OSnews

More owners of the first-generation Nest Hub are Google Fuchsia update is rolling out widely to 1st-gen Nest Hubs as it expands beyond the Preview program. Back in May, Google formally released Fuchsia, its effort to develop a “not Linux” operating system from scratch, which has been years in the making. The first device to receive the new OS was Google’s 2018 smart display, the Nest Hub — not to be confused with the second generation Nest Hub with sleep tracking released earlier this year — taking it permanently off of the existing Linux based “Cast OS” without negatively affecting the UI or experience. The rollout continues.

Samsung has confirmed that it will stop showing ads in default apps including Samsung Weather, Samsung Pay, and Samsung Theme. It follows comments made by its mobile chief TM Roh in an internal town hall meeting reported by Yonhap. “Samsung has made a decision to cease the advertisement on proprietary apps including Samsung Weather, Samsung Pay, and Samsung Theme,” the company said in a statement given to The Verge. “The update will be ready by later this year.” I never got any of these ads on my Samsung Galaxy Note 10+, but I’d be absolutely livid if I did. I’m not going to commend Samsung for doing the absolutely bare minimum here and not show ads on €1000 devices. Dear lord.

Dedication asks each of its adherents to have faith even as time and energy pass through from one year to the next. Dedication brings with it a variety of challenges, but also rewards. Dedication is something most people claim to have, but few readily exhibit it in the face of adversity. As of today, Aug. 18, 2021, the Haiku Project is celebrating two decades of dedication, marking the 20th anniversary of the founding of the Haiku operating system and the start of this ride to save, maintain, and expand upon the BeOS legacy it spawned from. Congratulations to the Haiku project and all of its contributors.

The Intel 386 SX CPU quickly replaced the 286 CPU in the early 1990s. For a time, it was a very popular CPU, especially for people who were wanting to run Microsoft Windows. Yet the two CPUs run at nearly identical speed. So what was the big deal? The 286 vs 386SX argument could be confusing in 1991, and it’s not much clearer today. Here at OSNews we pride ourselves in pointing you to the most relevant, up-to-date buying advice available on the internet.

Earlier this month, Apple unveiled a system that would scan iPhone and iPad photos for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). The announcement sparked a civil liberties firestorm, and Apple’s own employees have been expressing alarm. The company insists reservations about the system are rooted in “misunderstandings.” We disagree. We wrote the only peer-reviewed publication on how to build a system like Apple’s — and we concluded the technology was dangerous. We’re not concerned because we misunderstand how Apple’s system works. The problem is, we understand exactly how it works. There’s now so much evidence from credible, trustworthy people and organisations that Apple’s system is bad and dangerous, that I find it hard to believe there are still people cheering Apple on.

I at least peruse if not review in depth the vast majority of all those PRs, and every time I see a PR that is likely to impact performance, I make a note of it in a running log, giving me a long list of improvements I can revisit when it’s blog time. That made this August a little daunting, as I sat down to write this post and was faced with the list I’d curated of almost 550 PRs. Don’t worry, I don’t cover all of them here, but grab a large mug of your favorite hot beverage, and settle in: this post takes a rip-roarin’ tour through ~400 PRs that, all together, significantly improve .NET performance for .NET 6. You might want to get some coffee.

The theme for this release has been adding new functionality to the MATE Desktop while maintaining the look and feel that we all know and love. While all the added features are surely quite exciting we also did not forget to do tons of bugfixing, modernising the code base and optimizing the performance. MATE is one of the two great alternatives for people who find GNOME 3 and later unpleasant (the other being Cinnamon, my DE of choice).

In Windows 11, Microsoft has changed the way you set default apps. Like Windows 10, there’s a prompt that appears when you install a new browser and open a web link for the first time. It’s the only opportunity to easily switch browsers, though. Unless you tick “always use this app,” the default will never be changed. It’s incredibly easy to forget to toggle the “always use this app” option, and simply launch the browser you want from this prompt and never see this default choice again when you click web links. Microsoft has changed the way default apps are assigned in Windows 11, which means you now have to set defaults by file or link type instead of a single switch. In the case of Chrome, that means changing the default file type for HTM, HTML, PDF, SHTML, SVG, WEBP, XHT, XHTML, FTP, HTTP, and HTTPS. That’s what you get when you use proprietary operating systems. Windows and macOS are not designed for you; they’re designed for Microsoft and Apple, respectively.

Researchers have produced a collision in iOS’s built-in hash function, raising new concerns about the integrity of Apple’s CSAM-scanning system. The flaw affects the hashing system, called NeuralHash, which allows Apple to check for exact matches of known child-abuse imagery without possessing any of the images or gleaning any information about non-matching pictures. On Tuesday, a GitHub user called Asuhariet Ygvar posted code for a reconstructed Python version of NeuralHash, which he claimed to have reverse-engineered from previous versions of iOS. The GitHub post also includes instructions on how to extract the NeuralMatch files from a current macOS or iOS build. Once the code was public, more significant attacks were quickly discovered. A user called Cory Cornelius produced a collision in the algorithm: two images that generate the same hash. If the findings hold up, it will be a significant failure in the cryptography underlying Apple’s new system. American tech media and bloggers have been shoving the valid concerns aside ever since Apple announced this new backdoor into iOS, and it’s barely been a week and we already see major tentpoles come crashing down. I try not to swear on OSNews, but there’s no other way to describe this than as a giant clusterfuck of epic proportions.

Speaking of Debian, there’s even bigger news than a new Debian GNU/Hurd release – Debian 11.0 is out and about! This release contains over 11,294 new packages for a total count of 59,551 packages, along with a significant reduction of over 9,519 packages which were marked as obsolete and removed. 42,821 packages were updated and 5,434 packages remained unchanged. As always, Debian release are big, and they are hugely important as they serve as the base for some of the most popular Linux distributions out there.

It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2021. This is a snapshot of Debian “sid” at the time of the stable Debian “bullseye” release (August 2021), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release. In this release, the port of go has been completed, experimental support for APIC, SMP, and 64bit has been added, and more.

Asahi Linux, the effort to port Linux to Apple’s new M1 SoC, has posted its second progress report. It’s been a long time since the last update! In all honesty, the first Progress Report set the bar a little bit too high, and I found it difficult to sit down and put together monthly reports that would do it justice. So, going forward, we’re going to be providing shorter-form updates while striving to keep a monthly schedule. That said, a lot has happened in the past few months, so strap in for a bigger update this time! Quite a lot of detail in here, and lots of insights into the reverse engineering processes the developers are implementing.

A great intro to a classic platform by way of emulation and optionally even adapting a real physical keyboard: Back in the late 80s and through the 90s, Unix workstations were super powerful, super cool, and super expensive. If you were making 3D graphics or developing applications, you wanted a high-performance workstation and Sun made some of the best ones. But unless you worked for a huge company, university, or government, they were probably too expensive. More than twenty years later, we have much more powerful and affordable computers, so let’s emulate the old systems and see what it was like to run some of the coolest computers you could buy in the 90s. This is another in the series from the same author as the recently linked virtual NeXT machine, that also includes an entry for a virtual BeBox to experience BeOS.

This is the Commodore 64 KERNAL, modified to run on the Atari 8-bit line of computers. They’re practically the same machine; why didn’t someone try this 30 years ago? No time like the present.

Apple employees have flooded an Apple internal Slack channel with more than 800 messages on the plan announced a week ago, workers who asked not to be identified told Reuters. Many expressed worries that the feature could be exploited by repressive governments looking to find other material for censorship or arrests, according to workers who saw the days-long thread. Past security changes at Apple have also prompted concern among employees, but the volume and duration of the new debate is surprising, the workers said. Some posters worried that Apple is damaging its leading reputation for protecting privacy. It’s a complete 180 from Apple’s behaviour and statements (in western markets) – of course employees are going to be worried. I’ve been warning for years that Apple’s position on privacy was nothing more than a marketing ploy, and now Apple employees, too, get a taste of their own medicine that they’ve been selling in China and various other totalitarian regimes.

Hello Windows Insiders! Today we are rolling out the first set of updates for several apps that come included as part of Windows 11. The following app updates are rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel at first. Microsoft has updated some of the default Windows applications – Snipping Tool, Calculator, and Mail & Calendar.

