DragonFly version 6.2 is the next step in the 6.x release series. This version has hardware support for type-2 hypervisors with NVMM, an amdgpu driver, the experimental ability to remote-mount HAMMER2 volumes, and many other changes. You can get the new release from the downloads page.
Microsoft took a while to figure out that the A: assignment is pointless as the era of Floppy drives is now over. This has been fixed in Windows 11 Build 22000 (stable). Starting with Windows 11, Device Manager no longer defaults to A: i.e it doesn’t ask you for a floppy disk for drivers (icon has also been replaced). Device Manager can now automatically detect the OS drive, so you can easily locate the driver package if you extracted the downloaded zip file to a folder on the system drive. Everything about this user experience is terrible, but at least the ditching of A: makes it slightly less terrible. I can’t believe we’re at Windows 11 in 2022, and this UI is still identical to what was first shipped in Windows 95.
I’ve spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W. The code seems fairly solid at this point, although there are still some deficiencies to be fixed up. The original mailing list announcement of the Linux kernel gets regurgitated quite often, but I had never seen the original announcement for X. Fascinating.
2005! The future is here! You have just spent $129 for the newest release of Mac OS X: Tiger. You’re amazed by the brand new Spotlight and Safari RSS, you like your new OS so much you want to develop apps for it. You read on Apple’s website about this app “Xcode” that just received the version 2.0 update. That’s it! Time to code! You fire up Safari, go to Yahoo! and start searching for Xcode tutorials, unfortunately, besides a bunch of Geocities websites mentioning “Web 2.0” (or whatever that means), you don’t find much information online on how to create apps for Tiger. Wouldn’t it be nice to find a tutorial to help you to get started? I attended a launch party for Tiger at a third party Apple reseller in Berlin. The good old days – when Apple was fun. Good times.
This new ISO contains fixes, improvements, and software updates. Finally, the installer hanging at the cleaning stage for ZFS installation got fixed, and OpenRC and dhcpcd were removed from the base code. Furthermore, automation configuration for HD 7000 series and older GPUs has been added. I also added the support for os-release to show GhostBSD name and GhostBSD version in applications like mate-system-monitor, python distros, pfetch, and neofetch and added a new set of wallpapers for 2022 and removed p7zip from the default selection since it is vulnerable and unmaintained. GhostBSD is a desktop-oriented FreeBSD distribution, mating Mate with the FreeBSD base system.
A few months ago, System76 announced that they would be developing a new desktop environment based on the Rust programming language called COSMIC. Their idea is to create a desktop environment that is similar to the one that is currently available for the Pop!_OS operating system, but with a different focus. System76’s objective is to create something that is faster, more customizable, and free of the limitations of the GNOME desktop environment, and let’s face it, we’re all curious how this desktop will look. This post will explore how this new desktop environment is shaping up. There’s not a ton to see here yet, and it’s clearly very early days. Still, it’s interesting to see the beginnings.
PCI Express technology has served as the de facto interconnect of choice for nearly two decades. The PCIe 6.0 specification doubles the bandwidth and power efficiency of the PCIe 5.0 specification (32 GT/s), while providing low latency and reduced bandwidth overhead. We’re barely seeing the rollout of PCIe 5.0 begin, and we’re already moving ahead. Also, who knew the standards organisation for PCIe is headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, of all places. Although, to be fair, any city that understands and caters to the beautiful, thrilling, and honest sport of curling is a great city. And I’m not joking here – curling is exquisite, and quite probably the noblest of sports.
Linux 5.16 has many new features including the FUTEX2 futex_waitv system call for helping Steam Play (and Wine), memory folios have been mainlined, AMD Ryzen 6000 mobile series support is getting into better shape, Intel Alder Lake S graphics are now considered stable, Intel AMX support for Sapphire Rapids has landed, big AMD Ryzen with Radeon graphics performance improvements, and a wealth of other hardware improvements. And this new kernel release will find its way to your computer soon if you’re using either a bleeding edge distribution or manually added a kernel repository with up-to-date kernels (I tend go with xanmod).
The EU’s police agency, Europol, will be forced to delete much of a vast store of personal data that it has been found to have amassed unlawfully by the bloc’s data protection watchdog. The unprecedented finding from the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) targets what privacy experts are calling a “big data ark” containing billions of points of information. Sensitive data in the ark has been drawn from crime reports, hacked from encrypted phone services and sampled from asylum seekers never involved in any crime. Sometimes we need to be reminded that authorities illegally amassing huge troves of data on unsuspecting and innocent people is not something that only happens in the US. But it is also worth noticing how in EU we at least have institutions that are trying curb these blind mass surveillance tendencies. If that fight will have measurable effects in the long run is something that we can’t foresee.
