With the new school year starting, many students will head off to
college for the first time.
For some, college offers a chance to learn about computing and
even free software, or to use computers productively in their
learning about other subjects. For others, college brings with it
a new restriction to the house of learning: DRM. Some colleges
are now requiring and even supplying DRM-laden hardware to new
students in lieu of textbooks and other materials.
We’re compiling a list of colleges and other schools that either
require or supply DRM-laden hardware, such as the iPod, iPhone,
iPad or Amazon Kindle. Feel free to add other DRM-laden devices
too, but these are the most commonly found. We need your help to
do it!
## Take action
http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Defective_by_Design/Schools
Gnash is a free software project that aims to provide a libre alternative to the proprietary Adobe Flash software.
Gnash developers are in troubles and need funds to keep working on the project.
This is where you can make a difference.
The Gnash project is now accepting donations via Paypal using the DONATE button on their website: http://www.openmedianow.org/
I know people who don’t want to use Paypal so if you are one of those please contact me anyway. I can provide you bank account details to donate without using Paypal.
I trust that everybody in the free software community will donate even a small amount of money to support this high priority free software project.
Thank you for your collaboration.
A new threat to your digital freedom.
UltraViolet is a new type of restriction (we call it DRM, Digital Restrictions Management) that will be inside many new upcoming devices.
This happens because companies don’t want you to have control of your digital media.
Yes, your music, your movies, your ebooks. They want to prevent you from sharing them with your friends, to store them where you want, to play or read them how many times you wish.
I ask you to reject any piece of hardware or software that is encoumbered with UltraViolet DRM.
Please research online before your next purchase. The product you are going to buy may have this kind of restriction inside.
Use the button above to show other people that you don’t allow anyone to control what YOU can do with YOUR digital media.
Join our fight against all these digital restrictions.
Join our Defective By Design campaign and discover by yourself what are the other products and companies that want to enslave you.
Fight for your freedom. Share this post on your social network, blog, mail, irc channel.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom and to defend the rights of all free software users.
Did you ever think you had a wonderful idea to improve the fight for freedom on the digital age?
Too shy to tell anyone?
NOW it’s your time!
Please post and discuss your ideas for the Free Software Foundation.
Help us creating the digital world of tomorrow.
Help us building a LibrePlanet.
UPDATE:
Here are a couple of more articles about this topic that I found very interesting:
The Best Laptop Brands: A Comprehensive Review
Consumer Reports Buying Guide 2010
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I am researching about this topic: has Lenovo ruined the ThinkPad?
I keep reading very different reviews about new Lenovo thinkpads compared to old IBM ones.
People says Consumer Reports is a good unbiased source of information.
A journalist who can read the paid content of Consumer Reports wrote this article on Zdnet called “Gauging the ThinkPad: Before (IBM) and after (Lenovo)“.
Someone else is not so convinced. Read this interesting and detailed article: “Has Lenovo ruined the ThinkPad?”
So what do you think? What was your experience?
Has Lenovo ruined the ThinkPad?
Did the build quality change?
Leave a comment and share the post so we can have a big feedback.
Many of you surely know the Android operating system developed by Google. Maybe not everybody know it’s not fully free software.
This is why activists from LibrePlanet Italia and Software Freedom Law Center created a fully free software Android alternative called Replicant.
We don’t need only a libre Android but a libre Market too because Google Market is proprietary software.
We also need to look for all free software applications inside Google Market and this is where we are asking for your help.
We want to convince Google to fix an important bug of its Market application: it lacks a license information field. If every application listed in the market would have a license field, it would be a lot easier for us to look for free as in freedom software apps.
This is where you can help because there is already a bug opened about this.
Vote on this Android bug report here – http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=3746 – and
try to convince Google to extend their market app with license information so that libre software can be filtered by users.
There is also some work to do to create a free software replacement for the Google Market application.
We already have some great code to start so contact me if you want to help free software in the new exciting mobile field.
Thank you as always for all your support and love.
Please remember to share this article everywhere you have an account.
Here are some suggestions:
Share and favour this dent in Identi.ca.
Share it on Reddit.
Share and Digg it.
Blog about it.
Lemote Yeeloong comes with a chinese operating system that is a variant of Debian mipsel. I use only free software so I managed to install a fully free software GNU/Linux distribution like gNewSense.
Here you will find how to install gNewSense on your Yeeloong.
Note: gNewSense is looking for volunteers.
Join us and help us improving. With your skills and passion YOU are the one who can make the difference.
GNOME Foundation wants to hire a sysadmin so that GNOME developers can focus on GNOME.
GNOME is a wonderful free software desktop enviroment used by default by many GNU/Linux distributions included gNewSense, Trisquel, Debian just to name a few.
Please donate to the GNOME project and help them if you can.
I am pleased to announce the new version of the GNU IceCat web browser.
GNU IceCat is the GNU version of the Mozilla Firefox browser.
This new version includes all changes made upstream in Firefox 3.6.2
plus some other small bug fixes.
Now the privacy extension sets the User-Agent string provided by the
browser to the web sites to a fixed value to reduce tracking risks of
your browser. More details on this issue can be found here:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/tracking-by-user-agent
New files are available for download here:
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuzilla/3.6.2/
and on any mirror sites worldwide. You can find a complete mirrors list
here:
http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
SHA1 and MD5 checksums:
7dc14d4f2af5a8aa6d83fa194b811f4e745bdb34 icecat-3.6.2-i586.tar.xz
26f0605ccb8427c5ca7ad564e0d00d6472ab8b19 icecat-3.6.2.tar.xz
929587816b7ad54acd30500323da268d60cefa84 privacy_ext.xpi
226e86ad35d284120c5c65f5ea599505 icecat-3.6.2-i586.tar.xz
a3b2791f37633c36325a342ad8af21e0 icecat-3.6.2.tar.xz
a09fb351cf40bf58c5828cf2d0c32045 privacy_ext.xpi
Please report any problem you may experience while using IceCat to the
bug-gnuzilla@gnu.org mailing list.
On the Internet, proprietary software isn’t the only way to lose your freedom. Software as a Service is another way to let someone else have power over your computing.
A new article by FSF president Richard Stallman about the dangers of Software as a Service.
Read it here:
by Richard Stallman
