OpenAI doesn’t like it when you use “their” generated slop without permission
OpenAI says it has found evidence that Chinese artificial intelligence start-up DeepSeek used the US company’s proprietary models to train its own open-source competitor, as concerns grow over a potential breach of intellectual property. ↫ Cristina Criddle and Eleanor Olcott for the FT This is more ironic than writing a song called Ironic that lists situations that aren’t actually … ⌘ Read more

Google Maps is run by cowards
Google, on its Google Maps naming policy, back in 2008: By saying “common”, we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming. In other words, if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage. Google, today, in 2025: Google has confirmed that Google Maps will soon … ⌘ Read more

Reviving a dead audio format: the return of ZZM
Long-time readers will know that my first video game love was the text-mode video game slash creation studio ZZT. One feature of this game is the ability to play simple music through the PC speaker, and back in the day, I remember that the format “ZZM” existed, so you could enjoy the square wave tunes outside of the games. But imagine my surprise in 2025 to find that, while the Museum of ZZT does have a ZZM Audio section, it recommends t … ⌘ Read more

The invalid 68030 instruction that accidentally allowed the Mac Classic II to successfully boot up
A bug in the ROM for the Macintosh II was recently discovered that causes a crash when booting in 32-bit mode. Doug Brown discovered and documented the bug while playing with the MAME debugger. Why did it never show up before? It seems a quirk in Motorola’s 68030 CPU inadvertently fixes it when executing an illegal instruction that shou … ⌘ Read more

PebbleOS becomes open source, new Pebble device announced
Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble, the original smartwatch maker, made a major announcement today together with Google. Pebble was originally bought by Fitbit and in turn Fitbit was then bought by Google, but Migicovsky always wanted to to go back to his original idea and create a brand new smartwatch. PebbleOS took dozens of engineers working over 4 years to build, alongside our fantastic product and QA teams. Repro … ⌘ Read more

Chinese researchers just built an open-source rival to ChatGPT in 2 months, and Silicon Valley is freaked out
Speaking of “AI”, the Chinese company DeepSeek has lobbed a grenade dead-centre into the middle of the “AI” bubble, and it’s been incredibly entertaining to watch. DeepSeek has released several new “AI” models, which seem to rival or even surpass OpenAI’s latest ChatGPT models – but with a massive twist: DeepSeek, b … ⌘ Read more

AI bots paralyze Linux news site and others
Apparently, since the beginning of the year, AI bots have been ensuring that websites can only respond to regular inquiries with a delay. The founder of Linux Weekly News (LWN-net), Jonathan Corbet, reports that the news site is therefore often slow to respond. The AI scraper bots cause a DDoS, a distributed denial-of-service attack. At times, the AI bots would clog the lines with hundreds of IP addresses simultaneously as soon as they decided … ⌘ Read more

When a sole maintainer steps down, Linux drivers become orphans
The Linux kernel has become such an integral, core part of pretty much all aspects of the technology world, and corporate contributions to the kernel make up such a huge chunk of the kernel’s ongoing development, it’s easy to forget that some parts of the kernel are still maintained by some lone person in Jacksonville, Nebraska, or whatever. Sadly, we were reminded of this today when the sole maintainer of … ⌘ Read more

Android 16 Beta 1 has started rolling out for Pixel devices
Basically, this seems to mean applications will no longer be allowed to limit themselves to phone size when running on devices with larger screens, like tablets. Other tidbits in this first beta include predictive back support for 3-button navigation, support for the Advanced Professional Video codec from Samsung, among other things. It’s still quite early in the release process, so more is sure to come, and some … ⌘ Read more

Snowdrop OS: a homebrew operating system from scratch, in x86 assembly language
Snowdrop OS was born of my childhood curiosity around what happens when a PC is turned on, the mysteries of bootable disks, and the hidden aspects of operating systems. It is a 16-bit real mode operating system for the IBM PC architecture. I designed and developed this homebrew OS from scratch, using only x86 assembly language. ↫ Snowdrop OS’ website I have created and includ … ⌘ Read more

