In the News Archive

The dumb reason why flag emojis aren’t working on your site in Chrome on Windows

After doing more digging than I feel like I should have needed to, I found my answer: it appears that due to concerns about the fact that acknowledging the existence of certain countries can be perceived as a nominally political stance, Microsoft has opted to just avoid the issue altogether by not including country flag emojis in Windows’ system font. Problem solved! Can you imagine if, *gasp*, your computer could render a Taiwanese or Palestinian flag? The horror! ↫ Ryan Geyer Silicon Valley corporations are nothing if not massive cowards, and this is just another one of the many, many examples that underline this. Firefox solves this by including the flags on its own, but Google refuses to do the same with Chrome, because, you guessed it, Google is also a cowardly organisation. There are some ways around it, as the linked article details, but they’re all clumsy and cumbersome compared to Microsoft just not being a coward and including proper flag emoji, even if it offends some sensibilities in pro-China or western far-right circles. Your best bet to avoid such corporate cowardice is to switch to better operating systems, like any desktop Linux distribution. Fedora KDE includes both the Taiwanese and Palestinian flags, because the KDE project isn’t made up of cowards, and I’m sure the same applies to any GNOME distribution. If your delicate snowflake sensibilities can’t handle a Palestinian or Taiwanese flag emoji, just don’t type them. Bitter sidenote: it turns out WordPress, what OSNews uses, doesn’t like emoji, either. Adding any emoji in this story, from basic ones to the Taiwanese or Palestinian flag, makes it impossible to save or publish the story. I have no idea if this is a WordPress issue, or an issue on our end, since WordPress does mention they have emoji support.

OpenAI doesn’t like it when you use “their” generated slop without permission

OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property. ↫ Cristina Criddle and Eleanor Olcott for the FT This is more ironic than writing a song called Ironic that lists situations that aren’t actually ironic. OpenAI claims it’s free to suck up whatever content and data it can find on the web without any form of permission or consent, but throws a tamper tantrum when someone takes whatever they regurgitate for their own use without permission or consent? Cry me a river.

Chinese researchers just built an open-source rival to ChatGPT in 2 months, and Silicon Valley is freaked out

Speaking of “AI”, the Chinese company DeepSeek has lobbed a grenade dead-centre into the middle of the “AI” bubble, and it’s been incredibly entertaining to watch. DeepSeek has released several new “AI” models, which seem to rival or even surpass OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT models – but with a massive twist: DeepSeek, being Chinese, can’t use NVIDIA’s latest GPUs, and as such, was forced to work within very tight constraints. They’ve managed to surpass ChatGPT’s best models with a fraction of the GPU horsepower, and thus a fraction of the cost, and a fraction of the energy requirements. But unlike ChatGPT’s o1, DeepSeek is an “open-weight” model that (although its training data remains proprietary) enables users to peer inside and modify its algorithm. Just as important is its reduced price for users — 27 times less than o1. Besides its performance, the hype around DeepSeek comes from its cost efficiency; the model’s shoestring budget is minuscule compared with the tens of millions to hundreds of millions that rival companies spent to train its competitors. ↫ Ben Turner at LiveScience The fallout has been disastrous for NVIDIA, in particular. The company’s stock price tumbled 17% today, and more entertaining yet, the various massive investments of hundreds of billions of dollars into western “AI” seem like a huge waste of money. The DeepSeek models are also nominally open source, and are clearly showing that most likely, there simply isn’t a huge “AI” market worth hundreds of billions of dollars dollars at all. On top of that, the US is clearly not ahead in “AI” at all, as was the common wisdom pretty much until yesterday. Of course, DeepSeek is Chinese, and that means censorship – the real kind – is a thing. Asking the latest DeepSeek model about the massacre at Tiananmen Square returns nothing, suggesting the user ask about other topics instead. I’m sure over the coming weeks more and more or these kinds of censorship will be discovered, but hopefully its open source nature will allow the models to be adapted and changed to remove such censorship. Do note that all of these “AI” models are all deeply biased because they’re trained on content that is itself deeply biased, thereby perpetuating and amplifying damaging stereotypes and inaccuracies, especially since people have a tendency to assume computers can’t be biased. Whatever may happen, at least OpenAI losing its job to “AI” is hilarious.

AI bots paralyze Linux news site and others

Apparently, since the beginning of the year, AI bots have been ensuring that websites can only respond to regular inquiries with a delay. The founder of Linux Weekly News (LWN-net), Jonathan Corbet, reports that the news site is therefore often slow to respond. The AI scraper bots cause a DDoS, a distributed denial-of-service attack. At times, the AI bots would clog the lines with hundreds of IP addresses simultaneously as soon as they decided to access the site’s content. Corbet explains on Mastodon that only a small proportion of the traffic currently serves real human readers. ↫ Dirk Knop at Heise.de I’m sure someone will tell me we just have to accept that a large percentage of our bandwidth is going to overpriced bullshit generators, and that we should just suck it up and pay for Sam Altman’s new house. I hope these same people realise “AI” is destroying the last vestiges of the internet that haven’t fallen victim to all the other techbro fads so far, and that sooner rather than later there won’t be anything left to browse to. The coming few years are going to be fun.

Right to root access

I believe consumers, as a right, should be able to install software of their choosing to any computing device that is owned outright. This should apply regardless of the computer’s form factor. In addition to traditional computing devices like PCs and laptops, this right should apply to devices like mobile phones, “smart home” appliances, and even industrial equipment like tractors. In 2025, we’re ultra-connected via a network of devices we do not have full control over. Much of this has to do with how companies lock their devices’ bootloaders, prevent root access, and prohibit installation of software that is not explicitly sanctioned through approval in their own distribution channels. We should really work on changing that. ↫ Medhir Bhargava Obviously, this is preaching to the choir here on OSNews. I agree with Bhargava 100%. It should be illegal for any manufacturer of computing devices – with a possible exception for, say, things like medical implants, certain aspects of car control units, and so on – to lock down and/or restrict owners’ ability to install whatever software they want, run whatever code they want, and install whatever operating system they want on the devices that they own. Computers are interwoven into the very fabric of every aspect of our society, and having them under the sole control of the biggest megacorporations in the world is utterly dystopian, and wildly dangerous. Personally, I would take it a step further: any and all code that runs on products sold must be open. Not necessarily open source, but at the very least open, so that it can be inspected when malice is suspected. This way, society can make sure that the tech billionaire oligarchs giving nazi salutes aren’t in full, black-box control over our devices. Secrecy as a means of corporate control is incredibly dangerous, and forcing all code to be open is the perfect way to combat this. Copyright is more than enough intellectual property protection for code. The odds of this happening are, of course, slim, especially with the aforementioned tech billionaire oligarchs giving nazi salutes effectively running the most powerful military in human history. Reason is in short supply these days, and I doubt that’s going to change any time soon.

WordPress is in trouble

It’s hard to see how to move forward from here. I think the best bet would be for people to rally around a new community-driven infrastructure. This would likely require a fork of WordPress, though, and that’s going to be a messy. The current open source version of WordPress relies on the sites and services Mullenweg controls. Joost de Valk, the original creator of an extremely popular SEO plugin, wrote a blog post with some thoughts on the matter. I’m hoping that more prominent people in the community step up like this, and that some way forward can be found. Update: Moments after posting this, I was pointed to a story on TechCrunch about Mullenweg deactivating the WordPress.org accounts of users planning a “fork”. This after he previously promoted (though in a slightly mocking way) the idea of forking open source software. In both cases, the people he mentioned weren’t actually planning forks, but musing about future ways forward for WordPress. Mullenweg framed the account deactivations as giving people the push they need to get started. Remember that WordPress.org accounts are required to submit themes, plugins, or core code to the WordPress project. These recent events really make it seem like you’re no longer welcome to contribute to WordPress if you question Matt Mullenweg. ↫ Gavin Anderegg I haven’t wasted a single word on the ongoing WordPress drama yet, but the longer Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s CEO and thus owner of WordPress, keeps losing his mind, I can’t really ignore the matter any more. OSNews runs, after all, on WordPress – self-hosted, at least, so not on Mullenweg’s WordPress.com – and if things keep going the way they are, I simply don’t know if WordPress remains a viable, safe, and future-proof CMS for OSNews. I haven’t discussed this particular situation with OSNews owner, David Adams, yet, mostly since he’s quite hands-off in the day-to-day operations and has more than enough other matters to take care of, but I think the time has come to start planning for a potential worst-case scenario in which Mullenweg takes even more of whatever he’s taking and WordPress implodes entirely. Remember – even if you self-host WordPress outside of Automattic, several core infrastructure parts of WordPress still run through Automattic, so we’re still dependent on what Mullenweg does or doesn’t do. I have no answers, announcements, or even plans at this point, but if you or your company depend on WordPress, you might want to start thinking about where to go from here.

The Tasmania LAN party photos archive reminded me of my terrible teenage fashion choices

I’ve never been to a LAN party, not even back in the ’90s and early 2000s when they were quite the common occurance. Both my family and various friends did have multiple computers in the house, so I do have fond memories of hooking up computers through null modem cables to play Rise of the Triad, later superseded by direct Ethernet connections to play newer games. LAN parties have left lasting impressions on those that regularly attended them, but since most took place before the era of ever-present digital camera and smartphones, photos of such events are rarer than they should be. Luckily, Australian software engineer Issung did a lot of digging and eventually struck gold: a massive collection of photos and a few videos from LAN parties that took place from 1996 and 2010 in Australia. After trying a few other timestamps and a few more web searches I sadly couldn’t find anything. As a last ditch effort I made a few posts on various forums, including the long dormant Dark-Media Steam group, then I forgot about it all, until 2 months ago! Someone reached out and was able to get me into a small private Facebook group, once in I could see I had gotten more than I bargained for! I was just looking for Dark-Media photos, but found another regular LAN I had forgotten about, and photos from even more LANs from the late 90s. I was able to scrape all the photos and now upload them to archive.org where they can hopefully live forever. ↫ Issung I love browsing through these, as they bring back so many memories of the computers and dubious fashion choices of my teenage years – I used to combine different colours zip-off pants, and even had mohawks, spikes, and god knows what else before I started losing all my hair in my very early 20s. Anyway, the biggest change is the arrival of flat displays signalling the end of the widespread use of CRTs, and the slow dissappearence of beige in favour of black. Such a joy to see the trends change in these photos. If anyone else is sitting on treasure troves like these, be sure to share them with the world before it’s too late.

The Moxie child support robot gets new lease on life through open source

It’s a Christmas miracle! The Moxie, that support robot thing for kids we talked about two weeks ago, seems to be getting a new lease on life. The start-up that makes the Moxie has announced it’s going to not only release a version of the server software for self-hosting, but will also publish all of the source code as open source. We understand how unsettling and disappointing it has been to face the possibility of losing the daily comfort and support Moxie provides. Since the onset of these recent challenges, many of you have voiced heartfelt concerns and offered suggestions, and we have taken that feedback seriously. While our cloud services may become unavailable, a group of former technical team members from Embodied is working on a potential solution to allow Moxie to operate locally—without the need for ongoing cloud connectivity. This initiative involves developing a local server application (“OpenMoxie”) that you can run on your own computer. Once available, this community-driven option will enable you (or technically inclined individuals) to maintain Moxie’s basic functionality, develop new features, and modify her capabilities to better suit your needs—without reliance on Embodied’s cloud servers. ↫ Paolo Pirjanian Having products like this be dependent on internet connectivity is not great, but as long as Silicon Valley is the way it is, that’s not going to change. You can tell from their efforts that the people at Embodied do genuinely care about their product and the people that use it, because they have zero – absolutely zero – financial incentive or legal obligation to do any of this. They could’ve just walked away like their original communication said they were going to, but instead they listened to their customers and changed their minds. Regardless of my thoughts on requiring internet connectivity for something like this, they at least did the right thing today – and I commend them for that.

Never forgive them

The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products.  ↫ Ed Zitron This is the reality we’re all living in, and it’s obvious from any casual computer use, or talking to anyone who uses computers, just how absolutely dreadful using the mainstream platforms and services has become. Google Search has become useless, DuckDuckGo is being overrun with “AI”-generated slop, Windows is the operating system equivalent of this, Apple doesn’t even know how to make a settings application anymore, iOS is yelling at you about all the Apple subscriptions you don’t have yet, Android is adding “AI” to its damn file manager, and the web is unusable without aggressive ad blocking. And all of this is not only eating up our computers’ resources, it’s also actively accelerating the destruction of our planet, just so lazy people can generate terrible images where people have six fingers. I’m becoming more and more extreme in my complete and utter dismissal of the major tech companies, and I’m putting more and more effort into taking back control over the digital aspects of my life wherever possible. Not using Windows or macOS has improved the user experience of my PCs and laptops by incredible amounts, and moving from Google’s Android to GrapheneOS has made my smartphone feel more like it’s actually mine than ever before. Using technology products and services made by people who actually care and have morals and values that don’t revolve around unending greed is having a hugely positive impact on my life, and I’m at the point now where I’d rather not have a smartphone or computer than be forced to use trashware like Windows, macOS, or iOS. The backlash against shitty technology companies and their abusive practices is definitely growing, and while it hasn’t exploded into the mainstream just yet, I think we’re only a few more shitty iOS updates and useless Android “AI” features away from a more general uprising against the major technology platforms. There’s a reason laws like the DMA are so overwhelmingy popular, and I feel like this is only the beginning.

