The fascist tech bro takeover is here
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 m … ⌘ Read more

EU-US rift triggers call for made-in-Europe tech
The utter chaos in the United States and the country’s antagonistic, erratic, and often downright hostile approach to what used to be its allies has not gone unnoticed, and it seems it’s finally creating some urgency in an area in which people have been fruitlessly advocating for urgency for years: digital independence from US tech giants. Efforts to make Europe more technologically “sovereign” have gone mainstream. The European Commi … ⌘ Read more

A 10x Faster TypeScript
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 Hej … ⌘ Read more

Notes from setting up GlobalTalk using QEMU on Ubuntu
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 … ⌘ Read more

Exploring the (discontinued) hybrid Debian GNU/kFreeBSD distribution
For decades, Linux and BSD have stood as two dominant yet fundamentally different branches of the Unix-like operating system world. While Linux distributions, such as Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora, have grown to dominate the open-source ecosystem, BSD-based systems like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD have remained the preferred choice for those seeking security, performance, and licensing flexibility. … ⌘ Read more

Brother denies using firmware updates to brick printers with third-party ink
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 worke … ⌘ Read more

Porting the curl command-line tool and library with Goa
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 … ⌘ Read more

Popular “AI” chatbots infected by Russian state propaganda, call Hitler’s Mein Kampf “insightful and intelligent”
Two for the techbro “‘AI’ cannot be biased” crowd: A Moscow-based disinformation network named “Pravda” — the Russian word for “truth” — is pursuing an ambitious strategy by deliberately infiltrating the retrieved data of artificial intelligence chatbots, publishing false claims and propaganda for the purpose of … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft discovers massive malvertising campaign on GitHub
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, … ⌘ Read more

Made O’Meter helps you easily and quickly avoid American products
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 … ⌘ Read more

Comparing Fuchsia components and Linux containers
Fuchsia is a new (non-Linux) operating system from Google, and one of the key pieces of Fuchsia’s design is the component framework. Components on Fuchsia have many similarities with some of the container solutions on Linux (such as Docker): they both fetch content addressed blobs from the network, assemble those blobs into an isolated filesystem structure that holds all the dependencies necessary to run some piece of software, and … ⌘ Read more

Google, DuckDuckGo massively expand “AI” search results
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 mor … ⌘ Read more

NetBSD on a JavaStation
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 fla … ⌘ Read more

Zen and the art of microcode hacking
Now that we have examined the vulnerability that enables arbitrary microcode patches to be installed on all (un-patched) Zen 1 through Zen 4 CPUs, let’s discuss how you can use and expand our tools to author your own patches. We have been working on developing a collection of tools combined into a single project we’re calling zentool. The long-term goal is to provide a suite of capabilities similar to binutils, but targeting AMD microcode instead of CPU mach … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Publisher will no longer be supported after October 2026
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 Supp … ⌘ Read more

Why fastDOOM is fast
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, fa … ⌘ Read more

Redox continues adding dynamic linking support
These months are coming and going way too fast, for a whole variety of reasons, so we’ve got another month of improvements for Redox, the operating system written in Rust. I February, January’s work on dynamic linking continued, adding support for it to the recipes for Cargo, LLVM, Rust, libssh2, OpenSSL, zlib, COSMIC Terminal, NetSurf, libpng, bzip2, DevilutionX, and LuaJIT, as well as to the project’s Rust and OpenSSL forks. Relibc also … ⌘ Read more

Google multibillionaire Brin demands employees work 60 hours a week on autocomplete tools
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 t … ⌘ Read more

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from ‘serious attacks’
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 bo … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft is not ending Windows 11 support for Intel’s 8th, 9th, and 10th Gen processors
About two weeks ago, there was a bit of confusion about the system requirements for Windows 11 24H2, because Intel’s 8th Gen, 9th Gen, and 10th Gen processors had disappeared from the list of supported hardware. This seemed rather drastic, even by Windows 11 standards. I skipped posting about it on OSNews because I kind of assumed it must’ve been an error ins … ⌘ Read more

