This Friday is International Day Against DRM; Join us

This Friday, December 04, is International Day Against DRM (IDAD). I’ve talked about DRM before and explained how it’s a violation of our rights over freedom, computing, and privacy.

Sadly, there are thousands (if not millions) of products and devices that impose DRM on us and there’s not much we can do about it. However, we’re not defenseless.

Our biggest weapon, which all those products and companies are fearful of, is not using them. By cancelling our subscriptions and not buying/using their products, we defend ourselves, empower people against DRM companies, and tell them that we don’t let them violate our rights.

As a matter of fact, almost all of those companies are highly dependent on people, so we ourselves are our biggest weapon and shot against them.

Many, like Netflix, our getting paid by our money and data but they don’t deserve it. When we pay for something, and purchase it, we should be the owner of that copy/distribution and have full control over it; that is what DRM companies like Netflix are afraid of.

This year, the Free Software Foundation, the one behind the Defective by Design campaign, is focusing on Netflix.

Please join us on defending our rights and fighting Digital Restriction Managements. This is a fight for our future, not only about computers, but about everything.

Privacy from everyone, but us

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.

We don’t need data protection, we need PRIVACY

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.

Privacy should not be a luxury. It should not be a bargaining chip. It should never have a price tag.

International Internet Day

​International Internet Day is celebrated globally on October 29 every year. International Internet Day is celebrated to commemorate a momentous day in the history of telecommunications and technology. The day marks the sending of the first electronic message which was transferred from one computer to another in 1969.

Charley Kline, a student programmer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), transmitted the first-ever electronic message on 1969 October 29.

Kline, who was working under the supervision of Professor Leonard Kleinrock, transmitted a message from the computer housed at the UCLA to Bill Duvall who was using a computer positioned at the Stanford Research Institute’s computer.

The sender system at UCLA was the SDS Sigma 7 Host computer and the receiver was the SDS 940 Host at the Stanford Research Institute.

The message sent was the word “login”. Kline and Kleinrock managed to send “L” and “O” before the connection between the terminals crashed.

To celebrate, here’s the video of David Bowie talking about internet (courtesy of BBC):

David Bowie predicted in 1999 the impact of the Internet in BBC interview (video is courtesy of BBC)

New York’s Strand bookstore appeals for help

The New York Strand bookstore, one of the New York’s landmarks and probably one of the most important landmark of NYC in literary appeals for help due to financial crisis caused by coronavirus.

“We’ve survived just about everything for 93 years,” proprietor Nancy Bass-Wyden said in a statement, of the store her grandfather founded in 1927. “The Great Depression, two world wars, big box bookstores, ebooks and online behemoths. We are the last of the 48 bookstores still standing from 4th Avenue’s famous Book Row.

Please buy from your local stores and support local businesses instead of chain markets and Amazon. Specially, if you want a book, please buy it from your local physical bookstore if you can’t borrow it from your local library.

This way, you can be sure there’s no DRM involved and also local business won’t get shut down because of evil giants like Amazon.

International Day for the Eradication of Poverty

The International Day for the Eradication of Poverty is an international observance celebrated each year on October 17 throughout the world.

The first commemoration of the event took place in Paris, France in 1987 when 100 thousand people gathered on the Human Rights and Liberties Plaza at the Trocadéro to honor victims of poverty, hunger, violence, and fear at the unveiling of a commemorative stone by Joseph Wresinski, founder of the International Movement ATD Fourth World.

In 1992, four years after Wresinski’s death, the United Nations officially designated October 17 as the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.

Early in his career as an activist, Wresinski recognized that governments often ignored the plight of those living in poverty, leading to feelings of rejection, shame, and humiliation.

As a result, one of the primary goals of the Day is to recognize the struggles of the impoverished and to make their voices heard by governments and citizens. Participation by the poorest of people is an important aspect of the observance of the Day.

Wherever men and women are condemned to live in extreme poverty, human rights are violated. To come together to ensure that these rights be respected is our solemn duty.

Joseph Wresinski