Old But as Relevant as Ever: Committee on the ECHELON Interception System Warned Against Adoption and Use of Proprietary Software
TODAY'S topics that we can conveniently cover aren't many (we do intend to cover Sirius, EPO, GitHub and mobs in very long future series). The news is generally slow and Google News is even slower*, as Tux Machines has just pointed out.
We recently revisited Open Standards and someone has pointed out to us that this old document "Calls on the [EU] Commission to lay down a standard for the level of security of e-mail software packages, placing those packages whose source code has not been made public in the ‘least reliable’ category" (that means proprietary software is least secure).
That was exactly 2 months before the more famous "9/11" (11/09/2001, not the coup in Chile, which took place 50 years ago), coming from the Committee on the ECHELON Interception System (legitimate concerns about surveillance).
After all those years many governments continue to rely on Microsoft's proprietary 'E-mail' disservices (a back door for hostile nations) and consequently suffer data breaches that embarrass the public and cost the taxpayers a lot of money, never mind strategic espionage. █
____________
* As of moments ago, Phoronix is half of Google News (same as yesterday, sans the irrelevant stuff).