«System Beeps» is a music album in shape of an MS-DOS program that features original music composed for PC Speaker using the same basic old techniques like ones found in classic PC games. It follows the usual retrocomputing demoscene formula — take something rusty and obsolete, and push it to eleven — and attempts to reveal the long hidden potential of this humble little sound device. You can hear it in action and form an opinion on how successful this attempt was at Bandcamp, or in the video below. The following article is an in-depth overview of the original PC Speaker capabilities and making of the project, for those who would like to know more. What an amazing work of art, and I love the detailed description of how it was made using nothing but the PC speaker. This article is quite detailed, and the project itself is released under the CC-BY license.
Early adopters of LED lighting will remember 50,000 hour or even 100,000 hour lifetime ratings printed on the box. But during a recent trip to the hardware store the longest advertised lifetime I found was 25,000 hours. Others claimed only 7,500 or 15,000 hours. And yes, these are brand-name bulbs from Cree and GE. So, what happened to those 100,000 hour residential LED bulbs? Were the initial estimates just over-optimistic? Was it all marketing hype? Or, did we not know enough about LED aging to predict the true useful life of a bulb? I put these questions to the test. Join me after the break for some background on the light bulb cartel from the days of incandescent bulbs (not a joke, a cartel controlled the life of your bulbs), and for the destruction of some modern LED bulbs to see why the lifetimes are clocking in a lot lower than the original wave of LED replacements. Just a good, fun, but also depressing read.
Adiantum is a new form of encryption that we built specifically to run on phones and smart devices that don’t have the specialized hardware to use current methods to encrypt locally stored data efficiently. Adiantum is designed to run efficiently without that specialized hardware. This will make the next generation of devices more secure than their predecessors, and allow the next billion people coming online for the first time to do so safely. Adiantum will help secure our connected world by allowing everything from smart watches to internet-connected medical devices to encrypt sensitive data. (For more details about the ins and outs of Adiantum, check out the security blog.) Encryption should be available on every single Android phone, not just the high-end, expensive models only the lucky few in the world can afford. Good move.
AnandTech has published its review of AMD’s surprise new high-end Radeon VII graphics card, and the results should be cause for some cautious optimism among PC builders. Overall then, the Radeon VII puts its best foot forward when it offers itself as a high-VRAM prosumer card for gaming content creators. And at its $699 price point, that’s not a bad place to occupy. However for pure gamers, it’s a little too difficult to suggest this card instead of NVIDIA’s better performing GeForce RTX 2080. So where does this leave AMD? Fortunately for the Radeon rebels, their situation is improved even if the overall competitive landscape hasn’t been significantly changed. It’s not a win for AMD, but being able to compete with NVIDIA at this level means just that: AMD is still competitive. They can compete on performance, and thanks to Vega 20 they have a new slew of compute features to work with. It’s going to win AMD business today, and it’s going to help prepare AMD for tomorrow for the next phase that is Navi. It’s still an uphill battle, but with Radeon VII and Vega 20, AMD is now one more step up that hill. While not a slam-dunk, the Radeon VII definitely shows AMD can get at least close to NVIDIA’s RTX cards, and that should make all of us quite happy – NVIDIA has had this market to itself for far too long, and it’s showing in the arrogant pricing the company maintains. While neither RTX cards nor this new Radeon VII make me want to replace my GTX 1070 – and its custom watercooling parts – it at least makes me hopeful that the coming years will be more competitive.
Microsoft said last Fall that it would offer paid Windows 7 Extended Security Updates on a per-device basis for big customers willing to pay for them after the company ends Windows 7 support on January 14, 2020. Microsoft officials wouldn’t talk about how much those updates would cost, beyond saying they’d get more expensive over time. However, Microsoft has briefed some of its partners and salespeople about the cost of these Extended Support Updates (ESUs). And, as you’d expect, they’re not cheap, especially for customers who may want to apply them on multiple PCs. They’re even more expensive for customers using the Pro version of Windows than the Enterprise one. These extended security updates are only available to enterprise and educiation users, so no luck if you’re an individual home user.That being said, I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these updates make their way into less than legal channels.
VLC 4.0 is on the way, and the VLC developers have listed what they have in store for this major new release. The most obvious new user-facing feature is brand new user interfaces for each platform the media player supports, such as KDE, Gnome, Windows, macOS, and more. Work on the new VLC 4.0 user-interface is progressing, there will be GNOME and KDE adaptations, support for both server-side and client-side decorations, and great support for Wayland as well as X11 — including support for macOS, Windows, etc. With VLC 4.0, they intend to gut out support for Windows XP/Vista as well as bumping the macOS, iOS, and Android requirements. On the Linux front, they intend to require OpenGL acceleration for this media player. There’s no information yet on when this new release will be made available.
Hatari 2.2.0 has been released. Hatari is an Atari ST/STE/TT/Falcon emulator for GNU/Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Windows and other systems which are supported by the SDL library. The Atari ST was a 16/32 bit computer system which was first released by Atari in 1985. Using the Motorola 68000 CPU, it was a very popular computer having quite a lot of CPU power at that time. Unlike many other Atari ST emulators which try to give you a good environment for running GEM applications, Hatari tries to emulate the hardware of a ST as close as possible so that it is able to run most of the old ST games and demos. Hatari is open source software and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). This new release – a year in the making – has a sizeable changelog, but I’m not exactly an Atari expert, so I’m not entirely sure which of the changes are the most exciting.
Haiku’s latest monthly activity report for the month of January is out. waddlesplash spent a full week doing a major overhaul of the FreeBSD compatibility layer to port iflib, FreeBSD’s new ethernet driver subsystem. (The ipro1000 driver from FreeBSD 12 uses it now, so it had to be done sooner or later.) As a side effect of this work, PCI device probing and attaching for all FreeBSD-ported drivers is significantly faster and less error-prone (this probably trimmed ~half a second, and perhaps even more, off of boot time on all machines), and paves the way for eventual USB support. After overhauling the compat layer itself, waddlesplash finished porting ethernet and then WiFi drivers from FreeBSD 12. Thanks to the refactor, he rewrote the initialization code in the WiFi layer during this effort, which seems to have resulted in all “spontaneous WiFi disconnects” or “no networks shown” tickets tested so far to be reported as fixed! So, if you were experiencing those errors and haven’t retested, please do. This is just one of the many improvements this month, but there’s a lot more in the report.
We know that unsolicited volume can be a great source of distraction and frustration for users of the web. So we are making changes to how Firefox handles playing media with sound. We want to make sure web developers are aware of this new autoplay blocking feature in Firefox. Starting with the release of Firefox 66 for desktop and Firefox for Android, Firefox will block audible audio and video by default. We only allow a site to play audio or video aloud via the HTMLMediaElement API once a web page has had user interaction to initiate the audio, such as the user clicking on a “play” button. Good move, and long overdue. Autplaying video isn’t just a mere annoyance – it’s incredibly rude, obnoxious and desrespectful.
We are no longer in control of our home directories. My own home directory contains 25 ordinary files and 144 hidden files. The dotfiles contain data that doesn’t belong to me: it belongs to the programmers whose programs decided to hijack the primary location designed as a storage for my personal files. I can’t place those dotfiles anywhere else and they will appear again if I try to delete them. All I can do is sit here knowing that in the darkness, behind the scenes, they are there. Waiting in silence. Some of those programmers decided to additionally place some normal files and directories in the same place. Those are clearly visible every time I execute ls in my home directory. It is beyond me why my home directory ended up up containing a node_modules directory, package-lock.json, a yarn.lock file (I have never even consciously used yarn!), some 2 strange log files origination from some Java software clearly using an H2 database, and a Desktop directory. That last one has been created by Steam, which is quite unfortunate as I simply do not have a desktop or a desktop environment on my machine. I dread the day in which I will hear a loud knock on my door and one of those programmers will barge in informing me that he is going to store a piece of his furniture in the middle of my living room, If I don’t mind. The way Linux distributions handle the directory structuce in general is deeply broken and inconcistent – trying to cram a modern desktop operating system in a directory structure designed for punch card machines is lunacy – and this is yet another example of that. It’s not just developers being lazy; it’s also developers simply being unable to count on distributions making sane choices and following the FHS to begin with. UNIX-based operating systems are an outdated mess under the hood, and developers are trying to work around that mess by making an even bigger mess using hidden files and random directories all over the place. Of course, saying this is considered sacrilege, as an operating system designed for mainframes in the ’60s is clearly perfect, and never needs to change or alter or improve its underpinnings in any way, shape, or form.
Ultron OS is an x86 Operating System written in C++. It is able to boot, initialise the GDT and IDT and do a couple of things that operating systems are supposed to do. Exactly what is says on the tin: a high school project to write an operating system.
Intel on Thursday notified its partners and customers that it would be discontinuing its Itanium 9700-series codenamed Kittson processors, the last Itanium chips on the market. Under their product discontinuance plan, Intel will cease shipments of Itanium CPUs in mid-2021, or a bit over two years from now. The impact to hardware vendors should be minimal – at this point HP Enterprise is the only company still buying the chips – but it nonetheless marks the end of an era for Intel, and their interesting experiment into a non-x86 VLIW-style architecture. Itanium has a long and troubled history, but it’s always been something that I’ve wanted to experiment and play with. Maybe the definitive discontinuation of the platform will inject some more stock of machines into eBay.
Today, the Norwegian Consumer Council has filed a complaint against Google. Based on new research Google is accused of using deceptive design and misleading information, which results in users accepting to be constantly tracked. Google tracks users through “Location History” and “Web & App Activity”, which are settings integrated into all Google accounts. For users of mobile phones with Android, such as Samsung and Huawei phones, this tracking is particularly difficult to avoid. Google is processing incredibly detailed and extensive personal data without proper legal grounds, and the data has been acquired through manipulation techniques, says Gro Mette Moen, acting head of unit, digital services in the Norwegian Consumer Council. Is anybody surprised by this?
Last April, Microsoft open sourced the original File Manager that shipped with Windows 3.0, allowing users to make changes and if they want, compile it for use on Windows 10. Now, the firm is making it easier to run the legacy app, as it’s offering the Windows 3.0 File Manager through the Microsoft Store (via Aggiornamenti Lumia) as a UWP app. It’s definitely neat to play with this – and it works wonderfully. It also has a few updated features, but retains its classic look.
Apple has now shut down Google’s ability to distribute its internal iOS apps, following a similar shutdown that was issued to Facebook earlier this week. A person familiar with the situation tells The Verge that early versions of Google Maps, Hangouts, Gmail, and other pre-release beta apps have stopped working today, alongside employee-only apps like a Gbus app for transportation and Google’s internal cafe app. “We’re working with Apple to fix a temporary disruption to some of our corporate iOS apps, which we expect will be resolved soon,” says a Google spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. Apple has not yet commented on the situation. There are two sides to this story. One the one hand, I’m glad Apple is taking measures and revoking some of these companies’ developer rights. These kinds of privacy-invading apps are a terrible idea, even if people get paid for them, and no platform should allow them. On the other hand, though, I would much rather have such tactics be wholly illegal on a national level, since leaving such decisions in the hands of easily corruptible corporrations – see Apple and China – is a recipe for disaster.
When Microsoft revealed that it was finally putting its long-running, if disregarded, Windows Phone line out to pasture, it was less roar, more whimper. It was a valiant effort that introduced some original thinking to the smartphone space, but it ultimately was a noble failure. But it got me thinking about a platform with Microsoft’s fingerprints on it, that was a noble and influential attempt at producing a standard, but ultimately fell into obscurity, with the industry choosing a different path. Today’s Tedium is about the Windows Phone of the ’80s, MSX. The MSX was one of the first computers I used, since a friend of mine had one. I can’t remember what, exactly, we did with it, but I’m pretty sure it was games. The MSX was weirdly popular in The Netherlands, and they’re still relatively easy to come by here.
A Microsoft program manager has caused a stir on Twitter over the weekend by suggesting that Firefox-maker Mozilla should give up on its own rendering engine and move on with Chromium. “Thought: It’s time for @mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really ‘cared’ about the web, they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that’s used by less than five percent?” wrote Kenneth Auchenberg, who builds web developer tools for Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code. This is such a rude and discourteous thing to say to a competitor – a competitor that has played a crucial role in bringing back competition to the browser market back when Internet Explorer 6 kept the web down like an anker. We need competition on the web.
A team of former U.S. government intelligence operatives working for the United Arab Emirates hacked into the iPhones of activists, diplomats and rival foreign leaders with the help of a sophisticated spying tool called Karma, in a campaign that shows how potent cyber-weapons are proliferating beyond the world’s superpowers and into the hands of smaller nations. The cyber tool allowed the small Gulf country to monitor hundreds of targets beginning in 2016, from the Emir of Qatar and a senior Turkish official to a Nobel Peace laureate human-rights activist in Yemen, according to five former operatives and program documents reviewed by Reuters. The sources interviewed by Reuters were not Emirati citizens. No device is secure.
In September, members of Google’s Chrome security team put forth a radical proposal: kill off URLs as we know them. The researchers aren’t actually advocating a change to the web’s underlying infrastructure. They do, though, want to rework how browsers convey what website you’re looking at, so that you don’t have to contend with increasingly long and unintelligible URLs—and the fraud that has sprung up around them. In a talk at the Bay Area Enigma security conference on Tuesday, Chrome usable security lead Emily Stark is wading into the controversy, detailing Google’s first steps toward more robust website identity. I don’t know if Google’s proposed steps are any good, but I do like it that at least some people are not afraid to challenge the status quo. Things can always be better, and holding on to the past because “it’s always been that way” is a terrible argument.
Great reporting by TechCrunch’s Josh Constine: Desperate for data on its competitors, Facebook has been secretly paying people to install a “Facebook Research” VPN that lets the company suck in all of a user’s phone and web activity, similar to Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned in June and that was removed in August. Facebook sidesteps the App Store and rewards teenagers and adults to download the Research app and give it root access in what may be a violation of Apple policy so the social network can decrypt and analyze their phone activity, a TechCrunch investigation confirms. Facebook admitted to TechCrunch it was running the Research program to gather data on usage habits, and it has no plans to stop. Since 2016, Facebook has been paying users ages 13 to 35 up to $20 per month plus referral fees to sell their privacy by installing the iOS or Android “Facebook Research” app. Facebook even asked users to screenshot their Amazon order history page. The program is administered through beta testing services Applause, BetaBound and uTest to cloak Facebook’s involvement, and is referred to in some documentation as “Project Atlas” — a fitting name for Facebook’s effort to map new trends and rivals around the globe. This is a very interesting case. These users are clearly doing this of their own volition; they are making the choice to give up their privacy so Facebook can see literally everything they do on their iPhone. At the same time, we can all agree this scummy, sleazy, and stupid, and I would love for Apple to have the guts to revoke Facebook’s iOS developer account. They won’t, of course, but if Apple really cares about privacy – they do not, but for the sake of argument, let’s assume that they do – they should remove Facebook from the App Store.
