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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.
Legit privacy concerns aside, this sentence reads "silence of the f* lambs!!!" .
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
This problem will only be solved or approached once
(1) citizens can program, and once there is a language intuitive, useful and easy enough to pick up for non-programmers.
(2) programs can be changed on-the-fly -- like in OLPC/XO where you can switch to the source mode and edit the python code for each activity
As long as programming is not understood by users, the source might as well be not open, because they can not read and make sense of it anyway.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Eh. I don't own a cell phone either, but for a much different reason. People tended to call me when I used to have one, and I didn't like that at all.
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.
I own and operate a fairly famous restaurant, and see a lot of people every week. Just this past week on Friday evening an older guy and I began chatting about Big Brother and the eaves dropping nanny state we live in. He told me that one of his friends and him would talk about "things" down in his workshop on his property, but that he made anyone that came there take the batteries *out* of their cell phones, because they can record and transmit conversations even when you think they are off. He said we learned this little intelligence hack from the Chinese who have been doing it for a few years now. I have no idea, but have manually disabled the GPS tracking feature in the phone, however any picture I take with the phone still has the lat/lon data in the photo. I don't want the latitude and longitude dammit!
More than a few times I have told my wife that I wanted to throw our phones in the fireplace, but she is the trusting type, and doesn't seem to believe me when I tell her how her phone can violate hers and our privacy. I honestly hate cell phones on so many levels, but they are still one notch below my hatred of Facebook. To me the two go hand in hand. It is so easy to post things that may seem innocent on Facebook, but they end up being used against us. Facebook is number one in the privacy violation department, and we do it to ourselves. That is why both my wife and I have deleted our Facebook accounts and thankfully moved on over the last month and a half. I never liked Facebook anyway, but was on there to try to protect her. There is something gossipy and just plan creepy about it. Hell, i had customers who weren't even my friends on facebook coming in and asking me about posts i had made because they had been gossiping i guess with some of my Facebook friends in real life. JUST WIERD! My wife had her co-workers on there and supervisors on there. It was a recipe for disaster, and it almost ruined our marriage, and it definately creeped us out really good. Anyway, hopefully for my wife and I our cellphones will be the next to go... We aren't being luddites, but rather trying to retain at least a semblance of privacy in a nosy, gossipy, and evil networked world...
>>>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"
Actually, there has been a history of this, some phones can indeed enter a listen and transmit mode even when switched off. Google it.
Removing the battery, of course, would mitigate that. No iPhones then...
Stallman is right in the sense that we're all carrying around tracking devices and it's a scary concept when you put it that way but are you really going to knock down the reality door to the mobile phone users and get them to stop using the phones? Probably not. While I respect Stallman to the highest degree, immediately after reading this comment, I couldn't help but think of John Malkovich's character in Red.
You know, he may be a fanatic, but he is quite realistic with the "tracking" part. If you understand german, check out this animation (you can still watch the animation if you don't understand german and get the overall idea though).
Basically, some politicians asked for the 6 months of basic data about his phone useage ( which towers he was near to, with whom, when and for how long he was on the phone) mobile phone providers are required to keep in germany, and journalists at Die Zeit combined those with publicly available updates from his twitter and FB account and his party's website to reconstruct where he was and what he was doing in those 6 months.
They were not only able to track him, but also to build quite a detailled profile of his everyday life and personality that way
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
Nowhere does US law dictate that it must be able to dial 911, while turned off.
A cell I can't take the battery out and replace it (because it will invariably NOT last for long) is the definition of a throwaway cell. Best to throw it away right away.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Affordable motorcars are Hitlers dream. What's his point?
Now substract everything you know only because he himself chose to publish it on twitter, facebook and his blog, and all you're left with is the surprising revelation that he's in his office a lot.
The phone company keeps location based information of what mobile phone antenna's your mobile phone is close to, all the time. No one needs GPS for that. It is called triangulation.
New things are always on the horizon
Well until GNU/Hurd is not running on mobile phones, i stick with android...
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.
He just needs to stop communicating it this way. He's starting to ratchet up the rhetoric to the point where the fight against non-free software resembles a cosmic war.
This is not a good vs. evil zero-sum game, Mr. Stallman. Eliminationist rhetoric has no place in our society.
What about the radio firmware?
Exactly.
Most people have absolutely no idea that an entirely proprietary RTOS runs the baseband processor of their mobile phones, and that this RTOS has direct hardware access to all of the peripheral IO devices and sensors (GPS, microphone, data modem, etc). In many cases, the RTOS firmware is encrypted. In almost all cases it is more or less impossible for "the average consumer" to reprogram the baseband processor.
