Thom Holwerda Archive
Windows 10 users started seeing full-screen pop-ups after installing a cumulative update release in May 2023. Now, the pop-up is back again on our Windows 10 PC after installing the optional update released in January 2024, and it gouges the eyes. No one expects a gigantic multi-slide advert using their PCs (web browsers are a different story). ↫ Abhishek Mishra Windows is an advertising platform first, operating system second. You should be expecting ads.
As noted by Wired, WhatsApp wants the messaging services it connects with to use the same Signal Protocol to encrypt messages. Meta is also open to apps using alternate encryption protocols so long as companies can prove “they reach the security standards that WhatsApp outlines in its guidance.” The third-party services will also have to sign a contract with Meta before they plug into WhatsApp, with more details about the agreement coming in March. ↫ Emma Roth at The Verge They way this should work is that these megacorporations create free and open APIs any instant messaging application can tap into. I’m not looking to bring other services into WhatsApp; I’m looking to bring all services together in one unified application that respects my platform’s conventions and integrates properly with the operating systems I use. I feel like this contractual interoperability Facebook (and Apple) is offering is not interoperability at all, and does not reflect the spirit of the Digital Markets Act.
Since vintage computing is supposed to be a spiritual experience, I point out that today, February 3, 2024, the Torah reading for this week is the Ten Commandments. Regardless of your religious tradition or lack thereof, I think we can all agree on these. ↫ Old Vintage Computing Research Amen.
Europe’s right-to-repair rules will force vendors to stand by their products an extra 12 months after a repair is made, according to the terms of a new political agreement. Consumers will have a choice between repair and replacement of defective products during a liability period that sellers will be required to offer. The liability period is slated to be a minimum of two years before any extensions. The rules require spare parts to be available at reasonable prices, and product makers will be prohibited from using “contractual, hardware or software related barriers to repair, such as impeding the use of second-hand, compatible and 3D-printed spare parts by independent repairers,” the Commission said. ↫ Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica An excellent set of rules, and once again puts the EU at the forefront of consumer protection. Maybe some of it will trickle down to other places in the world.
I love this quick to-the-point summary of most of the popular browsers out there right now. I’m a Firefox user, of course, since it’s the best choice between Chrome (I’d rather choose death), Safari (not cross-platform so utterly pointless), the various Chrome skins, and Firefox (the one independent browser). Still, I’m continuously worried about Firefox’ future – specifically on platforms other than Windows or macOS – and strongly believe we need more true alternatives for a healthier browser ecosystem.
In keeping with the Commodore tradition of cost cutting, most consumer models of their Amiga line of computers came with severely watered down documentation. The Amiga 500 was an exception from this rule, but owners of later machines – such as the A1200 – may not have gotten any documentation for the command line part of AmigaOS at all. And, of course, even if this documentation had shipped with the machines, it wouldn’t have revealed features that were hidden to anyone without access to official developer documentation or even left completely undocumented or unfinished. This is a quick look at a few of these interesting features, some more obscure than others, but all of them decidedly useful. Most of them only apply to versions 2.x and/or 3.x of the OS. With that said, let’s dive right in! ↫ Carl Svensson Exactly what it says on the tin.
The migration from the classic Mail and Calendar app to the new Outlook app is in full swing already. Microsoft announced the deprecation of the classic apps in favor of a new Outlook app in June 2023. It introduced the new Outlook app to Insider builds a month later and announced that it would enforce the migration in early 2024. Not all users are migrated at this point. Those who have been migrated already or installed the Outlook app directly, may notice several differences between the new Outlook app and the classic Mail app. One of the main differences turns an ad-free email experience into one with ads. You may see ads in the inbox in the new Outlook. ↫ Martin Brinkmann Ads disguised as emails in your inbox. Microsoft will not rest until Windows resembles Times Square. What a trash fire of an operating system.
A number of you will have noticed already that the 64-bit time_t transition is now in progress in Debian experimental. The goal of this transition is to ensure that 32-bit architectures in trixie (whether they are currently release architectures, or out of archive, etc) will be capable of handling current and future timestamps referring to times beyond 2038. ↫ Steve Langasek on debian-devel-announce A crucial effort.
