Andrew S. Tanenbaum, professor emeritus of Computer Science at VU Amsterdam, receives the ACM Software System Award for MINIX, which influenced the teaching of Operating Systems principles to multiple generations of students and contributed to the design of widely used operating systems, including Linux.

Tanenbaum created MINIX 1.0 in 1987 to accompany his textbook, Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. MINIX was a small microkernel-based UNIX operating system for the IBM PC, which was popular at the time. It was roughly 12,000 lines of code, and in addition to the microkernel, included a memory manager, file system and core UNIX utility programs. It became free open-source software in 2000.

↫ VU Amsterdam website

Definitely a deserved award for Tanenbaum, and it’s a minuscule bit of pride that VU Amsterdam happens to be my Alma mater. He also wrote an article for OSNews way back in 2006, detailing MINIX 3, which is definitely a cool notch to have on our belt.

This article was originally published in Hackernoon on 05.29.24 by Charlie Sander, CEO at ManagedMethods. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks have plagued schools for quite some time. We often hear about ransomware attacks or other security breaches in the news, but DDoS attacks can be just as troubling for a school. DDoS attacks are cyberattacks in […]

The post In the News | What Does a DDoS Attack Mean for Schools, and How Can They Be Prevented? appeared first on ManagedMethods.

The post In the News | What Does a DDoS Attack Mean for Schools, and How Can They Be Prevented? appeared first on Security Boulevard.

GNU Nano, by far my favourite text editor when using the command line, released version 8.0 recently – and by recently I mean a month ago – and in it, there’s a pretty interesting additional feature that should make using Nano a little bit more straightforward for those not used to its key combinations.

Command-line option –modernbindings (-/) makes ^Q quit, ^X cut, ^C copy, ^V paste, ^Z undo, ^Y redo, ^O open a file, ^W write a file, ^R replace, ^G find again, ^D find again backwards, ^A set the mark, ^T jump to a line, ^P show the position, and ^E execute.

↫ GNU Nano’s news page

Basically, this option makes Nano’s key bindings a bit more in line with what you might expect as someone coming from a graphical environment. Of course, Nano’s keybindings are listed at the bottom of its user interface, but it’s still nice to have the option of making them more in line with the wider computing world.

Instead of using the command-line option, you can also change the name of Nano’s executable, or a symlink to it, to start with “e”.

Google is killing off a messaging service! This one is the odd “Google Business Messaging” service—basically an instant messaging client that is built into Google Maps. If you looked up a participating business in Google Maps or Google Search on a phone, the main row of buttons in the place card would read something like “Call,” “Chat,” “Directions,” and “Website.” That “Chat” button is the service we’re talking about. It would launch a full messaging interface inside the Google Maps app, and businesses were expected to use it for customer service purposes. Google’s deeply dysfunctional messaging strategy might lead people to joke about a theoretical “Google Maps Messaging” service, but it already exists and has existed for years, and now it’s being shut down.

↫ Ron Amadeo at Ars Technica

When it comes to Google, it’s often hard to distinguish meme from reality.

Speaking of The Verge, its parent company Vox Media, along with The Atlantic, have signed a deal with OpenAI.

Two more media companies have signed licensing agreements with OpenAI, allowing their content to be used to train its AI models and be shared inside of ChatGPT. The Atlantic and Vox Media — The Verge’s parent company — both announced deals with OpenAI on Wednesday.

↫ Emilia David at The Verge

In the case of Vox Media, the deal was made and announced without informing their staff, which obviously doesn’t sit well with especially Vox’ writers. By making deals like this, upper management gets to double-dip on the fruits of their workers’ labour – first, the published content generates ad revenues, and second, OpenAI pays them to use said content for training and other purposes.

And once the “AI” gets good enough, more and more of the writers will be fired, leaving only a skeleton crew of lower-paid workers to clean up the “AI” output. With this deal, the writing is on the wall for every journalist at Vox Media – you’re currently contributing to your own obsolescence, and your bosses are getting paid for it.

As far as I know, OSNews’ owner, David, has not yet been contacted by OpenAI. Regardless, I’ll sell the past 20-odd years of my terrible takes for 69 million euros, after deducting Swedish taxes. And since OpenAI is run by billionaires: taxes are this thing where normal people pay a portion of their income to the government in return for various government services.

It’s wild, I know.

iFixit is ending its collaboration with Samsung, as iFixit claims the Korean giant is not actually interested in offering repair options at all.

As we tried to build this ecosystem we consistently faced obstacles that made us doubt Samsung’s commitment to making repair more accessible. We couldn’t get parts to local repair shops at prices and quantities that made business sense. The part prices were so costly that many consumers opted to replace their devices rather than repair them. And the design of Samsung’s Galaxy devices remained frustratingly glued together, forcing us to sell batteries and screens in pre-glued bundles that increased the cost.

