Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 2/5/2014: Graphics/GPU Source Code for Linux, Drones With Linux





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



Leftovers



  • Health/Nutrition



    • Why American Apples Just Got Banned in Europe
      Back in 2008, European Food Safety Authority began pressing the chemical industry to provide safety information on a substance called diphenylamine, or DPA. Widely applied to apples after harvest, DPA prevents "storage scald"—brown spots that "becomes a concern when fruit is stored for several months," according to Washington State University, reporting from the heartland of industrial-scale apple production.


    • Antibiotic-resistant superbug arose in northern Manhattan
      Human skin is a garden of microbes that is home to about 1,000 bacterial species. Most are benign, but some invade the skin and cause illness—of these, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are particularly dangerous.




  • Security



  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression





  • Finance



    • Organized Labor, Public Banks and the Grassroots: Keys to a Worker-Owned Economy
      Before his death in February, Jackson Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Lumumba was helping his constituents chart an economic plan whose main component was worker-owned cooperatives. In her recent article about Lumumba and cooperatives, Laura Flanders cites Collective Courage author Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s point that African-American leaders from Marcus Garvey to W.E.B. DuBois were proponents of cooperatives. DuBois, Garvey and Lumumba understood that worker democracy was necessary for economic sovereignty and community solidarity.


    • Beyond Piketty’s Capital: Richard Wolff Warns us Not to Band-Aid Capitalism
      Wolff warns that we cannot band-aid capitalism. However laudable and even attainable may be suggestions from economists like Piketty or Dean Baker, to name just two, piecemeal policies designed to stop the system from funneling wealth upwards will not work for long. The elites are fully focused on preserving and expanding their fortunes, and the structure of the contemporary economy puts in the hands of a very few people in large corporate enterprises “both the incentive and the resources to roll back whatever adjustments a movement from below is able to make.”


    • IMF Confirms $17bn Loan to Ukraine with Conditions That Will Devastate the Economy
      The IMF has confirmed a conditional loan of $17bn to Ukraine in what it touts as a rescue package aimed at stabilizing Ukraine as it seeks to maintain independence from a belligerent Russia. Instead, we are witnessing the final stages of the US-EU coup of Ukraine, and by implementing the conditions of the loan, the nation will be left destitute and dependent.


    • Kshama Sawant, Seattle City Councilwoman: McDonald's Doesn't Need Time To Phase In $15 Minimum Wage
      Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, an outspoken socialist, claimed a victory Thursday after Mayor Ed Murray announced a plan to hike the city's minimum wage to $15, which Sawant was a driving force behind. But she told HuffPost Live's Alyona Minkovski that she isn't totally happy with the plan, which gives big corporations years to phase in the new wage.


    • Demanding 'Just and Sustainable' Economy For All, Thousands March on Congress
      In an expression of a "new populist" energy, thousands of demonstrators shut down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC on Monday as they demanded a livable wage and an end to the corporate domination of the national economy and politics.


    • The Big Tip That America’s Servers Never See
      A good many Americans now know the high-finance games that JPMorgan Chase and other big banks like to play — at our expense. And big oil giants like ExxonMobil have been outraging Americans for years.

      But plenty of other corporate giants that inflate our inequality have been flying under the radar screen. Who, for instance, has ever heard of Darden? Or Yum! Brands?

      These little-known outfits just happen to rate as two of the biggest corporate behemoths in the restaurant industry. They’ve been squeezing workers — and soaking taxpayers — as relentlessly as any enterprises in America. Yet they barely have any national profile at all.

      That may be about to change.

      Last week, on the eve of the National Restaurant Association annual meeting, two top think tanks — the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and Demos in New York— released new studies that detail how America’s food-service giants are growing the gap between the nation’s rich and everyone else.

      This week protesting restaurant workers will be taking that message to the streets. Many of these workers are currently laboring at the $2.13 hourly federal minimum wage for tipped workers, a base that hasn’t budged since 1991.


    • Any talk of economic recovery is pure fiction
      Down is up. Sick is healthy. The RMS Titanic is seaworthy. Topsy-turvy logic is a speciality of the austerity brigade, and here they come dishing up a third helping. First, in 2010-11, they pledged that making historic cuts amid a global slump would definitely, absolutely secure a strong recovery. Then things went predictably belly-up, forcing Cameron and Osborne to dump their deficit-reduction plans and the eurocrats to make more bailouts. Yet these reversals were, naturally, "sticking to the course". Now things don't look quite as awful as they did a couple of years ago – and this somehow gets chalked up as a miraculous rebound.




  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying



    • Science Media Centre Spins Pro-GMO Line
      Since consumer campaigning got GMOs labeled and crop restricting implemented in the United Kingdom, Cameron will likely have a hard time convincing UK consumers that all is well. However, Cameron is getting help in that quest from a little known group called the Science Media Centre (SMC), which helped release the report to great fanfare. The Guardian and The Independent published prominent coverage of the report, and it was featured by the BBC. The Independent and BBC coverage were both entirely uncritical, quoting the scientists handpicked by the SMC for its reporters' briefing. The Guardian report was less glowing, but still quoted the SMC scientists and buried the reactions of critics below the fold. None of them mentioned that the report briefing was held by the SMC.




