Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links - Copyright Maximalists turn on Libraries, Other Horrors. Will Yang Return to Yahoo?

Reader's Picks



  • Security



    • Another Nugget from M$
      Days ahead of the patch folks all around the world have been able to take over almost any PC on a LAN running that other OS just by placing a malicious .dll on some networked storage device. The mind boggles. I can see SANs intended to share files among the group to be used to own the whole LAN.


    • Google sheds some light on Iran's involvement with the Diginotar cert incident.
      It means that somebody in Iran had gone to great lengths to intercept supposedly secure Internet traffic, including Gmail messages. ... [Iran] remains one of the few nations that would have a need to defraud Western companies in order to conduct such surveillance. Many governments, including countries with a poor reputation for defending freedom of expression or privacy, are able to generate any number of fake digital certificates on their own authority. The current dependence of secure Internet traffic on a few, potentially insecure commercial companies is a profound flaw.

      Richard Stallman notes, "I am sad to report that the Chrome browser that this was done with is nonfree software."



  • Defence/Police/Aggression





  • Finance



  • Anti-Trust



    • Yahoo co-founder urged to help oust chairman
      A major Yahoo Inc. shareholder is recruiting company co-founder Jerry Yang to join a crusade to oust Chairman Roy Bostock amid the upheaval triggered by the recent firing of CEO Carol Bartz. The shareholder, hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, sought Yang's help in a letter sent Wednesday.


    • MICROSOFT DONATES $8 MILLION GRANT TO THURGOOD MARSHALL COLLEGE FUND[sic]
      Microsoft Corporation has recently announced that it will be renewing its partnership with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund through an additional $8 million software grant. This recent grant brings the total donation amount given by the Microsoft Corporation to $29 million, and will provide software for TMCF’s 47-member network of Historically Black Colleges and Universities. ...

      There may be a hardware component to this dumping/indoctrination, but the value is a tax avoidance fiction and the hardware will be a liability using the software that comes with it.





  • Censorship



    • Child Pornography Bill Makes Privacy Experts Skittish
      The bill requires all Internet service providers to save their customers' IP addresses — or online identity numbers — for a year. The bill's stated purpose is to help police find child pornographers, but critics say that's just an excuse for another step toward Big Brother.




  • Privacy

    • Massachusetts track car location by automatically scanning license plates from police cars.
      Civil libertarians are raising the alarm over the state’s plans to create a Big Brother database that could map drivers’ whereabouts with police cruiser-mounted scanners that capture thousands of license plates per hour.

      I'm not sure why the system would have to be in police cars and could not be operated from other cameras like the red light cameras at every major intersection. People should be concerned about those too.





  • Civil Rights



  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • WIPO Broadcasting Treaty Returns From The Grave
      The current draft Treaty would grant exclusive, 50-year intellectual property rights to distributors of information that apply in parallel with copyright protections, even when transmitters have had no role in creating the content being transmitted.

      The treaty and article use the propaganda term Intellectual Property, and the treaty is more than an extension of copyright.



    • Copyrights



      • PJ Notes a lawsuit to prevent universities from making digital libraries, which objects even to digitization of orphaned works.
        Well, the more they try to assert their Most Holy rights, and the rights of people no one can find, the more certain I am that copyright law will end up reformed. It's like Righthaven. Or patent trolls. When people get disgusted by excessive use of the law, they decide to do something about it. Maybe it's time to go back to the prior copyright system, where you had to register your copyright to have one?

        Guardian source article intentionally not linked.







  • Comments

    Recent Techrights' Posts

    IBM Effect at Confluent: Mass Layoffs and IBM's Business Conduct Guidelines (BCGs) Said to be Violated
    For Confluent employees who survived the layoffs there will be "culture chock"
    Estimates That IBM to Lay Off Close to 10,000 Workers in 2026 (Not Counting People Pushed Out)
    There's still chatter about Confluent mass layoffs
    Sophie Brun, Raphael Hertzog & Debian sexual conflicts of interest
    Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
     
    IBM Has Turned Red Hat and Fedora Into Slop
    This is IBM policy
    IBM is Being Robbed, Companies and Jobs Are Destroyed
    Companies taken over by IBM will be exploited and destroyed to keep a bubble inflated for a little while longer
    In Confluent Layoffs, IBM Vapourises a Quarter of Its Workforce (IBM Buys Something That It Destroys Already)
    In the past, such things were typically referred to as "media blackout"; now it's just "the norm".
    Over at Tux Machines...
    GNU/Linux news for the past day
    IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, March 18, 2026
    IRC logs for Wednesday, March 18, 2026
    Links 19/03/2026: LLM Fatigue (It Doesn't Work as Advertised), "Small Web Feeds"
    Links for the day
    SLAPP Censorship - Part 15 Out of 200: Background and Particulars of Truth Regarding Techrights and Tux Machines
    the basic facts (this has aged well, except the times/ages/numbers)
    A Slopfarms Survey for Today (linuxteck.com, linuxsecurity.com, linuxjournal.com)
    Not only did Google news link to a slopfarm; it linked to three run by the same team!
    Links 18/03/2026: "Venture Capitalist Warns That It’s All About to Come Crashing Down" Due to Slop Bubble, "Birdwatching for Fun and no Profit"
    Links for the day
    IBM Red Hat is Still Promoting Restricted Boot Which Restricts Users' Control Over Their Computers
    Red Hat under IBM is a total catastrophe
    Arvind Says... Something Something "Hey Hi" (the State of Today's Media)
    Look for news about IBM and most likely it'll boil down to some sound bites from an executive and nothing else
    New Post Has Just Explained How IBM Gets Robbed by the People Who Fail IBM
    Their plan for IBM is a personal plan
    Slop-Spewing GAFAM LLM That Knows Nothing and Understands Nothing, It's a Stochastic Parrot That Cannot Even Figure Out Tux Machines is a Community That Started in Tennessee 22 Years Ago
    RMS rightly calls those things "bullshit generators"
    Cusdeb Makes New Presentation About Where GNU Hurd (Still a Possible Linux Replacement) Stands in 2026
    coming from a generally RMS-friendly account
    Gemini Links 18/03/2026: Librarians, Phone Anxiety, Growing 'Small' Net, and Slop Versus Software Engineering
    Links for the day
    Smug Threat by Garrett to Put My Family and I in Prison Doesn't Prove We Did Anything Wrong, It Only Proves He's Truly Desperate to Stop Further Publications That Embarrass Him
    his reputation is poor in the United States
    systemd Increasingly Microsoft Project, Controlled by Microsoft and Slopware
    Cannot allow choice
    What IBM Meant to Red Hat: "Proprietary Bundling, Restricted Source Access"
    Anyone or anything that joins IBM likely shortens its lifespan
    IBM Thrashing Confluent Upon Arrival, Based on Rumours
    We deem it a bigger issue that investigative journalism perished, not that one must rely on hearsay online or mere "rumours"
    Slop Is Plagiarism, Not (Vibe) Coding, and It's Not Automated, It Doesn't Save Money
    Reject misnomers, explain what's actually happening
    UPC is Still Illegal and Unconstitutional (Kangaroo Court for Patents, Manned by Corporate Staff), Federal Court of Justice of Germany Receives Belated Complaint About It
    What is happening to Europe???
    EPO Demonstration Happening Right Now, Later This Week Things Will Only Escalate Further
    The SUEPO The Hague Committee wrote to staff this morning
    Links 18/03/2026: Commodore's Hedley Davis Dies, Apple Not Good Enough, Cheeto "Floats Treason Charges for Iran War Coverage"
    Links for the day
    A Step Close to Shutting Down the European Patent Office (EPO)
    Not going to work all month long
    EPO Staff Demonstration Today
    The demonstration will be live-streamed for those thousands of colleagues who don't live in Munich
    Gemini Links 18/03/2026: Brazilian SYN Attacks and BGP
    Links for the day
    LibreLocal Also Coming to Jordan, Kenya, Mexico, New Zealand, and Spain
    It helps raise awareness of Software Freedom
    Over at Tux Machines...
    GNU/Linux news for the past day
    IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 17, 2026
    IRC logs for Tuesday, March 17, 2026
    Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 14 Out of 200: Men Who Strangle Women (and Worse) Trying to Force Us to Write Public Apologies to These Men
    For those who never before saw a SLAPP, they basically make many demands
    Instant Bluewashing at Confluent: Mass Layoffs Alleged at IBM
    So the main question is, did IBM just fire 800 people?
    "Vibe-forking" and Why It'll Ultimately Fail (Hype on Top of Hype)
    Code made with LLMs sucks; converting solid, human-tested code into slop only complicates matters and increases risk
    Updates About Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation
    After all those years (a decade) and in spite of phony scandals many people out there still respect him
    LLM Slop With "Linux" in the Domain Names
    This is becoming a pain and a problem also in the arts and in software engineering
    The EFF Has a Bug, Fixing This Bug is Likely Not Possible Anymore
    "the EFF's continued existence impairs the arrival of a replacement organization, one which will actually champion digital rights."
    Links 17/03/2026: Microsoft Windows Broken by Samsung, Afghanistan-Pakistan War Escalation
    Links for the day
    Gemini Links 17/03/2026: Newcomers and False-Positive 'Slop'
    Links for the day
    Héctor Orón Martínez & Debian shadow candidate pressure on Sruthi Chandran
    Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
    Links 17/03/2026: American Fentanylware (TikTok) Investors Implicated in Kickbacks, "Big Oil Knew It Was Wrecking Louisiana’s Coast"
    Links for the day
    For Third Time in a Week The Register MS Runs Google SPAM That Paints Google as an Ally of Women (Which is False, They're Womanisers)
    What does that make The Register MS to women?
    British Justice Minister Sarah Sackman Blasts Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
    The "legal industry" is due for "some reckoning"
    GAFAM Deprecating Old Videos ("Content") by Removing the Support for Their Format for No Good Reason
    "Security" is not a valid excuse
    Credit/Debit Cards Have Long Been Called Plastics, Over Time They're Becoming More Like Pure Plastics
    They cost less than a dollar to manufacture
    The European Patent Office (EPO) Holds a Public Demonstration Tomorrow and It'll be Live-streamed
    The EPO's workforce was meant to be capable of speaking many languages and have extensive experience in the sciences
    People Who Attacked Techrights Also Attacked My Mother
    Picking on old ladies because you don't like Free software advocates is never OK
    Little Community Element Left in CentOS
    CentOS, unlike Fedora, was meant to be long supported and solid
    Social Control Media is Cancel Culture (Companies Like Facebook Also Punish/Ban Accounts for Mentioning "Linux" and Lobby for Anti-Linux Legislation)
    The masters of Social Control Media decide what ideas can and cannot be expressed
    Over at Tux Machines...
    GNU/Linux news for the past day
    IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 16, 2026
    IRC logs for Monday, March 16, 2026