It's only a security kerfuffle because Microsoft got lucky that Hanno Bock didn't use the power Microsoft handed him. From what I can tell, Microsoft's default start menu is populated with pictures and links to news stories (typical corporate news rubbish). Microsoft made an extremely poor decision to set up the default start menu the way they did, drawing anything from an Internet-based source without explicit user approval and consent. Then Microsoft lost control of the domain feeding that info (not the first time Microsoft has lost control over something that caused them to try and cover with public relations; I recall another domain they lost control over and, more recently, a chatbot they allowed to be programmed by public user input).
Bock could have silently fed content to users with other messages making it look like Microsoft suddenly favored causes they actually don't, like being anti-war or pro-software freedom. Or Bock could have located an exploit for the code that populates and draws those rectangles in the start menu and fed (what Microsoft often calls) "specially constructed" input designed to take advantage of those bugs and perhaps run code on the system. Some other user who came into the power Bock did might have made different choices which more clearly and publicly exposed Microsoft's thoroughly shitty design and the consequences of software non-freedom (where only Microsoft can fix the software that may still be vulnerable on millions of Windows 10 systems).
Why is it remarkable? Is it because it is weird since the G of GPL already means GNU?
While the initial "G" in GNU does mean GNU (GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix"), the "G" of "GPL" stands for "General"—General Public License. The GNU GPLs are so widely used and discussed that one can get away with saying "GPL" to mean one or more versions of the GNU General Public License. 'General' here means not specifically written for a particular GNU program. When GNU started different GNU programs had their own license—GNU Emacs General Public License for GNU Emacs, for example. It's not hard to see how this approach doesn't scale up well. The GNU GPLs are the license for many GNU programs. Today GNU GPL v3 is the latest such license and the license itself and GNU's pages about that license make it clear that the proper full name of this license is "GNU General Public License".
If you're like a lot of people, you already have a cell phone (more properly known as a tracker because that's what it does most of the time) so you already have the same spying capability in your house, on your person, and you likely choose to carry that around with you everywhere you go. Even technical users don't expect that the portable spy devices are listening whenever the proprietor wishes (and there's no indicator to tell the user when the mic is hot). You shouldn't own a tracker either.
This isn't quite true. People just need to insist on ownership. We are guilty of allowing commercial interests to lull us with making it easy at the cost of ownership.
There are plenty of gratis programs that implement limitations which work against the user over which the user has no control. There used to be a small program for detecting the "click of death" which was said to signal an imminent failure in an Iomega Zip drive (which were once much more popular). The program was written in assembly by a self-described security researcher and the user was allowed to download and run only the compiled executable for Windows but the program cost no money. That program had code in it that checked the date and would not run the program's main function if the program ran after a certain date. Had that program been free software (software the user is free to run, inspect, share, and modify) one could still make use of its routines today across operating systems. This might still be handy to people trying to retrieve data from Zip disks, for example. But the program was proprietary and carried a proprietary dependency (ran only on a proprietary OS).
So this teaches us that DRM (digital restrictions management) is a direct outcome of the power of a proprietor. The commercial factors are side issues; if we had free software to read the books, play the media, and do other things we could use them instead of the proprietary software each DRM implementation depends on and we could let commercial organizations sell us copies of free software and provide support and improved code at a fee. I'd happily pay for commercial support for free software I sometimes need fixed or improved. The real enemy is software non-freedom. And we need to speak out against those who claim that strongly copylefted free software will kill people (as automobile manufacturers have told people).
Your comments are doubly inactionable. You suggest that the proposed legislation is not useful but you don't say why you think it is not useful. And you don't write up legislation for your congressmembers that would implement what you think is useful. Lobby groups are well known to write legislation for Congress to pass; you should take your ideas and put them into language that can get passed (the legal equivalent of "code or..." minus the foul language and telling people to not participate in free speech).
As I've said multipletimes before, Firefox's saving grace is that it is free software—software we're free to run, inspect, share, and modify. If you don't trust Firefox you can make it trustworthy by examining what it does, changing it to meet your needs, and share improved copies to help your community. These freedoms are a clear difference from proprietary (user-subjugating) software such as Microsoft's browsers, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera. These freedoms are why Firefox is the basis of so many other browsers such as Tor Browser (making it easier to web browse on Tor) and LibreFox (which aims to "enforc[e] privacy and security of Firefox without forking the project").
Today you have hardware that respects your freedom and free distros to choose from. You aren't facing the same situation RMS did when he started GNU. You're not acknowledging this enormous difference. Also, the GNU GPL v2 (a license the FSF wrote and RMS is a chief author of) doesn't "allow" proprietary software drivers into the Linux kernel. Allowing that is a choice of Linux kernel copyright holders who don't sue, encourage other Linux kernel copyright holders not to sue, or pass on copies of that variant of the Linux kernel with the proprietary software intact. No license can do any better because copyright holders always have the final say on whom they'll choose to sue.
Again it's GNU that has a solution to this (which you also don't acknowledge): GNU Linux-libre—a variant of the Linux kernel with the non-free software removed. This project and the essay that started this/. thread fully acknowledge that GNU Linux-libre won't run on all of the hardware Torvalds' variant of the Linux kernel will run on. But that's not the point; the point is keeping users in control of their computers, respecting their software freedom, and showing that one can do computing with a fully-free system running on fully-free hardware. The FSF doesn't "allow binary blobs to be a part of an OS", some distributors of GNU/Linux do that. No FSF-approved free distro includes non-free software and the free distro guidelines go beyond that to push for pointing to only free software. The user is free to add non-free software and/or repos to their system if they wish but an FSF-approved distro won't do that by default.
