OSnews

A couple of weeks back, Google redesigned the search results for its desktop website. According to the firm, the new layout was meant to mimic the ordering of search results on the mobile version of the website. Most significantly, the changes allowed the inclusion of favicons next to display results and the removal of color overlays. This meant that advertisements and traditional search results were displayed inline with little to distinguish between the two. And now Google is backpedaling. As a DDG user, this thing kind of passed me by, but upon checking Google, I have to say I agree that this feels so off. You’d think adding favicons to search results wouldn’t make a big difference, but it really does – and not for the better.

A lightweight macOS window and app manager scriptable with JavaScript. You can also easily use languages which compile to JavaScript such as CoffeeScript. Phoenix aims for efficiency and a very small footprint. If you like the idea of scripting your own window or app management toolkit with JavaScript, Phoenix is probably going to give you the things you want. With Phoenix you can bind keyboard shortcuts and system events, and use these to interact with macOS. Pretty cool.

I wonder about the approach Purism took with the Librem 5. The company chose to do everything all at once by building a new smartphone OS and a new hardware supply chain. For a customer receiving a Librem 5 today, you’re getting an unfinished operating system and rough, gen-one open source hardware. That’s a bunch of compromises to accept for $750. A more reserved approach would have been to build an open source GNU/Linux-based OS on closed source hardware first and then make the difficult jump to custom hardware when the OS was in a more complete state. The Librem 5 is a tough sell, even for people who value the open source nature of the device. That’s simply too much money for such an outdated, unfinished device.

Microsoft is planning to use the Office 365 installer to forcibly switch Chrome users over to the company’s Bing search engine. Microsoft’s Office 365 ProPlus installer, used by businesses, will include a new Chrome extension next month that switches the default search engine to Bing. New installations of Office 365 ProPlus and updated installs will include the extension, as long as the default search engine in Chrome is not set to Bing. Microsoft is clearly marketing this to IT admins as enabling its Microsoft Search functionality in Chrome, but it also looks like a stealthy way of pushing people over to using Bing. If Bing is already set as the default search engine in Chrome, then the extension never gets installed. Microsoft is planning to roll this out in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and India next month. Windows is an advertising platform. Get out while you can.

When we first launched Chromebooks, devices only received three years of automatic updates. Over the years, we’ve been able to increase that to over six. Last fall, we extended AUE on many devices currently for sale, in many cases adding an extra year or more before they expire. This will help schools better select which devices to invest in and provide more time to transition from older devices. And now, devices launching in 2020 and beyond will receive automatic updates for even longer. The new Lenovo 10e Chromebook Tablet and Acer Chromebook 712 will both receive automatic updates until June 2028. So if you’re considering refreshing your fleet or investing in new devices, now is a great time. Eight years is a decent amount of time, especially since most Chromebooks are quite cheap – so this longevity is really good value. I only wish Google were this dedicated to Android, too.

Speaking of using BSD as a general purpose operating system: NomadBSD is a persistent live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery, for educational purposes, or to test FreeBSD’s hardware compatibility. This seems like quite the polished and minimalist – yet full-featured – FreeBSD distribution to test out your hardware.

This release represents a year of development effort and over 7,400 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that are listed in the release notes below. The main highlights are: – Builtin modules in PE format.– Multi-monitor support.– XAudio2 reimplementation.– Vulkan 1.1 support. Wine allows me to run virtually any Windows game I use on Linux – including League of Legends, my most-played game – so it’s a pretty amazing tool in my book. Since many people no longer directly interact with Wine, using it through tools like Steam’s compatibility tools or Lutris, instead, it’s easy to forget just how important of a project Wine really is.

An upcoming feature of WordPad has been discovered by enthusiasts, revealing in-app ads that promote Microsoft Office. The change is hidden in recent Insider Preview builds, and not activated for most users. WordPad is a very simple text editor, more powerful than Notepad, but still less feature rich than Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer. It is good for creating a simple text document without complicated formatting. The more advertisements and preinstalled junkware Microsoft shoves into Windows 10, the more the otherwise decent operating system turns into a user-hostile joke. Apple is going down the same route with iOS, and everything about it just feels disgusting and sleazy. One of the many reasons I transitioned all my machines away from Windows and to Linux.

Apple Inc dropped plans to let iPhone users fully encrypt backups of their devices in the company’s iCloud service after the FBI complained that the move would harm investigations, six sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. The tech giant’s reversal, about two years ago, has not previously been reported. It shows how much Apple has been willing to help U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite taking a harder line in high-profile legal disputes with the government and casting itself as a defender of its customers’ information. This once again just goes to show Apple’s privacy chest-thumping is nothing but marketing and grandstanding. This is effectively a backdoor for government agencies to use, and if the “good guys” can use it, so can the bad guys. On top of that, this neatly ties into Apple handing over iCloud data to the Chinese government – data that is most certainly being used by the Chinese regime in, among other things, its genocide of the Uyghurs. I prefer a company that’s open and honest about what data it collects and uses and why – Google – over a company that purposefully tries to muddy the waters through marketing and grandstanding – Apple. The devil you know and all that.

