OSnews

The lock screen work that we landed in 3.36 was the outcome of a long-running programme of UX work, which we first put together at the GNOME UX hackfest in London, back in 2017. There are still some outstanding pieces of the login/unlock experience that need to be filled in, and this is something that we hope to work on over the coming development cycle. However, we are also turning our attention to other aspects of the shell, which we have wanted to update for some time. In the rest of this post, I’ll describe some of the areas that we’re hoping to improve, before going on to talk about how we’re going to do it. An overview of what to expect from upcoming GNOME releases.

I am pleased to announce the KWinFT project and with it the first public release of its major open source offerings KWinFT and Wrapland, drop-in replacements for KDE’s window manager KWin and its accompanying KWayland library. The KWinFT project was founded by me at the beginning of this year with the goal to accelerate the development significantly in comparison to KWin. Classic KWin can only be moved with caution, since many people rely on it in their daily computing and there are just as many other stakeholders. In this respect, at least for some time, I anticipated to be able to push KWinFT forward in a much more dynamic way. This is a great concept, and will allow more experimentation and exciting new features in a place where this normally simply doesn’t make much sense.

We’ve just released SRU 20 for Oracle Solaris 11.4, the April 2020 CPU. It is available via ‘pkg update’ from the support repository or by downloading the SRU from My Oracle Support Doc ID 2433412.1. The administrator of my organisation needs to supply me with a Support Identifier before I can do something as simple as read the documentation about this new version, so I have no idea what to tell you. I guess Solaris technically isn’t dead yet?

Hercules is an open source software implementation of the mainframe System/370 and ESA/390 architectures, in addition to the new 64-bit z/Architecture. Hercules runs under Linux, Windows (98, NT, 2000, and XP), Solaris, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X (10.3 and later). The installation instructions will aid you in setting Hercules up.

If an application from a Chinese company installed a kernel driver onto your system with complete access to your computer, but they pinky-promised not to abuse this access and power, would you install the application? Well, if you’re interested in Riot Games’ new hit game Valorant, that’s exactly the question you’re going to have to answer. Riot Games, the company behind one of the most popular games in the world, League of Legends, recently starting publicly beta testing their new game, Valorant. Two months ago, the company penned a rather condescending blog post detailing their future anti-cheat technology, which would include a Windows kernel driver (running in ring 0, in x86 parlance). Valorant is their first game using this kernel driver, and as it turns out, this kernel driver starts at boot, and due to its very nature has full system access, even when you’re not running Valorant. According to Riot Games, we just have to trust them on their blue eyes that their kernel driver is fully secure and won’t be exploited by malicious third parties, and that the company won’t use it to spy on people or otherwise violate their privacy. Riot states on Reddit that “multiple external security research teams” have reviewed the driver, but as far as I can tell, these reviews have not been published for public vetting. What we’re dealing with here is a rootkit, a method more and more anti-cheat systems are employing in the fight against cheating. The argument is that game developers need full, complete, and total access to your system in order to prevent you from cheating, and a kernel driver is how they do it. There’s a long history of these sorts of things going horribly, horribly wrong. We all still remember the Sony rootkit debacle, where Sony CDs installed rootkits on users’ computers that ended up being exploited left, right, and centre by malicious parties. In 2016, Capcom installed a similar rootkit meant for anti-cheat with Street Fight V, which was an absolute security train wreck. And closer to home for Riot, the game client for their very own League of Legends installed crypto miners on users’ computers in the Philippines. Despite the inherent dangers in installing closed-source security-by-obscurity rootkits, Riot is dead-set on continuing to use them, and it’s only a matter of time before their rootkit will be forced upon League of Legends players as well – which in my case means I won’t be able to play League of Legends anymore even if I wanted their rootkit on my computer, since I play on Linux through Wine/Lutris, which doesn’t support kernel drivers at all. Players of Riot’s games will have to ask themselves if they trust Riot to install a rootkit with complete and full access to their system – browsing history, chat logs, email, everything. You have to trust Riot when they say the rootkit is “secure” and won’t be exploited by malicious third parties, and that the company itself won’t use it to invade your privacy. Interesting sidenote: Riot Games is owned by the Chinese company Tencent, the company behind WeChat. Tencent is, for all intents and purposes, an arm of the Chinese government, so not only do you have to trust Riot Games, you also have to trust their owner, Tencent, as well as who Tencent literally answers to – the Chinese government. I’m not going to tell anyone what they should or should not do with their computers, and if you trust Riot, Tencent, and the Chinese government enough to let them install a rootkit on your computer, then that’s your right to do so. However, I do feel users need to be at least aware of the choice they’re making.

Colorado — like most states and territories across the country — is experiencing record unemployment numbers. But the state’s unemployment system is built on aging software running on a decades-old coding language known as COBOL. Over the years, COBOL programmers have aged out of the workforce, forcing states to scramble for fluent coders in times of national crisis. A survey by The Verge found that at least 12 states still use COBOL in some capacity in their unemployment systems. Alaska, Connecticut, California, Iowa, Kansas, and Rhode Island all run on the aging language. According to a spokesperson from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, the state was actually only a month or two away from “migrating into a new environment and away from COBOL,” before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Are you one of the already 17 million people laid off in the US, losing what little health insurance you had in the process, and now you can’t even apply for unemployment assistance because some baby boomer coded the damn system in COBOL? Time to lift yourself up by the bootstraps and learn the wonders of COBOL!

Google has made significant progress toward developing its own processor to power future versions of its Pixel smartphone as soon as next year — and eventually Chromebooks as well, Axios has learned. The chip, code-named Whitechapel, was designed in cooperation with Samsung, whose state-of-the-art 5-nanometer technology would be used to manufacture the chips, according to a source familiar with Google’s effort. Samsung has also manufactured Apple’s iPhone chips, as well as its own Exynos processors. Apparently, Google has received the first batch in recent weeks. This development process has been one of the worst-kept secrets in the industry, since Google pretty much admitted it was developing its own mobile SoC years ago.

Google is replacing some Android apps for Chromebooks with Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). A PWA is essentially a webpage that looks and feels like a traditional app. This will certainly be good news for many Chromebook owners. In some cases, PWAs are faster and more functional than their Android counterparts. PWAs also take up less storage and require less juice to run. When PWAs are a better option than Android applications, you know you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. I really don’t understand why Google doesn’t just turn Chrome OS into a more traditional desktop Linux distribution – they’ll get better applications, better tooling, and better performance than shoehorning Android applications into Chrome or pretending a website is an application.

Intel’s Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF) is a feature that’s becoming increasingly common on highly portable Intel-based devices. The adaptive policy it implements is based around the idea that thermal management of a system is becoming increasingly complicated – the appropriate set of cooling constraints to place on a system may differ based on a whole bunch of criteria (eg, if a tablet is being held vertically rather than lying on a table, it’s probably going to be able to dissipate heat more effectively, so you should impose different constraints). One way of providing these criteria to the OS is to embed them in the system firmware, allowing an OS-level agent to read that and then incorporate OS-level knowledge into a final policy decision. Unfortunately, while Intel have released some amount of support for DPTF on Linux, they haven’t included support for the adaptive policy. And even more annoyingly, many modern laptops run in a heavily conservative thermal state if the OS doesn’t support the adaptive policy, meaning that the CPU throttles down extremely quickly and the laptop runs excessively slowly. It’s been a while since I really got stuck into a laptop reverse engineering project, and I don’t have much else to do right now, so I’ve been working on this. It’s been a combination of examining what source Intel have released, reverse engineering the Windows code and staring hard at hex dumps until they made some sort of sense. Here’s where I am. Someone has to do the dirty work.

The ReactOS Team is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.13. As with prior releases, keywords are noted representing the release itself and highlighting key improvements. In this particular case, the 0.4.13 version shows the results of significant hard work to bring improvements to the USB stack, further development on the Xbox port boot process, an Explorer File Search for the Shell module, as well as many other changes. There’s also new work on accessibility features, and the 64 bit version has seen considerable improvements, too.

The Verge reports: Apple and Google announced a system for tracking the spread of the new coronavirus, allowing users to share data through Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) transmissions and approved apps from health organizations. The new system, which is laid out in a series of documents and white papers, would use short-range Bluetooth communications to establish a voluntary contact-tracing network, keeping extensive data on phones that have been in close proximity with each other. Official apps from public health authorities will get access to this data, and users who download them can report if they’ve been diagnosed with COVID-19. The system will also alert people who download them to whether they were in close contact with an infected person. This is a clever use of technology, but as always, what can be used for good, can also be used for evil. A technology like this certainly seems useful in our current worldwide predicament, but it’s not hard to imagine what can be done with it that might be more nefarious. That being said, it’s refreshing to see these companies working together for the good of their users for once, instead of the constant hostility towards users to create platform lock-in and shareholder value. In any event, the APIs for this new system will arrive in iOS and Android over the coming months – through a regular OS update on iOS, and through Google Play on Android.

