One of the coolest things to come along in the 68K Mac homebrew community is the ROM Boot Disk concept. Classic Macs have an unusually large ROM that contains a fair bit of the Mac OS, which was true even in the G3 New World Mac era (it was just on disk), so it’s somewhat surprising that only one Mac officially could boot the Mac OS entirely from ROM, namely the Macintosh Classic (hold down Cmd-Option-X-O to boot from a hidden HFS volume with System 6.0.3). For many Macs that can take a ROM SIMM, you can embed a ROM volume in the Mac ROM that can even be mirrored to a RAM disk. You can even buy them pre-populated. How’s that for immutability?Well, it turns out Apple themselves were the first ones to implement a flashable Mac OS ROM volume in 1994, but hardly anyone noticed — because it was only ever used publicly in a minority subset of one of the most unusual of the Macintosh-derived systems, the Apple Interactive Television Box (a/k/a AITB or the Apple Set Top Box/STB). And that’s what we’re going to dig into — and reprogram! — today. I had never heard of this obscure Apple product, so I was like a kid in a candy store reading this. Great weekend material.
Lately I’ve been spending quite a bit of time learning Rust, and as any sane person would do, after writing a few 100 lines programs I’ve decided to take on something a little bit more ambitious: I have written a Java Virtual Machine in Rust. With a lot of originality, I have called it rjvm. The code is available on GitHub. I want to stress that this is a toy JVM, built for learning purposes and not a serious implementation. Toy or not, this is ambitious and impressive.
The Dolphin project has broken the silence regarding their legal tussle with Nintendo and Valve, giving a far more detailed elaboration of what, exactly happened. First things first – Nintendo did not send Valve or Dolphin a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) section 512(c) notice (commonly known as a DMCA Takedown Notice) against our Steam page. Nintendo has not taken any legal action against Dolphin Emulator or Valve. What actually happened was that Valve’s legal department contacted Nintendo to inquire about the announced release of Dolphin Emulator on Steam. In reply to this, a lawyer representing Nintendo of America requested Valve prevent Dolphin from releasing on the Steam store, citing the DMCA as justification. Valve then forwarded us the statement from Nintendo’s lawyers, and told us that we had to come to an agreement with Nintendo in order to release on Steam. Considering the strong legal wording at the start of the document and the citation of DMCA law, we took the letter very seriously. We wanted to take some time and formulate a response, however after being flooded with questions, we wrote a fairly frantic statement on the situation as we understood it at the time, which turned out to only fuel the fires of speculation. So, after a long stay of silence, we have a difficult announcement to make. We are abandoning our efforts to release Dolphin on Steam. Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for software to appear on it. But given Nintendo’s long-held stance on emulation, we find Valve’s requirement for us to get approval from Nintendo for a Steam release to be impossible. Unfortunately, that’s that. The post also goes into greater detail about the Wii Common Key that’s been part of Dolphin’s codebase for 15 years. This key was originally extracted from the GameCube hardware itself, and a lot of people online claimed that Dolphin should just remove this key and all would be well. After consulting with their lawyers, Dolphin has come to the conclusion that including the key poses no legal risk for the project, and even if it somehow did, the various other parts of the Dolphin codebase that make emulation of original games possible would pose a much bigger legal threat anyway. So, the team will keep on including the key, and the only outcome here is that Dolphin will not be available on Steam.
Seven companies—including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic, and Inflection—have committed to developing tech to clearly watermark AI-generated content. That will help make it safer to share AI-generated text, video, audio, and images without misleading others about the authenticity of that content, the Biden administration hopes. It’s currently unclear how the watermark will work, but it will likely be embedded in the content so that users can trace its origins to the AI tools used to generate it. And how easy will it be for bad actors to just remove the watermark? If we live in a world where these tools can create new content out of stealing everybody else’s content, what’s stopping anyone from developing a tool to remove these watermarks? This feels more like lip service than a real solution.
One of my old home automation boards running ebusd is still using Raspberry PI 2 B SoC. FreeBSD is still perfectly supporting this hardware, however, due to being a Tier-2 platform, binary updates freebsd-update are not supported. Of course, one can download the new image, but this will mean re-installing and reconfiguring all the software, which is time-consuming and painful. Also, the traditional “build from source” way will probably take forever on this tiny board and also could potentially destroy the SD card. So the obvious alternative was cross-compilation. If you’re in this very specific niche – you’re very happy this guide exists.
I’ve been going through my collection of PDAs over the last few weeks for, among other OSNews things, my Pixelfed account, and while playing around with various old applications, I came across the Google Maps application for Palm OS. As it turns out – this official Google application, last updated in 2008, still fully and completely works today, in 2023! I shot a quick video using the application, and uploaded it to the new (and not fully set-up yet, so forgive the lack of avatars, descriptions, banner images, and so on – it’s late in my time zone) OSNews PeerTube account, embedded below for your convenience. Navigation still works. You can pan around in both map and satellite view. And, as the video shows, you can zoom in quite far and get some incredible detail on that old Palm TX display (you can zoom in further). That’s some impressive API backwards compatibility.
