An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, software engineer Doug Brown published his discovery of how to trigger a long-known but previously inaccessible Easter egg in the Power Mac G3's ROM: a hidden photo of the development team that nobody could figure out how to display for 27 years. While Pierre Dandumont first documented the JPEG image itself in 2014, the method to view it on the computer remained a mystery until Brown's reverse engineering work revealed that users must format a RAM disk with the text "secret ROM image."

Brown stumbled upon the image while using a hex editor tool called Hex Fiend with Eric Harmon's Mac ROM template to explore the resources stored in the beige Power Mac G3's ROM. The ROM appeared in desktop, minitower, and all-in-one G3 models from 1997 through 1999. "While I was browsing through the ROM, two things caught my eye," Brown wrote. He found both the HPOE resource containing the JPEG image of team members and a suspicious set of Pascal strings in the PowerPC-native SCSI Manager 4.3 code that included ".Edisk," "secret ROM image," and "The Team."

The strings provided the crucial clue Brown needed. After extracting and disassembling the code using Ghidra, he discovered that the SCSI Manager was checking for a RAM disk volume named "secret ROM image." When found, the code would create a file called "The Team" containing the hidden JPEG data. Brown initially shared his findings on the #mac68k IRC channel, where a user named Alex quickly figured out the activation method. The trick requires users to enable the RAM Disk in the Memory control panel, restart, select the RAM Disk icon, choose "Erase Disk" from the Special menu, and type "secret ROM image" into the format dialog. "If you double-click the file, SimpleText will open it," Brown explains on his blog just before displaying the hidden team photo that emerges after following the steps.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The head of the federal government agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac wants the mortgage giants to consider accepting a homebuyer's cryptocurrency holdings in their criteria for buying mortgages from banks. William Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie, ordered the agencies Wednesday to prepare a proposal for consideration of crypto as an asset for reserves when they assess risks in single-family home loans.

Pulte also instructed the agencies that their mortgage risk assessments should not require cryptocurrency assets to be converted to U.S. dollars. And only crypto assets that "can be evidenced and stored on a U.S.-regulated centralized exchange subject to all applicable laws" are to be considered by the agencies in their proposal, Pulte wrote in a written order, effective immediately. Pulte was sworn in as the head of FHFA in March. Public records show that as of January 2025, Pulte's spouse owned between $500,000 and $1 million of bitcoin and a similar amount of Solana's SOL token. [...]

The policy change is meant to encourage banks to expand how they gauge borrowers' creditworthiness, in hopes that more aspiring homebuyers can qualify for a home loan. It also recognizes that cryptocurrencies have grown in popularity as an alternative to traditional investments, such as bonds and stocks. The agencies have to come up with their proposals "as soon as reasonably practical," according to the order. "This is a big win for advocates of cryptocurrencies who want crypto to be treated the same way as other assets are," said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin.

Currently, stock investments are treated as qualifying assets that count toward reserves that banks want borrowers to have. But assets that are more volatile, like individual stocks or crypto, may be discounted by lenders, Fairweather noted. "As long as lenders are appropriately discounting crypto based on volatility, it's fine that crypto investments count toward reserves," she said.

Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com, added: "If Fannie and Freddie are going to accept cryptocurrency as collateral, that's a strong incentive for banks to shift their practices. Because people who might otherwise have to sell cryptocurrency to qualify -- and maybe that's a deal-breaker for them now -- under this new policy, they can qualify. It sort of expands the potential pool of eligible buyers."

Apple's iOS 26 introduces Recovery Assistant, a feature that allows users to restore malfunctioning iPhones without requiring a Mac or PC. The system automatically boots devices into Recovery mode when startup issues occur, displaying the message "This iPhone encountered an issue while starting."

Users can then initiate recovery through another Apple device like an iPad, which downloads and installs a newer iOS version onto the malfunctioning iPhone. Apple described Recovery Assistant as "a new way to recover your device if it doesn't start up normally" in release notes for the second iOS 26 beta.

Apple has quietly removed its day-old "The Parent Presentation" video from YouTube. From a report: The Parent Presentation is a customizable slideshow that explains why a Mac is a useful tool in college. [...] Students can customize the presentation slides, and then show it to their parents to convince them to buy them a Mac. In an accompanying YouTube video shared by Apple, comedian Martin Herlihy showed a group of high school students how to effectively use The Parent Presentation. Some users described the ad as "cringe" and "gross."

