Thomas Pfeiffer @colomar@fosstodon.org

Welcome to 2020!
I guess it's time to take out the old #cyberpunk 2020 rulebook and check how close our world is to the world described in there...

I'm out of breath and will probably have sore legs tomorrow.

From playing "SUPERHOT".

In VR.

In my living room.

It's an amazing world that we live in.

Since I realized after tooting that the small text makes the Venn diagram not very social-media-friendly, here is a better version.

Btw: The diagram was created with the draw.io desktop version. I've used many diagram tools over the years, but I haven't found another one that combines learnability and versatility quite like draw.io. And it's Apache-licensed.

And no, I am in no way affiliated with draw.io, I just love the software.

One of the reasons why the FOSS world is often split when it comes to political topics:
FOSS attracts mainly two quite different crowds: The user freedom aspect (plus lack of state control) attracts many staunch libertarians, whereas the aspect of cooperating "for the greater good" (plus lack of commercial control) mostly attracts progressives.

It's actually quite surprising that those two groups, who usually hate each other with passion, can cooperate on the same thing.

@kde officially endorses the Global Climate Strike tomorrow, September 20th (see the banner on https://kde.org)!

We are aware that "There is no Free Software on a dead planet", so we encourage everyone to join your local Climate Strike march tomorrow (or today, depending on when you read this) so that we still have a future for Free Software to strive in.

Find your local march on https://globalclimatestrike.net/

Humble Bundle currently has three bundles that might be of interest to some of you:
"IT Security by Taylor & Francis" (DRM-free ebooks)
"Level Up Your Python" (ebooks, software (proprietary, so probably not interesting for you guys) and videos)
"Become a Game Developer" (ebooks and videos about Unity development)

I guess the IT Security one is potentially the most interesting ( https://www.humblebundle.com/books/information-technology-security-books )

I am in no way affiliated with Humble Bundle, I just share because I care ;)

https://www.humblebundle.com/ currently gives away DiRT Rally for free if you subscribe to their newsletter (or if you are already subscribed).
It runs natively on Linux!

I'm in no way affiliated with Humble Bundle and I don't get anything out of sharing this, I just like them and like Linux games.

Thank you @federicomena for reminding people how to disclose security vulnerabilities (especially in FOSS projects) in a way that is beneficial for everyone.

We need people who check open source code for security vulnerabilities, because bugs only become shallow if enough eyeballs actually turn to them.
But we also need those people to report them in a way that does not do harm.

https://people.gnome.org/~federico/blog/on-responsible-vulnerability-disclosure.html

Last month, in order to block a climate bill, Oregon Republicans fled the state and threatened to attack police sent out to retrieve them.

That's one fine democracy you have there, America...

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/guns-over-votes-oregon-republicans-kill-climate-bill-by-quorum/

After I've just rejected another project offer from a company whose company values I disagree with, I started thinking: Wouldn't it be great if all of us IT people could band together and sign a pledge not to work for unethical companies?

If enough of us did it, given how hard it is to find good people in our line of work, we could have a real impact!

Agreeing on a definition of "ethical" would not be easy, but I bet we could find some common ground.

Let me know if this proposal makes sense!