As mentioned previously, because FreeBSD is a real multi-purpose operating system with many different use cases, FreeBSD is very flexible and tuneable. Whether you want to run FreeBSD on your desktop computer or on your server, it provides many tuneable options that enables you to make it very performant. The options set out-of-the box may not suit your needs exactly, but then FreeBSD provides lots of documentation on how to get it to work as you need, and it provides a very helpful community with many people who has experience in dealing with many different situations and problems. I believe it is important to understand that FreeBSD is not like a GNU/Linux distribution. FreeBSD is an operating system made by developers who are also system administrators. This means that FreeBSD is supposed to be run by system administrators who understands how the system works. You cannot simply jump from something like Ubuntu, Fedora or OpenSUSE and then expect that you get the same experience on FreeBSD (I and a lot of other people would be extremely sad if that were the case). The BSDs just aren’t my thing. I’m not a developer, and I’m not a system administrator. Over the past six months or so, I’ve moved all my machines and all my workflows over to Linux – my laptop, my main PC (used for everything that isn’t translating), and my office PC (for my translation work), and I couldn’t be happier (in the interest of full disclosure, I do keep Windows around on my main PC for possible future Windows-only games, and I have a Windows 10 virtual machine on my office PC for some Windows-specific translation software I need to keep around). As I was planning this careful migration, I never once considered using any of the BSDs. For the simpler, almost exclusively desktop oriented work that I do, BSD just doesn’t seem like the right tool for the job – and that’s okay, I’m not the target audience – and I suspect there are many people like me. I think the BSDs are stronger for not trying to be everything to all people, and this more focused development seems to be exactly why someone chooses BSD over Linux. And I see no reason why anybody should want to change that.

Last week in Las Vegas while at CES, I spoke with Kan Liu, Director of Product Management for Google’s Chrome OS. In a wide-ranging discussion about the Chrome platform and ecosystem, Liu dropped something of a bombshell on me: the Chrome team is working—very possibly in cooperation with Valve—to bring Steam to Chromebooks. The next question, of course, is just what sorts of games would even be worth playing on a Chromebook when run directly on local hardware. Currently, most Chromebooks have extremely limited 3D acceleration performance, with only the most recent devices like Samsung’s Galaxy Chromebook possessing vaguely passable GPUs. Liu said we could expect that to change: more powerful Chromebooks, especially AMD Chromebooks, are coming. Liu would not explicitly confirm that any of these models would contain discrete Radeon graphics, but told us to stay tuned. This makes a lot of sense. Sure, you won’t be running the latest and greatest AAA titles on Chromebooks any time soon, but Steam has a massive library of less intensive games and older titles that would run just fine on any mid-range Chromebook. On top of that, this would open Chromebooks up to Steam’s streaming feature.

Pine64 has announced that it is finally shipping the PinePhone, a smartphone that takes the rare step outside the Android/iOS duopoly and is designed to run mainline Linux distributions. The PinePhone starts shipping January 17 in the “Braveheart” developer edition. An interesting device for sure, and the dip switches on the motherboard that act has hardware kill switches for things like the microphone and camera are pretty neat. I do take issue with the “Linux-powered” as if that’s some unique quality or anything. Save for the odd iPhone, every single smartphone in the world runs Linux. Maybe not in a form that adheres to your no true Scotsman idea of Linux, but 100% Linux nonetheless.

From this incredible momentum, today I’m pleased to announce the new Microsoft Edge is now available to download on all supported versions of Windows and macOS in more than 90 languages. Microsoft Edge is also available on iOS and Android, providing a true cross-platform experience. The new Microsoft Edge provides world class performance with more privacy, more productivity and more value while you browse. Our new browser also comes with our Privacy Promise and we can’t wait for you to try new features like tracking prevention, which is on by default, and provides three levels of control while you browse. The new Edge will also come to Linux, so this gives us yet another Chromium-based browser available on all platforms. Why, exactly, you’d choose Edge over Chrome, Vivaldi, or any others is still not entirely clear to me, however.

In 2011 Facebook announced the Open Compute Project to form a community around open-source designs and specifications for data center hardware. Facebook shared its hardware specs, which resulted in 38 percent less energy consumption and 24 percent cost savings compared with its existing data centers. What Facebook and other hyperscalers (Google, Microsoft, et al.) donate to the Open Compute Project are their solutions to the agonizing problems that come with running data centers at scale. Since then, the project has expanded to all aspects of the open data center: baseboard management controllers (BMCs), network interface controllers (NICs), rack designs, power busbars, servers, storage, firmware, and security. This column focuses on the BMC. This is an introduction to a complicated topic; some sections just touch the surface, but the intention is to provide a full picture of the world of the open-source BMC ecosystem, starting with a brief overview of the BMC’s role in a system, touching on security concerns around the BMC, and then diving into some of the projects that have developed in the open-source ecosystem. A good overview.

