadowski It turns out OpenBSD has a few relatively simple tools to make logs immutable, in a way that not even root can delete or modify them, or change any of the logging schedules. Reading through the blog post, you don't even need a ton of intricate knowledge to set this up, thanks mostly to just how much innate sense OpenBSD tends to make, and how excellent the documentation is. I have no need for this level of security, but if you do, you can set this up in a few minutes.

With both Exchange 2016 and 2019going out of support in October 2025, we have heard from some of our customers that they have started their migrations to Exchange Subscription Edition (SE) but might need a few extra months of Security Updates (SU) for their Exchange 2016 / 2019 servers while they are finalizing their migrations. We are announcing that we now have a solution for such customers.Starting onAugust 1st, 2025, customers can contact their Microsoft account team to get information about and purchase an additional 6-month Extended Security Update (ESU) for their Exchange 2016 / 2019 servers.Your account teams will have information related to per server cost and additional details on how to purchase and receive ESUs, starting August 1st, 2025. The Exchange Team blog Microsoft is clearly in a place where a lot of their software released over the past ten years or so just kind of works, and people just don't feel as strong of a need to upgrade to newer versions, especially not if those newer versions come with complex subscriptions. It must be a strange position to be in for Microsoft.

Tilckis an educationalmonolithickernel designed to be Linux-compatible at binary level. It runs on i686 and RISCV64 at the moment. Project's small-scale and simple design makes it theperfect playgroundfor playing in kernel mode while retaining the ability to compare how thevery sameusermode bitsrun on the Linux kernel as well. That's arare featurein the realm of educational kernels. Because of that, building a program for Tilck requires just agcc-musltoolchain frombootlin.com. Tilck hasno needto have its own set of custom written applications, like most educational kernels do. It just runs mainstream Linux programs like theBusyBoxsuite. While the Linux-compatibility and the monolithic design might seem a limitation from the OS research point of view, on the other side, such design bring the whole project much closer toreal-worldapplications in the future, compared to the case where some serious (or huge) effort is required to port pre-existing software on it. Also, nothing stops Tilck from implementing custom non-Linux syscalls that aware apps might take advantage of. Tilck GitHub page Tilck implements about 100 Linux syscalls, and is not focused on replacing the Linux kernel or even becoming a generic desktop or server operating system. It supports both i686 and RISC-V, has support for FAT, and a whole slew of other features. It can run a number of console and even a few framebuffer applications, but don't expect things like X11 to work, or to ever work.

Do you have a Windows XP retro virtual machine or, god forbid, run Windows XP on your primary machine? You're going to need a sort-of up-to-date browser, and it turns out Mypal68 offers just that. Terrible name aside, it's Firefox 68 ported to and maintained to run on Windows XP SP3; SP2 and lower are not supported, but some people do seem to have some success getting it to run on those. There are issues, of course: there's a 1.5GB memory limit, and the browser will crash when it reaches that limit, and 64bit builds simpy don't work at all, so there's only a 32bit build. Version 74.1.0 was released a few days ago, but that version number doesn't actually mean the browser is now based on Firefox 74; they had to change the reported version number for extension compatibility. I'm currently setting up a dedicated Proxmox PC for retro virtual machines, and Windows XP will obviously be one of them. I'm definitely going to try this out.

When it comes to open hardware, choices are not exactly abundant. Truly open source hardware - open down to the firmware level of individual components - that also has acceptable performance is rare, with one of the few options being the Talos II and Blackbird POWER9 workstations from Raptor Computing Systems (which I reviewed). Another option that can be fully open source with the right configuration are the laptops made by MNT, which use the ARM architecture (which I also reviewed). Both of these are excellent options, but they do come with downsides; the Talos II/Blackbird are expensive and getting a bit long in the tooth (and a possible replacement is at least a year away), and the MNT Reform and Pocket Reform simply aren't for everyone due to their unique and opinionated design. Using an architecture other than x86 also simply isn't an option for a lot of people, ruling out POWER9 and ARM hardware entirely. In the x86 world, it's effectively impossible to avoid proprietary firmware blobs, but there are companies out there trying to build x86 laptops that try to at least minimise the reliance on such unwelcome blobs. One of these companies is NovaCustom, a Dutch laptop (and now desktop!) OEM that sells x86 computers that come with Dasharo open firmware (based on coreboot) and a strong focus on privacy, open source, customisability, and repairability. NovaCustom sent over a fully configured NovaCustom V54 laptop, so let's dive into what it's like to configure and use an x86 laptop with Dasharo open firmware and a ton of unique customisation options. Hardware configuration I opted for the 14'' laptop model, the V54, since the 16'' V65 is just too large for my taste. NovaCustom offers a choice between a 1920*1200 60Hz and a 2880*1800 120Hz panel, and I unsurprisingly chose the latter. This higher-DPI panel strikes a perfect balance between having a 4K panel, which takes a lot more processing power to drive, and a basic 1080p panel, which I find unacceptable on anything larger than 9'' or so. The refresh rate of 120Hz is also a must on any modern display, as anything lower looks choppy to my eyes (I'm used to 1440p/280Hz on my gaming PC, and 4K/160Hz on my workstation - I'm spoiled). The display also gets plenty bright, but disappointingly, the V54 does not offer a touch option. I don't miss it, but I know it's a popular feature, so be advised. While the V54 can be equipped with a dedicated mobile RTX 4060 or 4070 GPU, I have no need for such graphical power in a laptop, so I stuck with the integrated Intel Arc GPU. Note that if you do go for the dedicated GPU, you'll lose the second M.2 slot, and the laptop will gain some weight and thickness. I did opt for the more powerful CPU option with the Intel Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, which packs 6 performance cores (with hyperthreading), 8 efficiency cores, and 2 low-power cores, for a total of 16 cores and 22 threads maxing out at 4.8Ghz. Unless you intend to do GPU-intensive work, this combination is stupid fast and ridiculously powerful. Throw in the 32GB of DDR5 5600MHz RAM in a dual-channel configuration (2*16, replaceable) and a speedy 7.400 MB/s (read)/6.500 MB/s (write) 1TB SSD, and I sometimes feel like this is the sort of opulence Marie Antoinette would indulge herself in if she were alive today. It won't surprise you to learn that with this configuration, you won't be experiencing any slowdowns, stuttering, or other performance issues. Ports-wise, the V54 has a USB-C port (3.2 Gen 2), a Thunderbolt 4 port (with Display Alt Mode supportingDP 2.1), a USB-A port (3.2 Gen 2) and a barrel power jack on the right side, a combo audio jack, USB-A port (3.2 Gen 1), microSD card slot, and a Kensington lock on the left, and an Ethernet and HDMI port on the back. Especially the Ethernet port is such a welcome affordance in this day and age, and we'll get back to it since we need it for Dasharo. The trackpad is large, smooth, and pleasant to use - for a diving board type trackpad, that is. More and more manufacturers are adopting the Apple-style haptic trackpads, which I greatly prefer, but I suspect there might be some patent and IP shenanigans going on that explain why uptake of those in the PC space hasn't exactly been universal. If you're coming from a diving board trackpad, you'll love this one. If you're coming from a haptic trackpad, it's a bit of a step down. A standout on the V54 is the keyboard. The keys are perfectly spaced, have excellent travel, a satisfying, silent click, and they are very stable. It's an absolute joy to type on, and about as good as a laptop keyboard can be. On top of that, at least when you opt for the US-international keyboard layout like I do, you get a keyboard that actually properly lists the variety of special characters on its keys. This may look chaotic and messy to people who don't need to use those special characters, but as someone who does, this is such a breath of fresh air compared to all those modern, minimalist keyboards where you end up randomly mashing key combinations to find that one special character you need. Considering my native Dutch uses diacritics, and my wife's native Swedish uses the extra letters a, a, and o (they're letters!), this is such a great touch. The keyboard also has an additional layer for a numeric pad, as well as the usual set of function keys you need on a modern laptop, including a key that will max out the fan speed in case you need it (the little fan glyph on my keyboard seems double-printed, though, which is a small demerit). I especially like the angry moon glyph on the sleep key. He's my grumpy friend and I love him. Of course, the

Did you know KDE has a television-focused user interface? It's been languishing for a while now, but a recent week-long effort by KDE developer Devin has brought a lot of new life into the project. I have been a long timePlasma Mobilecontributor, but I have always had a keen interest in having Linux on my TV! I have noticed that in the past few months, thePlasma Bigscreenproject has had some interest from people wanting to contribute, but there have not been any active KDE developers working on the project. Since I have some time off school (having just graduated university), I decided to take a swing at improving the project for a week. Devin, KDE developer It turned out to be one hell of a productive week, because the list of improvements achieved in that one week is kind of amazing. Lots of overhauls of the visual design, a new search view, complete redesign of the settings panels, and a lot more. The idea of running a KDE Plasma-based interface on my TVs sounds incredibly appealing, and I hope the project can make even more progress.

Haiku also survived another month of development, so it's time for another roundup of what they've been doing. Considering it's the height of Summer, it's no surprise the list of changes is a bit shorter, consisting mostly of smaller bugfixes and minor improvements. A few standout changes are that cursors can now be properly scaled in HiDPI, the iprowifi3945 driver from FreeBSD has been replaced by the OpenBSD one because it performs better, and several improvements to how colour schemes work. waddlesplash refactored how control edge (borders, etc.) colors are computed inside HaikuControlLook (the class that renders UI controls under the default appearance), cleaning up a lot of convoluted computations. He also fixed some color handling in the progress bar control, and then along with nephele, refactored how control colors are used and computed across the system. The Control background" color in Appearance preferences now has a new default and is much more properly used across the Interface Kit; under the default colors, renderings should be basically the same as before, but for users on dark mode" or other custom color schemes, it will now be much easier to pick control colors. waddlesplash on the Haiku website There's more, of course, so be sure to read the whole thing.

Late last year, Mishaal Rahman reported that Google was going to merge ChromeOS and Android, and it seems Google itself has now confirmed that's exactly what's happening. I asked because we're going to be combining ChromeOS and Android into a single platform, and I am very interested in how people are using their laptops these days and what they're getting done," Samat explained. Lance Ulanoff at TechRadar I'm definitely interested to see what using Android across desktops, laptops, tablets, martphones, and smartwatches is going to be like. The same applications on all those form factors? So many have tried, and as many have failed. I just don't think Google has what it takes.

The latest alpha of the upcoming Blender 5.0 release comes withHigh Dynamic Range (HDR) support for Linux on Waylandwhich will, if everything works out, make it into the final Blender 5.0 release on October 1, 2025. The post on the developer forum comes with instructions on how to enable the experimental support and how to test it. If you are using Fedora Workstation 42, which ships GNOME version 48, everything is already included to run Blender with HDR. All that is required is an HDR compatible display and graphics driver, and turning on HDR in the Display Settings. Sebastian Wick It's interesting to note that Blender on Windows won't be getting HDR support, and that's because Windows' HDR support is subpar compared to Wayland on Linux, and requires a ton more work which the Blender team isn't going to do. It seems the Wayland developers made all the right choices when it comes to HDR support. Needless to say, X11 doesn't have HDR support. The design of the Wayland color-management protocol, and the resulting active color-management paradigm of Wayland compositors was a good choice, making it easy for developers to do the right thing, while also giving them more control if they so chose. Sebastian Wick Weird. I was told Wayland was an unusable mess.

Tribblix, the illumos distribution that aims to provide a retro feel with modern components, has just released a new update, Milestone 37. At the system level, the max PID is now 99999, so you may see larger PIDs. Usernames exceeding 8 characters are now accepted without warnings. Files with dates after the Y2038 transition are now permitted on ZFS. Notable default version updates: the default Java is now JDK21, postgres is now v17, go is now v1.24, and ruby is v3.4. Tribblix Milestone 37 release notes See the full list of changes for all the various updated components.