PCIe 7.0 is is the next generation interconnect technology for computers that is set to increase data transfer speeds to 128 GT/s per pin, doubling the 64 GT/s of PCIe 6.0 and quadrupling the 32 GT/s of PCIe 5.0. This would allow a 16-lane (x16) connection to support 256 GB/sec of bandwidth in each direction simultaneously, excluding encoding overhead. Such speeds will be handy for future datacenters as well as artificial intelligence and high-performance computing applications that will need even faster data transfer rates, including network data transfer rates. ↫ Anton Shilov at AnandTech PCIe 7.0 won’t hit devices until late 2020s.

Oh boy. Roku has an… Interesting new patent. Thought you could avoid the ads infesting every “smart” TV you buy now by using external devices through HDMI? Disclosed herein are system, apparatus, article of manufacture, method and/or computer program product embodiments, and/or combinations and sub-combinations thereof, for ad insertion by a display device coupled to a media device via a high-definition media interface (HDMI) connection, where the media device provides media content and/or a control signal. When the media device pauses the media content, the display device can determine that a pause event has occurred and insert an ad shown on the display device. Further, some embodiments include determining the context and/or content of the media content that is paused, and determining an ad that is customized to the determined context and/or content to be displayed on the display device. In some embodiments, the display device can determine additional information from the control signal that may also be used to determine the ad to be displayed on the display device. ↫ Some bullshit patent for a bullshit ‘invention’ My eyes are bleeding. I require medical assistance.

One area of AMD’s product portfolio that doesn’t get as much attention as the desktop and server parts is their Embedded platform. AMD’s Embedded series has been important for on-the-edge devices, including industrial, automotive, healthcare, digital gaming machines, and thin client systems. Today, AMD has unveiled their latest Embedded architecture, Embedded+, which combines their Ryzen Embedded processors based on the Zen+ architecture with their Versal adaptive SoCs onto a single board. ↫ Gavin Bonshor at AnandTech Machines with these chips will flood the used market a few years from now, and they’re going to be great buys for all kinds of fun projects – and because the corporate world buys these machines by the truckload, they show up on eBay at impulse prices within years. Sometimes, you can even buy cheap whole lots of these kinds of boxes. They often tend to be a little weird, and come with features and trinkets normal computers don’t come with, which is always good for some weekend fun. Cathode Ray Dude is currently doing a series on these little things on YouTube, and there’s always something weird to discover about what kind of odd features and design choices these machines possess. If there’s interest from you, our lovely readers, I can see if I can snatch up a few weird ones from eBay and write about what kind of fun projects you can do with these. You can usually run Linux on these, the embedded versions of Windows, and if they’re not too weird, they could probably serve as a cheap Haiku box, too.

In May and June 2023, a threat actor compromised the Microsoft Exchange Online mailboxes of 22 organizations and over 500 individuals around the world. The actor—known as Storm-0558 and assessed to be affiliated with the People’s Republic of China in pursuit of espionage objectives—accessed the accounts using authentication tokens that were signed by a key Microsoft had created in 2016. This intrusion compromised senior United States government representatives working on national security matters, including the email accounts of Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, United States Ambassador to the People’s Republic of China R. Nicholas Burns, and Congressman Don Bacon. The Board finds that this intrusion was preventable and should never have occurred. The Board also concludes that Microsoft’s security culture was inadequate and requires an overhaul, particularly in light of the company’s centrality in the technology ecosystem and the level of trust customers place in the company to protect their data and operations. ↫ Cyber Safety Review Board’s report The Cyber Safety Review Board reviewed the attack on Microsoft Exchange from last year, with Microsoft’s cooperation, and it turns out it was kind of a complete and utter shitshow inside Microsoft – a cascade of failures, as the report calls it – and concludes that it was an entirely preventable attack. The report is not kind to Microsoft, and it’s a very interesting read if you’re into this sort of post mortems of security breaches.

