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08 Nov 2026 2:49pm GMT

Zabbix 8.0 LTS adds OpenTelemetry observability, ClickHouse storage, AI integration, and advanced event processing.

08 Nov 2026 12:35pm GMT

"Aaron Swartz would have turned forty this year," writes FSF deputy director Sean O'Brien. "November 8 is Aaron Swartz Day, when we remember a pioneer of free software and information sharing whose contributions helped shape the modern internet." The Internet Archive will host a hackathon Sunday in San Francisco celebrating Aaron's Swartz's life "and the projects he worked on, many of which are still going strong today," including SecureDrop, OpenLibrary, and Creative Commons. "We are also spreading the word about projects he inspired," including OnionPress and the EFF's Atlas of Surveillancedocumenting police tech use through open source research, now a collaborative effort with volunteers, the University of Nevada, Reno, and the Reynolds School of Journalism. The event is also supported by Free Law Project, and organizers are asking attendees to "bring a color print out of your favorite photos of Aaron for a huge collaborative collage." From the Internet Archive's blog: Aaron was also a co-founder of Creative Commons, where he worked with Lisa Rein developing the RSS-enhanced HTML code that sits behind Creative Commons licenses, much of which is still in use today. The "Quantifying the Commons" project was designed to help measure open-licensed and public-domain works worldwide, and is one of the projects participants can work on. Aaron loved Tor and created tools such as "Tor2web" (with Virgil Griffith) to help more people publish Tor-accessible websites. Onion Press is a Tor-based publishing system designed for decentralized, censorship-resistant publishing, and participants can work on the code base... We also encourage you to have a hackathon in your own town using our materials - or materials of your own. Please let us know if you plan to do this (although it's not required!). If you do let us know, we can include you on our website and help you spread the word about your event. So far, there is an event in Portland sponsored by Portland Civic Lab where they will be screening The Internet's Own Boy and celebrating Aaron's life. "EFF was proud to call Aaron a friend and ally," the digital rights organization posted this week. And the FSF's deputy director writes "It is particularly striking that some of the world's largest companies now rely on technology Swartz helped to develop." One of Swartz's most important technical contributions was his collaboration with John Gruber on Markdown, the simple text formatting system introduced in 2004. Markdown allows users to create structured documents using ordinary text, without requiring proprietary software. More than twenty years later, Markdown has become one of the most popular formats for documentation and publishing, and is widely used in community websites such as forums and wikis. This is not a minor contribution. Companies developing LLMs use Markdown extensively in their products and development tools. OpenAI, for example, recommends Markdown for organizing instructions and communicating structure to its ChatGPT models... Swartz also developed web.py, a public domain framework for building Python applications, and contributed to RSS 1.0, a public internet standard for distributing news and other information between websites. Swartz developed web.py while rewriting the software running Reddit after Reddit acquired Swartz's company Infogami. Reddit recently licensed its content to AI companies, and the FSF's deputy director notes "the enormous scale of the alleged 'piracy' by giant technology corporations" while Aaron himself had "faced criminal prosecution for downloading academic research that he wanted to distribute with no monetary gain." In 2011, federal prosecutors charged Swartz with computer fraud and related offenses after he downloaded millions of academic articles from the JSTOR collection through MIT's university network... Although he was not charged with copyright infringement, he faced aggressive federal prosecution and the possibility of decades in prison before he tragically died by suicide in January 2013, at just twenty-six years old... Swartz helped build tools that made the internet more useful and accessible, and his contributions continue to shape a world he never lived to see. On Aaron Swartz Day, we should remember his achievements and the access-to-knowledge principles that guided them. The companies benefiting from his legacy should respect those same principles by giving users true freedom and control, rather than imposing more restrictions on us all.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Nov 2026 12:34pm GMT

Tuning in to electronic noise can tell us whether electrons have paired up or not.

08 Nov 2026 12:15pm GMT

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08 Nov 2026 11:23am GMT

aerynOS improves Moss command handling, updates Git-based package versioning, and ships Linux 7.2.15 alongside KDE and NVIDIA fixes.

08 Nov 2026 11:01am GMT

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08 Nov 2026 10:56am GMT

Saturday NASA officials announced it's accepting applications for a new astronaut class, reports the Associated Press: With only 32 active astronauts, the space agency needs more recruits as it looks to expand humanity's presence beyond low-Earth orbit as quickly as possible... "We have far more work than we have astronauts," Artemis III commander Randy Bresnik told The Associated Press on Saturday. Aspiring astronauts have between now and Dec. 3 to submit their applications... [They'll begin their training by early 2028]. By then "we're going to have people on the moon - so don't delay," Bresnik urged potential candidates. Bresnik and his three crewmates will blast into orbit next summer to practice docking their capsule with a pair of lunar landers, one built by Elon Musk's SpaceX and the other by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. Their mission will stick close to Earth - no lunar flyby - and serve as a dress rehearsal for the following year's Artemis IV mission that will attempt to land two astronauts near the lunar south pole. The moon base will materialize as more rovers, robots, structures and power grids are launched. The article notes NASA's last call for new astronauts was two years ago, and "More than 8,000 applied, with 10 making the final cut in September 2025."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Nov 2026 8:03am GMT

Slashdot reader sandbagger brings news about the classic science ficdtion magazine Starlog. It's 33-year run from 1976 to 2009 is now available on the Internet Archive. And 17 years after publishing its final issue, Starlog is relaunching, publishing one issue a year starting November 13, according to The Hollywood Reporter: The magazine launched in 1976 and gained a fanbase for being one of the few places to get reliable news and interviews about geek culture. It launched with a cover focusing on Star Trek, one of its key areas of expertise, but the magazine's editors and writers also pioneered coverage of Star Wars. (The new issue chronicles some of the rumors it put out a year before the movie opened). In all, Starlog published 374 issues and more than 25,000 pages... In addition to the film and TV-focused features Starlog was known for, the new Starlog will also delve into futurism, as the cover from Gabriel Yeganyan highlights. The opening story of issue No. 1 looks at the viability of humans farming crops on planets outside of Earth, for example... The revival was announced earlier this year, and includes a podcast hosted by Jordan Hoffman, a veteran journalist who has contributed to The Hollywood Reporter.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

08 Nov 2026 4:03am GMT

systemd developers explain why Rust is welcome in standalone components but cannot yet be used in core shared libraries.

07 Nov 2026 8:42pm GMT

Genes and archaeology are revealing how Bantu speakers spread across much of Africa.

07 Nov 2026 12:15pm GMT

Soldier told repeatedly to lock down devices before deploying, got sextorted, court-martialed.

07 Nov 2026 11:00am GMT