TV manufacturers are shifting their focus from hardware sales to viewer data and advertising revenue. This trend is driven by declining profit margins on TV sets and the growing potential of smart TV operating systems to generate recurring income. Companies like LG, Samsung, and Roku are increasingly prioritizing ad sales and user tracking capabilities in their TVs, ArsTechnica reports. Automatic content recognition (ACR) technology, which analyzes viewing habits, is becoming a key feature for advertisers. TV makers are partnering with data firms to enhance targeting capabilities, with LG recently sharing data with Nielsen and Samsung updating its ACR tech to track streaming ad exposure. This shift raises concerns about privacy and user experience, as TVs become more commercialized and data-driven. Industry experts predict a rise in "shoppable ads" and increased integration between TV viewing and e-commerce platforms. The report adds: With TV sales declining and many shoppers prioritizing pricing, smart TV players will continue developing ads that are harder to avoid and better at targeting. Interestingly, Patrick Horner, practice leader of consumer electronics at analyst Omdia, told Ars that smart TV advertising revenue exceeding smart TV hardware revenue (as well as ad sale margins surpassing those of hardware) is a US-only trend, albeit one that shows no signs of abating. OLED has become a mainstay in the TV marketplace, and until the next big display technology becomes readily available, OEMs are scrambling to make money in a saturated TV market filled with budget options. Selling ads is an obvious way to bridge the gap between today and The Next Big Thing in TVs.

Indeed, with companies like Samsung and LG making big deals with analytics firms and other brands building their businesses around ads, the industry's obsession with ads will only intensify. As we've seen before with TV commercials, which have gotten more frequent over time, once the ad genie is out of the bottle, it tends to grow, not go back inside. One side effect we're already seeing, Horner notes, is "a proliferation of more TV operating systems." While choice is often a good thing for consumers, it's important to consider if new options from companies like Amazon, Comcast, and TiVo actually do anything to notably improve the smart TV experience for owners.

And OS operators' financial success is tied to the number of hours users spend viewing something on the OS. Roku's senior director of ad innovation, Peter Hamilton, told Digiday in May that his team works closely with Roku's consumer team, "whose goal is to drive total viewing hours." Many smart TV OS operators are therefore focused on making it easier for users to navigate content via AI.

Raspberry Pi, the British computer manufacturer, unveiled a new 2GB variant of its flagship Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer on Monday, priced at $50. Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton said the company aims to "bring high-performance general-purpose computing to the widest possible audience" with the new offering. The 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 utilizes a cost-optimized D0 stepping of the BCM2712 application processor, which removes non-essential functionality to reduce manufacturing costs.

Upton stated the chip is "functionally identical" to users compared to higher-memory variants. While the reduced RAM may limit multitasking capabilities, Raspberry Pi's optimized OS allows for efficient resource usage. The company expects the 2GB model to suffice for many users' needs, while power users may opt for 4GB or 8GB versions priced at $60 and $80 respectively. The Raspberry Pi 5, launched in October 2023, features a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 CPU running at 2.4GHz, dual 4K display output, and support for PCIe SSDs. Upton noted the latest model is "about 150 times as powerful" as the original Raspberry Pi from 2012.

Slashdot reader yeokm1 is the Singapore-based embedded security researcher whose side projects include installing Linux on a 1993 PC and building a ChatGPT client for MS-DOS.

Today he writes: When one thinks of modern technologies like Thunderbolt, 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet and modern CPUs, one would associate them with modern operating systems. How about DOS?

It might seem impossible, however I did an experiment on a relatively modern 2020 Thinkpad and found that it can still run MS-DOS 6.22. MS-DOS 6.22 is the last standalone version of DOS released by Microsoft in June 1994. This makes it 30 years old today.

I'll share the steps and challenges in locating a modern laptop capable of doing so — and the challenge of making the 30-year-old OS work on it with audio and networking functions. This is likely among the final generation of laptops able to run DOS natively.

