Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 19, 2025

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Don Marti ☛ the end(ish) of Google “Privacy Sandbox”

    One (so far) surviving part of "Privacy Sandbox" is Google’s continued participation in Meta and Mozilla’s adfraud-in-the-browser feature, now known as just "Attribution." So there will still be something to turn off. (icymi: Mozilla hit by complaint over Privacy Preserving Attribution by Richard Speed.)

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Aiven ☛ Exploring PostgreSQL 18's new UUIDv7 support

    Should you use UUIDs as the primary key in your database? You might have heard they are terrible for performance, which is often true for traditional UUIDv4.

    However, the introduction of UUIDv7 fixes many of the previous issues of UUIDv4. Let’s therefore explore what they are and why it might be a good idea to use them.

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

  • Mandaris Moore ☛ Restarting Theme Development

    I thought I would document what steps I went through. I’ve begun writing this on September 24th and worked on it in my spare time until clicking the publish button.

• GNU Projects

  • GNU ☛ unifont @ Savannah: Unifont 17.0.02 Released

    18 October 2025 Unifont 17.0.02 is now available.  This is a minor release aligned with Unicode 17.0.0.

    - This release includes several glyph updates and many new Chinese ideographs; see the ChangeLog file for details.

    - src/Makefile now uses CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS definitions for C program compilation.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ Inequality and homicide, within-country and between country by @ellis2013nz

      I saw this post (toot?) on Mastodon from Daniel Lakens mentioning in passing that “On the other hand, the homicide rate across the world is well modeled as exp(k * income_gini_coefficient).” This struck me as worth checking; So I did! It turns out it is more or less correct.

      Here is a chart I drew of homicides per 100,000 population on the vertical axis versus income or consumption inequality on the horizontal. Consumption is the preferred way to measure poverty and inequality in poorer countries in particular, so in this data, which comes from the World Bank, it is used when available.