eCulture

Alternative email provider. Proposes a free tier, and paying additional tiers. Free tier doesn't compromise on security. Supports IMAP and custom domains (for paying tiers). Easy tool to import AND export your emails, to migrate to a new provider. Also developping calendar, contacts, drive, and VPN. They have been Open Source (even Free, license MIT) since day 1.

Audited independently, passed in July 2021 https://protonmail.com/blog/security-audit/

Frame.work created a high quality modular laptop. change ports on the go, change your screen or other parts easily with provided guides. score of 10/10 in ifixit. If you have spare parts, you can order your laptop without it and add it yourself (e.g. disk or network card). All hardware linux compatible.

System76 funds development of FLOSS by providing custom hardware supporting GNU/Linux out of the box. They developed from scratch a Free BIOS alternative (coreboot). By selling laptops easy to repair they raise money to develop their ubuntu-derivative (Pop!_OS) optimized for their machines

August (2020), Democrats introduced a bill in Congress to block manufacturers' limits on medical devices, spurred by the pandemic. In Europe, the European Commission announced plans in March for new right-to-repair rules that would cover phones, tablets, and laptops by 2021.

Now for the first time ever, we have a global plan of action - the Contract for the Web - created by experts and citizens from across the world to make sure our online world is safe, empowering and genuinely for everyone. We invite governments, companies, civil society organizations and individuals to back the Contract and uphold its principles and clauses. The Contract for the Web will become a strong mechanism for each party to be held accountable for doing their part to build an open and free web.

Immediate action is required to halt the COVID-19 Pandemic and treat those it has affected. It is a practical and moral imperative that every tool we have at our disposal be applied to develop and deploy technologies on a massive scale without impediment. We therefore pledge to make our intellectual property available free of charge for use in ending the COVID-19 pandemic and minimizing the impact of the disease. We will implement this pledge through a license that details the terms and conditions under which our intellectual property is made available.

The only way out of our Big Tech problem is up and through. If our future is not reliant upon high tech, it will be because civilization has fallen. Big Tech wired together a planetary, species-wide nervous system that, with the proper reforms and course corrections, is capable of seeing us through the existential challenge of our species and planet. Now it's up to us to seize the means of computation, putting that electronic nervous system under democratic, accountable control.

With this, we now know the exact mRNA contents of the BNT162b2 vaccine, and for most parts we understand why they are there: The CAP to make sure the RNA looks like regular mRNA A known successful and optimized 5' untranslated region (UTR) A codon optimized signal peptide to send the Spike protein to the right place (copied 100% from the original virus) A codon optimized version of the original spike, with two 'Proline' substitutions to make sure the protein appears in the right form A known successful and optimized 3' untranslated region A slightly mysterious poly-A tail with an unexplained 'linker' in there The codon optimization adds a lot of G and C to the mRNA. Meanwhile, using Ψ (1-methyl-3'-pseudouridylyl) instead of U helps evade our immune system, so the mRNA stays around long enough so we can actually help train the immune system.

"Un monde virtuel, une pollution bien réelle 21 août 2020 Le numérique pollue bien plus qu'on l'imagine. Solange Ghernaouti, spécialiste en cybersécurité à l'UNIL, dévoile la face cachée de cette industrie «peu vertueuse». On n'y pense jamais quand on pianote sur son téléphone mobile. Ça ne se voit pas quand on joue avec sa console ou qu'on branche son téléviseur sur Netflix. C'est également invisible quand on fait une recherche sur Google ou qu'on trouve une nouvelle opportunité professionnelle sur LinkedIn. C'est toujours impossible à déceler quand on stocke ses photos de vacances dans le Cloud et qu'on regarde une vidéo sur YouTube. Enfin, ça ne fait aucun bruit suspect quand on écoute une playlist en streaming sur Spotify. Et pourtant, l'industrie numérique pollue."

"AI Explainability 360 This extensible open source toolkit can help you comprehend how machine learning models predict labels by various means throughout the AI application lifecycle. We invite you to use it and improve i"

"We are a five-person team concerned about the ways our communities' digital information is collected, stored, and shared by government and corporations. Based in marginalized neighborhoods in Charlotte, North Carolina, Detroit, Michigan, and Los Angeles, California, we look at digital data collection and our human rights, work with local communities, community orginizations, and social support networks, and show how different data systems impact re-entry, fair housing, public assistance, and community development."

"In the last decade Open Science principles, such as Open Access, study preregistration, use of preprints, making available data and code, and open peer review, have been successfully advocated for and are being slowly adopted in many different research communities. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic many publishers and researchers have sped up their adoption of some of these Open Science practices, sometimes embracing them fully and sometimes partially or in a sub-optimal manner. In this article, we express concerns about the violation of some of the Open Science principles and its potential impact on the quality of research output. We provide evidence of the misuses of these principles at different stages of the scientific process. We call for a wider adoption of Open Science practices in the hope that this work will encourage a broader endorsement of Open Science principles and serve as a reminder that science should always be a rigorous process, reliable and transparent, especially in the context of a pandemic where research findings are being translated into practice even more rapidly"

"Trackers are hiding in nearly every corner of today's Internet, which is to say nearly every corner of modern life. The average web page shares data with dozens of third-parties. The average mobile app does the same, and many apps collect highly sensitive information like location and call records even when they're not in use. Tracking also reaches into the physical world. Shopping centers use automatic license-plate readers to track traffic through their parking lots, then share that data with law enforcement. Businesses, concert organizers, and political campaigns use Bluetooth and WiFi beacons to perform passive monitoring of people in their area. Retail stores use face recognition to identify customers, screen for theft, and deliver targeted ads."

"Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already having a major impact on society. As a result, many organizations have launched a wide range of initiatives to establish ethical principles for the adoption of socially beneficial AI. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of proposed principles threatens to overwhelm and confuse. How might this problem of 'principle proliferation' be solved? In this paper, we report the results of a fine-grained analysis of several of the highest-profile sets of ethical principles for AI. We assess whether these principles converge upon a set of agreed-upon principles, or diverge, with significant disagreement over what constitutes 'ethical AI.' Our analysis finds a high degree of overlap among the sets of principles we analyze. We then identify an overarching framework consisting of five core principles for ethical AI. Four of them are core principles commonly used in bioethics: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice. On the basis of our comparative analysis, we argue that a new principle is needed in addition: explicability, understood as incorporating both the epistemological sense of intelligibility (as an answer to the question 'how does it work?') and in the ethical sense of accountability (as an answer to the question: 'who is responsible for the way it works?'). In the ensuing discussion, we note the limitations and assess the implications of this ethical framework for future efforts to create laws, rules, technical standards, and best practices for ethical AI in a wide range of contexts."

Comment battre les algorithmes de tris de candidatures ?

Dans le monde du recrutement, comme partout ailleurs, la digitalisation gagne du terrain chaque année sur un métier pourtant lié en grande majorité à des compétences émotionnelles humaines plutôt qu'à du pragmatisme robotisé. De nombreuses entreprises en ont d'ailleurs fait leur fonds de commerce, en promouvant des solutions capables, dans le cadre d'un recrutement, de trouver la perle rare ou de faciliter ou d'améliorer le premier filtre des CV.

"Medical R&D should respond to specific priority health needs. Opening up the R&D process to a wide range of contributors and stakeholders will allow the design of medicines that are better adapted to the needs of the end users, and will define the preferred product characteristics (PPCs) and target product profile (TPP) that will guide all the phases of product development. In OS, there are no insiders, meaning that strategic decisions may be made through informed community debate against the agreed-upon TPP. The broader community is thus involved in designing how a product will be developed, defining the studies that will be done, and establishing the criteria that will be applied for making stop/go decisions. In order to achieve this, investments are needed to build online communities and platforms that help groups collaborate effectively."

"The FSFE welcomes the "Public Money? Public Code!" policy by the new Munich government. After the last government of SPD and CSU had distanced itself from the prior progressive Free Software strategy this is now a positive signal again. Public administrations following the principle of "Public Money? Public Code!" can benefit from collaboration with other public bodies, independence from single vendors, potential tax savings, increased innovation, and a better basis for IT security.", says Matthias Kirschner, President of the Free Software Foundation Europe."

"This questionnaire enables your company to determine the current situation and shows you whether you are implementing the most important technical, organisational and employee-related measures for a minimum level of cybersecurity protection. Rather than focusing on a comprehensive and complete analysis, this is a way for SMEs - especially those with little in-depth understanding of computing and IT security - to quickly and easily find out whether their technical, organisational and staff-related measures provide sufficient protection against cyber-risks. Learn in the Cybersecurity guide how you can better protect your business against threats from cyberspace and use the free tools of the GCA Cybersecurity Toolkit to make your business more secure today."