The first macOS Tahoe beta appears to drop support for legacy FireWire 400 and 800, making it impossible to sync or mount older iPods and external drives that rely on the standard. MacRumors reports: Unlike on macOS Sequoia and earlier versions, the first macOS Tahoe beta does not include a FireWire section in the System Settings app. Of course, this could all end up being a false alarm. It is still early in the macOS Tahoe beta testing cycle, and FireWire support could return in a later beta version, or in time for the final release.

FireWire was primarily developed by Apple, but it was later standardized as IEEE 1394 and licensed for use in non-Apple devices. iPods started to transition from FireWire to USB for data transfer in 2003, so the standard is very outdated, but it would still be the end of an era if macOS Tahoe drops it. The last Mac with a FireWire port was released in 2012, so connecting older iPods and FireWire drives to newer Macs has long required the use of adapters.

Apple software chief Craig Federighi has ruled out bringing macOS to the iPad, amusingly using a kitchen utensil analogy to explain the company's design philosophy. "We don't want to create a boat car or, you know, a spork," Federighi said in an interview. "Someone said, 'If a spoon's great, a fork's great, then let's combine them into a single utensil, right?' It turns out it's not a good spoon and it's not a good fork. It's a bad idea. And so we don't want to build sporks."

The new version of iPadOS, which will ship to consumers later this year, features dynamically resizable windows that users can drag by their corners and a menu bar that is accessible through swipe gestures or cursor movement.

Some observers might consider the iPad Pro itself a "convertible" product that blurs the line between tablet and laptop, he said. However, the Mac and iPad serve distinct purposes, he asserted. "The Mac lets the iPad be iPad," he said adding that Apple's objective "has not been to have iPad completely displace those places where the Mac is the right tool for the job." Rather than full convergence, Federighi said the iPad "can be inspired by elements of the Mac" while remaining a separate platform. "I think the Mac can be inspired by elements of iPad, and I think that that's happened a great deal."

Apple announced that macOS 26 "Tahoe" will be the final version to support Intel-based Macs, with future macOS releases running exclusively on Apple Silicon devices (that is, 2020 M1 models and newer). They will, however, continue to receive security updates for a few more years. 9to5Mac reports: In some ways, Apple has already stopped supporting some non-Apple Silicon models of its lineup. macOS Tahoe does not work with any Intel MacBook Air or Mac mini for instance. But Tahoe does still support some Intel Macs. That includes compatibility with the 2019 16-inch MacBook Pro, the 2020 Intel 13-inch MacBook Pro, 2020 iMac, and the 2019 Mac Pro.

Based on Apple's warning, you can expect that macOS 27 will drop support for all of these legacy machines, and therefore macOS 26 will be the last compatible version. These devices will continue to receive security updates for another three years, however. Going forward, the minimum support hardware generations will be from 2020 onwards, as that is when Apple began the Apple Silicon transition with the M1. M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pros followed in 2021.

At WWDC 2025, Apple announced a new dedicated Games app coming to Mac, iPhone, and iPad with features like leaderboards, matchmaking, and integration with Apple Arcade. Engadget's Jessica Conditt describes it as "a revamp of Game Center" that behaves "more like a modern gaming hub, a la Xbox or GOG Galaxy." From the report: You can see what your friends are playing and challenge them to specific feats in certain titles. The library tab will include every game you've ever downloaded from the App Store, allowing you to booth them up right there. On Mac, a Games app overlay makes communication tools, audio controls, Bluetooth connections and live battery levels accessible at any time.

Apple unveiled iPadOS 26 at its Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday, introducing what appears to be the most significant productivity overhaul in the tablet operating system's history. The update brings dynamically resizable windows that users can drag by their corners, a menu bar accessible through swipe gestures or cursor movement, and Expose for viewing all open windows in a tiled array.

The new windowing system allows users to seamlessly close, minimize, resize, and tile app windows while maintaining the iPad's touch-first interface. When users reopen apps, windows return to their last position and size. The menu bar, a longtime Mac staple, provides access to familiar commands like File, Edit, and View through either touch or trackpad controls.

Apple is also enhancing the Files app with resizable columns and collapsible folders, while bringing the Preview app to iPad for the first time with PDF editing capabilities and Apple Pencil support. The update introduces Background Tasks for computationally intensive processes and new audio features including Voice Isolation and Local capture for video calls.

AppleInsider reports: The engineer behind much of the Mac's early graphical user interfaces, QuickDraw, MacPaint, Hypercard and much more, William D. "Bill" Atkinson, died on June 5 of complications from pancreatic cancer...

Atkinson, who built a post-Apple career as a noted nature photographer, worked at Apple from 1978 to 1990. Among his lasting contributions to Apple's computers were the invention of the menubar, the selection lasso, the "marching ants" item selection animation, and the discovery of a midpoint circle algorithm that enabled the rapid drawing of circles on-screen.

He was Apple Employee No. 51, recruited by Steve Jobs. Atkinson was one of the 30 team members to develop the first Macintosh, but also was principle designer of the Lisa's graphical user interface (GUI), a novelty in computers at the time. He was fascinated by the concept of dithering, by which computers using dots could create nearly photographic images similar to the way newspapers printed photos. He is also credited (alongside Jobs) for the invention of RoundRects, the rounded rectangles still used in Apple's system messages, application windows, and other graphical elements on Apple products.

Hypercard was Atkinson's main claim to fame. He built the a hypermedia approach to building applications that he once described as a "software erector set." The Hypercard technology debuted in 1987, and greatly opened up Macintosh software development.
In 2012 some video clips of Atkinson appeared in some rediscovered archival footage. (Original Macintosh team developer Andy Hertzfeld uploaded "snippets from interviews with members of the original Macintosh design team, recorded in October 1983 for projected TV commercials that were never used.")

Blogger John Gruber calls Atkinson "One of the great heroes in not just Apple history, but computer history." If you want to cheer yourself up, go to Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore.org site and (re-)read all the entries about Atkinson. Here's just one, with Steve Jobs inspiring Atkinson to invent the roundrect. Here's another (surely near and dear to my friend Brent Simmons's heart) with this kicker of a closing line: "I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied."

Some of his code and algorithms are among the most efficient and elegant ever devised. The original Macintosh team was chock full of geniuses, but Atkinson might have been the most essential to making the impossible possible under the extraordinary technical limitations of that hardware... In addition to his low-level contributions like QuickDraw, Atkinson was also the creator of MacPaint (which to this day stands as the model for bitmap image editorsâ — âPhotoshop, I would argue, was conceptually derived directly from MacPaint) and HyperCard ("inspired by a mind-expanding LSD journey in 1985"), the influence of which cannot be overstated.

I say this with no hyperbole: Bill Atkinson may well have been the best computer programmer who ever lived. Without question, he's on the short list. What a man, what a mind, what gifts to the world he left us.

Meta's Facebook and Instagram apps "were siphoning people's data through a digital back door for months," writes a Washington Post tech columnist, citing researchers who found no privacy setting could've stopped what Meta and Yandex were doing, since those two companies "circumvented privacy and security protections that Google set up for Android devices.

"But their tactics underscored some privacy vulnerabilities in web browsers or apps. These steps can reduce your risks." Stop using the Chrome browser. Mozilla's Firefox, the Brave browser and DuckDuckGo's browser block many common methods of tracking you from site to site. Chrome, the most popular web browser, does not... For iPhone and Mac folks, Safari also has strong privacy protections. It's not perfect, though. No browser protections are foolproof. The researchers said Firefox on Android devices was partly susceptible to the data harvesting tactics they identified, in addition to Chrome. (DuckDuckGo and Brave largely did block the tactics, the researchers said....)

Delete Meta and Yandex apps on your phone, if you have them. The tactics described by the European researchers showed that Meta and Yandex are unworthy of your trust. (Yandex is not popular in the United States.) It might be wise to delete their apps, which give the companies more latitude to collect information that websites generally cannot easily obtain, including your approximate location, your phone's battery level and what other devices, like an Xbox, are connected to your home WiFi.

Know, too, that even if you don't have Meta apps on your phone, and even if you don't use Facebook or Instagram at all, Meta might still harvest information on your activity across the web.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Tuesday, classic computer collector Joe Strosnider announced the availability of a new 3D-printer filament that replicates the iconic "Platinum" color scheme used in classic Macintosh computers from the late 1980s through the 1990s. The PLA filament (PLA is short for polylactic acid) allows hobbyists to 3D-print nostalgic novelties, replacement parts, and accessories that match the original color of vintage Apple computers. Hobbyists commonly feed this type of filament into commercial desktop 3D printers, which heat the plastic and extrude it in a computer-controlled way to fabricate new plastic parts.

