Who should your computer take its orders from? (2002)
gnu.org
gnu.org
> we need to make concessions with computers when we market them to the masses
or
> RMS's argument made a lot more sense when computers were a professional tool used by trained individuals. But that audience has changed a lot in the past 30 years.
So the argument is that users shouldn't have control over their own devices because most don't want it? That seems like a non sequitur.
1. Why not just hide the controls in a hard-to-reach menu or similar, if the goal is just not to frighten the poor device owners/users with control they don't want? Instead systems are purposefully engineered to lock them down.
2. There definitely seems to be a trend to take away ever more control that device owners used to have over the past decades and years. Apple leads the way with their phones and laptops, but I think that e.g., getting the right to administrate the OS on Android phones is also getting more difficult in general. So how come the users got by fine 15 years ago, without getting heart attacks from all the control over their systems available back then (compared to a today's smartphone).
3. I think it's pretty obvious that users will get less accustomed to having control over their devices if that control ceases to be available in off-the-shelf products, so the it's kind of backwards to just say "the users can't handle it".
The pre-smartphone phones were in practice frozen. I vaguely recall installing some game on the later ones via cable to the computer though. But anyways, smartphones are more open in practice than phones used to be. So not all bad developement.
(I am not mentioning the privacy drawbacks etc of new phones.)
Thing is a smart doesn’t compete with just a phone , it competes with laptops , desktops too.
A lot of people don’t bother buying laptops or desktops these days because they can do most of what they want on their phone
In the instance that the reason for not exposing the control is security, then, it's because obscurity is not a substitute for security.
> users will get less accustomed to having control over their devices if that control ceases to be available in off-the-shelf products, so the it's kind of backwards to just say "the users can't handle it".
I think there are enough examples of users compromising their own systems to demonstrate that it isn't being done without reason.
Regardless of any of this, I wasn't suggesting that we shouldn't use FOSS. I'm simply saying that his argument isn't as impactful as it once was.
He mentions TPM, but there are modern examples of this.
Try playing a modern UHD BluRay on your computer. Unless you have a drive that allows you to rip the BluRay (modified firmware) the only "legal" way to watch it at 4K is to use "specified software". One of those options being Cyberlink's PowerDVD, (yes that bloated video player that is 500MB from 2000). It requires Intel SGX/iGPU[1] and therefore won't work on AMD CPUs. This is because the firmware for the drive has encryption keys that only let certain software use it.
[1] https://www.cyberlink.com/support/faq-content.do?id=19144
I think this is the exact sort of thing that Stallman was talking about when it comes to a computer not following your instructions because of DRM.
HDCP being another one of these lame DRMs, except built into your monitor. I'd argue they don't prevent piracy at all, and don't really hinder it, but increase the cost of hardware because manufacturers have to pay for licensing.
1. Don't educate people about how to use computers
2. People can't use computers
3. Because people can't use computers selflessly offer yourself to manage it for them (without a any monopolistic thoughts of course)
4. Because people now cannot use their own computers, even if they would know how they can't make mistakes, innovate or learn
5. GOTO 2
I really think we should consider teaching kids command line in school, just like we teach them how to write.
And to a degree, I get it; we need to make concessions with computers when we market them to the masses. Even still, I can't help but feel like we made the wrong sacrifices. As companies like Apple, Samsung and Google make their surveillance increasingly intrusive, theirs audience becomes increasingly desensitized to their advances.
There are zero apps I can't uninstall or processes I can't see on my arch Linux desktop.
People spend WAY too much time focusing on Stallman's flaws and quirks and not nearly enough time on his ideas, which continue to be proven right over and over.
The guy is, at minimum, a total fucking creep who alienates women from the Free Software movement with his poor behavior.
Furthermore if he's not a closeted pedophile then he sure devotes a lot of energy to defending pedophiles and finding ways to justify having sex with minors.
The FSF is primarily a political advocacy project. Is RMS really who the Free Software community wants representing them to the rest of society?
Really?
This is exactly the kind of commentary I was talking about. The guy spots a serious problem 30+ years ahead of time, devotes his entire life to fighting it, while making tools that every developer uses every day, and all you have to say is, "He said some mean things, so let's reduce his entire existence to that". Thank God this mentality wasn't around during the second world war. We'd have stuck with Neville Chamberlain because he was such a nice guy compared to that drunken misogynist Churchill fellow.
RMS is an actively detrimental force in the Free Software movement. He's a complete and total liability who hasn't made a substantive contribution to anything in 20 years.
It's like people are purposely blinding themselves to the fact that if your cause is represented by a lunatic, it's less attractive than a similar cause led by someone who doesn't eat their toejam while giving a lecture.
You have a person lacking even the most basic of social graces, who's consistently rude and unpleasant, who makes really gross comments about women and pedophiles, and this is who you think should be the public face of the movement?
Why not literally anyone else?
If the Free Software movement wants to be taken seriously, perhaps it should take itself seriously.
Android phones will blatantly ignore user choice to turn off location data and continue broadcasting to google and subseqent agencies. https://www.news.com.au/technology/gadgets/mobile-phones/goo...
Regarding fingerprint: this is imaginary security, because people leave their fingerprints everywhere and social-engineering a person into placing fingerprints on something to be copied later is trivial. And if you go the extreme route of TV/film, fingers can be used after death or even removed.
Now, as an additional layer of security, I like the idea of biometrics such as fingerprints. If Android would let me save fingerprints and enable recognition while still requiring lockscreen pattern, that would seem like a win.
Fingerprints are admittedly not a match against someone willing to collect mine and make a model of them, but I'm not expecting anyone to do this. If I were, I would disable the fingerprint sensor, of course.
The point of these features is that they make it very easy to get to a reasonably good level of security. If the only option were an (admittedly more secure) strong passphrase to type at every boot, nobody would use it, which would be much worse.
On the other hand, there are a great number of "users" who have no interest in "using" their computers in as much as they are simply trying to accomplish some other task. Many average consumers just want to enjoy the outputs of their technology -- if someone else is giving the orders to the computer, that's not a drawback in their mind, if anything, it's a benefit. There is a reason why people are eating up cloud services, and this is it.
RMS's argument made a lot more sense when computers were a professional tool used by trained individuals. But that audience has changed a lot in the past 30 years.
Is there anything intrinsic about those tasks that means that control of those computing devices has to be rendered partially unto third parties by the everyday consumers who own them?
Or, to put it another way: can the useful affordances that everyday users find in proprietary software equally be implemented in free and open source software?
In the situations where FOSS wouldn’t work well for end users, there’s almost never a technological barrier to implementation, but tangentially related issues of ownership, control, expectation, obligation, law, or expediency.
A lot of these situations pop up when a system consists of hardware, software, and information, and users that are all from different parties. Sometimes someone other than the user has a legitimate interest in a system.
Group [A] are the end users
Group [B] is a software company
Group [C] is a provider of non-fungible data
[A] needs to access the information provided by [C]
[C] wants to facilitate this, so they contract with [B] to build an exclusive software mechanism to do so.
[C] believes this solution provides a competitive advantage, and requires [B] to perform work under an NDA.
In this situation, [A] doesn't have a choice between FOSS/proprietary. They have a choice between getting the information they need or not getting it. Even if there is a FOSS solution that does a similar functions as the software built by [B], it is not useful to [A], because it cannot provide the information from [C]