With Android 7.0 Nougat, Google introduced a partition scheme designed to speed up software updates. In Nougat, Google added support for duplicating certain partitions so that inactive partitions can get updated in the background and then swapped to active with a quick reboot. This “A/B partition” setup allows for “seamless updates” to take place on supported Android devices, much like Google’s Chrome OS. However, Google has never mandated the use of A/B partitions, so many devices out there that don’t support seamless updates. That could change with Android 11, however, as Google is making it mandatory for newly launched devices to support virtual A/B partitions. Anything to make the update situation on Android smoother is welcome.

There’s a storm brewing in the world of Qt and KDE, as the parent company of Qt, The Qt Company, is contemplating restricting new Qt releases to paying customers (i.e., not releasing them as open source) for twelve months. This obviously affects the KDE project considerably, who have been negotiating with The Qt Company for years now. An announcement made by The Qt Company in January derailed said negotiations, however. As KDE’s Olaf Schmidt-Wischhöfer explains: They announced that LTS releases of Qt will only be available for paid license holders. It is still unclear what this implies for contributions to Qt and for the sharing of security fixes between the various parties (including The Qt Company, the many Qt experts contributing, the KDE community, and Linux distributions). It seemed the two parties were working on a path forward acceptable to all parties involved, but then came the announcement earlier today that The Qt Company was contemplating restricting all releases to paid customers for twelve months. It seems bad blood has been brewing for a while, as Schmidt-Wischhöfer states: The Qt Company says that they are willing to reconsider the approach only if we offer them concessions in other areas. I am reminded, however, of the situation half a year ago. We had discussed an approach for contract updates, which they suddenly threw away by restricting LTS releases of Qt instead. All software changes in Qt will still be available at as Open Source as required by our contract – maybe with a delay of 12 months if the company decides to part ways with the communities. We will continue to work on a contract update that helps all sides. But even if these negotiations were to be unilaterally stopped by The Qt Company, Qt will stay Open Source, and KDE will be able to use it. I am also absolutely sure that the Qt + KDE communities will continue cooperation on new features, bug fixes, and security fixes, even should The Qt Company decide to forgo the benefits of cooperation. Luckily for the future of KDE and Qt, there is an agreement in place between KDE and The Qt Company that states that “ should The Qt Company discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under the required licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses.” This is a serious issue that I hope can be resolved, as nobody will benefit from a serious rift between The Qt Company and the KDE project.

Windows is getting support for browsing Linux file systems! Except, not really, since it only applies to WSL. We’ve had the ability to access your Linux files since Windows 1903, but now you can easily get to them from your left-hand navigation pane in File Explorer. Selecting the Linux icon will show you a view of all your distros, and selecting those will place you in the Linux root file system for that distro. As far as I can tell, this only applies to distributions installed through Windows Subsystems for Linux, not to actual distributions installed elsewhere on your computer (on other hard drives or partitions). Cool new feature, I guess, but properly sanctioned Windows support for Ext4 and other Linux-focused file systems would be so much more helpful.

Some very nice performance fixes landed this week, which should substantially boost move and copy speeds for local transfers and transfers to and from Samba shares in particular. But that’s not all, and there’s more on the menu… Every week, there’s a blog post highlighting the various changes, bugfixes, small new features, fixed paper cuts, and other small changes within KDE and its associated projects and programs. They’re a joy to read, and I would love it if more major software projects did this.

Hobbyist licenses for OpenVMS have been a notable option for users of the VAX, Alpha, and Integrity business servers. HP 3000 users tried for a similar license for MPE/iX, especially in the months following HP’s news it wouldn’t continue its 3000 business. HP declined to create the kind of license the users wanted to power the basement and in-garage 3000 servers they’d brought home. With the change in ownership of OpenVMS — HP Enterprise turned over the business to VMS Software Inc. — the hobbyist program is ending at HPE. VSI is considering one option to continue hobbyist-class licenses. That’s one hell of a bummer. I hope they can come to sort of solution or agreement.

