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Richard Stallman: Cell Phones Are 'Stalin's Dream'
jbrodkin writes "Cell phones are 'Stalin's dream,' says free software pioneer Richard Stallman, who refuses to own one. 'Cell phones are tools of Big Brother. I'm not going to carry a tracking device that records where I go all the time, and I'm not going to carry a surveillance device that can be turned on to eavesdrop.' Even the open source Android is dangerous because devices ship with proprietary executables, Stallman says in a wide-ranging interview on the state of the free software movement. Despite some progress, Stallman is still dismayed by 'The existence and use of non-free software [which] is a social problem. It's an evil. And our aim is a world without that problem.'"
Oh come on, trying to get everyone to stop using mobile phones is a little bit far fetched. It's also not like you can make the cell phone technology in any other way, location tracking will always be possible. That's why there are laws that restrict access to such records. AND if you really want to blow up a pizza place, leave your phone home that one time.
And the social problem of non-free software? People do not care. They never have, they never will. I doubt Stallman cares about every little detail about things he uses but isn't that interested in. When he is cooking his tv dinner, he just wants a microwave that works. When Stallman goes to his weekly pony riding classes, he just wants a pony that works without going into every mundane detail. Some little girl could think that Stallman is evil because he doesn't raise, feed and have the pony at his home as part of the family, but while Stallman doesn't have time to raise a pony, he wants to ride one. That's when you take what's easy for you without going in to details.
harbinger.
RMS is seen as crying wolf, but many of his weirdest predictions have come true.
Viz. The Right to Read
And we're already there with Amazon's action's regarding remote Kindle book manipulation.
Cell phones? Remember the article on government snooping while the phone's turned off? The fact that cell phones can and do track you is blindingly true, but for some reason, people don't even want to hear it.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Some of us who do software development have families to feed. All software can't be free. Not all developers can be paid to do open source development and research at MIT. I support open source, but open source isn't the savior of humanity to bring world peace. Free software is like some FSM for RMS. He practically worships it.
>>>They are so handy
What is needed is not to give-up the tool (cellphone, printing press) but limit the ability of government to abuse the tool by guaranteeing the right to use the tool Freely without restriction.
Governments should not be able to use Cellphone data unless first obtaining a warrant, and informing the person that the search has taken place. The EU has such a "law" codified in its Fundamental Rights document, and the US needs something similar but with stronger effect.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Affordable motorcars are Hitlers dream. What's his point?
The FBI could have planted bugs in my apartment. They could bug my landline telephone. They could point a laser device at my window and pick up voice via the vibrations. They could be following me. They could have planted a tracking device on my car.
All of those except the landline require actions in the physical world, where resources are limited and distances are real. Those natural limitations will prevent large-scale invisible abuse. You can do it on a limited scale, or you can do it big scale but then the country turns visibly into a police state.
Bugging your landline or your phone, or reading your GPS coordinates remotely requires a computer and being the FBI so you can tell the telco to go and do it. Running it on 1000 people is only marginally more troublesome than running it on 100 people. And that's a very important difference.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I read a book on computer security, and it mentioned that somethings only become sensitive when aggregated. I couldn't really grok a good example until I started seeing stuff like this. When people use Twitter and FB and whatnot, they don't consider the information they put out there as being "sensitive" or private. However, that doesn't mean it doesn't become so when aggregated. These people signed up for it, I know, but I think the vast majority of social media users out there don't quite understand just how scary the information about them becomes when it is all aggregated together.
But Stalin would also have loved computers. They are the perfect tool of big brother. I mean really folks here is a news flash for everybody. Technology can be used for good or for evil.
Jet aircraft can fly people to hospitals where they can get treatment or carry bombs.
The printing press can be used for the Bible, Penthouse, Mien Kampf, and text books. I will let you all argue over which is and is not evil.
And a cell phone can be used to call for help when you car is stranded or if you are hurt.
