The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties organization based in San Francisco, used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the secretive license agreement Apple offers as the only way to distribute applications through their “app store”. According to this license agreement the Apple app store is the only means by which compliant iPhone OS application developers may distribute their iPhone OS applications once the developer agrees to Apple’s onerous terms. How onerous? Take a look at EFF’s highlights from the license agreement:

Ban on Public Statements: As mentioned above, Section 10.4 prohibits developers, including government agencies such as NASA, from making any “public statements” about the terms of the Agreement. This is particularly strange, since the Agreement itself is not “Apple Confidential Information” as defined in Section 10.1. So the terms are not confidential, but developers are contractually forbidden from speaking “publicly” about them.

App Store Only: Section 7.2 makes it clear that any applications developed using Apple’s SDK may only be publicly distributed through the App Store, and that Apple can reject an app for any reason, even if it meets all the formal requirements disclosed by Apple. So if you use the SDK and your app is rejected by Apple, you’re prohibited from distributing it through competing app stores like Cydia or Rock Your Phone.

Ban on Reverse Engineering: Section 2.6 prohibits any reverse engineering (including the kinds of reverse engineering for interoperability that courts have recognized as a fair use under copyright law), as well as anything that would “enable others” to reverse engineer, the SDK or iPhone OS.

No Tinkering with Any Apple Products: Section 3.2(e) is the “ban on jailbreaking” provision that received some attention when it was introduced last year. Surprisingly, however, it appears to prohibit developers from tinkering with any Apple software or technology, not just the iPhone, or “enabling others to do so.” For example, this could mean that iPhone app developers are forbidden from making iPods interoperate with open source software, for example.

You will not, through use of the Apple Software, services or otherwise create any Application or other program that would disable, hack, or otherwise interfere with the Security Solution, or any security, digital signing, digital rights management, verification or authentication mechanisms implemented in or by the iPhone operating system software, iPod Touch operating system software, this Apple Software, any services or other Apple software or technology, or enable others to do so

Kill Your App Any Time: Section 8 makes it clear that Apple can “revoke the digital certificate of any of Your Applications at any time.” Steve Jobs has confirmed that Apple can remotely disable apps, even after they have been installed by users. This contract provision would appear to allow that.

We Never Owe You More than Fifty Bucks: Section 14 states that, no matter what, Apple will never be liable to any developer for more than $50 in damages. That’s pretty remarkable, considering that Apple holds a developer’s reputational and commercial value in its hands—it’s not as though the developer can reach its existing customers anywhere else. So if Apple botches an update, accidentally kills your app, or leaks your entire customer list to a competitor, the Agreement tries to cap you at the cost of a nice dinner for one in Cupertino.
EFF

How long will it be before Apple tries more restrictive terms with their other operating system, MacOS? You should declare your software freedom, refuse to buy Apple’s devices, and do not agree to these terms.

Glenn Greenwald was Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez’s guest on their show Democracy Now!; Goodman, Gonzalez, and Greenwald had this to say about the same event:

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to one of the pieces you’ve written about recently, and it has to do with the man Joe Stack, the man who drove a plane into the Austin IRS building, and how he has been described by the media.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, if you look at the initial reaction of the media—and I mean not just initial in the couple of hours after, but for the several days after—there was an overt reluctance to call him a terrorist. In fact, there were discussions about whether or not he ought to be called a terrorist, and the media essentially said that this doesn’t seem like terrorism.

AMY GOODMAN: And explain what happened.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, essentially, he wrote a manifesto that was not—that was anti-government. It wasn’t purely right-wing or left-wing. He talked about how the pharmaceutical industry and the health insurance industry, for example, are gouging the middle class and below. He talked about how the government is stealing from the middle class and the lower middle class in order to pilfer profits and money and transfer money to their cronies on Wall Street. And he also talked a lot about the unfairness of the tax code and how it was written by and for the benefit of corporations.

AMY GOODMAN: But he flew a plane into a building.

GLENN GREENWALD: Exactly. He burned his house down and then took a plane and flew it into the building, essentially modeling the—

AMY GOODMAN: For a political purpose.

