WSL9x by Hailey Somerville runs a modern Linux kernel (6.19 at time of writing) cooperatively inside the Windows 9x kernel, enabling users to take advantage of the full suite of capabilities of both operating systems at the same time, including paging, memory protection, and preemptive scheduling.

Run all your favourite applications side by side – no rebooting required!

Technical details

WSL9x is made up of three components: a patched Linux kernel, a VxD driver, and a wsl.com client program.

The driver is responsible for the initialisation of WSL9x . It sets up the initial mappings for the kernel code and loads vmlinux.elf off disk using DOS interrupts.

The driver then starts a new thread in the System VM, allocates a 16 KiB stack for entering Linux on, and drops into an event loop which handles entering the kernel, dispatching IRQs, returning to userspace, and idling.

The driver is also responsible for handling userspace events which must be dispatched to the kernel, currently page faults and syscalls.

The Linux kernel is based on user-mode Linux, but hacked to call Windows 9x kernel APIs instead of posix APIs, and running in ring 0 (supervisor/kernel mode) rather than ring 3 (user mode).

See all the details and code here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US military's massive $1.5 trillion budget request for the next fiscal year includes what Pentagon officials described as the largest investment in drone warfare and counter-drone technology in US history. The proposed spending on drone and autonomous warfare technologies within the FY2027 budget proposal for the US Department of Defense would surpass most countries' defense budgets and rank among the top 10 in the world for military spending, ahead of countries such as Ukraine, South Korea, and Israel. Specifically, the Pentagon is requesting $53.6 billion to boost US production and procurement of drones, train drone operators, build out a logistics network for sustaining drone deployments, and expand counter-drone systems to defend more US military sites. The funding request is budgeted under the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), an organization established in late 2025 that would see a massive budget increase after receiving about $226 million in the 2026 fiscal year budget. [...] Another $20.6 billion would help purchase one-way attack drones and drone aircraft developed through the US Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which is building drone prototypes capable of teaming up with human-piloted fighter jets. Part of this funding would also go toward defensive systems for countering small drones and the US Navy's Boeing MQ-25 drone designed to perform midair refueling of carrier-borne fighter aircraft to extend their strike ranges. Such drone-related spending even rivals the entire budget of the US Marine Corps. But the Pentagon has not said that it is creating a dedicated drone branch of the US military similar to the standalone Space Force. Pentagon officials emphasized that most of the money would go toward procuring drone and autonomous warfare technologies that already exist, and is largely separate from additional funding that would bolster US domestic manufacturing capacity to build such weapon systems. "That $70 billion is all going into existing systems and technologies," said Hurst. "The industrial base support is entirely separate." "The evolution we've seen in the battlefield is this evolution of technologies in the timeframe of weeks, not the typical years we see with our defense production," said Lt. Gen. Steven Whitney, director of force structure, resources, and assessment for the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a Pentagon press briefing. "So it's really critical we work with industry to get that capability fielded."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Supreme Court justices today expressed skepticism of AT&T and Verizon's claim that the Federal Communications Commission's procedure for imposing fines violated their right to a jury trial. But companies regulated by the FCC may come out ahead in the long run even if the carriers lose this case.

AT&T and Verizon, which were fined a total of $104 million for selling users’ real-time location data without consent, claim the FCC's penalty system deprived them of the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. During oral arguments today, justices repeatedly pointed out that carriers could have obtained a jury trial if they chose not to pay the fines and waited for the government to begin an enforcement action in court.

But even if AT&T and Verizon lose this case, they could get a victory of sorts because the FCC and justices seem to agree that FCC fine decisions are nonbinding and require a court decision to enforce them. A government lawyer told justices that the FCC may change the language of its forfeiture orders to make it clearer that fines don't have to be paid until after a jury trial.

Read full article

Comments

Some Japanese bullet trains will soon support premium private suites this October, featuring windows with embedded 5G antennas for steadier onboard Wi-Fi and NTT noise-cancelling cabin tech to reduce train noise. The 5G window antennas are designed to maintain line-of-sight connections as trains race past base stations at up to 285 km/h. The Register reports: Rail operator JR Central announced the new tech late last month and will initially deploy a couple of the suites on six trains. The carrier explained that the antennas come from a Japanese company called AGC that weaves microscopic wires through glass to form an antenna. JR Central will connect the windows to an on-train Wi-Fi router. AGC says rival tech relies on 5G signals reaching a train and then bouncing around inside before reaching the Wi-Fi unit. The company says antennas woven into train windows maintain line of sight to nearby 5G base stations. That matters because JR Central's Shinkansen can achieve speeds of up to 285 km/h, which means they speed past cellular network base stations so quickly that it's frequently necessary to reconnect to another radio. AGC says keeping a line of sight connection means its antennas allow increased 5G signal strength, so Wi-Fi service on board trains should be more stable and speedy. The sound-deadening kit JR Central will deploy is called Personalized Sound Zone (PSZ) and comes from Japan's tech giant NTT. The tech uses the same principles applied to noise-cancelling headphones -- determine the waveform of sound and project an inversion of that waveform that cancels out ambient noise.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Taking a break from attacking the First Amendment, FCC boss Brendan Carr this week engaged in a strange bit of performance art: his FCC announced that they’d be effectively adding all foreign-made routers to the agency’s “covered list,” in a bid to ban their sale in the United States.

