OSnews

DuckDuckGo’s premise is simple. They do not collect or share personal information. They log searches, but they promise that these logs are not linked to personally identifiable information. Their search engine results seemingly come from Bing, but they claim to have their own crawler and hundreds of other sources on top of that. They do customize the results a little: geo-searches like bars near my location give me results from my home city of New York. But search results aren’t personalized. I’ve always wondered how good the results would be. DuckDuckGo is my default, main search engine on all my computers and devices. Every now and then I do use the g command to tell DDG to do a Google search, but overall, I’m incredibly satisfied with how DDG performs.

Admittedly it’s been while since I last wrote about this (formerly MATE-based) desktop environment, but it’s still out there, shipping as default experience in Ubuntu Kylin, doing its thing. But not for much longer, it seems. Based on an updated shared on Chinese social media, the UKUI team appear to be rebuilding UKUI using Qt. The plan, they say, is to stick to to the same “easy, excellent, expert, elaborate” mantra that the original UKUI desktop was (supposedly) built to. I’m highlighting this here because there’s a ton of interesting Linux desktop work going on in China that we in the west rarely talk about, such as Deepin and its Qt-based Deepin Desktop Environment that’s also available on some other distributions. UKUI fits in that same bucket. There’s, of course, legitimate concerns over code from China, but since these projects are open source, it would seem there’s little to worry about on that front. The fact of the matter is that, totalitarian dictatorship or not, Chinese people are just regular folks, and many of them are probably excellent programmers and designers that can contribute a lot to the health, variety, and competition within the desktop Linux and wider open source community.

Want a more capable and less restrictive operating system on your iPhone? Enter Project Sandcastle. The iPhone restricts users to operate inside a sandbox. But when you buy an iPhone, you own the iPhone hardware. Android for the iPhone gives you the freedom to run a different operating system on that hardware. Android for the iPhone has many exciting practical applications, from forensics research to dual-booting ephemeral devices to combatting e-waste. Our goal has always been to push mobile research forward, and we’re excited to see what the developer community builds from this foundation. This project has some serious pedigree to it, from the original developers behind Android for the very first iPhone, to Corellium, a company Apple is suing because Corellium offers virtualised iOS devices in the cloud for developers. There’s so much going on here I barely know where to start. In any event, the current Android for iPhone beta only supports the iPhone 7 and 7+, but not every part of them, and other devices are clearly in the very early stages. The source code to Project Sandcastle is available on Github. I hope this will one day lead to Android running well on all sorts of iPhone models, if only because it is such a delightful slap in the face to Apple’s anti-consumer restrictions on its hardware and software.

In 2016, through a series of joint ventures and created companies, AMD licensed the design of its first generation Zen x86 processors to be sold into China. The goal of this was two-fold: China wanted a ‘home grown’ solution for high-performance x86 compute, and AMD at the time needed a cash injection. The outcome of this web of businesses was the Hygon Dhyana range of processors, which ranged from commercial to server use. Due to the Zen 1 design on which it was based, it has been assumed that the performance was in line with Ryzen 1000 and Naples EPYC, and no-one in the west has publicly tested the hardware. Thanks to a collaboration with our friend Wendell Wilson over at YouTube channel Level1Techs, we now have the first full review of the Hygon CPUs. This is such an intriguing story. This specific joint venture – underreported and unknown to many in the west – may prove invaluable to Chinese own tech sector for years to come.

Did you ever load up your modern Windows 10 PC, ready to install your favourite application or game, only to be greeted by a dialog telling you it won’t run, and then you realise you’re trying to run a 16 bit application on your modern 64 bit Windows 10 installation? I swear to god, this happens to me all the time. Luckily, there’s a solution to this problem. In fact, there’s multiple solutions to this problem. Of course, you can always just fire up a virtual machine with 32 bit Windows, Windows 3.1, or OS/2 for massive style points, but that’s cumbersome and uncool (except for OS/2. OS/2 is always cool). There’s a better way. Enter winevdm by otya128, which is a combination of MAME’s i386 emulation and the 16 bit part of wine. It allows you to run 16 bit applications on modern 64 bit versions of Windows. Edward Mendelson created a handy installer with some additional useful tools to make the process even easier. As a sidenote, there’s also NTVDMx64, which is a version of Microsoft’s own NTVDM (Windows NT’s virtual DOS machine) adapted for 64 bit (Mendelson made a handy installer for this one, too). By its very nature, NTVDMx64 doesn’t run Windows 16 bit applications; only DOS ones. It is also important to note that NTVDMx64 is based on leaked Windows NT source code, so please be careful in which settings you use it. There’s no real reason I’m talking about this today, other than the fact I that I ran into this stuff a few days ago when watching a YouTube video about running the IBM WorkPlace Shell for Windows 3.x on Windows 10, and thought it was fascinating. It might prove useful for some of you working at companies still running old 16 bit stuff, or if you’re digging around in your old floppy collection.

For those unfamiliar, PowerShell 7 is the latest major update to PowerShell, a cross-platform (Windows, Linux, and macOS) automation tool and configuration framework optimized for dealing with structured data (e.g. JSON, CSV, XML, etc.), REST APIs, and object models. PowerShell includes a command-line shell, object-oriented scripting language, and a set of tools for executing scripts/cmdlets and managing modules. Do we have any PowerShell users on OSNews? If so, why are you using it, and what for?

Firefox 75 due to be released next month should finally have its native Wayland support in good order. Merged yesterday were the Firefox Wayland patches for VA-API video acceleration support in conjunction with FFmpeg. And so the slow, almost never-ending march towards Wayland continues. I wonder if the march will ever end,

Today we have the launch of the Ampere Altra Arm CPUs. This is a completely new design built specifically for cloud providers. It has up to 80 cores and is designed to go head-to-head with AMD EPYC 7002 “Rome” series processors as well as 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Refresh parts. Ampere is launching today but we do not have a test system as we have had for all of the other major server chip launches recently. It sounds like Ampere is shipping mass production units soon, but not at the time we were briefed. Hopefully, we can get more hands-on insights in the near future. In this article, we are going to discuss the architecture based on the documents we have and our discussion with the company. We are going to check performance claims and help our readers critically analyze what they are being shown. We are then going to discuss systems disclosed with the chips before getting to our final thoughts. This seems like an impressive piece of engineering, but we’ll definitely need test systems and proper reviews to test the claims about the chip. While I’m very happy AMD is back in the game and we’ve got some real competition to Intel, we as consumers would benefit even more from proper ISA competition, something we haven’t seen in a long time.

This post will give you a quick intro to the basics of GUI programming for SerenityOS. A one-line introduction that covers the article perfectly. A rarity, indeed. We covered SerenityOS late last year.

Many older VPN offerings are “way too huge and complex, and it’s basically impossible to overview and verify if they are secure or not,” says Jan Jonsson, CEO of VPN service provider Mullvad, which powers Firefox maker Mozilla’s new VPN service. That explains some of the excitement around WireGuard, an open source VPN software and protocol that will soon be part of the Linux kernel—the heart of the open source operating system that powers everything from web servers to Android phones to cars. I’ve always been wary of the countless VPN services littering YouTube and podcast sponsor slots, since you can never be quite sure if you can trust them. Luckily I don’t need a VPN, but I’m glad Linux is getting it built-in.

Speaking about LSDJ, the premiere music software for the Game Boy, George Buckenham writes: But it also got me thinking about chorded input schemes. LSDJ is a workhorse of a program, able to do a lot of stuff. And it’s designed to let you do that stuff quickly – to let you iterate fast, put down a tune fast, adjust things while you’re standing on stage. But also… a Gameboy has 8 buttons – 4 directions, A, B, SELECT and START. So it has to make those buttons work hard. And that’s where chording comes in. Chording is a means of inputting commands to software by holding down multiple buttons at once. Ctrl-C is an example of a chorded command. Hold down Ctrl, then press C while you’re doing it. Text copied. But you can also make chording work harder than that. It requires a lot of planning and thinking to make a complex application controllable by only a few buttons, such as the mere 8 buttons on the original Game Boy. I wouldn’t want to be in the shoes of developers who have to make things work with limitations such as these.

The Chinese government has facilitated the mass transfer of Uyghur and other ethnic minority citizens from the far west region of Xinjiang to factories across the country. Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour, Uyghurs are working in factories that are in the supply chains of at least 83 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen. The current coronavirus outbreak is showing us once again just how dependent the world is on Chinese manufacturing. The companies implicated in this report – technology companies in particular, since this is OSNews – need all these Chinese workers to function, to exist, and to grow their revenue and Cayman Islands money piles even more, more, more. Do you really think Tim Cook loses one night of sleep over a few thousand Muslims ground to minced meat between the cogs of his manufacturing empire?

While open source software is taking over the world, a push for open source hardware has been quietly building. The RISC-V Foundation has been pushing its open sourced instruction set architecture for chips based on the long-established paradigms for reduced instruction set computing. And one of its most vocal advocates is Calista Redmond, the chief executive of the RISC-V Foundation, which is working to promote its adoption. This is a slow burn. RISC-V won’t change the world overnight, but will slowly but surely seep into every corner of the computing industry – and looking at the incompatible, closed-source mess that is the ARM world, we really need RISC-V on all those millions of embedded devices we use every day.