GLENN GREENWALD: For a political purpose, essentially modeling his act, of course, after what al-Qaeda did on September 11th. And he even said in his manifesto that he was doing it in order to put fear in the government and to inspire others to engage in violence in order to advance these ideas. It was the classic case of terrorism. If you look at any definition, it’s exactly what every definition of terrorism describes.

And yet, the media was overtly reluctant to call it “terrorism” because—and they were actually amazingly upfront about this—they talk about the fact that he was American, that he seemed like the guy next door, that you could identify with some of his grievances, and that terrorism is really something that, as several of them said, is done by Muslims in caves who hate the United States.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And amazingly, I recall, in the first hours of that attack, when in the Daily News on our website we published the story, the overwhelming number of reader responses that were coming into the news were supportive of him, and they say this is—I remember I was stunned. I’m saying, how are people coming out and supporting this attack because it was aimed at the IRS, supposedly by an American?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, that’s right, and I think—you know, I think that we’ve seen this a long time. I mean, there has been a lot of violence carried out by domestic groups within the United States going back to the 1990s, of course, against abortion clinics. Timothy McVeigh was the ultimate one, the formation of militias. And you’ve seen all kinds of escalation in the rhetoric and violence of right-wing groups, who believe that the US government is illegitimate and a justifiable target. Classic terrorism. And yet, we’re very reluctant to call it that.

And yet, at the same time, if you look at acts that clearly fall outside of the scope of terrorism, such as the attack on Fort Hood, which was an attack on a military base—unjustifiable and heinous as it was, it was an attack on a military base deploying soldiers into a war zone—that was immediately branded terrorism, because the perpetrator was Muslim and he said “Allahu Akbar” in the act. And we even have people in Afghanistan, in their own country, who, when they throw grenades or engage in other forms of warfare against the invading American army, are declared terrorists and put in Guantánamo. The word “terrorist” has really come to mean Muslims who dislike the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: The internal Newsweek discussion?

GLENN GREENWALD: There was a discussion that Newsweek published—it was originally intended to be private, and they ended up publishing it, I think, because they thought it was so enlightening that the public would benefit from it—about why there was an aversion, on their part and generally, to calling Joe Stack a terrorist.

And many of them—a couple of them said, “Look, this is a domestic terrorist, and we should call him that.” But many of them—the managing editor was the first to answer. What she said is, “My rule of thumb is, if it’s a domestic person or group, if it’s a right-wing group, they’re a ‘separatist’ or a ‘protester’ or a ‘bomber’; if it’s a left-wing group, it’s a ‘radical left-wing protester.’ But it’s a ‘terrorist’ only if it’s a foreign group engaging in violence protesting the United States.” So, in other words, in her mind—and many of them said similar things—that in order to be a terrorist, you have to be a foreigner—Americans could never possibly commit acts of terrorism, by definition—who is protesting the United States, meaning a terrorist is somebody who dislikes or objects to something the US government is doing. This is a journalist. These are journalists who are essentially propagandizing the public.

This recording comes to us courtesy of the Internet Society New York chapter The recordings are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Speech

Download Audio: hosted at Punkcast, hosted at Columbia University, hosted locally

Download Video: hosted at Punkcast, hosted at Columbia University, hosted locally

Q&A

Audio: hosted at Punkcast, hosted at Columbia University, hosted locally

Video: hosted at Punkcast, hosted at Columbia University, hosted locally

When Moglen talks about what your server should do, he talks about the kinds of services you should be free to host yourself. I’m reminded of how useful it might be to control your file sharing yourself without placing your faith in those who are untrustworthy by default.

Update 2010-02-10: The Software Freedom Law Center posted highlights from Eben Moglen’s talk.

“Ink” is an independently produced movie that is widely illicitly copied on the Internet. Ink stands out because unlike chiefs of more famous movie studios, Ink’s writer/director Jamin Winans and producer Kiowa K. Winans wrote to TorrentFreak to thank them for promoting the movie and to say that the illicit sharing has made the movie far more popular, including increasing sales of home video copies.

