It’s no great secret that our organization Reglue uses Linux Mint on many of our outgoing computers. I run Mint on one of my work…
FOSS Force
Back in the early days of the Snowden affair, when it first became obvious that Microsoft and others had co-operated with the NSA’s agenda to spy on every living human being on the planet who owned a computer, we said this wouldn’t bode well for those who make their living from tech in the U.S. We thought that proprietary software vendors would be most vulnerable due to their lack of transparency, i.e., the lack of available source code, especially after Redmond was exposed for building secret access into Windows.
Back in December, we asked for your opinion in our NSA in the USA Poll.
It only makes sense that the NSA be confronted online. After all, it’s the Internet the agency uses to spy on us. They’re not following us down dark streets or steaming open our snail mail. Instead, they’re monitoring our emails to discover who is in our circle and stalking us on Facebook and Google Plus. Especially if we use Windows, there’s no need for them to dirty their hands sifting through our garbage when they can enter through a virtual trap door on our computer to rifle through our word processor and spreadsheet files. Phone tapping? How old school in a world where every call we make, even from a land line, becomes VoIP somewhere along the line. When we use VoIP or Skype, they can easily listen. If we visit a website located in a country on their hit list, they sit-up and take notice.
The people at the NSA don’t care about our right to liberty, happiness or even life itself. They are obsessed with what they see as their mission and are convinced, as zealots are always convinced, that the ends justify the means. They embody the worst of Stalin, Mussolini, Franco and Pol Pot. They do so with an American twist, maintaining an illusion of freedom which keeps us pacified.
February 11th will be The Day We Fight Back.
FOSS Week in Review
Sixteen-year-old wrote the code for Target breach
The press calls him a “nearly seventeen-year-old” and he’s reported to be one of the people behind the malware used to compromise credit card data at Target and other locations. By our way of counting, “nearly seventeen” means he is sixteen or, like the show tune says, “sixteen going on seventeen.” He lives in Russia and is said to be the author of the BlackPOS malware that was used against Target and might have been used against Neiman Marcus.
This info comes from Los Angeles based cyber-intelligence firm IntelCrawler, which says it’s also traced six additional breaches to BlackPOS. As noted on MarketWatch, despite authoring the malware, the kid is just a small fry in this affair.
On Friday, Roy Schestowitz posted an article on Techrights which seems to accuse Red Hat of being in cahoots with the NSA. According to the article, the company has been building back doors into RHEL for the spy agency. However, the article appears to be long on accusations and short on proof.
I like both Techrights and Schestowitz. Both are controversial and that’s part of what I like about them. However, before making accusations it’s nice to have at least a few facts to back them up.
The article attempts to make the case for using CentOS over RHEL. Indeed, many of us who’re short on bucks and can’t afford Red Hat’s expensive support subscriptions are already using CentOS in server environments. We use it here at FOSS Force to serve web pages? Why? Because not only does CentOS have an extremely capable development team, the distro is in most ways a clone of Red Hat, which means the CentOS development team is able to leverage Red Hat’s research and development and incorporate it into their distro.
Back in November, the popular open source image editing program GIMP ended their association with SourceForge and dropped the site as its host. Since that time, downloads of GIMP have no longer been available on the site but have been moved to the GIMP’s website.
The split was the result of GIMP’s concern over policies at SourceForge, primarily SourceForge’s use of DevShare, an installer for Windows that bundles third party software offers with FOSS downloads. In addition, the GIMP folks had reservations about potentially deceptive “download here” buttons on ads being served by the likes of Google’s AdSense.
There were two sides to this story, of course.
I call them Mars kids.
They are the children who will grow up to see the first human step foot on Mars. While the majority of them will watch the epic event of a human presence on Mars, some of them will have another role. They will be the ones that made it possible.
Working as the front man for Reglue, I have the opportunity to watch school kids learn, as opposed to merely seeing the grades they accomplish by learning. I am able to watch the learning process itself. Some of it anyway.
In the summer of 2009, our organization began a summer program called Camp HeliOS. We held a three day camp in which kids took a computer apart and then put it back together again. We made sure that every kid was equally invested in the project.
FOSS Week in Review
NSA spying not as effective as claimed
Claims from the Obama White House and the NSA about the effectiveness of the NSA’s dirty tricks evidently aren’t true, according to a report from the New America Foundation. Since the Snowden revelations began, we’ve heard that something like 50 terrorist attacks have been averted as a result of the NSA monitoring Americans’ phone records and such.
However, Mashable tells us that according to this report, the effects of the NSA’s cyber spying has been minimal.
“‘Our review of the government’s claims about the role that NSA “bulk” surveillance of phone and email communications records has had in keeping the United States safe from terrorism shows that these claims are overblown and even misleading,’ said the research team, led by Peter Bergen, a reporter specialized in national security who also interviewed Osama Bin Laden in 1997.
“‘Traditional investigative methods, such as the use of informants, tips from local communities, and targeted intelligence operations, provided the initial impetus for investigations in the majority of cases, while the contribution of NSA’s bulk surveillance programs to these cases was minimal,’ they added.
The report goes on to claim that the spy agencies wholesale collection of phone data only had an impact in 1.8% of cases. The figures for PRISM’s impact is 4.4%.
At last week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, we again had the opportunity to witness how much the ideas behind open source are changing industries outside of software. I say this because open source hardware was much in evidence at this year’s event.
The press is taking note. In their coverage of CES, Adweek posted an article on an impressive mobile 3D mapping device being made by Occipital.
“All of this is made possible because Occipital is participating in a trend of open source hardware which is changing the way that startups operate. They focus on creating a stable piece of hardware and rely on the development community to extract its full potential for practical application.”
What a difference a split-second decision can make.
Two possible scenarios:
- You cross the street to make your bus connection, stand at the bus stop, get on the bus and go about your business.
- You cross the street to make your bus connection but notice an ad in the window of a corner market, advertising that the lottery is up to ten million dollars. You buy a ticket. You win.
We are faced with life-changing decisions every day, never knowing that different, seemingly inconsequential actions will take us down amazingly different paths.