And virtually everybody in the US intelligence apparatus disagrees with him.
The only statement we have which tries to make the opinion (an "assessment") from the Obama administration which I can't find anyone who seriously believes; nobody believes all of those agencies agree on anything much less that opinion. Sy Hersh says as much when he talked about that assessment and the media's lacking coverage of it ("What does an assessment mean? It's not a national intelligence estimate. If you had a real estimate you would have five or six dissents, people saying, 'cause I can tell you right now. One time they said 17 agencies all agreed. Oh really? The Coast Guard and the Air Force, they all agreed on it? And it was outrageous and nobody did that story."). Even the ostensible source of Russiagate stories—alleged collusion between some Russians and the Trump campaign—isn't looking so rosy for proponents anymore (it never looked relevant for the American public; Russiagate doesn't address the public's concerns it only reflects elite's interests). As the title indicates, "Mueller report PSA: Prepare for disappointment." and one report concurs. And this kind of downplaying has been done before. To think this is all being done in service of a neoliberalist losing a rigged election in search of an excuse to distract us from her culpability, what those leaked emails actually said, and possibly manufacture lies that could help foment a future war with Russia.
No they don't, they're morons.
Sources and evidence, not namecalling, are required to sustain convincing arguments.
Nelson's lawsuit is very informative for many reasons, one of which is it speaks loudly about why we should not trust Warner/Chappell's claims about their copyright assertions. We also have good reason not to trust any system or policy that encourages quickly shutting down service at the behest of a copyright claim. Copyright fraud is very real and there seems to be little incentive for claimants to fear making erroneous, exaggerated, or outright lying claims which continue decades of fraud as Warner/Chappell apparently did. As Nelson said in an interview with Al Jazeera, "A lot of people were duped into thinking that they had to pay for the song when in fact they didn't."
Red Letter Media's criticism is remarkably apt. Rich Evans pointed out something regarding how limited the Star Wars universe is when he, Mike Stoklasa, and Jay Bauman reviewed "Rogue One" about 10m28s in:
Rich Evans: The Star Wars universe—here's the dirty little secret—is very small and very limited. Whenever Star Wars tries to expand outside of Tie Fighters, X-Wings, Stormtroopers, and Lightsabres it's bad. You get—
Jay Bauman: You're talking about books and all the expanded universe shit?
Rich Evans: The prequels, you get the space bugs. Or you get "oh, it's a gritty war movie? Where's the fun and adventure? Where's the exact same thing that we did before?" It's Star Wars, I'm saying it's limited; it's a small little universe they can't do much with.
Mike Stoklasa: It's true. It feels so expansive and endless but really it's very narrow.
Jay Bauman: But they keep dredging up the same shit.
Mike Stoklasa: And you know what, we applaud those Marvel movies because they're really good at riding the line and finding everything that works. And here the think tank of studio executives said "Let's do something different but not too different, let's do something safe but not too safe. But how about we do this story and then we can have all these things in there that people remember but it's different, it's gonna be like a war movie.
Jay Bauman: We can bring Darth Vader back! Again!
Mike Stoklasa: Right. And we can have all the things that people remember. But they're there not because of fan service, they're there because they had to be there.
RLM also shows scenes in the ad for "Rogue One" that aren't in the movie (I think there's good reason to call this fraudulent on Disney's part).
As Rich Evans has pointed out, "Star Wars has been creatively bankrupt since 1983." and I concur. Evans said he enjoyed "Solo" but I figure that's slim pickings overall. There's just too much junk for me to want to spend money with a business that treats us horribly on important policy issues (copyright term extension, for instance) and is too scared to do anything interesting with some newly-acquired brand. When I consider the Disney-managed Star Wars stuff as a whole, I'm not incentivized to pay them to see it nor would I choose to spend more of my time watching it.
I find RLM's commentary to be far more interesting than a number of the things they watch and I'd understand if they decided they were no longer going to watch more of certain series (Star Wars movies, Star Trek Discovery TV show, to name a couple examples).
Bill Binney's group seems convinced the other way and makes a compelling case that the DNC's network connection wasn't fast enough for the data transfer to have been sent from the DNC to someone in Russia over the Internet. You cite no evidence to support your conclusion. You repeated a summary we're supposed to take for granted (given the repetition in corporate-friendly media) where every Russiagate story turns out to be completely untrue (such as Russians allegedly compromised the American power network via a power station in Vermont) or wildly overstated (such as trying to get us worked up over Russians buying social media ads totaling thousands of dollars). And all in service of what--covering for Hillary Clinton losing a rigged election to another political novice (I doubt many people in Illinois knew who Barack Obama was when he was that state's junior senator). Neoliberalism (a greater distance between rich and poor) and neoconservatism (more war) do a far better job of explaining why Mrs. Clinton couldn't convince enough voters in enough states with enough electoral votes to support her campaign than any Russians-did-it conspiracy theory. Candidate Trump (as opposed to President Trump) spoke against those values quite well (objecting to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, NAFTA, TPP, and mentioning Medicare for All once on "60 Minutes"). He didn't support much of that as president (he has ramped up war beyond Obama's ramp ups, signed trade deals that reintroduce anti-worker/anti-environmental policy, left US healthcare to the HMOs) but voters couldn't have known that for certain when they cast their vote. Comparing political records and what was said during campaigning it's no surprise some people (those who aren't elites, for example) wanted to give Trump their vote even if only to prevent Clinton from taking office.
Spying is big business. For example, spying is Google's main theme for which services to keep and which to do away with. Perhaps spying is driving these ancestry services as well. We already know these ancestry services share client data with police (1, 2, 3). Perhaps this data sharing is listed in the terms of service, but either way the sharing helps authorities augment their database and helps them perform more surveillance on ordinary citizens (most citizens don't commit crimes and therefore should not face such treatment; I'm not convinced those who commit crimes deserve this treatment but the vast majority of the public absolutely don't).
Have you seen what the Obfuscated C project can do?
Yes, obfuscated programming contests can serve as important learning tools for those who want to liberate themselves from continued ignorance driven by fear of the unknown.
I wouldn't trust NSA source code beyond 'print "Hello World";' and even that is iffy.
I think it's safe to say you won't be doing anything with the program (as far as you know) but programmers simply can't afford the luxury of being ignorant and non-programmers are not well served by inculcating fear. The result of your suggestion is to maintain a small group of elites who ought to be blindly trusted rather than kept in check through software freedom.
God help anyone who touches it if this release is binary only.
I'm not sure what constitutes 'touching' in this context but disassembling the binary and examining how that works (even running the code once understood on a spare computer or VM, perhaps one that isn't networked) should be encouraged particularly for the purposes of providing a free software replacement. Running the program temporarily might be necessary to provide a free software replacement. One hopes that any release comes with complete corresponding source code and build instructions. But really, there's no more reason to trust the proprietary software people run every day than there is to trust any code from the NSA. Proprietary software is often malware. We have no good reason to trust the NSA nor software proprietors; in fact, the proprietors sometimes work with the NSA (like when Microsoft specifically changed Skype to make it easier to spy upon).
Only Apple's bosses determine what "Apple's purpose" is. We come to know what Google's main line of business is (spying) because what now know that they have been doing (spying). Now that we know more about what Apple, Microsoft, and other proprietors do we can retroactively say what they've been doing. Snowden and others have provided irrefutable proof that software proprietors don't care about one's privacy and the structure of proprietary software was a long-time clue to those who understand the power of software non-freedom over the user regarding what is possible. Certainly keeping secrets from the user and putting in general-purpose holes into systems for future exploitation are the most practical means by which to do many things against the user's interests including but not limited to not looking out for their privacy. If Apple gets a pass amongst technocrats it's because some technically skilled users are easily distracted by details and not repeatedly taught to look at the bigger picture (software non-freedom is the root of virtually all of these abuses). Here are some more specific examples of these points:
Apple has blocked Telegram from upgrading its app for a month. This evidently has to do with Russia's command to Apple to block Telegram in Russia. The Telegram client is free software on other platforms, but no apps are free on an iThing.
As of 2015, Apple systematically bans apps that endorse abortion rights or would help women find abortions. This particular political slant affects other Apple services.
There are many more vulnerabilites listed here and here which could be turned into privacy violations depending on how these vulnerabilities or backdoors are used.
download firefox's source code, edit out google, compile, use it.
Precisely: use your software freedom with Firefox—make Firefox do what you want it to do yourself, or ask someone to edit out the stuff you don't like, or pay them to do this on your behalf, or get together with others and pool your development/funding efforts. You have options with free software which you don't have with almost every other major browser because they're all proprietary (Microsoft's, Apple's, Opera's, and most cell phone/tracker browsers). Google Chromium might also be free software. Every time Mozilla does something I think is foolish with Firefox (and this is hardly the first thing they've done with Firefox I don't agree with), Firefox's saving grace remains the same. Firefox has the same advantage to the user that any free software has: you have the freedom to make the software do what you want so the limits on your willingness to do this are up to you.
I'm not entirely convinced that "no user data was being shared with its partners" until someone looks into the code that implements this promotion—if this markup/style was downloaded ad-hoc, if anything in that code caused Firefox to download something ad-hoc, then the claim is untrue because that data you get had to come from somewhere and there's a privacy problem. But privacy issue or not, this is a mild annoyance.
If you want software that respects your software freedom, you'll want to get off of using Microsoft Windows (because Windows is proprietary, user-subjugating, non-free software) and use the GIMP. Paint.net is non-free software. It's license clearly states "You may not modify, adapt, rent, lease, loan, sell, or create derivative works based upon the Software or any part thereof." which includes free software freedoms—distributing for a fee, making derivative works, and altering the software.
You see Rick Brewster, Paint.NET author, convey the same anti-software freedom sentiment in the Paint.NET blog article referred to in this story alongside Krita, a free software drawing application licensed under the GNU GPL. Consider a quote from Brewster's own blog:
Paint.NET is also not something I want to be chopped up and swept into other projects like Krita. Remember, I make my living off of this — why would I just give away my IP like that? (although, of course, the whole conversation space here is much more complex — please don't assume I'm anti-OSS or something)
If whatever "OSS" refers to (I'm guessing open source software) includes not letting users "chop up" the covered software and include code in other projects, then that's a clear and firm difference between the older free software social movement and the younger, business-centric, reactionary open source developmental methodology. Free software allows the user to do precisely what the Paint.NET license prohibit and what Brewster's comment explains. If Brewster is getting this wrong, and "OSS" doesn't stand for what he prohibits, people should take him to task for misunderstanding what open source software means, and they not allow that name to be conflated with proprietary software. But as of yet, I see no followup posts to his spelling out any misunderstanding of his chosen terms (making Brewster's claim another instance of the pattern I described earlier). Brewster also uses the term "IP" (which I'm assuming means "intellectual property") which is a scam that carries a dangerous assumption and should only be used to point out how bad the phrase is.
Typically reiterating the Free Software Foundation (from 2010) or Richard Stallman's sentiments (dating back to 2011 and revised as news is published) doesn't go over well on corporate media tech sites. And then bad things happen and people eventually come around to realizing that the more principled approach (and attendant conclusions) was foreseen years ago.
The Open Source Initiative, contrary to some folks here on Slashdot, has expressed its purpose as the preservation of software freedom.
The OSI (for most of its existence) called the efforts of advocating for software freedom "ideological tub-thumping", hardly language I'd associate with preserving software freedom. Every now and then there's also some organization which calls itself an open source distributor that boasts of its association with a proprietor. Like the time Red Hat told us it was "partners" with Microsoft (Canonical did similarly with Microsoft) and did not frame the issue in terms of software freedom but "choice and flexibility" instead—apparently the flexibility to install a GNU/Linux on a Microsoft VM thus allowing the VM owner (Microsoft in this case) to know everything one is doing on that system. This is a position indistinguishable from granting considerable control to a proprietor over the possibly free GNU/Linux system. These are not the choices nor the language I'd expect from people choosing to frame what they're doing in terms that intend to remind people to learn about software freedom or request software freedom for their organizations so that their organizations can retain their own data and fully control what their organization does with their own computers. As the older "Why 'Free Software' is better than "Open Source" essay points out, "This manipulative practice would be no less harmful if it were done using the term 'free software.' But companies do not seem to use the term 'free software' that way; perhaps its association with idealism makes it seem unsuitable. The term 'open source' opened the door for this."
