KWin Maintainer: Fanboys and Trolls Are the Cancer Killing Free Software
An anonymous reader writes "Martin Gräßlin, maintainer of the KWin window manager, writes an informative blog post about his experiences with the less favorable pockets of the Free Software community. Quoting: 'Years ago I had a clear political opinion. I was a civil-rights activist. I appreciated freedom and anything limiting freedom was a problem to me. Freedom of speech was one of the most important rights for me. I thought that democracy has to be able to survive radical or insulting opinions. In a democracy any opinion should have a right even if it's against democracy. I had been a member of the lawsuit against data preservation in Germany. I supported the German Pirate Party during the last election campaign because of a new censorship law. That I became a KDE developer is clearly linked to the fact that it is a free software community. But over the last years my opinion changed. Nowadays I think that not every opinion needs to be tolerated. I find it completely acceptable to censor ...
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Rounds Brings Co-browsing To Mobile To Let Friends Surf The Web Together During Live Video Chats
Rounds, the video chat app and Israeli startup backed by $5.5 million in funding from Verizon Investments, Rhodium and DFJ’s Tim Draper among others, has been slowly expanding across platforms. Originally built as a Facebook-centric experience, Rounds expanded to the desktop last summer, launched Mac and Windows apps to allow its users to send and receive video calls without using their browser or signing into Facebook. A few months later, Rounds went mobile, officially debuting its first native apps for iOS and Android.
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tim draper
verizon
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How To Block the NSA From Your Friends List
Atticus Rex writes "The fact that our social networking services are so centralized is a big part of why they fall so easily to government surveillance. It only takes a handful of amoral Zuckerbergs to hand over hundreds of millions of people's data to PRISM. That's why this Slate article makes the case for a mass migration to decentralized, free software social networks, which are much more robust to spying and interference. On top of that, these systems respect your freedom as a software user (or developer), and they're less likely to pepper you with obnoxious advertisements." On a related note, identi.ca is ditching their Twitter clone platform for pump.io which promises an experience closer to the Facebook news feed. Unfortunately, adoption seems slow since Facebook, Google, et al have an interest in preventing interoperability and it can be lonely on the distributed social network.
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Yandex Takes Another Swipe At Google In Russia, Launches Yandex.Browser On iOS And Android
Yandex, referred to as the “Google of Russia” for its dominance in search and subsequent extension into cloud-based services like maps, online storage and apps, today is unveiling another service that will give it a stronger foothold in the fast-growing mobile market: it is debuting a dedicated mobile browser. But Yandex is still stopping short of launching a full-blown, Android-style platform to complete the picture. There are “no plans” to develop a mobile platform, a spokesperson tells me. “It doesn’t make sense for us. It is a totally different business. Anyway, we [now] have everything for our own mobile ecosystem on Android: search, apps like Mail and Maps, 3D UI (Yandex.Shell), app store and now the browser.” Yandex.Browser for mobile comes on the back of Yandex last year launching a dedicated desktop browser of the same name in October 2012. It will launch, the company says, “later this year.” The move comes at a time when Yandex is already a strong player in mobile. ...
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Airlines' performance improves, lags other industries: U.S. poll
(Reuters) - U.S. consumers are more satisfied with airlines in recent years but the industry still gets relatively low marks, mainly due to the onboard experience, according to a new customer poll...
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Found 18 hours ago on channel
Reuters