[Foundation-l] Texas Instruments signing key controversy

Gregory Maxwell gmaxwell at gmail.com
Wed Mar 3 12:28:41 UTC 2010


On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 9:50 PM, Techman224 <techman224 at techman224.com> wrote:
> It has come to my attention that the Wikimedia Foundation through its "Office actions" policy removed and oversighted the
> signing keys for Texas Instruments calculators under a DMCA takedown notice on October 7, 2009. Cary Bass then oversighted

Some random cryptographic signing keys are even less appropriate
material for Wikipedia than the first ten-gazillion digits of pi or
detailed instructions on compiling GCC.

Wikipedia is not a dumping ground for your copyfight.  There is plenty
of reason to exclude this material regardless of the copyright/legal
concerns,  and plenty of other people hosting it elsewhere.  Doubly
true where the material is promoted with spammish efforts, like it has
been with some of these cryptographic keys.

The WMF should absolutely duke it out to protect material that ought
to be in Wikipedia in accordance with the educational mission and
community editorial guidelines. It ought not engage in fights outside
of those areas for every instance of possibly suppressed legitimate
speech that occurs on the Internet (even in cases where we all
personally support the efforts).



More information about the foundation-l mailing list