We’re fi­nally ready to talk about Flipper One — a pro­ject we’ve been grind­ing on for years and have re­built from scratch sev­eral times. It’s an in­cred­i­bly hard pro­ject, both fi­nan­cially and tech­ni­cally. So to­day we’re go­ing pub­lic not with a big shiny an­nounce­ment, but to tell the whole story straight. Honestly? We’re gen­uinely ter­ri­fied, and we need your help.

TL;DR With Flipper One, we’re reimag­in­ing what a Linux cy­berdeck can be — it’s a huge pro­ject. We’re open­ing up the de­vel­op­ment process and ask­ing the com­mu­nity for help.

With Flipper One, we’ve set our­selves a list of am­bi­tious goals:

Build the most open and best-doc­u­mented ARM com­puter in the world, with full main­line Linux ker­nel sup­port.

Push ven­dors to open up their ex­ist­ing closed-source code and ditch bi­nary blobs en­tirely.

Build an un­con­ven­tional hard­ware plat­form based on a co-proces­sor ar­chi­tec­ture that pairs a mi­cro­con­troller with a CPU, and port tons of low-level MCU code.

Rethink how peo­ple use Linux and de­velop our own GUI frame­work with wrap­pers around ex­ist­ing CLI util­i­ties.

Many of these goals come with a lot of un­cer­tainty, which is scary. But we be­lieve this is the only way to make a truly mean­ing­ful con­tri­bu­tion to the open-source com­mu­nity and to ed­u­ca­tion.

What is Flipper One?

Flipper One is­n’t an up­grade to Flipper Zero — it’s a com­pletely dif­fer­ent pro­ject with its own goals. Flipper One is an open Linux plat­form you can build al­most any­thing on: from a 5G-enabled IP net­work an­a­lyzer to an SDR-powered ra­dio sig­nal an­a­lyzer with lo­cal AI. We fo­cused a lot on the hard­ware ex­pan­sion sys­tem. You can con­nect high-speed mod­ules to Flipper One over PCI Express, USB 3.0, and SATA in­ter­faces. Add an SDR, a fast SSD, or a cel­lu­lar mo­dem — just plug in the right mod­ule.

Flipper One comes with sev­eral net­work in­ter­faces: 2x Gigabit Ethernet, USB Ethernet (5 Gbps), and Wi-Fi 6E (2.4/5/6 GHz). You can add 5G con­nec­tiv­ity by plug­ging in an M.2 mo­dem. That means you can use Flipper One as a router, a VPN gate­way, or a bridge be­tween wired and wire­less net­works.

Zero vs One

Flipper Zero and Flipper One are com­pletely dif­fer­ent pro­jects built for dif­fer­ent tasks. The eas­i­est way to think about it is in terms of net­work­ing lay­ers:

Layer 0 — Offline point-to-point ac­cess-con­trol pro­to­cols: NFC, low-fre­quency RFID, Sub-1 GHz ra­dio, Infrared, wired pro­to­cols like iBut­ton, UART, SPI, I²C. Based on a low-power mi­cro­con­troller.

Layer 1 — Everything that’s IP-connected: Wi-Fi, Ethernet, 5G, and satel­lite. It’s all about net­work­ing, data trans­fer, and high-per­for­mance com­put­ing. Running on pow­er­ful hard­ware and an open Linux toolkit — enough com­put­ing power to han­dle SDR and lo­cal AI.

So they’re not “newer” and “older” gen­er­a­tions of the same prod­uct. Flipper One does­n’t re­place Flipper Zero — they’re dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories of de­vices.

Truly Open Linux plat­form

We want to build a truly open Linux hard­ware plat­form — the best-doc­u­mented ARM com­puter, one that works out of the box on any re­cent up­stream ker­nel. It will never go stale be­cause it’ll keep get­ting the lat­est up­dates. Our goals:

Full main­line Linux ker­nel sup­port

No bi­nary blobs, closed dri­vers, or pro­pri­etary firmware

No ven­dor-locked BSP (board sup­port pack­age)

We say “truly open” be­cause the cur­rent state of ARM Linux is de­press­ing. Every ven­dor bolts on their own cus­tom mess: closed boot blobs, ven­dor-spe­cific patches, “board sup­port pack­ages” that no­body out­side the chip maker can re­ally un­der­stand. You can no longer just read the specs and un­der­stand how com­put­ers work — you can only learn the workarounds for one spe­cific chip with one spe­cific BSP. We’re sick of this our­selves, and we don’t want to be part of the prob­lem by ship­ping yet an­other prod­uct that just adds to the mess.

To pull this off, we’ve part­nered with the Collabora team to push full sup­port for the Rockchip RK3576 SoC into the main­line Linux ker­nel. Practically, this means you can down­load the ker­nel di­rectly from ker­nel.org, with zero ven­dor patches, and run it on your Flipper One.

👩‍👩‍👧‍👦

Flipper + Collabora — Making things open to­gether We’ve part­nered with Collabora to bring the RK3576 SoC into the main­line ker­nel and give Flipper One full up­stream sup­port.Read more: Collabora blog post

Current RK3576 main­line sup­port is in pretty good shape, and all the ma­jor com­po­nents are work­ing. But there’s still one last bi­nary blob in the boot chain — the DDR trainer, which ini­tial­izes RAM dur­ing early boot.

We’re ask­ing the com­mu­nity to help us pol­ish RK3576 sup­port so we can build a truly open plat­form to­gether. We’d be glad for any kind of con­tri­bu­tion, not just code. For ex­am­ple, maybe you can find a way to con­vince Rockchip to open up that last blob.

Right now, we’re fo­cused on power man­age­ment and USB DP Alt-mode sup­port. There are also dri­vers and ac­cel­er­a­tors that aren’t fully up­stream yet — the NPU, hard­ware video de­cod­ing, and other ac­cel­er­a­tors. Collabora main­tains a pub­lic list of what’s al­ready work­ing in main­line and what is­n’t, and we’d love help clos­ing those gaps.

RK3576 open source roadmap — what we plan to do and how you can con­tribute

Open tasks — where you can help us

RK3576 main­line sta­tus from Collabora

Developer Portal — let’s build to­gether

Openness has al­ways been our thing. With Flipper One, we want to go fur­ther — not just open-source code, but an open de­vel­op­ment process. We’re pub­lish­ing our task track­ers, in­ter­nal dis­cus­sions, half-fin­ished docs, and ar­chi­tec­tural de­bates. All the messy stuff com­pa­nies usu­ally keep be­hind closed doors.

Introducing → Flipper One Developer Portal

This is un­com­fort­able. We’ve never been this open be­fore, and there’s a real in­stinct to hide the un­fin­ished work, the wrong turns, and the ar­gu­ments. But we be­lieve the ed­u­ca­tional value of build­ing openly is worth more than the pol­ish of pre­tend­ing it was easy.

What is the Developer Portal?

Flipper One Developer Portal is a pub­lic wiki with all the de­vel­op­ment doc­u­men­ta­tion for Flipper One, and any­one can edit it. The por­tal de­scribes the pro­jec­t’s struc­ture and ways you can par­tic­i­pate in de­vel­op­ment.

Flipper One is a mas­sive pro­ject, and sev­eral teams are work­ing on it, each re­spon­si­ble for its own part. We call these parts sub-pro­jects:

🔌 Hardware — elec­tri­cal hard­ware de­vel­op­ment. This is where the printed cir­cuit boards (PCBs), an­ten­nas, and every­thing re­lated to the elec­tri­cal con­nec­tions of chips, con­nec­tors, and proces­sors are de­signed.

⚙️ Mechanics — me­chan­i­cal en­gi­neer­ing and in­dus­trial de­sign. This is where the en­clo­sure, but­tons, plas­tic and metal parts, and mount­ing com­po­nents are de­signed. Everything the user phys­i­cally in­ter­acts with.

🐧 Linux (CPU Software) — soft­ware de­vel­op­ment for the RK3576 proces­sor. Linux ker­nel, mod­ules, dri­vers, user­space, boot­loader, Rockchip tools, etc. This is the largest and most com­plex sub-pro­ject, span­ning many repos­i­to­ries.

🕹️ MCU Firmware — firmware de­vel­op­ment for the RP2350 mi­cro­con­troller, which con­trols the dis­play, power sub­sys­tem, and CPU boot process, and han­dles but­ton and touch­pad events.

🎨 User Interface — UI/UX de­vel­op­ment. This is where the user in­ter­face, the de­vice’s vi­sual lan­guage, and all graph­ics are de­vel­oped.

📚 Docs — de­vel­oper por­tal wiki, tech­ni­cal docs, guides, and datasheets. All doc­u­men­ta­tion, in­clud­ing the Developer Portal it­self, is de­vel­oped here. It cov­ers the Flipper One prod­uct, de­vel­op­ment processes, and con­tri­bu­tion guides.

🧪 Testing — tools for test­ing de­vice sub­sys­tems and hard­ware val­i­da­tion. Includes scripts and pro­grams for test­ing power, net­work­ing, CPU, au­dio, graph­ics, etc., as well as in­ter­face pro­to­types, demos, and test apps.

Anyone can join

Whether you’re an en­gi­neer, soft­ware de­vel­oper, de­signer, or sim­ply an en­thu­si­as­tic user with ideas to share, you’re wel­come to par­tic­i­pate in de­vel­op­ment and help shape Flipper One.

We’re also hir­ing a Developer Portal Manager — some­one to act as a proxy be­tween our dev team and the com­mu­nity, help shape the Developer Portal, and en­gage with con­trib­u­tors. Apply for the Developer Portal & Community Manager role.

Co-processor ar­chi­tec­ture

Flipper One runs on two proces­sors: a high-per­for­mance CPU and a tiny low-power MCU. They run in par­al­lel, and each man­ages its own part:

High-performance CPU — the 8-core RK3576 SoC that runs Linux. It comes with a Mali-G52 GPU and an NPU for run­ning LLMs and other mod­els lo­cally. There’s also 8 GB of RAM on board. Read more in CPU Software.

Low-power MCU — the 2-core Raspberry Pi RP2350 mi­cro­con­troller that con­trols the dis­play, but­tons, touch­pad, LEDs, and the power sub­sys­tem. It runs its own MCU Firmware.

The de­vice can run on the MCU alone. Even when Linux is off, you can con­trol Flipper One with its but­tons and LCD screen, con­fig­ure the boot process — all with­out the main CPU run­ning. This is what’s miss­ing on most SBCs: when Linux is off, the de­vice is dead.

MCU ↔ CPU in­ter­con­nect

The two proces­sors com­mu­ni­cate over a set of in­ter­faces we call the Interconnect: SPI car­ries the frame­buffer to the MCU for dis­play out­put, I²C car­ries com­mands to the MCU and but­ton and touch­pad events back to the CPU, and UART plus a few GPIO lines han­dle CPU boot con­trol. This is a non-triv­ial ar­chi­tec­ture.

We plan to land the dis­play and in­put dri­vers in the Linux ker­nel. We want to do it cleanly, with­out out-of-tree ven­dor hacks. We’d love for the ker­nel com­mu­nity to re­view this de­sign, push back on it, and help us up­stream it the right way.

Flipper OS + FlipCTL

How we’re reimag­in­ing Linux cy­berdecks

I’m a fan of Raspberry Pi and use it in my own pro­jects, in­clud­ing car­ry­ing one around as a travel tac­ti­cal Linux box. A typ­i­cal Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian OS) work­flow looks like this: to­day it’s a router, to­mor­row it’s a TV box, the day af­ter that it’s a logic an­a­lyzer for a de­bug ses­sion. You in­stall dozens of pack­ages, com­pile some from source, edit sys­tem con­figs, tweak the de­vice tree, patch the ker­nel — and very quickly the sys­tem turns into a mess. There’s no clean way to undo it. Roll back to fac­tory? Doesn’t ex­ist. Every new pro­ject starts with re-flash­ing the SD card.

Even though we’ll be crit­i­ciz­ing Raspberry Pi a lot, we gen­uinely love and re­spect the com­pany. Their prod­ucts in­spired ours in many ways — they make in­cred­i­ble things and have con­tributed mas­sively to the em­bed­ded in­dus­try. And that love is ex­actly why we keep com­par­ing our­selves to them.

What is Flipper OS?

We want to fix this and reimag­ine how peo­ple use Linux on the go. We’re build­ing Flipper OS — a layer on top of a Debian-based sys­tem that in­tro­duces pro­files: full snap­shots of the OS with dif­fer­ent pre­con­fig­ured pack­ages and set­tings. You can boot a pro­file, clone it, break it, in­stall what­ever, and jump back to a clean copy. Or switch to an en­tirely dif­fer­ent pro­file for a dif­fer­ent use case. No more SD card shuf­fling.

Honestly, Flipper OS is an ex­tremely hard pro­ject, and we’re not 100% sure how to ar­chi­tect it yet. We’re pro­to­typ­ing con­cepts, and we want this to be use­ful far be­yond Flipper One — for cy­berdeck builds based on Raspberry Pi, or any portable tac­ti­cal Linux box. If you’ve thought about this prob­lem or built some­thing sim­i­lar, we’d love to hear from you. Read about the Flipper OS con­cept.

FlipCTL — a UI frame­work for tiny screens

As part of Flipper OS, we’re build­ing FlipCTL to solve a prob­lem com­mon to all Linux-based cy­berdecks: no­body de­signs UIs for small screens. So peo­ple end up run­ning full desk­top en­vi­ron­ments (KDE, GNOME, etc.) squeezed onto a tiny 7″ touch­screen. It’s mis­er­able. What made Flipper Zero great was its user in­ter­face, pur­pose-built for a small LCD. That’s largely what made the de­vice pop­u­lar. We want to bring that ap­proach to Linux multi-tools.

FlipCTL is a frame­work for build­ing menu-based in­ter­faces for small LCD screens, con­trolled by a D-pad and a few but­tons. The idea is to wrap ex­ist­ing Linux util­i­ties like ping, nmap, tracer­oute in a clean, nav­i­ga­ble UI that ac­tu­ally makes sense on a tiny screen. Our long-term goal: make adding an HMI (human-machine in­ter­face) to any em­bed­ded Linux de­vice as easy as run­ning one com­mand: apt in­stall flipctl

Routers, NAS boxes, servers, head­less boards — any­thing you can bolt a small screen onto should be able to use FlipCTL. The idea is sim­ple: get FlipCTL, write a con­fig, and ship a us­able in­ter­face with­out drag­ging in Qt, GNOME, or X11. We’re also plan­ning to re­lease the Flipper One dis­play and a but­ton board as a stand­alone “FlipCTL Control Board” — a pe­riph­eral you can plug into any Linux-based de­vice and in­stantly get a menu-dri­ven in­ter­face. Right now, FlipCTL is still at the con­cept and ar­chi­tec­ture stage, and we’d love any­one in­ter­ested to join in: Read about the FlipCTL con­cept.

M.2 ex­pan­sion mod­ules

The core idea be­hind Flipper One is an ex­pand­able hard­ware plat­form. Anyone can turn it into their own spe­cial­ized multi-tool. That’s why we added sup­port for high-speed M.2 ex­pan­sion mod­ules that in­stall in­side, un­der the back plate.

