Beta 5 is our third Platform Stable Android 14 release, which means that the developer APIs and all app-facing behaviors are final for you to review and integrate into your apps, and you can publish apps on Google Play targeting Android 14’s SDK version 34. It includes the latest fixes and optimizations, giving you everything you need to complete your testing. The final release is quite close now. ⌘ Read more
Beta 5 is our third Platform Stable Android 14 release, which means that the developer APIs and all app-facing behaviors are final for you to review and integrate into your apps, and you can publish apps on Google Play targeting Android 14’s SDK version 34. It includes the latest fixes and optimizations, giving you everything you need to complete your testing. The final release is quite close now. ⌘ Read more
It’s Back to School season, so grab yourself a brand new discounted computer and let’s get back to COSMIC class! Our new, not yet released Rust-based desktop environment for Pop!\\_OS and other Linux distros is filling out with some essential systems that cater the DE to both users and developers alike. Customization is one of our main focuses for COSMIC, and was a huge focus for us in August, too. There’s a lot of cool stuff in this update abo ... ⌘ Read more_
Mozilla has announced that the Android version of Firefox will soon support any and all extensions, and has informed extension developers about this change. For the past few years Firefox for Android officially supported a small subset of extensions while we focused our efforts on strengthening core Firefox for Android functionality and understanding the unique needs of mobile browser users. ... ⌘ Read more
Developers of the BeOS-inspired Haiku operating system have long been carrying patches for supporting the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) on their platform while this week the code was upstreamed for GCC 14. This commit to mainline GCC git adds support for the Haiku operating system. Excellent news, and well-deserved. ⌘ Read more
ARM Ltd has been dominating the Android world for the better part of the last decade, with their 7-series cores at the forefront of their success. Throughout the late 2010s, the Cortex A73, A75, and A76 steadily iterated on performance while maintaining excellent energy efficiency. Qualcomm, and then Samsung decided licensing ARM’s cores would be easier than trying to outdo them. Apple remained a notable rival, but their core designs were not available outsi ... ⌘ Read more
Installing Windows 11 without third-party bloatware like Candy Crush in just two clicks is possible, and all it takes is setting your region to English (World). No, we’re not kidding, and Microsoft said it’s aware and looking into the reports after we asked the company about the situation. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Windows Latest. “Microsoft is aware and is looking into i ... ⌘ Read more
CIQ, Oracle and SUSE today announced their intent to form the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA), a collaborative trade association to encourage the development of distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by providing open and free Enterprise Linux (EL) source code. The formation of OpenELA arises from Red Hat’s recent changes to RHEL source code availability. In response, CIQ, Or ... ⌘ Read more
I doubt there’s an operating system out there that we have more preconceived notions about than Chrome OS, and most of those notions will be quite negative. Since I had little to no experience with Chrome OS, I decided it was time to address that shortcoming, and install Chrome OS Flex on my Dell XPS 13 9370 (Core i7-8550U, 16GB of RAM, 4K display), and see if there’s any merit in running Google’s desktop operating system. In ... ⌘ Read more
It’s 2023, and those who have Framework’s first generation of laptops, containing Intel’s 11th-generation Core processor) might be itching to upgrade, especially with an AMD model around the corner. Or maybe, like me, they find that system’s middling battery life and tricky-to-tame sleep draining (since improved, but not entirely fixed) make for a laptop that doesn’t feel all that portable. Or they’re just ready for some ... ⌘ Read more
The UK’s elections watchdog has revealed it has been the victim of a “complex cyber-attack” potentially affecting millions of voters. The Electoral Commission said unspecified “hostile actors” had managed to gain access to copies of the electoral registers, from August 2021. Hackers also broke into its emails and “control systems” but the attack was not discovered until October last year. The watchdog has warned people to watch out f ... ⌘ Read more
To round out our options for supporting OSNews, we’re introducing support for Liberapay, an open source alternative to Patreon. OSNews is all about promoting choice – in operating systems, in devices, in software – so giving readers the option of donating through an open source platform, located in the European Union, fits within our values. If you want to donate this way, you can go to our Liberapay page. Liberapay joins the other ways you c ... ⌘ Read more
Android is the first mobile operating system to introduce advanced cellular security mitigations for both consumers and enterprises. Android 14 introduces support for IT administrators to disable 2G support in their managed device fleet. Android 14 also introduces a feature that disables support for null-ciphered cellular connectivity. 2G is not terribly secure, so being able to disable it is a welcom ... ⌘ Read more
The Brave web browser has carved out a niche over the past few years as an alternative to Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and other mainstream web browsers. Some of that has come from its marketing as a privacy-preserving web browser, and it has also been repeatedly evangelized by cryptocurrency enthusiasts. If someone recommends Brave to you, you should ignore them, because they are wrong. Brave Browser is a mess of a software project, and the company building it is even worse. Do ... ⌘ Read more
The GNU/Hurd is the Sagrada Família of the Software World: having started to develop in 1990, the GNU/Hurd has yet to reach version 1.0. The Linux kernel, on the other hand, began development in 1993 and was initially considered a “kludge” until the Hurd was completed. It is now matured and widely used. Like the Loch Ness Monster, many believe that GNU/Hurd is vaporware and does not exist. It does exist and continues to evolve, albeit at a slow pace. Just recently, the Debian GNU/Hurd 20 ... ⌘ Read more
After three years, there’s a new Window Maker release – version 0.96.0 – and it’s got some useful new features. First, the NeXTSTEP-inspired window manager now supports hot corners, so you can send your mouse to a corner of your display and have it execute a command. Second, you can now set keyboard shortcuts for various functions related to taking screenshots, which is a very welcome addition. On top of these, there’s a few smaller new features as well. ⌘ Read more
Which is precisely how it feels using using the Beepy from SQFMI. The handheld device, which was formerly known as the Beepberry before its creators received an all-to-predicable formal complaint, is unabashedly designed for Linux nerds. Over the last couple of weeks playing with this first-run hardware, I’ve been compiling kernel drivers, writing custom scripts, and trying (though not always successfully) to get new software in ... ⌘ Read more
The latest version of Intel Arc GPU Graphics Software introduced an interesting change that isn’t reflected in the Release Notes. The installer of the 101.4578 beta drivers add a “Compute Improvement Program” (CIP) component as part of the “typical” setup option that is enabled by default. Under the “custom” installer option that you have to activate manually, you get to select which components to install. The Compute Im ... ⌘ Read more
I’ve never used Zoom or similar tools, but I know it’s extraordinarily popular in the business world. You’d make a good one if you informed whomever is responsible for IT at your company that using Zoom puts your company’s data at risk. ⌘ Read more
Today, we’re announcing some important new features in Google Search to help you stay in control of your personal information, privacy and online safety. There’s improved tools to remove results about yourself, such as those containing phone numbers and such, as well as easier ways to remove explicit content about yourself, such as photos. Of course, tools such as these merely remove the results from Google S ... ⌘ Read more
The DisplayPort altmode is semi-proprietary, but it can absolutely be picked apart if we try. Last time, we found a cool appnote describing the DisplayPort altmode in detail, switched the FUSB302 into packet sniffing mode and got packet captures, learned about PD VDMs (vendor-defined messages), and successfully replayed the captured messages to switch a USB-C port into the DisplayPort altmode. Today, we will go through the seven messages that summon the DisplayPort alt ... ⌘ Read more
In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create the means to mandatorily block websites present on a government provided list. Such a move will ... ⌘ Read more
Bram Molenaar, the original author, maintainer, release manager, and benevolent dictator for life of vim has passed away today. His family announced his passing through a message using Molenaar’s account. :q ⌘ Read more
Pixel Binary Transparency responds to a new wave of attacks targeting the software supply chain—that is, attacks on software while in transit to users. These attacks are on the rise in recent years, likely in part because of the enormous impact they can have. In recent years, tens of thousands of software users from Fortune 500 companies to branches of the US government have been affected by supply chain ... ⌘ Read more
Google resisted pleas to extend the lifetime of Chromebooks set to expire as of this June and throughout the summer. Thirteen Chromebook models have met their death date since June 1 and won’t receive security updates or new features from Google anymore. But that hasn’t stopped the Chromebooks from being listed for sale on sites like Amazon for the same prices as before. Take the Asus Chromebook Flip ... ⌘ Read more
Arm is facing down its biggest competition ever, with the up-and-coming RISC-V architecture threatening to unseat it as the CPU at the center of almost every portable device. Now, one of Arm’s biggest customers is trying out RISC-V, as Qualcomm is getting involved in a joint venture dedicated to the architecture. The joint venture doesn’t have a name yet, but Qualcomm, NXP, Nordic Semiconductor, Bosch, and memory giant Infineon are all teaming up to form ... ⌘ Read more
While casually looking for updates in the Microsoft Store, I noticed a new update for Cortana after a long time. But, instead of improving things, the latest update caused the app to stop working on Windows 11. This shouldn’t surprise anyone, considering that Microsoft’s assistant hasn’t received a single feature update in the past two years Microsoft has finally killed Cortana on Windows 11 – its ... ⌘ Read more
A chrultrabook is a modified Chromebook designed to run Windows, Linux, or even macOS by utilizing MrChromebox coreboot firmware. The purpose of this site is to provide comprehensive and user-friendly documentation on hardware, firmware, and operating systems. This is a cool project to make it easy to run Windows, regular desktop Linux, or even macOS on your Chromebook. Excellent ... ⌘ Read more
Supporting the open web requires saying no to WEI, and having Google say no as well. It’s not a good policy. It’s not a good idea. It’s a terrible idea that takes Google that much further down the enshittification curve. Even if you can think of good reasons to try to set up such a system, there is way too much danger that comes along with it, undermining the very principles of the op ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft has accidentally leaked its internal “StagingTool” app that is used by employees to enable secret unreleased Windows 11 features. The software giant typically tests experimental or hidden Windows 11 features in public builds of the operating system, but Windows enthusiasts have until now had to rely on third-party tools to get access to secret features that Microsoft hasn’t ... ⌘ Read more
About Chromebooks reports: After covering Google’s effort to separate the Chrome browser from ChromeOS for over two years, it appears more of you will get to experience it. The project is called Lacros, and it uses the Linux browser for ChromeOS instead of the integrated browser. The idea is that browser updates can be pushed quicker to Chromebooks instead of waiting for a full ChromeOS update. Based on recen ... ⌘ Read more
You’ve all been waiting for it, many of you have guessed, and now, as announced at Flock To Fedora, it’s time to make it official: The new Asahi Linux flagship distribution will be Fedora Asahi Remix! We’re confident that this new flagship will get us much closer to our goal of a polished Linux experience on Apple Silicon, and we hope you will enjoy using it as much as we’re enjoying working on it. We’re still working out the kinks and making th ... ⌘ Read more
Have you ever wanted to do more with your phone, like setting up a Webserver or a Node.js server and running a web app directly on your phone? Or doing some coding on the go? Yes, I have too. With Termux, you can run a full Linux Desktop on your Android device, and here’s how. Even without resorting to a full X desktop, Termux is oretty great. I’m not really a terminal user, so for me it’s just for the novelty of it all, but it ce ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Edge has slowly crept its way up as one of the more popular web browsers people use every day, especially on Windows 11. In 2022, it even overtook Safari as the second-most-popular browser in the world behind Chrome (although it has since dropped back to third). Despite running on Chromium, the same engine as Chrome, it has a lot of features even Chrome lacks, like collections and shopping features that can help you save money. And, of course, ... ⌘ Read more
Windows has some pretty amazing backwards compatibility. In many cases, you can run ancient 32-bit Win32 applications just fine on your current system. However, there’s one issue: If you ever tried to run a 16-bit application from the Windows 3.x days, any 64-bit Windows version (starting from Windows XP) will refuse to run the application with an error message indicating that you should ask the ... ⌘ Read more
Speaking of fun little tools: Paginator is a desktop pager for EWMH-compliant X11 window managers. Paginator provides a graphical interface displaying the current configuration of all desktops, allowing the user to change the current desktop or the current active window with the mouse. Exactly what it says on the tin, and adds some usability to the desktop pager concept to something like Window Maker ... ⌘ Read more
You know neofetch, the little tool that shows you some nicely formatted system information in your terminal? Even though I find Archey 4 vastly superior, neofetch is still cool and often serves as an inspiration for people to create similar fun tools for other platforms. In this case – DOS, through dosfetch. That’s really all there’s to it – it’s just a fun little toy for a classic operating system. ⌘ Read more
Originally conceived as an alternative firmware for the TS100, this firmware has evolved into a complex soldering iron control firmware. The firmware implements all of the standard features of a ‘smart’ soldering iron, with lots of little extras and tweaks. I highly recommend reading the installation guide fully when installing on your iron. And after install just explore the settings menu. An alternative operating system for your sold ... ⌘ Read more
UBPorts has released the second update for the Ubuntu Touch version based on Focal Fossa. In this new version, the System Settings application has been improved in various places, the physical camera button now works (on devices that have one, I presume), and a whole load of bugs have been fixed. Device support has also improved, with the F(x)tec Pro1 X, Fairphone 3, and Vollaphone X23 now being supported by the Focal releases. ⌘ Read more
Overall, the Authority found the commitments proposed by Google to be adequate to address the competition concerns. The group, in fact, presented a package of three commitments, two of which envisage supplementary solutions to Takeout – the service Google makes available to end users for backing up their data – to facilitate the export of data to third-party operators. The third commitment off ... ⌘ Read more
If you’ve ever heard someone refer to a TV remote as a “clicker,” it’s because of Robert Adler’s 1956 creation. The elegant Star Trek-esque gadget pioneered a durable, clicky action for controlling gadgets and a simplicity of form that has since been naively abandoned. When Zenith first started experimenting with wireless remote controls, it used beams of light that the television co ... ⌘ Read more
Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles. Alice “psykose” who is easily responsible for the highest number of commits per author over the pa ... ⌘ Read more
One of the interesting and odd thing Google does is roast itself (and others) over security issues. In this year’s Year in Review of 0-days exploited in-the-wild, Google took particular aim at the Android ecosystem for being so bad at getting patches on users’ devices that Android doesn’t even need 0-days to be exploited in the first place. These gaps between upstream vendors and downstream manufacturers allow ... ⌘ Read more
31 years ago Tetris Max for the Macintosh was born, an improved clone of Tetris, and it became an insanely popular Mac game during the 1990s. I may or may not have had some involvement in its development. Macintosh System 6 was the current OS version at the time of the game’s release, but System 7 was introduced shortly afterwards. It’s recently come to my attention that the final version of Tetris Max (v2.9.1) may not work when runni ... ⌘ Read more
The Blue Lightning CPU is an interesting beast. There is not a whole lot of information about what the processor really is, but it can be pieced together from various scraps of information. Around 1990, IBM needed low-power 32-bit processors with good performance for its portable systems, but no one offered such CPUs yet. IBM licensed the 386SX core from Intel and turned it into the IBM 386SLC processor (SLC reportedly stood for “Super Little Chip”). ... ⌘ Read more
Mobile work phones running in the cloud: safe & instantly available smartphones for your team. Complete with a phone number, accessible from your browser. I find the pricing a bit steep, but the concept in and of itself is pretty cool: it’s an Android VM in the cloud running /e/OS. I’m not entirely sure what I’d use it for, but something about it I find intriguing. ⌘ Read more
For KDE Plasma 6, the KDE team intends to remove a number of old features and bits of code that haven’t been touched in ages or simply don’t make sense to keep around. Most of it is truly stuff few will use, but there’s some interesting ones in there that might make some users a little sad. First, they intend to remove the icon view from the settings application, leaving only the sidebar view that’s been the default for a while now. This one bugs me, because I o ... ⌘ Read more
Apple’s M2 Ultra powered Mac Pro is the final step in their Apple Silicon transition. But without GPU support or meaningful expansion, is it worth nearly double the price of a comparable Mac Studio? It really seems like high-end computing is simply no longer possible whatsoever on the Mac. The Mac Pro is a joke, the memory limits on the M2 chips make them useless for high-end uses, there’s not enough PCI-e lanes, the integrated GPUs are a jok ... ⌘ Read more
I have been reading Doom Guy by John Romero. It is an excellent book which I highly recommend. In the ninth chapter, John describes being hit by lightning upon seeing Adaptive Tile Refresh (ATS). That made me realize I never took the time to understand how this crucial piece of tech powers the Commander Keen (CK) series. During my research I was surprised to learn that ATS only powered the first CK trilogy. The second trilogy turned out to use something f ... ⌘ Read more
While most of us are used to this system and its quirks, that doesn’t mean it’s without problems. This is especially apparent when you do user research with people who are new to computing, including children and older people. Manually placing and sizing windows can be fiddly work, and requires close attention and precise motor control. It’s also what we jokingly refer to as shit work: it is work that the user has to do, which is generated by the system itself, ... ⌘ Read more
In my previous article, I described how I managed to install Windows 2000 in DOSBox-X. Even though this experiment was successful, I was not really with the results. While I got Windows 2000 working, I didn’t want to stop there. The final goal for the project was to get Windows XP running instead. However, after multiple attempts I gave up, thinking that Windows XP was impossible to use. Well – I was wrong. I can’t believe ... ⌘ Read more
You can become a Patreon, make a one-time donation through Ko-Fi, and now, by popular demand, we have a third option to support OSNews: merch! We’ve just launched our new merch store, currently selling three items – two T-shirts and a coffee mug. First, we have a plain logo T-shirt. It’s a crew (round) neck T-shirt available in ‘Night Sky Navy’ or ‘Herb Green’, with our logo printed top-left on the chest. Second, we have the same logo T-shirt in the same two colours, but with an a ... ⌘ Read more
The Android KitKat (KK) platform was first released ~10 years ago and since then, we’ve introduced many innovative improvements and features for Android, which are unavailable on KK. As of July 2023, the active device count on KK is below 1% as more and more users update to the latest Android versions. Therefore, we are no longer supporting KK in future releases of Google Play servic ... ⌘ Read more~
Last year at Google I/O, we shared some big changes coming to the Play Store for large screen devices. Since then, we’ve seen even more people using large screens for work and play, across millions of active Android devices. Apps and games play a critical role in shaping the on-device experience, so we’ve redesigned the Play Store to help users get the most from their tablets, Chromebooks, and foldables. Today, we’re introducing four majo ... ⌘ Read more
9to5Google reports: Last year, we reported that Google’s Fuchsia team had renewed its efforts to support smart speakers. Long story short, the team had experimented with a single speaker, ditched that effort, then “restored” it later on. More importantly, the Fuchsia team was found to be working on multiple speakers, the most notable of which was an as-yet-unreleased speaker equipped with UWB. In a newl ... ⌘ Read more
Intel has announced two new x86-64 instruction sets designed to bolster and offer more performance in AVX-based workloads with their hybrid architecture of performance (P) and efficiency (E) cores. The first of Intel’s announcements is their latest Intel Advanced Performance Extensions, or Intel APX as it’s known. It is designed to bring generational, instruc ... ⌘ Read more
There’s been a lot of concern recently about the Web Environment Integrity proposal, developed by a selection of authors from Google, and apparently being prototyped in Chromium. There’s good reason for anger here (though I’m not sure yelling at people on GitHub is necessarily the best outlet). This proposal amounts to attestation on the web, limiting access to features or entire sites based on whe ... ⌘ Read more
octox is a Unix-like operating system inspired by xv6-riscv. octox loosely follows the structure and style of xv6, but is implemented in pure Rust. It’s a learning project, so no lofty goals of world domination here. ⌘ Read more
The “enshittification” of social media started around 2016, but it reached new highs in 2023. All chronological feeds and hashtag importance have given way to narrow-AI algorithms and recommendation engines. The result was that reach has become impossible for the common user, and many art creatives lost their livelihoods. Enter the Fediverse. From Wikipedia: “The fediverse is an ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web pu ... ⌘ Read more
Google’s plan is that, during a webpage transaction, the web server could require you to pass an “environment attestation” test before you get any data. At this point your browser would contact a “third-party” attestation server, and you would need to pass some kind of test. If you passed, you would get a signed “IntegrityToken” that verifies your environment is unmodified and points to t ... ⌘ Read more
Ubisoft has confirmed that it is temporarily suspending accounts it deems to be “inactive”, preventing players from accessing their game libraries. Players are then sent an email informing them that their suspended account will be deleted in 30 days unless they click the “Cancel Account Closure” link. Modern gaming. ⌘ Read more
Ars Technica has a great article about the IBM mainframe. Mainframe computers are often seen as ancient machines—practically dinosaurs. But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today. If they’re dinosaurs, they’re T-Rexes, and desktops and server computers are puny mammals to be trodden underfoot. It’s estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes in use today. They’re u ... ⌘ Read more
After many years of effort, I am happy to announce that Debian riscv64 is now an official architecture! This milestone is not the end of the journey but rather the beginning of a new one: the port will need to be rebootstrapped in the official archive, build daemons will have to be reinstalled and handed over to DSA, many bugs will need to be fixed. If everything goes well, the architecture will eventually be released with Trixie. Please note ... ⌘ Read more
Thanks to a series of commits by Jonathan Gray (jsg@), -current now has support for microcode (updates) for AMD (amd64 and i386) processors. It’s great to see support for the AMD side gaining equivalence with that for Intel (for which support was added in 2018). Good news for OpenBSD users. ⌘ Read more
A lot of the cost of a video terminal was the screen. Yet nearly everyone had a TV, and used TVs have always been fairly cheap, too. That’s where Don Lancaster came in. His TV Typewriter Cookbook was the bible for homebrew video displays. The design influenced the Apple 1 computer and spawned a successful kit for a company known as Southwest Technical Products. For around $300 or so, you could have a terminal that uses your TV for output. The wild West days of home computing must’v ... ⌘ Read more
One of the coolest things to come along in the 68K Mac homebrew community is the ROM Boot Disk concept. Classic Macs have an unusually large ROM that contains a fair bit of the Mac OS, which was true even in the G3 New World Mac era (it was just on disk), so it’s somewhat surprising that only one Mac officially could boot the Mac OS entirely from ROM, namely the Macintosh Classic ... ⌘ Read more
Lately I’ve been spending quite a bit of time learning Rust, and as any sane person would do, after writing a few 100 lines programs I’ve decided to take on something a little bit more ambitious: I have written a Java Virtual Machine in Rust. With a lot of originality, I have called it rjvm. The code is available on GitHub. I want to stress that this is a toy JVM, built for learning purposes and not a serious implementation. Toy or not, this is ambitious and impressive. ⌘ Read more
The Dolphin project has broken the silence regarding their legal tussle with Nintendo and Valve, giving a far more detailed elaboration of what, exactly happened. First things first – Nintendo did not send Valve or Dolphin a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) section 512(c) notice (commonly known as a DMCA Takedown Notice) against our Steam page. Nintendo has not taken any legal action against Dolphin Emulator or Valve. What actually happened was that Valve’s ... ⌘ Read more
Seven companies—including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic, and Inflection—have committed to developing tech to clearly watermark AI-generated content. That will help make it safer to share AI-generated text, video, audio, and images without misleading others about the authenticity of that content, the Biden administration hopes. It’s currently unclear how the wa ... ⌘ Read more
One of my old home automation boards running ebusd is still using Raspberry PI 2 B SoC. FreeBSD is still perfectly supporting this hardware, however, due to being a Tier-2 platform, binary updates freebsd-update are not supported. Of course, one can download the new image, but this will mean re-installing and reconfiguring all the software, which is time-consuming and painful. Also, the traditional “build from source” way will probably take forever on th ... ⌘ Read more
I’ve been going through my collection of PDAs over the last few weeks for, among other OSNews things, my Pixelfed account, and while playing around with various old applications, I came across the Google Maps application for Palm OS. As it turns out – this official Google application, last updated in 2008, still fully and completely works today, in 2023! I shot a quick video using the application, and up ... ⌘ Read more
About a small town’s worth of people pointed me to this on Mastodon, so here it goes: In an IMAX theater, the m130’s job is to control the quick turn reel unit, or QTRU for short. (For many years, it appears, a non-emulated m130 sat holstered in most theaters.) The QTRU’s job is to control the platters, which are those large horizontal shelves where all of a film’s many reels are stitched together, stored, ... ⌘ Read more
USA readers may wonder why I was waiting for the release of a game already published. While Street Fighter II made it to the Super Famicom on June 10, 1992 in Japan and July 15, 1992 in North America, France had to wait until December 17, 1992 to get a PAL version. As I waited, I saw ads in French magazines offering imported cartridges of my Holy Graal. To make them work on a European Super Nintendo, one had to buy an adapter. The combo cost almost as ... ⌘ Read more
Apple says it will remove services such as FaceTime and iMessage from the UK rather than weaken security if new proposals are made law and acted upon. The government is seeking to update the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) 2016. It wants messaging services to clear security features with the Home Office before releasing them to customers. The act lets the Home Office demand security features are disabled, without telling the public. Under the upda ... ⌘ Read more
A few weeks ago I embarked on a somewhat crazy side project: Make the Open Watcom debugger work on OS/2 1.0. This project was not entirely successful, but I learned a couple of things along the way. I love these stories. ⌘ Read more
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the techniques described in Let’s Go Whaling bear comparison to some of those that bookmakers and casinos have long deployed, capitalising on deep understanding of psychology. The big difference, of course, is that the gamer can never win money, only prestige or progress in a virtual game. The very uncomfortable truth for Apple and Google: much – 70-75% – ... ⌘ Read more
Ars Technica: Antitrust enforcers released a draft update outlining new rules today that officials say will make it easier to crack down on mergers and acquisitions that could substantially lessen competition in the US. Now the public has 60 days to review the draft guidelines and submit comments to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) before the agencie ... ⌘ Read more
Starting in Windows 11, version 22H2, Enhanced Phishing Protection in Microsoft Defender SmartScreen helps protect Microsoft school or work passwords against phishing and unsafe usage on sites and apps. We are trying out a change starting with this build where users who have enabled warning options for Windows Security under App & browser control > Reputation-based protection > Phishing protection will see a UI ... ⌘ Read more
Turns out Intel’s NUC line is not going to die after all. Today, Intel announced it has agreed to a term sheet with ASUS, a global technology solution provider, for an agreement to manufacture, sell and support the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) 10th to 13th generations systems product line, and to develop future NUC systems designs. If you’re into Intel NUCs, Asus is the way to go now. ⌘ Read more
The contractors are the invisible backend of the generative AI boom that’s hyped to change everything. Chatbots like Bard use computer intelligence to respond almost instantly to a range of queries spanning all of human knowledge and creativity. But to improve those responses so they can be reliably delivered again and again, tech companies rely on ... ⌘ Read more
Together with the open source software community, GitHub has been working to support EU policymakers to craft the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). The CRA seeks to improve the cybersecurity of digital products (including the 96 percent that contain open source) in the EU by imposing strict requirements for vendors supplying products in the single market, backed by fines of up to €15 million or 2.5% of global revenue. This goal ... ⌘ Read more
The Interactive Advertising Bureau, one of the biggest names in online advertising, held some sort of corporate event or whatever in January of this year, and the IAB CEO, David Cohen, held a speech there to rally the troops. Apparently, those of us who are fighting back against the online advertising industry? We’re “extremists”. Extremists are winning the battle for hear ... ⌘ Read more
The Framework Laptop 16, available for preorder today starting at $1,699 prebuilt, is one of the most exciting notebooks we’ve ever seen. When it ships in Q4, the modular computer company’s first gaming laptop will let you swap practically every component — not just memory and storage, but each and every individual port, the motherboard, the battery, the speakers, you name it. Framework seems to be making it, despite the ridicule. ... ⌘ Read more
The biggest changes last month were a series of commits by waddlesplash, all related to the user\\_mutex API and the consumers of it. This API is the kernel portion of the implementation of basically anything related to mutexes or locks in userland, including pthread\\_mutex, pthread\\_cond, pthread\\_barrier, unnamed semaphores (via sem\\_open), rwlocks, and more. It bears some resemblance in concept to Linux’s futex API, but is very different in both design an ... ⌘ Read more
There’s a specter looming over the realm of Mastodon, and it’s the ghost of computing’s past. A loose group of retro computing hobbyists have taken it upon themselves to build Mastodon clients for various operating systems. Developing web clients using the technology of the 80’s and 90’s is a challenge, but the following projects have proven that their devs are up to the task! Should we find ourselves in the unlikely scenario where a ... ⌘ Read more
Android 14 introduces a number of new features for app stores, including an “update ownership” API that lets an app store claim ownership over an app it installs. If any other app store tries to push an update to that app, Android will throw up a dialog asking you what they want to do. The dialog asks you if you want to “update this app from ” since “this app normally receives ... ⌘ Read more
The availability of support for various apps and drivers (for various hardware and software) is crucial for the general adoption of any general purpose operating system like Redox OS. Some of us developers are working on improving the core of Redox OS (like the Kernel), which should create a solid base on which high quality native drivers and apps can be created with ease. Some others are working on porting (and adapting) various open source drivers and apps ( ... ⌘ Read more
A year ago, we compiled a model list of Macs spanning over two decades, complete with their launch dates, discontinuation dates, and all the available information about the macOS updates each model received. We were trying to answer two questions: How long can Mac owners reasonably expect to receive software updates when they buy a new computer? And were Intel Macs being dropped more aggressively now that the Apple Silicon transition was ... ⌘ Read more
Collapse OS (which we talked about 4 years ago) has a successor. Dusk OS is a 32-bit Forth and big brother to Collapse OS. Its primary purpose is to be maximally useful during the first stage of civilizational collapse, that is, when we can’t produce modern computers anymore but that there’s still many modern computers still around. ⌘ Read more
We talked about Chimera Linux before – it’s a unique coupling of the Linux kernel with a FreeBSD userland, musl, the package manager from Alpine Linux, and dinit. The project recently entered the alpha stage, and while not ready for everyday use, Wesley Moore still decided to try and give it a go. So far my experience has actually been better than I expected. Since I installed it I have not rebooted back into Arch. This isn’t the first time I’ve run a desktop musl system and I was ... ⌘ Read more
As a former BeOS user and fan(atic), I consider myself quite knowledgeable on the subject, but as I was watching the latest Micheal MJD video about BeOS, I learned something new I had never heard of before. It’s common knowledge that Be actively tried to court x86 OEMs to bundle BeOS alongside Windows in a dual-boot configuration. However, these efforts fell apart as soon as Microsoft caught wind of it and Redmond sent representatives t ... ⌘ Read more
As you may have noticed, I used the word copyrighted for the title of this story. And it’s not without reason. I think this story could have been fairly decent even without the copyright part, so before we get to the nitty gritty stuff – I can 100% confirm that Brave lets you ingest copyrighted material through their Brave Search API, to which they also assign you “rights”. Time and time again, Brave ... ⌘ Read more
This is a list of software and ideas developed or maintained by the OpenBSD project, sorted in order of approximate introduction. Some of them are explained in detail in our research papers. That’s an impressive list. ⌘ Read more
As some of us learned in the last week, it’s easy to uninstall a troublesome Rapid Security Response (RSR). Several naturally asked why that isn’t possible with a macOS update, pointing out that it was available and worryingly popular between High Sierra and Catalina 10.15.2, since when the ability has been lost. The answer is as straightforward as you’d expect: the updates themselves, as well as the update process, have becom ... ⌘ Read more
Onyx Boox has just done something exciting; they have taken a page from the Hisense playbook and released a dedicated e-reader with the familiar candy bar shape as a smartphone, except it is a dedicated e-reader. You can do phone calls with this unit and talk to people on Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp or WeChat with dual microphones. However, it does not support SIM cards or eSim, and you must be on a WIFI connect ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft ended Windows Server 2003’s Mainstream Support on July 13, 2010, and Extended Support on July 14, 2015. This means it would no longer provide security updates, technical support, or software updates for this server-based operating system. Windows Server 2003 is probably my favourite Windows release. I never liked Windows XP, and Server 2003, with its updated codebase and various fixes comp ... ⌘ Read more
In case you missed it, Red Hat announced they will no longer be providing the means for downstream clones to continue to be 1:1 binary copies of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Very quickly, both Jack and I shared some initial thoughts, but we intentionally took our time deciding the next right step for AlmaLinux OS. After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to b ... ⌘ Read more
Today we begin the final phase of this major change where Aptos will start appearing as the new default font across Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Excel for hundreds of millions of users. And, over the next few months it will roll out to be the default for all our customers. We can’t wait for Aptos to be readily available since it was crafted to embody the many aspects of the human experience. A new default font for Microsoft Office is a huge deal. ... ⌘ Read more
Beyond the dazzling sea of licensed fireworks and thunderclouds lies a cosmic array of ancient stars. It’s within our gaze upon these stars where we find the inspiration for COSMIC DE, our new desktop environment created for Pop!\\_OS and other Linux distros. Let’s get into the updates! COSMIC DE is System76’s in-progress Rust-based desktop environment. System76 has done some neat tricks while resizing windows in tiled mode, they’re splitting up the notifications s ... ⌘ Read more_
A few weeks ago we reported that the European Union wanted to force device makers to make batteries user-replaceable, and today it’s been confirmed and made official. The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user, leaving sufficient time for operators to adapt the design of their produ ... ⌘ Read more
Today, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has added 802.11bb as a standard for light-based wireless communications. The publishing of the standard has been welcomed by global Li-Fi businesses, as it will help speed the rollout and adoption of the data-transmission technology standard. Where Li-Fi shines (pun intended) is not just in its purported speeds as fast as 224 GB/s. Fraunhofer’s Dominic Schulz points ou ... ⌘ Read more