Category Archives: Software

Microsoft update breaks localhost in Windows 11, destroys loads of integrations eg Lian Li Fan software

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Microsoft’s October Windows 11 update has managed the impressive feat of breaking localhost, leaving developers unable to access web applications running on their own machines.

The problem first surfaced on Microsoft’s own support forums and quickly spread to Stack Overflow and Server Fault after the October 2025 cumulative update (KB5066835) landed, which appears to have severed Windows’ ability to talk to itself.

Developers describe HTTP/2 protocol errors and failed connections affecting everything from ASP.NET builds to Visual Studio debugging sessions.

Security nightmare stories needed!

Boss get the company hacked because he taped passwords to his monitor? Coworker get phished by a Nigerian prince?

Share the dirty details and they might appear in a future edition of PWNED, our new weekly feature about the worst security breaches that never should have happened.

Drop us a line at pwned@sitpub.com. Your anonymity is guaranteed.

The bug, introduced in build 26100.6899, has been traced to HTTP.sys, the Windows kernel component that handles local HTTP traffic. Developers have found that uninstalling KB5066835, and in some cases its sibling KB5065789, restores localhost functionality.

Others have discovered a temporary workaround that involves manually disabling HTTP/2 in the registry, which works but feels a bit like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly.

At the time of writing, Microsoft had yet to acknowledge the issue. Users report mixed results when trying to reinstall the patch or roll forward to newer builds. The problem appears to vanish on clean installs of Windows 11 24H2, suggesting that the error stems from a conflict in how the update interacts with existing system configurations, rather than being a universal bug.

In the meantime, moderators on Stack Overflow have already locked multiple posts and Server Fault threads are filled with frustrated devs trying to get their local servers running again.

All this comes as Microsoft pushed its final update for Windows 10 this week, officially ending support for the decade-old OS and urging users to move to Windows 11.

The transition hasn’t exactly been buttery smooth. Microsoft’s Windows 11 media creation tool also stopped working the day before, potentially affecting users trying to upgrade, and the same patch cycle saw end-of-support deadlines for Office 2019 and multiple server products.

All this means that, within the same week, Microsoft’s installer broke, its new OS borked local development, and Redmond’s multimillion-dollar upgrade push instead highlighted how fragile its ecosystem still is.

It’s almost enough to make you nostalgic for Clippy. We said almost. ®

Updated at 9.54 UTC on October 17, 2025, to add:

More than twenty four hours after asking Microsoft to comment, a spokesperson for the company sent a statement confirming problems.

“We are actively working on mitigations and recommend customers follow our guidance available here.”

Source: Microsoft update breaks localhost in Windows 11 • The Register

Reddit for the Lian Li problems

EU Data Act – get hold of your own data, but govt gets it too?

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[…] The Regulation on harmonised rules on fair access to and use of data — also known as the Data Act — entered into force on 11 January 2024 and into application on 12 September 2025. The Act is a key pillar of the European data strategy and it will make a significant contribution to the Digital Decade‘s objective of advancing digital transformation. The Data Act explained provides more in depth explanations.

The Data Act is designed to empower users — both consumers and businesses — by giving them greater control over the data generated by their connected devices, such as cars, smart TVs, and industrial machinery.

[…]

he new rules aim to facilitate the seamless transfer of valuable data between data holders and data users while upholding its confidentiality. This will encourage more actors, regardless of their size, to participate in the data economy. The Commission will also develop model contract clauses in order to help market participants draft and negotiate fair data-sharing contracts.

[…]

Public sector access and use of data

Rules enabling public sector bodies to access and use data held by the private sector for specific public interest purposes. For instance, public sector bodies will be able to request data necessary to help them respond quickly and securely to a public emergency, with minimal burden on businesses.

[…]

New rules setting the framework for customers to effectively switch between different providers of data-processing services to unlock the EU cloud market. This will also contribute to an overall framework for efficient data interoperability.

[…]

Users of connected products may choose to share this data with third parties. This will enable aftermarket (e.g. repair) service providers to enhance and innovate their services, fostering fair competition with similar services provided by manufacturers.

[…]

Source: Data Act | Shaping Europe’s digital future

Following the general provisions (Chapter I) which set out the scope of the regulation and define key terms, the Data Act is structured into six main chapters:

Chapter II on business-to-business and business-to-consumer data sharing in the context of IoT: users of IoT objects can access, use and port data that they co-generate through their use of a connected product.

Chapter III on business-to-business data sharing: this clarifies the data-sharing conditions wherever a business is obliged by law, including through the Data Act, to share data with another business.

Chapter IV on unfair contractual terms: these provisions protect all businesses, in particular SMEs, against unfair contractual terms imposed on them.

Chapter V on business-to-government data sharing: public sector bodies will be able to make more evidence-based decisions in certain situations of exceptional need through measures to access certain data held by the private sector.

Chapter VI on switching between data processing services: providers of cloud and edge computing services must meet minimum requirements to facilitate interoperability and enable switching.

Chapter VII on unlawful third country government access to data: non-personal data stored in the EU is protected against unlawful foreign government access requests.

Chapter VIII on interoperability: participants in data spaces must fulfil criteria to allow data to flow within and between data spaces. An EU repository will lay down relevant standards and specifications for cloud interoperability.

Chapter IX on enforcement: Member States must designate one or more competent authority(ies) to monitor and enforce the Data Act. Where more than one authority is designated, a ‘data coordinator’ must be appointed to act as the single point of contact at the national level.

[…]

Chapter V of the Data Act on business-to-government data sharing differentiates between two scenarios:

  • In order to respond to a public emergency, a public sector body should request non-personal data. However, if this is insufficient to respond to the situation, personal data may be requested. Where possible, this data should be anonymised by the data holder.    

  • In non-emergency situations, public sector bodies may only request non-personal data.

[…]

The Data Act will also entirely remove switching charges, including charges for data egress (i.e. charges for data transit), from 12 January 2027. This means that providers won’t be able to charge their customers for the operations that are necessary to facilitate switching or for data egress. However, as a transitional measure during the first 3 years after the Data Act’s entry into force (from 11 January 2024 to 12 January 2027), providers may still charge their customers for the costs incurred in relation to switching and data egress.

