Richard Speed reports via The Register: Asahi Linux, a project to port Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, has reported a combination of bugs in Apple's macOS that could leave users with hardware in a difficult-to-recover state. The issues revolve around how recent versions of macOS handle refresh rates, and MacBook Pro models with ProMotion displays (the 14 and 16-inch versions) are affected. According to the Asahi team, the bugs lurk in the upgrade and boot process and, when combined, can create a condition where a machine always boots to a black screen, and a Device Firmware Update (DFU) recovery is needed.

Asahi Linux's techies have looked into the issue, having first suspected it had something to do with either having an Asahi Linux installation on a Mac and then upgrading to macOS Sonoma or installing Asahi Linux after a Sonoma upgrade. However, the issue appears to be unconnected to the project. The team said: "As far as we can tell, ALL users who upgraded to Sonoma the normal way have an out-of-date or even broken System RecoveryOS, and in particular MacBook Pro 14" and 16" owners are vulnerable to ending up with a completely unbootable system." While this might sound alarming, the team was at pains to assure users that data was not at risk and only certain versions of macOS were affected -- Sonoma 14.0+ and Ventura 13.6+.

The first bug is related to macOS Sonoma using the previously installed version as System Recovery, which can cause problems when an older RecoveryOS runs into newer firmware. The second occurs if a display is configured to a refresh rate other than ProMotion. According to the Asahi Linux team, the system will no longer be able to boot into old macOS installs or Asahi Linux. "This includes recovery mode when those systems are set as the default boot OS, and also System Recovery at least until the next subsequent OS upgrade." The team noted: "Even users with just 13.6 installed single-boot are affected by this issue (no Asahi Linux needed).

"We do not understand how Apple managed to release an OS update that, when upgraded to normally, leaves machines unbootable if their display refresh rate is not the default. This seems to have been a major QA oversight by Apple."

At Apple's "Scary Fast" event today, the company unveiled a refreshed 24-inch iMac, entry-evel MacBook Pro that ditches the Touch Bar, and its latest "M3" in-house chips. The Verge reports: As expected, Apple's M3 chips took the spotlight during this month's event. The new lineup includes the M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips, which Apple says mark the "first personal computer chips" made using the more efficient 3-nanometer process. In addition to offering a "faster and more efficient CPU," the trio of chips comes with an updated GPU that supports ray tracing, mesh shading, and Dynamic Caching -- a feature that optimizes the amount of memory the device uses during tasks. Apple's M3 chips offer up to 128GB of unified memory, with the most powerful M3 Max chip coming with up to 92 billion transistors, a 40-core GPU, and a 16-core CPU.

The new 24-inch iMac is getting an M3-flavored upgrade that Apple says offers two times faster performance than its M1-equipped predecessor. Along with the new chip, the refreshed iMac features a 4.5K Retina display with more than 1 billion colors, support for Wi-Fi 6E, and a 1080p webcam. The iMac also offers up to 24GB of unified memory and comes in seven colors: green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver. There are also color-matched accessories that come with the iMac, but they still feature Lightning connectors. The 24-inch iMac costs $1,299 with an eight-core CPU or $1,499 with a 10-core chip. You can preorder it starting today, with availability starting on November 7th.

Alongside the M3 Pro and M3 Max-equipped MacBook Pro models, Apple is releasing a cheaper 14-inch MacBook Pro that comes with the base M3 chip and starts at $1,599. The device replaces the 13-inch MacBook Pro with an M2 chip that Apple released last year and offers performance that's up to 60 percent faster. The Touch Bar model is being discontinued, which means it's all physical keys from here out. There are some drawbacks to this entry-level model, though: it features a meager 8GB of RAM and comes in just silver and space gray variations -- the black color is exclusive to the higher-end MacBook Pros. The device is available to preorder today and officially launches on November 7th.

Long-time Slashdot reader CJSHayward shares "an attempt at Python virtual shell."

The home-brewed project "mixes your native shell with Python with the goal of letting you use your regular shell but also use Python as effectively a shell scripting language, as an alternative to your shell's built-in scripting language... I invite you to explore and improve it!"

