Software

As debate and legal argument continue over the extent to which developers of large language models are entitled to feed the world’s data into their systems without paying for it, India’s government has come up with an idea to regulate and secure the flow of information. India’s motive is to create AI models trained on local data, because it thinks offshore model-makers won’t be motivated to address the nation’s issues or to ensure owners of data stay in control. The scheme India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) thinks can make that happen is called the “Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA) for AI Training.” As described by Professor Ajay Kumar Sood, Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India, DEPA means “the model travels to the data, rather than the data travelling to the model.” The scheme envisions “Training Data Providers” (TDPs) – examples of which include hospitals, banks, and government agencies – sharing anonymized and encrypted data with a “Data Exchange Platform” (DEP). Entities called “Training Data Consumers” (TDCs) access the data stored at the DEPs to train their models. DEPs will operate what MeitY calls “hardware-based Secure Data Environments” in which “data remains encrypted and isolated even during processing.” They also enforce rules set by TDPs that describe how TDCs can use data. MeitY’s DEPA framework [PDF] says this scheme means “Differential privacy techniques are systematically applied to prevent the model from learning or revealing individual specific information,” adding “All activities inside the secure data environments are immutably logged for audit purposes, ensuring that the process is both secure and transparent.” India’s government already operates several data exchanges, but it is unclear how much work remains to make DEPA a reality. Once DEPA is working, MeitY envisions model-makers will use it to do things like “unlock currently fragmented health data to power breakthroughs in AI-driven diagnostics, drug discovery, and public health management.” The optimism extends to financial services. India is home to literally thousands of banks, and MeitY thinks “DEPA can enable secure sharing of diverse financial data, potentially extending formal credit to 400 million underserved individuals and MSMEs and fueling next-generation fintech innovation.” India’s government has long believed that if financial services companies can lend to more people, it will boost economic development. “Similarly, in Education, DEPA can overcome data interoperability challenges to enable AI-powered personalized learning for millions and create portable skill credentials essential for a future-ready workforce of its 250 million students in a $29 billion EdTech sector,” the framework states. “The successful adoption of DEPA Training across these domains is the essential catalyst for realizing India’s vision of inclusive growth and responsible AI leadership on the global stage.” While the purpose of the framework is to build Indian AIs for Indians, the document also has half an eye on the nation’s international standing. “DEPA is India’s contribution to global science diplomacy, advancing the efforts of institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations to shape a more inclusive and responsible global AI ecosystem,” the framework states. It also makes several mentions of digital public infrastructure (DPI), an idea pioneered by India that involves government funding creation of tools like the Unified Payments Interface payment systems and the Bharat Taxi zero-commission ride-sharing platform, to ensure Big Tech companies don’t dominate the local market. India also uses its DPI as a diplomatic tool, by giving it away to friendly nations. ®

If you want to ask AI a question and watch the conversation go up in virtual flames when you're done, there's a new Mac app for that. Howler is an open-source app from a Chinese developer going by Aries Zhou, and it takes incognito mode AI questions to a new level by making them graphically interesting and easy to access right from the desktop of a macOS device. Anyone familiar with the Harry Potter series is likely to know where the name comes from - Howlers are letters that scream in recipients’ faces and then burst into flames, destroying themselves, which is the exact same thing the prompts ostensibly do once a user taps the Escape key. The Howler app displays a parchment-esque letter on the screen whenever the user presses Option+H, complete with a little wax seal that shows a letter representing their chosen model. Responses to queries are written out “at a hand’s pace,” per Howler’s website, first in glowing gold that settles to a sepia-toned print. “Besides needing translation at any time, I often want to look up a concept or learn about an event on the fly, without wanting to switch to a browser or open a separate session in Chat,” Zhou wrote in a comment on his Hacker News post showing off the applet. “So I made Howler, dedicated to Harry Potter fans, always there when you call, burning after reading.” The biggest catch to using Howler is that setting it up involves either using an AI service that can run commands, like Claude Code or another coding agent, or running the configuration commands manually. The recommended method involves pasting a setup prompt into the agent's input field. Once set up, Howler can connect to supported AI models using an API key, or to compatible models running locally. Howler’s website states that the API key never enters the chat and is stored in the macOS Keychain for safety. In addition to the API key for the chosen model staying local and not being printed, Howler is described on its website as only storing messages in memory with no history, sending requests straight to the chosen AI service and never through a relay, keeping no logs, and only connecting to an outside service to check for updates - and even that feature can be disabled. It’s a handy tool for those who want to ask AI questions without leaving a chat history on their Mac – like trying to remember the name of that damn function you’re supposed to have down by now, or whether Memorial Day or Labor Day is the one in the fall. Just don’t assume the AI provider won’t retain a record of the exchange. “Unlike regular conversations, it doesn't take up your conversation list, and you don't have to think about cleaning it up or archiving it afterward,” Zhou explained. “It's only for handling your sudden flashes of inspiration or a moment of confusion.” And it does it with panache - sure, it’s just an interface for an AI model one could find elsewhere, but it’s easily conjured, dismissed with a snap, and is open source, to boot. You can find Howler on GitHub, or download it from its website, both linked above. ®

