Comment Re: The devices are still great to use now. (Score 1) 9
there is a hack to extend the date beyond dec 31, 2031.. all the way until 2099
Submission + - Working Palm OS Virus Rediscovered After 25 Years (linkedin.com)
ardiri writes: Palm OS developer Aaron Ardiri has rediscovered the original source code of a working, self-replicating Palm OS virus he developed and tested in June 2001, months before the planned PalmSource developer conference in San Jose.
Named "Virii," the virus intercepted Palm OS system calls to progressively infect legitimate applications while preserving their original functionality. Infected applications could then spread between handheld devices through infrared beaming, potentially allowing an infection to propagate among hundreds of developers exchanging software at the conference.
The virus also included a date-triggered payload designed to interfere with system time reporting between October 23 and 27, 2001, potentially causing erratic clocks, unreliable alarms, and missed appointments. Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, PalmSource 2001 was postponed until February 2002, and the experiment never went ahead. The virus was never publicly released.
In 2016, Ardiri mentioned the experiment in a retrospective about his involvement in the infamous Palm OS Liberty Trojan incident, believing the original source code had been lost. In October 2026, he rediscovered the complete implementation on a CompactFlash card containing files dated June 2001.
The newly published retrospective documents the original infection mechanism, potential conference-wide propagation, and historical context. The functional source code and binaries will remain private.
Named "Virii," the virus intercepted Palm OS system calls to progressively infect legitimate applications while preserving their original functionality. Infected applications could then spread between handheld devices through infrared beaming, potentially allowing an infection to propagate among hundreds of developers exchanging software at the conference.
The virus also included a date-triggered payload designed to interfere with system time reporting between October 23 and 27, 2001, potentially causing erratic clocks, unreliable alarms, and missed appointments. Following the September 11 terrorist attacks, PalmSource 2001 was postponed until February 2002, and the experiment never went ahead. The virus was never publicly released.
In 2016, Ardiri mentioned the experiment in a retrospective about his involvement in the infamous Palm OS Liberty Trojan incident, believing the original source code had been lost. In October 2026, he rediscovered the complete implementation on a CompactFlash card containing files dated June 2001.
The newly published retrospective documents the original infection mechanism, potential conference-wide propagation, and historical context. The functional source code and binaries will remain private.
Submission + - 25 Years Later, a Palm OS Developer Opens His Development Archive (github.com)
ardiri writes: Palm OS developer Aaron Ardiri (slashdot.org/~ardiri) has released approximately 1 GB of historical Palm OS development resources, accumulated during the early days of handheld computing and preserved on hard drive backups for more than 25 years. The collection includes historical SDKs, developer conference presentations, technical documentation, programming examples, limited source code, and development utilities. ROM images, commercial applications, and simulator binaries have deliberately been excluded.
Ardiri previously published the source code for his Palm OS and VTOS projects, including work exploring the capabilities of early handheld devices. This latest release expands those preservation efforts beyond his own software, making a broader collection of development resources available to the retrocomputing community. The archive is available at https://github.com/ardiri/dev-... and is intended for historical preservation, education, and research, particularly as enthusiasts continue working to maintain, emulate, and revive the platform (available at https://www.ardiri.com./
Ardiri has also written an auto-biography and shas started explored the engineering principles behind these systems in his books, including Inside the Machine, which examines computer architecture from fundamental logic through modern computing systems. At a time when much of the early mobile development ecosystem has disappeared into defunct websites and aging backups, this collection offers another opportunity to preserve the tools and knowledge that helped define an important era of personal computing.
Ardiri previously published the source code for his Palm OS and VTOS projects, including work exploring the capabilities of early handheld devices. This latest release expands those preservation efforts beyond his own software, making a broader collection of development resources available to the retrocomputing community. The archive is available at https://github.com/ardiri/dev-... and is intended for historical preservation, education, and research, particularly as enthusiasts continue working to maintain, emulate, and revive the platform (available at https://www.ardiri.com./
Ardiri has also written an auto-biography and shas started explored the engineering principles behind these systems in his books, including Inside the Machine, which examines computer architecture from fundamental logic through modern computing systems. At a time when much of the early mobile development ecosystem has disappeared into defunct websites and aging backups, this collection offers another opportunity to preserve the tools and knowledge that helped define an important era of personal computing.
