We’ve come a long way since then, steadily retreating from openness & user control of devices, and shifting towards a far more locked-down vendor-controlled world. The next step of Android’s evolution is Android 14 (API v34, codename Upside-Down Cake) and it takes more steps down that path. In this new release, the restrictions around certificate authority (CA) certificates become significa ... ⌘ Read more
We’ve come a long way since then, steadily retreating from openness & user control of devices, and shifting towards a far more locked-down vendor-controlled world. The next step of Android’s evolution is Android 14 (API v34, codename Upside-Down Cake) and it takes more steps down that path. In this new release, the restrictions around certificate authority (CA) certificates become significa ... ⌘ Read more
On July 11, 2023, Microsoft published a blog post which details how the China-Based threat actor, Storm-0558, used an acquired Microsoft account (MSA) consumer key to forge tokens to access OWA and Outlook.com. Upon identifying that the threat actor had acquired the consumer key, Microsoft performed a comprehensive technical investigation into the acquisition of th ... ⌘ Read more
Car makers have been bragging about their cars being “computers on wheels” for years to promote their advanced features. However, the conversation about what driving a computer means for its occupants’ privacy hasn’t really caught up. While we worried that our doorbells and watches that connect to the internet might be spying on us, car brands quietly entered the data business by turning their ... ⌘ Read more
While the Pixel 6 ushered in three years of major Android OS version updates and an additional two for security patches, that’s still nowhere near the longevity of the iPhone. Google hopes to change that on the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro with noticeably more OS updates. Looking at the mobile Android landscape, three years of OS updates – which was also the case on Qualcomm-powere ... ⌘ Read more
China ordered officials at central government agencies not to use Apple’s iPhones and other foreign-branded devices for work or bring them into the office, people familiar with the matter said. In recent weeks, staff were given the instructions by their superiors in workplace chat groups or meetings, the people said. The directive is the latest step in Beijing’s campaign to cut reliance on foreign technology and enhance cy ... ⌘ Read more
The European Commission has today designated, for the first time, six gatekeepers – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft – under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). In total, 22 core platform services provided by gatekeepers have been designated. The six gatekeepers will now have six months to ensure full compliance with the DMA obligations for each of their designated core platform services. Following the ... ⌘ Read more
As both a translator and a tech writer, this article touches upon a lot of aspects of my professional life. As a translator with a master’s degree in translation and over 13 years of experience as a translator, I can confidently say these AI-translated articles won’t be anywhere near the quality of a professional translation, let alone that of original content written in Spanish. Computers are actually not that great a ... ⌘ Read more
Speaking of operating systems written in Rust – a popular activity as of late – one of the SoC contributors to Redox is also writing their own operating system in rust, called Aero. Aero is a new modern, experimental, unix-like operating system written in Rust. Aero follows the monolithic kernel design and it is inspired by the Linux Kernel. Aero supports modern PC features such as Long Mode, 5-level paging, and SMP (multicore), to name a few. Ope ... ⌘ Read more
This year’s Redox Summer of Code program has seen us add some exciting capabilities to Redox. Our three interns each came up with their own project proposals, and delivered major new functionality. In addition to our paid internships, our volunteer contributors also made major strides this summer. This year’s projects include VirtIO drivers, the project to use Linux drivers on Redox that we talked about earlier, and on-demand paging and other memory management impro ... ⌘ Read more
I’ve always loved building tools and platforms, and have long been fascinated with the world of operating systems. Apart from reading through the source code (where that’s legally available, of course…) I think there’s no better way to explore and understand a system – and the mindset that produced it – than to develop for it. What follows is a brain-dump of what I’ve learned about developing for the AmigaOS, both on classic 68k-powered hardware to modern PowerPC ... ⌘ Read more
Apple and Microsoft have argued with Brussels that some of their services are insufficiently popular to be designated as “gatekeepers” under new landmark EU legislation designed to curb the power of Big Tech. Brussels’ battle with the two US companies over Apple’s iMessage chat app and Microsoft’s Bing search engine comes ahead of Wednesday’s publication of the first list o ... ⌘ Read more
In 2019, the US Department of Commerce put Huawei on an “Entity List”, which banned it from dealing with any US company. The move led Google to revoke Huawei’s Android license, among other repercussions. Then, Huawei developed its own OS, HarmonyOS, for phones, tablets. Wang Chenglu, former Huawei executive and now CEO of Shenzhen Kaihong Digital Industry Development, recently reve ... ⌘ Read more
