OSnews

It’s 2021, and it’s time to upgrade your smartphone. Maybe it’s getting slow, it might be damaged, or your device’s OEM refuses to update your version of Android. Whatever the reason, you set your budget and full of hope and starry-eyed about all the possibilities, you go to your preferred electronics store (or carrier, if you’re American) – and as you scroll through the possible phones, your hopes are shattered and your heart sinks in your shoes. Your choices are between an endless array of black slabs, and while you can technically choose between Android and iOS, you will have most likely made that specific choice ages ago, and switching platforms is hard. Slightly dramatised, sure, but the reality of smartphones today is that all of them look and feel the same. The difference between mid range and high end have shrunk over the years, and while there are still small differences here and there, the general experience is going to be the same from device to device. Even if you skip a few years of upgrades, the jump in performance to the latest and greatest processor isn’t going to make that much of a difference in your day to day use. While you can technically opt for one of the new folding phones, the reality is that they still suffer from early adopter problems, and their prices are far beyond what most of us would want to pay for a smartphone. With all phones looking the same, it’s hard to find a company willing to stand out in a crowd of black rectangles. One of the victims of this race to the rectangle is the smartphone keyboard – whether it’s BlackBerry or Android phones with keyboards, they’re basically no longer being made, and if you’re simply not a fan of typing on featureless glass, you’re pretty much out of luck. Except, not really. There are a few companies left still making smartphones with keyboards, and the British company Planet Computers is one of them. This British company does not just focus on building Android smartphones with keyboards – they take the concept a step further and gun for the iconic Psion devices from the ’90s. The company’s chief designer, Martin Riddiford, worked at Psion in the ’90s and aided in the design of the Psion Series 5’s keyboard, and that design has formed the basis for the company’s first two devices: the Gemini PDA and the Cosmo Communicator. After seeing my sorrowful lament of the Nokia N900, the company contacted me and asked me if I wanted to review their Cosmo Communicator Android smartphone. I obviously didn’t hesitate to say yes, and after a few weeks of delay due to our first child being born, I can finally give you my thoughts and insights on this device that fills a unique niche in the current mobile landscape. Keyboard and hinge The Cosmo Communicator is unlike any other Android device on the market today. As to be expected due to its pedigree, the device resembles a Psion Series 5, or perhaps a Nokia Communicator if you’re more familiar with that line of devices. When closed, the device is thicker and heftier than most other smartphones, but there’s a valid reason for that: open it up, and inside you’ll find a full QWERTY keyboard with real keys. When opened, it looks more like a small laptop than a smartphone. I want to dive straight into that keyboard, since it’s by far the device’s most defining feature. First of all, it’s smaller than a regular keyboard, obviously, so it definitely takes a little time to get used to. I have small hands and tiny fingers, so for me, it wasn’t that hard to get used to the size of the keyboard. The layout of the keys feels natural, and for me, there are no cases where I would’ve opted for keys in different positions. With such a cramped space, you’ll always have to make compromises and hard choices, but I think the Planet team has made all the right choices. The layout will take some getting used to, but that’s to be expected with any new keyboard, especially one in such an exotic form factor. I’m slightly less happy about the actual typing experience, though. Granted, I am a very light typist who applies relatively little force to each key press, but I found that my key presses would often not register unless I applied what I would consider too much force. This problem increases the farther away from the home row I am, and it’s downright annoying. Getting used to a new keyboard layout and smaller keys is one thing – unless you have truly gigantic hands, it won’t take you more than a few days – but having to change how hard you press down on a key is very, very hard to learn. However, as said, if you apply more force for each key press than I do, this might not be much of an issue at all for you. You might wonder if you can use the keyboard when thumb-typing. My hands are definitely too small for thumb-typing, as reaching the centre-most keys requires an uncomfortable amount of stretching and grip adjustments. Again, though, my hands are small, and if you have more average-sized hands, you might be able to thumb-type just fine. The keyboard is backlit, and comes in a variety of keyboard layouts to choose from upon purchase. Using the Fn key, you can also control things like volume, brightness, airplane mode, and other Android-specific features, and Planet was smart enough to include full inverted-T arrow keys. Aside from the cramped size, it comes very close to offering all the functionality of a regular keyboard, and while my personal typing style doesn’t mesh well with it, the Planet team has done a great job given the constraints they were working in. Moving on from the keyboard, the second aspect of the Cosmo that stands out is

It’s that time of the year again, and after last month’s unveiling of Arm’s newest infrastructure Neoverse V1 and Neoverse N2 CPU IPs, it’s now time to cover the client and mobile side of things. This year, things Arm is shaking things up quite a bit more than usual as we’re seeing three new generation microarchitectures for mobile and client: The flagship Cortex-X2 core, a new A78 successor in the form of the Cortex-A710, and for the first time in years, a brand-new little core with the new Cortex-A510. The three new CPUs form a new trio of Armv9 compatible designs that aim to mark a larger architectural/ISA shift that comes very seldomly in the industry. Alongside the new CPU cores, we’re also seeing a new L3 and cluster design with the DSU-110, and Arm is also making a big upgrade in its interconnect IP with the new cache coherent CI-700 mesh network and NI-700 network-on-chip IPs. AnandTech’s usual deep dive into the processors Android devices will be using next year.

Google has made a deal for access to patient records from HCA, which which operates 181 hospitals and more than 2,000 healthcare sites in 21 states, so the tech company can develop healthcare algorithms, The Wall Street Journal reports. Google will store anonymized data from patient health records and internet-connected medical devices. That data will be used to build programs that could inform medical decisions made by doctors. The deal is described as “multiyear” by the WSJ, without specifying how many years. This feels uncomfortable on so many levels.

