GNU News: What's New in GNU
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-03-19 19:50:29 UTC
- Modified: 2014-03-19 19:50:29 UTC
Software Freedom
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Tonight, Dr. Richard Stallman is presenting a talk titled A Free Digital Society. Dr. Stallman will address the many threats to freedom in our digital society. He'll focus on issues of digital surveillance that undermine the foundations of democracy, including massive surveillance, censorship, digital handcuffs, non-free software that controls users, and the ‘War on Sharing’.
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In September 1983, the GNU Project was born. GNU was to be a new kind of operating system: the first one with an explicit ethical goal.
Perhaps a little background is needed. GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.” Unix was an operating system (OS) that was in common use at the time, and the recursive acronym is a bit of programmers’ humour. The project emerged from the hacker culture at MIT, which had collapsed at the end of the 1970s when a technology company hired all but a few of the programmers.
Last week, I was writing about MediaGoblin when I was struck by a sudden realization: the project was not about code for its own sake. Instead it was about the sort of vision that seems to be disappearing recently from free and open source software (FOSS).
What makes MediaGoblin stand out is not just the idea of an all-in-one file-sharer, as convenient as that might be. Rather, the code is an explicit critique of centralized web services like Instagram, which require users to communicate through a single web site rather than directly with each other. As events of the past few years have proved, such centralization threatens privacy and makes surveillance all too easy.
FSF Internal
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The Free Software Foundation, a Boston-based 501(c)(3) charity with a worldwide mission to protect freedoms critical to the computer-using public, seeks a Boston-based individual to be its full-time Web Developer.
The theme of "Free Software, Free Society" will be explored at the LibrePlanet 2014 conference, to be held in Cambridge, MA at the Stata Center at MIT on March 22 and 23, 2014, by the Free Software Foundation in collaboration with MIT's Student Information Processing Board.
GNU GPL
In this edition, we conducted an email-based interview with Roman Telezhinsky, the lead developer of Valentina, a free software pattern making program, which is licensed under the GNU GPL version 3 (or any later version).
The Free Software Foundation will be providing a half-day legal seminar titled "GPL Enforcement and Legal Ethics", taking place on Monday, March 24 at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. Anyone can register to attend the seminar, though it is aimed particularly at practicing lawyers and law students. For practicing lawyers in the US, continuing legal education (CLE) credits are expected to be available for many states.
Popular GNU Programs
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The GNU Guix package manager / distribution system is still active in development and the developers have planned a road-map to reaching version 1.0.
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As some other good news for GNU Hurd, around 79% of the Debian archive is now building for GNU Hurd, including the Xfce desktop and Firefox web-browser. Future work planned for this GNU project is Xen PVH support, working x86_64 support, language bindings for translators, read-ahead, HDD/Sound/USB DDE support, and having a full GNU system with Hurd.
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That would be the oddly-named GIMP (acronym for: GNU Image Manipulation Program), an open source, high-end image editing and creation alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop and its now open-ended, monthly wallet-siphoning distribution mode for tasks like photo retouching, image editing and composition, and image authoring.
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The split was the result of GIMP’s concern over policies at SourceForge, primarily SourceForge’s use of DevShare, an installer for Windows that bundles third party software offers with FOSS downloads. In addition, the GIMP folks had reservations about potentially deceptive “download here” buttons on ads being served by the likes of Google’s AdSense.
Out this Sunday is a major update to GNU ease.js, which relicenses this JavaScript framework to the GPLv3 and has several other changes. GNU ease.js helps the Free Software Foundation's case for the "importance of free JavaScript" on the web.
Compilers
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For any students looking to get involved with this year's Google Summer of Code, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has several interesting projects that are looking to be tackled.
While GCC 4.9 is running behind schedule compared to where GCC 4.8 was at this time last year, open-source developers banding together still might get out the GNU Compiler Collection 4.9 release in early April with its many new compiler features.
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Samsung is still working towards bringing OpenACC support to GCC. We've seen Samsung developers working on OpenACC for GCC over the past several months -- along with other OpenACC initiatives out of CodeSourcery, etc -- and now there's some new OpenACC GCC Fortran patches.
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This testing is quite simple and straightforward as it's intended to just complement the AMD A10-7850K compiler benchmarks of the previous days. The processor being used this time around was the Intel Core i5 4670 that is a true quad-core CPU with a 3.4GHz base frequency and 3.8GHz Turbo Frequency. Being a Haswell CPU, it supports SSE 4.2, AVX 2.0, and all of the other latest-generation Intel extensions.
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Renato Golin of Linaro volleyed an interesting message to the GCC mailing list on Friday about "LLVM collaboration?" While controversial, he suggested LLVM and GCC developers begin collaborating due to an "unnecessary fence" between the competing compilers and decisions that need to be shared. He acknowledges while there's licensing differences (GPL vs. UIUC / BSD) there's differences between the compilers and their stacks that really shouldn't exist as it hinders the users and developers.
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Most people know I'm a fan of RMS' writing about Free Software and I agree with most (but not all) of his beliefs about software freedom politics and strategy. I was delighted to read RMS' post about LLVM on the GCC mailing list on Friday. It's clear and concise, and, as usual, I agree with most (but not all) of it, and I encourage people to read it. Meanwhile, upon reading comments on LWN on this post, I felt the need to add a few points to the discussion.
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Intel's Beignet open-source OpenCL implementation for their Linux graphics driver now switches to LLVM/Clang 3.5 as its preferred version.
Hardware
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The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today awarded Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the TAZ 3, the fifth model in the LulzBot line of 3D printers by Aleph Objects, Inc. The RYF certification mark means that the product meets the FSF's standards in regard to users' freedom, control over the product, and privacy.
