- wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Firefox is adding a switch to turn AI features off
by Peter Reutemann 03 Feb '26

03 Feb '26

'Unlike many of the companies stuffing AI into their browsers, Mozilla will soon give you a way to turn all of these features off. An update coming on February 24th will add a new “AI control” option to Firefox’s settings menu, allowing you to disable or enable the browser’s individual AI features, including access to a built-in AI chatbot, translations, AI tab group suggestions, and more.' -- source: https://www.theverge.com/news/872489/mozilla-firefox-ai-features-off-button Cheers, Peter

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When 20-Year-Old Bill Gates Fought the World's First Software Pirates
by Peter Reutemann 02 Feb '26

02 Feb '26

'Just months after his 20th birthday, Bill Gates had already angered the programmer community," remembers this 50th-anniversary commemoration of Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists. "As the first home computers began appearing in the 1970s, the world faced a question: Would its software be free?" Gates railed in 1976 that "Most of you steal your software." Gates had coded the BASIC interpreter for Altair's first home computer with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff — only to see it pirated by Steve Wozniak's friends at the Homebrew Computing Club. Expecting royalties, a none-too-happy Gates issued his letter in the club's newsletter (as well as Altair's own publication), complaining "I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up." But freedom-loving coders had other ideas. When Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs released their Apple 1 home computer that summer, they stressed that "our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost..." And early open-source hackers began writing their own free Tiny Basic interpreters to create a free alternative to the Gates/Micro-Soft code. This led to the first occurrence of the phrase "Copyleft" in October of 1976. Open Source definition author Bruce Perens shares his thoughts today. "When I left Pixar in 2000, I stopped in Steve Job's office — which for some reason was right across the hall from mine... " Perens remembered. "I asked Steve: 'You still don't believe in this Linux stuff, do you...?'" And Perens remembers how that movement finally won over Steve Jobs and carried the day. "Three years later, Steve stood onstage in front of a slide that said 'Open Source: We Think It's Great!' as he introduced the Safari browser, which at that time was based on the browser engine developed by the KDE Open Source project!"' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/02/01/1915221 Cheers, Peter

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Floppy Disk TV Remote
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 20 Jan '26

20 Jan '26

Hardware hacker wants to make an alternative remote control for his smart TV that would be more intuitive for his toddler child to use than a conventional interactive remote interface. So what does he do? Build it out of an ancient, 1990s-technology floppy drive. Basic idea is that each floppy disk represents a different stream; user inserts disk into drive, TV starts playing that stream. Initially he thought of faking it, with simulated floppy “disks” with RFID chips on them that the “drive” would detect. Then he figured that the actual tactile experience of putting a real working disk into a real working drive would be far more effective. So he stores a config file on each disk that contains information about the stream to be played (plus associated display artwork), that software can read from the drive. Since there is only a small amount of data to be read off each disk, the drive can work quite nicely off battery power. So it becomes a real remote control as in one that is remote, not connected to the TV by any wire. Albeit one that is not very easy to pick up, but never mind ... <https://www.tomshardware.com/maker-stem/microcontrollers-projects/floppy-di… labeled-floppies-to-watch-his-favorite-shows>

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“7 deprecated Linux commands you need to stop using - and what to use instead”
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 15 Jan '26

15 Jan '26

Jack Wallen’s list <https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-commands-deprecated-why-do-not-use/> of commands you shouldn’t be using any more, and what to use instead, is a mixed bag. ifconfig/iwconfig vs ip/iw -- the latter newer ones (part of the Linux “iproute2” suite) offer greater access to all the features of the Linux network stack than the former, older ones, and so are preferable in lots of ways. It is already possible to find setups which don’t have the old commands installed by default; I’m not sure if any distros have actually dropped the option for installing them altogether, but no doubt that will happen at some point. scp -- wrong. rsync, scp and sftp are all different ways of transferring files securely over SSH. scp did use to use its own protocol at one point, but it has been upgraded to use the same underlying protocol as sftp, so it’s perfectly fine to continue using the same command, if that’s what you’re used to. There is no sign that the scp command itself is going to be deprecated at any point, though no doubt the option to fall back to the old protocol for compatibility’s sake is likely to be removed eventually. egrep/fgrep -- it has been true for decades (possibly has always been true for the GNU utilities?) that egrep and fgrep are just synonyms for “grep -E” and “grep -F” respectively. And it is true that the alternative names are finally being deprecated after all these years, so it behooves you to learn to use the “grep” command for all forms. netstat vs ss -- yes, another case of the newer iproute2-based command taking over from the older, traditional command, and offering more features besides. Same remarks as above apply. route vs ip route -- iproute2 again. arp vs ip neighbour/neighbor -- more iproute2.

