Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 7/9/2011: Linux World Domination, China Picks IBM's GNU/Linux Mainframe



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Project of the Month September 2011 - GCompris


  • New on the site: Open source resources
    We're happy to announce a new open source resources section. To kick things off, we've added pages that highlight open source conferences and events, organizations, and projects and applications. It's not much, but it's a start. We have lots of ideas, and want to make this more robust and improve functionality. But for now, let's see if this idea catches on.


  • Web Browsers



  • SaaS

    • A Way off the Ranch
      In February 2011, Eben Moglen gave a landmark speech to the Internet Society titled "Freedom in the Cloud", in which he unpacked the problem. In the beginning, he said, the Internet was designed as "a network of peers without any intrinsic need for hierarchical or structural control, and assuming that every switch in the Net is an independent, free-standing entity whose volition is equivalent to the volition of the human beings who want to control it".




  • Databases

    • NoSQL Benchmarking
      NoSQL is the talk of the town. And we have already covered what it is for in one of our previous blogs. Today I would like to share the NoSQL benchmark test results we have recently conducted. It will help you to understand if the soon to develop system is compatible to NoSQL, and which NoSQL product to select.

      In this article we will reveal the characteristics of Cassandra, HBase and MongoDB identified through multiple workloads.




  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

    • Board Elections: Nominations Open


    • Developing LibreOffice
      Not being stopped by that knowledge, LibreOffice developers take a strong bite deep in the code base for improvements now and even better future LibreOffice development. I'm not only impressed, but also get more and more confident in the future of this project.




  • CMS

    • Octopress: Create Static Sites with a Full-Featured Framework
      Static sites have better performance than dynamic sites, but you lose a lot of features by giving up a content management system (CMS), right? Maybe not, if you have a framework like Octopress.

      Last week I looked at static sites and cloud services, but even Todd Hoff's excellent coverage put me off a bit. Then I ran into the Octopress 2.0 announcement.




  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • FSF's Star Turn in the Android FUDathon, Part 2
      The people and companies ... who disregard the Internet "don't be a dick" rule ... need more incentive to comply. However, even they don't lose the right to use the code permanently unless they decide to "be a dick" permanently. In those cases, it doesn't matter how many copies of the code they get -- each new license for each new copy would be terminated as soon as they attempted distribution outside the terms of the license.




  • Public Services/Government

    • Federal Court may share its DMS as open source, parliament says
      The Swiss Parliament's control committee for the Federal Court is allowing the publication as open source software of Open Justitia, a document management system developed in-house by the court. The software will be made available under the GPLv3 licence soon.


    • NSA Extends Label-based Security to Big Data Stores
      "There is a need for a flexible, high performance distributed key/value store that provides expressive, fine-grained access labels," the developers stated on the proposal page submitted to Apache. "We have made much progress in developing this project over the past [three] years and believe both the project and the interested communities would benefit from this work being openly available and having open development."


    • Open government policy developments in Australasia
      Last week in New Zealand, the Ministers of Finance and Internal Affairs adopted a statement detailing a new Declaration on Open and Transparent Government. The Declaration has been approved by Cabinet, and directs all Public Service departments, the New Zealand Police, the New Zealand Defence Force, the Parliamentary Counsel Office, and the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service; encourages other State Services agencies; and invites State Sector agencies to commit to releasing high value public data actively for re-use, in accordance with the Declaration and Principles, and in accordance with the NZGOAL Review and Release process. More information on this statement can be found at the CC Aotearoa New Zealand blog.


    • Publicly Releasing Open Source Software Developed for the U.S. Government by Dr. David A. Wheeler
      This article summarizes when the U.S. federal government or its contractors may publicly release, as open source software (OSS), software developed with government funds. This section is intended for non-lawyers, to help them understand the basic rules they must follow.

      This article was previously published in the Journal of Software Technology (aka Software Tech News), Vol.14, No.1, February 2011. It is part of “Open Technology Development (OTD): Lessons Learned and Best Practices for Military Software”, and thus is released under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 (CC-BY-SA) License. A one-page summary of this paper is available from MIL-OSS, and the MIL-OSS 2011 conference had a presentation on releasing OSS.




