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An internal Meta Platforms document detailing policies on chatbot behavior has permitted the company’s artificial intelligence creations to “engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual,” generate false medical information and help users argue that Black people are “dumber than white people.”

These and other findings emerge from a Reuters review of the Meta document, which discusses the standards that guide its generative AI assistant, Meta AI, and chatbots available on Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, the company’s social-media platforms.

↫ Jeff Horwitz at Reuters

The only way one can describe the examples of allowed behaviour towards minors is absolutely fucked up. If I’d find any person talking to my kids like Facebook and Zuckerberg apparently think it’s okay to talk to children, I’d be calling the police to file a report. I know I shouldn’t be surprised considering it’s Facebook and Zuckerberg, a company with a history of knowingly inciting violence and genocide and a founder who created his website to creep on women, but the lows to which this company and its founder are willing to go are just so unimaginable to even people with just a modicum of morality, I just can’t wrap my brain around it.

The treatment of people of colour isn’t any better. Facebook will happily argue for you that black people are dumber than white people without so much as batting an eye. Again, none of this should be surprising considering it’s Facebook, but add to it the fact that “AI” is the endgame for totalitarians, and it all makes even more sense. These tools are explicitly designed to generate totalitarian propaganda, because they’re trained on totalitarian propaganda, i.e., most of the internet. The examples of “AI” being fascist and racist are legion, and considering the people creating them – Zuckerberg, Altman, Musk, and so on – all have clear fascist and totalitarian tendencies or simply are overtly fascist, we, again, shouldn’t be surprised.

Totalitarians hate artists and intellectuals, because artists and intellectuals are the ones who tend to not fall for their bullshit. That’s why one of the first steps taken by any totalitarian regime is curtailing the arts and sciences, from Pol Pot to Mao, from Trump to Orban. Promoting “AI” as a replacement for exactly these groups in society – “AI” generating “art” to replace artists, “AI” doing “research” to replace actual scientists – fits within the totalitarian playbook like a perfectly fitted glove.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. This apparently also applies to “AI”.

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Hi, FAB 2025 is still happening in Prague and it has been a wonderful event. It’s been great to meet so many people from our community at home, in Czechia! But during my chats with the attendee’s, there was one topic which was emerging time and time again, and that is the state of open hardware. I cannot talk about all of the open hardware, but I can share experience from 3D printing. And it is not good! Open hardware in 3D printing is dead – you just don’t know it yet. This is an opinion piece, imagine we are talking about this topic over a cold Pilsner…

↫ Josef Prusa

What happens when the Chinese government lists 3D printing as an industry it wants to dominate? Well, an explosion in bogus patents and the death of tons of smaller, local brands, leaving only major players from China and perhaps one or two bigger non-Chinese brands. That’s the conclusion by Josef Prusa, founder of Prusa Research, a major 3D printer maker from Prague, Czechia. Prusa’s printers used to be entirely open source, but starting in 2023, this is no longer the case – ostensibly because being open source hardware meant that competitors were copying their work wholesale without contributing anything back, or worse, stealing their work entirely and keeping it all closed, despite the copyleft license in use.

Looking at the numbers, it seems clear that smaller companies will not be able to deal with the onslaught of bogus patents, as fighting patent infringement claims in court and getting patents invalidated, even if prior art exists in abundance, is prohibitively expensive and incredibly time-consuming. It’s a game of really expensive whack-a-mole against people with far deeper pockets than you.

Still, this whole thing does taste a bit sour considering Prusa’s abandonment of its open source roots and ideals. There’s a business to be run here, I understand that, but principles do matter, and if not even a company priding itself on producing open source hardware stands by its ideals, why should anyone else?

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We’re not done with the AROS news quite yet, as Andrzej Subocz published another update with the latest news from the AROS community. Some of it we already covered, but a lot it we haven’t. For instance, there’s the initial version of a partitioning tool for AROS, called QuickPart. For now, it’s in read-only mode, but once it’s complete, it will allow users to do, well, partitioning. Work has also begun on porting SDL2 to AROS, replacing the aging SDL 1.2 version currently available.

On top of all that, there’s a lot of work on new and improved network drivers for the 64bit version, an extensive amount of changes and improvements to the build system, C library, datatypes, and much more. Subocz’ full report has many more details, so head on over and read up.

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Covering the Amiga world is always a bit of a crapshoot, since for what is surely an incredibly small segment of the computing world, it happens to be incredibly complex, with multiple competing Amiga-ish operating systems and hardware platforms, all worsened by many empty promises and bitter animosity flying every which way. This makes it hard for an outsider to get a firm grasp on what’s going on, but as always, I’ll try my best.

The news here is that AmiKit has released a new browser for the classic 68k Amiga that can load modern websites. The browser is called AmiBrowser.

AmiBrowser is an HTML 5 capable web browser built for 68K with Zune/MUI. It
uses ARM libraries to power the native rendering of the web pages.

↫ AmiKit press release

AmiBrowser is exclusive to AmiKit’s own Amiga-like hardware, the A600 GS and A1200 NG, both of which are replacement boards for the original Amiga 600 and 1200, respectively. How do these machines work? Well, they come in the shape of their original counterparts, but with far fewer chips, and one crucial addition: a little Orange Pi Zero 3 (in the case of the A1200 NG, at least) daughterboard that contains the actual ARM SoC that powers the machine.

The way this setup works is that the Orange Pi Zero 3 boots into a minimal Linux environment with a launcher-like interface, which can in turn load up the Amiberry classic 68K Amiga emulator that can communicate with its ARM Linux host. It’s inside this 68K emulator where the actual operating system runs. This Amiga-like operating system is called AmiBench, which is, very simply put, a modified variant of the 68K version of AROS, combined with libraries and components that can make use of the ARM processor.

And so we finally arrive at this new browser. This new browser runs the Chromium Embedded Framework in the host Linux environment on the ARM processor, forwarding its rendering towards a native 68K Amiga/AROS application that’s running inside the 68K emulator. In between the CEF running on the Linux host and the native Amiga 68K application running inside the emulator sits a glue layer that takes care of the communication between the two sides. It’s an interesting approach to a very difficult problem: how do you run a modern browser on a hardware platform – 68K, in this case – that is horribly outdated and far too slow to deal with modern websites?

It’s an interesting approach, but it also feels a little bit like a house of cards. That being said, if the choice is between no access to the modern web and shaky access to the modern web, I’d still choose the latter.

Earlier today, I made the decision to remove all advertising from OSNews. From here on out, you will no longer see any ads, cookie banners, and other ad-related privacy-invasive technologies on this website. While this means a hit to my income, making OSNews even more reliant on our Patreon supporters and Ko-Fi donors, it genuinely feels liberating. I should’ve made this decision years ago. Read on for how you can support us, and our big fundraiser.

I have always been open and honest about my dislike for the modern online advertising industry. It’s incredibly privacy-invasive, a massive security risk, generally lacking in taste, and genuinely intrusive. As such, despite running ads on OSNews, I have always advocated for the concept of “your computer, your rules”, meaning only you, the user, gets to decide what gets run on your computer and displayed on your screen. This includes the use of ad-blockers.

I have a Pi-Hole, and you can pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Because of this, maintaining ads on OSNews became untenable. Everything about the ads on our site, from the actual ads themselves to the annoying cookie banners talking about “our 1500 partners”, gave me the ick, as the young, hip people say, and I’ve been considering turning them off for a long time. Today, after yet another reader rightfully pointing out how absurd our cookie banner was, I finally made the call. One email to our owner, David Adams, later, and we’re now entirely ad-free, for everyone.

This is a hit to my income, and as such, I kindly ask anyone capable of doing so to support the continued existence of OSNews. How can you support OSNews?

• You can become an OSNews Patreon, and get some comment bling if you so desire.
• You can make individual donations through Ko-Fi. For this purpose, I’ve set an incredibly ambitious, long-term fundraiser goal of €5000.
• You can buy our merch! T-shirts, mugs, sweaters – with amazing designs and top-notch quality.

We’ve been online since 1997, meaning soon we’ll be hitting our 30-year anniversary. Very few websites can boast about such a long, uninterrupted existence, and despite all the changes both the industry and the world at large have gone through, OSNews is still here, doing what it has always done. The removal of ads means we’re even more dependent on you, dear readers, but I’m confident in saying that we’ll make it another 30 years.

Thank you for all your continued support over the decades, and let’s keep going. Without icky ads.

Apple, back in June of this year:

This is our broadest software design update ever. Meticulously crafted by rethinking the fundamental elements that make up our software, the new design features an entirely new material called Liquid Glass. It combines the optical qualities of glass with a fluidity only Apple can achieve, as it transforms depending on your content or context.

↫ Apple’s WWDC press release

Today, iGerman00, detailing their merge request for adding Liquid Glass effects to a KWin plugin:

Added a Concave (lens) refraction mode for a more “Liquid Glass” look, it’s a lot closer than the current implementation. Also added a Refraction Corner Radius slider (0–200px, 30 steps) to shape the SDF independently of edge size. Because the concave implementation is a bit “weaker”, I’ve raised the maxima to 30 for the relevant sliders. Added some UI logic for irrelevant options between modes.

↫ iGerman00’s merge request

One of the world’s wealthiest companies, outdone by a random “amateur hobbyist developer“. Not only does this merge request recreate Apple’s Liquid Glass effects, it does so with a detailed settings panel to control every aspect of the effect, something Apple obviously won’t allow you to do.