ARM had a slow start on its way to move beyond microcontrollers and enter the high performance market. ARM Ltd made the Cortex A9, their first out-of-order core, in 2007. Throughout the 2010s, they gradually made bigger, higher power, and higher performance cores. Pushing performance boundaries isn’t easy, but today, ARM’s cores can be a viable alternative to Intel and AMD’s offerings in the server market. RISC-V started much later, but has seen faster growth. Be ... ⌘ Read more
A third XProtect was discovered in Ventura, this time observing potentially malicious behaviour such as attempts to access private data for browsers and messaging apps. This XProtect Behaviour Service (XBS) has used a set of Bastion rules embedded in the strings in syspolicyd to record behaviours in a new database, but so far has been an observer and hasn’t blocked such behaviours. Security researcher ... ⌘ Read more
The next version of the world’s most popular desktop Linux operating system (that’s Ubuntu, for those playing dumb) comes with fewer apps available out-of-the-box. Daily builds of Ubuntu 23.10 now ship with just a super-slim set of default software. These are designed to cover basic computing needs only. For anything else, the idea is that we, the user, fire up the Software Store (though the new one isn’t included in daily builds yet) and install wha ... ⌘ Read more
Adding screen savers to Wayland is not simply a matter of “port the XScreenSaver daemon”, because under the Wayland model, screen blanking and locking should not be a third-party user-space app; much of the logic must be embedded into the display manager itself. This is a good thing! It is a better model than what we have under X11. But that means that accomplishing that task means not just writing code, but engaging with whatever passes for a standards body or design committee i ... ⌘ Read more
The other day I had a pressing “need” to examine the behavior of Adaptec 154x and compatible SCSI HBAs and their DOS drivers. I found the hard way that the AHA-154xB does not work with Adaptec’s last DOS drivers from circa 1999. That includes the drivers still available for download (ASPI4DOS.SYS version 3.36), as well as the driver shipped with OEM versions of Windows 98SE (ASPI4DOS.SYS version 3.36S). The error message is far from enlightening; effectively the driver acts as ... ⌘ Read more
GNOME is going to change the way extensions are loaded in GNOME 45, and that’s going to be a bit of a nuisance for both users and developers. Extensions that target older GNOME versions will not work in GNOME 45. Likewise, extensions that are adapted to work with GNOME 45 will not work in older versions. You can still support more than one GNOME version, but you will have to upload different versions to extensions.gnome.org for pre- and post- ... ⌘ Read more
Floppy disk drives are curious things. We know them as the slots that ingest those small almost-square plastic “floppy disks” and we only really see them now in Computer Museums. But there’s a lot going on in that humble square of plastic and I wanted to write down what I’ve learned so far. Exactly what it says on the tin. ⌘ Read more
Take a look at this watch, it’s just some boring watch for runners, right? Nope, I think this might be the best ultra-low power consumer digital watch ever produced! Let me explain… This device certainly should entice some of you. ⌘ Read more
This pedestrian bridge crosses I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport. It connects Bloomington to Richfield. I drive under it often and I wondered: why is it there? It’s not in an area that is particularly walkable, and it doesn’t connect any establishments that obviously need to be connected. So why was it built? There’s no possible way to tie this to OSNews, but it’s such a fun and well-written story it’s worth breaking character for. I’m not even maki ... ⌘ Read more
Cutler and his team had nearly zero experience with either OS/2 or with PCs. They did, however, have ample experience with both portable code and with varied hardware platforms. Similar to his experience at DEC, Cutler was very quickly placed as the lead of the NT project. NT needed to have some compatibility with MS-DOS, OS/2, and UNIX (all systems Microsoft supported, sold, and developed at some level at the time ). As a result, NT was a fully 32 bit microkernel operati ... ⌘ Read more
The Linux From Scratch community is pleased to announce the release of LFS Version 12.0, LFS Version 12.0 (systemd), BLFS Version 12.0, and BLFS Version 12.0 (systemd). This release is a major update to both LFS and BLFS. The LFS release includes updates to binutils-2.41, gcc-13.2.0, and glibc-2.38. In total, 38 packages were updated since the last release. The Linux kernel has also been updated to version 6.4.12. One day, after I’m done with learning Nix and NixOS, ... ⌘ Read more
Are you a fervent user of WordPad? Are your company’s finances run through a document only WordPad can deal with? Do you run your Kinder egg smuggling side hustle through WordPad? You better find an alternative, because WordPad has just been deprecated. WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt. A moment o ... ⌘ Read more
Getting into Nix & Nix flakes can be a challenge. You may have have heard of Nix’s fame for reproducibility or Nix flake’s composability, but weren’t sure where or how to start. While some folks seem to settle for a devShell when it comes to Nix, going just a bit deeper, Nix can fulfill more project architecture requirements than merely delivering tooling. In this post we will follow journey of requirements from environment setup, to building, testing, & distrib ... ⌘ Read more
Today I read Wayland breaks your bad software, which is in large part an inventory of how Wayland is technically superior to X. I don’t particularly disagree with Wayland’s general technical merits and improvements, but at this point I think that they are mostly irrelevant. As such, I don’t think that talking about them will do much to shift more people to Wayland. (Of course, people have other reasons to talk about Wayland’ ... ⌘ Read more
Domain names ending in “.US” — the top-level domain for the United States — are among the most prevalent in phishing scams, new research shows. This is noteworthy because .US is overseen by the U.S. government, which is frequently the target of phishing domains ending in .US. Also, .US domains are only supposed to be available to U.S. citizens and to those who can demonstrate that they have a physical presence in the United States. The answer ... ⌘ Read more
Having used a wide range of field device communications busses from simple 4-20mA, classic serial busses like UART and Modbus, and more modern CAN bus, native USB, and Ethernet options I’m always playing with different transports and protocols to see what solutions make sense in my grab-bag of designs for hardware projects. I first became aware of Single Pair Ethernet when I was mindlessly browsing Sparkfun’s new products announcements a while ago, but did ... ⌘ Read more
With the introduction of the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro back in 2021, Google also announced a new subscription service called Pixel Pass. This Pixel Pass would allow you to pay a monthly fee to cover the newest Pixel phone, your YouTube Premium subscription, storage with Google One, and Google Play Pass. Today, Google quietly discontinued the Pixel Pass (effective August 29), so I hope you weren’t expecting to take advantage with the Pixel 8 ser ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft is testing an incredibly welcome feature in Notepad. With this update, Notepad will start automatically saving your session state allowing you to close Notepad without any interrupting dialogs and then pick up where you left off when you return. Notepad will automatically restore previously open tabs as well as unsaved content and edits across those open tabs. Saved session state does not impact any of your files, though, and it is still your choice wh ... ⌘ Read more
X11 is, to put it simply, not at all fit for any modern system. Full stop. Everything to make it work on modern systems are just hacks. Don’t even try to get away with “well, it just works for me” or “but Wayland no worky”. Unless your workflow (and hardware) comes from 20+ years ago, you have almost no reason to stick with Xorg, especially as it continues to get worse and worse when the user experience relies on newer and newer features. Almost everything that didn ... ⌘ Read more
As part of updates to the older file-system drivers for Linux 6.6, the ReiserFS file-system is no longer marked as “Supported” but is officially treated as “Obsolete” within the Linux kernel. The linux-fs merge for the Linux 6.6 cycle now treats ReiserFS as obsolete, the file-system long ago used by default on the likes of SUSE Linux. Last year with Linux 5.18 ReiserFS was deprecated and now with it being obsolete, it will likely be dropped from the main ... ⌘ Read more
Last month, the European Commission announced that it had opened a formal investigation regarding Microsoft’s bundling of Microsoft Teams with Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites for business customers. As we said at the time, “we will continue to cooperate with the Commission and remain committed to finding solutions that will address its concerns.” Today we are announcing proactive changes that we ... ⌘ Read more
The Regolith Desktop 3.0 has been released for Ubuntu Focal, Jammy, Lunar, and Debian Bullseye and Bookworm. A new Wayland-based session is available (for Jammy, Lunar, and Bookworm) as well as the existing X11 session. Regolith Desktop is a keyboard-focused, tiling desktop environment, and this new release comes with tons of new features even aside from the Wayland work. There’s now fractional scaling for resolutions higher than 1920×1080, as well as a whole boatload of ... ⌘ Read more
Multiplix is a small operating system serving as the foundation for some research projects in operating systems. It is currently designed as a monolithic kernel plus a special kernel monitor that runs at a higher privilege level. Multiplix is very much in-progress. The current status is that Multiplix can boot all cores, enable virtual memory and interrupts, supports multiple user-mode processes with a ... ⌘ Read more
I wanted to experiment with Non-Unix OS ideas. Exo-kernels are interesting, but it is mostly a theory. This project helps me understand the challenges involved in that pattern. OS development is extremely hard, Rust makes it more bearable. There’s some fascinating ideas in this experimental project. ⌘ Read more
Haiku developer PulkoMandy has released a new version of the BFS Windows driver, fixing some problems. In case you need to access your BFS (and possibly SkyFS, but I can’t test that) partitions from Windows, I just fixed some problems in and made a binary available. With Haiku becoming increasingly useable on a day-to-day basis, tools like these to make the cross-platform life just a bit easier are essential, so I’m glad the Haiku developers are dedicating some ... ⌘ Read more
I was having an email conversation with Stoo Cambridge, and he mentioned that he was having trouble making his Linux machine display thumbnails of Amiga IFF/ILBM files. It turns out I have a solution for him, so I am sharing it here to help anyone else. The number of people to whom this is relevant must be minute, but that’s exactly what why it’s perfect OSNews material. ⌘ Read more
Currently, in Windows 11, links contained in Windows system components, like, say, in the Settings application, are always opened in Edge, completely disregarding your default browser setting. Well, thanks to the European Union’s new Digital Services Act, this is going to change – but only for users in the European Economic Area. The latest ... ⌘ Read more
The Linux 6.6 modules infrastructure is changing to better protect against the illicit behavior of NVIDIA’s proprietary kernel driver. Luis Chamberlain sent out the modules changes today for the Linux 6.6 merge window. Most notable with the modules update is a change that better builds up the defenses against NVIDIA’s proprietary kernel driver from using GPL- ... ⌘ Read more
By far, the most popular so-called DOS Extender in the early 1990’s was DOS/4GW. MS-DOS game compatibility occupied a very large portion of my time during Windows 95 development, so I saw a lot of DOS Extender banners, most frequently the DOS/4GW banner. Now, you might wonder, “How did these games even run in Windows 95 if they came ... ⌘ Read more
From Google’s Workspaces Blog: Today we’re making Duet AI for Google Workspace generally available, and you can get started now with a no-cost trial. With over 3 billion users and more than 10 million paying customers who rely on it every day to get things done, Google Workspace is the world’s most popular productivity tool. Our pioneering technology makes collaborating with people easy, fun, and ubiquitously available. With the introduction of ... ⌘ Read more
ObjFW is a portable, lightweight framework for the Objective-C language. It enables you to write an application in Objective-C that will run on any platform supported by ObjFW without having to worry about differences between operating systems or various frameworks you would otherwise need if you want to be portable. It supports all modern Objective-C features when using Clang, but is also compatible with GCC ≥ 4.6 to allow maximum portability. ObjFW version 1.0 has just been released, which i ... ⌘ Read more
In this article, I describe my journey creating a barely functional rust backend enabling compilation for the .NET runtime (Usually used to run C# and F#). It is currently in the proof-of-concept stage, but I believe it still may be of some interest. Rust is everywhere. ⌘ Read more
Turns out that installing the Steam client from the Ubuntu repos on a new Ubuntu 23.04 install doesn’t work – and barely anyone noticed. Which is kind of surprising given the popularity of Steam, but also kind of not — and I’ll get to why in a second. So what’s the rub? This whole saga seems to illustrate that most Steam users on Linux install Steam from Valve itself, instead of using the packaged version. Interestin ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft has just paused Bing ads targeting Chrome users who have set Google as the default search engine. Windows 11 (and 10) users are seeing more Bing and Edge of late, and the most recent ad appears on top of games as the tech giant trying to push folks to use Bing rather than Google search in Chrome. As I reported on Sunday, Microsoft aggressively pushed Bing to Chrome user ... ⌘ Read more
I recently released a big update for my Mac ROM SIMM Programmer software which is written using Qt for cross-platform compatibility. As part of the update I wanted to release the Mac build as a universal x86\\_64/arm64 binary so that M1/M2 Mac users would be able to run it natively. It doesn’t currently compile for Qt 6, although I think I can fix that in the future without too much effort. However, Qt 5.15.9 and later do ... ⌘ Read more_
Google officially went online later in 1998. It quickly became so inseparable from both the way we use the internet and, eventually, culture itself, that we almost lack the language to describe what Google’s impact over the last 25 years has actually been. It’s like asking a fish to explain what the ocean is. And yet, all around us are signs that the era of “peak Google” is ending or, possibly, already over. There is a growing chorus of complaints that Google is not as accurate ... ⌘ Read more
Magnetic tape drives have long occupied the role that hard drives have shifted toward since the emergence of SSDs – cost-effective cold storage. Although they’re too slow for most users, recent developments allow magnetic drives to carry hundreds of gigabytes per square inch of tape. This week, IBM’s offerings in the space took another step forward. The company’s new TS1170 drive c ... ⌘ Read more