The other day I set out to solve a seemingly simple problem: With a DOS extended application, lock down memory buffers using DPMI and use them for bus-mastering (BusLogic SCSI HBA, though the exact device model isn’t really relevant to the problem). Now, DPMI does not allow querying the physical address of a memory region, although it does have provisions for mapping a given physical memory area. But that doesn’t help here–mapping physical memory is useful for framebuffers where a device memory needs to be mapped so that an application can access it. In my case, I needed the opposite, allowing a bus-mastering device to use already-allocated system memory. I think I may have understood some of these words.

In software development, and especially Google’s development cycles, there’s usually a point where the developers “eat their own dogfood” or use their own work, before letting normal users try it. It seems that Google’s long-in-development Fuchsia OS may finally be reaching this “dogfood” stage. And yet, we’re still no closer to what, exactly, Fuchsia is going to be for.

The SeaMonkey project is a community effort to develop the SeaMonkey Internet Application Suite (see below). Such a software suite was previously made popular by Netscape and Mozilla, and the SeaMonkey project continues to develop and deliver high-quality updates to this concept. Containing an Internet browser, email & newsgroup client with an included web feed reader, HTML editor, IRC chat and web development tools, SeaMonkey is sure to appeal to advanced users, web developers and corporate users. SeaMonkey has been around for a while, and I’m sure many of you are familiar with it. It’s effectively a modern continuation of the more classic Mozilla browser, the Mozilla Application Suite, which also included a news reader, email client, and so on. Not exactly the kind of thing most people want to use today, but there must still be a place for it in today’s era. That being said, the project just released its latest new version, 2.53.1, so I figured I’d highlight it here.

While it doesn’t get the same attention as their high-profile mobile, desktop, or server CPU offerings, AMD’s embedded division is an important fourth platform for the chipmaker. To that end, this week the company is revealing its lowest-power Ryzen processors ever, with a new series of embedded chips that are designed for use in ultra-compact commercial and industrial systems. The chips in question are the AMD Ryzen Embedded R1102G and the AMD Ryzen Embedded R1305G SoCs. These parts feature a 6 W or a configurable 8 W – 10 W TDP, respectively. Both SoCs feature two Zen cores with or without simultaneous multithreading, AMD Radeon Vega 3 graphics, 1 MB L2 cache, 4 MB L3 cache, a single channel or a dual-channel memory controller, and two 10 GbE ports. Two quite capable chips. I’ve always liked these low-power chips and have, on numerous occasions, pondered buying the devices these kinds of chips tend to end up in – small industrial machines, thin clients, that sort of stuff – since they’re cheap and abundant on eBay. Sadly, I can never quite find a use for them.

Are you constantly annoyed that your smartphone battery dies before the rest of the phone? Angry about the wastage that creates? Well, leaked EU proposals could force smartphone manufacturers to to make all batteries removable. That would mean that all brands wanting to sell in the EU would have to make sure each phone has a battery that can be removed by the user – and that even would include Apple, the company most resistant to legislation around its iPhone designs, if attempts to make it change ports in the past is anything to go by. This makes perfect sense. People are keeping their phones for longer and longer, so the ability to easily and quickly replace the battery is a big boon.

I stopped there because we had to get back to work, but without even leaving the Finder and Desktop I was able to find a bunch of things that long-time Mac users had never known about because they never discovered them in their daily use. None of this is meant to say macOS is garbage or anything like that. It’s just interesting to see when people who love the Mac and are so critical of “discoverability” on the iPad. I’m not even saying the iPad is better than the Mac here, I’m just saying that “discoverability” is one of the big things that has people in a tizzy right now about the iPad, but I think some are laying into the iPad harder than is warranted. You have no idea how many undiscoverable or obtuse features, functions, tricks, and so on you take for granted when using old, established platforms like Windows or macOS.

The third beta version of iOS 13.4 reveals the existence of a new feature called “OS Recovery”, which is quite suggestive. As best we can tell, it looks like a new way to restore an iPhone, iPad, and other Apple devices without the need to connect them to a computer. It’s not yet possible to access it in the system as the feature is still under development and it could be scrapped at any time. According to what we found in the system, it would be possible to restore the iOS directly over-the-air as well as by connecting the device via USB to another iPhone or iPad, similar to how Apple’s Migration Tool works. This seems like one of those things that should’ve been the default for years now on both iOS and Android – so much so that I had to stop and think twice just to remember it isn’t, yet.

Today, Firefox began the rollout of encrypted DNS over HTTPS (DoH) by default for US-based users. The rollout will continue over the next few weeks to confirm no major issues are discovered as this new protocol is enabled for Firefox’s US-based users. At the creation of the internet, these kinds of threats to people’s privacy and security were known, but not being exploited yet. Today, we know that unencrypted DNS is not only vulnerable to spying but is being exploited, and so we are helping the internet to make the shift to more secure alternatives. We do this by performing DNS lookups in an encrypted HTTPS connection. This helps hide your browsing history from attackers on the network, helps prevent data collection by third parties on the network that ties your computer to websites you visit. We can only hope other browsers will follow soon. This is a very important and great improvement.

Live Tiles have been a signature feature of the Windows OS interface since the launch of Windows 8. But these colorful, info-packed squares appear to be on their way into the trash bin. This should’ve been obvious to anyone who’s been keeping an eye on Windows development. Live tiles were amazing on Windows Phone, but never really fit desktop computing. I’m glad they’re going away.

I was on vacation for a few days, so I’m catching up on some of the more interesting news items from the past few days. This is one of them. Following an inadvertent tease last week, Google today officially launched the Android 11 Developer Preview. This is the fifth consecutive year that the company is providing an early look at its next major operating system. In more ways than one, this initial Android 11 preview is defined by an “earlier than ever” launch. The majority of past releases arrived in the second week of March, with Google this year wanting to give developers more time to provide feedback and prepare applications to new platform features. Very much an early release, so there’s not a lot of exciting user-facing features right now.

Google is planning to move its British users’ accounts out of the control of European Union privacy regulators, placing them under U.S. jurisdiction instead, sources said. The shift, prompted by Britain’s exit from the EU, will leave the sensitive personal information of tens of millions with less protection and within easier reach of British law enforcement. Brexiteers getting what they wanted and deserve.

Apple Inc. is considering giving rival apps more prominence on iPhones and iPads and opening its HomePod speaker to third-party music services after criticism the company provides an unfair advantage to its in-house products. The technology giant is discussing whether to let users choose third-party web browser and mail applications as their default options on Apple’s mobile devices, replacing the company’s Safari browser and Mail app, according to people familiar with the matter. Since launching the App Store in 2008, Apple hasn’t allowed users to replace pre-installed apps such as these with third-party services. That has made it difficult for some developers to compete, and has raised concerns from lawmakers probing potential antitrust violations in the technology industry. Just the mere possibility of antitrust action is making Apple considering changes to improve competition – the strength of legal action. Of course, these concessions are way too little, and especially the EU will want more than just competing Safari skins – that’s all third-party iOS browsers really are – and mail clients.

Quibble is the custom Windows bootloader – an open-source reimplementation of the files bootmgfw.efi and winload.efi, able to boot every version of Windows from XP to Windows 10 1909. Unlike the official bootloader, it is extensible, allowing you to boot from other filesystems than just NTFS. This is only a proof of concept at this stage – don’t use this for anything serious. Quibble can boot Windows from Btrfs, which is impressive enough in its own right.

One of the projects I have been watching with curiosity over the past year is /e/ (formerly Eelo), a mobile operating system that is based on Android, but with the pieces associated with Google’s software and services removed. The removed pieces have been replaced with alternatives, so that it still functions as a complete mobile operating system. DistroWatch is quite impressed with the release, while noting it still has some rough edges. The /e/ phone does not offer all the apps Android does, and it might not be entirely polished yet in the re-branding experience. However, it does provide a very solid, mostly Android compatible experience without the Google bits. The /e/ team offers a wider range of hardware support than most other iOS and Android competitors, it offers most of the popular Android apps people will probably want to use (I only discovered a few missing items I wanted), and the on-line cloud services are better than those of any other phone I’ve used (including Ubuntu One and Google). I’d certainly recommend /e/ for more technical users who can work around minor rough edges and who won’t get confused by the unusual branding and semi-frequent permission prompts. I’m not sure if I’d hand one of these phones over to an Android power-user who uses a lot of niche apps, but this phone would certainly do well in the hands of, for instance, my parents or other users who tend to interact with their phones for texting, phone calls, and the calendar without using many exotic applications. That’s quite impressive, and while unlikely, it would be great to have a stable, fully functional Android ROM that’s Google-free.

Why a rotary cellphone? Because in a finicky, annoying, touchscreen world of hyperconnected people using phones they have no control over or understanding of, I wanted something that would be entirely mine, personal, and absolutely tactile, while also giving me an excuse for not texting. The point isn’t to be anachronistic. It’s to show that it’s possible to have a perfectly usable phone that goes as far from having a touchscreen as I can imagine, and which in some ways may actually be more functional. Genius.

If you or your organization needs to synchronize data between email directories & databases, please visit their website and take a look.

Steve Streza, developer and all-around good guy, writing about Apple turning iOS into adware: Over the years, Apple has built up a portfolio of services and add-ons that you pay for. Starting with AppleCare extended warranties and iCloud data subscriptions, they expanded to Apple Music a few years ago, only to dramatically ramp up their offerings last year with TV+, News+, Arcade, and Card. Their services business, taken as a whole, is quickly becoming massive; Apple reported $12.7 billion in Q1 2020 alone, nearly a sixth of its already gigantic quarterly revenue. All that money comes from the wallets of 480 million subscribers, and their goal is to grow that number to 600 million this year. But to do that, Apple has resorted to insidious tactics to get those people: ads. Lots and lots of ads, on devices that you pay for. iOS 13 has an abundance of ads from Apple marketing Apple services, from the moment you set it up and all throughout the experience. These ads cannot be hidden through the iOS content blocker extension system. Some can be dismissed or hidden, but most cannot, and are purposefully designed into core apps like Music and the App Store. There’s a term to describe software that has lots of unremovable ads: adware, which what iOS has sadly become. Apple, decidedly not an ad company, puts tons of ads into iOS, while Google, decidedly very much an ad company, puts basically zero ads in Android. Yet, this is something we rarely talk about because for some reason, we seem to just accept platform owners treating users like garbage and negatively impacting the user experience to try and get them to subscribe to “services”. Apple is undertaking a massive push to get iOS users to subscribe to more and more services, and the company has clearly shown it has no qualms about degrading the user experience to get there. And of course, while you can block every other company’s ads on iOS – you can’t block Apple’s ads, since the rules Apple sets for third parties don’t apply to Apple itself, and you can’t change your default applications either. Now that you’re locked into their ecosystem, Apple is going to try every sleazy tactic under the sun to try and get you to subscribe to their services. Have fun.

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.0, the seventeenth major release of the NetBSD operating system. This release brings significant improvements in terms of hardware support, quality assurance, security, along with new features and hundreds of bug fixes. Support for the ARM architecture seems to be a major pillar of this new release.

In early May of 2019, Google submitted patches to merge support for the Incremental File System into the Linux kernel. According to the documentation that Google submitted, Incremental FS is a “special-purpose Linux virtual file system that allows execution of a program while its binary and resource files are still being lazily downloaded over the network, USB etc.” The purpose of this feature is “to allow running big Android apps before their binaries and resources are fully downloaded to an Android device.” Isn’t this already possible in various other ways, though? I mean, PlayStation 4 games can be played well before they’re entirely downloaded, as can Blizzard games, to name a few. I’m pretty sure those just load early-game assets first, so I’m not sure if that aligns with that Google is doing here, but this kind of feels like a solved problem.

Hot off the presses is our latest stable, version 1.5.0, marking the second stable release since the last progress report. In this past year, support has been added for multiple new platforms to make the emulator accessible, performance has dramatically increased, new features such as save states and cheat support have landed to make emulating more fun, and numerous accuracy improvements were made to continue polishing the overall emulation experience. I love these detailed overviews of changes in emulators. Dolphin started the trend, I think, and now this team is picking it up.

Besides the architectural progress, the CDC6600 was impressive for its clock speed of 10 MHz. This may not sound much, but consider that this was a physically very large machine entirely built from discrete resistors and transistors in the early 60ies. Not a single integrated circuit was involved. For comparison, the PDP-8, released in 1965 and also based on discrete logic, had a clock speed of 1.5 MHz. The first IBM PC, released 20 years later, was clocked at less than half the speed of the CDC6600 despite being based on integrated circuits. The high clockrate is even more impressive when comparing it to more recent (hobbyist) attempts to design CPUs with discrete components such as the MT15, the Megaprocessor or the Monster6502. Although these are comparatively small designs based on modern components, none of them get to even a tenth of the CDC6600 clock speed. Detailed look at the speed of the CDC6600.

