Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reasons not to use Facebook

stallman.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 376 posts

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#111

Post by golergka »

kragen wrote: post #55
paulsecwhatt wrote: post #45

I honestly don't understand why people value Stallman's opinions on these matters so highly. I completely disagree with him on essentially everything he writes about these topics. Granted, he's an incredible programmer who contributed immensely to the development of our modern operating systems and the tools we use, and people here love to bring that up ("what - you DON'T KNOW WHO STALLMAN IS? SHAME? HOW DARE YOU CRI…

People value Stallman’s opinions on these matters so highly because he has a remarkable history of being right about them ten or fifteen years before it becomes clear to everyone else that he was right, and he takes the risk of saying what he sees even when it will offend people. In fact, that’s why he’s famous; he’s certainly a good hacker, but the world has quite a number of good hackers who aren’t famous because t…

> I am not going to bother to rebut your examples

Well, this kind of attitude tells more about your argument than the rest of the comment.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#112

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

As a complimentary perspective:

For those who haven't seen it, I think Slavoj Žižek and Paul Holdengräber on "Surveillance and whistleblowers" is worth a watch. The part about surveillance starts at 21:14 so this link will take you there https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIPjmmmh_os#t=21m14s

Žižek: "The most dangerous unfreedom is the unfreedom you don't even experience, as such. If some of you are feminists ... every good feminist will tell you the first step of feminism is just to realise your situation of oppression... We need something similar here. That's the first point. The second point ... I'm a little bit sceptic about this paranoia 'ooh we are totally controlled' and so on and so on, I think we shouldn't take this too seriously. And this doesn't make the situation any easier if anything it makes it more... it [paranoia] is justified, but we should be aware, again we go in to metaphorics again the NSA the Big Eye knows everything, again the mega-machinery is extremely stupid, they don't know what they know. Do you remember, this is a very superficial anecdote ... a guy in LA was Googling the ways to kill your wife something like that, a couple days afterward the FBI brutally entered his house arrested him blah blah blah. Why? Because Google reported this to FBI. But do you know what was the result, this guy was a was one of the you know all the [TV] series CIS / police investigation, we was simply writing a scenario and wanted to check you know, and you have this again and again or form China they told me a wonderful example of this stupidity a guy just before Tiananmen [Square] anniversary a guy was an English professor in Beijing was flirting with a lady in London, and since they were both educated he used a wonderful quote from Shakespeare, because you know in Elizabethan England the word "protest" meant also "I publicly declare" and he quoted to her "I protest my love to you" chop-chop and the conversation was cut short because the word "protest" was prohibited because of associations with Tiananmen, what I find so ridiculous is that if the guy were to be extremely vulgar and told the lady something like "I will fuck your brain out" everything would be okay, you quote Shakespeare... You know computers just give you immense amounts of data and you can play with it."

Errors and omissions intentional as I'm directly transcribing Žižek talking.

He then goes on to relate an experience as a young adult in Slovenia meeting with his friends and upon parting, knowing everything was recorded, they didn't hind anything and at the end of the conversation they would say something like "Mother baked a good apple pie" and then later found out this really confused the people monitoring their conversations.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#113

Post by anigbrowl »

GigabyteCoin wrote: post #18

A friend of mine was turned off of a potentially new employee the other day because the candidate exclaimed that they recognized a customer from their instagram profile and that they followed it, loved it, etc. The customer was obviously embarrased, exclaimed that he had not used instagram in over a year, and promptly left the store. This left an uneasy feeling in my friend (the store owner). Which confused me to be…

Yeah, kind of a dubious move on your friend's part - how was the potential employee supposed to guess that the customer would feel embarrassed, in a bad way (as opposed to 'oh that picture was so embarrassing, haha')? Seems to me as it does you that it's the customer's reponsibility to own whatever s/he posts publicly.

I guess some people think that their followers on social media must all be personal acquaintances/relatives and are then weirded out to discover that some complete strangers may take an interest in them, but that's their problem Obviously there are exceptions to this, it wouldn't be cool to start an argument with someone over old Twitter comments or to say 'oh hey, I say you on the revenge porn subreddit.' It's sad that I even need to delineate such boundaries, but there you go.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#114

Post by killerpopiller »

paulsecwhatt wrote: post #45

I honestly don't understand why people value Stallman's opinions on these matters so highly. I completely disagree with him on essentially everything he writes about these topics. Granted, he's an incredible programmer who contributed immensely to the development of our modern operating systems and the tools we use, and people here love to bring that up ("what - you DON'T KNOW WHO STALLMAN IS? SHAME? HOW DARE YOU CRI…

sorry, but your comment is trolling! You just claim RS isn't "right" and name others who aren't "right" either - in your unfounded oppionion.

