Kim Carver, a legislator in the US state of Louisiana, added a provision to a child safety bill forcing Apple and Google to enforce age restrictions on downloads in their application stores. In other words, it would force Apple to make sure minors could not download gambling and casino applications – i.e., 99% of mobile games – that make up the vast majority of Apple’s services revenue. It would also make application stores play a role in enforcing age restrictions on social media applications, which makes sense because Apple and Google know the age of every one of their users. Well, it turns out Apple was not happy. They sent out an absolute army of lobbyists – including a guy known for lobbying on behalf of truck-stop casinos, in case you were wondering about the type of people Apple uses for lobbying – to kill this specific provision. Carver’s provision would have breezed through the Louisiana senate, but it needed a key committee approval before being put up for a vote. And it’s this committee that Apple started heavily influencing and pressuring. Carver began hearing rumblings that Apple was making inroads with the committee—his amended bill might be in trouble. Uncertain on how to proceed, he approached the chairwoman of the committee, Sen. Beth Mizell, for advice. He declined to describe the substance of the conversation to The Wall Street Journal, but in the end, he promised not to object if she removed the app store provisions or support restoring them on the Senate floor. “I made the choice to take the win that we could get,” Carver said. ↫ Jeff Horwitz and Aaron Tilley at The Wall Street Journal This is not the first time Apple has pressured legislatures to drop bills it didn’t like. A famous case is the state if Georgia, which intended to pass a number of application store bills to open up the App Store in much the same way the European Union did with the DMA. Apple went absolutely mental in Georgia, including threatening to cancel “a $25 million investment in a historically Black college in Atlanta”. Apple won. The way these sleazebag companies get away with such blatant corruption is by using third-party lobbyists, which technically are not employed by the companies in question, so no matter how low and sleazy these lobbyists go, the companies they lobby for can wash their hands in innocence and absolve themselves from any responsibility for the various financial and legal threats levied at underfunded, understaffed local legislatures. Spending a few millions on a local development project or whatever is peanuts for Apple, but a massive boon for a small community somewhere, so Apple pulling out means nothing to Apple, but would massively affect such a community. It’s not surprising local legislatures fold. Circling back to the age restriction provision itself – telling stores what they can and cannot sell is an entirely normal thing to do, and happens all the time all over the world. It’s why in, say, The Netherlands, supermarkets are only allowed to sell “light” alcohol like beer and wine, with hard alcohol moved to separate liquor stores that have to be separate from the supermarket, so age restrictions are easier to enforce. There’s also just an infinite number of things you’re just not allowed to sell, period. As always, Silicon Valley believes it’s a very special snowflake to whom regular, normal, widely accepted rules do not apply. Why shouldn’t a store selling gambling applications and similarly addictive and damaging applications have to do the absolute bare minimum to protect minors? Imagine the massive outcry if a Costco or Walmart was found to sell massive amounts of hard liquor to children – why should Silicon Valley companies be treated any differently?

For years now, people believe that their smartphones are listening to their conversations through their microphones, all the time, even when the microphone is clearly not activated. Targeted advertising lies at the root of this conviction; when you just had a conversation with a friend about buying a pink didgeridoo and a flanel ukelele, and you then get ads for pink didgeridoos and flanel ukeleles, it makes intuitive sense to assume your phone was listening to you. How else would Google, Amazon, Facebook, or whatever, know your deepest didgeridoo desires and untapped ukelele urges? The truth is that targeted advertising using cross-site cookies and profile building is far more effective than people think, and on top of that, people often forget what they did on their phone or laptop ten minutes ago, let alone yesterday or last week. Smartphones are not secretly listening to you, and it’s not through covert microphone activation that it knows about your musical interests. But then. Media conglomerate Cox Media Group has been pitching tech companies on a new targeted advertising tool that uses audio recordings culled from smart home devices. The existence of this program was revealed late last year. Now, however, 404 Media has also gotten its hands on additional details about the program through a leaked pitch deck. The contents of the deck are creepy, to say the least. Cox’s tool is creepily called “Active Listening” and the deck claims that it works by using smart devices, which can “capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations.” After the data is captured, advertisers can “pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers,” the deck says. The vague use of artificial intelligence to collect data about consumers’ online behavior is also mentioned, with the deck noting that consumers “leave a data trail based on their conversations and online behavior” and that the AI-fueled tool can collect and analyze said “behavioral and voice data from 470+ sources.” ↫ Lucas Ropek at Gizmodo Looking at the pitch deck in question, you can argue that it’s not even referring to smartphones, and that it is incredibly vague – probably on purpose – what “active listening” and “conversations” are really referring to. It might as well be simply referring to the various conversations on unencrypted messaging platforms, directly with companies, or stuff like that. “Smart devices” is also intentionally vague, and could be anything from one of those smart fridges to your smartphone. But you could also argue that yes, this seems to be pretty much referring to “listening to our conversations” in the most literal sense, by somehow – we have no idea how – turning on our smartphone microphones, in secret, without iOS or Android, or Apple or Google, knowing about it? It seems far-fetched, but at the same time, a lot of corporate and government programs and efforts seemed far-fetched until some whisteblower spilled the beans. The feeling that your phones are listening to you without your consent, in secret, will never go away. Even if some irrefutable evidence came up that it isn’t possible, it’s just too plausible to be cast aside.

