Sensing Technology As Open Source's New Frontier 51
destinyland writes "Christine Peterson coined the term 'open source.' Now she's proposing the same collaborative sharing approach to sensing technology 'to improve both security and the environment, while preserving — even strengthening — privacy, freedom, and civil liberties...' The Open Source Sensing initiative welcomes individuals and organizations, and warns that 'We have a short window of opportunity for guiding this technology to protect both our security *and* our privacy.' Peterson says that in the long term, 'open source defensive technologies will likely be the only ones capable of keeping up with rapidly-advancing offensive technologies, just as open source software is faster at addressing computer viruses today.' And the EFF's Brad Templeton warns that 'Cheap, ubiquitous sensing has the potential to turn the worlds of privacy and civil rights upside-down... It's not enough for governments to watch people; people have to watch governments.' His solution? 'Learning from the bottom-up approaches of the open source community.'
Nuclear WMD Sensing? (Score:4, Interesting)
The proposal itself stays away from video and on their site they talk about who would have release rights to this video, I'm not sure why the EFF is commenting on that. It looks like they want to stay away from somone/group grabbing all the video and putting it up on YouTube to make the street in front of your house a public spectacle.
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So you find out your neighborhood has an irregular--perhaps even mildly dangerous--amount of radioactive activity. Watch the lawsuits roll in ...
I dislike barratry and other abuses of our legal system as much as anyone, but you know, we are a society of laws. Now, if my neighbor's house is in fact dangerous to me and my family, well, yes, I would like a legal remedy. The other options are (1) suck it up, do nothing, and suffer the consequences or (2) settle things outside of any legal framework. While in theory (2) sounds like a good idea, and can work well sometimes, it can also get nasty. I think the legal system often gets a bad rap, because
Linux can win... (Score:1, Funny)
...the nosetop!
Knowing the government's level of incompetence? (Score:1)
I'll bet right before a large attack all of our technology will recieve a killall command.
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A good starting point would be to implant an RFID chip in every elected politician. They might become slightly more privacy oriented then.
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the open-source solutions to anti-virus:
solution 1) bury head in sand, pretend viruses don't exist and will never attack your systems
solution 2) stand naked directly in the path of oncoming viruses, with the attitude that no virus could possibly harm you.
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Then you run the risk of completely skewing elections for very silly reasons.
Perhaps that guy who would have been a kick ass administrator never gets voted for because people just don't like the fact that he downloads horse porn.
Or the guy who leads a regular, dull, and boring life turns out to be a horrible politician. Oh wait, we just had one of those.
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propose that politians should have no privacy. All their records should be open long before the regular citizen should go through that.
Politicians are regular citizens. Maybe if more people realized that fact it would be easier to not be afraid of them, and we then could really get some change going in this country.
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My... you're not a particularly bright child, are you?
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Yes, I am an American. We elected Bush twice (do some research into our electoral system). I don't spin. Usually.
I was commenting on the poster's use of language, i.e., "politician" versus "regular citizen." It's a common, uneducated misconception in our country that congressmen are endowed with some special magic not possessed by mere mortals. People understand so little of what goes on in capital hill; if they really understood, many new faces would be showing up in Washington next election.
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Re:I propose... (Score:5, Interesting)
PS: ban lobbies too, while we're at it! Let's give democracy a shot for a change.
I'd go two steps farther.
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Let's get closer to the mark and make it a felony for a candidate to accept money from anyone who isn't eligible to vote for them. Fewer felons to keep track of that way. :)
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Let's get closer to the mark and make it a felony for a candidate to accept money from anyone who isn't eligible to vote for them. Fewer felons to keep track of that way. :)
In some states, some felons lose the right to vote, that makes the candidate liable if they accept money from "anyone". Maybe that should be accepted as the cost to the politician of playing a fundamentally bribery based game. So, we'd need an accurate nationwide list of felons that have not been pardoned or expunged. Good Luck.
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It would be pretty hard for the candidate to check out each and every contributor, and the chances of making a mistale one way or another would be enormous.
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Yes. And it should be pretty hard for any person to get into office, where they can ruin the lives of many citizens with a pen stroke.
