Free, Libre, and Open Source Software Leftovers
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Martijn Braam ☛ Megapixels 2.0: DNG loading and Autowhitebalance
After getting some nice DNG exporting code to work with libdng in the last post I decided to go mess with auto white-balancing again on the Librem 5.
I got the Megapixels 2.x codebase to the point where it smoothly displays the camera feed on the Librem 5 and the PinePhone Pro. One of the things that Just Worked(tm) on the original PinePhone is the auto white-balance correction of the rear camera. This has also not worked on the front camera on that device and the results of lacking AWB code is very obvious: the pictures are very green.
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Tor ☛ New Release: Tor Browser 13.0.8 (Desktop)
Tor Browser 13.0.8 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
This is an emergency desktop-only release which fixes a crash in pluggable transports for Windows 7 users. The most recent Go toolchain update seems to have finally broken Windows 7 support (see golang/go/#57003 for background). We have downgraded our lyrebird, conjure, and webtunnel pluggable transports to the 1.20 series and they should be working once more on older Windows systems. Unfortunately, the snowflake pluggable transport depends on the 1.21 series to work, so it will remain broken on these systems.
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Standards/Consortia
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Erin Kissane ☛ Untangling Threads
Back in the fall, I wrote a series of posts on a particularly horrific episode in Meta’s past. I hadn’t planned to revisit the topic immediately, but here we are, with Threads federation with the ActivityPub-based fediverse ecosystem an increasingly vivid reality.
My own emotional response to Meta and Threads is so intense that it hasn’t been especially easy to think clearly about the risks and benefits Threads’ federation brings, and to whom. So I’m writing through it in search of understanding, and in hopes of planting some helpful trail markers as I go.
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Tim Kellogg ☛ Are They Actually Afraid of AI?
By nature, open source serves the people who create it. That’s true of all software, but there aren’t any gatekeepers for open source. Anyone can start a project or contribute to one. Participating in open source is exercising the power to control your own destiny. Your contributions don’t have to be aligned with some company, they just have to be aligned to the project, and if you can’t find such a project, you simply create your own project.