Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 15/8/2010: Dell Streak Catchup and Misc. News





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



Leftovers



  • Terrafugia Flying Car Approved by FAA, Will Be Available Next Year
    Late next year, you'll be able to buy your own flying car -- er, "roadable aircraft" -- thanks to a thumbs-up from the Federal Aviation Administration. As long as you have $194,000 and a sport pilot license.


  • Tour of full-sized Bloodhound SuperSonic car model




  • Security/Aggression







  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Geoengineering = Futurological Greenwashing
      Alex has similarly argued that geo-engineering is a form of greenwashing in this post.


    • Resource: New Mobile App to Combat Climate Skeptics
      Ever wish you had all the top climate information at your fingertips? If you're the owner of a smart phone, then your wish has been fulfilled: the "Skeptical Science" app for iphones, Android phones, and Nokia phones is available now (for free!).


    • Hope for a future beyond oil
      We have a full crew and a pretty big campaign team on board with people from all over the globe including Argentina, Panama, India, Australia, Sweden, Germany, UK, Netherlands, Finland, Italy, Ukraine, the Cook Islands and Bermuda. I'll introduce you to various members of the crew throughout our journey and there will be opportunities for you to talk directly with them via twitter and maybe even live video if our satellite system is up for it. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.


    • The nuclear threat from Russia’s forest fires


    • Nuclear News: Iran ready to launch Bushehr nuclear power plant: official
      An Iranian official said Thursday that the country is ready to launch its first Bushehr nuclear power plant, the official IRNA news agency reported. Chief of Bushehr nuclear power plant workshop, Mahmoud Jafari, said in Bushehr that the main tests and inspections of the power plant have been successfully carried out during the last six months, the report said. Double-checks, "installations and montage stage is completed and we are about to launch the power plant," Jafari was quoted as saying without referring to the specific time. In July, Sergei Kiriyenko, head of Russia's state-run atomic energy corporation Rosatom, said that preparations for the launch of Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant are proceeding as scheduled and the plant's first stage will be finished late August. Iran handed over the Bushehr project, started by German firm Siemens in the 1970s, to Russia in 1995. The launch of project has been postponed repeatedly in recent years.’


    • Nuclear News: Russia declares state of emergency in nuclear town as wildfires blaze


    • Another Crack: Petermann Glacier, Giant Ice Island, Breaks Off Into The Sea
      While the Senate, the White House, and delegates in Bonn at the international climate negotiations dither, Mother Nature keeps the hits coming. Russia is of course baking in record heat and now the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland has lost an iceberg of 87 square kilometers in size. For scale, the ice sheet is said to be 4 times the size of Manhattan.


    • Security contractor: BP fired me for taking photos of dispersants
      A security contractor who was once responsible for keeping reporters away from cleanup workers is now coming forward to blow the whistle on BP.

      Adam Dillon claims he was fired by the oil company after he took pictures showing how dispersants were being used in the Gulf.


    • BP to pay 50 mln dlr fine for deadly 2005 Texas blast
      BP agreed to pay a record 50.6 million dollar fine for safety violations at its troubled Texas City refinery, officials said in a settlement which could deepen the energy giant's legal woes.


    • BP's Deep Secrets


    • Social-engineering contest reveals secret BP info
      With just two phone calls, entrant Josh Michaels managed to dupe a computer support employee at BP into spilling details that could have proved crucial in launching a network attack against the global oil company. The information included what model laptops BP used and the specific operating system, browser, anti-virus and virtual private network software the company used.

      Michaels was also able to trick the employee into visiting Social-Engineer.org, a feat that won the contestant extra points.


    • Climate data shows June 2010 to be Earth’s hottest month on record
      Temperatures warmer than average spread throughout the globe in recent months, most prominently in Peru, in the central and eastern United States and in eastern and western Asia, according to NOAA.


    • EU climate exchange website hit by green-hat hacker
      An EU Climate Exchange website was hacked as part of a political protest against carbon credits by a green-hat defacement crew.


    • A looming oxygen crisis and its impact on our oceans
      We’ve known for a while that we are poisoning the oceans and that human emissions of carbon dioxide, left unchecked, would likely have devastating consequences. A 2010 study found that oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred.








  • Finance

    • Did market efficiency cause the sub-prime mortgage meltdown?
      This time around I learned something even more interesting from Liar's Poker: the most important thing for a young Wall Street trader to learn (from the perspective of the firm's 'mentors') was how to take advantage of the firm's customers. You see the greatest market inefficiency turns out to be trust. Anyone who went to a large Wall Street firm like Salomon Brothers in 1985 seeking financial advice was pretty much like an African wildebeest without the ability to smell lions.

      If you happen to have a copy of Liar's Poker on your Kindle I would direct you to location 2954 - 3060 (about 65% of the way through the book). This is where Lewis describes his first experience "helping" a customer. He was set up by people within Salomon Brothers to push bonds that were likely to devalue, which caused his first (and very trusting) customer to lose so much money that he was soon fired from his nice job. Why would some trader at Solomon Brothers push bonds on a customer that were likely to devalue? Because Solomon Brothers owned the bonds and needed to get rid of them before they devalued more than they had already.

      Do you sense a conflict of interest? Yes, and so did Lewis (only because he was a newbie). When Lewis found out he had been used he confronted the trader who had set him up. Instead of being sheepish, the trader responded harshly to Lewis: "'Look,' he said losing his patience,'who do you work for, this guy, or Solomon Brothers?'" In other words, internally, the traders and managers didn't even pretend that they were supposed to serving their customers.


    • Job ads up despite coalition cutbacks (UK)
      The number of jobs advertised in the public sector has fallen 21 per cent since the last survey in March. But contracting jobs for local and central government IT departments is still a strong sector and places more adverts than any others except for finance.


    • Geithner: Unemployment could go up before it goes down
      Geithner defends tax policy; Argues extending cuts for rich would be 'deeply irresponsible'








  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

    • Websites take on bogus reviewers
      Customer review sites are a useful way to find out about products and services, and for the businesses themselves they can be a valuable source of publicity. But a number of spam reviews sweeping the web are damaging local firms who depend on them to help make or break their reputation.


    • Policing the Web’s Lurid Precincts
      Ricky Bess spends eight hours a day in front of a computer near Orlando, Fla., viewing some of the worst depravities harbored on the Internet. He has seen photographs of graphic gang killings, animal abuse and twisted forms of pornography. One recent sighting was a photo of two teenage boys gleefully pointing guns at another boy, who is crying.








  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • BlackBerry assures India on access to services
      Research In Motion has promised India a technical solution for decoding encrypted BlackBerry data, a senior official said on Friday, a step that could allay Indian security concerns about the smartphone and avert a shutdown.


    • Google lets uneasy Germans opt out of 'Street View'
      Google said Tuesday it would allow Germans to opt out of its disputed Street View navigation service ahead of its launch in the country this year but privacy watchdogs were still not happy.

      The move is part of an effort to placate German authorities, who have serious concerns about the service that allows users to view online panoramic still photos at street level taken using specially equipped vehicles.


    • Suit alleges Disney, other top sites spied on users
      A lawsuit filed in federal court last week alleges that a group of well-known Web sites, including those owned by Disney, Warner Bros. Records, and Demand Media, broke the law by secretly tracking the Web movements of their users, including children.


    • Electronic Frontier Foundation - Cindy Cohn


    • How to Crush Dissent
      While in Berlin for the LinuxTag 2010 conference a couple of months ago, I took the opportunity for a 8-mile long meandering walk across the city, from Warschauer Strasse and the East Side Gallery to Wittenbergplatz and KaDeWe, taking in the various historical sites along the way. It was a great refresher course in 20th century European history. I especially enjoyed the free outdoor exhibit in Alexanderplatz, which dealt with the Revolutions of 1989 with a focus on the various dissident movements and publications in the DDR. Most were self-published, stealthily distributed samizdat newletters, copied laboriously using typewriters and carbon paper, primitive printing presses, or toward the end, some personal computers smuggled in from the West. They had on display an Amiga 500 and an NEC Pinwriter P6 used in 1989. Through “advanced” technology like this, document production could be raised from a few hundred to tens of thousands of copies.

      [...]

      I strongly believe that the capability for citizens to dissent is an essential complement to fallible leadership. And all leadership is fallible. Without such capabilities, transitions of power may be less frequent, but they also may be far bloodier.


    • Hiding files in Flickr pics will fool web censors
      Life is about to become more difficult for countries trying to censor access to foreign websites. A system dubbed Collage will allow users in these countries to download stories from blocked sites while visiting seemingly uncontroversial sites such as Flickr.

      Collage relies on a well-established technique known as digital steganography, in which an image file is changed to encode the hidden message without obviously affecting the appearance of the image. A prototype version is due to be unveiled on Friday, 13 August.

      Steganography normally requires specialist software, but Collage is designed so that anti-censorship activists and readers can publish and download the hidden stories without any specialist skills. A publisher or activist can, for example, use Collage to copy news stories from a website and embed the articles into Flickr images in a process that is almost entirely automated.


    • Legal action on 'zombie cookies' filed in US court
      A legal challenge has been launched in the US against a number of websites amid claims that they were engaged in "covert surveillance" of users.

      The lawsuit alleges that a number of firms, including Hulu, MTV, and Myspace, used a Quantcast Flash application to restore deleted cookies.








  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Net neutrality for wireless? Don't count on it.
      Earlier this week, Google and Verizon brokered a compromise on the definition -- or at least, their definition -- of net neutrality, a set of rules that ideally, would ensure that no company could place data-access restrictions on Web content, sites, platforms, and associated equipment. The deal itself sparked controversy over whose interests Google (GOOG) and Verizon (VZ) really had at heart and whether the deal would -- or more importantly, should -- be used as a model by the Federal Communications Commission.


    • Wacky Google/Verizon net neutrality theory
      What if Google agreed to Verizon's stance on wireless net neutrality in order to keep Verizon from making a deal with Apple for the iPhone?

      Rumors about Verizon and the iPhone are evergreens, and now that the iPhone 4 hype is dying down, those rumors are starting up again. Coincidental timing of "Huge CDMA chipset order" rumors and this net neutrality piece shouldn't be anything other than coincidental.








  • Intellectual Monopolies





    • Copyrights

      • Marking and Tagging the Public Domain: An Invitation to Comment
        Almost 1€½ years have passed since we launched CC0 v1.0, our public domain waiver that allows rights holders to place a work as nearly as possible into the public domain, worldwide, prior to the expiration of copyright. CC0 has proven a valuable tool for governments, scientists, data providers, providers of bibliographic data, and many others throughout world. At the time we published CC0, we made note of a second public domain tool under development — a tool that would make it easy for people to tag and find content already in the public domain.


      • LA reporter abandons YouTube copyright case
        A Los Angeles journalist who was accused of leaking confidential court documents from his lawsuit against YouTube has abandoned his suit and has agreed to pay $20,000 to the video-sharing site.


      • New Jersey Hit With Fees Over Truth-in-Music Law
        New Jersey will have to pay the legal fees for a music promoter that sued the state to stop it from enforcing its "truth-in-music" law.


      • Brazil supports fair use
        The law change was discussed on Micheal Geist's blog at the end of last week, where Geist, who is a Canadian law professor, said that it "Establishes equivalent penalties for hindering or preventing the users from exercising their fair dealing rights. In other words, the Brazilian proposals recognise what the Supreme Court of Canada stated several years ago - over-protection is just as harmful as under-protection."


      • Pirate Party can’t contest Federal election
        “Our application to register is before the Australian Electoral Commission, however a party cannot be registered once an election has been called,” the party said in a statement over the weekend. Prime Minister Julia Gillard has called the next Federal election for August 21.












Clip of the Day



Richard M. Stallman Jan 07 2001



[an error occurred while processing this directive]



Recent Techrights' Posts

Why Techrights Cannot be Vilified (and Instead It Gets SLAPPed Repeatedly by Microsoft People)
Attack dogs are all "bark"; because they have no actual "bite"
Links 25/06/2025: Elon Musk’s Lawyers Caught Lying, WhatsApp Faces More Bans
Links for the day
Wayland Pushers Lose the Argument, Use LLM Slop and Chatbots to Make Up Arguments for IBM
Another new low and low blow
What is "MATA"?
Think of it as GAFAM or "Meta"
WebProNews is a Slopfarm
Please avoid linking to WebProNews
 
Canonical Seems to Have Culled Some Sources of LLM Slop From Planet Ubuntu
It's like "junk food", it's not information
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, June 25, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, June 25, 2025
On "Weak Claims"
For the record, they sent me unjustified threats, repeatedly tried injunctions (censorship)
EPO Squeezing the Staff - Part I - Burnout and Family Health
more exceptional circumstances
This Month's Mail (MX) Server Survey Shows Microsoft at 0.20% "Market Share"
We need to remind people that desktops and laptops decline (in proportion to other client devices) and at the "back end" GNU/Linux is already dominant and has long been dominant
Links 26/06/2025: Filespooler Guide and Learning to Code
Links for the day
The 'Case' of the Serial Strangler From Microsoft is a Lot of Copypasta (Maybe Also LLM Slop) From the Matthew Garrett 'Case'
5RB deserves to know and the matter shall be properly reported in due course (when the time is right)
Austrian GNU/Linux Usage Up to About 5% as More of Europe Abandons Microsoft
Since inauguration day the Austrian people have adopted more and more of GNU/Linux
Why the "Wayland People" and "Rust People" Will Lose Hearts and Minds (Same Reasons)
Wayland pushers are fast becoming like "Rust People"
5,600 Pages/Articles Per Year
So far this year we've kept all the promises
BetaNews Beginning to Show What Its True Goals Are
The 'new' BetaNews won't be about journalism. It's trying to sell things.
Microsoft Has Lost "The War"
We'll soon see the 9th or 10th wave of Microsoft layoffs in 2025 alone
Slopwatch: A Wreck and a Dreck, "Flooding the Zone With Dreck" or Flooding the Web With Junk
"Slopwatch" continues today because we have many new examples
Links 25/06/2025: Thwarting More Software Patents, Overlap Grows Between EPO Corruption and Illegal Kangaroo Patent Courts in EU
Links for the day
Brian Fagioli Created Another Slopfarm Targeting "Linux" After BetaNews Became a Slopfarm of Phantom Accounts and Pseudonyms
Mr. Fagioli even had slop about a dead Torvalds (hypothetical) as clickbait
Wayland is Perfect, Nobody Can Escape Its Perfection! (Or Not)
Do not form on opinion on Wayland based on politics
Moral Duty for "Linux Sites" to Speak Out Against LLM Slop
My wife has long complained about "Linux bloggers" keeping quiet and thus passive about a growing problem: slop
In Recent Hours Google News Promoted at Least 3 Slopfarms That Relayed Linux Foundation Propaganda Made by Bots or LLM "Bullshit Generators" (as Dr. Stallman Dubbed Them)
Google is circling down the drain and Google News too is hopeless
Linux Journal is a Slopfarm, It's Experimenting With LLM 'Authors'
Is Slashdot next?
Microsoft LinkedIn is Dying and Many More Layoffs Are on the Way
LinkedIn is just a failed acquisition of Microsoft. It causes losses and debt.
Gemini Links 25/06/2025: Combinatorial Music and Self Hosting
Links for the day
Richard Stallman Coming Back to Europe This Autumn to Give More Talks
His last talk in Europe attracted about 400-450 people
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, June 24, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, June 24, 2025
Social Control Media, Technology & Catholicism: Synod on Synodality review and feedback
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
How Many More Women Will Managers at Microsoft Strangle and Tell to Kill Themselves (or Try to Kill)?
The world needs to know what happened
The New BetaNews: 7 New 'Articles', All of Them LLM Slop
BetaNews is basically defunct. Nobody writes there anymore.
Another "Told You So!": XBox Mass Layoffs at Microsoft (Many Recent Reports Were Chaff and Spin), Many Other Divisions Affected
With mass layoffs at Microsoft the world would be much better
statCounter Estimates Only 1 in 300 Iranians Would Use Microsoft for Search
Iranians don't quite trust Microsoft
Gemini Links 24/06/2025: ftpd on FreeBSD and Online Small Web Magazine
Links for the day
Google News Does Great Harm by Promoting Slopfarms as Legitimate News Sites
Slopfarms are sites which are 100% LLM slop
Links 24/06/2025: Trouble at "Open" "AI" and ‘Siarhei is Free’
Links for the day
Gemini Links 24/06/2025: Stimulants and Subscription Costs for DRM
Links for the day
When the Microsoft Aggressors Rely on Several Law Firms ('Attack Dogs', 'Guns for Hire'), Not Just One, Lawyering Up Against Techrights (Acting on Behalf of Americans Against UK Publishers)
From serving customers at some restaurant he has moved on to bullying people with demand letters
Links 24/06/2025: OpenAI [sic] May Soon Die (Too Much Debt) and Social Control Media Accused of Being Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda Amplifier
Links for the day
Nirbheek Chauhan in Planet GNOME Explains Why Wayland Pushers Are Losing
"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
Polygamy, from Catholic Synod on Synodality to Social Control Media & Debian CyberPolygamy
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Only a Third of or 1 in 3 Web-Connected Devices is a Desktop or Laptop, According to statCounter
we can expect Android to widen its lead
The Days Are Getting Shorter, the First Half of 2025 is Almost Over
We're gratified to see significant increase in traffic and also positive feedback on the work we do
Turning GNU/Linux Into a Political Football
X (not the site) is Free software
X Server Still Works for Many People
A lot of people will grow suspicious of Wayland boosters/pushers if they persist and insist on using these tactics
Exactly a Week Ago "BetaNews Staff" Said "Betanews Is Growing Alongside You". Since Then Every Article (All by "Camila Nogueira") Has Been LLM Slop.
BetaNews is basically a slopfarm
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, June 23, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, June 23, 2025
The "Tarzan Effect" in Compilers and Software
What happens when you forcibly make things 'work', either by hacks or by disregarding warnings (like those that compilers tend to issue)?
Gemini Links 23/06/2025: Mass Tourism, Hair Love, and Google Gemini as a Googlebomb
Links for the day