Maker of emotional supports robots for kids abruptly shuts down, kills all the robots in the process

Some news is both sad and dystopian at the same time, and this is one of those cases. Moxie, a start-up selling $800 emotional support robots intended to help children is shutting down operations since it can’t find enough money, and since their robots require constant connectivity to servers to operate, all of the children’s robots will cease functioning within days. They’re not offering refunds, but they will send out a letter to help parents tell their children “in an age-appropriate way” that their lovable robot is going to die. If you have kids yourself, you know how easily they can sometimes get attached to the weirdest things, from fluffy stuffed animals designed to be cute, to random inanimate objects us adults would never consider to be even remotely interesting. I can definitely see how my own kids would be devastated if one of their favourite “emotional” toys were to suddenly stop working or disappear, and we don’t even have anything that pretends to have a personality or that actively interacts with our kids like this robot thing does. We can talk about how it’s insane that no refunds will be given, or how a company can just remotely kill a product like this without any repercussions, but most of all I’m just sad for the kids who use one and are truly attached to it, who now have to deal with their little friend going away. That’s just heartbreaking, and surely a sign of things to come as more and more companies start stuffing “AI” into their toys. The only thing I can say is that we as parents should think long and hard about what kind of toys we give our children, and that we should maybe try to avoid anything tied to a cloud service that can go away at any time.

Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

The standard trope when talking about timezones is to rattle off falsehoods programmers believe about them. These lists are only somewhat enlightening – it’s really hard to figure out what truth is just from the contours of falsehood. So here’s an alternative approach. I’m gonna show you some weird timezones. In fact, the weirdest timezones. They’re each about as weird as timezones are allowed to get in some way. ↫ Ulysse Carion The reason why timezones are often weird is not only things like the shape of countries dictating where the actual timezones begin and end, but also because of politics. A lot of politics. The entirety of China runs on Beijing time, even though it covers five geographical timezones. Several islands in the Pacific were forced by their colonisers to run on insanely offset timezones because it made exploiting them easier. Time in Europe is political, too – countries like The Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Spain should really be in the same time zone as the UK, but adopted UTC+1 because it aligns better with the rest of mainland Europe. Although anything is better than whatever the hell Dutch Time was. Then there is, of course, daylight savings, which is a whole pointless nightmare in and of itself that should be abolished. Daylight savings rules and exceptions alone cover a ton of the oddities and difficulties with timezones, which is reason enough to get rid of it, aside from all the other possible issues, but a proposal to abolish it in the EU has sadly stalled.

Contractors training Amazon, Meta and Microsoft’s AI systems left without pay after Appen moves to new platform

One-third of payments to contractors training AI systems used by companies such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have not been paid on time after the Australian company Appen moved to a new worker management platform. Appen employs 1 million contractors who speak more than 500 languages and are based in 200 countries. They work to label photographs, text, audio and other data to improve AI systems used by the large tech companies and have been referred to as “ghost workers” – the unseen human labour involved in training systems people use every day. ↫ Josh Taylor at The Guardian It’s crazy that if you peel back the layers on top of a lot of tools and features sold to us as “artificial intelligence”, you’ll quite often find underpaid workers doing the labour technology companies are telling us are done by computers running machine learning algorithms. The fact that so many of them are either deeply underpaid or, as in this case, not even paid at all, while companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and OpenAI are raking in ungodly amounts of profits, is deeply disturbing. It’s deeply immoral on so many levels, and just adds to the uncomfortable feeling people have with “AI”. Again I’d like to reiterate I’m not intrinsically opposed to the current crop of artificial intelligence tools – I just want these mega corporations to respect the rights of artists, and not use their works without permission to earn immense amounts of money. On top of that, I don’t think it should be legal for them to lie about how their tools really work under the hood, and the workers who really do the work claimed to be done by “AI” to be properly paid. Is any of that really too much to ask? Fix these issues, and I’ll stop putting quotation marks around “AI”.

Google is preparing to let you run Linux apps on Android, just like Chrome OS

Engineers at Google started work on a new Terminal app for Android a couple of weeks ago. This Terminal app is part of the Android Virtualization Framework (AVF) and contains a WebView that connects to a Linux virtual machine via a local IP address, allowing you to run Linux commands from the Android host. Initially, you had to manually enable this Terminal app using a shell command and then configure the Linux VM yourself. However, in recent days, Google began work on integrating the Terminal app into Android as well as turning it into an all-in-one app for running a Linux distro in a VM. ↫ Mishaal Rahman at Android Authority There already are a variety of ways to do this today, but having it as a supported feature implemented by Google is very welcome. This is also going to greatly increase the number of spammy articles and lazy YouTube videos telling you how to “run Ubuntu on your phone”, which I’m not particularly looking forward to.

The Critical Role of Cart and Payment in App and Brand Design

A cart and payment process is a critical yet often overlooked part of the user journey that can make or break an ecommerce app. From the outset, cart design, user experience and flexible payment options should be at the top of the agenda for digital brands wanting to drive conversions. Understanding User Intent When users add items to their carts, they have shown a clear intent to purchase. To complete that transaction, the following checkout process needs to be as easy and seamless for them as possible. Higher abandonment rates occur due to unnecessary friction caused by a confusing interface, complicated payment flows, and the absence of preferred payment methods, among other things. Studies show that 76% of online shopping carts are eventually abandoned, and clunky checkout design is a big part of this. The cart and payment section is the last step in persuading users to buy. An optimized experience directly correlates with higher conversion rates and more revenue. Key Aspects to Optimize There are 3 key aspects of the cart and checkout process that need to be optimized for conversion-focused brands: 1. Cart Design and User Experience The cart should provide a simple, visual summary of items added for purchase along with quantity selected and total order value. Allowing users to easily edit item properties, apply discounts, and estimate shipping simplifies what can be an anxiety inducing process, especially on mobile. Advanced features like saved carts for returning users further facilitate purchases. Offering guest checkout alongside account creation streamlines the process for first-time customers. 2. Flexible Payment Options Research shows that cart abandonment is reduced on sites that offer preferred payment methods. The more payment modes you enable, the higher the chances that users will find an option they trust and feel comfortable with. Major credit cards, mobile wallets, Buy Now Pay Later schemes, bank transfers, and other must have options; location based popular payment methods like Sofort, iDeal if you are selling across geographies. PCI-compliant integration with payment gateways such as Stripe and PayPal unlocks multiple payment methods while additionally ensuring transaction and sensitive user data security. Discover how to add payment gateway in app to enhance the payment capabilities of your mobile app. 3. Testing and Optimization No cart experience is perfect out of the box. Running A/B tests by tweaking design elements, flows, payment options, etc., provides data-backed insights on what users respond best to. Tools like Hotjar record user sessions directly in your live cart which surfaces pain points that can then be fixed. Analytics dashboards reveal drop off rates at each step, average order values and other trends that indicate scope for improvement if benchmarked periodically. Examples of Brands with Great Cart Experiences Some standout examples of brands that ace the cart and payment process: 1. Made.com Made.com offers a clean, distraction free cart with focus on only relevant details like items added, shipping estimates, order total, discounts and gift cards applied. Purchasing without account creation can be done through their guest checkout and the option to save details for faster repeat orders. At checkout, there are multiple payment methods clearly presented, along with clear messaging around security and returns policy – both essential to gain user trust for a furniture brand. 2. Bolt.com Bolt presents users with a single-page visual cart that provides details of services (food, rides, etc.) along with associated quantities, pricing and taxes. Pre-added tips can be edited before seamlessly checking out via integrated payment partner Stripe. Discounts and promo codes can also be applied directly on this page. The cart is optimized for speed, which is in line with Bolt’s brand promise of efficient deliveries and payments. 3. Amazon Amazon offers the gold standard for guided cart experiences, with persistent visibility into items added for purchase, alerts on discounts and delivery estimates. Their patented one-click buying option removes friction, allowing power users to skip checkout. However, multiple payment methods, including COD and EMI schemes, make it accessible for first-time buyers, too. The entire purchase process is geared towards user convenience, distilled through decades of testing and user data. Designing a Cart Experience from Scratch Creating an effective cart experience requires understanding user psychology, buyer journeys, and an iterative design approach. Here is a step-by-step process to follow: 1. Define Goals and Outcomes First, define what a successful cart and checkout flow needs to achieve from a business point of view. Typical goals include: So that design choices align with business impact and tie these to overall revenue and growth goals. 2. Map the Existing User Journey Analyze data around existing user behavior across the checkout process, e.g.: The above can be gleaned from tools such as Google Analytics and Hotjar. 3. Competitor Benchmarking Look at how competitor brands within your industry offer study cart experiences. Find out what flows, or features appeal most to users. For example, they can provide guest checkout or Apple/Google Pay for mobility apps or BNPL options for D2C brands. The right cart design combines learnings from data and real-world behavior. 4. Create and Test Hypotheses Using what has been researched so far, imagine what cart element and flow changes could positively impact your goals, e.g. Once you’ve tested these hypotheses with real users through interviews or prototypes, roll them out globally. Tools like UserTesting.com can be used to do quick user studies to find feedback.   Choosing the Right Payment Partner To allow flexible payment options, though, one must interface with a payment service provider.  Here are key aspects to evaluate when choosing a payment partner: The partner should advocate consistent checkout integration among several platforms, including web, mobile apps, POS systems, etc.  For businesses selling cross-border, the partner must offer payment acceptance using local methods in 100+ markets, multi-currency processing and DCC. Using 3D security, risk-based analysis, artificial intelligence, etc., payment partners guard transactions. You should choose a mate with advanced competence in this field. The partner should support integration with credit cards, the most popular mobile wallets, UPI, BNPL schemes and