Their legislation would bar the companies from certain conduct that would tend to force developers to use their app stores or payment systems. It also would obligate the companies to protect app developers’ rights to tell consumers about lower prices and offer competitive pricing. It would effectively allow apps to be loaded onto Apple users’ devices outside of the company’s official app store. There’s so much movement on this front, I highly doubt Apple and Google will be able to stop it. This is one of the very, very rare cases where both sides of the political spectrum seem to somewhat agree, and I hope they can make it stick. It’s definitely not enough, but it’s a step in the right direction. I’m an extremist – all source code should be freely available (not necessarily open source – just viewable), to give consumers and society as a whole the ability to ensure they’re not being spied on, lied to, or endangered by foreign entities or corporate trickery. If copyright is good enough for writers, artists, and musicians, it’s damn well good enough for programmers. With how vital computers and software have become – woven into the fabric of our society – we as people should be able to see and check what those threads are doing and where they’re going to and coming from. Corporations have shown time and time again that they are not trustworthy entities and that they do not have society’s best interests at heart, and we need tools to bring the balance of power back – black boxes of code are dangerous.

So imagine my surprise when I dug around in a quarter-century-old archive to find a .zip file containing something that purported to be the original executable of Labyrinth. Surely such an ancient piece of code – written for Windows 3.1 – wouldn’t launch? Well, after a bit of fiddling with the Windows compatibility settings, I was shocked – and extremely pleased – to see that, yes, it most certainly did. It shouldn’t be surprising that a piece of good Windows code from 30 years ago still runs on Windows 10 today, and yet, it always is.

An operating system I’ve been writing since ~June 2017. Although it’s a long shot (and very optimistic), I ultimately intend it to replace Linux and Windows as a desktop operating system. Very optimistic, but there’s quite a few things here already. The code is on gitlab, where you can find more information, too.

MorphOS 3.15 ram-handler contains a bug that when unlucky may results in the RAM: root directory to appear to contain many duplicate entries. Multiple users had reported this over the years, but until recently the root cause of this issue had eluded us. Due to recent developments, the bug has finally been located and fixed (thanks to AngryTom for help!). Fixed ram-handler will be released as the part of the future MorphOS 3.16 release. Meanwhile you can install the following patch that fixes the problem for MorphOS 3.15. I know this isn’t a major new release or anything, but it’s rather rare and interesting to see a small, standalone update like this being release for a small, alternative operating system. Usually, these get rolled into major new releases or nightlies, so I found this interesting.

In 1985 Steve Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT Inc. in order to build the NeXT Computer. It was ahead of its time and had amazing features thanks to the NeXTSTEP operating system, most famously used at CERN by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web. NeXTSTEP later became OPENSTEP and when Apple acquired NeXT in 1997, they used it as the basis for Mac OS X and iOS. If you’ve done any Mac or iOS programming, you’ve seen the echoes of NeXTSTEP in the type names – NSObject, NSString, NSDictionary, and many others all come directly from NeXT (NS = NeXTSTEP). These computers cost about as much as a new car when they first came out, so they were out of reach for most people. What was it like to use a top of the line system in the early 90s? Let’s build our own and find out! Exactly as it says on the tin. A fun few hours.

Valve’s “Steam Deck” handheld PC has caused quite a stir among PC gaming geeks, but the biggest shakeup might not be its Nintendo Switch-like form factor. The software running inside of it is the real surprise. Why does the Steam Deck run Linux? Blame Windows. The Steam Deck and the software inside of it are the culmination of a nearly decade-long “hedging strategy” embarked upon by Valve chief Gabe Newell and company many moons ago, when Microsoft tried exerting more control over developers with Windows 8. But it’s also the next phase of Valve’s escape plan. Also, Windows is simply a terrible choice for the Steam Deck. The base model only has 64GB of storage, and Windows 10 will easily take up two-thirds of that.

