If, for some reason, you’re still using Chrome or one of the browsers that put a little hat on Chrome and call it a different browser, the time you’re going to want to consider switching to the only real alternative – Firefox – is getting closer and closer. Yesterday, Google has announced that the end of Manifest V2 is now truly here.

Starting on June 3 on the Chrome Beta, Dev and Canary channels, if users still have Manifest V2 extensions installed, some will start to see a warning banner when visiting their extension management page – chrome://extensions – informing them that some (Manifest V2) extensions they have installed will soon no longer be supported. At the same time, extensions with the Featured badge that are still using Manifest V2 will lose their badge.

This will be followed gradually in the coming months by the disabling of those extensions. Users will be directed to the Chrome Web Store, where they will be recommended Manifest V3 alternatives for their disabled extension. For a short time after the extensions are disabled, users will still be able to turn their Manifest V2 extensions back on, but over time, this toggle will go away as well.

↫ David Li on the Chromium blog

In case you’ve been asleep at the wheel – and if you’re still using Chrome, you most likely are – Manifest V3 will heavily limit what content blockers can do, making them less effective at things like blocking ads. In a move that surprises absolutely nobody, it’s not entirely coincidental that Manifest V3 is being pushed hard by Google, the world’s largest online advertising company. While Google claims all the major content blockers have Manifest V3 versions available, the company fails to mention that they carry monikers such as “uBlock Origin Lite”, to indicate they are, well, shittier at their job than their Manifest V2 counterparts.

I can’t make this any more clear: switch to Firefox. Now. While Firefox and Mozilla sure aren’t perfect, they have absolutely zero plans to phase out Manifest V2, and the proper, full versions of content blockers will continue to work. As the recent leaks have made very clear, Chrome is even more of a vehicle for user tracking and ad targeting than we already knew, and with the deprecation of Manifest V2 from Chrome, Google is limiting yet another avenue for blocking ads.

OSNews has ads, and they are beyond my control, since our ads are managed by OSNews’ owner, and not by me. My position has always been clear: your computer, your rules. Nobody has any right to display ads on your computer, using your bandwidth, using your processor cycles, using your pixels. Sure, it’d be great if we could earn some income through ads, but we’d greatly prefer you become a Patreon (which removes ads) or make an individual donation to support OSNews and keep us alive that way instead.

Wayland 1.23.0 has been released. This new release includes the usual bugfixes and protocol clarifications, a number of new features few of us will really understand because we lack the expertise, and most importantly of all: OpenBSD support.

That’s it. That’s the news.

Real-time Ubuntu 24.04 LTS integrates the PREEMPT_RT patch on AMD64 and ARM64. As the de-facto Linux real-time implementation, PREEMPT_RT increases predictability by modifying the existing kernel code. With time-bound responses for mission-critical latency requirements, Real-time Ubuntu 24.04 LTS provides deterministic processing to the most demanding workloads across industries, from manufacturing and automotive to the critical infrastructure of telco operators.

↫ Edoardo Barbieri at the Ubuntu blog

If you need it, you need it, but it’s exclusive to Ubuntu Pro. Luckily Pro is free for personal use, so if you really need Ubuntu but with a real-time kernel – based on Linux 6.8 – there’s nothing stopping you.

Servo, the Rust-based browser engine originally started by Mozilla but since spun off into an entity under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, has published another monthly update. As almost every month, there’s been a lot of progress on rendering tech I don’t quite understand, and further improved support for various standards. Another major focus is the ongoing font system rework, which is yielding not only vastly improved support for font rendering options, but is also reducing the memory load.

The example browser included in Servo is also making progress, from reducing the amount of errors on Windows, to implementing support for using extra mouse buttons to go back and forward, and showing the link desination when hovering the mouse over a link.

Twenty-five years. A quarter century. That’s how long we’ve been working on Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop, but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was renamed to Krita, and that name stuck.

I only became part of Krita in 2003, when Krita was still part of KDE’s suite of productivity applications, KOffice, later renamed to Calligra… And I became maintainer of Krita in 2004, when Patrick Julien handed over the baton. That means that I’ve been around Krita for about twenty of those twenty-five years, so I’ll hope you, dear reader, will forgive me for making this a really personal post; a very large part of my life has been tied up with Krita, and it’s going to show.

↫ Krita website

While it may not be as popular as something like LibreOffice due to fewer people needing it, Krita is a cornerstone application of the Linux desktop (it’s also available for Windows and macOS), and I honestly can barely believe it’s been around for this long. I’m about as far removed from being an artistic painter as a squirrel’s tail is from being a functioning propeller engine so I don’t have need for Krita, but I’m always surprised by how many people mention using it for their painting endeavours.

I wish the project and its developers another successful 25 years, and they’re going to need it – Krita 5.3 is coming soon(ish), and the much more involved Krita 6.0, which makes the jump fro Qt 5 to Qt 6, is also in the works. On a personal note, I’m online acquainted with the lead maintainer of Krita, and as she alludes to at the end of the article, COVID hit her hard, and maintaining such a huge open source project isn’t easy to begin with. Much respect for keeping it up, and of course, to everyone else contributing to the project.

About a week ago I reported on a case study from Dell and FreeBSD, about Dell’s ThinOS thin client operating system, which basically consists of a proprietary Dell GUI running on top of, at the moment, FreeBSD 12 (they’re moving to FreeBSD 14 for the next ThinOS release). Well, this got me interested – I’ve always been fascinated by thin clients, and a Dell/Wyse FreeBSD ‘distribution’ is just wild enough to be interesting – so I went onto eBay, and bought a Dell thin client.

More specifically, I bought a Dell OptiPlex 3000 Thin Client, which comes with an Intel Pentium Silver N6005, a four core CPU without hyperthreading, 16 GB of RAM, a 32GB eMMC storage chip with room for a small M.2 SSD, WiFi 6, Ethernet, USB 3.0, 2.0, and C ports, Bluetooth, and so on. A low-power, but still quite capable little computer that I snagged for a mere €130, which is a steal compared to the full unit price; my configuration is sold new for like €700-800. Of course, these things are sold in batches of hundreds or maybe even thousands of units, and in such volumes corporate clients get massive discounts.

Still, it’s a nice deal.

My model came installed with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which I was not at all interested in. I immediately downloaded the latest ThinOS version for my model, used Dell’s tool and instructions to create a bootable USB, and got to work. The installation process was quick and easy, and does indeed look like an automated FreeBSD installation, TUI and all. After the installation is completed, you get guided through a first-run experience to configure things like the keyboard, WiFi, and so on, and it looks rather fancy.

Once I completed the first-run experience, I hit the roadblock I was expecting: in order to use ThinOS, you need a ThinOS Activation License. Since my device was originally sold with (I think) Ubuntu preinstalled, it doesn’t have a TAL in its UEFI, and the only way to push a TAL to a device is to use the Dell Wyse Management Suite. Sadly, the Dell WMS only runs on Windows, and to make matters far worse, only on Windows Server. And it gets even worse – even if I created a Windows Server VM just to run WMS, I need the Pro version, which isn’t free (the free Standard version cannot push TALs), and I’d need to buy a TAL.

Aside from the Windows Server restriction, I was aware of these limitations and requirements, so I’m not in the least bit surprised. I was curious to see if buying a TAL was an easy experience, or if it’s entirely geared towards enterprise customers and silly hobbyists like me need not apply. Without a license, I can use the proprietary Dell user interface, but it seems I can’t connect to any possible VDI providers, and I can’t tell what other features might be gated at the moment. With some admittedly very mild poking and prodding, I also haven’t been able to discover any ways of ‘leaving’ Dell’s proprietary GUI to get to a terminal. I’ll do some more prodding over the coming days.

I’m not entirely sure where to go from here when it comes to seeing just how much you can do with ThinOS, which was my original goal for this project. I have a feeling the pro version of the Dell Wyse Management Suite is going to be rather expensive – I can’t find any pricing information, which confirms my suspicions – so I think the journey ends here. Unless any OSNews readers have experience with this stuff, and can point me to some tips and tricks to perhaps acquire and install a TAL some other way, there won’t be a more in-depth look at Dell’s weird version of FreeBSD on OSNews. Which sucks, but was to be expected when it comes to enterprise software.

Mind you, this does not mean the hardware is going to waste. Not only are there other purpose-built thin client operating systems to experiment with, it is also a full-fledged tiny x86 computer with completely silent passive cooling and a free M.2 slot, so the possibilities are endless.

Over on the GNU config-patches mailing list, Zack Weinberg is looking for help identifying a number of ancient operating systems and vendors.

These are probably all either vendor or OS names from the late 1980s or early 1990s. Can anyone help me fill out the following list of things that ought to appear in testsuite/config-sub.data, if I knew what to put in place of the question marks?

???-pc533 ???-pc533-???
???-sim ???-sim-???
???-ultra ???-ultra-???
???-unicom ???-unicom-???
???-acis ???-???-aos
???-triton ???-???-sysv3
???-oss ???-???-sysv3
???-storm-chaos ???-???-???

↫ Zack Weinberg

One of them has already been identified – “storm-chaos” turns out to have been added to binutils and/or maybe GCC in 2000, and after some digging around, John Marshall found what it’s referring to: chaos, a hobby operating system for x86 written in C. It has a long history, and after a period of inactivity came back in 2015 with a new website. Some new releases followed, with the last one being version 0.3.0 in 2019. It’s been silence since then.

The others are still up for grabs to be discovered. There is some talk that the pc533 one might be a misspelling of pc532, which would refer to the “NS32K-based PC532 board running NetBSD”. This is an incredibly obscure complete system built around the NS32532, of which only around 150 were built in the early ’90s. However, Weinberg is hesitant to accept this theory without more information, since there is already code to handle the pc532, and he wants to be sure before making any changes.

If there is one place on the internet outside of the GNU mailing lists that might be able to help Weinberg, it’s the OSNews audience. We have so many older people reading OSNews who have been working or otherwise active in this field for many decades, and I wouldn’t be surprised if these cryptic names make some bells ring for some of you. If one of you does e-mail a reply, be sure to mention this article – organic marketing to help keep us going!

Google is killing off a messaging service! This one is the odd “Google Business Messaging” service—basically an instant messaging client that is built into Google Maps. If you looked up a participating business in Google Maps or Google Search on a phone, the main row of buttons in the place card would read something like “Call,” “Chat,” “Directions,” and “Website.” That “Chat” button is the service we’re talking about. It would launch a full messaging interface inside the Google Maps app, and businesses were expected to use it for customer service purposes. Google’s deeply dysfunctional messaging strategy might lead people to joke about a theoretical “Google Maps Messaging” service, but it already exists and has existed for years, and now it’s being shut down.

↫ Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica

When it comes to Google, it’s often hard to distinguish meme from reality.

Speaking of The Verge, its parent company Vox Media, along with The Atlantic, have signed a deal with OpenAI.

Two more media companies have signed licensing agreements with OpenAI, allowing their content to be used to train its AI models and be shared inside of ChatGPT. The Atlantic and Vox Media — The Verge’s parent company — both announced deals with OpenAI on Wednesday.

↫ Emilia David at The Verge

In the case of Vox Media, the deal was made and announced without informing their staff, which obviously doesn’t sit well with especially Vox’ writers. By making deals like this, upper management gets to double-dip on the fruits of their workers’ labour – first, the published content generates ad revenues, and second, OpenAI pays them to use said content for training and other purposes.

And once the “AI” gets good enough, more and more of the writers will be fired, leaving only a skeleton crew of lower-paid workers to clean up the “AI” output. With this deal, the writing is on the wall for every journalist at Vox Media – you’re currently contributing to your own obsolescence, and your bosses are getting paid for it.

As far as I know, OSNews’ owner, David, has not yet been contacted by OpenAI. Regardless, I’ll sell the past 20-odd years of my terrible takes for 69 million euros, after deducting Swedish taxes. And since OpenAI is run by billionaires: taxes are this thing where normal people pay a portion of their income to the government in return for various government services.

It’s wild, I know.

When you launch a game on a Snapdragon on a Windows laptop, you might get an AI frame rate boost from Microsoft’s mysterious Auto Super Resolution (Auto SR) feature. But while Microsoft hasn’t fully explained how the feature works, The Verge can now confirm it’s not Qualcomm technology, not exclusive to Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X chips, and not exclusive to specific games, either.

↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge

These resolution enhancer technologies from NVIDIA, AMD, and apparently Microsoft are another great use of what we today call “AI” technologies. Of course, I wish we didn’t have to deal with several proprietary offerings but instead enjoyed several open source versions and possibly a standard to work off of, but give it some time, and we may still get there.

Like I’ve said before – there’s nothing inherently wrong with “AI” technologies, as long as they’re used in ways that make sense, run locally, and most importantly, aren’t based on the wholesale theft of artists’ and programmers’ works. Unsurprisingly, the tech bros at companies like OpenAI don’t really understand the concept of “consent”, and until they do, their offerings should be deemed illegal.

The Turbo9 is a pipelined microprocessor IP written in Verilog that executes a superset of the Motorola 6809 instruction set. It is a new modern microarchitecture with 16-bit internal datapaths that balances high performance vs small area / low power. The Turbo9R with a 16-bit memory interface achieves 0.69 DMIPS/MHz which is 3.8 times faster than Motorola’s original 8-bit MC6809 implementation. It is an active graduate research project at the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Florida.

↫ Turbo9 GitHub page

The Turbo9 is aimed at SoC sub-blocks and small mixed-signal ASIC, so it’s definitely not intended to be some sort of general purpose CPU. The reason for opting for the 6809 instead of, say, RISC-V or ARM, is that the 6809 enables a far smaller footprint due to being 16bit, which is all the target market really needs from the Turbo9.

The current version of the Turbo9 is thoroughly verified and is capable of running C code. However, we still consider this version v0.9 because we are missing a few items. All the 6809 instructions and addressing modes have been implemented and tested except SYNC and CWAI. The signed versions of the Turbo9’s 16-bit divide and multiply need to be completed. Interrupts are partially implemented including SWI and Reset.

↫ Turbo9 GitHub page

This is the kind of riveting content you’ll only really find on OSNews.

Aside from that, the company also announced Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 this week. The company has also published the minimum system requirements as well as supported processor families. They have been categorized as Preferred and Optional. Interestingly, SSD has been added as a minimum system requirement, which has been a rumour about the client OS since mid-2022.

↫ Sayan Sen at NeoWin

The LTSC release, which is not really supposed to be used by average consumers, is still remarkably popular. It contains a fixed feature set and gets far fewer updates than regular Windows releases, it omits otherwise stock applications like Edge, and gives its users far more control over which updates are and are not installed. LTSC also enjoys 10 years of support from Microsoft.

Interestingly enough, the minimum specifications for the IoT version of LTSC do not require a TPM 2.0, unlike the regular version of Windows, which infamously does require one. I would assume that the “preferred” minimum requirements, which does require TPM 2.0, line up very well with the minimum requirements for the regular LTSC version of Windows 11. Both will become available later this year, alongside the regular release of Windows 11 24H2.

The ELF object file format is adopted by many UNIX-like operating systems. While I’ve previously delved into the control structures of ELF and its predecessors, tracing the historical evolution of ELF and its relationship with the System V ABI can be interesting in itself.

↫ MaskRay

The article wasn’t lying. I had no reason to know this – and I’m pretty sure most of you didn’t either – but it turns out the standards that define ELF got caught up in the legal murkiness and nastiness of UNIX. After the dissolution of the committee governing ELF in 1995, stewardship went from one familiar name to the next, first Novell, then The Santa Cruz Operation, then Caldera which renamed itself to The SCO Group, and eventually ending up at UnXis (now Xinuos) in 2011. In 2015, the last maintainer of ELF left Xinuos, and since then, it’s been effectively unmaintained.

Which is kind of wild, considering ELF is a crucial building block of virtually all UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems today. The article mentions there’s a neutral Google Group that discusses, among other things, ELF, but that, too, has seen dwindling activity. Still, that group has reached consensus on some changes; changes that are now not reflected in any of the official texts. It’s a bit of a mess.

If you ever wanted to know the status of ELF as a standard, this article’s for you.

systemd uses DBus as the mechanism to interact with it. This article introduces just enough DBus concepts and the usage of busctl to communicate with systemd. These concepts should be useful when using DBus libraries.

↫ Beartama

Exactly what it says on the tin.

Earlier this month, we talked about the arrival of the new CAMM2 memory module standard, specifically designed to make replaceable memory modules as fast and capable as soldered memory. There’s technically no reason for CAMM2 to not also be beneficial to desktop use, and it turns out MSI is experimenting with this.

MSI on Thursday published the first image of a new desktop motherboard that supports the innovative DDR5 compression attached memory module (CAMM2). DDR5 CAMM2 modules are designed to improve upon the SO-DIMM form factor used for laptops, alleviating some of the high-speed signaling and capacity limitations of SO-DIMMs while also shaving down on the volume of space required. And while we’re eagerly awaiting to see CAMM2 show up in more laptops, its introduction in a PC motherboard comes as a bit of a surprise, since PCs aren’t nearly as space-constrained.

↫ Anton Shilov at AnandTech

This MSI motherboard is a bit of an experiment, as it also contains other more experimental choices like back-mounted power connectors. While CAMM2’s space savings won’t mean much for most desktop builds, it does leave more room for CPU coolers, and it looks a bit cleaner, too.

IceWM, the venerable window manager we’ve all used at some point in our lives, has released a new version, 3.5.0. It’s a relatively minor release, so you’ve got things like a new install option which will install an extra theme, a fix for porting to NetBSD 10, translation updates, and more such small improvements. The AddressBar, a command line in the taskbar that can be summoned with ctrl+alt+space, also got some love, with file argument completion and support for the cd and pwd commands.

You can compile IceWM yourself, of course, but it’ll most likely find its way into your distribution’s repository quickly enough.

But Google results are a zero-sum game. If the search engine sends traffic to one site, it has to take it from another, and the effects on the losers in this Reddit equation are just as dramatic. “Google’s just committing war on publisher websites,” Ray says. “It’s almost as if Google designed an algorithm update to specifically go after small bloggers. I’ve talked to so many people who’ve just had everything wiped out,” she says.

A number of website owners and search experts who spoke to the BBC said there’s been a general shift in Google results towards websites with big established brands, and away from small and independent sites, that seems totally disconnected from the quality of the content.

↫ Thomas Germain at the BBC

These stories are coming out left, right, and centre now – and the stories are heartbreaking. Websites that publish truly quality content with honest, valuable, real reviews are now not only having to combat the monster of Google’s own creation – SEO spam websites – but also Google itself, who has started downranking them in favour of fucksmith on Reddit. Add to that the various “AI” boxes and answers Google is adding to its site, and the assault on quality content is coming from all angles.

I don’t look at our numbers or traffic sources, since I don’t want to be influenced by any of that stuff. I don’t think OSNews really lives or dies by a constant flow of Google results, but if we do, there’s really not much I can do about it anyway. Google Search once gaveth, and ever since that fateful day it’s mostly been Google Search taketh. I can’t control it, so I’m not going to worry about it. All I can do is keep the site updated, point out we really do need your support on Patreon and Ko-Fi – to keep OSNews running, and perhaps maybe ever going ad-free entirely – and hope for the best.

I do feel for the people who still make quality content on the web, though – especially people like the ones mentioned in the linked BBC article, who set up an entire business around honest, quality reviews of something as mundane as air purifiers. It must be devastating to see all you’ve worked for destroyed by SEO spam, fucksmith on Reddit, and answers from an “AI” high on crack.

It turns out that digital rights management and its consequences extend even beyond your passing when it comes to Steam. Valve has made it clear that no, you cannot will your Steam account or games to someone else when you die.

The issue of digital game inheritability gained renewed attention this week as a ResetEra poster quoted a Steam support response asking about transferring Steam account ownership via a last will and testament. “Unfortunately, Steam accounts and games are non-transferable” the response reads. “Steam Support can’t provide someone else with access to the account or merge its contents with another account. I regret to inform you that your Steam account cannot be transferred via a will.”

↫ Kyle Orland at Ars Technica

My wife and I make sure we know each other’s passwords and login credentials to the most important accounts and services in our lives, since an accident can happen at any time, and we’d like to be somewhat prepared – as much as you can be, under the circumstances – for if something happens. I never even considered merging Steam accounts, but at least granting access to the person named in your will or your legal heir seems like something a service like Steam should be legally obliged to do.

I don’t think Steam’s position here – which is probably par for the course – is tenable in the long-term. Over the coming years and decades, we’re going to see more and more people who grew up almost entirely online pass away, leaving behind various accounts, digital purchases, and related matters, and loved ones and heirs will want access to those. At some point over the coming decades, there’s going to be a few high-profile cases in the media about something like this, and it’s going to spur lawmakers into drafting up legislation to make account and digital goods transfers to heirs and loved ones not a courtesy, but a requirement.

In the meantime, if you have a designated heir, like your children, a spouse, or whatever, make sure they can somehow gain access to your accounts and digital goods, by writing stuff down on paper and putting it somewhere safe or something similar. Again – you never know when you might… Expire.

These sources, as clearly stated in the repo’s readme, are the 8088 assembly language sources from 10th Feb 1983, and are being open-sourced for historical reference and educational purposes. This means we will not be accepting PRs that modify the source in any way.

↫ Rich Turner

I’m loving all these open source releases from Microsoft, but honestly, I’d wish the pace was a little higher and we’d get to some more recent stuff. Open sourcing early versions of MS-DOS and related software is obviously great from a software preservation standpoint, but at this rate we’ll get to more influential pieces of software by the time the sun experiences its helium flash.

On a related note, about a month ago Microsoft released the source code to MS-DOS 4.00. Well, we’ve now also got access to the code for MS-DOS 4.01, a bugfix release that came out very quickly after 4.00.

Due to various bugs, DOS 4.00 was a relatively short-lived release, and it was replaced by DOS 4.01 just a couple of months later.

Howard M. Harte (hharte), who already fixed various flaws in the official source code release of MS-DOS 4.00, managed to figure out the differences between DOS 4.00 and 4.01 — we now have access to the improved version as well!

↫ Lothar Serra Mari

We’re getting a pretty complete picture of early MS-DOS source code.

iFixit is ending its collaboration with Samsung, as iFixit claims the Korean giant is not actually interested in offering repair options at all.

As we tried to build this ecosystem we consistently faced obstacles that made us doubt Samsung’s commitment to making repair more accessible. We couldn’t get parts to local repair shops at prices and quantities that made business sense. The part prices were so costly that many consumers opted to replace their devices rather than repair them. And the design of Samsung’s Galaxy devices remained frustratingly glued together, forcing us to sell batteries and screens in pre-glued bundles that increased the cost.

