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A small personal note: I totally favor scientific crowd-experiment, but ONLY if done in FLOSS and public terms. SmartPhones these days are surveillance devices
by kkfx 5y ago
A small personal note: I totally favor scientific crowd-experiment, but ONLY if done in FLOSS and public terms. SmartPhones these days are surveillance devices maintained and paid by the formal owner while they serve far more their vendor and other player behind, with the formal owner as the last in the pyramid.
In that sense I have to refuse because I have to refuse the device used even by a formally FLOSS and public experiment. Of course asking to buy or buy and offer sensors devices to the masses is unfeasible BUT it's perfectly feasible, just, needed, asking to IMPOSE open hardware without lock-ins, FLOSS code on them and services with public APIs as a State law, gradually growing to exit actual extremely dangerous and sorry situation. Scientific institutions are among those best qualified to took such public statements. Avoiding them means avoiding part of the Scientific duty, witch is doing their best to improve the society.
- micromacrofoot 5y agoit’s fairly hard to find research participants
- kkfx 5y agoAnything "new" and "that demand a substantial social change" is hard, at least for start and for a not so short period of time... If no one start change never happen, if someone start...
- micromacrofoot 5y agoSoftware developers having been calling for FLOSS for decades at this point, and it's clear that the average person will only use FLOSS if it's mandated or clearly a better product in some way. Posing a fringe ethical dilemma alone will not get it done... the vast majority of people (including people collecting data for research) do not even care a little bit. They have a long list of other problems to solve first, and if FLOSS gets in the way of any of those they'll gladly forgo it.
- kkfx 5y agoCasual people and scientist are different cohorts of population, casual people do not have the culture to comprehend, most do not even understand the difference between a third-partly hosted web-app and a local one just because they look at the same screen, most do not understand why it's absurd and bad print a document, scan in to an image and send the image by mail etc BUT those normally are not scientist. Scientist normally like to learn, so if someone explain them something interesting they learn it in means. Population always follow. Just look at the French Revolutions the Sans-culottes was driven by bourgeois, similarly on the other sides soldiers are peoples/"commoners" driven by other bourgeois and aristocrats. The people have chosen a side or another, and they are pushed to chose by both sides. So far I do not see much on the FLOSS side since there is no community anymore and most just live on someone else computer. Who better than Scientist can correct that aim? Peoples in Humanities surely are more listening but they mostly lack enough skill to bridge the gap between the philosophy (in the classical sense of "the why") and the practice, scientist normally can.
- ganzuul 5y agoThis is why Nokia was gutted. Sony phones with Sailfish is the furthest separation you can achieve from the freaks responsible for this situation and still remain a participant in the information age. People don't understand the cruelty we have grown accustomed to.