International Day Against DRM (IDAD)

The fourteenth International Day Against DRM (IDAD) #DayAgainstDRM took place on 4th December 2020. The Defective by Design (DbD) campaign needs your help to spread the word. This year's annual day in protest of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) will be on December 4th, 2020, and will focus on streaming services' unjust use of DRM.

https://defectivebydesign.org/dayagainstdrm/2020

Follow the DFD Free Software foundation account on Mastodon.

#fsf,#drm,#protest,#defective,#digitial,#rights,#2020, #freedom,#media,#music,#video, #idad,#DayAgainstDRM,#dbd

IRC CHAT

• IRC Help

Other resources

• Drm.info
• FSFE DRM Flyer

PinePhone KDE Community

PinePhone KDE Community Edition Is Now Available for Pre-Order from $149.99 – 9to5Linux

The PinePhone KDE Community Edition Linux smartphone is now available for pre-order featuring KDE’s Plasma Mobile UI by default. Announced two weeks ago, PinePhone KDE Community Edition is the latest limited edition of the PinePhone Linux phone powered by the KDE Project and featuring the gorgeous Plasma Mobile user interface by default.

Read More here

Read more at 9to5Linux.com: PinePhone KDE Community Edition Is Now Available for Pre-Order from $149.99 https://9to5linux.com/?p=5736

• Mastodon

#phone,#freedom,9to5linux,#KDE,#Pre-order

I joined Mastodon social network last year. I am now reposting this guide to signing up and getting started.

Firstly you need to go to join mastodon where you will be presented with the following:-

Clicking on Get Started actually takes further down the page to:-

Where you can select from one of the many instances available, your choice may be influenced by:-

• Geographical location
• Interests
• Number of users on a particular instance

Or some other reason.

I decided to go for quto.org as this is a STEM related instance. So clicking on the signup link.

Filled in the credentials. After which I am asked to confirm. You will be asked to agree to some terms and conditions too.

Once confirmed you are taken to a set of 3 intro pages:

Then you are presented with

Where you can now set up your profile etc.

— Finding people to follow.

Enter their fediverse id in to the search box.

Usually this takes the form of

@username@instancename

You can follow me on the above qoto.org server by clicking this link.

In order for you to see items from my blog in your feed you need to take the following step in your profile settings.

Which is pretty easy to do, clearly this gives you a lot of control over what is then fed in to your feed.

Conclusion

Very easy sign up process, which is great, it looks like this instance also supports inline $\LaTeX$ which is cool too. I have now subscribed to this blog from mastodon.

Not quite ready to #deletetwitter yet, I have some contacts. Compared to the sign-up process on more old fashioned social media this is a breeze.

tags

#social,#network,#fediverse,#mastodon,#freedom,#privacy,#federation,#deletefacebook,#deletetwitter

You can find me on Friendica at [email protected]

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Licenced under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

University of costumed heroes

Software freedom is important as it gives users the power to be in control of the software they use and the hardware it is installed on.

GNU.org defines free software as :

What is Free Software?

Free software means the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”.

More precisely, free software means users of a program have the four essential freedoms:

* The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0). * The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this. * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help others (freedom 2). * The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

```

The latest Free Software Foundation video hopefully helps illustrate what can happen when you put trust in closed source systems that cannot be subject to scrutiny through access to the source code.

Examples of common free software

• GNU/Linux
• Libreoffice
• LaTeX
• Gimp – Photo editing
• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• GNU Privacy Guard

You can follow the fsf on the federated social media networks such as Mastodon

Initiatives such as Tech Pledge are also a good idea for getting people to think about how they behave on line and starting to build better, more friendly, respectful communities.

#fsf,#freesoftware,#video,#promotion,#software,#freedom

SnapAs : Adding photos to WriteFreely Blogs

As this blog is powered using WriteFreely, I have just found another service that is designed to complement adding pictures to blogs, making this process very simple.

SnapAs allows you to drag and drop a photo and provide the markdown code so that you just copy / paste in this to your blog.

There used to be a tutorial, but this is no longer available, there may be others on peertube.

The video is hosted on Peertube which is a federated and decentralised video sharing platform. There is a video here to explain more about this.

Hope this post is useful.

#fediverse,#writefreely,#SnapAs,#WriteAs,#blogging,#photos,#integration,#freedom,#decentralised.

I can be contacted on Mastodon here.

Licenced under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Get a free Repl.it online IDE account here Get an Overleaf account here, Online collaborative LaTeX Editor

Online and remote learning : Lets not forget privacy.

This is an excellent article by the Free software foundation on the importance of maintaing user / learner privacy while they are learning online.

Some interesting points being raised and some serious concerns about privacy, use of webcams and monitoring of students during tests etc.

Learners need to ask questions and not just accept this as the new normal.

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/remote-education-does-not-require-giving-up-rights-to-freedom-and-privacy

#learning,#education,#online,#technology,#freedom,#privacy,#freesoftware,#fsf.

Libreoffice 6.4.2

Libreoffice 6.4.2, is now available to download, Please see the latest announcement here This is an update to 6.4 that was announced in a [previous post] post](https://personaljournal.ca/paulsutton/libreoffice-6-4-released)

#libreoffice, #642, #released, #office, #freesoftware, #freedom, #writer, #calc, #impress, #draw, math, #base

You can find me on Friendica at [email protected]

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Licenced under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Libreoffice 6.4 released

LibreOffice 6.4 is here! More performance, more compatibility, and great new features to try out – it's an essential upgrade for the world's leading free office suite. Learn more and download it: https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/01/29/libreoffice-6-4/

References

• Libreoffice
• Libreoffice contribution wizard
• Libreoffice – Get involved
• Document Liberation
• Libreoffice – Twitter

#libreoffice, #64, #released, #office, #freesoftware, #freedom, #writer, #calc, #impress, #draw, math, #base

You can find me on Friendica at [email protected]

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Licenced under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Advocacy – The barriers to effective promotion

I have just tried to follow some links at the following site

https://www.softwarefreedomday.org/

If I click 2020 and follow the link to https://www.documentfreedom.org/ then I get a page that gives me the date for 2018 (so kinda out of date)

The link for hardware freedom day goes to

https://www.softwarefreedomday.org/ so it seems some of the links just go back on themselves. Not really helpful.

On the tab for 2020 there is no direct link to software freedom day.

I am happy to promote all this, but unless people can find what they expect they will just stick to what they are using now and go away with a really negative idea of what this is about.

Stickers like this and another one are great for advocacy, but useless if they link to outdated information.

I just find it very frustrating, and people will point out to us that they don't get this with Microsoft.

This is what we are up against. I feel that we just need to be far more effective, update information and ensure it is kept up to date.

References

• Software Freedom Day (SFD)
• Document Freedom

#freedom, #softeware, #hardware, #documents, #promotion, #advocacy, #barriers,

You can find me on Friendica at [email protected]

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Licenced under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)