Right off the bat, there is not that much use for a Pixel Watch with Windows on it. The project, as the maker says, is for “shits and giggles” and more like an April Fool’s joke. However, it shows how capable modern smartwatches are, with the Pixel Watch 3 being powered by a processor with four ARM Cortex A53 cores, 2GB of DDR4X memory, and 32GB of storage.

Getting Windows to run on Gustave’s arm, as you can imagine, took some time and effort of inspecting a rooted boot image, modifying the stock UEFI to run custom UEFI, editing the ACPI table, and patching plenty of other files. The result of all that is a Pixel Watch 3 with Windows PE.

↫ Taras Buria at Neowin

More of this sort of nonsense, please. This is such a great idea, especially because it’s so utterly useless and pointless. However pointless it may be, though, it does show that Windows on ARM is remarkably flexible, as it’s been ported to a variety of ARM devices it should never be supposed to run on. With Microsoft’s renewed entry into the ARM world with Windows on ARM and Qualcomm, I would’ve hoped for more standardisation in the ARM space to bring it closer to the widely compatible world of x86.

That, sadly, has not yet happened, and I doubt it ever will – it seems like ARM is already too big of a fragmented mess to be consolidated for easy portability for operating systems. Instead, individual crazy awesome people have to manually port Windows to other ARM variants, and that, while cool projects, is kind of sad.

FreeDOS is a free and open‐source operating system designed to be compatible with MS‑DOS. Developed to keep the DOS experience alive even after Microsoft ended support for MS‑DOS, FreeDOS has grown into a complete environment that not only preserves classic DOS functionality but also introduces modern enhancements. Its simplicity and low resource requirements have made it a cherished resource for retro computing enthusiasts and a practical tool for embedded systems and legacy hardware.

↫ André Machado

A short but useful overview of what FreeDOS is. One of my favourite stories about FreeDOS will always be not just that HP offered it as an option on some of its laptops – supposedly because it couldn’t sell laptops without an operating system preinstalled – but also just how convoluted this preinstalled copy of FreeDOS was set up. They shipped several FreeDOS virtual machines on top of a minimal installation of Debian, in a complex web of operating systems and VMs.

RISC OS, the operating system from the United Kingdom originally designed to run on Acorn Computer’s Archimedes computers – the first ARM computers – is still actively developed today. Especially since the introduction of the Raspberry Pi, new life was breathed into this ageing operating system, and it has gained quite a bit of steady momentum ever since, with tons of small updates, applications, and new hardware support, including things like support for wireless networking. This development has always been a bit piecemeal, though, and the pace has never been exceptionally fast.

Now, though, time really is ticking for RISC OS: popular RISC OS platforms like the Raspberry Pi are moving to 64bit ARM only, and this poses a big problem for RISC OS: most of it is written in pure 32bit ARM assembly. As you can imagine, the supply of capable 32bit ARM boards is going to dwindle over the coming years, which would put RISC OS right back where it was before the launch of the Raspberry Pi: floundering, relying on old hardware. This is obviously not ideal, and as such, RISC OS Open Limited wants to take a big leap to address this.

Since 2011, ROOL has successfully delivered dozens of community-funded improvements through its bounty scheme. While this model has enabled steady progress, it is not suited to the scale of work now required to modernise RISC OS. The Moonshots initiative represents a fundamental shift: focused, multi-year development projects undertaken by full-time engineers.

The first Moonshot aims to make the RISC OS source code portable and compatible with 64-bit Arm platforms, a prerequisite for future hardware support. ROOL has already scoped the work, identified key milestones, and built cost models based on realistic employment and project management needs.

↫ Steve Revill in a ROOL press release

They’re going to need a dedicated team of several developers working over the course of several years to port RISC OS to 64bit ARM. That’s going to require quite a bit of money, manpower, and expertise, and considering ROOL has only collected about £100000 worth of donations over the past 14 years, I can see why they’re aiming to go big for this effort. All these giant technology corporations with trillion dollar stock valuations are currently relying on ARM technology, so you’d think they could empty a few socks and cough up a few million to get this effort funded properly, but alas, we all know that’s not going to happen.

