FSF Executive Director, John Sullivan: interview

“I stay involved because I think it's one of the most important social movements in existence, and it needs help — a lot of help. As more and more of the world's social, cultural, economic, and political interactions are mediated by technology, control over the technology becomes incredibly important for the exercise of any basic individual freedoms.”

Matrix federated chat

Matrix is an open standard for decentralised communication, providing simple HTTP APIs and open source reference implementations for securely distributing and persisting JSON over an open federation of servers.

GnuPG developer Werner Koch receives donations, LF grant

“After this article appeared, Werner Koch informed us that last week he was awarded a one-time grant of $60,000 from Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative. Werner told us he only received permission to disclose it after our article published. Meanwhile, since our story was posted, donations flooded Werner's website donation page and he reached his funding goal of $137,000. In addition, Facebook and the online payment processor Stripe each pledged to donate $50,000 a year to Koch’s project.”

Cory Doctorow Rejoins EFF to Eradicate DRM Everywhere

“Doctorow will be a special consultant to the Apollo 1201 Project, a mission to eradicate DRM in our lifetime. Apollo 1201 will challenge the use of DRM as well as the legal structures that support it.”

Outreachy: broader outreach of underrepresented groups

“Outreachy helps people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software get involved. We provide a supportive community for beginning to contribute any time throughout the year and offer focused internship opportunities twice a year with a number of free software organizations.”

EU to fund free software code review

“The European Parliament has approved funding for several projects related to Free Software and privacy. In the EU budget for 2015, which the European Parliament adopted on December 17, the Parliamentarians have allocated up to one million Euro for a project to audit Free Software programs in use at the Commission and the Parliament in order to identify and fix security vulnerabilities.”

You can now petition the European Union to 'fix my document'

“Inspired by the pothole identification and alert site and app ‘fixmystreet.com’, OFE, through its ‘fixmydocument.eu’, is giving a crowd-sourced voice to public frustration with software interoperability limitations that stand in the way of citizens who are seeking to communicate and interact with government.”

Dark Mail Technical Alliance publishes technical specification for DIME

“Our Mission: To bring the world our unique end-to-end encrypted protocol and architecture that is the 'next-generation' of private and secure email.”

Sandstorm raises US$1.3M

“Sandstorm lets you run your own server and install apps like EtherCalc, GitLab, LibreBoard, Wave, and more as easily as you'd install apps on your phone.”

New releases

Linux.conf.au 2015, Auckland

Citizenfour

“Citizenfour is a front row seat for camera-shy Snowden's bombshell. Nerve-racking. Educational.”