The main Github.com domain was still accessible but raw.githubusercontent.com, where code is typically stored, was blocked.
Some days, like today, I regret commenting TorrentFreak out of my RSS feed reader.
It's kind of funny, but it's also kind of scary that not having access to Github would probably significantly impact a lot of companies and services. It would definitely impact me.
Oh well. We can always move to Sourcehut, right?
Because I like the 2-clause BSD license. I am not a fan of “copyleft” or forcing obligations on people in general. I want my software to be available for anyone who wants to use it.
Interesting choice to romanize Japanese. Now you have to figure out which romanization system to use (I was surprised を was romanized as o and not wo). But I do get it, I guess, because you have to wonder it would only use Hiragana or mix Kanji in:
Well, for the sake of being international, we should just use Katakana everywhere. That's the sanest suggestion (who's with me?):
Of course, you're kind of screwed on a TTY, since they don't generally render unicode...so let's go back to figuring out which romanization system to use.
I didn’t see any communities or articles talking about this, so either it’s not a big deal, or nobody is talking about it.
More than likely very few people own a pinephone, and the few that do don't read pinephone news. Thanks for posting this.
As for me, I'm not buying another pinephone/GNU+Linux compatible device until both the community and the manufacturer get their shit figured out. I bought the PInephone expecting it to one day become more useful to me, so I guess that's on me.
In about 5 years, the last patents for the baseline H.264 (AVC) video codec will expire. This means Firefox will finally be able to support decoding for H.264 (the codec most commonly used with the MP4 container) without Cisco needing to cover the licensing fees for them. DaVinci Resolve will also be able to support decoding/encoding on GNU/Linux. Basically, anyone will be able to implement a H.264 decoder/encoder without needing to pay royalties, which means free software programs like Firefox which don't charge their users will be able to implement it. The codec will no longer be patent-encumbered. See Wikipedia's debate on whether to support H.264 in 2014 for lots of opinions on this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Requests_for_comment/MP4_Video
However, H.265 (also called HEVC) is the "next-generation" video codec after H.264. The patent pool situation is so confusing and expensive compared to H.264 that Mozilla, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, and dozens of other companies using video compression technology formed the Alliance for Open Media to develop a royalty-free codec they could use instead of HEVC. As a result, HEVC has seen very little adoption, particularly on the web. Most companies continue to use H.264. Windows 10 asks you to pay $0.99 for HEVC decoding support in the default video player. In fact, Google even announced they were dropping support for H.264 in 2011 because of their "focus on open web principles": https://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in-chrome.html
They never went through with it, of course.
AV1 is finally at a point where there are production-ready encoders and decoders. The iPhone 15 Pro is shipping with AV1 hardware decoding support, so even Apple is on board (though only for the most expensive phone so far). So, we'll see hardware decoding support in more phones in a few years, and hopefully AV1 will see a lot of adoption.
Adding support for HEVC in browsers feels like a step back because it legitimizes the codec and works against AV1 adoption. Many of these companies have resisted implementing HEVC support (aside from Apple) because it positions AV1 as the only realistic option to shift to from H.264. With HEVC in the picture now, it might be a realistic option in the future. Well, there's VP9 too, but there are some patent disputes over that codec that might make companies sheepish about adopting it. Not that AV1 is free from those disputes either, but they are far more confident about it and Unified Patents is doing great work invalidating Sisvel's AV1 patent claims (and even some HEVC patents here and there).
My opinion is that the ship has already sailed. Chrome caving in and adding HEVC support last year, albeit only with hardware decoders, was all it took with their 90%+ market share. Firefox's 3% market share isn't going to make a dent, and not doing it risks keeping users who need HEVC support on Chrome. I also don't think hardware decoding support is a big deal right now due to all the older devices without HEVC hardware decoders, but it opens the door to ask for more support down the line. I very much doubt Google is going to do that, though.
All in all, having AV1 support heavily benefits the open source community, as AV1 itself is an open source codec. This means that AV1 has a royalty-free licensing model that makes it suitable for adoption in various open source projects. It was also designed to solve long-standing patent litigation issues that were common in other codecs in the industry.
It was certainly designed that way. However, Sisvel believes that AV1 uses patented technology in the specification. Sisvel announced this one year after the AV1 standard was finalized, and not during the three years the standard was being developed. Of course, patent holders can't be expected to deeply investigate every new technology that's coming out on the market...but this was the largest new technology, formed by a coalition of some of the biggest companies in the world deliberately designed to get away from patent-licensing organisations like MPEG LA, under development for 3 years. Read into Sisvel (and its member companies) motivations as you will.
Nonetheless, Unified Patents is hard at work challenging invalid AV1 patents, among others:
Don't know who Unified Patents is?
Unified is a 350+ international membership organization that seeks to improve patent quality and deter unsubstantiated or invalid patent assertions in defined technology sectors (Zones) through its activities. Should Unified determine that its goals can be better served by settling a post-grant challenge (or agreeing to never file any challenges), Unified will consider settling in exchange for a license, though never for money. As with all aspects of its challenges, Unified acts independently when settling, and never provides members with advance notice of negotiations, draft settlement agreements, or actual settlement.
They also do...prior art competitions?
Unified is pleased to announce prior art has been found on three patents owned by Speir Technologies, an Atlantic IP Services subsidiary.
We would also like to thank the dozens of other high-quality submissions that were made on this patent. The ongoing contests are open to anyone, and include tens of thousands of dollars in rewards available for helping the industry to challenge NPE patents of questionable validity by finding and submitting prior art in the contests. Visit PATROLL today to learn more about how to participate.
In other news, more than half of the H.264 patents have expired, and all the essential ones will be expired by 2027.
Not Power Profiles Daemon...
Red Hat has decided to stop allocating resources for maintaining and improving these parts of the freedesktop project. Red Hat isn't working on proprietary versions of them. They've just decided to stop paying for work to be done on them. It just so happens that many of these projects were only being maintained by Red Hat employees, it seems.
Its still open source. You can still view the source code. That’s what open source is.
"Open Source" does not, and has never only meant, "you can view the source code". This is the Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd/
Relevant excerpt:
- No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor
The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
The Open Source Definition is very specific, and this license does not meet it. This license is, as it calls itself, "source-available".
If the OSI had obtained that trademark in 1999 on "Open Source", it would be abundantly clear what software really is and is not open source https://opensource.org/pressreleases/certified-open-source.php/
What I like:
lf most of the time)What I dislike:
grim and slurp, which is my favorite screenshot workflow.My main search engine is Mojeek, and my secondary search engine is Kagi. I've paid for Kagi for over a year, and it gets good results. I think it's great that every part of both search engines work without Javascript, and that Kagi's results pages are very light. It's also cool that it returns results for pages in the Internet Archive, which can be useful for certain esoteric topics. I'm de-ranking certain sites so they're pushed to the bottom of results, like quora, twitter, w3schools, and reddit.
There are also no ads! At all! I used Duckduckgo in a VM today and it was dreadful how far you have to scroll just to get past the ads and see the actual results.
Kagi gets great results. My only problem is that, just like Duckduckgo, they use the Bing API. Now, Kagi actually uses their own non-commercial index Teclis, combined with their news index Tinygem, as well as calling Google's API and many other search engine APIs (including Mojeek). My main search engine is Mojeek because they use their own index.
I've found Kagi great for technical/日本語 queries, which is something Mojeek doesn't handle well. If I want to learn about a certain topic, I search Wikipedia directly. I think Kagi is the nicest and fanciest Bing/Google proxy around, with easily the best user experience of any search engine.
You can get the manga officially from here in its original form: https://www.aerialline.com/comics/ubunchu/
It's licensed under CC-BY NC 3.0 and the author includes the original photoshop files if you want to edit them.
It's pretty funny. I own a physical copy.