Denmark has begun phasing out Microsoft software in government, with the Road Traffic Authority piloting a switch to open-source OS and office tools. 🖥️
Officials cite data control and vendor lock-in risks, signaling a broader push that could affect up to 15,000 public employees. 🔓
🔗 https://itsfoss.com/news/denmark-road-traffic-authority-ditches-microsoft/
#TechNews #OpenSource #Privacy #Security #Government #EU #Data #Sovereignty #IT #PublicSector #Digital #Microsoft #Office #Software #Tech #Cloud #FOSS #Denmark #Danmark #LibreOffice #Linux
@cnx @giacomo OM is unfortunately not really FOSS anymore(?) as necessary parts of their map generator is not openly published/licensed.
Otherwise, here's an update of where CoMaps is today: https://www.comaps.app/news/2025-12-16/comaps-and-its-community-end-of-2025/ and differences to OM are also here in terms of features: https://www.comaps.app/support/how-do-the-features-differ-from-those-of-organic-maps/
@giacomo @cnx OSM is just a database of geographic information, it's not processed to actually be a navigatable map. Both Organic Maps and CoMaps (and all other OSM-based map/nav apps) process that data (routing penalties, picking POI types to include etc). The CoMaps map generator is based on the OM one, but has eg improved routing penalties
And yes, you can throw the maps on any static host for serving them as long as the folder structure matches it.
If you are going to give your children phones for Christmas, and they are not dumbphones that can only call and at most send sms, you are robbing them of a future.
Their smartphone will severely demage their frontal cortex, causing attention issues that will hurt them all life long.
Give them books, games, offline video games, whatever... but NOT smartphones.
You are really going to regret such gift.
Very interesting.
May I ask a couple of questions about your python scripts? #RTFM is a valid response, but I'm not at pc now...
1) is it possible to keep track of maps' updates?
2) what the difference between #OpenStreetMaps' maps, the ones from #CoMaps and the one from #OrganicMaps (I didn't know there was a dedicated organic maps server, I thought all maps were from open street maps!)
3) I see the server.py "just" wraps an #HTTPServer: is it possible to publish the downloaded maps on a public (static) shared hosting to be shared with friends?
Given how cheap is shared web hosting these days, this feature might turn #CoMaps to one of the best #privacy preserving tools for people and small communities!
well I think this is #freesoftware working at its best: I'm not deep enough in the #OrganicMaps' politics to know who is right and who is wrong, but forks are always welcome, in my opinion.
Great project I didn't know about.
How does #CoMaps compares with #OrganicMapsB
Programming is one of the cheapest and most energy efficient hobbies.
Yet companies are trying to convince us that you're not a REAL programmer if you don't rent computers from "the Cloud" and ask a bot at every step of software development. https://andrewkelley.me/post/renting-is-for-suckers.html via @eniko
I'd focus to support small and efficient alternative servers like #snac2 that would really benefit the #fediverse diversity and distribution
@EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu @Framasoft@framapiaf.org @Mastodon@mastodon.social @IceCubesApp@mastodon.online @ivory@tapbots.social @Tusky@mastodon.social @DataKnightmare@mastodon.xyz
quelli di anna's archive hanno messo a disposizione l'intero catalogo di Spotify! 🤯
"We backed up Spotify (metadata and music files). It’s distributed in bulk torrents (~300TB), grouped by popularity.
This release includes the largest publicly available music metadata database with 256 million tracks and 186 million unique ISRCs.
It’s the world’s first “preservation archive” for music which is fully open (meaning it can easily be mirrored by anyone with enough disk space), with 86 million music files, representing around 99.6% of listens."
Of course Spotify doesn’t have all the music in the world, but it’s a great start."
💾 Just in time to take part in #SolarpunkSunday: the page for my #wip, Kanteletar, is live!
https://clockwooork.github.io/kanteletar.html
Follow the story of a library across five centuries of future history, from the depths of the #ClimateCrisis in 22nd Century to Atlas' technoligarchy of the 24th Century; the neverending struggle of humanity in pursuit of cultural independence.
Currently one of five sections is complete; the second is underway!
PDF —> https://basket.the-wetlands.org/s/xdZCoA7Azg5nj98
EPUB —> https://basket.the-wetlands.org/s/YAWprSW69d87YiH
Where did I mentioned any "hidden agenda"?
Tbh, I don't even care if you have one. I was just commenting on your misguided overconplicated framework.
You tried to argue that actual digital sovereignty is impractical with a reduction to absurdum "in a pure paper based society".
Such a comparison is wrong on so many levels, and so obviously wrong, that it doesn't seem in good faith.
Also, the whole #OCT construction seems designed to blend the very concept digital sovereignty so that it doesn't exclude it's opposite, allowing digital #colonialism from #USA #BigTech to endure.
Obviously you might intend something completely different, but if the outcome of your resoning is compatible with any #BigTech to keep accessing data not generated in the #USA, it's in steer contraddiction with #DigitalSovereignty.
Unless, obviously, the whole world is just a US colony, as #Trump might in fact argue.
Ok, sorry.
Let's replace "Bullshit." with "What you wrote is so obviously false and so much misleading that it doesn't seem written in good faith. Yet let's assume you have just been fooled by BigTech marketing and propaganda, and let's try to show you the issues in your reasoning."
That's the #sovereignty part of #DigitalSovereignty.
Sovereignty is a national concept.
Individuals do not need "sovereignty" but #autonomy, #dataprotection and #freedom.
Any abstraction that put on the same level individual persons and entire nations is broken and misleading.
Bullshit.
In a paper society, the scale of demage one corrupt person can do to the sovereignty of a nation approach zero. As such, you can handle exceptional case of espionage in exceptional ways.
We are not talking about that either.
And yes, what I wrote is perfectly doable right now, with no more and no less than existing open source software.
It just remove most of #USA ties over #EU sovereignty, so I'm not surprised it's going to be defined as impractical by US corporations and lobbists.
BUT I can ensure you that there are thousands of European corporations that could provide all the service currently provided by US #BigTech if we managed to get rid for their unfair competition.
And in a couple of years, we would become competitive with US hyper-scalers too.
no nation can claim digital sovereignty if any person or corporation that responds to external laws can access (directly or indarectly) or prevent access to data about their citizens, companies or organization.Obviously, except data that people, companies and organizations intentionally make public for anyone.
This doesn't make such data "unprotected", obviously. But the protection applied to such publicly available data (be them contents created by citizens or their personal data) is unrelated to a Nation's sovereignty.
Way too overcomplicated and loosey defined.
#DigitalSovereignty is quite simple to define when you understand few #cybernetic concepts and #sovereignty itself.
First, the use value of data (and #personalData in particular) grows (at least) exponentially, doubling with each new bit you collect on a person, a community and so on.
Second, the copying data leaves no evidence.
By these simple postulates, it follows that no nation can claim digital sovereignty if any person or corporation that responds to external laws can access (directly or indarectly) or prevent access to data about their citizens, companies or organization.
That's it.
This is the basic building block of any real sovereignty, since without it, people cannot be citizens or sudite, just users.
On top of "digital sovereignty" we can then build a democratic national cyberspace, or a oppressive one.
To make it democratic we should also add a political priciple: "No data access without representation".
But as long as, say, #Google and #Apple can access any data on any smartphone by simply pushing a #backdoor in a system update of a specific user or group, and #Microsoft can do the same with most pc and laptop... as long both Google, Microsoft, #Cloudflare, #IBM and #Amazon can access data they host and elaborate "in the cloud", there is no ownership, no control and for sure there can be no #trust in them.
Sure #opensource is not enough: if #RedHat can technically uploas a backdoored opensource #Linux kernel image (or whatever), to a #EU organization that enabled automatic updates on their data centers, talking about trust and "digital sovereignty" is just smoke in the eyes, even if they send the backdoor's sources along with the kernel image to comply with #GPL.
In other terms, there is no way that the #GMAFIA can provide #DigitalSovereigntyAsAService to #EuropeanUnion.
L'Europa ripensa la protezione dati: semplificazione necessaria o compromesso al ribasso?
Di fronte alle crescenti difficoltà di applicazione e sotto la pressione della competizione globale, l'Unione Europea sta lavorando al cosiddetto "Digital Omnibus" – una proposta normativa che promette di semplificare gli obblighi di compliance riducendo vincoli e oneri amministrativi. Ma questa semplificazione è davvero tale? E soprattutto: quale prezzo paghiamo in termini di protezione dei dati personali e dei diritti fondamentali sanciti dalla Carta di Nizza?
In questo incontro, insieme a Pierluigi Perri e Matteo Colombo, ripercorreremo l'evoluzione della strategia digitale europea, analizzeremo l'impatto concreto del suo complesso quadro normativo sulle organizzazioni e valuteremo criticamente se la semplificazione proposta dall'Omnibus rappresenti un equilibrio sostenibile tra competitività economica e tutela dei diritti o se invece segni una pericolosa erosione delle tutele che hanno fatto della protezione dati un pilastro dell'identità europea.
garr.tv/w/5Th96wFXQwtiBDqsEqtr…
Grazie a @noccioletta@poliverso.org per la segnalazione
La guida di @_elena per i principianti che vogliono provare l'auto-hosting con YunoHost. Parte 2: installazione e configurazione
Oggi, nella seconda parte, ti guiderò attraverso i passaggi per installare #YunoHost , il sistema che (secondo le loro stesse parole) "si installa su un server e ti consente di installare e gestire - con pochissime conoscenze tecniche - i servizi digitali (app) che controlli".
https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbies-guide-to-self-hosting-with-yunohost-part-2-installation-setup/
Qui la prima parte: https://blog.elenarossini.com/a-newbies-guide-to-self-hosting-with-yunohost-part-1-reasons-requirements/
"Although Ecosia is a not-for-profit, they seem to be re-enacting the for-profit erosion of human knowledge and the active murder of the open web currently being orchestrated by Google and the other tech giants."
(Original title: Ecosia’s “Green AI”: false hope for corrosive tech)
https://ketanjoshi.co/2025/12/14/ecosias-green-ai-false-hope-for-corrosive-tech/
#CodeOfConducts do not exist to protect the weakest from harm, but to protect space's leaders from blame (and responsibility).
Without a #CoC, a community and its leaders are explicitly accountable for how they handle conflicts on a per case basis. With a CoC, leaders can exploit weak minorities to push their own agenda through a mostly uniform and conformist community.
Iow, CoC are designed to force a US-workspace like behaviour on people contributing for free, so that they are easier to manage (and exploit) as #FreeLabor.
But when you point this out, those same leaders will mount a rage mob against you.
That's why say #FOSDEM becomes a testimonial of companies that support a #genocide, like #Google or #Microsoft, %ak*n_ their money and let their employees to talk. And also why I'll never attend to one.
L'uso dei social media può compromettere l'attenzione dei bambini
I bambini che trascorrono molto tempo sui social media tendono a sperimentare un graduale declino della loro capacità di concentrazione. Questo è quanto emerge da uno studio completo del Karolinska Institutet, pubblicato su Pediatrics Open Science, in cui i ricercatori hanno seguito oltre 8.000 bambini di età compresa tra i 10 e i 14 anni.
https://news.ki.se/using-social-media-may-impair-childrens-attention
To be honest I don't know the technical details, but from users' perspective, it's almost transparent. The only procedure they have to do is called "client validation" and is triggered when a new client connect to a certain account on the server.
@paolo@mastodon.opencloud.lu @whitequark@mastodon.social @lynn@raru.re @ariadne@treehouse.systems
XMPP is better on most technical regards, but you need a little skills to use it securely, in particular to understand keys trust. But it's way cheaper to self-host, creating a more distributed network.
Matrix's clients offer a more mainstream #ux, that is why it's relatively easy to onboard non-nerds.
@paolo@mastodon.opencloud.lu @whitequark@mastodon.social @lynn@raru.re @ariadne@treehouse.systems
honest question: what's your concern with #Matrix?
I use #SchildiChat with a matrix.opencluod.lu that is operated by @paolo@mastodon.opencloud.lu, an #hacktivist for digital human rights I trust, and I've never had any usability issues.
@whitequark@mastodon.social @lynn@raru.re @ariadne@treehouse.systems
🍝 So che è un progetto satirico e non una previsione accurata, ma sappiate che di fianco alla scrivania ho una bottiglia di vino dedicata a quando questa cazzo di bolla #IA scoppierà 😂
Poi che ci tirerà tutti dietro nel vortice è innegabile, ma a quello ci si pensa dopo (soprattutto dopo il vino!)
Alt...
Un timer con 76 giorni e 8 ore mancanti, sovrastato dal titolo "tempo rimanente allo scoppio della bolla IA"
“The promise AI companies make to investors is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.” — Cory Doctorow
_____
#Business #Companies #Investors #Managers #Employees #Jobs #Salaries #AI #Quotes
1/2 In which I cover a couple of the weird/scary aspects of the #genAI bubble and try to get a feel what the post-bubble hangover will feel like. Tl;dr: Not like the dot-com bust. https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/12/07/Thin-Spots-In-the-AI-Bubble
«A man in Atlanta has been arrested and charged for allegedly deleting data from a Google Pixel phone before a member of a secretive Customs and Border Protection (CBP) unit was able to search it»
The crime of not possessing any data? 🙈
https://www.404media.co/man-charged-for-wiping-phone-before-cbp-could-search-it/
Île-de-France offers 550,000 students and staff a sovereign cloud collaboration platform – Nextcloud https://blog.quintarelli.it/2025/12/ile-de-france-offers-550000-students-and-staff-a-sovereign-cloud-collaboration-platform-nextcloud/
Sicuramente.
"I chatbot potrebbero influenzare le elezioni?
Le loro risposte pazienti e “fattuali” sono convincenti anche quando si tratta di votare, secondo un esperimento condotto in tre paesi"
Leggi tutto: https://ilpost.link/yXscILU7rn
It's so depressing how orgs like #Mozilla squander volunteer goodwill for nothing. They'll never recover from this self-inflicted damage:
«Mozilla’s translation bot on Support Mozilla (that is currently overwriting user contributions is based on the closed source, copyright infringing LLM, Google Gemini. This is in spite of Mozilla claiming that they are at the forefront of open source AI, and belies their exhortations to choose to build open source AI and data sets»
Martedì 9 dicembre alla #SalaStampa di @Montecitorio, #BDSItalia presenterà il suo dossier sul gigante delle armi #Leonardo e le sue complicità nel #genocidio.
Se non potete esserci,potete seguirlo in streaming
We did it!!!
We built a new free fridge and community pantry!
It took about a hundred days from deciding to do it, through planning, and finally execution (thread above tracks this). And that is for putting down concrete and electrical. If we did a simple fridge on a pallet, it can be quicker. But even going all out, dang!
So we held the ribbon cutting ceremony. A lot of folks showed up to do the initial stock. Now we'll maintain it and spread the word out to the community. The town has a food resource app. The library maintains a list. I'll add it to our site. The local paper is writing an article.
This is also just the first part of this fridge. They're adding another pantry and an awning to cover it all.
Alright. This one is done. On to the next one!
#solarPunk #solarPunkSunday #freeFridge #foodSecurity #postScarcity #mutualAid
Alt...
A free fridge stands outside next to a community pantry.
Alt...
A detail of the pantry shows a massive amount of food stocked. Cans, boxes, packets of vegetables, soups, pastas, and desserts.
Alt...
Folks lined up to stock the fridge and pantry
Alt...
Open freezer showing stocked food including an entire frozen turkey.
Added a little badge to my blog at https://jan.wildeboer.net to indicate that I write everything myself without "AI" assistance. (and also: no cookies, no trackers, no google fonts, everything served straight from my server that doesn't even store log files for the web server) The badge is a 12.5KB SVG file that you can download and use for yourself. Based on https://www.aimeecozza.com/human-made/ by @aimeecozza but slightly rotated and as SVG.
1/3
Alt...
The front page of my blog and all posts now have a "100% Human Made, no AI used" badge at the top of the page.
E questo dimostra quanto siano utili le AI.
Questa persona avrebbe potuto lavorare 30 anni nel settore, facendo piccole ma fastidiose cose stupide qua e là, che avrebbero fatto perdere tempo a migliaia di altrә programmatorә, mentre invece, grazie alla rapidità della AI, potrà dedicarsi da subito al compito che le è più confacente: zappare la cicoria.
La colonna di input dove scrivi i nuovi messaggi l'hanno spostata?
Mi mandi uno screenshot, che sono curioso...
Comunque quando #Mastodon si è diffuso, c'era solo l'interfaccia desktop, e di certo non è stata l'usabilità a spingerlo.
L'accoglienza?
Boh, forse. Quando iniziai ad usarlo io, nel 2018, era molto più accogliente di adesso, comunque.
Non c'erano ancora interessi economici in gioco all'epoca (o quanto meno, non erano palesi) e persone che per varie ragioni venivano "moderate" sulle piattaforme commerciali, affluivano su mastodon.social che le accoglieva a braccia aperte.
Ora che anche Mastodon è un'azienda "la moderazione è un dovere". E tutti a non vedere l'elefante nella stanza...
Nella sentenza di parla esplicitamente di "online marketplace".
@gazzettadelcadavere@mastodon.uno @informapirata@mastodon.uno @pirati@feddit.it @raccoon@hollow.raccoon.quest
mastodon è lo stato dell'arte della moderazione.Discutibile.
Mastodon, con il suo peso e la sua complessità, favorisce la creazione di istanze molto grandi¹, creando le condizioni che rendono utile/necessaria la moderazione.
In un #fediverse dove il numero medio di utenti per istanza fosse minore di 10, gli strumenti di moderazione vantati da #Mastodon sarebbero inutili e inefficaci.
In altri termini, Mastodon non sta facendo altro che provare a mitigare i problemi che lui stesso crea.
Il fatto che altri ne seguano le orme è miope: la soluzione non è avere più grandi istanze ben moderate, ma smantellare le grandi istanze e sostituirle con milioni di piccole istanze.
¹ più precisamente, disincentiva la creazione di piccole istanze, ma il risultato e lo stesso.
Più che per #Mastodon potrebbe avvantaggiare il #fediverse: fornirebbe un forte incentivo alla federazione di piccole istanze.
Lavorare con lentezza è difficile. Chi come me lavora a scuola riesce forse a ritagliarsi ogni tanto del tempo lento, per andare in biblioteca, al cinema nel primo pomeriggio, passare qualche ora senza fare niente la mattina a casa, fare colazione con dei biscotti fatti ieri sera, ascoltare la radio, scrivere (anche qui). Per me è un impegno che ho preso con me stesso anni fa, quando facevo altro nella vita. E l'impegno è: rallentare il tempo per vivere meglio.
"a course that's eliminated AI will appeal as an alternative pathway to universities concluding that, thanks to AI, they don't really need most lecturers, and students concluding that, for similar reasons, they don't really need universities."
https://danmcquillan.org/cpct_seminar.html
Alt...
A screenshot of a story from The Guardian on 20 Nov 2025 showing a powerpoint slide and with a headline reading ‘We could have asked ChatGPT’: students fight back over course taught by AI" and a subheading reading "Staffordshire students say signs material was AI-generated included suspicious file names and rogue voiceover accent"
Dear friends at #Dyne, you know how much I appreciate your work...
but please, get rid of all those trojan horses trackers CDNs on your website!
You don't need them: just copy the css and js on your web hosting and reference them from there, so that no external connection can track visitors.
#uBlockOrigin is a great tool to identify and block such trackers, but I dream of a world where websites fostering #surveillance get shamed and nobody give them any credit.
You should read with more attention: I wrote
you need to rent virtual slavesYet you are partially correct, because any actual slave may kill the masters or at least escape them.
Try to kill #Google, #OpenAI, #Microsoft, #GitHub or #Facebook / #Meta... 😉
Indeed, people bound by such #cybernetic agents through their software have even less #freedom of a slave: they cannot even concieve the idea of living without their master, they will argue that "there is no alternative" and that :they have "nothing to hide" or what not.
The chains that #AI is designed to impose on people are not physical, but cognitive.
So you are not even a slave anymore: people get reduced to "users", entities that exist only to use and as long they use, thus have no right outside the #ToS that only apply while they use.
You get reduced to a gear in a machine you do not understand or control, a machine built and controlled by billionaries who don't give a shit about you.
So yes, good catch... in a way.
@clew@ecoevo.social @inthehands@hachyderm.io @maxdwo@piaille.fr @benfulton@fosstodon.org @Unlikelylass@mspsocial.net @emenel@post.lurk.org