What I see is not precisely the same but much more in keeping with what is described in a GNU Project essay in the section "Different Values Can Lead to Similar Conclusions...but Not Always":
Radical groups in the 1960s had a reputation for factionalism: some organizations split because of disagreements on details of strategy, and the two daughter groups treated each other as enemies despite having similar basic goals and values. The right wing made much of this and used it to criticize the entire left.
Some try to disparage the free software movement by comparing our disagreement with open source to the disagreements of those radical groups. They have it backwards. We disagree with the open source camp on the basic goals and values, but their views and ours lead in many cases to the same practical behavior—such as developing free software.
As a result, people from the free software movement and the open source camp often work together on practical projects such as software development. It is remarkable that such different philosophical views can so often motivate different people to participate in the same projects. Nonetheless, there are situations where these fundamentally different views lead to very different actions.
The idea of open source is that allowing users to change and redistribute the software will make it more powerful and reliable. But this is not guaranteed. Developers of proprietary software are not necessarily incompetent. Sometimes they produce a program that is powerful and reliable, even though it does not respect the users' freedom. Free software activists and open source enthusiasts will react very differently to that.
A pure open source enthusiast, one that is not at all influenced by the ideals of free software, will say, "I am surprised you were able to make the program work so well without using our development model, but you did. How can I get a copy?" This attitude will reward schemes that take away our freedom, leading to its loss.
Without commenting on the people of OFAC, taking Noam Chomsky's explanation of standing for freedom of speech precisely for views one doesn't like (seen in context in the movie Manufacturing Consent where Chomsky defends Robert Faurrison's freedom of speech while not supporting his thesis—the segment begins around 2h24m21s and Chomsky's concise response about freedom of speech to a questioner is at 2h10m52s), I'm reminded that Cloudflare is the organization that also switched from a position that was content-neutral to picking and choosing whom to do business with based on what Cloudflare was caching. Torrentfreak.com covered this in an article concerning Cloudflare "kicking off" the Daily Stormer from their service according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince: "I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet." he claimed. This was a radical shift in policy from what Prince claimed about Cloudflare just a few weeks prior, "Even if it were able to, Cloudflare does not monitor, evaluate, judge or store content appearing on a third party website" and "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". So apparently Cloudflare was able do precisely what he said it could not do, and Cloudflare did in fact make such evaluations even while Prince apparently misrepresented these facts to the public.
Is it really "snooping" if neither the activity logs associated with this feature nor any information identifiably derived therefrom leaves the user's device?
Historically, anonymized data turns out to be not as anonymous as it was claimed to be. Put differently, de-anonymization is more possible than people try to lead others to believe it is. One example is the 2006 AOL search data which AOL anonymized and purposefully published with high-minded goals—to help researchers. It turned out that the query data was sufficient to let the New York Times determine that user #4417749 was Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow from Lilburn, Georgia, thus objectively proving that AOL's anonymization was inadequate. AOL's then-Chief Technical Officer, Maureen Govern, resigned from AOL, and two AOL employees were fired as a result of the proven de-anonymization.
Another problem is the principle behind your question: if the user has no opportunity to stop this from happening then what you're describing is indistinguishable from snooping on the user. This means that no matter how this is implemented or how undesirable this feature might be, Firefox's saving grace is that it is free software—free to all users to run, inspect, share, and modify. Multiple Firefox derivatives are objective proof that people use their software freedom. This software freedom also raises the bar for raising security and privacy issues in discussions like these: anyone raising the issue should be expected to make a more compelling case to back their claim by identifying the lines of Firefox source code that implement sending any data to Mozilla (and/or third parties involved in this). Mozilla says they don't send data anywhere to implement this feature; they say Firefox picks from canned recommendations and thus this isn't a privacy issue. It's possible that the recommendation ends up looking up something that itself could indirectly reveal something about the user's browsing the user would not want revealed.
I'd prefer not to have the browser analyze browsing habits at all, nor bother me with such suggestions. So I'm not enthusiastic about this alleged feature no matter how it is implemented. I prefer that the browser get on with doing what I consider to be the primary job of a web browser, regardless of how easy it was to implement, how little CPU time is involved, or any other technocratic detail of its implementation. I'll manually research which add-ons to install and use if and when I want such assistance.
Don't choose to take a proprietor's side or believe that monopoly power is somehow outside the realm of possibility. Monopolists (which every software proprietor is for that software) have the power to choose what that software does, leaving users out. Decisions like what Opera, Microsoft, and Google are embarking on with their proprietary derivatives of Chromium put those proprietors in power.
It took the world's largest antitrust trials to make Microsoft behave a little better in some respects, but by other perfectly reasonable measurements nothing substantive has changed—Windows, MSIE, and most of the software Microsoft has released remain proprietary (nonfree, user-subjugating). The software most computer users use on their own computers is proprietary. Thus there's no clear signal that proprietary power over the user is now undesirable.
Not dealing in (whether commercially or gratis) proprietary software is always wise. $7,300,000/800,000 people is almost $9.13/person. Nobody who can afford a modern Lenovo computer will find $9.13 very rewarding and Lenovo won't find $7.3M a challenge to pay.
But the structure of proprietary software (being hidden from the user who is legally prohibited from inspecting or editing the software and often prohibited from sharing the software as well) keeps users ignorant of the software they run. Since there's a lot of proprietary malware out there and we can't tell which proprietary software is malware, we are wise to avoid it all. Ethically, all proprietary software operates not in the user's interests. Users aren't well served by software running on their computers which don't respect their software freedom. This is increasingly becoming a health/life or death concern (see a recent story about a CPAP machine hacker, for instance) and have always been an a concern for those motivated by how we ought to treat other people (perhaps the most important consideration we can make in life).
