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Richard Stallman Inducted Into the 2013 Internet Hall of Fame
- RyanMcGreal 13y ago> Stallman had this to say upon his induction: "Now that we have made the Internet work, the next task is to stop it from being a platform for massive surveillance, and make it work in a way that respects human rights, including privacy." The man never misses an opportunity to try and get people thinking about the issues that matter.
- ConAntonakos 13y agoWell said.
- gargoiler80 13y agoIn your opinion they matter. I'm unconvinced. The majority of people are sharing more about themselves online. Not less. Outside this niche, people seem pretty uninterested that governments monitor the internet. They pretty much assumed as much. Stallman is just always swimming against the tide of what people actually want.
- nicholassmith 13y agoAnd the majority of people don't care about whether software is open source, but it's important irregardless.
- pron 13y agoSay "free software", not "open source": http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler
- reeses 13y agoYou focus on that, not on the use of 'irregardless'? What kind of pedant are you?
- gargoiler80 13y agoWhy do you think it's important? Is it important when I buy a wooden table that I'm given full details of how it was made, how the pieces fit together, what glue was used, what size router bits, etc?
- tjr 13y agoWhat if you wanted your wooden table to be two inches shorter? Should you be both technologically and legally prevented from sawing two inches off each of the legs? What if you wanted to build your own wooden table? Maybe you don't need the original schematics, but should you be both technologically and legally prevented from examining your own table to learn how it was constructed? What if (for whatever perverse reason) your wooden table did in fact come pre-installed with a miniature surveillance camera that sent footage of you back to the manufacturer. Should you be both technologically and legally prevented from removing such a device from your table?
- gargoiler80 13y agoYour arguments are all against reverse-engineering/code modification being illegal - which I think most people would agree on - not on free software. Allowing reverse engineering is a matter of allowing people freedom. Trying to force people to provide source code for everything is the opposite.
- tjr 13y agoI thought this was a discussion about "free software" in the context of how FSF/GNU defines "free software": http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
- gargoiler80 13y agoAccess to the source code is not a precondition to understanding how software works. It certainly helps, but it's not a requirement. If anyone believes that, they're effectively saying that it is absolutely impossible for a human to program in machine code. Which is obviously false.
- CanSpice 13y agoPeople should be allowed to share what they want. At the same time, people should be allowed to restrict others from sharing information about them. These two are not at odds with each other. The whole idea of "look at these people with 15,000 Foursquare checkins complain that the NSA is watching them" is fallacious. People choose to share their location with Foursquare; they don't choose (and currently cannot choose) to share their location with the NSA.
- cookiecaper 13y agoAny information placed into a communications medium like the internet without proper precautions should be considered publicly accessible, including accessible to governmental intelligence services. The user chooses to upload a history of his/her location. Tag-along listeners, whether it's a shoulder surfer or a packet sniffer (including highly sophisticated state-level packet sniffers), should be considered and accounted for before this information is published. Instantaneous perfect replication of massive strings of digits (into which meaningful information is encoded) is a double-edged sword, and it's scary for the same reasons it's valuable, and that's what people need to be educated on if they want to able to conduct private business on a major public communications platform. I love Bruce Scheiner's quote: "trying to make digital bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet". Fast, viral, sometimes uncontrollable replication is an inherent property of the medium we've established. It cannot be extracted without fundamentally modifying the essence of the 'net. We must learn to accept and cope with this.
- Amadou 13y agoThe problem here is that government intelligence services exist to serve the people. If the people do not wish for their government to spy on them, it needs to stop. This isn't about making bits uncopyable, this is about keeping our employees on task and within scope.
