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In its antitrust case against Google, the Federal Government filed a list of chats it had obtained that show Google employees explicitly asking each other to turn off a chat history feature to discuss sensitive subjects, showing repeatedly that Google workers understood they should try to avoid creating a paper trail of some of their activities. The filing came following a hearing in which judge Leonie Brinkemaripped Google for destroyed" evidencewhile considering a filing from the Department of Justice asking the court to find adverse interference" against Google, which would allow the court to assume it purposefully destroyed evidence. Previous filings, including in theEpic Games v Googlelawsuit and this current antitrust case, have also shown Google employeespurposefully turning history off. Seamus Hughes The fact that corporations break the law, and lie, cheat, and scam their way to the top is not something particularly shocking, nor will it surprise anyone. I can barely even get angry about it anymore - birds gotta eat, fish gotta swim, corpos gotta break the law, that sort of thing. It's just an inevitability of reality, a law of nature. You know it, I know it, the whole world knows it. No, what really upsets me is just how easily they get away with it, and even if they do get punished, any fines or other forms of punishment are so utterly disproportionately mild compared to the crimes committed. It's incredibly rare for anyone responsible for corporate crime to ever face any serious punishment, let alone jail time, and even in the rare cases where they do, they usually have some stock options or whatever left over from their employment contract that will ensure a lavishly wealthy lifestyle. Fines levied against corporations as a whole are usually so low they're just a minor cost of doing business, to the point where one has to wonder why they're even being levied at all. Compare this to us normal folks, and the differences couldn't be more stark. Whenever we're accidentally late on some small bill, we get fined automatically, with very little recourse. We get a speeding ticket automatically in the mail because we drove 5 km/h over the speed limit. Our tax agencies are stupidly effective and efficient at screwing you over for that small side hustle selling crap on eBay. And rarely do we have any effective, efficient recourse. And these things can quickly spiral out of control when you're already living paycheck to paycheck - being poor is really, really expensive. And let's not even get into how much worse any of this is if you're part of a minority, like being black in the US, or of North-African descent in Europe. In this case, the illegal activities of Google and its executies and employees is on such clear display, and yet, few, if any, will suffer any consequences for them. If you ever wonder why so many regular people flock to political extremes, it's exactly this kind of deep unfairness and inequality that lies at its roots. It's dispiriting, demoralising, and disheartening, and primes the pumps for disenfranchisement with society, and thus the search for alternatives, upon which extremists pray. We either stop our continual slide into corporatism, or our societies will fall.

After spending a few months in complete radio silence about Recall, Microsoft finally emerged with a statement that its controversial featurewill make a comeback later this year, in October, to be more precise. In preparation for the release, Microsoft quietly made a big change in Windows 11 version 24H2 on Copilot+ PCs, namely, adding the ability to uninstall Recall (viaDeskmodder). Taras Buria Recall, a half-baked security nightmare of a feature trying to catch the AI hype train, uninstallable using a Windows 95-era Windows Features dialog, is a better summary of the current state of Windows than anything anyone could put into words. Nobody cares about Windows, least of all Microsoft, and I have the sneaking suspicion that could Microsoft get away with it, they would put the source code to large parts of the Windows platform on GitHub to outsource" its development to the community and fire even more employees. Is anyone excited about new Windows releases? Is anyone looking forward to new features? Because it feels like every new releases, every new feature, just causes more dread, more exasperation, more what is it this time? than genuine excitement and happiness. Everything coming out of Microsoft when it comes to Windows ever since the release of Windows 11 is just... Sadness.

In one of the more unique public proactive transparency record releases for the National Security Agency (NSA) to date,NSA has released a digital copy of a lecture that then-Capt. Grace Hopper gave agency employees on August 19, 1982. The lecture, Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People," features Capt. Hopper discussing some of the potential future challenges of protecting information. She also provided valuable insight on leadership and her experiences breaking barriers in the fields of computer science and mathematics. NSA press release Digital preservation is about more than just code - it's also about invaluable content like this. It seems rather uncouth to spend only a few lines on who Grace Hopper really is, since it's your duty to know already, and she deserves a hell of a lot more than a few lines. If you don't yet know who she is, her Wikipedia page is a good place to start. The speech in question has an interesting history, in that the only medium on which it was stored were 1-inchAMPEXtapes. The speech was originally given to NSA employees, but not even the damn NSA had the ability to access the recordings of the speech, and had to call in the National Archives and Records Administration's help. The NARA managed to retrieve the footage from the tapes, and now here we are. This will make for some great weekend viewing.

I hate this timeline. It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I've ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide - and wild - word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech's final day of publication. For better or worse, we've reached the end of a long journey - one that started with areview of an AMD processor, and has ended with thereview of an AMD processor. It's fittingly poetic, but it is also a testament to the fact that we've spent the last 27 years doing what we love, covering the chips that are the lifeblood of the computing industry. Ryan Smith at AnandTech This sudden loss is sending shockwaves through the industry, and rightfully so. AnandTech is a pillar, a cornerstone of hardware reporting, and one of the very few - possibly only - tech news outlet out there with such depth, quality, integrity, and restraint. I can't think of any other outlet being as dedicated to proper benchmarking and hardware reviews as AnandTech was, and losing them is a huge loss for all of us. The cause is exactly what you'd expect, sadly. It's simply not really possible to remain profitable writing in-depth hardware reviews and benchmarks, as the world has shifted to video, and advertising income has cratered. There's tons of hints about AnandTech not wanting to embrace sensationalism and clickbaiting to increase revenue - they'd rather go out with class, and I admire and appreciate that greatly. It just goes to show how hard it is to keep your head above water in the current online publishing world without rampant clickbaiting and flashy videos. In a better, less monopolised world, AnandTech could thrive. Sadly, that's not the timeline we're in. As far as housekeeping goes, the site will remain up for now, but there's no guarantee it'll stay up forever. I'm sure countless people are already archiving the invaluable content AnandTech has produced over its 27 year run, including the forums. We shan't lose what AnandTech has created.

He regularly shares cool examples of fancy css animations. At the time of writing his focus has been on css scroll animations. I guess there are some new properties that allow playing a css animation based on the scroll position. Apple has been using this on their marketing pages or so jhehy says. The property seems pretty powerful. But how powerful? This got me thinking... Could it play a video as pure css? David Gerrells The answer is yes. This is so cursed, I love it - and he even turned it into an app so anyone can convert a video into CSS.

The internet today relies TOO MUCH on just a few big players. When one of them stops working, half the world is impacted because too many services, in my opinion, depend on them. Too big to fail," some might say. Single Point of Failure," I respond." The strength of the internet has always been its extreme decentralization, which is now less evident due to this phenomenon. In this article, I want to show how easy it is to create a self-hosted CDN using OpenBSD and just two external packages:VarnishandLego. Stefano Marinelli Stefano Marinelli is a gem of a person, and a great voice for the wider BSD community. In this article he covers building your own CDN using OpenBSD, and a few days ago he published a similar article, but using FreeBSD instead. These are excellent resources for anyone who wants to take self-hosting and data ownership to the next level, even cutting out big players like Cloudflare which often don't have the best interests of us regular people at heart. It's probably not for everyone, but odds are if you're reading OSNews, you might be capable of and interested in doing this. And Marinelli's point about the internet being overly reliant on a just a few small players is well taken. We often focus on the front-end of the monopolised internet - Google, Apple, Microsoft, and so on - but the backend and infrastructure often also suffers from the same problem. These articles focus on effectively replacing Cloudflare, but something like Amazon Web Services is also a prime example of a service that's basically become too big to fail. That's not at all how the internet was supposed to work, but unfettered capitalism ruins everything, and this is no exception. While a few of us breaking away from the monopolies and building our own alternatives isn't going to have any material impact, it at least aides in a cleaner conscience.

The EpochCassette Visionis often reported as the first Japanese cartridge-based game console. But reality is always a bit more complicated. In 1978, years before the Cassette Vision, two Japanese companies put together cartridge-based game consoles that were unique to Japan, but relied on technology and chips licensed from American firms. And hey, despite my whirlwind tour of Pong consoles, I never looked at GI chips. Behold, the *breathes in* Bandai Video Mate All Color TV Jack Addon 5000. (longest console name in the history of the blog?) This 1978 console was the follow-on to Bandai's earlier Video Mate TV Jack consoles, which were more or less the same as everyone else's Pong-on-a-chip consoles. (TheTV Jack 2500appears rather intriguing, but we're not looking at that one today) Nicole Express As usual, Nicole's deep dives into weird consoles you've never heard of are a great read, and this one is no exception. There are many things that make the Jack Addon 5000 unique and interesting, but the one thing that's really cool is that while the game lives on the cartridge, the colour lives inside the console itself. Inside the cartridge you'll only find the monochrome game chip; the colour is added by another chip that's fitted inside the console. Only four cartridges were ever released for the system, so it's not particularly more versatile than contemporary Pong clones that had multiple built-in games or game modes. Still, it's an interesting footnote, and I'm so happy we got such a detailed look at this console.

