Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 8/6/2015: Red Hat Upgraded, Debian 8.1 is Out





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Debunking 4 misconceptions about open source software
    Misconceptions range from the belief that open source is not secure enough for businesses, since it is community-based, to misunderstandings about the availability and quality of technical support. While some of them have been propagated since the early days of open source, enterprise-ready offerings today provide the same, if not higher, levels of security, capabilities and reliability as proprietary counterparts.


  • 2/3 Internet Exchange Points use Czech open source router
    Almost two-thirds (64 per cent) of Internet Exchange Points are now using BIRD, an open source router solution maintained by the Czech CZ.NIC Association, taking first place from proprietary routers.


  • 3 Financial Companies Innovating With Open Source
    The financial industry is on the verge of an open source breakthrough, say three companies on the cutting edge of the trend. Traditionally very secretive about their technology, banks, hedge funds and other financial services companies have begun in the past few years to talk about how they use open source software in their infrastructure and product development. They have also been steadily increasing their contributions to upstream projects in the form of user feedback and code. And some companies have initiated their own open source projects or released portions of their own code to the open source community.


  • Open-Source NFV Group Launches First Software Release
    The Open Platform for NFV (OPNFV) project has rolled out "Arno," an open-source platform that group officials said will give users and developers a framework for testing NFV efforts, checking out basic NFV uses cases and trying out virtual network functions (VNFs). The growing demand among telecommunications vendors and other organizations for ways to more quickly adopt and implement NFV is driving the OPNFV's efforts, according to Chris Price, technical steering committee chairman and open-source manager for software-defined networking (SDN), NFV and the cloud for network vendor Ericsson.


  • NASA Releases Source Code for Its Software Tools
    NASA has released the source code for a complete set of software tools that that cover pretty much everything from aeronautics and propulsion, and from system testing and handling.


  • Events



    • SELF 2015: Linux, Guns & Barbecue
      From what I learned talking with Jeremy Sands last Tuesday, everything about the SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) will be marinated in southern culture. So much so that if this were twenty years ago, I’d be expecting to see geeks with cigarette packs rolled-up in the sleeves of their T shirts. But these days people don’t smoke much anymore, not even in North Carolina, a state built by tobacco money.




  • SaaS/Big Data



  • Education



    • Open education at the Raspberry Pi Foundation
      When I started working at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we set out to revamp the website and add learning materials for educators. In the mean time, we wanted to get a few resources out in time for Hour of Code week, so we wrote them on GitHub for easy sharing. It's easy to get started writing with markdown, and it made collaboration straightforward. Despite all being new to GitHub, the education team really liked the way this worked and wanted to stick with the method, so we did.




  • BSD



    • Call for testing: OpenSSH 6.9
      OpenSSH 6.9 is almost ready for release, so we would appreciate testing on as many platforms and systems as possible. This release contains some substantial new features and a number of bugfixes.




  • Public Services/Government



    • Indian government includes open source in RFPs
      The Government of India has implemented a remarkable new policy-level change for open source software (OSS) deployment. The Ministry of Communication and Information Technology has asked that open source software-based applications be included in Requests for Proposals (RFPs) for all new procurements. Note there is not a plan at this time to replace existing proprietary systems with open source software.


    • Estonia: A Model for e-Government
      The bold plan is a logical step forward in an unprecedented roll-out of e-government services that began in 2000, when Estonia introduced a public system for electronic tax filing. In 2002, Estonia introduced a universal electronic identification card with digital signatures, which every citizen gets at the age of 15. The ID cards and signatures have become the keys to nearly universal access to government information and services as well as private-sector services in health care, banking and education, and law. In the years since, the Estonian government and industry have put more and more functions online, all connected by a nationwide data backbone called X-Road.


    • New case studies proof competence gvSIG’s GIS tools
      Four case studies published the past weeks by the gvSIG community show the usefulness of this suite of open source Geographic Information Systems. The cases detail the gvSIG use by public administrations in Spain and Italy, to collect, manage and analyse information on gas pipelines, to create hiking trails, examine city commerce, and plan public transport networks.




  • Openness/Sharing



    • Open-source “MMO for makers” aims to crowdsource manufacturing design
      Software developers have long been able to collaborate through community sites like those based on Git and Apache Allura to contribute code, synchronize software builds, and track issues around a project. And games like Minecraft allow people to collaborate in building virtual environments with embedded behaviors—including "mods" that leverage the games' simulation capabilities to interact with other objects in a virtual world. Now, an open-source Web platform originally designed with Defense Department funding could let communities collaborate to build more tangible things—like tanks, planes, and consumer appliances.




  • Programming



    • A Heterogeneous Execution Engine Might Make Its Way To LLVM
      An intern from Qualcomm's Innovation Center has been designing a heterogeneous execution engine for LLVM that he's hoping to eventually upstream within the LLVM project.


    • C++ at a functional programming event
      In the end, I decided to talk about functional reactive proramming in C++ which will be a thrilling and enticing tale of event-based systems and the power of reactive streams. I’ll also cover some fun new things we are to expect from C++17 that are bringing even more functional programming concepts than we have in the current standard






Leftovers





  • Finance



    • Labour Call Unemployed “The Work-Shy”
      I just read the Guardian’s account of today’s Labour leadership hustings, and they are not Tory Lite, they are Tory High Octane. Supporting Tory benefit cuts, calling the unemployed “the work-shy”, defending €£9,000 a year tuition fees, supporting Trident and falling over themselves to reject autonomy for the Scottish accounting unit. But what I find even more astonishing is that the Fabian Society audience were lining up afterwards for selfies with Liz Kendall, Yvette Cooper and Andy Burnham, and according to the Guardian nobody wanted a photo with Jeremy Corbyn, the one decent human being there.


    • Urgent: TTIP Vote - Please Write to Your MEPs before Wednesday
      There is a very important plenary vote in the European Parliament on TTIP this Wednesday...


    • Why I Defaulted on My Student Loans
      My mother could no longer afford the tuition that the student loans weren't covering.




  • Censorship



    • Lawyer who sued EFF blames Ars readers for hacking, defamation
      Atlanta IP lawyer Sanford Asman isn't happy that CaseRails CEO Erik Dykema won't hand his company's name over to him—in fact, he's filed a trademark lawsuit over it, just as he said he would last month.

      Asman believes that CaseRails is infringing his trademark rights to CaseWebs and CaseSpace, two websites that house his own litigation-management software. In fact, Asman believes any Web-based legal software with "case" in its name should be under his purview.




  • Privacy



    • The Mass Surveillance of US Public Continues as USA Today Declares It Ended
      And that points to a bigger problem with declaring that the NSA’s data collection has “ended”: The same data will still be collected, only it will be held in phone company computers rather than the NSA’s computers. The NSA will still have access to the data, only having to get an OK from the FISA court–a notorious rubberstamp that operates in secret. As NSA whistleblower J. Kirk Wiebe told FAIR, “It’s more of a psychological maneuver to make us all feel good than a true constraint.”




  • Civil Rights



    • LAPD officer convicted in videotaped beating of handcuffed suspect
      A Los Angeles Police Department officer was convicted Friday in connection to the videotaped beating of a female suspect who was struck in the throat and crotch in a patrol car.

      Officer Mary O'Callaghan, an 18-year veteran, was accused of felony assault under the color of authority in a 2012 incident largely captured on a patrol-car camera. The 35-year-old victim, Alesia Thomas, died later that July evening. Medical examiner officials said cocaine intoxication was a "major factor" in the Los Angeles woman's death.


    • Save Majid Ali
      Glasgow City College student Majid Ali faces torture and death if returned to Pakistan. Majid Ali’s brother and other members of his immediate family have been taken and I am afraid very probably murdered by the Pakistani authorities as part of their relentless persecution of the Baloch people and desire to wipe out Baloch national identity. The UK Home Office intends to deport Majid. The people of Scotland must defend him.


    • Saudi court upholds blogger's 10 years and 1,000 lashes
      Saudi Arabia's Supreme Court has upheld the sentence of 1,000 lashes and 10 years of imprisonment on blogger Raif Badawi, despite a foreign outcry.

      Speaking from Canada, his wife Ensaf Haidar told the BBC she feared his punishment would start again on Friday.

      Badawi was arrested in 2012 for "insulting Islam through electronic channels".


    • There is no justice: What cops and courts get wrong about the human brain
      Neuroscience explains why our justice system keeps sending innocent people to prison — and letting guilty ones go


    • Kalief Browder, 1993–2015
      Last fall, I wrote about a young man named Kalief Browder, who spent three years on Rikers Island without being convicted of a crime. He had been arrested in the spring of 2010, at age sixteen, for a robbery he insisted he had not committed. Then he spent more than one thousand days on Rikers waiting for a trial that never happened. During that time, he endured about two years in solitary confinement, where he attempted to end his life several times. Once, in February, 2012, he ripped his bedsheet into strips, tied them together to create a noose, and tried to hang himself from the light fixture in his cell.

      In November of 2013, six months after he left Rikers, Browder attempted suicide again. This time, he tried to hang himself at home, from a bannister, and he was taken to the psychiatric ward at St. Barnabas Hospital, not far from his home in the Bronx. When I met him, in the spring of 2014, he appeared to be more stable.

      Then, late last year, about two months after my story about him appeared, he stopped going to classes at Bronx Community College. During the week of Christmas, he was confined in the psych ward at Harlem Hospital. One day after his release, he was hospitalized again, this time back at St. Barnabas. When I visited him there on January 9th, he did not seem like himself. He was gaunt, restless, and deeply paranoid. He had recently thrown out his brand-new television, he explained, “because it was watching me.”

      [...]

      Ever since I’d met him, Browder had been telling me stories about having been abused by officers and inmates on Rikers. The stories were disturbing, but I did not fully appreciate what he had experienced until this past April when I obtained surveillance footage of an officer assaulting him and of a large group of inmates pummeling and kicking him. I sat next to Kalief while he watched these videos for the first time. Afterward, we discussed whether they should be published on The New Yorker’s Web site. I told him that it was his decision. He said to put them online.


    • Left Divided as Violence and Protests Derail Mexican Elections
      Mexico’s latest elections are threatened by drug cartel violence, social protests, and the mass resignation of election officials. The left, which in the past has succeeded in rallying a third or more of the nation’s voters for a single party, goes into this election deeply divided, prompting expectations of a win for the ruling party.


    • On Equality
      A good rule of thumb is that if we feel the views of others are offensive, they probably feel our own views are offensive as well, a view they are completely entitled to when they do not act on it to harm us. If we wish to have our freedom to own and express our views protected, we must also actively respect — preferably protect — the rights of others to the same freedom.




  • Internet/Net Neutrality



    • EU Commission Tries to Rip Citizens Off Net Neutrality
      The European Commission attacks Net Neutrality again, by introducing a “compromise document” that refuses to enshrine a definition of this crucial principle into the law. A strong coalition including the EU Council, the European Commission and a handful of MEPs is working against the general interest by including loopholes that will be used by the telecom lobby to circumvent the proposed protections against discrimination, thereby undermining fundamental rights and innovation.




  • DRM



    • Apple Music and the terrible return of DRM
      My Amazon Echo just arrived, months after I pre-ordered it. I'd totally forgotten about it until I got a ship notification the other day, and then it was there, a strange little tube promising yet another peek at a future that never seems fully within grasp.




  • Intellectual Monopolies





Recent Techrights' Posts

EPO Union Bemoans Lack of Social Dialogue as Dictator Wishes to Govern Forever (No Elections, No Rivals), Hide the Many Issues
"Exchange of open letters"
IBM Cannot Hide the Layoffs Forever
we welcome whistleblower to tell us more and send us documents related to that
What is a Conditional Fee Agreement (CFA)? When Law Firms Become the Litigants.
And the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) needs to be more serious about tackling this
Brigading Against Women - Part XX - Attempts by Lozza to Deplatform Techrights and Tux Machines Only Days After I Sued Garrett and My Wife Also Sued Garrett (Shortly Before the Serial Strangler From Microsoft Joined)
in 2024
Links 06/10/2026: A Year Since "NSA Whistleblower Reality Winner Released From Prison", World Tries to Deal With El Niño
Links for the day
 
Microsoft Hiring Only on the Cheap
Much of the same can be said about GAFAM and IBM
Gemini Links 06/10/2026: Nightfall Express, Shorthanding, and Raspberry Pi Desktop Gets a Debian Trixie Refresh
Links for the day
20th Anniversary Next Month
We are currently trying to agree on a plan for next month's celebrations
Taking Photos With Richard Stallman (RMS)
What's the point?
GAFAM Attack on FreeDesktop
Now they push lots of LLM slop into Linux
GNU/Linux Has Risen in France Since the Order to Adopt GNU/Linux (in Public Services)
We can expect the same in countries like Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, and The Netherlands
On Microsoft Hiring Freeze or No Permanent Jobs at Microsoft Anymore (Amid Many Silent Layoffs)
Microsoft has changed what it can offer workers
EPO's Central Staff Committee Asking The Council to Get Rid of Corrupt Campinos
We'll be covering EPO scandals around the time of that meeting
Gemini Links 06/10/2026: EU Kids Act, Practicality of Gemini, and Games
Links for the day
Links 06/10/2026: Data Breaches Epidemic and Turkey Blocking Journalists
Links for the day
The Whole Point of Computing is That Computers Are Deterministic (Speed With Predictable Accuracy)
Unlike stochastic parrots that stochastically utter out lies
It's Not a Linux Back Door If It's an Unpatched Device
"Linux Backdoor" is a glaring misfit, a possibly 'obscene' term
"SIRIUS CORPORATION LIMITED" as Evidence of the Financial Shell Games in the UK
Rianne and I still have some fond memories of the time the ex-wife of the CEO treated us like human beings
Lots of Silent Layoffs at IBM Last Week, Employees Explain Patterns of Those Impacted
It wasn't just gossip, it actually happened even if the media chose to look the other way (as usual)
Gemini Links 06/10/2026: Fighting for Purpose, Gemlogs, and Gemtext
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, October 05, 2026
IRC logs for Monday, October 05, 2026
Red Hat is Phased Out of Existence This Month Onwards
Within a few years we'll probably not see many redhat.com addresses anymore; many became ibm.* last week
Finland's GNU/Linux Share Measured at 12%
Last month GNU/Linux was measured at about 10% in Finland
UK Layoffs and Closures by Microsoft. In Expected Blow, Microsoft Likely Shuts Down Another Studio.
Microsoft's layoffs are never-ending, they just try to keep them all secret.
NVIDIA Buys the Media With Companies It Sponsors to Pretend to be Customers (Circular Funding Scheme)
The media crisis worsens
Discussion About Potential Sale of EPO Buildings and Enshittification of Europe's Largest Patent Office
It's noteworthy that only one hour (or 70 minutes) was devoted to so many topics
Brigading Against Women - Part IXX - Overreaction From Young Female Professional After Invalid Threats Made and Sent From an Incel in Another Continent
Cowards who send threats after committing crimes online
Stonewalling by Bots
We'll now turn our attention back to EPO and other matters
Gemini Links 05/10/2026: "Posthumanism", Cardputer, and More
Links for the day
Links 05/10/2026: “I’m Embarrassed on Behalf of the Tech Industry” and Slop Scammers "Lobbying the Vatican"
Links for the day
SIRIUS OPEN SOURCE LTD Officially Insolvent, Is Reform UK Next?
Sirius no more
Links 05/10/2026: "Congress Must Investigate War Profiteers Once Again" and Update on Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence
Links for the day
libera.chat is an Agenda-Peddling Platform Run by Agenda-Peddling Individuals
The volunteers of libera.chat ("staff") aren't working for free, they work towards an agenda
Nobel Season is Plutocracy Week
Later this week the billionaires will give a fake "Nobel" (in "Economics") to someone who parrots their preferred narrative and those same billionaires will use "Nobel" to bless the promoter of their latest pyramid scheme/buzzword
GNU/Linux Market Share in North America 13% This Past Weekend
It is perhaps not shocking that adoption of GNU/Linux is very high there
When Did Europe Begin to Side With White-Collar Criminals (or Participate in Suppressing People Who Oppose Them)?
How much corruption can we tolerate before the European Union becomes another Russian Federation?
Libera Chat's "Level of Control Might Make Sense for a Corporate Platform"
IRC is not centralised
Brigading Against Women - Part XVIII - Turning Censorship Attempts (Articles About Matthew Garrett) Into Mild Redactions
What Lozza did two years ago
Greenland Needs Digital Sovereignty
the large icy island isn't moving to GNU/Linux as quickly as the rest of Europe
Tracker of Internet Relay Chat Networks Out of Service (But Not Down) Since Thursday
We should note that the number of unique networks they track has grown since we last checked
Gemini Links 05/10/2026: NixOS, Guix, Codeberg Banning Slop, and "Gopher Apps on Android"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 04, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, October 04, 2026
Secret Microsoft Layoffs and Maybe Another "Voluntary Exit Program at Microsoft in October"
there's a morale crisis at Microsoft
MIT Technology Review (MTR) Reinforces MIT's Role in Promoting Slop (Pyramid Scheme) in Exchange for Money
MIT is a poster boy (or child) of institutional corruption, perverts, and corporate takeover
Many Topics to Cover
Drops in a big ocean
Proving Wrong Those Slop Maximalists and Boosters, GAFAM Says Slop is a Nuisance and Bans/Hides the Slop Submissions
People who say slop in projects is inevitable or even desirable are usually cheaters with self-guilt
Links 04/10/2026: “AI Torture Chamber” and "Aggressive Push to Integrate Hey Hi (AI) Slop Into Schools Is Turning Into a Disaster"
Links for the day
How Microsoft Hides Massive Layoffs From the Media (as Explained by Microsofters)
"rewards" are not exactly rewarding
Brigading Against Women - Part XVII - The Appeal
more to be known towards the end of the year
Gemini Links 04/10/2026: Peace in Outage, Pen Pals, and deGoogling
Links for the day
Links 04/10/2026: Fires Rage in Borneo and Mass Layoffs at Disney
Links for the day
Garrett's Litigation Partner is Unemployed Again
losing one's job
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 03, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, October 03, 2026