OSnews

This morning, WireGuard founding developer Jason Donenfeld announced a working, in-kernel implementation of his WireGuard VPN protocol for the FreeBSD 13 kernel. This is great news for BSD folks—and users of BSD-based routing appliances and distros such as pfSense and opnSense. Not something I personally use, but good news for those that do.

The Ampere graphics card was also supposed to be less attractive to miners, but it appears that the chipmaker shot itself in the foot and inadvertently posted a driver that unlocks mining performance on the RTX 3060. Meaning, anyone can unlock full mining performance with a minimum of effort. Well that was short-lived.

Starting on July 1, 2021 we are reducing the service fee Google Play receives when a developer sells digital goods or services to 15% for the first $1M (USD) of revenue every developer earns each year. With this change, 99% of developers globally that sell digital goods and services with Play will see a 50% reduction in fees. These are funds that can help developers scale up at a critical phase of their growth by hiring more engineers, adding to their marketing staff, increasing server capacity, and more. While these investments are most critical when developers are in the earlier stages of growth, scaling an app doesn’t stop once a partner has reached $1M in revenue — we’ve heard from our partners making $2M, $5M and even $10M a year that their services are still on a path to self-sustaining orbit. This is why we are making this reduced fee on the first $1M of total revenue earned each year available to every Play developer, regardless of size. We believe this is a fair approach that aligns with Google’s broader mission to help all developers succeed. We look forward to sharing full details in the coming months. Hopefully this will help small developers.

According to the report, citing a source within the Ministry, Apple struck a deal with the government that will show users a prompt when first configuring a device in Russia to pre-install apps from a list of government-approved software. Users will have the ability to decline the installation of certain apps. The new legislation is an amendment to the existing “On Consumer Protection” law that will require the pre-installation of software on all devices sold in Russia, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and smart TVs. The pre-installed software will include antivirus and cartographic apps, social media apps, and “Public Service” apps for payments and civil services. Apple bending over backwards to please Putin’s totalitarian regime will open the (back)door to countless other governments – western or not – demanding the same thing. As always, it seems Apple only cares about privacy and user experience if they can pull the wool over the eyes of gullible westerners – but as soon as the choice comes down to money or values, Tim Cook is jumping at the opportunity dump his proclaimed values in a ditch by the side of the road. Speaking of bending over backwards to please totalitarian regimes and dumping proclaimed values in a ditch by the side of the road, Tim Cook will attend the Chinese government’s China Development Forum, despite the ongoing Uighur genocide and crackdown on the democratic rights of the citizens of Hong Kong. Classy move, Tim, but then, anybody with even a modicum of pattern recognition skills is not surprised by your never-ending quest to please dictators.

The organization plans to remove the Compact option from the customize menu and migrate users who use Compact to the Normal mode once the change happens. The preference browser.uidensity will remain for the time being, but it is possible that it will get removed at one point in time as well or that the compact mode value won’t change it anymore at the very least. This is a terrible decision. I obviously use the compact layout everywhere, because not only does it look better and use less space, it also doesn’t have that insanely oversized back button. This change makes absolutely no sense to me, and I can’t wait until we get a hack to bring it back.

From a competitive standpoint, Milan continues to strengthen and maintain a very stark one-sided performance advantage against its biggest competitor, Intel. Rome had already offered more raw socket performance than the best Intel had to offer at the time, and the gap is currently quite large as Intel has not updated in that time. Intel has stated that its Ice Lake Xeon-SP family will come sometime soon, however unless Intel manages to close the core count gap, then AMD looks to be in very good shape. Meanwhile, as AMD is focused on Intel, the Arm competition has also entered the market with force through 2020, and designs such as the Ampere Altra are able to outperform the new top Milan SKUs in many throughput-bound workloads. AMD still has very clear advantages, such as much superior memory performance through huge caches, or vastly superior per-thread performance with specialised dedicated SKUs. Still, it leaves AMD in a spot as they can’t claim to be the outright performance leader under every scenario, and offers another generational target to consider as it develops future cores. Another monstrous CPU by AMD, and another case where Intel simply doesn’t even come close. There’s offerings on the ARM front, though, that are slowly starting to make their way into the data centre.

