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Digital Freedom

The fun of free software

Despite running Linux for over 6 years now, I just recently converted my machine to Debian Testing. My initial reason for running Testing was to obtain newer versions of packages I value, like the GNOME desktop environment, the LaTeXila editor, and the Scilab simulation software. Therefore right out of the box it was very satisfying getting to experience the progress that had been made since the last Debian Stable release. However in Scilab I experienced the problem of graphs not displaying as they should. Of course I filed a bug report and by creating a workaround (writing svg images) I was able to continue business as usual. Now what I wasn’t expecting, is the level of excitement I got from having a bug that was bothering you finally solved. When I upgraded my packages today I found out that this specific bug has been fixed and even though it was a minor issue, it is amazing that all the people in patching the software and releasing it cared about my issues, and that so many other users will benefit from this patch as well. Not just seeing the larger updates but especially seeing the smaller improvements does shed a different light on software development in the free software community and I’d like to think it is very addictive, especially for the more technical users, to continually be supplied with small improvements.

Circumventing Google on mobile

Nowadays there are many ways to circumvent Google’s services for mobile, which is especially important to Android users who would like to take the next step in freeing their Android. There are other email providers, other PIM syncing services and other application distributors. However I would assume that sometimes a couple of non-free applications might be holding users back from freeing their Android, for instance because no free alternative is available or because their friends are tied in a non-free environment. Luckily the Linux Action Show made me aware of GooglePlayDownloader a project which enables the user to download .apk files from the Google Play Store whilst circumventing the logging and syncing required by Google. This is of course a cat and mouse game, with the associated projects reverse-engineering the API’s and store navigation to keep track of this moving target. With most software creators targeting just the Google Play Store for Android applications, this is a valuable addition to the set of tools that aid in freeing mobile users.

Truly user-centered design

Federico Mena Quintero just published an extensive write-up about the reason for having the Linux-desktop (GNOME) focus on user-security and user-safety. Federico in return was inspired by the talk by Matthew Garret at GUADEC 2014, as featured by the Linux Weekly News. By using the parallelism of city-safety, Federico attempts to describe the way in which the total (desktop/city)-environment is benefiting from the established level of security and the achieved level of safety. I’d like to think that security is about the hard-limits, whilst safety is about the soft-limits, both of which can be crossed depending on the experience of the user. In a sense serving a secure and safe freedom-oriented system would make it impossible for users to compromise their own safety, security and privacy unless specific additional features are enabled. Of course the details about these features should be made very clear to the user, in order to avoid users unknowingly endangering themselves. The small bits which can be worked on at GNOME are listed in the meeting documents of the GNOME safety team.

Great insights from Flock 2014

This month the Fedora Flock conference was held in Prague. Even though I haven’t used Fedora in a while now, the conference was interesting to me because of other topics discussed. I already reported on the Novena presentation, but below I’ve listed other presentations.

Free And Open Source Software In Europe: Policies And Implementations – Gijs Hillenius

This presentation gives a nice overview of various initiatives around free software and how well organizations transition towards free software. The statement about the mayor of Munich has unfortunately been multiplied by the Linux press, but coming from this presentation it seems that the transition is properly locked into processes and there won’t be a change of plans any time soon. Gijs also gave other great examples of free software being used, of which the Gendarmerie struck me by scale and determination. Of course the main issue in Europe related to this topic is the reluctance of the European Commission of even considering free software, which is covered by Gijs as well.

Building an application installer from the ground up – Richard Hughes

The presentation give a nice overview of the process of solving the know problem of making legacy systems compatible with the new system. Basic considerations were how to deal with local and remote information storage and how to deal with fonts, plugins and terminal commands. I believe the team did a great job by keeping a local focus (including search), incorporating development efforts in the ranking, refraining from including all terminal commands in the software center (which would totally clutter the interface) and supplying content for the premium applications. This will help make software center a premium tool which will not only aid casual users, but will also be a powerful tool for power-users as well.

