10.18.13

Open Hardware (Freedom- and Modifications-friendly Hardware) a Growing Force, But Intel Needs to be Kept Away

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Hardware at 11:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Efforts that label themselves “Open Source Hardware” are gaining popularity, but Arduino and other efforts need to keep the notorious vandaliser, Intel, well out of their boundaries

So-called “Open Source Hardware” or “Open Hardware” is derived from the ideals of Free software, as laid bear by Richard Stallman 30 years ago. The notion that we should share designs and permit people to modify designs is not entirely novel because stuff like Lego encourages us and our children to do so. Talking about business models [1] is another, perpendicular/orthogonal issue and whether it can relate to software or not [2] might not matter so much, either. It’s like when people argue with Stallman about whether Free software is good for business or not, as if having a business model is somehow essential to justifying freedom or somehow defends denying people their freedom.

Arduino, one of the leading forces in the area, is now speaking to the press [3] and greedy, malicious Intel tries to interject itself into it, just like it did with OLPC, basically destroying the project. Arduino would be wise to learn from OLPC and send Intel far away. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. The Truth About Open Source Hardware Business Models

   After some time now, the Open Hardware Ecosystem and Business sector gained some significant traction. An excellent presentation by Mathilde Berchon was recently release at the open hardware summit, trying to summarize the increasingly interesting diversity and numbers of the OSHW business. W

2. Open source hardware holds the same promise as software

   I see SparkFun Electronics mentioned often in my social media stream, so I jumped at the chance to interview Chris Clark, the company’s Director of Information Technology.

3. Arduino creator explains why open source matters in hardware, too

   Ars conducts a Q&A with Massimo Banzi as Arduino’s rise continues.

4. Intel’s Quarky Arduino Adventure

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

New Strategy for Fighting Software Patents

Posted in Courtroom, Law, Patents at 10:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Taking into account systemic corruption in law and politics (Chris Dodd shown below)

Summary: When law is controlled and composed (by proxy) by corporations and their lobbyists, a new strategy for reform is needed

WHEN the highest court (SCOTUS) relies on a broken Internet (where material just vanishes [1]) and judges are political and/or tied to corporations, it is no surprise and there is no reason to wonder why there’s reluctance to end bribery/corruption (euphemisms include “campaign-finance”). The ‘legal’ system is so broken that even innocent people who were unjustly punished oughtn’t bother suing [3] and guilty cults that defraud thousands and run their own prison system walk away free, despite being recognised as organised fraud in other, more civilised nations [4]. It seems like in the eyes of this ‘legal’ system, dissent against crime or the pursuit of justice are now the real enemy. This is the sign of a a legal system entering a state of calamitous collapse. To blindly assume its moral higher ground would be unwise.

It has been about 2 months since we last covered patents on a regular basis. This is not a coincidence. Having campaigned against software patents since my days as a student, I hardly see any progress. In Europe, debate focuses on unification with US patent law (the typical cross-Atlantic treaty loophole), in New Zealand the fight against software patents never ends (even when the arguments are all settled), and in the US the debate is totally dead; all they talk about right now are “patent trolls”.

Fighting against a system which is inherently broken and does not permit progress — just fake Change® — is a tiresome exercise. It feels like a waste of energy. Larry Lessig tried to reform copyright law for years. He hardly succeeded. Corrupt politicians like Chris Dodd — those who literally bribe Congress — always get their way. Lessig understood this after years of campaigning regarding copyright law. Instead, after years of wasted effort, he turned his attention to fighting corruption in US Congress. it’s no simple task, either. Perhaps we too, at least in the coming years, will need to dedicate some time to fighting the patent issue from a political angle, not just a technical and logical angle. From the technical point of view, the argument was resolved a long time ago. Developers reached a consensus. But the patent lawyers and their lawyer/politician friends stand in the way and they will never give way to change unless they are named and shamed. SCOTUS and CAFC are part of the problem because their decisions continue to legitimise software patents. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Link Rot and the US Supreme Court

   “Hyperlinks are not forever. Link rot occurs when a source you’ve linked to no longer exists — or worse, exists in a different state than when the link was originally made. Even permalinks aren’t necessarily permanent if a domain goes silent or switches ownership. According to new research from Harvard Law, some 49% of hyperlinks in Supreme Court documents no longer point to the correct original content. A second study on link rot from Yale stresses that for the Court footnotes, citations, parenthetical asides, and historical context mean as much as the text of an opinion itself, which makes link rot a threat to future scholarship.”