You claim "the free-software revolution is stalled" but offer no evidence to support the claim. It seems you overlook what the FSF is doing to promote software freedom and misstate the responsibility the FSF has for the Linux kernel project as a whole.
Perhaps, it can demonstrate that compromise and practicality are sometimes necessary in a functioning society and not just a "deal with the devil". Rigidity to an ideology can often be more destructive and counter-productive over the long run. Progress comes from change not stasis.
Your statement is vague and not wise without applying it to an actual situation, so please be specific. As it stands you're replying to someone who has a far better track record of applying practical consideration to his decisions than is commonly received or reflected on sites like these where namecalling is the norm (if you don't believe me, consider that "crackpot" is one of the tags applied to this thread). This "crackpot's" "rigidity" has helped create a free operating system and many programs licensed to preserve software freedom despite so many people flatly insisting a free OS was a fantasy. Despite the current push for rewriting copylefted free software and releasing the rewrites under pushover (non-copylefted) free licenses, the GNU GPL is widely used. We have a huge collection of wise essays demonstrating critical thinking skills and appreciation for social solidarity to refer to for the foreseeable future. Accomplishments like that don't deserve ridicule or vague critique.
We will never sell-out our and compromise our principles. It would be like murder.
Failing to post to social media is not like murder. But more importantly, one could reasonably read this as being true no matter what happens. One merely has to understand that whatever the organization does, no matter how contradictory today's choices are given yesterday's statements of uncompromising principles, the organization always acts in line with their current principles.
Consider that organization representatives sometimes lie (or is that "compromise their principles"?). Cloudflare tells the public "Even if it were able to, Cloudflare does not monitor, evaluate, judge or store content appearing on a third party website." and Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said "We're the plumbers of the internet. We make the pipes work but it's not right for us to inspect what is or isn't going through the pipes." even as pro-ISIS websites used Cloudflare's website caching service. It was reported that changing this would be submitting to "mob rule". From the coverage on Gizmodo.com
Prince explained in an internal email to staffers that he doesn't think CEOs of internet companies should be in the position of policing content on their networks—he told Gizmodo he thinks that's a job that should ultimately be left up to law enforcement if the content violates the law—but felt pushed to act because the operators of the Daily Stormer are "assholes."
"I realized there was no way we were going to have that conversation with people calling us Nazis," Prince said. "The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them and that is the opposite of everything we believe. That was the tipping point for me."
Rather than post a followup, or use his apparently ready-made access to media to let everyone know that Matthew Prince and Cloudflare do not agree with the Daily Stormer's politics but stand up for free speech and not "inspect[ing] what is or isn't going through the pipes", on August 16, 2017 Prince said he "woke up [one] morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them [the Daily Stormer] off the Internet." (really, he was kicking Daily Stormer off Cloudflare). It seems wise to be prepared for a here-and-gone-again service model even from organizations whose principles once seemed so clear and uncompromised.
The digital hoarders really killed that service, ratter than the regular users.
No, the unsustainable terms of service ("unlimited") were the problem and that was always strictly under the control of the service provider, in fact that offer predates any of the clients using the service for what it was said to be. Microsoft made the same bad choice with its storage system which was once offered on an "unlimited" tier. Nobody has unlimited quantities of anything so offering such is unrealistic. It's not a client's fault for taking a service provider at face value and using what is on offer. It's the service provider's job to offer something they can sustain. Blaming the client for maintaining the provider's business is either a gross misunderstanding of who is in charge of the service or an attempt to shift blame and hold a service provider harmless for their unsustainable ideas.
I don't know of anyone who wished for video calls or uses them now that webcam hardware is so commonly available. I know of people who go to some effort to disable video in their calls (apparently including Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg who probably has access to a lot of webcams given how many people still use Facebook).
[...]but now that it's dead-easy we're all monkey about it. Grow up, humanity. Nobody cares about your mundane life.
Apparently the NSA and their many partners do, and trading data about people is very big business as well. The evidence from Ed Snowden alone is far more compelling than your summary and actually informative. Mass surveillance simply doesn't work as you claim. As Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras, and others have told us for years: mass surveillance is non-discriminatory. Data is collected en masse (NSA's strategy is "collect it all" not "collect some of the data"), decrypted, indexed, retained, and searched through later. The impression I got from Snowden's description was that much like someone using a web search engine, what's deemed interesting (what somebody "cares about") is decided at search time. So it's impossible to conclude that "Nobody cares about your mundane life" because the data you generate helps a lot of businesses every day. Another example is "LOVEINT"—people with access to this collected data using it to track what their love interests or spouses (current or former in both cases) are doing, perhaps another more clear-cut counterexample to your evidenceless claim.
As I write this your post is moderated "informative" but I can't find a single part of your post that points to any information or backs any of its claims with evidence.
Richard Stallman isn't listed as the author of the "Dating is a free software issues" essay, Molly de Blanc is.
