Raymond Chen published a blog post about how a crappy uninstaller on Windows caused a mysterious spike in the number of Explorer (Windows’ graphical shell) crashes. It turns out the buggy uninstaller caused repeated crashes in the 32bit version of Explorer on 64bit systems, and – hold on a minute. The how many bits on the what now?

The 32-bit version of Explorer exists for backward compatibility with 32-bit programs. This is not the copy of Explorer that is handling your taskbar or desktop or File Explorer windows. So if the 32-bit Explorer is running on a 64-bit system, it’s because some other program is using it to do some dirty work.

↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing

So I had no idea that 64bit Windows included a copy of the 32bit Explorer for backwards compatibility. It obviously makes sense, but I just never stopped to think about it. This made me wonder though if you could go nuts and do something really dumb: could you somehow trick 64bit Windows into running this 32bit copy of Explorer as its shell? You’d be running 32bit Explorer on 64bit Windows using the 32bit WoW64 binaries where you just pulled the 32bit Explorer binary from, which seems like a really nonsensical thing to do.

Since there’s no longer any 32bit builds of Windows 11, you also can’t just copy over the 32bit Explorer from a 32bit Windows 11 build and achieve the same goal that way, so you’d really have to go digging around in WoW64 to get 32bit versions. I guess the answer to this question depends on just how complete this copy of 32bit Explorer really is, and if Windows has any defenses or triggers in place to prevent someone from doing something this uselessly stupid. Of course, there’s no practical reason to do any of this and it makes very little sense, but it might be a fun hacking project.

Most likely the Windows experts among you are wondering what kind of utterly deranged new designer drug I’m on, but I was always told that sometimes, the dumbest questions can lead to the most interesting answers, so here we are.

Not too long ago I had a need and an opportunity to re-acquaint myself with the mechanism used for software emulation of the 8087 FPU on 8086/8088 machines.

↫ Michal Necasek

Look, when a Michal Necasek article starts out like this, you know you’re in for a learnin’ ol’ time.

The 8087 was a floating-point coprocessor for the 8086 and 8088 processors, since back in those early days, processors did not include an integrated floating-point unit. It wouldn’t be until the release of the 486DX, in 1989, that Intel would integrate an FPU inside the processor itself, negating the need for a separate chip and socket. Interestingly enough, Intel also released a cut-down version of the 486 with the FPU removed, the 486SX, for which an optional external FPU did exist.

In that reading „AI“ is a machine for the creation of epistemic injustice and the replacement of truth with what a tech elite wants it to be in order to control the population. This is a Fascist project that not so subtly aligns with Fascism’s totalitarian will to power and control as well as its reliance in replacing reasoning and debate with belief in power and the leader.

↫ Jürgen Geute

The purpose of a system is what it does, and what “AI” does is stunt users’ own abilities and development and concentrate power and wealth even further in the hands of a very small privileged few – a privileged few who consistently espouse fascist ideology and promote and implement fascist ideas. Jürgen Geute lays it out in much more detail backed by solid references and concrete examples, but the conclusion is clear.

And uncomfortable to many, as such conclusions always are.

I’m not sure many OSNews readers still use Ubuntu as their operating system of choice, and from the release announcement of today’s Ubuntu 26.04 it’s clear why that’s the case.

Resolute Raccoon builds on the resilience-focused improvements introduced in interim releases, with TPM-backed full-disk encryption, improved support for application permission prompting, Livepatch updates for Arm-based servers, and Rust-based utilities for enhanced memory safety. This release brings native support for industry-leading AI/ML toolkits like NVIDIA CUDA and AMD ROCm, making Ubuntu 26.04 LTS the ideal platform for AI development and production workloads. 

↫ Canonical press release

It’s obvious where Canonical’s focus lies with Ubuntu, and us desktop people who don’t like “AI” aren’t it. On top of all the “AI” nonsense, this new version comes with all the latest versions of the various open source components that make up a Linux distribution, as well as a slew of Rust-based replacements for core CLI tools, like sudo-rs, uutils coreutils, and more.