M.2 is a com­mon name for an ex­pan­sion mod­ule form fac­tor, but it does­n’t de­fine the ac­tual con­nec­tion in­ter­face. Under the hood, M.2 mod­ules can use dif­fer­ent in­ter­faces and come in dif­fer­ent sizes and con­nec­tor types.

We worked hard to make the M.2 port in Flipper One as uni­ver­sal as pos­si­ble, so you can plug in al­most any type of mod­ule — cel­lu­lar or satel­lite modems, SDR mod­ules, AI ac­cel­er­a­tors, SSDs (NVMe or SATA), and Wi-Fi cards via adapters.

M.2 tech specs

We packed the M.2 port with as many in­ter­faces as pos­si­ble and added sup­port for dif­fer­ent mod­ule sizes:

M.2 type: Key-B

Supported sizes: 2242, 3042, 3052 (up to D3 class thick­ness)

Interfaces: PCI Express 2.1 ×1 / USB 3.1 / USB 2.0 / SATA3 / Serial Audio / UART / I2C / SIM card

For the full M.2 port spec­i­fi­ca­tion and pinout, see the doc­u­men­ta­tion: M.2 Port spec­i­fi­ca­tion. We ex­pect the com­mu­nity and ven­dors to build their own M.2 mod­ules for Flipper One, so any feed­back and sug­ges­tions are wel­come.

GPIO mod­ules

For sim­pler DIY mod­ules, we added a GPIO con­nec­tor with stan­dard 2.54mm pin head­ers. Even here, we made sure the de­vice can be car­ried fully as­sem­bled with the mod­ule at­tached with­out it com­ing loose.

GPIO mod­ules also have their own mount­ing sys­tem:

Threaded in­serts — the back plate and an­tenna rail have threads spaced in a grid with 2.54mm pitch, match­ing stan­dard perf­board hole spac­ing. So you can just cut a piece of perf­board to size, sol­der your mod­ule onto it, and screw it to the Flipper One’s back.

Snap-fit notches — both sides of the body have notches for a snap-fit pro­tec­tive cover that adds rigid­ity to the whole as­sem­bly.

For the tech­ni­cal spec­i­fi­ca­tion, pinout, and schemat­ics, see the GPIO port page. You can also check out ex­am­ples of GPIO mod­ules, in­clud­ing a walkie-talkie and a cam­era mod­ule. Any feed­back and com­ments are wel­come.

Open hard­ware mod­ule sys­tem

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[video] You can view and down­load the 3D mod­els

We de­signed a cus­tom mount­ing sys­tem for Flipper One mod­ules. We are fully open­ing up the en­clo­sure parts in­volved in this sys­tem:

Body — the main en­clo­sure of the de­vice. M.2 mod­ules screw into a metal heatsink plate, with two threaded in­serts for 42mm and 52mm mod­ule lengths.

Back plate — the rear cover that pro­vides ac­cess to the M.2 ex­pan­sion port. It at­taches to the body with screws and can be swapped out for dif­fer­ent de­signs de­pend­ing on the in­stalled mod­ule.

Antenna rail — a sep­a­rate part used for mount­ing SMA an­ten­nas. The an­tenna rail is in­ten­tion­ally sep­a­rated from the back plate so that an­ten­nas can be in­stalled and ca­bles routed to the ra­dio mod­ule be­fore the back plate is closed. This elim­i­nates the risk of dam­ag­ing an­tenna ca­bles dur­ing as­sem­bly.

You can down­load the 3D mod­els to­day to de­sign en­clo­sures for your mod­ules or even cre­ate your cus­tom back plate and an­tenna rail. We look for­ward to com­mu­nity feed­back and sug­ges­tions on the me­chan­i­cal de­sign of mod­ules. Read about Mechanics.

Network multi-tool

Flipper One is all about con­nec­tiv­ity — a Swiss Army knife for IP net­works across all OSI lay­ers. We packed in all the es­sen­tial phys­i­cal in­ter­faces, giv­ing you five in­de­pen­dent net­work up­links, which you can bridge to­gether, con­fig­ure cus­tom rout­ing for, or pipe through VPN tun­nels:

2× Gigabit Ethernet — two in­de­pen­dent WAN/LAN ports, each run­ning at 1 Gbps. Can be used for trans­par­ent bridge, MitM sniff­ing, and more.

Wi-Fi 6E — 802.11ax based on the MT7921AUN chipset with mon­i­tor mode sup­port. Covers 2.4/5/6 GHz bands and can run as both a Wi-Fi client (STA) and a hotspot (AP).

Cellular mo­dem — 5G or LTE mo­dem via the M.2 ex­pan­sion mod­ule, with sup­port for ex­ter­nal an­ten­nas. Accepts a phys­i­cal Nano SIM (4FF) and eSIM.

USB Ethernet — up to 5 Gbps em­u­lated over USB-C. Connect your lap­top or smart­phone via a USB ca­ble to add an ex­tra net­work in­ter­face. Works via USB-CDC NCM, so no dri­vers are re­quired.

Out of the box, Flipper One can work as a gate­way to any net­work, a multi-hotspot bridge, an in­line Ethernet snif­fer, a USB Wi-Fi/Ethernet adapter for a PC or smart­phone — or any com­bi­na­tion, with dy­namic rout­ing, load bal­anc­ing, and failover. We de­scribe these as user-story-dri­ven fea­tures in the Features list.

Advanced built-in Wi-Fi

Elon Musk’s claim that he was mis­treated by his OpenAI co-founders failed af­ter nine California ju­rors re­turned a unan­i­mous ver­dict that his law­suits had been filed too late.

Musk ac­cused Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, OpenAI, and Microsoft of “stealing a char­ity” by cre­at­ing a for-profit af­fil­i­ate of the fron­tier AI lab. Jurors, how­ever, found that any harms that Musk may have suf­fered came be­fore the dead­line for fil­ing his claims un­der the law.

While the trial delved deeply into the melo­dra­matic his­tory of OpenAI and fea­tured tes­ti­mony from lead­ing fig­ures in Silicon Valley, it ul­ti­mately turned on fairly nar­row ques­tions of the law. The trial fo­cused on whether and when Altman and the other de­fen­dants had made and bro­ken promises to Musk, but his case failed to con­vince ju­rors that he had a valid claim.

In par­tic­u­lar, OpenAI had ad­vanced a statute of lim­i­ta­tions de­fense, which sought to prove that any harms Musk sought to lit­i­gate had taken place be­fore 2021. (The spe­cific date var­ied by the charge: be­fore August 5, 2021, for the first count; August 5, 2022, for the sec­ond count; and November 14, 2021, for the third count.) Ultimately, the jury found that ar­gu­ment per­sua­sive, which made for a short de­lib­er­a­tion pe­riod.

“There was a sub­stan­tial amount of ev­i­dence to sup­port the ju­ry’s find­ing, which is why I was pre­pared to dis­miss on the spot,” Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said af­ter the ver­dict was de­liv­ered.

The end of the case means that one ma­jor threat to OpenAI — a pos­si­ble re­struc­tur­ing — is now off the table ahead of its re­ported IPO.

“It did not take [the jury] two hours to con­clude … that Mr. Musk’s law­suit is noth­ing more than an af­ter-the-fact con­trivance that bears no re­la­tion­ship to re­al­ity,” OpenAI’s lead at­tor­ney, Bill Savitt, said af­ter the ver­dict. “They kicked it ex­actly where it be­longs — just to the side. This law­suit is a hyp­o­crit­i­cal at­tempt to sab­o­tage a com­peti­tor.”

Microsoft, which Musk sued for aid­ing and abet­ting OpenAI’s al­leged breach of char­i­ta­ble trust, wel­comed the ver­dict. A spokesper­son for the com­pany said it “remained com­mit­ted to our work with OpenAI to ad­vance and scale AI for peo­ple and or­ga­ni­za­tions around the world.”

The ver­dict came in the mid­dle of a hear­ing to de­ter­mine the po­ten­tial dam­ages to Musk if the ver­dict had gone the other way. While that dis­cus­sion is moot for now, the judge ap­peared un­con­vinced by the anal­ogy Musk’s lawyers drew be­tween his char­i­ta­ble con­tri­bu­tions and in­vest­ments in a for-profit startup.

“Your analy­sis seems to be de­void of con­nec­tion to the un­der­ly­ing facts,” she told Dr. C. Paul Wazzan, the ex­pert who came up with Musk’s es­ti­mate of OpenAI and Microsoft’s wrong­ful gains at his ex­pense — some $78.8 bil­lion to $135 bil­lion.

In a tweet af­ter the rul­ing, Musk ap­peared to take the pro­ce­dural grounds of the dis­missal as a moral vic­tory. “There is no ques­tion to any­one fol­low­ing the case in de­tail that Altman & Brockman did in fact en­rich them­selves by steal­ing a char­ity. The only ques­tion is WHEN they did it!” Musk wrote. “I will be fil­ing an ap­peal with the Ninth Circuit, be­cause cre­at­ing a prece­dent to loot char­i­ties is in­cred­i­bly de­struc­tive to char­i­ta­ble giv­ing in America.”

Reached for com­ment by TechCrunch, Musk’s lead coun­sel, Marc Toberoff, said, “One word: Appeal.”

When you pur­chase through links in our ar­ti­cles, we may earn a small com­mis­sion. This does­n’t af­fect our ed­i­to­r­ial in­de­pen­dence.

Tim Fernholz is a jour­nal­ist who writes about tech­nol­ogy, fi­nance and pub­lic pol­icy. He has closely cov­ered the rise of the pri­vate space in­dus­try and is the au­thor of Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the New Space Race. Formerly, he was a se­nior re­porter at Quartz, the global busi­ness news site, for more than a decade, and be­gan his ca­reer as a po­lit­i­cal re­porter in Washington, D.C.

You can con­tact or ver­ify out­reach from Tim by email­ing tim.fern­holz@techcrunch.com or via an en­crypted mes­sage to tim_fern­holz.21 on Signal.

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The un­der­signed or­gan­i­sa­tions con­demn Meta’s re­cent de­ci­sion to re­strict the Facebook and Instagram ac­counts of in­de­pen­dent NGOs, re­searchers, and civil so­ci­ety fig­ures from reach­ing au­di­ences in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This is the lat­est in a pat­tern of ma­jor tech­nol­ogy com­pa­nies, in­clud­ing Meta, act­ing as en­force­ment arms for re­pres­sive gov­ern­ments in the Gulf. We call on Meta to up­hold its hu­man rights re­spon­si­bil­i­ties and en­sure that users’ con­tent is not ar­bi­trar­ily re­stricted.

Since 30 April 2026, Gulf-focused NGOs ALQST for Human Rights and Democratic Diwan, as well as Saudi re­searcher Abdullah Alaoudh and hu­man rights de­fender Yahya Assiri, have had their Facebook ac­counts ren­dered “unavailable” in Saudi Arabia at the re­quest of the Saudi gov­ern­ment, in a form of “geo-blocking”. Similar re­stric­tions have been im­posed in the UAE, in­clud­ing against an aca­d­e­mic. According to Meta’s pub­licly avail­able con­tent re­stric­tion re­ports, over 100 Facebook pages and Instagram ac­counts have been re­stricted since March 2026. This fol­lows a sim­i­lar pat­tern on X (formerly Twitter). Most re­cently, the Saudi gov­ern­ment re­quested that a num­ber of X ac­counts be­long­ing to promi­nent Saudi ac­tivists be geo-blocked. As of the pub­li­ca­tion date (20 May), X had not com­plied.

The un­der­signed or­gan­i­sa­tions con­sider these mea­sures ar­bi­trary, dis­crim­i­na­tory, and a di­rect vi­o­la­tion of the right to free­dom of ex­pres­sion and ac­cess to in­for­ma­tion. Affected users were no­ti­fied that Meta acted in re­sponse to a “local le­gal re­quire­ment” or a “request from a gov­ern­ment” (i.e. Saudi Arabia and the UAE), demon­strat­ing the com­pa­ny’s will­ing­ness to com­ply with de­mands from state au­thor­i­ties that rou­tinely sup­press, sur­veil, and crim­i­nalise on­line ex­pres­sion.

Meta’s no­ti­fi­ca­tions cite com­pli­ance with “local laws”, and its re­ports spec­ify the cy­ber­crime laws of Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Authorities in Saudi Arabia and the UAE have long re­lied on dra­con­ian cy­ber­crime and coun­tert­er­ror­ism leg­is­la­tion to si­lence dis­sent and re­strict free­dom of ex­pres­sion on­line. Count­less ac­tivists and peace­ful crit­ics have been ar­rested, tried and sen­tenced for ex­press­ing crit­i­cal opin­ions in on­line pub­li­ca­tions or on so­cial me­dia, in­clud­ing Facebook and X.

The reports further cite that the con­tent al­legedly vi­o­lat­ing cy­ber­crime laws in­cludes “reporting on re­gional geopo­lit­i­cal con­flicts and se­cu­rity de­vel­op­ments.” Since the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran on 28 February 2026, Gulf gov­ern­ments have moved swiftly to tighten the in­for­ma­tion en­vi­ron­ment even fur­ther, con­trol­ling what their pop­u­la­tions can see, say, and share about the at­tacks un­fold­ing in their coun­tries.

Meta claims to con­duct hu­man rights due dili­gence re­views be­fore com­ply­ing with gov­ern­ment re­quests. We ask Meta to dis­close what that re­view looked like for ALQST’s page (and other af­fected ac­counts), who con­ducted it, what stan­dards were ap­plied, and how the com­pany con­cluded that re­strict­ing a hu­man rights or­gan­i­sa­tion at the re­quest of a gov­ern­ment that im­pris­ons peo­ple for so­cial me­dia posts is com­pat­i­ble with its own stated com­mit­ments.

Meanwhile, au­thor­i­ties in both coun­tries ex­ert near to­tal con­trol over on­line in­for­ma­tion, and rou­tinely block web­sites and in­ter­net ac­counts that might be of pub­lic in­ter­est, such as the web­sites of ALQST (blocked in Saudi Arabia since 2015), the Gulf Centre for Human Rights (blocked in Saudi Arabia and the UAE since 2015) and oth­ers that might con­tain con­tent crit­i­cal of the gov­ern­ment or that ad­vo­cate for hu­man rights and democ­racy in the coun­try. In this highly re­pres­sive con­text, Meta has a height­ened re­spon­si­bil­ity to up­hold free­dom of ex­pres­sion and pro­tect hu­man rights de­fend­ers, es­pe­cially from “censorship de­mands from gov­ern­ments or their prox­ies” as Meta pub­licly states in its hu­man rights pol­icy. Instead of pre­serv­ing the free flow of in­for­ma­tion, Meta has fur­ther re­stricted ac­cess to it.

Ironically, Meta’s no­ti­fi­ca­tions state that the com­pany con­ducted le­gal as­sess­ments be­fore­hand and “took into ac­count hu­man rights im­pli­ca­tions.” Given the well-doc­u­mented pat­tern of dig­i­tal re­pres­sion by Saudi and UAE au­thor­i­ties, such claims are dif­fi­cult to rec­on­cile. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights ex­pect com­pa­nies to as­sess whether gov­ern­ment re­quests are con­sis­tent with in­ter­na­tional hu­man rights stan­dards be­fore com­ply­ing and to be trans­par­ent about how they reached their con­clu­sions. The un­der­signed or­gan­i­sa­tions there­fore call on Meta to:

Publish the full le­gal re­quests re­ceived from Saudi and UAE au­thor­i­ties along with the hu­man rights as­sess­ments Meta claims to have con­ducted;

Restore full ac­cess to all af­fected ac­counts im­me­di­ately;

Commit to no­ti­fy­ing af­fected users with spe­cific de­tails about which con­tent trig­gered the re­stric­tion and un­der which law; and

Explain what role, if any, Meta’s re­gional of­fices in the Gulf played in pro­cess­ing these re­quests.