I don't use GNU Screen so I don't have much to say here, but I do know it's a popular tool among the kind of people who read OSNews, so a new major release should be covered here. In case you're not aware, Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells". Basically, it's window manager for terminals. You can download the tarball yourself, or just wait until the update hits your distribution of choice.

When one of China's once-popular electric vehicle startups went bust, car owners encountered an unexpected problem: Their vehicles went offline." Richard Qian didn't know what to expect when he heard that WM Motor, a Shanghai-based EV maker popular for its low prices,filed for bankruptcyin October 2023. He tried to drive his compact EX5 SUV as he normally would, but discovered that he could no longer log into WM Motor's smartphone app, which remotely controlled the car lock and air conditioner. He also couldn't see his car's mileage and charging status on the dashboard. Tianyu Fang at rest of world Chinese car makers are heavily pushing to gain a foothold here in Sweden, it seems, as ads for these brands are popping up all over the place, and dealerships - although most likely not dedicated dealerships - are present even here in the Arctic high north. I have no idea how successful they are, as I don't think I've ever seen one out in the wild, but with such massive presence they must be doing something right. Considering most of the cars they sell are electric, I assume if any of them go under, buyers would suffer the same issues as Qian did. Of course, EV startups aren't exactly a China-only thing, but there are definitely more of them than there are non-Chinese ones, since even brands already well-established in China will effectively be startups again when entering the European or American markets. If an otherwise successful Chinese car maker doesn't survive in Europe, the end result is the same as if it were a European EV startup: no dealer network, no spare parts, and most likely, no servers to run your EV app. This issue alone keeps me from taking EV startups - Chinese or otherwise - seriously until they've got several solid product generations under their belt. The idea of spending tens of thousands of euros on a car that randomly loses a bunch of its functionality because its brand went under sounds like a nightmare to me, especially since so many features are now shoveled into electronic black boxes, down to even the door handles. I'll stick with established brands, for now.

The internet is a complex network of routers, switches, and computers, and when we try to connect to a server, our packets go through many routers before reaching the destination. If one of these routers is misconfigured or down, the packet can be dropped, and we can't reach the destination. In this post, we will see howtracerouteworks, and how it can help us diagnose network problems. Sebastian Marines I'm sure most of us have used traceroute at some point in our lives, but I never once wondered how,, exactly, it works. The internet - and networking in general - always feels like arcane magic to me, not truly understandable by mere mortals without years of dedicated study and practice. Even something as simple as managing a home router can be a confusing nightmare of abbreviations, terminology, and backwards compatibility hacks, so you can imagine how complex it gets when you leave your home network and start sending packets out into the wider world. This post does a great job of explaining exactly how traceroute works without overloading you with stuff you don't need to know.

The Windows patch that's supposed to improve Windows' performance on AMD's new Ryzen 9000 chips has been backported from Windows 11 24H2 to Windows 11 23H2. Now, AMD has confirmed that it's bringing the same branch prediction optimizations to Windows 11 23H2 via backporting. The new update will be listed under the Windows Update menu in the Optional Updates" section as KB5041587" which makes things a lot easier for those who haven't updated or opted into the 24H2 preview. Hassan Mujtaba at Wccftech If you're using Windows on a Ryzen 9000 chip - or even other recent Ryzen chips, who may also see a benefit from this patch - you should strongly consider installing this patch.

The Box64 project, which allows you to run Linux x86-64 binaries on non-x86 architectures like ARM and RISC-V, has achieved a major milestone with its RISC-V backend. It's been over a year sinceour last updateon the state of the RISC-V backend, and we recently successfully ran The Witcher 3 on an RISC-V PC, which I believe is the first AAA game ever to run on an RISC-V machine. So I thought this would be a perfect time to write an update, and here it comes. Box86/Box64 blog Calling this a monumental achievement would be underselling it. Just in case you understand how complex running The Witcher 3 on RISC-V really is: they're running a Windows x86 game on Linux on RISC-V using Box64, Wine, and DXVK. This was only made possible relatively recently due to more and more x86 instructions making their way into RISC-V, as well as newer RISC-V machines that can accept modern graphics cards. The Witcher 3 can runs at about 15 frame per second in-game, using the 64-core RISC-V processor in the Milk-V Pioneer combined with an AMD Radeon RX 5500 XT GPU. That may not sound like much, but considering the complexity underpinning even running this game at all in this environment it's actually kind of amazing. It seems Box64 could become as important to gaming on ARM and RISC-V Linux as Wine and Proton were for gaming x86 Linux. There's still a lot more work to be done, and the linked article details a number of x86 instructions that are particularly important for x86 emulation, but are not available on RISC-V. The end result is that RISC-V has to run multiple instructions to emulate a single x86 instruction (a whole of 10 instructions for a simple byte add"), which obviously affects performance.

Microsoft is handing over the Mono project to WineHQ, which came as a bit of a surprise announcement today. We are happy to announce that the WineHQ organization will be taking over as the stewards of the Mono Project upstream atwine-mono/Mono GitLab (winehq.org). Source code in existingmono/monoand other repos will remain available, although repos may be archived. Binaries will remain available for up to four years. Microsoft maintains a modern fork ofMono runtime in the dotnet/runtime repoand has been progressively moving workloads to that fork. That work is now complete, and we recommend that active Mono users and maintainers of Mono-based app frameworks migrate to.NETwhich includes work from this fork. Mono's website Wine make use of Mono, so this seems like a natural home for the project. Mono is an open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET, and is available on a wide variety of platforms, but lately it's been languishing a bit, with no major release since 2019, and only small patches since then. Microsoft gained stewardship over the Mono project when it acquired Xamarin in 2016.

This isfreebsd-rustdate, a reimplementation offreebsd-update. It's primarily written because ofhow slowfreebsd-updateis, and iswritten in rustbecause I felt like it. In usage, it's expected to besimilar, but not identicaltofreebsd-update. There are probably a number of minor edge-case differences I don't even know about, but there are a number of larger ones that are intentional too. Matthew Fuller I love it when someone takes on a very well-established tool that's used by countless people who probably barely think about how it could be improved. In this case, the performance improvements are nothing short of extraordinary, but of course, its author Matthew Fuller rightfully points out that you really shouldn't be using this on any production system. It has not received even one percent of the kind of testing and eyeballs that the regular update tool in FreeBSD has received, so there may be edge cases or bugs. Improving the speed of the update process is always welcome. If it's slow and time-consuming, people might postpone the updates because they're getting in the way of what they want to do at the moment. Sure, I doubt the average FreeBSD user is the kind of person to postpone updates and run an insecure system in the meantime, but it might still draw a few people across the line to quickly get them done before continuing their work. This new rust-based FreeBSD update tool is definitely not going to be replacing the current one any time soon, nor is it even a part of the FreeBSD project in the first place, so there's no need to worry about any potential breakage to your FreeBSD system because they're replacing a battle-tested tool with a new one. All this does for now is highlight that there's gains to be made here, and that's a goal worth pursuing.

I have been working on an emulator forearly (Motorola 68000-powered) Macintosh computers. While implementing the disk drive, I noticed documentation was scattered and hard to find. Now that I have a working implementation, this post is my attempt to document everything in one place. Thomas Exactly what it says on the tin - everything you ever wanted to know about the disk drive on early Macintosh computers.

