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Google Won't Add Fact Checks Despite New EU Law
According to Axios, Google has told the EU it will not add fact checks to search results and YouTube videos or use them in ranking or removing content, despite the requirements of a new EU law. From the report: In a letter written to Renate Nikolay, the deputy director general under the content and technology arm at the European Commission, Google's global affairs president Kent Walker said the fact-checking integration required by the Commission's new Disinformation Code of Practice "simply isn't appropriate or effective for our services" and said Google won't commit to it. The code would require Google to incorporate fact-check results alongside Google's search results and YouTube videos. It would also force Google to build fact-checking into its ranking systems and algorithms.
Walker said Google's current approach to content moderation works and pointed to successful content moderation during last year's "unprecedented cycle of global elections" as proof. He said a new feature added to YouTube last year that enables some users to add contextual notes to videos "has significant potential." (That program is similar to X's Community Notes feature, as well as new program announced by Meta last week.)
The EU's Code of Practice on Disinformation, introduced in 2022, includes several voluntary commitments that tech firms and private companies, including fact-checking organizations, are expected to deliver on. The Code, originally created in 2018, predates the EU's new content moderation law, the Digital Services Act (DSA), which went into effect in 2022.
The Commission has held private discussions over the past year with tech companies, urging them to convert the voluntary measures into an official code of conduct under the DSA. Walker said in his letter Thursday that Google had already told the Commission that it didn't plan to comply. Google will "pull out of all fact-checking commitments in the Code before it becomes a DSA Code of Conduct," he wrote. He said Google will continue to invest in improvements to its current content moderation practices, which focus on providing people with more information about their search results through features like Synth ID watermarking and AI disclosures on YouTube.
Slashdot
~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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'Everything We Were Taught About Success Is Wrong'
Megan Hellerer, a career coach and founder of Coaching for Underfulfilled Overachievers, offers an alternative to the relentless "hustle culture" and "destinational living" mindsets, which often emphasize long-term goals at the expense of present happiness. "There's another way and I call it directional living," writes Hellerer. "Here's the catch: I can't find fulfilment for you. The good news is that it's all up to you..." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report published by The Guardian: Directional living is like the scientific method but for life. You begin with a hypothesis -- your best guess as to the direction of a loose "something bigger". You conduct tests and collect data through your experiences, refining your life hypothesis as you go.
If you have a hypothesis that involves living on the beach, you may test that by renting a house on the coast for one month and collecting data on how right, or not, that is for you. The goal is not to permanently relocate but to find out whether you want to continue exploring that path. Success is in finding what's true, not in proving your original theory correct.
I've found this idea speaks uniquely to UFOAs at this moment in time. [UFOA is a term Hellerer came up with that stands for "underfulfilled overachiever." This describes a constant striver who is living a great-on-paper life, yet feels disconnected from their work, life and self.] The closest thing I have to a personal motto is a quotation that's widely attributed to Carl Jung but that, as it turns out, he never actually said at all. "The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are." My greatest hope for you is that you get to live this privilege fully.
Slashdot
~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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Google Strikes World's Largest Biochar Carbon Removal Deal
Google has partnered with Indian startup Varaha to purchase 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide removal credits by 2030, marking its largest deal in India and the largest involving biochar, a carbon removal solution made from biomass. TechCrunch reports: The offtake agreement credits will be delivered to Google by 2030 from Varaha's industrial biochar project in the western Indian state of Gujarat, the two firms said on Thursday. [...] Biochar is produced in two ways: artisanal and industrial. The artisanal method is community-driven, where farmers burn crop residue in conical flasks without using machines. In contrast, industrial biochar is made using large reactors that process 50-60 tons of biomass daily.
Varaha's project will generate industrial biochar from an invasive plant species, Prosopis Juliflora, using its pyrolysis facility in Gujarat. The invasive species impacts plant biodiversity and has overtaken grasslands used for livestock. Varaha will harvest the plant and make efforts to restore native grasslands in the region, the company's co-founder and CEO Madhur Jain said in an interview. Once the biochar is produced, a third-party auditor will submit their report to Puro.Earth to generate credits. Although biochar is seen as a long-term carbon removal solution, its permanence can vary between 1,000 and 2,500 years depending on production and environmental factors.
Jain told TechCrunch that Varaha tried using different feedstocks and different parameters within its reactors to find the best combination to achieve permanence close to 1,600 years. The startup has also built a digital monitoring, reporting and verification system, integrating remote sensing to monitor biomass availability. It even has a mobile app that captures geo-tagged, time-stamped images to geographically document activities, including biomass excavation and biochar's field application. With its first project, Varaha said it processed at least 40,000 tons of biomass and produced 10,000 tons of biochar last year.
