Simon H

Twice a year I get contacted by someone who believes they've solved open source funding. It's usually a new app or licensing scheme. Both miss the point. Most companies see sponsoring open source as "charity" or an unnecessary expense, and until that changes, no solution will make a difference.

NEW ANALYSIS: China's CO2 has now been 'flat or falling' for 21 months

* Down in 2025
* Still below Mar 2024
* Clean energy wave a key factor

If this is China's peak (TBC) it's the climate story of the century so far…

www.carbonbrief.org/...

Have to say I'm not terribly surprised.

Modern conveniences meant housewives didn't have to work quite so hard any more. Did they work less? No, they joined the workforce.

Emails and computing made paperwork much faster. Could administrators work less? No! But now everything was happening faster!

Trust in European Software: Introducing Software Made & Hosted in Europe Labels

📢 The “Software Made & Hosted in Europe” labels are now available!

Join the upcoming info session to learn how these labels can strengthen your company's market visibility and contribute to Europe’s #techsovereignty.

📅 18 February
⏰️ 13:00–14:00 CET

Registration 👇️
www.digitalsme.eu/events/trust...

Everyone has their breaking point, I guess!

(A rather spectacular goof from The Spectator...)

Data breach at govtech giant Conduent balloons, affecting millions more Americans | TechCrunch The ransomware attack at Conduent allowed hackers to steal a "significant number of individuals’ personal information" from the govtech giant's systems. Conduent handles personal and health data of mo...

NEW: Govtech giant Conduent says a 2025 data breach now affects far more people than first disclosed, with the number of victims who had personal and medical data stolen stretching to tens of millions of people across the United States.

Conduent says its business supports 100+ million people.

Rebooting the UK's Cyber Strategy Weak cyber security undermines UK growth and national security. A new approach to UK cyber strategy is needed.

The UK’s cyber strategy is at a crossroads.

After a year of damaging cyber incidents & rising economic risk, voluntary guidance alone is no longer working.

Our new paper makes the case for a reset of the UK’s approach to cyber security as the government prepares the National Cyber Action Plan.

Notepad++ says Chinese government hackers hijacked its software updates for months | TechCrunch The developer of the popular text editor Notepad++ said hackers associated with the Chinese government hijacked its software update mechanism to deliver tainted software to users for months.

NEW: The developer of the long-running and popular open source text editor Notepad++ has confirmed that China government-backed hackers hijacked the software's update feature for months during 2025.

The hackers could access computers of victims who were running hijacked versions of Notepad++.

I have been told by many game developers that it's not their problem that their games allow workshop mods to perform RCE. It's no surprise that they keep getting found ...

Here's the jam packed agenda for the geospatial dev room tomorrow at @fosdem.org

I'm staging a low budget production of Swan Lake called Toilet Duck.

I'm trying a new "see how well AI image gen is" test. This time I'm going to ask it to draw a map of the world, and then zoom in to Europe, the UK, Yorkshire and York to see when things start to get hazy.

All of these are with the free models using the smart/thinking variants. 1/n

a screenshot of a github repo, showing there are 19 contributors: 14 avatars are displayed, with the text '+5 contributors'

open source is incredible

this project was started on thursday
and open sourced on friday
and people found out on saturday

a screenshot from the #contributing channel in a new project discord server. patak says: @Emanuele you can choose by the way, commenting is good, and start doing an issue directly also works. If two people work on the same issue at the same time, for OSS is actually a good thing. It is different than when you are working on a company and would like to maximize output. Here, if you start implementing something, and someone beats you to it and sends a PR, the knowledge you gained while trying is very valuable. You can help review the PR and make the implementation better in that way. Maintainers can even add you as co-author. And both of you will then have more experience on that part of the codebase, that is great for later. you can also think that there are now 30+ devs checking and working on the repo so if you want to coordinate that in a fine-grained way, you introduce a lot of bottlenecks it is more efficient to just let everyone do what they feel is more important and help each other when they collapse and you'll be surprised by how little collapse ends up happening, because there is a lot of side comms here too that arranges things naturally

when you collaborate in open source teams, you need to unlearn a lot of what your company work taught you

This is as good a time as any to share one of my favourite videos on YouTube...

youtu.be/QMpf1D3YohU?...

Graph showing this year's rapid drop-off in funding of the CDC, DOE, FDA, NASA, NIH, NIST, NOAA, and NSF compared to 2016-2024.

Lost Science:
Nature article documenting, with superb graphics, the recent deep cuts in the funding of American science.

www.nature.com/immersive/d4...

From Reform to Results: Incentives, Culture and the UK's Military Intelligence Services The UK is consolidating dispersed intelligence services under a new defence-led Military Intelligence Services construct to optimise performance.

'If MIS is used as a vehicle for subsequent deeper reform, particularly in professionalisation and institutional standing, it could strengthen the UK’s ability to operate in an increasingly contested security environment' write Professor David Gioe and Dr Will Styles in the latest RUSI Commentary.

Such a great chart.

www.ft.com/content/12f5...

A screenshot showing the titles of the emails: at 6.50 giving information about the platform a train will leave from, at 7.11 announcing its cancellation - and at 9.39 asking for customer feedback on the experience of travelling

A tale of three emails. Another masterpiece of back end integration between systems

This is quite a post

www.planetearthandbeyond.co/p/reality-is...

People get really seriously hurt by these companies in ways that are often impossible to recover from. People churn out of the industry with extremely limited prospects out of it and what is for all intents and purposes a brain injury.

Exclusive: US cargo tech company publicly exposed its shipping systems and customer data to the web Shipping tech company Bluspark left internal plaintext passwords, including those of executives, exposed to the internet, at a time when hacks in the shipping industry are on the rise.

New, by me: Security researcher Eaton Zveare spent weeks trying to alert a little-known but critical U.S. cargo tech giant that their shipping systems and customers' data were exposed to the web.

After weeks of trying, Zveare asked TechCrunch for help. We heard back! ...from the company's law firm.

My mate told me he had a job removing the white stringy bits from oranges. Pretty sure he’s taking the pith.

Fitburg brought to port after Elisa cable damage in Baltic Sea Finnish authorities escorted the cargo vessel Fitburg into Kantvik port under armed guard after it was seized on suspicion of damaging Elisa’s undersea cable between Finland and Estonia. Police detail...

Helsinki Times - Finnish authorities escorted the cargo vessel Fitburg into Kantvik port in Kirkkonummi on Wednesday afternoon under heavy guard, following its seizure on suspicion of damaging an undersea telecommunications cable owned by Elisa. www.helsinkitimes.fi/finland/finl...

We are now a quarter of the way into this century

Just one small part of Russia's massive overnight missile and drone attack on the people of Ukraine - a Russian-Iranian drone targets an apartment building in Kyiv at dawn.

Russians are only intensifying attacks on Ukraine's civilian population.

Review will be led/conducted by @bengroom.bsky.social and Mark Freeman.

‼️🇺🇸 Russian GRU hackers attacked critical US infrastructure, a grand jury indictment in California has been released.

They carried out attacks on an airport in Missouri, water systems in Texas, Pennsylvania and Indiana, a meatpacking plant in California, and an oil and gas company in Colorado.