The out-of-memory (OOM) killer has long been a scary and controversial part
of the Linux kernel. It is summoned from some dark place when the system
as a whole (or, more recently, any given control group) is running so low
on memory that further allocations are not possible; its job is to kill off
processes until a sufficient amount of memory has been freed. Roman
Gushchin has found a way to make the OOM killer even scarier: adding the
ability to load
custom OOM killers in BPF.
Author Archives: Xordac Prime
Libreboot 25.04 Open-Source Boot Firmware Released
Libreboot 25.04 “Corny Calamity” open-source boot firmware debuts with a new YY.MM versioning scheme, broad distro support, and more.
Thunderbird 138 Adds New Default Color Override for High Contrast Mode on Linux
Thunderbird 138 is out now as the latest stable version of this popular, open-source, free, and cross-platform email, address book, chat, news, and calendar client for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems.
Apple Must Halt Non-App Store Sales Commissions, Judge Says
Apple violated a court order requiring it to open up the App Store to third-party payment options and must stop charging commissions on purchases outside its software marketplace, a federal judge said in a blistering ruling that referred the company to prosecutors for a possible criminal probe. From a report: U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers sided Wednesday with “Fortnite” maker Epic Games over its allegation that the iPhone maker failed to comply with an order she issued in 2021 after finding the company engaged in anticompetitive conduct in violation of California law.
Gonzalez Rogers also referred the case to federal prosecutors to investigate whether Apple committed criminal contempt of court for flouting her 2021 ruling. The U.S. attorney’s office in San Francisco declined to comment. The changes the company must now make could put a sizable dent in the double-digit billions of dollars in revenue the App Store generates each year. The judge’s order [PDF]: Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.
It Is So Ordered.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The May 2025 Issue of the PCLinuxOS Magazine
The PCLinuxOS Magazine staff is pleased to announce the release of the May 2025 issue.
Why Windows 7 Took Forever To Load If You Had a Solid Background
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Windows 7 came onto the market in 2009 and put Microsoft back on the road to success after Windows Vista’s annoying failures. But Windows 7 was not without its faults, as this curious story proves. Some users apparently encountered a vexing problem at the time: if they set a single-color image as the background, their Windows 7 PC always took 30 seconds to start the operating system and switch from the welcome screen to the desktop.
In a recent blog post, Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen explains the exact reason for this. According to him, a simple programming error meant that users had to wait longer for the system to boot. After logging in, Windows 7 first set up the desktop piece by piece, i.e. the taskbar, the desktop window, icons for applications, and even the background image. The system waited patiently for all components to finish loading and received feedback from each individual component. Or, it switched from the welcome screen to the desktop after 30 seconds if it didn’t receive any feedback.
The problem here: The code for the message that the background image is ready was located within the background image bitmap code, which means that the message never appeared if you did not have a real background image bitmap. And a single color is not such a bitmap. The result: the logon system waited in vain for the message that the background has finished loading, so Windows 7 never started until the 30 second fallback activated and sent users to the desktop. The problem could also occur if users had activated the “Hide desktop icons” group policy. This was due to the fact that such policies were only added after the main code had been written and called by an If statement. However, Windows 7 was also unable to recognize this at first and therefore took longer to load.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft hits a speed bump on the way to a metal asteroid
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, located nearly 150 million miles from Earth on the way to an unexplored metal asteroid, has stopped firing its engines after detecting a problem in its propulsion system.
NASA published an update Tuesday revealing that the robotic spacecraft shut off its plasma thrusters earlier this month. The news wasn’t widely shared until Wednesday, when NASA science chief Nicky Fox posted it on X.
“Engineers with NASA’s Psyche mission are working to determine what caused a recent decrease in fuel pressure in the spacecraft’s propulsion system,” the agency said. The spacecraft detected the drop in pressure April 1 inside the line that feeds xenon fuel to the spacecraft’s four plasma thrusters.
