Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 24/4/2010: Dell and ASUS Go With Android



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux

  • A Linux Client at Work
    He had been listening to Clark Howard, and Clark had mentioned Linux on his show. This peaked the man's interest. His thought was "if I can run my computer without Microsoft's products, that's what I want to do." I then had the pleasure of telling him that I am both the Linux and Macintosh departments of the business. I proceeded to tell the man what the differences are and he became even more thrilled. No viruses? Really? No cost, really? Over 10,000 programs free for download? Oh boy! So, I pulled out the Mandriva 2010 disc, and went to town. In one hour, he was ready to go. He has told many people about the system, and the phone doesn't seem to stop ringing. Awesome for me, and for my boss. Their revenues saw a slight rise, and I now have some reasonable job security. How cool is that?


  • Linux Consulting: Seeing the Bigger Picture
    Recently we had a Linux consulting opportunity to install and configure a Postfix mail server for a small company. The company wanted “secure” email for their users. One aspect of the request was to create an encrypted login and communication from the client to the mail server for IMAP using Squirrelmail and providing secure connections to the local client Thunderbird or Outlook. This process is straightforward however there is an issue with the word “secure”.


  • Freedom movement
    With over 1,200 students participating, the conference exhibited the language of free software while not losing sight of the purely technical aspects of GNU/Linux. Coding sessions, handled by experts in GNU/Linux-based programming, exposed students to the free software culture that thrives in the Linux User Groups – popularly called Lugs, these form the basic units of the free software movement – in academic institutions and among software professionals across the country.


  • Audiocasts

    • Linux Outlaws 147 - Where's the 'kin Phone?
      This week on Linux Outlaws: Ash clouds, new DPL elected, Google doing good things for Linux and open source, Apache attacked, Microsoft’s new phone and Fab is annyoing everyone with hockey talk again…








  • Kernel Space

    • Software SSD Cache Implementation For Linux?
      With the bottom dropping out of the magnetic disk market and SSD prices still over $3/GB, I want to know if there is a way to to get the best of both worlds. Ideally, a caching algorithm would store frequently used sectors, or sectors used during boot or application launches (hot sectors), to the SSD.


    • Kernel Log: Coming in 2.6.34 (Part 2) - File Systems
      Version 2.6.34 of the Linux kernel will be the first to support the Ceph and LogFS file systems. A number of changes to the Btrfs and XFS code promise improved performance. The kernel should now be better at working with drives with 4 KB logical sectors.

      On Tuesday morning, Linus Torvalds released the fifth pre-release version of Linux 2.6.34. One feature highlighted in Torvalds' release e-mail was a fix for a problem in the ACPI subsystem which had afflicted several testers.






  • Applications







  • Desktop Environments

    • K Desktop Environment (KDE SC)

      • Kaudiocreator Returns in KDE4
        Thanks to Apachelogger, the KaudioCreator package is now available at https://edge.launchpad.net/~kubuntu-ppa/+archive/beta. This is the BEST cd-ripper I've ever used, and I hope the wonderfulness came across to KDE4.


      • Finally! The first Gluon alpha released! :D
        For those who don't want to worry about the reasonings behind Gluon and such, you can go straight to the download page and grab yourself a copy, and start playing around :-)






    • GNOME Desktop











  • Distributions



    • Mandrake/Mandriva Family

      • Linux Distro Review: PCLinuxOS 2010
        Overall, the PCLinuxOS 2010 KDE and Gnome versions are a very good choice, but I would not call them 'radically simple'. It's bloated with too many programs I will never use. New users should definitely avoid the KDE version and opt first for Gnome.

        My thanks go to PCLinuxOS for allowing us all the opportunity to make our own decision about their software. I am thankful to the Linux community at large for supplying such a wealth of distributions.






    • Red Hat Family

      • The future of open source is in the middle
        Open-source software is likely to remain in certain niches, former Red Hat VP Erik Troan says, but open source is increasingly becoming a necessary foundation.

