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Links 25/3/2015: India Moving to Free Software





GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Open source and DevOps aren’t mandatory, but neither is survival
    I can’t recall the exact time I learned about open source software, but I can certainly narrow down the place. I quickly realized how transformative it could be. In 1996, I was sitting in the tech support department of a large ISP that provided hosting and connectivity to the Fortune 1000. Most of our servers ran Solaris, floppy disks arrived via snail mail, and we applied security updates manually adhering to a regime of updates and invoices prescribed by Sun Microsystems. It was a huge change from my university career of dumb terminals and mainframes.


  • How open source can improve your software's security
    Let's be blunt: your code is full of security holes. Just as bad, your employees are careless with passwords and other ways of cracking into your data.

    Hence, while we may wring our hands over security breaches at Target, Morgan Stanley, or dozens of other breaches, the reality is that the only reason your company has yet to be cracked is that hackers haven't bothered to try. Yet.


  • Govt formulates policy on adoption of open source software
    The Government on Wednesday formulated a 'Policy on Adoption of Open Source Software for Government of India' that would encourage the formal adoption and use of Open Source Software (OSS) in Government organisations.

    Currently most eGovernance solutions are developed using Closed Source Software (CSS), which is licensed under the exclusive legal right of the copyright holder. In that the users' right to make modifications, sharing, studying, redistribution or reverse engineering is limited.


  • What the New York Times CIO asks when evaluating open source software
    In this interview, New York Times CIO Marc Frons explains how his teams evaluate whether to use open source or proprietary software and the simple question that helps guide the conversation.


  • Why Amnesty International uses Booktype 2.0 for report publishing
    Human rights NGO Amnesty International, a movement of more than seven million people, released its Annual Report for 2014-15 at the end of February. This 500+ page print book is published simultaneously in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic, and translated into 12 other languages by local teams. It is composed of 160 detailed chapters written by regional experts on the human rights situation in most of the countries of the world.


  • Action Launcher 3.3 released with new open-source Live Wallpaper API


  • Events



    • Two microconferences accepted for the Linux Plumbers Conference
      The Checkpoint/Restart and Energy-aware scheduling and CPU power management microconferences will be held at LPC.


    • Shevirah Set to Break Into Mobile Penetration Testing Market
      Weidman, no stranger to the world of mobile security, was the recipient of a Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) Cyber Fast Track grant in 2012 for her open-source Smartphone Pentest Framework project. In 2015, Weidman has been accepted into the Mach37 Cybersecurity accelerator program, which invests in security startups and provides tools and training to launch companies.




  • SaaS/Big Data



    • Scaling
      ownCloud runs on small Raspberry Pi’s for your friends and family at home but also on huge clusters of web servers where it can serve over hundreds of thousands of users and petabytes of data. The current Raspberry Pi doesn’t deliver blazing fast performance but it works and the new raspberry pi 2 announced last month should be great hardware for small ownCloud deployments. Big deployments like the one in Germany or at CERN are usually ‘spread out’ over multiple servers, which brings us to the secret sauce that makes scalable software possible.


    • MapR Notes Big Demand for Free Hadoop Training Offerings
      Recently, MapR Technologies, focused on Hadoop, has been out with some interesting announcements that we covered. We also interviewed the company's Tomer Shiran (shown), who noted that there is a serious lack of job candidates with advanced Hadoop and data analytics skills. He added that MapR is providing free online training for Hadoop. Now, there is some evidence of how popular the free training has been, with the training program enrolling more than 10,000 registrants worldwide in its first 30 days.




  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice



  • Healthcare



    • Why open source is key to mHealth data standards
      Open source software that allows for sharing and integration of mHealth data poses tremendous benefit for diagnosing, treating and preventing disease as well as the development of a more tailored patient healthcare strategy, according to Ida Sim, Ph.D, professor of medicine at University of California, San Francisco.




  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC



    • GCC 5 Compiler will be released soon
      And the developers expect to have the final version ready probably at the end of April, this year.


    • LibrePlanet 2015 brings free software luminaries to MIT
      The 2015 LibrePlanet free software conference drew nearly 350 activists from around the world to discuss issues of freedom, privacy, and security in computing. Free Software Foundation founder and president Richard Stallman delivered the opening keynote, "Free software, free hardware, and other things" before a packed room at MIT's Stata Center, with hundreds of remote participants tuning in online.