In what seems like several lifetimes ago, the mobile devices market seemed like it would be wide open. Even as the window for platforms that weren’t Android or iOS was closing rapidly, we were all hoping we wouldn’t end up with another duopoly. While there were several contenders – BlackBerryos 10, Windows Phone, to name a few – quite a few more nerdy mobile device users held out hope that instead of neutered, restrictive, and limited operating systems, we’d end up with a true computer in our pocket. No other device represented this slice of the market better than the Nokia N900. The N900 was the last standard Linux mobile device from Nokia, the last in the line of the N770, N800, and N810 internet communicators. The N900 was the first to include mobile phone functionality, making it the first Linux mobile phone device from Nokia, but not the last – the N950 and N9 would follow, but those were markedly different, more Android and iOS than standard Linux. The N900 ran Maemo, Nokia’s Linux platform for mobile devices, developed in collaboration with and/or using many popular open source Linux projects, like the Linux kernel (obviously), Debian, Gtk, GNOME, Qt, and more. Maemo’s user interface used the Matchbox window manager, and its application framework was Hildon. Underneath the Gtk+ user interface, Maemo was a remarkably standard Linux distribution, based on Debian, so you had easy access to all the usual Linux and Debian command line tools. It used APT for package management and software installation, BusyBox as the replacement for the GNU Core Utilities, and the X window manager. Still, despite its heavy focus on open source software, certain parts of the software stack were still closed source, like some code related to power management, as well as certain bits and bobs of the user interface, like a few status applets. This “mostly open source, but with some closed bits and bobs” would be a running theme into the future branches of the platform, like Sailfish and MeeGo. The hardware of the N900 is a case of throwing everything humanly possible into a single device, but to keep costs down, it mostly consists of cheaper parts. For example, the 800×480 resolution looks crisp on the 3.5″ display, but despite being released almost two years after the iPhone, the touch screen is resistive and requires a stylus. The SoC is a Texas Instruments OMAP3430, with a single core running at 600Mhz, supported by a 430 MHz C64x+ DSP and a PowerVR SGX530 GPU. You’ve got 256MB of RAM, 256MB of NAND flash, and 32GB of eMMC flash. The star of the show, of course, is the slide-out keyboard. It’s a full QWERTY keyboard that’s reasonably comfortable to type on considering its small size, and anyone who has ever used a Symbian device with a keyboard will feel right at home. It’s got a little kick stand, stereo speakers, and TV-out functionality through a special dongle and cable. Seeing Maemo 5 output to a giant 55″ 4K TV is a special kind of entertaining. Add to this the various standard things like WiFi, Bluetooth, a headphone jack, removable battery, rear and front camera, a dedicated camera button, and probably a few other features I’m forgetting. The N900 comes packed. Users of the N900 when it was new were a special kind of people. One of them was my brother – he was a die-hard N900 user for many years, so much so he bought a spare N900 in case his main one died. It wasn’t until the N900 really couldn’t keep up with modernity anymore – well past that point, honestly, but let’s not hurt his feelings – that he begrudgingly decided to switch over to an Android phone. He gifted one N900 to me for my collection. The N900 is a special kind of device that, while a footnote in mobile history, holds a special place in the hearts of a dedicated group of users who nobody is serving any more. These people wanted a proper mini-computer in their pocket, preferably running Linux, and the N900 was the only device that properly fit that niche. Its sort-of successors – the N9 and Jolla Phone, which I both have as well – simply do not fill that niche and do not scratch that itch. Today, most N900 users have probably migrated on to Android (and a few stragglers to Sailfish, I’m guessing), leaving behind the standard, regular Linux installation for the bastardised, weird Linux offshoot from Google. While you can install BusyBox on Android and unlock the bootloader and sort-of create an approximation of a standard Linux computer in your pocket – without the keyboard, without the more standard stacks and toolchains, it’s just not the same. There is still some hope for fans of the N900 – and other people who want a true Linux computer in their pocket – since there are two companies that sort-of cater to this niche. First, there’s F(x)tec, which probably comes closest with its line of smartphones with a slide-out keyboard. They currently offer a very cool device up for pre-order that’s capable of running Android, Sailfish, Ubuntu Touch, and standard ARM Linux distributions as well. I’ve been trying to get into touch with them for a review unit, but they have not responded (we’re small, after all). Another option that requires a bit more squinting are some of the very tiny laptops made by GPD – such as the GPD Pocket 2 and similar devices they make. They’re not quite the same as the F(x)tec or N900, but you can get quite close. GPD, too, has not responded to review requests, but again – we’re small, and if you can send stuff to outlets like Linus Tech Tips, OSNews simply isn’t on your radar. I’m genuinely sad that the N-line was yet another victim of Nokia’s endless mismanagement, since the N900 is simply a unique, one-of-a-kind device in a category virtually nobody even dares tip

ARM has introduced the Neoverse N1 platform, the blueprint for creating power-efficient processors licensed to institutions that can customize the original design to meet their specific requirements. Ampere licensed the Neoverse N1 platform to create the Ampere Altra, a processor that allows companies that own and manage their own fleet of servers, like ourselves, to take advantage of the expanding ARM ecosystem. We have been working with Ampere to determine whether Altra is the right processor to power our first generation of ARM edge servers. The AWS Graviton2 is the only other Neoverse N1-based processor publicly accessible, but only made available through Amazon’s cloud product portfolio. We wanted to understand the differences between the two, so we compared Ampere’s single-socket server, named Mt. Snow, equipped with the Ampere Altra Q80-30 against an EC2 instance of the AWS Graviton2. Cloudflare compared these two ARM server platforms and benchmarked them, and they give a ton of detail about them, too. Give it a few more years, and ARM will be a decidedly normal sight within data centres all over the world.

Another month, another Haiku activity report. It was less busy this month, so there’s nothing that really jumps out at me as a major fix or improvement. I’m going to highlight the first listed item, since fixes in software delivery are always welcome. Andrew Lindesay continues his work on cleaning HaikuDepot sources and removing a custom-made List class to use standard (BeAPI and C++ stl) containers. There were some regressions in the process, that were found and identified. Haiku’s steady stream of fixes and improvements continues.

Google Chrome version 89 began rolling out to users in the stable channel on March 2 and should be on most people’s machines by now. The new build offers significant memory savings on 64-bit Windows platforms thanks to increased use of Google’s PartitionAlloc memory allocator. On macOS, Chrome 89 plays catch-up and gets closer to the performance of the flagship Windows builds. I feel like we get these reports and promises about Chrome’s performance every few months, yet Chrome keeps being the butt of jokes regarding its resource usage, especially on the Mac. Maybe this round will yield tangible improvements.

The KaiStore team keeps up the momentum with another set of updates that make it easier to find the apps you’re looking for and enhance the UX experience as a whole. We don’t talk much about KaiOS on OSNews, which is a shame – it’s an offshoot of Firefox OS, and a massive success on phones that blends smartphone and feature phone functionality into one platform. This isn’t a big news item or anything, but ran across it and feel some attention for this platform is more than warranted.

This article is a guide for achieving a full-as-possible Wayland setup on Arch Linux. This guide does exactly what it says – it helps you set up a complete Arch Linux installation that is as Wayland as possible.

This afternoon, I was updating the streaming apps on my 2020 LG CX OLED TV, something I do from time to time, but today was different. Out of nowhere, I saw (and heard) an ad for Ace Hardware start playing in the lower-left corner. It autoplayed with sound without any action on my part. Now I’m fully aware that it’s not unusual to see ads placed around a TV’s home screen or main menu. LG, Samsung, Roku, Vizio, and others are all in on this game. We live in an era when smart TVs can automatically recognize what you’re watching, and TV makers are building nice ad businesses for themselves with all of the data that gets funneled in. But this felt pretty egregious even by today’s standards. A random, full-on commercial just popping up in LG’s app store? Is there no escape from this stuff? We’re just going to cram ads into every corner of a TV’s software, huh? Imagine if an autoplay ad started up while you were updating the apps on your smartphone. People want cheap TVs, so people get cheap TVs – warts and all. Someone should set up a website and list TVs that are “safe to buy” and do not contain or display any ads. Of course, this still doesn’t solve the issue of “smart” TVs being security nightmares, but it’d be a step.

Chromebooks launched 10 years ago with a vision to rethink computing by designing a secure, easy-to-use laptop that becomes faster and more intelligent over time. As more and more people began using devices running Chrome OS, we evolved and expanded the platform to meet their diverse needs. Today, Chrome OS devices do everything from helping people get things done to entertaining them while they unwind. But we want to do more to provide a powerfully simple computing experience to the millions of people who use Chromebooks. We’re celebrating 10 years of Chromebooks with plenty of new features to bring our vision to life. It’s hard to imagine it’s already been ten years. Chromebooks are definitely a big success, and I’d love to finally sit down and properly review a Chromebook. I’ve barely even used one, and I want to know what it’s really like to live in a always-online world.

Rust/coreutils is now available in Debian, good enough to boot a Debian with GNOME, install the top 1000 packages, build Firefox, the Linux Kernel and LLVM/Clang. Even if I wrote more than 100 patches to achieve that, it will probably be a bumpy ride for many other use cases. Fascinating initiative, and a hell of a lot of work. Rust seems to be gaining ground left, right, and centre.

This is an early attempt at microarchitecture documentation for the CPU in the Apple M1, inspired by and building on the amazing work of Andreas Abel, Andrei Frumusanu, @Veedrac, Travis Downs, Henry Wong and Agner Fog. This documentation is my best effort, but it is based on black-box reverse engineering, and there are definitely mistakes. No warranty of any kind (and not just as a legal technicality). To make it easier to verify the information and/or identify such errors, entries in the instruction tables link to the experiments and results (~35k tables of counter values). Amazing work, but the fact this kind of work is even needed illustrates just how anti-consumer these new Macs really are.

What a long, strange trip it’s been. MIPS Technologies no longer designs MIPS processors. Instead, it’s joined the RISC-V camp, abandoning its eponymous architecture for one that has strong historical and technical ties. The move apparently heralds the end of the road for MIPS as a CPU family, and a further (slight) diminution in the variety of processors available. It’s the final arc of an architecture. Interestingly, MIPS and RISC-V share an architect in Dave Patterson, and MIPS could be seen as an ancestor of RISC-V.

Thanks to Twitter, here’s an interesting footnote in computing history. As A/UX development was winding down, Apple was working on another project called the Macintosh Application Environment. This was an emulator that allowed users to run Mac software under Sun’s Solaris or Hewlett Packard’s HP-UX. A great deal of A/UX technology went into the design of this ill-fated product. This page is a pictorial tribute to the Macintosh Application Environment, running under Solaris 8 on an Ultra 10 workstation. If you want to try the MAE, you’ll need a Sun box running Solaris 9 or below – The software does not appear to work under Solaris 10. This is absolutely fascinating, and I had no idea this existed.

Our results clearly show that Intel’s performance, while substantial, still trails its main competitor, AMD. In a core-for-core comparison, Intel is slightly slower and a lot more inefficient. The smart money would be to get the AMD processor. However, due to high demand and prioritizing commercial and enterprise contracts, the only parts readily available on retail shelves right now are from Intel. Any user looking to buy or build a PC today has to dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge their way to find one for sale, and also hope that it is not at a vastly inflated price. The less stressful solution would be to buy Intel, and use Intel’s latest platform in Rocket Lake. This is Intel’s 10nm design backported to 14nm. It’s not great, and lags behind AMD substantially, but with the chip shortage, it’s probably the only processor you can get at a halfway reasonable price for the foreseeable future.

That’s one hell of a number of games. Proton has been receiving many updates in the past few months as well, with the introduction of the Soldier Linux runtime container and Proton Experimental on top of the regular Proton releases. We are still getting about 100 new titles working flawlessly (according to user reports) on a monthly basis, which is a very healthy and steady growth. Another point is the percentage of Windows games working out of the box in Proton over time. The number has been close to 50% since for a long time and seems to be fairly stable. Proton is one of the biggest things to happen to desktop Linux in over a decade – or more.

This article takes a look at what’s changed in the Android ecosystem for audio developers recently, the audio latency of popular Android devices, and discusses Android’s suitability for real-time audio apps. An infamous weak point for Android.

On OSNews we recently reported on how Google plans to remove support for third-party cookies. Many have seen this as offering a privacy boost for users, leading to a better Web where targeted ads based on web-browser behaviour are a thing of the past. The EFF takes a different view. Google is leading the charge to replace third-party cookies with a new suite of technologies to target ads on the Web. And some of its proposals show that it hasn’t learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model. This post will focus on one of those proposals, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which is perhaps the most ambitious—and potentially the most harmful. FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers. The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process. It may also exacerbate many of the worst non-privacy problems with behavioral ads, including discrimination and predatory targeting.

