G
a small ActivityPub server written in Go. It ships as a single static executable with a server-rendered web interface, a Mastodon-compatible client API, a durable federation queue, moderation tools, and optional PostgreSQL and S3 support. No runtime to install, no services to wire together.
Via https://littleone.littlefedi.social/@stefano/08d20839-b21b-47bc-a1b6-800d1137f36e | https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@stefano@littleone.littlefedi.social/117076101948770274 @stefano@littleone.littlefedi.social
⇒ When online commenters ‘detect’ my art as AI
Reactions in Hacker News and the Fediverse:
The reply from @uriel@bbs.keinpfusch.net made me giggle 
⇒ This New Open Source Project Wants to Be the AI-First Alternative to Microsoft Office
From Sourav Rudra's article on 5th August:
… I wouldn't hold my breath for a Linux build anytime soon. …
Linux support shipped five days later.
⇒ According to Statcounter, Linux on the desktop crossed over 7% globally
Also, FreeBSD has returned (at 0%). It comes and goes. It was absent a year ago, for example:
OpenBSD is more popular in the US (FreeBSD is absent).
FreeBSD is more popular in the UK (OpenBSD is absent).
"… VIDAR, a FreeBSD-based automatic firewall program. … The announcement doesn’t mention streaming so you may need to be in-person."
The event was streamed, there was a Streaming link at the head of the announcement. Follow-up:
OpenShift
For people who never heard of it (there's no link in the article …)
r/openshift in old and new Reddit:
The OpenShift Application Platform is Red Hat's enterprise-ready Kubernetes distribution, optimized for continuous application development and multi-tenant deployment.
A professional community to discuss OpenShift and OKD, Red Hat's auto-scaling Platform as a Services (PaaS) for applications.
Build, accelerate, and scale with an application platform that’s built for today's workloads and tomorrow's innovation. Deliver a comprehensive experience to modernize and build new applications, accelerate AI adoption, and fuel growth.
Red Hat’s OpenShift vs FreeBSD Jails - Klara Systems (2022)
Kubernetes has become a hot technology for managing clusters of applications, but it is famously difficult technology to use and understand. RedShift is an Enterprise cloud platform for running and managing Kubes without tying you into a single platform. FreeBSD is our favorite platform for running applications here at Klara, how does RedShift relate to the technologies that FreeBSD provides and can we create similar environments on top of FreeBSD?
⇒ GCC AI Policy Announcement
The announcement leads to source code, but not a normal view of the Policy.
Here's the Policy:
@tomaoki@mastodon.bsd.cafe please, how would you describe the current situation?
No mention of Optimus in the FreeBSD Handbook or FAQ.
In Bugzilla:
https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1vdgi2x/comment/p194kjz/
⇒ FreeBSD 16 Retires The Last Of Its GPL Code From Its Base System
Via @governa@fosstodon.org at https://fosstodon.org/@governa/117006685536082407
A follow-up to https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@82mhz/117002938483503805 @82mhz
The linked article (June 2026) began:
The work at Include Security has us working with AI day in and day out (hacking it, using it, training it, etc). ..
– 18–23 minutes, according to Firefox Reader.
I used AI to get a concise timeline. The text below is taken from Claude's response.
…
The root of it all is Hola VPN / Luminati (Bright Data's predecessor). In May 2015, it was discovered that Hola — a free "VPN" — was quietly turning users' devices into paid exit nodes sold through a sibling brand, Luminati, at up to $20/GB. The discovery came after 8chan's admin, Frederick Brennan, traced a wave of DDoS/spam attacks against his site back to Hola users being abused as a botnet, and outlets like The Register, Fortune/Motherboard, and TechRadar covered it within days. Hola's Luminati brand was described as "the world's largest VPN network," routing HTTP, HTTPS, or TLS requests through millions of idling end-user devices. Luminati (founded 2014) was Hola's mechanism for selling access to its userbase as exit nodes, charging $20 per gigabyte for bandwidth from its free VPN users, and it later rebranded as Bright Data. So the general "your free app is secretly selling your connection as a proxy" pattern is a 2015 story, not a 2026 one.
The TV angle specifically is much newer, and predates the IncludeSecurity teardown by about three and a half months. Independent tech journalist Janko Roettgers broke it in his Lowpass newsletter (syndicated by The Verge) in late February 2026: with Bright's SDK, a viewer's smart TV becomes part of a massive global proxy network that crawls and scrapes the web, alongside apps on desktop PCs and mobile devices, with the company claiming roughly 150 million such residential proxies worldwide, gathering data later resold to train AI models. Multiple later write-ups explicitly credit this as the origin point: "Lowpass, syndicated by The Verge, first surfaced the smart-TV angle in February, and this is the technical teardown."
Around the same period, the broader AI-scraping-via-residential-proxy story was already building: Krebs reported in October 2025 on botnets like Aisuru fueling large-scale AI data harvesting, and Google dismantled the criminal IPIDEA proxy network in January 2026. By April 2026, FlatpanelsHD was reporting that Amazon, Google and Roku had restricted Bright Data and similar residential proxy networks from their app SDKs (Fire TV, Google TV, Roku OS), while Bright Data continued listing LG's webOS and Samsung's Tizen as partners, with over 200 apps on webOS alone.
The IncludeSecurity/Buchodi post you linked was the first to actually reverse-engineer the SDK rather than just report on the business model — documenting the peer channel's weak authentication and the iOS VPN bypass — which is why it got picked up so widely (Hacker News, Krebs, CyberSecurityNews, etc.) even though the underlying phenomenon was already known.
A follow-up Spur.us platform scan in June 2026 quantified the scale: Bright Data, Bright Data Ltd, and Bright SDK accounted for 367 proxy-flagged apps in their dataset, with residential proxy SDKs found in nearly half of scanned LG webOS apps and over a quarter of Samsung Tizen apps. And just last week, Krebs on Security reported LG moving to ban these SDKs from its smart TV apps entirely.
So the short answer: the general practice (apps quietly monetizing users' devices as residential proxy exit nodes) was first exposed in 2015 with Hola/Luminati; the smart-TV-specific version of that story broke in February 2026 via Lowpass/The Verge; and your June 2026 link is the deep technical forensic follow-up, not the original discovery.
Here's the title:
The position is unexpected.
Perhaps the title is difficult to perceive when, for example, the screen is busy.
I had this difficulty more than once in the past.
An example:
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/04/22/high-quality-chaos/ via https://mastodon.social/@bagder/116448188069484288 (2026-04-22) – not recent, but it's news to me.
From today's post about last month's Ottawa FreeBSD Developer Summit:
Michael Winser – Alpha Omega – The Changing Landscape of Open Source Software Security
AI has entered the chat
A frame from Winser's presentation:
Daniel Stenberg on AI in security ― sentiment over time
From Stenberg's blog post:
…
Everything is AI now
Almost every security report now uses AI to various degrees. You can tell by the way they are worded, how the report is phrased and also by the fact that they now easily get very detailed duplicates in ways that can’t be done had they been written by humans.
The difference now compared to before however, is that they are mostly very high quality.
The reporters rarely mention exactly which AI tool or model they used (and really, we don’t care), but the evidence is strong that they used such help.
We are not unique
I did a quick unscientific poll on Mastodon to see if other Open Source projects see the same trends and man, do they! Friends from the following projects confirmed that they too see this trend. …
― #ai is currently not possible in (NodeBB) BSD Cafe Billboard.
https://wiki.freebsd.org/DevSummit/202606
LLM-driven kernel vulnerability research – Nicholas Carlini, Anthropic
Michael Winser – Alpha Omega – The Changing Landscape of Open Source Software Security
AI has entered the chat
FreeBSD Foundation Technology Team Update – Joe Mingrone
AI-assisted Vulnerability Discovery – Ed Maste
The Cloud Exists – Colin Percival and Gordon Tetlow
⇒ Dev accidentally commits Copilot binary to FreeBSD ports repo
https://mastodon.scot/@kim_harding/116980725539794502 with a link to discussion in r/freebsd.
⇒ Anti-AI open source has an enemy in common, but almost nothing else
https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@grahamperrin/116987441637631045 quotes https://mastodon.social/@buckfiftyseven/116980631827143297 with comments from @lproven@social.vivaldi.net (and I'll have more for @buckfiftyseven@mastodon.social later) …
