[free-software-melb] right to repair
The Australian Government Productivity Commission is looking for submissions for an inquiry into the right to repair, including the reduction of e-waste. Submissions are due by the end of January. https://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/current/repair/issues "The focus of this inquiry is on consumers’ ability to repair faulty goods and to access repair services at a competitive price. "We have been asked to look at the barriers and enablers of competition in repair markets and the costs and benefits of a regulated ‘right to repair’, including facilitating access to embedded software in consumer and other goods. "We have also been asked to look at arrangements for preventing premature or planned product obsolescence and the proliferation of e‑waste, and means of reducing e‑waste through improved access to repairs." Glenn -- pgp: 833A 67F6 1966 EF5F 7AF1 DFF6 75B7 5621 6D65 6D65 OpenPGP_signature Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au https://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
Re: [free-software-melb] Google
On Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 5:12 PM Brian May wrote:
> email I received from Google today saying that they intend to phase out
> support for username/password authentication for LSA ("less secure
> apps") using protocols such as IMAP, and require using OAuth
> authentication instead.
> I am not aware of any open source IMAP client software that can use
> OAuth.
>
I've been using OAuth with Thunderbird for IMAP to gmail, as my workplace
has been enforcing that and disabled app password access. I vaguely
remember having to upgrade Thunderbird or something to get it going.
Glenn
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Re: [free-software-melb] [fsf-community-team] code in a blog
On 18/04/18 18:15, Les Kitchen wrote: > Just quoting from the FSF's recommendations at >It is not worth the trouble to use copyleft for most small >programs. We use 300 lines as our benchmark: when a software >package's source code is shorter than that, the benefits >provided by copyleft are usually too small to justify the >inconvenience of making sure a copy of the license always >accompanies the software. I see what you mean then. It depends on how you were planning to distribute the code. To me the recommendations make the assumption that you are distributing your code as a collection of files (in which case, having a 200+ line copyright file for a tiny program might be less than pragmatic). Publishing code as part of a webpage or blog can be a bit different. For example, I notice that the FSF recommendations for the licence statement in Javascript files don't make use of the formula "You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program", and instead suggest various ways of linking to the licence. Any way you do it, the two significant parts are (a) to have a copyright notice so it is clear who the copyright holder is, and (b) for it to be clear which specific licence the code is under (and where it can be found). > Yeah, CC BY-SA was what I had in mind for content (just couldn't > remember the formula). But there has been some later traffic > about CC0... In my view the difference between these two free CC licences is philosophical, analogous to the difference between eg the Apache licence and the GPL licence. One issue is whether you care (as the creator) whether someone was to say modify your work and place it under a proprietary licence to the people they in turn distribute it to. And if you do care, whether you are willing to make use of a legal hack such as CC BY-SA to ensure that users further down the chain are not restricted in this way. Another issue to consider is attribution. In academia this is often handled in non-legal ways, because there is a strong community onus on crediting the source of material, and plagiarizing is penalized. Under the Australian copyright amendments in 2000 such rights were codified. But not all copyright codes legally require attribution of the source, and so many licences are explicit about this. CC0 relinquishes such legal rights (at least as far as it can). regards, Glenn -- pgp: 833A 67F6 1966 EF5F 7AF1 DFF6 75B7 5621 6D65 6D65 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au https://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
Re: [free-software-melb] [fsf-community-team] Free Mark Down Editor and Reader
On 11/04/18 19:13, Les Kitchen wrote: > Oh, appropriate to this list: One question I'm tussling with is > what licences to use. The original author doesn't say what > licence his code and initial setup is under. > Since it's on > github, I assume it's some sort of free licence, but which one? Hakyll is under a 3 clause BSD licence. https://github.com/jaspervdj/hakyll/blob/master/LICENSE > And for my stuff, it's going to be a combination of writing, for > which some sort of suitable Creative Commons licence would make > sense (by "suitable" I mean GPL-like), and code, for which I'm > thinking maybe Apache-2 would make most sense, since the amount > of code will be pretty small, and maybe not worth the overhead > of GPL. Any opinions? I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'overhead' of the GPL? If you plan to make source publicly available and reference/include the appropriate licence, then you've already there. The content on the site would be considered separate from the code, and would not be covered by the same copyright. Each article would be an original work, and you could use a licence such as CC BY-SA (which is perhaps the most GPL-like). regards, Glenn -- pgp: 833A 67F6 1966 EF5F 7AF1 DFF6 75B7 5621 6D65 6D65 ___ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au https://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
Re: [free-software-melb] FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: WIKILEAKS, Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed
On 08/03/17 14:14, Russell Coker wrote: > True. I think I've done my share of work in securing Linux systems both > directly through working on SE Linux and indirectly through finding bugs in > various daemons and applications (often due to SE Linux policy revealing > inappropriate things). You'll be pleased to see that selinux gets a few mentions in the CIA leaks :-), particularly in the Android context (eg that it prevents normal installation of their 'RoidRage' malware, and how they get around it). It is a very different leak to the NSA ones. The NSA ones gave a big picture view of the scope and magnitude of US surveillance, which provided evidence that these agencies were not well regulated (at least in a democratic context). The CIA leaks have the character of random documentation about tools and processes; probably not of as much import in a political sense, but of some interest to people working to secure commonly used platforms. What is interesting is that different agencies are independently working on ways of attacking computing infrastructure. I guess duplication of effort is the nature of a large bureaucracy. Glenn -- pgp: 833A 67F6 1966 EF5F 7AF1 DFF6 75B7 5621 6D65 6D65 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