At CES this week, Lenovo announced that their new Z-series laptops would ship with AMD processors that incorporate Microsoft’s Pluton security chip. There’s a fair degree of cynicism around whether Microsoft have the interests of the industry as a whole at heart or not, so unsurprisingly people have voiced concerns about Pluton allowing for platform lock-in and future devices no longer booting non-Windows operating systems. Based on what we currently know, I think those concerns are understandable but misplaced. As usual, Matthew Garrett does an excellent job explaining complex topics like this.
Moxie Marlinspike takes a look at “web3”. Despite considering myself a cryptographer, I have not found myself particularly drawn to “crypto.” I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the words “get off my lawn,” but I’m much more likely to click on Pepperidge Farm Remembers flavored memes about how “crypto” used to mean “cryptography” than I am the latest NFT drop. Also – cards on the table here – I don’t share the same generational excitement for moving all aspects of life into an instrumented economy. Even strictly on the technological level, though, I haven’t yet managed to become a believer. So given all of the recent attention into what is now being called web3, I decided to explore some of what has been happening in that space more thoroughly to see what I may be missing. Cryptocurrencies are the MLMs and pyramid schemes for nerdbros. They are a complete waste of effort, hardware, and electricity, and literally do not serve any purpose other than drawing in more unfortunate suckers to broaden the base of the pyramid at the expense of the environment. And NFTs are even worse. There is definitely interesting technology behind these concepts, but for now, they’re being used for scams, pyramid schemes, and MLMs. Don get suckered into this dumpster fire.
During discussions with my friends and colleagues, whenever the topic of chat protocols comes up, I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how this simplicity has fostered creativity in the lives of many young computer hobbyists growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For many of us who were introduced to the Internet during that time, writing an IRC bot turned out to be one of our first few non-trivial hobby programming projects that involved network sockets, did something meaningful, and served actual users. It’s a big loss we let IRC kind of fall by the wayside as the world moved to things like Slack, Discord, and Teams. It turns out people want features like audio and video chat, emoji, images, videos, and so on – all things a slow-moving, classic standard like IRC will never properly support.
Anyone trying to disassemble the PC DOS 1.1 boot sector soon notices that at offsets 1A3h through 1BEh there is a byte sequence that just does not belong. It appears to be a fragment of code, but it has no purpose in the boot sector and is never executed. So why is the sequence of junk bytes there, and where did it come from? The immediate answer is “it came from FORMAT.COM”. The junk is copied verbatim from FORMAT.COM to the boot sector. But those junk bytes are not part of FORMAT.COM, either. So the question merely shifts to “why are the junk bytes in FORMAT.COM, and where did they come from?” It is not known if anyone answered the question in the past, but the answer has been found now, almost 40 years later—twice independently. This kind of digital archeology is deeply fascinating.
AmigaOS 3.2.1 fixes several bugs and additionally comes with new features. The team of developers and testers have worked ever since the release of AmigaOS 3.2 fixing bugs and implementing new features. They have read social platforms for user anecdotes, videos and reviews, and are excited by the positive reception and feedback. The Amiga will never die.
Space Cadet Pinball has a special place in the hearts of many Windows enthusiasts. A customer used their support contract to ask how to change among the three levels of play in Space Cadet Pinball. My proudest achievement of Windows XP was fixing the game so it didn’t consume 100% CPU. People keep asking if it can be brought back. One point of contention is over my claim that I removed Pinball from Windows because I couldn’t get the 64-bit version to work. Retrocomputing enthusiast NCommander even undertook a Zapruder-level analysis of all of the 64-bit versions of Windows he could find to prove or disprove my story. I was amazed at the level of thoroughness (and the fortitude it required to get those Itanium systems up and running, much less debug them), but there’s one version of 64-bit Windows that NCommander didn’t try out, and that’s the one that’s relevant to the story. This story and investigation into Space Cadet Pinball is wild. At this point we seem to have a pretty complete picture of its entire history, but it too some serious digging to get there.
It’s not unusual to hear that a particular military technology has found its way into other applications, which then revolutionized our lives. From the imaging sensors that were refined to fly on spy satellites to advanced aerodynamics used on every modern jetliner, many of these ideas initially sounded like bad science fiction. So did this one. I had never heard of this.
Windows 11 is going to be a year old in July 2022 and Microsoft will be giving users an anniversary present – a new feature update with a long list of much-needed improvements. The update is apparently codenamed “Sun Valley 2” internally and it is going to be similar to the anniversary update for Windows 10. Sun Valley 2 or version 22H2 would be a version of Windows 11 with some important improvements to make it faster, smoother and more modern, and to integrate WinUI more closely with the rest of the operating system. For example, a new Windows Run with dark mode could show up in this release. We’re also expecting new native apps. Considering Windows 11’s modern desktop context menu has its own classic Win32 context menu, I think they still got some work to do.
So, AMD, Intel, and Nvidis all decided to announce their latest products all on the same day yesterday. Let’s start with Intel, who announced the laptop version of their latest generation of processors, and if the performance claims hold up, they’re some damn good chips – but as always, we’ll have to await proper benchmarks. These laptop chips use Intel’s new hybrid processor architecture, which combines larger, faster performance cores with smaller, more efficient cores (P-cores and E-cores, respectively). How many P-cores and E-cores you get depends on the processor you’re buying, and you’ll need an operating system that supports Intel’s “Thread Director” technology to get the most performance out of the chips. Windows 11 supports it now, Linux support is in the works, and Windows 10 doesn’t have it and won’t be getting it. AMD, not wanting to be outdone, introduced its Ryzen 6000 series of mobile processors, which finally move their integrated graphics to RDNA 2m, and are the first to include Microsoft’s Pluton security chip. Yesterday AMD disclosed that they would be launching the new Ryzen 6000 Mobile series today – updated cores, better graphics, more features, all in a single monolithic package a little over 200 mm2. There will be 10 new processors, ranging from the traditional portable 15 W and 28 W hardware, up to 35 W and 45 W plus for the high-end gaming machines. AMD is expecting 200+ premium systems in the market with Ryzen Mobile in 2022. Finally, we have NVIDIA, with the smallest announcement of new high and low-end mobile GPUs.
Haiku continues to be on its roll, this time making tons of progress porting Wine to run on Haiku. Rockstar Haiku developer X512 has managed to not just start porting Wine to Haiku, but also to get so far as to run actual Windows applications on the platform. The screenshots in the Haiku forum thread speak for themselves. This is amazing work, and I can’t even begin to imagine how so much progress can be made in such short time. That being said – and the reason I’m late with this story – I’m not entirely sure porting things like Qt, X.org, and Wine are the best way forward for Haiku. As an old BeOS nerd, what I want are fully native, platform-optimised Haiku applications that make use of all the unique features the operating system has to offer. I’m not interested in yet another platform to run Qt applications, LibreOffice, and a small handful of Windows applications. I really don’t like being a grumpy old man when it comes to relatively small, alternative projects whose members code for free, but none of the recent amazing news coming out of Haiku has made me more interested in Haiku – in fact, it has only made me less interested, and less enthusiastic. Haiku and BeOS occupy a special place in my heart, and the focus shift from focusing on Haiku as an API-compatible clone of BeOS to yet another platform that runs Qt, X, and a few Windows applications worse than Linux or BSD do is not something I’m particularly thrilled with. But here’s the cool thing – what I think is, and should be, entirely irrelevant, and these developers need to keep doing what they want to do, whether randos like me want them to or not. That’s the nature of open source.
Libadwaita 1.0 has been released, just at the end of the year. Libadwaita is a GTK 4 library implementing the GNOME HIG, complementing GTK. For GTK 3 this role has increasingly been played by Libhandy, and so Libadwaita is a direct Libhandy successor. Libadwaita is quite controversial, as aside from dark mode and a (promised) colour API, applications that use Libadwaita cannot be themed. It’s all the result of developers being unhappy us pesky users get to decide what our computers look like, so they decided to prevent users from theming their systems at all. GNOME’s own applications will surely transition to it, and it remains to be seen if the wider Gtk developer community will opt for it as well. Libadwaita hjas already led to two major departures from GNOME, and other Gtk-based desktop environments, such as Cinnamon and Mate, may follow.
Some time ago, a very weird issue was reported to me about a Nextcloud system. The user uploaded a file with an “ö” on a SMB share that was configured as an external storage in the Nextcloud server. But when accessing the folder containing the file over WebDAV, it did not appear (no matter which WebDAV client was used). After ruling out the usual causes (wrong permissions, etc…), I analyzed the network traffic between the WebDAV client and the server and saw that the file name is indeed not returned after issuing a PROPFIND. So I set some breakpoints in the Nextcloud source code to analyze if it is also not returned by the SMB server. It was returned by the SMB server, but when the Nextcloud system requested more metadata for the file (with the path in the request), the SMB server returned a “file not found” error, which lead Nextcloud to discard the file. How can it happen that the file is first returned by the SMB server when listing files but then the server suddenly reports an error when requesting more metadata? Special characters must be second only to time, dates, and timezones when it comes to weird behaviour in code.
Dear friends, we’re gathered here today to mourn the death of that once-beloved monarch of the mobile world: BlackBerry. And, yes, I realize that this is not the first time we’ve announced the death of the company or its devices (and, for reasons I’ll explain below, it likely won’t be the last) but this is a very definite ending for legacy BlackBerry hardware. As of January 4th, any phones or tablets running BlackBerry’s own software — that’s BlackBerry 7.1 or earlier, BlackBerry 10, or its tablet operating system BlackBerry PlayBook — will “no longer reliably function,” says the company. Whether on Wi-Fi or cellular, there’ll be no guarantee you can make phone calls, send text messages, use data, establish an SMS connection, or even call 9-1-1. That sounds pretty darned dead to us. This seems ripe for a community of dedicated fans to build custom servers to keep things going – much like exist for many older games.
The first phone I ever owned was a Motorola Razr. The Razr’s buttons are some of the finest ever to grace a mobile device. The keypad is laser-etched out of a sheet of shimmering aluminum, and when pressed, ignites in a lambent blue glow that looked like the sci-fi future. But there was one button that I was terrified to press. In all my years of owning a Razr, I can’t say I tapped it more than once or twice, and never on purpose: the internet button. A lot of much younger people will never understand the dread that these internet buttons filled us with in the early 2000s. Whether true or not, I didn’t know anyone who was not terrified of accidentally pressing one of these buttons on their phones and racking up a massive bill, or rushing through your prepaid card. Times certainly have changed.
For women who assembled iPhones at a Foxconn plant in southern India, crowded dorms without flush toilets and food sometimes crawling with worms were problems to be endured for the paycheck. But when tainted food sickened over 250 of the workers their anger boiled over, culminating in a rare protest that shut down a plant where 17,000 had been working. Just in case you thought Apple (and other companies, of course) wouldn’t exploit poor people of colour in countries other than China. Good on these women for standing up for their rights, which is at least something they can do that their counterparts in totalitarian China cannot.
So, you want to use Windows 2000 in 2021? Well, you’ve come to the right place, although we’re not the only place you’ll want to keep handy. You’ll find some great tips, software advice, and know-how at the MSFN Windows 2000 Forums. Special thanks to @win32, who provided many of the pointers and suggestions used in this guide. This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
I’ve been keeping an eye on MauiKit for a while now, and over Christmas, they surprised us with their brand new convergent desktop environment – Maui Shell – targeted at both desktops, tablets, and mobile devices. After developing a whole set of applications, as well as a Linux distribution to use them, their next step is now a complete desktop environment. The objective of Maui Shell is to deploy a convergent desktop shell with different form factors, from mobile phones and tablets to desktop computers. Maui Shell will adapt to various form factors, and there’s no need for multiple versions targeting different form factors. Maui Shell is still in early development, but they’ve published a tight schedule with the first complete release scheduled for late 2022, with several preview releases in between then and now. In fact, the next release of Nitrux will include the first test release as an alternative shell for users to log into. If you’re interested in a modern take on the Linux desktop, phone, and tablet – these are the projects to follow. They’ve got some good stuff under their belt already, a proven track record, and a clear vision of what they want Maui Shell and its applications to be.
Enlightenment 0.25 is here more than one and a half years after Enlightenment 0.24 to introduce a flat look to match the new flat theme, new gesture recognition bindings for touchpads, fingerprint support in desklock via the libFprint library and a new tool to configure fingerprints, a new binding action that lets users switch profiles, as well as palette editor and selector tool to help you set up custom colors. There are a lot more changes in here, and I’m actually interested in trying it out – it seems more grown-up and less over the top than it has in the past, and I’m curious to see what else has improved over the years.
Intel apologized on Thursday after a letter in which the chip maker said it would avoid products and labor from Xinjiang set off an outcry on Chinese social media, making it the latest American company caught between the world’s two largest economies. The chip maker apologized to its Chinese customers, partners and the public in a Chinese-language statement on Weibo, the popular social media site. The company said that the letter, which had been sent to suppliers, was an effort at expressing its compliance with United States sanctions against Xinjiang, rather than a political stance. Intel following in the footsteps of major US companies supporting genocide – Ford, IBM, Apple, and countless others.
To be clear, you absolutely can still run your own email infrastructure, getting email delivered to you, filtering incoming spam, sending email (with DMARC signatures and other modern email practices), providing IMAP access, and even run your own webmail setup. You can even do this with all open source software. But the email environment you get this way is increasingly what I called an artisanal one. It’s cute, decent enough, and hand-crafted, but it doesn’t measure up in usability, features, and performance to the email infrastructure that is run by big providers. Your IMAP access might be as good as theirs, but things like your webmail, your spam filtering, and almost certainly your general security will not be as good as they have. In short, if you run your own email infrastructure, it will not be up to the general quality you could get from outsourcing to big providers (they can’t really be called specialists). And you cannot fix this by trying harder, nor with the magical right choice of open source software, nor with the magical right choice of commercial software. Entirely “on premise” email is now an inferior thing for almost everyone. I’ve always wanted to try and run my own email server, but I’d never run my main email address myself, since my income and interactions with the government depend on it. Still, it’d be a fun side project.
The evolution to USB-C connectors just after the release of the USB 3.1 standard promised simplicity. Instead of host device Type-A and peripheral Type-B, Mini-B, Micro-B, and others, a single connector works for both ends of a connection and carries both power and data. Power can flow either way with the same cable: a computer charging a battery or phone; a battery charging a computer. It’s also reversible across its long axis, so it’s impossible to insert it in the wrong orientation. USB-C was supposed to be the last cable you would ever need. It hasn’t worked out that way. Better names for standards, mandatory logos on cables. That’s all we needed from the USB-IF. This has been bungled so hard they couldn’t have messed it up more if they tried.
The Dreamcast is a bit of an odd beast. Coming on the heels of the unpopular Sega Saturn, the Dreamcast was meant to be a simple console built with off-the-shelf parts. The PlayStation 2 was already tough competition, and ultimately the Dreamcast fell out of the public eye as the Nintendo 64 was released with incredible fanfare. In some sense, it’s a footnote in console history. But despite not achieving the success that Sega hoped for, the Dreamcast has formed a small cult following, because as we know, nothing builds a cult-like following like an untimely demise. Since its release, it has gained a reputation for being ahead of its time. It was the first console to include a modem for network play and an easy storage solution for transferring game data between consoles via the VMUs that docked in the controllers. It had innovative and classic games such as Crazy Taxi, Jet Set Radio, Phantasy Star Online, and Shenmue. Microsoft even released a version of Windows CE with DirectX allowing developers to port PC games to the console quickly. We see our fair share of console hacks here on Hackaday, but what is the ultimate legacy of the Dreamcast? How did it come to be? What happened to it, and why did so much of Sega’s hopes ride on it? I missed out on the Dreamcast, but I’ve always been deeply fascinated by it, and on many an occasion I’ve come close to pulling the trigger on eBay. What always holds me back is the knowledge that most likely I’ll buy it, mess around with it for a few days, and then rarely look at it again. To any Dreamcast owners among our readership – would any of you say the Dreamcast and its most prominent titles are still worth it in 2021?
Proton has made enormous strides toward game compatibility through advances in related technologies like DXVK, which enable DirectX 9, 10, and 11 games to run through the Vulkan API. In fact, the project is so far along that Amazon has thrown its hat in the ring, working toward streaming Proton enabled games through Luna. The progress of this effort is updated all the time on ProtonDB, and today they crossed a major milestone as user reports on the site reveal that 80% of the top 100 games on Steam now run on Linux, and by extension, Steam Deck. I have long stopped even checking ProtonDB to see if the games I’m interested in run well on Linux – I just assume that the games I’m into belong to the 80%, with the remaining 20% being the massive garbage pile that are abandoned indie games, anime nonsense, and porn that have infested Steam over the years. Proton, and all the work Wine, Valve, and open source developers have poured into it, is arguably one of the biggest contributions to desktop Linux in a long, long time, and with the Steam Deck on the horizon, it’s only going to get even better from here.
