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.

You might have seen this, one of the strangest and most primitive experiences in macOS, where you’re asked to press keys next to left Shift and right Shift, whatever they might be.

Perhaps I can explain.

↫ Marcin Wichary

It seems pretty obvious to me that’s what it was for, but I guess many normal, regular people have never seen anything but one particular keyboard configuration (ANSI for Americans, ISO for some Europeans, etc.) keyboards. Perhaps they don’t realise that not only are there ANSI keyboards with other layouts, but also entirely different keyboard configurations (mainly ISO and JIS).

Interestingly, my home country of The Netherlands uses a US English layout on an ANSI configuration, but of course, it’s the US International variant, either with deadkeys or using AltGr for the various accented/special characters we use. In my current country of residence, Sweden, they use this utterly wild and incomprehensible ISO layout where Shift unlocks characters on the bottom of keys, while AltGr unlocks characters at the top, the exact opposite of literally every other keyboard I’ve ever used (US Int’l, classic Dutch (no longer used), German, French, etc.). It’s utterly bizarre, but entirely normal to my Swedish wife.

We cannot use each other’s keyboards.

This post aims to be a high level introduction to using USB for people who may not have worked with Hardware too much yet and just want to use the technology. There are amazing resources out there such as USB in a NutShell that go into a lot of detail about how USB precisely works (check them out if you want more information), they are however not really approachable for somebody who has never worked with USB before and doesn’t have a certain background in Hardware. You don’t need to be an Embedded Systems Engineer to use USB the same way you don’t need to be a Network Specialist to use Sockets and the Internet.

↫ Nik “WerWolv”

A bit of a generic title, but the article details how to write a USB driver.

Since its launch in 2007, the Wii has seen several operating systems ported to it: Linux, NetBSD, and most-recently, Windows NT. Today, Mac OS X joins that list.

In this post, I’ll share how I ported the first version of Mac OS X, 10.0 Cheetah, to the Nintendo Wii. If you’re not an operating systems expert or low-level engineer, you’re in good company; this project was all about learning and navigating countless “unknown unknowns”. Join me as we explore the Wii’s hardware, bootloader development, kernel patching, and writing drivers – and give the PowerPC versions of Mac OS X a new life on the Nintendo Wii.

↫ Bryan Keller

And all of this, because someone on Reddit said it couldn’t be done. It won’t surprise you to learn that the work required was extensive, from writing a custom bootloader to digging through the XNU source code, applying binary patches to the kernel during the boot process, building a device tree, writing the necessary drivers, and so much more. Even just setting up a development environment was a pretty serious undertaking.

Especially writing the drivers posed an interesting and unique challenge, as the Wii doesn’t use PCI to connect and expose its hardware components. Instead, components are connected to a dedicated SoC with its own ARM processor that talks to the main Wii PowerPC processor, exposing hardware that way. This meant that Keller had to write a driver for this chip first, before moving on to the device drivers for devices connected to this ARM SoC – graphics drivers, input drivers, and so on.

After a ton more work and overcoming several complex roadblocks, we now have Mac OS X 10.0 Cheetah on the Nintendo Wii. Amazing.

From 2024, but still accurate and interesting:

Plan 9 is unique in this sense that everything the system needs is covered by the base install. This includes the compilers, graphical environment, window manager, text editors, ssh client, torrent client, web server, and the list goes on. Nearly everything a user can do with the system is available right from the get go.

↫ moody

This is definitely something that sets Plan 9 apart from everything else, but as moody – 9front developer – notes, this also has a downside in that development isn’t as fast, and Plan 9 variants of tools lack features upstream has for a long time. He further adds that he think this is why Plan 9 has remained mostly a hobbyist curiosity, but I’m not entirely sure that’s the main reason. The cold and harsh truth is that Plan 9 is really weird, and while that weirdness is a huge part of its appeal and I hope it never loses it, it also means learning Plan 9 is really hard.

I firmly believe Plan 9 has the potential to attract more users, but to get there, it’s going to need an onboarding process that’s more approachable than reading 9front’s frequently questioned answers, excellent though they are. After installing 9front and loading it up for the first time, you basically hit a brick wall that’s going to be rough to climb. It would be amazing if 9front could somehow add some climbing tools for first-time users, without actually giving up on its uniqueness. Sometimes, Plan 9 feels more like an experimental art project instead of the capable operating system that it is, and I feel like that chases people away.

Which is a real shame.

This year sees 35 years since 2.11BSD was announced on March 14, 1991 – itself a slightly late celebration of 20 years of the PDP-11 – and January 2026 brought what looks to be the venerable 16-bit OS’s biggest ever patch!

Much of the 1.3 MB size is due to Anders Magnusson, well-known for his work on NetBSD and the Portable C Compiler. Since 2.11BSD’s stdio was not ANSI compliant, he’s ported from 4.4BSD.

↫ BigSneakyDuck at Reddit

There’s an incredible amount of work in here on this old variant of BSD, including fixes for old bugs and tons of other changes. This, the 499th patch for 2.11BSD, is so big, in fact, that vi on 2.11BSD can’t handle the size of the files, so you’re going to need to cut them up with sed, for which instructions are included.

It’s quite unique to see such a big update on the 35th anniversary of an operating system.

Anyone remember the KDE 4.0 themes Oxygen and Air? Well, several KDE developers have been working tirelessly to bring them back, which means they’re patching it up, fixing bugs, and generally making these classic themes work well in the current releases of KDE Plasma 6.

The last post regarding work on fixing Oxygen was a month and a half ago. With all that’s happened in between, it feels like so much more time has actually passed. With this post, I’d like to do a sort of mid-term update summing up all of the improvements done so far. These improvements are not just my work, but also, as you’ll see, the work of the lead Oxygen designer Nuno Pinheiro, of several seasoned KDE developers, and of new contributors to Oxygen as well.

↫ Filip Fila

The effort to bring these themes back go much beyond just making them nominally work; the developers and designers are also making sure the themes work properly with all the new features that have come to KDE since the 4.x and 5.x days, like adaptive and floating panels, various forms of blur, and a ton more – which includes making sure the themes are fully compatible with Wayland, which introduced a slew of new visual glitches and issues to these old themes in recent years.

They are also working on improving, updating, and expanding the Oxygen icon set, which should surely bring back a ton of memories. This work involves not just designing new icons for applications and other things that didn’t exist back when Oxygen was current, but also fixing old icons that look blurry on modern setups, addressing cases where monochrome and colourful icons mismatch, and so on. They’re clearly taking this very seriously.

It seems to be an organic effort more and more people got involved with as time passed, and they’re aiming to have these themes ready for Plasma 6.7, to be released in June of this year. You can already try the current versions today, but they do require the absolute latest version of KDE Plasma to work properly. More improvements are planned for the coming weeks.

This whole thing brings a massive smile to my face, and is such a perfect illustration of why I love the KDE project and its approach and spirit. At this point in time, I personally can’t imagine using any other desktop environment.

If you’re using Windows or macOS and have Adobe Creative Cloud installed, you may want to take a peek at your hosts file. It turns out Adobe adds a bunch of entries into the hosts file, for a very stupid reason.

They’re using this to detect if you have Creative Cloud already installed when you visit on their website.

When you visit https://www.adobe.com/home, they load this image using JavaScript:

https://detect-ccd.creativecloud.adobe.com/cc.png

If the DNS entry in your hosts file is present, your browser will therefore connect to their server, so they know you have Creative Cloud installed, otherwise the load fails, which they detect.

They used to just hit http://localhost:<various ports>/cc.png which connected to your Creative Cloud app directly, but then Chrome started blocking Local Network Access, so they had to do this hosts file hack instead.

↫ thenickdude at Reddit

At what point does a commercial software suite become malware?

An ultra-lightweight real-time operating system for resource-constrained IoT and embedded devices. Kernel footprint under 10 KB, 2 KB minimum RAM, preemptive priority-based scheduling.

↫ TinyOS GitHub page

Written in C, open source, and supports ARM and RISC-V.

You’d think if there was one corner of the open source world where you wouldn’t find drama it’d be open source office suites, but it turns out we could not have been more wrong. First, there’s The Document Foundation, stewards of LibreOffice, ejecting a ton of LibreOffice contributors.

In the ongoing saga of The Document Foundation (TDF), their Membership Committee has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners. That includes over thirty people who have contributed faithfully to LibreOffice for many years. It is interesting to see a formal meritocracy eject so many, based on unproven legal concerns and guilt by association. This includes seven of the top ten core committers of all time (excluding release engineers) currently working for Collabora Productivity. The move is the culmination of TDF losing a large number of founders from membership over the last few years with: Thorsten Behrens, Jan ‘Kendy’ Holesovsky, Rene Engelhard, Caolan McNamara, Michael Meeks, Cor Nouws and Italo Vignoli no longer members. Of the remaining active founders, three of the last four are paid TDF staff (of whom none are programming on the core code).

↫ Micheal Meeks

The end result seems to be that Collabora is effectively forking LibreOffice, which feels like we’re back where we were 15 years ago when LibreOffice forked from OpenOffice. There seems to be a ton of drama and infighting here that I’m not particularly interested in, but it’s sad to see such drama and infighting result in needless complications for developers, end users, and distributors alike.

As if this wasn’t enough, there’s also forking drama in OnlyOffice land, the other open source office suite, licensed under the AGPL. This ope source office suite has been forked by Nextcloud and IONOS into Euro-Office, in pursuit of digital sovereignty in the EU. It’s also not an entirely unimportant detail that OnlyOffice is Russian, with most of its developers residing in Russia.

Anyway, the OnlyOffice team has not taken this in stride, claiming there’s a violation of the AGPL license going on here, specifically because OnlyOffice adds contradictory attribution terms to the AGPL. It’s a complicated story, but it does seem most experts in this area seem to disagree with OnlyOffice’s interpretation.

We’re in for another messy time.

This is the first of a series of articles in which you will learn about what may be one of the silliest, most preventable, and most costly mishaps of the 21st century, where Microsoft all but lost OpenAI, its largest customer, and the trust of the US government.

↫ Axel Rietschin

It won’t take long into this series of articles before you start wondering how anyone manages to ship anything at Microsoft. If even half of this is accurate, this company should be placed under some sort of external oversight.

I don’t like to cover “current events” very much, but the American government just revealed a truly bewildering policy effectively banning import of new consumer router models. This is ridiculous for many reasons, but if this does indeed come to pass it may be beneficial to learn how to “homebrew” a router.

Fortunately, you can make a router out of basically anything resembling a computer.

↫ Noah Bailey

I genuinely can’t believe making your own router with Linux or BSD might become a much more widespread thing in the US. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing – it’ll teach some people something new – but it just feels so absurd.

Why do so many people keep falling for the same trick over and over again?

With an over $400 billion gap between the money invested in AI data centers and the actual revenue these products generate, Silicon Valley slowly returned to the tested and trusted playbook: advertising.

Now, ads are starting to appear in pull requests generated by Copilot. According to Melbourne-based software developer Zach Manson, a team member used the AI to fix a simple typo in a pull request. Copilot did the job, but it also took the liberty of editing the PR’s description to include this message: “⚡ Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast.”

↫ David Uzondu at Neowin

It turns out that Microsoft has added ads to over 1.5 million Copilot pull requests on GitHub, and they’re even appearing on GitLab, one of the GitHub alternatives. The reasoning is clear, too, of course: “AI” companies and investors have poured ungodly amounts of money in “AI” that is impossible to recover, even with paying customers. As such, the logical next step is ads, and many “AI” companies are already starting to add advertising to their pachinko machines. It was only a matter of time before Copilot would start inserting ads into the pull requests it ejaculates over all kinds of projects.

This isn’t the first time a once-free service turns on its users, but it’s definitely one of the quickest turnarounds I’ve ever seen. Usually it takes much longer before companies reach the stage of putting ads in their products to plug any financial bleeding, but with the amount of money poured into this useless black hole, it really shouldn’t be surprising we’re already there. I’m sure Copilot’s competitors, like Claude, will soon follow suit.

They’re enshittifying Git, and developers are just letting it happen. No wonder worker exploitation is so rampant in Silicon Valley.