Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Fix, or Toss? The ‘Right to Repair’ Movement Gains Ground

Both Republicans and Democrats are pursuing laws to make it easier for people to fix cellphones, cars, even hospital ventilators. In Europe, the movement is further along.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/climate/right-to-repair.html #bigtech #purism #librem5

Gidimt'en Call Out for Support https://kolektiva.media/videos/watch/0bc98cb1-d60f-4771-a0a6-c9831c6ec0d3

This Year's Arctic Sea Ice Is Failing to Form, Raising a Huge ‘Red Flag’
https://earther.gizmodo.com/this-years-arctic-sea-ice-is-failing-to-form-raising-a-1845462392 #climatechange #climatecrisis #leadonclimate

With more and more people working from home, "bossware" that tracks what workers do is becoming more common. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/inside-invasive-secretive-bossware-tracking-workers

Russia gives whistleblower Edward Snowden permanent residency rights:

https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-security-snowden-russia-int-idUSKBN2771Q3

For the benefit of the mainstream and, especially, the media: the real definition of "hacker" http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/hacker.html

"We moved to GitHub because everyone's already there"

"We shut down the mailing lists because most of our users prefer to use GitLab in their web browser"

"We're rewriting in Rust because we don't really have any non-x86_64 users"

"We're leaving IRC because Discord is more user-friendly"

What all of these arguments have in common is that they exclude people, centralize infrastructure, and eschew free software for proprietary solutions, all in the name of some ill-defined measure of "progress".

Tor is a volunteer-run service that provides both privacy and anonymity online by masking who you are and where you are connecting. Review our guide on using Tor for Linux to get set up. https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/how-use-tor-linux

More bad shit added to #github in their #walledgarden buildup. From HN:

"Ugh, this has Microsoft's playbook written all over it. Introduce a certification, thus increasing the gap between developers who (had their employee) pay Microsoft and developers that didn't. Conflate a generic concept (Git in this case) with Microsoft's specific implementation (Github), muddying the difference in managers' lexicons. Attempt to set Github as a standard to reach in everyone's mind"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24855606

The fact that a lot of people use a particular software application does not, for a second, suggest that it's the best of its kind... nor even any good at all.

The market is largely ignorant, and therefore very vulnerable to marketing. Also, most pundits have a strong incentive to find the products of the richest software author the best (because they tend to spend the most on marketing with "independent" IT journalism titles). All this leads to incredible mediocrity in the software world.