Richard Stallman Makes a Come Back in his first public appearance at an US event

The free software movement has been around for over four decades now. It started as a response to proprietary software licenses that restricted people from understanding, modifying, or sharing the programs they ran on their computers.

At the center of this movement is the Free Software Foundation (FSF), founded in 1985. It has been the organizational backbone for promoting software freedom, maintaining crucial free software licenses like the GPL, and supporting projects that respect user rights.

Dr. Richard Stallman has been at the forefront of this movement from day one, along with countless other people who joined up to make their collective vision a reality. If you want to hear from him directly, he's speaking at Georgia Tech on January 23.

Your new project really could use a block device for Linux. File systems are easy to do with FUSE, but that’s sometimes too high-level. But a block driver can be tough to write and debug, especially since bugs in the kernel’s space can be catastrophic. [Jiri Pospisil] suggests Ublk, a framework for writing block devices in user space. This works using the io_uring facility in recent kernels.

This opens the block device field up. You can use any language you want (we’ve seen FUSE used with some very strange languages). You can use libraries that would not work in the kernel. Debugging is simple, and crashing is a minor inconvenience.

Another advantage? Your driver won’t depend on the kernel code. There is a kernel driver, of course, named ublk_drv, but that’s not your code. That’s what your code talks to.

The name Leviasynth has been circulating online for a year now. Back in January 2025, Medeli Electronics, a Chinese keyboard manufacturer that also owns ASM, filed a trademark for this exact name.

Speculation was soon refuted by Glen Darcy (ASM CEO) himself. The tables turned over the weekend with a leak. Now it’s official.

Folk medicine practitioners in 16th-century Europe left ingredients and fingerprints smudged on their manuals while developing remedies for minor ailments. Now, researchers are studying the chemical traces Renaissance people left behind to understand how they experimented with novel cures.

Two German medical manuals — "How to Cure and Expel All Afflictions and Illnesses of the Human Body" and "A Useful and Essential Little Book of Medicine for the Common Man" — were published in 1531 by eye doctor Bartholomäus Vogtherr. His systematically gathered recipe books for common ailments, like hair loss and bad breath, quickly became bestsellers in Renaissance domestic medicine.

If you were asked to pick the most annoying of the various Microsoft Windows interfaces that have appeared over the years, there’s a reasonable chance that Windows 8’s Metro start screen and interface design language would make it your choice. In 2012 the software company abandoned their tried-and-tested desktop whose roots extended back to Windows 95 in favor of the colorful blocks it had created for its line of music players and mobile phones.

Consumers weren’t impressed and it was quickly shelved in subsequent versions, but should you wish to revisit Metro you can now get the experience on Linux. [er-bharat] has created Win8DE, a shell for Wayland window managers that brings the Metro interface — or something very like it — to the open source operating system.

The most beautiful horror to ever exist lmao

Jan. 20, 2026
[from weekly newsletter about Cuba (with YouTube video links) from the Belly Of The Beast news/video collective.]

Donald Trump has boasted about the killing of 32 Cuban security personnel who died at the hands of U.S. Special Forces during the January 3 abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Trump called the Cubans “thugs and extortionists” who held Venezuela hostage for many years.

Yunio Estévez Samón, one of those killed in the U.S. attack, was neither a thug nor an extortionist. He was a 32-year-old cryptographer and a dedicated family man who has left behind a wife and three children. Belly of the Beast journalist Liz Oliva Fernández interviewed Claudia Rafaela, a close friend of Yunio’s, who talked about his death and the life he was building before it was cut short. See the interview.

Meanwhile, last week in Havana, thousands of Cubans joined in mourning alongside the families of those killed in Venezuela. And many more took to the streets to denounce U.S. aggression in a massive pro-government march to the U.S. Embassy

What Would a #Trump Deal With Cuba Look Like?
https://belly-of-the-beast.kit.com/posts/what-would-a-trump-deal-with-cuba-look-like

[from weekly newsletter about Cuba (with YouTube video links) from the Belly Of The Beast news/video collective.]

January 15, 2026

Also:

• Marco Rubio: President of Cuba?
• No plans for invasion against “tough Cubans”
• Cuba ramps up combat training
• Venezuela and Cuba reaffirm solidarity
• Cuba is not yet receiving more #Mexican oil
• US Ambassador to Cuba...or Miami?
• US sends hurricane aid to Cuba — two months later