Facebook

by pearjuice • 13 years ago

317 145 13 years ago

Aardwolf• 13 years ago

But he has his photo and text on his website, so the NSA can see that, so a photo on Facebook would not add anything new?

jd0075• 13 years ago

The point is on his website, he chooses what photograph of himself is put there. On Facebook, you have no control when others are sharing photographs with you in them. On your own website you would presumably not post photographs of yourself that compromises your privacy, but when others do so on social networks, there is no guarantee like that (unless every single one of your friends on Facebook explicitly gets permission from you for every photo they post to Facebook that contains you before sharing, which never happens).

neilc• 13 years ago

On Facebook, you have no control when others are sharing your photograph.

The same is true of the Internet in general.

davidjgraph3• 13 years ago

On Facebook, you have no control when others are sharing your photograph.

On a public web site you could simply copy a photo and put it on another web site.

On your own website you would presumably not post photographs of yourself that compromises your privacy, but when others do so on social networks

Differing how from if they just posted it on a public web site other than Facebook?

rtpg2• 13 years ago

But if I had a blog and posted pictures of an event where Stallman is present, doesn't it come out to the same thing?

davidjgraph3• 13 years ago

It's not about what data is on Facebook or a public web site. It's about the so-called "social graph" sites like Facebook create. That is, the relationships between people indicated directly between people (friends) and the inferred relationships worked out by mining data.

phy6• 13 years ago

Also, 22k people like his fan page. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Richard-Stallman/112830992063...

worldsayshi• 13 years ago

edit: Hmm, you probably wasn't trying to imply this..

But... that's not a fan page. It's just a wikipedia mirror. Like this one: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Quantum-Physics/1101559390141...

Compare to this (a fan page): https://www.facebook.com/daftpunk

Difference being that the mirror is (semi-) automatically generated.

This page: https://www.facebook.com/richardmatthew.stallman

.. is probably what Stallman is referring to.

dlsx2• 13 years ago

If only the mainstream media would listen to humanitarians like RMS. Instead they choose to listen to greedy slime balls that end in BERG.

Money is the root of all evil. Combine that with privacy, and Facebook IS the new root of all evil. I deleted my account years ago, and I know with 100% certainty it will never be purged. It's criminal, and I fucking loathe this fact. I would pay to cave in some of the faces at Facebook.

valtron• 13 years ago

You forgot /stein$/ and /^Gold/. Also, you didn't mention "big-nosed"! What is this, a civil discussion??

mikevm3• 13 years ago

If OP was being anti-Semitic, then it would surprise him that RMS is also of the Jewish persuasion.

balabaster3• 13 years ago

While what you say may be true, the large majority of your rhetoric is unhelpful to this conversation. So it's no wonder someone it's flagged it.

stan_rogers• 13 years ago

Radix malorum est cupiditas. That is to say, greed (or in early English bibles, "the love of money") is the root of all evil.

Money is a medium of exchange, a proxy token for barter. The need to have more than others (whether wealth in its various guises or power) is the corrupting influence. Or so the Pardoners would have us believe.

throwawaykf02• 13 years ago

To save everyone the time, here's a typical Internet thread about Stallman:

- He's crazy!

- But he's right!

- Right? He's just been stating the obvious all this time!

- NSA surveillance!

- Hadn't anyone heard about Echelon?

- He stands for freedom of users!

- But users don't care about those freedoms, they just want something that works!

- He's antisocial and extremely rude!

- Autism spectrum.

- But he's not diplomatic at all, we don't want him as a spokesperson for Open Source!

- It's GNU/Linux, not Linux.

- See? It's nitpicking things like GNU/Linux that make even open source enthusiasts hate him!

- Only the userland is GNU anyway.

- GPL!

- Emacs!

- GCC!

- HURD!

- Toejam.

AlexanderDhoore• 13 years ago

There should be an XKCD about this...

EGreg• 13 years ago

Randall Munroe you seein this? :)

jawns• 13 years ago

I feel like he could reduce the crazy vibe by hiring a web designer to overhaul this page. Well-designed crazy usually looks a little more sane than poorly designed crazy.

theboss• 13 years ago

Web designers aren't free software......

varjag• 13 years ago

I don't know. Most of the stuff on the page is factually correct, although a number of entries are sensationalized. If it's crazy, I'd argue it's 2nd-amendment-advocate-crazy, not timecube-crazy.

FiloSottile• 13 years ago

I think he has thoughts along the lines of http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

why-el• 13 years ago

This should amuse you a bit.

http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

phaer• 13 years ago

In my opinion his page is quite well designed. It's easy to navigate, it's obvious whats navigation and whats content. The page is very readable, you see links easily. The page loads fast and is responsible in the sense that it usable on all devices and clients i tried (including my phone and w3m in a terminal).

I guess what you mean by "well-designed" is more colors and and images, but i prefer his page over those ajaxy blogspot-themes, which get completely unusable if you are on a phone-line-connection in a remote area, and a few other pages. And that even though i have nothing against good modern css in general :)

panacea2• 13 years ago

As a web designer... I say the linked page is beautifully designed.

ams61102• 13 years ago

This style of site (plain HTML with no styles) is pretty typical for a CS person who pre-dates the world wide web.

krapp• 13 years ago

It's a site designed on behalf of a man who, as I understand it, would rather use some complicated web scraping/emailing scheme to view websites than even touch a web browser.

It is probably exactly what he intends the web to be. Or at least his little corner of it.

berntb2• 13 years ago

Well, it becomes simpler if we note that:

Most reasonably informed people should agree that the [software] world is a better place because rms is in it. And not only for gcc, emacs, etc.

The rest is just a question of how many years before today he is, this time. (And yes, sometimes the world he is years before isn't our planet. But his hit statistics isn't bad.)

rrich• 13 years ago

It is. His contributions have been immeasurable. He is a classic representation of how one's presentation doesn't equate to one's contribution. Something we all battle with at one time or another in the software industry. As rough around the edges as he can be his underlying message should be undoubtedly considered.

na85• 13 years ago

I've always viewed rms as such:

The world needs someone like Stallman quite simply because his views are so extreme. You need an extremist so that moderates can seem reasonable.

salient• 13 years ago

Don't forget "who can trust anyone with that hair?"

jfoster5• 13 years ago

His ideas aren't bad, but he is terrible at selling them.

bmelton4• 13 years ago

"It is a foolish buyer, he who evaluates the product being sold on the quality of the person selling it."

nl• 13 years ago

Meh.. The GNU project seems fairly successful if you view it in absolute terms.

saryant2• 13 years ago

He's pretty nuts. I met him when he spoke at my university a few years ago, the CS department invited him and had a reception with RMS for CS faculty and students only. At one point, a retired faculty member asked if he had any suggestions for convincing his bank to make their website Firefox-friendly since his wife didn't want to switch.

His suggestion was to lie to his wife and switch anyways...

Half the students at the speech got up and left (not kidding) when he put on a halo, proclaimed himself the Jesus Christ of Software and started auctioning off a stuffed gnu.

Add in his tirade about how evil the university IT department was for requiring authentication to access the network and you had a very pissed off administration the next day.

twelvechairs• 13 years ago

to actually focus on the linked article however - this isn't just an opinion but an actual reason why Facebook has lost its huge earlier momentum of use and user signups. though there's quite a big social network inertia, over time its going to be hard to justify the high-profit 'all your personal information is ours to sell and market' model.

lazyant• 13 years ago

you forgot about the parrots

mrobot• 13 years ago

That doesn't save time, it works directly against this by reducing it to a bunch of superficial funny bullets, it's an attack on preserving privacy, as usual. Let's talk about the article at least a little bit if we're going to talk.

Just wanting something that works is the same as having nothing to hide is the same as not understanding or caring about privacy.

repulsebo2• 13 years ago

The problem is that people are shooting the messenger and focus on a guy living by his words which is quite unusual.

The same happened here where most comments discuss stallman and not the actual matter of the post.

This is a nice list of sourced documentation about facebook dangers, I happen to maintain one myself for future reference and it is quite useful to have.

davidjgraph3• 13 years ago

I wonder why he doesn't suggest actively building a fake Facebook profile to dilute the accuracy of the information being mined? What's the worst that can happen, the account is blocked...

lazyjones• 13 years ago

What's the worst that can happen

Someone else might post something (wrong) that gets you in trouble because it's taken seriously.

grecy2• 13 years ago

By even going to the site, you are giving them data. They have your IP address, the unique attributes of your browser, etc. etc.

Once they figure out the profile is fake, they list you in the "trouble maker" category and step up monitoring that IP/browser combination until they know who you are, then they link that with everything they have on the real you (bank account, property, job, etc.)

Eventually, one day, you're trying to board a plane and you get denied because you've been known to disseminate "false or misleading information".

Playing their game validates it. Just don't play.

mateo411• 13 years ago

What unique aspects of your browser? The User-Agent header will tell you the kind of browser you have. However, it's unlikely that you are using a browser that's very unique.

They can use cookies to identify you. But you have to keep going back to their website.

Resident_Geek• 13 years ago

Eventually, one day, you're trying to board a plane and you get denied because you've been known to disseminate "false or misleading information".

That's absurd. How do you picture Facebook achieving control over whether you can board an airplane?

duvet• 13 years ago

It contributes to activity and encourages whatever friends you might have on that account to stay. I don't think there's much benefit to that unless you dedicate some time to creating around a million fake accounts with no real friends.

nly2• 13 years ago

Probably because RMS doesn't really use a web browser.

Text search for 'womb'

http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html

Double_Cast• 13 years ago

If you do as I do, and reject Facebook, you are safe from this form of snooping.

Am I? As far as I understood, Facebook tracks internet users who have never even created an account.

pilif• 13 years ago

Probably not if you consume the web the way Stallman does (http://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html)

balabaster3• 13 years ago

I concur - Facebook's plugins to every damn website means that they can tell where your IP address is visiting and correlate a "profile" over time based on the sites you visit. So while they may not know your name, they can tell (as long as it's a property they have a partnership with) where you've been. Site owners that care about privacy should reject all the social plugins that also do this. So if there's a Facebook Like button, or a Facebook comment system on the page, whether you utilize them or not, their plugin was called in order to load it and in turn, you've been tracked.

mikevm3• 13 years ago

That's why I use Ghostery.

ams61102• 13 years ago

They do, you have to actively blacklist them in some way. /etc/hosts file, ghostery, etc.

mark_l_watson2• 13 years ago

Wow, that is a long (if sometimes repetitive) list! Hopefully Richard had help putting that list together. I have two general comments:

1. I am surprised how many non tech Saavy people I talk with are starting to understand privacy issues.

2. I had dinner last night with some Silicon Valley residents who were talking about what a horrible investment Facebook would be long term. New things will replace Facebook, and they will eventually have fewer active users.

A bit off topic, but advice I like to give people is to use one specific web browser for social media connected sites like Facebook, GMail + Google+, Twitter, etc. and another web browser with locked down security for all other browsing. This is easy to do, lets people enjoy the social media stuff if they like, and still maintain some degree of privacy.

easong• 13 years ago

Disclaimer: I work for Disconnect

https://disconnect.me/ is designed to allow people to protect themselves from being spied on across the internet by Facebook, Google, et al without the inconvenience of using a separate browser or similar methods.

Anecdotally, I've also experienced a growth in non-techie interest in online privacy - in the pre Snowden era, I would have to explain myself and justify what I do every time I was asked where I worked. Nowadays, I get asked for a download link.

dizzystar• 13 years ago

I started using your service in place of ghostery. I like both of them and I truly appreciate what you guys are doing here.