2. Obama’s Lawyer Should Have Used Originalism to Sway Originalist Justices

   If he had met a conservative Court on its own ground, the solicitor general could have notched a victory for liberalism—and helped safeguard campaign-finance protections.

3. Unlawfully Detained by the U.S. Government? Don’t Bother Suing.

   Last Monday, on the same day as the opening of the new Supreme Court term, the federal appeals court in San Francisco threw out a damages suit by a former Guantánamo detainee who alleged that his detention and his treatment while detained had been unlawful. The decision by a unanimous three-judge panel in Hamad v. Gates did not hold that the plaintiff’s rights hadn’t been violated; rather, it held that it lacked the power to even address that question because of a 2006 statute that appears to take away the jurisdiction of the federal courts in such cases. Although there are reasons to quibble with the Ninth Circuit’s analysis, the result underscores a far broader point about which there can be no dispute: In case after case, on issues ranging from Guantánamo to surveillance to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, the federal courts have been categorically hostile to damages claims arising out of post-September 11 counterterrorism policies. And as in Hamad, this hostility has been reflected in the courts’ reliance upon a host of procedural doctrines to reject the plaintiffs’ claims without actually adjudicating—one way or the other—the underlying legality of the government’s conduct.

4. Scientology’s fraud conviction upheld in France

   France’s top appeals court has upheld a fraud conviction and fines totalling hundreds of thousands of euros against the Church of Scientology, for taking advantage of vulnerable followers.

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

Neal Heimbach Reveals Another Reason to Boycott Amazon

Posted in Action at 10:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Greenwashing a malicious brand

Summary: Amazon, the company (not the forests), not only harms human dignity of customers but also of employees

FOR a number of years now Techrights has strongly urged everyone to boycott Amazon, which does many despicable things that are too many to name offhand.

Now that reports reveal Amazon’s abuse of its own employees [1,2] we should simply take these employees’ lawsuits as a sign that Amazon is inherently unethical at many levels. It cares about its employees no more than those garment factories in Bangladesh [3], where death of these employees are common (everything to drive the price down!).

The reason we hear a lot more about the abuse of Amazon workers and hardly anything about workers in Bangladesh is probably the racial factor. We’re inclined to be more sympathetic towards people of our race (in Western nations) and suspicious of others, as new studies help remind us [4]. When thinking about how Amazon treats people, think about the many dead workers in Bangladesh. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Worker sues Amazon over lengthy security searches without pay

2. Amazon sued over 20-minute, unpaid, daily security searches of workers

   A Pennsylvania man who works for Internet retail giant Amazon says the company is taking advantage of workers by putting them through daily security checks that last anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes — and eat into unpaid hours, before work, after work and during lunch breaks.

   He’s kicked off a class-action suit against the company, filed in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas and alleging violations of the Pennsylvania Minimum Wage Act, NBC reported.

3. Bangladesh garment factory fire kills at least 10 people

4. Estate agents discriminate against black people, finds BBC investigation

   Posing as a landlord, reporter uncovers London agents willing to meet request flat should not be let to African-Caribbean renters

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

The Loss of Moral High Ground

Posted in Action at 9:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Warmongering and insistence that peace is “terrorism” or that war is “for peace” discredit the promises made by the West

THE moral high ground of NATO-affiliated nations was almost obliterated by violent intervention inside nations that did not ask for it. One recent example of this was the invasion into Iraq — an unnecessary and unpopular invasion which is now claimed to have killed half a million people [1,2]. Leaks from Assange and his colleagues contributed to estimates, so no wonder he is besieged by the British government [3]. The UK Ministry of Defence now views “anti-war” as some kind of terrorism [4] and the BBC lobbies hard for us to support invasion into Syria, Iraq’s neighbour [5,6]. Even a former UK ambassador is fuming about this propaganda.

