In collaboration with Polar Signals we have committed that beginning with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, our GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) package will enable frame pointers by default for 64-bit platforms. All packages in Ubuntu, with very few exceptions, will be rebuilt with frame pointers enabled, making them easier to profile and subsequently optimise. “I’ve enabled frame pointers at huge scale for Java and glibc and studied the CPU ... ⌘ Read more
In collaboration with Polar Signals we have committed that beginning with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, our GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) package will enable frame pointers by default for 64-bit platforms. All packages in Ubuntu, with very few exceptions, will be rebuilt with frame pointers enabled, making them easier to profile and subsequently optimise. “I’ve enabled frame pointers at huge scale for Java and glibc and studied the CPU ... ⌘ Read more
Three years after Fortnite-maker Epic Games sued Apple and Google for allegedly running illegal app store monopolies, Epic has a win. The jury in Epic v. Google has just delivered its verdict — and it found that Google turned its Google Play app store and Google Play Billing service into an illegal monopoly. After just a few hours of deliberation, the jury unanimously answered yes to every ques ... ⌘ Read more
As part of our transition to subscription and a simplified portfolio, beginning today, we will no longer sell perpetual licenses. All offerings will continue to be available as subscriptions going forward. Additionally, we are ending the sale of Support and Subscription (SnS) renewals for perpetual offerings beginning today. ↫ Krish Prasad of VMware This sucks. Every few yea ... ⌘ Read more
The Timeline feature in Maps helps you remember places you’ve been and is powered by a setting called Location History. If you’re among the subset of users who have chosen to turn Location History on (it’s off by default), soon your Timeline will be saved right on your device — giving you even more control over your data. Just like before, you can delete all or part of your information at any time or disable th ... ⌘ Read more
Today, Apple pushed out the public releases of iOS 17.2, iPadOS 17.2, macOS Sonoma 14.2, watchOS 10.2, and tvOS 17.2. iOS 17.2 and iPadOS 17.2’s flagship feature is the new Journal app, which Apple teased when it first introduced iOS 17 earlier. The app mimics several existing popular journaling apps in the App Store from third-party developers but leverages data from your Photos, workouts, and other Apple apps to make journaling suggestions. Other featu ... ⌘ Read more
NetDrive is a DOS device driver that allows you to access a remote disk image hosted by another machine as though it was a local device with an assigned drive letter. The remote disk image can be a floppy disk image or a hard drive image. ↫ Michael B. Brutman An incredibly useful tool for modern-day DOS work. ⌘ Read more
Porporo is an experimental operating system specification for Varvara, written in TAL and ANSI C. This is a work in progress, for more details follow the development during december. ↫ rabbits So, what is Varvara? Varvara is a specification for devices communicating with the Uxn CPU intended to run little audio and visual programs. ↫ Varvara official website …so, what is the Uxn CPU? This one-page ... ⌘ Read more
The Sophon SG2042 is the world’s first commodity 64-core RISC-V CPU for high performance workloads and an important question is whether the SG2042 has the potential to encourage the HPC community to embrace RISC-V. In this paper we undertaking a performance exploration of the SG2042 against existing RISC-V hardware and high performance x86 CPUs in use by modern super ... ⌘ Read more
The Unix philosophy of using compact expert tools that do one thing well and pipelining them together to manipulate data is a great idea and has worked well for the past few decades. This philosophy was outlined in the 1978 Foreword to the Bell System Technical Journal describing the UNIX Time-Sharing System: Items i and ii are oft repeated, and for good reason. But it is time to take this philosophy to the 21st century by further def ... ⌘ Read more
It’s 1995 and I’ve been nearly two years in the professional workspace. OS/2 is the dominant workstation product, Netware servers rule the world, and the year of the Linux desktop is going to happen any moment now. If you weren’t running OS/2, you were probably running Windows 3.1, only very few people were using that Linux thing. What would have been the prefect OS at the time would have been NT with a competent POSIX subsystem, but since we ... ⌘ Read more
According to my sources, the new Windows bosses are now returning to an annual release cycle for major versions of the Windows platform, meaning Windows is going back to having just one big feature update a year instead of multiple smaller ones throughout. Microsoft may still use Moment updates sparingly, but they will no longer be the primary de ... ⌘ Read more
But it’s worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do ... ⌘ Read more
This is a website dedicated to a project of mine, Sol-1. Sol-1 is a homebrew CPU and Minicomputer built from 74HC logic. ↫ Paulo Constantino Sol-1 has user and kernel priviledge mode, a maximum of 256 processes in parallel, paged virtual memory, serial ports, parallel ports, IDE interface, realtime clock, a DMA channel, and much more. There’s also an accompanying operating system called Solarium. ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD UNIX system can be updated in many ways. You can use freebsd-update(8) command to fetch and install the official binary patches. You can download the FreeBSD sources and compile your new version. You can download and install base.txz and kernel.txz sets in a new ZFS Boot Environment along with copying over your config files there – Other FreeBSD Version in ZFS Boot Environment – as documented here. While for most users these three options will be ... ⌘ Read more
It turns out that fancy video Google made to show off its new “AI” was… Well, not “faked”, but definitely a bit staged. Google also admits that the video is edited. “For the purposes of this demo, latency has been reduced and Gemini outputs have been shortened for brevity,” it states in its YouTube description. This means the time it took for each response was actually longer than in the video. In reality, the demo also wasn’t carried out ... ⌘ Read more
When I started taking apart the Fairphone 5, I didn’t really expect any surprises. Having dis- and reassembled the previous model several times, I had some experience with Fairphone’s approach to building a smartphone: Modularity paired with easy access to all major components. It’s a winning formula for a repairable smartphone they have iterated on several times now. So, what’s actually different this time around—apart from a new and shiny OLED screen and beefed up cam ... ⌘ Read more
Fvwm3, the successor to fvwm 2.6, has a new version, 1.0.9. This highly customisable and lightweight window manager for X has been around for a very long time, since 1993, and has been in development ever since. This new release, as the version number suggests, does not have the longest changelog. If you’re a user of fvwm, you already know exactly what 1.0.9 will mean for you. ⌘ Read more
HP knows people have grown to hate printers. It even knows that people hate HP printers. But based on a new marketing campaign the company launched, HP is OK with that—so long as it can convince people that there are worse options out there. The marketing campaign hitting parts of Europe aims to present HP as real and empathetic. The tagline “Made to be less hated” seems to acknowledge people’s frustrati ... ⌘ Read more
The controller, which was created in collaboration with disabled gaming groups such as AbleGamers, Stack-Up, and SpecialEffect, has a unique circular design. The controller comes with a number of different button caps, along with three stick caps that can be changed out to suit the specific needs of the gamer. The controller itself is also designed to rest on a flat surface for players that ... ⌘ Read more
systemd 255 has been released, and it contains one particular new feature I want to highlight. A new component “systemd-bsod” has been added to show logged error messages full-screen if they have a “LOG\\_EMERG” log level. This is intended as a tool for displaying emergency log messages full-screen on boot failures. Yes, BSOD in this case short for “Blue Screen of Death”. This was worked on as part of Outreachy 2023. The systemd-bsod will also display a QR code for getting more information ... ⌘ Read more
Government investigators in the United States have used push notification data to pursue people of interest, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a letter Wednesday to the Justice Department, revealing for the first time a way in which Americans can be tracked through a basic service provided by their smartphones. Wyden’s letter said the Justice Department had prohibited Apple and Google ... ⌘ Read more
This promise of a world responsibly empowered by AI continues to drive our work at Google DeepMind. For a long time, we’ve wanted to build a new generation of AI models, inspired by the way people understand and interact with the world. AI that feels less like a smart piece of software and more like something useful and intuitive — an expert helper or assistant. Today, we’re a step closer to this vision as we ... ⌘ Read more
Windows 10’s end-of-support date is October 14, 2025. That’s the day that most Windows 10 PCs will receive their last security update and the date when most people should find a way to move to Windows 11 to ensure that they stay secure. As it has done for other stubbornly popular versions of Windows, though, Microsoft is offering a reprieve for those who want or need to stay on Wi ... ⌘ Read more
A somewhat obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites may be about to accelerate the long, sad decline of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. There already are plenty of large entities, both public and private, whose websites lack proper support for Firefox; and that will get only worse in the near future, because the ’fox’s auburn paws are perilously close to the lip of the proverbial slippery slope. ↫ Bryce Wray US government guidelines say that US government websites only need ... ⌘ Read more
