Tag: privacy
-
Defence against the Dark Arts involves controlling your hardware
In light of the Vault 7 documents leak (and the rise to power of Lord Voldemort this year), it might make sense to rethink just how paranoid we need to be. Jarrod Carmichael puts it quite vividly: I find the general surprise… surprising. After all, this is in line with what Snowden told us years…
-
Helping Purism structure its messaging
I meant to finish writing and posting this a month or two ago, but urgent tasks and life kept getting in the way. I don’t often talk about client work here, but since this is public-facing ongoing work for a company that is insanely pro-Free-Software (not just “open source”), a company that ships GNOME3 by…
-
Back from the 2016 GNOME Summit
In my previous blog post, where I was providing an update on the 2016 GNOME Summit I was organizing in Montréal, I wrote, With a change of attendees comes a change of the nature of the event: instead of being an extremely technical, “deep end of the pool” event as it has been in the…
-
GUADEC 2016, laptops and tablets made to run GNOME, surprise Pitivi meeting
I went there for the 2016 edition of GUADEC: I arrived a couple of days early to attend my last GNOME Foundation board meeting, in one of the KIT’s libraries. The building’s uncanny brutalist architecture only added to the nostalgia of a two years adventure coming to an end: Then… A wild Kat strong-armed me…
-
Le chiffrement des partitions Linux d'un ordinateur de bureau est-il utile?
Pendant des années, j’ai eu un item sur ma liste de choses à faire: chiffrer (encrypter) le disque dur de données de mon ordinateur de bureau personnel. Parce que… que se passerait-il si je me faisais cambrioler? Bien qu’il soit facile de créer un volume chiffré avec Fedora (avec l’installateur initial ou avec GNOME Disks),…
-
The Death of Instant Messaging in 2013
We kinda failed at freeing/opening up telecommunications for the the public, though it wasn’t really our fault. Back in the nineties, ICQ and AIM were the significant players with a “first mover” advantage in the instant messaging market. MSN/Messenger/Live eventually ate their lunch, as users were looking for something less invasive and bloated for simple…
-
Unity and the post-Snowden world
I typically don’t listen to podcasts or watch talk shows, but the 29nd episode of the 2nd season of the Linux Action Show was referred to me and it does have a very interesting part where they discuss the usability and privacy issues around the latest iteration of Canonical’s “Unity” interface. The ten minutes where…
-
Privacy does not exist — it never did
Warning: this is certainly a depressing post. The NSA/PRISM/big brother scandal of late didn’t surprise nor shock me. The discovery that “the NSA probably silently circumvents/broke all our crypto and hid backdoors everywhere” is not really a discovery to geeks who have given the whole system a bit of thought — spies are spying on us,…
-
La pression sociale
Voici quelques pensées générales sur la responsabilité, le déterminisme et sur la société dans laquelle nous vivons. Je vais à contre-courant sur une poignée de choses dans la vie: Je refuse d’utiliser Facebook pour gérer mes relations avec mes véritables amis (en d’autres termes, les « relations privées »), pour les raisons énumérées précédemment. À la…
-
Pourquoi j'ai quitté Facebook: des précisions
Il y a deux ans je quittais définitivement Facebook. Depuis ce temps ma vie s’en est trouvée significativement améliorée, mais on me questionne encore sur les raisons de cette décision. Chaque fois, on me regarde comme si j’étais autiste. J’ai pensé aujourd’hui mettre à jour le billet que j’avais posté jadis, mais comme l’explication risque…