Vishnu @[email protected]

A sad day for #FreeSoftware, #Kerala forgets its legacy in leading the world and falls for Google's 'free of cost' service.

https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/kite-rolls-out-g-suite-platform-for-online-classes-in-kerala/article35217726.ece

I think we should educate teachers and general public about dangers of surveillance capitalism where you pay with your data, privacy and even at the cost of losing our political agency to big companies. #Google is providing 'Free of Cost' only because they know to make money out of people's data and has a monopoly in online ads. Would you join me?

Firefox, Safari and Brave have all declined to mark off Google’s latest addition to its Black Mirror bingo card, the Idle Detection API.

https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/#idle-detection-api

https://lists.webkit.org/pipermail/webkit-dev/2020-October/031565.html

https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/18269

Well this is interesting. An original Sci-Fi show being presented in short segments on Youtube and Vimeo. Production looks good and acting seems legit. Hopefully the story is good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVuZDtz-Aes

Yak Shaving,
my new favorite expression.😄

Today's side-quest: fixing contrast issues in light theme of my website

The workflow:

1. Use Firefox's accessibility tool: "Check for issues -> Contrast"
2. Use VS Code to convert colours in the #CSS from hex codes to hsl values
3. Reduce lightness value, typically to 33%
4. Repeat

#accessiblity

Even with 20/20 vision, it looks much more readable to me now.

August Community Update!

We're excited to announce the
#PineNote: fast refresh e-ink panel, 4GB RAM, 128GB eMMC, Rockchip RK3566- $399

Also:
- #PinePhone keyboard enters production - coming soon

- #PinebookPro new touchpad firmware

- #PineTime & #PineDio

- development updates

And _much_ more!

https://www.pine64.org/2021/08/15/introducing-the-pinenote/

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

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

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.