One of my goals with GBE+ is to program an emulator that is as complete as I can possibly make it. That means emulating devices like the GB Printer. To tell the truth, I had my eye on GB Printer support for some time, but only recently have I done enough work on the DMG/GBC core to make that possible. A long time ago, I tried getting the GB Printer to work in VBA-M (1.8.0) but the Linux version didn’t seem to do anything. That is to say, VBA-M did emulate the printer as if it were connected, but it didn’t save the image anywhere I could find. The Windows version worked flawlessly and showed me the final print as I expected. Maybe that was just user-error on my part, but it inspired me to one day make an emulator that would properly emulate the GB Printer on Linux, my OS of choice. Digressing, let’s take a look at what the GB Printer is doing and how it interacts with a Game Boy system. The Game Boy Camera and Game Boy Printer were these almost mythical items I’d talk about with my friends and my brothers, and the idea of taking photos with a Game Boy was so wild and out there it sparked our imaginations. To this day, I’ve never seen or used one in real life, and that bums me out.

In February, KrebsOnSecurity told the story of a private citizen auctioning off the dangerous domain corp.com for the starting price of $1.7 million. Domain experts called corp.com dangerous because years of testing showed whoever wields it would have access to an unending stream of passwords, email and other sensitive data from hundreds of thousands of Microsoft Windows PCs at major companies around the globe. This week, Microsoft Corp. agreed to buy the domain in a bid to keep it out of the hands of those who might abuse its awesome power. I had no idea that a seemingly innocuous default chosen decades ago had this much of an impact.

Google has been ramping up the Linux environment on Chrome OS lately, with features like microphone support and USB connections. For those of you who spend a lot of time in the command-line Terminal, Chrome OS 83 (currently in the Dev channel) has updated the app with new themes and customization options. The Terminal app on Chrome OS has changed very little since the Linux container was originally released — it’s a single window with text. However, the new version shipping in Chrome OS 83 offers tabs, pre-made themes, customizable colors and fonts for text, and even cursor options. To be honest, I’d rather have a proper, traditional Linux distribution than Chrome OS, but I guess these are welcome additions for those among us using the terminal on Chrome OS.

I guess current world events are starting to affect the flow of news in our sector, too, since there’s a decided lack of interesting stuff to talk about. So, let’s talk about this: One of the immediate differences Ubuntu 20.04 desktop/laptop users will notice when booting in UEFI mode is the boot splash screen improvements thanks to leveraging Red Hat’s work on providing a flicker-free boot experience and pulling in the UEFI BGRT system/motherboard logo during the boot process to provide a more transitive experience. Canonical in turn is working on pushing some of their improvements back into upstream Plymouth. The Ubuntu 20.04 LTS boot experience is on-par to what has been found in Fedora and other Linux distributions like Arch Linux for over one year. I love it when different distributions and other projects work together to improve something that isn’t particularly sexy or high on anybody’s agenda, yet still is a welcome improvement. This is a great example of that.

The Cidco MailStation is a series of dedicated e-mail terminals sold in the 2000s as simple, standalone devices for people to use to send and receive e-mail over dialup modem. While their POP3 e-mail functionality is of little use today, the hardware is a neat Z80 development platform that integrates a 320×128 LCD, full QWERTY keyboard, and an internal modem. After purchasing one (ok, four) on eBay some months ago, I’ve learned enough about the platform to write my own software that allows it to be a terminal for accessing BBSes via its modem or as a terminal for a Unix machine connected over parallel cable. A year old story, but come on, this is timelessly cool.

In Windows 10 version 2004, we are introducing the concept of Hosted Apps to the Windows App Model. Hosted apps are registered as independent apps on Windows, but require a host process in order to run. An example would be a script file which requires its host (eg: Powershell or Python) to be installed. By itself, it is just a file and does not have any way to appear as an app to Windows. With the Hosted App Model, an app can declare itself as a host, and then packages can declare a dependency upon that host and are known as hosted apps. When the hosted app is launched, the host executable is then launched with the identity of the hosted app package instead of its own identity. This allows the host to be able to access the contents of the hosted app package and when calling APIs it does so with the hosted app identity. This seems like something that could be useful for progressive web apps, and maybe even Electron apps by making them use Edge Chromium’s rendering engine instead of having every Electron application use its own copy of Chromium, which could benefit performance and battery life.

As the lead coder of bsnes, I’ve been attempting to perfect Super Nintendo emulation for the past 15 years. We are now at a point where that goal is in sight, but there we face one last challenge: accurate cycle timing of the SNES video processors. Getting that final bit of emulation accuracy will require a community effort that I hope some of you can help with. But first, let me recap how far we’ve come. The bsnes saga is a fascinating story of how an obsession for perfection can lead to something beautiful – not just the emulator itself, but also the various technical details and stories written about it. I doubt most people really needs the insane emulation accuracy bsnes strives for, but in the future, when original, first party SNES consoles have all died out or get incredibly rare, the accuracy of bsnes will be a godsend.

