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Posts Tagged ‘floss’

Rhasspy: a free/open voice assistant toolkit that’s fully offline

US Air Force research scientist Michael Hansen created Rhasspy as a privacy-oriented alternative to surveilling "voice assistant" products like Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri; the free/open project supports dozens of languages from German, French and English to Mandarin, Vietnamese and Russian, and is designed to run on Raspberry Pi-based devices.

It's licensed under the very permissive ...

Librecorps: an organization that connects student free/open source software developers with humanitarian NGOs

Librecorps is a program based at the Rochester Institute for Technology's Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) initiative that works with UNICEF to connect students with NGOs for paid co-op placements where they build and maintain FOSS tools used by nonprofits.

The organization and its participants have created a library of CC-licensed code and training documents, ...

Buy a Circuit Playground Express and a second one will be donated to Black Girls CODE

Phil from Adafruit writes, "For a limited time, whenever you buy a Circuit Playground Express the regular price of $24.95 here, on this page, Adafruit will automatically donate one to Black Girls CODE. Black Girls CODE's goal is to empower young women of color ages 7-17 to embrace the current tech marketplace as builders ...

Hiding secrets in online text with zero-width characters

Unicode includes six "zero-width characters" that are not visibly rendered in browsers (U+FEFF, U+200C, U+200D, U+200E, U+2060, U+180E) -- they're used for some specialized cases in rendering non-Roman alphabets.

Inzerosight's browser extension allows you to insert and detect hidden messages encoded in zero-width characters; absent the plugin or a source-code inspection, these do not show ...

SQL ****** Mystery: teaching SQL concepts with a mystery game

SQL ****** Mystery is a free/open game from Northwestern University's Knight Lab that teaches the player SQL database query structures and related concepts while they solve imaginary crimes.

It was inspired by The Command Line Murders, a ****** mystery game that teaches you to master Unix command-line syntax.

I love this kind of thing so ...

The Hippocratic License: A new software license that prohibits uses that contravene the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Coraline Ada Ehmke's Hippocratic License is a software license that permits the broad swathe of activities enabled by traditional free/open licenses, with one exception it bars use by: "individuals, corporations, governments, or other groups for systems or activities that actively and knowingly endanger, harm, or otherwise threaten the physical, mental, economic, or general well-being ...

Space Nerds in Space: a free/open co-op multiplayer spaceship landing simulator with combat, NPCs and more

Space Nerds in Space is a free/open source team game where players take on the roles of Navigation, Weapons, Engineering, Communications, Damage Control and work their controls to safely land a spaceship on a variety of planets, each with their own challenge -- and once your team is practiced, you can use a multi-team server ...

This is your smartphone on feminism

Maria Farrell admits that comparing smartphones to abusive men (they try to keep you from friends and family, they make it hard to study or go to work, they constantly follow you and check up on you) might seem to trivialize domestic partner violence, but, as she points out, feminists have long been pointing out ...

Google releases a free/open differential privacy library

"Differential privacy" (previously) is a promising, complicated statistical method for analyzing data while preventing reidentification attacks that de-anonymize people in aggregated data-sets.

If differential privacy were to be perfected, it would represent an amazing have-your-cake-and-eat-it proposition for Big Tech, which could continue to mine "behavioral data" for insights without having to worry about privacy ...

Fridge0: an open source hardware solar fridge with no battery requirement

Joey Hess designed the first Fridge0 a year ago: it uses a standard chest freezer with added thermal mass, a simple controller, and a photovoltaic panel that effectively stores sunshine as coldness, obviating the need for expensive backup batteries. The Fridge0 is an advance on traditional off-grid 12v solar fridges that assume that solar ...