[GNU/consensus] [whistle] I.0 Looking Through The Prism

[hellekin]

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= GNU/consensus Whistle =

Volume I, Number 0
http://libreplanet.org/wiki/GNU/consensus/whistle/012013-07

(the wiki version displays an image of rms and Assange showing a
parody of Obama's Yes We Can campaign, showing Edward Snowden's face)


== Editorial: Looking Through The Prism ==

Edward Snowden achieved in a few weeks what we could not do in the
last two decades.  Thanks to his exposure of the massive surveillance
program of the NSA, Prism, he brought to the mainstream the topic of
''privacy''.  He demonstrated the need for it, and the need for
decentralization.  He turned decades of accusations of police state
and loss of freedom, that were until now ignored by the general
public, or deemed paranoid, into visionary statements.  The Prism
scandal, exposed, gives us free software developers and activists, an
unprecedented opportunity to leverage mass consciousness and
collective intelligence to break free from the social network services
oligarchy, to build a truly end-to-end and participatory (voluntary)
social environment.

But that won't go without a hitch. In this first issue of the
GNU/consensus Whistle, we'll see how a momentum is being formed that
we need to seize for ''binding chaos''[0] and overcome the current
trust crisis altogether, for the benefit of all people.

This issue will feature some less known software projects that may be
of interest to developers.  Finally, the Whistle will provide a short
agenda of things past and to come, for which you're welcome as a
project or community manager to submit either to the list or to the
wiki for inclusion in the next issue.

It's also time that we think about organizing a common fund, or a
shared funding strategy to cover development and hosting expenses of
free software social networking. Each network, each software project
should evaluate and report its real costs and needs, so that we can
estimate what it takes to reach a decent independent social
networking. Lack of finance has long been hindering the development of
sustainable alternatives to centralized commercial platforms. Maybe
it's time to reconsider that central issue, in the wake of the massive
spread of consciousness relative to the Prism leak. From there, I'm
convinced there's an opportunity for a globalized solidary economy for
independent social networking, and economies of scale. Think
FreedomBox, Guifi.net...

- ---- hellekin (GNU/consensus maintainer) <address@hidden>

=== References ===

[0] Recommended reading:
http://georgiebc.wordpress.com/2013/05/24/binding-chaos/ Binding
Chaos, by Heather Marsh



== Pump Status: Clogged? ==

The news of the month, after Prism, is undoubtedly the switch of
Identi.ca from StatusNet to Pump.IO.  After donating the StatusNet
code to the Free Software Foundation, Evan took a radical step with
Identi.ca: everybody was expecting a smooth transition from StatusNet
to Pump.IO but instead it was a disruptive change.

Part of the Web felt abused by this change, while others praised it.
So what happened?

=== GNU social ===

Last year Evan Prodromou, creator of WikiTravel, StatusNet, and
Pump.io, a long-time free software and decentralization activist,
jumped on the NodeJS bandwagon and started creating the Pump, a leaner
version of StatusNet, meant for pure activity streams, and aimed at
developers.

Apart from the technical appeal of Node (evented I/O streaming,
Javascript on the server and the client, etc.), the Pump is designed
with efficiency in mind: @evan commented a tenfold resource gain
between StatusNet and Pump.io for a comparable amount of traffic.

Evan could serenely transition to Pump.io by joining forces with the
[https://gnu.org/s/social GNU social] team: he donated the StatusNet
code to the FSF, for the benefit of the <tt>GNU social</tt> project,
and the assurance that his baby remains healthy in good hands.  The
official announcement was made last month, but the integration of
StatusNet, and Free Social, into an unified base for <tt>GNU
social</tt> took more than a year (if you wonder why it took so long,
remember that code is as much about language and humanity, than it is
about technique.)

Congratulations to the <tt>GNU social</tt> team for pushing this to a
stable release state, under the GNU Affero General Public License!

=== Meanwhile, Plumbing... ===

At the heart of the controversy lies the loss of functionality that
accompanied the switch from StatusNet to Pump.IO.

Not only visually[1], but more importantly about broken links, missing
hashtags, the lack of group support, and federation features in the
core of the Pump.  People were expecting a drop-in replacement, but it
feels more like a drop-out.

The switch had been announced a long time ago, with ''repeated
warnings'' and ''a clear way out'': export your data, build your own
StatusNet.  Although I can understand the anger and the frustration at
waking up and seeing a completely different experience, nobody can
tell they were not forewarned, and I wish for the channeling of that
(wasted) energy into crafting solutions.

Of course all can mourn the loss of groups, a fantastic feature of
StatusNet^H<tt>GNU social</tt>, and the lack of bridges to other
systems--including its own past incarnation, as one ''may be clicking
dead links''[2]. That is not the first time such a thing occurs in the
(federated) Web.  One must remember the terrible transition of Lorea
from Elgg 1.7 to Elgg 1.8 that broke most of the federation features
as well, and left the inhabitants without a bridge.  Let's hope that
this state of affairs will encourage more people to fix the pipes
quickly, and not leave it alone and leaking.  As much as we enjoy
leaks, that one is not of the kind we're craving, and given the
momentum the Prism leak created, maybe a good old slap in the
(inter)face with a large trout will act as a much needed wake up call.

=== Fixing the pipes ===

Resilience over accusation wins every time.  This event demonstrates
the importance of coordination between free software projects to
ensure the global stability of the federation, and the lack of
incentive for cooperation that leads to sub-optimal decisions.  What
could have happened, or what should have happened in an ideal world,
is that Identi.ca and <tt>GNU social</tt> work with other public
instances of StatusNet to ensure a smooth transition for people and
organizations that relied upon groups, reliable links, and the Twitter
bridge for their communications.

In the current state of the free social network services, the
decisions of ones influence the whole society way too much.
Decentralization is needed, so let's take this as a lesson: (1) too
big a node makes a single point of failure; (2) we must be cooperating
in order to succeed; (3) we need economic incentives to cooperate
efficiently.

=== References ===

[1] the StatusNet experience at Identi.ca was one of the richest
around the federated Web. The new homepage shipped with its ugly stock
picture despite [https://github.com/e14n/pump.io/issues/316 a 7 months
old ticket]. (if you have some graphical talent, or want to fix a
dashboard, please do it [https://github.com/e14n/pump.io/pull/740
before reality gets merged] :)
[2] That would put a snarky smile on Ted Nelson's face.  If only he
would step down his genius throne and free his Xanadu to the world,
I'm convinced he would be more than compensated by liberating the key
to unbreakable links and micro-payments.



== Incoma: Visualizing Conversations ==

Incoma is an application to visualize and characterize conversation
flows.  Its objective is to enhance collective intelligence and
provide an appealing interface to facilitate massive participation in
conversations.

; Repository: https://github.com/Incoma/Incoma
; License:    [https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl GPLv3]
; Languages:  Javascript, HTML5, PHP, MySQL
; Status:     Beta

Try the demo at http://incoma.org/?c=sandbox



== FreedomHTML: Ethical HTML5 ==

With the Hollyweb[3] looming over the HTML5, Norbert Bollow and Jesús
Leganés Combarro decided to take action and created '''FreedomHTML'''.

http://www.freedomhtml.org FreedomHTML is a subset of the W3C HTML5
specification, excluding the parts which are troublesome for the
users' freedom. This project started in response to W3C recommending
Encrypted Media Extensions (a form of DRM) in HTML5. The authors
highlight that FreedomHTML is a ''profile'' and not a fork: this means
no compatibility problems and easy implementation for
browsers/validators developers.

FreedomHTML manages to underline what Free Software proponents see as
a threat in the current HTML5 discussions and to provide a viable
alternative for users in the worst case scenario.

[3] http://www.defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5



== LibreJS: Avoiding the Javascript Trap ==

"[https://gnu.org/s/librejs GNU LibreJS] aims to address the
JavaScript problem described in Richard Stallman's article 'The
JavaScript Trap'[4]. LibreJS is a free add-on for GNU IceCat and other
Mozilla-based browsers. It blocks nonfree nontrivial JavaScript while
allowing JavaScript that is free and/or trivial."

Web developers are encouraged to release their free Javascript code
using the methods promoted by the LibreJS project. Given the growing
trend in web applications and sites to require javascript running to
even access the contents, such a provision becomes necessary to
mitigate the large attack surface against basic privacy already
provided by web browsers.

[4] https://gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html



== Prism-Break: Out In No Time ==

Nylira's genius ''meme'' '''Prism-Break''', named after a successful
TV series where a brother sacrifices his freedom to free his innocent
brother, received instant sympathy around the world.  In case you
missed it, [https://prism-break.org/ Prism Break] is a one-stop shop
to discover how to break free from proprietary software and
surveillance services.  It lists proprietary solutions, along with
free software, or grassroots alternatives, and explains why some
obvious choices are missing.  It's a great resource for anyone to
watch trending alternative projects.  You can read an early interview
of Nylira (at http://nylira.com/on-prism/) conducted two weeks after
he released the project.  We're looking forward for more of it!



== Stop Surveillance! ==

The German NGO ''Digitale Gesellschaft e.V.'', a member of the
European Digital Rights (EDRi), published an open letter to European
governments, national parliaments, and EU institutions. Their 12
recommendations are available at http://www.stopsurveillance.org/, and
call for the rejection of illegal surveillance, the respect of the
basic human rights of personal privacy and confidentiality of
communications. The tenth recommendation reads: "Actively promote free
and open source projects for digital self-defense and promote the use
of this technology."



== State of The Federation ==

There's a
[http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/consensus/2013-07/threads.html
heated discussion] on the SocialSwarm and GNU/consensus mailing-lists
about a proposal crafted by Elijah Sparrow and Klaus Schliesiek:

*  Client side encryption
*  Social graph obfuscation
*  Self determined data storage
*  Scalability
*  Integration of old friends on legacy networks (which would
compromise 1 and 2 for those, of course).
*  High availability - you should be able to access your data when you
want it.
*  Device portability - you should be able to access your data from
multiple devices at the same time
*  Client choice - you should be able to use a mobile, desktop, or
html5 app client (once webcrypto is deployed in browsers).
*  Multiple identity - you should be able to maintain multiple
identities, and choose to link them orcnot.
*  Protocol agnostic - you should be able to cross-communicate with
different protocols, be they
XMPP, HTTP, or p2p based.
*  Secure groups - groups with membership determined
cryptographically. Groups function as a virtual user, with all users
in the group able to receive and send as the group.



=== Lorea Virtual Assembly #22, 29 July 2013 ===

https://n-1.cc/pages/view/1697817/lorea-virtual-assembly-22-monday-29-july-2013



=== Berlin Hackathon, 24/25 August 2013 ===

The purpose for this meeting will be to prepare the Socialnet_3.0
workshop at 30C3:

Klaus Schliesiek: "We should try to get an overview of current
activities for a democratic social network, propose an agenda for the
30C3 workshop and make a list of whom we would like to participate.

The aim of the 30C3 workshop itself will be to build a consensus of
how socialnet_3.0 is going to look like and to coordinate activities
such that this goal can be reached within the next 10 years."

== The GNU/consensus Whistle, Volume I, Issue 0, July 2013       ==
== http://libreplanet.org/wiki/GNU/consensus/whistle/012013-07   ==
==   https://gnu.org/consensus        mailto:address@hidden   ==
== Toward a GNU Consensus on Free Software for Social Networking ==
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