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  • Chinese Tencent-owned Riot Games installs rootkit on every League of Legends players’ computer

    Wed 9:05am By Thom Holwerda
    With 14.9, Vanguard, Riot’s proprietary Anti-Cheat system will be deployed and active in League of Legends. This means that active enforcement of Vanguard will be in effect and working hard to make sure your queues are free from scripters, botters, and…
  • Linux Mint: non-GNOME GTK desktop environments need to work together in the face of libadwaita

    Wed 5:03am By Thom Holwerda
    Anyone who has spent any time recently using non-GNOME GTK desktop environments, like Cinnamon, MATE, or Xfce, has had to deal with the unfortunate reality of a lot of GTK applications becoming GNOME applications instead, using GNOME’s own libadwaita. These…
  • Redox gets USB HID support

    Wed 5:02am By Thom Holwerda
    Another month, another detailed report about the progress made in Redox, the Rust-based operating system. A major improvements this month is support for USB HID, allowing USB keyboards and mice to work on Redox, but the project does note USB hubs are still…
  • You can’t just assume UTF-8

    Tue 4:35pm By Thom Holwerda
    Humans speak countless different languages. Not only are these languages incompatible, but runtime transpilation is a real pain. Sadly, every standardisation initiative has failed. At least there is someone to blame for this state-of-affairs: God. It was him,…
  • A few facts about POSIX

    Tue 3:38pm By Thom Holwerda
    Over 35 years ago, these problems with software portability led to the emergence of the first POSIX standard in 1988. The acronym was coined by Richard Stallman, who added “X” to the end of Portable Operating System Interface. It’s meant to provide a…
  • RISC-V support in Android just got a big setback

    Tue 2:46pm By Thom Holwerda
    Although Google has shown significant progress in recent weeks in improving RISC-V support in Android, it seems that we’re still quite a bit away from seeing RISC-V hardware running certified builds of Android. Earlier today, a Senior Staff Software Engineer…
  • JMP: this week’s sponsor

    Mon 8:10am By Thom Holwerda
    JMP is a fully FOSS service providing a way to get a real phone number that operates over the internet using XMPP. They provide numbers in the USA and Canada with everything you need to access SMS/MMS/etc. and voice calls using your XMPP (or SIP) clients of…
  • 9front “DO NOT INSTALL” released

    Mon 7:59am By Thom Holwerda
    There’s a new 9front release! So, what exactly is 9front, you may ask? Well, after it became clear that Bell Labs wasn’t doing much with plan9, a group of developers took matters into their own hands and created 9front, a fork of plan9. Their latest…
  • run0: a systemd-based, more secure replacement for sudo

    Mon 7:49am By Thom Holwerda
    Lennart Poettering, main developer of systemd, has announced run0, a systemd-based replacement for the well-known sudo command that fixes many of he inherent issues with the widely used tool to gain temporary elevated privileges. There are various problems…
  • Microsoft At Work

    Mon 6:41am By Thom Holwerda
    Well, this was a wild goose chase of a read. J. B. Crawford dove into the history of something I’ve never heard of – Microsoft At Work – and came away with a story that’ while clearer thanks to his research, is still frustratingly nebulous. I’m still…
  • The first video game, Spacewar!, on the DEC PDP-1 in your browser

    Mon 3:53am By Thom Holwerda
    This is a virtual DEC PDP-1 (emulated in HTML5/JavaScript) running the original code of “Spacewar!”, the earliest known digital video game. If available, use gamepads or joysticks for authentic gameplay — the game was originally played using custom…
  • Windows NT and NetWare on PA-RISC, and a HP-UX port to x86

    Sun 8:51am By Thom Holwerda
    Back when I was working on my article about PA-RISC, HP-UX, and UNIX workstations in general, I made extensive use of OpenPA, Paul Weissmann’s invaluable and incredibly detailed resource about HP’s workstation efforts, HP-UX, and tons of related projects…
  • GNOME Foundation in financial trouble

    Sun 4:45am By Thom Holwerda
    As you may be aware, the GNOME Foundation has operated at a deficit (nonprofit speak for a loss – ie spending more than we’ve been raising each year) for over three years, essentially running the Foundation on reserves from some substantial donations…
  • A BSD person tries Alpine Linux

    Sun 4:19am By Thom Holwerda
    In February last year I wrote about running a FreeBSD desktop, and concluded that sometimes you need to give yourself permission to tinker. Well recently I’ve started tinkering with Alpine Linux! It’s been recommended to me for years, so I’m finally…
  • Sculpt OS 24.04 released with initial suspend/resume support, new audio stack, and much more

    Sat 10:15am By Thom Holwerda
    The Genode project has released Sculpt OS 24.04, the general purpose desktop operating system based on the Genode OS Framework. This release is absolutely jam-packed with new features, improvements, and changes, and it’s hard to know where to begin. One of…
  • Microsoft intends to record everything you do on your PC for “AI” processing

    Sat 10:02am By Thom Holwerda
    Microsoft is about to go even more hog-wild with “AI” in Windows, as it intends to start recording everything you do on your Windows computer so “AI” features can find stuff for you. According to my sources, AI Explorer will run in the background and…