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FSF / Software Freedom: FSF, Guix, and the JS Trap
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FSF ☛ Why buy when you can learn and repair? Read our Giving Guide
When we first launched the Ethical Tech Giving Guide, we did so recognizing how pervasive proprietary software and hardware advertising can be for users. Each year, we publish an updated version detailing the known options for ethical tech gifts, from computers to e-books. This year, our focus has shifted to giving the gift of freedom instead of any specific items to purchase, providing you with concrete ways you can get started using free software on devices you already own. That bad gift you received a few years back can be given a new life: one that supports your freedom.
We have plenty of other suggestions for ethical tech gifts in our Ethical Tech Giving Guide as well as some tips and tricks for seasoned free software supporters -- not just for the holiday season! -- so consider getting your friends and family gifts that promote user freedom and maybe even introduce them to the free software movement.
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GNU ☛ GNU Guix: A Planet for Guix
I am pleased to announce the availability of Planet Guix, an Atom and RSS aggregator covering all things Guix. You can browse posts on the website or use your favourite feed reader to subscribe to the aggregate feed.
Planet Guix already has subscriptions to 19 blogs from around the community; if you write about Guix (no matter how infrequently) and would like your blog to be included, or if you would like to suggest another blog I missed, please create a pull request against the repository in Codeberg — you'll see that the subscriptions are simply configured as association lists in
planet/config.scm.Background
Back in September, Sébastien Gendre asked on the help-guix mailing list if there were any plans to create a Planet website for Guix.
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Traps
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JavaScript: The Ten-Day Hack That Became a Thirty-Year Trap
Thirty years ago, on December 4, 1995, the technological trajectory of our species shifted on its axis, though few recognized the seismic nature of the event at the time. Netscape Communications and Sun Microsystems issued a joint press release that would inadvertently lay the foundation for the most pervasive system of user subjugation in the history of computing. The announcement was for "JavaScript," described in the optimistic, marketing-heavy dialect of the mid-nineties Silicon Valley as an "open, cross-platform object scripting language" designed for "creating live online applications."
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