Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Libre Arts ☛ librearts Weekly recap — 2 March 2025
Week highlights: CMYK image mode is WIP in GIMP, new release of LSP plugins, great changes in Inkscape, Friction, and FreeCAD.
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EFF ☛ Meet Rayhunter: A New Open Source Tool from EFF to Detect Cellular Spying
CSS (also known as Stingrays or IMSI catchers) are devices that masquerade as legitimate cell-phone towers, tricking phones within a certain radius into connecting to the device rather than a tower.
CSS operate by conducting a general search of all cell phones within the device’s radius. Law enforcement use CSS to pinpoint the location of phones often with greater accuracy than other techniques such as cell site location information (CSLI) and without needing to involve the phone company at all. CSS can also log International Mobile Subscriber Identifiers (IMSI numbers) unique to each SIM card, or hardware serial numbers (IMEIs) of all of the mobile devices within a given area. Some CSS may have advanced features allowing law enforcement to intercept communications in some circumstances.
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[Repeat] Linuxiac ☛ Thunderbird 136 Now Available for Download, Here’s What’s New
Mozilla has just unveiled Thunderbird version 136 of its widely adopted free and open-source desktop email client, now available for download. One highlight of the new release is the ability for messages to automatically switch to dark mode with a simple toggle in the header.
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Thunderbird ☛ Thunderbird Release Channel Update - The Thunderbird Blog
The monthly Release channel is ready to help you move from annual to monthly updates in Thunderbird. This update lets you know how to switch from the annual update (ESR) to monthly updates (Release), why you might have to wait, and what features you’ll get first!
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[Repeat] Linuxiac ☛ KeePassXC 2.7.10 Brings Proton Pass Importer
The most striking change in this release is the brand-new Proton Pass importer, which streamlines the migration process for those switching from Proton Pass. Equally significant—and one of the most requested features—users can now adjust the application font size for better on-screen readability.
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Remkus de Vries ☛ A New Home for All Things Within WordPress
However… when I chose that, I also knew that if Within WordPress became successful, I would want that branding to live on its own. When I later added a podcast to the Within WordPress brand, it made even more sense to offload to a separate domain. In my head, that is.
You see, I’m a big fan of separation of concerns. That means, I have separate email addresses for all my (side) projects, as well as domains. That’s how my brain works. This separation of concerns also finds its way in how I see branding as a whole. Everything separated just makes more sense to me. In other words, I like a House of Brands versus a Branded House.
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Openwashing
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Silicon Angle ☛ Open-source vector database Qdrant expands enterprise cloud Hey Hi (AI) features [Ed: Open-source with a dash and "cloud Hey Hi (AI) features" means openwashing with buzzwords, false marketing in a nutshell]
High-performance open-source vector database Qdrant has added new enterprise-level security and management tools to its cloud offering, allowing companies to deploy and scale up artificial intelligence applications.
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Harish Pillay ☛ Running for a seat at the Open Source Initiative
I have been accepted as a candidate to be elected to the Board of the Open Source Initiative under the Individual Members category. If you are a member of the Open Source Initiative, I would be delighted if you would cast your vote in my favour.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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Quentin Santos ☛ IndexedDB is Weird
With JavaScript being single-threaded, a blocking API would mean fully blocking the page, render and basic user interaction included, while the request is being processed. Although this is apparently good-enough for JSON.parse(), the W3C decided to make the IndexedDB API non-blocking.
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Education
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Tor ☛ Tor Project's internship sponsored by Google Summer of Code | The Tor Project
For the Tor community, participating in GSoC is invaluable: it brings new contributors into our ecosystem, strengthens the broader open-source movement, and ensures mentorship opportunities for those interested in privacy and anonymity tools. The program removes financial barriers for participants by offering stipends, making it easier for people worldwide to contribute.
Between now and March 23rd, we welcome questions from prospective applicants about Tor and the projects ideas we prepared. If you're interested, please reach out to gsoc at torproject dot org for any questions or comments. Applications will be open from March 24th to April 8th 2025.
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Jamie Brandon ☛ HYTRADBOI 2025 postmortem
I didn't have a call for talks this time. I instead spent a lot of time cold-emailing speakers who I thought would have something interesting to say.
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Standards/Consortia
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Hackaday ☛ It’s 2025, And Here’s A New Film Format
We love camera hacking here at Hackaday, and it’s always fascinating to see new things being done in photography. Something rather special has come our way from [Camerdactyl], who hasn’t merely made a camera, instead he’s created an entirely new analogue film format. Move over 35mm and 120, here’s the RA-4 cartridge!
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Jan Piet Mens ☛ A look at DNS hosting with deSEC
Zones in deSEC profit from support for automatic DNSSEC (meaning it’s there whether you need it or not). The platform supports an array of record types, sports a Web interface and a very well documented REST API, offers IPv6 connectivity, enables 2FA with TOTP tokens, and even provides dynDNS integration should you need it. I’ve known of deSEC for a while now, but an interaction on the Fediverse last night prompted me to finally take a closer look.
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