BTW Windows Subsystem for Linux officially uses Arch now
The tryhard’s favorite distro wins an approved home in Microsoft’s OSThere have been unofficial versions for years, but Arch Linux is now officially on the menu for people using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).…
Alleged ‘Scattered Spider’ Member Extradited to US
Investigative journalist and cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs reports: A 23-year-old Scottish man thought to be a member of the prolific Scattered Spider cybercrime group was extradited last week from Spain to the United States, where he is facing charges of wire fraud, conspiracy and identity theft. U.S. prosecutors allege Tyler Robert Buchanan and co-conspirators hacked into dozens of companies in the United States and abroad, and that he personally controlled more than $26 million stolen from victims. Scattered Spider is a loosely affiliated criminal hacking group whose members have broken into and stolen data from some of the world’s largest technology companies. Buchanan was arrested in Spain last year on a warrant from the FBI, which wanted him in connection with a series of SMS-based phishing attacks in the summer of 2022 that led to intrusions at Twilio, LastPass, DoorDash, Mailchimp, and many other tech firms. The complain against Buchanan is available here (PDF).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Firefox 139 Beta Delivers Faster HTTP/3 Upload Performance
Firefox 138 was released yesterday and wasn’t particularly exciting besides enhanced profile management and Tab Groups support… Aside from that it was a pretty basic release. In turn Firefox 139 is now in beta and that release does bring some items worth mentioning like faster HTTP/3 upload performance…
DragonFlyBSD 6.4.1 Released With Many Bug Fixes
For fans of the DragonFlyBSD operating system, DragonFlyBSD 6.4.1 has been released after two and a half years to ship various bug fixes for this popular BSD…
Republicans In Congress Want a Flat $200 Annual EV Tax
New submitter LDA6502 writes: The Republican chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee is proposing a new annual federal vehicle registration fee of $200 for full EVs, $100 for hybrid EVs, and $20 for combustion vehicles. The tax would be tied to inflation, would be collected by the states, and would expire in 2035. Critics of the proposal note that it could result in low mileage EVs paying a far higher tax rate than heavy ICE trucks and SUVs. Ars Technica notes that the bill “exempts commercial vehicles, which should see a rush from tax avoiders to register their vehicles under their businesses […].” Farm vehicles will also be exempt from the tax.
“The Eno Center for Transportation calculates that this new tax will contribute an extra $110 billion to the highway Trust Fund by 2035 but that cuts to other taxes and more spending mean that the fund will still be $222 billion short of its commitments — assuming that this added fee doesn’t further dampen EV adoption in the U.S., that is.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Fortnite will return to iOS as court slams Apple’s “interference“ and ”cover-up“
Epic CEO and founder Tim Sweeney said in a Zoom call with press Wednesday night that the company is “going to do everything we can to bring Fortnite back to the iOS App Store next week.” That decision comes after a federal district court found late Wednesday that Apple was in “willful violation” of a 2021 injunction designed to allow iOS developers to steer customers to alternate payment processors for in-app purchases.
That 2021 injunction wound its way through years of appellate review until January 2024, when the Supreme Court declined to hear a final attempt by Apple to overturn it. Since then, the District Court for Northern California has been holding a series of evidentiary hearings examining the internal development of Apple’s so-called “compliance plan” for the injunction.
In a scathing Wednesday night order, District Court Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers determined that Apple had engaged in a plan to “thwart the injunction’s goals,” and then engaged in an “obvious cover-up” to prevent that plan from being revealed.
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 1, 2025
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
- Front: Mailman 2 vulnerabilities; AI in Debian; __nonstring__; Cache-aware scheduling; Freezing filesystems; Socket-level storage; Debugging information; LWN in 2025.
- Briefs: Debian election; Kali Linux key; OpenBSD 7.7; Firefox 138.0; GCC 15.1; Meson 1.8.0; Valgrind 3.25.0; FSF review; OSI retrospective; Mastodon; Quotes; …
- Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
EA “Pausing Development” On Future Rally Games
Codemasters is “pausing development” on future World Rally Championship games, ending updates for EA Sports WRC.
