Dutch Law Would Authorize Police To Hack Into Foreign Computers And Phones: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

When we wrote last year about a Dutch idea to give police there the power to break into computers -- even those located abroad -- we and many others pointed out a number of deep flaws with the plan. Undeterred, the Dutch government seems to be going ahead with the scheme, as Bits of Freedom explains: 

On Techdirt.

Could You Adopt a Hacking Business Model?

Once more there is a lot of heated discussion about what constitutes a “real” open source business model – that is, one that remains true to the spirit of open source, and doesn't just use it as a trendy badge to attract customers. But such business models address only a tiny part of running a company – how it generates money. What about the many other aspects of a firm?

That's precisely what The Hacking Business Model seeks to spell out.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Time to Re-Boot British Politics

So, the forces of stupidity, arrogance, greed, laziness and downright bloody-mindedness prevailed, and the Digital Economy Bill has turned from an ugly, misbegotten chrysalis into a ragged, leaden-winged butterfly, the Digital Economy Act. But along the way, a real, terrible beauty was born.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Behold the Biohackers

This is clearly getting serious:

Katherine Aull's laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lacks a few mod cons. "Down here I have a thermocycler I bought on eBay for 59 bucks," she says, pulling out a large, box-shaped device she uses to copy short strands of DNA. "The rest is just home brew," she adds, pointing to a centrifuge made out of a power drill and plastic food container, and a styrofoam incubator warmed with a heating pad normally used in terrariums.

In fact, Aull's lab is a closet less than 1 square metre in size in the shared apartment she lives in. Yet amid the piles of clothes she recently concocted vials of an entirely new genetically modified organism.

There's no stopping this now; great and terrible things will come of this....

Follow me on Twitter @glynmoody

Haque on Hacking Economics

And yes, it's all about openness, collaboration and respect:

companies who can build authentic, honest, open, collaborative relationships with consumers are significantly more profitable (and sustainably profitable) than companies who treat consumers deceptively, antagonistically, and manipulatively.

Why Linux is Great, Part 9392

What makes the code in the kernel so great is not that it goes in perfect, it's that we whittle all code in the treee down over and over again until it reaches it's perfect form.

So says Dave Miller, and he should know.

Will the Next Linus Be Female?

Here's a classic story.

Hacker gets tired of missing functionality; hacker thinks "it can't be that hard"; hacker takes a bit of open source code as a starting point, knocks up something over the weekend; next day, the revolution begins - in this case, being able to access Second Life from a browser (that is, without needing the stonking SL client or upmarket video cards).

But where things get even more interesting is that the hacker in this case is just 15 - and female. Katharine Berry's blog posting on her AjaxLife hack is here, and there's already an interview with her. Let's hope she isn't too put off by the media circus that is sure to descend on her (not me) to carry on honing the code.

Happy hacking.

BeThere? I'd Rather BeSquare

I've sometimes been vaguely tempted by BeThere's promises of "up to 24 Meg download" speeds. No more, if this is how it treats someone pointing out a serious vulnerability in its operations:

A 21-year-old college student in London had his internet service terminated and was threatened with legal action after publishing details of a critical vulnerability that can compromise the security of the ISP's subscribers.

BeThere took the retaliatory action four weeks after subscriber Sid Karunaratne demonstrated how the ISP's broadband routers can be remotely accessed by anyone curious enough to look for several poorly concealed backdoors. The hack makes it trivial to telnet into a modem and sniff users' VPN credentials, modify DNS settings and carry out other nefarious acts.

Here's a simple explanation: if someone exploits your vulnerability, they are crackers and deserve punishing; if someone points out your vulnerability so you can fix it and protect yourself, they are hackers and deserve rewarding. (Via TechDirt.)

We Have Lost the War...

...the techno-war for liberty, that is. At least, that's what the venerable Computer Chaos Club (CCC) reckons:

"We have lost the war ," is what it all boils down to according to the assessment delivered by Frank Rieger, the former CCC spokesman, at the last CCC Congress in Berlin in December. "We are living in that dark world of sci-fi novels we always sought to forestall. The police state is now."

...

The new technologies have opened up a plethora of possibilities for collecting, storing and linking data. The desire to data mine these huge international repositories has become ever more intense, especially since 9/11. Scared people make for pliable populations and governments have no hard time getting their hands on the information they want. Whence the relinquishing of civil rights and liberties is taking place - in a creeping fashion.

The CCC has not been able to prevent these developments. But it saw them coming. Since its founding on September 12, 1981 the Club has sought to be more than a kindergarten for nerds and geeks. Very early on the CCC showed a commitment to educating the public. It has repeatedly warned of the downsides of the technology it so fervently embraces. An attitude that may appear a little schizophrenic but that is nonetheless indispensable.

Enter the Chumby

A glorified alarm clock is not what you might expect to meet on this blog, but Chumby is rather different:

Introducing chumby, a compact device that can act like a clock radio, but is way more flexible and fun. It uses the wireless internet connection you already have to fetch cool stuff from the web: music, the latest news, box scores, animations, celebrity gossip...whatever you choose. And a chumby can exchange photos and messages with your friends. Since it's always on, you’ll never miss anything.

Interesting that wireless can now be taken for granted. Even more interesting that the system is hackable in just about every sense:

For the true geek, the electronics are "hackable," the case is removable. Your chumby can look however you like (bling-it-yourself or choose from 3rd party options). Stay tuned — who knows what creative programmer-types will make it do?

And, of course, the code is hackable too. And hackable code means one thing: a GNU/Linux core.

Whether the world needs Chumbies remains to be seen, but it's clear that the world needs free software to make them. (Via TechCrunch.)