- cookiecaper 13y agoThe point is that it's a public comms platform and you can never be sure who's listening, even if you're on a supposedly-private website. Who's looking at that data on the other side? Which of your friends is lax about logging out and will leave your info exposed for the next visitor at the library to peruse? Which of your friends is running a crawler and saving all of that data for posterity, and what will happen to these archives? It's just like going out on a public square -- you may hope that you'll have basic dignities respected and that no nefarious or malicious players are observing/recording, but since you can't be sure you must take reasonable precautions against potentially egregious misuses. If Congress says the NSA is no longer allowed to this, it doesn't really affect anything -- because the NSA or a close cousin will most likely defy the essence of such an order via loophole exploitation, etc., but mostly because any reasonable expectation of privacy from any and all entities, intel service or not, while sending comms through a public platform like the internet, requires heavy, explicit defensive measures like correct usage of PGP. That's how people need to view the network, because that's the reality. In almost all cases, your packets go through a dozen or more routers all around the world before they hit the intended recipient, and it's ridiculous to presume that none of these many nodes are an entry point for an actor who may not have your best interest at heart. It's like going out to the mall naked, and getting upset that someone took and published photos. We may hope that the people at the mall at a given time would not do this, but people realize that this is not realistic and wear clothing to prevent the exposure of their nude bodies. They take the initiative directly and personally. That is how the internet must be viewed. If you don't want something exposed, you can hope that no "bad people" will come in contact with it, but it's much wiser to personally ensure it's covered before you take it out "in public" (aka, bouncing between dozens of anonymous nodes, sitting on a server which any employee can access (including the cleaning lady, or someone posing as the cleaning lady...), exposed to hundreds of "friends", all of whom have total freedom to copy those bits and replicate them elsewhere, intentionally or not).
- phaer 13y agoThere is no thing that "[all] people actually want". There are just things which are important for a subset of people. At least RMS, myself and a few other people seem to actually want an internet without total government surveillance.
- gargoiler80 13y agoThe internet will always have government surveillance, just as real life always has surveillance and monitoring. If you don't want to be monitored, either encrypt things, or don't post it online.
- phaer 13y agoYour analogy does not work, at least not where I am living; parts of my life are not monitored by the government. All of them are monitored by someone like my friends, colleagues, etc but I am okay with that, as I can directly interact with them on the same level and they are not some big, centralized entity to which I never agreed. And i guess that you, like me, don't know the future; The question if there will always be government surveillance depends on our collective decisions and good portion of historical luck, but it isn't for sure.
- pron 13y agoI think Stallman is concerned about surveillance in general, not only government surveillance. Corporate surveillance is much more prevalent on (and more unique to) the internet than government surveillance.
- pron 13y ago> Stallman is just always swimming against the tide of what people actually want. Isn't that the mark of a thinking man? A drug dealer gives people what they want; a thinker tells them what they should want. So what if they don't listen? That's the normal division of labor: the prophet warns and the people ignore him.
- gargoiler80 13y agoI'd say Stallman has a very extreme set of priorities. For most people, they just want a computer/games console/cellphone that works, and operates in the way they want it to. Whether the source code is free or not is completely irrelevant, if it fulfils the purpose. If I buy a plastic toy for my kids, I don't feel the need to have the schematics, plastic moulds, and full assembly details for it. It's enough that it fulfils the purpose for which it was made. Personally, I think you have to trust other people at some point. You have to trust that a hot wheels toy car won't have a secret hidden camera transmitting back to the government, just like you have to trust closed source software.
- pron 13y agoI don't think Stallman's agenda stems (only) from paranoia. To me, Stallman represents a reminder to always think about the power structure of everything - even software. For an interesting comparison of Stallman's and Tim O'Reilly's ideologies look here: http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler http://www.thebaffler.com/past/the_meme_hustler
- jlgreco 13y agoStallman is under no delusions, he makes concessions all the time. He uses computers in a very extreme manner, finding fault with even all major Linux distros, but does not demand or expect that other do the same. He knows that other people will make practical concessions. Fucking hell, even of Steam, the popular game distribution and DRM software (which distributes primarily DRM'd closed source games) running on Linux, he says: “This development can do both harm and good. It might encourage GNU/Linux users to install these games, and it might encourage users of the games to replace Windows with GNU/Linux,” he wrote. “My guess is that the direct good effect will be bigger than the direct harm. But there is also an indirect effect: what does the use of these games teach people in our community?” Would he use Steam? I can assure you not. Even so, he thinks that Steam being on Linux will likely do more good than harm. This is not extremism, this is pragmatism.