With work wrapping up on the Hard Chargers content pack for EA Sports WRC, it’s been announced that Codemasters will be ceasing all active work on rally games. With the venerable UK studio having provided considerable VR support for three of its titles – EA Sports WRC, DiRT Rally, and DiRT Rally 2.0 – rally fans will soon have to find a new ride if they want to continue the journey in VR.
“Every great journey eventually finds its finish line, and today, we announce that we’ve reached the end of the road working on WRC”, began the announcement. “For now, we are pausing development plans on future rally titles. Rest assured, EA Sports WRC will continue to be available for existing and new players. We hope it remains a source of joy, excitement, and the thrill of rally racing. We’ve poured our hearts into making it for fans, and we know you’ll keep the passion alive.”
Codemasters’ association with rally games goes back more than 40 years, to the release of Paris to Dakar Rally for the ZX Spectrum back in 1991. The studio went up a gear six years later with the release of Colin McRae Rally in 1998, which sold beyond three million copies in Europe and became a huge success for the-then independent publisher.
Over the next decade, the studio focused all its efforts on driving games and was one of the first to embrace VR. When we reviewed DiRT Rally VR in 2016, we called it “the new high watermark for VR racing games.” The sequel wasn’t bad either. It’s unknown if Codemasters has been affected by EA’s recent redundancies reportedly cutting over 300-400 jobs, and we’ll update this story if we learn more.
Going forward, there aren’t too many new options for rally driving in VR. Whether Codemasters’ games will continue supporting the VR front with compatibility updates remains to be seen, while the studio’s next title F1 25 will continue supporting PC VR. Meanwhile, if we see any new games bounding towards us over the horizon, you’ll be the first to know.
If you’re in the market for a $1,900 color E Ink monitor, one of them exists now
Color E Ink in its current state requires a whole lot of compromises, as we’ve found when reviewing devices like reMarkable’s Paper Pro or Amazon’s Kindle Colorsoft, including washed-out color, low refresh rates, and a grainy look that you don’t get with regular black-and-white E Ink. But that isn’t stopping device manufacturers from exploring the technology, and today, Onyx International has announced that it has a $1,900 color E Ink monitor that you can connect to your PC or Mac.
The Boox Mira Pro is a 25.3-inch monitor with a 3200×1800 resolution and a 16:9 aspect ratio, and it builds on the company’s previous black-and-white Mira Pro monitors. The Verge reports that the screen uses E Ink Kaleido 3 technology, which can display up to 4,096 colors. Both image quality and refresh rate will vary based on which of the monitor’s four presets you use (the site isn’t specific about the exact refresh rate, but does note that “E Ink monitors’ refresh speed is not as high as conventional monitors’, and increased speed will result in more ghosting.”)
The monitor’s ports include one full-size HDMI port, a mini HDMI port, a USB-C port, and a DisplayPort. Its default stand is more than a little reminiscent of Apple’s Studio Display, but it also supports VESA mounting.
Microsoft Puts Brakes on AI Spending as Profit Increases 18%
After 10 consecutive quarters of rising AI-related investment, Microsoft has put on the brakes, spending over $1 billion less than the previous quarter (source paywalled; alternative source). Despite the slight slowdown, Microsoft posted stronger-than-expected results with $70 billion in revenue and $25.8 billion in profit. The New York Times reports: In the first three months of 2025, Microsoft spent $21.4 billion on capital expenses, down more than $1 billion from the previous quarter. The company is still on track to spend more than $80 billion on capital expenses in the current fiscal year, which ends in June. But the pullback, though slight, is an indication that the tech industry’s appetite for spending on A.I. is not limitless.
