Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 08/03/2023: FEX 2303 Tagged and Investing in RSS



  • GNU/Linux

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • OpenSource.comThe power of sisterhood and allyship in open source

      We are used to the term “career change” as if it were a break in a trajectory. But in my experience, that’s never really the case. A person cannot erase themselves from what they consist of, and this richness of diverse backgrounds resulted in several breaking points. Individual journeys, often far from computer science, hold accountability for the social implication of technology and bring richness and creativity to the technology industry.

      Being an artist has always given me freedom and opened doors to explore several fields, from architecture to sciences. A great part of my artistic experience took place in hackerspaces in Brazil, surrounded by the Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) ideology, the open free/libre culture of sharing. Nowadays, for several ideological and practical reasons that do not fall within the scope of this article, the most common term is “open source”. And lucky for me, my career switch started with an internship in an Open Source Program Office (OSPO), which made this switch feel — almost — like home.

    • OpenSource.com8 examples of influential women in tech

      A journey through open source is rarely something you do alone. Your hobby, career, and your life has been affected by others in the tech space, and statistically some of those people have been women. That's one of the many reasons International Women's Day exists, and it's a good excuse to reflect upon the women who have inspired your career in tech. We asked Opensource.com contributors for their thoughts.

    • Events

      • PostgreSQL2023-03-07 Swiss PGDay 2023 Announcement
      • Joe BrockmeierJoe Brockmeier: Why your talk was rejected (or maybe accepted)

        I had a few snarky opening lines for this post, but decided that was a bit unfair. Let’s just say that people get very impassioned about tech events and getting talks accepted. If you’re on the conference committee, it can be… intense, sometimes, managing the needs of an event versus people’s deep interest in being one of the speakers. I thought it’d be helpful to give some insights into why talks are and aren’t accepted.

    • GNU Projects

      • GNUa2ps @ Savannah: a2ps 4.15 released [stable]

        I am delighted to announce the first stable release of GNU a2ps since 2007!

        This release contains few user-visible changes. It does however contain a
        lot of changes “under the hood”: code clean-up, etc. Therefore, it’s likely
        that there are new bugs. Do report them to Savannah[1], or the mailing list
        please!

        A big thank-you to all those who tested pre-releases, and especially to
        Bruno Haible’s tireless work to promote portability: he both tested a2ps on
        many systems and found lots of minor portability problems, and advised on
        their solution (often, gnulib code that he wrote). Remaining problems are of
        course mine!

        [1] https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/a2ps


        Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature:
        https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/a2ps/a2ps-4.15.tar.gz
        https://ftpmirror.gnu.org/a2ps/a2ps-4.15.tar.gz.sig

        Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
        https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html

        Here are the SHA1 and SHA256 checksums:

        807667f838c29bde73bb91fae60ef98826bd460e a2ps-4.15.tar.gz
        pa3FqSIvmESKV8a162lItydD6vmjDGehNN8ILpnHZlI a2ps-4.15.tar.gz

        The SHA256 checksum is base64 encoded, instead of the
        hexadecimal encoding that most checksum tools default to.

        Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
        .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file
        and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this:

        gpg --verify a2ps-4.15.tar.gz.sig

        The signature should match the fingerprint of the following key:

        pub rsa2048 2013-12-11 [SC]
        2409 3F01 6FFE 8602 EF44 9BB8 4C8E F3DA 3FD3 7230
        uid Reuben Thomas <rrt@sc3d.org>
        uid keybase.io/rrt <rrt@keybase.io>

        If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
        or that public key has expired, try the following commands to retrieve
        or refresh it, and then rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.

        gpg --locate-external-key rrt@sc3d.org

        gpg --recv-keys 4C8EF3DA3FD37230

        wget -q -O- 'https://savannah.gnu.org/project/release-gpgkeys.php?group=a2ps&download=1' | gpg --import -

        As a last resort to find the key, you can try the official GNU
        keyring:

        wget -q https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-keyring.gpg
        gpg --keyring gnu-keyring.gpg --verify a2ps-4.15.tar.gz.sig


        This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
        Autoconf 2.71
        Automake 1.16.5
        Gnulib v0.1-5857-gf17d397771

        NEWS

        * Noteworthy changes in release 4.15 (2023-03-07) [stable]
        * New maintainer, Reuben Thomas.
        * Features:
        - Replace the 'psmandup' utility with simpler 'lp2' to directly print
        documents to a simplex printer.
        - Remove the outdated 'psset' and 'fixnt', and simplify 'fixps' to
        always process its input with Ghostscript.
        - Use libpaper's paper sizes. This includes user-defined paper sizes
        when using libpaper 2. It is still possible to define custom margins
        using "Medium:" specifications in the configuration file, and the
        one size defined by a2ps that libpaper does not know about, Quarto, is
        retained for backwards compatiblity, and as an example.
        * Documentation
        - Remove some obsolete explanations.
        - Reformat --help output consistently to 80 columns.
        - Some English fixes.
        * Bug fixes:
        - Avoid a crash when a medium is not specified; instead, use the default
        libpaper size (configured by the user or sysadmin, or the locale
        default).
        - Fix some other potential crashes and compiler warnings.
        - Fixes for security bugs CVE-2001-1593, CVE-2015-8107 and CVE-2014-0466.
        - Minor bugs fixed.
        * Predefined delegations:
        - Remove support for defunct Netscape and proprietary Acrobat Reader.
        - Add lpr wrapper for automatic detection of different printing systems,
        including CUPS support.
        * Encodings:
        - Use libre fonts for KOI-8.
        - Composite fonts support.
        * Build
        - Update build system to more recent autotools and gettext versions.
        - Build man pages in a simpler and more robust way.
        - Document runtime dependencies.
        - Minor code quality improvements.
        - Minor tidy up and removal of obsolete code.
        - Require libpaper.
        - Remove OS/2 support.

    • Licensing / Legal

      • Slashdot article with some new news about Daryl

        Last reply by swmech on Mon, 06 Mar 2023 20:36:13 +0000

      • David RosenthalOn Trusting Trustlessness

        The basic problem here is that an "upgradable smart contract" isn't worth the bits it is printed on, because the terms of the "contract" can be changed after the parties agreed to it by the owner of the "contract", or by the owners of any "upgradable smart contracts" used by the "contract" in question, who may or may not be one of the parties.

    • Programming/Development

    • Standards/Consortia

      • Tim KadlecInvesting in RSS

        Opening up my RSS reader, a cup of coffee in hand, still feels calm and peaceful in a way that trying to keep up with happenings in other ways just never has. There’s more room for nuance and thoughtfulness, and I feel more in control of what I choose to read, and what I don’t.

        The act of spending that time in those feeds still feels like a very deliberate, intentional act. Curating a set of feeds I find interesting and making the time to read them feels like an investment in myself.

      • IdiomdrottningRFC 2646’s Format=Flowed and inline quoting

        Format=Flowed is otherwise a fantastic format. It solves a lot of email’s problems. The next section (4.2) in the RFC is still great. Non–space-stuffed lines starting with a > are marked as quoted. Perfect, that’s exactly what we want. In other words, I am not suggesting changing the format or the on-the-wire protocol. I’m only talking about a way to make generating this format more palatable for text area based interfaces.

        Email is a text format and having to reach for a formatting menu or toolbar just to mark some text as quoted falls apart pretty quickly, as does trying to interleave your own responses in between the quoted lines. Those interfaces work for top-posting and bottom-posting, and that’s great, but they make inline-posting impossible.

  • Leftovers

    • YLECatalytic converter theft skyrockets in Finland

      Where the stolen catalytic converters end up is unclear.

    • Monday NoteCEOs Writing Three Envelopes

      There are many other examples of easy money toxicity, but we need to turn to something even more poisonous: large organizations’ loss of meaning. And the resulting hardening of corporate blood vessels. We can illustrate loss of meaning as follows: in a healthy organization, everyone from the friendly receptionist to the CEO can concisely say what the company’s mission is. Even drunk at three am under the rain, the person can utter words such as “we organize the world’s information” or “we make personal computers”. Once a group of people loses that ability, that cohesive force, psychic energy is rerouted towards individual power acquisition and preservation. Now, compound this with easy money and grandiose projects and you get dangerously inward-looking organizations. There, the rules are clear: advancing one’s rank and compensation demands getting more staff on one’s project. A sad and unfortunately not completely obsolete story of organization toxicity is aptly told in a Vanity Fair article titled Microsoft’s Lost Decade. To be fair to Microsoft’s current leadership, company culture has considerably evolved and the Vanity Fair piece should just be seen as more generally describing ailments that threaten large rich organizations.

    • The Register UKIDC gets even more pessimistic about PC sales

      IDC now predicts 403.1 million units will be shipped this year instead of the 429.5 million it forecast at the end of 2022. Tablets are expected to make up 142.3 million of these shipments and traditional form factors will account for the rest.

    • Sumana HarihareswaraThe Memex Mirage

      And I'd add: here, be your own librarian and archivist for a dizzying variety of formats, media, interpersonal communications platforms, etc. so you can immediately re-find that resource you ran across yesterday or ten years ago. Argh!

    • Education

    • Hardware

      • Dennis Crouch/Patently-OCHIPS and Science Act [Ed: Misleading names for bailouts. Taxpayers again being robbed to save failing billionaires.]

        The $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act is designed to use federal grants and investments to encourage domestic production of advanced semiconductors and will also fund research into further advanced technologies, including further improved microchips; quantum computing; and artificial intelligence (AI).€  Although many advanced chips are still primarily designed in the US, almost all of them are currently manufactured abroad (primarily in Taiwan and Korea). And, China is rapidly developing its own capabilities for advanced chip manufacture.

      • OpenSource.comWhat clown developers need to know about hardware

        It's easy to forget the progress that people in tech have made. In the early 2000s, most local user groups held regular install fests. Back then, to configure a single machine to run Linux well, we had to know intimate details about hardware and how to configure it. Now, almost twenty years later, we represent a project whose core ideal is to make getting a single computer to run Linux as easy as an API call. In this new world, operators and developers alike no longer have to worry about the hardware in their servers. This change has had a profound impact on the next generation of operators and developers.

        In the early days of computer technology, you had to put your hands on the hardware frequently. If a computer needed more memory, you just added it. As time passed, technology also evolved in big ways. This ended up moving the operator further from the hardware. What used to be a trip to the data center is now a support ticket to have remote hands on the hardware. Eventually, hardware was disposed of altogether. Instead, you now summon and destroy "servers" with simple commands and no longer have to worry about hardware.

        Here is the real truth: hardware exists because it is needed to power clouds. But what is a cloud, really?

      • HackadayThis Retro Game Console Puts Vacuum Fluorescent Display To Good Use

        Small in size, low-resolution, blocky segments, and a limited color palette — all characteristics of the typical vacuum fluorescent display, any of which would seem to disqualify them as the display of choice for a lot of applications. But this is Hackaday, and we don’t really pay much attention to what we’re supposed to do, but rather to what’s fun and cool to do. So when we see something like a VFD game console, we just have to sit up and take notice.

      • Michael UrspringerLenovo ThinkPad X1: USB-C ports no longer working

        I then did a battery reset (there is a small hole at the bottom of the ThinkPad which you need to press with a small pin) and voila: Everything worked again …

      • HackadayProbably The World’s Most Expensive Bar Bot

        Bar bots, or robotized bartenders, are a fun feature of events in our community, because there’s nothing like a cocktail untouched by human hand. Usually they have a row of bottles and a slide on which you put the glass, but [SecurityWriter] relates a tale of an altogether much grander affair. Given a weekend with a group of friends and an enterprise-grade IBM tape library robot, they did what any sensible engineer would do. They turned it into a bar bot.

      • HackadayHacking A €15 8051-Based Portable Soldering Iron With Custom Firmware

        With soldering irons being so incredibly useful, and coming on the heels of the success of a range of portable, all-in-one soldering irons from the likes of Waveshare and Pine64, it’s little wonder that you can get such devices for as little as 10 – 15 Euro from websites like AliExpress. Making for both a great impulse buy and reverse-engineering target, [Aaron Christophel] got his mittens on one and set to work on figuring out its secrets.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • The Scientist2023-03-06 Meningitis Bacteria Trigger Headaches, Then Sneak Into the Brain
      • CNNUS to relax Covid testing restrictions for travelers from China as soon as Friday

        The US is planning to relax Covid-19 testing restrictions for travelers from China as soon as Friday, a source familiar told CNN Tuesday, citing a decline in Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths and more data surrounding the variants that were circulating in China.

      • Vice Media Group‘We Had All the Issues That Town Has:’ East Palestine Is Not the First or Last Derailment Disaster

        In many ways, Sibley was a preview of East Palestine, Ohio, the train derailment that sparked an evacuation and widespread concerns about air, water, and soil contamination. Less than two years before international media focused its attention on the small Ohio town, Sibley experienced many of the same hardships: forced evacuations, contaminated soil and water, physical symptoms among some residents, and an uncertain future. But the biggest difference, as Huls tells it, was not anything to do with the derailment itself, but the attention it got. The only news crews that showed up in Sibley were local outlets.

      • Rolling Stone‘Sick and Twisted’: Women Describe Losing Pregnancies, Nearly Dying Because of Texas Laws

        The case marks the first time that pregnant women themselves have challenged the state’s three abortion bans: a criminal ban that pre-dates Roe v. Wade, a trigger ban passed in anticipation of Roe being overturned, and Senate Bill 8, an effective ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. All three bans have exceptions for medical “emergencies,” but advocates say they are unclear and have resulted in “widespread confusion” over who and what qualifies.

        What happened to each of them sounds like, as Zurawski put it, the “sick and twisted plot to a dystopian novel — but it’s not.”

      • Hollywood ReporterTikTok Under Fire From Bill Backed by White House

        The effort — led by Mark Warner, D-Va., the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and John Thune, R-SD, the Senate Republican whip — comes after Republicans on a House committee rammed through a bill on Wednesday that would effectively ban TikTok on mobile devices in the U.S over opposition from Democrats, who said that it could ensnare U.S. businesses that don’t pose a national security risk. The bipartisan bill introduced on Tuesday represents what could be the most achievable legislative solution to address concerns that the data TikTok collects on more than 100 million American users can be leveraged by the Chinese government to advance its interests.

      • Vanity FairBillie Eilish Says She Deleted All Social Media Apps Off of Her Phone

        The pop star recently revealed that she's deleted all social media apps off of her phone as a way to protect her mental health. “I don’t look at it anymore,” she explained on an upcoming episode of the Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast. “I deleted it all off my phone, which is such a huge deal for me. Cause, dude, you didn’t have the [Internet] to grow up with.” Eilish went on to explain in the preview clip, published Thursday, “For me, it was such a big part of–not my childhood, I wasn’t like an iPad baby, thank god–but honestly, I feel like I grew up in the perfect time of the [Internet] that it wasn’t so [Internet]-y that I didn't have a childhood. I really had such a childhood, and I was doing stuff all the time.”

      • Hearst Magazine Media, IncBillie Eilish Says She Deleted All Social Media From Her Phone: ‘I Don't Look at It Anymore’

        Eilish, by the way, isn't the only celebrity who has recently discussed removing social media apps from her phone. Selena Gomez spoke to Vanity Fair about why TikTok is the only platform she has on her phone and how she has had her assistant post to her other platforms for years now.

    • Proprietary

      • Jason ScottDiscord, or the Death of Lore

        I chose the life, it didn’t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long time ago, and I’ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold the heft and halter, the one standing at the death of all things, and while it means a lot of moments of rescue and recovery, it also means knowing, looking across at that which thrives and bustles, the desiccation and destruction to come. The only part of the fog of the future that’s guaranteed is the moment it switches from theory to a wall of iron and then darkness.

        All this to say: Discord.

