Free Knowledge Culture Calendar/Printable version
| This is the print version of Free Knowledge Culture Calendar You won't see this message or any elements not part of the book's content when you print or preview this page. |
January 1
Today is Public Domain Day, today ... presents! Tonight, copyright expired for a new batch of old media. 70 years (in most countries) after the authors’ deaths, they finally belong to all of us. Why wait that long? Because in the 16th century poor artists’ families had it rough, so copyright revenues for dad’s works were supposed to provide for two generations of descendants. Oh, and also the Mickey Mouse Act: that is, because the Disney corporation in particular wanted it that way. (Only big franchises profit from the repeated copyright term extensions.) Otherwise we’d have free Mickey Mouse, and that would be outrageous, wouldn't it?
January 2
Today in 1999 the first public version of 7-Zip was released. Being a competitive alternative to RAR that offers more freedom, its Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) has established itself where no RAR could go before.
January 3
Today in 2008 Kenyan activist Ory Okolloh asked for help to map post-election violence. A week later she and her collaborators launched Ushahidi (Swahili for “evidence” or “witness”) and began crowd-sourcing reports.
January 4
Following an agreement between Unisys and CompuServe to collect LZW patent fees from authors of GIF-supporting software, today in 1995 Thomas Boutell published a first draft of a Portable Bitmap Format (aka PNG), a better, smaller, more extensible replacement that made GIF largely obsolete.
January 5
Mike Masnick coined the term “Streisand effect” today in 2005. Imagine spending lots of money on a nice hideout, away from all the losers. Imagine someone taking a photo to show all the losers your hiding place. Imagine yelling at him to stop. Imagine that everyone who hears your yelling gets interested, copies the photo, a Wikipedia page is created for your house, the photo’s put on it, ...
Humans like to share; it’s a powerful thing.
January 6
_(14752913511).jpg)
Today in 1838 the successful single-wire telegraph with binary digital coding by Morse and Vail was demonstrated, five years after the invention of electric telegraphy. While analog telecommunication technologies like earlier telephones are now considered the old thing, the first era of near-instantaneous telecommunication before that was digital. For most applications, this type of technology replaced horse-mounted couriers carrying inked paper back and forth.
January 7
Today in 2008 Sony BMG Music Entertainment announced as the last major label to drop digital rights management.[1] Though the fight against DRM would continue on, this marks a major success for the movement.
January 8
My crime is that of curiosity. My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you
Today in 1986 the Hacker Manifesto aka. The Conscience of a Hacker was written. It is considered a cornerstone of the hacker culture from which Free Software originated.
January 9
Today in 1534 Hernando Pizarro brought the first report on the Quipus to Europe. They probably represent one of the first intricate binary codes known today. In 1583 Christian officials ordered them all to be burned.
January 10
Today in 2001, Nupedia starts a wiki which went on to become Wikipedia, the biggest encyclopedia of all times.
January 11
Today in 2009 Reglue, then known as the HeliOS Project, has become a member of Software in the Public Interest and stepped up its operation. This project recycled old computer hardware to provide computers to the downtrodden.
January 12
Today in 2005 The Political Economy of Peer Production by Michel Bauwens was published.
January 13
Today in 2010 OpenStreetMap volunteers started the first disaster relief mapping project in response to a devastating earthquake having struck Haiti the day before. First recent aerial imagery of the situation had just become available; – within a week they had accomplished the unprecedented feat of providing ground teams with up-to-date, street-level maps of the disaster zone. This began a tradition of humanitarian usage of OpenStreetMap, carried on by groups such as the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, Missing Maps, and other groups.
January 14
Today in 2012 the Ada Initiative held the first AdaCamp, which focused on the inclusion of women in technology and culture.
January 15
.jpg)
Today in 2001 Creative Commons was founded to promote free culture. The organization is best known for creating a range of influential free culture licenses. From porn to scientific papers – they became by far the most popular licenses for open content other than software code.
January 16
We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code.
Today in 1986 the Internet Engineering Task Force was formed, a standards organization for the Internet.
At the latest when compared to other large standardization bodies, it becomes clear how incredibly open its process is: Not only are the maybe seemingly high conference attendance fees actually a fraction of usual such fees, but most importantly do all working groups communicate out on the open Internet, and all meetings are streamed live and provide an open Internet Relay Chat back channel for remote participation.
In that manner, the IETF has created and develops many successful open standards that allow the different parts of the Internet to work together, including very basic ones like TCP, or the well-known HTTP.
[2]
January 17
Today in 1969 the U.S. government filed an antitrust lawsuit against the anticompetitive bundling of software with hardware sales by IBM. Although the case was eventually withdrawn in 1982, IBM unbundled software in June.
January 18
Today in 2011 FFmpeg developers declared mutiny and then forked the project as Libav, following disagreement over the development model and leadership, beside the chilling effects of a harsh social climate and other problems. After the much-criticized leader stepped down and was replaced by an assembly of active developers, committees were set up to take care of stalled technical issues and social friction, and also plans like an overhaul of the programming interfaces had been realized, most developers have reunited back under the FFmpeg banner by 2021.
January 19
.jpg)
Today in 1983 the Lisa desktop computer was introduced by Apple Computer, Inc. It started the successful commercialization of the graphical user interface concepts they had stolen from the 1973 Xerox Alto system.
January 20
Today in 2011 the Twitter hashtag #icanhazPDF was invented to circumvent the costly journal system used in Academia, and to call for more open access journals.
January 21
Today in 2008 Anonymous launched Project Chanology. On February 10 it took to the streets in massive protests in at least 100 cities worldwide.
January 22
...we have an opportunity to dramatically improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world...
Today in 2008 was the official release of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration.
January 23
Today in 2018 the W3C published the ActivityPub standard.
January 24
Today in 1948 IBM dedicated the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), the first electronic computer with stored instructions.
January 25
Today in 2017 the first stable version of Google’s Chromium/Chrome web browser was released that had WebRTC enabled by default and without prefix. Firefox followed two days later, although standardization is still not finished. It enables web browsers to not only access resources on central servers, but also make peer-to-peer connections to other browsers, topped off with a multimedia streaming framework. Among other things, this puts the missing free replacement for Skype into everyone’s browsers and provides an infrastructure for a more decentralized web.
January 26
Today in 1994 saw the first public Debian release (beta). It is the mother of many other remarkable GNU/Linux distributions.
| This page or section is an undeveloped draft or outline. You can help to develop the work, or you can ask for assistance in the project room. |
January 27
Today in 2011 the Internet was shut down in Egypt. Contrary to the intentions, it led to more people in the streets and was followed by an Anonymous Operation. Eventually Mubarak resigned.
January 28
Today in 2005 the non-profit educational project One Laptop per Child was started. Towards their eponymic constructionist-learning vision, they notably designed their utility-focused $100 Laptop. With extraordinary effort put to the engineering and putting user need above profit, they achieved revolutionary pricing, durability, environmental friendliness, openness, repairability, power consumption, and many other ground-breaking innovations. For many, radical openness seemed a logical part of the concept: openly documented hardware, easy disassembly, free software, ..., to allow users to dive in as deep as they like and tinker with every part, as so illustratively embodied by the “View Source” button. When Open Source was eliminated from the mission statement because Microsoft suddenly wanted Windows on the OLPC, many left the project disillusioned. Commercial companies scrambled to bring competing products to market, i.e. the entire Netbook category. With failing partnerships and delays, they had to settle for lower volumes and thus a higher price, and abandoned the project after one or two models. Success ratings were mixed.
January 29
Today in 1980 the USENIX conference began in Boulder, Colorado, where the Netnews design was presented. Since Netnews was developed for UNIX at a university, it was automatically classified as public domain software under the terms of the AT&T UNIX license. The Usenet developed into an important file-sharing platform. It itself also constitutes the original peer-to-peer application.
January 30
Today in 2001 The Hacker Ethic by Pekka Himanen was published.
January 31
most of you steal your software. [...] Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?
.svg)
General Partner, Micro-Soft
In 1976, today’s edition of the Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter published Bill Gates’ “Open Letter to Hobbyists”.
February 1
Today in 1992 the Linux kernel was put under GNU General Public License (GPL) to enable its use for the GNU operating system.
February 2
Today in 2003 the ReactOS project made its first release. However, the first version with a working GUI came almost a year later and development is still in alpha stage.
February 3
Today in 1998 Christine Peterson supposedly[3] introduced the term “Open source software”. It was meant for a marketing campaign for the “Open Source“ development model, avoiding the heavy moralism of user empowerment and liberation that advocates of the older term “Free Software” uphold. It has been so successful that most software development is now at least based on Open Source, but also that user freedom is rarely a priority: When a software company's needs are the dominant criterion, the improvements to the development process are welcome, but user freedom is not a vital interest. The viral Copyleft licenses have largely been replaced by liberal license terms, most notably the MIT license. Free Software is dead, Open Source has won.
February 4
.jpg)
Today in 2004 Facebook was founded.
February 5
A letter written today in 1676 by the famous Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke is widely remembered as the source of the famous phrase, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”, although it was uttered earlier by Bernard of Chartres.
February 6
Today in 1986 the Free Software Definition was published in GNU’s Bulletin.
February 7
Today in 2018 John Perry Barlow died.
February 8
Today in 2008 GitHub was founded. The platform was based on Git, which was relatively new at the time. It was intended to make merging individual code contributions, and thus distributed development, less complicated. It was hyped already before Github. Github combined the command-line tool with a graphical user interface and continuous integration tools and successfully marketed itself as a convenient all-in-one service that enabled a smoother software development workflow. This goes hand in hand with the trend towards liberal licensing (= non-Copyleft, mostly MIT), emphasizing frictionless license compatibility rather than freedom values. So much so that some years-long contributors of highly visible Open Source projects state that they “really had no idea what Open Source was” (Jacob Thornton, Bootstrap). Code sharing became a kind of natural default, and stripped of ideology; FLOSS became more about its productivity benefits than user rights.
February 9
Today in 1998 The Open Source Definition was announced, one of the most widely used set of criteria for evaluating the freedoms granted by a software license. It was adapted from the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
February 10
Today in 2005 Biological Innovation for Open Society (BiOS) was launched, an international initiative to democratize innovation with the patentleft royalty-free BiOS License.
February 11
Today in 2017 Google released version 1.0.0 of TensorFlow.
February 12
Today in 2007 version 1.0 of the Definition of Free Cultural Works was released.
February 13
Today in 1258 Mongols conquered Baghdad, killing scientists and philosophers and destroying the House of Wisdom and over thirty other public libraries, concluding the Islamic Golden Age and the Translation Movement.
February 14
Today in 1989 the .ZIP file format was released into the public domain. After a lawsuit against Phil Katz as a third party developer of an (improved) implementation of the then predominant ARC format, his better and free ZIP format supplanted ARC and sealed the end of the plaintiff company SEA.
February 15
Today in 1995 was the high-profile arrest of Kevin Mitnick. After being mistreated by the judiciary following an earlier arrest, he disappeared and was on the run for two and a half years. In a world that had become afraid of hackers, his judge was convinced that he could start a nuclear war from a phone. After years of imprisonment without trial or bail hearing, beatings and months of solitary confinement, he was convicted of computer and wire fraud and received a sentence that was higher than that of many killers.
February 16
Today in 1978 the first bulletin board system went online. One by one, people could call the system and read and leave messages, as if using a shared answering machine, harnessing the potential of combining affordable computers and modems. For nearly 20 years, BBSs were the primary way for computer users to get online, share software, join online communities, ...
February 17
Today in 2012 The Document Foundation was incorporated, a neutral foundation for the development of OpenOffice. Because Oracle resisted the concept, the office suite was forked. Although Oracle showed some effort and made OpenOffice an Apache project, influential Linux distributions and most users switched to LibreOffice.
February 18
Today in 2000 Geekcorps was incorporated.
February 19
On this day in 1971 the first warrant to search computer storage is issued in San Jose, California, for a trade secret theft investigation. It kicked off a new era of digital forensics and led to people protecting local personal data with (“warrant-proof”) encryption. The effectiveness of cryptography against comprehensive state surveillance capabilities is the basis of crypto-anarchism. For others it is a flaw in the desired unrestricted access of investigative authorities and intelligence agencies. As a result, there are regular calls for bans on strong encryption, justified by polemical reference to either terror or child pornography, and bigger waves of criminalization of the use of strong cryptography that have become known as the Crypto Wars. They make defending personal use of strong encryption an ongoing necessity. Even the strongest advocates of freedom of information make an exception for individual privacy, which is another important foundation for the free development of one’s personality.
February 20
Today in 1991 the first public version of Python (v0.9.0) was released.
February 21
Today in 1978 the influential “Nora-Minc report”, titled L'Informatisation de la société (The Computerization of Society), was submitted to the president of France. It laid out the vision on which the successful early online system Minitel was built.
February 22
.jpg)
Today in 2018 billionaire Elon Musk’s company SpaceX launched the first two satellites for its mega-constellation Starlink. It is intended to close the last gaps in global Internet coverage. The plan is to launch several times as many satellites than all previous ones combined. But some countries and all of Musk’s major competitors each have a similar plan (OneWeb, Kuiper, Hongyan, ...). Tens or hundreds of thousands of new satellites mean potential problems for future access to space and astronomical observations.
February 23
Today in 1998 the Mozilla Organization was created.
February 24
Today in 1986 the Internet domain registration was made available to the general public.
February 25
Today in 1989 the GNU General Public License was published. It was a generalized and sectioned version of the preceding special GPLs for EMACS, GCC, ...
February 26
Today in 2019 UNESCO published the Paris Call.
February 27
Today in 2002 Wendy Seltzer’s Chilling Effects database (now Lumen) was officially launched.
February 28
Today in 2008 Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky was published.
February 29
Today in 2012 the first orders for Raspberry Pi were accepted.
March 1
.jpg)
Today in 1994 the first issue of Linux Journal was published, the first Linux-specific periodical.
March 2
Today in 1791 the first semaphore telegraph transmission took place in France on what developed into the Chappe network. It eventually extended over 4,800 km.
March 3
Today in 2008 the OStatus protocol was introduced in StatusNet (GNU social).
March 4
Today in 1993 Marc Andreesen announced the NCSA Mosaic browser and introduced the HTML image tag. Mosaic quickly subsumed all text-oriented information search tools and surpassed them. Because it was easy to install, ported to several major operating systems and supported by a large institution (National Center for Supercomputing Applications, NCSA), it became the first graphical user interface for the Web. It has been described as the killer application of the 1990s. Members of the development team founded Netscape in 1994; a rebranded version was packaged with Windows as Internet Explorer.
March 5
Today in 1975 was the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club.
March 6
Today is National Day of Unplugging in the U.S.
March 7
Today in 1917 the computing pioneer Betty Holberton was born. She was responsible for much of the software for the UNIVAC system and created its C-10 instruction code, the first mnemonic code and mother of all modern programming languages. She went on to work on the programming language COBOL and was the driving force behind the standardization of FORTRAN. Grace Hopper called her the best programmer she ever knew. She also invented breakpoints for computer debugging, developed an early precursor to today’s compilers (her Sort Merge Generator), and was perhaps the first computer musician.
March 8
Today in 2002 Scientology attorneys sent Google a DMCA takedown notice in which they requested to delist xenu.net aka. Operation Clambake. Following public outcry, it was partially relisted and Google started submitting its cease and desist requests to the Lumen (formerly Chilling Effects) database and link to them from censored search results.[4]
March 9
Today in 1992 was the first release of ViolaWWW, the first popular browser on the Web.
March 10
Today in 2001 the Free Software Foundation Europe was founded.
March 11
Today in 2008 Library Genesis was launched.
March 12
Today is the birthday of Jude Milhon. She was a civil rights and cyber activist and senior editor at Mondo 2000, coined the term cypherpunk and co-created the bulletin board system Community Memory. She had significant influence on the hacker ethic.
March 13
Today in 1997 the UK’s fixed book price agreement (“Net Book Agreement”) was ruled to be anti-competitive and therefore against the public interest. In other countries such monopolies persist.
March 14
Today in 2000 was the initial release of Gnutella, the first decentralized peer-to-peer file-sharing system. It had several offshoots, such as Foxy, which is popular in Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Peer-to-peer technology brought back the promise of democratization that was seen in the decentralized design of the Internet (routing). Its most iconic application was music file sharing.
March 15
Today in 1985 the first (non-toplevel) Internet domain name was registered. While contributing to the success of the Internet through more human-friendly addresses, the Domain Name System also introduced a hierarchical Achilles heel to the originally decentralized Internet, since each computer holding a list of every other was considered impractical. Distributed hash tables brought a solution to this problem 16 years later.
March 16
Today in 2015 the Library Freedom Project was incorporated. It was started by Alison Macrina.
March 17
Today in 2006 Jack Goldsmith & Tim Wu published Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World.
March 18
Nous sommes non seulement consommateurs mais aussi créateurs.
Out of a need for visibility for Africans as creators, Made in Nigeria was launched today in 2017 to showcase software tools of global relevance that are made by Nigerians. It quickly took off when it was announced on Twitter two days later and spawned a wave of similar lists for other African countries.
Talent and brains are a major export of Africa, and the technology sector and Open Source (web) development are booming, especially in Nigeria, the world’s fastest-growing Open Source contributer region in 2020. Yet locals struggle to be recognized as creators and not just seen as passive consumers or even victims, with perceptions of Africans shaped by stereotypes and systemic racism rooted in colonialism. People regularly have to clarify that Africa is a whole continent, not just a country. Although Free Software is all about community, there was actually little diversity.
March 19
Today in 2007 the Free Software Foundation published the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL).
March 20
Today in 1985 was the first public release of GNU Emacs (v13), the first Copyleft and first GNU software.
March 21
Today in 2006 the first tweet was published.
March 22
Today in 1987 Richard Stallman released the first public version of the GNU Compiler Collection (GNU C Compiler, GCC).
March 23
Today in 2005 the RepRap project started working on the first of its first low-cost, self-replicating 3D printer.
March 24
Today in 2004 the – unsuccessfully appealed – court decision was made that forced Microsoft to give competitors such as the Samba project access to documentation of the “secret” workgroup server protocols of Windows. Following a complaint by Sun Microsystems the European Commission had brought an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft. An appeal failed on September 17, 2007. Microsoft had to pay an unprecedented fine of 497 million and another 280 million in 2007 for abuse of its quasi-monopoly. The Samba team finally gained access on December 20, 2007, albeit under a non-disclosure agreement, through the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation (PFIF), a non-profit organization established by the Software Freedom Law Center.
March 25
Today in 1999 The Apache Software Foundation was incorporated. Its permissive licensing terms made it popular with commercial information technology companies.
March 26
Today in 2001 the seminal paper on Freenet was published.
March 27
Today in 2000 the first World Computer Exchange started. It is an international non-profit organization committed to extending the positive impact of ICT projects in developing countries by offsetting the negative environmental impact of its e-waste hardware.
March 28
Today in 2012 Red Hat announced revenue figures. For the first time a company whose business is based solely on open source products exceeded one billion dollars in annual revenue.
March 29
Today in 2011 MAFIAAFire was registered on addons.mozilla.org. The United States Department of Homeland Security ordered its takedown in April and Mozilla resisted.
March 30
Today in 2000 freedesktop.org was launched.
March 31
Today in 1998 Netscape Communicator 5.0 source code was released to developers.
April 1
Today in 2014 the Heartbleed bug was discovered. For many this called into question the belief in the principle of many eyeballs (aka. “Linus’ law”). OpenSSL, which is used to secure large parts of the Internet, was taken for granted and saw little investment until this vulnerability had compromised 20% of web servers.
April 2
Should you go to jail for making your PS3 run your own programs?
Today in 2011 Anonymous started Operation Sony following the firmware update 3.21 of 1 April 2010 (after a decade of Linux on PlayStation) and a lawsuit against the PlayStation 3 hacker GeoHot.
April 3
Today in 2004 the first working meeting of Guifi.net took place. Six weeks later the first permanent connections were established.
April 4
Today in 1994 Netscape was founded. Its stock market success in 1995 kicked off the dot.com boom.
April 5
Today in 2010 WikiLeaks published the Baghdad airstrike video that they had obtained from Chelsea Manning. Smear campaigns and ongoing criminalization attempts against the publisher, Julian Assange, ensued.
For many, this was the first unvarnished look at modern warfare, shattering the propaganda myth of clean war and standing in stark contrast to the righteous public image, even though the patterns of how challenged power reacts and the dirty psychological dynamics inherent in war are the same everywhere.
April 6
Today in 2004 was the first release of the X.Org Server.
April 7
Today in 2006 the Software Freedom Conservancy was founded. It hosts dozens of free software projects and provides other helpful resources for Free Software development.
April 8
Today in 2011 Safecast launched the crowdfunding campaign for the mass production of its open hardware Geiger counter.
April 9
Today in 1980 the Lisp machine manufacturer Symbolics was founded. It hired off most of the hackers from the artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT and broke with their culture of communal code sharing. This experience led Richard Stallman to build today’s Free Software community with its explicit philosophy, after several years of single-handedly competing with all of Symbolics’ programmers.
April 10
Today in 2002 was the first release of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC). It uses spare processing time on machines of private Internet users and connects them into a crowd-sourced computing grid that constitutes one of the largest supercomputers in the world.
April 11
Today in 2012 the JavaScript web application server framework Meteor was launched.
April 12
Today in 2016 Let's Encrypt completed its test phase and was officially launched.
April 13
Today in 2012 the Open Data Institute was founded.
April 14
Today is Yukihiro Matsumoto’s birthday. He is recognized[5] for many years of work on GNU, Ruby, and other Free Software.
April 15
Today in 1994 the TRIPS agreement was signed.
April 16
Today in 2011 SciHub was launched.
April 17
.JPG)
Today in 1977 the first West Coast Computer Faire was concluded.
April 18
Today in 2017 Jonathan Taplin published Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.
April 19
Today in 1987 the early cracking group FAiRLiGHT was founded.
April 20
Today in 1994 WebCrawler was launched, the first full text search web search engine.
April 21
Today in 2005 the alternative BitKeeper client SourcePuller was released. It was built on a reverse engineered implementation of the BitKeeper source code management protocol for the Linux kernel developers by Andrew Tridgell. The disgruntled developer of the origrinal proprietary BitKeeper software denied the kernel developers continued free use of its software, which led to the development of the free replacements Mercurial and the enormously popular Git.
April 22
Today in 2006 the first Maker Faire opened.
April 23
Today is World Book and Copyright Day.
April 24
Today in 2010 Diaspora started its record-breaking crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.
April 25
Today in 2004 the OpenNet Initiative was announced. It monitored and reported on filtering and surveillance of Internet traffic.
April 26
Today is World Intellectual Property Day. Imagine what riches you could have extorted from people if you had a monopoly on the entire technological progress of mankind and kept it to yourself!
April 27
Today in 1995 the first version (0.6.2) of the Apache HTTP Server was released, a fork of the NCSA HTTPd 1.3 that initially comprised just a set of patches.
April 28
Today is Ian Murdock’s birthday.
April 29
Today in 1579 was the death of Diego de Landa. He ordered the burning of Mayan scripture in order to eradicate pagan rites. They were the most advanced writings of Mesoamerica.
April 30
Today is Claude Shannon’s birthday.
May 1
Today in 2002 OpenOffice.org 1 was released.
May 2
Today in 2006 OpenMRS 1.0.0 was published.
May 3
Today in 1978 the first spam email was sent, one of the first cases of online advertising. Email spam is estimated to have reached ~90% of global email traffic.
May 4
Today in 2000 the first Fórum Internacional de Software Livre (FISL) started in Porto Alegre, Brazil. It is one of the world's largest free software events and part of the strong free software scene in Brazil.
May 5
Today in 1974 the paper on TCP was published. TCP later got a more modular design and ARPANET switched to TCP/IP on January 1, 1983.
May 6
The first description of the C-10 instruction code dates from today in 1949. C-10 is the first mnemonic code and the ancestor of modern programming languages. It was created for the UNIVAC system by Betty Holberton, who was part of a team of mostly female software engineers, like most programmers before programming was considered prestigious.
May 7
Today in 1987 Brian Reid, John Gilmore, and Gordon Moffett decided to create the alt.* hierarchy on the Usenet.
May 8
Today in 2007 Sun finished the release of all parts of Java's core code they hold the copyright for. This eliminated “The Java Trap” and made Sun the biggest Free Software contributor.
May 9
Today in 1994 the iconic domain sex.com was registered, the most expensive Internet domain name. The associated website is often referred to as the first major commercial pornography site. Internet porn has been around for longer, initially mainly in the form of ASCII art on BBS and Gopher sites. But it was with porn that the Internet started to take off as a business platform and many online marketing innovations were developed.
May 10
.jpg)
Today in 2002 Shuman Ghosemajumder published Advanced peer-based technology business models, which proposed the Open Music Model, aimed at disempowering the widespread copyright piracy and met wide adoption in the content industry.
May 11
Today in 2017 Google published the first alpha version of Flutter, a cross-platform widget system for graphical user interfaces.
May 12
Today in 1996 the Internet Archive was founded.
May 13
Today in 2002 eMule was released. It became the most popular client for the eDonkey2000 network.
May 14
Today in 2013 SecureDrop was launched. It was Aaron Swartz’ last project, which already had a release date set, only a few weeks before his death.
May 15
Today in 1999 Loki Software shipped Civilization: Call to Power, the first big commercial game for Linux.
May 16
Today in 2003 Pamela Jones launched Groklaw.
May 17
Today is World Telecommunication and Information Society Day.
May 18
Today in 2010 RISC-V was started.
May 19
Today in 2010 Google released the VP8 video format and associated software under free licenses. Still the free alternative that lagged a step behind in quality, it was made the cornerstone of a series of successors that caught up with and eventually overtook patent-encumbered video compression technology in terms of both acceptance and quality.
May 20
Today in 2004 the Open Knowledge Foundation was launched.
May 21
Today in 2005 BBS: The Documentary by Jason Scott was published.
May 22
Today in 2001 was the presentation of Building peer-to-peer systems with Chord. This paper details the basis of the distributed hash table algorithms that made search in decentralized peer-to-peer networks reliable and efficient. Similar implementations got introduced into Kademlia (an eDonkey2000 extension), BitTorrent (Extension Protocol 5), and Gnutella2.
May 23
Today in 1995 the C++-like programming language Java was first released to the public. Java had enabled operating system independent software and became very popular and influential, while the necessary execution environment remained closed source for years (the “Java trap”). Google’s Android is based on Java technology and incited Oracle to buy up Sun and start dismantling it, mainly to leverage Java in a lawsuit in the hope of getting a share of the profits from Android.
May 24
Today in 2013 We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks was published.
May 25
Today in 2014 was the first release of the encrypting communication applications RedPhone and TextSecure, which were later merged into Signal. Their groundbreaking end-to-end encryption protocol set a new standard and marked the state of the art for years and was integrated into WhatsApp, among others.
May 26
Today in 1995 Bill Gates sent the “Internet Tidal Wave” memorandum to Microsoft executives, in which he acknowledges the importance of the Internet and the Web. Microsoft then abandoned its own proprietary “Microsoft Network” and turned it into a portal on the open Web.
May 27
_-oped12.jpg)
Today in 1997 The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary got published. It provided motivation for Mozilla and contained famous principles like “Release Early, Release Often” and “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” (aka. Linus’s law).
May 28
Today in 2000 the first release of Audacity took place.
May 29
Today in 1453 was the final destruction of the Imperial Library of Constantinople in the Fall of Constantinople after it was already heavily damaged from several fires and a christian Crusade in 1204. It was the last great library of the ancient world. Even though it was destroyed, it contributed greatly to modern-day knowledge of classical greek literature. It used to be a big collection and a center of study and science with great copying efforts.
May 30
Today in 2004 Oink’s Pink Palace was launched.
May 31
Today in 1994 Peter H. Salus published A Quarter-Century of Unix, a landmark work on the history of Unix.
June 1
.png)
Today in 1999 was the first release of Napster, the iconic pioneer of peer-to-peer file-sharing.
June 2
Today in 2016 ownCloud Inc. filed for bankruptcy almost immediately after its founder Karlitschek had left and forked the ownCloud software.
June 3
Today in 2004, revision 1 of x264 was released, an early and fast open source encoder implementation with uncompromising quality that contributed to the enormous success of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video format, which in turn is a commercial, patent-encumbered standard.
June 4
Today 1968 US patent No. 3,387,286 for a one-transistor MOS dynamic random access memory (DRAM) cell and the basic idea behind the three-transistor cell was granted. This was the dynamic RAM technology that replaced magnetic-core memory.
June 5
Today in 1998 version 1 of The GIMP was released.
June 6
Today in 1996 the influential early warez release group Rabid Neurosis was formed.
June 7
Today in 2018 the Software Heritage archive held its official opening ceremony at the UNESCO.
June 8
Today in 1995 version 1.0 of the Personal Home Page Tools (PHP) was released.
June 9
Today in 1994 the first Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference started. It is largest gathering of women in Information Technology.
June 10
The first documented mention of Copyleft was made today in 1976.
June 11
Today in 2000 United Nations Economic and Social Council ordered the establishment of the United Nations Information and Communication Technologies Task Force (UN ICT TF), tasked with bridging the digital divide.
June 12
Today in 2009 the first CrisisCamp barcamp started. It spawned the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathons that produce Open Source Software for charities, non-profit organizations and social enterprises.
June 13
Today in 1988 the CD-R specification was published. In October, the first empty CD media appeared on the market.
June 14
.jpg)
Today in 2013 prosecutors charged Edward Snowden with espionage and theft of government property.
June 15
Today in 2006 Peter H. Salus finished publishing The Daemon, the GNU and the Penguin: How Free and Open Software is Changing the World.
June 16
Today in 1997 Software in the Public Interest was founded. It funds and supports its many member projects by collecting tax-exempt donations, holding assets, organizing legal advice, trademarks, and other legal matters.
June 17
Today in 1972 the break-in at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and possibly first telephone conversation of W. Mark Felt aka. “Deep Throat” with the reporter Bob Woodward took place. They uncovered the Watergate scandal.
June 18
Today is Autistic Pride Day.
June 19
Today in 1996 the first version of the differential file transfer and synchronization utility rsync was released. It is the backend of e.g. most Linux backup software.
June 20
Today in 2012 the Open Source Hardware Association incorporated.
June 21
Today is Edward Snowden’s birthday.
June 22
Today in 2015 the scientific paper on the Domain Fronting technique for censorship circumvention was published.[6]
June 23
Today in 2009 was the first release of TAILS.
June 24
Today in 2002 On2 announced the release of the VP3 video compression technology as Free Software. In October Xiph.org released the first codec for the free video format Theora based on VP3.
June 25
Today in 1945 Herman Goldstine privately began circulating John von Neumann’s initial paper on what is now known as the von Neumann architecture.
June 26
Today in 2011 the first known published crack of the cracking group 3DM was released.
June 27
Today in 1997 ECMAScript was standardized. It brought a unifying standard after Borland and Microsoft had already forked off their own dialects of the Web scripting language JavaScript, which Netscape had introduced in 1995. It became the most widely used programming language and the Web the most common computing platform. After overcoming another divide, namely Microsoft’s JScript, the rise of Ajax web applications gave a big boost in popularity starting in 2005, and finally the immensely popular Node.js runtime brought substantial usage outside of web browsers.
June 28
Today in 2001 the first version of the BitTorrent reference implementation was released to facilitate the sharing of bootleg records, starting as an open source application. BitTorrent is optimized for efficient distribution of large files. It became the predominant file sharing system and iconic for its use as the platform of choice for copyright piracy.
June 29
Today in 2007 version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPL) was published.
June 30
Today in 2009 Janet Hope published Biobazaar: The Open Source Revolution and Biotechnology.
July 1
Today in 1970 the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center was opened. From here Apple and Microsoft stole the interface concepts that made modern personal computers accessible to masses of people: the computer mouse, graphical user interfaces with windows and icons, WYSIWYG editing, ...
July 2
Today in 1998 Fraunhofer announced at the MP3 Summit in San Diego that they will send out patent infringement letters to MP3 software developers. They started to do so in September.
July 3
Today in 2001 the first version of b2/cafelog was released. This weblog content management system was later reborn as WordPress and, with its particular beginner-friendliness, went for world domination. Meanwhile more than half of all websites are built using a content management system, far more than half of them with WordPress. It has evolved from a specialized blogging tool to an ecosystem with a huge selection of themes and plugins that cover diverse needs.
Its status and ease of use make this often needlessly complex system a natural choice for many simpler projects that do not actually require dynamic page generation. Coupled with this hard-to-control diversity, this makes it a very attractive target for attacks. To mitigate this, it was the first CMS to implement automatic software updates, one of the most effective practical measures against security flaws in software.
July 4
Today in 1971 Project Gutenberg published its first text. It is the oldest ebook library and the inventor of the ebook.
July 5
If not you, who? If not now, when? _ _ _ ____ _ _ | | | | __ _ ___| | __ | __ ) __ _ ___| | _| | | |_| |/ _` |/ __| |/ / | _ \ / _` |/ __| |/ / | | _ | (_| | (__| < | |_) | (_| | (__| <|_| |_| |_|\__,_|\___|_|\_\ |____/ \__,_|\___|_|\_(_)
Today in 2015 the Hacking Team data breach has been announced.
July 6
Today in 2003 the Internet celebrated the victory in the campaign for the release of the firmware source code of Cisco’s Linksys WRT54G Wi-Fi routers, which was withheld in violation of the terms of the GNU General Public License. People immediately started hacking it, and within months of the release the successful OpenWRT distribution had formed and started releasing aftermarket firmware images forked from this code.
July 7
Today in 2009 version 1.0 of the VLC media player was published.
July 8
1. Make each program do one thing well. ...
Today in 1978 Doug McIlroy first published a version of the Unix philosophy in The Bell System Technical Journal.
Following these principles facilitates the chaotic remote collaboration that is vital for the success of open source development, since even complex systems are preferably built in manageable parts.
2. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another,
...
July 9
Today in 2010 Wheelmap.org was launched.
July 10
Today in 2002 The Memory Hole was launched. It was later hacked, shut down, and replaced by The Memory Hole 2.
July 11
Today in 1816 Francis Ronalds offered the first working electrostatic telegraph to the British military.
July 12
Today in 1562 Spanish Roman Catholic bishop Diego de Landa burns most of Mayan scripture to eliminate pagan rites. The Mayas had the most advanced writing system in Mesoamerica.
July 13
Today in 2020 Nadia Eghbal’s book Working in Public was published, the first book on developer burnout in the FLOSS ecosystem. Her analysis breaks with the traditional Open Source propaganda, which assumes that more participation makes projects easier.
July 14
Today in 1992 version 0.1 of 386BSD was released. Although there had been an earlier release in March, it was very difficult to install, which made 0.1 much more popular and the first contact with BSD for many more people. 386BSD was the first open source operating system on the x86 architecture and is the ancestor of all modern BSD variants.
July 15
Today in 1454 the Malatestiana Library opened in Italy. It is credited as the first public library in Europe.
July 16
Today in 2007 Aaron Swartz announced the Open Library project.
July 17
Today in 1993 the influential and early Linux distribution Slackware was released. It was the first to offer an extensive collection of software and served as the basis for several other distributions.
July 18
The first picture on the Web was taken of a parodistic music group before it performed today in 1992 at the CERN Hardronic Festival and was published by Berners-Lee soon after. With this picture he hinted at another potential future for his young hypertext information system, after it had previously only been pitched for more serious matters like scientific collaboration.
July 19
Today in 2000 the first stable version (1.0) of the reference software of the Vorbis audio format was released. Vorbis delivered better sound quality than MP3. It was successful (only) in niches like video games.
July 20
Today in 2009 the paper The Post-Scarcity World of 2050–2075 was published, an influential paper on post-scarcity economy. It outlines a society that enjoys abundance of basic resources and argues that, despite a period of relative abundance of resources, humanity lives in an age of scarcity due to negligent past behavior.[7]
July 21
Today in 2010 Killed by Code: Software Transparency in Implantable Medical Devices by Karen Sandler et al. from the Software Freedom Law Center was published.
July 22
Today in 2001 The Secret History of Hacking was published, a documentary film about the golden age of hackers whose culture of creativity and sharing spawned the computer industry and their own exclusion with commercialization.
