When the Free Software movement started in the 1980s, most of the world had just made a transition from free university-written software to non-free, proprietary, company-written software. Because of that, the initial ethical standpoint of the Free Software foundation was that it's fine to run a non-free operating system, as long as all the software you run on that operating system is free.

Initially this was just the editor.

But as time went on, and the FSF managed to write more and more parts of the software stack, their ethical stance moved with the times. This was a, very reasonable, pragmatic stance: if you don't accept using a non-free operating system and there isn't a free operating system yet, then obviously you can't write that free operating system, and the world won't move towards a point where free operating systems exist.

In the early 1990s, when Linus initiated the Linux kernel, the situation reached the point where the original dream of a fully free software stack was complete.

Or so it would appear.

Because, in fact, this was not the case. Computers are physical objects, composed of bits of technology that we refer to as "hardware", but in order for these bits of technology to communicate with other bits of technology in the same computer system, they need to interface with each other, usually using some form of bus protocol. These bus protocols can get very complicated, which means that a bit of software is required in order to make all the bits communicate with each other properly. Generally, this software is referred to as "firmware", but don't let that name deceive you; it's really just a bit of low-level software that is very specific to one piece of hardware. Sometimes it's written in an imperative high-level language; sometimes it's just a set of very simple initialization vectors. But whatever the case might be, it's always a bit of software.

And although we largely had a free system, this bit of low-level software was not yet free.

Initially, storage was expensive, so computers couldn't store as much data as today, and so most of this software was stored in ROM chips on the exact bits of hardware they were meant for. Due to this fact, it was easy to deceive yourself that the firmware wasn't there, because you never directly interacted with it. We knew it was there; in fact, for some larger pieces of this type of software it was possible, even in those days, to install updates. But that was rarely if ever done at the time, and it was easily forgotten.

And so, when the free software movement slapped itself on the back and declared victory when a fully free operating system was available, and decided that the work of creating a free software environment was finished, that only keeping it recent was further required, and that we must reject any further non-free encroachments on our fully free software stack, the free software movement was deceiving itself.

Because a computing environment can never be fully free if the low-level pieces of software that form the foundations of that computing environment are not free. It would have been one thing if the Free Software Foundation declared it ethical to use non-free low-level software on a computing environment if free alternatives were not available. But unfortunately, they did not.

In fact, something very strange happened.

In order for some free software hacker to be able to write a free replacement for some piece of non-free software, they obviously need to be able to actually install that theoretical free replacement. This isn't just a random thought; in fact it has happened.

Now, it's possible to install software on a piece of rewritable storage such as flash memory inside the hardware and boot the hardware from that, but if there is a bug in your software -- not at all unlikely if you're trying to write software for a piece of hardware that you don't have documentation for -- then it's not unfathomable that the replacement piece of software will not work, thereby reducing your expensive piece of technology to something about as useful as a paperweight.

Here's the good part.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the bits of technology that made up computers became so complicated, and the storage and memory available to computers so much larger and cheaper, that it became economically more feasible to create a small, tiny, piece of software stored in a ROM chip on the hardware, with just enough knowledge of the bus protocol to download the rest from the main computer.

This is awesome for free software. If you now write a replacement for the non-free software that comes with the hardware, and you make a mistake, no wobbles! You just remove power from the system, let the DRAM chips on the hardware component fully drain, return power, and try again. You might still end up with a brick of useless silicon if some of the things you sent to your technology make it do things that it was not designed to do and therefore you burn through some critical bits of metal or plastic, but the chance of this happening is significantly lower than the chance of you writing something that impedes the boot process of the piece of hardware and you are unable to fix it because the flash is overwritten. There is anecdotal evidence that there are free software hackers out there who do so. So, yay, right? You'd think the Free Software foundation would jump at the possibility to get more free software? After all, a large part of why we even have a Free Software Foundation in the first place, was because of some piece of hardware that was misbehaving, so you would think that the foundation's founders would understand the need for hardware to be controlled by software that is free.

The strange thing, what has always been strange to me, is that this is not what happened.

The Free Software Foundation instead decided that non-free software on ROM or flash chips is fine, but non-free software -- the very same non-free software, mind -- that touches the general storage device that you as a user use, is not. Never mind the fact that the non-free software is always there, whether it sits on your storage device or not.

