In July, the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium overruled dozens of members' objections to publishing a DRM standard without a compromise to protect accessibility, security research, archiving, and competition.

EFF appealed the decision, the first-ever appeal in W3C history, which concluded last week with a deeply divided membership. 58.4% of the group voted to go on with publication, and the W3C did so today, an unprecedented move in a body that has always operated on consensus and compromise. In their public statements about the standard, the W3C executive repeatedly said that they didn't think the DRM advocates would be willing to compromise, and in the absence of such willingness, the exec have given them everything they demanded.

[...]

EFF no longer believes that the W3C process is suited to defending the open web. We have resigned from the Consortium, effective today. Below is our resignation letter

-https://boingboing.net/2017/09/18/antifeatures-for-all.html

Read more here: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/18/antifeatures-for-all.html

Hello all artists and designers!

Each year, DonationCoder runs a programming challenge called New Apps for the New Year, or NANY. It's a celebration of programming and encourages coders to provide some new app, tool, utility, game, etc., to the world, free of charge. Anyone who submits an app to NANY is rewarded with a commemorative mug or t-shirt which has a fun design on it. There has always been a standard design, which looks like this:


(Click to enlarge)

But there has often been an alternate design to set that NANY's event apart from the others. In addition to seeing all the new apps being released each year, one of my favorite things about NANY is seeing the fun new alternate design each year. As someone who has participated in a few of the past NANY events, I have to admit that having an alternate design I liked has often been a motivator for me to submit something. Sadly, the past couple of years there haven't been alternate designs. So after seeing mouser express his desire for an alternate design this year, I approached him with the idea of holding some kind of competition to solicit submissions. He agreed, and this is the result.

This design competition aims to make sure we have an alternate design to be offered alongside the traditional design. Some of the details are still being hashed out, but here's what we have so far:

• We want to find one alternate design for the NANY 2018 mug and t-shirt.
• The design must include:
  
  • The words "DonationCoder.com" (without quotes)
  • The words "NANY 2018" (without quotes)
  • Our mascot, Cody (the bird)
• Artists can submit as many entries as they would like by the deadline (tentatively set for December 1, 2017). These entries can be rough drafts/sketches.
• We will hold a forum poll, wherein previous NANY coders get to choose the winning design.
• The winner of the design competition will receive $75, and gives us permission to use the design. (We may require the design to be licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 or similar. Exact license TBD.)
• If the winning design was just a sketch, the winner must submit a finished design before the end of NANY 2018 (potentially to be used in apps, the website, and of course for the mugs/t-shirts), which is January 1, 2018.
• We may award $25 as runner-up prizes for other images if they can be used for other website purposes.
• The father of Cody, nudone, will receive $75 since we have used his images (and the likeness of Cody) for all these years without paying him anything.

The design for the mug must be 1662x600 or larger. We can use the same image for the t-shirt, or a larger, square image. Artists should feel free to make a larger image with the t-shirt in mind which can then have less important parts cropped out to fit the dimensions for the mug.

Some previous designs and other art to give artists ideas:

• Previous alternate NANY designs.
• DonationCoder & Cody themed art compilation thread

If you have any questions, comments, submissions, or other feedback, this is the place for it. Please let me know if I left anything out or if I can assist in any way.

This was originally a response to the Crashplan thread.

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Has anyone here heard of some of the new(ish) decentralized/distributed cloud storage services, such as Storj or Sia?

They're cheaper than, e.g., Amazon S3, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, etc., and have additional features such as privacy, since your data is broken up into little chunks, encrypted, and distributed across the drives of many different "storage farmers" who rent out their disk space.

Sia seems to be a lot cheaper, but also seems a bit more convoluted to set up. Storj is more expensive (than Sia, but still cheaper than Amazon S3, etc.) but appears to be fairly simple to set up. They've even partnered with FileZilla so now Storj services are built in to the latest version of FileZilla. Storj also offers 25GB free for 12 months. They might be worth looking into if you need cheap cloud storage.




Full disclosure: I recently learned about these services and decided to allocate some of my HDD space for a Storj farm to get an idea of how it works. So I get paid a few dollars worth of the Storj cryptocurrency each month for renting out some space on my HDD. As far as I know, there's no way to choose which farmer your data gets sent to, so there's no way for me to directly benefit from referring anyone. That said, there's a chance that if you do use Storj, some of your data could end up on my HDD and I will be compensated for renting out my space to you.

I also tried to rent out some space using Sia, but as I said, it is more convoluted. It requires you (as a "farmer") to put up some collateral and I wasn't sure enough that I had things configured correctly to want to risk losing my collateral.