  • Privacy



  • Civil Rights



  • Internet/Net Neutrality



    • FCC's Wheeler Says That If These Lame Net Neutrality Rules Don't Work, He'll Implement The Real Rules Next Time
      Following his weak attempt to diffuse concerns about his bogus "open internet" rules, FCC boss Tom Wheeler has decided to try again, by basically repeating what he said last week with slightly stronger language about how he won't let broadband providers violate net neutrality. Of course, as many people have explained, the problem is that the new rules clearly aren't strong enough, and leave open all sorts of ways to kill off basic neutrality online. Of course, the real problem is that the original 2010 "open internet" rules (which were really crafted by the telcos in the first place) didn't really protect net neutrality in the first place, and the new rules are basically an even weaker version of those rules. But, have no fear, claims Wheeler, if these rules don't work, he promises he'll actually pull out the big gun, Title II, and reclassify broadband players as telco services rather than information services, allowing the FCC to put them under common carrier rules.




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights



      • Dotcom Thanks RIAA and MPAA for Mega’s Massive Growth
        Mega.co.nz, the cloud storage company founded by Kim Dotcom, has seen the number of uploads triple in the past six months. Mega users now upload a total of half a billion files per month. According to Kim Dotcom, the MPAA and RIAA deserve some credit for the unprecedented growth.


      • Lawsuit Against First US Copyright Trolls For Extortion Ends In Victory
        A few years ago, we wrote about how a guy named Dimitry Shirokov, with help from the law firm of Booth Sweet had taken on the "fathers" of copyright trolling in the US, Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, who had formed an organization called US Copyright Group, which initiated the first round of mass copyright trolling in the US (before the likes of Prenda and others entered the space). Shirokov had tried to make his lawsuit a class action against the lawyers, claiming fraud and extortion. And while the class action part was unfortunately rejected, the case has ended with a victory for Shirokov, with the judge ordering DGW to pay $39,909.95 ($3,179.52 to Shirokov and the rest in attorneys' fees to Booth Sweet).


      • Books and more are relicensed to Creative Commons
        I began working with the Wikimedia Foundation in January 2012 for program and community support in India. With the Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge program, we focus on open access for scholarly publications to help communities enrich Wikipedia entries for Indic languages.

        While I was negotiating with a few authors to relicense their copyrighted books to a Creative Commons license (a license that allows anyone to reuse, modify and use content), I began identifying certain areas of motivation for an author to donate their work as free content.

        We worked closely with Goa University, Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa Trust, and the Institute of Odia Studies and Research.


      • Aereo Can't Be Bound by Secret Interpretations of Copyright Law
        It may seem like a wishy-washy answer, but there's an alarming point nested within it: the Solicitor General's office's position that the interpretation of the law—which the executive branch has worked into our international trade obligations—is the only way for the law to be "properly construed."

        That in turn suggests that the executive branch believes it is responsible for properly constructing the law. Of course, that position stands in conflict with Marbury v. Madison, the case that established judicial review in 1803: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."

        That has serious implications for the democratic process. Here's how it seems to work: the executive branch comes up with an interpretation of U.S. copyright law and then negotiates it into international agreements. It conducts these negotiations in secret, insisting that it needs no meaningful oversight because it doesn't require a change in U.S. law.


      • Ballots 2009 for the Swedish Pirate Party's election to the European Parliament
        More or less overnight, betting companies slashed their odds of the Swedish Pirate Party’s re-election to the European Parliament. Where a re-election scenario used to give you 8x your money back in a bet with them, it now gives a mere 1.25x. It appears the betting companies know something that Swedish oldmedia haven’t picked up on yet.


      • Kim Dotcom: On the road with Hollywood's biggest enemy
        Kim Dotcom, the multi-millionaire hacker-turned-entrepreneur, was on the roof of his New Zealand mansion, handcuffed and surrounded.

        One by one, his luxury cars were rolled out of garages and taken away. Dotcom's accounts, in various different countries, were frozen.

        His website, file storage service Megaupload, was shut down.

        Filings made in a court in Virginia outlined the accusation. Dotcom, US authorities said, was the man behind a "criminal enterprise" which used Megaupload to profit from piracy on a "massive scale". He faces more than 20 years in prison.


      • Tarantino is Back, Now Claiming Gawker is an Illegal Downloader


        After landing an early victory last week against Quentin Tarantino in their leaked screenplay row, Gawker is facing a new attack. In an amended complaint, Tarantino accuses Gawker of committing not only contributory infringement, but also direct infringement, after it illegally downloaded his script from a file-hosting site.








Recent Techrights' Posts

IBM to Announce 'Results' Shortly, Expect Lots of Chaff Like "Quantum" and "Hey Hi" (Nothing Material to Show)
We're still seeing layoffs and an exodus
Upcoming Techrights Series About the Failure of the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to Stop Hired Guns Who Work for Americans That Abuse Women
The SRA has demonstrated nothing but considerable incompetence at many levels
The "Alicante Mafia" - Part XIV - The EPO Vice-President Steve Rowan and the Hidden Alicante Connection is a Big Deal
We'll soon take a closer look at Ernst
 
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, January 28, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, January 28, 2026
Laos and Microsoft: About 10% Windows, 0% Bing
There are many more nations like it
EPO Technical Meetings Show no Breakthroughs, a Strike Goes Ahead This Friday
Apparently there was another (fourth) meeting today [...] The industrial actions are working already
Google News as the Sole Source of Slop About "Linux", a Feeder of Slopfarms or Serial Sloppers
At least it's no longer hard to 'contain' the slop problem, knowing which domains are the culprits and seeing that Google is their main 'feeder'
Links 28/01/2026: ChatGPT Has Financial Problems, White House Sharing Fakes (or Deepfakes) in Official Accounts/Sites
Links for the day
Gemini Links 28/01/2026: FlatCube NES Port Finished and "Why I Still Write on the Small Web in 2026"
Links for the day
Upcoming Techrights Series About the Public Appearances of Richard M. Stallman (RMS) in the United States
we plan to drop all pretences about "Open Source" and instead focus on Software Freedom
Upcoming Techrights Series About the Experiences of EPO Insiders
We'll start the new series some time next week
Links 28/01/2026: Microsoft Ordered to Stop Spying on School Children, Apple's Brand Tarnished by Its Complicity With Human Rights Abusers
Links for the day
Gemini Links 28/01/2026: Particle and AirMIDI
Links for the day
Amandine Jambert (EDPB/CNIL/FSFE), motive for lying, trust in blockchain and encryption
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, January 27, 2026
IRC logs for Tuesday, January 27, 2026
Expect More XBox Layoffs Shortly
As expected
Links 27/01/2026: Japan-China Feud Escalates Again, "Iran's Internet Blackout Persists"
Links for the day
Online 'Gathering' Held Today to Organise Industrial Actions in EPO, Strikes Will be Starting Shortly
"Online Extraordinary General Meeting on Action Plan"
It's Not About What You Know, It's About Who You Know (and Stay Quiet About the Cocaine)
This is not an organisation that exists to ensure laws are followed
FOSDEM 2026: democracy panel: FSFE uses women as stooges, gerrymander
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Must Use Proprietary JavaScript to Submit Feedback to the European Commission About Moving From GAFAM to Free Software
Nevertheless, go tell them why Software Freedom would benefit Europe's defence and economy
Distortion of the Facts About Mass Layoffs at IBM
more layoffs are ahead
Gemini Links 27/01/2026: "Waiting Isn't a Waste", Posting from Lynx, and Bookmarks
Links for the day
Links 27/01/2026: "Oracle Debt and TikTok Transition Troubles Vex the Ellison Media Empire", Richard Stallman Quoted on Copyrights
Links for the day
Steven Field (Red Hat) Speaks of "Recent Layoff" (RA/Wave) in Red Hat
IBM really doesn't like it when people talk about "RAs"
The "Alicante Mafia" - Part XIII - Is EPO Vice-President Steve Rowan in Cahoots With the "Alicante Mafia"?
that deserves much media attention, political intervention, and condemnation
A Week Ago We Contacted the EPO's Stephen (Steve) Rowan About Cocainegate
Tomorrow we'll write some more about Rowan
“Wikilaundering” Explained
"London PR firm rewrites Wikipedia for governments and billionaires"
IBM Reports 'Results' Tomorrow, Expect More "RAs" (Mass Layoffs)
they use words like "efficiency", "optimisation", "AI", "pivot", "modernisation" and so on
Earlier This Month Microsoft Lunduke Said in Public It Was Good That Renee Good Was Murdered, Now He Mocks or Demonises People for Saying the US is Unsafe
Don't be easily conned by demagogues
Google News and "Linux" Slop
Why won't Google be interested in tackling this issue? Instead Google has been trying to participate in this issue.
IBM Kills Red Hat in the Darkness
What IBM does to Red Hat is malicious
IBM Red Hat's Goal Is Not Real Security (It Probably Never Was)
Spies and trolls are very malicious people and sometimes they're the same thing
With Absurd Lies About Slop, Which Lacks Intelligence or Financial Potential, GAFAM and IBM Will Twist Mass Layoffs as 'Efficiency Drive' or 'AI Pivot'
More layoffs are on the way
Animal Advocacy Works
All it takes is effort and determination
EPO Strike This Week
What has happened to Europe?
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, January 26, 2026
IRC logs for Monday, January 26, 2026