The initial injustice of proprietary software often leads to further injustices: malicious functionalities.

The introduction of unjust techniques in nonfree software, such as back doors, DRM, tethering, and others, has become ever more frequent. Nowadays, it is standard practice.

We at the GNU Project show examples of malware that has been introduced in a wide variety of products and dis-services people use everyday, and of companies that make use of these techniques.

Here are our latest additions

April 2026

Proprietary Obsolescence

• Amazon is disconnecting the early models of the Swindle from the Amazon DRM-afflicted book store.

Malware in Appliances

• Some models of Vizio “smart” TVs will have some of their functionalities locked behind a Walmart account login.

GNU Health at the Cyber|Show!
Grab a coffee and listen to the 40 min. interview Andy Farnell and Helen Plews made to Luis Falcón in their wonderful show. ❤️

They covered key aspects on citizen and patient data privacy, hospital management, federated health networks, genomics and wearables. In the interview they also talked about the risks associated to commercial, closed sourced electronic health records systems and proprietary mobile applications.

The interview reveals how crucial is Free/Libre software for equity and digital sovereignty in our societies. 🩺 🏥 🧬 👇️
https://cybershow ... pisodes.php?id=64

About Cyber|Show:
https://cybers ... w.uk/about.php

Get this and latest news about GNU Health from our official Mastodon account:
https://mastodon. ... social/@gnuhealth

Tags: #GNUHealth #GNU #OpenScience #PublicHealth #Privacy #FreeSoftware #SocialMedicine #CyberShow

GNU Parallel 20260422 ('Artemis II') has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4

Quote of the month:

  It is a fantastic tool for decades!
    -- Ops_Mechanic@reddit

New in this release:

• Remote jobs are spawned via pipe to perl, so environment can be bigger. This is a major rewrite.
• --pipe-part -a supports -L/-N if zextract is installed.
• --pipe-part -a supports .gz, .bz2, .zst-files if zextract is installed.
• Comments in code is redone.
• Bug fixes and man page updates.

GNU Parallel - For people who live life in the parallel lane.

If you like GNU Parallel record a video testimonial: Say who you are, what you use GNU Parallel for, how it helps you, and what you like most about it. Include a command that uses GNU Parallel if you feel like it.

About GNU Parallel

GNU Parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers. A job can be a single command or a small script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, a list of users, a list of URLs, or a list of tables. A job can also be a command that reads from a pipe. GNU Parallel can then split the input and pipe it into commands in parallel.

If you use xargs and tee today you will find GNU Parallel very easy to use as GNU Parallel is written to have the same options as xargs. If you write loops in shell, you will find GNU Parallel may be able to replace most of the loops and make them run faster by running several jobs in parallel. GNU Parallel can even replace nested loops.

GNU Parallel makes sure output from the commands is the same output as you would get had you run the commands sequentially. This makes it possible to use output from GNU Parallel as input for other programs.

For example you can run this to convert all jpeg files into png and gif files and have a progress bar:

  parallel --bar convert {1} {1.}.{2} ::: *.jpg ::: png gif

Or you can generate big, medium, and small thumbnails of all jpeg files in sub dirs:

  find . -name '*.jpg' |
    parallel convert -geometry {2} {1} {1//}/thumb{2}_{1/} :::: - ::: 50 100 200

You can find more about GNU Parallel at: http://www.gnu ... rg/s/parallel/

You can install GNU Parallel in just 10 seconds with:

    $ (wget -O - pi.dk/3 || lynx -source pi.dk/3 || curl pi.dk/3/ || \
       fetch -o - http://pi.dk/3 ) > install.sh
    $ sha1sum install.sh | grep c555f616391c6f7c28bf938044f4ec50
    12345678 c555f616 391c6f7c 28bf9380 44f4ec50
    $ md5sum install.sh | grep 707275363428aa9e9a136b9a7296dfe4
    70727536 3428aa9e 9a136b9a 7296dfe4
    $ sha512sum install.sh | grep b24bfe249695e0236f6bc7de85828fe1f08f4259
    83320d89 f56698ec 77454856 895edc3e aa16feab 2757966e 5092ef2d 661b8b45
    b24bfe24 9695e023 6f6bc7de 85828fe1 f08f4259 6ce5480a 5e1571b2 8b722f21
    $ bash install.sh

Watch the intro video on http://www.youtub ... L284C9FF2488BC6D1

Walk through the tutorial (man parallel_tutorial). Your command line will love you for it.

When using programs that use GNU Parallel to process data for publication please cite:

O. Tange (2018): GNU Parallel 2018, March 2018, https://doi.org/1 ... 81/zenodo.1146014.

If you like GNU Parallel:

• Give a demo at your local user group/team/colleagues
• Post the intro videos on Reddit/Diaspora*/forums/blogs/ Identi.ca/Google+/Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin/mailing lists
• Get the merchandise https://gnuparall ... igns/gnu-parallel
• Request or write a review for your favourite blog or magazine
• Request or build a package for your favourite distribution (if it is not already there)
• Invite me for your next conference

If you use programs that use GNU Parallel for research:

• Please cite GNU Parallel in you publications (use --citation)

If GNU Parallel saves you money:

• (Have your company) donate to FSF https://my.f ... .org/donate/

About GNU SQL

GNU sql aims to give a simple, unified interface for accessing databases through all the different databases' command line clients. So far the focus has been on giving a common way to specify login information (protocol, username, password, hostname, and port number), size (database and table size), and running queries.

The database is addressed using a DBURL. If commands are left out you will get that database's interactive shell.

When using GNU SQL for a publication please cite:

O. Tange (2011): GNU SQL - A Command Line Tool for Accessing Different Databases Using DBURLs, ;login: The USENIX Magazine, April 2011:29-32.

About GNU Niceload

GNU niceload slows down a program when the computer load average (or other system activity) is above a certain limit. When the limit is reached the program will be suspended for some time. If the limit is a soft limit the program will be allowed to run for short amounts of time before being suspended again. If the limit is a hard limit the program will only be allowed to run when the system is below the limit.

This is to announce sed-4.10, a stable release.

It's been more than 3.5 years and quite a few new bug fixes.
Special thanks to Paul Eggert, Bruno Haible and Collin Funk
for all their help, and especially to Bruno for all the gnulib
support and thorough and indefatigable testing and analysis.

There have been 92 commits by 9 people in the 180 weeks since 4.9.

See the NEWS below for a brief summary.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed!
The following people contributed changes to this release:

  Arkadiusz Drabczyk (2)
  Ash Roberts (1)
  Brun Haible (1)
  Bruno Haible (5)
  Collin Funk (5)
  Hans Ginzel (1)
  Jim Meyering (60)
  Paul Eggert (16)
  Weixie Cui (1)

Jim
 [on behalf of the sed maintainers]
==================================================================

Here is the GNU sed home page:
    https://gnu.org/s/sed/

Here are the compressed sources:
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/sed/sed-4.10.tar.gz   (2.7MB)
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/sed/sed-4.10.tar.xz   (1.7MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures:
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/sed/sed-4.10.tar.gz.sig
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/sed/sed-4.10.tar.xz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

Here are the SHA256 and SHA3-256 checksums:

  SHA256 (sed-4.10.tar.gz) = TRef+vkuxNzsVB98Ayvhw7mhhW9JcK25WlBSIXAvUnc=
  SHA3-256 (sed-4.10.tar.gz) = ftB7Hf2uN4RnayBEgasV7KmqZqCxBUj7e+Am6WDaiKk=
  SHA256 (sed-4.10.tar.xz) = uOchgrLslqNXTimYxHt6qmTMIM4ADY6awxPMB87PKMc=
  SHA3-256 (sed-4.10.tar.xz) = bVWJvXR28fvhgP1XTpej6t8V+Bh2YI1lL6aGBy1cG5c=

Verify the base64 SHA256 checksum with 'cksum -a sha256 --check'
from coreutils-9.2 or OpenBSD's cksum since 2007.

Verify the base64 SHA3-256 checksum with 'cksum -a sha3 --check'
from coreutils-9.8.

Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

  gpg --verify sed-4.10.tar.gz.sig

The signature should match the fingerprint of the following key:

  pub   rsa4096/0x7FD9FCCB000BEEEE 2010-06-14 [SCEA]
        Key fingerprint = 155D 3FC5 00C8 3448 6D1E  EA67 7FD9 FCCB 000B EEEE
  uid                   [ unknown] Jim Meyering <jim@meyering.net>
  uid                   [ unknown] Jim Meyering <meyering@fb.com>
  uid                   [ unknown] Jim Meyering <meyering@gnu.org>

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
or that public key has expired, try the following commands to retrieve
or refresh it, and then rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

  gpg --locate-external-key jim@meyering.net

  gpg --recv-keys 7FD9FCCB000BEEEE

  wget -q -O- 'https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=sed&download=1' | gpg --import -

As a last resort to find the key, you can try the official GNU
keyring:

  wget -q https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg
  gpg --keyring gnu-keyring.gpg --verify sed-4.10.tar.gz.sig

This release is based on the sed git repository, available as

  git clone https://https.git.savannah.gnu.org/git/sed.git

with commit 89b7a2224d4faa9d8baf76094b1232ad1477ef3e tagged as v4.10.

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:

  https://gitweb.git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=sed.git;a=shortlog;h=v4.10

or run this command from a git-cloned sed directory:
  git shortlog v4.9..v4.10

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.73.1-b400b
  Automake 1.18.1.91
  Gnulib 2026-04-19 15211966deb52d4cae425c655177a815a88d3fc0

NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 4.10 (2026-04-21) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  sed 's/a/b/g' (and other global substitutions) now works on input
  lines longer than 2GB. Previously, matches beyond the 2^31 byte offset
  would evoke a "panic" (exit 4).
  [bug present since the beginning]

  'sed --follow-symlinks -i' no longer has a TOCTOU race that could let
  an attacker swap a symlink between resolution and open, causing sed to
  read attacker-chosen content and write it to the original target.
  [bug introduced in sed 4.1e]

  sed no longer falsely matches when back-references are combined with
  optional groups (.?) and the $ anchor.  For example, this no longer
  falsely matches the empty string at beginning of line:
    $ echo ab | sed -E 's/^(.?)(.?).?\2\1$/X/'
    Xab
  [bug present since "the beginning"]

  In --posix mode, sed no longer mishandles backslash escapes (\n,
  \t, \a, etc.) after a named character class like [[:alpha:]].
  For example, 's/^A\n[[:alpha:]]\n*/XXX/' would fail to match the
  trailing newline, treating \n as a literal backslash and an 'n'
  rather than a newline.  This happened when an earlier backslash
  escape in the same regex had already been converted, shifting the
  in-place normalization buffer.
  [bug introduced in sed 4.9]

  sed --debug no longer crashes when a label (":") command is compiled
  before the --debug option is processed, e.g., sed -f<(...) --debug.
  [bug introduced in sed 4.7 with --debug]

  sed no longer rejects the documented GNU extension 'a**' (equivalent
  to 'a*') in Basic Regular Expression (BRE) mode.  Previously, this
  worked only with -E (ERE mode), even though grep has always accepted
  it in BRE mode.
  [bug present since "the beginning"]

  sed no longer rejects "\c[" in regular expressions
  [bug present since the beginning]

  'sed --follow-symlinks -i' no longer mishandles an operand that is a
  short symbolic link to a long symbolic link to a file.
  [bug introduced in sed 4.9]

  Fix some some longstanding but unlikely integer overflows.
  Internally, 'sed' now more often prefers signed integer arithmetic,
  which can be checked automatically via 'gcc -fsanitize=undefined'.

** Changes in behavior

  In the default C locale, diagnostics now quote 'like this' (with
  apostrophes) instead of `like this' (with a grave accent and an
  apostrophe).  This tracks the GNU coding standards.

  'sed --posix' now warns about uses of backslashes in the 's' command
  that are handled by GNU sed but are not portable to other
  implementations.

** Build-related

  builds no longer fail on platforms without the <getopt.h> header or
  getopt_long function.
  [bug introduced in sed 4.9]

This is to announce coreutils-9.11, a stable release.

Notable changes include:
 - cut(1), nl(1), and un/expand(1) are multi-byte character aware
 - cut(1) supports new -w, -F, -O options for better compatibility
 - cat(1) and yes(1) use zero-copy I/O on Linux (up to 15x faster)
 - date(1) now parses dot delimited dd.mm.yy format
 - cksum --check uses more defensive file name quoting
 - shuf -i operates up to 2x faster by using unlocked stdio
 - wc -l operates up to 4.5x faster on hosts with neon instructions
 - wc -m is up to 2.6x faster when processing multi-byte characters

There have also been many bug fixes and other changes
as summarized in the NEWS below.

There have been 306 commits by 12 people in the 10 weeks since 9.10
Thanks to everyone who has contributed!

  Bruno Haible (2)                Paul Eggert (15)
  Chris Down (2)                  Pádraig Brady (156)
  Collin Funk (91)                Sam James (1)
  Dr. David Alan Gilbert (1)      Sylvestre Ledru (17)
  Gabriel (1)                     Weixie Cui (2)
  Lukáš Zaoral (2)                oech3 (19)

Pádraig [on behalf of the coreutils maintainers]
==================================================================

Here is the GNU coreutils home page:
    https://gnu.org/s/coreutils/

Here are the compressed sources:
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.11.tar.gz   (16MB)
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.11.tar.xz   (6.3MB)

Here are the GPG detached signatures:
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.11.tar.gz.sig
  https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-9.11.tar.xz.sig

Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
  https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

Here are the SHA256 and SHA3-256 checksums:

  SHA256 (coreutils-9.11.tar.gz) = IDO4owScBr/0mp486nK99Gg7zQy+uXUhHdVtuvi3Nq4=
  SHA3-256 (coreutils-9.11.tar.gz) = TwFrSgPuppf+jNggT+aXj037UfVVS2BmYBxXiPLYKxs=
  SHA256 (coreutils-9.11.tar.xz) = OUAk7aCllVIXztqc0SAeZdyPo6opwpURNaSVIdV8PMM=
  SHA3-256 (coreutils-9.11.tar.xz) = RkpNMip8O4ly+z3Fef9X20AsotbT1ycBZ5UbG84SiNM=

Verify the base64 SHA256 checksum with 'cksum -a sha256 --check'
from coreutils-9.2 or OpenBSD's cksum since 2007.

Verify the base64 SHA3-256 checksum with 'cksum -a sha3 --check'
from coreutils-9.8.

Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact.  First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball.  Then, run a command like this:

  gpg --verify coreutils-9.11.tar.gz.sig

The signature should match the fingerprint of the following key:

  pub   rsa4096/0xDF6FD971306037D9 2011-09-23 [SC]
        Key fingerprint = 6C37 DC12 121A 5006 BC1D  B804 DF6F D971 3060 37D9
  uid                   [ultimate] Pádraig Brady <P@draigBrady.com>
  uid                   [ultimate] Pádraig Brady <pixelbeat@gnu.org>

If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
or that public key has expired, try the following commands to retrieve
or refresh it, and then rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

  gpg --locate-external-key P@draigBrady.com

  gpg --recv-keys DF6FD971306037D9

  wget -q -O- 'https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=coreutils&download=1' | gpg --import -

As a last resort to find the key, you can try the official GNU
keyring:

  wget -q https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg
  gpg --keyring gnu-keyring.gpg --verify coreutils-9.11.tar.gz.sig

This release is based on the coreutils git repository, available as

  git clone https://https.git.savannah.gnu.org/git/coreutils.git

with commit c01fd163a47468a8296fb369f5233853bb551bb6 tagged as v9.11.

For a summary of changes and contributors, see:

  https://gitweb.git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=shortlog;h=v9.11

or run this command from a git-cloned coreutils directory:

  git shortlog v9.10..v9.11

This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
  Autoconf 2.73.1-b400b
  Automake 1.18.1
  Gnulib 2026-04-19 fb7312fa8d3df29f0ca0678f669b9a5b88a078ec
  Bison 3.8.2

NEWS

* Noteworthy changes in release 9.11 (2026-04-20) [stable]

** Bug fixes

  'dd' now always diagnoses partial writes correctly upon write failure.
  Previously it may have indicated that only full writes were performed.
  [This bug was present in "the beginning".]

