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Richard Stallman On Facebook's Privacy Scandal: We Need a Law. There's No Reason We Should Let Them Exist if the Price is Knowing Everything About Us (nymag.com)
From a wide-ranging interview of Richard Stallman by New York Magazine: New York Magazine: Why do you think these companies feel justified in collecting that data?
Richard Stallman: Oh, well, I think you can trace it to the general plutocratic neoliberal ideology that has controlled the U.S. for more than two decades. A study established that since 1998 or so, the public opinion in general has no influence on political decisions. They're controlled by the desires of the rich and of special interests connected with whatever issue it is. So the companies that wanted to collect data about people could take advantage of this general misguided ideology to get away with whatever they might have wanted to do. Which happened to be collecting data about people. But I think they shouldn't be allowed to collect data about people.
We need a law. Fuck them -- there's no reason we should let them exist if the price is knowing everything about us. Let them disappear. They're not important -- our human rights are important. No company is so important that its existence justifies setting up a police state. And a police state is what we're heading toward. Most non-free software has malicious functionalities. And they include spying on people, restricting people -- that's called digital restrictions management, back doors, censorship.
Empirically, basically, if a program is not free software, it probably has one of these malicious functionalities. So imagine a driverless car, controlled of course by software, and it will probably be proprietary software, meaning not-free software, not controlled by the users but rather by the company that makes the car, or some other company. Well imagine if that has a back door, which enables somebody to send a command saying, "Ignore what the passenger said, and go there." Imagine what that would do. You can be quite sure that China will use that functionality to drive people toward the places they're going to be disappeared or punished. But can you be sure that the U.S. won't?
Richard Stallman: Oh, well, I think you can trace it to the general plutocratic neoliberal ideology that has controlled the U.S. for more than two decades. A study established that since 1998 or so, the public opinion in general has no influence on political decisions. They're controlled by the desires of the rich and of special interests connected with whatever issue it is. So the companies that wanted to collect data about people could take advantage of this general misguided ideology to get away with whatever they might have wanted to do. Which happened to be collecting data about people. But I think they shouldn't be allowed to collect data about people.
We need a law. Fuck them -- there's no reason we should let them exist if the price is knowing everything about us. Let them disappear. They're not important -- our human rights are important. No company is so important that its existence justifies setting up a police state. And a police state is what we're heading toward. Most non-free software has malicious functionalities. And they include spying on people, restricting people -- that's called digital restrictions management, back doors, censorship.
Empirically, basically, if a program is not free software, it probably has one of these malicious functionalities. So imagine a driverless car, controlled of course by software, and it will probably be proprietary software, meaning not-free software, not controlled by the users but rather by the company that makes the car, or some other company. Well imagine if that has a back door, which enables somebody to send a command saying, "Ignore what the passenger said, and go there." Imagine what that would do. You can be quite sure that China will use that functionality to drive people toward the places they're going to be disappeared or punished. But can you be sure that the U.S. won't?
Is he still relevant?
he is 100% correct. I used to make fun of him in the 90s... but as I get older, I perceive him to be a kind of digital profit in the desert.
Facebook should be shutdown, and Zuckerburg will need to be hanged at the town square for his crimes against humanity.
I think it's insane to say something like Facebook should not exist because they can know everything about us.
The things that they know, ANYONE could know if they did what Facebook did. It's how the web and internet generally works that enables this, not Facebook.
Getting rid of Facebook is treating only the symptom, not the underlying problem... but here's the real issue, do the vast majority of people even want this problem fixed? I do not think they really care. Have you seen Facebook usage graphs recently? There was a dip around all the furor over Facebook but then it went right back up again... what Stallman and other technologists MUST come to grasp is that most people fundamentally do not value privacy much at all, so they are willing to trade it away for nearly anything. You have to start at that point and see how you go about helping people, not playing whack-a-mole with companies that make use of this fundamental aspect of human nature.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
âoeEmpirically, basically, if a program is not free software, it probably has one of these malicious functionalities.â
Yeah citation needed there buddy.
in my head as I read this, even if he is mostly right.
There is no reason we should let Richard Stallman exist if the price is listening to his nonsense.
Man those liberals must be awfully tired at this point, you know, being the root cause of all issues in present, past and future world. I mean the tentacles that reach that far into every aspect of human life must get tired.
That.... that or maybe people need to stop giving fuckwit conservative assholes a fucking soapbox to get on to blame it on "them". Nah can't be that, I must be a liberal snowflake.
So,... the privacy scandal was all because of liberal ideology? Well you are welcome conservatives, it was used to put your orange baffoon in power. But sure, keep blaming it on "liberals" and "muslims" and "illegals" and "them" and never once direct that lense inwards.
Have fun with that war with Russia and China, I'm sure that's a liberals fault too.
Technology will always be exploitable. Even free software. Some might say especially free software.
He isn't mad. Far from it.
He's just right, and that ticks off many people who don't want to "get" it. Watch now all those infantile asshats poking fun at him to detract from what matters.
Telling the truth and standing by it ain't always easy. And he's not... always diplomatic, mind you :-)
If you put your life on the net, the data will be collected.
You could build a FOSS global gossip network and it would still have it's data harvested. For example: I guarantee Github's data is scraped.
Don't put your life on the net, do put disinformation on the net. It is that simple.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Here's an idea, Stallman: do something productive for society and make products people can actually use (in other words, win on the market) rather than faking for government goons to enforce your will with guns.
"Pass a law to solve a problem" is the refrain of the incompetent.
If facebook suddenly disappeared would it really matter?
