Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 2/5/2014: Graphics/GPU Source Code for Linux, Drones With Linux





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



Leftovers



  • Health/Nutrition



    • Why American Apples Just Got Banned in Europe
      Back in 2008, European Food Safety Authority began pressing the chemical industry to provide safety information on a substance called diphenylamine, or DPA. Widely applied to apples after harvest, DPA prevents "storage scald"—brown spots that "becomes a concern when fruit is stored for several months," according to Washington State University, reporting from the heartland of industrial-scale apple production.


    • Antibiotic-resistant superbug arose in northern Manhattan
      Human skin is a garden of microbes that is home to about 1,000 bacterial species. Most are benign, but some invade the skin and cause illness—of these, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are particularly dangerous.




  • Security



  • Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression





  • Finance



    • Organized Labor, Public Banks and the Grassroots: Keys to a Worker-Owned Economy
      Before his death in February, Jackson Mississippi Mayor Chokwe Lumumba was helping his constituents chart an economic plan whose main component was worker-owned cooperatives. In her recent article about Lumumba and cooperatives, Laura Flanders cites Collective Courage author Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s point that African-American leaders from Marcus Garvey to W.E.B. DuBois were proponents of cooperatives. DuBois, Garvey and Lumumba understood that worker democracy was necessary for economic sovereignty and community solidarity.


    • Beyond Piketty’s Capital: Richard Wolff Warns us Not to Band-Aid Capitalism
      Wolff warns that we cannot band-aid capitalism. However laudable and even attainable may be suggestions from economists like Piketty or Dean Baker, to name just two, piecemeal policies designed to stop the system from funneling wealth upwards will not work for long. The elites are fully focused on preserving and expanding their fortunes, and the structure of the contemporary economy puts in the hands of a very few people in large corporate enterprises “both the incentive and the resources to roll back whatever adjustments a movement from below is able to make.”


    • IMF Confirms $17bn Loan to Ukraine with Conditions That Will Devastate the Economy
      The IMF has confirmed a conditional loan of $17bn to Ukraine in what it touts as a rescue package aimed at stabilizing Ukraine as it seeks to maintain independence from a belligerent Russia. Instead, we are witnessing the final stages of the US-EU coup of Ukraine, and by implementing the conditions of the loan, the nation will be left destitute and dependent.


    • Kshama Sawant, Seattle City Councilwoman: McDonald's Doesn't Need Time To Phase In $15 Minimum Wage
      Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, an outspoken socialist, claimed a victory Thursday after Mayor Ed Murray announced a plan to hike the city's minimum wage to $15, which Sawant was a driving force behind. But she told HuffPost Live's Alyona Minkovski that she isn't totally happy with the plan, which gives big corporations years to phase in the new wage.


    • Demanding 'Just and Sustainable' Economy For All, Thousands March on Congress
      In an expression of a "new populist" energy, thousands of demonstrators shut down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC on Monday as they demanded a livable wage and an end to the corporate domination of the national economy and politics.


    • The Big Tip That America’s Servers Never See
      A good many Americans now know the high-finance games that JPMorgan Chase and other big banks like to play — at our expense. And big oil giants like ExxonMobil have been outraging Americans for years.

      But plenty of other corporate giants that inflate our inequality have been flying under the radar screen. Who, for instance, has ever heard of Darden? Or Yum! Brands?

      These little-known outfits just happen to rate as two of the biggest corporate behemoths in the restaurant industry. They’ve been squeezing workers — and soaking taxpayers — as relentlessly as any enterprises in America. Yet they barely have any national profile at all.

      That may be about to change.

      Last week, on the eve of the National Restaurant Association annual meeting, two top think tanks — the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and Demos in New York— released new studies that detail how America’s food-service giants are growing the gap between the nation’s rich and everyone else.

      This week protesting restaurant workers will be taking that message to the streets. Many of these workers are currently laboring at the $2.13 hourly federal minimum wage for tipped workers, a base that hasn’t budged since 1991.


    • Any talk of economic recovery is pure fiction
      Down is up. Sick is healthy. The RMS Titanic is seaworthy. Topsy-turvy logic is a speciality of the austerity brigade, and here they come dishing up a third helping. First, in 2010-11, they pledged that making historic cuts amid a global slump would definitely, absolutely secure a strong recovery. Then things went predictably belly-up, forcing Cameron and Osborne to dump their deficit-reduction plans and the eurocrats to make more bailouts. Yet these reversals were, naturally, "sticking to the course". Now things don't look quite as awful as they did a couple of years ago – and this somehow gets chalked up as a miraculous rebound.