Decentralized messaging platform Matrix is no longer the upstart it once was. The organization is now a serious challenger to the status quo as concerns about sovereignty and independence reach new heights. At the organization's recent Malmo event, which grew attendance 30 percent year-on-year, the mood shifted from "yes, this is important" to "yes, we're rolling this out." Matrix is an open standard for communication. It's a federated system, so there are no central hubs or overseas control to worry about, and it can be used for anything from messaging to voice over IP. Video is also supported. The system is an alternative to services such as Microsoft Teams. It has become popular in the public sector as governments grow increasingly wary of relying on US tech giants for services that the Trump administration could switch off at will. However, that increased interest and subsequent roll-outs have brought a level of scrutiny Matrix was not fully prepared for. A recent report regarding anonymous reaction to a roll-out of the technology by the European Commission took Element - the company that puts the lion share of the money into Matrix - by surprise. One attendee at the Malmo conference observed, "First they [competitors] ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you." Matrix remains an open standard, however, the open source foundation behind it would certainly welcome more paying members. "It's true that we're definitely getting more attention than we have had before," said Element CEO Matthew Hodgson. "We are seeing Matrix ending up on the critical path of digital sovereignty as almost the poster child of the whole thing. "I'm not sure that we necessarily do want to be the poster child," he added, "We didn't sign up to end up being ambassadors for digital sovereignty, roaming from government to government, but empirically that's where we've ended up, and yeah, that's going to attract attention from people who would rather everyone just kept in their traditional big tech systems." This comes amid worries about the reliability of international partners, from early projects including France's Tchap messenger for the public sector and Germany's BundesMessenger through to more recent users, such as the Swedish public sector. Indeed, in one memorable demonstration during the Matrix event, messages were sent between French, Swedish, and NATO entities. "I cannot overstate the strangeness," Hodgson added, "of having various national militaries phoning up every couple of days, saying, 'Look, we need to get on board Matrix too because we need to talk to this country and they're using Matrix, and we need to talk to that country, and they're using Matrix.'" "It could be for defense, could be national security, could just be healthcare or education, public sector. But that is real. That is why there is a feeding frenzy." Not that Element or Matrix is trying to build a better Teams than Teams. Patrick Alberts, Element's Chief Product Officer, said, "This is a digitally sovereign communication solution that, by and large, works like Teams in many aspects, but it's not set out to be the faster Porsche here..." As for the reported complaints from the European Commission over Element's software implementation, Diana Gheorghe, EC head of sector for Communication and Collaboration Services, addressed them directly and described the anonymous complaints as "the natural friction of [a] high-profile rollout that we have done at scale." Alexandru Vignide, EC service manager for Communication and Collaboration Services, who is very much at the pointy end of making the sovereign communication tools work, noted the speed of the rollout, which began with a proof of concept in Q4 2025, and hit laptops between July and September 2026. The EC chose the Schengen Cloud Alliance (which includes OVHcloud) for hosting and, according to Vignide, "We wanted to provide a familiar experience for users." Not everyone is impressed with what is rolling out, but it's important to remember that change can be alarming, and this is still early days. It is, however, a significant one. Gheorghe said that, as well as increasing resilience and business continuity, "We wanted to have vendor diversity. We also wanted to have data control and ownership of the platform." Microsoft, as an example, would point to the sovereign capabilities of its system. As the Matrix conference kicked off, it announced new capabilities, including additional options for running AI, data services, and confidential workloads on customer-controlled platforms, and highlighted its sovereign partner ecosystem for customers who prefer local expertise. However, Microsoft (and other tech giants) cannot escape concerns about who ultimately controls the data and what administrations might do with it. In 2025, a Microsoft representative memorably confirmed the US giant "cannot guarantee" data sovereignty to customers in France. There is, however, a fly in the Matrix ointment. The platform is open source and, like so many open source projects, requires funding. Right now, Element accounts for much of the Matrix Foundation's funding. Hodgson finds this a little frustrating. "If every government who is operationally dependent on Matrix put the smallest amount of money in the Foundation, the Foundation would have enough money to really start investing in the ecosystem and not be dependent on Element basically picking up the tab." He acknowledged that things had improved in the last year, but said, "It's not good governance for an open standard to have one big player like Element effectively propping things up." This isn't uncommon in the open source world, and it's a little disappointing given the ever-increasing importance placed on sovereignty in communications. Alberts commented: "There is confusion in the market that the thing somehow creates itself. "No, it doesn't. It requires hardworking people. These hardworking people need to be paid, and that payment, in order to support government deployments going forward, ideally also comes from these governments. And some of them do a lot and do it in a great way, and that's amazing. "But some don't." ®

Reddit's r/opensource community has declared war on AI-generated software by introducing a sweeping set of new rules that also manage to shut out solo developers, newcomers, and anyone who doesn't speak English. The crackdown, announced over the weekend, bans projects that use AI, that were created with AI, or that are intended for AI applications. "The long story short, if your project uses AI, is made by AI, or is intended for AI, it's not welcome on r/opensource," moderator Wolvereness wrote. "AI, as it exists today, is incongruent to this Open Source community." To get a project featured on the subreddit, developers now need to show it has been actively maintained for at least a year, has an established community, and has at least three contributors, give or take. Student projects such as note-taking apps and PDF viewers aren't welcome either, and developers can no longer use the subreddit to find people willing to help maintain their software. That creates a chicken-and-egg problem for independent developers, who apparently need an established community before they can use an open source forum to find one. Even projects with no AI involvement could fall foul of the rules. One Reddit user pointed out that their nine-year-old project, which has more than 300 GitHub stars and dozens of resolved issues, would no longer qualify because they're its sole contributor. The moderator also imposed a minimum Reddit account age of one year and requires significant prior contributions. Anyone who attempts to post and then contacts the moderators seeking an exception risks being permanently banned and muted. Perhaps the most eyebrow-raising restriction concerns language. "If you don't speak English, you need to find a different community," the announcement states. Moderators say they cannot distinguish AI-written content from AI-translated text, and that non-English speakers cannot verify whether a translation is accurate. That particular rule has gone down about as well as you might expect. Fellow moderator ssddanbrown publicly objected, saying they hadn't been consulted about the changes and only learned of them through moderation notifications. "I don't agree with that rule. Especially so with how it was said," they wrote. The rules also raise awkward questions about projects like Linux, whose developers have taken a different approach to AI-assisted contributions. The kernel allows developers to use the technology while holding them responsible for the resulting code. Earlier this month, maintainers even decided to drop the requirement to disclose AI assistance. Asked whether that meant Linux would be banned from r/opensource, Wolvereness suggested it would probably still be allowed, arguing that enforcement would depend on whether a project was obviously the product of AI-generated code. "There's no 'objective' way to implement this policy," the moderator acknowledged. Apparently, AI is forbidden unless the moderators decide otherwise. The row comes as open source developers increasingly find themselves at odds over how to handle AI-generated contributions. System76 recently banned AI-generated code and other content from its COSMIC desktop project, while parts of GNOME have introduced similar restrictions. Other GNOME developers, however, have questioned the wisdom of rejecting AI-discovered security vulnerabilities simply because a machine found them. The debate has also caused rifts within KDE, while NetBSD has emerged as something of an AI-free alternative for developers who would rather keep generated code out of their projects altogether. Not everyone is convinced that blanket bans are the answer. Linux creator Linus Torvalds recently argued that competent developers should be free to use AI tools, while warning against low-effort patches submitted by people who don't understand the code they're contributing. Reddit moderators have opted for a broader approach, and one that has already prompted the creation of alternative communities, including r/TrueOpenSource and r/OpenSourceAIAllowed. The original announcement has since been updated to point disgruntled users towards these alternatives. Of course, r/opensource is a Reddit community, not an authority on what qualifies as open source software. Its moderators are free to decide what gets posted there, just as developers are free to take their projects elsewhere. ®

The Arc browser has flatlined, with its maker announcing it will be sunsetting it altogether on December 22, 2026. The Browser Company announced the news on October 22, just over three years after we noted Arc's arrival. Nothing will happen immediately, other than an end to new Arc accounts. Starting November 23, lights will begin turning off on iOS and Android, with several AI features disabled and sign-ins to sync tabs removed. Finally, on December 22, it will no longer be possible to access or use Arc on macOS and Windows. Accounts will be deactivated, and data deleted within 30 days. The solution? According to The Browser Company, a move to its AI browser, Dia, is one way forward. Users can import their profiles into the brave, new AI-native world and carry on as before. Sort of. When it launched, the Chromium-based Arc was an innovative browser with a workflow unlike its rivals. Instead of a plethora of tabs, there was a sidebar. The browser attempted to change how users interacted with the web but… frankly… it never really caught on. The writing was on the wall for a while. In 2025, The Browser Company pivoted to AI and its Dia browser, dropping Arc into maintenance mode. Later that year, the vendor was snapped up by Atlassian, although Arc continued to plow its lonely furrow. However, a year on, the time has come for Arc. CEO Josh Miller wrote: "We have so much pride and love for what we made alongside the Arc community," but it seems that wasn't enough to keep the browser maintained alongside Dia development. Hopes that Arc might be open-sourced so that its community could continue development were dashed in 2025, when Miller explained that "Arc isn't just a Chromium fork … It runs on custom infrastructure we call ADK — the Arc Development Kit." Dia also uses ADK. Arc's innovations have found their way, at least in part, into other browsers. Many users have found solace in the Zen browser, and there is always Vivaldi for power users. There is also a level of risk in going all-in on AI-native browsers in an increasingly crowded marketplace. For example, Strawberry, currently in beta, leverages AI agents to smooth a user's workflow. Dia might be a successor to Arc, but there is a risk that users will consider something else. As for Arc itself, The Browser Company plans to focus on Dia going forward. So for the Arc community, it is time to move on. ®

Whatever the task, there's an app for that… Except for the process of reviewing those apps, apparently. There are a growing number of reports on Apple's developer forums that developers are waiting a long time for their apps to be reviewed before they’re listed on the App Store. Subjects include 'Unusually long Apple 'waiting for review' time", "Stuck in Waiting for Review for about 3 weeks", "Stuck in 'Waiting for Review' since October 8", and so on, including a "Waiting for Review Megathread." To pick an example at random, D1 Tech say they've been waiting since September 19. There are also reports on Reddit, such as "My app has been waiting for App Store review for almost a month. Is this normal?" The typical review time is a day or two. Apple's own App Review guidelines say: App Review works around the clock, typically reviewing at least 50% of submissions in less than 24 hours and 90% in less than 48 hours." This isn't the first time this has happened. A thread of similar complaints is still visible from back in February, with at least 74 developers complaining of multi-week delays. Some of them noted that these were not new app submissions, but merely bug-fixes for existing, approved apps. In March, Business Insider reported on similar delays, suggesting that it was due to a large and rising influx of AI-coded apps. In April, The Information reported that submissions were up 84 percent. We have asked Apple if it has any explanation or comment to make about the delay. So far, the company has not replied, but we will update this story if we receive any more information. Saying that, though, long-term readers of The Register may remember vulture Kieren McCarthy’s three-month effort to attend Apple's iPhone 7 launch party, a decade ago. (Spoiler: he did not, in fact, get to join the party.) It is just conceivable that El Reg is not Cupertino's favorite news outlet. ®

Why use your smartphone when AI can do it for you? We’ve reached a new level of AI inanity with the launch of Opposable, a tool that taps, swipes, and types on Android phones and controls iPhones through a companion computer, sparing users the apparent burden of operating their own devices. If you don't want to update a calendar event, start a timer, or enable dark mode, you can apparently use an AI agent app on your computer (any client that supports MCP will do) to have Opposable do the thing for you on a connected phone. You could just do it on your computer, of course, but that’d require actually using your hands - like it’s some sort of baby’s toy. Lame. Opposable describes the purpose of its app as being to “give your AI thumbs” that allow an agent to open apps, read the screen, tap, and type, all while signed in to a device as the person too lazy to use a super-convenient technology themselves. As described in a blog post published by its creators Wednesday, Opposable's developers explain that its Android implementation uses accessibility services to inspect the screen, while screenshots provide visual input for an AI model. The model then decodes the images and figures out where it needs to tap on the screen in order to do whatever its user asked of it. The visual processing is handled by a vision-language model known as GUI-Owl 1.5 2B, running through llama.cpp, while tasks can be handled by either a paired desktop AI agent or an on-device agent that works without a desktop connection (the latter is available only on Android devices – iPhones require a companion computer, with a Mac beta available and a hardware-assisted Windows/Linux option also advertised). Even then, AI isn’t used for everything, with around 40 common tasks (setting an alarm, sending a text, switching Wi-Fi on or off) running as fixed code without an AI model involved. Opposable doesn’t appear to be particularly fast, however, and its accuracy is questionable too. Opposable’s website includes three different examples of tasks executed using its product, and none seem to merit using an AI over, you know, human hands. In one example, Claude Code over MCP is used to change the system’s theme to dark mode and then set a five-minute timer. This takes 50 seconds and requires 17 tool calls. In a second example using Claude Code and MCP, Opposable is asked to look up when Apollo 11 launched and who was on board, which takes just shy of 2 minutes. The number of tool calls isn’t mentioned, but the run cost is $0.44, which seems ridiculous when you can use your hands and figure it out for free. Hell, just asking Gemini or Siri right on a smartphone would return the answer faster and cheaper. Those half-a-buck requests to Opposable could add up pretty quickly if you’re lazy enough to justify its use. A third example shows a virtual Android device operating without a paired desktop agent, instead relying on the on-device agent that Opposable installs on Android phones. Opening the clock app and switching to the stopwatch tab takes it about 96 seconds, which is supposed to be impressive, apparently, as the company behind Opposable decided to showcase it on the thing’s website. As for Opposable’s ability to actually accomplish tasks, well, that’s not exactly a sure thing. “On eight tasks the model had never been tuned on, run on the emulator twice each, giving it the whole task succeeded 4 and 3 times,” the blog post notes. I’m pretty sure my brain and hands can do better without burning tokens to fail. “Giving it one subgoal at a time and checking each claimed success against the accessibility tree before the next subgoal succeeded 6 times in both rounds,” the blog continues - so even when it gets babysat each step of the way, it still only succeeds at three-quarters of tasks. Cool - that’s really going to free up all that time wasted setting timers and doing other mundane tasks on my handset. Why someone would install this on their Android device - which requires sideloading an APK and manually granting access to read and interact with the screen through accessibility settings - seems like a bit of a mystery. Opposable’s website even warns that it could be a security disaster: “whoever holds the token can operate the phone, so treat it like a password,” but still invites users to try. An argument could be made for using Opposable as an accessibility tool for people with difficulty using a smartphone, but this isn’t mentioned anywhere on its website. Opposable is instead billed as a way to “hand off the phone chores,” leaving users free to do something else - just not on the phone currently being slowly controlled by a clumsy AI. Sure, you could give your AI some virtual thumbs through Opposable, but … why? We reached out to the Opposable team to get an answer to that question, but didn’t hear back. ®