July 23
Today in 1990 the hacker show-trial of Knight Lightning started. It was catalytic for the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
July 24
Today in 2003 BitTorrent metasearch engine Torrentz.com was launched, the second most popular torrent website in 2012 and most widely used torrent meta search engine for over ten years. It was later raided and soon reappeared as Torrentz2.eu.
July 25
The first public version of Ruby on Rails dates from today in 2004.
July 26
Today in 2011 the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science was incorporated.
July 27
.png)
Today in 2012 Defense Distributed was founded. It published the first downloadable, fully 3D-printable gun in 2013.
July 28
Today in 2003 the first working version of Mozilla Thunderbird was published.
July 29
Today in 1972 first of the annual Phone Phreak Conventions was held in New York. Initially consisting mainly of blind people, phone phreaks studied and experimented with the largest automated machine of the time. This was possible due to signaling within the main channel: For example, whistling certain tones gave them control. Increasing public attention following a 1971 article in Esquire magazine attracted a lot of phone company agents to the convention and led to some high-profile arrests. The next year, everyone was wearing a mask. This community was a precursor to the hacker movement. Apple started out as a manufacturer of phreaking equipment.
July 30
Today in 2020 the first Linux systems were launched to Mars. NASA’s Mars 2020 mission uses Linux to relay imagery and control flight of the autonomous drone helicopter Ingenuity, among other things, and includes other Free Software like the famous FFMpeg.
July 31
Today in 1978 the National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) published its final report, in which it recommended extending copyright protection to software. Its drafts were implemented in 1980 with minor changes.
August 1
Today in 1996 the Internet Engineering Task Force standardized the eMail encryption scheme of the Pretty Good Privacy software. The publication of PGP had put strong cryptography into the hands of ordinary people for the first time. Since publication on the Internet was criminalized under U.S. export restrictions for weapons, it had to be exported in book form for the international market (with no viable OCR software yet..). There was a decade of policy debate for free access to strong cryptography for everyone, known as the (first) Crypto Wars. Although the system is clearly showing its age and difficult to use securely by today’s standards, no one has yet managed to establish a better system for eMail encryption.
August 2
Today in 2016 the Windows Subsystem for Linux was released. This allows the installation of a full Linux kernel as part of Windows. After its manufacturer Microsoft had long been known as the arch-enemy of Free Software, this was perhaps the clearest conceivable sign that this war is over. Microsoft had transformed itself – at least in parts – into an Open Source company and became, among other things, the largest Linux distributor.
August 3
Here at Gamma International, we've run out of governments to sell to, so we're opening up sales to the general public!
Today in 2014 Phineas Fisher hacked the german surveillance technology company Gamma Group and published source code, price lists and release notes. With support from the german government, Gamma produced and marketed the spyware FinFisher, which was used by governments around the world against political opposition. Customers were governments of more than 30 countries, including Bahrain, Egypt, Ethiopia, Germany, Uganda and the United States. Fisher published a series of educational posts on her methods.
August 4
Today is the birthday of Frances Allen. She laid the foundation for modern optimizing compilers and worked on code-breaking during the Cold War.
August 5
Today in 2009 Google’s acquisition of On2 got announced. After Google promptly gave On2’s top product VP8 to the general public, this proved to be only the first big step in a broader push to break the dominance of patent-encumbered media formats.
On2 was the provider of the main competing formats to MPEG’s lossy video compression standards. The company had previously contributed to the development of patent-free, open-source video compression (leading to OggTheora). Ever since the first MP3 patent infringement letters of 1998, there had been growing discontent with the patent licensing system for MPEG formats that restricted business models involving online media. As a result of particularly brazen royalty demands for the successor to the highly successful MPEG-4 AVC aka. H.264, much of the video coding industry rallied to the cause, culminating in the formation of the Alliance for Open Media consortium and the development of AV1.
August 6
Today in 1991 Tim Berners-Lee went public with his World Wide Web, featuring a server, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), URLs (the web address scheme), and the first browser. This marks the birth of the public face and the driving force of the spread of the Internet, and later the biggest software platform. The Web is the prime example of the success of open standards and would be unthinkable without its coevolution with the free software on which it is built.
August 7
Today in 1959 the Explorer 6 satellite was launched. It took the first photograph of Earth from orbit. It was the humble beginning of looking at the Earth from outside, which transformed people’s view of their home, especially once the first color images of the whole earth got published.
After an inspiring LSD trip, technology visionary Stewart Brand petitioned NASA to release one of the first color photographs (ATS-3, 1967) and he put it on the cover of his influential Whole Earth Catalog. This colorful island in the black void became a significant symbol, especially for the at least partially technophile hippie counterculture, and contributed to the rise of the environmental movement as people began to speak of “Spaceship Earth” and celebrate Earth Day. The social ambitions of the hippie movement and its search for a new perspective on everything, for a “planetary consciousness”, the associated use of psychedelic drugs – it all constituted an important background for the emergence of the free software movement and the entire Silicon Valley IT industry. The later Blue Marble composite image became one of the most reproduced images in history.
August 8
Today is International Cat Day. Although the awareness day originated from a more general animal welfare intention, it has particular resonance on the Internet, where the world’s most popular pet has quickly gained a foothold: Viral cat content is the most iconic example of Internet pop culture, complete with Internet Cat Video Festival and its “Golden Kitty” awards. Cats’ diverse behaviors and cute looks contribute to their prominence as a source of feel-good moments for Internet users.
August 9
Today in 2004 OpenStreetMap was launched. This unique project has very successfully taken the idea of freely licensed content further beyond software than its role model Wikipedia. It provides not only a map view, but the foundational geospatial data in an openly usable database with a flexible, extensible structure. It also contains more specialized information and can therefore serve a much broader scope and diverse niches. For example, it contains locations of bat houses and surveillance cameras and works as a central backend for various separate specialized projects and frontends like Wheelmap, which maps accessibility for wheelchair users.
August 10
Today in 2001 Slyck.com was launched, a news site focused on copyright issues that sprang from the DIY activism of the copyright piracy scene.
August 11
[Open Source] is long-term credible ... FUD tactics can not be used to combat it.
Today in 1998 Vinod Valloppillil of Microsoft sent an internal memorandum that got leaked as the first of the so-called Halloween documents. They certainly provided proof and dirty detail on how Microsoft ruthlessly fought for its monopoly and dealt with competition, but also revealed their actual understanding of the reality they were trying to deceive the world about. This one is about their analysis that “OSS poses a ... threat to Microsoft”. It acknowledges the viability of the open source software development model, even competitive disadvantage for their traditional model. In contrast to Gates’ rhetorical questions in his Open Letter to Hobbyists of →January 31, 1976, this was the surreptitious admission twenty years later that he was wrong.
August 12
Today in 1996 the first MP3 warez release group Compress ’Da Audio was founded. It released compressed Audio-CDs including WinPlay3.
August 13
_b_477.jpg)
Today in 1858 the first test message exchange was completed on the first transatlantic submarine cable. Though enthusiastically celebrated, poor reception limited its capacity to around 6 words per hour, and rapid failure after just three weeks undermined confidence and delayed efforts to restore a connection.
August 14
The Open Source Development Labs consortium, the forerunner to the Linux Foundation, was founded today in 2000.
August 15
Today in 1997 GNOME was started.
August 16
Today in 1993 the Debian Project was founded. It builds and maintains a complete operating system based on the FLOSS principles and has become a very influential FLOSS project with a strong ethical stance with its Social Contract and its authoritative Free Software Guidelines (DFSG).
August 17
Today is Margaret Hamilton’s birthday. She is credited with naming the discipline of “software engineering“ and legitimizing it, as well as for helping to open the door for more women to enter the field. She was the lead designer of the on-board flight software of the Apollo command module and the Skylab.
August 18
Today in 2008 the domain bitcoin.org was registered, the first trace in the obscure early history of the successful cryptocurrency. Prying financial exchange out of government control by technical means is a cryptoanarchist dream. It has gained wider acceptance after its first significant use to circumvent the financial blockade against Wikileaks in 2011. Besides the environmental problem of wasting electricity on the scale of a medium-sized country just to prove that it has indeed been wasted, its adoption for the purpose of laundering money from child pornography and human trafficking, which have since led to enormous increases in value, represents another dark side. The gigantic financial stakes have sparked a new interest in the critical importance of open source principles for the safety of computer code.
August 19
Today in 2004 Inveneo was incorporated, a non-profit organization that helped communities in developing countries to obtain information and communications technology.
August 20
Today in 2008 the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto by Aaron Swartz was published.
August 21
Today in 2018 the Valve corporation released Proton, a compatibility layer for running Windows games on Linux systems.
August 22
Today in 1988 the board of the IEEE approved the first edition of the POSIX standard.
August 23
Today in 2002, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) approved and published its Internet Manifesto.
August 24
Today in 2007 the first SIM unlock process for the Apple iPhone was demonstrated by George Hotz. Apple is notorious for not allowing consumers to take full control of their own devices. The unlock represents a first milestone of iOS jailbreaking.
August 25
Today in 1991 Linus Torvalds announced his new operating system kernel that was later named Linux.
With Version 7 Unix, the source code no longer got published and forbidden to use even for educational purposes. Computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum therefore wrote a new source-available Unix called Minix for his teaching purposes. Many Unix enthusiasts, including Linus Torvalds, adopted Minix because they could not afford a full-fledged commercial Unix. Tanenbaum was conservative about adding features, and for many, progress was slower than desired. The arrival of Linux was therefore met with excitement by many Minix users, however immature it was. The project has developed and pioneered several aspects of open, Internet-based software development.
August 26
Today in 1997 Bruce Perens announced The Open Hardware Certification Program, an early Open Hardware initiative.
August 27
.svg){kind=logo}
Today in 2006 the first edition of Linux Mint was released.
August 28
Today in 1992 the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided in the Sega vs. Accolade case. The ruling allows the copying and reverse engineering of copyrighted code for legitimate reasons as fair use if it is necessary for finding out the (unprotectable) “ideas and functional elements” of a program code. It also helped to establish that functional principles of computer software cannot be protected by copyright law.
August 29
Today in 1988 Unicode 88, the original Unicode manifesto, was published.
August 30
Today in 2016 the EU umbrella organization of regulatory agencies BEREC published its Net Neutrality Guidelines. They largely followed the criticism of the campaign savetheinternet.eu.
August 31
Today in 2007 the first version of Magento was released.
September 1
Today in 2015 the Alliance for Open Media and AV1 were announced.
September 2
Unix für PCs
Deutsche SlackwareLST
DLD
Quellcode & Anwendungen
Today in 1992 the Gesellschaft für Software und Systementwicklung mbH was founded, which developed the influential german SuSE Linux distribution that got many people into Linux.
September 3
Today in 1995 eBay was founded as AuctionWeb. It was a convincing pioneer in the commercialization of the Web and is a very successful survivor of the dot-com stock market bubble.
September 4
.png){kind=logo}
Today in 1998 Google, Inc. was incorporated.
September 5
Today in 1983 the term “hacker” entered mainstream media when Newsweek headlined: “Beware: Hackers at play”. It led to the introduction of six bills on computer crime in the U.S. congress.
September 6
Knowledge is open if anyone is free to access, use, modify, and share it
Today in 2006 the first official release version (1.0) of the Open Definition was published.
September 7
Today in 2004 Wikimedia Commons was launched, an important repository for (remotely) educational media files that often goes unnoticed in the shadow of its big sister project, Wikipedia.
September 8
Today is International Literacy Day.
September 9
Today in 2007 the English edition of Wikipedia reached 2 Million articles and was the biggest Encyclopedia of all times. It is a flagship of a wave of reintroduced user interactivity branded the “Web 2.0”.
September 10
Today in 2001 the Invisible IRC Project released the first official version of its software, the precursor of the Invisible Internet Project (I2P).
September 11
Today in 1995 the HP SureStore CD-Writer 4020i was announced. It was the first CD writer available for less than 1000 US dollars. CD recorders came within the reach of average consumers with prices eventually dropping below 100 dollars.[8]
September 12
Today the Day of Civic Hacking is celebrated in the USA. It is a day of action for programmers, designers and data scientists to develop solutions to problems and improve life within a community, for example by making processes in their environment more transparent or exposing problems, often enabled by Open Data. It is held since 2013, with hackathons and public events.
September 13
Today in 1956 the world’s first commercial hard disk drive was shipped. Advances in the development of hard disk drives have made long-term data storage capacity exhibit the fastest growth of all the basic elements of a computer system. This made storage so incredibly cheap that most people fail to imagine the scale and enabling potential of today’s data storage capacities.
September 14
Today in 2015 Stephanie Lenz wins against Universal Music after fighting for fair use of copyrighted content for over eight years. The verdict said that copyright holders must consider fair use in good faith before issuing a content takedown notice.
September 15
Today in 2003 The Pirate Bay was founded, the most iconic and resilient of all file-sharing platforms. It was born in the context of a widespread sense of entitlement among Scandinavians who see the American content industries as an ungrateful beneficiary of the fertile breeding ground of pop music that Scandinavia is, with international names like Abba and Roxette.
September 16
.jpg)
Today in 2013 Valve co-founder and executive director Gabe Newell famously stated his conviction that “Linux and open source are the future of gaming“ and that the company helps game developers achieve Linux compatibility. Valve followed up on its promises with SteamOS, Steam Machine and Proton, among others.
September 17
Today in 1991 version 0.01 of the Linux kernel was published.
September 18
Today in 1992 the first JPEG standard was published. It allows perceptually nearly indistinguishable reproductions of natural images at a fraction of the uncompressed size of the original, while the degree of compression can also be increased until the image impression falls apart. This well-engineered open standard is ancestor to almost all following popular lossy (moving) image compression algorithms, having all their main building blocks already in place. For still images, it proved difficult to improve on. It is an example of particularly long-lived, so-called “golden formats” that are especially well suited for long-term archival. While the standard specifies additional features, only those not encumbered by patents got widely implemented. Nevertheless, even the patent status of the core technology had to be defended in court.
September 19
Today in 2009 began the Free Software Foundation mini-summit on Women in Free Software. It was just one project in a wave of activity that rebirthed and set a regular schedule for GNOME’s outreach program which grew into a successful and lasting project. It was one of the first official acknowledgements of systemic sexism the Free Software world.[9] Even compared to the rest of the IT industry, the gender ratio was several times worse.
September 20
Today in 2002 the initial release of the Tor software took place.
September 21
Today in 2015 people started to share their abortion experiences in public under the hashtag #ShoutYourAbortion as a campaign against stigmatization and shaming.
September 22
Today in 2015, the last valid patent on MP3 expired (US patent 5,812,672) and the extremely popular audio format became a patent-free and open standard.
Although better formats are now available that also cover a wider range of uses, this contributes to the likely immortality of the format that began its career in the 1990s as an enabler of music file sharing in near-transparent quality.
September 23
Today in 2008 the first Android-based mobile phone was launched. Advances in energy efficiency and battery technology led to a decline in PC sales in favor of mobile devices towards 2010 (post-PC era). Following the introduction of the iPhone and 3G mobile networks, Android accompanied the mobile web to a wider audience. Building on the success of iTunes, the reinvention of the online software repositories of Linux as the "App Store" concept contributed to the popularity of the platform. The Linux-based Android system became the most popular operating system of all time. Although it has a core of Free Software and the introduction of Linux operating systems achieved a major breakthrough with Android, parts of mainstream Android distributions are proprietary – including a backdoor.
September 24
Today is World Day Against Software Patents. Software patents block features in software. Do something, buddy!
This international awareness day was declared in 2008, commemorating the rejection of key elements of a proposed directive on the patentability of “computer-implemented inventions” by the European Parliament in 2003. While this was celebrated as a victory of activism against software patents, others point out that Europe is still not free of patents on software algorithms. Also, isolated solutions are of limited value in a globalized world. Although serious efforts against overly broad and trivial patents are emerging, this can also be seen as a measure to strengthen the justifiability of the patent system in general. Some see software patents only as a special case of a broader problem and dream of a world without all patents.
September 25
Today is the birthday of Mary Allen Wilkes. After working on other early computers like the IBM 709 and TX-2, she developed the operating system for the first minicomputer, the LINC Assembly Program 6, one of the first interactive PC operating systems, and designed the LINC console. She was the first home computer user. Later, she pursued her old dream of becoming a lawyer, which her mentors had previously dissuaded her from because she was a woman.
September 26
Today is National Public Lands Day in the U.S.
September 27
Today in 1983 Richard Stallman announced the GNU Operating System as well as the GNU Project, where the explicit philosophy behind Free Software was developed and formulated. The announcement included a prototype of the GNU Manifesto. Feeling that value-devoid commercial enterprises were threatening the protected sphere of his productive hacker playground at university, motivated Stallman to engage in the obsessive powerhack that his work on GNU constitutes. It jumpstarted the modern Free Software ecosystem.
September 28
Today is the International Day for the Universal Access to Information. It was designated by the UNESCO, pushed by African civil society groups.
September 29
Today in 1996 Bliss, the first or second Linux virus, was first documented. While Unices had offered superior security for many years, any sense of unsinkability was now officially invalidated for Linux. Linux is still less targeted than Windows – sadly due to its lower acceptance.
September 30
Today is International Translation Day. It was established on the birthday of the christian patron saint of translators, which shows a different face of translation than that of building bridges: language as an instrument of power. Christians are particularly interested in translation and are very active in the field of dying languages. When big empires met a foreign culture, history shows repeating patterns of trying to subject the others to the own culture.
October 1
Today in 1994 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee. It is an important player in the standardization of open formats and protocols, a central foundation for the success of the Internet. But then they also standardized digital rights management for HMTL5, the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME).
October 2
Today in 2005 the Open Content Alliance was announced. It is one of the largest retro-digitisation initiatives.
October 3
Today in 1999 source code of the the Doom engine was released as Free Software. The source code was released two years earlier, but under a non-free license.
October 4
Today in 1985 Free Software Foundation was founded.
October 5
Today in 2016 Colin R. Turner published Into The Open Economy in which he proposes “open access economy”, an economy without trade and governance.
October 6
Today in 1999 was the first release of DeCSS (version 1.1b). It contained the decryption algorithm for the Content Scramble System and a decryption key extracted from the Xing DVD player software. Its source code was leaked a little later and helped write libdvdcss which cracks the copy-prevention system and allows DVD-Video playback on free operating systems.
October 7
Today in 1954 IBM demonstrated the first calculating machine based entirely on solid-state transistors. It was a cheaper, cooler, 95 % more energy-efficient experimental conversion of a vacuum tube machine.
October 8
Today in 1982 the inaugural meeting of the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) was concluded, an organization of the world’s major space agencies that develops international standard protocols for space communications.
October 9
Today in 1971 was the first time an email was sent from one host computer to another. Email is the oldest popular Internet service.
October 10
Today in 2010 Geeks Without Bounds was founded.
October 11
Today in 1993 the UNIX trademark was transferred to the vendor-independent X/Open consortium. While previously only one or two dominant variants existed, several increasingly incompatible proprietary Unix forks appeared in the past few years. Vendors had been fighting for influence on the development of the platform standard and fragmented the Unix ecosystem. AT&T partnered with Sun, which prompted concerned rivals to form the Open Software Foundation (OSF) to develop open Unix standards. AT&T and its partners then formed their own standards group, Unix International. The first significant step towards resolving the so-called Unix wars was taken with the formation of the Common Open Software Environment initiative, when all participants came together in a neutral forum to base the future of all their Unix variants on open, unified standards.
October 12
Today in 2001 the GPL-compliant patentleft Open Patent License was announced by the Free Software Foundation and FSMLabs.
October 13
Today in 2002 the first free version of Blender was released after crowd-funded payment for its open source release. It shaped to be a real competitor for 3DS, C4D, & Maya.
October 14
Today in 1996 Matthias Ettrich announced the free “Kool Desktop Environment”, KDE.
October 15
Today in 1996 Netscape introduced the first server-side JavaScript implementation LiveWire, foreshadowing a “JavaScript everywhere” future in a great return of this kind of technology: After the similar Node.js arrived in 2009, with significantly improved performance by leveraging newer just-in-time compilation, JavaScript went on to become the most widely used programming language of all time. The Node Package Manager lists more software modules than any other software repository before.
October 16
Today in 2008 Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig was published.
October 17
Today in 2011 first code for the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) was committed to the Tor Project’s git repository.
October 18
Today in 2008 Thingiverse was launched.
October 19
Today in 1969 the charge-coupled device was invented.
October 20
Today in 2004 the first Ubuntu release was made. Ubuntu was going to be the most popular desktop Linux, with remarkably good user support and an easier user interface. When it arrived, it opened up the world of Linux to new groups of users. For many, it represents their first conscious Linux experience. It is also known for some questionable development decisions by manufacturer Canonical: For a while, all input to Ubuntu’s central search field was sent to Amazon, unencrypted. Some more ambitious innovations have been canceled due to protest from users that were puzzled by seeming reinventions of the wheel, such as the convergence of desktop and mobile user interfaces.
October 21
Today in 2010 the first official release of OpenStack was made. This large infrastructure project is being developed by several companies to meet a common need.
October 22
Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the information is not made widely and readily available to society.
Today in 2003 the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities was published. It was one of the statements that established the term Open Access.
October 23
Today in 2001 the iPod was introduced, a very successful flagship product from Apple. Music was moving to hard drives. Together with the accompanying iTunes software, it brought convenient accessibility for large music collections to the masses. Users had tasted the feel of having all the music they could ever listen to at their fingertips. After Napster and its progeny the genie was out of the bottle and a startled music industry was fighting a futile fight to turn back the clock. 2003 the system was complemented by the iTunes Store, a legal music download service that profited from criminalization campaigns of the industry to scare file-sharing users. The iPod created a market for music on the Internet, paved the way for the Open Music Model, for Spotify and the like. Users gladly surrendered control over their music consumption and settled for (industry-controlled) access rather than more self-determined ownership of music files.
October 24
Today in 2003 version 1.0 of the compiler system LLVM was released. Strong corporate support is reflected in its licensing, which also positions the project as a liberal alternative to the copyleft-licensed GNU Compiler Collection, which has repeatedly fueled the Open Source vs. Free Software debate.
October 25
Today in 1861 the first telegraph message was sent across the North American continent. Previously, messages were transmitted by horse-mounted couriers of the Pony Express system. With transmission speeds now approaching the speed of light, the Pony Express ceased service within the week.
October 26
Today in 2018 Microsoft took over GitHub, the monopoly for source code hosting with millions of users and projects. With the integration of Web 2.0 gamification features (“social coding”), with user profiles that include résumés and references, Github established itself as a self-promotion platform for developers. It was able to capitalize on the platform effect and user dependency. Combined with the convenience of its all-in-one service it managed to become the new monopoly for programming collaboration. “Code is on Github” became a standard and good style for code releases, to show that you are willing to follow developers instead of throwing some code over the wall. With platforms – like Amazon, Netflix, Android – at the center of entire ecosystems and often holding a monopoly position, selling people’s dependency on a platform has become one of the most profitable business models. The purchase is therefore an obvious strategic investment for Microsoft.
October 27
Today in 2007 What.CD was launched. It was the most successful successor to Oink’s Pink Palace.
October 28
Today in 2014 the HTML5 specification was finalized. It ended the reign of Adobe/Macromedia Flash. While Web users run a lot of non-free JavaScript (e.g. YouTube’s HTML5 player), at least the platform is based on open standards and mostly Free Software. Flash is no longer required to display videos or consume web content of any kind. In 2011 Adobe threw in the towel on Flash and transistioned to HTML5 itself.
October 29
Today in 1969 the first transmission on the ARPANET was made, with the receiving system crashing after two bytes. On the anniversary of this date the International Internet Day is held.
October 30
Today in 2012 the dutch Rijksmuseum started to make its massive art collection freely available as full digital reproductions.
October 31
Today in 2005 Sony’s XCP rootkit became public.
November 1
Today in 1984 Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy was published. It documents the origins of the hacker culture and their philosophy and coined the term “hacker ethic”.
November 2
Today is the birthday of George Boole. His work laid the foundations of electronic computing and information processing as we know it.
November 3
Today in 2008 version 1.0 of the free video format Theora was released. It provided the world with a viable alternative to patent-encumbered video compression technology, but it was a step behind in terms of quality versus compression and therefore found only limited acceptance.
November 4
Today in 1952 millions of people got introduced to electronic computers when the television network CBS calculated an accurate prediction of the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower on their fifth build of a UNIVAC I system. When the machine predicted against all other predictions, the head of the news team decided to hush up the exact prediction, until the actual result fell within 1 % and an embarrassed newscaster admitted the cover-up.
November 5
Today in 2001 the first Audio CD was released that was intentionally corrupted for copy protection purposes, using a scheme called “Cactus Data Shield”, without properly informing users. Forced by disgruntled buyers, the Bertelsmann Music Group started replacing the disks two weeks later.
November 6
.jpg)
Today is Alexandra Elbakyan’s birthday. She is a hacker who became known for starting SciHub.
November 7
Today in 2013 Open-Source Lab by Joshua M. Pearce was published.
November 8
Today in 1956 the Hush-A-Phone v. United States case was decided. According to the decision, it is allowed to physically connect any device to the U.S. telephone network that does not interfere with its operation. In 1968 the FCC extended this privilege to electrical connections to the network. The ruling is considered a landmark for network neutrality, as it enables network use other than that intended by its operator, such as the use of answering machines.
November 9
Today in 1984 the 1984 Hackers’ Conference started. It hosted influential discussions about the values of the hacker movement.
November 10
Their interest is in protecting the software patent system that provides them revenue from Open-Source-driven reform.– Bruce Perens
Today in 2005 the Open Invention Network, a patent non-aggression community, was founded, mostly by large technology companies.
November 11
Today in 2016 the documentary film National Bird had its theatrical release in the US.
November 12
Today in 2005 TorrentFreak was launched.
November 13
Today in 1974 Karen Silkwood died when she tried to deliver proof of corporate practices at a Plutonium plant to the press.
November 14
Today in 2017 Firefox version 57 was released, the first version with major Rust components from the experimental Servo project enabled. After research into generic solutions for memory and data-race safety in the academic world, some of the solutions were finally transferred to the front line of systems programming by integrating them into a popular, Internet-exposed piece of software.
November 15
Today in 2005 Apple released Darwin, the open-sourced core of its new line of Unix-like operating systems that are otherwise commercial and locked down, a controversial strategy later referred to as the open-core model.
November 16
Today in 1974 humanity made its first attempt at intergalactic communication by sending the Arecibo message. We have not yet received an answer from E.T., which will not be possible for about 60,000 years due to the stagnating progress in physics.
November 17
Today in 1999 SourceForge.net was launched; the first significant product of its kind: an Internet platform that provides infrastructure for Free Software development, complete with hosting as well as development and collaboration tools.
Under frequently changing ownership and management, SourceForge was working on its own demise with questionable monetization attempts that cost trust and got the site onto on advertising and malware blocklists. For example, it was known for misleading advertisements with fake “download” buttons that were bigger and in more prominent locations than the real one, and incentivized developers to bundle their software with installers for pseudo-free spyware. When one day SourceForge seized several popular accounts and offered the software in question bundled with spyware, masses of users migrated to the now-dominant competitor Github.
November 18
Today in 1997 the first IEEE 802.11 Wifi standard was released. IEEE 802.11b was popularized in 1999 for local area networks in homes, cafés and workplaces (with Apple’s “Airport” routers and Macs and the “Wifi” branding), and later also for wireless community networks.
November 19
Today in 1975 Bit blit was finished. It was first implemented by Dan Ingalls and Diana Merry at Xerox PARC. It is a foundation to modern graphical user interfaces.
November 20
Today in 1963 an issue of the MIT newspaper The Tech was published with the first documented use of the term “hacker”. Contrary to Richard Stallman’s narrative, it was bearing a black-hat connotation.
November 21
Today in 1969 the first permanent ARPANET link was established. It was the first large-scale, general-purpose computer network that connected different kinds of computers. Other similar networks, including NPL, ALOHANET, HLN and CYCLADES, followed closely but were outrun by ARPAnet due to its massive funding.
November 22
,_(Mayence,_Johannes_Gutenberg,_1455)_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)
Today in 1454 Johannes Gutenberg printed his first dateable (and profitable) print product: one of thousands of indulgences. The ability to serve the religious market with masses of cheap print products was an impressive performance demonstration of the underlying movable-type printing technology. Although it was originally invented in China as early as 1040 A.D. (read: about 2,500 years earlier), this finally led to its widespread adoption which later also benefited dissemination of actual knowledge, serving the Renaissance and scientific revolution.
November 23
Today in 2005 the Free Software Foundation Latin America was launched.
November 24
Today in 1992 Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X was announced, the world’s first live CD Linux distribution. It drastically reduced the effort required to achieve a running Linux system/X server: Advertised as a “plug-and-play Linux”, it automatically detected hardware and configured itself accordingly. It pioneered IDE CD-ROM drive support when the CD-ROM driver situation was still very poor on Linux. The boot process had to be initiated with a floppy disk, since no standard for booting from CD was devised yet. It was ahead of its time, with available technology not yet fast enough for comfortable use. [10]
November 25
Today is Richard Greenblatt’s birthday. He was a key figure in the early hacker and Lisp communities and a member of the MIT AI Lab. He pioneered running a commercial IT company with a hacker-friendly environment and flat hierarchies.
November 26
Today in 2006 the Nexa Center for Internet and Society was founded.
November 27
Today in 1852 Ada Lovelace died at the age of 36.
November 28
Today in 1964 the Mariner 4 spacecraft was launched. It was the first mission to transmit pictures over interplanetary distances and the first to take close-up photos of another planet. Data arrived at 8.5 bits per second, and the first graphical representation of the data was hand-painted, paint-by-numbers style.
November 29
Today in 1974 was the announcement of the first commercially successful personal computer, the Altair 8800, which started the microcomputer revolution.
November 30
Today is International Computer Security Day. Go install some Linux systems, make backups and teach someone about password security and software updates!
December 1
Today in 2001 the Free-Software law was enacted in Kerala, an Indian state with about 33 million people. This was followed by similar laws in Venezuela (2004, ~30 million), Ecuador (2008, 17 million), Peru (2005, ~33 million).
December 2
Today is World Computer Literacy Day.
December 3
Today in 1998 Giko appeared on 2channel. It is the first cat meme on the Internet.
December 4
Today in 1995 the Comitê para Democratização da Informática aka. Center for Digital Inclusion was founded.
December 5
Today in 1973 Serpico was published, a neo-noir biographical crime film on Frank Serpico who revealed widespread corruption in the New York City Police Department.
December 6
Today in 2020 Microsoft announced that future versions of its Edge browser will be based on Google’s open Chromium core.
December 7
Today in 2001 the first e-mail was sent over the mailing list of the yet unnamed Rockbox aftermarket firmware project. A group of reverse engineering hacker enthusiasts formed around this mailing list and started reimplementing a firmware for Archos players.
December 8
.jpg)
Today in 1943 the specialized first (partially) programmable electronic computer had its first test run before being installed at Bletchley Park for Britain’s cryptanalysis efforts against the Nazis. It was hardwired and programmed with switches.
December 9
Today is Grace Hopper’s birthday. She worked on machine-independent programming using english words.
December 10
Today is Ada Lovelace’s birthday. She realized that Babbage’s Analytic Engine could represent not only numbers, but also generic entities such as words and music.
December 11
Today in 1989 Dr. Joseph Popp sent diskettes containing the AIDS Trojan, the first known ransomware, to thousands of recipients.
December 12
Today in 1984 Cisco was founded. It became a multi-billion dollar company based on the production of physical infrastructure for the Internet.
December 13
Today in 2004 the first batch of Vores Øl (our beer) was produced, the predecessor of FREE BEER (“free beer” as in “free speech”, not “free beer”...).
December 14
Today in 1988 TAT-8, the first transatlantic fiber-optic cable, entered service.
December 15
_5_-_Kuko.jpg)
![most of you steal your software. [...] Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?](/wiki/File:Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobbyists.jpg){kind=link}
On today's birthday of the Esperanto creator, Esperantists celebrate Zamenhofa Tago or Esperanto Book Day, the most popular holiday in Esperanto culture, with events to promote Esperanto literature. The auxiliary language is the strongest project of its kind to date. It is pitched as pivot language that can facilitate communication between participants that do not even speak Esperanto as a common language. This older community shares many beliefs and goals with enthusiasts who believe in the democratizing powers of the Internet, but focuses on a different technology with more low-tech appeal.
December 16
Today in 1947 the first working transistor was made at AT&T's Bell Labs in New Jersey. The first to see it were some colleagues who were given an internal demontration a few weeks later, and at the end of June next year it was presented to the public.
December 17
Today in 2012 the Freedom of the Press Foundation was launched.
December 18
Today in 1987 the Perl programming language was released. It was designed for administrators, with a focus on manipulating text. Its power and a shallow learning curve allowed for quick, satisfying hacks and contributed to its once immense popularity, especially for operating Internet services. It held hundreds of thousands of websites together. Problems included a lack of focus on code maintainability.
December 19
Today in 2011 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced its massive open online course program MITx.
December 20
Today in 1997 was the first release of the GNU Privacy Guard (gpg).
December 21
Today in 1999 the Quake engine was released by id Software as Free Software.
December 22
Today in 2017 The Post about Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon papers was released nationwide in the USA.
December 23
Today in 1998 was the official start of the OpenSSL project as fork of SSLeay when its original authors silently ditched the project for a job at RSA Inc.
December 24
The first “real” use of the typesetting system TeX was for a christmas present in 1978. It is perhaps the oldest surviving free software project, dating from before the PC and the computer mouse. Its markup language was an important influence for HTML, and its arrival in India catalyzed the formation of the local Free Software movement in the late 1980s. With its perfectionist concept, this cornerstone of digital typesetting software is still valued today in one form or another for its high quality output.
December 25
Today in 1990 the first version of the world’s first web browser, named WorldWideWeb, was released.
December 26
Today in 1982 Time magazine published its January issue which featured the home computer as “Person of the Year”, calling it 1982’s “greatest influence for good or evil” and recognizing the potential of computer networks. The computer had begun to become standardized (IBM PC compatible) and accessible to home users. For two years, sales had doubled every year.
December 27
.jpg)
Today is the birthday of Jean Bartik. She and did pioneering work on the ENIAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I systems. She assembled and trained the team that converted the ENIAC into a stored-program computer. The ENIAC led to the development of the computer industry. At a time when only the engineering of the hardware of computers was considered prestigious and therefore dominated by men, women were then given the job of debugging and programming these machines – and created the field of programming. She was also one of the first programmers in the U.S. Army and programmed the first missile guidance computer.
December 28
Today in 1969 Anna Torvalds started Linus Torvalds. He started Linux, the best-known free software project. For decades he maintained a leading role as its “benevolent dictator for life”. While not being the nicest collaborator, he coordinates the group of opinionated male kernel hackers putting to use some leadership training that he had gotten in the military.
December 29
Today in 2008 OpenBSC was published. It was the first in a family of free implementations of popular wireless protocols.
December 30
Today in 2015 Egypt’s NTRA blocked Facebook’s Free Basics aka. Internet.org service after it refused to offer surveillance capabilities to the government. It was launched in 2013 and marketed as tackling the digital divide, but is controversial because of its blatant violation of net neutrality. India later also blocked it, albeit with reference to problems regarding net neutrality.
December 31
Today in 2020 was the official end of the product lifecycle of Adobe Flash.
- ↑ https://www.afterdawn.com/news/article.cfm/2008/01/07/sony_bmg_drops_drm_in_digital_downloads
- ↑ https://arstechnica.com/2011/01/25-years-of-ietf-setting-standards-without-kings-or-votes/
- ↑ http://hyperlogos.org/blog/drink/term-Open-Source
- ↑ https://lumendatabase.org/notices/368
- ↑ https://fsf.org/news/2011-free-software-awards-announced
- ↑ David Fifield, Chang Lan, Rod Hynes, Percy Wegmann, Vern Paxson: Blocking-resistant communication through domain fronting
- ↑ https://futurenous.com.au/home/wp-content/uploads/jf2010_post-scarcity3.pdf
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/200301/roxio.com/en/support/cdr/historycdr.html
- ↑ http://datamation.com/osrc/article.php/3838186/Sexism-Open-Source-Softwares-Dirty-Little-Secret.htm
- ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cynd0guSUvM