Dr. Neal Krawetz, one of the leading experts in the area of computer forensics research, digital photo analysis, and related topics, has penned a blog post in which he takes apart Apple’s recent announcement and the technology behind it. He actually has a lot of experience with the very problem Apple is trying to deal with, since he is the creator of FotoForensics, and files CSAM reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) every day. In fact, he files more reports than Apple, and knows all the ins and outs of all the technologies involved – including reverse-engineering Microsoft’s PhotoDNA, the perceptual hash algorithm NCMEC and Apple are using. The reason he had to reverse-engineer PhotoDNA is that NCMEC refused to countersign the NDA’s they wanted Krawetz to sign, eventually not responding to his requests altogether. Krawetz is one of the more prolific reporters of CSAM material (number 40 out of 168 in total in 2020). According to him, PhotoDNA is not as sophisticated as Apple’s and Microsoft’s documentation and claims make it out to be. Perhaps there is a reason that they don’t want really technical people looking at PhotoDNA. Microsoft says that the “PhotoDNA hash is not reversible”. That’s not true. PhotoDNA hashes can be projected into a 26×26 grayscale image that is only a little blurry. 26×26 is larger than most desktop icons; it’s enough detail to recognize people and objects. Reversing a PhotoDNA hash is no more complicated than solving a 26×26 Sudoku puzzle; a task well-suited for computers. The other major component of Apple’s system, an AI perceptual hash called a NeuralHash, is problematic too. The experts Apple cites have zero background in privacy or law, and while Apple’s whitepaper is “overly technical”, it “doesn’t give enough information for someone to confirm the implementation”. Furthermore, Krawetz “calls bullshit” on Apple’s claim that there is a 1 in 1 trillion error rate. After a detailed analysis of the numbers involved, he concludes: What is the real error rate? We don’t know. Apple doesn’t seem to know. And since they don’t know, they appear to have just thrown out a really big number. As far as I can tell, Apple’s claim of “1 in 1 trillion” is a baseless estimate. In this regard, Apple has provided misleading support for their algorithm and misleading accuracy rates. Krawetz also takes aim at the step where Apple manually reviews possible CP material by sending them from the device in question to Apple itself. After discussing this with his attorney, he concludes: The laws related to CSAM are very explicit. 18 U.S. Code § 2252 states that knowingly transferring CSAM material is a felony. (The only exception, in 2258A, is when it is reported to NCMEC.) In this case, Apple has a very strong reason to believe they are transferring CSAM material, and they are sending it to Apple — not NCMEC. It does not matter that Apple will then check it and forward it to NCMEC. 18 U.S.C. § 2258A is specific: the data can only be sent to NCMEC. (With 2258A, it is illegal for a service provider to turn over CP photos to the police or the FBI; you can only send it to NCMEC. Then NCMEC will contact the police or FBI.) What Apple has detailed is the intentional distribution (to Apple), collection (at Apple), and access (viewing at Apple) of material that they strongly have reason to believe is CSAM. As it was explained to me by my attorney, that is a felony. This whole thing looks, feels, and smells like a terribly designed system that is not only prone to errors, but also easily exploitable by people and governments with bad intentions. It also seems to be highly illegal, making one wonder why Apple were to put this out in the first place. Krawetz hints at why Apple is building this system earlier in this article: Apple’s devices rename pictures in a way that is very distinct. (Filename ballistics spots it really well.) Based on the number of reports that I’ve submitted to NCMEC, where the image appears to have touched Apple’s devices or services, I think that Apple has a very large CP/CSAM problem. I think this might be the real reason Apple is building this system.

Every good operating system needs a web browser, especially as more and more apps move to the web. To that end, Google is preparing to bring the full Google Chrome browser experience to Fuchsia OS. This was inevitable, of course. As the article notes, Fuchsia already has the Chrome engine to display web content if needed, and now they are bringing the whole actual browser over as well. Just another step in the long journey to replace the underpinnings of Android and Chrome OS.

Apple also addressed the hypothetical possibility of a particular region in the world deciding to corrupt a safety organization in an attempt to abuse the system, noting that the system’s first layer of protection is an undisclosed threshold before a user is flagged for having inappropriate imagery. Even if the threshold is exceeded, Apple said its manual review process would serve as an additional barrier and confirm the absence of known CSAM imagery. Apple said it would ultimately not report the flagged user to NCMEC or law enforcement agencies and that the system would still be working exactly as designed. After yesterday’s news and today’s responses from experts, here’s a recap: Apple is going to scan all photos on every iPhone to see if any of them match against a dataset of photos – that Apple itself hasn’t verified – given to them by the authorities of countries in which this is rolled out, with final checks being done by (third party) reviewers who are most likely traumatized, overworked, underpaid, and easily infiltrated. What could possibly go wrong? Today, Apple sent out an internal memo to Apple employees about this new scanning system. In it, they added a statement by Marita Rodriguez, executive director of strategic partnerships at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and one of the choice quotes: I know it’s been a long day and that many of you probably haven’t slept in 24 hours. We know that the days to come will be filled with the screeching voices of the minority. Apple signed off on that quote. They think those of us worried about invasive technologies like this and the power backdoors like this would give to totalitarian regimes all over the world are the “screeching voices of the minority”. No wonder this company enjoys working with the most brutal regimes in the world.

A large number of security and privacy experts, legal experts, and more, in an open letter to Apple: On August 5th, 2021, Apple Inc. announced new technological measures meant to apply across virtually all of its devices under the umbrella of “Expanded Protections for Children”. While child exploitation is a serious problem, and while efforts to combat it are almost unquestionably well-intentioned, Apple’s proposal introduces a backdoor that threatens to undermine fundamental privacy protections for all users of Apple products. The open letter contains tons of arguments, scenarios, and examples from experts about just how bad this technology is, and just how easily it can be abused.

Oliver Kuederle, who works with the image hashing technology used by Apple’s new technology that’s going to scan the photos on your iOS device continuously, explains that it is far, far from foolproof: Perceptual hashes are messy. The simple fact that image data is reduced to a small number of bits leads to collisions and therefore false positives. When such algorithms are used to detect criminal activities, especially at Apple scale, many innocent people can potentially face serious problems. My company’s customers are slightly inconvenienced by the failures of perceptual hashes (we have a UI in place that lets them make manual corrections). But when it comes to CSAM detection and its failure potential, that’s a whole different ball game. Needless to say, I’m quite worried about this. This is just one of the many, many problems with what Apple announced yesterday.

Airyx is a new open-source desktop operating system that aims to provide a similar experience and compatibility with macOS on x86-64 systems. It builds on the solid foundations of FreeBSD, existing open source packages in the same space, and new code to fill the gaps. Airyx aims to feel sleek, stable, familiar and intuitive, handle your daily tasks, and provide as much compatibility as possible with the commercial OS that inspired it. An ambitious but interesting effort, that seems to align quite well with helloSystem.

Solène created a week-long personal computing challenge around old computers. I chose to use an Amiga for the week. In this issue I write about my experience, and what modern computing lost when Commodore died. I also want to show some of the things you can do with an Amiga or even an emulator if you’d like to try. I’ve tried to get into the Amiga-like operating systems – MorphOS, AROS, Amiga OS 4 – but the platform just doesn’t suit me. I find them convoluted, incomprehensible, and frustratingly difficult to use. Not that it matters – I’m not here to ruin the Amiga community’s party – but if they want to sustain that community instead of having it die out as their user numbers dwindle due to old age, they might want to consider making their operating systems a little less… Obtuse.

Apple has announced impending changes to its operating systems that include new “protections for children” features in iCloud and iMessage. If you’ve spent any time following the Crypto Wars, you know what this means: Apple is planning to build a backdoor into its data storage system and its messaging system. Child exploitation is a serious problem, and Apple isn’t the first tech company to bend its privacy-protective stance in an attempt to combat it. But that choice will come at a high price for overall user privacy. Apple can explain at length how its technical implementation will preserve privacy and security in its proposed backdoor, but at the end of the day, even a thoroughly documented, carefully thought-out, and narrowly-scoped backdoor is still a backdoor. Basically, Apple is going to scan your iCloud photo library, and compare cryptographic hashes of your photos to known photos containing child pornography. It’s hard to argue against this because it makes it seem as if you’re arguing against catching the sort of people that have such material. However, the issue with tools like this are not the ends – all of us are on the same side here – but the means. It’s more than obvious that this scanning is a gross invasion of privacy, but at the same time, you could easily argue that this is a bit of privacy we’d be willing to give up in order to aid in catching the worst elements of our society. The real problems stem from the fact that tools like this are simply never going to be foolproof. Software is incredibly unreliable, and while a random application crashing won’t ruin your life, an algorithm wrongfully labeling you as a pedophile most definitely will. On top of unintended consequences, malicious intent could be a major problem here too – what if some asshole wants to ruin your life, and sends you compromised photos, or otherwise sneaks them onto your device? And with Apple’s long history of working very closely with the most horrid regimes in the world, imagine what governments can do with a tool like this? On the ends that Apple is trying to get to here, we are all on the same side. The means to get there, however, need to be carefully considered.

The latest ReactOS newsletter has been published. Timo Kreuzer (tkreuzer) worked hard on various parts of the kernel and HAL, fixing issues here and there. Structured Exception Handling (SEH) support for the amd64 architecture was finished, various bugs around the kernel are fixed. A major issue with interrupt handling in HAL was also fixed in May, which finally allowed a semi-stable boot in a virtual environment. There’s also work being done on support for multiple monitors, improved support for SMP, and more.

As part of our ongoing efforts to keep our users safe, Google will no longer allow sign-in on Android devices that run Android 2.3.7 or lower starting September 27, 2021. If you sign into your device after September 27, you may get username or password errors when you try to use Google products and services like Gmail, YouTube, and Maps. Android 2.3.7 was released on 21 September, 2011. That’s ten years of support. I think that’s fair.

