Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 8/9/2015: Peppermint 6, elementary OS 0.3.1





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • SaaS/Big Data



  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice



    • LibreOffice Viewer for Ubuntu Touch Making Great Progress
      Developers are preparing a LibreOffice viewer for the Ubuntu phones, and it looks like it's coming along just nicely. It's still early work, but its makers are already reporting great progress and really good performance.


    • Microsoft vs OpenOffice in Pesaro: first, let’s recap
      Pesaro is a town of about 100 thousands people on the northern adriatic coast of Italy. Its Public Administration has been facing lots of critics from Free/Open Source software supporters because, in the last five years, it changed twice the same, important part of its ICT infrastructure. Both those changes bring consequences and open issues, both for the critics and for Pesaro, that have had little or no coverage at all so far, especially outside Italy (1). Before talking about them, however, it is necessary to summarize what happened.




  • BSD



  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC



    • Porting Guix and GuixSD
      A few weeks ago, Manolis Ragkousis announced the completion of the GSoC project whose purpose was to port Guix to the Hurd. The system distribution, GuixSD, cannot run GNU/Hurd yet, but the package manager itself can both cross-compile from GNU/Linux to GNU/Hurd and build natively on GNU/Hurd. The work of Manolis is being gradually merged in the main branch.

      More recently, Mark H Weaver posted a series of patches porting GuixSD to MIPS (Lemote Yeeloong), making it the first GuixSD port to non-Intel-compatible hardware (the package manager itself has supported mips64el for two years already.) By removing several platform-specific assumptions, this work paves the way for future ports.




  • Public Services/Government



    • Munich now a major contributor to open source
      The city of Munich is a major contributor to free and open source projects, sending bugfixes to upstream developers, making available software solutions and sharing best practices and technical information. In August, Munich IT staff members shared the city’s accomplishments with the community of Debian developers, one of the main free software distributions.


    • Munich Does A Lot Of The Right Things But Still Drags Onwards
      Munich may have put out the fire but they still are far from optimal in IT. There’s no reason at all they have to support 20-year-old computers. Such things can be replaced rather readily in today’s market with savings in energy-consumption, size, space, noise, dust,… Why spend a lot on labour to maintain obsolete technology far past its “best before” date? It’s not as if they are just getting full value out of previous expenditures nor keeping junk out of the landfill. Ten years’ support does that very well. Twenty years is just silly. 20 years ago, I was using a ‘486, for pity’s sake.




  • Openness/Sharing



  • Programming



    • Know Your Language: C Rules Everything Around Me (Part One)
      C is everywhere and in everything. C powers the Mars Curiosity rover, every computer operating system, every mobile OS, the Java Virtual Machine, Google Chrome, ATM machines, the computers in your car, the computers in your robot surgeon, the computers that designed the robot surgeon, the computers that designed those computers, and, eventually, C powers itself as its own implementation language.






Leftovers



  • How Apple is preparing for the end of the iPhone affair
    The launch of the iPhone 6s, fourth generation Apple TV and iPad Pro is impending...

    [...]

    Apple knows it can’t rely on the annual iPhone hype-release cycle forever.


  • Health/Nutrition



    • Here’s What I Saw in a California Town Without Running Water
      Glance at a lawn in East Porterville, California, and you'll instantly know something about the people who live in the house attached to it.

      If a lawn is green, the home has running water. If it's brown, or if the yard contains plastic water tanks or crates of bottled water, then the well has gone dry.




  • Security



    • Linux Foundation Security Checklist: Have It Your Way
      The Linux Foundation's recently published security checklist may draw more attention to best practices for protecting Linux workstations, even if IT pros do not embrace all of its recommendations.


    • ICT faces critical shortage of IT security execs
      There’s a critical shortage of IT security experts in Australia to meet an otherwise welcome increase in the demand for ICT executives after months of employment uncertainty for the country’s tech executives.




  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression



    • Why Murdoch Pushes for War
      Given the disgraceful Sun front page and middle spread urging war on Syria, and the all-out propaganda on Sky News, it is important to understand why Murdoch is pushing so hard for war. I therefore reproduce my article from February 2013. It is important to note that the links are to industry publications: this is very genuine, hard information.


    • Secret RAF drone strike kills two Britons in Syria
      DAVID CAMERON revealed yesterday that the RAF carried out a secret drone strike in Syria which killed two British citizens fighting for Islamic State (Isis).

      The Prime Minister insisted the strike was “necessary and proportionate” to stop attacks being planned on Britain.

      But campaigners described it as a an “extrajudicial killing” that “violated” the will of Parliament.






  • Finance



    • 'Why this long PayPal delay?'
      In the past I sold a few personal items on eBay that were paid for with PayPal. On those occasions I had immediate access to the money I received.

      However, in recent weeks I have sold some other items, also paid for with PayPal, but was able to access the money only after 21 days, even though PayPal deducted its fees immediately. Have things changed?


    • I Foreclose Houses For Banks: 5 Awful Realities
      About a decade ago, home prices exploded to bizarro levels, then millions of families got behind on their mortgage payments. A financial crisis spiraled out from there, almost destroying the world. Things have improved a bit since then, but it still sucks for lots of people. If you can't make your payments, the bank squares the debt by seizing your home, and you're left out in the cold. In the modern world, it's one of the worst things that can happen to you that doesn't involve a somber doctor asking you to please sit down.

      That's where Evelyn comes in. As part of her real estate job, she works with banks to handle foreclosures, evictions, and lockouts. We asked her what it's like watching this tragedy unfold again and again.




  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying



    • Harvard Professor Larry Lessig Says He's Running for President
      After exceeding his $1 million crowd-funding goal, Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessig announced today on “This Week” that he is running for president.

      “I think I'm running to get people to acknowledge the elephant in the room,” he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. "We have to recognize -- we have a government that does not work. The stalemate, partisan platform of American politics in Washington right now doesn't work.”


    • The Usual Warmongers
      To many of us who have been in conflict zones without a sanitised cordon around us, and actually seen the effects close-up (and that excludes almost all of the political class), it is astonishing that the neo-cons constantly seek to promote war, any war. They just cannot sit comfortably unless we are blowing somebody, somewhere, limb from limb.

      Little Aylan Kurdi and his family were fleeing Kobani, a town the US Air Force have been bombing relentlessly for weeks. Bombs are entirely agnostic over who they kill, and have not made life notably better for the population.

      Yet the news media are now insistently beating the drum for British bombing in Syria.




  • Censorship



    • Google DMCA Notice Record Smashed Again – But Why?
      Despite scaling dizzy heights in recent months, the record for DMCA notices being sent to Google's search engine has been smashed again. In a single week Google just processed a mind-boggling 13.68 million URLs, or to put it another way, almost 23 copyright complaints every second. So what's behind the massive surge?


    • Pirate Party Offers Uncensored DNS to Bypass Pirate Bay Blockade
      The Norwegian Pirate Party has made a big statement by launching a free DNS service which allows Internet users to bypass the local Pirate Bay blockade. The party advocates a free and open Internet for everyone and believes that the recent website blockades set a dangerous precedent.


    • Norwegian Pirate Party provides DNS server to bypass new Pirate Bay blockade
      Following a court-ordered block of The Pirate Bay and a number of other file-sharing websites in Norway, the Norwegian Pirate Party (Piratpartiet Norge) has now set up free, uncensored DNS servers that anyone can use to bypass the block. While the DNS servers are based in Norway, anyone can use them: if your ISP is blocking access to certain sites via DNS blackholing/blocking, using the Piratpartiet's DNS servers should enable access.




  • Privacy



    • It’s Impossible to Torrent Anonymously, Lawyer Says


      With dozens of cases under his belt Oregon lawyer Carl Crowell can be considered an expert when it comes to suing BitTorrent pirates. However, a recent claim that pirates can't be anonymous online conflicts with day-to-day reality.




  • Civil Rights



    • Sex abuse royal commission: Geelong Grammar paedophile teacher paid to retire to avoid scandal
      A former Geelong Grammar headmaster paid a teacher to retire early, in order to avoid a formal complaint about sexual abuse, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sex Abuse has heard.

      The former headmaster, Nicholas Sampson, is now the principal of elite New South Wales school, Cranbrook School.

      Former teacher Jonathan Harvey was jailed in 2007 for 10 months, with another 22 months suspended, after pleading guilty to abusing a former student, known as BLF, between 1976 and 1978.

      In his testimony to the royal commission on Monday, Harvey claimed the elite school's then-headmaster Nicholas Sampson suggested that he retire early, after hearing of his misconduct relating to a student.


    • Feds allege 4 men executed heist of $1 million worth of MacBook Airs
      Saljanin appears to have stopped at home in Yorktown Heights, New York, where he left the large, rented Penske truck in a parking lot overnight. When he came back the next day, he told police, the truck was gone. Of course, he told the authorities, he had no idea who could have done such a thing, nor did anyone else know that he was making the delivery.




  • Internet/Net Neutrality



    • How Comcast is changing tactics in response to cord cutters
      Reddit user demian87 recently posted a letter from Comcast notifying him or her of a new Comcast internet access pricing plan being trialed in Fort Lauderdale, the Keys, and Miami, Florida. According to this letter, Comcast will set a limit beginning on October 1 of 300 GB per household per month. Customers who exceed this limit will have to pay $10 for every additional 50 GB needed after that, or sign up for an unlimited data plan for an additional $30 per month.

      Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas confirmed that the letter is authentic, along with the company's new unlimited pricing plan. Douglas explained that "the company has trialed three other pricing plans since 2012 when Comcast had a static limit of 250 GB per month."

      In a related development reported by the New York Times, Comcast will campaign to win over the quintessential cord-cutter class with new TV services designed to entice them into subscribing to its internet access service. Comcast will begin offering a $15-a-month TV service called Stream that includes broadcast networks and HBO for its internet customers. The new service will be available in Boston, Chicago, and Seattle later this year and across the company's coverage areas in the United States in 2016.





  • Intellectual Monopolies





Recent Techrights' Posts

Biggest "AI Companies" (Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft) Borrowed (Additional Debt) About $100,000,000,000 in a Year
Who will be held accountable for all this?
In 2009 Microsoft Was Valued at ~150 Billion Dollars, Now They Tell Us Microsoft Lost ~1,000 Billion Dollars in Value. Does That Make Sense?
Or Microsoft lost 700 billion dollars in "value" in less than two weeks
Microsoft Stock Crashed When Alleged Vista 11 Numbers Disclosed
And last summer Microsoft indicated that it had lost 400 million Windows users
It's Not About Speed, It's About the Message (or Its Depth)
Better to write news than to just link to news if there's commentary that the news may merit
Mobbing at the European Patent Office (EPO) - Part IV - EPO Can Get Away With Murders, Suicide Clusters, and Systematic and Prolonged Bullying by 'Team Campinos' ("Alicante Mafia" as Insiders Call It)
Nobody in the Council or the EU/EC/EP gives a damn as long as laws are broken to fabricate 'growth'
Jeff Bezos Isn't Just Killing the Washington Post, He's Killing Thousands of News Sites/Newsrooms (in Dozens of Languages) That Rely on It for Many Decades Already
Not just slopfarms; even the Ukraine-based reporters are culled by Bezos, who's looking to please the dictators of the world
Central Staff Committee Confronted António Campinos for Giving His Cocaine-Addicted Friend Over 100,000 Euros to Do Nothing, Just Pretend to be Ill, While Cutting the Salaries of Everybody Else
"On the agenda: Amicale framework & Financial assistance for courses"
 
