flypig Archive

This is, in a way, a mature OS with an ecosystem and an aftermarket. (Which, we feel we must explicitly spell out, means that quite a few of those third-party applications and drivers will cost you money.) There are emulators that will let you run 20th century Acorn apps that you can find online, but this isn’t an emulated vintage environment like Amiga Forever. It’s not meant for running games from thirty years ago. This is a native bare-metal OS, built on 1980s roots but updated for 21st century hardware. It’s also not an experimental project with little practical use, like Redox OS or Serenity OS, interesting though those are. ↫ Liam Proven at The Register I grew up with RISC OS and still run a RISC OS machine to this day. As Liam Proven explains affectionately in this article, while as an operating system it’s missing many features we now take for granted (memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, compositing), some of the user interface ideas it implements still manage to feel advanced compared to modern-day desktops (no need for menu bars, no clunky file dialogues, elegant mouse button assignments). The fact it’s found a home on the Raspberry Pi and continues to support an active community is testament to its enduring appeal and the amazing work of the RISC OS Open project. Some additional notes from Thom: this new release supports 7 ARM platforms, most notably the Raspberry Pi Zero, 1, 2, 3 and 4 (but not the 5), and it even supports WiFi on the 3 and 4, which is an absolutely incredible achievement. The number of fixed bugs and addressed issues is massive, and there’s even more to come later during the year, as The Register’s article notes. I was waiting on this release to spur me on to buy a new Raspberry Pi (my only other Pi is our Pi-Hole), so I’ll definitely be on the lookout for a good deal. This release deserves my full attention for OSNews.

On OSNews we recently reported on how Google plans to remove support for third-party cookies. Many have seen this as offering a privacy boost for users, leading to a better Web where targeted ads based on web-browser behaviour are a thing of the past. The EFF takes a different view. Google is leading the charge to replace third-party cookies with a new suite of technologies to target ads on the Web. And some of its proposals show that it hasn’t learned the right lessons from the ongoing backlash to the surveillance business model. This post will focus on one of those proposals, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which is perhaps the most ambitious—and potentially the most harmful. FLoC is meant to be a new way to make your browser do the profiling that third-party trackers used to do themselves: in this case, boiling down your recent browsing activity into a behavioral label, and then sharing it with websites and advertisers. The technology will avoid the privacy risks of third-party cookies, but it will create new ones in the process. It may also exacerbate many of the worst non-privacy problems with behavioral ads, including discrimination and predatory targeting.