All the derivative release of Ubuntu, like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and others, will also be updated over the coming days. If you’re already running any of these, updating won’t be a surprise to you.

Despite years of apparent stagnation and reported mass layoffs, it seems the Solaris team at Oracle has found somewhat of a renewed stride recently. Both branches of Solaris – the one for paying customers (SRU) and the free one for enthusiasts (CBE) – are receiving regular updates again, and there seems to be a more concerted effort to let the outside world know, too. We’ve got another update to the SRU branch this week which brings updates to a few important open source packages, like Django, Firefox, Thunderbird, Golang, and others, to address security issues.

In addition, this update marks as a change in the release cadence for the commercial branch of Solaris. From here on out, there will be two “Critical Patch Updates” per quarter to address security issues, followed by a Support Repository Update containing new features and larger changes.

I need to post about this because if I don’t, people will get mad.

Cook will continue on as Apple CEO through the summer, with Ternus set to join Apple’s Board of Directors and take over as CEO on September 1, 2026. Cook is going to transition to chairman of the board at Apple, and he will “assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.”

↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors

This concludes OSNews’ coverage of Keeping Up With the Yacht Class, but rest assured, every other tech site will be milking this for weeks to come. You will still be worrying about how to pay for your next tank of gas.

LXQt, the desktop environment which is effectively to KDE what Xfce is to GNOME, has released version 2.4.0. Quite a few changes in this release are further refinements and fixes related to LXQt’s adoption of Wayland, but there are also a ton of small fixes, improvements, and small new features that have nothing to do with Wayland at all. There are also a few layout cleanups to make some dialogs and panels look a bit tidier and nicer.

Note that LXQt supports both X11 and Wayland equally, and the choice of which to use is up to you. If you’re using LXQt, you’ve already seen a few of these changes in point releases of its components, so not everything listed in the release notes might be news to you.

The title of my article on age verification in Linux and other operating systems had a “for now” added for a reason, and here we are, with two members of the US Congress introducing a bill to add age verification to operating systems. The text of the proposed bill was only published today, and it’s incredibly vague and wishy-washy, without any clear definitions and ton of open-ended questions.

Still, if passed, the bill would require actual age verification, instead of mere voluntary age reporting that current state-level bills cover. It also seems to eschew the concept of age brackets, giving application developers access to specific ages of users instead. It’s a vague mess of a bill that no sane person would ever want passed, but alas, sanity is a rare commodity these days, especially in US Congress.

It’s introduced by Democrat Josh Gottheimer and Republican Elise M. Stefanik, so it has that bipartisan sheen to it, which could increase its odds of going anywhere. At the same time, though, US Congress is about as useful as a box of matches during a house fire, so for all we know, this will end up going nowhere as its members focus on doing absolutely nothing to reign in the flock of coked-up headless chickens passing for an executive branch over there.

If something like this gets passed, every US-based operating system – which includes most open source operating systems and Linux distributions – will probably fall in line when faced with massive fines and legal pressure. This isn’t going to be pretty.

Another Haiku monthly activity report, but this time around, there’s actually a big ticket item. Haiku has been in a pretty solid and stable state for a while now, so the activity reports have been dominated by fairly small, obscure changes, but during March a major milestone was reached for the ARM64 port.

smrobtzz contributed the bulk of the work, including fixes for building on macOS on ARM64, drivers for the Apple S5L UART, fixes to the kernel base address, clearing the frame pointer before entering the kernel, mapping physical memory correctly, the basics for userland, and more. SED4906 contributed some fixes to the bootloader page mapping, and runtime_loader’s page-size checks.

Combined, these changes allow the ARM64 port to get to the desktop in QEMU. There’s a forum thread, complete with screenshots, for anyone interested in following along.

↫ waddlesplash

While it’s only in QEMU, this is still a major achievement and paves the way for more people to work on the ARM64 port, possibly increasing its health. There’s tons of smaller changes and fixes all over the place, too, as usual, and the team mentions beta 6 isn’t quite ready yet, still. Don’t let that stop you from just downloading the latest nightly, though – Haiku is mature enough to use it.

The editor in chief of this blog was born in 2004. She uses the 1997 window manager, Enlightenment E16, daily. In this article, I describe the process of fixing a show-stopping, rare bug that dates back to 2006 in the codebase. Surprisingly, the issue has roots in a faulty implementation of Newton’s algorithm.

↫ Kamila Szewczyk

I’m not going to pretend to understand any of this, but I know you people do. Enjoy.

A few weeks ago, Microsoft made some concrete promises about fixing and improving Windows, and among them was removing useless “AI” integrations. Applications like Notepad, Snipping Tool, and others would see their “AI” features removed. Well, it turns out Microsoft employs a very fringe definition of the concept.

Microsoft seems to have stripped away mentions of the “Copilot” brand in the Windows Insider version of the Notepad app. The Copilot button in the toolbar is gone, and instead, you’ll find a writing icon which will present you AI-powered writing assistance, such as rewrite, summarize, tone modification, format configuration, and more. Additionally, “AI features” in Notepad settings has been renamed to “Advanced features” and it allows users to toggle off AI capabilities within the app.

↫ Usama Jawad at Neowin

If the recent changes to Notepad are any indication, it seems Microsoft is, actually, not at all going to “reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points”, as they worded it, but is merely just going to rename these features so they aren’t so ostentatiously present. At least, that seems to be the plan for Notepad, and we’ll have to see if they have the same plans for the other applications. I mean, they have to push “AI” or look like fools.

I just don’t understand how a company like Microsoft can be so utterly terrible at communication. While I personally would want all “AI” features yeeted straight from Windows, I’m sure a ton of people are just fine with the features being less in-your-face and stuffed inside a normal menu alongside all the other normal features. They could’ve just been honest about their intentions, and it would’ve been so much better.

Like virtually every other technology company, Microsoft just seems incapable of not lying.

Ever heard of a condition called bixonimania? Did you search the internet or ask your “AI” girlfriend about some symptoms you were experiencing, and this was its answer? Well…

The condition doesn’t appear in the standard medical literature — because it doesn’t exist. It’s the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. “I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database,” she says.

↫ Chris Stokel-Walker at Nature

And “AI” ate it up like quality chocolate. It started appearing in the answers from all the popular “AI” tools within weeks, and later even started showing up as references in published literature, indicating that scientists copy/paste references without actually reading them. This is clearly a deeply concerning experiment, and highlights there may be many, many more nonsensical, fake studies being picked up by “AI” tools.

Of course, I hear you say, it’s not like propagating fake or terrible studies is the sole domain of “AI”, as there are countless cases of this happening among actual real researchers and scientists, too. The issue, though, is that the fake studies concerning “bixonimania” were intentionally made to be as silly and obviously ridiculous as possible. It references Starfleet Acadamy, the lab aboard the Enterprise, the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and many other fake references instantly recognisable as such by real humans.

In fact, the studies even specifically mention that “this entire paper is made up” and “fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group”. It would take any human only a few seconds after opening one of these papers to realise they’re entirely fake – yet, the world’s most advanced “AI” tools gobbled them up and spit them back out as pure fact within mere weeks of their publication

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. After all, “AI” tools have no understanding, no intelligence, no context, and they can’t actually make sense of anything. They are glorified pachinko machines with the output – the ball – tumbling down the most likely path between the pins based on nothing but chance and which pins it has already hit. “AI” output understands the world about as much as the pachinko ball does, and as such, can’t pick up on even the most obvious of cues that something is a fake or a forgery.

