The Brooklyn Public Library Gives Every Teenager in the U.S. Free Access to Censored Books
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Open Technology Fund Announces ‘Free and Open Source Software’ Sustainability Fund
https://www.opentech.fund/news/open-technology-fund-announces-free-and-open-source-software-sustainability-fund/
> The Open Technology Fund is pleased to announce the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Sustainability Fund, a new mechanism to support the long-term maintenance of FOSS projects and the communities that sustain them.
At #FOSDEM, @marcel_kolaja will present the #EU pilot project to look into open-sourcing the EU's apps and publishing them outside of #BigTech including on @fdroidorg. @eighthave will join, talking about how F-Droid will help pull the EU towards #FreeSoftware. Join us! https://fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/eu_app_stores/
@sergii yes, that is one case. If you read the whole article, you'll also see that some soldiers are calling the hotline from Russia before they've even made it to Ukraine.
Imagine if there was a billion in aid to #Ukraine to convince more Russian soldiers to desert. #NonViolent tactics like this are effective, and are much cheaper and vastly less destructive than the many 10s of billions in military aid that is flowing there.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/26/ukraine-hotline-encouraging-russians-to-surrender
The Eclipse Foundation has studied the Cyber Resilience Act and is very worried about the implications for open source foundations.
The DEA issued me a glomar answer in response to my FOIA request on whether they acquired phone hacking tech Graphite from Paragon.
Even though the NYTimes reported the DEA acquired the phone hacking tech.
https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/paragongraphite-137633/?
Spent half a day on 6 lines of code. Why is web-development always a major pita? Anyway when this gets deployed it might finally become possible to share links to apps on #FDroid here, without #mastodon getting all confused and rendering wrong previews.
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroid-website/-/merge_requests/899
@travisfw @fdroidorg it is still an open question who that funding will go to, as far as I know, the default for EU Pilot Projects is to do them internally.
#FDroid in an #EU "Pilot project — De-monopolized access to EU applications"... "The focus of the pilot project includes EU institutions releasing their apps on existing alternative app stores, including f-droid that aims at promoting apps released under open source licenses"
https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-14783-2022-ADD-5/en/pdf
Bits from the release team: #bookworm freeze started https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/01/msg00004.html
Those who follow me on The Bad Place have heard me repeat this a thousand times, But once more won't hurt.
Election security is incredibly complex, full of seemingly impossible tradeoffs. But disinformation about supposed "rigged" elections is perhaps the most serious threat to election integrity today,
The best defense is to learn how elections actualy work! Becoming a poll worker is a great way to do that
Also, this National Academies study is a terrific resource:
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/25120/securing-the-vote-protecting-american-democracy
@fdroidorg To be a little more specific. Non-free (aka proprietary, aka the opposite of free and open source) software is not allowed on the official f-droid.org reposiory. Most trackers are non-free. That's why they violate our policies and have to be removed, or they would prevent and app from being published. FOSS trackers are allowed, but will be tagged with the tracking anti-feature warning. However, those seem to be rather rare.
Recommendation engines based on tracking individual users' behavior will always be dangerous. They are fatally flawed and not beneficial to humanity, even if they are free software and publicly audited. They inevitably result in someone invisibly controlling many others as they are in the process of thinking. That said, they will always be with us, so we must push for regulation of how they are used. The standard #Mastodon experience does not use such algorithms, but they are coming soon.
This level of vigilance is hard, so we have added another layer of defense in the upcoming #FDroid client v1.16 release, currently in beta. We've moved the database to be based on #Room and its built-in #security measures, then had that new code audited https://f-droid.org/2022/12/22/third-audit-results.html 2/2