Microsoft released its first emulator for Windows 10X today, allowing developers to get a first look at the new operating system variant for dual-screen devices. Microsoft wants to give developers a head start on optimizing apps before devices launch later this year, so this basic emulator provides an early look at Windows 10X before it’s finalized. My first thoughts? Windows 10X feels like a slightly more modern version of Windows 10 that has been cleaned up for future devices. In Windows 10X, everything is new. There’s none of the old Win32 code and applications lying around, or fallbacks to old Win32 dialogs. Everything is a Modern application (or whatever they call it these days), including things like the file manager – the traditional Explorer is gone. While Windows 10X does support Win32 applications, they run in a container. As detailed in this video from Microsoft (select the video titled “How Windows 10X runs UWP and Win32 apps”), Windows 10X has three containers – Win32, MSIX, and Native. Win32 applications run inside a single Win32 container, capable of running pretty much anything “classic” you can throw at it, such as Win32, WinForms, Electron, and so on. MSIX containers are basically slightly more advanced classic applications, and these containers run inside the Win32 container as well. The Native container runs all the modern/UWP applications. The Win32 container is actually a lot more involved than you might think. As you can see in the below overview diagram from the video, the container contains a kernel, drivers, the needed files, a registry, and so on. It’s effectively an entire traditional Win32 Windows operating system running inside Windows 10X. Applications running inside the Win32 container are entirely isolated from the rest of the host Windows 10X operating system, and Windows 10X interacts with them through specialised, performance-optimised RDP clients – one for each Win32 application. This seems to finally be what many of us have always wanted out of a next-generation Windows release: move all the cruft and compatibility to a glorified virtual machine, so that the remainder of the operating system can be modernised and improved without having to take compatbility into account. For now, Windows 10X seems focused on dual screen devices, but a lot of people in the know seem to think this is the actual future of Windows. Time will tell if this is actually finally really the case, but this does look promising.

Apple has $209 billion in cash on hand. California law requires Apple Inc. to pay its workers for being searched before they leave retail stores, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously Thursday. A group of Apple workers filed a class-action lawsuit against the tech giant, charging they were required to submit to searches before leaving the stores but were not compensated for the time those searches required. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, where the case is now pending, asked the California Supreme Court to clarify whether state law requires compensation. In a decision written by Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye, the court said an industrial wage order defines hours worked as “the time during which an employee is subject to the control of an employer, and includes all the time the employee is suffered or permitted to work, whether or not required to do so.” I repeat, Apple has $209 billion in cash on hand. Since it’s really hard to imagine how much even just one billion dollars really is, this demonstration should give you a very good idea. One billion dollars is way, way, way more than you think it is. Apple has 209 times that in cash on hand.

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software. But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the company’s devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages. The article is behind a paywall, sadly, but I figured it’s important enough to link to.

NEXTSPACE is a desktop environment that brings a NeXTSTEP look and feel to Linux. I try to keep the user experience as close as possible to the original NeXT’s OS. It is developed according to the “OpenStep User Interface Guidelines“. I want to create a fast, elegant, reliable, and easy to use desktop environment with maximum attention to user experience (usability) and visual maturity. In the future I would like to see it as a platform where applications will be running with a taste of NeXT’s OS. Core applications such as Login, Workspace, and Preferences are the base for future application development and examples of style and application integration methods. NEXTSPACE is not just a set of applications loosely integrated to each other. It is a core OS with frameworks, mouse cursors, fonts, colors, animations, and everything I think will help users to be effective and happy. KDE, GNOME, Xfce, and later MATE and Cinnamon have sucked up so much of the Linux desktop space that there’s very little room left for anything else. You’re either mainly a Qt desktop, or mainly a GTK+ desktop, and anything that isn’t based on either of those toolkits will either waste time recreating lots of wheels, or accept that half – or more – of your applications are Qt or GTK+-based, at which point the temptation to run one of the aforementioned desktop environments becomes quite strong. This project, while very welcome and having my full support and attention, will have a very hard time, but that’s not going to deter me from being hopeful against all odds. Reading through the documentation and descriptions, it does seem the developers have the right attitude. They’re not claiming to take on the other players – they just want to make something that appeals to and works for them.

A brand new version of the Plasma desktop is now available. In Plasma 5.18 you will find neat new features that make notifications clearer, settings more streamlined and the overall look more attractive. Plasma 5.18 is easier and more fun to use, while at the same time allowing you to be more productive when it is time to work. A lot welcome changes and polish, and I’m particularly pleased with the death of the insipid ‘cashew’ menu that resided in the top-right of the KDE desktop. You had to dive into the settings to remove it, but now it’s been replaced by a global edit mode that’s entirely invisible until you enable it, following in the footsteps of similar edit modes in Cinnamon and other user interfaces.

After about a year of development, the MATE Desktop team have finally released MATE 1.24. A big thank you to all contributors who helped to make this happen. This release contains plenty of new features, bug-fixes, and general improvements. That’s an impressive list. I prefer Cinnamon and GNOME 3 (after lots of tweaking!) over MATE, but I’m glad MATE exists as a no-nonsense, relatively conservative continuation of GNOME 2.