From the web site: The Python Virtual Shell (pvsh or 'p' on the command line) lets you mix zsh / bash / etc. built-in shell scripting with slightly modified Python scripting. It's kind of like Brython [a Python implementation for client-side web programming], but for the Linux / Unix / Mac command line...

The core concept is that all Python code is indented with tabs, with an extra tab at the beginning to mark Python code, and all shell commands (including some shell builtins) have zero tabs of indentation. They can be mixed line-by-line, offering an opportunity to use built-in zsh, bash, etc. scripting or Python scripting as desired.

The Python is an incomplete implementation; it doesn't support breaking a line into multiple lines. Nonetheless, this offers a tool to fuse shell- and Python-based interactions from the Linux / Unix / Mac command line.

Dan Goodin reports via Ars Technica: Three years ago, Apple introduced a privacy-enhancing feature that hid the Wi-Fi address of iPhones and iPads when they joined a network. On Wednesday, the world learned that the feature has never worked as advertised. Despite promises that this never-changing address would be hidden and replaced with a private one that was unique to each SSID, Apple devices have continued to display the real one, which in turn got broadcast to every other connected device on the network. [...]

In 2020, Apple released iOS 14 with a feature that, by default, hid Wi-Fi MACs when devices connected to a network. Instead, the device displayed what Apple called a "private Wi-Fi address" that was different for each SSID. Over time, Apple has enhanced the feature, for instance, by allowing users to assign a new private Wi-Fi address for a given SSID. On Wednesday, Apple released iOS 17.1. Among the various fixes was a patch for a vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-42846, which prevented the privacy feature from working. Tommy Mysk, one of the two security researchers Apple credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerability (Talal Haj Bakry was the other), told Ars that he tested all recent iOS releases and found the flaw dates back to version 14, released in September 2020. "From the get-go, this feature was useless because of this bug," he said. "We couldn't stop the devices from sending these discovery requests, even with a VPN. Even in the Lockdown Mode."

When an iPhone or any other device joins a network, it triggers a multicast message that is sent to all other devices on the network. By necessity, this message must include a MAC. Beginning with iOS 14, this value was, by default, different for each SSID. To the casual observer, the feature appeared to work as advertised. The "source" listed in the request was the private Wi-Fi address. Digging in a little further, however, it became clear that the real, permanent MAC was still broadcast to all other connected devices, just in a different field of the request. Mysk published a short video showing a Mac using the Wireshark packet sniffer to monitor traffic on the local network the Mac is connected to. When an iPhone running iOS prior to version 17.1 joins, it shares its real Wi-Fi MAC on port 5353/UDP.

Apple has announced a Mac event for October 30th with the caption "Scary Fast." According to analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, the company is expected to focus on the M3 series MacBook Pro models. MacRumors reports: Kuo's wording suggests that he is expecting multiple M3 chips rather than just a single M3 chip, hinting at the possibility of M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips. If Apple does release M3, M3 Pro, and M3 Max chips at once, we can expect to see the new chips introduced in 13-inch, 14-inch, and 16-inch MacBook Pro models. Kuo says that he previously predicted that Apple would not likely introduce new MacBook Pro models in 2023 because of "limited 4Q 23 shipments," and if new MacBook Pros do come out in November or December, the tight supply will last until the first quarter of 2024. Kuo further says that Mac shipments have declined due to the "limited M2 computing power upgrade," which may be the reason why Apple might launch M3 MacBook Pro models with low production volume.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman also says that Apple has been testing M3 Max and M3 Pro MacBook Pro models, suggesting that these machines are going to be refreshed. Gurman just last week claimed that Apple would not update the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models with M3 Pro and M3 Max chips until early 2024, so it seems that his predictions have since changed. That Kuo and Gurman are both now suggesting that we'll see 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models at Apple's October event comes as a surprise because much of their prior information pointed toward a 2024 refresh for these devices.

Gurman maintains that Apple will not refresh the MacBook Air models, Mac mini, Mac Studio, or Mac Pro at this time, which leaves the iMac, 13-inch MacBook Pro, 14-inch MacBook Pro, and 16-inch MacBook Pro for the October event. As Gurman has previously pointed out, these are the machines that are facing extended shipping times in Apple's online store. You can watch the event live via Apple's website starting at 5 p.m. PT on October 30th.

Further reading: Apple To Revamp TV App in Step Toward Simplifying Video Services

Mac computer and iPhone maker Apple on Tuesday will announce plans to make parts, tools and documentation needed to repair its products available to independent repair shops and consumers nationwide, at fair and reasonable prices, the White House said. From a report: National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard made the announcement in remarks prepared for a White House event later Tuesday focused on the so-called "right to repair," calling on Congress to pass legislation requiring such action across the country.

The event is part of U.S. President Joe Biden's push to promote competition and crack down on so-called junk fees and other actions that increase prices for consumers. The latest effort is aimed at giving consumers more control over fixing what they own, from tractors to smart phones. Brainard said California, Colorado, New York and Minnesota had already passed right to repair laws, and 30 other states had introduced similar legislation.

According to Reuters, Nvidia is designing ARM-based processors that would run Microsoft's Windows operating system. While they're not expected to be ready until 2025, it poses a major new challenge to Intel which has long dominated the PC industry. From the report: The AI chip giant's new pursuit is part of Microsoft's effort to help chip companies build Arm-based processors for Windows PCs. Microsoft's plans take aim at Apple, which has nearly doubled its market share in the three years since releasing its own Arm-based chips in-house for its Mac computers, according to preliminary third-quarter data from research firm IDC. Advanced Micro Devices also plans to make chips for PCs with Arm technology, according to two people familiar with the matter. Nvidia and AMD could sell PC chips as soon as 2025, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Nvidia and AMD would join Qualcomm, which has been making Arm-based chips for laptops since 2016. At an event on Tuesday that will be attended by Microsoft executives, including vice president of Windows and Devices Pavan Davuluri, Qualcomm plans to reveal more details about a flagship chip that a team of ex-Apple engineers designed, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Nvidia, AMD and Qualcomm's efforts could shake up a PC industry that Intel long dominated but which is under increasing pressure from Apple. Apple's custom chips have given Mac computers better battery life and speedy performance that rivals chips that use more energy. Executives at Microsoft have observed how efficient Apple's Arm-based chips are, including with AI processing, and desire to attain similar performance, one of the sources said. Microsoft has been encouraging the involved chipmakers to build advanced AI features into the CPUs they are designing. The company envisions AI-enhanced software such as its Copilot to become an increasingly important part of using Windows. To make that a reality, forthcoming chips from Nvidia, AMD and others will need to devote the on-chip resources to do so. "Microsoft learned from the 90s that they don't want to be dependent on Intel again, they don't want to be dependent on a single vendor," said Jay Goldberg, chief executive of D2D Advisory, a finance and strategy consulting firm. "If Arm really took off in PC (chips), they were never going to let Qualcomm be the sole supplier."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: It hasn't been a great time in recent quarters for PC companies, but with IDC, Gartner and Canalys all reporting data for Q3 2023, it shows an improving landscape. While shipments still declined between 7% and 9%, depending on whose data you look at, the decline was slowing. But perhaps the biggest surprise in these numbers was the fact Apple was the biggest loser this quarter, with numbers declining between 23% and 29%.

First, let's look at the overall numbers. IDC found the market dropped 7.6% year over year with 68.2 million PCs shipped, Gartner reported a 9% decline with 64.3 million units shipped and Canalys found the market down 7% with 65.6 million units shipped. In spite of that, the consensus was that the long PC market decline may be over, and we could be headed for better days with the holiday shopping season approaching in the final quarter. "There is evidence that the PC market's decline has finally bottomed out," Mikako Kitagawa, director analyst at Gartner, said in a statement.

When you look at individual manufacturers, Apple experienced by far the biggest decline, with IDC reporting -23.1%, Gartner reporting -24.2% and Canalys -29.1%. The only other company with double-digit reductions was Asus, with -10.7%, -11.5% and -10.7%, respectively. If you're looking for the only company in positive territory, that would be HP, with IDC and Gartner reporting an increase of 6.4% and Canalys only slightly different at 6.5%.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from AppleInsider: Having been created on a Mac in the 1980s, LabView has now announced that its latest macOS update will be the final release for the platform. LabView is a visual programming language tool that lets users connect virtual measurement equipment together to input and process data. AppleInsider staffers have seen it used across a variety of industries and applications to help design a complex monitoring system, or automate a test sequence.

It's been 40 years since Dr James Truchard and Jeff Kodosky began work on it and founded their firm, National Instruments. The first release of the software was in October 1986 where it was a Mac exclusive. In a 2019 interview, Jeff Kodosky said this was because "it was the only computer that had a 32-bit operating system, and it had the graphics we needed." Now National Instruments has told all current users that they have released an updated Mac version -- but it will be the last.

National Instruments says it will cease selling licenses for the Mac version in March 2024, and will also stop support. LabView has also been sold as a subscription and National Instruments says it will switch users to a "perpetual licesse for your continued use," though seemingly only if specifically requested. As yet, there have been few reactions on the NI.com forums. However, one post says "This came as a shocker to us as the roadmap still indicates support." National Instruments says LabVIEW "will continue to be available on Windows and Linux OSes."

Valve says it has no plans for a macOS version of the recently released game Counter-Strike 2, the follow-up title replacing the hugely popular FPS Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. From a report: Valve confirmed its decision and gave its reasons in a newly published Steam support FAQ: "As technology advances, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue support for older hardware, including DirectX 9 and 32-bit operating systems. Similarly, we will no longer support macOS. Combined, these represented less than one percent of active CS:GO players. Moving forward, Counter-Strike 2 will exclusively support 64-bit Windows and Linux."

Members of the vintage Mac community are in desperate need of a new supply of a specific, discontinued dongle that has become increasingly rare and extremely expensive on the secondary market. From a report: "Bring Back the Belkin F2E9142-WHT ADC to DVI Cable for Vintage Apple Macs!," a change.org petition created this week by vintage Mac enthusiast Grant Woodward reads. "I am deeply concerned about the discontinuation of the Belkin F2E9142-WHT ADC to DVI cable. This essential piece of technology has become increasingly rare and difficult to find since it went out of production," the petition reads. "For those unfamiliar with its significance, this cable allows vintage Apple Macintosh computers to connect with more recent monitors, breathing new life into these iconic machines. It is an invaluable tool for restoring, collecting, and preserving these pieces of computing history." As Woodward notes, the adapter in question allows an older generation of Power Mac G3 and G4 from the early 2000s to connect to newer monitors.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Apple decides to end update support for your Mac, you can either try to install another OS or you can trick macOS into installing on your hardware anyway. That's the entire point of the OpenCore Legacy Patcher, a community-driven project that supports old Macs by combining some repurposed Hackintosh projects with older system files extracted from past macOS versions. Yesterday, the OCLP team announced version 1.0.0 of the software, the first to formally support the recently released macOS 14 Sonoma. Although Sonoma officially supports Macs released mostly in 2018 or later, the OCLP project will allow Sonoma to install on Macs that go back to models released in 2007 and 2008, enabling them to keep up with at least some of the new features and security patches baked into the latest release.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Eddy Cue, in a dark suit, peered down at the monitor in front of him. The screens in the Washington, DC, courtroom had briefly malfunctioned and left witnesses with only binders, but now the tech was up and running -- showing an image of three iPhones, each demonstrating a part of the phone's setup process. Cue squinted down at the screen. "The resolution on this is terrible," he said. "You should get a Mac." That got some laughs in an otherwise staid and quiet courtroom. Judge Amit Mehta, presiding over the case, leaned into his microphone and responded, "If Apple would like to make a donation..." That got even bigger laughs. Then everybody got back down to business.

Cue was on the stand as a witness in US v. Google, the landmark antitrust trial over Google's search business. Cue is one of the highest-profile witnesses in the case so far, in part because the deal between Google and Apple -- which makes Google the default search engine on all Apple devices and pays Apple billions of dollars a year -- is central to the US Department of Justice's case against Google. Cue had two messages: Apple believes in protecting its users' privacy, and it also believes in Google. Whether those two statements can be simultaneously true became the question of the day.

