On Wednesday 06 October 2021 17:20:43 you wrote: 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