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Open Letter By Eric S. Raymond To Chris Dodd
An anonymous reader writes "ESR, one of the finest engineers behind the open source movement and much of the software we use everyday, writes an open letter to U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd. ESR points out the concerns of 'the actual engineers who built the Internet and keep it running, who write the software you rely on every day of your life in the 21st century' about politicians attempts to lock down our Internet or our tools. A portion of the letter reads: 'I can best introduce you to our concerns by quoting another of our philosopher/elders, John Gilmore. He said: “The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
To understand that, you have to grasp that “the Internet” isn’t just a network of wires and switches, it’s also a sort of reactive social organism composed of the people who keep those wires humming and those switches clicking. John Gilmore is one of them. I’m another. And there are some things we will not stand having done to our network.'"
Politicians are always attempting to be experts at everything. This failure is magnified when they start talking about the Internet, because on the Internet, everyone's an expert.
Right?
How dare these self-righteous, misanthropic geeks dare tell us it's their network? Who bought and paid for this network? Why does this network exist in the first place? Because WE built it with our holy dollars. Someone get a muzzle on this dissident! A prime example of why we need control of our network!
” To understand that, you have to grasp that “the Internet” isn’t just a network of wires and switches"
Well of course not, as every (ex-) politician knows, it's a series of tubes.
I'm sure Mr. Raymond is quite aware that Senator Dodd no longer holds public office. It is still appropriate to refer to public officials by the title of the last office they held; this is common among those who have served in the Senate, as state governors, etc.
Furthermore, Senator Dodd is now the CEO of the MPAA, an organization whose positions on electronic rights is quite well known, and cause for substantial concern.
Lastly, I think it's a good idea to continue to refer to Mr. Dodd as Senator Dodd, since he took an oath to represent the people and the constitution of this nation, and should be reminded of that at every opportunity.
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That guy hypes himself way too much.
This is my sig.
100% correct. Senators, in the United States, retain that title even after they leave office.
I thought the beauty of the Internet was that once you're online, nobody knows you're a dog.
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Dear Congress,
You are damage. We will route around you.
-- the Internet
This is an open letter, and its main point is not to convince the opposition but to rally its own supporters. For which purpose chest pounding works very well.
To quote the fetchmail man page:
Most of the code is from Eric S. Raymond .
The fact is that there is a serious choke point for the vast majority of users (in the U.S. at least). A handful of big name companies control almost all the broadband ISP's and trunk lines in the U.S. You can't very easily "route around it" if the few providers in your area are censored. In my area, you can choose from 1 cable ISP, 1 DSL ISP, and 3 major cell providers. All five of these are major companies who would bow to the government in an instant if asked. If they were all effectively censored, there would be nowhere to turn save a satellite provider.
There are always ways around censorship for the hardcore techies, of course. But it really wouldn't be that hard to censor the internet for 99% of the population if the government really wanted to.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
In that case, it should be "Douchebag Dodd."
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Speak for yourself! I'm a marmoset
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
I'm getting sick of hearing the propaganda terms "lockdown" and "crackdown" used in place of the correct term, oppression. Are we too afraid to say it? Not politically correct enough? Can't admit our own reality to ourselves? Fuck that.
Let's call a spade a spade here. The terms "crackdown" and "lockdown" imply that the victim was doing something wrong or immoral in the first place. THAT is exactly why government and the media use these terms. They are "self-justified". They are deliberately false depictions of reality. It's pure propaganda, but the amazing part is that some victims will actually repeat the terms themselves.
The correct term, oppression, implies that the victim is innocent, not guilty -- and that the oppressors are guilty, not merely "getting around to that crackdown". For christ's sake, use the correct term.
However, for purposes of clarity, the summary should point out both that he is a former Senator and that he is now CEO of the MPAA.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Writing the head of the MPAA to try and sway him about the internet (to misquote former MPAA head Jack Valenti speaking of VCRs in the eighties) -- "The internet is to movies what Jack the Ripper was to women."
ESR ir right, but I think he sent his letter to the wrong Senator. It should have gone to the 100 corrupt Senators who actually legislate, rather than former corrupt Senators.
Free Martian Whores!
Sometimes when I read
“The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
which appears as a nice and cutesy rainbows and unicorns saying, I get the impression that it actually means
"Fuck off. You don't belong here and we'll subvert anything you try to do that impacts what we want to do"
In an angry, anti-establishment, "we know better than you" superior way.
Note that I do believe in a free Internet.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
His claim to have written "software you use everyday" is giflib; he stopped maintaining it in 1994, but it's in lots of browsers and browsing devices.
I can see where you're coming from, but who do you think pushes those 100 corrupt senators to adopt restrictive internet laws? Hint: lobbies like the MPAA, where Dodd is now chief. Convince the MPAA, RIAA, UFIA, etc to back off and those 100 corrupt senators won't even pay attention to the issue, because the corruption comes from them taking bribes and kickbacks from said special interests to vote for the laws in question.
Ah, but as he has publicly stated, he owns senators.
