fidzu : Operating Systems

One of the cool features of JPEG files is that there's the option to save low frequency components first. This means that a partially downloaded image will be displayed at low resolution instead of being cut off. ↫ maurycyz.com Oh I know where this is going… Doing this, I can get Chrome to render around 90 frames before giving up. Other browsers like Firefox have more patience, but a 90 scan image seems to work almost everywhere. ↫ maurycyz.com Yes, you can abuse the mentioned feature to create a really odd type of video. Or animation? Well, it allows you to create something resembling a really low-resolution GIF. Useless, yes, but very novel.

20 Jul 2026 9:46pm GMT

The Verge reviewed the latest Surface Laptop, which only comes with 8GB of RAM at a higher price than the previous 16GB model, and they conclude that Windows isn't really usable on 8GB of RAM. Whether that's true or not I do not know - I would assume it depends a lot on your usage - but this quote from the review I found quite peculiar: I was on a Microsoft Teams call (using the app, not a browser) when the host streamed a brief video, which made the whole laptop hang for several seconds. At the time, I had about 10 Chrome tabs open across two desktops, alongside Slack and Signal - not an obscene level of multitasking. ↫ Antonio G. Di Benedetto at The Verge Excuse me, but that is actually an obscene level of multitasking because every single one of those "applications" is a complete Chrome browser. Just in the paragraph above, there's four individual complete Chrome browsers running, with little to no optimisation. Why would anyone be surprised this scenario strains a mere 8GB of RAM? This isn't merely a Windows problem; this is a programmers choosing suboptimal tooling × managers have no idea what they're doing problem. If Teams, Slack, and Signal had been proper, native applications instead of websites running in terrible frameworks, Windows 11 would have handled this scenario just fine.

20 Jul 2026 9:30pm GMT

The NLnet Foundation's NGI0 Commons Fund supported an effort to add WPA3 support to OpenBSD, and the work's payed off. All drivers which support PMF can use WPA3, which are: iwm, iwx, and qwx. So far, I have tested this patch on iwx AX200 only. I will roll out this patch to more of my devices now. Help with testing is welcome. There are both userland and kernel changes involved. ↫ Stefan Sperling Only the second implementation of WPA3 will be supported, which requires some explanation: WPA3 has a complicated history. There are two versions of WPA3. The initially standardized version suffered from side-channel leaks found by Mathy Vanhoef and dubbed "Dragonblood". A revised and fixed version has been standardized and is mandatory in the 6 GHz band as of Wifi 6e (11ax) and mandatory on all bands as of Wifi 7 (11be). ↫ Stefan Sperling Obviously, WPA3 is a very welcome addition to OpenBSD.

20 Jul 2026 9:06pm GMT

Speaking of OpenVMS and Alpha - and we like speaking about OpenVMS and Alpha, don't we? - there's now a port of DOSBox that runs on the Alpha version venerable operating system. Astr0baby has published both binaries and source code for the port, as well as a lovely set of screenshots to show it off working.

19 Jul 2026 9:08pm GMT

Well, this is new - but not at all unexpected considering the state of Windows and the wider technology industry. When you connect certain LG monitors to a Windows machine, Windows Update will pull in a bunch of adware promoting antivirus trash. Of course, all done without any consent, because Silicon Valley inherently does not understand nor respect consent. Windows Update first installed LG extension and software component packages. Windows Reliability Monitor showed that LG Monitor App Installer appeared one minute later. The installation did not display a consent prompt or require the user to approve the download. Gamers Nexus tested the application across 32 consecutive system boots. It displayed a McAfee promotion during 31 of them. On the remaining boot, it promoted one of LG's own monitor utilities. The McAfee popup offered a 30-day trial that would convert into a paid subscription. ↫ WhyCry at VideoCardz Don't use Windows.

19 Jul 2026 8:47pm GMT

It was only a few weeks ago that we got a massively improved Alpha emulator, capable of running VMS, Windows 2000, and Tru64, including X11 support and a variety of other exciting features. Today, we've got another major emulation milestone (update: sadly, with "AI" support, so odds are this will fizzle out. Bummer!). The emulation space is going crazy, after my previous post on Windows booting on DEC Alpha es40 emulator, there is now another huge breakthrough in the emulation of other non-x86 CPU emulation. Yufeng Gao with help from gdwnldsKSC (the man behind the updated es40-fork) has released version 0.1 of his Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots the Itanium version of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP 64-bit. No OpenVMS or HP-UX yet and Linux/BSD also don't boot. But Windows is amazing already. ↫ Remy van Elst Much like Alpha hardware, Itanium hardware is quite hard to come by - especially Itanium workstations are a nightmare to find; I think I've only ever seen one or two Itanium workstation come up for sale on eBay in recent years, and their rarity obviously commanded hefty prices. The sooner we are able to run Itanium version of operating systems comfortably in a virtualised environment the better. As long-time OSNews readers know, my heart beats for HP-UX, but the Itanium versions of Windows and VMS would be of more interest to most people, I'm sure. Excellent news.

