stallman.org
stallman.org
- He's crazy!
- But he's right!
- Right? He's just been stating the obvious all this time!
- NSA surveillance!
- Hadn't anyone heard about Echelon?
- He stands for freedom of users!
- But users don't care about those freedoms, they just want something that works!
- He's antisocial and extremely rude!
- Autism spectrum.
- But he's not diplomatic at all, we don't want him as a spokesperson for Open Source!
- It's GNU/Linux, not Linux.
- See? It's nitpicking things like GNU/Linux that make even open source enthusiasts hate him!
- Only the userland is GNU anyway.
- GPL!
- Emacs!
- GCC!
- HURD!
- Toejam.
I guess what you mean by "well-designed" is more colors and and images, but i prefer his page over those ajaxy blogspot-themes, which get completely unusable if you are on a phone-line-connection in a remote area, and a few other pages. And that even though i have nothing against good modern css in general :)
It is probably exactly what he intends the web to be. Or at least his little corner of it.
Most reasonably informed people should agree that the [software] world is a better place because rms is in it. And not only for gcc, emacs, etc.
The rest is just a question of how many years before today he is, this time. (And yes, sometimes the world he is years before isn't our planet. But his hit statistics isn't bad.)
The world needs someone like Stallman quite simply because his views are so extreme. You need an extremist so that moderates can seem reasonable.
The reality is that what may have seemed a completely out there view can become the new normal within a surprisingly short time when the environment or culture changes. Apart from politics, you see this in everything from fashion to music, business etc. (e.g. predicting the death of print or record shops, or 'did I really think I looked good in that - what the hell was I thinking?')
I'm not a bug Facebook user, but it has nothing to do with privacy. I've always known some random engineer at Facebook could read my posts, and assumed it was not a stretch for the government.
You prefer to give up conveniences because of fear of govt. I'm still much more afraid of the random engineer, but think the convenience is worth it (maybe).
I don't mind Stallman, but to decry all boycotts and competition-of-personal-values is itself foolish. We should care about who gets our money and our attention.
I can see your point about vendor discretion, but that's not really the same thing. I try to avoid companies whose values do not align with my own wherever possible. In many cases, I even consider my opinions to be well founded, or even informed.
That said, I still understand them to be value judgements, and while I'm happy to discuss those values to whomever, it isn't my place to push my values onto another, and it would be silly of me to ignore the good aspects of somebody because they also possess aspects I consider to be negative.
Moreover though, it is foolish to discount good advice because you don't like the source. It is, I believe, the height of pettiness, and should be avoided at all costs by pragmatists.
So, you were quoting yourself?
Yes, I understand that it's a fault in humanity, that people's decision-making skills are compromised by completely irrelevant factors. I'm sure I'm just as guilty of it as anybody else.
The point, for what it's worth, wasn't to call the parent foolish, but to point out that disregarding a good idea because the messenger isn't your favorite is, plainly put, silly. As individuals, we should be mindful of the needlessly silly things that we do, and try to be better than that.
Its an natural psychological behavior to ignore issues not directly effecting themselves or those close around them.
His suggestion was to lie to his wife and switch anyways...
Half the students at the speech got up and left (not kidding) when he put on a halo, proclaimed himself the Jesus Christ of Software and started auctioning off a stuffed gnu.
Add in his tirade about how evil the university IT department was for requiring authentication to access the network and you had a very pissed off administration the next day.
Wait, what?! I can only imagine that's like a car crash where you don't want to look, but you just can't tear yourself away from it.
I happen to know that he considered that "funny". I'm willing to suffer his sense of humour; he is a national treasure, imnsho. The same goes for rms, I guess.
Just wanting something that works is the same as having nothing to hide is the same as not understanding or caring about privacy.
The same happened here where most comments discuss stallman and not the actual matter of the post.
This is a nice list of sourced documentation about facebook dangers, I happen to maintain one myself for future reference and it is quite useful to have.
There is a reason GvR is the figurehead of the Python Language - he has a track record of choosing directions that later turn out to be fruitful.
There is a reason Stallman ...
Look the guy spotted the trends waaaaay earlier than anyone else and be put his money where his mouth is. The original GPL is no less crazy than this. Hell most of us agree with this one.
1. I am surprised how many non tech Saavy people I talk with are starting to understand privacy issues.
2. I had dinner last night with some Silicon Valley residents who were talking about what a horrible investment Facebook would be long term. New things will replace Facebook, and they will eventually have fewer active users.