Apple is in court because of something called the Information Services Agreement, or ISA: a deal that makes Google's search engine the default on Apple's products. The ISA has been in place since 2002, but Cue was responsible for negotiating its current iteration with Google CEO Sundar Pichai in 2016. In testimony today, the Justice Department grilled Cue about the specifics of the deal. When the two sides renegotiated, Cue said on the stand, Apple wanted a higher percentage of the revenue Google made from Apple users it directed toward the search engine. [...] Meagan Bellshaw, a Justice Department lawyer, asked Cue if he would have walked away from the deal if the two sides couldn't agree on a revenue-share figure. Cue said he'd never really considered that an option: "I always felt like it was in Google's best interest, and our best interest, to get a deal done." Cue also argued that the deal was about more than economics and that Apple never seriously considered switching to another provider or building its own search product. "Certainly there wasn't a valid alternative to Google at the time," Cue said. He said there still isn't one.

"Huawei is emulating Apple in developing the processors that power its latest smartphone," reports Ars Technica, "a breakthrough that will help the Chinese company to reduce its reliance on foreign technology as it confronts US sanctions." Analysis of the main chip inside the Mate 60 Pro smartphone, which launched at the end of last month and immediately sold out, reveals that Huawei has joined the elite group of Big Tech companies capable of designing their own semiconductors. Four of the eight central processing units in the Mate 60 Pro's "system on a chip" (SoC) rely purely on a design by Arm, the British company whose chip architecture powers 99 percent of smartphones. The other four CPUs are Arm-based but feature Huawei's own designs and adaptations, according to three people familiar with the Mate's development and Geekerwan, a Chinese technology testing company that took a closer look at the main chip...

While Huawei is still licensing Arm's basic designs, its own HiSilicon chip design business has improved on them to build its own processor cores on the Mate's Kirin 9000S SoC. This will give it the flexibility needed to produce high-end smartphones despite the constraints of US export controls, said analysts and industry insiders. The Kirin 9000S also features a graphics processing unit and neural processing unit developed by HiSilicon. Its predecessor, the Kirin 9000 SoC, had relied completely on Arm for its CPUs and GPU...

Huawei was able to produce its own phone processors by adapting CPU core designs that were originally used in its data center servers, according to people with direct knowledge of its development. The strategy resembles Apple's moves to turn its iPhone processors into chips capable of powering its Mac computers — but in reverse. "No one ever did this before," said analyst Brady Wang of Counterpoint Research of Huawei's server-to-phone innovation...

Various testing teams, including Geekerwan's, have found that Huawei's semiconductor capabilities are one to two years behind those of chips made by the US's Qualcomm, the leading mobile chipmaker. Huawei's chips also consume more power than its competitors', according to measurements, and can cause the phone to heat up.
Reuters reports that "The United States has no evidence that Huawei can produce smartphones with advanced chips in large volumes, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on Tuesday."

But meanwhile, a Huawei Technologies unit "is shipping new Chinese-made chips for surveillance cameras, in a fresh sign the Chinese tech giant is finding ways around four years of U.S. export controls, two sources briefed on the unit's efforts said." The shipments to surveillance camera manufacturers from the company's HiSilicon chip design unit started this year, according to one of the sources, and a third source familiar with the industry supply chain. One of the sources briefed on the unit said at least some of the customers were Chinese...

"These surveillance chips are relatively easy to manufacture compared to smartphone processors," said the source familiar with the surveillance camera industry's supply chain, adding that HiSilicon's return would shake up the market... Before the U.S. export controls, it was the dominant chip supplier to the surveillance camera sector, with brokerage Southwest Securities estimating its global share in 2018 at 60%. By 2021, HiSilicon's global market share plummeted to just 3.9%, according to data from consulting firm Frost & Sullivan...

TechInsights analyst Dan Hutcheson said their analysis of the Mate 60 Pro and other components such as its radio frequency power chip also suggested that Huawei had access to sophisticated electronic design automation (EDA) tools that "they are not supposed to have".

