The Free Software Foundation Is Dying
- Drew DeVault tl;dr: “Their achievements are unmistakable: we must offer them our gratitude and admiration for decades of accomplishments in establishing and advancing our cause. The principles of software freedom are more important than ever, and the products of these institutions remain necessary and useful – the GPL license family, GCC, GNU coreutils, and so on. Nevertheless, the organizations behind this work are floundering.”featured in #405
Avoiding Internet Centralization
- Mark Nottingham tl;dr: "While the Internet was designed and founded as a decentralized network-of-networks, it is continuously subjected to forces that encourage its centralization." This document attempts to identify different types of centralization, catalogues some limitations to common approaches to controlling it, and recommends best practices for protocol designers.featured in #276
An Open Letter Against Apple's Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology
tl;dr: "While child exploitation is a serious problem, and while efforts to combat it are almost unquestionably well-intentioned, Apple's proposal introduces a backdoor that threatens to undermine fundamental privacy protections for all users of Apple products."featured in #244
Standing Up For Developers: Youtube-dl Is Back
- Abby Vollmer tl;dr: "We share developers’ frustration with this takedown—especially since this project has many legitimate purposes." Github outlines how they're changing their review process moving forward.featured in #215
Cloudflare Outage And The Risk In Today's Internet
- Guillermo Garron tl;dr: A small number of companies manage a large portion of the internet's infrastructure. This trends towards a single point of failure and places greater power in the hands of a few.featured in #194
featured in #170
A Framework for Regulating Competition on the Internet
- Ben Thompson tl;dr: The biggest task regulating large tech companies is to decouple platforms e.g. Apple's App Store and data aggregators e.g. Google. Ben highlights the difference in how they operate, monetize and the incentive hierarchy around each.featured in #165
featured in #164
Ethical Dilemmas in Software Engineering (Video)
- Bryan Cantrill tl;dr: 45 mins talk on the new dilemmas faced by software engineers, as software "eats the world", technology decision come with increasing pressure and responsibility.featured in #144
Why I (Still) Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry
- Paul Ford tl;dr: The author expresses his love for technology and the conflict he sees in an industry that's evolved from small, marginal communities of programmers and technologists who share his love to what it's become.featured in #141