Microsoft isn’t talking about its big Windows plans at Build 2021 this week, and that’s because the company is preparing to detail what’s next for its PC operating system separately. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella teased this announcement during his Build keynote this morning, revealing he has been testing “the next generation of Windows” in recent months. Windows is in a bit of a rut. As far as its core frameworks and lower levels go, it’s an incredibly solid, fast, extensible, and yes, secure operating system that can chug along just fine. The user experience, however, is a garbled, confusing mess consisting of bits and pieces dating back to Windows 3.11 (if you look hard enough). Almost every part of the operating system has multiple sides to it with different user experiences, looks, and feels, and if you come from a modern Linux distribution, the update experience, installing and managing applications, changing settings, and so on, are just downright laughably bad. The user-facing part of Windows doesn’t just need an overhaul – it’s had countless overhauls over the years, all leaving various bits and pieces around that you still encounter today – but a complete redesign. I think the lower-levels and core frameworks are more than fine, but everything on top of that needs a clean start. Microsoft has promised countless of these “next generations” of Windows, and aside from the move from Win9x to Windows NT, they’ve all been thin, patchy veneers atop all the thin, patchy veneers that came before. After so many empty promises, it’s just hard to take them seriously. Mark my words: this “next generation of Windows” is nothing but a few nips and tucks to the current, existing UI to make it slightly less of an inconsistent mess. Nothing more.

Though it can’t match the high-quality screens and discrete GPUs available in some competing laptops (like the Dell XPS 13 and Alienware m15 r4), Framework offers a unique feature customers can’t find anywhere else right now: control. Laptops have steadily gotten less repairable and upgradeable over time, to the horror of many computing enthusiasts. While we’re starting to see manufacturers ship more notebooks with upgradeable storage and graphics card options, the rest of the components are typically off-limits — and often soldered down in a way that makes trying to replace or upgrade it a dicey proposition at best. By contrast, Framework’s laptop has been designed from the ground up for socket-based modularity. This is a decision Patel claims hasn’t prevented them from achieving nearly the same heights of thinness and lightness as competitors like Apple and Dell have. This is the first review of the Framework Laptop I’ve seen, and it seems very positive. I’m unreasonably excited about this machine, and I’ll try and see if I can get my hands on a review unit. This machine seems like a perfect fit for the average OSNews reader.

Google’s long-in-development, from-scratch operating system, Fuchsia, is now running on real Made by Google devices, namely, the first-generation Nest Hub. Google has told us that as of today, an update is beginning to roll out to owners of the first-generation Nest Hub, first released in 2018. For all intents and purposes, this update will not change any of the functionality of the Nest Hub, but under the hood, the smart display will be running Fuchsia OS instead of the Linux-based “Cast OS” it used before. In fact, your experience with the Nest Hub should be essentially identical. This is possible because Google’s smart display experience is built with Flutter, which is designed to consistently bring apps to multiple platforms, Fuchsia included. A big moment for the Fuchsia team, and the culmination of years and years of work. Google is clearly testing the waters here, allowing the brand new operating system to get some experience under its belt in a relatively controlled environment. Theoretically, Google could do the same transparent rollout on Android devices, since Fuchsia can run Android applications just fine – users wouldn’t even notice. However, I’m sure that is still a few years away.

BlackBerry recognizes the importance of supporting the cybersecurity community in the fight against cyberthreats, and is therefore following up its release of the PE Tree Tool in 2020 by sharing this methodology report to inform security researchers and pen-testers on how to successfully emulate a MacOS ARM64 kernel under QEMU. Pen-testers and researchers can use the virtualized environment of a stripped-down MacOS kernel for debugging and vulnerability discovery, and this illustrates the extent to which one can use emulation to manipulate and control the kernel to their desired ends, whether it be to find a critical bug or to patch an area of the kernel. More importantly, this project was a successful experiment in cross-platform emulation that has the potential for future development. BlackBerry telling you how to virtualise ARM macOS. Yeah.

Whether you like the Eurovision Song Contest or not, no one can claim they don’t put on an extravagant show. After watching the performance last night, the thing that stayed with me most wasn’t the music, but the stunning lighting effects, visual effects and camera work. The 1831 lights, 24 cameras, 380 speakers and hundreds of mics all need orchestration in a way that’s hard to comprehend. Software makes it all possible. This year CuePilot was used to manage the entire production. CuePilot allows them to pre-programme all movement and to create a script for programming the lights, to pass to the camera operators and so on. It even allows them to create an entire pre-visualisation of the show — a 3D rendered simulation — before any footage has been shot. It’s so nice that we work now in, actually it feels like a videogame. I cut my shots in CuePilot, I send it to , they put it in the venue, and the venue is complete 3D of course now, with the light, with the movements, with the LED content and actually I see the song or the performance in actually real time and more-or-less real life. The objective is not just to create an elaborate show, but also to manage the emotions of the audience watching it. Gil Laufer, an MSc student at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and Eurovision fanatic, has researched the effect it has. Our hypothesis was that pre-programmed camera work will result in a more unified experience among the viewers. A unified experience means that in terms of emotions and their intensities, each individual among a group of viewers would feel the same as the other group members. This can be measured and later analyzed using statistical methods. The conclusions drawn from the research is that pre-programmed camera work can result in a more unified experience compared to manual camera work. The ability to do that depends on the overall creativity value of the production, which in turn depends on various aspects such as the number of cameras and the available shooting angles, the production team’s proficiency in using tools as CuePilot, and in the time that the team got to spend on the production. Musical productions may not be the usual fare for OSNews, but the fact is that the sophistication of orchestration, simulation of the final show, and bridging between the software and the hardware its controlling, just wouldn’t be possible without the developments made in operating system and software integration over the last two decades.

For most of the 2010s, the OpenBSD base system has been stuck with GCC 4.2.1. It was released in July 2007, imported into the OpenBSD source tree in October 2009, and became the default compiler on the amd64, i386, hppa, sparc64, socppc and macppc platforms in OpenBSD 4.8, released in November 2010. As specified in the commit message during import, this is the last version released under the GPLv2 license. OpenBSD was not the only operating system sticking to GCC 4.2.1 for licensing reasons, FreeBSD did the same, and Mac OS X as well. As a general rule, and this is not OpenBSD specific, being stuck with old compilers is problematic for several reasons. It seems most platforms OpenBSD supports now come with modern, up-to-date toolchains.

Have you ever want to follow along as someone ports an entire operating system to a new architecture? Well, now you can! Haiku developer X512 is porting the Haiku operating system to RISC-V, and is posting regularly in a long and detailed ongoing thread on the Haiku discussion forum, detailing his successes and struggles along the way. He’s already quite far along: Most things are working, system is quite stable. Now applications crash show error dialog instead of KDL. Also after removing no more needed workarounds (fully allocate stack memory instead of allocating on demand by page fault handler) memory usage was reduced. It’s fun and informative to read the whole thread from the beginning until today, and see the progress unfold as if you’re sitting right next to X512.

One reason these legislative efforts have failed is the opposition, which happens to sell boatloads of new devices every year. Microsoft’s top lawyer advocated against a repair bill in its home state. Lobbyists for Google and Amazon.com Inc. swooped into Colorado this year to help quash a proposal. Trade groups representing Apple Inc. successfully buried a version in Nevada. Telecoms, home appliance firms and medical companies also opposed the measures, but few have the lobbying muscle and cash of these technology giants. While tech companies face high-profile scrutiny in Washington, they quietly wield power in statehouses to shape public policy and stamp out unwelcome laws. Tech companies argue that right-to-repair laws would let pirates rip off intellectual property and expose consumers to security risks. In several statehouses, lobbyists told lawmakers that unauthorized repair shops could damage batteries on devices, posing a threat of spontaneous combustion. What’s good enough for the car industry, is more than good enough for these glorified toaster makers. Cars are basically murder weapons we kind of screwed ourselves into being reliant on, but Apple and Microsoft make complicated toasters that you need to really screw up in order to hurt anyone with. Computer and device makers must be forced to make parts and schematics available to any independent repair shop, just like car makers have to do. So many perfectly capable devices end up in dangerous, toxic landfills in 3rd world countries simply because Apple, Microsoft, and other toaster makers want to increase their bottom line. It’s disgusting behaviour, especially with how sanctimonious they are about protecting the environment and hugging baby seals.

Nyxt is a keyboard-oriented, infinitely extensible web browser designed for power users. Conceptually inspired by Emacs and Vim, it has familiar key-bindings (Emacs, vi, CUA), and is fully configurable in Lisp. A browser like this surely isn’t for me, but I feel there’s quite a few OSNews readers among us who would be interested in something like Nyxt. The developers just released version 2.0 with a massive list of improvements and new features.

Roughly a year ago at Mozilla we started an effort to improve Firefox stability on Linux. This effort quickly became an example of good synergies between FOSS projects. Just a nice feelgood read about collaboration in the open source world – and if you use Firefox on Linux, like I do, this is already benefiting you greatly.

Over the last year, you may have noticed our movement away from Internet Explorer (“IE”) support, such as an announcement of the end of IE support by Microsoft 365 online services. Today, we are at the next stage of that journey: we are announcing that the future of Internet Explorer on Windows 10 is in Microsoft Edge. Not only is Microsoft Edge a faster, more secure and more modern browsing experience than Internet Explorer, but it is also able to address a key concern: compatibility for older, legacy websites and applications. Microsoft Edge has Internet Explorer mode (“IE mode”) built in, so you can access those legacy Internet Explorer-based websites and applications straight from Microsoft Edge. With Microsoft Edge capable of assuming this responsibility and more, the Internet Explorer 11 desktop application will be retired and go out of support on June 15, 2022, for certain versions of Windows 10. It’s going to a nice farm upstate.

Developers of the open source organization Freenode are quitting en masse after Andrew Lee, a tech entrepreneur and the Crown Prince of Korea, has taken control of the network in what developers are describing as an “hostile takeover.” On Wednesday, a dozen Freenode staff volunteers published posts announcing their resignations, which explain their decision to quit. The broad strokes of the letters explain that they believe Lee bought the entire Freenode network under what they believe are false—but legal—pretenses, and that they have lost control over the network. They said there is little the staff can do to oppose changes that Lee wants to implement. The now former staff members announced that they are launching a new chat network, Libera.chat, to continue Freenode’s mission. I did not have this on my 2021 bingo card.

