Tech

microsoft-fixes-problem-that-let-edge-replicate-chrome-tabs-without-permission

Microsoft fixes problem that let Edge replicate Chrome tabs without permission

Browsers, google chrome, microsoft, Microsoft Edge, Tech, web browsers / /

Tab thieving thwarted —

Edge update is first proof that this was definitely a glitch.

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Microsoft fixes problem that let Edge replicate Chrome tabs without permission

Microsoft

Microsoft has fixed a problem that resulted in tabs from Google Chrome being imported to Microsoft Edge without user consent, as spotted by The Verge. Microsoft has kept mum on the situation, making the issued update the first time Microsoft has identified this as a problem, rather than typical behavior for the world’s third-most-popular browser.

In late January, The Verge Senior Editor Tom Warren reported experiencing the puzzling Edge issue. After updating his computer, Edge launched with the tabs that Warren most recently used in Chrome. He eventually realized that Edge has a feature you can toggle, reading: “Always have access to your recent browsing data each time you browse on Microsoft Edge.” The setting is reachable in Edge by typing “edge://settings/profiles/importBrowsingData.” Interestingly, it allows Edge to import browsing data from Chrome every time you open Edge, but data from Firefox can only be imported manually. However, Edge was seizing Chrome tabs without this setting enabled. Others reported having this problem via Microsoft’s support forum and social media, as well.

The Edge setting as seen on a Windows 11 23H2 system running Edge 122. You can have data continuously imported from Chrome or on demand from Firefox, but other browsers don't appear.

Enlarge / The Edge setting as seen on a Windows 11 23H2 system running Edge 122. You can have data continuously imported from Chrome or on demand from Firefox, but other browsers don’t appear.

Andrew Cunningham

Microsoft didn’t respond to The Verge’s initial request for comment, but this week it released an Edge update that seems to address matters. Microsoft’s release notes from February 15 say:

Edge has a feature that provides an option to import browser data on each launch from other browsers with user consent. This feature’s state might not have been syncing and displaying correctly across multiple devices. This is fixed.

Microsoft seems to be saying that the status (enabled or disabled) of Edge’s importing data ability wasn’t syncing correctly across people’s Microsoft devices. However, this doesn’t explain the number of users who claimed they saw the problem without having the feature enabled. Microsoft declined Ars Technica’s request for comment.

With this fix, Microsoft is claiming that the behavior was, indeed, unintentional. But that wasn’t a given. Besides the fact that Microsoft hasn’t provided more details about the problem, the company also has a history of both sneakily and overtly trying to coerce people into using Edge. You’ll see Microsoft pester you with pop-up messages if you try to download Chrome or change your default browser, for example.

Edge and Chrome are both based on the Chromium browsing engine, but Chrome has long maintained a massive lead over Edge in terms of market share. Global Statcounter data points to Chrome having 64.41 percent market share last month, followed by Safari (18.82 percent), and then Edge (5.36 percent). The numbers inch slightly more in Microsoft’s favor when looking at the US market specifically (9.31 percent share in January), although Chrome still dominated (49.06 percent).

  • Browser market share for the past year globally.

  • Browser market share for the past year in the US.

Like many web browsers, Edge has a hard time competing with Chrome, which ties in with other popular Google services, like Gmail. Similarly, Edge promotes Microsoft offerings, including coupons, Microsoft accounts, and, as of recently, Copilot.

Edge pulling Chrome tabs seemed to fit in with pushy strategies Microsoft has employed to get people on its browser and other products, like Microsoft 365. Without more information, we don’t know when Microsoft first knew about Edge’s unwanted tab replication or how long it took to make it stop. Regardless, Microsoft doesn’t intend for tab swiping to be part of the Edge experience currently, so at least this particular nuisance should be over.

Microsoft fixes problem that let Edge replicate Chrome tabs without permission Read More »

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Wyze outage leaves customers without camera coverage overnight

security cameras, Smart Home, Tech, wyze / /

Internet of ethereal things —

Company points to “AWS partner” for cameras disappearing from users’ apps.

– Updated

Wyze v3 camera pointed at viewer

Getty Images

Wyze cameras have been unreliable for many users for more than nine hours today, with cameras disappearing from the Wyze app or simply reporting errors when owners try to view them.

Users started reporting issues on Down Detector just before 4 am Eastern time, and the company issued a service advisory at 9: 30 am. As of 1 pm, the company stated that its “metrics show that devices are starting to recover,” and later that there was “continued improvement,” but it was still investigating history viewing issues. At 1: 15 pm, an Ars writer was able to view his Wyze v3 camera feed and update its firmware.

A Wyze employee updated the service advisory at 2: 28 p.m. Eastern to note “continued improvement for device connection recovery.” They added that the Event tab in the Wyze app, where one can see prior recordings activated by motion or other detections, is disabled, “to investigate a possible security issue,” and it will be back soon.

