Web Review, Week 2025-33 - ervin
Website Description| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-34. --- Google is killing the open web Tags: tech, google, web, xml, xslt, html, history, vendor-lockin Or why the XML roots of the web are important to keep in shape. I’m not necessarily in love with how verbose XML is, but it’s been a great enabler for interoperability. That’s indeed the latter reason which pushed Google to try to get rid of it as much as possible. https://wok.oblomov.eu/tecnologia/google-killing-open-web/ Is Germany on t...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-32. --- Big Tech’s “Sovereign Cloud” promises just collapsed — in their own words Tags: tech, cloud, privacy, law Indeed, you can’t trust claims of the big cloud players. If asked by they will hand out your data, wherever it is hosted. https://nextcloud.com/blog/big-techs-sovereign-cloud-promises-just-collapsed-in-their-own-words/ Does Free Software Restore Dignity? Tags: tech, foss, education, ethics This is an old one, but I think tha...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-31. --- Europe’s Self Inflicted Cloud Crisis Tags: tech, cloud, vendor-lockin, politics A change in culture and political will is indeed necessary. The relationship between organisations and US cloud providers isn’t healthy. https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/our-self-inflicted-cloud-crisis/ The Future is NOT Self-Hosted Tags: tech, self-hosting, criticism There is some truth to this. Self-hosting isn’t for everyone just for the skills and c...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-25. --- Is it really foss? Tags: tech, foss, licensing, community Nice idea and well executed I’d say. If you got doubts about something being FOSS, stopping there and checking is in order. https://isitreallyfoss.com/ bento: a computer in a keyboard Tags: tech, xr, hardware, hacking Definitely a cool hardware hack. There are really many form factors and hardware options to explore for better XR experience. https://github.com/lunchbox-computer/b...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-24. --- Google’s nightmare: How a search spinoff could remake the web Tags: tech, web, google, search, monopoly, economics There’s clearly something tempting about a web index somehow separated from Google. It always felt like a natural monopoly and so a type of public service. Now that push arrives a tad late so the impacts are unclear. Overall I still think this would be a net positive if there are more web search companies built onto such ...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-22. --- The two types of open source Tags: tech, foss, community, supply-chain, marketing, business I’m not sure this dichotomy is enough for building a taxonomy of FOSS projects. But I guess it’s a start and captures something often missing in other such attempts. https://filiph.net/text/two-types-of-open-source.html SteamOS massively beats Windows on the Legion Go S Tags: tech, linux, gaming, kde, power, performance Looks like Linux is now ...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-20. --- “Google wanted that”: Nextcloud decries Android permissions as “gatekeeping” Tags: tech, android, google, nextcloud, syncing Again, Google doing its thing to protect its advantage… In the end it’s the users who loose control. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/nextcloud-accuses-google-of-big-tech-gatekeeping-over-android-app-permissions/ Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast Tags: tech, ai, machine-lear...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-18. This is another big one with old articles, I’m not done purging the treasure trove I mentioned a couple of weeks back. --- Security Education Companion Tags: tech, security, education Need to teach security basics to your family, friends and neighbors? Here is a nice resource to do a good job there. We often approach the task the wrong way. https://www.securityeducationcompanion.org/ Future of OSL in Jeopardy Tags: tech, foss, politics A re...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-17. --- Privacy is power Tags: tech, privacy, philosophy, politics Reminder of why privacy matter and why we shouldn’t collectively give in to the data vultures. https://aeon.co/essays/privacy-matters-because-it-empowers-us-all Librarians are dangerous Tags: book, culture, learning Very nice praise to an underrated and underpaid job. Can we have more librarians please? https://bradmontague.substack.com/p/librarians-are-dangerous I wrote to the ...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-15. --- A new security fund opens up to help protect the fediverse Tags: tech, fediverse, security This is clearly needed. This should increase the maturity of the security practice around Fediverse software. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/02/a-new-security-fund-opens-up-to-help-protect-the-fediverse/ Bored of it Tags: tech, culture Hear, hear! It sucks up all the air in conversation and obliterate imagination. As if we couldn’t do better. http...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-13. --- OpenAI’s Studio Ghibli meme factory is an insult to art itself Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, politics, culture, art, copyright Sure, a filter which turns pictures into something with the Ghibli style looks cute. But make no mistake, it has utter political motives. They need a distraction from their problems and it’s yet another way to breach a boundary. Unfortunately I expect people will comply and use the feature with enthus...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-12. --- Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, criticism Those bots are really becoming the scourge of the Internet… Is it really necessary to DDoS every forge out there to build LLMs? And that’s not even counting all the other externalities, the end of the article make it clear: “If blasting CO2 into the air and ruining all of our freshwater and traumatizing cheap laborers...