Digital-Citizen

Mass surveillance is an abuse. One could go further in exploring additional abuses by looking into what is done with the data (Where is the data stored? Who else has access? What do they do with the data? Is any of this knowable?) but indiscriminately collecting information on people in the hope it will somehow prove useful is nothing but a cover for seeding people with the notion that it's right and proper to have no privacy.

Consider this excerpt from the article: "“Schools are justified in thinking about safety, both in terms of gun violence and other possible hazards,” Rachel Levinson, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Gizmodo. “At the same time, these technologies do not exist in a vacuum; we know, for instance, that facial recognition is less accurate for women and people of color, and also that school discipline is imposed more harshly on children of color.”"

Everything Levinson says here is vague and remarkably inarticulate. Being concerned is insufficient and a better written article would have asked Levinson further questions to clarify these claims. Precisely how is a bunch of data like this going to curb gun violence? What other hazards are you referring to, exactly? Why should we be concerned about the details of accuracy of the collected information while we're questioning whether it was ethical and useful to collect this data in the first place? Which school situations where "discipline is imposed more harshly on children of color" will be resolved by watching surveillance footage or examining location data?

All the more reason why people should get their own computers, never use school-issued computers, and make sure that their own computers run only a free software OS, and install nothing but free software on top of that. Also everyone (not just parents and students) need to politically organize to let students use privacy respecting books and (only if strictly needed) computer education that can be used from any computer OS.

> What about responsible disclosure ethics?

"Responsible" to whom? Terms like these indicate what side one takes, such as how one expands the term "DRM": digital rights management means taking the 1%/elite side favored by the publisher, the few in power. 'Digital restrictions management' highlights what's happening from the user's side, the 99%, the side of the many. Similarly with the harm to the users and the desire for freedom in the term "jailbreaking".

So, since we recognize the reporters owe AMD nothing, to whom are they "responsible"? Or what are they responsible for?

This phrase strikes me as useless except to try to foist a responsibility on people that they don't actually have and getting the relatively powerless to serve the interests of power -- users who can't inspect, edit, or share edited CPU microcode are somehow not acting responsibly if they don't give proprietors sufficient notice.

Where is the "responsible disclosure" for Intel when they refuse to let users fully control the signing keys used in the software that sees every network packet before the rest of the computer (for inbound network traffic) and before a packet leaves the computer (for outbound traffic)? The one-sidedness of it all sticks out like a sore thumb.

What's important aren't really the bugs, bugs can be fixed. What's important is who is allowed to run, inspect, share, and modify the code. If only the copyright holder is allowed to do this, that's proprietary software and that's malicious. If a user's software freedom is respected so users can choose to fix it themselves, wait for another release, hire someone else to fix the code, or live with the bugs that's treating the user properly.

Everyone makes mistakes; it's more about how those mistakes are handled and if a user's control over their computer is respected.

> 1-day notice? Such aggressive wording without even the chance for AMD to address the concerns?

Are the reporting parties under any obligation to give AMD notice?

Behaving according to AMD's wishes is not an obligation. Businesses will be the first to tell you that agreements and laws form obligations, not what someone perceives as a nice thing to do.

If not, then you're reacting to a distraction, a detail that doesn't matter: how the corporate-friendly tech press is trying to shift blame away from the party that either sold CPUs with bugs in them (mistakes happen, and this is unfortunate) or distributed nonfree (proprietary, user-subjugating) software which also happens to contain insecurities (a malicious and unjust way to distribute software).

That software and MacPaint might be more useful to people if it were released as free software: software that respects people's freedom to run, inspect, modify, and share published software even commercially. As it is, there's no language in the license ("This Material is Copyright © 1984 Apple Inc. and is made available only for non-commercial use.") that allows one to do much of anything with MacPaint.

Perhaps it was about purchasing the copyrights and patents Ring controls, or purchasing the company most likely to cause problems for Amazon when Amazon rolls out more of their ridiculous home invasion plan marketed as an inside-the-home delivery service. This is the service apparently everyone has been perfectly fine to do without since Amazon began doing business.

