Mastodon
PeerTube
Ensuring freedom, one blob at a time
By Zoë Kooyman, FSF Executive Director
At the end of 2025, the FSF launched LibrePhone, a project that works on closing the last gaps towards free mobile phone computing. LibrePhone's goal is to better understand and reverse-engineer the nonfree blobs used by a great majority of (if not all) SoCs (system on a chip) designs available today. Our current, primary focus is on the radio blobs that control WiFi, Bluetooth, NFC, and cellular communications.
Read More - Index
Video game console emulators: Free or not?
By Craig Topham, Copyright & Licensing Associate
When it comes to exercising your freedoms, video game console emulators (for the sake of brevity, VGCE) are hazardous terrain. A VGCE is a program built to allow a computer system to run software or use peripheral devices originally designed for a game console system. These proprietary software corporations often heavily guard their consoles from being reverse-engineered. Historically, these corporations have played legal whack-a-mole with any VGCEs that popped up; however, over the years some corporations have relented, even leaving room for fans to create new games or expand the world of popular game characters, but this doesn't mean these corporations have truly set their programs or systems free.
Read More - Index
Is the site down, or is it me? Introducing new FSF Uptime Kuma instance
By Michael McMahon, GNU/Linux Systems Administrator
Over the last couple of years, waves of botnets have occasionally taken down our sites. This is not a problem unique to us, but one that the Internet has been facing as a collective. The origins of the attacks range from aggressive LLM scrapers, vulnerability scanners, poorly optimized CI/CD servers, and beyond. We have made significant progress fighting these attacks, but there is always more work to be done to improve our systems and strengthen our defenses. We found quite a few ways to respond to and prevent botnet attacks, but still faced a significant related challenge: communicating when a website or service is down.
Read More - Index
Your computer is more powerful than you think
By Greg Farough, Campaigns Manager
The other day I wrote a simple (and local!) script to compute prime numbers, specifically what any given nth prime number is. Since a laptop approaching its twentieth birthday is my main machine, I expected it to chug along when I gave it something "difficult." The fifth prime number? No problem, it's 11. The 221st? 1381. Of course, the machine did get slower as the numbers grew larger, but I remained impressed by what an aging machine could still do quickly. These days, and thanks to a persistent propaganda campaign from numerous tech monopolies, there's a growing temptation to think that complex computing can only be done in the "cloud."
Read More - Index
Free software communities often start small
By Alex Jenkins, Student Free Software Activist
Like many free software community initiatives, Georgia Tech's first student-run free software club is a result of curiosity and a desire to share. In my sophomore year at Georgia Tech, I had a challenging course on the Assembly and C programming languages. While struggling with a GDB debugging assignment, I stumbled upon Dr. Richard M. Stallman's GNU C Language Introduction and Reference Manual. Within a week I felt like I had genuinely mastered the materials. What struck me wasn't just the depth of Dr. Stallman's knowledge — it was that the manual was entirely free to read and distribute. I had never really thought about the freedom to share knowledge itself until then, and that idea really stuck with me.
Read More - Index