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-10… somehow this one is really packed with content. Brace yourselves! --- The Digital Packrat Manifesto Tags: tech, culture, streaming, vendor-lockin Looks like I’m a digital packrat of some sort! There are reasons behind it and it’s well explained. https://www.404media.co/the-digital-packrat-manifesto/ ‘Flow’ wins best animated feature film Oscar Tags: tech, blender, foss, movie Behind the movie this is a big win for Blender. It proves...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-08. --- How Google turned ‘I’m not a robot’ into a massive surveillance system - Boing Boing Tags: tech, google, surveillance A good reminder that everything they buy they turn it into a surveillance system indeed… This time under the pretense of security. https://boingboing.net/2025/02/07/recaptcha-819-million-hours-of-wasted-human-time-and-billions-of-dollars-google-profit.html Stalkerware apps Cocospy and Spyic are exposing phone data ...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-06. --- Chatbot Software Begins to Face Fundamental Limitations | Quanta Magazine Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, mathematics, logic When you put the marketing claims aside, the limitations of those models become obvious. This is important, only finding the root cause of those limitations can give a chance to find a solution to then. https://www.quantamagazine.org/chatbot-software-begins-to-face-fundamental-limitations-20250131/ LLMs: harm...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-05. --- Supporting the Fediverse, one small act at a time Tags: tech, fediverse, community Indeed, the Fediverse needs to be better known. Any small actions towards this goal helps. https://blog.elenarossini.com/supporting-the-fediverse-one-small-act-at-a-time/ Open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp raise funds on Kickstarter Tags: tech, foss, fediverse This is good to see funds being raised for those projects. Lets hope they...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-03. --- How This “Basic” Robot Solves REAL Life Problems (without AI) - YouTube Tags: tech, robots, disability, empathy This is definitely an excellent use of robotics. Probably one of the best I’ve seen. The things we can do when we’re not just focusing on increasing productivity. These people get a shared sense of belonging they’d have a hard time to have without those robots. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iLcOLvNfz0 Common misconc...| ervin
Happy new year everyone! It’s now 2025, we’ll see what it brings. Unsurprisingly this week we got a couple of nice “2024 retrospective” articles in this edition, I expect more to show up in the coming weeks. Anyway, let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-01. --- Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech - Bert Hubert’s writings Tags: tech, foss, business Or why making a dent in the enterprise software space is hard for FOSS… The good news is, it’d require sett...| ervin
Let’s go for last web review of 2024! --- This is Your Brain On Surveillance: New Study Reveals How Awareness of Being Watched Alters Our Brains - The Debrief Tags: tech, surveillance, psychology, cognition It looks like it’s not only impacting negatively our privacy. The linked paper (good to read as well) hints at negative impacts on mental health as well. Still needs to be fully validated but it doesn’t look good already. https://thedebrief.org/this-is-your-brain-on-surveillance-new-...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-50. --- Census III of Free and Open Source Software Tags: tech, foss, supply-chain Interesting report, some findings are kind of unexpected. It’s interesting to see how much npm and maven dominate the supply chain. Clearly there’s a need for a global scheme to identify dependencies, hopefully we’ll get there. https://www.linuxfoundation.org/research/census-iii Open Source Archetypes: A Framework For Purposeful Open Source Tags: tech, foss, ...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-48. --- Are Overemployed ‘Ghost Engineers’ Making Six Figures to Do Nothing? Tags: tech, algorithm, productivity, business Can you see this kind of models getting abused quickly? Clearly it says something about the tech industry wanting to reduce costs. https://www.404media.co/are-overemployed-ghost-engineers-making-six-figures-to-do-nothing/ the tech utopia fantasy is over Tags: tech, politics Technology isn’t neutral. It’s impossible to...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-46. --- No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains Tags: tech, mobile, sensors, gps, transportation Now this is definitely a smart trick to estimate position in tunnels. https://blog.transitapp.com/go-underground/ OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Are Struggling to Build More Advanced AI - Bloomberg Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt More signs of the generative AI companies hitting a plateau… https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-45. --- Voted in America? This Site Doxed You Tags: tech, democracy I didn’t know the voting rolls were public record in the US… this is a really bad idea. https://www.404media.co/voted-in-america-this-site-doxed-you/ One weird trick to get the whole planet to send abuse complaints to your best friend(s) Tags: tech, networking, security, protocols Looks like there are people out there to get Tor relays down… and they found a smart networkin...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-44. --- What You Can Learn from Just Seven Pages by Hannah Arendt Tags: tech, philosophy, history, politics A very precious philosopher from the 20th century. Her texts are still very precious and resonate today. In this piece it’s focusing about tech relevant excerpts, she had plenty to say about today’s politics as well. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/what-you-can-learn-from-just-seven The Open Source AI Definition Tags: tech, foss, ai, ma...