- GhotiFish 13y agoYou are being downvoted unfairly. I can understand where you are coming from here, people are submitting themselves to this kind of monitoring even though they have options right now to baffle it. It seems people either don't know enough to do so or don't care. That can be frustrating, but it's not grounds to say: "You've done it to yourself, this is what you wanted."
- geg3 13y agoIs this majority you conjecture educated in (or even vaguely aware of) the subject matter? Why should their cynical assumptions be viewed as what-should-be? I get that importance is subjective. That being the case, why would you choose to support your own opinions by appealing to the cloudy ignorance of the majority? My opinion: some tides suck and should be swam against. Sometimes it takes an uncomfortable amount of effort to avoid drowning.
- shmerl 13y agoThe majority of people are sharing more about themselves online. Not less. So it matters even more. People need to be educated.
- mouseroot 13y agowell its kinda funny to poke-fun at stallman calling him a paranoid freak...but its even funnier when quite recently we find out hmm maybe hes not so paranoid, perhaps he just knows more then we do and I feel that's a safe claim to make I wouldn't mind picking his brain for at least an hour paranoid or not the dudes a bad ass i mean ("gnu" gnus not unix) hes simply a genius disguised as a madman
- mindcrime 13y agoThe majority of people are sharing more about themselves online. And? What does that have to do with anything? I can share 99.99% of my personal information, but if I want that .01% to stay private, I have the right to keep it private. So what if people have gone from routinely sharing 75% to sharing 98%... pretty much everybody has something they don't share. That's what is at issue.
- latj 13y agoMany people do not know the level of surveillance, propaganda, and violence that is carried out on their behalf using their money. Even more people are not aware of the consequences that this has on their own lives- in a social and economic sense.
- dinkumthinkum 13y agoI don't think you should be downvoted, that's childish. But, I will say I disagree. I am the last one to defend the hysteria over NSA's Prism, for the simple fact that this is such, in my view, low brow stuff that should not surprise any sophisticated person one bit. Nevertheless, many people that are not technologists do care. Now, I haven't done a poll and I imagine the "teeming masses" couldn't care less, nevertheless, intelligent people do care and are interested, if not up in arms. I suspect many may not be up in arms for the same reason I am. I mean really, is it that shocking that the phone companies and Google, Facebook (why would Facebook care about your privacy with respect to the government? They will share your data with anyone and everyone Zuckerberg has basically stated privacy is irrelevant in the past) would share information with the government? Honestly, I don't see why it is is scarier to think Eric Holder might have access to your data or Eric Schmidt ... Anyway, I think people do care.
- mouseroot 13y ago^ this is exactly where the state of the internet should be...lets fix the infrastructure before expanding it.
- myhf 13y agoWhat a pompous jerk. The GPL is what makes it more economical to build data-harvesting services than to sell software products that let people retain control of their own information.
- klrr 13y agoWhat do you mean? When you think about it, you can still charge people for support, warranty etc.
- dpapathanasiou 13y agoI wonder if his browsing habits have changed since 2007: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134979 http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.misc/134979
- ealexhudson 13y agoI doubt it. He still travels an awful lot, and while people often make fun of his "I browse via email" set-up, it's difficult to think of an alternative off-line cache setup that would handle long latency that well. I honestly believe if that "read everything offline" system was proposed on some popular productivity blog as a new life hack, hipsters would be all over it.
- gngeal 13y agoAnd Knuth doesn't use e-mail at all. And Dijkstra didn't use a computer for a very long time. I think it's safe to assume that this is the class of people that develop habits that would seem strange to most people.
- toolslive 13y agoI heard from people at the University of Belfast say that CAR Hoar had never used the universities computer system during the time he discovered quicksort. When asked about this he supposedly answered: "I proved it works, so why should I implement it"
- sleighboy 13y agoIf anyone takes the time to read that whole thread it may change their opinion of the man. He contradicts himself and makes assertions about OpenBSD that even the casual observer would know are false. I stopped taking him seriously after reading it back in 2007.
- protomyth 13y agoFor those who don't know, the ports tree Stallman is talking about is not installed by default. In fact, there is no option in the installer to do it for you. You must do it yourself.
- xenator 13y agoHe belongs to Wall of Shame.
- swombat 13y agoI'd delete this comment if I were you. You're running the risk of getting hellbanned for this.
- nmridul 13y agoAtleast you should explain why you think he belongs there ?
- hawkw 13y agoProbably that video of RMS eating something from his foot...
- zxcdw 13y agoWhat about it, exactly? Doesn't affect your life, shouldn't make a difference.
- astrodust 13y agoIf he's the representative of the Free Software Movement, is it unreasonable to have certain expectations of what this representative presents himself as? If he was only representing himself, as if he was just a writer or a programmer, you'd be right.
- gillianseed 13y agoHis views on open source represent that of the Free Software Movement, I don't see anyone questioning the german football coach's abilities of football and managing the german team due to him eating a booger on live tv during a game. Yet when it comes to Stallman, his detractors seem to focus on ridiculing his person rather than argue against what he is saying. If I find anything disgusting, it's such cowardly behaviour.
- alex_doom 13y agoI was not even aware this was a thing.
- gizbot 13y agoIt started in 2012, which we all know as the real beginning of the Internet.
- ownagefool 13y agoIndeed and it's a good thing they created all that GNU stuff in 2013 because obviously it didn't exist last year. :p
- pvnick 13y agoOh that makes sense, I was thinking "really, it took until 2013 to get RMS in there?" It seems like the internet hall of fame would almost be specifically created to contain Stallman.
- IvyMike 13y agoOf COURSE if there is to be an Internet Hall of Fame, RMS has to be in it. But they were between a rock and a hard place last year, given that the FSF was itself founded by RMS. They probably waited a year to avoid immediate whining of "RMS created an award to give to himself".
- rca 13y agoOut of curiosity, I took a look to last year's inductees, there are also a few famous name in there : Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds, and others. http://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/2012 http://www.internethalloffame.org/inductees/2012
- JshWright 13y agoNotably, in the privacy vein, Zimmermann was also inducted in 2012.
- mark_l_watson 13y agoWhile wearing my FSF Libre Planet t-shirt, I offer my congratulations to Richard :-) Congratulations offered, I would also like to point out that his concerns over freedom, control of your own software and data now seems even more relevant with the recent disclosures about the NSA.
- dfc 13y agoI had no idea that stallman came up with the term POSIX: http://stallman.org/articles/posix.html http://stallman.org/articles/posix.html
- RyanZAG 13y agoI find it intriguing to consider that in history and philosophy textbooks in 100 years time, Stallman is likely to have a number of very positive (and possibly even large) contributions to humanity, while Obama is likely to be regarded very negatively for his wiretapping and with no notable positive contributions. Meanwhile today, Stallman is regarded as some kind of madman while Obama is an amazing celebrity.
- skrebbel 13y agoYou're a bit filter bubbled. Of course Obama is an amazing celebrity. He's the president of the USA. That sort of makes him an amazing celebrity by definition. Stallman, however, is not the president and not Brad Pitt, so he has a harder time achieving celebrity status.
- tokenizer 13y agoCurrent celebs may need to be powerful or beautiful, but in the future, at least from what we've seen in the present, it is the thinkers and innovators that get remembered.
- bennyg 13y agoPlenty of celebrities get remembered too. Ever heard of Marilyn Monroe? It's pop culture, this is just how it works.
- dllthomas 13y agoHow many Marilyns do you remember from ancient Greece? How many thinkers?
- sliverstorm 13y agoWell, there's always women like Helen of Troy in history. You never know, Marilyn could go that way. Everyone knows her name, but I'd bet already many people don't even really remember how she looked, sounded like, or what she acted in.