The great unicorn of software development is to have one language and framework that enables devs to code an app once and run it on any operating system and any type of device. Flutter has been aiming to do this since its inception, and today it gets quite a bit closer to that goal with the announcement of Flutter 2. The latest major update brings major enhancements for mobile platforms, adds support to desktop, and massively extends its capabilities on the web — among other things. Does anyone here have experience with Flutter? It seems like it’s gaining some steam judging by the increase in news stories about it recently.

Genode 21.02 stays close to the plan laid out on our road map, featuring a healthy dose of optimizations, extends the framework’s ARM SoC options, and introduces three longed-for new features. Tons of new features and improvements in this Genode release.

Huge news from Google, who announced today that they are going to stop using your web browsing behaviour to display targeted advertisements. It’s difficult to conceive of the internet we know today — with information on every topic, in every language, at the fingertips of billions of people — without advertising as its economic foundation. But as our industry has strived to deliver relevant ads to consumers across the web, it has created a proliferation of individual user data across thousands of companies, typically gathered through third-party cookies. This has led to an erosion of trust: In fact, 72% of people feel that almost all of what they do online is being tracked by advertisers, technology firms or other companies, and 81% say that the potential risks they face because of data collection outweigh the benefits, according to a study by Pew Research Center. If digital advertising doesn’t evolve to address the growing concerns people have about their privacy and how their personal identity is being used, we risk the future of the free and open web. That’s why last year Chrome announced its intent to remove support for third-party cookies, and why we’ve been working with the broader industry on the Privacy Sandbox to build innovations that protect anonymity while still delivering results for advertisers and publishers. Even so, we continue to get questions about whether Google will join others in the ad tech industry who plan to replace third-party cookies with alternative user-level identifiers. Today, we’re making explicit that once third-party cookies are phased out, we will not build alternate identifiers to track individuals as they browse across the web, nor will we use them in our products. This is a big step that will have massive consequences for the advertisement industry as a whole, but at the same time, companies do not just give up on revenue streams without having alternatives ready. My hunch would be that Google has become so big and collects data from so many other sources, that it simply doesn’t need your web browsing behaviour and third-party cookies to sell targeted ads effectively.

The Arizona House of Representatives just passed landmark app store legislation in a 31-29 vote on Wednesday that could have far-reaching consequences for Apple and Google and their respective mobile operating systems. The legislation, a sweeping amendment to Arizona’s existing HB2005, prevents app store operators from forcing a developer based in the state to use a preferred payment system, putting up a significant roadblock to Apple and Google’s ability to collect commissions on in-app purchases and app sales. It will now head to the state senate, where it must pass before its sent to Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey. A lot of bribes are going to flow from Apple and Google to Arizona, since if a law like this passes, it could have devastating consequences for these two companies. Obviously, I hope it passes, but I have my doubts local Arizona politicians will be able to withstand those juicy, juicy bribes.

There’s a spectrum of openness when it comes to computers. Most people hover somewhere between fully closed – proprietary hardware, proprietary operating system – and partly open – proprietary hardware, open source operating system. Even if you run Linux on your AMD or Intel machine, you’re running it on top of a veritable spider’s web of proprietary firmware for networking, graphics, the IME, WiFi, BlueTooth, USB, and more. Even if you opt for something like a System76 machine, which has open firmware as a BIOS replacement and to cover some functions like keyboard lighting, you’re still running lots of closed firmware blobs for all kinds of components. It’s virtually impossible to free yourself from this web. Virtually impossible, yes, but not entirely impossible. There are options out there to run a machine that is entirely open source, from firmware all the way up to the applications you run. Sure, I can almost hear you think, but it’s going to be some outdated, slow machine that requires tons of tinkering and deep knowledge, out of reach of normal users or people who just want to buy a computer, take it out of the box, and get going. What if I told you there is a line of modern workstations, with all the modern amenities we’ve come to expect, that is entirely open? The instruction set, the firmware for the various components, the boot environment, the operating system, and the applications? No firmware blobs, no closed code hiding in various corners, yet modern performance, modern features, and a full, modern operating system? Now you’re playing with POWER Most people’s knowledge and experiences with the Power ISA begins and ends with Apple. The company used Power-based processors from 1994 until 2006, when it switched to using processors from Intel and the x86 ISA. Aside from Apple, there are two other major cornerstones of the Power ISA that most people are familiar with. First, game consoles. The GameCube, Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 all used PowerPC-based processors, and were all widely successful. Second, various embedded systems use Power processors as well. Aside from Apple, game consoles, and embedded systems, IBM has been developing and using processors based on the Power ISA for a long time now. IBM released the first Power processor in 1990, the POWER1, for its servers and supercomputers. They’ve steadily kept developing their line of processors for decades, and they are currently in the process of rolling out POWER10, which should be available later this year. Other Power ISA processors you may have heard of, such as the PowerPC G4 or G5 or the various gaming console processors, do not necessarily correspond to IBM’s own POWERx generations of processors, but are implementations of the same ISA. The nomenclature of the Power ISA has changed quite a bit over time, and companies like Apple and Sony using their own marketing names to advertise the processors they were using certainly didn’t help. To this day, PowerPC is often used as the name of the entire ISA, which is incorrect. The proper name for the ISA today is the Power ISA, but the confusion is understandable. The Power ISA, and related technologies, have been made freely available by IBM for anyone to use, and the specifications and reference implementations are open source, overseen by the OpenPOWER Foundation. The goal of the OpenPOWER Foundation is to enable the various partners involved in making Power hardware, like IBM, NXP, and others, to work together and promote the use and further development of the open Power ISA. In 2019, the OpenPOWER Foundation became part of the Linux Foundation. With Apple no longer making any Power-based computers, and with game consoles all having made the transition to x86, you may be left wondering how, exactly, you can get your hands on this fully open hardware. And, even if you could, how exotic and quirky is this hardware going to be? Is this another case of buying discard IBM POWER servers and turning them into very loud workstations with tape and glue, or something unrealistic and outdated no sane person would use? Thank god, no. Luckily for us, one company sells mainboards, POWER9 processors, and fully assembled POWER workstations: Raptor Computing Systems. Last year, they sent me their Blackbird Secure Desktop, and after many, many shipping problems caused by UPS losing packages and the effects of COVID-19, I can now finally tell you what it’s like to use this truly fully open source computer. Specifications The Blackbird Secure Desktop is built around Raptor’s Blackbird micro-ATX motherboard. This motherboard has a Sforza CPU socket, 2 DDR4 RAM slots compatible with EEC registered memory with a maximum combined capacity of 256GB, 2 PCIe 4.0 slots (16x and 8x), 2 gigabit Ethernet ports, another Ethernet port used for the BMC (OpenBMC – more on that later), 4 SATA ports (6Gb/s), and more than enough USB options (4 USB 3.0, 1 USB 2.0), and two RS-232 ports (one external, one internal using a header). On top of that, it has a CMedia 5.1 audio chip and associated jacks, an HDMI port driven by the on-board ASpeed graphics chip, as well as the ASpeed BMC. The board also comes with amenities we’ve come to expect from modern motherboards, like fan headers, an internal LED panel that displays the status of the motherboard, standard front panel connectors, a header for external audio, and so on. You also get a number of more exotic features, such as various headers to control the BMC, headers to update the open source firmware packages on the board, a FlexVer connector, and more. The only modern amenity that’s really missing from this board is an M.2 slot, which is something Raptor should really add to future revisions or new boards. In what will be a running theme in this review, for an exotic non-x86 ISA, the Blackbird motherboard is decidedly… Normal. Anyone who knows their way around a regular x86 motherboard won’t be confused by the Blackbird. Nor the

