Wednesday, October 1, 2014

Shuttleworth Pronouncements, Proclamations, Palaver and Privacy Integration

I see Mr. "I'm Special" Shuttleworth is at it again.

He seems to enjoy being in the limelight.  And, if you take pictures of him on stage with pictures of him in the backdrop with his name emblazoned -- all the better.  His ego fulfillment is unabashedly on display.

Seriously, I have taken jabs at Canonical Ltd., MS and his community of psychophants in the past and, quite frankly, enjoy doing it.  This is a small society which has little effect on the quality of Linux on the Desktop.

Ubuntu purports to offer new technology paradigms, but, in reality, is in opposition to anything but its own bastardized notions of innovation.  Left-handed doo-dads instead of right, global menus (Mac emulation), broken scrollbars, subverted Wayland code (Mir) all designed with a solitary purpose -- to wrest control from and drive a wedge into the open source community and advance a cause with no clear purpose.

Canonical Ltd. continues to 'spend' down MS IOUs as it capriciously plots its vision of the future that nobody quite understands.

Yesterday, "the King" made another one of his "Brilliant Man!" pronouncements.  Paraphrasing his overly verbose Here be Dragons post:  "Erahhh, gee, this whole invasion of privacy thing is getting out of hand -- I think I need to say something about it -- lend the appearance of having lofty thoughts at least and maybe I can buy some time while I actually come up with some new bright ideas -- Oh a fellowship! -- yes, that's it -- let me throw them a bone -- token gesture".

News Flash, Mr. Shuttleworth.  True Internet Privacy is attainable.  The technology used to protect your Distro, GnuPG, is viable and pivotal to 'the solution'.  It just needs to be made more user friendly with some help from the open source community with Apps that approach usability like Enigma.  Enigma isn't getting the love it could use, in fact, it has gone stale and lost support.  Still, we are not without recourse.

No, Google's End-toEnd encryption is not the solution.  That endeavor is 'reinventing the wheel'.  Google wants to port GPG to Javascript.  Bad Bad Bad.  Improve upstream OpenPGP.  What is needed is a true Desktop-Integrated Privacy App.  It should be transparent and drop-dead easy to use.

Much as we have come to expect of Microsoft Office or LibreOffice, we should provide the means for obtaining iron-clad Internet Privacy as a matter of right.


This is the true mandate.

So, please.  Mr. Shuttleworth.

Pronouncements, Proclamations, and Palaver are not needed.  Start by putting together a list of 'draft actionable items' for discussion that can become the final framework upon which to move forward in the Open Source Community, collectively, without divisiveness, or proprietary twists of any kind. -- Dietrich

0 comments:

Post a Comment