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Links 23/7/2012: Linux 3.5, Rupert Murdoch Out



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Smart meter hack framework goes open-source
    Security outfit SecureState’s smart meter hacking framework, Termineter, has gone live over at Google Code.

    The software is described as having a structure like Metasploit, with a similar interface and ability to be extended with external modules.


  • Open Source For Me But Not For Thee
    Open source is the best way to build and maintain big software projects. The more heads and hands you have on a project, over time, the more bullet-proof it can get.

    Trouble is, everyone wants the maximum benefits from open source but few people want to put in the work for someone else's project. That's why VMware (VMW) went through its recent reorganization, promising to separate its open source cloud projects from its proprietary virtualization.

    Open source is often the flag that's flown after failure. When IBM (IBM) failed in operating systems two decades ago, it slowly began embracing Linux, eventually unifying its whole product line under the open source operating system. The results were spectacular.


  • Four insights to selling and marketing open source software
    In the last 15 years of my career I have worked at several open source software companies, each with its own unique approach to software delivery, packaging, branding, and sales. Two things have become clear to me:

    1. There is no single best way to build a successful business around an open source software solution 2. Success depends on an organization’s commitment to building real-world solutions and its readiness to deliver genuinely valuable services that help customers to be successful with the solutions.


  • Events



  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla

      • Firefox 15 Beta Tackles Memory Leaks
        Mozilla has released a beta version of the next version of its Firefox browser with better memory management and significant speed improvements.


      • Mozilla Releases Test Version of Firefox OS
        Mozilla this week released an early desktop version of Firefox OS that will let developers experience the mobile OS before comes to phones.

        The builds are available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.


      • Firefox 15 reduces memory consumption
        In the beta version of Firefox 15, the Mozilla developers have implemented a "radical idea" to force add-ons to release memory allocated to them. According to the developers, many add-ons are causing memory leaks by not releasing their DOM structures when a tab is closed. This creates what the developers call zombie compartments – areas of memory that are never released.






  • SaaS



  • CMS



  • Education

    • Open source default choice for some Czech schools
      Schools in the Czech cities of Å umperk and Hradec Králové have been using open source for years, the Czech open source news magazine LinuxExpres reports.


    • BBC: A New ICT Curriculum
      I rejoiced when the Western Canadian Provinces got together and revised the maths curriculum to use computers and calculators in teaching. I had been using computers in that role for 25 years but most teachers had never done it. They took two years of “professional development” to indoctrinate the teachers. The UK has given the teachers just months for radical change. I predict “uneven” results…

      In ICT courses in Canada I have always been giving students the basics. I stretched “how to sit at a PC and turn it on” into disassembly/reassembly of ATX PCs with nomenclature and on-line shopping for parts… Instead of teaching them how to use M$’s office suite, I gave students a list of tasks to do with five different office suites and asked them to compare ease and performance. Instead of teaching students 300 features of Excel TM, I gave them real-world problems that could be solved several ways with spreadsheets and computer programming and had them learn the kinds of things that were better done with different methods. I exposed students to several spreadsheets and, yes, paper and pencil… Instead of limiting students to one PC with one hard drive, I showed them what they could do with thin clients, servers and clusters of servers, databases and web applications…




  • BSD

    • FreeNAS 8.2 is Released!
      The FreeNAS development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of FreeNAS 8.2.0-RELEASE.




  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • ARMv8 AArch64 Support For GCC Keeps Coming
      Support for AArch64, the ARMv8 64-bit architecture, continues to move along within the GCC compiler world.

      Besides the recently published AArch64 support for the Linux kernel, developers with ARM Holdings have also been tackling the compiler support and other areas of the Linux toolchain.




  • Public Services/Government



  • Programming

    • Finding Bottlenecks In Your Linux Game, Application
      If you are curious how Valve and Intel improved the OpenGL performance of their Mesa driver and also at the same time finding areas for performance optimizations within the Source Engine, here's some of the tools used.

      The tools that seem to be predominantly used, based upon what Intel's Ian Romanick wrote in a blog comment and from what I've learned in email communications and while at Valve, are Sysprof and APITrace.




