There’s more coming to Windows 11 at some point during this year, and three of them are of particular interest to the type of people who read OSNews. First, Windows is finally getting support for more archive file formats. Microsoft has finally added native support for more archive formats, allowing you to open tar, 7-zip, rar, gz, and other files. In addition, Windows 11 users will benefit from improved compression performance when zipping files. You’ll soon also be able to force quit applications straight from the taskbar, instead of having to open Task Manager, and as we noted not too long ago, ungrouped taskbar buttons are also making a comeback – among other things.

Ars Technica: A couple of months ago, Microsoft added generative AI features to Windows 11 in the form of a taskbar-mounted version of the Bing chatbot. Starting this summer, the company will be going even further, adding a new ChatGPT-driven Copilot feature that can be used alongside your other Windows apps. The company announced the change at its Build developer conference alongside another new batch of Windows 11 updates due later this year. Windows Copilot will be available to Windows Insiders starting in June. Like the Microsoft 365 Copilot, Windows Copilot is a separate window that opens up along the right side of your screen and assists with various tasks based on what you ask it to do. A Microsoft demo video shows Copilot changing Windows settings, rearranging windows with Snap Layouts, summarizing and rewriting documents that were dragged into it, and opening apps like Spotify, Adobe Express, and Teams. Copilot is launched with a dedicated button on the taskbar. Windows is getting an upgraded Clippy, one that shares its name with the biggest copyright infringement and open source license violation in history. In fact, some of the Windows Copilot features are built atop the Github Copilot, such as the new “AI” features coming to Windows Terminal. Now you can get other people’s code straight into your terminal, without their permission, and without respecting their licenses. Neat!

The United States surgeon general, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, issued a public advisory on Tuesday warning of the risks of social media use to young people. In a 19-page report, Dr. Murthy noted that although the effects of social media on adolescent mental health were not fully understood, and that social media can be beneficial to some users, “there are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” The surgeon general called on policymakers, tech companies, researchers and parents to “urgently take action” to safeguard against the potential risks. I don’t think anyone sane really needs to be convinced of the dangers of poorly-run and terribly moderated social media like Twitter and Facebook, but I do wonder why the supposed dangers stop at the age of 18? If we look at the past 10-15 years, it seems like to me the people who most easily fall prey to misinformation and targeted troll campaigns on social media are people of older generations, who then proceeded to to incredible damage to our societies in voting booths – something that can still get a lot worse in the coming years. I have no idea how to fix any of this – social media will always exist, and so will its dark side – but we better start thinking of something, fast, because I’m afraid the damage to our society we’ve seen so far from gullible idiots falling for obvious nonsense on social media is only going to get worse from here on out.

It’s finally over. In a post last year on the Windows XP subreddit (Windows XP web activation is finally dead…), retroreviewyt shared xp_activate32.exe4, which calculates the Installation ID then generates and optionally applies the corresponding Confirmation ID to activate Windows XP, all offline. Wiping the system and reinstalling Windows XP results in the same Installation ID being assigned by Windows (assuming no change in hardware or product key), thus the same Confirmation ID obtains even in msoobe’s standard telephone activation window. Long considered out of reach, this development bodes well for salvaging old systems even after Microsoft has shut down the activation servers. Incredible team effort spanning several decades. That being said, it’s quite sad that we do not live in a world where Microsoft just releases a simple tool to allow anyone to install XP anywhere without the need for activation.

This whitepaper details the architectural enhancements and modifications that Intel is currently investigating for a 64-bit mode-only architecture referred to as x86S (for simplification). Intel is publishing this paper to solicit feedback from the ecosystem while exploring the benefits of extending the ISA transition to a 64-bit mode-only solution. This seems like a very good idea – and it does seem like the time is ripe to remove some of the unused cruft from x86. Intel is proposing removing removing the 16 bit and 32 bit modes, and instead start in 64 bit mode right away. The company’s proposal does retain the ability to run 32 bit code on a 64 bit operating system, though. As a sidenote, the introduction to this proposal is hilarious: Since its introduction over 20 years ago, the Intel® 64 architecture became the dominant operating mode. As an example of this evolution, Microsoft stopped shipping the 32-bit version of their Windows 11 operating system. Intel firmware no longer supports non UEFI64 operating systems natively. 64-bit operating systems are the de facto standard today. They retain the ability to run 32-bit applications but have stopped supporting 16-bit applications natively. It’s 2023, and Intel is still not, in any way, capable of acknowledging AMD for coming up with AMD64. Sad.

This project’s vision is to help every college student read all the code of an operating system. With only 2000 lines of code, egos-2000 implements every component of an operating system for education. It can run on a RISC-V board and also the QEMU software emulator. Exactly what it says on the tin.

Recently, hinted by people on Discord, Neozeed found a Win64 compiler for AXP64 / ALPHA64, that came in as part of Platform SDK from 1999. This was to let Windows developers test compile their programs to make sure they are “64bit ready”, before the hardware was even available. However, as this was a cross-compiler from IA32 to IA64 and AXP32 to AXP64, there was no actual way of running any of the binaries. Until Itanium finally came out, after long delays. Sadly, 64-bit Alpha AXP Windows was never released outside of Redmond. And that would be the end of the story… if not for one reader, who contacted Neozeed after his previous post, and shared a disk image… containing a 64bit version of Windows 2000 for Alpha AXP! The reader got it from a lot of random lot of hard disks bought from an e-waste, years ago, and completely forgot about it until they saw the blog post! And you bet they got it up and running. This find is extraordinary.

The KDE project just finished up its 2023 developer sprint, and with Plasma 6 development being in full swing – which encompasses moving to Qt 6 – there’s some major announcements here. As a result, we advanced a number of topics that had been stuck for a while. A major area of my focus in this respect became “Better default settings”. The 5 -> 6 transition is the perfect time to make significant changes to the default settings in a way that improve the UX out of the box. The two biggest changes to KDE’s default settings will be moving from single-click to open a file, to double-clicking. Single-clicking to open has been a KDE staple for a long time, but it’s the exact opposite of literally every other major environment, so it makes sense to align this basic interaction with people’s expectations. Of course, this is KDE, so it’ll be a toggle in the same way it is now. The second major change is Wayland by default. While X.org will, of course, still work and be available to distributions and users, Wayland will be KDE’s official recommendation from here on out. With X.org development having pretty much halted completely, and quite a few major distributions now defaulting to Wayland, this is the right move to make. For all the Wayland haters – feel free to donate your time and expertise to X.org development, because no one else is. There’s a few other cool changes coming up, such as the floating panel by default, the accent colour being used in the top parts of windows, and more.

I was wondering what the IBM Personal Computer would have been like if they had chosen the Motorola 68000 instead of the Intel 8088, so I used my MCL86+ to emulate the 68000 and find out! The MCL86+ is a board which uses a Teensy 4.1 to emulate a microprocessor in C code as well as use its GPIOs to emulate the local bus of the Intel 8088. It can be used as a drop-in replacement for the Intel 8088 and can be cycle accurate as well as run in accelerated modes. That’s a neat trick.

Power-on self-tests (POST) are widely used in electronics, and one of the oldest features of personal computers. Every model of Mac in the past has had its own POST routines, some that have become famous because of the sounds that result, or what’s displayed, from the sight of a Sad Mac to the sound of a car crash. So what happens when an Apple silicon Mac fails its POST? Does it even run them? I never stopped to think about this. The answer is interesting in that it’s not definitive.

On a support page, Google details the full list of 180 countries in which Bard is now available. This includes countries all over the globe, but very noticeably not any countries that are a part of the European Union. It’s a big absence from what is otherwise a global expansion for Google’s AI. The reason why isn’t officially stated by Google, but it seems reasonable to believe that it’s related to GDPR. Just last month, Italy briefly banned ChatGPT over similar concerns that the AI couldn’t comply with the regulations. Google also slyly hints this might be the case saying that further Bard expansions will be made “consistent with local regulations.” In other words, Bard probably does things that run afoul of the stricter privacy regulations in the EU. Make of that what you will.

Wordstar was the word processor that helped sell the personal computer. At one time, it was ubiquitous, and many authors had a hard time giving it up. Some, like George R. R. Martin, apparently are still refusing to give it up. But most of us have moved on. Thanks to an open-source clone, WordTsar, you may not have to. This is a modern interpretation of our old friend. Maybe this will help The Winds of Winter.

The future of Google Search is AI. But not in the way you think. The company synonymous with web search isn’t all in on chatbots (even though it’s building one, called Bard), and it’s not redesigning its homepage to look more like a ChatGPT-style messaging system. Instead, Google is putting AI front and center in the most valuable real estate on the internet: its existing search results. A good overview of some of the “AI” stuff Google is integrating into Search. Many of these actually seem quite useful and well thought out, but time will tell if the wider web will be able to game these new tools in the same way SEO killed regular Search.

Apple Inc. failed to fully revive a long-running copyright lawsuit against cybersecurity firm Corellium Inc. over its software that simulates the iPhone’s iOS operating systems, letting security researchers identify flaws in the software. The US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on Monday ruled that Corellium’s CORSEC simulator is protected by copyright law’s fair use doctrine, which allows the duplication of copyrighted work under certain circumstances. CORSEC “furthers scientific progress by allowing security research into important operating systems,” a three-judge panel for the appeals court said, adding that iOS “is functional operating software that falls outside copyright’s core.” Good.