Chinese Tencent-owned company Riot Games installs rootkit on every League of Legends players’ computer
With 14.9, Vanguard, Riot’s proprietary Anti-Cheat system will be deployed and active in League of Legends. This means that active enforcement of Vanguard will be in effect and working hard to make sure your queues are free from scripters, botters, and cheaters! We recently released a blog detailing the “why” behind bringing Vang … ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint: non-GNOME GTK desktop environments need to work together in the face of libadwaita
Anyone who has spent any time recently using non-GNOME GTK desktop environments, like Cinnamon, MATE, or Xfce, has had to deal with the unfortunate reality of a lot of GTK applications becoming GNOME applications instead, using GNOME’s own libadwaita. These applications are hard to theme, and do not integrate at all with the proper GTK applicati … ⌘ Read more

Redox gets USB HID support
Another month, another detailed report about the progress made in Redox, the Rust-based operating system. A major improvements this month is support for USB HID, allowing USB keyboards and mice to work on Redox, but the project does note USB hubs are still problematic and might not work properly. Thanks to these USB improvements, Redox’ desktop environment Orbital now also ran on ARM64 in Qemu for the first time, which is a great step towards running it on real ARM64 hardware. … ⌘ Read more

You can’t just assume UTF-8
Humans speak countless different languages. Not only are these languages incompatible, but runtime transpilation is a real pain. Sadly, every standardisation initiative has failed. At least there is someone to blame for this state-of-affairs: God. It was him, after-all, who cursed humanity to speak different languages, in an early dispute over a controversial property development. However, mankind can only blame itself for the fact that computers struggle to talk to each other … ⌘ Read more

A few facts about POSIX
Over 35 years ago, these problems with software portability led to the emergence of the first POSIX standard in 1988. The acronym was coined by Richard Stallman, who added “X” to the end of Portable Operating System Interface. It’s meant to provide a specification of the interface that different Unix operating systems should have in common, including programming languages and tools. It’s important to note that the interface is portable, and not the implementation. ↫ vorakl While POSI … ⌘ Read more

RISC-V support in Android just got a big setback
Although Google has shown significant progress in recent weeks in improving RISC-V support in Android, it seems that we’re still quite a bit away from seeing RISC-V hardware running certified builds of Android. Earlier today, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google who, according to their LinkedIn, leads the Android Systems Team and works on Android’s Linux kernel fork, submitted a series of patches to AOSP that “remove ACK’s suppo … ⌘ Read more

JMP: this week’s sponsor
JMP is a fully FOSS service providing a way to get a real phone number that operates over the internet using XMPP. They provide numbers in the USA and Canada with everything you need to access SMS/MMS/etc. and voice calls using your XMPP (or SIP) clients of choice across all your devices. They are committed to growing the use of open communications technology such as XMPP, ultimately working to help people move their communication off the unencrypted telephone network and onto the fe … ⌘ Read more

9front “DO NOT INSTALL” released
There’s a new 9front release! So, what exactly is 9front, you may ask? Well, after it became clear that Bell Labs wasn’t doing much with plan9, a group of developers took matters into their own hands and created 9front, a fork of plan9. Their latest release is called DO NOT INSTALL, and brings things like more USB audio support, DNS over TLS, WiFi support for the Raspberry Pi, I2C support, and much more. I’m not particularly well-versed in the world of plan9, and more … ⌘ Read more

run0: a systemd-based, more secure replacement for sudo
Lennart Poettering, main developer of systemd, has announced run0, a systemd-based replacement for the well-known sudo command that fixes many of he inherent issues with the widely used tool to gain temporary elevated privileges. There are various problems with sudo, which basically come down to that it’s a large SUID binary, meaning it consists of privileged code that unprivileged users can run from their own context. This … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft At Work
Well, this was a wild goose chase of a read. J. B. Crawford dove into the history of something I’ve never heard of – Microsoft At Work – and came away with a story that’ while clearer thanks to his research, is still frustratingly nebulous. I’m still not entirely sure what Microsoft At Work really was, but I think it had the goal of running Windows on communications devices like faxes, to make it easier to share and work on documents across various devices. Crawford did a lot of digging, and eve … ⌘ Read more

The first video game, Spacewar!, on the DEC PDP-1 in your browser
This is a virtual DEC PDP-1 (emulated in HTML5/JavaScript) running the original code of “Spacewar!”, the earliest known digital video game. If available, use gamepads or joysticks for authentic gameplay — the game was originally played using custom “control boxes”. Spacewar! was conceived in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen. It was first realized on the PDP-1 in 1962 by Stephen … ⌘ Read more

Windows NT and NetWare on PA-RISC, and a HP-UX port to x86
Back when I was working on my article about PA-RISC, HP-UX, and UNIX workstations in general, I made extensive use of OpenPA, Paul Weissmann’s invaluable and incredibly detailed resource about HP’s workstation efforts, HP-UX, and tons of related projects and products. Weissmann’s been doing some serious digging, and has unearthed details about a number of essentially forgotten operating system efforts. First, it tur … ⌘ Read more