  • Standards/Consortia





Leftovers

  • Cotton brings doom to tribal farmers
    Desperation seems to have caught up with the normally imperturbable tribal farmers of Adilabad which is evident from the abnormally large number of suicides by them since 2011. As many as 27 of them, all cotton farmers including a woman, from the aboriginal Gond, Naikpod, Mannepu and the Lambada plains tribe, figure in the list of 101 cotton farmers who have committed suicide since January 2011.

    Giving up life, for whatever reason, was hitherto an unknown phenomenon in the primitive tribal communities which, paradoxically, have deprivation for a way of life. The gamut of Bt cotton, however, has dislocated their way of dealing with failures and like the trend in other communities, tribals are increasingly preferring the ‘easy way’ out.

    In 2010, only one Gond cotton farmer had committed suicide owing to debts. There was a drastic increase in the extent of land under cotton cultivation and the incidence of suicides in the agency in the following year.


  • Hardware

    • AMD could unveil low power tablet chips in August
      AMD isn’t expected to bring its new low power processors aimed at tablets to market until 2013. But according to Hexus, AMD will show off the first chips with its new low power “Jaguar” cores at the Hot Chips Symposium on August 28th.




  • Defence/Police/Aggression

    • U.S. Drug War Expands to Africa, a Newer Hub for Cartels
      In a significant expansion of the war on drugs, the United States has begun training an elite unit of counternarcotics police in Ghana and planning similar units in Nigeria and Kenya as part of an effort to combat the Latin American cartels that are increasingly using Africa to smuggle cocaine into Europe.






  • Finance

    • Cities: Be Like Oakland and Walk Away from Interest Swap Payments to Goldman and Bankers!
      The city of Oakland, California, is fighting back against Goldman Sachs by refusing to pay a penalty for getting out of an interest rate swap contract that is to Goldman's advantage.

      Isn't that a hoot? Anyway, turns out that Goldman and the city of Oakland entered into a deal to protect variable interest rate bonds issued by the city in 1997. Oakland was given a fixed rate of under 6 percent to protect against inflation on those bonds.


    • €£13tn: hoard hidden from taxman by global elite
      A global super-rich elite has exploited gaps in cross-border tax rules to hide an extraordinary €£13 trillion ($21tn) of wealth offshore – as much as the American and Japanese GDPs put together – according to research commissioned by the campaign group Tax Justice Network.

      James Henry, former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has compiled the most detailed estimates yet of the size of the offshore economy in a new report, The Price of Offshore Revisited, released exclusively to the Observer.


    • Goldman CEO on Dodd-Frank: ‘The vast bulk of it is good.’
      At the heart of Obama’s reelection narrative is the story that he battled the Big Bad Banks, mostly by passing regulation, and now those banks are retaliating by lining up behind deregulator Mitt Romney.


    • California’s Employment Picture
      Total employment in California pulled back in June from a recovery high of 16.5 million, set in May. This data series has been volatile, with annual revisions each year that have shifted the trough in total employment between early 2009 and early 2010. For now, the low was set in November of 2009, at 15.93 million. While “recovery” seems the right word to use in describing California’s job market, it is still the case that unemployment is hanging at 10.7%, per the most recent data. That’s the third highest state rate, in the country. Worse, as of Q1, California’s “U-6″, the broad measure of unemployment, was still above 20%. | see: California Employment in Millions (seasonally adjusted) 2000-2012.




  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying





Recent Techrights' Posts

Getting Rid of Microsoft Does Not Go Far Enough
Microsoft already has many problems. One day Microsoft won't exist anymore. But that does not guarantee users' freedom.
Alyssa Rosenzweig's LibrePlanet Talk About Freeing the Apple GPU
Alyssa Rosenzweig is the graphics witch behind the reverse-engineered drivers for the Apple GPU. She previously led Panfrost, the free drivers for Arm Mali GPUs powering devices like the Pinebook Pro. She graduated in 2023 with a Computer Science degree from the University of Toronto and now writes free software full-time.
Links 30/06/2024: LLMs Under Fire and Dictatorship of the Old
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So-called "advertiser-unfriendly" material was never a problem for Wikileaks
This War Crime Footage, Nothing Political Per Se, Is What They Made Julian Assange Plead Guilty To (War Criminals Not Convicted, Only Those Who Expose Them)
Wikileaks' Julian Assange: Exposing the US Military Crimes
20 Years Passed, Let's Go Even Faster Now
We are hoping to bring more original stories
 
Eko K. A. Owen, New Outreach and Communications Coordinator for the FSF
Nice to see many new additions to the FSF's team
[Meme] Smart Alec Poettering
How many Microsofters can the Debian Project withstand?
Microsoft Has Slaves and Enablers, Not Partners
Obligatory meme too
Windows in Åland Islands: From 100% to Less Than Half
Åland Islands lost the sense of urgency to move to GNU/Linux
Tobias Platen Covered Freedom-To-Play Games in LibrePlanet 2024
Freedom-To-Play games using Taler
[Meme] Opening a 'Webapp' With 'Only' 4 GB of RAM
Until 2020 none of my PCs ever had more than 2 GB of RAM
Destination 'Five Percent'
We reckon GNU/Linux can break the 5% barrier some time by the end of this year, even without counting Chromebooks
A Crisis of Online Journalism
Almost a week ago a journalist was forced to plead guilty for an act of journalism
Germany One of Many Countries Where Microsoft's Bing Lost Market Share After All That LLM Nonsense (Bing Chat and Further Rebrands/Renames)
openai.com traffic plunged 60% last month
Microsoft’s Latest Antitrust Scrutiny
4 new stories
Microsoft Layoffs, Mass Plagiarism, and More
outrage included
GNU/Linux Climbed 0.25% This Month (in statCounter)
Around midday on Tuesday we'll start seeing preliminary data for July
Ilya Gulko Introduces Pollyanna
"Pollyanna is a web framework that makes it easy to create your own libre social space, such as a social network or blog."
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looking to raise funds at the same time as the FSF
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
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IRC logs for Saturday, June 29, 2024
Links 29/06/2024: Astronauts at Risk, Ukraine Updates
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Fedora and Red Hat Leftovers
mostly redhat.com
Microsoft is Now Googlebombing or Spamming 'Open Source' and 'Linux' to Promote Proprietary Surveillance, Azure
Notice the title and the image, what's being promoted etc.
Seychelles: GNU/Linux Doing OK
Seychelles cannot be considered poor
Gemini Protocol Isn't Even Remotely "Dead"
"Lupa knows of 505,000 (half a million!) working Gemini URLs at present, up from about 425,000 this time last year"
About 10 New Free Software Foundation (FSF) Members Per Day
The total changed from 46 to 47 while typing the article
Vista 11 Adoption Unusually Low in Germany and It's Going Down, Not Up
This is not happening only in Germany
Kevin Korte on Computers Being Allowed to Make Decisions Based on Cryptic Algorithms and Proprietary/Secret Data
It uses buzzwords where none are needed
[Meme] Garbage In, Garbage Out (linuxsecurity.com)
It is neither Linux nor security, just chatbot-generated slop
Microsoft-Invaded CISA Spreads Anti-Free Software FUD (as If Proprietary Software Has No Memory Safety Issues), Brittany Day Uses Chatbots to Amplify and Permutate the Microsoft FUD
linuxsecurity.com became an anti-Linux spam site
Microsoft Laying Off Staff in an Act of Retaliation and Union-Busting
retaliatory layoffs at Microsoft
Gemini Links 29/06/2024: Content Drowning in 'Goo' and LLM Slop
Links for the day
Windows Lost Almost 92% Market Share in Egypt
From over 99% to just over 7%
In Ecuador, GNU/Linux Adoption Surged From Under 1% to Over 4% in About 3 Years
Not even counting Chromebooks
LibrePlanet: Cultivating Backups (of Recordings)
an appeal to recover some of these talks
Microsoft/Windows Machines Are Turned Off (or Windows Deleted/Decommissioned) in Web Servers, as the "Market Share" Collapse Continues
Taking full history into account, this is a decrease of over 90% in some cases
Corwin Brust Hosting Freedom: A Behind-the-scenes Tour With the GNU Savannah Hackers
"the "smiling faces" behind it."
Android at 90% or More in Chad
Windows below 2%
David Wilson: Cultivating a Welcoming Free Software Community That Lasts
"a feeling of shared ownership for all users."
Julian Assange Might Continue Wikileaks, But Certainly Not Yet (Recovery Time Needed)
