Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

The Association for Computing Machinery has made their entire publishing library open-access!

Sat, 07 Feb 2026 20:40:41 GMT

This is a really great thing! The ACM is one of the premier organizations for computer science, and for them to open up their publication library to open access is an incredibly huge deal.

In their statement released in mid-December, they announced:
We are pleased to share an important milestone for our field. Beginning January 2026, all ACM publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will be made open access. This change reflects the long-standing and growing call across the global computing community for research to be more accessible, more discoverable, and more reusable.

By transitioning to open access, ACM is supporting a publishing environment where:

Authors retain the intellectual property to their Work- All ACM authors retain the copyright to their published work while ACM remains committed to defending those Works against copyright and integrity related violations.
Published Work Will Benefit from Broader visibility and impact- Research will be freely available to anyone in the world, increasing readership, citations, and real-world application.
Students, educators, and researchers everywhere benefit- Whether at well-resourced institutions or in emerging research communities, everyone will have direct access to the full breadth of ACM-published work.
Innovation accelerates- Open access fosters collaboration, transparency, and cumulative progress, strengthening the advancement of computing as a discipline.

The world of research publication is tending towards increased lockdown and paywalls, plus corruption by AI slop. The ACM is fighting that by opening their doors and ensuring their authors maintain control of their IP. This is an incredibly cool thing!

There's a cool library tool that we use occasionally called Hathi Trust. They archive old material and they're a great reference place to find stuff. I was looking to borrow a book for one of our instructors, and Hathi had it online! You can download it! ONE PAGE AT A TIME. The book is 90 years old, in the public domain, and I can't find a free copy of it. So I literally started downloading it. One page at a time. I have the free time at work.

It costs $6,000 a year to become a member of Hathi. A YEAR. You have to be a pretty good-sized library to pay that, or have special needs to justify that outlay.

Fortunately my story has two happy endings. I was able to find a physical copy of the book, the United States Department of the Interior Library sent me a copy! But there's an even better ending. I was looking for something in our archive, sitting in the corner, pulling stuff down and buzzing through boxes. I happened to glance down and saw a three-ring binder in an area that I knew didn't contain what I was looking for. but the label on the binder caught my eye.

It was the same name as the book that the instructor had requested!

I pull the binder, and it was a facsimile of the book! So now I'll be able to scan the pages that I hadn't yet downloaded and assemble my own ebook! I had already assembled two sections of what I'd downloaded into ebooks: PDFs combined make HUGE ebooks!

Weirdest luck I've had in a long time. And no, it was not cataloged in our system.

https://dl.acm.org/openaccess

https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/12/19/168225/acm-to-make-its-entire-digital-library-open-access-starting-january-2026

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GitHub announces charging you for running it on your own hardware, then walks it back

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 17:55:43 GMT

GitHub is software mainly intended for programmers and developers as a software repository. Very useful stuff, very widely-used. And now about to get a lot more expensive for large teams.

Microsoft bought GitHub a few years back, and a month ago, announced that it would start charging people who ran it on their own hardware $0.002 per minute charge for "self-hosted runners executing jobs on private GitHub repositories. At the same time, GitHub noted in a Tuesday blog post that it's lowering the prices of GitHub-hosted runners beginning January 1, under a scheme it calls "simpler pricing and a better experience for GitHub Actions." Self-hosted runner usage on public repositories will remain free, we note." This was to go into effect in March.

One person contacted noted that they had run the numbers and it would cost them $3,500 a month on top of their normal monthly fee for using GitHub.

There was a large hue and cry, and pretty much the same day Microsoft announced that they were rescinding the charge.

HOWEVER, as The Register article points out about the later MS announcement, "We note that GitHub didn’t say it won’t ever go forward with charging for self-hosted runners, only that it’s postponing the change. As one commenter on the community thread pointed out, that means charging for self-hosted runners may be a foregone conclusion."

The Slashdot article lists many completely free, open-source alternatives to GitHub and I expect people are making migration plans as we speak.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/17/github_charge_dev_own_hardware/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/12/17/2042247/github-is-going-to-start-charging-you-for-using-your-own-hardware

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Microsoft releases the source code for Zork I, II, III

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 17:56:32 GMT

There are several things interesting about Zork. It was one of the earliest imagination games that didn't have set winning conditions, instead you explored and tried to figure things out. It also was perhaps the first multi-platform games. They developed the Z-Machine, sort of a virtual environment that allowed the game to run on IBM Dos machines, Apple IIs, and others. That was extraordinarily revolutionary for the time!

And now you can download the source code for free. You can also download Z-Machine implementations for free. There's also CRT emulators that you can download if you really want to go 1980s old school!

And if you don't want to bother with all that, you can buy the game at Good Old Games for $6, but it's Windows-only.

