Free software and open source

Free software is a kind of software that can be used and modified freely without any limitation. It can be shared and copied among consumers. In free software, usually the source code is available for users and released into the public domain. As far as I know, any software produced based on free software and its source code must follow the free software license; thus any modified version of free software is also free.

The difference between free software and open source software is that open source software has been developed under copyright which enables marketing. Additionally, open source software can have various licenses. It may get available under the public domain or open content licenses that forbid commercial use or allow selling the modified versions.

Apparently, although the terms look alike, there is a huge gap between the concepts. On one hand, free software is a way of freedom for knowledge and originated in a social movement that believes “non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution”. On the contrary, open source brings ethical issues and legal status that could limit the freedom.

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Software licensing and copying restrictions

Future of software licensing!

It is not easy to predict the situation of software licensing landscape in five years since this would be a long time in the computer generation. In my opinion, the issue is sort of related to the issue of open source and the fact that whether it offers competent solutions for at least wide spread software or not.

If we compare the current condition of software licensing to five years ago, there are more and more open source software and more proprietary software went under free licenses. The reason can be the popularity of open source and which it applies different beneficial licensing approaches that are harmless for an ordinary user.

The reputation of free licensing would change the proprietary software landscape from ordinary and non-beneficial consumers to professionals and companies who earn money by using these kinds of software thus, they are able to pay for their professional use.

Applicability of copying restrictions!

Copying restrictions should be applied in a situation that both consumer and producer can gain benefit out of it. If the consumer of software or any digital products use it for commercial purposes, should share the benefits; in this case the copying restrictions can be more applicable because it is more manageable to control the digital rights when it comes to the commercial use. Whereas for individuals who use digital products as sources of education or entertainment, it would be more costly to apply restrictions and control them. So, it’s better to change the restrictions framework to a way feasible and advantageous for both users and creators.

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Social engineering

Social engineering is the act of deceiving people to make them reveal confidential information. Nowadays, there are lots of spam that psychologically manipulate people; for instance phishing is a method of fraud by sending fake emails that people might trust they are coming from a legitimate company or authority and make them to share their private information.

There are also fake emails to manipulate people sensitive feelings. For instance, emails describing a very poor situation of a person having a serious disease and ask for charity. Some of them might be true but some are to deceive people and take them to a website to obtain credit card or ID information. That’s a shame that social engineering can affect on people’s feeling of trust and turn them insensitive toward the real difficulties human being are dealing with.

One way to decrease the effectiveness of social engineering attempts is people awareness and education. There is not enough education toward social engineering yet. People might be trained at school or work place how to use computers and internet but not how to deal with threats. First of all, they should be aware of various threats and frauds and learn about the secure applications and ways to avoid social engineering.

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Hackerism

Jargon File:

I started to browse the glossary accessible in the jargon file. I never thought that there are lots of expressions and words defined by hackers which are quite large. Looking here and there, the word “filter” caught my eyes.  I was curious to learn what the difference is between my understanding and hackers’ definition of this word. Not only this word but also most of the words I browsed and had a look, were difficult and sort of technical for me to understand. Here you see the meaning of “filter” found in jargon file:

• filter: n.

[very common; orig. Unix] A program that processes an input data stream into an output data stream in some well-defined way, and does no I/O to anywhere else except possibly on error conditions; one designed to be used as a stage in a pipeline (see plumbing). Compare sponge.

If I understood correctly, filter processes the given data to provide well-defined data as a result. This meaning of filter sounds positive whereas my understanding of the word was more about removal of data which had more negative expression. Now, I am wondering whether the word carries more positive or harmful value!

Hacker ethic

Searching the word “hacker” in Wikipedia results in:

• Hacker (computer security) or cracker, who accesses a computer system by circumventing its security system

I think that the real meaning of hacker has changed nowadays. Most of the time (maybe except the real hackers) the meaning for hacker equals to cracker. It is a pity that the meaning has changed for people and they usually do not have any idea what the hacker culture and ethic are, additionally they might call hackers as nerds! Since the hacker ethic is not known for people at the present time; although, the ethic itself is still appreciated by many professionals in the field. Out of hacker ethic defined by Himanen, hacker network ethic (nethic) remarkably effects on decentralization of information by promoting the open source concept.

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Ubiquitous computing

How to reach ubicomp?

It has been discussed that digital divide is in opposition to ubiquitous computing (ubicomp). Exploring the factors how digital divide may happen leads us to the fact that social cohesiveness plays a very important role to reach ubicomp. Without equality, justice, and equal opportunities in education, economy and welfare of a society; not all of people can be a part of network society. Partly may left aside with no access to information flow, and digital divide definitely would happen.

If ubiquitous computing aims to enable people to interact with technology naturally and casually, then it should provide access to technology for everyone and everywhere (to be considered as a natural habit for every human being). For that purpose a minimum level of education and wellbeing is required for everyone to have a computer in hand, use internet and access to information society.

 

Scenarios of “Estonia 2010”

“Military Estonia” is the closest scenario to current Iran situation. The angry and disappointed society has been restricted in suffocating armed forces. Lack of freedom and openness avoid the society from improvement and also keep it away from becoming innovative however, sometimes it can be seen that boundaries make people to think about new ways of acquiring the technology and access to information. It might have helped to a group of people (like artists or journalists) to create ingenious works but I suppose the society trend is indeed downward.

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Digital divide and Internet availability

Considering the digital divide in Iran, unfortunately it is closely related to the level of censorship and education. Although lots of users try to get around the filtering and internet limitation by means of various anti-filtering software, it can decrease the accessibility and internet usage.

Level of education in the respect of familiarity with computer and English language plays an important role in digital divide between different generations. Even for elderly or middle-aged educated generation is still hard to use the computer since in general people have a lack of knowledge in English language that is the main factor in understanding how to use a computer; also it is hard for them to learn a completely new technology; While the younger generation who have access to computer and internet, are very curious and fast in learning. Lack of copyright and cheap software has been helpful for younger generation to become familiar and learn using a variety of software.

Another important factor of digital divide is that society is not dependent on computer and internet use and still lots of work is done in traditional way, thus people do not feel any need or courage to learn it.

Lack of internet availability is another factor to increase digital divide, although based on available articles, Iran has the second highest percentage of its population using internet in the Middle East, after Israel. Based on Wikipedia, 20 million people use internet but one cannot get around the fact that precise statistics are rare and just a few researches have been done around this area. According to an article on Internet use in Iran, access is not inexpensive there. Perhaps, the main internet service providers (ISPs) are located in Tehran and other big cities. So it is not hard to imagine that internet must be much faster and easier to use in urban areas. It increased problems like digital divide and level of education difference, also centering all the technology in big cities has forced people to migrate from rural to urban areas which has made lots of difficulties in respect of cultural and economical issues.

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Internet fraud in social networks!

Sometimes, I feel insecure when using social networks specially Facebook. It has happened several times that I received a message from a friend or a shared link on my friend’s wall but has not been shared or sent by that person. I suppose a social network like Facebook is attractive bait for scammers and fraudsters, since millions of users are connected and, an exploit or vulnerability can be hastily scattered over the network.

I even received a message from one of my friends living in another country some months ago, describing his miserable situation. In the message, was written that he is on a trip and lost all his money, cell phone and everything he had; so needs immediate help by asking for money transfer to his bank account! I’d say I was influenced and  believed the story at that moment but after thinking for a while, I hesitated! If it was a true story he wouldn’t ask me, but a closer friend or a family member since I haven’t had heard anything from him for a long time.

Facebook is full of games and applications, for lots of them the source is not the Facebook portal, while using them would give permission to access our account information. Many of them are phishing and malicious programs aiming for social engineering. Various fun quizzes which are widespread can be suitable for phishing by asking users about personal identity information or taking them to fake websites.

Taking a look at a scambaiting website such as Scam-O-Rama, a story about a Facebook scam shows that even when you chat through Facebook with a friend whom you know for years, you should be skeptical whether you are talking to your friend or a scammer! It has happened that a person chat with a friend who is in trouble and asks for immediate help to send money. The conversation is usually tried to be short and depict a stressful atmosphere not to let that person think or hesitate about the situation! I noticed that lots of people do not insert their Birthday in the info page because of identity theft and some provide wrong information. Many are cautious about sharing data on social networks yet still I suppose it is easy to spy and scam through social networks as of gullible majority.