Google is announcing the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro today, though it might be better to call it a preview or a tease. Rather than releasing all the details on its new Android phones, Google is instead putting the focus on the new system on a chip (SoC) that will be inside the new Pixels. It’s called the Tensor SoC, named after the Tensor Processing Units (TPU) Google uses in its data centers. Tensor is an SoC, not a single processor. And so while it’s fair to call it Google-designed, it’s also still unclear which components are Google-made and which are licensed from others. Two things are definitely coming from Google: a mobile TPU for AI operations and a new Titan M2 chip for security. The rest, including the CPU, GPU, and 5G modem, are all still a mystery. Less mysterious: the phones themselves. I spent about an hour at Google’s Mountain View campus last week looking at the phone hardware and talking with Google’s hardware chief Rick Osterloh about Tensor. After all that, my main takeaway about the new Pixel 6 phones is simple. Google is actually, finally trying to make a competitive flagship phone. This looks like a really premium product, and it will most definitely have a price to match. Google finally switching over to its own SoC, after years of relying on Qualcomm, which is technically great for competition, but much as with Apple’s chips, it’s not like anyone else is really going to benefit from this. Assuming Google plans on selling this new Pixel in more than three countries, and assuming the claims about the cameras are backed up my real-world reviews, this will definitely be my next phone, since my current smartphone is ready for replacement. And what a surprise – smartphone camera quality suddenly matters now that I have a kid.

It’s no secret that the ACPI CPUFreq driver code has at times been less than ideal on recent AMD processors with delivering less than expected performance/behavior with being slow to ramp up to a higher performance state or otherwise coming up short of disabling the power management functionality outright. AMD hasn’t traditionally worked on the Linux CPU frequency scaling code as much as Intel does to their P-State scaling driver and other areas of power management at large. AMD and Valve have been working to improve the performance/power efficiency for modern AMD platforms running on Steam Play (Proton / Wine) and have spearheaded “ was not very performance/power efficiency for modern AMD platforms…a new CPU performance scaling design for AMD platform which has better performance per watt scaling on such as 3D game like Horizon Zero Dawn with VKD3D-Proton on Steam.” Valve has single-handedly made Linux a viable choice for people who play games, and with the Steam Deck on its way, their efforts are only going to ramp up. They’re doing this for their own bottom line, of course, but this is one of those cases where a corporate interest lines up perfectly with a consumer interest.

In the 1980s, Radio Shack parent Tandy Corp. released a graphical user interface called DeskMate that shipped with its TRS-80 and Tandy personal computers. It made its PCs easier to use and competed with Windows. Let’s take a look back. I’ve never used DeskMate – or Tandy computers in general – but there was a whole (cottage) industry of DOS graphical user interfaces and alternative Windows shells during the 3.x days, most notably Norton Desktop. If you ever have an empty weekend you want to fill up- fire up a DOS or windows 3.x virtual machine, and go to town. You can easily lose days researching this particular technological dead end.

After many months of work, Simon and I are pleased to announce the WireGuardNT project, a native port of WireGuard to the Windows kernel. This has been a monumental undertaking, and if you’ve noticed that I haven’t read emails in about two months, now you know why. WireGuardNT, lower-cased as “wireguard-nt” like the other repos, began as a port of the Linux codebase, so that we could benefit from the analysis and scrutiny that that code has already received. After the initial porting efforts there succeeded, the NT codebase quickly diverged to fit well with native NTisms and NDIS (Windows networking stack) APIs. The end result is a deeply integrated and highly performant implementation of WireGuard for the NT kernel, that makes use of the full gamut of NT kernel and NDIS capabilities. That’s an impressive porting job, and further spreads the availability of this protocol to entirely new users and settings.

IBM today announced IBM z/OS V2.5, the next-generation operating system for IBM Z, designed to accelerate client adoption of hybrid cloud and AI and drive application modernization projects. I have several IBM Z mainframes running in my garage running our family’s Minecraft server. This update will surely lead to downtime, which is a major, major bummer, especially since IBM is shoving ever more ads into z/OS to get us to subscribe to IBM Music.

As a weekend blast from the past, the Linux 5.14 kernel saw some Alpha CPU architecture updates — including various fixes and the removal of an Alpha-specific binary loader for running a decades dated x86 software emulator. While past the merge window, the Linux 5.14 code this week has dropped “binfmt_em86” from the kernel. This is an Alpha binary loader for Linux focused on running i386/i486 binaries via the EM86 emulator in user-space. This was part of the effort for allowing Intel Linux x86 binaries back in the day to run on DEC Alpha hardware. How will I run x86 Linux binaries on my AlphaServer ES47 now? What a preposterous commit. Linux is definitely going down the drain.

