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No One Should Have To Use Proprietary Software To Communicate With Their Government (fsf.org)

Posted by msmash on from the hate-for-all-things-proprietary dept.

Donald Robertson, writing for Free Software Foundation: Proprietary JavaScript is a threat to all users on the Web. When minified, the code can hide all sorts of nasty items, like spyware and other security risks. [...] On March 1st, 2016, the Copyright Office announced a call for comments on an update to their technology infrastructure. We submitted a comment urging them to institute a policy that requires all software they develop and distribute to be free software. Further, we also urged them to not require people to run proprietary software in order to communicate or submit comments to them. Unfortunately, once again, the Copyright Office requires the use of proprietary JavaScript in order to submit the comment and they are only accepting comments online unless a person lacks computer or Internet access. [...] The most absurd part of all this is that other government agencies, while still using Regulations.gov, are perfectly capable of offering alternatives to submission.

9 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Misplaced priorities... by geschbacher79 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This seems to be a case of completely misplaced priorities. The goal should be that the customer/visitor not have to install or use non-free software (such as MS Office, Edge Browser, Acrobat, etc), not the libraries used to render the government website. It might make perfect sense for the government to use non-free software to develop a site, such as their choice of database, OS, etc. Why worry about which javascript libraries are used if they work across all browsers? This seems like something that should be 34,500th on the list of priorities when it comes to the Federal Government's IT priorities.

    1. Re:Misplaced priorities... by mattventura · · Score: 3, Interesting

      To be fair, from what I've seen, almost every government website I've used would have been far more usable if it had not a single bit of javascript on it. Instead, all I see are nigh-unusable monstrosities.

    2. Re:Misplaced priorities... by vux984 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This seems to be a case of completely misplaced priorities.

      Yes... and... no.

      The root of the issue appears to be that its 'minified', which if it wasn't other people would rightly complain about wasted bandwidth over metered connections. Minified isn't deliberately obfuscated per se, although minification does tend to obfuscate functionality.

      That said, the FSFs request actually isn't unreasonable when you get right down to it. They suggest we establish a standard way link back to the original un-minified source.

      This is very easy to do, and honestly it is a perfectly reasonable thing to demand of a government.

      Is it my top priority? No. Is it worthy of a march in protest? Not to me.

      But I am actually in favor of this being standard practice for the government. At the end of the day they are running software on my computer, and they could easily provide the source for it. Its not a major burden, and it represents value to the people -- its a good faith demonstration of transparency. So that we can inspect for ourselves what they are running on our computers. Why not?!

    3. Re: Misplaced priorities... by ZeroWaiteState · · Score: 4, Interesting

      They're called source maps. They let you see the source in the developer tools without suffering the performance penalty of downloading unminified in production. Making source maps available fixes that complaint. I think the bigger issue is that the Copyright Office doesn't actually write their own code, and the vendors often don't provide unminified versions that can be source mapped.

  2. Treasury 'Foreign Accounts' form by david.emery · · Score: 5, Informative

    Last year (2014), I had to download Adobe Acrobat to submit a form to the US Treasury dept. The only way you could do this was Acrobat, it used PDF and Adobe proprietary form submission. (I couldn't use Apple Preview.app to fill out the form.)

    This year (2015), Treasury added the obvious alternative, a fully on-line Web form. I guess that's progress.

    1. Re:Treasury 'Foreign Accounts' form by advocate_one · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I used LibreOffice to open a .pdf file, make edits to the text and then printed it to pdf...

      --
      Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
  3. Re:ECMAScript? by CronoCloud · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Uninstall or disable LibreJs then.

    Not everyone wants to compute like they were a member of the "bearded computer priesthood" at the MIT AI lab in 1972.

    Stallmans axes...well his philosophies actually take choices AWAY from the users in favor of supposed freedoms they can really only take advantage of IF they are also members of "the bearded priesthood"

    And I say that as someone who DOES use Linux.

  4. Re:ECMAScript? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Uninstall or disable LibreJs then.

    Not everyone wants to compute like they were a member of the "bearded computer priesthood" at the MIT AI lab in 1972.

    Stallmans axes...well his philosophies actually take choices AWAY from the users in favor of supposed freedoms they can really only take advantage of IF they are also members of "the bearded priesthood"

    And I say that as someone who DOES use Linux.

    GNU/Linux

    :^)

  5. Re:"their" by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 3, Funny

    I reject your government, and substitute my own ... "strange women lyin' in ponds distributin' swords"

    --
    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.