Dropbox is a big user of Python. It’s our most widely used language both for backend services and the desktop client app (we are also heavy users of Go, TypeScript, and Rust). At our scale—millions of lines of Python—the dynamic typing in Python made code needlessly hard to understand and started to seriously impact productivity. To mitigate this, we have been gradually migrating our code to static type checking using mypy, likely the most popular standalone type checker for Python. (Mypy is an open source project, and the core team is employed by Dropbox.) This post tells the story of Python static checking at Dropbox, from the humble beginnings as part of my academic research project, to the present day, when type checking and type hinting is a normal thing for numerous developers across the Python community. It is supported by a wide variety of tools such as IDEs and code analyzers. I recently came across an article complaining about Python’s dynamic typing and couldn’t quite believe this was still the case. As it turns out, nowadays there is indeed a standardized way to do write type annotations and to type-check prior to runtime using mypy, all the while being driven forward by the good folks at Dropbox (which includes Python’s Benevolent Dictator for Life Guido van Rossum). This article provides a fascinating insider insight into the history of type-checking in Python and how it evolved in symbiosis with Dropbox’s codebase.

We have been working extremely hard since Android 10’s release last August to port our features to this new version of Android. Thanks to massive refactoring done in some parts of AOSP, we had to work harder than anticipated to bring some features forward, and in some cases, introduced implementations similar to some of our features into AOSP (but we’ll get to that later). Other than the Android 10 features, LineageOS 17.1 also brings back theming support (deprecated in 13.0), and the default installation solution is now Lineage Recovery (but other recoveries are still supported, and may even be advised by maintainers for specific devices). Not every Android devices is supported right away, of course, but there’s a decent number of supported devices regardless.

It’s April 1, and that means it’s both April Fools’ Day and the anniversary of the founding of Apple Inc. While this year is a sober one due to current events, I think a lot of people still appreciate what people are creating and sharing to keep spirits up, whether that be music or art or… Impractical programming projects. And while pranks on April Fools’ seem less and less fun, obvious jokes and whimsy, not at anyone’s expense, are still something I believe in… And even better if they actually work. Last year I implemented the world’s best code visualizer. This year I decided to seriously attempt something that I’d thought about in the past: getting a Swift program to run on Mac OS 9. This is not an April Fools joke, but a real project that really works. An absolutely outstanding effort and great technical write-up.

It’s no secret that we’ve been enthusiastic about Microsoft’s new, Chromium-based Edge browser for a while now. But that enthusiasm has mostly been limited to “a default Windows browser that doesn’t suck,” rather than being for any particularly compelling set of features the new Edge brings to the browser ecosystem. In a folksy announcement this week, Microsoft politely declared its determination to step up our expectations from “doesn’t suck” to somewhere on the level of “oh, wow.” Microsoft Corporate VP Liat Ben-Zur spent plenty of time enthusing about the way the new features are, apparently, already changing her life. The only thing that has me excited about the new Edge is that Windows will finally have a proper default browser that isn’t either complete garbage (Internet Explorer) or ignored by every web developer ever (the old Edge).

OpenBSD aims to be a secure operating system. In the past few months there were quite a few security errata, however. That’s not too unusual, but some of the recent ones were a bit special. One might even say bad. The OpenBSD approach to security has a few aspects, two of which might be avoiding errors and minimizing the risk of mistakes. Other people have other ideas about how to build secure systems. I think it’s worth examining whether the OpenBSD approach works, or if this is evidence that it’s doomed to failure. I picked a few errata, not all of them, that were interesting and happened to suit my narrative.

Honda has done what no other car maker is doing, and returned to analogue controls for some functions on the new Honda Jazz. While most manufacturers are moving to touchscreen controls, identifying smartphone use as their inspiration – most recently seen in Audi’s latest A3 – Honda has decided to reintroduce heating and air conditioning controls via a dial rather than touchscreen, as in the previous-generation Jazz. Unlike what the introduction states, Honda joins fellow Japanese car maker Mazda in not just blindly using touchscreens for everything inside cars. This is a good move, and definitely takes some guts, since I’ve seen countless car reviewers – including my standout favourite, Doug DeMuro – kind of blindly assuming that any car without 100% touchscreen control is outdated, without questioning the safety consequences. Good on Honda.

A work-in-progress patch series was posted over the weekend for adding variable refresh rate support into Mutter for X.Org and Wayland. This includes checking for VRR support from connected monitors using the DRM properties, support for activating VRR, and the ability to toggle the VRR support via a DBus API. The VRR support isn’t advertised to Wayland clients at the moment for the lack of an upstream Wayland protocol around VRR. I can’t wait for Mutter and Kwin to adopt and integrate support for variable refresh rates, so seeing these first patches is good news.

When AMD introduced its Ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs at CES, the company made bold claims of game-changing performance. Coming off of years of underwhelming laptop chips, AMD promised it had optimized Ryzen 4000 for mobile computing. Now we’ve tested those claims in AMD’s Ryzen 9 4900HS chip, an 8-core, 7nm chip with Radeon Vega cores. We’re stunned at the CPU’s impressive tour de force that defeats just about every Intel 8th- and 9th-gen laptop CPU we’ve ever seen. Just open up your YouTube feed and you’ll see pretty much every PC hardware channel staring at disbelief in just how good AMD’s Ryzen 4000 mobile processors really are. This isn’t just a “kind of good enough” processor – the top of the line model is faster than or equal than Intel’s top of the line processor at both single core and multicore workloads, while using slightly more than half the power. It’s all well and good for AMD to roundly run circles around Intel in the server and desktop/workstation space, but the laptop space is where the real money and mindshare can be found. This new line of AMD mobile processors is simply stunning.

Earlier this evening, Linus released Linux 5.6, which contains our first release of WireGuard. This is quite exciting. It means that kernels from here on out will have WireGuard built-in by default. And for those of you who were scared away prior by the “dOnT uSe tHiS k0de!!1!” warnings everywhere, you now have something more stable to work with. The last several weeks of 5.6 development and stabilization have been exciting, with our codebase undergoing a quick security audit, and some real headway in terms of getting into distributions. WireGuard is probably the biggest new feature in 5.6, announced earlier today.

You may have seen dark rumors around the Web that Microsoft is about to kill off the classic Control Panel. Rest assured, friend, we were as horrified as you are—but on more careful inspection, this seems not to be the case. That’s one of the many downsides of being at the mercy of closed operating systems like Windows or macOS – as a user, you’re not really in control, and your platform landlords can decide to remove vital functionality or features on a whim, and there’s nothing you can do about it. If you haven’t done so yet, I’d highly suggest start looking at open source alternatives before it’s too late, because I feel the noose is only going to tighten more, not less.

Here you’ll find my complete set of posts covering the Amiga Machine Code course. The course consists of twelve letters and two disks, that can be found here. The letters are available as PDF’s in their original Danish language as well as translated to English. Some light reading for the weekend.

If you have music on a collection of MiniDisc media and want to finally copy the data off onto modern media (or the cloud!), here are simple instructions for some different solutions. Why would you stop using MiniDisc though?

Ars Technica reports on a story from the early 2000s 2020: When software and operating system giant Microsoft announced its support for inclusion of the exFAT filesystem directly into the Linux kernel back in August, it didn’t get a ton of press coverage. But filesystem vendor Paragon Software clearly noticed this month’s merge of the Microsoft-approved, largely Samsung-authored version of exFAT into the VFS for-next repository, which will in turn merge into Linux 5.7—and Paragon doesn’t seem happy about it. Yesterday, Paragon issued a press release about European gateway-modem vendor Sagemcom adopting its version of exFAT into an upcoming series of Linux-based routers. Unfortunately, it chose to preface the announcement with a stream of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Steve Ballmer’s letterhead in the 1990s. This is some “get the facts” level of tripe. You’d think that in 2020, we’d be spared this sort of nonsense, and I’m sad I’m even spending precious bits on this one – but at least we get the name of Paragon out so you can avoid them like the plague.

AMD has filed at least two DMCA notices against Github repos that carried “stolen” source code relating to AMD’s Navi and Arden GPUs, the latter being the processor for the upcoming Xbox Series X. The person claiming responsibility for the leak informs TorrentFreak that if they doesn’t get a buyer for the remainder of the code, they will dump the whole lot online. I’d love to hear the backstory behind this hack. For a company like AMD, such a hack must’ve been an inside job, right? While I know I shouldn’t be surprised anymore by just how lacking security can be at even the most prominent technology companies, I just can’t imagine it being very easy to get your hands on this documentation and code without some form of inside help.

For those managing to get their hands on a recently released Loongson 3A4000/3B4000 or even older Loongson 3 MIPS64 processors, improving the support is on the way with the upcoming Linux 5.7 kernel. Queued as part of the MIPS architecture work for Linux 5.7 are a number of Loongson improvements, in particular for the Loongson 3 series. The Loongson processors are pretty much impossible to come by outside of China, and gained some fame as the platform of choice for Richard Stallman.

Apple has released macOS 10.15.4, watchOS 6.2, and iOS, iPadOS and tvOS 13.4. Earlier today, Apple continued its tradition of updating all of its operating systems at once. The day brought major new feature releases to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS. The iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS updates are numbered 13.4, Apple Watches got watchOS 6.2, and Macs saw the release of macOS Catalina 10.15.4. You know where to get them.

Ever wondered what’s it like to run Android without Google’s services and applications? Well, get a Huawei device. A smartphone UI isn’t much use without apps, of course, and here is where Huawei hits its first hurdle. Huawei has its own store called AppGallery, which it claims is the third largest in the world based on its more than 400 million monthly active users. The vast majority of those users will be in China, of course, where the Google Play Store has never been included alongside AppGallery. If you buy a Mate 30 Pro now anywhere in the world, though, AppGallery is what you get out of the box. To be blunt, it is not great. I wouldn’t call it barren — there is support from major US companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Snap. You can’t get Chrome, of course, but Opera is there if you want something with desktop sync. But a huge amount of its content is aimed at China, with other big Western names like Facebook, Slack, Netflix, and Twitter missing, which puts the Mate 30 Pro in a more precarious app situation than even the diciest days of Windows Phone. Huawei has announced a $1 billion plan to help stock AppGallery’s shelves, but it has its work cut out. A bigger problem is that even if you can get popular applications installed, they often won’t work properly because the device lacks the Google Mobile Services. It’s an incredibly hard situation for Huawei to be in.

Google announced its decision to drop support for the User-Agent string in its Chrome browser. Instead, Chrome will offer a new API called Client Hints that will give the user greater control over which information is shared with websites. We’ve talked about this earlier this year, but I want to highlight it again since it’s very important this initiative doesn’t devolve into Google and Chrome shoving this alternative down the web’s throat. Deprecating user agent strings is a good thing, but only if the replacement is a collective effort supported by everyone.

Update: the WebKit blog post has been updated with a clarification: Web applications added to the home screen are not part of Safari and thus have their own counter of days of use. Their days of use will match actual use of the web application which resets the timer. We do not expect the first-party in such a web application to have its website data deleted. That’s definitely a relief, and good thing they cleared this up. Original continues below: On the face of it, WebKit’s announcement yesterday titled Full Third-Party Cookie Blocking and More sounds like something I would wholeheartedly welcome. Unfortunately, I can’t because the “and more” bit effectively kills off Offline Web Apps and, with it, the chance to have privacy-respecting apps like the prototype I was exploring earlier in the year based on DAT. Block all third-party cookies, yes, by all means. But deleting all local storage (including Indexed DB, etc.) after 7 days effectively blocks any future decentralised apps using the browser (client side) as a trusted replication node in a peer-to-peer network. And that’s a huge blow to the future of privacy. I’m sure that’s entirely a coincidence for a company that wants to force everyone to use their App Store, the open web be damned.

When Apple CarPlay and Android Auto first started rolling out, initial evidence suggested these technologies held promise to reduce distracted driving. These systems funneled the most important features from our phones onto the infotainment screen, curbing motorists’ desire to reach for their handhelds. Yet, it looks like these mirroring technologies may not be nearly as safe as initially hoped. A new study from the UK’s IAM Roadsmart, an independent road safety organization, paints a far bleaker picture. The stark findings showed that drivers using one of the smartphone mirroring systems in a car displayed reaction times slower than someone who’d used cannabis. In fact, these motorists’ reaction times were five times slower than someone driving with the legal limit of alcohol in their system. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone with more than two braincells to rub together. These systems are based on touch screen technology, and touchscreens without any tactility are simply not suited for use while operating a motor vehicle. Touchscreens are far more distracting than plain old tactile buttons in a fixed order that you learn over time and can feel, and it blows my mind that no safety regulations heavily curtailing their use to parked situations has been enacted just yet.

