AVIF is a new image format derived from the keyframes of AV1 video.

Mentions: https://squoosh.app an image compression web app that allows you to dive into the advanced options provided by various image compressors.

Really nice read, that gave me some food for thought and includes a nice summary of the Open Source vs Free Software history.

Some hand-picked quotes:

Fuzzy, contentious, and complex ideas have been stripped of their subversive connotations and replaced by cleaner, shinier, and emptier alternatives; long-running debates about politics, rights, and freedoms have been recast in the seemingly natural language of economics, innovation, and efficiency.

Stallman’s may not have been the best software on offer, but some sacrifice of technological efficiency was a price worth paying for emancipation.

Any move to subject the fruits of developers’ labor to public regulation, even if its goal was to promote a greater uptake of open source software, must be opposed, since it would taint the reputation of open source as technologically and economically superior to proprietary software.

As O’Reilly put it in 2010, “the art of promoting openness is not to make it a moral crusade, but rather to highlight the competitive advantages of openness.”

It seems that anyone who wanted to claim that a revolution was under way in their own field did so simply by invoking the idea of Web 2.0 in their work: Development 2.0, Nursing 2.0, Humanities 2.0, Protest 2.0, Music 2.0, Research 2.0, Library 2.0, Disasters 2.0, Road Safety 2.0, Identity 2.0, Stress Management 2.0, Archeology 2.0, Crime 2.0, Pornography 2.0, Love 2.0, Wittgenstein 2.0. What unites most of these papers is a shared background assumption that, thanks to the coming of Web 2.0, we are living through unique historical circumstances. Except that there was no coming of Web 2.0—it was just a way to sell a technology conference to a public badly burned by the dotcom crash.

Some words—like “law”—are particularly susceptible to crazy talk, as they mean so many different things: from scientific “laws” to moral “laws” to “laws” of the market to administrative “laws,” the same word captures many different social relations. “Open,” “networks,” and “information” function much like “law” in our own Internet discourse today.

O’Reilly admitted that he was the one to edit the Wikipedia page for the book. O’Reilly is perfectly positioned to control our technology discourse: as a publisher, he can churn out whatever books he needs to promote his favorite memes—and, once those have been codified in book form, they can be easily admitted into Wikipedia, where they quickly morph into facts. What’s not to like about “collective intelligence”?

As long as this “open data” was liquid and reusable, others could build on it. Neither the political process that led to the release of the data nor its content was considered relevant to openness. Thus, data about how many gum-chewers Singapore sends to prison would be “open” as long as the Singaporean government shared it in suitable formats. Why it shared such data was irrelevant.

O’Reilly deploys the highly ambiguous concept of openness to confuse “transparency as accountability” (what Obama called for in his directive) with “transparency as innovation” (what O’Reilly himself wants).

If Participation 1.0 was about the use of public reason to push for political reforms, with groups of concerned citizens coalescing around some vague notion of the shared public good, Participation 2.0 is about atomized individuals finding or contributing the right data to solve some problem without creating any disturbances in the system itself.

In 2011, Cameron’s government released a white paper on “Open Public Services” that uses the word “open” in a peculiar way: it argues that, save for national security and the judiciary, all public services must become open to competition from the market.

Raymond writes in The Cathedral and the Bazaa [...] that “one may call [Linux hackers] motivation ‘altruistic’, but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist.” If it sounds like Ayn Rand, that’s because Raymond explicitly draws on her crazy talk.

These iconic, low-resolution designs are the perfect tool to learn the basics of physical interface design. Armed with 52 different bricks, let’s see what they can teach us about the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.

FROM: http://taint.org/2020/08/04/235802a.html

Ziklibrenbib est un blog collaboratif consacré aux musiques en libre diffusion. Sur ce blog, nous vous proposons une sélection régulière d’albums en libre diffusion, présentés à travers une micro chronique et un morceau en écoute.

Vous fréquentez une médiathèque avez déjà entendu parler des œuvres sous licence Creative Commons ou Art Libre ? Courrez montrer à votre discothécaire qu’il est tout à fait possible d’intégrer des musiques de qualité, que l’on peut copier, au fonds musical d’une médiathèque !

Aux termes de la présente décision, l’Autorité de la concurrence sanctionne Google pour avoira busé de sa position dominante sur le marché de la publicité en ligne liée aux recherches, en violation de l’article L. 420-2 du code de commerce et l’article 102 du Traité sur le fonctionnement de l’Union européenne

Cette décision fait suite à une saisine de la société Gibmedia. L’instruction menée a conduit à la notification d’un grief portant sur la mise en œuvre non transparente, non objective et discriminatoire des règles du service de publicité en ligne liée aux recherches de Google, appelé« AdWords », puis rebaptisé « Google Ads » en juillet 2018.

Script to install Datalogics PDF Checker CLI on a Linux system:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Lucas-C/dotfiles_and_notes/master/bin/install-pdfchecker.sh | bash
PDF_Checker/pdfchecker --profile PDF_Checker/CheckerProfiles/everything.json --input $pdf

Source: http://taint.org/2020/07/13/235801a.html

European standard EN45554 ‘details ”general methods for the assessment of the ability to repair, reuse and upgrade energy-related products.” In plain English, it’s a standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff. It’s also a huge milestone for the fight for fair repair.’

I have compiled a list of tools you might find helpful for testing structured data markup and rich snippet display (microdata, RDFa, RDFa Lite and JSON-LD)

Emmanuel Macron l’a affirmé dès son élection : il veut faire de la France une “startup nation”. Il démontre régulièrement son soutien à la “FrenchTech”, censée représenter la quintessence de l’innovation et de l’entreprenariat. Mais derrière cette ambition, la réalité est bien différente. La France peine à se dégager de l’emprise des GAFAM, comme l’ont cruellement rappelé les déboires de Qwant, le moteur de recherche qui devait supplanter Google. Et l’échec patent de l’application StopCovid en est une énième illustration. Pourquoi la France peine-t-elle à innover et à recouvrir son indépendance numérique ? Comment résister face aux plateformes, sans pour autant exploiter une main d’oeuvre uberisée, et en respectant la vie privée des utilisateurs ?

Pour en parler, nous avons reçu Jean-Baptiste Kempf, l’éditeur du logiciel français le plus utilisé au monde. Il s’agit du lecteur de vidéos VLC, le fameux logiciel au cône de chantier . Open-source, maintenu par la communauté, il est porté par une structure associative. On est bien loin des “jeunes qui veulent devenir milliardaires” dont rêve le Président Macron. Pourtant, le logiciel, né d’un projet étudiant, a dépassé les 3 milliards de téléchargements.

Jean-Baptiste Kempf juge sévèrement, mais non sans humour, l’incompétence des politiques dès lors qu’il s’agit d’innovation. Personnage atypique, on peine à la mettre dans une case. Mais ce qui est certain, c’est que son expérience remet en cause le récit du capitalisme comme moteur de l’innovation.

UnMetal is a 2D stealth/action game (with a bit of humor) where the goal is to escape from an enemy military base.

Cette démo dure 20min et je l'ai trouvé vraiment drôle & intéressante !
Une ambiance Metal Gear / The Expendables parodique, de l'action-infiltration, et plein d'items à collecter et assembler, façon Point-and-click.