After covering setting up your own CDN with both FreeBSD and OpenBSD, it’s now time to learn how to set up your own CDN wit NetBSD. This article is a spin-off from a previous post on how to create a self-hosted CDN, but this time we’ll focus on using NetBSD. NetBSD is a lightweight, stable, and secure operating system that supports a wide range of hardware, making it an excellent choice for a caching reverse proxy. Devices that other operating systems may soon abandon, such as early Raspberry Pi models or i386 architecture, are still fully supported by NetBSD and will continue to be so. Additionally, NetBSD is an outstanding platform for virtualization (using Xen or qemu/nvmm) and deserves more attention than it currently receives. ↫ Stefano Marinelli All the same from my previous post still applies, and it’s a great thing that Marinelli covers all three of the major BSDs (so far). If you want to run your own CDN on BSD, you can now make a pretty informed decision on which BSD best suits your needs.

Thanks to open source, no technology ever has to become obsolete, so long as a community remains to support it. You can sync Newtons and Palm Pilots with modern desktops, download web browsers for long-discontinued operating systems, or connect vintage computers like the Apple IIe to the modern internet via WiFi. Every year, new cartridges are released for old-school video game consoles like the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy. People keep old software and online platforms alive as well. The Dreamwidth team forked an old version of the early social network LiveJournal’s source code and built a community around it. The dial-up bulletin board system software WWIV is still maintained and there are plenty of BBSes still around. Teams are working to restore aspects of early online services like AOL and Prodigy. And you can still use Gopher, the hypertext protocol that was — for a brief period in the early 1990s — bigger than the web. ↫ Klint Finley Retrocomputing is about a lot of things, and I feel like it differs per person. For me, it’s a little bit of nostalgia, but primarily it’s about learning, and experiencing hardware and software I was unable to experience when they were new, either due to high cost or just general unavailability. There’s a lot to learn from platforms that are no longer among us, and often it helps you improve your skills with the modern platforms you do still use. The linked article is right: open source is playing such a massive role in the retrocomputing community. The number of open source projects allowing you to somehow use decades-old platforms in conjunction with modern technologies is massive, and it goes far beyond just software – projects like BlueSCSI or very niche things like usb3sun highlights there’s also hardware-based solutions for just about anything retro you want to accomplish. And we really can’t forget NetBSD, which seems to be the go-to modern operating system for bringing new life to old and retro hardware, as it often runs on just about anything. When I got my PA-RISC workstation, the HP Visualize c3750, I couldn’t find working copies of HP-UX, so I, too, opted for NetBSD to at least be able to see if the computer was fully functional. NetBSD is now a tool in my toolbox when I’m dealing with older, unique hardware. Retrocomputing is in a great place right now, with the exception of the ballooning prices we’re all suffering from, with even successful mainstay YouTubers like LGR lamenting the state of the market. Still, if you do get your hands on something retro – odds are there’s a whole bunch of tools ready for you to make the most of it, even today.

Despite reports to the contrary, Microsoft has stated that Recall will not be uninstallable after all. The feature did show up in the Windows Features dialog, but apparently, that was a bug. “We are aware of an issue where Recall is incorrectly listed as an option under the ‘Turn Windows features on or off’ dialog in Control Panel,” says Windows senior product manager Brandon LeBlanc in a statement to The Verge. “This will be fixed in an upcoming update.” ↫ Tom Warren at The Verge The company is not committing to saying it will not ever be uninstallable, probably because the European Union might have something to say about that. At the very least you’ll be able to turn Recall off, but it seems actually removing it might not be possible for a while.

