05.10.15

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Links 10/5/2015: Linux Mint 17.2 and Android M Plans

Posted in News Roundup at 4:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

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Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

Leftovers

  • Illegitimate Government: News Blackout on London Protest

    Legitimacy is a different question to legality. The government is undoubtedly legal under the current rotten system, but its legitimacy is a different question entirely. Legitimacy lies on the popular consent of the governed. With an extreme government supported by only 23% of the population, actively planning to inflict actual harm on many more than 23% of the population, there are legitimate philosophical questions to be asked about the right of the government to rule. With so many, particularly but not exclusively young people, now reading sources like this one and not being enthralled by the mainstream media, today’s protest is but a start.

  • Labour Urgently Needs Gallery Vernissages

    State propaganda and corporate media are wasting no time in promoting their candidate for leader of the pretend opposition: Chuka Umunna. He ticks absolutely all the right boxes. Private school educated, son of a High Court judge (which did not hold back his career to become a multi-millionaire lawyer) and entirely London based. Umunna has only ever moved out of the M25 on an aeroplane.

  • Science

    • Data science, the future of digitisation

      Large corporations such as Amazon, Ebay, Google, Facebook and LinkedIn are as much data science companies as they are leaders of specific domains.

      Global data science market is projected to be worth $320 billion by year 2020, says Graham Williams, data scientist at data processor company Togaware as well as the Australia Taxation Office.

    • Immense potential for data science domains

      The open source tools for data science domains such as data mining, analytics and big sata, previously used mostly by IT Industry, are increasingly becoming important for governments around the world, said Graham Williams, data scientist at Togaware and Australia Taxation Office. He was speaking at the three-day Workshop on “Data Mining and Analytics with R”, organized by the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS) at Technopark.

  • Transparency Reporting

    • Legislators Introduce Bill Calling For Nationwide Ban On Non-Disparagement Clauses

      Non-disparagement clauses are one of the stupidest things any company can enact. In most cases, it’s almost impossible to enforce them, no matter how artfully crafted. Most aren’t. Most non-disparagement clauses found lying around the internet have been lazily copied and pasted from pre-existing bad ideas instituted by other companies.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife

    • Climate change a “hoax,” says key business advisor to Aussie prime minister

      The climate-change-as-new-world-order-conspiracy trope is going strong south of the equator, with the chairman of Australia’s Business Advisory Council claiming that climate science is filled with “dud predictions.” Maurice Newman, who previously served as chancellor of Macquarie University and headed up the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, expressed his views in an opinion piece (subscriber only) published Friday in The Australian.

  • Finance

    • MEPs unimpressed with Commission’s ISDS proposal

      Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström tried to convince MEPs that there are ways to keep the Investment-State Dispute Settlement in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment partnership deal (TTIP). But unimpressed lawmakers failed to greet it as a full-fledged reform.

  • Censorship

    • BBC Wants Google to Remove Top Gear’s IMDb Page

      BBC Worldwide has sent tens of thousands of takedown requests to Google this week, but not all reported links are as bad as they claim. In fact, the company is targeting the IMDb pages of several of its own shows, including Top Gear and The Game, as well as one of Dailymotion’s homepages.

  • Privacy

    • Code Red Media Launch in Perugia

      Simon and I have known each other for years, way back to 2002, when he gave one of the earliest Winston Awards to David Shayler, in recognition of his work towards trying to expose surveillance and protect privacy. That award ceremony, hosted by comedian and activist Mark Thomas, was one of the few bright points in that year for David and me — which included my nearly dying of meningitis in Paris and David’s voluntary return to the UK to “face the music”; face the inevitable arrest, trial and conviction for a breach of the Official Secrets Act that followed on from his disclosures about spy criminality.

    • Anything to Say? unveiled in Berlin

      Last week artist Davide Dormino unveiled his sculpture celebrating whistleblowers in Alexanderplatz, Berlin.

    • Prison Messaging Service No Longer Claims It ‘Owns’ All Of Your Communications

      We recently wrote about some dangerous terms of service from a big prison messaging service, JPay, in which the company claimed to flat out own any content that anyone sent through its service. While the company itself did not appear to be doing stupid things to enforce this, this clause did allow prison guards to put one prisoner in solitary confinement after his sister posted a video he had sent via JPay to social media. The prison claimed it was doing so to protect JPay’s intellectual property.

    • I Give Up on Google: Free is Too Expensive

      The most recent example being retiring Classic Maps. That’s a problem, because the current Maps mysteriously doesn’t show most of my saved (“starred”) places. Google has known about this since at least 2013. There are posts all over their forums about it going back to when what is now “regular” Google Maps was beta. Google employees even knew about it and did nothing. For someone that made heavy use of it, this was quite annoying.

