UpStage (lgm2025)

UpStage, the artist-led platform for cyberformance (live online performance), celebrated its 20 th anniversary in 2024 along with the completion of the four-year Creative Europe funded artistic project Mobilise/Demobilise. This project enabled a complete “RE:imagination” of the UpStage code, removing its dependency on Flash, introducing new features and bringing it up to date with current technologies. The last time we presented UpStage at LGM, in 2021, we had just begun this process; since then, the new platform has been launched and development is ongoing. In this presentation, our Lead Developer Gloria W. and UpStage Persister Helen Varley Jamieson will present the...

State of Libre Graphics (lgm2025)

An update from the many projects of our community. ## Submit Slides and Content Please submit your slides as Pull Requests to https://github.com/libregraphicsmeeting/state-of-lg-2025 details to the format and process are in the README of the repository. If you have trouble contributing this way, feel free to contact us directly: [libregraphicsmeeting@strong-type.systems](mailto:libregraphicsmeeting@strong-type.systems). ## Call for Slides The public announcement is at: [Call for Slides: State of Libre Graphics](/news/2025-05-06_0001-call-for-slides-state-of-libre-graphics/). Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://pretalx.c3voc.de/lgm25-upstream-2025/talk/1718866582/
Video:lgm2025-83646-eng-State_of_Libre_Graphics_hd.mp4

The State of Processing: How We’re Bringing a Creative Coding Icon Back to Life (lgm2025)

Processing is one of the most widely used open-source tools for creative coding and CS education. Since it was first released in 2001, it has been instrumental in teaching coding to students, artists, and designers worldwide, serving as a gateway into programming for people who might never have touched code otherwise. A remarkable thing about Processing is the consistency of its API. Most Processing code written twenty years ago still runs in Processing today with only minor changes. That kind of longevity is rare in software and speaks to the project's thoughtful design. But behind the...

Chinese-Owned VPNs

One one my biggest worries about VPNs is the amount of trust users need to place in them, and how opaque most of them are about who owns them and what sorts of data they retain.

A new study found that many commercials VPNS are (often surreptitiously) owned by Chinese companies.

It would be hard for U.S. users to avoid the Chinese VPNs. The ownership of many appeared deliberately opaque, with several concealing their structure behind layers of offshore shell companies. TTP was able to determine the Chinese ownership of the 20 VPN apps being offered to Apple’s U.S. users by piecing...

Рецепт фасолей: как я отреверсил бюджетный кнопочный телефон, хакнул его и научил запускать нативные программы на C

Осторожно: помните ли вы, как в вашем телефоне Siemens, Motorola и Sony поселились маленькие программы — «эльфы»? В рамках этой статьи мы во всех деталях исследуем прошивку бюджетного кнопочника, разберемся в её архитектуре, хакнем и напишем загрузчик тех самых эльфов с MicroSD-флэшки. При этом я постараюсь объяснить всё максимально простым и доступным языком!

Недавно я познакомился с легендой форума allsiemens.ru — Ilya_ZX, который известен своим огромным вкладом в тему реверса и моддинга телефонов на платформе E-Gold и S-Gold. Илья поведал мне интересную историю о том, как в начале нулевых, будучи студентом, поспорил с одногруппником, сможет ли он добавить ‭‭«змейку‭‭» в свой...

Friday Squid Blogging: US Naval Ship Attacked by Squid in 1978

Interesting story:

USS Stein was underway when her anti-submarine sonar gear suddenly stopped working. On returning to port and putting the ship in a drydock, engineers observed many deep scratches in the sonar dome’s rubber “NOFOUL” coating. In some areas, the coating was described as being shredded, with rips up to four feet long. Large claws were left embedded at the bottom of most of the scratches.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Signal Blocks Windows Recall

This article gives a good rundown of the security risks of Windows Recall, and the repurposed copyright protection took that Signal used to block the AI feature from scraping Signal data.

Grundrechte-Report 2023 (grr)

Zur Lage der Bürger- und Menschenrechte in Deutschland Am Dienstag, den 23. Mai 2023 um 10 Uhr wurde in Berlin der neue Grundrechte-Report vorgestellt. In seinen 38 Beiträgen zeigt der alternative Verfassungsschutzbericht erneut auf, wie Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Behörden, aber auch Gerichte und Privatunternehmen die demokratischen und freiheitlichen Grundlagen unserer Gesellschaft gefährden. Link: https://www.fiff.de/veranstaltungen/grundrechtereport2023 about this event: https://www.fiff.de/veranstaltungen/grundrechtereport2023
Video:import-56349-deu-Grundrechte-Report_2023_hd.mp4

How Big Tech Exploits Apps to Circumvent Privacy Laws & a Solution from Purism

Despite the promises of robust privacy laws like Europe’s GDPR and California’s CCPA/CPRA, Big Tech continues to push the envelope when it comes to data collection. This is especially the case with regard to mobile applications. Big Tech takes advantage of a powerful loophole: apps operate as closed surveillance ecosystems where aggressive and wide-ranging Terms […]

The post How Big Tech Exploits Apps to Circumvent Privacy Laws & a Solution from Purism appeared first on Purism.

The Voter Experience

Technology and innovation have transformed every part of society, including our electoral experiences. Campaigns are spending and doing more than at any other time in history. Ever-growing war chests fuel billions of voter contacts every cycle. Campaigns now have better ways of scaling outreach methods and offer volunteers and donors more efficient ways to contribute time and money. Campaign staff have adapted to vast changes in media and social media landscapes, and use data analytics to forecast voter turnout and behavior.

Yet despite these unprecedented investments in mobilizing voters, overall trust in electoral health, democratic institutions, voter satisfaction, and electoral engagement...