The only short-coming is that my browser sometimes freezes when it is blocking certain flash objects. I consider it a minor inconvenience and a worthwhile trade-off. In general, sites load way faster. I am often appalled when I see the amount of trackers being blocked on some of these pages. It shows why the web, despite running on faster servers and delivering content across faster networks to faster computers, appears to be slowing down year after year.

It also reminds me that I have a responsibility to the users who visit my sites. I will never use any ad-tracking or social-media tracking software on my sites. I will host my own ads on my site and not depend on third-party companies to insert and regulate my ad presence. I will use minor tracking tools, but solely with the aim of improving user experience.

In all, I am very glad that you guys are doing what you are doing. In some meta respects, I think you are improving not only the state of the uses who use your product, but also the general well-being of the entire internet. Once we can extinguish the abusive trackers out there, we all can learn how to monetize our sites in a respectful and appropriate fashion.

aleph_naught• 13 years ago

Not hard to do in Chrome, just point to a different user-data-dir for each category of browsing you need. I have three, one for general browsing, and two others for gmail accounts. That way I can use google without being logged in to the 'general' browser; and use the other two just for gmail. This way I never have to log out or clear the cache after checking email. I can be logged into two gmail accounts at once without my web history being directly tracked.

Example:

    /usr/bin/google-chrome --user-data-dir=/home/bleh/.config/gmail http://www.gmail.com

beagle3• 13 years ago

This still makes you vulnerable to panopticlick style browser identification. Different browsers are a little better in that sense.

_Simon• 13 years ago

Getting a little bored of RMS now. He's becoming increasingly like chicken little rather that the boy that tells the emperor he's naked.

hayksaakian• 13 years ago

I think you might be getting bored of him because society has accepted that the emperor is naked and doesn't care.

interstitial2• 13 years ago

Society likes staring at the Emperor's junk and hopes he keeps tweeting it.

hernan604• 13 years ago

The best thing about fecesbook is the UX. They have done such a great job even illiterate people can use it.

Its a great tool to get UX ideas.

Old timers will remember bbs, irc. And after Okrut was created, many people left the old services. Now, many of them migrated to fecesbook.

That same people also are not interested in NSA or privacy. They just want to make noise, search and be found by other people like them.

dingaling• 13 years ago

I had occasion to use Facebook recently ( a relative asked me to upload a photo to her profile while she was busy ). I can honestly say I was utterly baffled by the UI.

Eventually my 83-year-old great aunt came in and showed me what sequence of links to click to arrive at an upload icon. shrug

I spend 10 hours a day on a command line.

eonil2• 13 years ago

This makes me curious of his thought on Google+

apetresc• 13 years ago

Take a wild guess. I'm sure you can guess it.

lifeisstillgood• 13 years ago

There is a reason Linus is the figurehead of the Kernel project - he has a track record of choosing directions that later turn out to be fruitful.

There is a reason GvR is the figurehead of the Python Language - he has a track record of choosing directions that later turn out to be fruitful.

There is a reason Stallman ...

Look the guy spotted the trends waaaaay earlier than anyone else and be put his money where his mouth is. The original GPL is no less crazy than this. Hell most of us agree with this one.

eonil2• 13 years ago

Anyway, ideal implementation for accessibility and readability. Must be the standard of HTML styling.

tarekmoz• 13 years ago

He never used Facebook, but oh gawd he loves to use <hr/>.. :)

jokoon2• 13 years ago

is there a way to make a browser block any access to those like widget, or any other facebook access ?

I haven't been or used on facebook for years now, and those tracking things weird me out

greenyoda2• 13 years ago

There are lots of browser add-ons that can block Facebook widgets: AdBlock, NoScript, RequestPolicy, Ghostery, etc.

drill_sarge• 13 years ago

just put the facebook addresses in your hosts file, f.e.