That is unless manufacturers obtain “conditional approval” (including all appropriate application fees and favors, of course) from the Trump administration via the Department of Defense or Department of Homeland Security. In other words, the Trump administration is attempting to shake down manufacturers of all routers manufactured outside the United States (which again, is nearly all of them) under the pretense of cybersecurity.

You can probably see how this might result in some looming legal action. And who knows what other “favors” to the Trump administration might be required to get conditional approval, like the inclusion of backdoors accessible by our current authoritarian government.

A fact sheet insists this was all necessary because many foreign routers have been exploited by foreign actors:

“Recently, malicious state and non-state sponsored cyber attackers have increasingly leveraged the vulnerabilities in small and home office routers produced abroad to carry out direct attacks against American civilians in their homes.”

But the biggest recent cybersecurity incident in recent U.S. memory, the Chinese Salt Typhoon hack (which involved Chinese state-sanctioned hackers massively compromising U.S. telecom networks to spy on important people for years) largely involved the broadly deregulated U.S. telecom sector failing to do basic things like change default admin passwords. And then trying to hide additional evidence of intrusion for liability reasons. A very domestic failure.

We’ve discussed at length that while Brendan Carr loves to pretend he’s doing important things on cybersecurity, most of his policies have made the U.S. less secure. Like his mindless deregulation of the privacy and security standards of domestic telecoms and hardware makers. Or his destruction of smart home testing programs just because they had some operations in China.

Most of the Trump administration “cybersecurity” solutions have been indistinguishable from a foreign attack. They’ve gutted numerous government cybersecurity programs (including a board investigating Salt Typhoon), and dismantled the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) (responsible for investigating significant cybersecurity incidents). The administration claims to be worried about cybersecurity, but then goes out of its way to ensure domestic telecoms see no meaningful oversight whatsoever.

I’d argue Trump administration destruction of corporate oversight of domestic telecom privacy/security standards is a much bigger threat to national security and consumer safety than 90% of foreign routers, but good luck finding any news outlet that brings that up in their coverage of the FCC’s latest move.

In reality, the biggest current threat to U.S. national security is the Trump administration’s rampant, historic corruption. Absolutely any time you see the Trump administration taking steps to “improve national security,” or “address cybersecurity” you can just easily assume there’s some ulterior motive of personal benefit to the president, as we saw when the great hyperventilation over TikTok was “fixed” by offloading the app to Trump’s dodgy billionaire friends.

On March 19, OpenAI announced that it would acquire Astral, the company behind uv, Ruff, and ty. The Astral team, led by founder Charlie Marsh, will join OpenAI’s Codex team. The deal is subject to regulatory approval.

First and foremost: congratulations to Charlie Marsh and the entire Astral team. They shipped some of the most beloved tools in the Python ecosystem and raised the bar for what developer tooling can be. This acquisition is a reflection of the impact they’ve had.

This is big news for the Python ecosystem, and it matters to us at JetBrains. Here’s our perspective.

What Astral built

In just two years, Astral transformed Python tooling. Their tools now see hundreds of millions of downloads every month, and for good reason:

• uv is a blazing-fast package and environment manager that unifies functionality from pip, venv, pyenv, pipx, and more into a single tool. With around 124 million monthly downloads, it has quickly become the default choice for many Python developers.
• Ruff is an extremely fast linter and formatter, written in Rust. For many teams it has replaced flake8, isort, and black entirely.
• ty is a new type checker for Python. It’s still early, and we’re already working on it with PyCharm. It’s showing promise.

This is foundational infrastructure that millions of developers rely on every day. We’ve integrated both Ruff and uv into PyCharm because they substantially make Python development better.

The risks are real, but manageable

Change always carries risk, and acquisitions are no exception. The main concern here is straightforward: if Astral’s engineers get reassigned to OpenAI’s more commercial priorities, these tools could stagnate over time.

The good news is that Astral’s tools are open-source under permissive licenses. The community can fork them if it ever comes to that. As Armin Ronacher has noted, uv is “very forkable and maintainable.” There’s no possible future where these tools go backwards.

Both OpenAI and Astral have committed to continued open-source development. We take them at their word, and we hope for the best.

Our commitment hasn’t changed

JetBrains already has great working relationships with both the Astral and the Codex teams. We’ve been integrating Ruff and uv into PyCharm, and we will continue to do so. We’ve submitted some upstream improvements to ty. Regardless of who owns these tools, our commitment to supporting the best Python tooling for our users stays the same. We’ll keep working with whoever maintains them.

The Python ecosystem is stronger because of the work Astral has done. We hope this acquisition amplifies that work, not diminishes it. We’ll be watching closely, and we’ll keep building the best possible experience for Python developers in PyCharm.