Signatories:

Access Now

ALQST for Human Rights

American Committee for Middle East Rights (ACMER)

DAWN

De|Center

Digital Action

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR)

HuMENA for Human Rights and Civic Engagement

MENA Rights Group

Skyline International for Human Rights (SIHR)

SMEX

Update May 21: GitHub has now linked this breach to the TanStack npm sup­ply-chain at­tack and says the em­ployee in­stalled a ma­li­cious ver­sion of the Nx Console ex­ten­sion.

GitHub has con­firmed that roughly 3,800 in­ter­nal repos­i­to­ries were breached af­ter one of its em­ploy­ees in­stalled a ma­li­cious VS Code ex­ten­sion.

The com­pany has since re­moved the un­named tro­janized ex­ten­sion from the VS Code mar­ket­place and has se­cured the com­pro­mised de­vice.

“Yesterday we de­tected and con­tained a com­pro­mise of an em­ployee de­vice in­volv­ing a poi­soned VS Code ex­ten­sion. We re­moved the ma­li­cious ex­ten­sion ver­sion, iso­lated the end­point, and be­gan in­ci­dent re­sponse im­me­di­ately,” the com­pany said.

“Our cur­rent as­sess­ment is that the ac­tiv­ity in­volved ex­fil­tra­tion of GitHub-internal repos­i­to­ries only. The at­tack­er’s cur­rent claims of ~3,800 repos­i­to­ries are di­rec­tion­ally con­sis­tent with our in­ves­ti­ga­tion so far.”

This comes af­ter GitHub told BleepingComputer on Tuesday evening that it was in­ves­ti­gat­ing claims of unau­tho­rized ac­cess to its in­ter­nal repos­i­to­ries and added that it has no ev­i­dence that cus­tomer data stored out­side the af­fected re­pos has been af­fected.

While GitHub has yet to at­tribute the breach, the TeamPCP hacker group claimed ac­cess to GitHub source code and “~4,000 re­pos of pri­vate code” on the Breached cy­ber­crime fo­rum on Tuesday, ask­ing for at least $50,000 for the stolen data.

“As al­ways this is not a ran­som, We do not care about ex­tort­ing Github, 1 buyer and we shred the data on our end, it looks like our re­tire­ment is soon so if no buyer is found we will leak it free,” the cy­ber­crim­i­nals said. “If you are in­ter­ested. Send your of­fers to the com­mu­ni­ca­tions be­low, we are not in­ter­ested in un­der 50k, the best of­fer will get it.”

​TeamPCP was pre­vi­ously linked to mas­sive sup­ply chain at­tacks tar­get­ing de­vel­oper code plat­forms, in­clud­ing GitHub, PyPI, NPM, and Docker, and, more re­cently, to the “Mini Shai-Hulud” sup­ply chain cam­paign(which also im­pacted two OpenAI em­ploy­ees).

​VS Code ex­ten­sions are plu­g­ins that can be in­stalled from the VS Code Marketplace (the of­fi­cial store for add-ons for Microsoft’s code ed­i­tor) to add fea­tures or in­te­grate tools into the ed­i­tor.

This is­n’t the first time a tro­janized VS Code ex­ten­sion has been spot­ted on the mar­ket­place, as mul­ti­ple other ma­li­cious ex­ten­sions with mil­lions of in­stalls have been used to steal de­vel­oper cre­den­tials and other sen­si­tive data over the last sev­eral years.

For in­stance, last year, VSCode ex­ten­sions with 9 mil­lion in­stalls were pulled over se­cu­rity risks, and 10 more, pos­ing as le­git­i­mate de­vel­op­ment tools, in­fected users with the XMRig cryp­tominer.

Later in the year, a ma­li­cious ex­ten­sion with ba­sic ran­somware ca­pa­bil­i­ties snuck onto the VS Code mar­ket­place af­ter a threat ac­tor named WhiteCobra flooded it with 24 crypto-steal­ing ex­ten­sions.

More re­cently, in January, two ma­li­cious ex­ten­sions ad­ver­tised as AI-based cod­ing as­sis­tants with 1.5 mil­lion in­stalls ex­fil­trated data from com­pro­mised de­vel­oper sys­tems to servers in China.

GitHub’s cloud-based plat­form is now used by over 4 mil­lion or­ga­ni­za­tions (including 90% of the Fortune 100) and more than 180 mil­lion de­vel­op­ers who con­tribute to over 420 mil­lion code repos­i­to­ries.

The Validation Gap: Automated Pentesting Answers One Question. You Need Six.

Automated pen­test­ing tools de­liver real value, but they were built to an­swer one ques­tion: can an at­tacker move through the net­work? They were not built to test whether your con­trols block threats, your de­tec­tion rules fire, or your cloud con­figs hold.

This guide cov­ers the 6 sur­faces you ac­tu­ally need to val­i­date.

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L’Europe rè­gle ses comptes

Publié le 15/05/26 à 19h35

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2

L’Europe lance en­fin sa ri­poste tech­nologique face à l’hégé­monie améri­caine. Cinq géants du paiement mo­bile con­ti­nen­tal vi­en­nent de sceller une al­liance his­torique pour uni­fier leurs réseaux. Dès l’an­née prochaine, les trans­ac­tions quo­ti­di­ennes de mil­lions d’u­til­isa­teurs s’af­franchi­ront des cir­cuits tra­di­tion­nels transat­lan­tiques pour cir­culer sur une in­fra­struc­ture stricte­ment eu­ropéenne et in­dépen­dante.

21

Visa et Mastercard, maîtres in­con­testés du paiement en Europe, font dé­sor­mais face à une of­fen­sive co­or­don­née de cinq cham­pi­ons na­tionaux.

© Olgsera

Le paysage ban­caire eu­ropéen s’ap­prête à vivre un séisme. Des ac­teurs ma­jeurs comme Bizum en Espagne, Bancomat en Italie, MB WAY au Portugal et Vipps MobilePay dans les pays du Nord s’u­nis­sent of­fi­cielle­ment à l’ini­tia­tive française Wero. Cette force de frappe n’a rien de sym­bol­ique car elle s’ap­puie sur une base solide de 130 mil­lions d’u­til­isa­teurs déjà ac­t­ifs. En con­nec­tant ces écosys­tèmes na­tionaux, l’Eu­rope ne se con­tente plus de cri­ti­quer la dom­i­na­tion de Visa et Mastercard, elle con­struit une al­ter­na­tive ca­pa­ble de traiter des mil­liards de trans­ac­tions an­nuelles sans que la moin­dre don­née ne tran­site par les serveurs des États-Unis.

L’interopérabilité to­tale comme clé de la lib­erté numérique

L’Europe dis­pose de l’in­fra­struc­ture, de l’échelle et de la vi­sion néces­saires pour of­frir une al­ter­na­tive eu­ropéenne sou­veraine, ro­buste et fi­able dans le do­maine des paiements.

L’Europe dis­pose de l’in­fra­struc­ture, de l’échelle et de la vi­sion néces­saires pour of­frir une al­ter­na­tive eu­ropéenne sou­veraine, ro­buste et fi­able dans le do­maine des paiements.

Le pro­jet s’ap­puie sur la créa­tion d’un hub cen­tral d’in­teropéra­bil­ité, géré par une en­tité com­mune que les parte­naires établiront au pre­mier se­mes­tre 2026. Cette plate­forme tech­nique per­me­t­tra aux dif­férents sys­tèmes de di­a­loguer en­tre eux, sans que les util­isa­teurs n’aient à changer leurs habi­tudes. Un Français util­isant Wero pourra ainsi trans­férer de l’ar­gent à un ami es­pag­nol sur Bizum, avec la même sim­plic­ité qu’un paiement do­mes­tique.

Les cinq parte­naires de l’al­liance eu­ropéenne des paiements, qui représen­tent déjà 130 mil­lions d’u­til­isa­teurs à tra­vers 13 pays.

© EPI

Un cal­en­drier de dé­ploiement am­bitieux vers une au­tonomie com­plète

Le dé­ploiement se fera pro­gres­sive­ment. Les vire­ments en­tre par­ti­c­uliers seront disponibles dès 2026 sur l’ensem­ble des treize pays cou­verts — d’An­dorre à la Suède. Les paiements en ligne et en ma­g­a­sin suiv­ront en 2027. À terme, cette coali­tion cou­vrira 72 % de la pop­u­la­tion de l’U­nion eu­ropéenne et de la Norvège.

La sou­veraineté eu­ropéenne des paiements n’est pas une vi­sion, mais une réal­ité en de­venir.

La sou­veraineté eu­ropéenne des paiements n’est pas une vi­sion, mais une réal­ité en de­venir.

L’alliance EuroPA, qui con­necte déjà l’Es­pagne, le Portugal, l’I­talie et Andorre depuis mars 2025, sert de pro­to­type. Six mil­lions d’eu­ros y ont tran­sité en un an, sans cam­pagne pro­mo­tion­nelle par­ti­c­ulière. Un sig­nal en­cour­ageant pour cette am­bi­tion d’au­tonomie eu­ropéenne dans un secteur longtemps dom­iné par des géants ex­tra-con­ti­nen­taux — une préoc­cu­pa­tion que Christine Lagarde avait déjà martelée en avril 2025.

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May 19, 2026

Gemini 3.5 is built to help you ex­e­cute com­plex, agen­tic work­flows.

In this story

Gemini 3.5 Flash

Frontier in­tel­li­gence, ex­cep­tional speed

Agentic tasks at scale

Richer graph­ics

Real-world im­pact

Personal AI agents

Built with Frontier safe­guards

Available to­day

Today, we’re in­tro­duc­ing Gemini 3.5, our lat­est fam­ily of mod­els com­bin­ing fron­tier in­tel­li­gence with ac­tion. This rep­re­sents a ma­jor leap for­ward in build­ing more ca­pa­ble, in­tel­li­gent agents. We’re kick­ing off the se­ries by re­leas­ing 3.5 Flash. It de­liv­ers fron­tier per­for­mance for agents and cod­ing, ex­celling at com­plex long-hori­zon tasks that de­liver real-world util­ity.

3.5 Flash is avail­able to­day to bil­lions of peo­ple glob­ally:

For every­one via the Gemini app and AI Mode in Google Search

For de­vel­op­ers in our agent-first de­vel­op­ment plat­form Google Antigravity and Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Android Studio

For en­ter­prises in Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and Gemini Enterprise.

We’re also hard at work on 3.5 Pro. It’s al­ready be­ing used in­ter­nally, and we look for­ward to rolling it out next month.

3.5 Flash: fron­tier per­for­mance for agents and cod­ing

Gemini 3.5 Flash de­liv­ers in­tel­li­gence that ri­vals large flag­ship mod­els on mul­ti­ple di­men­sions, at the speeds you have come to ex­pect from the Flash se­ries. It’s our strongest agen­tic and cod­ing model yet, out­per­form­ing Gemini 3.1 Pro on chal­leng­ing cod­ing and agen­tic bench­marks like Terminal-Bench 2.1 (76.2%), GDPval-AA (1656 Elo) and MCP Atlas (83.6%), and lead­ing in mul­ti­modal un­der­stand­ing (84.2% on CharXiv Reasoning). When look­ing at out­put to­kens per sec­ond, it is 4 times faster than other fron­tier mod­els.

Landing in the top-right quad­rant of the Artificial Analysis in­dex, 3.5 Flash de­liv­ers fron­tier-level in­tel­li­gence at ex­cep­tional speed — prov­ing you no longer have to trade qual­ity for la­tency.

3.5 Flash: agen­tic tasks at scale

This bal­ance of speed and per­for­mance makes 3.5 Flash ideal for tack­ling long-hori­zon agen­tic tasks. What used to take a de­vel­oper days or an au­di­tor weeks, 3.5 Flash can now help com­plete in a frac­tion of the time, of­ten at less than half the cost of other fron­tier mod­els. It rapidly plans, builds and it­er­ates to solve real-world prob­lems, whether it’s de­vel­op­ing new ap­pli­ca­tions, main­tain­ing code­bases or help­ing to pre­pare fi­nan­cial doc­u­ments.

When cou­pled with the up­dated Antigravity har­ness, 3.5 Flash be­comes a pow­er­ful en­gine for de­ploy­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive sub­agents to tackle prob­lems at scale for the most de­mand­ing use cases. Under su­per­vi­sion, it can re­li­ably ex­e­cute multi-step work­flows and cod­ing tasks while sus­tain­ing fron­tier per­for­mance.

Powered by Antigravity, 3.5 Flash ex­e­cutes multi-step work­flows to au­to­mat­i­cally re­name and cat­e­go­rize un­struc­tured as­sets based on dy­namic cri­te­ria.

Leveraging Antigravity, 3.5 Flash uses two agents to syn­the­size the AlphaZero pa­per and code a fully playable game in six hours.

3.5 Flash uses the Antigravity har­ness to trans­form a messy legacy code­base to Next.js.

3.5 Flash uses sub­agents to cre­ate new city land­scapes in Antigravity.

3.5 Flash uses two agents: a builder and a player, work­ing in a rapid self-im­prove­ment loop to de­velop a game in Antigravity.

Building on the strong mul­ti­modal foun­da­tion of Gemini 3, 3.5 Flash gen­er­ates richer, more in­ter­ac­tive web UIs and graph­ics.

3.5 Flash cre­ates in­ter­ac­tive an­i­ma­tions for a re­search pa­per on AI Studio.

3.5 Flash turns a plain text de­scrip­tion into in­ter­ac­tive hard­ware on AI Studio.

3.5 Flash ex­e­cutes mul­ti­ple con­cepts in par­al­lel to build a full brand­ing con­cept for a school fundraiser on AI Studio.

3.5 Flash gen­er­ates dif­fer­ent UX ap­proaches for a check­out flow in just 60 sec­onds on AI Studio.

3.5 Flash: real-world im­pact

3.5 Flash’s real-world agen­tic ca­pa­bil­i­ties are al­ready dri­ving mean­ing­ful progress for our de­vel­op­ers and en­ter­prises alike. In de­vel­op­ing the 3.5 model se­ries, we worked closely with in­dus­try part­ners to un­der­stand where toil and com­plex­ity arose in their work­flows. Partners are see­ing mean­ing­ful im­pact — from banks and fin­techs au­tomat­ing multi-week work­flows to data sci­ence teams un­earthing in­sights amidst com­plex data en­vi­ron­ments.

Shopify is run­ning sub­agents in par­al­lel to an­a­lyze com­plex data over a long hori­zon for more ac­cu­rate mer­chant growth fore­casts at a global scale.

Macquarie Bank is pi­lot­ing how 3.5 Flash can ac­cel­er­ate cus­tomer on­board­ing by rea­son­ing over com­plex 100+ page doc­u­ments, re­triev­ing rel­e­vant in­for­ma­tion and mak­ing re­li­able rec­om­men­da­tions with low la­tency.

