Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 16, 2026

• BSDly ☛ That grumpy BSD guy: OpenSMTPD Is The Mail Server For The Future

  The SMTP mail server for the 21st century and onwards is OpenSMTPD, which is developed as an integral part of OpenBSD, but available in a portable variety too.

  It was one of those things that I had fully intended to do years ago, but I only got around to actually doing once there was a definite deadline to get it done.

  The time has come, as OpenBSD 7.9 will leave the exim package behind, and exim users will need to find a replacement before upgrading. This article describes my transition to OpenBSD's own OpenSMTPD mail server.

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Language Registries Are Unstable by Default

  Running pip install requests or npm install react against the public registry is the same operation, structurally, as running apt install -t unstable against Debian sid, and nobody involved talks about it that way. I don’t mean “unstable” as a synonym for buggy, I mean it in the specific sense Debian has used since the late nineties: a pool of packages where new versions land the moment a maintainer uploads them, with no promotion gate, no minimum residency time, and no quality bar between the upload and your machine.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Maury ☛ Search engine results are truly terrible

    Even though it's is ubiquitous among computer nerds, ad blocking is quite rare even in other technical fields. This got me wondering how search engines perform without all the tricks people do to get better results.

    As a test, I wrote a few queries for... common software: [...]

  • Chromium

    • MacRumors ☛ Stop Chrome Browser From Downloading a Hidden 4GB AI File

      If your Mac's storage has been mysteriously shrinking recently and you use Google Chrome, you may have already identified the culprit. The browser has been downloading a 4GB AI model file onto computers without explicit user consent. Here's how to reclaim the space.

  • Mozilla

    • Mozilla ☛ Mozilla Privacy Blog: Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools and should not be undermined

      In the context of concerns around young people’s interactions with digital technologies, the UK’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology is consulting on additional measures to prepare young people for growing up in a digital world. Before the backdrop of users circumventing age assurance systems mandated under the UK’s Online Safety Act, the consultation considers age-gating virtual private networks (VPNs).

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

  • Justin Duke ☛ Buttondown no longer runs Redis

    Buttondown no longer runs Redis!

    I added it years ago for the same reason almost every Django app has Redis: that's just what you do. Workers wanted a queue, the queue wanted a broker, the broker was Redis. The cache wanted a backend, the backend was Redis. Sessions wanted a store, the store was Redis. And then it festers from there.

• Education

  • Bernát Gábor ☛ PyCon US 2026 Typing Summit Recap

    The PyCon US 2026 Typing Summit ran Thursday May 14, 2026, from 1 PM to 5 PM in Room 201A of the Long Beach Convention Center, the day before the main conference started. Eight talks plus a Typing Council Q&A, single track. This recap is for anyone who could not be in the room.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Howard Oakley ☛ Chinese whispers in PDF metadata

    Chinese whispers is an old children’s game where everyone sits in a circle, and one child whispers into the ear of the next on their right a sentence like Send reinforcements, we’re going to advance. That child then whispers the message they heard to the child on their right, until it reaches the one who started it, who says out loud what they heard, classically Send three-and-fourpence, we’re going to a dance, as a demonstration of how messages can so easily become corrupted. What this has to do with China remains one of childhood’s mysteries. I should also explain that three-and-fourpence was idiomatic British English in the days before our currency was ‘decimalised’, and meant three shillings and four (old) pence, about 17 (new) pence, sufficient at one time to enjoy a good night out.

    In this article I’m going to do much the same with metadata for a PDF document, tracing what gets indexed by Spotlight, so becoming discoverable by search, and what is displayed in the Finder. This relies on several of my utilities, most of which are available from this page.