I hope ROOL can make this work. RISC OS is a ton of fun to use, and occupies a unique place in computing history. I would be incredibly sad to see technological progress leave it behind, when what amount to chump change for so many wealthy companies and individuals could save it.

Do you want to install Windows 11 without internet access or without an online Microsoft Account? It seems Microsoft really doesn’t want you to, as it has removed a very common and popular way of bypassing this requirement. In the release notes for the latest builds from the Dev and Beta channels, the company notes:

We’re removing the bypassnro.cmd script from the build to enhance security and user experience of Windows 11. This change ensures that all users exit setup with internet connectivity and a Microsoft Account.

Let me blow your minds and state that I don’t think online accounts for an operating system are inherently a bad idea. I would love it if I could install Fedora KDE on a new machine, optionally log into some online “Fedora Account”, and have my customisations and applications synchronise automatically. It would save me some time and effort, and assuming it’s all properly encrypted and secured, I don’t think the risk factors are particularly high. The keyword here is, of course, optionally. Microsoft wants every Windows 11 user to have a Microsoft Account instead of a local account, and would rather not make it optional at all.

Of course, this is still Microsoft, a company wholly incapable of doing anything right when it comes to operating systems, so even making this script available again during installation is stupidly easy. It took a few nerds mere moments to discover you could just make some registry changes during installation, reboot, and have the script return to its rightful place.

Oh Microsoft. Never change.

I’ve complained about the utter inscrutability of the Windows release process for a long time, with Microsoft seemingly using channels, build numbers, code names, date-based version numbers, and so on interchangeably, making it incredibly hard to keep track of what is being released when. It turns out even Microsoft itself started losing track, because it’s now released a roadmap for Windows 11 development.

In the roadmap tool – of course it’s a tool – you can select a platform, which isn’t x86 or ARM, but Windows PC or Copilot+ PC, a version (23H2 or 24H2 for now), a status (In preview, Gradually rolling out, or Generally available), and a channel (Canary, Dev, Beta, or Retail), after which the roadmap tool will list whatever features match those criteria. Do you now see why people might want such a tool to keep track of what the hell is going on with Windows?

Anyway, as the date-based version numbers – 23H2 and 24H2 – may already make clear, this seems more like a roadmap about where development’s been than where development’s going. The problem for Microsoft, of course, is that it maintains several different Windows variants with different feature sets and update schedules, and users, too, can of course opt to stick to certain versions before moving on. The end result is this spaghetti, which makes it hard to untangle when you’re getting which feature.

Anyway, if you’re elbow-deep in the Windows spaghetti, this tool may be of use to you.

How do you create a brain drain and lose your status as eminent destination for scientists and researchers?

The United States seems to be sending out questionnaires to researchers at universities and research institutes outside of the United States, asking them about their political leanings. Dutch universities are strongly advising Dutch researches not to respond to the questionnaires, and warn that they are designed to stifle free speech and independent research through intimidation.

Universities of the Netherlands (UNL) has also warned researchers about the questionnaire. The USGS questionnaire asks, for example, whether the researcher’s organisation works with ‘entities associated with communist, socialist, or totalitarian parties’, whether the research project has taken ‘appropriate measures’ to ‘defend against gender ideology’ and whether the project has ‘measurable benefits for US domestic industries, workforce, or economic sectors’.

↫ Universiteit Leiden

Researchers trying to enter the United States are also facing intimidation tactics, with the United States government going so far as to refuse entry to scientists critical of the Trump regime:

A French scientist was denied entry to the US this month after immigration officers at an airport searched his phone and found messages in which he had expressed criticism of the Trump administration, said a French minister.

“I learned with concern that a French researcher who was traveling to a conference near Houston was denied entry to the United States before being expelled,” Philippe Baptiste, France’s minister of higher education and research, said in a statement on Monday to Agence France-Presse published by Le Monde.

↫ Robert Mackey at the Guardian

Being denied entry is one thing – being arrested and sent to a string of prisons is another, like this Canadian woman:

Our next stop was Arizona, the San Luis Regional Detention Center. The transfer process lasted 24 hours, a sleepless, grueling ordeal. This time, men were transported with us. Roughly 50 of us were crammed into a prison bus for the next five hours, packed together – women in the front, men in the back. We were bound in chains that wrapped tightly around our waists, with our cuffed hands secured to our bodies and shackles restraining our feet, forcing every movement into a slow, clinking struggle.

↫ Jasmine Mooney at the Guardian

If you’re a scientist or researcher planning on going to a conference in the US (or, say, a developer wanting to go to a tech conference), you should reconsider. Even if your papers are in order, you could end up on a plane to a concentration camp in El Salvador before you can even call a lawyer – while being told that any judge standing up for your rights should be impeached.

The United States’ war on free speech, science, and research goes far beyond intimidating individual scientists and researchers. The Trump regime is actively erasing and deleting entire fields of science, most notably anything involving things like climate and gender, and openly attacking and cutting funding to universities that disagree with the Trump regime.

Almost immediately after being sworn in as president on 20 January, Trump put his signature to piles of executive orders cancelling or freezing tens of billions of dollars in funding for research and international assistance, and putting the seal on thousands of lay-offs. Orwellian restrictions have been placed on research, including bans on studies that mention particular words relating to sex and gender, race, disability and other protected characteristics.

↫ Nature

US President Donald Trump’s latest war on the climate includes withdrawing support for any research that mentions the word.

He has also launched a purge on government websites hosting climate data, in an apparent attempt to make the evidence disappear.

↫ Corey J. A. Bradshaw at The Conversation

The Trump administration has fired hundreds of workers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the US’s pre-eminent climate research agency housed within the Department of Commerce, the Guardian has learned.

[…]

“There is no plan or thought into how to continue to deliver science or service on weather, severe storms and events, conservation and management of our coasts and ocean life and much more,” he said. “Let’s not pretend this is about efficiency, quality of work or cost savings because none of those false justifications are remotely true.”

↫ Dharna Noor and Gabrielle Canon at the Guardian

Intimidating current scientists isn’t enough, either – the scientists of the future must also suffer:

US President Donald Trump has signed an executive orderto dismantle the Department of Education, fulfilling a campaign pledge and a long-cherished goal of some conservatives.

[…]

In its statement, the American Federation of Teachers said: “No-one likes bureaucracy, and everyone’s in favour of more efficiency, so let’s find ways to accomplish that.

“But don’t use a ‘war on woke’ to attack the children living in poverty and the children with disabilities.”

↫ Ana Faguy at the BBC

But what about intimidating university students who don’t fall in line with the regime? Well, we can’t forget about those, now, can we?

After immigration agents detained Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil over his involvement in pro-Palestine protests on campus, President Donald Trump promised it was just the beginning. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has since arrested at least two more students who are in the country on visas — one of whom had recently sued the Trump administration on First Amendment grounds.

↫ Gaby Del Valle at The Verge

A Cornell University PhD student earlier this month sued the Trump administration seeking to stop the president’s order aimed at foreign students accused of “antisemitism”. Days later, lawyers at the justice department emailed to request that the student “surrender” to immigration officials

↫ Maanvi Singh at the Guardian

These are just a small selection of stories, and I could’ve picked a dozen more still if I wanted to. The point should be squarely (roundly?) driven home by now: the United States government seems to be doing everything in its power to scare off the very people an economy based on science, technology, and innovation needs to thrive, and this hasn’t exactly gone by unnoticed in the rest of the world.

It started with individual universities in Europe stepping up to attract US researchers and scientists, like the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium:

The Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) is opening 12 postdoctoral positions for international researchers, with a specific focus on American scholars working in socially significant fields. These prestigious fellowships come with substantial funding (€2.5 million) as part of the European Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) program. Additionally, as part of the Brains for Brussels initiative of Innoviris, VUB aims to actively attract American professors looking to relocate. In collaboration with its Francophone sister university ULB, VUB is also providing 18 apartments for international researchers seeking temporary residence at the Brussels Institute for Advanced Studies.

VUB’s initiative is a response to the alarming political interference in academic research by the Trump administration in the U.S. The university is taking a firm stand against these developments.

↫ Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Another example, the Aix-Marseille Université in France:

In a context where some scientists in the United States may feel threatened or hindered in their research, our university is announcing the launch of the Safe Place For Science program, dedicated to welcoming scientists wishing to pursue their work in an environment conducive to innovation, excellence and academic freedom.

↫ Aix-Marseille Université

It seems universities the world over are seeing an increase in applicants trying to escape the purges in the United States:

Universities around the world have reported seeing an uptick in applications from U.S.-based researchers, who face an increasingly uncertain climate under President Donald Trump’s administration. And some countries and their institutions are already looking to use the opportunity to attract new talent and reverse the steady migration of scientists to the U.S. in recent decades.

↫ Catherine Offord at Science

Governments in Europe soon picked up on this, and are now asking the European Union to launch concerted efforts to attract scientists and researchers fleeing the United States:

In a letter addressed to research commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva on Wednesday and seen by Science|Business, 13 governments asked the EU to show solidarity and welcome “brilliant talents from abroad who might suffer from research interference and ill-motivated and brutal funding cuts.”

“The current international context reminds us that freedom of science can be put at risk anywhere and at any time,” they wrote. While the new US administration is not named in the letter, the implication is clear.

↫ Juliette Portala and David Matthews at Science|Business

Curtailing freedom of speech and attacking academic freedom are classic elements of the authoritarian and fascist playbooks, and the end result is always the same: a massive brain drain as academia are either murdered, sent to work the fields, or in less extreme cases like what’s happening in the United States today, flee the country to offer their knowledge and expertise elsewhere. The effects of brain drain are well-understood, and will impact the economy of the United States harshly; especially the very technology companies supporting the Trump regime will start feeling the squeeze as it becomes harder and harder for them to attract the top talent they need. In fact, they’re already worried about what they have wrought.

Freedom of speech and academic freedom are under heavy assault in the United States, and it’s going to affect every American, from researchers and academics, down to classic cases of “I never thought leopards would eat my face”, like when a Trump voter saw his wife arrested, facing deportation to Peru (he still supports Trump, and doesn’t regret his vote – that’s going to make for interesting dinner conversation).

Authoritarian purges employ hatchets, not scalpels, and every American in the bottom 80% is going to suffer the consequences.

Up until now, Google developed several components of Android out in the open, as part of AOSP, while developing everything else behind closed doors, only releasing the source code once the final new Android version was released. This meant that Google had to merge the two branches, which lead to problems and issues, so Google decided it’s now moving all development of Android behind closed doors.

What will change is the frequency of public source code releases for specific Android components. Some components like the build system, update engine, Bluetooth stack, Virtualization framework, and SELinux configuration are currently AOSP-first, meaning they’re developed fully in public. Most Android components like the core OS framework are primarily developed internally, although some features, such as the unlocked-only storage area API, are still developed within AOSP.

Beginning next week, all Android development will occur within Google’s internal branches, and the source code for changes will only be released when Google publishes a new branch containing those changes. As this is already the practice for most Android component changes, Google is simply consolidating its development efforts into a single branch.

↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority

This brings up a very old debate: if development happens entirely behind closed doors, with only the occasional code drop, is the software in question really open source? Technically, the answer is obviously ‘yes’ – there’s no requirement that development take place in public. However, I’m fairly sure that when most people think of open source, they think not only of occasionally throwing chunks of code over the proverbial corporate walls, but also of open development, where everybody is free to contribute, pipe in, and follow along.

Clearly, this move makes Android more closed, not less so, and it follows in a long string of changes Google has made to Android that make it ever harder to consider AOSP, the Android Open Source Project, a capable, modern mobile operating system. The Android fork of the Linux kernel will always be properly open, of course, but I have my doubts Android in and of itself will remain open source in the narrow definition for much longer, and even if it does, you have to wonder how much value it will have.

I mean, Darwin, the open source base underneath macOS and iOS, is technically open source, but nobody cares because Apple made it pretty much worthless in and of itself. Anything of value is stripped out and not only developed behind closed doors, but also not released as open source, ensuring Darwin is nothing but a curiosity we sometimes remember exists. Android could be heading in the same direction.

