06.15.14
Posted in Deception, Free/Libre Software at 9:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Elon Musk from Tesla Motors claims to be ‘sharing’ inventions, but the true motivations are far less benign than it seems on the surface (if not malicious)
WE HAVE been patiently watching “Linux” and “Open Source” feeds filling up with something that is not related to software but claims to be inspired by “Linux” and “Open Source”. It’s some marketing stunt from Tesla, which got the attention of OS (Open Source) Vehicle (another openwashing attempt).
The post says: “Is this a marketing stunt?
“I don’t think so. This can be a genuine effort from one of the visionaries of the silicon valley, one of the most advanced companies on earth, taking finally into account that – by having a value proposition targeted at a customer segment that is pretty small, mostly made by wealthy people most of them living in the US. You can’t really change the world for the better in a short enough amount of time (do you remember we have only less than 6000 days? – look at this).
“As you may also know, Tesla is developing a pretty cool new technology for batteries and it’s probably sure that having other big automotive brands producing cars based on their technology, their batteries will be able to target a bigger market and – at the end – achieve a bigger transformation effect on automotive.”
But why were these patented in the first place? And if these were not patented, would Tesla be able to make a fuss about the so-called ‘giveaway’?
The post goes on: “But if Tesla really wants to scale up its contribution, it must work towards the real adoption of the technological solutions that it is making available, it must switch from a product approach to a platform approach and – in a way that is similar to what we are doing – needs to engage with the community, understand how these technologies can be used and are going to be used and make efforts to ensure that every player in the market will have the same access, an access that is clear in terms of rights, obligations and implications.
“Also, an open source (patents) car will work in the future only if it’s accompanied by an open and distributed manufacturing process, that is able to include multiple stakeholders and be based on a more participative value chain, also embedding the principles of Cradle to Cradle production, eliminating waste and obsolescence.”
We were preparing a long article about this whole marketing exercise that’s basically openwashing the company using the disgraced notion of “opened” patents. IBM, HP and other companies have been using this marketing exercise before. It’s utterly pointless and we have countered it repeatedly. Why are so many journalists bamboozled, including FOSS-friendly ones? Here is one key person from Canonical stating: “When I get home, I’m going to take down a plaque that has proudly hung in my own home office for nearly 10 years now. In 2004, I was named an IBM Master Inventor, recognizing sustained contributions to IBM’s patent portfolio.”
Further down he says: “I’ve never been more excited to see someone back up their own rhetoric against software patents, with such a substantial, palpable, tangible assertion. Kudos, Elon.”
But Elon did not revoke the patents, he just claimed to be sharing them (in a pseudo-geeky way with a famous meme). That’s a very different thing. It’s the same thing that IBM claims to be doing with OIN, among other strategic marketing angles.
Shameless here is the type of free marketing newspapers gave Tesla, characterising a patent hoard (followed by openwashing) as some kind of championship of FOSS. The PR nonsense audaciously uses the term sharing, even though it’s all about profit. They are selling patents as a form of marketing, creating dependence on their technology. Elon Musk, the CEO, has been getting far too much credit and publicity here; it’s rather familiar because all sorts of patent ‘pledges’ by HP and IBM are worse than useless and his is no better. Those two companies lobby for software and try to make it look OK. Likewise, Tesla is patenting all sorts of things and now makes the patents looks legitimate by ‘sharing’ them (whatever that means). It’s the Robin Hood mentality or the doctrine of ‘charity’, where rather than establishing social equality one works vertically, by giving from top to bottom, selectively, upon one’s will and supposed ‘generosity’. As long as there are patents on things like these, lawsuits will continue to harm small companies. “Heavy patent litigation scared off about $22 billion in VC funding over 5 years,” said this one new article, and it is one among many.
The press that Tesla received extends to other countries and resorts a to pathetic cocky attitude that uses metaphors (“Handing Over the Keys”) for openwashing or the notion that Telsa is “contrarian” and “open source” (“the open source movement”).
One decent response to the marketing from Tesla came from Jan Wildeboer, who wrote:
Thank you, Tesla Motors For The Patents, but …
Here’s the thing. Elon Musk doesn’t trust the patent system to protect his inventions. So instead of filing for more, he will simply not file at all and keep his inventions secret. The stuff that already got patented thus is already considered lost by him so it is safe to “open source” them all.
When will the press finally ‘get’ Tesla’s real reasons for doing this? It’s about self interest; Tesla would get sued by shareholders otherwise. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft, Security at 8:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s software must be so malicious if revealing its “secrets” gets people who work for Microsoft jailed for several months and then deported
A LOT of the press continues to ignore the real threats to our (digitised/digital) liberties online. The corporate press barely writes about back doors in proprietary software like Windows (the back doors are there by design) and instead props up the whole “Heartbleed” hype [1, 2, 3]. Here for example is an article where 2 months (yes, 8+ weeks) after some lines of code were shown to have an error in them (dubbed “Heartbleed” by a Microsoft-linked firm and then marketed like classic FUD) IDG is conveniently deducing that all of FOSS is not secure. This is disgraceful FUD and it’s part of a pattern we have been seeing. Sure, there is lots of business in such generalisations, including for insecurity firms like Symantec, which maliciously gets closer to Linux groups (surely to sell some snake oil and claim that FOSS needs proprietary “anti-viral” software add-ons to be secure).
It should be noted that months ago there were many articles about how insecurity firms like Symantec (with odious Microsoft links in the management) needed to intentionally overlook government-developed malware (like Stuxnet) and back doors. It all adds up to one thing: the least secure practice in IT is one that involves introducing secret code into complex systems. One proprietary program is enough to compromise a larger system.
According to this article, allowing the public to see Microsoft secrets is a serious crime that gets you imprisoned and deported. “The Government timed its Complaint and Arrest Warrant to coincide with Mr. Kibkalo’s pre-arranged attendance at a technology conference in Bellevue,” says one article. Another says:
Kibkalo’s circumstances are somewhat different than most employees that get on the “outs” with their tech companies: in his case, Microsoft sifted through the emails and documents of the French blogger in order to detect the source of the leaked information – and then discovered that it was Kibkalo. Microsoft says that it regrets its actions, despite the fact that it doesn’t need a warrant to search the emails of its own customers. At the same time, there was an issue with Microsoft’s violation of customer privacy – and privacy advocates find the company violation to be more than an issue of subjective preference. They view it more as an “improper search and seizure.” What grounds did Microsoft have to do this?
Here we have two issues: the first if that Microsoft illegally spies on E-mails (we covered this before) and the second is that the very notion of being allowed to see Microsoft source code (e.g. to find the back door) or some “secrets” is now a serious crime with serious punishment. For a ‘transparent’ and ‘open’ “new Microsoft” (marketing nonsene) this sure doesn’t bode too well. █
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Posted in Site News at 8:05 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Profiteering by privatisation necessitates bribing many officials and interest groups, which is exactly what the Gates Foundation has been working towards, under the guise of “charity”
OUR Gates Foundation wiki page has been viewed nearly 200,000 times, but unfortunately we have not covered the crimes perpetrated behind this shell since around 2011 (due to lack of time). Some time ago we wrote about Common Core, which is just one vector/angle by which Bill Gates stages a coup, making a profit by privatising what’s public. We wrote about this several times before, so in order to spare repetition we’ll cut to the chase.
Huffington Post has traditionally helped Gates’ coup because Huffington was wining and dining with Gates (and by extension with Microsoft). Now that the paper/site is sold to AOL it is giving a platform to Diane Ravitch (Research Professor of Education), not to Gates himself. Yes, at least once for a change, the notorious Bill Gates lobbying platform has given a platform to his critics. Ravitch has published the article “Time for Congress to Investigate Bill Gates’ Coup” in which she says:
The story about Bill Gates’ swift and silent takeover of American education is startling. His role and the role of the U.S. Department of Education in drafting and imposing the Common Core standards on almost every state should be investigated by Congress.