One thing that I'm kind of curious about, though: when did Microsoft acquire the rights to Infocom IP? I don't recall that. While this is a cool thing for Microsoft to do, the source code for Zork and pretty much all the other Infocom games has been available for a few years, I downloaded them ages ago.

https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11/20/preserving-code-that-shaped-generations-zork-i-ii-and-iii-go-open-source

https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/11/20/1942250/microsoft-open-sources-classic-text-adventure-zork-trilogy

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Major flaw found in RSA SSH where crypto keys can be recovered!

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 21:35:14 GMT

This is starting out with a warning: this article is really, REALLY deep computer security stuff, DO NOT dig into it if you don't have a minimal understanding of network encryption, SSH, RSA, etcetera! YOU WILL BE LOST!

RSA is a pretty much a deprecated encryption technique. While it was good in its day, it's somewhat broken and has been superseded by better methodologies, both because technology moves ever onward and because it's broken. Apparently it's mainly in use in old systems where companies haven't bothered to replace it: 'If it ain't broke, leave it alone', and just haven't budgeted the funds and time to get it done.

People who try to break computer security have found an interesting way to break RSA even worse. They monitor and sit and wait. The first thing that happens when establishing an SSH connection (and other secure types of connections) is a handshake - the computers send a few packets back and forth, exchange keys (encryption certificates), and get to know each other (proverbially). This handshake process is supposed to be encrypted and secured and not easily spied upon. Except sometimes it isn't.

Computers make mistakes. Sometimes the process that encrypts the handshake fails, it can be a memory bit failure, and this can reveal part of one of the private keys that provides the encryption to the handshake. These keys are generated by multiplying very large prime numbers. If you recover one of the keys, you can then recover the other key by dividing by great whomping big prime numbers. Once you break that, you have access to the certificates that created the secure connection and you can now sit in the middle and impersonate all traffic of either host.

This is what people in computer security call BAD.

OpenSSH applied fixes to try to prevent it, but some major vendors, including Cisco, roll their own code and had some pretty bad vulnerabilities to this problem. They might have fixed it, but when you're running closed-source software (where you've written your own code), rather than relying on an open software where there are tons of eyes looking for problems and testing, it's often weaker than the open source version such as OpenSSH.

Interesting times.

No real solid information as to whether or not this has been exploited in the wild as it's really hard to detect interception attacks like this.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/11/hackers-can-steal-ssh-cryptographic-keys-in-new-cutting-edge-attack/

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Appeals court upholds free public access to laws and regulations

Sun, 29 Oct 2023 17:20:52 GMT

This is a VERY important case! A guy founded a website, public.resource.org, and began posting public laws, rules, and regulations that were passed and codified. Things like electrical regulations, etc.

Naturally he got sued by trade organizations that published these rules and made lots of bucks! Can't have people giving away our bread and butter!

Last month an appeals court confirmed an appeal of a 2022 decision upholding the site's right to publish this information.

From the EFF post: "As part of its mission of promoting public access to all kinds of government information, Public Resource acquires and posts online a wide variety of public documents, such as nonprofits’ tax returns, government-produced videos, and standards incorporated into law by reference. These standards include electrical, fire safety, and consumer safety codes that have been mandated by governments. But without Public Resource’s work, they are often difficult to access, much less share with others, which means that areas of law that profoundly affect our daily life are obscured from our view. Even courts have had trouble accessing the laws that they are supposed to apply.

The American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), National Fire Protection Association Inc. (NFPA), and American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) are organizations that develop private sector codes and standards aimed at advancing public safety, ensuring compatibility across products and services, facilitating training, and spurring innovation.

ASTM, NFPA, and ASHRAE sued Public Resource in 2013 for copyright and trademark infringement and unfair competition."

It's nice to know that we do sometimes get our tax dollars worth, though sometimes it takes quite the fight for it to happen.

I might be able to use this as a source at my library. I've had requests for legal citations, and we don't have the material. THIS might have it! Definitely worth looking in to. And some of those nonprofit tax returns could also be interesting reading.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/appeals-court-upholds-publicresourceorgs-right-post-public-laws-and-regulations

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/09/17/1647253/public-resource-wins-2012-case-judge-rules-posting-regulations-online-is-fair-use

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For my programmer friends: a new mono-spaced font, completely free from Intel

Sat, 10 Jun 2023 17:18:43 GMT

It's called Intel One Mono, and at my first glance, it's pretty decent, though I'm not too sure that I care for the lower case L. They have an extremely unrestrictive license for it, and lots of instructions on how to download it from Github and incorporate it into most major editors.

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2023/06/intel-one-mono-font

https://github.com/intel/intel-one-mono

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/23/06/10/030224/intel-open-sources-new-one-mono-font-for-programmers

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New Hampster, sorry, New Hampshire, will use open source voting software next week!

