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The free and open source communities in India, particularly Mozilla and Wikimedia communities, are leading two unique global events for better privacy and in support of free software.

January Privacy Monthis led by the Mozilla community in India to educate themasses about online privacy via both online and offline outreach events. And,Freedom in Febis led by the Centre for Internet and Society to educate content producers like bloggers and photographers on how to donate their content under open licenses.

Mozilla's January Privacy Month beganlast yearto help celebrate the annualData Privacy Day. In 2016, this campaign held several in-person and online events thatreached14,339,443 people across 10 countries. "This was possible by sharing 1 privacy tip per day for 31 days throughout the month," says Ankit Gadgil, one of the core organizers. "And this year, we have three focus areas. First of all, we have made this campaign more open and global. Mozilla communities from Brazil, Italy, and Czech Republic are actively participating this year. All essential documents is localized so that we can target more users. Secondly, We are educating participants of offline events about marketing Firefox and other Mozilla products so that the users can have hands-on experience of using these tools that help protect their privacy. The third thing is, we are encouraging everyone that participate an offline event to blog about their learning. For instance, there was a Maker Fest in in the Indian state of Gujarat recently where they used Mozilla products to teach about privacy."

This year, the campaign continues to engage people at in-person and online events. Follow#PrivacyAwareto engage.

Mozilla products like Firefox have a security settingsboth in built and in the add-on library that are fully accessible to disabled peoplethat help protect users privacy and security, are all built collaboratively and are open source.

HTTPS Everywherecan be used forChrome and Operatoencryptuser communications so that external websites cannot seeuser's information. The project is built collaboratively by The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Freedom in Feb is an online campaign aimed at educating content creators about free content and show them how to contribute their work under free licenses.

To participate:

Creative works like multimedia, text-based content, art and design, etc. can be licensed under several Creative Commons licenses(CC),and other types of documentscan be licensed under the GNU Free Documentation Licenses (GFDL). Good examples can be found onWikipedia, where thecontent islicensed under both CC and GFDL licenses, allowing people to use, share, remix, and distribute derived work both commercially and non-commercially with attribution. Additionally, there arefree software licenses that allowdevelopers to share their software and software-related documentations.

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How communities in India support privacy and software freedom - Opensource.com

Free Software Foundation lists a Free Phone OS as a Top Priority for 2017 XDA Developers (blog) Hopefully that will change with the recent announcement from the Free Software Foundation that they are putting the free phone operating system as one of their top priority for 2017. In its mission statement, the FSF mentions the crucial need for a ...

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Free Software Foundation lists a Free Phone OS as a Top Priority for 2017 - XDA Developers (blog)

The Internal Revenue Service and its private-sector partners announced the 2017 opening of Free File, the free tax software preparation program that gives eligible taxpayers a dozen options for brand-name products.

Taxpayers also should remember that, by law, the IRS must hold refunds claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit or the Additional Child Tax Credit until February 15.

Anyone whose adjusted gross income in 2016 was $64,000 or less thats more than 70 percent of taxpayers will be eligible for Free File software. People who earned more than $64,000 may use Free File Fillable Forms, the electronic version of IRS paper forms, which will be available for preparing taxes on January 23.

You dont have to be an expert on taxes. Free File software can help walk you through the steps and help you get it right, said John A. Koskinen, IRS Commissioner. For 14 years, this partnership between the IRS and the Free File Alliance has helped taxpayers prepare and file their federal taxes for free. The real winner in this partnership has been the nations taxpayers.

Tim Hugo, executive director of the Free File Alliance, said, We are proud to once again offer the industrys most innovative and secure tax software at no cost to 70 percent of American taxpayers. Tax time can be stressful, but Free File makes step-by-step help accessible to everyone making $64,000 or less. Free File is the one place where taxpayers can choose from a variety of industry-leading tax software options in order to prepare and e-file their federal tax returns at absolutely no cost.

Free File is available exclusively at IRS.gov/FreeFile. Since 2003, more than 49 million people have used Free File, saving more than $1.4 billion based on a conservative $30-fee estimate.

Free Federal and Free State Tax Preparation

The IRS works with the Free File Alliance each year to ensure that taxpayers have more choices for free state options as well as free federal returns. Several offer both free federal and free state options.

State tax return offers are at the discretion of the providers. Some providers also offer state tax return preparation for a fee. Taxpayers living in those states only need Free Files federal tax products.

Find the Right Free File Product

Each of the 12 Free File providers sets differing criteria for use of their product, generally based on income, age or state residency. However, taxpayers with an AGI of $64,000 or less last year will find at least one product they can use. To make it easier to find the right Free File product, taxpayers should use Free Fill Software Lookup tool. Taxpayers can just enter in some information and let the tool find the products that match their situation.

For 2017, active duty military personnel with incomes of $64,000 or less may use any Free File software product of their choice without regard to the criteria.

Free File Helps Navigate Tax Changes

Free File software does the hard work. It walks users through the tax preparation process, and helps identify those tax changes that may affect their return.

For example, the IRS, by law, must hold all refunds that contain an EITC or ACTC benefit until February 15 time to ensure that the claims are accurate. Taxpayers should file as they normally would, and taxpayers should file electronically and use direct deposit. Refunds with EITC or ACTC may not be deposited into accounts until the week of February 27. Learn more at Refund Timing for Earned Income Tax Credit and Additional Child Tax Credit Filers.

Free File also can help taxpayers with their health care law requirements. Taxpayers must report their health care coverage or their return will not be accepted by the IRS. For each month in 2016, taxpayers and everyone on their return must:

Report health care coverage, or

Claim an exemption from coverage or

Report a shared responsibility payment.

Most people will simply have to check a box to report health care coverage for the entire year.

Shop and Compare: Free File Offers Best Free Value

Free File makes all versions of the Form 1040 available for free the Form 1040, Form 1040A and Form 1040EZ and their related schedules. All Free File forms are available throughout the filing season, not just for a limited time.

Free File members also do not repeatedly send taxpayers additional offers that drive up costs to users. Free File members cannot make repeated contacts, and Free File members are prohibited from offering refund products. Free File is meant to be a safe haven for taxpayers from these typically high-interest loan products.

Protect Identity and Personal Data

In an effort to combat identity theft, the IRS, state tax agencies and the tax industry are working together as the Security Summit. But the partners also need help from taxpayers to be aware of the various schemes used by cybercriminals to steal personal information.

The Free File Alliance and its members also are active participants in the Security Summit Initiative to provide additional identity theft safeguards for tax filing and for the Security Awareness campaign Taxes. Security. Together. that encourages taxpayers to take steps to better protect their data. Learn what taxpayers can do to better protect their identity.

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IRS offers free brand-name federal, state tax software - Southernminn.com

Paro Software, creator of HydroSym and HydroMan software for designing hydraulic schematics and hydraulic manifolds, respectively, has made its hydraulic-components library available to all users online for free. To gain access to over 40,000 hydraulic components, visit paro-nl.com/library.

The library allows for the design of full hydraulic schematics via simple drag-and-drop operations. Due to its international HydroSym user base, Paro updates its library with hydraulic components from around the world.

Our company mission has always been to make the lives of hydraulic engineers easier and enable them to do their jobs quicker and more accurately. said Marc Paro, CEO of Paro Software Heemskerk, Netherlands. In addition to generic symbols, many components are drawn specific to manufacturers, including Sun Hydraulics, Bosch Rexroth, Eaton, Parker, Yuken, and others.

We want to give hydraulic engineers all over the world one go-to place for finding specs documentation for hydraulic components, added Frank Halma, partner and director of engineering at Paro Software.

Company officials say that by digitizing up-to-date product specifications for hydraulic components, online and in one place, hydraulic engineers are able to quickly and easily find reliable information any time so they can get their job done.

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Component Library for Hydraulic-Schematic Software Offered for Free - Hydraulics & Pneumatics (press release) (registration) (blog)

Bryan is a writer and works as the Social Media Marketing Manager of SUSE. On this blog, he seeks to highlight the coolest things happening in the Linux world.

Network World | Jan 23, 2017 9:19 AM PT

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Free and open source software is an absolutely critical part of our worldand the future of technology and computing. One problem that consistently plagues many free software projects, though, is the challenge of funding ongoing development (and support and documentation).

With that in mind, I have finally settled on a New Years resolution for 2017: to donate to one free software project (or group) every monthor the whole year. After all, these projects are saving me a boatload of money because I dont need to buy expensive, proprietary packages to accomplish the same things.

Im not setting some crazy goal herenot requiring that I donate beyond my means. Heck, some months I may be able to donate only a few bucks. But every little bit helps, right?

To help me accomplish that goal, below is a list of free software projects with links to where I can donate to them. Organized by categories, just because. Im scheduling a monthly calendar item to remind me to bring up this page and donate to one of these projects.

This isnt a complete listnot by any measurebut its a good starting point. Apologies to the (many) great projects out there that I missed.

elementary OS In addition to the distribution itself (which is based, in part, on Ubuntu), this team also develops the Pantheon desktop environment.

Solus This is a from scratch distro using their own custom-developed desktop environment, Budgie.

Ubuntu MATE Its Ubuntuwith Unity ripped off and replaced with MATE. I like to think of this as What Ubuntu was like back when I still used Ubuntu.

Debian If you use Ubuntu or elementary or Mint, you are using a system based on Debian. Personally, I use Debian on my PocketCHIP.

PulseAudio PulsAudio is all over the place now. If it stopped being supported and maintained, that would be highly inconvenient.

Gimp The GNU Image Manipulation Program is one of the most famous free software projectsand the standard for cross-platform raster design tools.

FreeCAD When people talk about difficulty in moving from Windows to Linux, the lack of CAD software often crops up. Supporting projects such as FreeCAD helps to remove that barrier.

OpenShot Video editing on Linux (and other free software desktops) has improved tremendously over the past few years. But there is still work to be done.

Blender What is Blender? A 3D modelling suite? A video editor? A game creation system? All three (and more)? Whatever you use Blender for, its amazing.

Inkscape This is the most fantastic vector graphics editing suite on the planet (in my oh-so-humble opinion).

LibreOffice / The Document Foundation I am writing this very document in LibreOffice. Donating to their foundation to help further development seems to be in my best interests.

Python Software Foundation Python is a great language and is used all over the place.

Free Software Foundation The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom. We defend the rights of all software users.

Software Freedom Conservancy Software Freedom Conservancy helps promote, improve, develop and defend Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects.

Againthis is, by no means, a complete list. Not even close. Luckily many projects provide easy donation mechanisms on their websites.

Bryan is a writer and works as the Social Media Marketing Manager of SUSE. On this here blog, he seeks to accomplish two goals: 1) To be the voice of reason and practicality in the Linux and Open Source world. 2) To highlight the coolest things happening throughout the world of Linux.

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New Year's resolution: Donate to 1 free software project every month - Network World