Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 08, 2025

• Undeadly ☛ OpenBGPD 8.8 released

  The OpenBGPD project (essentially a subproject of the OpenBSD project), have released their latest work in the OpenBGPD 8.8 release.

• Mitchell Hashimoto ☛ Welcoming Ghostty Subsystem Maintainers

  I'm excited to share that there are eight newly promoted subsystem maintainers for Ghostty. These are the first maintainers to be promoted since the project's creation, and I'm thrilled to see the project grow in this way. Adding additional, independent maintainers is an important part of any open source project's long-term health and stability.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Mozilla

    • Tor ☛ New Release: Tor Browser 14.0.6 | The Tor Project

      Tor Browser 14.0.6 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Ruben Schade ☛ A month with MediaWiki powered by Postgres

    With thanks to the MediaWiki volunteers maintaining Postgres support, the pgsql@ team at FreeBSD team for maintaining the port, and the Postgres developers. You’ve all made my life immeasurably better :).

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • James G ☛ Redesigning the structure of my blog images folder

    My website file structure is split up into two parts: [...]

• Education

  • VisualMode LLC ☛ A Decade of TILs - Notes from VisualMode

    I started my TIL repo ↗ (essentially a microblog) 10 years ago to the day. February 6th, 2015 ↗.

    Has it really been 10 years?

    In that time I've written almost 1600 tiny Today I Learned posts across a bunch of programming topics. It's tempting to focus on the numbers (and I'll get to those later in the post), but first I want to be a bit reflective.

    Here are some of the insights I've had looking back.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • MIT Technology Review ☛ Inside the race to archive the US government’s websites

      “We’ve never seen anything like this,” says David Kaye, professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and the former UN Special Rapporteur for freedom of opinion and expression. “I don’t think any of us know exactly what is happening. What we can see is government websites coming down, databases of essential public interest. The entirety of the USAID website.”

      But as government web pages go dark, a collection of organizations are trying to archive as much data and information as possible before it’s gone for good. The hope is to keep a record of what has been lost for scientists and historians to be able to use in the future.

    • Rlang ☛ Inflation in mediaeval China

      In this post, I would like to draw attention to a very interesting data set collected by Guan, Palma and Wu as part of the replication package for their paper The rise and fall of paper money in Yuan China, 1260-1368. The paper describes inflation, money and prices during the Yuan Dynasty era in China.

      First, a little historical background.

• Standards/Consortia

  • SANS ☛ SSL 2.0 turns 30 this Sunday... Perhaps the time has come to let it die?

    Still, since the aforementioned protocol will celebrate its 30th birthday this Sunday, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a closer look at how common it is at this point, and what systems still support it.

    Going by the numbers from Shodan, at the time of writing, there still appear to be nearly 423 thousand public IP addresses, on which servers supporting SSL 2.0 are accessible on some port[6].