Hi

As we all know the XZ-Backdoor showed how open source can help to find out how and when things happened. You can look back into the source code, commits and comments to see what happened. Many started to talk about what it means regarding open source, and also showed that security is a very important part of computers and software.

But the XZ-Incident showed again one of the biggest problems of FOSS (and OSS), the lack of support the maintainers and contributors get. The maintainer of XZ (before he got replaced by Jia Tan via a social engineer attack), talked about mental issues and overall many things to look after. He was the only maintainer for a library that is used in many big Linux distributions but no one thought maybe to help him or support him.

We all use FOSS projects either knowingly or unknowingly (the XKDC comic comes to mind with the Nebraska maintainer project) and we all love and fight for open and free (libre) software. Simply using and pushing it is not enough we need to support the people that code, test and maintain the projects, libraries, programs that we use. If we don't, it will crash down on us sometime in the future.

When a friend does something for you, you say thank you and maybe buy him/her a beer. Why not do that too for a converter you used or some cool little terminal addition you found and now can't live without it?

As an experiment, make a list of all FOSS/OSS things you use in your daily life that you know of, and then look them up to see if they need funding or in general how they stand. Maybe you can donate to a few of them.

Make FOSS not only a philosophy but also a community that looks after each other.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.ch/post/113885

Lieutenant General Timothy D. Haugh is very clear on section 702:

"In my experience it is absolutely essential," he told lawmakers.

New York Times on Section 702: https://www.nytimes.com/article/warrantless-surveillance-section-702.html

A very "good" designed power point of section 702 by the US government: https://www.dni.gov/files/icotr/Section702-Basics-Infographic.pdf

The law text and section 702 (page 4), I had to search way too long to get to that, mostly you just find an overview by a three letter agency to justify the section. It is like the government does not want that you read it in full: https://www.congress.gov/110/plaws/publ261/PLAW-110publ261.pdf

cross-posted from: https://feddit.ch/post/91950

Meta is one of the biggest privacy offenders,, not suprising that they already seem to break EU privacy law.

Some section sof the article:

Upcoming data privacy regulations are preventing Meta's new microblogging app "Threads" from launching in European Union (EU) markets. Experts say this is only the beginning of the privacy battle facing te Twitter clone.

Judging by its entry in the Apple app store, it's no wonder that Threads is being shielded from EU scrutiny. Browsing history, geolocations, health and financial information, and much more are all up for grabs. There's even a dedicated category for "sensitive information" which, according to Apple's documentation, includes "racial or ethnic data, sexual orientation, pregnancy or childbirth information, disability, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, political opinion, genetic information, or biometric data."

cross-posted from: https://feddit.ch/post/88668

I'm still reading into it but this seems to be another step of the UK-Gov to further attack the privacy of their citizens and to circumvent EU privacy laws.

Short section of the article:

It would authorize the UK government to issue political directions to the UK data protection body, the Information Commissioner’s Office, the groups say. And it would enable the sharing of European personal data to other countries with reduced protections.

And as it seems (not suprising), the UK already has applied to the APEC-Framework Cross-Border data transfer:

The UK, the groups observe, has already applied to join the US-backed Cross-Border Privacy Rules Declaration, which allows international data transfers under the arguably weak Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Privacy Framework.

Bill Law text: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/data-protection-and-digital-information-bill-impact-assessments/data-protection-and-digital-information-no-2-bill-european-convention-on-human-rights-memorandum#summary-of-the-bill

Open letter against this bill: https://peoplevsbig.tech/open-letter-to-the-eu-commission-regarding-uk-s-data-bill

Edit:

• Added EU to the country tag because it also concerns EU citizens.
• Added the APEC section

I switched to Linux a few years ago and I remember how scary it was. No one in my surroundings used Linux back then, therefore I was on my own. I had lots of questions and had to use try and error, more error in the beginning I have to say.

Let's help new comers to the world of Linux to have an easy start, to then dive into the wonderful rabbit hole that FOSS is.