Ubisoft has confirmed that it is temporarily suspending accounts it deems to be “inactive”, preventing players from accessing their game libraries. Players are then sent an email informing them that their suspended account will be deleted in 30 days unless they click the “Cancel Account Closure” link. Modern gaming.

Ars Technica has a great article about the IBM mainframe. Mainframe computers are often seen as ancient machines—practically dinosaurs. But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today. If they’re dinosaurs, they’re T-Rexes, and desktops and server computers are puny mammals to be trodden underfoot. It’s estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes in use today. They’re used almost exclusively by the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers, and eight of the top 10 telecommunications companies. And most of those mainframes come from IBM. In this explainer, we’ll look at the IBM mainframe computer—what it is, how it works, and why it’s still going strong after over 50 years. Whenever I see anything about mainframes, I think of that one time an 18 year old decided to buy a mainframe off eBay to run at home, and did an amazing presentation about the experience.

Thanks to a series of commits by Jonathan Gray (jsg@), -current now has support for microcode (updates) for AMD (amd64 and i386) processors. It’s great to see support for the AMD side gaining equivalence with that for Intel (for which support was added in 2018). Good news for OpenBSD users.

A lot of the cost of a video terminal was the screen. Yet nearly everyone had a TV, and used TVs have always been fairly cheap, too. That’s where Don Lancaster came in. His TV Typewriter Cookbook was the bible for homebrew video displays. The design influenced the Apple 1 computer and spawned a successful kit for a company known as Southwest Technical Products. For around $300 or so, you could have a terminal that uses your TV for output. The wild West days of home computing must’ve been an absolutely fascinating time to live through. I know we have quite a few old-timers in the audience here, so there’s bound to be folks here who used this. Amazing

Lately I’ve been spending quite a bit of time learning Rust, and as any sane person would do, after writing a few 100 lines programs I’ve decided to take on something a little bit more ambitious: I have written a Java Virtual Machine in Rust. With a lot of originality, I have called it rjvm. The code is available on GitHub. I want to stress that this is a toy JVM, built for learning purposes and not a serious implementation. Toy or not, this is ambitious and impressive.

The Dolphin project has broken the silence regarding their legal tussle with Nintendo and Valve, giving a far more detailed elaboration of what, exactly happened. First things first – Nintendo did not send Valve or Dolphin a Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) section 512(c) notice (commonly known as a DMCA Takedown Notice) against our Steam page. Nintendo has not taken any legal action against Dolphin Emulator or Valve. What actually happened was that Valve’s legal department contacted Nintendo to inquire about the announced release of Dolphin Emulator on Steam. In reply to this, a lawyer representing Nintendo of America requested Valve prevent Dolphin from releasing on the Steam store, citing the DMCA as justification. Valve then forwarded us the statement from Nintendo’s lawyers, and told us that we had to come to an agreement with Nintendo in order to release on Steam. Considering the strong legal wording at the start of the document and the citation of DMCA law, we took the letter very seriously. We wanted to take some time and formulate a response, however after being flooded with questions, we wrote a fairly frantic statement on the situation as we understood it at the time, which turned out to only fuel the fires of speculation. So, after a long stay of silence, we have a difficult announcement to make. We are abandoning our efforts to release Dolphin on Steam. Valve ultimately runs the store and can set any condition they wish for software to appear on it. But given Nintendo’s long-held stance on emulation, we find Valve’s requirement for us to get approval from Nintendo for a Steam release to be impossible. Unfortunately, that’s that. The post also goes into greater detail about the Wii Common Key that’s been part of Dolphin’s codebase for 15 years. This key was originally extracted from the GameCube hardware itself, and a lot of people online claimed that Dolphin should just remove this key and all would be well. After consulting with their lawyers, Dolphin has come to the conclusion that including the key poses no legal risk for the project, and even if it somehow did, the various other parts of the Dolphin codebase that make emulation of original games possible would pose a much bigger legal threat anyway. So, the team will keep on including the key, and the only outcome here is that Dolphin will not be available on Steam.

One of my old home automation boards running ebusd is still using Raspberry PI 2 B SoC. FreeBSD is still perfectly supporting this hardware, however, due to being a Tier-2 platform, binary updates freebsd-update are not supported. Of course, one can download the new image, but this will mean re-installing and reconfiguring all the software, which is time-consuming and painful. Also, the traditional “build from source” way will probably take forever on this tiny board and also could potentially destroy the SD card. So the obvious alternative was cross-compilation. If you’re in this very specific niche – you’re very happy this guide exists.

