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Stallman Worried About Chrome OS
dkd903 noted that Stallman is speaking out about the risks of Chrome OS and giving up all your local data into the cloud, pushing people into "Careless Computing." Which is a much more urgent concern than something like calling it GNU/Chrome OS.
Like most other expressions of concern that come from brother Stallman, the geeks hear him, and keep merrily on with technological progress. Not that his concerns are never valid, but he has become the Chicken Little of geekdom.
Be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.
He previously called the cloud a joke. But here is the reality of the situation. I like having my email available on multiple devices. I like how easy it is to use web services rather than run my own cloud. I'm voluntarily allowing Google to serve ads to me in return for free services.
And for most non-technical users who can't figure out how to back-up their data, automatically saving their data in the cloud is better than having no back-ups at all.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Sometimes I am left wondering just how much "progress" cloud computing and web apps really represent. So you can edit your documents and photos using a web app instead of a desktop app...where is the progress? We were accessing files remotely years before cloud computing, so what exactly is it about the current methods that represents "progress?"
Just because you are using new methods to accomplish the same thing does not mean that you have made "progress."
Palm trees and 8
...the geeks hear him, and keep merrily on with technological progress. Not that his concerns are never valid, but he has become the Chicken Little of geekdom.
Perhaps the rest of us have the task of making sure it's not just 'the geeks' who hear him. Stallman has a valid and important point here, and I suspect most Slashdotters agree with him. But the non-geeks are the ones who most need to hear the message, and they'll only hear it above the din of Google's grand pronouncements if we all scream it out loud, long, and often.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
> Stallman warns would-be hackers not to download the LOIC software being pushed as a method of expressing anger with sites that have acted against Wikileaks - not because he thinks the protest is wrong, but because the tool's code is not visible to the user. "It seems to me that running LOIC is the network equivalent of the protests against the tax-avoiders' stores in London. We must not allow that to constrict the right to protest," he notes. "[But] if users can't recompile it, users should not trust it."
LOIC's source code is available on SourceForge.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/loic/
It's a choice - that's market economics for you. The models exist, and thrive, because demand is there, or at least there are enough people who are willing to sacrifice conventional ownership to play the game or use the software.
Welcome to the modern world: you don't like the product, don't buy it! Buy something else, something which does suit your needs. Or, if that doesn't exist, build it yourself, or help start an OSS project to do it instead. And, if all of that is impractical or impossible to finance, then you've probably found the reason why no-one else is doing it that way.
Of course, there is market momentum, the incumbent's advantage, monopolistic misbehaving etc, but that's what regulators are for (when they're left to do their job properly). However, "the cloud", downloadable content and subscription-based RPGs exist because there's a gap in the market. Think you can do better? Fill it yourself!
Rant over...
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
You don't need to have backups of your data
Really? You actually trust Cloud Supplier X to a) be taking usable backups of your data and b) not decide to shut down your account and delete all your data?
Good luck with that.
'Local processing good, remote processing bad' turning into 'Local processing good, remote processing better'?
Nah, it's just that in every new generation of IT someone gets the idea that life would be wonderful if we all paid to rent mainframe time from them. And then after a few years we remember that mainframes sucked and go back to local processing for a few years until the next generation comes along.
and who care the least.
We are geeks.. we think and care about technological issues around privacy and freedom and security. They are a big deal to most of us. This seems to blind us to the fact that most people don't really care.
This is hardly as universal as you imply. I am as geeky as the next Slashdotter and could not care less about privacy or security, and my definition of "freedom" is likely as idiosyncratic as yours. Geeks are fascinated by technology and I suspect that the vast majority of them would gladly part with privacy or security in exchange for something flashier, faster, and/or cooler, especially if it's programmable.
Advice: on VPS providers
What RMS and others aren't acknowledging is that you are already part of the cloud. You can set up your own web server, running whatever open source server you want. If you don't trust Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. with your email, you can set up your own mail server however you like, and you're running on the cloud. Sure, some (most) web apps aren't open source, but it doesn't have to stay that way - instead of compiling source to run natively, you can throw a web app on your server, and access it anywhere in the world using ChromeOS (or any other browser)!
Cloud computing doesn't have to rely on giving up your data - it's just moving to a thin client model. Maybe this is an opportunity to promote open source web-based applications that take advantage of the cloud based computing concept while leaving you in charge or protecting your own data, as RMS is advocating.
The trouble with "the cloud" is that it's ended up like this:
"But it's free." That's how it starts. Look at the pricing history of cable TV. Watch what's happening to TV on the Internet. For a while, you could watch reruns broadcast shows on the Internet for free. Now, shows are becoming less available, more ads are inserted, and shows are disappearing behind the iTunes, Hulu, and Amazon paywalls. That's for reruns of content previously broadcast free to air.
So don't expect the "cloud" to stay free.
Stallman should be more concerned about the trend that caused this one: the drastically decreasing numbers of people who actually create stuff on a computer. Twenty years ago there were lots of geeks out there and Stallman's desire to modify and study other people's work was understandable. It is even understandable that he thought everyone should have these freedoms he so enjoyed. Today such an attitude is unthinkable; computer users no longer create stuff, they merely consume it. The current trend toward the extinction of the desktop and its replacement by mobile devices or cloud computing is the natural consequence of this change. You can't create anything on your smartphone except raw pictures and video. You can, however, consume content that somebody used a desktop to create. And so, each year, there are more and more consumers, and less and less content worth consuming. What will be the point of having the freedom to modify and study code when nobody wants to DO anything?
People store personal information on Facebook, whose privacy policies are a constant subject of debate and, it seems, in constant flux
People store information on facebook with the purpose of sharing it. Anyone using facebook for private storage does not understand the purpose of facebook.
I put information on Facebook in order to share that information with my friends and family...
I mean, I know Facebook does other things with that information, and for the time being I have accepted that. But that's not the reason I put things on Facebook.
In general I agree with RMS's position here. Entrusting our information to other parties is rather careless. But still, when he reacts to the industry's method of framing a discussion by careful choice of terminology by doing the same thing himself (i.e. "it's not trusted computing, it's treacherous computing!" or "it's not cloud computing, it's careless computing!") I can't help but think of a whiny kid in a schoolyard name-calling match.
And then, another fun twist: isn't this almost exactly the "client-server ideal" from years back? A thin client connecting to a server somewhere, offering convenient and reliable storage of your data from various terminals or devices? The only difference is that the server is owned by Google.
Bow-ties are cool.
Lame way to try to discredit a valid point.
I don't understand since when is it obligatory to trash on Stallman every time he's mentioned?
If we take a broad definition of system software (where system utilities are included), it is, in fact GNU/Linux. Even the narrow definition does not make it invalid, but it does make a lesser point (standard C library, one of crucial parts of the OS is GNU, and perhaps some would say GRUB fits here too).
In any case, if you want to trash Stallman do it on its own time, and for a good reason. For example his ethical views that do not concern software: Abortion, sterilization, etc.
SaaS, on the other hand is a threat. And not a small one. ChromeOS' point is to be a cloud client. Where the cloud is proprietary software.
Also, I think it's a useless OS, but that's another issue.