Friday, January 3rd, 2020

Time	Event
8:58p	Security updates for Friday Security updates have been issued by Debian (netty) and Fedora (libssh, nethack, php, samba, and xen). (Comment on this)
9:16p	The Schism at the Heart of the Open-Source Movement (The Atlantic) It is not all that often that the mainstream press looks at issues in the open-source world, but this article from The Atlantic does just that; it looks at the controversy surrounding GitHub renewing its contract with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and the concerns some have had with their code being used by ICE. "So when news of GitHub’s contract with ICE emerged, its employees weren’t the only ones outraged. Because of the transitive nature of open source, volunteer developers—who host code on the site to share with others—may have unwittingly contributed to the code GitHub furnished for ICE, the agency responsible for enforcing immigration policy. Some were troubled by the idea that their code might in some way be used to help agents detain and deport undocumented migrants. But their outrage—and the backlash to it—reveals existential questions about the very nature of open source." (Comment on this)
10:11p	[$] Some median Python NaNsense Anybody who has ever taken a numerical analysis course understands that floating-point arithmetic on computers is a messy affair. Even so, it is easy to underestimate just how messy things can be. This topic came to the fore in an initially unrelated python-ideas mailing-list thread; what should the Python statistics module do with floating-point values that are explicitly not numbers? (Comment on this)

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