      • Papers With CodeMore than you've asked for: A Comprehensive Analysis of Novel Prompt Injection Threats to Application-Integrated Large Language Models

        We are currently witnessing dramatic advances in the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). They are already being adopted in practice and integrated into many systems, including integrated development environments (IDEs) and search engines. The functionalities of current LLMs can be modulated via natural language prompts, while their exact internal functionality remains implicit and unassessable. This property, which makes them adaptable to even unseen tasks, might also make them susceptible to targeted adversarial prompting. Recently, several ways to misalign LLMs using Prompt Injection (PI) attacks have been introduced. In such attacks, an adversary can prompt the LLM to produce malicious content or override the original instructions and the employed filtering schemes. Recent work showed that these attacks are hard to mitigate, as state-of-the-art LLMs are instruction-following. So far, these attacks assumed that the adversary is directly prompting the LLM. In this work, we show that augmenting LLMs with retrieval and API calling capabilities (so-called Application-Integrated LLMs) induces a whole new set of attack vectors. These LLMs might process poisoned content retrieved from the Web that contains malicious prompts pre-injected and selected by adversaries. We demonstrate that an attacker can indirectly perform such PI attacks. Based on this key insight, we systematically analyze the resulting threat landscape of Application-Integrated LLMs and discuss a variety of new attack vectors. To demonstrate the practical viability of our attacks, we implemented specific demonstrations of the proposed attacks within synthetic applications. In summary, our work calls for an urgent evaluation of current mitigation techniques and an investigation of whether new techniques are needed to defend LLMs against these threats.

      • DiscordHow Discord Stores Trillions of Messages

        Our requirements for our migration are quite straightforward: we need to migrate trillions of messages with no downtime, and we need to do it quickly because while the Cassandra situation has somewhat improved, we’re frequently firefighting.

    • Security

      • LWNSecurity updates for Tuesday [LWN.net]

        Security updates have been issued by Debian (kopanocore), Fedora (golang-github-projectdiscovery-chaos-client, rust-sequoia-octopus-librnp, rust-sequoia-sop, rust-sequoia-sq, and usd), Oracle (libjpeg-turbo and pesign), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, osp-director-downloader-container, pesign, rh-mysql80-mysql, samba, and zlib), SUSE (mariadb), and Ubuntu (fribidi, gmp, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-kvm, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux-raspi, nss, python3.6, rsync, systemd, and tiff).

      • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

        • [Repeat EarthlyRemote Code Execution as a Service

          We anticipated this type of workload when creating the initial version of Earthly compute. However, there was one issue that made container orchestration frameworks unsuitable: the workload. Earthly compute needs to execute customer-submitted Earthfiles, which are not dissimilar to Makefiles. Anything you can do on Linux, you can do in an Earthfile. This meant – from a security point of view – we were building remote code execution as a service (RCEAS).

        • APNICThe SSL certificate issuer field is a lie

          Not so fast! A certificate’s issuer field is frequently a lie that tells you nothing about the organization that really issued the certificate. Just look at the certificate chain currently served by doordash.com: [...]

        • Krebs On SecuritySued by Meta, Freenom Halts Domain Registrations

          The domain name registrar Freenom, whose free domain names have long been a draw for spammers and phishers, has stopped allowing new domain name registrations. The move comes just days after the Dutch registrar was sued by Meta, which alleges the company ignores abuse complaints about phishing websites while monetizing traffic to those abusive domains.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Defence/Aggression

      • YLEHelsinki Airport to toss out travel-sized bottle requirements by summer [Ed: Abandoning security theatre at long last? Little by little?]

        New security screening equipment will allow travellers to keep liquids and electronics in their carry-on luggage when departing from Helsinki Airport.

      • Marcy WheelerProud Boys seditious conspiracy trial enters 32nd day

        An overview of the "tools" theory of the Proud Boy prosecution.

      • CNNWatch Wolf Blitzer press Zelensky on Bakhmut strategy

        Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks to CNN's Wolf Blitzer about his military strategy as Russian forces continue to make gradual gains in the city of Bakhmut. Watch the full exclusive interview on Wednesday, March 8 at 9 p.m. ET.

      • CNNXi Jinping hits out at US as he urges China's private firms to 'fight' alongside Communist Party [Ed: Xi Jinping is saying exactly what American corporations and the US government say and do. Nothing different.]

        China's leader Xi Jinping hit out at the United States with unusually direct comments as he called on the country's private companies to "fight" alongside the Communist Party at a time of mounting challenges at home and abroad.

      • The NationThe Devastating Consequences of a War Over Taiwan

        While the world has been distracted, even amused, by the diplomatic tussle around China’s recent high-altitude balloon flights across North America, there are signs that Beijing and Washington are preparing for something so much more serious: armed conflict over Taiwan. Reviewing recent developments in the Asia-Pacific region raises a tried-and-true historical lesson that bears repeating at this dangerous moment in history: When nations prepare for war, they are far more likely to go to war.

    • Environment

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Common Dreams'A Very Dark Day': FCC Nominee Gigi Sohn Withdraws After Relentless Attack by Telecom Lobby

        "I could not have imagined that legions of cable and media industry lobbyists, their bought-and-paid-for surrogates, and dark money political groups with bottomless pockets would distort my over 30-year history as a consumer advocate into an absurd caricature of blatant lies," Sohn said in a statement. "The unrelenting, dishonest, and cruel attacks on my character and my career as an advocate for the public interest have taken an enormous toll on me and my family."

    • Monopolies

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • February 2023

        February started great with a small-honeymoon trip to the Archena Spa. This was our first trip without Bernat, who stayed with my sister for a couple of nights. Everything went well on both sides and we had a nice relaxing time in this beautiful location, including a fancy lunch near Murcia.

      • Unfuck you and unfuck your unfucking ‘manifesto’

        A spectre is haunting the left: the spectre of ‘manifestos’.

        Do we really need another ‘manifesto’? Particularly if, as is likely, it's pretentious and totalising and unable to survive contact with the enemy, i.e. the real world?

        The world is a complex mess. Specific aspects of the world are a complex mess. There usually aren't straightforward solutions.

        If you're dogmatically pushing a specific Understanding and a specific Solution, you're actually part of the problem. It's not all basically reducible to biology, but nor is it all basically reducible to social constructs.

    • Technical

      • So frustrated that I have no one to scream at, which may be the point why it's so hard to get ahold of customer representatives at tech companies these days

        I'm so frustrated right now.

        Bunny can't receive email, and we have no idea why that is. All we get is that there have been too many attempts to log into her account and she needs to reset the password. Now, her account is with `bellsouth.net` which is now owned by AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) but email for customers is handled by Yahoo, but trying to track down a human being to talk to is a Herculean effort these days, and even *if* we get ahold of someone, can they even help? Forget the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, it appears these days that the left hand doesn't even know it has fingers!


* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.



Recent Techrights' Posts

Silent Layoffs (PIPs) Have Allegedly Accelerated Since IBM's Stock Cratered
"IBM is Managing Decline, Not Building Growth"
Being Pro-Slop is Death Knell to One's Credibility
It's not hard to see Ubuntu users resisting and antagonising this
The Slop Bubble is Killing the Planet, Not Just the Economy
The chatbot/LLM speculation bubble not only causes a health crisis, a mental health epidemic, and climate change; it's also crashing the economy on several levels
 
Daniel Pocock in Mainstream Media Again
AFR wrote an article today. It is about Pocock and another contender.
Millions of Daily Requests
4.5+ million requests in 4 days
In statCounter, a Lot of "Unknown" Turns Out to be GNU/Linux
GNU/Linux has more than doubled
3,500 Active Gemini Capsules Soon
How much longer before 3,500+ active? A month?
Gemini Links 26/07/2026: European Eclipse, Writing About Writing, and Comments on Formatting Gopher Posts
Links for the day
Stigma of Being Laid Off by Microsoft
One might call this the "curse" of having worked for Microsoft
Non-Techs Using Slop Run Fedora and It's Turning Out to be a Total Disaster
RIP, Fedora?
Gemini Links 26/07/2026: Beach Day, CAs, and Plaintext
Links for the day
Sweden Needs GNU/Linux and Free Software, Not GAFAM
home of IKEA and ABBA
Maintenance Today
Preparing for more mass-publication activities
Links 26/07/2026: "Zelenskyy Says Russia Wants To Bring North Korean Troops Into Ukraine", Muslim Van Ramming Attack on Berlin Pride
Links for the day
Centrica fraud exposed: worse than Palestine Action 'terrorists' with cardboard placards
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 26/07/2026: "Nate Silver Discovers the Educated Poor" and "India’s “Cockroach” Protest Movement Faces State Repression"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, July 25, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, July 25, 2026
IBM Hammers a CoI Into a CoCed Fedora, RIP Fedora?
Also in the "Fedora is dead" dept. today
Gemini Links 25/07/2026: Zoo, MUD, Literature, EMF Camp, and e-ID
Links for the day
European Patent Office (EPO) Series: The Solution of No Choice: A Shortlist of One
deployment of the "shortlist of one" by Campinos
Wife of Dan Williams Has Explained Mental Factors Leading to His Death
"We need to be open and honest about mental health," his wife pleads
Several New Series Coming Soon
we'll publish 8 series in tandem, in parallel
Insolvency as the New Norm in the United States' Economy
this is vastly worse than then 2008 subprime mortgage crisis
IBM's CEO Might 'Retire' or 'Step Down' by Christmas
PIP the CEO
Misleading Articles About YouTube and Google Financial Performance
The future of Google is self-serving monopolisation and destruction of the Web
Microsoft Cannot Survive the Fall of Windows
It has amassed way too much debt
Links 25/07/2026: Hong Kong Squashing Criticism/Dissent, Mirror Caught Breaking Into Voicemail
Links for the day
PIPs Are Shrinking IBM and "IBM is Managing Decline, Not Building Growth"
IBM is going down the drain
IBM is Killing the Fedora Community, Replacing It With LLM Slop From IBM Staff
Krishna buys companies only to gut them. They've all learned this from experience.
Give Me Your "Dumbest" (Devices)
Why can't people accept that a "modern "smart" "phone" isn't necessary to check the time (overkill) and playing social control media "on the go" is far from necessary?
Earlier This Year Dan Williams Prepared for Scenario Where Linus Torvalds Dies
He had only just started a job at NVIDIA
Links 25/07/2026: Data Breaches Abundant and Attribution Imperiled in the Age of Slop Hype
Links for the day
Gemini Links 25/07/2026: Poetry and Plaintext Pages
Links for the day
What is Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
In many cases, the acronym became a misnomer
IBM PIPs Continue Until Morale Improves, Silent or Quiet Firings at IBM Explained
IBM is a dying company
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, July 24, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, July 24, 2026
Gemini Links 24/07/2026: Animal Friendship, Squirrels, and Lagrange
Links for the day
Links 24/07/2026: IOC Drops Russia Ban, New Internationalist Raises Money
Links for the day
Poor Piece From Valnet: Microsoft Keeps Sabotaging GNU/Linux, So You Should Quit Using GNU/Linux
Really awful take
We Need More Encryption, Not Less of It
Use Free software and use encryption to ensure sources are fully protected
At 3PM on a Friday The Register MS Collects Some 'Pyramid Scheme' Money From Communist China (ZTE)
This won't age well for The Register MS
Car Companies Fail Because They Don't Manufacture What Costumers Actually Want
They try to impose their dumb vision on purchasers
What Freedom Does Not Mean
Tell Warren Buffett to go skiing; he'll soon understand how much freedom he truly has
Linuxiac is Plagiarism
We won't link to it, we're done [...] If you wish to support journalism about GNU/Linux, do not visit or link to slop
Verizon is Over 200 Billion Dollars in Debt (US Telecoms Collapsing, Wrapping Up the Failure in "Hey Hi" Clothing)
They will tell us this is "innovation", not a failure, and that only "Luddites" would oppose this
You've Been Conned If You Ever Believed That MElon (MUSK, Elon) Was a Trillionaire
Connected to corrupt officials
The People Who Tried to 'Cancel' (or Deplatform/Censor) Daniel Pocock Are Annoyed That He's Mentioned in Dozens of Press Articles
If Pocock's words did not matter, there would not be such a huge effort to silence him
Cybershow Explains Why Only Sociopaths Gravitate Towards Leadership Position in 'Tech'
The general thesis is a familiar one
Speeding Up 'Down Under': Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania...
As things stand, the best we can do is let people retrieve pages within less than 0.1 seconds since a request is received
Google's Debt Trebled in Only 9 Months and It's Not Even the Full Picture (There's Secret Debt, Too)
No wonder there are so many layoffs and workers try to unionise
Links 24/07/2026: Mass Layoffs at Patreon, Netflix Deemed Bad for People's Brains
Links for the day
Microsoft Layoffs in India
it's about cost-cutting
Deregulation is Blowing Up the Economy, Which Has Become a Multi-Level Scheme or Pyramid Scheme
Why did only Japanese media call out the BS; is that so hard to figure out and properly report on?
Google Spreads Misinformation, Google's Slop Makes Stuff Up and Calls That "Intelligence"
Google very well understands (and even publicly admits so, albeit only for legal reasons) that the slop does not work
Daniel Pocock Proves Wikipedia is for Rich People or People Who Work for Very Rich People (the True Owners of Wikipedia)
It's for billionaires and their faithful boot lickers
GNOME: Your Personal Opinions Must Overlap GAFAM's (Otherwise Those Opinions Are Impermissible)
Get well soon, GNOME
Making Excuses for Stressful, Unrewarding, and Immoral Jobs
excuses for difficult and/or barely-rewarding jobs. [...] People in tech must not be evaluated (or have their "worth" assessed) based on remuneration
US is Insolvent, GAFAM is Buying Time by Hiding (Not Disclosing) Its True Debt Which Explains Never-ending Layoffs (Unrelated to Slop or "Efficiency Drives")
Five Tech Giants are Hiding $1.65tn in AI Debt, Using the Trick that Toppled Enron
Almost 5 Years Without Social Control Media ('Mind Prison')
Life is too short to be stuck inside a skinnerbox
Linux Must be About People (Humans), Not Bribery From Slop Companies Trillions of Dollars in Debt and in Pursuit of Positive Press
We've lost Williams
John Dvorak Understood That "MSM" Was a Vehicle of Censorship
Independent publishing, which obviates the need to censor (influenced by existing advertisers or lookout for prospective advertisers), is the only credibly thing out there
To Understand Why Linus Torvalds Became a Boot-Licking Booster of Slop Look at Another Operative of 'Linux' Foundation, the "Mentor" of Clickfraud SPAMnil (According to SPAMnil Himself)
it seems like SJVN does not give a full disclosure
Blaming "Computers" Instead of Blaming Microsoft
Blaming Microsoft is "hate"
"Online We Are All Refugees" and Slop Pushers Are the Oppressors
They basically resort to nationalism and racism to distract from their commercial failure and fraud (pyramid scheme)
PIP Apocalypse (PIPocalypse) at IBM, CEO Promotes Vapouware (Lying to Shareholders)
Companies get to shrink while lying about it to the public, even to shareholders
GNU/Linux Soaring in Antigua And Barbuda
GNU/Linux is internationally approaching 8%
Calling Out the Worst Culprits in "Linux" Slop (Slopfarms That Manipulate Information and Engage in Plagiarism)
Once they're gone (offline), the slopfarms cannot carry on for much longer
Defying Discrimination
Rianne's birthday is exactly a month away
Dan Williams Represented Real Diversity in Linux
Williams probably understood based on personal experience what it was like to be marginalised and discriminated against
The First Point About Software Freedom is, You Must Understand What It Really Means (Not "Open Source")
Forty Three Years of Commitment to Software Freedom [...] Educating people about what Software Freedom actually means
Gemini Links 24/07/2026: Recovering From Broken Shoulders, Loss of Passion, and "True Hacker Versus Growth Hacker"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, July 23, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, July 23, 2026