In a first for any OS/2-based distribution, ArcaOS 5.1 supports installation on the latest generation of UEFI-based systems, and includes the ability to install to GPT-based disk layouts. This enables ArcaOS 5.1 to install on a wide array of modern hardware. ArcaOS 5.1.0 can be used for new installs or to upgrade any prior version of ArcaOS 5. If installing from USB stick, the USB install stick may be created using any major operating system at hand (Windows, Linux, MacOS, and of course, OS/ ... ⌘ Read more
We have been in charge of maintaining one legacy Android app for our customer. It is an app, which is used by end-customers in production, but it does not have any active development going on because it’s been ready for years now. If it would be up to us, then we would not touch that app and would let it live its life happily ever after. Of course, there is no happily ever after when closed application stores are involved, so everything went south from ... ⌘ Read more
The EU Digital Services Act went into effect last Friday, and since there’s an insane amount of misinformation from big tech astroturfers about what the DSA means, it’s time to list what the DSA really does for people in the EU. People in the 27-nation European Union can alter some of what shows up when they search, scroll and share on the biggest social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook and other tech giants ... ⌘ Read more
The mess I’m describing — end-to-end encryption but with certain exceptions — may be a healthy balance of your privacy and our safety. The problem is it’s confusing to know what is encrypted and secret in communications apps, what is not and why it might matter to you. To illuminate the nuances, I broke down five questions about end-to-end encryption for five communications apps. This is strai ... ⌘ Read more
“But does it run Linux?” can now be finally and affirmatively answered for the Commodore C64! There is a catch (rather: a couple) of course: It runs extremely slowly and it needs a RAM Expansion Unit (REU), as there is no chance to fit it all into just 64KiB. It even emulates virtual memory with an MMU. Insanity. A real C64 would take about a week (!) to boot Linux. ⌘ Read more
Ichido is a set of experimental search engines and software projects created by Anthony Mancini. The flagship project is the Ichido general purpose search engine, a classic search engine with its own independent index. Now, indexing the web is hard and this is in beta so the search results aren’t exactly what you’d call competitive, but I have to say – the user interface for this search engine is downright fantastic. It ... ⌘ Read more
At some point last year (shortly before I began writing this blog post!) I found reference to a hanafuda video game created in 1998 for the Casio CALEID XM-700 Mobile Navigator on a random old, Japanese website. It turns out this device is a long-forgotten handheld computer that was released in 1997, only in Japan. The device is what you might refer to as a PIM or PDA, roughly equivalent to Apple Newton or Palm Pilot, particularly as it featured ... ⌘ Read more
It has been a little while since we shared our vision for Ubuntu Desktop, and explained how our current roadmap fits into our long term strategic thinking. Recently, we embarked on an internal exercise to consolidate and bring structure to our values and goals for how we plan to evolve the desktop experience over the next few years. This post is designed to share the output of those discussions and give insight into the direction we’re ... ⌘ Read more
Have you ever wanted a more lightweight version of OSNews? A version that loads more optimally inside a terminal? Well, I’ve got good news for you: OSNews is now available on Gemini. What is Gemini? This is how the project’s website describes it: Gemini is a new internet technology supporting an electronic library of interconnected text documents. That’s not a new idea, but it’s not old fashioned either. It’s timeless, and deserves tools which treat it as a first class ... ⌘ Read more
After 18 months developing with the Zephyr RTOS, I’m starting to become a strong proponent. In my opinion, one of the key advantages of the Zephyr RTOS is the hardware abstraction. It allows applications to be written for Zephyr that are platform independent and can be moved between different boards including different manufacturers of microcontrollers. In a world still suffering from chip shortages, it has been a breath of f ... ⌘ Read more
Last year the European Union enacted a new set of regulations known as the Digital Services Act (DSA), designed to harmonize content regulations across the EU and create specific processes for online content moderation. The DSA applies to many different online services – from marketplaces and app stores to online video sharing platforms and search engines. As a result, we have adapted many of our long-standing trust and safety processes and changed ... ⌘ Read more
Google is further strengthening its protections around Gmail, and from now on, you’ll have to verify it’s you through whatever 2FA method you prefer. It covers changing settings related to filters, forwarding, and IMAP access. When these actions are taken, Google will evaluate the session attempting the action, and if it’s deemed risky, it will be challenged with a “Verify it’s you” prompt. Throug ... ⌘ Read more
The BitLocker partition is encrypted using the Full Volume Encryption Key (FVEK). The FVEK itself is encrypted using the Volume Master Key (VMK) and stored on the disk, next to the encrypted data. This permits key rotations without re-encrypting the whole disk. The VMK is stored in the TPM. Thus the disk can only be decrypted when booted from this computer (there is a recovery mechanism in Active ... ⌘ Read more