Some sites, like Truth Out, now openly accuse Obama of terrorism [7] and a new interview with Noam Chomsky goes further [8]. Congressional approval under Obama’s reign has dropped below 10% [9], which really says a lot about whose side actual US citizens take. Has Nobel peace prize winner Obama got the moral high ground? Not in anyone’s mind. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Iraq war claimed half a million lives, study finds

   Some critics of previously controversial survey methods praise new approach, while others remain skeptical

2. So Half a Million Iraqis Did Die, After All

   Remember, a few years back, when a couple of studies (including one published by prestigious Lancet) that found hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died in the years after the U.S. invasion were derided, even mocked, by most media and many expert commentators? They pointed to reputable counts of those killed in the conflict, placing the number at “only” about 100,000. When WikiLeaks released its Iraq War Logs, documented deaths shot up another 10,000 or so.

3. Julian Assange: my life in the embassy

4. UK Ministry of Defence seeks to counter growing opposition to war

   A document obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act exposes the preoccupation of Britain’s ruling elite with how to prosecute future wars in the face of growing anti-war sentiment.

   The study was written in November 2012 by a Ministry of Defence (MoD) think tank, the Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) and entitled Risk: The Implications of Current Attitudes to Risk for the Joint Operational Concept .

5. Fake BBC Video

   But once you realise the indisputable fact of the fake interview the BBC has put out, some of the images in this video begin to be less than convincing on close inspection too.

6. The Theatre of War

   My last post on the BBC footage of Syrian casualties – and the different versions of what the doctor said – has brought me a deluge of emails, not least from the Guardian who have been in touch with the BBC and, if the Guardian can get over its phobia at ever mentioning me at all, will doubtless produce a “Craig Murray is a Conspiracy Theorist” piece. It would be unethical for me to reveal what the BBC said ahead of the Guardian, but I might point out that in a large amount of verbiage they completely failed to address or admit the point that they showed two different versions of what the doctor said.

   Close inspection of the two different versions, by numerous commenters and for which I am grateful, reveals that there were actually two or more takes of this scene. The easiest tell is the arm position of the man in the fluorescent jacket next to the doctor.

   Actually, that is much worse than if it were overdubbing. What this means is, that what is portrayed as a live action piece with casualties being rushed in, was actually a rehearsed piece of which several takes were done. Rehearsed because, with the exception of the words napalm and chemical weapons, the words are precisely the same, which is not easy spontaneously especially under that kind of stress.

7. Empire Under Obama: Barack Obama’s Global Terror Campaign

   Under the administration of Barack Obama, America is waging a global terror campaign through the use of drones, killing thousands of people, committing endless war crimes, creating fear and terror in a program expected to last several more decades. Welcome to Obama’s War OF Terror.

8. Noam Chomsky | On Shutdown, Waning US Influence, Syrian Showdown

   Harrison Samphir: Thank you for speaking with me today, Mr. Chomsky. I would like to begin with the recent federal government shutdown in the United States. Acknowledging that it has happened once before, how is this instance different, if at all? How does it speak to the unwillingness from above to institute meaningful reform – healthcare or otherwise – and respond to the desires of the majority of the population?

   Noam Chomsky: Well, actually, there was pretty good commentary on it this morning [October 4] in The New York Times by Paul Krugman who basically makes the point, it’s a narrow point, that the Republican Party among the public is a minority party. So for example, they do run the House of Representatives, they’re a majority there, and it’s the House that is essentially sending the government into shutdown and maybe default. But they won the majority of seats there because of various kinds of chicanery. They got a minority of the votes, but a majority of the seats, and they’re using them to press forward an agenda which is extremely harmful to the public. The particular thing that they’re focusing on is defunding the health-care system.

9. Less Popular Than Zombies: Congressional Approval Rating Drops to Single Digits

   He told the House Committee on Veterans Affairs the short-term effects include disability claims production slowing by an average of about 1,400 per day since the shutdown began Oct. 1, and that has stalled the department’s efforts to reduce the backlog of disability claims pending for longer than 125 days. Over 190,000 accumulated cases had been resolved in recent months.

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

Internet Bodies Engage in Illegal Censorship and Free Speech on the Web Continues to Erode

Posted in Action at 9:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The Internet as a platform for free speech is no more; the law is being bypassed to silence opposing voices

THE Internet is broken. ICANN should know this because domains are being censored now, despite no guilt established [1]. Anonymity is being impeded by the NSA, the FBI, and other parties, including some governments [2]. Freedom of speech is being compromised and intimidation against sites is now a tool for achieving this [3]. When it comes to surveillance sites, such as Facebook, censorship goes even further [4]. As one story shows us [5], merely publishing a list of names can now lead to legal abuse [5]. Rather than deal with abuse of the law (financial fraud) we have our “law enforcement” bodies dealing with those who speak about it. This is wrong. Censorship of the Web has been a hot topic in the UK recently and judging by where things are heading, the Internet needs a censorship-resistant alternative. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Seized Torrent Domains Must Be Released Says Domain Registrar

   As the fallout from this week’s seizure of file-sharing domains continues, it’s now been revealed that the registrars involved could now be exposing themselves to disciplinary action by IP address and DNS body ICANN. With the police now confirming to TorrentFreak that the action by the registrars was voluntary and based only on a “potential” breach of terms and conditions, it now appears that affected registrars must allow seized domains to be released.

2. Asking the EU Commission to stop blocking Tor

3. EU court holds news website liable for readers’ comments

4. Facebook Gives ‘Social Fixer’ Ultimatum

   Things aren’t going well for Matt Kruse, the developer of the über-popular Social Fixer browser extension which gives users control over how their Facebook pages and news feeds appear to them. It works within the browser and doesn’t affect the experience of anyone on Facebook other than the user. With it, status updates can be tabbed, items can be filtered, and it allows hiding or blocking sponsored stories and other advertising that runs through the news feed.

5. Greece retries journalist who leaked ‘Lagarde list’ of suspected tax evaders

   Kostas Vaxevanis published details of of more than 2,000 wealthy Greeks with cash deposits in Switzerland

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

“NSA Director Stepping Down to Spend Less Time With Your Family”

Posted in Security at 9:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: NSA news of interest and some international impact, especially in the United Kindgom

Keith Alexander is said to be “stepping down” and the above quote is a nice joke found in Twitter. Mr. Alexander is not going to be sued and he is not going to jail, either. When people have loyalty to a flag rather than loyalty to human values and principles, then as long as they stay within the country of that flag, they’ll enjoy immunity (Bush and Kissinger can’t travel much around the world, for fear of getting jailed for war crimes).

Let’s look at some of the latest news about the NSA. First of all, famous cryptographer Adi Shamir is yet another person who can’t enter the US, possibly because of his views [1]. Having spoken about back doors, he cannot enter a conference sponsored by the National Security Agency — the agency which lies about the public “dangers” of the leaks [2] (the only danger is to the budget of the NSA). Greenwald is going to have more of a day field with leaks [3] and Edward Snowden, who now gets a platform through other whistleblowers [4], debunks the lies we see in the corporate media [5-6]. Maybe it’s truly high time for Greenwald to step out of the British press, which finds itself embroiled in domestic scandals [7-9] as the attack on the press here intensifies (comments suggest that Greenwald and his new publisher will work far away from the reach of US political aggression and diplomatic blackmail).

Domestic surveillance [10] and abuses of the law [11,12] by US law enforcement currently breed debate and other misconceptions are being tackled [13] because those who abuse the law really struggle to find justification. They make a mockery of “law enforcement”. Let’s hope that many more heads will roll, not just Alexander’s. We were promised a “war on terror” and in due course we were all labeled “terrorists” and lost our dignity. Who’s the real terrorist here (terrorising people)? And how do we restore human dignity now? █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Cryptographer Adi Shamir Prevented from Attending NSA History Conference

   In this email message to colleagues, Israeli cryptographer Adi Shamir recounts the difficulties he faced in getting a visa to attend the 2013 Cryptologic History Symposium sponsored by the National Security Agency. Adi Shamir is the “S” in the RSA public-key algorithm and is “one of the finest cryptologists in the world today,” according to historian David Kahn. The NSA Symposium begins tomorrow. For the reasons described below, Dr. Shamir will not be there.

2. 10 reasons not to trust claims national security is being threatened by leaks

   Time and again GCHQ and other intelligence agencies have spuriously used ‘national security arguments’ to suppress information and stifle debate

3. Why Pierre Omidyar decided to join forces with Glenn Greenwald for a new venture in news

   Yesterday word leaked out that Glenn Greenwald would be leaving The Guardian to help create some new thing backed by Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. I just got off the phone with Omidyar and can report more details about what the new thing is and how it came to be.

   [...]

   NewCo is new venture— a company not a charity. It is not a project of Omidyar Network. It is separate from his philanthropy, he said. He said he will be putting a good deal of his time, as well as his capital, into it. I asked how large a commitment he was prepared to make in dollars. For starters: the $250 million it would have taken to buy the Washington Post.

4. My Visit With Edward Snowden

   He is an “asylee,” not a “fugitive,” as the mainstream media in America describe him routinely—even some of the trusted journalists who write exclusives based on his revelations. An asylee has the right to be left alone, not hunted like an animal. But similar to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Snowden is in a new purgatory the US has created: free but not free. Snowden is technically free, but still circumscribed by the specter of his home country, which refuses to recognize Russia’s grant of political asylum under international law and human rights agreements.

5. Ed Snowden Confirms He Took None Of The Documents To Russia

   As we noted last month, from earlier comments Ed Snowden had made about it being impossible for him to reveal the documents he leaked to the Russians or Chinese, it seemed quite likely that he got rid of the documents and had no copies any more himself. This seemed even more likely after the report from earlier this week that the four laptops he took were more of a diversion than anything else. And now, Snowden has confirmed directly that he handed the documents off to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald and did not keep copies for himself, as he’s now explained to the NY Times’ James Risen.

6. Snowden Says He Took No Secret Files to Russia

7. UK spy agencies inquiry to take public evidence

   Parliament’s intelligence watchdog is to hear evidence from the public as part of a widening of its inquiry into UK spy agencies’ intercept activities.

8. GCHQ accused of monitoring privileged emails between lawyers and clients

   Allegation relates to eight Libyan nationals and comes in wake of Guardian’s revelations about GCHQ and Tempora programme

9. UK Prime Minister Urges Investigation Of The Guardian Over Snowden Leaks; There Shall Be No Free Press

10. SD Times Blog: Oakland launches new program using Big Data to bolster police surveillance

    The city of Oakland is taking two popular buzzwords—“Big Data” and “surveillance state”—and combining them into a new program to aid in law enforcement.

    Joining similar police initiatives in Massachusetts, Texas and New York City, the Oakland Police Department is re-appropriating US$7 million in federal grants initially purposed for preventing terror attacks, and using it to construct a new surveillance center. Scheduled to open next summer, the project, formerly referred to as Oakland’s Domain Awareness Center, will electronically gather and analyze data around the clock from a variety of sensors and databases, displaying selected info on a bank of giant monitors.

11. Feds Sued for Hiding NSA Spying From Terror Defendants

    Five years after Congress authorized warrantless electronic spying, the Obama administration has never divulged to a single defendant that they were the target of this type of phone or email surveillance — despite lawmakers’ claims the snooping has stopped terrorist plots and resulted in arrests.

12. Door May Open for Challenge to Secret Wiretaps

    Five years after Congress authorized a sweeping warrantless surveillance program, the Justice Department is setting up a potential Supreme Court test of whether it is constitutional by notifying a criminal defendant — for the first time — that evidence against him derived from the eavesdropping, according to officials.

13. ‘Individual privacy vs collective security’? NO!

    Privacy is often misconstrued as a purely individual right – indeed, it is sometimes characterised as an ‘anti-community’ right, a right to hide yourself away from society. Society, in this view, would be better if none of us had any privacy – a ‘transparent society’. In practice, nothing could be further from the truth: privacy is something that has collective benefit, supporting coherent societies. Privacy isn’t so much about ‘hiding’ things as being able to have some sort of control over your life. The more control people have, the more freely and positively they are likely to behave. Most of us realise this when we consider our own lives. We wear clothes, we present ourselves in particular ways, and we behave more positively as a result. We talk more freely with our friends and relations knowing (or assuming) that what we talk about won’t be plastered all over noticeboards, told to all our colleagues, to the police and so forth. Privacy has a crucial social function – it’s not about individuals vs. society. Very much the opposite.

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

Truecrypt Cannot be Audited Because It’s Proprietary Software

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Security at 8:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Why nobody should trust Truecrypt (or any other piece of proprietary software for that matter), even if it claims to have been “audited”

THE other day we alluded to Truecrypt in this post, not quite mentioning the holes in the argument that Truecrypt can be “audited” [1-3]. Unless everyone can view the code and compile it independently (or rely on others to do so independently), we must assume that Truecrypt is not secure and that it might contain back doors (either unidentified or deliberately planted). This whole Internet ‘debate’ about Truecrypt “audit” should remind us that Free software is vital for dodging surveillance.

The NSA has used corporations to facilitate snooping and it may not be alone [4]. This is happening at many levels [5-7] based on new leaks and revelations, so rather than look for evidence of insecurity (e.g. back door) we should pursue real assurance of security. You know what the spies like to tell us: if you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide, right? So come on, Truecrypt, share your source code. What have you got to hide? █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. Should Truecrypt be audited?

   Truecrypt is a cross-platform, free disk encryption software for Windows and Unix-like operating systems. It is generally considered a good disk encryption software, and not too long ago, I wrote a tutorial that showed how to encrypt the Windows installation of a Windows-Linux dual-boot setup (see Dual-boot Fedora 18 and Windows 7, with full disk encryption configured on both OSs).

2. New effort to fully audit TrueCrypt raises $16,000+ in a few short weeks

3. Can you trust ‘NSA-proof’ TrueCrypt? Cough up some dough and find out

   The source code for the Windows, Linux and Mac OS X utility is publicly available for people to inspect and verify, but this has not been enough to convince every cryptography guru that it’s entirely secure.

4. After Snowden’s leaks, China’s Huawei calls for more transparency in the tech industry

   With all of the recent revelations about the US National Security Agency’s surveillance programs, it must be hard for the Chinese telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei not to gloat a little bit.

   After all, the leaks from former contractor Edward Snowden showed that the NSA enlisted US technology companies to enable its snooping on global telecommunications networks—which is exactly what US intelligence officials have accused Huawei of doing on behalf of the Chinese government.

5. Europe Moves to Shield Citizens’ Data

   Lawmakers here have introduced a measure in the European Parliament that could require American companies like Google and Yahoo to seek clearance from European officials before complying with United States warrants seeking private data.

6. Dutch Telcos Used Customer Metadata, Retained To Fight Terrorism, For Everyday Marketing Purposes

   One of the ironies of European outrage over the global surveillance conducted by the NSA and GCHQ is that in the EU, communications metadata must be kept by law anyway, although not many people there realize it.

7. NSA Harvesting Contact Lists

   A new Snowden document shows that the NSA is harvesting contact lists — e-mail address books, IM buddy lists, etc. — from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, and others.

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

Scarcity of Women is Not a Free Software Issue But a Western Issue (Science Stereotypes)

Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD at 8:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Tackling the claim that FOSS discourages women (common way to discredit a movement or individuals) using real research

OVER the years we have challenged many attempts to demonise FOSS by claiming that it was hostile towards women. This is actually a dishonest attack on FOSS, which narrows down a computer science (or more broadly, science) issue and tries to ascribe it just to the segment of collaborative and freely-shared software.

Over the past few days there have been numerous articles [1-4] that shed light on the gender gaps and where they can be found, why, and how to measure it. It is not a FOSS issue. It’s a real issue, but it is not a FOSS issue. It’s just a convenient way to try to attack FOSS, just like feminism or chauvinism have both become a very effective mechanism for attacking/discrediting individuals. Anna Troberg (pictured above) should know this. █

Related/contextual items from the news:

1. SparkFun Ponders Women in STEM Fields

   Tuesday was [Ada Lovelace] day and to recognize it SparkFun posted an article about women in their workforce and the STEM initiative. [Ada Lovelace] is credited with forging a path for women in mathematics and computing. The STEM acronym represents a movement to get more of America’s students into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics fields in order to keep up with the rest of the developed world.

2. How The Gender Gap In The Sciences Differs Around The Globe

   A map from UNESCO provides a very rough picture of “the gender gap in science” around the globe, showing large swaths of relative equality in parts of South America and Central Asia, and great inequality in countries including India, France, Germany, and Japan.

3. The Boards Are All White: Charting Diversity Among Tech Directors

4. Science images from across the globe

   One hundred images form a stunning new photographic exhibition that demonstrates the role played by imaging across many areas of science.

   The show reveals many aspects of Nature not usually visible to the naked eye.

   The Royal Photographic Society is hosting the event alongside the Science and Technology Facilities Council.

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend