Last weekend, we noticed that an attempt to download Google Chrome using Microsoft Edge results in the latter opening its sidebar with a poll, asking you to explain to Microsoft how you could dare try downloading Google Chrome. Of course, the exact wording is more tame, but you get the idea. Now, besides dismissing several banners and a full-size ad injected on the Chrome website, Edge wants you to answer a questionnaire with the following options. Frequently bought together.
Apple is releasing a slew of updates for its latest operating systems today, including iOS and iPadOS 17.1, macOS Sonoma 14.1, watchOS 10.1, and others. The company is also releasing security updates for a few previous-generation operating systems, so that people who aren’t ready to upgrade (and older devices that can’t upgrade) will still be protected from new exploits. If you have a bunch of Apple devices, it’s going to be a busy day. You might also want to take a look at your Apple subscriptions, because the company massively increased its prices across the board without advance notice.
A director from the White House announced that Apple plans to significantly expand access to device repairs for independent repair shops and consumers across the United States. The move is part of the Biden administration’s push for “right to repair” reforms. According to a statement by National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard (via Reuters), Apple will make parts, tools, and documentation needed for repairs available to independent repair shops and consumers nationwide. This will allow third-party technicians and do-it-yourselfers to fix Apple products at fair and reasonable prices quickly. There’s going to be a gotcha. With Apple, there always is.
State attorneys general in 41 states and the District of Columbia sued Meta today. The move comes after the conclusion of a multistate probe launched in 2021, where a bipartisan coalition of state enforcers began examining how Facebook and Instagram features are designed to allegedly addict and harm kids. Back in 2021, the Massachusetts attorney general’s office led the multistate probe investigating “Instagram’s impacts on young people” after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed that Facebook knew Instagram was “toxic” to teen girls but downplayed risks to the public. In a press release today, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell accused Meta of “deliberately” exploiting “young users’ vulnerabilities for profit.” Everyone liked that.
The big question coming up is how Google’s focus on AI will impact that core business. Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience is still only available on an opt-in basis, so we don’t yet know how much it’ll impact the company’s ad business. Google is already moving to head off that problem. On Google’s earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company would be experimenting with new formats native to the way SGE works — the company has already shown off some ideas — so perhaps we’ll start to see some of those formats debut in the coming weeks and months. Later in the call, chief business officer Philipp Schindler added that “it’s extremely important to us that in this new experience, advertisers still have the opportunity to reach potential customers along their dsearch journeys.” This is not news.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was interviewed by Business Insider, and when asked about his greatest strategic mistake, the answer was obvious. The decision I think a lot of people talk about – and one of the most difficult decisions I made when I became CEO —was our exit of what I’ll call the mobile phone as defined then. In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones. Microsoft’s failures to anticipate the mobile market is legendary at this point, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a Microsoft CEO state they should’ve tried harder and stuck with it. I was a huge fan of Windows Phone 7 and 8, and even imported the first devices running those platforms from the US, because the platforms were not available in The Netherlands at the time. However, Windows Phone was a dead end. Even regular Windows has a big application problem, and it was a millions of times worse on Windows Phone. I doubt any amount of money or development resources would’ve changed the fate of Windows Phone. It would’ve been good for the industry as a whole had Microsoft not failed, but the reality of it is that Android and iOS were already so far ahead it was impossible for anyone, even someone as large and wealthy as Microsoft, to catch up. Add to that the countless terrible business and technological decisions the company made with Windows Phone, and it just wasn’t meant to be. I understand that Nadella pines for the slice of the money pie they’ve could’ve had, but I doubt he sincerely thinks things could’ve turned out any differently.
For years, Qualcomm has been making Snapdragon chips for Windows PCs, and for years, those chips’ performance have failed to dislodge Intel’s or AMD’s chips to any significant degree. Its latest Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (and the closely related Microsoft SQ3) appears in just two consumer PCs, the cumbersomely named Microsoft Surface Pro 9 with 5G and Lenovo’s ThinkPad X13s Gen 1. But that may be changing. Nearly three years ago, Qualcomm bought a company called Nuvia for $1.4 billion. Nuvia was mainly working on server processors, but the company’s founders and many of its employees had also been involved in developing the A- and M-series Apple Silicon processors that have all enabled the iPhone, iPad, and Mac to achieve their enviable blend of performance and battery life. Today, Qualcomm is formally announcing the fruit of the Nuvia acquisition: the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite is a 12-core, 4 nm chip that will compete directly with Intel’s Core processors and AMD Ryzen chips in PCs—and, less directly, Apple’s M2 and M3-series processors for Macs. We’ve heard a lot of these claims over the years, and to be honest, I’m a little tired of promises. Show me the goods. Apple did.
