Education, Sharing, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 21, 2026

• Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

  • It's FOSS ☛ FOSS Weekly #26.34: StillOS Review, Kernel 7.2 Released, PINE Trouble, Beautifying GNOME, Terminal Multiplexers and More

    New kernel is here, folks.

  • Education

    • APNIC ☛ APNIC 62 OPM: Just the facts

      The proposals for APNIC 62 cover a wide range of topics. Some focus on IPv6 allocation sizes and address planning. Others examine how APNIC’s remaining IPv4 pool should be managed. There are also proposals dealing with abuse contacts and the definition of Internet abuse involving IP addresses.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

    • Open Data

      • Xssfox ☛ How a joke domain purchase turned into geopolitical warfare

        The thing is though that wind data isn’t just used for predicting the weather. It’s also used to calculate artillery ranging. What we had started doing is accidentally mapping out artillery sites. We decided to keep reverse predictions but we delete launch sites on genuine requests.

        The reverse prediction system has also detected many number of military vessels in the ocean.

        Lots more development happened on SondeHub with features like websockets and MQTT for live feeds. We disconnected Habhub backend from our proxy and with grant funding from ARDC we were able to setup a prototype amateur high altitude balloon version of SondeHub.

        Eventually Habhub was shutdown due to a lack of maintenance and we rushed together to migrate what we could to SondeHub.

        $439,000 missile vs party balloon

        All was going fine until the 2023 “China spy balloon” incident. SondeHub had a lot more traffic - but our architecture made it fairly manageable.

    • Open Access/Content

      • Diziet ☛ Ian Jackson: Open Letter to the Wikimedia Foundation Board

        I have just sent an open letter to the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the umbrella organisation for Wikipedia (and a number of other projects), expressing my support for Wiki Workers United and the unionisation effort by WMF staff.

  • Standards/Consortia

    • MWL ☛ Changing Language for Storage Capacity

      Back in the 90s a notably pedantic coworker informed us ignorant peasants that, according to International Electrotechnical Commission standard IEC 80000-13:2008, disks and memory were now to be measured in “bi” units such as kibibyte and mebibyte. I agreed that he was technically correct, but nobody cared and saying “mebibytes” made you sound like either a pedant or an idiot.1 For all practical system administration purposes, the difference between a 1.544 MB floppy and a 1.544 MiB floppy was negligible. Yes, the operating system showed everything in mebibytes, but everything was labeled as being megabytes, and we all knew what it means.

      This is no longer true.