ProcessOne: 🚀 ejabberd 25.08

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Release Highlights:

This release includes the support for Hydra rooms in our Matrix gateway, which fixes high severity protocol vulnerabilities.

• Improvements in Matrix gateway
  
• Fixed ACME in Erlang/OTP 28.0.2
  
• **[New mod_providers to serve XMPP Providers file](https://www.process-one.net/blog/rss/ … ⌘ Read more

The XMPP Standards Foundation: MongooseIM 6.4 - Simplified and Unified
MongooseIM is a scalable and efficient instant messaging server. It implements the open, proven, extensible and constantly evolving XMPP protocol, which is an excellent choice when it comes to instant messaging. To communicate with other XMPP entities, the server uses three main types of interfaces, listed in the table below.

XMPP InterfacePurposeConnection typeReworked in v … ⌘ Read more

For the first time, Americans will experience this homegrown WA apple
A homegrown West Australian apple makes its debut in American supermarkets, with the first shipment to China due to leave next year. ⌘ Read more

Why everyone is quitting social media ⌘ Read more

💻 Issue 483 - Pre-SIP: Dedented Multiline String Literals ⌘ Read more

Erlang Solutions: MongooseIM 6.4: Simplified and Unified
MongooseIM is a scalable and efficient instant messaging server. With the latest release 6.4.0, it has become more powerful yet easier to use and maintain. Thanks to the internal unification of listeners and connection handling, the configuration is easier and more intuitive, while numerous new options are supported.

New features include support for TLS 1.3 with optional channel binding for improved security, single round-trip authent … ⌘ Read more

The Next Big SHA? SHA3 Sponge Function Explained - Computerphile ⌘ Read more

Barossa mirco-winery, Ballycroft, powered by a second-hand EV
A micro-winery in the Barossa Valley has achieved a world first in their efforts to keep the vineyard eco-friendly. ⌘ Read more

Adelaide leads the charge to replace single-use fruit stickers
A Riverland citrus grower has started using laser printing on fruit eliminating the need for traditional stickers. ⌘ Read more

** 📸 Photo **

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** 📸 Photo **

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💻 Issue 482 - The Dereliction of Due Process ⌘ Read more

Sam Whited: Notes
I’ve recently been using the Mixxx software for DJs. This page includes some
personal notes on my own use cases, what’s good, what’s bad, etc.
It is not really made for general consumption, but is thrown up here anyways.
It will be a bit rambling and/or ranty at times, most likely.

Let’s get my overall impressions of the software out of the way up front: it’s
absolutely great and I recommend it over the commercial alternatives for DJs of
all stripes (except maybe Radio DJs, it’s not really for … ⌘ Read more

Regarding Mourning Posts 2.0 ⌘ Read more

💻 Issue 481 - The Untold Impact of Cancellation ⌘ Read more

San Francisco Billboards - August 2025
Every time I take a Lyft from the San Francisco airport to downtown going up 101, I notice the billboards. The billboards on 101 are always such a good snapshot in time of the current peak of the Silicon Valley hype cycle. I’ve decided to capture photos of the billboards every time I am there, to see how this changes over time. ⌘ Read more

** Make awk rawk **
A friend online recently replied to something I wrote about awk by saying:

[…] it’s a danged shame [awk] didn’t continue to evolve the way Ruby, Python, PHP have evolved over the decades.

I had exactly this thought while working on my slightly unhinged“lets see if I can implement a basic scheme using awk by writing an assembler and VM in awk,” skwak. Which eventually lead me to start noodling on how to layer in some modern niceties into awk, without breaking awk’s portability.
… ⌘ Read more

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem - Computerphile ⌘ Read more

Kunne det være sandt, at en persons foragt for LLM’er er proportinel med mængden af AI-markedsføring som personen er blevet vist? ⌘ Read more

The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter July 2025

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XMPP Newsletter Banner

Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again!
This issue covers the month of July 2025.

Like this newsletter, many projects and their efforts in the XMPP community are a result of people’s voluntary work. If you are happy with the services and software you may be using, please consider saying thanks or helping these project … ⌘ Read more

XMPP Providers: A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

In May 2025, we ran a small survey to gather feedback from XMPP server operators.
Our main concerns were XMPP Provider’s service and the project itself.
First of all, we would like to thank almost 60 people who participated in this survey.
While the XMPP Providers project currently lists a little more than 70 providers, this is a good turnout.
At this point we can already tell that the gen … ⌘ Read more

💻 Issue 480 - Example Driven Documentation ⌘ Read more

How the 1% stole minimalism (then threw it away) ⌘ Read more

Erlang Solutions: Supporting the BEAM Community with Free CI/CD Security Audits
At Erlang Solutions, our support for the BEAM community is long-standing and built into everything we do. From contributing to open-source tools and sponsoring events to improving security and shaping ecosystem standards, we’re proud to play an active role in helping the BEAM ecosystem grow and thrive.

One way we’re putting that support into action is by offering free CI/CD-based security … ⌘ Read more

XMPP Interop Testing: MOAR TESTS!
Ever heard of XMPP Interop Testing? It’s this cool project that helps make sure different XMPP servers can all work
together smoothly. Our XMPP Interop Testing project provides a suite of automated tests that can be integrated into
CI/CD pipelines to verify the compliance and interoperability of XMPP server implementations.

Late last year, we reported that we had secured funding graciously provided by NLnet that allowed
us to massively build out t … ⌘ Read more

Hahaha, I first thought of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA52uNzx7Y4 when I read @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz’s “lyrics”. ;-)

Doesn’t sound bad, I like it. The synth reminded me of some song by Beast in Black.

mandoc is nicer to read/write than the man macro package and, most importantly, it’s semantic markup.

HTML output is a bit broken in GNU groff, though (OpenBSD on the left, GNU on the right):

https://movq.de/v/f1898e648f/s.png

🤔

Still, I’m inclined to convert my manpages to mandoc.

@kingdomcome@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Yeah, it’s all about simplicity. That’s what got me hooked. In its original form without the extensions, you can even read the raw feed and it doesn’t feel all that bad.

Writing a Text Editor - Computerphile ⌘ Read more

Prosodical Thoughts: Debian repository key change
We have been working on some changes to our Debian/Ubuntu package repository.
If you use our repository to keep up to date with new Prosody packages, you
need to take action before 4th August 2025 to continue receiving updates
smoothly.

The ‘apt’ utility has been moving towards a new format for specifying package
repositories. If you are familiar with putting deb lines in a sources.list
file, [that method is changing](ht … ⌘ Read more

Heck yeah, that’s damn cool: Reading QR codes without a computer! https://qr.blinry.org/

37C3 and New Year’s Eve 2023
Another one from the vaults. The 37C3 conference took place in
December, 2023. This report was mostly written in January, 2024.
Mostly finished it at night in my cottage between 28 and 29th
December, then edited and added some stuff in July, 2025. So… Only
1.5 years late?

It was a little ironic, and a little sad, that I was finishing the
37C3 report during 38C3. I didn’t manage to get any tickets for me and
#3 for 38C3 and had to make do with watching the stream.

The links to the talks go to [C … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de According to this screenshot, KDE still shows good old application icons: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/KDE_Plasma_5.21_Breeze_Twilight_screenshot.png

And GNOME used to have them, too: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9f/Gnome-2-22_%284%29.png

I like the looks of your window manager. That’s using Wayland, right? The only thing on this screenshot to critique is all that wasted space of the windows not making use of the full screen!!!1 At least the file browser. 8-)

This drives me nuts when my workmates share their screens. I really don’t get it how people can work like that. You can’t even read the whole line in the IDE or log viewer with all the expanded side bars. And then there’s 200 pixels on the left and another 300 pixels on the right where the desktop wallpaper shows. Gnaa! There’s the other extreme end when somebody shares their ultra wide screen and I just have a “regularish” 16:10 monitor and don’t see shit, because it’s resized way too tiny to fit my width. Good times. :-D

Sorry for going off on a tangent here. :-) Back to your WM: It has the right mix of being subtle and still similar to motif. Probably close to the older Windowses. My memory doesn’t serve me well, but I think they actually got it fairly good in my opinion. Your purple active window title looks killer. It just fits so well. This brown one (https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-07-22/0/leafpads.png) gives me also classic vibes. Awww. We ran some similar brownish color scheme (don’t recall its name) on Win95 or Win98 for some time on the family computer. I remember other people visting us not liking these colors. :-D

ProcessOne: XMPP: When a 25-Year-Old Protocol Becomes Strategic Again
After twenty-five years, XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) is still here. Mature, proven, modular, and standardized, it may well be the most solid foundation available today to build the future of messaging.

And now, XMPP is more relevant than ever: its resurgence is driven by European digital sovereignty efforts, renewed focus on interoperabil … ⌘ Read more

gomdn: Yet another Static Site Generator
Yet another Static Site Generator (SSG), but this one is mine.

It’s a stupidly simple Go program ( wc says 229 lines), more like a
hack, really, but I don’t need something like Hugo. Most of the real
work is done by the goldmark package, of course. This is mostly just a
wrapper, deciding if something needs to be rebuilt.

I’ve been using a Perl script together with cmark (originally
Markdown.pl) since forever. And before that the old [txt2tags](htt … ⌘ Read more

Memory Mapping - Computerphile ⌘ Read more

Status 2025-07-21
Morning, computer! Spending my days off trying to figure things out.
Some of them will occur in this post. I think best when I’m writing,
after all.

I’m back from a short vacation since a couple of weeks. I’m still
going to take a few days off every week for a while. I need the break.
It’s been way too many 12-16 hour workdays. I’m nominally working 80%
(~6 hour days), so I figure I’ve been working a lot for free.

Yeah, well, I like the TKey project to succeed. The ideas behind it
have implicatio … ⌘ Read more

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I kind of like XML because it’s mostly well-defined and easy for humans to read (unlike YAML, which is a complete mess, imho) … and at the same time, it can get complicated really fast. 🫤 But at least it’s plain-text – that’s the important part in this case. 😅

Xfce does one thing very right: It stores its settings in plain-text XML files. This allows me to easily read, track, and maybe even distribute these settings to other machines.

(Unlike GNOME’s dconf, which uses some binary file format. Fun fact: The older and now deprecated gconf also used XML files.)

How brands manipulate you into buying more ⌘ Read more

Zip It! - Finding File Similarity Using Compression Utilities - Computerphile ⌘ Read more

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com And I read the following funny response to that:

Bluesky: Users verify their age by adding a payment method or uploading a photo ID.

Mastodon: Users verify their age by posting pictures of the vintage computer equipment in their homes.

https://beige.party/@maxleibman/114848276288629121

😏

ROFL 🤣 I’ve just read from someone on the Fedi, that Bluesky has started asking people for ID

Erlang Solutions: What is Remote Patient Monitoring?
Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) is changing how care is delivered. By tracking health data through connected devices outside traditional settings, it helps clinicians act sooner, reduce readmissions, and focus resources where they’re most needed. With rising NHS pressures and growing demand for digital care, RPM is becoming central to how both public and private providers support long-term conditions, recovery, and hospital-at-home mod … ⌘ Read more

TKey: The Next Generation
Not speaking for my employer, just as an interested developer in an
interesting open source project.

As you might have noticed, the platform repo of the Tillitis TKey has
some alpha tags for the next generation, Castor:

https://github.com/tillitis/tillitis-key1/tags

An alpha tag means that all planned features for the platform are in
place, but there’s not yet a complete audit and a lot of testing … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s not a strong sandbox in jenny’s case, it could still read my SSH private key (in case of an exploit of some sort). But I still like it.

I think my main takeaway is this: Knowing that technologies like Landlock/pledge/unveil exist and knowing that they are very easy to use, will probably nudge me into writing software differently in the future.

jenny was never meant to be sandboxed, so it can’t make great use of it. Future software might be different.

(And this is finally a strong argument for static linking.)

Another example:

$ setpriv \
    --landlock-access fs \
    --landlock-rule path-beneath:execute,read-file:/bin/ls-static \
    --landlock-rule path-beneath:read-dir:/tmp \
    /bin/ls-static /tmp/tmp/xorg.atom

The first argument --landlock-access fs says that nothing is allowed.

--landlock-rule path-beneath:execute,read-file:/bin/ls-static says that reading and executing that file is allowed. It’s a statically linked ls program (not GNU ls).

--landlock-rule path-beneath:read-dir:/tmp says that reading the /tmp directory and everything below it is allowed.

The output of the ls-static program is this line:

─rw─r──r────x 3000 200 07-12 09:19 22'491 │ /tmp/tmp/xorg.atom

It was able to read the directory, see the file, do stat() on it and everything, the little x indicates that getting xattrs also worked.

3000 and 200 are user name and group name – they are shown as numeric, because the program does not have access to /etc/passwd and /etc/group.

Adding --landlock-rule path-beneath:read-file:/etc/passwd, for example, allows resolving users and yields this:

─rw─r──r────x cathy 200 07-12 09:19 22'491 │ /tmp/tmp/xorg.atom

ProcessOne: ejabberd 25.07

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Release Highlights:

This release focus on integration in a wider federated network, with support for spam fighting features, better compliance with Matrix network and native support for PubSub Server Information to have your server count as part of the wider XMPP network (for example, you can register your server on XMPP Network Graph).

• **Spam filter … ⌘ Read more

CPU Kernel Mode - Computerphile ⌘ Read more

How to Mount a Balcony Awning
Hi Kris,

I’ve been reading your website for quite a while. It’s one of my favourite blogs. Thank you for what you are doing!

We are currently experiencing a heat wave in Germany, so I drew inspiration from Low-tech Magazine’s article “ How to Dress and Undress your Home” and built an awning on my balcony. I documented the process so that other readers can install one themselves.

The ov … ⌘ Read more