        [...]

        What people are really paying for in open source is editing, said Troan, channeling his grandfather, who was a newspaper editor for decades. They're relying on other people to pick out the bits of code and pieces of software that do what they need to get done once they're put together.


      • Red Hat (and KVM) are still RHEL-evant
        I started to read with a bipartisan mindset about “Xen and Theory of RHEL-evance” posted in the Citrix community blog by Simon Crosby. What appears to be a great title at first seems to be mostly FUD on why KVM is doomed for failure especially in the enterprise marketplace and Red Hat will drown with it. It did not have enough facts, just FUD most of the time. I would to counter his so called “facts” here as its been a long time anyway since I last updated my blog.




      • Fedora

        • Fedora elections coming up
          Per Paul’s announcement on Elections, Fedora will be holding Elections for FESCo and the Fedora Board starting with nominations opening tomorrow.

          I am going to throw my hat back in the ring for FESCo again. I hope folks will consider voting for me.












    • Debian Family

      • Debian Squeeze Bug Count
        Wow! the 900 developers and friends of Debian GNU/Linux are really eating up the bugs. They are down below 700 bugs now and they are not yet at package-freeze. If they keep this up, they will release this year.




      • Ubuntu

        • Frugal Tech Show: Matt Zimmerman, CTO of Canonical (Ubuntu Linux)


        • Ubuntu Shipit Opens Again: Get Free Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx CD


        • Ubuntu Lucid in final stretch
          Ubuntu's Lucid Lynx release is one step away from final release.

          Lucid Lynx, otherwise known as Ubuntu 10.04, is now in the final stretch.

          Yesterday the Ubuntu Developers announced the Release Candidate, the penultimate release before its final April 29 release.

          The desktop version of the release includes cloud computing updates, Music Store improvements and tighter social networking integration. Changes to the server version of the release are mostly focused on improving its cloud computing capabilities.


        • Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx Release Candidate Is Out [See What's New]


        • Ubuntu wants Adobe, even if Apple doesn't
          I recently suggested that, given Apple and Adobe's growing war over iPad and iPhone applications, it would make sense for Adobe to move not only its end-user applications, but its Creative Suite development stack, to Linux. While I don't know if Adobe is considering it, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, would welcome Adobe.

          Canonical marketing manager Gerry Carr told me that "in a recent survey we did of the Ubuntu User base where we got 32,000 plus responses, Adobe Photoshop as a potential application for Ubuntu got a 3.52 rating out of 5 being the second most popular potential app after Skype."


        • Open Source Communities: Canonical, Ubuntu and Jono Bacon
          Recently I read that Ubuntu devs are were debating about desktop color scheme, and someone was arguing that in the meantime Fedora devs are debating about update policy. I’d like to get your opinion about what is important at Ubuntu, and why.

          Jono, what are key issues at Ubuntu nowadays?
          Ubuntu as project invests it’s time and effort in a wide and diverse range of area including documentation, translations, development, testing, advocacy and more. In each of these areas we have sought to build a strong a vibrant community to help volunteers be productive and have fun at the same time.

          One particular focus we have been growing has been in the area of design. We are keen to apply the same ethos to the design community as the rest of the community: rewarding good work with great reputation, and looking to our top contributors to help guide and contribute to Ubuntu.


        • Ubuntu Discards System Tray
          Ubuntu, the open source operating system, is ditching the system tray, the bar at the bottom of most browsers that is supposed to act as a notification area. The rationale for the change, according to Matthew Paul Thomas, an Ubuntu contributor, was "its ineffectiveness at notifying people of things, and its inconsistent behavior."


        • Ubuntu 10.04 Overview
          For those running XP, not impressed with either buying a new OS for a couple of hundred or buying a new PC, Ubuntu is an option. But you will want to make sure you buy a book like Ubuntu for non-Geeks before taking the plunge. This will save you a lot of confusion as this is NOT Windows.