(Yeah, I realize that I'm essentially advocating career politicians, because "ordinary people" don't have the resources or skills to vet all their contributions. But perhaps I'm really advocating the creation of a "poli
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Make it a felony to contribute to more than one candidate for any election. Face it, a grand for the Repub abd another grand for the Dem, and no matter which candidate loses, the briber/contributor wins. Contributing to more than one candidate in any given race is an ill-disguised bribe, and it should be a felony.
Maybe you could restrict it a little further and market it better as "contributing twice is like voting twice". Exactly one contribution per election seems fair to me, just like one vote per election seems fair to me.
This also cuts back slightly on bribery, as you'd be unable to do the "half the money upfront to prove we're serious, then the other half the money after the politician makes the correct/profitable decision"
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Well that is just... broken?... dumb?
Actually, on item 1 I'd go along with you as long as you change it to you can donate to anyone who can vote on legislation that will affect you. I mean if the Senator from New Mexico gets to vote on a law regulating ocean fishing, it's only fair that residents of coastal states should have some small amount of influence in the senator's race for office.
On item 2, that really is just dumb. If there are three candidates running for office, one a democrat, one a republican
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On item one, if I can contribute to any candidate who can vote on any legislation that affects me, why can't I vote for or against any candidate who can vote on legislation that affects me?
On item two, the nambla candidate isn't likey to get many votes OR much campaign cash. I can't vote against the nambla candidate by voting for the Republican and Libertarian candidates, now can I?
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And I'll go one step farther:
Make it a felony for any legislator to pass legislation that impacts anyone who wasn't eligible to vote for them. There's an idea....
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The children will run wild!
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I must agree (Score:2)
This is an interesting concept. However I think there's a major flaw:
Open source software development works because it consists of people willing to sacrifice some of their spare time doing something that they enjoy. The actual cost is nil, or close to it. Distribution and collaboration are made easy via the internet.
However here you're talking hardware. Hardware has to be manufactured. It has cost. Then it has to be physically shipped to where you want to install
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Designing, fabbing and installing specialized sensors is one aspect of "sensor technology" and one that OSS is, as you say, arguably of limited use as a model. However, co-ordination of sensor values, turning the data points into some meaningful picture of the world, is more or less completely a s
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Only the design need be open source.
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The "Bad Guys" can look at the source... (Score:4, Insightful)
But so can the smart good guys. More (and possibly better) penetration testing and verification also means that there are fewer exploitable holes. Sounds like a win-win, both from the standpoint of security and privacy.
Totally Different Ideals (Score:4, Insightful)
An eloquent argument for a supremely bad idea (Score:2)
TFA doesn't consider the problems of compulsion and access.
The approach of "open source sensing" may have some validity in public places, but for the most part the interesting things that governments and other powerful entities do are either done in privacy or are already covered by news media of various kinds. There's no way to get access that would allow a discussion between police and prosecuting attorneys over the real reasons for a bust, there's no way to get access to the side discussions and dealma
Sensing Technology (Score:2)
So, how do you sense technology?
"Technology sense...tingling!"
Given Sen. Mark Sanford's recent admission... (Score:2)
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Can I man the tranquilizer rifle we use to stun them in the wild? Or the pincers that hook the ID tags into their ears?
Why are you looking at me like that?
whatever (Score:3, Informative)
Christine Peterson coined the term 'open source.'
Oh no she didn't.
It was Eric S. Raymond.
It *was* Christine Peterson (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.opensource.org/history [opensource.org]
They brainstormed about tactics and a new label. "Open source", contributed by Chris Peterson, was the best thing they came up with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source [wikipedia.org]
The group of individuals at the session included Christine Peterson who suggested open source.
It wasn't Eric Raymond. He was just in favor of that term over all the others that came up. I'm pretty sure I remember himself saying that on catb.org/~esr/<somewhere>, but I can't find that right now.
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I'm pretty sure that *he* claimed it was Christine Peterson when interviewed for the documentary "Revolution OS."
Sense what? (Score:1)
I read the article and watched the video and it set off my BS sensor. The video reminded me of the first time I heard the term "symbiosis" used in a merger meeting.