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Links 26/6/2010: HP and Linux, GNOME Shell 2.31.4 is Out



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Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source

  • Open Tech Exchange talks to Tectonic
    The latest episode of OTE podcast features an interview with Tectonic in which we talk about open source software in Africa.


  • Open Source Geographic Tracking?




  • Events







  • Web Browsers

    • Android Becomes Flash Mobile's First BFF


    • Uncertain future for Flash
      And it's not just YouTube that uses Flash, almost all video sites do, as well as online games sites and entertainment sites. An older survey of websites by browser maker Opera found that in most countries around 30% of websites were built in or contained Flash elements. And in some countries that was as high as 40% or 50%. So it's safe to say that as much as 30% of the web relies in some or other way on Flash.


    • Mozilla: We're not 'on board' with Google's plugin spice
      Mozilla says it has "no official position" on NPAPI Pepper, the revamped browser plug-in API developed by Google for use with Native Client, a plug-in that runs native code inside its Chrome browser.






  • SaaS

    • Red Hat says everybody gets a cloud
      At its Boston developer summit Red Hat is pushing the theme that every company can have its own cloud with the first in a line of Cloud Foundation tools.








  • Programming

    • Take more note when Eclipse code drops on schedule
      Five years into my tenure on this beat and I still read, in comments, snark about open source programmers being amateurs, coding in their parents’ basements, in their pajamas.

      This was always a false image. Not that I have anything against a good parent’s basement, or a nice comfortable pair of jammies. And when open source was being born, at the bottom of the dot-bomb, there was high unemployment in the code-o-sphere.

      But the coders and the coding were always professional. There have always been a lot of people in open source who knew how to make the coding train run on time.








  • Standards/Consortia





Leftovers



  • Security/Aggression

    • Peace campaigner, 85, classified by police as 'domestic extremist'
      For John Catt, protest has never been about chaining himself to a railing or blocking a road in an act of civil disobedience. The 85-year-old peace campaigner's far milder form of dissent typically involves turning up at a demonstration with his daughter, Linda, taking out his sketch pad and drawing the scene.


    • Senator Moves To Form Federal "Cyber-Emergency" Agency
      The President would gain the power to unilaterally declare a national cyber-emergency and order operators of "critical infrastructure" to immediately implement "response plans" as provided for by the act. Those who fail to do so would be subject to fines, while those who comply would be protected from civil liability for any damages they might cause in doing so — government speak for "you can break people's stuff and they're just out of luck."


    • FBI Failed To Break Encryption of Hard Drives








  • Environment

    • Ushahidi tracks the Gulf Oil Spill: Open Source Crowdsourcing at Work
      Together, crowdsourcing and open source are a potent combination especially during possible emergencies. In this case, the Ushahidi based Oil Crisis Map has helped share data across communities and has openly presented the magnitude of the oil spill. Also, it has enabled people on the ground to actively participate in solving this crisis using current and accurate information.

      Ushahidi (Swahili for "testimony") itself emerged from another emergency - monitoring a disputed Kenyan election in 2007 with a mash-up of eyewitness reports onto a Google map. Today Ushahidi has developers from Kenya (where it started), Ghana, South Africa, Malawi, Netherlands and the US. Ushahidi was also used in Project Vote Report India for India's 2009 general elections to track election irregularities.








  • Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights

    • Reporters Without Borders unveils first-ever “Anti-Censorship Shelter”
      Reporters Without Borders today launched the world’s first “Anti-Censorship Shelter” in Paris for use by foreign journalists, bloggers and dissidents who are refugees or just passing through as a place where they can learn how to circumvent Internet censorship, protect their electronic communications and maintain their anonymity online.








  • Copyrights

    • Creative Commons Responds to ASCAP
      Yesterday, we reported that ASCAP said that organizations like Creative Commons were undermining their copyrights. Today, we’ve received an official response from Creative Commons with regards to the letter writing campaign.

      In the same article, we discussed how Creative Commons was, contrary to what ASCAP said, not about undermining anyone elses copyrighted material, but rather, giving artists an option that was not the Public Domain (no rights reserved) nor Copyright (all rights reserved).

      Eric Steuer, a Creative Commons spokesperson, thanked ZeroPaid for the earlier posting as being well-thought out and was happy to respond to ASCAPs letter










Clip of the Day



CLUG Talk 25 August 2009 - Experiences as a Novice Linux User (2009)

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Recent Techrights' Posts

SLAPP Censorship - Part 43 Out of 200: Garrett and Graveley Particulars of Claims Almost Identical and 5RB Needs to Investigate Its Barristers (Its Reputation is at Stake)
Scrolling up and down in social control media
The Central Staff Committee of the EPO Explains Late March Meetings Coinciding With Commencement of the Non-Stop Strikes at Europe's Second-Largest Institution
The fifth meeting report and sixth meeting report show some of the concerns leading up to the mass strikes
thenextweb.com (TNW) Appears to Have Become a Slopfarm, Fake Articles About France and GNU/Linux Flood the Web
If you're not against slop, you're part of the problem
Almost 3 Days Later, Still Zero Press Coverage (Except One Publisher) About Mass Layoffs at Red Hat, Almost 500 People Laid Off (Over 400 for Sure)
"A document posted by FOSS advocacy site Techrights appears to be that memo and explains that Red Hat has devised a location strategy under which it has identified key sites for prioritized hiring and strategic workforce investment."
The Register MS, About 6 Million Pounds in Debt, Helps Promote Microsoft's Gartner Group and Prop Up the Ponzi Scheme of Slop Plagiarism, Fake Article Mentions "AI" About 20 Times
What was now known as The Register UK not only works against the interests of the UK; it works for charlatans and frauds
 