Normally I don't respond to idiots, but I think it's too funny you place any degree of blame on conservatives over this, when most of Silicon Valley is run by very liberal leaders. certainly Facebook is - and Obama made huge use of Facebook along with other data mining for two successful campaigns, which apparently was OK and widely lauded at the time. Just where do conservatives invite any blame for collection entirely run for and by liberals, that conservatives just happened to also make use of?
I say keep on mining Facebook, even though now you sell weapons to both sides as it were...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah Social Media turned out a lot like DDT.
We should ban it.
"You can be quite sure that China will use that functionality to drive people toward the places they're going to be disappeared or punished. But can you be sure that the U.S. won't? "
So we can't trust our government not to abuse power to discretely "disappear" us but we can trust them to enforce a law that prohibits a private social networking company. All of this magically solves our government paranoia issues how exactly?
I take it you don't know much about history or literature. If you did, you'd have a sense of what happened in the French Revolution. Read Dickens' Tale of Two Cities. You'd better hope the guillotine isn't turned on you.
Richard Stallman is falling into the same trap that we've been stuck in for ages - he thinks that there is an easy legislative road out of societal problems.
This is the same nonsense that people quote when they think that banning guns and knives will eliminate murder... or the people who think that banning abortions will cause people to stop having abortions... or that mandating abstinence only will cause there to be fewer teen pregnancies.
The technology to monitor everyone is here, and people will use it regardless of what we do. So our society can grow up to stop pretending we're all perfect, and to actively oppose massive stockpiling of data regardless of their benefits... or we will descend into the kind of totalitarian regime that has never been possible before - one that could truly be the thousand-year Reich.
Moreover, with the technological capabilities we are evolving right now, not only could we reach new levels of subconscious manipulation to produce new generations of obedient sheep, we could also engineer perfect weapons that will eliminate "enemies of the state" successfully, efficiency, and with little possibility of defense.
Maybe some of us can't or won't believe him; but, just wait until what he says happens (sooner or later).
Yipsters too busy WhatApping to care. Good job Grandpa.
Seems like proper labeling requirements would do the trick. Have them state up front in simple, easy-to-understand-for-a-non-technical-person terms what data they collect, who they share it with, and what someone could do with it. Then, if people still want to use the service, they can, and they'll do it with eyes open.
"He's nothing but a low-down, double-dealing, backstabbing, larcenous perverted worm! Hanging's too good for him. Burning's too good for him! He should be torn into little bitsy pieces and buried alive!"
Let's put his two core statements in closer proximity: "public opinion in general has no influence on political decisions" and "we need a law".
Hold up your hand if you see the problem...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
The facebook fiasco is bad, but there simply needs to be the same rules for corporations that exist for government. The data that corporations collect now make laws against search and seizure and privacy regulations laughable. They can't get your data directly but simply allow Google and Facebook to know everything about you then get it that way. I went to a hospital this past weekend that wanted to scan my drivers license just to go see my dad in the hospital. I refused and said I prefer to move about anonymously and refused to give it up. Where are we going to be when EVERY place demands identification? The government can't directly track your movements gestapo "paper's please" style, but they'll effectively have the exact same trail. It's not acceptable for your identification to be needed to participate in society.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
Go suck some more NSA cock Bill. Everyone knows you gave the gubmint a back door into Windows you whore.
Laws are backed by threats of violence.
So he's saying that we need a threat of violence to prevent us from voluntarily giving information to companies to provide us services.
But nevermind about those government organizations that spy on us against our will and without our knowledge which then use that information to persecute possibly innocent people and kill others around the world.
> Why do you think these companies feel justified in collecting that data?
Because the users voluntarily gave up that data.
I use Facebook sparingly, people can not tag me in things without explicit permission, and that is about as much as I'm willing to give up.
Unfortunately, we no longer have the power to get them created. That power now belongs to the rich, who have purchased the legislators. They create the laws that benefit them, and block the laws that would benefit us. I'm pretty sure the only thing that will change this is revolution - and that is becoming both increasingly less likely, (via bread-and-circuses, propaganda, and various other forms of Kool-Aid), and increasingly less possible, (via mass surveillance and, appropriately enough, Facebook). Not to mention that in a revolution, pretty much everyone loses big time, at least in the short term...
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Majority want Gay and Lesbian rights as well as allowing Marijuana and few are fighting against that. Why is this situation any different, even if the effects are negative?
ever see that video of this guy eating boogers off of his toes?
fuckin gross
The Amerikuk Right needed someone to blame for their loss in Vietnam, y'know rather than admit they were wrong in waging a war of oppression against the Vietnamese people (there was also no secret bombings of, say, Cleveland.. the immorality was ALL America's to own) so they blamed "Liberals" for young black men not wanting to blindly go die in Nam for Whitey Nixon (if thoe damn LIBERALS had just known their place we'ld have WON THE NAM!).
It all falls out from there.. refusal to admit ones wrongdoings leads to greater trauma and devastation of the self. SAD.
It's not even really physical. It is merely pictures and words. It is an ether, a medium (rare, if you don't mind) Nobody has any right to restrict what a person can post. We need more people to circumvent censorship, not fortify it with propaganda and heavy weaponry. Stallman is becoming an enemy to freedom.
google, microsoft, apple, comcast, and amazon (and others) should also be affected.
but ti's not necessarily a law or laws that would do it. the megacorps need to be broken up. they are too big, they are too vertical, they are too greedy.
Dont even try you say? Bravo.
KYS.
I am not a member,user of FB then why the hell should they data mine me others because our relatives put a picture up that happen to have me in them? I never agreed to FB terms and they don't have a right to spy on me at all. IMO what they are doing is wiretapping on mega scales..Someone should be in jail for wiretapping non users......