About a small town’s worth of people pointed me to this on Mastodon, so here it goes: In an IMAX theater, the m130’s job is to control the quick turn reel unit, or QTRU for short. (For many years, it appears, a non-emulated m130 sat holstered in most theaters.) The QTRU’s job is to control the platters, which are those large horizontal shelves where all of a film’s many reels are stitched together, stored, and then quickly spun out to and from the projector. The IMAX 1570 projector moves film at a little under six feet per second, so it’s all happening really fast. The m130 is apparently crucial to keeping the thing humming — “PALM PILOT MUST BE ON ALL THE TIME,” reads a notice above an image of a different m130 that has since been passed around the internet — but doesn’t often need to be used. “I’ve never had to interact with the Palm Pilot,” says one person familiar with the technology. “It’s really just a status screen.” Its job is to keep the QTRU moving at a consistent speed and to help keep the film’s video in sync with its audio. This doesn’t surprise me one bit. In environments like these, if something works, and has been working reliably for decades, there’s really no reason to change any of it. This application is probably quite simple, but since there’s only a very small number of theaters out there even capable of showing 70mm film, and it doesn’t look like it’s a format on the up and up.
USA readers may wonder why I was waiting for the release of a game already published. While Street Fighter II made it to the Super Famicom on June 10, 1992 in Japan and July 15, 1992 in North America, France had to wait until December 17, 1992 to get a PAL version. As I waited, I saw ads in French magazines offering imported cartridges of my Holy Graal. To make them work on a European Super Nintendo, one had to buy an adapter. The combo cost almost as much as the console (595F + 199F vs 1290F). Needless to say I couldn’t afford it. But I always wondered how Nintendo seemingly controlled the regions and how tinkerers had managed to circumvent that protection. A detailed look at how the 10NES sysyem worked.
Apple says it will remove services such as FaceTime and iMessage from the UK rather than weaken security if new proposals are made law and acted upon. The government is seeking to update the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) 2016. It wants messaging services to clear security features with the Home Office before releasing them to customers. The act lets the Home Office demand security features are disabled, without telling the public. Under the update, this would have to be immediate. I wonder if Apple would actually follow through with something like this, or if they’re only looking for a token concession so they can claim they’re still in the clear and do nothing. Interesting, though, that when the Chinese government comes calling, Tim Cook drops his “privacy is a fundamental human right” shtick real quick, but when the government of a western country comes calling, it’s a lot of rah-rah. A spine is clearly not very expensive.
A few weeks ago I embarked on a somewhat crazy side project: Make the Open Watcom debugger work on OS/2 1.0. This project was not entirely successful, but I learned a couple of things along the way. I love these stories.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the techniques described in Let’s Go Whaling bear comparison to some of those that bookmakers and casinos have long deployed, capitalising on deep understanding of psychology. The big difference, of course, is that the gamer can never win money, only prestige or progress in a virtual game. The very uncomfortable truth for Apple and Google: much – 70-75% – of App Store and Play Store revenue comes from exploitative casino games, mostly expertly designed to target the most vulnerable among us, like gambling addicts, children, people with mental issues like depression, and so on. It’s seedy, disgusting, predatory, and should be deeply, deeply illegal. Left or right, can’t we all agree we should ban these practices?
Ars Technica: Antitrust enforcers released a draft update outlining new rules today that officials say will make it easier to crack down on mergers and acquisitions that could substantially lessen competition in the US. Now the public has 60 days to review the draft guidelines and submit comments to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) before the agencies’ September 18 deadline. A fierce debate has already started between those in support and those who oppose the draft guidelines. Any corporation should be serving the democratically elected government of a country – not the other way around. If a merger or acquisition is deemed harmful to the competitive landscape, and thus to consumers, a government should be able to just stop it. The same applies to corporations who grow too large, too rich, too powerful – if a company’s actions start to dictate significant parts of the market or even economy, they are a threat to the stability and functioning of the society it’s claiming to be a part of, and as such, they should be able to be split up or their actions otherwise remedied to protect society. In other words, any steps the Us FTC and DOJ take to take control over runaway corporations are positive.
Starting in Windows 11, version 22H2, Enhanced Phishing Protection in Microsoft Defender SmartScreen helps protect Microsoft school or work passwords against phishing and unsafe usage on sites and apps. We are trying out a change starting with this build where users who have enabled warning options for Windows Security under App & browser control > Reputation-based protection > Phishing protection will see a UI warning on unsafe password copy and paste, just as they currently see when they type in their password. This actually seems like a cool and useful feature. The basic gist – which is a bit unclear from the short blurb above – seems to be that if, e.g., a child using a school account copies and pastes that school account password to use somewhere else, this feature will warn them about it. Usefulness of warning dialogs aside, I can see this being quite useful in large organisations.
Turns out Intel’s NUC line is not going to die after all. Today, Intel announced it has agreed to a term sheet with ASUS, a global technology solution provider, for an agreement to manufacture, sell and support the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) 10th to 13th generations systems product line, and to develop future NUC systems designs. If you’re into Intel NUCs, Asus is the way to go now.
The contractors are the invisible backend of the generative AI boom that’s hyped to change everything. Chatbots like Bard use computer intelligence to respond almost instantly to a range of queries spanning all of human knowledge and creativity. But to improve those responses so they can be reliably delivered again and again, tech companies rely on actual people who review the answers, provide feedback on mistakes and weed out any inklings of bias. It’s an increasingly thankless job. Six current Google contract workers said that as the company entered a AI arms race with rival OpenAI over the past year, the size of their workload and complexity of their tasks increased. Without specific expertise, they were trusted to assess answers in subjects ranging from medication doses to state laws. Documents shared with Bloomberg show convoluted instructions that workers must apply to tasks with deadlines for auditing answers that can be as short as three minutes. That’s the reality of “artificial intelligence” – the same reality it always seems to be in Silicon Valley: thousands and thousands of exploited workers behind the scenes running around like ants keeping the illusion of futurism alive for meager pay.
Together with the open source software community, GitHub has been working to support EU policymakers to craft the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). The CRA seeks to improve the cybersecurity of digital products (including the 96 percent that contain open source) in the EU by imposing strict requirements for vendors supplying products in the single market, backed by fines of up to €15 million or 2.5% of global revenue. This goal is welcome: security is too often an afterthought when shipping a product. But as written it threatens open source without bolstering resilience. Even though the CRA, as part of a long-standing line of EU ‘open’ strategy, has an exemption for open source software developed or supplied outside the course of a commercial activity, challenges in defining the scope have been the focus of considerable community activity. Three serious problems remain with the Parliament text set for the industry (‘ITRE’) committee vote on July 19. These three problems are set out below. Absent dissent, this may become the final position without further deliberation or a full Parliament plenary vote. We encourage you to share your thoughts with your elected officials today. The three problems are substantial for open source projects. First, if an open source project receives donations and/or has corporate developers working on it, it would be regulated by the CRA and thus face a huge amount of new administrative rules and regulations to follow that would no doubt be far too big a burden for especially smaller projects or individual developers. On top of that, the CRA, as it currently stands, also intends to mess with the disclosure process for vulnerabilities in a way that doesn’t seem to actually help. These three problems are big, and could have far-reaching consequences for open source.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau, one of the biggest names in online advertising, held some sort of corporate event or whatever in January of this year, and the IAB CEO, David Cohen, held a speech there to rally the troops. Apparently, those of us who are fighting back against the online advertising industry? We’re “extremists”. Extremists are winning the battle for hearts and minds in Washington D.C. and beyond. We cannot let that happen. These extremists are political opportunists who’ve made it their mission to cripple the advertising industry and eliminate it from the American economy and culture. This guy, who uses double spaces after a period and hence is already on my shitlist, just gave us an amazing creed.
The Framework Laptop 16, available for preorder today starting at $1,699 prebuilt, is one of the most exciting notebooks we’ve ever seen. When it ships in Q4, the modular computer company’s first gaming laptop will let you swap practically every component — not just memory and storage, but each and every individual port, the motherboard, the battery, the speakers, you name it. Framework seems to be making it, despite the ridicule. There’s more and more companies taking repairability seriously, and the EU, too, is flexing its legal muscle in this area. We’re getting there. Slowly.
The biggest changes last month were a series of commits by waddlesplash, all related to the user_mutex API and the consumers of it. This API is the kernel portion of the implementation of basically anything related to mutexes or locks in userland, including pthread_mutex, pthread_cond, pthread_barrier, unnamed semaphores (via sem_open), rwlocks, and more. It bears some resemblance in concept to Linux’s futex API, but is very different in both design and implementation. This month’s activity report contains a detailed description of what these commits actually entail, but as OSNews regulars will know, I’m not at all qualified to tell you what it all means. Other changes this month that my limited brain can actually comprehend are work done to make Haiku partially buildable using gcc 13, more RISC-V and ARM improvements, and a whole lot more.
There’s a specter looming over the realm of Mastodon, and it’s the ghost of computing’s past. A loose group of retro computing hobbyists have taken it upon themselves to build Mastodon clients for various operating systems. Developing web clients using the technology of the 80’s and 90’s is a challenge, but the following projects have proven that their devs are up to the task! Should we find ourselves in the unlikely scenario where an apocalypse happens, people can still post to Mastodon using retro PCs. This is an impressive list, and demonstrates the skill and dedication you can find in the retrocomputing community.
