Software liability comes to the EU.

The new EU liability law extends the definition of “defective products” to include software, holding manufacturers accountable for harm caused by software vulnerabilities.

If a software flaw leads to damage, manufacturers can now be held liable, emphasizing the importance of security throughout the product lifecycle. This change encourages companies to prioritize cybersecurity measures and regular updates to protect consumers, shifting some risk from users to software providers.

The law also allows easier access to evidence in legal claims, balancing the power dynamics between consumers and manufacturers.

There is a carve out for open source software. Importers and the EU representatives of foreign software can be held liable too.

You ever seen something so painfully out of touch and oblivious it hurts?

I'm sure many have seen https://stallman-report.org/ detailing Richard Stallman's misconduct and how it and his enablers have harmed the free software movement. Much of this is not new but I was still shocked by a line early in the "Why publish this report?" section: "Women represent just 3% of the free software community, compared to 23% of industry programmers generally." Obviously not all of that disparity can be attributed to #Stallman alone, but his continued position of prominence is a symptom of a broader disease in the community's culture. Paying attention to these problems rather than turning a blind eye to them is a necessary step towards healing.

Results of the 2024 TAB (the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board) election:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/87y13bc05z.fsf@trenco.lwn.net/

"'There were 934 eligible voters in this year's TAB election; 229 of them cast ballots. The results were (with the top five winning seats):

1 Kees Cook
2 Dan Williams
3 Miguel Ojeda
4 Dave Hansen
5 Shuah Khan
[...]

Thanks to everybody who participated.'"

#Linux #kernel #LinuxKernel

#BPF #kernel changes up to now normally came as part of the big -net pull. Seems for #Linux 6.12 the involved developers try something new, as Alexei send the changes straight to Linus this time:

https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/c/440b65232829fad69947b8de983c13a525cc8871

#LinuxKernel #eBPF

What happened to Greta Thunberg?
_________________________________

As Greta’s politics have grown and evolved, they reached a point where they now make billionaire media owners, milquetoast executives of major non-profits, and more than a few politicians a little uncomfortable. All she’s done is follow the science, but over time the science has led her to see that the climate crisis doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There are massive monetary incentives to destroy the planet in this capitalist system.

ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP made over $100 billion in profits in 2023 alone. In following the science, Greta had to start examining the capitalist system if she wanted to get down to the root of the climate crisis.

But Greta kept going. When she published The Climate Book in 2022, the then 19-year-old activist had some words for the entire system we live under today:

"We are never going back to normal again because ‘normal’ was already a crisis. What we refer to as normal is an extreme system built on the exploitation of people and the planet. It is a system defined by colonialism, imperialism, oppression and genocide by the Global North to accumulate wealth that still shapes our current world order.”

That was two years ago, and it’s no surprise she hasn’t been given the spotlight nearly as often since. In fact, in the wake of that book launch, she’s been the subject of countless hit pieces, and her Palestine solidarity activism has been denigrated as well.

Greta went from a cute kid saying that climate change is bad to a young adult rightly charging global systems with not only fueling the climate crisis but also being oppressive and grossly harmful to life in numerous other ways. And, perhaps most importantly, she sees these systems as interconnected and knows that radical change is necessary for the future of life on this planet.
_________________________________

FULL ESSAY -- https://www.jphilll.com/p/gretas-growth

#Politics #Economics #Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange

Last night at the real-time celebration, Thomas Gleixner handed Linus Torvalds his official pull request of the real-time patch on paper "wrapped in gold with a ribbon around it''

"It is not the case that “AI gathers data from the Web and learns from it.” The reality is that AI companies gather data and then optimize models to reproduce representations of that data for profit."

"The productivity myth suggests that anything we spend time on is up for automation — that any time we spend can and should be freed up for the sake of having even more time for other activities or pursuits — which can also be automated."

https://www.techpolicy.press/challenging-the-myths-of-generative-ai/

Read the whole thing!

