Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one

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/

🗓️ This Saturday we will join @fosdem to introduce the work of 🇪🇺 Open Source Program Office (@EC_OSPO)

With over 750 lecturers and 8000 participants, FOSDEM is the largest conference in Europe that promotes the use of free and open source software.

Learn more ➡️ bit.ly/3DH70M7

View from the inside of a cello (photographer unknown).

The Eclipse Foundation has studied the Cyber Resilience Act and is very worried about the implications for open source foundations.

https://eclipse-foundation.blog/2023/01/15/european-cyber-resiliency-act-potential-impact-on-the-eclipse-foundation/

#CRA #OpenSource #Policy

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/?

cropped + added alt text

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

#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

title text: If you think THAT'S unethical, you should see the stuff we approved via our Placebo IRB.

(https://xkcd.com/2726)
(https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2726)

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.

The Twitter API lockout of third-party apps is only the latest reminder of centralization's most important rule: The platform owner has the right to capriciously wreck the businesses of people who accepted the platform's invitation to run a business on the platform.

#DRM isn't just an annoyance -- it's a violation of your right to use the items you own as you see fit. Learn more about our Defective by Design campaign at http://defectivebydesign.org, and follow our campaign account at @endDRM

The release of subfolders for iOS is experiencing a short delay. Apparently, Apple doesn't take kindly to referencing other "mobile devices" in the What's New section of an update.

To be clear, we included no mention of Android in this submission.

This type of overly restrictive behavior is unacceptable and is a clear example of why open source software is important. A single company should not have this kind of market control.