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Links 25/3/2017: Maru OS 0.4, C++17 Complete





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Contents





GNU/Linux



Free Software/Open Source



  • Communities of Communities: The Next Era of Open Source Software
    We are now about 20 years into the open source software era. You might think that open source simply means publishing the source code for something useful. While this is correct by definition, the most important component of any open source project is its community and how it works together.

    Open source projects are not isolated islands. In fact, it’s common for them to depend on each other. As new projects are created, it is also common that members come from related projects to work on something new. Apache Arrow is an example of a new project that worked across many related projects, creating a new community that from the beginning knew it needed to build a community of communities.


  • 9 Open Source Storage Solutions: A Perfect Solution To Store Your Precious Data
    Whatever business nature you have, there must be some precious data which you want to store in a secured place. Finding a right storage solution is always critical for business, especially for small and medium, but what if you get a perfect solution at no cost.

    There is no doubt that business cant runs without data, but while looking for a solution, you might need to spend a fortune to cover all your storage requirements. Open source tools come as the viable solution where you won’t spend money yet get a suitable solution to store your precious data. And don’t worry we will help you to find one of the best.


  • 15 Open Source Solutions To Setup Your Ecommerce Business
    In the past few years, there is a rapid growth in the online sales. According to a survey, more than 40% people are now shifted to online stores and majorly buying products from their smartphones and tablets.

    With the expeditious rise in the online marketplace, more business introducing online stores. For the big fishes in the industry, the expenses of setting up an online store is like spending peanuts, but for the small or startups, it appears to be a fortune.

    The smart move could be open source platforms, to begin with as they are not only free also reliable and scalable. One can set up the online store not only quickly as well as, in future if you want to add some of the functionalities, which are available with only premium, can be done by paying quite a small amount.


  • An Industry First: Teradata Debuts Open Source Kylo to Quickly Build, Manage Data Pipelines


  • Why You Should Consider Open Sourcing Your Software
    Free & Open source software have grown so rapidly in the last few years. Just compare the situation of being ignored and considered like a nerds-movement in the early 2000’s to the situation today in 2017. We surly made a huge advancement so far. Thanks to the amazing ecosystem of open source which links both communities and enterprises together.

    However, when it comes to individuals, a lot of people are hesitant when it comes to open-sourcing their software. They think that the “secret” behind it will be stolen. They think that they will be releasing their work “for nothing in return” when they do so. That’s definitely false.


  • Events



    • Speaking at FOSSASIA’17 | Seasons of Debian : Summer of Code & Winter of Outreachy
      I got an amazing chance to speak at FOSSASIA 2017 held at Singapore on “Seasons of Debian – Summer of Code and Winter of Outreachy“. I gave a combined talk with my co-speaker Pranav Jain, who contributed to Debian through GSoC. We talked about two major open source initiatives – Outreachy and Google Summer of Code and the work we did on a common project – Lumicall under Debian.


    • Notes from Linaro Connect
      The first of two 2017 Linaro Connect events was held March 6 to 10 in Budapest, Hungary; your editor had the privilege of attending. Reports from a number of the sessions there have appeared in separate articles. There were a number of discussions at the event that, while not being enough to fill an article on their own, were nevertheless worthy of some attention.

      Connect is an interesting event, in that it is a combination of an architecture-specific kernel developers' gathering and a members-only meeting session. Not being a member, your editor only participated in the former aspect. Sessions at Connect are usually short — 25 minutes — and focused on a specific topic; they also routinely run over their allotted time. There is an emphasis on discussion, especially in the relatively unstructured "hack sessions" that occupy much of the schedule. Many of the sessions are focused on training: how to upstream code, for example, or kernel debugging stories in Mandarin (video).


    • Your guide to LibrePlanet 2017, wherever you are, March 25-26
      The free software community encompasses the globe, and we strive to make the LibrePlanet conference reflect that. That's why we livestream the proceedings of the conference, and encourage you to participate remotely by both watching and participating in the discussion via IRC chat.

      If you are planning to attend LibrePlanet in Cambridge, we encourage you to register in advance through Tuesday morning at 10:00 EST (14:00 UTC) -- advance registration helps us plan a better event. Walk ups are also welcome. Students and FSF members receive gratis admission.


