F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen Cancels RSA Talk In Protest 248
An anonymous reader writes "In a letter to RSA executives, F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen says he is canceling his talk at the 2014 RSA Conference, due to the company's deal with the NSA, and how the agency has treated foreigners."
From the letter: "
I don’t really expect your multibillion dollar company or your multimillion dollar conference to suffer as a result of your deals with the NSA. In fact, I'm not expecting other conference speakers to cancel. Most of your speakers are american anyway — why would they care about surveillance that’s not targeted at them but at non-americans. Surveillance operations from the U.S. intelligence agencies are targeted at foreigners. However I’m a foreigner. And I’m withdrawing my support from your event."
Company Value? (Score:3, Interesting)
How did the stock market react? RSA's mother company is EMC, isn't it? There doesn't seem to be much of an effect, on the contrary, gaining half a percent today? Or am I looking at the wrong data?
Re:RSA and American software (Score:3, Interesting)
EOL on XP coiniciding with all these revelations and doubts will hopefully inspire the businesses and governments fo the world to turn their eyes to OSS. Of course there are those that can't or at least think they can't but can at least test, examine or add a few lines of code. How many of those that can have customers or partners tied to the same programs as them? How much can be run from XP images in virtual machines?
Some have already moved to OSS, some are in the process and some are just thinking about it. Those that despise the US government for its behaviour should help each other out and move completely away from closed source software and do something about everything being forced through a limited number of US centric telcom bottlenecks.
I sincerely hope there is a movement in the works better planned and worded then my weak attempts at it. Time for some changes.
Re:I support Mr. Mikko Hyppone (Score:5, Interesting)
But beware, if you do that you might end up typing something stupid or embarrassing.
Consider: "Feliz año nuevo" - it means "Happy new year". The ñ isn't merely an accented character, it's a letter in its own right, and choosing the letter "n" instead seems innocent enough, but "Feliz ano nuevo" means "happy new anus".
Re:Good (non) job (Score:4, Interesting)
Noam Chomsky noted in a lecture I heard him give a few years ago that it's only in America that people ask things like "... well, what can we do?" Everywhere else he lectures, he says people come up to him and tell him what they personally are doing to combat inequity and injustice.
If Americans can personalize the injustices and inequities they face, maybe they can begin to figure out what they can do to fight back. There certainly is no incentive for US government agencies and US corporate interests to do anything but they currently are.