Jack of all trades,master of none
Seriously.. Stallman's right on this. Besides any company who's founder said this...
ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how'd you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don't know why
ZUCK: they "trust me"
ZUCK: dumb fucks
Is not really a company you want to trust your data with wither it's personal or professional.
Dude bought a couple dozen tickets, eh? I mean, that's some no-nonsense stream of consciousness insanity, right there.
Majority want Gay and Lesbian rights as well as allowing Marijuana and few are fighting against that.
Exactly, and as we can plainly see gay marriage is now pretty much universally possible, and soft drugs are rapidly on the way to full legalization.
I'm not sure which way you thought I was going with my post but I agree with you, why is this situation any different? People want cool technical things that work by trading privacy for whatever. So what good will it do trying to ban that? You will just be fighting against human nature which has never worked, ever.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
or socialist. Yeah, this is slightly off topic, but folks get confused so much when they hear this term that I think it's worth pointing out. Neoliberal is in line with the "Clintonian" or "Corporate" side of the Democratic party. e.g. Low regulations, free trade, legalize things that aren't directly harmful like drugs, etc. It's like a pro-corporate libertarian.
For the record, Stallman is very left wing.
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There oughta be a law.
Tyranny Of The Majority is only an issue when it comes to rights. How is Facebook use or non-use a rights issue? If you don't want your data collected, you can opt out of Facebook.
Now, recently it has been revealed that Facebook also collects data on non-users. OK, that might be an issue. However it could be addressed without the hammer that Stallman floats (the dissolution of Facebook).
This is the problem with Stallman. In principle, I can get on board with the notion that any particular corporate entity should not make us create national policy, and in principle if they do, I'd be willing to contemplate that corporate entity's restructuring or destruction. However, let's get real. How many people actually want Facebook to go away permanently, or feel that their behavior in any way rises to the level where this should be discussed?
As usual Stallman winds up sounding like the crazy dude, in torn and dirty clothes, walking the streets with a sandwich board. "The End Is Near!" quoth Stallman, and the citizens carefully avoid eye contact and start moving away.
The reason why things have value is twofold: they serve a purpose AND they are scarce. Their availability is limited. If money/gold/jewels were available with no restriction or limitation, they would be worthless. Some lunatic figured out how to use this principle to create bitcoin, which has a "value" based on the exact same principle--it's (artificially) difficult to obtain; I leave the "purpose" it servers to speculators.Therefore, free software is worth nothing because, irrespective of the purpose that it serves, it is available in unlimited supply. I know that Mr. Stallman means "free" as in speech but his definition of "free" does not put a limit on price: the moment when you put a price on "free as in speech" software you restrict its availability to those who can afford to pay for it. When you make code publicly available anyone can copy it ans sell it for a dime, thereby triggering a race to the bottom => the software has no value anymore. Mr. Stallman of GNU fame should make the distinction between commodity software and speciality software. I am in the camp of those who still believe that not all software algorithms have been invented yet, and that some people may be able to make a living developing better algorithms. Someone once said that a telepathical society would be doomed to death--why make any effort to compete against others when you know what they think and they know what you think?
This response from RMS is, in a nutshell, why I disagree with him on most issues. He's asked a fairly simple question about one tech company and goes off on a rant about politics, free software and tyranny. He wants Facebook to be made illegal, but completely seems to miss that if people didn't want Facebook to collect data on them, they could just not use Facebook.
RMS and the FSF seem hell bent on taking away choice from users. They don't like a license or a company or a technology so they want to ban it o insure no one can have it. They seem to completely miss how this is a worse option than letting people have lots of options and choose what they feel best suits them and their needs.
I just had this conversation with my 10 year old son when he said they should have a law against metal slides on the playground because he doesn't like them.
"Then don't use the metal slide," was my reply. "Use the plastic one instead."
I dabbled with using security on social media for about 2 years at Carnegie Mellon. It has extreme potential in RMS applications, and shows tremendous promise in preventing IP infractions. We (Dickie Stallman, head of theoretical computer science and myself, an aspiring computer scientist) immediately saw it's vast and influential potential, and immediately set to work on social media security.
However, our work became sidetracked when Dickie developed an unusual affinity for horse sex. While the applications of the common horse penis in regards to a human are precarious, to say the least, Dickie nevertheless remained determined to not only engage in rapid, pulse pounding horse sex, but to somehow also increase it's efficiency. Craig quickly utilized the powers of social media to aid him in his ghastly crusade.
After Dickie was caught with a horse that he named "El Chancho the long when limp", 8 gerbils, a shrink wrapped box of OpenBSD, a lengthy printout of recent Kuro5hin.org posts, and an Xbox, funding for the project was cut.
No one deserves privacy, and its deprivatized by aliens once youre a targeted individual, hence privacy is simply a concept that equal forces respect, but forces above us believe that we don't need it so why should I believe you need it. Whats necessary from the complete invasion of privacy and theft of data are people that are not going to do anything with their knowledge about you, that requires aliens to not think politically. However, they won't stop doing so, theyve overcomplicated themselves and their handling of us here. All humans have zero ideal of privacy, its not that aliens won't tell the NSA/FBI, they could and they probably have, its that its broken as an ideal from the nature of their agenda with us. The aliens have given themselves the need to know basis about every human, and in addition to their mind-reading, that gives them an advantage over us thats equivalent to a random human with a weapon advantage over a weaponless human, how to construct the situation to their perpetual advantage using TOTAL information as their power and telepathic manipulation is a weapon we havent classified with conventional definitions of war
Having your personal data collected by Facebook is not.
