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RMS and Clipperz Promoting Freedom In the Cloud
mbarulli writes "Clipperz and Richard Stallman recently launched a joint call for action to bring freedom and privacy to web applications. 'The benefits of web apps are many, but quite often users lose their freedom to study, modify and discuss the source code that powers those web apps. Furthermore, we are forced to trust third parties with our data (bookmarks, text documents, chat transcripts, financial info ... and now health records!) that no longer resides on our hard disks, but are stored somewhere in the cloud.' Clipperz and RMS urge web developers to adopt the new AGPL license and build their applications using a 'zero-knowledge architecture,' a framework for web services that has been derived from Clipperz online password manager. A smooth path toward web apps based on free software that know nothing about you and your data."
Especially when one considers the evergrowing warnings about google products and sites like facebook (which makes its money out of selling private information to advertisers without even making an attempt at disguising the fact) - we need, in this age of web-apps, to push for greater openness in their design.
It's no longer just about the source code, it's about every single aspect of our lives. Dr. Phill may get hits from doing shows about how people misrepresent themselves online - but the fact that his investigators are able to find out enough about a person to 'figure out the lies' just tell you how dangerous the system already is - and that is third parties, imagine the true power that applications like facebook or Yahoo! mail holds... it's scary.
On the other hand, most people could care so little about their privacy these days... one may go so far as to suggest that those who do not care, do not deserve it.
For the rest of us, why not contribute a bit to changing the picture - is there even one solid social networking tool out there that is built on open source ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
How do we know that the app we use indeed came from the source they say it did?
With desktop app, one could compile and take an MD5, or just compile and compare to the binaries distributed, or just not use the binaries at all and compile from source for their own use.
With a web app, even if we had the source, we'd still be connecting to a 3-rd party HTTP server, and there is really no way to verify how the "real" program is run.
What's to stop my friends/enemies from posting pictures of me online?
This might sound weird, but, how about you yourself?