Salesforce is in­te­grat­ing 3.5 Flash into Agentforce to re­li­ably au­to­mate com­pli­cated en­ter­prise tasks by de­ploy­ing mul­ti­ple sub­agents that re­tain con­text and ex­e­cute com­plex, multi-turn tool call­ing.

3.5 Flash is help­ing Ramp en­able smarter, more re­li­able OCR through mul­ti­modal un­der­stand­ing of com­plex in­voices com­bined with rea­son­ing over his­tor­i­cal pat­terns.

Xero is de­ploy­ing agents to au­tonomously man­age com­plex, multi-week work­flows, such as iden­ti­fy­ing sup­pli­ers and gath­er­ing in­for­ma­tion for 1099 tax forms, en­abling small busi­nesses to au­to­mate te­dious ad­min tasks.

Databricks is us­ing agen­tic work­flows to mon­i­tor and re­trieve real-time in­for­ma­tion, rea­son across mas­sive datasets to di­ag­nose is­sues, iden­tify fixes and pro­pose so­lu­tions for data sci­en­tists.

Personal AI agents: built with 3.5 Flash

3.5 Flash is now the de­fault model for the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search glob­ally. At I/O to­day, we showed how its agen­tic ca­pa­bil­i­ties are pow­er­ing new fea­tures to bring fron­tier-level in­tel­li­gence to your daily life.

The new Gemini Spark, your per­sonal AI agent, uses 3.5 Flash. It runs 24/7, help­ing you nav­i­gate your dig­i­tal life, tak­ing ac­tion on your be­half while un­der your di­rec­tion. We’re start­ing to roll out Gemini Spark to trusted testers to­day, and we’re plan­ning on bring­ing the Beta to Google AI Ultra sub­scribers in the US next week.

Gemini Spark uses 3.5 Flash to help ac­com­plish these tasks

Gemini Spark uses 3.5 Flash to help ac­com­plish these tasks

Gemini Spark uses 3.5 Flash to help ac­com­plish these tasks

Gemini Spark uses 3.5 Flash to help ac­com­plish these tasks

Gemini Spark uses 3.5 Flash to help ac­com­plish these tasks

The en­hanced agen­tic cod­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties of 3.5 Flash are also de­liv­er­ing even more in­tel­li­gent ex­pe­ri­ences across Search, from in­tro­duc­ing new in­for­ma­tion agents that work for you 24/7 to un­lock­ing more dy­namic gen­er­a­tive UI ex­pe­ri­ences. Learn more in our blog post.

Search lever­ages 3.5 Flash to build an in­ter­ac­tive vi­sual ex­plain­ing Gyroid pat­terns.

Gemini 3.5: built with fron­tier safe­guards

Gemini 3.5 was de­vel­oped in ac­cor­dance with our Frontier Safety Framework. We have strength­ened our cy­ber and CBRN safe­guards, which means it’s less likely to gen­er­ate harm­ful con­tent, and to mis­tak­enly refuse to an­swer safe queries. We achieve this with new, more ad­vanced safety train­ing and mit­i­ga­tions, in­clud­ing in­ter­pretabil­ity tools that help check and un­der­stand the AI’s in­ner rea­son­ing be­fore it pro­vides a re­sponse.

3.5 Flash is avail­able to­day

Gemini 3.5 Flash is gen­er­ally avail­able via Google Antigravity, the Gemini API in Google AI Studio and Android Studio, Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform and Gemini Enterprise. It’s also now avail­able to every­one in the Gemini app and AI Mode in Search. On be­half of the en­tire Gemini team, we can’t wait to see what you build.

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This is a vir­tual mu­seum of op­er­at­ing sys­tems (and stand­alone ap­pli­ca­tions) run­ning un­der em­u­la­tion, im­ple­mented as a Linux VM for QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM.

A cus­tom em­u­la­tor-in­de­pen­dent launcher is pro­vided, and all OSes and em­u­la­tors are pre-in­stalled and pre-con­fig­ured. The launcher in­cludes a snap­shot fea­ture to quickly re­vert bro­ken in­stal­la­tions back to a work­ing state. Hypervisor in­stallers and short­cuts to run the VM on Windows, ma­cOS, and Linux are also in­cluded.

Want to see the ear­li­est res­i­dent mon­i­tors? The an­ces­tor of all mod­ern OSes (CTSS)? The ear­li­est ver­sions of Unix? The first OS with a desk­top metaphor GUI (Xerox Star Pilot/ViewPoint)? Early ver­sions of main­stream OSes? If you want to ex­plore his­tor­i­cal OSes and plat­forms with­out hav­ing to worry about con­fig­ur­ing/​in­stalling em­u­la­tors and OSes or cor­rupt­ing em­u­lated in­stal­la­tions, you’ve come to the right place.

Just about every well-known OS and plat­form (and also a lot of ob­scure ones) is in­cluded in some form, span­ning the en­tire his­tory of stored-pro­gram com­put­ing from the Manchester Baby of 1948 (the first stored-pro­gram com­puter) to the pre­sent day.

The cat­a­logue cov­ers, among many other things:

The ear­li­est main­frames: Manchester Baby test/​demo pro­grams, Mark 1 Scheme A/B/C/T (the ear­li­est ex­am­ples of sys­tem soft­ware that could be con­sid­ered as an OS), var­i­ous EDSAC soft­ware, etc.

Later main­frames and mini­com­put­ers: CTSS, MVS, VM/370, TOPS-10/20, ITS, Multics, RSX, RSTS, and more

Workstations and Unix vari­ants: PERQ OSes, SunOS, IRIX, OSF/1, A/UX, NeXTSTEP, Plan 9, var­i­ous BSDs, plus Linux dis­tri­b­u­tions across the decades, and more

Home com­put­ers: var­i­ous CP/M vari­ants, Apple II, Commodore 8-bit ma­chines, Atari 8-bit, MSX, Tandy TRS-80, BBC Micro, ZX Spectrum, Sharp MZ, and more

Personal com­puter op­er­at­ing sys­tems: var­i­ous DOS vari­ants, OS/2, BeOS, Windows from 1.0 to early Longhorn be­tas, clas­sic Mac OS through Mac OS X 10.5 PPC, and more

Mobile and em­bed­ded: PalmOS, EPOC/Symbian, Windows CE, Newton OS, early Android and iOS where em­u­la­tion per­mits, QNX, etc.

Research and ob­scure sys­tems: ZetaLisp, Smalltalk en­vi­ron­ments, Oberon, Plan 9, and many more that few peo­ple now have ever booted

If a work­ing ver­sion of an op­er­at­ing sys­tem ex­ists some­where, the goal is to have it here, in a form any­one can run on a rea­son­ably mod­ern lap­top/​desk­top.

By the Numbers

1700+

in­stalls

250+

plat­forms

570+

dis­tinct oses

1948-now

era

Downloads

Both a full and a lite ver­sion are avail­able. The full ver­sion ships with every­thing pre-down­loaded and runs of­fline. The lite ver­sion down­loads disk/​tape/​etc. im­ages for guest VMs the first time they are run. Automatic and man­ual up­dates are sup­ported on both edi­tions so new in­stal­la­tions land with­out re-down­load­ing the whole VM.