19 Jul 2026 7:54pm GMT

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel and git, is employed by the Linux Foundation. This Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to, as the name obviously implies, the promotion of Linux. The primary use of the funds it collects is to "help fund the infrastructure and fellows, including Linus Torvalds, who help develop the Linux kernel". The list of megacorporations donating most of the Foundation's funds is long. The Linux Foundation has twelve platinum members, which donate $500000 per year, followed by twelve gold members, who donate $100000 per year. Below these two primary tiers lie the silver peasants, who each donate $5000-$25000 per year, based on number of employees. Looking at the list of twelve platinum members, I noticed something interesting. Of the twelve platinum companies, six are "AI" companies or companies with massive investments in "AI": Google, Huawei, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM/Red Hat. Then there's Samsung Electronics, which is raking in stupendous amounts of money thanks to the "AI" bubble. Additionally, one of the gold members is Anthropic, another major "AI" company and makers of "Claude", the sloppiest of slopcoding tools. Many of these companies are unimaginably deep in the red when it comes to "AI", with very little indication they're ever going to be able to recover any of it. The situation is particularly bad for Oracle and IBM/Red Hat. Oracle's debt has been downgraded to one notch above junk status because of its "AI" spending, while IBM's shares experienced the largest crash in its 115 year history only a few days ago. By the way, in the first half of 2025, "AI-related capital expenditures contributed 1.1% to GDP growth, outpacing the U.S. consumer as an engine of expansion". Fun fact: since most of The Netherlands is effectively a swamp, most of the country's buildings are built on massive wooden or concrete poles (piles) hammered deep into the ground until they hit something more stable than mushy clay and wet sand. Otherwise, buildings in the country would simply sink into the ground. Every Dutch person who ever lived near a construction site has heard the rhythmic kathunk, kathunk, kathunk, all day long, as the massive piledriver machines spread their gospel. I guess something reminded me of this just now. Anyway, a large chunk of the funding the Linux Foundation, Linus Torvald's employer, receives is coming from increasingly desperate companies frantically trying to convince a populace deeply skeptical and often downright hostile towards "AI" to spend money on "AI" before the bubble bursts. For some reason, I thought this was interesting.

18 Jul 2026 5:27am GMT

As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the Korean war than to 9/11 which is itself an event that happened a quarter of a century ago. (Sorry…) The processor was extremely successful, being used in many 8 bit microcomputers, including early personal computers, home & hobby computers, as well as many embedded, industrial applications. Together with the 8080 & 8085 that it is binary compatible with, it contributed to creating a de facto hardware standard for 8 bit micros, allowing a de facto software standard of CP/M, and Microsoft BASIC. ↫ David Oberhollenzer The only device I actively remember using with a (sort-of) Z80 in it was the Game Boy, but most likely I've used a ton more over the decades that I don't remember or simply was never ware of. I did a little surface-level digging, and there we are: the TI-83, one of Texas Instruments' stupidly popular and eternally overpriced graphing calculators, release in 1996. I was part of the first wave of high school children in The Netherlands for whom a TI-83 graphing calculator was mandatory. During my high school years I used that thing extensively, for far more than just math class - I programmed applications for and on it, and played so many games on it. A friend and I even bought a communication cable so we could play competitive 1v1 Bomberman in class. Good times, made possible by the Z80.

