Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one
Joined Aug 2019
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
The #European #standards being developed to allow compliance with the Cyber Resilience Act have unusually high participation from #OpenSource community members. As a result many of the draft standards are being developed in markdown and are available for public review in ETSI's Gitlab instance. You will find links next to each standard on this page:
https://www.stan4cra.eu/etsi-tc-cyber
Positive contributions are actively invited. I'm vice-chair of the committee hosting the work and I approve this message 🙂
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
Formal court orders? Subpoenas? Vague emails from law enforcement? Pings from regulatory bodies you never knew even existed? Oh, they all spell one thing: government requests!
Yes, #FDroid legal series continues, episode four.
What to do or not do when authorities come knocking: https://f-droid.org/2025/10/07/when-authorities-come-knocking-how-to-handle-requests-for-information.html
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
Interesting developments regarding the EU chat control proposal. I'm seeing posts preemptively celebrating that Germany will block it, but I'm not sure what that is based on. It's clear that we need to keep the pressure up.
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
@eighthave Yes, it was formed by Chris Simmonds and others following a talk last year at LPC. We wrote about the talk here: https://lwn.net/Articles/992992/
@jzb ah yes, I see it now https://yewtu.be/watch?v=fMuva71ryeg
@commonsguy Thanks, are you involved in it at all?
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
We did it: 🇩🇪Germany will OPPOSE Chat Control! 🥳
Thanks everyone for writing to the ministers. 🫶
#ChatControl will not get a majority in the EU Council - at least for now.
Anyone know anything about this new "AOSP Devs" group? It seems like it is trying to be like a community for free software devs to work on AOSP (e.g. outside of #Google
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
I know some of us are really angered by #Meta's decision to stop running political, electoral and social issue ads in the EU.
I understand this will force many civil society orgs to painfully disentangle their own #campaigning from #Meta platforms.
But in my books it's a win-win: CSOs win because they finally break free from an abusive relationship, and society wins because less of our political debates and election campaigns are run on toxic #BigTech platforms.
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
I've been an Android developer for … *checks calendar* … more than 15 years. It was a nice enough platform and the developer community is awesome.
But with Google's planned changes to turn Android into yet another walled garden, I'm seriously considering doing something else 😞
@gerhardbeck @don_atoms @marcprux @fdroidorg we're working on getting as much out there as possible. It would be very helpful if others also contributed!
@abacabadabacaba It is pretty clear that most parents around the world do believe that major harms come from the internet and that's why so many are supporting these kinds of measures.
And implementing an age-verification service that is provably private is really not that hard, especially for a $75 billion industry.
Tor and zero-knowledge proofs are well known existing techniques that are enough to do this. It could work in the browser like how WebAuthn does.
@padraic @fdroidorg all good ideas that I support! Those already working on supporting DMA are tiny teams, so let's open this up to community contribution! I'm already in over my head (but enjoying it!) So I can't do more. If people make contributions, we can find time to review and give input. Any ideas on where to coordinate this? I'm partial to the F-Droid https://f-droid.org/about/#contact
Otherwise, donations do directly support this work: https://f-droid.org/donate/
A key problem in the debate around #Israel/#Palestine is that it is framed as two sides of one coin: either you support Israel otherwise you support Palestine. I support none of those in power there, #Netanyahu, #Hamas, Palestinian Authority, the Israeli regime, etc. are all corrupt, brutal and lead to suffering for the vast majority of the people they claim to represent. Only those in power benefit currently. I support good governance for all the people who live there.
If we want to make this #EU #BrainGain permanent, and make real research centers, we'll have to do more than just be less bad than Trump. Academic culture everywhere in Europe is very conservative and hierarchical. Researchers massed in the #US because academia there are more focused on the work, and less about who is who, and who has which title. Austrian Academy of Sciences celebrates "Thanks to Trump we are seeing this brain gain" rather than "our great universities"
https://www.politico.eu/article/european-research-council-funding-us-researchers-relocation-europe/
Hans-Christoph Steiner
boosted
Broken links aside (fix incoming), #FDroid raises the case against the #Google developer forced registration once again.
We'll skip the small talk, go read, and better yet, spread this wide and far: https://f-droid.org/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html so people are made aware and actions can be taken and #Android is kept truly open!
#EU citizens support actions against #BigTech. About 90% of those polled support them. So #Apple really don't not care about #democracy. Mmmm too much sweet monopoly profits 🤑
https://www.politico.eu/article/europeans-agree-eu-should-enforce-rules-big-tech-says-poll/
#BigTech #EU #EuropeanCommission #DMA #DigitalMarketsAct #DigitalSovereignity
@abacabadabacaba I agree with EFF that using credit cards, driver's licenses, etc is problematic. That's my point, there are well known methods for exchanging authentication privately. That industry has the money to develop software they need.
That industry also has a long and wide track record of all sorts of abuse and exploitation. Instead of earnestly engaging with the real harms, they are just fighting this to protect their profits. EFF should know better to be joining that effort.
Wow is #Apple shameless in their attacks on the #DigitalMarketsAct! Yes, the #DMA affects them in ways they don't like, that's why we have the it! Then they do all this crap instead of earnestly engaging with the #EU democratic process. And now they are lobbying to have this very popular law repealed. This just reconfirms how much the world needs to break the #BigTech monopolies. They have more money than sense and are resorting to despotic tactics to protect profits.
@skorp @aleksandrayulia@floss.social that comment is definitely interesting, but difficult to unpack. Is there any more info on it? DMCA is US law, would this approach be legal elsewhere, like Brazil, Canada or EU?
Joined Aug 2019