At Google I/O today, Google unveiled more about Android 12, and the biggest change is a complete visual overhaul of the operating system. It’s called Material You, and it’s radically different from what Android looks and feels like today. Every visual and animated aspect of the operating system seems to have been changed. Some examples: Wallpaper-based theming — or “color extraction” as Google calls it — brings bold color combinations to every corner of the OS. It automatically decides which hues in your wallpaper are good for the dominant and complementary colors and applies them in all of Android’s screens, menus, and even first-party apps. Apple likely lit a fire under Google when it added widgets to iOS, and the Mountain View company has responded with a much-needed refresh of its first-party widget designs. Expect to see new clocks, new weather widgets, new shortcuts to oft-used contacts, and easier access to your favorite chats. As well as a refresh of the static design elements, Material You will also breathe new life into animations. We’re going to get more fluid motion, better feedback, and generally much smoother performance. Google says that its work under the hood will reduce the CPU time taken up by core system services by up to 22%, which will be reflected in the user experience. I think it definitely looks new and fresh, and less edgy and harsh than the current Material Design sometimes feels. Of course, everyone will hate these changes at first – as is tradition – but I’m very curious to see this in action on my own phone, and something like this is sure to get me to take a serious look at the next crop of Pixel phones as my possible next phone, just to get my hands on the new look and feel. Aside from the massive visual overhaul, Google is also continuing its improvements on the privacy front, but Android being a Google product, I always feel a tad bit skeptical about this particular effort. We’ll see how long it will take for OEMs to actually ship Android 12 – and how badly they will butcher Material You – and as always, that wait may be long.

Today, we’re sharing the biggest update to Wear ever – built with your preferences in mind. We’ve been hard at work in three areas: building a unified platform with Samsung, delivering a new consumer experience and providing updates to your favorite Google apps. WearOS definitely needs a lot of love, and this is a big sign Google is taking the platform seriously. Merging with Samsung’s incompatible Tizen efforts makes sense, and adding Google’s acquisition of FitBit into the mix is a no-brainer, too. I’m one of the few people who actually likes WearOS – warts and all – so I’m excited to see what the future brings here.

Now, KDE apps typically do not use client-side-decorated headerbars for their header areas like GNOME apps do. Instead, we generally hew to the traditional arrangement of a titlebar, menubar, and toolbar. The titlebar is “server-side” because it’s drawn by KWin, our window manager. Everything below the titlebar–such as the window’s menubar, toolbar, and content view–are drawn by the window itself; the window being a “client” of the window manager. Hence, “client-side”. KDE’s approach is so much better and more sane than the CSDs in GNOME. CSDs have wreaked havoc in the world of GTK desktops, with Xfce in particular suffering hard due to its use of Xfwm, causing a giant rift between the looks of Xfwm and the CSDs of many GTK applications. The main issue here is that a title bar is a title bar for a reason – I don’t want it littered with buttons and other widgets that belong to the application, not the window. I guess I’m just getting old.

Back in 2014 OSNews reported on Andy Baio’s experiment raising his son on classic video games and “compressing 25 years of gaming history into about four years”. Somehow the recent lack of activity on OSnews made me think of it. At the time Thom wrote: I sometimes wonder if I ever have kids (god forbid), how would I introduce them to the world of computers? Just hand them a dumb, locked, experimentation-hostile box like a modern smartphone or tablet and be done with it, or hook him up with a textual, CLI-based computer that I grew up with? I’m convinced that the latter would instill a far greater appreciation and understanding of technology than the former. As an avid gamer, I read the original article enthusiastically, but since then I’ve often wondered what the actual outcome of Andy Baio’s experiment was. So I thought it might be worth trying to find out. Happily Andy later gave a presentation in which he summarised some of his own conclusions. So if this was an experiment, what were the results? So without question, I think it’s clear, this affected the kinds of games that Eliot gravitates to now, especially compared to his friends, to start he likes hard games. Really, really hard games. Games that cause me to curl up in a ball and cry, or want to like, pick up my laptop and throw it in the garbage. The second result that I’ve noticed from our experiment: Eliot’s exposure to early games with limited graphics and sound seems to have kind-of inoculated him from the flashy hyper-realistic graphics found in today’s mainstream triple-A games. He can appreciate retro graphics on their own terms and just focus on the gameplay. But the most important outcome as far as Andy was concerned was that it left a deeper appreciation for games in general. My hope is that this experiment instilled a life-long appreciation for smaller, stranger, more intimate games, in my son. And hopefully he’ll continue to think more critically about them, enjoy them more, and maybe someday even make some of his own. But this was only six month’s after the original article. Was it a bit too early to come to that conclusion? Did the long-term effects actually result in a negative reaction, against video games? Well in 2019, five years later, Eliot released his own take on the History of Video Games. I think his words, a decade after Andy’s original experiment, speak for themselves. I highly recommend going and downloading an emulator (from a legitimate site!) and playing some of these classic gems in gaming history. There are many games that I’m sure I even don’t know about that are incredible. You may find overlooked gems that never got attention. Sometimes, people have a hard time playing video games that have a more “primitive” old, or 8-bit style. Try looking past the graphics, after all, there was a time when games didn’t even have graphics. So, for any new parents out there, it seems raising your kids on the classics is not such a crazy idea after all.

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.2, the second update of the NetBSD 9 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons since the release of NetBSD 9.1 in October 2020, as well some enhancements backported from the development branch. It is fully compatible with NetBSD 9.0. I’m not even remotely well-versed enough in NetBSD to make heads or tails of the changelog, but it seems like there’s quite a few notable ones in there.

