OSnews

Since starting the SerenityOS project in 2018, my goal has been “to build a complete desktop operating system to eventually use as my daily driver”. What started as a little therapy project for myself has blossomed into a huge OSS community with hundreds of people working on it all over the world. We’ve gone from nothing to a capable system with its own browser stack in the last 4 years. Throughout this incredible expansion, my own goals have remained the same. Today I’m updating them a little bit: in addition to building a new OS for myself, I’m also going to build a cross-platform web browser. If there is one person who can pull off making a web browser and turning it into a successful-enough open source application, it’s Andreas Kling. His work on SerenityOS is simply stunning and inspirational, attracting hundreds of people to work on a ’90s-inspired alternative desktop operating system. If he can organise the same amount of enthusiasm for Ladybird, it has a real shot at becoming a successful, but niche, browser. For now, it’s very early days, and Kling is open and honest about how much work is still left to do. Since all the code is new – this isn’t a fork or Blink, WebKit, or Gecko – you can imagine this isn’t exactly going to be an easy ride. It’s currently running on Linux, Windows through WSL, macOS, and Android, and Kling states the Linux version if the best tested one. I’m definitely excited for this one.

Tom Persky is the self-proclaimed “last man standing in the floppy disk business.” He is the time-honored founder of floppydisk.com, a US-based company dedicated to the selling and recycling of floppy disks. Other services include disk transfers, a recycling program, and selling used and/or broken floppy disks to artists around the world. All of this makes floppydisk.com a key player in the small yet profitable contemporary floppy scene. While putting together the manuscript for our new book, Floppy Disk Fever: The Curious Afterlives of a Flexible Medium, we met with Tom to discuss the current state of the floppy disk industry and the perks and challenges of running a business like his in the 2020s. What has changed in this era, and what remains the same? With the amount of legacy systems still running all over the world, there’s probably decent longevity in this business still.

Slovenia being a tiny country with a population of just 2 million, IBM OS/2 Warp 4 was one of the few non-Microsoft operating systems to be localized to Slovenian in the mid-90s and a big deal for the local IT community back then. But nearly 3 decades later, when OS/2 disappeared from the last ATMs in the country, the even rarer Slovenian version was as good as completely gone. Or was it? This is an amazing example of digital archeology, and I hope the other rare OS/2 translations are found as well. It’s difficult for small – but stunningly beautiful! – countries to maintain their digital independence, and properly localised software plays a huge role in that.

iOS 16 brings the biggest update ever to the Lock Screen, the ability to edit and collaborate in Messages, new tools in Mail, and more ways to interact with photos and video with Live Text and Visual Look Up. iOS 16 is available today as a free software update. Unlike in the Android world, every iOS user here on OSNews will most likely be able to install this latest update right away. I’m especially enamoured by the notifications popping in from the bottom instead of the top – this makes a lot more sense, and I hope Android picks it up as well.

In this article, we provide a holistic view of the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) abstractions by a systematic review of their historical evolution. We discuss some of the key factors that drove the evolution and identify the pitfalls that make them infeasible when building modern applications. Some light reading to start the week.

A website containing a vast, vast collection of domestic electrical plugs and sockets from all over the world, including more information and details about them than you knew existed. I’ve been stuck here for hours. Be wary of going in – you’re never coming back out. But you’ll be happier for it, since there’s enough information here to last a lifetime. One of my favourites is this one from Sweden – I was baffled by these at first when emigrating to Sweden a few years ago, but now I appreciate their genius and safety compared to just tying down live wires for ceiling lamps like we do in The Netherlands. Another fun and weird one is the Perilex plug, which is incredibly satisfying to plug into its corresponding socket (I used to work at a hardware store that sold a huge variety of plugs and sockets). I could go on for hours!

TinyClock is a tiny true 5-arch universal Mac OS X single-binary GUI application. Single universal binary, that can be natively executed on every hardware platform Mac OS X was made for (32/64 bit, PowerPC/x86/AppleSilicon). Just fun.

With the AM5 platform from AMD on the horizon, five major motherboard manufacturers have annonced their flagship motherboards with the X670E chipset. Some of them are having fun with this generation’s multi-faceted step into “five”: AM5, PCIe Gen 5.0, DDR5, 5nm process, boost clocks over 5GHz, you catch the drift. But do you know what every single announced motherboard has fewer than five of? PCI Express (PCIe) slots. Other than a GPU and the occasional WiFi card, I haven’t really had any need for my expansion slots in a long time. I just don’t know of anything useful. I doubt they’ll actually go away any time soon though.

