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

    "systemd is essentially a corporate IBM/Redhat project and corporations of course will comply"
    Microsoft and IBM care about users' freedom like Cheeto Lump cares about the US Constitution
    Gemini Links 20/03/2026: Digital Identity Bifurcation and a "Return to Gemini"
    Links for the day
     
    Symptom of Publishers Dying: They Move to Adopt Slop. Symptom of Software Companies Dying: They Move to Adopt Slop ('Vibe').
    It'll always fail. It's hype. It's a bubble.
    Under IBM, Red Hat Replaces Code With LLM Slop, Fedora is Slopware
    Not even hiding it, those things are in plain sight
    Gemini Links 20/03/2026: Depictions of Culture and The Social Smolnet
    Links for the day
    SimilarWeb Was Never a Reliable Yardstick for Traffic
    5RB may need some "house-cleaning"
    Strangulation, suffocation, Jonathan Carter & Debian toxic culture confirmed
    Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
    Reports or Hearsay Suggest Ogilvy Broke Up With IBM and Insiders Report Mass Layoffs in "Infrastructure" (Might Impact Red Hat Entrants)
    hearsay in Social Control Media
    Scheduled Server Maintenance Tomorrow Night
    Starting 9PM
    None of the Above (NotA) & Debian snubbing Sruthi Chandran
    Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
    Links 20/03/2026: Cryptography Pioneers Win Turing Award and BMG Sues Anthropic for Copyright Infringement
    Links for the day
    Even Uganda Understands That Journalists Never Belong in Prison
    "Ugandan authorities must respect the spirit of this ruling and abandon any measures that seek to jail Ugandans for the free flow of ideas."
    Inaction Helps Your Enemies
    Without freedom, there's nothing else left
    Windows Down From 99% to ~50% in Republic of Seychelles (République des Seychelles)
    Windows fell by a lot
    Confluent Insiders: IBM Laid Over Over 800 at Confluent, Not Just 800
    For the record, the layoffs at Confluent won't be over. After the bluewashing there will be "IBM RAs" impacting Confluent folks, aside from PIPs
    The Layoffs at IBM Carry on (Shades of Enron)
    Is IBM another Enron?
    "IBM boss Arvind Krishna... financial package valued at $38 million in calendar 2025 - equivalent to the average collective pay of 765 Big Blue workers."
    continues to ruin the company to enrich himself while pretending he has a strategy
    Over at Tux Machines...
    GNU/Linux news for the past day
    IRC Proceedings: Thursday, March 19, 2026
    IRC logs for Thursday, March 19, 2026
    SLAPP Censorship - Part 16 Out of 200: Detailing the Actors and Explaining Techrights' Own Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Network
    For those who have not followed our story
    Microsoft "hiding behind bigger news of war, Epstein, other companies' layoffs"
    They know what's coming, they just don't know when
    Joerg Jaspert (Debian Account Manager/DAM) personally approved Raphael Hertzog's wife Sophie Brun
    Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
    Letter 'A' prohibited by Code of Conduct extremism
    Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
    Spoiler: Diversity & Debian means different things to different people
    Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
    Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Admits Failures and Criticism of Inaction on SLAPPs
    many if not all solicitors and solicitor firms in the UK are in effect unregulated
    Archiving or Preserving Pages About IBM Layoffs
    Layoffs at IBM and the media does not talk about these
    ABC, the American National Broadcaster, "Now Publishes Slop"
    If the "big media" absorbs slop, it'll no longer be trusted and therefore not read/watched by the public
    Links 19/03/2026: Culling Deepfakes of Artists’ Music and "Age Verification Isn’t the Answer"
    Links for the day
    Gemini Links 19/03/2026: "Aktion GPT-4" and "Kill All Descendants"
    Links for the day
    "AI" 15 Times in Short 'Article' From The Register MS. And The Register MS Got Paid to Publish It.
    gets paid to do this
    People Who Decided to Boycott Novell Over Its Microsoft Alliance Should Also Boycott Canonical
    As an associate put it, "selling out further, due to Microsoft moles inside Canonical"
    Links 19/03/2026: "AI Glasses" as Euphemism for Mass Surveillance and ABC (US) Has Begun Publishing Slop as 'News'
    Links for the day
    The European Patent Office, Europe's Second-Largest Institution, is on Strike Today
    Lots more to come
    What People Impacted by the Bluewashing Layoffs at IBM Confluent Say (While the Media Says Nothing at All, in Effect Burying the News)
    Worse yet, the mainstream media spreads lies about it right now
    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".
    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"
    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
    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
    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
    Sophie Brun, Raphael Hertzog & Debian sexual conflicts of interest
    Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
    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