Category: IT-politik

Fri software som politisk bevægelse

James Love har en glimrende artikel på Huffington Post, hvor han forklarer, hvorfor han selv er glad for at bruge fri software på sin computer, og hvorfor andre “progressive” burde gøre det samme:

Like nearly everyone else these days, I use computers to write, read email, browse the web, store music and photos, and generally organize my life. Unlike most people, I’m using a free operating system, rather than Microsoft’s Windows/Vista, or Apple’s Mac OS. Specifically, I’m using Ubuntu, a popular distribution of GNU/Linux.

It’s hard to explain the experience without trying it. Using any Debian type Linux distribution (such as Ubuntu), it is very easy to find, install and update software. Pretty much everything I use is available at a zero price. Linux isn’t a program, but rather a collection of thousands of programs that work together, each maintained by different communities. Most share the source code they develop, allowing others to copy, modify and incorporate code into new and even competing programs.

Linux is a possible future, one that isn’t controlled by Microsoft or Apple, and one that responds to a different set of values. Ubuntu is so good that it now seems plausible to anticipate a significant shift from Apple and Microsoft to Linux. This would be no small thing, increasing the odds that the Internet will continue to develop in ways that empowers users. Linux provides a powerful counterweight to companies or governments that undermine innovation, privacy and freedom, benefits that should not be taken for granted or undervalued.

Med andre ord: Fri software sikrer, at brugeren har og beholder kontrollen over, hvad der foregår på hans computer, og gør det muligt at sikre sig mod regeringsstøttede og andre trusler mod ens privatliv.

Hele fri software-bevægelsen er en vigtig modvægt mod hele den tendens til overvågning og central kontrol, vi ser i de senere år, en bevægelse, der tager handsken op ved selv at skabe programmer, der kan fungere som modvægt til monopolernes kontrol over brugerne og regeringernes indgreb. Og så er det ved at være oppe i et stabilt teknisk leje, hvor man sagtens kunne installere det på sin bedstemors computer. Men læs endelig bare hele Loves artikel.

Digital signatur – hvorfor er der ingen, der bruger det?

Se her:

• S/MIME standards group debated using digital signatures on
their mailing list
– For people you know, you can authenticate messages based
on content (semantic integrity)
– For people you don’t know, a signature is irrelevant
• Also, digital signatures are just a royal pain to work with
• Result: The S/MIME standards developers decided to forgo
using S/MIME signed messages

Når doktoren selv nægter at tage sin egen medicin, siger det (ikke så) lidt om produktets kvaliteter. Det hjælper heller ikke, at håndteringen af X.509-certifikater (som bruges af digital signatur) er så uigennemskuelig, som den er, så det kan være svært at finde ud af, hvilket man bruger til hvad og hvorfor.

Web 2.0 = censur 2.0?

Kilde, en anmeldelse af en tilsyneladende lidt for ukritisk bog om Web 2.0-fænomenet:

Flickr recently deleted a picture by the Dutch photographer Maartin Dors that showed a Romanian street kid . Why? Because it violated a previously unknown, unpublished rule against depicting children smoking! What’s the rational of this rule? As a spokesperson explained, Flickr and Yahoo! ‘must craft and enforce guidelines that go beyond legal requirements to protect their brands and foster safe, enjoyable communities’. Jonathan Zittrain points out that the ‘ever-increasing usability [of Web 2.0]has been accompanied by the deliberalising of user rights’.2 Of course, users can revolt against overt manipulation as they did when the aggregation site digg.com tried to suppress postings with the code to crack HD DVD encryption in May 2007. The management had to reverse its policy, though I wonder if they would have had they been a subsidiary of a large conglomerate.

Hvis virkeligheden ikke er “safe and enjoyable” har den ingen plads på en side som Flickr. Og efterhånden som alle lægger deres personlige data på Web 2.0-sider som Flickr, Facebook, Myspace og hvad har vi – kan alt, hvad der ikke er “safe and enjoyable” og appellerer til, hvordan aktionærerne og den juridiske afdeling synes, en præsentabel virkelighed skal se ud, let gå hen og forsvinde.

Keine hexerei – eller blot en nødvendig og uheldig konsekvens af den centralisering, der følger med Web 2.0?

Cory Doctorow: Drop Mac for fri software (og meget mere)

Den canadiske forfatter Cory Doctorow taler i et længere interview med Chicago Tribune blandt meget andet om, hvorfor han har droppet Mac og er gået helt over til Ubuntu og fri software:

They say a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. You know, a free software advocate is a Mac user who’s found his data locked in. I’m now a full-on free software person. I don’t use proprietary stuff.

As a philosophical point?

But as a philosophy that arose from self-preservation. I have Logo programs on my laptop that I wrote on 1979 on an Apple II Plus that can still be read and executed. But I have data from a period later when I started using proprietary systems that can’t be read at all. There’s material I produced in Ready, Set, Go! for the Mac that’s locked in pretty much forever because I had forgotten the lesson of open file formats.

There’s the famous Franklin quote: Those who would give up freedom to win security deserve neither. And some friends of mine repurposed it as: Those who would give up openness for a little eye candy deserve neither. There is something to that. And im a full time Linux dude now. It matters.

Læs også om overvågning, borgerrettigheder og om hvad, der i Doctorows optik kan/skal gøres ved den vej, vinden blæser i disse år. Link.

GNU/Linux kan frelse verden

Nej, det er ikke mig, der siger det, det er IT-journalisten Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, der skriver i ComputerWorld:

You can’t afford to drive anywhere, and, even if you could, you may not have a GM car to drive there for much longer. Some of you may be losing your houses, and the mortgage companies that gave you that mortgage in the first place? IndyMac went down late last week and now the question of the day is which major national bank will follow it down.

What does this have to do with Linux? Everything.

With both people and companies having to squeeze a nickel’s worth of good out of every penny, how long do you think people will be paying Microsoft for its imperfect operating systems and office suites? Vista Business SP1 ‘upgrade’ has a list price of $199.95. Office 2007 Professional is $329.95. That’s $529.90, or as much as a new low-end PC. Or, I could go with Ubuntu Linux for zero money down. if I wanted big business support, I could buy SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP 2 from Novell for $50. SLED, like any desktop Linux, includes OpenOffice 2.4 for free.

Which one would you buy when your IT budget is going to be cut to the bone?

Ja, det er en svær beslutning (og lad os bare gentage: Ubuntu for zero money down). Men det bliver bedre:

Do you want to keep buying Windows when according to the SANS Institute’s ISC (Internet Storm Center), an unprotected Windows system will last “less than five minutes” before being hacked? Five minutes!?

Of course, not all experts think Windows is that insecure. Why some security pros believe that a vanilla copy of Windows could make it as long as 16-hours. Isn’t that reassuring?

You can prevent that from happening. All you have to do is to keep your patches up to date. To do that, of course, you’ll need to hope that the patches themselves won’t blow up; the patches actually work and that Microsoft won’t make it impossible for you to download those patches in the first place…. again. But, other than that what do you have to worry about?

Oh wait, there is all that malware out there. Well, you can always buy anti-viral software. So, if we go with the cheapest, most basic anti-virus program from Symantec, Norton Antivirus 2008 for one user has a list price of $39.99 per year.

Let’s add this up. I can pay $569.89 for the operating system and software for my PC or I can pay $50. Oh, and if I pay the big bucks, I have a system that won’t last a day on the Internet unless I’m constantly on my guard and Microsoft doesn’t foul up again.

Gosh, which one do you think is the better deal?

Som Vaughan-Nichols konkluderer: Måske det virkelig er på tide, at vi dropper den skat, Microsoft stadig tillader sig at opkræve på stort set hver eneste computer, der sælges i hele verden. Man har råd til at smide penge ud af vinduet til et dårligere og mindre sikkert produkt i gode tider, selvom det er diskutabelt, hvor klogt det er. Men i de mindre goder tider, skyerne synes at trække op til?

I mindre gode tider finder man tilbage til det, der giver bedst mening; og det vil i denne sammenhæng sige  fri software fremfor dyre monopoler. Så … frelse verden med software kan vi måske ikke – men skelne mellem det frie, sikre og åbent specificerede som man kan hente gratis og det dyre og usikre lukkede skrammel – det begynder vi nok snart at finde ud af, som Vaughan-Nichols antyder.

Mere overvågning

Ligesom vi har den danske overvågningslov i form af logningsbekendtgørelsen og svenskerne netop  har vedtaget FRA-loven, der giver efterretningstjenesten ret til at gemme al datatrafik, der potentielt krydser grænsen til Sverige, har englænderne besluttet, at de også vil være med. Den britiske regering planlægger en  national database over alle emails, telefonpringninger og SMS’er, som politiet skal kunne opdatere og bruge i realtid, dvs. løbende:

A Home Office project team is developing the radical plan for a system that would use new techniques to monitor phone lines and the internet to store details on every individual’s browsing and communications traffic – although not its content – enabling the police to build a profile of an individual and their network of contacts.

The proposal is still at a discussion stage between the Home Office and the telecommunications and internet industries, but the government’s draft legislative programme for this autumn does include a data communications bill which the Home Office acknowledges may include the legal power to set up such a central database and a public authority to administer it.

More than 57bn text messages were sent in Britain last year, suggesting that a central database would have to be massive.

Bemærk, at et sådan løbende opdateret monstrum af en national database går langt videre end den danske overvågningslov, som kræver, at landets telefonselskaber og internetudbydere opretholder logs, som politiet kan få udleveret om nødvendigt. I Storbritannien vil man have én database, som politiet simpelt hen altid har adgang til.

Landets “Information commissioner”, vel en pendant til de danske databeskyttelsesmyndigheder, mener en sådan database vil udgøre en trussel mod den britiske livsstil:

Richard Thomas said there needed to be the “fullest public debate” over the justification for – and implications of – a database which held details of everyone’s telephone and internet communications and was potentially accessible by a wide range of law enforcement agencies.

“Do we really want the police, security services and other organs of the state to have access to more and more aspects of our private lives?”

Og for de flestes vedkommende vil svaret nok være “nej”. Det værste og tåbeligste er, at en sådan lov ikke vil komme til at virke efter hensigten. For det første let kan omgås ved hjælp af et system som Polippix, for det andet vil man indsamle en så monumental mængde af data, at de reelt ikke kan bruges til noget som helst: Terrorbekæmpelse eller blot almindeligt politiarbejde handler  om at finde nålen i høstakken, og det bliver faktisk ikke lettere, fordi man bygger en større høstak.

Den foreslåede overvågning er med andre ord tåbelig, kontraproduktiv og ikke at forglemme en krænkelse af briternes privatliv. Velkommen til overvågningssamfundet!

Skift til OpenOffice – scor en million

Mere Version2:

Over 500 medarbejdere i grossist-virksomheden FTZ Autodele har fået skiftet Microsofts Officepakke ud med en gratis-version fra OpenOffice.org. Besparelse over én million kroner.

Og netop prisen har haft afgørende betydning i beslutningen om at droppe Microsoft Office-pakken, siger Lotus Notesansvarlig i FTZ Mads Andersen til Version2.dk.

»Vi har analyseret brugen af Office-pakken, og for langt de fleste medarbejdere er der tale om stærkt begrænset brug af de muligheder, der ligger i Office, så derfor er der heller ikke grund til at bruge forholdsvis mange penge på noget, som brugerne reelt ikke anvender,« siger han.

Ifølge Mads Andersen har selve implementeringen forløbet forholdsvist gnidningsløst, og der har kun været meldt om begrænset frustration over, at medarbejdere skulle sige farvel til den vante Office-pakke.

Det er det danske konsulenthus Symfoni, der har forestået implementeringen og de har også udviklet integration mellem OpenOffice og FTZ’s omfattende Notes-løsning…

Det fremgår også, at man har beholdt nogle Office-licenser af hensyn til nogle meget komplicerede regneark, som det ikke umiddelbart var let et portere, men som heller ikke alle medarbejdere havde brug for. En god, pragmatisk løsning – regnearkene kan naturligvis også konverteres og komme til at virke i OpenOffice, men det kan alt andet lige også komme til at tage tid, og det har man så fået nu.

En god, pragmatisk løsning – og en million sparede kroner på at skifte til fri software. Måtte mange flere følge efter!