“I thought FOSS was about technology, not identity” says a FOSSbro.

Well, Linus, if it was really about technology, every conference would have 51% women attendees and speakers, and a lot more gender minorities, and at least the current percentage of people from families that immigrated from global majority countries.

European tech conferences are very pale and male. If identity has nothing to do with this, and every human has an equal potential to be a computer enthusiast, how did this happen?

Maybe diversity isn’t the dominant “identity politics” in FOSS after all.

@dentangle @rakoo @jzb There's been an online event Fluconf a couple of times, around the same time as FOSDEM, but unlikely to happen next year, I think. I talked there once and it was nice. But more freeform chats sounds more interesting to me right now. Organizing a conference is a lot of work, as is traveling to one or giving a proper talk.

https://fluconf.online/

cc @ansuz

Before everyone decides this is all #PHP's fault and they should switch to some other backend... ALL SOFTWARE IS VULNERABLE and #GenAI is making this far worse.

Look for projects that are sticking with human code rather than deskilling for some meaningless LoC benchmark, and digging themselves into a hole that every user of their project is being pulled into.

#NoAI

you know it's a bad day in IT when @rysiek gets quoted in the Guardian

📣 Announcing the immediate availability of:

- PHP 8.2.35
- PHP 8.3.36
- PHP 8.4.27
- PHP 8.5.12

‼️ These address the following critical security issues:

- Remote Code Execution via Out of Memory corruption (CVE-2026-109618)
- Remote Code Execution via Stale Global State (CVE-2026-109619)

📝 https://www.php.net/ChangeLog-8.php
🎁 https://www.php.net/downloads?source=Y
:windows8: Windows: https://www.php.net/downloads.php?os=windows

Read more: https://www.php.net/archive/2026.php#2026-10-21-5

#PHP #Release #Security #CVE

Gentoo has the new PHP out (8.3.36 in the regular configuration but 8.4.27 and 8.5.12 for users who track testing.

https://packages.gentoo.org/packages/dev-lang/php

@alex

TPUK tried to shut down a drag queen story hour and so a bunch of queers showed up to try to keep it open.

Turnout of patrons was low and TPUK showed up late to intimidate people on the way out. To be clear, the people they showed up to intimidate were mums with prams.

But like, their leader had a megaphone and was laughing about an antifa person who had been neaten up or been in "an accident" or something, which was definitely a violent threat.

Anyway, fun times. Horrible thugs.

Today is the most "Captain, it's Wednesday" it has been for me in a long time.

The United States government declared the Italian anti-fascist collective to be 'terrorist'.

Autistic/Inventati provides digital services to different activist collectives, including queer rights, feminism, abortion rights and anti-militarism.

The US sent out a request for mutual legal assistance (MLA)
to the Dutch government.

The Dutch police seized the server which had Autistici's data
and is going to send this data to the US.

Data of queer rights organisations is at risk of being handed over to the US,
where a regime that is hostile to the queer community is in power.

https://action.allout.org/en/m/833e5223/

Honestly, not only should they avoid any platform like Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, they should make an effort to host everything offshore. Even if they host their own Mastodon instance, they're still vulnerable if they're using GoDaddy or Azure or GCP. Any US based service leaves you vulnerable.

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/10/20/accident-or-not-the-no-kings-takedown-is-why-you-shouldnt-rent-your-megaphone-from-zuck/

Society is at a crisis point. Democratically, economically, and ecologically, many of the systems we rely on are breaking down. To seriously address the issues requires that we set aside trying to deal with symptoms one at a time and finally reconcile with the underlying causes of capitalism, authoritarianism, and structured hierarchy.

It looks like Debian stable security just got it as well, but it hasn't trickled out to other repos as far as I can tell.

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/php8.4

The PSF is hiring a CPython Developer in Residence! Full-time, remote, $70K–170K (US) or comparable contractor rates abroad. Help keep Python’s core healthy and support the volunteers who maintain it. Apply by Nov 19:
https://pythonsoftwarefoundation.applytojob.com/apply/or9un7DlwI/CPython-Developer-In-Residence

#Python

The fact that the information architecture was not designed to:
a) remove identifying information from the body of the tip, and
b) store identity as a separate database with locked down...

That's deep, deep negligence in program design.

"[The hackers] added that the security measures of P3, which was storing Crime Stoppers' tips, were "terrible" and that the platform is still vulnerable."

It's really saying something when the hackers are more responsible than the vendor. They have not yet leaked the contents of the hack except to journalists.

Oh look, the cops leaked the full details of every single crime stoppers tip they got last year, including personal information on the tipster.

Edit: Not just last year, in the full 25 years they've been running this program!

https://www.cbc.ca/news/investigates/canadian-crime-stoppers-tips-leaked-hack-investigation-9.7388820

Of course it's an external vendor. What could go wrong with outsourcing systems like this?

People are going to die because of this criminal negligence.

#cdnpoli

Strongbad voice: "The system is down! do doop do doodle doop. The system is down do doop do doodle doop"

#NIST #PHP

Last year @jzb wrote this article about FOSDEM and the lack of transparency in it's processes, in the wake of the Jack Dorsey Keynote that was replaced.

It's a good overview of the conference and also covers some of the difficulties for folks attending.

https://lwn.net/Articles/1006351/

Many conferences aren't transparent, but I'd argue that the volunteers, Dev rooms and attendees put so much of their time into making this conference.

* Hubris, thinking licenses or (phantom) community size is enough to make software ethical.

Perhaps the most difficult aspect of getting into software freedom is learning how to look past the fossbros. Knowing to avoid the forums. The people actually doing the work tend to be less toxic than the peanut gallery.

I am grateful to the fediverse for helping me with this!

2/2

I've seen other terms, but I use the label "fossbro" to refer to a set of toxic attitudes which through their vocalness defines the software freedom movement to those outside it.

Comprising:
* Ableism, thinking everyone should have the skills & desire to modify their software.
* Entitlement, thinking they're the entirety of the community a FOSS project may wish to serve. Harassing you if you e.g. reduce the visibility of configuration options.

1/2

@btel @Gina @_elena Our goal was to deliver talks inspiring everyone who feels underrepresented in #FOSS to take up space. We wanted to create a positive and inclusive track, with lots of humor, and with moments to reflect on how we can all become better allies. We wanted to discuss community, leadership, and representation in the #FOSS ecosystem. Of course we wanted to reflect on how to make future #FOSDEM events more diverse and welcoming for all. #dei