You know what could really use a dose of “AI”? Your BIOS. aiBIOS leverages an LLM to integrate AI capabilities into Insyde Software’s flagship firmware solution, InsydeH2O® UEFI BIOS. It provides the ability to interpret the PC user’s request, analyze their specific hardware, and parse through the LLM’s extensive knowledge base of BIOS and computer terminology to make the appropriate changes to the BIOS Setup. This breakthrough technology helps address a major hurdle for PC users that require or desire changes to their BIOS Setup for their personal computers but do not fully understand the meaning of the settings available to them. ↫ Insyde press release Google told users to put glue on pizzas and eat rocks, so I’m sure the combined efforts of a BIOS maker will surely not pose any problems when automatically changing BIOS settings based on the requests of users who do not really understand what they’re doing. This surely is a recipe for success, and I can’t wait to tell my BIOS to enable XMP, only for it to disable hyperthreading, change the boot order to only allow booting from the non-existent floppy drive, and to force the use of the integrated GPU when I’m actually using a dedicated one. This is going to be just fine.
Starlark is a small programming language, designed as a simple dialect of Python and intended primarily for embedded use in applications. Some people might say it’s a bit like Lua with Python syntax, but I think there are many interesting bits to discuss. The language is now open-source and used in many other applications and companies. As I led the design and implementation of Starlark, I’d like to write a bit more about it. ↫ Laurent Le Brun I’m sure there’s a few among you will like this.
The short version is this: In its current form, Recall takes screenshots and uses OCR to grab the information on your screen; it then writes the contents of windows plus records of different user interactions in a locally stored SQLite database to track your activity. Data is stored on a per-app basis, presumably to make it easier for Microsoft’s app-exclusion feature to work. Beaumont says “several days” of data amounted to a database around 90KB in size. In our usage, screenshots taken by Recall on a PC with a 2560×1440 screen come in at 500KB or 600KB apiece (Recall saves screenshots at your PC’s native resolution, minus the taskbar area). Recall works locally thanks to Azure AI code that runs on your device, and it works without Internet connectivity and without a Microsoft account. Data is encrypted at rest, sort of, at least insofar as your entire drive is generally encrypted when your PC is either signed into a Microsoft account or has Bitlocker turned on. But in its current form, Beaumont says Recall has “gaps you can drive a plane through” that make it trivially easy to grab and scan through a user’s Recall database if you either (1) have local access to the machine and can log into any account (not just the account of the user whose database you’re trying to see), or (2) are using a PC infected with some kind of info-stealer virus that can quickly transfer the SQLite database to another system. ↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica It really does seem Recall is kind of a mess in the security department, and it has a certain rushed quality about it. All the screenshots are saved in an AppData folder, and data pulled from those screenshots is stored in a local SQLite database that happens to be entirely unencrypted. TotalRecall, a tool developed by Alexander Hagenah, will neatly pull the data from Recall for you without any hassle or issues. This truly is a security nightmare. Aside from all the obvious issues this presents, such as making it even easier for law enforcement to gain access to pretty much everything you do online, something especially troubling for minorities or in countries with less-than-stellar police departments, Recall also presents a whole host of other problems. Imagine being in an abusive relationship, and the abusive partner demanding Recall be left on at all times to exert even more control. Imagine an unscrupulous employee abusing Recall to steal sensitive information from a company for a competitor. Imagine living in some backwards part of a country with controlling religious parents, and you happen to be gay. The problems here are endless. The fact you can turn Recall off doesn’t mean much, since in the above examples, turning it off is not an option since there are controlling people involved who will demand you keep it on. Browser history and other forms of history in your computer exist as well, of course, but they’re not always as easy to parse, they’re easier to manipulate, sanitise, and temporarily hide. Recall just combines all of this and puts a neat little bow on it, ready to be abused by anyone with bad intentions. Recall is ill-conceived, badly implemented, and a solution looking for a problem, that in an of itself creates tons of other problems. I hope Microsoft reconsiders, but in a world where “AI” makes investors go nuts, I doubt we’ll see a sudden sense of clarity coming out of Redmond.
OpenAI’s efforts to produce less factually false output from its ChatGPT chatbot are not enough to ensure full compliance with European Union data rules, a task force at the EU’s privacy watchdog said. “Although the measures taken in order to comply with the transparency principle are beneficial to avoid misinterpretation of the output of ChatGPT, they are not sufficient to comply with the data accuracy principle,” the task force said in a report released on its website on Friday. ↫ Tassilo Hummel at Reuters I’m glad at least some authorities are taking the wildly inaccurate nonsense outputs of many “AI” tools seriously. I’m not entirely sure when a tool like ChatGPT can be considered “accurate”, but whatever it is now, is not it.
