Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 20/9/2016: GNOME 3.22 Preview, Absolute 14.2 Released



GNOME bluefish

Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Why China is the next proving ground for open source software
    Western entrepreneurs still haven't figured out China. For most, the problem is getting China to pay for software. The harder problem, however, is building software that can handle China's tremendous scale.

    There are scattered examples of success, though. One is Alluxio (formerly Tachyon), which I detailed recently in its efforts to help China's leading online travel site, Qunar, boost HDFS performance by 15X. Alluxio CEO and founder, Haoyuan Li, recently returned from China, and I caught up with him to better understand the big data infrastructure market there, as China looks to spend $370 million to double its data center capacity in order to serve 710 million internet users.


  • Samsung releases Open Source HbbTV media player
    Samsung Electronics announced that its Hybrid broadcast broadband TV (HbbTV) media player will be available as an open source project named HbbPlayer on github, an open source developer community. This will enable broadcasters and application developers who are writing HbbTV applications to test and validate them on a platform which can be implemented on any HbbTV 1.5-compliant TV.


  • How to make Open Source work for you
    Business today is all about adapting, pivoting and expanding quickly. With market conditions changing ever so rapidly, open source has become the key to helping companies modify their solutions while keeping their IT expenditures and development time to a minimum.

    Today, we're starting to see a new crop of developers who grew up using open source methodologies to develop open source components. As these developers make their way into enterprise IT departments, they're bringing their familiarity with and desire for open source with them.

    Accordingly, we've been seeing tremendous amounts of innovation come from open source projects. The focus of many open source projects is on helping to solve the complex technology challenges that most businesses face today such as how to work with big data and how to build the best cloud applications.

    So how can and should enterprises go about making open source work for them in the best way possible? Here are some factors to take note of.


  • Do you have a business or a hobby? Open source versus proprietary in the real world
    The open-source world is an endlessly interesting and exciting place for developers. The inventory of technologies is always growing, and bleeding-edge software platforms often debut in open source marketplaces. For these same reasons, however, enterprises can grow weary of open source, a seemingly endless tweaking and tinkering game to customize software for business purposes. Some say a proprietary solution that utilizes open source is preferable for businesses that need to make moves in real life.


  • Events



    • Manchester GNOME 3.22 Release Party – Friday 23rd Sept. @ MADLab [Ed: we're planning to be there.]


    • LAS (Libre Application Summit) GNOME Conference Takes Place September 19-23
      Today, September 19, 2016, was the first day of the first-ever LAS (Libre Application Summit) GNOME open source conference for GNU/Linux application developers.

      As you might have guessed already, the event is being organized by the GNOME Project, the same non-profit organization that's behind the popular GNOME desktop environment used in numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems around the globe, and an important part of the Free Software ecosystem.

      LAS (Libre Application Summit) GNOME conference's main goal is to encourage the growth of the Linux application ecosystem among small and medium-sized businesses, as well as various educational institutions. It also aims to expand the collaboration between the Linux kernel and major GNU/Linux operating systems.
    • Headed to LAS GNOME!
      By the time this gets posted on the blog, I will be headed to LAS GNOME. I'm really looking forward to being there!

      I'm on the schedule to talk about usability testing. Specifically, I'll discuss how you can do usability testing for your own open source software projects. Maybe you think usability testing is hard—it's not! Anyone can do usability testing! It only takes a little prep work and about five testers to get enough useful feedback that you can improve your interface.


    • Fedora 24 release party in Paris


    • HackMIT
      One of the core missions of a Fedora Ambassador is to represent the Fedora Community at events. On the weekend on September 17 and 18, 2016 I attended HackMIT as a representative of Fedora with Justin Flory. I was also honored to serve as a mentor to several teams.


    • Tickets for systemd 2016 Workshop day still available!


      We still have a number of ticket for the workshop day of systemd.conf 2016 available. If you are a newcomer to systemd, and would like to learn about various systemd facilities, or if you already know your way around, but would like to know more: this is the best chance to do so. The workshop day is the 28th of September, one day before the main conference, at the betahaus in Berlin, Germany. The schedule for the day is available here. There are five interesting, extensive sessions, run by the systemd hackers themselves. Who better to learn systemd from, than the folks who wrote it?


    • [LPC] Preliminary Microconference Schedule Up


      Every year we get a number of constraints on Microconferences which we try hard to accommodate. Accounting for all of those, we’ve put the preliminary schedule up here. If you notice any problems, please email contact@linuxplumbersconf.org and we’ll try to fix it

      Also note, this is preliminary, the Microconferences may still move around as we get requests to change them. Also note that the times of talks within Microconferences is highly likely to change (please see the MC leaders if you want this to change).


    • World Port Hackathon 2016 concludes successfully
      Last month, the fourth edition of the World Port Hackathon took place in Rotterdam. Several teams worked on problems identified by representatives of the port community in workshops leading up to the hackathon. This year's event was organised in co-creation with the Maritime and Port Authority (MPA) of Singapore.


    • Nexenta to Showcase Its Open Source-driven Software Defined Storage Solutions at OpenStack Days Nordic 2016




  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla



      • Firefox 49.0 Is Now Available
        While being delayed one week due to last-minute bugs, Firefox 49.0 is now available this morning.

        Firefox 49 ships with Linux Widevine support for handling this CDM similar to the existing Windows support for being able to play more protected HTML5 video content.


      • Mozilla emits JavaScript debugger for Firefox and Chrome
        Mozilla developers have released a new JavaScript debugger for Firefox.

        It's hoped the new "Debugger.html" will replace todays XUL-based debugger, which the project's Bryan Clark describes as “incredibly hard to change”.

        That may not necessarily happen, because Clark notes there's another team in Firefox that's working on refactoring the existing debugger code.






  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice



    • Oracle pledges continued support for Java and NetBeans
      Last week, Oracle disowned NetBeans. The company announced it was turning its Java-based NetBeans over to the Apache Software Foundation. Now, Oracle is changing its tune on both NetBeans and Java Enterprise Edition (JEE).

      Oh, don't get me wrong. Oracle still doesn't want to manage NetBeans. But Oracle claims it's not just dumping the NetBeans integrated developer environment (IDE) code. In an email, Bill Pataky, VP of Oracle Mobile Development Program and Developer Tools, told me, "Oracle is opening the governance model of NetBeans, not dropping support. Oracle has three products that depend on NetBeans." These are:




  • Education



  • Healthcare



    • How a free mobile app fights Ebola and other global epidemics
      Luckily an open medical record platform already existed: OpenMRS. In 2015, Save the Children International identified the need for medical data collection in the Ebola treatment centers and reached out to the OpenMRS community. Around the same time, Google Crisis Response and Doctors Without Borders were working on a similar project Project Buendia, an Android client built on top of an OpenMRS server.

      Founded in 2004, OpenMRS is a free, modular open-source electronic medical record platform used in more than 60 low- and middle-income countries. As the OpenMRS site explains, OpenMRS is a multi-institution, non-profit collaborative led by Regenstrief Institute, a medical informatics research leader, and Partners In Health, a Boston-based philanthropic organization with a focus on improving the lives of underprivileged people worldwide through health care service and advocacy.

      OpenMRS includes many features out of the box, such as a centralized dictionary that allows for coded data, user authentication, a patient repository, multiple identifiers per patient (i.e., patient can have multiple medical record numbers), data entry for electronic forms, data export, patient workflows (so patients can be put into programs and tracked through various states), relationships (to track relationships between two people, such as relatives and caretakers), and reporting tools. Add-on modules are also available or can be developed.




  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)



  • Funding



  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC



  • Licensing/Legal



    • LLVM contemplates relicensing
      The LLVM project is currently distributed under the BSD-like NCSA license, but the project is considering a change in the interest of better patent protection. "After extensive discussion involving many lawyers with different affiliations, we recommend taking the approach of using the Apache 2.0 license, with the binary attribution exception (discussed before), and add an additional exception to handle the situation of GPL2 compatibility if it ever arises."




  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration



    • Netflix's Meridian, an open source benchmark disguised as a original program
      The 12 minute long Netflix Original "Meridian" might not be the most exciting program they've ever released but it is among one of the most interesting. The program is available to anyone, via the Creative Commons license they attached to it, up to an including competitors such as iTunes and Hulu. This seemly strange move is because it is actually a benchmark for encoding streamed video and the more people that see it the more information Netflix and others will gain. It is originally filmed in 4k resolution at 60fps, which is far more than most displays can handle and much larger than residential data infrastructure is used to handling.


    • Vienna, KDZ release Open Government Implementation Model
      The City of Vienna and KDZ have released version 3.0 of their Open Government Implementation Model to the public in German as well as English. The Model describes five stages of a strategy as well as practical recommendations for politicians and administrations to implement open government.


    • Open Data



      • Tube Heartbeat open data project reveals pulse of London Underground
        Oliver O'Brien, a Senior Research Associate at University College London (UCL), has created a wonderful visualisation of the volume of passengers traveling the London Underground on a typical workday. His Tube Heartbeat project builds on the outcomes of the TfL Rolling Origin and Destination Survey (RODS), which was made publicly available under the UK Open Government Licence (OGLv2). It shows the numbers entering and exiting each of the 268 stations and the numbers traveling each of the 762 links in between.








Leftovers



  • Science



  • Hardware



    • We tear apart a hard drive and SSD to show you how they work
      It’s the day everybody dreads: You power up your PC and it sits dormant, failing to boot because your hard drive or SSD is dead. But after you stop cursing and reaching for your backups—you do create backups regularly, right?—you might as well make the best of things.

      There’s a world of small wonders hidden inside every storage drive if you take the time to dig around. Since storage drives die far less frequently than they used to, the opportunities for dissection are rare. So we’ve broken out our screwdrivers and dissected both a solid-state drive and a traditional hard drive for you, to reveal what makes them metaphorically tick. If your drives start actually ticking, back up your data now and start looking for a new one pronto.




  • Security



    • Security advisories for Monday


    • Why do we do security?
      I had a discussion last week that ended with this question. "Why do we do security". There wasn't a great answer to this question. I guess I sort of knew this already, but it seems like something too obvious to not have an answer. Even as I think about it I can't come up with a simple answer. It's probably part of the problems you see in infosec.

      The purpose of security isn't just to be "secure", it's to manage risk in some meaningful way. In the real world this is usually pretty easy for us to understand. You have physical things, you want to keep them from getting broken, stolen, lost, pick something. It usually makes some sort of sense.


    • New release: usbguard-0.6.2


    • DNSync


      While setting up my new network at my house, I figured I’d do things right and set up an IPSec VPN (and a few other fancy bits). One thing that became annoying when I wasn’t on my LAN was I’d have to fiddle with the DNS Resolver to resolve names of machines on the LAN.


    • The Cryptographic Key That Secures the Web Is Being Changed for the First Time
      Soon, one of the most important cryptographic key pairs on the internet will be changed for the first time.

      The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the US-based non-profit responsible for various internet infrastructure tasks, will change the key pair that creates the first link in a long chain of cryptographic trust that lies underneath the Domain Name System, or DNS, the "phone book" of the internet.

      This key ensures that when web users try to visit a website, they get sent to the correct address. Without it, many internet users could be directed to imposter sites crafted by hackers, such as phishing websites designed to steal information.


    • Oracle will acquire cloud security vendor Palerra [iophk: "one cannot vend security"]




  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature



    • IN PHOTOS: Copenhagen holds car-free day
      The car-free day began with the Copenhagen Half Marathon, where roughly 22,000 runners pounded the pavement for 21.0975 kilometres on a course that began at Fælledparken in Østerbro and wound its way through Nørrebro, Frederiksberg and the inner city.


    • Six US States Declare Emergency after Major Gasoline Pipeline Spill; Media Almost Silent
      The Colonial Pipeline spill has caused 6 states (Tennessee, Virginia, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and North Carolina) to declare a state of emergency. Gasoline (petrol) prices on the east coast are likely to spike. Yet, most puzzling is how this vast emergency and its likely effect on cost of living has gone unnoticed by mainstream media outlets. The pipeline is owned by Koch Industries: is this why the media is silent?


    • Haze from Indonesian fires may have killed more than 100,000 people – study
      A smog outbreak in Southeast Asia last year may have caused over 100,000 premature deaths, according to a new study released Monday that triggered calls for action to tackle the “killer haze”.

      Researchers from Harvard and Columbia universities in the US estimated there were more than 90,000 early deaths in Indonesia in areas closest to haze-belching fires, and several thousand more in neighbouring Singapore and Malaysia.


    • Study estimates 100,000 deaths from Indonesia haze
      Indonesian forest fires that choked a swath of Southeast Asia with a smoky haze for weeks last year may have caused more than 100,000 deaths, according to new research that will add to pressure on Indonesia's government to tackle the annual crisis.

      The study by scientists from Harvard University and Columbia University to be published in the journal Environmental Research Letters is being welcomed by other researchers and Indonesia's medical profession as an advance in quantifying the suspected serious public health effects of the fires, which are set to clear land for agriculture and forestry. The number of deaths is an estimate derived from a complex analysis that has not yet been validated by analysis of official data on mortality.

      The research has implications for land-use practices and Indonesia's vast pulp and paper industry. The researchers showed that peatlands within timber concessions, and peatlands overall, were a much bigger proportion of the fires observed by satellite than in 2006, which was another particularly bad year for haze. The researchers surmise that draining of the peatlands to prepare them for pulpwood plantations and other uses made them more vulnerable to fires.


    • Think California’s current drought is bad? Past incarnations have lasted hundreds of years
      California is now five years deep into one of its most severe droughts on record, and scientists are continually probing the different factors that affect the state’s climate, and how much those are related to the overall warming of the globe. Increasingly, this means looking back into the past for clues about how the region has changed over the last few thousand years and what influences might shape its future.

      In this connection, new research published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports suggests the Pacific Ocean may play a bigger role than anyone thought — and an unexpected one. Moreover, it suggests that massive long-term droughts can hit the region in conjunction with cycles of ocean warming and cooling — and that if these patterns continue to hold, another megadrought could lie in the future.

      “What this paper provides is a new analysis of the link between what happens in the ocean and what happens in terms of the water availability on the land,” said Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate system expert at Stanford University, who was not involved with the new study.






  • Finance



    • Zuckerberg's "compound" raises red flags for housing board
      An advisory board recommended a California city refuse Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's plans to demolish and rebuild four homes around his property because of privacy concerns, saying it won't support the building of a "compound."




  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics



    • Tom Watson plot to rid Labour of registered supporters in bid to stop Left-wing seizing leadership again


      Tom Watson has unveiled plans to axe Labour's registered supporters and give MPs a greater say in appointing the party's future leaders in a bid to prevent another Left-wing takeover.

      The deputy leader is also taking plans to Labour's ruling body today which would see the return of shadow cabinet elections in which more moderate MPs could enter Jeremy Corbyn's top team.


    • I Protected Hillary Clinton In The Secret Service - Here's Why Her 'Fainting' Video Really Scares Me
      I protected First Lady Hillary Clinton, President Bill Clinton, and their family while I served in the Secret Service Uniform Division as an officer from 1991-2003.

      By now, you have most likely seen the startling video of Hillary Clinton ‘fainting.’ Through the lens of my 29-year-career in The Service, I can see what a naked-eyed media pundit cannot: There is something seriously wrong with Mrs. Clinton.

      Pneumonia or overheating are highly suspect excuses and I’ll explain why.

      My analysis is not partisan. I cared for and protected the Clintons for many years. It was my duty to guard Mrs. Clinton in the Secret Service and I was so close to the First Family that the Supreme Court subpoenaed me to testify on the details of Bill Clinton’s late-term scandals.


    • What Are They Afraid Of?
      If all the major TV networks got together and decided to televise a presidential debate restricted to Republican nominee Donald Trump and Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, while barring Democrat Hillary Clinton, it would be recognized as an act of media bias. But what if the debates this fall are restricted to just Trump and Clinton? That, too, needs to be recognized as an intentional act of media exclusion.

      Since 1988, televised presidential and vice-presidential debates have been controlled by a private organization with no official status: the Commission on Presidential Debates. The commission grew out of a deal cut in the 1980s by GOP and Democratic leaders. Today, even though the U.S. public largely distrusts the two major parties’ presidential candidates, TV networks seem willing to let them again dictate the terms of debate, including who gets to participate.

      Presidential debates have been televised in every campaign since 1976. (They rarely happened before then; the Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 were an exception.) From 1976 through 1984, they were sponsored and run by the nonpartisan League of Women Voters. In 1980, the League insisted on including independent candidate John Anderson.

      In 1985, the national chairs of the Democratic and Republican parties, Paul Kirk and Frank Fahrenkopf, signed an agreement that referred to future debates as “nationally televised joint appearances conducted between the presidential and vice-presidential nominees of the two major political parties. . . It is our conclusion that future joint appearances should be principally and jointly sponsored and conducted by the Republican and Democratic Committees.”


    • How Trump May Win Ohio and Pennsylvania
      The every-four-years parade of east coast journalists trooping out into the Rust Belt of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia and their neighbors has begun.




  • Censorship/Free Speech



  • Privacy/Surveillance



  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Just under 30 percent of French Muslims reject secular laws - poll
      Just under 30 percent of France's 3 to 4 million Muslims reject the country's secular laws, according to an Ifop poll published by the French weekly Journal du Dimanche.

      When asked if they considered the Islamic legal and moral code of sharia to be more important than the French Republic's laws, 29 percent of respondents answered "yes."

      The poll found that 20 percent of male Muslim respondents and 28 percent of female Muslim respondents were in favour of the face veil, the niqab, and of the burqa which covers both face and body.

      Another 60 percent said they were in favour of letting girls and women wear a head scarf at schools and universities which is forbidden at France's secular public institutions.


    • 'No matter the price', Amal Clooney seeks justice for Yazidi sex slaves
      Islamic State militants who have enslaved, murdered and raped Yazidi women and children must be brought to justice, no matter the price, international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney said on Monday.

      Clooney, a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers in London, is on a mission to prosecute the Islamist group through the International Criminal Court for their crimes against the Yazidi community.

      She announced in June she would represent Yazidi women in Iraq who have been victims of sexual slavery, rape and genocide by Islamic State militants, also known as ISIS.


    • Black man shot by Tulsa police had hands ‘in the air,’ says pastor who reviewed video of the shooting
      A 40-year-old black man who was fatally shot by a Tulsa police officer had his hands up and appeared unarmed when one officer Tasered him and another fired at him, according to a local pastor who reviewed footage of the incident Sunday.

      The department hasn’t commented publicly on the video or said whether police recovered a weapon from the scene.

      Terence Crutcher died in the hospital Friday evening after being shot once, Tulsa police told the Associated Press. Police said two officers found Crutcher standing by his SUV, which had broken down in the middle of the road.

      As Crutcher approached the officers, he refused commands to raise his hands and instead reached into the vehicle, AP reported police saying. At that point, one officer fired a Taser and another fired a round, police told AP.




  • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • How Pirates Shaped The Internet As We Know It
      Today is "International Talk like a Pirate Day." While it's a lot of fun to act like a pirate, drink rum and catch up on Errol Flynn movies, piracy is also a serious issue with real economic and legal significance. As electronic devices become an increasingly ubiquitous part of our lives, the content we consume has moved from analog to digital. This has made copying – as well as pirating – increasingly easy and prevalent.

      Adding fuel to the flames of this rising "pirate generation" has been the content industry's recalcitrant and often combative attitude toward digital markets. Piracy, and the reactions to it, has had an immense impact on the daily lives of ordinary Americans, shaping their digital experience by determining how they can share, transfer and consume content.

      As soon as electronic storage and communication technology was sufficiently developed, digital piracy became accessible. Whether it's a song, movie, video game or other piece of software, you could suddenly reproduce it without having to steal it off a shelf or obtain any specialized machinery to counterfeit it. Additionally, if you wanted to listen to an mp3 of the latest Britney Spears album on your computer, there weren't many lawful options. This led to a surge in online piracy and helped foster a culture of online file-sharing.

      Out of this period came some ridiculous anti-piracy campaigns, but also major legislation both good and bad (such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Communications Decency Act) as well as legal battles that would set key precedents for how we access the digital world.


    • Making Sense of Modern Pornography
      Pornography helped shape the Internet—for instance, with its need for high-bandwidth technology—and it reflects and magnifies its trends. The triumph of porn has come at a cost to the industry itself, which can no longer produce a Jenna Jameson. Despite MindGeek’s near-monopoly of the tube sites (which, like other Internet platforms, are underregulated), their content is increasingly crowd-sourced. Mass production in the San Fernando Valley has been replaced by an amateur landscape in which everyone is a potential producer, and in which our fantasies and worst aspirations—our greed, our desire to humiliate, to dominate—are fed back to us in larger quantities than ever before. Decentralization hasn’t led to diversification (except at the margins, where buying ethical porn is like buying vinyl). Most porn remains conservative, brutal, and anonymous. It’s rapid-fire, often monotonous, and even if, or because, it does the trick, much of it is pretty depressing. It’s hard to see how local protests, however admirable, can resist a business model that already profits from decentralized, unregulated, amateur production. Except for the few companies that have profited from distribution, it’s unclear who makes money from porn, and how that money connects either to the work of performers or to how they are treated. With the decline of the industry, pornography, like the Internet itself, seems ever harder to control. Some will find that cause for horror, others, for celebration. Every era gets the porn it deserves. ♦


    • Open WiFi hotspots, city-WiFi and anonymity
      It is not reasonable to expect a café owner to keep a database of all local WiF users. That would require an extensive and very privacy sensitive register that cannot be tampered with and that can stand up to legal procedures. And still, it would do nothing to identify an individual user on the cafés single IP address. At least not with the relatively cheap and simple WiFi equipment normally used in such places.

      It all quickly gets complicated and expensive. This would effectively kill free WiFi with your coffee.

      The same general questions can be raised when it comes to Juncker’s free city WiFi. But there is a difference. Public sector operated WiFi will have more money and can apply common technical standards. As the number of users in a city-WiFi can be expected to be substantially higher that at a single café – there would not only need to be some sort of password protection but also individual user names, linked to personal identity. At least if you want to meet with the ECJ ambition to be able to identify single users.

      In both cases, anonymity will be more or less impossible.

      And when it comes to city-WiFi, we can expect various law enforcement and intelligence agencies to show a keen interest.




  • DRM



    • HP confirms that its printer firmware blocks some remanufactured cartridges
      EVIDENCE IS growing that printer maker HP put a 'self-destruct' protocol into a firmware update that would kill off printers using hooky cartridges.

      The news follows the revelation that thousands of people started getting the same error message about their cartridge on the same day, 13 September. Not a Friday.

      One third-party ink supplier carried out an investigation and it was discovered that the end-of-life date was programmed into a firmware update in March 2016.

      A statement to Dutch media explained that HP does indeed take steps to block cartridges "to protect innovation and intellectual property".

      However, this could have been handled better. HP could have, you know, told people and that.

      HP, one of the companies that has been forced to raise prices post-Brexit, has never made any secret of how it doesn't like third-party cartridges, but it really should have been explicit if it was going to do this.




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Trademarks



      • Colour combinations: getting back to WYSIWYG
        Guidance on protecting colour combinations in Europe has evolved over time. But in the light of recent decisions is further clarification needed? Roland Mallinson investigates




    • Copyrights



      • Copyright Is Not an Inevitable or Divine Right, Court Rules
        The Delhi High Court has delivered a landmark judgment which allows a local university copyshop to print course packs, using parts of commercial educational books. The judge held that copyright is not an inevitable or divine right. Copying for educational use is fair dealing, whether it's done by hand or automatically in an organized fashion.


      • Former Disney Digital Boss Says He “Loves Piracy”
        Entertainment industry workers usually speak about illegal downloading in the harshest of terms but for one former Disney executive, it has its upsides. Speaking at the huge All That Matters conference, Samir Bangara admitted that he "loves" piracy as it's a great indicator of content popularity.


      • Guy Arrested Over KickassTorrents Blocked From Talking To His US Attorney
        Just a few weeks ago, we had lawyer Ira Rothken on our podcast (it's a really great episode, so check it out if you haven't heard it yet). Rothken has been involved in lots of big copyright cases, but is probably most well-known these days as Kim Dotcom's US lawyer. In that episode we talked a lot about the Kim Dotcom situation, but also spent a fair amount of time on the case of Artem Vaulin, who was arrested in Poland for running the search engine KickassTorrents. The US is seeking to extradite him to stand trial in Illinois. On the podcast, Rothken expressed some concerns that he hadn't been able to speak directly to Vaulin and noted that he was working on it.
      • Former UMG Exec: Major Label Music Should Cost More And DMCA Safe Harbors Should Be Destroyed
        If you're going to argue against YouTube, Spotify, etc. and the supposed wholesale screwing of artists, it helps if:

        A. You're not a former member of an entity with decades of experience in screwing artists, and

        B. You have some grasp of basic economic concepts.

        Paul Young, a former director of licensing for Universal Music Group, has an op-ed posted at The Hill decrying the unfairness of streaming services and the wrongness of the DMCA. But any point he's trying to make is buried under ignorance and the demand that some artists be treated more equally than others.








Recent Techrights' Posts

[Meme] Driver Issues
Where do you want to drive today?
Another Dose of Fake 'Articles' About Linux
Don't give visibility to the nonsense of Microsoft
 
Dr. Andy Farnell's Article on Why Passwords Still Rock
"Seven for a secret never to be told"
The Problem Isn't That New Cars Use Electricity But That They Use Too Many Bits of Electronics
"...and proprietary software wrapped in proprietary APIs and protocols all without a modicum of compartmentalisation," an associate adds
We're Turning 18 in 30 Days
30 days from now the site turns 18
GNOME Foundation Says It's Nearly Broke (Again), It's Getting Rid of More People (Only Women Get the Boot), and It Will Improve Communications and Transparency Even Though It Secretly Ousts People From the GNOME Foundation Board (for Secret Reasons)
It only talks about this months later (under strict gag orders, only public shaming of a person)
Links 08/10/2024: Australian Fines for Twitter (X), Fake Patent Courts Still Not Scuttled
Links for the day
Gemini Links 08/10/2024: Guilt by Association, Workers vs Owners
Links for the day
Links 08/10/2024: War Updates, Samsung's Layoffs, and Gemini
Links for the day
Links 08/10/2024: Microsoft Deleting Office Documents Instead of Saving Them, "Threads Still Sucks"
Links for the day
gemini.techrights.org and techrights.org (Same Server, Not the Same Protocol)
We're reminding readers that everything in this site is fully accessible via gemini.techrights.org in Gemini Protocol
X Has Axed Itself. This is Great News and Further Affirmation of Everything We've Said About Social Control Media.
Don't waste any more time on social control media
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, October 07, 2024
IRC logs for Monday, October 07, 2024
Gemini Links 08/10/2024: Contingency Begets Complexity, Playing With Bezier Curves
Links for the day
Almost Half the Web Users Connecting to Your Site Are Using Linux
almost 1 in 2 Web-connected devices runs Android and about 2% run "proper" GNU/Linux
The Web Has Severe Amnesia Problems, But We Still Remember How Gilberto Gil Promoted Free Software in Brazil
The Digital Tipping Point (DTP) is years behind us now
Synthesised Voices Aren't a New Technology (the Hype Might Be, They Call It "Hey Hi" Now)
I still consider this an extension of the "hey hi" (AI) hype
LLM Hype is Already Descending, Apple Stopped Investing in the Money Furnace
Wall Street is a perverse force in the technology market, incentivising the most harmful (and mostly useless) things
Change Control and What Will Come After Git (If That's Still Possible at All)
It would be wrong to believe (at least misguided) Git can be a "standard" skill 30 or 50 years from now.
On the Web, HTTPS Has Actually Become a Privacy Problem (Broadcasting Usage/Access to the All-Seeing CA Eye). Geminispace Doesn't Have This Problem.
Down to 23 capsules: the rapid demise of Certificate Authority (CA) Let's Encrypt in Geminispace
Links 07/10/2024: Politics, Education, Wars, Financial Crunch
Links for the day
Munich Was Having Real Difficulties Moving From GNU/Linux to Windows
How many are still using GNU/Linux?
Links 07/10/2024:China’s 'Deflation' (Price Decreases), Brazil Still Bars Twitter ("X")
Links for the day
Links 07/10/2024: "Creative Computing" Turns 50, Long War in Middle East Turns 1
Links for the day
Gemini Links 07/10/2024: Luck and Dishonesty, Gaming Getting Worse
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 06, 2024
IRC logs for Sunday, October 06, 2024
EPO: We Give Recognition to Frauds
Good to see some frank recognition right there in the EPO's own Web site
Even Though We Don't Focus on statCounter for Now (Not Our Top Priority) GNU/Linux Reaches New Highs This Month:
We caught GNU/Linux at 4.86% before, but only temporarily
Links 06/10/2024: Ham Radio for Recovery, Health Problems Worldwide
Links for the day
Gemini Links 06/10/2024: Special Interest Galore and Religion
Links for the day
Keeping Control Out of Dictators' Hands
When people are just "numbers"...
Links 06/10/2024: Misinformation Growing on the Web, "Hey Hi" Hype Waning for Lack of RoI
Links for the day
[Meme] Years Have Passed and EPO Management Still Isn't Obeying a Ruling From a Court Regarding Communications Between Staff
Representatives talking to their staff is "privacy violation"?
Presentations of the Staff Union of the European Patent Office in Its Headquarters Tomorrow After Work
Annual General Meeting and reports
Gemini Links 06/10/2024: SSH Keys and Hobby Game Development
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, October 05, 2024
IRC logs for Saturday, October 05, 2024