GNOME Foundation in financial trouble
As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss – ie spending more than we’ve been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations received 4-5 years ago. The Foundation has a reserves policy which specifies a minimum amount of money we have to keep in our accounts. This is so that if there is a significant interruption to our usual incom … ⌘ Read more

A BSD person tries Alpine Linux
In February last year I wrote about running a FreeBSD desktop, and concluded that sometimes you need to give yourself permission to tinker. Well recently I’ve started tinkering with Alpine Linux! It’s been recommended to me for years, so I’m finally getting around to checking it out. There’s a lot to like if you come from BSD, which we’ll dig into here. ↫ Ruben Schade Just a quick look at this unexpectedly popular Linux distribution that really has its own identity. ⌘ Read more

Sculpt OS 24.04 released with initial suspend/resume support, new audio stack, and much more
The Genode project has released Sculpt OS 24.04, the general purpose desktop operating system based on the Genode OS Framework. This release is absolutely jam-packed with new features, improvements, and changes, and it’s hard to know where to begin. One of the biggest new features is support for suspend/resume, an experimental feature for now, for wh … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft intends to record everything you do on your PC for “AI” processing
Microsoft is about to go even more hog-wild with “AI” in Windows, as it intends to start recording everything you do on your Windows computer so “AI” features can find stuff for you. According to my sources, AI Explorer will run in the background and capture everything you do on your computer. It will document and triage everything it sees, no matter what apps or interfaces you’re … ⌘ Read more

How not to release historic source code
Regarding the release of the MS-DOS 4.00 source code, Michal Necasek makes an excellent point about how just dumping the code in git is a terrible and destructive way to release older source code. It’s terrific that the source code for DOS 4.00/4.01 was released! But don’t expect to build the source code mutilated by git without problems. Historic source code should be released simply as an archive of files, ZIP or tar or 7z or whatever, with all times … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft open-sources MS-DOS 4.00, releases early beta of MS-DOS 4.0 (multitasking)
Today, in partnership with IBM and in the spirit of open innovation, we’re releasing the source code to MS-DOS 4.00 under the MIT license. There’s a somewhat complex and fascinating history behind the 4.0 versions of DOS, as Microsoft partnered with IBM for portions of the code but also created a branch of DOS called Multitasking DOS that did not see a wide release. … ⌘ Read more

Corporate greed from Apple and Google have destroyed the passkey future
William Brown, developer of webauthn-rs, has written a scathing blog post detailing how corporate interests – namely, Apple and Google – have completely and utterly destroyed the concept of passkeys. The basic gist is that Apple and Google were more interested in control and locking in users than in providing a user-friendly passwordless future, and in doing so have made passkeys effective … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS released
It wasn’t too long ago that new Ubuntu releases were major happenings in the Linux world, as it was the default Linux distribution for many, both old and newcomers, in the desktop Linux space. These days, Ubuntu release hit a little different, with Canonical’s focus having shifted much more to the enterprise, and several aspects of the distribution being decidedly unpopular, like the snap package management system. Still, Ubuntu is probably still one of the most popular, if not t … ⌘ Read more

The only viable Android and iOS competitor intends to leave China and go global
Huawei plans to expand its native HarmonyOS smartphone platform worldwide, despite coming under US-led sanctions that have deprived it of access to key technologies. The Chinese tech megacorp released its own phone platform in 2019, the same year that US sanctions blocked Huawei from having further access to Google’s Android software to power its devices. More recently, the … ⌘ Read more

Palm OS and the devices that ran it
But just as smartphones would do, PDAs offered a dizzying array of operating systems and applications, and a great many of them ran Palm OS. (I bought my first Palm, an m505, new in 2001, upgrading from an HP 95LX.) Naturally, there’s no way we could enumerate every single such device in this article. So in this Ars retrospective, we’ll look back at some notable examples of the technical evolution of the Palm operating system and the devices that ran it—and ho … ⌘ Read more

Google postpones phasing out third party cookies in Chrome once more
While Firefox and Safari phased out third party cookies years ago, it’s taking Chrome a bit longer because, well, daddy Google got ads to sell. As such, Google has been developing a complicated new alternative to third party cookies that it calls “Privacy sandbox”, a name in the vain of “Greenland”. This process has not exactly been going well, because Google has had to postpone phasing out thir … ⌘ Read more

Snapdragon X Plus will bring ARM to ‘even more’ Windows laptops
While it’s still yet to debut, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite is looking like a big deal for ARM-powered Windows machines and, now, it’s getting a more affordable cousin in the Snapdragon X Plus. Announced today, Snapdragon X Plus is based on the same Oryon CPU as Snapdragon X Elite, just with a bit less power. The chip has 10 cores to the Elite’s 12, and is also clocked down from the Elite’s 3.8GHz to 3.4GH … ⌘ Read more

US Senate passes TikTok ban bill
A bill that would force China-based company ByteDance to sell TikTok — or else face a US ban of the platform — is all but certain to become law after the Senate passed a foreign aid package including the measure. It now heads to President Joe Biden, who already committed to signing the TikTok legislation should it make it through both chambers of Congress. The House passed the foreign aid package that includes the TikTok bill on Saturday. ↫ Lauren Feiner at The Verg … ⌘ Read more