↫ Scott Head

Honestly, this doesn’t surprise me. Unless right to repair legislation becomes more widespread and stricter, corporations will inevitably drag their feet in honouring any right to repair commitments and promises they make.

I needed a bit of a break from “real work” recently, so I started a new programming project that was low-stakes and purely recreational. On April 21st, I set out to see how much of a Unix-like operating system for x86_64 targets that I could put together in about a month. The result is Bunnix. Not including days I didn’t work on Bunnix for one reason or another, I spent 27 days on this project.

↫ Drew DeVault

Bunnix’ creator, Drew DeVault, has quite a bit of experience with writing operating systems, as they’re also the creator of Helios, an experimental microkernel operating system. Bunnix is remarkably capable for a 30-day project, and comes with support for both BIOS and UEFI boot, and it’ll boot on real hardware too. It doesn’t have USB support though, so if you’re going the real hardware route, you’ll need to take that into account for mouse and keyboard input.

Bunnix has a relatively solid set of drivers, taking the short development time into account: among other things, there’s PCI, AHCI block devices, serial ports, framebuffers, and ext4 support. The kernel supports a virtual filesystem, a /dev filled with block devices, a terminal emulator, and more. Bunnix is single-user for now, so it doesn’t enforce file permissions, but DeVault states it should be relatively easy to implement multiuser support.

A unique characteristic of Bunnix is that’s written mostly in Hare, complemented by some C. Hare is a relatively new programming language, which we touched on late last year when it was ported to OpenBSD. Implementing file systems proved to be one of the difficulties during development, partly due to Hare.

I also learned a lot about mixing source languages into a Hare project, since the kernel links together Hare, assembly, and C sources – it works remarkably well but there are some pain points I noticed, particularly with respect to building the ABI integration riggings. It’d be nice to automate conversion of C headers into Hare forward declaration modules. Some of this work already exists in hare-c, but has a ways to go. If I were to start again, I would probably be more careful in my design of the filesystem layer.

↫ Drew DeVault

DeVault’s post about Bunnix gives a lot more insight into the development of Bunnix, so I’d highly suggest to head on over to read more. Do note that DeVault considers Bunnix “done”, in the sense that the learning experience is over, and aside from a few random developments here and there, they won’t be doing any work on it anymore.

It turns out way fewer people knew search engines like DuckDuckGo are just whitelabel versions of Microsoft Bing than I thought. Today, in most of Europe and Asia, search engines like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant, other alternative search engines, ChatGPT internet search, and even Windows Copilot were all down. It turns out the culprit was Microsoft Bing; and when Microsoft Bing goes down, everyone who uses it goes down too.

Alternative search engines often try to be vague about their whitelabel status, or even outright hide it altogether. Bing is a popular search engine for whitelabeling, so when Bing goes down, almost the entire house of cards of alternative search engines comes tumbling down as well.

DuckDuckGo, for instance, places a lot of emphasis on using specialised search engines like TripAdvisor and direct sources like Sportradar or Wikipedia, as well as its own crawler and other indexes. However, as we saw today, as soon as Bing goes down, DuckDuckGo just stops working entirely. DDG happens to be my main search engine – a case of less shit than everyone else – so all throughout the day I was met with the error message “There was an error displaying the search results. Please try again.”

I don’t begrudge DDG or other search engines for repackaging Bing search results – building a truly new search engine and running it is incredibly hard, costly, and you’ll always be lagging behind – but I was surprised by how many people didn’t know just how common this practice really was. My Fediverse feeds were filled with people surprised to learn they’d been using Bing all along, just wrapped in a nicer user interface and with some additional features.

In which I build WindEmu, an emulator for the Psion Series 5mx (a PDA from 1999 running EPOC – the OS that would become Symbian), over the course of just over a week, without access to the actual hardware. Yet another cursed project.

↫ Ash Wolf

I had never seen this before, even though it’s from 2019. You can load the emulator in your browser and use EPOC32 as if it’s running on the real thing, and I have to say it feel remarkably realistic for a project completed in a little over a week. Of course, it may have been tweaked and improved over the years since 2019, but I don’t know by how much. The last GitHub commit was five years ago, so it seems there really hasn’t been much public work done on it since.

An emulator like this is probably the closest most of us will get to the later devices from Psion, since as with all retrocomputing platforms, the number of working devices is rapidly dwindling, and prices for working examples on sites like eBay have gone through the roof.

Google’s new search feature, AI Overviews, seems to be going awry.

The tool, which gives AI-generated summaries of search results, appeared to instruct a user to put glue on pizza when they searched “cheese not sticking to pizza.”

↫ Jyoti Mann at Business Insider

Google’s “artificial intelligence” is literally just parroting a joke Reddit comment from 11 years ago by a person named fucksmith. Google is paying Reddit 60 million dollars for this privilege.

“AI” is going just great.

Linux auto tiling manager with hot corner support for Openbox, Fluxbox, IceWM, Xfwm, KWin, Marco, Muffin, Mutter and other EWMH compliant window managers using the X11 window system. Therefore, this project provides dynamic tiling for XFCE, LXDE, LXQt, KDE and GNOME (Mate, Deepin, Cinnamon, Budgie) based desktop environments.

Simply keep your current window manager and install cortile on top of it. Once enabled, the tiling manager will handle resizing and positioning of existing and new windows.

↫ Cortile GitHub page

I’ve always been mildly interested in trying out a proper tiling window manager – of which are millions – but installing and setting up an entirely new environment always felt a bit like overkill for something I’m just curious about instead of actually intending to use it permanently. This seems like a great solution to this issue.

About a month ago we talked about the rumours, but now the feature’s officially announced: Microsoft is going to keep track of everything you do on your Windows machine by taking a constant stream of screenshots, and then making said screenshots searchable by using things like text and image recognition. As you might expect, this is a privacy nightmare, and the details and fine print accompanying this new feature do not exactly instill confidence.

First, the feature is a lot dumber than you might expect, as it doesn’t perform any “content moderation”, as Microsoft calls it.

Note that Recall does not perform content moderation. It will not hide information such as passwords or financial account numbers. That data may be in snapshots that are stored on your device, especially when sites do not follow standard internet protocols like cloaking password entry.

↫ Privacy and control over your Recall experience

Well, Microsoft says Recall doesn’t do any content moderation, but that’s actually a flat-out lie. Recall will not show any content with DRM that happens to be on your screen, and private browsing sessions in Chromium-based browsers won’t be shown either. You can also exclude specific applications and websites – filtering websites, however, is only available in Edge. In other words, managing this privacy nightmare is entirely left up to the user… Except for DRM content, of course. The mouse must be pleased, after all.

It also seems Microsoft is enabling this feature by default for at least some business users, as machines managed with Microsoft Intune will have Recall enabled by default, and administrators will need to use Group Policy to disable it. There is no way in hell any company serious about data security will want Recall enabled, so I guess this can be added to the pile of headaches administrators already have to deal with.

My biggest worry is the usual slippery slope this feature represents. How long before governments will legally require a feature like this on all our computers? The more Microsoft and other companies brag about how easy and low-power stuff like this is, the more governments – already on the warpath when it comes to things like encrypted messaging – will want their hands on this.

This is such a bad idea.

Several Dell products use ThinOS 9, such as the OptiPlex 3000 Thin Client, the OptiPlex All-In-One, and the Latitude series laptops, such as the Latitude 3440 and 5440. ThinOS is a ready-to-deploy solution that aims to improve virtual desktops while offering a secure platform for applications and services. It provides users with a seamless and integrated experience, whether remotely or from the office. It’s a software environment that optimizes virtual workspaces.

