Respects Your Freedom

Respects Your Freedom hardware product certification http ...
The Respects Your Freedom certification program is provided by the Free Software Foundation.

The Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) GNU project, started 1983-09-27, has a noble goal, to give computer users control over computers and related devices by developing software that gives everyone the right to run/ copy/ distribute/ study/ modify it, through its licenses, GNU General Public Licenses (GPL).

The Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification program extends this approach into hardware, by certifying devices, (and vendors at the device level) to ensure that the hardware respects the rights of users to freely use these products. Certification requires vendors go through a review process, where the FSF examines the user experience, from initial purchase through the flashing of modified versions of firmware. Certification criteria ensure that users never encounter nonfree software or documentation.

Certified vendors may use the RYF certification mark on the certified device and associated sales pages. The device is then listed on the RYF site to allow users to find devices. The certification can be revoked at any time, should issues arise.

At the 2021 LibrePlanet conference, online 2021-03-20 to 21, the FSF decided to prioritize e-book readers, in terms of RYF hardware certification. They were considering both adapting existing e-book readers but also contracting the production of new readers.

Most e-book readers run some version of the Linux kernel, and some run Linux operating systems. While e-book readers are a few steps closer to freedom (as the FSF puts it) than other devices, ensuring certification will still require a significant amount of work. Several critical e-reader components will not function without nonfree software, such as the e-ink screen, that powers the display.

In related moves, Denis “GNUToo” Carikli has documented e-book reader components (and other single-board computers). In 2020, David Remmel ported Parabola Linux to the reMarkable tablet, created a free e-book reader.

Challenges come not just with e-book readers, but with e-books themselves. Many books come with DRM = Digital Rights Management = Digital Restrictions Management (in FSF-speak), which prevents people from reading and sharing books that they buy and own. Consenting to the DRM that many e-books are distributed with, means that people lose control of their digital autonomy, no matter what kind of device they have.

DRM has gotten more restrictive. Textbooks commonly require a constant and uninterrupted Internet connection, and restrict the loading of a discrete number of pages at a time. In the global south, where internet connections can be unreliable, this negatively impacts the quality of education.

If the FSF is successful in providing RYF certification to an e-book reader, it will ensure that users will gain the ability to read appropriate digital file formats, of which epub is the most important. It will ensure that all readers will gain the right to read, essentially voiding e-book DRMs.

The Free Software Foundation

The FSF is not the first open-source organization I would want to contribute money to, or even join. Much of this is related to Richard Stallman (1953 – ) who on 2019-09-16 was forced to resigned as president of the FSF after pressure from journalists and members of the open source community in response to him making controversial comments in defence of Marvin Minsky (1927 – 2016) on Jeffrey Epstein’s (1953 – 2019) sex trafficking scandal. Stallman remained head of the GNU Project and in 2021 returned to the FSF board of directors, unfortunately.

There is a need to modernize the foundation’s governance structure and processes. That said, there could be hope ahead. The FSF board has now retained a professional consultant to help them “optimize the impact of the board and the organization”. The purpose of this consultation is to use six months to devise a range of systems and infrastructure that lead to:

– A transparent community-supported process for identifying new board members and evaluating current board members;
– A board member agreement that clearly outlines the responsibilities of all board members;
– A code of ethics that articulates the values of the FSF and conveys a set of principles to guide its decision making and activities, as well as the behaviour of its board members, officers, employees, and volunteers; and,
– More focused and streamlined board processes that encourage consistent attention on FSF’s most pressing needs.

These revisions are to ensure that user freedom cannot be compromised. Efforts are needed to strengthen the organization’s governance, ensuring that it is transparent, accountable, and that current and future board members, associate members, staff and the broader free software movement, act professionally. In particular, there is a need to attract a new generation of activists for software (and hardware) freedom to grow the movement.

Sci-Hub

The Sci-Hub logo.

When people feel that society is not working for them, they create their own solutions. Many become criminals. Some participate in guerrilla actions, ranging from one-off events to lifestyle transitions. A few found institutions, businesses and organizations to resolve these points of conflict. In this post, one will meet numerous people, and institutions that have arisen to gain free access to scientific information.

In the beginning, there was The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed 1990-07-10 by activist John Gilmore (1955 – ), poet, essayist and cattle rancher John Perry Barlow (1947 – 2018) and entrepreneur Mitch Kapor (1950 – ) to promote Internet civil liberties.

The EFF “provides funds for legal defense in court, presents amicus curiae briefs, defends individuals and new technologies from what it considers abusive legal threats, works to expose government malfeasance, provides guidance to the government and courts, organizes political action and mass mailings, supports some new technologies which it believes preserve personal freedoms and online civil liberties, maintains a database and web sites of related news and information, monitors and challenges potential legislation that it believes would infringe on personal liberties and fair use and solicits a list of what it considers abusive patents with intentions to defeat those that it considers without merit.”

The EFF had noted that more than half of all academic publishing is controlled by five publishers, using paywalls justified on the premise that they compensate publishers for their investment in editing, curating, and publishing. Yet, a large portion of that work involves uncompensated peer-reviews by scholars. In addition, much of the research behind these articles is publicly funded. Because of this, the EFF and many others argue that the results should be freely available.

On 2005-06-15, Reddit was born, a website with 1.) social news aggregation, 2.) web content rating, and 3.) discussion. It claims to be the front-page of the internet. It was founded by spez = Steve Huffman (1983 – ) and Alexis Ohanian (1983 – ), students at the University of Virginia. Later, Aaron Swartz (1986 – 2013) was given founder status for his work rewriting Reddit’s Lisp codebase using Python and web.py. Already in 2006-10, Reddit had been acquired.

According to Alexa Internet, Reddit ranks as the 18th-most-visited website in the world and 7th most-visited website in the USA. Somewhat less than half of its user base is from USA, and with users from the UK and Canada, Anglophiles dominate. Most of these are young. Some would even say that a large portion of the user base is eager to change the world. They are in part inspired by Swartz as computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist.

Reddit looks somewhat old fashioned with a bulletin board system that displays user-generated content (texts, photos, videos, links) and content discussions. Reddit is a play-on-words with read it. According to Reddit, there were approximately 430 million monthly users, or redditors (in 2019). Content is divided into 138 000 subreddits = categories/ communities. Redditor posts and comments result in a conversation. These can be voted upon using positive upvotes and negative downvotes. These votes determine a post’s site visibility. Redditors earn karma for their posts and comments. After six months, posts are automatically archived, prohibiting comments and votes.

Sci-Hub was founded by Kazakhstani computer programmer Alexandra Elbakyan (1988 – ) in 2011 in response to the high cost of research papers behind paywalls. The site is extensively used worldwide. One estimate is that it serves 400 000 requests per day to provides free access to an archive over 85 million research papers and books using 77 TB of data, without regard to copyright. It uses a variety of approaches to bypass publishers’ paywalls. Science journalist John Bohannon described Sci-Hub as “an awe-inspiring act of altruism or a massive criminal enterprise, depending on whom you ask.”

In 2019, a community of redditors downloaded and released 33TB of scientific papers and books from Library Genesis, a site similar to Sci-Hub. Now, the r/DataHoarder subreddit is involved in a new rescue mission for Open Science. It involves approximately 8 500 individuals torrenting papers in order to download the entire library. The goal is to make an open-source library that cannot be taken down.

Torrenting? Torrenting is a form of downloading where a torrent (aka tracker) will break up a file into smaller pieces, called packets. Some participants in the process (seeders) will have the entire file in their possession. Others, varyingly called peers or leechers, will only have some of the parts, but are in the process of acquiring them all. The torrent file being downloaded keeps track of who has which packet and alternate sources.

Harvard University warned in 2012 that subscription fees for scientific journals were becoming prohibitively expensive. The European Union, through European Commissioner covering the portfolio of Research, Science and Innovation, Carlos Moedas (1970 – ), announced 2016-05-28 that all publicly funded scientific papers published in Europe could be made free to access by 2020.

Guidelines were released in 2017, and in part state: “Modern research builds on extensive scientific dialogue and advances by improving earlier work. The Europe 2020 strategy for a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy underlines the central role of knowledge and innovation in generating growth. Broader access to scientific publications and data therefore helps to[:] build on previous research results (improved quality of results)[;] encourage collaboration and avoid duplication of effort (greater efficiency)[;] speed up innovation (faster progress to market means faster growth)[;] involve citizens and society (improved transparency of the scientific process)[.]” (p. 4)

Now, Redditors at the r/DataHoarder subreddit are trying to preserve the numerous papers available on Sci-Hub. In a post dated 2021-05-13, the moderators of r/DataHoarder, provided “… a clearer message about the fate of Sci-Hub and open science. We are the library, we do not get silenced, we do not shut down our computers, and we are many.” Redditors aim to release all of the downloaded data via a new uncensorable open-source website.

The Sci-Hub logo: An aside

In the next three paragraphs, Alexandra Elbakyan comments on the Sci-Hub logo, “The history of Sci-Hub logo is less intriguing than it appears to be. When Sci-Hub started in 2011, its first logo was a simple Soviet hammer and sickle, and when the mouse pointer hovered upon it, a text showed up stating: „Communism is … common ownership of the means of production with free access to articles of consumption.“

I took this communism definition from a Wikipedia page and it fitted Sci-Hub very neatly. I was lucky because that definition of communism in Wikipedia was only in 2011 – if you check earlier versions of Wiki article about communism or later versions, they do not contain anything about „free access to articles“.

In 2014 I created a group in a social network to bring together Sci-Hub users (vk.com/sci_hub). First I used the Mendeleev table as a logo, after that it was an alchemical serpent. Later I decided to look up some picture in Google with a key and books to use as a group logo, and found that Raven sitting on books, holding a key. I loved that picture and immediately put it up as a logo on Sci-Hub’s social network group. Later in 2015, I decided to re-design Sci-Hub website and create a modern design, and used the group raven logo as a website logo.”