In Google’s First Tensor Processing Unit – Origins, we saw why and how Google developed the first Tensor Processing Unit (or TPU v1) in just 15 months, starting in late 2013. Today’s post will look in more detail at the architecture that emerged from that work and at its performance. ↫ The Chip Letter People forget that Google is probably one of the largest hardware manufacturers out of the major technology companies. Sadly, we rarely get good insights into what, exactly, these machines are capable of, as they rarely make it to places like eBay so people can disseminate them.
Most of the Linux world has moved to systemd by now, but there are still quite a few popular other init systems, too. One of those is the venerable SysV init, which saw a brand new release yesterday. The biggest improvement also seems like it’ll enable a match made in heaven: SysVinit, but with musl. On Linux distributions which use the musl C library (instead of glibc) we can now build properly. Specifically, the hddown helper program now builds on musl C systems. ↫ SysVinit 3.09 release notes It’s important init systems like SysV init and runit don’t just die off or lose steam because of the systemd juggernaut, as competition, alternatives, and different ideas are what makes open source what it is.
Version 1.06 is a more modest release than 1.05 or 1.04. But I think that’s okay. v1.06 includes one new Application, three new Utilities and new features and improvements to several existing Apps and Utilities, and even some new low-level features in the KERNAL and libraries. This latest release makes use of a combination of all of the above to provide a handy new feature for users and a potentially powerful and useful feature for developers, when put to creative uses at a low-level. Discussions of just this nature have already been spurred on in the developer forums on the C64 OS Discord server. That feature is: Hidden Files. ↫ Greg Naçu C64 OS is a marvel of engineering, and what the developers are managing to squeeze out of the C64 is stunning. This article delves deep into how hidden files were implemented in the latest release.
Windows 11 has done a lot to update and modernize long-neglected parts of Windows’ user interface, including many Settings menus and venerable apps like Notepad and Paint. But if you dig deep enough, you’ll still find parts of the user interface that look and work like they did in the mid-’90s, either for compatibility reasons or because no one ever thought to go back and update them. Former Microsoft programmer Dave Plummer shared some history about one of those finely aged bits: the Format dialogue box, which is still used in fully updated Windows 11 installs to this day when you format a disk using Windows Explorer. ↫ Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica There’s a lot of old stuff left inside Windows, which is basically a layer cake of various user interface themes Microsoft fancied over the years. I delved into the history of another old Windows program 9 years ago: the Character Map.
It turns out Apple, Facebook, and Google were not as clever with their malicious compliance with the European Union’s DMA as they thought they were, as the European Commission has opened investigations into their compliance plans. Especially Apple, who has been most public about its malicious compliance, seems to be the target. Today, the Commission has opened non-compliance investigations under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) into Alphabet’s rules on steering in Google Play and self-preferencing on Google Search, Apple’s rules on steering in the App Store and the choice screen for Safari and Meta’s “pay or consent model”. The Commission suspects that the measures put in place by these gatekeepers fall short of effective compliance of their obligations under the DMA. In addition, the Commission has launched investigatory steps relating to Apple’s new fee structure for alternative app stores and Amazon’s ranking practices on its marketplace. Finally, the Commission has ordered gatekeepers to retain certain documents to monitor the effective implementation and compliance with their obligations. ↫ European Commission press release This is entirely unsurprising. Google’s and Facebook’s compliance plans were less scrutinised in the press, but all still raised questions about whether they would pass mustard. Apple’s plans, meanwhile, were universally seen as deeply malicious and not compliant, and it seems the European Commission agrees. Apple’s continuous wild, flailing attacks on the EU and the DMA certainly aren’t helping, either. There’s no denying Apple’s behaviour has been deeply unprofessional and anti-European Union, which contrasts strongly with how Apple and Tim Cook operate in China, where they face much stricter rules than they do in the EU. Tim Cook is currently in China praising and buttering up to the Chinese totalitarian regime, while the company has been attacking the European Union and DMA almost non-stop for months now. It really shows where Apple’s priorities lie. Meanwhile, Facebook’s pay-for-privacy model was always going to be a hard sell at €10 a month, and as such, the company already announced it was going to cut that cost in half. Google’s plans are a bit more nebulous, since it’s a bit more difficult to see tangible results from things like search rankings, but it seems here, too, the European Commission has its worries about compliance. The European Commission intends to complete its investigations within a year, and if found in violation of the law, companies can be fined for up to 10% of their worldwide turnover, which can grow up to 20% for repeated infringements.
Update: a short notice on the blog post now reads that “Floorp’s code is now fully public again.” It seems the developer has reversed course, which is good news. The original article continues below. Recently, a few people suggested I give the browser Floorp a try, a Firefox fork with some additional UI changes and additions. Since it was based on Firefox ESR, however, I saw no point in even trying it, because I prefer to be on the latest Firefox release. It seems I accidentally made the right choice, since yesterday the developers behind Floorp decided to take their modifications closed source. The appearance of Floorp forks – which, may I remind you, is a fork itself – seems to be the cause. I know it’s not nice of me to say, but Floorp has been in too much demand. It am surprise to me that companies and organizations would fork a fork that I had created when I was still a teenager, and at first I was happy about it, but it was not beneficial to me, and on the contrary, it was mentally draining. There were forks that wanted to hide the fact that they were Floorp forks, forks that did not want to contribute to Floorp at all, forks that used the code for life and just changed the name of Floorp, and many other forks were born. ↫ Floorp blog It seems the developer of Floorp is rather young, and started the project as a teenager, and as such, I don’t think we should be too harsh on them – I did some dumb things as a teenager – but complaining about forks of your own fork seems a bit disingenuous, regardless of how young and inexperienced you are. I understand seeing your work forked into competing browsers can be frustrating, but it’s a core part of the open source world, especially if you yourself owe your product to forking, too.
While app icons will likely remain locked to an invisible grid system on the Home Screen, to ensure there is some uniformity, our sources say that users will be able to arrange icons more freely on iOS 18. For example, we expect that the update will introduce the ability to create blank spaces, rows, and columns between app icons. ↫ Joe Rossignol at MacRumors It’s 2024 and iOS’ Springboard is slowly catching up to the Palm OS launcher. I’m drowning in the innovation here.
For the past week I have been configuring hyprland and using it as my daily driver. Coming from major Desktop Environments like KDE or Gnome, this was definitely quite challanging, specially when implementing features that we take it for granted on these DEs, like screen sharing or screenshot annotating. In this post I will be going through all the tools and scripts I have been creating to configure this amazing Window Manager to my liking. ↫ xd1.dev Like I mentioned in my MNT Reform review, I’m not a fan of these “build your own desktop environment” window managers and related tools, but there’s no denying they’re quite popular. This article is a good introduction to hyprland, one of the more popular window managers of this genre.
I saw this on a Linus Tech Tips video today, and it’s pretty neat: the Khadas Mind is a tiny computer powered by an Intel Core i5-1340P or Core i7-1360P, but it has a souped-up PCIe connector at the bottom that allows you to hook it up to all kinds of other devices, like a graphics card, a dock, and so on. It looks slick and quite user-friendly, and according to the LTT video, the company intends to release the specs for the connector so that third parties can hook into it as well, but a promise is just that – a promise. It’s way too early to tell if this will go anywhere – past attempts would suggest that sadly, it won’t – but that doesn’t mean it’s not an incredibly awesome and seemingly workable implementation of the modular PC idea.
I hope what you take away from this post is that while Apple Pay is a great way to pay for things and that Apple did a great job mainstreaming digital wallets like this, what they do is not unique in the industry. DPANs are great for making it harder to track one person’s purchases across multiple merchants and they make customers less at risk in the event of a data breach of payment card info. ↫ Matt Birchler The gist of the article is that all the things Apple claims are unique about Apple Pay are really not unique at all, and quite a few things Apple touts are just flat-out lies, such as merchants being unable to know what you buy or people being unable to track you when you use Apple Pay. Other digital wallets, from Google, Samsung, and others, work in the exact same way Apple Pay does, and even banks and similar companies implement their payment systems the way Apple Pay does. It’s a case study in how Apple’s marketing and PR bloggers manage to perpetuate a myth solely because so many people just assume it must be true. Apple wouldn’t lie, right?
I’ve got two bits of related news that will affect the future of OSNews. The first bit of news kind of led to the second bit of news. You don’t have to care much about former, but the latter will be important for where OSNews will be going from here on out. First, after 14 years, I’ve effectively quit my job as a translator – I am self-employed so there’s no dramatic clearing of my desk of being led out by security, which is probably a little bit of a letdown to some of you. The translation industry is in the process of collapsing – you know why – and I’ve been feeling the squeeze for a while now, and I like going out on my own terms. I’ve known this day would come, and I’m not sad about it. My motto: it is what it is. Of course, this meant I had to think of what to do next. Well, I have decided to work on OSNews full-time. This is risky, scary, and I’m absolutely terrified of what this will mean. Right now, my OSNews income – ads plus Patreon – does not even remotely come close to what I earned as a translator, and as any translator will tell you, translating isn’t exactly a cornucopia either. This means I’ve got some serious work ahead of me to change that. After talking things over with David, OSNews’ owner who takes care of the commercial/advertisement side, we’ve already taken a few steps. First, we’ve switched hosting providers and saved considerably on our hosting costs in the process. Second, David changed advertising partners to one that will most likely yield us some better rates, but since I don’t know much about that side of OSNews – as it should be – I can’t comment much on it. There are two main ways in which I can increase OSNews’ revenue, and that is by growing our readership, and by giving people more reasons to become a Patreon, make individual donations, or buy our merch. In other words, you can expect more original articles so that people will want to keep coming back, and possibly support me financially because they like what I do. A third avenue for revenue I’m exploring is sponsorships – this is a longer-term project, and I’m approaching and talking to several (tech) companies about this. If you happen to work for a company who would be a good fit for an OSNews weekly sponsorship, feel free to contact me for more information. The end goal: have OSNews be entirely funded by readers and sponsors, and remove all regular advertising. This all sounds great, but there is a dark side to this news, too. If all of this fails, if I am unable to attract more readers and make my work for OSNews financially sustainable, I’ll have to find work elsewhere – and that would mean the end of OSNews. I’m not trying to be alarmist or scare you; I just want to be as honest and realistic as possible about where we stand. Anyway, this is a big deal for me. I’ve really only ever had one job, and that’s being a translator, a job I am trained for with two university degrees to show for it. My only other job was a teenage thing where I worked at a hardware store (think hammers and screws, not computers) for eight years. I don’t like taking risks with these sorts of matters, so I’m absolutely terrified, and while I believe there’s a sustainable income hiding in this ol’ website, it’s not always clear how to get at it. Anyway, want to become a Patreon? Or a sponsor? Pretty please? Now would be kind of a really good time to do so.
The foundational tenet of “the Cult of Mac” is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur. Call it “Apple exceptionalism” – the idea that Apple, alone among the Big Tech firms, is virtuous, and therefore its conduct should be interpreted through that lens of virtue. The wellspring of this virtue is conveniently nebulous, which allows for endless goal-post shifting by members of the Cult of Mac when Apple’s sins are made manifest. ↫ Cory Doctorow An absolutely brilliant response to the DoJ lawsuit from Cory Doctorow. You notice this “Apple exceptionalism” a lot right now because of the new laws in the EU and now the lawsuit by the US DoJ. Apple products being better is posited as a fact, a law of the universe, and as such, any claims, either through lawsuits or legislation, that Apple is doing something wrong, illegal, or anticompetitive are by definition false. Things that, according to them, make Apple products “superior” can simply not be illegal. You also notice this a lot when it comes to the existence of Android. People who don’t like being locked in or have issues with Apple’s behaviour can just switch to Android, right? The thought that there are real, monetary costs to switching from iOS to Android – costs driven up by Apple’s very behaviour – is irrelevant to them, because in the eyes of the tech pundit, everyone’s rich. What we’ll be discovering over the course of the DoJ lawsuit – a course that will take us years – is that the general public cares a lot less about Apple as a company than Apple tech pundits think it does. People have iPhones not because they love Apple, but because their previous phone was an iPhone, because of network effects, or a bit of both. I doubt the average (in this case) American gives a rat’s ass about Apple, and are much more worried about the fact they have to live paycheck-to-paycheck in a dysfunctional shell of a democracy while being told the economy is doing just great.
The Department of Justice’s antitrust division has come into its own, having filed its third tech monopoly lawsuit in four years. The accumulated experience shows up in the complaint, according to antitrust experts who spoke with The Verge about the complaint filed Thursday accusing Apple of violating antitrust law. The DOJ describes a sweeping arc of behaviors by Apple, arguing that it adds up to a pattern of illegal monopoly maintenance. Rather than focusing on two or three illegal acts, the complaint alleges that Apple engages in a pattern of behaviors that further entrench consumers into their ecosystem and make it harder to switch, even in the face of high prices and degraded quality. ↫ Lauren Feiner at The Verge It’s been somewhat entertaining seeing Apple fanatics claim the complaint is bad, horrible, has no merit, has no chance in court, and that the DoJ has zero clue what it’s doing – while actual experts are actually positively surprised by how the complaint seems better than they expected. I wonder whose judgement to trust more.
Federal investigators have ordered Google to provide information on all viewers of select YouTube videos, according to multiple court orders obtained by Forbes. Privacy experts from multiple civil rights groups told Forbes they think the orders are unconstitutional because they threaten to turn innocent YouTube viewers into criminal suspects. ↫ Thomas Brewster at Forbes United States law enforcement has been asking Google who watches certain YouTube videos, covering as many as 30,000 people per video. They wanted names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google accounts who had watched a video within a certain week’s timeframe, and the IP addresses of everyone who watched the video without a Google account. That’s an absolute crapton of data, all because they suspected one person of a money-laundering scheme. And this is just one example. Forbes could not determine if Google complied with the requests, but it does highlight the dangers of having so much data on one place.
So looking back, it is obvious that neither Atari or Commodore would really be able to succeed in the long-term, although perhaps one of them could have become the 3rd “also-ran”. For a while, Atari really thought they could be that third choice and some of their late-model computers have some impressive innovations. With that preamble over with, let’s talk about the last Atari computer: the Falcon030. ↫ Paul Lefebvre In my mind, Atari is a game and console company, not a computer company – I don’t have any sale figures, but I feel like the Atari general computers weren’t quite as popular in The Netherlands as they were in some other places.
Picotron is a Fantasy Workstation for making pixelart games, animations, music, demos and other curiosities. It has a toy operating system designed to be a cosy creative space, but runs on top of Windows, MacOS or Linux. Picotron apps can be made with built-in tools, and shared with other users in a special 256k png cartridge format. ↫ Picotron website Picotron is very similar to PICO-8, but more powerful and with a few additional features – it’s actually made by the same people as PICO-8. It also contains a small, ‘toy’ operating system to serve as a workspace, everything makes use of Lua, and any applications made with it can be shared using a special 256k PNG cartridge format. It’s currently in alpha, and cost $11.99, and uses the early Minecraft model of a one-time purchase for access to all future updates. The FAQ has tons more information. It looks incredibly neat. I don’t have much use for it, but I’m interested to see what people with actual skills will make with it.
Android 15 adds “UI elements to ensure a consistent user experience across the satellite connectivity landscape.” A system-level “Auto-connected to satellite” notification conveys how “You can send and receive messages without a mobile or Wi-Fi network” with a shortcut to “Open Messages” or get more information. Meanwhile, note the status bar icon at the right. Speaking of Google Messages, “Android 15 provides support for SMS/ MMS applications as well as preloaded RCS applications to use satellite connectivity for sending and receiving messages.” Other apps will also be able to “detect when a device is connected to a satellite, giving them more awareness of why full network services may be unavailable.” ↫ Abner Li at 9To5Google 9To5Google also has a list of all the new features in this Developer Preview with copious amounts of screenshots.
The nonprofit organization that supports the Firefox web browser said today it is winding down its new partnership with Onerep, an identity protection service recently bundled with Firefox that offers to remove users from hundreds of people-search sites. The move comes just days after a report by KrebsOnSecurity forced Onerep’s CEO to admit that he has founded dozens of people-search networks over the years. On March 14, KrebsOnSecurity published a story showing that Onerep’s Belarusian CEO and founder Dimitiri Shelest launched dozens of people-search services since 2010, including a still-active data broker called Nuwber that sells background reports on people. Onerep and Shelest did not respond to requests for comment on that story. ↫ Brian Krebs It’s good that Mozilla has immediately responded properly to this discovery, but it does make one wonder – how did this happen in the first place? It seems like a service provider like this would be thoroughly vetted, especially considering Mozilla’s stated mission and types of users. My worries about Firefox’ future are no secret, and this gaffe certainly doesn’t help reduce my worries. It’s clear something went horribly wrong here, and my hope is that it’s a random fluke, and not a sign of more structural problems in Mozilla’s vetting process for potential partners.
Haiku published its latest monthly activity report, and this one is a veritable grab bag of a whole bunch of small fixes, improvements, and changes – there’s really no tent pole features or major improvements this month. Going through the list, the items that jump out at me are updated ping and traceroute applications and work on improving FFmpeg, but there’s so much more in there, so be sure to read the whole thing. At the end of the report, the Haiku project states about a possible fifth beta release: A few more tickets in the milestone were fixed, including the “ICU upgrade” one, but a few were also added (some migrated from HaikuPorts that turned out to be regressions in Haiku or its buildtools, etc.). ↫ Haiku Activity and Contract Report, February 2024 So, beta 5 is not quite ready for prime time just yet, but it feels like it’s getting closer.
Switch emulator Suyu—a fork of the Nintendo-targeted and now-defunct emulation project Yuzu—has been taken down from GitLab following a DMCA request Thursday. But the emulation project’s open source files remain available on a self-hosted git repo on the Suyu website, and recent compiled binaries remain available on an extant GitLab repo. While the DMCA takedown request has not yet appeared on GitLab’s public repository of such requests, a GitLab spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the project was taken down after the site received notice “from a representative of the rightsholder.” GitLab has not specified who made the request or how they represented themselves; a representative for Nintendo was not immediately available to respond to a request for comment. ↫ Kyle Orland at Ars Technica Self-hosting the code repository and binaries is probably the only way the Switch emulator can continue to reasonably exist. The issue with Switch emulation seems to be that the device is current, popular, and still makes endless amounts of money for Nintendo; it’s very different from SNES or Mega Drive emulation, to name a few examples. While I personally don’t think that should make Switch emulation off-limits or any less valid than emulating older systems, I can see how it would draw the ire of Nintendo more readily.