The latest version, ThinOS 9, is built on FreeBSD 12 with other 3rd-party open source components and is well-known for its robust security and stability. This aligns with the requirements of modern enterprises that demand high performance and protection in their computing solutions.

↫ Dell case study

While Dell and FreeBSD call this a ‘case study’ but while I see plenty of case, I see little study – it’s mostly just a load of marketing speak. That being said, there’s still interesting news in here about the future of ThinOS. The next release of ThinOS, version 10, will make the jump from FreeBSD 12 to the current FreeBSD 14 release, drastically improving hardware support in the process, while also bringing in the various other benefits of the latest FreeBSD release.

It will also improve ThinOS’ compatibility with Linux applications, a feature of FreeBSD, which is something Dell is keen to highlight. It should come as no surprise that ThinOS 10 will also improve its security features, probably also mostly coming along for the ride from FreeBSD 14.

Dell also mentions that it intends to continue using FreeBSD as the base for ThinOS, which could’ve easily gone differently as part of Dell’s acquisition of Wyze, where ThinOS originally comes from. This is good news for FreeBSD, but at the same time, when I look at thin clients on Dell’s website, ThinOS is just one of the options, and every photo shows the devices running Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021. I genuinely wonder what the spread is between buyers opting for ThinOS, Windows, and Linux.

Thin clients have always fascinated me, so perhaps I should go onto eBay, figure out which Dell thin clients are still supported by the latest ThinOS release, buy one, and set up a simple thin client environment in my home – using ThinOS, of course.

At the heart of developer productivity lies improving performance for developer workloads on Windows. Last year at Build, we announced Dev Drive a new storage volume tailor-made for developers and supercharged for performance and security. Since then, we have continued to invest further in Windows performance improvements for developer workloads.  

With the release of Windows 11 24H2, workflows will get even faster when developing on a Dev Drive. Windows copy engine now has Filesystem Block Cloning, resulting in nearly instantaneous copy actions and drastically improving performance, especially in developer scenarios that copy large files.

↫ Pavan Davuluri on the Windows blog

Sounds like a near and meaningful improvement.

Last week, Google unveiled a new little feature in Google Search, called “Web”. Residing alongside the various other options like “All”, “Images”, “Video”, and so on, its goal is to effectively strip Google Search results from everything we generally don’t like, and just present a list of actual links to actual websites. It turns out it’s quite simple to set this as your default search “engine” in your browser, so somebody made a website to make that process a little easier.

On May 15th Google released a new “Web” filter that removes “AI Overview” and other clutter, leaving only traditional web results. Here is how you can set “Google Web” as your default search engine.

↫ TenBlueLinks.org

It’s important to note that this is not some separate search engine, and that no data is flowing any differently than when using regular Google. All this does is append the parameter UDM=14 to the URL, which loads the option “Web”.

noTunes is a macOS application that will prevent iTunes or Apple Music from launching.

Simply launch the noTunes app and iTunes/Music will no longer be able to launch. For example, when bluetooth headphones reconnect.

You can toggle the apps functionality via the menu bar icon with a simple left click.

↫ noTunes GitHub page

Apparently, this is such a common complaint that an application had to be made just to gain some semblance of control over what some people still refer to as “their” computer. For both macOS and Windows, there’s a giant industry – you can’t really call it a cottage industry anymore at this point – of tools, applications, and fixes just to deal with or avoid all the user-hostile, anti-choice garbage Apple and Microsoft shove into their respective operating systems.

As a Linux user – and recent OpenBSD convert – I find this absolutely wild. Following any Apple podcast, or reading any Windows website, makes it so clear just how many hoops these people have to jump through and how many weirdly-shaped holes they have to contort into just to be able to gain some vague semblance of ownership of their own hardware. I’m not judging – we all have areas in our lives where we do this, they just differ from person to person – but it’s still confronting to see it so clearly, all the time.

Lawyers for Scarlett Johansson are demanding that OpenAI disclose how it developed an AI personal assistant voice that the actress says sounds uncannily similar to her own.

Johansson’s legal team has sent OpenAI two letters asking the company to detail the process by which it developed a voice the tech company dubbed “Sky,” Johansson’s publicist told NPR in a revelation that has not been previously reported.

↫ Bobby Allyn at NPR

This story highlights just how much disdain techbros have for the work of creative people. Here’s the timeline:

1. Nine months ago, Sam Altman approached Scarlett Johansson to ask her if OpenAI could use her voice for a voice assistant features. Johansson declined.
2. Two days before the launch of the new voice assistant feature, Altman contacted Johansson’s agent again, asking her to reconsider.
3. Before Johansson or her agent could reply, OpenAI launched the voice assistant, with a voice that sounds remarkably like Johansson’s. Altman even tweeted “Her”, the name of the film in which Johansson portrays an AI.
4. After everyone started pointing this out, Johansson’s lawyers demanded OpenAI take the new voice down. They complied.

Techbros like Sam Altman deeply despise and undervalue the work of creatives, believing human creativity to be merely an equation to be solved, definable by an algorithm. To people like him, creative work has no value, and as such, is up for grabs to be taken and cut up for his algorithms to spit out as “new” works. This story highlights this perfectly.

The sleaze runs deep with Altman and OpenAI.

Last week I wrote about Intel aiming to remove Xeon Phi support in GCC 15 with the products being end-of-life and deprecated in GCC 14. While some openly wondered whether the open-source community would allow it given the Xeon Phi accelerators were available to buy just a few years ago and at some very low prices going back years so some potentially finding use still out of them especially during this AI boom (and still readily available to buy used for around ~$50 USD), today the Intel Xeon Phi support was indeed removed.

↫ Michael Larabel

Xeon Phi PCIe cards are incredibly cheap on eBay, and every now and then my mouse hovers over the buy button – but I always realise just in time that the cards have become quite difficult to use, since support for them, already sparse to begin with, is only getting worse by the day. Support for them was already removed in Linux 5.10, and now GCC is pulling he plug too, so the only option is to keep using old kernels, or pass the card on to a VM running an older Linux kernel version, which is a lot of headache for what is essentially a weird toy for nerds at this point.

GCC 15 will also, sadly, remove support for Itanium, which, as I’ve said before, is a huge disgrace and a grave mistake. Itanium is the future, and will stomp all over crappy architectures like x86 and ARM. With this deprecation, GCC relegates itself to the dustbin of history.

AntennaPod has been around for a long time – the first bit of code was published in 2011. Since then, the app has grown massively and had several main developers. The beauty of open-source is that so many people can contribute and make a great app together. But sometimes having many people work on a project can lead to different ways of thinking about how to structure the project. Because of this, AntennaPod gradually grew to have a number of weird code constructs. Our latest release, version 3.4, fixes this.

↫ ByteHamster

The AntennaPod team had an incredible task ahead of itself, and while it took them a few years, they pulled it off. The code structure graphs from before and after the code restructuring illustrate better than words ever could what they achieved. Thy changed 10000 lines of source code in 62 pull requests for this restructuring alone, while still adding new major features in the meantime. Pretty incredible.

Microsoft’s developer conference Build is taking place this week, so there’s been some major Windows news and announcements, and for once – we’re not talking about more ads in your operating system, or even “AI” shoehorned into, I don’t know, Phone Dialer or Windows Fax and Scan.

