Education and Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 22, 2026

• Ergo IRC Chat Server ☛ Ergo v2.19.0, a new stable release

  We’re pleased to announce Ergo v2.19.0, a new stable release.

• Rick Carlino ☛ How Gnutella Scaled to Handle Query Traffic

  Flood routing was OK when Gnutella was an experimental network with a few thousand users. Blindly bothering every reachable computer was no longer viable once the network hit mainstream adoption. Based on my Internet Archive archaeology digs, this practice likely came to an end around the year 2003.

  Flood routing is a convenient half-truth we tell for the sake of moving an explanation along, like the time I told my son that semicolons in JavaScript are optional.

• Databases

  • Crooked Timber ☛ A big thank you …

    … to CT reader and commenter Dr Memory, who has cleaned up our database, eliminating many of the badly rendered quotation marks and similar problems. Those problems reflect the fact that the blog is now more than 20 years old, and has gone through multiple formatting systems.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice State of the Project (July 2025 – June 2026)

    We are releasing the quarterly updated State of the Project Slide Deck, based on data from July 1st, 2025, to June 30, 2026, extracted from the LibreOffice dashboard and the Matomo repository.

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

  • Craig Small: WordPress 7.0.2 for Debian

    I have just uploaded WordPress version 7.0.2 for Debian. This fixes two serious security bugs CVE-2026-60137 and CVE-2026-63030. Chained together, this gives a RCE and is in active exploitation, so update as soon as its available.

    These two bugs are also in WordPress 6.9.x below 6.9.5 and the SQLi one (CVE-2026-60137) only is in 6.8.x below 6.8.6. Debian Sid and Forky have 7.0 which is vulnerable to the RCE while Debian Trixie has 6.8.x so only the SQLi.

  • Kiwi TCMS: SiteGround uses Kiwi TCMS as central repository of testing knowledge

    SiteGround is a technology company founded in 2004 that helps individuals, entrepreneurs, and businesses build and grow their online presence. Our goal is to provide customers with the tools they need to create, manage, and grow their online businesses from a single platform.

    Over the years, SiteGround has built a strong engineering culture focused on performance, reliability, innovation, and customer experience.

• Education

  • Phil Gyford ☛ w/e 2026-07-19

    Some others I went to were very information-dense, rather than entertaining, so unless you already knew something about the topic, or were otherwise really into the details of it, they were a bit hard going for me. But there are plenty more videos to browse through.

  • Bertrand Meyer ☛ Questions and answers on AI and verification: a follow-up to my May ACM Tech Talk

    On May 7, I gave a well-attended ACM Tech talk on “Software Verification in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”. There were more questions at the end than I had the time to answer, but I promised the participants that I would answer everything. In the meantime I had to finish my book AI for Smarties: Understanding Artificial Intelligence, but now that it is out I am coming back to this discussion. Thanks for all the great questions!

    Yan Timanovsky, the organizer, provided me with the list of questions that had been written on the meeting chat and left unanswered. They are reproduced below. My plan is to provide answers — to those for which I can — over the next two or three weeks, so please come back once in a while.

    The questions contained the name and email of each questioner; I removed this information to preserve participants’ privacy.

  • Jacob Nowosad ☛ A world still to be mapped: reflections on geocomputation in R: takeaways from the talk and workshop at UseR! 2026 – Thinking in spatial patterns

    At useR! 2026 in Warsaw, I contributed to a workshop on Geocomputation with R (July 6, 2026) and gave a keynote entitled A world still to be mapped: reflections on geocomputation in R (July 8, 2026). Both were opportunities to consider what the R spatial ecosystem already makes possible, its strengths, limitations, and what remains to be done.

• GNU Projects

  • GNU ☛ parallel @ Savannah: GNU Parallel 20260722 ('Chat Control') released [stable]

    GNU Parallel 20260722 ('Chat Control')  has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Hackaday ☛ Who’s Building That Data Center?

      Whether you’re pro, against, or ambivalent about the proliferation of “AI” data centers, the map offers an engaging way to look at what projects are happening around the nation, especially when you start looking at clusters and how that interacts with the power generation and political makeup in a region. It’s particularly interesting how only three states account for roughly 70% of all the projects. Let us know if there’s a similar tracker in your area if you’re from one of the other parts of the globe!

    • PoweredByWho ☛ Project Map — PoweredByWho

      Public-record reporting on the data centers reshaping American grids, communities, and elections. Independent, non-partisan, no paywall.

    • Rlang ☛ Level With Me: Can the WGI Predict the WJP’s Rule of Law Scores?

      TLDR: The first post established that the WGI and WJP rule of law measures agree on how they rank countries. This follow-up tests the stricter question of whether the WGI can predict the WJP’s levels, rather than just the relative ranking / relative position of countries. It can: forecasting errors appear to be minimal and don’t vary significantly over time.

      This is second post in a series examining relationships between the rule of law and economic and social outcomes.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Martin Thompson: Why in Building Protocols, Like Code, Starting Over Is Dumb

    Today, the IETF held the CURRENT BoF, where the goal was to develop a new protocol. That protocol would be substantially like TLS, reusing its record layer and basic structure, but it would drop in MLS for key exchange.

    This is somewhere between a pretty bad idea and a horrible idea.