The Internet Archive has taken the rather unusual step of sending a DMCA notice to protect the copyrights of book publishers and authors. The non-profit organization asked GitHub to remove a tool that can strip DRM from books in its library. The protective move is likely motivated by the ongoing legal troubles between the Archive and book publishers. TorrentFreak reports: The Internet Archive sent a takedown request to GitHub, requesting the developer platform to remove a tool that circumvents industry-standard technical protection mechanisms for digital libraries. This "DeGouRou" software effectively allows patrons to save DRM-free copies of the books they borrow. "This DMCA complaint is about a tool made available on github which purports to circumvent technical protections in violation of the copyright act section 1201," the notice reads. "I am reporting a Git which provides a tool specifically used to circumvent industry standard library TPMs which are used by Internet Archive, and other libraries, to permit patrons to borrow an encrypted book, read the encrypted book, and return an encrypted book."

Interestingly, an IA representative states that they are "not authorized by the copyright owners" to submit this takedown notice. Instead, IA is acting on its duty to prevent the unauthorized downloading of copyright-protected books. It's quite unusual to see a party sending takedown notices without permission from the actual rightsholders. However, given the copyright liabilities IA faces, it makes sense that the organization is doing what it can to prevent more legal trouble. Permission or not, GitHub honored the takedown request. It removed all the DeGourou repositories that were flagged and took the code offline. [...] After GitHub removed the code, it soon popped up elsewhere.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Simply mentioning the name "Denuvo" among some gamers is pretty much guaranteed to get you an instant, strong reaction. Just look at the comment threads underneath any Ars article covering Denuvo and you'll see plenty of complaints about the DRM-enhancing anti-piracy technology. Irdeto, the company that acquired Denuvo in a 2018 purchase, doesn't generally make a habit of commenting at length on this reputation (or its secretive DRM schemes) in the public press. So when Irdeto Chief Operating Officer of Video Games Steeve Huin agreed to defend his company publicly in an exclusive interview with Ars Technica, I jumped at the chance to talk to him.

Huin stressed to Ars that he sees Denuvo as a positive force for the gaming community as a whole. "Anti-piracy technologies is to the benefit of the game publishers, [but also] is of benefit to the players in that it protects the [publisher's] investment and it means the publishers can then invest in the next game," he said. "But people typically don't think enough of that." "Whether people want to believe it or not, we are all gamers, we love gaming, we love being part of it," he continued. "We develop technologies with the intent to make the industry better and stronger."

[...] While the Denuvo name has become practically synonymous with its "anti-tamper" DRM technology, the company now hopes it can be just as well-known for its recent anti-cheating efforts. Denuvo's anti-cheat technology works on "some of the same principles" as its anti-tamper DRM, Huin said, but is aimed at maintaining code integrity at runtime rather than just when a game is loaded. "The core is the same, but the function of what they do is different," he said. Because of this difference, Huin allowed that, unlike Denuvo's anti-tamper DRM, the anti-cheat product could have "a very low impact" on a game's performance. "Less than one percent is the metric we use for validating," he said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon's No. 1 bestselling printer is the HP Deskjet 2755e. It's not hard to see why. For just $85, you get a wireless color printer, scanner, and six months of free ink. It also comes with HP Plus, one of the most dastardly schemes Big Inkjet has ever unleashed. I'm not talking about how printers quietly waste their own ink, or pretend cartridges are empty when they're not, or lock out official cartridges from other regions. Heck, I'm not even talking about "Dynamic Security," the delightful feature where new HP firmware updates secretly contain malware that blocks batches of third-party cartridges while pretending to harden your printhead against hacks. No, the genius of HP's latest scheme is that it's hiding in plain sight, daring you to unwittingly sign away your rights. Take the free ink, and HP controls your printer for life.

First introduced in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, HP Plus was built around FOMO right from the start. You get just seven days to claim your free ink, starting the moment you plug a new printer into the wall. Act now, and it'll also extend your warranty a full year, give you an "Advanced HP Smart app," and plant trees on your behalf. Because why wouldn't you want to save the forest? Here's one reason, as detailed in a new complaint by the International Imaging Technology Council (IITC) that might turn into a false advertising fight: HP Plus comes with a firmware update that utterly removes your printer's ability to accept third-party ink. You have to buy "genuine" HP ink as long as you use the printer.

A new set of patches have been released for the Intel Linux graphics driver that "can provide 10-15% better performance when operating in the tuned mode," reports Phoronix. From the report: The set of Intel i915 Linux kernel graphics driver patches are about exposing the Intel RPS (Requested Power State) up/down thresholds. Right now the Intel Linux kernel driver has static values set for the up/down thresholds between power states while these patches would make them dynamically configurable by user-space. Google engineer Syed Faaiz Hussain raised the issue that they experimented with the Intel RPS tuning and were able to manage up to 15% better performance. With Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with OpenGL was a 14.5% boost, CS:GO with Vulkan was 12.9% faster, and Civilization VI with OpenGL was 11% faster while Strange Brigade was unchanged. No other game numbers were provided.

But as this is about changing the threshold for how aggressively the Intel graphics hardware switches power states, the proposed patches leave it up to user-space to adjust the thresholds as they wish. Google engineers are interested in hooking this into Feral's GameMode so that the values could be automatically tuned when launching games and then returning to their former state when done gaming, in order to maximize battery life / power efficiency. The only downside with these current patches are that they work only for non-GuC based platforms... So the latest Alder/Raptor Lake notebooks as well as Intel DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics currently aren't able to make use of this tuning option.

Cory Doctorow just wrote a new thriller "about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the world really works," according to his publisher. Doctorow calls Red Team Blues "a book about the financial rot at the center of Silicon Valley... a kind of anti-finance finance thriller."

The publisher describes the book's hero as "a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. " He knows computer hardware and software alike, including the ins and outs of high-end databases and the kinds of spreadsheets that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He's as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he's a world-level expert on the kind of international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500 companies, mid-divorce billionaires, and international drug gangs alike.

He also knows the Valley like the back of his hand, all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs. Because he was there at all the beginnings. He's not famous, except to the people who matter. He's made some pretty powerful people happy in his time, and he's been paid pretty well. It's been a good life.

Now he's been roped into a job that's more dangerous than anything he's ever agreed to before — and it will take every ounce of his skill to get out alive.
"I write when I'm anxious, and right now these are anxious times," Doctorow explained last month in Publisher's Weekly, describing what he'd learned about selling audiobooks without going through Amazon's service Audible. This time Cory got 4,080 backers to pledge $152,735 to fund an audiobook for Red Team Blues read by Wil Wheaton that his Kickstarter campaign stressed would be DRM-free. ("Every audiobook sold on Audible be wrapped in Amazon's Digital Rights Management technology, which is a felony for you to remove, even if the copyright holder asks you to. It's punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine!")

Red Team Blues is the first book in a new trilogy, and Cory is now making in-person appearances to promote the book — starting today (and tomorrow) at the LA Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California. Tuesday he'll be in San Diego, and a week from Sunday he's appearing in San Francisco, before heading to Portland, Mountain View, Berkeley, and Gaithersburg Maryland.

The Verge reports: A federal judge has ruled against the Internet Archive in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a lawsuit brought against it by four book publishers, deciding that the website does not have the right to scan books and lend them out like a library. Judge John G. Koeltl decided that the Internet Archive had done nothing more than create "derivative works," and so would have needed authorization from the books' copyright holders — the publishers — before lending them out through its National Emergency Library program. The Internet Archive says it will appeal.
The decision was "a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve," argued Chris Freeland, the director of Open Libraries at the Internet Archive. In a blog post he argued the decision "impacts libraries across the U.S. who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.
The Verge adds that the judge rejected "fair use" arguments which had previously protected a 2014 digital book preservation project by Google Books and HathiTrust: Koetl wrote that any "alleged benefits" from the Internet Archive's library "cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers," declaring that "there is nothing transformative about [Internet Archive's] copying and unauthorized lending," and that copying these books doesn't provide "criticism, commentary, or information about them." He notes that the Google Books use was found "transformative" because it created a searchable database instead of simply publishing copies of books on the internet.

Koetl also dismissed arguments that the Internet Archive might theoretically have helped publishers sell more copies of their books, saying there was no direct evidence, and that it was "irrelevant" that the Internet Archive had purchased its own copies of the books before making copies for its online audience. According to data obtained during the trial, the Internet Archive currently hosts around 70,000 e-book "borrows" a day.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader esme for sharing the news.

On March 27th, Nintendo's eShop for its 3DS and Wii U consoles will be shut down. With many of the titles being original to those consoles and not available anywhere else, it's left archivists and historians scrambling to preserve them before it's too late. However, those preservation plans get complicated given Nintendo's litigious nature on matters of intellectual property. Techdirt's Timothy Geigner writes: Preventing the gaming public from continuing to buy games that rely on a company-operated backend infrastructure is one thing. After all, Nintendo can do what it wants when it comes to putting its products into commerce. But what really annoyed a ton of people, myself included, was how this would impact archivists and historians, or anyone else interested in preserving video game history and culture. With the impending shutdown, some of those entities are once again expressing concern: "While it's unfortunate that people won't be able to purchase digital 3DS or Wii U games anymore, we understand the business reality that went into this decision,' the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) tweeted when the eShop shutdowns were announced a year ago. 'What we don't understand is what path Nintendo expects its fans to take, should they wish to play these games in the future.'"

Because Nintendo is litigious, utilizes DRM, and the DMCA exists, all of that combines to make it wildly unsafe for museums and archivists to actually retain copies of these games that will shortly no longer be found anywhere else. And, no, the exemptions built into the DMCA for content such as movies and literature simply don't exist for the video game space. [...] So what can be done? Not a whole lot, honestly, but some hobbyists are at least going to make a go of it: "In an effort to address this -- or at least address it in a single place on as few consoles as possible -- YouTuber The Completionist decided to sit down and spend almost a year of his life (328 days in total) buying his way through both libraries. He's now done, and the statistics are staggering. The dude bought 866 Wii U games and 1547 3DS titles, numbers that include DSiWare, Virtual Console releases and downloadable content. That adds up to 1.2TB of data for the Wii U, and 267GB for the 3DS. Or, for the 3DS purists reading, 2,136,689 blocks."

As part of this effort, The Completionist has said he plans to donate all of this digital media to the VGHF. What they can do with all of that content still remains to be seen. All of the same copyright and DMCA rules still apply, so what access it can grant to researchers, never mind the public, is in question.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix: A pull request of early AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes was submitted for DRM-Next on Friday as some of the early feature work accumulating for the Linux 6.4 kernel cycle.

Among the AMDGPU kernel driver changes this round are a number of fixes affecting items such as the UMC RAS, DCN 3.2, FreeSync, SR-IOV, various IP blocks, USB4, and more. On the feature side, mentioned subtly in the change-log are a few power-related additions... These additions are largely focused on Van Gogh APUs, which is notably for the Valve Steam Deck and benefiting its graphics moving forward.

First up, this kernel pull request introduces a new sysfs interface for adjusting/setting thermal throttling. This is wired up for Van Gogh and allows reading/updating the thermal limit temperature in millidegrees Celsius. This "APU thermal cap" interface is just wired up for Van Gogh and seems to be Steam Deck driven feature work so that SteamOS will be better able to manage the thermal handling of the APU graphics....

These power features will be exposed via sysfs while Steam OS will wrap around them intelligently and possibly some new UI settings knobs for those wanting more control over their Steam Deck's thermal/performance.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: HP customers are showing frustration online as the vendor continues to use firmware updates to discourage or, as users report, outright block the use of non-HP-brand ink cartridges in HP printers. HP has already faced class-action lawsuits and bad publicity from "dynamic security," but that hasn't stopped the company from expanding the practice. Dynamic security is a feature used by HP printers to authenticate ink cartridges and prevent use of cartridges that aren't HP-approved. As the company explains: "Dynamic security relies on the printer's ability to communicate with the security chips or electronic circuitry on the cartridges. HP uses dynamic security measures to protect the quality of our customer experience, maintain the integrity of our printing systems, and protect our intellectual property. Dynamic security equipped printers are intended to work only with cartridges that have new or reused HP chips or electronic circuitry. The printers use the dynamic security measures to block cartridges using non-HP chips or modified or non-HP electronic circuitry. Reused, remanufactured, and refilled cartridges that reuse the HP chip or electronic circuitry are unaffected by dynamic security."

HP is set on continuing to use DRM to discourage its printer customers from spending ink and toner money outside of the HP family. "HP have updated their printers to outright ban 'non-HP' ink! They no longer shows the 'can't guarantee quality' message, but instead cancels your print completely until you inset a HP ink cartridge," Reddit user grhhull posted Tuesday. "After contacting HP, they advised 'this is due to the recent 'update' of all printers.'" It's unclear when HP issued updates for which model printers, but there are alleged customer complaints online stemming from late last year, showing plenty of customers surprised their printer no longer worked with non-HP ink cartridges after an update. Some pointed to third-party brands they had relied on for years.

HP community support threads include complaints about the OfficeJet 7740 and OfficeJet Pro 6970. HP lists both printers, as well as others, as able to circumnavigate dynamic security under specific conditions. However, HP's support page states this only applies to models manufactured before December 1, 2016. For more examples, there are comments on HP's support community suggesting that HP's OfficeJet 6978 and 6968 were recently affected. Both printers are discontinued, but HP's product pages make it clear that the fickle nature of dynamic security means that third-party ink could stop working at any time. And HP's dynamic security page also leaves the door open for the sudden bricking of functioning ink: "Firmware updates delivered periodically over the internet will maintain the effectiveness of the dynamic security measures," the page reads. "Updates can improve, enhance, or extend the printer's functionality and features, protect against security threats, and serve other purposes, but these updates can also block cartridges using a non-HP chip or modified or non-HP circuitry from working in the printer, including cartridges that work today."

Microsoft has unveiled Video Super Resolution (VSR) -- an "experimental" video upscaling feature for its Edge web browser that uses machine learning to increase the resolution of low-quality video. From a report: Announced on the Edge Insiders blog, Microsoft's VSR technology can "remove blocky compression artifacts" and improve text clarity for videos on platforms such as YouTube. The feature is still in testing and availability is currently restricted to half of the users running the Canary channel of Edge in Microsoft's Insider program. If you want to try it for yourself, there are a few stipulations: Microsoft VSR will only work on video resolutions of 720p or lower (provided both the height and width of the video exceeds 192 pixels), and the video itself can't be protected with digital rights management (DRM) technology like PlayReady or Widevine, which makes frames inaccessible to the browser for processing. That particular restriction could impact what content you can upscale with the feature, as most popular streaming platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max all leverage DRM tech for copyright protection. Unlike Nvidia's RTX Super Resolution, Microsoft's Video Super Resolution feature supports both Nvidia and AMD GPUs.

segaboy81 writes: Jailbreak hacker @ronsoros found stolen, open-source code in voice.ai, a real-time voice synthesizer, but instead of complying with the open-source license, they are taking measures to shut him down. "After an extensive investigation into an installation of Voice.ai, it was found that the company had integrated code from Praat, a widely-used open-source speech analysis software, and libgcrypt, a cryptographic library, in its proprietary software without releasing the source code of its software or providing proper attribution," reports Neowin.

"In his blog, undeleted, @ronsoros details the steps that were taken to uncover the violations. [...] @ronsoros reached out to the company to let them know they were in violation of two opensource licenses and was promptly booted from the community's Discord server."

To celebrate this year's "Public Domain Day," the Internet Archive "asked people to submit short films highlighting anything that was going to be made available in the Public Domain in 2023." For the contest, vintage images and sounds were woven into creative films of 2-3 minutes. Many of the films were abstract while others educational, they all showcased the possibility when public domain materials are made openly available and accessible for download. "The Internet Archive has spent 24 years collecting and archiving content from around the world...now is the time to see what people can do with it," said Amir Saber Esfahani, director of special arts projects at the Internet Archive.
The counsel from Creative Commons helped judged all 47 entries, with winners finally chosen "based on creativity, technique, engagement, and variety of 1927 content."

The winning entries include "The Public Domain Race," a montage of newly-uncopyrighted 1927 film clips and cartoons. And the honorable mentions include short films showing, among other things, 2023 filmmaker Sam Dody serenading a lovestruck silent film star from 1927 — and the story of why Mae West once spent eight days in jail.

But the big first-place prize of $1,500 went to Gnats Gonzales for reciting a poem that was emblazoned over the artwork and title pages of 1927 works that have finally entered the public domain. "... Let not kings nor selective texts decide what is known among you. Ignore the temptation of hippocampal decay. Plunge into the dark depths. And feel the warmth of mortal creation at its purest."

That last quote appears over a 1927 movie poster showing a woman smashing pies into the face of Oliver Hardy.

Car & Driver reports on what they found in the menus of a 2023 BMW X1: BMW TeleService and Remote Software Upgrade showed a message that read Activated, while BMW Drive Recorder had options to subscribe for one month, one year, three years, or "Unlimited...." We reached out to BMW to ask about the menus we found and to learn more about its plan for future subscriptions. The company replied that it doesn't post a comprehensive list of prices online because of variability in what each car can receive. "Upgrade availability depends on factors such as model year, equipment level, and software version, so this keeps things more digestible for consumers," explained one BMW representative.

Our X1 for example, has an optional $25-per-year charge for traffic camera alerts, but that option isn't available to cars without BMW Live Cockpit. Instead of listing all the available options online, owners can see which subscriptions are available for their car either in the menus of the vehicle itself or from a companion app.

BMW USA may not want to confuse its customers by listing all its options in one place, but BMW Australia has no such reservations. In the land down under, heated front seats and a heated steering wheel are available in a month-to-month format, as is BMW's parking assistant technology. In contrast, BMW USA released a statement in July saying that if a U.S.-market vehicle is ordered with heated seats from the factory, that option will remain functional throughout the life of the vehicle.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for submitting the story.

Slashdot has covered the legal hijinx of Malibu Media over the years. Now Ars Technica reports that the studio could be destroyed by unpaid taxes: Over the past decade, Malibu Media has emerged as a prominent so-called "copyright troll," suing thousands of "John Does" for allegedly torrenting adult content hosted on the porn studio's website, "X-Art." Whether defendants were guilty or not didn't seem to matter to Malibu, critics claimed, as much as winning as many settlements as possible. As courts became more familiar with Malibu, however, some judges grew suspicious of the studio's litigiousness. As early as 2012, a California judge described these lawsuits as "essentially an extortion scheme," and by 2013, a Wisconsin judge ordered sanctions, agreeing with critics who said that Malibu's tactics were designed to "harass and intimidate" defendants into paying Malibu thousands in settlements.

By 2016, Malibu started losing footing in this arena — and even began fighting with its own lawyer. At that point, file-sharing lawsuits became less commonplace, with critics noting a significant reduction in Malibu's lawsuits over the next few years. Now, TorrentFreak reports that Malibu's litigation machine appears to finally be running out of steam — with its corporate status suspended in California sometime between mid-2020 and early 2021 after failing to pay taxes. Last month, a Texas court said that Malibu has until January 20 to pay what's owed in back taxes and get its corporate status reinstated. If that doesn't happen over the next few weeks, one of Malibu's last lawsuits on the books will be dismissed, potentially marking the end of Malibu's long run of alleged copyright trolling.

For the last thirteen years the Free Software Foundation has published its Ethical Tech Giving Guide. But what's interesting is this year's guide also tags companies and products with negative recommendations to "stay away from." Stay away from: iPhones
It's not just Siri that's creepy: all Apple devices contain software that's hostile to users. Although they claim to be concerned about user privacy, they don't hesitate to put their users under surveillance.

Apple prevents you from installing third-party free software on your own phone, and they use this control to censor apps that compete with or subvert Apple's profits.

Apple has a history of exploiting their absolute control over their users to silence political activists and help governments spy on millions of users.


Stay away from: M1 MacBook and MacBook Pro
macOS is proprietary software that restricts its users' freedoms.

In November 2020, macOS was caught alerting Apple each time a user opens an app. Even though Apple is making changes to the service, it just goes to show how bad they try to be until there is an outcry.

Comes crawling with spyware that rats you out to advertisers.


Stay away from: Amazon
Amazon is one of the most notorious DRM offenders. They use this Orwellian control over their devices and services to spy on users and keep them trapped in their walled garden.

Be aware that Amazon isn't the peddler of ebook DRM. Disturbingly, it's enthusiastically supported by most of the big publishing houses.

Read more about the dangers of DRM through our Defective by Design campaign.


Stay away from: Spotify, Apple Music, and all other major streaming services
In addition to streaming music encumbered by DRM, people who want to use Spotify are required to install additional proprietary software. Even Spotify's client for GNU/Linux relies on proprietary software.

Apple Music is no better, and places heavy restrictions on the music streamed through the platform.


Stay away from: Netflix
Netflix is continuing its disturbing trend of making onerous DRM the norm for streaming media. That's why they were a target for last year's International Day Against DRM (IDAD).

They're also leveraging their place in the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to advocate for tighter restrictions on users, and drove the effort to embed DRM into the fabric of the Web.

"In your gift giving this year, put freedom first," their guide begins.

And for a freedom-respecting last-minute gift idea, they suggest giving the gift of a FSF membership (which comes with a code and a printable page "so that you can present your gift as a physical object, if you like.") The membership is valid for one year, and includes the many benefits that come with an FSF associate membership, including a USB member card, email forwarding, access to our Jitsi Meet videoconferencing server and member forum, discounts in the FSF shop and on ThinkPenguin hardware, and more.

If you are in the United States, your gift would also be fully tax-deductible in the USA.

AI tools like DALL-E 2, Lensa AI, and Midjourney "can be told to create imagery in the style of a particular artist," notes this article in the Daily Dot.

Yet "The current legal consensus, much to the chagrin of many artists, concludes that AI-generated art is in the public domain and therefore not copyrighted." So... In response to concerns over the future of their craft, artists have begun using AI systems to generate images of characters including Disney's Mickey Mouse. Given Disney's history of fierce protection over its content, the artists are hoping the company takes action and thus proves that AI art isn't as original as it claims. Over the weekend, Eric Bourdages, the Lead Character Artist on the popular video game Dead by Daylight, urged his followers to create and sell merchandise using the Disney-inspired images he created using Midjourney.... "Legally there should be no recourse from Disney as according to the AI models TOS these images transcends copyright and the images are public domain."

Bourdages tweet quickly racked up more than 37,000 likes and close to 6,000 shares.

In numerous follow-up tweets, Bourdages generated images of other popular characters from movies, video games, and comic books, including Darth Vader, Spider-Man, Batman, Mario, and Pikachu.

"More shirts courtesy of AI," he added. "I'm sure, Nintendo, Marvel, and DC won't mind, the AI didn't steal anything to create these images, they are completely 100% original...."

Just two days after sharing the images, however, Bourdages stated on Twitter that he had suddenly lost his access to Midjourney.
The article notes that Bourdages reiterated his point in a later tweet. "People's craftsmanship, time, effort, and ideas are being taken without their consent and used to create a product that can blend it all together and mimic it to varying degrees."

For the last thirteen years the Free Software Foundation has published its Ethical Tech Giving Guide, notes a recent FSF blog post. "The right to determine what a device you've purchased does or doesn't do is something too valuable to lose."

Or, as they put it in the guide: It's time to reclaim our freedom from the abuse of multinational corporations, who use proprietary software and malicious "antifeatures" to keep us powerless, dependent, and surveilled by the devices that we use. There's no time at which it's more important to turn these unfortunate facts into positive action than the holiday season.

The gifts that we recommend here might not be making headlines, but they're the rare exception to the apparent rule that devices should mistreat their users.
For technical users, the guide recommends pairing the FSF-sponsored Replicant, a fully-free distribution of Android, with the F-Droid app repository, which has hundreds of applications including Syncthing, Tor, Minetest, and Termux.

They also praise the X200 laptop, "one of the few home user devices that's able to run fully free software from top to bottom." With easy-to-repair hardware, it's the laptop most frequently used in the FSF's own office — just one of several freedom-respecting devices from Vikings. And there's shout-outs to MNT's Reform laptop, products from PINE64 and Purism, plus a freedom-respecting VPN, and a mini wifi adapter .

The guide even recommends places to buy DRM-free ebooks, including No Starch Press, Smashwords, Leanpub, Standard Ebooks, Nantucket E-Books, Libreture (which also offers a storage solution). Meanwhile for print books, there's the Gnu Press Shop

And it also recommends sources for DRM-free music (including Bandcamp, Emusic, the Smithsonian Institute's Folkways, the classic punk label Dischord, HDTracks, and Mutopia).

And it also tells you where to find free (as in freedom) films...

"An ugly hack within the Linux kernel that has been in mainline for over three years has been called out," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel. "Due to a buggy X.Org Server / xf86-video-modesetting DDX, the Linux kernel has been imposing different behavior on whether a process starts with 'X' and in turn disable the atomic mode-setting support." Linux security researcher and WireGuard creator, Jason Donenfeld, discovered the 'ugly code' within the kernel and commented on it via the kernel mailing list.

"The commit to this kernel with the 'X' first character check was made back in September 2019," notes Larabel. "The 'good' news is that since then on user-space side back in 2019 the xf86-video-modesetting code went ahead and disabled atomic support by default. So technically if running an updated X.Org stack within the past three years, this kernel hack isn't necessary anymore since user-space is just then avoiding the atomic API."

"Our new robot overlords are making a whole lot of progress in the space of AI music generation," quips TechCrunch, discussing a new project called "Harmonai" backed by Stability AI (creators of the open source AI image generator Stable Diffusion): In late September, Harmonai released Dance Diffusion, an algorithm and set of tools that can generate clips of music by training on hundreds of hours of existing songs.... Dance Diffusion remains in the testing stages — at present, the system can only generate clips a few seconds long. But the early results provide a tantalizing glimpse at what could be the future of music creation, while at the same time raising questions about the potential impact on artists....

Google's AudioLM, detailed for the first time earlier this week, shows... an uncanny ability to generate piano music given a short snippet of playing. But it hasn't been open sourced. Dance Diffusion aims to overcome the limitations of previous open source tools by borrowing technology from image generators such as Stable Diffusion. The system is what's known as a diffusion model, which generates new data (e.g., songs) by learning how to destroy and recover many existing samples of data. As it's fed the existing samples — say, the entire Smashing Pumpkins discography — the model gets better at recovering all the data it had previously destroyed to create new works....

It's not the most intuitive idea. But as DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion and other such systems have shown, the results can be remarkably realistic.
Its lyrics are gibberish, TechCrunch concedes — though their article also features several audio clips (including a style transfer of Smash Mouth's vocals onto the Tetris theme).

And the article also notes a new tool letting artists opt of of being used in AI training sets, before raising the obvious concern...

The project's lead stresses that "All of the models that are officially being released as part of Dance Diffusion are trained on public domain data, Creative Commons-licensed data and data contributed by artists in the community." But even with that, TechCrunch notes that "Assuming Dance Diffusion one day reaches the point where it can generate coherent whole songs, it seems inevitable that major ethical and legal issues will come to the fore."

For example, beyond the question of whether "training" is itself a copyright violation, there's the possibility that the algorithm might accidentally duplicate a copyrighted melody...

Developer Asahi Lina with the Asahi Linux project was successfully able to get GNOME running on the Apple M1, including "Firefox with YouTube video playback, the game Neverball, various KDE applications, and more," reports Phoronix. From the report: This is some great progress especially with the driver being written in Rust -- the first within the Direct Rendering Manager subsystem -- and lots of work there with the Rust infrastructure in early form. It won't be until at least Linux 6.2 before this driver could be mainlined while we'll see how quickly it tries to go mainline before it can commit to a stable user-space interface. At the moment there is also a significant driver "hack" involved but will hopefully be sorted out soon. Over in user-space, the AGX Gallium3D driver continues being worked on for OpenGL support with hopes of having OpenGL 2.1 completed by year's end. Obviously it will be longer before seeing the Apple graphics suitable for modern gaming with Vulkan, etc but progress is being made across the board in reverse-engineered, open-source Apple Silicon support under Linux. You can watch a video of the driver working here.