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In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

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Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#101

Post by freshhawk »

nextparadigms wrote: post #21
temphn wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you want to know is that somewhere there’s a regulator who might stop the bank. But you don’t want to hear that the regulator we really need to call upon is you, yourself. Eben Moglen, libertarian. Amazing to hear him say something so clean and simple. The only regulation that works is people voting with their wallets.

People need to take more responsibility for themselves and stop asking the Government to solve all their problems. They are only inviting trouble down the road as the Government gets bigger, more controlling and has more power over the population. All of that makes it harder to change the status quo, too.

You know your solution is garbage when it starts with "the first thing we need to do is change fundamental human behaviour"

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#102

Post by freshhawk »

nkoren wrote: post #27

Moglen is of course correct about the problems of privacy and corporate ownership of social networks -- but then goes on to take an absolutist position which is both strategically indefensible and ethically bankrupt. First, a key concept: there is no such thing as absolute freedom. Freedom can exist at many different levels, some of which are mutually exclusive; sometimes abrogations of lower-order freedoms are requi…

I think you are putting too much faith in the ability of facebook-like services to do useful things like the organization and communication that happened in the arab spring protests.

It's entirely possible this was a one time event. I wouldn't trust these services (especially facebook) not to cooperate fully with whoever is in power for censorship/identification purposes. If they don't cooperate they'll just be blocked anyway.

Surely the newness of this type of communication created these one-to-many communication freedoms, but I doubt it's accurate that these freedoms were/are anything but temporary.

That's not even counting the disagreement over how much of the communication was actually done on american social platforms vs existing text message infrastructure.

I agree that Moglen at least gets close to a absolutist position on this kind of thing (and Stallman is a good example of a similar position) but I don't accept that the positives of any contribution to Arab Spring style protests outweigh the negatives of literally informing on yourself and your friends to a private commercial surveillance network (which is indeed the literal truth even if I used Moglen's inflammatory language).

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#103

Post by freshhawk »

bh42222 wrote: post #79
anon1385 wrote: post #43

Changing Threats To Privacy From Tia To Google (Blackhat 2010) by Moxie Marlinspike http://www.securitytube.net/video/1084 How many people here would be excited about a law that required everyone to carry a government mandated tracking device with them at all times? Probably very few people right, no-one's really excited about that. How many people here have a cell phone? Right, probably everybody in this room has a…

So yes, I made a choice to have a mobile phone, but what kind of choice did I make? I think this is sort of an interesting phenomenon. What happens is a choice is introduced; it starts as a very simple choice: the choice of whether or not to have a mobile phone, a simple piece of technology. But slowly things happen to expand the scope of that choice until eventually it's so big as to encompass not just whether you h…

> Mobile phones that do not track you,

> that governments can not track.

The pragmatist in me wants to call that a pipe dream. Phones that work on the cell system that don't track you are an oxymoron. It would require a ground up reimplementation of phones. The best case I can see is burner sim cards for smartphones with all the data encrypted and some non-skype popular voip platform. Even if someone built all this you'd still be tracked while you used the phone.

You could start talking about mesh networks or public free wifi to improve some of those problems but any technically realistic solution relies on government supporting things they inherently dislike and popular support for "terrorist helping" technology (which the public doesn't care about until a local power group starts using surveillance to kill/torture a lot of them)

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#104

Post by nl »

skore wrote: post #100
nl wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rick Santorum is not attacking a straw man, he is stating his honest, if misguided, beliefs. Moglen is not attacking a straw man, he is stating his honest, if misguided, beliefs. You could now attack a point completely unrelated or only superficially related to his rants about gay marriage and that would be a straw man. You could also, however, argue for or against his points with your own argument. This is true. Add…

Moglen is not attacking a straw man, he is stating his honest, if misguided, beliefs. Seems like you finally got it! (Although I disagree that his beliefs are misguided.) Moglen was stating his beliefs because he was asked for them. You created a straw man to argue against them. You could have just said "I agree with Mr. Moglen on points X-Z, but I would like to weigh them against the benefits of social networks" - a…

You could have just said "I agree with Mr. Moglen on points X-Z, but I would like to weigh them against the benefits of social networks" - and then do that. That would clearly mark that you are opening your own line of reasoning instead of trying to forcibly claim them on the OP. Then, we could have that discussion together.

There are an infinite number of ways I could have responded, but I deliberately chose to use an analogy, and to express my anger about how Moglen presented a 100% negative view. I understand why you say that he didn't need to express anything positive about social networking, and I disagree. To me, one should always attempt to give an honest view on any subject. Moglen's 100% negative views are either wrong or dishonest. That make me angry.

Show me where I misrepresented Moglen's views in anyway. That's the definition of a strawman, and I object most strongly to your claim that I used one. Nor do I troll, take cheap shots or resort to personal attacks.

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#105

Post by waqf »

Sorpigal wrote: post #64
knowtheory wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually entirely untrue given the way that Facebook is set up. The most insidious thing that Facebook has done, is litter the web with their "Like" buttons. Oh sure, they're not the ones who have put up "Like" buttons around the web, all they've done is insist that websites who do want a "Like" button have to use file assets & scripts from their webserver. Well, by tracking where the "Like" button gets loade…

This is why it is essential for people who are concerned about privacy to use run Firefox and install the RequestPolicy extension. I simply don't whitelist facebook's domains and thus couldn't be tracked even if I had a Facebook account.

This. The only regret I had about switching from Firefox to Chromium is the lack of RequestPolicy. Apparently the hooks aren't there, as with AdBlockPlus.

In fact, just thinking about it now ... why did I switch? I should try Firefox again.

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#106

Post by y4m4 »

Moglen's argument fits in an idealist world, but having governing laws for Social engineering sites will help in regulating centralized power of corporations. This can be handled outside software too. But somewhat aggressive political behavior of Moglen worries me.

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#107

Post by skore »

nl wrote: post #104
skore wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moglen is not attacking a straw man, he is stating his honest, if misguided, beliefs. Seems like you finally got it! (Although I disagree that his beliefs are misguided.) Moglen was stating his beliefs because he was asked for them. You created a straw man to argue against them. You could have just said "I agree with Mr. Moglen on points X-Z, but I would like to weigh them against the benefits of social networks" - a…

You could have just said "I agree with Mr. Moglen on points X-Z, but I would like to weigh them against the benefits of social networks" - and then do that. That would clearly mark that you are opening your own line of reasoning instead of trying to forcibly claim them on the OP. Then, we could have that discussion together. There are an infinite number of ways I could have responded, but I deliberately chose to use…

Eben Moglen was asked "What's so bad about Social Networks?". Then he talked about what he thinks is bad about social networks.

You say: "His argument isn't valid because he isn't talking about what is good about social networks".

Instead of addressing what he did talk about, you chose to talk about something he did not. And that's the definition of a straw man:

to create the illusion of having refuted a proposition by replacing it with a superficially similar yet unequivalent proposition

"What is bad about social networks?" != "Can you provide a balanced picture of social networks?"

The fact that you have not given a single word to actually discussing his statements (Oh, because you agree? Hmm...), except defending your initial argument (based on the olde and extremely valuable "because!"), actually not even responding to my critique of that argument, shows that you are not interested in the discussion, you are only interested in being right. You've made a mistake in your understanding of the article and made a bad argument against it that I and others clearly saw for what it is. Get over it.

Actually, I don't know why I bother anymore. If what I (and a couple other commenters) have said before doesn't convince you, I reckon nothing will.

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#108

Post by skore »

pingswept wrote: post #67
skore wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you say it's not a straw man. Maybe you have some more words left to explain yourself on that point? He was asked for the problems. It's not his job to advertise social networking services. One of the big figures of Software Freedom is asked about the drawbacks of social networking services and you start your argument with saying that he doesn't talk about the benefits. And then you compare the drawbacks to the ec…

> Maybe you have some more words left to explain yourself on that point? You could make the same point more civilly.

I apologize for being slightly uncivil (although I saw it as stating my question deliberately terse), but "it's not a straw man" isn't really a good response against a claim that your argument is a straw man, don't you think?

Re: In which Eben Moglen calls out a reporter for having Facebook

#109

Post by pingswept »

skore wrote: post #108
pingswept wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe you have some more words left to explain yourself on that point? You could make the same point more civilly.

I apologize for being slightly uncivil (although I saw it as stating my question deliberately terse), but "it's not a straw man" isn't really a good response against a claim that your argument is a straw man, don't you think?

Apology accepted. I do agree that "it's not a straw man" is a weak rebuttal, but that's more reason to keep the tone civil-- so that people will argue with you sensibly.
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