Free Software and Sharing

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 03, 2023

• CC Open Education Platform Activities 2023

  In February and March, the CC Open Education Platform community voted on five winning ideas to advance open education globally. Five project teams, spanning Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ghana, Italy, Malaysia, Ukraine, South Africa, and the USA have received CC Open Education funds. The CC Open Education Platform also funded ongoing global community work supporting the UNESCO Recommendation on OER. We are delighted to share updates about the projects now underway.

  CC lauds all of the open education community efforts, and we look forward to sharing additional highlights at the end of this year.

• A Revised FAQ For Mozilla Firefox Users on Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 Outlining Why Mozilla Abandons Them.

  So while this change will be new for some Windows users, nobody should wait until their OS is out of support. They should just grab ESR. (And switch to Linux. But that’s not the main focus here.)

  Most Linux distributions where they value security, stability, and predictable software behavior, want nothing to do with Firefox’s Rapid Release channel, and it’s clear why.

• New Release: Tor Browser 12.5.2

  This release updates Firefox to 102.14.0esr, including bug fixes, stability improvements and important security updates. We also backported the Android-specific security updates from Firefox 116.

• Turning off the sidebar of Firefox's built in PDF viewer

  Apparently this behavior may actually be something that defaults to whatever the PDF asks for (also, also). I run into this routinely because a lot of academic papers in PDF form trigger this Firefox behavior (for whatever reason), which is possibly some default inherited through LaTeX or some other common scientific PDF creator.

• curl write-out to files

  The curl option –write-out is one of my personal favorites and offers users an excitingly powerful way to output information from a transfer. Over time, it has been extended to provide more and more features.

• Data Versioning

  The idea of version control for data has existed for decades. Countless startups and products have tried to tackle the problem, but nothing has come close to success. Why? Is the idea flawed?

• A Dylanesque Negotiating Strategy

  There has to be a science to it, right? But what I’ve seen from the recent deals OpenAI has made with the Associated Press and major newspaper publishers makes me think they just suck at negotiation.

  The AP’s OpenAI deal does not list a price. A deal with a consortium of local newspapers calls their deal a $5 million investment. And the best that anyone seems to have gotten from any of these agreements, honestly, is AP getting OpenAI to pledge to pay them more if someone manages to negotiate better than they did. With a bar that low, maybe someone will cross it.

• Running a Social Platform as Someone Who Dislikes Them

  Basil is right; I do struggle with the irony of running a social platform, yet being increasingly disenfranchised with the whole thing.