Submission + - From Palm OS to Foldable Phones (linkedin.com)
ardiri writes: Long-time Slashdot reader Aaron Ardiri, whose Palm OS work has appeared here a few times over the years, has revisited a mobile architecture he developed more than 20 years ago after this week's renewed attention on fold-able phones.
MedHand International began developing medical reference software for Palm OS in 2000, eventually supporting Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Windows and Mac OS X. Because medical publishers supplied content in wildly different formats, MedHand developed its own canonical XML representation—“MedHand XML”—and separated structured content from its presentation.
That work resulted in a patent filed in 2005 describing components, containers, a layout manager, hierarchical information and display-dependent presentation. Its diagrams explicitly show the same information hierarchy being presented differently on a mobile phone, PDA and desktop display.
The interesting comparison isn't that MedHand somehow “invented the foldable phone”—it didn't—but that modern foldables create essentially the architectural problem the software was designed to handle: the underlying information remains unchanged while the available display environment changes substantially, requiring the presentation and visible information hierarchy to adapt.
Ardiri has written a retrospective comparing the 2005 architecture with modern adaptive mobile interfaces. There's also an amusing historical circle: MedHand International built its own XML publishing pipeline before EPUB became an industry standard, while Ardiri has just released his autobiography and Inside the Machine as EPUBs—including on Apple Books.
So how many supposedly “new” computing problems are really old architectural problems waiting for the hardware to catch up?
MedHand International began developing medical reference software for Palm OS in 2000, eventually supporting Palm OS, Windows Mobile, Windows and Mac OS X. Because medical publishers supplied content in wildly different formats, MedHand developed its own canonical XML representation—“MedHand XML”—and separated structured content from its presentation.
That work resulted in a patent filed in 2005 describing components, containers, a layout manager, hierarchical information and display-dependent presentation. Its diagrams explicitly show the same information hierarchy being presented differently on a mobile phone, PDA and desktop display.
The interesting comparison isn't that MedHand somehow “invented the foldable phone”—it didn't—but that modern foldables create essentially the architectural problem the software was designed to handle: the underlying information remains unchanged while the available display environment changes substantially, requiring the presentation and visible information hierarchy to adapt.
Ardiri has written a retrospective comparing the 2005 architecture with modern adaptive mobile interfaces. There's also an amusing historical circle: MedHand International built its own XML publishing pipeline before EPUB became an industry standard, while Ardiri has just released his autobiography and Inside the Machine as EPUBs—including on Apple Books.
So how many supposedly “new” computing problems are really old architectural problems waiting for the hardware to catch up?
Comment Re:0.5 mm resolution (Score 1) 25
Also, they claim it is safe due to lack of radiation. But ultrasonic can fuck shit up too. I mean ultrasonic is currently used to break up kidney stones, shear and fragment DNA (for NGS prep).
Good points, but to be fair, ultrasonic is currently used to break up kidney stones because it is safe to use it to do so.
Comment Why not? (Score 1) 139
Plenty of trucks and other vehicles have little or any effective view directly out the back. To be blunt: If you need to look through your rear-view mirror to not kill someone, you either need better side mirrors or you need to learn to drive.
Comment Re:Question (Score 1) 20
retains access to the AI startup's technology until 2032, including models that achieve AGI
Exactly how do they envision an autocomplete gaining sentience?
It hasn't been "autocomplete" in a long time. Sure, there's a training step based on a corpus of Human language, and the autoregressive process outputs a single token at a time, but reinforcement learning trains specific behaviors beyond merely completing a sentence.
Besides, the best way to write something indistinguishable from what a Human might write is to, well, "think" like a Human.
Comment Will we finally learn our lesson? (Score 1) 32
Are we, as a sapient species facing an uncertain prospect of continuence in a world full of rapidly-advancing bullshit going to learn from this catastrophic and absurdly predictable failure of information security, personal and professional ethics, civilian government, market economics, basic common sense, and consumer psychology?
