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Steam On Linux Use Skyrocketed In March - More Than Double The macOS Gaming Marketshare
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 04 Apr '26

04 Apr '26

I keep thinking: if the number of Linux-based users of Steam is so much greater than those using macOS, doesn’t that mean that the size of the overall desktop Linux installed base is now larger than that of macOS? Because otherwise, macOS users must be somehow less fun-loving that Linux users ... which seems hard to accept. <https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-On-Linux-Tops-5p>

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Google Groups Spam
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 03 Apr '26

03 Apr '26

I thought Google Groups was defunct. But it appears it is still possible for people to use it to set up mailing lists. I have been receiving a certain amount of spam sent via this mechanism over the past couple of weeks: what seems to happen is that the spammer registers a random domain and sets Google to manage email for that domain, creates a list on Google Groups with an address on that domain, subscribes a bunch of victims to it, then sends out their junk mail with the from-address set to the list address. Several of those addresses have autoreply set (e.g. tech support addresses), so they in turn send those autoreplies to the list address, which adds to the spam. Thankfully, there don’t seem to be autoreplies to their autoreplies, so at least things don’t spiral completely out of control ... What I have found is that all these messages have a common characteristic, namely a “List-Unsubscribe” header line which contains an address like “<mailto:googlegroups-manage+«blah-blah»+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com>”. Checking a few other mailing lists I’m on (like this one), they have entirely different addresses in this field. So, following some instructions in the Postfix documentation, I have added a “header_checks” map to my MTA configuration, containing the rule /^List-Unsubscribe\:\s*.*\@googlegroups\.com REJECT I always feel a little nervous about these sorts of email-related changes, since it’s so easy to stuff something up and block receipt of all mail altogether. I’ll feel reassured by seeing this posting to the mailing list come back to me. ;)

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Open Source: This Is Not How It Works
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 03 Apr '26

03 Apr '26

The Europeans want to create their own open-source office suite, to get away from the whims of some US-based proprietary company -- a commendable goal. They are using the OnlyOffice source code as their starting point -- maybe not so commendable. Seems the OnlyOffice folks are not happy over this <https://www.computerworld.com/article/4153893/onlyoffice-accuses-euro-offic…>. Trouble is, I don’t see how they can have a point. They license the source code under the AGPL, a licence that I have some qualms about. But nevertheless, people are free to take the code under this licence and do whatever they like with it, subject to the terms of the licence. From the article: OnlyOffice said in blog post that those accessing its code under this license are required to abide by conditions, such as retaining OnlyOffice’s branding and “providing proper attribution to the original technology.” OnlyOffice said that Euro-Office doesn’t meet these conditions, and therefore “any further use of the software is unauthorized and, as such, constitutes an infringement of the copyright holder’s exclusive rights.” The company also claims it was not contacted about the Euro-Office project prior to launch. But open-source licences don’t require any such conditions: there is no need to preserve any such “branding” (in fact, some trademark owners insist that these be removed in any forks), and there is no need to seek additional agreement from the copyright owners before performing actions that are permitted under the licence anyway. Copyright notices must be kept, anyway, but I can’t believe the Europeans were planning on removing those.

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I tried to prove I'm not AI. My aunt wasn't convinced
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Mar '26

30 Mar '26

A BBC correspondent talks to some AI experts on ways that people can be sure they’re talking to the real you and not an AI. The consensus is: the fakes are so good now, there is no way even for the experts to be completely sure, when communicating with someone remotely, that they are genuine, just from the content alone. Apart from meeting in person, the only sure way is to apply authentication methods already in common use for secure logins to remote services. Only now the definition of “remote service” has to broadened to “talking to your friends”. <https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260324-i-tried-to-prove-im-not-an-ai-d…>

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Linux Maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman Says AI Tools Now Useful, Finding Real Bugs
by Peter Reutemann 30 Mar '26