Re: [free-software-melb] [free-software-melb-announce] FSM Jan 13th - LCA preview: Planning Alerts, State Contracts then The World
On 12/01/17 17:29, Riley Baird wrote: > On the topic of open government, I just thought that I'd like to share > a website that I've made. It's open source (AGPL-3.0+), and it tracks > how every MP votes on every division in the Victorian Parliament. > You can access it at http://vicvote.review Very useful, good job. Glenn -- pgp: 833A 67F6 1966 EF5F 7AF1 DFF6 75B7 5621 6D65 6D65 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
Re: [free-software-melb] Visiting Melbourne in January
On 02/11/14 09:32, Deb Nicholson wrote: seeing whatever stuff a nerdy tourist *really* ought to see in Melbourne. One arcanum is that Melbourne has the oldest and only surviving first generation electronic computer (this excludes the electromechanical Zuse Z4 in Munich, and reconstructions such as the Colossus at Bletchley Park). CSIRAC is housed at the Melbourne Museum, but can be a little tricky to find now; it is tucked away on the lower foyer level. http://museumvictoria.com.au/csirac/ Glenn -- sks-keyservers.net 0x6d656d65 signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
Re: [free-software-melb] GnuPG key management
On 12/08/13 15:49, Ben Finney wrote: Rather, the purpose of your signature is to say “I met this person, verified they are who they say they are, and this person tells me this is their email address and public key”. I don't think of it that way; when I sign GPG keys, I am signing each uid separately. Some uids contain an email address for that person, and I'd like to know that the address is actually connected to them when I sign it. Just as there might be another uid that is a photo, and signing it means that I recognize the photo to be of that person. You're recording a historical fact, true for a point in time, not guaranteeing that any particular thing will work in future. Yes, agreed. The signature binds information to a PGP key at a point in time. Glenn -- sks-keyservers.net 0x6d656d65 ___ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
Re: [free-software-melb] GnuPG key management
On 12/08/13 10:08, Ben Finney wrote: So I think it's impolite to make use of a keysigning party, then decline to put one's public key in the public keyserver network. What good reasons are there to abstain? I have come across one person who prefers to upload the signatures to the public keyserver themselves, because they are particular about sanitizing the signature set (such as rejecting ones that rely on SHA1 instead of SHA512). I guess there are small privacy advantages, by not making your network associations publicly visible, although that would mean the person did not sign anyone else's key either, which really does seem to lack community spirit! To me, the advantages of having my signed key available through a number of channels outweighs the minor loss of privacy, and I agree it makes good sense to upload them. Glenn -- sks-keyservers.net 0x6d656d65 ___ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
Re: [free-software-melb] Conflict between software freedom and trademark restrictions
On 21/07/13 13:02, Ben Finney wrote: I think that trademark has a significant benefit to society, which is to limit the tendencies of vendors to misrepresent their modified works as though being whatever the customer is looking for — even if that vendor has made incompatible or undesirable changes which are contradictory to what the customer would expect from the brand. Ben, I'd be interested in your (and others) opinion on the way Trisquel have given guidelines for the use of their trademark (http://trisquel.info/en/wiki/trademark-guidelines). Though I'm not sure what the legal status of such guidelines are. Glenn -- sks-keyservers.net 0x6d656d65 ___ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
Re: [free-software-melb] Debian social contract and software freedom
On 21/07/13 13:02, Ben Finney wrote: But those either ignore or punt the issue to trademark. The question still remains: what restrictions on the freedom of any recipient are acceptable in exchange for preventing the societal harms trademark law is designed to address? I'm not convinced that trademarks are being used to restrict software freedoms in any significant way. The trademark does not primarily concern the substance of the software, only the branding of it. While it can be inconvenient to change the branding, trademark alone does not prevent either redistribution or modification. I realize it is not entirely black and white, because the trademark will be embedded in the code, not merely a name-change. But for most software, this is more of an inconvenience than it is a substantive restriction of software freedoms. The issue in the Debian branding of Firefox and Thunderbird was not fundamentally the trademark. It was the use of a non-DFSG licence on the logo, which Debian could not use. Mozilla decided that if the logo was not used, then it was not okay to call the software 'Firefox'. I think a better resolution would have been for Mozilla to provide an alternative logo that could have been freely licenced, especially since the logo would still carry trademark protections against misuse. But the issue was not resolved, so Debian was forced to change the name. This did not stop it distributing the Mozilla software, even though it no longer was even able to use the trademark. The DFSG allows for such restrictions, though here it is perhaps talking more about a copyright licence. It does not explicitly mention the trademark issues at all. The license may require derived works to carry a different name or version number from the original software. (This is a compromise. The Debian group encourages all authors not to restrict any files, source or binary, from being modified.) Note that I'm not arguing that trademarks cannot be misused (eg they can have a chilling effect on parodies), and I'm not arguing that trademark licences are unimportant (it can be painful to ensure trademark compliance, and unconstructive to have to change the name for minor changes). But I think it is difficult for companies to misuse them specifically with regard to software freedom, because the trademark can in some abstract sense be separated from the software. Ideally the trademark for free software would be licenced in a way that makes it easier on recipients; but without any licence to use a trademark, we can still distribute and modify the associated software. I feel that patent law in particular is more important issue. Glenn -- sks-keyservers.net 0x6d656d65 ___ Free-software-melb mailing list Free-software-melb@lists.softwarefreedom.com.au http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
