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Why terminals are 80×25 characters by default

A rollicking and surprisingly political blog post takes us through a fascinating history, connecting 1860-era US bank note presses to the 80×20 terminal standard, passing though the Civil War, the US census, mechanical computers, punch cards, IBM, early display technology, VT100, ANSI, CP/M, and DOS along the way.

Project Treble improved Android update uptake

Google has published some statistics about the effects of Project Treble on Android updates. In late July, 2018, just before Android 9 Pie was launched in AOSP, Android 8.0 (Oreo) accounted for 8.9% of the ecosystem. By comparison, in late August 2019, just before we launched Android 10, Android 9 (Pie) accounted for 22.6% of the ecosystem. This makes it the largest fraction of the ecosystem, and shows that Project Treble has had a positive effect on updatability. That’s definitely good news, but Google still has a long way to go.

Google accused of spying with new tool that flags large employee meetings

Google employees have accused their employer of creating a surveillance tool disguised as a calendar extension designed to monitor gatherings of more than 100 people, a signal that those employees may be planning protests or discussing union organizing. Google parent company Alphabet “categorically” denies the accusation. The accusation, outlined in a memo obtained by Bloomberg News, claims severe unethical conduct from high-ranking Google employees, who they say allegedly ordered a team to develop an Chrome browser extension that would be installed on all employee machines and used primarily to monitor internal employee activity. Employees are claiming the tool reports anyone who creates a calendar invite and sends it to more than 100 others, alleging that it is an attempt to crackdown on organizing and employee activism. The company that earns its money by finding new ways to extract actionable data from us to sell ads more effectively is employing that same kind of technology to prevent its employees from unionising and demanding better working conditions? I’m so surprised.

Tails 4.0 released

We are especially proud to present you Tails 4.0, the first version of Tails based on Debian 10 (Buster). It brings new versions of most of the software included in Tails and some important usability and performance improvements. Tails 4.0 introduces more changes than any other version since years. The list of changes is indeed quite long, and note that it contains quite a number of security fixes too, so you should update as quickly as possible.

Six reasons why iOS 13 and Catalina are so buggy

iOS 13 and macOS 10.15 Catalina have been unusually buggy releases for Apple. The betas started out buggy at WWDC in June, which is not unexpected, but even after Apple removed some features from the final releases in September, more problems have forced the company to publish quick updates. Why? Based on my 18 years of experience working as an Apple software engineer, I have a few ideas. Interesting look at the inner workings of Apple and how they may contribute to Apple’s recent struggles.

My transition to an Ubuntu workstation

I’ve been using Ubuntu as my workstation OS for several months now. Ubuntu Server with the i3 window manager to be specific. I love it, and I’ve had to change my workflow a lot to make it work for me. But now that I’ve made the switch to it from Mac and Windows, I’m very happy with it. I’ll be honest, there’s not a ton of hard evidence that working on a Linux distro is objectively better than working on Windows or Mac. I have almost equal amounts of time spent working on each of these platforms, and I think each one excels at something different. With that in mind, I think Ubuntu just feels right for the priorities I have now. So what have I gained, what have I lost, and what did I learn along the way? While switching platforms is not always an easy task to accomplish – especially for people with very specific platform-specific software needs like, say, Xcode – I am convinced people convince themselves it’s harder than it really is. You can learn a lot from switching platforms, and test runs can teach you where your dependencies lie and how to overcome them, which is a wise thing to do, especially when you’re relying on proprietary tools that have turned into single points of failure beyond your control.

Xfce 4.16 development phase starting

Xfce developers have detailed their plans for the next release, and it includes a change that might ruffle some feathers. We will also play with client-side decorations where we feel it makes sense (for instance replacing the so-called XfceTitledDialog, that is used for all settings dialogs with a HeaderBar version). Before anyone gets too excited (both positively or negatively): It is not planned to redesign more complex applications (like Thunar) with Headerbars in 4.16. We will however try to keep the experience and looks consistent, which means gradually moving to client side decorations also with our applications (please note that client side decorations are not the same as HeaderBars!). Through this change e.g. “dark modes” in applications will look good (see the part about the Panel below). Now before there is a shitstorm about this change I would kindly ask everyone to give us time to figure out what exactly we want to change in this cycle. Also, switching to client-side decorations alone is not a big visual departure – feel free to also dig through the client-side decorations page if you want to read/see more on this. Not everyone likes these, but I think they tend to look better and cleaner, so I’m all for it.

