This December, if there’s one tech New Year’s resolution I’d encourage you to have, it’s switching to the only remaining ethical web browser, Firefox. According to recent posts on social media, Firefox’s market share is slipping. We should not let that happen. Roy Tanck I mean, yes, obviously, but how depressing is it that the only choice we have is between a browser made by Google, and a browser kept afloat by Google money? Where’s the real sustainable alternative?
You probably all know Gentoo Linux as your favourite source-based distribution. Did you know that our package manager, Portage, already for years also has support for binary packages, and that source- and binary-based package installations can be freely mixed? To speed up working with slow hardware and for overall convenience, we’re now also offering binary packages for download and direct installation! For most architectures, this is limited to the core system and weekly updates – not so for amd64 and arm64 however. There we’ve got a stunning >20 GByte of packages on our mirrors, from LibreOffice to KDE Plasma and from Gnome to Docker. Gentoo stable, updated daily. Enjoy! Gentoo’s official news This is not as big of a deal as I feel like it should be. Gentoo is special, unique, and exists outside of the usual realm of distribution competition. Gentoo offering a binary method of installation makes perfect sense, I doubt anyone will complain, and nothing much will change. Yet, it feels like it should be a bigger deal?
Pink-haired Aitana Lopez is followed by more than 200,000 people on social media. She posts selfies from concerts and her bedroom, while tagging brands such as hair care line Olaplex and lingerie giant Victoria’s Secret. Brands have paid about $1,000 a post for her to promote their products on social media—despite the fact that she is entirely fictional. Aitana is a “virtual influencer” created using artificial intelligence tools, one of the hundreds of digital avatars that have broken into the growing $21 billion content creator economy. Christina Criddle for Ars Technica While there’s a ton of questions to be asked about where, exactly, this could lead, and what “AI” will mean for especially women having their likeness recreated as “AI” avatars for people to sleaze over, or worse, the concept of having “AI” influencers doing fairly mundane and harmless things like promote a brand or show some fake photos of their apartments seems fairly benign and even interesting and beneficial to me. Of course, I say this with all the caveats that this is incredibly early days, we have no idea if there are any shady businesses behind these new “AI” influencers, and so on, and so forth. We’ve all seen what technology such as this can be used for, and it ain’t pretty.
We’re hearing more about this recently because the transition is picking up steam. X11’s maintainers have announced an end to its maintenance. Plasma is going Wayland by default, following GNOME. Fedora is dropping X11 support entirely. We’re in the part of the transition where people who haven’t thought about it at all are starting to do so and realizing that 100% of the pieces needed for their specific use cases aren’t in place yet. This is good! Them being heard is how stuff happens. I wish it had happened sooner, but we are where we are, and there are a lot of recent proposals and work around things like remote control, color management, drawing tablet support, and window positioning. There will probably be an awkward period before all of these pieces are in place for all of the people. And for the those who really do suffer from showstopping omissions, I say keep using X11 until it’s resolved. No one’s stopping you. Nate Graham at Pointie Stick Will all the people who both can and want to work on X.org please raise their hands? Oh, no hands? What a shame.
In August, word leaked out that The New York Times was considering joining the growing legion of creators that are suing AI companies for misappropriating their content. The Times had reportedly been negotiating with OpenAI regarding the potential to license its material, but those talks had not gone smoothly. So, eight months after the company was reportedly considering suing, the suit has now been filed. The Times is targeting various companies under the OpenAI umbrella, as well as Microsoft, an OpenAI partner that both uses it to power its Copilot service and helped provide the infrastructure for training the GPT Large Language Model. But the suit goes well beyond the use of copyrighted material in training, alleging that OpenAI-powered software will happily circumvent the Times’ paywall and ascribe hallucinated misinformation to the Times. John Timmer at Ars Technica OpenAI and similar companies are giant copyright infringement machines, and tools like GitHub Copilot are open source license violations at an industrial scale never before seen. They need to face a reckoning for their illegal behaviour, and need to start asking creators – of journalism, of art, of code – for permission to use their works, just like anybody else needs to do. “AI” needs to play by the rules, or get steamrolled by the justice system.
A new Windows Update feature could be a game-changer for those scared of losing files or pictures when attempting to reinstall or recover their Windows 11 installations. The new feature, “Fix Problems using Windows Update,” lets you reinstall Windows 11 using Windows Update. The idea is to repair the existing Windows installation by downloading a fresh copy of the OS from Windows Update. And the best part? It won’t remove any files, settings, or apps, according to a support document from July 2023. Mayank Parmar for Windows Latest If it works as advertised, it sounds like a useful feature. I wouldn’t trust Windows Update with anything more valuable than a used toothpick, but if you’re already using Windows, that ship sailed anyway, in which case this is better than nothing.
Pastel cities trapped in a timeless future-past. Empty apartments drenched in nostalgia. Classic convertibles speeding into a low-res sunset. Femme fatales and mutated monsters doing battle. Deep, dark dungeons and glittering star ships floating in space. All captured in a eerie palette of 4096 colours and somehow, you’re sure, from some alternate 1980s world you can’t quite remember… Biz Davis The PC-98 is exotic, and a little bit mysterious. Of course, thanks to the internet, abundant emulation options, detailed YouTube videos, and more, all the information is out there – but I still find that the PC-98 carries with it an air of mystery.
In the November 1980 issue of BYTE, the publication reported that Microsoft signed an agreement with Western Electric for the rights to develop and market UNIX from Bell Laboratories. The version of UNIX from Microsoft was to be specifically for the PDP-11, the Intel 8086, the Zilog Z8000, and the Motorola 68000, and its name was XENIX. Its major selling points were that it was supposed to be available for 16 bit microcomputers and that it would have MS BASIC, FORTRAN, and COBOL which were already widespread. Bradford Morgan White The story of Xenix, Microsoft’s UNIX.
Japan is preparing regulations that would require tech giants like Apple and Google to allow outside app stores and payments on their mobile operating systems, Nikkei has learned, in a bid to curb abuse of their dominant position in the Japanese market. Legislation slated to be sent to the parliament in 2024 would restrict moves by platform operators to keep users in the operators’ own ecosystems and shut out rivals, focusing mainly on four areas: app stores and payments, search, browsers, and operating systems. Ryohei Yasoshima and Riho Nagao for Nikkei Asia All around the world, the walls are closing in on these big tech monopolies. It’s a Christmas miracle.
The split between /bin and /sbin is not useful, and also unused. The original split was to have “important” binaries statically linked in /sbin which could then be used for emergency and rescue operations. Obviously, we don’t do static linking anymore. Later, the split was repurposed to isolate “important” binaries that would only be used by the administrator. While this seems attractive in theory, in practice it’s very hard to categorize programs like this, and normal users routinely invoke programs from /sbin. Most programs that require root privileges for certain operations are also used when operating without privileges. And even when privileges are required, often those are acquired dynamically, e.g. using polkit. Since many years, the default $PATH set for users includes both directories. With the advent of systemd this has become more systematic: systemd sets $PATH with both directories for all users and services. So in general, all users and programs would find both sets of binaries. Proposal on the Fedora wiki I think Arch already made this move a while ago, and it seems to make sense to me. There’s a lot of needless, outdated cruft in the directory structure of most Linux distributions that ought to be cleaned up, and it seems a lot more distributions have started taking on this task recently.
The venerable Enlightenment project has pushed out a new release, one mainly focused on bug fixes. There are a few new features, too, however, such as a watchdog thread, enabled by default, to detect mainloop hangs, bigger task previews, an API to play sounds for notifications, a DDC option in backlight settings, and a lot more.
Microsoft’s plan to end support for Windows 10 operating system could result in about 240 million personal computers being disposed, potentially adding to landfill waste, Canalys Research said. The electronic waste from these PCs could weigh an estimated 480 million kilograms, equivalent to 320,000 cars. While many PCs could remain functional for years post the end of OS support, Canalys warned demand for devices without security updates could be low. Akash Sriram for Reuters A lot of these machines are perfectly capable of running Windows 11 if not for Microsoft’s artificial restrictions, and while less relevant – most people can’t just switch to Linux or BSD – there are alternative operating systems to keep these machines going. The only good thing that might come of this is a flurry of cheap, usable hardware on the second hand market, which can be used by us enthusiasts for all kinds of things.