Source: Data Act explained

This is all great stuff, but the wording where public sector bodies can request personal data for unexplained emergencies (so… does a peaceful protest constitute an emergency, for example?) is pretty scary. Especially within the context of Chat Control Blanket Surveillance that the Danish presidency is keen to push through.

The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Code

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Freelance developers and entire companies are making a business out of fixing shoddy vibe coded software.

I first noticed this trend in the form of a meme that was circulating on LinkedIn, sharing a screenshot of several profiles who advertised themselves as “vibe coding cleanup specialists.”

[…]

“I’ve been offering vibe coding fixer services for about two years now, starting in late 2023. Currently, I work with around 15-20 clients regularly, with additional one-off projects throughout the year,” Hamid Siddiqi, who offers to “review, fix your vibe code” on Fiverr, told me in an email. “I started fixing vibe-coded projects because I noticed a growing number of developers and small teams struggling to refine AI-generated code that was functional but lacked the polish or ‘vibe’ needed to align with their vision. I saw an opportunity to bridge that gap, combining my coding expertise with an eye for aesthetic and user experience.”

Siddiqi said common issues he fixes in vibe coded projects include inconsistent UI/UX design in AI-generated frontends, poorly optimized code that impacts performance, misaligned branding elements, and features that function but feel clunky or unintuitive. He said he also often refines color schemes, animations, and layouts to better match the creator’s intended aesthetic.

Siddiqi is one of dozens of people on Fiverr who is now offering services specifically catering to people with shoddy vibe coded projects. Established software development companies like Ulam Labs, now say “we clean up after vibe coding. Literally.”

“Built something fast? Now it’s time to make it solid,” Ulam Labs says on its site. “We know how it goes.
You had to move quickly, get that MVP [minimally viable product] out, and validate the idea. But now the tech debt is holding you back: no tests, shaky architecture, CI/CD [Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery/Deployment] is a dream, and every change feels like defusing a bomb. That’s where we come in.”

Swatantra Sohni, who started VibeCodeFixers.com, a site for people with vibe coded projects who need help from experienced developers to fix or finish their projects, says that almost 300 experienced developers have posted their profiles to the site. He said so far VibeCodeFixers.com has only connected between 30-40 vibe code projects with fixers, but that he hasn’t done anything to promote the service and at the moment is focused on adding as many software developers to the platform as possible.

Sohni said that he’s been vibe coding himself since before Andrej Karpathy coined the term in February. He bought a bunch of vibe coding related domains, and realized a service like VibeCodeFixers.com was necessary based on how often he had to seek help from experts on his own vibe coding projects. In March, the site got a lot of attention on X and has been slowly adding people to the platform since.

Sohni also wrote a “Vibecoding Community Research Report” based on interviews with non-technical people who are vibe coding their projects that he shared with me. The report identified a lot of the same issues as Siddiqi, mainly that existing features tend to break when new ones are added.

“Most of these vibe coders, either they are product managers or they are sales guys, or they are small business owners, and they think that they can build something,” Sohni told me. “So for them it’s more for prototyping. Vibe coding is, at the moment, kind of like infancy. It’s very handy to convey the prototype they want, but I don’t think they are really intended to make it like a production grade app.”

Another big issue Sohni identified is “credit burn,” meaning the money vibe coders waste on AI usage fees in the final 10-20 percent stage of developing the app, when adding new features breaks existing features. In theory, it might be cheaper and more efficient for vibe coders to start over at that point, but Sohni said people get attached to their first project.

“What happens is that the first time they build the app, it’s like they think that they can build the app with one prompt, and then the app breaks, and they burn the credit. I think they are very emotionally connected to the app, because this act of vibe coding involves you, your creativity.”

In theory it might be cheaper and more efficient for vibe coders to start over if the LLM starts hallucinating and creating problems, but Sohni that’s when people come to VibeCodeFixers.com. They want someone to fix the bugs in their app, not create a new one.

Sohni told me he thinks vibe coding is not going anywhere, but neither are human developers.

“I feel like the role [of human developers] would be slightly limited, but we will still need humans to keep this AI on the leash,” he said.

Source: The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes

The article writer is highly sceptical about vibe coding, but it’s not going anywhere and it empowers the actual commissioners of the software to build proof of concepts using elements they like, so they are not at the mercy of a software development company who may or may not see and understand the vision as they see it.

You Can Now Tell Google Which Websites You Prefer in Search Results

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[…]If you frequently test features with Google Labs, you might remember trying this one out: Preferred Sources, as the name implies, lets you tell Google which websites you prefer to read news from. The goal, then, is to see pages from those sites in future Google searches about news stories, assuming those sites publish content related to your search.

Here’s how it works: When you search for something covered in the news, Google will display a “Top stories” section at the top of the search results page. While you can simply browse the stories that Google curates for you, you can also now click a new button to the right of the “Top stories” title. From here, you can search for any website, and click a checkbox next to its name to save it to your list of preferred sources.

[…]

Now, you can refresh your search results, which, with any luck, will populate with more of the sources you added to this list. Not only will they appear more frequently in the “Top stories” section going forward, Google may offer you a new “From your sources” section as well, which should only contain the websites you’ve added to your list.

[…]

Source: You Can Now Tell Google Which Websites You Prefer in Search Results

I am still using qwant.com

French city of Lyon ditching Microsoft for FOSS

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The République’s third-largest city and second-largest economic hub on Tuesday cited a desire to reduce dependence on American software, extend the lifespan of its hardware and therefore reduce its environmental impact, and strengthen the technological sovereignty of its public service.

Achieving those goals will see Lyon’s government, which serves over a million people, replace Office with OnlyOffice, a package developed by Latvia-based Ascensio Systems and made available under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License.

The municipality also plans to adopt a collaboration suite called “Territoire Numerique Ouvert” – Open Digital Territory – for videoconferencing and office automation tasks.

