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The Perl and Koha Conference will take place in Helsinki, From Monday, August 14^th through Wednesday, August 16^th, 2023. There will be two additional days of workshops following the main part of the conference. The Call for Talks is open through April 30^th, 2023 now.

Note for Perl (YAPC) people about Koha:

Koha, the free and open source library system software, is one of the most vibrant Perl projects around. Koha is used by thousands of libraries, big and small, all around the world. It uses the whole Perl technology stack, so all tech-related things around Perl are the things on which Koha is based. If you are a Koha software specialist, you are a Perl specialist. If you are a Perl specialist, you may become a Koha specialist!

But the Koha community is more than a software specialist. As libraries need software developers, the developers need the librarians, and we all need a common vision about the future development of Koha, and the underlying technologies.

Note for Koha-people about Perl:

Perl, our beloved language on which Koha created, and all accompanying technologies Perl developers live in, all fully fit in all technical topics of Koha development, improvement, design, speed, and generally the life of a "tech-expert who develops Koha". I.e. Perl community talks usually same things any Koha developer will talk about with somewhat "100% overlap": like Linux, SQL, ElasticSearch, RabbitMQ, Memcached, DevOps, Testing and CI/CD, general programming, refactoring, and efficiency, yet even more specific Perl's such as CPAN, Mojolicious, PSGI/Plack.

I presume NCommander is busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest as well as on the wrong side of the pond. However, perhaps there are others from SoylentNews more close by who could present the infrastructure there in Helsinki. Maybe janrinok?

PS. There is the Perl and Raku Conference 2023 July 11-13 2023 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada too. Although the call for papers deadline has already passed, it would still be possible to sign up to attend.

Multiple sites have reported that after months of negotiating with Google over blocked e-mail, the Republican National Committee has given up on getting results that way and will try suing. Unfortunately, aside from these recent accusations of partisanship, Google blocking mail is nothing new because it is well-known that Google has been causing increasing difficulty for independent mail services for a long time.

"Enough is enough - we are suing Google for their blatant bias against Republicans," said RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel in a statement to The Associated Press. "For ten months in a row, Google has sent crucial end-of-month Republican GOTV and fundraising emails to spam with zero explanation. We are committed to putting an end to this clear pattern of bias."

-- Republican committee sues Google over email spam filters [indiatimes.com], Economic Times

The U.S. political committee accuses the tech giant of "discriminating" against it by "throttling its email messages because of the RNC’s political affiliation and views," according to a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in California.

-- Republican National Committee sues Google over email spam filters [reuters.com], Reuters

The RNC filed a lawsuit Friday, Oct. 21, against Google in federal district court in California claiming the internet giant is “unlawfully discriminating against the Republican National Committee (‘RNC’) by throttling its email messages because of the RNC’s political affiliation and views.”

-- Republican National Committee Sues Google, Alleging Gmail Spam Filters Are Blocking Fundraising Emails [variety.com], Variety

Details: The RNC argues in the lawsuit that despite discussing the email issue with Google for more than nine months, it remains unresolved, alleging Google is sending emails to spam on purpose due to political bias.

-- Scoop: RNC sues Google claiming spam filter blocks email [axios.com], Axios

Among SMTP service maintainers admin after admin is finding that Google is making it impossible to host your own mail server [cfenollosa.com]. Even if you don't host your own mail server, you may notice that even using the mail client of your own choosing is very difficult with Google and limited to a subset of Mail User Agents (MUA) at that. So it is quite possible that this lawsuit risks distracting the country from the likelihood that Google is blocking most self-hosted mail and even a lot of the smaller commercial mail providers in an effort to grab control over the last of the market.

This throws a partisan wrench into the works and makes it less likely that the general problem that Google is causing for independent and self-hosted mail services will be addressed. So politics aside,
For those trying to correspond with those using Google's mail services, what have you noticed? For those using Google's mail services, what have you noticed?

The other week, Mexico News Daily reported that the Mexican Garrison of the 501^st Legion would march down a main artery of Mexico City. Later La Prensa Latina followed up and wrote that the route went through the downtown in the historic district. The 501^st Legion is a global Star Wars fan club with about 14k members and the Mexican Garrison has about 200 members.

Heise has an interview in English with Dmitry Kohmanyuk about running the Ukranian top level domain (UA) in this time of war. Dmitry has been working the Ukranian country code top level domain since its inception. He is currently unable to return to Ukraine but is one of a very dedicated team which keeps the domain running.

You said, you were critical about the notion of neutrality of infrastructure? Should The ICANN and Ripe have followed the appeal from Ukraine and cut Russia from IP resources and thrown their ccTLD .ru out of the authoritative root zone?

You know, I don’t know what they should do. I know what they should not do. They should not ignore the call. I understand that they allocated 1 million to keep the Internet running in Ukraine. I do not know how that money will be allocated, but I see the effort. I personally think they could sanction their Russian partners, like other US companies have done. Apart from what US laws say, every company can decide for itself to not serve some customers. They can decide to not do business with, let’s say North Korea. They could add Russia to that list.

Should the Internet community start to use BGP filters or filter specific domains?

I put my name to a letter which asks the community to consider a list of highly targeted sanctions. Bill Woodcock distributed it. And while I was not involved in the drafting as I felt I am partial, I did approved it. The letter explains how sanctions should be done in the internet age. I think it is a good start. It might not be the final thing possible. Some things might still be found inadequate. It is a mild letter, there are no threats in there. It has no negative language. And it also talks about the humanitarian aspect of sanctions. For me, the world exists because of trade, so stopping trade hurts people. Like when Ukraine stops producing wheat, people starve. We risk economic collapse with disruption of trade, that is clear.

He concludes by mentioning that there is no plan B.

Previously:
(2022) ICANN Won’t Revoke Russian Internet Domains, Says Effect Would be “Devastating” [soylentnews.org] [soylentnews.org]
(2015) ICANN Compromised... Again [soylentnews.org] [soylentnews.org]

The Verge has an interview with Eben Upton [theverge.com] of Raspberry Pi fame. Yes, there was a recent article about the Raspberry Pi, but this one goes into much more depth and we get the plans the founder has right from his own mouth.

It’s strange. You say it’s a long backstory; it really is a long backstory now. The foundation was incorporated right at the tail end of 2008. Then we had this very long and private prototyping cycle — knowing the sort of thing we wanted to build, but not knowing in detail what it was that we were going to build, or what it was that the market was going to accept. Even the public part of Raspberry Pi is now over 10 years old: we just celebrated the 10th anniversary of taking our first order on the 29th of February, 2012. We’ve had two birthdays so far — and a bunch of pseudo-birthdays.

[...] What is the role of the foundation?

The role of the foundation is to do good work. It’s a UK registered charity. It has a mission. I think “purposes” is the legal word: the thing that a British charitable foundation commits to do. The purposes of a foundation can only be changed with the consent of the charities commission and the foundation’s board and possibly membership. Its purposes are to promote STEM education, particularly computing education, especially among young people — particularly among primary and secondary schoolchildren. To do that, it does a variety of things. We return money to it. We return our surplus profit to it. That funds some activities. It receives corporate and individual philanthropic money.

It turns out that having a reliable source of income — which the foundation does from our work — is extremely valuable for corporate philanthropic partners, because if you’re a company and you’re giving to charity, you worry that the thing you’re funding will dry up and blow away. The way that people mitigate this risk is they make very short, single-year grants. That sucks for everyone, right? It sucks for the recipient because you can’t plan long-term. It sucks for the donor because you end up doing an enormous amount of work every year administering these recurring grants. If you have an organization that you could say, “This is independently funded. We can guarantee you that we won’t dry up and blow away. We can guarantee that all of your money you donate to us will go on actual project work rather than on central administrative costs. We’ll cover all of that ourselves. In return, you can make three-year grants. It’s easier for you. It’s easier for us. You can take that stream of dividend payment from us and you can leverage that into the philanthropic space.”

We also do a lot of government contracting as well now. We’re a trusted provider of teacher training services, for example. All of the teacher training for computer science in the UK now is handled by an organization called the National Center for Computing Education. The Raspberry Pi Foundation runs that along with a couple of partners. While it probably started as an organization that spends the money from the sale of products in pursuit of the traditional Raspberry Pi charitable purposes, it’s become a larger organization with these three pillars.

And since this is a journal entry I will editorialize by saying that further down in the interview it appears that he really smells money strongly now, and that is worrying. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has already made several bad decisions of a kind which has always previously proved fatal to other organizations, such as allowing microsofters directly onto the board as well as into key staff positions. Similar for Raspberry Pi Trading. Moves like that start a dry rot of sorts within the organization which destroy the organization's ability to stay on track and reach its goals, when left untreated. LIkewise when the original goals get displaced in pursuit of money.

Previously: many articles about the Raspberry Pi [soylentnews.org].

Dennis Yurichev (Денис Юричев) has written a four-part, illustrated blog post about understanding regular expressions using simple parsing tasks as examples. He uses DFA and NFA to illustrate the workflow within the examples:

• Fun with regular expressions: part I [yurichev.com]
• Fun with regular expressions: part II [yurichev.com]
• Fun with regular expressions: part III [yurichev.com]
• Fun with regular expressions and verification using CBMC: part IV [yurichev.com]

He has also published a book on SAT/SMT solvers can be viewed as solvers of huge systems of equations [sat-smt.codes] with many examples.

British computer scientist, Dr Andy Farnell, has written a long form article about why we will win the war for general-purpose computing. Currently, general-purpose computing is under assault from many directions from both multinational corporations and various politicians. However, although the future is not risk-free, he takes a positive outlook when accounting for the hardware, in particular SBCs, and the continuity provided by traditional computer culture.

Anyone who sees the booming market in single board computers, hybrid neural and DSP processors, massively multi-core silicon with embedded GPUs, new FPGA technology and the rise of RISC-V would surely laugh at the idea that General Purpose Computing is dying! But there are deeper theoretical objections to that claim. Advanced general purpose computing in myriad new forms might overtake our ability to define what computers are. That is a danger too. What we really need is a balance between genuinely general purpose computing and a shared concept of interoperable computing, making computers socially useful as well as offering individual utility.

While Big Tech wastes time locking down platforms, creating dumbed-down appliances, slurping up yesterdays data, telling people what they want and must have, creating thinly-veiled surveillance engines, securing their walled-gardens and 'intellectual property' – paradigm shifts will sneak up on them and leave them in the dust. Read a little history, it's always what happens.

Meanwhile, young people who continue to take a deep interest in technology, who learn programming, maths, physics and electronics, and who assert their right to tinker, repair, design, reverse engineer, build and sell new machines will hold the future. They will always be a threat to Big Tech (who will use broken patent laws, and their power to censor them using copyright). But the Tech Gaints cannot resist next generation of technological optimists, who will refuse to be dumbed-down, who will insist on ownership of their technology, and will ultimately 'take back tech'.

Young people who tinker, repair, reverse engineer, design, build, and sell new machines will determine the future, if allowed those activities. Stacked against them is the proprietary ICT in schools, broken patent laws, and abuse of copyright.

Previously:
(2021) Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 (Model A) Single Board Computer
(2020) SiFive Announces HiFive Unmatched Mini-ITX Motherboard for RISC-V PCs
(2020) Tiny Yet Useful: 13 Raspberry Pi Zero Alternatives
(2020) 2 GB Model of Raspberry Pi 4 Gets Permanent Price Cut to $35

Many articles are mentioning the current set of screensaver flaws but wrongly framing them as if they are something either new or surprising. Developer Jamie Zawinski, of Netscape fame, points out, that writing security-critical code is difficult and most people can't do it. However, given the history of what has gone on with screensavers and the number of reminders they have gotten, both gentle and forceful, it is more likely that they could design properly, they just don't want to. Specifically, he has been warning of why Xscreensaver is written the way it is for many years and the design considerations that other screensavers must keep in mind.

That comes up yet again in a recent post, where Jamie blogs about ongoing design flaws being implemented repeatedly in the custom screen savers [jwz.org] for various distros. In short, probably only XScreenSaver locks properly. That is because proper design considerations are intentionally absent from most other screen savers.

Making matters worse, in addition to perpetually creating the same design mistakes, it seems that at least three of the other screensavers have ripped off his Xscreensaver code in direct violation of copyright:

And in not-at-all-unrelated news:

Just to add insult to injury, it has recently come to my attention that not only are Gnome-screensaver, Mint-screensaver and Cinnamon-screensaver buggy and insecure dumpster fires, but they are also in violation of my license and infringing my copyright.

XScreenSaver was released under the BSD license, one of the oldest and most permissive of the free software licenses. It turns out, the Gnome-screensaver authors copied large parts of XScreenSaver into their program, removed the BSD license and slapped a GPL license on my code instead -- and also removed my name. Rude.

If they had asked me, "can you dual-license this code", I might have said yes. If they had asked, "can we strip your name off and credit your work as (C) William Jon McCann instead"... probably not.

Mint-screensaver and Cinnamon-screensaver, being forks and descendants of Gnome-screensaver, have inherited this license violation and continue to perpetuate it. Every Linux distro is shipping this copyright- and license-infringing code.

I eagerly await hearing how they're going to make this right.

Previously [jwz.org], previously [jwz.org], previously [jwz.org], previously [jwz.org], previously [jwz.org].

He has been blogging about preventing these specific flaws since at least 2011. The copyright violations just rub salt in that wound. The late Steve Jobs once commented that a particular group could not even copy well. Has that group's way of thinking spread too far now? It appears to have infected more than a few projects.