  • Programming



  • Standards/Consortia

    • WS-Calendar 1.0 adopted by OASIS Committee


    • The Next Internet: What's Holding Us Back?
      Tim Berners-Lee, to his credit, did not invent the Internet. He did have one good idea. He was not the first person or even the twelfth with the same idea, but he did make it work. Yet most of the underlying work - the bringing together of dozens of communications systems with slightly or wildly varying protocols - was done before him. He just plugged it in, and for that, he gets most of the credit.






Leftovers



  • Security



  • Cablegate

    • Wikileaks Provides Proof that UK is Eradicating Turks and Caicos Islanders Since Early 2000s


    • Talks over Egypt-Israel gas deal took 10 years, says Wikileaks
      Negotiations over the natural gas deal between Egypt and Israel dragged out over 10 years because of “political concerns in Egypt," a recently revealed Wikileaks cable said.

      A partial extract from cable number 05CAIRO4972 of a confidential document prepared by the US embassy in Cairo one day before the deal was signed said the US described the deal as "the most lucrative ever."

      On July 1, 2005, then Egyptian Petroleum Minister Sameh Fahmy and Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure Benjamin Ben-Eliezer signed the agreement to supply 1.7 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually to the Israel Electric Corporation (IEC) starting October 2006.


    • Addressing confusion about PFC Bradley Manning’s case
      In online discussions attributed to PFC Bradley Manning, he says that he hopes his actions will spur “discussion, debates, and reforms” and that he “want[s] people to know the truth, no matter who they are, because without information you cannot make informed decisions as a public.” This is the classic definition of a whistle-blower (a person who tells the public about alleged dishonest or illegal activities/misconduct occurring in a government department).

      Unfortunately, the government is charging PFC Bradley Manning with “knowingly [giving] intelligence to the enemy, through indirect means,” under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice — an allegation of treason and a capital offense. By this rational, scores of service-person-posted blogs, photos, and videos, would now be punishable by death—simply because they are accessible on the Internet. The charge against Bradley Manning appears to be about sending a message to other would-be whistle-blowers.


    • 2011-09-06 WikiLeaks Notes: Latest News on #Cablegate Releases & #WikiLeaks
  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Wikileaks has shown us a world we need to know
      Wik€­ileaks has its share of crit€­ics – the or€­gan€­i€­sa€­tion is too cen€­tred around Ju€­lian As€­sange and a per€­son€­al€­ity-type cult ex€­ists – but surely the vast bulk of in€­for€­ma€­tion the group has re€­leased since 2006 makes it a major force for good (not least be€­cause it’s forced gov€­ern€­ments and many jour€­nal€­ists on the de€­fen€­sive about their in€­sider tac€­tics)...


    • Dolphins call each other by name
      Dave the dolphin whistles, and his friend Alan whistles back. We can't yet decipher their calls, but some of the time Dave may be calling: "Alan! Alan! Alan! Alan!"

      Stephanie King of the University of St Andrews, UK, and colleagues monitored 179 pairs of wild bottlenose dolphins off the Florida coast between 1988 and 2004. Of these, 10 were seen copying each other's signature whistles, which the dolphins make to identify themselves to each other.


    • Girl's sex spy saga shocks staid Swiss
      Even by Romanian standards, the plot beggars belief. A hot-blooded young seductress masquerading as a journalist is order- ed by her masters in the Romanian Intelligence Service to lure the Swiss ambassador into bed.

      Once there, her task is to find out anything and everything she can about "Ceausescu's Gold" - the millions of dollars Romania's late dictator is believed to have stashed away in Swiss bank accounts just before his fall.

      Afternoons of passion in the Bucharest penthouse she would persuade him to buy her were to be followed by gentle probing as to the real intentions of ex-King Michael, the former Romanian monarch now exiled in the ambassador's Swiss homeland.

      And far from keeping the affair discreet, the agent is to make sure that she and her consort - a married man with two children - are frequently seen together wining and dining in public and at diplomatic functions. Just for good measure, the exercise will be called "Operation William Tell".




  • Finance

    • NY Approves Goldman Sachs' Sale of Litton with Stipulations
      The New York Department of Financial Services and Banking Department is including several stipulations with its approval of Goldman Sachs’ sale of its Litton Loan Servicing, LP, to special servicer Ocwen Financial Corp.


