Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 1/3/2012: Raspberry Pi and Cotton Candy, EU Censorship Plans





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



  • Desktop

    • Penguins Seen Over California
      California shifted from 1.5% to 18%. What’s with that? Google has only 10K employees in Mountain View, not enough to change the share in California that much.






  • Kernel Space



  • Applications



  • Desktop Environments



  • Distributions

    • Of Fanboys and Distribution Menageries
      Opening the word processor is a rare thing for me. I usually make do with LaTeX. But it is needed sometimes, like when you have a desire to write for your blog, and the writing will end up copied and pasted anyway, and you want a completely unrelated way to start your post. That done, let’s start:

      Our first topic of discussion is distribution menageries. Some people, with a drive I confess I cannot even begin to understand, install distributions. I am not talking about building a stable desktop for yourself with Scientific Linux and putting a Fedora or Arch next to it to play with latest innovations and software, I am talking about those people who install (and I took this list from an anonymous from Ubuntu Forums) Ubuntu 10.04, openSUSE 12.1, Ubuntu 11.10, Xubuntu 11.10, Mint Linux 12, Windows 7 and the last Kubuntu. Agreed, not everyone goes that extreme, but it is common to see people who installed 2 or 3 spins on same Ubuntu and something like a nonworking BSD. They speak of this on public forums without embarrassment; and as it happens, there is no embarrassment to be felt as all they get are pats on the back. This gives me, so conveniently, a way to introduce our next topic of discussion: Fanboys or fanbots, whichever you prefer. People who write window$, M$ (winzort is popular here) and claim that Microsoft is out to conquer the world. This last world conquering part is what really angers me; after all, world domination should be goal of every self respecting nerd; do not discriminate against Linux people, please.


    • Red Hat Family

      • Red Hat to Webcast Results for Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2012


      • ClearOS Community 6.2.0 Beta 3 Released
        ClearOS Community 6.2.0 Beta 3 has arrived! Along with the usual round of bug fixes and enhancements, Beta 3 includes the following new apps: Content Filter, Flexshare, Samba, Remote Server Backup, Print Server, Password Policies, and Network Visualizer. New apps in the Professional Edition include: Google Apps Synchronization, Active Directory Connector, and Central Management. This will be the last beta as we head toward a final release. We will soon be able to put those Duke Nukem jabs behind us ;-)


      • CentOS, RHEL and Scientific Linux 4 reach their End of Life
        The CentOS and Scientific Linux projects have stopped maintaining the series 4 versions of their Linux distributions. According to the "End of Life" (EOL) notifications by CentOS and Scientific Linux, there will be no further security fixes for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4-based distributions. Users will, therefore, need to switch to other versions.


      • Fedora





    • Debian Family





  • Devices/Embedded





Free Software/Open Source



  • Open source software brings benefits to Katikati Computers
    When Michael Pavletich and Glynn Smith found themselves running identical businesses six years ago, they decided they better join forces. Their operations in Katikati had the same business approach and philosophy and they also shared a love of motorcycling.

    However, though the partnership works well, Pavletich admits running a small business like Katikati Computers can be trying when one of them is away. Early in January, for example, Pavletich was effectively tied to the shop, while Smith was on holiday. Foot traffic and phone calls come and go, creating peaks in work that can only be overcome by coming in early and taking some work home.


  • SaaS

    • The Wild West of Big Data
      It is very easy to compare the atmosphere of this year's Strata Conference and the big data ecosystem to the atmosphere of the Linux and open source ecosystem around the turn of the century.

      (And yes, I get a little trill in my fingers when I get to type "turn of the century.")

      The comparison is not literal: I made this observation to someone I met at here at Strata this week and he dug into me a bit on how his company's offerings were not related to open source technologies.




  • CMS



  • Healthcare

    • Regina Holliday advocates patient engagement at HIMSS12


      Patient care has always been vital to healthcare. At the same time, patient engagement has always been frighteningly low. Patients have been passive players in their own care, depending on and assuming that 'doctor knows best.'

      Today’s patients, however, are becoming consumers of healthcare. They are more informed about their options and with more information at their disposal they are becoming more vocal than ever about their expectations for care.

      In the past, gaining access to medical records was difficult at best. Now, as paper records are being replaced with electronic data, patients will have an opportunity to take greater control of their healthcare records.




