Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Web, Standards, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 18, 2026

• MJ Fransen ☛ Translate Texinfo files using po4a

  Texinfo is a brilliant hypertext system that predates HTML. You access it with info, which is a text mode application. The content consists of a number of nodes. Each node is an information element. You access the nodes through menus, hyperlinks, and indices. Also you can "walk" through a info file with keys like [ and ]. See info info.

• Wouter Groeneveld ☛ A Note On Presenting Code in Emacs

  The other day, I decided it was finally time. It was finally time to open Emacs to demonstrate certain code functionalities in class. The result was predictable: it caused further confusion among already confused students. The root cause wasn’t switching out a familiar WebStorm-like environment for an esoteric IDE but rather the way the code was presented.

  Most classrooms come equipped with crappy projectors that are experts in washing out colours and blurring otherwise perfectly crisp text. My first instinct after opening up an editor in class is to zoom in. That always worked well enough—either by pinching on the trackpad (oooh look at that smooth zooming animation in IntelliJ!) or by pressing ⌘+. That zoom never worked that great in Sublime as the tree view didn’t budge, but it worked well enough for the few lines of code that needed selecting and highlighting.

• CoryDoctorow ☛ Pluralistic: The online community trilemma

  This is a really old question/debate in online community design. The original [Internet] community space, Usenet, was founded on strict hierarchical principles, using a taxonomy to produce a single canonical group for every kind of discussion. Sure, there was specialization (rec.pets.cats begat rec.pets.cats.siamese), but by design, there weren't supposed to be competing groups laying claim to the same turf, and indeed, unwary Usenet users were often scolded for misfiling their comments in the wrong newsgroup.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Chromium

    • Cyble Inc ☛ Chrome RCE Flaw CVE-2026-2441 Exploited In Wild

      The vulnerability comes from the Google Stable Channel Update for Desktop. The Stable channel has been updated for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The update includes 1 security fix for CVE-2026-2441, which is a Use-After-Free (UAF) vulnerability that could allow an attacker to potentially execute arbitrary code on a victim’s system simply by the victim visiting a specially crafted web page.

  • Mozilla

    • KQX ☛ How a single typo led to RCE in Firefox – kqx

      While touring the Firefox source code to gather inspiration for a CTF challenge (Stay tuned for TRX CTF 2026!) I stumbled across quite an interesting, albeit simple, bug inside SpiderMonkey’s Wasm component.

      I was able to exploit it to gain Code Execution inside the Firefox renderer process and reported my findings to Mozilla. Disclosure details are at the end of the post.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Ian Duncan ☛ Archive: Automatic Optimal Pipelining of Redis Commands - Ian Duncan

    In this post I describe different approaches for client-libraries to implement Redis protocol pipelining. I will cover synchronous as well as asynchronous (event-driven) techniques and discuss their respective pros and cons: Synchronous client APIs require the library user to explicitly pipeline commands, potentially yielding optimal protocol performance, but at the cost of additional bookkeeping when handling replies. Asynchronous client libraries, on the other hand, allow automatic pipelining, while being less efficient in their pipelining behavior.

• Education

  • ROS Industrial ☛ ROS 2 in Industry: Key Takeaways from the ROS-Industrial Conference 2025

    The 13th ROS-Industrial Europe Conference 2025 took place on 17–18 November 2025 in Strasbourg, co-located with ROSCon FR&DE. The event brought together industrial practitioners, researchers, and technology providers to share practical experience with deploying ROS 2 in production environments, discussing both proven approaches and remaining challenges.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • DataGeeek ☛ Modeling Bitcoin Volatility Through Structural Breaks: A Compositional Perspective

      Recent advances in time series modeling have emphasized the importance of structural breaks—abrupt changes in the underlying dynamics of financial or economic data. The paper “Directional-Shift Dirichlet ARMA Models for Compositional Time Series with Structural Break Intervention” (Katz, 2026) introduces a Bayesian framework that captures these breaks using three interpretable parameters: [...]

• Standards/Consortia

  • Tedium ☛ The Great Markdown Rebranding Of 2026

    For some reason, a bunch of big companies are really leaning into Markdown right now. AI may be the reason, but I kind of love the possible side benefits.

  • David Bushell ☛ Web font choice and loading strategy

    Web fonts are usually defined by the CSS @font-face rule. The font-display property allows us some control over how fonts are loaded. The swap value has become somewhat of a best practice — at least the most common default. The CSS spec says: [...]

  • Alex Schroeder ☛ 2026-02-11 Discord features to emulate

    I was talking to my friend acdw about Discord and IRC because dozens had posted the link to New And Upcoming IRCv3 Features for Libera.chat, on Linkbudz. When I see descriptions of IRCv3 features I always wonder how they might be useful. The explanations I see never seem all that compelling to me. I feel like software developers are working on features that I don’t understand and everybody else is looking at Discord and saying: “like that!”

  • Inside Towers ☛ Report: Protecting GPS is Crucial

    “Recent events in Europe have underscored these risks. Russian jamming and spoofing of GPS signals have disrupted civilian and military operations alike, offering a stark warning about how adversaries can exploit our dependence on space-based systems,” the former Representative in the U.S. House of Delegates (D-VA) writes in a new report.