Wyze attributed the issue to an “AWS partner” in an earlier update. Amazon Web Services’ dashboard showed no issues or outages as of 1: 30 pm Eastern. Ars reached out to Wyze for comment and will update this post with new information.

The Wyze subreddit was stuffed at the time of this writing with confirmations that the Wyze service was down, with many waking up to find that none of their Wyze cameras were working or even showing in their app at all. One redditor noted that they could see footage from a camera that was three time zones away. Many noted their strategy, or now intention, to diversify their security devices or implement solutions with local viewing options.

This post was updated at 4: 30 p.m. Eastern to note an update to Wyze’s service advisory.

Wyze outage leaves customers without camera coverage overnight Read More »

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Android 15 Developer Preview 1 is out for the Pixel 6 and up

Android 15, Google, Tech / /

Here’s hoping for some user-facing features someday —

Low-level developer features include fs-verify support, more screen-sharing modes.

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The Android 15 logo. This is

Enlarge / The Android 15 logo. This is “Android V,” if you can’t tell from the logo.

Google

It’s that time of year again. Android is going to start its ~8-month-long beta process with the release of a new major OS version. The Android 15 Developer Preview is out today for the Pixel 6, 7, and 8, Pixel Fold, and Pixel Tablet. This release should mark the end of major OS support for the Pixel 5 and 5a series.

So what’s new? It’s hard to know too much with only the simple text descriptions we’re getting, but we have a few bullet points. “Partial screen sharing” will let users share or record individual app windows instead of the entire screen. Phones don’t have much of a difference between an app window and a full screen, but it would be nice if this blocked incoming notifications from showing up on your screen share. It would also be nice for tablets.

Android is surfacing an API that supports the Linux kernel’s fs-verity feature. This will let you store a read-only file on a read-write file system and cryptographically sign it to ensure it hasn’t been maliciously tampered with. Google apparently wants app developers to use this, saying, “This leads to enhanced security, protecting against potential malware or unauthorized file modifications that could compromise your app’s functionality or data.“

Google says there are improved camera controls for apps and more “dynamic performance” controls that detect if your phone is overheating and let apps respond accordingly.

The release schedule.

Enlarge / The release schedule.

Google

There’s also a schedule that says we’re getting at least six developer releases. The first “beta” will be out in April; “platform stability,” when APIs are finalized and developers should get to work, is in June. The final release on the timeline is sometime after July, depending on how development goes.

We’ll know more about Android 15 when the actual documentation gets released and we can try some software. As always, these first Developer Preview releases are limited to low-level features for app developers, giving interested parties time to support new functionality before the OS releases in Q3. User-facing features will come later—hopefully. The Android 14 release was one of the smallest on record, so we’re hoping there are more meaningful improvements this year.

Android 15 Developer Preview 1 is out for the Pixel 6 and up Read More »

asahi-linux-project’s-opengl-support-on-apple-silicon-officially-surpasses-apple’s

Asahi Linux project’s OpenGL support on Apple Silicon officially surpasses Apple’s

Apple, Apple M1, Apple M2, Apple silicon, asahi linux, OpenGL, Tech, vulkan / /

who needs metal? —

Newest driver supports the latest versions of OpenGL and OpenGL ES.

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Slowly but surely, the Asahi Linux team is getting Linux up and running on Apple Silicon Macs.

Enlarge / Slowly but surely, the Asahi Linux team is getting Linux up and running on Apple Silicon Macs.

Apple/Asahi Linux

For around three years now, the team of independent developers behind the Asahi Linux project has worked to support Linux on Apple Silicon Macs, despite Apple’s total lack of involvement. Over the years, the project has gone from a “highly unstable experiment” to a “surprisingly functional and usable desktop operating system.” Even Linus Torvalds has used it to run Linux on Apple’s hardware.

The team has been steadily improving its open source, standards-conformant GPU driver for the M1 and M2 since releasing them in December 2022, and today, the team crossed an important symbolic milestone: The Asahi driver’s support for the OpenGL and OpenGL ES graphics have officially passed what Apple offers in macOS. The team’s latest graphics driver fully conforms with OpenGL version 4.6 and OpenGL ES version 3.2, the most recent version of either API. Apple’s support in macOS tops out at OpenGL 4.1, announced in July 2010.

Developer Alyssa Rosenzweig wrote a detailed blog post that announced the new driver, which had to pass “over 100,000 tests” to be deemed officially conformant. The team achieved this milestone despite the fact that Apple’s GPUs don’t support some features that would have made implementing these APIs more straightforward.

