news
GNU and FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty
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Sacha Chua ☛ April 30 Yay Emacs: Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs - Newbies/Starter Kits
The Emacs Carnival theme for April 2026 is newbies/starter kits. I'd like to chat with Prot about not only helping people get into Emacs but also supporting lifelong learning.
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Events
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FSF ☛ FSF Events: LibreLocal meetup in San Carlos de Bariloche, Provincia de Río Negro, Argentina
May 30, 2026 at 17:00 ART (20:00 UTC).
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Speaking at Chennai FOSS: GUI Design, QT, SOK and a lot more
Chennai FOSS 2026
Earlier this month, on 18th April 2026, I had the incredible opportunity to speak at Chennai FOSS 2026, an event organized by FOSS United. If you aren’t familiar with them, FOSS United is a non-profit foundation dedicated to promoting the Free and Open Source Software ecosystem in India.
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Software Freedom
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Shifting the Trap
Back in 2009, Richard Stallman warned us about The JavaScript Trap. The pitch was simple, and it's aged horrifyingly well. Every time you visit a modern website, your browser silently downloads and executes a pile of non-free JavaScript on your computer. You didn't choose this software. It runs anyway, on your hardware, in your name, and the moment your tab closes, it pretends nothing happened. It's the perfect non-free program: invisible, ephemeral, and authored by someone who would very much like you not to think about it at all.
The response from the free software community has been to push back at the browser layer - LibreJS, NoScript, Trisquel's defaults, gentle public reminders that yes, that "web app" is a program, and yes, you are running it.
Fine. Good. Necessary.
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GNU Projects
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LWN ☛ GnuPG 2.5.19 released
Werner Koch has announced the release of GnuPG 2.5.19. This release includes a few new options and a number of bug fixes, and comes with the reminder that the GnuPG 2.4 series will reach end-of-life soon
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Licensing / Legal
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CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: A free, open visual identity for enshittification (24 Apr 2026)
But you folks kept asking, and also, I really loved that design, so I offered Devin a cash buyout for the rights to his enshittification poop emoji and then I released it under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license that lets you use it any way you want, including for commercial products, provided you attribute it and link back to the original: [...]
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