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All that to say, I find that NetBSDs philosophy aligns with mine. The OS is small and cozy, and compared to many minimal Linux distributions, I found it faster to setup. Supported hardware is automatically picked up, for my Thinkpad T480s almost everything (except the trackpad issue I solved above) worked out of the box, and it comes with a minimal window manager and display manager to get you started. It is simple and minimal but with sane defaults. It is a hackable system that teaches you a ton. What more could you want? Marc Coquand I spent quite some time using OpenBSD earlier this year, and I absolutely, positively loved it. I can't quite put into words just how nice OpenBSD felt, how graspable the configuration files and commands were, how good and detailed the documentation, and how welcoming and warm the community was over on Mastodon, with even well-known OpenBSD developers taking time out of their day to help me out with dumb newbie questions. The only reason I eventually went back to Fedora on my workstation was performance. OpenBSD as a desktop operating system has some performance issues, from a slow file system to user interface stutter to problematic Firefox performance, that really started to grind my gears while trying to get work done. Some of these issues stem from OpenBSD not being primarily focused on desktop use, and some of them simply stem from lack of manpower or popularity. Regardless, nobody in the OpenBSD community was at all surprised or offended by me going back to Fedora. NetBSD seems to share a lot of the same qualities as OpenBSD, but, as the linked article notes, with a focus on different things. Like I said yesterday, I'm looking to building and testing a system entirely focused on tiled terminal emulators and TUI applications, and I've been pondering if OpenBSD or NetBSD would be a perfect starting point for that experiment.

This document provides information about the NanoBSD tools, which can be used to create FreeBSD system images for embedded applications, suitable for use on a USB key, memory card or other mass storage media. It can be used to build specialized install images, designed for easy installation and maintenance of systems commonly called computer appliances". Computer appliances have their hardware and software bundled in the product, which means all applications are pre-installed. The appliance is plugged into an existing network and can begin working (almost) immediately. FreeBSD documentation Some of the primary features of NanoBSD are exactly what you'd expect out of a tool like this, such as the system being entirely read-only at runtime, so you don't have to worry about shutdowns or data loss, and of course, the entire creation process of NanoBSD images using a simple shell script with any arbitrary set of requirements. For the rest, it remains a FreeBSD system, so ports and packages work just as you'd expect, and assuming your specific settings for the NanoBSD image didn't remove it, anything that works in FreeBSD, works in a NanoBSD image, too. The documentation is, as is often the case in the BSD world, excellent, and very easy to follow, even for someone not at all specialised in things like this. Reading through it, I'm pretty sure even I could create a customised NanoBSD image and run it, since it very much looks like you're just creating a custom installation script, adding just the things you need. I don't have a use for something like this, but I'm not sure how well-known NanoBSD is, and I feel like there's definitely some among you who would appreciate this.

Well, this sure is something to wake up to: a massive worldwide outage of computer systems due to a problem with CrowdStrike software. Payment systems, airlines, hospitals, governments, TV stations - pretty much anything or anyone using computers could be dealing with bluescreens, bootloops, and similar issues today. Open-heart surgeries had to be stopped mid-surgery, planes can't take off, people can't board trains, shoppers can't pay for their groceries, and much, much more, all over the world. The problem is caused by CrowdStrike, a sort-of enterprise AV/monitoring software that uses a Windows NT kernel driver to monitor everything people do on corporate machines and logs it for... Security purposes, I guess? I've never worked in a corporate setting so I have no experience with software like this. From what I hear, software like this is deeply loathed by workers the world over, as it gets in the way and slows systems down. And, as can happen with a kernel driver, a bug can cause massive worldwide outages which is costing people billions in damages and may even have killed people. There is a workaround, posted by CrowdStrike: This is a solution for individually fixing affected machines, but I've seen responses like great, how do I apply this to 70k endpoints?", indicating that this may not be a practical solution for many affected customers. Then there's the issue that this may require a BitLocker password, which not everyone has on hand either. To add insult to injury, CrowdStrike's advisory about the issue is locked behind a login wall. A shitshow all around. Do note that while the focus is on Windows, Linux machines can run CrowdStrike software too, and I've heard from Linux kernel engineers who happen to also administer large numbers of Linux servers that they're seeing a huge spike in Linux kernel panics... Caused by CrowdStrike, which is installed on a lot more Linux servers than you might think. So while Windows is currently the focus of the story, the problems are far more widespread than just Windows. I'm sure we're going to see some major consequences here, and my - misplaced, I'm sure - hope is that this will make people think twice about one, using these invasive anti-worker monitoring tools, and two, employing kernel drivers for this nonsense.

It's a bit of a Linux news day today - it happens - but this one is good news we can all be happy about. After earning a bad reputation for mishandling its Linux graphics drivers for years, almost decades, NVIDIA has been turning the ship around these past two years, and today they made a major announcement: from here on out, the open source NVIDIA kernel modules will be the default for all recent NVIDIA cards. We're now at a point where transitioning fully to the open-source GPU kernel modules is the right move, and we're making that change in the upcoming R560 driver release. Rob Armstrong, Kevin Mittman and Fred Oh There are some caveats regarding which generations, exactly, should be using the open source modules for optimal performance. For NVIDIA's most cutting edge generations, Grace Hopper and Blackwell, you actually must use the open source modules, since the proprietary ones are not even supported. For GPUs from the Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace, or Hopper architectures, NVIDIA recommends the open source modules, but the proprietary ones are compatible as well. Anything older than that is restricted to the proprietary modules, as they're not supported by the open source modules. This is a huge milestone, and NVIDIA becoming a better team player in the Linux world is a big deal for those of us with NVIDIA GPUs - it's already paying dividend in vastly improved Wayland support, which up until very recently was a huge problem. Do note, though, that this only covers the kernel module; the userspace parts of the NVIDIA driver are still closed-source, and there's no indication that's going to change.

Not too long ago it seemed like Linux support for the new ARM laptops running the Snapdragon X Pro and Elite processors was going to be pretty good - Qualcomm seemed to really be stepping up its game, and detailed in a blog post exactly what they were doing to make Linux a first-tier operating system on their new, fancy laptop chips. Now that the devices are in people's hand, though, it seems all is not so rosy in this new Qualcomm garden. A recent Linux kernel DeviceTree patch outright disables the GPU on the Snapdragon X Elite, and the issue is, as usual, vendor nonsense, as it needs something called a ZAP shader to be useful. The ZAP shader is needed as by default the GPU will power on in a specialized secure" mode and needs to be zapped out of it. With OEM key signing of the GPU ZAP shader it sounds like the Snapdragon X laptop GPU support will be even messier than typically encountered for laptop graphics. Michael Larabel This is exactly the kind of nonsense you don't want to be dealing with, whether you're a user, developer, or OEM, so I hope this gets sorted out sooner rather than later. Qualcomm's commitments and blog posts about ensuring Linux is a first-tier platform are meaningless if the company can't even get the GPU to work properly. These enablement problems should've been handled well before the devices entered circulation, so this is very disheartening to see. So, for now, hold off on X Elite laptops if you're a Linux user.

Ly is a lightweight TUI (ncurses-like) display manager for Linux and BSD. Ly GitHub page That's it. That's the description. I've been wanting to take a stab at running a full CLI/TUI environment for a while, see just how far I can get in my computing life (excluding games) running nothing but a few tiled terminal emulators running various TUI apps for email, Mastodon, browsing, and so on. I'm not sure I'd be particularly happy with it - I'm a GUI user through and through - but lately I've seen quite a few really capable and just pleasantly usable TUI applications come by, and they've made me wonder. It'd make a great article too.

UKIs can run on UEFI systems and simplify the distribution of small kernel images. For example, they simplify network booting with iPXE. UKIs make rootfs and kernels composable, making it possible to derive a rootfs for multiple kernel versions with one file for each pair. A Unified Kernel Image (UKI) is a combination of a UEFI boot stub program, a Linux kernel image, an initramfs, and further resources in a single UEFI PE file (device tree, cpu code, splash screen, secure boot sig/key, ...). This file can either be directly invoked by the UEFI firmware or through a boot loader. Hugues If you're still a bit unfamiliar with unified kernel images, this post contains a ton of detailed practical information. Unified kernel images might become a staple for forward-looking Linux distributions, and I know for a fact that my distribution of choice, Fedora, has been working on it for a while now. The goal is to eventually simplify the boot process as a whole, and make better, more optimal use of the advanced capabilities UEFI gives us over the old, limited, 1980s BIOS model. Like I said a few posts ago, I really don't want to be using traditional bootloaders anymore. UEFI is explicitly designed to just boot operating systems on its own, and modern PCs just don't need bootloaders anymore. They're points of failure users shouldn't be dealing with anymore in 2024, and I'm glad to see the Linux world is seriously moving towards negating the need for their existence.

