[Sheflug] EU, Free Software and Echelon

[Barrie Bremner <nospam [at] barriebremner.com>]

>>>>> "simon" == simon  <simon [at] cliffestones.demon.co.uk> writes:

    simon> Try the link below provided by JYA for more stuff on the EU
    simon> and free software

    simon> We offer an HTML version of the 92-page draft EuroParl
    simon> report on ECHELON, dated May 4, 2001:

    simon>   http://cryptome.org/echelon-ep.htm (246KB)

    simon> In Summary the EU is in favour of Free software and
    simon> encrypting all e-mail to combat Echelon. As the only
    simon> software you can verify to not be NSA doctored is stuff
    simon> you've got the source for.

This is rather odd - OK, so M$ have had variables named foo_NSA - but
if the NSA are after accessing everyone's files, what on Earth are
they doing pouring money into SE Linux - and Open Sourcing the lot?

A drastic change in policy, or are the NSA just making sure that they
have a secure OS to use whilst they hack into everyone else's Windoze
machines? :-)

I'm not a great fan of backdoors on any piece of software, especially
since it's not just the governments that we have to worry about.

There are enough holes in systems as it is, without introducing
(usually poorly protected) backdoors by design.

I'm quite surprised PGP hasn't taken off more - what with all the
ranting about Microsoft's wonderfully free (not!) EULAs for online
services, and all this government conspiricy malarky.

As an aside, I see a research arm of M$ have released a GPL IPng/IPv6
webserver!

I wonder if that project's budget will be pulled...or maybe this is
another spin.

Baz.

-- 
Barrie J. Bremner 		OpenPGP public key ID: 5164F553
baz [at] barriebremner.com	http://barriebremner.com/

baz /baz/ n.
 1. [common] The third metasyntactic variable.
 2. interj. A term of mild annoyance.
 3. Occasionally appended to foo to produce `foobaz'

	-- Jargon File v4.3.0, www.tuxedo.org/jargon

 4. Me.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Sheffield Linux User's Group - http://www.sheflug.co.uk
To unsubscribe from this list send mail to
- <sheflug-request [at] vuw.ac.nz> - with the word 
 "unsubscribe" in the body of the message. 

  GNU the choice of a complete generation.