    • How To Keep NSA Computers From Turning Your Phone Conversations Into Searchable Text

      As soon as my article about how NSA computers can now turn phone conversations into searchable text came out on Tuesday, people started asking me: What should I do if I don’t want them doing that to mine?

      The solution, as it is to so many other outrageously invasive U.S. government tactics exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, is, of course, Congressional legislation.

      I kid, I kid.

      No, the real solution is end-to-end encryption, preferably of the unbreakable kind.

      And as luck would have it, you can have exactly that on your mobile phone, for the price of zero dollars and zero cents.z

  • Civil Rights

    • Re:publica — The War on Concepts

      In my view this, to date, includes the four wars — on drugs, terror, the internet, and whistleblowers. No doubt the number will continue to rise.

  • Internet/Net Neutrality

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Copyrights

      • Mega Consults Legal Team Over New Piracy Report

        A new Hollywood commission report investigating the revenue sources of more than 600 supposedly infringing sites has controversially included file-hosting site Mega. The listing marks the second time in a matter of months that the cloud-storage service has been accused of online piracy via an industry-connected report. Yet again, the report’s authors are refusing to comment.

      • Trial of Torrent Site Admin and Hosting Provider Concludes

        An intriguing case dating back more than 3.5 years ended this week when two men went on criminal trial in Sweden. One was the former sysop of a 26,000 member private BitTorrent tracker. The other provided the site with web hosting and allegedly refused to take the site down when copyright holders asked.

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DecorWhat Else is New

  1. Links 1/12/2021: NixOS 21.11 Released

    Links for the day

  2. IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 30, 2021

    IRC logs for Tuesday, November 30, 2021

  3. Links 1/12/2021: Tux Paint 0.9.27 and WordPress 5.9 Beta

    Links for the day

  4. [Meme] EPO Administrative Council Believing EPO-Bribed 'Media' (IAM Still Shilling and Lying for Cash)

    IAM continues to do what brings money from EPO management and Team UPC, never mind if it is being disputed by the patent examiners themselves

  5. The EPO's Mythical “Gap” Has Been Found and It's Bonuses for People Who Use Pure Fiction to Steal From Patent Examiners

    The phony president who has the audacity to claim there's a budget gap is issuing millions of euros for his enablers to enjoy; weeks ahead of the next meeting of national delegates the Central Staff Committee (CSC) tells them: "Events show that the delegations’ concerns about functional allowances have materialised. The lack of transparency and inflation of the budget envelope gives rise to the suspicion that high management is pursuing a policy of self-service at the expense of EPO staff, which is difficult to reconcile with the Office’s claimed cost-saving policy, and to the detriment of the whole Organisation."

  6. Video: Making the Internet a Better Place for People, Not Megacorporations

    Following that earlier list of suggested improvements for a freedom-respecting Internet, here's a video and outline

  7. Links 30/11/2021: KDE Plasma 5.23.4, 4MLinux 38.0, Long GitHub Downtime, and Microsoft's CEO Selling Away Shares

    Links for the day

  8. A Concise Manifesto For Freedom-Respecting Internet

    An informal list of considerations to make when reshaping the Internet to better serve people, not a few corporations that are mostly military contractors subsidised by the American taxpayers

  9. Freenode.net Becomes a 'Reddit Clone' and Freenode IRC is Back to Old Configurations After Flushing Down Decades' Worth of User/Channel Data and Locking/Shutting Out Longtime Users

    Freenode is having another go; after “chits” and “jobs” (among many other ideas) have clearly failed, and following the change of daemon (resulting in massive loss of data and even security issues associated with impersonation) as well as pointless rebrand as “Joseon”, the domain Freenode.net becomes something completely different and the IRC network reopens to all

  10. Jack Dorsey's Decision is a Wake-up Call: Social Control Media is Just a Toxic Bubble

    The state of the World Wide Web (reliability, preservation, accessibility, compatibility etc.) was worsened a lot more than a decade ago; with social control media that’s nowadays just a pile of JavaScript programs we’re basically seeing the Web gradually turning into another Adobe Flash (but this time they tell us it’s a “standard”), exacerbating an already-oversized ‘bubble economy’ where companies operate at a loss while claiming to be worth hundreds of billions (USD) and generally serve imperialistic objectives by means of manipulation like surveillance, selective curation, and censorship