  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying



    • Science Media Centre Spins Pro-GMO Line
      Since consumer campaigning got GMOs labeled and crop restricting implemented in the United Kingdom, Cameron will likely have a hard time convincing UK consumers that all is well. However, Cameron is getting help in that quest from a little known group called the Science Media Centre (SMC), which helped release the report to great fanfare. The Guardian and The Independent published prominent coverage of the report, and it was featured by the BBC. The Independent and BBC coverage were both entirely uncritical, quoting the scientists handpicked by the SMC for its reporters' briefing. The Guardian report was less glowing, but still quoted the SMC scientists and buried the reactions of critics below the fold. None of them mentioned that the report briefing was held by the SMC.




  • Privacy



  • Civil Rights



  • Internet/Net Neutrality



    • FCC's Wheeler Says That If These Lame Net Neutrality Rules Don't Work, He'll Implement The Real Rules Next Time
      Following his weak attempt to diffuse concerns about his bogus "open internet" rules, FCC boss Tom Wheeler has decided to try again, by basically repeating what he said last week with slightly stronger language about how he won't let broadband providers violate net neutrality. Of course, as many people have explained, the problem is that the new rules clearly aren't strong enough, and leave open all sorts of ways to kill off basic neutrality online. Of course, the real problem is that the original 2010 "open internet" rules (which were really crafted by the telcos in the first place) didn't really protect net neutrality in the first place, and the new rules are basically an even weaker version of those rules. But, have no fear, claims Wheeler, if these rules don't work, he promises he'll actually pull out the big gun, Title II, and reclassify broadband players as telco services rather than information services, allowing the FCC to put them under common carrier rules.




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Copyrights



      • Dotcom Thanks RIAA and MPAA for Mega’s Massive Growth
        Mega.co.nz, the cloud storage company founded by Kim Dotcom, has seen the number of uploads triple in the past six months. Mega users now upload a total of half a billion files per month. According to Kim Dotcom, the MPAA and RIAA deserve some credit for the unprecedented growth.


      • Lawsuit Against First US Copyright Trolls For Extortion Ends In Victory
        A few years ago, we wrote about how a guy named Dimitry Shirokov, with help from the law firm of Booth Sweet had taken on the "fathers" of copyright trolling in the US, Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, who had formed an organization called US Copyright Group, which initiated the first round of mass copyright trolling in the US (before the likes of Prenda and others entered the space). Shirokov had tried to make his lawsuit a class action against the lawyers, claiming fraud and extortion. And while the class action part was unfortunately rejected, the case has ended with a victory for Shirokov, with the judge ordering DGW to pay $39,909.95 ($3,179.52 to Shirokov and the rest in attorneys' fees to Booth Sweet).


      • Books and more are relicensed to Creative Commons
        I began working with the Wikimedia Foundation in January 2012 for program and community support in India. With the Centre for Internet and Society's Access To Knowledge program, we focus on open access for scholarly publications to help communities enrich Wikipedia entries for Indic languages.

        While I was negotiating with a few authors to relicense their copyrighted books to a Creative Commons license (a license that allows anyone to reuse, modify and use content), I began identifying certain areas of motivation for an author to donate their work as free content.

        We worked closely with Goa University, Manik-Biswanath Smrutinyasa Trust, and the Institute of Odia Studies and Research.


      • Aereo Can't Be Bound by Secret Interpretations of Copyright Law
        It may seem like a wishy-washy answer, but there's an alarming point nested within it: the Solicitor General's office's position that the interpretation of the law—which the executive branch has worked into our international trade obligations—is the only way for the law to be "properly construed."

        That in turn suggests that the executive branch believes it is responsible for properly constructing the law. Of course, that position stands in conflict with Marbury v. Madison, the case that established judicial review in 1803: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."

        That has serious implications for the democratic process. Here's how it seems to work: the executive branch comes up with an interpretation of U.S. copyright law and then negotiates it into international agreements. It conducts these negotiations in secret, insisting that it needs no meaningful oversight because it doesn't require a change in U.S. law.


      • Ballots 2009 for the Swedish Pirate Party's election to the European Parliament
        More or less overnight, betting companies slashed their odds of the Swedish Pirate Party’s re-election to the European Parliament. Where a re-election scenario used to give you 8x your money back in a bet with them, it now gives a mere 1.25x. It appears the betting companies know something that Swedish oldmedia haven’t picked up on yet.


      • Kim Dotcom: On the road with Hollywood's biggest enemy
        Kim Dotcom, the multi-millionaire hacker-turned-entrepreneur, was on the roof of his New Zealand mansion, handcuffed and surrounded.

        One by one, his luxury cars were rolled out of garages and taken away. Dotcom's accounts, in various different countries, were frozen.

        His website, file storage service Megaupload, was shut down.

        Filings made in a court in Virginia outlined the accusation. Dotcom, US authorities said, was the man behind a "criminal enterprise" which used Megaupload to profit from piracy on a "massive scale". He faces more than 20 years in prison.


      • Tarantino is Back, Now Claiming Gawker is an Illegal Downloader


        After landing an early victory last week against Quentin Tarantino in their leaked screenplay row, Gawker is facing a new attack. In an amended complaint, Tarantino accuses Gawker of committing not only contributory infringement, but also direct infringement, after it illegally downloaded his script from a file-hosting site.








Recent Techrights' Posts

New XBox CEO Typecast in Social Control Media
Microsoft apologists will fall back on (or shuffle between) the "racist" and "sexist" angle
Sites Without JavaScript Deserve Your Visits
We're not arguing that the Web should be as simple or barebones like Gemini Protocol/GemText
EPO Strikes Are Already Working
Campinos is already going "into hiding"
The Brand 'Watsonx' is a Terrible Name for IBM 'Hey Hi' (Chatbots) Because Watson Agreed With Adolf Hitler
Almost a century has passed and IBM still believes that selling "intelligence", chatbots in particular, should be done under the name "Watson"
 
