Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty Matters

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 13, 2026

• University of Toronto ☛ Notes on debugging standard and third-party Emacs code

  If you have Emacs 31.1, you can follow along with this bug at home by putting the following text into a file, visiting the file, and then doing 'M-x goto-address'. The text is: [...]

• James Cherti ☛ Fixing Slow Scrolling in Emacs display-line-numbers-mode | James Cherti

  These settings avoid unnecessary width calculations and initialization scans.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers/Feed Readers

  • Ruben Schade ☛ MediaWiki-specific crawler spam

    So how is Facebook and MJ12whatever accessing them? They’re not coming to them from organic links or spidering, so they must be doing something else. I can’t know for sure, but I suspect they’re synthesising URLs upon discovering the site runs MediaWiki. Rather than an individual wiki user accessing these endpoints in good faith to figure out the history of a page, they’re iterating over every possible GET request value to extract as much training data as possible. They’re takin’ the piss, to use the local vernacular.

    But it gets funnier. Logs from these sites would show they’ve had thousands of their requests return 404 over more than a year, and yet they continue to try accessing it. Even the most basic scraping tools know to back off from a server after they’ve been nicked, or when the resource doesn’t exist. There’s no point otherwise.

  • Chromium

    • Collabora ☛ Re-engineering YouTube for the Living Room: Bringing Chrobalt to RDK

      Working closely with Google, we built the first RDK-based Chrobalt reference platform for third-party devices, enabling Chromium-based YouTube support, certification, and automation on embedded TVs and set-top boxes.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Simon Späti ☛ Context, Semantics, and Ontology: A Primer for the Agentic Era | ssp.sh

    So that means, a semantic layer understands the semantics, the metrics and governance access and data transformation, and has a link to (multi-dimensional) OLAP and query languages, while the context layer is more focused on gathering context and refinement between humans and agents.

    I see the two, a semantic layer and a context layer, working for distinct fields, and working hand in hand: [...]

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ Wrapping up the LibreOffice Conference 2026! Next step, uploading videos…

    So the LibreOffice Conference 2026 comes to an end!

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

  • University of Toronto ☛ One possible future for websites is less features

    I don't know where the web goes from the current situation, especially the small and medium web (which to me includes kernel.org and VCS forges and ordinary businesses, not only personal things like Wandering Thoughts). But one possible future I see is that people stop providing so many features on their websites. Regardless of whether the site is static or dynamic, people will move towards static style site layouts, with a limited number of URLs and a limited collection of features. For example, VCS forges might limit themselves to minimal web features rather than the expansive feature set that they've had so far. If you wanted more, you'd have to clone the repository and do the expensive computation locally.

• FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

  • CBC ☛ Time for a digital divorce? Trade war puts spotlight on Canada's relationship with U.S. big tech

    While it may sound like jargon, experts say digital sovereignty can be defined simply.

    It's about regulation, Vass Bednar, managing director of independent public policy think-tank the Canadian Shield Institute, told CBC Radio's Just Asking.

    "Fundamentally, our digital sovereignty is our ability to regulate digital environments using the tools that we have," she said, including regulation of algorithms that influence what information we see online.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Paul Krugman ☛ Henry Farrell and Abe Newman on Weaponized Interdependence

    So really, where this came from was that we had finished a long book looking at fights between the United States and European Union over privacy. And as part of that, one of the things we had looked at was the SWIFT system, which is a system which you use when you’re making bank transfers. It’s a messaging system that makes sure that the money gets to the right place, and that everything gets reconciled properly at the end of the day.

    And so Abe pointed out after we had finished this, he said, “Well, nobody’s written anything about SWIFT, and there’s something interesting and important with geopolitics going on.” And I was working with a statistical physicist who does a lot of work on networks and network dynamics, and so he thought that we could come up with something on this.