Are you an Android developer with applications on the Play Store? Well, you might want to know that Google is about to publish your phone number on the Play Store for everyone to see. We’re renaming the “Contact details” section on your app’s store listing to “App support” and adding a new “About the developer” section to help users learn more about you. This may show verified ide ... ⌘ Read more
Are you an Android developer with applications on the Play Store? Well, you might want to know that Google is about to publish your phone number on the Play Store for everyone to see. We’re renaming the “Contact details” section on your app’s store listing to “App support” and adding a new “About the developer” section to help users learn more about you. This may show verified ide ... ⌘ Read more
The general trend of macOS releases over the past few years is that it has been moving closer and closer to the look and feel of iOS. The icons have become iOS icons, and their shape has become the iOS shape, and you can now use your iPhone as the Mac’s webcam, etc. etc. This occasionally comes at the expense of other functionality (ask me how I feel about the new Settings menu), but it is the direction that Apple has clearly been hea ... ⌘ Read more
Speaking of beta programs and doing it right – here’s how things are going at the other end of the spectrum. Today we’re bringing you Android 14 Beta 4, continuing our work on polish and performance as we get closer to the general availability release of Android 14. Beta 4 is available for Pixel Tablet and Pixel Fold, in addition to the rest of the supported Pixel family, so you can test your applications on devices spanning multiple form factors and directly experience the wor ... ⌘ Read more
Apple is officially releasing the first public betas of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10, and macOS 14 Sonoma today, a little over a month after releasing the first developer betas at its Worldwide Developers Conference. I have to say, Apple is doing a great job with their public beta access. It’s easy enough that it’s accessible, but not so easy you’ve got millions of people runni ... ⌘ Read more
On behalf of the Thunderbird team, Thunderbird Council, our global community of contributors, and our extended Mozilla family, I am incredibly excited to announce the initial launch of Thunderbird 115 “Supernova” for Linux, macOS, and Windows! With this year’s version, we’re delivering much more than just another yearly release. Supernova represents a modernized overhaul of the software – both visually and technically – while retaining the familiarity and flexibility you expect fro ... ⌘ Read more
Today SUSE, the company behind Rancher, NeuVector, and SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) and a global leader in enterprise open source solutions, announced it is forking publicly available Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and will develop and maintain a RHEL-compatible distribution available to all without restrictions. Over the next few years, SUSE plans to invest more than $10 million into this project. The spicy bit here is that the CEO of SUSE, Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, worked at Red Hat for 18 ... ⌘ Read more
You could put it this way – DisplayPort has all the capabilities of interfaces like HDMI, but implemented in a better way, without legacy cruft, and with a number of features that take advantage of the DisplayPort’s sturdier architecture. As a result of this, DisplayPort isn’t just in external monitors, but also laptop internal displays, USB-C port display support, docking stations, and Thunderbolt of all flavors. If you own a display-capable docking statio ... ⌘ Read more
The Kelly Rowland/Nelly song Dilemma features an infamous scene amongst nerds where Kelly Rowland tries to send a message to Nelly using a Nokia 9210 Communicator. Unfortunately, she does this using the built in spreadsheet program and receives no reply. People suggested she might be using the =HYPERLINK() function in Excel, but would that even work? ⌘ Read more
This ports DoomGeneric NTNative to kernel-mode driver environment. This is bonkers. ⌘ Read more
Some huge news today. Intel has started to notify its ecosystem saying that it will stop direct investment in the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) business. For the handful of STH readers who are unaware, Intel not only makes chips but they also make systems. Earlier this year, we covered that Intel was exiting the server business and selling it to MiTAC. Now its line of PCs is being sunset as well. ... ⌘ Read more
Liam Dawe at GamingOnLinux: Well, the results are here. In the USA the FTC was trying to block Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard but Microsoft has won the fight. Now Microsoft are one big step closer to actually properly closing the deal, and a rather big consolidation of the gaming industry given how big Activision Blizzard are. I haven’t been keeping up with this case very much, but if history’s anything to go b ... ⌘ Read more
It’s been all over the news, so I can’t get around posting about it here: the year of the Linux desktop is finally here. According to the – admittedly, troublesome – figures from StatCounter, the market share of Linux on the desktop has reached 7.23%. Other publications do not count Chrome OS installations as part of the Linux share, but I think that’s nonsense – they’re both clearly Linux desktop operating systems, and should be added up. In the end, it doesn’ ... ⌘ Read more