On the whole, I'm satisfied that Lineage OS, as I use it, is preventing nearly all of Google's data collection. I don't install or use any Google services, I don't enable A-GPS, I don't use Chromium or the built-in browser. I could eliminate more arcane aspects of data collection - like the Internet connectivity check - if I wanted to take the trouble. I don't think that taking reasonable precautions to avoid becoming part of Google's data collection economy makes me a tinfoil-hatter. Nevertheless, I would probably use GrapheneOS instead, if I had devices that supported it. Ironically, if I wanted to use GrapheneOS, I'd have to buy Google-branded mobile devices, which is an irony that really stings. Kevin Boone The existence of Android versions like LineageOS, GrapheneOS, /e/OS, and similar, other de-Googled mobile operating systems is absolutely vital. The market is dominated by Google Android and iOS, and since full alternatives that aren't Android or iOS are effectively impossible, de-Googled Android is the best we're going to get. Regulators must ensure that banks, government ID applications, popular messaging platforms, and similarly crucial applications work 100% reliably on de-Googled Android, and do not require Google Play Services in any way, shape, or form. In The Netherlands, there are basically three banks that control the market, and there's really just one messaging application that rules the country - WhatsApp - and their use is effectively required to participate in society. Consequently, these applications and platforms should be accessible by as many people as possible, and that definitely includes de-Googled Android devices. Being alive should not be taxed by Apple or Google.

If you are looking to upgrade your TV and want a long-lasting option, you may consider getting a Samsung AI TV powered byTizen OS. The reason is that Samsung announced plans to offer seven years of Tizen OS upgrades for some of its Smart TVs. Sagar Naresh Bhavsar at Neowin Since buying a dumb TV is no longer possible, you might as well get the one with the longest possible support lifecycle. This new policy covers Samsung TVs from 2024 onward, as well as a few modls from 2023. There's no word on if the ads that I'm assuming are part of Samsung's smart TVs will also receive seven years of updates. Or, you know, get a good Android TV box and never plug your actual TV into your network to begin with.

Due to its limited RAM of 1,920 bits, the Programma 101 was mostly a machine conceived to make arithmetic calculations - sums, subtractions, divisions, multiplications, square roots -, yet, like modern computers, it could also perform logical operations, conditional and unconditional jumps, and print the data stored in a register, all through a custom-made alphanumeric programming language. This was, in the early '60s, what set computers apart from calculators, indeed. Overall, in today's terms, Programma 101 can be considered a sort of transitional fossil" between desktop calculators and personal computers. Riccardo Bianchini Olivetti sure is a name that carries an exceptional amount of weight in the retrocomputing world, as classic Olivetti computers, even standard Olivetti PCs, tend to be highly desirable. A Programma 101 in amazing condition is currently for sale on eBay for a massive 20000, and while there's quite a few relatively cheap '80s and '90s Olivetti PCs for sale, a sizable number of them are far more desirable and carry massive premiums for their unique design. It's sad how many once great and influential computer makers have been relegated to the dustbin of history, outcompeted, acquired, or run into the ground. Some of these once great brands live on as mere badges on electronic junk, and Olivetti, too, was not spared this fate. In fact, what is generally considered the worst PDA ever made, the Olivetti daVinci, was a generic product that just had an Olivetti logo slapped onto it. I have one in-box, and intend to one day write about it, because its awfulness needs to be shared with the world.

Earlier this year, Microsoft introduceda so-called Account Manager" for Windows 11that appears on the screen when you click your profile picture on the Start menu. Instead of just showing you buttons for logging out, locking your device or switching profiles, it displays Microsoft 365 ads. All the actually useful buttons are now hidden behind a three-dot submenu (apparently, my 43-inch display does not have enough space to accommodate them). Now, the Account Manager" is coming to Windows 10 users. Taras Buria at Neowin Yes, this is a really small ad int he grand scheme of things, but the mere concept of my operating system showing me all kinds of ads and upsells, as both Windows and macOS have been doing aggressively for years now, is so deeply offensive to me. It shows such utter disrespect to me as a user, and shows that Microsoft and Apple see me not as an end user, but as a ripe plum ready to be bled dry at every turn. It's revolting. As the latest release, Windows 11 has always been the most ad-ridden of the Windows releases still in use, but it seems Windows users can't escape the onslaught either. I'm especially expecting ever more aggressive ads and upsells for Windows 11 to appear in Windows 10 now that the 2025 cutoff date for Windows 10 support is nearing, of course appearing at the most inopportune times - because everybody loves a giant fullscreen ad on your operating system when you're trying to give a presentation or meet that tight deadline you forced yourself yo stress about by playing a bit too much League of Legends. If you want an ad- and upsell-free operating system, your options are legion - there's countless Linux distributions and the various BSDs to choose from.

The greek quiz is so obscure that it is ridiculous - noone can play this. Replace it with a new quiz about galley (ship) parts. This commit changes the LAST UNMODIFIED ORIGINAL FILE (meaning revision 1.1.1.1) from the original import that created OpenBSD on Oct 18, 1995. With this commit, we have completed an amusing mission of replacing the final parts of the original OpenBSD. We have reached OpenBSD of Theseus. Theo de Raadt With this change to a quiz game in OpenBSD, every single file of the OpenBSD code base is newer than that first, original import. Now I'm curious to see which other projects have achieved this milestone, and when.

Virtually every tech media outlet has been reporting that Microsoft is deprecating the Control Panel in Windows as if that's some sort of big revelation we should be outraged about. They're basing this on the following, now changed, paragraph someone found buried deep in a Windows support site somewhere: The Control Panel is a feature that's been part of Windows for a long time. It provides a centralized location to view and manipulate system settings and controls. Through a series of applets, you can adjust various options ranging from system time and date to hardware settings, network configurations, and more. The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience. Windows support website It seems the sudden avalanche of articles about this spooked Microsoft, because when you open the same website now, that last line instead reads: Many of the settings in Control Panel are in the process of being migrated to theSettingsapp, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience. Windows support website The idea that the Control Panel is being deprecated" is not exactly a new one; it's been an ongoing process since the release of Windows 8, twelve years ago now. With every new Windows release, more Control Panel applets are removed in favour of expanding the Settings application, to a point where few regular users have a need to open it directly. Settings still does rely on old Control Panel applets, though, and it won't take you many clicks through Settings to end up at a classic applet. So, while directly opening the Control Panel might not be a common thing people do, using classic applets sure is. Microsoft may be changing the verbiage of its support page to remove the word deprecated", but that ain't fooling anyone: the Control Panel has already been gutted beyond recognition, and it's definitely in the process of being deprecated - in true Microsoft fashion, it's just taking them a really long time, because nobody inside Microsoft seems to really care about Windows anymore.

German journalist Martin Bernklau typed his name and location into Microsoft's Copilot to see how his culture blog articles would be picked up by the chatbot, according to German public broadcaster SWR. The answers shocked Bernklau. Copilot falsely claimed Bernklau had been charged with and convicted of child abuse and exploiting dependents. It also claimed that he had been involved in a dramatic escape from a psychiatric hospital and had exploited grieving women as an unethical mortician. Copilot even went so far as to claim that it was unfortunate" that someone with such a criminal past had a family and,according to SWR, provided Bernklau's full address with phone number and route planner. Matthias Bastian So why did Copilot (which is just OpenAI's ChatGPT with sparkles) claim Bernklau did all sorts of horrible things? Well, his occupation - journalist - is a dead giveaway. He has written a lot of articles covering court proceedings in Tubingen on abuse, violence, and fraud cases, and since Copilot is just spicy autocorrect, it has no understanding of context and pinned the various crimes he covered on Bernklau. Adding in his address, phone number, and a damn planned route to his home is just the very disgusting icing on this already disgusting cake. What makes matters even worse, if you can believe it, is that Bernklau has absolutely no recourse. He contacted the public prosecutor's office in Tubingen, but they stated they can't press charges because the accusations coming from Copilot aren't being made by a real person. And to make it still even worse, Microsoft just threw its hands in the air and absolved itself of any and all responsibility by pointing to its terms of service, in which Microsoft discards liability for content generated by Copilot. Convenient. This is nothing short of a nightmare scenario that can utterly destroy someone's life, and the fact that Microsoft doesn't care and the law isn't even remotely prepared to take serious matters like these on is terrifying.

A page is the granularity at which an operating system manages memory. Most CPUs today support a 4 KB page size and so the Android OS and applications have historically been built and optimized to run with a 4 KB page size. ARM CPUs support the larger 16 KB page size. When Android uses this larger page size, we observe anoverall performance boost of 5-10%while using ~9% additional memory. In order to improve the operating system performance overall and to give device manufacturers an option to make this trade-off, Android 15 can run with 4 KB or 16 KB page sizes. Steven Moreland Android 15 has been reworked to be page-size agnostic, meaning that a single binary can run on either 4 KB or 16 KB versions of Android. Any assumptions about page size have been removed from Android as well, the EROFS and F2FS file systems as well as UFS are now compatible with 16 KB, and a whole lot more things have been changed and refactored to make this transition as effortless as possible. Application developers do need to do a few things, though. They'll need to recompile their binaries with 16 KB alignment, after which they'll need to be tested in a 16 KB version of an Android device or emulator. To make this possible, starting with Android 15 QPR1, the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro will get a new develop option that will reboot the device in 16 KB mode. In addition, Android Studio will gain a 16 KB emulator target as well. The 16 KB page size is an ARM-only feature, so people running the emulator on x86 devices will emulate the 16 KB page size, in which the Kernel runs in 4 KB mode, but all addresses exposed to applications are aligned to 16 KB". Of course, Google urges Android developers to test for 16 KB page sizes as soon as possible.