France’s L’Agence nationale de la cohésion des territoires – an agency that promotes industry development in the country’s regions – awarded a €2 million ($2.3 million) grant to help develop the suite and get it running in local datacenters. Nine French communities already use the suite, which has several thousand individual users.

[…]

Lyon’s government employs almost 10,000 people, so losing it as a customer will briefly sting some regional Microsoft salespeople and partners but won’t make a noticeable dent in the software giant’s balance sheet.

However the city’s decision comes just weeks after Denmark’s’ Ministry for Digitalization decided to drop Microsoft and amid a European Union push to develop sovereign digital capabilities that has seen the likes of Microsoft and AWS try to reassure European customers that their cloudy continental outposts can’t be caught up in US claims to possess extraterritorial jurisdiction over data stored in facilities owned by American companies.

So maybe Lyon ditching Microsoft represents one more snowball in a growing avalanche. ®

Source: French city of Lyon ditching Microsoft for FOSS • The Register

FreeTube – The Private YouTube Client

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FreeTube is a YouTube client for Windows (10 and later), Mac (macOS 11 and later), and Linux built around using YouTube more privately. You can enjoy your favorite content and creators without your habits being tracked. All of your user data is stored locally and never sent or published to the internet. FreeTube grabs data by scraping the information it needs (with either local methods or by optionally utilizing the Invidious API). With many features similar to YouTube, FreeTube has become one of the best methods to watch YouTube privately on desktop.

Source: FreeTube – The Private YouTube Client

WeTransfer faces open source competition by Sendox after controversy over terms of service

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The collective The New Digital announces the public beta of Sendox: an open source file sharing platform that puts privacy and digital sovereignty at its core. Sendox has been developed as a transparent and independent alternative to services like WeTransfer.

“We believe that digital freedom and autonomy are not luxuries, but fundamental rights,” said Frank Zijlstra, the initiator of The New Digital. “Sendox is a first, tangible building block in an open and sovereign digital ecosystem.”

Sendox is the first project from The New Digital, a collaboration of Dutch digital agencies, developers, and designers committed to an independent digital ecosystem. The collective aims to develop tools, infrastructure, and standards that are free from Big Tech influence, open, verifiable, collaboratively built, and that respect the digital autonomy of citizens and organisations.

Sendox is currently available as an open beta. This means the platform is still very much in development, and users are explicitly invited to test the system. Errors, bugs, or shortcomings can easily be reported, so the platform can be further optimized with the help of the community. Every user helps make Sendox more robust, user-friendly, and secure.

The public beta comes in the wake of the uproar over WeTransfer’s terms of service. Essentially, it means that people who send files via WeTransfer relinquish their rights. This allows the company to use the data – including the files sent – for purposes such as training artificial intelligence (AI).

After angry reactions from privacy organizations and users, this last point was scrapped, but according to experts, that does not change the situation. Some believe this could be the final blow for the digital transfer service that enjoyed trust for many years.

Source: WeTransfer faces open source competition after controversy over terms of service – TechCentral.ie

Your Samsung phone has a secret Wi-Fi menu. Here’s how to find it

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One such example is the “Connectivity Labs” Wi-Fi settings menu. It’s buried deep in the Settings app on your Samsung phone, and it’s something I didn’t know existed until just the other day. Which is a shame, because there’s some really cool stuff in here. Let me show you.

How to find Samsung’s secret Wi-Fi settings

Connectivity Labs toggle on a Samsung phone.

So, where is this hidden Wi-Fi settings menu? Here’s how to find and activate it:

  1. Open the Settings app on your Samsung phone.
  2. Tap Connections.
  3. Tap Wi-Fi.
  4. Tap the three dots in the upper-right corner.
  5. Tap Intelligent Wi-Fi.

From this page, find the Intelligent Wi-Fi button at the bottom and repeatedly tap it. You’ll see a pop-up letting you know that Connectivity Labs will be enabled if you keep tapping, so keep on doing that until you see the new Connectivity Labs option appear below Intelligent Wi-Fi.

It seems that Connectivity Labs was quietly added sometime in 2023, and it recently garnered a fresh batch of attention over the weekend on the r/SamsungGalaxy subreddit.

I’ve confirmed that Connectivity Labs is available on Samsung phones running One UI 7 and the One UI 8 Beta. Given that Connectivity Labs was introduced in 2023, it should also be present on Samsung phones that still have One UI 6.

The best Connectivity Labs features you should try

Samsung Connectivity Labs page.

Once Connectivity Labs is enabled, you’ll find a swath of new settings to play around with. The page starts by showing a graph of your Wi-Fi time and usage over the past week, including which specific bands you were using. It’s neat, but there are far more interesting things to check out.

Scroll past this graph, and you’re met with a laundry list of settings and toggles. You can play with all of them if you want, but I want to highlight a few of my favorites.

The first option on the list, Home Wi-Fi inspection, is particularly cool. Once you select it and tap on your home Wi-Fi network, you’re asked to walk around your house while the feature tests all the different access points and bands of your router, determining if there are any weak signal areas.

There are also some helpful toggles to configure how your phone stays connected to Wi-Fi networks and when it disconnects from them. The Switching to mobile data faster toggle, for example, will stop your phone from holding onto a weak Wi-Fi signal for too long and jump to your mobile data sooner than it typically does — something you may want to enable if you have an unlimited data plan and aren’t worried about your mobile data useage.

Auto reconnect to carrier Wi-Fi is another interesting setting. If you have a carrier like Xfinity Mobile or Spectrum Mobile, your phone probably automatically connects to your carrier’s public Wi-Fi hotspots to supplement your cell coverage. This is enabled by default, but if you don’t want that to happen, you can easily disable it from this menu.

I also quite like the Customize Wi-Fi list settings page. From here, you can enable a filter button on your main Wi-Fi networks page. When you tap it, you can choose to only see secured networks, Wi-Fi 6 connections, etc.

Finally, if you tap Wi-Fi developer options at the bottom of the Connectivity Labs page, you’ll find an entirely new menu of even more Wi-Fi settings to fiddle with.

Wi-Fi information page in Samsung's Connectivity Labs.

You can probably ignore most of these, but the Nearby Wi-Fi information page is quite helpful. It displays a list of all nearby Wi-Fi networks, along with their signal strengths, categorized as Best, Good, Bad, and Worst. If you’re in an area with a lot of public Wi-Fi networks to choose from, this could be a great way to ensure you choose the best one.

Who knew this was here?

Wi-Fi settings toggles in Samsung's Connectivity Labs page.

Had I not stumbled across that recent Reddit thread, I probably never would have known that Connectivity Labs existed. And given the small amount of reporting/discussion there is about Connectivity Labs online, it seems that most people don’t know about it either.

I’m not sure why Samsung has these settings buried so deeply and behind so many sub-menus. There’s genuinely useful stuff here, and while some of the settings are a bit technical, almost anyone can benefit from features like the home Wi-Fi inspection and the Wi-Fi filter menu.

I’d love to see Samsung make some of these settings more obvious, but until that happens, hopefully, this article helped you find them.

Source: Your Samsung phone has a secret Wi-Fi menu. Here’s how to find it

Security pro counts the cost of Microsoft dependency

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A sharply argued blog post warns that heavy reliance on Microsoft poses serious strategic risks for organizations – a viewpoint unlikely to win favor with Redmond or its millions of corporate customers.

Czech developer and pen-tester Miloslav Homer has an interesting take on reducing an organization’s exposure to security risks. In an article headlined “Microsoft dependency has risks,” he extends the now familiar arguments in favor of improving digital sovereignty, and reducing dependence on American cloud services.

The argument is quite long but closely reasoned. We recommend resisting the knee-jerk reaction of “don’t be ridiculous” and closing the tab, but reading his article and giving it serious consideration. He backs up his argument with plentiful links and references, and it’s gratifying to see several stories from The Register among them, including one from the FOSS desk.

He discusses incidents such as Microsoft allegedly blocking the email account of International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan, one of several incidents that caused widespread concern. The Windows maker has denied it was responsible for Khan’s blocked account. Homer also considers the chances of US President Donald Trump getting a third term, as Franklin Roosevelt did, the lucrative US government contracts with software and services vendors, and such companies’ apparent nervousness about upsetting the volatile leader.

We like the way Homer presents his arguments, because it avoids some of the rather tired approaches of FOSS advocates. He assigns financial value to the risks, using the established measurement of Return on Security Investment [PDF]. He uses the Crowdstrike outage from last July as a comparison. For instance, what if a US administration instructed Microsoft to refuse service to everyone in certain countries or even regions?

He tries to put some numbers on this, and they are worryingly large. He looks at estimated corporate Microsoft 365 usage worldwide, and how relatively few vendors offer pre-installed Linux systems. He considers the vast market share of Android on mobile devices compared to everything else, with the interesting comparison that there are more mobile phone owners than toothbrush owners. However, every Android account is all but tied to at least one Google account – another almost unavoidable US dependency.

There is a genuine need for people to ask questions like this. And, importantly, many of the decisions are made by people who are totally tech-illiterate – as many movers and shakers are these days – so it’s also important to express the arguments in terms of numbers, and specifically, in terms of costs. Few IT directors or CEOs know what an OS is or how it matters, but they’re all either former beancounters or guided by beancounters.

Another issue we rarely see addressed is the extreme reach of Microsoft in business computing. The problem is not just bigwigs who mostly don’t know a hypervisor from an email server; the techies who advise them are also a problem. We have personally talked to senior decision-makers and company leaders who know nothing but Windows, who regard Macs as acceptable toys (because they can run MS Office and Outlook and Teams), but who have never used a Linux machine.

There’s a common position that a commodity is only worth what you pay for it, and if you don’t have to pay for it, then it’s worthless. Many people apply this to software, too. If it’s free, it must be worthless.

It’s hard to get through to someone who is totally indifferent to software on technical grounds. When choices of vendors and suppliers are based on erroneous assumptions, challenging those false beliefs is hard.

(We’ve had a few abusive comments and emails from anti-vaxxers following our coverage of Xlibre. They’re wrong, but it’s tricky to challenge the mindset of someone who doesn’t believe in the basic concepts of truth, falsehood, or evidence.)

One way to define “information” is that it is data plus context. We all need contrast and context and comparisons to understand. Any technologist who only knows one company’s technologies and offerings lacks necessary context. In fact, the more context the better. Looking around the IT world today, it would be easy to falsely conclude that Windows NT and various forms of Unix comprise everything there is to know about operating systems. That is deeply and profoundly wrong. Nothing in computing is universal, not even binary; there have been working trinary or ternary computers, and you can go and see a working decimal computer at Bletchley Park.

Lots of important decision-makers believe that Microsoft is simply a given. It is not, but telling them that is not enough. It’s like telling an anti-vaxxer that the Earth is an oblate spheroid and there are no such things as chemtrails. After all, some US legislators want to ban chemtrails, so they must be real, right?

But if you can put a price on false beliefs, and then show that changing those beliefs could reduce risk in a quantifiable way, you can maybe change the minds of IT decision-makers, without needing to tell them that they’re science deniers and the Earth isn’t flat. ®

Source: Security pro counts the cost of Microsoft dependency • The Register

The Blue Screen of Death Is Dead. All hail the black screen of death.

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Microsoft’s iconic Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is dead after 40 years. RIP to the most panic-inducing screen a Windows user can encounter. Now, get ready to fear the Black Screen of Death.

In a blog post on its website today, the company revealed it’s ready to go live with an error screen redesign it’s been testing since March. In an update to all Windows 11, version 24H2 devices coming “later this summer,” the BSOD will finally be put out of its misery.

It’s likely to be a bittersweet moment for Windows users, who will undoubtedly have mixed feelings about the warning’s fate. Despite its ominous name, getting a BSOD wasn’t always as serious as it seemed—a simple crash could trigger it, and restarting could easily fix it. It could be worse than that, too, but in many cases, the old BSOD simply added a bit of personality to the most annoying interruptions to your workflow. Especially in recent years, when you would see a sideways frowning emoticon alongside your error message.