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-43. It’s published later than usual since I’m attending the Ubuntu Summit 2024 and had to travel because of it. --- Microsoft maintains its own Windows debloat scripts on GitHub Tags: tech, microsoft, criticism, funny This is indeed telling unfortunately. It’s kind of ironic that they felt the need of having their own debloat scripts. https://www.osnews.com/story/140955/microsoft-maintains-its-own-windows-debloat-scripts-on-github/ This Is ...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-42. --- You Can’t Make Friends With The Rockstars Tags: tech, capitalism, marketing, politics, criticism People have to realize that tycoons like the ones from big tech companies can both be rich and mediocre. They were smart enough to seize opportunities at the right time but they are not exceptional. In fact, they’re even boring and spineless. The best quote in this paper I think is: “There is nothing special about Elon Musk, Sam Altman, ...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-41. --- Why I use KDE Tags: tech, kde, foss, ux Looks like we properly live by the “simple by default, powerful when needed” tagline. Now there are also challenges, this article gives a nice balanced view. https://www.osnews.com/story/140538/why-i-use-kde/ It’s Not Easy Being Green: On the Energy Efficiency of Programming Languages Tags: tech, programming, performance, energy Nice paper which debunks the choice of the language as an importa...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-40. --- W3C 30th anniversary clip Tags: tech, web, history Excellent clip for the W3C 30th anniversary. Shows the big milestones and evolution of the WWW. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TfUBuIZkmQ OpenFreeMap Tags: tech, foss, map An excellent service to provide. Let’s hope it stays sustainable, the risk is commercial leeches not giving back a dime. Be responsible, sponsor it if you use it commercially. https://openfreemap.org/ Why laptop sup...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-39. --- We have lift-off! Element X, Call and Server Suite are ready! Tags: tech, matrix, ux Definitely a big announcement for Matrix. Could it be the beginning of going mainstream? I suspect it’ll be now or never. I’m slightly concerned about the desktop support being apparently ignored, the UX there is far from great still. https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-server-suite-are-ready/ Firefox tracks you with “privacy...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-38. --- Is Tor still safe to use? Tags: tech, tor, privacy The quick answer is yes. The longer answer is that more effort is still required to ensure the network has enough diversity of nodes to stay healthy. https://blog.torproject.org/tor-is-still-safe/ The Subprime AI Crisis Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, business, economics, criticism This is a very harsh and bleak view on the current generative AI craze. Clearly it survives on some s...| ervin
Alright… this is published a bit later than usual due to travels and lack of energy. Anyway, let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-37. --- Fediverse Discovery Providers Tags: tech, fediverse, search Nice to see such a project be funded. Let’s see how far this will go. https://www.fediscovery.org/ 2024: 0.5% of the Global Top 200 Websites Use Valid HTML Tags: tech, html, quality This is clearly not a great outcome. The browser monoculture probably doesn’t help. https://meiert.co...| ervin
At Akademy 2024, during my talk KDE to Make Wines I promised there would be a companion blog post focusing more on the technical details of what we did. This is the article in question. This is a piece I also wrote for the enioka blog, so there is a French version available. Where we set the stage After years of working in the service industry, one thing which doesn’t cease to amaze me is the variety of needs our customers have and how we can still be surprised by them. They sometimes lead ...| ervin
On my way to Akademy, looking forward to meeting people there. Even though I’m traveling with spotty Internet access for now, let’s not loose good habits. Here is my web review for the week 2024-36. --- The Internet Archive just lost its appeal over ebook lending - The Verge Tags: tech, copyright, law, library This is really bad news… Clearly the publishers cartel would try to outlaw libraries if they were invented today. https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/4/24235958/internet-archive-loses...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-35. --- Telegram is neither “secure” nor “encrypted” Tags: tech, telegram, security, privacy Here a good reminder that the PR of Telegram is highly misleading. It’s not very secure, they don’t really care about your privacy. https://rys.io/en/171.html How Telegram’s Founder Pavel Durov Became a Culture War Martyr Tags: tech, telegram, law Yes, such an arrest is concerning. Now, lots of people are voicing the wrong concerns… this a...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-34. --- Unbundling Profile: MIT Libraries - SPARC Tags: research, copyright, open-access It’s good to see major institutions like this get out of contracts with scientific publishing companies. Those unfortunately became mostly parasitic. Open access should be the norm for research. https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-knowledge-base/unbundling-profiles/mit-libraries/ Make Firefox Private Again Tags: tech, mozilla, privacy Since they unfortu...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-33. --- Why We Picked AGPL - ParadeDB Tags: tech, foss, business I wish more product companies would pick this license. Going for AGPL with a support and/or double license offering is a strong model in my opinion. https://blog.paradedb.com/pages/agpl Fellowship for Maintainers | Sovereign Tech Fund Tags: tech, foss, economics Interesting initiative. I’m looking forward to the results of this first pilot. https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/program...