        • 5 Recommended things to do before upgrading to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS


        • Ubuntu Power Users Community
          The benefit of this kind of community is that it would provide a home for those people who desire more configurability of Ubuntu beyond it’s default installation, and provide a fantastic way of supporting this community of users.


        • Canonical open sources Launchpad and Ubuntu Single Sign On code
          More details about the Canonical Identity Provider can be found on the project's Launchpad page (login required). Canonical Identity Provider code is released under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPLv3).




        • Server







        • Variants

          • Xubuntu Lucid
            So just for giggles I got the newest version of Seamonkey and installed it. Hey! The mail client is almost exactly like Thunderbird 2.0, and the browser, omygoodness – it’s faster than Firefox! Heheh. I got a bonus! I’m a happy boy again, and my inner geek can just find something else to go do with himself. I dunno, go watch Star Trek or something. I got a life to live, and an operating system that fits the bill.


          • Upcoming Artwork for Linux Mint 9
            Clement Lefebvre proudly announced two days ago (April 21st) the plans for the artwork of the upcoming Linux Mint 9 operating system. Dubbed Isadora, Linux Mint 9 will be based on the unreleased Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system and will include some new and beautiful artwork. The most important thing to mention is the fact that the window buttons in the title bar will remain on the right side!




















  • Devices/Embedded



    • Android

      • browse the web with your android powered e-reader
        This is what I was looking for, an E-reader with a E-ink screen so it's easy on the eyes, but also a full color 3.5” touchscreen LCD screen ideal for web browsing. The 6” EPD screen displays like a printed page and text is adjustable for easy extended reading.


      • Dell Android Mobile Device Trio: Thunder, Flash, Smoke Smartphones
        Dell's first attempt at an Android smartphone never made it out of the gate, according to one analyst, after the phones failed to impress the wireless carriers. But the second time may prove the charm as Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) has some stylish new Android phones in the works.


      • Dell preps bevy of Android devices
        Dell is planning to release a bevy of ARM-based mobile devices, according to what Engadget says are leaked company documents.


      • Automatic App Updating Coming in Android 2.2
        One Android feature that our readers have been asking for is the ability to update all applications and games to the latest release. It's not uncommon for the average user to see 15 or more notifications a day indicating new versions of downloaded apps.


      • Flash and Air Developers Finding it Easy to Port to Android.
        Androidpolice.com is reporting that with the recent huge push from Adobe, application and game developers are having a breeze of a time porting over their Air and Flash apps to Android. Most of the feedback of the process has been positive from devs, some even saying that their apps are porting over in 10 minutes!


      • Will Google Go After Flash Developers Next?
        For all I know Google has been going around secretly working to bring some Adobe applications to Android. Whether that involves giving away free phones or not is hard to say. I'd like to think that some of these developers would love nothing more than a chance to stand on stage at Google I/O and demonstrate their apps and games to the thousands in attendance.








    • Sub-notebooks

      • OLPC in Paraguay educates both little kids and teenagers
        Stop: How do the hackfest meetings work?

        Bernie: The participants have different software programming skills and the teaching method is very informal. Right now I have about ten students from 12 to 50 years old, and only two of them speak english. As you can imagine we have some problem to communicate with each other, but everybody's enthusiasm overcomes the limits of my uncertain spanish. The best students right now are Benedicto one of the Scratcheros, who's only 12 years old, and two older guys, Kenny Meyer and Gabriel. Kenny already knows well Python and Linux and also fixed a bug in one of our programs. Gabriel is very serious and motivated, wants to learn about everything and could help us with reporting bugs from the field.

        Stop: It looks like the OLPC in Paraguay isn't helping just the younger children. The project can also offer an excellent opportunity to older boys and girls to use ICT to do something useful for their peers (sometimes it also happens in Italy, as Stop! readers know from our JumPC and ITIS Linux stories). Congratulations to Bernie and we wish to him and all his teen hackers success!