Misguidedness aside, if some people decide they would rather not update the non-free software in their hardware and use the hardware with the old and potentially buggy version of the non-free software that it came with, then of course that's their business.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite stop there. If it had, I wouldn't have written this blog post.

You see, even though the Free Software Foundation was about Software, they decided that they needed to create a hardware certification program. And this hardware certification program ended up embedding the strange concept that if something is stored in ROM it's fine, but if something is stored on a hard drive it's not. Same hardware, same software, but different storage. By that logic, Windows respects your freedom as long as the software is written to ROM. Because this way, the Free Software Foundation could come to a standstill and pretend they were still living in the 90s.

An unfortunate result of the "RYF" program is that it means that companies who otherwise would have been inclined to create hardware that was truly free, top to bottom, are now more incentivised by the RYF program to create hardware in which the non-free low-level software can't be replaced.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world did not pretend to still be living in the nineties, and free hardware communities now exist. Because of how the FSF has marketed themselves out of the world, these communities call themselves "Open Hardware" communities, rather than "Free Hardware" ones, but the principle is the same: the designs are there, if you have the skill you can modify it, but you don't have to.

In the mean time, the open hardware community has evolved to a point where even CPUs are designed in the open, which you can design your own version of.

But not all hardware can be implemented as RISC-V, and so if you want a full system that builds RISC-V you may still need components of the system that were originally built for other architectures but that would work with RISC-V, such as a network card or a GPU. And because the FSF has done everything in their power to disincentivise people who would otherwise be well situated to build free versions of the low-level software required to support your hardware, you may now be in the weird position where we seem to have somehow skipped a step.

My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

-- J.B.S. Haldane

(comments for this post will not pass moderation. Use your own blog!)

24 Feb 2026 1:06am GMT

Capitalisme, IA et éducation

Extrait de mon journal du 29 janvier, en lisant "Comprendre le pouvoir" de Chomsky.

Le capitalisme n'a pas créé le système éducatif par humanisme, mais parce qu'il avait besoin d'employés qualifiés pour produire de la croissance. L'automatisation ayant détruit la culture de l'artisan et de l'ouvrier, raison du combat des luddites, une large population se trouvait réduite à se mettre au service des machines.

Mais les progrès de l'automatisation rendaient ce besoin de servants peu qualifiés de moins en moins nécessaire tout en nécessitant des personnes comprenant les machines afin de les entretenir et de les améliorer. Un système éducatif s'est donc naturellement mis en place dans les sociétés capitalistes, créant une élite intellectuelle dévouée au capitalisme.

Mais cette suréducation a créé trop de citoyens critiques qui remettent en cause les principes mêmes de la croissance infinie, notamment à cause des limites écologiques.

Face à cette suréducation, les guerres, les menaces de tout ordre et le totalitarisme politique permettent de restreindre l'éducation ou, a minima, de détourner l'attention. L'éducation informatique est la principale cible, car l'informatique est devenue la colonne vertébrale de la société capitaliste. Ne pas comprendre les enjeux informatiques rend même les citoyens les plus engagés totalement impuissants.

La promesse de l'IA, c'est justement de diminuer le besoin d'éducation tout en gardant un degré de production équivalent. Tout employé peut redevenir une main-d'œuvre peu qualifiée et interchangeable. L'IA est un Fordisme intellectuel.

Car les monopoles, la surveillance permanente, la consommation, l'érosion des droits et l'IAfication du travail ne sont que des outils pour garder les citoyens sous contrôle et dans les rails du capitalisme de production.

Et si ces citoyens s'imaginent échapper à ce contrôle grâce à leur groupe Facebook "anticapitaliste" ou un groupe Whatsapp "centrale d'achat solidaire du quartier", c'est encore mieux ! C'est plus subtil ! De toute façon, ils bossent la journée pour Microsoft et se contentent d'une image du monde générée par Google ou Meta.

Leur vie professionnelle est asservie par Microsoft, leur vie privée par Meta/Facebook et leurs centres d'intérêt sont contrôlés par Google. Maintenant que les humains sont définitivement ferrés, il est temps de réduire progressivement leur degré d'éducation et de connaissance afin d'améliorer leur servilité.

À propos de l'auteur :

Je suis Ploum et je viens de publier Bikepunk, une fable écolo-cycliste entièrement tapée sur une machine à écrire mécanique. Pour me soutenir, achetez mes livres (si possible chez votre libraire) !

Recevez directement par mail mes écrits en français et en anglais. Votre adresse ne sera jamais partagée. Vous pouvez également utiliser mon flux RSS francophone ou le flux RSS complet.

24 Feb 2026 1:06am GMT

Two people on a platform observe a decentralized web of nodes.

Four years ago, I published my first Web3 webpage using IPFS and ENS. I uploaded a simple "Hello World" HTML file, pointed dries.eth at it, and left it there. Two years later, I found it still running.

I haven't touched it since. Today, on the experiment's four-year anniversary, I checked again. It's still up at dries.eth.limo. Four years of total neglect, and the page loads just fine.

When I checked two years ago, every service I used was still operational. I called that "really encouraging". That optimism aged poorly.

Today, half the services have shut down, restricted access, or pivoted entirely:

Fleek, a platform I used to pin my content, shut down its hosting service on January 31, 2026. They pivoted to AI.
Infura was acquired by MetaMask and closed its IPFS service to new users.
Web3.storage rebranded to Storacha, and dropped IPFS pinning altogether.
Cloudflare sunset its public IPFS gateways.
Scaleway shut down its IPFS pinning service.

Of the original services, Pinata is still focused on IPFS. I logged in and my "Hello World" HTML file is still there. And eth.limo, the ENS gateway that lets anyone access .eth sites in a normal browser, still works.

Technically robust, commercially fragile

IPFS content exists only as long as someone chooses to host it. In 2022, my HTML file was pinned on Fleek, Pinata, Infura, and a friend's node. Today, it comes down to Pinata's free tier. My web3 page is hanging by a thread.

That sounds fragile, and in one sense it is. But the protocol is working as designed. IPFS doesn't promise permanence. It promises that content is addressable, verifiable, and can be kept alive by anyone who cares enough to pin it.

The durability of content on IPFS scales with how much people care about it. No one really cares about my "Hello World" page, so it's not being pinned. If this were dissident journalism or censored speech, people would likely pin it.

If you run an IPFS node and want to help keep it alive, feel free to pin it: ipfs pin add bafybeibbkhmln7o4ud6an4qk6bukcpri7nhiwv6pz6ygslgtsrey2c3o3q.

Of course, I could make it more robust myself by pinning it on additional services or running my own node. Instead, I relied on third parties. With no node of my own, I'm entirely dependent on pinning services and other users to keep it alive.

The real story isn't fragility. It's economics. There may simply not be enough demand for decentralized storage to support a healthy market of providers. Companies keep entering, failing to find a business model, and pivoting away.

Traditional hosting is cheap, reliable, and familiar. The people who need censorship resistance are a narrow group, and everyone else has little reason to switch, myself included. And to be fair, replacing everyday web hosting was probably never IPFS's goal.

I still love IPFS as a protocol and the ideas behind it. But it feels like the ecosystem around it is commercially thin, and getting thinner.

I've written before about the idea of a RAID for web content. Rather than relying on a single system, the goal is redundancy across multiple layers. I'd like to experiment more with IPFS and make it one of those layers.

Browser support got worse, not better

In 2022, mainstream browsers didn't support ENS or IPFS natively, except for Brave. Brave included a built-in IPFS node that could resolve ipfs:// and ipns:// addresses directly.

In August 2024, Brave removed that integration. Fewer than 0.1% of users had ever used it, and the support costs were too high.

Chrome, Firefox, and Safari still don't support ENS or IPFS natively. A Firefox issue for adding IPFS support has been open since 2017, with no plans to implement it. The IPFS community continues pushing for browser standards work, but native protocol support seems like a long way off.

Today, the easiest way to visit a .eth site is still through a gateway like eth.limo. You append .limo to the ENS name and visit it in any browser. It works, but it's a centralized bridge to a decentralized system, which is a little ironic.

