News from the Planet

Biodiversity data is most valuable when it is shared. A river survey stored in a single database helps one team, but the same records, shared openly, can inform researchers, conservationists, and policymakers around the globe. That is exactly what the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)…

This is a new series1 I'm starting on the tools I have been crafting and buying to play pedagogical games in my Economics classes. These games, aside from being just plain fun for the students, often aim to teach them a lesson via interactive play. Unsurprisingly, it is much easier for them to grok…

Today at ALL IN, Canada’s largest AI and technology event, Mozilla and Mila announced a new initiative and fresh investment to build an open source AI foundation layer that enables organizations and institutions to own and operate advanced AI systems locally, ensuring full control over their…

Highlights Firefox 155 just released! That’s the first release that went through the full 2-week release cycle process. The WebExtensions team added a new backgrounds_area theme property so themes can explicitly control whether background images apply to the whole window or only the top…

[Originally written in Czech] At the very beginning of the last year, Jiří Eischmann wrote a post on his blog about the status of the Czech translation at GNOME, tl;dr: the translation was slowly dying. I would really love to say that it is resolved, but that would be oversimplified. What…

Yesterday I gave a talk at Geomob London on my adventures in vibe coding. The slides are pretty but probably don’t tell the whole story unless you have been reading my regular posts on my projects. The images in the slides are all cartoons of an old dog learning new tricks and got some praise,…

I remember the moment when I learned about immutability. It changed everything. — <enis Defreyne Periodically, in various programming language forums, the discussion comes up of why a certain language doesn’t provide the immutable and mutable variants of some data structure as subtypes or…

It’s been about 4 months since my last GNOME Foundation update. Time flies. I’m sorry that it’s been so long. I will try to do more regular posts again in the future, but perhaps not at the same tempo as before. While I would love to post every other week, it’s hard to sustain. With that said, let’s…

This is a monthly newsletter about the current state of Radicle CI, what has happened recently, and near future plans. Current status Radicle CI is in production use. There are several CI nodes, and Lars runs a public one for open source Rust projects at callisto.liw.fi. CI node leaderboard This…

Back in April I wrote an informal history of the BuildStream project: Status update: 23rd April 2026. Things escalated and somehow I ended doing a podcast interview with Rich Bowen of the Apache Software Foundation recently, on the Apache PlusOne podcast:Apache BuildStream — with Sam Thursfield –…

Introduction After bazel-bootstrap 7.7.1 was landed into Debian unstable, I'm working on packaging newer Mozc (Most famous Japanese input method editor) with Bazel. Here is the blog entry initial efforts to build Mozc with Bazel at that time. kenhys.hatenablog.jp Why dh-bazel? After that, newer…

This is the second part of a two-part series in which we explore approaches to protecting children online while safeguarding privacy, security and the open web. Part one covers our concerns regarding age gates, and suggests alternative policy proposals that address the root causes of online harms.…

Nheko is my current favourite client for the Matrix IM system, which is my favourite IM system. Matrix is an open system with end to end encryption and Nheko is free software and runs well on Linux desktops and phones. The Nheko client allows interaction with dbus which could be good for automating…

Not a lot of things have landed this cycle, but there's still a bit to list, so let's do that. Android support As part of his effort to port GTK to Android, Florian also ported libadwaita demo. The builds are available from CI and the GTK 4 Android page. He also implemented a settings backend,…

We believe that there is an ongoing campaign targeting rust-lang members and owners of popular crates that is attempting to compromise devices and accounts in order to use them to publish malware. What we've seen A video call is set up for something positive — maybe for a job, maybe for a project,…

I’ve been working for a while as a contractor as part of the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) initiative for Flatpak, organized by Modal and Para-Real Ltd. There is a nice write up about the project, giving an overview of the investment and the collaborative effort. Intents My involvement has been focused…

SRFI 283 is now in draft status. This SRFI focuses on the introspection and type inference sides of typing / checking. It provides several useful procedures deriving types / checks for arbitrary data. procedure-check-of and check-of work with checks, as in SRFI 253. procedure-type-of and…

Github Link The following changes have been pushed to bugzilla.mozilla.org: Bug 2069143 - When retrieving comments for a bug(s) via REST API, remove comments that would be collapsed in the web UI unless explicitly asking for them Bug 2070247 - Support limiting who can needinfo the Hackbot…

Bugs resolved in Moz-Phab 2.19.1: bug 2071003 moz-phab patch --apply-to head moves to a detached HEAD Discuss these changes in #engineering-workflow on Slack or #Conduit Matrix. 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic

Each new post on this blog now has a Digital Object Identifier. This post looks at the how and the why of getting one, whether it is useful, and any issues you might experience if you go down this path. Table of ContentsBackgroundGetting a DOI the easy wayLet's Go Rogue!Automatic Submission of New…

When Ed challenged me to make a map of Geomob Events on a podcast, I jumped in scraped the data and produced quite a nice map despite fighting a battle with Gemini to extract the data for the map from the markdown files of the Geomob website. The problem, as Ed pointed out retrospectively was that…

The AI race is shifting. Again. Practically overnight, competition has expanded from “which AI model is best?” to a new high-stakes battle over which models people can access, through which products, and whether people have meaningful choice about AI at all. In response, Mozilla and Mistral today…

Sorry, this entry is only available in French.

EDIT: Updated to reference gh correctly. Thanks flod! Sometimes on Github, I need to fetch a patch from a fork I don't typically see everyday so I can try it out locally. I use the line at the top of the patch which has a copy button next to it because it's convenient. The common steps for this…

With GNOME 51 out the door, it's wallpaper reveal season again. This time around it's evolution, not revolution — the set sticks to its geometric roots.<The default is really just a stylistic touch up of the 50 hexagons. The subtle rim highlight received a spotlight and now shines extra bright. I…