Today, the European Commission adopted its adequacy decision for the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework. The decision concludes that the United States ensures an adequate level of protection – comparable to that of the European Union – for personal data transferred from the EU to US companies under the new framework. On the basis of the new adequacy decision, personal data can fl ... ⌘ Read more
Running OSNews.com is not exactly something that generates loads of income, yet it’s taking up a decent amount of time and energy that I have to find somewhere between my wife and kids, translation work, and the rest of my life. While OSNews will always remain free to access, it would mean the world to me if you could support my work financially. There’s two ways to do this. First, you can become a Patreon, which will grant you access to an adverti ... ⌘ Read more
So a few years ago, a Ukrainian programmer called Sergii Stoian started to build a modern Linux desktop environment based around the GNUstep components running on top of CentOS Linux, which he called NEXTSPACE. Sadly, development stalled a couple of years ago, before CentOS Linux’ premature end-of-life. We are happy to report that Stoian is alive and well, but what with his country being invaded and so on, he’s been a bit too busy to work on his project in ... ⌘ Read more
Oracle, who distributes an RHEL clone, has responded to Red Hat’s latest source code availability changes. We want to emphasize to Linux developers, Linux customers, and Linux distributors that Oracle is committed to Linux freedom. Oracle makes the following promise: as long as Oracle distributes Linux, Oracle will make the binaries and source code for that distribution publicly and freely available. Furthermore, Oracle welcomes downstrea ... ⌘ Read more
These are my notes from experimenting with building Wayland bits on OpenBSD during g2k23 in Tallinn… Thanks to the OpenBSD foundation for organizing this event. This is still far from a complete running system as there are many issues on the road, but it’s a good start and it shows that it’s definitely not impossible to get Wayland running on OpenBSD. This is one of the very few valid criticisms of Wayland: it’s designed and developed entirely for Linux, with no regard for BSD or other platfor ... ⌘ Read more
The Video Game History Foundation, in partnership with the Software Preservation Network, has conducted the first ever study on the commercial availability of classic video games, and the results are bleak. 87% of classic video games released in the United States are critically endangered. This confirms something all of us already suspected or knew: the vast majority of classic games are simpl ... ⌘ Read more
Here is a dumb question that you probably never asked yourself: What is the minimal amount of bytes we need to store in a .NET executable to have the CLR print the string "Hello, World!" to the standard output? In this post, we will explore the limits of the .NET module file format, get it as small as possible, while still having it function like a normal executable on a typical Windows machine with the .NET Framework installed. The ... ⌘ Read more
Today it’s been three weeks since my 4th RSoC started, where the main focus this time is to speed up Redox by implementing on-demand paging in the kernel. I don’t really understand any of this, but I know OSNews readers love this sort of nitty gritty stuff. ⌘ Read more
This is a community-based project and is actively updated. This project aims at restoring the legacy Windows Update websites, and allows older operating systems (Windows 95, NT 4.0, 98, Me, 2000, and XP) to obtain updates like they used to. Ever since 2011 when Microsoft pulled the plug on nearly all the Windows Update websites, the Windows Update feature for older Windows operating systems was no longer functional. The only way to instal ... ⌘ Read more
In our State of the Budgie blog post in May of last year, we emphasized that Budgie 11 would be Wayland-first, with initial expectations being that we would support an X11 fallback mode, as well as mentioning that “it is not entirely out of the realm of possibility to have a Budgie 10 under Wayland”. Since that blog post, several key developments have occurred in the Wayland ecosystem. This detailed article ... ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD is still going strong. Its strength comes from having built a strong base in its code, documentation, and culture. It has managed to evolve with the times, continuing to bring in new committers, and smoothly transition through several leadership groups. It continues to fill an important area of support that is an alternative to Linux. Specifically, companies needing redundancy require more than one operating system, since any single oper ... ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux distribution but it’s increasingly positioning snaps as the preferred way to ‘get’ software. The aim is, eventually, to default to a full-snap experience on the desktop. With that plan in mind you won’t be mighty surprised (and if you are, welcome back to planet earth) to hear that showcasing DEB software will not be the primary aim of this new Ubuntu Software replacement. Ubuntu’s Director of Engineering ... ⌘ Read more
Truth be told, this was the first time I heard of an Addressograph. So what does it do? What was the motivation behind its creation? And how does it work? Let’s take a dive into an Addressograph. I had never heard of this machine either – it’s designed to imprint things like names, addresses, and other information onto envelopes and forms. It’s one of the many, many innovations we’ve lost along the way in the 20th century that I’d love to see in the real wo ... ⌘ Read more
This project brings the Windows 10 or Windows 11 desktop operating system to your Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL. It’s the same edition of Windows you’re used to on your traditional laptop or desktop computer, but it’s the version for ARM64 (armv8a) processors. It can run ARM64, ARM, x86 and x64 applications (the last two via emulation) just fine. This is such a cool project, and is making me want to buy a 950 XL on eBay. ⌘ Read more
The Intel i960 was a remarkable 32-bit processor of the 1990s with a confusing set of versions. Although it is now mostly forgotten (outside the many people who used it as an embedded processor), it has a complex history. It had a shot at being Intel’s flagship processor until x86 overshadowed it. Later, it was the world’s best-selling RISC processor. One variant was a 33-bit processor with a decidedly non-RISC object-oriented ... ⌘ Read more
Wayland is an interesting beast. X11, for all its faults, does a lot for the desktop environment. If you’re stretched for time, you could – in theory – just slap a panel onto the default X11 window manager and call it a day. The modern landscape of desktop environments built on top of X11 exists because developers have gotten really good at eschewing X11’s built-in crusty junk for their own new and shiny junk, so that things work as you’d expect them to. For the most ... ⌘ Read more
At the time the KDE Free Qt Foundation was founded, Qt was developed by Trolltech–the company that originally developed the framework. The Foundation has supported Qt through its transitions, first to Nokia, then to Digia, and finally to The Qt Company. It has the right to release Qt, if necessary to ensure that Qt remains open source. This remarkable legal guarantee protects the free software community and creates trust among de ... ⌘ Read more
Back in May at the Build conference, we introduced Windows Copilot for Windows 11. In today’s flight we are offering an early look of Windows Copilot to Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel via a controlled feature rollout. This first preview focuses on our integrated UI experience, with additional functionality coming down the road in future previews. To use Copilot in this flight you must have Windows Build 23493 or higher in the Dev Channel, and Microsoft Edge v ... ⌘ Read more
Instead, they ended up on eBay, at a bargain-basement price of $59.99 each. And when the modern retro computing community turned them on, what they found was something worth bringing back to life. It took a while for anyone to notice these stylish metal-and-plastic machines from 1983. First, information spread like whispers in the community of tech forums, Discord serve ... ⌘ Read more
This is a wee operating system written to support the async style of programming in Rust on microcontrollers. It fits in about 2 kiB of Flash and uses about 20 bytes of RAM (before your tasks are added). In that space, you get a full async runtime with multiple tasks, support for complex concurrency via join and select, and a lot of convenient but simple APIs. I understood some of those words. ⌘ Read more
Microsoft has been increasingly moving Windows to the cloud on the commercial side with Windows 365, but the software giant also wants to do the same for consumers. In an internal “state of the business” Microsoft presentation from June 2022, Microsoft discuses building on “Windows 365 to enable a full Windows operating system streamed from the cloud to any device.” Who wants this? ⌘ Read more
macOS is fortunate to have access to the huge arsenal of standard Unix tools. There are also a good number of macOS-specific command-line utilities that provide unique macOS functionality. There’s some real cool stuff in here. ⌘ Read more
Red Hat’s announcement last week caused quite a bit of a stir, so today, Red Hat published a blog post to defend itself. We will always send our code upstream and abide by the open source licenses our products use, which includes the GPL. When I say we abide by the various open source licenses that apply to our code, I mean it. I was shocked and disappointed about how many people got so much w ... ⌘ Read more
I recently discovered a secret browser located inside the “Manage my account” popup that Android has in various apps (quite important apps, such as Settings, and all Google suite apps). The browser even bypasses parental control! A secret browser that is entirely different from whatever browsers you have installed on your Android device? I’m sure that won’t present any problems whatsoever. Then you have two ... ⌘ Read more
Do you use Windows 3.1? Do your friends send you jokes and haikus written by ChatGPT, and make you feel left out? Do you wish you had the sum of all human knowledge at your fingertips? Or wish you had your very own AI chatbot on your trusty 386? Wish no more! Introducing WinGPT, an AI Assistant for Windows 3.1. Absolutely bonkers. ⌘ Read more