The AlphaSmart dana is technically a Palm OS PDA, in the same way that Hannibal Lecter is technically a famous chef. The dana does run Palm OS 4.0, but it has almost reversed priorities from a normal PDA. For example, I drafted college essays on a dana, but never used the calendar or address book until I began writing this article. In contrast, Palm OS founder Jeff Hawkins distilled the average PDA user’s needs down to, “All I really care about is calendars and address book and trying to coordinate with my secretary.” Palm designed their operating system to organize a social schedule, but AlphaSmart Inc. used that codebase to create a device that focused on expression rather than organization. AlphaSmart was founded by ex-Apple employees who designed simplified computers for classrooms that couldn’t afford high end computers. AlphaSmart achieved these lower costs by hyperfocusing on composition. Those lower costs became irrelevant as laptop prices dropped, but the hyperfocus on composition itself has become more relevant in an era of distraction. If we consider the dana as a device for producing drafts, even its flaws are transformed into strengths. The dana is the pinnacle of AlphaSmart’s writer-focused devices. Former Apple engineers Ketan Kothari and Joe Barrus created AlphaSmart in the early 90s to create word-processing computers. Kothari said that their goal was to allow the users to “focus on the words”. They floated their ideas in an education discussion board on FidoNet, and met up with a group of enthusiastic teachers to get feedback on a prototype device. The prototype was simply a full keyboard with an LCD display and the ability to store writing. The teachers liked it, but told the engineers they needed something with fewer keys, standard batteries, and a smaller form factor. Kothari and Barrus incorporated these few tweaks into their original AlphaSmart device. All future products kept this form factor: a reduced keyboard with an LCD screen, output ports, and a battery compartment. Future models introduced a handful of new features. The 1995 AlphaSmart Pro could connect to both PC and Mac computers. Five years later, the AlphaSmart 3000 introduced USB support. Then in 2002, the dana adapted Palm OS 4 to facilitate a much more capable machine. The dana included a touch screen, a backlight, proper file management, compatibility with loads of Palm applications, a larger screen, improved font rendering, and a plethora of ports including two SD card slots. The dana was the first of the AlphaSmart machines to use the Palm OS, and also the last. The dana was released at a retail cost of well over $500 adjusted for inflation. At that time, the lower end 600mhz iBook retailed for $1700 adjusted for inflation. As the cost and weight of laptops fell, AlphaSmart had to simplify their designs to compete with lower end laptops. They released the Neo which abandoned Palm OS and many of the dana’s features, but cost half as much as the dana. Initially, AlphaSmart aimed for a two tier product line with the cheaper Neo and the higher end dana. However, they found schools were reluctant to pay more without getting a full-blown laptop. AlphaSmart slightly upgraded the memory in the Neo, rebranded it as the Neo2, and continued for several years with this as their sole device. In 2013, even though the Neo2 sold as low as $119, it was finally killed off. There is no current successor, and the dana stands as the high water mark of AlphaSmart’s mission to create a machine with a focus on the words. The Machine Itself The dana is a text editor that theoretically could function as a complete word processor. In the same way that the calendar and address book were the center of Palm’s handhelds, AlphaWord is the software heart of the dana. AlphaWord has plenty of options for formatting, but I rarely go into them. I’m typing this on the dana right now, and I am focused entirely on the content. I’ve adjusted the font to 18 point Garamond bold, but that’s purely for visibility. The font will be stripped when I move the document onto my laptop. The dana can output RTF documents that preserve fonts, but it’s a bit awkward. Preserving the fonts requires squinting into the already blurry screen at smaller 12-point letters. The dana has so much word processing power that it can even print straight from the dana, but this feature just highlights how much the dana should not be used for a finished product. First, AlphaWord does not separate documents into pages. Documents are pure streams of text, which is perfect for a first draft. However, the pageless documents mean that the actual layout is a mystery until the document is printed. Next, the dana has quite a few technical printer issues. I connected to two cheap inkjet printers, and both ignored the dana. I connected to a Brother laser printer, and I believe it printed the correct number of pages, but they all came out blank. I found a couple large office-style copiers that could print the documents straight from AlphaWord, but they disregarded the font except for italics and bold. My favorite printer interaction was connecting to a thermal printer. I didn’t expect anything, but the cheap thermal printer spooled out anything the dana threw at it. The thermal printer completely disregarded all formatting on the dana, but there was something fitting in the stark receipt-like printouts coming from the simple keyboard. I experimented with sending some receipt-style list poetry to the thermal paper and was pleased with the output. However, I can’t imagine trying to read an essay off of a narrow scroll of receipt paper. While the dana can’t adequately print, Palm OS facilitates a plethora of ways to get documents off of the dana. USB keyboard emulation is both the best way to get material off of the dana, and the machine’s default setup. When connected to via a standard USB cable, the dana becomes

Google intends to deprecate the user agent string in Chrome. According to the proposal, the first step is to deprecate the “navigator.userAgent” method used to access the User Agent string, suggested to start in March with Chrome 81. This change won’t have any visible effect for most people, and websites will continue to work completely as normal. However, web developers will be given explicit warnings in the Chrome development console that retrieving the User Agent string is no longer a good idea. Next, with the release of Chrome 83 in June, Google will begin to freeze, or stop updating, the User Agent string with each update to Chrome. At the same time, Chrome will also “unify” the information shared about your device’s operating system, for example meaning that two computers on slightly different Windows 10 updates should have the same User Agent. This will eliminate one more potential fingerprinting method. Finally, beginning in September’s Chrome 85 release, every Chrome rowser running on a desktop operating system, such as Windows, macOS, or Linux, will report the exact same User Agent string, eliminating all possible User Agent fingerprinting. Similarly, Chrome 85 will unify the User Agent on mobile devices, though devices will apparently be lumped into one of a few categories based on screen size. User agent strings have long outlived their usefulness, and today only serve to artificially restrict browser access in the stupidest of ways. I’m obviously not comfortable with Google spearheading this effort, so I’m counting on a lot of scrutiny from the web community and other browser makers.

Since Java Grinder (a Java byte-code compiler) already supports the Motorola 68000 CPU with the Sega Genesis I figured it shouldn’t be too hard to extend the MC68000.cxx class to support the Commodore Amiga computer. More specifically, the original Amiga 1000. Amazing.

It’s the end of an era. Today’s date, January 14, has been on the books for years now, and it’s the day that support ends for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. More specifically, extended support is ending for Windows 7 Service Pack 1, and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 and 2. There are, of course, workarounds. Microsoft is offering Extended Security Updates (ESUs) for those willing to pay up, and it’s only available for Windows 7 Professional and Enterprise. The price is going to be per-machine, and it will double every year. In other words, if you’ve got a business with multiple Windows 7 PCs, it’s going to be costly to keep them on the legacy OS. ESUs will be available for three years. You can get ESUs through volume licensing or through Microsoft 365. Windows 7 is 11 years old by now, and moving the operating system strictly to paid maintenance seems acceptable – you can’t expect operating systems to be maintained forever. This means that unless they’re planning on being irresponsible, Windows 7 users will have to start moving to Windows 10. They might want to download one of the many debloat programs, followed by a a tool that gives them strict control over Windows 10’s leaky privacy settings. Or, you know, move to something else entirely.

Over 50 organizations including the Privacy International, Digital Rights Foundation, DuckDuckGo, and Electronic Frontier Foundation have written an open letter to Alphabet and Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai about exploitive pre-installed bloatware on Android devices and how they pose a privacy risk to consumers. Thus, the group wants Google to make some changes to how Android handles pre-installed apps a.k.a bloatware. They want the company to provide users with the ability to permanently uninstall all pre-installed apps on their devices. While some pre-loaded apps can be disabled on Android devices, they continue to run some background processes which makes disabling them a moot point. The open letter requests Google to ensure that pre-installed apps go through the same scrutiny as all the apps listed on the Google Play Store. They also want all pre-installed apps to be updated through Google Play even if the device does not have a user logged into it. Google should also not certify devices on privacy grounds if it detects that an OEM is trying to exploit users’ privacy and their data. With antitrust regulators from both the EU and the US breathing down their necks, I highly doubt Google will do what this open letter asks of them. And let’s face it – you can’t on the one hand lament Google’s control over Android, while on the other hand ask that they use said control against parties you happen to dislike. I hate bloatware as much as anyone else, but I’d be a massive hypocrite if, after years of advocating for user freedom when it comes to smartphones, computers, and other devices, I would turn around and ask Google to lock down Android devices even more to Google Play just because I happen to think carriers are the scum of the earth.

For those who are not familiar with Celerity, this is a multi-university effort that has resulted in an open-source manycore RISC-V tiered accelerator chip. The project is part of the DARPA Circuit Realization At Faster Timescales (CRAFT) program which wants to drive the design cycle for custom integrated circuits to weeks and months from years. The Celerity team first presented the chip at Hot Chips 29. Last year, at VLSI 2019, Celerity was back to talk about the PLL and the NoC of its second-generation chip. The presentation was given by Austin Rovinski from the University of Michigan. I can read the words, but much of this is far too complicated for me to give any meaningful comment.

To date, Microsoft hasn’t said anything publicly about what’s going to happen to any of its digital app stores. But privately, officials across various teams at the company have been trying to come up with a concerted strategy, I’ve heard. That strategy does not call for Microsoft to drop the Web version of the Microsoft Store. I’m not sure what will happen to the Microsoft Store client that’s built into Windows 10 right now; my contacts say its future is “uncertain” at this point. To say the Microsoft Store has been a failure might be a bit too harsh – it has allowed Microsoft itself to update some core Windows applications easier than ever before – but a raging success it is not. Windows developers don’t really care, and users keep installing applications the way they’re used to, so it only makes sense for Microsoft to reevaluate its strategy with regard to the various versions of its application store. I’m not sad about it.

When a brand new John Deere tractors breaks down, you need a computer to fix it. When a John Deere tractor manufactured in 1979 breaks down, you can repair it yourself or buy another old John Deere tractor. Farming equipment—like televisions, cars, and even toothbrushes—now often comes saddled with a computer. That computer often comes with digital rights management software that can make simple repairs an expensive pain in the ass. As reported by the Minnesota StarTribune, Farmers have figured out a way around the problem—buying tractors manufactured 40 years ago, before the computers took over. I wonder if we’ll ever reach that state with computers – a point where they become so locked-down, unrepairable and impossible to fix that we will be forced to keep older hardware around just to retain control over our own devices.

Don’t use ZFS. It’s that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me. The benchmarks I’ve seen do not make ZFS look all that great. And as far as I can tell, it has no real maintenance behind it either any more, so from a long-term stability standpoint, why would you ever want to use it in the first place? ZFS could be the fastest file system in the world and randomly disperse kittens and I still wouldn’t touch it with a ten metre pole if I were Linus. Oracle is a colony of snakes led by the biggest snake of them all, and adding their code – even through shims or interfaces – should be a complete non-starter for any project.