FUSE-T is a kext-less implementation of FUSE for macOS that uses NFS v4 local server instead of a kernel extension. The main motivation for this project is to replace macfuse that implements its own kext to make fuse work. With each version of macOS it’s getting harder and harder to load kernel extensions. Apple strongly discourages it and, for this reason, software distributions that include macfuse are very difficult to install. With Apple locking down macOS more and more, developers have to resort to ingenious solutions to maintain the same level of functionality as before. This is an example of that.

Disassembly and enhancements for Apple II DeskTop (a.k.a. Mouse Desk), a “Finder”-like GUI application for 8-bit Apples and clones with 128k of memory, utilizing double hi-res monochrome graphics (560×192), an optional mouse, and the ProDOS 8 operating system. There’s a new version with tons of improvements.

The next generation of USB devices might support data transfer speeds as high as 80 Gbps, which would be twice as fast as current-gen Thunderbolt 4 products. The USB Promotor Group says it plans to publish the new USB4 version 2.0 specification ahead of this year’s USB Developer Days events scheduled for November, but it could take a few years before new cables, hubs, PCs, and mobile devices featuring the new technology are available for purchase. USB4 version 2.0. That’s the name they went with.

The overarching theme of Genode 22.08 is the emerging phone variant of Sculpt OS, touching topics as diverse as USB ECM, Mali-400 GPU, SD-card access, telephony, mobile-data connectivity, the Morph web browser, and a custom user interface. Among the further highlights are new tracing tools, improved network performance USB smart-card support, and VirtIO drivers for RISC-V. Genode never fails to impress.

The most notable proposed fix (listed in Annex II) is for phone makers and sellers to make “professional repairers” available for five years after the date a phone is removed from the market. Those repairers would have access to parts including the battery, display, cameras, charging ports, mechanical buttons, microphones, speakers, and hinge assemblies (including for folding phones and tablets). Phone companies also get a choice: either make replacement batteries and back-covers available to phone owners or design batteries that meet minimum standards. Those include still having 83 percent of its rated capacity after 500 full charging cycles, then 80 percent after 1,000 full charging cycles. Apple, for example, currently claims that its iPhones are designed to retain 80 percent capacity after 500 charge cycles. Good. I’ve been saying it for years: if the automotive industry can be legally obligated to provide spare parts, repair information, and more to third parties, so can the technology industry.

The Android update treadmill continues with the release of Android 13. It’s one of the smallest Android releases in recent memory, with barely any user-facing features to point to. Keep in mind, though, that this update follows the monster Android 12 release from last year. This is also the second Android OS release this year, the previous one being the tablet-focused Android 12L update that was rushed out the door in March. We would have a bit more meat to work with if Android 12L was part of this release, but as it is, we’re left with a grab bag of features for Android 13. It includes many foundational features for Android tablets and smart displays, but there’s not much here for phones. Even so, there are things to discuss, so let’s dive in. Ars Technica’s usual deep dive into every new Android release, and despite Android 13 being a relatively minor release, there’s still more than enough to cover.

In the last six months macOS malware protection has changed more than it did over the previous seven years. It has now gone fully pre-emptive, as active as many commercial anti-malware products, provided that your Mac is running Catalina or later. This article updates those I’ve previously written about Apple’s new tool in the war against malware, XProtect Remediator. Apple has been slowly building out its anti-malware and antivirus tools in macOS, and it has remained mostly quiet about it – understandable considering how bad tech press would have a field day with stories about Apple effectively turning macOS malware protection into a regular antivirus scanner.

We talk a lot about standards over this way, including what came before the standards were put into place and what came before that. Our last issue was about standards, even. But sometimes, de facto standards simply come into place, where a large number of people and organizations agree to do something a certain way, despite no formalized agreement or strategy. And one of the greatest examples of a de facto standard in computing history may be a controller port that remained in constant use on mainstream consoles and computers for two whole decades. I’m, of course, talking about the Atari joystick port, a port with a surprising amount of history behind it. My experience with this venerable port came through the MSX, which was weirdly popular in The Netherlands thanks to Phillips being a Dutch company. It wasn’t until much later that I realised it was in use all over the place.

Japan’s digital minister, who’s vowed to rid the bureaucracy of outdated tools from the hanko stamp to the fax machine, has now declared “war” on a technology many haven’t seen for decades — the floppy disk. The hand-sized, square-shaped data storage item, along with similar devices including the CD or even lesser-known mini disk, are still required for some 1,900 government procedures and must go, digital minister Taro Kono wrote in a Twitter post Wednesday. I understand wanting to dump the floppy and CD, but why dump MiniDisc? Us people of culture know the MiniDisc is the end-all-be-all of storage media, and nothing has ever surpassed it. Japan is about to make a grave, grave mistake.

With the rollout of Android 13 to the Pixel 6 and 6a, Google posted an interesting warning on the system image website: Once you flash Android 13, you can never go back to the old version. That’s still the case for anyone wanting a fully functional phone, but now, Google has posted an Android 12 “developer support image” that will let developers roll back their phones even after upgrading. The “developer” branding on the image means it’s not fully functional, but it will be good enough for app testing. Not being able to roll back would be terrible if Android 13 came with some sort of gamebreaking bug, so this is a welcome release.

This week, the Fuchsia team shared a new proposal titled “ADB on Fuchsia” that shares the team’s intention to support ADB for controlling devices and the reasoning behind wanting to do so. At present, the core “fx” and “ffx” tools used to control Fuchsia devices are only compatible with Linux and macOS computers. And while there’s an effort to get ffx running on Windows, that’s not projected to be completed until the end of 2022. Sadly, ADB for Fuchsia won’t work for consumer Fuchsia devices, such as the Nest Hubs, since Goolgle states that it will only be available during early development phases of Fuchsia devices.

Today we’re launching our Developer Preview of the new Cross device SDK for Android. First announced during the Google I/O ‘22 Multi-device development session, our Cross device SDK allows developers to build rich multi-device experiences with a simple and intuitive set of APIs. This SDK abstracts away the intricacies involved with working with device discovery, authentication, and connection protocols, allowing you to focus on what matters most—building delightful user experiences and connecting these experiences across a variety of form factors and platforms. Google intends to expand this tool to non-Android operating systems soon.

Roughly seven years ago, Partha Ranganathan realized Moore’s law was dead. That was a pretty big problem for the Google engineering vice president: He had come to expect chip performance to double every 18 months without cost increases and had helped organize purchasing plans for the tens of billions of dollars Google spends on computing infrastructure each year around that idea. But now Ranganathan was getting a chip twice as good every four years, and it looked like that gap was going to stretch out even further in the not-too-distant future. So he and Google decided to do something about it. The company had already committed hundreds of millions of dollars to design its own custom chips for AI, called tensor processing units, or TPUs. Google has now launched more than four generations of the TPU, and the technology has given the company’s AI efforts a leg up over its rivals. Google uses all kinds of custom hardware throughout its operations, but you rarely hear about it. This article provides some insight into the custom hardware Google uses for YouTube transcoding.

Justice Department lawyers are in the early stages of drafting a potential antitrust complaint against Apple, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter — a sign that a long-running investigation may be nearing a decision point and a suit could be coming soon. Various groups of prosecutors inside DOJ are assembling the pieces for a potential lawsuit, the individual said, adding that the department’s antitrust division hopes to file suit by the end of the year. The Justice Department has been investigating Apple since 2019 over allegations that it abused its market power to stifle smaller tech companies, including app developers and competing hardware makers. As the investigation has progressed, a suit has become increasingly likely, but the move to drafting sections of the suit is a significant step forward in the process. Finally.

Many federal policy changes are well known before they are announced. Hints in speeches, leaks, and early access to reporters at major publications all pave the way for the eventual confirmation. But on Thursday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) dropped a big one that seemed to take everyone by surprise. Starting in 2026, any scientific publication that receives federal funding will need to be openly accessible on the day it’s published. The move has the potential to further shake up the scientific publishing industry, which has already adopted preprint archives, similar mandates from other funding organizations, and greatly expanded access to publications during the pandemic. Aaron Schwartz died trying to make this happen.

We have ended up in a world where UNIX and Windows have taken over, and most people have never experienced anything else. Over the years, though, many other system designs have come and gone, and some of those systems have had neat ideas that were nevertheless not enough to achieve commercial success. We will take you on a tour of a variety of those systems, talking about what makes them special. In particular, we’ll discuss IBM i, with emphasis on the Single Level Store, TIMI, and block terminals Interlisp, the Lisp Machine with the interface of Smalltalk OpenGenera, with a unique approach to UI design TRON, Japan’s ambitious OS standard. This is an hour-long watch, but I’m getting some coffee and snacks ready this weekend. This seems like total OSNews bait.

Skirting the official macOS system requirements to run new versions of the software on old, unsupported Macs has a rich history. Tools like XPostFacto and LeopardAssist could help old PowerPC Macs run newer versions of Mac OS X, a tradition kept alive in the modern era by dosdude1’s patchers for Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina. For Big Sur and Monterey, the OpenCore Legacy Patcher (OCLP for short) is the best way to get new macOS versions running on old Macs. It’s an offshoot of the OpenCore Hackintosh bootloader, and it’s updated fairly frequently with new features and fixes and compatibility for newer macOS versions. The OCLP developers have admitted that macOS Ventura support will be tough, but they’ve made progress in some crucial areas that should keep some older Macs kicking for a little bit longer. I always love the dedication of these people trying to get macOS to run on hardware it was never intended to run on. It must be a small scene, actively fighting Apple every step along the way, but usually succeeding in the end. These are people giving older Macs a longer lease on life, and that’s only to be applauded.

It’s been a long journey these past few months trying to find a modern, compatible, FreeBSD laptop, and getting it to work well enough for daily use (everything except for gaming). For the past few months, I’ve been documenting my journey using this laptop, then I left the framework laptop and switched to a Thinkpad X260, and then a Thinkpad X1C7. This gave me perspective on what is considered “FreeBSD compatible”.. After experiencing what that “compatibility” meant, and the work needed to get those machines up and running, I decided to come back to the framework laptop with that perspective, and try to get FreeBSD running on it again in a smoother capacity. I’ve finally succeeded! Everything isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good, and will hold you until even better support comes to the machine. I can now pretty much say that you can use this laptop in a production capacity for your every day stuff. Getting FreeBSD to fully support a modern laptop for desktop use seems like what it was like to get desktop Linux up and running smoothly on a desktop about twenty years ago. I love the idea of desktop FreeBSD, but I feel like there’s a long way to go, and I wonder if the people actually developing and contributing to FreeBSD are really focused on it (which is, of course, their prerogative).

The WWDC 2019 had a major impact on the UI toolkit landscape: while the venerable AppKit APIs remained available, Apple removed the old Carbon APIs and introduced 2 brand new frameworks: Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI. Apple sporadically mentioned some apps built with these new UI toolkits. In this article, I try to bring a better overview of Apple’s use of AppKit, Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI in the different versions of macOS, from macOS Mojave to macOS Ventura. Really great visualisation, and shows that the march to SwiftUI continues – however, I’m not entirely sure macOS users should be happy about that.

When you open any link on the TikTok iOS app, it’s opened inside their in-app browser. While you are interacting with the website, TikTok subscribes to all keyboard inputs (including passwords, credit card information, etc.) and every tap on the screen, like which buttons and links you click. TikTok is spyware, and should be labelled and treated as such.

A colleague of mine shared a story from Windows XP product support. A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops. I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem. Not an artistic judgement. One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops. And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video! What’s going on? I did not see that one coming.

All the remixes use less memory than the default GNOME edition. To be honest, we didn’t expect that. The last time we did this comparison, in 2013, Kubuntu scoffed the most RAM – and as before, it still uses the most disk. KDE Plasma 5 really has slimmed down its memory footprint impressively, although it’s still no lightweight. The KDE, MATE, and Budgie editions are quite close in resource usage so in those terms, there’s not a lot to choose between them. That means it’s down to your personal preferences. All credit to the Lubuntu team: their remix remains the lightest by quite some margin, both in memory and disk usage. Saying that, it does use an old version of the LXQt desktop. There is a repository to install a newer version, but that’s a big ask for a non-techie user. These differences seem minute and insignificant to me, especially once you start loading a browser with a few tabs or a few documents, and any of these small RAM differences will melt like snow in the Sahara.

