Today in Techrights

• Global Dynamics of the Demise of Microsoft Windows (Now Down to 27%)
• Francisca Pacheco López on Richard Stallman
• The World Wide Web is Not Growing, Gemini Does
• Links 03/07/2022: GNU/Linux Steam Surge, GitHub Breaks the Law
• IRC Proceedings: Saturday, July 02, 2022
• Flooz on a Blockchain
• Links 02/07/2022: Debian 9 (Stretch) EOL, FocusWriter 1.8.1, and Darktable 4.0
• After Freenode's Demise It's OFTC That's Gaining in IRC, Not Libera.Chat
• Finland Turns 18
• Copyleft is Still Better and More Suitable for Business
• With New Data Just in (a Couple of Hours Ago), It Seems Clear Microsoft Windows Continues to Lose Market Share in July
• Links 02/07/2022: PSPP 1.6.2 Released, Linux Mint Rejects Parts of Systemd, Lots of Politics

Tor Browser Releases

• New Alpha Release: Tor Browser 11.5a13 (Android, Windows, macOS, Linux)

  Tor Browser 11.5a13 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

  Tor Browser 11.5a13 updates Firefox on Windows, macOS, and Linux to 91.10.0esr.

• New Release: Tor Browser 11.0.15 (Android, Windows, macOS, Linux)

  Tor Browser 11.0.15 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

  We use the opportunity as well to update various other components of Tor Browser...

today's leftovers

• The Old Computer Challenge V2: back to RTC

  This new challenge will embrace the old time of RTC modems with a monthly time budget. Back in these days, in France at least, people had to subscribe to an ISP for a given price, but you would be able to connect only for 10, 20, 30, 40... hours a month depending on your subscription. Any extra hour was very expensive. We used the Internet the most efficiently possible because it was time limited (and very slow, 4 kB/s at best). Little story, phone lines were not available while a modem was connected, and we had to be careful not to forget to manually disconnect the modem after use, otherwise it would stay connected and wasting the precious Internet time! (and making expensive bills)

• New Beta Release of Amiga-inspired Icaros OS

  A brand new beta release of Icaros — a distribution of AROS (an open source operating system that is API-compatible with Amiga) — has just been released.

• Booting Fedora into XWayland when Xorg breaks

  Now I could reboot and choose XWayland from the login screen instead.

• 204: Linux Accessibility, Vim, Thunderbird, GNOME, EndeavourOS, Fedora 37 and more Linux news! - This Week in Linux - TuxDigital

  On this episode of This Week in Linux: Accessibility in Linux, Vim 9.0, EndeavourOS 22.6, Thunderbird 102 Email Client, Software Freedom Conservancy Says Give Up GitHub, GNOME Web 43 Gets WebExtension Support, Potential RISC-V Laptops, Shotcut 22.06 Video Editor, all that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

• 64: The Ethical Dilemma Of Sentient AI - Hardware Addicts - TuxDigital

  Welcome to Hardware Addicts, a proud member of the TuxDigital Network. Hardware Addicts is the podcast that focuses on the physical components that powers our technology world. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about the ethics of AI…what do we do when the robots we create become sentient? How close have are we getting to true sentient AI in robotics? Then we head to Camera Corner where Wendy will discuss back button focus. So Sit back, Relax, and Plug In because Hardware Addicts Starts Now!

An experiment to test GitHub Copilot's legality

GitHub is enabling copyleft violation ✨at scale✨ with Copilot. GitHub Copilot encourages people to make derivative works of source code without complying with the original code’s license. This facilitates the creation of permissively-licensed or proprietary derivatives of copyleft code.

Unfortunately, challenging Microsoft (GitHub’s parent company) in court is a bad idea: their legal budget probably ensures their victory, and they likely already have a comprehensive defense planned. How can we determine Copilot’s legality on a level playing field? We can create legal precedent that they haven’t had a chance to study yet!

A chat with Matt Campbell about a speech synthesizer gave me a horrible idea. I think I know a way to find out if GitHub Copilot is legal: we could use its legal justification against another software project with a smaller legal budget. Specifically, against a speech synthesizer. The outcome of our actions could set a legal precedent to determine the legality of Copilot.