Overall, Microsoft’s results showed unexpected strength in its business. Sales surpassed $70 billion, up 13 percent from the same period a year earlier. Profit rose to $25.8 billion, up 18 percent. The results far surpassed Wall Street’s expectations. “Cloud and A.I. are the essential inputs for every business to expand output, reduce costs, and accelerate growth,” Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, said in a statement.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple Notifies New Victims of Spyware Attacks Across the World
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Apple sent notifications this week to several people who the company believes were targeted with government spyware, according to two of the alleged targets. In the past, Apple has sent similar notifications to targets and victims of spyware, and directed them to contact a nonprofit that specializes in investigating such cyberattacks. Other tech companies, like Google and WhatsApp, have in recent years also periodically sent such notifications to their users. As of Wednesday, only two people appear to have come forward to reveal they were among those who received the notifications from Apple this week.
One is Ciro Pellegrino, an Italian journalist who works for online news outlet Fanpage. Pellegrino wrote in an article that he received an email and a text message from Apple on Tuesday notifying him that he was targeted with spyware. The message, according to Pellegrino, also said he wasn’t the only person targeted. “Today’s notification is being sent to affected users in 100 countries,” the message read, according to Pellegrino’s article. “Did this really happen? Yes, it is not a joke,” Pellegrino wrote.
The second person to receive an Apple notification is Eva Vlaardingerbroek, a Dutch right-wing activist, who posted on X on Wednesday. “Apple detected a targeted mercenary spyware attack against your iPhone,” the Apple alert said, according to a screenshot shown in a video that Vlaardingerbroek posted on X. “This attack is likely targeting you specifically because of who you are or what you do. Although it’s never possible to achieve absolute certainty when detecting such attacks, Apple has high confidence in this warning — please take it seriously.” Reacting to the notification, Vlaardingerbroek said that this was an “attempt to intimidate me, an attempt to silence me, obviously.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Meta is a mulling ads and a ‘premium’ version of its AI assistant, Mark Zuckerberg says
One day after Meta rolled out its standalone AI app, Mark Zuckerberg has shared more about how the company plans to eventually monetize its generative AI assistant. During the company’s first quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg said Meta AI could one day show ads and product recommendations. He also hinted at plans for a subscription component for those who want a more “premium” version of the assistant.
“I think that there will be a large opportunity to show product recommendations or ads, as well as a premium service for people who want to unlock more compute for additional functionality or intelligence,” Zuckerberg said.
He added that for now the company is more focused on growing Meta AI’s usage. (He announced yesterday that Meta Ai had reached “almost” 1 billion monthly users.) “I expect that we’re going to be largely focused on scaling and deepening engagement for at least the next year before we’ll really be ready to start building out the business here,” he said.
Zuckerberg’s comments — just one day after Meta introduced its standalone AI app — underscores how important the assistant is to the company. The Facebook founder has repeatedly said he wants Meta AI to be the most used AI assistant in the world, and he said on Wednesday’s call that a standalone app would be particularly important for attracting US users.
Meta’s strategy for monetizing the assistant in many ways mirrors its approach to Threads, which only just began expanding its early experiments with ads this month long after it reached hundreds of millions of users. Speaking of Threads, Zuckerberg also shared some new milestones for Threads, saying that text-based app now has 350 million monthly active users and that time spent on the platform has increased 35 percent over the last six months thanks to improvements to the company’s recommendations systems.
Later in the call, Meta’s CFO Susan Li shared that the company has also been testing its Llama model to power Threads’ recommendations and that the addition of the large language model has led to a 4 percent increase in time spent. “It remains early here, but a big focus this year will be on exploring how we can deploy this for other content types, including photos and videos,” she said.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/meta-is-a-mulling-ads-and-a-premium-version-of-its-ai-assistant-mark-zuckerberg-says-225202560.html?src=rss
PyXL: Running Python Code Directly in Hardware? Yes, It’s Happening!
PyXL is a custom-built computer chip (a hardware processor) specifically designed to understand and execute Python code directly in hardware.