But sometimes, personality isn’t what you need, especially when you’re already stressed out about your computer encountering a serious error. Businesses and travelers alike were bombarded with a particularly unsolvable Blue Screen of Death during last year’s extended Crowdstrike outage, so it makes sense why Microsoft might want to move away from any association with it.

Black Screen of Death
Credit: Microsoft

Enter the new Black Screen of Death. Looking more like other Windows error messages, this is a simple black screen that says, in white text, that “Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart.” Below that is a progress counter, alongside your error code and which process triggered it.

“The updated UI improves readability and aligns better with Windows 11 design principles,” Microsoft Vice President of Enterprise and OS Security David Weston said in today’s blog post.

[…]

Source: The Blue Screen of Death Is Dead

TBH the new blue screen was pretty useless. The older one used to give you actual information about the problem and what triggered it.

Microsoft Is Deleting Old Drivers From Windows Update – does the manufacturer still exist? If not, your hardware just turned into junk.

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In a move that could quietly wreak havoc across the Windows ecosystem, Microsoft is purging outdated drivers from Windows Update. The company claims it is doing this for security and reliability, but the result might be broken hardware for users who rely on legacy devices. If you’re using older peripherals or custom-built PCs, you could soon find yourself hunting for drivers that have vanished into the digital abyss.

This initiative, buried in a low-profile blog post, is part of Microsoft’s new cleanup program. The first wave targets legacy drivers that already have newer replacements available. But the real kicker is that Microsoft isn’t warning individual users about which drivers are going away. If your device needs one of those expired drivers, Windows Update simply won’t offer it anymore. It just disappears.

Microsoft refers to this as “expiring” a driver, which means removing its audience assignments so Windows Update no longer distributes it. Once that happens, only the hardware partner who published it can bring it back. But there’s a catch. Microsoft may demand a business justification before allowing a republish. And if the partner doesn’t respond within six months, the driver is deleted permanently.

[…]

Microsoft’s cleanup may sound responsible on the surface, but for anyone still clinging to older hardware or niche accessories, it might feel more like abandonment. Once a driver disappears, finding it again could become a scavenger hunt. And if your hardware vendor is long gone, good luck.

Source: Microsoft Is Deleting Old Drivers From Windows Update And It Might Break Your PC – NERDS.xyz

Google backs down after locking out Nextcloud Files app

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[…] Andy Schertzinger, Director of Engineering at Nextcloud, told The Register: “Google has decided to restore the permissions to our Android app so we can bring back the full file syncing functionality.”

Nextcloud expects to release an update to the app shortly, and Schertzinger paid tribute to the broader community for its support.

Nextcloud’s problem was a decision made in late 2024 to revoke its app’s “All files access” permission on Android devices. Because the permission gives apps broad access to files on a device, Google is understandably cautious about granting it, preferring developers to use more privacy-friendly access tools, such as the Storage Access Framework (SAF).

However, for a file synchronization app like Nextcloud’s, the “All files access” permission was required. And it had been granted for years until, quite suddenly, it wasn’t anymore. The result was a crippled app in the Play Store, and Google appeared to ignore repeated requests for an explanation.

Nextcloud went public with its woes earlier this week and in an unexpected turn of events, Google offered to restore the permission it had previously revoked.

In a world where words like “anti-competitive” are frequently thrown around with regard to the tech giants, Google’s action demonstrates that there are still humans in the organization capable of changing course when required. We asked the ad slinger what happened – was the original revocation the result of an automated process gone awry or an overzealous reviewer? We have yet to receive a response. […]

Source: Google backs down after locking out Nextcloud Files app • The Register

The UN Ditches Google for Form Submissions, Opts for Open Source ‘CryptPad’ Instead

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Did you know there’s an initiative to drive Open Source adoption both within the United Nations — and globally? Launched in March, it’s the work of the Digital Technology Network (under the UN’s chief executive board) which “works to advance open source technologies throughout UN agencies,” promoting “collaboration and scalable solutions to support the UN’s digital transformation.” Fun fact: The first group to endorse the initiative’s principles was the Open Source Initiative…

“The Open Source Initiative applauds the United Nations for recognizing the growing importance of Open Source in solving global challenges and building sustainable solutions, and we are honored to be the first to endorse the UN Open Source Principles,” said Stefano Maffulli, executive director of OSI.
But that’s just the beginining, writes It’s FOSS News: As part of the UN Open Source Principles initiative, the UN has invited other organizations to support and officially endorse these principles. To collect responses, they are using CryptPad instead of Google Forms… If you don’t know about CryptPad, it is a privacy-focused, open source online collaboration office suite that encrypts all of its content, doesn’t log IP addresses, and supports a wide range of collaborative documents and tools for people to use.

While this happened back in late March, we thought it would be a good idea to let people know that a well-known global governing body like the UN was slowly moving towards integrating open source tech into their organization… I sincerely hope the UN continues its push away from proprietary Big Tech solutions in favor of more open, privacy-respecting alternatives, integrating more of their workflow with such tools.
16 groups have already endorsed the UN Open Source Principles (including the GNOME Foundation, the Linux Foundation, and the Eclipse Foundation).

Here’s the eight UN Open Source Principles:

  1. Open by default: Making Open Source the standard approach for projects
  2. Contribute back: Encouraging active participation in the Open Source ecosystem
  3. Secure by design: Making security a priority in all software projects
  4. Foster inclusive participation and community building: Enabling and facilitating diverse and inclusive contributions
  5. Design for reusability: Designing projects to be interoperable across various platforms and ecosystems
  6. Provide documentation: Providing thorough documentation for end-users, integrators and developers
  7. RISE (recognize, incentivize, support and empower): Empowering individuals and communities to actively participate
  8. Sustain and scale: Supporting the development of solutions that meet the evolving needs of the UN system and beyond.

Source: The UN Ditches Google for Form Submissions, Opts for Open Source ‘CryptPad’ Instead

VMware revives its free ESXi hypervisor

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News of the offering emerged in a throwaway line in the Release Notes for version 8.0 Update 3e of the Broadcom business unit’s ESXi hypervisor.

Just below the “What’s New” section of that document is the statement: “Broadcom makes available the VMware vSphere Hypervisor version 8, an entry-level hypervisor. You can download it free of charge from the Broadcom Support portal.”

We’ve asked VMware for details about the new release and its capabilities, but no further information was available at the time of writing.

VMware offered a free version of ESXi for years, and it was beloved by home lab operators and vAdmins who needed something to tinker with. But in February 2024, VMware discontinued it on grounds that it was dropping perpetual licenses and moving to subscriptions.

If you want to try the hypervisor, you’ll need to be registered with Broadcom’s customer support portal to download it. Sadly, our virtualization desk’s home lab is not currently operational, so while we’ve downloaded the ISO file, we haven’t been able to get it running. Suffice it to say, it doesn’t want to run nested inside a desktop hypervisor.

Broadcom hasn’t explained why it has reversed its decision, but it’s not hard to guess.

VMware shops and partners of all sizes might need test or training environments, but as Broadcom only sells subscriptions (and greatly favors three-year terms) there’s no cheap way to access Virtzilla’s code. A modest freebie makes it more likely the vCurious will do some tinkering that turns into a sale. Free editions are also a way of building a talent pool.

VMware’s rivals know this. Nutanix has had a free Community Edition for years and Platform9 announced a free edition of its own a couple of weeks back. Other VMware competitors are open source, so their code is always free.

While VMware has made its Workstation desktop hypervisor free, it lacked a no-cost server virtualization option. Now it’s back in the game.

[…]

Source: VMware revives its free ESXi hypervisor • The Register

27-Year-Old VB4 EXE turned into Python in minutes (with Claude) – AI-Assisted reverse engineering

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Reddit post detailing how someone took a 27-year-old visual basic EXE file, fed it to Claude 3.7, and watched as it reverse-engineered the program and rewrote it in Python.

It was an old Visual Basic 4 program they had written in 1997. Running a VB4 exe in 2024 can be a real yak-shaving compatibility nightmare, chasing down outdated DLLs and messy workarounds. So! OP decided to upload the exe to Claude 3.7 with this request:

“Can you tell me how to get this file running? It’d be nice to convert it to Python.”

Claude 3.7 analyzed the binary, extracted the VB ‘tokens’ (VB is not a fully-machine-code-compiled language which makes this task a lot easier than something from C/C++), identified UI elements, and even extracted sound files. Then, it generated a complete Python equivalent using Pygame.

According to the author, the code worked on the first try and the entire process took less than five minutes – they link to the LLM chat log for proof.

Totally makes sense that this would work, this seems like the first public/viral example of uploading an EXE like this though – we never even thought of doing such a thing!

Old business applications and games could be modernized without needing the original source code (is Delphi also semi-compiled?). Tools like Claude might make decompilation and software archaeology a lot easier: proprietary binaries from dead platforms could get a new life in open-source too…

Archive.org could add a LLM to do this on the fly… interesting times! – Link.

Source: 27-Year-Old EXE becomes Python in minutes (with Claude) – AI-Assisted reverse engineering « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!

NASA Demonstrates Software ‘Brains’ Shared Across Satellite Swarms

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[…] Distributed Spacecraft Autonomy (DSA), allows individual spacecraft to make independent decisions while collaborating with each other to achieve common goals – all without human input.

NASA researchers have achieved multiple firsts in tests of such swarm technology as part of the agency’s DSA project. Managed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, the DSA project develops software tools critical for future autonomous, distributed, and intelligent swarms that will need to interact with each other to achieve complex mission objectives.

[…]

Distributed space missions rely on interactions between multiple spacecraft to achieve mission goals. Such missions can deliver better data to researchers and ensure continuous availability of critical spacecraft systems.

[…]

Distributing autonomy across a group of interacting spacecraft allows for all spacecraft in a swarm to make decisions and is resistant to individual spacecraft failures.

The DSA team advanced swarm technology through two main efforts: the development of software for small spacecraft that was demonstrated in space during NASA’s Starling mission, which involved four CubeSat satellites operating as a swarm to test autonomous collaboration and operation with minimal human operation, and a scalability study of a simulated spacecraft swarm in a virtual lunar orbit.

Experimenting With DSA in Low Earth Orbit

The team gave Starling a challenging job: a fast-paced study of Earth’s ionosphere – where Earth’s atmosphere meets space – to show the swarm’s ability to collaborate and optimize science observations. The swarm decided what science to do on their own with no pre-programmed science observations from ground operators.

“We did not tell the spacecraft how to do their science,” said Adams. “The DSA team figured out what science Starling did only after the experiment was completed. That has never been done before and it’s very exciting!”

The accomplishments of DSA onboard Starling include the first fully distributed autonomous operation of multiple spacecraft, the first use of space-to-space communications to autonomously share status information between multiple spacecraft, the first demonstration of fully distributed reactive operations onboard multiple spacecraft, the first use of a general-purpose automated reasoning system onboard a spacecraft, and the first use of fully distributed automated planning onboard multiple spacecraft.

During the demonstration, which took place between August 2023 and May 2024, Starling’s swarm of spacecraft received GPS signals that pass through the ionosphere and reveal interesting – often fleeting – features for the swarm to focus on. Because the spacecraft constantly change position relative to each other, the GPS satellites, and the ionospheric environment, they needed to exchange information rapidly to stay on task.

Each Starling satellite analyzed and acted on its best results individually. When new information reached each spacecraft, new observation and action plans were analyzed, continuously enabling the swarm to adapt quickly to changing situations.

[…]

The DSA lunar Position, Navigation, and Timing study demonstrated scalability of the swarm in a simulated environment. Over a two-year period, the team ran close to one hundred tests of more complex coordination between multiple spacecraft computers in both low- and high-altitude lunar orbit and showed that a swarm of up to 60 spacecraft is feasible.

The team is further developing DSA’s capabilities to allow mission operators to interact with even larger swarms – hundreds of spacecraft – as a single entity.