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Lenovo's X230 is an "ultraportable business laptop" with 12.5-inch display, 2.96lb weight, and other modern features while boasting an Intel Core i5 series processor.
Privacy
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As consumers living in a post-Edward Snowden world, we should remain aware of what cryptography applications are out there, and how we can utilize them to keep our information (and thus, ourselves) safer. This article is intended to discuss some of the more practical usages of cryptography in modern computing, including PGP/GPG encryption, encrypted chat programs such as Cryptocat, the anonymous Tor browser, and will touch on a major buzz item of 2013, Bitcoin.
Recent Techrights' Posts
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- Microsoft already has many problems. One day Microsoft won't exist anymore. But that does not guarantee users' freedom.
- Alyssa Rosenzweig's LibrePlanet Talk About Freeing the Apple GPU
- Alyssa Rosenzweig is the graphics witch behind the reverse-engineered drivers for the Apple GPU. She previously led Panfrost, the free drivers for Arm Mali GPUs powering devices like the Pinebook Pro. She graduated in 2023 with a Computer Science degree from the University of Toronto and now writes free software full-time.
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- So-called "advertiser-unfriendly" material was never a problem for Wikileaks
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- 200 This Week
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- They basically blackmailed him into letting the US 'win' the argument
- At the End Journalism a Crime (If It Involves Accessing or Gaining Access to Documents Marked "Confidential" or "Classified" by Those Looking to Hide Their Misconduct/Crimes)
- At least in the US, especially where the imperialism is at stake
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- Links for the day
- 100% Slop/Spam From linuxsecurity.com
- This is the kind of stuff that's killing the Web faster
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- Links for the day
- In the First 6 Months of 2024 Thailand Moved to GNU/Linux, Not to Windows Vista 11
- maybe users moved from Vista 10 and 11 to GNU/Linux, seeing where Microsoft was heading with forced hardware "upgrades"
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- Nice to see many new additions to the FSF's team
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- Obligatory meme too
- Tobias Platen Covered Freedom-To-Play Games in LibrePlanet 2024
- Freedom-To-Play games using Taler
- [Meme] Opening a 'Webapp' With 'Only' 4 GB of RAM
- Until 2020 none of my PCs ever had more than 2 GB of RAM
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- We reckon GNU/Linux can break the 5% barrier some time by the end of this year, even without counting Chromebooks
- A Crisis of Online Journalism
- Almost a week ago a journalist was forced to plead guilty for an act of journalism
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- 4 new stories
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- outrage included
- GNU/Linux Climbed 0.25% This Month (in statCounter)
- Around midday on Tuesday we'll start seeing preliminary data for July
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- 'FSFE': Underage Labour, GAFAM Fronting, and Identity Theft to Undermine the FSF's Current Fundraiser
- looking to raise funds at the same time as the FSF
- Over at Tux Machines...
- GNU/Linux news for the past day
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- Links for the day
- Fedora and Red Hat Leftovers
- mostly redhat.com
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- Notice the title and the image, what's being promoted etc.
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- The total changed from 46 to 47 while typing the article
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- We are hoping to bring more original stories
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- This is not happening only in Germany
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- It uses buzzwords where none are needed
- [Meme] Garbage In, Garbage Out (linuxsecurity.com)
- It is neither Linux nor security, just chatbot-generated slop
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- linuxsecurity.com became an anti-Linux spam site
- Microsoft Laying Off Staff in an Act of Retaliation and Union-Busting
- retaliatory layoffs at Microsoft
- Gemini Links 29/06/2024: Content Drowning in 'Goo' and LLM Slop
- Links for the day
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- From over 99% to just over 7%
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- Not even counting Chromebooks
- LibrePlanet: Cultivating Backups (of Recordings)
- an appeal to recover some of these talks
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- Taking full history into account, this is a decrease of over 90% in some cases
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- "the "smiling faces" behind it."
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- "a feeling of shared ownership for all users."
- Julian Assange Might Continue Wikileaks, But Certainly Not Yet (Recovery Time Needed)
- And probably at a symbolic capacity only
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- Julian Assange's life inside the Ecuadorian embassy
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- uploaded to the LibrePlanet instance of MediaGoblin
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- in spite of technical difficulties encountered while recording
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- Over at Tux Machines...
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- Links for the day
- Links 28/06/2024: Overton window and Polarization
- Links for the day
- [Meme] In 50 Years...
- Microsoft's Vista 11 will take 50 years to be fully adopted
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- it looks like over the past 12 months Vista 11 hardly grew and it remains very low at around 12% of Windows usage in Russia
- Links 28/06/2024: More Attacks on the Press, More Censorship in Russia
- Links for the day
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- Links for the day
- IBM: So Long, Suckers. Your Free OS is Now Proprietary. Pay IBM or Else.
- almost exactly a year after turning RHEL into proprietary software
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- "Microsoft has pulled a Windows 11 update after users reported boot loops and startup failures."
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- We're talking about India today
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- There was a positive and mutual relationship between Wikileaks and Dr Jill Stein
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- Who's going to hold them accountable now?
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- I can cynically guess that only matters when a user with a Chinese name does it
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- predating indefinite detention
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- 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
- "I Hated Working at IBM. They Were the Most Unfriendly People."
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- GNU/Linux Consolidates in North America
- Android rising a lot this year, too
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- Work more; Get less
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- Published yesterday by a number of mainstream publishers
- Over at Tux Machines...
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- RIP Daniel Bristot de Oliveira, Red Hat death
- Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock