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Reasons not to use Facebook

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Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#291

Post by __david__ »

tedunangst wrote: post #115
tbirdz wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No it did not. It claimed he wrote many of the command line tools that we might use on our computers. It used coreutils ls as an example, but without qualifying it perfectly. Then the pedants started responding. :-)

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#292

Post by __david__ »

sseveran wrote: post #255
pckspcks wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way to not use Facebook. Let me repeat that: THERE IS NO WAY TO NOT USE FACEBOOK. Everyone's photos: Mine, yours, Stallmans, get posted to Facebook, annotated with our names (which is increasingly becoming easy enough to do with ML -- the human component will increasingly decline). If at least one of your friends uses Facebook, Facebook has profile information on you. Stallman doesn't have a Facebook acco…

Uh...Yes there is. I don't have a facebook account. I did for 8 years. Its possible my life would be different if I used it, but I suspect not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9201706

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#293

Post by evincarofautumn »

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…

In the U.S., we aren’t even granted an explicit right to privacy. The closest we’ve gotten to a ruling on the matter is that time William O. Douglas wrote “…specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. […] Various guarantees create zones of privacy.”

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#294

Post by notthemessiah »

kartikkumar wrote: post #242

Although I can get the rationale of most things he says, I’m not sure that he’s always offering sane alternative options: > Don't be tracked — pay cash. I’m wondering how he imagines this would pan out. Is RMS also against banking, since banks mine your data too. Does he suggest stuffing your mattress full of cash? (serious question). In the US, where credit ratings are essential to be able to make any sizeable/signi…

> I’m curious if he’s opposed to Bitcoin too.

He likes the privacy aspect of it, but has concerns with how it enables tax-evasion, and lack of monetary policy, hence why TALER (Taxable Anonymous Libre Electronic Reserves) is a GNU project: https://gnunet.org/taler2014ghm

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#295

Post by MCRed »

fit2rule wrote: post #107
MCRed wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Stallman predicted the total surveillance state, and warned of the very dire circumstances it put us all in.

Have you ever heard of George Orwell?

It's like you guys go to some sort of indoctrination camp and become members of a cult.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#296

Post by MCRed »

fit2rule wrote: post #164
wanda wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the total surveillance state was a prediction made decades before Stallman. Or are we just ignoring acience fiction authors and philosophers?

They certainly warned us, and Stallman has picked up the light to be shone on these dark territories from others before him, but who in the contemporary era has done as much as Stallman to educate the public as to the dangers of the usurpation of technology by nefarious agencies? I don't understand the need to denigrate Stallman for these deeds - what purpose does it serve to extinguish this light?

Basically, everyone working on it has done more than Stallman. All stallman does is post rants and demand adoration. He hasn't actually done anything. Well, he has opposed a lot of tools that would help protect against the surveillance state because they didn't fit his ideology.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#297

Post by ericfontaine »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #240

Another good article by Richard Stallman - his ideas keep gaining even more relevance for me. I do use Facebook to plug my books and to hopefully drive traffic to my blog articles, but I have been considering cancelling my account. I have similar issues with Google, but with Google I get much more value: using G+ to promote my own web properties, and generally really useful services. That said, I have switched to usi…

> I do use Facebook to plug my books and to hopefully drive traffic to my blog articles

The trick is configuring your blog to autopost to facebook, for which I use https://wordpress.org/plugins/add-link-to-facebook/ which also automatically grabs likes and comments from the facebook post and adds them to the wordpress comments database. Maybe this is acknowledging facebook's value, but at least I don't have to personally interact with facebook, nor are visitors to my blog tracked by facebook's javascript.

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#299

Post by waterlesscloud »

Daishiman wrote: post #171
_ak wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course phones were used to track people 10 years ago. And it wasn't even a secret. Location-based services were the hot shit back then for mobile carriers (at least in Europe). Making that to be a big conspiracy to infringe upon everybody's freedom and privacy is what makes Stallman's position so ridiculous. It always sounds like the rambling of a technophobic. No, that's not entirely true. Like the rambling of an…

> Of course phones were used to track people 10 years ago. And it wasn't even a secret. Location-based services were the hot shit back then for mobile carriers (at least in Europe). Bullshit; I remember trying to instill the same point to techies 7 years ago and a majority of technically competent people would say that, while possible, is not certain . Hindsight is 20-20.

Sometime around 1996 or so I went to the National Cryptologic Museum, which is adjacent to NSA headquarters. There was a guy with a little folding table outside the museum selling cellphones for some reason. At the time I joked that you'd think that would have to be the absolute worst place to sell cell phones since anyone leaving what is essentially the NSA museum would know better than to buy a cell phone there. They could eavesdrop and track everything!

It was a joke, of course, but it anchors in my head that I was certainly aware of the vulnerabilities of the technology at the time.

Off topic digression - I was there with a couple friends, we were all scruffy looking 20 somethings. In the parking lot, a middle aged man approached us and if we were being recruited by the NSA. A reasonable guess, I suppose, given how we looked and where we were. Anyway, he then proceeded to go on a rant about how we should never work for them or it would destroy our lives and we'd regret it. It's strange this guy went to Ft Meade to hang out in a parking lot and tell people not to work for the NSA.

The museum itself is definitely worth a visit if you're in DC. It's a short drive outside the city.

https://www.nsa.gov/about/cryptologic_heritage/museum/

Re: Reasons not to use Facebook

#300

Post by paulsecwhatt »

krapp wrote: post #278
funkyy wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Nostradamus. He said few things and based on his reputation people since hundreds of years take anything important that happens and bend it to fit his prophecies. 10 years ago me and my friends were well aware that police etc can listen to your mobile phones - I don't see big deal here. And none of my friends were that much in to computers or security.

Richard Stallman does have a lot of good ideas. But he also seems distrustful of anything that isn't entirely built on free software, and of anything at all to do with governments or corporations, and I think he gets praised for some keen insight when, really, anyone paranoid about the modern world and the government would have been just as insightful, although maybe not as literate. You shouldn't get credit for hitt…

https://stallman.org/pearlharbor.html

Indeed. If only we had had Stallman right before Pearl Harbor, I'm sure he could have published a manifesto, saving everyone from the obviously impending doom and most importantly maintaining their FREEDOM!

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