The important issue is putting people in a position where they get to control their own computers, not what's convenient for people to find has already been programmed for them. It's important not to conflate these issues or let anyone reframe the question away from control over one's computer into far less significant conveniences. In fact, control over one's own computers was the point of a previous poster ("I see no reason why I shouldn't be allowed to keep using old software as long as I want to"). The convenience of finding nonfree software that appears to do what you want is a trap because you are prevented from knowing all of what it can do, even people talented and willing to vet the program for you can't help you. We see proprietors leverage that power against their users all the time (so many/. stories are easily and rightly reduced to "another example of the power of a software proprietor and computer users who don't understand that power"). In the free world this is never a show-stopper problem because it comes down to limits you impose on yourself—your willingness to and talent in vetting a nonfree program is irrelevant—you aren't allowed to do these things no matter how willing or able you are due to an unjust power someone else asserts over you. If you're not willing or able to vet a free program you have options you might be unwilling to try to use to benefit your situation (including asking a friend, hiring someone, asking the community, learning to program). Socially we don't accept that array of choices as reason to frame the issue as you're trying to frame this issue where there's no clear difference between nonfreedom and freedom.
You can't be sure things will stay that way. Proprietary software grants proprietors the exclusive power to change how that software works. This means that at any time the program's behavior could change (as far as your perception goes); limits you haven't yet bumped into and therefore don't yet know about could be revealed to you. Add in networked computers that check for updates and that's a universal backdoor allowing the proprietor to change things they didn't think to set up earlier. It's always dangerous to make claims on behalf of how proprietary software works no matter how many time you've run that software and you therefore believe you're familiar with how that software operates. Free software lets you run, inspect, share, and modify the software so you can be sure of what you're running.
This is how things have always been in the free world: the users can singularly or collectively decide how much they're willing to offer and under what terms to get someone to do programming work. Thanks to software freedom, anyone with a copy of free software also has the freedom to get someone to improve that program for them, for any definition of "improve". The rest are details to be negotiated in a work contract such as how much to pay, who will do the work, contact points for progress updates, and when the work is due. It doesn't matter how old the software is or if there are newer programs one could use to do the same job. One retains control of their own computer and this extends to groups of people working together as you describe. These are enormous benefits to software freedom (but even that word is too weak to describe freedom)—self-determination and cooperation with one's community are freedoms we rightly cherish. None of this activity rejects commercialization but also doesn't make commercial concerns primary. Proprietary software is radically different: the proprietor is a monopoly. There is no competition thus no negotiating with more amenable parties should one find the price too high or if the proprietor is uncooperative. The proprietor also denies the user the freedom to do any of this work for themselves by themselves.
You want them to develop smash titles like Super Mario and give them for free?
You're pitching this idea as though that would be unreasonable to ask for, but I don't owe Nintendo money for their investment choices. When we consider that they're currently distributing proprietary (nonfree, user-subjugating) software that can be remotely disabled (via digital restrictions management and server dependencies based on servers that aren't distributed but can go away) I see no incentive to buy. The specific price of the game doesn't even enter into this; I'm not objecting to paying for a game, I object to submitting to a proprietor's power, a power that subjects me to watching my investment disappear due to disablement, spying, and other proprietary software ills. That's not worth any price to me. So I choose to do without and they don't get any of my money.
Considered from another perspective, it could be argued that they used to do precisely what you describe. Consider how they ran their company for a while—they sold copies of ROM-based games users used to be able to run in perpetuity so long as they had functioning equipment to run the programs on. Eventually people figured out how to make copies of those games and share those copies but Nintendo was still in business making more such games. With the older systems there was no disparity between what users and Nintendo were able to do because the games were in ROM: Nintendo didn't have any power to change the program beyond what the user could do using the equipment Nintendo sold them (such as a Super Nintendo console). That's a sharp difference from investing in something one can't run (like can be the case with Nintendo Switch software). We don't even know all of what it would take to get Nintendo to disable one's copy of a Switch game. Perhaps we'll find out that Nintendo is more censorious than people thought they were; perhaps Nintendo will use their unjust proprietor power on Switch users who dare to criticize them.
This is a shocking display. What they are calling a government-private partnership is nothing of the sort. It's a public subsidy to Amazon. The New York Times reported $5 billion in this project will be invested by Amazon. $5.5 billion dollars will be invested by New York and Virginia. That is a subsidy of over 50% of the cost of this project. We the taxpayers will be either paying higher taxes to fund this private company, among the richest in the world, or, if we don't get our taxes raised, the government will deliver fewer services to us because it has given this enormous subsidy to a company. $5 billion from Virginia and New York where Mr. Bezos, the owner of Amazon, is himself the owner of $160 billion. He didn't need it, the company doesn't need it. We are being asked to subsidize. All of the profits will go to the private companies and their shareholders. We, the public, will be funding more than half of this project. Shame is what Mr. DeBlasio ought to feel rather than posing in the PR as if he has delivered something. [...]
The projected number of jobs in the New York area from this is 2,500. That's a very small number and will have no effect on the unemployment problem of this city [New York City] it's just too small and that's not a surprise [...] because the kind of work Amazon does is highly automated; it uses machines for 90% of what it does. And half of the people it's likely to have working in New York will be brought in from other parts of the Amazon empire.
If you really want your code to be free, abandon licenses altogether.
We've been through this discussion throughout the 1980s and 1990s and there's no clear way to do this without licensing, even if only to forgo the very powers you say one should forgo.
and then have the stones to stick to your word
If you relinquish all copyright power in the work (say by putting it under Creative Commons Zero which is effectively placing the work into the public domain in the US and like regimes, and forgoing all copyright power in other regimes) you won't have anything to "stick to". If someone does something with the code you could have objected to on copyright grounds you will have forwent that power. If you want to object to something based on patent power (with any patents you hold which could read on the work) you'll need licensing to grant others the freedom to use those patent ideas—to forgo that power too.
So it only makes sense to talk about "sticking to your word" if you have something to stick to. For instance, one thing you might want to stick to is looking out for the software freedom for derivative works so that you ensure the software freedom you carefully chose to respect remains intact when someone builds on that code and distributes their derivative. This too requires the licensing power you eschew with attention paid to copyright and patent power (possibly more).
I think your willingness to publish more free software is helpful but more needs to be said and done to make your view practical. Yours is a rather inchoate expression of (perhaps) frustration with the complexity of what one needs to do to come close to forgetting about legalistic considerations and enjoy one's time spent programming. But what you've offered is not a practical way to look at the world as it is and has been for decades.
You're missing the point: Users deserve full control over their own computers. The user should decide what OSes they want to run. Treating users unethically by denying their software freedom is unjust. There are also ecological consequences others will no doubt get into which in the large affect us all. The amount of money spent on the computer is a very minor point at best.
I'm not concerned that proprietors don't care to fix problems in the software they distribute, I care that users are prohibited from running, inspecting, improving, and sharing the software they run when that software is proprietary (non-free, user subjugating) software. Whether an OS is a "service" or not is a distraction from this more fundamental point.
But customers have a right to expect prompt, accurate notification when those problems occur, and Microsoft is failing badly in that responsibility.
Users deserve software freedom, not some weaker stance such as "transparency" (whatever that means) nor distractions away from software freedom like "software as a service". In Microsoft's case with Windows it doesn't matter if one installs the software in the traditional way or acquires it as a service because either way their software freedom is not respected and that alone is reason enough to reject Windows just as it's good enough reason to reject any other proprietary software.
I concur; it's disappointing that people on a tech site such as/. conflate the intention of the user posting the material with how the posted material can be used later (even within the scope of uses we can identify today which is no doubt just the start). From a technical (as opposed to ethical) perspective, the poster's intention is irrelevant. The parent post is underrated and the grandparent post is overrated.
People in the future might not enjoy knowing that the choices they made today were the basis of learning a bunch of other people's coordinates and directionality/orientation of their bodies, and have a high degree of certainty who that was based on information from what are deemed socially sufficiently accurate inferences. All of that data comes from data shared with naive intention by people who, as the parent poster rightly put it, "haven't been paying attention" and some time with algorithms that essentially make a timeline by putting together analysis of school yearbook photos, Halloween shots, home videos, street footage, "smart TV" or "cell phone" (really, 'tracker' is a more honest name) camera/mic spying, and other sensor data. People today would likely find that kind of tracking creepy but it's possible. Tech people should be teaching the public to value their own privacy and the privacy of their friends and family now. Sometimes this means having the spine to say no to fads like Facebook accounts, installing proprietary software, and recording and/or sharing every moment when one doesn't know the scope of what they're sharing. There's a big difference between sending someone a copy of a digital picture versus showing them a snapshot in person. Innocently sharing such data (even unwittingly) contributes to a society in which a future of pervasive spying is increasingly likely.
Slashdot Mirror
The only statement we have which tries to make the opinion (an "assessment") from the Obama administration which I can't find anyone who seriously believes; nobody believes all of those agencies agree on anything much less that opinion. Sy Hersh says as much when he talked about that assessment and the media's lacking coverage of it ("What does an assessment mean? It's not a national intelligence estimate. If you had a real estimate you would have five or six dissents, people saying, 'cause I can tell you right now. One time they said 17 agencies all agreed. Oh really? The Coast Guard and the Air Force, they all agreed on it? And it was outrageous and nobody did that story."). Even the ostensible source of Russiagate stories—alleged collusion between some Russians and the Trump campaign—isn't looking so rosy for proponents anymore (it never looked relevant for the American public; Russiagate doesn't address the public's concerns it only reflects elite's interests). As the title indicates, "Mueller report PSA: Prepare for disappointment." and one report concurs. And this kind of downplaying has been done before. To think this is all being done in service of a neoliberalist losing a rigged election in search of an excuse to distract us from her culpability, what those leaked emails actually said, and possibly manufacture lies that could help foment a future war with Russia.
Sources and evidence, not namecalling, are required to sustain convincing arguments.
See the story about Jennifer Nelson's lawsuit against Warner/Chappell for many years of fraudulently charging for use of the Happy Birthday song by claiming a copyright they did not hold (an estimated $2M/year source of fraudulent income). She also made a documentary about her research and suit which is well worth watching.
Nelson's lawsuit is very informative for many reasons, one of which is it speaks loudly about why we should not trust Warner/Chappell's claims about their copyright assertions. We also have good reason not to trust any system or policy that encourages quickly shutting down service at the behest of a copyright claim. Copyright fraud is very real and there seems to be little incentive for claimants to fear making erroneous, exaggerated, or outright lying claims which continue decades of fraud as Warner/Chappell apparently did. As Nelson said in an interview with Al Jazeera, "A lot of people were duped into thinking that they had to pay for the song when in fact they didn't."
Red Letter Media's criticism is remarkably apt. Rich Evans pointed out something regarding how limited the Star Wars universe is when he, Mike Stoklasa, and Jay Bauman reviewed "Rogue One" about 10m28s in:
RLM also shows scenes in the ad for "Rogue One" that aren't in the movie (I think there's good reason to call this fraudulent on Disney's part).
As Rich Evans has pointed out, "Star Wars has been creatively bankrupt since 1983." and I concur. Evans said he enjoyed "Solo" but I figure that's slim pickings overall. There's just too much junk for me to want to spend money with a business that treats us horribly on important policy issues (copyright term extension, for instance) and is too scared to do anything interesting with some newly-acquired brand. When I consider the Disney-managed Star Wars stuff as a whole, I'm not incentivized to pay them to see it nor would I choose to spend more of my time watching it.
I find RLM's commentary to be far more interesting than a number of the things they watch and I'd understand if they decided they were no longer going to watch more of certain series (Star Wars movies, Star Trek Discovery TV show, to name a couple examples).
Bill Binney's group seems convinced the other way and makes a compelling case that the DNC's network connection wasn't fast enough for the data transfer to have been sent from the DNC to someone in Russia over the Internet. You cite no evidence to support your conclusion. You repeated a summary we're supposed to take for granted (given the repetition in corporate-friendly media) where every Russiagate story turns out to be completely untrue (such as Russians allegedly compromised the American power network via a power station in Vermont) or wildly overstated (such as trying to get us worked up over Russians buying social media ads totaling thousands of dollars). And all in service of what--covering for Hillary Clinton losing a rigged election to another political novice (I doubt many people in Illinois knew who Barack Obama was when he was that state's junior senator). Neoliberalism (a greater distance between rich and poor) and neoconservatism (more war) do a far better job of explaining why Mrs. Clinton couldn't convince enough voters in enough states with enough electoral votes to support her campaign than any Russians-did-it conspiracy theory. Candidate Trump (as opposed to President Trump) spoke against those values quite well (objecting to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, NAFTA, TPP, and mentioning Medicare for All once on "60 Minutes"). He didn't support much of that as president (he has ramped up war beyond Obama's ramp ups, signed trade deals that reintroduce anti-worker/anti-environmental policy, left US healthcare to the HMOs) but voters couldn't have known that for certain when they cast their vote. Comparing political records and what was said during campaigning it's no surprise some people (those who aren't elites, for example) wanted to give Trump their vote even if only to prevent Clinton from taking office.
