We are pleased to announce that Firefox 87 will introduce a stricter, more privacy-preserving default Referrer Policy. From now on, by default, Firefox will trim path and query string information from referrer headers to prevent sites from accidentally leaking sensitive user data. Good move.

Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore. Why do I say this? Well, if you’ve been rocking the iPhone SE 2020 you would know. What I’m saying is there a lot of UI glitches from apps running on iPhone SE. That does not look like a pleasant user experience.

For years now, we’ve been watching and waiting as Google has gradually developed their Fuchsia operating system from the ground up. Now evidence has appeared pointing to Google’s Fuchsia OS getting its first — and second — proper release. We’re still a few years away, but everything seems to be pointing towards Fuchsia becoming the company-wide operating system for virtually all of Google’s user-facing products – and it seems designed and set up in a way that regular users won’t even know they’ve made the transition from e.g. Android-on-Android-proper to Android-on-Fuchsia.

You read that right! It’s a video game in a font! A font as in “Time New Roman”. The entire game is enclosed in fontemon.otf, no javascript, no html, all font. I don’t even know where to start with this insane work of art. In short, some fonts use scripts to draw complex glyphs, and that’s exactly what this person used to create a game. Amazing.

With the release of FreeBSD 13.0 on the horizon, I wanted to see how it shapes up on my Lenovo T450 laptop. Previous major releases on this laptop, using it as a workstation, felt very rough around the edges but with 13, it feels like the developers got it right. It would be good for the desktop Linux world if FreeBSD managed to become even a little bit more mainstream among desktop users. Linux pretty much has the open source desktop world all to itself, and some competition would be very welcome.

This morning, WireGuard founding developer Jason Donenfeld announced a working, in-kernel implementation of his WireGuard VPN protocol for the FreeBSD 13 kernel. This is great news for BSD folks—and users of BSD-based routing appliances and distros such as pfSense and opnSense. Not something I personally use, but good news for those that do.

Starting on July 1, 2021 we are reducing the service fee Google Play receives when a developer sells digital goods or services to 15% for the first $1M (USD) of revenue every developer earns each year. With this change, 99% of developers globally that sell digital goods and services with Play will see a 50% reduction in fees. These are funds that can help developers scale up at a critical phase of their growth by hiring more engineers, adding to their marketing staff, increasing server capacity, and more. While these investments are most critical when developers are in the earlier stages of growth, scaling an app doesn’t stop once a partner has reached $1M in revenue — we’ve heard from our partners making $2M, $5M and even $10M a year that their services are still on a path to self-sustaining orbit. This is why we are making this reduced fee on the first $1M of total revenue earned each year available to every Play developer, regardless of size. We believe this is a fair approach that aligns with Google’s broader mission to help all developers succeed. We look forward to sharing full details in the coming months. Hopefully this will help small developers.

According to the report, citing a source within the Ministry, Apple struck a deal with the government that will show users a prompt when first configuring a device in Russia to pre-install apps from a list of government-approved software. Users will have the ability to decline the installation of certain apps. The new legislation is an amendment to the existing “On Consumer Protection” law that will require the pre-installation of software on all devices sold in Russia, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and smart TVs. The pre-installed software will include antivirus and cartographic apps, social media apps, and “Public Service” apps for payments and civil services. Apple bending over backwards to please Putin’s totalitarian regime will open the (back)door to countless other governments – western or not – demanding the same thing. As always, it seems Apple only cares about privacy and user experience if they can pull the wool over the eyes of gullible westerners – but as soon as the choice comes down to money or values, Tim Cook is jumping at the opportunity dump his proclaimed values in a ditch by the side of the road. Speaking of bending over backwards to please totalitarian regimes and dumping proclaimed values in a ditch by the side of the road, Tim Cook will attend the Chinese government’s China Development Forum, despite the ongoing Uighur genocide and crackdown on the democratic rights of the citizens of Hong Kong. Classy move, Tim, but then, anybody with even a modicum of pattern recognition skills is not surprised by your never-ending quest to please dictators.