All, in all, It wasmucheasier to program for Windows using Turbo Pascal 7 than with anything else. Not only did it provide a programming model that matched the way the Windows user interface worked, the application itself had a Windows graphical interface - many Windows programming tools at that time actually ran under MSDOS, and were entirely text-based. TP 7 also had fully-graphical tools for designing the user interface elements, like menus and icons. Laying out a menu using a definition file with an obscure format, using Windows Notepad, was never an agreeable experience. Microsoft did produce graphical tools for this kind of operation, but Turbo Pascal combined them into a seamless IDE. All I had to do to build and run my programs was to hit the F7 key. I could even set breakpoints for the debugger, just by clicking a line of code. As I said, common enough today, but revolutionary for early Windows programming. Kevin Boone Even as a mere child who didn't even know what programming was, I was aware of Turbo Pascal. It was a name that you just encountered all over the place as a DOS and Windows 3.x user, even if you didn't know what it was. The author of this article, Kevin Boone, even claims Turbo Pascal contributed to the widespread uptake, and eventual domination, of Microsoft Windows on desktop PCs", which is not something I can verify because I was far too young, but I wouldn't be surprised if it holds water. This article made me wonder if Pascal is easy to learn, and if someone wanting to learn programming can do worse than start with a Windows 3.x virtual machine and Turbo Pascal. Sure, it's probably not very relevant today, but it might serve as a good, solid base to work from? I have no idea.

The history of Ethernet is fascinating. The reason why we have three different frame types is that DIX used the Ethernet II frame that is prevalent today, while IEEE intended to use a different frame format that could be used for different MAC layers, such as token bus, token ring, FDDI, and so on. The IEEE were also inspired by HDLC, and modeled their frame header more in alignment with the OSI reference model that had the concept of SAPs. When they discovered that the number of available SAPs weren't enough, they made an addition to the 802 standard to support SNAP frames. In networks today, Ethernet II is dominant, but some control protocols may use LLC and/or SNAP frames. Daniel Dib I just smiled and nodded.

The conversation around gaming on Linux has changed significantly during the last several years. It's a success story engineered by passionate developers working on the Linux kernel and the open-source graphics stack (and certainly bolstered by the Steam Deck). Many of them are employed by Valve and Red Hat. Many are enthusiasts volunteering their time to ensure Linux gaming continues to improve. Don't worry, this isn't going to be a history lesson, but it's an appropriate way to introduceyet anotherperformance victory Linux is claiming over Windows. I recently spent some time with theFramework 13laptop, evaluating it with the new Intel Core Ultra 7 processor and the AMD Ryzen 7 7480U. It felt like the perfect opportunity to test how a handful of games ran on Windows 11 and Fedora 40. I was genuinely surprised by the results! Jason Evangelho I'm not surprised by these results. At all. I've been running exclusively Linux on my gaming PC for years now, and gaming has pretty much been a solved issue on Linux for a while now. I used to check ProtonDB before buying games on Steam without a native Linux version, but I haven't done that in a long time, since stuff usually just works. In quite a few cases, we've even seen Windows games perform better on Linux through Proton than they do on Windows. An example that still makes me chuckle is that when Elden Ring was just released, it had consistent stutter issues on Windows that didn't exist on Linux, because Valve's Proton did a better job at caching textures. And now that the Steam Deck has been out for a while, people just expect Linux support from developers, and if it's not there on launch, Steam reviews will reflect that. It's been years since I bought a game that I've had to refund on Steam because it didn't work properly on Linux. The one exception remains games that employ Windows rootkits for their anticheat functionality, such as League of Legends, which recently stopped working on Linux because the company behind the game added a rootkit to their anticheat tool. Those are definitely an exception, though, and honestly, you shouldn't be running a rootkit on your computer anyway, Windows or not. For my League of Legends needs, I just grabbed some random spare parts and built a dedicated, throwaway Windows box that obviously has zero of my data on it, and pretty much just runs that one stupid game I've sadly been playing for like 14 years. We all have our guilty pleasures. Don't kink-shame. Anyway, if only a few years ago you had told me or anyone else that gaming on Linux would be a non-story, a solved problem, and that most PC games just work on Linux without any issues, you'd be laughed out of the room. Times sure have changed due to the dedication and hard work of both the community and various companies like Valve.

Apple ismaking additional changesto its app ecosystem in the European Union to comply with the terms of the Digital Markets Act. The default browser selection experience that's already in place will be updated, Apple will allow EU users to set defaults for more types of apps, and core iOS apps like Messages and theApp Storewill also be deletable. iPhoneowners in the EU can already set different defaults for the browser, mail app, app marketplace, and contactless payments, but Apple is going to allow users to select new defaults for phone calls, messaging, password managers, keyboards, call spam filters, navigation, and translation. That means, for example, that EU users will be able to choose an app like WhatsApp instead of Messages to be their default texting app, or a mapping app like Waze to be the default instead ofApple Maps. Juli Clover at MacRumors It's clear by now that Apple's malicious DMA compliance attempts have proven to be an abject failure. Apple continuously needs to backtrack and give in more and more to the European Commission, without the Commission even having to really do anything at all. Slowly but surely, Apple is complying with the DMA, all while its toddler tantrums have done serious damage to the company's standing and reputation without having any of the desired effects for Apple. Whoever set out this toddler DMA strategy at Apple should probably be fired for incompetence. This latest round of additional changes to comply with the DMA are very welcome ones, and further solidify the EU version of iOS as the best version. Not only do iOS users in the European Union get different browser engines, they can also remove larger numbers of default applications, set more default applications, replace more Apple-services with third-party ones, and so on. Thanks to the DMA, iOS is finally becoming more of a real operating system, instead of a set of shackles designed primarily to lock users in. It's only a matter of time before laws similar to the DMA spread to the rest of the world, and I honestly don't think the United States is going to stay behind. Corruption in the US is widespread, but there's only so much money can do, even in US politics.

When one thinks of modern technologies like Thunderbolt, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet and modern CPUs, one would associate them with modern operating systems. How about DOS? It might seem impossible, however I did an experiment on a relatively modern 2020 Thinkpad and found that it can still run MS-DOS 6.22. MS-DOS 6.22 is the last standalone version of DOS released by Microsoft in June 1994. This makes it 30 years old today. I shall share the steps and challenges in locating a modern laptop capable of doing so and making the 30-year-old OS work on it with audio and networking functions. This is likely among the final generation of laptops able to run DOS natively. Yeo Kheng Meng I was unaware that the legacy boot mode through a UEFI Compatibility Support Module (CSM) was being phased out on Intel systems (I can't find anything definitive on what AMD is planning to do with CSM). This will definitely be an end-of-the-line kind of thing for people interested in running old, outdated operating systems on modern hardware, as doing so would require proper EFI support. I'm not actually salty about this at all by the way - there's no place in modern PCs for something designed in 1981. We have ATX for that. Anyway, it turns out MS-DOS 6.22 actually runs pretty well on this 2020 Thinkpad X13 Gen 1. Of course you have to enable CSM, and disable secure boot and kernel DMA proection, but once that's done, you can just install MS-DOS 6.22 like it's 1994. Thanks to SBEMU, you can use modern sound cards in pure DOS mode, and due to various backwards compatibility affordances in network chipsets, you can even use some of those - even through Thunderbolt, which is just PCI over a cable, after all (more or less). Running MS-DOS on a modern laptop may not allow you to get the most out of your modern hardware, but at least you can run DOS games very well, as the benchmarks Meng ran show.

