For a while now the transition away from Manifest V2 (MV2) to MV3 has been on-going and it looks like it is entering its final phase of deprecation, at least, in the case of Google Chrome. A recent discussion thread in the w3c WebExtensions Community Group GitHub repo has highlighted how the latest and upcoming versions of the most popular browser are expected to be its final releases with support for MV2 extensions. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin You shouldn’t be using Chrome anyway.

On a related note, what about a raycasting first-person shooter written in… COBOL? Can you think of a better programming language than COBOL to implement an FPS from scratch? I know I can’t, so buckle up and enjoy what can only be described as an out-of-body experience for COBOL enthusiasts as I set out to make a Wolfenstein3D-like raycasting based FPS game (and potentially go a bit further than that, hopefully it’s not a DOOMed attempt). ↫ icitry on YouTube I don’t link to YouTube videos very often, but there’s always the exception that proves the rule. The COBOL code’s available on GitHub. What a mad man.

Microsoft has detailed that Windows 11 is going to switch away from dedicated printer drivers to its Windows Ready Print system. This should make it a lot easier and less cumbersome to get printers running on Windows 11. At the core of Windows Ready Print is a transition away from legacy, third party drive-based workflows toward modern, standards-based printing with IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) using the Windows inbox IPP printer driver.  Starting in July 2026, new printer installations will default to Windows Ready Print where supported, enabling a simpler and more reliable setup experience. This change reduces the need for traditional driver management and lays the foundation for a more scalable and predictable print experience. ↫ elliesekine at the Windows Tech Community Printers still play a huge role in our lives – whether we like it or not – and their terrible user experience is basically a meme a this point. Making at least one aspect of printing easier, less cumbersome, and more streamlined is incredibly welcome, and I’m glad Microsoft is taking the Windows printing ecosystem along for the ride on this one. My own personal experience with printing on Linux and now on Windows 11 (as promised, I’ve been using nothing but Windows 11 since 26 May!) has been mostly effortless already. Our cheap networked printer/scanner/combo thing from HP “just works” on both Linux and Windows 11, since Windows downloads HP’s drivers and application automatically when detecting the printer on the network. Still, not having to use HP’s driver would be a nice bonus. Coincidentally, I also managed to get the printer component of our HP combo thing working on… HP-UX 11i v1. Despite being more than two decades newer, our HP printer works perfectly with a printer definition file included in HP-UX, giving me full printing from CDE and the rest of HP-UX. It’s entirely useless and cost me an evening of my life, but seeing the test page and other documents from HP-UX come out of our printer, over the network, put a big smile on my face.

It’s just a ruling from a lower court, but it sets the stage for how European courts are going to deal with the question of who is liable for whatever slop “AI” generates. The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no. 26 O 869/26). The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the “AI overview” is its own content, not just a list of search results. Google’s AI overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other, genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that didn’t appear in any of the linked sources. The publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, but Google didn’t respond appropriately. ↫ Matthias Bastian at The Decoder Google tried to argue it doesn’t carry any responsibility or liability for whatever slop its “AI” generate, but the German court does not agree. According to the court, “AI” overviews are not the same as regular search results, because they rewrite findings and just make shit up, thereby making claims that are nowhere to be found in any search results (or in reality in general). Furthermore, the court states that Google develops the “AI”, it runs it, it offers it to users, and Google alone controls its output, and as such, Google is liable for whatever their “AI” produces. Google also tried to argue that users know not to trust anything an “AI” produces, which is hilarious considering how hard Google is pushing these tools, but the courts state that the ability of users to do further research does not absolve Google of liability. In addition, the court made it very clear that free speech protections absolutely do not apply, because the “AI” expressions are coming from an algorithm, not a person, and are above all an expression of Google’s business activities”. In other words, if an “AI” tool generates false accusations and misleading statements, the creator of said “AI” is liable. With this ruling in hand, countless other people have a stronger case to make whenever Google or any other company tries to absolve itself from liability from slop just because a pachinko machine generated it. Excellent news, and the only fair outcome.

A new logo means new merch! I’m launching brand new merch today, all featuring the brand new OSNews logo. We’ve got the classic T-shirt with the new OSNews logo, in sandy white and terrain grey. They’re made from sustainably-grown and processed cotton, come in a variety of sizes, and ship worldwide. The crowdpleaser is also making its triumphant return: the OSNews coffee mug, now also with the new logo and a green-on-white two-tone design. It holds coffee and tea, of course, but feel free to use it for whatever you want. Grow a plant in it! A newcomer is the OSNews Mousepad – a basic, no-nonsense, no-frills mousepad that does exactly what it’s supposed to do, in a classic square(ish) formfactor. It makes for a great companion to any (retro) setup, but feels particularly at home with BeOS and OS/2. One merch item remains from our previous collection: the ever-popular Gemini shirt and longsleeve, with a retro ASCII-art OSNews logo in bright green on deep black. It’s like staring at a real classic CRT. On your chest. Don’t sit too close. As always, every price is set so that for every item sold, roughly €8 goes to OSNews. I will add the proceeds to our fundraiser tracker, so this is yet another way to support us, together with Ko-Fi donations, SEPA direct bank transfers, and Patreon.

In today’s climate, I needed this: GentleOS, an operating system targeting both 386 (GentleOS/32) and even processors as old as the 80186 (GentleOS/16), with a lovely retro graphical user interface, usable on bare metal, and, of course, open source. Its goal is to provide a simple platform for tinkering with retro hardware and running graphical interactive apps on bare metal. At minimum, it only requires an i386 CPU, 4MB of RAM, and a VGA display capable of 640x480x16 mode. By design it’s entirely monolithic, mostly configured at compile time, and only supports standard PC devices: VGA/SVGA, keyboard, PS/2 mouse, serial mouse, PC speaker. The only future plans are bugfixes, optimizations, and adding more apps. GentleOS/32 has a pure 16-bit spin-off called GentleOS/16, which targets devices as old as 80186. ↫ GentleOS GitHub page While it can be run on real hardware, you can also run it in Qemu to make it easier to test and play around with. It looks great, and the stated goal of just focusing on maintenance and possibly additional applications is music to my heart. With everything that’s going on in technology today, this is an ice-cold glass of tonic in a scorching, data center-infested desert.

Redox progressed another month, and that means a ton of improvements and new features to talk about. The biggest news this past month is that Xfce has been ported to Redox, which offers a better X11 experience than MATE currently does. There’s still some bugs but apparently is works quite well. The porting process for the COSMIC desktop environment also progressed, with COSMIC’s new Monitor application making its way to Redox. As part of Google Summer of Code, the EEVDF scheduler has been implemented in Redox, delivering better, more stable scheduling and overall system performance improvements. Also as part of GSoC inode caching has been implemented for RedoxFS, which improves file system performance. Of course, there’s a lot more here too, including the usual long list of kernel fixes, relibc improvements, and more.

Norman Feske, one of the main developers behind Genode and Sculpt OS, has published a blog post detailing how he developed a two-factor authentication application for Sculpt OS. With this little tool, which I have turned into an deploy option on Sculpt OS to swiftly bring it up whenever I need it, TOTP-based two-factor authentication has become part of my daily routine. Should you want to risk a look under the hood, let me point you to the vitotp Goa project. ↫ Norman Feske The Genode project moved from GitHub to Codebrg recently, and needed a native TOTP impelentation for that purpose.

x86CSS is a working CSS-only x86 CPU/emulator/computer. Yes, the Cascading Style Sheets CSS. No JavaScript required. What you’re seeing above is a C program that was compiled using GCC into native 8086 machine code being executed fully within CSS. ↫ Lyra Rebane Hand-written CSS, no JavaScript, and effectively no HTML. Wizardry.

RISC-V has been in the “promising” phase for a long time now, especially for general purpose computing, never really breaking through into the mainstream in any measurable way. While I think that breakthrough is still relatively far away, we now do have newer RISC-V SoCs on the market supporting the RVA23 baseline RISC-V profile. One of them is the SpacemiT Key Stone KЗ, which promises to deliver a massive performance increase over previous RISC-V offerings. It’s exactly this chip that’s finding its way into complete, turnkey mini PC solutions, like this one from a company called Firefly. The base model comes with 8GB of LDDPR5 RAM and 128GB of storage, at a price of about €300 or so (there’s also a 32GB/128GB model at well over €600). This is the first time I’m looking at a complete RISC-V solution where I feel like it might actually make for a good moment to jump in for us enthusiasts. No, the performance won’t rival anything Intel or AMD has to offer, but it seems capable enough for a lot of day-to-day tasks, and I’m curious to see just how far along the Linux world is when it comes to RISC-V support. It’s not part of our current set of fundraiser incentives, but if you’d like to see this RISC-V mini PC reviewed here on OSNews, you can always donate and add a note that you specifically want to see such a review (so I can gauge interest not just from our few commenters, but also from the more than 99% of our readers who only lurk). As always, you can donate through Ko-Fi, or, if you’re European, via a SEPA direct bank transfer (Name: Thom Holwerda – IBAN: SE08 8000 0820 1684 4657 8414 – BIC: SWEDSESS).

