Blame game, simple.

Proprietary software comes with a price tag (some people think free = bad), a license (which implies some sort of ownership) and a company behind it which you can sue if something hits the fan. Zero responsibility for the licensee.

FOSS, in the other hand, is no strings attached (for the most part, some sw is dual-licensed and/or there are paid services): if it hits the fan, you clean it up.

So proprietary-mentality managers either cough up money for an IT department, which they almost never do, or fork off money to a proprietary company and write it off as an expense and externalize everything, including resposibility.

It’s done before in Munich. It can work.

(Yes I know others were also trying to do exactly this, but only Jia Tan was successful)

The reason you know is because the target software is FOSS. Care to bet other similar schemes have been successfully pulled off with proprietary software?

Wasn’t it Munich who did that a few years back, only to backtrack sometime later?

I’d go with “firefox with uBlock Origin” + “pi hole or similar”.

5 years later… changes have only been for the worse…

Weird DDoS mitigation?

In this day and age, and considering the model expressed so, there’s really no reason to continue to use the image, no.

Any defense of the use of this photo which does not address those points isn’t really a good faith argument.

According to you.

Tradition is not really an excuse for anything really.

doesn’t change that it’s from a porn shoot

Your point? (I’d call it more erotica than porn but that’s irrelevant.) If your culture sexualizes nudity per se that’s not my problem and if nudity offends you well that’s your problem. She consented to this, was an adult at the time, got paid for it and moved on (and, for most of her life, couldn’t care less).

The model has indicated she doesn’t want it used for this

It’s a pretty valid reason to me and it would be nice if people respected that. Do note that Playboy has the rights of the photo though, not her, but chose to let it slide 'cos… free publicity.

there isn’t any other possible standard besides this exact photo

I never said that. It’s an old photo, along with all the other photos of the time it should’ve been retired ages ago, on technical grounds.

But these are not the reasons the IEEE is banning the photo, now are they?

This is an interesting video on the matter.

Is a little shoulder porn now?

if you can’t understand how that would make some people uncomfortable then you might be a bit lacking in empathy.

I’m lacking in empathy.

The 3d world has Utah teapots and Stanford bunnies and dragons which are all very neutral and don’t hurt anyone.

Ooooh i’m sure someone, somewhere, somehow will feel offended. Better ban those too.

Yes, the provenance is “questionable”, but it’s a pic of a human wearing a hat, ffs.

The model being tired of it would be enough reason for me to stop using it (as you mentioned, there are plenty of alternatives); but American prudeness? No.

I do wonder, however, if more recent papers (2010 and forward) using that image were doing so as reference to older papers, or entirely contained to their own research.

I hadn’t heard of this before this post, the pic is innocuous enough, i wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people don’t even know that’s a crop of an old magazine photo.

I would’ve thought a paper magazine is more permanent than digital media.

Kids used to grow up playing outside and getting slapped by their parents when stepping out of line.

Now they’re grown inside social media isolation bubbles and eventually meet the real world, leading to mental illpreparedness.

are implementing more and more forced features you can’t disable

Not even through about:config?

The Peter principle says otherwise, but analysts are a factor for sure.

For me, a doorbell that is more than a doorbell is a perfect example of tech built to fill a need no one had.

Because the tech-illiterate people who have authority only know “productivity” tools and couldn’t care less about the opinions of the people who actually know what they’re doing.

Non-consensual pornography is called rape and it’s a crime in most of the world.