Digital-Citizen

Yet another reason not to host on YouTube. Here are some more reasons not to host with YouTube:

- some YouTube videos use nonfree Javascript to implement DRM. https://notabug.org/GPast/avideo/ is a youtube-dl variant that avoids running that JS code. notabug.org seems to be down as I type this, perhaps it will return later. - should you wish to allow your video to be downloaded, YouTube sets up needless barriers to allow downloads. - hosting with YouTube means you and your users are being tracked by Google (which owns YouTube). - YouTube doesn't make it clear how to download the precise video file the submitter uploaded; users get rewritten videos instead. - YouTube only hosts videos, not arbitrary kinds of other media.

All of these problems are easily solved: use the Internet Archive (at https://archive.org/) and your own hosting instead of YouTube. IA offers a download URL which is static and will redirect to your uploaded data. You can use this URL in an HTML5 video or audio element to embed the data in a webpage (again, no JS needed). IA will (by default) rewrite certain kinds of files, but your original uploaded file is also available and machine-determinable (via an XML file that clearly indicates which is the source file and which are derivative files). IA can be used fully without JS turned on (no need to worry about executing code to get files). IA hosting is gratis (zero cost), as is YouTube.

I have no evidence which indicates IA tracks users akin to how Google does.

I encourage you to consider hosting your media with the Internet Archive and your own website instead of YouTube.

No, it's informed and clearheaded. We aren't well served by conflating trademarks (which, at their best, help with consumer protection via anti-fraudulence) with copyright infringement, or patent power. The similarities are far and few between, and mostly not relevant in any discussion. The term "intellectual property" is usually used by people trying to snow someone or someone who is confused about what's going on.

I appreciate the quality of the screen, but I think the Mitsubishi flat screens were a step up from Sony's Trinitrons. If I recall, the Trinitron were a section of a cylinder (vertically flat) but the Mitsubishi 2040U (and later short-neck version, 2060U or something like that) used a strategically distorted picture to ultimately hit a flat screen (both vertically and horizontally flat) and appear focused.

Sony would, in my opinion, ruin their name by mistreating people (both customers and would-be customers) by publishing what we now call "fake news" in the form of movie reviews by "David Manning" (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_(fictitious_writ... for more) and distributing malware to Windows users on some audio CDs (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk... for more).

The latter means that Windows users who may have legally acquired a copy of the affected 58 known audio CDs (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Compact_Discs_sold_wit... for the list) and inserted them into their Windows OS computer may have contracted software now identified as either spyware, a trojan horse, or a rootkit called "XCP" that could not easily be removed even if the user refused the EULA presented to them. Some of the software on these CDs appeared to be copyright infringements from FLOSS as well. And to cap it all off, the uninstaller for the malware only hid the software's entry in the Windows add/remove software list without uninstalling the software. Even Sony BMG's initial rootkit removal software exacerbated the problem further mistreating users. Ostensibly this was all done in the name of preventing people from making a copy of the audio tracks to their computers.

I don't recommend running Windows or any other nonfree software. But that's no excuse for Sony's abuses. There's no good way to justify committing copyright infringement against developers who are respecting a user's software freedom. Nor is there good reason to justify Sony's choices to repeatedly subject users to malware, stand in the way of a non-infringing use, or make malware hard to remove.

I'm not keen to distinguish between the various arms of Sony, so I choose not to do business with any of them. I also notice that despite all this malicious behavior the people who run the various arms of Sony are apparently not keen to distance themselves from the name "Sony".

I've found that linking to Stallman's articles tends to promote discussion wherein those who object to his articles don't provide specifics against his arguments to back up their own objections. Those pages are loaded with specific consequences; if you haven't spent time reading them you should.