Roku, the company that makes TV boxes and sells ad space based on your usage patterns, has released its remote control operating system as open source – and by remote control I don’t mean robot stuff or whatever, but actual remote controls, the thing you use to control your TV or whatever from the couch. Roku has announced the official availability of Roku LT OS – a lightweight, highly deterministic open-source operating system that is already used in our industry-changing Roku remote controls. In addition to high-performance automotive platforms, Roku LT OS is designed to be accessible to the broader developer community. The operating system ships with native support for the ESP32 platform, a highly popular SoC among hobbyists and makers. Because ESP32 development boards are widely available online for just a few dollars, developers can get started with Roku LT OS with minimal hardware investment. ↫ Roku’s developers blog As far as I can tell, this operating system is entirely new and not based on Linux or something else, but the available documentation is light on details so I can’t make much more out of it. Regardless, it’s nice to have another open source embedded operating system.

Raymond Chen shares some history regarding Windows 8’s development: During the development of Windows 8, we needed a name for “that thing we’re creating.” Not being a particularly clever bunch when it comes to code names, we just called it “the modern experience,” to distinguish it from what we had in Windows 7, which was called “the classic experience.” And then, as Microspeak demands, we started abbreviating like mad. ↫ Raymond Chen Basically, they added “mo” for “modern” in front of everything, so the Metro shell became “MoSh”, the Settings application “MoSet”, and so on. And yes, the code name for the Photos application was exactly what it sounds like.

At its Build conference, Microsoft announced coreutils for Windows. Coreutils for Windows is a Microsoft-maintained set of UNIX-style command-line utilities that run natively on Windows — the same commands and pipelines you use on Linux, macOS, and WSL. It ships as a single multi-call binary that exposes each utility under its standard name (cat.exe, grep.exe, find.exe, and so on), giving you the everyday tools developers already use on other platforms to script, automate, and process text. For the full list, see Commands. The goal is to remove friction when moving between Linux, macOS, WSL, containers, and Windows. The same commands, flags, and pipelines work the same way, so existing scripts and habits carry over without translation. Each command supports the standard --help flag for full syntax and options. ↫ Windows Developer Tools website It’s a port of the Rust-based rewrite of the GNU coreutils, findutils, and grep. There are a few caveats though, since these ports have to deal with a number of Windows-isms. The first thing that comes to mind for most of us are path separators; these ports will handle both the correct and incorrect Windows/DOS one, but since some tools may output only the incorrect one this may affect piping. You should also take into account things like Windows’ ACLs vs. POSIX permission bits, the lack of /dev/null, and a few other oddities. Furthermore, there are a bunch of commands that rely on POSIX-only concepts, so those aren’t included, and a few other commands that aren’t useful on Windows are excluded as well. Since a number of commands conflict with built-in commands from cmd.exe and PowerShell, which commands run will depend on the shell, the PATH order, and PowerShell’s alias table. Everything’s in preview, and installable through WinGet.

On the Vogon forums, user MarkDastedt posted an interesting bit of source code he discovered on an old company DVD: a very basic, very rudimentary implementation of multicore support for DOS. Another user, dartfrog, took a closer look and had this to say: Interesting stuff nonetheless. A worker core is running with no interrupt handlers, no page tables, no memory protection, and no OS. That’s about as close to bare metal as you can get, meanwhile the other core is still running DOS. Fascinating. ↫ MarkDastedt at the Vogon forums It’s effectively a simple demo, but according to other users in the thread, it fits in neatly with sporadic other attempts to bring some form of SMP or multicore-awareness to DOS. For instance, Michael Chourdakis worked on something similar to this demo for a series of articles now only available on the Wayback Machine. It makes for a cool demo, but moving from this to something robust and usable in DOS is not an easy task. Still, the possibilities are definitely there, even if you don’t implement full, modern SMP or multicore support. You could have specific DOS applications offloading dedicated tasks to different cores, but as others in the same thread note, individual cores are already stupidly powerful for anything DOS can do, making the use case for additional cores rather moot.