Gemini Links 22/02/2026: Okonomiyaki and Midcrunch Crisis
Links for the day
The Broken Window Industry and Its Ongoing Desires to Make Technology Less Dependable
Reliable computing is becoming harder to find
Freedom Means Accepting He or She Who is Different
In the Debian community we're sadly seeing some authoritarian overreach this month
Microsoft Windows Falls to Another New All-Time Low in Guatemala, It is a Bottomless Pit
Maybe users come to realise that Windows means back doors and those doors are open to a regime that ought not be trusted
"XBox" Will Become Slop After Mass Layoffs
When all else fails, "AI it"
Links 22/02/2026: Hardware Price Hikes Across the Board, "Microsoft Issues Statement on Potential Layoffs"
Links for the day
Microsoft "Layoffs Incoming"
This transition isn't about promoting games; it's about canning the console
Links 22/02/2026: "Bloat of Modern Fitness Apps" and Wikipedia Deprecates Archive.today
Links for the day
Our IRC 5-Year Anniversary (for Self-Hosted) is Fast Approaching
A week from now it's March already
Gemini Links 22/02/2026: Dream Job Gone and Slop in Taskwarrior
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 21, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, February 21, 2026
GNU/Linux Grew a Lot in Nicaragua
We've not noticed until today
Techrights Has Over 1,000 Good Articles 'in the Tank'
Drafts, notes, and lengthy documents
New Article Challenges Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) for Choosing the Wrong SLAPP Cases to Investigate
The one point we can agree on is that SRA does not know how to correctly select the worst culprits/offenders
Why IBM is Still Scary and Dangerous
Keep a distance from "Big Blue" Bully
Measuring the Growth of Our Mission and Community
Something between experiment and prototype
Richard Stallman in the United States - Part III - Georgia Tech Did a Fine Job Upholding Free Speech Principles
The real problem was social control media (toxic)
Debian's Master is Deleting Criticism of SystemD and Other Things (On-Topic and Published by Debian Developers), Resorts to the Excuse Messages Are "Too Long"
Censorship serves nobody except the masters that control this censorship
Digg's Latest Incarnation Already Failed, It's Infested With LLM Slop
Many submissions go to slopfarms and some get summarised by slop
Gemini Links 21/02/2026: Veganism and DeskPi RackMate T0
Links for the day
On The Web, XBox Already a Dying Breed
Down to about 0.05% on large machines, based on statCounter [...] Microsoft will never publicly admit or say how many billions it lost on the XBox
2026 a Year of 'Top-Down' Microsoft Layoffs (Management First)
Stay tuned for what comes next
Your "Likes" Aren't Yours and They're Mostly "Worthless Clicks"
Social hermits are not popular, irrespective of how many "Facebook friends" or "likes" they get
Waggener Edstrom/Frank Shaw Lied, There Are Definitely Microsoft Layoffs
Microsoft never issued a formal statement, it made allusions by proxy
Microsoft-Controlled Media With Embargo and Press Operatives
This won't be the last example of media manipulation for narrative control or face-saving "damage control"
Slop Hype Makes Our Core Technology Less Reliable and Far Less Resilient (We Pay for the Catastrophe That Follows)
Only slop-free projects can be trusted
Going for 1,000 (Days of Uptime)
universal records are vastly better
Firefox is No-Go in China, Not Even 1% "Market Share" Anymore
Given Mozilla's utterly rubbish marketing these days (politics over technical aspects), set aside the cheerleading for slop, there's hardly a chance of Mozilla Firefox reaching or exceeding 10% again
EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part III - It's in His Eyes
Workers are free to draw their own conclusions
Links 21/02/2026: Tensions Over Iran and Illegal Cheeto Tariffs, Presidential Approval Sags
Links for the day
Links 21/02/2026: "Moving Away From Cloudflare", Many Layoffs or Shutdowns in Games (Including XBox/Microsoft)
Links for the day
GNU Linux-libre is a Grown-Up Today
"before that, every distro that wanted to respect its users' freedom had to remove itself all of the binary blobs that were distributed as part of the kernel Linux's so-called sources"
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 20, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, February 20, 2026
Gemini Links 21/02/2026: "The Evil of Action" and Slop Bots Causing Great Harm Online (Not Just the Web)
Links for the day
Like a Shell
Overreactions can backfire
Not Only Leaders of XBox Got Sacked (Layoffs)
Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond got laid off
9PM on a Friday Night: Microsoft Says the Layoffs Are Not Layoffs
We've said for a long time that XBox is doomed this year
Gemini Links 20/02/2026: Misfin Server and Magic in Programming
Links for the day
Former Debian Project Leader Branden Robinson Cautions Against Cover-up and Censorship in Debian
Debian drama. Again.
analytics.usa.gov Reckons Windows "Market Share" Fell to Just 38%, Vista 11 Not Even a Third of Windows Users
This coming summer Vista 11 turns 5
The New Digg.com is Slop
Slop "summaries" and Serial Sloppers are drowning out the site with fake 'articles' (plagiarism)
Linus Torvalds: Bill Epsteingate Good Enough for Me to Wine and Dine With
Torvalds is more connected to Jeffrey Epstein than Richard Stallman ever was
Our Uptimes Are Always Better Than Any Site That Uses Clownflare
Clownflare as a company operates like a cult
GNU/Linux Apparently Rose to 6% in Uzbekistan
If accurate, this represents a new problem for Microsoft and a big win for Software Freedom
Sponsored Videos and 'Articles' in The Register MS, Stenography as a Service/Product
They should more accurately label these actors
It's Friday Again and Many People Leave IBM for Good (IBM Should be Reported for Illegal NDAs That Hide Layoffs)
we very seldom see anyone deviating a lot from the "template-like" narrative, let alone mentioning "layoffs" or "RA" or some other term that implies non-consensual departure
The Little Clique of Sloppers/Spammers About "Linux" Got Even Smaller
Thankfully there are still genuine and legit GNU/Linux sites out there
Links 20/02/2026: Microsoft Intentionally Kills Older Hardware, "The Story of XBox" Shows How Defective Microsoft Hardware Really Was
Links for the day
Turkmenistan One of Many Countries Where Microsoft Fell to Distant Third in Search
We expect many layoffs in Bing some time soon
Don't Wait for "Red Hat Layoffs" Because After Bluewashing They're IBM RAs and Don't Wait for "IBM Layoffs" Because They're Perpetual
IBM layoffs are silent and "forever" (small trickle that never ends and is widespread - after all IBM is a very global and ubiquitous firm)
Links 20/02/2026: Standards, Science, and Politics
Links for the day
What Do People Ever Buy From Microsoft Anyway (Not PCs)?
Microsoft sells two things these days: 1) vapourware/promises. 2) its stock.
Gemini Links 20/02/2026: "Mainstream Unix, Underground Unix", Slop Staging DDoS Attacks Against Small Sites
Links for the day
IBM Inclusivity: Red Hat Summit is for Rich Sponsors Like Microsoft and Rich Guests Who Pay $500 a Day
Nothing signals societal tolerance more than paying a large military contractor
GNU/Linux Adoption is Higher in Richer Countries
Is it because freedom is actually expensive - something that only privileged people can pursue?
Links 20/02/2026: Windows TCO Versus Deutsche Bahn, Europe Seeks More Independent Digital Future
Links for the day
IBM, Red Hat and Fedora: Don't Say "Master", It Offends People. Also IBM, Red Hat and Fedora: "Master Podman".
The hypocrisy at Red Hat and Fedora shows no boundaries
IBM Layoffs Aren't Just in IBM 'Proper'
Who is still using Lotus after the HCL move?
The Register MS Gets Paid by Gartner to Promote a Ponzi Scheme for Gartner, Microsoft, and Others
The credibility of that site will suffer because it tries to sell a major scam to its audience
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 19, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, February 19, 2026