  11. IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 29, 2021

    IRC logs for Monday, November 29, 2021

  12. Links 29/11/2021: NuTyX 21.10.5 and CrossOver 21.1.0

    Links for the day

  13. This Apt Has Super Dumbass Powers. Linus Sebastian and Pop_OS!

    Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission

  14. [Meme] Trying to Appease Provocateurs and Borderline Trolls

    GNU/Linux isn’t just a clone of Microsoft Windows and it oughtn’t be a clone of Microsoft Windows, either; some people set themselves up for failure, maybe by intention

  15. Centralised Git Hosting Has a Business Model Which is Hostile Towards Developers' Interests (in Microsoft's Case, It's an Attack on Reciprocal Licensing and Persistent Manipulation)

    Spying, censoring, and abusing projects/developers/users are among the perks Microsoft found in GitHub; the E.E.E.-styled takeover is being misused for perception manipulation and even racism, so projects really need to take control of their hosting (outsourcing is risky and very expensive in the long run)

  16. Links 29/11/2021: FWUPD's 'Best Known Configuration' and Glimpse at OpenZFS 3.0

    Links for the day

  17. President Biden Wants to Put Microsofter in Charge of the Patent Office, Soon to Penalise Patent Applicants Who Don't Use Microsoft's Proprietary Formats

    The tradition of GAFAM or GIAFAM inside the USPTO carries on (e.g. Kappos and Lee; Kappos lobbies for Microsoft and IBM, whereas Lee now works for Amazon/Bezos after a career at Google); it's hard to believe anymore that the USPTO exists to serve innovators rather than aggressive monopolists, shielding their territory by patent threats (lawsuits or worse aggression) and cross-licensing that's akin to a cartel

  18. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VIII — Mr. Graveley's Long Career Serving Microsoft's Agenda (Before Hiring by Microsoft to Work on GitHub's GPL Violations Machine)

    Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley was promoting .NET (or Mono) since his young days; his current job at Microsoft is consistent with past harms to GNU/Linux, basically pushing undesirable (except to Microsoft) things to GNU/Linux users; Tomboy used to be the main reason for distro ISOs to include Mono

  19. Dr. Andy Farnell on Teaching Cybersecurity in an Age of 'Fake Security'

    By Dr. Andy Farnell

  20. IRC Proceedings: Sunday, November 28, 2021

    IRC logs for Sunday, November 28, 2021

  21. Links 29/11/2021: Linux 5.16 RC3 and Lots of Patent Catch-up

    Links for the day

  22. By 2022 0% of 'News' Coverage About Patents Will Be Actual Journalism (Patent Litigation Sector Has Hijacked the World Wide Web to Disseminate Self-Promotional Misinformation)

    Finding news about the EPO is almost impossible because today’s so-called ‘news’ sites are in the pockets of Benoît Battistelli, António Campinos, and their cohorts who turned the EPO into a hub of litigation, not science; this is part of an international (worldwide) problem because financial resources for journalism have run out, and so the vacuum is filled/replaced almost entirely by Public Relations (PR) and marketing

  23. Trying to Appease Those Who Never Liked Free Software or Those Who Blindly Loved All Patent Monopolies to Begin With

    It’s crystal clear that trying to appease everyone, all the time, is impossible; in the case of the EPO, for example, we hope that exposing Team Battistelli/Campinos helps raise awareness of the harms of patent maximalism, and when speaking about Free software — whilst occasionally bashing the alternatives (proprietary) — we hope to convince more people to join the “Good Fight”

  24. Links 28/11/2021: Laravel 8.73 Released, GitHub Offline for Hours

    Links for the day

  25. IRC Proceedings: Saturday, November 27, 2021

    IRC logs for Saturday, November 27, 2021

  26. Links 27/11/2021: Nvidia’s DLSS Hype and Why GNU/Linux Matters

    Links for the day

  27. [Meme] Linus Gabriel Sebastian Takes GNU/Linux for a (Tail)'Spin'

    If you’re trying to prove that GNU/Linux is NOT Windows, then “haha! Well done…”

  28. GNU/Linux is for Freedom and It'll Gain Many Users When (or Where) People Understand What Software (or Computing) Freedom Means

    Software that respects people's freedom (and by extension privacy as well) is an alluring proposition; those who choose to try GNU/Linux for the wrong reasons are likely the wrong target audience for advocates

  29. Amid Reports of Microsoft's Competition Crimes in Europe...

    European companies are complaining, but they seem to overlook the principal aspect of an imperialistic system with bottomless pockets (almost 30 trillion dollars in debt already; US national debt soared again last month); Microsoft is shielded by a political system with military (“defence”) as bailout budget to help cushion international expansion for data grab and technical leverage, as we've seen in the case of EPO (this is all political, not technical, and should thus be treated as a political/corruption issue)

  30. Is Linus Trolling the GNU/Linux Community?

    This new video responds to what many sites have been provoked into amplifying

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