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Links 11/5/2015: Linux 4.1 RC3, OpenELEC 6.0 Beta





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom firms join MIPS open-source push
    Qualcomm Atheros, Lantiq (part of Intel) and Broadcom have appointed representatives to the board of the Prpl (‘purple’) Foundation, organisation set-up by Imagination Technologies to support open-source software on the MIPS architecture.


  • Events



    • OSCAL Open Source Conference Albania – DAY 1
      Held in Tirana and with attention on gathering free libre open source technology users, developers, academics, governmental agencies and people who share the same idea. Oscal aimed to inform and promote that software should be free and open for the local community and governments to develop and customize to its needs; that knowledge is a communal property and free and open to everyone. The conference is supported and organized by Open Labs, the community that promotes free libre open source culture in Albania since 2012.


    • User stories at Summit and more OpenStack news




  • Web Browsers



  • SaaS/Big Data



    • Big data challenges? Look at your people, not your technology
      As anyone pursuing a big data initiative knows, every big data strategy really has two components: the technology and the people. The technology part is actually very simple to solve, relative to the people. As long as you're not trying to crack big data problems with relational database technology from 2004, this piece of the equation shouldn't be a big scary beast.


    • Pivotal rolls out Hadoop distro update, new query optimizer
      Just a few months ago, Pivotal announced that it would open source its entire big data stack: the Pivotal HD distribution, Pivotal Greenplum Database, Pivotal GemFire real-time distributed data store, Pivotal SQLFire (a SQL layer for the real-time distributed data store), Pivotal GemFire XD (in-memory SQL over HDFS) and the Pivotal HAWQ parallel query engine over HDFS. These updates, says Michael Cucchi, senior director of Outbound Product at Pivotal, underscore Pivotal's continued commitment to supporting that open source strategy.




  • CMS



  • Education



  • Funding



  • BSD



  • Openness/Sharing



    • Open source, beyond technology
      Here at Opensource.com, the staff, community moderators, and contributors strive to show how the ideas underpinning open source go beyond technology and apply to all aspects of life and society. Imagine organizing a conference around that idea.


    • Open Hardware



      • What if a robot can sense what you think
        Surrounded by small yet sturdy pieces of 3D-printed plastic, a Macintosh and a couple of 3D-printers, sits 22-year-old Diwakar Vaish at New Delhi-based A-SET Training & Research Institute’s robotics lab watching a robot move its mechanical joints to groovy songs from old Bollywood movies. Vaish, who has a faint smile playing along his lips while watching the show, has jolted the robotics sector with his new first ever 3D-printed humanoid robot.


      • Hackaday Prize Entry: Open Source Diesel
        But what about the motors themselves? For his entry to The Hackaday Prize, [Shane] is designing an open source engine. It’s small, it’s a two-stroke, and it’s diesel, but it’s completely open hardware; a great enabling project for all the open source dirt bikes and microcombines.






  • Standards/Consortia



    • Khronos Group Releases Final SYCL 1.2 Specification
      The Khronos Group today announced the official release of the SYCL 1.2 specification. SYCL is the Khronos Group's single-source heterogeneous programming language that serves as an abstraction layer for utilizing OpenCL while writing standard C++ code.






Leftovers



  • Google killing PageSpeed website service


  • Hardware



  • Security



    • Top OpenStack Security Dev from Nebula Didn't go to Oracle, He Went to Netflix
      Lots of chatter in my news feeds the last few days about Oracle allegedly hiring most of Nebula's OpenStack devs. Trouble is it's not entirely accurate.

      [...]

      I can't speak to the rest of Nebula staff, and no doubt some of them have landed at Oracle - but not all.


    • The Internet of Things to take a beating in DefCon hacking contest
      Hackers will put Internet-connected embedded devices to the test at the DefCon 23 security conference in August. Judging by the results of previous Internet-of-Things security reviews, prepare for flaws galore.


    • The Increasing Problem Of FOSS Mailing List Flooding Attacks
      Recently, I have received a large amount of subscription confirmation emails. These mails are from public mailing lists, especially lists of Free and Open Source Projects, included but not limited to OpenBSD, FreeBSD, GNU Project, Ubuntu, CentOS, and Qt. The "subscribers" are from multiple IP addresses. After I shared my experience to social networks, I have found more than 10 victims of the same attack, included a famous Chinese tech-blog writer. One of us received more than 10k email for 24 hours. Some of our emails have already stopped operating and refusing all new incoming emails.




  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression



    • The Killing of Osama bin Laden
      A worrying factor at this early point, according to the retired official, was Saudi Arabia, which had been financing bin Laden’s upkeep since his seizure by the Pakistanis. ‘The Saudis didn’t want bin Laden’s presence revealed to us because he was a Saudi, and so they told the Pakistanis to keep him out of the picture. The Saudis feared if we knew we would pressure the Pakistanis to let bin Laden start talking to us about what the Saudis had been doing with al-Qaida. And they were dropping money – lots of it. The Pakistanis, in turn, were concerned that the Saudis might spill the beans about their control of bin Laden. The fear was that if the US found out about bin Laden from Riyadh, all hell would break out. The Americans learning about bin Laden’s imprisonment from a walk-in was not the worst thing.’




  • Censorship



    • The left has Islam all wrong: Bill Maher, Pamela Geller and the reality progressives must face
      Whatever her views on other matters are, Pamela Geller is right about one thing: last week’s Islamist assault on the “Draw Muhammad” cartoon contest she hosted in Texas proves the jihad against freedom of expression has opened a front in the United States. “There is,” she said, “a war on free speech and this violent attack is a harbinger of things to come.” Apparently undaunted, Geller promises to continue with such “freedom of speech” events. ISIS is now threatening to assassinate her. She and her cohorts came close to becoming victims, yet some in the media on the right and the center-right have essentially blamed her for the gunmen’s attack, just as far too many, last January, surreptitiously pardoned the Kouachi brothers and, with consummate perfidy to human decency, inculpated the satirical cartoonists they slaughtered, saying “Charlie Hebdo asked for it.”




  • Privacy



    • Snoopers' charter set to return to law as Theresa May suggests Conservative majority could lead to huge increase in surveillance powers


      The Conservatives are already planning to introduce the huge surveillance powers known as the Snoopers’ Charter, hoping that the removal from government of the Liberal Democrats that previously blocked the controversial law will allow it to go through.

      The law, officially known as the Draft Communications Data Bill, is already back on the agenda according to Theresa May. It is expected to force British internet service providers to keep huge amounts of data on their customers, and to make that information available to the government and security services.


    • US reviews use of cellphone spying technology
      Faced with criticism from lawmakers and civil rights groups, the U.S. Department of Justice has begun a review of the secretive use of cellphone surveillance technology that mimics cellphone towers, and will get more open on its use, according to a newspaper report.


    • 7 reasons why the feds shouldn’t mess with encryption
      Information security professionals were overwhelmingly opposed to a plea to rethink encryption by the Department of Homeland Security at last week's RSA conference.




  • Civil Rights



  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights



      • You Can’t Defend Public Libraries and Oppose File-Sharing
        Public libraries started appearing in the mid-1800s. At the time, publishers went absolutely berserk: they had been lobbying for the lending of books to become illegal, as reading a book without paying anything first was “stealing”, they argued. As a consequence, they considered private libraries at the time to be hotbeds of crime and robbery. (Those libraries were so-called “subscription libraries”, so they were argued to be for-profit, too.)








Recent Techrights' Posts

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They tell us X is "dead" and we must all be herded into Wayland ASAP
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when Bryant says "AI" that doesn't mean AI
"Governments, local authorities, schools and hospitals can lead by example by procuring only Free Software"
Crossposted from Tux Machines
Cindy Cohn Leaving the Electronic Frontier Foundation While Its Co-founder John Gilmore, Whom She Apparently Helped Oust, Will Celebrate 40 Years of the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
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"Google is Googlebombing KDE's Project Banana"
So is Google googlebombing KDE's Project Banana? You decide.
Some Very Large IRC Networks Are Growing
IRC will turn 38 next year
What Ruben Amorim and Stefano Maffulli Have in Common
Censors Wikipedia and Social Control Media
Microsoft Won't Cooperate in Trying to Tackle EPO Corruption (Microsoft Profits From This Corruption)
Use something like BigBlueButton, Jami, Ring, and Jitsi instead
We Are Sad to Hear the Story of Jonathan Riddell, Champion of KDE and GNU/Linux on Desktops/Laptops
I have enormous respect for Jonathan and everything he has done
 
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Cry us a river, Microsoft Lunduke
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The Oracle Ponzi Scheme
Oracle isn't doing well, but it's nowadays fashionable to say "clown" and "hey hi" to prop up one's stock, even based on nothing at all
Taking Out the Battery, Opening Up Your Computer, Just Like a "Normie" Would
At this stage, any person who still says "enable Secure Boot" is misguided or persuaded by companies that sell rootkits
Slopwatch: Serial Sloppers and Slopfarms Still Infesting Google News (Fake 'Articles' About "Linux" Spreading FUD)
searching for "Linux" today yields a lot of FUD
The Reach of Techrights Has Broadened
We nowadays cover a broader range of issues
Complicating Things for No Actual Benefit, Just Added Risk and More Difficulties Adding GNU/Linux and BSDs
Watch what it's like for people who wish to use BSDs
Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC logs for Monday, September 15, 2025
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They also mention MOK
Solved Less Than an Hour Ago: Trying to Escape Windows, 'Secure Boot' Gets in the Way
'Secure Boot' wasn't meant to even exist in the first place
Stefano Maffulli, Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative, Resigns or Gets Removed (We'll Continue Covering OSI Scandals)
A dozen mentions of "AI", not much about "Open Source"
Andy Has Just Nailed It (Regarding Complexity and Failure, a la UEFI)
The users no longer own or control what they buy
Compatibility Support Module (CSM) Versus GNU/Linux Simplicity
what Andy recently called "solutionism"
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Breach of EPO's Duty of Care or Cigna Reimbursement Issues
This is the sort of thing that motivated Luigi Mangione to assassinate a CEO
Ask Ubuntu About "Secure Boot" Violation and Laptops That Don't Boot GNU/Linux
Does anyone still believe that "Secure Boot" has anything at all to do with security?
Talking About the Problem vs Talking to the Problem
Wanting an audience is never a good excuse for compromising one's values and principles
Focusing on Patents
The reason we cover the EPO so much is that it's close to home
"Secure Boot Violation": The 'Joys' of Fake Security Gone Wrong
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EPO Imitates Microsoft: "Three Days or More Per Week" Inside the Office to Get a Desk to Work on; "the Office Breaches Its Promise Towards Staff and Acts in Breach of Its Duty of Care"
The EPO serves no actual function in Europe
Links 15/09/2025: Political Affairs, Censorship, and Copyrights
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Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC logs for Sunday, September 14, 2025
Satya's Plan B: Try to Hide the Massive Extent/Scale/Scope of Microsoft Layoffs
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With RTOs, PIPs, relocation etc. expect IBM to "shed off" many Red Hatters
UEFI "Secure Boot Doesn’t Play Nice at the Moment"
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Links 14/09/2025: Disasters for CEOs Obsessed With Slop and Slop Companies School Like Fish
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Microsoft Lunduke panders to extremists online
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