In January of 2021 I was exploring the corpus of Skins I collected for the Winamp Skin Museum and found some that seemed corrupted, so I decided to explore them. Winamp skins are actually just zip files with a different file extension, so I tried extracting their files to see what I could find.

This ended up leading me down a series of wild rabbit holes.

↫ Jordan Eldredge

I’m not going to spoil any of this.

This blog post is a guide explaining how to setup a full-featured email server on OpenBSD 7.5. It was commissioned by a customer of my consultancy who wanted it to be published on my blog.

Setting up a modern email stack that does not appear as a spam platform to the world can be a daunting task, the guide will cover what you need for a secure, functional and low maintenance email system.

↫ Solène Rapenne

If you ever wanted to set up and run your own email server, this is a great way to do it. Solène, an OpenBSD developer, will help you through setting up IMAP, POP, and Webmail, an SMTP server with server-to-server encryption and hidden personal information, every possible measure to make sure your server is regarded as legitimate, and all the usual firewall and anti-spam stuff you are definitely going to need.

Taking back email from Google – or even Proton, which is now doing both machine learning and Bitcoin, of all things – is probably one of the most daunting tasks for anyone willing to cut ties with as much of big tech as possible. Not only is there the technical barrier, there’s also the fact that the major email providers, like Gmail or whatever Microsoft offers these days, are trying their darnest to make self-hosting email as cumbersome as possible by trying to label everything you send as spam or downright malicious.

It’s definitely not an easy task, but at least with guides like this there’s some set of easy steps to follow to get there.

Simultaneous multithreading (SMT) is a feature that lets a processor handle instructions from two different threads at the same time. But have you ever wondered how this actually works? How does the processor keep track of two threads and manage its resources between them?

In this article, we’re going to break it all down. Understanding the nuts and bolts of SMT will help you decide if it’s a good fit for your production servers. Sometimes, SMT can turbocharge your system’s performance, but in other cases, it might actually slow things down. Knowing the details will help you make the best choice.

↫ Abhinav Upadhyay

Some light reading for the (almost) weekend.

In what started last year as a handful of reports about instability with Intel’s Raptor Lake desktop chips has, over the last several months, grown into a much larger saga. Facing their biggest client chip instability impediment in decades, Intel has been under increasing pressure to figure out the root cause of the issue and fix it, as claims of damaged chips have stacked up and rumors have swirled amidst the silence from Intel. But, at long last, it looks like Intel’s latest saga is about to reach its end, as today the company has announced that they’ve found the cause of the issue, and will be rolling out a microcode fix next month to resolve it.

↫ Ryan Smith at AnandTech

It turns out the root cause of the problem is “elevated operating voltages”, caused by a buggy algorithm in Intel’s own microcode. As such, it’s at least fixable through a microcode update, which Intel says it will ship sometime mid-August. AnandTech, my one true source for proper reporting on things like this, is not entirely satisfied, though, as they state microcode is often used to just cover up the real root cause that’s located much deeper inside the processor, and as such, Intel’s explanation doesn’t actually tell us very much at all.

Quite coincidentally, Intel also experienced a manufacturing flaw with a small batch of very early Raptor Lake processors. An “oxidation manufacturing flaw” found its way into a small number of early Raptor Lake processors, but the company claims it was caught early and shouldn’t be an issue any more. Of course, for anyone experiencing issues with their expensive Intel processors, this will linger in the back of their minds, too.

Not exactly a flawless launch for Intel, but it seems its main only competitor, AMD, is also experiencing issues, as the company has delayed the launch of its new Ryzen 9000 chips due to quality issues. I’m not at all qualified to make any relevant statements about this, but with the recent launch of the Snapdragon Elite X and Pro chips, these issues couldn’t come at a worse time for Intel and AMD.

Not everything made by KDE uses C++. This is probably obvious to some people, but it’s worth mentioning nevertheless.

And I don’t mean this as just “well duh, KDE uses QtQuick which is written with C++ and QML”. I also don’t mean this as “well duh, Qt has a lot of bindings to other languages”. I mean explicitly “KDE has tools written primarily in certain languages and specialized formats”.

↫ Thiago Sueto

If you ever wanted to contribute to KDE but weren’t sure if your preferred programming language or tools were relevant, this is a great blog post detailing how you can contribute if you are familiar with any of the following: Python, Ruby, Perl, Containerfile/Docker/Podman, HTML/SCSS/JavaScript, Web Assembly, Flatpak/Snap, CMake, Java, and Rust. A complex, large project like KDE needs people with a wide variety of skills, so it’s definitely not just C++.

An excellent place to start.

The assault on a user’s freedom to install whatever they want on what is supposed to be their phone continues. This time, it’s Samsung adding an additional blocker to users installing applications from outside the Play Store and its own mostly useless Galaxy Store.

Technically, Android already blocks sideloading by default at an operating system level. The permission that’s needed to silently install new apps without prompting the user, INSTALL_PACKAGES, can only be granted to preinstalled app stores like the Google Play Store, and it’s granted automatically to apps that request it. The permission that most third-party app stores end up using, REQUEST_INSTALL_PACKAGES, has to be granted explicitly by the user. Even then, Android will prompt the user every time an app with this permission tries to install a new app.

Samsung’s Auto Blocker feature takes things a bit further. The feature, first introduced in One UI 6.0, fully blocks the installation of apps from unauthorized sources, even if those sources were granted the REQUEST_INSTALL_PACKAGES permission.

↫ Mishaal Rahman

I’m not entirely sure why Samsung felt the need to add an additional, Samsung-specific blocking mechanism, but at least for now, you can turn it off in the Settings application. This means that in order to install an application from outside of the Play Store and the Galaxy Store on brand new Samsung phones – the ones shipping with OneUI 6.1.1 – you need to both give the regular Android permission to do so, but also turn off this nag feature.

Having two variants of every application on your Samsung phone wasn’t enough, apparently.

A story that’s been persistently making the rounds since the CrowdStrike event is that while several airline companies were affected in one way or another, Southwest Airlines escaped the mayhem because they were still using windows 3.1. It’s a great story that fits the current zeitgeist about technology and its role in society, underlining that what is claimed to be technological progress is nothing but trouble, and that it’s better to stick with the old. At the same time, anybody who dislikes Southwest Airlines can point and laugh at the bumbling idiots working there for still using Windows 3.1. It’s like a perfect storm of technology news click and ragebait.

Too bad the whole story is nonsense.

But how could that be? It’s widely reported by reputable news websites all over the world, shared on social media like a strain of the common cold, and nobody seems to question it or doubt the veracity of the story. It seems that Southwest Airlines running on an operating system from 1992 is a perfectly believable story to just about everyone, so nobody is questioning it or wondering if it’s actually true. Well, I did, and no, it’s not true.

Let’s start with the actual source of the claim that Southwest Airlines was unaffected by CrowdStrike because they’re still using Windows 3.11 for large parts of their primary systems. This claim is easily traced back to its origin – a tweet by someone called Artem Russakovskii, stating that “the reason Southwest is not affected is because they still run on Windows 3.1”. This tweet formed the basis for virtually all of the stories, but it contains no sources, no links, no background information, nothing. It was literally just this one line.

It turned out be a troll tweet. A reply to the tweet by Russakovskii a day later made that very lear: “To be clear, I was trolling last night, but it turned out to be true. Some Southwest systems apparently do run Windows 3.1. lol.” However, that linked article doesn’t cite any sources either, so we’re right back where we started. After quite a bit of digging – that is, clicking a few links and like 3 minutes of searching online – following the various reference and links back to their sources, I managed to find where all these stories actually come from to arrive at the root claim that spawned all these other claims.

It’s from an article by The Dallas Morning News, titled “What’s the problem with Southwest Airlines scheduling system?” At the end of last year, Southwest Airlines’ scheduling system had a major meltdown, leading to a lot of cancelled flights and stranded travelers just around the Christmas holidays. Of course, the media wanted to know what caused it, and that’s where this The Dallas Morning News article comes from. In it, we find the paragraphs that started the story that Southwest Airlines is still using Windows 3.1 (and Windows 95!):

Southwest uses internally built and maintained systems called SkySolver and Crew Web Access for pilots and flight attendants. They can sign on to those systems to pick flights and then make changes when flights are canceled or delayed or when there is an illness.

“Southwest has generated systems internally themselves instead of using more standard programs that others have used,” Montgomery said. “Some systems even look historic like they were designed on Windows 95.”

SkySolver and Crew Web Access are both available as mobile apps, but those systems often break down during even mild weather events, and employees end up making phone calls to Southwest’s crew scheduling help desk to find better routes. During periods of heavy operational trouble, the system gets bogged down with too much demand.

↫ Kyle Arnold at The Dallas Morning News

That’s it. That’s where all these stories can trace their origin to. These few paragraphs do not say that Southwest is still using ancient Windows versions; it just states that the systems they developed internally, SkySolver and Crew Web Access, look “historic like they were designed on Windows 95”. The fact that they are also available as mobile applications should further make it clear that no, these applications are not running on Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. Southwest pilots and cabin crews are definitely not carrying around pocket laptops from the ’90s.

These paragraphs were then misread, misunderstood, and mangled in a game of social media and bad reporting telephone, and here we are. The fact that nobody seems to have taken the time to click through a few links to find the supposed source of these claims, instead focusing on cashing in on the clicks and rage these stories would illicit, is a rather damning indictment of the state of online (tech) media. Many of the websites reporting on these stories are part of giant media conglomerates, have a massive number of paid staff, and they’re being outdone by a dude in the Arctic with a small Patreon, minimal journalism training, and some common sense.

This story wasn’t hard to debunk – a few clicks and a few minutes of online searching is all it took. Ask yourself – why do these massive news websites not even perform the bare minimum?

“Dell UNIX? I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

A couple of weeks ago I had my new XO with me for breakfast at a nearby bakery café. Other patrons were drawn to seeing an XO for the first time, including a Linux person from Dell. I mentioned Dell UNIX and we talked a little about the people who had worked on Dell UNIX. He expressed surprise that mention of Dell UNIX evokes the above quote so often and pointed out that Emacs source still has #ifdef for Dell UNIX.

Quick Googling doesn’t reveal useful history of Dell UNIX, so here’s my version, a summary of the three major development releases.

↫ Charles H. Sauer

I sure had never heard of Dell UNIX, and despite the original version of the linked article being very, very old – 2008 – there’s a few updates from 2020 and 2021 that add links to the files and instructions needed to install, set up, and run Dell UNIX in a virtual machine; 86Box or VirtualBox specifically.

What was Dell UNIX? in the late ’80s, Dell started a the Olympic project, an effort to create a completely new architecture spanning desktops, workstations, and servers, some of which would be using multiple processors. When searching for an operating system for this project, the only real option was UNIX, and as such, the Olympic team set out to developer a UNIX variant. The first version was based on System V Release 3.2, used Motif and the X Window System, a DOS virtual machine to run, well, DOS applications called Merge, and compatibility with Microsoft Xenix. It might seem strange to us today, but Microsoft’s Xenix was incredibly popular at the time, and compatibility with it was a big deal.

The Olympic project turned out to be too ambitious on the hardware front so it got cancelled, but the Dell UNIX project continued to be developed. The next release, Dell System V Release 4, was a massive release, and included a full X Window System desktop environment called X.desktop, an office suite, e-mail software, and a lot more. It also contained something Windows wouldn’t be getting for quite a few years to come: automatic configuration of device drivers. This was apparently so successful, it reduced the number of support calls during the first 90 days of availability by 90% compared to the previous release.

Dell SVR4 finally seemed like real UNIX on a PC. We were justifiably proud of the quality and comprehensiveness, especially considering that our team was so much smaller than those of our perceived competitors at ISC, SCO and Sun(!). The reviewers were impressed. Reportedly, Dell SVR4 was chosen by Intel as their reference implementation in their test labs, chosen by Oracle as their reference Intel UNIX implementation, and used by AT&T USL for in house projects requiring high reliability, in preference to their own ports of SVR4.0. (One count showed Dell had resolved about 1800 problems in the AT&T source.) I was astonished one morning in the winter of 1991-92 when Ed Zander, at the time president of SunSoft, and three other SunSoft executives arrived at my office, requesting Dell help with their plans to put Solaris on X86.

