Web Browsers and Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
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DomainTools ☛ Nowhere Near Extinction: Mastodon One Year Later
A little over a year has passed since the November 2022 migration of many Infosec folks to Mastodon and the ActivityPub Fediverse. I wrote an introductory post about the platform early on, but it’s worth checking back in to see how things have evolved.
As a quick reminder, Mastodon is a decentralized social media platform that operates on the ActivityPub protocol. Out of the box, ActivityPub platforms “federate” with each other, connecting automatically, but allowing folks to self-organize how they like and work things out within and between the different communities. Mastodon focuses on microblogging, while other platforms are more Reddit-like, or Instagram-like, and so on.
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Rob Knight ☛ We Need to Talk About Your Eleventy Post Dates
Since I really got back into following RSS feeds in the past couple of years I've noticed a problem with Eleventy sites[1] and post dates. This also caused me an issue while building EchoFeed but that's a story for another day. If I didn't know better I'd think everyone is scheduling their posts at midnight.
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The Register UK ☛ Brave, Mozilla, Vivaldi see browser installs rise on iOS
Since Apple implemented a browser choice screen for iPhones earlier this month to comply with Europe's Digital Markets Act (DMA), Brave Software, Mozilla, and Vivaldi have seen a surge in the number of people installing their web browsers.
It's an early sign that Europe's competition rules may actually … get this … enhance competition – an outcome that skeptics deemed unlikely.
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Open Access/Content
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Creative Commons ☛ Getty Museum releases 88K+ images of artworks with CC0
The J. Paul Getty Museum just released more than 88 thousand works under Creative Commons Zero (CCØ), putting the digital images of items from its impressive collection squarely and unequivocally into the public domain.
This is in line with our advocacy efforts at Creative Commons (CC): digital reproductions of public domain material must remain in the public domain. In other words, no new copyright should arise over the creation of a digitized “twin.”
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Licensing / Legal
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New Statesman ☛ We should open source the law
What if all English case reports – current and historic – were made available to the public for free? Currently, the majority of this immense body of text is controlled privately by two companies: the charity known as the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting (ICLR), and a company called the All England Law Reports. Both charge high fees for access and restrict how cases can be used. Unlike in some US states, neither are sanctioned by the courts as the sole and exclusive reporter of legal cases, but they nonetheless have an effective monopoly on the legal corpus. This is one of the world’s oldest continuous bodies of text dealing with legal cases and would be invaluable for creating LLM-powered legal tech. A public, machine-readable version of the law-reporting corpus available to anyone who wants to use it would be of enormous benefit.
Public access would allow researchers and innovators to train new (English) legal tools, such as tech for giving legal advice and predicting court decisions. This would vastly reduce the financial and time-cost of legal services, reducing transaction costs (which are considerable) and improving access to justice for all manner of clients. The success of these tools might also stimulate more extensive text production, such as the publication of case reports at every level of adjudication and pre-litigation. More ambitiously, if this technology reaches a sufficient level of reliability, the government could offer it as an optional, alternative form of dispute resolution in civil cases. These developments would have the potential to make the English legal system into the most dynamic and advanced in the world.
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