Apple releases iOS/iPadOS 18, macOS 15, and a ton more

It’s Apple operating system release day, so if you’re in the Apple ecosystem, it’s like Christmas morning, but for your devices. The two major platforms are, of course, iOS/iPadOS 18: ‌iOS 18‌ adds new customization options for the Home Screen, with the option to arrange apps and widgets with open spaces and add new tints to app icons. Control Center has been entirely overhauled with support for multiple pages, third-party controls, and the option to put controls on the Lock Screen and activate them with the Action Button. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors And macOS 15: ‌macOS Sequoia‌ features iPhone Mirroring, which allows you to control and monitor your ‌iPhone‌ right from your Mac. You can use your ‌iPhone‌’s apps and get your ‌iPhone‌’s notifications all while your ‌iPhone‌ is tucked away and locked. Window tiling has been improved to make it easier to arrange multiple windows on your Mac’s display, and there are new keyboard and menu shortcuts for organizing your windows. In Safari, Highlights will now show you the information you want most from websites, and there’s a new Viewer mode for watching videos without distractions. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors It doesn’t stop there, though, as Apple also released watchOS 11, visionOS 2, tvOS 18, and the most import ant most hotly anticipated out of all of Apple’s platforms, HomePod Software 18. It’s genuinely kind of staggering how Apple manages to update all of these various platforms at the same time, each coming with a ton of new features and bugfixes, and ship them out to consumers – generally without any major issues or showstoppers. Especially in the case of iOS and macOS, that’s definitely a major difference with the Windows and Android worlds, where users are confronted with strict hardware requirements, lack of update availability altogether, or just stick with previous versions because the new versions contain tons of privacy or feature regressions. Do note that Apple’s AI/ML features announced during WWDC aren’t shipping yet, and that iPhone Mirroring is not available in the EU because someone told Tim Cook “no” and he threw a hissy fit.

NSA releases copy of internal lecture delivered by computing giant Rear Adm. Grace Hopper

In one of the more unique public proactive transparency record releases for the National Security Agency (NSA) to date, NSA has released a digital copy of a lecture that then-Capt. Grace Hopper gave agency employees on August 19, 1982. The lecture, “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People,” features Capt. Hopper discussing some of the potential future challenges of protecting information. She also provided valuable insight on leadership and her experiences breaking barriers in the fields of computer science and mathematics. ↫ NSA press release Digital preservation is about more than just code – it’s also about invaluable content like this. It seems rather uncouth to spend only a few lines on who Grace Hopper really is, since it’s your duty to know already, and she deserves a hell of a lot more than a few lines. If you don’t yet know who she is, her Wikipedia page is a good place to start. The speech in question has an interesting history, in that the only medium on which it was stored were 1-inch AMPEX tapes. The speech was originally given to NSA employees, but not even the damn NSA had the ability to access the recordings of the speech, and had to call in the National Archives and Records Administration’s help. The NARA managed to retrieve the footage from the tapes, and now here we are. This will make for some great weekend viewing.

End of the road: an AnandTech farewell

I hate this timeline. It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication. For better or worse, we’ve reached the end of a long journey – one that started with a review of an AMD processor, and has ended with the review of an AMD processor. It’s fittingly poetic, but it is also a testament to the fact that we’ve spent the last 27 years doing what we love, covering the chips that are the lifeblood of the computing industry. ↫ Ryan Smith at AnandTech This sudden loss is sending shockwaves through the industry, and rightfully so. AnandTech is a pillar, a cornerstone of hardware reporting, and one of the very few – possibly only – tech news outlet out there with such depth, quality, integrity, and restraint. I can’t think of any other outlet being as dedicated to proper benchmarking and hardware reviews as AnandTech was, and losing them is a huge loss for all of us. The cause is exactly what you’d expect, sadly. It’s simply not really possible to remain profitable writing in-depth hardware reviews and benchmarks, as the world has shifted to video, and advertising income has cratered. There’s tons of hints about AnandTech not wanting to embrace sensationalism and clickbaiting to increase revenue – they’d rather go out with class, and I admire and appreciate that greatly. It just goes to show how hard it is to keep your head above water in the current online publishing world without rampant clickbaiting and flashy videos. In a better, less monopolised world, AnandTech could thrive. Sadly, that’s not the timeline we’re in. As far as housekeeping goes, the site will remain up for now, but there’s no guarantee it’ll stay up forever. I’m sure countless people are already archiving the invaluable content AnandTech has produced over its 27 year run, including the forums. We shan’t lose what AnandTech has created.

When EV startups shut down, will their cars still work?

When one of China’s once-popular electric vehicle startups went bust, car owners encountered an unexpected problem: Their vehicles went “offline.” Richard Qian didn’t know what to expect when he heard that WM Motor, a Shanghai-based EV maker popular for its low prices, filed for bankruptcy in October 2023. He tried to drive his compact EX5 SUV as he normally would, but discovered that he could no longer log into WM Motor’s smartphone app, which remotely controlled the car lock and air conditioner. He also couldn’t see his car’s mileage and charging status on the dashboard. ↫ Tianyu Fang at rest of world Chinese car makers are heavily pushing to gain a foothold here in Sweden, it seems, as ads for these brands are popping up all over the place, and dealerships – although most likely not dedicated dealerships – are present even here in the Arctic high north. I have no idea how successful they are, as I don’t think I’ve ever seen one out in the wild, but with such massive presence they must be doing something right. Considering most of the cars they sell are electric, I assume if any of them go under, buyers would suffer the same issues as Qian did. Of course, EV startups aren’t exactly a China-only thing, but there are definitely more of them than there are non-Chinese ones, since even brands already well-established in China will effectively be startups again when entering the European or American markets. If an otherwise successful Chinese car maker doesn’t survive in Europe, the end result is the same as if it were a European EV startup: no dealer network, no spare parts, and most likely, no servers to run your EV app. This issue alone keeps me from taking EV startups – Chinese or otherwise – seriously until they’ve got several solid product generations under their belt. The idea of spending tens of thousands of euros on a car that randomly loses a bunch of its functionality because its brand went under sounds like a nightmare to me, especially since so many features are now shoveled into electronic black boxes, down to even the door handles. I’ll stick with established brands, for now.

Microsoft update breaks GRUB on dual-boot systems

Ah, secure boot, the bane of many running anything other than Windows. While it’s already been found to be utterly useless by now, it’s still a requirement for Windows 11, and ever since it became part of PCs about a decade or so ago, it’s been causing headaches for people who don’t use Windows. Yesterday, Microsoft released a patch for a two-year-old vulnerability in the GRUB bootloader, and while the company claimed it would only be installed on single-boot Windows machines, that clearly wasn’t the case as right after its release, people dual-booting Linux and Windows found their Linux installations unbootable. Tuesday’s update left dual-boot devices—meaning those configured to run both Windows and Linux—no longer able to boot into the latter when Secure Boot was enforced. When users tried to load Linux, they received the message: “Verifying shim SBAT data failed: Security Policy Violation. Something has gone seriously wrong: SBAT self-check failed: Security Policy Violation.” Almost immediately support and discussion forums lit up with ​​reports of the failure. ↫ Dan Goodin at Ars Technica The fix is both easy and hilarious: disable secure boot, and you’re good to go. You can also get a bit more technical and remove the SBAT installed by this update, but while that will allow you to keep booting with secure boot enabled, it will leave you vulnerable to the issue the SBAT was supposed to fix. The efficacy of secure boot in home environments is debatable, at best, and while I’m not going to advise anyone to just turn it off and forget about it, I think most OSNews readers can make an informed decision about secure boot by themselves. If you’re using corporate machines managed by your employer’s IT department, you obviously need to refer to them. Microsoft itself has not yet commented on this issue, and is not responding to questions from press outlets, so we’re currently in the dark about how such a game-breaking update got out in the wild. Regardless, this once again shows just how annoying secure boot is. In many cases, the boot problems people trying out Linux run into caused by secure boot, but of course, the blame is placed squarely on Linux, and not on secure boot itself being a hot mess.

Parents rage against new fee to keep their smart bassinets smart

But last month, that hand-me-down network was dealt a blow when Happiest Baby, the company that makes Snoo, began charging for access to some of the bassinet’s premium features — features that used to be available to Snoo users indefinitely, at no extra cost. Now, access to the app needed to lock in the bassinet’s rocking level, to track the baby’s sleep and to use the so-called weaning mode, among other features, will cost parents $20 a month. The change has angered secondhand users and original buyers alike. On Reddit, the new subscription model has prompted review bombs, group brainstorms for collective action and detailed instructions for outraged parents seeking recourse. Some have taken to filing complaints with the Federal Trade Commission, Better Business Bureau and state-run consumer protection offices. ↫ Sandra E. Garcia and Rachel Sherman at The New York Times My wife had our first baby a little over three years ago, and our second one a little over a year ago, and let me tell you – the amount of “smart” and “connected” stuff they sell targeted at babies and young parents is insane. The only “smart” thing we got was a camera that pipes sound to my phone and detects movement, and sends a notification to our phone so we can take a peek and see if everything’s alright. Our oldest has outgrown it, and our youngest doesn’t really need it, so it’s just being useless at the moment, fitted to the wall. It definitely improved our nights, though, since it made sure we would never have to get up for no reason. Other than that, we are very analog. I had heard of “smart” bassinets, but we didn’t think we needed one. That’s just our decision, though, and you can rightfully argue that using a camera and open microphone is not that different. All of these new “smart” tools are just that, tools, and can be useful and make your life just a little bit easier, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Being a parent of a newborn is hard enough as it is without outsiders judging you and pressuring you into doing things you don’t think are right, especially since you know your own newborn – and yourself – better than some random outsiders do. The Snoo is one of the more popular smart bassinets, apparently, and at an entry price of 1700 dollars it’s bonkers expensive. The thing is, though, as a new parent you know a lot of the stuff you buy has a relatively limited shelf life – they grow so fast – so you kind of take into account that you’ll be selling some of the more expensive stuff down the line to recoup some of the costs. We have an insanely expensive stroller from a Norwegian brand, because it needed to be able to handle the Arctic climate and its endless snow, including specialised wheels and tires for trudging through the snow. The resale value of these is quite decent, so we know we’ll get a decent part of the initial cost back, especially since we take extremely good care of it. And this is where the company that makes the Snoo, Happiest Baby, decided to screw over its customers. The company clearly realised the theoretical loss of revenue from the used market, and came up with this subscription model to lock in some of that theoretical revenue. However, since Happiest Baby always promised all of its features would work perpetually, this came as a huge shock to both buyers of used Snoo bassinets, as well as to parents intending to sell their Snoo, who now see their resale value plummet. The reasoning behind the sudden subscription model given by the company is absolutely wild. Harvey Karp, the founder and chief executive of Happiest Baby, defended the move as a business necessity. “We don’t have any dollar from the government, we don’t have a dollar from a university,” said Dr. Karp, a former pediatrician who created the Snoo after becoming frustrated with the lack of progress in reducing rates of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. “We have to sell products and bring in revenue to be able to get to this goal.” That goal, according to Dr. Karp, is “that everyone will have access to this, and it will be paid for not by your friend, but it will be paid for by your corporation, the government or your insurance company,” the way breast pumps are often covered. He also pointed to Happiest Baby’s efforts to make the Snoo available “in the inner city and in rural areas.” For many parents, however, paying into that ideal is of little comfort to their bottom line. ↫ Sandra E. Garcia and Rachel Sherman at The New York Times He’s basically stating that because he doesn’t get free money from the government, universities, customers’ employers, or insurance companies, he can’t make any profit off the Snoo products. He’s arguing that a $1700 bassinet with some sensors and chips is not a profitable product, which sounds absolutely like a flat-out lie to me. If he really can’t make a profit with such a price for such a product, there’s clearly something else wrong with the way the company is spending its money. Anyone who has ever watched Last Week Tonight with Jon Oliver knows just how many healthcare-related markets and businesses in the United States rely almost exclusively on government money through programs like Medicare and Medicaid, leading to an insane amount of scams and wasted money because there aren’t even remotely enough inspectors and related personnel to ensure such money is effectively spent, made worse by the fact such tasks are delegated to the states. This whole Snoo thing almost make me think Karp intended to profit off these often nebulous government money streams, but somehow failed to do so. I feel for the parents, though. They bought a product that didn’t include a hint of a subscription or paywalled features, and now they have