Opendoor Cuts Jobs in India, Shifts Technical Hiring To Bay Area and Krakow
Property group startup Opendoor has cut 65 jobs, mostly in India, and is shifting technical hiring to Bay Area and Krakow (Poland).
Opendoor said in a statement: "As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance efficiency, optimize talent, and streamline operations, we have made the decision to consolidate our Engineering, Product, and Design (EPD) team structure. Moving forward, we will focus our technical hiring efforts in two main hubs: the Bay Area, California and Krakow, Poland."
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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Google Will Use Machine Learning To Estimate a User's Age
Google will soon use machine learning to estimate the age of its users. From a report: In an update on Wednesday, Google said it's testing a machine learning model in the US to help determine whether someone is under 18, allowing it to "provide more age-appropriate experiences" across its platforms. The age estimation model will use existing data about users, including the sites they visit, what kinds of videos they watch on YouTube, and how long they've had an account to determine their age.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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Tech Leaders Hold Back on AI Agents Despite Vendor Push, Survey Shows
Most corporate tech leaders are hesitant to deploy AI agents despite vendors' push for rapid adoption, according to a Wall Street Journal CIO Network Summit poll on Tuesday. While 61% of attendees at the Menlo Park summit said they are experimenting with AI agents, which perform automated tasks, 21% reported no usage at all.
Reliability concerns and cybersecurity risks remain key barriers, with 29% citing data privacy as their primary concern. OpenAI, Microsoft and Sierra are urging businesses not to wait for the technology to be perfected. "Accept that it is imperfect," said Bret Taylor, Sierra CEO and OpenAI chairman. "Rather than say, 'Will AI do something wrong', say, 'When it does something wrong, what are the operational mitigations that we've put in place?'" Three-quarters of the polled executives said AI currently delivers minimal value for their investments. Some companies are "having hammers looking for nails," said Jim Siders, Palantir's chief information officer, describing firms that purchase AI solutions before identifying clear use cases.
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~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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Children's Arithmetic Skills Do Not Transfer Between Applied and Academic Mathematics
Children working in India's fruit and vegetable markets can perform complex mental calculations with ease, yet struggle with basic written math tests that determine their academic future, according to new research that raises troubling questions about mathematics education worldwide.
The study, published in Nature, reveals how traditional education systems are failing to tap into the mathematical talents of students who develop practical skills outside the classroom, particularly those from lower-income families. MIT economist Abhijit Banerjee, who grew up watching young market vendors deftly handle complicated transactions, led the research. His team found that while these children could rapidly perform mental arithmetic, they performed poorly on standard written assessments like long division problems.
The findings come at a critical moment when mathematics education must evolve to meet modern demands, incorporating data literacy and computational skills alongside traditional mathematics. The research points to systemic issues, including a global shortage of trained mathematics teachers and assessment systems that reward memorization over reasoning. Without addressing these challenges, researchers warn, naturally talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds may never reach their potential in fields like research, entrepreneurship, or teaching.
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~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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Apple Explores Robotics Push For Smart Home Market, Analyst Says
Apple is developing robots for its smart home ecosystem, though mass production is unlikely to begin before 2028, according to widely reliable TF Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The project remains in early proof-of-concept testing, with Apple exploring both humanoid and non-humanoid designs, he wrote in a post on X.
The company is focusing on how users interact with robots rather than their physical appearance, prioritizing sensing hardware and software as core technologies, Kuo said. The tech giant has taken an unusual approach by publicly sharing some of its robotics research during this early stage, possibly to recruit talent, the analyst noted. The proof-of-concept phase, which precedes formal product development, serves as Apple's testing ground for product ideas and core technologies. Apple's foldable phone project is also currently in the proof-of-concept phase, he said.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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Google Fixes Flaw That Could Unmask YouTube Users' Email Addresses
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has fixed two vulnerabilities that, when chained together, could expose the email addresses of YouTube accounts, causing a massive privacy breach for those using the site anonymously.
The flaws were discovered by security researchers Brutecat (brutecat.com) and Nathan (schizo.org), who found that YouTube and Pixel Recorder APIs could be used to obtain user's Google Gaia IDs and convert them into their email addresses. The ability to convert a YouTube channel into an owner's email address is a significant privacy risk to content creators, whistleblowers, and activists relying on being anonymous online.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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Ex-Google Chief Warns West To Focus On Open-Source AI in Competition With China
Former Google chief Eric Schmidt has warned that western countries need to focus on building open-source AI models or risk losing out to China in the global race to develop the cutting-edge technology. From a report: The warning comes after Chinese startup DeepSeek shocked the world last month with the launch of R1, its powerful-reasoning open large language model, which was built in a more efficient way than its US rivals such as OpenAI.