The Platinum color, which Apple used in its desktop and portable computer lines starting with the Apple IIgs in 1986, has become synonymous with a distinctive era of classic Macintosh aesthetic. Over time, original Macintosh plastics have become brittle and discolored with age, so matching the "original" color can be a somewhat challenging and subjective experience. Strosnider said he paid approximately $900 to develop the color. "Rather than keeping the formulation proprietary, he arranged for Polar Filament to make the color publicly available [for $21.99 per kilogram]," adds Ars.

Apple's upcoming macOS 26 operating system may abandon support for several older Mac models, according to AppleInsider. The casualties will include 2018 MacBook Pro models, the 2020 Intel MacBook Air, the 2017 iMac Pro, and the 2018 Mac mini -- all currently the oldest machines compatible with macOS Sequoia, the report said, citing a source familiar with the matter. The 2019 MacBook Pro models and 2020 5K iMac models will retain compatibility with the new system, codenamed "Cheer," said AppleInsider.

Earlier this month app developer Guilherme Rambo had a warning for iPhone users: If you try to send an audio message using the Messages app to someone who's also using the Messages app, and that message happens to include the name "Dave and Buster's", the message will never be received.

In case you're wondering, "Dave and Buster's" is the name of a sports bar and restaurant in the United States... [T]he recipient will only see the "dot dot dot" animation for several seconds, and it will then eventually disappear. They will never get the audio message.
"The issue was first spotted on the podcast Search Engine..." according to an article in Fortune: Rambo's explanation of the curiosity goes like this.

"When you send an audio message using the Messages app, the message includes a transcription of the audio. If you happen to pronounce the name 'Dave and Buster's' as someone would normally pronounce it, almost like it's a single word, the transcription engine on iOS will recognize the brand name and correctly write it as 'Dave & Buster's' (with an ampersand)," he begins. So far, so good." [But ampersands have special meaning in HTML/XHTML...] And, as MacRumors puts it: "The parsing error triggers Apple's BlastDoor Messages feature that protects users from malicious messages that might rely on problematic parsing, so ultimately, the audio message fails to send."
To solve the mystery, Rambo "plugged the recipient device into my Mac and captured the logs right after the device received the problematic message." Their final thoughts... Since BlastDoor was designed to thwart hacking attempts, which frequently rely on faulty data parsing, it immediately stops what it's doing and just fails. That's what causes the message to get stuck in the "dot dot dot" state, which eventually times out, and the message just disappears. On the surface, this does sound like it could be used to "hack" someone's iPhone via a bad audio message transcription, but in reality what this bug demonstrates is that Apple's BlastDoor mechanism is working as designed.

Many bad parsers would probably accept the incorrectly-formatted XHTML, but that sort of leniency when parsing data formats is often what ends up causing security issues. By being pedantic about the formatting, BlastDoor is protecting the recipient from an exploit that would abuse that type of issue.

Montana has passed a bill allowing licensed clinics to offer experimental medical treatments that haven't been approved by the FDA, provided the drugs have passed phase I safety trials. MIT Technology Review reports: The bill, which was passed by the state legislature on April 29 and is expected to be signed by Governor Greg Gianforte, essentially expands on existing Right to Try legislation in the state. But while that law was originally designed to allow terminally ill people to access experimental drugs, the new bill was drafted and lobbied for by people interested in extending human lifespans -- a group of longevity enthusiasts that includes scientists, libertarians, and influencers. These longevity enthusiasts are hoping Montana will serve as a test bed for opening up access to experimental drugs. [...]

Supporters of the bill say it gives individuals the freedom to make choices about their own bodies. At the same event, bioethicist Jessica Flanigan of the University of Richmond said she was "optimistic" about the measure, because "it's great any time anybody is trying to give people back their medical autonomy." Ultimately, they hope that the new law will enable people to try unproven drugs that might help them live longer, make it easier for Americans to try experimental treatments without having to travel abroad, and potentially turn Montana into a medical tourism hub.

But ethicists and legal scholars aren't as optimistic. "I hate it," bioethicist Alison Bateman-House of New York University says of the bill. She and others are worried about the ethics of promoting and selling unproven treatments -- and the risks of harm should something go wrong. [...] At any rate, the clinics are coming to Montana, says [Dylan Livingston, founder and CEO of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives]. "We have half a dozen that are interested, and maybe two or three that are definitively going to set up shop out there." He won't name names, but he says some of the interested clinicians already have clinics in the US, while others are abroad."

Mac Davis -- founder and CEO of Minicircle, the company that developed the controversial "anti-aging" gene therapy -- told MIT Technology Review he was "looking into it." "I think this can be an opportunity for America and Montana to really kind of corner the market when it comes to medical tourism," says Livingston. "There is no other place in the world with this sort of regulatory environment."

