Brief items

While I think that Zoom certainly has a legal right to exclude users it doesn't want, it still sets a worrying precedent that they're picking and choosing who can use the service based on what they might talk about during a call. I recognize that some will insist (perhaps in both directions!) that this kind of thing is no different than Facebook or Twitter or YouTube banning someone, but to me there remain fundamental differences in the type of service being provided (transmission of transitory bits, rather than long-term hosting of content). Separately, unlike social media platforms, you can participate in a Zoom call without getting a Zoom account. As such, this strikes me as a slippery slope that goes way beyond social media content moderation.

After the cancellation of the NYU event (in which [Leila] Khaled was not speaking), Zoom put out a bland meaningless statement about its various terms of use, but refused to explain what policy was possibly violated by this academic seminar about Zoom's content moderation practices.

We are drowning in syzbot-found issues, almost none will get resolved unless people start providing resources to fix them. I would strongly recommend the people that find them also send a fix at the same time where ever possible.

I’m just posting some ideas that I came up with while pondering something that, from my perspective, is an area where Debian is clearly failing to meet the needs of some of our users. We know Debian is a popular and respected Linux distribution, and we know people value our stability. However, we also know that people like running Fedora and Ubuntu’s non-LTS releases. People like Arch Linux. Not just “end-users”, but also the people developing the software shipped by the distros themselves. There are a lot of potential contributors to Debian who are kept away by our unwillingness to provide a distro offering both fresh software and security support. I think that we could attract more people to the Debian community if we could provide a solution for these people, and that would ultimately be good for everybody.

So, yes, youtube-dl can be used to infringe the RIAA’s copyrights. It can also be used for non-infringing purposes. The code itself does not infringe. There’s nothing about it that gives the RIAA a justification to take it down. [...]

youtube-dl provides a focal point, but there’s more to it. Copyright law is now used to suppress instead of promote creative works. The DMCA, in particular, favors the large rightsholders over smaller developers and creators. It essentially forces sites to act on a “guilty until proven innocent” model. Companies in a position to push back have an obligation to do so. Microsoft has become a supporter of open source, now it’s time to show they mean it.

So, is Xorg abandoned? To the extent that that means using it to actually control the display, and not just keep X apps running, I'd say yes. But xserver is more than xfree86. Xwayland, Xwin, Xephyr, Xvnc, Xvfb: these are projects with real value that we should not give up. A better way to say it is that we can finally abandon xfree86.