Darth Vader in a kilt, on a unicycle, playing bagpipes.

It's good to be alive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdjY6oy4Y2c

Started the first leg of the journey to #LinuxPlumbers2024 with the train to Hamburg. The night train I was supposed to catch from there tonight has been cancelled, so I'll be spending the night and taking a day train tomorrow morning. Which may end up stranding me in Passau, but at least that's only a few hours from Vienna for when the tracks clear. Exciting!

"Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc... and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons."
~ Douglas Adams

I love this article about the US debate.

If you're American or British and it rubs you the wrong way, please note that this is how your press writes about us.

H/T to @meena for bringing it to my attention.

#USPol

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/9/11/debate-in-nuclear-armed-former-colony-fails-to-reassure-global-community

If you want to keep using @signalapp in the EU, say no to #ChatControl

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/take-action-to-stop-chat-control-now/

#Signal #ChatControl #EU #surveillance

Calling for the help of the fediverse!
Help spread the word of our browser extension Consent-O-Matic that helps automate answering those ever-present cookie consent pop-ups.

It's developed by researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark and free to use for Chrome/Edge, Firefox and Safari including for iOS.

Also, it's open source, so if you have a bit of technical skill, you can help us improve the rule set for greater coverage.

https://consentomatic.au.dk

I've been running mail servers and writing email software since the dialup days of 1995. I guess by today's trends, that could brand me a holdout.

But we're still hosting mail for hundreds of company domains across dozens of mail servers, all in a nicely packaged system that's always just an "apt install" away.

The landscape has changed over time, and, yes, it is annoying dealing with the imbalance that the behemoth mail providers represent these days.

But there's a lot to be said for not bargaining away your digital autonomy.

I saw @mwl selling his "Run Your Own Mail Server" book and jumped to pick up a copy. Not so much because I had a need for it (though it'll be interesting to compare notes!), but because I strongly support the idea that email is still a shared ecosystem and love that Michael is sharing the knowledge to encourage folks to continue to participate.

Long live the open Internet.

#ryoms

Seen a couple takes about the Hachette case along the lines of “the Internet Archive should’ve stuck to just archiving the Internet and not testing new theories of copyright” and uhhh... I’m not sure what it is you think the Internet Archive does, outside of testing new theories of copyright.

#InternetArchive

Left: the University of Copenhagen using photos from Fridays for Future marches to advertise its "sustainability" commitments

Right: the University of Copenhagen calling on a team of cops to arrest Greta Thunberg and its own students.

Solidarity with Studerende Mod Besættelsen for your courage - Academic Boycott Now!

https://www.instagram.com/studerendemodbesaettelsen/

#Palestine #Genocide #StopGenocide #Gaza #Sustainability #ScienceMastodon #BDS

Happy Birthday to the LVFS

9 years ago today I wrote 4 little PHP scripts and pushed it to OpenShift which was the beginning of the LVFS. We've since rewritten it in Python, switched the deployment from "sudo git pull" on the server under my stairs at home (literally) to deploying onto AWS with Terraform.

In 9 years we've onboarded over 140 vendors, shipped ~110 million firmware files and added support for ~85 firmware update protocols for ~1600 different devices. I'm pretty happy with that.

I am begging software projects to release programs as tarballs or plain old static binaries. I don't know what a Helm chart is. I am not installing an entire Kubernetes cluster. Docker breaks LXC and firewalls and is constantly breaking for mysterious reasons. I would rather submit myself to hours of `./configure && make && make install` frustration than try to hack through the endless hellscape of containerized deployment systems.

Magit is the tool that makes me fire dozens of commits weekly without getting in the way or triggering RSI.

Rebasing, branch and worktree management, amends, fixups and all other important functionality is 3-4 presses away.

https://emacsair.me/2024/08/09/magit-4.0/

Good work @tarsius, keep rocking.

Support magit project financially or by spreading the word, especially if you benifit from it financially or it saves your precious time.

#emacs #magit #git #foss #floss #funding