We’ve talked about Tribblix before on OSNews – it’s a distribution of illumos, built by Peter Tribble. In his latest blog post, Tribble details some of the changes he’s made to the live ISO and other images for the most recent release. All along, there’s been an overlay (think a group package) called base-iso that lists the packages that are present in the live image. On installation, this is augmented with a few extra packages that you would expect to be present in a running system but which don’t make much sense in a live image, to construct the base system. You can add additional software, but the base is assumed to be present. The snag with this is that base-iso is very much a single-purpose generic concept. By its very nature it has to be minimal enough to not be overly bloated, yet contain as many drivers as necessary to handle the majority of systems. As such, the regular ISO image has fallen between 2 stools – it doesn’t have every single driver, so some systems won’t work, while it has a lot of unnecessary drivers for a lot of common use cases. ↫ Peter Tribble Tribble then details how he addressed this issue, which is, unsurprisingly, rather clever. I’m not going to spoil it here, so go on over and read the details.

I work at Red Hat on GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. For the last five releases of GCC, I’ve been working on -fanalyzer, a static analysis pass that tries to identify various problems at compile-time, rather than at runtime. It performs “symbolic execution” of C source code—effectively simulating the behavior of the code along the various possible paths of execution through it. This article summarizes what’s new with -fanalyzer in GCC 14, which I hope will be officially released sometime in April 2024. ↫ David Malcolm No matter how many more of you become a Patreon to keep OSNews alive, I’ll never be able to really add anything meaningful to articles like these.

It was Stability’s armada of GPUs, the wildly powerful and equally expensive chips undergirding AI, that were so taxing the company’s finances. Hosted by AWS, they had long been one of Mostaque’s bragging points; he often touted them as one of the world’s 10 largest supercomputers. They were responsible for helping Stability’s researchers build and maintain one of the top AI image generators, as well as break important new ground on generative audio, video and 3D models. “Undeniably, Stability has continued to ship a lot of models,” said one former employee. “They may not have profited off of it, but the broader ecosystem benefitted in a huge, huge way.” But the costs associated with so much compute were now threatening to sink the company. According to an internal October financial forecast seen by Forbes, Stability was on track to spend $99 million on compute in 2023. It noted as well that Stability was “underpaying AWS bills for July (by $1M)” and “not planning to pay AWS at the end of October for August usage ($7M).” Then there were the September and October bills, plus $1 million owed to Google Cloud and $600,000 to GPU cloud data center CoreWeave. (Amazon, Google and CoreWeave declined to comment.) ↫ Kenrick Cai and Iain Martin As a Dutch person, I can smell a popping bubble from a mile away, even if tulipmania is most likely anti-Dutch British propaganda. In all seriousness, there’s definitely signs that the insane energy and compute costs of artificial image and video generation in particular are rising at such an insane pace it’s simply unsustainable for the popularity of these tools to just keep rising. Eventually someone’s going to have to pay, and I wonder just how much regular people are willing to pay for this kind of stuff.

Amazon is phasing out its checkout-less grocery stores with “Just Walk Out” technology, first reported by The Information Tuesday. The company’s senior vice president of grocery stores says they’re moving away from Just Walk Out, which relied on cameras and sensors to track what people were leaving the store with. Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped. ↫ Maxwell Zeff Behind every Silicon Valley innovation are underpaid poor people.

Windows 10 is reaching end of support on October 14, 2025, so if you’re still using Windows 10 – and let’s face it, if you’re somehow forced to still use Windows, better 10 than 11 – your time is running out. Luckily, end of support is a bit of a nebulous term when it comes to Microsoft products, and many among you, especially those managing larger fleets of systems, will know Microsoft offers something called the Extended Security Update (ESU) program, wherein you get additional security updates even after end of support. Microsoft just unveiled the prices for this program for Windows 10. While there’s several schemes, the one most of you will be interested in is this one: With the 5-by-5 activation method, you’ll download an activation key and apply it to individual Windows 10 devices that you’ve selected for your ESU program. Manage it via scripting or the Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT), among other methods. You can use on-premises management tools such as Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) with Configuration Manager to download and apply the updates to your Windows 10 devices. The 5-by-5 activation subscription will establish the Year One list price of ESU for Windows 10. This is the base license and will cost $61 USD per device for Year 1, similar to the Windows 7 ESU Year 1 price. ↫ Jason Leznek Honestly, that’s not an egregious price, but do note that this price doubles every year for three years total, and note that if you want to start using ESU in year two, you’ll have to pay for year one as well. In other words, pricing ramps up fast. Furthermore, this program only includes security updates – no new features or anything like that, and it doesn’t include support either. So, if you’re still using Windows 10 after October 14, 2025, you’ll either have to pay up, have an insecure system, downgrade to Windows 11, or move to a better alternative. Choice’s yours.

Microsoft is currently testing a new AI-powered Xbox chatbot that can be used to automate support tasks. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the software giant has been testing an “embodied AI character” that animates when responding to Xbox support queries. I understand this Xbox AI chatbot is part of a larger effort inside Microsoft to apply AI to its Xbox platform and services. ↫ Tom Warren at The Verge I’m convinced. This is the future. Artificial intelligence, AI, no quotation marks. Please, Microsoft. Train this AI on Xbox voice chat and messages. What could possible go wrong?

Before the cancellation of The Problem with Jon Stewart on Apple TV+, Apple forbade the inclusion of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan as a guest and steered the show away from confronting issues related to artificial intelligence, according to Jon Stewart. ↫ Samuel Axon at Ars Technica Just when you thought Apple and Tim Cook couldn’t get any more unlikable.

Redis, a tremendously popular tool for storing data in-memory rather than in a database, recently switched its licensing from an open source BSD license to both a Source Available License and a Server Side Public License (SSPL). The software project and company supporting it were fairly clear in why they did this. Redis CEO Rowan Trollope wrote on March 20 that while Redis and volunteers sponsored the bulk of the project’s code development, “the majority of Redis’ commercial sales are channeled through the largest cloud service providers, who commoditize Redis’ investments and its open source community.” Clarifying a bit, “cloud service providers hosting Redis offerings will no longer be permitted to use the source code of Redis free of charge.” This generated a lot of discussion, blowback, and action. The biggest thing was a fork of the Redis project, Valkey, that is backed by The Linux Foundation and, critically, also Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc. Valkey is “fully open source,” Linux Foundation execs note, with the kind of BSD-3-Clause license Redis sported until recently. You might note the exception of Microsoft from that list of fork fans. ↫ Kevin Purdy at Ars Technica Moves like this never go down well.

Way back in the day, back when I wasn’t even working at OSNews yet, I used to run QNX as my desktop operating system, together with a small number of other enthusiasts. It was a struggle, for sure, but it was fun, exciting, and nobody else was crazy enough to do so. Sadly, the small QNX desktop community wasn’t even remotely interesting to QNX, and later Blackberry when they acquired the company, and eventually the stand-alone Neutrino-powered version of QNX disappeared behind confusing signup screens and other dark patterns. It meant the end of our small little community. Much to my utter surprise and delight, I saw a post by js about how he ported GCC 10 to QNX – in this case, to QNX 6.5 SP1, released in 2012 – and submitted it to pkgsrc. His ultimate goal is to port one of his other projects, ObjFW, to QNX. He makes use of pkgsrc to do this kind of work, which also means he had to make pkgsrc bootstrap and a lot of other software work on QNX. We’re at QNX 8.0 by now, and as much as I bang my head against QNX and BlackBerry’s wall of marketing and corporate speak, I just can’t find out if it’s even still possible to download QNX Neutrino and install it on real generic hardware today.

This is a contender for the World Record for Feature Creep Side Project. It is pretty high in the contender list as it’s a bolt on to another contender for the World Record for Feature Creep Side Project (the MII Apple //e emulator). It is a library that duplicate a lot of a Macintosh Classic “Toolbox” APIs. It is not a complete implementation, but it is enough to make a few simple applications, also, all the bits I needed for the MII emulator. ↫ libmui GitHub page This is absolutely wild.