The ReactOS Team is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.14. As with every other release, we’re regularly noting improvements and updates to keep you in touch with what is being done in ReactOS. In this release, improvements range from FreeLoader fixes, Shell features, kernel fixes, NetKVM VirtIO bringup, further work on the Xbox port and support for NEC PC-9800. A steady stream of improvements, and there’s more already implemented in the nightly builds that’s not in this release.
An Xlib compatibility layer implemented on top of the Haiku API, in order to run X11 applications on Haiku without an X server. Xlib‘s API is relatively low-level, but it is just high-level enough that it can be emulated on top of a higher-level API like Haiku’s. At present, it provides “most” commonly-used Xlib APIs, but many of them are stubbed or incomplete implementations. (GTK, with some hacks, can compile, link, and open a window before it runs in to missing functionality.) This is crazy person work by Haiku developer waddlesplash. He also posted continuously updated progress thread on the Haiku website, which provides a lot more detail about the process, the current state, and possible future plans.
Everybody knows how big of a sandbox Minecraft is, but this is taking it to the next level: somebody has built a complete 8-bit RISC processor in Minecraft, capable of running custom software: Sammyuri has reportedly spent seven months constructing an enormous–and enormously complicated–computer processor that exists virtually within the Minecraft engine. Although another Minecraft mod allows players to run the Mario 64 engine within Minecraft, sammyuri’s creation, called the Chungus 2, exists on an entirely different scale. The Chungus 2, which is short for Computation Humongous Unconventional Number and Graphics Unit 2, may be the single largest and most complex processor built in Minecraft as of writing. He even wrote an assembler so you can program it yourself.
The Casio Loopy is a 32-bit machine with a SuperH CPU, released in 1995. This family of CPUs is probably more famous for its use by Sega, but the SH7201 used in the Loopy appears to be still in production by Renesas. I’m not sure how much the SH7201 has changed over that time; it seems to be an SH-1 system, as opposed to the SH-2 used in the 32X and Saturn, and the SH-4 used in the Dreamcast. The Loopy is a treasure. If you’ve never heard of this thing before – you’re in for a treat.
You can no longer fully switch away from Edge in Windows 10 and 11. It seems that Microsoft has quietly backported the block, introduced a month ago in a Dev build of Windows 11, on tools like EdgeDeflector and browsers from being the true default browser in Windows 10, with the change being implemented in Windows 11 too. Starting from KB5008212, which was installed on all supported versions of Windows 10 yesterday with Patch Tuesday, it is no longer possible to select EdgeDeflector as the default MICROSOFT-EDGE protocol. They spent engineering resources on this.
An additional change that Microsoft is planning is that it is switching the default terminal app in Windows 11 to Windows Terminal. This modification will be rolled out in 2022 via the Windows Insider Program first before being made available generally. Microsoft hasn’t defined a firm timeline as of yet, but it’s clear that we can expect this to happen sometime next year. That would mean the end of the regular cmd.exe, which is currently the default command line in Windows. Of course, the new Windows Terminal application includes cmd.exe as an option as well, so it’s obviously not like it’s going away.
Google’s Project Zero describes a (now fixed) zero-click exploit in iMessage, and, well, it’s kind of insane. JBIG2 doesn’t have scripting capabilities, but when combined with a vulnerability, it does have the ability to emulate circuits of arbitrary logic gates operating on arbitrary memory. So why not just use that to build your own computer architecture and script that!? That’s exactly what this exploit does. Using over 70,000 segment commands defining logical bit operations, they define a small computer architecture with features such as registers and a full 64-bit adder and comparator which they use to search memory and perform arithmetic operations. It’s not as fast as Javascript, but it’s fundamentally computationally equivalent. Mother of god.
Repairability of electronics is a hot topic when hardware gets discussed, and Dell produced a concept laptop to explore the idea of a highly repairable Dell laptop. On Tuesday, Dell announced a new design concept for a laptop that’s long lived, easy to take apart and fix, and takes a smaller toll on the climate. It’s a collection of ideas that could go a long way toward making the tech giant’s products more sustainable — depending on whether, and how, Dell decides to implement them. Called “Concept Luna,” the proof-of-concept laptop dreamed up by Dell’s design team has a number of unusual features that are intended to make repair and maintenance easy. No screwdrivers or glue solvents are needed to pry loose a broken keyboard or peel off a cracked screen; both components simply pop free after a pair of keystones holding them in place are removed. The entire system contains far fewer screws than a typical Dell laptop, reducing the time needed to replace components. And you’ll never have to worry about replacing a broken fan, because there isn’t one: a shrunken-down motherboard placed in the top cover allows the laptop to passively cool itself. As good as this sounds, there is a red flag. Dell told The Verge that Concept Luna’s board “doesn’t have any more soldered on or integrated components than a typical laptop we sell today”. That’s right. Dreams of user replaceable RAM, CPU, and storage are probably going to remain dreams, and consumers are going to be stuck with however the machine was provisioned at build time. Like concept cars, this probably isn’t going to go into production, but the ideas could find their way into future products.
If you’ve followed the display, graphics card or games console market at all recently you will surely have heard about HDMI 2.1. It’s the new connection interface standard widely being adopted on new graphics cards, displays, games consoles and other devices; allowing support for improved bandwidths, resolutions, refresh rates and features. It’s one of the hot topics at the moment when it comes to buying a new device, and promoted heavily by manufacturers, often as one of the leading items in their spec. In this article we want to look at what the “HDMI 2.1” term really means, and address a worrying early sign in the market of things to come. We’ve delved in to what is required for this certification and what that means to you as a consumer if you ever want to buy something labelled with HDMI 2.1. Don’t make any assumptions about what that will give you, sadly it doesn’t seem to be nearly as simple as that. Oh good. More weird cable and port specifications to worry about.
A considerable amount of people assume Wayland isn’t particularly suitable for gaming, usually because you can’t turn off the compositor. This post will challenge that assumption and see how the current state of gaming on Wayland is, with a focus on KWin, KDEs compositor. A very in-depth look at how Wayland works for gaming – from input lag to rendering – compared to X, including latency benchmarks.
Today we are going to share the result of a bit of investigation that started a few months ago on STH. The short version, it appears as though the Dell EMC S5200-ON series switches, the company’s high-end 25GbE-200GbE switches, have license/ royalty stickers that have a different company name on them than they should have. Instead of saying “American Megatrends”, they instead said “American Megatrands”. To give some perspective, this looks strange because it would be like buying a Dell notebook and getting a “Macrosoft Wandows” license sticker on it. Through a fairly rough October, we validated that indeed these stickers are in the wild. Ultimately, after we brought their existence to American Megatrends (AMI) and Dell’s attention (HPE did not care enough to investigate), we now have an artifact that says that American Megatrends is honoring the license stickers and will not pursue legal action against Dell’s customers or those using them. This may seem like something insignificant and innocuous, but supply chain security is a big, big deal, and the fact these clearly misspelled license/royalty stickers made their way from printing down to the end-user of not just corporate hardware but supercomputers for the US military is… Concerning, to say the least. It shows that tampering with hardware anywhere between production of the individual chips and components down to delivery by the delivery person might be a lot easier to do than we think.
I read this article (“Open Source” is Broken by Xe) written in the aftermath of the unfortunate log4j2 fiasco. The author discusses a pertinent problem that has plagued the FOSS (Free and Open Source) world ever since large for-profit corporations started their widespread consumption of FOSS, ever since countless “unicorns” raised infinite amounts of funding on valuations built pretty much entirely on FOSS, ever since FOSS got co-opted into corporatisation and capitalisation. And yet, countless maintainers of critical and widely used FOSS struggle to make a living. Whose fault is this? I do not believe that this is FOSS’ fault as a conceptual framework or a system. If FOSS was broken, the internet as we know it today wouldn’t exist; the countless marvels of technology that we take for granted and techno-economies that thrive on them wouldn’t exist; millions of software developers (like me) who learnt to write code with FOSS and learnt to make a living with that knowledge wouldn’t exist. How is it that FOSS, a beautiful system that has uplifted and empowered massive swathes of human beings across the globe irrespective of their borders, race, creed, and economic backgrounds, is “broken”? To imply that FOSS is broken because it is abused by a certain category of users, is a form of victim blaming. Reading the various hot takes regarding the log4j2 problems has been an exercise in frustration. The fact that the maintainers of this small but important piece of software barely received any donations or other forms of financial support, despite their software being extensively used by some of the largest corporations in the world is not a fault of open source – it’s the fault of garbage corporations only taking, but rarely giving. The issue here is not open source – it’s unchecked capitalism. That being said, these maintainers, and other people who contribute to open source projects, know full well it’s most likely not going to make them rich, or even allow them to recoup any investments made. That’s the nature of open source, and it seems like the technology world has become so infested with venture capitalists that even the mere idea of someone working on something not for the money, but for other reasons seems entirely alien to a lot of people, meaning open source must, therefore, be broken. Money corrupts anything it touches. I’m insanely grateful for the almost endless number of people contributing to open source projects not because they expect to become rich, but because they enjoy doing it, to show off their skill, for the community of people they love interacting with, for the recognition it sometimes brings, or for the mere secret knowledge that their small project nobody’s ever heard of is a crucial cog in the massive machinery that keeps the technology world spinning. Open source isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as intended, and it’s by far the most powerful force in the technology world, and it will outlive any of the corporations so many people bend over backwards to please today.