In order to be able to choose their own browser, people must be free to download it, easily set it to default and to continue using it – all without interference from the operating system. Windows users do not currently enjoy this freedom of choice. To investigate Microsoft’s tactics and the impact on consumers, Mozilla commissioned Harry Brignull and Cennydd Bowles, independent researchers and experts in harmful design. Today, the researchers have published a report detailing how Microsoft prevents effective browser choice on Windows. In the report, they document how Microsoft places its own browser — Edge — at the center of its operating system and weaponizes Windows’ user interface design to undermine people selecting rival browsers. ↫ Mozilla Research We all already know Microsoft does these things, and of course, a study paid for by Mozilla agreeing with Mozilla is not exactly earth-shattering, but stuff like this is important for aiding in convincing regulators to do something about this stuff. It simply shouldn’t be legal to employ all kinds of nasty tricks and dark patterns to force people to use a certain browser.
Niri is a scrollable, tiling window manager for Wayland. What does it mean for a tiling window manager to be scrollable? Windows are arranged in columns on an infinite strip going to the right. Opening a new window never causes existing windows to resize. Every monitor has its own separate window strip. Windows can never “overflow” onto an adjacent monitor. Workspaces are dynamic and arranged vertically. Every monitor has an independent set of workspaces, and there’s always one empty workspace present all the way down. ↫ Niri’s GitHub page Definitely an intriguing idea.
SeaweedFS is a simple and highly scalable distributed file system. There are two objectives: to store billions of files!, to serve the files fast! SeaweedFS started as an Object Store to handle small files efficiently. Instead of managing all file metadata in a central master, the central master only manages volumes on volume servers, and these volume servers manage files and their metadata. This relieves concurrency pressure from the central master and spreads file metadata into volume servers, allowing faster file access (O(1), usually just one disk read operation). There is only 40 bytes of disk storage overhead for each file’s metadata. It is so simple with O(1) disk reads that you are welcome to challenge the performance with your actual use cases. ↫ SeaweedFS’s GitHub page It’s Apache-licensed and the code is, as usual, on GitHub.
The proposed activity is to evaluate the usage of Rust programming language in space applications, by prototyping an RTOS targeting ARM Cortex-M7 SAMV71 microcontroller together with the required BSP (Board Support Package) and a Demonstration Application. Rust safety features and its growing usage make this programming language a viable option in the space sector. It is proposed to first develop a lightweight real time operating system providing a minimal set of capabilities required for development of flight application software. This system will provide an executor, tasklets mechanisms and BSP for SAMV71. The design of the system will be guided to support potential future qualification activities. Although the project is a study, ECSS software development practices will be used to facilitate potential application in ESA projects. The practical feedback from ECSS application in Rust projects will be reported. In the second part of the activity, a small demonstration application software will be developed, providing a minimal feature-set representative of a CubeSat class project – UART communication, mode management and sensor handling. This application will showcase the viability of the developed RTOS and provide input to a Lessons Learned report, describing the encountered issues, potential problem and improvement areas, usage recommendations and proposed way forward. ↫ The European Space Agency Rust, but in space. The code’s on GitHub.
Many OSI Affiliates engaged with the European Commission, European Parliament and European Council during 2023. With the welcome coordination of Open Forum Europe, a group met regularly to keep track of progress explaining the issues. Many of us also committed time and travel to meet in-person. As a result of all this effort from so many people, the final text of the CRA mitigated pretty much all the risks we had identified to individual developers and to Open Source foundations. ↫ Simon Phipps (yes, the Simon Phipps) Many in the open source community were deeply worried about the EU’s Cyber Resiliency Act’s impact on open source software, and rightfully so. It’s great to hear that the EU communicated and cooperated closely with the open source community to ensure the impact of the CRA on open source would be minimal, and it turns out they listened. Excellent news.
Google has removed links to page caches from its search results page, the company’s search liaison Danny Sullivan has confirmed. “It was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn’t depend on a page loading,” Sullivan wrote on X. “These days, things have greatly improved. So, it was decided to retire it.” ↫ Jon Porter at The Verge Google Search continues to become ever more useless.
