Vishnu @[email protected]

Make Plasma 5.22 great! Join us for Beta Review Day on May 22 and help us squash all the bugs in Plasma 5.22 Beta: http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/plasma-5-22-beta-testing-day

Lemmy is a free open source federated alternative to Reddit. You can follow their official account at:

➡️ @LemmyDev

You can try the flagship instance at https://lemmy.ml

They have now introduced federation between Lemmy instances, so people on one Lemmy instance can interact with people on others. (They are working on federating with the rest of the Fediverse later.)

#Lemmy #Fediverse #ActivityPub #FOSS #Libre #FreeSoftware #OpenSource #SelfHosting #Reddit #HackerNews #Alternatives

After the Five Eyes, the EU Council is now trying to backdoor encryption in messaging apps. We will keep fighting for your right to privacy. 💪 Here is why: https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/eu-backdoor-surveillance
It's good that the MIT uses the same arguments: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/97690
(comic v/Stuart Carlson)

We've just created https://join.lemmy.ml to list public lemmy servers.

#lemmy #activitypub

Ad Observatory is an NYU project that enlists Facebook users to record the ads they see, building a database of the ads Facebook runs and to check whether Facebook is adhering to its own policies, for example, on labeling and limiting political ads

https://adobservatory.org/

1/

GitHub has removed the ability to access youtube-dl's source code due to a DMCA request by the RIAA

... The clear purpose of this source code is to (i) circumvent the technological protection measures used by authorized streaming services such as YouTube, and (ii) reproduce and distribute music videos and sound recordings owned by our member companies without authorization for such use. We note that the source code is described on GitHub as “a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites.” ...

https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/10/2020-10-23-RIAA.md

Micah F. Lee (EFF/The Intercept @micahflee https://nitter.net/micahflee/status/1319746131723628544?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

"RIAA blitz takes down 18 GitHub projects used for downloading YouTube videos"
https://www.zdnet.com/article/riaa-blitz-takes-down-18-github-projects-used-for-downloading-youtube-videos/

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24872911

Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jgub36/youtubedl_just_received_a_dmca_takedown_from_riaa/
https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/jgtzum/youtubedl_repo_had_been_dmcad/
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/jgubfx/youtubedl_github_repo_taken_down_due_to_dmca/
https://old.reddit.com/r/youtubedl/comments/jgttnc/youtubedl_github_repository_disabled_due_to_a/

Reddit search: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/search/?q=youtube-dl+dmca&sort=relevance&t=all

Nitter/Birbsite: https://nitter.net/search?f=tweets&q=youtube-dl+riaa+dmca&since=&until=&near=

Censorship, propaganda, surveillance, and targeted manipulation are inherent characteristics of monopoly: https://joindiaspora.com/posts/7bfcf170eefc013863fa002590d8e506

RMS, "The Right to Read" (1997): https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

Remember that the RIAA is a bad-publicity-deflection cartel of its major members. These are:
#Sony
#SonyMusic
#UniversalMusic
#AtlanticRecords
#Disney
#ExcelerationMusic
#InterscopeGeffen
#NonesuchRecords
#PartisanRecords
#ProvidentMusic
#SireRecords
#TommyBoy
#WarnerMusic

#DMCA #youtubedl #RIAA #MPAA #github #Censorship #Surveillance #Propaganda #Manipulation #Monoply #CensorshipPropagandaSurveillanceMonopoly #TheRightToRead #EFF

Happy Free Software Day!

I'm accidentally celebrating by just learning about all the cool organizations and people working on free software in India. As in, I learned about FSFI first, and then I pulled on further threads from there and found more orgs, and then I discovered on their news pages that today is FSD. 😀

FSF India fsf.org.in/ @fsfi

Swathanthra Malayalam Computing smc.org.in/ @smc

Software Freedom Law Center, India sflc.in/ @sflcin

Free Software Community of India fsci.org.in/

The FSCI don't seem to have an official account on Fedi or Diaspora, but I'm now following some individuals mentioned on their website, by just searching for their usernames on Fedi and Diaspora.
Free Software Community of India

Current Etherium Network Fees Are Killing CryptoCurrency Tokens Like The #Brave Browsers #BAT Currency. Smaller amount of digital currency tokens on the #Etherium blockchain have become worthless due to the unusually high transaction fees.
https://linuxreviews.org/Current_Etherium_Network_Fees_Are_Killing_CryptoCurrency_Tokens_Like_The_Brave_Browsers_BAT_Currency

📦 libvarnam-ibus now added to #AUR

#Malayalam -> #മലയാളം

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/libvarnam-ibus-git

This week in KDE: Elisa displays the progress of the playing song inline and allows you to customize the sidebar, the Disk Usage viewer recovers a classic widget design and KDE's remote desktop session viewer, KRDC, solves its cursor lagging problem.

https://pointieststick.com/2020/07/10/this-week-in-kde-new-features-galore/

Why Mastodon and the fediverse are “doomed to fail”

-> a small rant about how the profit lens distorts our understanding of success vs. failure:

https://write.as/eloquence/why-mastodon-and-the-fediverse-are-doomed-to-fail

Chapter 99 in The Tech Industry Is Broken With Problems It Has No Desire To Fix.

Tech corporations demand "freedom" to exploit the software commons without contributing to it. To use open source communities and their volunteers as unpaid interns, while keeping the platforms they build on top of their work proprietary, and patent-encumbered. To ensure their ability to keep doing this, they run a constant PR offensive against copyleft licenses that oblige reciprocity, framing them as a denial of developer freedom (to prevent users and other developers using their freedoms).