Genode OS Framework 25.02 released
The prime feature is the continuation of the multi-monitor topic of the previous release, covering multi-monitor window management and going as far as seamlessly integrating multi-monitor virtual machines (Section Multi-monitor window management and virtual machines). The second and long anticipated feature is the Chromium engine version 112 in combination with Qt 6.6.2, which brings our port of the Falkon web browser on par with the modern web (Section Qt, WebE … ⌘ Read more

Netboot Windows 11 with iSCSI and iPXE
For the past several years my desktop has also had a disk dedicated to maintaining a Windows install. I’d prefer to use the space in my PC case for disks for Linux. Since I already run a home NAS, and my Windows usage is infrequent, I wondered if I could offload the Windows install to my NAS instead. This lead me down the course of netbooting Windows 11 and writing up these notes on how to do a simplified “modern” version. ↫ Terin Stock The setup Terin S … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla deletes promise not to sell Firefox users’ data
The hits just keep on coming. Mozilla not only changed its Privacy Notice and introduced a Terms of Use for Firefox for the first time with some pretty onerous terms, they also removed a rather specific question and answer pair from their page with frequently asked questions about Firefox, as discovered by David Gerard. The following question and answer were removed: Does Firefox sell your personal data? Nope. Never have, … ⌘ Read more

What would happen if we didn’t use TCP or UDP?
At some point, I wondered—what if I sent a packet using a transport protocol that didn’t exist? Not TCP, not UDP, not even ICMP—something completely made up. Would the OS let it through? Would it get stopped before it even left my machine? Would routers ignore it, or would some middlebox kill it on sight? Could it actually move faster by slipping past common firewall rules? No idea. So I had to try. ↫ Hawzen Okay so the end result is that i … ⌘ Read more

A love letter to Void Linux
I installed Void on my current laptop on the 10th of December 2021, and there has never been any reinstall. The distro is absurdly stable. It’s a rolling release, and yet, the worst update I had in those years was one time, GTK 4 apps took a little longer to open on GNOME. Which was reverted after a few hours. Not only that, I sometimes spent months without any update, and yet, whenever I did update, absolutely nothing went wrong. Granted, I pretty much only did full upgrades … ⌘ Read more

Understanding surrogate pairs: why some Windows filenames can’t be read
Windows was an early adopter of Unicode, and its file APIs use UTF‑16 internally since Windows 2000-used to be UCS-2 in Windows 95 era, when Unicode standard was only a draft on paper, but that’s another topic. Using UTF-16 means that filenames, text strings, and other data are stored as sequences of 16‑bit units. For Windows, a properly formed surrogate pair is perfectly acceptable. However … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla is going to collect a lot more data from Firefox users
I guess my praise for Mozilla’s and Firefox’ continued support for Manifest v2 had to be balanced out by Mozilla doing something stupid. Mozilla just published Terms of Use for Firefox for the first time, as well as an updated Privacy Notice, that come into effect immediately and include some questionable terms. The Terms of Use state: When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant u … ⌘ Read more

PowerPC Windows NT made to run on GameCube and Wii
Remember about half a year ago, when the PowerPC versions of Windows NT were made to run on certain models of PowerPC Macs? The same developer responsible for that work, Rairii, took all of this to the next level, and it’s now possible to run the PowerPC version of Windows NT on the GameCube, Wii, Wii U, and a few related development boards. NT 3.51 RTM and higher. NT 3.51 betas (build 944 and below) will need kernel patches to ru … ⌘ Read more

zlib-rs is faster than C
I’m sure we can all have a calm, rational discussion about this, so here it goes: zlib-rs, the Rust re-implementation of the zlib library, is now faster than its C counterparts in both decompression and compression. We’ve released version 0.4.2 of zlib-rs, featuring a number of substantial performance improvements. We are now (to our knowledge) the fastest api-compatible zlib implementation for decompression, and beat the competition in the most important compression cases too. ↫ F … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla reaffirms it won’t remove Manifest v2 support from Firefox
Mozilla has officially reiterated that it’s going to keep offering support for both Manifest v2 and Manifest v3 extensions in Firefox. Google is removing support for Manifest v2 from Chrome, and with it a feature called blockingWebRequest that is used by ad blockers like uBlock Origin. Google’s replacement for that feature is more restrictive and less capable, and as such, uBlock Origin no longer wor … ⌘ Read more

12 years of incubating Wayland color management
The Wayland color-management protocol extension has landed on Feb 13th, 2025, in upstream wayland-protocols repository in the staging directory. It was released with wayland-protocols 1.41. The extension enables proper interactions between traditional (sRGB), Wide Color Gamut (WCG), and High Dynamic Range (HDR) image sources and displays once implemented in Wayland compositors and used in applications. Of course, a protocol is just a la … ⌘ Read more

Xcode phones home a lot, and that should worry you
I’ve saved the worst for last. For some reason, Xcode phones home to appstoreconnect.apple.com every time I open an Xcode project. This also appears to be unnecessary, and I experience no problems after denying the connections in Little Snitch, so I do! I assume that the connections send identifying information about the Xcode project to Apple, otherwise why even make the connections when opening a project? And all of these connect … ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm gives OEMs the option of 8 years of Android updates
Starting with Android smartphones running on the Snapdragon 8 Elite Mobile Platform, Qualcomm Technologies now offers device manufacturers the ability to provide support for up to eight consecutive years of Android software and security updates. Smartphones launching on new Snapdragon 8 and 7-series mobile platforms will also be eligible to receive this extended support. ↫ Mike Genewich I mean, good news of cou … ⌘ Read more

It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds
We now have the bizarre situation that anyone with any sense can see that America is no longer a reliable partner, and that the entire US business world bows to Trump’s dictatorial will, but we STILL are doing everything we can to transfer entire governments and most of our own businesses to their clouds. Not only is it scary to have all your data available to US spying, it is also a huge … ⌘ Read more

Sailfish OS 5.0 released for all supported devices
Sailfish OS 5.0, originally released late last year as part of the new Jolla C2 Community Phone, will now be pushed to all Sailfish OS devices. There have been several other minor releases since the original release, so if you’re running Sailfish OS on something other than the C2, you’re getting a release with some more bugfixes and improvements. The main improvement is an upgrade to Gecko ESR91, with work underway to move to ESR1 … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft improves Windows 11’s Start menu somewhat
Microsoft seems to be addressing some of the oddities with the Windows 11 Start menu, finally adding basic views that should’ve been in Windows 11 since the very start. We’re introducing two new views to the “All” page in the Start menu: grid and category view. Grid and list view shows your apps in alphabetical order and category view groups all your apps into categories, ordered by usage. This change is gradually rolling out so … ⌘ Read more

The DOS 3.3 SYS.COM bug hunt!
Last year somebody reported a problem with the DOS 3.3 SYS.COM command when used with NetDrive. They started with a valid FAT12 image, ran SYS.COM to make it bootable, and then they were not able to mount the image using NetDrive again. Running SYS.COM against the image had broken something. Besides copying the operating system’s hidden files to the target drive letter, SYS.COM also copies some boot code into the first sector of the disk. In general it does not make sense … ⌘ Read more

Illumos on SPARC: possible, but problematic
While SPARC may no longer be supported by the main Illumos project, it still works and is still viable. This page brings together a variety of information regarding Illumos on SPARC, not necessarily limited to Tribblix. ↫ Tribblix website It seems running Tribblix – and other Illumos-based distributions – on SPARC is still possible, but there are some serious limitations anyone who has tried to use even slightly older operating systems will be fai … ⌘ Read more

Flathub safety: a layered approach from source to user
About two weeks ago we talked about why Fedora manages its own Flatpak repository, and why that sometimes leads to problems with upstream projects. Most recently, Fedora’s own OBS Flatpak was broken, leading to legal threats from the OBS project, demanding Fedora remove any and all branding from its OBS Flatpak. In response, Fedora’s outgoing project leader Matthew Miller gave an interview on YouTube to Brodie Robertson, in … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft is paywalling features in Notepad and Paint
There’s some bad news for Windows users who want to use all of the built-in features of the operating system and its integrated apps. Going forward, Microsoft is restricting features in two iconic apps, which you’ll need to unlock with a paid subscription. The two apps in question? Notepad and Paint. Windows Insiders were previously able to use these app features free of charge. However, Microsoft is now making it necessary … ⌘ Read more