Telegram doesn’t hold up to the promise of being private, nor secure. The end-to-end encryption is opt-in, only applies to one-on-one conversations and uses a controversial ‘homebrewn’ encryption algorithm. The rest of this article outlines some of the fundamentally broken aspects of Telegram. ↫ h3artbl33d Telegram is not a secure messenger, nor is it a platform you should want to be on. Chats are not encrypted by default, and are stored in plain text on Telegram’s server. Only chats between two (not more!) people who also happen to both be online at that time can be “encrypted”. In addition, the quotation marks highlight another massive issue with Telegram: its “encryption” is non-standard, home-grown, and countless security researchers have warned against relying on it. Telegram’s issues go even further than this, though. The application also copies your contacts to its servers and keeps them there, they’ve got a “People nearby” feature that shares location data, and so much more. The linked article does a great job of listing the litany of problems Telegram has, backed up by sources and studies, and these alone should convince anyone to not use Telegram for anything serious. And that’s even before we talk about Telegram’s utter disinterest in stopping the highly illegal activities that openly take place on its platform, from selling drugs, down to far more shocking and dangerous activities like sharing revenge pron, CSAM, and more. Telegram has a long history of not giving a single iota about shuttering groups that share and promote such material, leaving victims of such heinous crimes out in the cold. Don’t use Telegram. A much better alternative is Signal, and hell, even WhatsApp, of all things, is a better choice.

In its antitrust case against Google, the Federal Government filed a list of chats it had obtained that show Google employees explicitly asking each other to turn off a chat history feature to discuss sensitive subjects, showing repeatedly that Google workers understood they should try to avoid creating a paper trail of some of their activities.  The filing came following a hearing in which judge Leonie Brinkema ripped Google for “destroyed” evidence while considering a filing from the Department of Justice asking the court to find “adverse interference” against Google, which would allow the court to assume it purposefully destroyed evidence. Previous filings, including in the Epic Games v Google lawsuit and this current antitrust case, have also shown Google employees purposefully turning history off. ↫ Seamus Hughes The fact that corporations break the law, and lie, cheat, and scam their way to the top is not something particularly shocking, nor will it surprise anyone. I can barely even get angry about it anymore – birds gotta eat, fish gotta swim, corpos gotta break the law, that sort of thing. It’s just an inevitability of reality, a law of nature. You know it, I know it, the whole world knows it. No, what really upsets me is just how easily they get away with it, and even if they do get punished, any fines or other forms of punishment are so utterly disproportionately mild compared to the crimes committed. It’s incredibly rare for anyone responsible for corporate crime to ever face any serious punishment, let alone jail time, and even in the rare cases where they do, they usually have some stock options or whatever left over from their employment contract that will ensure a lavishly wealthy lifestyle. Fines levied against corporations as a whole are usually so low they’re just a minor cost of doing business, to the point where one has to wonder why they’re even being levied at all. Compare this to us normal folks, and the differences couldn’t be more stark. Whenever we’re accidentally late on some small bill, we get fined automatically, with very little recourse. We get a speeding ticket automatically in the mail because we drove 5 km/h over the speed limit. Our tax agencies are stupidly effective and efficient at screwing you over for that small side hustle selling crap on eBay. And rarely do we have any effective, efficient recourse. And these things can quickly spiral out of control when you’re already living paycheck to paycheck – being poor is really, really expensive. And let’s not even get into how much worse any of this is if you’re part of a minority, like being black in the US, or of North-African descent in Europe. In this case, the illegal activities of Google and its executies and employees is on such clear display, and yet, few, if any, will suffer any consequences for them. If you ever wonder why so many regular people flock to political extremes, it’s exactly this kind of deep unfairness and inequality that lies at its roots. It’s dispiriting, demoralising, and disheartening, and primes the pumps for disenfranchisement with society, and thus the search for alternatives, upon which extremists pray. We either stop our continual slide into corporatism, or our societies will fall.

After spending a few months in complete radio silence about Recall, Microsoft finally emerged with a statement that its controversial feature will make a comeback later this year, in October, to be more precise. In preparation for the release, Microsoft quietly made a big change in Windows 11 version 24H2 on Copilot+ PCs, namely, adding the ability to uninstall Recall (via Deskmodder). ↫ Taras Buria Recall, a half-baked security nightmare of a feature trying to catch the AI hype train, uninstallable using a Windows 95-era Windows Features dialog, is a better summary of the current state of Windows than anything anyone could put into words. Nobody cares about Windows, least of all Microsoft, and I have the sneaking suspicion that could Microsoft get away with it, they would put the source code to large parts of the Windows platform on GitHub to “outsource” its development to the community and fire even more employees. Is anyone excited about new Windows releases? Is anyone looking forward to new features? Because it feels like every new releases, every new feature, just causes more dread, more exasperation, more what is it this time? than genuine excitement and happiness. Everything coming out of Microsoft when it comes to Windows ever since the release of Windows 11 is just… Sadness.