People used to "rant and rave" about how one was "living in a dreamland" to think that they could run a computer with a completely free OS. Fortunately people who fought for software freedom didn't take those criticisms seriously and now we have multiple completely free OSes. It seems that what was readily declared to be fantastic is becoming real thanks to those who push past the objectors and the namecallers. What matters is the substance of what we fight for—lazy convenience accepting whatever someone else wants to do to our computers, or demanding control over our computers and making it possible to do various jobs while retaining our software freedom.
Apple is part of the UAE's "secret hacking team of American mercenaries" which seek to "help the United Arab Emirates engage in surveillance of other governments, militants and human rights activists critical of the monarchy".
Some of what Apple won't comment on: "The operatives utilized an arsenal of cyber tools, including a cutting-edge espionage platform known as Karma, in which Raven operatives say they hacked into the iPhones of hundreds of activists, political leaders and suspected terrorists." (source: the aforementioned Reuters article)
Additional commentary from the only comedy news program worth watching, Redacted Tonight.
Microsoft Office doesn't offer the compatibility its proponents claim. I've seen a lot of documents that don't render the same way across successive versions of Microsoft Office, so forward compatibility is shot. Microsoft Office 365 won't load and render all of the documents Microsoft Office 2016 (with all updates) will generate, so compatibility across current versions is not there either. Word also isn't designed for large documents; I never would have advised using Microsoft Word to begin this documentation project, but I wasn't asked when the project began so now the question is what to do with this huge document that doesn't work as it should on Microsoft's OS (either Windows 7 or 10) running Microsoft's word processor with all of Microsoft's updates applied.
A few weeks ago a Word user generated a multi-hundred page document with Word from Microsoft Office 2016 and she was stuck with choosing between watching Word 2016/32-bit crash relatively slowly when editing the document (so she had some time to make a few edits and then watch the app die), Word 2016/64-bit crash more quickly, or Word/Office365 render the document so far away from anything reasonable it wasn't worth using. LibreOffice Writer also didn't render the document perfectly, but it did not crash so it was wiser to spend time fixing the lack of fidelity there and continue using LibreOffice than not knowing when the entire app would die and take the last edits after the most recent save with it.
So I'm not convinced that even within Microsoft their programmers have written code to properly support even the currently-supported variants of Word documents. I have found this to be true across every version of Microsoft Office, this is not news to me. When considering the cost of Microsoft Office365, consider how much it will cost you to lose fidelity of documents even within Microsoft's proprietary software. I believe that cost is too high: I wouldn't trust any document I cared about to a program that locked me into their way of doing things. There's just too much at risk on top of the awful anti-user problems facing all proprietary software users.
You mean the ones that cannot run Group FaceTime to begin with
Perhaps they could if Apple weren't preventing users from implementing it themselves via the power of proprietary software. The grandparent poster's sentiment is correct but comes from the wrong angle—the proper argument which all proprietors lose to is to point out how proprietary software is anti-user. Keeping devices working for the user is far more important economically to the user and far more important to the ecology than taking the pro-proprietor angle. And those values are far more important to our well-being and ability to continue to live on this planet, thus making them far more important values overall.
No, nor did they bother to immediately disclose this even to their users. That would interfere with the effectiveness of the spying. Most people learned about this from Ed Snowden's disclosures (three cheers for Snowden!). So when Apple tells you "What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone" there's no reason to believe them. After all, I'll bet people running iTunes thought they were getting a media player, not opening a remotely-exploitable hole despite Apple knowing about this problem for years and licensing iTunes such that nobody else was allowed to fix it and distribute an improved version of the software. The power of proprietary software (non-free software, user-subjugating software) is what makes this entire story indistinguishable from one spy agency telling other competing spies to buzz off—on Apple's turf the users are exclusively Apple's to exploit.
A clear example of how software non-freedom (proprietary, user-subjugating software) hurts users. This is a relatively minor, therefore fortunate, example in that (as far as the Xbox goes) it's chiefly for recreational use and nobody's lives depends on this. But as more important systems take on the same network-bound DRM schemes, people will be needlessly impoverished, needlessly suffer reputation damage, needlessly lose jobs, and even needlessly die from things like this. It's a good thing that medical equipment, for instance, is not networked and under the control of those at the console (we also know this from what ought to be common sense and the stories about CPAP machines ratting out their users to insurance companies and medical organizations).
Technologically speaking, you should be able to host your own server for these games and thus keep playing against opponents without involving a single central authority you can't replace. Software freedom would give you the freedom you need to improve the game to implement this. A single point of failure central authority, however, also puts you at the mercy of that authority when they want to stop you from playing the game (and by "you" I mean cherry-picked individuals, sets of users, or all users—their choice of users)
I'm sure some of this has already happened and it's only a matter of time until there are enough stories we can point to to create an organized map of them like what the GNU Project has done to back up their claim that proprietary software is often malware.
Apparently you want the Firefox developers to do all of the programming and research work for you so you can have this. I'm guessing you'd also like all of this to happen gratis. It seems to me that you would be well served to look into hiring someone to deliver this to you. You want things one could theoretically pay for since Firefox is free (as in freedom) software. I suggest that you ask developers to repackage a Firefox derivative that meets your needs.
The most telling thing about this is so few other browsers offer this as a possibility; the other popular browsers are proprietary so this simply isn't an option and you get "the new crap" "foisted upon you" (as an anonymous poster wrongly said).
You should be sure about how you feel about this: possibilities are better than a proprietary blob and giving thanks is better than not giving thanks. It's a shame that Firefox developers can't get the credit and thanks they deserve for delivering such a fine browser to us while simultaneously respecting our software freedom. Thanks Firefox hackers for distributing a useful, powerful, feature-filled browser to me that respects my software freedom.
Kudos to him for preserving a slice of software history. Not only has he collected a rich historical collection preserving the evolution of spreadsheet software, but from the article he's also interviewed and corresponded with the software pioneers from the field, most of whom are in their 80s and 90s now, preserving their historical testimony. Without him an important part of software history might otherwise have been forgotten. I suspect his collection, and his research into the field, will be an invaluable archive for those interested in computing history.
And computing today: the people who work on making sure LibreOffice can import old and obscure file formats should encourage him to share his collection with the world by uploading these executables to archive.org so the old programs can be run on emulators. Generating spreadsheet files with old software, doing the reverse engineering on the files, and making LibreOffice better (via the Document Liberation work, I imagine) would help the public and improve free (as in freedom) software at the same time. It would be great to be able to tell someone with, say, old Amiga and old MS-DOS spreadsheet programs that they can load their old files into something modern like LibreOffice Calc or Gnumeric and help them switch to a modern supported operating system that won't be a nuisance to maintain.
It's a shame that his interest in preserving software history is being met with more mockery than support by the slashdot community.
A sentiment I've maintained for years; try reading just about any/. story (they virtually all have something to do with software freedom) and see how frequently the audience here supports proprietary software yet they also lament DRM schemes (which are impossible without proprietary software). These posters also have nothing to say when some proprietor uses their unjust power over the user (such as the time a proprietary flight simulator developer installed stored password readers+uploaders on all of their clients computers without the user's knowledge or consent). This is reinforced by the censorship system known as "moderation" which carries multiple ugly biases that stymie reasonable conversation. Fortunately not all/. readers and posters express such ignorance and eschew software freedom.
That you would conflate life and death information about US empire (as are readily found in WikiLeaks publications) with personal peccadilloes about Assange speaks very badly about you and your priorities, and says nothing about Assange or WikiLeaks. Greenwald has made an impressive reputation for keeping his comments on very important matters of state and not letting personal trifles steer him from informing us about what we ought to consider. So much of this ad job promoting these leaks reads the opposite way: Emma Best's own words, the coverage of Emma Best's work here come off as vague attempts at trying to downplay the importance of WikiLeaks and distract away from the content of the leaks via vastly overstated claims about Assange's ego. I don't care how big his ego is; given the importance of the leaks WikiLeaks and Greenwald have published I say they're both incredibly important to the public. And guilt by association with parties (it's assumed) we're not supposed to like (oh no -- Russians!) is remarkably clueless (such as the recent New York Times article about Emma Best) given that the NYT was fine to base articles on WikiLeaks leaks not that long ago.
The anonymous post that included "Trust but verify." was right; only software freedom gives us the best known defense against malware. I don't agree with post moderation but if a discussion forum will have such censorious distractions, posts like that deserve far more than 0 points.
Your post, on the other hand, in which you claim that software freedom is "bullshit" ironically highlights how valuable software freedom is: separating functionality into components solves nothing if those components are implemented with non-free (user-subjugating, proprietary) software. Whatever value the separation purports to grant users is entirely lost by not respecting a user's software freedom. In fact we know that proprietary software is often malware.
If Privacy is really dead, then Scott should publish his Name, Address, Account Numbers and passwords, location schedule, and DNA profile and always keep them all current. Until then, it's NOT.
I understand your larger point, and I quite agree that anyone who claims they don't care about privacy is lying, but you'll understand if I don't want someone else's choices determining the value of my privacy. I say privacy matters to us all even if someone claims otherwise (as glib sycophants on/. sometimes claim without challenge or evidence).
Just because I have nothing to hide doesn't mean that I want you to see.
Actually, everyone has something to hide. And that's not even the strongest reason why we all need privacy.
Glenn Greenwald was discussing privacy with Noam Chomsky and Ed Snowden and Greenwald brought up his email account just to put the lie to people who argue that they have nothing to hide (around 29m37s). He tells them to email him the credentials of every account they have—not just the nice accounts like work, email, bank, and phone, he said—all of the accounts including the accounts people keep secret from their spouses and significant others. He tells them he intends to snoop around on those accounts to see what they've been doing, and so that he can become their impostor. After all, if they have nothing to hide then they have nothing to fear by telling him what they're really up to.
The result? Greenwald said:
To this day, not a single person has taken me up on this offer. I check that email account really frequently and it is a very lonely and desolate place. And the reason is because we really understand instinctively, without this abstract debate, why privacy is so critical. We are social animals: we have a need for other people to know and see what we're doing, which is why we post things about ourselves online. But we also have a need to do things without other people watching because when other people are watching what you're doing, you're much more likely to engage in decision making that is the byproduct of societal orthodoxies or external expectations and not a byproduct of your own agency and independence.
This also gets into why privacy matters most—a far stronger reason to value privacy both in the abstract and in one's own life is that "Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance." as Bruce Schneier points out in an essay he posted:
We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.