AMD says Microsoft's upcoming Windows 11 version 24H2 update will improve performance for its new Zen 5 CPUs. The Ryzen 9000 series launched earlier this month, andfailed to live up toAMD's performance promises in most reviews. After rumors of a Windows bug, AMD has revealed that AMD-specific branch prediction code will be optimized in Windows 11 version 24H2, which is expected to ship next month. Tom Warren at The Verge It's wild how seemingly small things can have a major impact on the launch of a new processor (or GPU) line these days. The main culprit behind the disappointing benchmarks upon launch of the Ryzen 9000 series turned out to be the 9000's new branch prediction method, the code for which is not yet available in Windows. However, AMD ran their tests in Admin mode", which yielded results as if such code was actually present. AMD has said the branch prediction code needed to unlock the full potential of Ryzen 9000 chips in Windows and yield benchmark results comparable to AMD's own internal tests and PR promiseswill be released next month as part of Windows 11, version 24H2 in preview through the Windows Insider Program (Release Preview Channel - Build 26100) or by downloading the ISOhere. AMD claims this update will benefit users of previous Zen 5 and Zen 3 processors as well, but to a lesser degree. No word on if this issue affects Linux users in any way.

Ah, secure boot, the bane of many running anything other than Windows. While it's already been found to be utterly useless by now, it's still a requirement for Windows 11, and ever since it became part of PCs about a decade or so ago, it's been causing headaches for people who don't use Windows. Yesterday, Microsoft released a patch for a two-year-old vulnerability in the GRUB bootloader, and while the company claimed it would only be installed on single-boot Windows machines, that clearly wasn't the case as right after its release, people dual-booting Linux and Windows found their Linux installations unbootable. Tuesday's update left dual-boot devices-meaning those configured to run both Windows and Linux-no longer able to boot into the latter when Secure Boot was enforced. When users tried to load Linux, they received the message: Verifying shim SBAT data failed: Security Policy Violation. Something has gone seriously wrong: SBAT self-check failed: Security Policy Violation." Almost immediately support and discussion forums lit up withreportsof the failure. Dan Goodin at Ars Technica The fix is both easy and hilarious: disable secure boot, and you're good to go. You can also get a bit more technical and remove the SBAT installed by this update, but while that will allow you to keep booting with secure boot enabled, it will leave you vulnerable to the issue the SBAT was supposed to fix. The efficacy of secure boot in home environments is debatable, at best, and while I'm not going to advise anyone to just turn it off and forget about it, I think most OSNews readers can make an informed decision about secure boot by themselves. If you're using corporate machines managed by your employer's IT department, you obviously need to refer to them. Microsoft itself has not yet commented on this issue, and is not responding to questions from press outlets, so we're currently in the dark about how such a game-breaking update got out in the wild. Regardless, this once again shows just how annoying secure boot is. In many cases, the boot problems people trying out Linux run into caused by secure boot, but of course, the blame is placed squarely on Linux, and not on secure boot itself being a hot mess.

One feature I couldn't live without anymore is snapshots. As system administrators, we often find ourselves in situations where we've made a mistake, need to revert to a previous state, or need access to a log that has been rotated and disappeared. Since I started using ZFS, all of this has become incredibly simple, and I feel much more at ease when making any modifications. However, since I don't always remember to create a manual snapshot before starting to work, I use an automatic snapshot system. For this type of snapshot, I use theexcellentzfs-autobackuptool- which I alsouse for backups. The goal is to have a single, flexible, and configurable tool without having to learn different syntaxes. Stefano Marinelli I'm always a little sad about the fact that the kind of advanced features modern file systems like ZFS, btrfs, and others offer are so inaccessible to mere desktop users like myself. While I understand they're primarily designed for server use, they're still making their way to desktops - my Fedora installations all default to btrfs - and I'd love to be able to make use of their advanced features straight from within KDE (or GNOME or whatever it is you use). Of course, that's neither here or there for the article at hand, which will be quite useful for people administering FreeBSD and/or Linux systems, and who would like to get the most out of ZFS by automating some of its functionality.

This article is targeted at embedded engineers who are familiar with microcontrollers but not with microprocessors or Linux, so I wanted to put together something with a quick primer on why you'd want to run embedded Linux, a broad overview of what's involved in designing around application processors, and then a dive into some specific parts you should check out - and others you should avoid - for entry-level embedded Linux systems. Jay Carlson Quite the detailed guide about embedded Linux.

The FreeBSD project has published its latest quarterly status report, and there's a lot in there. The most prominent effort listed in the report is a close collaboration between FreeBSD and AMD on an IOMMU driver for AMD's server processors. Work continued on a joint project between Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and The FreeBSD Foundation to develop a complete FreeBSD AMD IOMMU driver. This work will allow FreeBSD to fully support greater than 256 cores with features such as CPU mapping and will also include bhyve integration. Konstantin Belousov has been working on various parts of the project, including driver attachment, register definitions, an ACPI table parser, and utility functions. Two key components that need to be completed are context handling, which is mostly a generalization of Intel DMAR code, and page table creation. After this, the AMD driver's enable bit can be turned on for testing. FreeBSD status report page It's great to see AMD and FreeBSD working together like this, and it highlights that FreeBSD is a serious player in the server space. Other things mentioned in the status report are continued work in improving the audio experience, wireless networking, RISC-V support, OpenZFS, and more. Through the work of Tom Jones, FreeBSD is also getting the Vector Packet Processor, a userspace networking stack that delivers fast packet processing suitable for software-defined networking and network function virtualization applications. Of course, this is just a selection, and there's way more listed in the report. I would also like to highlight the ongoing, neverending work of improving the experience of using KDE on FreeBSD. The FreeBSD KDE team notes that due to the massive release of KDE 6, and the associated flurry of follow-up releases, requiring a lot of work and testing, KDE on FreeBSD still hasn't fully caught up with the latest releases. KDE Frameworks is currently at 6.3.0 (6.5.0 is current), KDE Plasma Desktop is currently 6.0.3 (6.1.4 is current), and KDE Gear 6 hasn't been ported at all yet. In other words, while progress is being made, it's clear the team could use a hand, too.

Google now displays convenient artificial intelligence-based answers at the top of its search pages -meaning users may never click through to the websites whose data is being used to power those results. But many site owners say they can't afford to block Google's AI from summarizing their content. That's because the Google tool that sifts through web content to come up with its AI answers is the same one that keeps track of web pages for search results, according to publishers. Blocking Alphabet Inc.'s Google the way sites have blocked some of its AI competitors would also hamper a site's ability to be discovered online. Julia Love and Davey Alba OSNews still relies partially on advertising right now, and thus Google continues to play a role in our survival. You can help by reducing our dependency on Google by supporting us through Patreon, making donations using Ko-Fi, or buying our merch. The more of you support us, the closer to reality the dream of an ad-free OSNews not dependent on Google becomes. OSNews is my sole source of income, and if that does not work out, OSNews will cease to exist if I'm forced to find another job. Due to Google's utter dominance on the internet, websites and publishers have no choice but to accept whatever Google decides to do. Not being indexed by the most popular search engine on the web with like 90% market share is a death sentence, but feeding Google's machine learning algorithms will be a slow death by a thousands cuts, too, for many publishers. The more content is fed to Google's AI tools, the better they'll get at simply copying your style to a T, and the better they'll get at showing just the little paragraph or line that matters as a Google result, meaning you won't have to visit the site in question. It's also not great for Google in the long-term, either. Google Search relies on humans making content for people to find; if there's no more quality content for people to find, people aren't going to be using Google as much anymore. In what is typical of the search giant, it seems they're not really looking ahead very far into the future, chasing short-term profits riding the AI hype train, while long-term profits take a back seat. Maybe I'm just too stupid to understand the Silicon Valley galaxy brain business boys, but to a simple man like me it seems rather stupid to starve the very websites, publishers, authors, and so on that your main product relies on to be useful in the first place. I honestly don't even know how much of OSNews' traffic comes from Google, so I don't know how much it would even affect us were we to tell Google's crawlers to get bent. My guess is that search traffic is still a sizable portion of our traffic, so I'm definitely not going to gamble the future of OSNews. Luckily we're quite small and I doubt many people are interested in AI generating my writing style and the topics I cover anyway, so I don't think I have to worry as much as some of the larger tech websites do.

There's been a few new releases since the last time we talked about MenuetOS, back in March of this year when version 1.50.00 was released, so I figured it was time to take a look at what the project's been up to. And just in case you don't remember - MenuetOS is 64 bit operating system written in assembly that fits on a single 1.44 MB floppy disk. There's also a 32 bit version that's no longer being developed - I think. Weirdly enough, the 1.50.00 released is no longer listed, but recent changes include Mplayer being part of the disk image, further updates to the included X-Window Server, the usual bugfixes, and a few more things. The X server is quite cool - with it, you can run, say, Firefox on your Linux installation, but have the MenuetOS X server render the UI. In addition, thanks to MenuetOS now including a basic POSIX layer, it's possible to create basic applications that run unmodified on both MenuetOS and a Linux distribution like Ubuntu. Neat.

But last month, that hand-me-down network was dealt a blow when Happiest Baby, the company that makes Snoo, began charging for access to some of the bassinet's premium features - features that used to be available to Snoo users indefinitely, at no extra cost. Now, access to the app needed to lock in the bassinet's rocking level, to track the baby's sleep and to use the so-called weaning mode, among other features, will cost parents $20 a month. The change has angered secondhand users and original buyers alike. On Reddit, the new subscription model has promptedreview bombs,group brainstormsfor collective action anddetailed instructionsfor outraged parents seeking recourse. Some have taken to filing complaints with the Federal Trade Commission, Better Business Bureau and state-run consumer protection offices. Sandra E. Garcia and Rachel Sherman at The New York Times My wife had our first baby a little over three years ago, and our second one a little over a year ago, and let me tell you - the amount of smart" and connected" stuff they sell targeted at babies and young parents is insane. The only smart" thing we got was a camera that pipes sound to my phone and detects movement, and sends a notification to our phone so we can take a peek and see if everything's alright. Our oldest has outgrown it, and our youngest doesn't really need it, so it's just being useless at the moment, fitted to the wall. It definitely improved our nights, though, since it made sure we would never have to get up for no reason. Other than that, we are very analog. I had heard of smart" bassinets, but we didn't think we needed one. That's just our decision, though, and you can rightfully argue that using a camera and open microphone is not that different. All of these new smart" tools are just that, tools, and can be useful and make your life just a little bit easier, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Being a parent of a newborn is hard enough as it is without outsiders judging you and pressuring you into doing things you don't think are right, especially since you know your own newborn - and yourself - better than some random outsiders do. The Snoo is one of the more popular smart bassinets, apparently, and at an entry price of 1700 dollars it's bonkers expensive. The thing is, though, as a new parent you know a lot of the stuff you buy has a relatively limited shelf life - they grow so fast - so you kind of take into account that you'll be selling some of the more expensive stuff down the line to recoup some of the costs. We have an insanely expensive stroller from a Norwegian brand, because it needed to be able to handle the Arctic climate and its endless snow, including specialised wheels and tires for trudging through the snow. The resale value of these is quite decent, so we know we'll get a decent part of the initial cost back, especially since we take extremely good care of it. And this is where the company that makes the Snoo, Happiest Baby, decided to screw over its customers. The company clearly realised the theoretical loss of revenue from the used market, and came up with this subscription model to lock in some of that theoretical revenue. However, since Happiest Baby always promised all of its features would work perpetually, this came as a huge shock to both buyers of used Snoo bassinets, as well as to parents intending to sell their Snoo, who now see their resale value plummet. The reasoning behind the sudden subscription model given by the company is absolutely wild. Harvey Karp, the founder and chief executive of Happiest Baby, defended the move as a business necessity. We don't have any dollar from the government, we don't have a dollar from a university," said Dr. Karp, a former pediatrician who created the Snoo after becoming frustrated with the lack of progress in reducing rates of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. We have to sell products and bring in revenue to be able to get to this goal." That goal, according to Dr. Karp, is that everyone will have access to this, and it will be paid for not by your friend, but it will be paid for by your corporation, the government or your insurance company," the way breast pumps are often covered. He also pointed to Happiest Baby's efforts to make the Snoo available in the inner city and in rural areas." For many parents, however, paying into that ideal is of little comfort to their bottom line. Sandra E. Garcia and Rachel Sherman at The New York Times He's basically stating that because he doesn't get free money from the government, universities, customers' employers, or insurance companies, he can't make any profit off the Snoo products. He's arguing that a $1700 bassinet with some sensors and chips is not a profitable product, which sounds absolutely like a flat-out lie to me. If he really can't make a profit with such a price for such a product, there's clearly something else wrong with the way the company is spending its money. Anyone who has ever watched Last Week Tonight with Jon Oliver knows just how many healthcare-related markets and businesses in the United States rely almost exclusively on government money through programs like Medicare and Medicaid, leading to an insane amount of scams and wasted money because there aren't even remotely enough inspectors and related personnel to ensure such money is effectively spent, made worse by the fact such tasks are delegated to the states. This whole Snoo thing almost make me think Karp intended to profit off these often nebulous government money streams, but somehow failed to do so. I feel for the parents, though. They bought a product that didn't include a hint of a subscription or paywalled features, and now they have

Hetzner no longer offers a FreeBSD rescue system but it is possible to install and manage FreeBSD with OpenZFS from the Linux rescue system on a dedicated server with UEFI boot. The installation is done on a mirrored OpenZFS pool consisting of two drives. Martin Matuska Not much to add here - Hetzner is a popular hosting and server provider, and if you want to use FreeBSD on their machines, here's how.

The tech review world has been full of murky deals between companies and influencers for years, but it appears Google finally crossed a line with the Pixel 9. The company's invite-only Team Pixel program - which seeds Pixel products to influencers before public availability - stipulated that participating influencers were not allowed to feature Pixel products alongside competitors, and those who showed a preference for competing phones risked being kicked out of the program. For those hoping to break into the world of tech reviews, the new terms meant having to choose between keeping access or keeping their integrity. Victoria Song at The Verge Even though this ended up being organised and run by a third party, and Google addressed it immediately, it doesn't surprise me at all that stuff like this happens. Anyone who has spent any time on tech YouTube, popular tech news sites, and content farms knows full well just how... Odd a lot of reviews and videos often feel. This is because a lot of review programs subtly - or not so subtly - imply that if you're not positive enough, you're going to be kicked out and won't get the next batch of cool products to review, thereby harming your channel or website. Apple is a great example of a company that uses the threat of not getting review samples, event invites, and similar press benefits to gain positive media attention. I myself was kicked out of Apple's review program and press pool way back during the Intel transition, because I mentioned the new Intel MacBook Pro got uncomfortably hot, and Apple really didn't like that. They tried to pressure me to change the wording, but I didn't budge, and consequently, that was the end of me getting any review items or press invites. I only ever accepted one Apple press invite, by the way, to their headquarters in The Netherlands, which was in Bunnik, of all places. Not much of value was lost without Apple press invites. Nobody wants to go to Bunnik. With every review of a loaned item on OSNews, you can be 100% sure there are no shenanigans, because I simply do not let anyone influence me. OSNews doesn't live or die by getting reviews of the latest and greatest tech, so I have no incentive to deal with pushy, manipulative companies or PR people. I refused to budge to Apple 17 years ago, during my first year at OSNews, when I was in my early 20s - and I've never budged since, either. Now look at everyone getting press access from Apple, and think to yourself - would any of them tell Apple to get bent? That being said, I'd love to review the new Google Pixel 9 Pro Fold, if only to make fun of that horrid name. Hit me up, Google.

In October last year, we covered a very simple bypass trick that involved just a single command when running the Windows 11 Setup. While this passthrough got popular in the tech community during this time as a result of the media coverage from Neowin as well as others, it was actually something even older. To use this, all a user had to do wasadd /product server"when running the setup, and Windows would just skip the hardware requirements check entirely. As it turns out, Microsoft has blocked this bypass method on the latestCanary build 27686as discovered by X user and tech enthusiast Bob Pony. When trying to use the Server trick now, the hardware requirements check is not bypassed. Sayan Sen It's such an own goal to limit Windows 11 as much as Microsoft is doing. Windows 11 runs pretty much identically, performance-wise, to Windows 10 on the same hardware, so there's no reason other than to enable the various security features through TPMs and the like. The end result is that people simply aren't upgrading to Windows 11 - not only because Windows 10 is working just fine for them, but also because even if they want to upgrade, they often can't. Most people don't just buy a brand new PC because a new version of Windows happens to be available. There's been a variety of tricks and methods to circumvent the various minimum specifications checks Microsoft added to the regular consumer versions of Windows, and much like with the activation systems of yore, Microsoft is now engaging in a game of whack-a-mole where as soon as it kills on method, ten more pop up to take its place. There's a whole cottage industry of methods, tools, registry edits, and much more, spread out across the most untrustworthy-looking content farms you can find on the web, which all could've been avoided if Microsoft just offered consumers the choice of disabling these restrictions, accompanied by a disclaimer. So Microsoft is now in the unfortunate situation where most of its Windows users are still using Windows 10, yet the end of Windows 10's support is coming up next year. Either Microsoft extends this date by at least another five years to catch the wave of natural' PC upgrades to a point where Windows 10 is a minority, or it's going to have to loosen some of the restrictions to give more people the ability to upgrade. If they don't, they're going to be in a world of hurt with security issues and 0-days affecting the vast majority of Windows users.