Schmidt, who has become a significant tech investor and philanthropist, said the majority of the top US LLMs are closed -- meaning not freely accessible to all -- which includes Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's GPT-4, with the exception being Meta's Llama. "If we don't do something about that, China will ultimately become the open-source leader and the rest of the world will become closed-source," Schmidt told the Financial Times. The billionaire said a failure to invest in open-source technologies would prevent scientific discovery from happening in western universities, which might not be able to afford costly closed models.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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How 3D-Printed Parts Changed the NASCAR Cup Series
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Popular Science: In 2021, NASCAR unveiled its Next Gen platform that included a number of rule changes from the previous iteration. Now fully symmetrical and using composite body panels instead of metal, the latest NASCAR vehicles are more like the street versions of the Chevrolet Camaro, the Ford Mustang, and the Toyota TRD Camry. Race car driving isn't an inexpensive sport, and one of the goals for the Next Gen platform was to reduce operating costs and create parity across the board. Technique Chassis, the sole chassis manufacturer for the NASCAR Cup Series, builds a modular offering in three parts. As a result, everyone is starting with the same platform, and finding a competitive advantage is in the tiniest details. One smart way to differentiate from the competition is 3D-printed parts. But this isn't your hobbyist level 3D printing.
Minnesota-based Stratasys specializes in "additive manufacturing," the process of creating an object by building it one layer at a time. Stratasys Senior Global Director of Automotive & Mobility Fadi Abro explains that this term is synonymous with 3D printing. However, the industry often reserves that description for hobby-level projects on smaller, non-industrial printers, while additive manufacturing represents robust industrial solutions. Additive manufacturing is the exact inverse of subtractive manufacturing, which requires cutting away at a solid chunk of material to achieve a final product. In art terms, additive manufacturing would be like sculpting with modeling clay while subtractive is akin to carving a shape from a block of marble. As it relates to NASCAR, Stratasys provides parts like ducts, covers, brackets, and tubing. Together with the racing organization, Stratasys reviews the current driver needs and makes recommendations for other parts and modifications. [...]
The kind of printers Stratasys builds aren't the type you buy at your local electronics store, either. Each industrial-grade 3D printer costs anywhere from $20,000 to $600,000. Using this kind of equipment isn't without precedent, and builds at SEMA's annual extravaganza feature 3D parts we wouldn't have dreamed of a few years ago. [...] In the past few months, Stratasys has been on a roll, signing an extension to its 20-year partnership with the Joe Gibbs Racing team and earning the title of "Official 3D Printing Partner of NASCAR." Competition for this market continues to heat up, however, as there are startups and legacy companies pushing hard. Around the world, 3D printing companies abound. Stratasys has one major factor on its side: 35 years of experience. What's new is that today's printing is more accurate, it's faster, the materials are more robust, Abro says. "I think what's changed drastically over the past five to seven years has been all about material development," Abro explains. "We're seeing materials that are just incredible, whether it's how resistant to heat they are or how strong they are compared to how much they weigh."
"It's better, faster, cheaper. It's faster to print something than to mill it, and then it's certainly cheaper in a multitude of different ways. Number one, there's not as much skill required for 3D printing as there is in CNC machining; you need a more traditional manufacturing method."
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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Man Who Hijacked SEC's X Account To Pump Bitcoin Faces Up To 5 Years In Prison
Eric Council Jr. pleaded guilty to identity theft and access device fraud after hijacking the SEC's X account to falsely announce Bitcoin ETF approval. He was compensated in Bitcoin by co-conspirators, and while the Justice Department continues its investigation, Council faces up to five years in prison. Gizmodo reports: According to the Justice Department, Council accessed the SEC's account using an attack called SIM swapping, in which a perpetrator uses social engineering to trick a phone carrier's customer service representatives into transferring an individual's phone number to a new device. Basically, they call into a support line and use pieces of personal information about a victim they have gathered online to convince the representative they are the person they are targeting. Once perpetrators take the number and can begin receiving text messages, they are able to reset the passwords of accounts on services like X. It is not really a "hack" in the traditional sense that they are not finding flaws in software but rather exploiting human trust.
Unfortunately for individuals like Council, all Bitcoin transactions are logged on a blockchain for anyone to see, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for investigators to find. If he did make out with a lot of crypto, it would be hard to keep it hidden forever. Council allegedly did not post the message himself to the SEC's X account, but conducted the SIM swap and left the rest of the work to his co-conspirators who compensated Council in the form of, of course, Bitcoin. The price of the cryptocurrency rose by $1,000 after the fake announcement, according to the Justice Department, and fell by $2,000 after the SEC issued a correction. That could have led to a big windfall depending on how much Bitcoin the perpetrators held at the time.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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The Mystery Behind the Best UFO Picture Ever Seen
In August 1990, two hikers in Scotland captured photographs of a mysterious diamond-shaped aircraft accompanied by a Harrier jet, but the images and story were suppressed by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) for decades. Was it a prank, a hoax, an optical illusion or something else entirely? The Guardian's Daniel Lavelle reports on "what really happened in Calvine." Here's an excerpt: On a misty evening in August 1990, two men hiking on the moors surrounding Calvine, a pretty hamlet in Perth and Kinross, claimed to have seen a giant diamond-shaped aircraft flying above them. It apparently had no clear means of propulsion and left no smoke plume; it was silent and static, as if frozen in time. Terrified, they hit the ground and scrambled for cover behind a tree. Then a Harrier fighter jet roared into view, circling the diamond as if sizing it up for a scuffle. One of the men snapped a series of photographs just before the bizarre craft shot away vertically and disappeared.
