So given that, xmem can be useful as a monitoring tool. Fluffy (my main server) runs both squid and apache, and given that fluffy only has 64MB of RAM, things can get a little cramped. If I suddenly see that the whole of xmem turns blue (i.e. the swap file’s thrashing), then I know that something is odd, and I can easily find out which processes are eating up so much RAM.

I said earlier that xmem can brighten up one’s desktop. Indeed, as I use FVWM in a rather archaic fashion, it seems fitting I should like xmem. 🙂 Here’s a full screenshot showing xmem (plus other applications) in action.

↫ Thomas Adam

This is basically just an excuse to show off this awesome FVWM desktop shown off in this short little article about xmem, written by one of FVWM’s core developers. It just looks neat.

We are proud to announce that version 1.6 of the Windows App SDK is now available! Whether you’re looking for the incredible performance boost and footprint reduction of Native AOT support, enhancements for deploying your package, or quality of life improvements for controls like PipsPager and RatingControl, WinAppSDK 1.6 offers a raft of new features, performance boosts and structural changes that enable you to make your native Windows apps better than ever before. 

The Windows App SDK provides a rich set of APIs and tools to help you build beautiful and fast Windows desktop apps, including any C++ Win32 or C# .NET app. You can harness the modern controls and polish of WinUI 3, which ships as part of the WinAppSDK, or if you have an existing app that uses Win32 such as WPF, you can take advantage of only the parts of the SDK that you need. The WinAppSDK also stays up to date with frequent and OS-independent releases so your app can always access the latest innovations.

↫ Duncan MacMichael at the Windows Blogs

There’s actually quite a few nice and welcome updates in version 1.6, most prominently the aforementioned Native AOT. This stands for native Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compilation, and, as the name suggests, compiles your application ahead of time for the architecture it’s going to run on. This reduces the size of the application package and greatly improves the startup time. Another welcome improvement is that the embedded Edge WebView2 SDK is no longer hard-coded, but a NuGet reference, so developers can choose to use any version of the webview they want, preferably the newest version.

There’s a lot more in here, so if you’re a Windows developer trying to use the latest set of tools from Microsoft – this one’s for you.

The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in a fight to lend out scanned ebooks without the approval of publishers. In a decision on Wednesday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that permitting the Internet Archive’s digital library would “allow for widescale copying that deprives creators of compensation and diminishes the incentive to produce new works.”

The decision is another blow to the nonprofit in the Hachette v. Internet Archive case. In 2020, four major publishers — Hachette, Penguin Random House, Wiley, and HarperCollins — sued the Internet Archive over claims its digital library constitutes “willful digital piracy on an industrial scale.”

↫ Emma Roth

If you’re a library and scan books and offer a lending service, you’re committing “willful digital piracy on an industrial scale”. If you scan the entire goddamn internet without any regard for licensing or copyright and regurgitate chunks of it on command, you’re a visionary, a revolutionary, a genius.

Make it make sense.

A. Wilcox, the original creator of Adélie Linux, has ported systemd to musl, the glibc alternative.

I have completed an initial new port of systemd to musl. This patch set does not share much in common with the existing OpenEmbedded patchset. I wanted to make a fully updated patch series targeting more current releases of systemd and musl, taking advantage of the latest features and updates in both. I also took a focus on writing patches that could be sent for consideration of inclusion upstream.

The final result is a system that appears to be surprisingly reliable considering the newness of the port, and very fast to boot.

↫ A. Wilcox

I absolutely adore Adélie Linux as a project, even if I don’t run it myself, since they have a very practical approach to software. Systemd is popular for a reason – it’s fast and capable – and it only makes sense for Adélie to offer it as a potential option, even when using musl. Choice is a core value of the open source and Linux world, and that includes the choice to use systemd, even for a distribution that has traditionally used something else.

The port is already quite capable, and Wilcox managed to replace OpenRC on her system with systemd in-place, and it booted up just fine, and it also happened to boot in about a third of the time OpenRC did. It’s not ready for prime time yet, though, and most services are not yet packaged for systemd, an effort for which Adélie Linux intends to rely on upstream and cooperation with systemd experts from Gentoo and Fedora. They’re also working together with systemd, musl, and others to make any switching a user might want to do as easy as possible.

A beta or anything like that is still a ways off, but it’s an impressive amount of progress already.