But how do these movie makers treat you, the audience?

• Paley shares with her audience by licensing her work to be shared (and built upon). If you share/build upon Sita in accordance with her license, you need not fear a copyright infringement lawsuit. Paley contributes something to our culture that treats us fairly and encourages us to do the same.
• The Winanses are knowingly allowing their restrictively-licensed movie to be shared illicitly. Even as they celebrate the popularity and sales brought to them by sharing, they retain the power to win a copyright infringement lawsuit even for non-commercially sharing a verbatim copy of their movie. Enforcement of their copyright against anyone who shares the movie can come at any time.

Metaphorically, the Sword of Damocles hovers above anyone who shares a copy of Ink; losing a copyright infringement lawsuit could cost someone a lot of money. There is no such threat for those who shares copies of Sita. The terms under which we may share and build upon Sita are very easily to comply with. There are no terms under which we may legally share Ink.

I think it’s important to keep this in mind as you read TorrentFreak’s glowing letters of support about Ink. We can all appreciate a good movie, but not all good movies are licensed to treat us the same way. This is why I gladly bought an artist-signed copy of Sita (and would consider buying Sita chotchkes from Nina Paley).

Let’s hope that Ink’s copyright holders come to realize their movie should be licensed to us to share (at least non-commercially and verbatim).

BitTorrent is the most popular filesharing protocol on the Internet today. BitTorrent users typically obtain pieces of the data they want and share pieces of the same data with others. By cooperating in this fashion, almost everyone who wants a copy of the data gets what they want.

There are many programs one can use to share data using the BitTorrent protocol. Many are free software—one can inspect, share, and modify the program to suit one’s needs. uTorrent is a popular non-free (or proprietary) BitTorrent client. Like any proprietary program, exactly what the uTorrent program does when it runs is not clearly known to anyone except its developers. uTorrent became popular because it is a zero-cost, small, and quick program which requires little computing power. Many BitTorrent clients allow web-based control: one can set up Transmission (a free software BitTorrent client) to host a web-based control panel that lets users remotely control Transmission. With some savvy, one could set up one’s computer at home to run Transmission all the time and use this web-based remote control to keep track of and control Transmission from anywhere on the Internet.

The next version of uTorrent is due out soon; codenamed “Falcon”, an article on torrentfreak.com glowingly describes this version because this version of uTorrent offers a different kind of web-based control panel: users can control their copy of uTorrent by logging into the Falcon website and controlling their copy of uTorrent from this website.

Freedom and privacy

What’s the difference? The difference is who has access to your computer and who has access to data on what you’re sharing.

When you set up the remote control you can determine who connects to it. With “Falcon” uTorrent, you have to trust the people at falcon.utorrent.com as well or else the remote control service based on their website won’t work. The remote control service based on logging into falcon.utorrent.com’s website depends on uTorrent being accessible to uTorrent employees and their agents. In order for that remote control to work, you must leave a program running with your authority on your computer which is accessible by the people who run uTorrent.

Perhaps this was always the case; after all, uTorrent is proprietary and always has been. This is a natural consequence of not knowing (and being prohibited from learning) exactly what that program does. This could have always been the achilles heel of widespread BitTorrent use: all proprietary BitTorrent clients sharing information about its users and its users peers unbeknownst to the users.

“Falcon” uTorrent may track your sharing and that of your peers even if the uTorrent privacy policy or employees say otherwise. uTorrent is certainly in a position to do this; if you use this remote control service in the way its intended to work, you’re handing them control over the uTorrent program running on your computer. We don’t know what this program is capable of (only a free software program would give us that information). It would not be difficult for uTorrent employees and their agents to keep track of anything that program has access to read: what you’re sharing, with whom you’re sharing data, your other files/folders, perhaps even other network connections or information about your computer. “Agents” means exactly that: anyone uTorrent people decide should have access to data about your system or whomever you’re connected to. You have no control over what information is collected or whom that information is disseminated to.

