My deepest apologies for not posting this earlier. I am not worthy of forgiveness.
Here is the GNEWS. The Award for the Advancement of Free Software is given annually to an individual who has made a great contribution to the progress and development of free software, through activities that accord with the spirit of free software. This year, it was given to Sébastien Jodogne for his work on free software medical imaging with his project Orthanc. One of Jodogne's nominators said, "The Orthanc project started in 2011, when Sébastien noticed in his work as a medical imaging engineer that hospitals are very exposed to lock-in problems when dealing with their medical imaging flows....Freely creating electronic gateways between imaging modalities (autorouting), between medical departments, or even between hospitals remains a challenging task. But the amount of medical images that are generated, analyzed, and exchanged by hospitals is dramatically increasing. Medical imaging is indeed the first step to the treatment of more and more illnesses, such as cancers or cardiovascular diseases." ---------------------------------------------- Kat Walsh joins FSF board of directors A lawyer with extensive background in the free culture movement, Walsh brings a wealth of experience with law and licensing to the FSF board. In particular, her skills will help support and oversee the FSF's licensing work on the GNU General Public License (GPL) as well as the LGPL and GFDL. Kat worked as a staff lawyer at Creative Commons, where she was on the team that drafted the last major revision to the family of Creative Commons licenses, completed in November 2013 with the release of the 4.0 licenses. An active contributor to Wikipedia, Walsh was elected to the board of directors of the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) for three terms between 2006 and 2013 and served as the organization's chair from 2012 to 2013. ---------------------------------------- Netflix is trying to weave digital rights management into HTML5. DefectivebyDesign.org currently have a campaign running to work with World wide web consortium (W3C) to make sure that does not happen. They would like our signatures on a petition. You can do that digitally by going to http://www.defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5 The Defective by Design website was mysteriously unavailable today so I could not get information on the action day. -------------------------------------------------------------- Embedded linux conference happened on March 23 - 25. You can get your hands on notes and videos from that conference at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/embedded-linux-conference There's talk notes on UAV's and Connected Cars, Robotics and Open Hardware, along with the regular way-too-deep-for-me hyper techie linux system kernal freaky stuff. Lots of stuff. Well worth a peruse if you think computers are fun. ---------------------------------------------------- GNU Mailman mailing list manager project aims to release its 3.0 suite in April, during the sprints following PyCon North America. Mailman 3 is a major rewrite that includes a new user membership system, a REST API, an archiver replacement for Pipermail, and a better web interface for subscriptions and settings — but it carries with it a few new dependencies as well. Brave system administrators can try out the fifth beta version now Full announcement and links for downloads found at https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-announce/2014-December/000197.html ------------------------------------------------------ Since opening its doors in 2008, GitHub has grown to become the largest active project-hosting service for open-source software. But it has also attracted a fair share of criticism for some of its implementation choices—with one of the leading complaints being that it takes a lax approach to software licensing. That, in turn, leads to a glut of repositories bearing little or no licensing details. The company recently announced a new tool to help combat the license-confusion issue: a site-wide API for querying and reporting license information. Full story at https://lwn.net/Articles/636261/ --------------------------------------- Your (Australian) Internet Service Provider (ISP) could soon start handing out your personal information to corporations. http://action.sumofus.org/a/corporate-isp-abuse/?akid=9883.831468.iLt0Vq&rd=1&sub=fwd&t=1001 Google Code to shut down in August http://pipedot.org/story/2015-03-12/google-code-shutting-down Gitorious to shut down in May https://about.gitlab.com/2015/03/03/gitlab-acquires-gitorious/ XFCE release 4.12 brings refinement and improvements http://www.xfce.org/about/news/?post=1425081600 0 A.D. Alpha 18 Rhododactylos released http://wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=19709 Mesa 10.5 Release Brings Skylake Support, OpenGL 4 partially implemented http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Mesa-10.5-Released DRI3 Support Finally Added To AMD's Radeon X.Org Driver "For users means improved window resizing, improved synchronization of rendering, and slightly better security" http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-DRI3-DDX-Present "Hello Barbie" Listens To Children Via Cloud https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35XCUbscziE http://www.commercialfreechildhood.org/action/shut-down-hello-barbie User-Focused Security: End-to-End Encryption Extension for Yahoo Mail (fork of Google's End-to-End browser extension) http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/113708033335/user-focused-security-end-to-end-encryption Ubuntu 10.04 LTS 5 year support ends at the end of the month. Kaspersky outs hard drive infecting malware http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2015/02/17/equation-group/1 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/12/nsas_on_drugs_infosec_bods_unveil_space_grade_malware/ https://puri.sm/posts/purism-avoids-common-nsa-drive-firmware-virus/ Software Freedom Conservancy Funds GPL Suit Against VMWare http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/03/05/1721231/software-freedom-conservancy-funds-gpl-suit-against-vmware New Zealand Spied On Nearly Two Dozen Pacific Countries http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/03/04/1748223/new-zealand-spied-on-nearly-two-dozen-pacific-countries Feds Admit Stingrays Can Disrupt Cell Service of Bystanders http://www.wired.com/2015/03/feds-admit-stingrays-can-disrupt-cell-service-bystanders/ UK Gov't Asks: Is 10 Years In Jail the Answer To Online Pirates? http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/03/08/134235/uk-govt-asks-is-10-years-in-jail-the-answer-to-online-pirates China takes Under the Dome anti-pollution film offline http://m.bbc.com/news/world-asia-31778115 Other interesting topics I had in mind, but weren't particularly newsworthy specifically for March: AMDGPU kernel driver for Radeon R9 3XX and above. NVIDIA Alerts Nouveau: They're Starting To Sign/Validate GPU Firmware Images http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTc5ODA _______________________________________________ Free-software-melb mailing list [email protected] http://lists.softwarefreedom.com.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/free-software-melb Free Software Melbourne home page: http://www.freesoftware.asn.au/melb/
