On Wednesday 06 October 2021 17:20:43 you wrote:
On Wed, 6 Oct 2021, William Morder wrote:
On Wednesday 06 October 2021 16:35:20 you wrote:
RMS gets a bad rap these days, but he was right about one basic idea: that our data ought never be collected in the first place. Once it is collected, with or without our permission, whether it is legal or illegal, then *somebody* out there will want it, and will have the means to get it.
Who is RMS?
Oh, sorry for the shorthand.
Richard Stallman, one of main persons behind GNU/Linux. (Or, he would probably say, the *only* one, the sole creator ... ) You can discover more for yourself, as there are a lot of pages out there either written by him or about him. The FOSS or Open Source movement is rather a watered-down version of his original idea.
Oh, I know him. I went to a presentation he gave at the ETH Zürich a long time ago. At the end of his presentation he put on a gown and introduced us to the "Church of Emacs"! He was certainly an inspiration. Sorry to hear he gave himself a bad rap.
Gianluca
He annoying at best, a jerk or asshole most of the time, and nowadays has got himself a bad reputation, and some of it is deserved. He says a lot of things that are, um, politically incorrect or worse. But he was right about this one idea, which is that we must stop these problems at their root.
Bill
Yes, it is too bad. My sense of him is that he is one of those stuck-back-in-the-1960s hippies who never moved on. I mean, he was still living in student residence dormitories (I believe it was) at his university until a couple years ago (aged in his mid-60s, but still living like a university student). And, like many a crusty old hippie I know from the generation before myself, he doesn't recognize that what sounded cool and hep back in the 1960s sounds, to a younger generation, inappropriate or offensive. People don't talk like that any more, but he is tone-deaf.
He is one of that original pantheon of MIT geeks and hackers (in the "pure" sense of the word), and created emacs (I think it was), and other stuff that is fundamental to our present technology. So I give him due respect, but I can also see how he upsets some people, because he irked me, too. Still, on this basic idea, he is right, and it's getting harder to evade that point.
Users can own their data only if they own their machines, and if the software is free/libre; to protect our communications and data, and to preserve our privacy, we must use encryption. Otherwise, we will slip gradually into having no privacy at all, then attempts to preserve our privacy are criminalized. It really comes down to a choice between one or the other.
Then he fell into trouble with the "cancel culture" and Me-Too movement, etc., because he said some things that were objectionable. In any case, if he had thought twice about his words, he might have saved himself much pain and suffering, as his indiscretions got him removed from some positions (though now semi-rehabilitated and reinstated?), and also he lost his student housing arrangements, and now is living who knows where; although according to his home page he is now giving talks in Europe.
Bill
On Wed, Oct 06, 2021 at 05:57:55PM -0700, William Morder via tde-users wrote:
Then he fell into trouble with the "cancel culture" and Me-Too movement, etc., because he said some things that were objectionable.
I think you mean "accurate". But to the woke, true and objectional are synonyms.
I remember when it was the *right wingers* who proudly claimed that reality was whatever they wanted it to be, and sneered at the "reality based community" who cared about what was actually true and what wasn't. How times have changed -- the so-called "left" now actively want corporations to censor viewpoints other than their own, not just "fake news" but *inconvenient truths*.
I'd much rather be sneered at by right-wingers than cancelled, censored, smeared, banned, assaulted and arrested by neoliberal rainbow-haired corporate faux-leftists.
In any case, if he had thought twice about his words, he might have saved himself much pain and suffering, as his indiscretions got him removed
"Indiscretions" is an excellent word. It literally means *not discreet*, that is, not respectful of secrects, not avoiding causing embarrassment.
The secrets to which I speak are things which everyone knows are true, but polite society pretends are not, and gets embarrassed or shocked when forced to confront those indiscreet facts.
For more on the long, repeated attempts to do to Richard Stallman what they did to Eric Raymond, see:
https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/09/30/in-defense-of-richard-stallman/
https://www.wetheweb.org/post/cancel-we-the-web
https://libreboot.org/news/rms.html
Stallman is an actual anti-corporatist leftist, but he is still respected and influential in FOSS circles, which is why he has to go. If you are not suckling at the teat of megacorps, the woke want you silenced, and they will lie and distort to do so.
-
Steven D'Aprano -
William Morder