Sure it is - if you (A) don't use the internet, or (B) always using private browsing mode how would Facebook be tracking anything about you?
There are a lot of tracking mechanisms but also ways to get around them, including simply not using the medium they all use to track you - not just Facebook.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Richard Stallman can go fuck himself. He's the kind of person who's the reason why there are so many laws in the United States that no one could possibly be aware of them all. Just don't use facebook. You know, like how you didn't use MySpace or refused to use Windows? This stuff works itself out in time. Always.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Don't listen to someone who eats shit they pick off of their feet.
What a twat. There are lots of free business models. Selling a bit of our data to advertisers is how the world works. That is how their business model works. Do you want to pay $5 per month for your Gmail account, $50 / year for your Flickr photo stream or for posting to Instragram, or pay for Bing'ing cat pictures. Yes it would be great for the consumer if there were paid ad-free options that didn't data harvest your every move. To say that if a program isn't paid for via a store purchase it is malicious, is just plain ignorant. Yes, deceptively data gathering apps are the norm and there should be some better regulation apart from permissions and App store curation; but to say all data gathering is malicious, hurts the consumer, and leads to a police state is ignorant and misleading.
Framing the law is the difficulty.
Easier is a simple law guaranteeing us a right to the data.
Whatever you got. We get to get.
Downloading "my data" from FB gives me what I posted, my contacts.
What it should be is all the data they have associated to that account.
A freedom of information act for the people, for us.
Ideally this would spread to government,
open available access to the data.
And an Opt Out option.
Now if it turns out they are hiding things from us, hell to pay.
So this means gov'/court authority to get access to verify.
If they hide crap, play games.
Hell to pay.
This applies to any firm, anybody that chooses to collect the data.
Provide access.
Should be fairly simple.
The People have already voted, saying that they strongly want Facebook to have this information and are willing to endure lots of annoyances if it means they'll be able to share their data with Facebook. They vote with their actions. And nobody got tricked. There wasn't anyone who shared the data with Facebook and didn't know what they were doing. Perhaps they didn't think through the consequences. But they really did know that Facebook would have the info.
So why do you think they would support a law that puts an end to this?
All I can think of, is that maybe some people will revisit their previous choice, due the consequences being shown more clearly by a high-profile election. Now that people sees the downside, maybe they'll change their mind. But do we actually have evidence that they have changed their mind?
(I'm not even 100% sold on the idea (though I do think it more likely than not) that targeted advertising bought that election. Everyone agrees that Trump is a piece of shit so there must be some reason that someone so awful won, but remember that the candidate that came in second place was a pretty shitty option too. How much can you really blame America's problems on targeted advertising?)
I'm all for asking people what they want again. But you're purely speculating that they'll answer differently this time. They've already been asked before, and they were zealously opposed to RMS' suggestion last time. Don't be surprised if little has changed.
The Right to Privacy.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
They don't have a right to exist. Corporations are NOT people! Outlaw what should be obvious as illegal anyways,
spying on people and collecting databases. Wiretapping is illegal already. Apply it !
And Fuck the courts that say, "You can't prove that you've been harmed by this spying and selling of your
personal data." The harm is a priori obvious to anyone with a concious.
"We need a law...there's no reason we should let them exist if the price is knowing everything about us."
So Richard Stallman wants to ban websites that allow you to enter information about yourself. Facebook is just one of millions of sites where you can add personal information. It just happens to be the most used.
Most people don't want to go through the weird wget nonsense that Stallman uses https://stallman.org/stallman-...
"I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/g...) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation). "
You first.
You may have missed the bit where Facebook collected and saved information on people who were not users and never signed up. And where never offered a way to opt-out.
Just because Stallman is a crackpot doesn't mean what he says is automatically wrong. Only that it is important to examine the validity given the source. I think in this case some of the things he mentions does ring true. On other topics I strongly disagree with Stallman.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Libertarianism is not only present; it's the fastest-growing global political philosophy. Read the demographic and sociological data.
Statists are in for a very sad 21st century. #LegalizeFreedom
The actual difference is Steve Jobs was successful at business and made billions creating something people wanted to buy, while Stallman has been wildly unsuccessful and is mad about it and blames other people for his failures; that's why he wants to resort to legislation to force people to act like him.
Dumbfuck, laws change nothing only criminalize behavior, rarely does it change it. If you create a law it must be enforceable and penalties attached, waste of energy, just like Facebook.
He doesn't score points with language like this.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Governments aren't "people," either. Governments don't have a "right to exist" by that logic. The difference is corporations operate on consensual sales and governments operate on violence. You can boycott Amazon and not buy their stuff; you can't refuse to pay taxes to Uncle Sam.
If all you're concerned about is making billions and being successful at business, don't be surprised if people forget you in 20 years. Certainly, Steve Jobs didn't take those billions to the grave, and they didn't stop him from dying--or being wise enough to get chemotherapy early instead of waiting.
Apple computers never got above 5% market share. GNU/Linux is at about 1%. That's wildly unsuccessful compared to Apple? In the phone/tablet space, sure, Apple is well ahead of any sort of GNU-based phone. Then again, most everything about a phone/tablet has been precisely the sort of tracking that RMS abhors, so I don't think he'd really want to be associated with it..
This I agree with, but not in the sense you mean. He's mad that after clear spelling out the threats, people willing embraced it like a bunch of morons. A lot of people here argue it's too complex, and it's gotten to the point that even people who aren't involved at all are still be tracked indirectly--if 98% of people take and share photos and software scans them, you basically can't interact with society at all to avoid being tracked. It's little wonder then that he wants legislation because people are apparently too stupid to listen to what he's repeated said and dismissed him as mad.