OpenBSD 6.6 released

Theo de Raadt announced the release of OpenBSD 6.6 on October 17, 2019. Marquee features include a new system upgrade tool, an AMD GPU driver, upgrades to core systems daemons ntpd and smtpd, and other platform improvements.

Rebble with a cause: how Pebble watches were granted an amazing afterlife

Rebble is an inspiring repair story, and the way Pebble enabled this second life is a path that every gadget manufacturer should strive to emulate. Pebble created an open (and open-source) environment for developers and enthusiasts. As a direct result, Rebble is saving thousands of gadgets from the bin and building a real community around dogged longevity. Keeping Pebbles running, in the face of much fancier options, knitted the community together. This should be a legal requirement. If a company wants to end the life of a cloud-connected product, they should be legally obliged to open up the code and tools necessary for third parties to keep the product alive.

What is Phantom OS about?

Phantom is, basically, a virtual machine (VM) working in a huge persistent virtual memory. Part of the VM classes (some classes, called ‘internal’) are implemented in kernel, giving VM code access to low level kernel services. Persistent virtual memory is completely orthogonal to object space and VM (no relation between, for example, object boundary and virtual memory page, etc.) and is implemented so that abrupt computer failure or loss of power leaves system in coherent state. On the application code (VM bytecode) level OS shutdown (either manual or caused by failure) is not even ‘seen’ – applications and their data are ‘never die’, they continue their work after the next OS boot up as if no shutdown ever happened. The code of this slickly presented operating system is available on github.

Samsung’s ‘Linux on DeX’ project shuts down after just 11 months

The desktop environment that turns your Samsung phone or tablet into a PC when connected to an external display, nicknamed ‘DeX,’ has been around for a while now. Nearly a year ago, Samsung introduced the Linux on DeX beta, which could run a full Linux OS on top of DeX. Sadly, the project seems to have been discontinued. Samsung is sending out an email to testers explaining that the beta program has ended, and that Linux on DeX will not be supported on devices running Android 10. That’s definitely a bit of a shame. While I haven’t yet tried Dex on my brand new Note 10+, the idea of messing around with a full Linux distribution running on my phone was a neat and interesting concept.

LegoOS: a disseminated, distributed OS for hardware resource disaggregation

LegoOS is a disseminated, distributed operating system designed for hardware resource disaggregation. It is an open-source project built by researchers from Purdue University. LegoOS splits traditional operating system functionalities into loosely-coupled monitors and run them directly on disggregated hardware devices. LegoOS also manages distributed resources and handles hardware component failures in a disaggregated cluster. For more information, please check out our recent awarded paper. You can get LegoOS here.

The US nuclear forces’ Dr. Strangelove-era messaging system finally got rid of its floppy disks

In 2014, “60 Minutes” made famous the 8-inch floppy disks used by one antiquated Air Force computer system that, in a crisis, could receive an order from the president to launch nuclear missiles from silos across the United States. But no more. At long last, that system, the Strategic Automated Command and Control System or SACCS, has dumped the floppy disk, moving to a “highly-secure solid state digital storage solution” this past June, said Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the Air Force’s 595th Strategic Communications Squadron. These are incredibly difficult systems to upgrade, so this is no small feat.

Ubuntu 19.10 released

The new Ubuntu release is now available. The Ubuntu kernel has been updated to the 5.3 based Linux kernel, and our default toolchain has moved to gcc 9.2 with glibc 2.30. Additionally, the Raspberry Pi images now support the new Pi 4 as well as 2 and 3. Ubuntu Desktop 19.10 introduces GNOME 3.34 the fastest release yet with significant performance improvements delivering a more responsive experience. App organisation is easier with the ability to drag and drop icons into categorised folders and users can select light or dark Yaru theme variants. The Ubuntu Desktop installer also introduces installing to ZFS as a root filesystem as an experimental feature. Ubuntu Server 19.10 integrates recent innovations from key open infrastructure projects like OpenStack Train, Kubernetes, and Ceph with advanced life-cycle management for multi-cloud and on-prem operations, from bare metal, VMware and OpenStack to every major public cloud. While you may not be using the default Ubuntu, lots of people are using Ubuntu-based distributions like Mint, so a new Ubuntu release always affects quite a few people far beyond just Ubuntu users.