It won’t be long before truly nefarious forces start doing this very same thing. Why build, staff, and maintain a troll farm when you can just have “AI” generate intentional misinformation which will then be spread and pushed by even more “AI”? Remember, it took one malicious asshole just one long since retracted fake paper to convince millions that vaccines cause autism. I shudder to think how many people are accepting anything “AI” says as gospel.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that companies – and for our field, technology companies specifically – working with the defense industry tends to raise eyebrows. With things like the genocide in Gaza, the threats of genocide and war crimes against Iran, the mass murder in Lebanon, it’s no surprise that western companies working with the militaries and defense companies involved in these atrocities are receiving some serious backlash.

With that in mind, it seems Red Hat, owned by IBM, is desperately trying to scrub a certain white paper from the internet. Titled “Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge”, the 2024 white paper details how Red Hat’s products and technologies can make it easier and faster to, well, kill people. Links to the white paper throw up 404s now, but it can still easily be found on the Wayback Machine and other places.

It’s got some disturbingly euphemistic content.

The find, fix, track, target, engage, assess (F2T2EA) process requires ubiquitous access to data at the strategic, operational and tactical levels. Red Hat Device Edge embeds captured, analyzed, and federated data sets in a manner that positions the warfighter to use artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to increase the accuracy of airborne targeting and mission-guidance systems.

[…]

Delivering near real-time data from sensor pods directly to airmen, accelerating the sensor-to-shooter cycle.

[…]

Sharing near real-time sensor fusion data with joint and multinational forces to increase awareness, survivability, and lethality.

[…]

The new software enabled the Stalker to deploy updated, AI-based automated target recognition capabilities.

[…]

If the target is an adversary tracked vehicle on the far side of a ridge, a UAS carrying a server running Red Hat Device Edge could transmit video and metadata directly to shooters.

↫ Red Hat white paper titled “Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge”

I don’t think there’s something inherently wrong with working together with your nation’s military or defense companies, but that all hinges on what, exactly, said military is doing and how those defense companies’ products are being used. The focus should be on national defense, aid during disasters, and responding to the legitimate requests of sovereign, democratic nations to come to their defense (e.g. helping Ukraine fight off the Russian invasion).

There’s always going to be difficult grey areas, but any military or defense company supporting the genocide in Gaza or supplying weapons to kill women and children in Iran is unequivocally wrong, morally reprehensible, and downright illegal on both an international and national level. It clearly seems someone at Red Hat feels the same way, as the company has been trying really hard to memory-hole this particular white paper, and considering its word choices and the state of the world today, it’s easy to see why.

Of course, the internet never forgets, and I certainly don’t intend to let something like this slide. We all know companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Google have no qualms about making a few bucks from a genocide or two, but it always feels a bit more traitorous to the cause when it’s an open source company doing the profiting. It feels like Red Hat is trying to have its cake and eat it too, by, as an IBM subsidiary, trying to both profit from the vast sums of money sloshing around in the US military industrial complex as well as maintain its image as a scrappy open source business success story shitting bunnies and rainbows.

It’s a long time ago now that Red Hat felt like a genuine part of the open source community. Most of us – both outside and inside of Red Hat, I’m sure – have been well aware for a long time now that those days are well behind us, and I guess Red Hat doesn’t like seeing its kill cycle this compressed.

If you want to run FreeBSD on a laptop, you’re often yanked back to the Linux world of 20 years ago, with many components and parts not working and other issues such as sleep and wake problems. FreeBSD has been hard at work improving the experience of using FreeBSD on laptops, and now this has resulted in a list of laptops which work effortlessly with the venerable operating system.

There’s only about 10 laptops on the list so far, but they do span a range of affordability and age, with some of them surely being quite decent bargains on eBay or whatever other used stuff marketplace you use. If you want to use FreeBSD on a laptop, but don’t want to face any surprises or do any difficult setup, get one of the laptops on this list – a list which will surely expand over time.