People embrace the devil. Most evangelists aren't exactly the most happy of people.
Truman got us into Vietnam, heavily ramped up by Kennedy and Nixon got us out.
"I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/g...) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it (using konqueror, which won't fetch from other sites in such a situation). "
"I usually use a string between two tin cans, for offline web browsing, but the cans are hand-forged in public forges according to freely available schematics and the string is assembled my me from the lint from my clothes dryer." -- Sound like Stallman.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
His solution is to empower the government to crush private businesses. The government, which has given us:
1. The NSA ...And many more! Good idea, Stallman. You've clearly put at least three minutes of thought into this idea.
2. The Great Firewall of China
3. The Russian IP ban
Said cool technical things could still exist, and would like be more cool and technical, if we had data protection/privacy laws.
They would by definition not exist because laws would either prevent them form existing (as was RMS's desire) or be so cumbersome to actually use due to various laws that in fact no-one would use them so they would not exist.
There's no reason we have to be tied to our current data laws.
You are right, they should all be jettisoned as they are holding any society that adopts them from full potential.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No matter what RDS thinks, or you or I think, no law will be made. You can squeak in protest all you want if you have the time and energy to waste.
Laws are made by legislators, guided by powerful market forces. There don't seem to be any legislators here, and certainly none that care to protect your privacy.
...omphaloskepsis often...
If it is "free" software it is much more likely to have "malicious functionalities" because the world is NOT free. I'm calling TANSTaaFL on rms. Much more could be said, but I've been called for food and Slashdot is not much motivation these years.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I read it as a rehash of the oft-quoted "your post advocates a [many checkboxes] solution". Not don't try--try in a useful manner.
Do those gigabytes contain personal information?
Business contact info is not personal information. It is disingenuous to try to compare the two.
Freedom, Liberty, Thinking, Love, Sex - not necessarily in this exact order
So what's this "prophet's" stance on all the data government collects on it's citizens? Clearly the government shouldn't exist either.
so I can give the company a like. I'm not the only one. So yeah, lots of people force people to use Facebook. It's like Cell phones. These days if you apply for any job better than burger flipper's assistant and don't have one you're unemployable. Facebook is getting there, and don't think they haven't noticed (and are taking steps to encourage this line of thought).
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No one said Steve Jobs was God and above death. That logic is absurd. Also, Richard Stallman didn't invent Linux.
Zoom. The point is that he had billions he can't take to his grave. And again, he almost certainly died prematurely because he delayed chemotherapy because apparently he was too arrogant to listen to doctors. So, yea, the sort of successful that too much of a megalomaniac to know when he's wrong or something is outside his field of expertise.
I never claimed he did, nor would I think anyone competent would misunderstand what GNU/Linux meant in context: that the userland was a core part of what enticed people to use a Linux desktop (along with XFree86/Xorg, KDE/Gnome, etc). The same with Android: it's the UI/userland that defines it a lot more than the kernel*. Hence, RMS receives no credit for the success of Android. Regardless, the success of RMS was never about directly adopting GNU--as much as that was certainly hoped. It was about adopting Free Software. And, again, even as widespread as Linux is used, so much of the userland stack is not Free Software and so very much it has not been a success. The whole online platform of proprietary software, the data mining, etc, that's especially antithetical to the idea of putting the user first with software.
So, Steve Jobs was very successful if his goal was to achieve wealth. RMS was very unsuccessful if his goal was to have people adopting his Free Software. Whether as a whole he was unsuccessful is really to be seen in 50 years. Will Free Software will still be a thing? For Steve Jobs, he's dead; his success ends with his life, at best, as does his possible failure. For RMS, it's a much murkier thing.
* This is not meant to diminish the Linux kernel. Obviously without it, GNU would have likely been mostly forgotten as HURD is still basically nowhere as far as heavy developer support. The synergy was there, in part because Linus adopted the GPL v2. It's unclear where the future of Linux the kernel or the OS will lead.
Worldwide, Apple's computer market share is around 8%. In the US, it's been at or above 10% since at least 2012, getting close to 15% several times.
It's still very much a minority in the non-server computing world, just not as much of a minority as you think.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Is a colossal idiot and nobody should ever listen to anything he says.
1. Can't help but think that the USA would be a better place if EVERYONE was required to vote. It's hardly a democracy if less than 30% vote!
2. Governments have a vested interest in having extensive data available about people that they can't lawfully collect (to the extent that they are complicit), do we even trust them to create meaningful laws?
3. Mark only disclosed information about externally facing aspects of fb, how about full disclosure of all the internal data mining they do so they can target us with such precision, to advertisers, and bad actors.
4.$17 per person per year is approximately what facebook generated in 2016, is your privacy more valuable than that, not including the cost of having Trump... That will probably be everything else.
5. Restrict the permissions on your favorite "free app", and tell me if its still free?
Have you any experience with grey areas?
When you operate in a grey area and the judge looks down at you and casts judgement, but have no other directly comparable references to draw a decision from, they have to then draw their sense of justice, ethics, and morality from other references.
The law generally protects individuals, and Facebook and companies engaged in similar privacy violating and profile building activities are not operating in alignment with the intent and general notions of other laws designed to protect individuals.
Take HIPPA for example.
What is more personal to you (anyone reading this).
Do you care more if Facebook knows and shares what your blood pressure has been for the past 10 years, or if Facebook knows and shares who you know or have known and exchange information with for the past 10 years?
Does your hospital get to share your data?
Does your bank get to share your spending data?