Slashdot
~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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AT&T Kills Home Internet Service In New York Over Law Requiring $15 Plans
Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin reports: AT&T has stopped offering its 5G home Internet service in New York instead of complying with a new state law that requires ISPs to offer $15 or $20 plans to people with low incomes. New York started enforcing its Affordable Broadband Act yesterday after a legal battle of nearly four years. [...] The law requires ISPs with over 20,000 customers in New York to offer $15 broadband plans with download speeds of at least 25Mbps, or $20-per-month service with 200Mbps speeds. The plans only have to be offered to households that meet income eligibility requirements, such as qualifying for the National School Lunch Program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or Medicaid. [...]
Ending home Internet service in New York is relatively simple for AT&T because it is outside the 21-state wireline territory in which the telco offers fiber and DSL home Internet service. "AT&T Internet Air is currently available only in select areas and where AT&T Fiber is not available. New York is outside of our wireline service footprint, so we do not have other home Internet options available in the state," the company said. AT&T will continue offering its 4G and 5G mobile service in New York, as the state law only affects home Internet service. People with smartphones or other mobile devices connected to the AT&T wireless network should thus see no change.
Existing New York-based users of AT&T Internet Air can only keep it for 45 days and won't be charged during that time, AT&T said. "During this transition, customers will be able to keep their existing AT&T Internet Air service for up to 45 days, at no charge, as they find other options for broadband. We will work closely with our customers throughout this transition," AT&T said. Residential users will be sent "a recovery kit with instructions on how to return their AIA equipment, while business customers can keep any device they purchased at no charge," AT&T said.
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~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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Toyota Unit Hino Motors Reaches $1.6 Billion US Diesel Emissions Settlement
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Toyota Motor unit Hino Motors has agreed a $1.6 billion settlement with U.S. agencies and will plead guilty over excess diesel engine emissions in more than 105,000 U.S. vehicles, the company and U.S. government said on Wednesday. The Japanese truck and engine manufacturer was charged with fraud in U.S. District Court in Detroit for unlawfully selling 105,000 heavy-duty diesel engines in the United States from 2010 through 2022 that did not meet emissions standards. The settlement, which still must be approved by a U.S. judge, includes a criminal penalty of $521.76 million, $442.5 million in civil penalties to U.S. authorities and $236.5 million to California.
A company-commissioned panel said in a report in 2022 Hino had falsified emissions data on some engines going back to at least 2003. Hino agreed to plead guilty to engaging in a multi-year criminal conspiracy and serve a five-year term of probation, during which it will be barred from importing any diesel engines it has manufactured into the U.S., and carry out a comprehensive compliance and ethics program, the Justice Department and Environmental Protection Agency said. [...] The settlement includes a mitigation program, valued at $155 million, to offset excess air emissions from the violations by replacing marine and locomotive engines, and a recall program, valued at $144.2 million, to fix engines in 2017-2019 heavy-duty trucks
The EPA said Hino admitted that between 2010 and 2019, it submitted false applications for engine certification approvals and altered emission test data, conducted tests improperly and fabricated data without conducting any underlying tests. Hino President Satoshi Ogiso said the company had improved its internal culture, oversight and compliance practices. "This resolution is a significant milestone toward resolving legacy issues that we have worked hard to ensure are no longer a part of Hino's operations or culture," he said in a statement. Toyota's Hino Motors isn't the only automaker to admit to selling vehicles with excess diesel emissions. Volkswagen had to pay billions in fines after it admitted in 2015 to cheating emissions tests by installing "defeat devices" and sophisticated software in nearly 11 million vehicles worldwide. Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), BMW, Opel/Vauxhall (General Motors), and Fiat Chrysler have been implicated in similar practices.
Slashdot
~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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Starship Rocket Breaks Up Mid-Flight, But SpaceX Catches Booster Again After Launch
SpaceX conducted its seventh test flight of the Starship rocket on Thursday with mixed results. The upper stage was lost nine minutes after launch, but the Super Heavy booster successfully landed back at the launch site, marking a second successful recovery. CNBC reports: SpaceX said in a post on X that the ship broke up during its ascent burn and that it would "continue to review data from today's flight test to better understand root cause." After the rocket lost communication, social media users posted photos and videos of what appeared to be fireballs in the sky near the Caribbean islands. Starship's launch trajectory takes it due east from Texas, which means the fireballs are likely debris from the rocket breaking apart and reentering the atmosphere.
Starship launched from SpaceX's private "Starbase" facility near Brownsville, Texas, shortly after 5:30 p.m. ET. A few minutes later, the rocket's "Super Heavy" booster returned to land at the launch site, in SpaceX's second successful "catch" during a flight. It did not catch the booster on the last flight. There were no people on board the Starship flight. However, Elon Musk's company was flying 10 "Starlink simulators" in the rocket's payload bay and planned to attempt to deploy the satellite-like objects once in space. This would have been a key test of the rocket's capabilities, as SpaceX needs Starship to deploy its much larger and heavier upcoming generation of Starlink satellites. You can watch a recording of the launch here.
Slashdot
~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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PC Gaming Has Been Outperforming Console For Years, Report Finds
A recent 200-page report published by Epyllion reveals that PC gaming has been outperforming consoles over the last decade, "breezing past console platforms and generating more content spending and revenue," reports Insider Gaming. From the report: One slide revealed that since 2011, PC's content spend has dominated 'living room' console revenue by more than 65%, and it has earned 225% more than 'combined console' spend. That's a total of $30 billion if you want to put a number on it. Those numbers exclude hardware and accessories.
The report also showed that mobile gaming is leagues ahead of both PC and console platforms, representing the number one money maker in the games industry. This stat has been recorded despite an $18 billion increase in spending on console platforms in 2024 compared to 2011. That 75% increase is still trumped by content spend on PC platforms. But why is PC becoming increasingly popular and much more profitable? Epyllion suggested it boils down to a few core reasons:
- PC platforms have a much larger library of games and 'near-full backwards compatibility'
- On a PC, you can multi-task (stream, communicate, alt+tab, multiple monitors)
- Lower entry price point than consoles
- Higher top-end performance
- Better for esports and competitive gaming
- Able to play more early-access games
- More annual game releases
- Console 'exclusives' are now finding their way to PC
Slashdot
~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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Apple Pulls AI-Generated Notifications For News After Generating Fake Headlines
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Apple is temporarily pulling its newly introduced artificial intelligence feature that summarizes news notifications after it repeatedly sent users error-filled headlines, sparking backlash from a news organization and press freedom groups. The rare reversal from the iPhone maker on its heavily marketed Apple Intelligence feature comes after the technology produced misleading or altogether false summaries of news headlines that appear almost identical to regular push notifications.
On Thursday, Apple deployed a beta software update to developers that disabled the AI feature for news and entertainment headlines, which it plans to later roll out to all users while it works to improve the AI feature. The company plans to re-enable the feature in a future update. As part of the update, the company said the Apple Intelligence summaries, which users must opt into, will more explicitly emphasize that the information has been produced by AI, signaling that it may sometimes produce inaccurate results.
Slashdot
~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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David Lynch, Director of Twin Peaks and Dune, Dies At 78
David Lynch, a four-time Oscar-nominated filmmaker known for the 1984 sci-fi epic Dune and the Showtime drama Twin Peaks, has died. "In January 2025, Lynch evacuated his Los Angeles home due to the Southern California wildfires," writes longtime Slashdot reader Z00L00K. "According to Deadline, these events preceded a terminal decline in his health, and on January 16, 2025, Lynch's family announced that he had died at the age of 78." Deadline reports: Lynch had been diagnosed with emphysema. Sources told Deadline that he was forced to relocate from his house due to the Sunset Fire and then took a turn for the worse. In an interview with Sight & Sound magazine last year, Lynch revealed that due to Covid fears and his emphysema diagnosis, he could no longer could leave the house, which meant if he directed again, it would be remote. He then followed up the interview with a post on social that he "will never retire" despite his physical challenges.
Slashdot
~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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Blue Origins' New Glenn Rocket Reaches Orbit
Longtime Slashdot reader timeOday shares a report from the New York Times: At 2:03 a.m. Eastern time, seven powerful engines ignited at the base of a 320-foot-tall rocket named New Glenn. The flames illuminated night into day at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. The rocket, barely moving at first, nudged upward and then accelerated in an arc over the Atlantic Ocean, lit up in blue, the color of combustion of the rocket's methane fuel. Thirteen minutes later, the second stage of New Glenn reached orbit.
The launch was a major success for Blue Origin, Mr. Bezos' rocket company. The upward flight appeared almost flawless, but Blue Origin's stretch goal of landing the booster stage on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean failed. As planned, the booster fired three of its engines to slow down, but then the stream of data stopped, indicating that the booster had been lost.
"We'll learn a lot from today and try again at our next launch this spring," Dave Limp, the chief executive of Blue Origin, said in a statement. In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Limp said that, with a successful inaugural launch of New Glenn, Blue Origin is aiming for a second launch in the spring and that he wanted six to eight launches this year. A recording of the launch is available on YouTube.
Slashdot
~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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AI Slashes Google's Code Migration Time By Half
Google has cut code migration time in half by deploying AI tools to assist with large-scale software updates, according to a new research paper from the company's engineers. The tech giant used large language models to help convert 32-bit IDs to 64-bit across its 500-million-line codebase, upgrade testing libraries, and replace time-handling frameworks. While 80% of code changes were AI-generated, human engineers still needed to verify and sometimes correct the AI's output. In one project, the system helped migrate 5,359 files and modify 149,000 lines of code in three months.
Slashdot
~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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Microsoft Patches Windows To Eliminate Secure Boot Bypass Threat
Microsoft has patched a Windows vulnerability that allowed attackers to bypass Secure Boot, a critical defense against firmware infections, the company said. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-7344, affected Windows devices for at least seven months. Security researcher Martin Smolar discovered the vulnerability in a signed UEFI application within system recovery software from seven vendors, including Howyar.
The application, reloader.efi, circumvented standard security checks through a custom PE loader. Administrative attackers could exploit the vulnerability to install malicious firmware that persists even after disk reformatting. Microsoft revoked the application's digital signature, though the vulnerability's impact on Linux systems remains unclear.
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~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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Nvidia Reveals AI Supercomputer Used Non-Stop For Six Years To Perfect Gaming Graphics
Nvidia has dedicated a supercomputer running thousands of its latest GPUs exclusively to improving its DLSS upscaling technology for the past six years, a company executive revealed at CES 2025. Speaking at the RTX Blackwell Editor's Day in Las Vegas, Brian Catanzaro, Nvidia's VP of applied deep learning research, said the system operates continuously to analyze failures and retrain models across hundreds of games.
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~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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A New Jam-Packed Biden Executive Order Tackles Cybersecurity, AI, and More
U.S. President Joe Biden has issued a comprehensive cybersecurity executive order, four days before leaving office, mandating improvements to government network monitoring, software procurement, AI usage, and foreign hacker penalties.
The 40-page directive aims to leverage AI's security benefits, implement digital identities for citizens, and address vulnerabilities that have allowed Chinese and Russian intrusions into U.S. government systems. It requires software vendors to prove secure development practices and gives the Commerce Department eight months to establish mandatory cybersecurity standards for government contractors.
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~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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Nintendo Admits Emulators Are Legal Despite Crackdown
Nintendo's top intellectual property lawyer has acknowledged that video game emulators are technically legal, even as the company continues to shut down popular emulation projects worldwide. Speaking at the Tokyo eSports Festa, Koji Nishiura, deputy general manager of Nintendo's intellectual property department, said emulators violate the law only when they bypass encryption, copy copyrighted console programs, or direct users to pirated material. The statement comes after Nintendo forced the closure of several major emulation projects last year, including Yuzu, Citra, and Ryujinx.
Slashdot
~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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NewsBone.com
Suggest a feed to syndicate here, or check out what I'm doing over at freshtao.
~Created Fri Jan 17 02:27:15 2025
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Offer: Volunteer labor for your open source project
OSNews Sponsor OS-SCi is educating the next generation FOSS engineers, and as part of their coursework, they’re looking for worthy open source projects to which they can contribute their time and effort. In addition to the work they provide during their studies, these volunteers will be encouraged to continue to be involved after they finish their courses and proceed into the workforce. If you are involved in an open source project and would like some help, please register here. Also, please leave a comment below to share some details about your project with the OSNews community. Perhaps we can use this forum to bring some OSNews readers together as long term collaborators. In other news, OS-SCi is organizing an international Open Source Hackathon on 21-22 February online and on multiple university campuses. Register for the hackathon here. Read more details here.
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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Microsoft will also stop supporting Office applications on Windows 10 after October 14
It seems we’re getting a glimpse at the next stick Microsoft will be using to push people to buy new PCs (we’re all rich, according to Microsoft) or upgrade to Windows 11. In a blog post extolling the virtues of a free upgrade from Windows 10 to 11, the company announced that with the end of support for Windows 10, Microsoft will also stop supporting Office applications on Windows 10, otherwise known as Office 365. Lastly, Microsoft 365 Apps will no longer be supported after October 14, 2025, on Windows 10 devices. To use Microsoft 365 Applications on your device, you will need to upgrade to Windows 11. ↫ Microsoft’s Margaret Farmer Of course, the applications won’t stop working on Windows 10 right away after that date, but Microsoft won’t be fixing any security issues, bugs, or other issues that might (will) come up. It reads like a threat to Windows users – upgrade by buying a new PC you probably can’t afford, or not only use an insecure version of Windows, but also insecure Office applications. I doubt it’ll have much of an impact on the staggering number of people still using Windows 10 – more than 60% of Windows users – so I’m sure Microsoft has more draconian plans up its sleeve to push people to upgrade.
