April 2015 - Free-software-melb - lists.softwarefreedom.com.au

Updated letter to Mozilla for Day Against DRM
by Ben M 02 May '15

02 May '15

Hi all, Thanks for the feedback for our "Day Against DRM" letter to Mozilla. I have made a new revision based on that and have posted it to the wiki. There's still about a week to go so any further feedback or refinements welcome. http://freesoftware.org.au/wiki/advocacy/LetterToMozilla Ben M

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GNEWS from last meeting
by Scott Junner 30 Apr '15

30 Apr '15

My deepest apologies for not posting this earlier. I am not worthy of forgiveness. Here is the GNEWS. The Award for the Advancement of Free Software is given annually to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software. This year, it was given to Sébastien Jodogne for his work on free software medical imaging with his project Orthanc. One of Jodogne's nominators said, "The Orthanc project started in 2011, when Sébastien noticed in his work as a medical imaging engineer that hospitals are very exposed to lock-in problems when dealing with their medical imaging flows....Freely creating electronic gateways between imaging modalities (autorouting), between medical departments, or even between hospitals remains a challenging task. But the amount of medical images that are generated, analyzed, and exchanged by hospitals is dramatically increasing. Medical imaging is indeed the first step to the treatment of more and more illnesses, such as cancers or cardiovascular diseases." ---------------------------------------------- Kat Walsh joins FSF board of directors A lawyer with extensive background in the free culture movement, Walsh brings a wealth of experience with law and licensing to the FSF board. In particular, her skills will help support and oversee the FSF's licensing work on the GNU General Public License (GPL) as well as the LGPL and GFDL. Kat worked as a staff lawyer at Creative Commons, where she was on the team that drafted the last major revision to the family of Creative Commons licenses, completed in November 2013 with the release of the 4.0 licenses. An active contributor to Wikipedia, Walsh was elected to the board of directors of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for three terms between 2006 and 2013 and served as the organization's chair from 2012 to 2013. ---------------------------------------- Netflix is trying to weave digital rights management into HTML5. DefectivebyDesign.org currently have a campaign running to work with World wide web consortium (W3C) to make sure that does not happen. They would like our signatures on a petition. You can do that digitally by going to http://www.defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5 The Defective by Design website was mysteriously unavailable today so I could not get information on the action day. -------------------------------------------------------------- Embedded linux conference happened on March 23 - 25. You can get your hands on notes and videos from that conference at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/embedded-linux-conference There's talk notes on UAV's and Connected Cars, Robotics and Open Hardware, along with the regular way-too-deep-for-me hyper techie linux system kernal freaky stuff. Lots of stuff. Well worth a peruse if you think computers are fun. ---------------------------------------------------- GNU Mailman mailing list manager project aims to release its 3.0 suite in April, during the sprints following PyCon North America. Mailman 3 is a major rewrite that includes a new user membership system, a REST API, an archiver replacement for Pipermail, and a better web interface for subscriptions and settings — but it carries with it a few new dependencies as well. Brave system administrators can try out the fifth beta version now Full announcement and links for downloads found at https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-announce/2014-December/000197.html ------------------------------------------------------ Since opening its doors in 2008, GitHub has grown to become the largest active project-hosting service for open-source software. But it has also attracted a fair share of criticism for some of its implementation choices—with one of the leading complaints being that it takes a lax approach to software licensing. That, in turn, leads to a glut of repositories bearing little or no licensing details. The company recently announced a new tool to help combat the license-confusion issue: a site-wide API for querying and reporting license information. Full story at https://lwn.net/Articles/636261/ --------------------------------------- Your (Australian) Internet Service Provider (ISP) could soon start handing out your personal information to corporations. http://action.sumofus.org/a/corporate-isp-abuse/?akid=9883.831468.iLt0Vq&rd… Google Code to shut down in August http://pipedot.org/story/2015-03-12/google-code-shutting-down Gitorious to shut down in May https://about.gitlab.com/2015/03/03/gitlab-acquires-gitorious/ XFCE release 4.12 brings refinement and improvements http://www.xfce.org/about/news/?post=1425081600 0 A.D. Alpha 18 Rhododactylos released http://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=19709 Mesa 10.5 Release Brings Skylake Support, OpenGL 4 partially implemented http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-10.5-Released DRI3 Support Finally Added To AMD's Radeon X.Org Driver "For users means improved window resizing, improved synchronization of rendering, and slightly better security" http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-DRI3-DDX-Present "Hello Barbie" Listens To Children Via Cloud https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35XCUbscziE http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org/action/shut-down-hello-barbie User-Focused Security: End-to-End Encryption Extension for Yahoo Mail (fork of Google's End-to-End browser extension) http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/113708033335/user-focused-security-end-to-end-… Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 5 year support ends at the end of the month. Kaspersky outs hard drive infecting malware http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2015/02/17/equation-group/1 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/12/nsas_on_drugs_infosec_bods_unveil_s… https://puri.sm/posts/purism-avoids-common-nsa-drive-firmware-virus/ Software Freedom Conservancy Funds GPL Suit Against VMWare http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/03/05/1721231/software-freedom-conservan… New Zealand Spied On Nearly Two Dozen Pacific Countries http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/03/04/1748223/new-zealand-spied-on-nearly-… Feds Admit Stingrays Can Disrupt Cell Service of Bystanders http://www.wired.com/2015/03/feds-admit-stingrays-can-disrupt-cell-service-… UK Gov't Asks: Is 10 Years In Jail the Answer To Online Pirates? http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/03/08/134235/uk-govt-asks-is-10-years-in-j… China takes Under the Dome anti-pollution film offline http://m.bbc.com/news/world-asia-31778115 Other interesting topics I had in mind, but weren't particularly newsworthy specifically for March: AMDGPU kernel driver for Radeon R9 3XX and above. NVIDIA Alerts Nouveau: They're Starting To Sign/Validate GPU Firmware Images http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc5ODA

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Radeon GPUs and proprietary microcode discussion
by Adam Bolte 30 Apr '15

30 Apr '15

There's some interesting discussion happening currently around AMD's proprietary microcode for its Radeon hardware on Phoronix: http://www.phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?116965-Nouveau-NVIDIA-s-New-H… (scroll down to the third last comment on the page, and continue from there) bridgeman is one of the engineers at AMD who knows a lot about the GNU/Linux GPU driver developers and hardware manufacturing process, so it's great to have someone such as him discuss his personal views on the microcode issue. It's especially interesting to learn that both AMD and the FSF tried to get board vendors to distribute the microcode on a chip instead of relying on operating system distributions to deliver it, but nobody wanted to pick up the expense for the flash chips. Anyway, I think some of you will find it worth a read (but mind the trolls!), and it would be a good time to post anything else on the topic that needs to be said while we have the attention on this issue from somebody at AMD. Cheers, Adam

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Re: [free-software-melb] Updated letter to Mozilla for Day Against DRM
by Michael Verrenkamp 29 Apr '15

29 Apr '15

Probably also a good idea to have one simple line somewhere towards to end to summarise the whole effort.Something like this... "Putting any company and its closed formats above the users freedoms, doesn't help the user. It only demonstrates a lack of respect for those who have contributed, used and ultimately driven such wonderful projects as your own to the position you are in now." Only if you feel it is necessary. -Michael -- Sent from my GNU/Linux-Libre box. Run free. http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html Come Visit Free Software Australia - http://freesoftware.org.au/ jabjabs(a)fastmail.com.au

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Re: [free-software-melb] Adam and Andrew make Free Software Melbourne awesome (Ben Sturmfels)
by Michael Verrenkamp 29 Apr '15

29 Apr '15

"I should clarify - the chaos was of course having 3 people called Ben, not from using fully free software. We've been doing free software audio conferencing for a couple of years now." Sounds like my kind of chaos... we need more Bens. Also it is pretty much expected that free software audio conferencing to work fairly well nowadays, it is one of the more modern era software functions that have been solved fairly comprehensively. -- Sent from my GNU/Linux-Libre box. Run free. http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html Come Visit Free Software Australia - http://freesoftware.org.au/ jabjabs(a)fastmail.com.au

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Adam and Andrew make Free Software Melbourne awesome
by Ben Sturmfels 28 Apr '15

28 Apr '15

Hi Folks, Free Software Melbourne is awesome because people like Adam Bolte and Andrew Spiers make it so. We thank you both for your time and effort organising the monthly meetups, finding interesting speakers, running Software Freedom Day, organising campaigns, hosting games nights and much more. Adam has been our President for the last year and Secretary the year before. He's made sure that we're always up-to-date with the Gnews and the latest in free software gaming. He also hosts our website out of his home (see why)[1]. Andrew has been Vice-President for the last year. He hasn't been able to attend our monthly meetups for a little while, but we're all missing him and hope see him soon. Following the March meetup, Scott Junner and Ben Minerds now have joined Ben Finney and myself on the mostly Bens committee[2] for the coming year. Our first (fully free software) audio conference was amusingly chaotic. We're looking forward to lots of fun free software activities this year. Regards, Ben x 3 + Scott [1] see why: http://freesoftware.org.au/about/ [2] committee: http://freesoftware.org.au/melbourne/committee/

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