Spying is big business. For example, spying is Google's main theme for which services to keep and which to do away with. Perhaps spying is driving these ancestry services as well. We already know these ancestry services share client data with police (1, 2, 3). Perhaps this data sharing is listed in the terms of service, but either way the sharing helps authorities augment their database and helps them perform more surveillance on ordinary citizens (most citizens don't commit crimes and therefore should not face such treatment; I'm not convinced those who commit crimes deserve this treatment but the vast majority of the public absolutely don't).
Yes, obfuscated programming contests can serve as important learning tools for those who want to liberate themselves from continued ignorance driven by fear of the unknown.
I think it's safe to say you won't be doing anything with the program (as far as you know) but programmers simply can't afford the luxury of being ignorant and non-programmers are not well served by inculcating fear. The result of your suggestion is to maintain a small group of elites who ought to be blindly trusted rather than kept in check through software freedom.
I'm not sure what constitutes 'touching' in this context but disassembling the binary and examining how that works (even running the code once understood on a spare computer or VM, perhaps one that isn't networked) should be encouraged particularly for the purposes of providing a free software replacement. Running the program temporarily might be necessary to provide a free software replacement. One hopes that any release comes with complete corresponding source code and build instructions. But really, there's no more reason to trust the proprietary software people run every day than there is to trust any code from the NSA. Proprietary software is often malware. We have no good reason to trust the NSA nor software proprietors; in fact, the proprietors sometimes work with the NSA (like when Microsoft specifically changed Skype to make it easier to spy upon).
Only Apple's bosses determine what "Apple's purpose" is. We come to know what Google's main line of business is (spying) because what now know that they have been doing (spying). Now that we know more about what Apple, Microsoft, and other proprietors do we can retroactively say what they've been doing. Snowden and others have provided irrefutable proof that software proprietors don't care about one's privacy and the structure of proprietary software was a long-time clue to those who understand the power of software non-freedom over the user regarding what is possible. Certainly keeping secrets from the user and putting in general-purpose holes into systems for future exploitation are the most practical means by which to do many things against the user's interests including but not limited to not looking out for their privacy. If Apple gets a pass amongst technocrats it's because some technically skilled users are easily distracted by details and not repeatedly taught to look at the bigger picture (software non-freedom is the root of virtually all of these abuses). Here are some more specific examples of these points:
Precisely: use your software freedom with Firefox—make Firefox do what you want it to do yourself, or ask someone to edit out the stuff you don't like, or pay them to do this on your behalf, or get together with others and pool your development/funding efforts. You have options with free software which you don't have with almost every other major browser because they're all proprietary (Microsoft's, Apple's, Opera's, and most cell phone/tracker browsers). Google Chromium might also be free software. Every time Mozilla does something I think is foolish with Firefox (and this is hardly the first thing they've done with Firefox I don't agree with), Firefox's saving grace remains the same. Firefox has the same advantage to the user that any free software has: you have the freedom to make the software do what you want so the limits on your willingness to do this are up to you.
I'm not entirely convinced that "no user data was being shared with its partners" until someone looks into the code that implements this promotion—if this markup/style was downloaded ad-hoc, if anything in that code caused Firefox to download something ad-hoc, then the claim is untrue because that data you get had to come from somewhere and there's a privacy problem. But privacy issue or not, this is a mild annoyance.
If you want software that respects your software freedom, you'll want to get off of using Microsoft Windows (because Windows is proprietary, user-subjugating, non-free software) and use the GIMP. Paint.net is non-free software. It's license clearly states "You may not modify, adapt, rent, lease, loan, sell, or create derivative works based upon the Software or any part thereof." which includes free software freedoms—distributing for a fee, making derivative works, and altering the software.
You see Rick Brewster, Paint.NET author, convey the same anti-software freedom sentiment in the Paint.NET blog article referred to in this story alongside Krita, a free software drawing application licensed under the GNU GPL. Consider a quote from Brewster's own blog:
If whatever "OSS" refers to (I'm guessing open source software) includes not letting users "chop up" the covered software and include code in other projects, then that's a clear and firm difference between the older free software social movement and the younger, business-centric, reactionary open source developmental methodology. Free software allows the user to do precisely what the Paint.NET license prohibit and what Brewster's comment explains. If Brewster is getting this wrong, and "OSS" doesn't stand for what he prohibits, people should take him to task for misunderstanding what open source software means, and they not allow that name to be conflated with proprietary software. But as of yet, I see no followup posts to his spelling out any misunderstanding of his chosen terms (making Brewster's claim another instance of the pattern I described earlier). Brewster also uses the term "IP" (which I'm assuming means "intellectual property") which is a scam that carries a dangerous assumption and should only be used to point out how bad the phrase is.
Typically reiterating the Free Software Foundation (from 2010) or Richard Stallman's sentiments (dating back to 2011 and revised as news is published) doesn't go over well on corporate media tech sites. And then bad things happen and people eventually come around to realizing that the more principled approach (and attendant conclusions) was foreseen years ago.
The OSI (for most of its existence) called the efforts of advocating for software freedom "ideological tub-thumping", hardly language I'd associate with preserving software freedom. Every now and then there's also some organization which calls itself an open source distributor that boasts of its association with a proprietor. Like the time Red Hat told us it was "partners" with Microsoft (Canonical did similarly with Microsoft) and did not frame the issue in terms of software freedom but "choice and flexibility" instead—apparently the flexibility to install a GNU/Linux on a Microsoft VM thus allowing the VM owner (Microsoft in this case) to know everything one is doing on that system. This is a position indistinguishable from granting considerable control to a proprietor over the possibly free GNU/Linux system. These are not the choices nor the language I'd expect from people choosing to frame what they're doing in terms that intend to remind people to learn about software freedom or request software freedom for their organizations so that their organizations can retain their own data and fully control what their organization does with their own computers. As the older "Why 'Free Software' is better than "Open Source" essay points out, "This manipulative practice would be no less harmful if it were done using the term 'free software.' But companies do not seem to use the term 'free software' that way; perhaps its association with idealism makes it seem unsuitable. The term 'open source' opened the door for this."
What I see is not precisely the same but much more in keeping with what is described in a GNU Project essay in the section "Different Values Can Lead to Similar Conclusions...but Not Always":
Without commenting on the people of OFAC, taking Noam Chomsky's explanation of standing for freedom of speech precisely for views one doesn't like (seen in context in the movie Manufacturing Consent where Chomsky defends Robert Faurrison's freedom of speech while not supporting his thesis—the segment begins around 2h24m21s and Chomsky's concise response about freedom of speech to a questioner is at 2h10m52s), I'm reminded that Cloudflare is the organization that also switched from a position that was content-neutral to picking and choosing whom to do business with based on what Cloudflare was caching. Torrentfreak.com covered this in an article concerning Cloudflare "kicking off" the Daily Stormer from their service according to Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince: "I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet." he claimed. This was a radical shift in policy from what Prince claimed about Cloudflare just a few weeks prior, "Even if it were able to, Cloudflare does not monitor, evaluate, judge or store content appearing on a third party website" and "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". So apparently Cloudflare was able do precisely what he said it could not do, and Cloudflare did in fact make such evaluations even while Prince apparently misrepresented these facts to the public.
Historically, anonymized data turns out to be not as anonymous as it was claimed to be. Put differently, de-anonymization is more possible than people try to lead others to believe it is. One example is the 2006 AOL search data which AOL anonymized and purposefully published with high-minded goals—to help researchers. It turned out that the query data was sufficient to let the New York Times determine that user #4417749 was Thelma Arnold, a 62-year-old widow from Lilburn, Georgia, thus objectively proving that AOL's anonymization was inadequate. AOL's then-Chief Technical Officer, Maureen Govern, resigned from AOL, and two AOL employees were fired as a result of the proven de-anonymization.
Another problem is the principle behind your question: if the user has no opportunity to stop this from happening then what you're describing is indistinguishable from snooping on the user. This means that no matter how this is implemented or how undesirable this feature might be, Firefox's saving grace is that it is free software—free to all users to run, inspect, share, and modify. Multiple Firefox derivatives are objective proof that people use their software freedom. This software freedom also raises the bar for raising security and privacy issues in discussions like these: anyone raising the issue should be expected to make a more compelling case to back their claim by identifying the lines of Firefox source code that implement sending any data to Mozilla (and/or third parties involved in this). Mozilla says they don't send data anywhere to implement this feature; they say Firefox picks from canned recommendations and thus this isn't a privacy issue. It's possible that the recommendation ends up looking up something that itself could indirectly reveal something about the user's browsing the user would not want revealed.
I'd prefer not to have the browser analyze browsing habits at all, nor bother me with such suggestions. So I'm not enthusiastic about this alleged feature no matter how it is implemented. I prefer that the browser get on with doing what I consider to be the primary job of a web browser, regardless of how easy it was to implement, how little CPU time is involved, or any other technocratic detail of its implementation. I'll manually research which add-ons to install and use if and when I want such assistance.
Don't choose to take a proprietor's side or believe that monopoly power is somehow outside the realm of possibility. Monopolists (which every software proprietor is for that software) have the power to choose what that software does, leaving users out. Decisions like what Opera, Microsoft, and Google are embarking on with their proprietary derivatives of Chromium put those proprietors in power.
It took the world's largest antitrust trials to make Microsoft behave a little better in some respects, but by other perfectly reasonable measurements nothing substantive has changed—Windows, MSIE, and most of the software Microsoft has released remain proprietary (nonfree, user-subjugating). The software most computer users use on their own computers is proprietary. Thus there's no clear signal that proprietary power over the user is now undesirable.
Not dealing in (whether commercially or gratis) proprietary software is always wise. $7,300,000/800,000 people is almost $9.13/person. Nobody who can afford a modern Lenovo computer will find $9.13 very rewarding and Lenovo won't find $7.3M a challenge to pay.
But the structure of proprietary software (being hidden from the user who is legally prohibited from inspecting or editing the software and often prohibited from sharing the software as well) keeps users ignorant of the software they run. Since there's a lot of proprietary malware out there and we can't tell which proprietary software is malware, we are wise to avoid it all. Ethically, all proprietary software operates not in the user's interests. Users aren't well served by software running on their computers which don't respect their software freedom. This is increasingly becoming a health/life or death concern (see a recent story about a CPAP machine hacker, for instance) and have always been an a concern for those motivated by how we ought to treat other people (perhaps the most important consideration we can make in life).
The important issue is putting people in a position where they get to control their own computers, not what's convenient for people to find has already been programmed for them. It's important not to conflate these issues or let anyone reframe the question away from control over one's computer into far less significant conveniences. In fact, control over one's own computers was the point of a previous poster ("I see no reason why I shouldn't be allowed to keep using old software as long as I want to"). The convenience of finding nonfree software that appears to do what you want is a trap because you are prevented from knowing all of what it can do, even people talented and willing to vet the program for you can't help you. We see proprietors leverage that power against their users all the time (so many /. stories are easily and rightly reduced to "another example of the power of a software proprietor and computer users who don't understand that power"). In the free world this is never a show-stopper problem because it comes down to limits you impose on yourself—your willingness to and talent in vetting a nonfree program is irrelevant—you aren't allowed to do these things no matter how willing or able you are due to an unjust power someone else asserts over you. If you're not willing or able to vet a free program you have options you might be unwilling to try to use to benefit your situation (including asking a friend, hiring someone, asking the community, learning to program). Socially we don't accept that array of choices as reason to frame the issue as you're trying to frame this issue where there's no clear difference between nonfreedom and freedom.
You can't be sure things will stay that way. Proprietary software grants proprietors the exclusive power to change how that software works. This means that at any time the program's behavior could change (as far as your perception goes); limits you haven't yet bumped into and therefore don't yet know about could be revealed to you. Add in networked computers that check for updates and that's a universal backdoor allowing the proprietor to change things they didn't think to set up earlier. It's always dangerous to make claims on behalf of how proprietary software works no matter how many time you've run that software and you therefore believe you're familiar with how that software operates. Free software lets you run, inspect, share, and modify the software so you can be sure of what you're running.
This is how things have always been in the free world: the users can singularly or collectively decide how much they're willing to offer and under what terms to get someone to do programming work. Thanks to software freedom, anyone with a copy of free software also has the freedom to get someone to improve that program for them, for any definition of "improve". The rest are details to be negotiated in a work contract such as how much to pay, who will do the work, contact points for progress updates, and when the work is due. It doesn't matter how old the software is or if there are newer programs one could use to do the same job. One retains control of their own computer and this extends to groups of people working together as you describe. These are enormous benefits to software freedom (but even that word is too weak to describe freedom)—self-determination and cooperation with one's community are freedoms we rightly cherish. None of this activity rejects commercialization but also doesn't make commercial concerns primary. Proprietary software is radically different: the proprietor is a monopoly. There is no competition thus no negotiating with more amenable parties should one find the price too high or if the proprietor is uncooperative. The proprietor also denies the user the freedom to do any of this work for themselves by themselves.
You're pitching this idea as though that would be unreasonable to ask for, but I don't owe Nintendo money for their investment choices. When we consider that they're currently distributing proprietary (nonfree, user-subjugating) software that can be remotely disabled (via digital restrictions management and server dependencies based on servers that aren't distributed but can go away) I see no incentive to buy. The specific price of the game doesn't even enter into this; I'm not objecting to paying for a game, I object to submitting to a proprietor's power, a power that subjects me to watching my investment disappear due to disablement, spying, and other proprietary software ills. That's not worth any price to me. So I choose to do without and they don't get any of my money.
Considered from another perspective, it could be argued that they used to do precisely what you describe. Consider how they ran their company for a while—they sold copies of ROM-based games users used to be able to run in perpetuity so long as they had functioning equipment to run the programs on. Eventually people figured out how to make copies of those games and share those copies but Nintendo was still in business making more such games. With the older systems there was no disparity between what users and Nintendo were able to do because the games were in ROM: Nintendo didn't have any power to change the program beyond what the user could do using the equipment Nintendo sold them (such as a Super Nintendo console). That's a sharp difference from investing in something one can't run (like can be the case with Nintendo Switch software). We don't even know all of what it would take to get Nintendo to disable one's copy of a Switch game. Perhaps we'll find out that Nintendo is more censorious than people thought they were; perhaps Nintendo will use their unjust proprietor power on Switch users who dare to criticize them.
I'm noticing a lack of numbers in your claim. How many people experienced this?
Richard Wolff did a good job of concisely making the points on just how bad a deal this is for New York and Virginia (which are together funding over half of the costs of this project -- $5.5B versus Amazon's $5B according to the New York Times)—and all for an estimated 2,500 jobs in New York (I don't know how many jobs are projected for the Virginia site but I'm guessing it's comparable totaling around 5,000 jobs). Here's some of what he said:
We've been through this discussion throughout the 1980s and 1990s and there's no clear way to do this without licensing, even if only to forgo the very powers you say one should forgo.
If you relinquish all copyright power in the work (say by putting it under Creative Commons Zero which is effectively placing the work into the public domain in the US and like regimes, and forgoing all copyright power in other regimes) you won't have anything to "stick to". If someone does something with the code you could have objected to on copyright grounds you will have forwent that power. If you want to object to something based on patent power (with any patents you hold which could read on the work) you'll need licensing to grant others the freedom to use those patent ideas—to forgo that power too.
So it only makes sense to talk about "sticking to your word" if you have something to stick to. For instance, one thing you might want to stick to is looking out for the software freedom for derivative works so that you ensure the software freedom you carefully chose to respect remains intact when someone builds on that code and distributes their derivative. This too requires the licensing power you eschew with attention paid to copyright and patent power (possibly more).
I think your willingness to publish more free software is helpful but more needs to be said and done to make your view practical. Yours is a rather inchoate expression of (perhaps) frustration with the complexity of what one needs to do to come close to forgetting about legalistic considerations and enjoy one's time spent programming. But what you've offered is not a practical way to look at the world as it is and has been for decades.
You're missing the point: Users deserve full control over their own computers. The user should decide what OSes they want to run. Treating users unethically by denying their software freedom is unjust. There are also ecological consequences others will no doubt get into which in the large affect us all. The amount of money spent on the computer is a very minor point at best.
I'm not concerned that proprietors don't care to fix problems in the software they distribute, I care that users are prohibited from running, inspecting, improving, and sharing the software they run when that software is proprietary (non-free, user subjugating) software. Whether an OS is a "service" or not is a distraction from this more fundamental point.
Users deserve software freedom, not some weaker stance such as "transparency" (whatever that means) nor distractions away from software freedom like "software as a service". In Microsoft's case with Windows it doesn't matter if one installs the software in the traditional way or acquires it as a service because either way their software freedom is not respected and that alone is reason enough to reject Windows just as it's good enough reason to reject any other proprietary software.
I concur; it's disappointing that people on a tech site such as /. conflate the intention of the user posting the material with how the posted material can be used later (even within the scope of uses we can identify today which is no doubt just the start). From a technical (as opposed to ethical) perspective, the poster's intention is irrelevant. The parent post is underrated and the grandparent post is overrated.
People in the future might not enjoy knowing that the choices they made today were the basis of learning a bunch of other people's coordinates and directionality/orientation of their bodies, and have a high degree of certainty who that was based on information from what are deemed socially sufficiently accurate inferences. All of that data comes from data shared with naive intention by people who, as the parent poster rightly put it, "haven't been paying attention" and some time with algorithms that essentially make a timeline by putting together analysis of school yearbook photos, Halloween shots, home videos, street footage, "smart TV" or "cell phone" (really, 'tracker' is a more honest name) camera/mic spying, and other sensor data. People today would likely find that kind of tracking creepy but it's possible. Tech people should be teaching the public to value their own privacy and the privacy of their friends and family now. Sometimes this means having the spine to say no to fads like Facebook accounts, installing proprietary software, and recording and/or sharing every moment when one doesn't know the scope of what they're sharing. There's a big difference between sending someone a copy of a digital picture versus showing them a snapshot in person. Innocently sharing such data (even unwittingly) contributes to a society in which a future of pervasive spying is increasingly likely.