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RISC-V PC Motherboard
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Jan '26

14 Jan '26

Here’s a mini-ITX motherboard with most of the usual trimmings (no integrated graphics or audio, though), but with a RISC-V CPU. So you’ll be using that single PCIe-x16 slot for a graphics card. Known to run Ubuntu. It’s available for pre-order <https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/milk-v-titan-mini-ix-board-…>. At this stage, it seems more targeted towards developers and early adopters, not (yet) the mass market.

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How Long Does It Take to Fix Linux Kernel Bugs?
by Peter Reutemann 13 Jan '26

13 Jan '26

'A report from It's FOSS: Jenny Guanni Qu, a researcher at [VC fund] Pebblebed, analyzed 125,183 bugs from 20 years of Linux kernel development history (on Git). The findings show that the average bug takes 2.1 years to find. [Though the median is 0.7 years, with the average possibly skewed by "outliers" discovered after years of hiding.] The longest-lived bug, a buffer overflow in networking code, went unnoticed for 20.7 years! [But 86.5% of bugs are found within five years.] The research was carried out by relying on the Fixes: tag that is used in kernel development. Basically, when a commit fixes a bug, it includes a tag pointing to the commit that introduced the bug. Jenny wrote a tool that extracted these tags from the kernel's git history going back to 2005. The tool finds all fixing commits, extracts the referenced commit hash, pulls dates from both commits, and calculates the time frame. As for the dataset, it includes over 125k records from Linux 6.19-rc3, covering bugs from April 2005 to January 2026. Out of these, 119,449 were unique fixing commits from 9,159 different authors, and only 158 bugs had CVE IDs assigned. It took six hours to assemble the dataset, according to the blog post, which concludes that the percentage of bugs found within one year has improved dramatically, from 0% in 2010 to 69% by 2022. The blog post says this can likely be attributed to: - The Syzkaller fuzzer (released in 2015) - Dynamic memory error detectors like KASAN, KMSAN, KCSAN sanitizers - Better static analysis - More contributors reviewing code But "We're simultaneously catching new bugs faster AND slowly working through ~5,400 ancient bugs that have been hiding for over 5 years." They've also developed an AI model called VulnBERT that predicts whether a commit introduces a vulnerability, claiming that of all actual bug-introducing commits, it catches 92.2%. "The goal isn't to replace human reviewers but to point them at the 10% of commits most likely to be problematic, so they can focus attention where it matters..."' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/26/01/12/0443201 Cheers, Peter

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DMCA Takedown On Free Software
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 07 Jan '26

07 Jan '26

Just read this report <https://www.tomshardware.com/software/chinese-semiconductor-outfit-has-linu…> about a DMCA takedown on a GitHub repository belonging to Rockchip. The copyright takedown was requested by the FFmpeg project. Their code is open source, of course. As is the code in the Rockchip repository. But the company took their code, removed the original attribution and licensing (LGPL), and put the result under an Apache licence, which is not compatible with the LGPL. Given that LGPL is a copyleft licence, and Apache is not, this could lead others to believe they could in turn take the Rockchip version of the code and develop it further and incorporate it into proprietary products without making any source available -- which is something copyleft is designed to prevent. Of course this action did not come out of the blue. The FFmpeg project had raised the issue with Rockchip back in 2024, but in the absence of any progress since that time, they felt that action had to be taken.