Physical buttons are increasingly rare in modern cars. Most manufacturers are switching to touchscreens – which perform far worse in a test carried out by Vi Bilägare. The driver in the worst-performing car needs four times longer to perform simple tasks than in the best-performing car. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Anyone with more than only a modicum of experience in human-machine interaction will tell you touchscreens are a terrible idea in cars. It’s high time safety regulators start, well, regulating the use of touchscreens in cars.

Linux hardware projects are made or broken by their community support. PINE64 has made some brilliant moves to build up a mobile Linux community, and has also made some major mistakes. This is my view on how PINE64 made the PinePhone a success, and then broke that again through their treatment of the community. I want to start by pointing out that this is me leaving PINE64 and not the projects I’m involved in like postmarketOS. This is just a sad story. I hope some of the problems can be mended in time.

As it turns out, our guesstimation was probably pretty spot on, as there are now multiple reports alleging that Microsoft is going to be making Windows 11 22H2 (codenamed Sun Valley 2 or SV2) public on the 20th of September. It will be apparently be served via the Windows Update option in the Settings. For those on Windows 11 21H2, which is the original release, it should be a seamless upgrade process as the system requirements haven’t changed. I guess this Windows version gobbledygook means something to someone, but I lost track a long time ago.

In my last blog post, I introduced the userspace_fexec/userspace_clone features. As the names suggest, they move the inherently complex implementations of fork(3) and execve(2), from the kernel into relibc, giving userspace much more freedom while simplifying the kernel. There has been considerable progress since last post; the features userspace_fexec/userspace_clone, userspace_initfs, and userspace_initfs, have now all been merged! I understood some of those words.

Today, Google is releasing Android 13 for Google Pixel smartphones, following months of developer previews and beta releases. It’s an update that polishes a lot of the changes that Android 12 brought to the table, while also introducing a ton of small, helpful features across the board that aims to improve privacy, security, and usability. Alongside the update, the company has also announced that Android 13’s source code is now available in AOSP. It’ll be a while before Android 13 lands in most of our hands.

Apple is set to expand ads to new areas of your iPhone and iPad in search of its next big revenue driver. Let’s begin with the current state of play: Apple’s advertising efforts today consist of display ads inside of its News and Stocks apps, as well as inside the App Store, across the iPhone, iPad and Mac. The App Store also has Google-like search ads. And more recently, Apple put advertising inside of TV+ for its “Friday Night Baseball” deal with Major League Baseball. I believe that the iPhone maker will eventually expand search ads to Maps. It also will likely add them to digital storefronts like Apple Books and Apple Podcasts. And TV+ could generate more advertising with multiple tiers (just as Netflix Inc., Walt Disney Co. and Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. are doing with their streaming services). So that was the plan all along. First, Apple tried to cut a deal with Facebook – one of the two online advertising giants (Apple already gets billions a year from the other, Google) – to get in on the online ad revenue. Second, when that fell through, Apple went on a privacy crusade against Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Google) to harm its online advertising business. Third, Apple is now going to expand its own ad business by adding even more ads to iOS. And all along the way, millions fell for it. John Gruber, a few years ago: My concern, again, is what happens if the drive to increase services revenue takes precedence over Apple’s “Prime Directive”: to put product design and experience above all else. Well, now you know.

The IVI in the car, like many things these days, is just a computer. My goal was to hack the IVI to get root access and hopefully be able to run my own software on it. Of course, the first step in hacking a device like this is research. This is a story full of twits and turns, and some rally questionable decisions by Hyundai’s developers.

Apple and Meta may not be the best of friends right now, but at one point, Apple was in discussions with the social media company about how it could make more money from its presence on the App Store, according to The Wall Street Journal. Apple reportedly argued that it deserved a cut of certain portions of Facebook’s ad revenue. The specific ads in question were boosted posts, which let users pay to have their posts reach more people, the WSJ reports. Apple apparently argued boosted posts are in-app purchases, which it famously takes a portion of; Meta argued that they were ads, from which Apple doesn’t get a share. It seems that Meta won out. So Apple was perfectly fine with profiting off Facebook’s anti-privacy business model, and only when Facebook declined did Apple go on its holier-than-thou privacy crusade against Facebook’s ads business. Apple’s privacy position is pure marketing, and any time Apple needs to choose between money and privacy, money wins every time. Whether it’s Google paying Apple billions to be the default search provider on iOS, Apple handing over all Chinese users’ data to the Chinese government, or now, in dealing with Facebook, Apple will choose money over privacy every time. Apple repeatedly calls privacy “a fundamental human right“, but human rights should not be for sale. It’s yet another illustration of corporations being above the law – Apple is allowed to just lie left, right, and centre without any legal repercussions.