Last week Microsoft released Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22000.100 to everyone in the Dev Channel. After no major issues were detected, Microsoft has released the same build to the more stable Beta channel. Microsoft suggests those who would like to test Windows 11 but who are not ready for the wild Dev channel ride may want to switch to the Beta channel now. Microsoft also said they will not be releasing a Dev channel build this week. This is the first what you could call beta release of Windows 11, hinting that Microsoft is well on track to release Windows 11 later this Fall.

Today, we’re announcing additional details for the upcoming safety section in Google Play. At Google, we know that feeling safe online comes from using products that are secure by default, private by design, and give users control over their data. This new safety section will provide developers a simple way to showcase their app’s overall safety. Developers will be able to give users deeper insight into their privacy and security practices, as well as explain the data the app may collect and why — all before users install the app. Ultimately, all Google Play store apps will be required to share information in the safety section. We want to give developers plenty of time to adapt to these changes, so we’re sharing more information about the data type definitions, user journey, and policy requirements of this new feature. This basically means Android and the Play Store are getting the same kind of privacy labels as Apple introduced in iOS and the App Store. This is competition at work, and it’s great that both platforms will soon offer this feature.

Despite having officially launched earlier this year, there’s still quite a bit of mystery around Google’s next operating system, Fuchsia. To help explain the most important details, two Googlers have shared a video tour and Q&A with much of what you might want to know about Fuchsia OS. This is an hour-long deep dive into Fuchsia, and it’s definitely not for the faint of heart. If you ever wanted to know anything about the inner workings of Google’s new operating system that seems bound to replace everything from Android to Chrome OS, this is your chance.

The IBM PC spawned the basic architecture that grew into the dominant Wintel platform we know today. Once heavy, cumbersome and power thirsty, it’s a machine that you can now emulate on a single board with a cheap commodity microcontroller. That’s thanks to work from , who has shared a how-to on Youtube. The full playlist is quite something to watch, showing off a huge number of old-school PC applications and games running on the platform. There’s QBASIC, FreeDOS, Windows 3.0, and yes, of course, Flight Simulator. The latter game was actually considered somewhat of a de facto standard for PC compatibility in the 1980s, so the fact that the ESP32 can run it with code suggests he’s done well. This is excellent work, and while there’s tons of better ways to emulate an old IBM PC, they’re not as cool as running it on a cheap microcontroller.

Remember Framework, the company building a repairable, modular laptop? The first reviews are in, and it seems they’re quite positive – people are wondering why none of the other big OEMs are capable of making a thin, light, and sturdy laptop with this amount of upgradeability and repairability. Linus from Linus Tech Tips made a long, detailed video about the laptop as well, and was so impressed he bought one right away. I have to say – this laptop has me very, very intrigued. It hits all the right buttons, with the only major uncertainty being just how long a relatively small company like this can stay afloat, to ensure a steady stream of future upgrades. It seems anyone can make new modules and new parts for this laptop, though, so hopefully a community of makers springs up around it as well. In any event, I’m hoping to get my hands on a review unit, because we really need to know how well Linux runs on this machine.

Poetry is in motion. The Haiku Project, its developers and team members announced the Haiku operating system released its third beta release, version R1/Beta3, July 25th, 2021. Version R1B3 continues the trend of more frequent releases to provide users and developers with an up to date and stable platform to work on. This release combines the best of Haiku’s history as a spiritual successor of BeOS and the hard work of a passionate community. It provides several new features and performance improvements that make Haiku even better. WebKit, the backend of the bundled web browser developed by the Haiku team, WebPositive, received multiple major improvements. This provides a good base for further improvements as well as an improved browsing and website rendering experience in WebPositive, which developers will continue to focus on for the next release, Beta 4 and as Haiku nears its first initial release, R1. Going from beta 2 to beta 3 is a giant leap if you haven’t been keeping up. Haiku is much farther along than people think, with the biggest drawback being, as always, that hardware support is going to be a mixed bag. Haiku is still every bit as clean, fast, and enticing as the original BeOS was over two decades ago, and I’ve scored two junkyard office PCs to see if I can get a proper Haiku box running.

