John Adams <[email protected]> writes: > <scarcasm> > > I'm completely certain that these small, poorly funded projects have hired > massive security teams (as the major social networks do) and provide a safe > alternative to Facebook or Twitter. > > </scarcasm>
One compromise at Twitter gave attackers access to a slew of login details to try against other sites. The same thing (on a much smaller scale) could be true of identi.ca, since it has many users, but the same would not be true of identi.ca's (StatusNet / pump.io) ideal world, where everyone has their own individual instance, each of which would have to be compromised separately in order to capture a useful list of credentials. Also, break-ins like this are only one aspect of security, and the article is primarily about how easy your data is to obtain via "legitimate" means, and who makes decisions related to that. There are plenty of other differences that land in favor of the free software decentralized services vision. Such as, actually deleting your data when you want it deleted. Or ease of moving your information from a platform found to be insecure to a better one. More could have been said in the article about the fundamental difference in vision and what it means for the future. A future where we don't have to rely on antagonistic corporations to build huge castles to guard our baby pictures with massive security teams seems worth contemplating. Encouraging people to try out that vision, and see how it changes their relationship to all this spying news, seems like a good thing to me. As usual, it's not that simple for dissidents under active threat, but as a way to encourage broad social change, I think it has merit. -john -- John Sullivan | Executive Director, Free Software Foundation GPG Key: 61A0963B | http://status.fsf.org/johns | http://fsf.org/blogs/RSS Do you use free software? Donate to join the FSF and support freedom at <http://www.fsf.org/register_form?referrer=8096>. computer terrorism warfare bank HAMASMOIS munitions sweep underground Roswell keyhole SDI ANZUS pre-emptive Ansar al-Islam terrorism Aladdin -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at [email protected] or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