Download the Virtual OS Museum

Screenshots

0. Launcher main win­dow

1. Launcher VM info

2. Unix PC SVR2 and XVM RSX

AFROS (XaAES) 8.12 – 00 TeraDesk

AO-DOS 2.10 – 00 Intro

ATT Unix PC System V R2 3.51m - 00 File Manager and Terminal

A_UX 3.1.1 – 00 Finder with util­i­ties

Amiga UNIX (AMIX) 2.1c - 00 OpenLook desk­top with ap­pli­ca­tions

CP_M for PSI98 2.2 (6.31-Z) - 00 DIR

CSIDOS 3.32 – 00 Intro

Coherent 4.2.14 – 00 olwm with ap­pli­ca­tions

Domain_OS SR10.4 – 01 VUE desk­top

E_OS LX 0.2.5 – 00 Terminal

FlexOS 2.3 (COROS LS-B 4.01) - 03 About

GNO_ME 2.0.6 – 01 TMTerm

HP-UX 11i v1 (B.11.11) - 00 CDE with util­i­ties

Human68K 3.02 – 00 LHES

IBM 1130 DMS V2M12 - 00 LET list­ing

IBM OS_2 (Extended Edition) 1.1 – 00 Desktop Manager

IRIX 6.5.22m - 00 IMD with ap­pli­ca­tions

Inferno Fourth Edition (20100115) - 00 GUI with ap­pli­ca­tions

LisaOS 3.1 – 02 LisaDraw

MOS for BBC Master Compact 5.10 (Base) - 02 Desktop

Mac OS (Classic) 1.0 al­pha; Sony Test (System ‘7.0’, Finder 1983 – 10-04) - 00 Finder

Mac OS 9.0.4 – 00 Finder, Internet Explorer,and Help

Mach386 2.6 1.0 (X108_MSD) - 00 X11 with ap­pli­ca­tions

Minerva 1.98 (QL_E (shares disk im­ages with SMSQ_E QL_E)) - 00 Desktop with ap­pli­ca­tions

Minix 3.4.0rc6 – 00 X11 Terminal and Links

NeXTStep (68k) 3.3 – 00 Desktop with ap­pli­ca­tions

OS-9_x86 (a.k.a. OS-9000_x86) 6.1 – 00 XiBase

PSI-OS 12.2 – 00 Start

Plan 9 4th Edition - 01 acme filesys­tem server

QNX 1.2 – 00 boot

RISC OS 3.11 (Minimal (Old boot)) - 00 Desktop with ap­pli­ca­tions

SILLIAC soft­ware col­lec­tion - 00 Blob demo

SINIX (PC-X) 1.2 – 01 Login Prompt

SX-WINDOW 3.1 – 00 Desktop

Sharp Personal CP_M for MZ-2500 (MZ-6Z001) 1.0a - 00 VCCP

Softlanding Linux System 1.0 – 00 ls un­ame and ker­nel source

Solaris_SPARC 9 (s9_58shwpl3) - 00 CDE ter­mi­nal help and file man­ager

Syllable 0.5.2 – 00 Desktop with ap­pli­ca­tions

SymbOS 1.0 Beta - 01 About

Tru64 UNIX 5.1B - 00 CDE with util­i­ties

ULTRIX_VAX 4.0 – 00 DECwindows with ap­pli­ca­tions

UNICOS 10.0.0.2 – 01 X11 with util­i­ties

More screen­shots

Why this ex­ists

While the state of soft­ware preser­va­tion has im­proved sig­nif­i­cantly over the past two decades, many of the ex­ist­ing soft­ware preser­va­tion pro­jects are still not par­tic­u­larly ac­ces­si­ble.

When I started col­lect­ing em­u­la­tor im­ages (2003), there were only a few small archives of soft­ware im­ages and the cor­re­spond­ing doc­u­men­ta­tion, and rel­a­tively few em­u­la­tors for any­thing other than well-known con­sumer-ori­ented plat­forms. Nowadays there are many large archives of his­tor­i­cal soft­ware and doc­u­men­ta­tion, and a lot of em­u­la­tors for even a lot of very ob­scure plat­forms.

However, while such ef­forts are valu­able when it comes to keep­ing his­tor­i­cal soft­ware avail­able and runnable (and with­out them this pro­ject would have never been pos­si­ble; see the cred­its page for a list of em­u­la­tors, pre-in­stalled im­ages, and me­dia archives I have used), it of­ten still takes time and ef­fort to get runnable VM in­stal­la­tions from them. OSes may have com­pli­cated in­stall pro­ce­dures. Some may de­pend on par­tic­u­lar de­vice con­fig­u­ra­tions within an em­u­la­tor. Some will only run in cer­tain em­u­la­tor ver­sions, break­ing in later ones due to re­gres­sions. Some em­u­la­tors might have com­plex con­fig­u­ra­tion files, or may re­quire a spe­cific en­vi­ron­ment on the host sys­tem.

This pro­ject is an at­tempt to keep reach­able as much of the his­tory that’s been pre­served in var­i­ous places as pos­si­ble. Not the­o­ret­i­cally reach­able. Not “bootable in prin­ci­ple if you as­sem­ble the right tool­chain on a Tuesday.” Reachable. You click an en­try, it runs, and where pos­si­ble it runs with soft­ware of the era al­ready loaded the way some­one might ac­tu­ally have used the ma­chine at the time.

The work be­hind it

This is the re­sult of over 20 years of col­lect­ing. OS in­stal­la­tions have been sourced from var­i­ous places. Some have been down­loaded as pre-in­stalled im­ages, whereas oth­ers were in­stalled from im­ages of orig­i­nal in­stall me­dia. Some were in­stalled in less than an hour, whereas oth­ers took al­most a week.

A de­cent num­ber only run in par­tic­u­lar em­u­la­tor ver­sions due to re­gres­sions in later ver­sions, and some em­u­la­tors needed mi­nor patches to run on mod­ern Linux or to play nice with the launcher. A few em­u­la­tors have been patched to run OSes that were pre­vi­ously bro­ken.

Many in­stal­la­tions also in­clude var­i­ous add-on soft­ware - ap­pli­ca­tions, de­vel­op­ment tools, games, util­i­ties, etc. - set up the way it ac­tu­ally might have been used.

This is still far from fin­ished; I have many more im­ages sit­ting around that I have yet to in­stall and em­u­la­tors I want to fix; check out my YouTube chan­nel, blog, or BlueSky to see what I’m cur­rently work­ing on.

Support the pro­ject

This is a per­sonal pro­ject, run and cu­rated by one per­son, sus­tained by pa­tience and time. If you find it in­ter­est­ing, the eas­i­est ways to sup­port it are:

Patreon for on­go­ing sup­port

Ko-fi for one-off con­tri­bu­tions

Discord/Fluxer to talk about it, ask ques­tions, or sug­gest new plat­forms/​OSes to add (new en­tries may not be added im­me­di­ately since I’ve got a lot of stuff to add)

GitLab to sub­mit bug re­ports or patches re­lated to the launcher and scripts

Telling some­one who works on, writes about, or stud­ies the his­tory of com­put­ing that this ex­ists

Axel’s blog

Home Blog Now

20 May, 2026

AI takes in all the in­put, whether the orig­i­nal au­thors have con­sented or not, and do some “learning”, and then the AI com­pa­nies sell these learned re­sult to hu­mans, with­out com­pen­sat­ing the orig­i­nal au­thors.

Worse, the cus­tomer of these AI com­pa­nies (AI tools bro) sell the prompted / processed re­sult to other cus­tomers, prof­itting off things AI has copied from all over the in­ter­net.

Is this what the pin­na­cle of hu­man is? Lazy and greedy?

I re­search and write e-com­merce re­lated tu­to­ri­als on my own, and a few other lazy web­site au­thors just ask ChatGPT to copy a few well per­form­ing tu­to­r­ial on­line, and then they pub­lished it as their own.

I found out this be­cause they ranked higher than me in Google search re­sult, and then when I read their ar­ti­cle, their ar­ti­cle con­tains links to my ac­tual web­site, with the ex­act link text (?!) , which means they didnt bother to check and re­move, and thats how I found out.

Fuck Google for rank­ing some copy­cat web­site higher than mine, even though they copied my ar­ti­cle