A new lobbying group, dubbed the Freedom Cities Coalition, wants to convince President Trump and Congress to authorize the creation of new special development zones within the U.S. These zones would allow wealthy investors to write their own laws and set up their own governance structures which would be corporately controlled and wouldn’t involve a traditional bureaucracy. The new zones could also serve as a testbed for weird new technologies without the need for government oversight.

↫ Lucas Ropek

I mean, just in case you weren’t convinced yet these people are utterly insane.

This is the kind of nonsensical libertarian Ayn Rand-inspired wank material dystopian fiction draws a lot of inspiration from, and it never ever ends well for anyone involved, especially not for the poor and lower classes inhabiting such places, because they’re supposed to be warnings, not instruction manuals. The fact that this insipid brand of utter stupidity is even considered by a president of the United States in this day and age should be all the proof you need that he and those around him have the moral compass of the rotting carcass of Margaret Thatcher.

I can’t believe we have to tell these Silicon Valley “geniuses” that lawless corporate towns are bad. In 2025.

The future of the United States is no longer decided in Washington. That ship has sailed. It’s now dictated in the bunkers, private jets, and compounds of an ideological Silicon Valley, by billionaires and wealth extremists intent on treating democracy as a nuisance that must be swatted away. These men – raised on a rabid press that mythologized their existence in their lifetimes, called them Wunderkind and treated them as something above and beyond mere mortality – have consumed a steady diet of libertarian and authoritarian fan fiction and conceived a new order, designed to elevate their lofty egos at any and all cost.

The Internet was supposed to be the great equalizer. It was meant to be a force that shattered hierarchies and gave power to ordinary people. Instead, it enabled the wealth extraction and avarice of a cartel of overfed, over-pampered despots who enriched themselves in the name of innovation, bled the world to the point of near-total collapse, intellectualized their power fetish and now view public institutions as the final obstacles to be dismantled in their megalomanic pursuit of More.

↫ Joan Westenberg

The US has only itself to blame. Let’s hope they don’t drag the rest of us with them.

To meet those goals, we’ve begun work on a native port of the TypeScript compiler and tools. The native implementation will drastically improve editor startup, reduce most build times by 10x, and substantially reduce memory usage. By porting the current codebase, we expect to be able to preview a native implementation of tsc capable of command-line typechecking by mid-2025, with a feature-complete solution for project builds and a language service by the end of the year.

↫ Anders Hejlsberg

It seems Microsoft is porting TypeScript to Go, and WILL eventually offer both “TypeScript (JS)” and “TypeScript (native)” alongside one another during a transition period. TypeScript 6.x will be the JavaScript-based one and will continue to be developed until TypeScript 7.0, the Go-one, is mature enough. During the 6.x release cycle, however, there will be breaking changes and deprecations in preparation for 7.0.

Those are some serious performance improvements, but I’m sure quite a few projects are going to run into issues during the transition period. I hope for them that the 6.x branch remains maintained for long enough to reasonably get everyone on board the new Go version.

I signed up for GlobalTalk in 2024, but never found the time to get a machine set up. Fast-forward to MARCHintosh 2025 and I wasn’t going to let another year go by. This is a series of notes from my experience getting System 7.6 up and running on QEMU 68k on Ubuntu. Hopefully this will help others that might be hitting a roadblock. I certainly hit several!

↫ Cale Mooth

A short and to-the-point guide for those of us who want to partake in GlobalTalk but can’t due to the lack of compatible hardware.

Brother laser printers are popular recommendations for people seeking a printer with none of the nonsense. By nonsense, we mean printers suddenly bricking features, like scanning or printing, if users install third-party cartridges. Some printer firms outright block third-party toner and ink, despite customer blowback and lawsuits. Brother’s laser printers have historically worked fine with non-Brother accessories. A YouTube video posted this week, though, as well as older social media posts, claim that Brother has gone to the dark side and degraded laser printer functionality with third-party cartridges. Brother tells Ars that this isn’t true.

↫ Scharon Harding at Ars Technica

I find this an incredibly interesting story. We all know the printer space is a cursed hellhole of the very worst worst types of enshittification, but Brother seemed like an island of relative calm in a sea of bullshit. In turn, people are so used to printers being shit, that any problem that comes up is automatically explained by malice, which is not entirely unreasonable. Borther insists, though, that it does not break printers using third-party toner or ink through firmware.

Brother does make it very clear that it is standard procedure to only perform troubleshooting on Brother printers using ‘genuine’ Brother ink and toner, which is not entirely unreasonable in my book. There’s no telling what kind of effects third part cartridges – which do contain electronics – have on the rest of the printer, and I don’t think it’s fair to expect Brother to be able to document all of those possible issues. As long as using third-party toner and ink cartridges doesn’t invalidate any warranties, and as long as Brother doesn’t intentionally break printers for using third-party toner and ink, I think Brother meets its obligations to consumers.

If you choose to use third-party ink and toner cartridges in Brother printers, I think it’s only reasonable you remove those during the troubleshooting process to ensure they’re not the cause of any problems you’re experiencing.

For more than a decade, we have a port of the curl library for Genode available. With the use of Sculpt OS as a daily driver as well as the plan to run Goa natively on Sculpt OS by the end of the year, the itch to also port the curl command-line tool became irresistible. Of course this is a perfect territory for using Goa.

In this article, I will share the process of porting the curl command-line tool and shared library in order to guide future porting efforts of other projects.

↫ Johannes Schlatow

A detailed, step-by-step retelling of porting the curl command-line tool and associated libraries to Genode/Sculpt OS. Articles like these are invaluable to anyone trying to port things to Genode and Sculpt OS, as it points to some directions you can explore when encountering errors and hurdles of your own.

Like the other Chrome skins, Microsoft Edge is also moving to disable Manifest v2 extensions, restricting the effectiveness of ad blockers like uBlock Origin. As an advertising company, Microsoft was obviously never going to do the work to keep Manifest v2 support around in Chrome, so this was inevitable. Blocking ads might be a necessary security practice, but why cry over spilled user data, am I right?

Anyway, today:

In early December 2024, Microsoft Threat Intelligence detected a large-scale malvertising campaign that impacted nearly one million devices globally in an opportunistic attack to steal information. The attack originated from illegal streaming websites embedded with malvertising redirectors, leading to an intermediary website where the user was then redirected to GitHub and two other platforms. The campaign impacted a wide range of organizations and industries, including both consumer and enterprise devices, highlighting the indiscriminate nature of the attack.

↫ Microsoft Threat Intelligence

If only there was a type of browser extension that prevents such malvertising attacks from being possible in the first place, and if only support for such browser extensions wasn’t being gutted as we speak.

If only.

With the United States having started an incredibly dumb and destructive trade war with Canada, Mexico, and most likely soon the European Union, there’s quite a few people who want to avoid American products. With how interconnected the global production chain and corporate ownership structures are, it’s often difficult to determine where products actually come from. Luckily, technology can help. There’s online directories like Buy European Made, which lists European companies in all kinds of markets, or European Alternatives, which focuses on listing European alternatives to online services.

As nice as these are, they are quite manual, and require people to actively search around, which is kind of a hassle when you’re making a quick grocery store run. What if we could use image recognition to just take a photo of a product’s box, and have our phone tell us where a product’s made? That’s exactly what Made O’Meter does: take a photo of a product, wait for a few seconds, and it’ll tell you exactly where it’s made. It’s made in Denmark, with the goal to “support Europe, Canada & friends”.

I’ve been trying it out on various products around the house, from groceries like cereals and cookies, to tech products and clothing we just bought that still had the tags on them. Every result turned out to be 100% accurate, and it takes only a few seconds to analyse each photo. It also doesn’t seem to be too fussy with the quality of the photos themselves – it doesn’t care about hands and fingers in the frame, or weirdly-shaped boxes that don’t fit nicely in a view finder. It’s a website, not an app – very platform-agnostic, which is great – and I was using it in Firefox for Android without issue.

If you want to avoid American products, Made O’Meter is a great tool to have with you the next time you order something or run to the store.

Clearly, online search isn’t bad enough yet, so Google is intensifying its efforts to continue speedrunning the downfall of Google Search. They’ve announced they’re going to show even more “AI”-generated answers in Search results, to more people.

Today, we’re sharing that we’ve launched Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews in the U.S. to help with harder questions, starting with coding, advanced math and multimodal queries, with more on the way. With Gemini 2.0’s advanced capabilities, we provide faster and higher quality responses and show AI Overviews more often for these types of queries.

Plus, we’re rolling out to more people: teens can now use AI Overviews, and you’ll no longer need to sign in to get access.

↫ Robby Stein

On top of this, Google is also testing a new search mode where “AI” takes over the entire search experience. Instead of seeing the usual list of links, the entire page of “results” will be generated by “AI”. This feature, called “AI Mode” is opt-in for now. You can opt-in in Labs, but you do need to be a paying Google One AI Premium subscriber. I guess it’s only a matter of time before this “AI Mode” will be the default on Google Search, because it allows Google to keep its users on Google.com, and this makes it easier to show them ads and block out competitors.

We all know where this is going.

But, I hear you say, I use DuckDuckGo! I don’t have to deal with any of this! Well, I’ve got some bad news for you, because DuckDuckGo, too, is greatly expanding its use of “AI” in search. DDG will provide free, anonymous access to various “AI” chatbots, deliver more “AI”-generated search results based on more sources (but still English-only), and more – all without needing to have an account. A few of these features were already available in beta, and are now becoming generally available.

Props to DuckDuckGo for providing a ton of options to turn all of this stuff off, though. They give users quite a bit of control over how often these “AI”-generated search results appear, and you can even turn them off completely. All the “AI” chatbot stuff is delegated to a separate website, and any link to it from the normal search results can be disabled, too. It’s entirely possible to have DuckDuckGo just show a list of regular search results, exactly as it should be.

Let’s hope DDG can keep these values going, because if they, too, start pushing this “AI” nonsense without options to turn it off, I honestly have no idea where else to go.

Back when Java was still a new programming language, Sun had the idea of building a computer specifically designed for Java, unique processor running byte-code as its native machine code and all. This whole endeavour proved to be more complicated than Sun had hoped, and as such, they eventually abandoned the idea of a Java processor in favour of plain SPARC. When the JavaStation shipped, it was a regular SPARC workstation without a hard drive, running something called JavaOS from flash memory.

Since JavaOS is, of course, long gone, what can you do with JavaStation today? Well, you apparently can run NetBSD on it, but it’s quite an ordeal. The JavaStation needs to boot from the network using a combination of RARP, NFS, and more, and surprisingly, this entire setup, including the computer acting as the ‘server’ for the JavaStation, is well-documented and supported by NetBSD. Once you’ve gone through all the steps, you’ll end up with a JavaStation running the latest release of NetBSD, which is pretty cool.

Obviously there is still a lot to do; as you can see postfix isn’t happy, and the swapfile security needs tightening up for a start. But we do now have a functional NetBSD system running on a vintage network computer!

↫ Old Fart’s Almanac

NetBSD’s continued support for the most arcane of hardware will never cease to amaze me.

In October 2026, Microsoft Publisher will reach its end of life. After that time, it will no longer be included in Microsoft 365 and existing on-premises suites will no longer be supported. Microsoft 365 subscribers will no longer be able to open or edit Publisher files in Publisher. Until then, support for Publisher will continue and users can expect the same experience as today.

↫ Microsoft’s Support website

Microsoft Publisher is an application with a long history, and it’s been part of Microsoft Office for almost 35 years. The initial 1.0 version was released all the way back in 1991, and it’s tried to compete with tools like InDesign and QuarkXPress in the desktop publishing market, but it never gained much of a share. Microsoft advises users of Publisher to use a combination of Word, PowerPoint, or Designer instead, which, of course, are all Microsoft products too.

Due to Microsoft’s stupidly complex naming schemes and branding changes over the years, you might assume that the quoted paragraph means Publisher will just stop working for everyone, but that’s not the case. People who have the regular, non-subscription version of Publisher, probably as part of Microsoft Office, will of course be able to keep using it perpetually, just without support. If you use Office through Microsoft 365, however, the application will just… Stop working.

Welcome to the future, I guess.

I’m curious, though – do any of you use Microsoft Publisher, at home or at your work? I assumed the entire desktop publishing market was locked up by things like InDesign and QuarkXPress, and I had almost forgotten Publisher was still a thing in the first place.

How much faster is fastDOOM than regular Doom on a decked-out 486 from 1993?

30% faster without cutting any features! On a demanding map like doom2’s demo1, the gain is even higher, from 16.8 fps to 24.9 fps. That is 48% faster!

I did not suspect that DOOM had left that much on the table. Obviously shipping within one year left little time to optimize. I had to understand how this magic trick happened.

↫ Fabien Sanglard

What follows is an incredibly detailed exploration of why, exactly, fastDOOM is so much faster, by building and benchmarking every version, and even going git commit by git commit to really understand how fastDOOM’s developer, Victor “Viti95” Nieto, achieved these impressive results.

Over the past few years, the tech industry has gone from cushy landing pad for STEM grads to a cesspit of corporate greed, where grueling hours are commonplace, and layoffs could strike at any moment.

Unfortunately for employees of Alphabet, the parent company of Google, the squeeze is just getting started.

↫ Joe Wilkins at Futurism

Sergey Brin, one of the original co-founders of Google who seems to spend most of his time not working at Google, has sent out a company-wide memo demanding everyone working at Google puts in at least 60 hours a week, in the office, to work on “AI” that will eventually replace the very employees he’s demanding work 60 hours a week in the office. Mind you, this is the same Google that has just gone through several rounds of layoffs and made $26.3 billion in profit in a single quarter.

The goal, according to Brin, is for Google to be the first to create an “artificial general intelligence”, you know, that thing we used to call just “AI” until the Silicon Valley scammers got a hold of the term. There’s no indication anyone is even remotely close to anything even remotely related to “AGI”, and it’s highly unlikely the glorified autocomplete they are peddling today are anything more than a very expensive dead end to nowhere, but that’s not stopping him from working his employees to the bone.

At this point in time I feel like the big tech companies are racing towards a cliff, blinded by huge piles of investment money, deafened by each other’s hyperbolic claims and promises, while clueless politicians cheer them on. All of this is going to come crashing down in a spectacular fashion, and of course, the billionaires at the top won’t be the one suffering the consequences.

As is tradition.

Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, has issued a call for the C++ community to defend the programming language, which has been shunned by cybersecurity agencies and technical experts in recent years for its memory safety shortcomings.

C and C++ are built around manual memory management, which can result in memory safety errors, such as out of bounds reads and writes, though both languages can be written and combined with tools and libraries to help minimize that risk. These sorts of bugs, when they do crop up, represent the majority of vulnerabilities in large codebases.

↫ Thomas Claburn at The Register

I mean, it makes sense to me that those responsible for new code to use programming languages that more or less remove the most common class of vulnerabilities. With memory-safe languages like Rust having been around for quite a while now, it’s almost wilful negligence to write new code where security is a priority in anything but such memory-safe languages. Of course, this doesn’t mean you delete any and all existing code – it just means you really need to start writing any new code in safer languages. After all, research shows that even when you only write new code in memory-safe languages, the reduction in vulnerabilities is massive.

This reminds me a lot of those old videos of people responding to then-new laws mandating the use of seat belts in cars. A lot of people didn’t want to put them on, saying things to the tune of “I don’t need one because I’m a good driver”. Even if you are a good driver – which statistically you aren’t – everyone else on the road isn’t. When we see those old videos now, they feel quaint, archaic, and dumb – of course you wear a seat belt, you’d be an irresponsible idiot not to! – but only a few decades ago, those arguments made perfect sense to people.

It won’t be long before the same will apply to people doggedly refusing to use memory-safe languages or libraries/extensions that introduce such safety to existing languages, and Bjarne Stroustrup seems to understand that. Are you really smarter than Bjarne Stroustrup?