And probably at a symbolic capacity only
Bringing in 12 Santas and Taking 13 Out (Old Interview With Julian Assange)
Julian Assange's life inside the Ecuadorian embassy
Neil Plotnick on GNU/Linux in the High School Classroom
uploaded to the LibrePlanet instance of MediaGoblin
Asia Appears to be Fastest to Adopt GNU/Linux
the home of a considerable majority of the world's population
Alexandre Oliva's LibrePlanet 2024 Talk About "Software Enshittification"
in spite of technical difficulties encountered while recording
What They Used to Do With Mono They Now Do With Systemd (Lower and Deeper Down Than Userspace)
Now we have a project started primarily by Red Hat (and managed by Microsoft GitHub, which is proprietary) being managed by Microsoft and primarily serving Microsoft and IBM
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GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 28, 2024
IRC logs for Friday, June 28, 2024
Links 28/06/2024: Kangaroo Courts and Patents Spam, EFF Still Fighting for CPC's TikTok (a Digital Weapon)
Links for the day
Links 28/06/2024: Overton window and Polarization
Links for the day
[Meme] In 50 Years...
Microsoft's Vista 11 will take 50 years to be fully adopted
Only About 1 in 8 Russian Windows Users is Using Vista 11
it looks like over the past 12 months Vista 11 hardly grew and it remains very low at around 12% of Windows usage in Russia
Links 28/06/2024: More Attacks on the Press, More Censorship in Russia
Links for the day
Gemini Links 28/06/2024: Christmas Prematurely, Self-hosting
Links for the day
IBM: So Long, Suckers. Your Free OS is Now Proprietary. Pay IBM or Else.
almost exactly a year after turning RHEL into proprietary software
Vista 11 is Doomed and Despite Lack of Adoption Microsoft Already Speaks of Vapourware ("12")
"Microsoft has pulled a Windows 11 update after users reported boot loops and startup failures."
ChromeOS Reaches Highest Share in Years at the World's Most Populous Nation, Windows Now at All-Time Low of 13%
We're talking about India today
[Video] "It Is Incredible That Julian Assange Survives"
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Never Assume That Because the Law Exists the Powerful Will Follow the Law
Who's going to hold them accountable now?
Nearly a Month Has Passed and Nobody at the Debian Project Even Attempted to Explain What Seems Like Back-dooring of Debian (and Hundreds of Distros That Are Debian-Derived)
I can cynically guess that only matters when a user with a Chinese name does it
[Video] Julian Assange Explains Wikileaks' Logistics
predating indefinite detention
IBM Was Never the "Good Guy", Just a Self-Serving and Opportunistic Money- and Power-Hungry Monopolist, Living Off of Taxpayers' Money (Government Contracts)
The Nazi Party of Germany was its second-biggest client at one point and now it's looking to profit from the work of slaves
"I Hated Working at IBM. They Were the Most Unfriendly People."
Don't forget what Watson the son did to a poor woman on a plane
State of the News (and Depletion of Journalism Online, Not Just Offline)
Newspapers are not coming back and the Web is not coming back either
GNU/Linux Consolidates in North America
Android rising a lot this year, too
[Meme] More Monopolies Granted While Patent Examiners Die (Overworking for Less Compensation)
Work more; Get less
Staff Union of the EPO (SUEPO) is Taking the New Pension Scheme (NPS) to an International Tribunal (ILOAT)
SUEPO wants more EPO staff to participate in collective action
Stella Assange and the Legal Team Speak to the Media a Day After WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange Arrives in Australia
Published yesterday by a number of mainstream publishers
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, June 27, 2024
IRC logs for Thursday, June 27, 2024
RIP Daniel Bristot de Oliveira, Red Hat death
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock