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RMS Robbed of Passport and Other Belongings In Argentina
New submitter Progman3K writes "Richard Stallman, father of the FSF, had his bag containing his laptop, medicine, money and passport stolen after his talk at the University of Buenos Aires on Friday, June 8." Adds reader jones_supa, excerpting from the same linked story: "As a result of this occurrence, he was forced to cancel his talk in Cordoba, and it's still unknown how this will impact the rest of his speaking engagements throughout the world."
Passports want to be free.
Free as in steal it.
So, did he use truecrypt?
Perhaps he would had been better off if he made a living producing software and selling it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Whichever Argentinian stole it is probably claiming that it is theirs as a result of their ancestor looking after the cow that the bag was made from between 1828 and 1832.....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Leave the stuff, take the person. How much could they get for Stallman?
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
What a loss, the only laptop running Gnu Hurd. The individual who stole it will be very sorry though, as he will be forced to use emacs, and as it does everything, it will be the only program on the computer... :D
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
I'm Argentine. I avoid problematic areas. But this happened during a conference. In ALL conferences in EVERY country stuff is robbed cause people are idiots. And security guards are idiots. THAT's common sense. Avoiding an entire country is plan idiocy.
Buanzo Consulting - 15 Years of GNU/Linux experience, for you.
With the Truecrypt license? If he is using encryption, I suspect he is using the GPL licensed dm-crypt!
This is really not newsworthy. It happens in Buenos Aires all the time. I was there 2009 at Wikimania (where RMS also attended) and I in the few days I was there multiple of my friends had their bags/laptops stolen, while I was in the same room.
The thiefs are really skilled and they make it almost impossible for you to notice the theft. The only way to defend yourself is to have all your stuff at your body all the time, thus being a harder target than everyone else.
quick - someone lend him a windows laptop.
Okay, that's enough Linus. It's simply not funny any more. Hand it back now.
If you're going to be a smartass, at least do it properly.
"I think it would be a good idea!"
Gandhi, about Internet Security
> Perhaps he would had been better off if he made a living producing software and selling it.
Maybe he would; but we're surely better off since he chose to benefit mankind over himself.
Don't get me wrong, this is not a religious thing... but IMHO overall tech progress got a powerful impulse with the GPL and things like Linux (or GNU/Linux in his lingo). It's easy to underestimate the role of Free Software in mankind's advancement.
Now it would be nice if someone explained that to the thief. Argentinians have an advanced culture and possibly even a thief might grok why it is important not to take this man's passport.
I guess we need to look for a bag with no soap or razor in it.
University of Buenos Aires is a free, public university recognized as one of the best in the world. Anyone can attend and it's also filled with students from other South American countries that travel to Buenos Aires to study. Courses are usually huge, with ~200 students each, and anyone is free to attend them as a listener, even if you are not a student. Teachers, by tradition, are expected to be professionals that excelled in their respective fields and for them it is an honor to be able to be there, all this in the spirit of having the best public education.
This much freedom has the obvious drawback that, as no one checks your student ID at the entrance, anyone can go in including thieves, which often mix up with other students to steal stuff. I've seen this happening several times myself so you have to watch out for strange people and your belongings all the time.
As pro human rights groups are so strong here (product of opposition to US-Sponsored dictatorships during most of the past century), law is lax and stronger security measures are often seen in a negative light, as the population don't know anymore where to draw the line.
Blindly spawning mindless stereotypes like "third world countries are best shunned" is also first-class idiocy.
I mean, really, who looks at that beard and thinks, "I'm gonna steal from that wizard. No way his bag has any exploding magical components in it or anything."
While I am sorry for his loss (and that is only a story because of who was robbed - a zillion other tech people get robbed in foreign countries and they don't make /.) RMS has traveled the world for years, and I would have thought he knew better about he risks of theft. His passport and money should not have been left unsecured, and he should have ascribed to a layered packing regime that I learnt about years ago that includes three general zones:
On your person - Contains stuff that is critical to your well being and ability to travel
Passport and money belongs squarely in that last category. They are replaceable, but their loss has a much greater impact on a trip than losing stuff from the other two categories.
Leaving his passport and money in an unsecured location was a stupid and idiotic move on *his* part (although I bet that that is probably somewhat offset by him being distracted for a moment). And yes I know that this sounds like blaming the victim, but there is a point where you have to take responsibility for your own actions.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
It's the world that needs more openness. And better utilization of the technology we do have.
Losing the passport wouldn't be such a calamity if governments were up to date. We shouldn't even use a physical item like that for purposes of verifying identity and permissions. At a border crossing, stating names and perhaps a number, or undergoing a brief biometric scan ought to be all that travelers need do. The officials at the border can then use their networked computers to check the information. It's just dopey to rely on the picture of a person carried by that person to check identity! That's as dopey as DRM. Yeah, yeah, like cash they have put security threads and watermarks and such on the passport pictures, to make forgery more difficult. And don't forget the embedded RFID chip! Currently, with passports the US now issues business sized cards for your wallet. The cards have useful phone numbers and a space upon which you are supposed to write your passport number, for just such an occurrence. Haven't progressed much!
As for personal data, no one should ever have the only copies of their work on a single laptop, except possibly for whatever was being worked on in the last few minutes or since the last time the laptop had been connected to the Internet. The laptop itself is pretty cheap these days. I hope RMS didn't lose any data. Passwords are similar. Never have unencrypted passwords or or other unencrypted sensitive data on a laptop. But if he wasn't up to scratch on that stuff, this could be the worst loss of all.
Medicines shouldn't be a big deal either. Unfortunately, they can be thanks to intellectual property law. At $5/pill for typical name brand drugs, those medicines could easily cost more to replace than everything else in the bag.
Money? Let's hope he's not in the habit of lugging around thousands of dollars in cash. Sensible travelers only carry a little cash, leaning on credit cards whenever possible. But I could see a guy like RMS scorning credit cards because they come with lots of baggage, like the tracking of your every purchase. At any rate, banks, like governments, are woefully behind on technology. Shouldn't need a piece of plastic to do a transaction.
With all that said, his Argentine hosts treated him very shabbily. If laptop bag theft is such a big problem, they should know that. It's their home, they ought to know what protections guests will need, what crimes are in vogue. Should have had someone or something watching his bag. Wasn't anyone recording his speech on video? There's no footage at all of his bag being swiped? That a thief got away with his bag doesn't speak well of them. They seem negligent at the least. Such thefts may be aided by corruption. I shouldn't wonder that petty theft of that nature is a very low priority for their police, who will undoubtedly say there's nothing they can do.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The USA has it's third world areas..... Detroit, New Jersey, South Central LA, Mississippi......
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Every comment I've read is either abrasively sarcastic or downright mean. What gives? This used to be the land of OSS/free speech.
To be sure, /. has never been exactly "nice". But, come on guys! This kind of negativity needs to stop.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
I was born in Argentina too. The post author above was talking the best he could on his second language (as I am doing here), while I bet most of you can only talk English. Still, you made fun of him, and yes, it was funny, but that does not encourage participation. Now, on the topic: Buenos Aires has become a dangerous place in the last 10 or so years, and if you travel there you need to watch over your belongings and know when/where you can go and when/where you cannot. You can get robbed, scammed, or attacked if you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. I agree with the comment that said that Argentina is more and more resembling an African nation. And the people living there has no reference to compare, and passionately will defend their country's image against all logic. All that said, there is no excuse for this. Like him or not, RMS has been and is a very important influence in the world of software, and without crazies like him we will probably not have free Linux and all the free software that is available around and most of us use. He deserves better. The person who stole from him did not care or did not knew about him. Now, avoiding an entire country because you are afraid it is not as civilised as your own country, or your experience would be unfamiliar, seems extreme.
I earn my paychecks by writing Free Software. Sucks to be you, I guess.
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He was going well until he said:
That's an extremely ignorant comment. RMS has been to Argentina (and around Latin America) plenty of times without any problems. Shit happens. And it can happen in your beloved first-world New York too.
Fuck condescending comments about the third world.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
This is actually true. I can attest that, at least until the early to mid 90s, his 'rms' login on the MIT AI servers had no password.
And I earn my paychecks because of the various free platforms that are available thanks to GNU. Although we sell our end product, it runs on OS's that are free, written using free compilers and tools, connects to backends running free software, stores customer data in free software databases, etc. The business side does use a lot of non-free software though.
I'd be curious to find an accounting of what percentage of business value out there can be traced down to being "enabled" by free software vs. non-free software.
1) Argentina was quite prosperous at one time, but the past decade or so has been really hard on them. Their economic problems have caused a significant drop in the standard of living for many of its citizens, and crime has become much more of an issue. Today, it is much more akin to an African nation than it is to a Western nation.
As an Argentinian myself, i have to (sadly) agree. The standard of living for major cities (Cordoba, Rosario, Buenos Aires) has dropped sharply in the past decade, but it is practically nonexistant once you travel to the north, where basic services like running water, electricity, or sewers are scarce if present at all.
That said, Buenos Aires is more akin to a typical european city. But crime rates are horribly high - the citys' premimum neighborhoods and locations sits next to a shantytown so big it's almost a favela by now. You got to be careful if visiting.
According to a testimonial, the whole incident was pretty thought through. The robbers replaced Stallman's bag with an identical, albeit empty one at the end of the talk. On top of it, the canera on which the whole conference (and probably the robbers) was filmed got stolen too. The op name is lucas romero if you want to try to find it. ill post a link when i get home
And in today's world, avoiding third-world nations "just because" is ridiculous. You're saying that executives from Apple should never have gone to China. You're saying that Venezuela, a member of OPEC, should never have members from other OPEC nations visiting there. And where do you draw the line...I'm not sure I'd consider Argentina a third-world country just because they had an economic breakdown...and there is no way they are more akin to an African country than a Western one. If a financial meltdown with long-term effects qualifies a country for third world status, then why not Japan? They still haven't recovered from the financial collapse that happened in the 90s.
And let's keep something in mind...this was Richard Stallman speaking at a conference in a major city. This was not him going off into a remote area in the countryside to dig a well. There are places in most American states where he'd be statistically more likely to come to harm than he was in that hotel. Petty crime is what happens in such places, and little else.
The reason why the post had been modded down...and why it should still be, even if it is not...is because the whole point of it is ridiculous. For a soccer mom to avoid nations with shaky economies? Fine, if a bit wimpy. But for large-impact entities...be they people or simply influential people at large organizations...to shun safe areas in third-world countries because of petty crime is entirely infeasible, self-defeating, and frankly smacks of the armchair thinking of someone who has never ventured outside middle America. The world is global; that's how it is now.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
As someone how lives in buenos aires, I must tell you; you're quite wrong.
I know which places to go to, and which no to go to. If you take a wrong turn, and walk 4 blocks down the wrong street, it might be your last wrong turn. Or you might just get mugged.
I had a friend who got mugged waiting for the bus on their first trip to BA. It wan't just her though; it was the entire line of people waiting for the bus. Inside the main Terminal in Retiro, Buenos Aires.
It's a mix... you have a small area that's first-world-ish, and the area next to it is almost third-world-ish.
Well, Mexico is technically in North America. Nevertheless, what's happening in mexico (drug killings) isn't new.
I'm not saying Argenina is a great economy, but I hate being compared to Somalia or whatever. Whenever someone mentions that living in Argentina is "bad" I just let pictures talk:
http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/1020/catalinas2.jpg
http://img25.imageshack.us/img25/3406/096catalinasnorte.jpg
https://ayudabuenosaires.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/obelisco-av-9-de-julio.jpg
I know that's just the capital, and things are MUCH better there. But I'll start to worry the day it stops looking as shiny as now.