- jwcrux 13y agoFull inductees also include Aaron Swartz and Jimmy Wales http://www.internethalloffame.org/blog/2013/06/26/internet-hall-fame-announces-2013-inductees http://www.internethalloffame.org/blog/2013/06/26/internet-h...
- derpapst 13y agoMany years ago, when I did my first steps in Emacs, I wrote Richard a mail asking, why it has such unusual and sometimes awkward keyboard shortcuts. He replied: "For fast and efficient editing." I like that guy.
- counterpointer 13y agoI like RMS(even attended one of his talks, was fun) and he has been surprising prescient about many things. But he still seems to be falling victim to the "Smarter people are more likely to believe in false conspiracy theories" rule. In his post against Ubuntu's local searches being sent to Amazon, he claimed as-a-matter-of-fact that Windows sends local searches to an internet server and his friend proved so. This may be true in Windows 8.1 but is certainly not true beforehand. I figure that if someone else said something similar about FOSS in the same casual way, RMS himself would characterize(rightly so) it as FUD tactics. Still, I do think that we need more people like him rather than everyone else who seem to be aligning themselves with some or the other corporate entity and thus lose their moral compass in the process.
- SatyajitSarangi 13y agoMost of his detractors think that technology has outpaced him. He thinks that technology has outpaced us, rather spoilt us.
- gngeal 13y agotechnology has outpaced him It feels sort of weird to see such claims about a guy who was hacking on computer systems that were almost two decades ahead of everything else. (But that probably depends on what one sees as "technology". Shrinking transistor size is definitely technological progress, but I don't think that this alone has ever had a qualitative influence on the impact of computing systems - unlike their ubiquity, which, on the other hand, is not as much a technological advancement as it is a social one.)
- sliverstorm 13y agoBut is he still doing that? (Honest question, I don't know) Just because you were on the bleeding edge twenty years ago, does not mean you haven't been outpaced today.
- dinkumthinkum 13y agoHe was a brilliant technologist. I'm not sure how much programming he does anymore. But the technology outpacing stuff ... Have you looked into the sorts of devices and technologies he currently uses?
- SatyajitSarangi 13y agoAm I the only one surprised that it took such a long time for them to do this? How did Jimmy Wales got there before Stallman, using an ideology that was pretty much ushered by Stallman as Guerrilla Warfare? I know that Stallman has his fair share of quirks, who doesn't? But I believe in today's world, he is more of a forgotten hero, whose "quriks" get highlighted more than his long list of achievements and just for inspiring people to join the bandwagon of open source coding.
- gargoiler80 13y ago> Am I the only one surprised that it took such a long time for them to do this? It only started last year.
- rdouble 13y agoHas anyone else even heard of the "internet hall of fame" before now?
- reeses 13y agoIt reminds me of those "best of the web" and "site of the day" badges people put on their sites in Web 0.95 patch level c.
- vacri 13y agoThough horrible and garish, it's good to see the million dollar homepage still honouring his pledge. http://milliondollarhomepage.com/ http://milliondollarhomepage.com/
- dombili 13y ago> "How did Jimmy Wales got there before Stallman..." He didn't. He's also being inducted this year.
- dllthomas 13y agoWell deserved.
- rmsify 13y agoI'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as internet hall of fame, is in fact, GNU/internet hall of fame, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus internet hall of fame. Internet hall of fame is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called 'internet hall of fame', and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a internet hall of fame, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Internet hall of fame is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Internet hall of fame is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with internet hall of fame added, or GNU/internet hall of fame. All the so-called 'internet hall of fame' distributions are really distributions of GNU/internet hall of fame.
- racl101 13y agoJust now? Geez. This guy should've been inducted in the first year.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mehrzad 13y agoDoes anyone have a serious reason not to call it "GNU/Linux"? Curious.
- Uchikoma 13y agoSomeone will not be happy with this one: "Aaron Swartz (posthumous) Co-authored version of RSS"