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RIP Stewart Cheifet
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 06 Jan '26

06 Jan '26

Those who spent their formative years back in the 20th century may or may not remember Stewart Cheifet, long-time presenter and executive producer of a US TV program called “The Computer Chronicles”, which was mainly produced through the 1980s and 1990s. I don’t recall that ever being shown here in NZ, but I later came to discover him through compilations of the shows on YouTube. And it turns it he has been instrumental in ensuring that records of all 400-odd episodes, as far as possible, have been preserved at the Internet Archive, as a valuable snapshot of the computing scene back in that era. Also of note, his co-presenter for the first several years was Gary Kildall, of CP/M fame, until the death of the latter. Now we hear Cheifet himself has passed away at the age of 87 <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/01/stewart-cheifet-pbs-host-who-chroni…>. (Oh, and if you’re wondering, he always pronounced it like “shuffay”).

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pv - monitor the progress of data through a pipe
by Peter Reutemann 06 Jan '26

06 Jan '26

Hi everyone It's not Easter, but I love finding nifty little tools... :-) While looking up stackexchange for importing gzip-compressed MySQL dumps, I came across "pv", a tool for monitoring progress through pipes. Allows you to monitor how long, e.g., the import of a database dump will take. Example import command: pv mydump.sql.gz | gunzip | mysql -u root -p <database name> You will then see something like this: 1.73GiB 0:05:26 [6.54MiB/s] [=> ] 5% ETA 1:31:51 Here is the man page for pv: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/pv.1.html -- source: https://serverfault.com/a/445130 Cheers, Peter

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2025 might have been the year for Linux gaming, but there's still a way to go until I switch from Windows
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 30 Dec '25

30 Dec '25

Here is an article full of praise for the success Linux has been enjoying in handheld PC gaming, being able to run most Windows games better than Windows itself can manage <https://www.pcgamer.com/software/linux/2025-might-have-been-the-year-for-li…>. The writer mentions the one big obstacle to Linux enjoying greater success in this area: kernel-level anti-cheat mechanisms. The vast majority of these are Windows-specific, and many vendors are not only reluctant to support Linux as an alternative platform, they are downright hostile to it. Ultimately, though, I am going to put my bet on free-market Capitalism winning out. The customer is king. It is the game vendors who have to entice the buyers to part with their money in return for something worthwhile, the customers have no obligation to simply hand it over. If the only ace the Windows products have up their sleeve is obnoxious anti-cheat mechanisms, that may not be enough to keep customers flocking to them in droves. In other words, if the Linux-based handhelds continue to offer a superior user experience to the Windows-based ones, then those last remaining holdout vendors will be forced, purely by market forces, to go where the money is: they will ultimately be dragged, kicking and screaming, into supporting Linux gaming in some form.

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Unix V4 Recovered
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 25 Dec '25

25 Dec '25

A tape containing the only known copy of Bell Labs Unix version 4, dating from 1973, has been found at the University of Utah <https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/unix-v4-recovered-from-randomly…>. This was the first version of Unix in which the kernel and core utilities were (re)written in C. This particular tape had been sent to Martin Newell, he of the famous teapot. And yes, the recovered code is now available for you to try running for yourself.

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The Linux Kernel Is Just A Program
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 24 Dec '25

24 Dec '25

Came across this nifty little article <https://serversfor.dev/linux-inside-out/the-linux-kernel-is-just-a-program/> (found on Bluesky <https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3mapj6kf76k2d>) showing that you can run the Linux kernel directly from within a VM in qemu, without installing a distro or anything. It will boot, and then die because it wants to mount a root filesystem and start an init process; so then it’s easy enough to set that up with a few more commands, try booting it again, and there you go -- you have a running VM.

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Linux Kernel Rust Code Sees Its First CVE Vulnerability
by Peter Reutemann 18 Dec '25

18 Dec '25

'Longtime Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced that the Linux kernel has received its first CVE tied to Rust code. Phoronix reports: This first CVE (CVE-2025-68260) for Rust code in the Linux kernel pertains to the Android Binder rewrite in Rust. There is a race condition that can occur due to some noted unsafe Rust code. That code can lead to memory corruption of the previous/next pointers and in turn cause a crash. This CVE for the possible system crash is for Linux 6.18 and newer since the introduction of the Rust Binder driver. At least though it's just a possible system crash and not any more serious system compromise with remote code execution or other more severe issues. ' -- source: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/12/17/2034233 Cheers, Peter

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Blocking ads with OpenWRT router
by Peter Reutemann 16 Dec '25

16 Dec '25

Hi everyone Found out on the weekend that I can install AdBlock straight on my router that is running OpenWRT: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/ad-blocking?s%5B%5D=adblock Gets rid of (a large portion of) ads on mobile devices, like Android phones, when they are connected via WiFi. Cheers, Peter

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New Rule Forbids GNOME Shell Extensions Made Using AI-Generated Code
by Peter Reutemann 15 Dec '25

15 Dec '25

'Phoronix reports: Due to the growing number of GNOME Shell extensions looking to appear on extensions.gnome.org that were generated using AI, it's now prohibited. The new rule in their guidelines note that AI-generated code will be explicitly rejected: "Extensions must not be AI-generated While it is not prohibited to use AI as a learning aid or a development tool (i.e. code completions), extension developers should be able to justify and explain the code they submit, within reason. Submissions with large amounts of unnecessary code, inconsistent code style, imaginary API usage, comments serving as LLM prompts, or other indications of AI-generated output will be rejected." In a blog post, GNOME developer Javad Rahmatzadeh explains that "Some devs are using AI without understanding the code..."' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/12/14/0453227 Cheers, Peter

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New FreeBSD 15 Retires 32-Bit Ports and Modernizes Builds
by Peter Reutemann 08 Dec '25

08 Dec '25

'FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE arrived this week, notes this report from The Register, which calls it the latest release "of the Unix world's leading alternative to Linux." As well as numerous bug fixes and upgrades to many of its components, the major changes in this version are reductions in the number of platforms the OS supports, and in how it's built and how its component software is packaged. FreeBSD 15 has significantly reduced support for 32-bit platforms. Compared to FreeBSD 14 in 2023, there are no longer builds for x86-32, POWER, or ARM-v6. As the release notes put it: "The venerable 32-bit hardware platforms i386, armv6, and 32-bit powerpc have been retired. 32-bit application support lives on via the 32-bit compatibility mode in their respective 64-bit platforms. The armv7 platform remains as the last supported 32-bit platform. We thank them for their service." Now FreeBSD supports five CPU architectures — two Tier-1 platforms, x86-64 and AArch64, and three Tier-2 platforms, armv7 and up, powerpc64le, and riscv64. Arguably, it's time. AMD's first 64-bit chips started shipping 22 years ago. Intel launched the original x86 chip, the 8086 in 1978. These days, 64-bit is nearly as old as the entire Intel 80x86 platform was when the 64-bit versions first appeared. In comparison, a few months ago, Debian 13 also dropped its x86-32 edition — six years after Canonical launched its first x86-64-only distro, Ubuntu 19.10. Another significant change is that this is the first version built under the new pkgbase system, although it's still experimental and optional for now. If you opt for a pkgbase installation, then the core OS itself is installed from multiple separate software packages, meaning that the whole system can be updated using the package manager. Over in the Linux world, this is the norm, but Linux is a very different beast... The plan is that by FreeBSD 16, scheduled for December 2027, the restructure will be complete, the old distribution sets will be removed, and the current freebsd-update command and its associated infrastructure can be turned off. Another significant change is reproducible builds, a milestone the project reached in late October. This change is part of a multi-project initiative toward ensuring deterministic compilation: to be able to demonstrate that a certain set of source files and compilation directives is guaranteed to produce identical binaries, as a countermeasure against compromised code. A handy side-effect is that building the whole OS, including installation media images, no longer needs root access. There are of course other new features. Lots of drivers and subsystems have been updated, and this release has better power management, including suspend and resume. There's improved wireless networking, with support for more Wi-Fi chipsets and faster wireless standards, plus updated graphics drivers... The release announcement calls out the inclusion of OpenZFS 2.4.0-rc4, OpenSSL 3.5.4, and OpenSSH 10.0 p2, and notes the inclusion of some new quantum-resistant encryption systems... In general, we found FreeBSD 15 easier and less complicated to work with than either of the previous major releases. It should be easier on servers too. The new OCI container support in FreeBSD 14.2, which we wrote about a year ago, is more mature now. FreeBSD has its own version of Podman, and you can run Linux containers on FreeBSD. This means you can use Docker commands and tools, which are familiar to many more developers than FreeBSD's native Jail system. "FreeBSD has its own place in servers and the public cloud, but it's getting easier to run it as a desktop OS as well," the article concludes. "It can run all the main Linux desktops, including GNOME on Wayland." "There's no systemd here, and never will be — and no Flatpak or Snap either, for that matter.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/12/07/0627214 Cheers, Peter

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How Home Assistant Leads a 'Local-First Rebellion'
by Peter Reutemann 08 Dec '25

08 Dec '25

'It runs locally, a free/open source home automation platform connecting all your devices together, regardless of brand. And GitHub's senior developer calls it "one of the most active, culturally important, and technically demanding open source ecosystems on the planet," with tens of thousands of contributors and millions of installations. That's confirmed by this year's "Octoverse" developer survey... Home Assistant was one of the fastest-growing open source projects by contributors, ranking alongside AI infrastructure giants like vLLM, Ollama, and Transformers. It also appeared in the top projects attracting first-time contributors, sitting beside massive developer platforms such as VS Code... Home Assistant is now running in more than 2 million households, orchestrating everything from thermostats and door locks to motion sensors and lighting. All on users' own hardware, not the cloud. The contributor base behind that growth is just as remarkable: 21,000 contributors in a single year... At its core, Home Assistant's problem is combinatorial explosion. The platform supports "hundreds, thousands of devices... over 3,000 brands," as [maintainer Franck Nijhof] notes. Each one behaves differently, and the only way to normalize them is to build a general-purpose abstraction layer that can survive vendor churn, bad APIs, and inconsistent firmware. Instead of treating devices as isolated objects behind cloud accounts, everything is represented locally as entities with states and events. A garage door is not just a vendor-specific API; it's a structured device that exposes capabilities to the automation engine. A thermostat is not a cloud endpoint; it's a sensor/actuator pair with metadata that can be reasoned about. That consistency is why people can build wildly advanced automations. Frenck describes one particularly inventive example: "Some people install weight sensors into their couches so they actually know if you're sitting down or standing up again. You're watching a movie, you stand up, and it will pause and then turn on the lights a bit brighter so you can actually see when you get your drink. You get back, sit down, the lights dim, and the movie continues." A system that can orchestrate these interactions is fundamentally a distributed event-driven runtime for physical spaces. Home Assistant may look like a dashboard, but under the hood it behaves more like a real-time OS for the home... The local-first architecture means Home Assistant can run on hardware as small as a Raspberry Pi but must handle workloads that commercial systems offload to the cloud: device discovery, event dispatch, state persistence, automation scheduling, voice pipeline inference (if local), real-time sensor reading, integration updates, and security constraints. This architecture forces optimizations few consumer systems attempt. "If any of this were offloaded to a vendor cloud, the system would be easier to build," the article points out. "But Home Assistant's philosophy reverses the paradigm: the home is the data center..." As Nijhof says of other vendor solutions, "It's crazy that we need the internet nowadays to change your thermostat."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/12/07/1955259 Cheers, Peter

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Proposed Patches Make Upstream Linux Kernel Usable For The OpenWrt One Router
by Peter Reutemann 27 Nov '25

27 Nov '25

'Announced nearly one year ago was the OpenWrt One as a router/AP that is "hacker-friendly" and open-source. The OpenWrt One is powered by a Filogic 820 SoC and features WiFi 6. This official OpenWrt device is manufactured by Banana Pi. While there is downstream open-source code available for customizing the OpenWrt One to your heart's content, the upstream Linux kernel support to date hasn't been full-featured. Sjoerd Simons of Collabora today posted a set of 15 patches for making the OpenWrt One AP functional with the upstream Linux kernel. As Sjoerd puts it, to make the OpenWrt One "actually useful as an access point" with the mainline Linux kernel. The patches get PCI Express working as tested with NVMe storage, the wired network interfaces enabled, the WiFi/wireless networking brought up, status LEDs enabled, SPI NOR, and related bits. The patches bring the necessary Device Tree support and extensions to existing drivers to make everything work without any new drivers being required. There are various kernel quirks required too at this point for making the device happy with the mainline Linux kernel. All in just over 500 lines of code for making the OpenWrt One useful with these patches that will be hopefully mainlined to the Linux kernel.' -- source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/OpenWrt-One-Useful-Linux Has anyone experience with this router? Cheers, Peter

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Arduino's New Terms of Service Worries Hobbyists Ahead of Qualcomm Acquisition
by Peter Reutemann 25 Nov '25

25 Nov '25

'Ars Technica: Some members of the maker community are distraught about Arduino's new terms of service (ToS), saying that the added rules put the company's open source DNA at risk. Arduino updated its ToS and privacy policy this month, which is about a month after Qualcomm announced that it's acquiring the open source hardware and software company. Among the most controversial changes is this addition: "User shall not: translate, decompile or reverse-engineer the Platform, or engage in any other activity designed to identify the algorithms and logic of the Platform's operation, unless expressly allowed by Arduino or by applicable license agreements ..." In response to concerns from some members of the maker community, including from open source hardware distributor and manufacturer Adafruit, Arduino posted a blog on Friday. Regarding the new reverse-engineering rule, Arduino's blog said: "Any hardware, software or services (e.g. Arduino IDE, hardware schematics, tooling and libraries) released with Open Source licenses remain available as before. Restrictions on reverse-engineering apply specifically to our Software-as-a-Service cloud applications. Anything that was open, stays open." But Adafruit founder and engineer Limor Fried and Adafruit managing editor Phillip Torrone are not convinced. They told Ars Technica that Arduino's blog leaves many questions unanswered and said that they've sent these questions to Arduino without response. "Why is reverse-engineering prohibited at all for a company built on openly hackable systems?" Fried and Torrone asked in a shared statement. There are also concerns about the ToS' broad new AI-monitoring powers, which offer little clarity on what data is collected, who can access it, or how long it's retained. On top of that, the update introduces an unusual patent clause that bars users from using the platform to identify potential infringement by Arduino or its partners, along with sweeping, perpetual rights over user-generated content. This could allow Arduino, and potentially Qualcomm, to republish, modify, monetize, or redistribute user uploads indefinitely.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/11/24/2144256 Cheers, Peter

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The DoorDash Problem: Amazon Sues Perplexity
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 22 Nov '25

22 Nov '25

A lot of companies are making a comfortable living by selling goods or services online: Amazon, DoorDash, Uber etc. A key part of the business model is that the visitors to their site are actual humans, who can be shown ads, or otherwise persuaded to upsell to some enticing extra product (“Would you like chips with that?”) and thereby disgorge a little bit of extra revenue. This is part of what’s called “building a relationship with the customer”. Which is a nice way of saying “owning the customer”. But what if the visitors to your site are AI bots, looking for deals on behalf of a human that ends up one step removed from contact with you? Then all those ads and extra persuasive messages fall on the worst kind of deaf ears -- no ears at all. The human says to the AI agent “get me a ride to the airport”, the agent goes away to the Uber and Lyft sites (or whatever else turns up), and picks the cheapest option at that moment. The human doesn’t know which company is providing the ride that turns up on their doorstep, and they won’t care. The providers of these products have become mere commodity suppliers. This thought does scare some of these online retailers. And now Amazon, just about the biggest such e-tailer out there, is suing Perplexity, a provider of just such an AI agent service. Amazon says that this is about maintaining a “positive customer experience”; but surely the form of the “customer experience” is something for the customer to choose. Amazon also says that access by AI bots is against the terms of service for its site, and that is clearly the core of its legal claim. But will such a claim hold up in court? How far can companies go in dictating exactly what form users’ accesses to their site can take? <https://www.theverge.com/podcast/823909/the-doordash-problem-ai-agents-web-…>

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The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 21 Nov '25

21 Nov '25

People in the US like to make fun of the seemingly endless bureaucratic hurdles that the EU Governments keep putting in the way of US companies looking to make a quick buck. You know, having to worry about boring things like “privacy” and “interoperability” and “security”, that kind of thing. Oh, and maintaining free-market competition -- imagine lecturing the USA about how to achieve that! But every now and then, this endless stream of new regulations hits the jackpot. Like how Google is suddenly able to offer full two-way compatibility with Apple’s formerly-proprietary “AirDrop” feature for exchanging files between mobile devices -- the file exchange is done directly, peer-to-peer, without going through any central servers. It’s all down to the fact that the EU forced Apple to move away from the completely proprietary low-level radio protocol it was originally using for AirDrop, towards something that was more amenable to exactly the sort of reverse-engineering of the higher-level protocol that Google did. Of course Apple did also contribute work towards the new standard, just as it did with USB Type-C; it’s better to be seen to be cooperating with inevitability, rather than futilely trying to fight it tooth and nail. <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/the-eu-made-apple-adopt-new-wi-fi-s…>

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HP And Dell Disable HEVC (H.265) Support Built Into Their Laptops’ CPUs
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 21 Nov '25

21 Nov '25

Some owners of HP and Dell laptops are finding that their machines can no longer playback HEVC/H.265-encoded video content, even though this capability is supposed to be built into their hardware <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/hp-and-dell-disable-hevc-support-bu…>. Why is this happening? The obvious answer: patent issues. The royalty rates these companies have to pay to offer this functionality is going up quite substantially from next year, and they have to cut costs. So the users will have to pay extra money to get this capability back. Synology also used to offer the capability to transcode videos to H.265 on some of its products, but discontinued that as of last year. This is why AV1 was created by Google and other companies: to offer a patent-free alternative to H.265. But in spite of all the patent issues that were clear from the beginning, lots of companies went ahead with H.265-based products regardless. Maybe now we will see the popularity of AV1 increase?

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The Origin Of The Smiley
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 21 Nov '25

21 Nov '25

Here’s a report <https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/in-1982-a-physics-joke-gone-wrong-s…> on the precise origins of the use of the character sequences “:-)” and “:-(”, not quite to denote happiness/unhappiness as they are commonly used today, but to distinguish jokes from serious postings. The discussion happened back in September 1982, on a bulletin-board system running on a DECsystem-20 at Carnegie-Mellon University. It came about as a result of a joke posting being taken way too seriously (of course ...). To add to the interest, there is more than personal testimony to back up the record: original backup tapes of bboard postings from that time were dug up, and the actual transcript of those discussions was extracted, and are now available online <https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm>.

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Taming The Data Destroyer
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 17 Nov '25

17 Nov '25

I use the “dd” command fairly frequently, to put new versions of SystemRescue on the USB stick I dedicate to that purpose, for example. The command has been nicknamed the “data destroyer”, because while doing sector-level copies as root, it can be all too easy to write to the wrong device, and destroy an important filesystem. The “lsblk” command can be handy for confirming which block device you should be writing to, before pressing Enter on that fateful command. There’s lots of information it can display, to help you identify the right device. For example, a command like lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,SERIAL,WWN,VENDOR,MODEL shows a little tree display of devices and partitions in the first column, followed by a lot of info you can use to identify what is currently plugged in. I tried a couple of USB sticks, and they showed amazingly long strings for their serial numbers. My SystemRescue stick shows the vendor as “TOSHIBA” and the model as “TransMemory”. Interestingly, both Western Digital and Seagate drives show the vendor as “ATA”, though the model name begins with “WDC” for the one and “ST” for the other. The SSD boot drives in both my main workstation and laptop display blank for the vendor, but again the model field shows some vendor-specific information.

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Glitch Tokens
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 16 Nov '25

16 Nov '25

Added something more to my modest store of AI knowledge with this little item about “glitch tokens” -- inputs that make AI language models respond in bizarre and inexplicable ways <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO2X3oZEJOA>. Some people assumed this behaviour was just a random consequence of the whole neural-network concept. Others probed a bit deeper, and discovered some actually explicable, if surprising, causes of particular glitches. What else is lurking in there ... ?

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