↫ Charles H. Sauer

Sadly, this would also prove to be the last release of Dell UNIX. After a few more point release, the brass at Dell had realised that Dell UNIX, intended to sell Dell hardware, was mostly being sold to people running it on non-Dell hardware, and after a short internal struggle, the entire project was cancelled since it was costing them more than it was earning them.

As I noted, the article contains the files and instructions needed to run Dell UNIX today, on a virtual machine. I’m definitely going to try that out once I have some time, if only to take a peek at that X.desktop, because that looks absolutely stunning for its time.

Only yesterday, I mentioned one of the main reasons I decided to switch back to Fedora from OpenBSD were performance issues – and one of them was definitely the lack of hardware acceleration for video decoding/encoding. The lack of such technology means that decoding/encoding video is done using the processor, which is far less efficient than letting your GPU do it – which results in performance issues like stuttering and tearing, as well as a drastic reduction in battery life.

Well, that’s changed now. Thanks to the work of, well, many, a major commit has added hardware accelerated video decoding/encoding to OpenBSD.

Hardware accelerated video decode/encode (VA-API) support is beginning to land in #OpenBSD -current.

libva has been integrated into xenocara with the Intel userland drivers in the ports tree. AMD requires Mesa support, hence the inclusion in base.

A number of ports will be adjusted to enable VA-API support over time, as they are tested.

↫ Bryan Steele

This is great news, and a major improvement for OpenBSD and the community. Apparently, performance in Firefox is excellent, and with simply watching video on YouTube being something a lot of people do with their computers – especially laptops – anyone using OpenBSD is going to benefit immensely from this work.

In September 1989, Novell released NetWare 386 V3.0, the first in a long line of 32-bit network operating systems. At the time, Novell’s mainstay was NetWare 2.15, a system designed to run on 286-based machines.

NetWare 386, as the name suggests, required at least a 386 processor. It was a major redesign of the NetWare OS intended to take advantage of (then) high end 32-bit hardware. Whereas NetWare 2.x was linked from object modules during installation (much like commercial UNIX implementations), NetWare 386 utilized modules (NLMs, or NetWare Loadable Modules) which could be loaded and unloaded at run-time.

↫ Michal Necasek

NetWare 386 or 3.0 was a very limited release, with very few copies sold before it was superseded by newer versions. As such, it was considered lost to time, since it was only sold to large corporations – for a massive almost 8000 dollar price tag – who obviously didn’t care about software preservation. There are no original disks left, but a recent “warez” release has made the software available once again.

As always, pirates save the day.

In 2018, we announced the deprecation and transition of Google URL Shortener because of the changes we’ve seen in how people find content on the internet, and the number of new popular URL shortening services that emerged in that time. This meant that we no longer accepted new URLs to shorten but that we would continue serving existing URLs.

Today, the time has come to turn off the serving portion of Google URL Shortener. Please read on below to understand more about how this will impact you if you’re using Google URL Shortener.

↫ Sumit Chandel and Eldhose Mathokkil Babu

It should cost Google nothing to keep this running for as long as Google exists, and yet, this, too, has to be killed off and buried in the Google Graveyard. We’ll be running into non-resolving Google URL Shortener links for decades to come, both on large, popular websites a well as on obscure forums and small websites. You’ll find a solution to some obscure problem a decade from now, but the links you need will be useless, and you’ll rightfully curse Google for being so utterly petty.

Relying on anything Google that isn’t directly serving its main business – ads – is a recipe for disaster, and will cause headaches down the line. Things like Gmail, YouTube, and Android are most likely fine, but anything consumer-focused is really a lottery.

All that to say, I find that NetBSDs philosophy aligns with mine. The OS is small and cozy, and compared to many minimal Linux distributions, I found it faster to setup. Supported hardware is automatically picked up, for my Thinkpad T480s almost everything (except the trackpad issue I solved above) worked out of the box, and it comes with a minimal window manager and display manager to get you started. It is simple and minimal but with sane defaults. It is a hackable system that teaches you a ton. What more could you want?

↫ Marc Coquand

I spent quite some time using OpenBSD earlier this year, and I absolutely, positively loved it. I can’t quite put into words just how nice OpenBSD felt, how graspable the configuration files and commands were, how good and detailed the documentation, and how welcoming and warm the community was over on Mastodon, with even well-known OpenBSD developers taking time out of their day to help me out with dumb newbie questions.

The only reason I eventually went back to Fedora on my workstation was performance. OpenBSD as a desktop operating system has some performance issues, from a slow file system to user interface stutter to problematic Firefox performance, that really started to grind my gears while trying to get work done. Some of these issues stem from OpenBSD not being primarily focused on desktop use, and some of them simply stem from lack of manpower or popularity. Regardless, nobody in the OpenBSD community was at all surprised or offended by me going back to Fedora.

NetBSD seems to share a lot of the same qualities as OpenBSD, but, as the linked article notes, with a focus on different things. Like I said yesterday, I’m looking to building and testing a system entirely focused on tiled terminal emulators and TUI applications, and I’ve been pondering if OpenBSD or NetBSD would be a perfect starting point for that experiment.

Well, this sure is something to wake up to: a massive worldwide outage of computer systems due to a problem with CrowdStrike software. Payment systems, airlines, hospitals, governments, TV stations – pretty much anything or anyone using computers could be dealing with bluescreens, bootloops, and similar issues today. Open-heart surgeries had to be stopped mid-surgery, planes can’t take off, people can’t board trains, shoppers can’t pay for their groceries, and much, much more, all over the world.

The problem is caused by CrowdStrike, a sort-of enterprise AV/monitoring software that uses a Windows NT kernel driver to monitor everything people do on corporate machines and logs it for… Security purposes, I guess? I’ve never worked in a corporate setting so I have no experience with software like this. From what I hear, software like this is deeply loathed by workers the world over, as it gets in the way and slows systems down. And, as can happen with a kernel driver, a bug can cause massive worldwide outages which is costing people billions in damages and may even have killed people.

There is a workaround, posted by CrowdStrike:

1. Boot Windows into Safe Mode or the Windows Recovery Environment
2. Navigate to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike directory
3. Locate the file matching “C-00000291*.sys”, and delete it. 
4. Boot the host normally. 

This is a solution for individually fixing affected machines, but I’ve seen responses like “great, how do I apply this to 70k endpoints?”, indicating that this may not be a practical solution for many affected customers. Then there’s the issue that this may require a BitLocker password, which not everyone has on hand either. To add insult to injury, CrowdStrike’s advisory about the issue is locked behind a login wall. A shitshow all around.

Do note that while the focus is on Windows, Linux machines can run CrowdStrike software too, and I’ve heard from Linux kernel engineers who happen to also administer large numbers of Linux servers that they’re seeing a huge spike in Linux kernel panics… Caused by CrowdStrike, which is installed on a lot more Linux servers than you might think. So while Windows is currently the focus of the story, the problems are far more widespread than just Windows.

I’m sure we’re going to see some major consequences here, and my – misplaced, I’m sure – hope is that this will make people think twice about one, using these invasive anti-worker monitoring tools, and two, employing kernel drivers for this nonsense.

It’s a bit of a Linux news day today – it happens – but this one is good news we can all be happy about. After earning a bad reputation for mishandling its Linux graphics drivers for years, almost decades, NVIDIA has been turning the ship around these past two years, and today they made a major announcement: from here on out, the open source NVIDIA kernel modules will be the default for all recent NVIDIA cards.

We’re now at a point where transitioning fully to the open-source GPU kernel modules is the right move, and we’re making that change in the upcoming R560 driver release.

↫ Rob Armstrong, Kevin Mittman and Fred Oh

There are some caveats regarding which generations, exactly, should be using the open source modules for optimal performance. For NVIDIA’s most cutting edge generations, Grace Hopper and Blackwell, you actually must use the open source modules, since the proprietary ones are not even supported. For GPUs from the Turing, Ampere, Ada Lovelace, or Hopper architectures, NVIDIA recommends the open source modules, but the proprietary ones are compatible as well. Anything older than that is restricted to the proprietary modules, as they’re not supported by the open source modules.

This is a huge milestone, and NVIDIA becoming a better team player in the Linux world is a big deal for those of us with NVIDIA GPUs – it’s already paying dividend in vastly improved Wayland support, which up until very recently was a huge problem. Do note, though, that this only covers the kernel module; the userspace parts of the NVIDIA driver are still closed-source, and there’s no indication that’s going to change.