Blockbuster report by The New York Times on Apple and Tim Cook gladly making endless concessions to please the Chinese government. Nothing in here is really new to most of us, but it’s startling to see it laid out in such detail, and sourced so well. For instance, when it comes to Chinese people, privacy is apparently no longer a “fundamental human right“: Inside, Apple was preparing to store the personal data of its Chinese customers on computer servers run by a state-owned Chinese firm. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has said the data is safe. But at the data center in Guiyang, which Apple hoped would be completed by next month, and another in the Inner Mongolia region, Apple has largely ceded control to the Chinese government. Chinese state employees physically manage the computers. Apple abandoned the encryption technology it used elsewhere after China would not allow it. And the digital keys that unlock information on those computers are stored in the data centers they’re meant to secure. This means zero privacy for Chinese Apple users, as Apple has pretty much ceded all control over this data to the Chinese government – so much so Apple’s employees aren’t even in the building, and Apple no longer has the encryption keys either. And on top of this, it turns out Apple is so scared of offending the Chinese government, the company proactively censors applications and other content in the Chinese version of the App Store, removing, censoring, and blocking content even before the Chinese government asks for it. “Apple has become a cog in the censorship machine that presents a government-controlled version of the internet,” said Nicholas Bequelin, Asia director for Amnesty International, the human rights group. “If you look at the behavior of the Chinese government, you don’t see any resistance from Apple — no history of standing up for the principles that Apple claims to be so attached to.” Apple even fired an App Store reviewer because the reviewer approved an application that while not breaking a single rule, did offend the Chinese government. That is how far Apple is willing to go to please its Chinese government friends. Apple isn’t merely beholden to China – it’s deeply, deeply afraid of China. How many more concessions is Tim Cook willing to make, and how many more Chinese rings is he willing to kiss?

AmigaOS 3.2 comes packed with well over 100 new features, dozens of updates that cover nearly all AmigaOS components and a battery of bugfixes that will undoubtedly solidify the user experience. This is a large overhaul of Amiga 3.x for 68k-based Amigas developed by Hyperion Entertainment. There’s a very long changelog available on Hyperion’s site, but one very interesting addition is built-in ADF management which greatly simplifies dealing with floppy disk images.

Sailfish OS Kvarken 4.1.0 has just been released to Early Access users across all officially supported devices, alongside which there’s also been an announcement of official support for the Xperiai 10 II. The free trial version of Sailfish OS is available for Xperia 10 II devices now in the early access phase. The commercial licences will be launched when OS release 4.1.0 rolls out to all users. In addition to the long list of bugfixes and feature improvements, Kvarken 4.1.0 on the Xperia 10 II is also the first version of Sailfish OS to run as 64-bit on ARM.

As we head into the spring of 2021, the plans are changing again for the OS. According to people familiar with the company’s plans, Microsoft will not be shipping Windows 10X this year and the OS as you know it today, will likely never arrive. The company has shifted resources to Windows 10 and 10X is on the back burner, for now. Microsoft missed the boat on the modern smartphone, and as far as their operating system business goes, they seem like a rudderless ship in a hurricane ever since. If I cared, it’d be painful to watch.

You may have noticed a lack of new stories on OSNews the past week, and that’s because my fiancée and I had our first baby about a week ago. Since I’m making use of my ten workdays of childbirth leave as granted by the Swedish government, I’m not allowed to perform any work during those ten workdays (we’ve got another few hundred days of parental leave, too), which includes OSNews work. Since OSNews’ owner David happened to be on vacation with his family at this time, too, we were kind of left in the lurch. Our apologies, but there wasn’t much we could do. In any event, we’re learning how to be parents by leaps and bounds every day, and we’re taking good care of our little .deb. I’ll be back on duty coming Monday, so expect normal service to resume then. In the meantime, feel free to submit news items David can quickly and easily post – it doesn’t have to be perfect, as long as we give y’all some stuff to talk about. Until then, I’m going back to installing and configuring Void Linux on my main laptop – I already use and love it on my POWER9 machines – and I’ll see you all in a few days.

After another 6 months have passed we are proud to announce the release of our 2021.04 snapshot. The images are available at the usual place. As usual we have automatically received all updates that have been integrated into illumos-gate. The major changes are new versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, multiple NVIDIA drivers to choose from, and a lot more. For those unaware, OpenIndiana is a distribution of illumos, which in turn is the continuation of the last open source Solaris version before Oracle did what it does best and messed everything up.

After sixteen major releases, you might think there’s not much left to be added to Parallels Desktop – and for the vast majority of Mac users who are still using Intel CPUs, there isn’t. For them, this update to the popular virtualisation software tidies up a few bugs and adds support for the latest version of the Linux kernel, but that’s largely it. Overall it’s not even consequential enough to warrant a full ticking up of the version number. Yet arguably, this is the most significant release of Parallels Desktop since it first appeared in 2006. Just as version one unlocked the potential of Apple’s then-recent switch to the Intel architecture, this one breaks new ground by allowing you to install and run Windows 10 on Apple Silicon. They conclude it’s a great first release, but that it still has ways to go.

OpenBSD 6.9 has been released. This release focuses a lot on improving support for certain platforms, such as powerpc64 – mainly for modern POWER9 systems such as the Blackbird (which we reviewed late last year) and Talos II (which I have here now for review), arm64, and preliminary support for Apple’s ARM M1 architecture. There is way, way more in this release, of course, so feel free to peruse the release notes. On a related note, I recently bought an HP Visualize C3750 PA-RISC workstation, and it’s been pretty much impossible to get my hands on a proper copy of HP-UX 11i v1 that works on the machine. As such, in the interim, I installed OpenBSD on it, and it’s been working like a charm. I still need to set up and try X, but other than that, it’s been a very pleasant experience. Effortless installation, good documentation, and user friendlier than I expected.

