Slashdot Mirror
Domain: foreignaffairs.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to foreignaffairs.com.
Stories · 4
-
How Silicon Valley Helped the NSA
theodp writes "The U.S. tech giants' pledge to up their privacy game in the wake of reports that all-your-data-belong-to-the-NSA rings a little hollow to Abraham Newman, who reminds us that such protections run counter to the business model and public policy agenda that tech companies have pursued for decades. 'For years,' writes Newman, 'U.S. information technology (IT) firms have actively backed weak privacy rules that let them collect massive amounts of personal data. The strategy enabled the companies to work their way into every corner of consumers' lives and gave them a competitive edge internationally. Those same policies, however, have come back to haunt IT firms. Lax rules created fertile ground for NSA snooping. In the wake of the surveillance scandals, as consumer confidence plummets, technology companies' economic futures are threatened.'" -
Open Source, Open World
New submitter Ian Grant writes "This article takes a brief look at open source software in Brazil and how it's transforming tech use in South America: Bringing free software to Brazil, however, is not just a matter of copying North American practices. The idea of free software has also been substantially transformed through contact with Brazilian politics. In the United States, the open source software community has long had libertarian leanings, which have only strengthened over time. The core tenet of free software, after all, is giving the users freedom to do what they want. ... And when free software was finally embraced by business, many members of the movement welcomed it as a validation of their ideas. The business-friendly side of free software is easily visible in Brazil, too. Many Brazilian companies, for example, use Linux. At the forum in Porto Alegre, commercial free software was well represented by large foreign companies, many of which appeared to be there primarily for recruiting. Yet the forum also showcased another side of Brazil’s place in the world of free software — a key meeting place of free software and leftist politics. " -
The Wrong Way To Weaponize Social Media
BorgiaPope writes "NYU's Clay Shirky, in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, calls the US government's approach to social media 'dangerous' and 'almost certainly wrong,' as in its favoring Haystack over Freegate. The Political Power of Social Media claims that the freedom of online assembly — via texting, photo sharing, Facebook, Twitter, humble email — is more important even than access to information via an uncensored Internet. Countering Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, Shirky looks at recent uprisings in the Philippines, Moldova, and Spain to make his point that, instead of emphasizing anti-censorship tools, the US should be fighting Egypt's recent mandatory licensing of group-oriented text-messaging services." Only part of Shirky's piece is available for non-subscribers, but Gladwell's New Yorker piece is all online. -
DoD Takes Criticism From Security Experts On Cyberwar Incident
wiredmikey writes "Undersecretary of Defense William J. Lynn is being challenged by IT security experts who find it hard to believe that the incident which led to the Pentagon's recognizing cyberspace as a new 'domain of warfare' could have really happened as described. In his essay, 'Defending a New Domain,' Lynn recounts a widely-reported 2008 hack that was initiated when, according to Lynn, an infected flash drive was inserted into a military laptop by 'a foreign intelligence agency.' Critics such as IT security firm Sophos' Chief Security Adviser Chester Wisniewski argue that this James Bond-like scenario doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The primary issue is that the malware involved, known as agent.btz, is neither sophisticated nor particularly dangerous. A variant of the SillyFDC worm, agent.btz can be easily defeated by disabling the Windows 'autorun' feature (which automatically starts a program on a drive upon insertion) or by simply banning thumb drives. In 2007, Silly FDC was rated as Risk Level 1: Very Low, by security firm Symantec."