Four nonprofit groups seeking to protect kids’ privacy online asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate YouTube today, after back-to-back reports allegedly showed that YouTube is still targeting personalized ads on videos “made for kids”. Now it has become urgent that the FTC probe YouTube’s data and advertising practices, the groups’ letter said, and potentially intervene. Otherwise, it’s possible that YouTube could continue to allegedly harvest data on millions of kids, seemingly in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and the FTC Act. Targeted online advertising already oozes sleaziness, but targeting children is on a whole different level. There’s a reason you should keep a close eye on what your kids are watching on YouTube, and the various content rabbit holes YouTube’s algorithm can trap people in aren’t the only reason to do so. I’m not one of those extremists that believes YouTube is universally bad for kids – it all depends on what you watch, not that you watch – but that doesn’t mean I’m about to hand the remote control to my kids and leave the room.

The company raked in $13.5 billion in revenue since May, it revealed in its Q2 2024 earnings, with the unprecedented demand for its generative AI chips blowing past any difficulty it might have had selling desktop and laptop GPUs into a shrinking PC industry. Data center accounted for a record $10.32 billion of that revenue, more than doubling in just one quarter, and Nvidia made $6.188 billion in profit as a result — up 843 percent year over year. And while gaming is more than a billion dollars short of pandemic highs, it was actually up 22 percent year over year to $2.48 billion in revenue, too. I don’t really post about financial results anymore – the amounts of money “earned” by tech companies are obscene and utterly destructive – but I do want to highlight NVIDIA here, if only to be able to link back this a few years from now after the “AI” bubble has popped.

Ars Technica writes: There are hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL code running on production systems worldwide. That’s not ideal for a language over 60 years old and whose primary architects are mostly retired or dead. IBM, eager to keep those legacy functions on its Z mainframe systems, wants that code rewritten in Java. It tried getting humans to do it a few years back, but now it has another idea. Yes, you guessed it: It’s putting AI on the job. The IBM watsonx Code Assistant, slated to be available in Q4 this year, intends to keep humans in the mix, but with a push from generative AI in analyzing, refactoring, and testing the new object-oriented code. It’s not an all-or-nothing process, either, as IBM claims that watsonx-generated code should be interoperable with COBOL and certain Z mainframe functions. This might be one of those cases where using “AI” actually makes sense and can be a meaningful tool for the relatively few COBOL programmers left trying to modernise COBOL codebases. I’m obviously not well-versed enough in any of this to make any objective statements, but it seems to make sense.

The computer on Keegan McNamara’s desk is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. The machine sits on a light wood table, bathed in the sunlight coming into the second floor of McNamara’s Los Angeles house. McNamara, tall and blonde in jeans and a light khaki Carhartt jacket, walks over to the desk, sits down, and reaches over to hit the power button. Then he pauses. He forgot something. He digs into his pants pocket, pulls out his keys, picks a silver one, sticks it into a cylinder just to the right of the computer’s 8-inch screen, and turns. A light on the left side of the device turns red. Then McNamara reaches up and flips a silver switch just above the keyhole, the lights on the left turn to yellow and then green, and his computer comes to life. Like I said, this is not your average computer.  This sure is interesting.

You can still do a clean install of Windows, and it’s arguably easier than ever, with official Microsoft-sanctioned install media easily accessible and Windows Update capable of grabbing most of the drivers that most computers need for basic functionality. The problem is that a “clean install” doesn’t feel as clean as it used to, and unfortunately for us, it’s an inside job—it’s Microsoft, not third parties, that is primarily responsible for the pile of unwanted software and services you need to decline or clear away every time you do a new Windows install. You mean you don’t want Candy Crush Saga and Instagram ads on your freshly installed PC?

Despite all of the litigation, Windows 2 made it to market, gained 3rd party support, and signaled a massive transition in computing that all of the competition had failed to do. With Windows 2, millions of people were using a graphical desktop with graphical applications. The mouse was made a standard tool. PCs were now being urged to adopt powerful graphics adapters. Many people claim Windows 2 to be a failure, but this is not an accurate assessment. While it didn’t sell to the level of later releases, the market hadn’t really become accustomed to buying an operating system on a store shelf. People typically received an OS as part of a computer purchase. That Microsoft was able to sell over 2 million copies of Windows 2 shows a serious change; MS-DOS’s days were now numbered. I’ve always considered Windows 1.0 and 2.0 to be false starts, failed attempts at what would become Windows 3.x. This article makes the case that Windows 2.0 was more important and successful than we give it credit for today.

I’ve been working off and on doing further Mac-ification to my updated fork of MacLynx, the System 7-compatible port of the venerable text browser Lynx for classic 68K Macintoshes (and Power Macs) running A/UX 3.x or System 7.x and later. There’s still more to do, but a lot has been worked in since I last dropped beta 4, so it’s time for another save point. Meet MacLynx “beta 5”. Extraordinary work, and a great way to keep an old Mac connected to the web.

ART is the engine behind the Android operating system (OS). It provides the runtime and core APIs that all apps and most OS services rely on. Both Java and Kotlin are compiled down to bytecode executed by ART. Improvements in the runtime, compiler and core API benefit all developers making app execution faster and bytecode compilation more efficient. While parts of Android are customizable by device manufacturers, ART is the same for all devices and Google Play system updates enable a path to modular updates. Google’s been working hard to make ART more modular, and untangling it from the rest of Android for easier updates. This has led to some drastic improvements in application startup times – ART 13 cut them by 30%, Google claims – and since ART updates hit every single Android device, there’s no fragmentation. As for the future, ART 14 is on its way. In the coming months, we’ll be releasing ART 14 to all compatible devices. ART 14 includes OpenJDK 17 support along with new compiler and runtime optimizations that improve performance while reducing code size. It’s good to see that some Android improvements are not held back by Android’s update woes.

You can now play with NVIDIA GeForce graphics card BIOS like it’s 2013! Over the last decade, NVIDIA had effectively killed video BIOS modding by introducing BIOS signature checks. With GeForce 900-series “Maxwell,” the company added an on-die security processor on all its GPUs, codenamed “Falcon,” which among other things, prevents the GPU from booting with unauthorized firmware. OMGVflash by Veii; and NVflashk by Kefinator (forum names), are two independently developed new tools that let you flash almost any video BIOS onto almost any NVIDIA GeForce graphics card, bypassing “unbreakable” barriers NVIDIA put in place, such as BIOS signature checks; and vendor/device checks (cross-flashing). vBIOS signature check bypass works up to RTX 20-series “Turing” based GPUs, letting you modify the BIOS the way you want, while cross-flashing (sub-vendor ID check bypass) works even on the latest RTX 4090 “Ada.” No security is unbreakable. This will hopefully enable a lot of unlocking and safe performance boosts for artificially stunted cards.

As an undergraduate student in the early 1990s, I wrote all my class papers using WordPerfect for DOS. WordPerfect was a powerful desktop word processor that was used in offices all over the world. But WordPerfect was quite expensive; my student edition of WordPerfect cost around $300. When the new version of WordPerfect came out, I just couldn’t afford to buy it. Fortunately, the shareware market was starting to take off around this time. “Shareware” was a new model where software publishers released a program for free so you could try it out – usually for a limited time. If you liked it, you sent them a check and they mailed back a registered copy of the software. Shareware often had the same or similar features as the commercial software it aimed to displace, usually at a lower price. And that’s how I discovered the Galaxy word processor. Galaxy had all the features that I needed in a desktop word processor, but at about one-third the price. The registration fee for Galaxy was $99. There’s so many pieces of software that lost out in the market, and the further back in time we go, the more obscure these tend to get. I had never heard of Galaxy, but I’m glad someone took the time to write this article, ensuring – hopefully – it’ll be saved from obscurity for a long time to come.

This post is a detailed discussion into user profiles, their directories, and how they are—to put it bluntly—in total disarray on Windows and Linux (I haven’t used a Mac in ages, but I assume the situation is very similar there, too). Applications treat the user profile as a dumping ground, and any user with a reasonably wide list of installed software will find their user profile very difficult to traverse after some time in use. There are platform conventions and attempts to standardise things on more open-source platforms, but a lot of developers resolutely refuse to change the behaviour of their software for a variety of reasons (some less valid than others). The first part is a deep dive into user profiles on Linux and Windows, and the conventions that have been established on these platforms over the years. The second section details how they are broken on each platform, and why they are broken. This happens to be one of my “pet peeves” as well. One the left, my home directory. On the right, my home directory but with all the garbage unhidden. This is bananas. First, it’s been my long-standing conviction that if you, as a developer, need to actively hide things from the user in this way, you’re doing it wrong and and you’re writing bad code. If you’re an operating system developer, don’t use hidden directories and files to hide stuff from the user – use clear directory names, encourage the use of human-readable file names and contents, and put them in places that make sense. Second, if you’re an application developer, follow the damn guidelines of the operating system you’re coding for. More often than not, these guidelines aren’t that hard to understand, they’re not onerous, and they’re certainly not going to be worse than whatever nonsense you yourself can come up with. Having a hidden .paradoxlauncher directory in my home directory displays just such an utter disrespect for me as a user, and tells me that you just don’t care, whether that’s you, the developer, personally, or whatever manager is instructing you to do the wrong thing. At the same time, aside from excessive symlinking, there’s really no solution to any of this. As users, we just have to deal with the results of incompetence and ridiculous crunch culture in software and game development.

Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t just let this one go. I tested all the popular Windows uninstallers and I didn’t like what I saw. I thought many of these programs had some rudimentary issues with their user interface, and they just didn’t work that well. How difficult could it really be to do something better? As it turned out, it was very difficult, actually. It’s 2023, and Windows users still cannot centrally manage their software. People have to create multiple uninstaller programs to finally make a decent one, and not only does it need to uninstall applications, it also needs to somehow find all the garbage files and registry keys these applications barf all over the system. We deserve so much better than this trash.

This headline is entirely correct and I will stand by it. This is one of those products that I truly cannot wait to experience and review firsthand: LG is bringing the quirky, one-of-a-kind StanbyME Go to the United States later this month for $999.99. If you missed its international launch, which flew under the radar for many, let me catch you up: the StanbyME Go is a 27-inch 1080p LCD TV housed in a large suitcase that also contains a built-in battery and 20-watt speakers. The idea is that this thing can be a portable entertainment solution whether you’re at a picnic, on a family vacation, or just hanging out on the back patio. Maybe you’ll bring it tailgating with all your pals during football season. The possibilities are limited only by your imagination and the StanbyME Go’s three-hour battery life. This thing runs webOS and does tons of tablet things. This is a webOS tablet.

Microsoft has announced that on 29 July, 2024, the Xbox 360 Store on the Xbox 360 and the Xbox 360 Marketplace on the web will close their doors. For once, one of these service or online store shutdowns is actually being handled well, as Microsoft states: This change will not affect your ability to play Xbox 360 games or DLC you have already purchased. Xbox 360 game content previously purchased will still be available to play , not only the Xbox 360 console but also Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S devices via backward compatibility. While it doesn’t mention downloading existing content you own, several other reports state this is possible. If so, this would make it the fairest way to shut down a service like this. On a related personal note, I should really order a replacement disc drive for my venerable Xbox 360 – an original one, still working other than the broken drive! – and fix it back up. I’ve got a huge collection of 360 games I want to keep being able to play.