08 Feb 2025
the #Eurostack, so hot right now
Is it just me or is it all about Europe right now? Put on some Kraftwerk and follow along I guess.
Fedora
Chooses Forgejo! This is GitHub-like project hosting software with
version control, issues, pull requests, all the usual stuff. I have a
couple of small projects on Codeberg,
which is the (EU) hosted nonprofit instance and it works fine as far as
I can tell. Also a meissa
GmbH presentation
at FOSDEM 2025 You know X, Facebook, Xing, SourceForge? What
about GitHub? It is time to de-risk OpenSource engagement!
Lots more Europe-hosted Saas, too. Baldur Bjarnason has more info on Todo notes as a storm approaches
The Sovereign Tech Agency is supporting some Linux plumbing: Arun Raghavan: PipeWire ♥ Sovereign Tech Agency.
The northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein is moving 30,000 PCs
from Microsoft Windows and Office to Linux and LibreOffice: LibreOffice
at the Univention Summit 2025 I know, I know, government in
Germany goes desktop Linux
is the hey, Rocky, watch me pull
a rabbit out of my hat
of IT, but this time they’re not up
against Microsoft in its prime, they’re up against a new generation that
can’t
open their old files, while LibreOffice can.
They
Said It Couldn’t Be Done by Pierre-Carl Langlais, Anastasia
Stasenko, and Catherine Arnett. These represent the first ever models
trained exclusively on open data, meaning data that are either
non-copyrighted or are published under a permissible license.
Trained on the Jean
Zay supercomputer. Related: Pirate
Libraries Are Forbidden Fruit for AI Companies. But at What
Cost?
Scott Locklin lists Examples
of group madness in technology. One of the worst arguments I hear
is that
thing X is inevitable because the smart people are doing
it.
As I’ve extensively documented over the last 15 years on this
blog, smart people in groups are not smart and are even more subject to
crazes and mob behavior as everyone else.
Not a European product: Framework
Laptop’s RISC-V board for open source diehards is available for $199
but there is a Europe angle here. European
Union Seeks Chip Sovereignty Using RISC-V - EE Times, RISC-V Summit Europe. RISC-V
holds significance for Europe due to its potential to foster innovation,
enhance technological sovereignty, and stimulate economic growth within
the region. By embracing RISC-V, European countries can reduce their
dependency on foreign technologies and proprietary architectures,
thereby enhancing their autonomy in critical sectors such as
telecommunications, cybersecurity, and data processing.
Also international, not Europe-specific: Postgres full-text search is Good Enough! by Rachid Belaid. (But there is a tech autonomy angle, and an active PostgreSQL Europe, so for practical purposes PostgreSQL is part of the Eurostack.)
Good advice from tante/Jürgen Geuter: Innovation
is a distraction The demand for more Innovation (and sometimes
even the request for more research) has become a way to legitimize not
doing anything. A way to say
the unpleasant solutions we have are not
perfect but in the future there might be a magic solution that doesn’t
bother us and everyone gets a fucking unicorn
.
Marloes de Koning interviews Cristina Caffarra. ‘We
have to get to work and put Europe first. But we are late. Terribly
late’
(That seems like an easy target. Not only are way
more than 30 percent of the European Alternatives up to
a servicable level by now, but unfortunately a lot of the legacy US
vendors are having either quality or compliance problems, or both. The
risks, technical and otherwise, keep going up.You really don’t have to buy everything in Europe,
says the competition expert, who is familiar with the criticism that the
American supply is simply superior. But start with 30 percent of your
procurement budget in Europe. That already makes a huge
difference.
Greg Nojeim and Silvia Lorenzo Perez cover Trump’s
Sacking of PCLOB Members Threatens Data Privacy Aside from its
importance in protecting civil liberties, the PCLOB cannot play its key
role in enforcing U.S. obligations under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy
Framework (DPF) while it lacks a quorum of members. The European
Commission would lose a key oversight tool for which it bargained, and
the adequacy decision that it issued to support the DPF could be struck
down under review at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU),
which struck down two predecessor EU-U.S. data privacy arrangements, the
Safe Harbor Agreement and the Privacy Shield.
Karl Bode writes, Apple Has To Pull Its “AI” News Synopses Because They Were Routinely Full Of Shit (If the features unavailable in Europe are problematic anyway…)
Sarah Perez covers Report:
Majority of US teens have lost trust in Big Tech. Common Sense
says that 64% of surveyed U.S. teens don’t trust Big Tech companies to
care about their mental health and well-being and 62% don’t think the
companies will protect their safety if it hurts profits. Over half of
surveyed U.S. teens (53%) also don’t think major tech companies make
ethical and responsible design decisions (think: the growing use of dark
patterns in user interface design meant to trick, confuse, and deceive.
A further 52% don’t think that Big Tech will keep their personal
information safe and 51% don’t think the companies are fair and
inclusive when considering the needs of different users.
(What if
the Eurostack becomes the IT version of those European food brands that
sell well in other countries too?)