“Regrettably, the M1 doesn’t map well to any graphics standard newer than OpenGL ES 3.1,” writes Rosenzweig. “While Vulkan makes some of these features optional, the missing features are required to layer DirectX and OpenGL on top. No existing solution on M1 gets past the OpenGL 4.1 feature set… Without hardware support, new features need new tricks. Geometry shaders, tessellation, and transform feedback become compute shaders. Cull distance becomes a transformed interpolated value. Clip control becomes a vertex shader epilogue. The list goes on.”

Now that the Asahi GPU driver supports the latest OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards—released in 2017 and 2015, respectively—the work turns to supporting the low-overhead Vulkan API on Apple’s hardware. Vulkan support in macOS is limited to translation layers like MoltenVK, which translates Vulkan API calls to Metal ones that the hardware and OS can understand.

Apple’s OpenGL support has been stuck at the 4.1 level since macOS 10.9 Mavericks was released in 2013. Since then, the company has shifted its focus to its proprietary Metal graphics API, which, like DirectX 12 and Vulkan, is a “low-overhead” API meant to reduce the performance overhead sometimes associated with older APIs like OpenGL. But despite declaring OpenGL officially deprecated in 2018, Apple has left its existing OpenGL implementation alone since then, never updating it but also maintaining support even as it has transitioned from Intel’s processors to its own CPUs and GPUs.

Rosenzweig’s blog post didn’t give any specific updates on Vulkan except to say that the team was “well on the road” to supporting it. In addition to supporting native Linux apps, supporting more graphics APIs in Asahi will allow the operating system to take better advantage of software like Valve’s Proton, which already has a few games written for x86-based Windows PCs running on Arm-based Apple hardware.

Though there are still things that don’t work, Fedora Asahi Remix is surprisingly polished and supports a lot of the hardware available in most M1 and M2 Macs—including the webcam, speakers, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and graphics acceleration. Other features, like Thunderbolt, running displays over USB-C, the system’s built-in microphone, and the Touch ID fingerprint sensors, remain non-functional. Asahi’s most recent update blog post, published in mid-January, highlighted HDMI support, support for DRM-protected websites via Google’s proprietary Widevine package, Touchbar support for the handful of Apple Silicon Macs that use one, and more.

As for the newest wave of M3 Macs, Asahi developer Hector Martin said in October 2023 that basic support for the newest chips would take “at least six months.” Among other things, the team will need time to support the M3 GPU in their drivers; the team also relies primarily on Mac mini models for development, and the M3 Mac mini doesn’t exist yet.

Asahi Linux project’s OpenGL support on Apple Silicon officially surpasses Apple’s Read More »

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Lawsuit against Prime Video ads shows perils of annual streaming subscriptions

Amazon, amazon prime video, culture, streaming, Tech / /
Priyanka CHopra (left) and Richard Madden (right) in the AMazon Prime Video original series Citadel.

Enlarge / Priyanka Chopra (left) and Richard Madden (right) in the Prime Video original series Citadel.

Streaming services like Amazon Prime Video promote annual subscriptions as a way to save money. But long-term commitments to streaming companies that are in the throes of trying to determine how to maintain or achieve growth typically end up biting subscribers in the butt—and they’re getting fed up.

As first reported by The Hollywood Reporter, a lawsuit seeking class-action certification [PDF] hit Amazon on February 9. The complaint centers on Amazon showing ads with Prime Video streams, which it started doing for US subscribers in January unless customers paid an extra $2.99/month. This approach differed from how other streaming services previously introduced ads: by launching a new subscription plan with ads and lower prices and encouraging subscribers to switch.

A problem with this approach, though, as per the lawsuit, is that it meant that people who signed up for an annual subscription to Prime Video before Amazon’s September 2023 announcement about ads already paid for a service that’s different from what they expected.

And that’s not the only risk people face when opting-in to a yearlong relationship with streaming services these days.

Paying extra “for something they already paid for”

The lawsuit recently filed against Prime Video names California resident Wilbert Napoleon as a plaintiff and argues that Amazon’s advertisements for Prime Video made “reasonable consumers” think that they would get ad-free movie and TV-show streaming for the duration of their subscription.

The lawsuit reads:

Reasonable consumers expect that, if you purchase a subscription with ad-free streaming of movies and tv shows, that the ad-free streaming for movies and tv shows is available for the duration of the purchased subscription.

… however, Plaintiff and class members’ reasonable expectations were not met. Instead of receiving a subscription that included ad-free streaming of [TV] shows and movies, they received something worth less.

Napoleon bought an annual subscription to Prime Video in June 2023, per the court filings. The lawsuit accuses Amazon of falsely advertising Prime Video.

“Subscribers must now pay extra to get something that they already paid for,” the lawsuit says.

The idea of expectations not being met is common for streaming customers. That said, the lawsuit hasn’t gotten far enough yet where we should expect big changes to Prime Video or financial penalties for Amazon. Changing the user experience mid-deal is aggravating for customers, but Prime Video’s terms of use claim that Amazon maintains the right to diminish the value of Prime Video:

Offers and pricing for subscriptions (also referred to at times as memberships), the subscription services, the extent of available Subscription Digital Content, and the specific titles available through subscription services, may change over time and by location without notice (except as may be required by applicable law).

But there’s still a broader point to be made around streaming services trying to lure people into yearlong commitments knowing that the product they offer today might drastically change over the next 12 months.

Amazon, for example, announced that it would bring commercials to Prime Video in September and didn’t confirm when it would introduce ads until December, about a month ahead of the changes. Yet, Amazon reportedly had plans to bring ads to the service as early as June, per a report from The Wall Street Journal that cited anonymous “people familiar with the situation.” Despite these reported plans to alter the user experience significantly, Amazon continued to sell annual subscriptions to Prime Video. For months, people were committing to something that they expected would include commercial-free viewing, which used to be a popular draw of Prime Video compared to rival streaming services.

Prime Video also seemingly didn’t give a heads-up that it was removing Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos support unless subscribers agreed to pay $2.99 more per month for an ad-free plan.

Amazon declined to comment on this story. Lawyers for the lawsuit filed against Amazon didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Lawsuit against Prime Video ads shows perils of annual streaming subscriptions Read More »

mozilla-lays-off-60-people,-wants-to-build-ai-into-firefox

Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox

AI, Firefox, mozilla, Mozilla Firefox, Tech / /

Please just make a browser —

Memo details layoffs, “strategic corrections,” and a desire for “trustworthy” AI.

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Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox

Mozilla got a new “interim” CEO just a few days ago, and the first order of business appears to be layoffs. Bloomberg was the first to report that the company is cutting about 60 jobs, or 5 percent of its workforce. A TechCrunch report has a company memo that followed these layoffs, detailing one product shutdown and a “scaling back” of a few others.

Mozilla started as the open source browser/email company that rose from the ashes of Netscape. Firefox and Thunderbird have kept on trucking since then, but the mozilla.org/products page is a great example of what the strategy has been lately: “Firefox is just the beginning!” reads the very top of the page; it then goes on to detail a lot of projects that aren’t in line with Mozilla’s core work of making a browser. There’s Mozilla Monitor (a data breach checker), Mozilla VPN, Pocket (a news reader app), Firefox Relay (for making burner email accounts), and Firefox Focus, a fork of Firefox with a privacy focus.

That’s not even a comprehensive list of recent Mozilla products. From 2017–2020, there was “Firefox Send,” an encrypted file transfer service, and a VR-focused “Firefox Reality” browser that lasted from 2018 to 2022. In 2022, Mozilla launched a $35 million venture capital fund called Mozilla Ventures. Not all Mozilla side-projects are losers—the memory-safe Rust programming language was spun out of Mozilla in 2020 and has seen rapid adoption in the Linux kernel and Android.

Mozilla is a tiny company that competes with some of the biggest tech companies in the world—Apple, Google, and Microsoft. It’s also very important to the web as a whole, as Firefox is the only browser that can’t trace its lineage back to Apple and WebKit (Chrome’s Blink engine is a WebKit fork. Microsoft Edge is a Chromium fork). So you would think focusing on Firefox would be a priority, but the company continually struggles with focus.

The Mozilla Corporation gets about 80 percent of its revenue from Google—also its primary browser competitor—via a search deal, so Mozilla isn’t exactly a healthy company. These non-browser projects could be seen as a search for a less vulnerable revenue stream, but none have put a huge dent in the bottom line.

TechCrunch managed to get an internal company memo that details a few “strategic corrections” for the myriad Mozilla products. Mozilla has a “mozilla.social” Mastodon instance that the memo says originally intended to “effectively shape the future of social media,” but the company now says the social group will get a “much smaller team.” Mozilla says it will also “reduce our investments” in Mozilla VPN, Firefox Relay, and something the memo calls “Online Footprint Scrubber” (that sounds like Mozilla Monitor?). It’s also shutting down “Mozilla Hubs,” which was a 3D virtual world it launched in 2018—that’s right, there was also a metaverse project! The memo says that “demand has moved away from 3D virtual worlds” and that “this is impacting all industry players.” The company is also cutting jobs at “MozProd,” its infrastructure team.

While chasing the trends of VR and metaverse didn’t work out, Mozilla now wants to chase another hot new trend: AI! The memo says: “In 2023, generative AI began rapidly shifting the industry landscape. Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox, largely driven by the Fakespot acquisition and the product integration work that followed. Additionally, finding great content is still a critical use case for the Internet. Therefore, as part of the changes today, we will be bringing together Pocket, Content, and the AI/ML teams supporting content with the Firefox Organization. More details on the specific organizational changes will follow shortly.” Mozilla paid an undisclosed sum in 2023 to buy a company called Fakespot, which uses AI to identify fake product reviews. Specifically citing “generative AI” leads us to believe the company wants to build a chatbot or webpage summarizer.

The TechCrunch report interprets the memo, saying, “It now looks like Mozilla may refocus on Firefox once more,” but the memo does not give an affirmative statement on “Firefox the browser” being important or seeing additional investments. In 2020, the company had another round of layoffs and said it wanted to “refocus the Firefox organization on core browser growth,” but nothing seems to have come of that. Firefox’s market share is about 3 percent of all browsers, and that number goes down every year.

Mozilla lays off 60 people, wants to build AI into Firefox Read More »

why-walking-around-in-public-with-vision-pro-makes-no-sense

Why walking around in public with Vision Pro makes no sense

Apple, augmented reality, Features, Mixed Reality, Reviews, spatial computing, Tech, vision pro, visionOS / /

  • A close-up look at the Vision Pro from the front.

    Samuel Axon

  • The Apple Vision Pro with AirPods Pro, Magic Keyboard, Magic Trackpad, and an Xbox Series X|S controller.

    Samuel Axon

  • You can see the front-facing cameras that handle passthrough video just above the downward-facing cameras that read your hand gestures here.

    Samuel Axon

  • There are two buttons for Vision Pro, both on the top.

    Samuel Axon

  • This is the infamous battery pack. It’s about the size of an iPhone (but a little thicker) and has a USB-C port for external power sources.

    Samuel Axon

  • There are two displays inside the Vision Pro, one for each eye. Each offers just under 4K resolution.

    Samuel Axon

  • Apple offers several variations of the light seal to fit different face shapes.

    Samuel Axon

If you’ve spent any time in the tech-enthusiast corners of Instagram of TikTok over the past few weeks, you’ve seen the videos: so-called tech bros strolling through public spaces with confidence, donning Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro headset on their faces while gesturing into the air.

Dive into the comments on those videos and you’ll see a consistent ratio: about 20 percent of the commenters herald this as the future, and the other 80 mock it with vehement derision. “I’ve never had as much desire to disconnect from reality as this guy does,” one reads.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going all-in on trying the Vision Pro in all sorts of situations to see which ones it suits. Last week, I talked about replacing a home theater system with it—at least when traveling away from home. Today, I’m going over my experience trying to find a use for it out on the streets of Chicago.

I’m setting out to answer a few questions here: Does it feel weird wearing it in public spaces? Will people judge you or react negatively when you wear it—and if so, will that become less common over time? Does it truly disconnect you from reality, and has Apple succeeded in solving virtual reality’s isolationist tendencies? Does it provide enough value to be worth wearing?

As it turns out, all these questions are closely related.

The potential of AR in the wild

I was excited about the Vision Pro in the lead-up to its launch. I was impressed by the demo I saw at WWDC 2023, even though I was aware that it was offered in an ideal setting: a private, well-lit room with lots of space to move around.

Part of my excitement was about things I didn’t see in that demo but that I’ve seen augmented reality developers explore in smartphone augmented reality (AR) and niche platforms like HoloLens and Xreal. Some smart folks have already produced a wide variety of neat tech demos showing what you can do with a good consumer AR headset, and many of the most exciting ideas work outside the home or office.

I’ve seen demonstrations of real-time directions provided with markers along the street while you walk around town, virtual assistant avatars guiding you through the airport, menus and Yelp reviews overlaid on the doors of every restaurant on a city strip, public art projects pieced together by multiple participants who each get to add an element to a virtual statue, and much more.

Of course, all those ideas—and most others for AR—make a lot more sense for unintrusive glasses than they do for something that is essentially a VR headset with passthrough. Nonetheless, I was hoping to get a glimpse at that eventuality with the Vision Pro.

Why walking around in public with Vision Pro makes no sense Read More »

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Broadcom-owned VMware kills the free version of ESXi virtualization software

Biz & IT, Broadcom, esxi, hypervisor, Tech, virtualization, VM, vmware / /

freesphere —

Software’s free version was a good fit for tinkerers and hobbyists.

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Broadcom-owned VMware kills the free version of ESXi virtualization software

VMware

Since Broadcom’s $61 billion acquisition of VMware closed in November 2023, Broadcom has been charging ahead with major changes to the company’s personnel and products. In December, Broadcom began laying off thousands of employees and stopped selling perpetually licensed versions of VMware products, pushing its customers toward more stable and lucrative software subscriptions instead. In January, it ended its partner programs, potentially disrupting sales and service for many users of its products.

