I recently discovered a secret browser located inside the “Manage my account” popup that Android has in various apps (quite important apps, such as Settings, and all Google suite apps). The browser even bypasses parental control! A secret browser that is entirely different from whatever browsers you have installed on your Android device? I’m sure that won’t present any problems whatsoever. Then you have two methods which I don’t know what they do, but they sound scary. As this is a secret-browser of the ‘on-device encryption’ feature, I can guess, they are both used to set your local encryption keys. So it looks like a malicious website can put their keys there, and try to make you pay for them! I think this is the time to tell you that I already reported this to Google, and they say this is not a security vulnerability (probably because this secret browser is not very popular), and that the parental control bypass is the “Intended Behavior”. Oh. Good.

Do you use Windows 3.1? Do your friends send you jokes and haikus written by ChatGPT, and make you feel left out? Do you wish you had the sum of all human knowledge at your fingertips? Or wish you had your very own AI chatbot on your trusty 386? Wish no more! Introducing WinGPT, an AI Assistant for Windows 3.1. Absolutely bonkers.

I recently started a Pixelfed account dedicated to all the various pieces of (mobile) hardware I own. It’s still quite new, but the intention is to post photos of my Palm/PocketPC/etc. device collection a few times a week, with a short info blurb. The account will post no other content, so you won’t see photos of my food, sunsets, beaches, or other irrelevant nonsense. In case you aren’t aware – Pixelfed is the Fediverse equivalent of Instagram, in the same way Mastodon is the Fediverse equivalent of Twitter. You can follow my Pixelfed account either through Pixelfed itself, through Mastodon, or through many other Fediverse-capable applications and services. Of course, you can also just bookmark it.

Kicking off a busy day of product announcements and updates for AMD’s data center business group, this morning AMD is finally announcing their long-awaited high density “Bergamo” server CPUs. Based on AMD’s density-optimized Zen 4c architecture, the new EPYC 97×4 chips offer up to 128 CPU cores, 32 more cores than AMD’s current-generation flagship EPYC 9004 “Genoa” chips. According to AMD, the new EPYC processors are shipping now, though we’re still awaiting further details about practical availability. There is so much competition in the processor space at the moment – it’s just great. Few of us will ever get to use or even see these processors, but eventually, technologies developed for the very high end of the today will make their way down to the attainable end of tomorrow.

Yes, I’m a little late, but here we go: The MorphOS development team is proud to announce the public release of MorphOS 3.18! This new release includes several new applications such as Hex – a scriptable file/RAM/disk hex editor, ArchiveIt – a ZIP archiver/unarchiver application and Thermals – an app displaying thermal and fan information and graphs. In addition, MorphOS 3.18 supports Samba 2 and 3 network share browsing and mounting in the Ambient desktop. Radeon drivers have been updated to better support dual monitors, more graphics card models and 3D, including updated TinyGL library and drivers. We have also improved Realtek 8168 ethernet drivers with support for more card variants and enhanced networking stability on PCI express systems like PowerMac G5 11,2. USB input device connectivity issues on supported CyrusPlus 5040 systems have been corrected. This looks like a great release, but with the supply of PowerPC Macs, especially capable ones, dwindling, one has to wonder just how long they can keep this going. There have been rumbles here and there these past ten years of a port to x86, but I have no idea where those efforts stand.

More than two years ago, Red Hat introduced CentOS Stream as the focal point for collaboration around Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). CentOS Stream shortens the feedback window between Red Hat engineers and partners, customers, and communities while at the same time providing even greater visibility into the next innovations in RHEL. We’ve seen great success in the Special Interest Group (SIG) community to help integrate and bring new technologies together faster than ever. The Automotive SIG is an excellent example of this. Hardware partners have also ramped up to use CentOS Stream for more rapid support of new hardware technologies. Because of CentOS Stream, Red Hat Enterprise Linux development is more transparent and open than ever before. As the CentOS Stream community grows and the enterprise software world tackles new dynamics, we want to sharpen our focus on CentOS Stream as the backbone of enterprise Linux innovation. We are continuing our investment in and increasing our commitment to CentOS Stream. CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal. This is peculiar, but not entirely unexpected. This change is going to have some serious effects for third party RHEL-compatible Linux distributions, such as Rocky Linux, Alma Linux, and so on. Alma Linux published a blog post about what this means for the future of the project, and the gist seems to be “we don’t really know yet”.

The confusion over Microsoft’s plans to retire the current Mail and Calendar apps for Windows with the new Outlook for Windows app continues. Last week, Microsoft sent a message to Microsoft 365 admins stating the Mail and Calendar apps would be replaced by the new Outlook starting in September 2024. However, an apparent backlash against that timeframe caused Microsoft to send out a follow-up message stating it was now “reevaluating the timeline”. Now, a new post on the Microsoft 365 message center, as shown by Windows enthusiast Tero Alhonen on Twitter, states that Microsoft won’t replace the apps with Outlook until sometime “by the end of next year.” This newly vague timeline shows Microsoft still doesn’t have a firm date yet, and may not have one for some time. So Microsoft is – confusion aside – going to replace the native Windows e-mail and calendar applications with a website. Not even Microsoft wants to write native Windows Applications. Makes you wonder just how much life Windows has left.

Linux on the PS3 has a pretty interesting history. If you’re familiar with the History of the PS3 you probably know that when it was first released in 2006 Sony shipped it with support to run other operating systems through a feature called OtherOS. OtherOS allowed people to install operating systems like Linux or FreeBSD on a second partition on the PS3 hard drive. In 2010 Sony removed OtherOS support in firmware 3.21 because of “security concerns” AKA some people were starting to use it to look a bit too close into the PS3 internals and figure out how to pirate games. With custom firmware it’s possible to use OtherOS on modern firmwares so that’s what we’ll be doing here. This is the continuation of part 1 about the Xbox 360.

The European Commission has made a formal antitrust complaint against Google and its ad business. In a preliminary opinion, the regulator says Google has abused its dominant position in the digital advertising market. It says that forcing Google to sell off parts of its business may be the only remedy, if the company is found guilty of the charges. This would be a significant move targeting the main source of the search giant’s revenue, and a rare example of the EU recommending divestiture at this stage in an investigation. The Commission has already fined Google over three prior antitrust cases, but has only previously imposed “behavioral” remedies — changes to its business practices. Music to my ears. Companies exist to serve society, and if they no longer serve society by becoming too large, too powerful, and too wealthy, thereby massively restricting competition, they must be chopped up into smaller parts to create breathing room in the market. Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft – and that’s just the tech sector – all need to be broken up to allow newcomers to fairly compete. The US has taken similar actions with railroads, oil, airplanes, and telecommunications, and the technology market should be no different.

Eight years after Google Domains launched, and a little more than a year after it graduated out of beta, Google is “winding down following a transition period,” as part of “efforts to sharpen our focus.” That’s corporate-ese for “We need to keep cost-cutting, so we’re selling this business we just finished shaping up to Squarespace.” I have two domains over at Google Domains. I doubt Squarespace’s UI is going to be as nice and easy to understand as Google’s is.

It’s no secret that the Android Open Source Project has been languishing compared to the distributions (?) of Android that are actually being used by Google itself (on their Pixel phones) and OEMs such as Samsung, Sony, and others. Now, it seems Google has taken a pretty substantial step in further gutting AOSP – it has deprecated both the Dialer and Messaging applications in AOSP, with the following message: This app is not actively supported and the source is only available as a reference. This project will be removed from the source manifest sometime in the future. This means that soon, if you build the Android Open Source Project, you will no longer be able to send messages or make phone calls without adding your own messaging and dialer applications. In the grand scheme of things, this doesn’t matter all that much since every OEM already uses their own applications, but for the open source operating system that is Android, this is another nail in the coffin. Due to the slow erosion of functionality from AOSP, as well as the transfer of functionality from AOSP to closed-source Google applications and frameworks, we’re fast approaching a point where you can’t really state that AOSP is a full open source mobile operating system anymore. Is a mobile operating system that can’t send messages or make phone calls really complete?

Edge has a built-in image enhancement tool that, according to Microsoft, can use “super-resolution to improve clarity, sharpness, lighting, and contrast in images on the web.” Although the feature sounds exciting, recent Microsoft Edge Canary updates have provided more information on how image enhancement works. The browser now warns that it sends image links to Microsoft instead of performing on-device enhancements. The biggest problem with Edge’s “super-resolution” and other questionable services is that it is enabled by default. Therefore, unaware users automatically give the browser permission to send pictures to Microsoft for processing and enhancement. Don’t use Edge.

After 1 year, 9 months, and 28 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 12 (code name bookworm). The biggest change conceptually is that Debian now includes a non-free-firmware package area, and the Debian project from here on out will allow non-free firmware to be included on installation media. For the rest, a new Debian release is exactly as you’d expect – all the latest versions of packages, and it will serve as the base for an immense number of popular Linux distributions, either directly (such as Ubuntu) or indirectly (such as Linux Mint).

For those of you a little confused about what a postcode is, it’s effectively the same as a US zip code; a way of distilling a postal address down to but a few characters. Hence why some rogue auto-translate function in Windows 11 is occasionally switching ‘zip’ to ‘postcode’ in the UK’s Windows menus. As a translator myself, this is easy enough to explain. Either we’re looking at a terrible machine translation that wasn’t properly vetted, or a translator/reviewer not getting enough context to properly translate this string. As translators, we often get the absolute bare minimum to work with when it comes to software – usually just the strings, and if we’re very, very, very lucky, we might get a screenshot, but that’s a rarity. It’s easy to look at this and think the translator is an idiot, but without any context, some isolated strings, often delivered in a random order, can be incredibly hard to translate in a way that makes any sense in the target context. It’s just another way the software industry gets away with bottom-of-the-barrel effort, something no other industry is allowed to do. A random package of disposable paper plates has to adhere to more standards, controls, and checks than consumer software has to do. Managers in the consumer software industry face virtually no consequences for shipping the absolute bare minimum in quality, and unlike in any other industry, shipping broken garbage that never gets fixed is the norm, rather than the exception. There’s no other product category in our lives where we would tolerate the amount of brokenness that’s common in software. And, of course, software translations are no exception. It’s an easy target for managers to outsource and automate to “save money”. This is what it leads to.