GNU Nano, by far my favourite text editor when using the command line, released version 8.0 recently – and by recently I mean a month ago – and in it, there’s a pretty interesting additional feature that should make using Nano a little bit more straightforward for those not used to its key combinations. Command-line option –modernbindings (-/) makes ^Q quit, ^X cut, ^C copy, ^V paste, ^Z undo, ^Y redo, ^O open a file, ^W write a file, ^R replace, ^G find again, ^D find again backwards, ^A set the mark, ^T jump to a line, ^P show the position, and ^E execute. ↫ GNU Nano’s news page Basically, this option makes Nano’s key bindings a bit more in line with what you might expect as someone coming from a graphical environment. Of course, Nano’s keybindings are listed at the bottom of its user interface, but it’s still nice to have the option of making them more in line with the wider computing world. Instead of using the command-line option, you can also change the name of Nano’s executable, or a symlink to it, to start with “e”.
Remember when I said the honeymoon with AMD’s consumer-friendly chipset and socket support policy would eventually end? Well, while this is not exactly that, it will make a lot of people very unhappy. While AMD, as does any other company, was boastful about its product touting the 16% IPC boost on Zen 5 and the big AI performance leap delivering up to 50 TOPS on the NPU side, an interesting drawback of the Ryzen AI 300 series that has managed to avoid getting media attention is the lack of support for Windows 10. While this was just an unconfirmed rumour last month even though it was suggested by a supposed Lenovo China manager, we have now got confirmation from AMD itself that the report, that Strix point and newer CPUs and APUs will not support Windows 10 is true. ↫ Sayan Sen at NeoWin Official support for Windows 10 is ending next year, so there is some reason to AMD’s madness, but at the same time, almost 70% of Windows users are currently using Windows 10, and leaving those users behind might not be the best idea AMD ever had. There is an argument to be made that at least a reasonable number of these people are still using Windows 10 not out of their own volition, but because of Microsoft’s strict hardware requirements, and as such, anyone buying a new AMD machine will just opt for the latest version of Windows out of habit, but I still think there’s a sizable contingent of people who actively choose Windows 10 over 11 for a whole host of reasons. On a strongly related note, despite 2025 marking the end of regular support for Windows 10, Microsoft yesterday announced it’s expanding the the number of Insider channels for new Windows 10 features from one to two, adding a Beta tier below the existing Release Preview tier. Microsoft, too, will have to come to terms with the fact that with 70% of Windows users using Windows 10, they might not even be able to drop support for the operating system as early as next year. While this 70% number will surely slowly decrease over the next 12 months, with many people simply being unable to upgrade due to hardware limitations, I have a suspicion we might see an extension on that 2025 date.
A new point release in the FreeBSD 14 series – the first one, in fact, not counting 14.0. FreeBSD 14.1 adds SIMD implementations of string and memory operations on amd64 in the C library to improve performance, improvements to the sound system, such as device hotplug support, and the latest versions of OpenZFS, clang/llvm, and OpenSSH. FreeBSD 14.0 users can just upgrade to FreeBSD 14.1, or you can do a fresh install, of course.
Hot on the heels of AMD, here’s Intel’s next-generation processor, this time for the laptop market. Overall, Lunar Lake represents their second generation of disaggregated SoC architecture for the mobile market, replacing the Meteor Lake architecture in the lower-end space. At this time, Intel has disclosed that it uses a 4P+4E (8 core) design, with hyper-threading/SMT disabled, so the total thread count supported by the processor is simply the number of CPU cores, e.g., 4P+4E/8T. ↫ Gavin Bonshor at AnandTech The most significant change in Lunar Lake, however, has nothing to do with IPC improvements, core counts, or power usage. No, the massive sea change here is that Lunar Lake will do away with separate memory sticks, instead opting for on-die memory at a maximum of 32GB LPDDR5X. This is very similar to how Apple packages its memory on the M dies, and yes, this also means that as far as thin Intel laptops go, you’ll no longer be able to upgrade your memory after purchase. You choose your desired amount of memory at purchase, and that’s what you’ll be stuck with. Buyer beware, I suppose. We can only hope Intel isn’t going to default to 8GB.
About a week ago, there has been a little addition to the 3dbrew wiki page about 3DS cartridges (carts) that outlines the technical details of how the 3DS cartridge controller and a 3DS cartridge talk to each other. I would like to take this opportunity to also include the 3DS itself in the conversation to illuminate which part of which device performs which step. I will then proceed to outline where I think the corresponding design decisions originate. Finally, I will conclude with some concrete ideas for improvement. ↫ Forbidden Tempura Everything you ever wanted to know about 3DS cartridges and how they interact with the 3DS.
We’ve got some possibly sad, possibly great news. Today, Andreas Kling, the amazing developer who started SerenityOS as a way to regain a sense or normalcy after completing his drug rehab program, has announced he’s stepping down as the ‘big dictator for life’ of the SerenityOS project, handing leadership over the maintainer group. The other half of the coin, however, is that Kling will officially fork Ladybird, the cross-platform web browser that originated as part of SerenityOS, turning it into a proper, separate project. Personally, for the past two years, I’ve been almost entirely focused on Ladybird, a new web browser that started as a simple HTML viewer for SerenityOS. When Ladybird became a cross-platform project in 2022, I switched all my attention to the Linux version, as testing on Linux was much easier and didn’t require booting into SerenityOS. Time flew by, and now I can’t remember the last time I worked on something in SerenityOS that wasn’t related to Ladybird. ↫ Andreas Kling If you know a little bit about Kling’s career, it’s not entirely surprising that his heart lies with working on a browser engine. He originally worked at Nokia, and then at Apple in San Francisco on WebKit, and there’s most likely some code that he’s written in the browser you’re using right now (except, perhaps, for us Firefox users). As such, it makes sense that once Ladybird grew into something more than just a simple HTML viewer, he’d be focusing on it a lot. As part of the fork, Ladybird will focus entirely on Linux and macOS, and drop SerenityOS as a target. This may seem weird at first, but this is an entirely amicable and planned step, as this allows Ladybird to adopt, use, and integrate third party code, something SerenityOS does not allow. In addition, many of these open source projects Ladybird couldn’t really use anyway because they simply didn’t exist for SerenityOS in the first place. This decision creates a lot of breathing room and flexibility for both projects. Ladybird was getting a lot of attention from outside of SerenityOS circles, from large donations to code contributions. I’m not entirely surprised by this step, and I really hope it’s going to be the beginning of something great. We really need new and competitive browser engines to push the web forward, and alongside Servo, it now seems Ladybird has also picked up the baton. What this will mean for SerenityOS remains to be seen. As Kling said, he hasn’t really been involved with SerenityOS outside of Ladybird work for two years now, so it seems the rest of the contributors were already doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I hope this doesn’t mean the project will peter out, since it has a certain flair few other operating systems have.
Another month, another Redox progress report. The Rust-based operating system, headed by system76 engineer Jeremy Soller, has made a big move by replacing Redox’ Orbital file manager, text editor and terminal by their COSMIC counterparts, COSMIC Files, COSMIC Editor and COSMIC Terminal, in the default Redox installation. COSMIC is the Rust-based desktop environment system76 is currently developing for their Linux distribution, Pop!_OS. You really have to start wondering what the long-term goals for Redox really are here. I’m not saying they’re intending to replace Linux with it – that’d be suicide – but the steady progress towards a general purpose operating system is undeniable.
There’s no denying that not everyone is happy with the state of the GTK world, and I, too, have argued that GNOME’s massive presence and seeming unwillingness to cooperate with or even consider the existence of other GTK-based desktop environments is doing real, measurable harm to the likes of Xfce, Cinnamon, and others. A major root cause is a feeling that GTK is nothing but a vessel for GNOME, and that the project doesn’t really seem to care much about anyone else. GNOME Foundation member and all-round very kind person Hari Rana, also known as TheEvilSkeleton, penned a blog post highlighting the other side of the story. In essence, what it comes down to, according to Rana, is that it’s better for everyone if GNOME-specific widgets are moved out of GTK, and into something else – first libhandy, and now its succesor libadwaita, splitting the toolkit (GTK) from the design language (libadwaita). This allows GNOME developers to focus on, well, GNOME, and frees up time for GTK developers to focus on generic widgets that aren’t specific to GNOME. Thanks to the removal of GNOME widgets from GTK 4, GTK developers can continue to work on general-purpose widgets, without being influenced or restricted in any way by the GNOME HIG. Developers of cross-platform GTK 3 apps that rely exclusively on general-purpose widgets can be more confident that GTK 4 won’t remove these widgets, and hopefully enjoy the benefits that GTK 4 offers. ↫ Hari Rana From a GNOME standpoint, this makes perfect sense, and I can obviously see the benefits for them. However, what this entire post seems to ignore is that the main effect of the split between GTK 4 and libadwaita is that various GTK applications, now targeting libadwaita because of GNOME’s immense popularity, simply no longer integrate very well with other desktops, like Xfce or Cinnamon. GNOME is, of course, under no obligation to remedy this situation, but at the very least they could acknowledge this is a very real problem that their fellow developers working on Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, and others, have to deal with. It works the other way around too. Developers targeting the Linux desktop, where GNOME is more or less the default, have to choose between making a GTK application that integrates well with GNOME by opting for libadwaita and leaving non-GNOME users with a crappy experience, or opting for ‘pure’ GTK 4 and leaving GNOME users with a worse experience. Neither option is good for the Linux desktop as a whole. The very real ripple effects of GNOME’s choices regarding GTK and libadwaita are seemingly being stubbornly ignored, neglected, and often not even acknowledged at all, and it’s no surprise this creates an immense amount of friction in the wider desktop Linux community. It just feels smug and careless, and of course that’s going to rub people the wrong way- regardless of the purity of your intentions.
