Free, Libre, and Open Source Software for the Web
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Mozilla ☛ Mozilla Addons Blog: Developer Spotlight: Control Panel for Twitter
You can’t predict how or when success will come. In the case of Control Panel for Twitter — a Firefox extension that gives users authority over the amount of algorithmic content they’re fed — it went viral in Japan a few years ago and word spread fast. One devoted fan even jumped into the open-source code and quickly localized the extension in Japanese, further catapulting its appeal. Today, Control Panel for Ex-Twitter has more than 250,000 users from all over the world enjoying it across various browsers.
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Anne van Kesteren: Contributing to WebKit
Over the last couple weeks I have looked at the WebKit code with the intent of fixing a few things in areas of the web platform I’m familiar with as a personal curiosity. The code had always appeared hackable to me, but I had never given it a go in practice. In fact, this is the first time I have written C++ in my life! Marcos had given me a quick guide to set up my environment and I was off to the races.
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The V8 Sandbox
After almost three years since the initial design document and hundreds of CLs in the meantime, the V8 Sandbox — a lightweight, in-process sandbox for V8 — has now progressed to the point where it is no longer considered an experimental security feature. Starting today, the V8 Sandbox is included in Chrome's Vulnerability Reward Program (VRP). While there are still a number of issues to resolve before it becomes a strong security boundary, the VRP inclusion is an important step in that direction. Chrome 123 could therefore be considered to be a sort of "beta" release for the sandbox. This blog post uses this opportunity to discuss the motivation behind the sandbox, show how it prevents memory corruption in V8 from spreading within the host process, and ultimately explain why it is a necessary step towards memory safety.
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LWN ☛ V8 incorporates new sandbox
V8, the JavaScript engine used in Chrome, announced that its memory sandbox is no longer experimental.
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CNX Software ☛ Google’s Jpegli open-source library can compress high quality images 35% more than traditional JPEG codecs
Google has released the Jpegli open-source library for advanced JPEG coding that maintains backward compatibility while delivering an up to 35% compression ratio improvement at high-quality compression settings. Surveillance Giant Google Research has been working on improving the compression of data (Brotli), audio (e.g. Lyra V2), and images with projects such as WebP or FLIF for many years in order to speed up the web and make it consume less bandwidth for dollar savings and lower carbon emissions.
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IT Wire ☛ Nextcloud goes the way of all flesh, introduces AI-as-a-service
In a statement, the Germany-based company said this included a nearly complete overhaul of the user interface and a different way in which the Hey Hi (AI) Assistant worked at the back-end.
The two new notable features in the Assistant are Context Write and Contest Chat. The latter is the ability for the Assistant to provide answers about a user's data.
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Content Management
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Major Hayden ☛ Major Hayden: Roll your own static blog analytics
Static blogs are easy to serve, but so many of the free options have no analytics whatsoever.
This post talks about how to serve your own blog from a container with live updating analytics
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MWL ☛ 40: Failure is a Renewable Resource
Today’s reading is from next month’s FreeBSD Journal Letters column. Perhaps you have extensive monitoring and log analysis, all meticulously tuned to inform you of every little wobble. You can identify the host spewing stray packets with a single netflow query and know how many times a second hopeful spambot flings garbage at xmlrpc. php.
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