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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

#91

Post by icebraining »

kstenerud wrote: post #83
icebraining wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But he's not complaining, just reporting. If I'm fat, is it immoral for me to say that obesity is a problem? Frankly, I find his position ridiculous. He's essentially saying journalists have to be these beacons of virtue above everyone else if they want to report on bad things that are happening.

It's fine to say that obesity is a problem, but it's hypocritical to berate Burger King for contributing to obesity when you eat there three nights a week. It's even worse when you excuse it, saying that your circumstances are special somehow. The reporter, similarly, is looking for fuel to blame the banks for their evil practices, when she herself is contributing to the flow of evil information.

But so what if it is hypocritical? Is it any less true? Why should her personal life be in any way relevant?

I can understand his point about users being the problem - although that doesn't in any way excuse the banks - but criticizing her specifically is completely ridiculous.

It reminds me of how I hear people in my country commenting to each other about how nice is that politician because he rides a scooter instead of a Mercedes, while he and his party continue to sell out the country to big companies.

It's an irrelevant, stupid detail that detract from his position and makes him seem like an unreasonable person.

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

#92

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

bproper wrote: post #80
billybob wrote: post #71

Best quote: "The problem is caused by people who would like a little help spying on their friends. And in a genteel way, that’s what the social media offers. They get to surveil other people. In return for a little bit of the product, they assist the growth of these immense commercial spying operations." This has become the crux of my objection to social networks: they exist to gather data on you. Whatever benefit yo…

Too bad we can't exchange that for a system where social networks let you own the data and charge a monthly subscription fee.

Diaspora lets you own the data, and it's free. If you wanted to run your own node on a dedicated server rented at a hosting company, you could do that too.

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

#93

Post by Confusion »

jonhendry wrote: post #85
Confusion wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clean water is not fundamentally a scarce resource. Almost nothing is. The only actually scarce resource, and the one everything depends on, is energy. Given enough energy, we can clean all the water we want and distribute it anywhere we want. Given enough energy, we could recycle everything down to the smallest granule of rare earth metals. We would only get into trouble once we would be using all of the stuff at th…

Um, no. You might as well say that scarcity of energy is the only thing between us and free ponies for everyone. Even if energy were free, there'd still be the question of paying for the facilities to purify the water. The kinds of places where clean water is scarce now tend not to have much money, or much clout, with which to get such facilities built. More likely you'd get wealthy people wasting vaster quantities o…

  You might as well say that scarcity of energy is the only 
  thing between us and free ponies for everyone.
That's exactly what I'm saying, with the caveat that it will take time to get to the situation where everyone can turn the energy into free ponies. As you rightly point out, there is infrastructure required to make use of the free energy. However, if you would have free energy, that infrastructure will get much cheaper. The richer will sponsor infrastructure for the poorer, as has started happening more and more. We are slowly but surely succeeding in improving the living conditions of the poorest. The component cost of energy in everything is not to be underestimated. If you could eliminate that, things would drastically change.

The energy is there for the picking, but no country or company is trying hard enough. And why should they? What would they gain? That's the problem.

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

#94

Post by kstenerud »

icebraining wrote: post #91
kstenerud wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fine to say that obesity is a problem, but it's hypocritical to berate Burger King for contributing to obesity when you eat there three nights a week. It's even worse when you excuse it, saying that your circumstances are special somehow. The reporter, similarly, is looking for fuel to blame the banks for their evil practices, when she herself is contributing to the flow of evil information.

But so what if it is hypocritical? Is it any less true? Why should her personal life be in any way relevant? I can understand his point about users being the problem - although that doesn't in any way excuse the banks - but criticizing her specifically is completely ridiculous. It reminds me of how I hear people in my country commenting to each other about how nice is that politician because he rides a scooter instea…

He's making the point that she just doesn't GET it. He took a confrontational tone specifically to get her to spit out excuses for her continued use of Facebook.

His point is not just that users are contributing to the problem, but that users REFUSE to believe they're contributing to the problem. It's the whole "a little bit can't hurt" excuse, which is why he used littering as a metaphor.

In the end it doesn't matter what she writes about the evil banks. It's impossible to stop them from using information YOU PUBLISHED against you. If you don't publish it, it can't be used against you. His further rant is against your friends publishing information about you that can be used against you.

So yeah, she can write her story about banks denying loans based on photos of your frequent trips to Vegas, but it's not going to help anybody because people will focus on the evil banks, and will still fail to grasp the concept of NOT PUBLISHING PERSONAL INFORMATION.

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

#95

Post by spinchange »

It's interesting to me that the impetus for this post is seemingly motivated by the reporter's reaction to Mr. Moglen's tone over the substance of what he said.

I know it's "just" betabeat, a blog, etc, but imagine if Leslie Stahl or even Katie Couric made the emphasis of a story how they were "legit yelled at" by an expert source who gave some thought provoking ideas on a silver platter that could have been developed into much more.

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

#96

Post by md224 »

Splines wrote: post #81
md224 wrote: post #13

I'm kind of amazed at some of the completely unsympathetic responses on here and on the original article. There are two distinct issues I see here: 1) whether or not Moglen's tone/attitude was appropriate, and 2) if his arguments were valid. Personally I think he was a bit harsh on her and could have at least expressed his feelings in a more diplomatic manner. She's a journalist calling about a story, not someone on…

most of what gets shared on Facebook is fairly innocuous, if not utterly mundane. It usually is, until it isn't. By then, it's too late.

Do you have any examples to back up this statement, other than people getting fired from their jobs for foolishly posting incriminating information online? It seems to me that most of the alarmist reactions to social media are based on completely theoretical "slippery slope" arguments that assume we're heading straight for an Orwellian future. That may be true, but so far I haven't had any of my friends scooped up by the secret police for Facebook-related thought-crimes.

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

#97

Post by anon1385 »

lurker14 wrote: post #90
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…

This post breaks line-wrapping for the whole page. I suspect that long string of italicized text is to blame. Please remove the italics (which also make the words hard to read).

Ah, sorry about that. The post is too old for me to edit now.

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

#98

Post by pbburrell »

pgroves wrote: post #73

Facebook now acknowledges what we said for a long time and they didnt acknowledge, that every single photograph uploaded to Facebook is put through facial recognition software they call PhotoDNA which is used to find people for whom any law enforcement agency in the world is looking. How true is this?

I don't think it's very true at all. From what I've read, PhotoDNA is used to detect child pornography by comparing a photograph's "hash" against a database of hashes for known pornographic images. There's no facial recognition involved.

More here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2564235

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

#99

Post by jwallaceparker »

mfringel wrote: post #50
jwallaceparker wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Ethics aside, it's also bad strategy, and just won't work. If you're obligated to give up your car before writing about global warming, or obligated to become a vegan before writing about animal cruelty, or obligated to take monastic vows before writing about conflict in domestic relationships -- then you'll probably never write about any of these issues. And that won't help anybody, will it? I find Moglen's absol…

I find that point to be orthogonal. That's like saying that everyone at Occupy Wall Street had forswear all material goods in order to be considered "valid" protesters. Discarding someone's argument due to a lack of complete purity is just plain facile.

>> That's like saying that everyone at Occupy Wall Street had forswear all material goods in order to be considered "valid" protesters.

No, it isn't.

Occupy Wall Street isn't about giving up all material goods. A better analogy is a OWS protester who is a manager at one of the banks that got bailed out.

>> Discarding someone's argument due to a lack of complete purity is just plain facile.

I never said the arguments should be discarded. I acknowledged that Al Gore did a good job spreading the word about global warming.

I'm just saying it's refreshing when someone actually stands behind their argument by making a personal change or sacrifice.

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

#100

Post by skore »

nl wrote: post #45
skore wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, this is moving quickly into troll territory. One final reply: The premise of the article we are discussing was this: "My editor wanted a quote from a privacy advocate, so I immediately thought of Eben “Spying for Free” Moglen, a militant digital privacy advocate, founder of the uber-secure personal server FreedomBox, and the inspiration for the decentralized social network Diaspora." Eben Moglen was asked fo…

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" - 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.

You must understand - I did not take exception to you trying to start that discussion, but it's a cheap shot to say that Mr. Moglen was the one who should have done so. It's perfectly reasonable to stand up for your own arguments without forcing them on another person. It was a particularly cheap shot because you did not offer anything in line with your argument except the washing machine argument which I found very weak for the reasons I mentioned earlier.

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