Exactly ten years ago, on April 8, 2014, Microsoft released the final security patch for Windows XP. The day marked the end of the road for one of the most iconic Windows versions ever released. ↫ Taras Buria at Neowin I never liked Windows XP. Compared to the operating systems I was using at the time – BeOS, Mandrake Linux 8.x – Windows XP felt kind of like a bad joke I wasn’t in on. It looked ridiculous, didn’t seem to offer anything substantial, and it didn’t take long for major security incidents related to Windows XP to start dominating the news. It wasn’t until several service packs had been released that Windows XP came into its own, but by that point, I had already found a much better alternative for my Windows needs at the time. I’m of course talking about Windows Server 2003, the better Windows than Windows XP. Today though, I do have an odd fondness for Windows XP, as I grow older and XP has become something from my teenage years. The look and feel of Windows XP – the classic theme, not that horrendous Fisher Price nonsense – the sound set, the wallpaper of course – has become iconic, warts and all, and whole generations of people will feel instant feelings as soon as they see Bliss or hear that iconic startup sound. Windows XP with a few service packs now belongs to the small group of Windows releases that I would call the peak of the platform, together with Windows 95 and Windows 7 (and perhaps Server 2003, but that’s more of a personal thing and not a consumer operating system). Everything else has not exactly been great or even aged well, and I doubt Windows 10 and 11 will suddenly get good, either.

Built using the Arm Neoverse™ V2 CPU, Axion processors deliver giant leaps in performance for general-purpose workloads like web and app servers, containerized microservices, open-source databases, in-memory caches, data analytics engines, media processing, CPU-based AI training and inferencing, and more. Axion is underpinned by Titanium, a system of purpose-built custom silicon microcontrollers and tiered scale-out offloads. Titanium offloads take care of platform operations like networking and security, so Axion processors have more capacity and improved performance for customer workloads. Titanium also offloads storage I/O processing to Hyperdisk, our new block storage service that decouples performance from instance size and that can be dynamically provisioned in real time. ↫ Amin Vahdat on the Google blog Fancy new ARM processors from Google, designed explicitly for the data centre. In other words, we’ll never get to play with it unless one makes its way to eBay in a few years.

Intel and AMD both tried to ship iGPUs fast enough to compete with low end discrete cards over the past 10 years with mixed results. Recently though, powerful iGPUs have been thrown back into the spotlight. Handhelds like Valve’s Steam Deck and ASUS’s ROG Ally demonstrated that consumers are willing to accept compromises to play games on the go. AMD has dominated that market so far. Valve’s Steam Deck uses AMD’s Van Gogh APU, and the ROG Ally uses the newer Phoenix APU. Unlike Van Gogh, Phoenix is a general purpose mobile chip with both a powerful CPU and GPU. Phoenix doesn’t stop at targeting the handheld segment, and threatens Intel’s laptop market share too. In response, Meteor Lake brings a powerful iGPU to the party. It has the equivalent of 128 EUs and clocks up to 2.25 GHz, making it modestly wider and much faster than Raptor Lake’s 96 EU, 1.5 GHz iGPU. Raptor Lake’s Xe-LP graphics architecture gets replaced by Xe-LPG, a close relative of the Xe-HPG architecture used in Intel’s A770 discrete GPU. At the system level, Meteor Lake moves to a GPU integration scheme that better suits a chiplet configuration where the iGPU gets significant transistor and area budget. I’ll be testing Meteor Lake’s iGPU with the Core Ultra 7 155H, as implemented in the ASUS Zenbook 14. I purchased the device myself in late February. ↫ Chips and Cheese I’m absolutely here for the resurgence in capable integrated GPUs, both for PC gaming on the go and for better graphics performance even in thinner, smaller laptops. I would love to have just a bit more graphics power on my thin and small laptop so I can do some basic gaming with it.

Today, the all-new Find My Device is rolling out to Android devices around the world, starting in the U.S. and Canada. With a new, crowdsourced network of over a billion Android devices, Find My Device can help you find your misplaced Android devices and everyday items quickly and securely. Here are five ways you can try it out. ↫ Erik Kay on the Google blog This old Android feature has basically been updated to be the same thing as Apple’s Find My, but with more than just one vendor making the tracking tags. Of course, this means it also comes with the same problems, from its use by stalkers to controlling partners, and everything in between. This is a very problematic technology, one which I think is almost impossible to make safe. Still, I have a Samsung tracker that I don’t use anymore – because I bought a Pixel 8 Pro, and don’t want to install any Samsung applications – and I do plan on getting a new tracker that’s compatible with this new Find My Device network. With two small kids, it’s easy to lose track of something like my car keys, and instead of stressing about where they are when we need to leave on time, I can just ping them using our Google Home devices instead. Sometimes, these silly smart technologies really do take just that little bit of stress out of your life – you just have to be really picky and honest with yourself about what you really need.

