Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-09.

Open letter to browser and OS makers

Tags: tech, web, http, security

We’re indeed close to universal HTTPS adoption. One last push please?

https://medium.com/@boblord/open-letter-to-browser-and-os-makers-12d65aa314f7

France is about to pass the worst surveillance law in the EU

Tags: tech, privacy, surveillance, cryptography, politics

They really never learn… Whatever the country politician try to blindly fight against cryptography again and again. Let’s hope this one is stopped.

https://tuta.com/blog/france-surveillance-nacrotrafic-law

It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds

Tags: tech, cloud, politics, law, privacy, vendor-lockin

Maybe it’ll at least be a wake up call for governments and businesses to let go of their US cloud addiction. There are reasons why you don’t want such vendor lock-in. The political drama unfolding in the United States makes obvious why you should think carefully at how dependent you are from your service and infrastructure providers.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/you-can-no-longer-base-your-government-and-society-on-us-clouds/

Y Combinator Supports AI Startup Dehumanizing Factory Workers

Tags: tech, business, criticism

I’m still baffled people are coming with ideas like this for their businesses… The level of cynicism you must have to build such a startup.

https://www.404media.co/optifyeai-ycombinator-startup-ai-factory/

A new Android feature is scanning your photos for ‘sensitive content’ - how to stop it

Tags: tech, google, android, smartphone, security, criticism

Another example that on such ecosystems you’re not really owning your device. Seek alternatives!

https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-new-android-feature-is-scanning-your-photos-for-sensitive-content-how-to-stop-it/

Xcode constantly phones home

Tags: tech, apple, surveillance

Not all of this makes sense… Why are they collecting so much from an IDE?

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2025/2/5.html

How Core Git Developers Configure Git

Tags: tech, git, version-control, tools, command-line

Or why even the core git developers don’t really use the defaults. This piece gives good knobs to play with in order to have a nicer experience.

https://blog.gitbutler.com/how-git-core-devs-configure-git/

Smart Pointers Can’t Solve Use-After-Free

Tags: tech, c++, memory, safety

They help with some issues… but they can’t solve all the memory safety issues of the language I’m afraid.

https://jacko.io/smart_pointers.html

Bookmarklets (and Custom URL Schemes) Are Criminally Underrated

Tags: tech, browser, desktop, linux

This is indeed forgotten features available in our desktop and browsers. It can be very convenient.

https://silly.business/blog/bookmarklets-and-custom-url-schemes-are-criminally-underrated/

The web on mobile

Tags: tech, web, mobile, ux, performance

It could be so much better indeed. Unfortunately in great part this is about UX design and carrying heavyweight frontend frameworks though…

https://adactio.com/journal/21728

Programming Really Is Simple Mathematics

Tags: tech, programming, mathematics, logic

Interesting endeavor… this is nice to have an attempt at a formal definition with no axiom introduced.

https://bertrandmeyer.com/2025/02/25/new-preprint-programming-really-is-simple-mathematics/

A discussion between John Ousterhout and Robert Martin

Tags: tech, craftsmanship, design, tdd, teaching, complexity

Very interesting discussion weighting the main differences and disagreements between a Philosophy of Software Design, and Clean Code. I read and own both books and those differences were crystal clear, it’s nice to see the authors debate them. I’m a bit disappointed at the section about TDD though, I think it could have been a bit more conclusive. It gives me food for thought about my TDD teaching though and confirms some of the messages I’m trying to push to reduce confusion.

https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code

Testing Numbs Us to Our Loss of Intellectual Control

Tags: tech, architecture, design, tdd, complexity

Nice little paper I overlooked. I agree with it obviously. More tests are not a free pass to let complexity go wild. Architecture and design concerns are still very important even if you TDD properly.

https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/so/2020/03/09068304/1j30VMzNxLO

Leading while learning

Tags: management, leadership

The proposed three traits are definitely spot on. Too much confidence is a red flag, some balance needs to be found.

https://zendesk.engineering/leading-while-learning-why-great-managers-dont-have-all-the-answers-f297cc383d01

Bye for now!

Last week, part of the Kdenlive core team met in Amsterdam for a short sprint, the highlight of which was a visit to the Blender Foundation.

Francesco Siddi, COO at Blender, provided us with a rare insight into Blender’s history and precious advice about product management for Kdenlive – we hope to implement some of these advices soon.

As the meeting took place on a Friday afternoon, we also had the opportunity to attend their “Weekly”, which is an open session where artists and developers share their progress of the past week on various Blender related projects.

So thanks again to Francesco and everyone at the Blender Foundation for their hospitality.

On the next day, we discussed a few topics, including:

• Refining the audio workflow task
• Proof of concept on how we can improve clip timecode – define a start timecode when rendering
• Finalized an MLT patch to make rendering work without a display server (required to make Flatpak pass our render test suite)
• Scratched a few itches

Smaller statusbar in Dolphin, CSS Font Variables in Krita, and SystemdGenie redesign

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps. This time again a bit delayed. If you are a non technical person and are looking at a way to contribute to KDE, you can help editing "This Week in KDE Apps" would be very much welcome. Just join our Matrix chat.

This week we have some big changes in Krita, a redesign in SystemDGenie and a new, more compact statusbar for Dolphin.

Amarok Rediscover your music

We dropped the Qt5 support and moved to Qt6 (Tuomas Nurmi, Link).

Dolphin Manage your files

Dolphin now uses a more compact statusbar by default (Akseli Lahtinen, 25.04.0. Link).

When in selection mode, Dolphin now has a special keyboard navigation mode. You can read all about this feature in detail in the merge request description (Felix Ernst, 25.04.0. Link).

Kasts Podcast application

We fixed various usability issues and recent regressions (Bart De Vries, 25.04.0. Link 1, link 2, link 3, ...).

Kate Advanced text editor

We improved support for DAP (the generic protocol for debuggers) (Waqar Ahmed, 25.04.0 Link), and sped up KWrite's startup time by not loading a MIME database when just querying the icon for text/plain file. (Kai Uwe Broulik, 25.04.0. Link)

Kleopatra Certificate manager and cryptography app

We removed the Decrypt/Verify all files in folder menu item in the Dolphin context menu as it was never implemented (Tobias Fella, 25.04.0. Link).

Konqueror KDE File Manager & Web Browser

The Save As dialog now remembers where a file was last downloaded and will open that directory. Note that the last location is only remembered for the duration of the Konqueror window (Stefano Crocco, 25.04.0. Link).

Krita Digital Painting, Creative Freedom

We added a glyph palette to choose between alternates or variation of a given glyph, as well as a character map of a given font (Wolthera van Hövell, Link).

And implemented the edition of the CSS Font Variants in the text properties docker (Wolthera van Hövell, Link).

Krita now compiles with Qt6 on Windows (Dmitry Kazakov, Link).

We added a new extension "Mutator". This new extension provides a docker which adds brush variations through action-invoked settings randomization (Emmet O'Neill, Link). We also added global pen tilt direction offset which is helpful to make brushes feel the same for right- and left-handed users (Maciej Jesionowski. Link). Another brush related improvement is that their smoothness is now also affected by the speed (killy |0veufOrever, Link).

Kup Backup scheduler for KDE's Plasma desktop

We improved the link text in the KCM user interface (Robert Kratky - first contribution 🚀, 0.11.0. Link).

NeoChat Chat on Matrix

Long pressing has been disabled on non-touchscreen devices (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link), and we improved the usability of the account menu by giving it a proper button (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link).

Okular View and annotate documents

We have improved the error handling entering a bad passphrase for a digital signature (Sune Vuorela, 25.04.0. Link) and made the overprint preview setting a combobox that gives you the option to choose between "Always", "never" and "Automatic", which is similar to Acrobat Reader. The "Automatic" value depends on the value of HasVisibleOverprint in the PDF metadata (Kevin Ottens, 25.04.0. Link).

SystemDGenie

SystemDGenie was ported to a more "frameless" interface and the statusbar was removed (Thomas Duckworth. Link 1 and link 2).

SystemDGenie shows unloaded and inactive units by default (Thomas Duckworth. Link) and the startup time was sped up by fetching the list of sessions and units asynchronously (Carl Schwan. Link).

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.

For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.

Get Involved

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.

You can also help us by donating. Any monetary contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.

Edit 2025-03-17: applications for this position are closed.

KDE e.V., the non-profit organization supporting the KDE community, is looking for a contractor to improve KDE’s Plasma desktop environment in ways that support user acquisition through growth into new hardware and software markets. The Plasma software engineer will address defects and missing features that are barriers to these objectives. Please see the full job listing for more details about this opportunity. We are looking forward to your application.

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 of millions of people

Tags: tech, privacy, security

That’s a lot of stalkerware in the wild. And this exploit is only about two such apps. What’s wrong with people that they install this kind of crap on their loved ones smarphones?

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/20/stalkerware-apps-cocospy-spyic-exposing-phone-data-of-millions-of-people/

How to Backdoor Large Language Models

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, security

The security implications of using LLMs are real. With the high complexity and low explainability of such models it opens the door to hiding attacks in plain sight.

https://blog.sshh.io/p/how-to-backdoor-large-language-models

Groundbreaking BBC research shows issues with over half the answers from Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, reliability, research

Interesting research, looking forward to the follow ups to see how it evolves over time. For sure the number of issues is way to high still to make trustworthy systems around search and news.

https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2025/bbc-research-shows-issues-with-answers-from-artificial-intelligence-assistants

ChatGPT’s Political Views Are Shifting Right, a New Analysis Finds

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, politics

This might be accidental but this highlights the lack of transparency on how those models are produced. It also means we should get ready for future generation of such models to turn into very subtle propaganda machines. Indeed even if for now it’s accidental I doubt it’ll be the case much longer.

https://gizmodo.com/chatgpts-political-views-are-shifting-right-a-new-analysis-finds-2000562328

AI is Stifling Tech Adoption

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, programming, innovation

This is definitely a problem. It’s doomed to influence how tech are chosen on software projects.

https://vale.rocks/posts/ai-is-stifling-tech-adoption

Notes: AI Copilot Code Quality

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, productivity, maintenance

People really need to be careful about the short term productivity boost… If it kills maintainability in the process you’re trading that short term productivity for a crashing long term productivity.

https://kracekumar.com/post/ai_copilot_code_quality_paper/

Can I ethically use LLMs?

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, ethics

I like this paper, it’s well balanced. The conclusion says is all: if you’re not actively working on reducing the harms then you might be doing something unethical. It’s not just a toy to play with, you have to think about the impacts and actively reduce them.

https://ntietz.com/blog/can-i-ethically-use-llms/

exo: Run your own AI cluster at home with everyday devices 📱💻 🖥️⌚

Tags: tech, foss, ai, machine-learning, gpt

Early days but this looks like an interesting solution to democratize the inference of large models.

https://github.com/exo-explore/exo

Meshtastic

Tags: tech, networking, radio

This is definitely a fun and interesting project. Such decentralized mesh network are tempting to play with.

https://meshtastic.org/

The IPv6 transition | APNIC Blog

Tags: tech, networking, internet, ip

Very interesting paper on the IPv6 transition. It shows quite well the stagnation we’re in and provides good arguments about why it is so slow to transition.

https://blog.apnic.net/2024/10/22/the-ipv6-transition/

Taichi Lang: High-performance Parallel Programming in Python

Tags: tech, python, performance, gpu

Looks like an interesting DSL to write high performance Python code.

https://www.taichi-lang.org/

A year of uv: pros, cons, and should you migrate

Tags: tech, python

More feedback about uv use in the wild. This is getting really close to becoming the de facto solution for new projects.

https://www.bitecode.dev/p/a-year-of-uv-pros-cons-and-should

Programming with Math | The Lambda Calculus

Tags: tech, mathematics, logic, science

A neat little introduction to an important field in computer science. Lambda calculus is often too little known but it has very important ramifications in several fields.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViPNHMSUcog

Your company needs Junior devs

Tags: tech, teaching, learning

Definitely this. It’s important for an organization to create knowledge… and this requires both people willing to learn and to teach.

https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2024/09/07/your-team-needs-juniors

Don’t call yourself a senior until you’ve worked on a legacy project

Tags: tech, problem-solving, learning

I’m not sure I would phrase it like this but there’s quite some truth to it. It’s important to figure out what we take for granted and to open the black boxes. This is where one finds mastery.

https://www.infobip.com/developers/blog/seniors-working-on-a-legacy-project

Introducing Test-Last Development (TLD)

Tags: tech, tdd, satire

This is a good satire which shows well the excuses people use to not test first.

https://bitfieldconsulting.com/posts/test-last-development

Bye for now!

Fahrenheit, new releases and bugfixes

Welcome to a new issue of "This Week in KDE Apps"! Every week we cover as much as possible of what's happening in the world of KDE apps. This time again a bit delayed due to some personal travel.

Releases

• Kaidan 0.11.0 is out. This new version of KDE's XMPP client brings Qt6 support as well as a few new features.
• Tellico 4.1.1 is out with a few minor fixes.
• Amarok 3.2.2 is out with some minor bugfixes, and improvements for building Amarok on non-UNIX systems and without X11 support.

KDE Itinerary Digital travel assistant

Temperature displayed in Itinerary will now use Fahrenheit units when you set your home country to the USA. (Joshua Goins, 25.04.0. Link)

Kasts Podcast application

Improved the volume button to use an adaptive icon depending on the volume level. (Bart De Vries, 25.04.0. Link)

Kate Advanced text editor

Added a button to clear the debug output in the debug plugin. (Waqar Ahmed, 25.04.0. Link)

Added a button to switch between a normal diff (with only a few lines of context) and a full diff with all the context. (Leo Ruggeri, 25.04.0. Link)

KOrganizer KOrganizer is a calendar and scheduling application

Fixed showing the details of a recurrent event. (Allen Winter, 25.04.0. Link)

Konsole Use the command line interface

Fixed some freezing issues when starting Konsole and any applications using Konsole KPart like Kate. (Waqar Ahmed, 24.12.3. Link)

Merkuro Calendar Manage your tasks and events with speed and ease

Added an option to filter the tasks to only displays the ones due today. (Shubham Shinde, 25.04.0. Link)

SystemDGenie

Ported the editor to KTextEditor. (Thomas Duckworth. Link)

…And Everything Else

This blog only covers the tip of the iceberg! If you’re hungry for more, check out Nate's blog about Plasma and be sure not to miss his This Week in Plasma series, where every Saturday he covers all the work being put into KDE's Plasma desktop environment.

For a complete overview of what's going on, visit KDE's Planet, where you can find all KDE news unfiltered directly from our contributors.

Get Involved

The KDE organization has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we're going to need your support for KDE to become sustainable.

You can help KDE by becoming an active community member and getting involved. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer either. There are many things you can do: you can help hunt and confirm bugs, even maybe solve them; contribute designs for wallpapers, web pages, icons and app interfaces; translate messages and menu items into your own language; promote KDE in your local community; and a ton more things.

You can also help us by donating. Any monetarnky contribution, however small, will help us cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.

To get your application mentioned here, please ping us in invent or in Matrix.

The Amarok Development Squad is happy to announce the immediate availability of Amarok 3.2.2, the second bugfix release for Amarok 3.2 "Punkadiddle"!

3.2.2 features some minor bugfixes, and improvements for building Amarok on non-UNIX systems and without X11 support. Additionally, a 16-year-old feature request has been fulfilled. Concluding years of Qt5 porting and polishing work, Amarok 3.2.2 is likely to be the last version with Qt5/KF5 support, and it should provide a nice and stable music player experience for users on various systems and distributions. The development in git, on the other hand, will soon switch the default configuration to Qt6/KF6, and focus for the next 3.3 series will be to ensure that everything functions nicely with the new Qt version.

Changes since 3.2.1

FEATURES:

• Try to preserve collection browser order when adding tracks to playlist (BR 180404)

CHANGES:

• Allow building without X11 support
• Various build fixes for non-UNIX systems

BUGFIXES:

• Fix DAAP collection connections, browsing and playing (BR 498654)
• Fix first line of lyrics.ovh lyrics missing (BR 493882)

Getting Amarok

In addition to source code, Amarok is available for installation from many distributions' package repositories, which are likely to get updated to 3.2.2 soon, as well as the flatpak available on flathub.

Packager section

You can find the tarball package on download.kde.org and it has been signed with Tuomas Nurmi's GPG key.

About Me

I’m Rishav Ray Chaudhury, a third year Electrical Engineering undergrad from India. I have participated in Season of KDE this year. I am tasked with implementing a variant of the Mancala board game called Kalah under the guidance of João Gouveia and Benson Muite.

Why I chose this project

As with any aspiring developer, I too started out with game development. A couple of my friends and I started to make games using C# and the Unity framework in my first year of University. The feeling of making games that my friends enjoyed was exhilarating to say the least. This was also around the same time that I learned about open-source software. Apparently, a lot of software that developers frequently use, was developed by a group of passionate programmers. I tried contributing to some repos but was unsuccessful, mainly because I was completely unfamiliar with the projects. That all changed when I started using Arch Linux. For Arch, the desktop environment that I chose was KDE Plasma. After using it for some time, I came to know about Season of KDE and finally took the initiative to start contributing to software that I frequently used. Of the projects, the game development project was the one that caught my eye and now here I am developing a game for it.

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-07.

Wikipedia Prepares for ‘Increase in Threats’ to US Editors From Musk and His Allies

Tags: tech, wikipedia, knowledge, politics, privacy

Some powerful bullies want to make the life of editors impossible. Looks like the foundation has the right tools in store to protect those contributors.

https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-prepares-for-increase-in-threats-to-us-editors-from-musk-and-his-allies/

The Future Is Too Easy

Tags: tech, business, marketing, criticism

Alright, this piece is full of vitriol… And I like it. The CES has clearly become a mirror of the absurdities our industry is going through. The vision proposed by a good chunk of the companies is not appealing and lazy.

https://defector.com/the-future-is-too-easy?ref=DenseDiscovery-325

Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared”

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, ux, cognition, research

This is clearly pointing in the direction of UX challenges around LLM uses. For some tasks the user’s critical thinking must be fostered otherwise bad decisions will ensue.

https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human-cognition-atrophied-and-unprepared-3/

Poisoning for propaganda: rising authoritarianism makes LLMs more dangerous

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, politics, criticism

Of course it would be less of a problem if explainability was better with such models. It’s not the case though, so it means they can spew very subtle propaganda. This is bound to become even more of a political power tool.

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/poisoning-for-propaganda/

The skill of the future is not ‘AI’, but ‘Focus’

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, programming, focus, learning, criticism

This is an interesting way to frame the problem. We can’t rely too much on LLMs for computer science problems without loosing important skills and hindering learning. This is to be kept in mind.

https://www.carette.xyz/posts/focus_will_be_the_skill_of_the_future/

How does a Linux machine connect to the internet, really?

Tags: tech, linux, networking

Due to NetworkManager you forgot how to setup an interface and the networking stack manually? Here is a good summary of the important steps.

https://pjg1.site/linux-internet-from-scratch

You Should Use /tmp/ More

Tags: tech, habits

Surprising idea… I guess I’ll mull this one over and maybe try. This is not a small change of habit though.

https://atthis.link/blog/2025/58671.html

Thread-safe memory copy – Daniel Lemire’s blog

Tags: tech, memory, multithreading

What do you want? Speed or safety? Ultimately you’ll have to choose one.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/02/07/thread-safe-memory-copy/

Refined: simple refinement types for Rust

Tags: tech, type-systems, rust

A good example of what can be done when you have a rich type system.

https://jordankaye.dev/posts/refined/

How Does Ada’s Memory Safety Compare Against Rust?

Tags: tech, system, rust, ada, memory

Interesting comparison. Ada doesn’t fare as good as I’d have expected as soon as pointers are in the mix… but there is a twist, you can go a very long way without pointers in Ada.

https://ajxs.me/blog/How_Does_Adas_Memory_Safety_Compare_Against_Rust.html

About GPU Conditionals

Tags: tech, gpu, 3d, shader, optimization

This is indeed something easy to get wrong. Also this misconception is very widespread, so it’s good to debunk it.

https://iquilezles.org/articles/gpuconditionals/

Reassessing Wayland

Tags: tech, linux, wayland

This is obviously all good news on the Wayland front. Took time to get there, got lots of justified (and even more unjustified) complaints, but now things are looking bright.

https://dudemanguy.github.io/blog/posts/2025-02-03-wayland-xorg-2/wayland-xorg-2.html

Operational and Denotational Strategies for Understanding Code

Tags: tech, programming, teaching

A good reminder that you should always bring several perspectives when teaching something. This a a simple framework which can be used widely in our field.

https://noelwelsh.com/posts/operational-denotational-understanding/

Less-Than Estimation

Tags: tech, estimates

Nice and tiny estimation approach. I can see projects where this could work.

https://chrisdone.com/posts/less-than-estimation/

Managing Your Time as a Middle Manager

Tags: management, time

A couple of interesting ideas. This fluid focus concept definitely require communication around it when applied.

https://newsletter.canopy.is/p/managing-your-time-as-a-middle-manager

Bye for now!