A bit off topic, but advice I like to give people is to use one specific web browser for social media connected sites like Facebook, GMail + Google+, Twitter, etc. and another web browser with locked down security for all other browsing. This is easy to do, lets people enjoy the social media stuff if they like, and still maintain some degree of privacy.
https://disconnect.me/ is designed to allow people to protect themselves from being spied on across the internet by Facebook, Google, et al without the inconvenience of using a separate browser or similar methods.
Anecdotally, I've also experienced a growth in non-techie interest in online privacy - in the pre Snowden era, I would have to explain myself and justify what I do every time I was asked where I worked. Nowadays, I get asked for a download link.
The only short-coming is that my browser sometimes freezes when it is blocking certain flash objects. I consider it a minor inconvenience and a worthwhile trade-off. In general, sites load way faster. I am often appalled when I see the amount of trackers being blocked on some of these pages. It shows why the web, despite running on faster servers and delivering content across faster networks to faster computers, appears to be slowing down year after year.
It also reminds me that I have a responsibility to the users who visit my sites. I will never use any ad-tracking or social-media tracking software on my sites. I will host my own ads on my site and not depend on third-party companies to insert and regulate my ad presence. I will use minor tracking tools, but solely with the aim of improving user experience.
In all, I am very glad that you guys are doing what you are doing. In some meta respects, I think you are improving not only the state of the uses who use your product, but also the general well-being of the entire internet. Once we can extinguish the abusive trackers out there, we all can learn how to monetize our sites in a respectful and appropriate fashion.
I put a lot of work into my sites and the really large payoff is meeting people with similar interests and also people who might want to use my consulting services. It would make me sad to have to abuse people's privacy in order to make a living. (I am contracting at Google for a while, but I generally think that mostly Google falls into the good guys camp, as opposed to Facebook - just my personal opinion.)
Example:
/usr/bin/google-chrome --user-data-dir=/home/bleh/.config/gmail http://www.gmail.comhttps://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-se...
(btw you need to add a <meta charset="utf-8" /> or something similar to that site, some of the quotes get funky)
There are others out there besides Facebook.
Am I? As far as I understood, Facebook tracks internet users who have never even created an account.
http://www.businessinsider.com/evidon-sells-ghostery-data-to...
http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/31/ghostery-a-web-tracking-bl...
Back when land-line telephone subscription was more popular, did folks used to complain about the phone company putting their name and address (by default) in a large directly shared with the entire public?
I know you could pay a fee to be unlisted, but didn't it strike anyone as a gigantic privacy issue in general?
It's hard to take a phone book listing and figure out who my friends and family are, who employs me, what I'm doing all the time, etc. as it is fairly trivial to do with Facebook et al.
It was a very, very different age in many ways.
What ubiquitous cheap computing and fast connectivity creates is the possibility for thousands to millions of systems to attack a given person simultaneously (DDoS, distributed brute force attacks), or for a very small number of actors (as few as one) to attack from one to billions of people simultaneously.
The phone book vector was, by contrast, limited in that:
⚫ It only listed your name, phone number, and street address. Not reams of additional information.
⚫ Utilizing it required a phone call (toll calls, remember those), postage, or a street visit. Attacks, in other words, cost real money (at least for most players).
⚫ There was limited additional data readily linked by those data. Again, not the mebabytes to gigabytes of information in a typical social networking profile.
Yes, some players had access to more powerful tools -- but even marketing databases and the like were vastly more primitive than they are now, and hugely less available. Depending on when exactly you're talking about (1930s to 1980s), there might have been some computer capacity, but you'd likely have had to have spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, even as late as the 1980s, to effectively utilize the data in an automated fashion.
And yes, there were people who complained and concealed their listings, but the risks were very, very different in magnitude then.
But... that's not a fan page. It's just a wikipedia mirror. Like this one: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Quantum-Physics/1101559390141...
Compare to this (a fan page): https://www.facebook.com/daftpunk
Difference being that the mirror is (semi-) automatically generated.
This page: https://www.facebook.com/richardmatthew.stallman
.. is probably what Stallman is referring to.
The same is true of the Internet in general.
If you are an entity like the aforementioned NSA, searching the entire Internet for your photo isn't really any more challenging than using Facebook. The computing resources necessary are considerably larger, but that is a relatively small barrier.