0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 facebook.com 0.0.0.0 login.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 www.login.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 fbcdn.net 0.0.0.0 www.fbcdn.net 0.0.0.0 fbcdn.com 0.0.0.0 www.fbcdn.com 0.0.0.0 static.ak.fbcdn.net 0.0.0.0 static.ak.connect.facebook.com 0.0.0.0 connect.facebook.net 0.0.0.0 www.connect.facebook.net 0.0.0.0 apps.facebook.com

jokoon2• 13 years ago

thanks a lot !

jroseattle• 13 years ago

My only issue with Richard's rant here is -- why stop at Facebook? The social network/media economy is responsible for lots of business plans, with lots of people vested in their success.

There are others out there besides Facebook.

linux_devil2• 13 years ago

Agree , but I think drastic drop in number of active users will make them realize , people are actually concerned about their privacy and there was something wrong .

gress• 13 years ago

Yeah - it seems weird to point at Facebook when the elephant in the room is Google.

belorn2• 13 years ago

While Google is a larger issue regading privacy, facebook is a larger issue regarding lock-in. Anyone who do not have an facebook account know how often information is locked into facebook, never reaching anyone who chooses not to participating in giving facebook more information.

greenyoda2• 13 years ago

The link to an ACLU article on how Facebook censored an ACLU Facebook post on censorship was quite interesting:

https://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty-national-se...

linux_devil2• 13 years ago

Realized this late , but saving lot of time since past 6 months . Deactivated facebook , and find more time to actually go out and socialize. Don't even know if it was adding to efficiency.

RexRollman2• 13 years ago

I stay away from Facebook, Twitter, and Google for many of the reasons that Stallman lists. I treat email like a postcard and I do nothing on the Internet under my real name.

That said, I know many people don't care about this stuff, and I applaud their lack of concern.

adwf• 13 years ago

As much as I've avoided Facebook for so long, I've come to the realisation that if you want to use the internet, old-school "full" privacy is dead and gone.

I've had a profile on FB for a long time now, but never ever used it. I've had the javascript blocked around in my general web browsing, never installed the phone app, etc. All I've ever received is the occasional email saying that someone has tagged me in a status/photo. These annoyed me a little, as I wanted to avoid FB as much as possible, whilst still being sociable with my friends.

I came to a sad epiphany a few months ago however. I realised that even if I weren't aware of all the photos/tags being posted of me, I'd still be tagged by my friends regardless. Even if I completely cancelled my account, the photos are still going up because I still meet with my friends and have an active social life. This is when I realised what I needed to do.

It is the exact same situation as when someone makes a small jest at your expense at a party. If it's a friend, you know they're just messing around and taking the piss, you laugh it off, not offended. If it's not a friend however, you might get a little offended by it. "Were they insulting me? Trying to embarrass me? Should I laugh it off as a joke?" It's potentially annoying, just as a violation to your privacy is. Inevitably, you have only a few choices: Laugh, insult them back? (guess it depends on your culture/how rude it was!) Some people might even just punch the guy...

You can't punch Facebook. (I wish)

It isn't gonna go away just because you're upset.

So the question here is: Why do we laugh these little embarrassments off? The little invasions of our private self that we find annoying?

Because it's a way of owning the situation. You can't be offended/embarassed by something you laugh off and apparently don't care about. "Yeah, my Karaoke is terrible, but I love it!", "Yeah, I do have a habit of giggling in a funny way, hahahaha!". It's exactly the same when you look at highly confident people, they never seem embarrassed by anything at all. They just smile and carry on.

Well I made a decision a couple of months ago to take the exact same approach to Facebook, so I'm on it properly now. I can't punch FB in the face, but I can take ownership of my own public persona. My friends/aquaintances are going to be posting about me regardless, might as well take control of the situation and make sure I know everything is good.

PS: And hey, there are still plenty of good uses of FB anyway, might as well enjoy the perks too.