[…]

Source: NASA Demonstrates Software ‘Brains’ Shared Across Satellite Swarms   – NASA

Circle to Search now offers one-tap actions for phone numbers, emails and URLs

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[…] As a reminder, Circle to Search is an AI-powered feature Google released at the start of last year. You can access it by long-pressing your phone’s home button and then circling something with your finger. At its most basic, the feature is a way to use Google Search from anywhere on your phone, with no need to switch between apps. It’s particularly useful if you want to conduct an image search since you don’t need to take a screenshot or describe what you’re looking at to Google.

As for those enhancements I mentioned, Google is adding one-tap actions for phone numbers, email addresses and URLs, meaning if Circle to Search detects those, it will allow you to call, email or visit a website with a single tap. Again, there’s no need to switch between apps to interact with those elements.[…]

Source: Circle to Search now offers one-tap actions for phone numbers, emails and URLs

Pixelfed Is an Instagram Alternative That Feels Like a Return to the Glory Days of Photo Sharing with your friends

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Are you one of the many reconsidering their relationship with Meta’s Instagram? If you’re looking for another outlet to share your photos, Pixelfed, an open source photo-sharing alternative without ads or tracking, has officially launched mobile apps for Android and iPhone.

These apps, which allow you to upload photos and videos directly from your phone, arrive just a few days after Meta blocked users from sharing links to the service (prompting a few days of unprecidented levels of traffic in backlash).

Pixelfed, like Mastodon, is part of the Fediverse, meaning people on Mastodon can follow accounts on Pixelfed, and vice-versa. It also means that signing up can be a little confusing to Fediverse neophytes: When getting set up, you will need to choose a server in order to share photos and follow other users. The biggest server, pixelfed.social, is currently lagging due to a large influx of new users, so it’s worth considering the other options presented in the app itself (or browse this directory).

Remember when Instagram was fun?

Decentralization is interesting and laudable, sure, but the thing I like best about Pixelfed is that it feels like a return to Instagram’s glory days. As you might recall, Instagram used to be a photo sharing service. Yes, you technically can still share photos on Instagram, but it’s been a long time since that was the primary focus of the application. Your timeline, once filled with photos from people you follow, is these days dominated by ads and “recommended” videos from celebrities and strangers.

Despite some recent changes to give you back a little more control, Insta is also ruled by the algorithm, which means that when you post a photo, there’s less of a chance that your friends will actually see it. Because of this, the people you care about are probably posting fewer photos than they used to, which in turn frees up the algorithm to put more random videos in your timeline. It’s enough to make you wonder why anyone still uses the service—it’s certainly not for the reasons they signed up for it.

The Pixelfed mobile app, in contrast to Instagram’s current incarnation, is simple. You can scroll through the photos posted by people you’ve chosen to follow. You can see the most popular photos on your server, or the entire Fediverse. Or you can upload photos. These new applications technically aren’t the first Pixelfed apps—there were plenty of third party applications that could access it, and those still exist. But now there’s also an official app, and it works pretty well.

The simple user interface for uploading a photo, which you can take in the app or share from your phone's photo library.
Credit: Justin Pot

Another thing that’s missing from Pixelfed: ads and any kind of tracking. The developer team promises those “features” are never coming. In a Mastodon post, developer Daniel Supernault said “Pixelfed is a lot of things, but one thing it is not, is an opportunity for VC or others to ruin the vibe,” adding that he turned down VC funding and plans to never add ads. “Pixelfed is for the people, period.”

I’m not the kind of tech journalist who likes to make predictions about which applications will “win.” I will say, though, that the internet would be a better place if that mentality were more common.

Source: Pixelfed Is an Instagram Alternative That Feels Like a Return to the Glory Days of Photo Sharing | Lifehacker

Mastodon announces transition to nonprofit structure – does what OpenAI should have done

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Decentralized social network organization Mastodon said Monday that it is planning to create a new nonprofit organization in Europe and hand over ownership of entities responsible for key Mastodon ecosystem and platform components. This means one person won’t have control over the entire project. The organization is trying to differentiate itself from social networks controlled by CEOs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

While exact details are yet to be finalized, this means that Mastodon’s current CEO and creator, Eugen Rochko, will hand over management bits of the organization to the new entity and focus on the product strategy.

The organization said that it will continue to host the mastodon.social and mastodon.online servers, which users can sign up for and join the ActivityPub-based network. Mastodon currently has 835,000 monthly active users spread across thousands of servers.

[…]

Last year, the company formed a U.S.-based nonprofit to get more funds and grants with Twitter co-founder Biz Stone on the board. At the same time, the organization lost its nonprofit status in Germany.

While Mastodon relies on donations and sponsorships to operate, Bluesky, its main competitor working on a rival decentralized network, is reportedly raising a new funding round from investors at a $700 million valuation.

The blog post noted that the new Europe-based nonprofit entity will wholly own the Mastodon GmbH for-profit entity. The organization is in the process of finalizing the place where the new entity will be set up.

[…]

In the past few months, the ownership of open source projects has been a recurring news subject. For instance, people have questioned control of certain WordPress community projects being in the hands of WordPress’s co-creator Matt Mullenweg. Mastodon is trying to avoid situations where only one person has decision-making powers with today’s new structure.

Source: Mastodon announces transition to nonprofit structure | TechCrunch

2024 Open Source Software Funding Report

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This report summarizes insights from the inaugural 2024 Open Source Software Funding Survey, a collaboration between GitHub, the Linux Foundation, and researchers from Harvard University. The objective of this study was to better understand how organizations fund, contribute to, and otherwise support open source software.

Key Findings
Scale
Challenges
Lessons learned
  • Leave “fingerprints” on your organization’s OSS efforts to help managers, researchers, and other observers more easily collect this information.
  • Empower employees to self report contributions made under the organization’s banner.
  • Make OSS contribution part of your monitoring pipeline by conducting brief, regular surveys within your organization to collect key metrics.
  • Consider sharing data to public OSS funding index.
Toolkit

Source: 2024 Open Source Software Funding Report

This Nvidia App Setting Is Tanking Your Frame Rate – the rest of the problems it causes cannot be fixed

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[…]

following a Dec. 5 driver update that skipped GeForce Experience in favor of the Nvidia App (all future updates will follow its lead). The new app is meant to streamline the grab bag of features Nvidia has accumulated over the years, pairing its driver updating utility with a streamlined gaming overlay and improved tools for easily optimizing graphics or enabling G-Sync and other advanced settings. However, upon installing it, some gamers noticed their games running a bit more slowly.

“We’ve confirmed reports around the web that the Nvidia App using the default settings can impact gaming performance,” writes Tom’s Hardware’s Jarred Walton, “dropping frame rates by up to 15% in some cases.”

In particular, Walton saw performance drops ranging from 2% to 12% across the games he tested, which included Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Baldur’s Gate 3, Black Myth: Wukong, Flight Simulator 2024, and Stalker 2.

[…]

In a statement to Walton, Nvidia confirmed that the issue is specifically with the Game Filters and Photo Mode setting, and that the company is actively looking into a fix. So while you might not be able to play your games with an RTX HDR filter in the meantime, you’ll be able to use the rest of the app, even the overlay, as you would have before.

[…]

The simplest solution, and probably the best one for most people, is to follow Nvidia’s official advice and turn off the Game Filters and Photo Mode setting. To do this, just navigate to Settings > Features > Overlay > Game Filters and Photo Mode and toggle it off. I

Source: This Nvidia App Setting Is Tanking Your Frame Rate | Lifehacker

Which unfortunately is OK because the new app does creates problems with photos / screenshots and screen videos being way too bright, among a raft of other problems.

But you don’t need to log in to this app to get driver updates.

QNAP NAS users locked out after firmware update snafu, can’t reset

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Owners of QNAP network-attached storage (NAS) boxes are finding that a firmware update has left them unable to log into their device, and a reset doesn’t seem to fix the issue.

The Taiwan-based storage biz specializes in NAS kit and offers a whole portfolio of models to address various needs. However, users are complaining of issues following a firmware release that went out to some products last week.

According to posts on the company’s community forums, the update in question is QTS 5.2.2.2950, build 20241114. QTS is the firm’s Linux-based operating system for its entry-level and mid-range products.

The firmware upgrade was removed for some models sometime after it was released, yet users are contiuing to gripe that QNAP has failed to disclose which models were affected by the errant update.

“I thought I had a problem with my QNAP, so I used three second reset and now I can’t log in at all,” one customer complained, who added they still see an error message saying: “Your login credentials are incorrect or account is no longer valid.”

The user explained they have two identical TS-653D NAS servers. “Because I can no longer get to either machine, I have completely reset one by holding the reset button for 10 seconds and after two beeps released. This has been completely reset as I can see in Qfinder [QNAP’s desktop tool], only I still cannot access it with ‘admin’ and The Cloud Key Password.”

A seemingly more tech-savvy user revealed: “I have raised this with QNAP, but so far the devs/support are silent. Not even any guidance to any possible issues.”

Another user said: “It is also available as an update for my TS-453D in AMIZ. But AMIZ is not able to apply it.” AMIZcloud is a SaaS tool for deploying, managing, and monitoring QNAP devices.

In response to our queries, a QNAP spokesperson told us: “We recently released the QTS 5.2.2.2950 build 20241114 operating system update and received feedback from some users reporting issues with device functionality after installation.

“In response, QNAP promptly withdrew the operating system update, conducted a comprehensive investigation, and re-released a stable version of QTS 5.2.2.2950 build 20241114 within 24 hours.”

Source: QNAP NAS users locked out after firmware update snafu • The Register

Automotive Grade Linux Launches New Expert Group to Help Automakers Manage Open Source Activities. Lots of Automakers are already onboard.

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 Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open source platform for Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs), has created a new Open Source Program Office (OSPO) Expert Group (EG). Led by Toyota, the OSPO EG will promote the establishment of OSPOs within the automotive industry and encourage the sharing of information and best practices between them.

Open source software has become more prevalent across the automotive industry as automakers invest more time and resources into software development. Automakers like Toyota and Subaru are using open source software for infotainment and instrument cluster applications. Other open source applications across the automotive industry include R&D, testing, vehicle-to-cloud and fleet management.

“Historically, there has been little code contributed back to the open source community. Often, this was because the internal procedures or IT infrastructure weren’t in place to support open source contributions,” said Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux. “The rise of SDVs has led to a growing trend of automakers not just using, but also contributing, to open source software. Many organizations are also establishing OSPOs to streamline and organize open source activities to better support business goals.”

Automakers including Toyota, Honda, and Volvo have already established Open Source Program Offices. The new AGL OSPO Expert Group provides a neutral space for them to share pain points and collaborate on solutions, exchange information, and develop best practices that can help other automakers build their own OSPOs.

[…]

The AGL Open Source Program Office Expert Group meets biweekly on Tuesdays. Learn more about how to get involved here.

Source: Automotive Grade Linux Launches New Expert Group Led by Toyota to Help Automakers Manage Open Source Activities – Automotive Grade Linux

Things no one wants: Microsoft rolls out bloated AI-enabled Notepad

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Windows Insiders will soon get firsthand experience of Microsoft’s AI ambitions for Paint and Notepad: the image editor is getting Generative Fill and Erase and the text editor is getting a Rewrite function.

We’d been hearing since January that Microsoft Notepad would get an AI makeover – and yesterday it was confirmed Microsoft will roll out a new version of the text editor with generative AI options.

Dubbed “Rewrite,” the function takes a text selection and rewrites it based on the user’s selections of tone, format, and length. So if, for example, a user has text that they think is too wordy or casual, Rewrite will provide three variations they can pick from. Alternatively, the user can opt to revert to the original text.

[…]

Source: Microsoft rolls out AI-enabled Notepad to Windows Insiders • The Register

Notepad was useful because it was small. Very small. And fast. All these extra features slow it down. It should be simple. Bring back wordpad if you want this kind of feature bloat.