  'fold' will no longer truncate output when encountering 0xFF bytes.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-9.8]

  'fold' is again responsive to its input.  Previously it would have delayed
  processing until 256KiB was read from the input.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-9.8]

  'kill --help' now has links to valid anchors in the html manual.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-9.10]

  When configured with --enable-systemd, the commands 'pinky',
  'uptime', 'users', and 'who' no longer consider the systemd session
  classes 'greeter', 'lock-screen', 'background', 'background-light',
  and 'none' to be users.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-9.4]

  'pwd' on ancient systems will no longer overflow a buffer
  when operating in deep paths longer than twice the system PATH_MAX.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-9.6]

  'stat --printf=%%N' no longer performs unnecessary checks of the QUOTING_STYLE
  environment variable.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-8.26]

  'timeout' no longer exits abruptly when its parent is the init process, e.g.,
  when started by the entrypoint of a container.
  [bug introduced in coreutils-9.10]

** New Features

  'cut' now supports multi-byte input and delimiters.  Consequently
  the -c option is now honored, and no longer an alias for -b, and
  the -n option is now honored, and no longer ignored.
  Also the -d option supports multi-byte delimiters.

  'cut' adds new options for better compatibility:
  The -w,--whitespace-delimited option was added to support blank aligned fields
  and for better compatibility with FreeBSD/macOS.
  The -O option was added as an alias for the --output-delimiter option,
  for better compatibility with busybox/toybox.
  The -F option was added as an alias for -w -O ' '
  for better compatibility with busybox/toybox.

  'date --date' now parses dot delimited dd.mm.yy format common in Europe.
  This is in addition to the already supported mm/dd/yy and yy-mm-dd formats.

** Changes in behavior

  'cksum --check' now uses shell quoting when required, to more robustly
  escape file names output in diagnostics.
  This also affects md5sum, sha*sum, and b2sum.

** Improvements

  'cat' now uses zero-copy I/O on Linux when appropriate, to improve throughput.
  E.g., throughput improved 6x from 12.9GiB/s to 81.8GiB/s on a Power10 system.

  'df --local' recognises more file system types as remote.
  Specifically: autofs, ncpfs, smb, smb2, gfs, gfs2, userlandfs.

  'df' improves duplicate mount suppression, by checking each mount against
  all previously kept entries for the same device, not just the latest one.

  'expand' and 'unexpand' now support multi-byte characters.

  'groups' and 'id' will now exit sooner after a write error,
  which is significant when listing information for many users.

  'install' now allows the combination of the --compare and
  --preserve-timestamps options.

  'fold', 'join', 'numfmt', 'uniq' now use more consistent blank character
  determination on non GLIBC platforms.  For example \u3000 (ideographic space)
  will be considered a blank character on all platforms.

  'nl' now supports multi-byte --section-delimiter characters.

  'shuf -i' now operates up to two times faster on systems with unlocked stdio
  functions.

  'tac' will now exit sooner after a write error, which is significant when
  operating on a file with many lines.

  'timeout' now properly detects when it is reparented by a subreaper process on
  Linux instead of init, e.g., the 'systemd --user' process.

  'wc -l' now operates up to four and a half times faster on hosts that support
  Neon instructions.

  'wc -m' now operates up to 2.6 times faster on GLIBC when processing
  non-ASCII UTF-8 characters.

  'yes' now uses zero-copy I/O on Linux to significantly increase throughput.
  E.g., throughput improved 15x from 11.6GiB/s to 175GiB/s on a Power10 system.

** Build-related

  ./configure --enable-single-binary=hardlinks is now supported on systems
  with dash as the system shell at /bin/sh.
  [issue introduced in coreutils-9.10]

  The test suite may have failed with a "Hangup" error if run non-interactively.
  [issue introduced in coreutils-9.10]

Dear community

The GTK client 5.0.2 of the GNU Health Hospital and Health Management system has been released!

This is a maintenance patchset that fixes the following issues:

• Unknown icon error when registering gnu health local icons
• Swapped Export - import icons
• Update connection port number in README file
• GNU Health GTK client does not automatically discover plugins from gnuhealth_plugins

You can get the latest GNU Health client from GNU.org, Python Package Index or Codeberg.

Happy hacking!