Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 28, 2025

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • It's FOSS ☛ Safe Browsing Flags Open Source Photo App Immich Web URLs as Dangerous

    Automated security system mistook legit Immich instances for phishing, which seems to be coming from misconfigured HTTPS setting.

  • Chromium

    • Troy Hunt ☛ Troy Hunt: How We (Almost) Found Chromium's Bug via Crash Reports to Report URI

      Tracking down bugs in software is a pain that all of us who write code must bear. When we're talking about outright errors in a web page, you typically have something to get you started (such as output in the console), but that wasn't the case here: [...]

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ LibreItalia Conference 2025 in Gradisca d’Isonzo

    Libreitalia Conference 2025 was organized by Marco Marega – a LibreItalia and TDF Member – in Gradisca d’Isonzo, near the border with Slovenia, in Gorizia’s province. Gradisca is a very nice fortified city surrounded be beautiful parks. The conference venue was the historical Monte di Pietà palace, that the municipality administration kindly allowed to use.

  • Document Foundation ☛ Join the LibreOffice Team as a Paid Developer focusing on scripting support, preferably full-time, remote (m/f/d)

    Love LibreOffice development? Want to turn your passion into a paid job? We are The Document Foundation (TDF), the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice. We’re passionate about free software, the open source culture and about bringing new companies and people with fresh ideas into our community.

• Licensing / Legal

  • ZDNet ☛ Why open source may not survive the rise of generative AI

    Generative AI is erasing open source code provenance.

    [...]

    Even if an engineer suspects that a block of AI-generated code originated under an open source license, there's no feasible way to identify the source project. The training data has been abstracted into billions of statistical weights, the legal equivalent of a black hole.

    The result is what O'Brien calls "license amnesia." He says, "Code floats free of its social contract and developers can't give back because they don't know where to send their contributions."

• Standards/Consortia

  • The Guardian UK ☛ Could the internet go offline? Inside the fragile system holding the modern world together

    All this is inconvenient, but nowhere near the end of the [Internet]. “Technically, if we have two networked devices and a router between them, the [Internet] is running,” says Michał “rysiek” Woźniak, who works in DNS, the system involved in this week’s outage.

    But there is “absolutely a lot of concentration happening on the [Internet]”, says Steven Murdoch, a professor of computer science at University College London. “This happens with economics. It’s just cheaper to run all things in the same place.”

  • [Old] IEEE ☛ How JPEG Became the Internet’s Image Standard

    Despite not appearing together right away—the JPEG first appeared in Netscape in 1994, two years after the image standard was officially published—the JPEG and Web browser fit together naturally. JPEG files degraded more gracefully than GIFs, retaining more of the picture’s initial form—and that allowed the format to scale to greater levels of success. While it wasn’t capable of animation, it progressively expanded from something a modem could pokily render to a format that was good enough for high-end professional photography.

    For the Internet’s purposes, the degradation was the important part. But it wasn’t the only thing that made the JPEG immensely valuable to the digital world. An essential part was that it was a documented standard built by numerous stakeholders.