As expected Linux 6.4 is out today as stable as an on-time release following a relatively quiet cycle the past two months. While the RC period of Linux 6.4 was relatively quiet and uneventful, that’s not to say there isn’t anything good with Linux 6.4… But in fact there’s a lot from beginning to upstream various Apple M2 support code in different drivers, AMD Guided Autonomous Mode added to their P-State driver, and a lot of other new hardware work. It’ll find its way to your distribution, or ... ⌘ Read more
I recently started a Pixelfed account dedicated to all the various pieces of (mobile) hardware I own. It’s still quite new, but the intention is to post photos of my Palm/PocketPC/etc. device collection a few times a week, with a short info blurb. The account will post no other content, so you won’t see photos of my food, sunsets, beaches, or other irrelevant nonsense. In case you aren’t aware – Pixelfed is the Fediverse equivalent of Instagram ... ⌘ Read more
Kicking off a busy day of product announcements and updates for AMD’s data center business group, this morning AMD is finally announcing their long-awaited high density “Bergamo” server CPUs. Based on AMD’s density-optimized Zen 4c architecture, the new EPYC 97×4 chips offer up to 128 CPU cores, 32 more cores than AMD’s current-generation flagship EPYC 9004 “Genoa” chips. According to AMD, the new EPYC p ... ⌘ Read more
In this blog we’ll look at what it takes to construct an in-memory loader for Mach-O bundles within MacOS Ventura without using dyld. We’ll walk through the lower-level details of what makes up a Mach-O file, how dyld processes load commands to map areas into memory, and how we can emulate this to avoid writing payloads to disk. I also recommend reading this post alongside the code published here to fully understand the individual are ... ⌘ Read more
Yes, I’m a little late, but here we go: The MorphOS development team is proud to announce the public release of MorphOS 3.18! This new release includes several new applications such as Hex – a scriptable file/RAM/disk hex editor, ArchiveIt – a ZIP archiver/unarchiver application and Thermals – an app displaying thermal and fan information and graphs. In addition, MorphOS 3.18 supports Samba 2 and 3 network share browsing and mounting in the Ambient desktop. Radeon drivers have been updat ... ⌘ Read more
More than two years ago, Red Hat introduced CentOS Stream as the focal point for collaboration around Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). CentOS Stream shortens the feedback window between Red Hat engineers and partners, customers, and communities while at the same time providing even greater visibility into the next innovations in RHEL. We’ve seen great success in the Special Interest Group (SIG) community to help integrate and bring ne ... ⌘ Read more
Apple today announced the availability of new software tools and technologies that enable developers to create groundbreaking app experiences for Apple Vision Pro — Apple’s first spatial computer. Featuring visionOS, the world’s first spatial operating system, Vision Pro lets users interact with digital content in their physical space using the most natural and intuitive inputs possible — their eyes, hands, and voice. Starting today, Apple’s global community of developers w ... ⌘ Read more
The confusion over Microsoft’s plans to retire the current Mail and Calendar apps for Windows with the new Outlook for Windows app continues. Last week, Microsoft sent a message to Microsoft 365 admins stating the Mail and Calendar apps would be replaced by the new Outlook starting in September 2024. However, an apparent backlash against that timeframe c ... ⌘ Read more
Linux on the PS3 has a pretty interesting history. If you’re familiar with the History of the PS3 you probably know that when it was first released in 2006 Sony shipped it with support to run other operating systems through a feature called OtherOS. OtherOS allowed people to install operating systems like Linux or FreeBSD on a second partition on the PS3 hard drive. In 2010 Sony removed OtherOS support ... ⌘ Read more
The European Union (EU) is set to usher in a new era of smartphones with batteries that consumers can easily replace themselves. Earlier this week, the European Parliament approved new rules covering the design, production, and recycling of all rechargeable batteries sold within the EU. For “portable batteries” used in devices such as smartphones, tablets, and cameras, consumers must be able to “easily remove an ... ⌘ Read more
The European Commission has made a formal antitrust complaint against Google and its ad business. In a preliminary opinion, the regulator says Google has abused its dominant position in the digital advertising market. It says that forcing Google to sell off parts of its business may be the only remedy, if the company is found guilty of the charges. This would be a significant move ... ⌘ Read more
Eight years after Google Domains launched, and a little more than a year after it graduated out of beta, Google is “winding down following a transition period,” as part of “efforts to sharpen our focus.” That’s corporate-ese for “We need to keep cost-cutting, so we’re selling this business we just finished shaping up to Squarespace.” I have two domains over at Google Domains. I doubt Squa ... ⌘ Read more
One of my favourite software projects got a brand new release – the Not so Common Desktop Environment (NsCDE) 2.3 has been released. NsCDE brings the look, feel, and behaviour of CDE to the modern Linux desktop through a combination of themes, scripts, FVWM customisations, and a lot more. This new release brings the usual bugfixes, but also new features – like Qt6 integration, CSS updates for newer releases of Firefox and Thunderbird, and more. ⌘ Read more
It’s no secret that the Android Open Source Project has been languishing compared to the distributions (?) of Android that are actually being used by Google itself (on their Pixel phones) and OEMs such as Samsung, Sony, and others. Now, it seems Google has taken a pretty substantial step in further gutting AOSP – it has deprecated both the ... ⌘ Read more
Edge has a built-in image enhancement tool that, according to Microsoft, can use “super-resolution to improve clarity, sharpness, lighting, and contrast in images on the web.” Although the feature sounds exciting, recent Microsoft Edge Canary updates have provided more information on how image enhancement works. The browser now warns that it sends image links to Microsoft instead of performing on-device enhancements. The biggest problem w ... ⌘ Read more
It is with huge pleasure that the Debian GNU/Hurd team announces the release of Debian GNU/Hurd 2023. This is a snapshot of Debian “sid” at the time of the stable Debian “bookworm” release (June 2023), so it is mostly based on the same sources. It is not an official Debian release, but it is an official Debian GNU/Hurd port release. Debian GNU/Hurd is probably the easiest, most accessible way to try out Hurd. ⌘ Read more
After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 12 (code name bookworm). The biggest change conceptually is that Debian now includes a non-free-firmware package area, and the Debian project from here on out will allow non-free firmware to be included on installation media. For the rest, a new Debian release is exactly as you’d expect – all the latest versions of packages, and it will serve as the base for an immense number of po ... ⌘ Read more
For those of you a little confused about what a postcode is, it’s effectively the same as a US zip code; a way of distilling a postal address down to but a few characters. Hence why some rogue auto-translate function in Windows 11 is occasionally switching ‘zip’ to ‘postcode’ in the UK’s Windows menus. As a translator myself, this is easy enough to explain. Either we’re lookin ... ⌘ Read more
We’re bringing a new mid-tier compiler to Chrome. Maglev is a just-in-time compiler that can quickly generate performant machine code for all relevant functions within the first one-hundredth of a second. It reduces overall CPU time to compile code while also saving battery life. Our measurements show Maglev has provided a 7.5 percent improvement on Jetstream and a 5 percent improvement in Speedometer. Maglev will start rolling out in Chrome version ... ⌘ Read more
From CrossOver’s blog: Apple revealed their new Game Porting Toolkit today at WWDC. This Toolkit is designed to allow Windows game developers a way to easily and quickly determine how well their game could run on macOS, with the ultimate goal of facilitating the creation of Mac game ports. We are ecstatic that Apple chose to use CrossOver’s source code as their emulation solution for the Game Porting Toolkit. We have decades of experience creating ports with ... ⌘ Read more
Back in March I came home for spring break and quickly found myself motivated to do something dumb with Linux but there was an issue, all of my stuff was back in my dorm. The only thing I really had was a hard modded Xbox 360, an old monitor, and an even older keyboard. I knew what I had to do. Of course. ⌘ Read more
After years of speculation, leaks, rumors, setbacks, and rumblings of amazing behind-the-scenes demos, Apple has made its plans for a mixed reality platform and headset public. Vision Pro is “the first Apple Product you look through, not at,” Apple’s Tim Cook said, a “new AR platform with a new product” that augments reality by seamlessly blending the real world with the digital world. The headset will start ... ⌘ Read more
Apple today announced macOS Sonoma, the latest version of its Mac operating system. Launching this fall, macOS Sonoma includes several new features, including desktop widgets, Apple TV-like aerial screensavers, enhancements to apps like Messages and Safari, a new Game mode that prioritizes CPU and GPU performance for gaming, and more. Apple also showed off iOS 17, watchOS 10, and iPadOS 17. iOS 17 features personalized contact posters with photos, Memojis, and eye-catching ty ... ⌘ Read more
The Mac Pro might not look different from its predecessor on the outside, but on the inside, Intel’s Xeon CPU and AMD’s Radeon Pro graphics are gone, and in their place we have a new chip called the M2 Ultra. This is the same chip in the new Mac Studio; it has a 24-core CPU and an up to 76-core GPU, and it starts with twice the memory and SSD storage of the old Mac Pro. Apple promises it will be “3x faster” than the Intel Mac Pro. Memory tops out at 192GB. ... ⌘ Read more
At Build 2023 developer conference, Microsoft finally teased the all-new modern File Explorer refresh. It’s unclear when the update is coming out, but we have accessed an early and unreleased version of the new File Explorer that mirrors what was teased at the conference. This definitely looks like a marked improvement over the aging current File Explorer, which isn’t very hard to do. I ... ⌘ Read more
