DanielTux @danielst@librem.one

Aspen batch phones going out next will get an anodized chassis - look at those kill switches. Thank you for your patience as we incrementally ship through tens of thousands of Librem 5 phones over the coming months. Yes, we know you're excited, we are too and you will be impressed! #Purism #Librem5 #Linux

Yes, we know you're excited; Yes, you can see the anodized chassis we got into this Aspen batch; Yes, we are asking you to be patient as we incrementally ship through tens of thousands of Librem 5 phones over the next handful of months; Yes, you will get yours. Yes, you will be impressed. @purism #librem5

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Mastodon, is in fact, ActivityPub/Mastodon, or as I've recently taken to calling it, ActivityPub plus Mastodon. Mastodon is not a social network unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning ActivityPub system made useful by the ActivityPub namespaces, vocabulary and non-normative sections comprising a full social network as defined by W3C Recommendation 23 January 2018.

Many computer users use a modified version of the ActivityPub social network every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of ActivityPub which is widely used today is often called "Mastodon", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the ActivityPub social network, developed by the W3C.

There really is a Mastodon, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the social network they use. Mastodon is the frontend: the program in the system that lets you interacts with the posts of all the people you follow. The frontend is an essential part of a social network, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete social network. Mastodon is normally used in combination with the ActivityPub social network: the whole system is basically ActivityPub with Mastodon added, or ActivityPub/Mastodon. All the so-called "Mastodon" distributions are really distributions of ActivityPub/Mastodon.

GNOME Foundation facing patent lawsuit over Shotwell https://www.gnome.org/news/2019/09/gnome-foundation-facing-lawsuit-from-rothschild-patent-imaging/ - The Debian project stands with the @GNOME Foundation against this attack on free software and its communities.

»Warum Vermummungsverbote problematisch sind. Nicht nur in Hongkong. – netzpolitik.org «

https://netzpolitik.org/2019/warum-vermummungsverbote-problematisch-sind-nicht-nur-in-hongkong/

»In Hongkong wurde heute ein Vermummungsverbot eingeführt, in Deutschland gibt es ein solches Gesetz seit den 80er Jahren.

In Zeiten von Gesichtserkennung müssen wir über die Abschaffung des Vermummungsverbotes nachdenken, um das Versammlungsrecht und damit die Demokratie zu stärken.

Ein Kommentar.«

Yesterday I blogged about how I’m starting to post the links I previously posted on @indie / the Ind.ie site to my own site (and on here.)

Also I wrote a couple of reasons why… including how often my work is attributed to @aral

https://laurakalbag.com/introducing-lauras-lens/

If anyone has been fooled by Microsoft's widely trumpeted "love" for Linux and Free and Open Source Software (#FOSS)... I encourage you to watch this German-made investigative documentary and consider which view you think is more credible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duaYLW7LQvg

@lightweight looks like https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=duaYLW7LQvg works if using the web UI to download a webm version

Synapse 1.4.0 released

Wheyhey as I live and breathe 1.4.0 is here! 1.4.0 should be considered ‘The Privacy Release’ and is the cumulation of a huge body of work…

Tutorial: Developing Your First Librem 5 App. Hello World :) https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Apps/Tutorials/First_Application/index.html #Purism #Librem5 #GNOME #Python #Linux #mobiledev #mobileapp #mobileappdevelopment

Good news as EU formally adopts Ecodesign measures:

- As of 2021, all TVs, monitors, fridges, freezers, washing machines, washer-dryers, dishwashers and lighting products on the EU market will have to meet minimum repairability requirements
- Manufacturers will have to ensure easy disassembly with commonly available tools.
- Spare parts and repair information will have to be made available to professional repairers for a minimum number of years.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-49884827
https://www.coolproducts.eu/news/eu-to-pull-plug-on-wasteful-unrepairable-products

Did you know the Zorin OS team is building something awesome to increase #Linux adoption in schools and governments?

It's a tool they hope will eventually be used by other desktop distros like @elementary, @ubuntu and Pop OS.

Listen to my interview with Artyom Zorin:

https://linuxforeveryone.fireside.fm/11

@micahbp @purism

Pure Maps with Wayland was looking good more than a month ago. And a lot of work was getting pushed in the past couple weeks, so likely there are ongoing improvements.

https://devtube.dev-wiki.de/videos/watch/a9f2058a-7a20-4ad7-8ebe-b79325e3a851

Adversarial Interoperability

“Interoperability” is the act of making a new product or service work with an existing product or service: modern civilization depends on the standards and practices that allow you to put any dish into a dishwasher or any USB charger into any car’s cigarette lighter.

But interoperability is just the ante. For a really competitive, innovative, dynamic marketplace, you need adversarial interoperability: that’s when you create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them. Think of third-party printer ink, alternative app stores, or independent repair shops that use compatible parts from rival manufacturers to fix your car or your phone or your tractor.

Adversarial interoperability was once the driver of tech’s dynamic marketplace, where the biggest firms could go from top of the heap to scrap metal in an eyeblink, where tiny startups could topple dominant companies before they even knew what hit them.

But the current crop of Big Tech companies has secured laws, regulations, and court decisions that have dramatically restricted adversarial interoperability. From the flurry of absurd software patents that the US Patent and Trademark Office granted in the dark years between the first software patents and the Alice decision to the growing use of "digital rights management" to create legal obligations to use the products you purchase in ways that benefit shareholders at your expense, Big Tech climbed the adversarial ladder and then pulled it up behind them.

That can and should change. As Big Tech grows ever more concentrated, restoring adversarial interoperability must be a piece of the solution to that concentration: making big companies smaller makes their mistakes less consequential, and it deprives them of the monopoly profits they rely on to lobby for rules that make competing with them even harder.

For months, we have written about the history, theory, and practice of adversarial interoperability. This page rounds up our writing on the subject in one convenient resource that you can send your friends, Members of Congress, teachers, investors, and bosses as we all struggle to figure out how to re-decentralize the Internet and spread decision-making power around to millions of individuals and firms, rather than the executives of a handful of tech giants.

Interoperability: Fix the Internet, Not the Tech Companies: a taxonomy of different kinds of interoperability, from “indifferent interoperability” (I don't care if you plug your thing into my product) to “cooperative interoperability” (please plug your thing into my product) to “adversarial interoperability” (dang it, stop plugging your thing into my product!).
Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today’s Monopolies: The history of adversarial interoperability and how it drove the tech revolutions of the past four decades, and what we can do to restore it.
Interoperability and Privacy: Squaring the Circle: Big Tech companies created a privacy dumpster fire on the Internet, but now they say they can’t fix it unless we use the law to ban competitors from plugging new services into their flaming dumpsters. That’s awfully convenient, don't you think?
A Cycle of Renewal, Broken: How Big Tech and Big Media Abuse Copyright Law to Slay Competition: Cable TV exists because of adversarial interoperability, which gave it the power to disrupt the broadcasters. Today, Big Cable is doing everything it can to stop anyone from disrupting it.
‘IBM PC Compatible’: How Adversarial Interoperability Saved PCs From Monopolization: IBM spent more than a decade on the wrong end of an antitrust action over its mainframe monopoly, but when it created its first PCs, scrappy upstarts like Phoenix and Compaq were able to clone its ROM chips and create a vibrant, fast-moving marketplace.
SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects: Microsoft came this close to owning the modern office by locking up the intranet in a proprietary network protocol called SMB...That is, until a PhD candidate released SAMBA, a free/open product that adversarially interoperated with SMB and allows Macs, Unix systems, and other rivals to live on the same LANs as Windows machines.
Felony Contempt of Business Model: Lexmark’s Anti-Competitive Legacy: Printer companies are notorious for abusive practices, but Lexmark reached a new low in 2002, when it argued that copyright gave it the right to decide who could put carbon powder into empty toner cartridges. Even though Lexmark failed, it blazed a trail that other companies have enthusiastically followed, successfully distorting copyright to cover everything from tractor parts to browser plugins.
Adblocking: How About Nah?: The early Web was infested with intrusive pop-up ads, and adversarial interoperability rendered them invisible. Today, adblocking is the largest boycott in history, doing more to curb bad ads and the surveillance that goes with them than any regulator.

Skurrile Geschichte aus dem Birdcage: DLF mach ein Interview mit Snowden via Videochat. Im Chatroom: DLF, Snowden... und ein unbekannter dritter. Erste Vermutung: Backuprechner der Redaktionstechnik - die nach Rücksprache aber keine Backupverbindung im Chat hat 🤔
https://twitter.com/skoldehoff/status/1173639238329520128

Great to see #Unity3d games running so well on the #Librem5 https://youtu.be/JEI6AwjSpiA Thank you for testing and sharing http://www.roired.com #Purism #PureOS #Linux #gamedev #indiegames #unity #csharp

So I'm not going to announce it properly until tomorrow but I've just deployed Site.js version 12.6.0, which adds Windows 10 support. If any of you want to kick the tires and let me know if the sky falls down or anything, I'd appreciate it.

It also has macOS Catalina support and a bit more polish in general across all platforms.

https://sitejs.org

#SiteJS #SmallTechnology

First bits of fixes for the #librem5 (it uses another chip to drive the backlight than it's devkit) making it mainline already: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-leds/ba610ed3-19b7-3e10-7032-453e0cb05704@gmail.com/

#linux #kernel #librem5 @purism

As I am often asked where you can watch the documentary about EU's dependency on #Microsoft. Here the links:

English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duaYLW7LQvg&list=PLIRVyxfizePF-IrUa57ARJsWq7fKSoocJ

German: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZaDuinGf2o&list=PLIRVyxfizePF-IrUa57ARJsWq7fKSoocJ&index=2

#publiccode #freesoftware