Het vrijheidsdoosje van Moglen

Gisteren in de trein geluisterd (mp3) naar bovenstaande lezing (transcriptie) die Eben Moglen twee weken geleden hield bij de Internet Society in New York.
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But the deal that you get with the traditional service called telephony contains a thing you didn’t know, like spying. That’s not a service to you but it’s a service and you get it for free with your service contract for telephony. You get for free the service of advertising with your gmail which means of course there’s another service behind which is untouched by human hands, semantic analysis of your email. I still don’t understand why anybody wants that. I still don’t understand why anybody uses it but people do, including the very sophisticated and thoughtful people in this room.
And you get free email service and some storage which is worth exactly a penny and a half at the current price of storage and you get spying all the time.

The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age.
Because he harnessed Friday night. That is, everybody needs to get laid and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, “I will give you free web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time”. And it works.
That’s the sad part, it works.

My friend and colleague Bradly Kuhn who works at the Software Freedom Law Center is one of those archaic human beings who believes that a social security number is a private thing. And he goes to great lengths to make sure that his Social Security is not disclosed which is his right under our law, oddly enough. Though, try and get health insurance or get a safe deposit box, or in fact, operate the business at all. We bend over backwards sometimes in the operation of our business because Bradly’s Social Security number is a secret. I said to him one day “You know, it’s over now because Google knows your Social Security number”. He said “No they don’t, I never told it to anybody”. I said, “Yeah but they know the Social Security number of everybody else born in Baltimore that year. Yours is the other one”.
And as you know, that’s true. The data that we infer is the data in the holes between the data we already know if we know enough things.

Freedom still matters and what we need to do is to make free software matter to the problem that we have which is unfree services delivered in unfree ways really beginning to deteriorate the structure of human freedom.
Like a lot of unfreedom, the real underlying social process that forces this unfreedom along is nothing more than perceived convenience.

En wat is zijn oplossing? Een vrijheidsdoosje:

What will Freedom Boxes do?
A plug server or other digital appliance in your home running the Freedom Box software can provide many services to you and your friends, automatically and securely. The following is a short list of the services we think are important:

• Safe social networking, in which, without losing touch with any of your friends, you replace Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and other centralized services with privacy-respecting federated services;

• Secure backup: Your data automatically stored in encrypted format on the Freedom Boxes of your friends or associates, thus protecting your personal data against seizure or loss;

• Network neutrality protection: If your ISP starts limiting or interfering with your access to services in the Net, your Freedom Box can communicate with your friends to detect and route traffic around the limitations. Network censorship is automatically routed around, for your friends in societies with oppressive national firewalls, or for you;

• Safe anonymous publication: Friends or associates outside zones of network censorship can automatically forward information from people within them, enabling safe, anonymous publication;

• Home network security, with real protection against intrusion and the security threats aimed at Microsoft Windows or other risky computers your network;

• Encrypted email, with seamless encryption and decryption;

• Private voice communications: Freedom Box users can make voice-over-Internet phone calls to one another or to any phone. Calls between Freedom Box users will be encrypted securely;

Geen makkelijk verhaal en aan het eind wordt Moglen ook redelijk technisch, maar ik vind het wel een interessant concept. Ben benieuwd of het hem lukt het "gemak inclusief spioneren" te verslaan...

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