Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 1/9/2015: Manjaro Linux 0.8.13, Netrunner 14.2 LTS





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • The new IT is all about the customer
    Open source code. GitHub and other cloud repositories enable developers to share and consume code for almost any purpose imaginable. This reflects today's practical, non-ideological open source culture: Why code it yourself if someone else is offering it free under the most liberal license imaginable?


  • Events/Communities



  • SaaS/Big Data



    • OpenStack Was Key To Building Servers.Com
      When XBT Holding S.A. decided to simplify how its subsidiaries provided global hosting, network solutions, and web development they turned to the open source cloud infrastructure platform OpenStack. By consolidating the offerings under a single service provider, Servers.com, customers can more easily browse, mix, compare and choose the most suitable services.


    • ZeroStack Comes Out of Stealth, Focused on Private Clouds
      There is another OpenStack-focused startup on the scene, and you have to appreciate its creative name: ZeroStack. The cloud computing company has come out of stealth mode to introduce a private cloud solution that it claims is easier to configure, consume and manage than any other technology on the market.


    • Apache Ignite, a Big Data Tool, Graduates as a Top-Level Project
      Only a few days ago, Apache, which is the steward for and incubates more than 350 Open Source projects, announced that Apache Lens, an open source Big Data and analytics tool, has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP). Now, the ASF has announced that Apache Ignite is to become a top-level project. It's an open source effort to build an in-memory data fabric that was driven by GridGain Systems and WANdisco.


    • Funding the Cloud: Top VCs Aim for the Silver Lining


    • How Apache Spark Is Transforming Big Data Processing, Development




  • Databases



    • Accelerating Scientific Analysis with the SciDB Open Source Database System
      Science is swimming in data. And, the already daunting task of managing and analyzing this information will only become more difficult as scientific instruments — especially those capable of delivering more than a petabyte (that’s a quadrillion bytes) of information per day — come online.

      Tackling these extreme data challenges will require a system that is easy enough for any scientist to use, that can effectively harness the power of ever-more-powerful supercomputers, and that is unified and extendable. This is where the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center’s (NERSC’s) implementation of SciDB comes in.




  • CMS



    • PiwigoPress release 2.31
      I just pushed a new release of PiwigoPress (main page, WordPress plugin dir) to the WordPress servers. This release incorporates new features for the sidebar widget, and better interoperability with some Piwigo galleries.




  • Education



    • How to teach student sys admins
      Students spend the 16-week long course learning practical skills using real tools. To support their systems, students learn about using support tickets and documentation by using RT and MediaWiki. To deploy and maintain their systems, they learn about configuration management using Puppet, system monitoring using Nagios, and backup and recovery using Bacula. But the broad concepts are more important than the specific software packages I just mentioned. The point is to learn, for example, configuration management, not to be trained to use Puppet. The software used by Clark is used because it works for him, but the software is flexible and changeable.






  • Openwashing (Fake FOSS)



  • Funding



  • BSD



    • OpenBSD Is Getting Its Own Native Hypervisor
      The OpenBSD Foundation has been funding work on a project to provide OpenBSD with its own, native hypervisor.

      The hypervisor's VMM is so far able to launch a kernel and ask for a root file-system, but beyond that, it's been laying most of the hypervisor foundation up to this point.


    • Coming Soon to OpenBSD/amd64: A Native Hypervisor
      Earlier today, Mike Larkin (mlarkin@) published a teaser for something he's been working on for a while.


    • the peculiar libretunnel situation
      The author of stunnel has (once, twice) asserted that stunnel may not be used with LibreSSL, only with OpenSSL. This is perhaps a strange thing for free software to do, and it creates the potential for some very weird consequences.

      First, some background. The OpenSSL license and the GPL are both free software licenses, but they are different flavors of freedom, meaning you can’t mix them. It would be like mixing savory and sweet. Can’t do it. Alright, so maybe technically you can do it, but you’re not supposed to. The flavor, er, freedom police will come get you. One workaround is for the GPL software to say, oh, but maybe wait, here’s an exception. (Does this make the software more or less free?) Here’s a longer explanation with sample exception.


    • FreeBSD on Beagle Bone Black (with X11)
      X11 clients on the Beagle Bone Black .. that’s X11 over the network, with the X Server elsewhere. No display as yet. The FreeBSD wiki notes that there’s no (mini) HDMI driver yet. So I built some X11 programs, xauth(1) and xmessage(1), and installed them on the Bone. Since I bought a blue case for the Bone, and it is the smallest computer in the house (discounting phones .. let’s call it the smallest hackable computer in the house) the kids decided to call it smurf. Here’s a screenshot of poudriere’s text console as it builds packages.




  • Openness/Sharing



    • Schiphol Airport working on open innovation
      ...open data and an open programming interface...


    • How open film project Cosmos Laundromat made Blender better
      If you're not familiar with the string of open projects that the Blender Institute has kicked out over the years, you might not be familiar with the term "open movie." Simply put, not only is Cosmos Laundromat produced using free and open source tools like Blender, GIMP, Krita, and Inkscape, but the film itself, and all of its assets—models, textures, character rigs, animations, all of it—are available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license. Want to see what a production character rig looks like? Or know how that giant color tornado was created? How about actually using a character (or just a prop) in your own project? Maybe you even want to redo the entire film to your own tastes. It's an open movie! You can!


    • Making strides in container integration, and more OpenStack news




  • Programming



    • The thin line between good and bad automation
      I don't like automation -- I love it. I whisper sweet nothings, come 'round with flowers, and buy milkshakes for automation. I've even stood outside the window with a boombox for automation. I will go out of my way to automate tasks that, while they are not terribly tedious, I don't want to have to remember exactly how to do them somewhere down the road, when months have gone by since the last time I had to relearn them.






Leftovers



  • Security



  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression



    • Breaking the Depleted Uranium Ceiling
      It is an astonishing fact that, despite near universal recognition now that the war in Iraq was a disaster, no major British social institution is headed by a single one of the majority of the population wo were opposed to the war.

      Every Cabinet Minister actively supported the war. Of the fifteen Tory MPs who rebelled and voted against the war, not one is a minister. Civil servants officially have no politics but privately their opinions are known. There is not one single Permanent Under Secretary of a UK government department who was known to be against the war and most were enthusiasts. Simon Fraser, PUS at the FCO, was an active Blairite enthusiast for the war. Though no Blairite, the Head of MI6 Alex Younger was also an enthusiast.


    • Missing From Reports of Yemeni Carnage: Washington’s Responsibility
      But that “huge role” often disappears when the the leading papers are discussing the carnage that results from the air attacks that the US is supporting and supplying. Thus when the Times‘ Rick Gladstone (8/22/15) reported that “Saudi-led airstrikes on a residential district in Yemen’s southwestern city of Taiz had killed more than 65 civilians, including 17 people from one family,” according to Doctors Without Borders, and that the death toll in the war included “hundreds of civilians killed in airstrikes,” Washington’s role in facilitating those deaths went unmentioned.




  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife



    • Obama can rename Mount McKinley Denali — but he can’t stop its loss of ice
      This Monday through Wednesday, President Obama will be in Alaska, visiting melting glaciers and remote towns and meeting with other Arctic leaders. On Sunday, the president made a major statement by officially renaming Mt. McKinley — the U.S.’s highest peak — Denali, its traditional native name.

      The trip’s purpose is to highlight climate change — and for Alaska in particular, the change has been dramatic.






  • Finance



    • Blythe Masters Tells Banks the Blockchain Changes Everything
      These Wall Street veterans all know who Blythe Masters is. She’s the wunderkind who made managing director at JPMorgan Chase at age 28, the financial engineer who helped develop the credit-default swap and bring to life a market that peaked at $58 trillion, in notional terms, in 2007. She’s the banker later vilified by pundits, unfairly some say, after those instruments compounded the damage wrought by the subprime mortgage crash in 2008. Now, one year after quitting JPMorgan amid another controversy, Blythe Masters is back. She isn’t pitching a newly minted derivative or trading stratagem to this room. She’s promoting something wilder: It’s called the blockchain, and it’s the digital ledger software code that powers bitcoin.