    • GNU Manifesto Published Thirty Years Ago
      It was in March 1985 that Richard Stallman first set out his belief in the ideal of Free Software with the publication of the GNU Manifesto.

      [...]

      If you have always referred to Linux as just "Linux" then you might be surprised to know that the FSF claims that it really should always be called "GNU/Linux". There is also now a modified GNU/Linux system that has all proprietary and non-free code removed - Linux-libre.




  • Project Releases



  • Openness/Sharing



  • Programming



    • Intro to Grace: an open source educational programming language
      When it comes to picking a programming language to use when teaching people how to program, there are many, many options. Scratch is a good choice when teaching the basics because of its drag and drop building block method of programming. Python or Ruby are also good choices—both languages have a straight-forward syntax, are used in major real-world projects, and have excellent communities and supplemental projects built around them. Or there is Java, Objective-C, and C#, which are solid programming languages and marketable job skills. Honestly, they are all good choices, but when it comes to teaching programming in an academic setting, are they really the best way to go about doing it?






Leftovers



  • Germanwings to Cancel More Flights as Crew Members Refuse to Fly
    Germanwings will have to cancel more flights today as some crew members refuse to fly, a day after an Airbus A320 operated by the budget arm of Lufthansa crashed in the French Alps.

    "There will be irregularities... There are crew members who do not want to fly in the current situation, which we understand," a spokeswoman for Germanwings said.


  • Germanwings Is An Example Of European Carriers Trying To Compete In The Budget Airline Game
    Germanwings, the airline operating Flight 9525 that crashed in the French Alps Tuesday, may not be well known outside Europe. But the low-cost carrier owned by Lufthansa Group is emblematic of a trend many flag carriers in Europe are embracing: launching their own budget airlines for short-haul flights to compete with wildly successful low-cost carriers that have snatched 26 percent of market share in Europe.


  • Security



    • Google Hit Again by Unauthorized SSL/TLS Certificates
      The purpose of an SSL/TLS digital certificate is to provide a degree of authenticity and integrity to an encrypted connection. The SSL/TLS certificate helps users positively identify sites, but what happens when a certificate is wrongly issued? Just ask Google, which has more experience than most in dealing with this issue.




  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife



    • New York Times: Nuclear Establishment Tool
      The New York Times' longtime nuclear power reporter, Matthew Wald, has announced that he's been hired as the senior director of policy analysis and strategic planning for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the chief lobbying arm of the nuclear industry. Investigative reporter Karl Grossman wrote a piece a few years ago on the ties between the Times and the nuclear power establishment that go back to the dawn of the Atomic Age.




  • PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying



    • Jeb Bush Returns to the Washington Fund-Raising Well
      Mr. Bush, the former Florida governor, has sounded that theme regularly in his fledgling presidential campaign. But even as he positions himself as a Washington outsider, he seems to have mastered a skill that is crucial in this city: tapping into the money-raising clout of the K Street lobbyists, political operatives, superlawyers and business leaders in Washington’s permanent class.


    • Information Warfare: Automated Propaganda and Social Media Bots
      NATO has announced that it is launching an “information war” against Russia.

      The UK publicly announced a battalion of keyboard warriors to spread disinformation.

      It’s well-documented that the West has long used false propaganda to sway public opinion.

      Western military and intelligence services manipulate social media to counter criticism of Western policies.




  • Privacy



    • Britain’s Surveillance State
      Edward Snowden exposed the extent of mass surveillance conducted not just by the United States but also by allies like Britain. Now, a committee of the British Parliament has proposed legal reforms to Britain’s intelligence agencies that are mostly cosmetic and would do little to protect individual privacy.


    • On CISA the Surveillance Bill
      After the Senate Intelligence Committee passed CISA, its sole opponent, Ron Wyden, said, “If information-sharing legislation does not include adequate privacy protections then that’s not a cybersecurity bill – it’s a surveillance bill by another name.” Robert Graham, an expert on intrusion-prevention, argues, “This is a bad police-state thing. It will do little to prevent attacks, but do a lot to increase mass surveillance.”




  • Civil Rights



    • White House chief of staff: 50 years of Israeli occupation must end
      White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough made it clear Monday that the crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations over the issue of a Palestinian state has not dissipated, despite efforts by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to clarify remarks he made late in the election campaign that no such state would be established on his watch.


    • The $450 an Hour Terror Industry Echo Chamber
      Matthew Levitt, a prominent figure in the Terror Industry, has been testifying in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev trial. He’s one of a number of noted figures who gets presented as experts at trials who doesn’t speak Arabic, who hasn’t bothered to learn Arabic over the course of years of this work.

      Yesterday, Levitt spent several hours explaining how the explanation Dzhokhar wrote on a boat in Watertown had to have come from Anwar al-Awlaki’s propaganda.

      Just before Levitt testified yesterday, he RTed an article describing him as the expert that would testify at Dzhokhar’s trial. As soon as he got done, he RTed several more articles about his own testimony, describing himself as an “expert” “decoding” the boat. And then, for good measure, he RTed a livetweet from his own testimony.

      Today, on cross, it became clear the Awlaki propaganda on Dzhokhar’s computer was all Levitt got from prosectors. He didn’t know how long it had been on Dzhokhar’s computer. Nor did he know what else Dzhokhar has read. He also doesn’t know much about Chechnya, except in the context of Jihad. And though Levitt testified yesterday that there always must be a “radicalizer,” he did not know, nor was he asked, to identify the “radicalizer” in Dzhokhar’s life.


    • In Defense of Doing Wrong
      I want to say that it’s the wrong answer to the wrong question. It’s the wrong answer because we all have a lot to hide. We all talk and behave scandalously, and if all that [information] were available to everybody, it would cause no end of grief. It’s the wrong question because, as you’ve heard from all three of my fellow panelists tonight, privacy isn’t fundamentally about secrecy. It’s about things like autonomy—we’ve heard dignity, liberty, power, control, and maybe we’ll talk about that later. - See more at: http://thepointmag.com/2015/politics/in-defense-of-doing-wrong#sthash.fQbKXkkE.dpuf


    • The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Prison


    • A Prosecutor Seeks Redemption. Can We Allow Prisoners the Same?
      BY NOW MANY have read and been moved by the extraordinary mea culpa published in the Shreveport Times by a man named Marty Stroud III, who more than thirty years ago sent Glenn Ford to die for a crime he did not commit.


    • NYT Reported Japanese Internment as 'Pioneering Chapter in US History'
      Reporter Lawrence E. Davies described the first internees as "weary but gripped with the spirit of adventure over a new pioneering chapter in American history." This rah-rah treatment continued throughout the article: The internees were said to have begun "assembling long before daylight near the Pasadena Rose Bowl, scene of many a great football game." Their destination was "a new reception center rising as if by magic at the foot of snow-capped peaks."

      Only two internees are quoted in the article. One, Arthur Hirano, a former New York City chef, says: “This is a wonderful place. We didn’t expect such fine treatment.” Another, Mike Nishida, who is scheduled to join the US military, says, “I'm going up there to do any job they put me on in the meantime.”




  • Internet/Net Neutrality





Recent Techrights' Posts

Getting the European Court of Justice to Annul the Illegal and Unconstitutional Unified Patent Kangaroo Court (UPC)
We're still working on it
They Tell Us Slop Replaces Workers, But the Reality Is, US Debt Has Surged 2,300 Billion Dollars in Six Months (the Economy is Collapsing)
Oligarchy already entertains the option of running away to (or colonising) some other planet without pitchforks and "unwashed masses"
 
Expensive errors: Forbes Gold price, $44 billion Bitcoin given away by Bithumb, South Korea
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 08/02/2026: Microsoft OSI (Openwashing Lobby) in Europe, Raised Against Social Control Media Provocateurs in EU
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The Open Source Initiative (OSI) Lobbies for Microsoft in the EU, Promoting Proprietary Lock-in
OSI pushing and selling Microsoft and GitHub. OSI is Microsoft front group.
Finland's Dependence on GAFAM (US) Needs to be Lessened, EU Must Follow This Path
It's unwise to make one's entire national infrastructure (computer systems) dependent on a regime which compares its black citizens to monkeys and assassinates nonviolent dissenters
Links 08/02/2026: Microsoft GitHub as Burden on Developers and "The Chomsky Epstein Files"
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Forbes: BitCoin, Cryptocurrency pages removed from investment database, links stop working
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Bitcoin warning followed immediately by network outage
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Money Funneled to Protection of Software Freedom, But Nothing Really Lost
Crossposted from personal site
Mozilla Firefox Sinks to Just 1.5% in the United States
According to analytics.usa.gov
We're Still Fast
The site is even faster than the BBC's despite being on shoestring budget with only a small technical team
Gemini Protocol is Not a Waste of Time of Effort
We see more and more GNU/Linux- or BSD-focused bloggers turning to Gemini
Our Gemini Protocol Support Turns 5 Today
today is a rare anniversary for us
In Today's World, One Must be Tough and Principled to Get Ahead Morally
But not financially (sellouts)
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 07, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, February 07, 2026
The Right Wing in the United States Does Not Support Free Speech, It Supports Its Own Speech
Free speech is often opposed by those who also oppose Free software
IRC is a Lot Better Than Social Control Media (They're Not the Same at All)
A good social analogy for IRC is, there are many buildings with a party in each building
Microsoft 'Open' 'AI' is 'Dead Meat'
Or 0xDEADBEEF as some geeks might call it
When Identifying "Low Performers" and "PIPs" Aren't About Improving Performance But Reinforcing a Clique in Your Company/Organisation
It's very troubling to see once-respectable brands like IBM and institutions like the EPO resorting to this
Slop and Flop (IBM), Slopfarms and Hybrids (Linuxiac)
Did Bobby Borisov assume he would never get caught?
Crowdfunding vs Bitcoins: donations are better investment than digital tulip mania
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 07/02/2026: Misinformation by Slop, Overrated Slop Causes Stock Market Panic
Links for the day
Gemini Links 07/02/2026: Diode Function Generators and Panic Over Buzzwords and Slop
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A Can of WORMS - Part III - Envying the Influence and Accomplishments of RMS, Socially Deleterious Attacks on Popular Movements
the actions are deliberate and coordinated, not some 'organic' or grassroots behaviour
Crisis teams assembled as financial regulators anticipate Bitcoin implosion
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Reddit as a Hive of Trolls, Social Control Media Curated (Many Voices Censored and Banned) by Marketing Firm of GAFAM
Typical Reddit
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Delusion - Part III - Women Failing Women to Help Violent Americans From Microsoft
Summed up, SRA will gladly prioritise the "legal industry" over women strangled, raped etc
The World Gets Smaller, as Does Its Real Economy ('Human Resources') and So-called 'Natural Resources' (What Humans Call the Planet)
Don't talk about "AI"
Converting FOSDEM Talk on Software Patents in Europe Into Formats That Work for "FOS" and Don't Have Software Patent Traps
transcoded version of the video
Links 07/02/2026: More White House Racism, "Europe Accuses TikTok of Addictive Design"
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Silent Mass Layoffs: It's Not the Revolution, It's the Loophole and the Hack ("Low Performers" or "Underperformers")
Layoffs by another approach
Mark Shuttleworth (MS) Pays Salaries to Microsoft (MS) Employees
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Biggest "AI Companies" (Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft) Borrowed (Additional Debt) About $100,000,000,000 in a Year
Who will be held accountable for all this?
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In 2009 Microsoft Was Valued at ~150 Billion Dollars, Now They Tell Us Microsoft Lost ~1,000 Billion Dollars in Value. Does That Make Sense?
Or Microsoft lost 700 billion dollars in "value" in less than two weeks
PIPs and Silent Layoffs at IBM (and Red Hat) Still Going on, It's "Forever Layoffs" (to Skirt the WARN Act)
American workers out
Over at Tux Machines...
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IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 06, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, February 06, 2026
Stressful Times for Team Campinos ("Alicante Mafia") at Europe's Second-Largest Institution
Keep pushing
Growing Discrimination in the European Patent Office (EPO)
it's a race to the bottom, basically
Google News Drowning in (or Actively Promoting) Slopfarms Again
LLM slop is a nuisance
Microsoft Stock Crashed When Alleged Vista 11 Numbers Disclosed
And last summer Microsoft indicated that it had lost 400 million Windows users
Gemini Links 07/02/2026: "Choosing a License for Literary Work" and "Social Media Is Not Social Networking (Anymore)"
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Gemini Links 06/02/2026: Git and Email Patches; MNT Pocket Reform
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Geminispace Net Growth in 2026 About a Capsule a Day
A pace like this means net gain of ~300 per year, i.e. about the same as last year
It's Not About Speed, It's About the Message (or Its Depth)
Better to write news than to just link to news if there's commentary that the news may merit
Benjamin Henrion Warned About the Illegal and Unconstitutional Unified Patent Court (UPC) in FOSDEM 2026
Listen to Benjamin Henrion
Economies Crashing Not Because of Slop Improving 'Efficiency' (That's a False Excuse) and 'Expensive' (Read: Qualified) Workers Discarded in Race to the Bottom
Actual cocaine addicts are pushing out moral people
IBM's CEO Speaks of Layoffs, Resorts to Mythical (False) Excuses
This has nothing to do with slop
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Does Linux Torvalds Regret Having Dinners With Bill 'Russian Girls' Gates?
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IBM: Cheapening Code, Cheapening Staff, Cheapening Everything
IBM's management runs IBM like it's a local branch of McDonald's. IBM is a junk company with morbid innards.
GNU/Linux Measured at 6% in One of the World's Largest Nations
Democratic Republic Of The Congo
Linux Foundation Operative Says We and Our Software All "Owe an Enormous Debt of Gratitude" to a Software Patents Reinforcer
The only true solution is to entirely get rid of all software patents
Mobbing at the European Patent Office (EPO) - Part IV - EPO Can Get Away With Murders, Suicide Clusters, and Systematic and Prolonged Bullying by 'Team Campinos' ("Alicante Mafia" as Insiders Call It)
Nobody in the Council or the EU/EC/EP gives a damn as long as laws are broken to fabricate 'growth'
Jeff Bezos Isn't Just Killing the Washington Post, He's Killing Thousands of News Sites/Newsrooms (in Dozens of Languages) That Rely on It for Many Decades Already
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Central Staff Committee Confronted António Campinos for Giving His Cocaine-Addicted Friend Over 100,000 Euros to Do Nothing, Just Pretend to be Ill, While Cutting the Salaries of Everybody Else
"On the agenda: Amicale framework & Financial assistance for courses"
How to Win Lawsuits in 5 Simple Steps
Keep issuing threats every week and send 60 kilograms of legal papers to the target
More Than 99% of "AI" Companies Aren't AI, They're Pure BS
We need to discard those stupid debates about "AI" and reject media that gets paid to participate in such overt narrative control (manipulation like The Register MS)
AI Used to Save Lives, Now "AI" is a Grifting Scheme That Burns the Planet and Will Crash the Economy
What the media calls "AI" (it gets paid to call it that) is the same stuff that could instead be dubbed "algorithms"
Living in Freedom When 'False Flag Operations' Like EFF Get Captured by Billionaires to Take Freedom Away
There are many ways to think of Software Freedom
Amutable is a Microsoft Siege Against Freedom in GNU/Linux, Just Like the People Who Brought You 'Secure Boot' Controlled by Microsoft
Do whatever is possible to avoid Amutable and its "products"
Growing Focus on Publication
Over the past ~10 days we always served more than a million Web hits per day
"Going to be a large number of Microsoft layoffs announced soon"
Everybody knows a giant wave of layoffs is coming Microsoft's way
End of the 'GPU Bubble' and NVIDIA Finally Admits It Won't Bail Out Microsoft OpenAI Anymore
circular financing (financial/accounting fraud)
Corrupt Media Won't Hold Accountable Rich People for Role in Pedophilia
Journalistic misconduct or malpractice is a real thing
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 05, 2026
IRC logs for Thursday, February 05, 2026
EPO Management ("Alicante Mafia") Not Properly Sharing Information on Scale of Strikes by EPO Staff
disproportionate (double) deductions in salaries against people who participate in strikes, which are protected by law
Gemini Links 06/02/2026: Slop/Microslop, Home Assistant, and Valid Ex Commands
Links for the day
Blackmail evidence: Debian social engineering exposed in ClueCon 2024 talk on politics
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Bitcoin crash: opportunity or the end game?
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Changes at the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
SRA is basically a waste of money
Claims That IBM Will Lay Off 20% (or 15%) of Its Workforce This Year Unless It Finds a Way to Push Them All Out by Threats, Shame, Guilt
Where are the articles about IBM layoffs?
IBM Isn't a Serious Company Anymore, It's a Ponzi Scheme Operated by a Clique and It Misuses Companies It Acquires to Prop Up or Legitimise the Scheme
IBM seems like it's nothing but a "Scheme"
Google News Drowning in Slop About "Linux" (Slopfarms Galore)
Google should know better than to link to any of these slopfarms, but today's Google is itself a pusher of slop