Inside TurboTax’s 20-year fight to stop Americans from filing their taxes for free

But the success of TurboTax rests on a shaky foundation, one that could collapse overnight if the U.S. government did what most wealthy countries did long ago and made tax filing simple and free for most citizens. For more than 20 years, Intuit has waged a sophisticated, sometimes covert war to prevent the government from doing just that, according to internal company and IRS documents and interviews with insiders. The company unleashed a battalion of lobbyists and hired top officials from the agency that regulates it. From the beginning, Intuit recognized that its success depended on two parallel missions: stoking innovation in Silicon Valley while stifling it in Washington. Indeed, employees ruefully joke that the company’s motto should actually be “compromise without integrity.” It always surprises me just how badly designed and openly corrupt US politics really is. Even something as banal as filing taxes is made a complicated, outdated mess just so some scumbags can earn some money.

Microsoft to close Windows Phone 8.1 application store in December

Support for Windows Phone 8.1 operating system ended on July 11, 2017. As a culmination of the end of support process, the Windows Phone 8.1 Store will shut down on December 16, 2019. Lumia phones using Windows Phone 8.1 and any apps that have already been downloaded from the Store may continue to work after this date. Any Lumia device that can’t be upgraded to Windows 10 Mobile will be affected.

Haiku monthly activity report for September

Another month, another Haiku activity report – this time for September. It’s another big one, but if I had to pick one thing to highlight, it’d be this one: Some initial work for ARM64 was completed by kallisti5. This includes setting up the Haikuports package declarations, writing the early boot files, and in general getting the buildsystem going. Jaroslaw Pelczar also contributed several further patches (some of these still undergoing review), providing the initial interrupt handling support, and various stubs to let things compile kallisti5 did some work on 32bit ARM as well, cleaning up some of the code to better match other platforms and preparing the reuse of EFI for ARM and ARM64 (as u-boot now implements an EFI interface, which would make things much simpler for our ARM boot process if we manage to use it). Haiku has been working on ARM support for a while now, and while it may seem like a weird niche distraction for such a small project, it actually makes good, future-proofing sense to spend work hours in this area. ARM is definitely growing in the laptop space, and it makes sense to prepare Haiku for a future wherein ARM laptops are readily available. On top of that, adding support for architectures other than your main one aides in finding difficult to spot bugs, ensures architecture-independent code, and in general is just a fun thing to do for a specific kind of person.

Google’s auto-delete tools are practically worthless for privacy

In reality, these auto-delete tools accomplish little for users, even as they generate positive PR for Google. Experts say that by the time three months rolls around, Google has already extracted nearly all the potential value from users’ data, and from an advertising standpoint, data becomes practically worthless when it’s more than a few months old. “Anything up to one month is extremely valuable,” says David Dweck, the head of paid search at digital ad firm WPromote. “Anything beyond one month, we probably weren’t going to target you anyway.” Colour me entirely the exact opposite of surprised.

A detailed look at Ubuntu’s new experimental ZFS installer

Yesterday brought exciting news on the ZFS and Ubuntu fronts—experimental ZFS root support in the installer for Ubuntu’s upcoming interim release, Eoan Ermine. The feature appeared in the 2019-10-09 daily build of Eoan—it’s not in the regular beta release and, in fact, wasn’t even in the “current daily” when we first went to download it. It’s that new! (Readers wanting to play with the new functionality can find it in today’s daily build, available here.) Ars takes a look at this feature that’s clearly in still in alpha.

DuckDuckGo Search improvements: past year date filter, dark theme refinements, and more

While we’ve been busily improving our privacy protection ducklings — like DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser (for iOS/Android) and DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials (for Firefox/Chrome) — we haven’t been neglecting our first born — DuckDuckGo Private Search! In fact, quite the opposite — we’ve made several improvements recently that we’re excited to share with you. They should make your searching not only more effective, but also a more pleasant experience, and still of course with our same strict commitment to privacy: no personal information is associated with your searches, such that you have no search history and therefore no search profiling or ads following you around based on your searches. Some solid improvements all around, but nothing earth-shattering.