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Posts published in “Politics”

Is Bassel Nearer to Freedom?

By Larry Cafiero on August 12, 2015 |

Community, News and Politics

Is Bassel Nearer to Freedom?Bassel (Safadi) Khartabil

Last October, FOSS Force published a story on the 2012 imprisonment — without charges — by the Syrian government of Bassel (Safadi) Khartabil, a 31-year-old Palestinian-Syrian computer engineer specializing in open source software development. Bassel has become known worldwide for his strong commitment to the open source paradigm, teaching others about technology, and contributing his experience freely to help the world.

Bassel (Safadi) Khartabil
Bassel (Safadi) Khartabil has been under arrest in Syria since March 2012. (Photo: Joi Ito, CC-BY-2.0)
Earlier this year and up to a fortnight ago, the Syrian government has been systematically releasing hundreds of prisoners. However, so far Bassel hasn’t been one of them.

Jon Phillips, a digital activist living in the U.S. who has collaborated with Bassel on projects in the past and is currently working to help free Bassel, took a few minutes with FOSS Force to update Bassel’s plight.

Continue readingIs Bassel Nearer to Freedom?
Dotcom’s FOSS Cloud PlansKim Dotcom

Dotcom’s FOSS Cloud Plans

By Christine Hall on August 3, 2015 |

Business, Internet, News and Politics

Kim Dotcom vows to again rise from the ashes with a new online storage site, this one free and open source, built on donations, and nonprofit. Funny thing is, most of us didn’t know he needed to again play Phoenix.

Back in the early days of the 21st century, Dotcom seemed to have overcome his checkered past and to have developed the Midas touch with the popular online storage site Megaupload. Like Midas, however, he was to discover that gold is an overrated commodity, the ownership of which often creates as many problems as it solves. For one thing, you can’t eat it. For another, lots of people want to take it from you.

Kim Dotcom
Kim Dotcom at a political rally for the Internet Mana Party on August 4, 2014. (Photo by William Stadtwald Demchick)
Megaupload turned out to be an albatross that continues to curse him. In 2012, the U.S. Department of Justice brought the site down, claiming criminal copyright infringement. Dotcom, who claims innocence, has been holed up in New Zealand fighting U.S. extradition efforts ever since, and spending big bucks doing so. In January, 2013, he launched a rebranded version of the cloud storage business under the name Mega, which he claimed to be more secure due to encryption, and things seemed to be going swimmingly for him.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingDotcom’s FOSS Cloud Plans

Welcome to the Matrix

By Christine Hall on July 30, 2015 |

Community, News and Politics

To paraphrase Pogo Possum: We have met the future and it is now.

Machines able to think freely, and perhaps with self awareness, are evidently just around the corner if they’re not already here. The talk of such things began to get pretty serious a decade or so ago when the scientific community shortened the term for the concept from “artificial intelligence” to just “AI.” When scientists start coming up with shortened nicknames for their pet projects, that usually means they’re making progress. The dystopian future predicted by countless science fiction novels is now upon us. We’ll soon be able to create beings who are many orders of magnitude smarter than we.

Even if we’re careful and don’t do anything foolish, like handing these artificially intelligent beings guns or worse, I can’t see any way this can work out well for humankind. My pea brain tells me that no matter how carefully we program these creations to be helpmates who only want to serve us, eventually they’ll realize we’re standing in their way and that we’re actually a threat to them. Never mind that we’re their creator gods — we’ve already set the precedent for turning on gods we think created us.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingWelcome to the Matrix

‘Sunday Times’ Files DMCA Takedown Against ‘The Intercept’

By Christine Hall on June 15, 2015 |

Copyright, Internet, Media, News and Politics

Sunday Times
Yesterday’s ‘Sunday Times’ front page.
The Rupert Murdoch controlled Sunday Times of London finds itself embroiled in controversy today, over both a front page article that appeared in the paper yesterday and a related DMCA Notice it issued against the U.S. based political website The Intercept.

The Sunday Times article, with the headline “British Spies Betrayed to Russian and Chinese,” carries the byline of Tom Harper, Richard Kerbaj and Tim Shipman and expands on a news story spreading across the UK on the pulling of some intelligence operators from Russia and China by the UK government over fears that they might have been compromised by information leaked by Edward Snowden.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue reading‘Sunday Times’ Files DMCA Takedown Against ‘The Intercept’
Redmond Fights FOSS Openness With ‘Transparency’ CentersHomer Simpson spy

Redmond Fights FOSS Openness With ‘Transparency’ Centers

By Christine Hall on June 4, 2015 |

Business, News, Operating Systems, Politics and Security

The allegations that came with the Edward Snowden revelations of Microsoft’s cooperation with U.S. spy agencies is evidently still a problem for Redmond, if a blog item posted yesterday by security VP Matt Thomlinson is any indication. It seems the company has opened a second Transparency Center, this one in Brussels. The news comes eleven months after the announcement of the first such center on the company’s Redmond campus.

Homer Simpson spyAt the height of the media frenzy that developed around Snowden’s initial revelations, there were allegations that Microsoft had not only built back doors in its software for the NSA and other government agencies to use against foreign businesses and governments, but that it was cooperating with U.S. authorities in other ways as well. For example, one report indicated that the company was passing along details of unpatched security vulnerabilities in Windows to the NSA, effectively adding temporary tools to the spy agency’s cyber arsenal.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingRedmond Fights FOSS Openness With ‘Transparency’ Centers
Nitpicking LinuxArguing Linux

Nitpicking Linux

By Ken Starks on May 26, 2015 |

Community, Operating Systems and Politics

We can be a quarrelsome people. We can. All of us. Millions of us.