That’s the 1983 Convergent WorkSlate, a one-of-a-kind handheld system from some misty alternate history where VisiCalc ruled the earth. Indeed, even the “software” packages Convergent shipped for it — on microcassette, which could store voice memos and data — were nothing more than cells and formulas in a worksheet. The built-in modem let you exchange data with other Workslates (or even speak over the phone to their users), and it came with a calculator desk accessory and a rudimentary terminal program, but apart from those creature comforts its built-in spreadsheet was the sole centre of your universe. And, unlike IAI and the Canon Cat, I’ve yet to find any backdoor (secret or otherwise) to enable anything else.

That means anything you want to program has to be somehow encoded in a spreadsheet too. Unfortunately, when it comes to actually programming the device it turns out the worst thing a spreadsheet on an 8-bit CPU can be is Turing-complete (so it’s not), and it has several obnoxious bugs to boot. But that doesn’t mean we can’t make it do more than balance an expense account. Along the way we’ll examine the hardware, wire into its peripheral bus, figure out how to exchange data with today’s future, create a simple game, draw rudimentary graphics and (with some help) even put it on the Internet with its very own Gopher client — after we tell of the WorkSlate’s brief and sorrowful commercial existence, as this blog always must.

↫ Cameron Kaiser

The amount of knowledge, skill, and sheer passion Cameron Kaiser displays in every one of these articles he writes is astonishing, and I’m incredibly grateful websites like OSNews can benefit from the work of people far, far smarter and more skillful than I’ll ever be. The code for the projects detailed in the article is available on GitHub, and more technical information can be found on Kaiser’s website.

Kim Carver, a legislator in the US state of Louisiana, added a provision to a child safety bill forcing Apple and Google to enforce age restrictions on downloads in their application stores. In other words, it would force Apple to make sure minors could not download gambling and casino applications – i.e., 99% of mobile games – that make up the vast majority of Apple’s services revenue. It would also make application stores play a role in enforcing age restrictions on social media applications, which makes sense because Apple and Google know the age of every one of their users.

Well, it turns out Apple was not happy. They sent out an absolute army of lobbyists – including a guy known for lobbying on behalf of truck-stop casinos, in case you were wondering about the type of people Apple uses for lobbying – to kill this specific provision. Carver’s provision would have breezed through the Louisiana senate, but it needed a key committee approval before being put up for a vote. And it’s this committee that Apple started heavily influencing and pressuring.

Carver began hearing rumblings that Apple was making inroads with the committee—his amended bill might be in trouble. Uncertain on how to proceed, he approached the chairwoman of the committee, Sen. Beth Mizell, for advice.

He declined to describe the substance of the conversation to The Wall Street Journal, but in the end, he promised not to object if she removed the app store provisions or support restoring them on the Senate floor.

“I made the choice to take the win that we could get,” Carver said.

↫ Jeff Horwitz and Aaron Tilley at The Wall Street Journal

This is not the first time Apple has pressured legislatures to drop bills it didn’t like. A famous case is the state if Georgia, which intended to pass a number of application store bills to open up the App Store in much the same way the European Union did with the DMA. Apple went absolutely mental in Georgia, including threatening to cancel “a $25 million investment in a historically Black college in Atlanta”. Apple won.

The way these sleazebag companies get away with such blatant corruption is by using third-party lobbyists, which technically are not employed by the companies in question, so no matter how low and sleazy these lobbyists go, the companies they lobby for can wash their hands in innocence and absolve themselves from any responsibility for the various financial and legal threats levied at underfunded, understaffed local legislatures. Spending a few millions on a local development project or whatever is peanuts for Apple, but a massive boon for a small community somewhere, so Apple pulling out means nothing to Apple, but would massively affect such a community. It’s not surprising local legislatures fold.

Circling back to the age restriction provision itself – telling stores what they can and cannot sell is an entirely normal thing to do, and happens all the time all over the world. It’s why in, say, The Netherlands, supermarkets are only allowed to sell “light” alcohol like beer and wine, with hard alcohol moved to separate liquor stores that have to be separate from the supermarket, so age restrictions are easier to enforce. There’s also just an infinite number of things you’re just not allowed to sell, period.

As always, Silicon Valley believes it’s a very special snowflake to whom regular, normal, widely accepted rules do not apply. Why shouldn’t a store selling gambling applications and similarly addictive and damaging applications have to do the absolute bare minimum to protect minors? Imagine the massive outcry if a Costco or Walmart was found to sell massive amounts of hard liquor to children – why should Silicon Valley companies be treated any differently?

