Windows 10 gets three more years of security updates, if you can afford them
Windows 10’s end-of-support date is October 14, 2025. That’s the day that most Windows 10 PCs will receive their last security update and the date when most people should find a way to move to Windows 11 to ensure that they stay secure. As it has done for other stubbornly popular versions of Windows, though, Microsoft is offering a reprieve for those who want or need to stay on Wi … ⌘ Read more

Firefox on the brink?
A somewhat obscure guideline for developers of U.S. government websites may be about to accelerate the long, sad decline of Mozilla’s Firefox browser. There already are plenty of large entities, both public and private, whose websites lack proper support for Firefox; and that will get only worse in the near future, because the ’fox’s auburn paws are perilously close to the lip of the proverbial slippery slope. ↫ Bryce Wray US government guidelines say that US government websites only need … ⌘ Read more

HP Smart is auto installing on Windows 11 and Windows 10 on non HP-machines
According to our tests and reports seen by us, HP Smart is auto-installing on all versions of Windows that use Microsoft Store, including Windows 11 23H2 or 22H2. HP Smart is an app that allows you to manage HP printers, and it’s typically pre-installed on HP PCs. It’s not supposed to be installed when you’re not using an HP device like a PC or printer. However, the Microsoft Store … ⌘ Read more

Rest in peace, Optane
Intel’s Optane memory modules launched with a lot of fanfare in 2015, and were recently discontinued, in 2022, with similar fanfare. It was a sad day for me, a lover of abstraction-breaking technologies, but it was forseeable and understandable. At the time of Optane’s launch, a lot of us were excited about the idea of having a new storage tier, sitting between DRAM and flash. It was announced as having DRAM endurance and speed with the persistence and size of flash. It was a futuristic m … ⌘ Read more

A year in recap: Windows accessibility
The Windows Accessibility team adheres to the disability community’s guiding principle, “nothing about us without us,” emphasizing the creation of products that empower everyone. We launched and announced new and exciting features last September through our Windows 11 2022 Update and with your feedback, we have improved upon those experiences in a number of ways. ↫ Divya Bhaskaran on Microsoft’s official Windows blog In this blog post, Microsoft details s … ⌘ Read more

The hidden secrets of the Fn key on the Mac
Even if you’ve used the Mac for decades, I suspect you have never fully understood the Fn key. Not helping is the fact that Apple sometimes calls it the Function key, but all Mac keyboards already have 12 or more numbered F-for-Function keys! The Fn key first appeared in 1998 in the PowerBook G3 Series (Wallstreet) and has become a fixture in the lower-left corner of laptop keyboards ever since. The Fn key migrated to standalone keyboards only … ⌘ Read more

macOS Sonoma is setting records for update size
It was Big Sur that focussed attention on the size of macOS updates. In Mojave and earlier, updates had essentially been Installer packages that brought a minimum of overhead. By the time that many had installed Big Sur’s new Signed System Volume (SSV), we were starting to discover just how large its updates were. Those were early days with its completely new updating process that builds a new System volume, takes a snapshot of it, and … ⌘ Read more

Ousted propaganda scholar Joan Donovan accuses Harvard of bowing to Meta
A prominent disinformation scholar has accused Harvard University of dismissing her to curry favor with Facebook and its current and former executives in violation of her right to free speech. Joan Donovan claimed in a filing with the Education Department and the Massachusetts attorney general that her superiors soured on her as Harvard was getting a record $500 million pledge from Meta … ⌘ Read more

Launching brand new BeOS, Mac OS X, and MS-DOS T-shirts in the OSNews Merch Store!
The holidays are coming, there’s a chill in the air (literally for me, I live in the Arctic), so it’s time for a few new additions to the official OSNews Merch Store. Do you live in the terminal, breathe the terminal? We’ve got new shirts just for you. The opening message of the terminals of Mac OS X, BeOS, and MS-DOS (let’s be generous and call MS-DOS a terminal), with … ⌘ Read more

Finally: proper attribution
You may have noticed that starting today, I’ve been adding a dedicated link to the main story in every post on OSNews. Our old-fashioned 2001 method of “biggest link is main story” simply doesn’t hold up today as proper attribution, so from here on out every post will have a link marked by ↫ crediting the name and/or publication of the main linked article (or multiple where it makes sense). I’ve been unhappy with our attribution for years, and finally got my act together and s … ⌘ Read more

Porting Hare to OpenBSD
I was always very interested in OpenBSD and a few months ago, I decided to give it a try. I’ve quickly fallen in love with it! There is, however, a big problem: Hare does not fully support OpenBSD! So, I decided to port it and I am happy to announce that my work was merged yesterday and OpenBSD is now fully supported by Hare. Let me show you some of the tricky stuff that was involved in the port. ↫ Lorenz (xha) on the official Hare blog Hare is a relatively new programming language, … ⌘ Read more

The world depends on 60-year-old code no one knows anymore
The problem is that very few people are interested in learning COBOL these days. Coding it is cumbersome, it reads like an English lesson (too much typing), the coding format is meticulous and inflexible, and it takes far longer to compile than its competitors. And since nobody’s learning it anymore, programmers who can work with and maintain all that code are a increasingly hard to find. Many of these “COBOL cowbo … ⌘ Read more

Everything you ever wanted to know about HP’s 9000 Series 300
Hewlett-Packard’s 9000 Series 300 (HP300) was a range of technical workstations based on Motorola 680×0 microprocessors. Superbly engineered in modular form, and ahead of the curve in terms of functionality, these workstations were used mainly as instrument controllers and for desktop technical computing. The HP300 series launched in 1985 with the models 310 (pictured below) and 320. It evolved through numerou … ⌘ Read more

The Unix V6 shell and how control flow worked in it
On Unix, ‘test‘ and ‘[‘ are two names for (almost) the same program and shell builtin. Although today people mostly use it under its ‘[‘ name, when it was introduced in V7 along side the Bourne shell, it only was called ‘test‘; the ‘[‘ name was only nascent until years later. I don’t know for sure why it was called ‘test‘, but there are interesting hints about its potential genesis in the shell used in V6 Research Unix, the pred … ⌘ Read more

Fuchsia version 14 rolling out to Nest Hub Preview Program
According to Google’s official support page listing the current firmware versions of its speakers and smart displays, version 14.20230831.4.72 is now available to those enrolled in the Preview Program (which can be accessed via the Google Home app). These updates are often released in stages, meaning it may be a few weeks before your Nest Hub gets the latest build. On the project’s website, Google offers a more in- … ⌘ Read more

Windows-as-an-app is coming
Windows App, which is still in beta, will let you connect to Azure Virtual Desktop, Windows 365, Microsoft Dev Box, Remote Desktop Services, and remote PCs from, well, pretty much any computing device. Specifically, you can use it from Macs, iPhones, iPads, other Windows machines, and — pay attention! — web browsers. That last part means you’ll be able to run Windows from Linux-powered PCs, Chromebooks, and Android phones and tablets. So, if you’ve been stuck running Windows … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft soliciting feedback about an “Windows Advanced Settings” panel
Currently, there are many settings/registry keys that developers desire to tweak that are either not accessible via the Windows Settings app and/or are difficult to discover throughout the OS. Users may have to resort to running scripts or manually changing registry keys to get their machine into their ideal state. Furthermore, there is not a single place for developers to discover and twe … ⌘ Read more

Google researchers’ attack prompts ChatGPT to reveal its training data
A team of researchers primarily from Google’s DeepMind systematically convinced ChatGPT to reveal snippets of the data it was trained on using a new type of attack prompt which asked a production model of the chatbot to repeat specific words forever.  Using this tactic, the researchers showed that there are large amounts of privately identifiable information (PII) in OpenAI’s large language m … ⌘ Read more

My long quest to revive a ’90s Windows gaming cult classic
As 2023 draws to a close—and as we start to finalize our Game of the Year contenders—I really should be catching up on the embarrassingly long list of great recent releases that I haven’t put enough time into this year. Instead, over the last few days, I’ve found myself once again hooked on a simple, addictive, and utterly unique Japanese Windows freeware game from the late ’90s that, until recently, I thought I had … ⌘ Read more

First bits of a Haiku compatibility layer for NetBSD
Does anyone here remember Cosmoe? Cosmoe was an attempt to combine Haiku’s API with the Linux kernel and related tools, started in the early 2000s. The project eventually fizzled out, now only an obscure footnote for BeOS diehards such as myself. It seems, though, that the idea of combining the Haiku API with a mature UNIX-like operating system refuses to die, and a few days ago, on the NetBSD Users’s Discussion List, a develo … ⌘ Read more

Cinnamon 6.0 arrives with initial Wayland support
Cinnamon, the desktop environment mostly associated with Linux Mint, has released its sixth version. It also adds support for AVIF images, a new option for notification screen selection, a new gesture for desktop zoom, a new menu details option, color picker support in the screenshot service, and an xdg-portal configuration file. Various improvements are present as well to fix missing thumbnails for windows that are created while th … ⌘ Read more

How Huawei made a cutting-edge chip in China and surprised the US
This ambition to escape dependence on foreign technology rests on the shoulders of Huawei and SMIC. The successful launch of the Kirin 9000S injected new vigor into the semiconductor industry, with executives reporting that chip start-ups are seeing a surge in funding. But Huawei’s long-term ambitions are not limited to the markets in China’s orbit. The original nickname for the Kirin 9000S—Charlotte— … ⌘ Read more

This month in Servo: better floats, :has(), color-mix(), and more!
Our nightly example browser, servoshell, is now easier to navigate, accepting URLs without http:// or https:// both in the location bar and on the command line, and should no longer lock up when run with –no-minibrowser. Local paths can also be given on the command line, and are still preferred when the path points to a file that exists. Work is now underway to improve our embedding story and prepare Servo f … ⌘ Read more

Evaluating M3 Pro CPU cores: general performance
Evaluating the performance of CPUs with identical cores is relatively straightforward, and they’re easy to compare using single- and multi-core benchmarks. When there are two different types of core, one designed primarily for energy efficiency (E), the other for maximum performance (P), traditional benchmarks can readily mislead. Multi-core results are dominated by the ratio of P to E cores, and variable frequency confounds further. I … ⌘ Read more

Windows NT: peeking into the cradle
Reading the story of how Windows NT came to be was entertaining, as it is a story of the system itself and the dynamics between Dave Cutler, the original designer and lead for NT, and the other people involved in the project. I was shy of being 10 years old when Windows NT launched and I didn’t comprehend what was going on in the operating systems world and why this release was such a big deal. Reading the book made me learn various new things about the develop … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft contributes Azure RTOS to open source
We’re pleased to share an important update regarding Azure RTOS – an embedded development suite with the ThreadX real-time operating system that has been deployed on more than 12 billion devices worldwide. Reinforcing our commitment to innovation and community collaboration, Azure RTOS will be transitioning to an open-source model under the stewardship of the Eclipse Foundation, a recognized leader in hosting open-source IoT projects. W … ⌘ Read more

New Chinese Loongsoon chip matches Intel’s 14600K in IPC tests
Chinese chip designer Loongson has finally launched its loong teased “next-generation” 3A6000-series processors based on the LoongArch microarchitecture. IPC tests showed the 3A6000 matching Intel’s Raptor Lake i5-14600K in IPC (instructions per clock), with both chips clocked at 2.5GHz. As well as the headlining x86 compatible processor came the announcement of numerous partner desktop, laptop, and all-in-o … ⌘ Read more

Analyzing the Monoprice Blackbird HDCP 2.2 to 1.4 down converter
I got my hands on a Monoprice Blackbird 4K Pro HDCP 2.2 to 1.4 Converter. According to the marketing copy it “is the definitive solution for playback of new 4K HDCP 2.2 encoded content on 4K displays with the old HDCP 1.4 standard.” Stuffed after a delicious Thanksgiving meal, I decided to take it apart after the guests had left. It’s a simple single-function device, so I didn’t expect much, but maybe t … ⌘ Read more

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 to remove X.org
With this, we’ve decided to remove Xorg server and other X servers (except Xwayland) from RHEL 10 and the following releases. Xwayland should be able to handle most X11 clients that won’t immediately be ported to Wayland, and if needed, our customers will be able to stay on RHEL 9 for its full life cycle while resolving the specifics needed for transitioning to a Wayland ecosystem. It’s important to note that “Xorg Server” and “X11” are not syn … ⌘ Read more

Migrating from VM to Hierarchical Jails in FreeBSD
FreeBSD has supported nesting of jails natively since version 8.0, which dates back to 2009. Looking at the jail(8) man page, there is an entire paragraph named Hierarchical Jails that explains the concept of jail hierarchy well. It’s one of the many gems of FreeBSD that, although not widely known or used, is, in my opinion, extremely useful. BastilleBSD plays a central role in this article, and that’s a project I’ve been hearing … ⌘ Read more

PipeWire 1.0 released
PipeWire 1.0 now has all the features that are expected to move media streams inside a system. It takes advantage of advanced features of the Linux kernel to provide low latency, low footprint, and high performance while being secure. It is the perfect tool to build an embedded system or to securely share streams between containers. Linux audio and video has come a long way, and PipeWire is part of that. Excellent work. ⌘ Read more

This company just put the air in Apple’s MacBook Air
Frore Systems is a startup with $116 million in funding, and I’ve shown you its first product before: the AirJet Mini is a piezoelectric cooling chip that weighs just nine grams and is thinner than two US quarters stacked together. Each nominally consumes one watt and can remove 4.25 additional watts of heat. Here’s the question: what would happen if Frore used those AirJets to cool a laptop that normally doesn’t have a fan at … ⌘ Read more

Google Play keeps banning the same web browser due to vague DMCA notices
App developer Elias Saba has had some bad luck with Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedowns. His Android TV app Downloader, which combines a web browser with a file manager, was suspended by Google Play in May after several Israeli TV companies complained that the app could be used to load a pirate website. Google reversed that suspension after three weeks. But Downloader has b … ⌘ Read more

Building a NetBSD ramdisk kernel
When I used OpenBSD, I was a big fan of bsd.rd: a kernel that includes a root file system with an installer and a few tools. When I invariably did something bad to my root file system, I could use that to repair things. bsd.rd is also helpful for OS updates. And there is only a single file involved. On NetBSD however, there is usually no netbsd.rd kernel installed, or even available by default. The facility is there, it’s just not standard. To be fair, there are a n … ⌘ Read more

Super tiny Windows 11 OS gets a big update: Tiny11 2311 shrinks 20% and allows cumulative updates
NTDEV, the developer behind Tiny11, has released a new update for its miniature Windows 11 operating system, called Tiny11 2311, that adds Microsoft’s latest feature update, 23H2, into the OS and introduces a plethora of bug fixes addressing issues in the outgoing version of Tiny11. On top of this, the new update also shrinks Tiny11’s insta … ⌘ Read more

How Apple’s developers reflashed Mac ROMs in the ’90s
After I wrote about the possibility of programmable Mac ROM SIMMs in Quadras a couple of months ago, I suspected that there had been a way for developers at Apple in the 68k Mac era to reflash the ROM in their Macs during development, just like BIOS updates on PCs. The reason I believed this is because the ROM SIMM socket in the Quadras brought out pins for 12V (VPP) and write enable (/WE). I had verified that the write enable … ⌘ Read more

Debian’s MIPS64EL CPU port is at risk due to declining hardware access
Debian’s MIPS64EL that is a 64-bit little endian port using the N64 ABI is at risk due to declining access for building the Debian 64-bit MIPS packages. MIPS64EL is now being treated as an “out of sync” architecture due to lacking sufficient build daemon resources for timely building new packages and if the situation doesn’t improve, it may not be suitable as a release architecture for Debian … ⌘ Read more

A quick look back at Microsoft’s first sports video game: Microsoft Olympic Decathlon
Ironically, the second commercial game that Microsoft published, after Microsoft Adventure in 1979, was an attempt at a sports game sim. It was called Microsoft Olympic Decathlon, and like Microsoft Adventure, it was first launched as a TRS-80 PC game, this time in 1980. Microsoft has so many unexpected products in its long history. ⌘ Read more

China’s new(ish) SW26010-Pro supercomputer at SC23
Sunway’s new supercomputer therefore feels like a system designed with the goal of landing high on some TOP500 lists. For that purpose, it’s perfect, providing a lot of throughput without wasting money on pesky things like cache, out-of-order execution, and high bandwidth memory. But from the perspective of solving a nation’s problems, I feel like Sunway is chasing a metric. A nation doing well in advanced technology might have a lot … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft brings ChatGPT AI to Windows 11’s command line
Windows Terminal is getting an optional feature – ChatGPT-powered “AI chat” on Windows 11. ChatGPT integration is now available in Terminal (Canary), a new development channel to test experimental features ahead of a wider rollout. With ChatGPT AI Chat in Terminal, you can use AI to generate commands, explain errors, and get recommendations. Microsoft wants Terminal to use the natural language AI to explain commands, su … ⌘ Read more

Here is a “simple” method to uninstall Edge in Windows 10 and 11
Earlier this month, Microsoft released new preview updates with changes to make its operating systems compliant with European Union regulations. Those changes include the ability to uninstall Edge, decouple the OS from Bing, turn on third-party news feeds in Widgets, and more. Sadly, only EU citizens can enjoy those changes without messing with their PCs’ software intestines. Other people must tweak Windo … ⌘ Read more

What has changed in CPU cores in M3 chips?
If you read the initial reviews of Apple’s new M3-based Macs, you’d be forgiven for thinking little had changed in their CPU cores, apart from a rejigging of numbers and an increase in the maximum frequency of their P cores. As my MacBook Pro 16-inch M3 Pro arrived three days early, this article presents a tentative first look at what has changed in their CPU cores, and from that, how you might choose the right chip for your next Apple silicon Mac … ⌘ Read more

Building up networks of zones on Tribblix
With OpenSolaris and derivatives such as illumos, we gained the ability to build a whole IT infrastructure in a single box, using virtualized networking (crossbow) to build the underlying network and then attaching virtualized systems (zones) atop virtualized storage (zfs). Some of this was present in Solaris 10, but it didn’t have crossbow so the networking piece was a bit tricky (although I did manage to get surprisingly far by abusing the loopba … ⌘ Read more

Zork for the PDP-11/RT-11 recreated
We talked about Zork yesterday, and how the code for interpreters for the game was found and published on Github. Today we have a blog post detailing how to actually use one of these interpreters, the one for the PDP-11. Ok so what or where to do this?! First you need SIMH or any other good PDP-11 emulator, a copy of RT-11, and of course the source to the interpreter oddly enough named PDP11.ZIP. Just keep in mind that this is NOT a pk-zip file, it’s a text fi … ⌘ Read more