The idea that the richest man in America can purchase and — working closely with the U.S. Department of Education — impose new and untested academic standards on the nation’s public schools is a national scandal. A Congressional investigation is warranted.
The close involvement of Arne Duncan raises questions about whether the law was broken.
Thanks to the story in the Washington Post and to diligent bloggers, we now know that one very rich man bought the enthusiastic support of interest groups on the left and right to campaign for the Common Core.
Who knew that American education was for sale?
Who knew that federalism could so easily be dismissed as a relic of history? Who knew that Gates and Duncan, working as partners, could dismantle and destroy state and local control of education?
Read the remainder of this article because Ravitch sure knows what Gates is really up to. She has been tracking and writing about this for years. She can’t just be dismissed as some kind of “irrational hater” or a “nobody” given her professional background. █
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06.14.14
Posted in Europe, Law, Patents at 5:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The US is not even trying to truly reform patent policy and Europe is preparing to ‘import’ (through globalisation/treaties/etc.) this atrocious policy, based on new reports in the British press
WE shall slowly return to covering patent issues, for they are certainly becoming a huge subject again, especially in light of renewed Apple lawsuits/aggression, corruption in the courtrooms (blindly favouring al patents), and distraction by the media (we covered all three just two days ago), not to mention software patents (and patent trolls) in Europe becoming a huge issue because EU patents may soon follow US criteria for acceptance. “New EU rules have been created which allow the judgments of new unified patent courts (UPCs) to have legal effect from early 2015,” says The Register. This is great news for trolls and also for patent lawyers who wish to see patent scope expanding.
Mr. Mark Bohannon (Red Hat lobbyist) has written a couple of articles in the past week. In them, Bohannon focuses on trolls (not the real issue) and also expresses little or no hope for imminent change in the US patent system. To quote: “Late last month, as you’ve likely read by now, the US Senate Judiciary Committee (SJC) abruptly pulled consideration of a legislative patent reform package from consideration. For this year, at least, the prospect of addressing abusive patent litigation through Congressional action is on ice.
“The move by the Committee disappointed, even outraged, a broad coalition working for legislative reform.
“Reaction came not just from many in the technology and Internet innovation sector, which have been at the forefront of reform efforts. Consumer and civil society groups (EFF, Engine Advocacy, Public Knowledge) voiced deep concern.
“Reflecting the wide swath of the US economy that is affected by abusive patent litigation, the view of many in the mainstream of American business was that the SJC “chose special interests over jobs on main street.” Retailers noted that “withdrawing the patent reform bill is a victory for patent trolls.” They were joined by restaurant owners, home builders, credit unions, hotels and lodges, the gaming industry, and the online travel industry, just to name a few.”
The problem, however, is not “abusive patent litigation”, it is patent scope. It sure seems like even if a patent reform was passed in the US, it would be beneficial to large corporations but hardly help the public. In other words, not only is there no sign of improvement in the US; even if the said reforms were to pass, not much would have changed. The real solutions are totally off the table. This system is inherently rigged, probably beyond repair, which is why we started focusing on limiting its reach (e.g. to Europe) rather than fixing it before it spreads. █
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Posted in Asia, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 5:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: China’s move to GNU/Linux is now being extended to the private sector (not just public sector) and there is nothing Microsoft can do to stop it this time
CHINA is abandoning Microsoft not for financial reasons but for security-related reasons. Bill Gates already tried dumping ‘free’ (gratis) software on China whilst arrogantly accusing the Chinese of ‘piracy’. Gates and his fellow criminals also bribed Chinese officials. Well, these days of Microsoft crimes may be over. It won’t work.
