Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links - New and Old Censorship, Anti-trust, Privacy Violations and Pollution.

Reader's Picks



  • Hardware



  • Health/Nutrition



  • Security



  • Defence/Police/Aggression



  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife





  • Finance





  • Anti-Trust

    • Pay TV piracy hits News
      The actions are documented in an archive of 14,400 emails held by former Metropolitan Police commander Ray Adams who was European chief for Operational Security between 1996 and 2002. The Financial Review is publishing thousands of the emails on its website at URL afr.com.

      The emails show that Murdoch used "piracy" as a competitive weapon, helping people to break the digital handcuffs of rival's pay TV boxes. The loss of face and revenue helped Murdoch to consolidate his media empire.



    • Microsoft all but buys Netscape with AOL patent acqusition

      This Microsoft friendly news source uses gloats over this superposed "end of the browser wars" and uses the term "intellectual property" while glorifying and validating software patents.



  • Censorship

    • The reason I'm helping Chris Hedges' lawsuit against the NDAA
      the Homeland Battlefield Bill has already a chilling effect upon my ability to investigate and document matters of national controversy that would ordinarily be subject to my professional inquiry. It has therefore prevented my readers from receiving the full spectrum of truthful reporting which, in a functioning democracy, they have a right to expect.


    • Iraq’s internet on the brink
      A year since the Arab Spring, the internet in the region is facing significant threats from governments trying to gain more control over it.


    • Media companies & ISPs outline plan to stop piracy

      Not so voluntary censorship is set to roll out on people in the US. Appealing accusations of sharing will cost people $35.



    • World Without Web
      ... we underestimate the alarming degree of contingency lurking behind ‘inevitable’ developments. ... The divergence point for this history is in 1983-1984, when the leadership of DARPA lied through its teeth to Congress about who was being allowed access to the Internet. ... what if DARPA had been caught in that lie, funding for its network research scaled back, and a serious effort made to kick randoms off the early net?


    • CISPA – The Sneaky Son Of SOPA

      A good collection of links about a nasty law against sharing.





  • Civil Rights



  • Privacy



  • Education Watch



  • DRM

    • How Adobe DRM Requires People to Pirate Library Books
      Open standards make sense. What makes no sense is that large companies in the field still do not understand this. ... It turns out that a majority of the 6,495 titles available at my local library were accessible only through a locked .acsm file format. ...you can think of a .acsm file as being very much like a .torrent file. If you use Windows or Mac, you can (theoretically) download and install Adobe Digital Editions (ADE). This software reads the .acsm file and then it will download the actual .epub book, complete with DRM. ... there is no legal way to access the content without breaking the law if you are using free (libre) software.

      Tell your local librarian to never use a system like this!





  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Another Patent Attack on Google with More Wild $$ Predictions ~pj
      Nokia and Microsoft. Partners at law, so to speak. Is this another Microsoft/Nokia outsourced production? Remember when Barnes & Noble told us that it views Microsoft and Nokia's patent campaign as an antitrust violation, a deliberate campaign to destroy Android and maintain Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop and extend it to smartphones, with Nokia piggybacking with its patents for weapons and MOSAID being brought in to do some of the dirty work? So when you read the scare headlines, remember this: Google is awesome at patent litigation. It tends to prevail. I told you that when Oracle first sued Google


    • Oracle’s Position is Worse Than I Thought


    • USPTO Issues Interim Mayo Guidance ~pj
      "...the claimed product or process amounts to significantly more than a law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea with conventional steps specified at a high level of generality appended thereto." Why *wouldn't* that apply to software?


    • Mayo Decision Impacts Myriad Genetics - Judgment Vacated, Remanded ~pj
      Things are looking up in PatentLand


    • Prometheus bound: An important precedent for the next software patent case
      Plainly, this was not a dispute about software patents, but the Court’s unanimous opinion will guide it and lower courts as they analyze future software patent cases.


    • Copyrights

      • Judge rules file sharing is not a "conspiracy"
        The litigators are trying to get around the fact that judges aren't happy with allowing mass lawsuits, so what they are doing is taking one internet user to court but using that lawsuit as a pretext to subpoena other defendants who had participated in the same BitTorrent swarm. ... James Holderman of the Northern District of Illinois raised his eyebrow in disgust at this trick, saying that it was trying to get around the "stiffening judicial headwind."


      • 5000+ Artists Line Up For a Pirate Bay Promotion
        “We’re one of the worlds top 60 sites in the Internet. This brings us a responsibility to use the site to do something good. When I think about it, it’s insane that all the other top 100 sites only blast ads and self-centered stuff on their front pages. We do this for fun and for the love of culture, so we’re everything the major labels are not.”


      • 3 Major Publishers Sue Open-Education Textbook Start-Up

        See also this excllent summary

        To gain access to the digital alternatives, students select the traditional books assigned in their classes, and Boundless pulls content from an array of open-education sources to knit together a text that the company claims is as good as the designated book. The company calls this mapping of printed book to open material “alignment”—a tactic the complaint said creates a finished product that violates the publishers’ copyrights.


      • DRM is crushing indie booksellers online


      • MPAA Lines Up With Porn Studio in Steamy Copyright Dispute

        A video site that published movies as urls is surprised that people would download those movies. They also found a judge that agrees enough to shut down a website where users share the urls, sometimes as embedded movies.







  • Recent Techrights' Posts

    "How Many Friends Do You Have?"
    "Do bots count?" "Friends in Facebook?" "Does a girlfriend chatbot count as a friend?"
    Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Responds to Crises Only After It's Way Too Late
    The SRA does not do its job. The new chief's job is face-saving PR in the media.
    The Techrights Team Makes the Platform Faster
    The infrastructure is already fast
    France Does Not Need Digital Weapons Disguised as Social and as Media
    French people lost interest in Social Control 'Media' (or Networks)
    EPO "Productivity" Will Fall Off a Cliff If Examiners Stick to the European Patent Convention (EPC) and Follow the Real Rules
    The EPO's "Cocaine Communication Manager" would hate to see the next "productivity" metrics
    The Problem is Not Technology, the Problem is Really Bad Things Sold or Imposed as "Tech" (Like a Religion Built Around Technology)
    Don't hate technology, hate the corporations that abuse it to promote coercion, exploitation etc.
    Resisting IBM and EPO Corruption
    Rise up against EPO dictatorship next week
    Where Slop Meets Ghostwriting: It's a False Analogy
    It's a false analogy
     
    Links 18/02/2026: Gig 'Economy' Condemned, Microsoft Insulting/Stressing People With False Slop Predictions
    Links for the day
    Twitter Falling to 1% in Africa's Largest Nation (Algeria)
    About 15 years ago the regime in Egypt got toppled (and others had been too) partly because of social control media such as Twitter
    Mozilla Firefox Died in Afghanistan
    Mozilla has been a complete disaster
    Gemini Links 18/02/2026: Astronomy and Texinfo
    Links for the day
    Are IBM CEO and IBM CFO Ready for Financial Audit That Topples the Shares by 50% in One Day?
    The same "chefs" that cooked up Kyndryl Holdings Inc are still in charge of the IBM kitchen
    "Senior AI Reporter" at Slop Technica/Ars Sloppica Has Written Nothing in Nearly a Week, Did Conde Nast Suspend Him for Fake Articles With Fake Quotes?
    Slop Technica/Ars Sloppica is having a serious credibility issue right now
    Linux Foundation Puts Slop Images, Not Just Slop Text, in Linux.com
    More of the same then
    The Register MS Paid-for 'Articles' (Ads) Seem to be LLM Slop Again
    If it's true that The Register MS is resorting to these marketing tactics, will they later delete the evidence (as they did months ago)?
    Over at Tux Machines...
    GNU/Linux news for the past day
    IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, February 17, 2026
    IRC logs for Tuesday, February 17, 2026
    Microsoft Had Mass Layoffs Every Month Last Year, This Year It's Delaying a Lot to "Prove" Rumours That Crashed Its Stock... 'Wrong'
    Building a bigger snowball for later
    Red Hat Is Not a Company Anymore, Amid Bluewashing and Mass Layoffs It's Merely IBM "Division" or "Brand" or "Product"
    systemd at this point is sort of like IBM/Microsoft thing
    IBM suffers "worst weekly drop in six years", Microsoft's MSN calls it "buying opportunity"
    Ask Cramer what to do
    Still Some Slopfarms in View, Sometimes Targetting "Linux"
    That's a total of at least 4 in Google News today, coming from 3 sources
    Gemini Links 17/02/2026: 3D-Printed Stainless Steel Smartwatch and Gopher Bay Offline
    Links for the day
    Links 17/02/2026: Machine Rage and Microsoft Kills XBox Social Clubs
    Links for the day
    Links 17/02/2026: Why OpenClaw is Very Sleazy and Ars Technica Exposed as Hub of LLM Slop (Credibility Destroyed Overnight)
    Links for the day
    Benj Edwards (Ars Technica) Used Fake Articles to Promote Ponzi Scheme for Conde Nast and Its Client (Marketing)
    What Ars Technica and Conde Nast do here helps defraud the general public
    Slop Technica: Ars Technica Seems Like Repeat Offender, a Part-Time Slopfarm
    The culprits are repeat offenders, but the publisher will never admit this in public
    Only One in 50 Saudis Would Use Microsoft for Search, Almost Same as Would Use Russia's Yandex
    If statCounter is to be trusted
    Microsoft's "AI" Concerns Are All Indian (or Low-Paid Workers Who Work Extra Hours Unpaid)
    portraying charlatans and frauds like they're some kind of visionaries and luminaries
    Microsoft Turned Bing Into Censorship Machine of China, But Bing Is Pegged at a Mere 2% in Asia, Yandex is Bigger
    Expect many Bing layoffs some time soon (like in past years)
    Just Like The Register MS, Conde Nast's Ars Technica Has Just Publicly Admitted That It Published Fake Articles (Slop) Made by LLMs About Serious Subjects
    Conde Nast might shut Ars Technica down to escape the bad publicity/association
    Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Way Too Slow to Respond to Financial Fraud at Law Firms, in Effect Helping Those Law Firms Defraud Many More People (Fleecing Clients)
    Who will hold the SRA accountable for this?
    Techrights Became a Hub for News That IBM/Red Hat Doesn't Want You to See (and Pays Mainstream Media to Distract From)
    the more viciously the notorious organisation attacks the reporter, the greater the interest in what the reporter has to say
    EPO's Central Staff Committee on Fourth Technical Meeting, Two Days Before First of (At Least) 4 Winter Strikes at the Second-Largest European Institution
    “future orientations on the salary adjustment procedure”
    IBM's Collapse Continues, Half of EU Countries to Have Mass Layoffs, "IBM Clearly Disinvests From Europe" Says IBM European Works Council
    Recent publication
    Over at Tux Machines...
    GNU/Linux news for the past day
    IRC Proceedings: Monday, February 16, 2026
    IRC logs for Monday, February 16, 2026
    Gemini Links 17/02/2026: Alpenglow Industries' Closure and Gemini Server Issues
    Links for the day
    The Southern California Linux Expo (“SCALE”) or SCALE 23x Becomes Microsoft
    It's not supporting the event, it is buying it.
    Where Microsoft's Bing Cannot Even Reach 1% "Market Share"
    Looking at "I" countries
    Microsoft to Focus on Name-Dropping Buzzwords to Distract From Declining Business, IBM RAs (Layoffs) With Staff Stack-Ranked
    Calling everything cloud or reclassifying as "AI"
    Another EPO Strike One Week From Now, Local Staff Committee Munich to Discuss It This Week
    Campinos MIA while Office staff goes on strike at least 4 times
    Links 16/02/2026: Barack Obama Responds to Racist Cheeto and Benjamin Mako Hill Studies Online Communities
    Links for the day
    Gemini Links 16/02/2026: Task Completed by Avoidance and "Playing Again With Akkoma"
    Links for the day
    Happy Birthday (or Anniversary) to SoylentNews
    "Happy Birthday SoylentNews"
    Techrights' Architecture
    Stability is the main goal
    IBM Reduces the Thresholds for Acceptance (and the Salaries)
    Are chatbots good enough as IBM staff?
    When It Comes to Rust, Keep All the Eyes on the Ball (Technical and Legal Perils, Sustainability Questions)
    It's not about security or politics
    Linux Foundation Continues Falling Off a Cliff in Geminispace
    Gemini Protocol will turn 7 this summer
    Links 16/02/2026: cURL’s Daniel Stenberg Asserts That Slop is DDoSing Free Software, But Still Uses a Plagiarism and GPL-Violating Blender (Microsoft GitHub)
    Links for the day
    The Techrights Community Never Needed Money, Only Goodwill
    We accomplish things by a track record of suppressed facts
    "AboutCode" is a Microsoft Proxy and Microsoft's Acquisition of the OSI Advances Via OSI Moles
    presenting direct evidence anybody can verify
    Social Control Media is Just a Digital Weapon
    Social control media is not social and not media
    They Will Call Smart People "Luddites"
    Is society "seeing the light"?
    Microsoft Amutable Already Reveals That Its Focus Is Not Linux, It'll Promote "Remote Attestation"
    This is basically an attack on Software Freedom, even if they toss around the brand "Linux"
    More People in Chad Move to GNU/Linux
    Last year we began to see GNU/Linux rising there - a trend which continues this year
    Dr. Andy Farnell on How Universities and Culture of Education Got Crushed by "Technofascist Nightmare"
    Farnell says he "already soft-quit in [his] mind"
    Debt of Broadcom Grew by More Than 50%, Broadcom is Deeper in Debt Than Google
    Expect many more cuts
    Over at Tux Machines...
    GNU/Linux news for the past day
    IRC Proceedings: Sunday, February 15, 2026
    IRC logs for Sunday, February 15, 2026