"...there are some things we will not stand having done to our network." (emphasis mine)
That is exactly how I feel. As a Network Engineer myself I share their frustration with old, grumpy, white men who sit on capital hill raining down laws that would effect my job and customers without understanding the technology itself, nor the gravity their actions would have on the Internet community at large. I've watched the hours long C-SPAN videos of the hearings with the SINGLE Google representative they invited as an "expert" only to see her get cut-off and publicly flogged and discredited, while old men who had to read basic networking terms such as "internet", "Internet" (they are not interchangeable), "IP Address" and "DNS" off a prepared piece of paper, listed the "merits" of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA. Especially from a security standpoint, the amount of negative repercussions to censoring the internet along the same lines as China could be catastrophic, and that is before even considering its' effect on free speech.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
This one I remember: ESR's goodbye note
This one I felt certain I would find: Ubuntu and GNOME jump the shark
(Failure to properly support Unicode in 2012? You're soaking in it.) ESR longs for the era when when the Unix ethos bound us together. It ends in another bail-out, this time with a less dramatic letter.
Maybe the Unix brotherhood has finally jumped the shark. I'm not sure I believe in the political force ESR claims to represent. It feels more like he's writing the letter to convince himself.
Jamie Zawinski was feeling the irritation back in 2003: Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers. Personally I blame SMS.
Well, I have a leather jacket and a USB fob with Mint 12 to get on with the exorcism before the April EOL on 10.10. I didn't know the open source movement would degenerate into a lifetime occupation of oasis hopping. That was not my original dream.
From the letter,
His description of "approved" operating systems is too broad. Signing code itself is not a problem, in fact it's a blessing when used properly. The key to proper use is deciding who holds the signing keys. The consumer who owns the device needs to be in charge of that device; he or she must be able to decide whether or not unsigned code is allowed to run. If the user chooses to run only signed code, I think it perfectly fine to let manufacturers implement this as they wish. This could be extended to several layers: the hardware, the boot OS, the user OS, etc. Each of these could be secured, with the user's permission, by the corresponding manufacturer/distributor.
This certainly wouldn't prevent developers from "cutting" any shape they wanted with their code. But they would have to participate in some share system of security. That doesn't seem to be too much of a stretch to me, and fundamentally a good idea, to boot.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
ESR is no different in this case as he has his own agenda he is trying to push.
You are more right than you realize. ESR considers himself one of the Open Source greats despite that his largest contribution is that he maintained the termcap db and his is the first I've heard anything from him since Linus Torvalds refused his rewrite of the kernel config system. Not to mention his self proclaimed expertise in lovemaking.
His main function in life is to be what bloggers were before we called them bloggers and really isn't someone we need or want as a spokesman.
Wasn't James Madison against this, and insisted that senators and presidents should be entitled "Mister", like everybody else, not to create a new nobility that would be against the constitution?
Who cares? Madison's dead and he's just one of the founders.
That's just the way he would have liked to have been referred to posthumously.
I was with you, Eric, right up until you called the media industry execs "stupid" and "dimwits". Your arguments were clear and well stated right up to that point. However, when you call your audience dimwits, they stop listening and discount anything you've said up to that point. This is a great shame, because your letter was incredibly persuasive and non-ranty up to that moment.
Apache guy, Open Source enthusiast, runner
Which is stupid. Senator, Representative, President, are all job titles. No longer have the job? You don't get the honorific.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
"Smarmy marmoset", sounds like a good name for an Ubuntu release.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
George Washington in particular was against this - the reason he went by "Mr President" was that he wanted to have some sort of title that indicated that the President of the United States was on par with his counterparts in other countries (which were likely to be Kings, Dukes, or Princes), but he wanted to emphasize that the President is also just a regular citizen, so he started it with "Mister". One of the key reasons he was instrumental in creating American democracy is that after he won the American Revolutionary War he didn't take the army he'd just won with and try to take over the country, and then as President stepped down after 2 terms and peacefully transferred power to John Adams.
I am officially gone from
Yet most Americans will weigh Madison's opinion more heavily than yours. Why is that?
There is a difference between the people who use it, the people who own it, the people who run it. And most of the people who run the core stuff are on the same page.
Well one of his more valuable contributions is GPSD which the maritime industry not only uses every day, but hourly. Every time we put to sea the GPS talks to GPSD which in turn drives the chart software that displays our position at the helm. For that code alone I would nominate Raymond for a MacArthur Fellowship.
You may be a user, but that doesn't make you part of the culture that ESR is referring to . He's talking about the culture of the people who actually work on and in the Internet. The people who would of course care about how it is used, as opposed to the people who use it and have no idea of how it works, or how it could be damaged and what the damage may do to the Internet as a whole.
Uh he also wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which as far as I know was the first article of any sort that could explain how Open Source worked, and why it worked so well. Surely that's got to count for something.
We have a republic. We have voting for representatives and representative, judicial and executive rule. We have a constitution that specifies these things, and instructs the government that each state government must also conform to this structure.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
nobody knows you're a dog.
Facebook knows you're a dog. It also knows what breed, how old you are, your preference in bitches (or other dogs as it may be), your favorite brand of dogfood, and how often you play fetch.