    • eBay Pledges Loyalty To PayPal — Bans Rivals
      eBay will soon be banning PayPal rivals, ProPay and Skrill, from offering payment services to sellers on its platform.


    • Police force could lose 22,000 jobs under new spending cuts
      Major reduction in funding could see number of police officers in England and Wales fall to 40-year low




  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying



  • Censorship



    • Muhammad cartoon editor gets Norway prize
      Jyllands-Posten editor Flemming Rose, who was behind the controversial 2005 publication of Prophet Muhammad cartoons, is being honoured by a Norwegian free speech group.




  • Privacy



    • Don’t let Roanoke murderer’s arrest justify a license plate reader rise
      As someone who has been reporting on license plate readers (LPR) for some time now, it actually surprised me when I heard that Roanoke, Virginia, shooter Vester Lee Flanagan had been first located through the use of the scanning device. While the devices have been in use in Virginia for years, their effectiveness and efficiency there—and nationwide—is questionable.

      According to local media accounts, when Virginia State Police Trooper Pamela Neff received the suspect’s plate number over her radio last week, she punched it into her LPR system and got an alert that the car had passed by not three minutes earlier. Within 10 minutes, Neff and other officers converged on Flanagan’s location, finding that he had shot himself, ending the manhunt.


    • Fake EFF site serving espionage malware was likely active for 3+ weeks




  • Civil Rights



  • Internet/Net Neutrality



    • FCC Introduces Rules Banning WiFi Router Firmware Modification
      For years we have been graced by cheap consumer electronics that are able to be upgraded through unofficial means. Your Nintendo DS is able to run unsigned code, your old XBox was a capable server for its time, your Android smartphone can be made better with CyanogenMod, and your wireless router could be expanded far beyond what it was originally designed to do thanks to the efforts of open source firmware creators. Now, this may change. In a proposed rule from the US Federal Communications Commission, devices with radios may be required to prevent modifications to firmware.




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights



      • Yandex Demands Takedown of ‘Illegal’ Music Downloader


        Russian search giant Yandex has ordered U.S-based Github to take down a tool that allows downloading of MP3s from its music streaming service. Yandex, which has 60% of the local search market and has deals with Universal, Sony and Warner to offer a Spotify-like platform, says that the music downloader is illegal.








Recent Techrights' Posts

When Short is Way Too Short (Superficiality, Lowering of Entropy)
Demonstrating how truly worthless social control media was all along
NVIDIA's Crisis Has Only Just began
NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA) is set to open in the red tomorrow
IBM Has Destroyed Red Hat and Hashicorp, Insiders Say It's the Usual From IBM:
Bluewashing is a death wave
Techrights Was Right About Slop Destroying Development Communities and Projects
Slop does not improve your project. It kills the community. Without community, what is left? A 'botfarm'?
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXXI - Harassment Law and "Things Are Unfairly Asymmetric" (Exploring the Boundaries of Death Threats and Various Threats From America)
the sort of "technofascism" that our country must learn to confront rather than facilitate
 