Any netnews set of servers not owned by cooperative entities is more supportive of free speech than any single-point-of-censorship/chokepoint like a website. If a website's owners don't want to carry one's posts, or if a sufficiently organized set of readers don't want others to read that post it's easy to score the post low and effectively keep others from reading it by default. Not so easy to do with netnews where servers share posts with each other; servers that share posts will typically spread that post to another server. There are multiple points at which one can upload the post and wait for the normal store-and-forward mechanism to work. That post can be scored low or marked read by an individual, but such action won't keep others from reading the post.

I think this is a big part of the reason why centralization is always censorship and, in turn, why organizations desire that power when setting up yet another discussion site.

It's not clear to me that Veil is better than that plus maybe a VPN or Tor, even for the sites where Veil could work at all.

My understanding of Veil is that Veil is an image-based proxy: One gives Veil the URL of the page to visit and one of Veil's array of proxy servers (which you must trust) returns an image of the page requested. The Veil URL presumably doesn't correspond to the real page URL and would be recycled after a short while (so the same Veil URL would return different images in the hopes of obfuscating what previous users looked up at that Veil URL).

From what I can ascertain Veil will fail to live up to the claims made in the TechCrunch article because those claims (such as "[Veil] masks the page you’re viewing not just from would-be attackers, but from your own operating system") are either impossible to meet or impossible to meet using one's own computer (a computer one presumably trusts). Sure, Veil renders your browser's history useless and your computer won't run the client-side programs (JS, WebAssembly, etc.) to see a webpage but I can avoid running that stuff now and simply choose not to visit pages that require such.

The paper makes more claims that are not really believable in the context of pitching Veil as a useful privacy-oriented service: for example, talking about a DNS cache as a point of privacy vulnerability is a noble goal but kind of silly when a server-side DNS log or (for many users) logs made en route (DNS is often done in the clear) will reveal DNS traffic. One doesn't need to go to the client to get this information.

With regard to getting information from the client, Veil does nothing to defeat frequent screen snapshotting or covert console recording (nor could it). That is an actual threat to one's privacy, particularly with proprietary software. Eventually information has to be decoded and displayed in cleartext before the user's eyes can see it and comprehend it. Therefore that's an attack point. The free software VM-based GNU/Linux OS Qubes faces the same vulnerability and there are no known solutions besides teaching people to value their software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify published software) and install only free software on one's computer. Contrary to the TechCrunch article, "security researchers will want to audit the code", everyone deserves software freedom not just security researchers and reading the source code is insufficient to assess its trustworthiness.

Perhaps Veil (image-based browsing) helps avoid some problems incurred through JS but Veil could create some problems too: it's not clear how or if filling out forms and form submission works, and the more interactive a site is via JS the less likely that site works with Veil. Even animated CSS is likely to fail here as a snapshot can't give you that animation. I imagine that Veil is useful if you don't mind giving up those things, and you somehow come to trust Veil's proxy servers (I'm not sure how one could assess such trustworthiness). Theoretically Veil could do image tile sliding and crossfading to reintroduce what is inherently lost with snapshots, but I'm guessing that's a lot more work than anyone will put into this.

I'm pretty sure I saw something like this many years ago when webpages were far more likely to be static HTML (and thus easily snapshotted for viewing), but that implementation focused on caching and website development (what does this page look like in these 5 browsers?), which strike me as more achievable goals.

Finally, I'm pretty tired of seeing research summaries or proposals as PDFs. It seems to me to be an awful tradeoff -- give up accessibility (I can't resize the fonts or use my preferred fonts) for some layout that, frankly, doesn't require a PDF in the first place. There's nothing shown in the Veil PDF that couldn't have been done on an ordinary HTML+CSS static webpage.

> They have again made statements saying that this tool was only used against pirated copies of their software.

That's quite a claim. But it wouldn't matter if they did apologize. No apology would take away the malware or cause this publisher to have not used the secrecy of proprietary software (and the implicit trust all of their users had in the publisher) to not do what they did.

Too bad for the users who obtained copies (regardless of how) that this claim is utterly unverifiable and ultimately up to the dictates of an organization that already misrepresented its aim to its users -- I'll bet that people who got a copy thought they were getting a flight simulator, not a credentials copier. There's no reason to trust that they're not lying now. And what if FlightSimLabs (or some organization they trust to hold data) inadvertently leaked sensitive information? That's the trouble with trusting organizations to hold sensitive data; they can end up contributing to harm even if they don't intend to do so, or do so accidentally purely by way of making bad decisions about whether to hold the data in the first place and also by bad design of where and how to store the sensitive data.

Proprietary software hides malware (see https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary.html for lots of examples), users deserve software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, modify, and share published software), and users deserve to control their own computers. And this DRM was indiscriminate (as most DRM is): it was installed on all users of the affected program, including on the copies distributed in the manner FlightSimLabs wanted.

The article reads to me like Amazon is cynically trying to escape criticism for the poor working conditions they impose on their workers, even using this offer to get the public to flip the criticism Amazon receives to get the public to see this offer as a reasonable choice for the poorer Amazon employees. Amazon is really saying that the cost of these offers (even including the cost of employee turnover) is less than the cost of improving working conditions so employees aren't in such dire straits by working there in the first place.

60-year-old Jim Perota, who worked in Amazon's distribution center in Chattanooga for 3 years, said he took his $3,000 offer and figures "he more or less broke even". But working conditions were so bad even this was considered reasonable because, "What mattered was that he got out.". How bad were working conditions?

> He says he hated the job. He says he lost 30 pounds working at Amazon > because he was on his feet so much, picking items off shelves and > putting them in bins, and also packing goods into boxes. His breaks were > only 15 minutes, but it would take 10 minutes to get to the break room, > so he’d sit on stairs, waiting for the work to begin again, he told me. > Perota had worked for the postal service, as a disc jockey, and for the > U.S. Census, but working for Amazon “was the most brutal, and it took > the biggest toll on my body,” he said. But he couldn’t quit, because he > needed the health insurance, he said.

"The Offer" strikes me as a distraction away from focusing on Amazon's exploitation of their workforce. I can only imagine that this exit payment plan costs Amazon less than improving the working conditions and earning a set of employees that are proud to work there.

When one uses any of the popular commercial streaming services they also submit to non-free software (proprietary software, untrustworthy by default), and tracking.

The media one gets from such services contain DRM (digital restrictions management; I use this expansion of the term because I side with the people who are subjected to the restrictions, not with the publishers who subject others to those restrictions). DRM is anti-user, always implemented with non-free software, and (even on its own greedy merits) routinely fails to achieve the claimed goal of preventing unauthorized copies. But DRM achieves a little-discussed goal of giving someone else control over one's computer. In this time of remote control and mass surveillance, it's worth noting that DRM is rightly seen by those subjected to it as a threat, not a friend.

And there's nothing incompatible with commercially distributing DRM-free copies of digital works via a free software client. Private BitTorrent trackers work and could be set up and used by authorized distributors to implement commercial distribution. But years into the existence of the commercial streaming services there's no indication that they care to try.

These issues aren't explored at all in the wholly lacking article; these issues are ignored as reasons why people would want to retain full control of their computers and copy data via a free software BitTorrent client.

From the article:

> The real problem here is that there’s no way to know just how much of VPN traffic is growing or how much of it is BitTorrent.

That's a show-stopper problem for the entire article. All of the claims made in the article hinge on the idea that BitTorrent use is undergoing a "Long, Slow Decline". But the author provides no way to back up that claim and buries the lede suggesting why: they don't have the data to back up the claim in their chosen title. The article is largely a joke, a collection of baseless speculation, propaganda (including uncritical use of "piracy", "Legitimate Alternatives")[1], no awareness of why people share data via BitTorrent, and nothing that indicates an awareness of how laws differ around the world (an American bias is unacceptable since the Internet, BitTorrent use, and alleged activity are all global). Sadly some of the feedback on this group echoes the same sentiment: claims about what most people do without posting any sources to back up the claims.

On top of all that, the article is hosted on a service that could use a more resilient underlying infrastructure. As one poster here pointed out, it's as if the article should have been hosted on a service that lets people pass around verbatim copies of the article.

[1] See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html on how these and other terms are unwise to use without explaining what you mean. One of the giant risks is conveying an undisclosed viewpoint that colors your take on everything else: "unauthorized copying" or "prohibited copying" could have been used instead of "piracy", for example. I'd add "legitimate" to that list of words for the same reason: the word implies that such copying is illegitimate where it is illegal. But as that gnu.org article also points out, "[L]aws don't define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice. If the laws (the implementation) don't fit our ideas of right and wrong (the spec), the laws are what should change.". If we're to have a reasonable discussion of this, we ought to admit to our views and speak of them clearly, not hide behind propaganda without ever explicitly coming to terms with their implications.

You have good reason not to trust it or any device like it; proprietary software (which is always untrustworthy) + mic and/or camera + Internet connection equals spy device that doesn't respect your software freedom, pure and simple. You deserve to have as much control over your computers as you wish and no device like that will respect your privacy. The alleged convenience is highly overrated (everyone who has one has lived most of their lives without one and apparently been able to do just fine without) and, more importantly than any alleged convenience, not a good trade-off in light of paying with your freedom and privacy.

But the same can be said of the tracker devices residing in many pockets. Some call it a cell phone or mobile phone, but its primary job and the job it does most of the time is to geolocate or track itself. And a tracker's mic has no indicator when it's listening, or a way for the user to vet the captured data, or control where the captured data goes. Those trackers that also have cameras are even worse in this regard. And they all run non-free, user-subjugating, proprietary software. So none of them respect a user's software freedom or privacy. I suspect that those with user-unmodifiable batteries aren't truly ever off except for when all of the batteries run down. But most users never turn their trackers off anyhow, so that's a bit of a moot point.

What other freedoms can proprietors convince you to do away with in exchange for some minor convenience or possibly a little innumerate fear-baiting (such as "you'll want this tracker in the case of an emergency!").

Not among the powerful, no. The public gets great benefit from FLOSS codecs (Opus, VPx, AV1, etc.) and containers anyone is free to implement without patent hassles (such as Matroska and the smaller variant used in WebM). Patent holders usually try to wrangle control of everyone (Apple being a part of a media codec patent-holding group meant Apple pushed those codecs and back when people cared what Apple picked that meant more power for Apple). In this respect, it's a class issue.

In 1990 IBM (in "Think" magazine, #5) said they got considerably more value from cross-licensing than fees (in other words, looking at this in terms of money is wrongheaded) because cross-licensing gives them access to ideas). So, it's the power to control one's competition at play as well. This arrangement means (as Richard Stallman pointed out in essays and talks years ago found online in https://audio-video.gnu.org/video/rms-vub-2011-02-22.ogv ) that the entire temporary monopoly one ostensibly gets from the patent system is a sham, a myth. Organizations that hold a lot of patents can always find ways to economically compel smaller patent holders into cross-licensing, thus eliminating any real value of patenting ideas for most.

I think you're reacting to the wrong issue -- a minor and perhaps unwise choice of words: substitute "strong" for "unbreakable" and the point remains -- aren't we better off by standing up for what ought to be a human right -- strong encryption -- instead of knuckling under to implementing backdoored encryption that governments have long wanted cryptographers to implement?

> Wouldn't it be better if we adopt the position that unbreakable crypto is a basic human right?

Yes, but you're asking a set of people who have not given us much evidence they're capable or willing to implement that human right. It takes a strong will and a stiff spine to stand up to powerful interests and I'm not convinced the people I see reported on in mainstream so-called journalism have that political will. Hiding behind technological inferiority seems to take precedence over standing for our rights on principle.

Freedom of speech, which you mentioned, also takes a beating these days in light of completely and accurately conveying messages some people don't agree with in a timely manner. We can't have freedom of speech because that might involve giving up conveniences, they argue.

The article says:

"Sniggering Linux users who believe in open code and open standards can take a hike. The Online Accounts systems in GNOME, Ubuntu Unity, Plasma, and MATE do the exact same thing as Window 10. There are underlying CalDAV and CardDAV sync engines (Evolution Data Server, Akonadi) that power them but the user interface only expose two–three providers like Google and Yahoo! with no option to auto-discover or manually configure any other providers."

I think this takes a needlessly limited view by casting the limits imposed on users of nonfree software onto free software (which is odd because elsewhere the author says they love free software). Here's the overlooked difference: with a free software program, one can improve the code to add the desired functionality and interoperability. Users can even get together and collectively fund a programmer to help them out. By contrast, Microsoft Windows 10 Email app is nonfree (proprietary, user-subjugating). Even technically capable and willing users are prohibited from reading the relevant source code, modifying it, and distributing it to help others. Even if Microsoft alters their code to add missing functionality, users likely gain no software freedom in the process. Users aren't allowed to inspect and rebuild the software. Software freedom leads to trusting that software and proprietary software is often malware (https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.html for pointers to how Microsoft's software is often malware). Software freedom is the key to understanding the difference.

This limitation has nothing to do with GNU/Linux systems (unfairly referred to as "Linux" in the article; see https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Linux for more on this) per se; software can be ported to other OSes and the desired features could be available there too.

Standards that allow interoperability are a good unto themselves, just like software freedom, and we should push for both, use both, and improve both to meet our needs, not "take a hike" as the author suggests.

With software freedom users don't have to beg a software proprietor (who is also a known NSA collaborator and multinational antitrust violator) to make the software more interoperable. They can help themselves, they can hire someone to help, they can ask the community (perhaps in more kind words than the article) to help. These are potent options that render the software trustworthy (regardless of who wrote it) and with sufficient improvement even cross-platform.

With Chrome you face the inherent untrustworthiness of nonfree software. Chrome users always trust Google. No set of preference changes or add-ons makes Chrome safe from Google's power over your data or your computer. This strikes me as a fundamentally worse position for any Chrome user.

Perhaps, but like the grandparent post said, one can find other online stores that don't require JavaScript.

Going beyond what the grandparent post said, JS is a big reason why websites are slow, insecure (from the user's perspective), and time-consuming. Amazon.com's site is ridiculously sluggish precisely because of needless JS. There's nothing about purchasing something online that legitimately needs JS to make that purchase work. You can search for stuff on Amazon without JS but (for all I know) purchasing doesn't work without JS because of implementation choices Amazon made. I'm not so convinced Amazon's prices are all that great, and buying locally is often a better deal for things I buy. The more I learn about how Amazon conducts business (see https://stallman.org/amazon.html for many reasons why) the more interested I am in avoiding them.

If you want to buy new or used books and you want to do business with Amazon, AbeBooks is owned by Amazon and AbeBooks works fully without JS.

I'm guessing there are other places to get items instead of using eBay.

The bulk of the article is about reacting to largely inchoate disapproving reviews. Furthermore, those reviews (according to one post quoted in the article) make up one-tenth of one percent of disapproving reviews. That suggests it's quite easy to find a lot of reviews that aren't screeds. The article does a very poor job of explaining why it's worth taking such a small minority of angrily-worded reviews so personally.

Surprisingly, the part of the article that comes close to talking about what you brought up gets very little coverage and doesn't start the article (burying the lede). There too, according to the article, those posts (which you refer to) make up "an even smaller proportion". So those posts which might justifiably concern not only aren't featured prominently in the article, but constitute an indefinably smaller portion of what was already vaguely described as small. One has to wonder why the language you're talking about isn't the basis for the article. Seems a shame to focus on petty namecalling if publishing someone else's address presumably to encourage the public to shame or harass them in person or to "try and find their family" (quoting the article) presumably for some in-person dealing is commonplace. I don't know if that's the case, and neither your reply nor the article help anyone determine how frequent that is.

The article claims "What I’m drawing attention to here is the normalisation of online abuse — both from the perspective of content creators and from the point of view of the audience. It is now, for a significant part of our audience, the way in which they communicate with creators.". That's an evidenceless innumerate claim from the article which very much needs some backing. We simply aren't given information we need to make sense of the claims. What constitutes "normalisation"? How much is "significant"?

But what we are given is propaganda -- "creators" -- a word used to compare the programmer to a deity so as to "elevate authors' moral standing above that of ordinary people" (as https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Creator explains), which is preposterous. They're programmers or software developers, working people who sometimes write programs some people don't like and less than 1% of whom (we're told) express themselves very poorly.

You are going well beyond the article with your evidenceless claims about the police, police resources, and everyone's speech rights.

I concur.

It's interesting that so many people who claim they understand what the software is doing don't appear to understand that proprietary software is always untrustworthy. Users have no real control over proprietary software, no matter how technical and willing they are to change their copy of the software.

Therefore it doesn't matter which apps are installed on a proprietary OS. The proprietary OS (or possibly some hardware beneath it) is untrustworthy. Every keystroke, drag/gesture, location change, camera/mic input, and more pass through proprietary software before they get to the ostensibly trustworthy app.

Here's a few more:

Ethics of computing: explaining and considering the principles of free software, practical reasons for respecting software freedom, and reviewing corporate-minded disclosure policies such as so-called "embargoes" on when security flaws may be revealed by independent actors who haven't agreed to keep secrets for businesses. Plenty of discussion and debunking of the latest corporate-written news stories.

Reverse engineering protocols and file formats: we are saddled with a lot of network protocols and file formats that need to be documented so we can write fully compatible free software. A free software Skype client wouldn't protect any user from the calls routed through a central Skype server, but it would allow users to tell their Skype-using friends and family to consider switching to a free software client where their calls aren't copied by default by Microsoft (a known NSA spying partner).

Writing documentation for IT professionals and non-technical computer users: too few people I know in IT jobs write documentation at all (even something as trivial as updating a ticket explaining what they did to resolve an issue). Some IT pros don't use complete sentences when they speak or write leading to unclarity and needless confusion, and further exacerbating an 'insiders club' mentality. This is a course aimed at showing technically-minded people (or those who aim to become such) the value of speaking clearly, writing clearly, and committing things to writing instead of depending on memory and verbal "hand-off" between IT professionals.

Yes, and for good reason: https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/proprietary-back-doors.html has a list of some of the backdoors found in proprietary software (software users are not free to run, inspect, share, and modify).

https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/ has a list of other kinds of malware found in proprietary software sorted by type and company or type of product. It's very informative reading and touches on issues which often come up on sites like Hacker News.

A correction: running no additional nonfree code.

"The reason why that's unlikely to happen is that companies treat source code as a significant asset, which is why I first mentioned a longer support period. My favorite approach for this problem would be regulation requiring mandatory release of source code, the toolchain, signing keys, etc. if the manufacturer stops supporting something, so the places which want to keep their trade secrets can still do so but are required to help their users at the same time."

I mostly concur, therefore I certainly hope you're all donating to the Software Freedom Conservancy for their GNU GPL enforcement efforts (see https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/ for more) and encouraging people to license their free software under a strongly-copylefted free software license such as the GNU GPL v3 or later, or the AGPL v3 or later. These licenses allow users to request and deserve to receive complete corresponding source code, build instructions, signing keys, and other materials needed to build the software.

We all need free software for all our computers and we need it whether a manufacturer supports something or not. It's not the public's job to look out for Western Digital's interests including their alleged trade secrets. Western Digital still supports the WDMyCloud device but apparently can't be trusted to handle the software that device runs. It would help WDMyCloud users to publish that device's entire software as free software (if they haven't already), as well as the other things you rightly mention (build instructions, signing keys, and anything else needed to get the device running) so users aren't waiting for this less trusted party to make better choices. Users ought to be free to run, inspect, modify, and share this software or get someone else they trust to do this work on their behalf.

Regarding "Youtube is a video hosting site, it's not a political platform": politics enters any situation where 2 or more people are involved. Another poster has clearly explained how YouTube is quite fine hosting shows with what are clearly political views as well as choosing whose views are currently in favor. Calling any editing effort non-political is either woefully uninformed or an attempt to manipulate others (snowed or trying to snow others).

Regarding "has no obligation to host content it doesn't deem suitable": Yes, sadly, this is a problem not unique to YouTube. All hosters get to decide what to host and to change that decision at any time.

Some people choose to respond to hosting on sufferance by becoming sycophants (placate the hoster with speech one believes won't offend the censors) but that is ultimately detrimental to one's own message and free speech overall. We have no solution for this that is really easy for nontechnical computer users because we all depend on other parties for Internet access. If homes had Internet access that could not be taken away, we might be able to recommend self-hosting. For now, in the age of the ISPs, the best we can do is massively decentralized hosting which uses no DRM, running additional nonfree code (such as YouTube's DRM in JS), and somehow getting a lot of peers with lots of storage and bandwidth to keep available copies of everything uploaded (we ought not decide that one message is worth sharing and not another message because that is the very problem we're trying to solve).

This is a tough problem to solve. I don't know what a viable solution will look like quite yet. But I know what to avoid: we won't solve this problem by placating big business desires for more control over what we say and how we get copies of other people's works.

There's nothing special about "video service" nor is that even a relevant concept to discuss and in no way contradicts anything I said. If you're going to claim otherwise, please be specific about this alleged contradiction so we can have a meaningful conversation. Serving data is serving data. Hosters have to put effort into disguising/obfuscating a URL to make it not be a static link (and thus completely useful for HTML5 video/audio use, or pointing others to download and keep, or something else).

If a hoster doesn't want one to distribute the files, that is the issue. Not whether one distributes them for use in an HTML5 video/audio element, or downloading for local storage, or use in some other way.

https://blog.archive.org/2009/07/01/archive-org-supports-the... would seem to address your claim.

IA (https://archive.org) offers a BitTorrent feed for each of its uploads. You should check out what IA offers.

That's quite a claim made without any pointer to evidence. Do you have any evidence to back up this claim?

IA has been around for many years and not bumped into this problem. Nor are they making choices that even hint at this problem. In fact, they have long made choices (such as default derivatives generation) which suggest they have plenty of storage space and bandwidth.

Also, this isn't an evidenceless complaint specific to IA.

The two cases (YouTube and using nonfree OSes) are not comparable as the grandparent poster and this suggest.

In Stallman's case there were no free software OSes. One could not use a computer in freedom. Therefore he used a nonfree OS to write free software until he could run a free software OS and thus had no more need for nonfree OSes. For years now he (and the FSF) don't run nonfree systems. They even endorse computers (and other computer hardware) that can be run completely in freedom (see https://www.fsf.org/ryf for details).

We already have file hosting options that don't use DRM, nonfree JS (or indeed any JS), and avoid the other problems of YouTube. There's no need for coming up with something new as we already have viable other means of sharing files.

We don't need YouTube, they need us. By buying into their limitations and restrictions uploaders endorse YouTube (which is undesirable and certainly not very thoughtful) and help foist YouTube's choices on others (which is unethical).