RS lists examples of FB malpractice, abuse of power and in contrast to your trash talk he is linking proof to each claim.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#115

Post by tedunangst »

tbirdz wrote: post #77
tedunangst wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HISTORY A diff command appeared in Version 6 AT&T UNIX.

C'mon Ted, you knew what he meant, there's no reason to be that snarky. For anyone who does not know, __david__ is most likely referring to the GNU coreutils and GNU diffutils, which do indeed credit Richard Stallman in the AUTHOR section, not any BSD, AT&T or other versions of those utilities.

The now deleted comment above, (not by __david___ but the context for this thread), claimed that Stallman wrote all of the software that all of us use. That's not strictly true, for ls nor for diff.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#116

Post by Veedrac »

Since this seems to just be a braindump, I might as well add Veritasium's comments on the matter:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ZqXlHl65g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVfHeWTKjag

I found them pretty interesting listening from a content-distribution and -consumption side of things, rather than from a social-network perspective.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#117

Post by b2hdx »

pdkl95 wrote: post #49
Frondo wrote: post #33

My problem with essays like this is that they don't address the more critical underlying point: most people don't recognize privacy as a human right, and most people don't realize why privacy is important and worth protecting. To most people, "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" sounds reasonable . That's the deeper problem at work here. With more people on board to why privacy matters, articles l…

I suspect one of the reasons this "done nothing wrong" fallacy persists so well these days is how "privacy" has come to replace the word "freedom". Using "privacy" tends to imply some amount of shame , as if the you didn't (or shouldn't) have the freedom to do that act in the first place. The reason why people see that they have "nothing to hid", is that they have already self-censored themselves away from doing any…

http://kazerad.tumblr.com/post/99022123468/shepherd-of-the-m... This post goes further into the shame idea and explores how communities use shame to self-censor and censor others from doing any supposedly-shameful activities, and on top of that explains some of the importances of anonymity in a way that I think most people on HN haven't considered before.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#118

Post by tedunangst »

darklajid wrote: post #92
tedunangst wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone number verification? I have an iPhone, which doesn't ever let apps read text messages, which actually would be nice sometimes when my banking app would like to verify it's running on my phone, as opposed to somebody else's phone.

Why would Facebook need to verify a phone number? It's a social network, used for jokes, farmville and whatnot. Most people I know that are on FB don't even use their 'real' name. IF someone provides a telephone number in his account details, FB can treat it like a string. I understand why FB would like to 'verify a number', but why should we allow that to happen? Why is this a valid reason to ask for permissions on…

If you don't let people use two factor auth, they bitch about your lack of security. If you let people use two factor auth, they bitch that you're collecting phone numbers. Can't win.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#120

Post by joeyspn »

MCRed wrote: post #95
kragen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People value Stallman’s opinions on these matters so highly because he has a remarkable history of being right about them ten or fifteen years before it becomes clear to everyone else that he was right, and he takes the risk of saying what he sees even when it will offend people. In fact, that’s why he’s famous; he’s certainly a good hacker, but the world has quite a number of good hackers who aren’t famous because t…

Can you give an example? For instance, I was aware of Stallman in the 1980s, read his writings back then, didn't think they were correct, and the future he predicted has not come to be. Yes there are some of us who are that old. Specifically, he said that without the virility of his license, there would be no free/open source software and that all software would be locked down and proprietary. The entire open source…

Here's a funny one: Stallman came to my uni to give a speech to CompSci alumni 10 years ago, and he told the audience that he didn't own a cellphone, cos phones were being used to track people. He also talked about the backdoors in several OS's. Everybody was laughing at his words. We're talking 10 years ago.

Few months ago remembering this speech with old uni mates we talked about how damn right that excentric man was. He saw it coming, and tried to warn everybody... Maybe he's a bit of an "extremist", but he certainly has a point.

Post reply on HN