Transparent Telematics updates

Telematics Freedom seeking Partnership for European Projects

21-Nov-2008, by Giovani Spagnolo in Draft2Gether, Universal Audiovisual Library, Rule2Gether, Do2Gether, Transparent Telematics, The Freedom Box with tags e-democracy, europe, floss, freedom box, funding, grants, media

The Telematics Freedom Foundation is seeking new partners to kick-off some of its projects in the fields of Innovation Technology, Social Networking, Media and Audiovisual.

Those interested can find the profile of Telematics Freedom on CORDIS platform (the Community Research and Development Information Service for Science, Research and Development on the Seventh Framework Programme).

In particular, the projects for which we seek funds and partnerships are:

  • Freedom Box: Aims to promote wide dissemination and standardization of TV Media Centers connected to the web that are easy to use and economic for anyone; and by anyone verifiable and customizable. The ultimate goal is to bring to market easy-to-use and economically affordable devices that promote long-term maximization of important constitutional liberties in 2 stages: (1) Freedom of choice of audiovisual content on TV at home; (2) Freedom to communicate via Internet with levels of authentication, privacy and security that are adequate to constitutional rights. The operating system and any programs installed on the box will be distributed using free/open source licenses, preferably GNU Affero GPLv3 or GPL v3.
  • Universal Audiovisual Library: A Digital Library Database that collects hundreds of thousands of GB of audio and video content in its original language, released under open and public licenses. Created and managed by Telematics Freedom Foundation and several free-content partners.
  • Rule2Gether: Software for consensus-building, debate and preference expression following the Direct Democracy approach and methodologies. Particularly useful for Electoral Lists and/or Political Parties. Rule2Gether is software developed specifically to allow simple democratic discussions and easy decision-making procedures in any kind of organization.
  • User-Verifiable Telematics: A research project for the realization of software, hardware and processes that enable ordinary non-technical citizens to affordable access any internet-based telematic communication with pretty high levels of privacy and security that are fully user-verifiable. A model for the democratic control of services and practical means to verify software and hardware for all servers that run these services.
  • Draft2Gether: A new model for creating documents, annotating and proposing amendments in a democratic and cooperative way. Draft2Gether puts any group of people (10's to 100's) in a position to discuss and approve changes in documents democratically, through e-voting and annotation mechanisms. Draft2Gether is perfect for writing documents within standardization commitees, petitions, legal documents or any other type of document that needs to be approved by a large group of people through a careful discussion and a democratic voting of each change.
  • Do2Gether: Do2Gether is a Political Social Networking and Groups Management tool. The ultimate goal is to be a Free Alternative to YahooGroups/GoogleGroups™ (or a mix of GoogleGroups™+Facebook™). Do2Gether is a project to create a basic software platform for political networking. A web application focused on the needs of political or democratically-run organizations, which cannot (and must not) use a big player's web services such as YahooGroups or Google Groups for groups management or Facebook, Orkut and MySpace for social interaction and professional networking for obvious privacy issues or because of statutory rules.

User-Verifiable Telematics at the University of Washington Rome Center

10-Sep-2008, by Giovani Spagnolo in Transparent Telematics with tags e-democracy, politics, rome, telematics

Today at the Rome Center of University of Washington, the premiere state university of the state of Washington, located in Seattle, USA, the Founder of Telematics Freedom Foundation - Rufo Guerreschi - gave a talk about the User-Verifiable Telematics project.

The event took place at UW's Rome Center at 95 Piazza del Biscione, 3rd floor with post-graduate students.

You can:

Why citizens should fully control certain telematics services, and how they can actually do it!

10-Jun-2008, by Giovani Spagnolo in Transparent Telematics with tags e-democracy, floss, law, policy, politics, telematics
It is not enough for citizens to be told to have certain rights as users of a given telematic service, under a license (such as FLOSS), or a legislations (such a national and global privacy protection regulations) or under a contract with the service provider (such as Terms of Use). To actually control a telematic service, or a web service, a user needs reasonable practical means to verify the software AND the hardware of all servers which run at and beyond the point of decryption of his communications with such service (or “end servers”).

 

If such “end servers” interact with other external network services, he will know - by having access to the code of the “end servers” - which services, and all the details and conditions of such interactions.

It is not at all feasible, nor necessary for most user scenarios, to control servers and networks in between the client device and the “end servers”, as we can extensively rely on decades-old tested encryption protocols and FLOSS software to secure from third-party interference through software, hardware and cables in between. True, there is a possibility that even those protocols may have been broken by some powerful third party through undisclosed computers and alghorythms, but it is a "very" remote possibility for a host of reason. We therefore advise it's use, even in the political arena, except for governmental elections and primaries.

In fact, the communication could be intercepted in between, but the content could not be read. It could be stopped or deviated in between, but there is free software that, installed on both client and server can certainly verify that it did happen.

This is not new. Democracies, for centuries now, have always provided citizens with reasonable means to verify that key constitutional rights were not widely abused. When I go to vote, I do not simply have the right that my vote be secret and fairly counted, but I rely on a good number of other citizens, randomly selected or with conflicting interests, which prevent the bad guys to put in place large scale abuses of such rights. There are also a number of process regulations, such as recounts, that further prevent such frauds.

In fact, in order to provide such concrete control over telematics, server rooms (or “cages”) hosting a such “free” telematic service could be physically managed applying those same (or enhanced) physical security provisions that are currently applied to ballot boxes during an election. In practice, physical access to such server room would be enabled only while 4 or more randomly selected or elected users (or citizens) are physically present.

According to this model of telematic service provisioning, anyone could deploy a “free” telematic services, by developing new software or freely installing or extending any publicly available FLOSS software, and running those according to such hosting requirements.

Anyone can do this, without breaching any FLOSS license, by requiring the signing of a copyright assignment, or similar statement, whenever users, or anyone, wants to access the software source code.

Here is a practical example of how a foundation or government can do that. We have in fact deployed such Code Access Policies for our telematics service for democratic organizing at do2gether.com.