30 Mar '26

'Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman tells The Register that AI-driven code review has "really jumped" for Linux. "There must have been some inflection point somewhere with the tools..." "Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports." It's not just Linux, he continued. "All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real." Security teams across major open source projects talk informally and frequently, he noted, and everyone is seeing the same shift. "All open source security teams are hitting this right now...." For now, AI is showing up more as a reviewer and assistant than as a full author of Linux kernel code, but that line is starting to blur. Kroah-Hartman has already done his own experiments with AI-generated patches. "I did a really stupid prompt," he recounted. "I said, 'Give me this,' and it spit out 60: 'Here's 60 problems I found, and here's the fixes for them.' About one-third were wrong, but they still pointed out a relatively real problem, and two-thirds of the patches were right." Mind you, those working patches still needed human cleanup, better changelogs, and integration work, but they were far from useless. "The tools are good," he said. "We can't ignore this stuff. It's coming up, and it's getting better...." [H]e said that for "simple little error conditions, properly detecting error conditions," AI could already generate dozens of usable patches today. The sudden increase in AI-generated reports and AI-assisted work has also spurred a parallel push to build AI into the kernel's own review infrastructure. A key piece of that is Sashiko, a tool originally developed at Google and now donated to the Linux Foundation. Kroah-Hartman said some patches are being generated with AI now. "You have a little co-develop tag for that now. We're seeing some things for some new features, but we're seeing AI mostly being used in the review."' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/26/03/28/0717258 Cheers, Peter

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A Homegrown Excel Bug?
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 26 Mar '26

26 Mar '26

A correction to MBIE’s report on current fuel reserves <https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/mbie-clarifies-fuel-data-showing-far…> adds a previously-missing column showing ships that are currently “discharging” their fuel load. This gives an extra 16 days’ supply of diesel that was previously reported as only on its way here, not actually here. How do you miss out a column from a report? Answers on a postcard, please ...

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Wine 11 Rewrites How Linux Runs Windows Games At the Kernel Level
by Peter Reutemann 25 Mar '26

25 Mar '26

'Linux gamers are seeing massive performance gains with Wine's new NTSYNC support, "which is a feature that has been years in the making and rewrites how Wine handles one of the most performance-sensitive operations in modern gaming," reports XDA Developers. Not every game will see a night-and-day difference, but for the games that do benefit from these changes, "the improvements range from noticeable to absurd." Combined with improvements to Wayland, graphics, and compatibility, as well as a major WoW64 architecture overhaul, the release looks less like an incremental update and more like one of Wine's most important upgrades in years. From the report: The numbers are wild. In developer benchmarks, Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, which is an impressive 678% improvement. Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS. Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS. As well, Call of Duty: Black Ops I is now actually playable on Linux, too. Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games. The games that benefit most from NTSYNC are the ones that were struggling before, such as titles with heavy multi-threaded workloads where the synchronization overhead was a genuine bottleneck. For those games, the difference is night and day. And unlike fsync, NTSYNC is in the mainline kernel, meaning you don't need any custom patches or out-of-tree modules for it work. Any distro shipping kernel 6.14 or later, which at this point includes Fedora 42, Ubuntu 25.04, and more recent releases, will support it. Valve has already added the NTSYNC kernel driver to SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, loading the module by default, and an unofficial Proton fork, Proton GE, already has it enabled. When Valve's official Proton rebases on Wine 11, every Steam Deck owner gets this for free. All of this is what makes NTSYNC such a big deal, as it's not simply a run-of-the-mill performance patch. Instead, it's something much bigger: this is the first time Wine's synchronization has been correct at the kernel level, implemented in the mainline Linux kernel, and available to everyone without jumping through hoops. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/03/24/1946246 Cheers, Peter

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MultiTail
by Peter Reutemann 16 Mar '26

16 Mar '26

Just came across this post/tutorial on MultiTail: 'MultiTail is a powerful terminal-based utility that allows you to view multiple log files simultaneously in a single terminal window. Think of it as tail -f on steroids. Instead of opening several terminal tabs or splitting your screen with tmux, MultiTail creates dynamically managed panes inside one terminal session. Each pane can follow a different file, command output, or even network stream. At its core, MultiTail is designed to: - Monitor multiple log files at once - Display them in split windows - Apply colorization rules - Merge multiple files into one unified view - Filter content live - Follow new files dynamically' -- source: https://idolinux.com/multitail-what-it-is-and-how-it-can-make-you-a-better-… Cheers, Peter

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Keep Android Open
by Michael Doerner | TechnologyWise 08 Mar '26

08 Mar '26

Any suggestions who to address, where to go to with this in NZ? https://keepandroidopen.org/

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Norwegian Consumer Council PSA -- In English! (Language Warning)
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Mar '26

