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 applications 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.

KDE’s login manager, SDDM, has its share of problems, and as such, a number of KDE developers are working on replacement to fix many of these long-standing issues. So, what exactly is wrong with SDDM as it exists today?

With SDDM, power management is reinvented from scratch with bespoke configuration. We can’t integrate with Plasma’s network management, power management, volume controls, or brightness controls without reinventing them in the desktop-agnostic backend.

SDDM was already having to duplicate too much functionality we have in KDE, which was very frustrating when we’re left maintaining it.

↫ David Edmundson

On top of that, theming is also a big issue with SDDM, as it doesn’t adopt any of the existing Plasma themes, wallpapers, and so on, forcing users to manually makes thse changes for SDDM, and forcing theme developers to make custom themes just for SDDM instead of it just adopting Plasma’s settings. The new login manager they’re working on will instead make use of existing Plasma components and be brought up like Plasma itself, too.

For now, the SDDM replacement is roughly at feature parity with SDDM, but it’s by no means ready for widespread adoption by distributions or users. Developers interested in trying it out can do so, though, and as it mostly looks like the existing default SDDM setup, you won’t even notice anything in day-to-day use.

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.

What if you want to use a web browser like Dillo, which lacks JavaScript support and can’t play audio or video inside the browser?

Dillo doesn’t have the capability to play audio or video directly from the browser, however it can easily offload this task to other programs. This page collects some examples of how to do watch videos and listen to audio tracks or podcasts by using an external player program. In particular we will cover mpv with yt-dlp which supports YouTube and Bandcamp among many other sites.

↫ Dillo website

The way Dillo handles this feels very UNIX-y, in that it will call an external program – mpv and yt-dlp, for instance – to play a YouTube from an “Open in mpv” option in the right-click menu for a link. It’s nothing earth-shattering or revolutionary, of course, but I very much appreciate that Dillo bakes this functionality right in, allowing you to define any such actions and add them to the context menu.

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.

Nvidia releasing its Linux graphics driver as open source is already bearing fruit for alternative operating systems.

As many people already knows, Nvidia published their kernel driver under MIT license: GitHub – NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules: NVIDIA Linux open GPU kernel module source (I will call it NVRM). This driver is very portable and its platform-independent part can be compiled for Haiku with minor effort (but it need to implement OS-specific binding code to be actually useful). This is very valuable for Haiku because Linux kernel GPU drivers are very hard to port and it heavily depends on Linux kernel internals. Unfortunately userland OpenGL/Vulkan driver source code is not published. But as part of Mesa 3D project, new Vulkan driver “NVK” is being developed and is functional already. Mesa NVK driver is using Nouveau as kernel driver, so it can’t be directly used with NVRM kernel driver. NVK source code provides platform abstraction that allows to implement support of other kernel drivers such as NVRM.

I finally managed to make initial port NVRM kernel driver to Haiku and added initial NVRM API support to Mesa NVK Vulkan driver, so NVRM and NVK can work together. Some simple Vulkan tests are working.

↫ X512 on the Haiku forums

Incredibly impressive, and a huge milestone for the Haiku operating system. It supports any Nvidia GPU from the Turing architecture, which I think means Nvidia RTX 20xx and newer, since they have a required microcontroller older GPUs do not have. Of course, this is an early port and a lot of work remains to be done, but it could lead to huge things for Haiku.

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.

There’s no escaping Rust, and the language is leaving its mark everywhere. This time around, Chrome has replaced its use of FreeType with Skrifa, a Rust-based replacement.

Skrifa is written in Rust, and created as a replacement for FreeType to make font processing in Chrome secure for all our users. Skifra takes advantage of Rust’s memory safety, and lets us iterate faster on font technology improvements in Chrome. Moving from FreeType to Skrifa allows us to be both agile and fearless when making changes to our font code. We now spend far less time fixing security bugs, resulting in faster updates, and better code quality.

↫ Dominik Röttsches, Rod Sheeter, and Chad Brokaw

The move to Skrifa is already complete, and it’s being used now by Chrome users on Linux, Android, and ChromeOS, and as a fallback for users on Windows and macOS. The reasons for this change are the same as they always are for replacing existing tools with new tools written in Rust: security. FreeType is a security risk for Chrome, and by replacing it with something written in a memory-safe language like Rust, Google was able to eliminate a whole slew of types of security issues.

To ensure rendering correctness, Google performed a ton of pixel comparison tests to compare FreeType output to Skrifa output. On top of that, Google is continuously running similar tests to ensure no quality degradation sneaks into Skrifa as time progresses.

Whether anyone likes Rust or not, the reality of the matter is that using Rust provides tangible benefits that reduce cost and lower security risks, and as such, its use will keep increasing, and tried and true tools will continue to be replaced by Rust counterparts.

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.

Oracle, the company owned by a guy who purchased a huge chunk of the Kingdom of Hawaii from the Americans, has released Java 24. I’ll be honest and upfront: I just don’t care very much at all about this, as the only interaction I’ve had with Java over the past, I don’t know, 15 years or so, is either because of Minecraft, or because of my obsession with ancient UNIX workstations where Java programs pop up in the weirdest of places. I know Java is massive and used everywhere, but going through the list of changes and improvements does not spark any joy in me at all, and just makes me want to stick my pinky in an electrical socket to make something interesting happen.

If you work with Java, you know all of this stuff already anyway, as you’ve been excitedly trying to impress Nick from accounting with your knowledge of Flexible Constructor Bodies and Quantum-Resistant Module-Lattice-Based Key Encapsulation Mechanisms because he’s just so dreamy and you desperately want to ask him out for a hot cup of coffee, but you’re not sure if he’s married or has a boy or girlfriend so you’re just kind of scoping things out a bit too excitedly and now you’re worried you might be coming off as too desperate for his attention.

