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Microsoft Begins the First-Ever Secure Boot Certificate Swap Across Windows Ecosystem
Microsoft has begun automatically replacing the original Secure Boot security certificates on Windows devices through regular monthly updates, a necessary move given that the 15-year-old certificates first issued in 2011 are set to expire between late June and October 2026.
Secure Boot, which verifies that only trusted and digitally signed software runs before Windows loads, became a hardware requirement for Windows 11. A new batch of certificates was issued in 2023 and already ships on most PCs built since 2024; nearly all devices shipped in 2025 include them by default. Older hardware is now receiving the updated certificates through Windows Update, starting last month's KB5074109 release for Windows 11. Devices that don't receive the new certificates before expiration will still function but enter what Microsoft calls a "degraded security state," unable to receive future boot-level protections and potentially facing compatibility issues down the line.
Windows 10 users must enroll in Microsoft's paid Extended Security Updates program to get the new certificates. A small number of devices may also need a separate firmware update from their manufacturer before the Windows-delivered certificates can be applied.
Slashdot
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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A Bitcoin Blunder for the Ages: $40 Billion Accidentally Given Away
An anonymous reader shares a report: The hundreds of prize payouts were mostly just a few bucks each, part of a promotional campaign by a South Korean cryptocurrency exchange. The total reward pot: 620,000 Korean won, or about $425. Then came a colossal mistake. A staffer for Bithumb, South Korea's No. 2 crypto exchange, didn't distribute 620,000 Korean won. Rather, the prizes, due to an input error, emerged in a different currency: 620,000 bitcoins, valued at more than $40 billion.
That meant a winner who should have received a sum of 2,000 won -- enough to buy a cheap cup of coffee -- reaped, at least momentarily, more than $120 million in bitcoins. Enough recipients sought to sell or withdraw bitcoin that the market sank 17%, before Bithumb halted transactions after roughly 30 minutes. Those affected included investors who had held bitcoin before the botched giveaway. The losses totaled about $685,000, Bithumb says.
The company has since said it has reversed the transactions or had recipients voluntarily return more than 99% of the misdistributed bitcoins. But Bithumb is still trying to convince users who during the brief window of trading managed to offload more than 100 bitcoins, valued at roughly $9 million, to give back the equivalent funds.
Slashdot
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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Apple and Google Agree To Change App Stores After 'Effective Duopoly' Claim
Apple and Google have agreed to a set of commitments to the UK's Competition and Markets Authority that will prevent them from giving preferential treatment to their own apps and require greater transparency around how third-party apps are approved for sale.
The CMA announced the measures on Tuesday, seven months after it declared that the two companies held an "effective duopoly" over the UK's mobile app ecosystem. Both companies also committed to not using data gathered from third-party developers in ways the regulator deems unfair. The CMA granted both app stores "strategic market status" in October 2025, a designation that gave it the authority to demand changes.
CMA head Sarah Cardell called the commitments "important first steps" and said the regulator would "closely monitor" implementation. Technology analyst Paolo Pescatore described the announcement as a "pragmatic first step" but noted some may see it as "addressing the low-hanging fruit." The UK's app economy is the largest in Europe by revenue and number of developers, generating an estimated 1.5% of the country's GDP.
Slashdot
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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The Big Money in Today's Economy Is Going To Capital, Not Labor
The American economy's most valuable companies are now worth trillions of dollars more than their predecessors were a generation ago, yet they employ a fraction of the workers -- and a new analysis by the Wall Street Journal argues that this widening gap between capital and labor is the defining economic story of our time.
Labor received 58% of gross domestic income in 1980; by the third quarter of 2025, that figure had fallen to 51.4%. Corporate profits' share rose from 7% to 11.7% over the same period. Nvidia, the most valuable US company in 2026, is nearly 20 times as valuable as IBM was in 1985 in inflation-adjusted terms and employs roughly a tenth as many people. Since the end of 2019, real average hourly wages have risen 3% while corporate profits have climbed 43%.
Household stock wealth now equals almost 300% of annual disposable income, up from 200% in 2019. Yale economist Pascual Restrepo predicted that AI integration will shrink labor's share of revenue further, just as factory automation did for blue-collar workers in decades past.
Slashdot
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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NYC Private School Tuition Breaks $70,000 Milestone for Fall
The top private schools in New York City plan to charge more than $70,000 this year for tuition, an amount exceeding that of many elite colleges, as they pass on the costs of soaring expenses including teacher salaries. From a report: Spence School, Dalton School and Nightingale-Bamford School on Manhattan's Upper East Side are among at least seven schools where the fees now exceed that threshold, according to school disclosures and Bloomberg reporting
Fees among 15 private schools across the city rose a median of 4.7%, outpacing inflation. Sending a kid to New York private school has always been expensive, but the cost now is so high that even those with well-above-average salaries are feeling squeezed. Prices have risen dramatically in the past decade, up from a median of $39,900 in 2014.