The Redox project has published an overview of the progress made in January, and it’s a long list. Redox now supports the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, a few of System76’s Cosmic Desktop applications now run on Redox, several more Linux applications haven been ported (most notably for me, nano, my CLI text editor of choice), and much more. The most important change is an overhaul of how Redox handles resource paths: Redox has a microkernel core, with drivers and other resource providers running as tasks and providing “schemes”. A scheme is the name of a resource provider, and until now, resources have been accessed using URI/URL format. For example, files would be accessed as file:path/to/my_file, and a TCP connection would be accessed as tcp:127.0.0.1. This format, while forward-looking, has not been very backwards-compatible. In order to simplify our efforts to port Linux software to Redox, we have decided to change our resource path format to the Linux-compatible /scheme/scheme_name/path/to/resource. Paths that do not begin with /scheme will be assumed to refer to the file scheme, so /path/to/my_file is treated by the system as /scheme/file/path/to/my_file, but the application will only see the /path/to/my_file portion. Using this format, normal paths now look just like Linux paths, while drivers and other resources can still be addressed without breaking software. ↫ Ron Williams The change is an ongoing process, so you might encounter some issues related to it in the coming time.
That was back in August and since then, there has not been anything too noteworthy in terms of Windows bootability support on ReFS. Meanwhile, Microsoft has also not updated the officially supported ReFS version up from 3.10 yet, and as such, trying to run Windows on any newer ReFS version leads to an immediate crash on the newest Canary build 26040. Apparently, the crash is worse than it was on previous builds as it now throws up no recovery messages either. ↫ Sayan Sen at NeoWin It seems like NTFS will be with us for quite a while longer.
The ReactOS project is working on a new graphical installer to replace the older, text-mode one. In the first blog post about this effort, from December 2023, developer hbelusca details their work on setupapi, the module that enables “reading and processing INF files, moving/copying files from an installation source media to a target, supporting also extraction from compressed .CAB cabinet files”, as well as device installation functions. The second post dives into partitioning during installation, which involves a lot of very delicate work, from partitioning to installing the bootloader, and from copying files to modifying the registry. On top of that, this needs a GUI, and preferably one that’s better and more versatile than the well-known blue text-mode setup we all know from old versions of Windows. The new GUI presents more options, allows for bootloader settings, and, of course, partitioning in a non-destructive way before committing. In addition, while the blue text-mode setup can only go forward, the new GUI is bidirectional. The third and final post dives into testing all this work and fixing bugs. The post goes into great detail describing a number of bugs and their fixes, and is well worth a read, too.
Microsoft is testing native Sudo command support for Windows 11. The support for native “Sudo” command was spotted in a leaked Windows Server preview build, accidentally published to the Windows Update servers over the weekend. ↫ Mayank Parmar It’s kind of wild that something like sudo doesn’t exist in Windows.
A few times a year, a claim will make the rounds that the largest PDF you can make is a square covering about the middle section of Germany – 381 km × 381 km. Turns out, this is only the maximum size Acrobat Reader can display, and not the limit of the format itself at all. So, how big can you go? Very big: If you’re curious, that width is approximately the distance between the Earth and the Moon. I’d have to get my ruler to check, but I’m pretty sure that’s larger than Germany. I could keep going. And I did. Eventually I ended up with a PDF that Preview claimed is larger than the entire universe – approximately 37 trillion light years square. Admittedly it’s mostly empty space, but so is the universe. If you’d like to play with that PDF, you can get it here. Please don’t try to print it. ↫ Alex Chan Don’t worry, I’m out of magenta anyway.
Around late 1986, Sega released the “Sega AI Computer”. This is one of Sega’s least well known and rarest systems. Not much is known about this system apart from a small amount of information in Japanese and American flyers and press articles. The information we have is still piecemeal and may be partly inaccurate. Today we are making public, for the first time: all system roms extracted from the Sega AI Computer, data dumps from 26 my-cards and 14 tapes, many scans and photographs, and in collaboration with MAME developers, an early working MAME driver allowing this computer to be emulated. ↫ SMS Power! Incredible. Usually stuff like this is relegated to a YouTube video, with potential archival efforts pushed to the background since it’s boring and won’t get any views. This is an amazing effort.