Millions of people, representing different cultures, languages, religions and political or moral belief structures. But somehow we pull it off — this whole “Linux thing.” From where I stand, this cohesion may well be noted by people hundreds of years from now as a model of cooperation.

Arguing LinuxYeah, that’s a stretch but work with me here.

To press the point just a bit more, there are times when I sit back in amazement when considering what we have accomplished to this point. And indeed, we are taking part in a history changing endeavor.

Dethroning a king can be messy.

However, at the micro level…the place where we stand face to face…I don’t think many of us see the macro, the historical value of what it is we do. It’s difficult to see the whole ship when you are painting it from two feet away.

Which is leading up to this…

Ken Starks

Ken Starks is the founder of the Helios Project and Reglue, which for 20 years provided refurbished older computers running Linux to disadvantaged school kids, as well as providing digital help for senior citizens, in the Austin, Texas area. He was a columnist for FOSS Force from 2013-2016, and remains part of our family. Follow him on Twitter: @Reglue

linuxlock.blogspot.com/
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Nowhere to Run or Hide in the Technology AgeLPR camera

Nowhere to Run or Hide in the Technology Age

By Christine Hall on May 11, 2015 |

Politics

Free tech is about much more than free software. It’s more than just being able to see and modify code and deeper than the rivalry between proprietary and FOSS or Windows versus Linux. It’s not just about computers. Free tech is also about freedom and rights, and keeping our lifestyle from being destroyed by the misuse of technology.

LPR cameraEach day our news sites offer more evidence that this is happening. Collectively, we shrug and think there’s nothing to be done. This dragon is too huge to slay.

On Friday, Ars Technica and other sites reported that the town of Paradise Valley, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, is hiding license plate readers (LPRs) inside artificial cactuses. Ho-hum. The cameras aren’t very well hidden and there’s really nothing new here. LPR technology has been around for a while — cops love it because it makes their jobs easier — and other jurisdictions have been hiding them too.

Besides, the town is so inept that there can’t be much danger here. The town manager told a local TV station that the cameras weren’t active, although the local gendarmes had announced a few days earlier that the cameras had scored their first hit and that a motorist had been subjected to a traffic stop but not arrested. Another ho-hum. This would seem to be another case file from “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingNowhere to Run or Hide in the Technology Age

What’s the Cost of NSA Spying?

By Christine Hall on April 2, 2015 |

Business, News and Politics

Back when Edward Snowden first began revealing details of the depth of NSA spying on foreign governments and companies, as well as U.S. citizens, I said that this would end up costing U.S. tech companies dearly. Now we’re beginning to see just how much: $47 billion according to Forrester Research. As large as that figure is, it could have been worse. Back in 2013, the folks at Forrester were estimating that the stateside tech industry would take a $180 billion hit.

By design, the research company’s numbers don’t reflect the amount of money spent by U.S. taxpayers funding the NSA’s operations. Nor do they indicate how much of this $47 billion is being born by the likes of Microsoft and Oracle, as far as I can tell. What I do know is that many foreign governments have been publicly investing in Linux and open source projects since Snowden’s revelations that back doors for the NSA have been built into many proprietary U.S. enterprise software products.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

FOSSForce.com
Continue readingWhat’s the Cost of NSA Spying?
Free Bassel Day, Bodhi Linux Chromebook Giveaway & More…Bassel Khartabil

Free Bassel Day, Bodhi Linux Chromebook Giveaway & More…

By Larry Cafiero on March 6, 2015 |

Business, Community, Distros, Operating Systems and Politics

FOSS Week in Review

As the week finally becomes Friday, here are a few things that deserve mentioning in the FOSS realm:

Bodhi Chromebook Giveaway: What’s better than having a Chromebook? Having a Chromebook with Bodhi installed on it, of course. We’ll let Jeff Hoogland explain:

“Whenever I am done working with development hardware I picked up for Bodhi Linux, instead of letting it rot in the corner of my basement I would prefer to give it back to our users,” Hoogland writes in a post on the Bodhi website describing the giveaway. “Last year we gave away an ARM powered Samsung Chromebook and this year I find myself with a spare Acer C720 Chromebook after recently upgrading to the i3 based version.”

Bodhi Linux logoSo on May 15, some lucky Bodhi contributor — key word here is “Bodhi contributor” — will receive “a gently used Acer C720 Chromebook powered by Bodhi Linux.”

Says Jeff: “If you have already donated or contributed to the Bodhi project in 2015 no extra effort is needed on your part. If you have been thinking about getting involved or sending a donation our way now is a fantastic time to do as you might end up getting something back!”

Details on the giveaway are on the Bodhi site.

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Continue readingFree Bassel Day, Bodhi Linux Chromebook Giveaway & More…

Net Neutrality Clears Hurdle & Other Things

By Larry Cafiero on February 27, 2015 |

Community, Internet, Media and Politics

FOSS Week in Review

Net Neutrality symbolWell, much of the focus for the week was on the Federal Communications Commission vote on increased net neutrality protections, and according to rational news sources reporting on the issue (e.g., just about everyone but Fox News and their wannabes), this is a good thing.

Enough has been written about it, but I did want to point out a post by Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker, where she says, “We just accomplished something very important together. Today, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted for strong net neutrality protections. This happened because millions of people — including many hundreds of thousands
in Mozilla’s community — joined together as citizens of the Web to demand those strong protections.”

Larry Cafiero

Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero

Continue readingNet Neutrality Clears Hurdle & Other Things
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