06 Mar '26

The Norwegian Consumer Council (Forbrukerrådet) has released a wickedly funny skit (in English, even) warning against products that start out attractive and fun to use, but then get enshittified with extra-cost “options” that turn out not to be so “optional”. And yes, they use the word a lot. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Upf_B9RLQ>

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A Taste Of CDE
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 02 Mar '26

02 Mar '26

An emulation of an early-1990s Linux GUI in a browser <https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/nostalgic-developer-recreates-t…>. Actually, who says CDE was ever “dead”? GNU created their own version of the OSF Motif GUI toolkit, called “Lesstif”, and it continues to be available in Linux distros to this day.

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The Two Linuses
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 28 Feb '26

28 Feb '26

This 53-minute video <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA> was posted back in January, but I only discovered it more recently. In it, Linux creator Linus Torvalds pays a visit to the offices of Linus Sebastian (the brains behind the “Linus Tech Tips” YouTube channel), while the latter builds the former a new custom PC to the former’s requirements. With a 24-core, 48-thread CPU (great for kernel builds, which is what Torvalds spends much of his work day doing), and 64GiB worth of memory -- proper ECC memory (a long-time pet peeve of the Linux man). As the build progresses, they discuss many things, including questions previously collected from the community, addressed to Linus T. Asked which of his software “children” he is more fond of, Linux or Git, Torvalds reveals that he only spent 6 months working on Git, before passing it off to Junio Hamano, who has been the prime mover behind it for the past 20 years. (What, no mention of Subsurface?) He also brought in one of the guitar-effects pedals that he has been designing, purely as a hobby to unwind from his day job, with no expectation that they will ever be useful to anybody, not even himself (he doesn’t play guitar). Which distro does he use? It turns out his current fave is Fedora, because (unlike, say, Ubuntu) they make it easy for him to replace their kernel with his custom, fresh-built ones.

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Firefox 148 Lets You Kill All AI Features in One Click
by Peter Reutemann 27 Feb '26

27 Feb '26

'Mozilla has released Firefox 148 for Windows, macOS and Linux, bringing a new AI Settings section that lets users disable all of the browser's AI-powered features in one click and then selectively re-enable the ones they actually want, such as the local translation tool that works locally rather than in the cloud. The update also patches more than 50 security vulnerabilities -- none known to be under active exploitation -- over half of which Mozilla classifies as high risk, including five sandbox escape flaws and eight use-after-free bugs in the JavaScript engine that could allow code execution.' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/26/182239 Cheers, Peter

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Austria Military Ditches Microsoft for Open-Source Libreoffice – Here’s Why
by Peter Reutemann 26 Feb '26

26 Feb '26

'Austria's military has completed a major IT overhaul, replacing Microsoft Office with the open-source LibreOffice suite across all its desktop systems. The change, finalized this month, affects approximately 16,000 workstations in the Austrian Armed Forces. This move will substantially reduce Austria's software bill. At $33.75 per user per month, a Microsoft 365 E3 subscription for 16,000 workstations costs approximately $6,480,000 per year, compared to LibreOffice's zero cost. But this move isn't about saving money. The real motivation is to gain digital sovereignty and control over critical data. As Michael Hillebrand of Directorate 6 information and communications technology (ICT) and Cyber Defense, explained: "It was very important for us to show that we are doing this primarily to strengthen our digital sovereignty, to maintain our independence in terms of ICT infrastructure and to ensure that data is only processed in-house."' -- source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-european-military-just-ditched-microsoft… Cheers, Peter

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Fear Of Forking, Revisited
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 23 Feb '26