Aspirations for Chinese independence and growth seem to make the Windows ban irreversible. It’s not just in government anymore; state TV encourages the public to follow suit and in corporate press like CNN it is now common to see the Chinese smeared over the decision to ban spyware with back doors. See this article in ECT, showing that the anti-China rhetoric (insulting their intelligence) reached even FOSS sites, quite oddly in fact.
From a purely economic perspective, never mind security and technical advantages of GNU/Linux over Windows, Microsoft is unable to compete. As Pogson pointed out the other day: “M$ charges as little as $15 in the low-end notebook space. This is only the second or third time in PC-history that M$ has had to compete on price with */Linux (and their own installed base).”
Still, Microsoft can no longer compete so well with Android and Chrome OS. All it is trying to do right now is extort companies that distribute devices with Linux on them, establishing a new form of control or Microsoft tax (through patent racketeering).
The press in Korea shows what it labels “A tablet running the China Operating System, based on Linux.” The press in China continues to explain how a Windows ban “encourages domestic developers” (which is true actually). To quote the article:
Instead, the Chinese government is calling for the increased purchase and development of domestically developed operating systems, specifically those created on Linux. Although the ban of Windows 8 does not directly affect the general public, Sina News reports that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is pushing for domestic users to gravitate from Windows XP to domestic operating systems too. It’s not too far fetched an idea, either–China has a long history of successfully developing domestic software. The messaging software QQ, for example, is more popular than the foreign-developed MSN, since it was specifically developed to cater to Chinese people’s sensibilities.
Here is another such article that says: “Windows 8 Business use has been banned from Chinese government computers. This leaves an open door policy for OS makers to come into a huge personal computing market. Since China has the world’s largest population, it is safe to assume it may have the biggest logistics, Government records and computers to keep track of this information.”
China has not one Linux-based operating system. It has several. It would be funny if China was to actively encourage diversity in operation systems, more so than in the West (where Windows dominates desktops) because we are commonly taught that ‘true’ capitalism encourages many players (competition) rather than monopoly and even state-imposed monopoly (which is exactly what China is moving away from). Perhaps Free software is going to bring China a lot of healthy competition among domestic players, instead of a monopoly maintained by a foreign player that facilitates espionage against companies like Huawei. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, HP, Microsoft at 4:46 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“On the same day that CA blasted SCO, Open Source evangelist Eric Raymond revealed a leaked email from SCO’s strategic consultant Mike Anderer to their management. The email details how, surprise surprise, Microsoft has arranged virtually all of SCO’s financing, hiding behind intermediaries like Baystar Capital.”
–Bruce Perens (years back)
Summary: Thoughts and analysis of HP, which despite pretending to have embraced Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) is very much a Microsoft ally, managed to a large degree by people from Microsoft
HP is a scam when it comes to “open source” support. While their hardware is quite Linux-friendly (my wife uses an HP laptop), their extreme/radical policy of self interest in the server room and on the desktop continues to show. Their recent openwashing campaign, which I have campaigned against (they are claiming to invest in FOSS only for marketing purposes, just like IBM), should not impress too easily. What comes to mind is HP’s negative lobbying against FOSS and stories we have heard from Perens (former HP manager for FOSS). It’s all just a charade, intended for the most part to increase sales but also to attract talented staff (recruitment).
HP’s history has been quite well documented in this site for nearly 8 years of its existence. HP is an ally of Microsoft and many of its managers these days are people who worked for Microsoft. In order to keep selling GNU/Linux servers (hardware with GNU/Linux sells better) HP is trying to maintain an image that would appeal to geeks. However, it’s all fake, it’s a façade. Perens proves it now in part by repeating what he wrote some years ago [1]. The stuff Perens says about SCO and HP is dynamite, revealing a huge extent of collusion against GNU/Linux. HP was well aware of it.
