From @baldur, this is the best article I have read explaining the differences between EU and US tech companies' view of competition and antitrust, and in particular why Apple has got its relationship with the EU horribly, horribly wrong.

baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facin…

As an unofficial addendum to @JonathanMosen ’s reviews of the Zoom H1 Essential, H4 Essential and H6 Essential, I received my H4 Essential and H6 Essential today. Thanks to the reviews, unpacking, supplying batteries etc., was no problem at all. The first thing I did was install the German accessibility module. This works just like Jonathan demonstrated in his H1 Essential review. However, after the installation, German speech comes on, and English is completely gone from the device. So one cannot switch back and forth between accessibility languages like one can with the UI language. And: The accessibility language is totally independent from the UI language. At first, I still had the UI language set to English and had already installed the German accessibility pack.

Attached is an audio quickly demonstrating how the German voice sounds.

Apple's response to its ~$2 billion fine is telling.

It's the same mentality Apple shows with the #DMA.

This must be the start of the #EU's crackdown on #BigTech. 💪

Here's why we're in revolt against #Apple's malicious compliance with the DMA
➡️ tuta.com/blog/apple-eu-dma-mal…

This entry was edited (1 year ago)

We first made the #curl build use #nroff for building the hugehelp file in December 1998, for curl 5.2. This makes "curl -M" work.

Now, I'm working on a change that finally removes nroff from the curl build process: github.com/curl/curl/pull/1304…

in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

In the OpenVPN project, we had the man page as a nroff/groff formatted page which was insane to edit. Some years ago, we converted it into .rst files and generate the proper man-page using rst2man. We also split all the text into several .rst files being included from a "main file", so the result is the same single man page.

This move gave us a few advantages ... some not even intended.

  • A lot more people were able to correctly edit and fix the man page content.
  • Using more advanced groff formatting is handled far more easier (like tables, "code sections", indented "blobs" for warnings/notes, etc)
  • The restructuring allowed us to even split out a whole section into its own man page very easily (like example configurations)
  • A single source of truth, the .rst files - regardless of rendering approach (plain text, man/nroff/groff, web)
  • GitHub and GitLab renders the .rst files quite nicely, which makes it easier to read when supporting users, just by giving them a URL to the right area from the code repos ... which then is always kept up-to-date.

github.com/OpenVPN/openvpn/tre…

gitlab.com/openvpn/openvpn/-/b…

#LibreOffice 24.2 is our latest big update, with many new features, including password strength indication when saving encrypted files. Find out more: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl… #foss #opensource

LibreOffice reshared this.

in reply to Éibhear 🔭

@eibhear This was discussed on our marketing channels, but the main reason is to make users more aware of how new/old their version is. Something like "LibreOffice 7.6" doesn't really say anything – but "year.month" has more relevance to end-users. We had requests for this, and some other open source projects use it too (most notably Ubuntu).

Of course, one version scheme won't satisfy everyone, but we think this is more meaningful for end-users.

Over the last months the Rust/cargo support in meson improved a lot.

It's now ready to build and install a GTK4 Rust application with around 70 dependencies without having to write almost any custom build glue for the dependencies.

github.com/sdroege/mandelbrot#…

The application in question is just a small experiment of mine for rayon and GTK4 input handling / rendering. The more or less same should work for other GTK4 applications at this point.

All this still depends on two unmerged meson PRs, but it's a huge step forward from the situation just a few months ago.

Thanks to the hard work of @xclaesse and dcbaker!

I hope in the future this will allow GNOME applications written in Rust to have a less strange and fragile build setup than what they have right now with mixing cargo and meson.

#rustlang #rust #gtk #gnome #meson #mesonbuild

reshared this

Veckans avsnitt är här: @bagder berättar allt om att gå på jättekonferensen FOSDEM, och om CVE-systemets små utmaningar och frustrationer. kodsnack.se/572/, eller överallt där poddar finns!

It’s the end of an era, Signal will now respond to subpoenas and hand over phone numbers when given usernames. I’ve seen first hand how this worked with Wire. Subpoenas come in in high numbers and you can’t fight them all.
The only advantage Signal has over Wire is that usernames are not necessarily visible to contacts. But the problem is still there.

theintercept.com/2024/03/04/si…

Unknown parent

mastodon - Link to source

Raphael Robert

@daniel Quite possibly, and Apple push tokens as well. But they never publicly talked about it.

More context here for those who are wondering what this is about: blog.phnx.im/privacy-of-push-n…

Claude 3 can summarize up to about 150,00 words, (a length similar to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.) also It outperformed GPT-4 and Gemini Ultra on industry benchmark tests, such as undergraduate level knowledge, graduate level reasoning and basic mathematics. It allows users to upload images and documents for the first time. #LLm #AI #ML cnbc.com/2024/03/04/google-bac…
#AI #ML #llm

My Mastodon image shows two playful dolphins. This article explains why. Written 3+ years ago, still true today. Can Flipper, Lassie, and the Australian Skippy the Kangaroo help us do our work even in these times? lflegal.com/2020/09/dolphin/ #a11y #negotiations

If I don't agree, I cannot use the TV that was ALREADY PURCHASED UNDER A DIFFERENT AGREEMENT!

And I just read some of it. I don't agree.
I want my money back. The TV we bought did not have this forced agreement.

That's it! I'm fucking done. My next "TV" is just going to be a monitor. I don't want anymore smarts in what's just being used as a display

NV Access is very pleased to announce the release of our updated Microsoft Word with NVDA training module. Available now from nvaccess.org/product/microsoft… Extensively rewritten, the module incorporates the latest NVDA and Office 365 features and keystrokes. At only $32 Australian (Roughly $20 USD / 19€ - converted at checkout), it's very affordable. #Training #NVDA #NVDAsr #Accessibility #ScreenReader #Learning #Word #Microsoft #Office
This entry was edited (1 year ago)

reshared this

Video: Assistive robot guide dog could soon help blind people navigate indoor spaces attoday.co.uk/video-assistive-…

We made a new game called Brailliance! Count the dots and guess the word to win. It's simple and addictive, and also fully accessible. It's also a lot of fun for sighted people. It might even teach a little bit of braille along the way, or at least further the goal of awareness.

You can play it in your web browser on our site: themisgames.com/brailliance/me…

Please give us all the feedback you can!

“Nielsen has given everyone who sees accessibility as an unnecessary cost center a way out. Listen, they will say, the experts are telling us that AI is going to solve this, so let’s deprioritize the work now so we don’t duplicate our efforts.”–Matt May

buttondown.email/practicaltips… #a11y

#a11y

Jamie Teh reshared this.

in reply to Amanda Carson

@acarson Totally agree. I've already had far too many conversations with well-meaning folks who see AI as the path to better accessibility across the board. Because apparently it's reasonable to pay many people to work on pixel-perfect design for "most users", but "you disabled folks" can just be served by that AI over there, accuracy, efficiency or delightfulness be damned.
@vick21 @zeldman @weirdwriter
in reply to victor tsaran

@vick21 You're entirely correct. I'm not saying that AI is the problem. The problem is that Jakob's article explicitly dehumanises the humans with disabilities. It effectively says: everyone else deserves a hand-crafted experience, but you disabled folks aren't worthy of that. @acarson @zeldman @weirdwriter
in reply to victor tsaran

@vick21 @weirdwriter No, actually they are very well aware of how accessibility works. They just see that “AI” can, for example, describe images. So they ask “why should we invest in training people and development time when ‘AI’ might be doing it for us good enough in a similar time frame”.

Companies want to make smart investments. Saving money because tech solves it is seen as smart, even when the outcome is suboptimal.

in reply to Eric Eggert

@yatil @weirdwriter I understand. I have heard similar arguments before, e.g. “why would a blind person care about fashion, cars, etc, and go to those websites?” The subject may have changed, but the underlying attitudes are the same. All I am saying is that these are just excuses 2.0, but in their nature not much different from what we have heard over the years. Not sure if I am expressing my point well though.

RIP Monthian. What a sad loss. We used to work on a few initiatives in Thailand some years ago. nfb.social/@President/11203760…

I think this article, while somewhat radical and presumptuous, does have some good points, at least the ones I agree with.
I do think generative AI might have a potential of creating on-demand user interfaces to “personalize” #accessibility, but I think we forget about a human element here. Someone has to build such smarts and, as long as disabled people are deprioritized, whatever the reasons may be, the outcome will likely be not much different.

jakobnielsenphd.substack.com/p…

in reply to victor tsaran

I think the outcome could be different if we can run the personalized generative UI implementation on the user's own machine, decouple it from specific applications (maybe the generative UI should connect to application APIs), and ideally make it open source. Then the deprioritized groups of disabled people can hack on our own generative UI implementations, as we've hacked on our own screen readers etc.
in reply to Ringo De Smet

The latest news is in the most recent Developer update. Sorry for the delay and one of our goals this year is to be more transparent about how we're progressing towards our goals!

blog.thunderbird.net/2024/02/t…