news
Licensing, Free Software, and Standards
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PowerDNS ☛ PowerDNS Authoritative Server 4.9.11
This 4.9.11 version only contains a small new optional feature: the ability to not perform database updates of the freshness check timestamps on secondary servers, when using the LMDB backend.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Document Foundation ☛ Coming up: LibreOffice event in Nepal
Look! Our Nepalese community is preparing a very cool LibreOffice event for early December.
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Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)
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Mat Duggan ☛ I broke and fixed my Ghost blog
Once a month I will pull down the latest docker images for this server and update the site. The Ghost CMS team updates things at a pretty regular pace so I try to not let an update sit for too long.
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Education
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Rlang ☛ Building and Customising Statistical Models with Stan and R: An Introduction to Bayesian Inference workshop – R-posts.com
The session aims to provide you with hands-on experience specifying, fitting, and interpreting Bayesian models in Stan, and a clear sense of how to extend these methods to your own data. No prior experience with Bayesian analysis or Stan is required, though familiarity with R and regression modelling will be helpful.
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EDRI ☛ RightsCon 2026
Each year, RightsCon convenes business leaders, policymakers, general counsels, government representatives, technologists, academics, journalists, and human rights advocates from around the world to tackle pressing issues at the intersection of human rights and technology. In engaging fireside chats, hands-on workshops, strategic roundtables, private meetings, and a lively exhibition space, RightsCon is where a global movement comes together to build strategies and drive forward change toward a more free, open, and connected digital world.
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RIPE ☛ CAPIF 4: Grounded in IPv6, Looking to Orbit
The fourth Central Asia Peering and Interconnection Forum (CAPIF 4) successfully concluded in Almaty, Kazakhstan, last week, bringing together a record 328 participants (even more than the 280 we initially reported, which was still record-breaking!) from 22 countries.
Over the course of two days, network operators, ISPs, IXPs, policymakers and other stakeholders from across Central Asia and beyond assembled to discuss IPv6, networks of the future, AI, and even a touch of orbital tech! This time, CAPIF returned to Almaty, where the first forum was held, underlining the city’s role as a regional hub for Internet collaboration.
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Licensing / Legal
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Futurism ☛ Lawyer Gets Caught Using AI in Court, Responds in the Worst Possible Way
Needless to say, the judge was not amused.
“In other words, counsel relied upon unvetted AI — in his telling, via inadequately supervised colleagues — to defend his use of unvetted AI,” wrote New York Supreme Court judge Joel Cohen in a decision filed earlier this month.
“This case adds yet another unfortunate chapter to the story of artificial intelligence misuse in the legal profession,” the judge further lamented.
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Don Marti ☛ notes on Humans Commons
It’s pretty clear that we need some kind of open content license that allows for Creative Commons-style re-use by other writers or artists, but also includes some kind of protection from machine learning training. We’re not getting a "noai" license from the original Creative Commons organization, though. Instead, they’re offering a separate "signals" system with at least one major loophole that would make it ineffective in practice. There is no requirement in the license to preserve the signal, so an AI firm could encourage someone else to mirror your site without the signal, then crawl the mirror. Not a big obstacle for an industry that’s already running at supervillain scale.
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Dayvi Schuster ☛ I Miss when Software Ended
Remember when software had an end, like a movie or a book? You bought it, installed it, used it. There were no weekly updates, no monthly subscriptions, no constant notifications to update or accept frankly ever more intrusive permissions or ridiculous terms of service. Software was a product, not a service. You owned it, you controlled it. It was yours.
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Standards/Consortia
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Vegard ☛ A tiny peek into the world of ZigBee.
I recently switched to using Zigbee2MQTT with the Deconz Conbee II I have, largely because everyone seems to recommend it and it supposedly has much better device support than the software deconz provides themselves. Last, but not least, I like to play and wanted to see why people liked this.
Zigbee2Mqtt will handle all devices you connect to it, and it will translate it all to MQTT. I originally thought I would have to do a lot of stuff in Home Assistant to translate MQTT messages and create devices from it, but it seems I was wrong: Zigbee2Mqtt handles all that for you, as soon as it knows about a device, it will inform and have homeassistant create the device. Neat!
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Daniel Stenberg ☛ chart: which host, which protocol
A flow chart describing some steps and decisions done within curl when a HTTP URL is provided. For hostnames, protocol and port numbers.
This flow chart ignores proxies, authentication considerations and use of unix domain sockets to keep things simpler.
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Matt Langford ☛ Rethinking Webmentions
In researching, I stumbled across Robb Knight’s Webmention Redux post where he discusses further issues with the setup. In the end, he scrapped displaying webmentions in favor of a Mastodon widget of sorts that displays the post, likes counter, boosts counter, and reply counter. I immediately liked that idea and decided to implement it on this site.
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