KWin now supports ICC profiles: In display settings you can set one for each screen, and KWin will use that to adjust the colors accordingly. The Plasma 6 beta is already shipping with that implementation in KWin, and with a few additional steps you can play most HDR capable games in the Wayland session. Xaver Hugl I’ll admit colour management and HDR is a bit outside my wheelhouse, but I do know both are essentially vital for quite a few digital professions, and that support for them on Wayland specifically has been subpar or missing entirely. It seems progress is being made on these topics, and that’s good news.
I also had another set of addressable lights on my desk. While decorating my office for Christmas, I decided to invest some time in connecting them to Home Assistant using the BJ_LED code as a template. It should have been straightforward, right? Well, yes, but also no. Will Cooke We all love a good reverse-engineering story, especially if it involves bricking Christmas lights.
And the culling of Windows features continues. Windows Mixed Reality is deprecated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. This deprecation includes the Mixed Reality Portal app, and Windows Mixed Reality for SteamVR and Steam VR Beta. Microsoft’s “Deprecated features for Windows client” page All this mixed reality stuff was a big push in Windows, up to the point Microsoft added applications and dedicated folders for it to Windows. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone use any of it. The Verge notes Microsoft has been downsizing its VR efforts for a while now, and it seems the company is bailing on the VR hypetrain.
Advertisements are a part of our lives, including our digital ones. They are in the websites we browse, the search results we receive, and the online news we read. Tired of receiving so many ads, some users try to avoid them by installing an adblocker. But is this a legal practice? Is using adblockers an act of restricting market autonomy, or do they help achieve user freedom? Imagine a scenario where website owners hold copyright over their websites, including whatever ads they place, and could effectively sue for copyright infringement if users were to remove or suppress ads when visiting these websites. This hypothetical situation would enable any website copyright holder to use the legal system to stop any ordinary user on the internet who tries to bypass these ads. This would lead to an internet where unsolicited information and advertisements are imposed on users. Fortunately, recent court decisions have at least prevented this hypothetical from becoming a reality in Germany. FSFE Good. My position has always been clear: your computer, your rules. Block ads to your heart’s content. Even on OSAlert – block away if you want. There are far better ways to support us, anyway (Patreon, Ko-Fi, Liberapay, merch).
CP/M is an operating system dating to the mid-1970s that found its niche giving cheap 8-bit home computers the flexibility, if not the power, of expensive workstations. The Brother SuperPowerNote was a fancy and “very weird” portable typewriter from the early 1990s. David Given ported the former to the latter, creating a freakishly versatile laptop. The source code is on github! Rob Beschizza And now I’m browsing eBay for electronic/digital typewriters again. There’s so many of them! And they all look so awesome and fun! Please stop me! One day I’ll finally pull the trigger.
So what can you do with it? Well, let’s first address the elephant in the room – the internet is still lousy on OS 9. Despite Cameron Kaiser’s genius effort put into his Classilla browser project, he’s pretty much squeezed every ounce of usability from the now 20+ year old underlying networking frameworks. A lot of websites still render “ok” in the browser, but most of the modern web will simply cause it to spit back an error. Also, file sharing with other machines on your network takes a bit more forethought these days as OS 9’s implementation of AppleTalk will only work with OS X versions up to 10.4 Tiger. In Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and later, AppleTalk will not function at all without some difficult technical workarounds, so a “bridge” Mac is generally recommended (for those not familiar with that term – bridge Macs are machines that can handle both legacy and modern technologies and can be networked between both old and new hardware). It is also possible to wring out a bit more usability by setting up a web proxy such as macHTTP and running a small Netatalk server on one of your modern Macs (this is something I’d like to feature in the future). Adam Goff at Low End Mac Running Mac OS 9 today has become somewhat of a rite of passage for retrocomputing and operating system nerds (…2006), and every few years a new article about the experience makes the rounds. For good reason, too – OS 9 is fun, quirky, has tons of software to play around with, and still looks and feels great.
