Recommended New Article From Dr. Andy Farnell and Some Site Miscellany
This morning Dr. Andy Farnell published a decent and very long article in which he explained why "Free software as a vital weapon against fascism" (he defines what he means by that).
There's lots of good information and really good points in there. Towards the end he says: "How to manage and help colleagues or partners who are still stuck on US BigTech (eg. How to politely refuse a "Teams" invitation and respond with something safer). The time to start moving was yesterday. But today is the next best chance."
Andy says he and his daughter successfully avoid GAFAM; the same is true in our household. It'd doable. It may take some adjustment, but it's worth the effort.
One piece of software that my wife uses (only habitually) is LibreOffice. It can handle almost all the charts and spreadsheets she must deal with. Earlier today we wrote about how Apple was very hostile towards open standards like ODF. It still is. Regulators do nothing about this. We mentioned "DOCX" along the way, but that was not a good idea because it's just some vague and "moving target" of Microsoft. "DOCX" is proprietary and a secret; "furthermore," one person reminded us, "OOXML is *NOT* the same as DOCX [and] OOXML is not used anywhere by any program since the spec is so large yet incomplete."
"The various projects just try to reverse-engineer DOCX, and that can be pointed out without mentioning DOCX."
Fair point.
So we stand corrected. Thankfully I very seldom receive "DOCX" files. Andy mentioned "[h]ow to politely refuse a "Teams" invitation and respond with something safer)." I do the same when receiving attachments in lousy, proprietary formats (including "DOCX"). It typically works (data resent in an open format instead).
There's not much to report other than this. Today and yesterday I spent hours improving my feed reader (which I had created) because the news is very slow and some proportion of the stuff on the Web is fake 'articles' or LLM slop. Hours ago I saw new examples of that in LinuxTechLab and Planet Ubuntu. Yes, there's still slop in Planet Ubuntu. That's bad optics. But that's hardly the worst thing about Ubuntu right now.
As usual, linuxsecurity.com has also just published this fake article.
100% certainty about its 'fakeness':
linuxsecurity.com will never recover from this. They've quit caring. █