Craig Lindsay was a press officer at the RAF base in Pitreavie Castle in Dunfermline, 50 miles away, when the Daily Record got in touch a few days later. The hikers, who worked as chefs at Fisher's Hotel in Pitlochry, had sent six photos of the diamond to the newspaper and told their story. The Record's picture editor, Andy Allen, sent Lindsay the best of the bunch. Lindsay had never seen such a clear photograph of a supposed UFO, so he forwarded the picture to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), which told him to ask the Record to send the other five photographs and their negatives. The MoD also instructed him to phone the hikers, which he did. One of them told Lindsay the whole story: the diamond, the jet, how it levitated eerily with no sound and accelerated with no obvious propellant. The MoD told Lindsay to leave the case with them. He pushed the diamond to the back of his mind.
That autumn, Lindsay attended a routine meeting in London. On his lunch break, he went for a wander around the MoD's offices and saw something familiar. "There, on the wall in front of me, was a great big poster-size print of the best of them [the photographs]. So, I spoke to the guys that were there and I asked them what their other photographs were like." The ministry's staff placed the other photographs on a windowsill. The snaps showed the Harrier jet moving from the right side of the frame to the left, while the diamond didn't move an inch. He quizzed some of the specialists who had investigated the photos. They told him there was no evidence of a hoax, but they didn't know what the diamond was. "I gradually forgot all about the thing," says Lindsay. "Nothing had appeared from the first inquiry ... I assumed that everything had just been forgotten." The Record didn't run the story, the hikers never spoke publicly about the photos and the images weren't seen by the public for 32 years. "It is the 35th anniversary of what has been described as the best UFO photo ever taken. Now is the time to come forward and tell us what really happened," says Prof David Clarke, a lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University who worked as a reporter in the 1990s.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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New Hack Uses Prompt Injection To Corrupt Gemini's Long-Term Memory
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, researcher Johann Rehberger demonstrated a new way to override prompt injection defenses Google developers have built into Gemini -- specifically, defenses that restrict the invocation of Google Workspace or other sensitive tools when processing untrusted data, such as incoming emails or shared documents. The result of Rehberger's attack is the permanent planting of long-term memories that will be present in all future sessions, opening the potential for the chatbot to act on false information or instructions in perpetuity. [...] The hack Rehberger presented on Monday combines some of these same elements to plant false memories in Gemini Advanced, a premium version of the Google chatbot available through a paid subscription. The researcher described the flow of the new attack as:
1. A user uploads and asks Gemini to summarize a document (this document could come from anywhere and has to be considered untrusted).
2. The document contains hidden instructions that manipulate the summarization process.
3. The summary that Gemini creates includes a covert request to save specific user data if the user responds with certain trigger words (e.g., "yes," "sure," or "no").
4. If the user replies with the trigger word, Gemini is tricked, and it saves the attacker's chosen information to long-term memory.
As the following video shows, Gemini took the bait and now permanently "remembers" the user being a 102-year-old flat earther who believes they inhabit the dystopic simulated world portrayed in The Matrix. Based on lessons learned previously, developers had already trained Gemini to resist indirect prompts instructing it to make changes to an account's long-term memories without explicit directions from the user. By introducing a condition to the instruction that it be performed only after the user says or does some variable X, which they were likely to take anyway, Rehberger easily cleared that safety barrier. Google responded in a statement to Ars: "In this instance, the probability was low because it relied on phishing or otherwise tricking the user into summarizing a malicious document and then invoking the material injected by the attacker. The impact was low because the Gemini memory functionality has limited impact on a user session. As this was not a scalable, specific vector of abuse, we ended up at Low/Low. As always, we appreciate the researcher reaching out to us and reporting this issue."
Rehberger noted that Gemini notifies users of new long-term memory entries, allowing them to detect and remove unauthorized additions. Though, he still questioned Google's assessment, writing: "Memory corruption in computers is pretty bad, and I think the same applies here to LLMs apps. Like the AI might not show a user certain info or not talk about certain things or feed the user misinformation, etc. The good thing is that the memory updates don't happen entirely silently -- the user at least sees a message about it (although many might ignore)."
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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'Ne Zha 2' Becomes First Non-Hollywood Film To Hit $1 Billion
Chinese animated film Ne Zha 2 has broken multiple box office records, becoming China's highest-grossing film of all time and the first non-Hollywood movie to surpass $1 billion in a single market. From a report: Helmed by Yang Yu, known as Jiaozi, the film hit the big screen during the lucrative Chinese New Year frame on Jan. 29, surpassing 2017's "Wolf Warrior 2" to become China's most-watched film. Meanwhile, its total revenue (including presales) hit 8 billion yuan (about 1.12 billion U.S. dollars) by Sunday. In just eight days and five hours after its release, "Ne Zha 2" became China's highest-grossing film of all time on Thursday, exceeding the 5.77 billion yuan record set by "The Battle at Lake Changjin." A day later, it overtook "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" to become the highest-grossing film ever in a single market, reaching over 6.79 billion yuan (including presales) in China on Friday.
A follow-up to the animated sensation "Ne Zha," which grossed 5 billion yuan and topped the country's box office charts in 2019, the sequel has captivated audiences with its breathtaking visuals, rich storytelling and deep cultural resonance. The record-breaking run makes "Ne Zha 2" not just a box office titan but a cultural phenomenon, further underscoring China's ability to produce homegrown blockbusters that strike a chord with domestic audiences. You can watch the international trailer on YouTube.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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'Serial Swatter' Who Made Nearly 400 Threatening Calls Gets 4 Years In Prison
Alan W. Filion, an 18-year-old from Lancaster, Calif., was sentenced to four years in prison for making nearly 400 false bomb threats and threats of violence (source may be paywalled; alternative source) to religious institutions, schools, universities and homes across the country. The New York Times reports: The threatening calls Mr. Filion made would often cause large deployments of police officers to a targeted location, the Justice Department said in a news release. In some cases, officers would enter people's homes with their weapons drawn and detain those inside. In January 2023, Mr. Filion wrote on social media that his swats had often led the police to "drag the victim and their families out of the house cuff them and search the house for dead bodies."
Investigators linked Mr. Filion to over 375 swatting calls made in several states, including one that he made to the police in Sanford, Fla., saying that he would commit a mass shooting at the Masjid Al Hayy Mosque. During the call, he played audio of gunfire in the background. Mr. Filion was arrested in California in January 2024, and was then extradited to Florida to face state charges for making that threat. Mr. Filion began swatting for recreation in August 2022 before making it into a business, the Justice Department said. The teenager became a "serial swatter" and would make social media posts about his "swatting-for-a-fee" services, according to prosecutors.
In addition to pleading guilty to the false threat against the mosque in Florida, Mr. Filion pleaded guilty in three other swatting cases: a mass shooting threat to a public school in Washington State in October 2022; a bomb threat call to a historically Black college or university in Florida in May 2023; and a July 2023 call in which he claimed to be a federal law enforcement officer in Texas and told dispatchers that he had killed his mother and would kill any responding officers.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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KDE Plasma 6.3 Released
Today, the KDE Project announced the release of KDE Plasma 6.3, featuring improved fractional scaling, enhanced Night Light color accuracy, better CPU usage monitoring, and various UI and security refinements.
Some of the key features of Plasma 6.3 include:
- Improved fractional scaling with KWin to lead to an all-around better desktop experience with fractional scaling as well as when making use of KWin's zoom effect.
- Screen colors are more accurate with the KDE Night Light feature.
- CPU usage monitoring within the KDE System Monitor is now more accurate and consuming fewer CPU resources.
- KDE will now present a notification when the kernel terminated an app because the system ran out of memory.
- Various improvements to the Discover app, including a security enhancement around sandboxed apps.
- The drawing tablet area of KDE System Settings has been overhauled with new features and refinements.
- Many other enhancements and fixes throughout KDE Plasma 6.3. You can read the announcement here.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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Tumblr To Join the Fediverse After WordPress Migration Completes
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Since 2022, blogging site Tumblr has been teasing its plans to integrate with the fediverse -- the open social web powered by the protocol ActivityPub also used by Mastodon, Threads, Flipboard, and others. Now, the Automattic-owned blogging platform is sharing more information about when and how that integration could actually happen. As it turns out, the current plan to tie Tumblr into the open social web will come about by way of the site's planned move to the WordPress infrastructure. Automattic confirmed to TechCrunch that when the migration is complete, every Tumblr user will be able to federate their blog via ActivityPub, just as every WordPress.com user can today. The company noted that the migration could also allow for other open web integrations, like giving Tumblr users a way to run other custom plug-ins or themes.
Last summer, Automattic announced it would move its half a billion blogs to WordPress, to make it easier for the company to build tools and features that worked across both services, while also allowing Tumblr to take advantage of the open source developments from WordPress.org. Though the WordPress community itself is in a state of upheaval, ultimately running Tumblr's back end on WordPress would allow for greater efficiencies, while not changing the interface and experience that Tumblr's user base has grown to love. Automattic declined to share a time frame as to when the migration would be complete, given its scale, but a rep for the company called the progress so far "exciting." Automattic didn't say if it would consider integrating with the AT Protocol that powers Bluesky.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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NewsBone.com
Suggest a feed to syndicate here, or check out what I'm doing over at freshtao.
~Created Wed Feb 12 13:27:15 2025
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KDE Plasma 6.3 brings drawing tablet improvements
Speaking of KDE, Plasma 6.3 has been released. It brings with it a ton of improvements aimed at digital artists, such as much improved management and configuration of drawing tablets. You can now map an area of the tablet’s surface to a part of the screen, change the functions of stylus buttons, customise the pressure curve and range of a stylus, and much more. The entire settings panel for drawing tablets has also been redesigned to make it easier to find what you’re looking for. Plasma 6.3 also completely overhauls KWin’s fraction scaling. Fractional scaling in KWin will not try to snap everything to your display’s pixel grid, to reduce blurriness and make everything look sharper. KWin’s zoom effect also makes use of these improvements, making for a pixel-perfect zoom feature with a pixel grid overlay, which is great for artists and designers. This will be a very welcome improvement for people using e.g. 125% or 150% scaling on their displays. Hardware monitoring is much improved too, with System Monitor showing more information while using fewer resources, and KDE users on FreeBSD can now see GPU statistics too. There’s also a ton of small additions that are still quite welcome, like opening the menu editor instead of a properties dialog when clicking on Edit Application in a launcher menu’s context menu, the ability to clone panels, an option to turn of symbolic icons in Kickoff, a “Show Target” option in the context menu of symbolic links, and a lot more. KDE Plasma 6.3 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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Moving KDE’s styling into the future
One of the major issues with KDE’s styling system is the fact that over the year, it has accumulated four ways of styling applications – which makes themeing and changing aspects of the default theme far more cumbersome than it should be. In fact, with the current version of KDE, it’s effectively impossible to consistently theme the entire KDE desktop, as several parts of it, like Kirigami applications, only inherit parts of the theme you’re applying. It’s a bit of a mess, and KDE is well aware of this. This problem is not new; we already identified it several years ago. Unfortunately, it also is not easy to solve. Some of the reasons it got to this state are simply inertia. Some things like Plasma’s SVG styling were developed as a way to improve styling in an era where a lot of the technologies we currently use did not exist yet. The solutions developed in those days have now existed for a pretty long time so we cannot suddenly drop them. Other reasons are more technical in nature, such as completely different rendering stacks. ↫ Arjen Hiemstra These different rendering stacks form the core of the problem, as they can’t use the same rendering code for everything. Currently, KDE tries to address the problem through a compatibility layer to tie everything together, but it’s not perfect, it has to be maintained, and it means they’re not utilising their rendering stacks to their fullest potential. The solution KDE is working on is called Union. However, there is another option, which is to take a step back and realise that we actually may not even want to share the rendering code, given that they are quite different. Instead, we need a description of what the element should look like, and then we can have specific rendering code that implements how to render that in the best way for a certain technology stack. ↫ Arjen Hiemstra Basically, an input layer will interpret file formats with style descrpitions, while an intermediate layer consists of a library that converts that interpretation into a more abstract description of what needs to be rendered. The final output layer then uses the data from the intermediate layer to tell the rendering stacks what to do. By standardising on the input format, say CSS, it’ll be much easier to impement themes or make changes. This effort is still far from done, but they’re making good progress. It ties into the Plasma Next initiative, which is, as the name implies, an effort to make changes to Plasma’s default look and feel.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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Oasis: a small, statically-linked Linux system
You might think the world of Linux distributions is a rather boring, settled affair, but there’s actually a ton of interesting experimentation going on in the Linux world. From things like NixOS with its unique packaging framework, to the various immutable distributions out there like the Fedora Atomic editions, there’s enough uniqueness to go around to find a lid for every pot. Oasis Linux surely falls into this category. One of its main unique characteristics is that it’s entirely statically linked. All software in the base system is linked statically, including the display server (velox) and web browser (netsurf). Compared to dynamic linking, this is a simpler mechanism which eliminates problems with upgrading libraries, and results in completely self-contained binaries that can easily be copied to other systems. ↫ Oasis GitHub page That’s not all it has to offer, though. It also offers fast and 100% reproducible builds, it’s mostly ISO C conformant, and it has minimal bootstrap dependencies – all you need is a “POSIX system with git, lua, curl, a sha256 utility, standard compression utilities, and an x86_64-linux-musl cross compiler”. The ISO C-comformance is a crucial part of one of Oasis’ goals: to be buildable with cproc, a small, very strict C11 compiler. It has no package manager, but any software outside of Oasis itself can be installed and managed with pkgsrc or Nix. Another important goal of the project is to be extremely easy to understand, and its /etc directory is honestly a sight to behold, and as the project proudly claims, the most complex file in there is rc.init at a mere 16 lines. The configuration files are indeed incredibly easy to understand, which is a breath of fresh air compared to the archaic stuff in commercial UNIX or the complex stuff in modern Linux distributions that I normally deal with. I’m not sure is Oasis would make for a good, usable day-to-day operating system, but I definitely like what they’re putting down.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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Redox’ relibc becomes a stable ABI
The Redox project has posted its usual monthly update, and this time, we’ve got a major milestone creeping within reach. Thanks to Anhad Singh for his amazing work on Dynamic Linking! In this southern-hemisphere-Redox-Summer-of-Code project, Anhad has implemented dynamic linking as the default build method for many recipes, and all new porting can use dynamic linking with relatively little effort. This is a huge step forward for Redox, because relibc can now become a stable ABI. And having a stable ABI is one of the prerequisites for Redox to reach “Release 1.0”. ↫ Ribbon and Ron Williams A major step forward for Redox, and one of those things not everyone might think about when they consider the state of an operating system. This wasn’t all of the news this month, though, as Redox also received a port of the LOVE game engine, which powers quite a few successful indie games, like the recent hit Balatro. Thanks to this port, you can now play Balatro on Redox, which is pretty cool – and highlights just how far Redox has already come. On top of these major two headlines, there’s a ton of improvements all over the operating system, mostly at the lower levels.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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Rediscovering Plan 9 from Bell Labs
During a weekend of tidying up – you know, the kind of chore where you’re knee-deep in old boxes before you realize it. Digging through the dusty cables and old, outdated user manuals, I found something that I had long forgotten: an old Plan 9 distribution. Judging by the faded ink and slight warping of the disk sleeve, it had to be from around 1994 or 1995. I couldn’t help but wonder: why had I kept this? Back then, I was curious about Plan 9. It was a forward-thinking OS that never quite reached full potential. Holding that disk, however, it felt more like a time capsule, a real reminder of computing’s advancements and adventurous spirit in the 1990s. ↫ Bill Dyer at It’s FOSS As the article notes, 9front is the way to go if you want to try Plan 9 today. Plan 9/9front appeals to a very specific type of person, but when you dive into the excellent – and incredibly entertaining – documentation, it really seems quite easy to grasp and get started with. There’s definitely things you’ll need to unlearn and some compromises you’ll need to make, but I think you’ll be able to get a lot more work done than you might think. Also, if you start adding software to 9front, you get to use the best GitHub alternative of all time: shithub. That alone makes it worth it to try 9front.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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FreeBSD and hi-fi audio setup: bit-perfect, equalizer, real-time
A complete guide to configuring FreeBSD as an audiophile audio server: setting up system and audio subsystem parameters, real-time operation, bit-perfect signal processing, and the best methods for enabling and parameterising the system graphic equalizer (equalizer) and high-quality audio equalization with FFmpeg filters. Linux users will also find useful information, especially in the context of configuring and personalising the MPD player and filters. ↫ Marcin Szewczyk-Wilgan FreeBSD is a much more capable desktop and workstation operating system than it gets credit for, especially with the Linux world sucking all the air out of the room, but you do often need to do a little more and dive a little deeper into the operating system to get it to do what you want. In the case of audio, Szewczyk-Wilgan explains that he thinks it’s even ahead of Linux, due to being able to “precisely track the parameters of the audio device along with the system kernel parameters and modify them”, as well as FreeBSD having better support for real-time operation. This guide is an incredibly detailed explanation of which options and configurations you should use in FreeBSD to turn it into an audio server. This clearly isn’t for everyone, and I assume most audio experts won’t be considering FreeBSD, but what this article demonstrates is that it’s very, very much possible to do so.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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Three years of ephemeral NixOS: my experience resetting root on every boot
We had a bit of a bug caused by changes we made to make quotes look better, but we’ve fixed it now, so we’re back on track (you may need to do a force-reload in your browser). Sorry for the disruption – and if you want to stay up-to-date on such issues next time it (inevitably) happens, you should follow the OSNews Fedi account (or just bookmark it without following it, if you’re not interested in social media). Anyway, back to the news! Fresh OS installs are bliss. But the joy fades quickly as installing and uninstalling programs leave behind a trail of digital debris. Even configuration management and declarative systems like NixOS miss crucial bits, like the contents of /var/lib or stray dotfiles. This debris isn’t just unsightly. It can be load-bearing, crucial to the functioning of your system, but outside of your control, and not preserved on rebuilds. Full system backups merely preserve this chaos. I wanted a clean slate, automatically, every boot. “Erase your darlings” inspired an idea in the NixOS community: allowlisting files and directories that persist across reboots. Anything not on the list gets wiped. The simplest implementation involves mounting / as a tmpfs (i.e. in RAM), and then bind-mounting or symlinking the allowlisted items to a disk-backed filesystem. ↫ Tuxes.uk I dabbled in NixOS over the past week or so, and while I find it intriguing and can definitely see a use for it, I also found it rather needlessly cumbersome and over-engineered for something as simple as a desktop system. I felt like I was taking a whole bunch of additional steps to do basic things, without needing any of the benefits Nix and NixOS bring. This doesn’t mean Nix and NixOS are bad – just that for me, personally, it doesn’t fill any need I have. Taking the Nix concept as far as starting with a completely fresh installation on every boot sounds absolutely insane to me. Of course, it’s not entirely fresh on every reboot, as several applications and important configuration elements do survive the reboot, but it’s still quite drastic compared to what everyone else is doing. Unsurprisingly, there are a few issues; it’s hard to know what really needs and doesn’t need saving, there might be some unexpected issues because software doesn’t expect to be wiped, and so on. Overall though, it seems to work susprisingly well, and for a specific type of person, this is definitely bliss.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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Cassette: a POSIX application framework featuring a retro-futurist GUI toolkit
Cassette is a GUI application framework written in C11, with a UI inspired by the cassette-futurism aesthetic. Built for modern POSIX systems, it’s made out of three libraries: CGUI, CCFG and COBJ. Cassette is free and open-source software, licensed under the LGPL-3.0. ↫ Cassette GitHub page Upon first reading this description, you might wonder what a “cassette-futurism aesthetic” really is, but once you take a look at the screenshots of what Cassette can do, you immediately understand what it means. It’s still in the alpha stage and there’s lot still to do, but what it has now is already something quite unique I don’t think the major toolkits really cater to or can even pull off. There’s an example application that’s focused on showing some system stats, and that’s exactly the kind of stuff this seems a great fit for: good-looking, small widget-like applications showing glanceable information.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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UnixWare in 2025: still actively developed and maintained
