Displaying items by tag: US Immigration and Customs Enforcement

The Microsoft-owned software code repository GitHub has warned users not to upload banned content to the site, following its decision to take down the youtube-dl script after a complaint from the Recording Industry Association of America.

The Software Freedom Conservancy, an organisation that helps promote, develop, improve and defend free and open source software, has asked Microsoft to resign from the Recording Industry Association of America after the RIAA forced the takedown of youtube-dl, a popular command-line script that can be used to download videos from YouTube and many other videos from the Internet, from GitHub, a code repository owned by Microsoft.

The Microsoft-owned source code repository GitHub has taken down the repository for youtube-dl, a popular command-line script that can be used to download videos from YouTube and many other videos from the Internet, following a DMCA takedown letter sent by the Recording Industry Association of America.

Retail giant Amazon has announced that it will place a one-year moratorium on the use of its facial recognition technology by police in the wake of protests in the US over the killing of George Floyd, an African-American man, in Minneapolis.

GitHub officials have kept silent in public about the protests staged at the venue of the company's annual user conference on Wednesday, but at a private media session chief executive Nat Friedman was quizzed about it.

GitHub's deal with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has come back to embarrass it at the wrong time, with a number of employees resigning at the time the company is holding its annual user conference.

Workers at retail giant Amazon have written to chief executive Jeff Bezos, telling him not to sell Rekognition facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies and to cancel the contract for hosting data-mining company Palantir on its cloud.

Ninety-seven open-source developers have threatened to move their projects from the source code repository GitHub, which is now owned by Microsoft, unless the software behemoth ends its contract with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Microsoft excised some portions of a January blog post about its close association with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement — which is under fire for enforcing an US Government policy of forcibly separating asylum-seekers from their children — but then restored it after the deletion was spotted.