Monthly Archive:: July 2023
UBPorts has released the second update for the Ubuntu Touch version based on Focal Fossa. In this new version, the System Settings application has been improved in various places, the physical camera button now works (on devices that have one, I presume), and a whole load of bugs have been fixed. Device support has also improved, with the F(x)tec Pro1 X, Fairphone 3, and Vollaphone X23 now being supported by the Focal releases.
Overall, the Authority found the commitments proposed by Google to be adequate to address the competition concerns. The group, in fact, presented a package of three commitments, two of which envisage supplementary solutions to Takeout – the service Google makes available to end users for backing up their data – to facilitate the export of data to third-party operators. The third commitment offers the possibility to start testing, prior to its official release, a new solution – currently under development – that will allow direct data portability from service to service, for third-party operators authorised by end users who so request, in relation to data provided by the users themselves or generated through their activity on Google’s online search engine and YouTube platform. The Italian competition authority has effectively forced Google to improve its Google Takeout tool, making it easier for users to not only take out their data, but also to migrate it to other services without having to manually export and import. If, in the near future, wherever you may live, you discover it’s become easier to move away from Google services, tank this case (and many others). This case is based on the GDPR, the Europan Union privacy law corporatists (and Facebook advocates) want you to equate to cookie popups, to scare you into thinking privacy laws – any laws, really – that target big companies are scary, ineffective, and out to hurt you. However, almost all of the cookie popups you see today are universally not in compliance with the GDPR, and are not mandated by the GDPR at all. The best way for a website or company to avoid cookie popups (even compliant ones), is to… Not share user data with third parties. Whenever you see a cookie popup (even a compliant one) don’t blame the EU or the GDPR – blame the website or company for shipping your data off to some ad provider or analytics service. Stop and think about why your data is being shared with third parties. And yes, that includes us, this website, OSNews.
If you’ve ever heard someone refer to a TV remote as a “clicker,” it’s because of Robert Adler’s 1956 creation. The elegant Star Trek-esque gadget pioneered a durable, clicky action for controlling gadgets and a simplicity of form that has since been naively abandoned. When Zenith first started experimenting with wireless remote controls, it used beams of light that the television could receive to communicate a command, eventually debuting the Flash-Matic in 1955. It only took a year in the market for this idea to be abandoned due to its sensitivity to full-spectrum light from the sun and lightbulbs. So Zenith’s engineers tried an even simpler approach that didn’t require batteries at all, using sound instead of light. This is from well before my time – and I have no idea if devices like this even ever made it to The Netherlands, where I’m originally from – but this is such a cool solution to the technical problem they were facing. I had no idea early remote controls were sound-based.
Alpine Linux remains one of the most popular lightweight Linux distributions built atop musl libc and Busybox. Alpine Linux has found significant use within containers and the embedded space while now sadly the most prolific maintainer of packages for the Linux distribution has decided to step down from her roles. Alice “psykose” who is easily responsible for the highest number of commits per author over the past year has decided to step down from maintaining her packages. This could be a massive hit to Alpine Linux. This distribution is definitely quite popular in its niche, and it always has way better package support than you’d expect from a small distribution like this. I wish Alice all the best, though, and hope for the project itself that the workload can be spread out among other maintainers.
One of the interesting and odd thing Google does is roast itself (and others) over security issues. In this year’s Year in Review of 0-days exploited in-the-wild, Google took particular aim at the Android ecosystem for being so bad at getting patches on users’ devices that Android doesn’t even need 0-days to be exploited in the first place. These gaps between upstream vendors and downstream manufacturers allow n-days – vulnerabilities that are publicly known – to function as 0-days because no patch is readily available to the user and their only defense is to stop using the device. While these gaps exist in most upstream/downstream relationships, they are more prevalent and longer in Android. This is a great case for attackers. Attackers can use the known n-day bug, but have it operationally function as a 0-day since it will work on all affected devices. The Android update problems are not just limited to devices not receiving updates to new major Android versions – it also extends to the monthly Android security patches that somehow need to make it to users’ devices. My Galaxy S21 has been getting these updates consistently, sometimes even before Pixel devices get them, but many, many devices never get these at all, or only sporadically. The Android update problem is by far the biggest problem in the Android ecosystem, and despite Google and OEMs promising to do better every year, we’re still far, far from where we should be.
31 years ago Tetris Max for the Macintosh was born, an improved clone of Tetris, and it became an insanely popular Mac game during the 1990s. I may or may not have had some involvement in its development. Macintosh System 6 was the current OS version at the time of the game’s release, but System 7 was introduced shortly afterwards. It’s recently come to my attention that the final version of Tetris Max (v2.9.1) may not work when running System 6 on certain Mac hardware, even though the game was advertised as System 6 compatible. I haven’t yet been able to fully verify this myself, but there’s a Macintosh Garden bug report from ironboy36 in 2022, and more recently a detailed bug report complete with video (thank you James!). Obviously I need to fix this stuff ASAP – 31-year-old bug be damned. And I need your help! Consider this a group debugging effort. This is such a cool story. If anyone can contribute to fixing this – please help them out.
The Blue Lightning CPU is an interesting beast. There is not a whole lot of information about what the processor really is, but it can be pieced together from various scraps of information. Around 1990, IBM needed low-power 32-bit processors with good performance for its portable systems, but no one offered such CPUs yet. IBM licensed the 386SX core from Intel and turned it into the IBM 386SLC processor (SLC reportedly stood for “Super Little Chip”). Later on, IBM updated the processor to support 486 instructions. It is worth noting that there were still the SLC variants available—nominally a 486, but with a 16-bit bus. The licensing conditions reportedly prevented IBM from selling the SLC processors on the free market. They were only available in IBM-built systems and always(?) as QFP soldered on a board. A very unique processor from the days Intel licensed others to make x86 chips, even allowing them to improve upon them. Those days are long gone, with only AMD and VIA remaining as companies with an x86 license.
Mobile work phones running in the cloud: safe & instantly available smartphones for your team. Complete with a phone number, accessible from your browser. I find the pricing a bit steep, but the concept in and of itself is pretty cool: it’s an Android VM in the cloud running /e/OS. I’m not entirely sure what I’d use it for, but something about it I find intriguing.
For KDE Plasma 6, the KDE team intends to remove a number of old features and bits of code that haven’t been touched in ages or simply don’t make sense to keep around. Most of it is truly stuff few will use, but there’s some interesting ones in there that might make some users a little sad. First, they intend to remove the icon view from the settings application, leaving only the sidebar view that’s been the default for a while now. This one bugs me, because I only use the icon view – it’s what I use on every other platform, too. The sidebar view might be more modern, but I find it difficult to find anything in there. The reasoning behind its removal is that the code has simply not been touch in a while, and features like search highlighting aren’t even available in icon view. Second, they’re removing Unsplash integration, which kind of sucks. The reason? AI. This one is quite sad, as no one wanted to remove it. Alas, we had to because Unsplash changed their terms of service to preclude Plasma’s usage of it, as a way of fighting automated data scrapers for AI training models. With a heavy heart, we removed it. So the next time anyone asks you what AI can do for humanity, now you have a concrete answer: prevent Plasma 6 from shipping an Unsplash Picture of the Day wallpaper plugin. Thanks, AI! Third, and I love this one, they’re finally fixing the weird issue where the selected Plasma style would overwrite some of the icons from the system-wide icon theme. This feature originally served the purpose of allowing monochrome icons to be set in Plasma, but this is simply no longer needed and only leads to confusion. There’s a lot more that’s being cleaned up and removed, so take a peek at the list to see if your favourite obscure feature is getting cut. Of course, as Nate Graham notes, if you wish for some of these features to stay – you can pick up the code and work on it.
Apple’s M2 Ultra powered Mac Pro is the final step in their Apple Silicon transition. But without GPU support or meaningful expansion, is it worth nearly double the price of a comparable Mac Studio? It really seems like high-end computing is simply no longer possible whatsoever on the Mac. The Mac Pro is a joke, the memory limits on the M2 chips make them useless for high-end uses, there’s not enough PCI-e lanes, the integrated GPUs are a joke compared to offerings from AMD and NVIDIA, and x86 processors at the higher end completely obliterate the M2 chips. At least ARM Macs use less power, so there’s that. But then, if you have to wait longer for tasks to finish – or can’t perform your tasks at all – does that really matter on your stationary, high-end workstation?