"We don't know if they got them illicitly, or more probably the Chinese developed their own EDA tools," he said.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

Apple on Monday rolled out iOS 17, iPadOS 17, tvOS 17, HomePod 17 and watchOS 10, the latest operating system versions for all its devices minus the Mac lineup. iOS 17: iOS 17 expands on last year's Lock Screen updates with the addition of interactive widgets and StandBy, a new feature that turns the iPhone into a mini home hub when it is charging. You can now see voicemail transcriptions in real time, and leave video messages in FaceTime. FaceTime also now works on the Apple TV with tvOS 17. With NameDrop, exchanging contacts is as simple as touching two phones together, and Messages has been overhauled with new safety features and updates to the way that stickers work. Autocorrect is better than ever, Spotlight search has been improved, private browsing in Safari is more secure with Face ID lock, and there's now a mood tracking feature in the Health app. Passwords can be shared in iCloud Keychain and AirTags can be shared among family members too, plus there are new features for the AirPods Pro. Apple has also added updates to Siri, Mail, Reminders, Notes, Home, and more. tvOS 17: In tvOS 17, Apple has added a FaceTime app for FaceTime calls on a larger screen. The feature works through an iPhone or iPad running iOS 17/iPadOS 17, with the iOS device serving as the camera and the TV serving as the display. With a Split View option, you can place your FaceTime call on one side of the TV and a TV show or game on the other side for SharePlay experiences. [...] Other new features include Dolby Vision 8.1 support, an enhance dialogue option to make it easier to hear what's being said over music and effects, and support for third-party VPN apps.

When Linus Torvalds announced Linux kernel 6.6's first release candidate, it included a newly-stable version of KSMBD, which is Samsung's in-kernel server for the SMB protocol (for sharing files/folders/printers over a network).

An announcement in 2021 had said that "For many cases the current userspace server choices were suboptimal either due to memory footprint, performance or difficulty integrating well with advanced Linux features."

LWN noted at the time that Linux has been using "the user-space Samba solution since shortly after the beginning." In a sense, ksmbd is not meant to compete with Samba; indeed, it has been developed in cooperation with the Samba project. It is, however, meant to be a more performant and focused solution than Samba is; at this point, Samba includes a great deal of functionality beyond simple file serving. Ksmbd claims significant performance improvements on a wide range of benchmarks...One other reason — which tends to be spoken rather more quietly — is that a new implementation can be licensed under GPLv2, while Samba is GPLv3.
The Register notes that when Samba switched to GPL 3, "one result was that Apple dropped Samba from Mac OS X and replaced it with its own, in-house server called SMBX." And they also remember that a month after its debut in 2021, "Linux sysadmins got to enjoy KSMBD's first security exploit." What's changed now is that it has faced considerable security testing and as a result it is no longer marked as experimental. It's been developed with the assistance of the Samba team, which itself documents how to use it. It's compatible with existing Samba configuration files. As the team says, "It is not meant to replace the existing Samba fileserver 'smbd', but rather be an extension and will integrate with Samba in the future...."

KSMBD is also important in that placing such core server functionality right inside the kernel represents a significant potential attack surface for crackers... The new bcachefs file system will not be going into kernel 6.6, and its developer is not happy.
"It's taken some time to get KSMBD to a state that was considered stable," points out Linux magazine. That time has come, and KSMBD is planned for Linux kernel 6.6.: But why is KSMBD important? First off, it promises considerable performance gains and better support for modern features such as Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA)... KSMBD also adds enhanced security, considerably better performance for both single and multi-thread read/write, better stability, and higher compatibility. In the end, hopefully, this KSMBD will also mean easier share setups in Linux without having to jump through the same hoops one must with the traditional Samba setup.

Researchers say they have found fake apps in Google Play that masqueraded as legitimate ones for the Signal and Telegram messaging platforms. The malicious apps could pull messages or other sensitive information from legitimate accounts when users took certain actions. ArsTechnica: An app with the name Signal Plus Messenger was available on Play for nine months and had been downloaded from Play roughly 100 times before Google took it down last April after being tipped off by security firm ESET. It was also available in the Samsung app store and on signalplus[.]org, a dedicated website mimicking the official Signal.org. An app calling itself FlyGram, meanwhile, was created by the same threat actor and was available through the same three channels. Google removed it from Play in 2021. Both apps remain available in the Samsung store.

Both apps were built on open source code available from Signal and Telegram. Interwoven into that code was an espionage tool tracked as BadBazaar. The Trojan has been linked to a China-aligned hacking group tracked as GREF. BadBazaar has been used previously to target Uyghurs and other Turkic ethnic minorities. The FlyGram malware was also shared in a Uyghur Telegram group, further aligning it to previous targeting by the BadBazaar malware family. Signal Plus could monitor sent and received messages and contacts if people connected their infected device to their legitimate Signal number, as is normal when someone first installs Signal on their device. Doing so caused the malicious app to send a host of private information to the attacker, including the device IMEI number, phone number, MAC address, operator details, location data, Wi-Fi information, emails for Google accounts, contact list, and a PIN used to transfer texts in the event one was set up by the user.

Microsoft is discontinuing Visual Studio for Mac, committing to security updates and platform update compatibility for the next 12 months. 9to5Mac reports: "With today's announcement, we're redirecting our resources and focus to enhance Visual Studio and VS Code, optimizing them for cross-platform development," the company said in the announcement. "No new framework, runtime, or language support will be added to Visual Studio for Mac." The company added: "We will also continue to provide runtime and workload updates so you can continue building and shipping applications built on .NET 6, .NET 7, and the Mono frameworks. While not officially supported, we've also enabled rudimentary support for .NET 8 in Visual Studio for Mac for building and debugging applications."

Once the wheels fall off Visual Studio for Mac, Microsoft recommends accessing its IDE through Windows in a machine virtual on the Mac or in the cloud. Otherwise, Microsoft points to cross-platform compatible developer technology that will run on macOS: "The recently announced C# Dev Kit, .NET MAUI, and Unity Extensions for VS Code are available in preview and are intended to augment VS Code's capabilities for .NET and C# developers. These extensions operate natively across all supported platforms, including macOS, and the experience using these will continue to be improved as they move from preview to GA and beyond."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There have been a lot of Wipeout games released since the 1995 original, including Wipeout HD and the Omega Collection, but only the original has the distinction of having its Windows port source code leaked by (since defunct) archive Forest of Illusion. Dominic Szablewski grabbed that code before it disappeared and set about creating a version that's not just a port. He rewrote the game's rendering, physics, sound, and generally "everything everywhere." He documented the project, put his code on GitHub, and has some version of a justification. "So let's just pretend that the leak was intentional, a rewrite of the source falls under fair use and the whole thing is abandonware anyway," Szablewski writes.

As he digs into the specifics of his work, Szablewski takes the reader on a tour of PSX dev kits and how they handled Z-levels, how to translate yesterday's triangles to today's OpenGL, breaking the 30 FPS cap on a game that explicitly forbade that, and more. He takes the code from 40,699 lines to 7,731 and notably loved an excuse to work in C. "I had an absolute blast cleaning up this mess!" Szablewski's Wipeout rewrite can be compiled for Windows, Linux, Mac, and WASM (Web Assembly). You can even play it in your browser on his server (please be gentle). I spent some time in it this morning, and let me tell you: I am not ready for anti-gravity racing in the year 2052. It was a struggle to even get to fourth place, but those struggles were due entirely to skill, not system. The web version feels buttery smooth, even when you're continually clunking into walls. I had misremembered this game as having a lot more to it, but it's all feel: the trance/prog music, the physics, the controls, and the sense that you're always just slightly out of control.

Codeweavers took to its official forums today to announce the release of CrossOver 23.0.0, the new version of its software that aims to make emulating Windows software and games easier on macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS systems. From a report: CrossOver 23 has updated to Wine 8.0.1, and it's loaded with improvements across all its platforms. The most notable, though, is the addition of DirectX 12 support under macOS via VKD3D and MoltenVK. This marks the first time most Mac users have had access to software that relies on DirectX 12; previously, only DirectX 11 was supported, and that went for other software solutions like Parallels, too. This new release adds "initial support" for geometry shaders and transforms feedback on macOS Ventura. Codeweavers claims that will address a lot of problems with "missing graphics or black screens in-game" in titles like MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, Street Fighter V, Tekken 7, and Octopath Traveler.