Four short links: 21 June 2018
Chinese Internet, Booting Linux, Pull Requests, and Commercialized Commons
- Beijing Wants to Rewrite the Rules of the Internet — China’s cyber governance plan appears to have three objectives. One is a legitimate desire to address substantial cybersecurity challenges, like defending against cyber attacks and keeping stolen personal data off the black market. A second is the impulse to support domestic industry, in order to wean the government off its dependence on foreign technology components for certain IT products deemed essential to economic and national security. (In effect, these requirements exclude foreign participation, or make foreign participation only possible on Beijing’s terms.) The third goal is to expand Beijing’s power to surveil and control the dissemination of economic, social, and political information online.
- How Modern Linux Systems Boot — “Sometimes the reasons for failure are obscure and annoying” could appear in every man page.
- The Art of Humanizing Pull Requests — What are PR’s, how to effectively create a PR, how to give feedback on PR’s, and how to respond to feedback. For the junior dev in your life.
- How Markets Co-opted Free Software’s Most Powerful Weapon (YouTube) — Benjamin Mako Hill’s LibrePlanet 2018 keynote. new proprietary, firm-controlled, and money-based models are increasingly replacing, displacing, outcompeting, and potentially reducing what’s available in the commons.[…] In the talk, I talk about how this happened and what I think it means for folks who are committed to working in commons. I talk a little bit about what the free culture and free software should do now that mass collaboration, these communities’ most powerful weapon, is being used against them. (via copyrighteous)