My biggest worry are Android ROMs, most notably for me personally GrapheneOS. I honestly have no idea how this will impact such projects.

Some more light reading:

While it was already established that the open source supply chain was often the target of malicious actors, what is stunning is the amount of energy invested by Jia Tan to gain the trust of the maintainer of the xz project, acquire push access to the repository and then among other perfectly legitimate contributions insert – piece by piece – the code for a very sophisticated and obfuscated backdoor. This should be a wake up call for the OSS community. We should consider the open source supply chain a high value target for powerful threat actors, and to collectively find countermeasures against such attacks.

In this article, I’ll discuss the inner workings of the xz backdoor and how I think we could have mechanically detected it thanks to build reproducibility.

↫ Julien Malka

It’s a very detailed look at the situation and what Nix could to prevent it in the future.

This whitepaper provides an introduction to and overview of seL4. We explain what seL4 is (and is not) and explore its defining features. We explain what makes seL4 uniquely qualified as the operating-system kernel of choice for security- and safety-critical systems, and generally embedded and cyber-physical systems. In particular, we explain seL4’s assurance story, its security- and safety-relevant features, and its benchmark-setting performance. We also discuss typical usage scenarios, including incremental cyber retrofit of legacy systems.

↫ Gernot Heiser

Some light reading for Monday.

It’s been over three years since the last ReactOS release, but today, in honour of the first commit to the project by the oldest, still active contributor, the project released ReactOS 0.4.15. Of course, there’s been a steady stream of nightly releases, so it’s not like the project stalled or anything, but having a proper release is always nice to have.

We are pleased to announce the release of ReactOS 0.4.15! This release offers Plug and Play fixes, audio fixes, memory management fixes, registry healing, improvements to accessories and system tools including Notepad, Paint, RAPPS, the Input Method Editor, and shell improvements.

↫ ReactOS 0.14.5 release announcement

There’s a lot in this one, as the long gap between releases indicates. Thanks to the major changes in the plug and play subsystem of the kernel, ReactOS now supports more third party drivers, and it can now boot from USB and chipsets with EHCI, OHCI, and UHCI controllers. The open source AC’97 driver from the Windows Driver Kit has also been ported to ReactOS to enable sound on VirtualBox and old motherboards. The open source FAT driver from the same WDK has also been ported, which is a massive improvement over the old one. ReactOS can now also make use of custom IMEs, ZIP archive support has been integrated into the shell, and a new default visual style has been chosen.

There’s a lot more in this release, though, and since it was branched over six months ago, there are a lot of improvements from since that time that are not yet part of this release, like a graphical installers, UEFI and SMP support, new NTFS driver, and a ton more. In other words – don’t let the long time between releases fool you; there’s a lot going on in the ReactOS world.

SoftBank Group Corp. today announced that it will acquire Ampere Computing, a leading independent silicon design company, in an all-cash transaction valued at $6.5 billion. Under the terms of the agreement, Ampere will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of SoftBank Group and retain its name. As part of the transaction, Ampere’s lead investors – Carlyle and Oracle – are selling their respective positions in Ampere.

↫ SoftBank and Ampere Computing press release

Despite not really knowing what SoftBank does and what their long-term goals are – I doubt anyone does – I hope this at the very least provides Ampere with the funds needed to expand its business. At this point, the only serious options for Arm-based hardware are either Apple or Qualcomm, and we could really use more players. Ampere’s hardware is impressive, but difficult to buy and expensive, and graphics card support is patchy, at best.

What Ampere needs is more investment, and more OEMs picking up their chips. An Ampere workstation is incredibly high on my list of machines to test for OSNews (perhaps a System76 model?), and it’d be great if economies of scale worked to bring the prices down, possibly allowing Ampere to developer cheaper, more affordable variants for us mere mortals, too. I would love to build an Arm workstation in much the same way we build regular x86 PCs today, but I feel like that’s still far off.

I have no idea if SoftBank is the right kind of company to make this possible, but one can dream.

