Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Standards

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 18, 2026

• Events

  • Collabora ☛ Bringing BitNet to ExecuTorch via Vulkan

    BitNet-style ternary brings LLM inference to ExecuTorch via its Vulkan backend, enabling much smaller, bandwidth-efficient models with portable GPU execution on edge devices. Presented at PyTorch Conference Europe 2026.

• Web Browsers/Web Servers

  • Bhaskar English ☛ Google Punishes Back-Button Hijacking Sites | June 2026 Update

    Have you ever clicked the back button on a website but still couldn’t leave the page? That frustrating experience is known as back button hijacking. Now, Google says it’s taking strict action against sites that use this trick. In a recent developer update, the company announced that websites blocking users from going back normally will face penalties in Google Search rankings starting June 15, 2026.

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

  • Tom MacWright ☛ Eleventy

    When I started this blog in 2011, I built it using Jekyll. Jekyll served me well for fifteen years. It was fast enough, and though it would take me an hour or two to get the system reinstalled when I switched laptops, it mostly just worked. But late last year, I was in the midst of updating all of my local installations to the latest versions of their runtimes, and when I tried to update Jekyll to Ruby 4, it wouldn't go. The Jekyll project did eventually merge support for Ruby 4 (a one-line fix) in February , but I took this as a sign to get going.

    I probably could have kept on with Jekyll for another few years, but there's no denying the project has slowed down, and my optimization stack for this blog has gotten a little more complicated - it'd be nice to use a tool more optimization-minded and simplify my toolchain.

    So: I switched to 11ty. Or, as it is about to be called Build Awesome. I switched and started to write this blog post before all of the hubbub: I have some thoughts, but that's not the point.

• FSF / Software Freedom / Digital Sovereignty

  • PC World ☛ The real threat to the PC isn't death. It's losing control

    Recent rulings and settlements dumped ice-cold reality on me. Not just the fact that companies are not our friends, which has always been clear; the Ticketmaster lawsuit drives that point home, as does the NZXT settlement for PC rentals that never made financial sense. But also: We now apparently live in a time where war is being waged over ownership. Or more precisely, who controls our hardware, software, and even fundamental right to privacy.

• GNU Projects

  • GNU ☛ health @ Savannah: Thalamus 0.9.18 released

    Dear GNU Health community

    We are happy to announce the release of Thalamus 0.9.18. Thalamus is the message and authentication server of the GNU Health Federation.

• Standards/Consortia

  • [Repeat] Hackaday ☛ FRED Comes To Hobby Operating Systems (and Linux)

    Those who have worked on a hobby operating system for x86 will have interacted with its rather complex and confusing interrupt model. [Evalyn] shows us why and how to use Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED), a new standard by the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group.

  • Bill Glover ☛ Your email is not secure enough

    I was aware that Gmail now requires all senders to specify both SPF and DKIM records for your domain. They didn’t require DMARC but I set this up on my main email domain. I thought I’d done everything required.

    When closing my AWS account I had to migrate a number of DNS records off Route53. It turns out I’d missed one, the DMARC entry for one of my domains. This is the domain I was using to reply to Amazon (Retail) customer support. I no longer had a DMARC reporting solution in place and assumed the record wasn’t required. I have a strong suspicion that this is why Amazon rejected my reply.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ IPv6 usage reaches historic 50% across Google services, matching IPv4 — increased usage eases pressure on the IPv4 address market as 'new' protocol designed in 1998 finally hits its stride

    That changed over time by force of necessity, and Google's tracking graph shows that for a brief moment in time on March 28, 50% of worldwide users accessed the service over an IPv6 connection, marking a historic first. APNIC's stats show that the protocol is in use by 43% of the world, with Asia and the Americas inching ever close to those 50%. Cloudflare, meanwhile, shows that 40% of traffic is done in IPv6, an actually impressive figure if you consider it's measuring actual transferred packets rather than just counting addresses.