Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and the Web
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Daniel Lemire ☛ How does your URL parser handle Unicode?
Most strings today in software are Unicode strings. It means that you can include mathematical symbols, emojis and so forth. There are many different versions of the letter ‘M’, for example: the Roman letter M (U+004D) is semantically different from the Roman numeral Ⅿ (U+216F) while they both often have the same visual representation. John Cook has an interesting post on Unicode Stegonography: you can possibly use this ambiguity to hide messages in plain view. E.g., if you need to warn someone that you are in danger, you could send a text with the Roman numeral M. Normal people reading the text would not notice the difference.
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University of Toronto ☛ The modern web is why web browsers don't have "nice things" (platform APIs)
Every so often I read something that says or suggests that the big combined browser and platform vendors (Google, Apple, and to a lesser extent Microsoft) have deliberately limited their browser's access to platform APIs that would put "progressive web applications" on par with native applications. While I don't necessarily want to say that these vendors are without sin, in my view this vastly misses the core reason web browsers have limited and slow moving access to platform APIs. To put it simply, it's because of what the modern web has turned into, namely "a hive of scum and villainy" to sort of quote a famous movie.
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Mozilla
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Mozilla ☛ Mozilla Localization (L10N): Mozilla Localization in 2024
A Year in Data
2024 was a year with plenty of achievements for the Mozilla localization community (here’s the 2023 report in case you missed it, or want to check how we fared against our original plans). Let’s start with the numbers first: [...]
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Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)
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WordPress ☛ WordPress Themes Need More Weird: A Call for Creative Digital Homes
The modern web has gradually shifted from a vibrant tapestry of personal expression to a landscape of identical designs, where millions of websites share not just similar structures, but identical visual language, spacing, and interaction patterns.
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Licensing / Legal
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Harish Pillay ☛ The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth
In December 2024, Deepseek released version 3 of its foundational model under the MIT License, but the training data remains undisclosed, raising concerns about potential censorship, particularly regarding sensitive historical events. Users noted the model's impressive performance, yet it exhibited limitations in addressing politically sensitive inquiries, diminishing its credibility in the Hey Hi (AI) landscape.
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