September 2020 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Eric S. Raymond: Is Microsoft Switching To a Linux Kernel That Emulates Windows?
by Peter Reutemann 28 Sep '20

28 Sep '20

'Most of Microsoft's money now comes from its cloud service Azure, points out open-source advocate Eric S. Raymond. Now he posits a future where Windows development will "inevitably" become a drag on Microsoft's business: So, you're a Microsoft corporate strategist. What's the profit-maximizing path forward given all these factors? It's this: Microsoft Windows becomes a Proton-like emulation layer over a Linux kernel, with the layer getting thinner over time as more of the support lands in the mainline kernel sources. The economic motive is that Microsoft sheds an ever-larger fraction of its development costs as less and less has to be done in-house. If you think this is fantasy, think again. The best evidence that it's already the plan is that Microsoft has already ported Edge to run under Linux. There is only one way that makes any sense, and that is as a trial run for freeing the rest of the Windows utility suite from depending on any emulation layer. So, the end state this all points at is: New Windows is mostly a Linux kernel, there's an old-Windows emulation over it, but Edge and the rest of the Windows user-land utilities don't use the emulation. The emulation layer is there for games and other legacy third-party software. Economic pressure will be on Microsoft to deprecate the emulation layer... Every increment of Windows/Linux convergence helps with that — reduces administration and the expected volume of support traffic. Eventually, Microsoft announces upcoming end-of-life on the Windows emulation. The OS itself , and its userland tools, has for some time already been Linux underneath a carefully preserved old-Windows UI. Third-party software providers stop shipping Windows binaries in favor of ELF binaries with a pure Linux API... ...and Linux finally wins the desktop wars, not by displacing Windows but by co-opting it. Perhaps this is always how it had to be.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/09/27/193250 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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GNU is Not Unix Emacs Developers (Including Richard Stallman) Discuss How to Build a More 'Modern' Emacs
by Peter Reutemann 27 Sep '20

27 Sep '20

'LWN.net re-visits the emacs-devel mailing list, where the Emacs 28 development cycle has revived discussions about how to make the text editor more "modern" and attractive to new users: A default dark theme may not be in the future, leading one to think that there may yet be hope for the world in general. But there does seem to be general agreement that Emacs could benefit from a better, more centralized approach to color themes, rather than having color names hard-coded throughout various Elisp packages. From that, a proper theme engine could be supported, making dark themes and such easily available to those who want them... Another area where Emacs is insufficiently "modern", it seems, has to do with keyboard and mouse bindings. On the keyboard side, users have come to expect certain actions from certain keystrokes; ^X to cut a selection, ^V to paste it, etc. These bindings are easily had by turning on the Cua mode, but new users tend not to know about this mode or how to enable it. Many participants in the discussion said that this mode should be on by default. That, of course, would break the finger memory of large numbers of existing Emacs users, who would be unlikely to appreciate the disruption. Or, as Richard Stallman put it: It is not an option to change these basic key bindings to imitate other, newer editors. It would create a different editor that we Emacs users would never switch to. It is unfortunate that the people who implemented the newer editors chose incompatibility with Emacs.... The situation with mouse behavior is similar; as several participants in the discussion pointed out, users of graphical interfaces have come to expect that a right-button click will produce a menu of available actions. In Emacs, instead, that button marks a region ("selection"), with a second click in the same spot yanking ("cutting") the selected text. Many experienced Emacs users have come to like this behavior, but it is surprising to newcomers. The right mouse button with the control key held down does produce a menu defined by the current major mode, but that is evidently not what is being requested here; that menu, some say, should present global actions rather mode-specific ones. Stallman suggested offering a "reshuffled mode" that would bring the context menu to an unadorned right-button click, and which would add some of the expected basic editing commands there as well. This would be relatively easy to do, he said, since mouse bindings are separate from everything else. Besides, as he noted, the current mouse behavior was derived from "what was the standard in X Windows around 1990"; while one wouldn't want to act in haste, it might just be about time for an update. Other proposed changes involved "discoverability," including the default enabling of various modes, although to incorporate them into GNU Emacs "would often require the author to sign copyrights over to the Free Software Foundation, which is not something all authors are willing to do..."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/09/25/2213230 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Bored Developer Creates 'DOS Subsystem For Linux'
by Peter Reutemann 27 Sep '20

27 Sep '20

'iTnews: A software engineer in Melbourne is whiling away the city's lockdown by creating a tool that DOS users so far have lacked: an integrated Linux environment similar to what Windows 10 users enjoy... "I first started out just seeing if I could get Linux booting from the DOS command line, and that turned out to be straightforward enough so I thought it'd be fun to see if I could continue executing DOS once Linux was running," Charlie Somerville said. "I'm mostly surprised by how smoothly the whole thing works given how *dodgy* it all is haha," he added. DOS Subsystem for Linux runs a real copy of MS-DOS under the QEMU virtual machine, and starts up from that, Somerville said... "Helpfully Linux seems to leave the first megabyte of memory (where DOS lives) intact during its own boot process, so it's just a matter of jumping back to the right place to continue DOS execution," he added. Somerville had it pointed out to him that this approach of running DOS under vm8086 is actually how early Windows worked. "Kinda cool to rediscover the technique so many years later," Somerville said.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/09/26/048223 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Firefox 81 Released, Can Now Be Your Default Browser in iOS
by Peter Reutemann 27 Sep '20

27 Sep '20

'Engadget reports: One big benefit of iOS 14 is that you can set non-Apple-made apps as your default, including for email and web browsing. Hot on the heels of you being able to set Chrome and Gmail as your clients of choice, Firefox is enabling you to make its browser the default on iPhones and iPads. Naturally, you'll need to have both the latest version of the operating system and the apps, and then just make the switch inside settings. Meanwhile, Bleeping Computer profiles some of the new features in this week's release of Firefox 81, including: The ability to control videos via your headset and keyboard even if you're not using Firefox at the time - A new credit card autofill feature for Firefox users in the U.S. and Canada - A new theme called AlpenGlow - Firefox can now be set as the default system PDF viewer' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/09/26/0454229 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Bug Allowed Hijacking Other Firefox Mobile Browsers on the Same Wi-Fi Network
by Peter Reutemann 27 Sep '20

27 Sep '20

'"Mozilla has fixed a bug that can be abused to hijack all the Firefox for Android browsers on the same Wi-Fi network and force users to access malicious sites, such as phishing pages," reports ZDNet: The bug was discovered by Chris Moberly, an Australian security researcher working for GitLab. The actual vulnerability resides in the Firefox SSDP component. SSDP stands for Simple Service Discovery Protocol and is the mechanism through which Firefox finds other devices on the same network in order to share or receive content (i.e., such as sharing video streams with a Roku device). When devices are found, the Firefox SSDP component gets the location of an XML file where that device's configuration is stored. However, Moberly discovered that in older versions of Firefox, you could hide Android "intent" commands in this XML and have the Firefox browser execute the "intent," which could be a regular command like telling Firefox to access a link... The bug was fixed in Firefox 79; however, many users may not be running the latest release. Firefox for desktop versions were not impacted. ' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/09/26/0443215 Chers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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killedbygoogle.com
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Sep '20

26 Sep '20

Came across this <https://killedbygoogle.com/> little hall of -- shame? sadness? quiet desperation? schadenfreude? -- listing projects that Google created and later abandoned, or is in the process of abandoning. Found it in a reader comment to this report <https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/23/google_sunsets_chrome_web_store/> on the death of Chrome Web Store payments. By the way: Neighbourly is dead? I keep seeing mentions of neighbourly.co.nz in the local free papers -- is that different?

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Facebook “Took A Page From Big Tobacco’s Playbook”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Sep '20

26 Sep '20

Some former Facebook employees are testifying to the US Congress <https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/09/former-facebook-manager-we-took…> as part of a hearing into the role social media platforms play in spreading extremist and radical content. Tim Kendall, former director of monetization, says: “We took a page form Big Tobacco’s playbook, working to make our offering addictive at the outset.” After making some more direct comparisons with how tobacco companies made their product more addictive, he talked about “engagement”, which was the measure Facebook tried to maximize above all else: “We initially used engagement as sort of a proxy for user benefit,” Kendall explained. “But we also started to realize that engagement could also mean [users] were sufficiently sucked in that they couldn’t work in their own best long-term interest to get off the platform... We started to see real-life consequences, but they weren’t given much weight. Engagement always won, it always trumped.” If a company becomes large and powerful, and cannot be trusted to exercise that power responsibly, then it must be taken from them.

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Researchers Found the Manual For the World's Oldest Surviving Computer
by Peter Reutemann 24 Sep '20

24 Sep '20

'Researchers will be able to gain a deeper understanding of what's considered the world's oldest surviving (digital) computer after its long-lost user manual was unearthed. Engadget reports: The Z4, which was built in 1945, runs on tape, takes up most of a room and needs several people to operate it. The machine now takes residence at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, but it hasn't been used in quite some time. An archivist at ETH Zurich, Evelyn Boesch, discovered the manual among her father's documents in March, according to retired lecturer Herbert Bruderer. Rene Boesch worked with the Swiss Aeronautical Engineering Association, which was based at the university's Institute for Aircraft Statics and Aircraft Construction. The Z4 was housed there in the early 1950s. Among Boesch's documents were notes on math problems the Z4 solved that were linked to the development of the P-16 jet fighter. "These included calculations on the trajectory of rockets, on aircraft wings, on flutter vibrations [and] on nosedive," Bruderer wrote in a Association of Computing Machinery blog post.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/09/23/2058222 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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Wikipedia is getting a new look for the first time in 10 years. Here’s why.
by Peter Reutemann 24 Sep '20

24 Sep '20

'In order to make the desktop experience more readable and less overwhelming to new users, Wikipedia is being redesigned to move page elements, collapse in the sidebar, and decrease the maximum line width. From Diff, the Wikimedia community blog: Forthcoming changes to the desktop include a reconfigured logo, collapsible sidebar, table of contents, and more! You can see the full list of new features on MediaWiki. These changes will happen incrementally over a long period of time, to allow for ample user testing and feedback. If all goes to plan, these improvements will be the default on all wikis by the end of 2021, timed with Wikipedia's 20th birthday celebrations.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/09/23/1822218 Link to gallery of images that show the differences/new features: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reading/Web/Desktop_Improvements#What_featur… Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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meeting next Monday
by Peter Reutemann 24 Sep '20

24 Sep '20

Hi everyone We have a meeting next Monday, but no topic/speaker yet. Any ideas? Maybe some bash scripting or some useful command-line utilities? I came across "pigz" (https://linux.die.net/man/1/pigz) today by accident... Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

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