Enlarge / A photo of an IBM PC 5155 portable computer running a ChatGPT client written by Yeo Kheng Meng. (credit: Yeo Kheng Meng )

On Sunday, Singapore-based retrocomputing enthusiast Yeo Kheng Meng released a ChatGPT client for MS-DOS that can run on a 4.77 MHz IBM PC from 1981, providing a unique way to converse with the popular OpenAI language model.

Vintage computer development projects come naturally to Yeo, who created a Slack client for Windows 3.1 in 2019. "I thought to try something different this time and develop for an even older platform as a challenge," he writes on his blog. In this case, he turned his attention to MS-DOS , a text-only operating system first released in 1981, and ChatGPT , an AI-powered large language model (LLM) released by OpenAI in November.

As a conversational AI model, ChatGPT draws on knowledge scraped from the Internet to answer questions and generate text. Thanks to an API that launched his month , anyone with the programming chops can interface ChatGPT with their own custom application.

Enlarge / Curling, like the cURL project, requires precision and is underappreciated.

When you first start messing with the command line, it can feel like there's an impermeable wall between the local space you're messing around in and the greater Internet. On your side, you've got your commands and files, and beyond the wall, there are servers, images, APIs, webpages, and more bits of useful, ever-changing data. One of the most popular ways through that wall has been cURL, or "client URL," which turns 25 this month.

The cURL tool started as a way for programmer Daniel Stenberg to let Internet Chat Relay users quickly fetch currency exchange rates while still inside their chat window. As detailed in an archived history of the project , it was originally built off an existing command-line tool, httpget, built by Rafael Sagula. A 1.0 version was released in 1997, then changed names to urlget by 2.0, as it had added in GOPHER, FTP, and other protocols. By 1998, the tool could upload as well as download, and so version 4.0 was named cURL.

Over the next few years, cURL grew to encompass nearly every Internet protocol, work with certificates and encryption, offer bindings for more than 50 languages, and be included in most Linux distributions and other systems. The cURL project now encompasses both the command-line command itself and the libcurl library. In 2020, the project's history estimated the command and library had been installed in more than 10 billion instances worldwide.

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Jackson | Stone | Getty Images )

Google, Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft said they’re joining forces to stop Kazakhstan’s government from decrypting and reading HTTPS-encrypted traffic sent between its citizens and overseas social media sites.

All four of the companies’ browsers recently received updates that block a root certificate the government has been requiring some citizens to install. The self-signed certificate caused traffic sent to and from select websites to be encrypted with a key controlled by the government. Under industry standards, HTTPS keys are supposed to be private and under the control only of the site operator.

A thread on Mozilla’s bug-reporting site first reported the certificate in use on December 6. The Censored Planet website later reported that the certificate worked against dozens of Web services that mostly belonged to Google, Facebook, and Twitter. Censored Planet identified the sites affected as:

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