Better Presentation of fonts in Fedora – Pravin Satpute

Overall I didn’t find this presentation a strong one. It made me aware of a new fact, namely that developers are able to choose their own fonts, regardless of fonts included in the distribution or supplied by the user. However I’m not quire sure if Pravin maybe meant that developers aren’t able to develop for a specific set of fonts, because that is decided later on by the selected theme and the font settings. Halfway down the presentation a small discussion about the font feature in the new software center, where a main question arose on grouping fonts and how to deal with example texts. These questions however remain unanswered. Pravin provided a link to his font portal which seems to be aimed at providing additional features like comments and character support views on top of a concept like the Open Font Library. The key point I took away from this presentation is that work is needed on creating a generic overview covering the font characteristics, the character support, license information, readability, and possibly user reviews.

GNOME: a content application update – Debarshi Ray

This presentation gives a great overview of the effort of GNOME to come up with a set of applications to manage content, much in the same way Adobe Bridge has introduced the concept a while ago for the Adobe Creative Suite. It is not about viewing or editing and it is not about the files, it is about the content from various sources and managing it. One of the powerful concept explicitly highlighted is the ‘reversible delete’ so that rather than explicitly asking for confirmation, you can undo an accidental deletion. Furthermore secondary click (right click) have been removed to better suit touchscreen controls. Debarshi also gives a hint of things to come concerning sharing via various sharing points, managed in the settings dialog. The mock-up shown also shows regular applications like GIMP and Inkscape to be covered by this concept of sharing points, which seems odd but would help to unify the management concept.

How Is the Fedora Kernel Different – Levente Kurusa

This presentation was beyond my state of knowledge about kernels and the Linux kernel in particular. It did however highlight how the Linux kernel can be tweaked to meet different needs and how different distributions make different decisions on these settings. In general however I would believe most users would never be able to distinguish these kernels, just like I wouldn’t. I’d be more struck by decisions on a higher level like the default desktop environment and the package manager.

Procrastination makes you better – Life of a remotee – Flavio Percoco

This presentation gave a brief and humorous overview on the struggles of working remotely, covering some tips on improving your working life. It is strong in the sense that it was a very personal story, relating to many remote workers, although it only has limited pointers to other material on dealing with working remotely.

UEFI – The Great Satan and you – Adam Williamson

This was a very explanatory presentation covering both the technology of UEFI and Secure boot and the practical implications. Since I have no experience with a machine featuring UEFI, I didn’t have any idea about how much of a pain dealing with UEFI and Secure boot would be. It seems this very much depends on the machine being used, although best-practices exist. Also it clarified the controversy around Secure boot, since basically other keys apart from Microsoft could have been included, but unfortunately no other party was willing to take on the job. Surely a presentation worth recommending.

UX 101 – Practical usability methods that everyone can use – Karen T.

I found this presentation be a great one, coming clearly from a design-side rather than a development side. The presentation gives a concise overview of achieving a great interface, which is great to watch again before taking on a new project involving design. I believe anyone involved in user interfaces can learn from this overview.

Yubikeys – Nick Bebout

This presentation covers the Yubikeys by Yubico, which can be used for two-factor authentication. The newer model called the Yubikey Neo also features the possibility of hardware-based PGP. The presentation covered some aspects specifically targeted for Fedora users, but it did a decent covering of the features of Yubikey and even of smart-cards. Including a demo, this presentation offers plenty of pointers to delve into the various aspects of key management and two-factor authentication.

Richard Stallman reformatted

This year Richard Stallman gave a presentation at TEDxGeneva, which is now available on video. Having seen my fair share of Stallman presentations, it is quite noticeable how Stallman is forced to keep his presentation concise and keep the content aligned with the presented illustrations. Despite this struggling, the presentation gives a good summary of the many aspects of free software and the iconic illustrations make it very lively and understandable. Surely a video to recommend to others. (Despite the explicit note by Stallman to refrain from using the term ‘open-source’ I will classify it this way, mainly because free software includes freeware which is even more harmful than open-source software.)

