Digital and software freedom/rights advocate from Slovenia, Europe. Also a member of the Pirate party. You can find me on Mastodon: @[email protected]

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Joined 2Y ago
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Cake day: Jun 08, 2023

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24555514 > With Lenovo's announcement at CES 2025 of the Lenovo Legion Go S, we are pleased to share that their "Powered by SteamOS" model is the first handheld officially licensed to ship with Valve's SteamOS. We built this operating system to provide a seamless user experience optimized for gaming, while retaining access to the power and flexibility of a PC. SteamOS is the same operating system we run on Steam Deck, and the team is making updates to ensure it fully supports the Lenovo Legion Go S and provides the same seamless experience customers expect. > > In addition, the same work that we are doing to support the Lenovo Legion Go S will improve compatibility with other handhelds. Ahead of Legion Go S shipping, we will be shipping a beta of SteamOS which should improve the experience on other handhelds, and users can download and test this themselves. And of course we'll continue adding support and improving the experience with future releases.
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With Lenovo's announcement at CES 2025 of the Lenovo Legion Go S, we are pleased to share that their "Powered by SteamOS" model is the first handheld officially licensed to ship with Valve's SteamOS. We built this operating system to provide a seamless user experience optimized for gaming, while retaining access to the power and flexibility of a PC. SteamOS is the same operating system we run on Steam Deck, and the team is making updates to ensure it fully supports the Lenovo Legion Go S and provides the same seamless experience customers expect. In addition, the same work that we are doing to support the Lenovo Legion Go S will improve compatibility with other handhelds. Ahead of Legion Go S shipping, we will be shipping a beta of SteamOS which should improve the experience on other handhelds, and users can download and test this themselves. And of course we'll continue adding support and improving the experience with future releases.
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24503345 > A team from China’s top government research academy pledged to produce this year a processor based on the open-source chip-design architecture RISC-V, as Beijing advances its semiconductor self-reliance drive amid escalating US restrictions. > > The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) will be able to deliver its XiangShan open-source central processing unit in 2025, wrote Bao Yungang, deputy director at the academy’s Institute of Computing Technology, in a Weibo post on Sunday.
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/24419041 > RISC-V laptops offer customizable and affordable personal computing with their open-source instruction set architecture. Early versions have demonstrated their potential, but lagged in performance. But in 2025, Framework and DeepComputing are partnering to make the best RISC-V laptop yet, promising an alternative to laptops powered by x86 and Arm.
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>“The future of gaming handhelds is coming to CES ‘25 and you have a front row seat!” the email in my inbox exclaims. Let me translate: it looks like Lenovo just tacitly confirmed it will announce its first SteamOS handheld in Las Vegas on or before January 7th, 2025. We’re expecting it to be the Steam button equipped Legion Go S that leaker Evan Blass revealed last week.
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Ahead of tomorrow's availability of the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor as the first Zen 5 CPU released with 3D V-Cache, today the review embargo lifts. Here is a look at how this 8-core / 16-thread Zen 5 CPU with 64MB of 3D V-Cache is performing under Ubuntu Linux compared to a variety of other Intel Core and AMD Ryzen desktop processors. The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D as previously shared is AMD's first processor leveraging 2nd Gen 3D V-Cache. The 64MB of cache is now underneath the processor cores so that the CCD is positioned closer to the heatsink/cooler to help with more efficient cooling compared to earlier X3D models. The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D boosts up to 5.2GHz and feature a 4.7GHz base clock while total it provides 104MB of cache. Like with the prior 8-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D, all eight cores have access to the 64MB 3D V-Cache. The Ryzen 7 9800X3D features a 120 Watt default TDP. AMD's suggested pricing on the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is $479 USD. The AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D will work with existing AMD AM5 motherboards with a simple BIOS update. For my testing I was able to use the ASUS ROG STRIX X670E-E GAMING WIFI motherboard previously used for all Ryzen 9000 series testing after a simple BIOS update. AMD also sent out an ASRock X870E Taichi motherboard as part of the review kit. For these 9800X3D benchmarks I ended up testing both initially on the ASUS ROG STRIX X670E-E GAMING WIFI motherboard to match the previously tested Ryzen 9000 series processors and then repeated the run with the ASRock X870E Taichi motherboard as well for reference.
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Valve announced a change for Steam today that will make things a lot clearer for everyone, as developers will now need to clearly list the kernel-level anti-cheat used on Steam store pages. In the Steamworks Developer post Valve said: "We've heard from more and more developers recently that they're looking for the right way to share anti-cheat information about their game with players. At the same time, players have been requesting more transparency around the anti-cheat services used in games, as well as the existence of any additional software that will be installed within the game."
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Agree and hope it brings even better GNU/Linux gaming support, as it is the OS that is in this democratic users/people owned operating system, just as other free as in freedom and opensource collaborative software. In this regard Valve does quite a very good job of improving and sponsoring GNU/Linux, Mesa drivers KDE and other opensource projects. What all other gaming companies fail terribly at. What comes after Valve must be even better at it.