In June 2022, I started work on porting FreeBSD to run on Firecracker. My interest was driven by a few factors. First, I had been doing a lot of work on speeding up the FreeBSD boot process and wanted to know the limits that could be reached with a minimal hypervisor. Second, porting FreeBSD to new platforms always helps to reveal bugs — both in FreeBSD and on those platforms. Third, AWS Lambda only supports Linux at present; I’m always eager to make FreeBSD more available in AWS (alth ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 and Windows 11 has again flagged ChromeSetup.exe – the installation file for Google’s famous Chrome browser – as potentially harmful. Microsoft Edge’s built-in security feature suggests users delete ChromeSetup.exe and try Edge via multiple pop-up messages. Windows Latest understands Microsoft Edge 116 has incorrectly flagged ChromeSetup.exe as potentially ha ... ⌘ Read more
Python is one of the most popular programming languages today, loved by businesses and students alike and Excel is an essential tool to organize, manipulate and analyze all kinds of data. But, until now, there hasn’t been an easy way to make those two worlds work together. Today, we are excited to introduce the Public Preview of Python in Excel – making it possible to integrate Python and Excel analytics within the same Excel grid for uninterrupted workflow. Python ... ⌘ Read more
Meanwhile, if you are on Windows 11 and wondering about its compatibility with your system, a document from Intel, spotted by Twitter (X) user Chi11eddog, seemingly confirms that Windows 11 is going to be supported. And although the document does not mention Windows 12, which is expected given that the product has not even been officially announced yet (Microsoft rece ... ⌘ Read more
Four nonprofit groups seeking to protect kids’ privacy online asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate YouTube today, after back-to-back reports allegedly showed that YouTube is still targeting personalized ads on videos “made for kids”. Now it has become urgent that the FTC probe YouTube’s data and advertising practices, the groups’ letter said, and potentially inte ... ⌘ Read more
The company raked in $13.5 billion in revenue since May, it revealed in its Q2 2024 earnings, with the unprecedented demand for its generative AI chips blowing past any difficulty it might have had selling desktop and laptop GPUs into a shrinking PC industry. Data center accounted for a record $10.32 billion of that revenue, more than doubling in just one quarter, and Nvidia made $6.188 billion in profit as a resu ... ⌘ Read more
Over the past year or so, I’ve been working with other BlueSCSI developers to add Wi-Fi functionality to their open-hardware SCSI device, enabling Wi-Fi support for old Macs and other vintage computers going back some 36 years. This is my Macintosh Portable M5126. It’s very Macintosh and hardly portable. For some reason I’m using it on my lawn reading the Wi-Fi Wikipedia article over Wi-Fi through my Wikipedia application for System 6, with my Wi-Fi Desk ... ⌘ Read more
Ars Technica writes: There are hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL code running on production systems worldwide. That’s not ideal for a language over 60 years old and whose primary architects are mostly retired or dead. IBM, eager to keep those legacy functions on its Z mainframe systems, wants that code rewritten in Java. It tried getting humans to do it a few years back ... ⌘ Read more
The computer on Keegan McNamara’s desk is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The machine sits on a light wood table, bathed in the sunlight coming into the second floor of McNamara’s Los Angeles house. McNamara, tall and blonde in jeans and a light khaki Carhartt jacket, walks over to the desk, sits down, and reaches over to hit the power button. Then he pauses. He forgot something. He digs into his pants pocket, pulls out his keys, picks a silver one ... ⌘ Read more
Google introduced Project Mainline in Android 10, modularizing OS components so feature and security updates could be delivered through Google Play instead of regular OTA updates. Android 10 launched with 12 supported Mainline modules, but in the latest release, that number has ballooned to 37 updatable modules. Here’s a look at how Project Mainline is changing in Android 14 and beyond. If you ... ⌘ Read more
You can still do a clean install of Windows, and it’s arguably easier than ever, with official Microsoft-sanctioned install media easily accessible and Windows Update capable of grabbing most of the drivers that most computers need for basic functionality. The problem is that a “clean install” doesn’t feel as clean as it used to, and unfortunately for us, it’s an inside job—it’s Microsoft, not third parties, that i ... ⌘ Read more
Despite all of the litigation, Windows 2 made it to market, gained 3rd party support, and signaled a massive transition in computing that all of the competition had failed to do. With Windows 2, millions of people were using a graphical desktop with graphical applications. The mouse was made a standard tool. PCs were now being urged to adopt powerful graphics adapters. Many people claim Windows 2 to be a failure, but this is not an accurate assessment. While it didn’t sell to t ... ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD developers are looking at using the open-source NVIDIA kernel driver being developed by NVIDIA as an open-source Direct Rendering Manager driver that is out-of-tree, but not to be confused with Nouveau. With that kernel driver they are able to provide this nvidia-drm-kmod driver on their own and within the ports collection for better integration with the kernel and those wanti ... ⌘ Read more