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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Nepenthes: a dangerous tarpit to trap LLM crawlers
If you don’t want OpenAI’s, Apple’s, Google’s, or other companies’ crawlers sucking up the content on your website, there isn’t much you can do. They generally don’t care about the venerable robots.txt, and while people like Aaron Schwartz were legally bullied into suicide for downloading scientific articles using a guest account, corporations are free to take whatever they want, permission or no. If corporations don’t respect us, why should we respect them? There are ways to fight back against these scrapers, and the latest is especially nasty in all the right ways. This is a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers. Specifically, it’s targeting crawlers that scrape data for LLM’s – but really, like the plants it is named after, it’ll eat just about anything that finds its way inside. It works by generating an endless sequences of pages, each of which with dozens of links, that simply go back into the tarpit. Pages are randomly generated, but in a deterministic way, causing them to appear to be flat files that never change. Intentional delay is added to prevent crawlers from bogging down your server, in addition to wasting their time. Lastly, optional Markov-babble can be added to the pages, to give the crawlers something to scrape up and train their LLMs on, hopefully accelerating model collapse. ↫ ZADZMO.org You really have to know what you’re doing when you set up this tool. It is intentionally designed to cause harm to LLM web crawlers, but it makes no distinction between LLM crawlers and, say, search engine crawlers, so it will definitely get you removed from search results. On top of that, because Nepenthes is designed to feed LLM crawlers what they’re looking for, they’re going to love your servers and thus spike your CPU load constantly. I can’t reiterate enough that you should not be using this if you don’t know what you’re doing. Setting it all up is fairly straightforward, but of note is that if you want to use the Markov generation feature, you’ll need to provide your own corpus for it to feed from. None is included to make sure every installation of Nepenthes will be different and unique because users will choose their own corpus to set up. You can use whatever texts you want, like Wikipedia articles, royalty-free books, open research corpuses, and so on. Nepenthes will also provide you with statistics to see what cats you’ve dragged in. You can use Nepenthes defensively to prevent LLM crawlers from reaching your real content, while also collecting the IP ranges of the crawlers so you can start blocking them. If you’ve got enough bandwith and horsepower, you can also opt to use Nepenthes offensively, and you can have some real fun with this. Let’s say you’ve got horsepower and bandwidth to burn, and just want to see these AI models burn. Nepenthes has what you need: Don’t make any attempt to block crawlers with the IP stats. Put the delay times as low as you are comfortable with. Train a big Markov corpus and leave the Markov module enabled, set the maximum babble size to something big. In short, let them suck down as much bullshit as they have diskspace for and choke on it. ↫ ZADZMO.org In a world where we can’t fight back against LLM crawlers in a sensible and respectful way, tools like these are exactly what we need. After all, the imbalance of power between us normal people and corporations is growing so insanely out of any and all proportions, that we don’t have much choice but to attempt to burn it all down with more… Destructive methods. I doubt this will do much to stop LLM crawlers from taking whatever they want without consent – as I’ve repeatedly said, Silicon Valley does not understand consent – but at least it’s joyfully cathartic.
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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Microsoft releases 161 Windows security updates
Speaking of Microsoft shipping bad code, how about an absolutely humongous ‘patch Tuesday’? Microsoft today unleashed updates to plug a whopping 161 security vulnerabilities in Windows and related software, including three “zero-day” weaknesses that are already under active attack. Redmond’s inaugural Patch Tuesday of 2025 bundles more fixes than the company has shipped in one go since 2017. ↫ Brian Krebs Happy new year, Windows users.
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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A Microsoft change to the Linux kernel caused major breakage, but was caught in time
A change to the Linux 6.13 kernel contributed by a Microsoft engineer ended up changing Linux x86_64 code without proper authorization and in turn causing troubles for users and now set to be disabled ahead of the Linux 6.13 stable release expected next Sunday. ↫ Michael Larabel What I like about this story is that it seems to underline that the processes, checks, and balances in place in Linux kernel development seem to be working – at least, this time. A breaking change was caught during the prerelease phase, and a fix has been merged to make sure this issue will be fixed before the stable version of Linux 6.13 is released to the wider public. This all sounds great, but there is an element of this story that raises some serious questions. The change itself was related to EXECMEM_ROX, and was intended to improve performance of 64bit AMD and Intel processors, but in turn, this new code broke Control Flow Integrity on some setups, causing some devices not to wake from hibernation while also breaking other features. What makes this spicy is that the code was merged without acknowledgement from any of the x86 kernel maintainers, which made a lot of people very unhappy – and understandably so. So while the processes and checks and balances worked here, something still went horribly wrong, as such changes should not be able to be merged without acknowledgement from maintainers. This now makes me wonder how many more times this has happened without causing any instantly discoverable issues. For now, some code has been added to revert the offending changes, and Linux 6.13 will ship with Microsoft’s bad code disabled.
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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Google allows advertisers to fingerprint you for even better tracking
They tried to keep it from prying eyes, but several people did notice it: Google made a pretty significant policy change regarding the use of fingerprinting by advertisers. While Google did not allow advertisers to use digital fingerprinting, the company has now changed its mind on this one. Google really tried to hide this change. The main support article talking about the reasoning behind the change is intentionally obtuse and nebulous, and doesn’t even link to the actual policy changes being implemented – which are found in a separate document. Google doesn’t highlight its changes there, so you have to compare the two versions of the policy yourself. Google claims this change has to be implemented because of “advances in privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) such as on-device processing, trusted execution environments, and secure multi-party computation” and “the rise of new ad-supported devices and platforms”. What I think this word salad means is that users are regaining a modicum of privacy with some specific privacy-preserving features in certain operating systems and on certain devices, and that the use of dedicated, siloed streaming services is increasing, which is harder for Google and advertisers to track. In other words, Google is relaxing its rules on fingerprinting because we’re all getting more conscious about privacy. In any event, the advice remains the same: use ad-blockers, preferably at your network level. Install adblocking software and extensions, set up a Pi-Hole, or turn on any adblocking features in your router (my Ubiquiti router has it built-in, and it works like a charm). Remember: your device, your rules. If you don’t want to see ads, you don’t have to.
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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FM TOWNS Technical Databook partially translated to English
In recent months, we’ve talked twice about FM Towns, Fujitsu’s PC platform aimed solely at the Japanese market. It was almost entirely only available in Japanese, so it’s difficult to explore for those of us who don’t speak Japanese. There’s an effort underway to recreate it as open source, which will most likely take a while, but in the meantime, a part of the FM TOWNS Technical Databook, written by Noriaki Chiba, has been translated from Japanese into English by Joe Groff. From the book’s preface: That is why the author wrote this book, to serve as an essential manual for enthusiasts, systems developers, and software developers. Typical computer manuals do not adequately cover technical specifications, so users tend to have a hard time understanding the hardware. We have an opportunity to thoroughly break through this barrier, and with this new hardware architecture being a milestone in the FM series, it feels like the perfect time to try. Hardware manuals up to this point have typically only explained the consequences of the hardware design without explaining its fundamentals. By contrast, this book describes the hardware design of the TOWNS from its foundations. Since even expert systems developers can feel like amateurs when working with devices outside of their repertoire, this book focuses on explaining those foundations. This is especially necessary for the FM TOWNS, since it features so many new devices, including a 80386 CPU and a CD-ROM drive. ↫ Noriaki Chiba This handbook goes into great detail about the inner workings of the hardware, and chapter II, which hasn’t been translated yet, also dives deep into the BIOS of the hardware, from its first revisions to all the additional features added on top as time progressed. This book, as well as its translation, will be invaluable to people trying to use Towns OS today, to developers working on emulators for the platform, and anyone who fits somewhere in between. It seems this translation was done entirely in Groff’s free time as a side project, which is commendable. We’re looking at about 65000 words in the target language, of a highly technical nature, all translated for free because someone decided it was worth it. Sending this over to a translation agency would most likely cost well over €10000. Of course, that would include additional editing and proofreading by parties other than the initial translator(s), but that’s definitely not needed for a passion project like this. Excellent, valuable work.
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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Let’s talk about bias
When someone says you’re biased against them because you object to their stated goal of removing you from society, they’re not actually asking for fairness — they’re demanding complicity. It’s the political equivalent of asking why the gazelle seems to have such a negative view of lions. Think about the underlying logic here: I’m biased because I don’t give equal weight to both sides of a debate about my fundamental rights. I’m biased because I notice patterns in political movements that explicitly state their intentions regarding people like me. I’m biased because I take them at their word when they tell me what they plan to do. ↫ Joan Westenberg OSNews and I will always stand for the right of transgender people to exist, and to enjoy the exact same rights and privileges as any other member of society. This is non-negotiable.
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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Enlightenment 0.27.0 released
Enlightenment 0.27.0 has been released, and we’ve got some highly informative release notes. This is the latest release of Enlightenment. This has a lot of fixes mostly with some new features. ↫ Carsten Haitzler That’s it. That’s the release notes. Digging into the commit history between 0.26.0 and 0.27.0 gives some more information, and here we can see that a lot of work has been done on the CPU frequency applet (including hopefully making it work properly on FreeBSD), a lot of updated translations, some RandR work, and a ton of other small changes. Does any one of us use Enlightenment on a daily basis? I’m actually intrigued by this release, as it’s the first one in two years, and aside from historical usage decades ago – like many of us, I assume – I haven’t really spent any time with the current incarnation.
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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Can you complete the Oregon Trail if you wait at a river for 14272 years: a study
Two years ago, Twitch streamer albrot discovered a bug in the code for crossing rivers. One of the options is to “wait to see if conditions improve”; waiting a day will consume food but not recalculate any health conditions, granting your party immortality. From this conceit the Oregon Trail Time Machine was born; a multiday livestream of the game as the party waits for conditions to improve at the final Snake River crossing until the year 10000, to see if the withered travellers can make it to the ruins of ancient Oregon. The first attempt ended in tragedy; no matter what albrot tried, the party would succumb to disease and die almost immediately. A couple of days before New Years Eve 2025, albrot reached out and asked if I knew anything about Apple II hacking. ↫ Scott Percival It may have required some reverse engineering and hackery, but yes, you can reach the ruins of Oregon in the year 16120.