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 16:41:15 GMT

Specifically, three towns will, and will hand-tally election results along side the open source software in verification. Should be interesting. Anyone who wants to challenge the result is welcome to hire a software expert to analyze the code and try to find problems that could be interpreted as vote flipping.

Now, this is not an electronic voting machine, this is a vote scanner or tabulator. People up there use paper ballots, which I think is the safe way to vote.

Pretty cool, IMO.

https://therecord.media/new-hampshire-set-to-pilot-voting-machines-that-use-software-everyone-can-see/

https://politics.slashdot.org/story/22/11/03/2155238/new-hampshire-set-to-pilot-voting-machines-that-use-open-source-software#comments

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An interesting computer security project: Dice Keys

Sat, 22 Aug 2020 18:39:23 GMT

The purpose is to generate encryption keys with a high level of entropy. Specifically, it's a kit of 25 dice that get locked in to a 5x5 grid. For each die, the die is individually numbered, each face is individually numbered, and the rotation is individually numbered! Because of this, the entropy possible is 2^196, or 124,127,134,662,179,891,202,329,100,571,859,806,502,566,406,865,813,504,000,000! That's a bloody huge number!

Here's what it looks like after you shake the dice in the provided bag, roll them into the provided plastic cage and lock them down:

After you roll the dice and lock it down, you use a smartphone app to capture the dice and an app generates the key, which you can use within your phone or copy into a USB key. The best thing is that the software that generates the key is open source, so if the company disappears, as long as you still have your dice or a picture of it, you can still regenerate your key! And the case design is such that if you drop it (or a toddler accident), it won't accidentally pop open and spill the dice all over the place.

Bruce Schneier, noted encryption expert, is a consultant on the project.

I ordered two of them, I think they're pretty cool. And at $25 for the basic kit, they're not too expensive. Honestly, I don't know if I'll ever use it, but the potential utility is quite good. And since they've already built 900 kits and sent them to the fulfillment center, there's zero chance that the project will not succeed.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/dicekeys/dicekeys

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And now on Github: source code for Infocom games!

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 20:32:50 GMT

Zork. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Planetfall. A Mind Forever Wandering. Leather Goddess of Phobos. Sorcerer. Deadline. All the source code is there, as is a link to a manual that explains how the Lisp-like Zork Implementation Language, ZIL, works (scroll down to download it in PDF, epub, Kindle, and other formats). There's interpreters for all of the major operating systems available, apparently ZIL is very popular in the interactive fiction community.

Activision still holds the rights, and technically this could all disappear in the blink of an eye, but the code is so ancient that it might just stay up. It should prove to be quite an interesting study in natural language parsers.

There's a total of 54 repositories, it took me about 25 minutes to download all the zips and it's a total of about 167 meg when all is said and done.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/04/you-can-now-download-the-source-code-for-all-infocom-text-adventure-classics/

Just to add to stuff that you might want to download, Archive.org has a thing called the Infocom Cabinet, containing stunning collections of documents scanned from Infocom documenting behind the scenes stuff from Infocom projects. For example, the tome, and there's no better word for tome as it's near 600 pages long! on Hitchhikers - is just on Hitchhikers! There's similar for Zork, Leather Goddess, Mind Forever Wandering, two for Planetfall, etc! 28 entries in all. This is going to be an amazing partial biography and behind the scenes of Infocom! It's a somewhat bigger download: 28 files which, in epubs, is 1.4 gig!

Back to downloading, I guess....

https://archive.org/details/infocomcabinet

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The city government of Barcelona is switching to open source and Ubuntu!

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 14:45:31 GMT

I think they have a good plan and have an excellent chance of success. Several years ago Munich tried to switch to Linux, and last year they switched back to Windows. They tried an everything in one shot approach, which I think is doomed from the get go. Barcelona is starting with replacing their Exchange servers with Open-XChange, Internet Explorer with Firefox, and Office with LibreOffice. Then they'll continue from there, eventually replacing the underlying Windows OS with Ubuntu after all of the apps are open source. I'm not sure when they'll be replacing their data center servers with Linux, it's not mentioned in the Europa.eu article.

Apparently this is part of a new European campaign called Public Money, Public Code, of which Barcelona is the first country to attempt such a conversion. It certainly won't be easy being the first, but they'll be able to provide LOTS of information to other municipalities who go down this path later.

https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/news/public-money-public-code

https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/01/15/0415219/city-of-barcelona-dumps-windows-for-linux-and-open-source-software

https://publiccode.eu/

There's a good comment on the Slashdot story:

"Most IT shops do not know the answer to three questions
1) How much (all up, everything) do we pay microsoft in licence fees per year
2) How much do we pay other vendors for licence fees
3) Over 3 years how much have we paid for software- all up, including lawyers, audits, and licence management packages, and administrators who add nothing to the bottom line ensuring 'compliance'"

This can be a compelling reason to go open source like this.

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