How sure are we that NSA doesn't have open source contributors on their payroll as well? What Microsoft, Google, etc are doing is deplorable but these guys seem pretty to determined to retain the ability to violate anybody's privacy, anywhere, anytime they choose. On Fri, 2013-07-12 at 09:30 +1200, Ian Stewart wrote:

Currently the lead article in The Guardian newspaper from UK is titled: "Revealed: how Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages?"

See...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user...

Sub-titled: • Secret files show scale of Silicon Valley co-operation on Prism • Outlook.com encryption unlocked even before official launch • Skype worked to enable Prism collection of video calls • Company says it is legally compelled to comply

While the article does not discuss the option of switching to Open Source Software, the comments section of the article contains quite a few posts discussing Linux and OSS as an alternative to Microsoft products.

Maybe these comments will help with boosting awareness of Open Source Software.

_______________________________________________ wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug

Well those are the open branches ... I'm talking about the ones that contribute to open source covertly for their benefit. I don't think they'll be doing that in the open. On Fri, 2013-07-12 at 09:55 +1200, Peter Reutemann wrote:

...

How sure are we that NSA doesn't have open source contributors on their payroll as well?

Apache Accumulo is an NSA open source project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Accumulo

The NSA was the primary original developer of SELinux: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux

Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 _______________________________________________ wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug

To me, capturing and processing gigabyte after gigabyte of data per second appears more like a game played by children. They do it because they can. You do not expect children to be more that that, but what about politicians and their dependants, security services? Once captured, what do you do with the data? To make them available to humans, you have to reduce the data rate to mere bytes per second, as that is all a human decision maker can handle. And during that process, the data get distorted inevitably to such a degree that they are useless anyway . . . Examples: 1. take a 10MByte photo and jpeg-compress it to 10 byte. How recognizable is that photo after compression? . . . 2. weather report: to make a reasonable forecast, how big a computer do you need, and how accurate is the forecast going to be? Even with the biggest machines available currently, localized storm cells get overlooked, and nothing can be done to alert emergency services beforehand. 3. Did data processing prevent the Boston Bombings or the London attack on a serviceman? The culprits were known to the security services beforehand and under surveillance . . . As long as the data processing rate inside a human brain is way higher than what the same human acquires through his / her senses (=10 billion neurons times 300 firings per second = 3.10^11 bit per second) than its data acquisition rate (<3 MegaBit/second for the visual system (optical nerve constraint), a few kilobit/second for the auditory system and a few byte/second for spoken communications), humans can, and will be, unpredictable to other humans. If you restrict input to a (smallish) finite number and consider the consequences of rounding associated with it, Gödel's Decidability Theorem restricts the conclusions you can draw so severely that at the huge data compression rates, which these "Security Service Children" play with, make the data themselves useless - to humans, because of the limited input rate a human has and the huge effect error propagation builds up to Wolfgang Vogelbein. On 13/07/13 20:05, Ronnie Collinson wrote:

If they did, it would be unlikely to work well, given any one can inspect the code, and they would be more likely to compel companies that contribute.

On 12 July 2013 10:14, GJB <kiwigb(a)yahoo.com <mailto:kiwigb(a)yahoo.com>> wrote:

Well those are the open branches ... I'm talking about the ones that contribute to open source covertly for their benefit. I don't think they'll be doing that in the open.

On Fri, 2013-07-12 at 09:55 +1200, Peter Reutemann wrote: > > How sure are we that NSA doesn't have open source contributors on their > > payroll as well? > > Apache Accumulo is an NSA open source project: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Accumulo > > The NSA was the primary original developer of SELinux: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security-Enhanced_Linux > > Cheers, Peter > -- > Peter Reutemann, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Waikato, NZ > http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ <http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/%7Efracpete/> Ph. +64 (7) 858-5174 <tel:%2B64%20%287%29%20858-5174> > _______________________________________________ > wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz <mailto:wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz> > Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug

_______________________________________________ wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz <mailto:wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz> Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug

_______________________________________________ wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Unsubscribe: http://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug