One year ago today, an NSA contractor named Edward Snowden went public with his history-changing revelations about the NSA's massive system of indiscriminate surveillance. Today the FSF is releasing Email Self-Defense, a guide to personal email encryption to help everyone, including beginners, make the NSA's job a little harder. We're releasing it as part of Reset the Net, a global day of action to push back against the surveillance-industrial complex.
If the FSF really want to do something useful, they should start with something smaller.
Our first products to recieve Repsects Your Freedom (RYF) certification (i.e., use of the RYF certification mark on their product) was the LulzBot 3D printer made by Aleph Objects, Inc. (the latest model is the TAZ). The next products we certified were wireless chipsets sold by ThinkPenguin. The latest company we worked with, Gluglug, came forward and submitted these laptops to us for certification, so we reviewed the work they did and then awarded them use of the RYF certification mark.
The kind of approach you discuss makes sense. But, should the FSF really be building and selling hardware? From what you are saying it sounds like, perhaps, you understand hardware a lot better than I do. As such, I hope you will launch a business to do the kinds of things you discuss. If you do, and you aim to sell hardware that meets our certification criteria, I'd be happy to talk with you about what we can do to help in terms of promotion or endorsement.
Thanks for the feedback.
Joshua Gay
Licensing & Compliance Manager
Free Software Foundation
In the words of Bishop Desmond Tutu: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality."
In the words of Elie Wiesel: "I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. "
In the words of Dante Alighieri: "The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
[...] the W3C cannot prevent companies from grafting DRM onto HTML. They do this through nonfree plug-ins such as Flash, and with nonfree Javascript code, thus showing that we need control over the Javascript code we run and over the C code we run. However, where the W3C stands is tremendously important for the battle to eliminate DRM. On a practical level, standardizing DRM would make it more convenient, in a very shallow sense. This could influence people who think only of short-term convenience to think of DRM as acceptable, which could in turn encourage more sites to use DRM. On the political level, making room for DRM in the specifications of the World Wide Web would constitute an endorsement in principle of DRM by the W3C. Standardization by the W3C could facilitate DRM that is harder for users to break than DRM implemented in Javascript code. If the DRM is implemented in the operating system, this could result in distribution of works that can't be played at all on a free operating system such as GNU/Linux.
Buy the way, any change you make would have to be certified by the FCC as being compliant and that can be expensive.
I'm pretty sure this is not true. I recently read a tech topic blog on the FCC site that states,
WLAN was originally designed and developed as a home networking technology for nomadic users to wirelessly extend an Ethernet equivalent local area network (LAN) using shared communications media among a group of users through a wireless connection that operates at relatively short distances. WLAN uses license-exempt spectrum bands regulated by FCC rules, 47 C.F.R. Part 15.2 The FCC originally conceived the license-exempt bands to provide a no-cost slice of public access spectrum with only two provisions. First, the transmitter could cause no harmful interference to any nearby licensed services, and secondly, any receiver in this band must be able to accept any interference that may be present. Subsequently, the first wireless LAN was developed by the IEEE 802.11 standards committee (widely known as Wireless Fidelity or 'Wi-Fi' and 'Radio LAN') in 1997. Interestingly, the Wi-Fi standards were a response on the part of industry to the relatively restriction free use of the license-exempt spectrum allocation and rules.
2: See http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_07/47cfr15_07.html for the Part 15 rules. Note that the letter versions of the standards are not chronologically consistent since version (b) actually came before (a)!
But, even if you were right, it's important to know that you don't have to hack alone. You can work with others. Let's say you are worried some change you want to make could lead to some malfunction which would boost the signal. You could file a feature request to the project and see if someone else will make the change and test it. Or, if you make the change in code and are worried about installing it yourself, submit the patch upstream and see if others can review the code and test it for you. Just because things could potentially go wrong doesn't mean we should live in fear and abstain from using, fixing, or customizing our software.
Control your hardware, don't let it control you. =]
The FSF decided to investigate this AR9271 part. I'm not sure why.
The reason is because RYF certification is not simply done on software for a given chipset. RYF certification works by us entering into a formal agreement with a company that sells hardware. The agreement states that the company can display the RYF certification mark on all products that pass our testing and certification process so long as that company agrees to meet various requirements; we agree to do a limited amount of promotion on the product (press release, listing the product on our site, etc). In this case, the agreement is with ThinkPenguin and the product we tested and certified is the TPE-N150USB.
Over time we will certify more products and enter into agreements with more companies. I hope that people will come to trust the RYF certification mark and seek it out when looking to purchase computers and other hardware products — thus making it valuable to both the buyer and seller.
If you know a company selling devices with these other chipsets that support free firmware, or really any company selling hardware that supports 100% free software, please email us to let us know, and maybe send that company a link to FSF.org/RYF and encourage them to consider applying for certification.
And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones
