Thom Holwerda Archive

I hope what you take away from this post is that while Apple Pay is a great way to pay for things and that Apple did a great job mainstreaming digital wallets like this, what they do is not unique in the industry. DPANs are great for making it harder to track one person’s purchases across multiple merchants and they make customers less at risk in the event of a data breach of payment card info. ↫ Matt Birchler The gist of the article is that all the things Apple claims are unique about Apple Pay are really not unique at all, and quite a few things Apple touts are just flat-out lies, such as merchants being unable to know what you buy or people being unable to track you when you use Apple Pay. Other digital wallets, from Google, Samsung, and others, work in the exact same way Apple Pay does, and even banks and similar companies implement their payment systems the way Apple Pay does. It’s a case study in how Apple’s marketing and PR bloggers manage to perpetuate a myth solely because so many people just assume it must be true. Apple wouldn’t lie, right?

I’ve got two bits of related news that will affect the future of OSNews. The first bit of news kind of led to the second bit of news. You don’t have to care much about former, but the latter will be important for where OSNews will be going from here on out. First, after 14 years, I’ve effectively quit my job as a translator – I am self-employed so there’s no dramatic clearing of my desk of being led out by security, which is probably a little bit of a letdown to some of you. The translation industry is in the process of collapsing – you know why – and I’ve been feeling the squeeze for a while now, and I like going out on my own terms. I’ve known this day would come, and I’m not sad about it. My motto: it is what it is. Of course, this meant I had to think of what to do next. Well, I have decided to work on OSNews full-time. This is risky, scary, and I’m absolutely terrified of what this will mean. Right now, my OSNews income – ads plus Patreon – does not even remotely come close to what I earned as a translator, and as any translator will tell you, translating isn’t exactly a cornucopia either. This means I’ve got some serious work ahead of me to change that. After talking things over with David, OSNews’ owner who takes care of the commercial/advertisement side, we’ve already taken a few steps. First, we’ve switched hosting providers and saved considerably on our hosting costs in the process. Second, David changed advertising partners to one that will most likely yield us some better rates, but since I don’t know much about that side of OSNews – as it should be – I can’t comment much on it. There are two main ways in which I can increase OSNews’ revenue, and that is by growing our readership, and by giving people more reasons to become a Patreon, make individual donations, or buy our merch. In other words, you can expect more original articles so that people will want to keep coming back, and possibly support me financially because they like what I do. A third avenue for revenue I’m exploring is sponsorships – this is a longer-term project, and I’m approaching and talking to several (tech) companies about this. If you happen to work for a company who would be a good fit for an OSNews weekly sponsorship, feel free to contact me for more information. The end goal: have OSNews be entirely funded by readers and sponsors, and remove all regular advertising. This all sounds great, but there is a dark side to this news, too. If all of this fails, if I am unable to attract more readers and make my work for OSNews financially sustainable, I’ll have to find work elsewhere – and that would mean the end of OSNews. I’m not trying to be alarmist or scare you; I just want to be as honest and realistic as possible about where we stand. Anyway, this is a big deal for me. I’ve really only ever had one job, and that’s being a translator, a job I am trained for with two university degrees to show for it. My only other job was a teenage thing where I worked at a hardware store (think hammers and screws, not computers) for eight years. I don’t like taking risks with these sorts of matters, so I’m absolutely terrified, and while I believe there’s a sustainable income hiding in this ol’ website, it’s not always clear how to get at it. Anyway, want to become a Patreon? Or a sponsor? Pretty please? Now would be kind of a really good time to do so.

The Department of Justice’s antitrust division has come into its own, having filed its third tech monopoly lawsuit in four years. The accumulated experience shows up in the complaint, according to antitrust experts who spoke with The Verge about the complaint filed Thursday accusing Apple of violating antitrust law. The DOJ describes a sweeping arc of behaviors by Apple, arguing that it adds up to a pattern of illegal monopoly maintenance. Rather than focusing on two or three illegal acts, the complaint alleges that Apple engages in a pattern of behaviors that further entrench consumers into their ecosystem and make it harder to switch, even in the face of high prices and degraded quality. ↫ Lauren Feiner at The Verge It’s been somewhat entertaining seeing Apple fanatics claim the complaint is bad, horrible, has no merit, has no chance in court, and that the DoJ has zero clue what it’s doing – while actual experts are actually positively surprised by how the complaint seems better than they expected. I wonder whose judgement to trust more.

Federal investigators have ordered Google to provide information on all viewers of select YouTube videos, according to multiple court orders obtained by Forbes. Privacy experts from multiple civil rights groups told Forbes they think the orders are unconstitutional because they threaten to turn innocent YouTube viewers into criminal suspects. ↫ Thomas Brewster at Forbes United States law enforcement has been asking Google who watches certain YouTube videos, covering as many as 30,000 people per video. They wanted names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google accounts who had watched a video within a certain week’s timeframe, and the IP addresses of everyone who watched the video without a Google account. That’s an absolute crapton of data, all because they suspected one person of a money-laundering scheme. And this is just one example. Forbes could not determine if Google complied with the requests, but it does highlight the dangers of having so much data on one place.

Picotron is a Fantasy Workstation for making pixelart games, animations, music, demos and other curiosities. It has a toy operating system designed to be a cosy creative space, but runs on top of Windows, MacOS or Linux. Picotron apps can be made with built-in tools, and shared with other users in a special 256k png cartridge format. ↫ Picotron website Picotron is very similar to PICO-8, but more powerful and with a few additional features – it’s actually made by the same people as PICO-8. It also contains a small, ‘toy’ operating system to serve as a workspace, everything makes use of Lua, and any applications made with it can be shared using a special 256k PNG cartridge format. It’s currently in alpha, and cost $11.99, and uses the early Minecraft model of a one-time purchase for access to all future updates. The FAQ has tons more information. It looks incredibly neat. I don’t have much use for it, but I’m interested to see what people with actual skills will make with it.

Android 15 adds “UI elements to ensure a consistent user experience across the satellite connectivity landscape.” A system-level “Auto-connected to satellite” notification conveys how “You can send and receive messages without a mobile or Wi-Fi network” with a shortcut to “Open Messages” or get more information. Meanwhile, note the status bar icon at the right. Speaking of Google Messages, “Android 15 provides support for SMS/ MMS applications as well as preloaded RCS applications to use satellite connectivity for sending and receiving messages.” Other apps will also be able to “detect when a device is connected to a satellite, giving them more awareness of why full network services may be unavailable.” ↫ Abner Li at 9To5Google 9To5Google also has a list of all the new features in this Developer Preview with copious amounts of screenshots.

Haiku published its latest monthly activity report, and this one is a veritable grab bag of a whole bunch of small fixes, improvements, and changes – there’s really no tent pole features or major improvements this month. Going through the list, the items that jump out at me are updated ping and traceroute applications and work on improving FFmpeg, but there’s so much more in there, so be sure to read the whole thing. At the end of the report, the Haiku project states about a possible fifth beta release: A few more tickets in the milestone were fixed, including the “ICU upgrade” one, but a few were also added (some migrated from HaikuPorts that turned out to be regressions in Haiku or its buildtools, etc.). ↫ Haiku Activity and Contract Report, February 2024 So, beta 5 is not quite ready for prime time just yet, but it feels like it’s getting closer.

Switch emulator Suyu—a fork of the Nintendo-targeted and now-defunct emulation project Yuzu—has been taken down from GitLab following a DMCA request Thursday. But the emulation project’s open source files remain available on a self-hosted git repo on the Suyu website, and recent compiled binaries remain available on an extant GitLab repo. While the DMCA takedown request has not yet appeared on GitLab’s public repository of such requests, a GitLab spokesperson confirmed to The Verge that the project was taken down after the site received notice “from a representative of the rightsholder.” GitLab has not specified who made the request or how they represented themselves; a representative for Nintendo was not immediately available to respond to a request for comment. ↫ Kyle Orland at Ars Technica Self-hosting the code repository and binaries is probably the only way the Switch emulator can continue to reasonably exist. The issue with Switch emulation seems to be that the device is current, popular, and still makes endless amounts of money for Nintendo; it’s very different from SNES or Mega Drive emulation, to name a few examples. While I personally don’t think that should make Switch emulation off-limits or any less valid than emulating older systems, I can see how it would draw the ire of Nintendo more readily.

