Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 17, 2026

• University of Toronto ☛ Understanding the limitation of 'do in new frame/window' in GNU Emacs

  GNU Emacs has a core model for how it operates, and some of its weird seeming limitations are easier to understand if you internalize that model. One of them is what you have to do in GNU Emacs to get the perfectly sensible operation of 'do in a new frame or window'. For instance, one of the things I periodically want to do in MH-E is 'open a folder in a new frame', so that I can go through it while keeping my main MH-E environment on my inbox to process incoming email.

• The Anarcat ☛ Antoine Beaupré: Keeping track of decisions using the ADR model

  In the Tor Project system Administrator's team (colloquially known as TPA), we've recently changed how we take decisions, which means you'll get clearer communications from us about upcoming changes or targeted questions about a proposal.

  Note that this change only affects the TPA team. At Tor, each team has its own way of coordinating and making decisions, and so far this process is only used inside TPA. We encourage other teams inside and outside Tor to evaluate this process to see if it can improve your processes and documentation.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • GreyCoder ☛ Buster: The Best Way To Avoid Google's ReCAPTCHAs7

    The best way to bypass ReCAPTCHAs is to use Buster, a free browser extension. It’s is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. Buster fills out the audio challenge automatically for you.

  • Doc Searls ☛ Where Are We?

    But Google Search has changed. Old pages are gone from many searches. This matters to me because I’ve been writing on the Web for thirty-one years, almost entirely on static sites. But Google no longer finds many of those. My friend Dave Askins tells me the same malady has befallen much of his own archival work, which is present on the Web, but absent from Google searches. Why?

  • University of Toronto ☛ Sometimes giving syndication feed readers good errors is a mistake

    Yesterday I put this into effect for certain sorts of problems, including claimed HTTP User-Agents that are for old browser. Then several people reported that this had caused Feedly to start presenting my feed as the special 'your feed reader is (claiming to be) a too-old browser' single entry feed. The apparent direct cause of this is that Feedly made some syndication feed requests with HTTP User-Agent headers of old versions of Chrome and Firefox, which wound up getting a series of HTTP 302 temporary redirections to my new 'your feed reader is a too-old browser' stub feed. Feedly then decided to switch its main feed fetcher over to directly using this new URL for various feeds, despite the HTTP redirections being temporary (and not served for its main feed fetcher, which uses "Feedly/1.0" for its User-Agent).

• Standards/Consortia

  • Document Foundation ☛ Why ODF and not OOXML

    Many interpreted the last article in this series as an attack on Microsoft for using the OOXML format against users’ interests. However, this was only one of my objectives, as I also wanted to raise users’ awareness of fake open-source software, such as OnlyOffice, which partners with Microsoft in a strategy to lock users in.

    Users are already aware of the advantages of standard, open formats because they access sites every day whose content is accessible thanks to the HTML format. This is a standard, open format that was first developed and then defended by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. He prevented Microsoft from transforming it into a proprietary format with Internet Explorer 6. This forced users to have two versions of a site: one in a standard format and one in a proprietary format.