Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War
ideologically, a core tenant of open source is non-discriminatory empowerment. When I was introduced to open source in the 90’s, the chief “bad guy” was Microsoft – people wanted to defend against “embrace, extend, extinguish” corporate practices, and by homesteading on the technological frontier with GNU/Linux we were ensuring that our livelihoods, independence, and security would never be beholden to a hostile corporate power. Now, the world has changed. Our open source code may end up being labeled as enabling a “foreign adversary”. I never suspected that I could end up on the “wrong side” of politics by being a staunch advocate of open source, but here I am. My open source mission is to empower people to be technologically independent; to know that technology is not magic, so that nobody will ever be a slave to technology. This is true even if that means resisting my own government. The erosion of freedom starts with restricting access to “foreign adversaries”, and ends with the government arbitrarily picking politically convenient winners and losers to participate in the open source ecosystem. Freedom means freedom, and I will stand to defend it. Now that the US is carpet-bombing Huawei’s supply chain, I fear there is no turning back. The language already written into EO13873 sets the stage to threaten open source as a whole by drawing geopolitical and national security borders over otherwise non-discriminatory development efforts. While I still hold hope that the trade war could de-escalate, the proliferation and stockpiling of powerful anti-trade weapons like EO13873 is worrisome. Now is the time to raise awareness of the threat this poses to the open source world, so that we can prepare and come together to protect the freedoms we cherish the most. I hope, in all earnestness, that open source shall not be a casualty of this trade war.
(tags: open-source business china economics huawei us-politics trade-war oss gnu linux)
jCenter is the new default repository used with Android’s gradle plugin, I haven… | Hacker News
I am a developer Advocate with JFrog, the company behind Bintray. So, jcenter is a Java repository in Bintray (https://bintray.com/bintray/jcenter), which is the largest repo in the world for Java and Android OSS libraries, packages and components. All the content is served over a CDN, with a secure https connection. JCenter is the default repository in Groovy Grape (http://groovy.codehaus.org/Grape), built-in in Gradle (the jcenter() repository) and very easy to configure in every other build tool (maybe except Maven) and will become even easer very soon. Bintray has a different approach to package identification than the legacy Maven Central. We don’t rely on self-issued key-pairs (which can be generated to represent anyone, actually and never verified in Maven Central). Instead, similar to GitHub, Bintray gives a strong personal identity to any contributed library. If you really need to get your package to Maven Central (for supporting legacy tools) you can do it from Bintray as well, in a click of a button or even automatically.
(tags: jars maven gradle java bintray via:lemire packaging distribution)
Russians used fake Foster email for disinformation – researchers
Facebook believes this is the first time fake information about Northern Ireland and topics concerning Anglo-Irish relations has been disseminated by Russian operators acting in concert. The Atlantic Council’s research centre found the campaign was “persistent, sophisticated and well-resourced” and said that “the likelihood is that this operation was run by a Russian intelligence agency”. The operation “appeared designed to stoke racial, religious or political hatred, especially in Northern Ireland”, the researchers said, disclosing their findings in an online article published on the Medium self-publishing online platform over the weekend.
(tags: ireland russia disinformation fake-news facebook dfrlab ira politics)
Why the BAI is not the body to regulate the internet
Simon McGarr makes a good argument, and I agree
(tags: bai ireland regulation internet web messaging crypto privacy)