For the next couple (or maybe more) posts I’ll be explaining how WdFilter works. I’ve always been very interested on how AVs work (Nowadays I would say EDRs though) and their development at kernel level. And since, unfortunately I don’t have access to the source code of any, my only chance is to reverse them (or to write my own). And of course what a better product to check than the one written by the company who developed the OS. For those who don’t know, WdFilter is the main kernel component of Windows Defender. Roughly, this Driver works as a Minifilter from the load order group “FSFilter Anti-Virus”, this means that is attached to the File System stack (Actually, quite high – Big Altitude) and handles I/O operations in some Pre/Post callbacks. Not only that, this driver also implements other techniques to get information of what’s going on in the system. The goal of this series of post is to have a solid understanding on how this works under the hood. Not for the fain of heart.

Microsoft has now started to show text ad for its new Chromium-based Edge in the all apps list. The ad, which shows up under ‘Suggested’ listing for Start menu, recommends using the new version of Microsoft Edge. Surprisingly, the ad is targeting Firefox users. If you have Firefox as your default browser, you might see the advertisement or suggestion in the Start menu. Depending on whether you’re actively using Firefox or other browsers, the recommendation may or may not show up. “Still using Firefox? Microsoft Edge is here,” the ad label reads and it includes a link to download Chromium-based browser. Don’t use operating systems like Windows or iOS which are nothing but bait-and-switch vessels for ads.

Of course, AT&T wasn’t the company that ended up bringing us most of the tech predicted in the “You Will” ads. But it did bring that tablet device to market. It’s called the EO Personal Communicator 440, and while not the first mass-manufactured tablet computer — that honor goes to the GRiDPad, a device sold by Radio Shack’s corporate parent Tandy — the EO is generally considered one of the first tablets with mobile connectivity. Released by AT&T in 1993, not long after the telecom giant bought a majority stake in its maker EO, it was a tantalizing glance into the future. Any article on the EO is an article I will post – I’m a simple man – but that website’s fonts and font colours give me a headache.

Glass is a simulated operating system user interface (UI) project and it is being made with Unity 2018.4. It is not a real OS, although everything in the package is functional and can be changed easily. Not really an operating system, of course, but still a fascinating project. It also highlights just how versatile modern game engines really are – this is the same engine some of my favourite modern cRPGs and Cities: Skylines are running on.

Windows 10 may now be essential but users new and old have had a rough ride in recent weeks. And it has just gotten a lot worse after a new, high-profile Windows 10 failure has left more questions than answers and some seriously angry users. The drama began yesterday as Windows 10 users suddenly found that Search was broken with a black bar showing where search results should be, even for those who tried to perform a local search of their files. This is the future of proprietary operating systems like Windows, macOS and iOS as their parent companies move towards services and subscription models. More and more, they’ll use their operating systems to push their services and subscriptions, to the detriment of the user experience. It’s been happening in Windows 10 for a few years now, and iOS, too, is riddled with ads for Apple’s services. And so, we arrive at the point where local file search breaks down due to server issues. What a time to be alive.

In our tests here (more in our benchmark database), AMD’s 3990X would get the crown over Intel’s dual socket offerings. The only thing really keeping me back from giving it is the same reason there was hesitation on the previous page: it doesn’t do enough to differentiate itself from AMD’s own 32-core CPU. Where AMD does win is in that ‘money is less of an issue scenario’, where using a single socket 64 core CPU can help consolidate systems, save power, and save money. Intel’s CPUs have a TDP of 205W each (more if you decide to use the turbo, which we did here), which totals 410W, while AMD maxed out at 280W in our tests. Technically Intel’s 2P has access to more PCIe lanes, but AMD’s PCIe lanes are PCIe 4.0, not PCIe 3.0, and with the right switch can power many more than Intel (if you’re saving 16k, then a switch is peanuts). We acknowledge that our tests here aren’t in any way a comprehensive test of server level workloads, but for the user base that AMD is aiming for, we’d take the 64 core (or even the 32 core) in most circumstances over two Intel 28 core CPUs, and spend the extra money on memory, storage, or a couple of big fat GPUs. Aside from the artificial maximum memory limitation – which AMD put in place to protect its own Epyc processors – the 3990X is simply a masterpiece. To be able to get 64 cores and 128 threads for a relatively mere $3990 is nothing short of stunning, and while few of us actually need a processor like that, the 3990X shines like the halo product that it is.

Alan Kay said: “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible”. This sentence was the inspiration for the founder of RT-Thread to stick to his beliefs. RT-Thread is an open source embedded real-time operating system, and this project started in 2006. I know you have no idea what RT-Thread is, but you are using an IoT OS system now, that’s where this article may be of interest. Let’s take a quick tour of RT-Thread. RT-Thread: background RT-Thread, short for Real Time-Thread, is, as its name implies, an embedded real-time multi-threaded operating system. One of its basic properties is to support multitasking. Allowing multiple tasks to run at the same time does not mean that the processor actually performs multiple tasks at the same time. In fact, a processor core can only run one task at a time. Every task is executed quickly, and through the task scheduler (the scheduler determines the sequence according to priority), the tasks are switched rapidly, which gives the illusion that multiple tasks are running at the same time. In the RT-Thread system, the task is implemented by threads. The thread scheduler in RT-Thread is the task scheduler mentioned above. RT-Thread is mainly written in C, making it easy to understand and easy to port. It applies object-oriented programming methods to real-time system design, making the code elegant, structured, modular, and tailorable. For resource-constrained Microcontroller Unit (MCU) systems, the NANO version of RT-Thread (tailored from the standard version of RT-Thread), which requires only 3KB of flash and 1.2KB of RAM, can be tailored with easy-to-use tools. For resource-rich IoT devices, RT-Thread can use the online software package management tool, together with system configuration tools, to achieve intuitive and rapid modular cutting, seamlessly import rich software feature packs, thus achieving complex functions like Android’s graphical interface and touch sliding effects, smart voice interaction effects, and so on. RT-Thread’s architecture RT-Thread is not only a real-time kernel, but also has a rich middle-tier component, as shown in the following figure. It includes: The kernel layer: RT-Thread kernel, the core part of RT-Thread, includes the implementation of objects in the kernel system, such as multi-threading and its scheduling, semaphore, mailbox, message queue, memory management, timer, etc.; libcpu/BSP (Chip Migration Related Files/Board Support Package) is closely related to hardware and consists of peripheral drivers and CPU transport. The components and service layer: Components are based on upper-level software on top of the RT-Thread kernel, such as virtual file systems, FinSH command-line interfaces, network frameworks, device frameworks, and more. Its modular design allows for high internal cohesion within the assembly and low coupling between components. The RT-Thread software package: A general-purpose software component running on the RT-Thread IoT operating system platform for different application areas, consisting of description information, source code or library files. RT-Thread provides an open package platform with officially available or developer-supplied packages that provide developers with a choice of reusable packages that are an important part of the RT-Thread ecosystem. The package ecosystem is critical to the choice of an operating system because these packages are highly reusable and modular, making it easy for application developers to build the system they want in the shortest amount of time. RT-Thread supports more than 174 software packages. RT-Thread has launched more than a decade ago, and this is the first time we make an official self-introduction to the world, especially at the beginning of 2020, it feels great! We welcome suggestions for RT-Thread, and you can feel free to contact us on Twitter or send us an e-mail. And if you have any great ideas, you are very welcome to contribute to our Github.

bww Bitwise works has released a port of GCC 9.2 compiler to OS/2 Warp, ArcaOS and eComStation. This is a new milestone for OS/2 software development that allows the community to port more open source software to this platform. The project port is available at github.

One of the great game industry battles of the turn of century was the standoff between Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament. With both multiplayer focused first person shooters released just weeks apart from one another, that the two games would wind up going head to head was inevitable. If pressed I am always going to have to say I favour the former, but the remarkable thing for us Linux users is that, for a time, both games lived harmoniously under the same publisher. While Quake III Arena was granted its place in eternity when its source code was released in 2005, community support for Unreal Tournament was able to breathe some new life into the game, even with the limitations of the closed binary. Even a strong community can’t fix such problems.

Recently, Motherboard obtained a copy of the contract businesses are required to sign before being admitted to Apple’s IRP Program. The contract, which has not previously been made public, sheds new light on a program Apple initially touted as increasing access to repair but has been remarkably silent on ever since. It contains terms that lawyers and repair advocates described as “onerous” and “crazy”; terms that could give Apple significant control over businesses that choose to participate. Concerningly, the contract is also invasive from a consumer privacy standpoint. In order to join the program, the contract states independent repair shops must agree to unannounced audits and inspections by Apple, which are intended, at least in part, to search for and identify the use of “prohibited” repair parts, which Apple can impose fines for. If they leave the program, Apple reserves the right to continue inspecting repair shops for up to five years after a repair shop leaves the program. Apple also requires repair shops in the program to share information about their customers at Apple’s request, including names, phone numbers, and home addresses. Nobody should be surprised by this. The only reason Apple announced this half-hearted program in the first place is to try and take the wind out of the sails of right to repair legislation, which is being proposed all over the US (and beyond), and the terms of this contract only further confirm that. As for the privacy aspect and Apple wanting all that very private user information – if you still think Apple cares about privacy, you really haven’t been paying attention.