Slashdot
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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Software Poses 'All-Time' Risk To Speculative Credit, Deutsche Bank Warns
The software and technology sectors pose one of the all-time great concentration risks to the speculative-grade credit market, according to Deutsche Bank AG analysts. Bloomberg: They comprise $597 billion and $681 billion of the speculative-grade credit universe, or about 14% and 16% respectively, analysts led by Steve Caprio wrote in a Monday note. Speculative debt spans high-yield debt, leveraged loans and US private credit.
That's "a meaningful chunk of debt outstanding that risks souring broader sentiment, if software defaults increase," the analysts wrote, with "a potential impact that would rival that of the Energy sector in 2016." Unlike in 2016, pressures would likely first emerge in private credit, business development companies and leveraged loans, with the high-yield market weakening later, the analysts added.
The rapid adoption of artificial intelligence tools risks further weighing down multiples and revenues for software-as-a-service firms, while the US Federal Reserve's hawkish stance since 2022 has pressured cash flows, the analysts wrote. For instance, software payment-in-kind loan usage has risen to 11.3% in BDC portfolios, over 2.5 percentage points higher than the already elevated index average of 8.7%, according to Deutsche. PIK deals typically allow borrowers to pay interest in more debt rather than cash.
Slashdot
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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2 To 3 Cups of Coffee a Day May Reduce Dementia Risk. But Not if It's Decaf.
If you think your daily doses of espresso or Earl Grey sharpen your mind, you just might be right, new science suggests. The New York Times: A large new study provides evidence of cognitive benefits from coffee and tea -- if it's caffeinated and consumed in moderation: two to three cups of coffee or one to two cups of tea daily.
People who drank that amount for decades had lower chances of developing dementia than people who drank little or no caffeine, the researchers reported. They followed 131,821 participants for up to 43 years. "This is a very large, rigorous study conducted long term among men and women that shows that drinking two or three cups of coffee per day is associated with reduced risk of dementia," said Aladdin Shadyab, an associate professor of public health and medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who wasn't involved in the study.
The findings, published Monday in JAMA, don't prove caffeine causes these beneficial effects, and it's possible other attributes protected caffeine drinkers' brain health. But independent experts said the study adjusted for many other factors, including health conditions, medication, diet, education, socioeconomic status, family history of dementia, body mass index, smoking and mental illness.
Slashdot
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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Deepfake Fraud Taking Place On an Industrial Scale, Study Finds
Deepfake fraud has gone "industrial," an analysis published by AI experts has said. From a report: Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams -- leveraging, for example, deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus -- are no longer niche, but inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale, said the analysis from the AI Incident Database.
It catalogued more than a dozen recent examples of "impersonation for profit," including a deepfake video of Western Australia's premier, Robert Cook, hawking an investment scheme, and deepfake doctors promoting skin creams. These examples are part of a trend in which scammers are using widely available AI tools to perpetuate increasingly targeted heists. Last year, a finance officer at a Singaporean multinational paid out nearly $500,000 to scammers during what he believed was a video call with company leadership. UK consumers are estimated to have lost $12.86bn to fraud in the nine months to November 2025.
"Capabilities have suddenly reached that level where fake content can be produced by pretty much anybody," said Simon Mylius, an MIT researcher who works on a project linked to the AI Incident Database. He calculates that "frauds, scams and targeted manipulation" have made up the largest proportion of incidents reported to the database in 11 of the past 12 months. He said: "It's become very accessible to a point where there is really effectively no barrier to entry."
Slashdot
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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Electric Cars Are Making It Easier To Breathe, Study Finds
An anonymous reader shares a report: It turns out that when fewer cars spew exhaust as they drive along, air quality improves. That's the conclusion of a new study published in The Lancet Planetary Health that looked at the effect of increased numbers of both EVs and plug-in hybrids on air pollution in California. The Golden State has by far the largest number of plug-in vehicles in the United States, and they've now reached significant numbers to have a positive impact on air quality.
Between 2019 and 2023, for every 200 EVs or plug-in hybrids added, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels dropped 1.1%, according to the study, which used satellite data to track those levels through the unique way NO2 absorbs and reflects sunlight. NO2 can trigger asthma attacks, cause bronchitis, and increase the risk of heart disease and stroke.
Slashdot
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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Kalshi Prediction Markets Match or Beat Traditional Forecasting Tools For Macro Indicators, NBER Study Finds
A new NBER working paper from researchers at the Federal Reserve, Northwestern's Kellogg School and Johns Hopkins finds that Kalshi -- the largest federally regulated prediction market in the U.S., overseen by the CFTC -- produces macroeconomic forecasts that match or beat those of professional forecasters and traditional financial instruments like fed funds futures.
The study compared Kalshi-implied forecasts for the federal funds rate, CPI inflation and unemployment against the New York Fed's Survey of Market Expectations and Bloomberg consensus. Kalshi's modal forecast correctly predicted the federal funds rate on the day before every FOMC meeting since 2022, something neither the survey nor fed funds futures achieved. For headline CPI, Kalshi's median and mode produced a statistically significant improvement over Bloomberg consensus.
Kalshi also fills a gap no other financial market covers: real-time probability distributions for GDP growth, core CPI, unemployment, and payrolls. The paper documented how these distributions shift in response to macro news -- positive CPI surprises moved the mean of the fed funds rate distribution four times more than negative ones. Trading volumes on the platform have grown to nearly 100 million contracts for a single FOMC meeting, supported by liquidity from Susquehanna, Citadel, and Two Sigma.
Slashdot
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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Linux 7.0 Kernel Confirmed By Linus Torvalds, Expected In Mid-April 2026
An anonymous reader writes: Linus Torvalds has confirmed the next major kernel series as Linux 7.0, reports Linux news website 9to5Linux.com: "So there you have it, the Linux 6.x era has ended with today's Linux 6.19 kernel release, and a new one will begin with Linux 7.0, which is expected in mid-April 2026. The merge window for Linux 7.0 will open tomorrow, February 9th, and the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone is expected on February 22nd, 2026."
Slashdot
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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OpenAI Starts Running Ads in ChatGPT
OpenAI has started testing ads inside ChatGPT for logged-in adult users on the Free and Go subscription tiers in the United States, the company said. The Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education tiers remain ad-free. Ads are matched to users based on conversation topics, past chats, and prior ad interactions, and appear clearly labeled as "sponsored" and visually separated from ChatGPT's organic responses.
OpenAI says the ads do not influence ChatGPT's answers, and advertisers receive only aggregate performance data like view and click counts rather than access to individual conversations. Users under 18 do not see ads, and ads are excluded from sensitive topics such as health, mental health, and politics. Free-tier users can opt out of ads in exchange for fewer daily messages.
Further reading: Anthropic Pledges To Keep Claude Ad-free, Calls AI Conversations a 'Space To Think'.
Slashdot
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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Sixteen AI Agents Built a C Compiler From Scratch
Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini set 16 instances of Claude Opus 4.6 loose on a shared codebase over two weeks to build a C compiler from scratch, and the AI agents produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM and RISC-V architectures.
The project ran through nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and cost about $20,000 in API fees. Each instance operated inside its own Docker container, independently claiming tasks via lock files and pushing completed code to a shared Git repository. No orchestration agent directed traffic. The compiler achieved a 99% pass rate on the GCC torture test suite and can compile major open source projects including PostgreSQL, SQLite, Redis, FFmpeg and Doom. But it lacks a 16-bit x86 backend and calls out to GCC for that step, its assembler and linker remain buggy, and it produces less efficient code than GCC running with all optimizations disabled.
Carlini also invested significant effort building test harnesses and feedback systems to keep the agents productive, and the model hit a practical ceiling at around 100,000 lines as bug fixes and new features frequently broke existing functionality.
Slashdot
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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Romance Publishing Has an AI Problem and Most Readers Don't Know It Yet
The romance genre -- long the publishing industry's earliest adopter of technological shifts, from e-books to self-publishing to serial releases -- has become the front line for AI-generated fiction, and the results as you can imagine are messy. Coral Hart, a Cape Town-based novelist previously published by Harlequin and Mills & Boon, produced more than 200 AI-assisted romance novels last year and self-published them on Amazon, where they collectively sold around 50,000 copies. She found Anthropic's Claude delivered the most elegant prose but was terrible at sexy banter; other programs like Grok and NovelAI wrote graphic scenes that felt rushed and mechanical. Chatbots struggled broadly to build the slow-burn sexual tension romance readers crave, she said.
A BookBub survey of more than 1,200 authors found roughly a third were using generative AI for plotting, outlining, or writing, and the majority did not disclose this to readers. Romance accounts for more than 20% of all adult fiction print sales, according to Circana BookScan, and the genre's reliance on familiar tropes and narrative formulas makes it especially susceptible to AI disruption.
Slashdot
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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Autodesk Takes Google To Court Over AI Movie Software Named 'Flow'
Autodesk has sued Google in San Francisco federal court, alleging the search giant infringed its "Flow" trademark by launching competing AI-powered software for movie, TV and video game production in May 2025.
Autodesk says it has used the Flow name since September 2022 and that Google assured it would not commercialize a product under the same name -- then filed a trademark application in Tonga, where filings are not publicly accessible, before seeking U.S. protection.
Slashdot
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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NewsBone.com
Suggest a feed to syndicate here, or check out what I'm doing over at freshtao.
~Created Tue Feb 10 13:27:21 2026
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The official unplanned emergency OSNews fundraiser!
It’s time for an OSNews fundrasier! This time, it’s unplanned due to a financial emergency after our car unexpectedly had to be scrapped (you can find more details below). If you want to support one of the few independent technology news websites left, this is your chance. OSNews is entirely supported by you, our readers, so go to our Ko-Fi and donate to our emergency fundraiser today! Why support OSNews? In short, we are truly independent. After turning off our ads, our Patreons and donors are our sole source of income, and since I know many of you prefer the occasional individual donation over recurring Patreon ones, I run a fundraiser a few times a year to rally the troops, so to speak. This particular fundraiser wasn’t planned, however, given the circumstances described below, several readers have urged me to run a fundraiser now. We’re incredibly grateful for even having the opportunity to do something like this, and as always, I’d like to stress that OSNews will never be paywalled, and that access to our website will never be predicated on your financial support. You can ignore all of this and continue on reading the site as usual. What’s going on? Sadly, and unexpectedly, we’ve had to scrap our car. Our 2007 Hyundai Santa Fe did not survive this Arctic Winter, as the two decades in the biting cold has taken a toll on a long list of components and parts – it would no longer start. After consulting an expert, we determined that repairs would’ve been too expensive to make financial sense for such an old vehicle. Sometimes, you have to take the loss lest you throw money down a pit. An unreliable car in an Arctic climate is a really bad idea, since getting stranded on a back road somewhere when it’s -30°C (or colder) with two toddlers is not going to be a fun time. On top of that, my wife uses our car to commute to work, and while using the bus is going to be fine for a little while, her job in home care for the very elderly and recovering alcoholics is incredibly stressful and intensive. Dealing with bus schedules and wait times at such low temperatures is not exactly compatible with her job. Since she’s just recovering from a doctor-mandated rest period – very common in her line of work – her income has taken a hit. Taking professional care of people with severe dementia or other old-age related conditions is a thankless and underpaid job, and it’s no surprise those working in this profession often require mandated rest (and thus a temporary pay cut). And so, urged on by readers on Mastodon, I’m doing an OSNews fundraiser to help us pay for the “new” car. Of course, we’re looking for a used car, not a new one, and based on our needs we’ve set a budget of around €10,000. This should allow us to buy something like a used Mazda 6 or Volvo V60 from around 2014-2015, or something similar in size and age, with a reasonable petrol engine (an EV is well out of our price range). We consider this the sweet spot for safety features, size, age, longevity, and reliability. We’ve got some savings, but most of the purchase price will have to come in the form of a car loan. We’ve already made some changes to our monthly expenses to cover for part of the monthly repayments, including a lucky break where our daycare expenses will be going down considerably next month. Based on this, I’ve set the fundraising goal at €5000. If we manage to hit that – and the last few times we hit our goals quite fast – it won’t cover the entire purchase price, but it will cut down on the amount we need to loan considerably. I’m feeling a little apprehensive about all of this, since this isn’t really an OSNews-related expense I can easily get some content out of. However, I’m entirely open to suggestions about how I could get some OSNews content out of this – perhaps buying and installing one of those Android headunits with a large display? They make them tailored for almost every vehicle at low prices on AliExpress, and the installation process and user experience might be something interesting to write about, as it’s potentially a great way to add some modern features to an older car. Feel free to make any suggestions. I’m also open to other crazy ideas. If you happen to work at an automaker, and need some testing done in an Arctic environment – including ice roads – I’m open to ideas. A few random notes Since about half of our audience hails from the United States, I figured I’d make a few notes about car pricing in Europe, and in Arctic Sweden in particular. Cars are definitely more expensive here in Europe, doubly so in the sparsely populated area where we live (low supply leads to higher prices). Buying a brand new car is entirely out of the question due to pricing, and leasing is also far too expensive (well over €500/month for even a basic, small car). Used electric cars are still well out of our budget as well, and since we don’t have our own driveway, we wouldn’t be able to charge at home anyway. Opting to forego a car entirely is sadly not an option either. With two small children, the Arctic climate, the remoteness, my wife’s stressful job and commute, and long distances to basic amenities, we can’t “go Dutch” and live off public transport and bicycles, no matter how much we’d want to. We have considered it, but it’s just not a realistic long-term solution. Had we lived in The Netherlands or in a big city, going carless would’ve possibly been a more realistic option. We intended to drive the Santa Fe until it fell apart, but we did not expect this to happen so soon. Feel free
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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The Dillo appreciation post
About a year ago I mentioned that I had rediscovered the Dillo Web Browser. Unlike some of my other hobbies, endeavours, and interests, my appreciation for Dillo has not wavered. I only have a moment to gush today, so I’ll cut right to it. Dillo has been plugging along nicely (see the Git forge.) and adding little features. Features that even I, a guy with a blog, can put to use. Here are a few of my favourites. ↫ Bobby Hiltz If you’re looking for a more minimalist, less distracting browser experience that gives you a ton of interesting UNIXy control, you should really consider giving Dillo a try.
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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KDE Linux improves by leaps and bounds
KDE’s Nate Graham has published a status update about KDE Linux, the KDE project’s new immutable Linux distribution, intended to be the “KDE OS” showcasing the best of the KDE community. While the project is approaching the beta stage, it’s currently still in alpha, but from what I gather from friends who are using it, the alpha label might actually be like how Haiku is supposedly still alpha: intended more to scare people away for now than ana ctual descriptor of the state of the software. Recently, KDE Linux enabled delta updates, possibly dramatically reducing the size of updates. Before delta updates were enabled, a system update would come in at 7GB, while with delta updates enabled, it’s gone down to 1-2GB. In addition, plasma-setup and plasma-login-manager have been added to KDE Linux, which are, respectively, a first-run setup assistant and KDE’s new login manager. This new login manager was forked from SDDM, and specifically targets Wayland, and comes with much deeper Plasma integration than SDDM. Note that SDDM will remain available for platforms that don’t use Wayland. KDE Linux has also massively improved its hardware support, and the list is long; from scanners to fancy multi-button mice, from Android devices to professional audio devices, and much more. Performance has been improved as well, the boot manager menu will no longer be shown at every boot but only when needed, the wireless regulatory domain is now properly set and managed, and much, much more. I’m keeping an eye on KDE Linux as a possible replacement for my Fedora KDE installations if Fedora ever loses the plot, even if it’s an immutable distribution relying on Flatpak. I’m a KDE user, and I want the latest and greatest the KDE community has to offer without going through an distributor.
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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The Scriptovision Super Micro Script video titler is almost a home computer
Cameron Kaiser comes in with another amazing article, this time diving into a unique video titler from Canada, released in 1985. The Super Micro Script was one of several such machines this company made over its lifetime, a stylish self-contained box capable of emitting a 32×16 small or 10×4 large character layer with 64×32 block graphics in eight colours. It could even directly overlay its output over a composite video signal using a built-in genlock, one of the earliest such consumer units to do so. Crack this unit open, however, and you’ll find the show controlled by an off-the-shelf Motorola 6800-family microcontroller and a Motorola 6847 VDG video chip, making it a relative of contemporary 1980s home computers that sometimes used nearly exactly the same architecture. More important than that, though, it has socketed EPROMs we can theoretically pull and substitute with our own — though we’ll have to figure out why the ROMs look like nonsense, and there’s also the small matter of this unit failing to generate a picture. Nevertheless, when we’re done, another homegrown Canadian computer will rise and shine. We’ll even add a bitbanged serial port and write a MAME emulation driver for it so we can develop software quickly … after we fix it first. ↫ Cameron Kaiser I know I keep repeating myself, but Kaiser’s work on so many of these rare and unique systems is not only worthwhile and amazing to read, they’re also incredibly valuable from a historical and preservation perspective. This article in hand, anyone who stumbles upon one of these machines can get the most out of it, possibly fix one, and use it for fun projects. I’m incredibly grateful for this sort of work. Video titles are such an interesting relic of the past. These days, adding titles to a video is child’s play, but back when computing power came at a massive premium and digital video was but a distant dream, using analog video to overlay text onto was the best way to go about it. Video titler makers did try to move the technology from professional settings to home settings, but from what I can gather, this move never really paid off. Still, I’d love to buy one of these at some point and mess around with it. There’s some real cool retro effects you can create with these.
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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Why E cores make Apple siliconfast
If you use an Apple silicon Mac I’m sure you have been impressed by its performance. Whether you’re working with images, audio, video or building software, we’ve enjoyed a new turn of speed since the M1 on day 1. While most attribute this to their Performance cores, as it goes with the name, much is in truth the result of the unsung Efficiency cores, and how they keep background tasks where they should be. ↫ Howard Oakley While both Intel and AMD are making gains on Apple, there’s simply no denying the reality that Apple’s M series of chips are leading the pack in mobile computing (the picture is different in desktops). There are probably hundreds of reasons why Apple has had this lead for so many years now, but the way macOS distributes background and foreground tasks across the two types of cores in M series chips is an important one. Still, I wonder how the various other processors that use power and efficiency cores fare in this regard. You’d think they would provide a similar level of benefit, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the way Windows or Linux handles such cores and the distribution of tasks is simply not as optimised or strict as it is in macOS. Apple often vastly overstates the benefits of its “vertical integration”, but I think the tight coupling between macOS and Apple’s own processors is definitely a case where they’re being entirely truthful.
