Trust is good, control is better: Reproducible builds at F-Droid
Free Software is a great thing, because it allows users to check that apps are doing what they pretend to do. But almost nobody compiles apps themselves.
Open-Sourcing Inform 7
This is a talk and slides from Narrascope 2019 , held at MIT, Boston, on 14-16 June 2019. It's a sequel to a talk given in London a year earlier , when I went into "literate programming" at greater depth, but when the design of Inter was more embryonic. I'd like to thank the Narrascope organisers for fitting me in to…
Xfce 4.14 released
Why is the release manager late to the party with his blog post? The explanation is simple: We prioritized sticking to the schedule and getting our releases out to everyone as planned, as our codebase was ready. What was not (entirely) ready was some parts of the website, which were brought up-to-date over the course…
The Principles of Versioning in Go
This blog post is about how we added package versioning to Go, in the form of Go modules, and the reasons we made the choices we did. It is adapted and updated from a talk I gave at GopherCon Singapore in 2018 .
Who eats who in open source
TL;DR: If the cloud didn’t eat Hadoop Inc., Pivotal and Red Hat, what explains their diminished prospects? Marc Andresseesssen’s “software is eating the world” has given rise to an entire technolog…
On Recent Controversial Events
Update in 2024 : You may have linked to this page because it's heavily quoted by a semi-anonymously published website called the “Stallman Report”. While the author of that document tried to contact me shortly before launching their site, I missed that email for a week or two. (I get a lot of email and as those of you…
Announcing Notqmail
Running my own email server has its challenges. Chief among them: my favorite mail-server software hasn’t been updated since I started using it in 1998.
Debian Riscv64 port in mid 2019
It's been a while since last post (Talk about the Debian GNU/Linux riscv64 port at RISC-V workshop), and sometimes things look very quiet from outside even if the people on the backstage never stop working. So this is an update on the status of this port before the release of buster, which should happen in a few weeks…
Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War
When I heard that ARM was to stop doing business with Huawei, I was a little bit puzzled as to how that worked: ARM is a British company owned by a Japanese conglomerate; how was the US able to extend its influence beyond its citizens and borders? A BBC report indicated that ARM had concerns over its US origin…
How to liberate a Chromebook
Google is about as open as a clam. Over the holidays, I found a Chromebook that Samsung had given me to evaluate about six years ago and which had been gathering dust ever since. Coincidentally, Laura’s sister Annie had just told me that she needed a laptop. Hmm… Well, there was no way I was going to give her a Google…
Open Source Hardware Hearing Aid Part 1
My mother got hearing aids a few years ago. About a month later, she lost one. Insurance said if she wanted a replacement, she could pay them many thousands of dollars or she could wait a year.
FreeBSD – A lesson in poor defaults
This page lists some of the changes I make to a vanilla install of FreeBSD for security hardening. Some changes to increase network performance or make things a bit more sane are also included. It only covers basic changes that a sysadmin can make to a running system.
Getting a scientific prize for open-source software
Note An important acknowledgement for a different view of doing science: open, collaborative, and more than a proof of concept. A few days ago, Loïc Estève, Alexandre Gramfort, Olivier Grisel,...
SleepyHead Project Is Shutting Down
LEDAK388 Berdiri Sebagai Bandar Game Online Resmi Memiliki Permainan Lengkap Dan Server Gacor Yang Terbukti Paling Gampang Mengasilkan Kemenangan.
Characterizing secret leakage in public GitHub repositories
How bad can it git? Characterizing secret leakage in public GitHub repositories Meli et al., NDSS’19 On the one hand you might say there’s no new news here. We know that developers shouldn’t …
Exposing the Wayland lie (2018)
Hi, people of the future! Did you know that I wrote a follow-up article to this one, called “Further Thoughts on Wayland”? This original article was written in a more combative tone tha…
Back from the Blender Conference
Yesterday, me, Dmitry, Wolthera and Agata visited BlenderCon 2019 . Intel had asked us to come to the conference to help set up the Intel/Acer booth, which was showing off Krita in all its HDR glory . After all, it’s pretty cool when a free software project has a real, tangible, technical, artistic first ! It was…
FatELF: Universal Binaries for Linux (2015)
FatELF is a file format that embeds multiple ELF binaries for different architectures into one file. This is the Linux equivalent of what Mac OS X calls "Universal Binaries."
Recap of the `funding` experiment
Feross Aboukhadijeh is a computer security researcher, teacher, web developer, designer, long distance runner, gamer, music lover, and builder of websites that (sometimes) go viral.