Modern Unix derivatives have this really bad idea called ioctl. It’s a function which performs arbitrary operations on a file descriptor. It is essentially the kitchen sink of modern Unix derivatives, particularly Linux, in which they act almost like a second set of extra syscalls. For example, to g...

Congratulations to Rust for its first (but not its last) supply-chain attack this week! They join a growing club of broken-by-design package managers which publish packages uploaded by vendors directly, with no review step, and ship those packages directly to users with no further scrutiny. Timeline...

Congratulations to Rust for its first (but not its last) supply-chain attack this week! They join a growing club of broken-by-design package managers which publish packages uploaded by vendors directly, with no review step, and ship those packages directly to users with no further scrutiny.Timeline ...

Cross-posted from the Hare blog In the process of writing an SSH agent for Himitsu, I needed to implement many SSH primitives from the ground up in Hare, now available via hare-ssh. Today, I’m going to show you how it works! Important: This blog post deals with cryptography-related code. The code yo...

Cross-posted from the Hare blogIn the process of writing an SSH agent for Himitsu, I needed to implement many SSH primitives from the ground up in Hare, now available via hare-ssh. Today, I’m going to show you how it works!Important: This blog post deals with cryptography-related code. The code you’...

The “secret programming language” I have been teasing for several months now is finally here! It is called Hare, and you can read about it on the Hare blog: https://harelang.org/blog/2022-04-25-announcing-hare/ Check it out!

The “secret programming language” I have been teasing for several months now is finally here! It is called Hare, and you can read about it on the Hare blog:https://harelang.org/blog/2022-04-25-announcing-hare/Check it out!

This month marked my first time filing taxes in two countries, and I can assure you it is the worst. I am now a single-issue voter in the US: stop taxing expats! You can get some insight into the financials of SourceHut in the recently-published financial report. But let’s get right into the fun stu...

This month marked my first time filing taxes in two countries, and I can assure you it is the worst. I am now a single-issue voter in the US: stop taxing expats! You can get some insight into the financials of SourceHut in the recently-published financial report. But let’s get right into the fun stu...

You’ve heard of git-over-email thanks to git send-email — now you can enjoy git snail-mail: a new tool making it easier than ever to print out git commits on paper and mail them to your maintainers. Running git snail-mail HEAD~2.. prepares the last two commits for post and sends them directly to the...

You’ve heard of git-over-email thanks to git send-email — now you can enjoy git snail-mail: a new tool making it easier than ever to print out git commits on paper and mail them to your maintainers.Running git snail-mail HEAD~2.. prepares the last two commits for post and sends them directly to the ...

Disclaimer: I founded a project and a company that focuses on free software infrastructure. I will elect not to name them in this post, and will only recommend solutions I do not have a vested interest in. Free and open source software (FOSS) projects need infrastructure. Somewhere to host the code,...

Disclaimer: I founded a project and a company that focuses on free software infrastructure. I will elect not to name them in this post, and will only recommend solutions I do not have a vested interest in.Free and open source software (FOSS) projects need infrastructure. Somewhere to host the code, ...

I moved to Amsterdam in July 2021, and now that I’ve had some time to settle in I thought I’d share my thoughts on how it’s been so far. In short: I love it here! I did end up finding housing through the hacker community thanks to my earlier post, which was a great blessing. I am renting an apartmen...

I moved to Amsterdam in July 2021, and now that I’ve had some time to settle in I thought I’d share my thoughts on how it’s been so far. In short: I love it here!I did end up finding housing through the hacker community thanks to my earlier post, which was a great blessing. I am renting an apartment...

Greetings! The weather is starting to warm up again, eh? I’m a bit disappointed that we didn’t get any snow this winter. Yadda yadda insert intro text here. Let’s get down to brass tacks. What’s new this month? I mainly focused on the programming language this month. I started writing a kernel, whic...

Greetings! The weather is starting to warm up again, eh? I’m a bit disappointed that we didn’t get any snow this winter. Yadda yadda insert intro text here. Let’s get down to brass tacks. What’s new this month?I mainly focused on the programming language this month. I started writing a kernel, which...

As a prolific maintainer of several dozen FOSS projects, I’m often asked how I can get so much done, being just one person. The answer is: I’m not just one person. I have enjoyed the help of thousands of talented people who have contributed to these works. Without them, none of the projects I work o...

As a prolific maintainer of several dozen FOSS projects, I’m often asked how I can get so much done, being just one person. The answer is: I’m not just one person. I have enjoyed the help of thousands of talented people who have contributed to these works. Without them, none of the projects I work o...

As many readers are aware, I have been working on designing and implementing a systems programming language. This weekend, I’ve been writing a PNG file decoder in it, and over the past week, I have been working on a simple kernel with it as well. I’m very pleased with our progress so far — I recentl...

As many readers are aware, I have been working on designing and implementing a systems programming language. This weekend, I’ve been writing a PNG file decoder in it, and over the past week, I have been working on a simple kernel with it as well. I’m very pleased with our progress so far — I recentl...

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) publishes a document called the Open Source Definition (OSD), which defines the term “open source”. However, there is a small minority of viewpoints within the software community which wishes that this were not so. The most concerning among them are those who wish op...

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) publishes a document called the Open Source Definition (OSD), which defines the term “open source”. However, there is a small minority of viewpoints within the software community which wishes that this were not so. The most concerning among them are those who wish op...

Plaid is a business that has built a widget that can be embedded in any of their customer’s websites which allows their customers to configure integrations with a list of third-party service providers. To facilitate this, Plaid pops up a widget on their customer’s domain which asks the end-user to t...

Plaid is a business that has built a widget that can be embedded in any of their customer’s websites which allows their customers to configure integrations with a list of third-party service providers. To facilitate this, Plaid pops up a widget on their customer’s domain which asks the end-user to t...

Hello once again! Another month of free software development goes by with lots of progress in all respects. I will open with some news about godocs.io: version 1.0 of our fork of gddo has been released! Big thanks to Adnan Maolood for his work on this. I’m very pleased that, following our fork, we w...

Hello once again! Another month of free software development goes by with lots of progress in all respects.I will open with some news about godocs.io: version 1.0 of our fork of gddo has been released! Big thanks to Adnan Maolood for his work on this. I’m very pleased that, following our fork, we we...

Upon hearing the term “accessibility”, many developers call to mind the HTML ARIA attributes and little else. Those who have done some real accessibility work may think of the WCAG guidelines. Some FOSS developers1 may think of AT-SPI. The typical user of these accessibility features is, in the mind...

Upon hearing the term “accessibility”, many developers call to mind the HTML ARIA attributes and little else. Those who have done some real accessibility work may think of the WCAG guidelines. Some FOSS developers1 may think of AT-SPI. The typical user of these accessibility features is, in the mind...

This is the first in a series of posts I intend to write explaining how various free and open source software licenses work, and what that means for you as a user or developer of that software. Today we’ll look at the MIT license, also sometimes referred to as the X11 or Expat license. The MIT licen...