Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links - Education Watch, BBC Apologizes for Selling Out, BP Oil Lingers

Reader's Picks



  • Science



  • Health/Nutrition



  • Security



    • Traveling Light in a Time of Digital Thievery

      Copy is not theft. Most of the privacy problems people have are Windows exploits and the power non free software owners help themselves to in the first place. As usual, the NYT is lost in a maze of details and misses the big picture.





  • Defence/Police/Aggression



  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife





  • Finance



  • Anti-Trust



  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying



    • BBC to issue global apology for documentaries that broke rules
      Independent revealed programmes were made by third-party in pay of governments and firms

      Techrights has written a lot about Microsoft BBC corruption. The apology is a good first step. The BBC should abandon broadcast to focus on publicly financed program production and public domain distritution to free itself from money problems. More money, not less should be provided for this.





  • Privacy

    • Austrian Law Student Faces Down Facebook
      In less than a year, Mr. Schrems's one-person operation has morphed into a Web site, Europe Versus Facebook, and a grass-roots movement that has persuaded 40,000 people to contact Facebook in Ireland, where its European headquarters are located, to demand a summary of all the personal data the U.S. company is holding on them... Mr. Schrems filed the grievance after using a provision of Irish law to obtain from Facebook a copy of all of the information the company had been keeping on him. ... Facebook was routinely collecting data [1,222 pages worth] that he had never consented to give, like his physical location, which he assumes was determined from his computer's unique address identifiers, which can be traced geographically. Facebook was also retaining data he had deleted...




  • Education Watch

    • The F-word of Ed Reform — and its unholy alliance with right-wing union-busting
      There is a word for this kind of anti-democratic collaboration between business and government, but we haven’t used it much since the 1940s: fascism.

      This article is a good run down of what's going on in the world of civil servant union busting and "education reform"



    • More Anti-Charter School Resolutions in Washington State

      It looks like a good backlash it on the way. That's good for Washington state and a good example for the rest of us.



    • 60% Teach for America , Inc. recruits and 40% credentialed teachers in Lousiana

      Louisiana would have money for their schools and other things if government had the guts to tax the multinationals that run cancer alley.



    • New Orleans: Beachhead for Corporate Takeover of Public Schools
      New Orleans is important in the national education debate, but not for the reasons we commonly hear; it is important because it is the beachhead for a national movement to remove schools from local democratic control and accountability. The privatization trade-off is that the public sacrifices control of schools for a privatized system that delivers better education for the same tax dollar. While the citizens of New Orleans certainly lost control of their schools [after Hurricane Katrina], it cannot be said that they have received a better education, if that also means an equitable education, nor can it be said that it came at the same cost. ... Hurricane Katrina was the perfect storm for the corporate education movement: No democracy, no unions, and a goal of 100% privatization of all public schools. It is no mystery why they chose New Orleans as their beachhead.


    • The Myth of “Choice” in New Orleans: How the Recovery School District, Through the Charter School Movement Has Cheated Nearly 5000 New Orleans Students Out of Access to Real “Choice”


    • An essay by a former Teach for America recruit: Why I did TFA, and why you shouldn’t
      I’m glad I ‘did’ TFA. Twenty years ago they filled a need. Putting a few hundred barely trained teachers into the toughest to serve schools was one of those concepts that was ‘so crazy, it might just work.’ We weren’t always doing ‘good,’ but we also weren’t doing much harm. Our five or six hundred teachers were pretty insignificant in the scheme of things. Over the next twenty years, TFA did a lot of growing, but not a lot of evolving. They replicated their institutes and increased their regions. The 2011 corps is nearly 6,000, twelve times as big as the cohorts from the early 90s. Unfortunately, the landscape in education has changed a lot in the past twenty years. Instead of facing teacher shortages, we have teacher surpluses. There are regions where experienced teachers are being laid off to make room for incoming TFA corps members because the district has signed a contract with TFA, promising to hire their new people. ... TFA has participated in building a group of ‘leaders’ who, in my opinion, are assisting in the destruction of public education.


    • Occupy the DOE in DC from March 30th to April 2nd
      The key lever is the vaunted score on high-stakes state standardized tests, used to justify a slew of controversial decisions. As a result of ten years of this kind of reform, we are experiencing schools just as segregated by race and social class as they were in the 1950s. We in the United States are also experiencing a teaching profession that is constantly undermined and under attack. The culture of punishment and competition created under No Child Left Behind and now Race to the Top has proven to be a massive failure.


    • The NAACP Resolution on Charter Schools: Segregation is Not Innovation




  • ACTA

    • ACTA bombshell: Germany refuses to sign anti-piracy treaty amid protests [Update]
      With protests against the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) set to rage across Europe on Saturday ... More recent reports suggest Germany is simply delaying its decision on signing ACTA until a later date, rather than refusing to sign the treaty outright. This is a lesser victory for ACTA opponents, but still a sign that the public outcry against the agreement is having an effect.

      Go protest till they kill it properly.









  • Recent Techrights' Posts

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    Mozilla is not leftist
    Further Media Cut-downs
    media reporting about the media being cut
    Gemini Links 09/09/2025: Moon Eclipse and ROOPHLOCH Reports
    Links for the day
     
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    Links for the day
    Blaming Everything on China
    TikTok works for China. GAFAM works for fascists.
    People Get Tired of "Hey Hi" (AI), Unlike the Subservient Money-Obsessed Media That Gets Paid to Pretend This Bubble Still Matters
    "crash will be way bigger than dot.com burst in 90s. and that was Internet, actually transformative technology, not this expensive AI toy with direct dependency on the energy input which is not scalable"
    Brett Wilson LLP Accepts That the Serial Strangler From Microsoft Filed a Case That Also Implicates My Wife (Everything is Connected)
    They used to pretend that there were two separate cases
    10 Reasons to Disable (or Enable) UEFI Secure Boot
    Tomorrow the "trusted corporation" Microsoft will see a certificate expire
    Gemini Links 10/09/2025: Hospital and Large Feeds
    Links for the day
    Over at Tux Machines...
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    IRC logs for Tuesday, September 09, 2025
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    Microsoft saying "security" is like a Convicted Felon in the White House saying "law and order".
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    Bruce Schneier About "Secure Boot"
    Bruce Schneier isn't a fan of "Secure Boot"
    Links 09/09/2025: Microsoft Mass Layoffs Again and "RTO" (Timed Like It Serves as a Distraction From the Mass Layoffs)
    Links for the day
    RMS Told Microsoft to Stop 'Secure Boot' (He Even Went There to Say That), But They Didn't Listen
    Dr. Stallman (RMS) assumed that speaking to sociopaths would work
    What Richard Stallman Told Me About 'Secure' Boot in 2012
    "if the user doesn't control the keys, then it's a kind of shackle"
    Those Who Helped Microsoft Weaponise "Secure Boot" Against GNU/Linux and BSDs Are Fleeing
    Microsofters doing what they do best: they evade accountability
    Simple is Better, Simplicity is Power
    That is "the advantage of having commodity GNU/Linux systems," an associate notes
    Much Ado About Nonsense
    Microsoft Lunduke is still all dramatisation and sensationalism
    Current Events in France
    It needs to dump Microsoft and other GAFAM (US) giants, move to Free software
    Links 09/09/2025: US-Korea Tensions and Meta Whistleblowers
    Links for the day
    Links 09/09/2025: “Torrents of Hate” and Political Crisis in France
    Links for the day
    Gemini Links 09/09/2025: "Dedigitizing" and Forgejo on FreeBSD
    Links for the day
    Google News (Not Just Google Search) Lets Itself by Gamed by One Slopfarm - to the Point Almost Half of "Linux" News is Bot-Produced Plagiarism (LLM Slop With Slop Images)
    That says a lot about what Google thinks of quality, even in Google News
    Bill Gates-Funded Media Inadvertently Refutes the Microsoft Lie That in 2025 Microsoft Had Just Two Waves of Layoffs
    There were about 12 rounds of layoffs so far in 2025
    Official SUSE Blog Still Uses LLM Slop (Bots) to Make Fake Articles (Marketing)
    The company is all about sound bites
    Companies Realise That Slop Doesn't Work as Advertised, Accordingly Dump It
    "Hype dims as a country-wide survey of US corporations shows a sudden drop-off in AI use among firms with more than 250 employees."
    Microsoft-Funded Lawsuits Against Critics of UEFI 'Secure Boot'
    Remember that no company (or law firm) ever survives collaborations with Microsoft
    From theregister.co.uk to theregister.com (US) to The Register MS (Run by Microsoft Operatives) and theregister.ai
    The best way to break this racket (or cycle of hype and harm) is to break the chains of funding
    Open Source Initiative (OSI) Culture of Censorship Necessitates More Speech
    The OSI bans dissent or people who merely point out that the OSI is abusive
    How to Reach Us Discreetly (Other Than Encrypted E-mail)
    We're still managing to maintain a 100% source protection record. We soon turn 19.
    LLMs Are Vastly Worse Than a Waste of Energy and the Externalities Are Huge
    Worse than just higher power bills for everybody
    LLMs Versus Search (Not Replacing Search But Engaging in DDoS Attacks Against Web Sites That Permit Searching)
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    Over at Tux Machines...
    GNU/Linux news for the past day
    IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 08, 2025
    IRC logs for Monday, September 08, 2025
    It's Only the Second Week of September and Already Two Waves of Layoffs at Microsoft, Slopfarms and Microsoft-Funded Sites Spin It as "AI Investments" Rather Than Commercial Failure
    A very large third one expected next week
    The UEFI 9/11 - Part IX - Shunning Old Computers (in 2023 the Certificate Was Updated/Overridden, Underlying Aim May Be Herding/Forcing People to Get TPM and Other 'Novel' Restrictions)
    the "upgrade treadmill"
    Rumour: Second Wave of Microsoft Mass Layoffs in September to Commence Third Week of September
    That basically answers questions like, "Any specific date or time of the month?"
    If Your Machine Still Has "Secure Boot" Enabled, Then Microsoft Has a de Facto Kill Switch (Even If Your Machine Doesn't Have Windows and Never Had Windows)
    It is not incorrect to call UEFI 'secure boot' a "kill switch"
    Gemini Links 08/09/2025: Reality, ROOPHLOCH 2025, and Writing Another Gemini Client
    Links for the day
    Updating Firmware is Not the Solution But Only Additional Risk, Disable "Secure Boot" Today
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    Microsoft Tim's DevClass (Part of The Register MS/Situation Publishing) is Full of Slop
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    Microsoft Trying to Fake Demand for Slop. At What Cost?
    That's a giant demotion and broken promises
    Reddit is Corporate Propaganda
    To make matters worse, Reddit ousted many original moderators
    Jeff Geerling Shocked to Discover Many Metrics in YouTube Are Fake (His Audience Turns Out to be Much Smaller)
    Maybe self-host all videos, don't rely on Google's "FOMO" cheating (addiction based on false assumptions)
    Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant and Kryptonite/Garlic to Vampires
    Transparency (sometimes described by words like "Sunlight" or "Truth") is paramount
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    Visiting a Web Page or a Public URL Should be Safe, Predictable, and Benign
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    The Register MS (Situation Publishing) is Paid to Spread Mindless Hype for the "Hey Hi" Ponzi Scheme and That's a Serious Problem
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    Links for the day
    Gemini Links 08/09/2025: Socialist Computer Museum and GAFAM/ByteDance/TikTok-Dominated Net
    Links for the day
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    EPO Workers Point Out that the EPO is Destroying the Planet Under the Guise of "Hey Hi" (It Also Grants Many Invalid Patents Illegally
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    Turn Off Microsoft's Restricted Boot ("Secure Boot")
    We're still running a series on this issue
    Social Control Media Sites Have Become Bot Farms (Not Limited to LLMs and Automation)
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    Deep in Debt With the Magnitude of Losses Quickly Growing, Microsoft "Open" "Hey Hi" Now Uses Broadcom for Vapourware, Pretending It'll Do OK Next Year
    At some stage it'll collapse
    You Can Tell Microsoft is in Trouble When Its Own Fans and Staff Blast it
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    Microsoft customers experience problems
    Lawyers Who Think They Are Online Assassins Don't Deserve a Licence to Operate
    they've become a laughing stock in their "sector"
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    Over at Tux Machines...
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    IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 07, 2025
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