I’ve been going through my collection of PDAs over the last few weeks for, among other OSNews things, my Pixelfed account, and while playing around with various old applications, I came across the Google Maps application for Palm OS. As it turns out – this official Google application, last updated in 2008, still fully and completely works today, in 2023! I shot a quick video using the application, and uploaded it to the new (and not fully set-up yet, so forgive the lack of avatars, descriptions, banner images, and so on – it’s late in my time zone) OSNews PeerTube account, embedded below for your convenience. Navigation still works. You can pan around in both map and satellite view. And, as the video shows, you can zoom in quite far and get some incredible detail on that old Palm TX display (you can zoom in further). That’s some impressive API backwards compatibility.

USA readers may wonder why I was waiting for the release of a game already published. While Street Fighter II made it to the Super Famicom on June 10, 1992 in Japan and July 15, 1992 in North America, France had to wait until December 17, 1992 to get a PAL version. As I waited, I saw ads in French magazines offering imported cartridges of my Holy Graal. To make them work on a European Super Nintendo, one had to buy an adapter. The combo cost almost as much as the console (595F + 199F vs 1290F). Needless to say I couldn’t afford it. But I always wondered how Nintendo seemingly controlled the regions and how tinkerers had managed to circumvent that protection. A detailed look at how the 10NES sysyem worked.

Apple says it will remove services such as FaceTime and iMessage from the UK rather than weaken security if new proposals are made law and acted upon. The government is seeking to update the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) 2016. It wants messaging services to clear security features with the Home Office before releasing them to customers. The act lets the Home Office demand security features are disabled, without telling the public. Under the update, this would have to be immediate. I wonder if Apple would actually follow through with something like this, or if they’re only looking for a token concession so they can claim they’re still in the clear and do nothing. Interesting, though, that when the Chinese government comes calling, Tim Cook drops his “privacy is a fundamental human right” shtick real quick, but when the government of a western country comes calling, it’s a lot of rah-rah. A spine is clearly not very expensive.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the techniques described in Let’s Go Whaling bear comparison to some of those that bookmakers and casinos have long deployed, capitalising on deep understanding of psychology. The big difference, of course, is that the gamer can never win money, only prestige or progress in a virtual game. The very uncomfortable truth for Apple and Google: much – 70-75% – of App Store and Play Store revenue comes from exploitative casino games, mostly expertly designed to target the most vulnerable among us, like gambling addicts, children, people with mental issues like depression, and so on. It’s seedy, disgusting, predatory, and should be deeply, deeply illegal. Left or right, can’t we all agree we should ban these practices?

Ars Technica: Antitrust enforcers released a draft update outlining new rules today that officials say will make it easier to crack down on mergers and acquisitions that could substantially lessen competition in the US. Now the public has 60 days to review the draft guidelines and submit comments to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) before the agencies’ September 18 deadline. A fierce debate has already started between those in support and those who oppose the draft guidelines. Any corporation should be serving the democratically elected government of a country – not the other way around. If a merger or acquisition is deemed harmful to the competitive landscape, and thus to consumers, a government should be able to just stop it. The same applies to corporations who grow too large, too rich, too powerful – if a company’s actions start to dictate significant parts of the market or even economy, they are a threat to the stability and functioning of the society it’s claiming to be a part of, and as such, they should be able to be split up or their actions otherwise remedied to protect society. In other words, any steps the Us FTC and DOJ take to take control over runaway corporations are positive.

Turns out Intel’s NUC line is not going to die after all. Today, Intel announced it has agreed to a term sheet with ASUS, a global technology solution provider, for an agreement to manufacture, sell and support the Next Unit of Compute (NUC) 10th to 13th generations systems product line, and to develop future NUC systems designs. If you’re into Intel NUCs, Asus is the way to go now.

The contractors are the invisible backend of the generative AI boom that’s hyped to change everything. Chatbots like Bard use computer intelligence to respond almost instantly to a range of queries spanning all of human knowledge and creativity. But to improve those responses so they can be reliably delivered again and again, tech companies rely on actual people who review the answers, provide feedback on mistakes and weed out any inklings of bias. It’s an increasingly thankless job. Six current Google contract workers said that as the company entered a AI arms race with rival OpenAI over the past year, the size of their workload and complexity of their tasks increased. Without specific expertise, they were trusted to assess answers in subjects ranging from medication doses to state laws. Documents shared with Bloomberg show convoluted instructions that workers must apply to tasks with deadlines for auditing answers that can be as short as three minutes. That’s the reality of “artificial intelligence” – the same reality it always seems to be in Silicon Valley: thousands and thousands of exploited workers behind the scenes running around like ants keeping the illusion of futurism alive for meager pay.