It kind of goes by under the radar, but aside from HP-UX, Solaris, and AIX, there’s another traditional classic UNIX still in active development today: UnixWare (and its sibling, OpenServer). Owned and developed by Xinuos, UnixWare and other related code and IP was acquired by them when the much-hated SCO crashed and burned about 15 years ago or so, and they’ve been maintaining it ever since. About a year ago, Xinuos released Update Pack 1 and Maintenance Pack 1 for UnixWare 7 Definitive 2018, followed by similar update packs for OpenServer 6 later in 2024. These update packs bring a bunch of bugfixes and performance improvements, as well as a slew of updated open source components, like new versions of SAMBA, sendmail, GCC and tons of other GNU components, OpenSSH and OpenSSL, and so, so much more, enabling a relatively modern and up-to-date build and porting environment. They can be installed through the patchck update utility, and while the Maintenance Pack is free for existing registered users, the Update Pack requires a separate license. UnixWare, while fully capable as a classic UNIX for workstations, isn’t really aimed at individuals or hobbyists (sadly), and instead focuses on existing enterprise deployments, where such licensing costs are par for the course. UnixWare runs on x86, and can be installed both on real hardware as well as in various virtualised environments. I contacted Xinuos a few days ago for a review license, and they supplied me with one so I can experiment with and write about UnixWare. I’ve currently got it installed in a Linux kvm, where it runs quite well, including the full X11R6 CDE desktop environment and graphical administration tools. Installing updates is a breeze thanks to patchck automating the process of finding, downloading, and installing the correct ones. I intend to ask Xinuos about an optimal configuration for running UnixWare on real hardware, too.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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MaXX Interactive Desktop 2.2.0 released
Late last year, the MaXX Interactive Desktop, the Linux (and BSD) version of the IRIX desktop, sprung back to life with a new release and a detailed roadmap. Thanks to a unique licensing agreement with SGI, MaXX’ developer, Eric Masson, has been able to bring a lot of the SGI user experience over to Linux and BSD, and as promised, we have a new release: the final version of MaXX Interactive Desktop 2.2.0. It’s codenamed Octane, and anyone who knows their SGI history will chuckle at this and other codenames MaXX uses. Like last year’s alpha release, 2.2.0 brings an Exposé-like overview features, initial freedesktop.org integration, tons of performance improvements and bug fixes, desktop notifications, and much more. For the next release, 2.3.0 they’re planning a new file manager, support for .desktop files, a ton of new preference panes, a quick search feature, and a whole bunch of lower-level stuff. With how serious the renewed development effort seems, I hope that some day, the project will consider building MaXX out to a full Linux distribution, to gain more control over the experience and ensure normal users don’t have to perform a manual installation.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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Why Upstart from Ubuntu failed
Upstart was an event-based replacement for the traditional System V init (sysvinit) system on Ubuntu, introduced to bring a modern and more flexible way of handling system startup and service management. It emerged in the mid-2000s, during a period when sysvinit’s age and limitations were becoming more apparent, especially with regard to concurrency and dependency handling. Upstart was developed by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, with the aim of reducing boot times, improving reliability, and making the system initialization process more dynamic. Though at first it seemed likely to become a standard across many distributions, Upstart eventually lost mindshare to systemd and ceased to be Ubuntu’s default init system. ↫ André Machado I think it’s safe to say systemd won the competition to become the definitive successor to sysvinit on Linux, but Canonical’s Upstart made a valiant effort, too. However, with a troublesome license, it was doomed from the start, and it didn’t help that virtually every other major distribution eventually adopted systemd. These days, systemd is the Linux init system, and I personally quite like it (and the crowd turns violent). I find it easy to use and it’s never given me any issues, but I’m not a system administrator dealing with complex setups, so my experience with systemd is probably rather limited. It just does its thing in the background on my machines. None of this means there aren’t any other init systems still being actively developed. There’s GNU Shepard we talked about recently, runit, OpenRC, and many more. If you don’t like systemd, there’s enough alternatives out there.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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The dumb reason why flag emojis aren’t working on your site in Chrome on Windows
After doing more digging than I feel like I should have needed to, I found my answer: it appears that due to concerns about the fact that acknowledging the existence of certain countries can be perceived as a nominally political stance, Microsoft has opted to just avoid the issue altogether by not including country flag emojis in Windows’ system font. Problem solved! Can you imagine if, *gasp*, your computer could render a Taiwanese or Palestinian flag? The horror! ↫ Ryan Geyer Silicon Valley corporations are nothing if not massive cowards, and this is just another one of the many, many examples that underline this. Firefox solves this by including the flags on its own, but Google refuses to do the same with Chrome, because, you guessed it, Google is also a cowardly organisation. There are some ways around it, as the linked article details, but they’re all clumsy and cumbersome compared to Microsoft just not being a coward and including proper flag emoji, even if it offends some sensibilities in pro-China or western far-right circles. Your best bet to avoid such corporate cowardice is to switch to better operating systems, like any desktop Linux distribution. Fedora KDE includes both the Taiwanese and Palestinian flags, because the KDE project isn’t made up of cowards, and I’m sure the same applies to any GNOME distribution. If your delicate snowflake sensibilities can’t handle a Palestinian or Taiwanese flag emoji, just don’t type them. Bitter sidenote: it turns out WordPress, what OSNews uses, doesn’t like emoji, either. Adding any emoji in this story, from basic ones to the Taiwanese or Palestinian flag, makes it impossible to save or publish the story. I have no idea if this is a WordPress issue, or an issue on our end, since WordPress does mention they have emoji support.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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TuxTape: a kernel livepatching solution
Geico, an American insurance company, is building a live-patching solution for the Linux kernel, called TuxTape. TuxTape is an in-development kernel livepatching ecosystem that aims to aid in the production and distribution of kpatch patches to vendor-independent kernels. This is done by scraping the Linux CNA mailing list, prioritizing CVEs by severity, and determining applicability of the patches to the configured kernel(s). Applicability of patches is determined by profiling kernel builds to record which files are included in the build process and ignoring CVEs that do not affect files included in kernel builds deployed on the managed fleet. ↫ Presentation by Grayson Guarino and Chris Townsend It seems to me something like live-patching the Linux kernel should be a standardised framework that’s part of the Linux kernel, and not several random implementations by third parties, one of which is an insurance company. There’s a base core of functionality for live-patching in the Linux kernel since 4.0, released in 2015, but it’s extremely limited and requires most of the functionality to be implemented separately, through things like Red Hat’s kpatch and Oracle’s Ksplice. Geico is going to release TuxTape as open source, and is encouraging others to adopt and use it. There are various other solutions out there offering similar functionality, so you’re not spoiled for choice, and I’m sure there’s advantages and disadvantages to each. I would still prefer if functionality like this is a standard feature of the kernel, not something tied to a specific vendor or implementation.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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GTK announces X11 deprecation, new Android backend, and much more
Since a number of GTK developer came together at FOSDEM, the project figured now was as good a time as any to give an update on what’s coming in GTK. First, GTK is implementing some hard cut-offs for old platforms – Windows 10 and macOS 10.15 are now the oldest supported versions, which will make development quite a bit easier and will simplify several parts of the codebase. Windows 10 was released in 2015 and macOS 10.15 in 2019, which are fair cut-off points, in my book. GTK 4.18 will also bring major accessibility improvements with the AccessKit backend, giving GTK accessibility features on Windows and macOS for the first time, which is great news. Another major new feature is the new Android backend, which, while not yet complete, will allow you to run GTK applications on Android. Do note that this is experimental, so don’t expect everything to work without any issues quite yet. Lastly, the news that everyone was freaking out about over the weekend: the X11 backend has been deprecated, and will be removed in GTK 5. This freaked a lot of people out, but note that this doesn’t mean you magically can’t use GTK 4 applications on X11 anymore – it merely means that X11 support will be removed in GTK 5, which doesn’t even exist yet, and with GTK 4 being supported until GTK 6 is released, people using legacy windowing systems like Xorg will be fine for a long time to come. As the GTK project notes on Fedi: The X11 backend being deprecated mainly means that we’re not going to spend time implementing new features, like dmabuf, graphics offloading, or Vulkan support. X11 support will still exist until GTK4 is EOL, which will happen once GTK *6* is released. We’re talking about a 20 years horizon, at this point… Of course, somebody could show up tomorrow, and implement everything that the Wayland backend does, but for X11. We can always undeprecate things. We are not holding our breath, though… ↫ The GTK project on Fedi This is the right move, and I’m glad the GTK project is doing this, and is giving everyone ample time to prepare. A lot of people will still freak out, get mad, and scream bloody murder at certain individuals in the wider Linux community, and those people are, of course, free to start working on Xorg. Like the GTK developers, though, I’m not holding my breath, because despite years of excessive Wayland hate, not a single person has stood up to do the work required to keep Xorg going.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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Run Linux inside a PDF file via a RISC-V emulator
You might expect PDF files to only be comprised of static documents, but surprisingly, the PDF file format supports Javascript with its own separate standard library. Modern browsers (Chromium, Firefox) implement this as part of their PDF engines. However, the APIs that are available in the browser are much more limited. The full specfication for the JS in PDFs was only ever implemented by Adobe Acrobat, and it contains some ridiculous things like the ability to do 3D rendering, make HTTP requests, and detect every monitor connected to the user’s system. However, on Chromium and other browsers, only a tiny subset of this API was ever implemented, due to obvious security concerns. With this, we can do whatever computation we want, just with some very limited IO. ↫ LinuxPDF GitHub page I’m both impressed and concerned.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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The GNU Guix System
GNU Guix is a package manager for GNU/Linux systems. It is designed to give users more control over their general-purpose and specialized computing environments, and make these easier to reproduce over time and deploy to one or many devices. ↫ GNU Guix website Guix is basically GNU’s approach to a reproducible, functional package manager, very similar to Nix because, well, it’s based on Nix. GNU also has a Linux distribution built around Nix, the GNU Guix System, which is fully ‘libre’ as all things GNU are, and also makes use of the GNU Shepard init system. Both Shepard and Guix make use of Guile. The last release of the GNU Guix System is a few years old already, but it’s a rolling release, so that’s not much of an issue. It uses the Linux kernel, but support for GNU Hurd is also being worked on, for whatever that’s worth. There’s also a third-party distribution that is built around the same projects, called rde. It focuses on being lightweight, ready for offline use, and minimal distractions. It’s probably not suitable for most normal users, but if you’re a power user and you’re looking for something a little bit different, this could be for you. While it’s in active development, it’s considered usable and stable by its creators. I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m definitely intrigued by what it has to offer. Nix sucks up a lot of the attention in this space, so it’s interesting to see some of the alternatives that aim for similar goals.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 12 12:06:12 2025
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