Stephen E. Arnold: Replicant Hopes to Free Mobile from the Tyranny of Proprietary Software

BTS (Base Transciever Station), Design, Innovation, Mobile, Software, Spectrum
Stephen E. Arnold
Stephen E. Arnold

Replicant Hopes to Free Mobile from the Tyranny of Proprietary Software

August 27, 2013

Citing freedom and security concerns, the makers of Replicant are calling for donations, we learn from “Fundraising a Fully Free Fork of Android” at Boing Boing. The project hopes to give us all the choice to run our Android-based mobile devices entirely upon free software.

But wait, you ask, isn’t Android is already open source? Well, most of it, but a few “key non-free parts” keep our Android devices tethered to proprietary programs. Such parts, they say, include the layer that communicates with hardware; yes, that would be pretty important.

Also of concern to Replicant developers are the pre-loaded applications that some of us call “bloatware,” but upon which many users have come to rely. The team plans to develop free software that provides the same functionality. (I hope they also include the option to delete applications without them returning uninvited. That would be a nice change.) Furthermore, they have set up rival to the Google Play store, their app repository called F-Droid. That repository, the article notes, works with all Android-based systems.

The write-up summarizes:

“Mobile operating systems distributed by Apple, Microsoft, and Google all require you to use proprietary software. Even one such program in a phone’s application space is enough to threaten our freedom and security — it only takes one open backdoor to gain access. We are proud to support the Replicant project to help users escape the proprietary restrictions imposed by the current major smartphone vendors. There will still be problems remaining to solve, like the proprietary radio firmware and the common practice of locking down phones, but Replicant is a major part of the solution.”

Replicant is underpinned by copyrighted software that has been released under an assortment of free licenses, which their site links to here. This is an interesting initiative, and we have a couple of questions should it be successful: Will Google’s mobile search revenues come under increased pressure? What happens if Samsung or the Chinese mobile manufacturers jump on this variant of Android? We shall see.

Cynthia Murrell, August 27, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

Jean Lievens: The Sharing Economy — Whole Living

Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Governance, Innovation, Mobile, Money, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Spectrum, Transparency
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

The sharing economy: a whole new way of living

From accommodation to cars, the internet is turning us from consumers into providers and challenging established business models. We talk to Martin Varsavsky, founder of Fon – the largest Wi-Fi company in the world – and profile two more pioneers, from TaskRabbit.com and BlaBlaCar.com

In 2006, serial entrepreneur and investor Martín Varsavsky – inspired by a conviction that he could cloak the world in free Wi-Fi by encouraging people to share their home connections – founded Fon in Madrid. The company is now the largest Wi-Fi network in the world, with almost 12m hot spots in more than 100 countries.

“My general thinking at the time was that we live in a world in which benefits are only accrued through economic growth and the endless consumption of resources, and that there have to be other ways that are of more benefit to people,” he says. “Why should everyone have their own car when most of the time they are not using them? Think of a marina full of boats. How frequently do those boats go out?”

Today, it has been argued that the sharing economy – which is perhaps best defined as a way of sweating underutilised assets, by building communities around them and turning consumers into providers – has the potential to reboot businesses across most economic categories. Indeed, Forbes magazine recently estimated that total revenues for the sector could top $3.5bn this year, with growth exceeding 25%. However, when setting up Fon, Varsavsky became convinced that people needed a nudge or financial incentive before they'd happily share their assets.

Read full article.

Mini-Me: Give Every Afghan a Radio? Or Give Every Afghan OpenBTS with a Radio App? + OpenBTS Meta-RECAP

BTS (Base Transciever Station), Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Education, Governance, Hardware, Innovation, Mobile, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience, Software, Spectrum
Who?  Mini-Me?
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Overheard in the World Cafe:

Speaker A:  My friend is creating a wide-area radio network for Afghanistan.

Speaker B:  Afghanistan has no infrastructure — including radio stations.  Although radio is popular, it is mostly shortwave, with a few local FM stations for the local Iman.  And electricity for radio stations is spotty at best including in Kabul.