Well actually that last one is my whole case in point of why law is needed in this instance (which goes against me entirely, I generally hate new law).
Because it has been OK for Facebook to sell your personal data for so long with no regulation, now our banks are selling our spending data.
And whats the good of all of it? Is social media helping or hurting the economy? Or has advertising spending that would already have been spent on advertising just moved to a new platform to be spent on?
If Cambridge Analytica bought everyone's Facebook data and everyone's Banking data couldn't they basically build a model of anyone's entire life, and almost never need to spy on them?
How much is the Federal Government spending for this data?
If near real time Domestic Surveillance is a thing and the Orwellian state is here, why are mass shootings and bombings happening?
Would PRISM even exist if a law were passed banning the collection, housing, and type of intrusive privacy violating profile building activities companies like Facebook have been exercising?
While it's hard to be sure, macOS seems to be around 5.6% at least according to one proxy measure. Another suggests 12.5%. Another suggests 21 million macOS vs 283 million windows and a nebulous other which indicates maybe a max of 6.9%. It looks like that there's a mixing of iOS and macOS. If we're going with macOS+iOS and including all computational devices, it looks like 12.3% might be the right number. But, then, there's 21.6% "other".
So, at this point, I'll accept it's possible your numbers may be right. But, it's really hard to know because all these proxies look very questionable.
Look up GNU
Not only are your values perverted (another poster rightly points out that you can't take it with you) what's left behind is a bad way to treat people—proprietary software is rightly identified as user-subjugating by rms. Technical achievement and business deals come and go, but treating people ethically sticks with people for a long time and sets a great example for how we can run a society that we can live with.
In fact, Steve Jobs (while heading up NeXT) was the first commercial copyright infringer of GCC, then known as the GNU C Compiler later the GNU Compiler Collection when it compiled a lot more languages than just C. NeXT needed a compiler, GCC did the job, and NeXT wrote Objective-C support for GCC then chose to distribute only object code for NeXT's GCC variant. This was a clear violation of the GNU GPL v2 (the relevant GCC license at the time) as there was no complete corresponding source code on offer or copy distributed alongside the binaries. Someone from the FSF (I'm not sure who, Eben Moglen perhaps?) had a talk with NeXT and after some discussions (which I'm guessing were quite unpleasant for Jobs and NeXT's lawyers to hear) NeXT ended up doing what they should have done from the start: shipping complete corresponding source code to their variant of GCC with the GCC binaries. The copy I saw was in a box of Extended Density (2.88MB) floppy disks.
Brad Kuhn, former FSF Executive Director current President and Distinguished Technologist at the Software Freedom Conservancy, has told this story before and he (probably rightly) speculates this is what drove Apple to become the irrational GPL-hater they are today: NeXT got caught treating their users badly, violating GCC's license, and subverting a license designed to let them do what they needed while also treating the users justly. This is why Apple is moving toward a non-copylefted compiler (which Kuhn speculates they'll someday stop contributing to when it becomes good enough for them to use without caring about contributing back). This is why Apple switched away from the (I'm told better functioning) Samba to some proprietary SMB implementation for MacOS X. I'm told some other GPL-covered software on MacOS X remains out of date; if that's so, this is probably why. And it's telling that Apple is no rush to replace CUPS as they did Samba and GCC—Apple bought Easy Software (which wrote CUPS) thus making Apple CUPS' copyright holder so Apple went from being a GPL licensee to being a GPL licensor. This also helps illustrate why Apple's view of the GPL is irrational: GPL-covered programs were perfectly good for them throughout NeXT and Apple's early days with MacOS X, and the GPL is apparently remains a fine license when licensing to others. But share and share alike is apparently not the way they want to treat their users for plenty of other software they distribute.
Digital Citizen
It's so telling that people would ever push an ego-based argument about the name "GNU" (as in GNU/Linux or GNU+Linux) when "Linux" is clearly the egotistical name. RMS has consistently stood behind the idea that he wants GNU to get a fair share of the credit for the systems that contain GNU so people are reminded of software freedom. That's not egotistical at all. But the name Linux points to one guy, Linus Torvalds. Linux was never an OS and still isn't; if all one has is Linux one doesn't have the majority of the code one needs to do practical work or that one would expect an OS to do (even if that expectation is kept low, such as doing everything on the command line). Linux was and remains a kernel. Even in 2018 it's hard to give credit where credit is due on /., what a shame.
Digital Citizen
"The Corporation" features Robert Hare's analysis of corporation as psychopath. RMS is likely referring to this when he said:
The Corporation is an excellent documentary. I highly recommend the 2-disc DVD set and the additional features and alternate audio tracks. There are other copies on archive.org too. And I see the same team is now working on a sequel.
Digital Citizen
This is why you should delete your social media. By continuing to use facebook you're rewarding them for doing harmful things to your friends, family, and the everyone else in the world.
So Richard Stallman wants to ban websites
FFS no, why do people insist on misreading what Stallman says so aggressively? It's like you're determined for him to be wrong no matter what he actually says.
He said companies, not websites. He doesn't want to take the form off your crappy former-geocities page, don't worry.
He wants (among other things) laws put in place to limit the power of companies in this regard.
How about you stop with the kneejrek reaction, engage your brain and address what he said, not what you wanted him to have said?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I did not let Facebook steal my private data because I did not give it away to Facebook.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Linux runs 96% of servers on the internet:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The GCC Objective-C code was shockingly bad. It's about 10,000 lines of code in a single file doing everything from semantic analysis to code generation. It has no clean layering, so GCC still accepts different subsets of Objective-C syntax in C and C++ mode. It is full of comments that refer to pre-NeXT versions of Objective-C that the released code has never supported.