This week, Broadcom is making a change that is smaller in scale but possibly more relevant for home users of its products: The free version of VMware’s vSphere Hypervisor, also known as ESXi, is being discontinued.

ESXi is what is known as a “bare-metal hypervisor,” lightweight software that runs directly on hardware without requiring a separate operating system layer in between. ESXi allows you to split a PC’s physical resources (CPUs and CPU cores, RAM, storage, networking components, and so on) among multiple virtual machines. ESXi also supports passthrough for PCI, SATA, and USB accessories, allowing guest operating systems direct access to components like graphics cards and hard drives.

The free version of ESXi had limits compared to the full, paid enterprise versions—it could only support up to two physical CPUs, didn’t come with any software support, and lacked automated load-balancing and management features. But it was still useful for enthusiasts and home users who wanted to run multipurpose home servers or to split a system’s time between Windows and one or more Linux distributions without the headaches of dual booting. It was also a useful tool for people who used the enterprise versions of the vSphere Hypervisor but wanted to test the software or learn its ins and outs without dealing with paid licensing.

For the latter group, a 60-day trial of the VMware vSphere 8 software is still available. Tinkerers will be better off trying to migrate to an alternative product instead, like Proxmox, XCP-ng, or even the Hyper-V capabilities built into the Pro versions of Windows 10 and 11.

Broadcom-owned VMware kills the free version of ESXi virtualization software Read More »

windows-11-24h2-goes-from-“unsupported”-to-“unbootable”-on-some-older-pcs

Windows 11 24H2 goes from “unsupported” to “unbootable” on some older PCs

Tech, Windows, Windows 11, windows 11 24h2 / /

is anyone still reading this using a Core 2 Duo? —

New Windows version needs CPU features that became common in the late 00s.

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We've installed Windows 11 on systems as old as this Core 2 Duo Inspiron tower. As of version 24H2, the OS may no longer be bootable on these systems.

Enlarge / We’ve installed Windows 11 on systems as old as this Core 2 Duo Inspiron tower. As of version 24H2, the OS may no longer be bootable on these systems.

Andrew Cunningham

Officially, Windows 11 has higher system requirements than Windows 10. But to date, once you’ve bypassed those requirement checks, there have been few consequences to running Windows 11 on old hardware. Unsupported or not, Windows 11 would run on pretty much any 64-bit PC that could boot Windows 10—we’ve run it on PCs as old as a Windows XP-era Core 2 Duo desktop.

That’s apparently changing a bit in Windows 11’s 24H2 update, which Microsoft began testing earlier this month. According to posts from a user named Bob Pony on X, formerly Twitter, the latest Windows 11 builds refuse to boot on older processors that don’t support a relatively obscure instruction called “POPCNT.” Short for “population count,” it’s used for “counting the number of bits in a machine word,” according to an explainer by programmer Vaibhav Sagar.

It’s unclear why POPCNT has become the load-bearing CPU instruction for a whole bunch of Windows components, but it looks like the Windows kernel, the system’s USB and network drivers, and other core system files now require the instruction as of Windows 11 24H2.

In modern x86 CPUs, POPCNT is implemented as part of the SSE4 instruction set. For Intel’s chips, it was added as part of SSE4.2 in the original first-generation Core architecture, codenamed Nehalem. In AMD’s processors, it’s included in SSE4a, first used in Phenom, Athlon, and Sempron CPUs based on the K10 architecture. These architectures date back to 2008 and 2007, respectively.

That effectively bars mid-2000s Intel Core 2 Duo systems and early Athlon 64-era PCs from booting Windows 11 at all, not that they officially supported it in the first place. This means the change should mainly affect retro-computing enthusiasts who spend their days making YouTube videos in the “we installed Windows 11 on a potato, let’s see how it runs” genre rather than users of actual systems. Even if you upgraded these PCs with 4 or 8GB of RAM and changed out the creaky old hard drives for SSDs, these are not PCs that will run Windows 10, Windows 11, or any modern apps particularly well.

These same retro-computing enthusiasts may also find a way around this requirement eventually. Windows 10 and 11 won’t boot on systems without SSE2 support, for example, but that hasn’t stopped people from finding a way to do it anyway.

Though Windows 11’s system requirements suggest CPU clock speed and the amounts of RAM and storage your PC has, system requirements in the modern era have become more granular and esoteric. For example, it seems as though Windows 11’s CPU requirement (an 8th-gen Intel Core CPU or newer, or an AMD Ryzen 2000-series CPU or newer) is driven at least partly by support for “mode-based execution control” (MBEC), a security feature that accelerates some of the operating system’s memory integrity protections. No CPU manufacturer is including stuff like POPCNT or MBEC in their marketing materials, but modern Windows support is increasingly dictated by these kinds of features.

Listing image by Microsoft

Windows 11 24H2 goes from “unsupported” to “unbootable” on some older PCs Read More »

apple’s-imessage-is-not-a-“core-platform”-in-eu,-so-it-can-stay-walled-off

Apple’s iMessage is not a “core platform” in EU, so it can stay walled off

Apple, beeper, beeper mini, brendan carr, Digital Markets Act, European Union, FCC, federal communications commission, iMessage, IPhone, messaging, Policy, SMS, Tech / /

Too core to fail —

Microsoft’s Edge browser, Bing search, and ad business also avoid regulations.

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Apple Messages in a Mac dock

Getty Images

Apple’s iMessage service is not a “gatekeeper” prone to unfair business practices and will thus not be required under the Fair Markets Act to open up to messages, files, and video calls from other services, the European Commission announced earlier today.

Apple was one of many companies, including Google, Amazon, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Meta, and Microsoft to have its “gatekeeper” status investigated by the European Union. The iMessage service did meet the definition of a “core platform,” serving at least 45 million EU users monthly and being controlled by a firm with at least 75 billion euros in market capitalization. But after “a thorough assessment of all arguments” during a five-month investigation, the Commission found that iMessage and Microsoft’s Bing search, Edge browser, and ad platform “do not qualify as gatekeeper services.” The unlikelihood of EU demands on iMessage was apparent in early December when Bloomberg reported that the service didn’t have enough sway with business users to demand more regulation.

Had the Commission ruled otherwise, Apple would have had until August to open its service. It would have been interesting to see how the company would have complied, given that it provides end-to-end encryption and registers senders based on information from their registered Apple devices.

Google had pushed the Commission to force Apple into “gatekeeper status,” part of Google’s larger campaign to make Apple treat Android users better when they trade SMS messages with iPhone users. While Apple has agreed to take up RCS, an upgraded form of carrier messaging with typing indicators and better image and video quality, it will not provide encryption for Android-to-iPhone SMS, nor remove the harsh green coloring that particularly resonates with younger users.

Apple is still obligated to comply with the Digital Markets Act’s other implications on its iOS operating system, its App Store, and its Safari browser. The European Union version of iOS 17.4, due in March, will offer “alternative app marketplaces,” or sideloading, along with the tools so that those other app stores can provide updates and other services. Browsers on iOS will also be able to use their own rendering engines rather than providing features only on top of mobile Safari rendering. Microsoft, among other firms, will make similar concessions in certain areas of Europe with Windows 11 and other products.

While it’s unlikely to result in the same kind of action, Brendan Carr, a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, said at a conference yesterday that the FCC “has a role to play” in investigating whether Apple’s blocking of the Beeper Mini app violated Part 14 rules regarding accessibility and usability. “I think the FCC should launch an investigation to look at whether Apple’s decision to degrade the Beeper Mini functionality… was a step that violated the FCC’s rules in Part 14,” Carr said at the State of the Net policy conference in Washington, DC.

Beeper Mini launched with the ability for Android users to send fully encrypted iMessage messages to Apple users, based on reverse-engineering of its protocol and registration. Days after its launch, Apple blocked its users and issued a statement saying that it was working to stop exploits and spam. The blocking and workarounds continued until Beeper announced that it was shifting its focus away from iMessage and back to being a multi-service chat app, minus one particular service. Beeper’s experience had previously garnered recognition from Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.).

Ars has reached out to Apple, Microsoft, and Google for comment and will update this post if we receive responses.

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encrypted-email-service-skiff-gets-acquired,-will-shut-down-in-six-months

Encrypted email service Skiff gets acquired, will shut down in six months

Tech / /

You are no longer needed —

Skiff users will lose their @skiff.com email addresses, need to export data ASAP.

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The Skiff email app.

Enlarge / The Skiff email app.

Skiff, an encrypted email and productivity startup, is being acquired and shut down by another productivity suite company, Notion. Skiff users have just six months before their email and all other data are wiped out. If you set up forwarding before the shutdown date, Skiff says it will keep forwarding your email to another service for the next year.

Skiff’s website has been replaced with the purchase notice and a link to a data migration page, which says, “We will be closing down Skiff’s product suite after a 6-month sunset period.” Acquisitions happen all the time, but in this case, there will be no transfer or continuation of service over to Notion. Users will lose their @skiff.com email address and all data will be deleted, so export your mail soon. Skiff has export services available at https://app.skiff.com/dashboard/?settingTab=export.

Losing your email address can be a nightmare, as it can feel almost impossible to chase down every service you’ve tied to your account. Based on the pile of posts inundating Skiff’s account on X, Skiff users seem pretty upset by the move. The main page of skiff.com doesn’t even mention the impending shutdown. A sign-off reads, “We look forward to continuing to serve you,” so it’s easy to assume that the service will keep running.