  • Business



  • Funding

    • Unreleased Elliott Smith, Deerhunter on Kickstarter Comp for Open Source Project CASH Music
      CASH Music is a not-for-profit open software project based in Portland, Oregon that will offer musicians and labels free, open source tools necessary for independently marketing their music. ("What Wordpress did for bloggers, we're doing for musicians," they say.) The organization, led by Maggie Vail (formerly of Kill Rock Stars) and Jesse von Doom, is currently raising funds on Kickstarter.




  • Project Releases



  • Public Services/Government

    • Eurogreens: Dear Mr. President, where is our Info?


    • Code for America Meets Austin
      It's hard to believe my team has been in Austin for nearly four weeks already. As part of the 2012 Code for America Fellowship program, we're nearing the end of our residency: five weeks of interviews, meetings, events and information gathering. Code for America is a non-profit based in San Francisco that partners teams of developers and designer with cities around the country to encourage innovation in government and civic engagement.




  • Openness/Sharing



    • Open Data



    • Open Access/Content

      • California State Senate bill seeks to create open source textbook library
        College students may find relief from high textbook prices in a California State Senate bill that would create a free open source textbook library.

        State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, introduced a bill Feb. 8 that would fund a library containing open source textbooks for the 50 most popular lower division courses at the state’s colleges and universities. Students could download the textbooks for free or pay about $20 for a hard copy.

        On March 3, the bill — which asks for $25 million in state funding to create the open source textbooks — will be eligible for discussion in committee hearings. But that funding request can change as the bill moves through the hearings, according to Steinberg spokesperson Alicia Trost.




    • Open Hardware

      • An open-source robo-surgeon
        RAVENS have a bad reputation. Medieval monks, who liked to give names to everything (even things that did not need them), came up with “an unkindness” as the collective noun for these corvids. Blake Hannaford and his colleagues at the University of Washington, in Seattle, however, hope to change the impression engendered by the word. They are about to release a flock of medical robots with wing-like arms, called Ravens, in the hope of stimulating innovation in the nascent field of robotic surgery.






  • Standards/Consortia





Leftovers





  • Finance



  • Censorship

    • EU Censorship Plan With A Cheesy Name: The Clean IT Project
      Those last two sentences are particularly ominous. First, because they show no awareness that any attempt to "clean" the Internet inevitably affects everyone else's online freedom. Given that there are no hard and fast rules about what is terrorism, the past teaches us that there is always collateral damage in the form of over-reaction -- not least because people understandably err on the side of caution in this area.




  • Privacy

    • Privacy commissioner has concerns with Google's new privacy policy
      Canada's privacy commissioner has expressed concerns with Google's new privacy policy, asking the Internet giant to clearly explain how it plans to use personal information it collects from users.

      In a letter to the company sent Thursday, but released publicly Friday, Jennifer Stoddart said Google's new policy appears to have loopholes where users may unwillingly have their personal information used in ways that make them uncomfortable.




  • Civil Rights

    • Lawful Access Signals Canada Is Open to 'Big Brother Inc.'
      Privacy International, one of the world's leading privacy organizations, last year released the results of a multi-year investigation into the shadowy world of the commercial surveillance industry. Dubbed "Big Brother Inc.," the investigation placed the spotlight on dozens of companies that specialize in covert surveillance technologies that are typically sold directly to governments and law enforcement agencies.




  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Kickstarter Expects To Provide More Funding To The Arts Than NEA


    • Organic Farmers' Preemptive Lawsuit Against Monsanto Patents Tossed Out For Being A Bit Too Preemptive
      Monsanto has quite a track record of going after farmers for making use of its "patented" seeds, even in a case that involve seeds that blew onto a farm from a neighboring farm. So, it wasn't entirely surprising to see a group of organic farmers preemptively sue Monsanto last year, asking for a declaratory judgment that they did not infringe. However, the judge in the case has now dismissed the case, noting that for a declaratory judgment, there has to be a real conflict, and Monsanto keeps insisting that it won't sue these farmers. From a legal standpoint, this argument makes sense (and the declaratory judgment standard can be pretty high in some cases -- especially if no direct threat has been issued). But, it still seems unfortunate. Given Monsanto's past actions in other cases, even if it says it won't sue now, plenty of farmers are reasonably scared about what will happen down the road. But, for now, they just have to wait and hope that Monsanto seeds don't show up on their farms...



    • Business Software Alliance’s latest weird argument for stronger IP laws
      The Business Software Alliance has found a newly imagined detriment of Canada’s supposedly sub-par intellectual property laws – make sure you’re sitting down for this shocker – it’s slowing down the advancement of cloud computing.

      It’s the latest of many poxes that have stricken Canada as a result of our outdated IP enforcement and copyright protection regime, all of which have been fastidiously documented by this interest group representing the world’s largest software companies.


    • Copyrights

      • Would You Rather Be 'Right' Or Realistic?


      • Artist Sues Sony Over Background Used in Music Video (Exclusive)


      • Company That Issued Bogus Takedown Says It Was All A Mistake, Apologizes
        ote about how a totally bogus DMCA takedown notice, coming from an "anti-piracy" firm called Armovore, deleted a key Techdirt blog post about SOPA/PIPA from Google's search results. That post apparently got some attention within Google, who kicked off an expedited review and reinstated our site and a few others. Soon after that, we got a couple emails from folks at Armovore, and they also posted some comments to the site, in which they apologized, and said that it was an "early" version of the technology. To their credit, they "accept full responsibility for the mistake" and insist that while that takedown was an automated keyword-based effort, they now only do manual takedowns. They even apologized that multiple people reached out to apologize.


      • ‘Towards Flexible Copyright?’


      • ACTA

        • David Martin and the straw man about boarder searches in ACTA
          In fact, I never read these article about iPod searches at the customs or heard an advocacy group in Europe to make that consumer case. I only heard about the straw man of the ACTA defenders that there were these “misconceptions” of critics, even at times when ACTA was yet in a preparatory phase. Actually, as you see from the text, it wouldn’t even be even a misconception though it is a side topic. A distraction.


        • Karel De Gucht's Fake ACTA Debate


          Last week, the Trade Commissioner De Gucht, the same who recently declared he was “not afraid of the anti-ACTA demonstrations”, went on to explain why, considering the wave of criticism on ACTA, he is now turning to the European Court of Justice to assess whether ACTA would be detrimental to fundamental rights1.











Recent Techrights' Posts

"I Hated Working at IBM. They Were the Most Unfriendly People."
Don't forget what Watson the son did to a poor woman on a plane
Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO) is Taking the New Pension Scheme (NPS) to an International Tribunal (ILOAT)
SUEPO wants more EPO staff to participate in collective action
Stella Assange and the Legal Team Speak to the Media a Day After WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Arrives in Australia
Published yesterday by a number of mainstream publishers
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
[Video] The 'Dangerous Precedent' (Jen Robinson on Assange Plea Bargain)
Published 3 hours ago in Australia
Microsoft is Losing Its Grip on Bulgaria
now may be a good time to look into statistics from Bulgaria
LinuxSecurity.com Back to Relaying Anti-Linux FUD From Microsoft, Using Microsoft Chatbots That Recycle and Add Permutations to the FUD
They're killing the Web every time they do this
 
