Slashdot Mirror
Why American Corporate Software Can No Longer Be Trusted
jrepin writes "There is a problem with proprietary, closed software, which makes Rick Falkvinge, the founder of the first Pirate Party, a bit uneasy: 'We get a serious democratic deficit when the citizens are not able to inspect if the computers running the country's administrations are actually doing what they claim to be doing, doing all that and something else invisibly on top, doing the wrong thing in the wrong way at the wrong time, or doing nothing at all. ... In the debate around the American Stop Online Piracy Act, American legislators have demonstrated a clear capability and willingness to interfere with the technical operations of American products, when doing so furthers American political interests regardless of the policy situation in the customer’s country."
Unfortunately, not even that - The recent debacle with Canonical/Ubuntu needing to pull the Oracle/Sun JVM pretty much demonstrates that we can't even trust FOSS, without completely disabling any form of updates whatsoever.
That said, at least with open source, you have a chance of identifying and disabling the myriad ways a system tries to update itself. Good luck getting anything proprietary to stop phoning home, short of never connecting it to the internet (in which case it may just petulantly refuse to work, a la the annoying DRM in many games).
One of the major arguments for SOPA have been the trillions of dollars of theoretical losses of sales by the Media companies. As has been pointed out repeatedly ad nauseum, these losses are only theoretical.
But has someone on the senate actually done some estimation of possible loss of revenue, if the internet actually becomes splintered and USA loses its control? Or of even more foreign governments just turning to open source solutions, instead of to, say Microsoft? China, for example, is a big competitor already for the control of internet. They control a sizable part of it already. Let us say that they actually get it in their head to actually set up an alternate mechanism and act as the controlling authority? Even USA doesn't really dares to stand up to them... so all in all, we are talking of China ultimately controlling the distribution of said media/softwares, and who knows what terms they will set for the USA based companies?
I will admit that chances of above happening are remote at the moment. But what are these media folks, and their employees in the senate, smoking? Why even take the chance?
FreeBSD in particular is quite competitive with Linux, since many of the same GUI elements and applications will run on both.
Not quite true.
For a very narrowly defined subset of hardware, FreeBSD is quite competitive with Linux assuming you're using DragonFly and not FreeBSD due to the erratic and insecure nature of ports maintenance.
FreeBSD lacks the accessibility and support that Linux does. By "support" I not only mean community support and end-user documentation (or kernel architecture documentation which is correct/consistent/current, for that matter), but hardware support, which is spotty on quality even when the hardware is "supported". ("That's the vendor's responsibility", someone will say. Since when has that been fully accurate? Even MS has taken great efforts to make sure that there are good drivers for Windows.)
Never mind that most applications which work on FreeBSD do so through a Linux compatibility layer which is kludged together, at best, and a maintenance and security nightmare at worst.
It'd be nice to have an alternative, but FreeBSD proper is not it.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Let's take your claims and dissect them.
Let's dispense with the argument that this is US legislators fighting for "US trade interests". This is about particular US companies pushing US legislators to fight back against a stubborn foe: global piracy. (Also, by framing it as "US trade interests" you're intentionally suggest a wider attack on foreign trade. If you set it up more accurately, it would be "unfair competition" because piracy is an illegitimate form of trade competition. Of course, if you talk about piracy as a form of unfair competition, you can't scare people because if you said "the US legislators won't hesitate to fight unfair competition" you'd lose the moral highground.)
The US is able to unilaterally cut websites (both foreign and domestic) off the internet because they are doing something that many people find wrong, but other countries have semi-legalized. But, wait, what did you write in the article again: "[US] policymakers are not the slightest afraid of legislatively ordering American-run corporations to sabotage their customers in order to further United States foreign policy". What in the world does kicking websites off the internet have to do with forcing US corporations to sabotage their customers? What are you alleging here? Where is the sabotage? How does this "advance US foreign policy"? It sounds to me like SOPA is US corporations telling the US government what to do, and you're here telling us that the US government is telling the US corporations what to do. So which is it? Who is telling who what to do because it seems to me that SOPA is doing the exact opposite of what you're claiming in your article. I can see absolutely nothing to support your claims of "sabotage" in order to "advance US foreign policy". Since you brought up Apple and Microsoft specifically, could you please explain how and why these companies are going to sabotage you at the behest of the US government, why no US company can be trusted, and what this has to do with SOPA?
A precursory example? You mean that nothing in SOPA supports your claims, but you fully expect that sometime in the future things will start happening differently to support your view of the world?
First, define "political leverage" because I can't figure out how it makes sense in this context.
Second, how is "kicking piracy websites off the internet" creating political leverage at the expense of the customers and US supplier?
What in the world are you talking about? What, specifically are you alleging? Are you saying that the US government passing SOPA at the behest of corporations indicates that the US government is going to force corporations to ... what? Steal your state secrets? That's quite a stretch from "US corporations want the US government to pass laws to allow a crackdown on piracy websites" into a complete reversal "the US government is dictating to US corporations to sabotage customers and steal information from foreign nations".