23 Feb '26

Was rereading this old essay <http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/forking.html> that I found some years ago. It’s a commentary on the status of the Free Software movement (unfortunately referred to as “freeware” at one point) as of late 1999, at a point when various parties (*cough* proprietary software propagandists *cough*) were still trying to spread FUD about how “forks” of software projects could leave them fragmented and users without a coherent support framework. He recaps the unfortunate history of Unix, and the swallowing up of essentially its entire market by Microsoft: Those companies bought the right [from AT&T] to make their own Unixes: IBM released AIX. Apple did A/UX. DEC did Ultrix[8], OSF/1, and Digital Unix (later renamed "Compaq Unix" and now "Compaq Tru64 Unix"). Data General did DG/UX, SGI did IRIX, HP did HP/UX, and SCO did Xenix[9] which eventually mutated into SCO Open Server. And we could cite others, but I'll spare you. The point is that these were the jokers who ruined Unix. Every one of them marketed his mutant Unix as "Unix plus" — everything the other guys have and more. Needing to create differentiators, they deliberately made their Unixes incompatible while giving lip service to "standards". For customers, this was simply a mess, and Microsoft drove right through these guys' disunity like a Sherman tank. It is the classic instance of forking that sticks in people's minds. Which is why you folks are expected to assure customers that the same won't happen to GNU/Linux. We'll return to this point later. Among various other examples, the author tries to explain why this is not a serious possibility with the Linux kernel, and how even the BSD forks were not really forks, and would stay largely in sync. Well, he was mostly right on the first of those cases, but somewhat wrong on the second one. As to how the release of Open-Source BSD came about: One fine day in 1991, grad student Keith Bostic came to the BSD lead developers, inspired by Richard M. Stallman's (remember him?) [13] GNU Project, and suggested replacing BSD's remaining AT&T work to create a truly free BSD. Dreading the confrontation likely to result with AT&T, they tried to stall by assigning Bostic the difficult part of this task, rewriting some key BSD utilities. This backfired when he promptly did exactly that. So, they grumbled but then completed the job[14], and tried to prevent AT&T from noticing what they had done. AT&T did notice[15], panicked, and sued. That, too, is a long story best omitted. Under the stress of the lawsuit, freeware BSD split into three camps (FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD).[16] But there were also several proprietary branches[17], made possible because U.C. Berkeley's "BSD Licence" allowed creation of those: Sun Microsystems's SunOS, Tenon Intersystems's MachTen, BSDI's BSD OS [18], and NeXT Computer's NeXTStep OS all came out for sale without public access to source, and were all based on the Berkeley BSD source code. For one thing, I thought *every* proprietary Unix was based on code licensed from AT&T; but this is saying that SunOS and NeXTStep, among a few others, came from BSD and owed nothing to AT&T. A word about the three free BSD variants: All three were splinters from a now-dead project called 386BSD. All have talked about re-merging in order to save duplication of effort, but they now persist as separate projects because they've specialised: FreeBSD aims for the highest possible stability[19] on Intel x86 (IA32) CPUs, NetBSD tries to run on as many different CPU types as possible, and OpenBSD aims to have the tightest security possible. In other words, the 386BSD project remains forked because there are compelling reasons that make this a win for everyone. Also, where possible, these three sister projects collaborate on tough tasks — and they also collaborate with GNU/Linux programmers. Some of the best hardware drivers in the Linux kernel are actually BSD drivers. There's a high level of compatibility among the three BSDs and between them and GNU/Linux: Unlike the proprietary Unix vendors, BSD and GNU/Linux programmers have an incentive to eliminate incompatibility and support standards. But as we know from more recent history, the BSDs don’t cooperate that much at all, at least not any more. As of today, they are well and truly fragmented. As for the AT&T lawsuit, it seems it had no legal basis at all: At the time, the lawsuit's allegation of infringement of AT&T source-code copyright cast a shadow over not just Berkeley's BSD and BSDI's BSD OS, but also William and Lynne Jolitz's free-software 386BSD project, which was a patchkit of about 180 patches based on Berkeley's "NET/2" BSD release. (In retrospect, there is grave doubt about whether AT&T's complaint ever had merit, on several grounds, but this was not clear at the time. Kirk McKusick told me that defendants ultimately agreed in the settlement that seven BSD files were encumbered by AT&T copyrights only to let AT&T save face on what would otherwise have been a dead loss, allowing that concession because the seven files were dreadful spaghetti code and overdue for replacement anyway.) Apparently in part because of the legal threat, the Jolitzes withdrew from the project, leaving copyright questions and a leadership vacuum on top of the project's other problems. Anyway, there are other examples of forks that were successful versus those that were not so successful. I don’t think the pattern the author claims to see holds up; I think it is far more an issue of management culture: if the original project leaders try to be too controlling and reject useful-looking ideas, then forks will happen. The new ideas in the forks may or may not succeed; but of course that success (or not) is key to the success of the fork.

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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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