I have been reading Doom Guy by John Romero. It is an excellent book which I highly recommend. In the ninth chapter, John describes being hit by lightning upon seeing Adaptive Tile Refresh (ATS). That made me realize I never took the time to understand how this crucial piece of tech powers the Commander Keen (CK) series. During my research I was surprised to learn that ATS only powered the first CK trilogy. The second trilogy turned out to use something far better. I’ve played all the Commander Keen games as a child over and over again, but being quite young at the time (I’m from 1984, so do the math), it never dawned on me just how much of a technological marvel these games really were.
While most of us are used to this system and its quirks, that doesn’t mean it’s without problems. This is especially apparent when you do user research with people who are new to computing, including children and older people. Manually placing and sizing windows can be fiddly work, and requires close attention and precise motor control. It’s also what we jokingly refer to as shit work: it is work that the user has to do, which is generated by the system itself, and has no other purpose. Most of the time you don’t care about exact window sizes and positions and just want to see the windows that you need for your current task. Often that’s just a single, maximized window. Sometimes it’s two or three windows next to each other. It’s incredibly rare that you need a dozen different overlapping windows. Yet this is what you end up with by default today, when you simply use the computer, opening apps as you need them. Messy is the default, and it’s up to you to clean it up. There are a lot of interesting ideas in what GNOME is working on to address these issues, and it includes a lot of new thinking and new approaches to windowing. I have a lot of reservations, though. I do not like it when windows do something out of their own volition. A window should be where I put it, and manipulating one window should not make any changes to the shape or position of other windows, unless I’m specifically asking the window manager to do so (e.g. using the side-by-side snap feature, which I never do). There’s nothing I hate more than my UI deciding what’s best for me. Windows should be where I put them – until I explicitly instruct my window manager to put them somewhere else. I also do not understand this obsession with fullscreen windows. I just don’t get it. Unless it’s a video or a game, none of my windows ever go fullscreen, whether it be on a small 13″ laptop display, or on my 28″ 4K desktop monitor. I find fullscreen claustrophobic, and it almost never makes any sense anyway since virtually no application actually makes use of all that space. You just end up with tons of wasted space. Designing a UI with fullscreen as a corner stone absolutely baffles me. As such, some of these ideas for GNOME worry me a tiny bit, since they go against some of the core tenets I hold about my UI. I’ll see how it works out when it ships, but for now, I’m cautiously worried.
In my previous article, I described how I managed to install Windows 2000 in DOSBox-X. Even though this experiment was successful, I was not really with the results. While I got Windows 2000 working, I didn’t want to stop there. The final goal for the project was to get Windows XP running instead. However, after multiple attempts I gave up, thinking that Windows XP was impossible to use. Well – I was wrong. I can’t believe this works.
You can become a Patreon, make a one-time donation through Ko-Fi, and now, by popular demand, we have a third option to support OSNews: merch! We’ve just launched our new merch store, currently selling three items – two T-shirts and a coffee mug. First, we have a plain logo T-shirt. It’s a crew (round) neck T-shirt available in ‘Night Sky Navy’ or ‘Herb Green’, with our logo printed top-left on the chest. Second, we have the same logo T-shirt in the same two colours, but with an additional quote printed below it for those of you who really long for the olden days when Eugenia ran this place. This second shirt is a limited edition, and will eventually be replaced by a shirt with a different quote, so get it while supplies last. Both T-shirts are made of 100% organic cotton for that extra soft feel. Each shirt costs $29.99 and ships worldwide. Third, there’s a coffee mug with a logo and a quote for people who are kind of sick of my shit. It’s a mug. It holds coffee (or tea, or gasoline). It’s white. It sells for $19.99 and also ships worldwide. Since I want to be transparent about this – we’re working with a third party store from Richmond, Virginia, US, who produces the shirts and mugs, since we obviously can’t produce them ourselves. The pricing has been carefully set so that for each item sold, OSNews gets about $8. Do note that the items are made-to-order, so shipping takes a little longer than in-stock items from regular stores. I intend to add more items and maybe more colour options in the future (lighter colours are hard with our current logo), but we all have to start somewhere. As always, thanks for all your support – whether it be monetarily or just by being here. It means a lot.
The Android KitKat (KK) platform was first released ~10 years ago and since then, we’ve introduced many innovative improvements and features for Android, which are unavailable on KK. As of July 2023, the active device count on KK is below 1% as more and more users update to the latest Android versions. Therefore, we are no longer supporting KK in future releases of Google Play services. KK devices will not receive versions of the Play Services APK beyond 23.30.99. It’s time.
Last year at Google I/O, we shared some big changes coming to the Play Store for large screen devices. Since then, we’ve seen even more people using large screens for work and play, across millions of active Android devices. Apps and games play a critical role in shaping the on-device experience, so we’ve redesigned the Play Store to help users get the most from their tablets, Chromebooks, and foldables. Today, we’re introducing four major updates to help users find high-quality large screen apps on Play: refreshed app listing pages, ranking and quality improvements, streamlined store navigation, and a split-screen search experience. I’m glad Google seems to be finally doing the things it need to do to make Android applications feel more at home on larger displays. While I believe the problem has been somewhat overblown by tech media, there’s no denying iPadOS has a wider and more optimised tablet application offering, and Google’s got a lot of work to do to catch up.
9to5Google reports: Last year, we reported that Google’s Fuchsia team had renewed its efforts to support smart speakers. Long story short, the team had experimented with a single speaker, ditched that effort, then “restored” it later on. More importantly, the Fuchsia team was found to be working on multiple speakers, the most notable of which was an as-yet-unreleased speaker equipped with UWB. In a newly posted code change, the Fuchsia team formally marked all of its speaker hardware as “unsupported” and altogether removed the related code. Among the hardware now unsupported by Fuchsia, you’ll find the underlying SoCs for the Nest Mini, Nest Audio, Nest Wifi point, a potentially upcoming Nest speaker, and some Android Things-based smart speakers. The Fuchsia team hasn’t shared a reason why its smart speaker efforts were discontinued. One issue that potentially played a role is that the Amlogic A113L chip used in “Clover” – an unknown device that we suspect may be the Pixel Tablet dock – does not meet Fuchsia’s strict CPU requirements. Amlogic’s engineers attempted to work around this issue, seemingly to no avail. It also doesn’t help Google fired about 20% of the 400 people working on Fuchsia. Since its discovery about six years ago, Fuchsia has been on an upward trajectory, but the massive layoffs and now the end of the smart speakers project, one has to wonder what the future of Fuchsia is going to be. Everything seemed to point at Fuchsia one day taking hold in Android and Chrome OS, but that seems farther away now than ever.
Intel has announced two new x86-64 instruction sets designed to bolster and offer more performance in AVX-based workloads with their hybrid architecture of performance (P) and efficiency (E) cores. The first of Intel’s announcements is their latest Intel Advanced Performance Extensions, or Intel APX as it’s known. It is designed to bring generational, instruction set-driven improvements to load, store and compare instructions without impacting power consumption or the overall silicon die area of the CPU cores. Intel has also published a technical paper detailing their new AVX10, enabling both Intel’s performance (P) and efficiency (E) cores to support the converged AVX10/256-bit instruction set going forward. This means that Intel’s future generation of hybrid desktop, server, and workstation chips will be able to support multiple AVX vectors, including 128, 256, and 512-bit vector sizes throughout the entirety of the cores holistically. The basic gist is that these two new instruction sets should bring more performance at lower energy usage.
There’s been a lot of concern recently about the Web Environment Integrity proposal, developed by a selection of authors from Google, and apparently being prototyped in Chromium. There’s good reason for anger here (though I’m not sure yelling at people on GitHub is necessarily the best outlet). This proposal amounts to attestation on the web, limiting access to features or entire sites based on whether the client is approved by a trusted issuer. In practice, that will mean Apple, Microsoft & Google. Of course, Google isn’t the first to think of this, but in fact they’re not even the first to ship it. Apple already developed & deployed an extremely similar system last year, now integrated into MacOS 13, iOS 16 & Safari, called “Private Access Tokens“. Ten bucks this bad thing Apple is already shipping will get far less attention than a proposal by Google.
octox is a Unix-like operating system inspired by xv6-riscv. octox loosely follows the structure and style of xv6, but is implemented in pure Rust. It’s a learning project, so no lofty goals of world domination here.
