Summary: Tracking in Facebook criticised; Malicious features in mobile phones (tracking and listening) are being discussed as well
THIS 84th episode speaks about phones' exploitation for tracking and listening by authorities. For those who are not aware yet, as long as the main battery is inside a phone, or any battery at all is inside a phone (some have several batteries), then even when the phone is switched off it can be used to listen to the carrier and his/her environment. Craig Murray, a former British ambassador, says the MI5 uses this technique.
Android/Replicant are discussed, noting that they do not help resolve the above issue. One listener of TechBytes asked: "Maybe you could ask him [Stallman] about so called smartphones. Everybody knows he doesn't use any... But can he think any condition he could think about using one. Fairphone? Phone with FirefoxOS? Prepaid SIM without registration?" Stallman said he was hypothetically thinking about getting an OpenMoko phone, but eventually decided that tracking would be unavoidable.
So the real extent of layoffs is greater than what's publicly stated (there are silent layoffs) [...] Whatever IBM says about the scope, scale, or magnitude of the "RAs", it doesn't tell the full story
If patent law had been applied to novels in the 1880s, great books would not have been written. If the EU applies it to software, every computer user will be restricted, says Richard Stallman
This is a real problem and most certainly a big problem because when people try to find real information about security and GNU/Linux they instead read "word salads" made by bots