Following a complaint filed by association HOP – Stop Planned Obsolescence, Steering Group member of the Right to Repair Europe Coalition in September 2017, the printer manufacturer Epson has been summoned before the criminal court on charges of planned obsolescence and misleading commercial practices.

#PlannedObsolescence #RightToRepair #France

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/48722120

Archived version

A month or so ago, the Netherlands reportedly blocked a US company from buying the cloud provider that runs Dutch digital identity (there is a post about it in this community here).

The more recent news is that the Chief Privacy Officer of the Dutch government, who was behind this initiative, is about to lose his job.

...

For more than four months, Pieter van Oordt warned internally about the risks of the takeover. When these warnings were ignored, he brought the issue to the media, the Dutch Parliament, and the Cabinet. He showed that Parliament had received incomplete and misleading information and revealed that vulnerabilities in digital infrastructure had been shared with a U.S. company. His actions forced the Ministry of Economic Affairs to block the takeover.

Instead of protection, Van Oordt faced retaliation. He was excluded from meetings, his salary increase was blocked, and his request for protection under the European Whistleblower Directive was rejected, despite an expert report confirming that he should have been protected. He has been suspended, and his dismissal is mentioned in a written notice from the Attorney General on 22 May 2026.

The dismissal has not yet been implemented.

...

Someone started a petition (not me), I post this here as you may want to sign it (and maybe spread the word).

The petition calls on the European Parliament and the European Commission to act:

• Protect Pieter van Oordt from an unlawful dismissal.
• Ensure he can continue his work safely within the public sector.
• Place digital sovereignty of vital infrastructure high on the European agenda.
• Hold the Dutch government and the responsible ministries accountable.

[To read the English version of the linked text, you need to scroll down. It's below the Dutch version.]

Still in beta. Was made aware of it by this video

The most important part of FLOSS is "F", apparently.

For those outside the loop: rsync starting using AI agents to handle the influx of AI security reports to improve the test suite and fix bugs. It introduced a few CVEs and people who never contributed in any way started firing shots at the maintainer.

rsync maintainer's response to the people getting pissy about his usage of AI: medium and the related post on programming.dev

Some people talk about mailing lists with a lot of reverence, but I have only ever found them to be extremely ugly and unreadable.

Are there any good clients out there that make them readable? For example a lemmy-like, threaded interface with interactivity? Or for PR/MRs an interface that shows the diffs with syntax highlighting, toggleable unified and side by side diff views, ability to comment within diffs and continue discussions within them (maybe even threaded)?

I've heard and read variations of this a lot. GitHub never was simply a git frontend. It always had a community and artefacts around the code.

When Github was stable and well loved, people defended it all the time. It was the place to upload code, find contributors, and (after Microslop bought it) even funding for those lucky few popular enough to get it. I understand that change is hard but GitHub's trajectory was written in stone the second Microslop bought it.

Of course, letting go of something is difficult, especially if it feels simple to use and everybody else seems to be using it. But when cracks start to show, the minority will react. The majority will simply tolerate enshittification and reject anything else, for many reasons. Some are valid, some not, it's perspective sometimes.

However, claiming that moving away from Github is easy because git is decentralised... that's either a profound lack of understanding or a bad faith argument. Maybe even both. If you honestly think that's the case, go see how fun it is to contribute to the Linux kernel (or any project using mailing lists). Go to a project hosted on Git Web and try to submit a bug report.

Alternatives

There is hope for one GitHub alternative in particular with a highly unfortunate name for reason I won't get into: forgejo. They have been trying for years to build a federated gitforge (without much success unfortunately), but hope might be on the horizon as Europe starts down the path of leaving foreign Big Tech behind. The Netherlands wants to contribute to forgejo.

Gitlab, another GitHub alternative, has many French institutions as customers, but they have done their absolute best to ignore any requests for federation support. Instead, they've jumped onto the bandwagon and gone all in on AI. Don't expect any progress on that front any time soon.

Why federation

As stated before, GitHub has many things besides git, the biggest one is the community. But to contribute, you need to create an account Microslop's platform. You cannot use that account for smooth experience once you move to an alternative. You can login with it, but that's about it.

Without federation, any alternative is fighting an already immense uphill battle. When you create your user with your repositories on ALTERNATIVE SERVER that cannot connect to ANOTHER SERVER, which forces you to create accounts on every other server.

Federation would solve that. You could search, find and contribute to repositories on the fediverse. It could (hopefully) put a dent in GitHub's omnipresence and allow for users to migrate away once, without creating accounts everywhere. Normal users could also contribute straight from the fediverse without having to create an account on Github first.

Let's hope European countries fund forgejo instead of forking it or starting a completely new project.

Desktop web-apps won. Simply because native UI libraries never evolved past their 90s days. Either the UI is defined in some DSL, that's loaded (or compiled) and then you spend most of the time writing getElement(pathToElement) and wiring it up, or you have to boilerplate create each element and parent.addChild(element).

And wiring it up is also a pain. Send a signal or event, add a listener or slot, or whatever fancy name each framework comes up with, and if you have to modify another element, it means querying for it, or having a singleton, or passing a reference/pointer, or whatever. It's so friggin-old school.

In the meanwhile, the web discovered reactivity, components, declaring the UI and having the logic in the same file, live debugging, tight development loops, and so much more.

Is it just too difficult for native frameworks? Is it a sunken cost issue or fear of breaking backwards compatibility? Why can't native UI development be as easy and approachable as web dev?

Don't get me wrong, I need webdev like a child needs cancer, but I've tried Slint, imGUi, Qt, Gtk, wxWidgets, and more and the experience makes me want to blow my brains out every single time. I dread writing any native GUI that I got desperate enough to try writing a TUI but that's unbelievably worse!

It's gotten so bad, that Tauri and Dioxus are now on the menu. I never wanted to mix web dev into my native applications, but it feels like the abominably anachronistic state of native UI development is just forcing not only me, but anybody who wants to have a good experience writing native UI apps (especially those that are multi-platform), to use a fucking web view! A memory-hogging web view!

I've tried FairEMail and SimpleEmail, but they require opening the app to see emails. They seem to be forks or versions of each other without background syncing and (sorry) a terribly ugly interface. Neither seem to have filters.

Background syncing shouldn't be constantly on, just every 5-10 minutes or so. Normally I check once a day, but forget to quite easily and then miss an email. If it checked automatically even twice daily, that'd be enough.

The maker of Ghostty and Hashicorp is finally leaving Github.

"the_yank_stank" has nothing to do with programming or tech and the user just started posting news about child rape or something.

Framework released a love letter to Apple.