You’re likely familiar with the old tale about how Steve Jobs was ousted from Apple and started his own company, NeXT. Apple then bought NeXT and their technologies and brought Jobs back as CEO once again. However, Jobs’ path wasn’t unique, and the history of computing since then could’ve gone a whole lot different. In 1990, Jean-Louis Gassée, who replaced Jobs in Apple as the head of Macintosh development, was also fired from the company. He then also formed his own computer company with the help of another ex-Apple employee, Steve Sakoman. They called it Be Inc, and their goal was to create a more modern operating system from scratch based on the object-oriented design of C++, using proprietary hardware that could allow for greater media capabilities unseen in personal computers at the time. Not much new information in here for the regular OSNews reader – and these articles get published about once a year – but it’s always nice to see the best operating system of all time get some love.

Today, you can upgrade a desktop PC’s gaming performance just by plugging in a new graphics card. What if you could do the same exact thing with everything else in that computer — slotting in a cartridge with a new CPU, memory, storage, even a new motherboard and set of ports? What if that new “everything else in your computer” card meant you could build an upgradable desktop gaming PC far smaller than you’d ever built or bought before? Last week, I visited Intel’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California so I could stop imagining and check out the NUC 9 Extreme for myself. The linked The Verge article is a decent overview, but for more information, I’d suggest watching Gamers Nexus’ Stephen Burke’s (praise be upon Him) video, to get an even better idea of what Intel is trying to do here. It’s certainly a very fascinating product, and I’m very happy to finally see a major player trying to do something new to combine small form factors with easy expandability and upgradeability. I still have many questions, though, most importantly about just how open this platform – if it even is a platform to begin with – really is. The bridge board that the processor PCIe card and GPU slot into looks quite basic, and there already seem to be multiple variants of said board from different manufacturers, so I hope AMD could just as easily build a competing module. If not, buying into this platform would tie you down to Intel, which, at this point in time, might not be the optimal choice.

Why is Wednesday, November 17, 1858 the base time for OpenVMS (VAX VMS)? Interesting answer for sure.

On Tuesday, Sonos sued Google in two federal court systems, seeking financial damages and a ban on the sale of Google’s speakers, smartphones and laptops in the United States. Sonos accused Google of infringing on five of its patents, including technology that lets wireless speakers connect and synchronize with one another. Sonos’s complaints go beyond patents and Google. Its legal action is the culmination of years of growing dependence on both Google and Amazon, which then used their leverage to squeeze the smaller company, Sonos executives said. “Google has been blatantly and knowingly copying our patented technology,” Mr. Spence said in a statement. “Despite our repeated and extensive efforts over the last few years, Google has not shown any willingness to work with us on a mutually beneficial solution. We’re left with no choice but to litigate.” Sonos executives said they decided to sue only Google because they couldn’t risk battling two tech giants in court at once. Yet Mr. Spence and congressional staff members have discussed him soon testifying to the House antitrust subcommittee about his company’s issues with them. I’ve said it many times before – companies like Google and Amazon have simply become too large, too powerful, and too invulnerable, and this is simply yet another example in a long string of examples. Break them up.

Intel has dominated the CPU game for decades, and at CES 2020, the company officially announced its first discrete GPU, the codenamed “DG1”, marking a big step forward for Intel’s computing ambitions. There were almost no details provided on the DG1, but Intel did showcase a live demo of Destiny 2 running on the GPU. Rumors from Tom’s Hardware indicate that the DG1 is based on the Xe architecture, the same graphics architecture that will power Intel’s integrated graphics on the upcoming 10nm Tiger Lake chips that it also previewed at its CES keynote. The market for discrete GPUs is in desperate need of a shake-up, especially at the higher end. Nvidia has had this market to itself for a long time, and it’s showing in pricing.

At last year’s CES, AMD showcased its then Ryzen 3000 mobile processors as part of the announcements. In what is becoming a trend, at this year’s CES, the company is doing the same in announcing its next generation Ryzen 4000 mobile processors. This year is a little different, with AMD showing off its manufacturing strategy at TSMC 7nm for the first time in the mobile space. There’s a ton of options on the table, both at 15W and 45W, offering some really impressive core counts, frequencies, and most importantly, design wins. Here are all the details. Let’s hope we’re getting choice and competition back in the laptop space.

Of course, that was also a very different time. In 2010, Wi-Fi wasn’t nearly as ubiquitous as it is today. Tethering was something I would only do under the most urgent of circumstances, given my (rooted) phone’s measly data plan allowance. The Chromebook was here, but the world wasn’t quite ready for the Chromebook. In 2019, a public space, restaurant, or even a shopping center without free Wi-Fi is basically unconscionable. Tethering using your smartphone is easier and more practical than ever. Connectivity is all around us, and technologies like Bluetooth and mesh networking have made our lives the most wire-free they’ve been since, well, wires were a thing. We live in a world where the Chromebook, and Chrome OS, should be thriving. But increasingly, it looks like Google’s cloud-first laptop platform has hit a dead end, and I’m not sure there are many available detours that can get it back on track. I haven’t yet used Chrome OS for any appreciable amount of time other than a short stint after getting it running on my Surface Pro 4 – a fun side project – but a good Chromebook has been on my list for a long time. I gave my aunt one a few years ago, set it up, and never heard any tech help question from her ever again – the device has been rock solid, zero issues, and she loves it. A radical departure from her Windows laptop before that, for sure, which was a support nightmare. In any event, I find it difficult to say anything meaningful about the linked editorial, since I simply lack the long-term experience as a user of the platform. I do think Chrome OS’ slowing development – if that is actually taking place – might simply be because the platform has grown up, has found its niche, and is content settling there. I don’t think Chromebooks have it in them to truly break into the wider PC market, since Windows and Apple PCs have that pretty well locked down.

Another choice would be Eric Chahi’s 1991 critically acclaimed” title “Another World”, better known in North America as “Out Of This World” which also happens to be ubiquitous. I would argue it is in fact more interesting to study than DOOM because of its polygon based graphics which are suitable to wild optimizations. In some cases, clever tricks allowed Another World to run on hardware built up to five years prior to the game release. This series is a journey through the video-games hardware of the early 90s. From the Amiga 500, Atari ST, IBM PC, Super Nintendo, up to the Sega Genesis. For each machine, I attempted to discover how Another World was implemented. I found an environment made rich by its diversity where the now ubiquitous CPU/GPU did not exist yet. In the process, I discovered the untold stories of seemingly impossible problems heroically solved by lone programmers. In the best case I was able to get in touch with the original developer. In the worse cases, I found myself staring at disassembly. It was a fun trip. Here are my notes. The first article in this series deals with Another World in genera, while two follow-ups dive deep into the Amiga version and the Atari ST version. Another article about the DOS version will be published over the weekend.

While more and more games support Linux natively, there’s a huge swath of games that now run on Linux thanks to Valve’s Proton, Wine, DXVK, and communities like Lutris that make installing Windows games on Linux a breeze. In fact, I’ve been playing League of Legends on Linux this way for months now. Still, there’s always this nagging feeling that Riot, League of Legends’ developer, might one day mess up its anticheat system and ban those of us playing League on Linux. I’ve read on the League of Linux subreddit that apparently, there’s people inside Riot using Linux and that they try to make sure this won’t happen, but that’s far from a guarantee. Turns out I’m right to be on my toes, since Electronic Arts seems to have issued a blanket ban on people playing Battlefield V on Linux using DXVK. Users are reporting that Battlefield V’s anticheat software reports they’ve been banned, and after contacting EA, they received the following message: Hello, Thank you for contacting us regarding the action that was taken on your account. The action pertains to the following violation: Promote, encourage or take part in any activity involving hacking, cracking, phishing, taking advantage of exploits or cheats and/or distribution of counterfeit software and/or virtual currency/items After thoroughly investigating your account and concern, we found that your account was actioned correctly and will not remove this sanction from your account. Thank you,EA Terms of Service This just goes to show that while gaming on Linux has become something I barely even think about – I stick to buying Linux-only games on Steam, and haven’t had any envy for a long time now – there’s real dangers associated with doing so.

iFixit details Apple’s copyright lawsuit against Corellium: Despite a lack of apparent interest in enforcing their copyright to iOS software, in this specific case Apple has decided to exert control over iOS. And they’ve crossed a red line by invoking the most notorious statute in the US copyright act, section 1201. This is the very law that made it illegal for farmers to work on their tractors and for you to fix your refrigerator. It’s the same law that we’ve been whacking away at for years, getting exemptions from the US Copyright Office for fixing, jailbreaking, and performing security research on everything from smartwatches to automobiles. Enter Apple with the latest terrible, awful, no-good application of 1201. Apple claims that in making virtual iPhones for security and development use, Corellium is engaged in “unlawful trafficking of a product used to circumvent security measures in violation of 17 U.S.C. § 1201.” In other words: Corellium sells a way to use iOS that works around the way Apple intended it to work. Apple knows that you can’t use Corellium’s software to create your own knock-off iPhone. But they can claim that Corellium’s software is illegal, and they might technically be right. That’s terrifying. I hope the lawsuit ends with a loss for Apple, but I wouldn’t bet on it,

Recently, I’ve started to explore RISC-V. I experienced the journey as pretty refreshing, particularly because I’ve been working on x86 low-level software almost exclusively for about 10 years. In this post, I want to quickly go over some high-level stumbling blocks I noticed as I was starting out. I’m probably going to write about more technical differences in subsequent blog posts. While reading the rest of this post, please keep in mind: RISC-V is simple! If you managed to do any low-level coding on x86, you will find your way around RISC-V with little effort. It’s easy to forget how crazy some parts of x86 are. Just see my past posts. The more interest in RISC-V, the quicker we can expect a RISC-V laptop to run Linux on. I’m all for it.

