GNU News (December-January)
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-21 10:28:00 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-21 10:28:00 UTC
Summary: GNU, FSF, and Free software news from the past month or so
-
Richard Stallman today met Mr Rahul Gandhi, Vice President of the Indian National Congress and shared his views on digital surveillance system, unique identification project, free software in education and governance in a meeting that went on for one hour. Mr Joseph Mathew, Secretary of SPACE also participated in the meeting. Mr Gandhi showed keen interest in Stallman's views on various issues relating to information technology.
-
To commemorate the occasion of GNU completing 30 years and SPACE 10 years, the free software community in Thiruvananthapuram is also organising an exhibition on free software and free knowledge on Education Freedom Day, which falls on January 18 at the Museum. The exhibition will focus on free software and free hardware for education and privacy protection. Various free software projects like Fedora, WoMoz, and HackerSpace will be part of the exhibition.
-
GnuCash is more than a simple checkbook register, although it can be used for that purpose. Its real power is in the features supporting small business use and managing multiple accounts. Its basic features are intuitive, but if you don't have a bookkeeping background, be prepared to spend some time with the user guide in order to fully appreciate its advanced capabilities.
-
But the researchers, including Adi Shamir, a co-inventor of the widely-used RSA encryption algorithm, have shown how within one hour it was possible to extract a 4096-bit RSA private key used to decrypt email from a laptop running the OpenPGP-based mail encryption tool, GNU Privacy Guard.
-
After earlier this month delivering LLVM Clang 3.3/3.4 benchmarks for the new compiler infrastructure out of Apple, today are results that directly compare the new LLVM Clang 3.4 performance against the stable GCC 4.8.2 compiler and GCC 4.9.0 development compiler under various C/C++ benchmarks.
-
An Intel engineer has published a patch-set providing a new GCC compiler architecture target for Intel's upcoming Broadwell CPUs.
-
Novena Project aims to create an entirely open source laptop, from the iron down to the bits, and a prototype already exists
-
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today awarded Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to Gluglug X60 laptops. The RYF certification mark means that the product meets the FSF's standards in regard to users' freedom, control over the product, and privacy. This is the first laptop to receive RYF certification from the FSF.
-
FOSS is the last place to suspect “back doors” or traps.
-
Computer scientists have devised an attack that reliably extracts secret cryptographic keys by capturing the high-pitched sounds coming from a computer while it displays an encrypted message.
The technique, outlined in a research paper published Wednesday, has already been shown to successfully recover a 4096-bit RSA key used to decrypt e-mails by GNU Privacy Guard, a popular open source implementation of the OpenPGP standard. Publication of the new attack was coordinated with the release of a GnuPG update rated as "important" that contains countermeasures for preventing the attack. But the scientists warned that a variety of other applications are also susceptible to the same acoustic cryptanalysis attack. In many cases, the sound leaking the keys can be captured by a standard smartphone positioned close to a targeted computer as it decrypts an e-mail known to the attackers.
-
The Free Software Foundation today has come out for "the first time we've ever been able to encourage people to buy and use a laptop as-is." The Free Software Foundation now backs one laptop model as respecting the customer's freedoms, but are the hardware specs any good?
-
GNU Binutils was updated this morning and some of the major changes for these binary tools updates include supporting several new processors.
-
To read more about all of these and see the honorable mentions not listed here, make sure to head back to the full hive five feature.
Recent Techrights' Posts
- There Was Always Too Much 'Crazy Stuff' Going on Around Freenode
- What many IRC users lost sight of
- Exposing Crime is Not a Crime (It Never Was)
- In the eyes of rich and powerful people, those who speak about their crimes are the "criminals"
- Drug Addiction is a Real Problem, It Destroys Families
- a rather sensitive matter
-
- Some of the Many Reasons We Sued Microsofters for Harassment
- perpetrators of harassment
- For 20 Years Many People Were Sharecropping for Canonical's Oligarch, Now He's Deleting All Their Contributions
- "Ubuntu has erased instead of archiving the trove of material at Ubuntu Forums"
- GNU/Linux Distros Abandoning Microsoft GitHub
- Will curl be next to leave Microsoft GitHub?
- Expect More XBox Mass Layoffs Soon If the Rumours Are True
- From a Microsoft media operative
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 07, 2025
- IRC logs for Saturday, June 07, 2025
- Europe Needs to Move Away From GAFAM; The Sooner, the Better
- Europe - not just the EU - must abandon GAFAM as soon as possible
- The Issue Isn't GNOME's Promotion of Diversity But GNOME Corruption, Abuse, Censorship, and Worse
- So-called "Conservative" (republican, pro-Trump, bigoted) people want you to think the problem with GNOME is politics
- When the News Sources Become Scarce and Increasingly Full of Polluted/Contaminated 'Content' (With LLM Slop and Slop Images)
- Integrity matters
- "Linux" Sites That Spew Out LLM Slop
- We're lacking enough material for another "Slopwatch"
- Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part V: Breaking the Law, Just Like EPO
- We'll hopefully cover some of the pertinent details later this year
- Links 08/06/2025: Security Lapses, CISA Cuts, and More
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 07/06/2025: Mime Types and Geminisphere Introduction
- Links for the day
- Links 07/06/2025: Slop Companies Retain All Private Data, More Books Banned in the US
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 07/06/2025: "A Monk's Guide to Happiness" and "Wireless Earbuds"
- Links for the day
- Links 07/06/2025: More Rumours of Mass Layoffs in Microsoft's XBox Division, New COVID Variant
- Links for the day
- Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part IV: Political Scrutiny and Errors/Inconsistencies in Official Documents
- When such organisations receive scrutiny they start focusing on cover-up and muzzling of facts (or crushing people who say the truth)
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 06, 2025
- IRC logs for Friday, June 06, 2025
- Slopwatch: LinuxTechLab, Planet Ubuntu, Anti-Linux FUD, and Microsoft SPAM
- It's not easy to altogether avoid take articles these days
- Gemini Links 06/06/2025: "MBA Tear" and Slop ('AI') as Plagiarism
- Links for the day
- Links 06/06/2025: "Convicted Felon and MElon Trade Insults" and Europe Snubbed by US Again
- Links for the day
- Links 06/06/2025: Microsoft XBox Bracing For More Mass Layoffs, Climate Disaster, Fake 'Money' Tokens From US President
- Links for the day
- Gemini Links 06/06/2025: Vanishing Cultures and MElon Implosion
- Links for the day
- Extortion is a Crime, Even If You're Based in Another Continent and Work for Microsoft
- reported to British authorities
- We're in 6/6 Now, Almost Halfway in 2025
- 2025 was probably the best year for us
- South Americans Are Saying Goodbye to Microsoft
- We're hardly even "Cherry-Picking" or conveniently singling out one South American nation
- Abuse Inside the Polish Patent Office (UPRP) - Part III: Data Protection Failures, Just Like at the European Patent Office (EPO)
- Just less than a decade ago we showed that the EPO had illegally shared staff data with third parties
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
- IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 05, 2025
- IRC logs for Thursday, June 05, 2025