Brief items

In an ideal world, schools should be actively preparing pupils to be empowered citizens in a digital world that is increasingly riddled with exploitative and coercive systems. Instead, the [UK] government is forcing schools to collect data that are then sold or given to firms that exploit it, with no meaningful consent. There is not even the normal right to request subject access [so] you can check whether the information about you is right and have it corrected if it's wrong.

Securus Technologies markets a product to law enforcement that taps into realtime cell-tower data from mobile carriers to produce fine-grained location tracking of anyone carrying a phone; it is nominally marketed to find parolees and wandering Alzheimer's patients, but because it has no checks or balances, cops can query it willy-nilly to find anyone's location.

That's what, Cory Hutcheson, ex-Sheriff of Mississippi County, MO, is accused of doing; prosecutors say that for three years, Hutcheson abused Securus's system to track all kinds of people -- even a local judge -- without a warrant.

Securus claims that it restricts the use of its system to legally permitted surveillance, requiring users to upload warrants or court orders prior to use; but it does not vet or review those orders before granting access. Securus also does not make the alleged court orders visible to carriers before it queries their databases, meaning that the phone companies have to take Securus's word for it.

The carriers, meanwhile, are exploiting a loophole in privacy laws that nominally prohibit selling this kind of data: by burying "consent" to the sale of your location data in their lengthy, never-read agreements, the carriers are able to circumvent the law; primarily to sell your data to marketers, but also to surveillance companies like Securus.

A hacker has broken into the servers of Securus, a company that allows law enforcement to easily track nearly any phone across the country, and which a US Senator has exhorted federal authorities to investigate. The hacker has provided some of the stolen data to Motherboard, including usernames and poorly secured passwords for thousands of Securus' law enforcement customers.

Although it's not clear how many of these customers are using Securus's phone geolocation service, the news still signals the incredibly lax security of a company that is granting law enforcement exceptional power to surveill individuals.

Security is never something we actually want. Security is something we need in order to avoid what we don't want. It's also more abstract, concerned with hypothetical future possibilities. Of course it's lower on the priorities list than fundraising and press coverage. They're more tangible, and they're more immediate.

This is all to the attackers' advantage.

These numbers are so inaccurate it's not really worth it to bother: should a DD who hasn't made an upload in ten years be counted? Should a non-DD non-DM contributor who maintains 86 packages for one and half decades? Then, don't forget that a good part of the credit should go to upstreams who actually wrote the software. And so on.

Thus, saying that Debian is produced "by almost a thousand active developers" is the most accurate figure we can honestly give.

So while the use cases you mention should be taken into consideration, I don't believe they support the conclusion that we should continue to release Ubuntu on i386 in future releases.

[This] is a cost largely paid by Canonical (both in terms of infrastructure, and in terms of engineering work to keep the base system working). It's not very compelling to say that Canonical should continue bearing these costs out of pocket on the grounds that some other companies are unwilling to update their software to an ISA from this millennium :)

Unfortunately, if we all stop using small distros five years from now there will likely be no brilliant new up-and-comers.

For people who want to insist that Linux is not Unix; that's fine. I usually like to yank their chain by saying, tongue in cheek, that sure, Linux is not Unix, but it is largely compatible with Legacy Unix systems. :-)

While Wayland is certainly making great strides, I don't think the world is yet ready to stop using X altogether, but it's getting harder and harder for us to keep X alive.