Alexandre Oliva

So-called smartphones have long been recognized as a surveillance problem by the Free Software community, and it feels like, even at the speed of light, no personal data can escape them any more. Still, they offer useful features that many people find valuable enough to make up for their perceived privacy loss, to everyone's detriment. What if we could get the useful features without sacrificing our privacy? We have enough Free Software and Hardware, and we could have surveillance-Free OLPC-like networking with Tor, using onion-like services for incoming calls. Time seems ripe. Who wants one? Who wants to make them? How can we make them viable?

Architectural bugs Spectre and Meltdown have caused major panic and still worry many. Oddly, some proposed mitigations that require installing proprietary blobs have not caused similar worries, despite growing awareness about prevalent data collection, built-in backdoors and the risks of placing too much trust in software and hardware designers with interests not aligned with those of users. Whom can we trust, then? What lessons are there for the Free Software community? Being suspicious of Web blobs and foggy computing, and not victimizing anyone through them, do we have anything to fear but fear itself?

Architectural bugs Spectre and Meltdown have caused major panic and still worry many. Oddly, some proposed mitigations that require installing proprietary blobs have not caused similar worries, despite growing awareness about prevalent data collection, built-in backdoors, and the risks of placing too much trust in software and hardware designers with interests not aligned with those of users. Who can we trust, then? What lessons are there for the free software community? Being suspicious of Web blobs and foggy computing, and not victimizing anyone through them, do we have anything to fear but fear itself?

Free software is a requirement for privacy and security. At Yale, we've been teaching cybersecurity, facilitating privacy workshops, and analyzing leaky mobile apps using only free software. We'll talk about a new class at Yale Law School, give a summary of this year's Yale Privacy Lab workshops, and provide insight from our collaborations with local makerspaces, Yale CEID, and MakeHaven. Come find out how we emphasize cybersecurity while keeping free software front and center. This session will include a MITM demonstration with a GNU/Linux minicomputer.

Other people: Danny O'Brien

Santa Claus knows it all, and will reward authority-approved behavior. Grownups take other social control myths for granted. Enter the World Wide Web, and the propaganda machines behind them lose their local monopolies. Now, in the globalized competition for hearts (brains might tell fake from fact), they wish to censor fake news, the post-truth label for both competing propaganda and concealed truth. Such censorship will not stop at social(-control) media: (centralized) web searches are already censored and otherwise distorted, and even (proprietary) software assistants, running on our own mobile computers, may end up assisting not us, but the censors that control their software by concealing the present from us--our future. To make intelligent decisions, we need truth, and to get it we will need not just education for critical thinking, decentralized social media and a neutral network, but also software freedom on our own communication and computing devices.

In fiction, we have often faced our fear that man-made creatures will become smart enough to subjugate us. As technology evolves, the Singularity may seem an inevitable looming future, but such intelligent beings have actually been with us for a very long time. Over many decades, they disabled the checks intended to keep them under our control, and turned most of us into their much-needed servants, who now live in an artificial reality they created to control us, while our planet can hardly support our life much longer. These creatures grew more powerful and smarter with our technological advances, but then they sent their agents back to disable our defenses and the leaders of our resistance, turning many of our tools and much of our infrastructure against us. They vaporized our freedoms, and a dark cloud now covers most of the planet. We still have one card left up our sleeves to tame these creatures, but we need more Neos and Connors to play it successfully. Are you up for it?

In Orwell's 1984, Newspeak had its vocabulary reduced so that subversive ideas could not be expressed. Likewise, user-programmable general-purpose computers are losing ground to ones that don't let users express the computations they wish to perform, unless they are available in exclusive appstores. Unable to program, users lose the freedom to improve software, and even the notion that they could! Failing to realize the importance of essential software freedoms, they fail to demand them! That's double plus unGNU! Let's fix it!