- Mozilla (committer level)
- engineer on firefox spoke briefly--very proud to sponsor all volunteer, all open source conference
- Rackspace Cloud
- many others
- etherpad
- session notes link on website links to wiki
- freenode (coordinate food, beer, hacking, etc.)
- android app
- lightning talks -- sign up to do a 5 minute talk
Danny O'Brien
- former activist for EFF
- advocate for journalist and blogger's rights - Committee to Protect Journalists (http://cpj.org)
- half the journalists currently imprisoned are online journalists
- Free Software: World Domination. Fast. (Linus Torvalds' plan, 1995)
- Tajikistan -- one of the last places the internet will reach
- mountainous
- poor
- land-locked--surrounded by neighbors with censorship policies
- difference between rural and urban described as "rural like Yahoo, urban like Google"
- the real effect of social tools doesn't happen until years after their invention
- e.g. Thailand--during recent problems, one of the major places people get information is prachatai.com (runs on Drupal)
- independent news media site
- not surprising that something like Drupal used for this--cost, flexibility
- kenya - ushahidi.com
- originally set up to try and map election abuses
- people can submit info via text message
- map mashup - software open sourced
- these examples are how we expect FLOSS to work
- what's next after world domination?
- still a huge space of things that could be done by open source systems that aren't being done either by proprietary or floss systems
- low-hanging fruit
- encryption for all!
- free software tends to be better about rigorous security--more interest in using open standards
- why don't we do more of this by default?
- TLS provides security for readers and publishers
- makes simple censorship complicated
- more difficult to block specific web sites by URL
- tools already exist--just not being used by default
- still not the easiest thing to set up TLS on a web site
- free software is supposed to make the tricky stuff easy
- minimal data retention
- we're pack-rats but we're not spooks
- preset defaults in logging and data capture become ubiquitous
- how would apache be different if it didn't log everything by default?
- by having a minimalist approach in terms of data retention in the applications we build we can set standards others use
- logs are exactly what the government, etc. go after
- all this data just sits there with no use until suddenly someone's interested in it
- we control the presets
- we have default policies, and they are wrong
- defaults: we don't have encryption, we log aggressively
- these policies have serious ramifications
- how do proprietary systems help repressive regimes?
- proprietary software isn't necessarily gung-ho about helping repressive regimes, but the incentives with proprietary software are screwed up
- incentives of proprietary software are similar to the incentives of repressive regimes
- internet and journalists
- originally the internet pushed power to the individual
- these days since everything is aggregated, control is pushed back to a small number of entities
- e.g. Ethiopian journalists pushed out of the country, kept in touch with people via Facebook
- Ethiopian govt got Facebook to shut down the Facebook page, so the journalists lost contact with their audience
- e.g. journalist arrested and tortured in Iran--first thing they wanted is the person's Facebook password
- can see your social network and communications
- problem is that Facebook REALLY doesn't want anyone to be able to delete their data
- fixing the incentives
- we can build software that counters the above incentives
- we can patch/hack facebook
- build data liberation tools
- build floss alternatives (software & services)
- "Boston Data Lift" (Franklin Street Statement)
- Free-speech friendly third parties without commercial goals (Dreamwidth)
- Build distributed, federated systems -- status.net and beyond
- these are directions open source moves in anyway, but important to push things back out to the edge and let people control their own data
- what happens if we don't go off in these directions?
- kyrgyzstan - Stan TV
- kyrgystan recently had a coup -- tried to stop independent media like Stan TV
- closed down Stan TV based on accusations of piracy
- Microsoft came in with a task force and shut everything down based on the fact that they didn't have proof they were using valid Windows licenses
- Kenya - ushahidi.com
- more advanced than the US in many ways in terms of how they use technology (e.g. micropay service based on mobile phone network)
- downside? avg Kenyan spends over 50% of their disposable income on mobile telecommunications
- bottom 75% spends 63.6% on mobile telecommunications
- HAVE to have a mobile phone to function
- we need to push the boundaries of open practices to resolve this
- Thailand
- Monday of this week--the person who installs/runs Drupal on site mentioned above was arrested
- violation of computer security laws
- based on some comments that were left on Drupal that were defamatory to the King of Thailand
- Thai authorities may not understand the concept of building out a network
- Monday of this week--the person who installs/runs Drupal on site mentioned above was arrested
- why is all of this important?
- the more we spread software of this type, the more the establishment in places like Thaliand will understand how everything works
- the more we build out federated systems, there IS no central person who can be held responsible
- free software advocates are either doing free journalism or writing the software that enables free journalism
- kyrgyzstan - Stan TV
- what do you think about locked down app stores like that of apple?
- when YOU have control over your technology, your incentives match what you need and why
- when there's an intermediary in the way, the person in control might have different incentives
- benefits free media to be able to limit these sorts of controls
- what's the best way to make all the free tools known to more journalists?
- we're still not very good at making software easy to use
- journalists have a lot more to worry about than how to install a PGP plugin into Thunderbird
- i don't have the answer, but i hope this is an extra push to get better at this
- users depend vitally on the software we write
- recent story -- student's car got towed, griped online, towing company suing student for disparaging remarks. on the other extreme, there's real hate speech. where does the responsibility lie?
- knee-jerk reply -- can't solve social issues with technology. but plenty of examples where we do solve social issues with technology.
- we can improve how free speech is distributed
- "answer to bad speech is more speech" -- shine a light
- problem with centralized tools is they're used to keep the weakest members of society from being able to speak
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