It does not matter whether you run an unlocked Android phone with whoever knows how many Cyanogen mods. I highly doubt that Cyanogen has deciphered, disassembled, reprogrammed, reassembled, and reencrypted any baseband firmware images at all.
All baseband firmware is proprietary as regulated by most governments. Well... except for OsmoconBB :)
Stallman has a good point, but there is a point where Ben Franklin's quote about safety for security becomes ridiculous. The internet can be used as a means of control, as well as a source of free speech and democracy. It's really all in the safeguards and culture that surround the new technology. You can abuse GPS, but it also gets my directionally challenged arse to the proper destination 9 times out of 10.
I support him trying to change the culture surrounding technology, but closed source has its place too. Actually, I kinda like the competition between the two philosophies.
When we are in the work camps and the non-geeks ask us why we didn't warn them, we will respond "Erm, there was this one guy called Stallman who kept trying to warn us, but we wouldn't listen". Stallman will become a legend, maybe even Skylab's Terminators will talk about him once they have destroyed Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
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.
a lot of you in other countries havent gone through this, but in turkey, everyone knows that they are being listened. the government refuses that they are listening to everyone's cell phones, however, always anything that is detrimental to the interests of the current government 'leaks' to pro-government newspapers from unknown sources. ironically, neither police or secret service unable to 'find' who does this. it keeps on going and going. even the judges' phones are being wiretapped, without authority. some judges started to buy jammers. despite ALL of these are in mainstream media, and everyone discusses, situation still hasnt changed. wiretapping goes on, noone is able to 'find' who is doing it. even ordinary people started to pay attention to what they are telling over the phone to each other. it was officially stated that over 60,000 people were being wiretapped at a given moment, but, naturally these are only those who went through 'due process'. everyone knows much more is being covered.
it is probably happening in usa, u.k. etc too. but, the difference is, the governments there are not so clumsy as to go on using everything they find out by leaking it to their supporter media. they are probably using those much more wisely. how do i know ? well, the entire listening equipment and infrastructure here in turkey was bought and installed by american corporations.
Read radical news here
Ahh, yes. Like his fanatical rant about the evils of DRM in books, and how it could be used to control what we were allowed to read, right? glad that one never happened.
It'd be a lot easier to dismiss RMS as a "nut" if he wasn't right so damn often.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
There is nothing wrong with open source as a concept, but calling someone who wants to keep their code to themselves evil is ludicrous. If I spend months and months slaving over hot butterfly brains, no one can tell me what to do with the fruits of my labor. The world is certainly a better place thanks to Torvalds et al, but they had no moral obligation to give away their work.
lose != loose
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.
Yeah, because using a webcam for surveillance is such a crazy idea.
It will not be the first or the last time.
I swear everybody needs to read A Tale of Two Cities.
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only."
Or as the Talking Heads said, "Same as it ever was."
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
What you are saying above is very interesting. It's even more interesting to realize that my phone (a n900) has the exact behavior that you describe above, because I downloaded some add-on (free) software to do it. I don't care if it connects to the provider network, because I don't have voice in my contract anyway (because if I did, the price would double, so I decided to use 2 phones, one for data, SIP and skype, and the other one for voice only). The fact that I have the feature you are missing might be the reason why I didn't think about it.
As for your 2nd part, amazingly, using WiFi (which is routed through my ADSL) is in fact slower than using 3G. Latencies are bigger, it often does a bad hashed voice with "hole" where the other party can't get what I say, and I suspect that WiFi is using more power than 3G (maybe because WiFi wasn't designed for low consumption?). All that is annoying anyway because of the silly 800 mA/h battery of the n900, and it doesn't invalid what you said. And of course, as everyone knows, I really hope my phone wont break, because I wont ever be able to buy one again, as Nokia decided to work for the dark side...
Thanks for stating the *non*-obvious that I missed.
I get the impression they have never even tried to understand where he is coming from
No, we know where he's coming from. The trouble is that location is not reachable by any means known to normal people.
I'm not seeing the fundamental difference between corporations and governments.
There are plenty of examples of corporate actions that operate at a loss to gain a little power. They can turn that little seed of power into quite the large sum of money. Arguably, abusive monopolies are pretty similar to oppressive governments. It's not exactly the same, but it's similar.
Your initial point centered around the idea that Stallman wasn't sane, so you're a douchebag.