[Fsf-friends] Item-9 in Open Source Definition

[Mani A]

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 2:10 AM, Praveen A <pravi.a at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2008/11/26 Raj Mathur <raju at linux-delhi.org>:
>> Er, would you have some data to back up that statement?  If you mean
>> organised crime is technically advanced, sure, I have no quarrel with
>> that.
>
I could have used 'Many' instead of 'Most'. But I meant to include
entities like the 'US Government ' and their agencies in the term
'organized crime industry'.

There are plenty of known cases in proprietary software for elections,
hedge funds and ... Desktops/servers : )

If some body commits a cyber crime from an OSS platform, then it
becomes a honest crime only if the relevant scripts/programs along
with relevant documentation are published ... with due credits.


> This is an interesting article which shows what some of the corporate
> "cutting edge research" produces.
>
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/20797485/chinas_allseeing_eye

That is another biased article by Klein. Democracy, unions and
information are not as problematic as Klein believes it to be. The
people's daily online for example provides lot more info. The problem
is more severe in other countries, where the dominant media is more
tightly in corporate reins and people are fed 'democracy'. Capitalism
is always a problem. ... may be a lesser problem when trained
administrators try to rein them in.

Research in pattern recognition and facial recognition has been a hot
topic... especially since the seventies. It has its positive and evil
uses. But basic research on the subject is 'well known'.  Given the
capability of present day computers, it adds an extra dimension to
spying and surveillance. The US administration (a bunch of corporates)
also has a partly stated full time imperialism programme in place in
this regard.

A different concern is the private research carried out by different
secret service and defence agencies. The 'who-knows-what-it-is '
programs produced will be all the more unknown.


Best

A. Mani


-- 
A. Mani
Member, Cal. Math. Soc