Big Sur’s sealed System volume seemed like a good idea. Although the read-only version in Catalina may look impregnable, guaranteeing integrity using a Merkle Tree of hashes, then locking the whole lot in a snapshot, looks even more robust. Like other good engineering ideas, though, it also needs thinking through thoroughly. It’s locked down for your own safety, though. Giving up freedom in exchange for safety never hurt anytone, right?

This is the heart of the conflict: Rust (and many other modern, safe languages) use LLVM for its relative simplicity, but LLVM does not support either native or cross-compilation to many less popular (read: niche) architectures. Package managers are increasingly finding that one of their oldest assumptions can be easily violated, and they’re not happy about that. But here’s the problem: it’s a bad assumption. The fact that it’s the default represents an unmitigated security, reliability, and reproducibility disaster. I’m sure this will go down well.

Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t allow you to remove 3D Objects and other folders from File Explorer using Control Panel or Settings. If you want to remove these folders, you need to use Registry editor and delete the entry. With the Sun Valley update, Microsoft is looking to reduce the clutter in File Explorer and they plan to hide the 3D Objects folder by default. After the update, this useless folder will no longer be shown under ‘This PC’ unless you right-click and select the “Show all folders” option on the navigation pane. I know this is a small change, and I know it’s insignificant, but these unremovable garbage folders always feel like such a slap in the face. It’s an annoying reminder that when you use Windows, you don’t really own your computer.

At Framework, we believe the time has come for consumer electronics products that are designed to last. Founded in San Francisco in 2019, our mission is to empower you with great products you can easily customize, upgrade, and repair, increasing longevity and reducing e-waste in the process. Today, we are excited to unveil our first product: the Framework Laptop, a thin, lightweight, high-performance 13.5” notebook that can be upgraded, customized, and repaired in ways that no other notebook can. This product – be sure to read the description and features – seems too good to be true. I hope they can keep their promises, because this is exactly what a lot of people are looking for.

But back to my ‘gut-reply’, I wanted to be certain that my fond memories of Snow Leopard weren’t just nostalgia. While I am confident when I say that Snow Leopard is the most stable version of Mac OS, I wanted to make sure its user interface was really the good user interface and experience I was remembering. So, after a few frustrating attempts at creating a virtual machine on my current iMac with Mac OS High Sierra, I decided to install Snow Leopard on a USB flash drive, and boot my 2009 MacBook Pro (yes, it’s still alive & kicking) in Snow Leopard from that flash drive. It seems to be a rather widespread conviction that it’s been downhill for macOS for years now, and I can’t say I disagree. Especially the current version looks like a touch-first operating system, but without a touchscreen. So many huge targets, lots of needless whitespace, things you have to swipe, buttons hidden until you mouse-over – it feels like Apple is trying to out-Windows 8 Windows 8.

How do you boot a computer from punch cards when the computer has no operating system and no ROM? To make things worse, this computer requires special metadata called “word marks” that can’t be represented on a card. In this blog post, I describe the interesting hardware and software techniques used in the vintage IBM 1401 computer to load software from a deck of punch cards. (Among other things, half of each card contains loader code that runs as each card is read.) I go through some IBM 1401 machine code in detail, which illustrates the strangeness of the 1401’s architecture and instruction set compared to a modern machine. I simply cannot imagine what wizardry these newfangled computers must’ve felt like to the people of the ’50s, when computers first started to truly cement themselves in the public consciousness. Even though they’ve been around for twice as long, I find a world without cars far, far easier to imagine and grasp than a world without computers.

The Playstation 2 was not one of the most powerful consoles of its generation, yet it managed to achieve a level of popularity unthinkable for other companies. This machine is nowhere near as simple as the original Playstation was, but we will see why it didn’t share the same fate of previous complicated consoles. Excellent deep dive into the Playstation 2.

Today we are pleased to announce Total Cookie Protection, a major privacy advance in Firefox built into ETP Strict Mode. Total Cookie Protection confines cookies to the site where they were created, which prevents tracking companies from using these cookies to track your browsing from site to site. I don’t think anybody will be against this.

In the middle of last year I reviewed System76’s Lemur Pro, a lightweight, battery-life focused Linux laptop. I concluded that the Lemur Pro did not have any big failings, and packed a few stand-out features such as the amazing battery life and open source firmware few – if any – other laptop makers can offer. Linux user or not, the Lemur Pro was a great all-rounder that could go toe-to-toe with competing Windows laptops any day of the week. Since the publication of that review, System76 has released a new version of the Lemur Pro, focusing entirely on upgrading the internals of the machine. The casing, the keyboard, the trackpad, the display, and so on, remain unchanged, but this time around, it comes packing with Intel’s latest 11th Gen Core i5 or i7 processor – the 1135G7 or 1165G7 – and thus with Intel Iris Xe graphics, which should prove to be a massive boost over the previous generation’s UHD graphics. This won’t be a full review – other than the spec bump, nothing has changed regarding the rest of the Lemur Pro. Aside from possible changes mentioned here, the review of last year’s model still applies. As such, I decided to use the term “re-review”, which I think better describes this article. I opted for the Core i5 model this time around, since I feel the difference between it and the i7 are relatively small, especially considering the intended use case for a lightweight ultrabook such as this. This gave me some more financial room to max out the RAM at 40GB (DDR4 at 3200Mhz) and pick the 1TB SSD (M.2 PCIe gen4). The price of this specific configuration is $1613.00. The remainder of the specifications are identical to last year’s machine. It has the same fairly standard 1920×1080 14.1″ 60Hz panel, which won’t win any awards, but isn’t bad in any way either. Much like last year, I do wish System76 offered higher resolution and especially higher refresh rates as options, since once you go high refresh rate, you just can’t go back. At the same time, however, I know a lot of people are still using 60Hz displays, and wouldn’t care one bit about sticking to it. The ports situation remains the same as well, so you get one USB 3.1 Type-C Gen 2 port (these names…), two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, a MicroSD slot, an HDMI port, a barrel connector for the included charger, a combined headphone/microphone jack, and that Kensington lock thing for corporate or public environments. The Type-C port can be used a DisplayPort as well, and USB-C charging is supported as well. The stand-out feature of last year’s model makes a return here, with the 73Wh battery once again delivering astonishing battery life. I can easily go over 10 hours of normal use – some browsing, some video, some basic document work – and for this model, they’ve fixed the issue I had last year where setting the laptop to battery-saving mode would cause signficiant slowdowns in playing video. I’m sure the brand new Iris Xe graphics play a big role here, and I just leave the battery-saving mode on at all times, since I didn’t notice any downsides. Not noticing any downsides to the battery-saving mode is definitely one of the main advantages of the move to 11th Gen Intel processors and the Iris Xe GPU, but that’s not the only benefit – the laptop gets less hot too, which is great for those of us using laptops on our, you know, laps. Kicking in an open door, overall performance is improved too, with applications opening faster, complex web pages loading faster, and less fans spinning up, too. This being a full Intel machine also means it’s already, well, ready for Wayland, without having to resort to workarounds or hacks. Sadly, if using System76’s own Pop!_OS, you need to manually enable Wayland by commenting out WaylandEnable=false in /etc/gdm3/custom.conf/. Once you’ve done this, Wayland is an option in GDM and you can login. I’m taking Wayland compatibility into account when it comes to my purchasing decisions, and I figured I’m probably not alone in this. I hope System76 makes Wayland easier to enable – or even the default – on its fully Intel machines soon, because it definitely improves responsiveness and performance across the board. This is hard to quantify, and people will understandably ask for proof, but on all three machines I’m currently running in Wayland – my Dell XPS 13 9370, this Lemur Pro, and a Blackbird POWER9 machine – there’s less stutter, less tearing, better video playback performance, and lower heat output when using Wayland compared to X.org. As I mentioned at the beginning, this new Lemur Pro is a spec bump, and as such, the trackpad and keyboard are still the same. While the keyboard was already a solid one, I was less happy with the trackpad, and that remains the same here. It’s still of the diving board type, and its surface doesn’t feel nearly as nice as that of my XPS 13 – which has an excellent trackpad – or other competitors, such as the best-in-class trackpads found on Apple’s laptops. It’s not a bad trackpad, but it’s not particularly good or great either – just average. In conclusion, this new generation of the Lemur Pro is by all accounts an excellent upgrade, with better performance, less heat output and fewer fan spin-ups – all without sacrificing the excellent battery life of its predecessor. If you have one of the earlier generations Lemur Pros with the same design, there’s probably not enough here to warrant an upgrade, but if you were on the fence last year, the spec bump definitely warrants a new, fresh look. System76 took their already excellent all-rounder, and made it even better, without rocking the boat, without large changes in pricing, and still with System76’s unique open source firmware and coreboot which you’ll be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. And that’s exactly what

Solaris is still a thing, even though it’s now developed by a company nobody likes and seems to have lost all of the momentum among enthusiasts, so much so that I doubt anyone will even really care about this news item. Oracle released Solaris 11.4 almost three years ago, and is still updating it with monthly updates. Solaris 11.4 SRU30 is the latest one, released on 16 February. The update consists mainly of updates from upstream packages, but there seems to be little in the way of new features or big improvements. For those, we have to most likely wait until Solaris 11.5 or 12.0, if Oracle ever makes it that far with the formerly open source operating system that they closed back up.

KDE Plasma’s theming system is actually quite complex. It has many ways to be customized. It’s normal ever for expert users to not fully get how it works. I’ll try to explain how it works to the best of my knowledge. I’m pretty sure most KDE users here are more than aware of all of this stuff, but it’s still a good and concise overview for newcomers to KDE.

One of the most important tasks of the distribution packager is to ensure that the software shipped to our users is free of security vulnerabilities. While finding and fixing the vulnerable code is usually considered upstream’s responsibility, the packager needs to ensure that all these fixes reach the end users ASAP. With the aid of central package management and dynamic linking, the Linux distributions have pretty much perfected the deployment of security fixes. Ideally, fixing a vulnerable dependency is as simple as patching a single shared library via the distribution’s automated update system. Of course, this works only if the package in question is actually following good security practices. Over the years, many Linux distributions (at the very least, Debian, Fedora and Gentoo) have been fighting these bad practices with some success. However, today the times have changed. Today, for every 10 packages fixed, a completely new ecosystem emerges with the bad security practices at its central point. Go, Rust and to some extent Python are just a few examples of programming languages that have integrated the bad security practices into the very fabric of their existence, and recreated the same old problems in entirely new ways. This post explains the issue packagers run into very well – and it sure does look like these newer platforms are not very good citizens. I know this isn’t related, but this gives me the same feelings and reservations as Flatpak, Snap, and similar tools.

The first Android 12 developer preview hit the streets Thursday, and we’ve played with it for a day. There’s not a lot to see in this release—at least not at first. Most of the interesting bits are hidden, and the developer community is slowly enabling them. Many changes are half-finished alpha tweaks that will look different in the final release; after all, Google says these releases are for “testing and feedback.” This first release of Android 12 is meant to get some APIs and other changes in front of people for feedback, but it’s also designed to not spill the beans too much on what the final build of Android 12 will look like. With that in mind, many of the features in an earlier Android 12 leak seem right on the money. This public release is a sanitized build with a lot of stuff turned off, but the more we flip on hidden flags and catch hints in the documentation, the more this build looks like a solid halfway point between Android 11 and those leaked Android 12 screenshots. Ars always has great overviews of upcoming Android releases, and this one is no exception.

It’s time for an update on the OSNews Patreon, and the projects I’m working on as part of it. Almost three weeks ago I wrote about the Sunfire V245 delivered to my door, ready to be turned into an entirely impractical and loud UltraSPARC workstation. Last we left off, I had just received the unit, and was waiting on a few additional parts to get going – most importantly, a USB serial cable – which were delivered shortly. Why, then, hasn’t there been another article or update, showing the big server running? It turned out the machine wouldn’t boot properly. Together with John, the person who donated the machine to me, I’ve been trying to diagnose the problem, and after two weeks of troubleshooting, we seem to have isolated the probable cause of the problems. We think two replacement parts will address the problem, and John will be sending those over as soon as possible. I’ve kept all the logs and information I noted down during the ongoing troubleshooting process, and rest assured, I will write a summary about our steps and processes, to give you a glimpse into diagnosing a hardy and annoying problem that seems to be a moving target, yet is probably caused by a very much fixed part of the machine. Stay tuned! Moving on, I have two other Patreon projects planned. First, I accidentally ordered the wrong graphics cards for the SunFire V245 – they turned out to be incompatible, instead being designed for Sun’s AMD Opteron-based Ultra workstations. Since I’m now stuck with two identical Sun-branded NVIDIA Quadro workstation GPUs, I figured I might as well try and find a Sun Ultra 40 and see just how useful that beast of a workstation is in 2021. Sadly, as with many pieces of more exotic hardware, they are hard to find in Europe, and affordable machines from the United States come with very hefty shipping costs. I’m hoping for some luck on the old world continent here. Second, I intend to build a machine using nothing but parts from AliExpress. As most of you are probably aware, there’s a lively market of new Chinese-branded single and dual-socket Intel X79 and X99 motherboards on AliExpress. Countless other people on the web and YouTube have built machines around these motherboards, sporting used Xeon processors and RAM. This has become a pretty popular and mostly reliable and trustworthy market on AliExpress, and I want to explore if it’s worth it to build such a machine for people like us here on OSNews. It’s fun, exotic, cheap, and possibly stupid, so why wouldn’t you want to see me try? Please note that these plans are all subject to change, of course, and because they involve purchasing equipment from places like eBay and AliExpress, I cannot give any timelines or make any promises. Thanks to all of our Patreons – 56 of them already! – for making these projects possible, and if you want to help, support OSNews and become an OSNews Patreon!

The focus of this update is to support a number of new features that are useful for applications and games, and which have also been considered potential integration pain points for the Wayland driver. These are copy/paste, drag-and-drop and support for changing the display mode. Getting Wine properly supported on Wayland is a hugely important step in the move to Wayland, because thanks to Wine/Proton, gaming on Linux is massively viable. Having to use XWayland for games is not something I’m looking forward to.

A new court filing has revealed that, as part of the ongoing legal battle between Apple and Epic Games, Apple subpoenaed Valve Software in November 2020, demanding it provide huge amounts of commercial data about Steam sales and operations going over multiple years. Apple is demanding Valve – who is not a party to this lawsuit in any way, shape, or form – provide Apple with detailed data and information about, initially, every single game sold on Steam, including “names, prices, configurations and dates of every product on Steam, as well as detailed accounts of exactly how much money Steam makes and how it is all divvied-up”. Apple later scaled this down to just the top 600 games on Steam. Valve is not having any of it, of course. Valve’s argument goes on to explain to the court that it is not a competitor in the mobile space (this is, after all, a dispute that began with Fortnite on iOS), and makes the point that “Valve is not Epic, and Fortnite is not available on Steam.” It further says that Apple is using Valve as a shortcut to a huge amount of third party data that rightfully belongs to those third parties. The conclusion of Valve’s argument calls for the court to throw Apple’s subpoena out. “Somehow, in a dispute over mobile apps, a maker of PC games that does not compete in the mobile market or sell ‘apps’ is being portrayed as a key figure. It’s not. The extensive and highly confidential information Apple demands about a subset of the PC games available on Steam does not show the size or parameters of the relevant market and would be massively burdensome to pull together. Apple’s demands for further production should be rejected.” This feels weird and wrong in so many ways, so much so that it almost feels as if Apple is trying to gain insight into a massive market – PC games – that it is not a part of – yet. The amount and detailed nature of the data Apple is requesting is so bizarre and over the top, that the only logical conclusion I can draw is that Apple wants this data for potential competitive purposes, and not for legal purposes at all.

Today, we’re releasing the first Developer Preview of Android 12, the next version of Android, for your testing and feedback. With each version, we’re working to make the OS smarter, easier to use, and better performing, with privacy and security at the core. In Android 12 we’re also working to give you new tools for building great experiences for users. Starting with things like compatible media transcoding, which helps your app to work with the latest video formats if you don’t already support them, and easier copy/paste of rich content into your apps, like images and videos. We’re also adding privacy protections and optimizing performance to keep your apps responsive. As is standard practice by now, this first Developer Preview focuses mostly on under-the-hood and developer features, leaving the user-focused features for later releases.

You may have noticed that it’s kind of hard to find any new graphics card as of late, since supplies are limited for a whole variety of reasons. For the launch of its upcoming RTX 3060 GPU, which might prove to be a relatively affordable and capable upgrade for many, NVIDIA is going to try and do something about the shortage – by crippling the card’s suitability for cryptominers. RTX 3060 software drivers are designed to detect specific attributes of the Ethereum cryptocurrency mining algorithm, and limit the hash rate, or cryptocurrency mining efficiency, by around 50 percent. To address the specific needs of Ethereum mining, we’re announcing the NVIDIA CMP, or, Cryptocurrency Mining Processor, product line for professional mining. CMP products — which don’t do graphics — are sold through authorized partners and optimized for the best mining performance and efficiency. They don’t meet the specifications required of a GeForce GPU and, thus, don’t impact the availability of GeForce GPUs to gamers. It’s a good first step, I guess, but I feel the market is so starved at the moment this will be a drop in the ocean.

Today, we are introducing the next feature update to Windows 10, version 21H1. As people continue to rely on Windows more than ever to work, learn and have fun, we understand the importance of providing the best possible update experience to help people and organizations stay protected and productive. It is a responsibility we do not take lightly and why for the first time an H1 (first half of the calendar year) feature update release will be delivered in an optimized way using servicing technology, while continuing our semi-annual feature update cadence. In today’s blog I will cover details on how we plan to service the release, its scope, and next steps. Since I’ve lost track of the Windows release process and everything feels random and messy, I’m just going to say nothing at all.

If Microsoft had its way, Office 2021 probably wouldn’t be news at all—the Redmond giant would almost certainly prefer that everyone simply subscribe to Microsoft 365, pay a small monthly or annual fee, and get new features and fixes as they’re rolled out. For many if not most Office users, the subscription-based service is the most convenient way to get Office, even when they want to use it as locally installed software rather than doing their work in the browser and in the cloud. For the rest of us—and for those who don’t want to put up with the Byzantine procedures necessary to install Microsoft 365 apps on Remote Desktop Servers—there’s Office 2019 now, and there will be Office 2021 later this year. There will also be a new Office LTSC (Long Term Service Channel), which trades a 10 percent price hike for a guarantee of longer support periods… longer than the consumer version of Office 2021, that is. A new version of Microsoft Office used to be big news in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Now, with Office 365, LibreOffice, Google Docs, and several more than capable older standalone versions of Office, it feels like most people just don’t care anymore.

The KDE team has released Plasma 5.21, and this is one hell of a release. They’ve paid a lot of attention to presentation for this release, with visual improvements in both first and third party applications, including a new main menu (the old menu, as well as the basic cascading menu, are of course still available if you want them). On the application front, Plasma 5.21 introduces the System Monitor, a brand new resource and task manager that gives you all the information you’d ever need on your running system – and in true KDE fashion, it includes the ability to create your own personalised pages with just the information you need. Another big focus was Wayland: We have extensively refactored the compositing code in KWin and the changes should reduce latency throughout all compositing operations. We have also added a control in the compositing settings so you can choose whether you prefer lower latency or smoother animations. In addition, we have also added support for mixed-refresh-rate display setups on Wayland, e.g. you can have one screen refreshing at 144Hz and another at 60Hz, which is ideal for improving work-stations with multiple monitors. Preliminary support for multiple GPUs was also added on Wayland. There’s much more in this release, and I’m excited to try it out.

Go 1.16 has been released. The new embed package provides access to files embedded at compile time using the new //go:embed directive. Now it is easy to bundle supporting data files into your Go programs, making developing with Go even smoother. You can get started using the embed package documentation. Carl Johnson has also written a nice tutorial, “How to use Go embed”. Go 1.16 also adds macOS ARM64 support (also known as Apple silicon). Since Apple’s announcement of their new arm64 architecture, we have been working closely with them to ensure Go is fully supported; see our blog post “Go on ARM and Beyond” for more. More details can be found in the release notes.

Sailfish OS has moved into its fourth generation with the release of Sailfish OS 4.0.1 Koli. On a high-level Sailfish 4 includes several security and functionality updates, the long-awaited browser update, redesigned daily usage flow of key applications, as well as a rebooted developer experience. In particular we’re proud to boast full-scale OS-level Mobile Device Management (MDM) to enable easy and manageable end-to-end trusted corporate and governmental sector deployments. There are also a bunch of other new additions, including Android 9 app support, app sandboxing, and QR code scanning, along with improved notifications, events view, contact management and more.