Speaker A:  Well, I can build really cheap, “ultra” cheap, radio receivers.

Speaker B:  As long as you are doing that, why not give them OpenBTS cell phones running on ambient energy, and include a radio app?  Then get someone else — Google, Virgin Mobile, the Chinese or India — to focus on all-purpose cellular towers and tethered ballons?

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Give Every Afghan a Radio? Or Give Every Afghan OpenBTS with a Radio App? + OpenBTS Meta-RECAP”

Patrick Meier: YouTube (15:33) Digital Humanitarians: Patrick Meier at TEDxTraverseCity 2013

Crowd-Sourcing, Culture, Data, Design, Governance, Innovation, Knowledge, Mobile, Resilience, Software, Spectrum, Transparency, YouTube

ABOVE IS FULL PRESENTATION BELOW IS ORIGINAL POST WITH FAST FORWARD LINK & POST

Phi Beta Iota:  We strongly recommend watching the full presentation.  This is “ground zero” for the future of intelligence, along with OSE and M4IS2.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: YouTube (15:33) Digital Humanitarians: Patrick Meier at TEDxTraverseCity 2013”

John Maguire: YouTube (15:09) Wireless Scalar Wave Demonstration — and Potential Chinese Harvesting Method – NSA is HOSED

BTS (Base Transciever Station), Cloud, Innovation, Spectrum
John Maguire
John Maguire

Tesla technologies can revolutionize communications as we know them today. here is demonstrated one example where it outperforms standard electro-magnetic or transverse wave propagation.

A German Electrical Engineer operating under the pseudonym TheOldScientist demonstrates the existence of Longitudinal/Scalar Waves. Classical Electromagnetic-Waves are Transverse and can be shielded through the use of a Faraday Cage. L/S Waves on the other hand bypass all manner of barriers, and have been shown to propagate at superluminal speeds as well. Proper utilization of S/L Waves can open up broad vistas for communications technologies as well as eliminate electro-smog (a byproduct of unharnessed scalar-pollution currently produced by traditional EM-technologies).

See Also:

Continue reading “John Maguire: YouTube (15:09) Wireless Scalar Wave Demonstration — and Potential Chinese Harvesting Method – NSA is HOSED”

Berto Jongman: Building Trust in Cyberspace + Robert Garigue RECAP

Advanced Cyber/IO, Security, Software, Spectrum
Berto Jongman
Berto Jongman

Building Trust in Cyberspace

The EastWest Institute released Building Trust in Cyberspace, a report featuring highlights of its 3rd Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit held in New Delhi on October 30-31, 2012. More than 300 participants from 22 countries heard from cyber experts from across the globe representing both the private and public sectors.

Open publication | Download (mobile viewing)

Testimonial

I went to a conference that made me rethink everything that I have ever written, said and advocated about the Internet. I had a visceral, emotional reaction to the information presented at the International Youth and Technology Forum on Digital Citizenship,  April Rudin – CEO The Rudin Group, The Huffington Post, April 21 2011

Robert Garigue
Robert Garigue

IN MEMORY OF ROBERT GARIGUE

He was the first to understand that security is about distributed trust, not centralized control.

See Also:

21st Century Intelligence Core References 2.2

Advanced Cyber/IO: Knowledge Integration

GARIGUE Tagged at Phi Beta Iota

John Robb: Four Sources of Trust, Crypto Not Scaling….

Review: World 3.0 – Global Prosperity and How to Achieve It

Click on Image to Enlarge
Click on Image to Enlarge

Robert Garigue: Feedback for Dynamic System Change

Robert Garigue: Role of the Chief Information Security Officer

Robert Garigue: Security as the Guarantor of Values Executed by Systems–Security as Truth & Trust

Robert Garigue: Standards Toward Interoperability

Robert Garigue: The New Information Security Agenda–Managing the Emerging Semantic Risks

Robert Garigue: The Next Long Wave of Innovation

Robert Garigue: Truth & Trust as Security Requirements

Who’s Who in Cyber-Intelligence: Robert Garigue

Worth a Look: Liars and Outliers – Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive (Bruce Schneier)