The European Commission is issuing antitrust charges against Apple over concerns about the company’s App Store practices. The Commission has found that Apple has broken EU competition rules with its App Store policies, following an initial complaint from Spotify back in 2019. Specifically, the Commission believes Apple has a “dominant position in the market for the distribution of music streaming apps through its App Store.” The EU has focused on two rules that Apple imposes on developers: the mandatory use of Apple’s in-app purchase system (for which Apple charges a 30 percent cut), and a rule forbidding app developers to inform users of other purchasing options outside of apps. The Commission has found that the 30 percent commission fee, or “Apple tax” as it’s often referred to, has resulted in higher prices for consumers. “Most streaming providers passed this fee on to end users by raising prices,” according to the European Commission. As predicted, and entirely reasonable. This is only the first step in the process, and Apple will have the opportunity to respond. If found guilty, Apple could face a fine of more than 22 billion euro, 10% of its annual revenue, or be forced to change its business model.

The Windows 10 May 2021 Update has been finalized and Build 19043.928 is likely to be the release candidate. Unsurprisingly, May 2021 Update will begin rolling out to millions of users around the world in May, and it will ship with a few minor improvements, mostly for enterprise customers. Microsoft has officially named the version 21H1 update as “May 2021 Update” and published the final bits in the Release Preview Channel. I wish Microsoft would rethink its obtuse versioning and naming scheme for windows, because none of this makes any sense to me anymore. This is a small update, and mostly focused on remote work scenarios in the enterprise.

Linux 5.12 brings Intel Variable Rate Refresh (VRR/Adaptive-Sync), Radeon RX 6000 series overclocking support, mainline support for the Nintendo 64, the Sony PlayStation 5 DualSense controller driver, CXL 2.0 Type-3 memory device support, KFENCE, dynamic preemption capabilities, Clang link-time optimizations, laptop support improvements, and much more. A decently sized release. My favourite is definitely adding N64 support to the kernel.

Today, we’re pivoting towards the future and the new Neoverse V1 and Neoverse N2 generation of products. Arm had already tested the new products last September, teasing a few characteristics of the new designs, but falling short of disclosing more concrete details about the new microarchitectures. Following last month’s announcement of the Armv9 architecture, we’re now finally ready to dive into the two new CPU microarchitectures as well as the new CMN-700 mesh network. These are looking really good.

I’m linking to The Verge, since the original FT article is locked behind a paywall. The European Commission will issue antitrust charges against Apple over concerns about the company’s App Store practices, according to a report from the Financial Times. The commission has been investigating whether Apple has broken EU competition rules with its App Store policies, following an initial complaint from Spotify back in 2019 over Apple’s 30 percent cut on subscriptions. The European Commission opened up two antitrust investigations into Apple’s App Store and Apple Pay practices last year, and the Financial Times only mentions upcoming charges on the App Store case. It’s not clear yet what action will be taken. I’m glad both the US and EU are turning up the heat under Apple (and the other major technology companies), since their immense market power and clear-cut cases of abuse have to end. I am a strict proponent of doing what the United States used to be quite good at, and that’s breaking Apple and Google up into smaller companies forced to compete with one another and the rest of the market. The US has done it countless times before, and they should do it again. In this specific case, Apple should be divided up into Mac hardware, mobile hardware, software (macOS, iOS, and applications), and services. This would breath immense life into the market, and would create countless opportunities for others to come in and compete. The US has taken similar actions with railroads, oil, airplanes, and telecommunications, and the technology market should be no different.

iOS 14.5 is a major update with a long list of new features, including the ability to unlock an iPhone with an Apple Watch, 5G support for dual-SIM users, new emoji characters, an option to select a preferred music service to use with Siri, crowd sourced data collection for Apple Maps accidents, AirPlay 2 support for Fitness+, and much more. The update also introduces support for AirTags and Precision Finding on the iPhone 12 models, and it marks the official introduction of App Tracking Transparency. There are a long list of bug fixes, with Apple addressing everything from AirPods switching issues to the green tint that some users saw on ‌iPhone 12‌ models. A big update for such a small version number, and a lot of good stuff in there. Apple also released macOS Big Sur 11.3, which is a smaller update than the iOS one, but still contains some nice additions such as better touch integration for running iOS apps on the Mac and improved support for game controllers.

Microsoft is working on a brand-new Store app for Windows 10 that will introduce a modern and fluid user interface, as well as bring changes to the policies that govern what kind of apps can be submitted to the store by developers. According to sources familiar with the matter, this new Store will pave the way to a revitalized storefront that’s more open to both end users and developers. The biggest change is that Microsoft will supposedly allow developers to host unpackaged, unaltered, bog-standard Win32 applications in the Store. Right now, even Win32 applications need to be packaged as MSIX, but this requirement is going away. The Microsoft Store definitely needs a lot of love, but I feel like the problem isn’t the Store itself – it’s just how messy and fragmented managing applications on Windows really is.

It has been recently announced that the venerable TenFourFox web browser for PowerPC (PPC) Macs was going to cease regular development, which rekindled my interest in playing around with my trusty PowerBook G4, which only gets occasional use if I’m testing a PowerPC version of some of my own software. Such is the way of aging hardware and software: the necessity to support them wanes over time, but it does question how useful can an 18 year old laptop be in 2021. Can it still be useful, or is it relegated to a hobbyist’s endeavors? As usual, the internet and networking are the hurdles.

Today, Canonical released Ubuntu 21.04 with native Microsoft Active Directory integration, Wayland graphics by default, and a Flutter application development SDK. Separately, Canonical and Microsoft announced performance optimization and joint support for Microsoft SQL Server on Ubuntu. Ubuntu 21.04 is an important release, if only because of the switch to Wayland, following in Fedora’s footsteps. Ubuntu did opt out of shipping GNOME 40, though, so it comes with 3.38 instead. The step to Wayland is surely going to cause problems for some people, but overall, I think it’s high time and Wayland is pretty much as ready as it’s ever going to be. Remember, Wayland is not X, as I said a few months ago: Wayland is not X.org. Let me repeat that. Wayland is not X.org. If you need the functionality that X.org delivers, then you shouldn’t be using Wayland. This is like buying a Mac and complaining your Windows applications don’t work. With NVIDIA finally seeming to get at least somewhat on board, and X.org development basically having dried up, the time for Wayland is now.

While installing Windows NT 3.1 worked perfectly, I really like to tinker with my retro stuff. The Windows NT 3.1 CD comes with the full set of debugging symbols, I’m curious into investigating why NetDDE throws an error into the event log, and the system crashes with a specific EISA ethernet card (which might be due to faulty hardware), so I decided to dive into kernel debugging. Setting up kernel debugging is straight-forward, once you realize you should use the i386kd executable supplied with Windows NT 3.1 instead of kd/ntkd from the current Windows 10 develepmont kit. As soon as I want to break in (using Ctrl-C in i386kd), the target machine reboots instead of providing a kd> prompt. Such an obscure question and bug, and yet, there’s someone providing a detailed answer – and a fix.

The next version of Android remains focussed on developers until the first beta launches next month. With that in mind, we’re diving into today’s release of Android 12 DP3 to find all the new features. Mostly small changes, still, and many of them seem specific to Google’s own devices.

A statement from the University of Minnesota Department of Computer Science & Engineering: Leadership in the University of Minnesota Department of Computer Science & Engineering learned today about the details of research being conducted by one of its faculty members and graduate students into the security of the Linux Kernel. The research method used raised serious concerns in the Linux Kernel community and, as of today, this has resulted in the University being banned from contributing to the Linux Kernel. We take this situation extremely seriously. We have immediately suspended this line of research. We will investigate the research method and the process by which this research method was approved, determine appropriate remedial action, and safeguard against future issues, if needed. We will report our findings back to the community as soon as practical. This story is crazy. It turns out researchers from the University of Minnesota were intentionally trying to introduce vulnerabilities into the Linux kernel as part of some research study. This was, of course, discovered, and kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman immediately banned the entire university from submitting any code to the Linux kernel. Replying to the researcher in question, Kroah-Hartman wrote: You, and your group, have publicly admitted to sending known-buggy patches to see how the kernel community would react to them, and published a paper based on that work. Now you submit a new series of obviously-incorrect patches again, so what am I supposed to think of such a thing? They obviously were _NOT_ created by a static analysis tool that is of any intelligence, as they all are the result of totally different patterns, and all of which are obviously not even fixing anything at all. So what am I supposed to think here, other than that you and your group are continuing to experiment on the kernel community developers by sending such nonsense patches? Our community does not appreciate being experimented on, and being “tested” by submitting known patches that are either do nothing on purpose, or introduce bugs on purpose. If you wish to do work like this, I suggest you find a different community to run your experiments on, you are not welcome here. Because of this, I will now have to ban all future contributions from your University and rip out your previous contributions, as they were obviously submitted in bad-faith with the intent to cause problems. This is obviously the only correct course of action, and the swift response by the university is the right one.

WSL lets you run a Linux environment, and up until this point has focused on enabling command line tools utilities and applications. GUI app support now lets you use your favorite Linux GUI applications as well. WSL is used in a wide variety of applications, workloads, and use cases, so ultimately, it’s up to you on what you’d like to use GUI app support for. Useful for developers who target multiple platforms.

It’s a year later and we can now safely conclude that WinGet is terrible. It calls itself a package manager, but it doesn’t really manage packages: it can only install them. With AppGet you could actually manage your software. If it got outdated, you could update it. If you no longer wanted it, you can uninstall it. WinGet doesn’t do that. It just downloads software and installs it. For months there’s been “experimental” support for the most important feature of a package manager: upgrades. It just doesn’t work. Sure, it will download the updates. It’ll even pretend to install them. And if you run it again, it will do it all over again for the same packages. It’s pointless. It just pretends to upgrade software, just like it pretends to be a package manager. One of the main reasons I use Linux is just how insanely superior installing and managing applications is on Linux compared to Windows and macOS. As a Linux Mint user, I’m part of the Debian ecosystem, meaning virtually every piece of Linux software comes packaged as a .deb (you’ll have a similar experience with e.g. RPM or Arch-based distributions), managed from one central place. I never have to think about how to install, update, or remove an application. Windows and macOS have various different methods of installing, updating, and removing applications, and many of these methods leave files all over the place. On both Windows and macOS, you have to deal with individual per-app update tools, application stores, downloading individual updates from the web, using tacked-on, always-breaking ports systems, and it’s up to you to remember how, exactly, each application handles its installation, update, and removal procedures. WinGet is just another mess to add to the giant pile of garbage that is managing applications on Windows.

Apple has announced a new, redesigned 24-inch iMac, featuring an M1 chip, a 4.5K display, and a range of color options, as well as an improved cooling system, front-facing camera, speaker system, microphones, power connector, and peripherals. These look pretty good, but they come with the same limitations as all the other identical M1 Macs – 8 GB of RAM standard with a maximum of a mere 16 GB, lacklustre graphics chip, no high refresh rate displays (in 2021!), barely any ports, zero expandability, and Linux/BSD support will always remain problematic and years behind the curve. Good processor, but at what cost?

In order to research the topic, I tested the power consumption of several commonly available flash carts and some of my own designs. In this blog post I intend to show that there is more variation in flash cart power consumption than people might think, and a flash cart can even be more power efficient than a genuine cart! Everything you ever wanted to know about the power consumption of Game Boy cartridges.

Entire servers can now be marked as NSFW if their community “is organized around NSFW themes or if the majority of the server’s content is 18+.” This label will be a requirement going forward, and Discord will proactively mark servers as NSFW if they fail to self-identify. Discord previously allowed individual channels to be marked as NSFW and age-gated. The NSFW marker does two things. First, it prevents anyone under the age of 18 from joining. But the bigger limitation is that it prevents NSFW servers from being accessed on iOS devices — a significant restriction that’s almost certainly meant to cater to Apple’s strict and often prudish rules around nudity in services distributed through the App Store. Tumblr infamously wiped porn from its entire platform in order to come into compliance with Apple’s rules. There’s two things happening here. There’s the tighter restrictions by Discord, which I think are reasonable – you don’t want minors or adults who simply aren’t interested in rowdier conversations to accidentally walk into channels where people are discussing sex, nudity, or porn. Labeling these channels as such is, while not a panacea, an understandable move, also from a legal standpoint. I still think sex and nudity are far, far, far less damaging or worrisome than the insane amounts of brutal violence children get exposed to in movies, TV series, games, and the evening news, but I understand American culture sees these things differently. Then there’s Apple’s demands placed on Discord. This is an absolutely bizarre move by Apple on so many levels. First, the line between porn and mere nudity is often vague and nebulous, such as in paintings or others forms of art. This could be hugely impactful to art communities sharing the things they work on. Second, Discord is primarily a platform for close-knit groups of friends, and if everyone in your friend group is over 18, there’s going to be discussions and talk about sex, nudity, porn, and other things adults tend to talk about from time to time, just as there are in real life. None of these two – art and casual conversation – are criminal, bad, or negative in any way. And third, and this is the big one, these restrictions Apple is placing on Discord do not apply to Apple’s own applications. iMessage serves much the same function as Discord does, yet there’s no NSFW markers, 18+ warnings, or bans on such content on iMessage. Other platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and the damn web through Safari, provide access to far vaster collections of the most degenerate pornography mankind ever wrought, and yet, Apple isn’t banning them either. This just goes to show that, once again, that iPhone isn’t really yours. Apple decides how you get to use it, and you’re merely along for the $1000 ride. Android may have its problems, but at least I don’t have Tim Cook peeping over my shoulder to see if I’m looking at something he deems lewd.

The U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee formally approved a report accusing Big Tech companies of buying or crushing smaller firms, Representative David Cicilline’s office said in a statement on Thursday. With the approval during a marathon, partisan hearing, the more than 400-page staff report will become an official committee report, and the blueprint for legislation to rein in the market power of the likes of Alphabet Inc’s Google, Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Facebook Inc. This could be potentially really good news, but let’s just say that US Congress hasn’t exactly been the most reliable governmental body, so I won’t cheer until Biden signs a dotted line.

The search functionality of FrogFind is basically a custom wrapper for DuckDuckGo search, converting the results to extremely basic HTML that old browsers can read. When clicking through to pages from search results, those pages are processed through a PHP port of Mozilla’s Readability, which is what powers Firefox’s reader mode. I then further strip down the results to be as basic HTML as possible. FrogFind is a clever and incredibly useful search engine if you like to play around with old, outdated hardware with terrible browsers. It makes a lot of the web accessible, fast, and usable on my old Palm devices, for instance, but truly anything that at least has a browser should work just fine. There are quite a few old and unmaintained platforms out there that cannot access the current web anymore, but tools like FrogFind address this problem in a very usable way. It’s the creation of YouTuber ActionRetro, an excellent YouTube channel with tons of awesome vintage Mac (and other platforms) content.

We’re providing a honed desktop user experience in Pop!_OS through our GNOME-based desktop environment: COSMIC. It’s a refined solution that makes the desktop easier to use, yet more powerful and efficient for our users through customization. The new designs are developed from extensive testing and user feedback since the Pop!_OS 20.04 release, and are currently being further refined in their testing phase. As we finalize these new designs, read on for some preliminary info on a few of the major changes COSMIC brings to Pop!_OS. With some users deeply unsatisfied with GNOME 40, it makes sense for System76 to make this move now. One of the most basic changes in COSMIC compared to regular GNOME is that it will come with a dock – one of the most popular GNOME extensions. The fact you have to go into a special overview mode just to deal with running applications has always been a headscratcher to me and many others, and if System76 can do a good job listening to community input, this could be a real winner.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE. This is the first release of the stable/13 branch. The announcement and release notes contain more information.

Getting started with developing applications for a mobile platform can be a challenging task, especially when it comes to building and testing the application on the mobile device itself. The Librem 5 makes its application development workflow extremely simple. Among other things, you can develop applications on-device, which is something sorely missing from other platforms.