Cusp of Collapse
NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA) is set to open in the red tomorrow
Getting Fed Up Not Only With Microsoft But Also Windows
This morning we wrote about North America
Layoffs and Silent Layoffs (e.g. PIPs) as a "Break" From IBM
If the press doesn't report it, then it never happened, right?
Microsoft XBox at 25 and All-Time Low
XBox will be "officially" dead (not the brand) when sales fall below some threshold and then production is halted, sort of like Apple's Vision Pro
Links 15/11/2026: Microsoft Already Emitting Chaff to Distract From Its Catastrophe, Jensen Huang Deemed Just 'Fall Guy' Amid Collapse of the Pyramid Scheme
Links for the day
Gemini Links 15/11/2026: CD Players Live on and Self-Hosting from Home Fallacy
Links for the day
Techrights Hates Slop Bots
They benefit nobody
The Economy is Fine! (If Only for China!)
The future is slop! If not, then it's China's fault! It's "sabotaging" the "Western hey hi" in this "hey hi arms race!"
"IT" as "Musical Chairs" (on the Deck of The Titanic)
Each generation will get worse for "IT"
Salesforce in Trouble, Debt Nearly Quadrupled in 9 Months
Salesforce is perishing in a deep pool of debt
"Microsoft is Next IBM"
The words of a Microsoft insider and responses to that
IRC is Decentralised
Bye, Microsoft Teams/Skype
Links 15/11/2026: Murdoch's "WSJ Buries Stephen Miller's Racism" and "America Has Entered a New Age of Propaganda"
Links for the day
In the UK, GNU/Linux Usage Soared During Microsoft Downtime
since the massive outage GNU/Linux usage soared to over 10%
Google Slop About Richard Stallman Shows Stallman Was Right, LLMs are BS Generators
Google slop is the "new Google"
Spouse of Garrett Needs to Get "Several Firearms" to Feel Safe Amid Divorce (Garrett Has a "Girlfriend" Now)
Seems like Isis and my wife have a lot in common when it comes to Garrett
Vista 11 is Small
Can Microsoft survive the fall of Windows?
Six Richard Stallman and FSF Talks This Month (FSF Staff at Ohio State University)
Dr. Stallman's talks in Ecuador are well timed because of the collapse of the LLMs (slop) pyramid scheme
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, November 14, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, November 14, 2026
Gemini Links 15/11/2026: "The Bastards Can Never Win" and "The Last Low-Tech Generation"
Links for the day
Links 14/11/2026: Wuhan Corruption and "Aid Isn’t Reaching Ebola’s Epicenter"
Links for the day
Rahul Kumar Has Turned tecadmin.net Into a Slopfarm That Promotes Slop and Microsoft (as Usual)
Slop promoting slop - a death knell of once-active "Linux" sites
Large-Scale Layoffs - Not Just PIPs - at Red Hat and IBM This Month
Mainstream media has quit covering mass layoffs
Links 14/11/2026: "The Claude Delusion" and "The Microsoft Outage is a Warning for the World"
Links for the day
Ethics in Perspective, Free Software and Morality
top clients of Jeffrey Epstein are one happy family
Richard Stallman (RMS) at Universidad Central del Ecuador (Guayaquil), Cuenca, Campus Sur Universidad Politecnica Salesiana (Quito), and Ohio State University
Long live the message and mission of RMS
They Paid Workers in 'Shares' (That Lost Almost Half Their Value in One Month)
Welcome back 1999 or 2007
The Register MS Made Millions of Pounds by Participating in the Slop Hype Campaign (It's Still Doing It), Now It Admits That It's Just a Bubble
the slop frenzy played a role in the Microsoft meltdown
Intercontinental Brigading - Part XXXXX - Pyramid Schemes (Planned Plunder) and Canceled/Botched Surgeries Aren't "Funny", They Cause Serious Harm and Distress
We were right about Microsoft
Links 14/11/2026: "OpenAI Is Sustaining Enormous Losses" and Slop "Loses the Popular Vote"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, November 13, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, November 13, 2026
Gemini Links 14/11/2026: Code of Conduct, Back to Gemini, and Gemlog to Inbox
Links for the day
Slop Promotion, Including Paid-for Slop Promotion for So-called 'Linux' Foundation (Its Clients Are Slop Companies)
We've noticed a lot of this lately in "It's FOSS" and to a lesser degree in "FOSS Force"
Gemini Links 13/11/2026: Productivity Metrics and Antenna Outage