↫ Scott Head

Honestly, this doesn’t surprise me. Unless right to repair legislation becomes more widespread and stricter, corporations will inevitably drag their feet in honouring any right to repair commitments and promises they make.

After Broadcom acquired VMware, there’s been a steady stream of worrying or outright bad news for people using VMware products at home, for personal use, as enthusiasts. The biggest blow to the enthusiast market was the end of perpetual licensing, forcing people into subscriptions instead. Finally, though it seems we’re getting some good news.

The most exciting part is that Fusion Pro and Workstation Pro will now have two license models. We now provide a Free Personal Use or a Paid Commercial Use subscription for our Pro apps. Users will decide based on their use case whether a commercial subscription is required.

This means that everyday users who want a virtual lab on their Mac, Windows or Linux computer can do so for free simply by registering and downloading the bits from the new download portal located at support.broadcom.com.

↫ Michael Roy on the VMware blog

This is definitely good news for us enthusiasts, and it means I won’t have to buy a cheap VMware license off eBay every few years anymore, so I’m quite satisfied here. However, with VMware under Broadcom focusing more and more on the enterprise and squeezing every last penny out of those customers, one has to wonder if this ‘free for personal use’ is just a prelude to winding down the development of enthusiasts’ tools altogether.

It wouldn’t be the first time that a product going free for personal use was a harbinger of worse things yet to come.

Window management in Emacs gets a bad rap.

Some of this is deserved, but mostly this is a consequence of combining a very flexible and granular layout system with rather coarse controls. This leaves the door open to creating and using tools for handling windows that employ and provide better metaphors and affordances.

As someone who’s spent an unnecessary amount of time trying different approaches to window management in Emacs over the decades, I decided to summarize them here. Almanac might be overstating it a bit – this is a primer to and a collection of window management resources and tips.

↫ Karthik Chikmagalur

I honestly had no idea Emacs was this… Advanced, complex, and feature-laden. I mean, I thought Emacs’ complexity was just a meme, but reading this article it seems the memes don’t do it justice.

I want to run GoToSocial on some *BSD system. Because I am who I am, I went for using NetBSD 10.0 . And because my hypervisor is running bhyve on OmniOS , you get the title of this blog post.

Don’t get too anxious, it is quite straightforward. So let the journey begin.

↫ Joel Carnat

Bhyve is a hypervisor originating from FreeBSD, while OmniOS is a distribution of illumos, a continuation of the last open source Solaris release from Oracle. GoToSocial, meanwhile, is an ActivityPub social network server, so it belongs in the same family as Mastodon, Glitch, Akkoma, and countless others. This guide makes this whole process look like a piece of cake, so if you’ve ever been interested in running your own ActivityPub server – read on.

On a slightly related sidenote, there’s no OSNews AT instance, partly because I don’t want to deal with the moderation and costs, and partly because I’m incredibly happy being a member of Exquisite, a Glitch instance running on OpenBSD, managed by OpenBSD enthusiasts. Never say never, of course, but the odds of seeing an OSNews AT instance in the future are very slim.

Cory Doctorow, nailing it as usual.

If you care about how people are treated by platforms, you can’t just tell them to pay for services instead of using ad-supported media. The most important factor in getting decent treatment out of a tech company isn’t whether you pay with cash instead of attention – it’s whether you’re locked in, and thus a flight risk whom the platform must cater to.

↫ Cory Doctorow

I’m sick and tired of the phrase “if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product”, because it implies that if just you pay for a product or service, you’re not going to be treated like ass. The problem is, as Doctorow points out, that this simply is not supported by the evidence, and that it isn’t whether or not you’re paying that makes you have a good or bad experience – it’s whether or not you’re locked in.

If you’ve got nowhere else to go, then corporations can treat you like ass.

There are so, so many free services and products I use where I’m anything but a “product”. My Linux distribution of choice, Fedora. My web browser, Firefox. The countless open source applications I use on my desktops, laptops, and smartphone. Those are all cases where even though I’m not paying, I know I’m being treated with respect, and I feel entirely comfortable with all of those. And no, you don’t get to exclude the open source world just because it’s inconvenient for the “you’re the product” argument.

There are also countless services and products where the opposite is true; I’m a paying customer, but I still feel like I’m the product. I pay for additional Google Drive storage. I pay for an Office 364 subscription because I needed it as a translator (I’m working on OSNews full-time now, and could use your help keeping the site going), but I can’t cancel it because my wife, my parents, and my parents-in-law use that same subscription. We pay for Netflix and one or two other video services. I don’t know if our ISP or wireless provider do anything malicious, but it wouldn’t surprise me. And so on.

Being a paying customer means nothing. It’s how easy it is for you to stop being a customer that matters.