Every so often people yearn for a lost (1980s or so) era of ‘single user computers’, whether these are simple personal computers or high end things like Lisp machines and Smalltalk workstations. It’s my view that the whole idea of a 1980s style “single user computer” is not what we actually want and has some significant flaws in practice.

↫ Chris Siebenmann

I think the premise of this entire article is flawed, and borders on being a strawman argument. I honestly don’t think there’s many people out there who genuinely and seriously want to use an ’80s home computer for all their computing tasks, but this article seems to think that there are. Virtually every single person expressing interest in and a desire for classic computers does so from a point of nostalgia, as a learning experience, or as a hobby. They’re definitely not interested in using any of those ’80s machine to do their banking or to collaborate with their colleagues.

Additionally, the problems and issues people have with modern computing platforms is not that they are too complex, but that they are no longer designed with the user in mind. Windows, macOS, iOS; they’re all first and foremost designed to extract money from you through ads, upsells, nag screens, and similar anti-user features, and it’s those things that people are sick of. Coincidentally, they are all things we didn’t have to deal with back in the ’80s and ’90s. In other words, remove the user-hostility from modern operating systems, and people wouldn’t complain about them so much.

Which seems rather obvious, doesn’t it?

It’s why using a Linux desktop like Fedora is such a breath of fresh air. There’s no upsells for cloud storage or streaming services, no restrictions on what I can and cannot install to protect some multitrillion euro company’s revenue streams, no ads and nag screens infesting my operating system – it’s just an operating system waiting for me to tell it what it do, and then it does it. It’s wild how increasingly revolutionary that’s becoming.

Whenever I am forced to interact with Windows 11 or whatever the current version of macOS is, I feel such a profound and deep sadness for what they’ve become, and it seems only natural to me that this sadness is fueling a longing for back when these systems weren’t so user-hostile.

Tuxguitar is a quite powerful application written in a mixture of Java / C. It is able to render a score in real time either via Fluidsynth or via pure MIDI. The development of Tuxguitar started in 2008 on Sourceforce and after a halt in 2022, the project restarted on Github and is still actively developed.

The goal of this article is to try to render a score via Tuxguitar, and various other applications connected to Tuxguitar, via Jack or Pipewire-Jack. The score used throughout this article will be The Pursuit Of Vikings by the band Amon Amarth. It has 2 guitars, a bass and a drum track.

↫ Yann Collette at Fedora Magazine

If you’re into audio production and are considering using Linux for your audio needs, this article is a good starting point.

You may not have heard of the “Transparency & Consent Framework”, but you’ve most likely interacted with it, probably on a daily basis. The TCF is used by 80% of the internet to obtain “consent” from users to collect their data and share it among advertisers – you know, the cookie popups. In a landmark EU ruling yesterday, the TCF has been declared to violate the GDPR, making it illegal.

For seven years, the tracking industry has used the TCF as a legal cover for Real-Time Bidding (RTB), the vast advertising auction system that operates behind the scenes on websites and apps. RTB tracks what Internet users look at and where they go in the real world. It then continuously broadcasts this data to a host of companies, enabling them to keep dossiers on every Internet user. Because there is no security in the RTB system it is impossible to know what then happens to the data. As a result, it is also impossible to provide the necessary information that must accompany a consent request.

↫ Irish Council for Civil Liberties

It’s no secret that cookie consent popups do not actually comply with the GDPR, and that they are not even necessary if you simply don’t do any cross-site sharing of personal information. It seems that this ruling confirms this in a legal sense, forcing the advertising industry to come up with a new, better system. On top of that, every individual company that participated in this scheme is now liable for fines and damages.

Complaints coordinated by Johnny Ryan, Director of Enforce at the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, prompted the ruling. He said:

Today’s court’s decision shows that the consent system used by Google, Amazon, X, Microsoft, deceives hundreds of millions of Europeans. The tech industry has sought to hide its vast data breach behind sham consent popups. Tech companies turned the GDPR into a daily nuisance rather than a shield for people.

↫ Irish Council for Civil Liberties

The problem here is not so much the clarity of applicable laws and regulations, but the cost and effectiveness of enforcement. If it takes years of expensive and complex legal proceedings to bring a company that violates the GDPR to heel, is it really an effective legal framework? Especially when you take into account just how many companies, big and small, there are that violate the GDPR?