The tradeoff is that we are pivoting away from work we had been doing on desktop applications and will cease shipping LibreOffice as part of RHEL starting in a future RHEL version. This also limits our ability to maintain it in future versions of Fedora. We will continue to maintain LibreOffice in currently supported versions of RHEL (RHEL 7, 8 and 9) with ... ⌘ Read more
IceWM 3.4.0 might as well be called the Keybinding Update, since virtually all changes are related to them in some way. This release adds support for keybindings to literal Latin-1 characters, all UTF-8 code points in keybindings, and more. ⌘ Read more
ArcaOS 5.0.8 includes refreshed driver content, updated kernel and included software, as well as installation boot fixes since 5.0.7 was released at the end of 2021. It also rolls in a few fixes that come from our 5.1.0 development work. ArcaOS 5.0.8 can be used for new installs or to update any prior version of ArcaOS 5. If you have experienced difficulty installing previous releases of ArcaOS on your hardware, 5.0.8 may address your issue(s). This is a small point release in the run-up ... ⌘ Read more
DESKTOP is a graphical user interface for DOS, which ones used to be a commercial shell like MS-Windows 3.0 or GEOS. However, due to the dominance of MS-Windows 95, we were forced to stop publishing the program, so it’s free now… I’ve done a lot of digging into these alternative shells for both MS-DOS and Windows 3.x/9x, but I had somehow never heard of this one. It’s freely available, and has some neat and interesting features, like copy and ... ⌘ Read more
Windows 11 users who open the official Get Help support application of the operating system may be greeted with an advertisement for Microsoft’s Teams application now. The ad is not the first for Microsoft Teams in Windows 11. Back in late 2021, a Microsoft Teams advertisement was causing freezes on Windows 11 systems it was displayed on. Another day, another ad. Fun times to be a Windows user. ⌘ Read more
Apollo, the popular Reddit app for iOS, could face millions of dollars in fees as a result of Reddit’s new paid API model. According to an update posted by developer Christian Selig, Reddit could charge Apollo roughly $20 million per year if it continues operating at its current scale. Reddit announced changes to its API policy in April, which allows the platform to ... ⌘ Read more
Ars Technica: This weekend saw an exception to that rule, though, as Nintendo’s lawyers formally asked Valve to cut off the planned Steam release of Wii and Gamecube emulator Dolphin. In a letter addressed to the Valve Legal Department (a copy of which was provided to Ars by the Dolphin Team), an attorney representing Nintendo of America requests that Valve take down Dolphin’s “coming soon” Ste ... ⌘ Read more
According to Canonical’s Oliver Grawert, the next long-term support release of Ubuntu will be available to download in 2 versions: a classic, deb-based version (default) and, for the first time, an immutable, snap-based build. This makes sense, and was inevitable. I wonder how long they’re going to keep the .deb-based version around; I doubt they’d pull it any time soon. Still, competition is good, and it’s been clear for a while now that immutabilit ... ⌘ Read more
As cryptocurrencies rise and fall, there’s one number that just keeps going up. Whenever somebody loses money to a crypto scam or hack, the Grift Counter on Molly White’s blog, Web3 Is Going Just Great, spins higher and higher. Recently it ticked over $12 billion. White started the blog in December 2021 out of frustration with the mainstream coverage of crypto, which she says paid too much attention to rags-to-riches tales a ... ⌘ Read more
With United States v. Smith (S.D.N.Y. May 11, 2023), a district court judge in New York made history by being the first court to rule that a warrant is required for a cell phone search at the border, “absent exigent circumstances” (although other district courts have wanted to do so). EFF is thrilled about this decision, given that we have be ... ⌘ Read more
Way back in 2006, to celebrate the introdiction of MINIX 3, Andy Tanenbaum, the operating system’s legendary creator, published an introduction article to the new version here on OSNews. I’ve followed along with development ever since, with the last item we ever posted dating from 2015. Over the weekend, a link to the MINIX 3 git repository made the rounds, noting that the last change is dated 14 November, 2018. It seems like MINIX 3 has pretty much stalled, and digging through the Google Groups group i ... ⌘ Read more
The IRIX Network, the primary community for SGI and IRIX enthousiasts, has announced a fundraising effort to reverse-engineer the last 32 bit version of the IRIX kernel. IRIX-32, so named for its basis on kernel and APIs of the last 32-bit compatible IRIX (5.3) is a proposed reverse engineering project to be conducted by a team of developers in the US and the EU. Purpose: We will reverse e ... ⌘ Read more
The Verge: First introduced in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, HP Plus was built around FOMO right from the start. You get just seven days to claim your free ink, starting the moment you plug a new printer into the wall. Act now, and it’ll also extend your warranty a full year, give you an “Advanced HP Smart app,” and plant trees on your behalf. Because why wouldn’t you want to save the forest? Here’s one reason, as detail ... ⌘ Read more
There’s more coming to Windows 11 at some point during this year, and three of them are of particular interest to the type of people who read OSNews. First, Windows is finally getting support for more archive file formats. Microsoft has finally added native support for more archive formats, allowing you to open tar, 7-zip, rar, gz, and other files. In addition, Windows 11 users will benefit from improved compression performance when zipping ... ⌘ Read more
Ars Technica: A couple of months ago, Microsoft added generative AI features to Windows 11 in the form of a taskbar-mounted version of the Bing chatbot. Starting this summer, the company will be going even further, adding a new ChatGPT-driven Copilot feature that can be used alongside your other Windows apps. The company announced the change at its Build developer conference alongside another ne ... ⌘ Read more
The time has arrived for Windows 11 users to prepare to download the latest feature drop for the operating system. After months of testing in the Windows Insider program, Windows 11 “Moment 3” update is ready for its public release on May 24, 2023. The latest feature update for Windows 11 has no official name (so much for hating silly names, such as “Fall Creators Update“), so enthusiasts call it “Moment 3,” according to the leaked stor ... ⌘ Read more
The United States surgeon general, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, issued a public advisory on Tuesday warning of the risks of social media use to young people. In a 19-page report, Dr. Murthy noted that although the effects of social media on adolescent mental health were not fully understood, and that social media can be beneficial to some users, “there are ample indicators that social media can also have ... ⌘ Read more
It’s finally over. In a post last year on the Windows XP subreddit (Windows XP web activation is finally dead…), retroreviewyt shared xp\\_activate32.exe4, which calculates the Installation ID then generates and optionally applies the corresponding Confirmation ID to activate Windows XP, all offline. Wiping the system and reinstalling Windows XP results in the same Installation ID being assigned by Windows (assuming no change in hardware or product key), thus the same ... ⌘ Read more_
axle OS is a hobby microkernel and userspace. I started the project in early 2016, and have had stints of working on it heavily since then. axle OS’s first incarnation was a multitasking monolithic kernel, with little support for IPC, user-mode or process loading. The current incarnation is a microkernel built around variable-length IPC messaging. All applications, including the desktop environment and device drivers, are ELF executables running in userspace. We re ... ⌘ Read more
This whitepaper details the architectural enhancements and modifications that Intel is currently investigating for a 64-bit mode-only architecture referred to as x86S (for simplification). Intel is publishing this paper to solicit feedback from the ecosystem while exploring the benefits of extending the ISA transition to a 64-bit mode-only solution. This seems like a very good idea – and it does seem like the time is ripe to remove some ... ⌘ Read more
This project’s vision is to help every college student read all the code of an operating system. With only 2000 lines of code, egos-2000 implements every component of an operating system for education. It can run on a RISC-V board and also the QEMU software emulator. Exactly what it says on the tin. ⌘ Read more
Apple today previewed software features for cognitive, vision, hearing, and mobility accessibility, along with innovative tools for individuals who are nonspeaking or at risk of losing their ability to speak. These updates draw on advances in hardware and software, include on-device machine learning to ensure user privacy, and expand on Apple’s long-standing commitment to making products for everyone. These are all good, truly helpful features. ... ⌘ Read more
Recently, hinted by people on Discord, Neozeed found a Win64 compiler for AXP64 / ALPHA64, that came in as part of Platform SDK from 1999. This was to let Windows developers test compile their programs to make sure they are “64bit ready”, before the hardware was even available. However, as this was a cross-compiler from IA32 to IA64 and AXP32 to AXP64, there was no actual way of running any of the binaries. Until Itanium finally came out, after long delays. Sadly, ... ⌘ Read more
The KDE project just finished up its 2023 developer sprint, and with Plasma 6 development being in full swing – which encompasses moving to Qt 6 – there’s some major announcements here. As a result, we advanced a number of topics that had been stuck for a while. A major area of my focus in this respect became “Better default settings”. The 5 -> 6 transition is the perfect time to make significant changes to the default settings in a way that improve the UX out of the box ... ⌘ Read more
The rumour, by way of The Information, claims senior Microsoft execs hope to seal a deal with Mozilla to make Bing the default search engine as soon as this year, as the browser’s existing big-bucks deal with Google is coming up for renewal. Now, Firefox making a search engine switch isn’t new. Mozilla tested Microsoft’s Bing as Firefox’s default search engine back back in 2021; and those with longer memories may just rem ... ⌘ Read more
I was wondering what the IBM Personal Computer would have been like if they had chosen the Motorola 68000 instead of the Intel 8088, so I used my MCL86+ to emulate the 68000 and find out! The MCL86+ is a board which uses a Teensy 4.1 to emulate a microprocessor in C code as well as use its GPIOs to emulate the local bus of the Intel 8088. It can be used as a drop-in replacement for the Intel 8088 and can be cycle accurate as well as run in accele ... ⌘ Read more
