Cyberspace

Posts about cyberspace and liberty. Free software, privacy, technology, copyright/copyleft, our digital rights, and whatever concerns us in the digital age.

The importance of license in libre works

One of the most important parts of free software movement is license. Choosing a license is one of the constant concerns of the free software and free culture community. As you know, a work is considered libre only if it’s published under a free (as in freedom) license.

One of the problems is that it happens a lot that a developer forgets to distribute his work under a proper license. Well it can be solved easily by reminding the community the importance of providing a license but the bigger problem is the license itself.

Most of the times, developer distribute their works with weak licenses or licenses that are not fully compatible with free (as in freedom) culture.

As far as I know, the most popular software license is Expat (MIT), as of 2020. MIT is a great simple libre license. However, it’s weak and not copyleft. I personally license my works under the latest version of GNU General Public License (GPL) but some people may don’t like it as they may find it unpleasing.

Anyway, what I’m talking about is the importance of license as the license specifies the terms of the software. Whether it can be used for progress of technology or helping the people or be used to please corporations, it’s all can be defined by the license.

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Encryption is worthless unless we control the keys

A lot of companies advertise their encryption of data. Encryption is a good practice for privacy and security but it’s worthless sometimes. For example, WhatsApp encrypts messages but it’s worthless as it’s Facebook (WhatsApp’s owner) who creates and manages the keys.

What a secure messenger or any service should do is to let the user create and handle encryption keys. Let me give you another example. Imagine you want to send a letter to a friend and I’m the mail person. You give me your letter and I promise you to hide it. Now, I may hide it from other people but I still have access to it.

Encryption is like that. If you want to hide your letter, you should do it yourself and not trust anyone. As long as other services do the encryption for you or manage your keys, you’re not truly secure and that encryption is worthless.

People should be aware if they’re seeing an advertisement

A lot of people are tired of advertisements. For example, some of us are using ad blockers now when we’re surfing the web. A lot of people mute the TV when they see an ad, others may use different technics to avoid ads. But what we’re facing now, is advertisements that are not specifically tell us what they are.

If you see a billboard in a street recommending something, you can tell it’s an ad, but what if your favorite football player recommends something? Imagine Leo Messi posting a picture of himself drinking Pepsi. How would you know if it’s really his preference or it’s just a paid ad?

Such thing can affect our decision on choosing stuff.

Read more… “People should be aware if they’re seeing an advertisement”

Most free programs are not alternatives

It’s a reply to “Wanna try Jitsi Meet? ” by Paulo Pinto .

I believe referring to a free software as an alternative to a proprietary software is not right. Most free software are not created to replace something. They have been created to satisfy a need for a service or software and are licensed free (as in freedom) to respect users’ rights.

I wouldn’t refer to a software as an alternative to another software, unless the creators specifically mention it.

Browsing in private mode

There’s a lot of reports that some web sites are blocking users’ access if they are on private browsing mode. One of these web sites is The Washington Post, who chose “Democracy Dies in Darkness” as its motto. It’s very funny that the very news agency that claims to fight for democracy and freedom is tracking its users and collects their personal information.

If you visit The Washington Post web site with private mode activated on your browser, you’ll see such notice:

We noticed you’re browsing in private mode.

Private browsing is permitted exclusively for our subscribers. Turn off private browsing to keep reading this story, or subscribe to use this feature, plus get unlimited digital access.

I do support asking for subscription or limiting the amount of articles a user can read on free plan but limiting people from using private mode is not acceptable. The point of private browsing is to not being recognized nor  followed.

This is actually much more worrying that this is a bug from browsers. A browser should not let websites know if a user is browsing web in private mode. Not being tracked should not be a luxury. A user should be in private browsing mode by default and if they wanted, they can turn it off.

Tracking people in private mode should be considered as a violation of people’s privacy and browsers should be forced to put more effort to make private browsing much more safer and easier for users.

Save Internet Freedom

https://saveinternetfreedom.tech

Save Internet Freedom

There’s some crazy internal US politics right now that threatens Open Technology Fund, who funded Let’s Encrypt, Certbot, Tor Project , Guardian Project, Signal, and a lot more.

Looks like a couple proprietary software companies are trying to take over this free software money. Please sign on to the campaign to try to stop it.

About passwords

For years, we have used passwords to protect our security. We used different kinds of passwords. From mechanical locks and keys to digital ones and of course current passwords for our accounts.

Setting passwords helped us to secure our accounts but as we had progress in safe passwords, others made progress to break them. For years, we protected our accounts and goods against humans but what we’re facing now is computers.

We’ve been trained to set passwords hard to remember for humans but easy for computers to find. This should be changed.

Read more… “About passwords”