OSNews uses a cookie popup and displays advertising, something we have to do to gain a little bit of extra income – but I’m not happy about it. Our ads don’t provide us with much income, perhaps about €150-200, but that’s still a decent enough chunk of our income pie that we need it. I would greatly prefer we turn off these ads altogether, but in order to be able to afford that, we’d need to up our Patreon income. OSNews Patreons get an ad-free version of OSNews.

That’s a long and slow process, especially with the current economic uncertainty making people reconsider their expenses. Disabling our ads altogether for everyone once we’re fully reader-funded is still my end goal, but until the world around us settles down a bit, that’s a little while off. If you want to speed this process up – you can become an OSNews Patreon and enjoy an ad-free OSNews today.

I generally don’t pay attention to the releases of programming languages unless they’re notable for some reason or another, and I think this one qualifies. Rust is celebrating its ten year anniversary with a brand new release, Rust 1.87.0. This release adds anonymous pipes to the standard library, inline assembly can now jump to labeled blocks in Rust code, and support for the i586 Windows target has been removed. Considering Windows 7 was the last Windows version to support i586, I’d say this is fair.

You can update to the new version using the rustup command, or wait until your operating system adds it to its repository if you’re using a modern operating system.

Following rumors, Xiaomi today announced that it will launch its very own chip for smartphones later this month. The “XRING 01” is a chip that the company has apparently been working on for over 10 years now.

Details about the chip are scarce so far, but GizmoChina points to recent leaks that suggest the chip is built on a 4nm process through TSMC. The chip supposedly has a 1+3+4 layout and should lag just a bit behind Snapdragon 8 Elite and Dimensity 9400 in terms of raw horsepower, sounding familiar to Google’s work with Tensor chips.

↫ Ben Schoon at 9To5Google

I like this. Having almost every Android device use Qualcomm’s chips is not good for fostering competition, and weakens Android OEMs’ bargaining position. If we have more successful SoC makers, consumers will not only gain access to a wider variety of chips that may better suit their needs, it will also force Qualcomm to lower its prices, compete better, or both. Everybody wins.

Well, except Qualcomm, I guess.

You’d almost forget, but aside from the enterprise-focused variant of Solaris for which Oracle sells support contracts, the company has also nominally maintained and released a version of Solaris aimed at non-production use and enthusiasts. This version, called Solaris CBE or Common Build Environment, has always been free to download and use, but since it was last updated all the way back in early 2022, you’d be forgiven for having forgotten all about it. Today, though, Oracle has finally released a new version of Solaris CBE, after three years of silence.

The Common Build Environment (CBE) release for Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU 81 is now available via “pkg update” from the release repository or by downloading the install images from the Oracle Solaris Downloads page. As with the first Oracle Solaris 11.4 CBE, this is licensed for free/open source developers and non-production personal use, and this is not the final, supported version of the 11.4.81 SRU, but the pre-release version on which the SRU was built. It contains all of the new features and interfaces, but not all of the final rounds of bug fixes, from the 11.4.81 SRU.

The previous version was the CBE for 11.4.42, so there’s more than 3 years worth of changes between these two releases. If you wanted to read about the changes in every intervening SRU, you can find the monthly SRU release announcements for every SRU, and the What’s New summaries for each quarterly feature release starting with SRU 63, on the Oracle Solaris blog. Some FOSS version updates are also listed in Oracle Solaris 11.4 Bundled Software Updates. You can also find posts about some of the new features from the SRUs on Joerg Moellenkamp’s blog and Marcel Hofstetter’s blog.

↫ Alan Coopersmith and Jan Pechanec

With three years of changes, updates, and fixes to talk about, it’s no surprise there’s a lot of things this new release covers, and credit to Oracle: the blog post announcing this new release is incredibly detailed, lists a ton of the changes in great detail, and is definitely required reading if you’re interested in trying this release out for yourself. I’m definitely tempted, even if it’s Oracle.

Solaris 11.4 SRU 81 CBE comes with much more recent versions of the free and open source tools and frameworks you’ve come to expect, like updated versions of GCC, LLVM/clang, tons of programming languages like Python, Perl, and Rust, as well as updates to all the related toolchain components. The CTF (Compact C Type Format) utilities (ctfconvert, ctfdump, and ctfmerge), used to build Solaris itself and crucial for tools like DTrace, have also been updated, and now reside in /usr/bin. These updates are joined by a massive number of other, related low-level changes.