In regards to performance, AMD is touting an average (geomean) IPC increase in desktop workloads for Zen 5 of 16%. And with the new desktop Ryzen chips’ turbo clockspeeds remaining largely identical to their Ryzen 7000 predecessors, this should translate into similar performance expectations for the new chips. The AMD Ryzen 9000 series will also launch on the AM5 socket, which debuted with AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series and marks AMD’s commitment to socket/platform longevity. Along with the Ryzen 9000 series will come a pair of new high-performance chipsets: the X870E (Extreme) and the regular X870 chipsets. The fundamental features that vendors will integrate into their specific motherboards remain tight-lipped. Still, we do know that USB 4.0 ports are standard on the X870E/X870 boards, along with PCIe 5.0 for both PCIe graphics and NVMe storage, with higher AMD EXPO memory profile support expected than previous generations. ↫ Gavin Bonshor at AnandTech I absolutely love that AMD maintains compatibility with its chipset and socket generations as well as it does. I’m currently running a Ryzen 9 7900X, and I see no reason to upgrade any time soon, but it’s good to know I’ll at least have otions once the time comes. Compare this to Intel, which broke compatibility pretty much intentionally almost every generation for years now, and this is a huge win for consumers. Of course, as AMD regains more and more of its foothold across the market, it will eventually also resort to the kind of tactics Intel has been using while it pretty much had the market to itself. It’s only a matter of time before we’ll see the first new Ryzen generation that mysteriously requires a new socket or chipset out of the blue.
Tock is an embedded operating system designed for running multiple concurrent, mutually distrustful applications on Cortex-M and RISC-V based embedded platforms. Tock’s design centers around protection, both from potentially malicious applications and from device drivers. Tock uses two mechanisms to protect different components of the operating system. First, the kernel and device drivers are written in Rust, a systems programming language that provides compile-time memory safety and type safety. Tock uses Rust to protect the kernel (e.g. the scheduler and hardware abstraction layer) from platform specific device drivers as well as isolate device drivers from each other. Second, Tock uses memory protection units to isolate applications from each other and the kernel. ↫ Tock GitHub page We’ve never featured Tock on OSNews before, as far as I can tell, which seems odd considering it’s been around for a while. The most recent release stems from January 2023, so a short while ago, but that’s not too surprising considering the target audience of this embedded operating system. It’s licensed under either Apache or MIT.
The act of discarding a message that does not exist must therefore do one of two things. It may cause the message contents to also cease to exist. Alternately, it might not affect the existence but only the accessibility of message contents. Perhaps they continue to exist, but discarding the message (which already did not exist) causes the copy operation to cease being invokable on the message contents (even though they do continue to exist). The story of existence has many mysteries. ↫ Mark J. Nelson The one question that can really break my brain in a way that is feels like it’s physically hurting – which it can’t, because, fun fact, there’s no pain receptors in the brain – is the question what exists outside of the universe? Any answer you can come up with just leads to more questions which just lead to more questions, in an infinite loop of possible answers and questions that the human mind is not equipped to grasp. Anyway, it turns out using Outook can lead to the same existential crises.