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Echelon: a signals intelligence system

While reading the “Inside Echelon” article, I was amazed how powerful and influential the intelligence security agencies have been. One of the global surveillance systems is Echelon which is quite old (over 50 years old) and utilized by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept the national and international communications transiting through communications satellites.

Image by Sailor Coruscant

By emergence of automated computer systems, intelligence agencies used “key words” and “topic analysis” to filter redundant and access the desired information through networks. Data acquired by the Echelon network is used by the US and its allies for diplomatic, military and commercial purposes. Perhaps after the cold war period, it’s been mainly used for commercial and economic functions.

These kinds of intelligence agencies are able to collect and preserve vast volumes of information and communication data. Verbal and non-verbal traffic can be monitored by on-line processing systems; even automatic systems might be able to recognize the content of phone calls or the speaker’s identity. Furthermore, they are capable of interfering targeted computers by employment of information stealing viruses and wide variety of snooping software or hardware.

Accessing and processing the top secret information and telecommunications of countries governments are always the target of these sorts of agencies. A recently revealed example of designing a malware to access and extract confidential industrial and military information is Stuxnet worm targeted high-value assets in Iran.

From the BBC report, researchers believe that Stuxnet cannot be written by some hackers while could only have been designed by a nation state since the project seems to be very well-planned and well-funded. It has vast amount of code to affect the real-world infrastructure. Some experts speculate that this malware is going to disrupt some nuclear power plants or uranium enrichment plants there. It has been detected in June and its source is still unclear.

I suppose surveillance systems like Echelon is developing under “information warfare” circumstances. Since lots of clandestine communications is taken place through computer systems, designing spyware to retrieve information can be taken into consideration by intelligence agencies.

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Blocking software for a young teen: An experience with CyberPatrol!

I set up a blocking software named CyberPatrol to see how it filters the web content and to which extent. While installing, it provides various levels of blocking; it is possible to change the settings and manage the level of filtering for a child to a grownup person. I was curious to see how it works when I set the user type for a young teen and the environment for home. As you can see in the picture below in CyberPatrol Filtering level, high to maximum strength is considered for a teen. In addition, it is possible to set the time management for daily and weekly time limit, and monitoring which all web activity can be recorded. From the picture, the interesting point is that for a young teen gambling is less filtered than sex education.

While searching for different keywords I tried to find out how it is with dictatorship. Among the names of some dictators, the only name which couldn’t go through was Adolf Hitler, whereas almost all names of dictators were searchable including the existing ones!

In the category of sex education the keyword “get pregnant” is allowed while “not get pregnant” is filtered! “Make out” is filtered but “Made out” is allowed and give the same results.

In the Violence category, “kill”, “torture”, “death” are filtered while “murder”, “suicide”, “slaughter”, “assassinate”, “execute” and “stoning” are allowed and even horrible  pictures can be accessed.

In my opinion, the filtering policy was very random and setting it up would have even worse effect on a teenager. Since the issue of trust and reliability between parents and child can be spoiled that is more important than setting up a blocking software! I suppose spending time with children and explaining everything to help them distinguish between right and wrong would have a better result.

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Nonmarket production in Google 3D Warehouse!

Google 3D Warehouse is a repository for sharing 3D models. A lot of users make 3D models to share on the Warehouse or to be attached on Google Earth. Mostly, the models are made by users of Google Earth to contribute to build the 3D globe. Buildings, streets, bridges, cultural heritage sites and much more are being modeled and shared on this 3D social network.

In my opinion, the 3D construction in such a social network is a kind of nonmarket production since firstly, it is sharing information and information is non-rival and considered as “public goods”. Secondly, usage and access to Google Earth is free. Users and non-users of 3D warehouse can use the models (not in commercial use though) as part of access to information. Thus the production takes place in a system that provides information, entertainment and fame as benefits.

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