Make sure you don’t say anything mean or secret after hanging up a call on Signal, as a bug in the encrypted messaging app’s calling library could prevent a call from ending properly, potentially leaving audio and possibly video active. The vulnerability, CVE-2026-113380, was published by MITRE on Tuesday and given a CVSS score of 9.3, marking it as a critical issue in Signal’s open-source RingRTC library in every single version before 2.72.0. That update was pushed out last month, but the vulnerability wasn’t made public until now. RingRTC is Signal’s own calling library built on top of WebRTC, a technology introduced in 2011 that has since become widely used for voice and video communication over the internet. RingRTC provides Signal-specific calling functionality using WebRTC, which already encrypts media traffic, but that isn't stopping RingRTC from failing to hang up calls in certain conditions, according to the CVE report. What’s happening is, in essence, a denial-of-service attack on RingRTC’s finite state machine (FSM) event queue, which handles events involved in managing calls. If one of the people on the call saturates the FSM queue with requests, it can become overwhelmed and fail to process a hangup request, preventing the call from terminating properly. The vulnerability is classified as CWE-754, or improper checking for unusual or exceptional conditions, according to a report posted to GitHub. A conceptual proof of concept is available in the GitHub report linked above, using a Python script to simulate how flooding an event queue can prevent a hangup request from being processed. Were a malicious actor to exploit this, the person on the other end may think the call has been terminated, but either or both of their video and audio channels could still be open. The attack complexity is considered low according to the CVE, and while CISA’s known exploited vulnerabilities catalog doesn’t indicate this has been spotted in the wild, Signal users ought to ensure they’ve updated their apps - mobile and desktop - to the latest versions to ensure they don’t end up being caught on a hot mic without any notice. Comparing RingRTC 2.72.0 to the previous version indicates that Signal's fix allows the call's finite state machine (FSM) to detect termination requests independently of the event queue, while adding a timeout to prevent stalled processing from indefinitely blocking a hangup. It's not entirely clear from Signal's release notes when the fixed version of RingRTC reached the Android, iOS, and desktop versions of its apps. Signal Desktop's release history indicates that RingRTC 2.72.0 was incorporated in September, but the precise rollout dates across all platforms remain unclear. We’ve reached out to Signal to learn more, but haven’t heard back. In the meantime, best to update your installation to be sure you’re not still vulnerable. That, and watch what you say after hanging up a call. ®

Generative AI is saving open source developers time while giving maintainers more rubbish to sift through, according to a Linux Foundation survey. Respondents estimated that a quarter of incoming pull requests – proposed code changes – were low-quality "AI slop." Open source projects have spent the past year grappling with AI-generated contributions, useful vulnerability discoveries, false positives, and duplicate reports. Linus Torvalds has warmed to the tools, while remaining critical of low-quality submissions. The foundation argues that projects need clearer policies and better tools to handle the influx. Almost three-quarters (71 percent) of maintainers reckon GenAI has lowered the barriers to contributing to open source, but just over half (53 percent) disagree that the technology has improved community trust. Respondents estimated that AI cut code-authoring time by 52 percent on average. But for highly complex tasks, 21 percent reported taking longer. Then there is governance. Only 35 percent of projects have a formal policy permitting GenAI use, while 32 percent have no policy and no plans for one, leaving expectations unclear across much of the community. Hilary Carter, SVP of Research at the Linux Foundation, said: "Open source projects need to design for a growing AI-generated contributor base, not simply react to it. That means setting clear expectations for GenAI, putting responsibility for testing and disclosure on contributors and giving maintainers better tools to manage incoming pull requests." Among large projects, the estimated share of incoming pull requests classified as AI slop rises to 31 percent. The workload extends beyond proposed code changes. The curl project announced this week it will move low and medium severity severity flaws to public view to protect a security team almost overwhelmed by AI-assisted reports. Project maintainer Daniel Stenberg said: "We are struggling as a project as all key maintainers feel strained, overloaded and brought to the brink of what we can muster." On the need for better tools for maintainers, Carter said: "If we get those fundamentals right, AI can expand participation without overburdening and increasing costs for maintainers." ®

Software developers will need to get their kicks from becoming code coaches of AI, professors of prompt engineering, and masters of their domain. So says Pratik Wadher, chief technology officer at Kaseya, who oversaw a team of codesmiths rewriting software across the company’s managed services portfolio, which spans remote monitoring and management, backup and recovery, cybersecurity, and automation. “The goal is unifying our data, unifying our API, but as we are starting to also look at the product portfolio that we have, we're trying to understand what are the patterns that we can use to consolidate the product workflows,” he tells The Register. Storage is a good example. The basic workflows involve reading and writing data to storage arrays, Kaseya's own cloud environment, or the racks run by hyperscalers. The team re-architected the back end of its storage products so the storage engine reads and writes to any kind of storage from ZFS to S3. “This is where AI helps,” Wadher claims. “Fundamentally we have accelerated that piece of re-architecture.” Since joining Kaseya in September 2025, the CTO has been trying to simplify what he admits can be a “confusing” number of individual products. “The storage layer that we've been writing, we re-architected and wrote it in six weeks. And that's the actual writing, implementing and testing the code. There are years of domain expertise behind understanding how we want to write it.” In the process, Kaseya used Anthropic coding agents to help a human write the spec. The meatbags at Kaseya then iterated on it and peer-reviewed it with critique agents, before the AI generated the code. Anthropic’s Claude is becoming the “de facto standard” for writing code at Kaseya. “When I look at my engineers, it's not how I used to write code. It's almost like I'm manipulating these agents, but the best engineers are still critical, because you have developed a lot of experience in understanding what you need to do,” Wadher says. Does this take the fun out of coding? Yes and no, he claims. Mirroring the wider industry, some Kaseya engineers are embracing the new approach and some are more “hesitant.” “The fun part of coding is going to be the design, the architecture, the thinking. Writing code is fun but I don't think it's [the] fun [part]. The fun part is having the code run, seeing what it can do, and then tweaking it and changing it. If you can accelerate that and start seeing the results, I think that, for me at least, that would be the fun part: seeing the impact.” Developers must become proficient prompters and “you need the domain expertise,” he adds. “If you’re just using AI to generate code I don’t think you’re going to be useful and I don't think the code you're writing is going to be useful.” Some Reg readers and some of the article-writing vultures may disagree. There is a clear split happening in the world of FOSS, for example, where some projects want only human-written code and others take what they describe as a more pragmatic view of AI tools. AI is already forcing change upon the tech sector. Research last year suggested the number of graduates starting a career in technology is plunging with certain functions being subsumed by agents. “I think basic tasks will be done by AI, so you're not going to need that,” Wadher says. “The skills that will be extremely important are critical thinking and writing. “The worst part of coding, [the thing] engineers hate is writing the documentation. Well, guess what? That is going to become even more critical now. Being able to write clear, concise design specifications, the functional specifications, is going to be extremely important. The good thing is that you’ll now have an [AI] partner that can do this with you and you can iterate with this partner. “I would say the new code is the spec. That's what you're going to check into GitHub now, because you want to make sure that the spec you wrote is going to generate the same type of code now over and over again. I have seen variances." ®