Nvidia and AMD could sell PC chips as soon as 2025, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Nvidia and AMD would join Qualcomm, which has been making Arm-based chips for laptops since 2016. At an event on Tuesday that will be attended by Microsoft executives, including vice president of Windows and Devices Pavan Davuluri, Qualcomm plans to reveal more details about a flagship chip that a team of ex-Apple engineers designed, according to a person familiar with the matter. Nvidia is such a natural partner for Microsoft when it comes to ARM chips, I’m surprised it’s taking them this long to jump back into the ring after the failed Surface RT. AMD making ARM chips is fascinating and surprising, though, but I guess they don’t feel they can compete on performance-per-watt with x86.
Dave Cutler is a seminal figure in computer science, renowned for his contributions to operating systems. Born in 1942, he played pivotal roles in the development of several OSes, most notably VMS for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and Windows NT for Microsoft. Cutler’s design principles emphasize performance, reliability, and scalability. His work on Windows NT laid the foundation for many subsequent Windows versions, solidifying its place in enterprise and personal computing. A stickler for detail and a rigorous engineer, Cutler’s influence is evident in modern OS design and architecture. He’s a recipient of the Computer History Museum’s Fellow Award for his unparalleled contributions. I don’t often link to videos, but when I do, it’s a good one.
At midnight US Pacific Time tomorrow, Windows Embedded Compact 2013 – or perhaps better colloquially referred to as Windows CE 8.0 – will slip from history as it exits is Extended Support Phase with Microsoft and it, as well as the entire history of Windows CE, becomes an unsupported, retired former product. Windows CE 8.0 was released on 11th August 2013 and slipped into the end of its mainstream support on 9th October 2018. Yet few even noticed either occurrence. As a product CE 8.0 release failed to gain much of any traction or fanfare. Even here in the Windows CE community, most people disregard Windows Embedded Compact 2013 as a complete non-starter. As with Windows CE 7.0 before it. Few, if any devices were ever released on the platform and as a result most people – myself included – have never even seen a physical CE 8 device. I’ve used and own a lot of Windows CE-based devices over the years, and contrary to most people’s opinions, I absolutely adore Windows CE. Back when Apple was still busy not dying, and Android was barely a blip on anyone’s radar, Windows CE-based devices were incredibly powerful, versatile, and capable. Platforms like PocketPC and Windows Mobile may not have been the most graceful platforms, but they were so far ahead of anyone else when it came to pure functionality and capabilities it wasn’t even close. I was streaming Futurama episodes from my Windows XP machine to my PocketPC, while checking my email and browsing with Pocket IE – in the early 2000s. No other platform could do this in a PDA form factor – not even Palm OS. I hope, against my own better judgment, that Microsoft will do the right thing and publish the source code to Windows CE on Github. The number of Windows CE devices out there is immense, and giving the community the option of supporting them going forward would save a lot of them from the trash heap.
One of the most distinctive features of Apple silicon chips is that they have two types of CPU core, E (Efficiency) cores that are energy efficient but slower than the P (Performance) cores, which normally run much of the code in the apps we use. Apps don’t decide directly which cores they will be run on, that’s a privilege of macOS, but they register their interest by setting a Quality of Service, or QoS, which is then taken into account when they’re scheduled to run. With the introduction of Game Mode in Sonoma, CPU scheduling can now work differently, with E cores being reserved for the use of games. This article looks at another atypical situation, when running a macOS virtual machine (VM) assigned a set number of virtual cores. How does macOS Sonoma handle that? Exactly what is says on the tin.
TalosSpace has more details on the upcoming, recently announced OpenPOWER machines from Raptor. I asked Timothy Pearson at Raptor about the S1’s specs, and he said it’s a PCIe 5.0 DDR5 part running from the high 3GHz to low 4GHz clock range, with the exact frequency range to be determined. (OMI-based RAM not required!) The S1 is bi-endian, SMT-4 and will support at least two sockets with an 18-core option confirmed for certain and others to be evaluated. This compares very well with the Power10, which is also PCIe 5.0, also available as SMT-4 (though it has an SMT-8 option), and also clocks somewhere between 3.5GHz and 4GHz. S1 embeds its own BMC, the X1 (or variant), which is (like Arctic Tern) a Microwatt-based ISA 3.1 core in Lattice ECP5 and iCE40 FPGAs with 512MB of DDR3 RAM, similar to the existing ASpeed BMC on current systems. X1 will in turn replace the existing Lattice-based FPGA in Arctic Tern as “Antarctic Tern,” being a functional descendant of the same hardware, and should fill the same roles as a BMC upgrade for existing Raptor systems as well as the future BMC for the next generation systems and a platform in its own right. The X1 has “integrated 100% open root of trust” as you would expect for such a system-critical part. This all sounds like exactly the kind of things I wanted to hear, and these details make me sufficiently excited about the near future of Raptor’s OpenPOWER workstations. The only little bit of less pleasant news is that the machines won’t be available until late 2024, so we’ve got a little wait ahead of us.
This is a version of the Oberon System 3 (also known as ETH Oberon), compatible with the Oberon+ compiler, IDE and runtimes and the OBX Platform Abstraction Layer (PAL), and thus truly cross-platform (runs on all platforms where LeanQt is available). The migration is still work in progress, but sufficiently complete and stable to explore the platform. The latest commit is tested on both the Mono CLI and as a native executable built with the generated C code. I have to admit that while I’m aware of the Oberon System, I know far too little about it to make any meaningful statements here.
There are few things more frustrating than paying for high-speed PC components and then leaving performance on the table because software slows your system down. Unfortunately, a default setting in Windows 11 Pro, having its software BitLocker encryption enabled, could rob as much as 45 percent of the speed from your SSD as it forces your processor to encrypt and decrypt everything. According to our tests, random writes and reads — which affect the overall performance of your PC — get hurt the most, but even large sequential transfers are affected. While many SSDs come with hardware-based encryption, which does all the processing directly on the drive, Windows 11 Pro force-enables the software version of BitLocker during installation, without providing a clear way to opt out. (You can circumvent this with tools like Rufus, if you want, though that’s obviously not an official solution as it allows users to bypass the Microsoft’s intent.) If you bought a prebuilt PC with Windows 11 Pro, there’s a good chance software BitLocker is enabled on it right now. Windows 11 Home doesn’t support BitLocker so you won’t have encryption enabled there. Nothing like buying a brand new PC and realising you’re losing a ton of performance for something you might not even need on a home PC.
Well, this is a pleasant surprise and a massive coincidence. Besides that BMC-focused press release, Raptor Computing Systems tweeted out that they are working on “next generation of high performance, fully owner controlled systems! Built using the open POWER ISA 3.1, these new machines will be direct upgrades for existing POWER9 systems.” Power ISA 3.1 aligns with new functionality IBM introduced in Power10. This is fantastic news, and it seems they’re sidestepping the IBM POWER10 binary blobs issue by relying on a different chip vendor altogether, Solid Silicon, who announced an OpenPOWER CPU that will be used in Raptor’s upcoming systems, the S1. It seems unlikely to me that the S1 will be an entirely new, unique processor, so perhaps it’s a slightly modified IBM POWER10 design without the binary blobs. I’m incredibly excited about this news, and can’t wait to hear what they’re planning.
The Intel 14th Gen Core series is somewhat of a somber swansong to the traditional and famed Core i series naming scheme, rounding off what feels like the end of an era. With the shift to their upcoming Meteor Lake SoC, the impending launch of the new naming scheme (Core and Core Ultra) branding, and what Intel hopes to be a groundbreaking mobile chiplet-based architecture. The crux of the analysis is if you’re upgrading from an older and outdated desktop platform, the Intel 14th Gen series is a solid performer, but there’s still value in current 13th Gen pricing. Those must be considered in the current global financial situation; some users may find a better deal. If you already have 12th or 13th Gen Core parts, then there’s absolutely no reason to upgrade or consider 14th Gen as a platform, as none of the features (mainly software) justify a sidegrade on which is ultimately the same platform and the same core architecture. AnandTech always delivers. Unlike Intel.
Speaking of POWER – well, PowerPC – what about OS/2 Warp for PowerPC? What was OS/2 Warp, PowerPC Edition like? An unfinished product, rough around the edges but simultaneously technically very interesting and advanced and showing promise. Even though the OS/2 PPC release wasn’t called beta, it is obvious that this is a beta level product (if even that in some respects). Many features are unfinished or completely missing (networking in the first place). The kernel level code doesn’t look much like production build and prints out quite a lot of debugging output on the serial console. The HPFS support was very unstable, and the stability of Win-OS/2 left a lot to be desired. There were too many clearly unfinished parts of the product (documentation, missing utilities etc.). On the other hand a large portion of the system worked well. The user interface and graphics subsystem in general didn’t exhibit any anomalies. Multitasking was reliable and all things considered, responsiveness quite good for a 100MHz CPU and code that was not likely to have been performance tuned. The multimedia subsystem worked much better than I expected. Many things were much improved compared to Intel OS/2 — internationalization, graphics subsystem, updated console API and so on. The system seemed to have enough raw power, even if it wasn’t harnessed too well. Boot time was rather long but once up and running, the system was snappy (with some exceptions, notably the CD-ROM driver). To reach true production quality, the OS would have needed at least additional six months of intense development, probably more. I’m a tad bit jealous some people manage to find the right hardware to run OS/2 for PowerPC, since it’s incredibly high on my list. At least I have this great article to read through every now and then, until the day I manage to get lucky myself.
Just as IBM was posting “future” processor compiler patches in 2019 for what ended up being early POWER10 enablement, they are once again repeating their same compiler enablement technique with sending out “PowerPC future” patches for what is likely to be POWER11. The “PowerPC future” patches sent out today are just like before — complete with mentions like “This feature may or may not be present in any specific future PowerPC processor…Again, these are preliminary patches for a potential future machine. Things will likely change in terms of implementation and usage over time.“ If this is indeed a sign that POWER11 is on its way, I really hope IBM learned from its mistake with POWER10. POWER9 was completely open, top to bottom, which made it possible for Raptor Computing Systems to build completely open source, auditable workstation where every bit of code was open source. POWER10, however, contained closed firmware for the off-chip OMI DRAM bridge and on-chip PPE I/O processor, which meant that the principled team at Raptor resolutely said no to building POWER10 workstations, even though they wanted to. I firmly believe that if IBM tried even the littlest bit, there could be a niche, but fairly stable market for POWER-based workstations, by virtue of being pretty much the only fully open ISA (at least, as far as POWER9 goes). Of course, we’re not talking serious competition to x86 or ARM here, but I’ve seen more than enough interest to enable a select few OEMs to build and sell POWER workstations. Let’s hope POWER11 fixes the firmware mess that is POWER10, so that we can look forward to another line of fully open source workstations.
This paper reflects work done in late 2022 and 2023 to audit for vulnerabilities in terminal emulators, with a focus on open source software. The results of this work were 10 CVEs against terminal emulators that could result in Remote Code Execution (RCE), in addition various other bugs and hardening opportunities were found. The exact context and severity of these vulnerabilities varied, but some form of code execution was found to be possible on several common terminal emulators across the main client platforms of today. Additionally several new ways to exploit these kind of vulnerabilities were found. This is the full technical write-up that assumes some familiarity with the subject matter, for a more gentle introduction see my post on the G-Research site. Some light reading for the weekend.
Threat actors are known for impersonating popular brands in order to trick users. In a recent malvertising campaign, we observed a malicious Google ad for KeePass, the open-source password manager which was extremely deceiving. We previously reported on how brand impersonations are a common occurrence these days due to a feature known as tracking templates, but this attack used an additional layer of deception. The malicious actors registered a copycat internationalized domain name that uses Punycode, a special character encoding, to masquerade as the real KeePass site. The difference between the two sites is visually so subtle it will undoubtably fool many people. We have reported this incident to Google but would like to warn users that the ad is still currently running. Ad blockers are security tools. This proves it once again.
Submitted by