For many years, Apple has built a dominant iPhone platform and ecosystem that has driven the company’s astronomical valuation. At the same time, it has long understood that disruptive technologies and innovative apps, products, and services threatened that dominance by making users less reliant on the iPhone or making it easier to switch to a non-Apple smartphone. Rather than respond to competitive threats by offering lower smartphone prices to consumers or better monetization for developers, Apple would meet competitive threats by imposing a series of shapeshifting rules and restrictions in its App Store guidelines and developer agreements that would allow Apple to extract higher fees, thwart innovation, offer a less secure or degraded user experience, and throttle competitive alternatives. It has deployed this playbook across many technologies, products, and services, including super apps, text messaging, smartwatches, and digital wallets, among many others. Apple’s conduct also stifles new paradigms that threaten Apple’s smartphone dominance, including the cloud, which could make it easier for users to enjoy high-end functionality on a lower priced smartphone—or make users device-agnostic altogether. As one Apple manager recently observed, “Imagine buying a Android for 25 bux at a garage sale and it works fine … And you have a solid cloud computing device. Imagine how many cases like that there are.” Simply put, Apple feared the disintermediation of its iPhone platform and undertook a course of conduct that locked in users and developers while protecting its profits. Critically, Apple’s anticompetitive conduct not only limits competition in the smartphone market, but also reverberates through the industries that are affected by these restrictions, including financial services, fitness, gaming, social media, news media, entertainment, and more. Unless Apple’s anticompetitive and exclusionary conduct is stopped, it will likely extend and entrench its iPhone monopoly to other markets and parts of the economy. For example, Apple is rapidly expanding its influence and growing its power in the automotive, content creation and entertainment, and financial services industries–and often by doing so in exclusionary ways that further reinforce and deepen the competitive moat around the iPhone. ↫ DoJ antitrust lawsuit vs. Apple The United States Department of Justice is filing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple.

What if the kind of laptop you’re looking for just isn’t available from any of the major or even minor manufacturers? You know exactly what you want out of a laptop, and while quite a few fulfill many of your requirements, the requirement that matters most just isn’t being made. It’s not a case of “too expensive” or “too cheap” – simply nobody will sell it to you. From HP, Dell, Apple, down to smaller and local OEMs, none of them can serve your particular set of needs. For me, that particular requirement, that particular need is that of the laptop with an 8″ to 10″ screen size. Even the most portable laptops sold by well-known brands today stop at 13″, often even 14″, with nowhere to go but up. I currently have a 13.3″ laptop – an otherwise excellent XPS 13 9370 with a gorgeous 4K display – but as much as I love it, it’s just too big and heavy for me. I want something smaller, no bigger than roughly 10″. Why? Well, I use my laptop in exactly two locations: on the couch in one of our two living rooms, or in bed (okay that’s technically three locations). That’s it. I work from home on my workstation, I play games on my gaming PC, so I don’t need big performance on the road, nor do I need a big portable display to make working on the go bearable. On top of all this, I have two small kids running around the house, so a laptop that is easier to quickly close and put out of harm’s way is very welcome. And considering the most intensive workload it’ll ever have to contend with is playing YouTube video, I don’t need the latest Core i7 or Apple M3 either. Why not a tablet, then? First and foremost, I want to use a desktop operating system, not Android or iOS, since writing OSNews posts or doing a quick translation for my job are not fun experiences on mobile operating systems. On top of that, a tablet with a keyboard accessory often makes use of a kickstand and flappy keyboard, which are cumbersome to use on the couch, in bed, or on your lap. The exception here would be the iPad with a Magic Keyboard, but that’s an incredibly expensive affair and an Apple product, so obviously a no-go. Luckily, while the kind of small laptop I’m looking for is not available from one of the major OEMs, there are a small number of specialised OEMs that do focus on making small laptops. Roughly, the devices they make fall into one of three pricing categories. First, there’s the high-end – these usually start at around €800 or so and get well over €1000, and have a decent set of specs, often focused on gaming by opting for AMD APUs. A major player in this market is GPD, who’ve been offering products in this segment for years, and are actually a decently well-known brand at this point, even being featured on major YouTube channels like Linus Tech Tips. Then there’s the very low end, a market segment drowning in the exact same 7″ laptop priced at €250 or so, sold under a variety of brand names, sporting the same low-end Celeron chip and rather crappy display. It’s also quite thick, made out of cheap plastic, and every review I’ve seen of these are not particularly positive. Unless you know what you’re getting into, do not buy these. They’re e-waste trash. In recent times, however, a middle segment has slowly started to take shape, coming in price points in between the low and high end, with reasonable specifications and build quality, without going overboard. This was exactly what I was looking for. Aside from price and specifications, mini-laptops also come in a variety of different input layouts. Being smaller than other laptops, some compromises will have to be made, and it’s this particular aspect that will most likely play a major role in which models appeal to you. The gaming-focused mini laptops will often come with dual joysticks and face buttons, while other models will come with a more traditional keyboard and trackpad, and the smallest laptops in this category ditch the trackpad in favour of a little sensor pad in the top-right of the keyboard, or a ThinkPad-style nipple. Having kept and eye on this market for years now, I knew exactly what I was looking for: I wanted a traditional keyboard and touchpad layout, with medium specifications, a capable display, and all-metal construction, for no more than roughly €400-500. Clearly, the time to strike was now, as the small, budget-oriented OEM Chuwi had just updated its 10″ mini laptop with Intel’s latest low-power processor, the N100. The Chuwi Minibook X (2023), as it’s called, has an all-aluminium construction, and comes with quite decent specifications, and I managed to snag a new model through their eBay store for a mere €320 (I asked them for a discount down from €400 , and they gave it; I did not mention who I was or that I run OSNews). It has the aforementioned Alder Lake Intel N100 – released earlier this year, it’s an Intel 7 processor with 4 cores and 4 threads (so no hyperthreading) with a maximum turbo frequency of 3.4 Ghz, with a TDP of just 6 W. It’s not going to compare well to the various Core i3/i5/i7 processors, of course, but considering the type of device, it makes perfect sense to opt for something like the N100. Furthermore, this device is packing 12 GB of LPDDR5 RAM running at 4800 Mhz, and my model comes with a 512 GB SSD. The display is a 10.3″ panel with a native resolution of 1920×1200, with a refresh rate of only 50Hz (although some people managed to reach 60Hz and even 90Hz), and support for touch. Ports-wise, it has two USB-C ports (one marked as compatible with charging – I haven’t dared

Java 22 ships the final versions of the Foreign Function and Memory API as well as the Unnamed Variables and Patterns API. Plus Java 22 brings region pinning for the G1 garbage collector, statements before super(…) are in preview phase, a class-file API preview, support to launch multi-file source code programs, the latest work on the Java Vector API, Stream gatherers in preview, the second preview for structured concurrency programming, and various other additions. ↫ Michael Larabel at Phoronix You can find the GPL-licensed OpenJDK builds at the OpenJDK website.

A global theme on the KDE third party store had an issue where it executed a script that removed user’s data. It wasn’t intended as malicious, but a mistake in some shell parsing. It was promptly identified and removed, but not before doing some damage to that user. This has started a lot of discourse around the concept of the store, security and upstream KDE. With the main question how can a theme have access to do this? ↫ David Edmundson That ‘some damage’ was personal data loss, which is quite something to happen after installing a theme. KDE kind of shot itself in the foot here by having something called ‘global themes’, which is a combination of themes for various elements of the desktop, like the application style, icon theme, cursor theme, colour scheme, and so on, but also things like panel layout and even widgets, applets, and other things that can run code. Some of these global themes use shell scripts to implement the more advanced aspects of their themes, and all these things combined means that global themes installed through KDE’s own built-in theme installer can cause some serious damage. The problem is getting some attention now, and I hope they can find a way to make this process more transparent for end users, so people know what they’re getting themselves into. I’m not advocating for dumbing all this stuff down – this isn’t iOS or whatever – but better communication, perhaps clearer labels and warnings are definitely needed.

In order solve that problem, we started looking for some options and the most obvious one was QtQuick. It’s a quite powerful framework and it’s already used extensively in Plasma. So, in Plasma 5.24, we introduced basic support for implementing kwin effects written in QML and even added a new overview effect. Unfortunately, if you wanted to implement a QtQuick-based effect yourself, you would still have to write a bit of C++ glue yourself. This is not great because effects that use C++ are a distribution nightmare. They can’t be just uploaded to the KDE Store and then installed by clicking “Get New Effects…”. Furthermore, libkwin is a fast moving target with lots of ABI and API incompatible changes in every release. That’s not good if you’re an effect developer because it means you will need to invest a bit of time after every plasma release to port the effects to the new APIs or at least rebuild the effects to resolve ABI incompatibilities. This has been changed in Plasma 6.0. In Plasma 6, we’ve had the opportunity to address that pesky problem of requiring some C++ code and also improve the declarative effect API after learning some lessons while working on the overview and other effects. So, enough of history and let’s jump to the good stuff, shall we? ↫ Vlad Zahorodnii Making it easier to write things like Plasma widgets and Kwin effects is always desirable, and making them easier to distribute is only icing on the cake.

You know those modal screens that interrupt your groove when you are surfing? There are no laws forcing websites to use them. They use them because they choose to. ↫ Bite code! Cookie banners are not only not required, they’re not even needed, and most implementations you encounter today are illegal anyway. You can use session cookies and anonymous stats cookies without needing any user approval. Companies like to use these cookie banners because they want to make you mad at the law, not at them for tracking you up the wazzoo, and people who actually do know better trot out the cookie banners to enrage you at the government instead of at the corporations exploiting you. EU law only states that if a website wants to track you, they have to let you know. That’s it. Seems very reasonable to anyone who isn’t a corporatist.