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Steam On Linux Use Skyrocketed In March - More Than Double The macOS Gaming Marketshare
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 02 Apr '26

02 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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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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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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Why Windows sucks and how to fix it, according to a former Microsoft engineer
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 14 Nov '25

14 Nov '25

Former Microsoft engineer (and retrocomputing enthusiast) Dave Plummer has done a video on what he thinks is wrong with Microsoft Windows <https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-windows-sucks-and-how-to-fix-it-according…>. According to him, Windows should have a “Pro” mode, which turns off a lot of the handholding. Secondly, users need to be given more control over the telemetry data that Microsoft collects about their activities. And thirdly, Microsoft should restore the option to run a Windows installation without having to register a Microsoft account. Generally, Microsoft should avoid “dark patterns” -- trying to inveigle its users into accessing the company’s online services, whether they wanted to or not. And turn down the volume a bit on all this “agentic OS” malarkey. All I have to say is: “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!”. Plummer may be an engineer, but he’s not a businessman. Perhaps he hasn’t noticed that Windows isn’t bringing in as much profit for the company as it used to. So all these changes are attempts to boost revenue -- necessary, in the company’s eyes. Because how else do you keep such an expensive-to-develop, expensive-to-maintain OS afloat? Does Microsoft think it can get away with such behaviour, in spite of the chorus of complaints? Of course it does. And the article admits as such: So does Windows really suck? Yeah, it does, at least in certain ways. Of course, I'm still using it after all these years. Maybe it's become like an old, worn shoe that still feels comfortable despite all the problems. Phrases like “boiling the frog” come to mind ...

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New Project Brings Strong Linux Compatibility To More Classic Windows Games
by Peter Reutemann 14 Nov '25

14 Nov '25

'Ars Technica reports: For years now, Valve has been slowly improving the capabilities of the Proton compatibility layer that lets thousands of Windows games work seamlessly on the Linux-based SteamOS. But Valve's Windows-to-Linux compatibility layer generally only extends back to games written for Direct3D 8, the proprietary Windows graphics API Microsoft released in late 2000. Now, a new open source project is seeking to extend Linux interoperability further back into PC gaming history. The d7vk project describes itself as "a Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 7 [D3D7], which allows running 3D applications on Linux using Wine." The new project isn't the first attempt to get Direct3D 7 games running on Linux. Wine's own built-in WineD3D compatibility layer has supported D3D7 in some form or another for at least two decades now. But the new d7vk project instead branches off the existing dxvk compatibility layer, which is already used by Valve's Proton for SteamOS and which reportedly offers better performance than WineD3D on many games. D7vk project author WinterSnowfall writes that while they don't expect this new project to be upstreamed into the main dxvk in the future, the new version should have "the same level of per application/targeted configuration profiles and fixes that you're used to seeing in dxvk proper." And though d7vk might not perform universally better than the existing alternatives, WinterSnowfall writes that "having more options on the table is a good thing in my book at least." The report notes that the PC Gaming Wiki lists more than 400 games built on the aging D3D7 APIs, spanning mostly early-2000s releases but with a trickle of new titles still appearing through 2022. Notable classics include Escape from Monkey Island and Hitman: Codename 47.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/11/10/2216209 Cheers, Peter

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