cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21415339

As Big Tech’s market power grew, so did its political clout. Now, as the EU tries to rein in the most problematic aspects of Big Tech – from disinformation, targeted advertising to unfair competition practices – the digital giants are lobbying hard to shape new regulations.

Read the full report.

In 'The Lobby Network', Corporate Europe Observatory and Lobbycontrol offer an overview of the tech industry's EU lobbying firepower. For the first time, we map the 'universe' of actors lobbying the EU’s digital economy, from Silicon Valley giants to Shenzhen’s contenders; from firms created online to those making the infrastructure that keeps the internet running; tech giants and newcomers.

We found a wide yet deeply imbalanced ‘universe’:

• with 612 companies, groups and business associations lobbying the EU’s digital economy policies. Together, they spend over €97 million annually lobbying the EU institutions. This makes tech the biggest lobby sector in the EU by spending, ahead of pharma, fossil fuels, finance, and chemicals.
• in spite of the varied number of players, this universe is dominated by a handful of firms. Just ten companies are responsible for almost a third of the total tech lobby spend: Vodafone, Qualcomm, Intel, IBM, Amazon, Huawei, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Google spend more than €32 million making their voices heard in the EU.
• out of all the companies lobbying the EU on digital policy, 20 per cent are US based, though this number is likely even higher. Less than 1 per cent have head offices in China or Hong Kong. This implies Chinese firms have so far not invested in EU lobbying quite as heavily as their US counterparts.
• digital industry companies are not just lobbying individually. They are also collectively organised into business and trade associations which are themselves important lobby actors. The business associations lobbying on behalf of Big Tech alone have a lobbying budget that far surpasses that of the bottom 75 per cent of the companies in the digital industry.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21439893

Meta has a Palestine problem. If you use Facebook or Instagram, you’ve probably seen the censorship yourself. Dena Takruri uncovers an internal culture of censorship, intimidation and fear within Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook.

She speaks to Meta employees who’ve tried to fix the problem or speak out, and say they were silenced or even fired. She also investigates Meta leaders’ deep ties to Israel, which may explain why it’s suppressing and censoring Palestine content for billions of users around the world.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21458338

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) support for the C23 programming language standard is now considered "essentially feature-complete" with GCC 15. As such they are preparing to enable the C23 language version (using the GNU23 dialect) by default for the C language version of GCC when not otherwise specified.

Preparations are now underway to set the default C language version of GCC to GNU23 as the GNU dialect of C23. Or in other words, implying -std=gnu23 when no other C standard is specified.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21468695

Forgejo v9.0 is the first version to be released under a copyleft license, after a year of discussions. Among the motivations for this change is the realization that a pattern emerged over the years, exemplified by Redis, CockroachDB, Terraform and many others. They turned proprietary because people chose their own financial gain over the interest of the general public. Forgejo admins no longer have to worry about this sword of Damocles: relicensing it as a proprietary software is not allowed.

The removal of the go-git backend is part of a larger effort to make Forgejo easier to maintain, more robust and even smaller than it already is (~100MB). When presented with go-git as an alternative to Git, a Forgejo admin may overlook that it has less features and a history of corrupting repositories. It would have been possible to work on documentation and new tests to ensure administrators do not run into these pitfalls, but the effort would have been out of proportion compared to the benefits it provides.

The Forgejo localization community was created early 2024 with the ambitious goal of gaining enough momentum to sustain a long term effort. A daunting task considering there are over 5,000 strings to translate, verify and improve. There has been many calls for help in the past and the community keeps growing steadily. Fortunately, the translation hackathon (translathon) organized by Codeberg in October was exceptional. It attracted an unprecedented number of participants who improved or created thousands of translations.

OGRE has grown to become one of the most popular open-source graphics rendering engines. It’s been 2 years since 2.3.0 and almost a year since the last 2.3.x release. It’s about time for 3.0.0!

• Ogre to OgreNext name migration
• Dealing with ABI mismatches: AbiCookie
• ABI Semver
• Move to C++11 and general cleanup

Forgejo v9.0 is the first version to be released under a copyleft license, after a year of discussions. Among the motivations for this change is the realization that a pattern emerged over the years, exemplified by Redis, CockroachDB, Terraform and many others. They turned proprietary because people chose their own financial gain over the interest of the general public. Forgejo admins no longer have to worry about this sword of Damocles: relicensing it as a proprietary software is not allowed.

The removal of the go-git backend is part of a larger effort to make Forgejo easier to maintain, more robust and even smaller than it already is (~100MB). When presented with go-git as an alternative to Git, a Forgejo admin may overlook that it has less features and a history of corrupting repositories. It would have been possible to work on documentation and new tests to ensure administrators do not run into these pitfalls, but the effort would have been out of proportion compared to the benefits it provides.

The Forgejo localization community was created early 2024 with the ambitious goal of gaining enough momentum to sustain a long term effort. A daunting task considering there are over 5,000 strings to translate, verify and improve. There has been many calls for help in the past and the community keeps growing steadily. Fortunately, the translation hackathon (translathon) organized by Codeberg in October was exceptional. It attracted an unprecedented number of participants who improved or created thousands of translations.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) support for the C23 programming language standard is now considered "essentially feature-complete" with GCC 15. As such they are preparing to enable the C23 language version (using the GNU23 dialect) by default for the C language version of GCC when not otherwise specified.

Preparations are now underway to set the default C language version of GCC to GNU23 as the GNU dialect of C23. Or in other words, implying -std=gnu23 when no other C standard is specified.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21439893

Meta has a Palestine problem. If you use Facebook or Instagram, you’ve probably seen the censorship yourself. Dena Takruri uncovers an internal culture of censorship, intimidation and fear within Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook.

She speaks to Meta employees who’ve tried to fix the problem or speak out, and say they were silenced or even fired. She also investigates Meta leaders’ deep ties to Israel, which may explain why it’s suppressing and censoring Palestine content for billions of users around the world.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/21439893

Meta has a Palestine problem. If you use Facebook or Instagram, you’ve probably seen the censorship yourself. Dena Takruri uncovers an internal culture of censorship, intimidation and fear within Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook.

She speaks to Meta employees who’ve tried to fix the problem or speak out, and say they were silenced or even fired. She also investigates Meta leaders’ deep ties to Israel, which may explain why it’s suppressing and censoring Palestine content for billions of users around the world.

Meta has a Palestine problem. If you use Facebook or Instagram, you’ve probably seen the censorship yourself. Dena Takruri uncovers an internal culture of censorship, intimidation and fear within Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook.

She speaks to Meta employees who’ve tried to fix the problem or speak out, and say they were silenced or even fired. She also investigates Meta leaders’ deep ties to Israel, which may explain why it’s suppressing and censoring Palestine content for billions of users around the world.

This new edition has been the occasion to overhaul the presentation in many places, but its main purpose is the update to the new C standard, C23. The goal was to publish this new edition of Modern C at the same time as the new C standard goes through the procedure of ISO publication. The closest approximation of the contents of the new standard in a publicly available document can be found here. New releases of major compilers already implement most of the new features that it brings.