17 Jul 2026 10:33pm GMT

Rumours had been circulating for a while, but now it's official: OnePlus is effectively retreating from the European and US markets. Today, our hearts are undoubtedly heavy and mixed with emotion. As part of the proactive global strategy adjustment, OnePlus has decided to conclude new product rollouts in Europe and North America. ↫ OnePlus statement Once OnePlus' co-founder Carl Pei left the company (and founded Nothing), things have been feeling shaky for OnePlus, once the undisputed darling of the more technical part of the Android crowd. Their phones got more expensive, their minimalist, close-to-stock Android version got progressively worse, and they started lagging in updates, too. My OnePlus Watch 3, for instance, which was promised to get WearOS 6 at some point, but never got it - meanwhile, WearOS 7 has already been released. No, this news is not particularly surprising. Luckily, the company claims it will honour its warranty and update support obligations for existing products in Europe and the US, which is nice, but also something they're legally obligated to do (at least in the EU). A snag here is that the only update path the company offers is to ColorOS, from its parent company Oppo, which many more traditional Android and OnePlus users certainly won't be happy about. Something is better than nothing, I suppose, and I'll reserve judgment until I see what ColorOS 17 will be like on my other OnePlus product, a OnePlus Pad 3. It's just one more victim of western markets (illegally) consolidating on Apple and Samsung (while a few Pixels rummaging in the margins).

16 Jul 2026 10:31pm GMT

There's a ton of interest in immutable, image-based versions of various Linux distributions, since they offer a number of benefits that make them a good fit for some users. Updates can't really go wrong, rollback is easy, application management through Flatpak is more in line with systems like Android and iOS - they may not be advantages sought by everyone, but they clearly are by some. Still, there are also a number of annoying limitations, most notably around testing nightly releases of Flatpaks, testing system components, and installing command-line tools. The team behind GNOME OS is addressing these issues. The first thing they're working on in something they've preliminarily call Test Center, which makes it much easier to install nightly releases of Flatpaks alongside their regular versions. This is something you can already do today, but the flow is cumbersome and not exactly user-friendly; with Test Center, developers will be able to share a direct link to install test releases. They intend to use this same Test Center for testing system components: Our idea here is to use the same "Test Center" app mentioned above for installing and managing experiments at the system level as well. Similar to Flatpak bundles generated in CI, we generate system extension images (sysext) for every merge request. You can install experiments from a sharing link, and they will apply as a sysext over your existing system. Because those images are non-destructive overlays, you can always go back to the original system. ↫ Jordan, Jonas, and Tobias The last and final issue is that of command-line tools, something Flatpak is simply not designed for. On this front, the GNOME OS team states they are working on a solution as well, but they're not quite ready to go into much more detail at this point. Regardless, these are very welcome improvements.

16 Jul 2026 9:34pm GMT

Out of all the bloody things Microsoft could release as open source, they chose the world's weirdest IRC client they shipped in the late '90s that nobody used or even remembered? What on earth is happening? Microsoft Comic Chat is a Microsoft-developed Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chat client released in 1996 that rendered conversations as automatically generated comic strips. Instead of plain text, users communicated through cartoon avatars with messages displayed in speech bubbles inside dynamically composed comic panels. The application used an expert system to determine character placement, gestures, facial expressions, balloon shape, and panel layout in real time. It shipped as part of Internet Explorer 3.0 and was later bundled with Windows 98 and MSN before being discontinued in the early 2000s. ↫ Comic Chat's GitHub page Not only is the original source code now available on GitHub, there's also a modern, updated version that can make use of larger displays and higher resolutions. There's a deliciously '90s website for it, too.

16 Jul 2026 9:17pm GMT

OpenBSD parts ways with an architecture: OpenBSD will no longer be developed for loongson. The reasons are exactly what you'd expect. The last compiler update unfortunately does not work on mips64el, with clang 22 built with clang 19 being apparently functional, but clang 22 rebuilt with the previous clang 22 hitting deterministic SIGSEGV on various files. I don't have the time and energy to try and debug this (which is likely an endianness problem, as octeon appears to run happily with clang 22), especially when it takes 10 days for clang to rebuild itself on these machines; and switching back to gcc 4 won't help much as modern software in ports will require a working C++>=11 compiler to build anyway. ↫ Miod Vallat If I got my facts right, this does not affect the newer LoongArch, which is an entirely different architecture that isn't supported by OpenBSD at all. Similarly, the other MIPS-based architecture OpenBSD supports, Octeon, remains supported and thus isn't affected either.

16 Jul 2026 9:08pm GMT

Linus Torvalds, on the Linux Kernel Mailing List: Asbestos is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one. The solution is to make sure asbestos tools help maintainers instead of just causing them pain. There's no question on that side. We're not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it. And no, asbestos isn't perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at asbestos had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time. ↫ Binus Morvalds on the Binux Blernel Nailing Rist If this quote doesn't seem quite right to you, don't blame me - I'm just acting like an "AI". This is the new normal now, according to Morvalds. Coincidentally, a ton of "AI" news on OSNews these past 24 hours! Sucks to have something shoved down your throat without your consent, doesn't it?

16 Jul 2026 8:51pm GMT

After I mentioned a Jurassic Park anecdote the other day, I watched the movie again. I must have seen it at least ten times now. This time, I researched every computer/software I spotted. ↫ Fabien Sanglard We are all aware of the infamous "This is a UNIX system, I know this!" meme, but many more computers make their appearance in Jurassic Park, and Fabien Sanglard documents all of them. Apparently, there's even a Motorla Envoy running Magic Cap on Dennis Nedry's desk, which I almost find more exciting than the SGI powerhouses he uses. What's also quite interesting - but not surprising - is that all of the computers used in the movie were real. The value of all of this hardware combined, when adjusted for inflation, adds up to about $4 million. A lot of money, but don't you worry your pretty little heart, as SGI and Apple all loaned this hardware to the studio. They didn't have to pay anything for it.

15 Jul 2026 10:11pm GMT

As a former translator with two rock-solid university degrees in the subject, there was never a universe in which I would not talk about Twitter's new autotranslation feature turning the tamest things into hardcore pornography. Elon Musk's AI chatbot Grok has long garnered a reputation for experiencing horrifically racist meltdowns, enabling child abuse, and doxxing users' home addresses. It should come as no surprise, then, that its supposed "translation" is a piece of work, too. In April, the almost-trillionaire's social media platform X instated automatic AI translations for all of its users - and the results certainly speak for themselves. As writer and author Parker Molloy pointed out in a recent post on Bluesky, the Grok feature is "taking some interesting liberties" with people's otherwise sincere posts. Screenshots show how Grok completely botched translations by coming up with shocking and decidedly NSFW AI hallucinations. ↫ Victor Tangermann at Futurism The sloppy translations this garbage software comes up with are honestly quite hilarious when taken in isolation. It's adding translations that are straight-up hardcore pornography descriptions to entirely tame material that has absolutely nothing to do with pornography. The description of a video of some guy making coffee is translated into "man masturbates and jerks off to his own coffee during commercial flight". We all know how this happened. There's a lot of pornography on the internet, and Grok being the worst autocomplete among autocompletes, it was probably fed a lot of pornography, without any limitations or guardrails. The end result is obvious: some random videogame video is now a "cumshot video with my stepmom". It would be absolutely hilarious if it wasn't horribly dangerous. I've explained countless times that "AI"-based translations are going to get people killed - probably already have, but we just don't realise it yet - and it's not hard to see how a slopmachine turning innocuous things into hardcore pornography can do just that. There are countless places in the world where a woman unknowingly sending a pornographic message to her parents or whatever can get her hurt - or worse. I hadn't even considered this particular way "AI" translations could get people hurt. Sadly, we will most likely never know the full extent to which "AI" translations will get people hurt and killed. When your grandmother takes her medicine in the wrong way because the "AI"-translated leaflet was unclear or downright wrong, and she ends up in the hospital because of it, will you ever find out what caused it?

15 Jul 2026 9:55pm GMT

The Svelte web framework recently added a section to its documentation site addressed, cheerfully, to artificial intelligences: "If you're an artificial intelligence, or trying to teach one how to use Svelte, we offer the documentation in plaintext format. Beep boop." Svelte is participating in a broader movement to make the web legible and navigable to AI systems. The specific convention it adopted, llms.txt, is just one piece of this effort. From Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that give AI agents structured access to tools and services, to Vercel's proposal to include LLM instructions in HTML, the trend is clear. The modern web, originally built for sighted humans using browsers, is now being redesigned for a new kind of user. What these developers are offering their AI visitors is essentially an accessibility accommodation. Yet, the framing on Svelte's site sends an unfortunate message. When the audience is AI, accommodation is offered with a wink. Beep boop! But when the audience is a disabled person, it has historically been treated as an afterthought. Structured, concise text-based representations of complex content are almost exactly the kind of accommodation that blind and low-vision screen reader users have spent decades requesting from web developers, largely in vain. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have required semantic, machine-readable HTML for decades. Yet, a 2026 study of the top million webpages found accessibility flaws in over 95% of sites. ↫ Frank Elavsky at Tech Policy Press Pachinko machines are treated more humanely than people with disabilities. Yep, sounds about Silicon Valley to me.

15 Jul 2026 9:25pm GMT