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

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 15, 2026

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Daniel Stenberg ☛ curl performance

    tldr: the live version is here: https://curl.se/perf/ How fast is “fast” and is it good enough? Does it run as fast now as it did before or was there a regression? What exactly needs to be fast? How fast is it?

  • Mozilla

    • Thunderbird ☛ Desktop Calendar: A Design Journey

      Hello, Thunderbird community and followers of the blog! This is Jesse from the design team. Today’s post is about our recent journey in redesigning the calendar portion of Thunderbird, and what you can expect us to deliver in the near future.

      The calendar is a key part of any productivity toolset, from your PC Desktop to your office wall. There has been a calendar in Thunderbird since early in the project, and like all parts of the application, it’s evolved on its own terms, for better or for worse. It has many layers of functionality, but the experience has lost parity with current UI standards — at this point, it feels stylistically dated and functionally convoluted.

      So, with the help of the design team and the developers and the community, we have taken on the task of modernizing and streamlining the calendar. This is my account of the designers’ part of that journey.

• Education

  • Raspberry Pi ☛ Just released: Raspberry Pi Book of Making 2027

    Each month in Raspberry Pi Official Magazine, we strive to bring you an eclectic mix of DIY electronics, 3D prints, microcontrollers, sensors, motors, and other fun things to do with Raspberry Pi. This year, we’ve once again taken a selection of our favourite builds and gathered them in one place: the Raspberry Pi Book of Making 2027.

• Standards/Consortia

  • ARRL ☛ Colombian Amateurs Help in Earthquake Response; Clear Frequencies Requested

    CO2JC has also requested that all amateurs avoid transmitting on the IARU Region 2 emergency frequencies of 3985, 7060, 7240, 7275, 14300, and 21360 kHz, as well as 146.520 MHz for those in VHF range of Colombia, in order to minimize potential interference to emergency communications.

  • DJ Bernstein ☛ cr.yp.to: 2026.08.14: NSA and IETF, part 9

    Back in June, I saw that NSA and its minions had called and were packing an IETF vote on standardizing a specification of how to remove the ECC seatbelt from hybrid ECC+ML-KEM in TLS. For example, one vote for the spec was from NSA's Mike Jenkins, who had never sent email to the TLS mailing list before. I responded by calling for volunteers to speak up on the public-interest side.

    I'm happy to report that 82 people spoke up on the TLS mailing list in unambiguous opposition to this spec during the voting period. There were also some additional people (Izzy Grosof, for example, and Ivan Visconti) who had already registered opposition before the voting period; I've heard credible reports of further opposition messages being blocked by the chairs; and, even though this wasn't filed as opposition, it was good to see the following statement from Roberto Avanzi: "as a codesigner of ML-KEM myself I would not trust using it exclusively: what if it gets broken mathematically and in the classical computational model (I.e. non-quantum)? Hybrid is better, and the additional time used by ECC is not significant."

    (In the opposite direction, I've been pointed to the following claim from Thomas Ptacek: "The more cryptography-literate you are, the more likely it is you think hybrids are silly." Oh, well, I guess that settles it then.)

    For 75 of the 82 people with opposition statements on the list during this voting period, I see no way that anyone can even try arguing that anything in their messages suggests the possibility of spec modifications removing the objections. I've taken quotes from those 75 people and forwarded them to "IESG", the Internet Engineering Steering Group, along with my replies to talking points from spec proponents. Copies of my messages to IESG: 1, 2, 3, 4.

    The rest of this blog post says what's supposed to happen, what has happened so far, and what's likely to happen next.

  • [Old]

    BoingBoing ☛ The technical trainwreck that is USB-C

    Marco Arment calmly explains USB-C, a garble of different standards shoehorned into using physically identical ports and cables which nonetheless remain maddeningly incompatible with one another.