In this article I bring you an interesting news, released by theItalian Linux Society, which will certainly be of interest to most Italian GNU / Linux users. The story stars Luca Bonissi, a passionate supporter of free software, champion of the right to reimbursement of the Windows license, who managed to obtain compensation of twenty thousand euros from Lenovo.

The EU’s cloud infrastructure initiative, Gaia-X, poses a great risk of destroying the European ecosystem and hopes of sovereignty after the inclusion of some of the world’s largest tech firms in the project

Munich’s flip-flop back to open source is the latest sign of Germany’s political sea change over proprietary software.

We are seeing how the monopolistic repair and lobbying practices of medical device companies are making our response to the coronavirus pandemic harder.

The Swiss Canton of Zürich will make software developed for or by its public services available as open source. On 30 September the Canton parliament accepted a proposal to change the way it develops software to increase the role of open source. The government now has two years to work out how to adapt its rules and regulations.

Politicians should value highly the technological independence provided by using free and open source software, recommends Lieutenant colonel Stéphane Dumond, head of IT at the Gendarmerie in France. Using such software puts public services in control of their technology decisions and reduces strictly pecuniary constraints, he says.

Earlier this year, Techdirt wrote about an intriguing tweet from the account of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister of Poland, which announced: “Tomorrow #Poland brings action against copyright directive to CJEU”. The hashtags for the tweet made clear what Poland was worried about: “#Article13 #Article17”.

Two years ago, researchers Billy Rios and Jonathan Butts discovered disturbing vulnerabilities in Medtronic’s popular MiniMed and MiniMed Paradigm insulin pump lines. An attacker could remotely target these pumps to withhold insulin from patients, or to trigger a potentially lethal overdose. And yet months of negotiations with Medtronic and regulators to implement a fix proved fruitless. So the researchers resorted to drastic measures. They built an Android app that could use the flaws to kill people.

Thanks to “data inference” technology, companies know more about you than you disclose.

France, with its strict regulations of digital markets and its industries, has been allowed to drive the oppressive changes in copyright that are now about to be European law. It is not too late to save European citizens from these reforms that will do serious damage to the internet, writes Amelia Andersdotter.

One of the many concerns about the upload filters of the EU’s Copyright Directive is that they could lead to censorship, even if that is not the intention. The problem is that once a filtering mechanism is in place to block unauthorized copies of materials, it is very hard to stop its scope being widened beyond copyright infringement. As it happens, the German government has just provided a good example of the kind of abuse that is likely to become a commonplace.

Microsoft has a DRM-locked ebook store that isn’t making enough money, so they’re shutting it down and taking away every book that every one of its customers acquired effective July 1. Customers will receive refunds. This puts the difference between DRM-locked media and unencumbered media into sharp contrast. I have bought a lot of MP3s…