Risto H. Kurppa recently posted about a bad experience with a free software hacker when Kurppa tried to get access to the most recent revisions of an unpublished program’s source code. We aren’t told what program this is, except that source code is published with certain versions (called “release” versions, ostensibly versions the developers [...]
Dave Cross encourages the dependence upon proprietary software by complaining that the Free Software Foundation’s recent 25th birthday video should have been distributed in non-free formats so people could see the video.
A surface analysis would reveal that proprietors support their own video formats exclusively. A deeper more significant analysis would reveal what users are [...]
Katherine Albrecht, co-author of “Spychips: How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID“, has written an article for Scientific American explaining how we inadvertently consent to lose our privacy and what’s being done about it on a federal level in the US and EU.
If you live in a state bordering [...]
Background
It’s needlessly hard to see a movie on the web because there are no widely-accepted standards for how movies should be encoded as data. Currently popular choices become unpopular later and none of them are well-documented (in a technical sense) or legally in the clear so that all browser programmers can implement them. [...]
More Microsoft advocates than I can link to (1, 2 are a couple) recently wrote non-critically about Microsoft’s recent announcement: Internet Explorer 8, the upcoming version of Microsoft’s proprietary web browser, will pass a standards-compliance test called “Acid2“. As this was covered widely in mainstream corporate press, this is not really news.
What’s news is [...]
The Samba team will soon get the fruits of the EU antitrust suit against Microsoft. Samba is software which allows an operating system to communicate with Microsoft Windows shared folders and printers over a network. The network protocols Microsoft uses are secret and had to be determined by Samba programmers by listening on the [...]
The latest change to iPod software that rendered the audio listening device less interoperable has been broken. This isn’t the first time iPod and iTunes-related algorithms were broken and it won’t be the last.
Read more about the news or download a local copy of the public domain source code that implements the new hashing [...]
Background
Apple has changed the way iPods work so that only Apple’s software can successfully manipulate the songs on an iPod. Until the new arrangement is reverse-engineered, Apple has locked in iPod users into their software, transforming a more useful general-purpose audio listening and file carrying device to something that chiefly obeys Apple’s wishes.
Lennart Poettering [...]
Thanks to Lovely Lizzie for the tip: If you received a passport recently, you’ve probably got one with an RFID tag in it. Radio Frequency Identification tags are a chip and antenna combination that receive a signal from a scanner. When the scanner sends one a signal, the RFID tag uses the energy [...]
AMD owns ATI, a computer videocard manufacturer. Recent ATI videocards have no free software drivers. The proprietary ATI driver which works with a typical GNU/Linux system is poor quality and as a result many users have problems with it. At the Red Hat summit going on right now, an AMD representative discussed [...]
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley