fidzu : nerd

Microsoft released the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" in 2016, adding an optional Linux environment into every operating system since Windows 10. But now an open source developer has brought Linux to Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me, reports the blog It's FOSS, "with Linux kernel 6.19 running alongside the Windows 9x kernel, letting both operate on the same machine at the same time." A virtual device driver handles initialization, loads the kernel off disk and manages the event loop for page faults and syscalls. Since Win9x lacks the right interrupt table support for the standard Linux syscall interrupt, WSL9x reroutes those calls through the fault handler instead. Rounding it all out is wsl.com, a small 16-bit DOS program that pipes the terminal output from Linux back to whatever MS-DOS prompt window you ran it from. The end result is that WSL9x requires no hardware virtualization, and can run on hardware as old as the i486, the article points out. On Mastodon the developer says they "really got this one in right under the wire, before they start removing 486 support from Linux." The source code for WSL9x is released under the GPL-3 license, and was "proudly written without AI."

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25 Apr 2026 6:34pm GMT

"Old code like amateur radio and NFC have long been a burden to core networking developers," reads the pull request. And so Thursday Linus Torvald merged the pull request "to rid the Linux kernel of the old Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) subsystem," reports Phoronix, "and various other old network drivers largely for PCMCIA era network adapters." This was the code suggested for removal given the recent influx of AI/LLM-generated bug reports against this dated code that likely has no active upstream users remaining... [W]ith the large language models and increased code fuzzing finding potential issues with these drivers for obsolete hardware, it's easier to just get rid of these drivers if no one is actively using the hardware from decades ago... This merge lightens the kernel by 138,161 lines of code with ISDN gone and numerous old network adapters and also getting rid of legacy ATM device drivers as well as the amateur ham radio support. The main networking drivers removed affect the 3com 3c509 / 3c515 / 3c574 / 3c589, AMD Lance, AMD NMCLAN, SMSC SMC9194 / SMC91C92, Fujitsu FMVJ18X, and 8390 AX88190 / Ultra / WD80X3. Linux 7.1 also has removed the long-obsolete bus mouse support as well as beginning to phase out Intel 486 CPU support and removing support for Russia's Baikal CPUs.

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25 Apr 2026 5:34pm GMT

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25 Apr 2026 5:21pm GMT

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25 Apr 2026 4:54pm GMT

It's the U.S. government's main link to the AI industry, reports The Washington Post, working to assess national security risks of new models like Anthropic's "Mythos". To run it they'd hired Collin Burns, who'd worked at OpenAI and then Anthropic. But Burns started work Monday at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation - and then "was pushed out Thursday by the White House, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations." Officials were concerned about Burns having worked at the AI company, which has fought bitterly with the Trump administration in recent months, according to one of the people and another person. That person said some senior figures at the White House had not been briefed on Burns's selection in advance... The new pick was Chris Fall, a scientist with a long career spanning the federal government and academia. Burns had been asked to resign that afternoon, according to one of the people familiar with the situation... Dean Ball, a former Trump administration AI adviser, said on social media that Burns had given up valuable Anthropic stock and moved across the country to take the government position, and had been "rewarded by his country with a punch in the face." "Obviously what happened is Burns was bumped because of his association with Anthropic," Ball wrote. "A dumb but predictable own goal."

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25 Apr 2026 4:34pm GMT

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25 Apr 2026 3:59pm GMT

"It wasn't a big deal. It just coincided with the fact that Moon was farther away from the Earth."

25 Apr 2026 11:40am GMT

Slack messages, interviews with current and former works paint picture of company in turmoil.

25 Apr 2026 10:49am GMT

"If boost-phase intercept from space is not affordable and scalable, we will not produce it."

25 Apr 2026 2:52am GMT

Firefox 149 quietly adds Brave's adblock-rust engine as an experimental content-blocking prototype, disabled by default and without filter lists.

24 Apr 2026 4:45pm GMT

Fwupd 2.1.2 adds an AMD EntrySign HSI check, native CBOR parsing, safer firmware parsing limits, and support for more hardware.

24 Apr 2026 3:20pm GMT

Bitwarden has confirmed a brief supply-chain compromise of its CLI 2026.4.0 npm package, with no evidence of vault data exposure.

24 Apr 2026 2:59pm GMT