PPS: I'm aware that it's a shitty situation. I almost feel like I've got Stockholm syndrome and have just given in. But FB isn't going anywhere soon.

satori99• 13 years ago

"Ira, I learned centuries back that there is no privacy in any society crowed enough to need IDs. A law guaranteeing privacy simply insures that bugs -- microphones and lenses and so forth -- are that much harder to spot." --Lazurus Long, Time Enough For Love, pg 15

kh_hk• 13 years ago

Leaving Facebook is / can also be a time investment. Years ago I found out I was spending way too much time there on things I do not want to care about (note the distinction between caring, not wanting to care, and not caring).

Do I really want to invest my time untagging myself from shameful photos, even issuing take-down requests to my own friends? I was not invited to a party because I do not have a facebook account? I am the expensive friend, who can't be contacted using whatsapp or facebook? I am not able to show off my "awesome" travels in order to step up on the social ladder? Cry me a river, I tell them, and myself every time.

sasas• 13 years ago

Leaving Facebook is / can also be a time investment.

Absolutely. It can also be an investment in reducing those narcissistic tendencies we all have hidden away ...

thearn4• 13 years ago

No disagreement with RMS actually, but just out of curiosity:

Back when land-line telephone subscription was more popular, did folks used to complain about the phone company putting their name and address (by default) in a large directly shared with the entire public?

I know you could pay a fee to be unlisted, but didn't it strike anyone as a gigantic privacy issue in general?

ceejayoz• 13 years ago

Eh, there are plenty of public records - births, deaths, real estate transactions, tax records, lawsuits, etc.

It's hard to take a phone book listing and figure out who my friends and family are, who employs me, what I'm doing all the time, etc. as it is fairly trivial to do with Facebook et al.

dredmorbius• 13 years ago

Tools to automatically search and utilize that data were somewhat limited. There were classes of people who could suppress their listing. And you could (generally) hide behind an initial and no-address listing as well (phone books listed _both_ phone number _and_ street address by default).

It was a very, very different age in many ways.

What ubiquitous cheap computing and fast connectivity creates is the possibility for thousands to millions of systems to attack a given person simultaneously (DDoS, distributed brute force attacks), or for a very small number of actors (as few as one) to attack from one to billions of people simultaneously.

The phone book vector was, by contrast, limited in that:

⚫ It only listed your name, phone number, and street address. Not reams of additional information.

⚫ Utilizing it required a phone call (toll calls, remember those), postage, or a street visit. Attacks, in other words, cost real money (at least for most players).

⚫ There was limited additional data readily linked by those data. Again, not the mebabytes to gigabytes of information in a typical social networking profile.

Yes, some players had access to more powerful tools -- but even marketing databases and the like were vastly more primitive than they are now, and hugely less available. Depending on when exactly you're talking about (1930s to 1980s), there might have been some computer capacity, but you'd likely have had to have spent several hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, even as late as the 1980s, to effectively utilize the data in an automated fashion.

And yes, there were people who complained and concealed their listings, but the risks were very, very different in magnitude then.

jgalt212• 13 years ago

per Stallman:

The NSA tracks Americans' social networks, and Facebook is just one of its sources.

maybe so, but they don't seem to be doing it very effectively. If so, they would have been a. more closely following the the Boston Marathon bombers. b. would have been able to ID them from photos pulled from the surveillance tapes.

so while the NSA and their recent "efforts" are pretty scary and de jure or de facto illegal, it is the government, so how effective can they really be at keeping an eye on us?

tripzilch2• 13 years ago

Oh it's effective alright, it's just that keeping you safe from terrorist attacks is not what it's effective at.

martinvol• 13 years ago

Did he check that all the websites he linked were fully open source? Just asking.

drakaal• 13 years ago

Stallman is an idiot.

When you post to your blog you tell the NSA what you know. When you attend a conference where Stallman speaks and paid with your credit card the NSA knows you support his ludicrous ideas.

Stallman thinks information should be free, but apparently that doesn't include information about where you shop. Sure I get it. Information should be free unless he can charge you to hear him speak, or it is his information.

You can't have it both ways.

Also, is CSS bad in some way? Do themes support the Evil too? Cause for a famous guy that is one ugly website.

smky803• 13 years ago

I really would like to see Facebook broken up via the Sherman Antitrust Act, or some such legislation.

As I see it, the "network externality effect" which keeps such monopolies in business could perhaps be mitigated by creating a sort of social network "DNS", which could be created by the government or a private corporation. Facebook/Google+/etc would be clients that would make requests for someone's data via the DNS. So it would basically serve as a "Bridge" or "Facade" to use a design pattern.

Example if Suzy is on Facebook, and Lucy is on Google+, when Suzy rquests Lucy's photos, Facebook sends an API request to the DNS "request_photos('Lucy', 'Suzy')", the DNS sees Lucy is on Google+ and forwards the request there.

The purpose of the bridge/facade then is to make it not really matter where a person stores their data or what client they use to view others. You just need some sort agreed upon API for determining where the data for each person is, an for sharing data between services.

For someone with more strict privacy concerns, the DNS for such a person could simply record that the person uses this social networking service, which doesn't allow requests from outside. Again the benefit here of the API would be that to add yourself to that service would be as simple as "upload_photos(serverX, request_photos('Suzy', 'Suzy'))", etc.

I'm sure there's a million things wrong with the above, but just a random thought.

crystaln• 13 years ago

Right... the solution to Stallman's concerns about government surveillance of social networks is definitely a government shutdown of Facebook and the development of a centralized social DNS created by the government.

smky803• 13 years ago

The point was really just to push for decentralization of social networks, through some kind of mandated data-sharing interface. The "DNS" thing is probably actually unnecessary I guess, it was just a random thought.

We don't let utilities just get a monopoly in an area and then just gouge everyone, and we shouldn't allow a social network to do so either.

The NSA spying, by itself, is just a symptom of larger problem, which is the ability of a smaller, more cohesive group of people to leverage larger institutions like massive governments and corporations to control and extract rents out of the less cohesive masses. I doubt there is a technological solution to this, especially with so many engineers working for the bad side as Useful Idiots or straight up Defectors.

daveid• 13 years ago

I'm not so sure about government-controlled DNS... But what you are describing is "federation" and that's what Diaspora and identi.ca are built around. Everyone can run their own server, and every server can talk to each other, allowing users from different servers to interact seamlessly.

smky803• 13 years ago

Ah, that makes a lot of sense, thanks for that. I guess what I would like to see is some kind of government mandate to force social networks and the like to follow this model.

sidcool• 13 years ago

May be this is an unpopular opinion, but facebook is a 'for profit' business. If we want to use it for free, we should be ready to pay some price for it. I am not a particular fan of facebook, except for it's ability to help me connect within closed private groups and tracking technology and programming news. I don't post photos or statuses on facebook.

Again, this is not absolving facebook of their dark patterns of snooping on users and their broken privacy framework. Even Google is not an ideal in this case.

SimHacker2• 13 years ago

I just uploaded a scan of the Copyleft (L) sticker that I mailed to RMS, which inspired him to use the term for free software. And I wrote up the story behind it: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/copyleft/

tripzilch2• 13 years ago

Awesome. Thanks for the story.

(btw you need to add a <meta charset="utf-8" /> or something similar to that site, some of the quotes get funky)

evincarofautumn• 13 years ago

Oh Stallman, such a character. Some of these are legitimate concerns, some just gave me a great laugh. For example, weigh these two against one another:

Facebook deleted a statement by a human rights group, then said that was a mistake. That Facebook invited the group to post the statement again — instead of undoing the deletion — demonstrates arrogance.
Facebook permanently records everything you do, even what you look at, even items that are "deleted".

Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by ineptitude! Either Facebook is an evil omnipresent observer, permanently recording everything…or some representative goofed up and they can’t undo the deletion of the data because they actually deleted the data.

But hey, if he wants to avoid Facebook and recommend against it, that’s fine. We should all make our own value assessments and our own decisions about privacy concerns, though. Just consider that Facebook’s occasional privacy blunders might be…just that.

Facebook

Related Stories