So while everyone was patching their php installations and adjusting the certificate stores, what other naughtiness has gone unnoticed?!

My small business runs almost exclusively on FOSS, and I started to keep track of donations, but it was a piecemeal, hard to keep up, approach:

https://decoded.legal/foss/

# Funding Free / open source software: what can I, personally, do differently?

Almost five years on, and I don't think that much has changed.

I wish that there was an easier way of funding Free software.

https://neilzone.co.uk/2021/12/funding-free-open-source-software-what-can-i-personally-do-differently/

#FOSS #Linux

@neil Philips One Sonicare. Port in the handle under a waterproof seal.

# The Intimate Image Reports (Trusted Flagger) Regulations 2026

> South West Grid for Learning Trust is designated as suitable to make intimate image reports to providers of internet services and providers of internet access services for the purpose specified in paragraph 1(1) of Schedule 14 to the Crime and Policing Act 2026.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2026/1107/contents/made

@neil I use an Icy Bear. https://icybeardental.com/products/next-generation-sonic-toothbrush - works well, no proprietary charging stand, you just flip open the cap at the bottom to expose the socket - but it hardly ever needs charged.

Can anyone recommend, please, from your own direct personal experience, an electric toothbrush which charges (directly - i.e.a port on the toothbrush) via USB-C?

Link me happy, if you've got one that you like!

A slight (well, significant) annoyance with Thunderbird, is that the calendar functionality is not handling all .ics files correctly, meaning that some events are not on the correct day. This tends to happen for repeating events, where one of the repetitions is rescheduled.

khal handles it fine, but I tend(ed) to rely on Thunderbird.

Hmm...

The BBC being absolutely on the button. Their Cyber correspondent had never even heard of php before? Really??? 🤦‍♀️

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/ckgel5xp2xv9t

#php

What do ducks eat with their nachos?

Quackamole!

🦆🥑

I self-hosted Jitsi for years, and it was great.

But, a few months ago, I decided that I just wasn't using it enough to justify retaining it. So I switched to offering Signal instead.

I meant to look at other, light touch, in-browser, FOSS options, but I haven't got round to it yet.

# Changes coming to meet.jit.si

I had missed this announcement:

> Starting today, meetings on meet.jit.si are limited to 95 minutes.

> More changes are coming, stay tuned!

https://jitsi.org/blog/changes-coming/

It is a sad thing, but my oss and external websites have essentially been made private or projects disbanded.

Between the UK online safety act, AI scrapers, AI "contributions", various critical vulnerabilities... I've just concluded that running small things in the open just isn't worth the time, and ceased to be fun a while ago. Especially if I'm the primary user and just wanted to share.

I did pass a few things on to others, such as the Go HTML sanitizer, a large community platform, and a couple of other things... But if it wasn't large, it disappeared over the last year.

Yesterday I discovered a few old WordPress sites dating back a decade... It's not worth doing the work to keep them online.

And also yesterday when I installed a couple of new tools... Those became accessible via TailScale only.

The web really got screwed huh.

Yesterday, as I sat here, using a laptop running on Free software written and maintained by volunteers, to connect, by means of a secure tunnel formed by Free software written and maintained by volunteers, to multiple servers, all running Free software written and maintained by volunteers, to apply patches prepared urgently by volunteers to resolve security vulnerabilities, I felt *incredibly* grateful for every single one of those volunteers, who makes the fact that I could do *any* of this possible.

Thank you, genuinely.

#FOSS #FreeSoftware #Linux

My OPNSense firewall just got the PHP update. Sounds like pfSense got it earlier today.

If you have a firewall, you should probably take the update. Even if you don't serve the interface over the wider network, you shouldn't sleep on it- you probably can't vouch for every device on your network.

I joined a French language chatroom.

I was not expecting all those cats.

I've seen a couple of "the fediverse is only used by nerds, so it won't survive - it needs the cool kids to arrive" hot takes recently.

I'm not sure the basic principle - that it is only used by nerds today - is correct anyway.

And even if it were, a small group of nerds is more than enough to keep a service running for themselves and their friends. The fediverse has already "survived" for years.

And who says nerds aren't the "cool kids" anyway?! Being nerdy is pretty cool, IMHO.

I am about to launch a new, super-secure FFA: four factor authentication.

There is only one factor, and it is 4.

The Law Society (of England and Wales) has published a new practice note, "Using artificial intelligence in legal practice".

I have not read it yet, and I wasn't involved in writing it.

(If I am your lawyer, note that I don't use genAI in my work for you.)

https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/topics/ai-and-lawtech/using-artificial-intelligence-in-legal-practice

Neil: works very hard on his cybersecurity, and still worries a lot.

Also:

> The attack exploited a test account, known as ‘Test2’, that had existed for more than 12 years and had either remained active since it was created or been inadvertently reactivated before the incident. It was found that throughout this period, the ‘Test2’ account was protected by the password ‘Password1’, which, when checked against a third-party password strength tool, was classified as ‘very weak’ and could be compromised in less than a second.

https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs/2026/10/password1-is-not-an-appropriate-password/