Links 07/02/2026: More White House Racism, "Europe Accuses TikTok of Addictive Design"
Links for the day
Silent Mass Layoffs: It's Not the Revolution, It's the Loophole and the Hack ("Low Performers" or "Underperformers")
Layoffs by another approach
Mark Shuttleworth (MS) Pays Salaries to Microsoft (MS) Employees
Canonical selling Microsoft
Links 07/02/2026: Windows TCO Rising, Lousy Patents Invalided
Links for the day
Microsoft Leadership: Stop Taxing Us, Tax Only Poor People
Does Microsoft create jobs?
In Case You've Missed It (ICYMI), Google's Debt More Than Doubled in a Year
Wait till it "monetises" billions of GMail users with slop
PIPs and Silent Layoffs at IBM (and Red Hat) Still Going on, It's "Forever Layoffs" (to Skirt the WARN Act)
American workers out
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 06, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, February 06, 2026
Stressful Times for Team Campinos ("Alicante Mafia") at Europe's Second-Largest Institution
Keep pushing
Growing Discrimination in the European Patent Office (EPO)
it's a race to the bottom, basically
Converting FOSDEM Talk on Software Patents in Europe Into Formats That Work for "FOS" and Don't Have Software Patent Traps
transcoded version of the video
Google News Drowning in (or Actively Promoting) Slopfarms Again
LLM slop is a nuisance
Gemini Links 07/02/2026: "Choosing a License for Literary Work" and "Social Media Is Not Social Networking (Anymore)"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 06/02/2026: Git and Email Patches; MNT Pocket Reform
Links for the day
Geminispace Net Growth in 2026 About a Capsule a Day
A pace like this means net gain of ~300 per year, i.e. about the same as last year
Benjamin Henrion Warned About the Illegal and Unconstitutional Unified Patent Court (UPC) in FOSDEM 2026
Listen to Benjamin Henrion
Economies Crashing Not Because of Slop Improving 'Efficiency' (That's a False Excuse) and 'Expensive' (Read: Qualified) Workers Discarded in Race to the Bottom
Actual cocaine addicts are pushing out moral people
IBM's CEO Speaks of Layoffs, Resorts to Mythical (False) Excuses
This has nothing to do with slop
Links 06/02/2026: Voter Intimidation and Press Shutdowns in US, Web Traffic Warped by LLM Sludge
Links for the day
Does Linux Torvalds Regret Having Dinners With Bill 'Russian Girls' Gates?
See, the rules that govern the Linux Foundation and its big sponsors aren't the same rules that apply to all of us
IBM: Cheapening Code, Cheapening Staff, Cheapening Everything
IBM's management runs IBM like it's a local branch of McDonald's. IBM is a junk company with morbid innards.
GNU/Linux Measured at 6% in One of the World's Largest Nations
Democratic Republic Of The Congo
Linux Foundation Operative Says We and Our Software All "Owe an Enormous Debt of Gratitude" to a Software Patents Reinforcer
The only true solution is to entirely get rid of all software patents
How to Win Lawsuits in 5 Simple Steps
Keep issuing threats every week and send 60 kilograms of legal papers to the target
More Than 99% of "AI" Companies Aren't AI, They're Pure BS
We need to discard those stupid debates about "AI" and reject media that gets paid to participate in such overt narrative control (manipulation like The Register MS)
AI Used to Save Lives, Now "AI" is a Grifting Scheme That Burns the Planet and Will Crash the Economy
What the media calls "AI" (it gets paid to call it that) is the same stuff that could instead be dubbed "algorithms"
Living in Freedom When 'False Flag Operations' Like EFF Get Captured by Billionaires to Take Freedom Away
There are many ways to think of Software Freedom
Amutable is a Microsoft Siege Against Freedom in GNU/Linux, Just Like the People Who Brought You 'Secure Boot' Controlled by Microsoft
Do whatever is possible to avoid Amutable and its "products"
Growing Focus on Publication
Over the past ~10 days we always served more than a million Web hits per day
"Going to be a large number of Microsoft layoffs announced soon"
Everybody knows a giant wave of layoffs is coming Microsoft's way
End of the 'GPU Bubble' and NVIDIA Finally Admits It Won't Bail Out Microsoft OpenAI Anymore
circular financing (financial/accounting fraud)
Corrupt Media Won't Hold Accountable Rich People for Role in Pedophilia
Journalistic misconduct or malpractice is a real thing
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 05, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, February 05, 2026
EPO Management ("Alicante Mafia") Not Properly Sharing Information on Scale of Strikes by EPO Staff
disproportionate (double) deductions in salaries against people who participate in strikes, which are protected by law
Gemini Links 06/02/2026: Slop/Microslop, Home Assistant, and Valid Ex Commands
Links for the day
Blackmail evidence: Debian social engineering exposed in ClueCon 2024 talk on politics
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Bitcoin crash: opportunity or the end game?
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Changes at the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
SRA is basically a waste of money
Claims That IBM Will Lay Off 20% (or 15%) of Its Workforce This Year Unless It Finds a Way to Push Them All Out by Threats, Shame, Guilt
Where are the articles about IBM layoffs?
IBM Isn't a Serious Company Anymore, It's a Ponzi Scheme Operated by a Clique and It Misuses Companies It Acquires to Prop Up or Legitimise the Scheme
IBM seems like it's nothing but a "Scheme"
Google News Drowning in Slop About "Linux" (Slopfarms Galore)
Google should know better than to link to any of these slopfarms, but today's Google is itself a pusher of slop
Links 05/02/2026: EU Commission Gutting Net Neutrality
Links for the day
Gemini Links 05/02/2026: NixOS Books and Monochrome Emojis
Links for the day
Links 05/02/2026: Canadian Government Uses US LLMs to Override Expert Opinions, NVIDIA Troubles Due to Enablement of Mass Plagiarism ('Piracy') Misleadingly Obscured as "Hey Hi"
Links for the day
Explaining the Letter From JUDGE SYKES FRIXOU, Threatening Me Around the Time GNOME's Nat Friedman Lost His CEO Job at Microsoft GitHub and His Best Friend Got Arrested for Strangulation
this letter (with annotation) is critical
Linuxiac Not Rehabilitated, It's Still Full of LLM Slop (Part of a Trend)
The Web as a resource/source of information is perishing
"Sponsored by Azul" to Write Fake 'Article' About Azul, Quoting Azul Itself
The "journalism" industry [sic] became so utterly corrupt
JuristGate is for sale: three billion Swiss francs for a domain name
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Like Microsoft and IBM, the 'Alicante Mafia'-Governed EPO Does PIPs Nowadays (at the EPO, It's "Professional Incompetence Procedure")
So "PIPs" are definitely in the EPO and we saw letters sent to staff
Time for Change, More New Articles, Less Curation
The oligarchy wants to gut the real press and replace media with slop and social control media (or social control media with slop in it, i.e. their own voices, mechanised)
Gemini Links 05/02/2026: Coercion, Antibiotics, and LVDT Project
Links for the day
Almost 1,600 EPO Employees Went on Strike Last Week
There is another strike coming 2.5 weeks from now
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, February 04, 2026
IRC logs for Wednesday, February 04, 2026