What do SourceHut, GNOME’s GitLab, and KDE’s GitLab have in common, other than all three of them being forges? Well, it turns out all three of them have been dealing with immense amounts of traffic from “AI” scrapers, who are effectively performing DDoS attacks with such ferocity it’s bringing down the infrastructures of these major open source projects. Being open source, and thus publicly accessible, means these scrapers have unlimited access, unlike with proprietary projects.

These “AI” scrapers do not respect robots.txt, and have so many expensive endpoints it’s putting insane amounts of pressure on infrastructure. Of course, they use random user agents from an effectively infinite number of IP addresses. Blocking is a game of whack-a-mole you can’t win, and so the GNOME project is using a rather nuclear option called Anubis now, which aims to block “AI” scrapers with a heavy-handed approach that sometimes blocks real, genuine users as well.

The numbers are insane, as Niccolò Venerandi at Libre News details.

Over Mastodon, one GNOME sysadmin, Bart Piotrowski, kindly shared some numbers to let people fully understand the scope of the problem. According to him, in around two hours and a half they received 81k total requests, and out of those only 3% passed Anubi’s proof of work, hinting at 97% of the traffic being bots – an insane number!

↫ Niccolò Venerandi at Libre News

Fedora is another project dealing with these attacks, with infrastructure sometimes being down for weeks as a result. Inkscape, LWN, Frama Software, Diaspora, and many more – they’re all dealing with the same problem: the vast majority of the traffic to their websites and infrastructure now comes from attacks by “AI” scrapers. Sadly, there’s doesn’t seem to be a reliable way to defend against these attacks just yet, so sysadmins and webmasters are wasting a ton of time, money, and resources fending off the hungry “AI” hordes.

These “AI” companies are raking in billions and billions of dollars from investors and governments the world over, trying to build dead-end text generators while sucking up huge amounts of data and wasting massive amounts of resources from, in this case, open source projects. If no other solutions can be found, the end game here could be that open source projects will start to make their bug reporting tools and code repositories much harder and potentially even impossible to access without jumping through a massive amount of hoops.

Everything about this “AI” bubble is gross, and I can’t wait for this bubble to pop so a semblance of sanity can return to the technology world. Until the next hype train rolls into the station, of course.

As is tradition.

Long ago, during the time of creation, I confidently waved my hand and allocated a 1GB ESP partition and a 1GB boot partition, thinking to myself with a confident smile that this would surely be more than enough for the foreseeable future. However, this foreseeable future quickly vanished along with my smile. What was bound to happen eventually came, but I didn’t expect it to arrive so soon. What could possibly require such a large boot partition? And how should we resolve this? Here, I would like to introduce the boot partition issue I encountered, as well as temporary coping methods and final solutions, mentioning the problems encountered along the way for reference.

↫ fernvenue

Some of us will definitely run into this issue at some point, so if you’re doing a fresh installation it might make sense to allocate a bit more space to your boot partition. If you have a running system and are bumping into the limitations of your boot partition and don’t want to reinstall, the linked article provides some possible solutions.

One of the two major open source desktop environments, GNOME, just released version 48, and it’s got some very big and welcome improvements. First and foremost there’s dynamic triple-buffering, a feature that took over five years of extensive testing to get ready. It will improve the smoothness and fluidity of animations and other movements on the screen, as it did for KDE when it landed there in the middle of last year.

GNOME 48 also brings notification stacking, combining notifications from the same source, improvements to the new default image viewer such as image editing features, a number of digital well-being options, as well as the introduction of a new, basic audio player designed explicitly for quickly playing individual audio files. There’s also a few changes to GNOME’s text editor, and following in KDE’s recent footsteps, GNOME 48 also brings HDR support.

Another major change are the new default fonts. Finally, Cantarell is gone, replaced by slightly modified versions of Inter and Iosevka. Considering I absolutely adore Inter and installing and setting it as my main font is literally the first thing I do on any system that allows me to, I’m fully behind this change. Inter is exceptional in that it renders great in both high and low DPI environments, and its readability is outstanding.

GNOME 48 will make its way to your distribution’s repositories soon enough.