I hate this timeline. It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication. For better or worse, we’ve reached the end of a long journey – one that started with a review of an AMD processor, and has ended with the review of an AMD processor. It’s fittingly poetic, but it is also a testament to the fact that we’ve spent the last 27 years doing what we love, covering the chips that are the lifeblood of the computing industry. ↫ Ryan Smith at AnandTech This sudden loss is sending shockwaves through the industry, and rightfully so. AnandTech is a pillar, a cornerstone of hardware reporting, and one of the very few – possibly only – tech news outlet out there with such depth, quality, integrity, and restraint. I can’t think of any other outlet being as dedicated to proper benchmarking and hardware reviews as AnandTech was, and losing them is a huge loss for all of us. The cause is exactly what you’d expect, sadly. It’s simply not really possible to remain profitable writing in-depth hardware reviews and benchmarks, as the world has shifted to video, and advertising income has cratered. There’s tons of hints about AnandTech not wanting to embrace sensationalism and clickbaiting to increase revenue – they’d rather go out with class, and I admire and appreciate that greatly. It just goes to show how hard it is to keep your head above water in the current online publishing world without rampant clickbaiting and flashy videos. In a better, less monopolised world, AnandTech could thrive. Sadly, that’s not the timeline we’re in. As far as housekeeping goes, the site will remain up for now, but there’s no guarantee it’ll stay up forever. I’m sure countless people are already archiving the invaluable content AnandTech has produced over its 27 year run, including the forums. We shan’t lose what AnandTech has created.

He regularly shares cool examples of fancy css animations. At the time of writing his focus has been on css scroll animations. I guess there are some new properties that allow playing a css animation based on the scroll position. Apple has been using this on their marketing pages or so jhehy says. The property seems pretty powerful. But how powerful? This got me thinking… Could it play a video as pure css? ↫ David Gerrells The answer is yes. This is so cursed, I love it – and he even turned it into an app so anyone can convert a video into CSS.

The Epoch Cassette Vision is often reported as the first Japanese cartridge-based game console. But reality is always a bit more complicated. In 1978, years before the Cassette Vision, two Japanese companies put together cartridge-based game consoles that were unique to Japan, but relied on technology and chips licensed from American firms. And hey, despite my whirlwind tour of Pong consoles, I never looked at GI chips. Behold, the *breathes in* Bandai Video Mate All Color TV Jack Addon 5000. (longest console name in the history of the blog?) This 1978 console was the follow-on to Bandai’s earlier Video Mate TV Jack consoles, which were more or less the same as everyone else’s Pong-on-a-chip consoles. (The TV Jack 2500 appears rather intriguing, but we’re not looking at that one today) ↫ Nicole Express As usual, Nicole’s deep dives into weird consoles you’ve never heard of are a great read, and this one is no exception. There are many things that make the Jack Addon 5000 unique and interesting, but the one thing that’s really cool is that while the game lives on the cartridge, the colour lives inside the console itself. Inside the cartridge you’ll only find the monochrome game chip; the colour is added by another chip that’s fitted inside the console. Only four cartridges were ever released for the system, so it’s not particularly more versatile than contemporary Pong clones that had multiple built-in games or game modes. Still, it’s an interesting footnote, and I’m so happy we got such a detailed look at this console.

I don’t use GNU Screen so I don’t have much to say here, but I do know it’s a popular tool among the kind of people who read OSNews, so a new major release should be covered here. In case you’re not aware, “Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells”. Basically, it’s window manager for terminals. You can download the tarball yourself, or just wait until the update hits your distribution of choice.

The internet is a complex network of routers, switches, and computers, and when we try to connect to a server, our packets go through many routers before reaching the destination. If one of these routers is misconfigured or down, the packet can be dropped, and we can’t reach the destination. In this post, we will see how traceroute works, and how it can help us diagnose network problems. ↫ Sebastian Marines I’m sure most of us have used traceroute at some point in our lives, but I never once wondered how,, exactly, it works. The internet – and networking in general – always feels like arcane magic to me, not truly understandable by mere mortals without years of dedicated study and practice. Even something as simple as managing a home router can be a confusing nightmare of abbreviations, terminology, and backwards compatibility hacks, so you can imagine how complex it gets when you leave your home network and start sending packets out into the wider world. This post does a great job of explaining exactly how traceroute works without overloading you with stuff you don’t need to know.

The Windows patch that’s supposed to improve Windows’ performance on AMD’s new Ryzen 9000 chips has been backported from Windows 11 24H2 to Windows 11 23H2. Now, AMD has confirmed that it’s bringing the same branch prediction optimizations to Windows 11 23H2 via backporting. The new update will be listed under the Windows Update menu in the “Optional Updates” section as “KB5041587” which makes things a lot easier for those who haven’t updated or opted into the 24H2 preview. ↫ Hassan Mujtaba at Wccftech If you’re using Windows on a Ryzen 9000 chip – or even other recent Ryzen chips, who may also see a benefit from this patch – you should strongly consider installing this patch.