Today in Techrights

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 20, 2025

Updated This Past Day

1. Very Shallow LLM Slop for IBM Disguised as Journalism About a "Plan to Train 5 Million Learners in India by 2030" (Unverified Figures With Very Distant Future Date/Year)

   The Web has become somewhat of a laughing stock

2. 'Linux' Foundation: The Foundation Has Almost Nothing to Do With Linux, It Just Misuses the Name "Linux"

   Only a tiny portion of the Foundation's budget actually goes to Linux

3. Red Hat Senior Engineering Manager Leaves (or Gets Pushed Out by IBM) After Nearly 20 Years at the Company

   The recent massive wave of IBM layoffs impacted Red Hat and so will the next (impending, Q1) wave

4. Nearly Three Months Have Passed Since EPO Cocainegate and the EPO's Management Still Refuses to Talk About It

   But it's clearly aware of it

5. In Activism and Journalism, If You're Ineffective They Ignore You, When You Become Effective They Stalk and Harass You, Failing That They Threaten You

   "the Wikileaks effect"

   New

6. Barbados: Significant Gains for GNU/Linux

   over 5% if one counts ChromeOS as well

7. Austria vs GAFAM

   another win against GAFAM

8. Microsoft Has Purchased Another Linux Foundation Seat

   From the latest (new) report

9. No Electronics, No Clocks, No Phones

   We're meant to think that more gadgets will make life easier

10. Gemini Links 19/12/2025: Great Website Rebuild of 2025 and Running OpenBSD in a Hostile Environment

    Links for the day

11. Google News Helps Slopfarms (What's Left of Them)

    Lately we've noticed that nothing in the RSS feeds we follow is burping out slop

12. Links 19/12/2025: Privacy International's Reports and Russian Assets in EU

    Links for the day

13. Today, The Register MS is Parroting Marketing Spam for Ponzi Scheme ("AI") in Exchange for Money

    The Register MS should be held accountable when the bubble pops

14. Why We Got Told by Insiders That Almost Everyone at EPO Reads Techrights and Many at IBM Track IBM RAs Via Techrights

    In a nutshell, we cover topics almost no other site dares touch

15. IBM Research Shutting Down Labs, Lots of Workers Laid Off (Even Days Before Christmas in Devout Catholic Country)

    Heartless, soulless company

16. Links 19/12/2025: Windows TCO in NHS, "Locked Out of Apple Account Due to Gift Card"

    Links for the day

17. Richard Stallman Explains Why Software Patents Are Really Bad and Very Much Unnecessary

    "The relationship between patents and products varies between the fields"

18. The Copycats of the FSF Have Serious Problems

    If you care about Software Freedom, then support the real thing

19. Once Again, Just in Time for Christmas, UEFI and Its Boot System Turn Out to be a Giant Bug Door (Also a Microsoft Remote Kill Switch)

    This industry - even academia - has been deeply compromised

20. Google Has Begun Linking to commandlinux.com in Google News, But It Seems to be a Slopfarm

    This is not innovation, it's sloppiness, laziness, and a modern form of plagiarism

21. Microsoft Reportedly Tries to Cause Top-Level Managers to Resign If they Don't Participate in the Ponzi Scheme

    Apparently even executives who don't play along are given marching orders

22. Microsoft, Over 120 Billion Dollars in Debt, Prepares Next Round of Mass Layoffs (After Christmas)

    Microsoft is not managing to pay back its debt

23. Links 19/12/2025: Scam Altman Humiliates Self in Public, Climate Alarm Sounded, Egyptian Economist Convicted Over "Social Control Media Posts Critical of the Government"

    Links for the day

24. You Can Get Work Done With Lean Software

    obviously!

25. "The War on Privacy" is Real

    "He Built a Privacy Tool. Now He’s Going to Prison."

26. The Cost of Being Influential

    The "tech world" and its monopoly enforcer (patent system) are sleepwalking into autocracy

27. More Shutdowns and Layoffs at IBM

    if someone covers correct but suppressed information, then people will make an effort to find it

28. Over at Tux Machines...

    GNU/Linux news for the past day

29. IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 18, 2025

    IRC logs for Thursday, December 18, 2025

30. EPO Violates Laws to Profit More From Invalid Patents, Then Cuts the Budget Allocated to Staff

    taking away what was already promised to staff

31. Only a Few Examples of LLM Slop Found, Mostly via Google News

    Is it fair to say that sites learned LLM slop does not offer any real value?

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    The corresponding text-only bulletin for Friday contains all the text.

    Top-read articles (excluding bot/crawler visits):

    Span from 2025-12-13 to 2025-12-19

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    686	/n/2025/12/13/LLM_Slop_Becoming_Rarer.shtml
    681	/n/2025/12/15/Another_AI_Slop_Use_Cases_Turns_Out_to_be_a_Fraud.shtml
    659	/n/2025/12/14/Links_14_12_2025_The_Slop_of_Things_to_Come_Goldman_Sachs_Nervo.shtml
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    625	/n/2025/12/16/A_Lot_of_People_Don_t_Want_Smart_Things_That_Spy_Stop_Working_C.shtml
    620	/n/2025/05/24/Free_Software_as_a_Culture_of_Resistance.shtml
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    588	/n/2025/12/15/EPO_People_Power_Part_XII_The_Mobbing_Got_So_Bad_People_Were_Un.shtml
    585	/n/2025/12/15/Over_at_Tux_Machines.shtml
    585	/n/2025/12/15/The_Register_MS_Has_Just_Been_Paid_to_Promote_the_Ponzi_Scheme_.shtml
    582	/n/2025/12/16/Links_16_12_2025_More_GAFAM_Now_Amazon_Layoffs_and_iRobot_Chapt.shtml
    579	/n/2025/12/13/Over_at_Tux_Machines.shtml
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    567	/n/2025/12/17/Links_17_12_2025_User_Data_Compromised_in_SoundCloud_and_Effort.shtml
    558	/n/2025/12/16/Google_News_Still_Has_an_LLM_Slop_Problem_With_Slop_Images_Too_.shtml
    557	/n/2025/12/15/They_Say_Rules_Are_Made_to_be_Broken_at_Microsoft_That_Became_a.shtml
    556	/n/2025/12/17/Firefox_and_Mozilla_Commit_Suicide_With_Slop_Market_Share_Falls.shtml
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    525	/n/2025/12/15/Breaking_Your_Proprietary_Router_in_the_Name_of_Security.shtml
    525	/n/2025/12/17/Still_Not_Enough_for_Slopwatch.shtml
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