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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Adventures in Guix packaging
We talked about Nemin’s first impressions of the Guix System as someone coming from a Nix environment, but today they’ve got a follow-up article diving into the experience of creating new packages for Guix. I spent about a week packaging WezTerm and learning the ropes of being a Guix contributor along the way. During the packaging process I stumble many times, only to stand back up and figure out a solution. I also explain some of my complaints about the peculiarities of the process, but also provide plenty of praise about of how much the system tries to enable you to do your job. Finally, I also touch on how positive the experience of the code review was. ↫ Nemin’s blog These are the kinds of content a rather niche system like Guix needs. Guix isn’t exactly one of the popular picks out there, so having level-headed, honest, but well-written introductions to its core concepts and user experience, written by a third party is going to do wonders for people interested in trying it out.
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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The chaos in the US is affecting open source software and its developers
It was only a matter of time before the illegal, erratic, inhumane, and cruel behaviours and policies of the second Trump regime were going to affect the open source world in a possibly very visible way. Christian Hergert, longtime GNOME and Linux contributor, employed by Red Hat, wanted to leave the US with his family and move to Europe, but requests to remain employed by Red Hat were denied. As such, he decided to end his employment at Red Hat and push on with the move. However, without employment, his work on open source software is going to suffer. While at their in-person visa appointment in Seattle, US border patrol goons shot two people in their hometown of Portland, underlining the urgency with which people might want to consider getting out of the US, even if it means losing employment. Regardless, the end result is that quite a bit of user-facing software that millions of people use every day is going to be affected. This move also means a professional shift. For many years, I’ve dedicated a substantial portion of my time to maintaining and developing key components across the GNOME platform and its surrounding ecosystem. These projects are widely used, including in major Linux distributions and enterprise environments, and they depend on steady, ongoing care. For many years, I’ve been putting in more than forty hours each week maintaining and advancing this stack. That level of unpaid or ad-hoc effort isn’t something I can sustain, and my direct involvement going forward will be very limited. Given how widely this software is used in commercial and enterprise environments, long-term stewardship really needs to be backed by funded, dedicated work rather than spare-time contributions. ↫ Christian Hergert The list of projects for which Hergert is effectively the sole maintainer is long, and if you’re a Linux user, odds are you’re using at least some of them: GNOME’s text editor, GNOME’s terminal, GNOME’s flagship IDE Builder, and tons of lower-level widely-used frameworks and libraries like GtkSourceView, libspelling, libpeas, and countless others. While new maintainers will definitely be found for at least some of these, the disruption will be real and will be felt beyond these projects alone. There’s also the possibility that Hergert won’t be the only prolific open source contributor seeking to leave the US and thus reducing their contributions, especially if a company like Red Hat makes it a policy not to help its employees trying to flee whatever mess the US is in. Stories like these illustrate so well why the “no politics!” crowd is so utterly misguided. Politics governs every aspect of our lives, especially so if you’re part of a minority group currently being targeted by the largest and most powerful state apparatus in the world, and pretending to be all three wise monkeys at once is not going to make any of that go away. Even if you’re not directly targeted because you’re not transgender, you’re not brown, you’re not an immigrant, or not whatever else they fancy targeting today, the growing tendrils of even an incompetent totalitarian regime will eventually find you and harm you. More so than any other type of software, open source software is made by real humans, and as these totalitarian tendrils keep growing, more and more of these real humans will be affected, no matter how incompetent these tendrils might be. You can’t run away and hide from that reality, even if it makes you uncomfortable.
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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Commission trials European open source communications software: Matrix
“As part of our efforts to use more sovereign digital solutions, the European Commission is preparing an internal communication solution based on the Matrix protocol,” the spokesperson told Euractiv. Matrix is an open source, community-developed messaging protocol shepherded by a non-profit that’s headquartered in London. It’s already widely used for public messengers across Europe, with the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces all using tools built on the protocol. ↫ Maximilian Henning at Euractiv Right now, most government agencies and institutions in Europe are effectively entirely reliant on Microsoft for their digital infrastructure, and that’s not a tenable situation going forward with the Americans being openly hostile towards Europe, up to and including threatening to invade European countries. Europe needs its own digital infrastructure, and opting to build those around open source tools is the obvious way to go. Of course, this isn’t an easy process, but two platitudes apply here: Rome wasn’t built in a day, and every journey begins with a first step. By opting to use existing open source tools, though, these efforts will have a massive head start, and will hopefully lead to a flurry of increased activity for the open source projects in question. In this particular case it’s Matrix, which can surely need some additional work and eyeballs, if my use of the protocol is any indication.