“Only Apple” my ass.

You click a link in your chat app, your browser with a hundred tabs comes to the front and opens that page. How hard can it be? Well, you probably know by now that Wayland, unlike X, doesn’t let one application force its idiot wishes on everyone else. In order for an application to bring its window to the front, it needs to make use of the XDG Activation protocol.

In essence, an application cannot take focus, it can only receive focus. In the example above, your chat app would request an XDG Activation token from the compositor. It then asks the system to open the given URL (typically launching the web browser) and sends along the token. The browser can then use this token to activate its window.

↫ Kai Uwe

After explaining exactly how this mechanism works, KDE developer Kai Uwe details the issue that not every application yet properly supports the XDG Activation protocol, and some that do have bugs that, say, might make an application discard its token too early. In other words, it’s time to start testing.

You’ll need to use the latest git master brach of KWin, and enable set the “Focus Stealing Prevention” option in Window Management to “Extreme”. When set to “Extreme”, KWin will exclusively activate windows that request activation with a valid token. They’ve already found and fixed a number of issues in KDE using this method, but more are bound to found, particularly in third-party applications.

They’re planning on turning on KWin’s focus stealing prevention on Wayland with forgiving settings at first, but increase the strictness of the feature as time progresses and issues are fixed.

One of the things I’m working on at Red Hat is HDR support. HDR is inherently linked to luminance (brightness, but ignoring human perception) which makes it an important parameter for us that we would like to be in control of.

↫ Sebastian Wick

A really interesting look at how GNOME is going to handle screen brightness.

Over the years, we’ve seen a good number of interfaces used for computer monitors, TVs, LCD panels and other all-things-display purposes. We’ve lived through VGA and the large variety of analog interfaces that preceded it, then DVI, HDMI, and at some point, we’ve started getting devices with DisplayPort support. So you might think it’s more of the same. However, I’d like to tell you that you probably should pay more attention to DisplayPort – it’s an interface powerful in a way that we haven’t seen before.

↫ Arya Voronova at HackADay

DisplayPort is a better user experience in every way compared to HDMI. I am so, so sad that HDMI has won out in the consumer electronics space, with all of its countless anti-user features as detailed in the linked article. I refuse to use HDMI when DisplayPort is available, so all of my computers’ displays are hooked up over DP. Whenever I did try to use HDMI, I always ran into issues with resolution, refresh rates, improper monitor detection, and go knows what else. Plug in a DP cable, and everything always just works.

Sadly, in consumer electronics, DisplayPort isn’t all that common. Game consoles, Hi-Fi audio, televisions, and so on, all push HDMI hard and often don’t offer a DisplayPort option at all. It takes me back to the early-to-late 2000s, when my entire audio setup was hooked up using optical cables, simply because I was a MiniDisc user and had accepted the gospel of optical cables. Back then, too, I refused to buy or use anything that used unwieldy analog cables. Mind you, this had nothing to do with audio quality – it was a usability thing.

If anyone is aware of home audio devices and televisions that do offer DisplayPort, feel free to jump into the comments.

It’s a bit of a silly post, because syntax is the least interesting d detail about the language, but, still, I can’t stop thinking how Zig gets this detail just right for the class of curly-braced languages, and, well, now you’ll have to think about that too.

On the first glance, Zig looks almost exactly like Rust, because Zig borrows from Rust liberally. And I think that Rust has great syntax, considering all the semantics it needs to express (see “Rust’s Ugly Syntax”). But Zig improves on that, mostly by leveraging simpler language semantics, but also through some purely syntactical tasteful decisions.

↫ Alex Kladov

Y’all know full well I know very little about programming, so there’s much interesting stuff I can add here. The only slightly related frame of reference I have is how some languages – as in, the ones we speak – have a pleasing grammar or spelling, and how even when you can’t actually speak a language, some of them intrinsically look attractive and pleasing when you see them in written form.

I mean, you can’t look at Scottisch Gaelic and not notice it just looks pleasing:

Dh’ éirich mi moch air mhaduinn an-dé
‘S gun ghearr mi’n ear-thalmhainn do bhrìgh mo sgéil
An dùil gu ‘m faicinn fhéin rùn mo chléibh
Och òin gu ‘m faca ‘s a cùl rium féin.

↫ Mo Shùil Ad Dhèidh by Donald MacNicol

I have no idea if programmers can look at programming languages the same way, but I’ve often been told there’s more overlap between programming languages and regular language than many people think. As such, it wouldn’t surprise me if some programming languages look really pleasing to programmers, even if they can’t use them because they haven’t really learned them yet.

AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans. As a result, on September 30, 2025 this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued.

↫ AOL support document

I’ve seen a few publications writing derisively about this, surprised dial-up internet is still a thing, but I think that’s misguided and definitely a bit elitist. In a country as large as the United States, there’s bound to be quite a few very remote and isolated places where dial-up might be the best or even only option to get online. On top of that, I’m sure there are people out there who use the internet so sparingly that dial-up may suit their needs just fine.

I genuinely hope this move by AOL doesn’t cut a bunch of people off of the internet without any recourse, especially if it involves, say, isolated and lonely seniors to whom such changes may be too difficult to handle. Access to the internet is quite crucial in the modern world, and we shouldn’t be ridiculing people just because they don’t have access to super high-speed broadband.

Remember the old Windows Control Panel? It’s still there, in your up-to-date Windows 11 installation, as a number of settings still cannot be changed in the “new” Settings application. In the latest Insider Preview for Windows 11 in the Dev Channel, Microsoft moved another long list of settings from the Control Panel to Settings.

The focus is very much on time and language this time around. A whole slew of more niche features related to the clock, such as adding additional clocks to the Notification Center or changing your time synchronisation server, can now be done in Settings. Format settings for time and date have also been moved into Settings, which is a welcome change for anyone dealing with mysterious cases where Windows somehow insists on using anything but the sane 24-hour clock.

As for language settings, things like enabling Unicode UTF-8 support is now available in Settings as well, and you can now copy existing language and regions settings from one user to another, and to the welcome screen. Lastly, keyboard settings like the character repeat/delay rate and blink rates are now also in Settings.

It’s absolutely wild to me that Windows still has two separate places to change settings, and that countless settings dialogs still look like they came straight from Windows 95. It’s a reply fractured user experience, and one that’s been in place since the release of Settings in Windows 8, 13 years ago.

The curve Windows is graded on compared to its competitors has basically become a circle. People write entire treatises about how Linux is not ready for the desktop because of some entirely arbitrary and nebulous reasons, while at the same time Windows users are served a hodgepodge of 30 years of random cruft without anyone even so much as raising an eyebrow.

I’ve long argued that if you truly take a step back and look at the landscape of desktop operating systems today, and you were to apply the same standards to all of them, there’s no chance in hell Windows can be considered “ready for the desktop”. The fact Windows has had two competing settings applications 13 years now with no end in sight is just one facet of that conclusion, but definitely an emblematic one.

Choosing human-readable file formats is an act of technological sovereignty. It’s about maintaining control over your data, ensuring long-term accessibility, and building systems that remain comprehensible and maintainable over time. The slight overhead of human readability pays dividends in flexibility, durability, and peace of mind.

These formats also represent a philosophy: that technology should serve human understanding rather than obscure it. In choosing transparency over convenience, we build more resilient, more maintainable, and ultimately more trustworthy systems.

↫ Adële

It’s hard not to agree with this sentiment. I definitely prefer being able to just open and read things like configuration files as if they’re text files, for all the same reasons Adële lists in their article. It just makes managing your system a lot easier, since I means you won’t have to rely on the applications the files belong to to make any changes.

I think this also extends to other areas. When I’m dealing with photo or music library tools, I want them to use the file system and directories in a human-readable way. Having to load up an entire photo management application just to sort some photos seems backwards to me; why can’t I use my much leaner file manager to do this instead? I also want emails to be stored as individual files in directories matching mailboxes inside my email client, just like BeOS used to do back in the day (note that this is far from exclusive to BeOS). If I load up my file manager, and create a new directory inside the root mail directory I designated and copy a few email files into it, my email client should reflect that.

As operating systems get ever more locked down, we’re losing the human-readability of our systems, and that’s not a good development.

With Apple’s desktop operating systems straying ever further from what some of us consider its heyday, it’s no surprise people long for the days before Apple started relentlessly focusing on services revenue, bringing iOS paradigms to macOS, and dropping its Aqua design language for whatever they’re doing now. Some people take this longing and channel it into something a bit more concrete, and an example of this is a website I stumbled upon on Fedi: Mavericks Forever.

Mavericks Forever is a detailed guide to, as the name implies, keep using Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks. It covers everything from hardware options to security patches, browser choices, and so, so much more. It even goes as far as adding more recent emoji releases, custom security patches, and visual customisations. There’s a ton to go over here, and of course, you don’t have to implement every single suggestions.

I ostensibly like pain, because I’ve had a soft spot for the trash can Mac Pro ever since they came out. Now that they are wholly and completely outdated by Apple standards, their prices are probably dropping rapidly, so I may have to grab one from eBay or whatever and follow this guide for a modern-ish Mavericks setup. I do actually like the Mac OS X of old quite a bit, I would love to have a usable version of it that I can use when I feel like it.

If only to remember the good old days.