"likely came AFTER" comes with no evidence to justify the assertion of likelihood. Again. And this evidenceless assertion as we get yet another Russiagate "bombshell" from anonymous sources (this time with Robert Mueller, Russiagate-supporter's hero, saying it's not so). In the end the DNC emails still strike me as a relatively minor detail overshadowed by the importance of what those emails said. In other words, the DNC emails continue to be consistent with someone on the inside leaking them, but regardless of how they got out what they say is far more important and not at all helpful to make the Clinton campaign or DNC corporation look like organizations worth supporting (but if you want collusion, there it was). Another year of things not looking good for Russiagate as Jimmy Dore and Aaron Maté discuss.
We need a Creative Commons sci/fi universe that people can create from instead of using some copyrighted story.
Most Creative Commons licenses mean that licensors retain their copyright on the work. The issue isn't whether the work is copyrighted, the issue is in what rights licensees get. But there are more works being elevated to the public domain[1], so one is free to draw on those if one desires an already-written story.
[1] I say "elevated to" rather than "falling into" because I don't think of the public domain as being of lower value to the public. I see "falling into the public domain" as propagandistic and I think it's worthwhile to get people to reconsider that oft-repeated language.
Slashdot Mirror
It's only a security kerfuffle because Microsoft got lucky that Hanno Bock didn't use the power Microsoft handed him. From what I can tell, Microsoft's default start menu is populated with pictures and links to news stories (typical corporate news rubbish). Microsoft made an extremely poor decision to set up the default start menu the way they did, drawing anything from an Internet-based source without explicit user approval and consent. Then Microsoft lost control of the domain feeding that info (not the first time Microsoft has lost control over something that caused them to try and cover with public relations; I recall another domain they lost control over and, more recently, a chatbot they allowed to be programmed by public user input).
Bock could have silently fed content to users with other messages making it look like Microsoft suddenly favored causes they actually don't, like being anti-war or pro-software freedom. Or Bock could have located an exploit for the code that populates and draws those rectangles in the start menu and fed (what Microsoft often calls) "specially constructed" input designed to take advantage of those bugs and perhaps run code on the system. Some other user who came into the power Bock did might have made different choices which more clearly and publicly exposed Microsoft's thoroughly shitty design and the consequences of software non-freedom (where only Microsoft can fix the software that may still be vulnerable on millions of Windows 10 systems).
While the initial "G" in GNU does mean GNU (GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix"), the "G" of "GPL" stands for "General"—General Public License. The GNU GPLs are so widely used and discussed that one can get away with saying "GPL" to mean one or more versions of the GNU General Public License. 'General' here means not specifically written for a particular GNU program. When GNU started different GNU programs had their own license—GNU Emacs General Public License for GNU Emacs, for example. It's not hard to see how this approach doesn't scale up well. The GNU GPLs are the license for many GNU programs. Today GNU GPL v3 is the latest such license and the license itself and GNU's pages about that license make it clear that the proper full name of this license is "GNU General Public License".
If you're like a lot of people, you already have a cell phone (more properly known as a tracker because that's what it does most of the time) so you already have the same spying capability in your house, on your person, and you likely choose to carry that around with you everywhere you go. Even technical users don't expect that the portable spy devices are listening whenever the proprietor wishes (and there's no indicator to tell the user when the mic is hot). You shouldn't own a tracker either.
There are plenty of gratis programs that implement limitations which work against the user over which the user has no control. There used to be a small program for detecting the "click of death" which was said to signal an imminent failure in an Iomega Zip drive (which were once much more popular). The program was written in assembly by a self-described security researcher and the user was allowed to download and run only the compiled executable for Windows but the program cost no money. That program had code in it that checked the date and would not run the program's main function if the program ran after a certain date. Had that program been free software (software the user is free to run, inspect, share, and modify) one could still make use of its routines today across operating systems. This might still be handy to people trying to retrieve data from Zip disks, for example. But the program was proprietary and carried a proprietary dependency (ran only on a proprietary OS).
So this teaches us that DRM (digital restrictions management) is a direct outcome of the power of a proprietor. The commercial factors are side issues; if we had free software to read the books, play the media, and do other things we could use them instead of the proprietary software each DRM implementation depends on and we could let commercial organizations sell us copies of free software and provide support and improved code at a fee. I'd happily pay for commercial support for free software I sometimes need fixed or improved. The real enemy is software non-freedom. And we need to speak out against those who claim that strongly copylefted free software will kill people (as automobile manufacturers have told people).
Your comments are doubly inactionable. You suggest that the proposed legislation is not useful but you don't say why you think it is not useful. And you don't write up legislation for your congressmembers that would implement what you think is useful. Lobby groups are well known to write legislation for Congress to pass; you should take your ideas and put them into language that can get passed (the legal equivalent of "code or ..." minus the foul language and telling people to not participate in free speech).
As I've said multiple times before, Firefox's saving grace is that it is free software—software we're free to run, inspect, share, and modify. If you don't trust Firefox you can make it trustworthy by examining what it does, changing it to meet your needs, and share improved copies to help your community. These freedoms are a clear difference from proprietary (user-subjugating) software such as Microsoft's browsers, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera. These freedoms are why Firefox is the basis of so many other browsers such as Tor Browser (making it easier to web browse on Tor) and LibreFox (which aims to "enforc[e] privacy and security of Firefox without forking the project").
Today you have hardware that respects your freedom and free distros to choose from. You aren't facing the same situation RMS did when he started GNU. You're not acknowledging this enormous difference. Also, the GNU GPL v2 (a license the FSF wrote and RMS is a chief author of) doesn't "allow" proprietary software drivers into the Linux kernel. Allowing that is a choice of Linux kernel copyright holders who don't sue, encourage other Linux kernel copyright holders not to sue, or pass on copies of that variant of the Linux kernel with the proprietary software intact. No license can do any better because copyright holders always have the final say on whom they'll choose to sue.
Again it's GNU that has a solution to this (which you also don't acknowledge): GNU Linux-libre—a variant of the Linux kernel with the non-free software removed. This project and the essay that started this /. thread fully acknowledge that GNU Linux-libre won't run on all of the hardware Torvalds' variant of the Linux kernel will run on. But that's not the point; the point is keeping users in control of their computers, respecting their software freedom, and showing that one can do computing with a fully-free system running on fully-free hardware. The FSF doesn't "allow binary blobs to be a part of an OS", some distributors of GNU/Linux do that. No FSF-approved free distro includes non-free software and the free distro guidelines go beyond that to push for pointing to only free software. The user is free to add non-free software and/or repos to their system if they wish but an FSF-approved distro won't do that by default.
You claim "the free-software revolution is stalled" but offer no evidence to support the claim. It seems you overlook what the FSF is doing to promote software freedom and misstate the responsibility the FSF has for the Linux kernel project as a whole.
Your statement is vague and not wise without applying it to an actual situation, so please be specific. As it stands you're replying to someone who has a far better track record of applying practical consideration to his decisions than is commonly received or reflected on sites like these where namecalling is the norm (if you don't believe me, consider that "crackpot" is one of the tags applied to this thread). This "crackpot's" "rigidity" has helped create a free operating system and many programs licensed to preserve software freedom despite so many people flatly insisting a free OS was a fantasy. Despite the current push for rewriting copylefted free software and releasing the rewrites under pushover (non-copylefted) free licenses, the GNU GPL is widely used. We have a huge collection of wise essays demonstrating critical thinking skills and appreciation for social solidarity to refer to for the foreseeable future. Accomplishments like that don't deserve ridicule or vague critique.
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2019/mar/13/lf-community-bridge/ is more understandable than the article we're pointed to in this /. story. This blog post also makes a number of interesting counterpoints worth considering.
Failing to post to social media is not like murder. But more importantly, one could reasonably read this as being true no matter what happens. One merely has to understand that whatever the organization does, no matter how contradictory today's choices are given yesterday's statements of uncompromising principles, the organization always acts in line with their current principles.
Consider that organization representatives sometimes lie (or is that "compromise their principles"?). Cloudflare tells the public "Even if it were able to, Cloudflare does not monitor, evaluate, judge or store content appearing on a third party website." and Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said "We're the plumbers of the internet. We make the pipes work but it's not right for us to inspect what is or isn't going through the pipes." even as pro-ISIS websites used Cloudflare's website caching service. It was reported that changing this would be submitting to "mob rule". From the coverage on Gizmodo.com
Rather than post a followup, or use his apparently ready-made access to media to let everyone know that Matthew Prince and Cloudflare do not agree with the Daily Stormer's politics but stand up for free speech and not "inspect[ing] what is or isn't going through the pipes", on August 16, 2017 Prince said he "woke up [one] morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them [the Daily Stormer] off the Internet." (really, he was kicking Daily Stormer off Cloudflare). It seems wise to be prepared for a here-and-gone-again service model even from organizations whose principles once seemed so clear and uncompromised.
No, the unsustainable terms of service ("unlimited") were the problem and that was always strictly under the control of the service provider, in fact that offer predates any of the clients using the service for what it was said to be. Microsoft made the same bad choice with its storage system which was once offered on an "unlimited" tier. Nobody has unlimited quantities of anything so offering such is unrealistic. It's not a client's fault for taking a service provider at face value and using what is on offer. It's the service provider's job to offer something they can sustain. Blaming the client for maintaining the provider's business is either a gross misunderstanding of who is in charge of the service or an attempt to shift blame and hold a service provider harmless for their unsustainable ideas.
I don't know of anyone who wished for video calls or uses them now that webcam hardware is so commonly available. I know of people who go to some effort to disable video in their calls (apparently including Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg who probably has access to a lot of webcams given how many people still use Facebook).
Apparently the NSA and their many partners do, and trading data about people is very big business as well. The evidence from Ed Snowden alone is far more compelling than your summary and actually informative. Mass surveillance simply doesn't work as you claim. As Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras, and others have told us for years: mass surveillance is non-discriminatory. Data is collected en masse (NSA's strategy is "collect it all" not "collect some of the data"), decrypted, indexed, retained, and searched through later. The impression I got from Snowden's description was that much like someone using a web search engine, what's deemed interesting (what somebody "cares about") is decided at search time. So it's impossible to conclude that "Nobody cares about your mundane life" because the data you generate helps a lot of businesses every day. Another example is "LOVEINT"—people with access to this collected data using it to track what their love interests or spouses (current or former in both cases) are doing, perhaps another more clear-cut counterexample to your evidenceless claim.
As I write this your post is moderated "informative" but I can't find a single part of your post that points to any information or backs any of its claims with evidence.
Richard Stallman isn't listed as the author of the "Dating is a free software issues" essay, Molly de Blanc is.
People used to "rant and rave" about how one was "living in a dreamland" to think that they could run a computer with a completely free OS. Fortunately people who fought for software freedom didn't take those criticisms seriously and now we have multiple completely free OSes. It seems that what was readily declared to be fantastic is becoming real thanks to those who push past the objectors and the namecallers. What matters is the substance of what we fight for—lazy convenience accepting whatever someone else wants to do to our computers, or demanding control over our computers and making it possible to do various jobs while retaining our software freedom.
Apple is part of the UAE's "secret hacking team of American mercenaries" which seek to "help the United Arab Emirates engage in surveillance of other governments, militants and human rights activists critical of the monarchy".
What Apple tells people via its ads: "What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone"
Some of what Apple won't comment on: "The operatives utilized an arsenal of cyber tools, including a cutting-edge espionage platform known as Karma, in which Raven operatives say they hacked into the iPhones of hundreds of activists, political leaders and suspected terrorists." (source: the aforementioned Reuters article)
Additional commentary from the only comedy news program worth watching, Redacted Tonight.
Microsoft Office doesn't offer the compatibility its proponents claim. I've seen a lot of documents that don't render the same way across successive versions of Microsoft Office, so forward compatibility is shot. Microsoft Office 365 won't load and render all of the documents Microsoft Office 2016 (with all updates) will generate, so compatibility across current versions is not there either. Word also isn't designed for large documents; I never would have advised using Microsoft Word to begin this documentation project, but I wasn't asked when the project began so now the question is what to do with this huge document that doesn't work as it should on Microsoft's OS (either Windows 7 or 10) running Microsoft's word processor with all of Microsoft's updates applied.
A few weeks ago a Word user generated a multi-hundred page document with Word from Microsoft Office 2016 and she was stuck with choosing between watching Word 2016/32-bit crash relatively slowly when editing the document (so she had some time to make a few edits and then watch the app die), Word 2016/64-bit crash more quickly, or Word/Office365 render the document so far away from anything reasonable it wasn't worth using. LibreOffice Writer also didn't render the document perfectly, but it did not crash so it was wiser to spend time fixing the lack of fidelity there and continue using LibreOffice than not knowing when the entire app would die and take the last edits after the most recent save with it.
So I'm not convinced that even within Microsoft their programmers have written code to properly support even the currently-supported variants of Word documents. I have found this to be true across every version of Microsoft Office, this is not news to me. When considering the cost of Microsoft Office365, consider how much it will cost you to lose fidelity of documents even within Microsoft's proprietary software. I believe that cost is too high: I wouldn't trust any document I cared about to a program that locked me into their way of doing things. There's just too much at risk on top of the awful anti-user problems facing all proprietary software users.
Perhaps they could if Apple weren't preventing users from implementing it themselves via the power of proprietary software. The grandparent poster's sentiment is correct but comes from the wrong angle—the proper argument which all proprietors lose to is to point out how proprietary software is anti-user. Keeping devices working for the user is far more important economically to the user and far more important to the ecology than taking the pro-proprietor angle. And those values are far more important to our well-being and ability to continue to live on this planet, thus making them far more important values overall.
No, nor did they bother to immediately disclose this even to their users. That would interfere with the effectiveness of the spying. Most people learned about this from Ed Snowden's disclosures (three cheers for Snowden!). So when Apple tells you "What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone" there's no reason to believe them. After all, I'll bet people running iTunes thought they were getting a media player, not opening a remotely-exploitable hole despite Apple knowing about this problem for years and licensing iTunes such that nobody else was allowed to fix it and distribute an improved version of the software. The power of proprietary software (non-free software, user-subjugating software) is what makes this entire story indistinguishable from one spy agency telling other competing spies to buzz off—on Apple's turf the users are exclusively Apple's to exploit.
A clear example of how software non-freedom (proprietary, user-subjugating software) hurts users. This is a relatively minor, therefore fortunate, example in that (as far as the Xbox goes) it's chiefly for recreational use and nobody's lives depends on this. But as more important systems take on the same network-bound DRM schemes, people will be needlessly impoverished, needlessly suffer reputation damage, needlessly lose jobs, and even needlessly die from things like this. It's a good thing that medical equipment, for instance, is not networked and under the control of those at the console (we also know this from what ought to be common sense and the stories about CPAP machines ratting out their users to insurance companies and medical organizations).
Technologically speaking, you should be able to host your own server for these games and thus keep playing against opponents without involving a single central authority you can't replace. Software freedom would give you the freedom you need to improve the game to implement this. A single point of failure central authority, however, also puts you at the mercy of that authority when they want to stop you from playing the game (and by "you" I mean cherry-picked individuals, sets of users, or all users—their choice of users)
I'm sure some of this has already happened and it's only a matter of time until there are enough stories we can point to to create an organized map of them like what the GNU Project has done to back up their claim that proprietary software is often malware.
Apparently you want the Firefox developers to do all of the programming and research work for you so you can have this. I'm guessing you'd also like all of this to happen gratis. It seems to me that you would be well served to look into hiring someone to deliver this to you. You want things one could theoretically pay for since Firefox is free (as in freedom) software. I suggest that you ask developers to repackage a Firefox derivative that meets your needs.
The most telling thing about this is so few other browsers offer this as a possibility; the other popular browsers are proprietary so this simply isn't an option and you get "the new crap" "foisted upon you" (as an anonymous poster wrongly said).
You should be sure about how you feel about this: possibilities are better than a proprietary blob and giving thanks is better than not giving thanks. It's a shame that Firefox developers can't get the credit and thanks they deserve for delivering such a fine browser to us while simultaneously respecting our software freedom. Thanks Firefox hackers for distributing a useful, powerful, feature-filled browser to me that respects my software freedom.
And computing today: the people who work on making sure LibreOffice can import old and obscure file formats should encourage him to share his collection with the world by uploading these executables to archive.org so the old programs can be run on emulators. Generating spreadsheet files with old software, doing the reverse engineering on the files, and making LibreOffice better (via the Document Liberation work, I imagine) would help the public and improve free (as in freedom) software at the same time. It would be great to be able to tell someone with, say, old Amiga and old MS-DOS spreadsheet programs that they can load their old files into something modern like LibreOffice Calc or Gnumeric and help them switch to a modern supported operating system that won't be a nuisance to maintain.
A sentiment I've maintained for years; try reading just about any /. story (they virtually all have something to do with software freedom) and see how frequently the audience here supports proprietary software yet they also lament DRM schemes (which are impossible without proprietary software). These posters also have nothing to say when some proprietor uses their unjust power over the user (such as the time a proprietary flight simulator developer installed stored password readers+uploaders on all of their clients computers without the user's knowledge or consent). This is reinforced by the censorship system known as "moderation" which carries multiple ugly biases that stymie reasonable conversation. Fortunately not all /. readers and posters express such ignorance and eschew software freedom.
That you would conflate life and death information about US empire (as are readily found in WikiLeaks publications) with personal peccadilloes about Assange speaks very badly about you and your priorities, and says nothing about Assange or WikiLeaks. Greenwald has made an impressive reputation for keeping his comments on very important matters of state and not letting personal trifles steer him from informing us about what we ought to consider. So much of this ad job promoting these leaks reads the opposite way: Emma Best's own words, the coverage of Emma Best's work here come off as vague attempts at trying to downplay the importance of WikiLeaks and distract away from the content of the leaks via vastly overstated claims about Assange's ego. I don't care how big his ego is; given the importance of the leaks WikiLeaks and Greenwald have published I say they're both incredibly important to the public. And guilt by association with parties (it's assumed) we're not supposed to like (oh no -- Russians!) is remarkably clueless (such as the recent New York Times article about Emma Best) given that the NYT was fine to base articles on WikiLeaks leaks not that long ago.
The anonymous post that included "Trust but verify." was right; only software freedom gives us the best known defense against malware. I don't agree with post moderation but if a discussion forum will have such censorious distractions, posts like that deserve far more than 0 points.
Your post, on the other hand, in which you claim that software freedom is "bullshit" ironically highlights how valuable software freedom is: separating functionality into components solves nothing if those components are implemented with non-free (user-subjugating, proprietary) software. Whatever value the separation purports to grant users is entirely lost by not respecting a user's software freedom. In fact we know that proprietary software is often malware.
I understand your larger point, and I quite agree that anyone who claims they don't care about privacy is lying, but you'll understand if I don't want someone else's choices determining the value of my privacy. I say privacy matters to us all even if someone claims otherwise (as glib sycophants on /. sometimes claim without challenge or evidence).
Actually, everyone has something to hide. And that's not even the strongest reason why we all need privacy.
Glenn Greenwald was discussing privacy with Noam Chomsky and Ed Snowden and Greenwald brought up his email account just to put the lie to people who argue that they have nothing to hide (around 29m37s). He tells them to email him the credentials of every account they have—not just the nice accounts like work, email, bank, and phone, he said—all of the accounts including the accounts people keep secret from their spouses and significant others. He tells them he intends to snoop around on those accounts to see what they've been doing, and so that he can become their impostor. After all, if they have nothing to hide then they have nothing to fear by telling him what they're really up to.
The result? Greenwald said:
This also gets into why privacy matters most—a far stronger reason to value privacy both in the abstract and in one's own life is that "Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance." as Bruce Schneier points out in an essay he posted:
"likely came AFTER" comes with no evidence to justify the assertion of likelihood. Again. And this evidenceless assertion as we get yet another Russiagate "bombshell" from anonymous sources (this time with Robert Mueller, Russiagate-supporter's hero, saying it's not so). In the end the DNC emails still strike me as a relatively minor detail overshadowed by the importance of what those emails said. In other words, the DNC emails continue to be consistent with someone on the inside leaking them, but regardless of how they got out what they say is far more important and not at all helpful to make the Clinton campaign or DNC corporation look like organizations worth supporting (but if you want collusion, there it was). Another year of things not looking good for Russiagate as Jimmy Dore and Aaron Maté discuss.
Most Creative Commons licenses mean that licensors retain their copyright on the work. The issue isn't whether the work is copyrighted, the issue is in what rights licensees get. But there are more works being elevated to the public domain[1], so one is free to draw on those if one desires an already-written story.
[1] I say "elevated to" rather than "falling into" because I don't think of the public domain as being of lower value to the public. I see "falling into the public domain" as propagandistic and I think it's worthwhile to get people to reconsider that oft-repeated language.