Plasma 6 is coming together nicely on the desktop! Coming back from hiatus, I was pleasantly greeted by a much more working session than when I last saw it in May; I have now completely switched over to it on my main machine! On the other hand, there is still a lot of work to do on mobile to prepare it for the Plasma 6 release in February. I will outline the current situation and the work I have done in the past few months in order to make Plasma 6 a possibility for Plasma Mobile. Devin at espi.dev The linked blog post provides a great overview of the work that is being done and needs to be done on Plasma Mobile for Plasma 6, and I have to say that it’s definitely looking good and I’m quite interested is somehow giving Plasma Mobile a go. The problem, however, is one that’s all too familiar to anyone who’s tried to run anything but Android or iOS as their main mobile operating system over the past 15 years or so: the lack of the kind of applications that you need to be a part of modern society. I don’t like it, but without my banking applications, identity applications I need in Sweden, things like WhatsApp, Signal, Discord – my phone would basically be a curious toy instead of a useful tool. Add needing the best possible smartphone camera to the equation – I have two small kids – and using anything but iOS and Android is simply out of the question. One alternative smartphone operating system knew this, and implemented fairly transparent Android application compatibility – Sailfish – through their Aliendalvik tool. It seems Jonas Dressler, who works on GNOME Shell for mobile, was curious, and decided to take a closer look at Aliendalvik, to see if there’s anything there that the teams working on bringing KDE and GNOME to smartphones can make something of it. Sadly, Aliendalvik is not open source, so some reverse-engineering was required. The interesting thing here is that due to the fairly standard userspace Sailfish is using, the Android integration is mostly using standard freedesktop APIs to integrate with the host OS: Running Android apps are exposed as individual Wayland surfaces/windows, notifications from Android appear as org.freedesktop.Notification messages on DBus, music player controls are exposed using MPRIS, and even text input for android apps can be provided using the Wayland text input protocol. This means that basically Aliendalvik should work just as well on a standard Linux distribution like Fedora, Arch Linux, or Debian. The Android container can be started using standard linux container tooling and the host integration binaries are compiled for ARM64 and mostly link to various open source Qt libraries. Jonas Dressler After a few days of reverse-engineering, hacking, and lots of other hard work, Dressler managed to get Aliendalvik to work on GNOME Shell running on Arch on a smartphone, with all the integration between the Android applicatins and the underlying Arch installation working, and the code and instructions are up on Github. He also posted a video showing it working, and it’s indeed as impressive as it sounds. Sadly, the elephant in the room here is, of course, the fact that Aliendalvik is not open source. Jolla could potentially offer it for purchase on non-Sailfish Linux-based smartphones, or perhaps even release it as open source entirely, but I’m not entirely sure if Jolla would be interested in any of that. The company is… In a bit of an odd state, and I feel like it’s mostly been in limbo with not as much progress as they once hoped they’d make. Releasing one of their crown jewels as open source seems unlikely. My personal conviction is that if we ever want a Linux smartphone that is somewhat viable but isn’t Android, it’s going to have to be either Plasma Mobile or GNOME Shell on mobile, running on one of the popular, mainstream distributions that already run on ARM, are interested in mobile, and have a huge community to power the whole thing. Things like Sailfish or even Ubuntu Touch, as interesting and impressive as they are, just don’t seem viable to me in the long term when the entirety of the KDE and GNOME communities are working on their own projects.
One of the changes Google is forced to make because of the antitrust trial vs. Epic concerns how sideloading works on Android. Right now, sideloading an app on Android requires users to open an APK and, if the source app is not already approved, follow a link to settings where that option can be enabled before they can return to the installation process. Following the changes outlined in this settlement, Android will be required to simplify this process by condensing it down to one screen. Android will still be able to outline the risks of sideloading on this screen, but it will be a one-step process. The new screen will say: Ben Schoon at 9to5Google I’m not sure if this is a better approach. The way I have sideloading set up on my Android devices is that only File, Google’s file manager for Android, is allowed to install any APK, so even if, for some reason, I download a harmful APK accidentally through a phishing email or my browser, it will just sit inert in my downloads folder until I were to actively open Files and install said APK. It’s safeguard I most likely don’t need, but I do like having installing APKs limited to just the Google file manager for my own peace of mind. This change would, if I’m reading things correctly, make it so that any application can more easily be given the permission to install APKs, which seems like it’s not going to encourage many more people to intentionally sideload, but will perhaps make people accidentally grant random applications the permission to do so. It’s an odd change, for sure, and I hope there’s some way to disable this if Google implements this outside of the US as well.