And the internet can be used to view websites like Godhatesfags, slashdot, whitehouse.gov and REI.com. Again you can pick which of those is evil and which is good.
Welcome to the real world. Many things can be used for good and evil. That is just the way of the universe.
Oh and China is pushing Linux!
EVIL!!!!!!!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Indeed! Most programming languages are actually pretty easy, and I think most people wouldn't have much trouble learning the basics (it's just basic logic if/then, loops etc.), but the platforms are so monstrously complicated that it requires a massive time investment to get anything that does anything, that it's just not worth people's time.
Like most not-really-a-programmer types, I've learned the a portions of the web stack (SQL, PHP, Javascript), and I feel pretty comfortable reading other languages such as Python, Ruby, Java, or C--they just aren't that different. But learning how to get from lines of Objective-C, say, to a functional Application? Oh man, that'll take me weeks.
When Richard Stallman makes paranoiac comments like that, he makes a pretty good argument for getting a closed-source device. The guy lives on an extremely slow Chinese netbook, avoids using as much of the Internet as possible, and is basically a hermit! His version of "freedom" actually makes him one of the most enslaved people on the planet. He's dependent on what other people say to make judgments because he won't use their devices and has little access to modern news sources because he's afraid of most of the web. Meanwhile, an iPhone owner might not have his pick of apps, but at least he can actually communicate with the outside world and get knowledge about what really matters -- political freedom, not theoretical software freedom.
Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but getting totally fucked over by allowing myself to become dependent on orphanware, is how I became an "OSS geek." Proprietary executables have serious practical real-world disadvantages.
Free software isn't a religion; it's a rational strategic reaction. My Amiga went years without an OS update. OS/2 too. My current work machine can't run a lot of software because it has an obsolete version of Mac OS X and there is no upgrade for this hardware.
The proprietary compilers for the proprietary language that my former employer used (Clipper and Visual Objects) sucked and weren't getting maintained, and there wasn't anything to do about it except throw away thousands of lines of code that our products depended on. (Our solution was: go out of business. Problem solved.)
Then I look at all the computers I now own, and am grateful that every single one of them can and does get maintenance, because they run Free Software. The only way these computers will ever become obsolete, will be if I decide they're too old/slow/powerhungry. (It's surprisingly how many peoples' computers become obsolete for reasons other than those things.) The only weakness is that some of them have Nvidia hardware and I run the proprietary drivers, so some day I will upgrade a kernel, and the driver will no longer exist because Nvidia will decide, "fuck you, user." Fortunately, this day hasn't come yet for those machines -- and it won't come for any of my newer hardware, ever. (Why? Because I preemptively prevented it, by thinking about it before stupidly buying things which require proprietary drivers.)
If you use proprietary software, you get fucked, and that is the common case, not the rare case. It happens to most users at one time or another. Some of them realize what caused their problems and become "OSS geeks," and some of them don't get it, and repeat the mistake again and again and again, never ever learning how they set themselves up to become dependent on third parties.
This makes no sense.
If people post on Facebook, they're making their lives public. You may as well complain that when you took out that front-page ad about what's in your pants, EVERYONE read it and knew about it. Private information freely discussed in public is PUBLIC information. If you don't want people to hear about it, don't post it all over the friggin' internet.
It's not Facebook's fault that people reveal stupid details. That's what they want to do. And if your friends in REAL LIFE are revealing gossip about you, that's YOUR FRIENDS that are the problem.
I really think he has a mental disorder, it goes way beyond tin foil hat. While I too would love to dream about a society where software is just created out of the goodness of peoples hearts, viruses and malware dont exist and everyone is connected to the internet....I usually wake up...Stallman doesn't but does very little to address the reality that people still need to make money, people wont just blindly trust other people and people will be willing to pay for a convenience or better experience than their free equivalent will provide. While I respect Stallman's right to live his life as he chooses IMHO paranoia and fear is not a brand of freedom I want to partake in.