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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“I now assume that all ads on Apple News are scams”
What does it look like when a hardware and software company descends into an obsession with recurring services revenue to please its shareholders? Look no further than Apple, who has turned its Apple News service into a vehicle for scam ads. These fake “going out of business ads” have been around for a few years, and even the US Better Business Bureau warns about them, as they take peoples’ money then shut down. Does Apple care? Does Taboola care? Does Apple care that Taboola serves ads like this? My guess: no, no, and no. ↫ Kirk McElhearn While serving obvious scams to users is already bad enough, the real kicker is that even if you are a paying user of Apple News, you still get served ads, including the scams. Of course, massive corporations like Apple are free too just scam you, since they’re effectively immune from any legal consequences, so it’s unlikely the scamming will stop as long as it makes line go up. On an entirely unrelated note, OSNews is entirely free of ads, so there’s no scams here. OSNews is fully funded by our readers through single donations on Ko-Fi or by becoming a Patreon.
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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Unsealed court documents show teen addiction was big tech’s “top priority”
I nominate this for the “Most Expected News Of The Decade” award. Today, The Tech Oversight Project published a new report spotlighting newly unsealed documents in the 2026 social media addiction trials. The documents provide smoking-gun evidence that Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok all purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing, and how that mass youth addiction was core to the companies’ business models. The documents contain internal discussions among company employees, presentations from internal meetings, expert testimony, and evidence of Big Tech coordination with tech-funded groups, including the National Parent Teachers Association (PTA) and Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), in attempts to control the narrative in response to concerned parents. ↫ The Tech Oversight Project Modern social media companies are not entirely different from tobacco companies. They and everyone else know full well just how dangerous social media is, and how being addicted to it has disastrous consequences for the people involved. Tobacco companies, too, knew how dangerous smoking was decades before the general population was aware, and yet they kept pushing cigarettes, even to kids, deaths be damned. In fact, they’re still doing the same thing today with “vapes”, and we’re kind of letting it happen all over again. Social media is directly responsible for genocides, extreme polarisation, the spread of endless amounts of lies causing parents to harm their children, mass generation of child pornography, and much, much more. All of this is not a coincidence, mere side-effects, unintended consequences – social media are designed and optimised specifically to achieve these goals, like cigarettes and now “vapes” are designed specifically to be as addictive as possible. The people responsible – social media companies, their executives, their employees – need to face justice, answer for what they’ve done, and face the legal consequences. Of course, that’s not going to happen. Billionaires and their megacorporations are untouchable, too big to fail, too closely tied to especially the current regime in the US. I don’t think social media bans for people under 16 are the answer, since they tend to come with onerous and invasive online identity checks and because they cut vulnerable people off from their support networks, but it’s clear we need to do something.
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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Microsoft has killed widgets six times
Gadgets, desk accessories, widgets – whatever you they were called, they were a must-have feature for various operating systems for a while. Windows in particular has tried making them happen six times, and every time, they failed to really catch on and ended up being killed, only for the company to try again a few years later. Microsoft has been trying to solve the same UX problem since 1997: how to surface live information without making you launch an app. They’ve shipped six different implementations across nearly 30 years. Each one died from a different fundamental flaw – performance, security, screen space, privacy, engagement. And each death triggered the same reflex: containment. ↫ Pavel Osadchuk There’s quite a few memories in this article. I never actually used Active Desktop back when it came out, because I seem to remember the channels feature was either not available in The Netherlands or the available channels were American stuff we didn’t care about. The sidebar in Vista had a lot of potential, and I did like the feature, but there weren’t a lot of great widgets and we hadn’t entered the era of omnipresent notifications begging for out attention just yet, so use cases remained elusive. Now Metro, that’s where things came together, at least for me. I was en enthusiastic Windows Phone user – I imported two Windows Phone devices from the US to be an early adopter – and I still consider its live tiles with notifications and other useful information to be the most pleasant user interface for a mobile device, bar none. It may have taken Microsoft six tries, but they nailed it with that one, and I’m still sad the Windows Phone user interface lost out to whatever iOS and Android offered. On desktops and laptops, though, it’s a different story, and I don’t think the Metro tiles concept ever made any sense there. Widgets as they exist in Windows now mostly seem like an annoying distraction, and I’ve never seen anyone actually use them. Does anyone even keep them enabled at all?
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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Microsoft Research releases LiteBox, a new library operating system
Microsoft Research, in collaboration with various others, has just released LiteBox, a library operating system. LiteBox is a sandboxing library OS that drastically cuts down the interface to the host, thereby reducing attack surface. It focuses on easy interop of various “North” shims and “South” platforms. LiteBox is designed for usage in both kernel and non-kernel scenarios. LiteBox exposes a Rust-y nix/rustix-inspired “North” interface when it is provided a Platform interface at its “South”. These interfaces allow for a wide variety of use-cases, easily allowing for connection between any of the North–South pairs. ↫ LiteBox GitHub Page Suggested use-cases are running unmodified Linux applications on Windows, sandboxing Linux applications on Linux, running OP-TEE applications on Linux, and more. It’s written in Rust, and the code is available on GitHub under an MIT license.