Links for the day
The Real Issue With The Register MS is Not the Politics of Some Staff's "Tweets", It's That The Register MS Publishes Fake Articles for Sponsors (50,000 Pounds Minimum)
AWS and Google each pay millions for fake articles which beget journalistic bias too (they literally pay the salaries of the 'reporters')
Microsoft Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): We Need Accountability Because Many People Die and It's Because of Microsoft Diehards or People Bribed by Microsoft to Deploy Microsoft Where Lives Are at Risk
They're trying to save face right now
What the Media Misses: It's Not an NVIDIA Issue, Super Micro Computer Inc Also Fell From $45 to $26 in the Period NVIDIA Lost 33% of Its Faked 'Value', NVIDIA is Collapsing Like Intel
History goes in circles
It's Not About China or Sex, It's About Corruption at NVIDIA and a Pyramid Scheme Perpetrated Under the Guise of "Hey Hi Revolution" (That Wasn't, It's Manufactured and Hyped by Bribes, Subsidised by Multi-Trillion-Dollar Loans, People's Pension Funds and More)
What's at stake here is a lot bigger than the "Ponzi hub" of Jensen Huang
No, You're Not a "Most Valuable Company" When Everything is Down for Half a Day in the Entire Planet
Still down, still no explanation (maybe they too aren't sure)
Waste of Money: Giving More Money to Toothless Regulators That Don't Even Examine Evidence
Shame in SRA
"Techrights Statement on Phoronix" Still Valid Five Years Later
Our position as stated in early 2022 has not changed
Vista 11's 'Growth' Has Stalled, It's Measured at Only 17.9% in the US This Year
That helps put in perspective Microsoft's attempt to discard almost 30% of its remaining workforce
"NVIDIA is Enron" (Subsidising the Pyramid Scheme That It Profited From), Microsoft is Next to be Down for the Count
Microsoft increasingly looks like the "next NVIDIA"
Richard Stallman Travels to South America to Give Talks About Free Software in Spanish, FSF Raises Money
The FSF is raising money (goal is $400,000) and the FSF has just mentioned the upcoming talks by the FSF's founder
United States Adding ~300 Billion in Government Debt Per Month, Wall Street Shaves Off Trillions in 'Value' in Less Than One Week
cushioning "assets" by helping them fake "value"
Microsoft: Pay Us for the Stuff That's Offline and We Cannot Fix
Learn to take control of the technology that you rely on
Links 13/11/2026: "Copyright-Strike-for-Hire" and "Stevie Wonder Photo Lawsuit"
Links for the day
The Slop Bubble (or Pyramid Scheme) Relied on Trust and Patience (Being Patient as Losses Grow and Debt Explodes, Trusting the Roadmap of Cheaters and Frauds)
Remember that it all began with trust
Anthropic's IPO Depends on $895.4 Billion in Debt (Money It Doesn't Have, It Loses Over 100 Billion Dollars Per Reporting Period), NVIDIA Has Just Lost Almost 2 Trillion Dollars In Value and Its Debt Trebled in Three Months
This coming week will be very, very entertaining for slop critics/sceptics to watch
At Microsoft, "Buyouts" or "Global Voluntary Separation Agreement" (GVSA) Not Much Different From Layoffs (Severance Shockingly Low)
From what we are able to gather, many people are leaving Microsoft 'voluntarily'
Is Microsoft the Next Fake-Valued Corporation to Lose 35% in "Market Value"? Is Slop Bringing Microsoft Down?
Will NDAs prevent people talking or journalists finding out the true cause?
Lorenzo Stoakes (ARM) the Latest of Many to Quit Linux Development Over Linus Torvalds' Obsession With Slop (Linus Wants to Work With Bots, Not Humans Who Understand Whatever Code They Write)
Linus caught the 'brain virus'
Silent Layoffs at IBM (and Red Hat) Continue in November 2026
IBM's CEO is "a Palliative Care Doctor Who Slides [IBM] Gently Into the Night"
Microsoft Asks 60,000 Workers to Leave, Some Leave, Services Go Down
Microsoft laid off about 40,000-50,000 people in past years
Gemini Links 13/11/2026: Roku Exits the Smart Home Market and Poor Reporting/Journalism Regarding Slop Plagiarism
Links for the day
Links 13/11/2026: "Apple Support Community Forums to Permanently Close" and "The Slop Market is Getting Nervous"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, November 12, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, November 12, 2026