According to our tests and reports seen by us, HP Smart is auto-installing on all versions of Windows that use Microsoft Store, including Windows 11 23H2 or 22H2. HP Smart is an app that allows you to manage HP printers, and it’s typically pre-installed on HP PCs. It’s not supposed to be installed when you’re not using an HP device like a PC or printer. However, the Microsoft Store ... ⌘ Read more
Intel’s Optane memory modules launched with a lot of fanfare in 2015, and were recently discontinued, in 2022, with similar fanfare. It was a sad day for me, a lover of abstraction-breaking technologies, but it was forseeable and understandable. At the time of Optane’s launch, a lot of us were excited about the idea of having a new storage tier, sitting between DRAM and flash. It was announced as having DRAM endurance and speed with the persistence and size of flash. It was a futuristic m ... ⌘ Read more
The Windows Accessibility team adheres to the disability community’s guiding principle, “nothing about us without us,” emphasizing the creation of products that empower everyone. We launched and announced new and exciting features last September through our Windows 11 2022 Update and with your feedback, we have improved upon those experiences in a number of ways. ↫ Divya Bhaskaran on Microsoft’s official Windows blog In this blog post, Microsoft details s ... ⌘ Read more
Even if you’ve used the Mac for decades, I suspect you have never fully understood the Fn key. Not helping is the fact that Apple sometimes calls it the Function key, but all Mac keyboards already have 12 or more numbered F-for-Function keys! The Fn key first appeared in 1998 in the PowerBook G3 Series (Wallstreet) and has become a fixture in the lower-left corner of laptop keyboards ever since. The Fn key migrated to standalone keyboards only ... ⌘ Read more
It was Big Sur that focussed attention on the size of macOS updates. In Mojave and earlier, updates had essentially been Installer packages that brought a minimum of overhead. By the time that many had installed Big Sur’s new Signed System Volume (SSV), we were starting to discover just how large its updates were. Those were early days with its completely new updating process that builds a new System volume, takes a snapshot of it, and ... ⌘ Read more
A prominent disinformation scholar has accused Harvard University of dismissing her to curry favor with Facebook and its current and former executives in violation of her right to free speech. Joan Donovan claimed in a filing with the Education Department and the Massachusetts attorney general that her superiors soured on her as Harvard was getting a record $500 million pledge from Meta ... ⌘ Read more
The holidays are coming, there’s a chill in the air (literally for me, I live in the Arctic), so it’s time for a few new additions to the official OSNews Merch Store. Do you live in the terminal, breathe the terminal? We’ve got new shirts just for you. The opening message of the terminals of Mac OS X, BeOS, and MS-DOS (let’s be generous and call MS-DOS a terminal), with ... ⌘ Read more
You may have noticed that starting today, I’ve been adding a dedicated link to the main story in every post on OSNews. Our old-fashioned 2001 method of “biggest link is main story” simply doesn’t hold up today as proper attribution, so from here on out every post will have a link marked by ↫ crediting the name and/or publication of the main linked article (or multiple where it makes sense). I’ve been unhappy with our attribution for years, and finally got my act together and s ... ⌘ Read more
I was always very interested in OpenBSD and a few months ago, I decided to give it a try. I’ve quickly fallen in love with it! There is, however, a big problem: Hare does not fully support OpenBSD! So, I decided to port it and I am happy to announce that my work was merged yesterday and OpenBSD is now fully supported by Hare. Let me show you some of the tricky stuff that was involved in the port. ↫ Lorenz (xha) on the official Hare blog Hare is a relatively new programming language, ... ⌘ Read more
The problem is that very few people are interested in learning COBOL these days. Coding it is cumbersome, it reads like an English lesson (too much typing), the coding format is meticulous and inflexible, and it takes far longer to compile than its competitors. And since nobody’s learning it anymore, programmers who can work with and maintain all that code are a increasingly hard to find. Many of these “COBOL cowbo ... ⌘ Read more
Hewlett-Packard’s 9000 Series 300 (HP300) was a range of technical workstations based on Motorola 680×0 microprocessors. Superbly engineered in modular form, and ahead of the curve in terms of functionality, these workstations were used mainly as instrument controllers and for desktop technical computing. The HP300 series launched in 1985 with the models 310 (pictured below) and 320. It evolved through numerou ... ⌘ Read more
On Unix, ‘test‘ and ‘[‘ are two names for (almost) the same program and shell builtin. Although today people mostly use it under its ‘[‘ name, when it was introduced in V7 along side the Bourne shell, it only was called ‘test‘; the ‘[‘ name was only nascent until years later. I don’t know for sure why it was called ‘test‘, but there are interesting hints about its potential genesis in the shell used in V6 Research Unix, the pred ... ⌘ Read more
According to Google’s official support page listing the current firmware versions of its speakers and smart displays, version 14.20230831.4.72 is now available to those enrolled in the Preview Program (which can be accessed via the Google Home app). These updates are often released in stages, meaning it may be a few weeks before your Nest Hub gets the latest build. On the project’s website, Google offers a more in- ... ⌘ Read more
Windows App, which is still in beta, will let you connect to Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Microsoft Dev Box, Remote Desktop Services, and remote PCs from, well, pretty much any computing device. Specifically, you can use it from Macs, iPhones, iPads, other Windows machines, and — pay attention! — web browsers. That last part means you’ll be able to run Windows from Linux-powered PCs, Chromebooks, and Android phones and tablets. So, if you’ve been stuck running Windows ... ⌘ Read more
Currently, there are many settings/registry keys that developers desire to tweak that are either not accessible via the Windows Settings app and/or are difficult to discover throughout the OS. Users may have to resort to running scripts or manually changing registry keys to get their machine into their ideal state. Furthermore, there is not a single place for developers to discover and twe ... ⌘ Read more
A team of researchers primarily from Google’s DeepMind systematically convinced ChatGPT to reveal snippets of the data it was trained on using a new type of attack prompt which asked a production model of the chatbot to repeat specific words forever. Using this tactic, the researchers showed that there are large amounts of privately identifiable information (PII) in OpenAI’s large language m ... ⌘ Read more
As 2023 draws to a close—and as we start to finalize our Game of the Year contenders—I really should be catching up on the embarrassingly long list of great recent releases that I haven’t put enough time into this year. Instead, over the last few days, I’ve found myself once again hooked on a simple, addictive, and utterly unique Japanese Windows freeware game from the late ’90s that, until recently, I thought I had ... ⌘ Read more
Does anyone here remember Cosmoe? Cosmoe was an attempt to combine Haiku’s API with the Linux kernel and related tools, started in the early 2000s. The project eventually fizzled out, now only an obscure footnote for BeOS diehards such as myself. It seems, though, that the idea of combining the Haiku API with a mature UNIX-like operating system refuses to die, and a few days ago, on the NetBSD Users’s Discussion List, a develo ... ⌘ Read more
Cinnamon, the desktop environment mostly associated with Linux Mint, has released its sixth version. It also adds support for AVIF images, a new option for notification screen selection, a new gesture for desktop zoom, a new menu details option, color picker support in the screenshot service, and an xdg-portal configuration file. Various improvements are present as well to fix missing thumbnails for windows that are created while th ... ⌘ Read more
This ambition to escape dependence on foreign technology rests on the shoulders of Huawei and SMIC. The successful launch of the Kirin 9000S injected new vigor into the semiconductor industry, with executives reporting that chip start-ups are seeing a surge in funding. But Huawei’s long-term ambitions are not limited to the markets in China’s orbit. The original nickname for the Kirin 9000S—Charlotte— ... ⌘ Read more
Our nightly example browser, servoshell, is now easier to navigate, accepting URLs without http:// or https:// both in the location bar and on the command line, and should no longer lock up when run with --no-minibrowser. Local paths can also be given on the command line, and are still preferred when the path points to a file that exists. Work is now underway to improve our embedding story and prepare Servo f ... ⌘ Read more
Evaluating the performance of CPUs with identical cores is relatively straightforward, and they’re easy to compare using single- and multi-core benchmarks. When there are two different types of core, one designed primarily for energy efficiency (E), the other for maximum performance (P), traditional benchmarks can readily mislead. Multi-core results are dominated by the ratio of P to E cores, and variable frequency confounds further. I ... ⌘ Read more
Reading the story of how Windows NT came to be was entertaining, as it is a story of the system itself and the dynamics between Dave Cutler, the original designer and lead for NT, and the other people involved in the project. I was shy of being 10 years old when Windows NT launched and I didn’t comprehend what was going on in the operating systems world and why this release was such a big deal. Reading the book made me learn various new things about the develop ... ⌘ Read more
We’re pleased to share an important update regarding Azure RTOS – an embedded development suite with the ThreadX real-time operating system that has been deployed on more than 12 billion devices worldwide. Reinforcing our commitment to innovation and community collaboration, Azure RTOS will be transitioning to an open-source model under the stewardship of the Eclipse Foundation, a recognized leader in hosting open-source IoT projects. W ... ⌘ Read more
Chinese chip designer Loongson has finally launched its loong teased “next-generation” 3A6000-series processors based on the LoongArch microarchitecture. IPC tests showed the 3A6000 matching Intel’s Raptor Lake i5-14600K in IPC (instructions per clock), with both chips clocked at 2.5GHz. As well as the headlining x86 compatible processor came the announcement of numerous partner desktop, laptop, and all-in-o ... ⌘ Read more
I got my hands on a Monoprice Blackbird 4K Pro HDCP 2.2 to 1.4 Converter. According to the marketing copy it “is the definitive solution for playback of new 4K HDCP 2.2 encoded content on 4K displays with the old HDCP 1.4 standard.” Stuffed after a delicious Thanksgiving meal, I decided to take it apart after the guests had left. It’s a simple single-function device, so I didn’t expect much, but maybe t ... ⌘ Read more
With this, we’ve decided to remove Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases. Xwayland should be able to handle most X11 clients that won’t immediately be ported to Wayland, and if needed, our customers will be able to stay on RHEL 9 for its full life cycle while resolving the specifics needed for transitioning to a Wayland ecosystem. It’s important to note that “Xorg Server” and “X11” are not syn ... ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD has supported nesting of jails natively since version 8.0, which dates back to 2009. Looking at the jail(8) man page, there is an entire paragraph named Hierarchical Jails that explains the concept of jail hierarchy well. It’s one of the many gems of FreeBSD that, although not widely known or used, is, in my opinion, extremely useful. BastilleBSD plays a central role in this article, and that’s a project I’ve been hearing ... ⌘ Read more
PipeWire 1.0 now has all the features that are expected to move media streams inside a system. It takes advantage of advanced features of the Linux kernel to provide low latency, low footprint, and high performance while being secure. It is the perfect tool to build an embedded system or to securely share streams between containers. Linux audio and video has come a long way, and PipeWire is part of that. Excellent work. ⌘ Read more
Frore Systems is a startup with $116 million in funding, and I’ve shown you its first product before: the AirJet Mini is a piezoelectric cooling chip that weighs just nine grams and is thinner than two US quarters stacked together. Each nominally consumes one watt and can remove 4.25 additional watts of heat. Here’s the question: what would happen if Frore used those AirJets to cool a laptop that normally doesn’t have a fan at ... ⌘ Read more
App developer Elias Saba has had some bad luck with Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedowns. His Android TV app Downloader, which combines a web browser with a file manager, was suspended by Google Play in May after several Israeli TV companies complained that the app could be used to load a pirate website. Google reversed that suspension after three weeks. But Downloader has b ... ⌘ Read more
When I used OpenBSD, I was a big fan of bsd.rd: a kernel that includes a root file system with an installer and a few tools. When I invariably did something bad to my root file system, I could use that to repair things. bsd.rd is also helpful for OS updates. And there is only a single file involved. On NetBSD however, there is usually no netbsd.rd kernel installed, or even available by default. The facility is there, it’s just not standard. To be fair, there are a n ... ⌘ Read more
NTDEV, the developer behind Tiny11, has released a new update for its miniature Windows 11 operating system, called Tiny11 2311, that adds Microsoft’s latest feature update, 23H2, into the OS and introduces a plethora of bug fixes addressing issues in the outgoing version of Tiny11. On top of this, the new update also shrinks Tiny11’s insta ... ⌘ Read more
After I wrote about the possibility of programmable Mac ROM SIMMs in Quadras a couple of months ago, I suspected that there had been a way for developers at Apple in the 68k Mac era to reflash the ROM in their Macs during development, just like BIOS updates on PCs. The reason I believed this is because the ROM SIMM socket in the Quadras brought out pins for 12V (VPP) and write enable (/WE). I had verified that the write enable ... ⌘ Read more
Debian’s MIPS64EL that is a 64-bit little endian port using the N64 ABI is at risk due to declining access for building the Debian 64-bit MIPS packages. MIPS64EL is now being treated as an “out of sync” architecture due to lacking sufficient build daemon resources for timely building new packages and if the situation doesn’t improve, it may not be suitable as a release architecture for Debian ... ⌘ Read more
Ironically, the second commercial game that Microsoft published, after Microsoft Adventure in 1979, was an attempt at a sports game sim. It was called Microsoft Olympic Decathlon, and like Microsoft Adventure, it was first launched as a TRS-80 PC game, this time in 1980. Microsoft has so many unexpected products in its long history. ⌘ Read more
Sunway’s new supercomputer therefore feels like a system designed with the goal of landing high on some TOP500 lists. For that purpose, it’s perfect, providing a lot of throughput without wasting money on pesky things like cache, out-of-order execution, and high bandwidth memory. But from the perspective of solving a nation’s problems, I feel like Sunway is chasing a metric. A nation doing well in advanced technology might have a lot ... ⌘ Read more
Windows Terminal is getting an optional feature – ChatGPT-powered “AI chat” on Windows 11. ChatGPT integration is now available in Terminal (Canary), a new development channel to test experimental features ahead of a wider rollout. With ChatGPT AI Chat in Terminal, you can use AI to generate commands, explain errors, and get recommendations. Microsoft wants Terminal to use the natural language AI to explain commands, su ... ⌘ Read more
Earlier this month, Microsoft released new preview updates with changes to make its operating systems compliant with European Union regulations. Those changes include the ability to uninstall Edge, decouple the OS from Bing, turn on third-party news feeds in Widgets, and more. Sadly, only EU citizens can enjoy those changes without messing with their PCs’ software intestines. Other people must tweak Windo ... ⌘ Read more
If you read the initial reviews of Apple’s new M3-based Macs, you’d be forgiven for thinking little had changed in their CPU cores, apart from a rejigging of numbers and an increase in the maximum frequency of their P cores. As my MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 Pro arrived three days early, this article presents a tentative first look at what has changed in their CPU cores, and from that, how you might choose the right chip for your next Apple silicon Mac ... ⌘ Read more
With OpenSolaris and derivatives such as illumos, we gained the ability to build a whole IT infrastructure in a single box, using virtualized networking (crossbow) to build the underlying network and then attaching virtualized systems (zones) atop virtualized storage (zfs). Some of this was present in Solaris 10, but it didn’t have crossbow so the networking piece was a bit tricky (although I did manage to get surprisingly far by abusing the loopba ... ⌘ Read more
We talked about Zork yesterday, and how the code for interpreters for the game was found and published on Github. Today we have a blog post detailing how to actually use one of these interpreters, the one for the PDP-11. Ok so what or where to do this?! First you need SIMH or any other good PDP-11 emulator, a copy of RT-11, and of course the source to the interpreter oddly enough named PDP11.ZIP. Just keep in mind that this is NOT a pk-zip file, it’s a text fi ... ⌘ Read more
Jason Scott posted the source code for all the Infocom games in 2019. This was pretty awesome. Everybody who is interested in that stuff cheered, and now it’s part of the common knowledge of Infocom. If you’re researching the history of those games, or want to study their design, you can dig in. So the game source was big news. Infocom’s interpreter source, however, remained obscure. This was the game-playing software for each platform: the Apple 2 interpreter, th ... ⌘ Read more
There has been quite a bit of documentation about exploiting the CANON Printer firmware in the past. For some more background information I suggest reading these posts by SYNACKTIV, doar-e and DEVCORE. I highly recommend reading all of it if you want to learn more about hacking (CANON) Printers. The TL;DR is: We’re dealing with a Custom RTOS called DRYOS engineered by CANON that doesn’t ship with any modern mitigations like ... ⌘ Read more
EE Journal reports: National Instruments (NI) recently released a new version of its LabView test automation programming environment for the latest Apple Macintosh computers based on the Arm-based Apple M1 CPU/GPU SoC. At the same time, NI let its customers know that this release would be the last one for Apple Macintosh computers, sending a shock through some portion of the company’s customer base. LabView’s importance to test and measurement can ... ⌘ Read more
After a few minor delays, FreeBSD 14.0 has officially been released. The highlights according to the FreeBSD team itself: For more details, you can dive into the release notes, and if you’re already using FreeBSD you know exactly how to upgrade. ⌘ Read more
Firefox users across the internet say that they are encountering an “artificial” five-second load time when they try to watch YouTube videos that exists on Firefox, but not Chrome. Google, meanwhile, told 404 Media that this is all part of its larger effort against ad blockers, and that it doesn’t have anything to do with Firefox at all. I’m s ... ⌘ Read more
While Elementary OS commits to Wayland, the development team of the Budgie desktop is changing course and will work with the Xfce developers toward Budgie’s Wayland future. There is general consensus now that the future of graphical desktops on Linux lies in Wayland rather than X11, but the path is still not a smooth and easy one. While in Latvia for the Ubuntu Summit, the Reg FOSS desk met with the developers behind Ubuntu Budgie, who to ... ⌘ Read more
Today we want to focus on what came next, Symbian Anna, which arrived a year after the launch of Symbian^3 (Symbian^2 launched only in Japan). Anna was unveiled in early 2011 alongside the Nokia X7 and Nokia E6. The E6 was a bar phone with a QWERTY keyboard (and a 2.45″ touch display), but the X7 was all touch (4.0″ display). Even better, owners of certain olde ... ⌘ Read more
The seL4 microkernel is currently the only kernel that has been fully formally verified. In general, the increased interest in ensuring the security of a kernel’s code results from its important role in the entire operating system. One of the basic features of an operating system is that it abstracts the handling of devices. This abstraction is represented by device drivers – the software that manages the hardware. A proper verification of th ... ⌘ Read more
In the best case, we may be able to avoid feeding the data through the compositing pipeline of the compositor as well, if the compositor supports direct scanout and the dmabuf is suitable for it. In particular on mobile systems, this may avoid using the GPU altogether, thereby reducing power consumption. I don’t understand what’s happening but it seems like a good idea? Can anyone help? ⌘ Read more
Apple has officially ceased the sale of OS X Lion 10.7 and Mountain Lion 10.8 from its online store. That’s it. That’s the post. ⌘ Read more
OpenVMS on x86 is now available for hobbyists! Almost a year after the official release. This is a part 1 of my getting started guide, showing you how to install OpenVMS on VirtualBox on Windows 10/11. More parts will follow, documenting license installation, network setup, ssh, application installation etc. If you want to give OpenVMS for x86 a try, this is the series of articles to read and follow along with. Excellent wor ... ⌘ Read more
A few months ago, I talked about the only PC ever shipped with BeOS preinstalled, the Flora Prius from Hitachi. However, due to illegal pressure from Microsoft, Hitachi disabled the special bootloader required to boot into BeOS, so while the best operating system eve ... ⌘ Read more
The PARC facility also is known for the invention of Ethernet, a networking technology that allows high-speed data transmission over coaxial cables. Ethernet has become the standard wired local area network around the world, and it is widely used in businesses and homes. It was honored this year as an IEEE Milestone, a half century after it was born. Truly one of the success stories of the technology world. Sure, those first Ethernet cables ... ⌘ Read more
Shortly after announcing the end of three services, one of which is as old as MS-DOS, Microsoft deprecated the Tips app. Now, another utility is about to get the axe: Microsoft has updated its Windows documentation again, detailing the end of the story for Steps Recorder (psr.exe). Steps Recorder is an old utility from the Windows 7 era that lets you, as the name implies, record y ... ⌘ Read more
In order to comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, Microsoft is planning a number of changes to Windows to comply with this new legislation. Ars sums them up nicely: All of the above will be exclusive to the EU/EEA, so Windows users elsewhere are out of luck. ⌘ Read more
With these changes in place, we’ve seen support for Manifest V3 increase significantly among the extension developer community. Specifically, we are encouraged by our ongoing dialogue with the developers of content blocking extensions, who initially felt Manifest V3 could impact their ability to provide users with the features they’ve come to expect. Google has made several changes to Manifest V3 specifically to ease concerns among developers of cont ... ⌘ Read more
The rumors are true: Microsoft has built its own custom AI chip that can be used to train large language models and potentially avoid a costly reliance on Nvidia. Microsoft has also built its own Arm-based CPU for cloud workloads. Both custom silicon chips are designed to power its Azure data centers and ready the company and its enterprise customers for a future full of AI. Microsoft’s Azure Maia AI ... ⌘ Read more
The European Union making tech better for everyone. We’ll have to wait and see if supporting RCS will be enough to prevent the EU from requiring Apple open up iMessage. ⌘ Read more
With this release, .NET reshapes the way we build intelligent, cloud-native applications and high-traffic services that scale on demand. Whether you’re deploying to Linux or Windows, using containers or a cloud app model of your choice, .NET 8 makes building these apps easier. It includes a set of proven libraries that are used today by the many high-scale services at Microsoft to help you with fundamental challenges around observability, resiliency, scalability, manageability, and more. Integrate la ... ⌘ Read more
Google today is announcing strengthened protections for Android developers publishing apps to its Google Play store. The changes are a part of Google’s broader efforts at keeping low-quality and unsafe apps out of its app store and off consumers’ devices, which also recently included the launch of a new real-time app scanning feature to co ... ⌘ Read more
It’s definitely clear that Huawei is pulling the plug on Android apps, but it’s still rather hard to believe that the company is throwing away Android (AOSP) entirely. For that, we’ll just have to wait and see, as more digging can be done when “Next” hits the scene next year. The Chinese market is big enough to sustain its own application ecosystem, and many western services are banned in China anyway, so the Pla ... ⌘ Read more
I tried to launch BattleTech over and over and had zero success. I couldn’t figure out why it was struggling on my model 80 board, where it runs just great on 86Box. What is going on? One thing I had stumbled upon was that if I launched an ancient Infocom game in a DOS box, and then launched BattleTech it had a much higher chance of running. But this did not always equate to it working. How is launching an old COM file from the early ... ⌘ Read more
Phoronix listed some of the major work happening in 6.7 for the RISC-V architecture: Merged last week was support for cbo.zero in user-space, support for CBOs on ACPI-based RISC-V systems, support for software shadow call stacks, improvements for the T-Head cache flushing operations, and other clean-ups and fixes. Meanwhile sent out today was a secondary pull request of more ... ⌘ Read more
However, there was a secret weapon hidden in ANS AIX most of us at the time never knew about. Built-in to the operating system was a fully Unix-native AppleTalk stack and support for receiving and sending Apple Events, surfaced in the form of Apple’s disk administration tools and AppleShare. But Apple had a much more expansive vision for this feature: full server-client “symbiotic” applications that could do t ... ⌘ Read more
Remember when we linked to David Revoy’s story about how his drawing pen’s buttons stopped working properly due to a Linux kernel update? Well, it turns out that Linux kernel developers took this one up, and a fix is already being tested. This solution is still W.I.P. and I still have some homework to send more data about my tablets after this blog post, but in overall I’m already using a newer ke ... ⌘ Read more
“Microsoft steals access data” – When the well-known German IT portal “Heise Online” uses such drastic words in its headline, then something is up. If Microsoft has its way, all Windows users will have to switch to the latest version of Microsoft Outlook. But: Not only can the IMAP and SMTP access data of your e-mail account be transferred to Microsoft, but all e-mails in the INBOX can also be copied to the ... ⌘ Read more
Yep you read that right, we’ve decided to throw the lever and go Wayland by default! The three remaining showstoppers are in the process of being fixed and we expect them to be done soon–certainly before the final release of Plasma 6. So we wanted to make the change early to gather as much feedback as possible. Excellent news. Of course, distributions will still be able to opt for the unmaintained, deprecated X.org if they want to, but most distributions ... ⌘ Read more
The year was 1983. Microsoft was slowly becoming a well-known tech company in the PC space. Two years before, in 1981, Its MS-DOS operating system would be installed in the first IBM PC. It launched its first-word processing program, Word, earlier in 1983, along with its first Microsoft Mouse product. It even made Mac and PC hardware expansion cards. H ... ⌘ Read more
Apple has been under pressure in the European Union as the Digital Markets Act antitrust legislation requires the company to allow users to sideload apps outside the App Store to increase competition. 9to5Mac has now found evidence in the iOS 17.2 beta code that the company is indeed moving towards enabling sideloading on iOS devices. The meat of ... ⌘ Read more
Will SteamOS ever become generally available straight from Valve, instead of the community builds you can try out right now? “We’re hoping soon, though, it is very high on our list, and we want to make SteamOS more widely available. We’ll probably start with making it more available to other handhelds with a similar gamepad style controller. And then further beyond that, to m ... ⌘ Read more
Some of the x86 microcode loading improvements in Linux 6.7 include not loading microcode on 32-bit before paging has been enabled to avoid a variety of issues, reworked late-loading of CPU microcode, late-loading microcode is now CPU hotplug safe, and the notion of a minimum microcode revision for determining when late microcode loading is deemed safe. Considering how crucial microcode loading is, it makes sense to improve it as much as po ... ⌘ Read more
It’s about a legal battle between Intel and NEC in the 1980s over the microcode of the 8086 processor. But whilst it may be about events a long time ago, the themes are still familiar today. Whilst writing it, I couldn’t help but think about the ongoing lawsuit between Qualcomm and Arm. About how the future of both companies, and indeed others, including Intel, may be crucially affected by the results of a ruling on intellectual property prot ... ⌘ Read more
As AMD is now well into their third generation of RDNA architecture GPUs, the sun has been slowly setting on AMD’s remaining Graphics Core Next (GCN) designs, better known by the architecture names of Polaris and Vega. In recent weeks the company dropped support for those GPU architectures in their open source Vulkan Linux driver, AMDVLK, and now we have confirmation t ... ⌘ Read more
Amazon has been working on a new operating system to replace Android on Fire TVs, smart displays and other connected devices, I have learned from talking to multiple sources with knowledge of these plans, as well as job listings and other materials referencing these efforts. Development of the new operating system, which is internally known as Vega, appears fairly advanced . The system has a ... ⌘ Read more