There are various ways you can change the default browser and similar defaults on Windows, but oneof the ways many third-party tools do this is by editing the relevant registry strings. It turns out that Microsoft is not particularly happy with this, as they’ve recently introduced a new driver specifically designed to prevent this from happening, by blocking tools like regedit or PowerShell from editing a number of registry keys for setting default applications. The driver was discovered by Christoph Kolbicz. Microsoft implemented a driver based protection to block changes to http/https and .pdf associations by 3rd party utilities. The rollout was staggered and activated “randomly”, but in the meantime I got many reports – also from business or education environments (but not Server OS). Microsoft also updated the driver during my tests (from 2.0 to 2.1) and extended the deny list of executables. This means, they can change the behavior almost on the fly and add new tricks or block additional extensions/protocols! ↫ Christoph Kolbicz Digging further into what, exactly, this driver can do, Microsoft also made it so that even if you disable the driver, an additional scheduled task will run to re-enable the driver and revert the registry changes. It also seems this is somehow related to the changes Microsoft has to make to comply with the EU’s DMA, but the driver is also installed on systems outside of the EU, so it’s all a bit unclear at the moment.

Over the GNOME 46 cycle, VTE has seen a lot of performance improvements. Christian Hergert mentioned some of them in his blog posts about VTE and about his work in GNOME 46. But how much did the performance actually improve? What should you, the user, expect to feel after installing a fresh Fedora 40 update and launching your favorite terminal? Let’s measure and find out! ↫ Ivan Molodetskikh The short version is that the improvements are definitely noticeable during genera use – for the long version, read the actual article.

With Microsoft’s rollout of the new Outlook for Windows, it appears the company has transformed its email app into a surveillance tool for targeted advertising. Everyone talks about the privacy-washing campaigns of Google and Apple as they mine your online data to generate advertising revenue. But now it looks like Outlook is no longer simply an email service; it’s a data collection mechanism for Microsoft’s 801 external partners and an ad delivery system for Microsoft itself. ↫ Edward Komenda on the Proton blog Now, note that this is an article written by Proton, posted on the company blog, so of course they’re not going to be too kind towards their competitors. That being said, the article’s not wrong: the new Outlook web application, now the default in Windows, not only shared your data with around 800 partners, it also displays ads inside of the application. On macOS, it will even show yo fake emails that are, in fact, ads. Furthermore, once you add your accounts to this new Outlook web application, you’ll also be uploading your username and password to Microsoft, giving them access to your email accounts for advertising and data collection purposes, a shady practice a ton of email clients on mobile devices tend to do as well. Suffice it to say you really shouldn’t be using this new Outlook, and you should make sure friends and family don’t either. This is yet another nail in the coffin of Windows, now an advertising and data collection platform first, and operating system second.

WinBtrfs is a Windows driver for the next-generation Linux filesystem Btrfs. A reimplementation from scratch, it contains no code from the Linux kernel, and should work on any version from Windows XP onwards. It is also included as part of the free operating system ReactOS. ↫ WinBtrfs GitHub page If you’re running a distribution that defaults to Btrfs, or you actively choose to use it on other distributions, and you also happen to dual-boot Windows because your boss makes you use some garbage corpo software, this driver will make your setup a bit easier to manage.

I made a graphical IRC client that runs in UEFI. It’s written in Rust and leverages the GUI toolkit and TrueType renderer that I wrote for axle’s userspace. I was able to develop it thanks to the vmnet network backend that I implemented for QEMU. I’ve published the code here. ↫ Phillip Tennen Words are not enough.

One of the things I’ve always wanted to experiment with on my computers is logging in and authenticating things like sudo requests with a hardware tool – a fingerprint reader, a smart card, or a USB hardware security device like a YubiKey. There’s really no solid reason for me to want this other than that it just feels cool and futuristic to me (yes, even in this, the year of our lord 2024). I have no state secrets, no secret Swiss bank accounts, no whistleblower material to protect, and my computers rarely leave the house – I just want it because it’s possible and cooler than typing in my password. Due to the flexibility and feature set of the YubiKey, I think it’s the best choice to go for. A no-name USB fingerprint reader would probably be ugly, cumbersome to position, and Linux support would be difficult to determine. A USB smart card reader would bring the same issues as the fingerprint reader, and combined with a smart card it seems like it’s just a Yubikey with extra steps. I do have to admit the idea of sliding a smart card in a slot and have it authorise you sounds really, really satisfying. Anyway, YubiKeys come in all shapes and sizes, but I want one of the USB-A ones with a fingerprint reader built-in, since I can plug it in at the bottom of my monitor, perfectly positioned to put my thumb on it to authenticate. This way, it’s easily accessible to be used to log into my desktop session, authorise sudo requests when I’m configuring things, log into websites with Firefox, and so on. But there’s a problem: setting up a YubiKey on Linux seems like it’s a huge ordeal. Just look a the official instructions on the YubiKey website, or the instructions on the Fedora website, my distribution of choice. That’s absolutely insane, and nobody should be expected to understand any of this nonsense to use what is being marketed as a consumer product. It’s important to note that this is not a hardware, software, or driver issue – all the necessary support is there, and Linux can make full use of the functionality tools like the YubiKey offers. The problem is that you’re expected to set this up manually, package by package, configuration file by configuration file, PAM module by PAM module. When I first looked into getting a YubiKey, I expected biometric and advanced authentication tools like these to be fully integrated into modern Linux distributions and desktop environments. I figured that once you plugged one of these tools into your PC, additional options would become available in GNOME’s or KDE’s user account settings, but apparently, this isn’t the case. This means that even if you manually set everything up using the official arcane incantations, your graphical user interface won’t be aware of any of that, and changing anything will mean you have to go through those official arcane incantations again. This is entirely unacceptable. The moment you plug in an an advanced hardware security tool like a YubiKey, GNOME and KDE should recognise it, and the settings, tools, and setup ‘wizards’ relevant to it should become available. All the hardware and software support is there – and in 2024, biometric and advanced security devices like these should not be so complicated and unforgiving to set up. Smart cards and fingerprint readers have been supported by Linux for literally decades. Why isn’t this easier? For now, I’m still in doubt about going through with buying a YubiKey. I definitely have the skills to go through with this whole insane setup process, but I really shouldn’t have to.

A new major release, FFmpeg 7.0 “Dijkstra”, is now available for download. The most noteworthy changes for most users are a native VVC decoder (currently experimental, until more fuzzing is done), IAMF support, or a multi-threaded ffmpeg CLI tool. This release is not backwards compatible, removing APIs deprecated before 6.0. The biggest change for most library callers will be the removal of the old bitmask-based channel layout API, replaced by the AVChannelLayout API allowing such features as custom channel ordering, or Ambisonics. Certain deprecated ffmpeg CLI options were also removed, and a C11-compliant compiler is now required to build the code. ↫ FFmpeg website I don’t think many of directly interface with FFmpeg, but we’re most likely all using it one way or another. Even Microsoft (here‘s the referenced bug report).

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.

Earlier this week, Qt 6.7 was released with a whole slew of new features and improvements. Reading through the various highlights, there’s further improvements to Qt Graphs, first released with Qt 6.6 and still under active development, better SVG support, variable fonts and icon font support, and much more. There’s also a variety of new examples and demo applications, and of course, Qt 6.7 supports all the latest operating system releases. One feature that truly stood out to me as something that I’m assuming will make Qt developers happy is improved support for embedding native controls into Qt applications. On both desktop and mobile platforms, applications often need to combine UI elements from different technologies and frameworks. Qt uses and integrates tightly with the native technologies on each platform to create basic UI elements such as windows, and it has for a long time been possible to use UI elements from other frameworks within a Qt Widgets application. With Qt 6.7, we are now adding support for embedding native windows into a Qt Quick scene as well. This allows use of native controls such as AppKit’s MapView or a Windows media player inside a Qt Quick UI, with correct positioning and stacking. By layering windows, Qt Quick UI elements can be overlaid on top of the native components as well. ↫ Volker Hilsheimer Alongside Qt 6.7, Qt Creator 13 has also been released, which comes with its own set of improvements and new features.

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.