Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 13, 2026

• University of Toronto ☛ Undo in Vi and its successors, and my views on the mess

  This is one particular piece of POSIX compliance that I think everyone should ignore.

  Vim and its derivatives ignore the POSIX requirement and implement multi-level undo and redo in the usual and relatively obvious way. The vim 'u' command only undoes changes but it can undo lots of them, and to redo changes you use Ctrl-r ('r' and 'R' were already taken). Because 'u' (and Ctrl-r) are regular commands they can be used with counts, so you can undo the last 10 changes (or redo the last 10 undos). Vim can be set to vi compatible behavior if you want. I believe that vim's multi-level undo and redo is the default even when it's invoked as 'vi' in an unconfigured environment, but I can't fully test that.

• It's FOSS ☛ Mitchell Hashimoto Launches 'Vouch' to Fight Hey Hi (AI) Slop in Open Source Ecosystem

  New tool helps open source projects manage the scourge of Hey Hi (AI) slop.

• It's FOSS ☛ FOSS Weekly #26.07: Kernel 6.19, Hey Hi (AI) for Real Sysadmin Works, Arch Apps on Ubuntu and More GNU/Linux Stuff

  The last kernel of the 6.x series is here.

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

  • Chuck Grimmett ☛ Action Scheduler clean up

    Action Scheduler is a library for triggering a WordPress hook to run at some time in the future. It is used in a lot of large plugins to handle background processing of large job queues. It is an extremely useful tool. Unfortunately, it is also easy for bugs to make the queue or logs explode in size.

• Education

  • TechTea ☛ New Linux User Tips

    A lot of people are jumping on the Linux bandwagon after being abused for too long by big tech companies, but a lot bounce off due to friction and an unwillingness to learn a new way to work. I’ve used Linux full-time for my personal computing for more than 10 years and used it off and on even before that. That is not to say I’m an expert, but I have an idea of what it is like to use Linux as a daily driver and am definitely more qualified to talk about it compared to a lot of the social media personalities who act like they just discovered it. With that in mind, here are some tips from a casual Linux user so you don’t bash your head against a wall trying Linux.

• Licensing / Legal

  • Creative Commons ☛ How to Keep the Internet Human

    But of course, it is not just open content that is vulnerable. All content online today has essentially been treated as fair game. The free-for-all extends to everything online.

    This has led to a vast renegotiation of what it means to share publicly, still currently underway. We see this in the massive wave of litigation against AI services, the rise of paywalls and commercial licensing deals, the introduction of new technologies to increase control over content in ways that scale back the open web, and the extreme backlash against AI by creators and the general public.

• Standards/Consortia

  • RIPE ☛ Forward to Hell? On Misusing Transparent DNS Forwarders For Amplification Attacks

    Transparent DNS forwarders transfer DNS requests without rebuilding packets. Therefore, for example, the source IP address included in the query forwarded to other DNS components (for example, recursive resolvers) remains the IP address of the original resolver.

    Transparent forwarders raise severe threats to the Internet infrastructure: [...]

  • NVISO Labs ☛ Hunting Kerberos: Decode TGT TicketOptions with KQL

    Before going deeper into identifying potential Kerberos abuse, we will briefly explain how the Kerberos protocol works. Kerberos is a complex authentication protocol, and properly expanding on it would require a whole separate post; therefore, we will focus on the basics for the sake of clarity.