Our intern Michele Marrali just had a look at the companies who are participating in the W3C discussion about making DRM a part of the HTML5 standard – something that’s a horrible idea if you care about security and freedom. Here’s what he found: Google – US Netflix – US Sony – JPN Adobe – Read more »
On March 29, I had the pleasure of giving a talk at the annual conference of the Turkish GNU/Linux Users Association in Istanbul, Turkey. This was a pretty interesting time to speak about freedom and technology. Local elections were scheduled across the country for the following day. The government had blocked both YouTube and Twitter. Read more »
The UK is currently inviting comments on the standards it should use for “sharing or collaborating with government documents”. Among other things, the government proposes to make ODF the sole standard for office-type documents. FSFE has submitted its comments on this proposal, which we believe is very positive. Just now, in the final hours of Read more »
On Document Freedom Day (March 26), FSFE and the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament are organising an event in the European Parliament to discuss how cryptography can help us break the grip of the surveillance state. The draft program looks amazing. We’ll have Werner Koch (of GnuPG fame, and one of FSFE’s founders), Karen Read more »
There are lots of reasons to love Free Software. The stack of little games that comes pre-packaged with most GNU/Linux distributions. The way it makes you feel empowered rather than constrained. How it has taught an entire generation to see sharing knowledge as the normal thing to do, not as the exception. And all those Read more »
Today is “the day we fight back” against mass surveillance, and here at FSFE we’re proud to be part of the struggle. Mass surveillance is a huge problem. Governments are spying on you, endangering the very fabric of democracy. Corporations are asking you to deal away your privacy for a little convenience, with much the Read more »
At the Free Software Foundation Europe, we have long advocated building networked systems that have no central point of control. In a world where Facebook owns your social network, where Google follows almost everything you do on the web, and governments merrily intercept your private information without regard for legal niceties, this idea provides us Read more »
Today I participated in a lunch discussion run by EurActiv that was supposed “to explore the opportunities for more transparent and efficient EU decision-making”. Under discussion was an EU-funded project that would somehow rank people trying to influence policy making in Brussels, and make it easier to see who’s working on what.This would supposedly make Read more »
On Tuesday, the UK government published a proposal to make the Open Document Format the standard format for all government files.As The Register notes, The Cabinet Office’s Standards Hub explained its thinking on the matter and published the recommendation this week, using the following language: “When dealing with citizens, information should be digital by default Read more »
If you’re suspecting that the European Commission isn’t entirely serious about using and supporting the Open Document Format, you might be on to something. Responding to questions from the European Parliament about whether the EC’s Microsoft addiction might have lead it into being locked into the Redmond giant’s products, the Commission basically says “move on, Read more »