Long-time Slashdot reader mbessey (a Mac/iOS developer) writes: As we're coming up on the 50th anniversary of the first release of UCSD Pascal, I thought it would be interesting to poke around in it a bit, and work on some tools to bring this "portable operating system" back to life on modern hardware, in a modern language (Rust).
Wikipedia describes UCSD Pascal as "a version that ran on a custom operating system that could be ported to different platforms. A key platform was the Apple II, where it saw widespread use as Apple Pascal. This led to Pascal becoming the primary high-level language used for development in the Apple Lisa, and later, the Macintosh. Parts of the original Macintosh operating system were hand-translated into Motorola 68000 assembly language from the Pascal source code."

mbessey is chronicling their new project in a series of blog posts which begins here: The p-System was not the first portable byte-code interpreter and compiler system — that idea goes very far back, at least to the origins of the Pascal language itself. But it was arguably one of the most-successful early versions of the idea and served as an inspiration for future portable software systems (including Java's bytecode, and Infocom's Z-machine).
And they've already gotten UCSD Pascal running in an emulator and built some tools (in Rust) to transfer files to disk images. Now they're working towards writing a p-machine emulator in Rust, which they can they port to "something other than the Mac. Ideally, something small â" like an Arduino or Raspberry Pi Pico."

"Google-owned YouTube's revenue last year was estimated to be $54.2 billion," reports the Los Angeles Times, "which would make it the second-largest media company behind Walt Disney Co., according to a recent report from research firm MoffettNathanson, which called YouTube 'the new king of all media.'" YouTube, run by Chief Executive Neal Mohan since 2023, accounted for 12% of U.S. TV viewing in March, more than other rival streaming platforms including Netflix and Tubi, according to Nielsen... More people are watching YouTube on TV sets rather than on smartphones and computer screens, consuming more than 1 billion hours on average of YouTube content on TV daily, the company said on its website.
When YouTube first started its founders envisioned it as a dating site, according to the article, "where people would upload videos and score them. When that didn't work, the founders decided to open up the platform for all sorts of videos." And since this was 20 years ago, "Users drove traffic to YouTube by sharing videos on MySpace."

But the article includes stories of people getting rich through YouTube's sharing of ad revenue: Patrick Starrr, who produces makeup tutorial videos, said he made his first $1 million through YouTube at the age of 25. He left his job at retailer MAC Cosmetics in Florida and moved to L.A...

[Video creator Dhar Mann] started posting videos on YouTube in 2018 with no film background. Mann previously had a business that sold supplies to grow weed. Today, his company, Burbank-based Dhar Mann Studios, operates on 125,000 square feet of production space, employs roughly 200 people and works with 2,000 actors a year on family friendly programs that touch on how students and families deal with topics such as bullying, narcolepsy, chronic inflammatory bowel disease and hoarding. Mann made $45 million last year, according to Forbes estimates. The majority of his company's revenue comes through YouTube.
He tells the Times "I don't think it's just the future of TV — it is TV, and the world is catching on."

And then there's this... "My mom would always give me so much crap about it — she would say, 'Why do you want to do YouTube?'" said Chucky Appleby, now an executive at MrBeast. His reply: "Mom, you can make a living from this." MrBeast's holding company, Beast Industries, which employs more than 400 people, made $473 million in revenue last year, according to Business Insider. In the last 28 days, MrBeast content — which includes challenges and stunt videos — received 3.6 billion views on YouTube, Appleby said.

Appleby, 28, said he's since bought a Jeep for his mom.

Some developers are "crying foul" after Microsoft's C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code stopped working with VS Code derivatives like VS Codium and Cursor, reports The Register. The move has prompted Cursor to transition to open-source alternatives, while some developers are calling for a regulatory investigation into Microsoft's alleged anti-competitive behavior. From the report: In early April, programmers using VS Codium, an open-source fork of Microsoft's MIT-licensed VS Code, and Cursor, a commercial AI code assistant built from the VS Code codebase, noticed that the C/C++ extension stopped working. The extension adds C/C++ language support, such as Intellisense code completion and debugging, to VS Code. The removal of these capabilities from competing tools breaks developer workflows, hobbles the editor, and arguably hinders competition. The breaking change appears to have occurred with the release of v1.24.5 on April 3, 2025.