You only learn about the impending shutdown after scrolling down, clicking the small “migrate your data” link at the bottom of the page, and opening the first FAQ answer. In the fourth paragraph, you finally learn about the six-month warning. Burying the lede under all the self-congratulatory acquisition news makes Skiff users look like a disposable afterthought.

After receiving complaints, Skiff responded by saying, “We deeply apologize for the inconveniences caused,” and the company will now keep email forwarding running “through 2025 for one year going forward.” Skiff was a public service for just two years and had 2 million users; it was seen by some as a growing competitor to services like Proton Mail. Skiff started at $0 per month but had several premium plans that added more storage, email addresses, and custom domains for $3–$12 per month.

Skiff had raised $14 million from various big-name venture capital investors like Sequoia Capital, Alphabet chairman John Hennessy, and Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. Publicly, the company is committed to users and privacy, but those VCs needed a return on their investment. Notion doesn’t have the privacy focus that Skiff had, so that whole idea seems dead.

Notion started as a note-taking app that competed with products like Evernote but now seems to be acquiring its way into offering a full-blown productivity suite. The company has a calendar app, a docs app, a wiki editor, an AI chatbot, and project management software. With Skiff, there will now presumably be an email service, putting Notion pretty close to Google Workspace or Office 365.

Encrypted email service Skiff gets acquired, will shut down in six months Read More »

prime-video-cuts-dolby-vision,-atmos-support-from-ad-tier—and-didn’t-tell-subs

Prime Video cuts Dolby Vision, Atmos support from ad tier—and didn’t tell subs

Amazon, amazon prime video, culture, dolby atmos, dolby vision, streaming, Tech / /

Surprise —

To get them back, you must pay an extra $2.99/month for the ad-free tier.

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High King Gil-galad and Elrond in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

Enlarge / The Rings of Power… now in HDR10+ for ad-tier users.

On January 29, Amazon started showing ads to Prime Video subscribers in the US unless they pay an additional $2.99 per month. But this wasn’t the only change to the service. Those who don’t pay up also lose features; their accounts no longer support Dolby Vision or Dolby Atmos.

As noticed by German tech outlet 4K Filme on Sunday, Prime Video users who choose to sit through ads can no longer use Dolby Vision or Atmos while streaming. Ad-tier subscribers are limited to HDR10+ and Dolby Digital 5.1.

4K Filme confirmed that this was the case on TVs from both LG and Sony; Forbes also confirmed the news using a TCL TV.

“In the ads-free account, the TV throws up its own confirmation boxes to say that the show is playing in Dolby Vision HDR and Dolby Atmos. In the basic, with-ads account, however, the TV’s Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos pop-up boxes remain stubbornly absent,” Forbes said.

Amazon hasn’t explained its reasoning for the feature removal, but it may be trying to cut back on licensing fees paid to Dolby Laboratories. Amazon may also hope to push HDR10+, a Dolby Vision competitor that’s free and open. It also remains possible that we could one day see the return of Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos to the ad tier through a refreshed licensing agreement.

Amazon has had a back-and-forth history with supporting Dolby features. In 2016, it first made Dolby Vision available on Prime Video. In 2017, though, Prime Video stopped supporting the format in favor of HDR10+. Amazon announced the HDR10+ format alongside Samsung, and it subsequently made the entire Prime Video library available in HDR10+. But in 2022, Prime Video started offering content like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power in Dolby Vision once again.

Amazon wasn’t upfront about removals

Amazon announced in September 2023 that it would run ads on Prime Video accounts in 2024; in December, Amazon confirmed that the ads would start running on January 29 unless subscribers paid extra. In the interim, Amazon failed to mention that it was also removing support for Dolby Vision and Atmos from the ad-supported tier.

Forbes first reported on Prime Video’s ad-based tier not supporting Dolby Vision and Atmos by assuming that it was a technical error. Not until after Forbes published its article did Amazon officially confirm the changes. That’s not how people subscribing to a tech giant’s service expect to learn about a diminishing of their current plan.

It also seems that Amazon’s removal of the Dolby features has been done in such a way that it could lead some users to think they’re getting Dolby Vision and Atmos support even when they’re not.

As Forbes’ John Archer reported, “To add a bit of confusion to the mix, on the TCL TV I used, the Prime Video header information for the Jack Ryan show that appears on the with-ads basic account shows Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos among the supported technical features—yet when you start to play the episode, neither feature is delivered to the TV.”

As streaming services overtake traditional media, many customers are growing increasingly discouraged by how the industry seems to be evolving into something strongly reminiscent of cable. While there are some aspects of old-school TV worth emulating, others—like confusing plans that don’t make it clear what you get with each package—are not.

Amazon didn’t respond to questions Ars Technica sent in time for publication, but we’ll update this story if we hear back.

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