Eight-Ball-Based-On-Cursory-Reading-Of-Literally-Any-Slice-of-Human-History says "no".
What do you say, and why is it also "no"?
Eight-Ball-Based-On-Cursory-Reading-Of-Literally-Any-Slice-of-Human-History says "no".
What do you say, and why is it also "no"?
Comment News at 11. (Score 1) 95
Proprietary service drops support for proprietary protocol..
Submission + - Python Software Foundation refuses $1.5 million grant with anti DEI provision. (blogspot.com) 1
Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program.
"We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
"We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
Comment Re:That library file limit (Score 1) 7
Nope. That's why I changed all my players to BlueOS.
Comment Re:F-Sonos (Score 1) 38
I replaced all my SONOS connects with BlueSound node Nano devices. A pricey replacement, but worth it.
As a bonus I was now able to turn off SMB1 on my home Samba server !
Comment Re:Modern security products seem to increase... (Score 2) 30
I don't necessarily disagree with where you're going here, but can you elaborate on this:
The whole world has realized that they need to start air-gapping databases
I've worked at government contractors that had real air-gaps for things like their databases, but that does not seem to be the norm for the rest of the world. How would ordinary businesses make use of their databases if they are not network accessible under any circumstances, printed reports? Some sort of unidirectional transmission? What sort of data ingress are they using?
I ask this because I have been involved in the transfer of data in highly regulated, air-gapped systems, and they are incredibly expensive. Are you really indicating that true air-gap databases will be ubiquitous (or at least commonplace) in the forseeable future?
Comment Re:Why Samba? (Score 1) 33
> Every large NAS vendor (Synology, QNAP, etc) has their own SMB server they wrote themserlves
That's untrue. Both Synology and QNAP use Samba. QNAP contributes code and bugfixes back to samba.org (Hi Jones !).
Submission + - Samba gets funding from the German Sovereign Tech Fund.
Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: The Samba project has secured significant funding (€688,800.00) from the German
Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to advance the project. The investment was
successfully applied for by SerNet. Over the next 18 months, Samba developers
from SerNet will tackle 17 key development subprojects aimed at enhancing
Samba’s security, scalability, and functionality.
The Sovereign Tech Fund is a German federal government funding program that
supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital
infrastructure. Their goal is to sustainably strengthen the open source
ecosystem.
The project's focus is on areas like SMB3 Transparent Failover, SMB3 UNIX
extensions, SMB-Direct, Performance and modern security protocols such as SMB
over QUIC. These improvements are designed to ensure that Samba remains a
robust and secure solution for organizations that rely on a sovereign IT
infrastructure. Development work began as early as September the 1st and is
expected to be completed by the end of February 2026 for all sub-projects.
All development will be done in the open following the existing Samba
development process. First gitlab CI pipelines have already been running [4]
and gitlab MRs will appear soon!
https://samba.plus/blog/detail...
https://www.sovereigntechfund....
Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) to advance the project. The investment was
successfully applied for by SerNet. Over the next 18 months, Samba developers
from SerNet will tackle 17 key development subprojects aimed at enhancing
Samba’s security, scalability, and functionality.
The Sovereign Tech Fund is a German federal government funding program that
supports the development, improvement, and maintenance of open digital
infrastructure. Their goal is to sustainably strengthen the open source
ecosystem.
The project's focus is on areas like SMB3 Transparent Failover, SMB3 UNIX
extensions, SMB-Direct, Performance and modern security protocols such as SMB
over QUIC. These improvements are designed to ensure that Samba remains a
robust and secure solution for organizations that rely on a sovereign IT
infrastructure. Development work began as early as September the 1st and is
expected to be completed by the end of February 2026 for all sub-projects.
All development will be done in the open following the existing Samba
development process. First gitlab CI pipelines have already been running [4]
and gitlab MRs will appear soon!
https://samba.plus/blog/detail...
https://www.sovereigntechfund....
