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Free Software, Digital Sovereignty, and Standards
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James Cherti ☛ The Emacs security settings that might silently compromise your system
Emacs ships with default settings intended for backward compatibility and convenience over strict security. The following settings enforce TLS certificate verification, reduce unintended ffap network lookups, restrict the evaluation of potentially unsafe local file, and directory variables, automated package review system, and protect authentication credentials stored by Emacs.
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Standards/Consortia
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Digital Camera World ☛ This rainbow chart has been keeping pro photographers in check for 50 years – ColorChecker is celebrating its big birthday with a virtual museum
As the owners of the ColorChecker changed, so did the technology behind it. These days, ultra-precise laser scanners measure the light of each color patch, translating them into universal digital coordinates that computers and software can understand.
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Michael Geist ☛ Be Careful What You Wish For: Why Asking Google Maps to Defy the U.S. on Lake Ontario Would Undermine Canadian Digital Sovereignty
Several prominent Canadian sites displayed Lake America to Canadians over the weekend, including Hydro One’s outage map, the LCBO store locator, GO Transit’s station finder, and a federal housing and infrastructure map. This occurred because those services embed the Google Maps API and had not set the region parameter to Canada, a setting that Google’s own documentation encourages developers to apply. This was easily fixable, with Hydro One and the LCBO quickly correcting their maps, and speaks not to a choice by Google but rather to the choices made by those sites themselves. If digital sovereignty is about choice, then choice has to be exercised. Just as businesses and organizations are choosing to host their data in Canada or use Canadian-based services (consider my recent Law Bytes podcast on Gander Social), sites must proactively ensure that the defaults on their services are set to Canada.
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