Brief items

As mobile phone masts went up across the world's jungles, savannas and mountains, so did poaching. Wildlife crime syndicates can not only coordinate better but can mine growing public data sets, often of geotagged images. Privacy matters for tigers, for snow leopards, for elephants and rhinos – and even for tortoises and sharks. Animal data protection laws, where they exist at all, are oblivious to these new threats, and no-one seems to have started to think seriously about information security.

So we have been doing some work on this, and presented some initial ideas via an invited talk at Usenix Security in August. A video of the talk is now online.

If you're an American of European descent, there's a 60% chance you can be uniquely identified by public information in DNA databases. This is not information that you have made public; this is information your relatives have made public.

But to know why you don't get a timely response, you need to intimately understand Gentoo's inner dynamics, which you can't. So, you think we rudely ignore you. But we don't, you're just lost in a Kafkaesque maze!

Using old documentation can be like hiking an overgrown trail. The prospects of rogue branches, poison ivy, and getting lost suggest you are unlikely to emerge unscathed.

Keyboard crusaders that would otherwise pounce on anyone daring to suggest that some language is better than any other will concede that Lisp is on another level. Lisp transcends the utilitarian criteria used to judge other languages, because the median programmer has never used Lisp to build anything practical and probably never will, yet the reverence for Lisp runs so deep that Lisp is often ascribed mystical properties.

The GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) has done a wonderful job defending the software freedom of community-developed projects like Mastodon and Mediagoblin. So, we should answer with skepticism a solitary for-profit company coming forward to claim that "Affero GPL has not resulted in sufficient legal incentives for some of the largest users of infrastructure software … to participate in the community. Many open source developers are struggling with a similar reality". If the last sentence were on Wikipedia, I'd edit it to add a Citation Needed tag, as I know of no multi-copyright-held or charity-based AGPL'd project that has "struggled with this reality". In fact, it's only a "reality" for those that engage in proprietary relicensing. Eliot Horowitz, co-founder of MongoDB and promulgator of their new license, neglects to mention that.

The fine grain of interface access rights provided by the snapd governance agent can thus provide further isolation and security when it is running user-modified code, guaranteed under the snap packaging paradigm to cause no other program code to be modified, to break, or to perform differently because of the presence of the user-modified program. Such a structure of modification permission can be operated by the OEM consistent with the requirements of GPLv3. The OEM can publish an authenticated record of the installation permission issued, indexed by the Vehicle Identification Number—without publishing the car owner’s personal information—so that public and private parties can be assured that no surreptitious modification of vehicle software occurs.