May 10, 2020

New Website, Manjari v1.800 and More: SMC Monthly Updates April 2020

New Look for SMC Website!

SMC website now runs on a modernized tech stack. Latest redesign enables dark mode and makes the website localised and mobile friendly. New website is available on IPFS as well

The website migration was carried out by Santhosh Thottingal, Jishnu Mohan, Aashik Salahudeen, Balasankar C and Joice Joseph. Suggestions, improvements, comments are welcome.

Blog Theme Updated!

The blog itself has been updated to a new Ghost theme called Editorial. Anivar Aravind was responsible for this. We welcome community contributions to make both the website and blog better in terms of design as well as content.

Latest Version of Aksharamazha App Released

Jishnu Mohan released v2.0.0 of Akshara Mazha, live wallpaper application for Android on play store. Latest update features

Less distracting characters
Better text arrangement
More Malayalam fonts
UI improvements for preference screen
Support for newer Android versions

IndicKeyboard v3 beta Released.

Indic Keyboard released beta v3 for testers. In this release, Jishnu Mohan added emojis as per unicode 12 definitions and made miscellaneous crash fixes.

Beta version can be obtained from Play store beta channel. We urge testers, hobbyists and enthusiasts to test and report bugs.

Manjari Version 1.800 Released.

The text Kerala Sarkar(കേരള സർക്കാർ) is in Manjari font.

Manjari version 1.800 released. The popular Malayalam font has released with tabular number and slashed zero open type features along with bug fixes.

Corpus of Kerala Chief Minister Press Releases

Santhosh Thottingal made a Malayalam corpus out of Covid-19 press releases and announcements by Kerala Chief Minister's official Telegram channel. Split into sentences, the content is since 6 June 2017 to 19 April 2020. The corpus is available at SMC Gitlab Repo.

SAAS vs FOSS

Kailash Nadh wrote an insightful article titled "സാസോ ഫോസോ?". His observations helped understand how distinct they are amidst Saas Vs FOSS discussion happened.

Privacy and Security in The Time of Covid-19

Security and privacy are serious concerns these days, more so in this time of difficulty. A lot more people have started working from due to COVID-19 and most are doing it for the first time. Members of SMC community shared advisories on on protecting from online fraud and other possible manipulations. Hrishikesh KB shared his knowledge here while Anivar shared his expert opinion on Privacy, surveillance and health data to different news media.

SMC and Indic Project Endorsed a Representation to Ensure Privacy During COVID-19

Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, Indic Project with various organizations and individuals endorsed a representation to the Prime Minister's Office and various central government ministries on May Day opposing mandatory use of Aarogya Setu app. The representation ask ministries to ensure the privacy of health workers and volunteers who are active in COVID-19 alleviation programs.

SMC signed Joint Letter on Concerns Over Privacy in Wake of Corona

With support from SMC and other non-profit organizations, SFLC opened #ProtectHealthPrivacy portal to help public to express their concerns over the unwarranted and excessive collection and processing of personal data.

Stop exposing our Private Data: No Surveillance Without Due Process – final

The portal is up for individuals and organizations to demand that Government of India do collection and processing of data in the following manner

Time bounded
Necessary and Proportional
Transparent and Accountable
Secure
For the Limited Purpose of public health and combating COVID-19.

Fixed Grandham project deployment.

Balasankar C updated outdated TLS certificate for Grandham Project. He also fixed issues in its deployment as well.

Other News

Netha Hussain won RedHat Women in Open Source Award 2020.
Sruthi Chandran came second for Debian project leader elections.
Balasankar C got engaged through video conference.