In today’s Intel Accelerated event, the company is driving a stake into the ground regarding where it wants to be by 2025. CEO Pat Gelsinger earlier this year stated that Intel would be returning to product leadership in 2025, but hasn’t yet explained how this is coming about – that is until today, where Intel has disclosed its roadmap for its next five generations of process node technology leading to 2025. Intel believes it can follow an aggressive strategy to match and pass its foundry rivals, while at the same time developing new packaging offerings and starting a foundry business for external customers. On top of all this, Intel has renamed its process nodes. Counting Intel out because they’re facing some really tough years is not very smart. I obviously have no idea when they’ll be on top again, but this industry has proven to have its ups and downs for the two major players, and I have little doubt the roles will become reversed again over time.

While Loongson has been known for their MIPS-based Loongson chips that are open-source friendly and have long been based on MIPS, with MIPS now being a dead-end, the Chinese company has begun producing chips using its own “LoongArch” ISA. The first Loongson 3A5000 series hardware was just announced and thanks to the company apparently using the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org we have some initial numbers. Announced this week was the Loongson 3A5000 as their first LoongArch ISA chip that is quad-core with clock speeds up to 2.3~2.5GHz. Loongson 3A5000 offers a reported 50% performance boost over their prior MIPS-based chips while consuming less power and now also supporting DDR4-3200 memory. The Loongson 3A5000 series is intended for domestic Chinese PCs without relying on foreign IP and there is also the 3A5000LL processors intended for servers. Performance isn’t even remotely interesting – for now. The Loongson processors will improve by leaps and bounds over the coming years, if only because it will have the backing of the regime. I hope some enterprising people import these to the west, because I’d love to see them in action. Nothing in technology excites me more than odd architectures.

Google has provided a few more details about the upcoming release of Wear OS 3, which combines Samsung’s Tizen with Google’s Wear OS. Sadly, but not unexpectedly, pretty much no existing Wear OS devices will be updated to Wear OS 3. Wear OS devices that will be eligible for upgrade include Mobvoi’s TicWatch Pro 3 GPS, TicWatch Pro 3 Cellular/LTE, TicWatch E3 and follow on TicWatch devices, as well as Fossil Group’s new generation of devices launching later this year. It would seem existing devices simply aren’t powerful enough, so the four existing Wear OS users – I’m one of them – are shit out of luck.

Google can’t seem to catch a break when it comes to Chrome OS 91. First we saw many users reporting their devices using an egregious amount of CPU after upgrading to 91.0.4472.147. While Google pulled the update shortly thereafter and rolled everyone back to 91.0.4472.114, that managed to lock out Linux apps. Now we’re seeing the arrival of 91.0.4772.165, and this update introduces an awful bug that’s breaking Chromebooks left and right. So what happened? Thanks to the work of an eagle-eyed user on Reddit, we now know that a single typo appears responsible for locking so many users out of their Chromebooks. By looking at the diff in this file, we can see that Google forgot to add a second “&” to the conditional statement, preventing Chrome OS from decrypting your login information (required to log you in). This kind of sloppiness is what you get in an industry where there really aren’t any consequences to speak of for screwing things up. It’s not like software development is a real industry with strict product safety laws or anything.

California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) says that renowned game publishing studio Blizzard Entertainment, and its owner Activision Blizzard, have created a culture of “constant sexual harassment” and gender-based discrimination, in a new lawsuit filed Tuesday that claims top executives were aware and/or involved. And in the hours since the suit was revealed, numerous women have already stepped forward to corroborate the allegations. The details are so disturbing that we’re going to start with a trigger warning right now. The idea that male employees held “cube crawls” is one of the tamer allegations in the lawsuit. This is by far the worst case of structural sexual abuse at a gaming company to date, and you really need to the read the full complaint to understand just how criminal the behaviour of male Activision Blizzard employees and managers has been, but some of these examples should give you a good idea. It even led to the suicide of one of the female employees at the company. The abuse was so widespread, so pervasive, so depraved, and so institutionalised, that in my view, we’re dealing with a criminal organisation that ought to be shut down and banned, much like any other criminal organisation. The fact this is a company (or a religious institution, for that matter) should be of no consequence. The complain itself is the result not of a single employee or one particular case, but of a two year investigation by California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing.

Plasma Mobile 21.07 has been released, with a ton of improvements and fixes. The shell is now more responsive, by improving performance of the panel. On top of that, there’s countless fixes and improvements in the various applications, such as the podcasts application, the dialer, the SMS app, and more.