In this article, I look inside a chip in the IBM 3274 Control Unit.1 But before I discuss the chip, I need to give some background on mainframes. Ken Shirriff Whenever we talk about mainframes, I am obligated to link to the story of an 18 year old buying a mainframe, while still living at his parents. One of the greatest presentations of all time.

We've been talking a lot about sleazy ways in which the online advertising industry is conspiring with browser makers - who also happen to be in the online advertising industry - to weaken privacy features so they can still track you and the ads they serve you, but with privacy". They're trying really hard to make it seem as if they're doing us a huge favour by making tracking slightly more private, and browser makers are falling over themselves to convince us that allowing some user and ad tracking is the only way to stop the kind of total everything, everywhere, all at once tracking we have now. We've got Google and Chrome pushing something called Privacy Sandbox, and we've got Mozilla and Facebook pushing something called Privacy-Preserving Attribution, both of which are designed to give the advertising industry slightly more private tracking in the desperate hope they won't still be doing a lot more tracking on the side. Safari users, meanwhile, have been feeling pretty good about all of this in the knowledge Apple cares about privacy, so surely Safari won't be doing any of this. You know where this is going, right? Today, the WebKit project published a lengthy blog post detailing all the various additional measures it's taking to make its Private Browsing mode more, well, private, and a lot of them are great moves, very welcome, and ensure that private browsing on Safari is a little bit more private than it is on Chrome, as the blog post gleefully points out. However, not long into the blog post, the shoe drops. We also expanded Web AdAttributionKit (formerly Private Click Measurement) as a replacement for tracking parameters in URL to help developers understand the performance of their marketing campaigns even under Private Browsing. John Wilander, Charlie Wolfe, Matthew Finkel, Wenson Hsieh, and Keith Holleman A little further down, they go into more detail: Web AdAttributionKit (formerly Private Click Measurement) is a way for advertisers, websites, and apps to implement ad attribution and click measurement in a privacy-preserving way. You can read more about it here. Alongside the new suite of enhanced privacy protections in Private Browsing, Safari also brings a version of Web AdAttributionKit to Private Browsing. This allows click measurement and attribution to continue working in a privacy-preserving manner. John Wilander, Charlie Wolfe, Matthew Finkel, Wenson Hsieh, and Keith Holleman So not only does Safari already include the kind of tracking technology everyone is - rightfully - attacking Mozilla over for adding it to Firefox, Apple and the Safari team are actually taking it a step further and making this ad tracking technology available in private browsing mode. The technology is limited a bit more in Private Browsing mode, but its intent is preserved: to track you and the ads you see online. I would hazard a guess that when you enable a browser's private browsing or incognito mode, you assume that means zero tracking. We already know that Chrome's Incognito mode leaks data like a sieve with bullet holes in it, and now it seems Safari's Private Browsing mode, too, is going to allow advertisers to track you and the ads you see - blog post full of fancy privacy features be damned. Do you know those Around the web" chumboxes? Even if you're unfamiliar with the term, you've most definitely seen these things all over the web, and really hate them. A major player in the chumbox business is a company called Taboola, a name that's quite despised and reviled online. Popular Apple blogger John Gruber called Taboola a slumlord" and the lowest common denominator clickbait property. Do you want to know which major technology company just signed a massive deal with Taboola? Ad tech giant Taboola has struck a deal with Apple to power native advertising within the Apple News and Apple Stocks apps, Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda told Axios. Sara Fischer at Axios Apple needs to find new markets to keep growing, and clearly, pestering its users with upsells and subscriptions to its services isn't enough. The online advertising industry is massive - just look at Google's and Facebook's financial disclosures - and Apple seems to be interested in taking a bigger slice of that fat pie. And as Google and now Mozilla are finding out, a browser that blocks ads and ad tracking kind of gets in the way of that. Anyone who can make and sell plug-and-play Pi-Hole devices even normal people can use is going to make a killing.

I've long been warning about the dangers of relying on just one browser as the bullwark against the onslaught of Chrome, Chrome skins, and Safari. With Firefox' user numbers rapidly declining, now stuck at a mere 2% or so - and even less on mobile - and regulatory pressure possibly ending the Google-Mozilla deal with makes up roughly 80% of Mozilla's income, I've been warning that Mozilla will most likely have to start making Firefox worse to gain more temporary revenue. As the situation possibly grows even more dire, Firefox for Linux would be the first on the chopping block. I've received quite a bit of backlash over expressing these worries, but over the course of the last year or so we've been seeing my fears slowly become reality before our very eyes, culminating in Mozilla recently acquiring an online advertising analytics company. Over the last few days, things have become even worse: with the release of Firefox 128, the enshitification of Firefox has now well and truly begun. Less than a month after acquiring the AdTech company Anonym, Mozilla has added special software co-authored by Meta and built for the advertising industry directly to the latest release of Firefox, in an experimental trial you have to opt out of manually. This Privacy-Preserving Attribution" (PPA) API adds another tool to the arsenal of tracking features that advertisers can use, which is thwarted by traditional content blocking extensions. Jonah Aragon If you have already upgraded to Firefox 128, you have automatically been opted into using this new API, and for now, you can still opt-out by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Website Advertising Preferences, and remove the checkmark Allow websites to perform privacy-preserving ad measurement". You were opted in without your consent, without any widespread announcement, and if it wasn't for so many Firefox users being on edge about Mozilla's recent behaviour, it might not have been snuffed out this quickly. Over on GitHub, there's a more in-depth description of this new API, and the first few words are something you never want to hear from an organisation that claims to fight tracking and protect your privacy: Mozilla is working with Meta". I'm not surprised by this at all - like I, perhaps gleefully, pointed out, I've been warning about this eventuality for a long time - but I've noted that on the wider internet, a lot of people were very much unpleasently surprised, feeling almost betrayed by this, the latest in a series of dubious moves by Mozilla. It's not even just the fact they're working with Meta", which is entirely disqualifying in and of itself, but also the fact there's zero transparency or accountability about this new API towards Firefox' users. Sure, we're all technologically inclined and follow technology news closely, but the vast majority of people don't, and there's bound to be countless people who perhaps only recently moved to Firefox from Chrome for privacy reasons, only to be stabbed in the back by Mozilla partnering up with Facebook, of all companies, if they even find out about this at all. It's right out of Facebook's playbook to secretly experiment on users. This is what I wrote a year ago: I'm genuinely worried about the state of browsers on Linux, and the future of Firefox on Linux in particular. I think it's highly irresponsible of the various prominent players in the desktop Linux community, from GNOME to KDE, from Ubuntu to Fedora, to seemingly have absolutely zero contingency plans for when Firefox enshittifies or dies, despite everything we know about the current state of the browser market, the state of Mozilla's finances, and the future prospects of both. Desktop Linux has a Firefox problem, but nobody seems willing to acknowledge it. Thom Holwerda It seems my warnings are turning into reality one by one, and if, at this point, you're still not worried about where you're going to go after Firefox starts integrating even more Facebook technologies or Firefox for Linux gets ever more resources pulled away from it until it eventually gets cancelled, you're blind.

Built around the new Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture with some fundamental improvements to both graphics and AI performance, the Ryzen AI 300 series, code-named Strix Point, is set to deliver improvements in several areas. The Ryzen AI 300 series looks set to add another footnote in the march towards the AI PC with its mobile SoC featuring a new XDNA 2 NPU, from which AMD promises 50 TOPS of performance. AMD has also upgraded the integrated graphics with the RDNA 3.5, which is designed to replace the last generation of RDNA 3 mobile graphics, for better performance in games than we've seen before. Further to this, during AMD's recent Tech Day last week, AMD disclosed some of the technical details regarding Zen 5, which also covers anumber of key elements under the hood on both the Ryzen AI 300 and the Ryzen 9000 series.On paper, theZen 5 architecture looks quite a big step up compared to Zen 4, with the key component driving Zen 5 forwardthrough higher instructions per cycle than its predecessor, which is something AMD has managed to do consistently from Zen to Zen 2, Zen 3, Zen 4, and now Zen 5. Gavin Bonshor at AnandTech Not the review and deep analysis quite yet, but a first thorough look at what Zen 5 is going to bring us, straight from AnandTech.