Also, the case of what the "average consumer cares about" (almost invariably an evidenceless case which serves to benefit a business) is often pitched but always shown to be wrong. As Glenn Greenwald points out very clearly in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOksJKfapVM (around 28m30s) he has challenged the notion that privacy is vague or somehow unimportant, or that anyone doesn't care. In fact, he demonstrates how people who say something like what you assert, "They don't actually mean it. At all. And the proof of it is they do all sorts of things to safeguard their own privacy; I mean we all have things to hide. There are things that everyone in this room would be willing to have their spouse or their best friend or their physician or their lawyer or their psychiatrist know but would be mortified to have anyone else know. The people who say they don't value privacy, they put and use locks on their bedroom and bathroom door, they put passwords on their email and social media accounts, they do all sorts of things there's a place they can go in the world to think and reason and explore without the judgmental eyes of other people being cast upon them. This is really critical to human freedom.".

Greenwald challenges people who pitch a line quite comparable to what you said to take him up on his offer to divulge all of one's credentials to everything they have (no exceptions, all accounts should be included) by emailing them to an account he maintains. He asks them for this info and tells them explicitly, "I just want to be able to troll through what you're doing online and publish under your name...". A perfectly reasonable request for anyone who wants to insist people don't care about privacy. The results of his request: "To this day, not a single person has taken me up on this offer.". That whole talk is worth hearing and reflecting on.

People do value their own privacy even if they hold immature evaluations of the importance of privacy or don't know enough about how computers work to think through the consequences of their tech-related choices. People need to learn about the cost of "things being free" and hold mature discussions of important issues of our day which certainly include how everyday technology affects one's privacy (and the privacy of anyone who goes to their house within range of that Echo always-on mic; it's not just about your choice for yourself in your home). People need to learn about the inherent value of privacy as well as the notion that some degree of privacy is not easily regained when lost, so one should not trade privacy away for convenience (not that I agree with you that Amazon Echo is convenient; even on its own merits it has already failed to distinguish between its owner and people on TV demonstrating the device causing lots of unwanted orders. This clear exposure of a security problem is hardly convenient). We do that work, in part, with discussions like these, not by downplaying the importance of privacy but by teaching people the very practical outcomes you inchoately chastise Stallman for presenting.

Amazon Echo might be "an ad machine" but that article is a good example of business-minded misdirection: using a relatively minor problem -- persistent advertising -- to deflect attention away from a much greater problem -- persistent spying -- where businesses are the main beneficiaries of the misdirection.

The real problem with Echo is that it's an always-on microphone connected to a networked computer that runs proprietary software (see https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/ for how proprietary software is often malware). Users have no software freedom to inspect what the software on the Echo does, change the Echo's software to make the Echo do something different, or share the Echo software (whether modified or not) to help their community. Even if Echo's software comes with some form of user controls, those controls are implemented with proprietary software, software users cannot trust. No matter how technical and willing a user is to improve their Echo device to meet their needs, the permission to do so is purposefully missing. Amazon does not respect a user's software freedom. Therefore there's no good reason to trust the Echo. For all we know Echo is now or at some later time will relay whatever is within mic range to someplace else, thus presenting a constant threat to one's privacy.

Nobody needs Echo; it does nothing users weren't perfectly fine to do another way by visiting a website to place orders. But one should reconsider doing business with Amazon at all (see https://stallman.org/amazon.html for details).

Is 3 years considered quickly enough? How about 3 years for a remotely-exploitable problem? According to <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/apple/8912714/Apple-iT... Telegraph</a>, "Apple was informed about the relevant flaw in iTunes in 2008, according to Brian Krebs, a security writer, but did not patch the software until earlier this month [Nov 2011], a delay of more than three years.".

It seems to me that nobody but Apple has a responsibility to its users. The public at large certainly doesn't owe Apple (or any other software proprietor) specific performance regardless of whether they report what they've found publicly or when.

Apple is also not being nice to its users by denying them software freedom: most of MacOS is proprietary and the aforementioned bug concerned iTunes, a proprietary media player. So no matter how technically savvy and willing the user is, they're not allowed to diagnose and fix the problem, prepare a fixed copy of the changed files, and help their community by sharing copies of the improved code.