San Francisco's city attorney David Chiu issuingto shut down 16 of the most popular websites and apps allowing users to nudify" or undress" photos of mostly women and girls who have been increasingly harassed and exploited by bad actors online. These sites, Chiu's suit claimed, are intentionally" designed to create fake, nude images of women and girls without their consent," boasting that any users can upload any photo to see anyone naked" by using tech that realistically swaps the faces of real victims onto AI-generated explicit images. Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica This is an incredibly uncomfortable topic to talk about, but with the advent of ML and AI making it so incredibly easy to do this, it's only going to get more popular. The ease with which you can generate a fake nude image of someone is completely and utterly out of whack with the permanent damage it can do the person involved - infinitely so when it involves minors, of course - and with these technologies getting better by the day, it's only going to get worse. So, how do you deal with this? I have no idea. I don't think anyone has any idea. I'm pretty sure all of us would like to just have a magic ban button to remove this filth from the web, but we know such buttons don't exist, and trying to blast this nonsense out of existence is a game of digital whack-a-mole where there are millions of moles and only one tiny hammer that explodes after one use. It's just not going to work. The best we can hope for is to get a few of the people responsible behind bars to send a message and create some deterrent effect, but how much that would help is debatable, at best. As a side note, I don't want to hang this up on AI and ML alone. People - men - were doing this to to other people - women - even before the current crop of AI and ML tools, using Photoshop and similar tools, but of course it takes a lot more work to do it manually. I don't think we should focus too much on the role ML and AI plays, and focus more on finding real solutions - no matter how hard, or impossible, that's going to be.

A story you hear all the time about the Apple IIGS is that Apple purposefully underclocked or limited its processor in some way to protect the nascent Macintosh, and ensure the IIGS, which could build upon the vast installed base of Apple II computers, would not outcompete the Macintosh. I, too, have always assumed this was a real story - or at least, a story with a solid kernel of truth - but Dan Vincent decided to actually properly research this claim, and his findings tell an entirely different story. His research is excellent - and must have been incredibly time-consuming - and his findings paint a much different story than Apple intentionally holding the IIGS back. The actual issue lied with the production of the 65816 processor that formed the beating heart of the IIGS. It turns out that the 65816 had serious problems with yields, was incredibly difficult to scale, and had a ton of bugs and issues when running at higher speeds. What a ride, huh? Thanks for making it this far down a fifty-plus minute rabbit hole. I can't claim that this is the final take on the subject-so many of the players aren't on the record, but I'm pretty confident in saying that Apple did not artificially limit the IIGS' clock speed during its development for marketing purposes. Now, I'm not a fool-I know Apple didn't push the IIGS as hard as it could, and it was very much neglected towards the end of its run. If the REP/SEP flaws hadn't existed and GTE could've shipped stable 4MHz chips in volume, I'm sure Apple would've clocked them as fast as possible in 1986. Dan Vincent Promise me you'll read this article before the weekend's over. It's a long one, but it's well-written and a joy to read. You'll also run into Tony Fadell - the creator of the iPod - somewhere in the story, as well as a public shouting match, and an almost fistfight, between the creator of the 65816 and Jean-Louis Gassee during San Francisco AppleFest in September 1989, right after Gassee placed the blame for the lack of a faster IIGS on the 65816's design. This is an evergreen article.

Even though FAT32 supports disk sizes of up to 2TB, and even though Windows can read FAT32 file systems of up to 2TB, Windows can't actually create them. The maximum file system limit Windows can create with FAT32 is 32GB, a limitation that dates back to Windows 95 which has never been changed. It seems Microsoft is finally changing this with the latest Insider Preview build of Windows 11, as the format command can now finally create FAT32 file systems of up to 2TB. When formatting disks from the command line using theformatcommand, we've increased the FAT32 size limit from 32GB to 2TB. Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc Sadly, this only works through the format command; it's not yet reflected in the graphical user interface, which is just so typically Microsoft. Of course, most of us will be using exFAT at this point for tasks that require an interoperable file system, but not every device accepts exFAT properly, and even those that do sometimes have issues with exFAT that are not present when using FAT32. A more interesting new addition in this preview build is the Windows Sandbox Client Preview. This build includes the new Windows Sandbox Client Preview that is now updated via the Microsoft Store. As part of this preview, we're introducing runtime clipboard redirection, audio/video input control, and the ability to share folders with the host at runtime. You can access these via the new ..." icon at the upper right on the app. Additionally, this preview includes a super early version of command line support (commands may change over time). You can use wsb.exe -help' command for more information. Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc Windows Sandbox is a pretty cool feature that provides a lightweight desktop environment in which you can run applications entirely sandboxed, separate from your actual Windows installation. Changes and files made in the sandbox do not persist, unless the sandbox is shut down from within the sandbox itself. There's a whole variety of uses this could be good for, and having it integrated into Windows is awesome. Windows Sandbox is available in Windows Pro or Enterprise - not Home - and is quite easy to use. Open up its window, copy/paste an executable to the sandbox, and run it inside the sandbox. As said, after closing the sandbox, all your changes will be lost. That process is still a bit clunky, but with a bit more work it should be possible for Microsoft to smooth this out, and, say, add an option in the right-click menu to just launch any executable in the sandbox that way.

Similar to less popular handheld of the era, the Gameboy, the Psion used a proprietary cartridge format for distributing commercial software. Psion sold blank cartridges, flashing hardware and duplicators to software houses, as well as releasing a number of titles under their own license. There's a wide range of commercial software available for the Series 3 family, and only some of it was ported to the Series 5 (I really wish Scrabble had been released on Series 5). The range of software available was significant. Cartridges unlocked the Psion 3's ability to play a large number of games, provide phrase book translation to a number of languages (Berliz Interpreter), route plan your car journeys (Microsoft Autoroute), look up the best wines for this year (Hugh Johnson's Wine Guide) or build your organisation chart Purple Software's OrgChart. Kian Ryan I have a Psion 3, but the only cartridges I have are empty ones you can use for personal storage. I've always wanted to buy a selection of cartridges on eBay, but sadly, my Psion 3 died due to me forgetting to remove the batteries when immigrating to Sweden, something I only discovered like five years later. I was smart enough to remove all batteries from every single device in my massive collection, but I guess the Psion 3 slipped through my fingers. Anyway, this article is a great look at some of the cartridges that existed for the Psion 3, and it's really making me want to replace my broken Psion 3 and buy one that comes with a set of cartridges. There's something really attractive about how the Psion 3's EPOC operating system worked, and the third party programs look like so much fun to explore and use.

Last week wasn't the first time Google was declared a monopoly - eight months ago, in the Epic vs. Google case, Google's control over the Play Store was also declared monopolistic. The judge, Google, and Epic have been arguing ever since over possible remedies, and in two weeks' time, we'll know what the judge is going to demand of Google. Eight months after a federal jury unanimously decidedthat Google's Android app store is an illegal monopoly inEpic v. Google, Donato held his final hearing on remedies today. While we don't yet know what will happen, he repeatedly shut down any suggestion that Google shouldn't have to open up its store to rival stores, that it'd be too much work or cost too much, or that the proposed remedies go too far. We're going to tear the barriers down, it's just the way it's going to happen," said Donato. The world that exists today is the product of monopolistic conduct. That world is changing." Donato will issue his final ruling in a little over two weeks. Sean Hollister at The Verge I was a bit confused by what opening up" the Play Store really meant, since Android is already quite friendly to installing whatever other applications and application stores you want, but what they're talking about here is allowing rival application stores inside the Play Store. This way, instead of downloading, say, the F-Droid APK from the web and installing it, you could just install the F-Droid application store straight from within the Play Store. Epic wants the judge to take it a step further and force Google to also give rival application stores access to every Play Store application, allowing them to take ownership of said applications, I guess? I'm not entirely sure how that would work, considering I doubt there'd be much overlap between the offerings of the various stores. The prospect of micromanaging where every application gets its updates from seems like a lot of busywork, but at the same time, it's the kind of fine-grained control power users would really enjoy. A point of contention is whether or not Google would have to perform human review on every application store and their applications inside the Play Store, and even if Google should have any form of control at all. What's interesting about all these court cases in the United States is how closely the arguments and proposed remedies align with the European Digital Markets Act. Where the EU made a set of pretty clear and straightforward rules for megacorporations to follow, thereby creating a level playing field for all of them, the US seems to want to endlessly take each offending company to court, which feels quite messy, time-consuming, and arbitrary, especially when medieval nonsense like jury trials are involved. This is probably a result of the US using common law, whereas the EU uses civil (Napoleonic) law, but it's interesting nonetheless.

While a US judge ruled last week that Google is a monopoly, and hat it has abused its monopoly position, potential remedies were not part of the case up until this point. Now, though, the US Department of Justice is mulling over potential remedies, and it seems everything is on the table - down to breaking Google up. Justice Department officials are considering what remedies to ask a federal judge to order against the search giant, said three people with knowledge of the deliberations involving the agency and state attorneys general who helped to bring the case. They are discussing various proposals, including breaking off parts of Google, such as its Chrome browser or Android smartphone operating system, two of the people said. Other scenarios under consideration include forcing Google to make its data available to rivals, or mandating that it abandon deals that made its search engine the default option on devices like the iPhone, said the people, who declined to be identified because the process is confidential. The government is meeting with other companies and experts to discuss their proposals for limiting Google's power, the people said. David McCabe and Nico Grant The United States has a long history of breaking companies up, but the real question here is how, exactly, you would break Google up. Google makes virtually all of its money using its advertising business, and products like Chrome or Android in an of themselves make little to no money - they probably only cost Google money. Their real purpose is to direct people to using Google Search, which is where the various ads are Google's real money maker. In other words, what would happen if you were to split off Chrome or Android? How are these products supposed to make money and survive, financially? I don't understand entirely how Google's advertising business spaghetti is organised, but it seems like to me that's where any talk of splitting Google up to create breathing room in the market should be focusing on. Breaking that core business up into several independent online advertising companies, which would suddenly have to compete with each other as well as with others on a more equal footing, would be much better for consumer than turning Chrome or Android into unsustainable businesses. In an advertising market not dominated by one giant player, there's far more room and opportunity for smaller, perhaps more ethical companies to spring up and survive. Perhaps I'm wrong, and maybe there is life in a business that contains everything Google does except for online advertising, but I feel like said new company would not survive in a market where it has to contend with other abusive heavyweights like Facebook and Apple.

Way back, Valve had the intention of making gaming on Linux a reality by allowing anyone to make PCs running SteamOS, with the goal of making Steam less dependent on the whims of Windows. This effort failed and fizzled out, but the idea clearly never died inside Valve, because ten years later the Steam Deck would take the market by storm, spawning a whole slew of copycats running unoptimised, difficult to use Windows installations. There have been hints Valve was toying with the idea of releasing official SteamOS builds for devices other than the Steam Deck, and the company has not confirmed these rumours. The company'slong saidit plans to let other companies use SteamOS, too - and that means explicitly supporting the rival Asus ROG Ally gaming handheld, Valve designer Lawrence Yang now confirms toThe Verge. Sean Hollister at The Verge This is great news for the market, as some of these Steam Deck competitors are interesting from a specifications perspective - although pricing sure goes up with that - but running Windows on a small handheld gaming device is a chore, and relying on OEMs to make gaming overlays" to make Windows at least somewhat usable is not exactly something you want to have to rely on. SteamOS is clearly lightyears ahead of Windows in this department, so having non-Steam Deck handheld gaming PCs officially supported by Valve is great news. We're still a long way off, though, says Valve, and the same applies to Valve's plans to release a generic SteamOS build for any old random PC. That effort, too, is making steady progress, but isn't anywhere near ready. Of course, there's a variety of unofficial SteamOS variants available, so you're not entirely out of luck right now. On top of that, there's things like Bazzite, which offer a SteamOS-like experience, but using the Atomic variants of Fedora.

Following the removal of IA-64 (Itanium) support in the Linux kernel and glibc, and subsequent discussions on our mailing list, as well as a vote by the Gentoo Council, Gentoo will discontinue all ia64 profiles and keywords. The primary reason for this decision is the inability of the Gentoo IA-64 team to support this architecture without kernel support, glibc support, and a functional development box (or even a well-established emulator). In addition, there have been only very few users interested in this type of hardware. Gentoo website Et tu, Gentoo? Linux removing Itanium I can understand; the Freemason corporate overlords who pull the strings of Linux kernel development are terrified of just how powerful Itanium really is. GCC removing Itanium makes sense too, as the unwashed communists at the FSF just don't understand the capitalist greatness that is Itanium. But Gentoo? Now I know how Jesus felt when Judas betrayed him; how Caeser felt when he gazed upon Brutus' face. I feel empty inside.

There's a new Haiku activity report, and it's a big one. A lot of bottlenecks and performance issues were addressed recently, and the list is too long and detailed for me to cover everything. Haiku developer Waddlesplash does a great job in this report detailing the various things he worked on to solve some of these bottlenecks and performance issues, and they cover everything from speeding up the readv and writev I/O calls, fixing an issue with the kernel's device_manager lock, improving ELF symbol lookup by implementing the DT_GNU_HASH hash table, and much more. As part of working on these performance issues, Waddlesplash also fixed up Haiku's CPU time profiler. Haiku has a built-in CPU time profiler (just called profile.) Unfortunately, it's been rather broken for years, regularly outputting data that was either empty or just didn't make any sense. In order to use it to try and track down some of the other bottlenecks, I spent a bunch of time fixing various bugs in it, as well as the debugger support code that it relies on to function, including to stack trace collection, buffer flushing, symbol lookup, scheduler callbacks, image load reporting, and more. I also implemented userspace-only profiling (ignoring kernel stack frames entirely), fixed some output buffer sizing issues, and fixed a race condition in thread resumption that also affected strace. While it isn't perfect, it's much better than before, and can now be used to profile applications and the kernel to see where CPU time is being spent; and notably it now checks the thread's CPU time counters to detect if it missed" profiling ticks, and if so how many. Haiku's website Beyond these performance fixes, there's a ton of other improvements and fixes, from better handling of HiDPI displays in HaikuDepot, improvements to CharacterMap, fixing subtitles in MediaPlayer, and tons more. Of course, there's the bevy of driver fixes, including a major overhaul of the FAT driver, which was still largely based on old, original BeOS code because Be used the FAT driver as sample code. Haiku's FAT driver is now based on FreeBSD's FAT driver, which addressed a whole slew of issues. This isn't even all of it - there's so much more in this month's activity report, so definitely head on over and give it a read.

It's been busy in the world of hobby and teaching/learning operating systems these past few months, and today we've got another one - SpecOS. SpecOS is a 64 bit operating system kernel for x86-64 processors, still in quite early stages, written in (questionable quality) C. It is (not very) powerful. This used to be 32 bit, but has been transferred to a 64 bit operating system. It uses a monolithic kernel, because I like having everything in one place. This may take some inspiration from other operating systems, but it is not UNIX based. SpecOS GitHub page It's got the basics covered with PS/2 keyboard and VGA support, a real-time clock driver, a basic hard disk driver, and physical and virtual memory management, among other things. We're clearly looking at a hobby project, and the author is very clear about that. A virtual machine is highly advised, as running it on real hardware is... Well, you're on your own, basically.

Serena is an experimental operating system based on modern design principles with support for pervasive preemptive concurrency and multiple users. The kernel is object-oriented and designed to be cross-platform and future proof. It runs on Amiga systems with a 68030 or better CPU installed. One aspect that sets it aside from traditional threading-based OSs is that it is purely built around dispatch queues somewhat similar to Apple's Grand Central Dispatch. There is no support for creating threads in user space nor in kernel space. Instead the kernel implements a virtual processor concept where it dynamically manages a pool of virtual processors. The size of the pool is automatically adjusted based on the needs of the dispatch queues and virtual processors are assigned to processes as needed. All kernel and user space concurrency is achieved by creating dispatch queues and by submitting work items to dispatch queues. Work items are simply closures (a function with associated state) from the viewpoint of the user. Serena GitHub page Serena is a remarkably advanced concept, and since it runs in an Amiga emulator just fine, there's no need for real hardware, which is becoming ever harder to come by. It has its own unique file system, the executable file format is Atari ST GemDos (for now), and it has its own shell. It comes with a variety of drivers and services for your basic needs like keyboard and mouse input, a basic graphics drivers, a VT52 and VT100 series compatible interactive console, a floppy disk driver, and much more. Anyone can load up WinUAE and try SerenaOS out - it's available under the MIT license.