I managed to attend this year’s LinuxAlt. It was a great event with a lot of interesting presentations about free software and related activities. It’s amazing and encouraging that numerous volunteers, sponsors and attendees can make the gathering happen each year.
I upgraded OS X on my work computer to a new version. It required two system restarts and made the computer (with an SSD drive!) unusable for about half an hour. This is the so called “world’s most advanced desktop operating system”.
I can no longer ignore smartphones, for various reasons. So I bought one, an Android based Samsung phone. One of the reasons I’ve avoided smartphones so far is they run on non-free software. While the underlying operating system is mostly free, phone vendors are active in putting special restrictions on it. Samsung installs its own […]
Tim Berners-Lee has officially overridden the formal objection by EFF against inclusion of DRM support into official W3C standards. We were unable to make strong enough opposition and to find some solution. This is bad news for open Web and free software.
There is double celebration here today: the feast day of Saint Wenceslas, the most famous Czech saint and martyr, and GNU 30th anniversary.
Does anybody know about any activities in Czech Republic related to GNU 30th anniversary? If there is anything planned, please let me know.
This short YouTube movie illustrates in a nice way what I wrote about in my recent post about smartphones.
Debian has celebrated its 20th anniversary last week. IIRC, I’ve installed Debian in 1995 for the first time, version 0.93R5. My very first GNU/Linux distribution was SLS (who knows today what it was?). I switched to Slackware soon and after some time I decided it might be a good idea to try something else once […]
I strongly recommend reading the excellent essay on surveillance partnership of government and private sectors by Bruce Schneier. I’d just add that I don’t believe changes in formal policies are enough to solve the problem (although they are very important). We also need to technically break the inherent surveillance grounds. We users can do it, […]
If you care about freedom and you use Android based devices, please consider donating to FSF’s fundraising program for Replicant. Replicant is free (“free” as in “freedom”) replacement for Android; software freedom is very important on mobile devices. See the fundraising announcement for more information.