Since we’re on the topic of BSD, what about yet another helpful guide on what to do after first installing OpenBSD? We’ve covered a few of these already, but more can never hurt, and OpenBSD is a great platform that would suit a lot more of us than you might think.

Despite some persistent rumors, installing OpenBSD is both quick and easy on most not too exotic hardware. But once the thing is installed, what is daily life with the most secure free operating system like?

↫ Peter N. M. Hansteen

This guide by Hansteen focuses primarily on the various basic system management tools you’ll be needing to keep OpenBSD up to date after initial installation, and how to install anything else you might need.

After covering setting up your own CDN with both FreeBSD and OpenBSD, it’s now time to learn how to set up your own CDN wit NetBSD.

This article is a spin-off from a previous post on how to create a self-hosted CDN, but this time we’ll focus on using NetBSD. NetBSD is a lightweight, stable, and secure operating system that supports a wide range of hardware, making it an excellent choice for a caching reverse proxy. Devices that other operating systems may soon abandon, such as early Raspberry Pi models or i386 architecture, are still fully supported by NetBSD and will continue to be so. Additionally, NetBSD is an outstanding platform for virtualization (using Xen or qemu/nvmm) and deserves more attention than it currently receives.

↫ Stefano Marinelli

All the same from my previous post still applies, and it’s a great thing that Marinelli covers all three of the major BSDs (so far). If you want to run your own CDN on BSD, you can now make a pretty informed decision on which BSD best suits your needs.

Mouse is an interpreted stack orientated language designed by Peter Grogono around 1975. It was designed to be a small but powerful language for microcomputers, similar to Forth, but much simpler. One obvious difference to Forth is that Mouse interprets a stream of characters most of which are only a single character and it relies more on variables rather than rearranging the stack as much. The version for CP/M on the Walnut Creek CD is quite small at only 2k.

↫ Lawrence Woodman (2020)

Even with very little to no programming experience I can tell that this language looks a lot smaller and more compact than other code I’ve seen. I’ll have to leave it to the actual programmers and developers among the OSNews audience to provide more valuable insight, but I feel like there’s definitely something here that’ll interest some of you.

Despite reports to the contrary, Microsoft has stated that Recall will not be uninstallable after all. The feature did show up in the Windows Features dialog, but apparently, that was a bug.

“We are aware of an issue where Recall is incorrectly listed as an option under the ‘Turn Windows features on or off’ dialog in Control Panel,” says Windows senior product manager Brandon LeBlanc in a statement to The Verge. “This will be fixed in an upcoming update.”

↫ Tom Warren at The Verge

The company is not committing to saying it will not ever be uninstallable, probably because the European Union might have something to say about that. At the very least you’ll be able to turn Recall off, but it seems actually removing it might not be possible for a while.

If you’re reading this, you did a good job surviving another month, and that means we’ve got another monthly update from the Servo project, the Rust-based browser engine originally started by Mozilla. The major new feature this month is tabbed browsing in the Servo example browser, as well as extensive improvements for Servo on Windows.

Servo-the-browser now has a redesigned toolbar and tabbed browsing! This includes a slick new tab page, taking advantage of a new API that lets Servo embedders register custom protocol handlers.

↫ Servo’s blog

Servo now runs better on Windows, with keyboard navigation now fixed, --output to PNG also fixed, and fixes for some font- and GPU-related bugs, which were causing misaligned glyphs with incorrect colors on servo.org and duckduckgo.com, and corrupted images on wikipedia.org.

Of course, that’s not at all, as there’s also the usual massive list of improved standards support, new APIs, improvements to some of the developer tools (including massive improvements in Windows build times), and a huge number of fixed bugs.

In its antitrust case against Google, the Federal Government filed a list of chats it had obtained that show Google employees explicitly asking each other to turn off a chat history feature to discuss sensitive subjects, showing repeatedly that Google workers understood they should try to avoid creating a paper trail of some of their activities. 

The filing came following a hearing in which judge Leonie Brinkema ripped Google for “destroyed” evidence while considering a filing from the Department of Justice asking the court to find “adverse interference” against Google, which would allow the court to assume it purposefully destroyed evidence. Previous filings, including in the Epic Games v Google lawsuit and this current antitrust case, have also shown Google employees purposefully turning history off.

↫ Seamus Hughes

The fact that corporations break the law, and lie, cheat, and scam their way to the top is not something particularly shocking, nor will it surprise anyone. I can barely even get angry about it anymore – birds gotta eat, fish gotta swim, corpos gotta break the law, that sort of thing. It’s just an inevitability of reality, a law of nature. You know it, I know it, the whole world knows it.

No, what really upsets me is just how easily they get away with it, and even if they do get punished, any fines or other forms of punishment are so utterly disproportionately mild compared to the crimes committed. It’s incredibly rare for anyone responsible for corporate crime to ever face any serious punishment, let alone jail time, and even in the rare cases where they do, they usually have some stock options or whatever left over from their employment contract that will ensure a lavishly wealthy lifestyle. Fines levied against corporations as a whole are usually so low they’re just a minor cost of doing business, to the point where one has to wonder why they’re even being levied at all.

Compare this to us normal folks, and the differences couldn’t be more stark. Whenever we’re accidentally late on some small bill, we get fined automatically, with very little recourse. We get a speeding ticket automatically in the mail because we drove 5 km/h over the speed limit. Our tax agencies are stupidly effective and efficient at screwing you over for that small side hustle selling crap on eBay. And rarely do we have any effective, efficient recourse.

And these things can quickly spiral out of control when you’re already living paycheck to paycheck – being poor is really, really expensive. And let’s not even get into how much worse any of this is if you’re part of a minority, like being black in the US, or of North-African descent in Europe.

In this case, the illegal activities of Google and its executies and employees is on such clear display, and yet, few, if any, will suffer any consequences for them. If you ever wonder why so many regular people flock to political extremes, it’s exactly this kind of deep unfairness and inequality that lies at its roots. It’s dispiriting, demoralising, and disheartening, and primes the pumps for disenfranchisement with society, and thus the search for alternatives, upon which extremists pray.

We either stop our continual slide into corporatism, or our societies will fall.

In one of the more unique public proactive transparency record releases for the National Security Agency (NSA) to date, NSA has released a digital copy of a lecture that then-Capt. Grace Hopper gave agency employees on August 19, 1982.

The lecture, “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People,” features Capt. Hopper discussing some of the potential future challenges of protecting information. She also provided valuable insight on leadership and her experiences breaking barriers in the fields of computer science and mathematics.

↫ NSA press release

Digital preservation is about more than just code – it’s also about invaluable content like this. It seems rather uncouth to spend only a few lines on who Grace Hopper really is, since it’s your duty to know already, and she deserves a hell of a lot more than a few lines. If you don’t yet know who she is, her Wikipedia page is a good place to start.

The speech in question has an interesting history, in that the only medium on which it was stored were 1-inch AMPEX tapes. The speech was originally given to NSA employees, but not even the damn NSA had the ability to access the recordings of the speech, and had to call in the National Archives and Records Administration’s help. The NARA managed to retrieve the footage from the tapes, and now here we are.

This will make for some great weekend viewing.

I hate this timeline.

It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication.

For better or worse, we’ve reached the end of a long journey – one that started with a review of an AMD processor, and has ended with the review of an AMD processor. It’s fittingly poetic, but it is also a testament to the fact that we’ve spent the last 27 years doing what we love, covering the chips that are the lifeblood of the computing industry.

↫ Ryan Smith at AnandTech

This sudden loss is sending shockwaves through the industry, and rightfully so. AnandTech is a pillar, a cornerstone of hardware reporting, and one of the very few – possibly only – tech news outlet out there with such depth, quality, integrity, and restraint. I can’t think of any other outlet being as dedicated to proper benchmarking and hardware reviews as AnandTech was, and losing them is a huge loss for all of us.

The cause is exactly what you’d expect, sadly. It’s simply not really possible to remain profitable writing in-depth hardware reviews and benchmarks, as the world has shifted to video, and advertising income has cratered. There’s tons of hints about AnandTech not wanting to embrace sensationalism and clickbaiting to increase revenue – they’d rather go out with class, and I admire and appreciate that greatly. It just goes to show how hard it is to keep your head above water in the current online publishing world without rampant clickbaiting and flashy videos.

In a better, less monopolised world, AnandTech could thrive. Sadly, that’s not the timeline we’re in.

As far as housekeeping goes, the site will remain up for now, but there’s no guarantee it’ll stay up forever. I’m sure countless people are already archiving the invaluable content AnandTech has produced over its 27 year run, including the forums. We shan’t lose what AnandTech has created.