Sorry I'm late getting this up. Had to somewhere to be after I finished editing last night!

Microsoft joins OpenChain and the FBI gets unlimited access to a genetic database.

Purism has announced a partnership with a game developer to bring gaming to the Librem 5 phone? We dig into the details. Plus, Microsoft joins the OpenChain project as a platinum member--and to my surprise, it's not another nonsense blockchain scheme, AND a private DNA aggregator has volunteered to share their database with the FBI. What does this mean for your medical and genetic privacy? All this and more TODAY!

Gaming

Purism partners with GDQuest to promote game development for the Librem 5!

https://puri.sm/posts/purism-announces-a-partnership-with-gdquest-to-develop-adaptive-game-tutorials/

This story is awesome.

Purism has partnered with game developer Nathan Lovato, known for his YouTube channel GDQuest
He recently successfully completed a kickstarter for a tutorial series of the same name
GDQuests's partnership with Purism comes as we're mere months away from the launch of the Librem 5 phone.
GDQuests is creating three videos tackling the topic

News

Firefox blocks auto playing videos

https://gizmodo.com/firefox-will-soon-free-you-from-autoplay-hell-1832334542

Firefox version 66 will join many other browser vendors in blocking videos that autoplay.
This feature is the bane of many users web browsing for a long time
Bloomberg and Business Insider are horrible bastards when it comes to such nonsense.
I'm a messy web surfer. If I have less than 30 tabs open, something's probably wrong.
So to locate the tab that just started playing a random-ass video I didn't ask for--that's just not cool
Browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Microsoft Chrome already block unmuted audio and video autoplay content.
The fact that it took Mozilla this long to adopt the same policy is puzzling.
I'm wondering why we don't hear pedants mourning this kind of censorship on the web.
- All the major browsers are breaking the HTML standard by blocking autoplay on elements, thus depriving web developers of their god-given right to pester people with autoplaying audible and visual noise
- If that was sarcasm, if you couldn't tell.
Video tags which have the "muted" element will still autoplay.
And users can allow pages to autoplay sound.

Microsoft joins the OpenChain Project

OpenChain Site

Press Release

For those of you who don't know, the OpenChain project aims to make compliance with Open Source licenses simpler, easier, and more effective for everyone involved in the software supply chain.
They offer training for companies so they can improve their open source compliance, specifications that compliance programs must satisfy, and conformance guidelines that organizations adhere to.
OpenChain is a Linux Foundation project
Microsoft has joined the project as a Platinum member
According to the press release, this was a move aimed allow Microsoft to "help create best practices and define standards for open source software compliance, so that its customers have even greater choice and opportunity to bridge Microsoft and other technologies together in heterogeneous environments."
“By joining the OpenChain Project, we look forward to working alongside the community to define compliance standards that help build confidence in the open source ecosystem and supply chain.” Said David Rudin, a Microsoft Attorney

Germany Slaps Facebook

https://gizmodo.com/facebook-scolded-in-germany-but-insists-it-needs-to-col-1832421065

German regulators said that Facebook gave the German people an "all or nothing choice" to submitting to Facebook's invasive anti-privacy practices or not use Facebook at all.
A German court just told Facebook they can't combine user data gathered through Instagram, Whatsapp, or other Facebook-owned sites, into a singular profile.
Germany's decision here could have a huge impact on Facebook's business model as it could impact the data aggregation and user activity tracking across third-party websites which integrate Facebook's Like, Share, and Pixel tracking.
Facebook then tried to say that their invasive, stalker-like behavior actually helps society at large by detecting "abusive behavior and disabling accounts tied to terrorism, child exploitation and election interference across both Facebook and Instagram."
- Which I don't need to tell you is a load of horse shit.

Genealogy site sharing info with the FBI

Genealogy site sharing data with FBI

CBC report of identical twins getting different results in the home DNA testing kit

This is a prime example of the Military-Industrial complex.
FamilyTreeDNA has granted the FBI access to its genetic profile database.
This more than doubles the genetic information that the agency has access to.
It's estimated that the FBI only needs 2% of the population's DNA to be able to "reliably" match any sample in the country.
FamilyTreeDNA has about 2 million genetic samples on record.
This is not the first time the FBI has used DNA samples from a private database
But this is the first time a private entity has volunteered their information for use by a public agency like this.
I would think that a company like this should be bound by HIPPA privacy laws, but do they count as a medical institution? I don't know... but I think they should be.
To my mind, the scariest thing about this is that an innocent person might get swept up into a criminal investigation based solely on their genetics (something they have no control over)
What really spooks me is how ill-informed the general public is when it comes to forensics thanks to propaganda like CSI, NCSI, and other procedural crime drams.
And how attorneys might be able to exploit that ignorance, twist results of investigations using this data, and actually convict innocent people of crimes.
Who's to say what conditions the DNA processing was done under, how reliable record keeping is at the company, or how their proprietary algorithms have interpreted the genome of the individuals in their database.
Linked in the show notes you'll find a report from the CBC about how these DNA testing companies is a bunch of humbug.
It's merely a "recreational" approximation of science and the results you get in exchange for your personally and familiarly identifiable information is guess at best--and you'll find you get very different results based on which company you choose to use.

Links