Keys all over again

I just updated my GnuPG encryption by generating a new key-pair from scratch. Contrary to the last time I took care in keeping my main key private and explicitly using subkeys to be used for signing and decrypting. Even though a common practice has been established, it is quite a challenge to understand the different options and the way in which different configurations might be better or worse. I took some advice by looking at the GNU Privacy Handbook, a recent post by Stephen Josefsson, A Riseup article on best practices, a list of instructions on strictly working with a live OS, and an outdated manual for keysigning parties. Strictly signing offline feels like a hassle, but I’m sure I will get by.

One of the intended improvements I wasn’t able to work out, was using different passwords for my subkeys. I found an email on the GnuPG user mailinglist, but these instructions didn’t make it happen. This therefore remains to be worked out. The article of Stephen Josefsson also triggered some thoughts on more advanced configurations, by using a picture and refraining from using 64-bit based key-sizes. So there are still some ways of improving the quality of the configuration, although at the very least this change was a step in the right direction.

A while back a report was published on the responses given on the EU copyright consultation. Despite the length of the document (101 pages) it is very readable and as the matter of fact it gives a decent overview of the different viewpoint involved in this issue. I’ve given some highlights below.

Institutional users on the terms of protection, making the case that in most cases the copyright is exhausted at the end of the copyright term:

Institutional users generally believe that the current terms are inappropriate and should be shortened. … They point out that in many cases, the costs of the digitisation of copyright protected works that are no longer commercially exploited exceeds the potential economic value of these works.

Some of the authors and performance reacting on the same issue apparently don’t seem to get that the copyright is defined to extend to a set period after death of the author:

The vast majority of authors and performers consider that the term of protection currently set out in EU law is appropriate and should not be shortened. However, some respondents in these categories favour a longer term of protection, which, they say, would better reflect longer life expectancy.

I was glad to see notice of disabilities in the section on copyright exceptions, although I would assume the real questions arise when third party service providers aid in transforming content to digital or audible form. Furthermore it struck me that there seems to be a lack of agreement amongst member states on about all of the issues. This would therefore further complicate the process of copyright reform and unification, resulting in the continuation of the status quo. An issue I wasn’t quite aware of, is that event though an exception exists for educational institution, this often times results in problems when courses are made available to an outside audience. This issue therefore hinders the adoption of new ways of teaching. At the minimum a clear stance should be taken about such cases. As a student it is painful to see end users argue for access of scientific articles without needing to go through all the paywalls which have been put up by the various journals. Staying on top of recent development is however important to all professionals in academics, probably to anyone studying, and therefore also to society as a whole. Limiting the flow of the information our modern society has been built upon can therefore be considered very coercive.

After reading through the document I would summarize that on the one hand the authors, management organizations and publishes are quite satisfied with the way the system is set-up, whilst the end users desire more freedom and increase clarity. A large part of these end users however seem to acknowledge the fact that copyright should be kept in order to keep the system going. So does this mean that copyright in its current form isn’t serving society they way it was intended originally?

Good design

In the 1970s industrial designer Dieter Rams famously wrote his ten principles for good design which is a powerful way of evaluating the quality of any product. Many methodologies exist on how best to design in order to achieve a certain kind of product, but I have yet to come across any other methodology on evaluating the end-product. In a way that final evaluation is all that matters, even though many companies can get away with tricking customers into buying lesser products. Setting a standard of good products will be a tremendous boost for overall wealth in the world, since this will most surely inspire others to strive for similar goals.

The products by Apple are known to be adhering to these principles of good design, whether or not they intended it to. The way in which products adhere to these principles unfortunately can’t be measured quantitatively, making it also hard to define a ‘best’ product. This especially holds true because these principles aren’t in any way limited to industrial design. Just think about how Wikipedia has established not only their product but also their underlying mission making it so that now all these ten principles can considered met.

Privacy and security

Considering how issues related to privacy and security map on these principles, I believe that principles 6, 8 and 9 call for the implementation of proper security and privacy, whilst principles 1, 2, 5 guide the right way of implementing privacy and security. This user-friendly approach of privacy and security has luckily been called upon in the community many times over.

  • The 6th principle ‘good design is honest’ calls for a product to clarify what security and privacy is given and also what isn’t. If say back-doors are purposely added to a product, this should be clear to the user. If on the other hand the product is as secure as possible, users should be informed what threats exist however unlikely.
  • The 8th principle ‘good design is thorough down to the last detail’ calls on designers (and engineers, which are also designers) to leave no aspects undecided, and therefore requires them to take a stance on matters like privacy and security.
  • The 9th principle ‘good design is environmentally friendly’ goes a long way of addressing all issues that are related to a product but also go way beyond the scope of a single product. The main argument here is the generalization principle of ‘what if all products were like that’, which calls on even the most limited product to respect the bigger picture. Examples included in the original principles are resource conservation, minimizing physical pollution and minimizing visual pollution. All of these examples of course hold for the complete product cycle, since this is needed to even grasp the bigger picture. Personally I’d like to believe that respecting privacy and security are part of this 9th principle, since if all product would violate privacy and security, a fearful society described in George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four might become a reality. This is the referred bigger picture this principle adheres to.
  • The 1st principle ‘good design is innovative’ calls on designers to refrain from solely relying on ‘common standards’ and consider new innovations to be incorporated in their products. If everybody just keeps saying privacy and security are hard and leaves it at that, society will only deteriorate on this issue.
  • The 2nd principle ‘good design makes a product useful’ and the 5th principle ‘good design is unobtrusive’ emphasize the importance of not putting the burden of security and privacy on the users. Most users don’t like to fiddle with that and will mess things up eventually regardless of intention. These issues should be for the designer to solve, not for the user to worry about.

Conclusion

These powerful principles might some times seem to be in conflict with each other and often times products are designed for short-term gains despite best intentions. It is however up to involved designers to improve the products and make the hard compromises required, not only to suit target customers but to suit society as a whole. This holds for privacy and security just as it holds for aesthetics and sustainability. Designers have to power to shape our world and with great power comes great responsibility.

A minimum level of sharing capabilities

Lately it has struck me how the sharing of content we were used to, is now slowly being taken away from us, without most of us noticing. Remember how anyone was able to lend out their books, CD’s and DVD’s, even just a couple of years ago? Today there is a totally different paradigm. More and more the content is becoming strictly contained in the domains of the service providers via forms of DRM. Streaming services like Spotify and Netflix keep their content stored online and programs like iTunes and Adobe Digital Editions make sure that even the local storage is in the hands of the service provider. Now, this movement in itself is not as bad as it might seem, since you could for example still lend somebody the account credentials or share an e-reader. However simultaneously there is trend towards a strong tie between devices and their users. Just imagine swapping smartphones with a friend for a week so you can enjoy each others e-books, it is unthinkable since that smartphone is tied to your email, your apps, your passwords, your phone number and your other media. Spending a little money on buying an e-book rather than sharing devices is therefore the only sane option. Apple currently seems at the forefront of pushing this paradigm of devices belonging to only a single user by focusing on a seamless experience between devices and by linking it all to your Apple ID. It is not without reason that better content sharing options were most-requested and recently adopted in the form of Family Sharing. However the scope of lending out content is still far more limited than it ever was in the previous decades.

Apart from sharing, we in Europe have also agreed on several rights people have for legally copying content. In the Netherlands this mainly entails making a private copy of legally distributed content and making a private copy for studying purposes. Depending on the media copying was done with a photo-copier, an audio tape recorder or a video tape recorder. With content being restricted end-to-end, the only real way of making a copy seems to be at the side of the human accessing it. This means recording the audio using a microphone, recording the video using a video-camera and copying an e-book with a camera or photo-copier. Granted, other methods exist but these mainly require someone technical to circumvent these restrictions. So the conclusion to be made, is that with the digital revolution, copying content in the way you are entitled to by law has become harder and not easier.

How can it be that as a society we have agreed on what a person should and should not be able to do with content in terms of lending and copying, but that the main content distributors and their technology are not supporting these rights in any way? Since ultimately the desire for content outweighs the ethical considerations for most consumers, it is up to the governments and related institutions to demand the implementation of the level of freedom we have agreed on. Since the law is the ultimate restriction, code needn’t be and shouldn’t be more restrictive than the law.