Gas fees dropped 99%

Not everything got worse. In my original post, I called out the cost of updating an ENS record as a major barrier. When content changes on IPFS, its hash changes too. To keep dries.eth pointing to the latest version, that new address has to be written to Ethereum, which costs gas.

Updating my content on Ethereum cost me $11.69 in 2022 and $4.08 in 2024. If I wanted to update it today, it would cost roughly one cent.

Average Ethereum gas prices now sit around 0.03 to 0.05 Gwei, compared to 30 to 50 Gwei when I first set this up. That is roughly a thousand times cheaper.

Two things drove this.

First, Ethereum roughly doubled the computation it can process per block over 2025. Validators gradually raised the gas limit, and the Fusaka upgrade in December formally pushed it from 30 million to 60 million.

Second, many applications migrated to Layer 2 networks. These are separate blockchains that batch up transactions and settle them back to Ethereum in bulk. As traffic moved off the main chain, congestion and fees dropped further.

The impact on ENS is dramatic. Just this month, ENS Labs cancelled its planned Layer 2 blockchain called "Namechain" because Ethereum's main network got so inexpensive that the Layer 2 became unnecessary. Nick Johnson, ENS co-founder and lead developer, noted that subsidizing 100% of all ENS transactions at current gas prices would cost about $10,000 per year.

A mixed scorecard

Four years in, the technology is better than ever but the market around it is worse. The IPFS protocol seems sound. ENS records are permanent. Gas fees have nearly vanished. But the commercial ecosystem for decentralized hosting has steadily thinned.

I wrote in 2022 that "IPFS and ENS offer limited value to most website owners, but tremendous value to a very narrow subset". Four years later, that assessment holds true.

AI also absorbed most of the tech industry's attention and capital. Web3 funding dropped sharply. Fleek's pivot from IPFS hosting to AI inference feels symbolic.

Will I keep the experiment going? Of course. But it's probably time to add a few more pins and stop relying on free tiers. The protocols don't need my help. The ecosystem apparently does.

24 Feb 2026 1:06am GMT

This is a copy of an email I used to send internally at work and now made public. I'm not sure I'll make a habit of posting it here, especially not twice a year, unless people really like it. Right now, it's mostly here to keep with my current writing spree going.

This is your bi-yearly reminder that time is changing soon!

What's happening?

For people not on tor-internal, you should know that I've been sending semi-regular announcements when daylight saving changes occur. Starting now, I'm making those announcements public so they can be shared with the wider community because, after all, this affects everyone (kind of).

For those of you lucky enough to have no idea what I'm talking about, you should know that some places in the world implement what is called Daylight saving time or DST.

Normally, you shouldn't have to do anything: computers automatically change time following local rules, assuming they are correctly configured, provided recent updates have been applied in the case of a recent change in said rules (because yes, this happens).

Appliances, of course, will likely not change time and will need to adjusted unless they are so-called "smart" (also known as "part of a bot net").

If your clock is flashing "0:00" or "12:00", you have no action to take, congratulations on having the right time once or twice a day.

If you haven't changed those clocks in six months, congratulations, they will be accurate again!

In any case, you should still consider DST because it might affect some of your meeting schedules, particularly if you set up a new meeting schedule in the last 6 months and forgot to consider this change.

If your location does not have DST

Properly scheduled meetings affecting multiple time zones are set in UTC time, which does not change. So if your location does not observer time changes, your (local!) meeting time will not change.

But be aware that some other folks attending your meeting might have the DST bug and their meeting times will change. They might miss entire meetings or arrive late as you frantically ping them over IRC, Matrix, Signal, SMS, Ricochet, Mattermost, SimpleX, Whatsapp, Discord, Slack, Wechat, Snapchat, Telegram, XMPP, Briar, Zulip, RocketChat, DeltaChat, talk(1), write(1), actual telegrams, Meshtastic, Meshcore, Reticulum, APRS, snail mail, and, finally, flying a remote presence drone to their house, asking what's going on.

(Sorry if I forgot your preferred messaging client here, I tried my best.)

Be kind; those poor folks might be more sleep deprived as DST steals one hour of sleep from them on the night that implements the change.

If you do observe DST

If you are affected by the DST bug, your local meeting times will change access the board. Normally, you can trust that your meetings are scheduled to take this change into account and the new time should still be reasonable.

Trust, but verify; make sure the new times are adequate and there are no scheduling conflicts.

Do this now: take a look at your calendar in two week and in April. See if any meeting need to be rescheduled because of an impossible or conflicting time.

When does time change, how and where?

Notice how I mentioned "North America" in the subject? That's a lie. ("The doctor lies", as they say on the BBC.) Other places, including Europe, also changes times, just not all at once (and not all North America).

We'll get into "where" soon, but first let's look at the "how". As you might already know, the trick is:

Spring forward, fall backwards.

This northern-centric (sorry!) proverb says that clocks will move forward by an hour this "spring", after moving backwards last "fall". This is why we lose an hour of work, sorry, sleep. It sucks, to put it bluntly. I want it to stop and will keep writing those advisories until it does.

To see where and when, we, unfortunately, still need to go into politics.

USA and Canada

First, we start with "North America" which, really, is just some parts of USA[1] and Canada[2]. As usual, on the Second Sunday in March (the 8th) at 02:00 local (not UTC!), the clocks will move forward.

This means that properly set clocks will flip from 1:59 to 3:00, coldly depriving us from an hour of sleep that was perniciously granted 6 months ago and making calendar software stupidly hard to write.

Practically, set your wrist watch and alarm clocks[3] back one hour before going to bed and go to bed early.

[1] except Arizona (except the Navajo nation), US territories, and Hawaii

[2] except Yukon, most of Saskatchewan, and parts of British Columbia (northeast), one island in Nunavut (Southampton Island), one town in Ontario (Atikokan) and small parts of Quebec (Le Golfe-du-Saint-Laurent), a list which I keep recopying because I find it just so amazing how chaotic it is. When your clock has its own Wikipedia page, you know something is wrong.

[3] hopefully not managed by a botnet, otherwise kindly ask your bot net operator to apply proper software upgrades in a timely manner

Europe

Next we look at our dear Europe, which will change time on the last Sunday in March (the 29th) at 01:00 UTC (not local!). I think it means that, Amsterdam-time, the clocks will flip from 1:59 to 3:00 AM local on that night.

(Every time I write this, I have doubts. I would welcome independent confirmation from night owls that observe that funky behavior experimentally.)

Just like your poor fellows out west, just fix your old-school clocks before going to bed, and go to sleep early, it's good for you.

Rest of the world with DST

Renewed and recurring apologies again to the people of Cuba, Mexico, Moldova, Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, Chile (except Magallanes Region), parts of Australia, and New Zealand which all have their own individual DST rules, omitted here for brevity.

In general, changes also happen in March, but either on different times or different days, except in the south hemisphere, where they happen in April.

Rest of the world without DST

All of you other folks without DST, rejoice! Thank you for reminding us how manage calendars and clocks normally. Sometimes, doing nothing is precisely the right thing to do. You're an inspiration for us all.

Changes since last time

There were, again, no changes since last year on daylight savings that I'm aware of. It seems the US congress debating switching to a "half-daylight" time zone which is an half-baked idea that I should have expected from the current USA politics.

The plan is to, say, switch from "Eastern is UTC-4 in the summer" to "Eastern is UTC-4.5". The bill also proposes to do this 90 days after enactment, which is dangerously optimistic about our capacity at deploying any significant change in human society.

In general, I rely on the Wikipedia time nerds for this and Paul Eggert which seems to singlehandledly be keeping everything in order for all of us, on the tz-announce mailing list.

This time, I've also looked at the tz mailing list which is where I learned about the congress bill.

If your country has changed time and no one above noticed, now would be an extremely late time to do something about this, typically writing to the above list. (Incredibly, I need to write to the list because of this post.)

One thing that did change since last year is that I've implemented what I hope to be a robust calendar for this, which was surprisingly tricky.

If you have access to our Nextcloud, it should be visible under the heading "Daylight saving times". If you don't, you can access it using this direct link.

The procedures around how this calendar was created, how this email was written, and curses found along the way, are also documented in this wiki page, if someone ever needs to pick up the Time Lord duty.

23 Feb 2026 7:31pm GMT