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I missed this great news from a couple of months back. The EU has standardised what #repairability means. Soon we might see score (on scale from A to E) when buying electronics evaluating its repeatability. https://de.ifixit.com/News/35879/repairability-standard-en45554

Olympus is selling their camera division, according to the official News Release.

(Despite saying the opposite less than two months ago on imaging-resource.com)

If Spotify chooses to continue on their current path of exclusive content it will break interoperability with other podcast apps and force listeners of those shows to use the Spotify podcast client. I suspect that many listeners will also transfer their existing subscriptions into Spotify to avoid needing two separate podcast clients.

A nice write-up by ProtonMail of Apple's practices that help regimes in many countries to silence their opposition: https://protonmail.com/blog/apple-app-store-antitrust/

Because Qualcomm is no longer supporting the chipset in the Fairphone 2, we have to make Android 9 comply with all of Google’s requirements ourselves.

Great effort by Fairphone!

thenextweb.com/facebook/2020/06/17/

Facebook gives US users power to turn off political ads ... Plus, to make political ads more transparent, Facebook will show “Paid for by” disclaimer on the ad, even where you share it.

Finally! Why did it take so long? Next step: show “Paid for by” for all ads, not just when they are political.

"I think it is wrong to teach maths without teaching programming. We all learn to use calculators at school. This was an innovation of the 20th century. Now it is 2020 and it is time to move on." --- Alex Kurz

A wonderful example when somebody in industry is doing a wonderful (academical) research, and delivers a great talk: Alexis King - “Effects for Less”

I came across of Socialism 101 and, as I'm reading through it, I think that I see what made communism so successful. They managed to convince"ordinary folks" that they're under dictatorship (by their bosses). They put equality between "has more power" and dictatorship. Then they argue that as long as we have any classes there will be one class ruling over the other ones. So they claim that the ruling class should be the working class, it should be a dictatorship of the working class. But the mistake is that what dictatorship means changed in between. In the first instance it was about "having more power than" whereas in the second instance it was about working class taking freedoms of factory owners, bankers, ...

Rhetoric fallacy, I would say! 🤔

Related to my one year old article on tomas.jakl.one, I just rediscovered a text by Cory Doctorow on boingboing.net titled After months of insisting that #Article13 doesn't require filters, top EU Commissioner says "Article 13 requires filters" 😔

Normally countries would find their own ways to regulate TV, radio, press, etc. from foreign influence. However, what do you do when #BigTech takes their role and gives you no real oversight or even monitoring capabilities? I like that the #EU is now demanding clearly what it wants, instead of just unpredictably suing the Big Tech companies and hoping that they will somehow get better. Of course we have to be vigilant and make sure that while we're fighting misinformation coming from abroad, we're also not silencing our own citizens.

More on this here: https://www.politico.eu/article/european-commission-disinformation-social-media/

Björn Schießle wrote:

You want digital sovereignty? Than you have to chose Free Software! Otherwise you will never be in control and for example other might decide if it is worth supporting your mother language.

(Microsoft retires support in his iOS Outlook app for 27 languages such as Norwegian, Slovenian, Latvian, Basque, Irish, Persian, ...)

Bedtime thought: on Facebook, GitHub, Mastodon, Spotify, etc. we should be able to view all activity (logs) of connected apps on those platforms. Is there a platform that gives users this much control?

"From now on, all IT solutions developed by  and for the EU institutions will first need to be assessed against the possibility of using Open Source solutions."

Source: european-pirateparty.eu

Great day for both the EU and open source! 😍

Year 2020 is the year of #Linux desktop! Just not the way anybody imagined it https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2020/05/19/developing-for-all-1-billion-windows-10-devices-and-beyond/ :-)