    • All Work and No Pay: The Great Speedup
      ON A BRIGHT SPRING DAY in a wisteria-bedecked courtyard full of earnest, if half-drunk, conference attendees, we were commiserating with a fellow journalist about all the jobs we knew of that were going unfilled, being absorbed or handled "on the side." It was tough for all concerned, but necessary—you know, doing more with less.




  • Copyrights

    • Universities flee Access Copyright
      In the wake of a proposed fee increase, universities across Canada have opted to leave contracts with once-popular copyright licenser Access Copyright. Many schools, including York University, the University of British Columbia and almost every school in the prairie region have abandoned their contracts with Access Copyright in favour of steering the waters of copyright legislation on their own.


    • MPAA Unsurprisingly Behind Australia iiNet Case
      Hid Behind Scenes to Avoid Impression of Being a Bully






Recent Techrights' Posts

An American War on GNU/Linux, Software Freedom, and British Investigative, Science-Based Reporting - Part I - A Matter of National Security
Those people are Americans who try to advance the interests of American corporations by weaponising courts abroad
The Register MS, Sponsored by Communist Party of China (CPC)
What will happen when the bubble crashes the economy?
 
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, March 07, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, March 07, 2026
Gemini Links 07/03/2026: Buying Woodland, Indra 1.3.0 Available, and LLM Exhaustion
Links for the day
The Harder They Attempt to Take Down This Site (and Take Away Liberties), the More People Will See This Site
We'll carry on as usual, as from sunlight comes justice
Why They Always Try to Shoot the Messenger (When the Message Harms Profits)
A matter of economics
Coinbase - Like Block - is in Huge Trouble, Its Debt Nearly Doubled in Half a Year
The real reason Block is collapsing is its debt
Starting Another New Series This Evening, It's About American Folly
today commences a series long in the making (years)
Nations Stand to Benefit From Gender Equality and Increased Participation by Women
International Women's Rights Day starts in about 6 hours in the UK
Microsoft is Losing It, Now It's Censoring Its Critics and Sceptics
Whether the measurements made by statCounter are accurate or not, the trends (long-term) typically make sense
WIRED (Conde Nast) Reviews Are Paid-for Marketing Spam, They Change Dates on Old 'Articles' to Make Them Look Relevant and New
The Web is fast becoming a burial ground for ads, trash, spam, and slop
Gemini Links 07/03/2026: Humour, Chilling, and Oversized 'Phones'
Links for the day
Cyber|Show by Andy and Helen Recommended by Techrights and Tux Machines
If your time is limited and you look for informative essays and shows (audio)
Links 07/03/2026: CJEU to Finally Examine Behaviour of the Illegal and Unconstitutional Unified Patent Kangaroo Court, Creative Commons (CC) Hosts Open Heritage Statement Event in Amsterdam
Links for the day
Microsoft's Thailand Problem
It's definitely not Windows
New Lows for Microsoft in Micronesia
GNU/Linux has shown some growth there too
Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 5 Out of 200: Clearly Not a Security Professional/Expert, Only Ever Pretending to be One
"The Claimant says he is “a computer security expert”, but his background and his track record in the education sense (genetics) does not support this assertion."
Links 07/03/2026: Fuel Already Running Low and "Economic Crisis of the Iran War"
Links for the day
The Corporate Media Repeated the Lies Told by Jack Dorsey ("AI" Hype), Now It Does the Same for Larry Ellison
Disregard the hundreds of headlines that say mass layoffs at Oracle are due to "AI" something
The Free Software Community is Gaining Momentum as Its Importance is More Broadly Realised
As long as "trendy" technology goes in a negative direction there will be a growing portion in society looking for alternatives
Spooking or Chasing Away Women (From Computer Science)
The status quo discourages women from even trying to study Computer Science and related disciplines
"IBM Has Changed So Much in the Last Decade to the Point It's Completely Unrecognizable."
IBM is a dying, rotting company with a morbid culture
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, March 06, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, March 06, 2026
Gemini Links 07/03/2026: Coffee Problem, Marchintosh, Learning, and "Selectively Disabling HTTP"
Links for the day
Under IBM, Some Fedora Blog Posts Have Become LLM Slop! (Red Hat is Doomed by Slop Fanaticism)
Who would even bother reading such trash?
Lots of People Leaving IBM Today
IBM cannot be trusted
Dances With Wolves, Wakes Up With Fleas
Small minds say "td;dr" whereas the rest say, "give me information, give me time to study it"...
LLM Slop Rare and Scarce This Friday
We still hope that by the end of this year slop will become nearly extinct
Defending British Democracy From American Predators
We stand united and strong in the face of predators
Links 06/03/2026: LLM Prompt-injection Vulnerability in Microsoft's Proprietary GitHub, "260,000 Federal Jobs Lost"
Links for the day
It's Friday and Many People Publicly Announce Leaving IBM (Which is Engineering 'Willful' Departures to Mask RAs' Scale)
We understand from whistleblowers that IBM already destroyed Red Hat's culture
Dr. Richard Stallman (RMS), the Man Whose Mind Scares GAFAM et al, Began Speaking in Switzerland
His ideas and ideals are not obscene
Gemini Links 06/03/2026: "Setting up the Feed" and Using Molly Brown
Links for the day
Links 06/03/2026: Can't Copyright Slop in US, Microsoft Became Slop Provider for Militarism
Links for the day
Garrett Does Not Just Try to Cover Up for Himself, He's Clearly Covering Up for His Mates From Microsoft (and Admits Third Parties Fund His Litigation, With Their Legal Bills Estimates Already Approaching $1,000,000)
They have already sent us about 75 KG of legal papers. How is any judge supposed to keep up?
Richard Stallman in the United States - Part IV - Back to Switzerland
The "cancel mob" tried to "finish off" RMS 5 years ago
Dr. Richard Stallman in Ada Lovelace Lecture Series 20 Hours From Now in Lucerne School of Computer Science and Information Technology (Rotkreuz)
Well-connected and affluent corporations want everything to be controlled by them, ranging from culture to words and news
Threats Issued to Daniel Pocock Having Launched the JuristGate Web Site Which Covers Financial Fraud in "Legal Insurance" Clothing
Is our world governed by laws or by rich corporations (or nations/superpowers) with well-connected lawyers/politicians?
International Women's Day: At the EPO, for Women to Become Managers They Need to Sleep With Well-connected Men and Mingle With Corrupt Men
Sunday is International Women's Day
Dr. Richard Stallman Starts His Talks in Switzerland in 8 Hours
They try to assess how many people plan to attend to ensure everyone gets a seat (without compromising the privacy/identity of those attending)
IBM Red Hat Layoffs: It's Not About "AI"
"Automation" is not "AI", it's just a generic term which can describe jobs left for machines to do, sometimes computers
Microsoft Windows Used to be Identified on Over 99% of Web Requests From Benin. Now It's Around 50%.
Or a lot less
Microsoft 'Open' 'AI' Has Severe Financial Problems, Version Inflation ("GPT-5.4") is Mindless Hype and a Misleading Distraction
In practice, both users and sponsors of ChaffGPT are fleeing
The Techrights Static Site Generator (SSG) Turns 5 Next Year
It's still under active development in our Git servers
New XBox Boss (Sharma) Implicitly Confirmed XBox (the Console) is Now Dead
Vista 11 is now also known as "XBox"
Murder as a 'Joke' to GAFAM People (Sociopathy)
When it comes to Microsoft and Salesforce, they profit from this mentality
GNU/Linux Seen as Rising to 20% in Eritrea, But That's statCounter Identifying "Unknown" as GNU/Linux
What if statCounter managed to figure out what all those "unknowns" are?
Microsoft ‘Project Helix’ is Just a Tweet in MElon's "X"
Some "tweet" is easy, as words are cheap
Microsofters' SLAPP Censorship - Part 4 Out of 200: Rianne’s Version of Events and Narrative
today we tell Rianne's experience
EPO Staff to 'Meet' This Coming Tuesday to Plan Industrial Actions Including Upcoming Strikes
using Microsoft spyware to organise this can be an own goal because Microsoft serves the dictators, not the union that tries to topple them
Thousands of EPO Workers Rally Against EPO Management
The staff is furious to see what became of the EPC and the EPO. This is not sustainable.
In Argentina Firefox is Measured at Only 1%, Google Chrome (Proprietary) at About 90%
And it has long been that way
IBM's March 2026 Layoffs Already Happening (to Accelerate Soon in Europe and America)
We're probably seeing some of the last years of IBM and it's anything but certain that IBM can survive the coming decade
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, March 05, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, March 05, 2026