When watching videos yesterday, one Redditor encountered a popup informing them that “Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube”. The message offered a button to “Allow YouTube ads” in the person’s ad blocking software and went on to explain that ads make the service free for billions of users and that YouTube Premium offers an ad-free experience. It even provided a button to easily sign up for a YouTube Premium membership. This was always going to happ ... ⌘ Read more
On a support page, Google details the full list of 180 countries in which Bard is now available. This includes countries all over the globe, but very noticeably not any countries that are a part of the European Union. It’s a big absence from what is otherwise a global expansion for Google’s AI. The reason why isn’t officially stated by Google, but it seems reasonable to believe that it’s rela ... ⌘ Read more
Wordstar was the word processor that helped sell the personal computer. At one time, it was ubiquitous, and many authors had a hard time giving it up. Some, like George R. R. Martin, apparently are still refusing to give it up. But most of us have moved on. Thanks to an open-source clone, WordTsar, you may not have to. This is a modern interpretation of our old friend. Maybe this will help The Winds of Winter. ⌘ Read more
Have you ever found yourself in this position? You see an image on a website, in your feed, or in a message from a friend — and you think, “this doesn’t feel quite right.” Is the image being shown in the right context? Has it been manipulated or faked? Where did it come from? When you’re trying to figure out if a piece of information or an image is reliable, having the full story is key. That’s why we’re expanding our ongoing wo ... ⌘ Read more
The future of Google Search is AI. But not in the way you think. The company synonymous with web search isn’t all in on chatbots (even though it’s building one, called Bard), and it’s not redesigning its homepage to look more like a ChatGPT-style messaging system. Instead, Google is putting AI front and center in the most valuable real estate on the internet: its existing search results. A good overview of some of the “AI” stuff Google is integ ... ⌘ Read more
Apple Inc. failed to fully revive a long-running copyright lawsuit against cybersecurity firm Corellium Inc. over its software that simulates the iPhone’s iOS operating systems, letting security researchers identify flaws in the software. The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Monday ruled that Corellium’s CORSEC simulator is protected by copyright law’s fair use doctrine, which allows the duplication of c ... ⌘ Read more
Google I/O, Google’s developer conference, started today, and there has been a deluge of news coming out of the advertising giant. I do not intend to cover every single bit of I/O news, instead choosing to focus one some of the more interesting bits and pieces. In the coming weeks, when you search for something that might benefit from the experiences of others, you may see a Perspectives filt ... ⌘ Read more
Using Lotus 1-2-3 in today’s world is a bit of a challenge. The truth is I’m cheating, it does work, but it only supports a few standard text mode resolutions. If your terminal is not exactly 80 columns wide, it just makes a big ugly mess on your screen. There’s a workaround, just type stty cols 80, and it will be confined to a portion of your terminal, looking a bit sad. There is no way to display more columns, and maximizing your terminal will do n ... ⌘ Read more
Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for the iPad will each be available for $4.99 per month or $49.99 per year, with a one-month free trial. Final Cut Pro requires an iPad with an M1 chip or newer, while Logic Pro requires an A12 Bionic iPad or newer. The apps will be available on the App Store starting on Tuesday, May 23. It’s great seeing Apple bring professional applications t ... ⌘ Read more
And yet, 25 years on, Google Search faces a series of interlocking AI-related challenges that together represent an existential threat to Google itself. The first is a problem of Google’s own making: the SEO monster has eaten the user experience of search from the inside out. Searching the web for information is an increasingly user-hostile experience, an arbitrage racket run by search-optimized content sharks running ... ⌘ Read more
It’s no secret that Microsoft has been looking to increase advertising for its products within Windows 11, and investigation by Twitter user Albacore into recent Insider builds has found that the Settings Home page will soon start to present adverts for Microsoft 365 products in the near future. A banner asking users who aren’t subscribed to the platform to “Try Microsoft 365” shows at the top of ... ⌘ Read more
IBM had unknowingly created a juggernaut when they allowed Bill Gates and Microsoft to control the PC operating system standard, first with DOS and then with Windows. Having lost control of the PC hardware standard, IBM was determined to regain control of the operating system standard. Their weapon? The OS/2 operating system, a powerful and feature packed operating system that best case should have had little trouble overcoming Windows, and worst case should have at least been able to carve ... ⌘ Read more