If, for some reason, you’re still using Chrome or one of the browsers that put a little hat on Chrome and call it a different browser, the time you’re going to want to consider switching to the only real alternative – Firefox – is getting closer and closer. Yesterday, Google has announced that the end of Manifest V2 is now truly here. Starting on June 3 on the Chrome Beta, Dev and Canary channels, if users still have Manifest V2 extensions installed, some will start to see a warning banner when visiting their extension management page – chrome://extensions – informing them that some (Manifest V2) extensions they have installed will soon no longer be supported. At the same time, extensions with the Featured badge that are still using Manifest V2 will lose their badge. This will be followed gradually in the coming months by the disabling of those extensions. Users will be directed to the Chrome Web Store, where they will be recommended Manifest V3 alternatives for their disabled extension. For a short time after the extensions are disabled, users will still be able to turn their Manifest V2 extensions back on, but over time, this toggle will go away as well. ↫ David Li on the Chromium blog In case you’ve been asleep at the wheel – and if you’re still using Chrome, you most likely are – Manifest V3 will heavily limit what content blockers can do, making them less effective at things like blocking ads. In a move that surprises absolutely nobody, it’s not entirely coincidental that Manifest V3 is being pushed hard by Google, the world’s largest online advertising company. While Google claims all the major content blockers have Manifest V3 versions available, the company fails to mention that they carry monikers such as “uBlock Origin Lite”, to indicate they are, well, shittier at their job than their Manifest V2 counterparts. I can’t make this any more clear: switch to Firefox. Now. While Firefox and Mozilla sure aren’t perfect, they have absolutely zero plans to phase out Manifest V2, and the proper, full versions of content blockers will continue to work. As the recent leaks have made very clear, Chrome is even more of a vehicle for user tracking and ad targeting than we already knew, and with the deprecation of Manifest V2 from Chrome, Google is limiting yet another avenue for blocking ads. OSNews has ads, and they are beyond my control, since our ads are managed by OSNews’ owner, and not by me. My position has always been clear: your computer, your rules. Nobody has any right to display ads on your computer, using your bandwidth, using your processor cycles, using your pixels. Sure, it’d be great if we could earn some income through ads, but we’d greatly prefer you become a Patreon (which removes ads) or make an individual donation to support OSNews and keep us alive that way instead.
Wayland 1.23.0 has been released. This new release includes the usual bugfixes and protocol clarifications, a number of new features few of us will really understand because we lack the expertise, and most importantly of all: OpenBSD support. That’s it. That’s the news.
Real-time Ubuntu 24.04 LTS integrates the PREEMPT_RT patch on AMD64 and ARM64. As the de-facto Linux real-time implementation, PREEMPT_RT increases predictability by modifying the existing kernel code. With time-bound responses for mission-critical latency requirements, Real-time Ubuntu 24.04 LTS provides deterministic processing to the most demanding workloads across industries, from manufacturing and automotive to the critical infrastructure of telco operators. ↫ Edoardo Barbieri at the Ubuntu blog If you need it, you need it, but it’s exclusive to Ubuntu Pro. Luckily Pro is free for personal use, so if you really need Ubuntu but with a real-time kernel – based on Linux 6.8 – there’s nothing stopping you.
Servo, the Rust-based browser engine originally started by Mozilla but since spun off into an entity under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation, has published another monthly update. As almost every month, there’s been a lot of progress on rendering tech I don’t quite understand, and further improved support for various standards. Another major focus is the ongoing font system rework, which is yielding not only vastly improved support for font rendering options, but is also reducing the memory load. The example browser included in Servo is also making progress, from reducing the amount of errors on Windows, to implementing support for using extra mouse buttons to go back and forward, and showing the link desination when hovering the mouse over a link.
Twenty-five years. A quarter century. That’s how long we’ve been working on Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop, but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was renamed to Krita, and that name stuck. I only became part of Krita in 2003, when Krita was still part of KDE’s suite of productivity applications, KOffice, later renamed to Calligra… And I became maintainer of Krita in 2004, when Patrick Julien handed over the baton. That means that I’ve been around Krita for about twenty of those twenty-five years, so I’ll hope you, dear reader, will forgive me for making this a really personal post; a very large part of my life has been tied up with Krita, and it’s going to show. ↫ Krita website While it may not be as popular as something like LibreOffice due to fewer people needing it, Krita is a cornerstone application of the Linux desktop (it’s also available for Windows and macOS), and I honestly can barely believe it’s been around for this long. I’m about as far removed from being an artistic painter as a squirrel’s tail is from being a functioning propeller engine so I don’t have need for Krita, but I’m always surprised by how many people mention using it for their painting endeavours. I wish the project and its developers another successful 25 years, and they’re going to need it – Krita 5.3 is coming soon(ish), and the much more involved Krita 6.0, which makes the jump fro Qt 5 to Qt 6, is also in the works. On a personal note, I’m online acquainted with the lead maintainer of Krita, and as she alludes to at the end of the article, COVID hit her hard, and maintaining such a huge open source project isn’t easy to begin with. Much respect for keeping it up, and of course, to everyone else contributing to the project.
