I frequently write about Windows, Edge, and other Microsoft-adjacent technologies as part of my day job, and I sign into my daily-use PCs with a Microsoft account, so my usage patterns may be atypical for many Ars Technica readers. But for anyone who uses Windows, Edge, or both, I thought it might be useful to detail what I’m doing to clean up a clean install of Windows, minimizing (if not totally eliminating) the number of annoying notifications, Microsoft services, and unasked-for apps that we have to deal with. ↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica Five pages of nonsense you have to go through to make Windows 11 somewhat less of a trashfire. I can’t believe we’ve reached a point where this is normal and accepted, and often even defended by Windows users, here on OSNews as well. I know “just install Linux” generally isn’t a helpful comment, but at what point is installing Linux the path of least resistance compared to whatever the hell this is? Especially now that most work is done online in the browser anyway?
I wrote different boot managers. Three boot managers are available as download. The Plop Boot Manager 5, PlopKexec and the new boot manager PBM6. The new boot manager is under development. ↫ Elmar Hanlhofer I had never heard of the three Plop boot managers, written by Elmar Hanlhofer, but they seem like quite the capable tools. First, Plop Boot Manager 5 is the most complete version, but it’s also quite outdated by now, with its last release stemming from 2013. That being said, it’s incredibly feature-packed, but since it lacks UEFI support, its use case seems more focused on legacy systems. PBM6, meanwhile, is the modern version with UEFI support, but it’s not complete and is under development, with regular releases. Finally, PlopKexec is exactly what the name implies – a boot manager that uses the Linux kernel. I’ve never encountered these before, but they seem quite interesting, and if it wasn’t for how much I do not like messing with bootloaders, I’d love to give these a go. Have any of you ever used it?
The first “Power11” patches were queued today into the PowerPC’s “next” Git branch ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel cycle. The first of many IBM Power11 processor/platform enablement patches are beginning to flow out for the Linux kernel for enabling the next-generation Power processors. This shouldn’t be too surprising given that a few months ago IBM began posting “PowerPC Future” patches for the GCC compiler with speculating at the time it was for Power11 just as IBM previously called their “future” CPU target in GCC for Power10 prior to those processors officially debuting. ↫ Michael Larabel I really hope IBM learned from the POWER10 fiasco and will make sure POWER11 is properly and fully open again, because POWER9’s openness made it unique among the other options out there. Without it, there’s really no reason for an enthusiast community to developer around POWER11 as it did around POWER9, and that would be a shame. Again.
US chip company Intel will make high-end semiconductors for Microsoft, the companies announced, as it seeks to compete with TSMC and Samsung to supply the next generation of silicon used in artificial intelligence for customers around the world. Chief executive Pat Gelsinger said at a company event on Wednesday that Intel is set to “rebuild Western manufacturing at scale,” buoyed by geopolitical concerns in Washington about the need to bring leading-edge manufacturing back to the US. ↫ Michael Acton Having our entire advanced chip industry built atop one Dutch company and one company on an island China would love to invade is not exactly the recipe for a stable supply chain. I think it’s a great idea to build capacity in the US and Europe, and if Intel’s the one to do it – with lavish government funding, I might add – then so be it. We’d all love for it to be more diverse than that, but the sad reality is that building advanced chip factories is really hard and really expensive, and very few companies have both the knowledge and money to do so.
A customer was developing an automated test that required the system to suffer a blue screen crash. They configured their test systems to crash when the ScrollLock key is pressed twice while holding the Ctrl key, and they wrote a simple program that ran as administrator and injected the appropriate keystrokes. But no crash occurred. What did they do wrong? ↫ Raymond Chen Does anyone here not love a Raymond Chen mystery?
Android introduced support for Seamless Updates quite a long time ago at this point and, while it’s seen adoption from most, Samsung stubbornly refuses to move its devices to the A/B system. Android is now moving towards a future where A/B Seamless Updates are the only supported update mechanism, but that may not be enough to stop Samsung. ↫ Ben Schoon at 9To5Google The fact Samsung hasn’t embraced Seamless Updates yet is utterly baffling. It’s better in every single way, and there’s little to no downsides one can think of. I hope this little nudge gets them to finally get their act together.
This is the (work in progress) SunOS jdk builder. The aim is to attempt to download, patch, and build any relevant jdk tag, and do so for SPARC and x86, and for illumos and Solaris 11.4. It has currently been spot-tested on current illumos/x86 (specifically Tribblix m32). It is dependent on the jdk-sunos-patches repository, which holds all the patches for each tag. ↫ Peter Tribble Built by Peter Tribble, the same person behind Tribblix, and he’s published a blog post with more details about this project. I’ve definitely been seeing an uptick recently in interest in Solaris, which is great to see. It’s gotten me interested in installing Tribblix on my dual-Xeon workstation to see just how much I’ve been missing since last using Solaris like 15-20 years ago.