Paladin, a C++ development IDE for Haiku, has been updated with several new features and bug fixes. Some of the new features: • Quick Find window (Alt+F) – find files in a project by name, or abbreviation (E.g. qfw gives you QuickFindWindow.cpp) • All the Samples from the online Haiku dev book are included as Template Projects • Running applications ‘as logged’ now gives a live Monitor Window showing the streamed contents of stderr and stdout, using a new and reliable posix CommandThread wrapper (a ‘Preview Feature’ that, if popular, may end up back in Haiku proper for others to use) • Automatic switching of Haiku libraries when you open the same project from 32bit and 64bit Haiku versions • Running a build now generates compile_commands.json as used by other software • All new backend functionality now using a TDD approach to improve quality and avoid regressions • User requested modifications are prioritised, with a delivery average of 2 weeks There’s an update video available so you can get a better feel of the new features, and you can download and install Paladin through HaikuDepot. The code’s available under the MIT license at GitHub.

The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of the new TDE R14.0.7 release. TDE is a complete software desktop environment designed for Unix-like operating systems, intended for computer users preferring a traditional desktop model, and is free/libre software. TDA is a fork of the last KDE 3.x release, and looks the part. If you’ re looking for a maintained KDE 3 desktop – Trinity’s your jam. This particular release is a maintenance release, so don’t expect massive changes.

A little over a month ago I wrote about an issue I was having in Linux, where playing a video would cause processor usage to skyrocket, and hence, increase the heat output considerably, causing the fans in my laptop to spin up loudly. This behaviour was Linux-specific, as it didn’t happen when using the same laptop in Windows. I experienced the problem on KDE Neon and the latest KDE release and on Linux Mint running Cinnamon. After publication of the article, and at the suggestion of lakerssuperman2, I tried the latest release of Ubuntu running GNOME, but there, too, I experienced the problem. Many other readers were quite helpful in trying to get the problem fixed – or at least diagnosed – but I wasn’t getting anywhere. Until just-me pointed something out: I have the same laptop. I watch YouTube daily and don’t remember the fans ever kicking in for that. But I just noticed that you have the 4K screen (my model has the FHD screen – by choice) – so that might explain the difference. This turned out to be an interesting avenue of investigation. I had considered the resolution of my display as a possible culprit before, but disregarded it since I couldn’t imagine the difference between 1080p and 4K having any meaningful impact. After some fiddling with my settings, however, I concluded that while the resolution indeed was not the problem – something related to it was: user interface scaling. As soon as I turned off 200% scaling and set it to 100% – making the user interface near-unusably small in the process – the problem disappeared entirely. Finally, after years of fighting this problem, I seemed to have nailed the cause, with the help of the OSNews readership (thank you!). I couldn’t believe it looked like it was something as simple as UI scaling. Of course, running 4K at 100% scaling on a 13″ display is not exactly ideal, so I set to experiment with different combinations of resolutions and scaling factors to pinpoint if certain combinations were more or less problematic than others. Running a quick command to enable fractional scaling (gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "") to give me access to 125%, 150%, and 175% scaling factors, I discovered that setting the factor to anything but 100% would cause the problem. I eventually settled on a decent middle ground of 2048×1152 at 100% scaling, with the UI fonts set to 11. Of course, this doesn’t make optimal use of a 4K display, but things look great and crisp, correctly sized, and completely usable. But most importantly, temperatures and processor usage is now effectively on par with Windows. This means that there is an issue somewhere with how scaling seems to be implemented in either X.org, the Intel driver, the Mutter/Kwin window managers, or any combination thereof. Since both Mutter and Kwin seem to have the problem, my gut feeling is that there’s an issue somewhere in the Intel driver or in how the driver interacts with X.org (as a side note, I tried running Ubuntu with Wayland and GNOME, but performance as a whole seemed problematic there). Ever since, I’ve been running Linux on my XPS 13 without any issues, the fans never even turn on, temperatures remain well within expected values, and I have no more issues playing videos. Thanks to you, OSNews readers, I’ve been able to solve – or at least, circumvent – an issue that has been frustrating me for a long, long time.

This talk will cover everything about the Acorn Archimedes, a British computer first released in 1987 and (slightly) famous for being the genesis of the original ARM processor. The audience will get an appreciation for the Arc’s elegant design, the mid-1980s birth of RISC processors, and the humble origins of the now-omnipresent ARM architecture. The weather’s frightful, the fire’s delightful, there’s no place to go, so here’s an hour long technical talk about the Acorn Archimedes by Matt Evans.

Lilith is “a POSIX-like x86-64 kernel and userspace written in Crystal”, which only raises the question what Crystal, exactly, is. It’s a programming language whose syntax is “heavily inspired by Ruby’s, so it feels natural to read and easy to write, and has the added benefit of a lower learning curve for experienced Ruby devs”.

The Multicians web site presents the story of the Multics operating system for people interested in the system’s history, especially Multicians. The site’s goals are to: • preserve the technical ideas and advances of Multics so others don’t need to reinvent them. • record the history of Multics, its builders, and its users before we all forget. • give credit where it’s due for important innovations. • remember some good times and good people. A great initiative, and a treasure trove of information about MULTICS, the mainfraime timesharing operating system that arguably influenced every single operating system we use today.

In 2019, smartphone brands have made huge jumps in camera quality, especially when it comes to zoom and low-light. On the other hand, video quality hasn’t been given the same amount of attention. That could change in 2020 with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865’s improved ISP. Yet, even as Android smartphones are shipping with larger internal storage capacities, have faster modems, and are now supporting 5G networks, an old limitation prevents most of these phones from saving video files that are larger than 4GB in size. However, that could change in Android 11, the next major version of Android that’s set to release in 2020. The reason the limit existed in the first place is far more interesting than its removal – it’s a classic case of “ should be enough for everyone” that’s now been annoying people who record a lot of video on Android for years.

A new mechanism to help thwart return-oriented programming (ROP) and similar attacks has recently been added to the OpenBSD kernel. It will block system calls that are not made via the C library (libc) system-call wrappers. Instead of being able to string together some “gadgets” that make a system call directly, an attacker would need to be able to call the wrapper, which is normally at a randomized location. I understood some of these words.

Now, Walking Cat has uncovered a change in the latest Fast Ring build that indicates a shift in the way new features are delivered to the users. Microsoft recently published a new app on the Microsoft Store called the “Windows Feature Experience Pack”. The app looks like a dummy at the moment but it does coincide with a small change made to the About section of the Settings app. The About section now shows Windows Feature Experience Pack under Windows Specifications. The version number is entirely different from the OS Build number which currently is 19536.1000. According to Walking Cat, this indicates a shift in the way shell features are delivered to the users. It looks like Microsoft might deliver shell experiences separately in the future. This is one of the unicorns Microsoft seems to have been chasing for a very, very lone time. The ability to more easily update core parts of the operating system without interrupting users, and outside of large operating system updates, has been improving with every single major release – from XP to today – but Microsoft is still a long way off. In fairness to Microsoft, Apple is still tying things like Safari to operating system updates in both iOS and macOS, and Google is also slowly but surely untangling Android to bypass OEMs and carriers to deliver updates faster. This is an industry-wide trend.

Here’s a motherboard Intel very quickly wanted to forget about. It’s the Intel CC820—or Cape Cod—desktop board, a product that was late to market (not unusual) and within a few months, the subject of a recall (quite unusual). As the CC820 designation suggests, the board was built on the ill-fated Intel 820 ‘Camino’ chipset. Fascinating story.

We’ve included many reliability improvements in Nuuksio especially targeting Email, Calendar synchronisation and VPN settings. In addition to reliability improvements, the Email app now has enhanced support for handling HTML formatted messages. Audio routing for Android apps has been improved on Android app support 8.1, fixing issues with applications such as WhatsApp calls and Youtube. The operating system now supports hardware MPEG2, VP9 and h.265/HEVC video decoding (the exact support depends on the device). The detailed release notes are also available.

Every minute of every day, everywhere on the planet, dozens of companies — largely unregulated, little scrutinized — are logging the movements of tens of millions of people with mobile phones and storing the information in gigantic data files. The Times Privacy Project obtained one such file, by far the largest and most sensitive ever to be reviewed by journalists. It holds more than 50 billion location pings from the phones of more than 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including Washington, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Each piece of information in this file represents the precise location of a single smartphone over a period of several months in 2016 and 2017. The data was provided to Times Opinion by sources who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to share it and could face severe penalties for doing so. The sources of the information said they had grown alarmed about how it might be abused and urgently wanted to inform the public and lawmakers. We all know this is happening, yet there’s very little we can do about it – save for living far away in the woods, disconnected from everything. There’s cameras everywhere, anything with any sort of wireless connection – from smartphone to dumbphone – is tracked at the carrier level, and even our lightbulbs are ‘smart’ these days. Yet, despite knowing this is happening, it’s still eye-opening to see it in such detail as discovered by The New York Times.

Linking to The Verge, because the original report is stuck behind a paywall: Facebook is developing its own operating system that could one day reduce the company’s reliance on Google’s Android, according to a new report by The Information. Development is currently being led by Mark Lucovsky, a Microsoft veteran who co-authored the Windows NT operating system. The report provides a limited amount of information about how the new operating system could be used, but it notes that both Facebook’s Oculus and Portal devices currently run on a modified version of Android. According to one of Facebook’s AR and VR heads, Ficus Kirkpatrick, “it’s possible” that Facebook’s future hardware won’t need to rely on Google’s software, which would reduce or remove entirely the control Google has over Facebook’s hardware. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance today announced a new working group that plans to develop and promote the adoption of a new, royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products, with security as a fundamental design tenet. Zigbee Alliance board member companies such as IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy, and Wulian are also onboard to join the working group and contribute to the project. This really was about damn time. I’d love to add more smart devices to our home, but the varying standards and questionable security has always made me think twice. A royalty-free, secure, and interoperable standard that everyone can use and adhere to sounds like music to my ears.

Back in October, Wladimir Palant, developer of the popular AdBlock Plus browser extension, published a blog post outlining how extensions from security company Avast/AVG were collecting massive amounts of data from users. In a somewhat-belated response, Google has now removed some of Avast’s extensions from the Chrome Web Store. I’m so surprised.

It’s well known that if you drag a file from Finder and drop it into Terminal, the full path of the file will output in Terminal. The same behavior occurs with copy and paste too. This has always been a very convenient but innocuous operation… until macOS 10.15 Catalina. I’ve discovered that on Catalina, pasting a file from Finder not only outputs the file path in Terminal, it also invisibly and permanently grants Terminal access to the file, bypassing any macOS privacy protections! This is such a weird bug… Or feature?