Direct download as Ogg (00:09:52, 5.5 MB)

Summary: Stallman speaks about erosion of freedom on the Internet

TODAY’S part deals largely with the Internet and the full transcript follows.

Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz: I read an article yesterday in the Canadian press, I think it was CBC, writing about the ban effective today or yesterday of using a mask in a protest, so you can face up to 10 years in jail for merely attending a protest with something to conceal your face.

Dr. Richard M. Stallman: Really? Where is this banned?

RSS: In Canada.

RMS: Oh, yeah, this sort of tyrannical law being spread around the world. You know, the ban on burqas in France is a ban on just covering your face, so this is in itself tyranny.

RSS: I think that recently the issue of free speech online [...] has been cracked down [on] in Korea — and when I say Korean I mean South Korea — because they don’t necessarily like the comments people make online.

RMS: No, they gave up on that. They [have tried] that and they gave up. They backed down.

RSS: There is a very famous case, people say about Carl Sagan when he was writing anonymously in favour of legalising marijuana for example. These things show you that in order to challenge an existing law, which may itself be unjust, you have to preserve people’s right to anonymity when they write things and as long as you try to take this right away you’re basically discouraging, scaring people’s away from being…

RMS: Yes. Well, yes indeed, those laws are tyranny, but we see in governments that work for the plutocrats around the world, they act like governments of occupation. So, systematically they change laws to make democracy just a shell. It’s lip service while everything possible is done to eliminate real democracy, to make democracy unable to oppose plutocrats.

RSS: There is a certain degree of overlap between the operations of the government of course. And to give an example of one revolving door, here in the UK a few days ago the manager of BT moved into a government position, some kind of a manager in charge of something and I made a joke basically because BT and a company which came from BT, called Phorm, was responsible to a great degree for DPI, for deep packet inspection in the UK, so everything that goes through my line — landline or Internet basically — is subjected to inspection and to analysis by BT and that’s another issue which relates to the need for privacy and the fact that even the ISP [...] it will be able to tell who you are and what you’re sending back and forth through the line. And that’s another topic people don’t tend to touch on very often.

RMS: Yeah, well, you know, they’ve just announced that censorship would be applied to the Internet in England.

RSS: Yeah, because we have to “protect the children”. Or the “Terrorists”.

RMS: And the thing is, censorship would be applied to everyone that doesn’t have a private Internet subscription.

RSS: Right. By default. So you’d…

RMS: But in public Internet ports it won’t be possible for you to turn it off. So the point is, it will be censorship that you can’t avoid unless you have your own Internet subscription and note it will be censorship of whatever they decide to censor. Now, they say they are going to censor porn. but every past attempt to do so has blocked other things as well.

RSS: I think the Great Firewall of China as it’s called actually started as a copyright thing, which is kind of funny because it’s in China… so they said we have to do this for copyright reasons…

RMS: You should check that because I don’t think that that’s true.

RSS: I read it somewhere. I found it to be quite dubious, but I thought…

RMS: Well, I don’t think that that’s true. They merely used porn as the excuse because they do try to block access to porn.

RSS: OK. And of course it starts with…

RMS: But I don’t think they would have given copyright as the excuse.

RSS: Well, that’s the trajectory. You start with the children and terrorists and then move to copyrights and expression of political dissent.

RMS: There was a case where we know that that’s an intended trajectory. You can try to find a reference for this, but somebody from the IFPI, which is the international organisation of record companies, said in an international meeting that he was in favour of filters to block child pornography because then they would be able to use the same filters to block other things.

RSS: There was a case where, I don’t think it was law-based person but a person working for Hollywood, [who] spoke about how they really like child porn and terrorism because that’s a very convenient pretext for them to bring…

RMS: I’d like you to… Can you find the reference?

RSS: ….Ars Technica at some stage. I did try…

RMS: Can you find it? Because the [incomprehensible - statement?] I found a reference for at one point and linked to concerns somebody from IFPI, not from Hollywood. It sounds like maybe you are thinking of the same case.

RSS: It was around 2010 or 2011, I think.

RMS: Well, that’s later than the one I’m thinking of, I think, so I’d be interested in seeing if there’s a second case of this.

The next part will be out later this week. Stallman will also be touring the UK very soon, so I may try to get video interviews with him (depending on my work schedule).

We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date.

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Direct download as Ogg (00:09:18, 4.9 MB)

Summary: The latest Stallman interview, which deals with NSA involvement in Microsoft Windows and how to use search engines anonymously

TODAY we turn our attention to two subjects which are not frequently tackled by the corporate media. The first one expands on matters we covered in the second part and to a lesser degree the first part of this interview. The second subject is anonymity. Browsing the Web these days is hard without identifying oneself, due to many cookies and cross-site interaction (e.g. Google and Facebook code inside plenty of Web pages). I asked Stallman what to use for search and the full transcript follows.

Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz: Whenever the source code is being passed for the NSA before release, as you see before the release of Windows Vista or Windows 7, they always pass it through the NSA and they assure you that it’s fine and that it [has[ gone through hardening of the operating system. I think fewer people will believe that after the Snowden leaks, but anyway I…

Dr. Richard M. Stallman: Well, the thing is, it’s different in the case of Windows because Microsoft keeps that source code secret from the users, which is in itself reason to distrust it and that’s why it has the universal back door. The users can’t take that out, so once software is proprietary, that means that the owner of a program has power over the users, it subjugates the users and that is an opportunity for abuses. But that opportunity is not there in the same way with Free software where the users can change this code. Not only do it individually, but they can work together to make their own version of it.

RSS: I’d like to [discuss] different sort of strand of topics. I have everything written down in terms of, like, one-word or two-word kind of a summary of things I wanted to go through and the next few things are to do with browsing and the of of the Internet in the form of the World Wide Web.

So, the first thing I wanted to ask you is, what do you suggest to people who want to do a Web search and what do you use yourself?

RMS: Well, it’s fine to use any search engine as long as it has no idea of who you are.

RSS: And which one would you personally use the most?

RMS: Well, I generally use DuckDuckGo first, but I will use the Google search engine also.

RSS: There are several… OK, this actually relates to a discussion I’ve been having all over the Internet in the past few months and the thing about DuckDuckGo, it’s hosted in the United States, whereas something like IXQuick or StartPage are based in Holland, and some people have pointed out that DuckDuckGo is using Yahoo, which basically means Microsoft for search results, to a certain degree. And they also seem to be very…

RMS: Look, we don’t know to what extent [duck duck go records things]…. there is no proof that DuckDuckGo doesn’t track IP addresses, for instance, of requesters. And they could have been [tracking], right? What can they possibly do to prove that they don’t track people? The point is, I don’t refuse to use Google search engine either because I just never find myself in such a way… I always just use it from other people’s computers, people who have let me use them, of course. [If] I don’t have to break security, I borrow people’s computers for a few minutes… for a while [incomprehensible] to use, so my searches are done from lots of different machines and each of those machines is mainly used by others.

RSS: OK, so basically you suggest trying to discourage the tracking by using different IP addresses…

RMS: Well, you could use Tor also. The point is, if you identify yourself to a search engine, you are basically helping it track you.

RSS: And increasingly they do provide incentives for people to be logged in, explicitly, when they are using a service like YouTube or Google search engine, which is something that didn’t happen before and I think that’s something that exploits the need for convenience — to have people give away their identity whenever they use the search engine, which didn’t exist about 10 years ago, it’s a new thing. Also, I wanted to point out, I had this small argument with DuckDuckGo over the fact, for example, that even though they don’t retain the data, all of their infrastructure is hosted on Amazon, so Amazon knows people’s IP addresses and whether there is some tracking at the router or some place or another, there might be a third party knowing…

RMS: Yeah, the point is that, the NSA might snoop all your packets and see that you’re sending a packet to DuckDuckGo. You can’t stop that, so the point is, I don’t assume that doing the search there means that I won’t be recorded in any way, but there’s no way they would know that it was me.

RSS: So basically, the notion of anonymity is important here. The use of the Net anonymously…

The next part will deal with anonymity in a broader context, so stay tuned.

We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date.

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“Richard Stallman Speaks About Back Doors After NSA Documents Leak” is the title of a submission that I summarised as follows: “Companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, and Google are scrambling to restore trust amid fresh litigation over the PRISM surveillance program. Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and a newly-inducted member of the 2013 Internet Hall of Fame, speaks about not only abandoning the cloud, which he warned about 5 years ago, but also escaping software with back doors. “I don’t think the US government should use operating systems made in China,” he says in this new interview, “for the same reason that most governments shouldn’t use operating systems made in the US and in fact we just got proof since Microsoft is now known to be telling the NSA about bugs in Windows before it fixes them.””

The text for the next part of the interview is not ready yet. I’ve just released this second part (now in the front page of Slashdot), but I need to do some fact-checking on SELinux (NSA-developed) before releasing the next part. Busy times since the NSA leaks…

Direct download as Ogg (00:09:50, 5.7 MB)

Summary: The second part of this interview series focuses on back doors in software

TODAY we speak about back doors and software freedom tackling this issue. Now that we know that [cref 69563 the NSA receives notifications about zero-day flaws in Windows (long in advance, directly from Microsoft)], which enables cracking PCs abroad, this is very relevant.

This is the second of several and the transcript follows.

Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz: I want to try and discuss with you this whole subject of back doors. I think in the past — I know from experience — people were trying to call people like yourself “paranoid” for discussing or even entertaining the possibility that there may be back doors in proprietary software. Well, now we know that they exist. One of the things…

Dr. Richard M. Stallman: We know for a long time about specific back doors in specific proprietary software. It has been documented. For instance, the existence of a universal back door in Microsoft Windows was proved years ago. And the existence of a universal back door in most portable phones was proved years ago. Now, a universal back door means that they can be used to do absolutely anything. It can be used to change the software, so whatever they want to do, they could put in software which does it.

RSS: We can make an educated guess about what they think is intercepted and how, but I think that many discussions lack technical details on exactly how the NSA is doing what it does because Glenn Greenwald is not going to release the documents related to that. But some people were talking about hardware-level — even firewall- of network-level — back doors. We may know, based on the leaks for example of Klein in AT&T, they might be harvesting the data at the chokepoints.

RMS: Well, it’s not a back door. If AT&T agreed to connect its computers to surveillance of the NSA, that doesn’t involve a back door. Those computers belong to AT&T, so if AT&T has full control over them, which it should, then AT&T could also connect to the NSA. You see, these are somewhat different issues. The first issue, which Free software is part of, is that you should have control over your computer. Now, that’s violated with proprietary software if your computer is running, say, Windows, or Mac OS, or if it’s an iThing, or most kinds of Android products, then you don’t control it, some company is controlling it and making it do things that you’ll like. So the first thing is, [incomprehensible] says that the computer should have full control over it.

But that doesn’t mean that when you’re using some company’s service, if a company has full control over the computers that implement that service, which it should, that doesn’t mean the company will treat you right. That’s a separate issue. It’s wrong for [another] company to have control over these computers and if AT&T uses proprietary software, it [that other company] fully has control over AT&T’s computers and that’s wrong. However, making sure AT&T has complete control over its computers doesn’t guarantee that AT&T will treat us right.

RSS: I was thinking about a different scenario where the company that you interact with might itself backdoored in the sense that the firewalls, they might be using older hardware and might be using — maybe — back door by design, so that the NSA, for example, can quietly and silently infiltrate and capture data, for example, [from] firewalls or Intel chips for example.

RMS: It’s possible, and not just necessarily Intel chips because the Pentagon suspects that devices made by Huawei might have some back door of the Chinese government…

RSS: And the latest NDAA is actually explicitly forbidding the use of hardware made in China. That’s from the NDAA 2014. But not many speak about why this is happening, why they modified the rules. Recently, interestingly enough, a guy who was interacting with these companies — I’m not sure if you’ve heard about Shane Todd — the guy who lived in Singapore was assassinated apparently under the — basically, the guise of suicide — and there seems to be a lot of suspicion among those two camps of telecom companies and what they might be doing at the back room.

RMS: Well, it’s perfectly reasonable suspicion to me. I don’t think the US government should use operating systems made in China for the same reason that most governments shouldn’t use operating systems made in the US and in fact we just got proof since Microsoft is now known to be telling the NSA about bugs in Windows before it fixes them.

RSS: I was just going to bring this up exactly, so I was saying that the NSA recently received notifications about the zero-day holes in advance and [incomprehensible] the NSA and the CIA to just crack PCs abroad for espionage purposes.

RMS: Now, [incomprehensible] that this proves my point, which is that you have to be nuts if you were some other country and using Windows on your computers. But, you know, given that Windows has a universal back door in it, Microsoft would hardly need to tell the NSA about any bugs, it can tell the NSA about the mal-feature of the universal back door and that would be enough for the NSA to attack any computer running Windows, which unfortunately is a large fraction of them.

The next part will be published next week.

We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date.

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Richard Stallman on Snowden, NSA, etc.

Direct download as Ogg (00:08:15, 5.9 MB)

Summary: The first part of a series about privacy

TODAY we officially begin a series of interviews with Dr. Richard Stallman, as [cref 69689 promised last week]. Stallman was proven to be right on the issues of privacy and freedom as more information was being shown for everyone to see how surveillance is used to control users’ behaviour and distort/impede communications in some cases. As more evidence came to light, showing in concrete form what a lot of people already knew but could not always prove, there was a lot to be discussed not hypothetically but realistically.

This is the first part of many and the transcript follows (some parts were too incomprehensible due to low recording quality, so we duly apologise for inaccuracies).

Dr. Roy S. Schestowitz: As I said before, I think the plan was mostly to focus on things that we hadn’t touched before and primarily things to do with privacy. I think we were — and many people were — advocating for freedom in technology were proven to be correct in the sense that on the issue of privacy and freedom everything seems to be very symbiotic and I think in recent weeks we found that more and more people have woken up to the fact that they need to assure they can control their software.

Dr. Richard M. Stallman: It’s not just about what happens in your computer. With Free software you control what happens in your computer, but of course there are other systems of snooping. The NSA is setting up snooping that we have been reading about recently. They don’t work through software in your computer. So, what this shows is, a) they have {users must have} control over the software in your computer; b) we need to work politically to make sure that the software that’s not in our computer — the systems that are not ours — are nonetheless not being used to snoop on us.

RSS: I think information is increasingly being used to change behaviour in people and also to distort the ways of communication between entities and I think that routers, for example, play a role in the way in which we interact with computers, so I wonder what your take is on the [snooping] in routers, many of them [are] Cisco ones.

RMS: Ed Snowden, I think, said that the NSA takes control of routers in order to monitor Internet traffic in other countries.

RSS: It is actually proven to be the case and any interested person who researched this subject before would know that Cisco was working with the Chinese government to enable things like sending E-mail port back to communication and such things, so we do know that there is a degree of collusion between them. I think we’ll touch on this later when we’re just thinking the possibility of back doors. But I think it’s more evident now that it comes to light, showing in concrete terms what we already know was probably happening all these years.

RMS: There are many routers you can get that you can then install free software into. So if we are talking about your router, then yeah, you should put Free software into it. But when you talk to other [incomprehensible] it’s critical to ask first if they are not yours. And some of them will belong to companies that might very well be collaborating with surveillance. And Free software is not going to fix that problem, because if that company which [incomprehensible] for its switch/routers was to collaborate with the NSA, it is going to collaborate with the NSA or the Chinese government or whatever. So, Free software means you can control over the software or what your computer is doing or your computers are doing, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the other organisations you deal with are going to respect your privacy.

RSS: Unless of course we use encryption, for example.

RMS: Yes. Of course encryption in itself doesn’t disguise who we are talking to and it’s been played out that if the government knows who knows who, then it is a tremendous start on breaking any dissident movement.

The next part will be published in a few days.

We hope you will join us for future shows and consider subscribing to the show via the RSS feed. You can also visit our archives for past shows. If you have an Identi.ca account, consider subscribing to TechBytes in order to keep up to date.

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Twitter is going down the drain and it has itself to blame

MAGINE a company stupid enough to follow the trajectory of MySpace and the now-deceased Digg.com by its very own choice. Enter Twitter.

Twitter was a rapidly-growing site back in the days. It was getting links everywhere, just like Digg had gotten a lot of buttons and links. But then came the OAuth ‘revolution’ and Twitter shot many applications (digital vehicles that brought it traffic) right at the head. It wasn’t an accident. Twitter ended up breaking hooks and denying access by some applications that I was using until 2010, e.g. in IRC. What a colossal mistake. Twitter never quite recovered since then. Au contraire — the site has been declining little by little, especially in recent months. Rather than encourage developers to get involved, Twitter is doing it again — dampening third-party contributions — this time even more aggressively than before.

The news sites took little note of what Twitter had done. Twitter’s API idiocy not only broke crucial parts in 3 Web sites of mine but also in some clients’ sites. Thanks for the trouble, Twitter. You break things and leave us all to collect the pieces.

Twitter is making irrational decisions like killing off RSS, third-party developers, off-site links, etc. Are they on a suicide plan?

Twitter’s own widget, which is apparently what Twitter is trying to promote, is not even valid (X)HTML, so they’re encouraging people to put broken code inside their Web pages while blocking the competition.

Twitter’s future, I would guess, is similar to that of MySpace and Digg.com. The US Library of Congress is saving all the contents, so one day when Twitter.com goes offline we might still remember that old site which committed suicide, taking down with it all of our data, more or less like identi.ca.

WEEK ago I asked my bank for clarifications on privacy. The bank manager never called back at all (they had promised s/he would), essentially making promises in vain and evading the serious issue. I contacted NatWest again, expressing disappointment that they broke their promise. An advisor told me they would call back shortly, but I have been waiting for many hours in vain. Here is the chat log:

You are now connected with an adviser.

Guri: Hi, you’re chatting with Guri. How may I help you?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: Hi Guri

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: Last week I spoke with a Rep. called Manny

Guri: Hi Dr. Schestowitz

Guri: How may I help you today?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: He spoke to his boss and said they would call me back by Friday

Guri: okay

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: That was a week ago, on Monday

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: He said they would have phoned by the end of the week, but did not

Guri: I am very sorry to hear that…

Guri: may i know regarding what he has arranged the call for you ?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: I left my telephone number with him, can you please check this?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: The cal was regarding data privacy in my 5 accounts, I said I would like my data not to be shared across nations.

Guri: May I know the sort code, your full name and first line of address to check the details for you?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: Sort code: XXXX , Dr. Roy Schestowitz, XXXX

Guri: Thank you. I will locate your details. There may be a slight delay while I check your information. I appreciate your patience.

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: No problem

Guri: Dr. Schestowitz, If you want I will set a new call back for you and you will get the call within 3-4 hours

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: Please.

Guri: May I know your Telephone number?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: XXXX

Guri: Thank you

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: I look forward to the call in a few hours, thanks and good day

Guri: I have arranged the call back for you

Guri: You will get the call within 3-4 hours

Guri: Is there anything else I can help you with today?

Dr. Roy Schestowitz: That’s all, thanks

it’s not over yet. They failed to call back twice in a row now. I think it’s deliberate because of the nature of the query. They want secrecy around their abuse of customers’ data.