"Responsible disclosure" is indeed propaganda that benefits the proprietor in a clumsy attempt to divert blame for a product people paid for with their software freedom as well as their money.

That video ("Mozilla is Not Trustworthy") is remarkably inarticulate and inchoate all in pursuit of something we don't need to do in the first place -- trust Mozilla. And Mozilla certainly doesn't owe us.

Software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify published computer software) means we don't need to trust Mozilla's free software because we have permission to inspect the code to see what the software does, change the code if we don't like what the software does, distribute the improved software (or a verbatim copy at our choice) even commercially, and run the software anytime we wish for any reason. These principles place us in control of our computers to the extent we're willing and able to put in the work. We can even hire other people to do this work if we don't do the work ourselves.

Lunduke complained about incorporation and non-profit status but never articulated an argument explaining how these things are a problem. Around 7m53s he said this "doesn't make them [Mozilla] untrustworthy" leaving me wondering why this was brought up in the first place. He consistently mispronounced the word "Mozilla" as "Motzilla" (there's no "t" in their name), and directly contradicted his own thesis (around 6m30s) in neighboring sentences: "This is not an opinion on my part. I guess that my opinion is that they're not trustworthy based on these facts...". He did that again in his own ignorance of the terms "foundation" and "corporation" around 7m where he seemed to have a problem with the difference between what he read into the terms he didn't define versus what he described to be the case (thus vaguely complaining that Mozilla made money and published free software for hire). I think it comes down to not having a good argument to raise in the first place but feeling a need to say something about a situation he found irksome. But I think his disorganized view built on a non-issue is typical of the published reaction to this situation.

This entire kerfuffle comes off to me as manufacturing a controversy out of very little. The main beneficiaries of this indignance are the software proprietors -- organizations that make nonfree browsers you can't trust because you never really know what they're doing when those programs run.

It's telling that vanishingly little of the commentary on this situation brings people to understand what software freedom is or how its practical consequences read directly on this situation by explaining how the other programs to do the same job (mostly nonfree user-subjugating programs) are not alternatives at all because they don't respect a user's software freedom. It's not clear how this issue with Looking Glass (the Firefox add-on in question) rises to something more serious than a bungled PR effort and poor communication from Mozilla. Source code analysis shows that Looking Glass did nothing unless activated and that add-on was off by default; hardly something to get so worked up over and largely a purposefully-missed opportunity to teach people about software freedom.

There's no reason to limit this examination to web browsers. Justifying use of any nonfree browser in light of security problems hinges on trusting the proprietor (which you should never do) precisely because those programs are nonfree. Users don't have other information on which to make an informed decision and the information they have is inadequate to make an informed decision. These browsers are also published by known NSA partners. There's no good reason to defend switching to any nonfree program to do any job, particularly if you're going to have a discussion centered on privacy and security.

I see the lacking discussion on this topic as a consequence of pushing for "open source" instead of insisting on software freedom. Open source development methodology was founded to separate the ethics-based principles on which the free software movement is based (the free software movement is a social movement) from the practical outcome of software freedom -- lots of useful software -- while talking chiefly to businesses about the gratis programming labor those businesses can use. This approach purposefully skips past an ethical understanding of how to treat people with regard to computers. This approach requires talking at length about this situation without drawing users' attention to what software freedom is or how it matters. But there's no substance in that approach so proponents raise ill-formed non-issues (with a heavy dose of entitlement ("Mozilla has to prove to us that they are worthy of our usage") to make it seem like Mozilla has become a persistent problem instead of seeing a long-time free software publisher make a relatively minor communication mistake that posed no threat to Firefox users. Quite the contrary is the case: we can and should continue to run and build new programs on Mozilla's free software just as we do with any other free software. Thanking them for their work and not taking an entitled attitude is also right and proper.