Cyberspace

I’ve talked about Apple’s definition of privacy before and explained how horrible it is but they took this to the next level. Apparently the new version of Apple macOS informs Apple every time a user runs a program on its machine.

Many Apple fans and/or developers including Apple Inc. itself have tried to justify this privacy violation by explaining how it is secure or is not a big deal but sadly they are wrong.

Apple is not a privacy hero. They are not keeping all data to themselves and even if they were, it does not justify stealing our data and sneaking in our machines and collecting our very personal data.

What they did is stealing. Exactly like a thief who sneaks into our homes and collects/steals our belongings.

I have explained about the ridiculous “data protection” and how companies are misleading people about their privacy by using this word. This is exactly how Apple is doing it. Apple claims that it doesn’t share data with others while we know for a fact that it’s a lie. Now with that claim, they suddenly decided to consider themselves entitled to control everything.

It’s a disaster. Imagine how insecure and horrible this is. Apple doesn’t even follow the terms of stupid data protection. Jeffrey Paul, a security expert who reported this, wrote:

1. These OCSP requests are transmitted unencrypted. Everyone who can see the network can see these, including your ISP and anyone who has tapped their cables .
2. These requests go to a third-party CDN run by another company, Akamai.
3. Since October of 2012, Apple is a partner in the US military intelligence community’s PRISM spying program , which grants the US federal pigs and military unfettered access to this data without a warrant, any time they ask for it. In the first half of 2019 they did this over 18,000 times, and another 17,500+ times in the second half of 2019.

Often when companies and some authorities talk about privacy, they start bringing “data protection” in discussion which means nothing than violating people’s privacy in a nicer way.

Data protection means the company or authority can actually collect data and use them but it can’t share or sell it to others, well at least publicly. This is exactly the way Apple advertises about its privacy policies.

Even many privacy activists are promoting Apple because of its privacy policies while Apple is in fact one of the biggest violators of people’s privacy. For example, it wasn’t a long ago that we found out Apple was (or maybe still is) letting contractors (actual humans, not even bots) to listen to people’s conversations with Siri.

Privacy comes when there’s no identifiable personal data involved. A company promising that it won’t jeopardize our privacy is not enough for people. We need mechanisms and products that will protect our privacy and it comes only when they don’t collect our data.

Well of course some products only work with our data. For example, a mobile phone map application for routing only works when we give it our location. Well, as far as I know, data can be purged or even be collected in a way that no personally identifiable data would be stored or transmitted.

We have a lot of services like EteSync that provide what they intend to provide and they actually work with very personal data. EteSync for example is a service that syncs your contacts and calendar but encrypts all data in a way that nobody except you yourself can see them.

This is what we want as a privacy service/product. If a corporation like Google follow policies like ‘data protection’, they would still violate our privacy while deceiving us about how they value our rights.

We need privacy, not data protection. Nobody should have access to our data to whether they want to protect it or not.

Who would have thought that Microsoft, a company that once branded Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches” have condescended to adding its browser software in GNU+Linux?

This means free software world has definitely won, doesn’t it?

Microsoft will release its Edge browser for GNU+Linux next month , initially through the browser’s Dev preview channel.

The Windows giant, which has warmed to GNU+Linux in recent years, made the announcement at its Ignite 2020 conference, conducted virtually this week on account of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Our mission to bring Microsoft Edge to the platforms our customers use daily takes its next step: starting in October, Microsoft Edge on [GNU+]Linux will be available to download on the Dev preview channel,” said veep Liat Ben-Zur in a blog post. “When it’s available, [GNU+]Linux users can go to the Microsoft Edge Insiders site to download the preview channel, or they can download it from the native [GNU+]Linux package manager.”

Initially, Microsoft will provide Edge for GNU+Linux through Debian and Ubuntu distributions, with others to follow.

I don’t know what will be the license of the browser and if Microsoft releases the software under a proper license like GNU GPL but I’m not optimistic about it. Microsoft doesn’t like the free software world as we threaten its interests in violating people’s rights.

However, it’s still good news. It means Microsoft now knows more people are informed and interested in their rights. It means that they feel more and more people are using GNU+Linux as their operating system. I won’t use it though.

One thing I should mention is that we are surrounded with proprietary software and companies. Almost all of the major tech and publishing companies are proprietary ones. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon (Big Tech ) are constantly working to protect the proprietary software and patents of theirs.

Sadly, the majority of people use almost only proprietary software and these companies are benefiting from them. Now, what we do (supporting the free culture) is against their benefit so they have to advertise against it and target people with false accusations against free software world.

For instance, the Google page about the AGPL details inaccurate (but common) misconceptions about the obligations of the AGPL that don’t follow from the text. Google states that if, for example, Google Maps used PostGIS as its data store, and PostGIS used the AGPL, Google would be required to release the Google Maps code. This is not true.

These companies don’t like free software. This is actually one of the reasons that they use the term Open Source instead of free software.

Now, if they have to pretend to like a free software, they prefer the ones they can control, the ones like MIT that can be used proprietorially. An example is BSD. One of the major developers of BSD is Apple which benefits a lot from the weak BSD licenses.

Copyleft restricts big tech from benefiting and not giving back to community so these companies don’t like it and do everything they can to weaken the copyleft culture so they can survive on benefiting from our community and violating people’s freedom and rights.