    • Tablets

      • Asustek Eee Pad to hit channel in July
        To compete against Apple's iPad, Asustek has strengthened the Eee Pad's industrial design and has cooperated with Google to adopt its Android platform. Asustek will also add features that iPad currently does not support such as USB, integrated webcam, and Adobe Flash, Shih noted.










Free Software/Open Source

  • Become a lord of the diamond with NetStats Baseball
    You may never get to manage in the major leagues, but with NetStats Baseball, you can get an idea of what it’s like. NetStats is a simulation of Major League Baseball that uses statistics from players and games from 1901 through 2009 as input to gameplay. You can play a game between any two MLB teams from those years, create your own teams from real-life players across various years, play a whole season game by game, or watch AI managers play an entire season in seconds.


  • Datacenter Barometer: Cfengine Revs Up Configuration Management
    What I found interesting about Cfengine is that Burgess originally started Cfengine as a scientific research project, and even though he founded a commercial company in 2008 to develop and support commercial extensions for Cfengine, that same level of academic rigor still pervades through the project. Burgess still does research on systems management, and has developed the Promise Theory, "model of voluntary cooperation between individual, autonomous actors or agents who publish their intentions to one another in the form of promises," from his work on Cfengine.


  • Neufbox4 and OpenWrt [French ISP SFR releases source code of its OpenWrt based DSL router]
    The Neufbox4 is a BRCM63xx based DSL router the french ISP SFR (www.sfr.fr) provides to its customers, and more than 3 million units are currently in use. The device is developed by Efixo (www.efixo.net) and the OpenWrt based sources are available through a subversion repository and documentation is placed in a Trac wiki (http://dev.efixo.net).


  • Metasploit Goes Commercial in New Express Edition
    The Metasploit Framework is an open source vulnerability testing framework and is currently at version 3.3. Rapid7, the lead vendor supporting Metasploit, is now aiming to make Metasploit easier to use and manage -- and that's where Metasploit Express, set for release in May, fits in.




  • Mozilla

    • High performance Theora codec for Firefox on OMAP3 previewed
      On his blog, Matthew Gregan reports that there has been some success in shifting the major part of the processing load caused by decoding Theora videos into the DSP (Digital Signal Processor) core of Texas Instruments' OMAP 3 processor. This family of processors is used in the Motorola Droid, Nokia N900 and Palm Pre smartphones as well as the Beagle Board. Gregan is employed by Mozilla and is currently working on improving video and audio support in Firefox. It is not currently known when the development work previewed will be incorporated into a future release of Mozilla's mobile browser.








  • Databases







  • CMS







  • BSD

    • FreeBSD Status Report January-March, 2010


    • FreeBSD/CLANG compiler ready for testing
      Currently FreeBSD uses GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) as its system compiler. Since the GCC project has moved to the GPLv3 license, the FreeBSD Project is forced to use version 4.2.1 or earlier.


    • Clang, Chromium, ZFS Improve On FreeBSD
      Daniel Gerzo with the FreeBSD project has issued a status report concerning work going on within FreeBSD and related projects for the first quarter of this year. Catching our interest in particular were the updates surrounding LLVM/Clang as the compiler for FreeBSD's base, the Chromium web browser porting efforts to FreeBSD, and ZFS file-system enhancements.


    • BSDTalk interview with Dru Lavigne
      Dru and Will talk about her new book, The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD, and also about the new BSD Professional Certification exam.






  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • Reasons Why You Don't Contribute To Open-Source Software
      GCC on the other hand tends to have a higher standard with regard to code quality and documentation with requiring patches comply with the GNU style.


    • Freedom, the Marathon, Open Source Software and Beer
      So too do both facets of the word “free” apply to the open source world. GNU.org maintains a definition of free software that begins by taking the distinction on directly as follows: Free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.


    • Free vs open: What's the difference?
      The phrase 'Free Software' is used by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in its older meaning: it's software that comes with no restrictions for you to modify it and distribute it.

      The FSF defines these freedoms as: the freedom to run the program for any purpose, commercial or otherwise; the freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do something else the freedom to redistribute copies; the freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements.

      That much makes sense: we share our software and everyone benefits. But it does confuse many people because you are quite within your rights to sell that software if you want it – Free Software can have a non-free price tag.








  • Releases

    • VLC media player version 1.0.6 release - vulnerabilities removed, stability improved
      Version 1.0.6 (part of the 'Goldeneye' branch) of the free media player and streamer – VLC media player – eliminates nine security vulnerabilities and offers increased stability. The vulnerabilities were discovered by the developers while working on the code for the upcoming version 1.1.0 and include heap overflows in the audio decoders for DTS, MPEG and A/52, and memory access errors in the AVI, ASF and Matroska demultiplexers.








  • Europe

    • How the UK government can follow Obama's open source revolution
      The Obama White House is releasing custom open source code that it developed itself back to the Drupal community.

      The White House said that by releasing some of its code it will get the benefit of more people reviewing and improving it.


    • EU: open standards and interoperable systems for e-government
      EU governments should use open standards and interoperable systems to deliver electronic government services, EU ministers and the European Commission agreed earlier this week. They also stated they would promote the reuse of public sector information.

      The ministers declared to "embed innovation and cost effectiveness into eGovernment through the systematic promotion of open standards and interoperable systems, development of EU wide e-authentication schemes and proactive development of e-invoicing, e-procurement and pre-commercial procurement."


    • Cenatic: 'Using open source is key for e-government'
      Using open source is a key element for delivering electronic government services, argues Cenatic, Spain's national competence centre on open source. In a paper published on 5 April, the centre lists nine other reasons why public administrations should be using open source.

      According to Cenatic, open source software conforms to European rules and recommendations in interoperability. "The European Union and the Spanish Government have decided that the use of open source software is a key element for the development of e-government and open government."


    • Final version of Procurement and Open Source Software Guideline published
      The final version of the Procurement and Open Source Software Guideline has been published on OSOR.eu. The study, commissioned by the European Commission as part of the "Dissemination of good practice in Open Source Software (GPOSS)" measure under the IDABC programme, gives guidelines for public administration on how and why publicly acquire open source software.








  • Licensing

    • Cherry-Picking Open Source Licenses
      The widespread creation and reuse of open source software by commercial companies has introduced a whole new level of complexity to the legal challenges related to software licenses. Companies distributing open source software must draft or choose an appropriate license for their original code and they must understand and comply with the license obligations imposed on them with the use of third-party code, including open source. Deciding what open source license to distribute software is a key element in building an ecosystem of users, partners, supporters, and advocates.

      [...]

      Whether an author or business model demands restrictive or permissive licensing terms, there is likely to be an OSI-approved license that supports the goals of the individual or organization. So you may not need to create your own license or pay an attorney to create one for you. Authors need to weigh their objectives against the various types and popularity of licenses. Users need to understand the license obligations of open source software they are considering, evaluate them for their particular use case, and be sure they can abide by them. There is an abundance of open source available. It's a valuable and powerful resource that many companies employ to improve the efficiency and speed of their development process.








  • Open Access/Content

    • Urban Forest Map: Wikipedia + Google maps, but for Trees
      Since everything's open source, if someone else has a good idea of something to do with all this tree-info, they're free to go ahead and build their project. "The data, the software source code, and the website html/css code are licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL)"








  • Standards/Consortia

    • Best of HTML5
      Until recently web-based video relied on Flash, Adobe's rich media language. But HTML could put an end to that with its own native video tag. In HTML 5 it is not only as easy to embed a video in a website as it has been to embed an image - using just one tag - but it also opens the way for a host of additional features. Using the HTML5 video tag developers can embed videos without third-party codes and manipulate the videos in real-time. A demonstration of HTML5's video capabilities can be found here.


    • Invasion of the .docs
      The biggest worry in the transition was my wife's school-work. She's working on some degrees right now, and she has to write an awful lot of papers. She also has to read a lot of .doc files. As a former Ubuntu user, she also had some old ODF files lying around.








Leftovers

  • Poison pen reviews were mine, confesses historian Orlando Figes
    After Amazon notices rubbishing peers' work were spotted, esteemed Russianist initially denied all connection, then said his wife had written them. He has now conceded the 'foolish errors' were his own


  • Is Google Appifying Email a Good Thing?
    It’s Google’s Internet, we just use it. Well, maybe not, but some days it seems that way. Google’s gone from searching the Internet to being a big chunk of it. The latest moves from Mountain View include adding OAuth and contextual gadgets to email. Good on the surface for Google users, but what do they mean for everybody else?




  • Security/Aggression

    • Local computer security expert investigates police practices
      Eric Rachner sits in the back of a police car the night he was arrested for obstructing an officer. This image is taken from video footage recorded by a camera inside the vehicle -- footage that Seattle police long maintained had been erased.


    • NSA's boot camp for cyberdefense
      If you're the kind of person who worries about the security of computer networks, you should know that the National Security Agency is worrying about it too.

      Since Tuesday, the NSA has been conducting its 10th annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a competition that pits students from a series of military academies against each other--and against the competition's leaders at NSA--in a bid to see who has the best cyberdefense skills. The idea? To "build and defend computer networks against simulated intrusions by the National Security Agency/Central Security Services Red Team."






  • Environment







  • Finance







  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Cox Discontinues Usenet, Starting In June
      Existential Wombat was one of several readers to note that Cox Communcations customers have been put on notice that their Usenet access will soon dry up, unless they want to pay a monthly surcharge for it.


    • Facebook: Privacy Enemy Number One?
      Facebook's notable announcements this week range from a holistic vision of a seamless, semantically-enabled Web of human relationships, to a simple "Like" button, which will soon be omnipresent on the Internet. The moves are ambitious, giving even fast-moving rivals like Twitter reason to worry. Still, the simple fact that gets lost in the rush towards ubiquitous social connectivity is that Facebook users still don't know what they are sharing, with whom, or why it matters. In short: Facebook remains a privacy minefield.


    • Burma's hip-hop resistance spreads message of freedom
      Thxa Soe's music gives country's youth a focus for dissatisfaction with the junta despite strict censorship


    • Chinese artist's work removed from Paris gallery in censorship row
      A British curator has accused France's most prestigious art school of "unambiguous censorship" after a work satirising one of Nicolas Sarkozy's campaign slogans was taken down hours after going on display.

      Clare Carolin, a senior tutor at the Royal College of Art in London, who was working on the ill-fated project at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, condemned the decision to remove the work, which was deemed "too explosive".








  • Internet/Net Neutrality/DRM

    • Nina Paley: My Decision To Turn Down Netflix Due To DRM
      Sita Sings the Blues has a few Endorsed DVD distributors. In addition to QuestionCopyright.org and myself, there’s FilmKaravan, a distribution collective that handles “downstream” deals with VistaIndia and IndiePix. Their distributions are on amazon.com (I get a much smaller percentage from those than from my DVDs, but they reach a much wider market) and Netflix.

      [...]

      In the last few years DRM has grown increasingly pervasive, with little-to-no press coverage. Consumers passively accept it, as proven by Apple’s new “everything-DRM” device, the iPad.








  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights

      • India's copyright proposals are un-American (and that's bad)
        India's copyright office website is "best viewed in 1024 x 768 true colors, Internet Explorer version 6.0 or above."

        That might sound a bit dated, but it has nothing on the country's copyright law, which was last overhauled completely in 1957. Although it was updated five times in the 1980s and 1990s, the law does not comply with numerous international treaties such as the WIPO Internet Treaties of 1996.

        On April 19, another major set of Copyright Act amendments (PDF) was introduced with the explicit goal of bringing India into compliance "with the provisions of the two WIPO Internet Treaties, to the extent considered necessary and desirable." (Note that final clause; we'll return to it in a bit.)

        [...]

        The US has these laws in place already, and these provisions are also being pushed as part of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which hopes to bring the wonder of $1.92 million statutory judgments against individual file-sharers to the rest of the world.








    • ACTA and Digital Economy Bill

      • ✍ Explaining Freedom
        I looked through all the major party manifestos and found almost no mention of:

        * the Digital Economy Act and its consequences for WiFi availability and internet filtering, * the consequences of widespread data triangulation precipitated by surveillance, * the need for open data formats and not just “open data”, * the reasons why the publication of the ACTA draft doesn’t clear up many concerns despite the people behind it claiming there are no problems.














Clip of the Day



Glaciers Spur Alaskan Earthquakes (8/3/2004)

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Links for the day
Microsoft's All-Time Low in Finland
Microsoft is in a freefall
Security: Shane Wegner & Debian statement of incompetence
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, July 17, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, July 17, 2025
Gemini Links 17/07/2025: "Goodreads for Gemini" and Defence of "The Small Web"
Links for the day
Links 17/07/2025: Anger and Morale Issues at Microsoft, Wars and Conflicts Get Digital
Links for the day
CALEA / CALEA2 is the Real Problem, Not Chinese Operatives Exploiting CALEA / CALEA2 (as Any Other Nation Can)
CALEA / CALEA2 is more of a front door than a back door
99.99% Uptime in First Half of 2025
Since January there was only one noticeable outage
Nils Torvalds and Anna "Mikke" Torvalds (née Törnqvis) Hopefully Use GNU/Linux by Now
"Torvalds Family Uses Windows, Not Linus’ Linux"
Attack of the Slopfarms
FUD-amplifying bots with slop images, slop text (LLM slop)
When People Call a Best/Close Friend of Bill Gates a "Serial Rapist"
Good thing that the Linux Foundation keeps the "Linux" trademark ("Linux Mark") clean
Not My Problem, I Don't Care
Context/inspiration: Martin Niemöller
Honest Journalism About the European Patent Office Ceased to Exist After SLAPPs and Bribes to the Media
The EPO is basically a Mafia
Microsoft Bankruptcy in Russia, Shutdown in Pakistan, What Next?
It seems possible that in 2025 alone Microsoft will have laid off over 50,000 workers
Life Became Simpler When I Stopped Driving and I Don't Miss Driving When I See "Modern" Cars
Gee, wonder why car sales have plummeted...
Why I Believe Brett Wilson LLP and Its Microsoft Clients Are All Toast
So far our legal strategy has worked perfectly
EPO Jobs Are Very Toxic and Bad for One's Health
Health first, not monopolies
Response to Ryo Suwito Regarding the Four Freedoms
the point of life isn't to make more money
Microsoft's Morale Circling Down the Drain
Or gutter, toilet etc.
What Matters More Than "Market Share"
The goal is freedom, not "market share"
Tech Used to be Fun. To Many of Us It's Still Fun.
You can just watch it from afar and make fun of it all
Links 17/07/2025: "Blog Identity Crisis" and Openwashing by Nvidia
Links for the day
Greffiers and the US Attorney of the Serial Strangler From Microsoft
The lawsuit can help expose extensive corruption in the American court system as well
Credit Suisse collapse obfuscated Parreaux, Thiébaud & Partners scandal
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
The People Who Promoted systemd in Debian Also Promote Wayland
This is not politics
UK Media Under Threat: Cannot Report on Data Breach, Cannot Report on Microsoft Staff Strangling Women
The story of super injunction (in the British media this week, years late)
Victims of the Serial Strangler From Microsoft, Alex Balabhadra Graveley, Wanted to Sue Him But Lacked the Funds (He Attacked Their Finances)
Having spoken to victims of the Serial Strangler From Microsoft
Links 17/07/2025: Science, Hardware, and Censorship
Links for the day
Gemini Links 17/07/2025: Staying in the "Small Web" and Back on ICQ
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, July 16, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, July 16, 2025