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Links 10/12/2015: Many New Kernels, Mesa 11.0.7, elementary OS 0.3.2, PINE 64





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • 5 open source tools for making music
    Do you think music software is only the domain of expensive proprietary software? Think again. There are literally hundreds of applications out there designed by, and for, those with a musical bent. Music projects, including many projects specifically for the Linux operating system, flourish in the open source community as musicians take to coding to produce tools to make their lives easier.


  • World’s Fastest Password Cracking Tool Hashcat Is Now Open Source
    The world’s fastest cracking tool Hashcat is now open source. The company has called it a very important step and listed out the reasons that inspired them to take this step.


  • Hashcat advanced password recovery now open source
    Steube said that many of these researchers can't reveal the exact changes they would need to make due to non-disclosure agreements (NDA) so making the software open source allows them to make the changes themselves.


  • Apache Advances Open Source Kylin for OLAP-on-Hadoop
    Just over a year after being open sourced by creator eBay Inc., the Kylin project -- a Big Data distributed analytics engine -- has been advanced by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to top-level status.

    Apache Kylin is designed to provide a SQL interface and multi-dimensional analysis (OLAP) on Apache Hadoop, with support for extremely large datasets.


  • Act now to rebuild trust in the code controlling everyday stuff
    AMID the ongoing fallout over the software in some Volkswagen cars that was able to cheat emissions tests, the public may well be pondering a wider question: can we trust the software in the gadgets we use every day? If a car’s software can deceive, what might our devices be programmed to do that is not in our interests?

    Some TVs and fridges already stand accused of manipulating energy efficiency tests. But software can’t just be used to make beating such tests easier. It also makes it easier to lock consumers into proprietary systems and raises suspicions of planned obsolescence.

    Whenever devices go online, manufacturers (and others) gain the ability to invade privacy: recall Samsung’s TVs with voice recognition that also happened to gather private conversations.


  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla



      • Firefox OS Pivot to Connected Devices
        Everything is connected around us. This revolution has already started and it will be bigger than previous technology revolutions, including the mobile smartphone revolution. Internet of Things, as many call it today, will fundamentally affect all of us.


      • The Firefox OS smartphone is dead
        The Firefox OS smartphone has been discontinued by Mozilla. This comes as no real surprise, given the intense competition in the smartphone market and the domination of Apple's iOS and Google's Android phones.


      • Mozilla Launches Free Ad Blocker for iOS 9






  • Databases





  • Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)



  • BSD



  • Licensing



    • Silly questions about telephony
      Question two. From a GNU/Linux PC, I want the capability to connect to a USA cell phone network and make a voice call to an old-school 9600 bps landline audio modem, and have serial comms with this landline audio modem.


    • Parallels Between Code of Conducts and Copyleft (and their objectors)
      The question is, is this an objection to copyleft, or is it an objection to code of conducts? I've seen objections raised to both that go along these lines. I think there's little coincidence, since both of them are objections to added process which define (and provide enforcement mechanisms for) doing the right thing.




  • Openness/Sharing



    • Open Hardware



      • bq Witbox 2 Open Source 3D Printer Launches For €1,690
        Being open source all the design files for the Witbox 2 3D Printer can be found over on GitHub via the link below, if you are interested. For more details and specifications on the Witbox 2 Jumbo to the official website via the link below where it is also now available to purchase priced at €1,690.








Leftovers



  • Security



    • Symantec: iOS and OS X users face a surge of fresh security threats
      SECURITY FIRM Symantec has warned that the hacker threat to Apple users has reached unprecedented levels.

      The firm reckons that Apple is a victim of its success, becoming a bigger target as its user base grows. To be fair to Apple most of the problem relates to jailbroken devices, which is not a thing that the firm recommends. We have seen incidents recently that make the most of this. The threat applies to mobile software and the desktop.


    • DoS attack brings UK universities to a virtual standstill
      According to the Telegraph newspaper, universities across the country have been hit by DoS attacks. This means in some cases no internet access, and that means students will have to study like it's 1980 something.


    • U.K. Cops Are Trying to Scare Teen Hackers With House Calls
      It was a summer morning, officer Paul Hastings recalls, when he arrived at a suspected hacker’s house in the northern English city of Hull. There, police had tracked one of the people who’d signed up online for a hacking service called Lizard Stresser that was used to attack companies including Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Sony at the end of 2014. This particularly fearsome cybervigilante was asleep when Hastings knocked, so his dad answered the door.

      The visit was one of about 50 U.K. police made this year to people they say used the Lizard Stresser site, many of them children. The Hull suspect, a teenager, couldn’t have done anything wrong, his dad told Hastings. He spent all his time upstairs, on his computer.

      [...]

      Teen hackers have been pop culture figures since Matthew Broderick starred in WarGames, and the U.K. has a long history with juvenile black hats. In 1994, when U.S. Air Force researchers found an unauthorized user on their systems downloading data, they tracked the hacker to a North London suburb. Working with London police, they found their culprit: a 16-year-old boy in an attic bedroom, as journalist Gordon Corera recounts in Intercept: The Secret History of Computers and Spies.




  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression



  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife



    • Climate Change Deniers Try to Derail the Paris Talks
      LE BOURGET, France—Monday began what’s supposed to be the final week of the climate talks, the one where top-level negotiators hammer out an accord to stop the deadly march of global warming. To troll this momentous event, the climate change deniers at the Heartland Institute came all the way from Chicago to stage a “counter-conference” at a central Paris venue called, seriously, the Hotel California.


    • How haze-emitting fires have changed the way Indonesia engages with the world
      The recent fires in Indonesia were something of a lightbulb moment for Indonesia in the way it views its development model and the threats from climate change, a senior member of the country's delegation to the Paris climate talks said on Tuesday.

      It also triggered a rethink of how the country should represent itself at the talks, said Mr Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, chairman of Indonesia's Advisory Council for Climate Change, and a former environment minister.

      Indonesia has brought about 400 delegates to the talks, a large number by any measure.

      About 80 are directly paid for by the government. The delegation comprises business and opinion leaders, non-governmental organisations, members of local communities and interfaith networks, he told a press conference on the sidelines of the talks.


    • COP21: Indonesian forest fires hot issue for global climate summit
      As 190 nations grapple with the world's future at the global climate summit in Paris, forest fires in Indonesia have been continuing to rage since July 2015.

      Emissions from this year’s fires have reached 1.62 billion metric tons of CO2, bumping Indonesia up from sixth largest to fourth largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter in the world, surpassing Russia in a matter of six weeks and the entire US economy in just 38 days. [1]

      Global Forest Watch Fires detected at least 127,000 fires across Indonesia this year, the worst since 1997. These fires were mostly caused by the clearing of forested peat lands to plant palms for oil.


    • Senate Science Committee hearing challenges “dogma” of climate science
      While the eyes of the world are on Paris, where nations are hammering out an agreement to do something about the reality of climate change, the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness once again held a hearing on Tuesday to debate whether climate change is for real. Subcommittee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), who is running for his party’s presidential nomination, convened the hearing titled “Data or dogma? Promoting open inquiry in the debate over the magnitude of human impact on Earth’s climate.”






  • Finance



    • 6 signs greed has destroyed American culture
      The love of money for money’s sake is the social disease of our time. We see it all around us: in the celebration of ill-gotten stock gains, public admiration for the heads of criminal banks, the words of Kanye West, in the commercialization of charity and even spirituality.

      This adoration of wealth isn’t a new thing, of course. When I was in elementary school I was sent to a school counselor for being moody, introspective – in other words, for being either a proto-goth or a writer in the making. I was asked to draw a picture of myself as a happy adult, and the resulting portrait showed a rich man standing beside a Rolls-Royce with an ascot around his neck.


    • 5 BS Myths About Being Poor You Believe Thanks To The Media
      Poor people, right? Visit the "news of the weird" section of a major media site and you'll find a gauntlet of undesirables engaging in such wacky antics as getting into drunk fistfights at McDonald's and whatnot. And, in basically all of these cases, what you're reading barely qualifies as news. It's Internet rubbernecking and -- as far as most news outlets are concerned -- anyone below the poverty line is fair game as a source of national amusement (and it's not unlike similar stunts the news pulls on Asian people and the youths).




  • Privacy



    • Kazakhstan Decides To Break The Internet, Wage All Out War On Encryption
      Starting on January 1, the country of Kazakhstan has formally declared war on privacy, encryption, and a secure Internet. A new law takes effect in the new year that will require all citizens of the country to install a national, government-mandated security certificate allowing the interception of all encrypted citizen communications. In short, the country has decided that it would be a downright nifty idea to break HTTPS and SSL, essentially launching a "man in the middle" attack on every resident of the country.


    • FBI Chief Asks Tech Companies to Stop Offering End-to-End Encryption
      After the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, encryption has once again become a political target in Washington. Despite there still being no solid evidence the attackers benefited from or even used encryption (in at least one case, they coordinated via distinctly unencrypted text messages) law enforcement and national security hawks have used the tragedies to continue pressing tech companies to give the US government access to encrypted communications—even if that means rolling back security and changing the nature of their businesses.

      At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, FBI director James Comey went so far as to suggest that companies providing users with end-to-end encryption might need to simply, well, stop doing that.

      “It's not a technical issue, it's a business model question,” said Comey, referring to companies like Apple and WhatsApp which encrypt data so that it can't be read by any third party, including the companies themselves. “Lots of good people have designed their systems and their devices so that judges' orders can not be complied with, for reasons that I understand, I'm not questioning their motivations.”


    • How your private emails can spread all over the world
      SNAP. You press the shutter icon on your phone and capture a photo of your baby daughter. With a couple of swipes, you attach it to an email in your Gmail app and fire it off to your mother-in-law.

      As personal data goes, it doesn’t get much more innocuous. But the truth is that spraying around any private information is risky. You might think that’s overblown. As long as you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.

      It’s not that simple. Just look at this summer’s hack that exposed the data from Ashley Madison, a site catering for people looking for an affair, and imagine if the same happened with all your emails stored by Google, or your photos on Facebook. Even if you’ve done nothing illegal or immoral, faced with a database of every photograph and comment you’ve ever shared privately, friendships and business deals could dissolve the world over.


    • Palantir Raises $125 Million in New Funding
      Data-analysis company Palantir Technologies has raised $125 million in new funding, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The financing increased the size of the company's current funding round to about $680 million.

      Palantir, a secretive company co-founded by investor Peter Thiel in 2004, builds software for searching through and analyzing reams of data. Banks, police departments, and intelligence agencies are among the Palo Alto, Calif., company's customers.


    • Why Yahoo Decided to Keep Its Alibaba Stake
      Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and chairman Maynard Webb appeared on CNBC today to explain why the company’s board of directors decided not to spin off its stake Alibaba.
    • Government and Corporations Are Responsible for Culture of Surveillance
      There is no liberty without privacy. As the culture of surveillance grows, liberty recedes. The New American has reported on many of the threats to privacy that are becoming more and more commonplace. Some Smart TVs are spying on users via their integrated cameras, microphones, and Internet connectivity and then reporting back to the manufacturers, who sell that data to advertisers. Other "Internet of Things" devices have surveillance capabilities that are marketed as features promising convenience to users. Facebook performs social/psychological experiments on its users and also harvests users' data to sell to advertisers.




  • Civil Rights



  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights



      • Copyright case over “Happy Birthday” is done, trial canceled
        With less than a week to go before a trial, a class-action lawsuit over the copyright status of "Happy Birthday" has been resolved. Details of the settlement, including what kind of uses will be allowed going forward, are not clear.


      • EU Proposal Bans Netflix-Style Geo Blocking and Restrictions


        The European Commission has officially presented its plan to abolish geo-blocking and filtering restrictions across EU member states. The new proposal requires online services to allow users to access their accounts all across Europe, even in countries where it's officially not available yet.

        [...]

        Ironically, the changes may not always be beneficial. In some cases people use a VPN to access a broader library of films and video in another EU country, which will no longer be possible under the new rules.








Recent Techrights' Posts

Gnome Foundation Inc is in Trouble
the agenda is set GAFAM and IBM rather than donors
SLAPP Censorship - Part 22 Out of 200: When You Complain People Impersonate You in IRC (But You Yourself Impersonate People in IRC and Lock Them Out of Their IRC Handles)
We'll cover this with direct evidence some time soon
 
Fedora Maintainer-ship Using Slop (Mistakes) Would Make Fedora Less Reliable
It won't produce reliable code or stable systems one can rely upon
IBM's "Legacy Employees" (Experienced Workers, IBM Management Dubs Them 'Dinobabies')
This notion of "legacy employees" seems like something overlapping with "expensive" (well paid) staff, even if not entirely equivalent
EPO's "Current Industrial Actions Are Likely to Intensify Further."
There is another strike in 5 days
This Morning The Register MS Published Slop Promotion With the Term "AI" 15 Times In It. The Register MS Was (As Usual) Paid to Do This
This is not a serious publisher
SLAPP Censorship - Part 23 Out of 200: We Were Right All Along (for 2 Years) About Third Party Funding and Willingness to 'Break the Bank' in Pursuit of "Revenge"
How much damage can a person do to oneself in pursuit of cover-up of legitimate technical concerns?
Links 25/03/2026: Airports Further Militarised, "Slopification and Its Discontents", Microsoft 'Open' 'Hey Hi' Shutting Things Down
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/03/2026: Blogging Fright and Absolutely Useless 'Apps' Made by Slop Machines
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Rise in Energy Prices Will Significantly Accelerate the Death of So-called "AI Companies"
It should be noted that fake news about Microsoft OpenAI doubling workforce (mere words, not actions) can serve as a nice distraction from the death of Sora due to divestment
It's Always a Question of Trust
There's a widespread stigma of lawyers being manipulative and chronically dishonest
Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Must More Carefully Investigate or Assess the Financial State of Law Firms in the UK
We'll cover this in depth in the future
GAFAM Mozilla Removes Theora Support, Now GNU Needs to Re-encode Videos
Mozilla used to mean something to Free software advocates
An Open Admission Profits Depend on Addiction
Proprietary software tends to be like this
IBM Americas President Ayman Antoun Comes to OpenText, Weeks Ahead the Mass Layoffs Begin
Is that what IBM will be good at?
Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 24, 2026
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 24, 2026
Gemini Links 24/03/2026: Junk Drawer Time Capsule and Building Outside Alire
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Not Much LLM Slop About "Linux" Lately, It Only Ever Comes From the Same Few Sites
As long as only few such sites use LLM slop we can skip and avoid them
Links 24/03/2026: "Epic Lays Off Over 1000 Employees" and US in Financial Trouble According to the Fed
Links for the day
The "Media" Does Not Only 'Miss' Mass Layoffs
"The Treasury just declared the U.S. insolvent. The media missed it"
The Empty Suits of IBM Managers (NIH or "Nothing Invented Here")
IBM's management adopted the business model of parasites
2012: 'Secure' (Microsoft-Controlled) Boot Has Not (Yet) Been Made Obligatory. 2026: systemd Has Not Implemented Age Verification
should we stop calling "nazi" everyone we don't agree with?
More Threats (Including Physical Threats) Against Us Are a Dumb Move
It's like a "hit list" (targets list) and I shall keep the police duly informed
New Example of Pentagon in "Feminist" Clothing Inside Fake News of Publishers Paid to Promote Outsourcing to US ("Clown Computing") and American Slop
Google now pays money to promote Google as a friend of women
Hating Techrights is a Career
but is it good for civil society?
Dr. Stallman’s Work Will Never be Considered 'Mainstream' Because He Rejects and Works Against the So-called 'Mainstream'
Try to be more like Stallman
The New Layoffs: 'Silent Layoffs', 'Secret Layoffs', 'Quiet Layoffs', 'Passive Layoffs' 'Stealth Layoffs', and Unannounced Layoffs Disguised as Return-to-Office (RTO Mandates)
The US needs to revisit and fix the WARN Act
EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part IX - Cocaine Addicts in Charge of the EPO Attacking Families of EPO Staff
Things like being high-profile and being a serious drug addict aren't opposites
What Feminism in Science Means (Codes of Conduct Don't Tackle the Real Issues)
Universality matters, more so in a project or community that's said to build the "universal operating system" (Debian)
SLAPP Censorship - Part 21 Out of 200: It's About Behaviour Online, Not How Much Money From Shadowy Third Parties Gets Spent on Lawyers and Two Barristers
75+ KG of legal papers, 2 cases, 2 barristers (one hiding in the metadata) and maybe two law firms (also hiding in the metadata) against two modest people in Manchester seems disproportionate and vindicative
Links 24/03/2026: "Airports on ICE" and "Have You Paid Your “Intuit Tax”?"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 24/03/2026: Slop Interview and Why Slop Makes Lousy Code
Links for the day
Richard Stallman to Give Public Talk This Thursday at the University of Bologna (Italy)
Hardly the first time he speaks in Bologna
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 23, 2026
IRC logs for Monday, March 23, 2026
Gemini Links 23/03/2026: "Mandatory" Bad Things and Dangers of Perfection Aspirations
Links for the day
SLAPP Censorship - Part 20 Out of 200: All Roads Lead to Rome and to GAFAM Funding
Now about 10% into this series
Last Week's EPO Strike Was the Biggest (Highest Participation Rate), Hours Ago General Assembly Discussed Next (Growing) Intensity of Strikes
Well done and well attended
Mass Layoffs at HashiCorp, IBM Hid Them
The media did not mention those layoffs
Microsoft Downgraded on Concerns (Lack of Growth) Amid Silent Layoffs in 2026
The press isn't functioning anymore
Links 23/03/2026: Gulf Water at Risk, Heatwave in Malaysia
Links for the day
Slop Means False, New Article by Cybershow
"We are living in a world that is rapidly divesting from reality."
Debianism election 2026 community poll created, everybody can vote
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 23/03/2026: "Shocking Peter Thiel Antichrist Lectures", Robert Mueller Remembered
Links for the day
The Scandal Bigger Than IBM/Red Hat Layoffs is the de Facto "Media Blackout" About Those Layoffs
So we have a media crisis, aside from the economic crises
Gemini Links 23/03/2026: Geminispace/Elpher Enhancement and the Cerberus Cinco
Links for the day
Fear is Not a Legitimate Factor
Smart people know that trying to prevent moral people from doing the "Right Thing" will backfire
Fuel Autonomy and What It Teaches Us About Software Autonomy (or Software Freedom)
Need we wait until a "software Pearl Harbor" or protect ourselves proactively by weaning ourselves off of GAFAMware?
Scheduled Maintenance This Coming Wednesday
Other than that, all is the same and we carry on as usual
Most Press Articles About IBM Are LLM Slop, Sometimes With Slop Images
IBM basically laid off almost 1,000 people last week [...] At the moment about 75% of the 'articles' we see about IBM (in recent days) are some kind of slop
Links 23/03/2026: Security Breaches, Energy Shortages, Another SRA Scandal, and Patents on Nature
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Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC Proceedings: Sunday, March 22, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, March 22, 2026