If we imagine a more decentralized system, people might well still adopt a single ontology for events and relationships, but much "private" information might actually never be revealed to third parties, as opposed to disclosing all of it to Facebook and asking Facebook to limit whom they show it to.
I agree that it's much easier through facebook, though.
On a public web site you could simply copy a photo and put it on another web site.
> On your own website you would presumably not post photographs of yourself that compromises your privacy, but when others do so on social networks
Differing how from if they just posted it on a public web site other than Facebook?
On your own public website you can choose what photos you want to put there. If you put a photo on a public website, clearly you have no issue with the photo being seen by other people. This is not true for photos that others share with you in them. Your real life friends take photographs of you and publishes them on Facebook without your consent, some of which you may not want to be public.
> Differing how from if they just posted it on a public web site other than Facebook?
Most public websites do not index user photographs by time/event and are easily searchable by name. But yes, it is not that different in general fundamentally. Facebook just allows the information to be much more easily aggregated and browsed
I dunno, I have issues with facebook but I actually like how photos and tagging automatically fill my timeline so I don't have to actually write to my family.
Besides, most of the things you (if you were the NSA) could find through Facebook could almost trivially be found through looking through the guy's e-mail, or other sources. Nobody thinks Facebook to be private anyways, since its main purpose is for stuff to be published (to friends, but considering I have 300 on FB, it might as well be public)
Someone else might post something (wrong) that gets you in trouble because it's taken seriously.
Once they figure out the profile is fake, they list you in the "trouble maker" category and step up monitoring that IP/browser combination until they know who you are, then they link that with everything they have on the real you (bank account, property, job, etc.)
Eventually, one day, you're trying to board a plane and you get denied because you've been known to disseminate "false or misleading information".
Playing their game validates it. Just don't play.
They can use cookies to identify you. But you have to keep going back to their website.
That's absurd. How do you picture Facebook achieving control over whether you can board an airplane?
Text search for 'womb'
As I see it, the "network externality effect" which keeps such monopolies in business could perhaps be mitigated by creating a sort of social network "DNS", which could be created by the government or a private corporation. Facebook/Google+/etc would be clients that would make requests for someone's data via the DNS. So it would basically serve as a "Bridge" or "Facade" to use a design pattern.
Example if Suzy is on Facebook, and Lucy is on Google+, when Suzy rquests Lucy's photos, Facebook sends an API request to the DNS "request_photos('Lucy', 'Suzy')", the DNS sees Lucy is on Google+ and forwards the request there.
The purpose of the bridge/facade then is to make it not really matter where a person stores their data or what client they use to view others. You just need some sort agreed upon API for determining where the data for each person is, an for sharing data between services.
For someone with more strict privacy concerns, the DNS for such a person could simply record that the person uses this social networking service, which doesn't allow requests from outside. Again the benefit here of the API would be that to add yourself to that service would be as simple as "upload_photos(serverX, request_photos('Suzy', 'Suzy'))", etc.
I'm sure there's a million things wrong with the above, but just a random thought.
We don't let utilities just get a monopoly in an area and then just gouge everyone, and we shouldn't allow a social network to do so either.
The NSA spying, by itself, is just a symptom of larger problem, which is the ability of a smaller, more cohesive group of people to leverage larger institutions like massive governments and corporations to control and extract rents out of the less cohesive masses. I doubt there is a technological solution to this, especially with so many engineers working for the bad side as Useful Idiots or straight up Defectors.
> Facebook deleted a statement by a human rights group, then said that was a mistake. That Facebook invited the group to post the statement again — instead of undoing the deletion — demonstrates arrogance.
> Facebook permanently records everything you do, even what you look at, even items that are "deleted".
Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by ineptitude! Either Facebook is an evil omnipresent observer, permanently recording everything…or some representative goofed up and they can’t undo the deletion of the data because they actually deleted the data.
But hey, if he wants to avoid Facebook and recommend against it, that’s fine. We should all make our own value assessments and our own decisions about privacy concerns, though. Just consider that Facebook’s occasional privacy blunders might be…just that.
I've had a profile on FB for a long time now, but never ever used it. I've had the javascript blocked around in my general web browsing, never installed the phone app, etc. All I've ever received is the occasional email saying that someone has tagged me in a status/photo. These annoyed me a little, as I wanted to avoid FB as much as possible, whilst still being sociable with my friends.
I came to a sad epiphany a few months ago however. I realised that even if I weren't aware of all the photos/tags being posted of me, I'd still be tagged by my friends regardless. Even if I completely cancelled my account, the photos are still going up because I still meet with my friends and have an active social life. This is when I realised what I needed to do.
It is the exact same situation as when someone makes a small jest at your expense at a party. If it's a friend, you know they're just messing around and taking the piss, you laugh it off, not offended. If it's not a friend however, you might get a little offended by it. "Were they insulting me? Trying to embarrass me? Should I laugh it off as a joke?" It's potentially annoying, just as a violation to your privacy is. Inevitably, you have only a few choices: Laugh, insult them back? (guess it depends on your culture/how rude it was!) Some people might even just punch the guy...
You can't punch Facebook. (I wish)
It isn't gonna go away just because you're upset.
So the question here is: Why do we laugh these little embarrassments off? The little invasions of our private self that we find annoying?
Because it's a way of owning the situation. You can't be offended/embarassed by something you laugh off and apparently don't care about. "Yeah, my Karaoke is terrible, but I love it!", "Yeah, I do have a habit of giggling in a funny way, hahahaha!". It's exactly the same when you look at highly confident people, they never seem embarrassed by anything at all. They just smile and carry on.
Well I made a decision a couple of months ago to take the exact same approach to Facebook, so I'm on it properly now. I can't punch FB in the face, but I can take ownership of my own public persona. My friends/aquaintances are going to be posting about me regardless, might as well take control of the situation and make sure I know everything is good.
PS: And hey, there are still plenty of good uses of FB anyway, might as well enjoy the perks too.
PPS: I'm aware that it's a shitty situation. I almost feel like I've got Stockholm syndrome and have just given in. But FB isn't going anywhere soon.
Do I really want to invest my time untagging myself from shameful photos, even issuing take-down requests to my own friends? I was not invited to a party because I do not have a facebook account? I am the expensive friend, who can't be contacted using whatsapp or facebook? I am not able to show off my "awesome" travels in order to step up on the social ladder? Cry me a river, I tell them, and myself every time.
Absolutely. It can also be an investment in reducing those narcissistic tendencies we all have hidden away ...
Again, this is not absolving facebook of their dark patterns of snooping on users and their broken privacy framework. Even Google is not an ideal in this case.
When you post to your blog you tell the NSA what you know. When you attend a conference where Stallman speaks and paid with your credit card the NSA knows you support his ludicrous ideas.
Stallman thinks information should be free, but apparently that doesn't include information about where you shop. Sure I get it. Information should be free unless he can charge you to hear him speak, or it is his information.
You can't have it both ways.
Also, is CSS bad in some way? Do themes support the Evil too? Cause for a famous guy that is one ugly website.
That said, I know many people don't care about this stuff, and I applaud their lack of concern.
I haven't been or used on facebook for years now, and those tracking things weird me out
0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 facebook.com 0.0.0.0 login.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 www.login.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 fbcdn.net 0.0.0.0 www.fbcdn.net 0.0.0.0 fbcdn.com 0.0.0.0 www.fbcdn.com 0.0.0.0 static.ak.fbcdn.net 0.0.0.0 static.ak.connect.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 connect.facebook.net 0.0.0.0 www.connect.facebook.net 0.0.0.0 apps.facebook.com
The NSA tracks Americans' social networks, and Facebook is just one of its sources.
maybe so, but they don't seem to be doing it very effectively. If so, they would have been a. more closely following the the Boston Marathon bombers. b. would have been able to ID them from photos pulled from the surveillance tapes.
so while the NSA and their recent "efforts" are pretty scary and de jure or de facto illegal, it is the government, so how effective can they really be at keeping an eye on us?
Its a great tool to get UX ideas.
Old timers will remember bbs, irc. And after Okrut was created, many people left the old services. Now, many of them migrated to fecesbook.
That same people also are not interested in NSA or privacy. They just want to make noise, search and be found by other people like them.
Eventually my 83-year-old great aunt came in and showed me what sequence of links to click to arrive at an upload icon. shrug
I spend 10 hours a day on a command line.
Money is the root of all evil. Combine that with privacy, and Facebook IS the new root of all evil. I deleted my account years ago, and I know with 100% certainty it will never be purged. It's criminal, and I fucking loathe this fact. I would pay to cave in some of the faces at Facebook.
Money is a medium of exchange, a proxy token for barter. The need to have more than others (whether wealth in its various guises or power) is the corrupting influence. Or so the Pardoners would have us believe.