Valve designer Lawrence Yang confirmed to The Verge that the company plans to support SteamOS on the rival Asus ROG Ally gaming handheld. From the report: A few days ago, some spotted an intriguing line in Valve's latest SteamOS release notes: "Added support for extra ROG Ally keys." We didn't know Valve was supporting any ROG Ally keys at all, let alone extras! Maybe Valve was just supporting those keys in the Steam desktop client on a Windows, where it offers a Steam Deck-like Big Picture Mode interface for any PC, and the line mistakenly made it into these patch notes? I asked to be safe. But no: this is indeed about Valve eventually supporting the ROG Ally and other rival handhelds!

"The note about ROG Ally keys is related to third-party device support for SteamOS. The team is continuing to work on adding support for additional handhelds on SteamOS," Yang tells me. That doesn't mean Asus will officially bless Valve's installer or sell the Ally with SteamOS, of course. (Asus has told me there are many reasons why it ships with Windows; a big one is that Microsoft has dedicated validation teams that ensure its operating system works across many different hardware configurations and chips.) And it's not like Valve is suggesting it'll offer SteamOS for rival handhelds anytime soon, either. Valve is "making steady progress," Yang tells me, but it "isn't ready to run out of the box yet." Valve has announced plans for a general release of SteamOS 3 that can be installed on non-handheld PCs; however, Yang says it's not quite ready yet. As for turning Steam Decks into dual-booting Windows machines, here's what Yang said: "As for Windows, we're preparing to make the remaining Windows drivers for Steam Deck OLED available (you might have seen that we are prepping firmware for the Bluetooth driver). There's no update on the timing for dual boot support -- it's still a priority, but we haven't been able to get to it just yet."

Google unveiled its latest Pixel smartphone series on Tuesday, introducing four new models with enhanced AI capabilities and updated designs. The Pixel 9 lineup includes the standard Pixel 9, two Pro models, and a foldable device. The new Pixel phones feature flat sides and an elongated camera module on the rear, departing from the curved edges of previous generations. Screen sizes range from 6.3 inches on the standard Pixel 9 to 6.8 inches on the Pixel 9 Pro XL.

All models are powered by Google's new Tensor G4 processor and come with increased RAM, with Pro models boasting 16GB. The devices run on Android 14 and will receive seven years of OS updates and security patches. Google has significantly expanded the AI capabilities of the new Pixels. An updated on-device Gemini Nano model can now analyze images and speech in addition to text. New features include automatic screenshot cataloging and retrieval, and an AI-powered illustration generator called Pixel Studio. Camera improvements are a key focus, with all models receiving upgraded ultrawide lenses and the Pro versions featuring a new 42-megapixel selfie camera with autofocus. Google has introduced "Magic Editor," allowing users to transform parts of an image using text prompts and generative AI.

The Pixel 9 Pro Fold, Google's second-generation foldable device, is thinner than its predecessor at 5.1mm when unfolded. It features a larger 8-inch inner display with increased brightness, reaching up to 2,700 nits in peak mode. Pricing for the new Pixel lineup starts at $799 for the standard Pixel 9, representing a $100 increase from last year's model. The Pixel 9 Pro and Pro XL are priced at $999 and $1,099 respectively, while the Pixel 9 Pro Fold will retail for $1,799. The devices will be released in stages, with the Pixel 9 and 9 Pro XL available from August 22, followed by the 9 Pro in September and the Pro Fold on September 4.

Michael Larabel reports via Phoronix: Intel Linux engineer Colin Ian King discovered that if aligning the slab in the ACPI code via the "SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN" flag will offer a measurable improvement in memory performance and reducing the kernel boot time.

Colin explained with this one line kernel patch: "Enabling SLAB_HWCACHE_ALIGN for the ACPI object caches improves boot speed in the ACPICA core for object allocation and free'ing especially in the AML parsing and execution phases in boot. Testing with 100 boots shows an average boot saving in acpi_init of ~35000 usecs compared to the unaligned version. Most of the ACPI objects being allocated and free'd are of very short life times in the critical paths for parsing and execution, so the extra memory used for alignment isn't too onerous."

Security researchers from SafeBreach have found what they say is a Windows downgrade attack that's invisible, persistent, irreversible and maybe even more dangerous than last year's BlackLotus UEFI bootkit. From a report: After seeing the damage that UEFI bootkit could do by bypassing secure boot processes in Windows, SafeBreach's Alon Leviev became curious whether there were any other fundamental Windows components that could be abused in a similar manner. He hit the jackpot in one of the most unlikely places: The Windows update process.

"I found a way to take over Windows updates to update the system, but with control over all of the actual update contents," Leviev told us in an interview ahead of his Black Hat USA conference presentation today detailing his findings. Using his technique, having compromised a machine so that he could get in as a normal user, Leviev was able to control which files get updated, which registry keys are changed, which installers get used, and the like. And he was able to do all of it while side-stepping every single integrity verification implemented in the Windows update process. After that, "I was able to downgrade the OS kernel, DLLs, drivers ... basically everything that I wanted." To make matters worse, Leviev said that poking and prodding around the vulnerabilities he found enabled him to attack the entire Windows virtualization stack, including virtualization-based security (VBS) features that are supposed to isolate the kernel and make attacker access less valuable.

With Windows 10's end-of-life update coming next October, it appears that users are finally making the jump to its successor. As spotted by Neowin, Windows 11 crossed the 30% market share mark for the first time since its release. From the report: According to Statcounter's latest findings, last month, Windows 11 reached a new all-time high of 30.83%, gaining 1.08 points in just one month or 7.17 points year-over-year (it was at 23.66% in July 2023). Just as Windows 11 climbs, Windows 10 loses its market share. It is now below 65%, or 64.99%, to be precise, or -1.06 points in one month. Year-over-year change is 11.15 points (it was at 71.14% in July 2023). [...]

Other Windows versions, which are now long unsupported, still have a fair share of customers who refuse to jump-ship. Windows 7, for one, is the third most popular Windows with a 3.04% market share (+0.08 points). Windows 8.1 is fourth with 0.42% (+0.02 points), and Windows XP is fifth with 0.38% (-0.01 points).

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from Phoronix: The Redox OS project that is a from scratch open-source operating system written in the Rust programming language now has a working web server, among other improvements achieved during the month of July...

Notable new software work includes getting the Simple HTTP Server running as the first web (HTTP) server for the platform. Simple HTTP Server itself is written in Rust as well. There is also an ongoing effort to bring the Apache HTTP server to Redox OS too.

Another app milestone is the wget program now working on Redox OS. There's also been more work on getting the COSMIC desktop apps working on Redox OS, build system improvements, and other changes.

According to Statcounter, Linux use hit another all-time high in July. For July 2024, the statistics website is showing Linux at 4.45%, climbing almost a half a percentage point from June's 4.05% high.

Is 2024 truly the year of Linux on the desktop?

Azure used to be a cloud platform dedicated to Windows. Now, it's the most widely used operating system on Microsoft Azure. The New Stack's Joab Jackson writes: These days, Microsoft expends considerable effort that Linux runs as smoothly as possible on Azure, according to a talk given earlier this year at the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit given by two Microsoft Azure Linux Platforms Group program managers, Jack Aboutboul, and Krum Kashan. "Linux is the #1 operating system in Azure today," Aboutoul said. And all must be supported in a way that Microsoft users have come to expects. Hence, the need for the Microsoft's Linux Platforms Group, which provides support Linux to both the internal customers and to Azure customers. These days, the duo of engineers explained, Microsoft knows about as much as anyone about how to operate Linux at hyperscale. [...]

As of today, there are hundreds of Azure and Azure-based services running on Linux, including the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), OpenAI, HDInsight, and many of the other database services. "A lot of the infrastructure powering everything else is running on Linux," Aboutoul said. "They're different flavors of Linux running all over the place," Aboutoul said. To run these services, Microsoft maintains its own kernel, Azure Linux, and in 2023 the company released its own version of Linux, Azure Linux. But Azure Linux is just a small portion of all the other flavors of Linux running on Azure, all of which Microsoft must work with to support.

Overall, there are about 20,000 third-party Software as a Service (SaaS) packages in the Azure marketplace that rely on some Linux distribution. And when things go wrong, it is the Azure service engineers who get the help tickets. The company keeps a set of endorsed Linux distributions, which include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian, Flatcar, Suse, Canonical, and Oracle Linux and CentOS (as managed by OpenLogic, not Red Hat). [...] Overall, the company gets about 1,000 images a month from these endorsed partners alone. Many of the distributions have multiple images (Suse has a regular one, and another one for high-performance computing, for instance).

In an interview with The Verge's Nilay Patel, Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said the automaker has no plans to adopt Apple CarPlay in its vehicles. "We have a great relationship with Apple," he said. "As much as I love their products, there's a reason that ironically is very consistent with Apple ethos for us to want to control the ecosystem." CarPlay isn't "consistent with how we think about really creating a pure product experience," Scaringe said. From the report: One example given by Scaringe includes CarPlay's inability to "leverage other parts of the vehicle experience," which would require Rivian customers to leave the app in order to do things like open the vehicle's front trunk. "We've taken the view of the digital experience in the vehicle wants to feel consistent and holistically harmonious across every touchpoint," said Scaringe. Instead, the Rivian CEO says the company will eventually add CarPlay's most desirable features "but on an a la carte basis."

Scaringe says that excluding CarPlay will allow the company to be more selective about features like routing and mapping charging points, noting that Rivian had acquired route planning app maker Iternio last year to facilitate that. "We recognize that it'll take us time to fully capture every feature that's in CarPlay, and hopefully, customers are seeing that. I think it often gets more noise than it deserves," Scaringe said in the interview. "The other thing beyond mapping that's coming is better integration with texting. We know that needs to come, and it's something that teams are actively working on."

At the end of June, Apple's App Store rejected the Windows/retro PC emulator "UTM SE". But in a reversal Apple approved the app Saturday, reports the Verge.

"We are happy to announce that UTM SE is available (for free) on iOS and visionOS App Store," the developer posted on X, "and coming soon to AltStore PAL."

From the Verge: After Apple rejected the app in June, the developer said it wasn't going to keep trying because the app was "a subpar experience." Today, UTM thanked the AltStore team for helping it and credited another developer "whose QEMU TCTI implementation was pivotal for this JIT-less build."

As with other emulators on the App Store, you can't do much with UTM SE out of the box. It doesn't come with any operating systems, though the app does link to UTM's site, which has guides for Windows XP through Windows 11 emulation, as well as downloads of pre-built virtual Linux machines. Mac OS 9.2.1 and DOS are listed in one screenshot from the UTM SE App Store page. Mac OS 9.2.1 and DOS are listed in one screenshot from the UTM SE App Store page.

Slashdot reader joshuark shared this report from BetaNews: Check Point Research has identified a critical zero-day spoofing attack exploiting Microsoft Internet Explorer on modern Windows 10/11 systems, despite the browser's retirement.

Identified as CVE-2024-38112, this vulnerability allows attackers to execute remote code by tricking users into opening malicious Internet Shortcut (.url) files. This attack method has been active for over a year and could potentially impact millions... Attackers use a sophisticated trick to mask the malicious .hta extension, making use of the outdated security of Internet Explorer to compromise systems running updated Windows operating systems.
From Check Point Research: Even though IE has been proclaimed "retired and out-of-support," technically speaking, IE is still part of the Windows OS and is "not inherently unsafe, as IE is still serviced for security vulnerabilities, and there should be no known exploitable security vulnerabilities," according to our communications with Microsoft.