Resistance to SLAPPs in the UK: Coalition Growing
thankfully awareness of SLAPPs in the UK is improving
Links 12/04/2026: Mass Rebellion Against Slop, UK Crackdown on Nudification by Slop
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/04/2026: "Objective Truth" and Flutter
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, April 11, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, April 11, 2026
Red Hat: We Kill People, But Please Obey the CoC or We'll Banish You
From Red Hat's own site
Gemini Links 11/04/2026: Floppy Disks on Linux and Junix
Links for the day
statCounter: Microsoft Windows Falls to All-Time Low This Month in France
French government agencies are ordered to move to GNU/Linux
Disgruntled IBMers Explain Why IBM is Circling Down a Death Spiral, Gerstner (Recently Deceased) Destroyed IBM in April 1993, and IBM Now Weaponises PIPs to Attack Its Own
We've just checked if anyone has covered mass layoffs at IBM Red Hat. Nope.
Gemini Links 11/04/2026: Critique of Delta Chat and Why Trying to Emulate Centralised, Addictive "Facebook" is Misguided
Links for the day
Links 11/04/2026: Scam Altman’s Trust Issues at OpenAI and EFF Quitting Twitter
Links for the day
Links 11/04/2026: Twitter Presence Considered Harmful to News Sites, "The Future of Everything is Lies"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, April 10, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, April 10, 2026
Three Years Ago We Disconnected From the United States, Now France Does the Same
Maybe in the coming months France will recruit loads of UNIX/Linux specialists
While Thousands of EPO Workers Are on Strike the President of the EPO, Who Bribes His Voters, Gives Himself Millions of Euros and 5,000 Euros Per Month in Housing Allowance
Campinos is immune, inherently corrupt, and habitual briber of his 'voters'
IBM and Red Hat Whistleblowers Versus a Dying Fourth Estate (Journalism Seems to Have Died as Silently as IBM RAs Go)
What a crazy world we live in!
Slopfarms We Forget About Because They Silently Die
The hard reality (for slobs and sloppers) is, slopfarms have no future
Gemini Links 10/04/2026: Flexiveganism, What Happened to Twitter, and Algorithm Fetishes
Links for the day
Links 10/04/2026: Indonesia's Social Control Media Bans Extend to Google YouTube, "I.M.F. Says Iran War Will Drag Global Growth Lower"
Links for the day
Media Blackout Regarding Mass Layoffs at Red Hat
To be very clear, what happened is certainly real
IBM 'Value' Fell 20%, The Executives Took Bonuses and Bonus Hikes
IBM is paying more and more money to the executives
SLAPP Censorship - Part 42 Out of 200: Getting the Very Basic Technical Concepts Very Wrong, or Where Miscomprehension Begets "Plausible Deniability"
It's difficult to argue with people over things that they do not even understand
This Coming Weekend and Next Week We'll Cover EPO Scandals a Lot, There Are Still Perpetual Strikes That the Media Intentionally Avoids Covering
Expect our focus on EPO corruption to grow again
More Information on IBM Red Hat Layoffs in April 2026, Hundreds of Skilled GNU/Linux Engineers Laid Off (300+ Simultaneously)
How long can the corporate media ignore IBM layoffs for?
Raw: Extensive Evidence of Red Hat's Mass Layoffs in China (IBM Meets Geopolitics)
This has nothing to do with workers' performance
We'll Never Ever Do Social Control Media, Nate Silver's Article Helps Explain Why
If you want to research and publish, stay away from it
SLAPP Censorship - Part 41 Out of 200: More Misuse of UK-GDPR (for US Citizens), More Copy-Pasting for Garrett and Graveley, Alleging That Publishing Unflattering Information is a 'Privacy' Issue
No wonder his own colleagues thought poorly of him (the junior barrister)
Links 10/04/2026: Pseudoscience and "Amazon Pulls Support for Perfectly Fine Older Kindles" and More Attacks on American Journalism
Links for the day
Dr. Andy Farnell Blasts Misuse of the Term "AI" to Describe Plagiarism, Plunder, and Misinformation
Dr. Stallman wrote about it back in the early 1980s
A Sign of Progress?
We'll solve war hunger and colonise Mars soon, according to men who never graduated from College
The Slop Delusion: This Morning We Broke Story on Red Hat Layoffs in Two Posts, Google is Already Plagiarising Them With Slop and Getting the Basic Facts Wrong
Google does not have "AI"; it has slop, which means it scrapes other people's work, then imitates it poorly
"IBM is Constantly Laying Off People" (Not Just in Red Hat)
IBM as a company is collapsing
Many Layoffs at IBM Red Hat, as the Rumours Said
Red Hat mass layoffs [...] "this was a difficult decision to make."
Microsoft, Drowning in Net Debt, Will Make Many More Cuts
The company is a net negative to society
April 15: Richard Stallman to Speak at the University of Texas in Austin, Texas
Next Wednesday in the afternoon Dr. Stallman will speak in a US college for the second time this year and for the second time in nearly 8 years
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, April 09, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, April 09, 2026
Gemini Links 10/04/2026: Cycling, Slop, and Software to Keep Photos Organised
Links for the day