First and foremost, Windows is going to get a new compiler, kernel, and scheduler, but despite such massive low-level changes, the marketing version number won’t jump from 11 to 12. Of course, we all know the marketing version number has nothing to do with the actual Windows NT version number, which currently sits at 10. The Windows NT version number, meanwhile, is actually also meaningless, since it magically jumps around left and right too, going from 6.2 to 10 between Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, where it has stayed ever since.

“We really focused on modernizing this update of Windows 11,” said Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Windows and Devices Pavan Davuluri at a technical briefing on Microsoft’s campus in mid-April. “We engineered this update of Windows 11 with a real focus on AI inference and taking advantage of the Arm64 instruction set at every layer of the operating system stack. For us, what this meant really was building a new compiler in Windows. We built a new kernel in Windows on top of that compiler. We now have new schedulers in the operating system that take advantage of these new SoC architecture.”

↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica

The focus is clearly on ARM here, which coincides with the launch of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite, a new SoC that finally seems to truly make ARM laptops that aren’t from Apple a real, competitive thing – so much so that Qualcomm is even breaking with tradition and taking Linux support very seriously for this new chip.

Microsoft also unveiled the name for its new x86 translation layer for Windows on ARM: Prism. Microsoft told Ars Technica that Prism is as fast as Apple’s Rosetta 2, which is interesting because Apple’s M series chips contain special silicon to speed up the translation process, making me wonder if Qualcomm has done the same, or is just brute-forcing it.

Performance like this means the apps customers love work great. Microsoft has partnered closely with developers across the globe to optimize their applications for this processor. In addition, the powerful new Prism emulation engine delivers a 2x performance boost compared to Surface Pro 9 with 5G. On the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, powered by Snapdragon X Elite and Snapdragon X Plus processors, experiences like Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft 365 and Chrome will feel snappy, quick and responsive.

↫ Pete Kyriacou on the Windows blog

The new Windows on ARM machines using the Snapdragon X Elite will be marketed under the new Copilot+ brand name, which brings with it some requirements, the biggest of which is the neural processing unit: it must be capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second. At the time of writing, the only Windows-capable processor that can boast such numbers is, of course, the new Snapdragon X Elite. AMD and Intel need not apply. They simply cannot match this.

Microsoft tied a bow on all this stuff by unveiling the new Surface Pro and new Surface Laptop, both powered by the new Snapdragon SoCs. You can preorder them today, but they won’t be available until 18 June.

Last year marked a significant milestone for both myself and the OpenBSD desktop community, as we successfully ported KDE Plasma 5 and all dependencies to OpenBSD. With the release of OpenBSD 7.5 on April 5, 2024, KDE Plasma in version 5.27.10 has become a part of our lovely operating system. This success is the result of years of development work and commitment to achieving this goal.

KDE launched version 6 of its Plasma desktop environment on February 28, 2024, bringing numerous updates and features as well as the major switch to Qt6. I am immensely proud that the OpenBSD team has managed to prepare for this major update so swiftly. All necessary components have been committed to our CVS tree, and the packages will soon be available.

↫ Rafael Sadowski

Excellent news for OpenBSD users who don’t wish to be using GNOME, Xfce, or one of the smaller build-it-yourself desktop environments. My dual-Xeon workstation, which I switched over from Fedora KDE to OpenBSD, runs Xfce, because I feel a smaller desktop environment is a more natural fit for OpenBSD, but I’m very happy to know that I have KDE to fall back on in case Xfce turns out not to be a good fit for me in the long term.

I’ll give the OpenBSD developers an other experts in that community some more time to iron out any wrinkles, and then I’ll probably give it a go to see just how well KDE will be integrated with the OpenBSD base system.

Windows Server 2025 comes equipped with dtrace as a native tool. DTrace is a command-line utility that enables users to monitor and troubleshoot their system’s performance in real-time. DTrace allows users to dynamically instrument both the kernel and user-space code without any need to modify the code itself. This versatile tool supports a range of data collection and analysis techniques, such as aggregations, histograms, and tracing of user-level events. To learn more, see DTrace for command line help and DTrace on Windows for additional capabilities.

↫ What’s new in Windows Server 2025

DTrace was originally developed by Sun as part of Solaris, but eventually made its way to other operating systems as Sun collapsed in on itself and Oracle gave it the final push. DTrace is available for the various surviving Solars-based operating systems, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, macOS, and QNX, and Microsoft ported DTrace from FreeBSD to Windows back in 2018. With Windows Server 2025, DTrace will be shipped out of the box.

iOS 17.5 seems to be experiencing a rather nasty bug that raises some very, very concerning questions about what Apple thinks “delete” really means.

After updating their iPhone, one user said they were shocked to find old NSFW photos that they deleted in 2021 suddenly showing up in photos marked as recently uploaded to iCloud. Other users have also chimed in with similar stories. “Same here,” said one Redditor. “I have four pics from 2010 that keep reappearing as the latest pics uploaded to iCloud. I have deleted them repeatedly.”

“Same thing happened to me,” replied another user. “Six photos from different times, all I have deleted. Some I had deleted in 2023.” More reports have been trickling in overnight. One said: “I had a random photo from a concert taken on my Canon camera reappear in my phone library, and it showed up as if it was added today.”

↫ Tim Hardwick at MacRumors

A report a few days later says that even on devices that have been wiped and sold, photos seem to be reappearing. This is even scarier than photos reappearing on devices you’re still using today – just think of all the iOS devices you’ve had and sold that might still be in use today. Users all over could be looking at old photos you took that you thought weren’t only deleted, but also wiped when you sold the devices in question.

Apple has not said anything yet, but it further illustrates just how untrustworthy companies like Apple really are. Even taking into account it might take some time (minutes? An hour?) for a delete request to propagate through iCloud’s server network, there’s obviously no way photos that were supposedly deleted years ago are resurfacing now – especially when entire device wipes are involved, and any new user isn’t even logged into the same iCloud account.

I hope for everyone involved – the users, that is, I don’t give a rat’s ass about Apple – that this isn’t very widespread, because the last thing any of us needs is old nude photos reappearing on random people’s devices.

What a mess.

So, I won’t be wasting too many words on this – partially because I’m not into cheap soap operas, and partially because there’s no way to know what’s going on with this nonsense without dedicating a year’s worth of detailed study into the subject. So it seems that the company Hyperion, which develops and owns the rights to Amiga OS 4 and Amiga OS 3.2 has gone into bankruptcy proceedings. The main shareholder of Hyperion, someone named Ben Hermans, has apparently set up several shell companies (or something?), and they might now own the rights to the two variants of Amiga OS, or they might not? And those shell companies have also gone into bankruptcy proceedings?

Hyperion has been managed by a receiver since last week (Update)
“Ben Hermans BV” (hereinafter: BHBV) is a private company with limited liability owned by Ben Hermans, which has held 97% of the shares in Hyperion since 2019 and acts as a ‘director’ of Hyperion on paper. In March, bankruptcy proceedings were initiated against BHBV for the second time. In the same month, Ben Hermans had already initiated the founding of a new company with the same name.

As BHBV has not published any statutory annual reports since 2021, it is currently unclear whether the company still holds the majority of shares in Hyperion. Ben Hermans has not responded to an inquiry from amiga-news.de; the appointed liquidator Charlotte Piers tells us she’ll get back to us in the next few days with “a more detailed response”.

↫ Amiga-news.de

I stopped trying to keep track of this stuff years and years ago, but bits and bobs I’ve picked up since is that there’s been countless lawsuits flying back and forth, questions of rights ownership, and all sorts of other drama you can only keep track of by following the various different Amiga websites and forums in great detail on a daily basis.

As is Amiga tradition.

Amiga OS 4 is an interesting operating system that I spent some fun time with for an OSNews review way back in 2009, but at this point, if you’re truly hooked on the Amiga OS way of doing things, just stick to AROS. There’s technically also MorphOS, which is pretty great actually, but unless they sort out their own mess of being stuck to dying PowerPC Macs and move to x86 or ARM, they’re basically on borrowed time, too.

I didn’t know this was a thing, but apparently Microsoft offers a Windows tune-up application in the vein of things like CCleaner and similar tools. One of the things it does is protect users from applications that try and change default settings, and it seems the application takes this matter very seriously.

Microsoft may be taking a bit of liberty with that last bit. It looks like the PC Manager feels your PC is broken and needs repair if you changed your default search engine from Bing.

↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin

Setting aside just how defeatist it feels that the creator of Windows needs to make an application to keep Windows from falling over, I find it almost endearing just how hard Microsoft is trying to get users to choose Bing.

If you’ve ever seen the Swedish film Fucking Åmål, it’s also very likely you remember the gut-wrenching, maximally cringe-inducing birthday party for main character Agnes where nobody shows up, while her mother, oblivious to just how deeply disliked Agnes is by her classmates, tries desperately to assure her daughter that people will show up. Director Lukas Moodysson takes no prisoners and drags out the scene to really maximise just how uncomfortably sad the whole thing is.

It’s incredibly hard to watch.

Well, Agnes is Bing, Microsoft is its mother, and nobody shows up to Bing’s birthday party either.

Apple’s grudging accommodation of European law – allowing third-party browser engines on its mobile devices – apparently comes with a restriction that makes it difficult to develop and support third-party browser engines for the region.

The Register has learned from those involved in the browser trade that Apple has limited the development and testing of third-party browser engines to devices physically located in the EU. That requirement adds an additional barrier to anyone planning to develop and support a browser with an alternative engine in the EU.

↫ Thomas Claburn at The Register

If any normal person like you and I showed the same kind of blatant disregard for the law and authorities like Apple does in the EU, we’d be ruined by fines and possibly end up in jail. My only hope is that the European Commission goes through with its threats of massive fines of up to 10 or even 20 percent of worldwide turnover.

After launching Slack AI in February, Slack appears to be digging its heels in, defending its vague policy that by default sucks up customers’ data—including messages, content, and files—to train Slack’s global AI models.

↫ Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica

I’ve never used Slack and don’t intend to ever start, but the outcry about this reached far beyond Slack and its own communities. It’s been all over various forums and social media, and I’m glad Ars dove into it to collect all the various conflicting statements, policies, and blog posts Slack has made about their “Ai” policies. However, even after reading Ars’ article and the various articles about this at other outlets, I still have no idea what, exactly, Slack is or is not using to train its “AI” models.

I know a lot of people here think I am by definition against all forms of what companies are currently calling “AI”, but this is really not the case. I think there are countless areas where these technologies can make meaningful contributions, and a great example I encountered recently is the 4X strategy game Stellaris, one of my favourite games. The game recently got a big update called The Machine Age, which focuses on changing and improving the gameplay when you opt to play as cybernetically enhanced or outright robotic races.

As per Steam’s new rules regarding the use of AI in games, the Steam page included the following clarification about the use of “AI”:

We employ generative AI technologies during the creation of some assets. Typically this involves the ideation of content and visual reference material. These elements represent a minor component of the overall development. AI has been used to generate voices for an AI antagonist and a player advisor.

↫ The Machine Age Steam page

The game’s director explained that during the very early ideation phase, when someone like him, who isn’t a creative person, gets an idea, they might generate a piece of “AI” art and put it up on an ideation wall with tons of other assets just to get the point across, after which several rounds of artists and developers mould and shape some of those ideas into a final product. None of the early “AI” content makes it in the game. Similarly, while the game includes the voice for an AI antagonist and player advisor, the voice actors whose work was willingly used to generate the lines in the game are receiving royalties for each of those lines.

I have no issues whatsoever with this, because here it’s clear everyone involved is doing so in an informed manner and entirely willingly. Everything is above board, consent is freely given, and everybody knows what’s going on. This is a great example of ethical “AI” use; tools to help people make a product, easier – without stealing other people’s work or violating various licenses in the process.

What Slack is doing here – and what Copilot, OpenAI, and the various other tools do – is the exact opposite of this. Consent is only sought when the parties involved are big and powerful enough to cause problems, and even though they claim “AI” is not ripping anyone off, they also claim “AI” can’t work without taking other people’s work. Instead of being open and transparent about what they do, they hide themselves behind magical algorithms and shroud the origins of their “AI” training data in mystery.

If you’re using Slack – and odds are you do – I would strongly consider urging your boss to opt your organisation out of Slack’s “AI” data theft operation. You have no idea how much private information and corporate data is being exposed by these Salesforce clowns.

It’s a compelling story and on the surface makes a lot of sense. Carefully curated software patches applied to a known Linux kernel, frozen at a specific release, would obviously seem to be preferable to the random walk of an upstream open source Linux project. But is it true? Is there data to support this ?

After a lot of hard work and data analysis by my CIQ kernel engineering colleagues Ronnie Sahlberg and Jonathan Maple, we finally have an answer to this question. It’s no. The data shows that “frozen” vendor Linux kernels, created by branching off a release point and then using a team of engineers to select specific patches to back-port to that branch, are buggier than the upstream “stable” Linux kernel created by Greg Kroah-Hartman.

↫ Jeremy Allison at CIQ

I mean, it kind of makes sense. The full whitepaper is available, too.

It’s only been in the last couple of years that I’ve begun to dig deep into the inner workings of how terminal emulators, and the applications that run inside of them, really work. I’ve learned that there is a lot of innovation and creative problem solving happening in this space, even though the underlying technology is over half a century old.

I’ve also found that many people who use terminal based tools (including shells like Bash and editors like Vim) know very little about terminals themselves, or some of the modern features and capabilities they can support.

In this article, we’ll discuss some of the problems that terminal based applications have historically had to deal with (and what the modern solutions are) as well as some features that modern terminal emulators support that you may not be aware of.

↫ Gregory Anders

I don’t use the terminal much – usually just to update my systems – but on occasion I’ve had to really sit down and explore them more than usual, especially now that my workstation runs OpenBSD, and the depth and breadth of features, options, and clever tricks they possess is amazing. Over the past half century they’ve accumulated a lot of features along the way, and even though its unlikely to ever be for me, I can somewhat begin to appreciate why some people just tile a bunch of terminals on their screens and do all their computing that way.

I grew up with MS-DOS and Windows 3.x and later, so I’m just too attached to my mouse and pretty icons to switch to a terminal lifestyle, but over the years I’ve seen some pretty amazing terminal applications, from Mastodon clients to complex mail applications and web browsers, and you can be sure none of them steal your data or show you ads.

Maybe the terminal people are right after all.

Nearly 30 years after the launch of the Virtual Boy, not much is publicly known about how, exactly, Nintendo came to be interested in developing what would ultimately become its ill-fated console. Was Nintendo committed to VR as a future for video games and looking for technological solutions that made business sense? Or was the Virtual Boy primarily the result of Nintendo going “off script” and seizing a unique, and possibly risky, opportunity that presented itself? The answer is probably a little bit of both.

As it turns out, the Virtual Boy was not an anomaly in Nintendo’s history with video game platforms. Rather, it was the result of a deliberate strategy that was consistent with Nintendo’s way of doing things and informed by its lead creator Gunpei Yokoi’s design philosophy.

↫ Benj Edwards and Jose Zagal at Ars Technica

I’ve never used a Virtual Boy, and in fact, I’ve never even seen one in real life. It was mythical object when I was not even a teenager yet, something we read about in gaming magazines in The Netherlands. We didn’t really know what it was or how it worked, and it wasn’t until much later, in the early YouTube age, that I got to see what using one was actually like in the countless YouTube videos made about the device.

