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Comment by joejohnson | Hacker News Reader

Richard Stallman is absolutely correct in calling this spyware. At the very least, this "feature" should be off by default.

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God, it pains me to click the "upvote" button on a comment that begins "Richard Stallman is absolutely correct", but the second sentence was so correct that I had to. ;-)

He is correct on a lot of things if you throw popular opinion out of the window and consider what is best for you*

* human nature is inherently self-destructive. He seems to identify that it doesn't have to be.

> human nature is inherently self-destructive

Just because it is, doesn't mean it has to be.

Yes 100% this.

RMS is usually correct. Annoying, offensive, unpragmatic, undiplomatic and confrontational, but in the end he's usually right in his basic analyses of the problem. Often well before anyone else even recognizes there is a problem.

The ends don't justify the means.

No. He's completely off his nut about blobs, cloud computing and a host of other topics. Very few people use a distribution that he doesn't have issues with.

Your third sentence doesn't support your second.

I use closed source software, but that doesn't mean I think he's wrong on his overall analysis of its downsides.

I agree that it should be off by default, but I don't think it's accurate to call it spyware. It's fairly obvious that it's doing a local+remote search, and there are simple ways to turn off or avoid the remote part. It's not tricking the user, it's just not the feature I want in that place.

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