For desktop users, GNOME has been updated from the veritably ancient GNOME 3.38 to GNOME 45 (current is 48.1), which is a big jump for Solaris desktop users. Firefox and Thunderbird jump from 91 ESR to 128 ESR, which should deliver a much-improved browsing and email experience. All of this graphical desktop use is powered by version 21.1 of the X server, Mesa 21.3.8, and version 470.182 of the NVIDIA driver. Grub has been updated to version 2.12, and thanks to a new secure boot shim, users no longer have to make any changes to secure boot settings, as Solaris will always default to installing the secure boot image.

This is just a small selection of all the changes, and it seems Oracle is planning on releasing these CBE versions more often from here on out, as they say this release contains a ton of preparatory work for changes in upcoming releases, “which should come more often than once every three years going forward”. Do note that while Solaris CBE releases are free for non-production use, they’re not open source.

How do you get email to the folks without computers? What if the Post Office printed out email, stamped it, dropped it in folks’ mailboxes along with the rest of their mail, and saved the USPS once and for all?

And so in 1982 E-COM was born—and, inadvertently, helped coin the term “e-mail.”

↫ Justin Duke

The implementation of E-COM was awesome. You’d enter the messages on your computer, send it to the post office using a TTY or IBM 2780/3789 terminals, to Sperry Rand Univac 1108 computer systems at one of 25 post offices. Postal staff would print the messages and send them through the regular postal system to their recipients. The USPS actually tried to get a legal monopoly on this concept, but the FCC fought them in court and won out.

E-COM wasn’t the breakout success the USPS had hoped for, but it did catch on in one, unpleasant way: spam. The official-looking E-COM enevelopes from the USPS were very attractive to junk mail companies, and it was estimated that about six companies made up 70% of the total E-COM volume of 15 million messages in its second year of operation.

The entire article is definitely recommended reading, as it contains a ton more information about E-COM and some of the other attempts by USPS to ride the coattails of the computer and internet revolution, including the idea to give every US resident an @.us e-mail address. Wild.

At the start of this year, Microsoft announced that, alongside the end of support for Windows 10, it would also end support for Office 365 (it’s called Microsoft 365 now but that makes no sense to me) on Windows 10 around the same time. The various Office applications would continue to work on Windows 10, of course, but would no longer receive bug fixes, security plugs, and so on. Well, it seems Microsoft experienced some pushback on this one, because it just extended this end-of-support deadline for Office 365 on Windows 10 by an additional three years.

To help maintain security while you transition to Windows 11, Microsoft will continue providing security updates for Microsoft 365 Apps on Windows 10 for three years after Windows 10 reaches end of support. These updates will be delivered through the standard update channels, ending on October 10, 2028.

↫ Microsoft support article

The reality is that the vast majority of Windows users are still using Windows 10, and despite countless shady shenanigans and promises of “AI” bliss, there’s relatively little movement in the breakdown between Windows 10 and Windows 11 users. As such, the idea that Microsoft would just stop fixing security issues and bugs in Office on Windows 10 a few months from now seemed preposterous from the outset, and that seems to have penetrated the walls of Microsoft’s executives, too.

The real question now is: will Microsoft extend the same courtesy to Windows 10 itself? The clock is ticking, there’s only a few months left to go before support for Windows 10 ends, leaving 60-70% of Windows users without security fixes and updates. If they blinked with Office, why wouldn’t they blink with Windows 10, too? Who dares to place a bet?

Following on from OpenBSD/arm64 on QEMU, it’s not always practical to compile userland software or a new kernel on some systems, particularly small SoCs with limited space and memory – or indeed QEMU, in fear of melting your CPU.

There are two scenarios here – the first, if you are looking for a standard cross-compiler for Aarch64, and the second if you want an OpenBSD-specific environment.

↫ Daniel Nechtan

Exactly what it says on the tin.

I had to dig through our extensive archive – OSNews was founded in 1997, after all – to see if we reported on it at the time, but it turns out we didn’t: in 2006, Intel announced that in 2007, it would cease production of a range of old chips, including the 386 and 486. In Product Change Notification 106013-01, Intel proclaimed these chips dead.

Intel Corporation has been manufacturing its MCS 51, MCS 251 and MCS 96 Microcontroller Product Lines for over 25 years now, and the Intel 186 Processor Families, the Intel 386 Processor Families and the Intel 486 Processor Families for over 15 years now. Additionally, we have been manufacturing the i960 32 Bit RISC Processor Families for over 15 years. However, at this time, the forecasted volumes for these product lines are now too low to continue production of these products beyond the year 2007. Therefore, Intel will cease manufacturing silicon wafers for our 6″ based processes in 2007. Affected products include Intel’s MCS 51, MCS 251, MCS 96, 80X18X, 80X38X, 80X486DXX, the i960 Family of Microcomputers, in addition to the 82371SB, 82439TX and the 82439HX Chipsets. Intel has no choice but to issue a Product Discontinuance Notice (PDN) effective 3/30/06. Last time orders will be accepted till 3/30/07 with last time ship dates of 9/28/07.

↫ Intel Product Change Notification 106013-01

Considering the 386, 486, and i960 families of processors were only used for niche embedded at very low volumes at that point in time, it made sense to call it quits. We’re 18 years down the line now, and I don’t think anyone really mourns the end of production for these processors. Windows ended support for these chips well before the 2007 end of production date, with Windows 2000 being the last Windows version that would run on a 486, albeit only barely, since it officially required a Pentium processor.

Linux, though, continued to support the 486, but that, too, is now coming to an end. In a patch submitted to the LKML, Ingo Molnár, support for a variety of “complicated hardware emulation facilities” for x86-32 will be removed, effectively ending support for 486 and very early 586 processors, by increasing the minimum kernel support features to include TSC and CX8 (CMPXCHG8B) hardware support. Linus Torvalds has expressed interest in removing support for the 486 back in 2022, so this move doesn’t come as a huge surprise.

While most tech news outlets leave it at that, as I was reading this news, I immediately thought of the Vortex86 line of processors and what this would mean for Linux support for those processors. In case you’re unaware, the Vortex86 is a line of x86-32-compatible processors, originating at SiS, but now developed and produced by DMP Electronics in Taiwain. The last two variants were the Vortex86DX3, a dual-core chip running at 1Ghz, and the Vortex86EX2, a chip with two asymmetrical cores that can run two operating systems at once.

Their platform support documents for Windows and Linux are from 2021, so we can’t rely on those for more information. Digging through some of the documentation from ICOP, who sell industrial PCs based on the latest Vortex86DX3, I think support in modern kernels is very much hit and miss even before this news. All Vortex86 processors are supposedly i586 (with later variants being i686, even), but some of the earlier versions were compatible with the 486SX. On top of that, Linux 4.14 seems to be the last kernel that supports any of these chips out-of-the-box based on the documentation by DMP – but then, if you go back to ICOP, you’ll find news items about Linux 5.16 adding better support for Vortex86, so I’m definitely confused.

My uneducated guess is that the DX3 and EX2 will probably work even after these changes to the Linux kernel, but earlier models might have more problems. Even on the LKML I can find messages from the kind of people who know their stuff who don’t know all the ins and outs of these Vortex86 processors, and which instructions they actually support.

It won’t matter much for people relying on Vortex86 processors in industrial and commercial settings, though, since they tend to use custom stacks built by the vendor, so they’re going to be just fine. What’s more interesting is the what I assume is a small enthusiast market using Vortex86 processors who might want to run modern Linux kernels on them. I have a feeling these code removals might lead to some issues on especially the earlier models, meaning you’ll have to use older kernels.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Vortex86 line of processors, and on numerous occasions I’ve hovered over the buy button on some industrial PC using the VortexDX3 (or earlier) processor. Let me know if you’re interested in seeing what this chip can do, and if there’s enough interest, I can see if I can set a Ko-Fi goal to buy one these and mess around with Windows Embedded/CE, Linux, and god knows what else these things can be made to run.

We’re looking at an article from 2007 here, but I still think it’s valuable and interesting, especially from a historical perspective.

I first started working on the UNIX file system with Bill Joy in the late 1970s. I wrote the Fast File System, now called UFS, in the early 1980s. In this article, I have written a survey of the work that I and others have done to improve the BSD file systems. Much of this research has been incorporated into other file systems.

↫ Marshall Kirk McKusic

Variants of UFS are still the default file system in at least NetBSD and OpenBSD, and it’s one of the two default options in FreeBSD (alongside ZFS). In other words, this article, and the work described therein, is still relevant to this very day.

I think one of the more controversial parts of Windows 11 – aside from its system requirements, privacy issues, crapware, and “AI” nonsense – is its Start menu. I’ve heard so many complaints about how it’s organised, its performance, the lack of customisation, and so on. Microsoft heard those complaints, and has unveiled the new Start menu that’ll be shipping to Windows 11 soon – and I have to say, there’s a ton of genuine improvements here that I think many of you will be happy with.

First and foremost, the “all applications” view, that until now has been hidden behind a button, will be at the top level, and you can choose between a category view, a grid view, and a list view. This alone makes the Windows 11 Start menu so much more usable, and will be more than enough to make a lot of users want to upgrade, I’m sure.

Second, customisation is taken a lot more seriously in this new incarnation of the Start menu. You can actually shrink or remove completely sections you’re not using. If you’re not interested in those recommendations, you can just remove that section. Don’t want to use the feature where you pin applications to the Start menu? Remove that section. This, too, seems to address common complaints, and I’m glad Microsoft is fixing this.

Then there’s the rest. Microsoft is promising this new Start menu will perform better, which better be true because I’ve seen some serious lag and delays on incredibly powerful hardware. The recommendations have been improved as well, in case you care about those, and there’s a new optional mobile panel that you can slide out, which contains everything related to your phone.

Personally, I’m a classic Start menu kind of person – on all my machines (which all run Fedora KDE), I use a classic, very traditional cascading menu that contains nothing but application categories and their respective applications, and nothing more. Still, were I forced to use Windows, these improvements are welcome, and they seem genuine.

A few months ago I shared my Swift SDK for Darwin, which allows you to build iOS Swift Packages on Linux, amongst other things. I mentioned that a lot of work still needed to be done, such as handling codesigning, packaging, and bundling.

I’m super excited to share that we’ve finally reached the point where all of these things are now possible with cross-platform, open source software. Enter, xtool!

[…]

This means it’s finally possible to build and deploy iOS apps from Linux and Windows (WSL). At the same time, xtool is SwiftPM-based and fully declarative, which means you can also use it to replace Xcode on macOS for building iOS software!

↫ kabiroberai

While this is obviously an impressive piece of engineering that’s taken countless years to fully put together, the issue this doesn’t address are Apple’s licensing terms when it comes to Xcode and development for Apple’s platforms. The Apple Developer Program License Agreement clearly forbids installing Xcode and the Apple SDK on non-Apple branded devices, and as this new xtool requires you download Xcode.xip and use it, it seems it violates these terms.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, these terms are idiotic and should be 100% illegal, but if you’re an Apple developer who relies on your Apple developer account to make money, using a tool like this definitely has the potential to put your developer account at risk. For experimentation, sure, this is great, but for any official work I would be quite weary until Apple makes some sort of statement about the matter, which is highly unlikely to happen.

Perhaps the courts can, at some point, have a say here – especially in the EU – but even then, Apple can always find or manufacture some reason to terminate your account if they really want to. If you want to develop on your own terms, perhaps developing for Apple platforms is not what you should be doing.

We present the formal verification of Apple’s iMessage PQ3, a highly performant, device-to-device messaging protocol offering strong security guarantees even against an adversary with quantum computing capabilities. PQ3 leverages Apple’s identity services together with a custom, post-quantum secure initialization phase and afterwards it employs a double ratchet construction in the style of Signal, extended to provide post-quantum, post-compromise security.

We present a detailed formal model of PQ3, a precise specification of its fine-grained security properties, and machine-checked security proofs using the TAMARIN prover. Particularly novel is the integration of post-quantum secure key encapsulation into the relevant protocol phases and the detailed security claims along with their complete formal analysis. Our analysis covers both key ratchets, including unbounded loops, which was believed by some to be out of scope of symbolic provers like TAMARIN (it is not!).

↫ Felix Linker and Ralf Sasse

Weekend, light reading, you know how this works by now. Light some candles, make some tea, get comfy.