Federal election regulators voted Thursday to allow Google to proceed with a plan to make it easier for campaign emails to bypass spam filters. Google’s proposal to run a pilot project changing the filters for political emails came after intense Republican criticism that spam filters were biased against conservatives, a charge the tech giant denies. In a sign of public disgust with spam, the Federal Election Commission received thousands of public comments urging it to deny the request. But a majority of the six-member commission decided that Google’s project did not constitute an improper in-kind political contribution that would violate federal campaign finance laws. This reminds me of Twitter admitting it won’t ban nazis because that would mean banning accounts of Republican politicians. I remember the days being biased against nazis was a good thing. Times sure do change.

So, as part of RSoC 2022, I have been working on introducing Virtualization on Redox OS. This feature/technology is called Revirt and has wide-ranging consequences for Redox OS as a secure, well-designed, virtualizable and effective operating system. This is a big new addition to Redox OS.

But still, CP/M was, for a while, the industry-standard microcomputer OS, making Digital Research a powerful and important company. Wealthy companies that lose dominance over a market they formerly controlled don’t tend to just give up. Digital Research put a substantial R&D effort into expanding and enhancing CP/M, creating a large family of OSes. It had some significant wins and big sales. Some of those products are still in use. All those products are arguably “CP/M derivatives”, and as such, Bryan Sparks’ 2001 edict might have just open-sourced them all. One of the many giants we lost along the way.

The /e/ OS operating system provides a user-friendly alternative to Android for people who want the Android experience without the reliance on Google and associated manufacturer-related applications and telemetry. Compared to LineageOS, /e/ provides a more unified experience out of the box, with a suitable suite of default open source applications and a system-based application store. Despite the fact that /e/ borrowed from various pre-existing open source projects to create its default applications, none looks out of place. It’s a good choice for people looking to de-Google, but the rather lacklustre device support is a big problem, forcing you to buy a new device if you want to give this a go. That’s not really /e/’s fault, of course, but it’s an issue nonetheless.

All of that makes Arc a lot more serious than Larrabee, Intel’s last effort to break into the dedicated graphics market. Larrabee was canceled late in its development because of delays and disappointing performance, and Arc GPUs are actual things that you can buy (if only in a limited way, for now). But the challenges of entering the GPU market haven’t changed since the late 2000s. Breaking into a mature market is difficult, and experience with integrated GPUs isn’t always applicable to dedicated GPUs with more complex hardware and their own pool of memory. Regardless of the company’s plans for future architectures, Arc’s launch has been messy. And while the company is making some efforts to own those problems, a combination of performance issues, timing, and financial pressures could threaten Arc’s future. There’s a lot of chatter that Intel might axe Arc completely, before it’s really truly out of the gate. I really hope those rumours are wrong or overblown, since the GPU market desperately needs a 3rd serious competitor. I hope Intel takes a breather, and allows the Arc team to be in it for the long haul, so that we as consumers can benefit from more choice in the near future.

You have a perfectly healthy, functioning Epson inkjet printer in your home office. It’s served you well for years and you use it frequently. Then, one day, you go to print a document and realize that the printer isn’t working. A message on the display reads “a part inside your printer is at the end of its service life. Service is required.” That’s funny, you think. You hadn’t noticed anything wrong with your printer before this message appeared. The device was working well and the quality of the printing was fine. If nothing was broken, why are you suddenly getting this message? More important: how do you get rid of it so that you can continue using your printer? This should absolutely be criminal behaviour. If there was ever an industry that could do with a worldwide judicial probe and investigation, it’s the printer makers. They employ so many clearly scammy business practices, and get away with them too.

extrowerk tells us about a new hacker-friendly device – a $20 LTE modem stick with a quadcore CPU and WiFi, capable of running fully-featured Linux distributions. This discovery hinges on a mountain of work by a Chinese hacker , who’s figured out this stick runs Android, hacked its bootloader, tweaked a Linux kernel for it and created a Debian distribution for the stick – calling this the OpenStick project. ’s writeup translates the ’s tutorial for us and makes a few more useful notes. With this writeup in hand, we have unlocked a whole new SBC to use in our projects – at a surprisingly low price! There’s so much computing power in cheap, disposable technology these days, and you can do fun things with it.