There are two parts to an Objective-C implementation, the compiler and the runtime. With ARC, the compiler is the more complex of the two, but back in 1988 the majority of the complexity was in the runtime. NeXT was not forced to release the code for their runtime, which made the compiler useless on non-NeXT platforms. Eventually other GCC contributors wrote a replacement runtime, but this was not quote compatible with the NeXT one and so the ugly GCC code was then full of 'if (next_runtime)' chunks.
By forcing NeXT to release the code, rather than persuading them to join the community, they burned any goodwill that existed. NeXT (and Apple) never imported the GNU changes into their GCC tree, so never got any of those 'if (next_runtime)' checks. This meant that new features of the language were supported by the Apple fork and were difficult to merge into upstream GCC. As a result, modern GCC supports a dialect of Objective-C circa 2005, and only gained support for that around 2010. And, because of aforementioned layering issues, it doesn't support most of these features in Objective-C++ mode.
In other words, if the GCC Objective-C story is a poster child for the success of the GPL (and for a long time, it was on the FSF web site) then the GPL is an abject failure.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
also happens if someone saves data about you an her/his cellphone and uses whatsapp. you data automticallyguet uploaded to them. hate that.
But for this to get any traction, we need a more attractive spokesperson. Even Woz would be better.
proprietary software is rightly identified as user-subjugating by rms.
That's just rubbish, it's the sort of hyperbole that causes people to not take the free software ideology seriously. If I want to edit an image I am not "subjugated" if I choose to use Photoshop to accomplish the task any more than I am if I use GIMP to accomplish the task. Even worse is his assertion that proprietary software takes away users' freedom, which is again wrong and is the same silly notion used by the MPAA affiliates to describe their "stolen" profits. Something that was never granted cannot be taken away.
Free software certainly has its merit and advantages but the hyperbole and half-truths that RMS engages in just makes him sound like a complete kook and it's no better than the sort of idiotic arguments the **AA folks make about piracy.
A free and open internet means you don't restrict that information or what can be done with it, if you don't want it on there then don't put it there but don't try and use lawyers to prevent the existence of the free and open internet.
A new phenomenon? Hardly.
How long did the US stay in Vietnam after most Americans thought it was time to get out?
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Sure, but "most people don't care" isn't always a reason in favor of, or against, a particular policy desire. That's tyranny of the majority.
Of course, in a world of billions, most people only care about themselves and the few things they do in their own lives and the few people they do them with. Many people, hardly most, in these United States and a few Europeans, cared about the exploding engine of the Southwest Airline .... for a few hours. But then, once they glimpsed the roadkill scene and heard a headline's worth on info, they turned and went on their way,ignoring the ongoing drone of media coverage. They couldn't care less about real explanations, about the history of airplane disasters and the Southwest management ignoring of recommendations of inspections to avoid this one explosion, fatality, heroic pilot, and whether any ruling authority required the inspections to happen, or whether they ever did. WHY? Because they know they will never be involved, if they even should fly, even on that airline, even in that particular model aircraft. Winning the lottery, even if you play the lottery, is way too unlikely, The same applies to our "PRIVACY", and any of the thousands of software employers, or "social media" or facebook. Their own lives are too insignificant, uninteresting, unlikely to get the attention of prying governmental or private corporations. And who cares if you get too many ads for the new model of anything???
In other words, had the FSF let NeXT run roughshod over them by remaining silent about continued infringement on the generous GNU GPL v2 license terms, as you seem to think would have been a good idea, people would have had even less code on which to implement anything instead of gaining something with "a replacement runtime". You're actually arguing for a more difficult set of improvements for GCC because that would have been more convenient for proprietors (NeXT and later Apple).
By committing copyright infringement against a very generous copyright holder licensing its work for all to build upon and share, NeXT created that bad will. Maybe NeXT should have written their own code or licensed a compiler from someone willing to work with them on proprietary terms. That's what Apple is doing today, perhaps guided by having learned that the FSF isn't going to ignore being mistreated when it offers its work for all to run, share, inspect, and modify (even commercially).
Only in your topsy-turvy view where works offered on a share-and-share-alike basis are somehow bad and only worth as much respect as a proprietor feels like doling out. And those copyright holders who stand up for software freedom are somehow doing the wrong thing because life became more inconvenient for proprietors and perhaps require some more work to make something more featureful.
Digital Citizen
You're arguing for exploitation. Free software licenses, particularly strongly-copylefted free software licenses, are designed to ensure software freedom remains intact for everyone who gets a copy. Defending software freedom requires standing up for one's free software license, in court if need be. After all, we're not talking about some proprietor licensing their work on restrictive terms, we're talking about the FSF licensing under the GNU GPL v2; a generous copyright holder licensing their work under terms that allow us to leverage their achievements for our own gain (even privately) so long as any published software remains in the commons for us all to use (share and share alike). If you don't like that, don't distribute strongly-copylefted free software. This choice means not giving up on the freedom that came with the software and not treating other people badly by denying them those freedoms (an undefended GNU GPL'd work is functionally no different from a non-copylefted free software license, also called a "pushover" license). The freedoms of the Internet aren't threatened by people running, inspecting, sharing, or modifying strongly-copylefted free software.
Digital Citizen
nothing like mass hysteria on something everyone actually already knew was happening to bring out the carrion eaters all across the planet ... i suppose there will be pop tarts too who suddenly start rioting because its an easy way to the spotlight ...
... but its so typically typical
again
where the hell would facebook have gotten their money from if not from user data ?
yea its the 'how' and its the bla and actually its simply something someone gratefully used to give the competition a headshot and now all the lag behind carrion feeders want their share
dont get me wrong im not a zuckerfan
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
NeXT believed that they were complying with the GPL. They shipped GCC with the option to load a plugin that handled Objective-C. The Objective-C code was in a separate module. It never went to court, so it's not clear which way the license would have been interpreted, but this is exactly what nVidia does with the Linux kernel, so it's not clear that a court would have found that this actually was copyright infringement. NeXT decided that the code was not worth very much and throwing it over the wall was cheaper than going to court. If the code had been valuable, they'd have defended it and may or may not have been forced to release it.
As the maintainer of the GNUstep Objective-C runtime, I can attest to the fact that the code in GCC is of negative value. If the FSF had been forced to implement it from scratch, they'd have been better off (Iain Sandoe is now starting to clean it up, some decades later, and I wish him well). Meanwhile, I started hacking on clang and added an abstraction layer that makes it easy to support multiple runtimes. The Apple folks, including quite a lot of former NeXT employees back then, picked this up and helped us maintain something that made it easier for us to support a different implementation. Oh, and they also open sourced their runtime, though it's quite closely integrated with functionality that's only available on Darwin so it's not that interesting to anyone else.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Z^-1
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Ok I think you misunderstand. What I said is that the idea that proprietary software "subjugates users" is nonsense, it is just simply hyperbole as I demonstrated with the example. Use of hyperbole like this undermines the whole free software movement as a whole because it is so demonstrably false and so easy for users to immediately see that it is false because they have freedom of choice.
Defending software licenses, be those free or proprietary is the right thing to do, you seem to think I disagree on that point but I do not. However saying that companies that aggregate data freely available on the internet (subject of this story), like Facebook, are not allowed to do that is an affront to a free and open internet.
The FSF apparently believed NeXT was not complying with the GPL. If it's not clear what a court would have found, it is a half-truth to try and draw the conclusion you do comparing this to the nVidia infringement case concerning the Linux kernel without looking at more than one case: such as whether courts tend to favor copyright holders' interpretation of their chosen licenses, and how well courts understand the GPL. We know that NeXT valued that code, that code was critical to NeXT's development system; code for which there was no alternative then. NeXT's decision to "throw code over the wall" (as you passive aggressively say) came after talking to the FSF. NeXT did not do this on their own.
Your entire second paragraph is basically a red herring, as whatever technical issues were present in NeXT's Objective-C code and your further prognostication on FSF adding Objective-C support in GCC don't have any bearing on whether what NeXT did was copyright infringement against what was and is a very generous license. It doesn't matter if you conclude that the FSF would have been better off in some alternate version of events because that didn't happen.
Digital Citizen
I didn't misunderstand; you didn't demonstrate hyperbole in the way you think you did. Your one-sided application of the term hyperbole is telling and inverted ("the whole free software movement as a whole" is not undermined, but the power proprietors wield to take advantage of computer users causes all proprietary software to come under suspicion by default precisely because we can't tell what's really going on, improve, or share modified proprietary software regardless of our skill and motivation). https://gnu.org/malware has plenty of examples of proprietary malware that work precisely because that software doesn't respect a user's software freedom; as that page says,
Also, you oversimplify what's going on with Facebook: the harm of Facebook's data collection is partially attributable to proprietary software. There are other methods by which Facebook harms people (both its users and non-users) that don't involve proprietary software, so there's plenty of good reason not to trust spying services like Facebook. Depending on the method, software licenses might not be relevant at all. But software licenses don't all treat users the same way even if they all hinge on copyright law, therefore there's nothing compelling anyone to view all licenses the same way.
Digital Citizen
We know that NeXT valued that code, that code was critical to NeXT's development system; code for which there was no alternative then.
That is categorically not true. NeXT licensed the StepStone Objective-C compiler (as I recall, they actually bought it outright and then licensed it back), which was a source-to-source translator from Objective-C to C. They could have used this without modifying GCC at all, though at the cost of worse debug info.
NeXT's decision to "throw code over the wall" (as you passive aggressively say) came after talking to the FSF. NeXT did not do this on their own.
I don't know why you think 'throw code over the wall' is passive-aggressive phrasing. That's exactly what they did. They continued to maintain their own GCC fork, providing code dumps but nothing to make it easy to integrate the code upstream. It wasn't until many years later that Apple pushed their code into a branch in GCC's svn and the FSF relaxed their requirement on copyright assignment to allow some of it to be merged back into the main trunk.
It doesn't matter if you conclude that the FSF would have been better off in some alternate version of events because that didn't happen.
On the contrary, it did happen with Clang. Apple released clang under a permissive license, which allowed them to incorporate parts of the front end into their proprietary IDE. On non-Apple systems, Clang provides vastly better support for Objective-C than GCC ever did. The end result is that, if you care about Objective-C on Free Software systems (as I do), you are better off avoiding GCC. Hardly a resounding win for the GPL.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I didn't misunderstand; you didn't demonstrate hyperbole in the way you think you did.
Actually I did, with a very clear, specific and real example that you demonstrably cannot disprove. That's the reason I used a specific scenario rather than trying to paint broad strokes like you (and the FSF) have. While I agree with what you say being true in some circumstances it clearly is not true in all circumstances so your broad assertions are dishonest at best.
I don't subscribe to an absolutist view on this sort of thing, but I do understand that when absolutists put a stake in the ground it's very hard to walk that back and admit they were wrong or perhaps overzealous. But then people are more likely to be on your side when you admit you've made a mistake rather than when you continue flogging the dead horse.