Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 5/1/2013: Fedora 18 Delayed; Civil Rights Focus





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Netflix makes cloud Janitor Monkey open source
    Netflix, the popular online video service that makes extensive use of public-cloud infrastructure by Amazon Web Services (AWS), has made code for one of the tools it developed to make its cloud-using life easier open source.

    Netflix developers built Janitor Monkey to automate clean-up of unused cloud resources, such as virtual-machine (VM) instances and cloud-storage volumes, or “Elastic Block Storage” (EBS) volumes in AWS parlance.


  • Another Satisfied Customer of FLOSS


  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla

      • A simulated FirefoxOS experience
        Your editor has frequently written that, while Android is a great system that has been highly beneficial to the cause of open mobile devices, it would be awfully nice to have a viable, free-software alternative. Every month that goes by makes it harder for any such alternative system to establish itself in the market, but that does not keep people from trying. One of the more interesting developments on the horizon has been FirefoxOS — formerly known as Boot2Gecko — a system under development at Mozilla. In the absence of any available hardware running this system, the recent 1.0 release of the FirefoxOS simulator seemed like a good opportunity to get a feel for what the Mozilla folks are up to.






  • SaaS/Big Data

    • OPENNEBULA 2012: YEAR IN REVIE
      Time flies, and we are approaching the end of another successful year at OpenNebula!. We’ve had a lot to celebrate around here during 2012, including our fifth anniversary. We took that opportunity to look back at how the project has grown in the last five years. We are extremely happy with the organic growth of the project. It’s five years old, it’s parked in some of the biggest organizations out there, and that all happened without any investment in marketing, just offering the most innovative and flexible open-source solution for data center virtualization and enterprise cloud management. An active and engaged community, along with our focus on solving real user needs in innovative ways and the involvement of the users in a fully vendor-agnostic project, constitute, in our view, the OpenNebula’s recipe to success. As 2012 draws to and end, we’d like to review what this year has meant for the OpenNebula project and give you a peek at what you can expect from us in 2013. You have all the details about the great progress that we have seen for the OpenNebula project in our monthly newsletters.




  • Licensing

    • Different Software Licenses
      There are times where one might be inclined to use a different license, e.g. the BSD license or even a license similar to the openmotif license. At least that's the theory since what I really did was release source code with no license mentioned at all, kind of an ad hoc free/open software release. So I'm going to mellow a bit and say if someone wants to use a different but still open/free type license then I'll accept that and not argue about it.






Leftovers

  • Why I Hate Microsoft
    It’s still not time to treat M$ as a normal business. They don’t yet work for a living, making $hundreds of thousands per employee per annum doing little more than shipping licensing agreements to OEMs. Certainly their OS is not worth what people are paying for it and M$ still attacks other businesses, most recently spreading FUD about Google at FTC, which dropped the matter after Google agreed to make a few changes. Google makes far more per employee per annum but they do work for it making huge server-farms do much of the work. That’s smart and does not harm competition. It’s time the rest of the world became smarter and dropped M$ as a “partner” in anything.


  • Journalism Is Not Narcissism
    Every year, thousands of fresh-faced young aspiring journalists flood our nation's college classrooms, in order to learn how to practice their craft. What should we tell them? This, first: journalism is not about you.


  • Italian authorities fine Apple another $264K over product warranties
    Apple's changes to its product warranty policies in Italy have been enough to satisfy investigators, but not before the company was slapped with one final fine totaling $264,000.


  • Apple Must Pay Chinese Authors for Copyright Infringement


  • Google Muscles in on Microsoft’s Turf
    Google is muscling in on Microsoft ’s turf as it wins over more business customers with its cloud-based software.


  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression



  • Cablegate



  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Shell ship wreck debacle
      Shell has admitted that the Kulluks generators are wrecked. The weather forecast for today is strong winds and high seas.






  • Finance

    • Glenn Hubbard, Leading Academic and Mitt Romney Advisor, Took $1200 an Hour to Be Countrywide's Expert Witness
      At issue here is the fact that Hubbard testified on behalf of Countrywide in the MBIA suit. He conducted an "analysis" that essentially concluded that Countrywide's loans weren't any worse than the loans produced by other mortgage originators, and that therefore the monstrous losses that investors in those loans suffered were due to other factors related to the economic crisis – and not caused by the serial misrepresentations and fraud in Countrywide's underwriting.


    • What is behind the US fiscal cliff standoff?
      The phrase 'fiscal cliff' invokes images of an economy spiralling to the bottom.

      It was that image that was supposed to force politicians on Capitol Hill to work together to avoid the simultaneous expiration of tax cuts as well as the implementation of deep spending cuts.


    • Fiscal Cliff Follies: Political Theater Distracts From Key Problems With the Fix
      Extremely unequal distributions of wealth and income continue to enable the richest and largest individuals and enterprises to manipulate the economy and control the political parties. The result is an economic structure disinterested in a democratically focused way out of crisis and decline.




  • Censorship



  • Privacy



  • Civil Rights

    • The Perks of Being an American
      In the final days of the 112th Congress, President Obama signed two last minute bills. Both were extensions of highly controversial Bush-era policies. Both were scheduled to expire January 1, 2013. And both owe their passage largely to calamitous predictions that the sky would fall if they weren't reauthorized in time.


    • Lawyers For The One Case Where There's Proof Of Warrantless Wiretapping Decide Not To Appeal To Supreme Court
      Now, the lawyers representing Al-Haramain have decided that they will not appeal the case to the Supreme Court, on the belief that the "current composition" of the court works against them. In other words, they believe that the current Justices on the court would side with the appeals court in rejecting their case, and then that would be precedent across the country (unless Congress changed the law, which it's unlikely to do). The "hope" then is that somehow, down the road, someone else somehow gets evidence that they, too, were spied upon without a warrant, and it happens in a different district, and (hopefully) that circuit's appeals court rules differently, setting up a circuit split. Oh, and that by the time that happens, the "composition" of the court shifts enough that the court actually respects the 4th Amendment. In other words: none of this is likely. Instead, the feds retain their ability to spy on people without warrants in direct violation of the 4th Amendment.


    • DHS TO PICK UP $6 BILLION TAB FOR CYBER SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS AT EVERY DEPARTMENT
      The Homeland Security Department is footing a potentially $6 billion bill to provide civilian agencies with the technology and expertise needed for near real-time threat detection, DHS officials said this week. The White House has demanded so-called continuous monitoring since 2010, but many agencies did not have the resources or know-how to initiate such surveillance.



    • Score one for the thicket
      WHILE everyone was watching the fiscal-cliff debacle, Congress and Barack Obama decided that they could still eavesdrop on Americans' putatively private conversations without putting themselves to the trouble of obtaining a warrant.


    • The 2013 NDAA Signing Statement: No Better Than the 2012 Version


    • European Court orders damages for CIA torture victim
      In mid-December 2012, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg awarded damages of €60,000 to Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese origin. The judges accepted that Macedonian security services had illegally seized El-Masri at the end of 2003, subjected him to abuse and finally handed him over to agents from the CIA.


    • Activist clear trash near NC CIA contractor's base
      Stop Torture Now has committed to collect trash from the road outside the airport under the state's "Adopt-a-Highway" program.



    • Obama may pick Pentagon, CIA heads next week
      President Barack Obama may round out his new national security leadership team next week, with a nomination for defense secretary expected and a pick to lead the CIA possible.




  • Internet/Net Neutrality

    • Behind closed doors at the UN’s attempted “takeover of the Internet”
      In early December, I found myself in an odd position: touching down in Dubai with credentials to attend a 12-day closed-door meeting of the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT). It's a meeting I spent the last six months trying to expose.


    • REBUILDING THE WEB WE LOST
      We have the obligation to never speak of our concerns without suggesting our solutions. I've been truly gratified to watch the response to The Web We Lost over the last few days; It's become one of the most popular things I've ever written and has inspired great responses. But the most important question we can ask is: How do we rebuild the positive aspects of the web we lost? There are a few starting points, building on conversations we've been having for years. Let's look at the responsibilities we must accept if we're going to return the web to the values that a generation of creators cared about.


    • China's legislature adopts online info rules to protect privacy
      The decision bans service providers, as well as government agencies and their personnel, from leaking or damaging users' digital information, as well as from selling or illegally providing this information to others.


    • China requires Internet users to register names


    • China closing Web loophole
      Michael Anti, a Beijing-based critic of Web censorship, believes the current pushback on the Web reflects paranoia over incoming President Xi Jinping's crackdown on official corruption. Local officials could be pressuring propaganda departments to curb freedom of speech online, he said. "Officials hate the Internet," Anti said. "They're afraid of being victims of the anti-corruption campaign.


    • China’s New Internet Law Legalizes Deletion of “Illegal” Content, Bad News for Sina Weibo




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights

      • Tough Times for Trolls and their "Copyright Negligence" Scheme
        Despite at least five smackdowns by federal judges, copyright trolls are still accusing Internet subscribers of "negligently" allowing someone else to download porn films without paying. Last week, subpoena defense attorney Morgan Pietz fought back by asking the Northern California federal courts to put all of the open "negligence" cases filed by a prolific troll firm in front of a single judge - a judge who already ruled that the "negligence" theory is bogus.








Recent Techrights' Posts

Dystopian Trends in Technology Make Richard Stallman More Relevant Than Ever
It's good to see him attracting vast audiences
Richard Stallman (RMS) Announced His Talk Less Than 24 Hours Before It Took Place and Still Filled Up the Auditorium at Sapienza Università di Roma
Photos from yesterday evening [...] It looks like it was a very successful event
 
Rhonda D'Vine, Gerfried Fuchs, Pronouns & Debian pregnancy cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
At IBM, Relocation Means Layoffs (Downsizing)
Silent or 'invisible' layoffs?
Central Staff Committee of the European Patent Office (EPO) Warns That EPO Management is Robbing or Manipulating Pension Funds Again
Faking "growth" is just about as bad as forgery
Probably a Lot Worse Than LLM Slop: GNOME Tying Itself to Divisive Politics, Even Where It's Clearly Not Relevant
Something has gone terribly wrong in GNOME
Links 14/10/2025: Microsoft OneDrive Scanning Faces in Photos (Without Asking First), "OpenAI Says It Will Move to Allow Smut"
Links for the day
They Generally Don't Like Scholars, as They're Less Compelled or Pressured to Repeat What Corporations and Oligarchs Say
People who loathe scholars have an agenda in mind that, unlike that of reasonable people, revolves around controlling people
Belated New Article About Last Thursday's Lecture by Richard Stallman in Helsinki, Finland
there are good reasons to pay with cash, not limited to privacy
Attacking Richard Stallman Has Become 'Career Suicide'
If you're going to viciously attack somebody, make sure your arguments are rock-solid
Microsoft's Failing XBox Business Has Turned Games Into Funerals
How does it feel to depend on Microsoft?
Yesterday's "Distinguished Lecture" by Richard Stallman Possibly Attended by Close to 1,000 People
The capacity of the place is about 900
Slop Poisons Everything
Imagine wanting to find what Torvalds has just said or what has just been released
Taking Software Freedom 'Mainstream'
interest in Software Freedom must have grown
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, October 13, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, October 13, 2025
Gemini Links 14/10/2025: Ada Lovelace Day, Sony CLIE PEG-TG50 Review, Why to Avoid Network Solutions
Links for the day
The EPO's War on Techrights Was a Massive Mistake
The EPO started the SLAPPs after we had published a few hundreds of articles; we've since then published close to 6,000 because the attacks on us emboldened insiders to help us
General-Purpose Computers to Become Growing Area of Coverage
Without them, we have little left for controlling our lives
"They missed a great opportunity to shut up." -Jacques Chirac
Brett Wilson LLP has been trying to cheat the legal system many times
Harassment evidence: Switzerland, overcrowded fitness and yoga centers, incompetence and racism in accident response
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Vincent Danjean & Debian NXIVM collateral, blackmail risks
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
In Sweden This Past Friday Richard Stallman Explained Why Copyleft is Important
And he didn't have to 'bash' BSDs, either
IBM Layoffs Due to a Lack of Money and Company Debt Rising by Almost 10 Billion Dollars in 6 Months
IBM didn't buy Red Hat for any ideological reasons; it was a fast "cash grab" for revenue
Forbes Already Stopped Being a News Sites. Now It's a Spam and Propaganda Platform for "Paying Partners" (Companies).
news from Forbes became very scarce
Is the Second-Largest Institution in Europe (EPO) Gradually Becoming More Like a Sweatshop?
Underpaid, unqualified, inexperienced and incompatible people are already recruited to replace veteran examiners
The Register MS Has No FOSS Coverage Anymore
The Editor in Chief is like a Microsoft plant
Links 13/10/2025: "Toasty Subwoofer" and WiFi Speakers "Are About To Go Dumb"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 13/10/2025: iNaturalist and Tove Jansson’s Moominpappa at Sea
Links for the day
Microsoft Does Not Deny That Large Retailers Like Walmart, Costco and Target Are Giving Up on XBox (and Not Stocking It)
No doubt XBox is in trouble and rumours suggest that more mass layoffs are imminent
We'll Encourage Richard Stallman to Talk About Software Patents at the EPO Next Week When He Visits Munich (EPO Headquarters)
Go listen to Richard Stahlmann
Investigative Journalism Protects Society From Corruption, Crimes Against Women, Assaults on Civil Society
"what is the point of men doing military practice to defend a system that is so rotten?"
Swiss pimp usurping reputation of legendary Tissot boss Francois Thiébaud from France (BaselWorld, SWATCH Group SA)
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Paris 'Love Nest' & Debian Outreachy: from Lycée Lakanal to ENS Cachan, Cr@ns, nepotism
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Richard Stallman to Give Public Talk in 3 Hours, Then in the Technical University of Munich (Germany) Next Week
Richard Stallman at TUM on 21.10.2025 18:00, MW2001
Arnaud Parreaux lost case defending rogue employer
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Mathieu Elias Parreaux declared bankrupt in Switzerland
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Breakdown of the Rule of Law and Patent Law in the European Union (EU)
The EPO cannot recruit suitably qualified patent examiners this way, let alone retain them
Gemini Links 13/10/2025: Good Films, Wizard of Earthsea, Upgrading the Steam Controller's Stick
Links for the day
Leaks and Whistleblowers: Our Plan for Today
Society simply cannot advance when too many people self-censor
It's Not Justice When One Side Denies the Other Side the Ability to Even Speak
At this stage, Brett Wilson LLP is in my humble opinion acting in contempt of the Court
Links 13/10/2025: Australian Catholic University Uses Slop to Libel Students, Canada Threatens to Kill Beluga Whales
Links for the day
How Not to Silence Tux Machines (It'll Only Backfire, Badly)
defending Microsoft while attacking this site
Slopwatch: UbuntuPIT and Google News
It seems abundantly clear that Google News and Google in general participates in the slop epidemic
Vincent Danjean (not INTERPOL), Claire Bardel & Debian pregnancy cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Christmas lynchings: Martin Krafft (madduck), Penny Leach (mjollnir) & Debian pregnancy cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 13/10/2025: Birthdays and "Committee Unable to Contact Nobel Prize Winner"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 12, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, October 12, 2025
The Same People Who Attacked Richard Stallman (RMS) Are Attacking Daniel Pocock to Discourage People From Listening to His Information
Pocock is being demonised for the same reasons and by the same people who attack RMS
Your Typical Anti-Richard Stallman (RMS) Cancellist
"About the RMS cancellation"
Richard Stallman (RMS) Has Announced His Talk in Rome Less Than 20 Hours in Advance (and on a Sunday)
Why did he wait until the night before?
We Are Safe in a Modern "Tech" Society, Right?
People are safer if they control their own computing
GNU Tools Cauldron Event in Portugal: Videos Now Available via Invidious
Go have a look
The Way Things Are Going, They May Soon Stop Saying "Web Address" and Instead Say "Chrome Address"
The Web isn't built or based around open Web standards anymore. It's centered around user-agent.
Microsoft as a Golden Cage
"I was laid off by Microsoft and can't find a job. I'm weeks away from giving up my apartment and moving across the country to live with family."
Weekend Discussion About How IBM's Bluewashing of Red Hat Will Cause "Enshittification" for Users
"I worked at a software company that was acquired by IBM so I knew it was game over for RedHat the day they were acquired"
Brett Wilson LLP Getting Sued by Its Very Own Clients, a Legal Story That Has Made the Mainstream News (Law360)
Law360 or Law.com are about as mainstream as one can get in that "sector" (litigation 'industry')
Slopwatch: GNU/Linux Sites That Became Slopfarms and Spamfarms
The Web is a mess and "Linux" or "Ubuntu" sites became part of the problem
Richard Stallman's Talk 25 Hours Away, Aula Magna Palazzo del Rettorato (CU001), Sapienza Università di Roma (Piazzale Aldo Moro, 5)
The talk is 25 hours away and we see some QR code for it
Gemini Links 12/10/2025: Watches, the Depression of 2026, Gamboling with Odds
Links for the day
Links 12/10/2025: 'False' DMCA Claims and Slop Facing Perils Again (the Hype Wears Off)
Links for the day
Microsoft Has Just Lost Privacy Case in Austria and Its Latest Moves Make a Complete Ban Seem Imperative
Microsoft is not a software company, it's a spying agency that uses software to collect data
The Register MS: Microsoft is the Security Expert, Not the Prime Culprit, So Buy More Microsoft
This front page feature is devoid of any actual substance, it's just Microsoft copypasta
Stefano Zacchiroli (Zack) & Debian pregnancy cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Lucas Nussbaum & Debian pregnancy cluster
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 12/10/2025: "Palm Computering", Further Exploration of Slide Rules, and Key Takeaways from The Well-Grounded Rubyist
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 11, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, October 11, 2025
Tomorrow: Founder of the Free Software Foundation and of GNU/Linux, Richard Stallman, Speaks in Roma (Rome), Italy at 4PM
GNU/Linux is more important than ever in this dystopian world
Microsoft and Apple Are Rare Topics in Geminispace
in Geminispace it's rather safe to assume everyone is into BSD, GNU/Linux, and sometimes retro