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IT

I will coin a new term for IT, Information Technology – Money Making Technology.

So IT becomes MMT.

The whole of IT jumped from information, to cowboys trying to make the most money in the less time possible, it basically became the synthesis of ultra-capitalism; because the ultra-capitalists took over it is not Information Technology anymore, it is Money Making Technology. A vital and integral part of any Corporatocrat system.

corporatocracy is a situation in which corporate bodies interact with sovereign power in an unhealthy alignment between business and political power. In a corporatocracy an elite upper-class, maintains ties between business and government, sometimes by lobbying efforts or funding political advertising campaigns, or providing bailouts when corporations are seen as too big to fail, for the purpose of controlling government and dictating policy to serve its financial interests.

Most FOSS/FLOSS projects are trying to push in the wrong direction anyway, a copy of an ultra-capitalist venture is just that really, a copy of an ultra-capitalist venture.

  1. Free and open-source software (F/OSSFOSS) or free/libre/open-source software (FLOSS) is software that is both free software and open source. It is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, copy, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code. This approach has gained both momentum and acceptance as the potential benefits have been increasingly recognized by both individuals and corporations.

If IT is ever to become what it originally stands for, Information, it will need to think outside the box, and think about flow of information with no money involved, while prioritizing quality over time to deliver.

In commercetime to market (TTM) is the length of time it takes from a product being conceived until its being available for sale. TTM is important in industries where products are outmoded quickly. A common assumption is that TTM matters most for first-of-a-kind products, but actually the leader often has the luxury of time, while the clock is clearly running for the followers.

The excuse that capital, vast amounts of money, is what made IT‘s evolution is far from valid.

Visual is primarily marketing, and marketing is nothing more than people trying to convince other people to depart with their money.

If it was not for the visual, there would be no need for the expensive hardware we are forced to use today. Maybe for a server, but not for the personal hardware millions of people in private, public and personal spaces buy and upgrade as often as a “superior” version is released to the market.

And the quality would be improved as result, as software developers would have to use skill to fit the more in the less space, as they did back in the 70s, 80s and 90s, before the venture capitalists took the technology over and imposed the practice of throwing anything together in the shortest of the time,  make it look good and/or like it does or could do something, in order to collect the most money in the shortest time (ie. while they still can, while the word is not out that it is nothing but marketed crap), and then depart to the next venture, no  bother who is still having to (in most cases, daily) use that half put together buggy piece of software; or the damages incurring from the same.

The new version or new product will “always be better”, creating a false sense of evolution, a sense that simply shadows the fact that, in the end of the day, all they are doing is their best at selling marketed crap to get the biggest volume of people as possible to depart from their hard owned money.

Executive tricked associates of Vanguard nonprofit group into giving him approximately $31 million in investments.

SAN FRANCISCO – American- Israeli hi-tech executive Samuel “Mouli” Cohen received one of the harshest sentences ever meted out in a white-collar crime case on Monday, for having defrauded victims of approximately $31 million.

Found guilty on 29 of 35 counts of wire fraud, money laundering and tax evasion in November 2011, Cohen was sentenced in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California to 22 years in prison.

The fraud he perpetrated led to the collapse of the Vanguard Public Foundation, a privately funded non-profit civil rights and social justice organization with ties to actor Danny Glover and singer Harry Belafonte. Cohen was convicted of soliciting investments between 2002 and 2008 from 50 individuals, most of them associated with Vanguard, and falsely claiming that Microsoft was poised to acquire Ecast, the electronic jukebox company of which he was co-founder and CEO.

Cohen lied to investors, telling them that once Ecast was acquired, its shares would be exchanged on a 1-for-1 basis with Microsoft shares.

Click here to read the full article in the Jerusalem Post: http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishFeatures/Article.aspx?ID=268340&R=R1

Court document: http://onward.justia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/mouli-cohen-superseding-indictment_Redacted.pdf

Just to report my latest impressions in the world of Social Networks and Microblogs, a perspective from someone that has spent a lot of time not only using them, but also developing, programming and running them.

What is it really is the difference between Microblogging sites such as Twitter and StatusNet, and Social Networks such as Facebook, Orkut, Google+, Diaspora ?

In practice, there is little you can’t do of the same in both, each has its own ways of doing so.

Social Networks are immersive – they want you to migrate your social circle, your daily life to them, does not matters if they are commercial, proprietary, open source, or whatever schema they might be following – they still are Social networks. They want you to migrate your social circle for you to spend as much time as possible in it – be it using it once, twice a day, or all day long.

This is what any website ever wanted, including the ones fighting for Google ranking, this level of user activity. Usage of a website or service, in the internet, means money, be it via investments, fees or donations. Means it has been put to use, is worth something. And this something is money. So they are constantly looking for new ways and ideas to get people to use them as often as possible.

In my personal opinion, this is highly addictive, and many people that actually got into the habit of use them might agree so. As something highly addictive, it is not beneficial – it is a distraction, a distraction amplified to unhealthy levels. It is good for commerce in general, but not for people. Plus all the privacy issue around it – no matter if a Social Network is private, public, open, proprietary, people are still being motivated to put write down, photograph and video every single details of their lives in a computer. In most cases, in a computer controlled by someone they don’t even know. This is the equivalent of being wiretapped during the war, just it is worse – it is about voluntarily wiretapping yourself, because everybody else seems to be doing the same.

As for Microblogs, they are not much different, but they are different considering the amount of time wasted in them. Rather wasting time having some useless discussion for days in a Social Network, you are writing and exchanging small pieces of text back and forth, like a SMS. You are not presented at every time with the opportunity to express yourself, that meaning, hand over all details and moments of your private life into someone else computers. They are far from being private, but the amount of time spent in this messages turns it into something less wastefull than Social Networks.

Not even forums nor mailing lists trap people in the unhealthy levels that Social networks do. Nor demand as much data and fingerprints off them. But, just like with highly addictive substances, once one entered the game, it is very difficult to simply give up and get out of it, they will go looking for supposedly unhealthier alternatives. Which really, are not.

Some people do get addicted to Microblogging as well, specially with the advent of smart phones that run them, but the style of communication is different – rapid flow of information vs never-ending very personal threads.

All in all, I suggest you to see them for what they are – websites, not venues to express yourself while handing out every single bit of information about your private, be it marked as “supposedly” private, or not.

Nothing, unless it is anonymized via a system such as Tor and its hidden services, I2P or Freenet, and even like that you need to be aware of what you are inputing into the remote computer – you might be typing in your computer, but you are saving it into someone else computer – is private on the internet.

Just to advise anyone looking for a VPN for private web browsing, it just came to my attention that the “Hide My Ass” service is openly cooperating with law enforcement. That meaning, as soon as the police, or any other agency send them a letter (“court order”) asking them to hand over user data logged in their supposedly paid private and secure services and servers, they will promptly hand over all they have.

When you sign for a VPN service, the VPN service becomes your Internet Service Provider from then on.  You pay for privacy and security, and if a service like this not only logs but hands the information over, it is of no use for privacy, even if it was being offered free.

hidemyass.com

hidemyass.com website

According to a post in their own blog, http://blog.hidemyass.com/2011/09/23/lulzsec-fiasco/ ,

We have received concerns by users that our VPN service was utilized by a member or members of the hacktivist group ‘lulzsec’. Lulzsec have been ALLEGEDLY been responsible for a number of high profile cases.

It first came to our attention when leaked IRC chat logs were released, in these logs participants discussed about various VPN services they use, and it became apparent that some members were using our service. No action was taken, after all there was no evidence to suggest wrongdoing and nothing to identify which accounts with us they were using. At a later date it came as no surprise to have received a court order asking for information relating to an account associated with some or all of the above cases. As stated in our terms of service and privacy policy our service is not to be used for illegal activity, and as a legitimate company we will cooperate with law enforcement if we receive a court order (equivalent of a subpoena in the US).

Our VPN service and VPN services in general are not designed to be used to commit illegal activity. It is very naive to think that by paying a subscription fee to a VPN service you are free to break the law without any consequences. This includes certain hardcore privacy services which claim you will never be identified, these types of services that do not cooperate are more likely to have their entire VPN network monitored and tapped by law enforcement, thus affecting all legitimate customers.

21:05 edit: Why do we log the above^ information? Being able to locate abusive users is imperative for the survival of operating a VPN service, if you can not take action to prevent abuse you risk losing server contracts with the underlying upstream providers that empower your network. Common abuse can be anything from spam to fraud, and more serious cases involve terrorism and child porn. The main type of logging is session logging – this is simply logging when a customer connects and disconnects from the server, this identifies who was connected to X IP address at X time, this is what we do and all we do. Some providers choose not to do session logging and instead try to locate the abusive customer by using the intelligence from the complaint, for example if someone hacks XYZ.com they may monitor traffic to XYZ.com and log which customers have a connection to this website. Ask yourself this: if a provider claims not to do any form of logging, but is able to locate abusive customers, how are they able to do this without any form of logging?

22:05 edit: Regarding censorship bypassing, some have stated it is hypocritical for us to claim we do not allow illegal activity, and then claim our service is used in some countries to bypass censorship illegally. Again we follow UK law, there isn’t a law that prohibits the use of Egyptians gaining access to blocked websites such as Twitter, even if there is one in Egypt … though there are certainly laws regarding the hacking of government and corporate systems.

All in all, I would say that this is Hide My Ass gone to the bin, as I can not imagine anyone giving them a cent for privacy after this incident – only made worse by their very own response to the same – or in its turn, to any other similar services in the UK.

Update 28.9.2011: A thread about the subject was started in the Full Disclosure mailing list, with the main points being,

Though HMA claims they complied with a court order, it looks as if
they facilitated a law enforcement request. The US and the FBI have no
jurisdiction in the UK.

And the guy wasnt even a part of lulzsec.

Oh i agree it is still a terrible precedent to be set.. I dont even know
where, legally, i stand anymore…
It is rather disturbing, nomatter WHO it was laurela.
I am all for the hatred against the VPN provs, and this is not just
happening here, and i made a BIG statement about this, and privacy, in my
channel on efnet, first as i saw it.

Then saw a torrentfreak feed,of someone who was an owner of a huge torrent
site, was handed to authorities, not by the hoster, no… but by the
frigging payment handler, ie paypal or alertpay most likely.

This is not good, it makes a grey could now over what is ‘anon’ and what
isnt. and thats a bad thing for us all.
To much fraud is causing this, thats plain and simple.Abusing places like
Sony, and, major banks, only make the authorities turn to politics, whom in
turn can bully with federal and state laws of ANY country, i think this is
the dangerous part wich is affecting lulzsec members or whoever was apart of
it, and, i mean efnet is no recruiting grounds for decent hkrs.
Simple as that, you know it, maybe thru word of mouth ok, but not alone by
being in channels but that network, is one federal hideout now..and, that is
every channel, if it is not being spied (yea they have a module
m_spychannel.c or similar, wich, they actually had without realising, asked
a friend, to code for them.
This was rejected by me/her,but i believe they have the module running now.
And, we can only hope that the greater common sense will prevail and
hopefully, places will be forced to prove anonymity in some way, wether
that be by showing people email interaction with requester’s of peoples
info, or anything simple even, wich would be then a standard for VPN, I do
not use them but, if i bought anonymous vpn, id expect exactly that,without
political interaction and grey areas about who and what is now legal and not
legal on the internet, on chatrooms, and on even websites.

What really concerns me is that vpn providers might give
over logs to oppressive regimes. TOR is starting to look better and better.

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