Spring 2013 - D'Youville College

STAYING INFORMED - our faculty and staffSOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT FOR THE LEMOTE YEELOONG NETBOOK:PROTECTING FREEDOM IN A WORLD OF POTENTIALLY DANGEROUSTECHNOLOGIESDr. Anthony BasileDr. Basile holding the Lemote Yeelongrunning Hardened Gentoo Linux.Next time you walk down the halls ofD’Youville College when classes are aboutto change, take a look at how many studentshave their heads down, looking at theirAndroid or iPhone, texting away. If wecontrast this picture with what you wouldhave seen only ten years ago, you realize thatsomething is happening to our relationshipwith technology. It can look bewilderinglynew, but this is a repeated phenomenon inhuman history. When a new technologyenters our society, we adopt it and thencan’t imagine life without it. Try taking ateenager’s cell phone away and you’ll knowwhat I mean! Broadening our focus over thelast century, can you imagine life withoutTV? Without radio? Without cars?There is no denying it, we get hooked toour technologies. And where there isdependency, there is the possibility ofcontrol. We don’t usually think of our choiceof computer technologies as political, but asearly as 1982, Richard Stallman, a pioneerprivacy and freedom [1] . In 1983, Stallmanstarted the GNU software project [2] whichaims to build a complete operating systemwith purely free software. The movementtook hold. The Free Software Foundationwas founded two years later, and in 1990the Electronic Freedom Foundation wasestablished. Both have full legal standingand aim at protecting the rights of softwaredevelopers and users, respectively [3] .Today, much of the GNU software projecthas found its way into Gentoo Linuxwhich powers servers at companies likethe NASDAQ Open Market Exchange [4] ,Engine Yard which hosts sites like groupon.com [5] , and D’Youville College’s DistanceLearning [6] . It often surprises people to seefree software being used at companies tomake money, but that’s a misunderstandingof what “freedom” means in this context.As the geek community puts it, we don’tmean “free” as in “free beer” but “free”as in “free speech.” So when we say“free software,” we mean software whichrespects your freedom. For example, thismeans freedom from the sort of controlexercised by social media giant Facebookwhen it gathered information about itsusers, all the while deceiving them aboutprivacy [7] .Here’s where I come into the picture. Myresearch is centered on being a GentooDeveloper. What this means is that I don’tjust run computers with Gentoo Linux onthem, like the distance learning servers orthe desktop I’m writing this paper on. But,I help build the Gentoo Linux operatingsystem from scratch, along with a worldwide network of other developers [8] . This isthe ultimate in computer freedom becauseyou build the very operating system thatcontrols every aspect of the computer –well almost, but more on that below! Myparticular contribution has been to addsecurity enhancements to those small handheld devices and tablets you see everyonecarrying [9] . Android phones, for example,run Linux, as do the new SamsungChromebook series 5 [10] .So why did I say “almost” completefreedom above? Well there are limits, themost important being the hardware. Ican’t control what hardware goes into mycomputer, so what’s to stop manufacturersfrom putting chips in computers to spyon us? This isn’t paranoia; it has alreadyhappened with DRM (Digitial RightsManagement) systems that decide to “tell”on you if you install what they decide is“stolen” software or music. Remember theSony BMG copy protection rootkit scandalback in 2005 [11] ? Sony decided that if youbuy a music CD from them, that theywould secretly install spying software onyour computer without telling you. Nice!Sony was sued and lost, but that doesn’tstop other companies from trying.This is where I come back into the picture.A company in China known as Lemotebegan manufacturing the Yeeloongnetbooks [12] which are distributed in theUS by FreedomInc.com [13] . The Yeeloonghas achieved legendary status becauseeverything about its hardware has beendisclosed! There can’t be anything inthere that can be used maliciously by somecompany or government. For someone likemyself, building a free operating system onfree hardware was a temptation too hard toresist. So over the summer of 2012, I setmyself to porting Hardened Gentoo over tothe Yeeloong. The challenge was that theYeeloong is powered by a MIPS processor,which is totally different than typical Intel that worked on Intel broke and had to be sweat and tears, I got a functioning system12