So you want to play Adventure, but don’t know how to turn on the PDP-11? These instructions are for booting our dual rack machine from its RL01 drives, although booting the single cabinet machine from the RK05 is very similar. Detailed instructions for booting a PDP-11, including lots and lots of photos.
Today, the Commission has adopted new rules on Open Source Software that will enable its software solutions to be publicly accessible whenever there are potential benefits for citizens, companies or other public services. The recent Commission study on the impact of Open Source Software and Hardware on technological independence, competitiveness and innovation in the EU economy showed that investment in open source leads on average to four times higher returns. The Commission services will be able to publish the software source code they own in much shorter time and with less paperwork. Good. A small step, sure, but my hope remains that eventually, we come to realise that for our own safety and security, all code must be open source, no matter if it’s from Apple, Microsoft, or anyone else. We can’t continue down our current path where some of the most crucial, elemental parts of our society rely entirely on closed code of which we have no idea what it is – or isn’t – doing.
Some time ago I stopped releasing EasyOS as an ISO file, from then onward as a drive image file only. This has been contentious, and I receive emails from people lamenting the demise of the ISO. So, I should post some thoughts why I made this decision. Not an exhaustive rationale, just some thoughts while I think of them right now… The ISO9660 file format is very old, going right back to 1988, and has since then had enhancements bolted on, see the Wikipedia ISO9660 page. In addition, there is the “hybrid ISO”, enabling booting from a USB-stick, and on top of that enhancements to enable booting from either or both legacy-BIOS and UEFI firmware computers, see here. I think I agree. ISO files have become a bit of a headache lately, and I’d much rather just use a straightforward image I can dd to a USB drive.
ArcaOS 5.0.7 includes refreshed driver content, updated kernel and included software, as well as installation boot fixes since 5.0.6 was released in 2020. If you have experienced difficulty installing previous releases of ArcaOS on your hardware, 5.0.7 may address your issue(s). If installing from USB stick, the image may be created using any major operating system at hand (Windows, Linux, MacOS, and of course, OS/2, eComStation, and ArcaOS). Once built, the USB stick can be inserted into any USB port in the target system to boot into the ArcaOS installer/updater. This is an important update, as boot issues during installation were a problem on all my machines. I’m hoping this release will address them, since running ArcaOS on real hardware, instead of in a virtual machine, makes me giddy with excitement – especially since an updated, modern browser is on its way, too.
In an extensive paywalled report based on interviews and purported internal Apple documents, The Information revealed that Tim Cook personally forged a five-year agreement with the Chinese government during a series of in-person visits to the country in 2016. The need to push for a closer alliance with the Chinese government reportedly came from a number of Apple executives who were concerned about bad publicity in China and the company’s poor relationship with Chinese officials, who believed that Apple was not contributing enough to the local economy. Alleged internal documents show that Cook “personally lobbied officials” in China over threats made against Apple Pay, iCloud, and the App Store. Cook set out to use a “memorandum of understanding” between Apple and a powerful Chinese government agency called the National Development and Reform Commission to formally agree to a number of concessions in return for regulatory exemptions. The 1,250-word agreement was written by Apple’s government affairs team in China and stewarded by Cook as he met with Chinese officials. It was already well-known that Tim Cook and Apple were closely cooperating with the Chinese regime, but it seems they even went as far as begging and groveling to work with the Chinese regime in incredibly close ways. Mind you, that same regime Apple is so keen to closely cooperate with and please is currently executing a genocide to ethnically cleanse China. I’ve heard all the spineless corporatist excuses a million times. “Apple is just following Chinese law!” No. “Vote with your wallet!” No. “It’s not illegal so who cares if they aid a genocidal regime!” No. We throw minorities in jail for carrying a few grams of drugs, but we let corporations and executives who plot and scheme with genocidal regimes run free. Is that justice? We have devolved into a society where we just accept this – and that worries me just as much as all the other existential threats we’re facing.
OSnews