From a competitive standpoint, Milan continues to strengthen and maintain a very stark one-sided performance advantage against its biggest competitor, Intel. Rome had already offered more raw socket performance than the best Intel had to offer at the time, and the gap is currently quite large as Intel has not updated in that time. Intel has stated that its Ice Lake Xeon-SP family will come sometime soon, however unless Intel manages to close the core count gap, then AMD looks to be in very good shape. Meanwhile, as AMD is focused on Intel, the Arm competition has also entered the market with force through 2020, and designs such as the Ampere Altra are able to outperform the new top Milan SKUs in many throughput-bound workloads. AMD still has very clear advantages, such as much superior memory performance through huge caches, or vastly superior per-thread performance with specialised dedicated SKUs. Still, it leaves AMD in a spot as they can’t claim to be the outright performance leader under every scenario, and offers another generational target to consider as it develops future cores. Another monstrous CPU by AMD, and another case where Intel simply doesn’t even come close. There’s offerings on the ARM front, though, that are slowly starting to make their way into the data centre.

In what seems like several lifetimes ago, the mobile devices market seemed like it would be wide open. Even as the window for platforms that weren’t Android or iOS was closing rapidly, we were all hoping we wouldn’t end up with another duopoly. While there were several contenders – BlackBerryos 10, Windows Phone, to name a few – quite a few more nerdy mobile device users held out hope that instead of neutered, restrictive, and limited operating systems, we’d end up with a true computer in our pocket. No other device represented this slice of the market better than the Nokia N900. The N900 was the last standard Linux mobile device from Nokia, the last in the line of the N770, N800, and N810 internet communicators. The N900 was the first to include mobile phone functionality, making it the first Linux mobile phone device from Nokia, but not the last – the N950 and N9 would follow, but those were markedly different, more Android and iOS than standard Linux. The N900 ran Maemo, Nokia’s Linux platform for mobile devices, developed in collaboration with and/or using many popular open source Linux projects, like the Linux kernel (obviously), Debian, Gtk, GNOME, Qt, and more. Maemo’s user interface used the Matchbox window manager, and its application framework was Hildon. Underneath the Gtk+ user interface, Maemo was a remarkably standard Linux distribution, based on Debian, so you had easy access to all the usual Linux and Debian command line tools. It used APT for package management and software installation, BusyBox as the replacement for the GNU Core Utilities, and the X window manager. Still, despite its heavy focus on open source software, certain parts of the software stack were still closed source, like some code related to power management, as well as certain bits and bobs of the user interface, like a few status applets. This “mostly open source, but with some closed bits and bobs” would be a running theme into the future branches of the platform, like Sailfish and MeeGo. The hardware of the N900 is a case of throwing everything humanly possible into a single device, but to keep costs down, it mostly consists of cheaper parts. For example, the 800×480 resolution looks crisp on the 3.5″ display, but despite being released almost two years after the iPhone, the touch screen is resistive and requires a stylus. The SoC is a Texas Instruments OMAP3430, with a single core running at 600Mhz, supported by a 430 MHz C64x+ DSP and a PowerVR SGX530 GPU. You’ve got 256MB of RAM, 256MB of NAND flash, and 32GB of eMMC flash. The star of the show, of course, is the slide-out keyboard. It’s a full QWERTY keyboard that’s reasonably comfortable to type on considering its small size, and anyone who has ever used a Symbian device with a keyboard will feel right at home. It’s got a little kick stand, stereo speakers, and TV-out functionality through a special dongle and cable. Seeing Maemo 5 output to a giant 55″ 4K TV is a special kind of entertaining. Add to this the various standard things like WiFi, Bluetooth, a headphone jack, removable battery, rear and front camera, a dedicated camera button, and probably a few other features I’m forgetting. The N900 comes packed. Users of the N900 when it was new were a special kind of people. One of them was my brother – he was a die-hard N900 user for many years, so much so he bought a spare N900 in case his main one died. It wasn’t until the N900 really couldn’t keep up with modernity anymore – well past that point, honestly, but let’s not hurt his feelings – that he begrudgingly decided to switch over to an Android phone. He gifted one N900 to me for my collection. The N900 is a special kind of device that, while a footnote in mobile history, holds a special place in the hearts of a dedicated group of users who nobody is serving any more. These people wanted a proper mini-computer in their pocket, preferably running Linux, and the N900 was the only device that properly fit that niche. Its sort-of successors – the N9 and Jolla Phone, which I both have as well – simply do not fill that niche and do not scratch that itch. Today, most N900 users have probably migrated on to Android (and a few stragglers to Sailfish, I’m guessing), leaving behind the standard, regular Linux installation for the bastardised, weird Linux offshoot from Google. While you can install BusyBox on Android and unlock the bootloader and sort-of create an approximation of a standard Linux computer in your pocket – without the keyboard, without the more standard stacks and toolchains, it’s just not the same. There is still some hope for fans of the N900 – and other people who want a true Linux computer in their pocket – since there are two companies that sort-of cater to this niche. First, there’s F(x)tec, which probably comes closest with its line of smartphones with a slide-out keyboard. They currently offer a very cool device up for pre-order that’s capable of running Android, Sailfish, Ubuntu Touch, and standard ARM Linux distributions as well. I’ve been trying to get into touch with them for a review unit, but they have not responded (we’re small, after all). Another option that requires a bit more squinting are some of the very tiny laptops made by GPD – such as the GPD Pocket 2 and similar devices they make. They’re not quite the same as the F(x)tec or N900, but you can get quite close. GPD, too, has not responded to review requests, but again – we’re small, and if you can send stuff to outlets like Linus Tech Tips, OSNews simply isn’t on your radar. I’m genuinely sad that the N-line was yet another victim of Nokia’s endless mismanagement, since the N900 is simply a unique, one-of-a-kind device in a category virtually nobody even dares tip

Another month, another Haiku activity report. It was less busy this month, so there’s nothing that really jumps out at me as a major fix or improvement. I’m going to highlight the first listed item, since fixes in software delivery are always welcome. Andrew Lindesay continues his work on cleaning HaikuDepot sources and removing a custom-made List class to use standard (BeAPI and C++ stl) containers. There were some regressions in the process, that were found and identified. Haiku’s steady stream of fixes and improvements continues.

Google Chrome version 89 began rolling out to users in the stable channel on March 2 and should be on most people’s machines by now. The new build offers significant memory savings on 64-bit Windows platforms thanks to increased use of Google’s PartitionAlloc memory allocator. On macOS, Chrome 89 plays catch-up and gets closer to the performance of the flagship Windows builds. I feel like we get these reports and promises about Chrome’s performance every few months, yet Chrome keeps being the butt of jokes regarding its resource usage, especially on the Mac. Maybe this round will yield tangible improvements.

This article is a guide for achieving a full-as-possible Wayland setup on Arch Linux. This guide does exactly what it says – it helps you set up a complete Arch Linux installation that is as Wayland as possible.

This afternoon, I was updating the streaming apps on my 2020 LG CX OLED TV, something I do from time to time, but today was different. Out of nowhere, I saw (and heard) an ad for Ace Hardware start playing in the lower-left corner. It autoplayed with sound without any action on my part. Now I’m fully aware that it’s not unusual to see ads placed around a TV’s home screen or main menu. LG, Samsung, Roku, Vizio, and others are all in on this game. We live in an era when smart TVs can automatically recognize what you’re watching, and TV makers are building nice ad businesses for themselves with all of the data that gets funneled in. But this felt pretty egregious even by today’s standards. A random, full-on commercial just popping up in LG’s app store? Is there no escape from this stuff? We’re just going to cram ads into every corner of a TV’s software, huh? Imagine if an autoplay ad started up while you were updating the apps on your smartphone. People want cheap TVs, so people get cheap TVs – warts and all. Someone should set up a website and list TVs that are “safe to buy” and do not contain or display any ads. Of course, this still doesn’t solve the issue of “smart” TVs being security nightmares, but it’d be a step.