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-31. --- Third-party cookies have got to go | W3C Tags: tech, browser, privacy, google Apparently this needs to be spelled out for browser providers to understand this needs to go. https://www.w3.org/blog/2024/third-party-cookies-have-got-to-go/ CWE Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses Tags: tech, security Looks like we really get back to the same type of vulnerabilities… it’s only a couple of dozens usual suspects. https://cwe.mitre.org/...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-29. --- The graying open source community needs fresh blood • The Register Tags: tech, foss, community This is indeed a problem. Somehow it became much harder to attract younger developers. https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/15/opinion_open_source_attract_devs/ “Privacy-Preserving” Attribution: Mozilla Disappoints Us Yet Again Tags: tech, browser, mozilla, privacy You’d expect Mozilla to know better. This is disappointing, they’re no l...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-27. --- Online anonymity: study found ‘stable pseudonyms’ created a more civil environment than real user names Tags: tech, internet, anonymity, privacy There’s clearly an interesting balance between full anonymity and no anonymity at all. This is a path to keep discussions genuine and civil. https://theconversation.com/online-anonymity-study-found-stable-pseudonyms-created-a-more-civil-environment-than-real-user-names-171374 Telegram say...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-26. --- Chat Control and the New Panopticon - by Masayuki Hatta Tags: tech, surveillance, privacy, cryptography, law Very neat piece, shows quite well the problems with Chat Control like laws. It’s been postponed this time, but expect it to comeback somehow. https://mhatta.substack.com/p/chat-control-and-the-new-panopticon Cleantech has an enshittification problem Tags: tech, politics, law This is becoming an important industry. Regulation is n...| ervin
Like last year, the KDEPIM team convened in Toulouse to hold it’s traditional spring sprint. Unlike last year this time it was late spring, almost made it into summer. This time we’ve been hosted by Étincelle Coworking in one of their spaces. It was fairly nice. Lots of space, comfortable, well situated in the center. I definitely recommend. The Warm-up Some of the team (namely Carl and Volker) arrived early before the official start. I’m pretty sure Carl made it early to have lunch in...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-24. --- Microsoft Will Switch Off Recall by Default After Security Backlash Tags: tech, microsoft, privacy Unsurprisingly they had to adjust under the pressure. The most blatant issues might be gone, it is still a bad idea at its core. https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-recall-off-default-security-concerns/ AI chatbots are intruding into online communities where people are trying to connect with other humans Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, g...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-22. --- The next decade of the web | James’ Coffee Blog Tags: tech, web, social-media, democracy Very nice piece. Hopefully it’ll push people to remember that the big social media enclosures are not really the Web. We can have more democracy on the Web again if we collectively want to. https://jamesg.blog/2024/05/19/next-web-decade/ How does AI impact my job as a programmer? – Chelsea Troy Tags: tech, programming, debugging, teaching, gpt, ...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-20. --- Password cracking: past, present, future Tags: tech, security Ever wondered about the state of the art in password cracking? This is not an easy read but a good reference. https://www.openwall.com/presentations/OffensiveCon2024-Password-Cracking/ Beyond public key encryption – A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering Tags: tech, cryptography There are other cryptography schemes out there with interesting properties. Too bad they’re...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-19. --- Heat Death of the Internet - takahē Tags: tech, internet, web, satire, criticism Obviously a satire, some of it feels eerily real though. https://www.takahe.org.nz/heat-death-of-the-internet/ “AI now beats humans at basic tasks”: Really? Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, research, benchmarking, criticism Nice article. It’s a good reminder that the benchmarks used to evaluate generative AI systems have many caveats. https://aig...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-17. --- AI isn’t useless. But is it worth it? Tags: tech, ai, gpt, copilot, criticism, work It is an interesting essay. It leans on the side of “assistants are useful for simple coding tasks” and it’s a bit more critical when it’s about writing. The stance is original I find, yes it can help with some writing tasks, but if you look at the writing tasks you can expedite this way… if you wish to expedite them isn’t it a sign that they...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-06. --- We’ve been waiting 20 years for this - The History of the Web Tags: tech, web, blog, culture Excellent piece about the resurgence of old trends on the web. https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/weve-been-waiting-20-years-for-this/ The European regulators listened to the Open Source communities! - Voices of Open Source Tags: tech, foss, law Looks like good progress has been made. A few more adjustments would be welcome before it gets ratified. ...| ervin
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-05. --- This Web Page is Best Viewed in the EU Tags: tech, vendor-lockin, apple A little victory for European users trapped in the iOS ecosystem… still more needs to be done though. https://cloudfour.com/thinks/this-web-page-is-best-viewed-in-the-eu/ Announcing Interop 2024 – Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog Tags: tech, standard, web, browser It’s good to see this initiative keeps thriving. It’s the best way to ensure the standard i...| ervin