Anyway, that’s how offices work, right? I’ve never worked for anyone but myself and office settings induce a deep sense of existential dread in me, so my knowledge of office work, and Java if we’re honest, may be based a bit too much on ’90s sitcoms and dramas. Whatever, Java 24 is here. Do a happy dance.

It’s barely been two months after the announcement that Pebble would return with new watches, and they’re already here – well, sort of. Pebble has announced two new watches for preorder, the Core 2 Duo and the Core Time 2. The former is effectively a Pebble 2, upgraded with new internals, while the Core Time 2 is very similar, but comes with a colour e-ink display and a metal case. They’re up for preorder now at $149 and $225, respectively, with the Core 2 Duo shipping in July, and the Core Time 2 shipping in December.

Alongside this unveil, Eric Migicovsky, the creator of Pebble, also published a blog post detailing the trouble Pebble is and will have with making smartwatches for iOS users. Apple effectively makes it impossible for third parties to make a proper smartwatch for iOS, since access to basic functionality you’d come to expect from such a device are locked by Apple, reserved only for its own Apple Watch. As such, Migicovsky makes it explicitly clear that iOS users who want to buy one of these new Pebbles will are going to have a very degraded experience compared to Android users.

Not only will Android users with Pebble have access to a ton more functionality, any Pebble features that could exist for both Android and iOS users will always come to Android first, and possibly iOS later. In fact, Migicovksy goes as far as suggesting that if you want a Pebble, you should buy an Android phone.

I don’t want to see any tweets or blog posts or complaints or whatever later on about this. I’m publishing this now so you can make an informed decision about whether to buy a new watch or not. If you’re worried about this, the easiest solution is to buy an Android phone.

↫ Eric Migicovsky

I have to hand it to Migicovksy – I love the openness about this, and the fact he’s making this explicitly clear to any prospective buyers. There’s no sugarcoating or PR speak to try and please Tim Cook – he’s putting the blame squarely where it belongs: on Apple. It’s kind of unreal to see such directness about a new product, but as a Dutch person, it feels quite natural. We need more of this style of communication in the technology world, as it makes it much clearer that you’re getting – and not getting.

I do hope that Pebble’s Android support functions without the need for Google Play Services or other proprietary Google code, since it would be great to have a proper, open source smartwatch fully supported by de-Googled Android.

A few months after 0.27.0 was released, we’ve got a small update for Enlightenment today, version 0.27.1. It’s a short list of bugfixes, and one tiny new feature: you can now use the scroll wheel to change the volume when your cursor is hovering over the mixer controls.

That’s it. That’s the release.

Settle down children, it’s time for another great article by Cameron Kaiser. This time, they’re going to tell us about the DEC Professional 380 running PRO/VENIX.

The Pro 380 upgraded to the beefier J-11 (“Jaws”) CPU from the PDP-11/73, running two to three times faster than the 325 and 350. It had faster RAM and came with more of it, and boasted quicker graphics with double the vertical resolution built right into the logic board. The 380 still has its faults, notably being two-thirds the speed of the 11/73 and having no cache, plus all of the 325/350’s incompatibilities. Taken on its merits, though, it’s a tank of a machine, a reasonably powerful workstation, and the most practical PDP-adjacent thing you can actually slap on a (large) desk.

This particular unit is one of the few artifacts I have left from a massive DEC haul almost twelve years ago. It runs PRO/VENIX, the only official DEC Unix option for the Pros, but in its less common final release (we’ll talk about versions of Venix). I don’t trust the clanky ST-506 hard drive anymore, so today we’ll convert it to solid state and double its base RAM to make it even more professional, and then play around in VENIX some for a taste of old-school classic Unix — after, of course, some history.

↫ Cameron Kaiser

Detailed, interesting, fascinating, and full of photos as always.

In 1994, a single Macintosh Performa model, the 550, came from the factory with a dedicated, hidden recovery partition that contained a System 7 system folder and a small application that would be set as bootable if the main operating system failed to boot. This application would then run, allowing you to recover your Mac using the system folder inside the recovery partition. This feature was apparently so obscure, few people knew it existed, and nobody had access to the original contents of the recovery partition anymore.

It took Doug Brown a lot of searching to find a copy of this recovery partition. The issue is that nobody really knows how this partition is populated with the recovery data, so the only way to explore its contents was to somehow find a Performa 550 hard drive with a specific version of Mac OS that had never been reformatted after leaving the factory.

The thing is, this whole functionality was super obscure. It’s understandable that people weren’t familiar with it. Apple publicly stated it was only included with this one specific Performa model. Their own documentation also said that it would be lost if you reformatted the hard drive. It was hiding in the background, so nobody really knew it was there, let alone thought about saving it. Also, I can say that the first thing a lot of people do when they obtain a classic computer is erase it in order to restore it to the factory state. Little did anyone know, if they reformatted the hard drive on a Performa 550, they could have been wiping out rare data that hadn’t been preserved!

↫ Doug Brown

Brown found a copy, and managed to get the whole original functionality working again. It’s a fairly basic way of doing this, but we shouldn’t forget we’re talking 1994 here, and I don’t think any other operating system at the time had the ability to recover from an unbootable state like this. Like Brown, I wonder why it was abandoned so quickly. Perhaps Apple was unwilling to sacrifice the hard drive space?

Groundbreaking or not, it’s still great to have this recovered and preserved for the ages.