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Sensing Technology As Open Source's New Frontier
destinyland writes "Christine Peterson coined the term 'open source.' Now she's proposing the same collaborative sharing approach to sensing technology 'to improve both security and the environment, while preserving — even strengthening — privacy, freedom, and civil liberties...' The Open Source Sensing initiative welcomes individuals and organizations, and warns that 'We have a short window of opportunity for guiding this technology to protect both our security *and* our privacy.' Peterson says that in the long term, 'open source defensive technologies will likely be the only ones capable of keeping up with rapidly-advancing offensive technologies, just as open source software is faster at addressing computer viruses today.' And the EFF's Brad Templeton warns that 'Cheap, ubiquitous sensing has the potential to turn the worlds of privacy and civil rights upside-down... It's not enough for governments to watch people; people have to watch governments.' His solution? 'Learning from the bottom-up approaches of the open source community.'
The proposal lists detection of nuclear WMDs via neutrons and gamma rays ... the proposal itself also correctly notes that places like NYC are trying to ban Geiger counters and probably wouldn't be too keen on this sort of data being opened up to the masses. So you find out your neighborhood has an irregular--perhaps even mildly dangerous--amount of radioactive activity. Watch the lawsuits roll in ...
The proposal itself stays away from video and on their site they talk about who would have release rights to this video, I'm not sure why the EFF is commenting on that. It looks like they want to stay away from somone/group grabbing all the video and putting it up on YouTube to make the street in front of your house a public spectacle.
My work here is dung.
But so can the smart good guys. More (and possibly better) penetration testing and verification also means that there are fewer exploitable holes. Sounds like a win-win, both from the standpoint of security and privacy.
Write your representatives! Repeal the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics!
propose that politians should have no privacy. All their records should be open long before the regular citizen should go through that.
Politicians are regular citizens. Maybe if more people realized that fact it would be easier to not be afraid of them, and we then could really get some change going in this country.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
The problem is that a lot of the OSS community breathes the philosophy that "all information should and must be free... except for information about me, which should be confidential or not exist in digestable form at all." While an overstated and oversimplified sumation of reality... if those are two guiding principals, then where the rubber hits the road is quite difficult, if you're designing multipurposed software that doesn't have a very narrow scoped-purpose at design time, and you're really concerned that your work is going to be used in ways that violate either of those provlems. FOSS is a widget... if some company builds gears it has to know that one buyer might be using them to build hospital machinery and the other harpoon guns for whales. If OSS says you can use it, execpt for these purposes, it isn't very free as in freedom anymore.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
PS: ban lobbies too, while we're at it! Let's give democracy a shot for a change.
I'd go two steps farther.
Free Martian Whores!
Let's get closer to the mark and make it a felony for a candidate to accept money from anyone who isn't eligible to vote for them. Fewer felons to keep track of that way. :)
On item one, if I can contribute to any candidate who can vote on any legislation that affects me, why can't I vote for or against any candidate who can vote on legislation that affects me?
On item two, the nambla candidate isn't likey to get many votes OR much campaign cash. I can't vote against the nambla candidate by voting for the Republican and Libertarian candidates, now can I?
Free Martian Whores!
Christine Peterson coined the term 'open source.'
Oh no she didn't.
It was Eric S. Raymond.
Respect the Constitution
http://www.opensource.org/history
They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source", contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing they came up with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
The group of individuals at the session included Christine Peterson who suggested open source.
It wasn't Eric Raymond. He was just in favor of that term over all the others that came up. I'm pretty sure I remember himself saying that on catb.org/~esr/<somewhere>, but I can't find that right now.