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Then what alternative would you propose? The terms of the debate have been defined by totalitarians who themselves use Newspeak to get people to accept their sy

by Decade 10y ago

Then what alternative would you propose? The terms of the debate have been defined by totalitarians who themselves use Newspeak to get people to accept their systems. By disrupting the language, RMS makes dissent thinkable.

Karunamon 10y ago
Is this using the RMS definition of "totalitarian", which makes moral judgements on the great evil of not releasing the source code to your software on very specific terms, or the one used by most of the world in reference to government institutions? Much of this is GNU virtue signaling. And it comes off as very pretentious and off putting. Example: nobody is ever going to use "SaaSS", because the replacement term conveys no extra meaning to someone who's not in the GNU in-group. For the same reason everyone says "Linux" and not "GNU/Linux". Or the idea that "Photoshop" should be avoided only because it's a "proprietary" name and no other reason. One can imagine the speaker spitting the p-word as if an epithet. The "hacker"/"cracker" boat sailed decades ago. "Trusted computing" as another epithet ignores that such systems can be engineered to work for, or against the user. If you control your own keys, you're ensuring that the computer works in your interests and not the interests of the guy that wrote the malware that just arrived over the NIC. Most of these re-definitions make the mistake of presuming that human communication is optimized for complete logical/ideological correctness rather than efficiency of communication or many other purposes. Imagine if every TCP packet contained a 1 meg checksum. You've ensured that the receiver got exactly what you sent, but it took ages and a lot of almost-certainly-unnecesary noise to get it across.
- Decade 10y ago
  Trying to avoid the weeds that so many other people have argued, so: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” - Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and former CEO of Google.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    And your point is...?
    - Decade 10y ago
      You do not win the culture wars by using words defined by totalitarians. People who have no respect for others’ freedoms.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - Karunamon 10y ago
        You live in a parallel version of Earth I'd like to inhabit if you think the FSF is winning any culture battles, let alone wars.
        Decade 10y ago
        They are winning battles. Back when they started, nobody thought software deserved to be free. Bill Gates published a letter where he asserted that nobody should use Microsoft software without paying Microsoft, and only Microsoft had the privilege of improving it. 30 years later, Microsoft releases a lot of stuff under the Apache 2.0 license. If you were not connected to the past, you would not recognize how huge this is.
        Karunamon 10y ago
        And yet, Microsoft's releases are done under APL2, not GPL. I'd argue that that the FSF is culturally irrelevant - the hacker mindset (and so the sharing one) would exist with or without RMS.
  - icebraining 10y ago
    That quote continues, ... But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we’re all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.
- Decade 10y ago
  That is a false dichotomy. I don’t agree with every definition that RMS provides, but I agree with the legitimacy of his effort. I think RMS updates the terms sporadically, and some of the definitions are now outdated. For the “hacker”/“cracker” thing, that effort is a lost cause that he just won’t let go, but it’s useful to preserve as a time capsule of the cultural events that led to our current state. There have been multiple complaints that computing is a pop culture, with no sense of the past or the future. RMS is connected to both past and future.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
pcl 10y ago
Then what alternative would you propose? Hmm. I'm not really sure, as I'm certainly not a rhetorical pro. But I feel like defining new negative terms and discussing them, rather than re-casting other terms, would be a good start. The "Trusted Computing" example mentioned in the article and in a child comment is a good one to look at, I think. "Trusted Computing" sounds Orwellian to start with; as the rule of thumb goes, if you need to put an adjective in the name, it's probably not true [0]. So eschewing "Trusted Computing" makes good sense, but re-casting it as "Treacherous Computing" is goofy, and just sounds like a snide and kinda pathetic attack. Maybe it'd be better to create a new positive name ("Verifiable Computing", say) and discuss how it's better than "Trusted Computing"? [0] cf. "Democratic" People's Republic of Korea, German "Democratic" Republic, "United" States of America, Computer "Science"

by Decade 10y ago

Karunamon 10y ago

Is this using the RMS definition of "totalitarian", which makes moral judgements on the great evil of not releasing the source code to your software on very specific terms, or the one used by most of the world in reference to government institutions? Much of this is GNU virtue signaling. And it comes off as very pretentious and off putting. Example: nobody is ever going to use "SaaSS", because the replacement term conveys no extra meaning to someone who's not in the GNU in-group. For the same reason everyone says "Linux" and not "GNU/Linux". Or the idea that "Photoshop" should be avoided only because it's a "proprietary" name and no other reason. One can imagine the speaker spitting the p-word as if an epithet. The "hacker"/"cracker" boat sailed decades ago. "Trusted computing" as another epithet ignores that such systems can be engineered to work for, or against the user. If you control your own keys, you're ensuring that the computer works in your interests and not the interests of the guy that wrote the malware that just arrived over the NIC. Most of these re-definitions make the mistake of presuming that human communication is optimized for complete logical/ideological correctness rather than efficiency of communication or many other purposes. Imagine if every TCP packet contained a 1 meg checksum. You've ensured that the receiver got exactly what you sent, but it took ages and a lot of almost-certainly-unnecesary noise to get it across.

Decade 10y ago
Trying to avoid the weeds that so many other people have argued, so: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” - Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and former CEO of Google.
- Karunamon 10y ago
  And your point is...?
  - Decade 10y ago
    You do not win the culture wars by using words defined by totalitarians. People who have no respect for others’ freedoms.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      You live in a parallel version of Earth I'd like to inhabit if you think the FSF is winning any culture battles, let alone wars.
      - Decade 10y ago
        They are winning battles. Back when they started, nobody thought software deserved to be free. Bill Gates published a letter where he asserted that nobody should use Microsoft software without paying Microsoft, and only Microsoft had the privilege of improving it. 30 years later, Microsoft releases a lot of stuff under the Apache 2.0 license. If you were not connected to the past, you would not recognize how huge this is.
        Karunamon 10y ago
        And yet, Microsoft's releases are done under APL2, not GPL. I'd argue that that the FSF is culturally irrelevant - the hacker mindset (and so the sharing one) would exist with or without RMS.
- icebraining 10y ago
  That quote continues, ... But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we’re all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities.
Decade 10y ago
That is a false dichotomy. I don’t agree with every definition that RMS provides, but I agree with the legitimacy of his effort. I think RMS updates the terms sporadically, and some of the definitions are now outdated. For the “hacker”/“cracker” thing, that effort is a lost cause that he just won’t let go, but it’s useful to preserve as a time capsule of the cultural events that led to our current state. There have been multiple complaints that computing is a pop culture, with no sense of the past or the future. RMS is connected to both past and future.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

pcl 10y ago

Then what alternative would you propose? Hmm. I'm not really sure, as I'm certainly not a rhetorical pro. But I feel like defining new negative terms and discussing them, rather than re-casting other terms, would be a good start. The "Trusted Computing" example mentioned in the article and in a child comment is a good one to look at, I think. "Trusted Computing" sounds Orwellian to start with; as the rule of thumb goes, if you need to put an adjective in the name, it's probably not true [0]. So eschewing "Trusted Computing" makes good sense, but re-casting it as "Treacherous Computing" is goofy, and just sounds like a snide and kinda pathetic attack. Maybe it'd be better to create a new positive name ("Verifiable Computing", say) and discuss how it's better than "Trusted Computing"? [0] cf. "Democratic" People's Republic of Korea, German "Democratic" Republic, "United" States of America, Computer "Science"