NetBSD 9.3 has made it into the wild. Aside from many bug fixes, 9.3 includes backported improvements to suspend and resume support, various minor additions of new hardware to existing device drivers, compatibility with UDF file systems created on Windows 10, enhanced support for newer Intel Gigabit Ethernet chipsets, better support for new Intel and AMD Zen 3 chipsets, support for configuring connections to Wi-Fi networks using sysinst(8), support for wsfb-based X11 servers on the Commodore Amiga, and minor performance improvements for the Xen hypervisor. A solid set of improvements for a point release.

MGR, sometimes said to be short for “ManaGeR”, sometimes short for “Munger”, is a simple network transparent window system. It was originally developed for the Sun 3 series of workstations by Stephen Uhler and colleagues beginning in 1984 while at Bellcore (later Telcordia, now part of Ericsson) and later enhanced by many others. The window system ran on many different hardware platforms, at least these: Sun 3/xx workstations running SunOS, which was the the original development platform, Sun SPARCstations (SunOS and then ported by me to Solaris), Intel x86 based PCs (Coherent, Minix, FreeBSD or Linux), Atari ST (under MiNT), AT&T UnixPC (SysV) and the Macintosh. I had never heard of MGR before, so this was a great read.

In interviews with 15 female Apple employees, both current and former, the Financial Times has found that Mohr’s frustrating experience with the People group has echoes across at least seven Apple departments spanning six US states. The women shared allegations of Apple’s apathy in the face of misconduct claims. Eight of them say they were retaliated against, while seven found HR to be disappointing or counterproductive. This story is based on those interviews and discussions with other employees, internal emails from Apple’s People team, four exit contracts written by lawyers for Apple, and anonymous employee reviews. There’s some real blood-boiling stuff in here. Emily says she felt that HR treated her like she was the problem. “I was told went on a ‘career experience’ for six months, and they said: ‘maybe you’ll be better by the time he’s back?’” Or this one, where a colleague undressed another colleague as she was sleeping, and snapped photos of her. Apple’s response? “Although what he did was reprehensible as a person and potentially criminal, as an Apple employee he hasn’t violated any policy in the context of his Apple work,” HR wrote. “And because he hasn’t violated any policy we will not prevent him seeking employment opportunities that are aligned with his goals and interests.” Apple seems like a fun work environment for women.

Internet Explorer was finally killed off for almost every consumer version of Windows on June 15, 2022. It’s death was even mourned celebrated with faux gravestones commemorating it as a “good tool to download other browsers”. However, it seems like Microsoft’s browser still lives on in the depths of its latest operating system. Although Windows 11 does not officially come bundled with Internet Explorer, the ancient browser can still be launched on the OS. This thing will never die. I will go to my grave when Windows 32 hits and it will still come with iexplore.exe because the online passport request form in some tiny municipality in Slovenia only works in IE.

As a rush of cybercriminals, state-backed hackers, and scammers continue to flood the zone with digital attacks and aggressive campaigns worldwide, it’s no surprise that the maker of the ubiquitous Windows operating system is focused on security defense. Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday update releases frequently contain fixes for critical vulnerabilities, including those that are actively being exploited by attackers out in the world. The company already has the requisite groups to hunt for weaknesses in its code (the “red team”) and develop mitigations (the “blue team”). But recently, that format evolved again to promote more collaboration and interdisciplinary work in the hopes of catching even more mistakes and flaws before things start to spiral. Known as Microsoft Offensive Research & Security Engineering, or Morse, the department combines the red team, blue team, and so-called green team, which focuses on finding flaws or taking weaknesses the red team has found and fixing them more systemically through changes to how things are done within an organization. Cheap jokes from the Windows XP era aside, I feel like there haven’t really been any massive security problems with Windows that we used to see in the XP days. Working for any of Microsoft’s security teams can’t be an easy job, and it’s always interesting to get an insight into how they operate.