Years ago in Slashdot Perens explained how HP offered him AstroTurfing help, i.e. it offered to spawn agents of propaganda if he needed it. To quote Will Hill (from last night): “Yes, I was just thinking about that the other day. He said this in 2008…”
…just about every PR firm offers to help “manage the perception of your company in online communities” these days. What do you think that means? Astroturfing Slashdot, Youtube, etc. In my various manangement positions it’s been offered to me. Indeed, some of the companies offer to create negative publicity for your competition that way – HP had a publicity firm for its Linux activities that told us it would do that when we wanted. I never asked them to do so and hope nobody else did either. This stuff is just standard these days. You’ve got to expect it.
As Hill adds: “There’s a grim similarity between that and government astroturf programs revealed by Snowden. Greenwald recaps well that in “No Place to Hide” by showing us that government hires teams of psychologists and has made a science of disrupting online discussions and deception. The point of it all is “strategic influence disruption.” The targets not terrorists but “hactivists” like Anonymous, environmental groups and people who might compete with the plutocracy. We should not be too surprised by the similarity because both programs are run by the same people – 75% of the spy complex money goes to private contractors and HP is probably one of them.”
There are some new examples of what seems like AstroTurfing by Microsoft. Some Microsoft lies (a placement) got posted in “CFO World”. It is an evidence-free denial of Microsoft collusion against public. This is how propaganda works.
Meanwhile, returning to the subject which is HP, watch Microsoft booster Julie Bort going into propaganda mode, claiming that HP has “Plans To Destroy Microsoft Windows” (we countered a similar bit of propaganda some months ago) and then calls HP CEO “gutsy” for inviting Microsoft’s CEO. This is utter deception, a sort of PR which seeks to portray Microsoft has burying the hatchet and smoking the pipe of peace with rivals. Here is a portion: “Moments after HP announced its grand new plans to compete with the Microsoft Windows operating system, Whitman was thanking Microsoft for being a major sponsor of the conference and inviting the company’s new CEO, Satya Nadella, on stage.”
This very much shows whose bed HP is in. The company, despite trying top appear as a backer of FOSS, is very much serving Microsoft’s agenda, still. HP is pretending. Yes, HP only pretends to be a friend of GNU/Linux in order to drive server sales to geeks. We know this also because not too long ago HP lobbied against GNU/Linux in Europe (amid national migrations), saying it would be more expensive than Windows. We covered this several times back then and also showed in over a dozen posts that around the same time HP was appointing Microsoft executives to executive positions at HP. The same happened in Amazon, but that’s another story.
There are other interesting bits in the new interview with Perens, including his take on dual-licensing, but most relevant to us was the following bit:
Perens: At some point I accumulated enough credit for achievements that it became unnecessary to fight over it 
. But I am hardly without flaws. Most visible might be that I want to get things done and don’t mind trampling others if that’s what it takes. I try to keep my ego down enough so that I get through those narrow doors.
The worst problems I saw at HP had little to do with Open Source. What I remember most was the sadness. There were and are many smart people there, and so many of us were conscious that the company was in a sort of death spiral and that we couldn’t do anything about it. The “pretexting” scandal was to the discredit of the board, the general counsel actually took the 5th in front of Congress on national television! Carly (the CEO) asked all of the employees to take a voluntary pay cut in the same month that she and other Board officers sold tens of Millions of dollars of HP stock. I remember my boss (a Section Manager, now the CTO) announcing at a meeting that an employee had gotten a “Reinvention Memo”. That meant lay-off, a sarcastic re-framing of HP’s “Reinvent” motto that showed how even upper managers like him were in despair. There was a series of ill-advised acquisitions of second-best or declining companies that HP failed to turn around, and then sold for cents on the dollar two years after acquiring them. The Compaq merger put the company at the very top of a business with vanishingly-small margins.
There was one really bad day that I guess is safe to talk about now, more than 10 years later, because the information is already in the public and thus no longer subject to NDA: Microsoft showed HP their plans to sue the Open Source projects for the Linux Kernel, Samba, Sendmail, and a list of other projects. Someone immediately shot me an HP VP’s memo recounting that meeting and concluding that we should back off of Open Source before the lawsuits started. When I passed it to my boss, I was told to keep it quiet. But I was hired to be an Open Source community leader first, and an HP officer second, and keeping quiet about that meant betraying the Open Source developer community. I just hated that and it poisoned my involvement with HP.
Microsoft eventually used SCO as a proxy to achieve what it disclosed to HP that day. I’d been warned long before that happened, and could do nothing until SCO announced their damaging but ultimately unsuccessful jihad against Linux.
What I think is worth remembering about HP is that it was once the great tech company that people wanted to work for, as Apple or Google might be for many today. I think a lot of what made it great left with Agilent. The Test and Measurement business was a low-volume, high-margin business that required lots of too-highly-paid old smart people who worked in expensive labs in Palo Alto, California. That became the most costly place to do anything largely due to HP’s own success. But Test and Measurement was also the brain-trust of the company, and lent its creativity to all of HP’s other aspects. So we lost a lot, I think, when Agilent was spun off of HP.
HP’s problem regarding Open Source and Linux was that systems running Linux competed with other HP lines running HP-UX or Microsoft, and HP was structured as Organizational Silos. Each line had its own sales-people, and different lines competed with each other for the same customer. HP-9000 folks were always complaining because Linux undercut HP-UX and thus HP-9000, as were folks who sold Microsoft Windows systems based on x86. If I said anything in the press about Open Source or Linux, a customer would ask one of those single-line sales-people about it, and it would come back to my boss as a complaint rather than a sales opportunity.
HP was always to some extent in Microsoft’s pocket, although they were also aware that Microsoft had screwed them and would continue to do so. HP de-emphasized further development of the HP 9000 hardware because Microsoft had told them in the late 80′s that they were soon to have an enterprise-quality NT. HP believed it, but MS failed to deliver for a decade. That lost HP Billions while Sun Microsystems took the engineering workstation market from HP. The HP officer who made that decision of course went on to be a Microsoft executive.
What we did achieve at HP was a good process for deciding what to do with Open Source when individual opportunities came up. If you wanted to incorporate Open Source in a product, or you had a business reason to Open Source something, we resolved the legal issues, the community issues, we even handled some security aspects and achieved a reasonable level of reuse. That could all be achieved by middle managers. So, everybody in the company knew that it was OK to use Open Source, but there was a process you had to go through. It wasn’t particularly expensive, it did sometimes sink multiple days of some engineer in doing paperwork, but that’s just due diligence and we ended up on a better legal footing when we used Open Source than otherwise.
There were things we decided not to Open Source because there was no good business reason for doing so. We weren’t UNICEF, so there had to be a business reason for everything. There were times when legacy customers would have gained benefit if we brought one of HP’s nine legacy operating systems to Open Source, but untangling the proprietary software that originated with third parties from the rest was too difficult. There were a few times when it was decided not to Open Source a legacy product because we were afraid that IBM might use it to sell their hardware against ours. Once that happened with a system that had only 5000 existing customers, and it would have been better for the customers for HP to open it but the decision – not mine – was not to do so.
I’ve since helped other companies start their own internal Open Source Process, and still do so today.
What we never achieved within HP, what I never had the power to do, was: to get HP to completely stand behind any innovative product regardless of what that meant for old-line products, to make innovation the #1 job of the company, and to grow a brand-new company from the old one every year that they were in business. They needed to embrace disruptive technologies as a pioneer rather than have the disruption done to HP by competitors. I think they tried to kill the Silo organizational structure after I left, I don’t know how successful that was.
Let this remind us that neither HP nor Microsoft has changed. In fact, many people from Microsoft moved to HP and there is now Microsoft agenda at HP. Microsoft’s FOSS moles too are now working for HP, in very senior positions in fact. Both companies deserve to be treated as a pair and the same goes for Dell; these are historically (in recent history) Microsoft hardware companies. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Microsoft eventually used SCO as a proxy to achieve what it disclosed to HP that day. I’d been warned long before that happened, and could do nothing until SCO announced their damaging but ultimately unsuccessful jihad against Linux.
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Servers at 4:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The Register misleads readers into thinking that Microsoft is gaining market share on the Web
Simon Sharwood from The Register released a propaganda piece we are unable to ignore. It’s a familiar talking point. We covered this numerous times before. Sharwood’s propaganda is titled “Microsoft poised to take Web server crown from Apache” (implying growth) although the very opposite is true.
Microsoft is actually losing share (as it has been losing for years) and in servers that really count it has less than ten percent market share.
Fortunately, some readers of The Register are not dumb enough. They reply in the comments section. One insightful comment says: “Apparently MS has been throwing money or other arm-twisting tricks to persuade large hosters of parked pages to switch to IIS. AFAICS the only benefit of this is incomplete articles in the press about how IIS is set to become (/will become) the most popular web server, which is a useless metric. As mentioned, the picture for Active sites is very different, and the Top Million even more so .. which somehow does not get mentioned in the news reports.”
Sadly, very few people read comments, so the vast majority will be left with the impression that Microsoft is doing well on the Web. That’s some very powerful propaganda. All Microsoft had to do was bribe some people to game numbers, then find gullible or corruptible journalists (“useful idiots” or liars) to drop out there some misleading claims at Microsoft’s behest.
Ever since Microsoft paid The Register the publication has not been the same. Microsoft likes not only to bribe hosts (selectively) but also governments and media companies. It helps distort public perceptions. The Register is definitely part of the problem now. This example of one of many. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD, Security at 3:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Attempts to belittle the “eyeballs on the code” motto
Summary: Another week brings another set of bugfixes, which some choose to characterise as a very big deal despite evidence to the contrary
WHEN one has an agenda one can accentuate a particular side by covering it excessively. To be frank, not only FOSS-hostile circles are to be blamed for security hype; even some FOSS-friendly sites are releasing articles like “Linux Malware And Antivirus” or cover every security fix as though it’s major news. Consider just the past few days in Softpedia: A Steam OS bugfix is news and the same goes for Ubuntu because these projects make attractive headlines, especially after the whole “Heartbleed” hype [1, 2, 3]. Guess who was behind it: the firm of Microsoft’s ‘Former’ Security Chief. GnuTLS was subjected to the same treatment by the same Microsoft-connected firm because like any project it has bugfixes [1, 2], never mind the real security issues (back doors in proprietary software like Windows).
Amid some of the latest reports from Microsoft-friendly sources and FOSS-friendly sources like SJVN (we cited two of these articles before) we should keep in mind that not all bugs are created equal and if we let every bugfix in a project like Linux or OpenSSL become major news, then we will lose sight of the real issue, which is proprietary software having bugs by design, to facilitate intrusion.
Kevin Poulsen, who did some Wikileaks-hostile coverage back in the days, correctly points out that “After Heartbleed, We’re Overreacting to Bugs That Aren’t a Big Deal”. Here is how his article begins:
Here’s something else to blame on last April’s Heartbleed security bug: It smeared the line between security holes that users can do something about, and those we can’t. Getting that distinction right is going to be crucial as we weather a storm of vulnerabilities and hacks that shows no sign of abating.
Last week the OpenSSL Foundation announced it was patching six newly discovered vulnerabilities in the same software that Heartbleed lived in. The first reaction from many of us was a groan–here we go again. Heartbleed triggered what was probably the single largest mass-password change in history: In response to the bug, some 86 million internet users in the U.S. alone changed at least one password or deleted an internet account. The thought of a repeat was (and is) shudder-inducing.
Be aware that there’s a disturbing trend right now, where so-called ‘security’ firms (opportunists/attention whores) or media companies try to exploit general security paranoia (or privacy concerns) to ‘sell’ us stories about ‘gaping holes’; the reality is usually just some routine bugfixes, wrapped up by those who have agenda. Dan Goodin and the Microsoft-connected firm (which even branded a bug) are some of the worst in this regard. █
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