It seems it caused quite a few headaches, was cumbersome to use, had very few games, and those that were sold ended up collecting dust pretty quickly. In that sense, it seems not a lot has changed over the past thirty years.

Winamp has announced that on 24 September 2024, the application’s source code will be open to developers worldwide.

Winamp will open up its code for the player used on Windows, enabling the entire community to participate in its development. This is an invitation to global collaboration, where developers worldwide can contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve.

↫ Winamp press release

Nice, I guess, but twenty years to late to be of any relevance. At least it’ll be great for software preservation.

But what’s up with the odd language used in the press release, and the weirdly specific date that’s month from now? They really seem to want to avoid the term “open source”, which makes me think this is going to be one of those cases where they hope the community will work for them for free without actually using a real open source license. You know, those schemes that always – no exception – fail.

Ordinary modifiers are normally straightforward, in that they are additional keys that are held down as you type the main key. Control, Shift, and Alt all work this way (by default). However, some modifiers are ‘sticky’, where you tap their key once to turn them on and then tap their key again to turn them off. The obvious example of this is Caps Lock (unless you turn its effects off, remapping its physical key to be, say, another Ctrl key). Another example, one that many X users have historically wound up quietly cursing, is NumLock. Why people wind up cursing NumLock, and why I have a program to control its state, is because of how X programs (such as window managers) often do their key and mouse button bindings.

↫ Chris Siebenmann

I always have an applet in my KDE panel that shows me if I have any sticky modifiers enabled without realising it. On some of my keyboards, this isn’t always easily noticable, especially when you’re focused on what’s happening on your display. A little icon that only shows up when a sticky modifier is engaged solves this problem, as it immediately stands out in your peripheral vision.

With Qualcomm and Microsoft about to flood the market with devices using the new Snapdragon X Elite, those of us who don’t want to use Windows felt a bit uneasy – what’s Linux support going to look like for this new generation of ARM devices? Well, it seems Qualcomm’s been busy, and they’ve published a blog post detailing their work on Linux support for the X Elite.

It’s been our priority not only to support Linux on our premium-tier SoCs, but to support it pronto. In fact, within one or two days of publicly announcing each generation of Snapdragon 8, we’ve posted the initial patchset for Linux kernel support. Snapdragon X Elite was no exception: we announced on October 23 of last year and posted the patchset the next day. That was the result of a lot of pre-announcement work to get everything up and running on Linux and Debian.

↫ Qualcomm’s developer blog

In the blog post, the company details exactly which X Elite features have already been merged into mainline with Linux 6.8 and 6.9, as well as which features will be merged into mainline in Linux 6.10 and 6.11, and to be quite frank – it’s looking really solid, especially considering this is Qualcomm we’re talking about. Over the coming six months, they’re going to focus on getting end-to-end hardware video decoding working, including in Firefox and Chrome, as well as various CPU and GPU optimisations, adding the required firmware to the linux-firmware package, and providing access to easy installers.

All in all, it’s looking like the X Elite will be exceptionally well supported by Linux before the year’s over.

The blog post also details the boot path for Linux on the X Elite, and that, too, is looking good. It’s using a standard UEFI boot process, and supports GRUB and systemd-boot out of the box. Linux boots up using devicetrees, though, and apparently, there’s a known problem with using those that Qualcomm and the community are working on.

We’re working closely with upstream communities on an open problem with the UEFI-based BIOS while booting with devicetrees. The problem is that, when you have more than one devicetree blob (DTB) packed into the firmware package flashed on the device, there is no standard way of selecting a devicetree to pass on to the kernel. OEMs commonly put multiple DTBs into the firmware package so it will support devices with slightly different SKUs, so we’re keen to solve this problem.

↫ Qualcomm’s developer blog

I am pleasantly surprised by the openness and straightforwardness Qualcomm is showing the Linux community here, and I really hope this is a sign of how the company will keep supporting its laptop and possibly desktop-oriented SoCs from here on out. It seems like next year we will finally be getting competitive ARM laptops that can run Linux in a fully supported fashion.

Google released Android 15 beta 2 today, and with it, they unveiled some more of the new features coming to Android later this year when the final release lands. Android 15 comes with something called a private space, an area with an extra layer of authentication where you can keep applications and data hidden away, such as banking applications or health data. It’s effectively a separate user profile, and shows up as a separate area in the application drawer when unlocked. When locked, it disappears entirely from sight, share sheets, and so on.

Another awesome new feature is Theft Detection Lock, which uses Google “AI” to detect when a phone is snatched out of your hands by someone running, biking, or driving away, and instantly locks it. Theft like this is quite common in certain areas, and this seems like an excellent use of “AI” (i.e., accelerometer data) to discourage thieves from trying this.

There’s also a bunch of smaller stuff, like custom vibration patterns per notification, giving applications partial access to only your most recent photos and videos, system-wide preferences for which gender you’d like to be addressed as in gendered languages (French gets this feature first), and a whole lot more.

Developers also get a lot to play with here, from safer intents to something like ANGLE:

Vulkan is Android’s preferred interface to the GPU. Therefore, Android 15 includes ANGLE as an optional layer for running OpenGL ES on top of Vulkan. Moving to ANGLE will standardize the Android OpenGL implementation for improved compatibility, and, in some cases, improved performance. You can test out your OpenGL ES app stability and performance with ANGLE by enabling the developer option in Settings -> System -> Developer Options -> Experimental: Enable ANGLE on Android 15.

↫ Android developer blog

You can install Android 15 beta 2 on a number f Pixel devices and devices from other OEMs starting today. I installed it on my Pixel 8 Pro, and after a few hours I haven’t really noticed anything breaking, but that’s really not enough time to make any meaningful observations.

Google also detailed Wear OS 5.

Later this year, battery life optimizations are coming to watches with Wear OS 5. For example, running an outdoor marathon will consume up to 20% less power when compared to watches with Wear OS 4. And your fitness apps will be able to help improve your performance with the option to support more data types like ground contact time, stride length and vertical oscillation.

↫ Android developer blog

Wear OS 5 will also improve the Watch Face Format with more complications, which is very welcome, because the selection of complications is currently rather meager. Wear OS 5 will also ship later this year.

As expected earlier this year, Raspberry Pi is going public on the stock exchange in London. Back then, CEO Eben Upton said he did not expect the IPO to change how Raspberry Pi did things, but history tells us that initial public offerings tend to, well, change how companies do things. In their official announcement that they intend to hold an IPO, there’s an incredibly interesting and telling contradiction, as noted by @yassie_j on MastoAkkoma:

Raspberry Pi, in their listing press release, says: The Enthusiast and Education market is the “heart” of the Raspberry Pi movement.

But also says: Industrial and Embedded market […] accounts [for] over 72 per cent

So the heart seems to be going neglected, it seems, because there’s no way you’re going to not cash in on industrial applications. Especially when you’ve just done a big IPO.

↫ @yassie_j on Akkoma

This exactly illustrates the fears we all have about what an IPO is going to mean for Raspberry Pi. It’s already become increasingly more difficult for enthusiasts to get their hands on the latest Raspberry Pi models, but once the IPO’s done and there’s shareholders breathing down their neck, that will most likely only get worse. If the industrial and embedded market is where you’re making most of your money, where do you think Raspberry Pi devices are going to end up?

Luckily the market’s a lot bigger and more varied now than it was back when Raspberry Pi was new, so we have a wide variety of options to choose from. Still, I’m definitely worried about what Raspberry Pi, as a company, will look like five, ten years from now.