Free Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 07, 2023

• DingsALot robot bellringer

  David Ray at Cyber City Circuits designed DingsALot over Christmas a few years ago. It’s a choir of bells powered by Raspberry Pi that sings any song the conductor plays on an attached keyboard.

• Move people to free software

  The plan to support ActivityPub is good news. However, the app is proprietary and it will be privacy-violating. The app is not available in the Europe due to the EU’s strict privacy regulations. That’s how dangerous it is for people’s privacy.

• First BSDCan Operations Team Meeting

  I’ve just sent an email everyone who volunteered to help make BSDCan 2024 happen. I suspect some of you have not received that email. If you haven’t seen it, please check your spam folder. We need to start organizing now to make 2024 go smoothly. Mostly smoothly.

• Working together for free software licensing

  Our copyright & licensing associate Craig Topham is working together with free software developers, lawyers, and volunteers to help the community with licensing questions, finding hardware that respects your freedom, and keeping the public informed of interesting free software projects out there. In this article, Topham shares some of the accomplishments the Licensing and Compliance Lab achieved during the last six months.

• The mere 'presence' of an URL on a web server is not a good signal

  There are a variety of situations where you (in the sense of programs and systems) want to know if a web server supports something or is under someone's control. One traditional way is to require the publication of specific URLs on the web server, often URLs with partially random names. The simplest way to implement this is to simply require the URL to exist and be accessible, which is to say that fetching it returns a HTTP 200 response. However, in light of web server implementations which will return HTTP 200 responses for any URL, or at least many of them, this simple check is clearly not sufficient in practice. The mere 'presence' of a URL on a web server proves very little.