Brief items

In other words, Russia is set to introduce its first online voting system. The system will be tested in a Moscow neighborhood that will elect a single member to the capital's city council in September. The details of how the experiment will work are not yet known; the State Duma's proposal on Internet voting does not include logistical specifics. The Central Election Commission's reference materials on the matter simply reference "absentee voting, blockchain technology." When Dmitry Vyatkin, one of the bill's co-sponsors, attempted to describe how exactly blockchains would be involved in the system, his explanation was entirely disconnected from the actual functions of that technology. A discussion of this new type of voting is planned for an upcoming public forum in Moscow.

The report is a neat illustration of what I've called the adoption curve for oppressive technology, which goes, "refugee, immigrant, prisoner, mental patient, children, welfare recipient, blue collar worker, white collar worker."

This adds the initial driver for panfrost which supports Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost family of GPUs. Currently, only the T860 Midgard GPU has been tested. [...]

How's performance? Great, because I haven't measured it.

Sure, it's a matter of kernel coding conventions.

But this isn't the way to get those changed! The process for making such changes involves large numbers of people arguing at each other (perhaps at kernel summit) until Linus comes in and tells everyone how it's going to be.

Further Discussion for DPL!

Further Discussion builds concensus within Debian!

Further Discussion gets things done!

Further Discussion welcomes diverse perspectives in Debian!

We’ll grow the community with Further Discussion!

Our conclave recently communed and began working on new means of communication between our worlds. Forget the flying owls (fedmsg) that could be lost on the way to the target world, and behold the magical mirrors (Fedora messaging). This will help communicate more reliably than ever before.

I am really not sure what people are expecting from the DPL. My past experience showed me that expectations varied a lot between different groups/team/persons. Having a DPL elected doesn't mean people agree with his/her program.

I am not sure what kind of governance the project needs today. We should collectively think about this before rushing someone to invest all his emotional and physical energy for one year.

All this has been replaced by a set of Docker containers running my docker-debian-base software. They’re all in git, I can rebuild one of the containers in a few seconds or a few minutes by typing "make", and there is no cruft from 2002. There are a lot of benefits to this.

And yet, there is a part of me that feels it’s all so… cold. Servers having "personalities" was always a distinctly dubious thing, but these days as we work through more and more layers of virtualization and indirection and become more distant from the hardware, we lose an appreciation for what we have and the many shoulders of giants upon which we stand.

There was a time when commercial chat services supported XMPP because it was felt to be the right thing to do. But that was old-school hippie thinking, because if chatterers can just go ahead and talk to anyone anywhere, then your service probably won’t go viral and how are you going to monetize? You can simultaneously think markets are a useful civic tool and recognize obvious, egregious failures. So the links were severed and a whole lot of services just died.

I'm very disappointed in this. While I don't care for the way the SSPL was introduced, this license poses interesting questions about how copyleft can be extended (or not) and how the OSD's clauses about software packaging need to change in a SaaS world.

If nothing else, SSPL was a serious license proposal and deserved serious consideration it didn't get. THis was a dramatic failure of the license-review process, and I think shows that this group needs to be reconstituted.