arctux

Some projects I support:

GIMP: https://liberapay.com/GIMP/

Mastodon: https://liberapay.com/Mastodon/

Matrix: https://liberapay.com/matrixdotorg/

Syncthing: https://liberapay.com/Syncthing/

Wireguard: https://liberapay.com/WireGuard/

Liberapay doesn't charge any fees, so they ask for support on their own platform: https://liberapay.com/Liberapay/

To be clear, I find Facebook and Google's tracking-based advertisement business model repugnant. I was only giving credit as to the transparency report, which it publishes despite not being required to do so.

There are a good number of valid points, but the article's arguments in support of SOPA and PIPA are weak. Even assuming that online copyright violations are a cancer on the economy, there needs to be some sense of proportionality. Most people and organizations didn't necessarily object to better enforcement; they objected to the manner. Crime is likely to decrease if we were to install surveillance cameras on every street corner, but those cameras are neither reasonable nor conducive to a free society.

The most compelling argument is the importance of large-scale corporate surveillance to infringements on civil rights. To its (partial) credit, Google is as open as it can be about governmental requests for its vast troves of information. It turns over data to governments more than 200,000 times per year [0], often without a warrant (or equivalent) and frequently to countries with appaling human rights records. Further, it has at least once turned over a list of all people who were in area at the time of a crime [1]. Google may have collected location data for benign reasons, but it has now been used to harm its users. I fear this pattern is going to play out with more frequency and greater severity.

[0] https://transparencyreport.google.com/ [1] http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/counties/wake-county/...

You might want to check out Eraser, made by Mapzen. Eraser is a Google Maps like app that uses OpenStreetMap data and is backed solely open source software and open data. It's a little rough around the edges (especially when it comes to transit routing).

https://github.com/mapzen/eraser-map

https://mapzen.com/blog/erasermap-beta/

>I like to think I'm a proponent of open source as I try to contribute but to be honest I don't actually think it really matters for Android to be independent of Google services because as far as I can tell, most people like Android with Google services?

People like Google services, but they're less enthusiastic about Google's data collection practices. My father, who is now retired from a career in semiconductor manufacturing and programming, was unaware of Google's practice of monitor users' credit cards [0] and was visibly uncomfortable when he was made aware of it. Google's terms of service were effectively changed in a manner that harmed him, but he has no recourse.

Google services are frequently useful, but let's not pretend that there are other good choices. Google offers their apps for free, and has immediate access to approximately one billion Android devices by mandating an app's inclusion. That's an impossibly high barrier for all but the largest companies.

[0]: http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-google-a...

Check out https://openaddresses.io

It has ~477 million freely-licensed addresses.

Addgene is a great service. My lab has ordered a couple vectors from them. I do wish the material transfer agreements were less painful, though.

It's great to see more open science. Now we just need to fix publishing, and we're golden...

Mapzen is an awesome company. I'm excited to see what comes of OpenTraffic, a Mapzen-sponsored, open-source traffic speed data set: https://github.com/opentraffic/

>Google is not giving away the source code of Android for philanthropic reasons, it's just part of the business model, i.e. the process of money making to pay the employees and the shareholders.

They're also "giving away" a smaller and smaller fraction of Android with each release. This article is four years old, but quite relevant: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on... A non-exclusive list of Android apps that are no longer open source: Camera, Gallery, Keyboard, Music.

In order to include any Google apps or use the Android trademark, you are required to include almost all Google apps and make no other apps default. Further, Google makes it substantially easier to license their apps if you join the Open Handset Alliance (OHA), which contractually prohibits you from building non-Google approved devices.

This is something I've been wrestling with as well. Several of my friends work for Google or Facebook.

I've discussed this at length with some of them. Several seem to object strongly to, for example, Congress's block of the FCC's proposed ISP privacy rules. Yet they work for companies which implement forms of tracking which are substantially similar. Some work directly on implementation of said tracking.

I find it frustrating since each and every one of them has other options. In the words of Jeff Hammerbacher: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."

> Getting really sick of this story. Open Markets really comes across sleazy when you read the emails published by New America. [1] Slaughter's second statement, via Medium, is also worth reading. [2] Combined with the fact that Open Markets has been publishing anti-Google stuff for years while Google funded New America, Barry Lynn's side of the story make no sense at all.

As far as I can tell, though, Slaughter doesn't contradict any of the facts laid out by Lynn.

Also, I find this passage from [2] troubling:

> On the contrary, Barry’s new organization and campaign against Google is the opening salvo of one group of Democrats versus another group of Democrats in the run-up to the 2020 election, at a time when I personally think the country faces far greater challenges of racism, violence, a broken political system, and geographic and partisan divisions so great that we are losing any common sense of what we stand and strive for as a country.

Should we not pay attention to problems related to the growing power of large corporations and monopolies just because the US has other significant issues?

I think he's referencing

>If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place

-Eric Schmidt

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/07/schmidt_on_privacy/

Notably, he worked for the nominally-independent New America's Open Markets program, not for Google.

You might want to check out Eraser, made by Mapzen. Eraser is a Google Maps like app that uses OpenStreetMap data and is backed solely open source software and open data. It's a little rough around the edges (especially when it comes to transit routing).

https://github.com/mapzen/eraser-map https://mapzen.com/blog/erasermap-beta/