The Counterpoint program launcher was supplied with the Amstrad PC5086 and other Amstrad PCs from that era. It acts as a user-friendly front end, replacing the full GUIs (Windows 2.0, or GEM) supplied with previous models. The Amstrad-branded version opens with a warning that it should only be used on Amstrad computers. However it appears to run successfully in non-Amstrad environments, such as the virtual machine used to make these screenshots. I love discovering user interfaces I’ve never known about this before, and this one fits the bill just right. Wild UI experimentation was the norm during the late ’80s and early ’90s, before we all settled on what we’re all using now. Digging into the past and learning from even relatively obscure footnotes such as these is fascinating.

It came out much later in March than we expected, but yesterday Google launched the second developer preview for Android 11, the next big version of Android due out at the end of the year. Despite the coronavirus disrupting just about every part of normal life, Google posted the same schedule it did with Preview 1, indicating that the plan is still to have a preview release every month. Anyway, here are the important new things in this release. As always, an excellent look at the new features by Ars. We’re still early on in Android 11’s development cycle, though, so everything is still very much subject to change.

Usually, x86 tutorials don’t spend much time explaining the historical perspective of design and naming decisions. When learning x86 assembly, you’re usually told something along the lines: Here’s EAX. It’s a register. Use it. So, what exactly do those letters stand for? E–A–X. I’m afraid there’s no short answer! We’ll have to go back to 1972… I love digital archeology.

We have seen earlier that Microsoft’s designers are working on a new Start Menu for Windows 10 (not Windows 10X) and now Panos Panay has posted a video celebrating 1 billion Windows 10 installations which appears to confirm that the changes and more are on the way. There’s finally hopefully going to be a modern replacement for Explorer, and context menus seem to be modern and thus consistent too. The already mentioned updated Stert menu is coming, too.

From the team that has brought PC and Console gamers the latest in graphics innovation for nearly 25 years, we are beyond pleased to bring gamers DirectX 12 Ultimate, the culmination of the best graphics technology we’ve ever introduced in an unprecedented alignment between PC and Xbox Series X. When gamers purchase PC graphics hardware with the DX12 Ultimate logo or an Xbox Series X, they can do so with the confidence that their hardware is guaranteed to support ALL next generation graphics hardware features, including DirectX Raytracing, Variable Rate Shading, Mesh Shaders and Sampler Feedback. This mark of quality ensures stellar “future-proof” feature support for next generation games! That’s some Vista-era name right there.

Sony has broken its silence. PlayStation 5 specifications are now out in the open with system architect Mark Cerny delivering a deep dive presentation into the nature of the new hardware and the ways in which we should expect a true generational leap over PlayStation 4. Digital Foundry had the chance to watch the lecture a couple of days ahead of time and had the opportunity to talk to Cerny in more depth afterwards about the nature of the custom PlayStation hardware and the philosophy behind its design. And just as with the Xbox Series X, specifications are meaningless without the games to back them up.

Apple today released the golden master version of iOS and iPadOS 13.4, the latest major updates to the iOS 13 operating system that was released in September. The iOS and ‌iPadOS‌ 13.4 GMs come after a little over a month of beta testing. The biggest new feature – which is accompanied by new iPad Pro devices and a keyboard with trackpad – is mouse support in iPadOS. The cool thing here is that Apple’s iOS cursor – a dot, so not an arrow – is a thing of marvel, and it does some really neat tricks that you won’t find anywhere else. When you hover over a tappable button, the pointer disappears and instead you get a hover-state highlight around the button. Hover over an app icon in the Dock or on your homescreen, and instead of seeing the mouse pointer on top of the icon, you see a highlight around the icon, much like the way icons are popped on tvOS. When text editing, the cursor changes to an I-beam, of course, but it’s an all-new I-beam cursor, not the one you get in iOS while using the on-screen keyboard as a virtual trackpad (after a tap-and-hold on the spacebar or two-finger tap-and-drag on the key area). This new I-beam cursor is smart. It adjusts to the size of the text you’re editing — if you’re editing 16-point text you’ll get a smaller cursor; if you’re editing 48-point text you’ll get a larger cursor. (Lo these 35+ years after the original Macintosh, it suddenly strikes me as a bit silly that the I-beam cursor stays small even when editing very large text.) The new iPadOS I-beam cursor also is aware of where lines are in text fields, and “snaps” to the line. There seem to be a lot of small little niceties here that seem so obvious once you see them in action. It’s really cool stuff, and I can’t wait to try it out.