Chromium Ozone/Wayland: the last mile stretch
Lets start with some context, the project consists of implementing, shipping and maintaining native Wayland support in the Chromium project. Our team at Igalia has been leading the effort since it was first merged upstream back in 2016. For more historical context, there are a few blog posts and this amazing talk, by my colleagues Antonio Gomes and Max Ihlenfeldt, presented at last year’s Web Engines Hackfest. Especially due to the Lacros pr … ⌘ Read more

1972 UNIX V2 “beta” resurrected from old tapes
There’s a number of backups of old DECtapes from Dennis Ritchie, which he gave to Warren Toomey in 1997. The tapes were eventually uploaded, and through analysis performed by Yufeng Gao, a lot of additional details, code, and software were recovered from them. A few days ago, Gao came back with the results from their analys of two more tapes, and on it, they found something quite special. Getting this recovered version to run was a bit of a … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla once again confirms it’s all about ads and “AI” now
We’ve recognized that Mozilla faces major headwinds in terms of both financial growth and mission impact. While Firefox remains the core of what we do, we also need to take steps to diversify: investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term; and creating online fundraising campaigns that … ⌘ Read more

NES86: x86 emulation on the NES
The goal of this project is to emulate an Intel 8086 processor and supporting PC hardware well enough to run the Embeddable Linux Kernel Subset (ELKS), including a shell and utilities. It should be possible to run other x86 software as long as it doesn’t require more than a simple serial terminal. ↫ NES86 GitHub page Is this useful in any meaningful sense? No. Will this change the word? No. Does it have any other purpose than just being fun and cool? Nope. None of that … ⌘ Read more

The generative AI con
Everywhere you look, the media is telling you that OpenAI and their ilk are the future, that they’re building “advanced artificial intelligence” that can take “human-like actions,” but when you look at any of this shit for more than two seconds it’s abundantly clear that it absolutely isn’t and absolutely can’t. Despite the hype, the marketing, the tens of thousands of media articles, the trillions of dollars in market capitalization, none of this feels real, or at least real enough to s … ⌘ Read more

Broadcom, TSMC weigh possible Intel deals that would split storied chip maker
Broadcom has been closely examining Intel’s chip-design and marketing business, according to people familiar with the matter. It has informally discussed with its advisers making a bid but would likely only do so if it finds a partner for Intel’s manufacturing business, the people said.  Nothing has been submitted to Intel, the people cautioned, and Broadcom could decide not to … ⌘ Read more

Humane is shutting down the AI Pin and selling its remnants to HP
Humane is selling most of its company to HP for $116 million and will stop selling AI Pin, the company announced today. AI Pins that have already been purchased will continue to function normally until 3PM ET on February 28th, Humane says in a support document. After that date, Pins will “no longer connect to Humane’s servers.” As a result, AI Pin features will “no longer include calling, messaging, A … ⌘ Read more

AIDA64 drops support for Windows 95, 98, and ME
AIDA64, the popular benchmarking tool for Windows, released a new version today. I don’t particularly care about benchmarking – even less so benchmarking on Windows – but this new release comes with an interesting line in the release notes. Discontinued support for Windows 95, 98, Me ↫ AIDA64 v7.60 release notes Seeing a widely-used, popular piece of software drop support for Windows 95, 98, and ME only in this, the year of our lord, 2025 … ⌘ Read more

ArcaOS 5.1.1 released
It’s been two years since the release of ArcaOS 5.1, which was a hugely important release because it brought UEFI support to this continuation of IBM’s OS/2, ensuring longevity for the project for years to come. Since I don’t think much is known about what, exactly, Arca Noae, and eComStation before it, has access to within the licensing agreement with IBM, it’s difficult to ascertain just how much room they actually have to make changes to the code at the core of the old OS/2. Regardles … ⌘ Read more

UNIX man pages
What might be somewhat more surprising though considering its research origins is that Unix almost since the very beginning had a comprehensive set of online reference documentation for all its commands, system calls, file formats, etc. These are the the manual- or man-pages. On Unix systems used interactively, the man-pages have historically always been installed, space permitting. The way the manual pages have evolved and how they are used has changed over the decades. This set of posts is intended … ⌘ Read more