How does software freedom help me here?

In theory any program could do the same thing but software freedom lets us understand what free software programs are capable of. Free software programs can be modified to enhance our privacy and these improved versions of programs can be distributed to enhance the privacy of our friends and neighbors. Even if we’re not programmers we all know how to copy computer programs and install improved versions of programs, so we can help one another share only the information we want to share. Not so with proprietary programs.

With proprietary programs the programmers determine what gets shared. Once that data has been uploaded to uTorrent’s programmers (or their agents), who’s to know how widely it is shared from there? I need not even get into the consequences of human error on the server side where uTorrent admins inadvertantly leak information they collected.

Assuming what’s described in the torrentfreak.com story is accurate, uTorrent’s implementation of remote access to your sharing means you’ll give uTorrent information which would be invaluable to copyright holders and their agents who are looking for a convenient list of users to target for copyright infringement lawsuits.

Since “Falcon” is proprietary, you’ll probably not know if turning off the remote access is good enough to ensure your privacy. Worse still, if any of your filesharing peers use this service they’re alerting the uTorrent admins about your filesharing. So your rejection of uTorrent isn’t good enough to keep your use of the filesharing out of uTorrent’s hands.

Conclusion

“Falcon” poses a considerable risk to filesharers who want to retain their privacy and this version continues a long line of denying users their software freedom. If the program were free software, groups could set up competing services based on trustworthiness; we could have other remote control services running in competition with the uTorrent.com-based remote control service. You wouldn’t have to reveal your filesharing to parties except those you trusted while retaining the convenience of a small program running quickly. You could use whatever metric of trust to determine who those trustworthy parties are, if anyone. Instead, proprietary software pushes you into a monopoly for this service. This remote control protocol could be a commodity, improved and built upon as BitTorrent protocol itself is.

Trading away your software freedom is never a good idea.

The free software movement is primarily concerned with building and defending software freedom—the freedom to run, share, and modify published computer software. This is an ethical consideration borne out of considering how we ought to treat one another using computers and software. The open source movement pushes aside software freedom and pursues attracting business to the open source development methodology. To that end they concern themselves primarily with speaking to programmers who can help business develop its software. These concerns share some common ground but they can reach polar opposite responses to practical questions as the aforementioned essay illustrates:

It is remarkable that such different philosophical views can so often motivate different people to participate in the same projects. Nonetheless, there are situations where these fundamentally different views lead to very different actions.

The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program that is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users’ freedom. Free software activists and open source enthusiasts will react very differently to that.

A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, “I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?” This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.

The free software activist will say, “Your program is very attractive, but I value my freedom more. So I reject your program. Instead I will support a project to develop a free replacement.” If we value our freedom, we can act to maintain and defend it.

If linux.conf.au were more concerned with teaching people about software freedom they’d recognize that the Linux kernel is a part of an operating system, not the whole thing. If you have only the Linux kernel on your computer you don’t have all the software you need to do things people expect a modern computer to do such as browse the web, compute in spreadsheets, and play movies. The Linux kernel allows an operating system to share computer hardware resources harmoniously so Linux is an important part of an operating system (for instance, a GNU/Linux system or a Busybox/Linux system as one might use on their home computer or Internet router) but we should give credit where credit is due. Calling attention to the name “GNU” helps draw attention to the cause of freedom and cooperation.

linux.conf.au hosts many talks and broadcasts them online in live streams. Apparently the live streaming is an opportunity for the online audience to install some non-free software, Microsoft’s Silverlight, via the conference’s live stream webpages. This year, linux.conf.au is hosting a talk by Robert O’Callahan, a hacker for Mozilla (makers of Firefox) who is giving a talk on “why open video is important for free software“; an important topic for free software activists everywhere. Viewers are given a mixed message when talks like these are streamed via patent-encumbered protocols over a proprietary program instead of the protocols and software O’Callahan will likely cover. A message rooted in freedom is subtly undermined when free and proprietary are presented as equals. Other conferences around the world have no problem streaming their talks in formats one can play with unencumbered free software (Debian’s conference, a very large Brazilian conference). The technology O’Callahan describes is viable today but if “unencumbered baseline codecs are critical for the Web and for the free software community” one wonders why this approach is not used exclusively to publish these live streams. Viewers/listeners to the online stream should be directed to install a free software browser which supports playing Ogg Vorbis+Theora not directed to install proprietary software.