Following the April update, attempts to install the C/C++ extension outside of VS Code generate this error message: "The C/C++ extension may be used only with Microsoft Visual Studio, Visual Studio for Mac, Visual Studio Code, Azure DevOps, Team Foundation Server, and successor Microsoft products and services to develop and test your applications." Microsoft has forbidden the use of its extensions outside of its own software products since at least September 2020, when the current licensing terms were published. But it hasn't enforced those terms in its C/C++ extension with an environment check in its binaries until now. [...]

Developers discussing the issue in Cursor's GitHub repo have noted that Microsoft recently rolled out a competing AI software agent capability, dubbed Agent Mode, within its Copilot software. One such developer who contacted us anonymously told The Register they sent a letter about the situation to the US Federal Trade Commission, asking them to probe Microsoft for unfair competition -- alleging self-preferencing, bundling Copilot without a removal option, and blocking rivals like Cursor to lock users into its AI ecosystem.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Whisky, a gaming-focused front-end for Wine's Windows compatibility tools on macOS, is no longer receiving updates. As one of the most useful and well-regarded tools in a Mac gamer's toolkit, it could be seen as a great loss, but its developer hopes you'll move on with what he considers a better option: supporting CodeWeavers' CrossOver product.

Also, Whisky's creator is an 18-year-old college student, and he could use a break. "I am 18, yes, and attending Northeastern University, so it's always a balancing act between my school work and dev work," Isaac Marovitz wrote to Ars. The Whisky project has "been more or less in this state for a few months, I posted the notice mostly to clarify and formally announce it," Marovitz said, having received "a lot of questions" about the project status. [...] "Whisky, in my opinion, has not been a positive on the Wine community as a whole," Marovitz wrote on the Whisky site.

He advised that Whisky users buy a CrossOver license, and noted that while CodeWeavers and Valve's work on Proton have had a big impact on the Wine project, "the amount that Whisky as a whole contributes to Wine is practically zero." Fixes for Wine running Mac games "have to come from people who are not only incredibly knowledgeable on C, Wine, Windows, but also macOS," Marovitz wrote, and "the pool of developers with those skills is very limited." While Marovitz told Ars that he's had "some contact with CodeWeavers" in making Whisky, "they were always curious and never told me what I should or should not do." It became clear to him, though, "from what [CodeWeavers] could tell me as well as observing the attitude of the wider community that Whisky could seriously threaten CrossOver's viability." "Whisky may have been a CrossOver competitor, but that's not how we feel today," wrote CodeWeavers CEO James B. Ramey in a statement. "Our response is simply one of empathy, understanding, and acknowledgement for Isaac's situation."

With macOS now 24 years old and Apple officially designating all Intel-based Mac minis as "vintage" or "obsolete," The Register takes a look at new internet tools that help keep vintage Macs online and surprisingly relevant: Cameron Kaiser of Floodgap Systems is a valuable ally. His retro computing interests are broad, and we've mentioned him a few times on The Register, such as his deep dive into the revolutionary Canon Cat computer, and his evaluation of RISC-V hardware performance. Back in 2020, he revived the native Classic Mac OS port of the Lynx web browser, MacLynx. Earlier this month, he came back to it and has updated it again, including adding native Mac OS dialog boxes. His account is -- as usual -- long and detailed but it's an interesting read. He also maintains some other web browsers for elderly Macs, including TenFourFox for Mac OS X 10.4 and Classilla for Mac OS 8.6 and 9.x.

If you're not up to git pull commands and elderly Mac OS X build tools, then there is a fork of TenFourFox that may be worth a look, InterWebPPC. It's not current with the new batch of patches, but we can still hope for another build. In other "Classic on the internet" news, although it's not a huge amount of use on its own, there's also a newly released Classic Mac OS version of Mbed-TLS on GitHub. This ports the SSL library -- also used in the super-lightweight Dillo browser -- to the older C89/C90 standard, so that it can build in CodeWarrior and run with OpenTransport from Mac OS 9 right back to later versions of Mac OS 7.

Modern macOS is UNIX certified and as such it's not all that dissimilar from other Unix-like OSes, such as Linux and the BSD family. Classic Mac OS is a profoundly different beast, which makes porting modern code to it a complex exercise -- but equally, it's a good learning exercise, and we're delighted to see 21st century programmers exploring this 1980s OS. That may be part of the motivation behind the newly announced and still incomplete SDL 2 "rough draft" that appeared a week ago. It builds on the existing SDL 1.2 port, but so far, it's less complete -- for instance, there's no sound support.