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Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards
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FSF ☛ We want to see how you use free software every day!
Share with the community how you use free software every day, for work or fun! Submit up to ten photos to the FSF40 Photo Contest from August 14 - August 31, 2025.
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Alex Ellis ☛ The 90s UNIX Utility That Fell Out of Favour
My interest in MUDs - taught me about the finger command. You could run it, along with who to see who was logged into the server - for how long, if they were idle, if they had in-game email and when they last connected. Along with this, you could define a plan that would be printed out when someone ran the command.
I must have tried finger on abx.net, but my main usage was through the game - to see if my friends had been on that day.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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IPFS Foundation ☛ Ed25519 Support in Chrome: Making the Web Faster and Safer
We're happy to share that Ed25519 is now supported in Chrome (version). Following Ed25519 support in Firefox 129 in August 2024 and Safari 17.0, Chrome finally following suit in 137 in May of this year. Ed25519 is now supported in every major browser engine, reaching 79% and counting of web users.
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[Repeat] Mozilla ☛ Is Germany on the Brink of Banning Ad Blockers? User Freedom, Privacy, and Security Is At Risk. - Open Policy & Advocacy
Unfortunately, on July 31, the German Federal Supreme Court partially overturned the decision of the Hamburg court and remanded the case for further proceedings. The BGH (as the Federal Supreme Court is known) called for a new hearing so that the Hamburg court can provide more detail regarding which part of the website (such as bytecode or object code) is altered by ad blockers, whether this code is protected by copyright, and under what conditions the interference might be justified.
The full impact of this latest development is still unclear. The BGH will issue a more detailed written ruling explaining its decision. Meanwhile, the case has now returned to the lower court for additional fact-finding. It could be a couple more years until we have a clear answer. We hope that the courts ultimately reach the same sensible conclusion and allow users to install ad blockers.
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Daniel Stenberg ☛ car brands running curl
Seven years ago I wrote about how a hundred million cars were running curl and as I brought up this blog post in a discussion recently, I came to reflect over how the world might have changed since. Is curl perhaps used in more cars now?
Yes it is.
With the help of friendly people on Mastodon, and a little bit of Googling, the current set of car brands known to have cars running curl contains 47 names. Most of the world’s top brands: [...]
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Education
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userR! 2025 ☛ useR! 2025
useR! 2025 brings together R users, developers, and enthusiasts from around the world for three days of tutorials, presentations, and networking. The conference is aimed at beginners as well as experienced users.
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Standards/Consortia
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Hackaday ☛ Suggested Schematic Standards
We often think that if a piece of software had the level of documentation you usually see for hardware, you wouldn’t think much of it. Sure, there are exceptions. Some hardware is beautifully documented, and poorly documented software is everywhere. [Graham Sutherland’s] been reviewing schematics and put together some notes on what makes a clean schematic.
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