Archive for the ‘privacy and licensing’ Category
Not too long ago, Jason Chen, a Gizmodo editor, had all the computer related materials in his residence seized by cops acting on a warrant in relation to Apple’s missing iPhone 4G prototype. If you recall, Jason Chen got hold of the pre-release iPhone from a guy who found it in a California bar. So Jason blogged about it (the iPhone), a move that rubbed Apple the wrong way. Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple, then claimed that the phone was stolen.
To cut to the chase, a group from California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT), acting on said warrant to seize any computer-related hardware, software and documentation, raided Jason Chen’s residence and confiscated at least eighteen items. Some of the items that the REACT group left with are:
Social network service providers today are in a unique position. They are intermediaries and hosts to our communications, conversations and connections with loved ones, family, friends and colleagues. They have access to extremely sensitive information, including data gathered over time and from many different individuals.
Here at EFF, we’ve been thinking a lot recently about what specific rights a responsible social network service should provide to its users. Social network services must ensure that users have ongoing privacy and control over personal information stored with the service. Users are not just a commodity, and their rights must be respected. Innovation in social network services is important, but it must remain consistent with, rather than undermine, user privacy and control. Based on what we see today, therefore, we suggest three basic privacy-protective principles that social network users should demand:
Are you an attorney licensed to practice law in the United States? If you are, EFF needs your help to fight spam-igation.
The U.S. Copyright Group has quietly targeted 50,000 Bit Torrent users for legal action in federal court in Washington DC. The defendants, all Does, are accused of having downloaded independent films such as “Far Cry,” “Steam Experiment,” and “Uncross the Stars” without authorization. U.S. Copyright Group has recently announced that it will also be targeting unauthorized downloaders of the film “Hurt Locker.” News reports suggest that the attorneys bringing these suits are not affiliated with any major entertainment companies, but are instead intent on building a lucrative business model built from collecting settlements from the largest possible set of individual defendants.
The race to own your virtual identity is on. In announcements made just days apart at the end of April, Facebook and the Mozilla Foundation launched parallel efforts to extend the way users are identified and connected on the Web.
The two approaches are fundamentally different. Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol uses the oAuth standard, which lets a website identify a user via a third-party site without exchanging sensitive information. Facebook–whose 400 million active users make it the world’s largest social network in the world–stands to benefit as other sites come to rely on the information it holds about users and their social connections.
To pay so much attention to Bill Gates’ retirement is missing the point. What really matters is not Gates, nor Microsoft, but the unethical system of restrictions that Microsoft, like many other software companies, imposes on its customers.
That statement may surprise you, since most people interested in computers have strong feelings about Microsoft. Businessmen and their tame politicians admire its success in building an empire over so many computer users.
Many outside the computer field credit Microsoft for advances which it only took advantage of, such as making computers cheap and fast, and convenient graphical user interfaces.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced yesterday a campaign to collect a clear list of OpenOffice.Org extensions that are FaiF, to convince the OO.o Community Council to list only FaiF extensions, and to find those extensions that are proprietary software, so that OO.o extension developers can focus of their efforts on writing replacements under a software-freedom-respecting license.
I use OpenOffice.Org (OO.o) myself only when someone else sends me a document in that format; I’m a LaTeX, DocBook, MarkDown, or HTML user for documents I originate. Nevertheless, I’m obviously a rare sort of software user, and I understand that OO.o is a program many people use. Plus, a program like OO.o is extremely large, with a diverse user base, so extension-style improvement, from a technological perspective, makes sense to meet all the users’ requirements.
I have just finished attending the Fifth Annual Open Source Think Tank, hosted by Andrew Aitken and I at Meritage in Napa Valley. Andrew and his team did a great job of organizing the event. The Think Tank is a great forum for discussing the important questions facing the industry, but equally important, we have structured the Think Tank to provide plenty of time to meet and get to know other attendees (more on that later!). Colin Bodell, VP Web Platforms for Amazon, said it best: he always leaves with a thick sheaf of new cards and many new relationships. I provided my annual summary of Open Source Legal Developments, including both 2009 and 2010 (you can see the powerpoint at http://www.docstoc.com/docs/34875054/Open-Source-Think-Tank-2010-Legal-Issues)
How essential is anonymity to peer to peer relationality?
