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This is the latest digest from the FOSS Post newsletter, which is now a bi-weekly newsletter about Linux and open source software. We may send special issues in the remaining weeks when we don’t send our newsletter.
The most important news last week in the open source world was the announcement by the PyPI project that it has been subpoenaed; The US Department of Justice sent 3 subpoenas to PyPI in order to receive information about 3 users, and the Python package index had no other legal option but to comply.
They provided information about these users such as:
Usernames on the index, what packages they uploaded or downloaded.
Their IP addresses.
Connection records and for how long they connected to the service.
Other related metadata.
The folks at PyPI are transparent about what has been handed to the US government and how, and they go into detail about the format of the data which was given.
Still, it is a first where the Department of Justice sends subpoenas for programmatic library registries and expects something in return. Perhaps these registries should keep less data from now on about their users and how they interact with their service, so that they don’t need to hand personally-identifiable information to governments just because they requested so.
If you are a software developer living under a horrible regime, then you may want to double-check your information that is stored with these registries so that you don’t get into trouble of any sort.
Latest Open Source News
We follow open source news from all over the Internet so you don’t have to.
A developer behind Asahi Linux shared a message where they tell users to stop using Xorg, and use Wayland by default instead. They say the former is buggy, unmaintained and won’t be getting updates and bug fixes from their side. However, one can note that many use cases are still not fully supported on Wayland (i.e accessibility for users with a disability).
The KDE team discusses using better defaults, including Wayland session instead of Xorg.
System76 published a new blog post about their COSMIC desktop environment, and what progress they have made so far. They are also working on making their new laptop model “the quietest laptop” in the market.
Interesting Stuff from the Web
These other news, discussions and articles might be interesting for you, all related to either Linux or open source software:
The EU AI Act is a new proposed regulation by the EU to control generative AI. Basically, it bans all of it except the ones which got a license first, including open source projects. It would be a very big issue if it passes in its current form.
“Pipewire Camera support in Firefox” is a nice blog post about how developers are trying to get camera support to work using WebRTC with Pipewire; the new audio backend for Linux.
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