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Last week I noted that the GNU project was celebrating
its 30th anniversary. I thought it might be interesting to hear what
Richard Stallman had to say about the environment in which he came up
with the idea for GNU. What follows is part of a long interview I conducted with him in 1999, when I was carrying out research for "Rebel Code". Most of this is unpublished, and offers what I hope is some insights into the hacker culture at MIT, where Stallman was working.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
At the beginning of this year, I discussed a report
written for the European Parliament, which warned that the US legal
framework allowed the authorities there to spy on EU data held by any US
cloud computing service. I also noted as an interesting fact that the NSA was building a huge new data centre, and that encryption might not offer the protection we thought.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
When the first Android smartphones came out, the consensus view among
certain "experts" was that Google didn't stand chance. The dogma was
that the iPhone was so perfect, and its hold on the market so strong,
that there was no way that Android could displace it. I think we can
say that hasn't proved to be the case:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Last week, I wrote an article pointing out that the NSA's
assault on cryptography, bad as it was, had a silver lining for open
source, which was less vulnerable to being subverted than closed-source
applications produced by companies. However, that raises the question:
what about the mobile world?
On
Open Enterprise blog.
One of the many valuable things that come out of the Linux Foundation
is an annual review of Linux kernel development. It's just released
the 2013 edition (freely available upon registration), and the news is resoundingly good. Here are the key points.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Remember the Digital Economy Act? Surely one of the worst pieces of
UK legislation passed - or rather, rammed through - in recent years, as
readers may recall. This was inspired (if that's the right word) by the
French Hadopi scheme brought in by Nicolas Sarkozy, whereby people were
threatened with being disconnected from the Internet if they were
accused of unauthorised sharing of digital files.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
A couple of weeks ago, Mike reported on the extraordinary turn of events
involving Edward Snowden's email supplier, Lavabit. The company's
owner, Ladar Levison, preferred to shut down the service rather than
hand over to the US government something that it wanted really badly --
exactly what, we don't know because of a gag order. We then learned that the mere act of shutting Lavabit down threatened to land Levison in big trouble anyway.
On Techdirt.
A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt noted that the Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, was angry
that the NSA had been reading her private emails and text messages, and
that as a result she was contemplating cancelling an imminent
high-profile state visit to the US. That was before the recent
revelations that the NSA had also engaged in industrial espionage
at the biggest Brazilian company, Petrobras, which seems to have been
the final straw: Rousseff has now formally "postponed" her trip to the
US, according to the Brazilian news site O Globo (original in Portuguese.)
On
Techdirt.
Last week we reported on the suspension
of Hadopi's one and only suspension, as France moved away from using
Internet disconnection as a punishment. That manifest failure of the
scheme that pioneered the three strikes approach makes a new paper from
the Australian scholar Rebecca Giblin, called "Evaluating graduated response",
particularly timely. As its title suggests, this is a review of the
three strikes approach in the light of the experiences in the five
countries that have adopted it: France, New Zealand, Taiwan, South Korea
and the UK -- even though the latter has still not put it into
practice.
On
Techdirt.
One of the key issues in the debate surrounding Snowden's leaks is whether they might be threatening
our security by letting the bad people know what the NSA and GCHQ are
up to. Nigel Inkster, former deputy chief of the UK's foreign
intelligence agency, MI6, doesn't think so:
On
Techdirt.
In the wake of the continuing leaks about the NSA's activities, most
commentators are understandably still trying to get to grips with the
enormity of what has been happening. But John Naughton, professor of
the public understanding of technology at the UK's Open University,
tackles a very different question on his blog: what is likely to happen in the future, if things carry on as they are?
On
Techdirt.
Back in June we wrote about Hadopi's first and only successful disconnection
case. As we also noted then, in the wake of its abject failure, Hadopi
was being dramatically curtailed. In particular, disconnection is no
longer available as a punishment for those alleged to have downloaded
files without authorization.
On
Techdirt.
Now that Sarkozy has been thrown out of office, France is no longer
producing the steady stream of bad proposals for the Internet that it
once generated. That has left an opening for some other country to take
its place, and it seems that Russia is keen to pick up where Sarkozy
left off. We've been reporting on previous worrying developments there, and TorrentFreak has news on another one:
On
Techdirt.
It would be something of an understatement to say that encryption
is a hot topic at the moment. But leaving aside deeper issues like the
extent to which the Internet's cryptographic systems are compromised,
there is a more general question about whether Web sites should be
pushing users to connect using HTTPS in the hope that this might improve
their security. That might seem a no-brainer, but for the Wikimedia
Foundation (WMF), the organization that runs Wikipedia and related
projects, it's a more complex issue.
On
Techdirt.
As more and more information about the NSA's global surveillance
capabilities emerges through leaks of material obtained by Edward
Snowden, the US authorities have been playing the terrorist card
heavily. That is, they concede that they have been spying on pretty
much everyone, but claim that it was only to fight terrorism, and thus
to save lives. In particular, the NSA insists it is not spying on anyone for the purposes of industrial espionage -- here's what it wrote in an email to the Washington Post on the subject just a couple of weeks ago:
On
Techdirt.
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