    • IBM Interconnect 2017 first day keynote recap


    • Community Leadership Summit 2017: 6th – 7th May in Austin
      Secondly, the bulk of the event is an unconference where the attendees volunteer session ideas and run them. Each session is a discussion where the topic is discussed, debated, and we reach final conclusions. This results in a hugely diverse range of sessions covering topics such as event management, outreach, social media, governance, collaboration, diversity, building contributor programs, and more. These discussions are incredible for exploring and learning new ideas, meeting interesting people, building a network, and developing friendships.




  • Web Browsers



    • Mozilla



      • MUA++ (or on to thunderbird)


      • Caspia Projects and Thunderbird – Open Source In Absentia
        What does this have to do with Thunderbird? I sat in a room a few weeks ago with 10 guys at Clallam Bay, all who have been in a full-time, intensive software training program for about a year, who are really interested in trying to do real-world projects rather than simply hidden internal projects that are classroom assignments, or personal projects with no public outlet. I start in April spending two days per week with these guys. Then there are another 10 or so guys at WSR in Monroe that started last month, though the situation there is more complex. The situation is similar to other groups of students that might be able to work on Thunderbird or Mozilla projects, with these differences:1) Student or GSOC projects tend to have a duration of a few months, while the expected commitment time for this group is much longer.






  • BSD



    • Make Dragonfly BSD great again!
      Recently I spent some time reading Dragonfly BSD code. While doing so I spotted a vulnerability in the sysvsem subsystem that let user to point to any piece of memory and write data through it (including the kernel space). This can be turned into execution of arbitrary code in the kernel context and by exploiting this, we're gonna make Dragonfly BSD great again!




  • Licensing/Legal



    • OpenSSL Re-Licensing to Apache License v. 2.0

      The OpenSSL project, home of the world’s most popular SSL/TLS and cryptographic toolkit, is changing its license to the Apache License v2.0 (ASL v2). As part of this effort, the OpenSSL team launched a new website and has been working with various corporate collaborators to facilitate the re-licensing process.





  • Programming/Development





Leftovers



  • We need a software revolution for the greater social good
    Five years ago, tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously wrote, “Software is eating the world.” It’s hard to think of more prophetic words coming out of Silicon Valley, and new players that have software at their core continue to reinvent entire industries. Uber disrupting the taxi industry and Airbnb the hospitality industry are just two examples.


  • FedEx Caught Off-Guard By Browsers Blocking Flash, Will Give Customers $5 To Enable It
    FedEx will give customers that use the Chrome 56 and Safari 10 browsers or newer a $5 discount once they enable the Flash plugin. The offer comes after both Chrome and Safari have started blocking Flash content by default in the past few months.


  • Science



    • Robots are stronger, faster, more durable… and hackable
      We hear a lot about robots getting smarter as the AI juggernaut rolls on, but less about significant gains in strength and durability thanks to better electric motors and batteries.

      That growing physical prowess raises risks to people near them should something go wrong, which means it is more vital than ever that these devices, set to share our living and working spaces, remain entirely under our control.




  • Hardware



    • Five reasons why I’m excited about POWER9
      There’s plenty to like about the POWER8 architecture: high speed interconnections, large (and flexible) core counts, and support for lots of memory. POWER9 provides improvements in all of these areas and it has learned some entirely new tricks as well.




  • Security



    • Google Threatens to Distrust Symantec SSL/TLS Certificates


      Google is warning that it intends to deprecate and remove trust in Symantec-issued SSL/TLS certificates, as Symantec shoots back that the move is unwarranted.


    • Hackers Stole My Website…And I Pulled Off A $30,000 Sting Operation To Get It Back

      I learned that my site was stolen on a Saturday. Three days later I had it back, but only after the involvement of fifty or so employees of six different companies, middle-of-the-night conferences with lawyers, FBI intervention, and what amounted to a sting operation that probably should have starred Sandra Bullock instead of…well…me.



    • Google Summer of Code
      The Linux Foundation umbrella organization is responsible for this year's WireGuard GSoC, so if you're a student, write "Linux Foundation" as your mentoring organization, and then specify in your proposal your desire to work with WireGuard, listing "Jason Donenfeld" as your mentor.


    • Takeaways from Bruce Schneier’s talk: “Security and Privacy in a Hyper-connected World”
      Bruce Schneier is one of my favorite speakers when it comes to the topic of all things security. His talk from IBM Interconnect 2017, “Security and Privacy in a Hyper-connected World“, covered a wide range of security concerns.


    • [Older] Make America Secure Again: Trump Should Order U.S. Spy Agencies to Responsibly Disclose Cyber Vulnerabilities
      Last week, WikiLeaks released a trove of CIA documents that detail many of the spy agency’s hacking capabilities. These documents, if genuine (and early reports suggest that they are), validate concerns that U.S. spy agencies are stockpiling cybersecurity vulnerabilities. The intelligence community uses undisclosed vulnerabilities to develop tools that can penetrate the computer systems and networks of its foreign targets. Unfortunately, since everyone uses the same technology in today’s global economy, each of these vulnerabilities also represents a threat to American businesses and individuals. In the future, rather than hoard this information, the CIA and other intelligence agencies should commit to responsibly disclosing vulnerabilities it discovers to the private sector so that security holes can be patched.


    • Announcing Keyholder: Secure, shared shell access


      The new software is a ssh-agent proxy that allows a group of trusted users to share an SSH identity without exposing the contents of that identity’s private key.

      [...]

      A common use of the ssh-agent is to “forward” your agent to a remote machine (using the -A flag in the OpenSSH client). After you’ve forwarded your ssh-agent, you can use the socket that that agent creates to access any of your many (now unencrypted) keys, and login to any other machines for which you may have keys in your ssh-agent. So, too, potentially, can all the other folks that have root access to the machine to which you’ve forwarded your ssh-agent.


    • pitchfork
      After years of training journalists and NGOs communication and operational security, after years of conducting research into the tools and protocols used, it took some more years developing a reasonable answer to most of the issues encountered during all this time.

      In todays world of commercially available government malware you don't want to store your encryption keys on your easily infected computer. You want them stored on something that you could even take into a sauna or a hot-tub - maintaining continuous physical contact.

      So people who care about such things use external smartcard-based crypto devices like Ubikey Neos or Nitrokeys (formerly Cryptosticks). The problems with these devices is that you have to enter PIN codes on your computer that you shouldn't trust, that they are either designed for centralized use in organizations, or they are based mostly on PGP.




  • Defence/Aggression

    • Lawsuits blaming Saudi Arabia for 9/11 get new life

      Sovereign immunity usually protects governments from lawsuits, but the bill creates an exception that lets litigants hold foreign governments responsible if they support a terrorist attack that kills U.S. citizens on American soil.



    • Westminster killer left jail a Muslim - childhood friend [iophk: "UK jails are incubators for Islam"


    • Cornerstone of Afghan Reconstruction Effort — Roads — is Near-Total Failure
      One of the planned cornerstones of the 15+ year Afghan Reconstruction Effort was to be an extensive, nationwide network of roads.

      The United States’ concept was roads would allow the Afghan economy to flourish as trade could reach throughout the country, security would be enhanced by the ability to move security forces quickly to where they were needed, and that the presence of the roads would serve as a literal symbol of the central government’s ability to extend its presence into the countryside.


    • Right-Wing Foundation, Scary Nuke Maps Drive Narrative on North Korea ‘Threat’
      Tensions between the United States and North Korea are making their way back into the news after a series of missile tests and presidential Twitter threats. Meanwhile, a conservative think tank—previously thought all but dead—has seen a resurgence in relevancy, thanks to its alignment with Donald Trump. The result is that the Heritage Foundation has provided much of the narrative backbone for North Korean/US relations in the age of Trump, making the rounds in dozens of media articles and television appearances.

      Heritage talking heads have been featured in North Korea stories in the Washington Post (2/28/27, 3/19/17), New York Times (3/16/17), AP (3/19/17), Christian Science Monitor (3/17/17), Boston Herald (3/9/17), BBC (3/17/17), Fox News (3/10/17), CNN (3/15/17), MSNBC (3/19/17), CNBC (3/7/17), Voice of America (2/24/17) and Vox (3/17/17).

      The most prominent of Heritage’s experts is former CIA analyst Bruce Klingner, who plays the part of the Reasonable Hawk, insisting North Korea is “growing [its] nuclear and missile capabilities” and is an “existential threat to South Korea and Japan and will soon be a direct threat to the continental United States,” but opposes preemptive bombing or invasion until the threat is “imminent”—a term he never quite defines (but one, it’s worth noting, the current Secretary of State uses to describe the situation.)





  • Transparency/Investigative Reporting



    • INTERNATIONAL JOURNALISM PRIZE AWARDED BY MEXICO FOR JULIAN ASSANGE INTERVIEW
      John Pilger has been awarded the International Journalism Prize by the Press Club of Mexico in the XLIV National and International Competition of Journalism, founded in 1951 by Antonio Saenz de Miera. The citation reads, "The exclusive interview with WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, through which international public opinion was able to ascertain the extent of the key issues of the current political situation [is] journalism that allows people to defend themselves against powerful, clandestine forces."




  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature



    • Earth's worst-ever mass extinction of life holds 'apocalyptic' warning about climate change, say scientists

      According to a paper published in the journal Palaeoworld, volcanic eruptions pumped large amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, causing average temperatures to rise by eight to 11€°C.

      This melted vast amounts of methane that had been trapped in the permafrost and sea floor, causing temperatures to soar even further to levels “lethal to most life on land and in the oceans”.



    • TransCanada Drops Keystone XL NAFTA Lawsuit One Hour After Trump Approves Pipeline Project

      [...] Donald Trump reversed the Obama Administration’s rejection of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, and within the hour, TransCanada, the company behind the massive pipeline project, announced it will drop its $15 billion North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) complaint against the U.S. over the project’s rejection.

      [...]

      TransCanada dropped this NAFTA lawsuit only after Donald Trump caved on his demand that Keystone XL will be built with American steel.







  • Finance

    • Singapore will ratify Trans-Pacific Partnership: PM Lee [iophk: "stupid and dangerous for all"

      Singapore will push forward with ratification of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), said Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Friday (24 March), at the end of a four-day official visit to Vietnam.

    • Pay crash expected in online gig economy as millions seek work

      The report argues that because only a handful of countries are responsible for the demand in digital work, concentrated mostly in North America and western Europe, it should be these countries that enforce a minimum standard. That way, workers would have their rights protected regardless of their location.



    • Guy Who Wants Everyone To Believe He Created Bitcoin, Now Patenting Everything Bitcoin With An Online Gambling Fugitive
      As you may recall, there was a giant fuss last year, when an Australian guy named Craig Wright not only claimed that he was "Satoshi Nakamoto" -- the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin -- but had convined key Bitcoin developer Gavin Andresen that he was Nakomoto. That was a big deal because Andresen was one of the first developers on Bitcoin and regularly corresponded with Nakamoto (Andresen's own name sometimes popped up in rumors about who Nakamoto might be). Even with Andresen being convinced, plenty of others soon picked apart the claims and found the claims severely lacking in proof.

      Then, last summer, Andrew O'Hagan published an absolutely massive profile of Wright that only served to raise a lot more questions about Wright, his businesses, his claims to having created Bitcoin, and a variety of other things. However, as we noted at the time, buried in that massive article was a bizarre tidbit about how Wright was actively trying to patent a ton of Bitcoin related ideas. As we noted, the article stated that Wright's plan was to patent tons of Bitcoin stuff, reveal himself as Nakamoto and then sell his patents for a billion dollars.


    • Ukip's only MP Douglas Carswell quits party
      Ukip’s only member of parliament, Douglas Carswell, has quit the party to become an independent MP, prompting a backlash from within Ukip and among its supporters.

      Carswell, who defected from the Conservative party to Ukip in August 2014, said he was leaving “amicably, cheerfully and in the knowledge that we won”.

      He said he would not be standing down before the next general election, and claimed there was no need for a byelection because he was not joining another party. Ukip, he added, had achieved its founding aims with the vote to leave the EU. “After 24 years, we have done it. Brexit is in good hands,” he said.


    • Tens of thousands march against Brexit
      Unite for Europe campaigners marched through central London to Westminster, the scene of floral tributes to those killed and injured in Wednesday’s atrocity.

      Opening the event, Alastair Campbell said: “Before we talk about Brexit, before we call on any of the speakers, we need to recognise that something really bad happened not far from here just the other day.”

      Campaigners stood with their heads bowed for a minute-long silence on Saturday, with the only sound the chiming of Big Ben.


    • Brexit talks will fail without compromise: José Manuel Barroso


      Brexit negotiations are on course to fail unless both Britain and the European Union ditch their winner-takes-all approach to the coming talks, the former president of the European commission José Manuel Barroso has said.

      With just days to go before Theresa May formally notifies Brussels of the UK’s intention to leave the EU, Jean-Claude Juncker’s predecessor said the two sides were playing a dangerous game.

      The UK’s prime minister has said she believes “no deal is better than a bad deal”, and some in her cabinet have openly talked up the prospect of walking away from the negotiating table.

      Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, has placed the settlement of Britain’s €£50bn in financial liabilities as the prerequisite for any progress. Last week the French former minister conjured up a vision of queues of Dover, nuclear fuel shortages and chaos for citizens as a consequence of Britain’s failure to live up to its responsibility.




  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics



    • Trump: Liar, Loser, Not A Leader
      The debacle of Trump and Ryan being unable to pass their “sicknesscare” bill through a Congress that the GOP controls is diagnostic.


    • Michael Moore warns Dems: Now is not the time to gloat

      "This is not the time for the Democrats to gloat," Moore said. "This is the time we have to now double down. [...]"



    • The Political Economy of ‘Moral Authority’
      The implication of this phrase, of course, is that the United States derives its greatness from a presumed moral authority. Corporate media are now sounding the alarm that the US’s moral authority is suddenly under attack by the Trump administration.


    • Black Man Stabbed to Death by White Supremacist–Then Smeared by Media


      According to police, white 28-year-old Maryland man James Harris Jackson took a Bolt bus up to New York City Friday for the express purposes of killing black men and did just that, stabbing 66-year-old Timothy Caughman in Hell’s Kitchen Monday night. Police say the suspect, an ex-military member of a white supremacist hate group, asked police to arrest him, warning he would attack again if they didn’t.


    • Dan Goldberg on Neil Gorsuch, Marianne Lavelle on Climate Change Denial


      This week on CounterSpin: When Neil Gorsuch’s name was first announced as a candidate for the Supreme Court, corporate media’s focus was on his “eloquence” and “intelligence.” The Washington Post published 30 articles, op-eds, blog posts and editorials in the 48 hours after the announcement—not a single one overtly critical or in opposition to his nomination. That changed somewhat when Gorsuch actually faced questions, but have we learned enough about the record and the ideas of the man who may get one of the most powerful jobs in the country? We’ll talk about Gorsuch with Dan Goldberg from Alliance for Justice.


    • Trump advisor Steve Bannon ordered conservative Republicans to vote for Trumpcare and they just laughed at him
      The general consensus seems to be that the failure to replace Obamacare is unexpectedly bad for both president and GOP: he's exposed as a crêpe leopard, and them as a bunch of unprincipled bickering morons with nothing to show for 7 years' empty ranting about Obamacare.


    • Advice for Trump: It’s All About the Infrastructure


    • You Can Be a Journalist, Too, Just Calling Names Like 7th Graders
      The New York Times employs a columnist named Charles Blow (above). Blow writes the same column twice a week, about 800 words of simple name calling directed at Trump. That’s what his job is. He gets paid a lot of money for something that must take him about 15 minutes to type up. It is an amazing world we’ve entered since November.

      [...]

      He continues to have explosive Twitter episodes — presumably in response to some news he finds unflattering or some conspiracy floated by fringe outlets — that make him look not only foolish, but unhinged.

      Trump’s assaults on the truth are not benign. Presidential credibility is American credibility. There is no way to burn through one without burning through the other.

      And when he’s not making explosive charges, he’s taking destructive actions.




  • Censorship/Free Speech



  • Privacy/Surveillance



    • Data Privacy: 7 Trackers Collecting Your Personal Data
      Whether we think about it or not, there’s an agreement at work behind the scenes when you visit some websites and use many popular apps. Call it the price of “free.” For every website visit and app use, you agree to give up certain personal data in exchange for whatever information or service you’re using.

      The problem isn’t only that these activities are taking place, it’s that many apps or services are lax in clearly disclosing that they’re monetizing your personal data. And in many cases, doing so without your explicit approval. We’re automatically being opted in when we agree to Terms of Service and Privacy Policies. Even the most conscientious reader can struggle to make sense of those agreements and the data collection activities they describe.


    • Ban on electronic devices Disproportional and Impractical


      In a written statement yesterday the Secretary of State for Transport, Chris Grayling, announced a ban on "Phones, laptops and tablets larger than 16.0cm x 9.3cm x 1.5cm in the cabin on flights to the UK from Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Tunisia."

      The United States issued a similar ban earlier in the day. It was not long after that that the UK followed suit, however the UK ban is structured around any inbound flights from the afore mentioned countries rather than specific airports, which is the case with the US ban.

      Whilst security is increased on these items coming into the UK, Chris Grayling does state that "These new measures apply to flights into the UK and we are not currently advising against flying to and from those countries." so anyone travelling to any of the countries on the list is still able to do so, and there is no change to the Foreign Office's advice against travelling there.
    • The Ad Industry Is Really Excited About Plans To Gut Broadband Privacy Protections
      The broadband, advertising and marketing industries are absolutely thrilled about plans to kill the FCC's new broadband privacy protections for consumers. Passed last year, the rules simply require that ISPs provide working opt-out tools, go to reasonable lengths to protect data and notify users of hack attacks, and be transparent about what data they collect and who they sell to. The rules also require that ISPs obtain opt-in consent (public enemy number one for marketing folks) for the collection and sale of more personal data like financial details or browsing histories.


    • How ISPs can sell your Web history—and how to stop them

      The House is also controlled by Republicans, but "we think we've got a shot at killing it off," Gillula said. The House is expected to vote on the measure next week, but there's still time to contact your legislator before a vote.

      "If we kill it [in the House], we don’t have to worry about any of this creepy tracking," Gillula said.



    • Encryption Workarounds Paper Shows Why 'Going Dark' Is Not A Problem, And In Fact Is As Old As Humanity Itself
      That analogy reveals something profound: that the supposedly new problem of "going dark" -- of not being able to find out information -- has existed as long as humans have been around. After all, there is no way -- yet, at least -- of accessing information held in a person's mind unless some kind of interrogation technique is used to extract it. And as the analogy shows us, that is exactly like needing to find some encryption workaround when information is held on a digital device. It may be possible, or it may not; but the only difference between the problems faced by those demanding answers thousands of years ago and today is that some of the required information may be held external to the mind in an encrypted digital form. Asking for guaranteed backdoors to that digital data is as unreasonable as demanding a foolproof method to extract information from any person's mind. We accept that it may not be possible to do the latter, so why not accept the former may not be feasible either?


    • Three privacy tools that block your Internet provider from tracking you

      Recently, the United States Senate saw fit to allow Internet Service Providers to sell your web browsing history and other data to third parties. The action has yet to pass the House, but if it does, it means anyone concerned about privacy will have to protect themselves against over zealous data collection from their ISP.





  • Civil Rights/Policing



  • DRM



    • It's happening! It's happening! W3C erects DRM as web standard
      The World Wide Web Consortium has formally put forward highly controversial digital rights management as a new web standard.

      Dubbed Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), this anti-piracy mechanism was crafted by engineers from Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, and has been in development for some time. The DRM is supposed to thwart copyright infringement by stopping people from ripping video and other content from encrypted high-quality streams.

      The latest draft was published last week and formally put forward as a proposed standard soon after. Under W3C rules, a decision over whether to officially adopt EME will depend on a poll of its members.



    • The End of Ownership
      The internet of things, End User License Agreements, and Digital Rights Management are increasingly being used to give electronics manufacturers control and ownership over your stuff even after you buy it. Radio Motherboard talks to Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz, authors of The End of Ownership about what we stand to lose when our songs, movies, tractors, and even our coffee makers serve another master. 




  • Intellectual Monopolies



    • Why You Should Care About The Supreme Court Case On Toner Cartridges

      [...] the crux of a Supreme Court case that will answer a question with far-reaching impact for all consumers: Can a company that sold you something use its patent on that product to control how you choose to use after you buy it?



    • Copyrights



      • Another Loss For Broadcast TV Streaming, And A Dangerous Shift Of Decision-Making Power
        Another court has ruled that streaming local broadcast TV channels to mobile devices is something that only traditional pay-TV companies can do—startups need not apply. The Ninth Circuit appeals court has ruled that FilmOn, an Internet video service, cannot use the license created by Congress for “secondary transmissions” of over-the-air TV broadcasts. That likely means that FilmOn and other Internet-based services won’t be able to stream broadcast TV at all. That’s a setback for local TV and the news, weather, local advertising, and community programming it carries.


      • Brazil Proposes New Digital Copyright Rules for the WTO
        Copyright rules don't belong in trade agreements—so where do they belong? For the most part, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is probably the right place; it's a fully multilateral body that devotes its entire attention to copyright, patent, and other so-called intellectual property (IP) rules, rather than including them as an afterthought in agreements that also deal with things like dairy products and rules of origin for yarn. Although we don't always like the rules that come out of WIPO, at least we can be heard there—and sometimes our participation makes a tangible difference. The landmark Marrakesh Treaty for blind, visually impaired and print disabled users provides a good example.

        But there's another multilateral international body that can also lay claim to authority over international intellectual property rules—the World Trade Organization (WTO). When the WTO first covered copyright and patent rules in a dedicated agreement called TRIPS, it was decried by activists as being far too strict. Today, ironically, those same activists (even EFF) often tout TRIPS as a more appropriate baseline standard for global IP rules, in contrast to the stricter (or "TRIPS-plus") rules demanded for inclusion in preferential trade agreements such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).


      • Netflix Gets Serious About Its Anti-Piracy Efforts


      • [Older] 'Plan B' to get Dotcom out of New Zealand drags on for 29 months

        An inquiry into deporting Kim Dotcom has been underway for 29 months and is set to be the longest, most drawn out investigation of its type.









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Resting Time
we deserve a short break - even if only for tomorrow
Wikileaks Revelations About the History of IBM and Its Role in the Cold War
IBM is still an ICBM company (to this very date)
Revisiting Julian Assange's Excellent Talk, His First Talk Since 2019 (Tactful and Almost Invulnerable to 'Cheap Shots')
Assange need not be politically-correct or self-censor
Windows Kills More Than Most Wars (But the Media Casually Ignores the Death Toll of Microsoft)
The bottom line is, many people are dying, they die due to Microsoft, and the media fails us by not informing us and failing to even name the principal culprit
Mozilla is GAFAM, HTTPS is Monopolies
Firefox used to boast that it would make the Web more accessible. Today's Mozilla is rowing in the opposite direction.
Gemini Links 03/10/2024: RetroChallenge and Change of Online Habits
Links for the day
Links 03/10/2024: Quantum Computer Vapourware (as Usual) and Samsung Layoffs
Links for the day
Links 03/10/2024: "Hey Hi" Scandals and Copyright/Trademark Disputes
Links for the day
Invidious Seems to be Nearing 'End of Life' After Repeated Crackdowns by Google/Alphabet/YouTube
To Free software users, YouTube ought to become a "no-no"
Links 03/10/2024: Climate Issues and Tensions in East Asia
Links for the day
Like a Marketing Department of Microsoft, Canonical Sells Back Doors and Surveillance as "Confidential" and "Hey Hi" (AI)
Notice how Canonical has made no statement critical of Microsoft for years
Gemini Links 03/10/2024: Frozen Tofu and SGI O2
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 02, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 02, 2024