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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“The people should own the town square”
Mastodon, the only remaining social network that isn’t a fascist hellhole like Twitter or Facebook, is changing its legal and operational foundation to a proper European non-profit. Simply, we are going to transfer ownership of key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components (including name and copyrights, among other assets) to a new non-profit organization, affirming the intent that Mastodon should not be owned or controlled by a single individual. It also means a different role for Eugen, Mastodon’s current CEO. Handing off the overall Mastodon management will free him up to focus on product strategy where his original passion lies and he gains the most satisfaction. ↫ Official Mastodon blog Eugen Rochko has always been clear and steadfast about Mastodon not being for sale and not accepting any outside investments despite countless offers, and after eight years of both creating and running Mastodon, it makes perfect sense to move the network and its assets to a proper European non-profit. Mastodon’s actual control over the entire federated ActivityPub network – the Fediverse – is actually limited, so it’s not like the network is dependent on Mastodon, but there’s no denying it’s the most well-known part of the Fediverse. The Fediverse is the only social network on which OSNews is actively present (and myself, too, for that matter). By “actively present” I only mean I’m keeping an eye on any possible replies; the feed itself consists exclusively of links to our stories as soon as they’re published, and that’s it. Everything else you might encounter on social media is either legacy cruft we haven’t deleted yet, or something a third-party set up that we don’t control. RSS means it’s easy for people to set up third-party, unaffiliated accounts on any social medium posting links to our stories, and that’s entirely fine, of course. However, corporate social media controlled by the irrational whims of delusional billionaires with totalitarian tendencies is not something we want to be a part of, so aside from visiting OSNews.com and using our RSS feeds, the only other official way to follow OSNews is on Mastodon.
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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WordPress is in trouble
It’s hard to see how to move forward from here. I think the best bet would be for people to rally around a new community-driven infrastructure. This would likely require a fork of WordPress, though, and that’s going to be a messy. The current open source version of WordPress relies on the sites and services Mullenweg controls. Joost de Valk, the original creator of an extremely popular SEO plugin, wrote a blog post with some thoughts on the matter. I’m hoping that more prominent people in the community step up like this, and that some way forward can be found. Update: Moments after posting this, I was pointed to a story on TechCrunch about Mullenweg deactivating the WordPress.org accounts of users planning a “fork”. This after he previously promoted (though in a slightly mocking way) the idea of forking open source software. In both cases, the people he mentioned weren’t actually planning forks, but musing about future ways forward for WordPress. Mullenweg framed the account deactivations as giving people the push they need to get started. Remember that WordPress.org accounts are required to submit themes, plugins, or core code to the WordPress project. These recent events really make it seem like you’re no longer welcome to contribute to WordPress if you question Matt Mullenweg. ↫ Gavin Anderegg I haven’t wasted a single word on the ongoing WordPress drama yet, but the longer Matt Mullenweg, Automattic’s CEO and thus owner of WordPress, keeps losing his mind, I can’t really ignore the matter any more. OSNews runs, after all, on WordPress – self-hosted, at least, so not on Mullenweg’s WordPress.com – and if things keep going the way they are, I simply don’t know if WordPress remains a viable, safe, and future-proof CMS for OSNews. I haven’t discussed this particular situation with OSNews owner, David Adams, yet, mostly since he’s quite hands-off in the day-to-day operations and has more than enough other matters to take care of, but I think the time has come to start planning for a potential worst-case scenario in which Mullenweg takes even more of whatever he’s taking and WordPress implodes entirely. Remember – even if you self-host WordPress outside of Automattic, several core infrastructure parts of WordPress still run through Automattic, so we’re still dependent on what Mullenweg does or doesn’t do. I have no answers, announcements, or even plans at this point, but if you or your company depend on WordPress, you might want to start thinking about where to go from here.
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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The history and use of /etc/glob in early Unixes
One of the innovations that the V7 Bourne shell introduced was built in shell wildcard globbing, which is to say expanding things like *, ?, and so on. Of course Unix had shell wildcards well before V7, but in V6 and earlier, the shell didn’t implement globbing itself; instead this was delegated to an external program, /etc/glob (this affects things like looking into the history of Unix shell wildcards, because you have to know to look at the glob source, not the shell). ↫ Chris Siebenmann I never knew expanding wildcars in UNIX shells was once done by a separate program, but if you stop and think about the original UNIX philosophy, it kind of makes sense. On a slightly related note, I’m currently very deep into setting up, playing with, and actively using HP-UX 11i v1 on the HP c8000 I was able to buy thanks to countless donations from you all, OSNews readers, and one of the things I want to get working is email in dtmail, the CDE email program. However, dtmail is old, and wants you to do email the UNIX way: instead of dtmail retrieving and sending email itself, it expects other programs to those tasks for you. In other words, to setup and use dtmail (instead of relying on a 2010 port of Thunderbird), I’ll have to learn how to set up things like sendmail, fetchmail, or alternatives to those tools. Those programs will in turn dump the emails in the maildir format for dtmail to work with. Configuring these tools could very well be above my paygrade, but I’ll do my best to try and get it working – I think it’s more authentic to use something like dtmail than a random Thunderbird port. In any event, this, too, feels very UNIX-y, much like delegating wildcard expansion to a separate program. What this also shows is that the “UNIX philosophy” was subject to erosion from the very beginning, and really isn’t a modern phenomenon like many people seem to imply. I doubt many of the people complaining about the demise of the UNIX philosophy today even knew wildcard expansion used to be done by a separate program.
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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Bringing SerenityOS to real hardware, one driver at a time
Many moons ago, around the time when Andreas formally resigned from being Serenity’s BDFL, I decided that I want to get involved in the project more seriously. Looking at it from a perspective of “what do I not like about this (codebase)”, the first thing that came to mind was that it runs HERE points at QEMU and not THERE points at real hardware. Obvious oversight, let’s fix it. ↫ sdomi There’s no way for me to summarise this cursed saga, so just follow the lovely link and read it. It’s a meandering story of complexity, but eventually, a corrupted graphical session appeared. Now the real work starts.
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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Google launches Chromium development fund to ward off antitrust concerns
Don’t you just love it when companies get together under the thin guise of open source to promote their own interests? Today Google is pleased to announce our partnership with The Linux Foundation and the launch of the Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers. The goal of this initiative is to foster a sustainable environment of open-source contributions towards the health of the Chromium ecosystem and financially support a community of developers who want to contribute to the project, encouraging widespread support and continued technological progress for Chromium embedders. The Supporters of Chromium-based Browsers fund will be managed by the Linux Foundation, following their long established practices for open governance, prioritizing transparency, inclusivity, and community-driven development. We’re thrilled to have Meta, Microsoft, and Opera on-board as the initial members to pledge their support. ↫ Shruthi Sreekanta on the Chromium blog First, there’s absolutely no way around the fact that this entire effort is designed to counter some of the antitrust actions against Google, including a possible forced divestment of Chrome. By setting up an additional fund atop the Chromium organisation, placed under the management of the Linux Foundation, Google creates the veneer of more independence for Chromium than their really is. In reality, however, Chromium is very much a Google-led project, with 94% of code contributions coming from Google, and with the Linux Foundation being very much a corporate affair, of which Google itself is a member, one has to wonder just how much it means that the Linux Foundation is managing this new fund. Second, the initial members of this fund don’t exactly instill confidence in the fund’s morals and values. We’ve got Google, the largest online advertising company in the world. Then there’s Facebook, another major online advertising company, followed by Microsoft, which, among other business ventures, is also a major online advertising company. Lastly we have Opera, an NFT and cryptoscammer making money through predatory loans in poor countries. It’s a veritable who’s who of some of the companies you least want near anything related to your browsing experience. I highly doubt a transparent effort like this is going to dissuade any judge or antritrust regulator from backing down. It’s clear this fund is entirely self-serving and designed almost exclusively for optics, with an obvious bias towards online advertising companies who want to make the internet worse than towards companies and people trying to make the internet better.
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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VLC gets caught in “AI” hype, adds “AI” subtitles and translations
VLC media player, the popular open-source software developed by nonprofit VideoLAN, has topped 6 billion downloads worldwide and teased an AI-powered subtitle system. The new feature automatically generates real-time subtitles — which can then also be translated in many languages — for any video using open-source AI models that run locally on users’ devices, eliminating the need for internet connectivity or cloud services, VideoLAN demoed at CES. ↫ Manish Singh at TechCrunch VLC is choosing to throw users who rely on subtitles for accessibility or translation reasons under the bus. Using speech-to-text and even “AI” as a starting point for a proper accessibility expert of translator is fine, and can greatly reduce the workload. However, as anyone who works with STT and “AI” translation software knows, their output is highly variable and wildly unreliable, especially once English isn’t involved. Dumping the raw output of these tools onto people who rely on closed captions and subtitles to even be able to view videos is not only lazy, it’s deeply irresponsible and demonstrates a complete lack of respect and understanding. I was a translator for almost 15 years, with two university degrees on the subject to show for it. This is obviously a subject close to my heart, and the complete and utter lack of respect and understanding from Silicon Valley and the wider technology world for proper localisation and translation has been a thorn in my side for decades. We all know about bad translations, but it goes much deeper than that – with Silicon Valley’s utter disregard for multilingual people drawing most of my ire. Despite about 60 million people in the US alone using both English and Spanish daily, software still almost universally assumes you speak only one language at all times, often forcing fresh installs for something as simple as changing a single application’s language, or not even allowing autocorrect on a touch keyboard to work with multiple languages simultaneously. I can’t even imagine how bad things are for people who, for instance, require closed-captions for accessibility reasons. Imagine just how bad the “AI”-translated Croatian closed-captions on an Italian video are going to be – that’s two levels of “AI” brainrot between the source and the ears of the Croatian user. It seems subtitles and closed captions are going to be the next area where technology companies are going to slash costs, without realising – or, more likely, without giving a shit – that this will hurt users who require accessibility or translations more than anything. Seeing even an open source project like VLC jump onto this bandwagon is disheartening, but not entirely unexpected – the hype bubble is inescapable, and a lot more respected projects are going to throw their users under the bus before this bubble pops. …wait a second. Why is VLC at CES in the first place?
OSnews
~Created Fri Jan 17 01:06:12 2025
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