Glenn Greenwald on Bill Moyer’s Journal in a web exclusive (video, transcript) had this to say about President Obama’s continuation of rounding up people around the world and locking them up for as long as we like.

[O]ne of the principle controversies of the Bush Administration, one of the defining aspects of their radicalism, was the idea that we can take human beings who we don’t capture on a battlefield, who we simply abduct and pick up, who we suspect of engaging in terrorism and put them into cages for years or decades without having to charge them with any crime.

That — simply based on executive authority — the ability to point to someone and say, “This is a terrorist,” then justifies the elimination of all due process and putting them into prison forever. Obama, several months ago, said that he not only believes in that power, but wanted Congress to enact a statute that would permanently enshrine this theory of law into Presidential power.

He gave up on that because there was going to be difficulty in terms of getting the bill that he wanted passed through the Congress. So, instead what he did was he embraced the Bush/Cheney justification as to why the President can do that, which is that the Congress implicitly authorized it.

And so, we’re continuing our scheme of indefinite lawless detention, free of due process, free of any charges of any kind. Where we can pick up people anywhere around the world and put them into cages. He’s actively defending that power in Afghanistan, by saying that people who we abduct far away from the battlefield, far away from Afghanistan, and then ship to Afghanistan and imprison at Bagram have no rights even to habeas corpus, which the Supreme Court said at least that Guantanamo detainees have.

And so, that’s just one example where for years liberals yelled and screamed vehemently that Bush was subverting the Constitution and degrading the American culture, political culture, by asserting this power. And yet, here you have Barack Obama not just refusing or taking his time undoing it, but himself actively defending and advocating it. And there’s very little outcry. And that repeats itself in terms of the state secrets privilege. And the effort to block accountability for torture victims. And a whole variety of other powers that Bush and Cheney asserted to great controversy.Glenn Greenwald

The Left has profoundly mischaracterized Obama’s campaign promise to end the use of Guantanamo Bay: during the campaign this was widely celebrated as a reason to vote for Obama. But even if that prison is destroyed and never to be used again, the US maintains a system of prisons around the world (some unknown to us, I can only guess). It’s reasonable to believe that in those other prisons the US tortures (whether directly or by proxy hardly matters) and detains people indefinitely. Shifting the site of illegal unethical behavior is not the same as ceasing that behavior.

Obama’s support for your civil liberties is profoundly lacking. You’ll recall his administrations support of the telecommunications corporations’ illegal wiretapping which surpassed the Bush administration.

I hope that by the time Obama’s first term is over we can look at his presidency and name a dozen seriously beneficial things he has done for the US (ideally, 12 things John McCain would have been unlikely to do). Not being Bush isn’t good enough.

gNewSense GNU/Linux

If you’re looking for a fully-free software GNU/Linux distribution for your Intel-compatible personal computer (most are such computers), download this disc image and give gNewSense a try. gNewSense is a complete operating system based on the GNU OS and the Linux kernel. gNewSense most closely resembles the Ubuntu GNU/Linux system but gNewSense is fully free software out of the box, no special install needed so you are free to inspect, run, share, and modify the software should you wish to.

You can download the software here or from the gNewSense website. The complete source code is available as well (locally or from the gNewSense website).

First time burning a CD? No problem, here’s some help on how to do it and verify the results.

If you wish to verify your download, here’s the relevant MD5SUM data:

897d81b3c2493b4779dea45d6b7f041c gnewsense-livecd-deltah-i386-2.3.iso
5b031d62952de343666ffd40d4ceda05 gnewsense-cdsource-deltah-i386-2.3.tar


If you’ve already got gNewSense and you want to update to this release, you should be able to use the normal update mechanism.