db0European Commission cuts funding support for Free Software projects
wildbus8979Ouf, that a rough blow!
Yea. One of my project is funded through ngi currently š
I shudder to think what this will do for the development of kbin! Oh wait.
Did you just apply for it?
No weāre already accepted, but I would have liked to renew it eventually.
No I meant, what was the grant process? As in, just applying for it, or selected for it?
Yes you have to apply for it and itās a long process afterwards with multiple stages. Go check nlnet.nl and they explain it.
Beaver [she/her]They have lots of money for corporate software from Microsoft though.
The public to private theft is infinite
If there are any French or Germans in particular reading this please share on your numerous native instances: If you are in the EU you need to contact policy makers (as outlined in the article) about this. Iām sorry I canāt be with you on this one but Brexit.
If there are any French or Germans in particular reading this please share on your native instances
The beauty of high level corruption is that local peasants can't do much about it.
Good news is that Germany for example if trying to get away from corpos and use OSS, so at least we know within german government there are people who [see] this issue properly.
Unfortunately your information seems a little outdated. Itās true that Germany did try it for a moment until Microsoft showed up with suitcases of money in the chancellor office so to speak and he announced to essentially move away from open source again.
Though on the federal level, thereās still some hope. Maybe.
You are talking about Limux which started 2 decades ago, but there are other initiatives to enforce oss software in german government.
And also the same who wrote the bundes trojaner :-) ( I know itās most likely the German intelligence but still funny )
cygnusDamn, rare technology L from the EU. Hopefully they walk back this decision.
Not rare, theyāve been trying to block encryption for a while unfortunately
Also
The reasons for this shift in budget away from funding Free Software and the NGI initiative seems to be an allocation of more funds for AI, leaving internet infrastructure by the wayside.
Good old AI bubble strikes again.
As long as public money -> public code, this could potentially be a net positive for stopping predatory AI practices from Microsoft and buddies.
Itās a justification, they know full well itās not some future revolution.
But itās a very good device to hijack discourse and funds.
It seems obvious that people who get to the top are smart, just not in the good way. They know the potential of various technologies. If they donāt understand the subjects themselves, they have hundreds of experts willing to lecture them. Even if they pretend to not have understood a word, in fact they do gain knowledge.
Yeah, after what happened to Greece itās hard to forget how the EU is heavily infiltrated by the vultures of private finance.
Just vultures. Itās pure corruption. People of the kind that already rule Russia.
Any kind of progress, justice, right etc they donāt respect.
Big fish eating smaller fish is one thing they respect, and they also want more privacy while stealing, and the ability to spy after everyone else and coerce courts and institutions.
Itās that simple.
Agreed. We have allowed our democratic system to be quietly stolen from us without even really noticing. I think we either need to properly reclaim it or to start new systems away from it. The Fediverse is a really good example of the latter.
The fediverse exists in the web, while they exist in the reality and command police, people in airports and train stations, military, internet service providers, etc.
Thatās why we should follow the example of the French and do a Revolution every now and then!
Revolutions are destructive and have bad potential. But a certain degree of unchecked chaos is useful.
I would argue that the web is part of reality - itās our main method of communication. It might be small but I think itās a good example of successful self-organisation away from government/business/finance.
It might be small but I think itās a good example of successful self-organisation away from government/business/finance.
Itās definitely not small, and backbones and intercontinental cables and such are not self-organization.
Late 90-s and early 00-s web, however were such an example. But they still relied on benevolence of ICQ and AIM owners, OS vendors, organizations making standards.
Sorry, I was referring the Fediverse while you were referring to the internet as a whole. Limitations of written communication and all that!
OK, then fediverse still relies on PKI.
Was ist PKI?
Public key infrastructure, but specifically - the current centralized system with root certificates which everyone trusts, that the Web uses.
Hawala awaits :-)
Was ist das?
