Now that the dust has settled and we have made our voices heard, we would like to give a sincere thanks to everyone who helped to make the International Day Against DRM (IDAD) 2019 possible. This is the thirteenth year that we have come together to voice our dissent against the unjust power of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and we could not have done it without the help of digital rights activists from all over the world.

In our continued fight against DRM, we make it clear that we reject a world in which learning is shackled behind draconian restrictions. On IDAD 2019, we used our strength in numbers to tell Pearson that restricting access to textbooks is antithetical to the human right to education. Here in Boston, we protested outside the Pearson building, and spoke with a wide range of students and shoppers about the importance of their digital rights. Demonstrating our own commitment to a culture based on sharing rather than exclusion, we also worked in the FSF office, and remotely with collaborators from around the world, to make contributions to ethical and DRM-free educational materials.

The digital version of the dust jacket we made for this year's event is already available in six languages, with at least two more currently in the final stages of editing. It will remain freely available for you to print and share to spread the message of our resistance to media restriction. If you have a translation into your native language that you want to contribute, please write to us at campaigns@fsf.org.

With the help of our 15 participating organizations this year, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, APRIL, and Question Copyright, we proved once again that DRM is an issue that affects all owners of digital media, and is not just the concern of technologists. We would especially like to thank the FCK DRM campaign for highlighting our efforts in a newsletter that reaches more than eight million people worldwide, as well as No Starch Press, Leanpub, and Libreture for sales on DRM-free works that they held in conjunction with this year's IDAD.

Defective by Design continues its fight against DRM year-round, and there's still much more to be done. Just in the last week we have heard of the Disney+ streaming service's use of the highest level of Widevine DRM, and the forthcoming Google Stadia project is going to make a strong attempt at eliminating even the idea of digital game ownership. Here at Defective by Design, we are already brainstorming new ways to combat these attacks on our freedom, but to continue doing so we need your help.

To fight DRM, we need vigilant activists who will stand firm in defending the digital freedoms of those in their communities. We encourage any and all anti-DRM activists to join us as part of the Defective by Design email announce list, or to communicate with us in real-time in the #dbd channel of the Freenode Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network. Given the vast amount of resources corporations like Pearson, Disney, Netflix, Amazon, and Google have at their disposal, we are reliant on the community for donations to Defective by Design's mission to end DRM once and for all.

All of us at Defective by Design extend our heartfelt thanks and appreciation to everyone who participated this year, and we welcome all those who are just joining in on the fight.

Photo copyright: © 2019 Free Software Foundation, Inc., by Valessio Brito. This image is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

• artanis-0.4
• aspell-0.60.8
• binutils-2.33.1
• gdb-9.1
• libmicrohttpd-0.9.68
• libredwg-0.9
• nano-4.5
• parallel-20191022
• parted-3.3
• screen-4.7.0
• src-highlite-3.1.8

For announcements of most new GNU releases, subscribe to the info-gnu mailing list: https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/info-gnu.

To download: nearly all GNU software is available from https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/, or preferably one of its mirrors from https://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html. You can use the URL https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/ to be automatically redirected to a (hopefully) nearby and up-to-date mirror.

This month, we welcome Amin Bandali and Mike Gerwitz as new co-maintainers of GNUzilla.

A number of GNU packages, as well as the GNU operating system as a whole, are looking for maintainers and other assistance: please see https://www.gnu.org/server/takeaction.html#unmaint if you'd like to help. The general page on how to help GNU is at https://www.gnu.org/help/help.html.

If you have a working or partly working program that you'd like to offer to the GNU project as a GNU package, see https://www.gnu.org/help/evaluation.html.

As always, please feel free to write to us at maintainers@gnu.org with any GNUish questions or suggestions for future installments.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is happy to announce our office in Boston as the next official EmacsConf satellite! Join us on Saturday, November 2 for an all-day event on everyone's favorite self-documenting, customizable, and extensible editor: GNU Emacs! The FSF will join Zürich, Switzerland as the second physical satellite to EmacsConf, which will be held online this year.

Beginning at 9:00 a.m. EDT, we will be gathering at the FSF office to watch both remote and in-person talks on Emacs and Emacs Lisp. A light breakfast and dinner will be provided by the FSF, and three lucky attendees will come away with some official Emacs merchandise from the GNU Press.

A tentative schedule of the conference is as follows:

• 9:00 a.m. EDT: Conference begins with keynotes from Amin Bandali, Sacha Chua, and Emacs maintainer John Wiegley.
• 9:30 a.m. EDT: "User-related" conference track begins, with talks from Sachin Patil, Parham Doustdar, and Marcin Swieczkowski in addition to the lightning talks.
• 12:00 p.m. EDT: "Development" conference track begins, with talks from Jonathan Chu, Howard Abrams, Damien Cassou, and Matt Ray.
• 4:00 p.m. EDT: "Future" conference track begins, with talks from Greg Farough and Perry Metzger.
• 4:50 p.m. EDT: Closing remarks, with dinner provided by the FSF.

A small raffle will be conducted after the conclusion of each conference track, and Emacs stickers will be free for all attendees!

Although attendance is gratis, space is very limited, so please be sure to send an RSVP to campaigns@fsf.org as soon as possible to secure your spot.

Each year we stage the International Day Against DRM (IDAD) to help others learn about the dangers of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). For this year's IDAD on October 12th, we are focusing in particular on the increasing and disturbing amount of DRM present in ebooks and other online educational materials. Having so thoroughly invaded our leisure time, the digital infection known as DRM should not be allowed to spread into the classroom. Joining us in the fight for IDAD 2019 are the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and The Document Foundation, among ten other participating organizations we are privileged to have standing with us in the fight against DRM.

In a bid to become the "Netflix of textbooks," and like many other publishers, Pearson is doing the opposite of what anyone committed to education should do: severely restricting a student's access to the materials they need for their courses through arbitrary page limits, "rented" books that disappear, and many which require a constant Internet connection.

Publishers like Pearson should not be allowed to decide the rigidly specific conditions under which a student can learn. No book should spy on your reading habits or simply "disappear" after you have had it for too long. In the digital age, it is unacceptable for a publisher to impose the same principles of scarcity that would apply to a physical product to a digital file. The computing revolution was caused by files being shared, not merely rented. Imposing these limitations on digital media is an attack on user freedom, no matter how much corporate PR may spin the story. It's our aim to let the world know that we support the rights of readers. You could say that for IDAD 2019, Defective by Design has you covered.

We have developed a dust jacket you can slip over any "dead tree" book that you are reading to warn others about the looming threat of DRM. Whether in school, in a coffee shop, or on the subway, it is an easy conversation starter about the insidious nature of DRM. We encourage all readers to use them, whether on the latest hardcover bestseller or the textbook you use in class (while you still have one).

Defective by Design will be printing high quality versions of the dust jacket for every book shipped from our friends at the GNU Press while supplies permit. And true to our mission, we are also releasing the source files to these designs so that others may do the same. They are fully editable and shareable in Scribus v1.5+, so feel free to print, share, translate, and give away your own printed copies to readers and anti-DRM activists in your area.

Using ebooks for educational purposes is far from a bad thing: in fact, we will be bringing together the global Defective by Design community to help improve the fully shareable and editable works like those published by our friends at FLOSS Manuals. We're excited to be promoting an opposition to "locked-down" learning by staging a global hackathon on free culture works in the #dbd channel on Freenode, or our own in-person meeting to help edit these ethical alternatives at our offices in Boston.

Activists all over the world come together on the International Day Against DRM to resist Digital Restrictions Management's massive and aggressive encroachment on our real digital rights.

This year, we're confident that we can show major book publishers like Pearson that putting a lock on learning is unacceptable. Join us on October 12th and beyond in our double-fronted attack to tell others about the evils of DRM, and to eliminate unethical digital publishing by contributing to free and ethical alternatives.

Spread the message

• Print and share these covers as widely as you can, leaving them as freebies in libraries, coffee shops, and wherever books are appreciated. Snap a photo of your campaigning in action, and share it to social media with the tags #idad, #dbd, or #DefectivebyDesign.

• To help us coordinate year-round actions against DRM, join the DRM Elimination Crew mailing list.

• If you would like to translate the dust jacket into your language, please email campaigns@fsf.org and we will be happy to include it on the official Defective by Design site. We're currently offering them in English, Spanish, and German.

IDAD actions

• Protest with us on October 12th outside the Pearson Education offices in Boston, MA at 12:00, or coordinate your own local actions with us on the LibrePlanet wiki.

• Join our remote collaboration session on free culture textbooks in the #dbd channel of the Freenode network beginning on October 12th at 17:00 EDT (21:00 UTC). Or if you're in the Boston area, drop by the FSF offices at the same time for a night of fun, refreshments, and old-fashioned cooperation.

The International Day against DRM (IDAD), organized yearly by the Defective by Design campaign, is promising to be an exciting day of protest against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). This year we are standing up for readers' rights against the restrictive behavior of DRM-encumbered textbooks and digital learning environments from groups like Pearson, and our protestors will collect at the Pearson Education offices in Boston on October 12th, 2019.

The day's success is dependent on the amount of people showing up, and, of course, on the visuals that we provide to supplement our message. And so, we're inviting you to our sign-making party at 17:30 on October 9th, at the Free Software Foundation (FSF) office in downtown Boston! We will provide refreshments, art materials, and instructions to make your own protest signs, so all you have to do is join in the fun!

Volunteering at the sign-making party is a great way to meet new community members and to contribute to the fight against DRM. We are also still looking for people to join us in our Boston IDAD protest on October 12 at noon, as well as an evening hackathon, or collaboration session, on unrestricted and truly shareable educational materials in the FSF offices from 17:00 onwards.

When and how can I help?:

• October 9, 17:30: Sign-making party at the FSF office at 51 Franklin Street (dinner included)
  
• October 12, 12:00: Protest at the Pearson Education Offices at 501 Boylston Street (refreshments included)
  
• October 12, 17:00: Hackathon at the FSF office at 51 Franklin Street (dinner included)
  

Please email campaigns@fsf.org to confirm you will be there for any of these dates, or for more information.