I’ve been working off and on doing further Mac-ification to my updated fork of MacLynx, the System 7-compatible port of the venerable text browser Lynx for classic 68K Macintoshes (and Power Macs) running A/UX 3.x or System 7.x and later. There’s still more to do, but a lot has been worked in since I last dropped beta 4, so it’s time for another save point. Meet MacLynx “beta 5”. Extraordinary work, and a gre ... ⌘ Read more
ART is the engine behind the Android operating system (OS). It provides the runtime and core APIs that all apps and most OS services rely on. Both Java and Kotlin are compiled down to bytecode executed by ART. Improvements in the runtime, compiler and core API benefit all developers making app execution faster and bytecode compilation more efficient. While parts of Android are customizable by device manufacturers, ART i ... ⌘ Read more
Liam Dawe at GamingOnLinux looks back at the release of Valve’s Proton, five years ago today. Proton just makes a lot of sense. It didn’t take long for Valve to expand Proton to go initially from a few select Valve-approved titles, to being able to run anything we choose to try with it. From there, Linux gaming just seemingly exploded. And then eventually we saw why Valve made Proton with the Steam Deck a ... ⌘ Read more
You can now play with NVIDIA GeForce graphics card BIOS like it’s 2013! Over the last decade, NVIDIA had effectively killed video BIOS modding by introducing BIOS signature checks. With GeForce 900-series “Maxwell,” the company added an on-die security processor on all its GPUs, codenamed “Falcon,” which among other things, prevents the GPU from booting with unauthorized firmware. OMGVflash ... ⌘ Read more
As an undergraduate student in the early 1990s, I wrote all my class papers using WordPerfect for DOS. WordPerfect was a powerful desktop word processor that was used in offices all over the world. But WordPerfect was quite expensive; my student edition of WordPerfect cost around $300. When the new version of WordPerfect came out, I just couldn’t afford to buy it. Fortunately, the shareware market was starting to take off around this time. “Shareware” was a new m ... ⌘ Read more
Budgie 10.8 is a brand new release series for Budgie Desktop, featuring improvements to Budgie Menu, adoption of StatusNotifier support in System Tray, Magpie v0.x support, and more! I’m quite happy Budgie is back on track after a few leaner years. Development has picked up, there’s a clear roadmap, and it’s fun to follow along with the changes and improvements. ⌘ Read more
This post is a detailed discussion into user profiles, their directories, and how they are—to put it bluntly—in total disarray on Windows and Linux (I haven’t used a Mac in ages, but I assume the situation is very similar there, too). Applications treat the user profile as a dumping ground, and any user with a reasonably wide list of installed software will find their user profile very difficult to traverse after some time in use. There are platform conventions and attempts to stand ... ⌘ Read more
Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t just let this one go. I tested all the popular Windows uninstallers and I didn’t like what I saw. I thought many of these programs had some rudimentary issues with their user interface, and they just didn’t work that well. How difficult could it really be to do something better? As it turned out, it was very difficult, actually. It’s 2023, and ... ⌘ Read more
In the year 1999, Bandai announced the MobileWonderGate – a device which allowed connecting a WonderSwan to the Internet thanks to a collaboration with the mobile network NTT DoCoMo. This was primarily used by a selection games to provide downloadable content, as expected for this type of handheld attachment. … Oh, it also came with a web browser supporting a subset of HTML 3.2, tables, GIF images, reading Japanese websites, a bookmark system, an ... ⌘ Read more
This headline is entirely correct and I will stand by it. This is one of those products that I truly cannot wait to experience and review firsthand: LG is bringing the quirky, one-of-a-kind StanbyME Go to the United States later this month for $999.99. If you missed its international launch, which flew under the radar for many, let me catch you up: the StanbyME Go is a 27-inch 1080p LCD TV housed in a large suitcase that also contains a built-in battery and 20-watt speakers. The id ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft has announced that on 29 July, 2024, the Xbox 360 Store on the Xbox 360 and the Xbox 360 Marketplace on the web will close their doors. For once, one of these service or online store shutdowns is actually being handled well, as Microsoft states: This change will not affect your ability to play Xbox 360 games or DLC you have already purchased. Xbox 360 game content previously purchased will still be available to play , not only the Xbox 360 co ... ⌘ Read more
It looks like Google is desperate to move more Pixel Tablet units, with the company widely using notifications from the Google Home app to promote the new tablet launched earlier this year. Many people report seeing a “Meet the Google Pixel Tablet” banner in their notifications, with a tap on it sending them straight to its product listing on the Google Store. Samsung received hefty criti ... ⌘ Read more
Microsoft is making it possible to remove a few more of the preinstalled Windows 11 applications. In the release notes for a recent Insider Preview, build 25931, the company notes: In addition to the Camera app and Cortana, the Photos app, People app, and Remote Desktop (MSTSC) client can be uninstalled. In addition, this build also deprecates Windows Internet Name Service (WINS) and Remote Mailsl ... ⌘ Read more
About Chromebooks reports: This isn’t turning out to be a good week if you’re a Chromebook hardware fan. Previously planned Chromebooks with Nvidia GPUs are no longer in the works. This follows Monday’s news that Qualcomm Gen 3 Snapdragon 7c Chromebooks were canceled. Indeed, a reader comment from the Snapdragon post pointed out the Google code that explains, in no uncertain terms, that several ChromeOS baseboards have been canc ... ⌘ Read more
I have struggled, literally for years, with Quicken being dog slow to start. It could take 30+ seconds to start. From what I could remember, this problem has existed since I first installed Windows 10. The title gives the answer away, but yes, it’s exactly what it says – some applications on Windows will load every single font on the system before loading the rest of the application. If you have a lot of fo ... ⌘ Read more
For the past several years, more than 90% of Chrome users’ navigations have been to HTTPS sites, across all major platforms. Thankfully, that means that most traffic is encrypted and authenticated, and thus safe from network attackers. However, a stubborn 5-10% of traffic has remained on HTTP, allowing attackers to eavesdrop on or change that data. Chrome shows a warning in the address bar when a connection to a site is not secure, but we believe this is insufficient ... ⌘ Read more
Won’t belong now until “violating Chrome Web Store policy” will be applied to ad blockers. ⌘ Read more
The original iMac entered a computing world that was in desperate need of a shake-up. After the wild early days of the personal computer revolution, things had become stagnant by the mid-1990s. Apple had spent a decade frittering away the Mac’s advantages until most of them were gone, blown out of the water by the enormous splash of Windows 95. It was the era of beige desktop computers chained to big CRT displays and other peripherals. In 1997, Steve Jobs returned to an Apple that ... ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD is a compelling and cutting-edge operating system that provides a wealth of features and advantages. FreeBSD’s deep OpenZFS integration, completely customizable packaging, and the ability to manage a huge fleet with a small team make it a clear contender for consideration in your next infrastructure build. This one’s written by a company that, among other things, sells FreeBSD and OpenZFS support, ... ⌘ Read more
A necessary correction to an earlier post: support for Haiku has not been upstreamed into GCC. From the Haiku development mailing list: It is definitely our goal to get Haiku’s GCC toolchain upstream, and that commit does indeed nudge us a little in that direction… However it’s a small portion of a larger commit adding architecture support. Good to have this cleared up. ⌘ Read more
Debate continues to rage over the federal Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which seeks to hold platforms liable for feeding harmful content to minors. KOSA is lawmakers’ answer to whistleblower Frances Haugen’s shocking revelations to Congress. In 2021, Haugen leaked documents and provided testimony alleging that Facebook knew that its platform was addictive and was harming teens—but blinded by its pursuit of profits, it cho ... ⌘ Read more
ZFSBootMenu is a bootloader that provides a powerful and flexible discovery, manipulation and booting of Linux on ZFS. Originally inspired by the FreeBSD bootloader, ZFSBootMenu leverages the features of modern OpenZFS to allow users to choose among multiple “boot environments” (which may represent different versions of a Linux distribution, earlier snapshots of a common root, or entirely different distributions), manipulate snapsh ... ⌘ Read more
Certain font-related CSS properties will render your site completely inaccessible if their value is declared using pixels even once. Just read it and absorb the information. ⌘ Read more
There’s no denying that the browser is the single-most important application on any operating system, whether that be on desktops and laptops or on mobile devices. Without a capable, fast, and solid browser, the usefulness of an operating system decreases exponentially, to the point where I’m quite sure virtually nobody’s going to use an operating system for regular, normal use if it doesn’t have a browser. Having an at least somewhat useable browser is what e ... ⌘ Read more
macOS Catalina and later include an anti-malware scanning service, XProtect Remediator (XPR), that periodically checks your Mac for known malware. If it detects anything untoward, it tries to remove it in a process Apple terms remediation. Because this is all performed as a background service, XPR doesn’t inform you when it scans, or when it detects and remediates malware. Instead it records those events in the log, and in Ventura and later ... ⌘ Read more