Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 05, 2025

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • James G ☛ Artemis Changelog #6

    Artemis, the calm web reader I maintain, has a few new features. Below is a summary.

  • Michał Górny ☛ Portability of tar features

    This naturally raised more questions on how portable various tar formats actually are. To verify that, I have decided to analyze the standards for possible incompatibility dangers and build a suite of test inputs that could be used to check how various implementations cope with that. This article describes those points and provides test results for a number of implementations.

    Please note that this article is focused merely on read-wise format compatibility. In other words, it establishes how tar files should be written in order to achieve best probability that it will be read correctly afterwards. It does not investigate what formats the listed tools can write and whether they can correctly create archives using specific features.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Document Foundation ☛ XML: a technology at the heart of our daily lives

    In my last article, I mentioned XML several times, perhaps assuming that all users had a basic understanding of it.

• Education

  • Coalition for Networked Information ☛ Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2025

    The ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries has been scheduled for December 15-19; the conference will be a fully virtual, synchronous event. The call for papers, posters, and more has been released. For more information, see https://2025.jcdl.org/

  • ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries ☛ ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries JCDL 2025 - JCDL 2025

    JCDL 2025 will be held as a fully virtual, synchronous event. In addition to the main conference, JCDL 2025 will feature workshops, tutorials, panels, and a doctoral consortium. The program will also include opportunities to share a wide range of contributions, including posters for early-stage work, demonstrations of working systems, and a resource track dedicated to highlighting datasets, software, and collections that benefit the digital library community. We welcome participation from academia, government, industry, and other sectors, reflecting the broad and interdisciplinary nature of the digital library community.

  • Lars Wikman ☛ Making of an Elixir conference

    I’m making an Elixir conference and it happens 10-12th of September in Varberg, Sweden. Tickets are still available at the time of writing. I figured it might be interesting to hear one data point of pulling something like this together.

• FSF

  • Unicorn Media ☛ FSF Summer Fundraiser: Lots of Merch Until July 28

    The online store for the Free Software Foundation summer fundraiser is full of really neat stuff… and it's for a good cause.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • The Register UK ☛ Wikidata: Bridging FOSS ideals and direct democracy

      Multiple other projects also use the vast linked data store that underpins ubiquitous internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia, and some of them are helping the fight for democracy.

      Wikipedia is big, but even so, it's bigger than it looks. For a start, the encyclopedia itself is larger than it appears: there are active Wikipedias in 342 different languages. More than 65 million articles and over 273 million pages, and they are all linked to each other within each language as well as between languages. The result is a vast linked knowledge graph, and it's free, open source, and multilingual.

• Programming/Development

  • Nelson Elhage ☛ The ITTAGE indirect branch predictor

    While investigating the performance of the new Python 3.14 tail-calling interpreter, I learned (via this very informative comment from Sam Gross) new (to me) piece of performance trivia: Modern CPUs mostly no longer struggle to predict the bytecode-dispatch indirect jump inside a “conventional” bytecode interpreter loop. In steady-state, assuming the bytecode itself is reasonable stable, modern CPUs achieve very high accuracy predicting the dispatch, even for “vanilla” while / switch-style interpreter loops!

  • Mozilla ☛ Steve Fink: Effectful Logging

    These recent blog posts are veering in the “here’s a horrible thing I just did!” direction. No apologies. Recently, I was working on a weird problem where I wanted to snapshot /proc/$pid/maps before and after a couple of mmap and madvise calls. But I didn’t particularly want to write C++ code to do it.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ Just say no to broken JSON

    The JSON format has a simple syntax with a fixed number of data types such as strings, numbers, Booleans, null, objects, and arrays. Strings must not contain unescaped control characters (e.g., no unescaped newlines or tabs); instead, special characters must be escaped with a backslash (e.g., \n for newline). Numbers must follow valid formats, such as integers (e.g., 42), floating-point numbers (e.g., 3.14), or scientific notation (e.g., 1e-10). The format is specified formally in the RFC 8259.

• Security

  • LWN ☛ Security updates for Friday

    Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 9.0, container-tools:rhel8, ghostscript, git-lfs, grafana-pcp, pandoc, perl-FCGI:0.78, ruby:2.5, ruby:3.3, tigervnc, and varnish:6), Debian (jpeg-xl and mediawiki), Fedora (darktable, guacamole-server, mingw-gdk-pixbuf, and yarnpkg), Oracle (gimp, kernel, libsoup, python-tornado, python3.12, and thunderbird), Slackware (php), SUSE (libgepub), and Ubuntu (libtpms, linux-aws-5.15, linux-intel-iot-realtime, and linux-bluefield).

  • Hacker News ☛ Critical Sudo Vulnerabilities Let Local Users Gain Root Access on Linux, Impacting Major Distros

    Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed two security flaws in the Sudo command-line utility for Linux and Unix-like operating systems that could enable local attackers to escalate their privileges to root on susceptible machines.