I believe answering that question becomes easier if we look at the historical development of relationality and that such a review may lead us to challenge any simplistic identification of peer to peer relationality with anonymity.
For starters, let us broadly define peer to peer relationality, as that type of relationality where individuals can freely aggregate themselves around common goals, enabled by the affordances of the new type of internetworked technologies .
European researchers are proposing a paradigm-shifting solution to trusted computing that offers better security and authentication with none of the drawbacks that exist in the current state of the art.
Trusted computing (TC) is a hot topic in computer science. Major software and hardware providers are planning to include TC components in the next generation of computers, and the US army and the US Department of Defence reportedly require trusted platform modules on all their computers.
iBad
Tech commentators have a love/hate relationship with Apple’s new iPad. Those who try it tend to like it, but many dislike its locked-down App Store which only allows Apple-approved apps. Some people even see the iPad as the dawn of a new relationship between people and computers.
To me, the iPad is Disneyland.
I like Disneyland. It’s clean, safe, and efficient. There are lots of entertaining things to do. Kids can drive cars; adults can wear goofy hats with impunity. There’s a parade every afternoon, and an underground medical center in case you get sick.
In today’s world more geographic information is being collected about us, such as where we live, where the clinic we visited is located, and where we work. Web sites are also collecting more geographic information about their users. This location information makes it easier to identify individuals, which can raise privacy concerns when location is coupled with basic demographics and sensitive health information. Individuals living in small areas tend to be more easily identifiable because they are unique on their local demographics.
A new research study published online in the BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making journal measures how easy it is to determine the identity of individuals using their geographical information.
A. Rationale for enforcement of the GPL – At present, the enforcement of the GPL license conditions is driven by single developers and organizations supporting Free Software. Most famous is Mr. Harald Welte, former maintainer of the Netfilter/Iptables project, who is running the enforcement project gpl-violations.org. Some years ago, Mr. Welte became aware of the fact that many manufacturers use the Linux kernel in their products without complying with the GPL conditions, and give the necessary credit to the Free Software community. His letters to the companies remained mostly unanswered or negotiations were so protracted that by the time the source code was eventually published, the relevant product was no longer available for sale. Therefore, he decided to take legal action in a more formal way.
After the first enforcement cases became public, more and more interested parties informed Mr. Welte about other violations. He then decided to establish ‘www.gpl-violations.org’ to provide a platform for enforcement activities and public documentation of his and others’ efforts to bring commercial GPL users into GPL compliance.[1] Having access to modified source codes of technical devices is a strong motivation to participate in the enforcement of the GPL, and thus many people support gpl-violations.org.
Free software is ubiquitous. It runs everywhere on (almost) everything. The question that dominated most of the discussions at the Libre Planet Conference in Boston about a week ago is what now? How can the community capitalize on its achievements to make the movement more inclusive and reconceive the relationship between free software and privacy?
Most attendees seem to agree that it’s time to proselytize to the non-hacker masses and get them to care about the privacy, freedom, and control they sacrifice when buying proprietary technology. At John Gilmore’s group discussion on the future of free software Saturday morning, people proposed making the user interface more friendly; addressing freedom in the browser space; developing a solid gaming platform for free software. “My experience is that if you give people who play games the option to improve them they will,” one attendee said. “I know people who became programmers so they could improve the games they played.”
Today two computer security researchers, Christopher Soghoian and Sid Stamm, released a draft of a forthcoming research paper in which they present evidence that certificate authorities (CAs) may be cooperating with government agencies to help them spy undetected on “secure” encrypted communications. (EFF sometimes advises Soghoian on responsible disclosure issues, including for this paper.) More details and reporting are available at Wired today. The draft paper includes marketing materials from Packet Forensics, an Arizona company, which suggests that government “users have the ability to import a copy of any legitimate keys they obtain (potentially by court order)” into Packet Forensics products in order to impersonate sites and trick users into “a false sense of security afforded by web, e-mail, or VoIP encryption”. This would allow those governments to routinely bypass encryption without breaking it.