NixBSD: an unofficial NixOS fork with a FreeBSD kernel
NixBSD is an attempt to make a reproducible and declarable BSD, based on NixOS. Although theoretically much of this work could be copied to build other BSDs, all work thus far has been focused on building a FreeBSD distribution. ↫ NixBSD GitHub page Look, it’s my job to make sure I use and am familiar with as many operating systems and related tools as possible. As much as you guys support OSNews on Patreon or Ko-Fi, it’s g … ⌘ Read more

SDL 3.2.0 released
SDL, the Simple DirectMedia Layer, has released version 3.2.0 of its development library. In case you don’t know what SDL is: Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform development library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware via OpenGL and Direct3D. It is used by video playback software, emulators, and popular games including Valve‘s award winning catalog and many Humble Bundle games. ↫ SDL website This new release has a lot of impr … ⌘ Read more

9front “THIS TIME DEFINITELY” released
The operating system I’m not cool enough to run has pushed out a new release: 9front “THIS TIME DEFINITELY” is now available. 9front is a fork of plan9, created after plan9 languished at Bell Labs. This release enables gefs, the new file system, in the installer, “ip/ipconfig now support dhcpv6 dynamic allocations and handles prefix expirations”, and it comes with some smaller changes, too, of course. Despite every piece of evidence to the contrary, I am s … ⌘ Read more

Right to root access
I believe consumers, as a right, should be able to install software of their choosing to any computing device that is owned outright. This should apply regardless of the computer’s form factor. In addition to traditional computing devices like PCs and laptops, this right should apply to devices like mobile phones, “smart home” appliances, and even industrial equipment like tractors. In 2025, we’re ultra-connected via a network of devices we do not have full control over. Much of this has t … ⌘ Read more

How UNIX spell ran in 64kB RAM
How do you fit a 250kB dictionary in 64kB of RAM and still perform fast lookups? For reference, even with modern compression techniques like gzip -9, you can’t compress this file below 85kB. In the 1970s, Douglas McIlroy faced this exact challenge while implementing the spell checker for Unix at AT&T. The constraints of the PDP-11 computer meant the entire dictionary needed to fit in just 64kB of RAM. A seemingly impossible task. ↫ Abhinav Upadhyay They still managed to … ⌘ Read more

Introduction to GrapheneOS
GrapheneOS (written GOS from now on) is an Android based operating system that focuses security. It is only compatible with Google Pixel devices for multiple reasons: availability of hardware security components, long term support (series 8 and 9 are supported at least 7 years after release) and the hardware has a good quality / price ratio. The goal of GOS is to provide users a lot more control about what their smartphone is doing. A main profile is used by default (the owner … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.13 released
Linux 6.13 comes with the introduction of the AMD 3D V-Cache Optimizer driver for benefiting multi-CCD Ryzen X3D processors, the new AMD EPYC 9005 “Turin” server processors will now default to AMD P-State rather than ACPI CPUFreq for better power efficiency, the start of Intel Xe3 graphics bring-up, support for many older (pre-M1) Apple devices like numerous iPads and iPhones, NVMe 2.1 specification support, and AutoFDO and Propeller optimization support when compiling the Linux kernel with … ⌘ Read more

MorphOS 3.19 released
It’s been about 18 months, but we’ve got a new release for MorphOS, the Amiga-like operating system for PowerPC Macs and some other PowerPC-based machines. Going through the list of changes, it seems MorphOS 3.19 focuses heavily on fixing bugs and addressing issues, rather than major new features or earth-shattering changes. Of note are several small but important updates, like updated versions of OpenSSL and OpenSSH, as well as a ton of new filetype definitions – and so much more. Havin … ⌘ Read more

Google begins requiring JavaScript for Google Search
Google says it has begun requiring users to turn on JavaScript, the widely used programming language to make web pages interactive, in order to use Google Search. In an email to TechCrunch, a company spokesperson claimed that the change is intended to “better protect” Google Search against malicious activity, such as bots and spam, and to improve the overall Google Search experience for users. The spokesperson noted that, with … ⌘ Read more