Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Sovereignty, and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 10, 2026

• Obnam ☛ 2026-06-06 [Older] Obnam: client for server

• Sacha Chua ☛ 2026-06-08 Emacs news

  It's Emacs Built-ins appreciation month! I'm coming to appreciate the menu bar more. What built-ins do you appreciate? Write about it and send Ross a link!

• University of Toronto ☛ Understanding Embark in GNU Emacs (a bit) and some 'stupid' Embark tricks

  When I wrote about the Emacs packages I use, I mentioned that I had Embark installed but barely used it because I didn't understand much about how to really use it. One reason for that is that while there are a bunch of articles on the web about things you can do with Embark, all of the ones I've tried to read started out with complicated stuff involving other third party packages I didn't use, which caused me to tune out and stop reading. As sometimes happens, writing that entry caused me to poke at Embark some more and now I have a somewhat better understanding of it and some Embark tricks I want to remember.

• Forgejo ☛ Forgejo monthly report - May 2026

  The monthly report is meant to provide a good overview of what has changed in Forgejo in the past month. Additionally, this report covers the previous month, April 2026, as well. If you would like to help, please get in touch in the chatroom or participate in the ongoing discussions.

• Education

  • Remkus de Vries ☛ The WordPress Conference We Need Next

    I just got back from WordCamp Europe in Kraków, Poland. A wonderful event, one I helped start and shape. But… if you’ve been hanging around me at any WordPress event in the past couple of years, you may have heard me share my thoughts on what we’re missing in the world of WordPress events. WordCamp Europe included.

• Digital Sovereignty

  • FSFE ☛ 2026-06-03 [Older] EU Tech Sovereignty: A milestone for Public Code? Now implementation is key

• Standards/Consortia

  • Terence Eden ☛ How many consecutive hyphens can you have in a domain name?

    A seemingly simple question which sent me down into the murky depths of standards. How many consecutive hyphens can you have in a domain name? It probably isn't sensible to name your online presence a----------hyphen.com - but is there anything technically stopping you?

  • 404 Media ☛ The U.S. Military Quietly Turned GPS Into a Global ‘Numbers Station,’ Evidence Suggests

    “There was a perfect match between the timeline and that presentation and the change points that were automatically identified from the data,” Murdoch said. “That was the smoking gun that made me think: This is what it's for.”

    These automated systems replaced the cumbersome manual distribution of cryptographic keying material, allowing military GPS receivers around the world to be rekeyed remotely through satellite broadcasts rather than through onsite procedures.

  • Posit Software PBC ☛ In Defense of YAML

    Every programmer has opinions about configuration files. These opinions tend to be strongly held and inversely proportional to the stakes involved. In the last few years, the consensus view has shifted: YAML is bad, TOML is good, and enthusiastic users of YAML just might be plainly uninformed. This post takes a different view. We intend to present an argument for YAML which is grounded in history, its specification, and the state of tooling in 2026.

    The case against YAML was, for a long time, a reasonable one. The format attracted its critics for real reasons, through years of surprising behavior that burned even careful users. But the specification evolved, and the tooling is finally catching up. To understand why the current consensus is outdated, we need to trace the lineage of configuration formats themselves, because this sort of argument has played out before.