Surprisingly few organizations were promoting Linux distros at Open Source Summit Europe. The only dedicated stands we found belonged to two Chinese projects, with openEuler occupying the larger booth. For users accustomed to Western enterprise distros, openEuler may be a less familiar name, but it has an impressive history. It's the modern free community version of Huawei's EulerOS, a version of which achieved official official UNIX™ certification. openEuler is no longer a solely Huawei project, though. Since then, it's been opened up, and it is now run by the OpenAtom Foundation. OpenAtom was co-founded in 2020 by Huawei along with some other big Chinese names, such as Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent. Another of the co-founders was Inspur, which formerly developed its own distro, K/UX – a version of which also achieved official UNIX™ certification. Inspur K/UX won Unix certification in February 2016, and EulerOS seven months later. K/UX's Unix certification expired in 2019. A few months later, in May 2019, the US placed wider sanctions on Huawei. It is possible that the fresh restrictions on American sales prompted Huawei's interest in closer co-operation with other companies in the Chinese Linux space. As far as we can see, there were no further versions of K/UX after version 3. As additional motivation for cooperation, both EulerOS and K/UX were originally based on CentOS Linux, and of course, in December 2020, the CentOS Project announced it would shift its focus from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream. The openEuler community has taken the platform in new directions. It has built its own stack of tools for developing, deploying, and running LLMs, called Intelligence BooM. It has a tool for migrating CentOS Linux systems to openEuler, called x2openEuler. As you would expect, it supports Kubernetes, as well as Docker and Podman, but it also has its own container engine called iSula (named after a species of ant). Aware that it's less known outside Asia, at the Open Source Summit, OpenAtom was handing out copies of a special "Focus Guide" from Admin Magazine, which is also available as a free download. Some parts of this are also available online without registration, such as AI and the BooM Stack and Automating Migration to openEuler. openEuler has a dual-strand release cycle, akin to Ubuntu rather than the RHELatives, with LTS versions and more frequent "innovation releases." The current LTS is version 24.03, released in June 2024, while the latest version is 26.09. There is a plethora of versions and editions available on the downloads page: the latest release is for x86-64 and 64-bit Arm. The LTS version adds support for RISC-V and LoongArch, and there are minimal versions for 32-bit Arm as well. The older 22.03 LTS was also available for SW-64, meaning the SunWay RISC processors that Register sister site The Next Platform looked at in 2016. As LWN put it last year, this is a "non-upstream kernel port." There are five types of installation ISO available: Offline Standard, Offline Everything (a hefty 24.9 GB), Network Install (a still significant 1.5 GB), and two variants of the desktop "DevStation" version – a basic one at 3.3 GB and an "everything" edition at 25 GB. We gave the DevStation a very quick whirl in VirtualBox. It boots into its own installation program called Heolleo, which offers the choice of Simplified Chinese or English. Installation took a while, as it automatically fetches updates as it goes. We ended up with a GNOME desktop configured for Chinese, but we opened Settings, typed "language" into the Search box, and picked English. After a reboot, we could read most of the desktop. Program groups and some other elements are still in Chinese, but it's navigable with a bit of guesswork. It's GNOME 49, with the Dash to Panel and Arc Menu extensions preinstalled for a slightly more familiar layout. Opening a terminal, we were greeted with: Welcome to 6.18.48-0.0.0.15.oe2609.x86_64 It also offers the Deepin Desktop Environment, UKUI (as seen in Ubuntu Kylin), MATE, Xfce, and the Kiran Desktop Environment, which is a new one to us. In places, the English-language materials for openEuler mention Chinese CPU makers rather than western ones – which is understandable, in context. Examples include processors from Hygon, a Chinese licensee of AMD designs, as well as Phytium and Kunpeng, which explain the Arm support on offer. In the western world, the Red Hat user community responded to the end of CentOS Linux by building new free distros that stay as close as they can to their progenitor: the Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux projects, rebuilt from Red Hat source code. Then, when the IBM subsidiary restricted access to that source to its customers in 2023, the Rocky and AlmaLinux projects started to diverge. Rocky aims for the closest possible RHEL compatibility, and its most visible innovation is that it's built its own new build service. It also found a clever workaround to get Red Hat's kernel source code. AlmaLinux still targets RHEL compatibility, but differentiates itself by retaining older device support and older CPU architectures after Red Hat drops them. Chinese vendors have responded very differently. Those offering CentOS Linux-based OSes clubbed together, dropped their rival versions and their UNIX compatibility efforts, and instead are working on new tools and subsystems. Much like European interest in digital sovereignty, this is in part due to the Trump administration. Half a decade after it was cut off from its upstream sources, the openEuler platform is thriving and growing, even if few in the western world pay any attention at all. ®

Enterprises say nearly a third of their software budgets goes on upgrades, migrations, and licensing changes they wouldn't have chosen, according to research suggesting that keeping vendors happy has become an expensive business. The study, conducted by Censuswide for software support provider Origina and published with Thinkers50, surveyed 2,018 senior IT decision-makers in the US and UK. Respondents put the average share at 28 percent. And customers aren't necessarily getting anything better for their money. Some 95 percent of respondents said they had paid for at least one vendor-driven change in the past three years despite expecting worse reliability, performance, or value. The most recent vendor-driven change cost respondents' organizations an average of $12.87 million. Origina calls this the "software tax," but unlike most taxes, it comes with the added pleasure of potentially making your IT systems worse. The costs don't stop at software either. According to the survey, 91 percent of respondents said their organizations had retired working hardware in the past three years to meet software support deadlines, sacrificing an estimated 1.65 years of remaining useful life on average. Then there's the small matter of finding people to carry out all these supposedly essential changes. Some 84 percent said experienced engineers were regularly diverted from other projects to handle vendor-driven upgrades and migrations. That leaves less time for the work businesses actually want done, including the AI projects that software vendors themselves have spent the past few years telling everyone they urgently need. Asked about the last time an AI or data project was delayed, paused, or canceled, 90 percent said vendor-driven costs contributed at least moderately. While customers might be tempted to tell their suppliers where to stick their next upgrade, many apparently don't feel they have much choice. Some 76 percent said they have little negotiating leverage with their major software vendors. Origina founder and CEO Tomás O'Leary reckons customers have been backed into a corner. "When the alternative to an unwanted upgrade is losing support on systems the business runs on, saying yes is often a rational response. That's exactly the problem," he said. "The market has left some of the most experienced technology leaders in the world with little room to refuse, and that cost shows up in budgets, in engineering time and in innovation that never gets funded." The findings also suggest that IT bosses are getting rather fed up with the arrangement. Some 91 percent backed legislation that would give enterprise software customers protections comparable to those enjoyed by long-term residential tenants, while 82 percent supported software maintenance requirements similar to EU hardware repairability rules. Origina has a commercial interest in the argument: it sells independent support for enterprise software, offering customers an alternative to vendors' own maintenance and upgrade arrangements. Still, the findings suggest plenty of customers feel they're spending millions following their suppliers' priorities rather than their own. ®

Microsoft has acknowledged that the October 2026 Windows Server updates may be destabilizing Exchange Server. The problems are related to this list of Windows Server updates (see here) and Microsoft makes it clear they are not related to the October 2026 security updates for Exchange Server. The software giant says the bug can hit Exchange Servers running Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022, and 2025. The glitch might not be immediate and could impact Exchange Server OWA, which can throw up connection glitches or cause lengthy email queues, "with email crawling to a halt." Rebooting the server might make the problem go away temporarily, but a more permanent workaround is a registry edit. The destabilization issue could impact Exchange Server 2016, 2019, and the new Subscription Edition (SE), says the Windows maker. Microsoft strongly advised that customers should not uninstall the October 2026 Windows Server update and stated, "Not all Exchange servers will be impacted by installation of those updates equally; the severity and speed of impact varies based on Exchange server load. Some servers might never see a problem." However, for those administrators who found their weekend swallowed by borked Exchange Servers, the registry edit is currently the only workaround. The cause of the issue is a default limit on the amount of memory used by Endpoint Mapper when handling Endpoint Lookup calls. In Microsoft's Release Health Dashboard for Windows Server 2025 (Server 2022, 2019, and 2016 are also affected), the Microsoft said: "For workloads such as Exchange Server, the default limit of 512 simultaneous Endpoint Lookup calls might not be sufficient under heavy load." Hence, the instruction to use a registry setting to increase the maximum. It added, "We are investigating this issue and will provide more information when it is available." Customers were understandably frustrated. On Microsoft's support page, one wrote, "We have had the problem like every 20h since Wednesday, when we installed the windows updates for October and the exchange su. Reboot only solution," before noting that the registry setting appeared to have improved things. Another fumed, "Also please release your updates tested and without problems. Without giving us the job to test for you. We're already paying for the software and you want to make tests with us?! I spent all weekend on my servers because of this." The issue is bad form on the part of Microsoft and appears to be the result of a poorly thought-through default applied in the operating system which impacted Exchange Server. Microsoft has yet to commit to issuing an out-of-band update to resolve the issue, after all, not every customer is affected, and the problem depends heavily on how busy a server is. However, at least there's a registry workaround that might do the trick while Microsoft ponders its next move. ®

Monday mornings are no joke, so The Register always tries to lighten them up with a new installment of "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace japes, mistakes, and escapes. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Joe" who told us that while studying for an electrical engineering degree in the late 1990s, he scored a gig in the messaging lab at an Australian mobile carrier. "The office there was full of practical jokers," he wrote. "Boxes of confetti balanced on a door, a bag of prawn heads left under the carpet in one of the senior engineer's cars, hand cream on the phone earpieces... all the usual stuff." Joe told us that one colleague, whom he suggested we call "TF," took the pranks a little too far. "TF liked to sneak up behind me and ROAR in my ear to scare me in the hope I would jump," Joe wrote. "As this was not an especially clever tactic, I resolved to make my revenge a legendary once-and-for-all-time affair." Joe couldn't find an opportunity until his last week in the job, which helpfully coincided with TF attending a conference. "All the PCs had Borland C compilers installed," Joe explained. "I used it to write a completely harmless program that looked exactly like MS-DOS formatting a disk." The program even wrote junk data to a temporary file so the PC's disk activity light would flash, making the fake formatting operation more convincing. After a few minutes of blinkenlights faking the formatting, the program displayed a message revealing the prank. Joe added the program to autoexec.bat so it would run whenever the PC booted, but set it to termintate immediately until a month after his departure. "About five or six weeks later I got a phone call from one of the other guys," Joe recalled. "You're a bloody genius, TF just about shat himself this morning." "Mission accomplished!" Joe declared. By then, he was safely out of the job. Have you pranked your way to revenge? Email Who, Me? and tell us how it went. ®

The UK's competition watchdog wants to designate Microsoft with strategic market status (SMS) in business software, allowing the regulator it to intervene to level the playing field, and says it is considering other areas for investigation. Regulators around the world are watching to see what the UK decides in this case, with bodies such as the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the European Commission mulling similar actions. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is opening a consultation on whether to tag the Redmond software giant with strategic market status in respect of its portfolio of business software applications. This follows an investigation the regulator started back in May into Microsoft’s software portfolio including Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Teams, plus its security, server and operating systems. The watchdog is also probing whether Microsoft enjoys a position of “substantial and entrenched market power” through the suite of software that could be seen as stifling competition and harming buyer choice. It lays out its proposed decision in a document [PDF] and is inviting comments that must be submitted by November 13. The CMA will make its final decision by February 13, 2027. Bargain spotter The CMA makes it clear the company holds a strong position in each of the five areas it investigated (personal computer operating systems, productivity software suites, security software, server operating systems and relational database management systems), and that customers face barriers when switching providers – limiting their choice and weakening the ability of other software developers to offer rival products. Its proposal document notes Microsoft has been by far the largest provider of business software in the UK for decades. It finds that many customers view Microsoft's portfolio as a unified software environment, forming an end-to-end, integrated stack which makes for easier technical integration between products, with discounted pricing for buying whole bundles of applications together. This makes customers less likely to adopt products from alternative providers that may offer similar or superior functionality, as doing so would duplicate licensing costs for products already in their Microsoft bundle, the CMA says. “Organizations should be able to choose the products that work best for them, switch provider when they want to and combine services from different suppliers. We want to ensure businesses have the freedom to choose how they use Microsoft’s products alongside alternatives,” said CMA chief exec Sarah Cardell. Finding that the criteria for SMS designation are met would not imply or assume wrongdoing on Microsoft’s part, the regulator stresses. A separate document [PDF] spells out the potential interventions that the CMA could make. These include ensuring that Microsoft’s technical design choices do not restrict the ability to use other providers; that commercial arrangements (like bundling) do not limit effective competition; and preventing Microsoft from using its market power in business software to distort competition in adjacent activities, such as cloud services. Rivals back licensing scrutiny Cloud providers previously complained that Microsoft's licensing terms make it more costly for companies to deploy Windows Server instances and services such as SQL Server on non-Microsoft clouds. The proposed SMS designation grew out of the CMA’s investigations into whether the big global players were having a negative impact on the cloud services market in the UK. This largely fizzled out with the watchdog securing undertakings from Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) that they would work to reduce barriers to switching between clouds and operating multi-cloud deployments. In an update, the CMA says that more can be done to address barriers to switching between cloud providers and using multiple cloud services, and it will continue to work with AWS and Microsoft to address them. It also says it its looking into whether customers can freely choose the best AI tools, and whether alternative AI providers have a level playing field to compete against Copilot. In a statement sent to The Register, Microsoft said it does not share the CMA’s views in its proposed decision on business software solutions. “All our products - including Copilot - are open and interoperable, giving customers the ability to use them alongside competing services and choose solutions that work best for them at attractive prices. We will continue engaging constructively to ensure UK customers and businesses carry on benefiting from robust competition,” a spokesperson told us. However, some pressure groups were quick to signal their approval. The Browser Choice Alliance said it welcomes the CMA’s proposed decision, adding that: “BCA members have long experienced how Microsoft leverages its market power from Windows and productivity software to push users towards its Edge browser, even where they’re trying to use an alternative.” The Open Cloud Coalition, which counts Google as a member, said: “Microsoft’s restrictive software licensing practices distort competition in the cloud, harm choice, and increase costs. This once-in-a-generation opportunity to end these practices can strengthen competition and lower customer costs, if the CMA acts quickly and decisively.” ®

AI and digital sovereignty dominated this year's Open Source Summit Europe. But beyond the AI noise, the sovereignty discussions offered something useful: practical plans for putting open source to work. The recurring theme of digital sovereignty started right from the first day's keynotes, with Geopolitics, Sovereignty, and the Fight to Stay Open, by the Linux Foundation's Nithya Ruff and Johan Linaker from Research Institutes of Sweden, whose name is considerably longer than its URL: ri.se. This isn't just some European issue. Ruff stressed that it mattered "from Canada, to Sierra Leone, to Trinidad and Tobago." This was followed by Open Source Security as the Foundation of European Sovereignty, focusing on OSS supply chains. Then ORBIT Launchpad: Building the Due Diligence Bridge Between Manufacturers and Open Source, with speakers from Dell and Microsoft discussing OpenSSF's efforts to build catalogs of open source components to help companies achieve CRA compliance, such as CRABFOSC – the CRA Baseline For Open Source Consumption. The EU's Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) is now starting to bite: reporting obligations for actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe security incidents began last month, with its main requirements applying from December 2027. Hearing Dell and Microsoft discuss how to meet those requirements, rather than simply why they matter, was encouraging. Éléonore Daxhelet presented the 2026 report from the EU's Open Source Observatory, or OSOR. Emphasizing that this isn't just an EU matter, she highlighted Diaa, from the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, as well as the Swiss EMBAG legislation we recently covered. The slides are online [PDF]. Then, as if to emphasize that further, Kazuki Imamura from Japan's Innovation Platform Agency (IPA) presented the Japan-Type OSS Model. The IPA looked at hundreds of companies in seven countries, and more than 30,000 GitHub repositories, and found that while a lot of organizations are talking about open source, few are actually doing it. Japan has its own three-axis approach, where the public sector attempts to plant seeds and cultivate efforts by local commercial vendors, with a strong emphasis on the need for machine-readable legislation and rules. Again, the slides are online [PDF] and contain some uncomfortable numbers. To pick out the single talk with the most information, it might be Strategic Approach To Demonstrating the Value of OSS Efforts by Dr Dawn Foster of Fast Wonder. She started with the Linux Foundation's report on Measuring OSPO Value, examining open source program offices, and then presented a remarkable amount of guidance and info from the CHAOSS Project. It stands for Community Health Analytics in Open Source Software, and Foster's dense slide deck [PDF] linked to multiple different guides from the CHAOSS Practitioner Guides. There is a lot of reading here, including a series on viability metrics, a guide on demonstrating organizational value, and a guide on how to research software impact. To our eye, this looks like pragmatic stuff: info on how to introduce and run FOSS programs, on how to talk to users, and, perhaps most importantly, on how to explain it to executives. Many talks made reference to Schleswig-Holstein's moves away from the US cloud. One was from two of the people behind Berlin's Strategy for Digital Sovereignty. Berlin is both a city and a German state, with more residents than Schleswig-Holstein. The city government is working with PwC to manage its migration – not the first name that springs to mind in FOSS, but a sign that the giant consultancies see business here too. We were not surprised to see the only mention of KPIs at the entire summit here; we were slightly more surprised by the timescales, which aim to make 70 percent of the software stack on administrative workstations open source by 2032. The slide deck [PDF] reveals a rather bureaucratic planning process, but that's not a big surprise; nor is quite a lot of discussion of Governance, Dependencies, and Measures. Executives, in our experience, tend to like numbers they can measure and targets they can aim for. Emiel Brok from SUSE talked about the State of the OSS Union: Assessing Your Stack's Autonomy Under EU Law. This covered the European Commission's proposed Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA) and how organizations can measure their readiness for it. Some of this revolves around the EU Cloud Sovereignty Framework [PDF], and its definitions of eight Sovereignty Objectives (SOV-1 to SOV-8) and Sovereignty Effectiveness Assurance Level, the SEAL scale, from SEAL-0 (No Sovereignty) to SEAL-4 (Full Digital Sovereignty), defined as "complete EU control, subject only to EU law, with no critical non-EU dependencies." Brok mentioned SUSE's online Cloud Sovereignty Framework Self Assessment, which lets you get an idea of where your organization stands in ten minutes. All this may sound dry beside the kernel GPU driver discussions happening elsewhere at the event. But plans, targets, and measurements are signs that organizations are treating open source as infrastructure rather than an experiment. Sometimes, being bureaucratic is a win. ®

Don't need a full-fat productivity suite and worried about where your documents are being stored? Welcome to TinyLittleOffice, a set of applications where the document is the link itself. Using a URL to stash information isn't new. Look at many URLs, and you'll see a lengthy sequence of seemingly random characters at the end. Using that space to stash data isn't novel, but using it for documents is an interesting approach. TinyLittleOffice comprises a selection of tools, including a basic word processor, presentation builder, spreadsheet, calendar, and a drawing tool. The theory is a simple one: create a document and get a link. The link is the document. The document isn't saved on a server or made into an attachment (although it is possible to export to a variety of formats), so it is, in theory, private. That is, unless you're worried about what the server is doing when it opens the link. Using the URL for documents is far from a completely new idea. Paul Ford's (the author) "co-conspirator," Rich Ziade, came up with the idea of TinySheet six years ago: a simple spreadsheet that ran in the browser and kept its data in the URL. "We moved on," wrote Ford, "and sadly, those sites fell off the web, and the old links all broke." Years later, the concept was resurrected and expanded to include other productivity tools. The server code is on GitHub, which should, in theory, at least ease concerns about the new links rotting away. We tested the project, and it is indeed very impressive from a technical standpoint. It can easily create short documents and spin up spreadsheets. Sure, it won't make LibreOffice lose any sleep, but it's a fun tool, and sending increasingly lengthy URLs (there is a URL shortener on tap, though they do expire) is a lightweight alternative to a document attachment. And there's the rub. Why not simply use a tool that creates a document? As Ford acknowledges, "There are lots of tradeoffs. This is not, in any way, how web apps are expected to work. The links can get unwieldy pasted in chat, and you can't upload video or images, full stop. It's not collaborative like Google Docs. It's collaborative like handing out zines at a street fair." However, to carp about what TinyLittleOffice doesn't do is to miss the point. It is lightweight by design – it has to be in order to cram document data into the link. Ford called it "disposable software," which is true. "Everything in tech is huge right now," writes Ford. "Every system lives on someone else’s machine and tracks you everywhere. All the content you make with those systems is being gobbled by LLMs. "Meanwhile, most normal people are in chat all day, hiding out from the mess, rambling about politics and sports on WhatsApp or coordinating mutual aid on Signal. "I really enjoyed building something for them/us." ®

KDE is marking its 30th birthday by showing X11 sessions the door. The newly released KDE Plasma 6.8 is Wayland-only, though X11 applications can still run through XWayland. The change arrives right on schedule after last month's beta. KWin handles both window management and display-server duties. That means X11-based screen-recording tools, for example, won't work any more. You can't "shade" windows – roll them up into the title bar and back – and that's not planned to come back. Restoring saved sessions can also behave differently. Applications cannot freely position their own windows under Wayland, leaving placement to the compositor. Saying that, there are lots of tweaks and refinements in this release. The Spectacle screenshot tool can now include system audio and microphone input in its screen recordings. Plasma 6.8 integrates with non-KDE tools better. For instance, KDE's browser integration now supports the Flatpak version of Microsoft's Edge browser. GTK2 applications also get better dark-theme matching. Internationalization is getting better – for example, the Clock understands the Bikram Sambat calendar, and Amharic is now supported in KDE's on-screen keyboard. The System Monitor app has better tracking of VRAM usage as well as main memory, and can pin tasks to certain CPU cores. There's better multi-monitor handling: screens are color-coded as well as by make and model, which is helpful if you have multiple identical monitors. There are more authentication options in KDE's VPN support too. The Union theming system is in beta, though not enabled by default. KWin can also apply matching effects to windows with client-side decorations, such as Valve's Steam client. Plasma's High Dynamic Range (HDR) support is better: it follows ICC color profiles, and understands Hybrid Log Gamma. On Nvidia GPUs, Plasma 6.8 enables triple-buffered output, resulting in smoother animations and transitions. Speaking of animations, more system effects – such as desktop "peek" and window "aperture" (when windows slide to the edge of the screen out of the way) – now respect the global animation settings. The Wayland-only session requires alternatives to remote-access tools that depend on an X11 desktop session, but the built-in Remote Desktop server, based on KRdp, has been improved. It's faster, it can adapt to slower connections on the fly, the clipboard is now bi-directional between host and remote system, and an exclusive mode can lock the host's screen while providing a virtual display sized to the client's window. KRdp uses Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol, but there's also Krfb if you prefer VNC instead. If you really need individual remote Wayland applications over SSH, then Waypipe is the way to go. The full changelog has all the details of the changes. Kubuntu 27.04 – recently announced as being codenamed "Tenacious T-Rex" – should include Plasma 6.8 when it arrives in April next year. KDE's internal metrics showed more than 95 percent of Plasma 6.6 users running Wayland in June. Including older versions, adoption was about 76 percent. Even so, we suspect that some users won't be happy with this change. With 6.8 out of the door, and on its way into fast-moving distros near you, the SonicDE project, which aims to continue development of the X11-capable KWin from Plasma 6.7, may start to pick up more interest. The KDE Project started with founder Matthias Ettrich's announcement on the de.comp.os.linux newsgroup on October 14, 1996. Before KDE, there were some commercial proprietary Unix desktop environments that were ported to Linux. For instance, Caldera OpenLinux 1.0 shipped with Visix's Looking Glass – you can see a tiny screenshot of it in the OpenLinux 1.1 announcement – but none ever went FOSS. Xfce is slightly older – as founder Olivier Fourdan described in this 2009 article: "I started the project in late 1996, before GNOME or gtk+ even existed." The XForms Common Environment was released first, but in those early days, what was then called XFce wasn't open source. It also started out as a recreation of CDE, which was finally open sourced in 2012. This makes it an early equivalent of NsCDE, which we compared with the real thing in 2022. In its early days, the Qt C++ toolkit that KDE chose caused problems, which led to the establishment of the KDE Free Qt Foundation in case something bad happened to its creators. Qt's licensing situation improved in 2000, when Qt 2.2 became available under both the GPL and QPL, resolving the GPL-compatibility concerns surrounding KDE's foundations. Even holdout Red Hat started bundling KDE. Thirty years on, KDE remains one of the great survivors of the free desktop. Long may it continue. ®

A browser-based emulator for the original iPhone is the latest project to tap into the rich vein of nostalgia running through the tech industry. While far from a complete implementation, the emulation does enough to evoke happier times, before Apple burdened its mobile operating system with frills and complexities, and spent years (and multiple operating system updates) making the Podcasts app steadily more broken. The browser-based emulation (and we use the term carefully; anyone expecting all the functionality of yesteryear will be sorely disappointed) shows an original iPhone as it debuted in 2007. The buttons are where you remember them, the screen is ringed by bezels that wouldn't pass muster today, and the skeuomorphic icons are all present and correct. There's even the browser, though it doesn't do much yet. Even a gentle prod shows how incomplete this implementation is. Some apps work well, such as Calculator, while others - Contacts - struggle, and anything that needs an online connection fails, including loading today's web in 2007's Safari. It does, however, recall how simple things were almost 20 years ago, when the iPhone first appeared, and it joins an array of old-time systems that can be fired up (or at least look like they are) in a browser. Want a look at Apple's abandoned System 7 replacement? Step this way. Perhaps an XP-like implementation? No problem. It would be churlish to dwell on the emulation's deficiencies. For now, it's arguably more curiosity than anything else: Apple didn't launch the App Store until 2008, so third-party apps would be off the table, at least until a later version of iOS landed. Running it in a browser is undoubtedly convenient, though. Alternatives such as Light Touch offer a fuller implementation, but they demand more than a handy Chrome instance on a Windows device to open a portal back to a brighter time. So, fire up 2006's Nintendo Wii, pop on that CD of Back to Black, and relive the excitement of switching on the very first iPhone. Although perhaps give that other 2007 icon, Windows Vista, a bit of a swerve… ®

Tiny11 Builder, a tool for creating less-bloated Windows 11 installation images, now has a desktop app preview that makes the process less reliant on PowerShell know-how. As the author explains: "Tiny11 Builder aims to be the de facto standard for creating lightweight, safe and efficient Windows images." The tool creates an ISO image for Windows installation, stripping out bundled apps and selected system components. It accepts Windows 11 installation media from 22H2 onward, including 26H2, and the result is something a good deal more compact than Microsoft's original. The major visible change is a WinUI 3 desktop application that uses a new C# image builder rather than merely running the existing PowerShell scripts behind a graphical interface. Those scripts remain available, but the new interface is considerably more polished. There are three basic build modes: Tiny11, which removes bundled apps while retaining Windows Update, Defender, and recovery tools; Tiny11 Core, which disables updates and Defender and irreversibly removes components, including the recovery environment; and finally a custom option where users can decide which Windows elements to keep or drop from the ISO image. Tiny11 remains an impressive technical achievement, but it carries an important health warning: the ISOs it creates are definitely not supported by Microsoft, and if you opt for Tiny11 Core, the author recommends sticking to test VMs only. This is for enthusiasts who understand that a smaller installation can come with missing functionality, security trade-offs, and support complications. There is also no guarantee that attempts to bypass some of the more onerous aspects of Windows 11 installation will work. As the author notes in the project's repository: "Local-account and hardware-check settings are best effort, not guaranteed bypasses on new builds." In other words, don't count on it to bypass Windows 11's hardware requirements or account demands on newer builds. Tiny11 is all about stripping fluff and fripperies from the Windows 11 installation image. As with earlier versions, a license is still required. While the ISO might have been debloated, this is still Microsoft Windows 11 after all. "No modification bypasses Windows licensing or activation," the author notes. The appeal of removing Microsoft's excesses is clear. Whether the reduced footprint is worth the loss of components and potential support headaches depends on what users choose to strip out. ®