Jowi Morales reports via Tom's Hardware: There's a vast difference between hardware and software developers, which opens up pitfalls for those trying to coordinate the two teams. Arm and x86 researchers encountered it years ago -- and Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, fears RISC-V development may fall into the same chasm again. "Even when you do hardware design in a more open manner, hardware people are different enough from software people [that] there's a fairly big gulf between the Verilog and even the kernel, much less higher up the stack where you are working in what [is] so far away from the hardware that you really have no idea how the hardware works," he said (video here). "So, it's really hard to kind of work across this very wide gulf of things and I suspect the hardware designers, some of them have some overlap, but they will learn by doing mistakes -- all the same mistakes that have been done before." [...]

"They'll have all the same issues we have on the Arm side and that x86 had before them," he says. "It will take a few generations for them to say, 'Oh, we didn't think about that,' because they have new people involved." But even if RISC-V development is still expected to make many mistakes, he also said it will be much easier to develop the hardware now. Linus says, "It took a few decades to really get to the point where Arm and x86 are competing on fairly equal ground because there was al this software that was fairly PC-centric and that has passed. That will make it easier for new architectures like RISC-V to then come in."

williamyf writes: Mozilla has released version 128 of the Firefox web browser. Some noteworthy features include: "Firefox can now translate selections of text and hyperlinked text to other languages from the context menu. [...] Firefox now has a simpler and more unified dialog for clearing user data. In addition to streamlining data categories, the new dialog also provides insights into the site data size corresponding to the selected time range. [...] On macOS, microphone capture through getUserMedia will now use system-provided voice processing when applicable, improving audio quality." More info in the release notes here.

But the most important feature of 128 is that it is the newest ESR. Why is this important? Glad you asked:

* Firefox ESR is the browser of choice for many Linux distros (including Debian), so this is important for the Linux community at large.
* Many downstream projects (like Thunderbird or KAiOS) use Firefox ESR as their base, so whatever is included in 128 will determine the capabilities of those projects for the next year.
* Many ISVs (software makers), both big and small, test/certify their software only against the ESR version of Firefox. For users of such software, the new ESR is very important.
* Many companies and individuals value stability of the UI/Workflow over new bells and whistles, for them, ESR is important.
* When an OS is discontinued, Mozilla lets the ESR be the last browser on the platform, exceeding the support window of the likes of Alphabeth, Apple or Microsoft, so for people on older OSs, ESR is important.

Link to download (the ESR) here.

Its FOSS writes: When it comes to Linux, we get to see some really cool, and sometimes quirky projects (read Hannah Montana Linux) that try to show off what's possible, and that's not a bad thing. One such quirky undertaking has recently surfaced, which sees a sophomore trying to one-up their friend, who had booted Linux off NFS. With their work, they have been able to run Arch Linux on Google Drive.
Their ultimate idea included FUSE (which allows running file-system code in userspace). The developer's blog post explains that when Linux boots, "the kernel unpacks a temporary filesystem into RAM which has the tools to mount the real filesystem... it's very helpful! We can mount a FUSE filesystem in that step and boot normally.... " Thankfully, Dracut makes it easy enough to build a custom initramfs... I decide to build this on top of Arch Linux because it's relatively lightweight and I'm familiar with how it work."
Doing testing in an Amazon S3 container, they built an EFI image — then spent days trying to enable networking... And the adventure continues. ("Would it be possible to manually switch the root without a specialized system call? What if I just chroot?") After they'd made a few more tweaks, "I sit there, in front of my computer, staring. It can't have been that easy, can it? Surely, this is a profane act, and the spirit of Dennis Ritchie ought't've stopped me, right? Nobody stopped me, so I kept going..." I build the unified EFI file, throw it on a USB drive under /BOOT/EFI, and stick it in my old server... This is my magnum opus. My Great Work. This is the mark I will leave on this planet long after I am gone: The Cloud Native Computer.

Despite how silly this project is, there are a few less-silly uses I can think of, like booting Linux off of SSH, or perhaps booting Linux off of a Git repository and tracking every change in Git using gitfs. The possibilities are endless, despite the middling usefulness.

If there is anything I know about technology, it's that moving everything to The Cloud is the current trend. As such, I am prepared to commercialize this for any company wishing to leave their unreliable hardware storage behind and move entirely to The Cloud. Please request a quote if you are interested in True Cloud Native Computing.

Unfortunately, I don't know what to do next with this. Maybe I should install Nix?

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: "If Einstein paved the way for a new era in physics," explains auction house Christie's in a promotion piece for its upcoming offering of 150+ "objects of scientific and historical importance" from the Paul G. Allen Collection (including items from the shuttered Living Computers Museum), "Mr. Allen and his collaborators ushered in a new era of computing. Starting with MS-DOS in 1981, Microsoft then went on to revolutionize personal computing with the launch of Windows in 1985."

Christie's auction and characterization of MS-DOS as an Allen and Microsoft innovation comes 30 years after the death of Gary Kildall, whose unpublished memoir, the Seattle Times reported in Kildall's July 1994 obituary, called DOS "plain and simple theft" of Kildall's CP/M OS. PC Magazine's The Rise of DOS: How Microsoft Got the IBM PC OS Contract notes that Paul Allen himself traced the genesis of MS-DOS back to a phone call Allen made to Seattle Computer Products owner Rod Brock in which Microsoft licensed Tim Paterson's CP/M-inspired QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) for $10,000 plus a royalty of $15,000 for every company that licensed the software. A shrewd buy-low-sell-high business deal, yes, but hardly an Einstein-caliber breakthrough idea.

Nearly half of Americans are using third-party antivirus software and the rest are either using the default protection in their operating system -- or none at all. From a report: In all, 46 percent of almost 1,000 US citizens surveyed by the reviews site Security.org said they used third-party antivirus on their computers, with 49 percent on their PCs, 18 percent using it on their tablets, and 17 percent on their phones. Of those who solely rely on their operating system's built-in security -- such as Microsoft's Windows Defender, Apple's XProtect, and Android's Google Play -- 12 percent are planning to switch to third-party software in the next six months.

Of those who do look outside the OS, 54 percent of people pay for the security software, 43 percent choose the stripped-down free version, and worryingly, three percent aren't sure whether they pay or not. Among paying users, the most popular brands were Norton, McAfee, and Malwarebytes, while free users preferred -- in order -- McAfee, Avast, and Malwarebytes. The overwhelming reason for purchasing, cited by 84 percent of respondents, was, of course, fear of malware. The next most common reasons were privacy, at 54 percent, and worries over online shopping, at 48 percent. Fear of losing cryptocurrency stashes from wallets was at eight percent, doubled since last year's survey.

An anonymous reader shares a report: ChromeOS Flex extends the lifespan of older hardware and contributes to reducing e-waste, making it an environmentally conscious choice. Unfortunately, recent developments hint at a potential end for ChromeOS Flex. As detailed in a June 12 blog post by Prajakta Gudadhe, senior director of engineering for ChromeOS, and Alexander Kuscher, senior director of product management for ChromeOS, Google's announcement about integrating ChromeOS with Android to enhance AI capabilities suggests that Flex might not be part of this future.

Google's plan, as detailed, suggests that ChromeOS Flex could be phased out, leaving its current users in a difficult position. The ChromiumOS community around ChromeOS Flex may attempt to adjust to these changes if Google open sources ChromeOS Flex, but this is not a guarantee. In the meantime, users may want to consider alternatives, such as various Linux distributions, to keep their older hardware functional.