Should web developers use pixels or ems/rems for accessible fonts? It’s an emotionally-charged question because there are a lot of conflicting opinions out there, and it can be overwhelming. Maybe you’ve heard that rems are better for accessibility. Or maybe you’ve heard that the problem is fixed and pixels are fine? The truth is, if you want to build the most-accessible product possible, you need to use both pixels and ems/rems. It’s not an either/or situation. There are circumstances where rems are more accessible, and other circumstances where pixels are more accessible. ↫ Joshua Comeau The linked article isn’t just an explanation of why, but also a tutorial.
On Friday, Bloomberg reported that Reddit has signed a contract allowing an unnamed AI company to train its models on the site’s content, according to people familiar with the matter. The move comes as the social media platform nears the introduction of its initial public offering (IPO), which could happen as soon as next month. Reddit initially revealed the deal, which is reported to be worth $60 million a year, earlier in 2024 to potential investors of an anticipated IPO, Bloomberg said. The Bloomberg source speculates that the contract could serve as a model for future agreements with other AI companies. ↫ Benj Edwards at Ars Technica Properly paying for the content you’re feeding into your “AI” model is a huge improvement over just taking it without users’ consent, but it does add yet another area of concern for users of all kinds of platforms. Whatever you write, create, or post might be fed into “AI” models without you ever realising it, and while the platform you use gets paid for that, you aren’t. In any event, OSNews is not selling your comments to an “AI” company, but with how old we are, there’s no doubt both your comments and our stories have already found their way into countless “AI” black holes.
This new release is based on FreeBSD 14.0-STABLE. Update Station got a significant change to upgrade to a major FreeBSD version, allowing upgrading GhostBSD from 13.2-STABLE to 14.0-STABLE. Also, a major change to the installer is the user created is an admin, and the root user gets the same password as the admin. If the admin password is changed after the installation, the root password will not change. ↫ GhostBSD’s website GhostBSD is a user-friendly, desktop-first ‘distribution’ of FreeBSD – a project which, in my humble view, should be part of the FreeBSD project-proper. With some old-time Linux feeling a sense of disenfranchisement towards Linux due to things like Wayland and systemd, FreeBSD could serve as an excellent alternative, and an official desktop-first ISO could play a role in that. Of course, that’s not exactly core to FreeBSD’s mission, and they really shouldn’t be listening to idiots like me, but I think it’s an idea worth pondering.
This site contains reconstructed source code for Lander, David Braben’s epic game for the Acorn Archimedes, with every single line documented and (for the most part) explained. Lander was the very first game to be released for the ARM processor, and it is both a milestone and a masterpiece. My hope is that this site will be useful for those who want to learn more about Lander and what makes it tick. It is provided on an educational and non-profit basis, with the aim of helping people appreciate the second classic game from this legend of 3D coding (the first classic being Elite, of course). ↫ Mark Moxon An incredibly valuable resource.
I remember using DJGPP back in the 1990s before I had been exposed to Linux and feeling that it was a strange beast. Compared to the Microsoft C Compiler and Turbo C++, the tooling was bloated and alien to DOS, and the resulting binaries were huge. But DJGPP provided a complete development environment for free, which I got from a monthly magazine, and I could even look at its source code if I wished. You can’t imagine what a big deal that was at the time. But even if I could look under the cover, I never did. I never really understood why was DJGPP so strange, slow, and huge, or why it even existed. Until now. As I’m in the mood of looking back, I’ve spent the last couple of months figuring out what the foundations of this software were and how it actually worked. Part of this research has resulted in the previous two posts on DOS memory management. And part of this research is this article. Let’s take a look! ↫ Julio Merino Having access to tools such as this, including the source code, must’ve been a huge deal to a lot of people, even if ti was “strange, slow, and huge” as the author notes.
We’re releasing the first Developer Preview of Android 15 today so you, our developers, can collaborate with us to build a better Android. Android 15 continues our work to build a platform that helps improve your productivity while giving you new capabilities to produce superior media experiences, minimize battery impact, maximize smooth app performance, and protect user privacy and security all on the most diverse lineup of devices out there. ↫ Dave Burke on the Android Developers Blog This being the first Android 15 Developer Preview, the tentpole features it would contain are not here yet. We’re looking at a lot of under-the-hood features most users will never actively notice, but are still very welcome. The Privacy Sandbox has been updated, it adds Health Connect, a secure place to store health data, partial screen sharing, and a lot more.
With the second beta of iOS 17.4, Apple disabled much of the functionality of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) in the European Union. There was some speculation that it could be a temporary change or a bug related to some of the updates to the app ecosystem in Europe, but Apple has confirmed that PWAs were intentionally removed and won’t be returning. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors When users in the European Union install iOS 17.4, all functionality regarding progressive web apps will be removed from iOS. This means that when you pin a PWA on your iOS home screen, instead of it opening ‘like an application’, so without any browser chrome but with additional other odds and ends to make it feel more like a native application, it’ll just open inside the full browser instead. It’s typical Apple behaviour – vindictive and petty. Their stated reasoning – it was too hard and too much work to implement this for engines other than WebKit – is a bunch of utter nonsense, since Apple had no issues with developing like 600 new APIs and a whole bunch of new complex frameworks and administrative layers just to support their malicious DMA compliance to ensure they wouldn’t lose a single cent of protection money when a developer wants to distribute an application outside of the App Store. PWAs were the only way you could get an application-like experience on your iPhone from something not controlled, owned, and monetised by Apple, so it had to go to force developers to choose either of Apple’s new, maliciously DMA compliant monetised distribution options in the EU. Every time this company does anything, it’s just… Slimy, scummy, sleazy, and anti-user.
Recently, I began a new project – developing a MIPS emulator for Windows. Although Windows NT is commonly associated with x86-based architectures (and more recently ARM64), historically some lesser-known editions were released for other chipsets. MIPS, a RISC architecture, briefly featured on Windows NT 3.51/4.0 alongside the DEC Alpha and PowerPC before being discontinued with the release of Windows 2000. Having been predominantly x86-focused until now, I have no prior experience with MIPS – or RISC architectures in general. As with the Win16 emulator, my plan is not to achieve 100% compatibility with complex software. Instead, I aim to emulate enough core functionality to successfully run some of the built-in Windows games and utilities. I would like to achieve this in the most universal way possible, relying on minimal hardcoded “fixes” and hooks. ↫ x86matthew A very impressive project, and a fun one, to boot. Do note that the series of articles is split up, and you can move to the next one in the series at the bottom of each article.
The European Court of Human Rights yesterday banned a general weakening of secure end-to-end encryption. The judgement argues that encryption helps citizens and companies to protect themselves against hacking, theft of identity and personal data, fraud and the unauthorised disclosure of confidential information. Backdoors could also be exploited by criminal networks and would seriously jeopardise the security of all users’ electronic communications. There are other solutions for monitoring encrypted communications without generally weakening the protection of all users, the Court held. The judgement cites using vulnerabilities in the target’s software or sending an implant to targeted devices as examples. ↫ EU Reporter Excellent ruling, and it throws up another roadblock to weakening end-to-end encryption in the EU, after the European Parliament also took a stance against such weakening.
Around 1977, Intel released a floppy disc controller (FDC) chip called the 8271. This controller isn’t particularly well known. It was mainly used in business computers and storage solutions, but its one breakthrough into the consumer space was with the BBC Micro, a UK-centric computer released in 1981. There are very few easily discovered details about this chip online, aside from the useful datasheet. This, combined with increasing observations of strange behavior, make the chip a bit of an enigma. My interest in the chip was piqued when I accidentally triggered a wild test mode that managed to corrupt one of my floppy discs even though the write protect tab was present! You can read about that here. Can we reverse engineer a detailed understanding of how it works? What wonders will we find? ↫ Chris Evans This thing is wild.
We’re on approach towards an alpha version of the new COSMIC desktop environment for Pop!_OS and other distros. Meanwhile, COSMIC testing has expanded to more users around the office. This month, we’re providing updates to the checklist we published in January on remaining tasks for releasing the alpha. ↫ System76’s official blog COSMIC is feeling very close now, and this update has a ton of new things and improvements in it, and COSMIC being new, it’s a lot of stuff that’s table stakes. There’s a screenshot utility now, you can tab various windows together, kind of like Haiku can, the design for the on-screen display notifications has been finalised, there’s new animations, and so much more. I’m very excited to try this out.
Microsoft, in collaboration with our ecosystem partners, is preparing to roll out replacement certificates that’ll set new Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Certificate Authorities (CAs) trust anchors in Secure Boot for the future. Look out for Secure Boot database updates rolling out in phases to add trust for the new database (DB) and Key Exchange Key (KEK) certificates. This new DB update is available as an optional servicing update for all Secure Boot enabled devices from February 13, 2024. ↫ SochiOgbuanya This update will replace the Windows 8-era certificates, set to expire in 2026, with new ones.
The robots.txt file governs a give and take; AI feels to many like all take and no give. But there’s now so much money in AI, and the technological state of the art is changing so fast that many site owners can’t keep up. And the fundamental agreement behind robots.txt, and the web as a whole — which for so long amounted to “everybody just be cool” — may not be able to keep up either. ↫ David Pierce for The Verge Another thing “AI” does not respect.