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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Zig replaces third-party C code with Zig’s own code
Over the past month or so, several enterprising contributors have taken an interest in the zig libc subproject. The idea here is to incrementally delete redundant code, by providing libc functions as Zig standard library wrappers rather than as vendored C source files. In many cases, these functions are one-to-one mappings, such as memcpy or atan2, or trivially wrap a generic function, like strnlen. So far, roughly 250 C source files have been deleted from the Zig repository, with 2032 remaining. With each function that makes the transition, Zig gains independence from third party projects and from the C programming language, compilation speed improves, Zig’s installation size is simplified and reduced, and user applications which statically link libc enjoy reduced binary size. ↫ Andrew Kelley on the Zig Devlog The goal is to replace all of the musl, wasi-libc, and MinGW-w64 C code bundled in Zig with new Zig code.
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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Rust in the NetBSD kernel seems unlikely
Rust is everywhere, and it’s no surprise it’s also made its way into the lowest levels of certain operating systems and kernels, so it shouldn’t be surprising that various operating system developers have to field questions and inquiries about Rust. NetBSD developer Benny Siegert wrote a blog post about this very subject, and in it, details why it’s unlikely Rust will find its way into the NetBSD base system and/or the kernel First, NetBSD is famed for its wide architecture and platform support, and Rust would make that a lot more troublesome due to Rust simply not being available on many platforms NetBSD supports. Rust release cycles also aren’t compatible with NetBSD, it would draw a lot of dependency code into the base system, and keeping Rust and its compiler toolchain working is a lot of work that falls on the shoulders of a relatively small group of NetBSD developers. Note that while NetBSD does tend to take a more cautious approach to these matters than, say, Linux or FreeBSD, the operating system isn’t averse to change on principle. For instance, not only is Lua part of the base system, it’s even used in the NetBSD kernel due to its ability to rapidly develop and prototype kernel drivers. In short, while it doesn’t seem likely Rust will make it into the NetBSD base system, it’s not an impossibility either.
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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Everything you ever wanted to know about Amiga UNIX
We recently talked about Apple’s pre-Mac OS X dabblings in UNIX, but Apple wasn’t the only computer and operating system company exploring UNIX alternatives. Microsoft had the rather successful Xenix, Atari had ASV, Sony had NEWS, to name just a very small few. The Amiga, too, wanted in on the UNIX action, and as such, released Amiga UNIX, based on AT&T System V Release 4. The Amiga UNIX website is dedicated to everything you would ever want to know about this operating system. This site is dedicated on preserving Amix’s history and sharing information and instructions on what Amix is, how to install it (either on real hardware or in emulation) and what can you do with it. Mainly, it tries to cater to people who wish to run AMIX for whatever reason on their hardware. By documenting experiences with it, it is hoped that subsequent SVR4 junkies will find the way more smooth than it might have been without any guidance at all. For even a relatively experienced modern Unix or GNU/Linux administrator, System V UNIX is sufficiently different to present difficulty in installation and administration. Not so much in moving around between directories, and using common utilities that persist to this day – although many of those are hoary and somewhat forgetful in their retirement – but of doing more in depth tasks and understanding the differences. ↫ The Amiga Unix Wiki If you wish to run Amiga UNIX yourself, you’ll either have to have one of the original two models sold with it – the 2500UX and 3000UX – or one of the Amigas that meets the minimum requirements. Another option is, of course, emulation, and WinUAE has support for running Amiga UNIX.
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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Firefox nightly gets “AI” kill switch
After a seemingly endless stream of tone deaf news from Mozilla, we’ve finally got some good news for Firefox users. As the company’s been hinting at for a while on social media now, they’ve added an “AI” kill switch to the latest Firefox nightly release, as well as a set of toggles to disable specific “AI” features. You can choose to use some of these and not others. If you don’t want to use AI features from Firefox at all, you can turn on the Block AI enhancements toggle. When it’s toggled on, you won’t see pop-ups or reminders to use existing or upcoming AI features. Once you set your AI preferences in Firefox, they stay in place across updates. You can also change them whenever you want. ↫ Ajit Varma at the Mozilla blog I’m particularly enamoured with the specific mention that the setting will remain unaffected by updates. It’s incredibly sad that Mozilla even has to mention this, but they have nobody to blame but themselves for that one. None of this is enough to draw me away from Librewolf and back to Firefox, but at least it gives those of us who prefer to keep using Firefox the option to disable all of this “AI” nonsense. Also, there’s no Librewolf for POWER9, so I have to use Firefox somewhere. It’s unlikely Chrome or Safari will get such clear “AI” kill switches, so it might become a reason for some to switch to Firefox from Chrome or Safari.
OSnews
~Created Tue Feb 10 12:06:16 2026
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