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One could argue he hasn't changed at all. On the contrary, it's the obligation of the actor to act transparently toward those acted upon. In your case, you wer
by eksith 13y ago
One could argue he hasn't changed at all. On the contrary, it's the obligation of the actor to act transparently toward those acted upon.
In your case, you were the actor dropping in on RMS so the obligation was on you to be transparent about it. I'm guessing you weren't, since it wasn't very polite to peek at their email ;)
And therein lies the dilemma. Those with power will observe yet must be transparent about said observation. However they aren't transparent for fear of tipping their hand to what is essentially the proverbial "boogey man" that is terror.
- cromwellian 13y agoWell, I did nothing to conceal the fact that I ran the mail command. I was only a teenager, knew nothing about Unix nor internet mail, and so I was looking at shell history and trying commands at random exploring. The system was regularly backed up and restored, so for example, if you installed something like a MUD server on RMS's account, the next day it would be reverted. From what I could tell, the GNU accounts were held nothing more than mailing lists, there was never any private correspondence that I could see. I'm pretty sure RMS was aware his email and everything he did on the account could be seen by everyone. In fact, his mbox file wasn't even protected, you could grep the /var/spool/mail directory.
- eksith 13y agoWhat a wonderful and innocent time in the computer world it was back then. Thanks for sharing this. It seems they all treated mail as a message board; just a means to share ideas publicly. And if you weren't going to put it on those lists, they it didn't belong in email after all.
- cromwellian 13y agoYeah, the Morris Worm was the first big strike against such openness. A lot more stuff got locked down after that. I remember a lot of universities allowed you to telnet in and log in as 'guest' with no password back then. IIRC, I could telnet into Berkeley XCF and UIUC.
- dredmorbius 13y agoMany of us who aren't quite as old-school as RMS still treat electronic communications in this way. Yes, there's communications we'll make which are more privileged, but we understand that fundamentally the system is open to observation and snooping. If we've got something to say we don't want others to know, we say it in person, using crypto, or through code (formal or informal) which will be difficult for others to understand, if at all. And there's still good old mail. First class will often reach someone faster than they'll dig through their mail spool these days (and a letter indicates an investment in communication), even next-day mail is pretty cheap (much less expensive than FedEx).