Never Assume That Because the Law Exists the Powerful Will Follow the Law
Who's going to hold them accountable now?
Nearly a Month Has Passed and Nobody at the Debian Project Even Attempted to Explain What Seems Like Back-dooring of Debian (and Hundreds of Distros That Are Debian-Derived)
I can cynically guess that only matters when a user with a Chinese name does it
[Video] Julian Assange Explains Wikileaks' Logistics
predating indefinite detention
IBM Was Never the "Good Guy", Just a Self-Serving and Opportunistic Money- and Power-Hungry Monopolist, Living Off of Taxpayers' Money (Government Contracts)
The Nazi Party of Germany was its second-biggest client at one point and now it's looking to profit from the work of slaves
State of the News (and Depletion of Journalism Online, Not Just Offline)
Newspapers are not coming back and the Web is not coming back either
GNU/Linux Consolidates in North America
Android rising a lot this year, too
[Meme] More Monopolies Granted While Patent Examiners Die (Overworking for Less Compensation)
Work more; Get less
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 27, 2024
IRC logs for Thursday, June 27, 2024
RIP Daniel Bristot de Oliveira, Red Hat death
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
European Commission fooled by IBM Red Hat merger risk to source code
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 27/06/2024: Black-Lives-Matter-Poster-Related Lawsuit, Misinformation and Propaganda by Chinese Userfarms
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/06/2024: Rogue Legends and Old Computers
Links for the day
[Meme] They Think of Their Business Partner, Microsoft
Think.
At the Cusp of Productivity
Work in progress: a critique of terms of service (ToS) in "modern" computing
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is Becoming More European Than the Google- and Microsoft-Funded 'FSFE' (Fake 'FSF', a Case of Identity Theft)
The Board of Directors of the FSF is now all European as far as women (3) go
[Meme] Meanwhile at IBM's Headquarters
Old white men can find common themes to laugh at in IBM
IBM's Board is a Men's Club, Unlike the FSF's, But Red Hat/IBM Are Trolling the Community Using the "Diversity Shtick"
CoC-fighting over diversity to distract from their own failings
John Gilmore, Cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Joins the FSF's Board
it's already riling up the Microsofters and misogynists
Links 27/06/2024: Microsoft's Chief Brand Offices Kathleen Hall to Leave, The Beauty of Blogging, Ukraine Updates
Links for the day
Microsoft Got Lost in Bermuda
based on far too little data
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, June 26, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, June 26, 2024
Microsofter Throwing Stones in a Glasshouse Again
"Life is imitating art" and if you're a BS artist, your life must be BS
Far Too Young to Die
He seemed to be healthy
Virgin Islands, Marshall Islands, Guam and Other American Satellites Drift Further Away From Microsoft
So even US-controlled islands are moving away from Windows, little by little...
Let's Encrypt is Dying in Geminispace (Now Down Very Sharply to 6%), More People Self-Sign as They Certainly Should
Abandoning a fake security model?
No More Justice for Assange?
Not the site anyway
[Meme] "No News is Good News"
2 days have passed and still not a word
Northern Mariana Islands May Have Been Taken Over by Debian!!
The place is strategic for military reasons (like a giant aircraft carrier with running water)
Birthday With His Family
Julian Assange was born 3 July 1971
Julian Assange on Cryptographically-deniable Block Storage Device (aka Marutukku)
An oldie
Links 26/06/2024: US State Department Controlling YouTube, Artificial Intelligence (AI) Hype on the Brink as "Losses Balloon"
Links for the day
GNU/Linux Back Above 4% (in statCounter)
happened minutes or a few hours ago
Free Assange! (by Alexandre Oliva)
Reprinted with permission from Alexandre Oliva
Julian Assange & Debian: was he a developer?
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 26/06/2024: More on Hey Hi (AI) Bubble Fading, RIAA Steps in
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/06/2024: UAF Botanical Garden and YouTube Workarounds
Links for the day
Microsoft Market Share Falling to New Lows in Aruba
Being below 20% in America is the exception, not the norm
Streaming in a Few Minutes: Julian Assange Press Conference
They test the microphone now.
[Video] Julian Assange Arrives Safely in Australia
even the person on the air cried
Debian Project Still Has a Lot of Explaining to Do...
Assange was actually a Debian Developer
[Meme] When Ian (of Debian) Was Still Alive
I wasn't always a Debian Developer...
"Julian Assange is Free"
Published ~34 minutes ago
GNU/Linux Userbase Surging in Iceland
Maybe there's something big going on, like people deleting Vista 11 in droves and installing GNU/Linux instead
Jennifer Robinson: "After 14 years of legal battles, Julian Assange can go home a free man”
She explains the implications for the general freedom of the press
Judge: Assange Leaves Court 'A Free Man'
on his way to Australia now
Julian Assange verdict: guilty, not guilty or blackmailed
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
12 Months Ago the FSF Said It Would Issue a Statement on IBM Taking RHEL Proprietary
Statement never happened
Sheriff of Cork & Debian Edward Brocklesby or Brockelsby Street confusion
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Microsoft's Bing Fall From 2.6% Before LLM Hype to Just 0.79% Right Now in Russia
statCounter's data
[Meme] Speaking Truth to Power (Still Easier in the West Than in Russia/BRIC)
Different people, different outcomes
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, June 25, 2024
IRC logs for Tuesday, June 25, 2024
The Plot to Silence (or Deplatform) Techrights
This past month I've been spending time working on the text of an online publication
[Meme] Julian Assange's Lawyers Need to Ensure Assange Maintains Freedom to Publish
Let's ensure he can continue to publish
"Conviction for a Crime he Did Not Commit," Said Jennifer Robinson
Robinson is the kind of woman accomplisher we should look up to
Trying to Make Blogs (Independent and Mostly Decentralised Platforms) What Comes After Social Control Media
Social Control Networks 'stole the thunder' of blogs, but can we get back to blogs?
Julian Assange Has Landed
There will probably be some press interviews some time this month or next month