MESSAGE
| DATE | 2006-10-25 |
| FROM | rc
|
| SUBJECT | Re: [NYLXS - HANGOUT] Free Software Magazine
|
Yeah, its great, awesome monetary split compared to traditional
publishing. I have been playing with LyX for a couple of weeks. It
rocks, period. Plus, I believe it will spit out a final format ready
for lulu if it doesn't hook right into over the net.
http://www.lyx.org/
R
Ruben Safir wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 25, 2006 at 11:21:01AM -0400, rc wrote:
>> BTW - Lulu.com was founded by Red Hat founder Bob Young
>>
>> http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/blogs/secure_voip_calling_free_software_right_to_privacy
>>
>
> Say - I didn't know that. LULU looks like it might be a seriously useful tool
> when we publish out text book.
>
> Ruben
>
>> Secure VoIP calling, free software, and the right to privacy
>>
>> By David Sugar
>>
>> Online on: 24/10/2006
>>
>> All free nations in the world today recognize certain basic principles,
>> such as freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the freedom of
>> privacy. These values that we all share were articulated by and fought
>> for by people such as Voltaire, Jefferson, and Bolivar. This common
>> heritage of freedom is today under attack by those who wish to turn the
>> clock back on human progress. We all know that a government that lives
>> in such fear of its own citizens that it must spy on them and claims the
>> authority to do so en-mass and unchallengeable is not a legitimate
>> government of the people it claims to serve.
>>
>> There is an interesting story about George Washington during the
>> American Revolutionary War. At one point some of Washington's officers
>> were plotting rebellion against him, and he accidentally received a
>> dispatch that was meant for one of the conspirators. Having opened it,
>> and read it, he realized what had happened, and then asked the courier
>> to please apologize because the letter was not meant for him. He choose
>> to act as best he could in a manner as if he had not read the letter.
>> For Washington understood that even at a time of war, there are certain
>> ideals that must never be sacrificed, otherwise even if victory was
>> achieved, it is not worth the price of a nation nobody would wish to
>> live in.
>>
>> With these thoughts, we chose, on the first Monday of this October, to
>> release a stack for secure VOIP calling, as free software developed
>> through GNU Telephony, a loose organization of developers who specialize
>> in free software for telecommunications. We accomplished this by
>> creating a free software stack that implements Phil Zimmerman's ZRTP, as
>> well as the Secure RTP spec. This is now part of the GNU RTP Stack,
>> ccrtp. We chose to make this available for immediate use in the most
>> compelling way, by having available at the same time, a complete secure
>> softphone client anyone can also download and use and which implements
>> the secure calling features in an easy to use manner. This client was
>> the Twinkle Softphone client, developed by Michel De Boer, and modified
>> with his help to meet this goal in time with our initial release.
>>
>> Secure calling VOIP using ZRTP operates much like ssh in concept. The
>> keys for communication are generated locally, rather than using an
>> external certificate authority, hence preventing weak or poisoned
>> certificates which SRTP potentially allows. Fingerprint session
>> signatures are shown and cached much like the ssh host fingerprints, so
>> that one can determine if there is a man in the middle decrypting at one
>> end and encrypting to another.
>>
>> What we have developed does not interfere with lawful police
>> investigations, since the end point can still be compromised with
>> physical access, presumably executed as part of a lawful and judicially
>> supervised court order. But it does prevent arbitrary and mass spying on
>> what people say, which must come to an end before all other freedoms are
>> lost. With additional technologies including tls secured SIP and
>> anonymizing connection proxies, it is possible to also reduce
>> associative information signal that intelligence so desperately wishes
>> to mine, and that is a goal of later phases of this project.
>>
>> Since it is free software, anyone can download and use it. Since it is
>> offered as a library, it can be used to produce applications, like
>> Twinkle, that can perform secure communications by design, rather than
>> as an afterthought. This technology is here to stay. There are enough
>> people who have set it up now around the world, including some I
>> personally showed. The source is available and mirrored worldwide.
>> Binaries have been build and now distributed in Debian. Much of that was
>> all done very rapidly and early on at the start of the month, the rest
>> while I was in Maturin speaking at the IVth International Free Knowledge
>> Conference, which I will write about next week, to deliberately make
>> sure it was immediately usable and widely disseminated.
>>
>> This technology we are bringing to free VOIP software was of course
>> first proposed, in a proprietary form, and as an external proxy known as
>> zfone, by Phil Zimmerman. Much of the work in developing secure calling
>> in the GNU RTP Stack was done by people like Werner Dittman and Federico
>> Pouzols, and with lots of Michel De Boer from Twinkle. Whether you are a
>> head of state wishing to communicate in private, a union organizer
>> within a company, or simply talking to your family and friends, you have
>> a basic right and expectation of privacy. We intend to do everything in
>> our power to help further that goal.
>>
>> Further information can be found at GNU Telephony
>>
>>
>> Ruben Safir wrote:
>>> On Mon, Oct 23, 2006 at 10:32:43PM -0400, einker wrote:
>>>> I' ve been reading this since issue #5. I thought you knew about it ....
>>>>
>>> I discovered it last month and posted a note about it to the list. Since
>>> I got no responses, I thought I'd mention it again./ It would be nice to
>>> make
>>> a contribution to their rag. They did a much better job than we did
>>> trying to promote the same thing.
>>>
>>>
>>> Ruben
>>>
>>>> On 10/23/06, Ruben Safir wrote:
>>>>> Has anyone seen this Free Software Magazine at
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> This site is one of the best examples of Free Software in action I've
>>>>> ever
>>>>> seen.
>>>>> Its content is awesome, the commentaries just wonderful and in depth.
>>>>> The
>>>>> Magazine is everything I had hoped for with the NYLXS Quarterly Journal
>>>>> as
>>>>> a
>>>>> serious review journal that doesn't completely lose the new user or
>>>>> program
>>>>> user of computers.
>>>>>
>>>>> And David Sugar is a regular writer in it.
>>>>>
>>>>> And then they discovered this every cool social enginering tool.....
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.lulu.com/
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Ruben
>>>>> --
>>>>> __________________________
>>>>> Brooklyn Linux Solutions
>>>>>
>>>>> So many immigrant groups have swept through our town
>>>>> that Brooklyn, like Atlantis, reaches mythological
>>>>> proportions in the mind of the world - RI Safir 1998
>>>>>
>>>>> DRM is THEFT - We are the STAKEHOLDERS - RI Safir 2002
>>>>> http://fairuse.nylxs.com
>>>>>
>>>>> "Yeah - I write Free Software...so SUE ME"
>>>>>
>>>>> "The tremendous problem we face is that we are becoming
>>>>> sharecroppers to our own cultural heritage -- we need
>>>>> the ability to participate in our own society."
>>>>>
>>>>> http://www.mrbrklyn.com - Consulting
>>>>> http://www.nylxs.com - Leadership Development in Free Software
>>>>> http://www2.mrbrklyn.com/resources - Unpublished Archive or stories and
>>>>> articles from around the net
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> Regards,
>>>>
>>>> Evan M. Inker
>
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