PA Laptop Spying Inspires FSF Crowdsourcing Effort

holmesfsf writes "Creeped out by the Lower Merion School District's remote monitoring of students? Check out the Free Software Foundation's response to the laptop spying scandal and help build a wiki listing of school districts that provide students with laptops, so that the FSF can campaign against mandatory, proprietary laptops."

Comments

So when will RMS stop using his?

[DAldredge]

When will RMS stop using his proprietary laptop?

FS is the best situation life's offering

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

There's no proposal that can solve everything. Of the proposals that exist today, free software is just far and away the best situation life's offering.

It's not about *you* being free to read and change the source or distribute modified versions, it's about *all users* being able to do this. "freedom 3" makes this clear:

"The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this."

It's about allowing people to help each other, building an empowered community. If the situation is serious enough, anyone can take a look, or find/pay someone else to take a look. And even if the situation doesn't seem serious, there's still the possibility that someone will be taking a look at the code anyway. And once one person does this, then all users can benefit from that person's exercise of their freedoms.

The possibility of these things happening is usually enough to dissuade software publishers from putting nastyware into free software in the first place.

So, you're theory just predicts a problem that's possible but which is non-existant or practically non-existant in reality.

Re:I wonder about "Free"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's laughable that some GNU nuts think that C source code is impossible to obfuscate while proprietary software is impossible to disassemble! Or maybe they think the CVS repositories their software comes from receive more eyeballs than products that have ~90% desktop market share... Ridiculous!

A person injecting backdoors into proprietary software would be identified, held accountable, and never work in the software industry again. A company selling software with deliberate backdoors would quickly find itself exposed, boycotted, and out of business. A person injecting harmful open source code, on the other hand, can remain perfectly anonymous, and the project maintainers would lose nothing. It is also much easier to compromise one of countless CVS and mirror servers (and ISO's downloaded via BitTorrent especially) than it is to compromise shrink-wrapped software and updates that come from a centralized source.

It's true that Microsoft had habitually put usability (or "n00b appeal"), execution speed, and lower tech support costs ahead of security, but that is already starting to change. Microsoft computers are more vulnerable because more n00bs use them - if they used Linux they'd be just as vulnerable or worse! They're also more targeted by hackers for ideological anti-capitalist reasons, and by scammers because people who run Microsoft software are less likely to be broke college kids with nothing that's worth stealing.

All things being equal, proprietary software is always more secure than open source, at least because you know whose neck to choke if something goes wrong!

And remember that the entity most interested in spying on you is your government, who don't need to screw around with software in order to do it! And governments love open source software, which after the collapse of the private software industry would be funded at tax-victim expense and ever more government control!

(Signed: Alex Libman's sock-puppet)

yup

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

If they do that, then any student can disable it, and every student can then use that one student's non-spying version.

The perfect solution would be to have no spying in the first place, but since you haven't offered any way to do this, having software freedom is indeed the next best solution.

Re:Windows Vista/7 64-bit kernel mode code signing

[Blakey Rat]

I don't want to debate the nuances, because I really don't care. I just hate it when people reply to a post without addressing it, and wanted to point out that you were guilty of that.