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Dutch Defence Secretary Threatens To “Jailbreak” Their F-35 Fighters
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Feb '26

19 Feb '26

Gijs Tuinman, when asked if the EU can make changes to the fighter jet without US approval, replied <https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/dutch-secretary-of-defense-threa…>: “I’m going to say something I should never say, but I’ll do it anyway,” the defense secretary said. “Just like your iPhone, you can jailbreak an F-35. I won’t say more about it.” The operating system apparently runs to 8 million lines of code, and of course it’s encrypted/obfuscated. But so are lots of games on consoles and PCs that use elaborate copy-protection and anti-cheat mechanisms. And there are quite a few people with experience wading their way through mazes like that. Of course the US officially denies that the hardware it sells to other countries has any kind of “kill switch” in it. So maybe the EU has a Plan B, maybe it doesn’t ...

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Seasoned Windows Expert Gives Linux A Try
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 19 Feb '26

19 Feb '26

The article title seems optimistic enough: “I replaced Windows with Linux, and there's only one feature I miss” <https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-replace-windows-with-linux/>. The article is by Ed Bott, “Senior Contributing Editor” at ZDNet, and he is definitely a long-standing Windows guy. After suggesting, in a previous article, that Windows users could consider switching to Linux as a way to keep old machines, that Microsoft won’t support on Windows 11, going, he finally decides to try it for himself. (With the help of ongoing advice from Google’s Gemini chatbot.) His choice of hardware to use in the experiment was ... interesting. One might almost say he picked on hardware which is known to be troublesome with Linux ... First he tried a couple of ARM-based Windows machines, and recorded failure for both. There was a suggestion that this could be made to work by extracting proprietary firmware blobs from the Windows install and incorporating them into the Linux kernel build (by “editing some device trees”, which sounds like building a kernel from source to me), but he decided not to bother. Next he tried a couple of Microsoft Surface models. Both were x86-based, but Surface machines do have some odd hardware not present in common-or-garden PCs. In this case he was helped out by a project on GitHub specifically to get Linux running on these devices. Finally he was able to get Zorin OS 18 Core working on one Surface, and Fedora 43 on the other. The latter had sleep problems, and he had no luck getting a webcam working (the “one feature” that he misses as mentioned in the title, being Windows Hello facial recognition). After all the setup headaches, the part that gave him the least trouble was accessing the apps he is used to -- he didn’t even have to resort to WINE for any of these. His conclusion: All in all, this was not a friction-free experience. I do not recommend it for novices or for anyone who wants a PC that is easy to operate and troubleshoot. But if you're a reasonably knowledgeable PC hobbyist and you're willing to accept a learning curve that includes time in a terminal session, Linux is a perfectly acceptable alternative. I do not recommend that you tell your tech-challenged relatives to try the upgrade on their own. They'd be better off with a Mac, honestly. I’m not sure that people would be better off with a Mac any more. The current sky-high prices of RAM mean that some might decide to buy a lower-spec machine initially, in the hope of upgrading it later; you can’t do this with Apple products any more. Also, I think the installed base of desktop Linux is already larger than that of Mac users anyway.

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KDE Says Plasma Desktop Will Never Force Users to Use systemd
by Peter Reutemann 17 Feb '26

17 Feb '26

'The KDE project has addressed some recent concerns from users that they are forcing the systemd init system on current or future versions of its Plasma desktop environment. This comes after the developers of the KaOS Linux independent distro announced that they decided to replace the KDE Plasma desktop environment with a Niri/Noctalia setup to move away from systemd, saying that “Plasma pretty much demands systemd, and will be fully mandatory soon.“ Well, when asked if Plasma or any of its components demands systemd or if it is forced on users, the KDE project said no, except for the new Plasma Login Manager display manager that will be introduced with the upcoming KDE Plasma 6.6 release tomorrow. “So you are forcing Plasma users to use systemd?” No, the Plasma Login Manager is one of probably half a dozen login managers (or more) that can boot Plasma,” said the KDE devs. “We made PLM because it will give distro creators a cool piece of kit that can (not “must”, not “should”: can) be tacked onto a system to boot into Plasma.” The KDE project also said that they are not planning on making any of Plasma’s core components dependent on systemd, and that it will also continue to work on non-Linux systems like FreeBSD, as there were many recent reports on various news outlets that “KDE will drop support for non-systemd systems.” So there you have it, only the Plasma Login Manager will be dependent on systemd, but future Plasma desktop releases aren’t dependent on Plasma Login Manager, nor systemd. Therefore, Linux distros that want to ship the latest Plasma releases will have to use a different login manager, such as SDDM.' -- source: https://9to5linux.com/kde-says-plasma-desktop-will-never-force-users-to-use… Cheers, Peter

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Origins Of PipeWire
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Feb '26

16 Feb '26

Just been watching this video of a talk at FOSDEM 2020 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5Y8VLv0CQ8>, entitled “PipeWire in the Automotive Industry”. I had never heard of PipeWire back then, so it was interesting to discover that it was originally called “PulseVideo”, because it was supposed to be like PulseAudio, but only for video streams. But then it gradually took over the functions of PulseAudio, by offering a more efficient architecture for dealing with both audio and video streams. And also supporting security isolation between applications, which is something PulseAudio never had. PipeWire also subsumes the functionality of JACK as well (the architecture for audio and MIDI routing that is used in music/audio production workflows), and its interconnection functions naturally support the patchbay model of JACK. The presenter of the talk, George Kiagiadakis, is the creator of WirePlumber, which does PipeWire session management. He created it as part of his job contributing to the “Automotive Grade Linux” project, specifically working on the part dealing with automotive audio: this includes not just car entertainment systems, but also navigation interactions, voice activation functions and emergency notifications -- who knew the audio system in a modern car could be so complex?

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ENIAC Turns 80
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Feb '26

15 Feb '26

<https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/eniac-the-worlds-first-general-p…> In fact the Bletchley Park “Colossus” machine (that Alan Turing had a hand in) was working a little before ENIAC, but the existence of that was kept strictly secret until about the 1970s. The hardware engineers who built the early electronic computers didn’t really appreciate the importance and subtlety of the programming problem -- they saw it as a mere janitorial chore, that could be delegated to lower-paid underlings, like women. Here <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buAYHonF968> is the testimony of one of those women, and the clever innovations they developed to facilitate the programming process.

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People can’t find jobs, jobs can’t find people; who’s to blame?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Feb '26

15 Feb '26

This article about the ongoing difficulties of people trying to find jobs, while at the same time employers seem unable to find people to fill their job positions, seems to put the primary blame on AI <https://www.thepost.co.nz/business/360905126/people-cant-find-jobs-jobs-can…>. Specifically, employers are relying too much on AI-generated situations-vacant ads, which leave out important information about the actual job situation. And so they get too many applicants who are unsuited to that actual job situation. Interesting to compare this part I’m not advising anyone to be a luddite here, but at a certain time we have AI talking to AI who’s talking to AI. Hiring is an inherently human process and unfortunately no AI (that I know of) can screen for personality, fit within a team or attitude. with this part The uncomfortable truth? If you wouldn't give your all to a role, employers can sense it. If the employers are using AI to screen their applicants, then probably they won’t “sense” any such thing ...

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Robert Tinney Has Died
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 12 Feb '26

12 Feb '26

Anybody who has read a few issues of Byte Magazine, from around the mid-1970s to the latter 1980s, will remember the charming and idiosyncratic cover paintings during that time. These were the work of an artist named Robert Tinney. Some of the works aroused so much interest that he offered signed limited-edition prints for sale. Now, the famous artist has passed away <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/02/byte-magazine-artist-robert-tinney-…>. That article says Tinney was never a technical person. So you could say he brought a certain naïveté to his interpretations of the technical topics in each issue. But that naïveté ended up being a key part of the charm of his illustrations -- intentionally or not, they expressed a kind of wit that appealed to geeks.

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You Can Now Run Debian GNU/Linux on the OpenWrt One Open-Source Router
by Peter Reutemann 04 Feb '26

04 Feb '26

'Collabora shares with us today a new project that lets you install and run the Debian GNU/Linux operating system on the open-source OpenWrt One router. Collabora’s Sjoerd Simons has developed openwrt-one-debian, a set of scripts and tools that make it easier for one to install a full Debian GNU/Linux operating system on the OpenWrt One device, leveraging its NVMe storage and giving you the freedom to enable custom services, support for containers, development tools, and more.' -- source: https://9to5linux.com/you-can-now-run-debian-gnu-linux-on-the-openwrt-one-o… Cheers, Peter

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'Vibe Coding Kills Open Source'
by Peter Reutemann 04 Feb '26

04 Feb '26

'Four economists across Central European University, Bielefeld University and the Kiel Institute have built a general equilibrium model of the open-source software ecosystem and concluded that vibe coding -- the increasingly common practice of letting AI agents select, assemble and modify packages on a developer's behalf -- erodes the very funding mechanism that keeps open-source projects alive. The core problem is a decoupling of usage from engagement. Tailwind CSS's npm downloads have climbed steadily, but its creator says documentation traffic is down about 40% since early 2023 and revenue has dropped close to 80%. Stack Overflow activity fell roughly 25% within six months of ChatGPT's launch. Open-source maintainers monetize through documentation visits, bug reports, and community interaction. AI agents skip all of that. The model finds that feedback loops once responsible for open source's explosive growth now run in reverse. Fewer maintainers can justify sharing code, variety shrinks, and average quality falls -- even as total usage rises. One proposed fix is a "Spotify for open source" model where AI platforms redistribute subscription revenue to maintainers based on package usage. Vibe-coded users need to contribute at least 84% of what direct users generate, or roughly 84% of all revenue must come from sources independent of how users access the software.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/03/1754205 Cheers, Peter

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Notepad++ Compromised By State Actor
by Peter Reutemann 03 Feb '26

03 Feb '26

'Luthair writes: Notepad++ claims to have been targeted by a state actor, given their previous stance on Uyghurs one can speculate about a candidate. Notepad++, in a blog post: According to the analysis provided by the security experts, the attack involved infrastructure-level compromise that allowed malicious actors to intercept and redirect update traffic destined for notepad-plus-plus.org. The exact technical mechanism remains under investigation, though the compromise occurred at the hosting provider level rather than through vulnerabilities in Notepad++ code itself. Traffic from certain targeted users was selectively redirected to attacker-controlled served malicious update manifests.' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/02/02/1646253 Cheers, Peter

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