I agree and hope that what comes after it is even better at supporting gaming on GNU/Linux and contributing to various libre and opensource projects like KDE and Proton and Mesa and such.





Meta has a Palestine problem. If you use Facebook or Instagram, you’ve probably seen the censorship yourself. Dena Takruri uncovers an internal culture of censorship, intimidation and fear within Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook. She speaks to Meta employees who’ve tried to fix the problem or speak out, and say they were silenced or even fired. She also investigates Meta leaders’ deep ties to Israel, which may explain why it’s suppressing and censoring Palestine content for billions of users around the world.
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Technology is playing a central role in enabling the relentless mass slaughter and destruction unleashed in Gaza. From supplying the dystopian AI systems used to automate the killing and bombing, to facilitating the spread of state-sponsored disinformation and online incitement to violence and war crimes, Big Tech is deeply embroiled in this brutal war. However, the impunity with which Israeli authorities have been allowed to wage this war has also served to shield technology companies from scrutiny. Not only have companies failed to uphold their human rights commitments in times of war, they have also dismissed, ignored, and even punished dissenting voices among their own ranks, civil society, and the public flagging their possible complicity in what the UN’s top independent expert on Palestine describes as an unfolding genocide. This post interrogates how technology companies can be potentially facilitating or contributing to an endless list of egregious violations of international law, including the crime of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, currently under investigation by the ICJ and the International Criminal Court (ICC). We also provide companies with recommendations to avoid potential complicity in such violations.
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At Apple’s secretive Global Police Summit at its Cupertino headquarters, cops from seven countries learned how to use a host of Apple products like the iPhone, Vision Pro and CarPlay for surveillance and policing work.
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OpenAI, a non-profit AI company that will lose anywhere from $4 billion to $5 billion this year, will at some point in the next six or so months convert into a for-profit AI company, at which point it will continue to lose money in exactly the same way. Shortly after this news broke, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati resigned, followed by Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and VP of Research, Post Training Barret Zoph, leaving OpenAI with exactly three of its eleven cofounders remaining. This coincides suspiciously with OpenAI's increasingly-absurd fundraising efforts, where (as I predicted in late July) OpenAI has raised the largest venture-backed fundraise of all time $6.6 billion— at a valuation of $157 billion.
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Oh how I wish those TV manufacturers would get rid of HDMI and replace it with DisplyPort. HDMI mafia does not allow opensource implementations of HDMI specification and so not all latest features of it can be supported by graphics card drivers on GNU/Linux. Death to HDMI!


Why are we letting algorithms rewrite the rules of art, work, and life?
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An open-source developer at AMD has carried out a DOOM port that runs almost entirely atop AMD GPUs for rendering and the game logic. This DOOM GPU port relies on the AMD ROCm library with the LLVM libc C library for offloading the classic DOOM to the AMD GPU.
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Will AI soon surpass the human brain? If you ask employees at OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other large tech companies, it is inevitable. However, researchers at Radboud University and other institutes show new proof that those claims are overblown and unlikely to ever come to fruition. Their findings are published in Computational Brain & Behavior today.
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The Fediverse has been teaching me how to be a better digital citizen. Actually, let me rephrase that: without the shadow of a doubt, the Fediverse has made me a better digital citizen. You may have heard in passing how Fediverse networks are considered to be “ethical social media” – but this description has rarely been followed up by an explanation of how and why. I’d like to give it a shot, through the prism of my personal experience.
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Arch Linux and Valve Collaboration
Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on the distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables them to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.
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Elon Musk's X is blocking links to the JD Vance "dossier" containing the Trump campaign's research on the vice presidential nominee. X also suspended Ken Klippenstein, the journalist who published the dossier that apparently comes from an Iranian hack of the Trump campaign.
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The Israeli Defense Tech Conference, aimed at tech companies working with the Israeli military, was scheduled for November at the Google for Startups campus in Tel Aviv. The event, according to a listing posted on the event RSVP app Luma, was pitched at “founders, investors and innovators” looking to network and learn more about the defense tech space. It was co-sponsored by Google, Fusion Venture Capital, Genesis, a startup accelerator, and the Israeli military’s research and development arm, known as the Directorate of Defense Research and Development (DDR&D, or Ma’fat). When The Intercept contacted Google, the event page disappeared. Google was not only listed as the physical host of the event and one of its sponsors, but the event listing also included a notice that attendees “approve of sharing [their] details with the organizers (Fusion & Google)” as part of signing up. When The Intercept contacted Google, as well as the other companies and venture capital firms on the event page, the event page disappeared.
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A new project launching today aims to capitalize on the momentum seen within the fediverse, also known as the open social web, which describes interconnected social networking services powered by the ActivityPub protocol. Co-founded by the co-author and current editor of ActivityPub, Evan Prodromou, a new nonprofit organization called the Social Web Foundation will focus on expanding the fediverse, improving ActivityPub and the user experience, informing policymakers, and educating people about the fediverse and how they can participate.
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A report from Morgan Stanley suggests the datacenter industry is on track to emit 2.5 billion tons by 2030, which is three times higher than the predictions if generative AI had not come into play. The extra demand from GenAI will reportedly lead to a rise in emissions from 200 million tons this year to 600 million tons by 2030, thanks largely to the construction of more data centers to keep up with the demand for cloud services.
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Paris Marx is joined by Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner to discuss the complicity of Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and how tech workers are organizing to stop it. Mohammad Khatami and Gabi Schubiner are former Google software engineers and organizers with [No Tech for Apartheid](https://www.notechforapartheid.com/).
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Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from help with writing1,2 to informing hiring decisions3. However, these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgements biased in problematic ways about groups such as African Americans4,5,6,7. Although previous research has focused on overt racism in language models, social scientists have argued that racism with a more subtle character has developed over time, particularly in the United States after the civil rights movement8,9. It is unknown whether this covert racism manifests in language models. Here, we demonstrate that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice, exhibiting raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English (AAE) that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded. By contrast, the language models’ overt stereotypes about African Americans are more positive. Dialect prejudice has the potential for harmful consequences: language models are more likely to suggest that speakers of AAE be assigned less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death. Finally, we show that current practices of alleviating racial bias in language models, such as human preference alignment, exacerbate the discrepancy between covert and overt stereotypes, by superficially obscuring the racism that language models maintain on a deeper level. Our findings have far-reaching implications for the fair and safe use of language technology.
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Researchers have documented an explosion of hate and misinformation on Twitter since the Tesla billionaire took over in October 2022 -- and now experts say communicating about climate science on the social network on which many of them rely is getting harder. Policies aimed at curbing the deadly effects of climate change are accelerating, prompting a rise in what experts identify as organised resistance by opponents of climate reform. Peter Gleick, a climate and water specialist with nearly 99,000 followers, announced on May 21 he would no longer post on the platform because it was amplifying racism and sexism. While he is accustomed to "offensive, personal, ad hominem attacks, up to and including direct physical threats", he told AFP, "in the past few months, since the takeover and changes at Twitter, the amount, vituperativeness, and intensity of abuse has skyrocketed".
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The ideologues of Silicon Valley are in model collapse. To train an AI model, you need to give it a ton of data, and the quality of output from the model depends upon whether that data is any good. A risk AI models face, especially as AI-generated output makes up a larger share of what’s published online, is “model collapse”: the rapid degradation that results from AI models being trained on the output of AI models. Essentially, the AI is primarily talking to, and learning from, itself, and this creates a self-reinforcing cascade of bad thinking. We’ve been watching something similar happen, in real time, with the Elon Musks, Marc Andreessens, Peter Thiels, and other chronically online Silicon Valley representatives of far-right ideology. It’s not just that they have bad values that are leading to bad politics. They also seem to be talking themselves into believing nonsense at an increasing rate. The world they seem to believe exists, and which they’re reacting and warning against, bears less and less resemblance to the actual world, and instead represents an imagined lore they’ve gotten themselves lost in.
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Apple vs the “free market”
Every artist, performer and creator on Patreon is about to get screwed out of 30% of their gross revenue, which will be diverted to Apple, the most valuable company on the planet. Apple contributes nothing to their work, but it will get to steal a third of their wages. How is this possible? Enshittification.
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It’s the heavy graphics used which looks like it uses WebGL and this is disabled in LibreWolf since it can easily be used for fingerprinting a user. It would be great if they could not use such heavy graphics if WebGL is not supported and just used simple static image or something like that. Well it would be great in general not just for privacy reasons.


With over 3,500 commits authored by over 500 contributors, the latest Godot Engine release comes packed full of new features and improvements. Looking back at the amount of blood, sweat, and tears that went into this one, we can almost guarantee that there's something for everyone in here. Discover new node types, quality of life changes, and of course many bug fixes in the release overview below.
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Surveillance technology and spyware are being used to target and suppress journalists, dissidents, and human rights advocates everywhere. Surveillance Watch is an interactive map that documents the hidden connections within the opaque surveillance industry. Founded by privacy advocates, most of whom were personally harmed by surveillance tech, our mission is to shed light on the companies profiting from this exploitation with significant risk to our lives. By mapping out the intricate web of surveillance companies, their subsidiaries, partners, and financial backers, we hope to expose the enablers fueling this industry's extensive rights violations, ensuring they cannot evade accountability for being complicit in this abuse. Surveillance Watch is a community-driven initiative, and we rely on submissions from individuals passionate about protecting privacy and human rights. Acknowledging that we are barely scratching the surface of this industry, our interactive map is just the beginning – we are continuously working to expand this resource to include other information and integrate with existing databases that track this data. Our right to privacy is non-negotiable, and anyone who threatens it must be held accountable. Support our mission by sharing this map and staying informed.
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Y'all like Linux? Of course you do, that's why you're here! Wendell gives you the scoop on the more powerful half of AMD's Ryzen 9000 offerings, and makes a strange discovery about gaming on linux.
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Illusion — Why do we keep believing that AI will solve the climate crisis (which it is facilitating), get rid of poverty (on which it is heavily relying), and unleash the full potential of human creativity (which it is undermining)?
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The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has officially allowed the FSFE to intervene in the litigation brought by Apple against the European Commission to avoid being designated as a ‘gatekeeper’ under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). The company has put forward an aggressive policy against Software Freedom and interoperability, seeking to deter the enforcement of the DMA – a law dedicated to increase fairness and contestability in digital markets by regulating the economic behaviour of very large tech corporations. The FSFE aims to protect Free Software against monopolistic corporate control.
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Government involvement in content moderation raises serious human rights concerns in every context. Since October 7, social media platforms have been challenged for the unjustified takedowns of pro-Palestinian content—sometimes at the request of the Israeli government—and a simultaneous failure to remove hate speech towards Palestinians. More specifically, social media platforms have worked with the Israeli Cyber Unit—a government office set up to issue takedown requests to platforms
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One of the Steam Deck's primary advantages over more powerful handheld gaming PCs is its operating system, which is designed to mimic a game console interface within a Linux PC environment. Valve has long planned to bring the OS to other devices, but a recent Steam Deck software update includes the first mention of a rival handheld.
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One of Washington’s largest corporate tax breaks has grown alongside a data center boom in Central Washington, including this data center in East Wenatchee owned by the Sabey Corp. Despite forgoing more than $474 million since 2018, the state can’t say how many jobs were created by the tax break. During that same time frame, it also hasn’t evaluated whether the revenue loss was worth it.
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Palantir, the company named for the dangerous seeing-stones that tended to mislead their users, has announced a partnership with Microsoft to deliver services for classified networks in US defense and intelligence agencies. “This is a first-of-its-kind, integrated suite of technology that will allow critical national security missions to operationalize Microsoft’s best-in-class large language models (LLMs) via Azure OpenAI Service within Palantir’s AI Platforms (AIP) in Microsoft’s government and classified cloud environments,” the announcement says. Palantir is a data-analysis company that sucks down huge amounts of personal data to assist governments and companies with surveillance. It is somewhat unclear from the text of the announcement what services Palantir and Microsoft will offer. What we do know is that Microsoft’s Azure cloud services will integrate Palantir products. Previously, Azure incorporated OpenAI’s Chat-GPT4 into a “top secret” version of its software.
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The Free Software Foundation Europe is intervening in a litigation brought by Apple against the European Commission before the Court of Justice of the European Union. The case relates to Digital Markets Act, with Apple seeking to avoid obligations related to its App Store and the interoperability of its operating systems. The FSFE aims to hold Apple accountable under the DMA to protect Free Software against monopolistic corporate control.
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Yeah I am so glad I switched to GNU/Linux years ago, Have to keep supporting closed OSes at work with our software and with each release they are just getting worse and worse, while GNU/Linux just keeps getting better.


So not even with setting the Width option to Fill Width and Style with disabled Floating option? (see this picture for refeence)


Yeah I hear good things about qemu. Will really have to reserve some time to learn it some day. And just for kicks I have just tried and installed KDE Neon into VirtualBox too, and damn I am actually surprised how fast Plasma runs under it, definitely faster than Plasma 5 did. Another job well done :)


Yeah also don’t like the dock, but with KDE Plasma at least you can make it full width as it is so nicely customizable. VM, oooo I wonder how it will run there, I guess it will be quite slow, at least Plasma 5 was a lot slower in VB for me than later on real hardware, so it might not be well representative.


Good. If only that spyware would stay down forever.


No thanks. We don’t need more closed and bloated spyware, what we need is more open and privacy respecing OSes like GNU/Linux and devices using it like Steam Deck.


No thanks. We don’t need more closed and bloated spyware, what we need is more open and privacy respecing OSes like GNU/Linux and devices using it like Steam Deck.


No thanks. We don’t need more closed and bloated spyware, what we need is more open and privacy respecing OSes like GNU/Linux and devices using it like Steam Deck.


No thanks. We don’t need more closed and bloated spyware, what we need is more open and privacy respecing OSes like GNU/Linux and devices using it like Steam Deck.



The main point to know is if you do not encrypt it with keys generated localy on your machine and encrypt it locally, then you can not be sure it really is E2E encrypted. If a corporation does it for you with their keys they can ready anything so this kind of E2E is more or less marketing bullshit and Apple is guilty of this too.


Straight from the old Big Tabacco playbook of traps. Give away free stuff to get you addicted while in school and then when you are out they start profiting on your bad habbit you are hard to get rid off. Better to use software that is free for ever and even better if it is also free as in freedom and opensource.


Good. Abusive monopolies and already too big and too powerful corporations like Microsoft should never be allowed to become even bigger and more powerful They should be split up.