I decided to document my journey of writing an OS in Nim. Why Nim? It's one of the few languages that allow low-level systems programming with deterministic memory management (garbage collector is optional) with destructors and move semantics. It's also statically typed, which provides greater type safety. It also supports inline assembly, which is a must for OS development. Other options include C, C++, Rust, and Zig. They're great languages, but I chose Nim for its simplicity, elegance, and performance. Fusion OS documentation website I love it when a hobby operating system project not only uses a less common programming language, but the author also details the entire development process in great detail. It's not a UNIX-like, and the goals are a single 64 bit address space, capability-based security model, and a lot more. It's targeting UEFI machines, and the code is, of course, open source and available on GitHub.

It's time for Google being Google, this time by using an undocumented APIs to track resource usage when using Chrome. When visiting a *.google.com domain, the Google site can use the API to query the real-time CPU, GPU, and memory usage of your browser, as well as info about the processor you're using, so that whatever service is being provided - such as video-conferencing with Google Meet - could, for instance, be optimized and tweaked so that it doesn't overly tax your computer. The functionality is implemented as an API provided by an extension baked into Chromium - the browser brains primarily developed by Google and used in Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, and others. Brandon Vigliarolo at The Register The original goal of the API was to give Google's various video chat services - I've lost count - the ability to optimise themselves based on the available system resources. Crucially, though, this API is only available to Google's domains, and other, competing services cannot make use of it. This is in clear violation of the European Union's Digital Markets Act, and with Chrome being by far the most popular browser in the world, and thus a clear gatekeeper, the European Commission really should have something to say about this. For its part, Google told The Register it claims to comply with the DMA, so we might see a change to this API soon. Aside from optimising video chat performance, the API, which is baked into a non-removable extension, also tracks performance issues and crashes and reports these back to Google. This second use, too, is at its core not a bad thing - especially if users are given the option to opt out of such crash analytics. Still, it seems odd to use an undocumented API for something like this, but I'm not a developer so what do I know. Mind you, other Chromium-based browsers also report this data back to Google, which is wild when you think about it. Normally I would suggest people switch to Firefox, but I've got some choice words for Firefox and Mozilla, too, later today.

About a month ago, Cameron Kaiser first introduced us to the Canon Cat, a computer designed by Jeff Raskin, but abandoned within six months by Canon, who had no idea what to do with it. In his second article on the Cat, Kaiser dives much deeper into the software and operating system of the Cat, even going so far as to become the first person to write software for it. One of the most surprising aspects of the Cat is that it's collaborative; other users can call into your Cat using a landline and edit the same document you're working on remotely. Selecting text has other functions too. When I say everything goes in the workspace, I do mean everything. The Cat is designed to be collabourative: you can hook up your Cat to a phone line, or at least you could when landlines were more ubiquitous, and someone could call in and literally type into your document remotely. If you dialed up a service, you would type into the document and mark and send text to the remote system, and the remote system's response would also become part of your document. (That goes for the RS-232 port as well, by the way. In fact, we'll deliberately exploit this capability for the projects in this article.) Cameron Kaiser You can also do calculations right into the text, going so far as allowing the user to define variables and reuse those variables throughout the text to perform various equations and other mathematic operations. If you go back and change the value of a variable, all other equations using those variables are updated as well. That's quite nifty, especially considering the age of the Cat, and since the Cat is fixed width, you can effectively create spreadsheets this way, too. There's really far too much to cover here, and I strongly suggest you head on over and read the entire thing.

Microsoft has again quietly updated its Validation OS ISOs. In case you are not familiar with it, Validation OS is an official lightweight variant of Windows and it is designed for hardware vendors to test, validate and repair hardware defects. Sayan Sen at Neowin I had no idea this variant of Windows existed, but it kind of makes sense when you think about it. OEMs or other companies making devices that run or work with Windows may need to test, reboot, test, reboot, and so on, endlessly, and having a lightweight and fast version of Windows that doesn't load any junk you don't need - or just loads straight into your company's hardware testing application - is incredibly valuable. According to Microsoft, the Windows Validation OS boots to a command line that allows you to run Win32 applications. This has made me wonder if I can use it for the one thing I am forced to use Windows for: playing League of Legends (I cobbled together a spare parts machine solely for this purpose). My guess is that either the Validation OS will lack certain components or frameworks League of Legends requires, or is so different from regular Windows that it will trip Riot Games' rootkit, or both. Still, I'm curious. I might load this up on a spare hard drive and what's possible.

The corporate branding, the new AI-powered developer platform" slogan, makes it clear that what I think of as GitHub"-the traditional website, what are to me the core features-simply isn't Microsoft's priority at this point in time. I know many talented people at GitHub who care, but the company's priorities just don't seem to value what I value about the service. This isn't an anti-AI statement so much as a recognition that the tool I still need to use every day is past its prime. Copilot isn't navigating the website for me, replacing my need to the website as it exists today. I've had tools hit this phase of decline and turn it around, but I'm not optimistic. It's still plenty usable now, and probably will be for some years to come, but I'll want to know what other options I have now rather than when things get worse than this. Misty De Meo Apparently, GitHub is in the middle of a long, drawn-out process where it's rewriting its frontend using React. De Meo was trying to use a particular feature of GitHub - the blame view, which also works through the command line but is apparently much harder to parse there - and realised the browser search feature just couldn't find the line of code they absolutely knew for sure was there. After scrolling for a while, the browser search feature suddenly found the line of code. I'd heard rumblings that GitHub's in the middle of shipping a frontend rewrite in React, and I realized this must be it. The problem wasn't that the line I wanted wasn't on the page-it's that the whole document wasn't being rendered at once, so my browser's builtin search bar just couldn't find it. On a hunch, I tried disabling JavaScript entirely in the browser, and suddenly it started working again. GitHub is able to send a fully server-side rendered version of the page, which actually works like it should, but doesn't do so unless JavaScript is completely unavailable. Misty De Meo Seem like a classic case of people being told to develop something in too little time, with the wrong tools, while management is breathing down their necks and pulling engineers away to work on buzzwords like AI".

The most fascinating time for Windows NT were its first few years on the market, when the brand new operating system supported a wide variety of architectures, from default x86, all the way down to stuff like Alpha, MIPS, and exotic things like Intel i860, and even weirder stuff like Clipper (even a SPARC port was planned, but never released). One of the more conventional architectures that saw a Windows NT port - one that was actually released to the public, no less - was PowerPC. The last version of Windows NT to support exotic architectures was 4.0, with Windows 2000 only supporting x86, dropping everything else, including PowerPC (although Windows 2000 for Alpha reached RC1 status). The PowerPC version of Windows NT only supported IBM and Motorola systems using the PowerPC Reference Platform, and never the vastly more popular PowerPC systems from Apple. Well, it's 2024, and that just changed: Windows NT 4.0 can now be installed and run on certain Apple New World Power Macintosh systems. This repository currently contains the source code for the ARC firmware and its loader, targeting New World Power Macintosh systems using the Gossamer architecture (that is, MPC106 Grackle" memory controller and PCI host, and Heathrow" or Paddington" super-I/O chip on the PCI bus). NT4 only, currently. NT 3.51 may become compatible if HAL and drivers get ported to it. NT 3.5 will never be compatible, as it only supports PowerPC 601. (The additional suspend/hibernation features in NT 3.51 PMZ could be made compatible in theory but in practise would require all of the additional drivers for that to be reimplemented.) maciNTosh GitHub page This is absolutely wild, and one of the most interesting projects I've seen in a long, long time. The deeply experimental nature of this effort does mean that NT 4.0 is definitely not stable on any of the currently supported machines, and the number of drivers implemented is the absolute bare minimum to run NT 4.0 on these systems. It does, however, support dual-booting both NT 4.0 and Mac OS8, 9, and X, which would be quite something to set up. I'm not definitely going to keep an eye on eBay for a supported machine, because running NT on anything other than x86 has always been a bit of a weird fascination for me. Sadly, period-correct PowerPC machines that support NT are extremely rare and thus insanely expensive, and will often require board-level repairs that I can't perform. Getting a more recent Yikes PowerMac G4 should be easy, since those just materialise out of thin air randomly in the world. I'm incredibly excited about this.

This solution lets developers compile their Amiga API-based applications as Linux binaries. Once the features are implemented, tested and optimized using the runtime on Linux or Windows, developers re-compile their applications for their Amiga-like system of choice and perform final quality checking. Applications created with AxRuntime can be distributed to Linux or Windows communities, giving developers a much broader user base and a possibility to invite developers from outside general Amiga community to contribute to the application. AxRuntime website I had never considered this as an option, but with AmigaOS 3.x basically being frozen in time, it's a relatively easy target for an effort such as this. It won't surprise you to learnt hat AxRuntime is using code from AROS, which itself is fully compatible with AmigaOS 3.1. This should technically mean that any AmigaOS application that runs on AROS should be able to be made to run using this runtime, which is great news for Amiga developers. Why? Well, the cold, harsh truth is that the number of Amiga users is probably still dwindling as the sands of time cause people to, well, die, and the influx of new users, who also happen to possess the skillset to develop AmigaOS software, must be a very, very slow trickle, at best. This runtime will allow AmigaOS developer to package their software to run on Linux and Windows machines, getting a lot more eyes on the software in the process. Amiga devices are not exactly cheap or easy to come by, so this is a great alternative.

Back in August 2023, we previewed our work on an experimental version of Chrome browser for ChromeOS named Lacros.The original intention was to allow Chrome browser on Chromebooks to swiftly get the latest feature and security updates without needing a full OS update. As we refocus our efforts on achieving similar objectives with ChromeOS embracing portions of the Android stack, we have decided to end support for this experiment. We believe this will be a more effective way to help accelerate the pace of innovation on Chromebook. ChromeOS Beta Tester Community To refresh your memory, Lacros was an attempt by Google to decouple the Chrome browser from ChromeOS itself, so that the browser could be updated indepdnently from ChromeOS as a whole. This would obviously bring quite a few benefits with it, from faster and easier updates, to the ability to keep updating the Chrome browser after device support has ended. This was always an experimental feature, so the end of this experiment really won't be affecting many people. The interesting part is the reference to the recent announcement that ChromeOS' Linux kernel and various subsystems will be replaced by their Android counterparts. I'm not entirely sure what this means for the Chrome browser on ChromeOS, since it seems unlikely that they're going to be using the Android version of Chrome on ChromeOS. It's generally impossible to read the tea leaves when it comes to whatever Google does, so I'm not even going to try.

I've read this article several times now, and I'm still not entirely sure how to properly summarise the main points without leaving important details out. If you really boil it down to the very bare essentials, which packages get updates on which Ubuntu release is a confusing mess that most normal users will never be able to understand, potentially leaving them vulnerable to security flaws that have already been widely patched and are available on Ubuntu - just not your specific Ubuntu version, your specific customer type, or the specific package type in question. So, in the case of McPhail here, they needed a patched version of tomcat 9 for Ubuntu 22.04. This patched version was available for Ubuntu 18.04 users because not only is 18.04 an LTS release - meaning five years of support - Canonical also offers a commercial Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) subscription for 18.04, so if you're paying for that, you get the patched tomcat9. On Ubuntu 20.04, another LTS release, the patched version of tomcat9 is available for everyone, but for the version McPhail is running, the newer LTS release 22.04, it's only available for Ubuntu Pro subscribers (24.04 is not affected, so not relevant for this discussion). Intuitively, this doesn't make any sense. The main cause of the weird discrepancy between 20.04 and 22.04 is that Canonical's LTS support only covers the packages in main (about 10% of the total amount of packages), whereas tomcat9 lives in universe (90% of packages). LTS packages in universe are only supported on a best effort" basis, and one of the ways a patched universe package can be made available to non-paying LTS users is if it is inhereted from Debian, which happens to be the case for tomcat9 in 20.04, while in 22.04, it's considered part of an Ubuntu Pro subscription. So, there's a fixed package, but 22.04 LTS users, who may expect LTS to truly mean LTS, don't get the patched version that exists and is ready to go without issues. Wild. This is incredibly confusing, and would make me run for the Debian hills before my next reboot. I understand maintaining packages is a difficult, thankless task, but the nebulousness here is entirely of Canonical's own making, and it's without a doubt leaving users vulnerable who fully expect to be safe and all patched up because they're using an LTS release.

In 2019, a startup called Nuvia came out of stealth mode. Nuvia was notable because its leadership included several notable chip architects, including one who used to work for Apple. Apple chips like the M1 drew recognition for landing in the same performance neighborhood as AMD and Intel's offerings while offering better power efficiency. Nuvia had similar goals, aiming to create a power efficient core that could could surpass designs from AMD, Apple, Arm, and Intel. Qualcomm acquired Nuvia in 2021, bringing its staff into Qualcomm's internal CPU efforts. Bringing on Nuvia staff rejuvenated Qualcomm's internal CPU efforts, which led to the Oryon core in Snapdragon X Elite. Oryon arrives nearly five years after Nuvia hit the news, and almost eight years after Qualcomm last released a smartphone SoC with internally designed cores. For people following Nuvia's developments, it has been a long wait. Chips and Cheese Now that the Snapdragon X Elite and Pro chips are finally making their way to consumers, we're also finally starting to see proper deep-dives into the brand new hardware. Considering this will set the standard for ARM laptops for a long time to come - including easy availability of powerful ARM Linux laptops - I really want to know every single quirk or performance statistic we can find.

For the uninitiated, what are we looking at? Could it be the Moire Error from Doom? Well, no. You are looking at (part of) the boot up screen for the X Window System, specifically the pattern it uses as the background of the root window. This pattern is technically called a stipple. What you're seeing is pretty important and came to symbolize a lot for me as a computer practitioner. Matt T. Proud The X bootup pattern is definitely burnt onto my retina, as it probably is for a lot of late '90s, early 2000s Linux users. Setting up X correctly, and more importantly, not breaking it later, was almost an art at the time, so any time you loaded up your PC and this pattern didn't greet you, you'd get this sinister feeling in the pit of your stomach. There was now a very real chance you were going to have to debug your X configuration file, and nobody - absolutely nobody - liked doing that, and if you did, you're lying. Matt T. Proud dove into the history of the X stipple, and discovered it's been part of X since pretty much the very beginning, and even more esoteric X implementations, like the ones used by Solaris or the various commercial versions, have the stipple. He also discovered several other variants of the stipple included in X, so there is a chance your memory might be just a tiny bit different. The stipple eventually disappeared at around 2008 or so, it disappeared as part of the various efforts to modernise, sanitise, and speed up the Linux boot process on desktops. On modern distributions still using X, you won't encounter it anymore by default, but in true X fashion, the code is still there and you can easily bring it back using a flag specifically designed for it, -retro, that you can use with startx or your X init file. There's a ton more information in Proud's excellent article, but this one paragraph made me smile: I will remark that in spite of my job being a software engineer, I had never spent a lot of time looking at the source code for the X Server (XFree86 or X.Org) before. It's really nuts to see that a lot of the architecture from X10R3 and X11R1 still persists in the code today, which is a statement that can be said in deep admiration for legacy code but also disturbance from the power of old decisions. Without having looked at the internals of any Wayland implementation, I can sympathize sight unseen with the sentiments that some developers have toward the X Window System: the code is a dead end. I say that with the utmost respect to the X Window System as a technology and an ecosystem. I'll keep using X, and I will be really sad when it's no longer possible for me to do so for one reason or another, as I'm extremely attached to it quirks. But it's clear the future is limited. Matt T. Proud We all have great - and not so great - memories of X, but I am really, really happy I no longer have to use it.

Palestinians living abroad have accused Microsoft of closing their email accounts without warning - cutting them off from crucial online services. They say it has left them unable to access bank accounts and job offers - and stopped them using Skype, which Microsoft owns, to contact relatives in war-torn Gaza. Microsoft says they violated its terms of service - a claim they dispute. Mohamed Shalaby and Joe Tidy at the BBC Checking up on your family members to see if they survived another day of an ongoing genocide doesn't seem like something that should be violating any terms of any services, but that's just me.

A global internet sweep that examined the websites and mobile apps of 642 traders has found that 75,7% of them employed at least one dark pattern, and 66,8% of them employed two or more dark patterns. Dark patterns are defined as practices commonly found in online user interfaces and that steer, deceive, coerce, or manipulate consumers into making choices that often are not in their best interests. International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network Dark patterns are everywhere, and it's virtually impossible to browse the web, use certain types of services, or install mobile applications, without having to dodge and roll just to avoid all kinds of nonsense being thrown at you. It's often not even ads that make the web unusable - it's all the dark patterns tricking you into viewing ads, entering into a subscription, enabling notifications, sharing your email address or whatever, that's the real reason. This is why one of the absolute primary demands I have for the next version of OSNews is zero dark patterns. I don't want any dialogs begging you to enable ads, no modal windows demanding you sign up for a newsletter, no popups asking you to enable notifications, and so on - none of that stuff. My golden standard is your computer, your rules", and that includes your right to use ad blockers or anything else to change the appearance or functioning of our website on your computer. It'd be great if dark patterns became illegal somehow, but it would be incredibly difficult to write any legislation that would properly cover these practices.

I try to keep tabs on a huge number of operating system projects out there - for obvious reasons - but long ago I learned that when it comes to the world of Amiga, it's best to maintain distance and let any important news find its way out of the Amiga bubble, lest one loses their sanity. Keeping up with the Amiga world requires following every nook and cranny of various forums and websites with different allegiances to different (shell) companies, with often barely coherent screeching and arguments literally nobody cares about. It's a mess is what I'm trying to say. Anyway, it seems one of the many small companies still somehow making a living in the Amiga world, AmigaKit, has recently released a new device, the A600GS. It's a retrogaming-oriented Amiga computer, but it does come with something called AmiBench, that's apparently a weird hybrid between bits of Amiga OS 4 and AROS, so it does also support running a proper desktop and associated applications, but only AmigaOS 3.x applications (I think? It's a bit unclear). It has HDMI at up to 1080p, and even WiFi and Bluetooth support, which is pretty neat. Wait, Wifi and Bluetooth support? What are we really dealing with here? Once again the information is hard to find because AmigaKit is incredibly stingy with specifications - I had to read goddamn YouTube comments to get some hints - but it seems to be a custom board with an Orange Pi Zero 3 stuck on top doing most of the work. In other words, the meat of this thing is just an emulator, which in and of itself isn't a bad thing, it's just weird to me that they're not upfront and direct about this. While this answers some questions, it also raises a whole bunch more. If this is running on low-end Allwinner ARM hardware from 2022, how is this AmiBench desktop environment (or operating system?) a fork of OS4 with AROS code in it? AmigaOS 4 is PowerPC-only, which may explain why AmigaKit only mentions AmigaOS 3.x and 68K compatibility, and not AmigaOS 4 compatibility. And what's AROS doing in there? I mean, this is an interesting product in the sense that it's a relatively cheap turnkey solution for classic Amiga enthusiasts, but a new Amiga this is definitely not. At about 130, this is not a bad deal, but other than hardcore fans of the classic 68K Amiga, I don't see many people being interested in this. The Apollo Standalone V4+ piques my interest way more, but at 700-800, it's also a lot more expensive, but at least they're much clearer about what the Apollo is, what software it's running, and that they're giving back their work to AROS.

I love a good bug hunting story, and this one is right up there as a great one. Way back in 2018, Doug Brown discovered that after installing Ubuntu MATE 18.04, if he launched Firefox from the icon in the default panel arrangement to install Chrome from the official Chrome website, the process was broken. After downloading the .deb and double-clicking it, GDebi would appear, but after clicking Install", nothing happened. What was supposed to happen is that after clicking Install", an authentication dialog should appear where you enter your root password, courtesy of gksu. However, this dialog did not appear, and without thinking too much of it, Brown shrugged and just installed the downloaded Chrome .deb through the terminal, which worked just fine. While he didn't look any deeper into the cause of the issue, he did note that as the years and new Ubuntu releases progressed, the bug would still be there, all the way up until the most recent release. Finally, 2.5 years ago, he decided to dive into the bug. It turned out there were lots of reports about this issue, but nobody stepped up to fix it. While workarounds were made available through wrapper scripts, and deeper investigations into the cause revealed helpful information. The actual error message was a doozy: Refusing to render service to dead parents", which is quite metal and a little disturbing. In summary, the problem was that GDebi was using execv() to replace itself with an instance of pkexec, which was intended to bring up an authentication dialog and then allow GDebi to run as a superuser. pkexec didn't like this arrangement, because it wants to have a parent process other than init. Alkis mentioned that you could recreate the problematic scenario in a terminal window by running gdebi-gtk with setsid to run it in a new session. Doug Brown Backing up a few steps, if the name gksu" rings a bell for you, you might have already figured out where the problem most likely originated from. Right around that time, 2018, Ubuntu switched to using PolicyKit instead, and gksu was removed from Ubuntu. GDebi was patched to work with PolicyKit instead, and this was what introduced the actual bug. Sadly, despite having a clear idea of the origin of the bug, as well as where to look to actually fix it, nobody picked it up. It sat there for years, causing problems for users, without a fix in sight. Brown was motivated enough to fix it, submitted the patch, but after receiving word it would be looked at within a few days, he never heard anything back for years, not helped by the fact that GDebi has long been unmaintained. It wasn't until very recently that he decided to go back again, and this time, after filling out additional information required for a patch for an unmaintained package, it was picked up, and will become available in the next Ubuntu release (and will most likely be backported, too). Brown further explains why it took so long for the bug to be definitely fixed. Not only is GDebi unmaintained, the bug also only manifested itself when launching Firefox from the panel icon - it did not manifest when launching Firefox from the MATE menu, so a lot of people never experienced it. On top of that, as we all sadly know, Ubuntu replaced the Firefox .deb package with the SNAP version, which also doesn't trigger the bug. It's a long story for sure, but a very interesting one. It shows how sometimes, the stars just align to make sure a bug does not get fixed, even if everyone involved knows how to fix it, and even if fixes have been submitted. Sometimes, things just compound to cause a bug to fall through the cracks.

Android, like many other operating systems, uses the open-source Linux kernel. There are several different types of Linux kernel releases, but the type that's most important to Android is the long-term support (LTS) one, as they're updated regularly with important bug fixes and security patches. Starting in 2017, the support lifetime of LTS releases of Linux was extended from two years to six years, but early last year, this extension was reversed. Fortunately, Google has announced that moving forward, they'll support their own LTS kernel releases for four years. Here's why that's important for the security of Android devices. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority I fully support the Linux kernel maintainers dropping the LTS window from six to two years. The only places where such old kernels were being used were embedded devices and things like smartphones vendors refused to update to newer Android releases, and it makes no sense for kernel maintainers to be worrying about that sort of stuff. If an OEM wants to keep using such outdated kernels, the burden should be on that OEM to support that kernel, or to update affected devices to a newer, supported kernel. It seems Google, probably wisely, realised that most OEMs weren't going to properly upgrade their devices and the kernels that run on them, and as such, the search giant decided to simply create their own LTS releases instead, which will be supported for four years. Google already maintains various Android-specific Linux kernel branches anyway, so it fits right into their existing development model for the Android Linux kernel. Some of the more popular OEMs, like Google itself or Samsung, have promised longer support life cycles for new Android versions on their devices, so even with this new Android-specific LTS policy, there's still going to be cases where an OEM will have to perform a kernel upgrade where they didn't have to before with the six year LTS policy. I wonder if this is going to impact any support promises made in recent years.

Among them, Byron Jourdan, Senior Director, Product Management of Mozilla, under the Reddit username ComprehensiveDoor643 revealed that Mozilla plans to support Firefox on Windows 7 for longer. When asked separately about whether it also included Windows 8 and 8.1 too, Jourdan added that it was certainly the plan, though for how long the extended support would last was still undecided. Sayan Sen at Neowin Excellent move by Mozilla. I doubt there's that many new features and frameworks in Windows 10 or 11 that are absolutely essential to Firefox working properly, so assuming it can gracefully disable any possible Windows 10/11-exclusive features, it should be entirely possible to use Firefox as an up-to-date, secure, and capable browser on Windows 7/8.x. Windows 7 and 8.x users still make up about 2.7% of Windows users worldwide, and with Windows' popularity, that probably still translates to millions and millions of people. Making sure these people have access to a safe and secure browser is a huge boon, and I'm very happy Mozilla is going to keep supporting these platforms as best they can, at least for now. For those of us who already consider especially Windows 7 a retrocomputing platform - I sure do - this is also great news, as any retro box or VM we load up with it will also get a modern browser. Just excellent news all around.

Most people are familiar with GRUB, a powerful, flexible, fully-featured bootloader that is used on multiple architectures (x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le OpenFirmware). Although GRUB is quite versatile and capable, its features create complexity that is difficult to maintain, and that both duplicate and lag behind the Linux kernel while also creating numerous security holes. On the other hand, the Linux kernel, which has a large developer base, benefits from fast feature development, quick responses to vulnerabilities and greater overall scrutiny. We (Red Hat boot loader engineering) will present our solution to this problem, which is to use the Linux kernel as its own bootloader. Loaded by the EFI stub on UEFI, and packed into a unified kernel image (UKI), the kernel, initramfs, and kernel command line, contain everything they need to reach the final boot target. All necessary drivers, filesystem support, and networking are already built in and code duplication is avoided. Marta Lewandowska I'm not a fan of GRUB. It's too much of a single point of failure, and since I'm not going to be dual-booting anything anyway I'd much rather use something that isn't as complex as GRUB. Systemd-boot is an option, but switching over from GRUB to systemd-boot, while possible on my distribution of choice, Fedora, is not officially supported and there's no guarantee it will keep working from one release to the next. The proposed solution here seems like another option, and it may even be a better option - I'll leave that to the experts to discuss. It seems like to me that the ideal we should be striving for is to have booting the operating system become the sole responsibility of the EUFI firmware, which usually already contains the ability to load any operating system that supports UEFI without explicitly installing a bootloader. It'd be great if you could set your UEFI firmware to just always load its boot menu, instead of hiding it behind a function key or whatever. We made UEFI more capable to address the various problems and limitations inherent in BIOS. Why are we still forcing UEFI to pretend it still has the same limitations?

Despite being live since 1997, OSNews has had fairly few redesigns in the grand scheme of things. If my memory serves me correctly, we've had a grand total of 6 designs, and we're currently on version 6, introduced about 5 years ago because of unpleasant reasons. It's now 2024, and for a variety of reasons, we're looking to work towards version 7 of our almost 30 year old website, and we need help. I have a very clear idea of what I want OSNews 7 to be like - including mockups. The general goals are making the site visually simpler, reducing our dependency on WordPress extensions, and reducing the complexity of our theme and website elements to make it a bit easier for someone like me to change small things without breaking anything. Oh and a dark mode that works. Note that we're not looking to change backends or anything like that - WordPress will stay. If you have the WordPress, design, and developer skills to make something like this a reality, and in the process shape the visual identity of one of the oldest continuously running technology news websites in the world, send me an email.

Graham's TWM page has been around for like two decades or so and still isn't even remotely as old as TWM itself, and in 2021 they published an updated version with even more information, tips, and tricks for TWM. The Tab Window Manager finds its origins in the lat 1980s, and has been the default window manager for the X Windowing System for a long time, now, too. Yet, few people know it exists - how many people even know X has a default window manager? - and even fewer people know you can actually style it, too. OK, so TWM is fairly easy to configure but alot of people, upon seeing the default config, scream Ugh, thats awful!' and head off to the ports tree or their distro sources in search of the latest and greatest uber desktop environment. There are some hardcore TWM fans and mimimalists however who stick around and get to liking the basic feel of TWM. Then they start to mod it and create their own custom dekstop. All part of the fun in Unix :). Graham's TWM page I'll admit I have never used TWM properly, and didn't know it could be themed at all. I feel very compelled to spend some time with it now, because I've always liked the by-now classic design where the right-click desktop menu serves as the central location for all your interactions with the system. There are quite a few more advanced, up-to-date forks of TWM as well, but the idea of sticking to the actual default X window manager has a certain charm. I almost am too afraid to ask, because the answer on OSNews to these sorts of questions is almost always yes" - do we have any TWM users in the audience? I'm extremely curious to find out if TWM actually has a reason to exist at this point, or if, in 2024, it's just junk code in the X.org source repository, because I'm looking at some of these screenshots and I feel a very strong urge to give it a serious go.

The goal is to be able to drag an icon from a background window without immediately raising that window and obscuring the drop target window when using the click-to-focus mode. This is a barebones description of what needs to happen. It assumes familiarity with code, protocols, etc. as needed. Quod Video The articles describes how to get there using both X and Wayland, and it's clear there's still quite a bit of work to do. At least on my KDE Wayland setups, the way it works now is that when I click to drag an icon from a lower Dolphin window to a higher one, it brings the lower window forward, but then, when I hover for a bit over the other window, it brings it back up. Of course, this only works if the destination window remains at least partially visible, which might not always be the case. For usability's sake, there needs to be an option to start a drag operation from one window to the next without altering the Z-order.

If there was ever a will they, won't they?" love story in mobile computing, it's definitely Google's on and off again relationship with Android's desktop mode. There have been countless hints, efforts, and code pertaining to the mythical desktop mode for Android, but so far, Google has never flipped the switch and made it available. It's 2024, Android 15 development is in full swing, and it seems Google and Android's desktop mode are dating again. This past spring, Google added DisplayPort support to the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro in a Feature Drop update, allowing for easy wired connections to external monitors. Then, tinkering in Android 14 QPR3 Beta 2.1, Mishaal Rahman was able to get a new desktop interface up and running, complete with Android apps running in resizeable floating windows. It's not confirmed that Android 15 will ship with a built-in desktop mode, but the bones are there. It does make me wonder, though: why? What would a desktop interface add to Android? Taylor Kerns at Android Police I'm actually fairly convinced Android could, indeed, serve as an excellent desktop operating system, but without any official backing by Google, it's always been a massive hack to use Android with a mouse and keyboard. It's not so much the hardware support - it's all there - but rather the software support, and the clunky way common Android UI tasks feel when performing them with a mouse. I've installed Android desktop distributions' countless times, and the third-party hacks they use, like clunky taskbars and custom menus and so on, make for a horrid user experience. Samsung DEX seems to be the only somewhat successful attempt at adding a desktop mode to Android, but it can't be installed on any regular PC or laptop, and requires cumbersome cabling or expensive docks, making it more of a curiosity than a true desktop mode in the sense most of us are thinking of. This feature needs to come from Google itself, and it needs to be something third parties can use in their ROMs and x86 builds so we can truly use Android on a desktop. I don't believe that's going to happen, though. It's clear Google is more interested in pushing Chrome OS for desktop and laptop use, and it seems more likely that any desktop mode that gets added to Android is going to be similar in nature to DEX - something you can only use by hooking up your phone to a display and configuring wireless input devices. Cool, but not exactly something that will turn Android into a desktop contender.

I've just confirmed with, well, myself, that comment editing on OSNews finally works again. We're finally free. Our trying times are behind us, and we can begin to rebuild. Stay safe out there, and be kind to each other.

To evolve Fuchsia beyond smart home devices, Google has been working on projects such as Starnix to run unmodified Linux binaries on Fuchsia devices. In addition, since late April of this year, Google has been working on a new project called microfuchsia" that aims to make Fuchsia bootable on existing devices via virtualization. Microfuchsia, according to Google, is a Fuchsia OS build that targets virtual machines and is designed to be bootable in virtualization solutions such as QEMU and pKVM. Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority The goal here might be, according to Mishaal Rahman, might be to use this new microfuchsia thing to replace the stripped-down Android version that's currently being used inside Android's pKVM to run certain secured workloads. Relevant patches have been submitted to both the Fuchsia and Android side of things for this very purpose. At this point, it really seems that Google's grand ambitions with Fuchsia simply didn't survive the massive employee culling, with leadership probably reasoning that Android and Chrome OS are good enough, and that replacing them with something homegrown and possibly more suited - speculation, of course - simply isn't worth the investment in both time and money. It probably makes sense from a financial standpoint, but it's still sad.

A few weeks ago, I broke the news that Mozilla had removed several anti-censorship Firefox extensions from its store in Russia, and a few days later I also broke the news they reversed course on their decision and reinstated the extensions. Perhaps not worthy of a beauty prize, as a Dutch saying goes, but at least the turnaround time was short, and they did the right thing in the end. Well, let's see how Apple is going to deal with the exact same situation. Novaya Gazeta Europe reports that bowing under pressure from the same Russian censors that targeted Mozilla, the company has removed a whole slew of VPN applications used by Russians to evade the stringent totalitarian censorship laws in the warmongering nation. Apple has removed several apps offering virtual private network (VPN) services from the Russian AppStore, following a request from Roskomnadzor, Russia's media regulator, independent news outlet Mediazona reported on Thursday. The VPN services removed by Apple include leading services such as ProtonVPN, Red Shield VPN, NordVPN and Le VPN. Those living in Russia will no longer be able to download the services, while users who already have them on their phones can continue using them, but will be unable to update them. Novaya Gazeta Europe Apple has a long history of falling in line with the demands from dictators and totalitarian regimes, and Russia is no stranger to telling Apple what to do. Earlier this year, Apple was ordered to remove an application developed by the team of the murdered opposition figure Alexey Navalny, and of course, Apple rolled over and complied. Much like Apple's grotesque suck-up behaviour in China, This stands in stark contrast to Apple's whining, complaining, and tantrums in the European Union. It seems Apple finds it more comfortable to operating under dictators than in democracies.

We talked about Psion last week, and we're talking about Psion again this week. This time, Kian Ryan highlights a very important capability of Psion's devices, a capability that's entirely absent from today's mobile devices: a built-in IDE and dedicated programming language so you can write code and build applications, including ones with a graphical user interface, right on the device. All Psion devices could run OPL, either preinstalled on the device or via a DATAPAK memory card. It's a BASIC-esque programming language, and while you could develop OPL programs on your PC in DOS, Psion devices also shipped with an IDE preinstalled so you could get just as much done on the device itself. Back then, this wasn't particularly unique, but these days, mobile devices have become so locked-down and dumb that developing applications on-device is basically a non-starter. Which can't be said about my current mobile. My mobile is a great device to consume content on, but it has no built in tools to extend its functionality. If I want to build an application for it, I have to use another computer to download a build environment, build the application, sign it, and then transfer the packaged app to my phone. On the Psion, all the tools are right there, on my home screen. It does feel like we're missing an opportunity here. Kian Ryan They're entirely right, of course. Our current mobile devices are faster and technically more capable than ever, but extending the functionality of your smartphone using the smartphone itself by writing and compiling code on it is far more cumbersome than it was in the past. Even my Psion Organiser II LZ64, from 1986, has OPL on it, and if I took the time to relearn the basic BASIC I once knew, I could probably still program something useful on it today, almost 40 years later, without being gatekept by anyone, and without needing any other device. That's something quite magical that we've lost, and that's sad.

I've been working on a bunch of small projects involving microcontrollers. Currently a lot of them are based around the Raspberry Pi Pico boards because I like the development experience of those a lot. They have a decent SDK and cheap hardware to get started and the debugger works with gdb/openocd so it just integrates in all IDEs that support that. One of my current projects is making a fancy hardware controller for a bunch of video equipment I use. The main things that will be controlled are two PTZ cameras (those are cameras that have motors to move them). One stationary camera and the video switching equipment that that's hooked up to. Martijn Braam There's more to building something like this than connecting up hardware components - there's also software that needs to be taken care of. In this case, the author is weighing several real-time operating systems for use in the project, namely FreeRTOS, NuttX, and Zephyr. If you're working on a similar project, this article may help in choosing the RTOS that's right for you.

David Rosenthal, one of the primary contributors to the X Windowing System, has published an awesome blog post about the recent 40 year anniversary of X, full of details about the early days of X development, as well as the limitations they had to deal with, the choices they had to make, and the environment in which they were constrained. Once at Sun I realized that it was more important for the company that the Unix world standardized on a single window system than that the standard be Sun's NeWS system. At C-MU I had already looked into X as an alternative to the Andrew window system, so I knew it was the obvious alternative to NeWS. Although most of my time was spent developing NeWS, I rapidly ported X version 10 to the Sun/1, likely the second port to non-DEC hardware. It worked, but I had to kludge several areas that depended on DEC-specific hardware. The worst was the completely DEC-specific keyboard support. Because it was clear that a major redesign of X was needed to make it portable and in particular to make it work well on Sun hardware, Gosling and I worked with the teams at DEC SRC and WRL on the design of X version 11. Gosling provided significant input on the imaging model, and I designed the keyboard support. As the implementation evolved I maintained the Sun port and did a lot of testing and bug fixing. All of which led to my trip to Boston to pull all-nighters at MIT finalizing the release. David Rosenthal They were clearly right. During those days, the UNIX world was using a variety of windowing systems, all tied to various companies and platforms. Standardising virtually the entire UNIX world on X aided in keeping UNIX compatible-ish even in the then-new graphical era, and X's enduring existence to this very day is evidence of the fact they made a lot of right choices early on. Rosenthal also explains why one of the main alternatives to X, Sun's PostScript-based NeWS, which was also co-developed by Rosenthal, didn't win out over X. It had several things working against its adoptions and popularisation, such as Sun requiring a license fee for the source code, its heftier system requirements, and the fact it was more difficult to program for. After trying to create what Rosenthal describes as a ghastly kludge" by combining NeWS and X into Xnews, Sun eventually killed it altogether. Of course, this wouldn't be restrospective of X without mentioning Wayland. We and Jobs were wrong about the imaging model, for at least two reasons. First, early on pixels were in short supply and applications needed to make the best use of the few they were assigned. They didn't want to delegate control to the PostScript interpreter. Second, later on came GPUs with 3D imaging models. The idea of a one-size-fits-all model became obsolete. The reason that Wayland should replace X11 is that it is agnostic to the application's choice of imaging model. David Rosenthal This is about as close to a blessing from the original X Windowing System developers you're ever going to get, but Rosenthal does correctly note that XWayland is a thing, and since not every application is going to be rewritten to support Wayland, X will most likely be around for a long time to come. In fact, he looks towards the future, and predicts that we'll definitely be celebrating 50 years of X, and that yes, people will still be using it by then.

It seems the dislike for machine learning runs deep. In a blog post, Cloudflare has announced that blocking machine learning scrapers is so popular, they decided to just add a feature to the Cloudflare dashboard that will block all machine learning scrapers with a single click. We hear clearly that customers don't want AI bots visiting their websites, and especially those that do so dishonestly. To help, we've added a brand new one-click to block all AI bots. It's available for all customers, including those on the free tier. To enable it, simply navigate to the Security > Bots section of the Cloudflare dashboard, and click the toggle labeled AI Scrapers and Crawlers. Cloudflare blog According to Cloudflare, 85% of their customers block machine learning scrapers from taking content from their websites, and that number definitely does not surprise me. People clearly understand that multibillion dollar megacorporations freely scraping every piece of content on the web for their own further obscene enrichment while giving nothing back - in fact, while charging us for it - is inherently wrong, and as such, they choose to block them from doing so. Of course, it makes sense for Cloudflare to try and combat junk traffic, so this is one of those cases where the corporate interests of Cloudflare actually line up with the personal interests of its customers, so making blocking machine learning scrapers as easy as possible benefits both parties. I think OSNews, too, makes use of Cloudflare, so I'm definitely going to ask OSNews' owner to hit that button. Cloudflare further details that a lot of people are blocking crawlers run by companies like Amazon, Google, and OpenAI, but completely miss far more active crawlers like those run by the Chinese company ByteDance, probably because those companies don't dominate the AI" news cycle. Then there's the massive number of machine learning crawlers that just straight-up lie about their intentions, trying to hide the fact they're machine learning bots. We fear that some AI companies intent on circumventing rules to access content will persistently adapt to evade bot detection. We will continue to keep watch and add more bot blocks to our AI Scrapers and Crawlers rule and evolve our machine learning models to help keep the Internet a place where content creators can thrive and keep full control over which models their content is used to train or run inference on. Cloudflare blog I find this particularly funny because what's happening here is machine learning models being used to block... Machine learning models. Give it a few more years down the trajectory we're currently on, and the internet will just be bots reading content posted by other bots.

The article's from 2021, but I think it's still worth discussing. A hard reality of C and C++ software development on Windows is that there has never been a good, native C or C++ standard library implementation for the platform. A standard library should abstract over the underlying host facilities in order to ease portable software development. On Windows, C and C++ is so poorly hooked up to operating system interfaces that most portable or mostly-portable software - programs which work perfectly elsewhere - are subtly broken on Windows, particularly outside of the English-speaking world. The reasons are almost certainly political, originally motivated by vendor lock-in, than technical, which adds insult to injury. This article is about what's wrong, how it's wrong, and some easy techniques to deal with it in portable software. Chris Wellons As someone who doesn't know how to code or program, articles like these are always difficult to properly parse. I understand the primary problem the article covers, but what I'm curious about is how much of this problem is personal - skill issue - and how much of it is a widely held belief by Windows developers and programmers. I know there's quite a few of you in our audience, so I'd love to hear from you how you feel about this. The author also authored his on fix, something called libwinsane, which I'm also curious about - is this the only solution, or are there more options out there?

Another month, another report from the Redox team. The Rust-based operating system saw another active month, including getting a whole bunch of new funding deals for specific features, such as adding UNIX-style signals to Redox, as well as the further development of Termion, a Redox project that is a pure Rust, bindless library for low-level handling, manipulating and reading information about terminals". Furthermore, the default user interface Orbital got a small makeover with new colours and a new default wallpaper, and there's the usual documentation and website improvements. More substantial are doubling the performance of RedoxFS by improving the speed of block reads and writes, and changes in how the xHCI drivers works to drastically reduce CPU usage. The PCI/PCIe and x86 VirtIO drivers has also been improved, and you can now do userspace debugging using the GNU Debugger from outside the VM. There's a lot more, so head on over to read the whole thing.

The impact printer was a mainstay of the early desktop computing era. Also called dot matrix printers," these printers could print low-resolution yet very readable text on a page, and do so quickly and at a low price point. But these printers are a relic of the past; in 2024, you might find them printing invoices or shipping labels, although more frequently these use cases have been replaced by other types of printers such as thermal printers and laser printers. The heart of the impact printer is the print head. The print head contained a column of pins (9 pins was common) that moved across the page. Software in the printer controlled when to strike these pins through an inked ribbon to place a series of dots" on a page. By carefully timing the pin strikes with the movement of the print head, the printer could control where each dot was placed. A column of dots might represent the vertical stroke of the letter H, a series of single dots created the horizontal bar, and another column would create the final vertical stroke. Jim Hall at Technically We Write Our first printer was a dot matrix model, from I think a brand called Star or something similar. Back then, in 1991 or so, a lot of employers in The Netherlands offered programs wherein employees could buy computers through their work, offered at a certain discount. My parents jumped on the opportunity when my mom's employer offered such a program, and through it, we bought a brand new 286 machine running MS-DOS and Windows 3.0, and it included said dot matrix printer. There's something about the sound and workings of a dot matrix printer that just can't be bested by modern ink, laser, or LED printers. The mechanical punching, at such a fast rate it sounded like a tiny Gatling gun, was mesmerising, especially when paired with continuous form paper. Carefully ripping off the perforated edges of the paper after printing was just a nice bonus that entertained me quite a bit as a child. I was surprised to learn that dot matrix printers are still being manufactured and sold today, and even comes in colour. They're quite a bit more expensive than other printer types these days, but I have a feeling they're aimed at enterprises and certain niches, which probably means they're going to be of considerably higher quality than all the other junk printers that clog the market. With a bit more research, it might actually be possible to find a brand new colour dot matrix printer that is a better choice than some of the modern alternatives. The fact that I'm not contemplating buying a brand new dot matrix printer in 2024, even though I rarely print, is a mildly worrying development.

Microsoft Defender is the endpoint security solution preinstalled on every Windows machine since Windows 7. It's a fairly complex piece of software, addressing both EDR and EPP use cases. As such, Microsoft markets two different products. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is a cloud based endpoint security solution that combines sensor capabilities with the advantages of a cloud processing. Microsoft Defender Antivirus (MDA), on the other hand, is a modern EPP enabled by default on any fresh Windows installation. MDA is the focus of this analysis. Retooling If you've ever wanted to know how Microsoft Defender works, this article contains a wealth of detailed information.

R9 is a work-in-progress effort to build a Plan 9 kernel to Rust. It was started a couple years back by the maintainers of the Harvey OS distribution of Plan 9, who threw in the towel after loss of traction". R9 is a reimplementation of the plan9 kernel in Rust. It is not only inspired by but in many ways derived from the original Plan 9 source code. R9OS GitHub page For now, the project is obviously mostly focused on running in virtual machines, specifically Qemu, in which it can be run using a variety of architectures: aarch64, x86-64 (with or without kvm), and RISC-V.

Once upon a time, the IBM PC was released. In the IBM PC BIOS, you could enter characters that weren't present on the keyboard by holding the Alt key and typing the decimal value on the numeric keypad. For example, you could enter n by holding Alt and typing Numpad1 Numpad6 Numpad4, then releasing the Alt key. Raymond Chen Another Raymond Chen story, and this one involves hearts, snowmen, different editing controls, codepages, and more. In other words, just another Tuesday for Chen.

The European Union's Digital Markets Act is the gift that keeps on giving. This time, it's Facebook's turn to be slapped on the fingers with a ruler - a metric ruler, of course - because of its malicious compliance with the DMA. Today, the Commission has informed Meta of its preliminary findings that its pay or consent" advertising model fails to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). In the Commission's preliminary view, this binary choice forces users to consent to the combination of their personal data and fails to provide them a less personalised but equivalent version of Meta's social networks. European Commission press release The European Commission's preliminary conclusion takes issue with Facebook's binary choice between pay for zero ads" and full-on tracking and all the ads". According to the DMA, Facebook must offer users the option of an equivalent experience with less tracking, and the company doesn't offer such an option to users. In addition, Facebook's proposal does not allow users to exercise their right to freely consent to the combination of their personal data". It's important to note that this is not some sort of definitive ruling of finding; it's preliminary, and Facebook now has the opportunity to state its case and formulate its arguments. If the eventual ruling is that Facebook does not comply, the company is liable for fines up to 10% of its yearly worldwide turnover, which can rise up to 20% for repeated infractions.

Well, it seems we've got a better understanding now of why Andreas Kling decided to leave the SerenityOS project to focus entirely on Ladybird, the web browser that grew out of his hobby operating system. They've got some big plans for where to take Ladybird, and I'm saying they" because it's being backed by a big name. They've set up a fancy new website for the project, which makes it all look a bit more presentable to a general audience. The project is aiming for a first alpha release for Linux and macOS in 2026, and Windows or mobile versions are not something they're currently interested in - they want to get the desktop version to be presentable first. It also seems we're not in Kansas anymore - they've got four full-time paid engineers working on Ladybird at the moment, with three more starting soon. Sure, they've got some sponsors, but that seems like a lot of people, so where's the cash coming from? Well, the project also announced its first two board members, and it won't surprise you Andreas Kling himself is one of them. The other name is none other than Chris Wanstrath, and if that name doesn't ring a bell - he's the co-founder and former CEO of GitHub, which he sold to Microsoft in 2018. He also created the Atom text editor and led several other projects. Oh, he also happens to be a billionaire who apparently has donated 1 million dollars to Ladybird. In other words, the Ladybird project is a lot more of a serious, grown-up effort than it may have seemed when Kling first announced his departure from SerenityOS. This means the project has some serious money behind it, an influential name with probably some great networking skills, and, of course, Kling's unique experience working on browser engines for Nokia and Apple in the past. All in all, this is great news.

In this writeup we provide a summary of technical information crucial to evaulate the exploitability and impact of memory safety problems in IBM i programs. As administrators and developers of IBM i aren't supposed to work below MI level" this kind of information is not officially documented by the vendor. The information presented here is thus based on already published reverse engineering results, and our own findings uncovered using IBM's System Sertice Tools (SST) and the POWER-AS specific Processor extensions we developed for the Ghidra reverse engineering framework. Tests were performed on a physical POWER 9 system running IBM i V7R4. Programs were compiled by the default settings of the system in the ILE program model. C language source code will be provided separately. Silent Signal Some light reading.

On the brink of insanity, my tattered mind unable to comprehend the twisted interplay of millennia of arcane programmer-time and the ragged screech of madness, I reached into the Mass and steeled myself to the ground lest I be pulled in, and found my magnum opus. Booting Linux off of a Google Drive root. Ersei That's not... You shouldn't... Why would...