Itās informal way of transferring the money. You give your money to Hawalardar which contacts the Hawalardar in the destination country. That person gives back the money minus fee which you pointed out or any person who knows the code. It works like money transfer but outside the formal payment system. Thatās why itās hated by most governments in the world. In many countries it has names like in China āflying moneyā
First time Iāve heard of it. Sounds awesome!
apfelwoiSchoppenWerenāt there recently EU calls for using open source software due to concerns about proprietary software like Windows in the wake of gestures generally at Windows.
MegaTravellerYes, there are calls to move towards OOS, but as I assume that is it. Only calls. I remember cities moving onto open source and than thanks for lobbyists moving back to proprietary software again.
I remember cities moving onto open source and than thanks for lobbyists moving back to proprietary software again.
What you remember is the news cycle covering the City of Munich switching from Windows to Linux, then another news cycle about how theyāre moving back to Windows.
What didnāt get much coverage though, is that Microsoft did a (suspected under-table) deal with the outgoing government to switch back to Windows if Microsoft built an office in Munich.
What then happened is the new government came in, looked at the situation, and cancelled it (although MS may have built that office always). Right now Munich is still using Linux and still actively rolling it out.
Gsus4Is it as vague as āfunds for AIā or cloud computing capacity to compete with China and the US? Because we could use that in the EU. I just donāt know who would be operating it. Universities?
Thatās stupid.
The money is needed for funding the police to implement chat controlās and going darkās enforcement.
š²ššššššš š¼ššš Even sadder:
The reasons for this shift in budget away from funding Free Software and the NGI initiative seems to be an allocation of more funds for AI, leaving internet infrastructure by the wayside.
Lol, whyyyyyyyYYYYYYYY.
Kill bots
Very big brain moment aktschualluy. The AI will start maintaining all the dropped projects!
Oh, for fucks sake.
Read about this on the site of the garage project. they apparently wouldnāt be a thing without this funding.
Recently set up a cluster and itās great. Sad to hear this went through
Well, they still canāt underfund gnu privacy guard :-) Itās pretty much already finished product and working pretty well.
Eh? I tried it about a year ago, and I found all the same clunky problems that were there 20 years ago.
clunky
Thunderbird + kleopatra? K-9 + OpenKeyChain ( android )? Where did you have issues?
I went through an exercise with a few other developers to see if we could use it for transferring sensitive information. I was using Windows w/WSL2 at the time (now Iām full Linux for my work machine), and I believe the other two were on Macs.
Our conclusions were that while it might be useful alongside other ways, it was too clunky to use in general. One of the more useful things we could do is have developers sign git commits.
The email plugins for various clients make it easy to mistakenly think youāre sending an encrypted email. When even technical people are making this mistake, then itās a big issue for widespread adoption. The plugins also donāt always send it in a format that works for every client out there. We found the most consistent way was to encrypt the message in a file and attach it to the email.
The plugins donāt work with modern webmail, anyway.
Public key servers are unreliable. Theyāre largely maintained by volunteers, so this is understandable, but we couldnāt recommend that the company use them. If we wanted reliability, weād need to run our own internal keysever.
Then thereās the key signing meetings weād need to have. Even technical people find these a bother. These are, unfortunately, inherent to the web of trust model.
I really wanted to make it work. The decentralized nature of the web of trustāas opposed to the hierarchical model of TLSāis appealing to me personally. But this shit hasnāt gotten better in 20 years.
The email plugins for various clients make it easy to mistakenly think youāre sending an encrypted email.
Ok. Now I know whatās the issue but this is not the problem with gpg. Nah, gpg integration with thunderbird is so flawless that it clearly says when itās encrypting when not. Also you can see the raw email content and then you see whether itās plaintext or ciphertext. Iām using thunderbird with gpg very often so I know how it works nicely with gpg
Itās a problem with the gpg ecosystem. No matter what code is actually responsible, it prevents us from using it in practice. Weāre not going to switch our whole email system and clients just for this.
We implemented this at work using Hashicorp Vault for PKIs and a dovecote smtp server to pass IMAP from whatever client our endusers were using. The only problem was clients using the O365 webportal in unsupported or outdated browsers, but we took care of that with SCCM.
developer.hashicorp.com/vault/ā¦/pki-engine
Oh god, the funding shifted to AI.