Now that we have the MenuetOS 64 disk image file (M6414490.IMG), it is time to analyze! We will analyze the image file both statically and dynamically. Static analysis is reading and analyzing code without running it, whereas dynamic analysis is running the code and watching how it changes registers and memory during execution. Each analysis mode compliments the other; there are some things that can only be discerned through code execution, like register values or stack layout at a specific point in time during execution. Static analysis is useful for “filling in the blanks” when executing code to understand what the code should do next (or just did). Since MenuetOS 64 is written in Intel x64 assembly, our static analysis will consist of memory mapped disassembly in Ghidra. After reading this post, readers should understand how to launch a MenuetOS 64 virtual machine using QEMU as well as how to attach a debugger (gdb) to QEMU in order to debug while code is executing. Also, readers should understand how MenuetOS 64 begins the boot process as control of execution is passed to MenuetOS 64 code from the virtualization firmware. Nicholas Starke This is an old post – from late 2022 – but a great read nonetheless, and considering MenuetOS doesn’t change very much from year to year, it’s still mostly relevant.

We haven’t been hearing much out of the Fuchsia team anymore after said team was hit hard by the Google layoffs, but we’ve got some news so my fancy Fuchsia database category doesn’t go entirely to waste. As Phoronix highlights, Fuchsia support is being upstreamed to Mesa 3D, indicating that no, Fuchsia is not entirely dead. This adds fairly standard support for Fuchsia in src/util. It’s being used in downstream forks of Lavapipe and it’s useful for gfxstream-vk. The idea is to incrementally merge these obvious changes to help reduce the patch load until someone has time to upstream the full driver. Gurchetan Singh As you can tell from the language here, we’re dealing with the first experimental steps, and a lot more work is required before full Fuchsia support can be added to Mesa 3D, as further evidenced by the various friendly conversations attached to the merge request. After some small changes to the code here and there, the code was merged a few days later, so it seems the process can continue. It used to be quite easy to predict where Fuchsia was going, since pretty much every indication was that Google had grand ideas for the project, and consequently, the Fuchsia team was large, staffed with well-known names, and the kind of progress we saw all pointed towards a role for Fuchsia on smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops, and perhaps even beyond. There was a real sense that Google intended to almost silently replace the Linux base with Fuchsia in Android, and all the technologies to do so were either in place or actively being worked on. Then came Google’s massive layoffs, though, and the Fuchsia team was hit proportionally harder than other teams, and now, it’s not so clear anymore what the future has in store for this custom operating system. Several Fuchsia-related efforts were wound down, from no longer porting Chrome to Fuchsia to killing Fuchsia smart speaker efforts. This was one of the few truly interesting projects inside Google, and it presented a real chance that we might see a new major operating system enter the market, for the first time in decades. Alas, Google gonna Google.

I bought a Topton GM1 Industrial Mini PC for my HomeLab. It is aimed at running Slackware Linux but I wanted to have a quick look at how well BSD OSes support it out-of-the-box. Joel Carnat That’s really all there’s to this story. I just really, really love tiny industrial and office computers and thin clients, and every time I see another one for sale I really have to stop myself from buying one I have absolutely no use for. There’s just something about how these little guys are built that speaks to me – they’re different than regular PCs, but only marginally so, making them fun to play around with, getting drivers for everything, seeing if Linux and BSD have any issues with it, and so on. They’re also often fanless, which is a major boon. The Dell thin client I wrote about last week has been run through a gauntlet of operating systems to see just how capable it is, and I’m surprise by just how much you can do even with a pedestrian Pentium Silver. For now it’s running Fedora GNOME to get an idea how the most default of default Linux environments performs and feels – so I can include it in future articles about it – but I think I’m going to set it up as a retrogaming console using Batocera. Industrial, office, and thin client computers are just fun to play around with, and they’re incredibly cheap when buying used. If things like a Raspberry Pi are hard to get, backordered, or overpriced due to demand outstripping supply, it’s definitely a good idea to see if you can find some cast-off thin client or whatever for your project instead.

I’ve barely scratched the surface, but there’s enough here for me to seriously consider a switch to it as my primary Linux distro for testing and servers. I love that htop(1) and lsof(1) only shows a small list of recognisable processes, that it uses OpenRC, that package management seems straight forward, and that it’s so simple to configure. I’ve wondered what a modern, functional “Occam’s Linux” would look like. This is it. Ruben Schade Alpine is very popular among people inclined towards BSD, but who still want to run Linux as well – and it’s easy to see why when you try it out or read about it. This article is a good jumping-off point for those of you curious about Alpine.

The short version is this: In its current form, Recall takes screenshots and uses OCR to grab the information on your screen; it then writes the contents of windows plus records of different user interactions in a locally stored SQLite database to track your activity. Data is stored on a per-app basis, presumably to make it easier for Microsoft’s app-exclusion feature to work. Beaumont says “several days” of data amounted to a database around 90KB in size. In our usage, screenshots taken by Recall on a PC with a 2560×1440 screen come in at 500KB or 600KB apiece (Recall saves screenshots at your PC’s native resolution, minus the taskbar area). Recall works locally thanks to Azure AI code that runs on your device, and it works without Internet connectivity and without a Microsoft account. Data is encrypted at rest, sort of, at least insofar as your entire drive is generally encrypted when your PC is either signed into a Microsoft account or has Bitlocker turned on. But in its current form, Beaumont says Recall has “gaps you can drive a plane through” that make it trivially easy to grab and scan through a user’s Recall database if you either (1) have local access to the machine and can log into any account (not just the account of the user whose database you’re trying to see), or (2) are using a PC infected with some kind of info-stealer virus that can quickly transfer the SQLite database to another system. Andrew Cunningham at Ars Technica It really does seem Recall is kind of a mess in the security department, and it has a certain rushed quality about it. All the screenshots are saved in an AppData folder, and data pulled from those screenshots is stored in a local SQLite database that happens to be entirely unencrypted. TotalRecall, a tool developed by Alexander Hagenah, will neatly pull the data from Recall for you without any hassle or issues. This truly is a security nightmare. Aside from all the obvious issues this presents, such as making it even easier for law enforcement to gain access to pretty much everything you do online, something especially troubling for minorities or in countries with less-than-stellar police departments, Recall also presents a whole host of other problems. Imagine being in an abusive relationship, and the abusive partner demanding Recall be left on at all times to exert even more control. Imagine an unscrupulous employee abusing Recall to steal sensitive information from a company for a competitor. Imagine living in some backwards part of a country with controlling religious parents, and you happen to be gay. The problems here are endless. The fact you can turn Recall off doesn’t mean much, since in the above examples, turning it off is not an option since there are controlling people involved who will demand you keep it on. Browser history and other forms of history in your computer exist as well, of course, but they’re not always as easy to parse, they’re easier to manipulate, sanitise, and temporarily hide. Recall just combines all of this and puts a neat little bow on it, ready to be abused by anyone with bad intentions. Recall is ill-conceived, badly implemented, and a solution looking for a problem, that in an of itself creates tons of other problems. I hope Microsoft reconsiders, but in a world where “AI” makes investors go nuts, I doubt we’ll see a sudden sense of clarity coming out of Redmond.

Remember when I said the honeymoon with AMD’s consumer-friendly chipset and socket support policy would eventually end? Well, while this is not exactly that, it will make a lot of people very unhappy. While AMD, as does any other company, was boastful about its product touting the 16% IPC boost on Zen 5 and the big AI performance leap delivering up to 50 TOPS on the NPU side, an interesting drawback of the Ryzen AI 300 series that has managed to avoid getting media attention is the lack of support for Windows 10. While this was just an unconfirmed rumour last month even though it was suggested by a supposed Lenovo China manager, we have now got confirmation from AMD itself that the report, that Strix point and newer CPUs and APUs will not support Windows 10 is true. Sayan Sen at NeoWin Official support for Windows 10 is ending next year, so there is some reason to AMD’s madness, but at the same time, almost 70% of Windows users are currently using Windows 10, and leaving those users behind might not be the best idea AMD ever had. There is an argument to be made that at least a reasonable number of these people are still using Windows 10 not out of their own volition, but because of Microsoft’s strict hardware requirements, and as such, anyone buying a new AMD machine will just opt for the latest version of Windows out of habit, but I still think there’s a sizable contingent of people who actively choose Windows 10 over 11 for a whole host of reasons. On a strongly related note, despite 2025 marking the end of regular support for Windows 10, Microsoft yesterday announced it’s expanding the the number of Insider channels for new Windows 10 features from one to two, adding a Beta tier below the existing Release Preview tier. Microsoft, too, will have to come to terms with the fact that with 70% of Windows users using Windows 10, they might not even be able to drop support for the operating system as early as next year. While this 70% number will surely slowly decrease over the next 12 months, with many people simply being unable to upgrade due to hardware limitations, I have a suspicion we might see an extension on that 2025 date.