[liberationtech] Identi.ca, Diaspora, and Friendica are more secure alternatives to Facebook.

[John Sullivan]

John Adams <jna at retina.net> writes:

> <scarcasm>
>
> I'm completely certain that these small, poorly funded projects have hired
> massive security teams (as the major social networks do) and provide a safe
> alternative to Facebook or Twitter.
>
> </scarcasm>

One compromise at Twitter gave attackers access to a slew of login
details to try against other sites. The same thing (on a much smaller
scale) could be true of identi.ca, since it has many users, but the same
would not be true of identi.ca's (StatusNet / pump.io) ideal world,
where everyone has their own individual instance, each of which would
have to be compromised separately in order to capture a useful list of
credentials.

Also, break-ins like this are only one aspect of security, and the
article is primarily about how easy your data is to obtain via
"legitimate" means, and who makes decisions related to that.

There are plenty of other differences that land in favor of the free
software decentralized services vision. Such as, actually deleting your
data when you want it deleted. Or ease of moving your information from a
platform found to be insecure to a better one.

More could have been said in the article about the fundamental
difference in vision and what it means for the future. A future where we
don't have to rely on antagonistic corporations to build huge castles to
guard our baby pictures with massive security teams seems worth
contemplating. Encouraging people to try out that vision, and see how it
changes their relationship to all this spying news, seems like a good
thing to me. 

As usual, it's not that simple for dissidents under active threat, but
as a way to encourage broad social change, I think it has merit.


-john

--
John Sullivan | Executive Director, Free Software Foundation
GPG Key: 61A0963B | http://status.fsf.org/johns | http://fsf.org/blogs/RSS

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