Richard Stallman: Cell Phones Are 'Stalin's Dream' 792
jbrodkin writes "Cell phones are 'Stalin's dream,' says free software pioneer Richard Stallman, who refuses to own one. 'Cell phones are tools of Big Brother. I'm not going to carry a tracking device that records where I go all the time, and I'm not going to carry a surveillance device that can be turned on to eavesdrop.' Even the open source Android is dangerous because devices ship with proprietary executables, Stallman says in a wide-ranging interview on the state of the free software movement. Despite some progress, Stallman is still dismayed by 'The existence and use of non-free software [which] is a social problem. It's an evil. And our aim is a world without that problem.'"
Have to agree..Facebook too! (Score:4, Interesting)
I own and operate a fairly famous restaurant, and see a lot of people every week. Just this past week on Friday evening an older guy and I began chatting about Big Brother and the eaves dropping nanny state we live in. He told me that one of his friends and him would talk about "things" down in his workshop on his property, but that he made anyone that came there take the batteries *out* of their cell phones, because they can record and transmit conversations even when you think they are off. He said we learned this little intelligence hack from the Chinese who have been doing it for a few years now. I have no idea, but have manually disabled the GPS tracking feature in the phone, however any picture I take with the phone still has the lat/lon data in the photo. I don't want the latitude and longitude dammit!
More than a few times I have told my wife that I wanted to throw our phones in the fireplace, but she is the trusting type, and doesn't seem to believe me when I tell her how her phone can violate hers and our privacy. I honestly hate cell phones on so many levels, but they are still one notch below my hatred of Facebook. To me the two go hand in hand. It is so easy to post things that may seem innocent on Facebook, but they end up being used against us. Facebook is number one in the privacy violation department, and we do it to ourselves. That is why both my wife and I have deleted our Facebook accounts and thankfully moved on over the last month and a half. I never liked Facebook anyway, but was on there to try to protect her. There is something gossipy and just plan creepy about it. Hell, i had customers who weren't even my friends on facebook coming in and asking me about posts i had made because they had been gossiping i guess with some of my Facebook friends in real life. JUST WIERD! My wife had her co-workers on there and supervisors on there. It was a recipe for disaster, and it almost ruined our marriage, and it definately creeped us out really good. Anyway, hopefully for my wife and I our cellphones will be the next to go... We aren't being luddites, but rather trying to retain at least a semblance of privacy in a nosy, gossipy, and evil networked world...
Re:Gone off the deep end (Score:5, Interesting)
No. Because there is no reason for the FBI to have any interest in me
You are probably less relevant than RMS. But there are many powerful interests which would have interest in tracking and eavesdropping on him, so his argument is sound.
But your point of view leads to the more worrying conclusion that, because most people lack the talent or the courage to take a stand, it shouldn't matter that those who do make a difference may be prevented from doing so. Essentially, you're scared of freedom and you resent those who want to enjoy it.
Anyway, as a matter of routine I take out my cellphone battery when I don't need to use it. It probably cumulatively wastes an hour a year of quick hand movement, which is less than I waste in a couple of weeks on.. err.. masturbating? I know I'm less relevant than RMS, but being the activist type (in the sense of organisation and publication) I'm probably slightly more interesting than the average lady or gent. I know for certain by questions I've been asked at US immigration that at least someone's paying attention to what I'm doing.
You have the right to be boring. I shall celebrate my freedom not to be.
Re:Have to agree..Facebook too! (Score:4, Interesting)
So, to summarize, you don't know how to configure your phone to not geotag images, and you are unable to engage your brain before friending someone or posting something on Facebook.
That's it? Really?
You may not be luddites, but you do apparently lack any semblance of social antennas when it comes to picking your friends and choosing what information you share with them (both on Facebook and in real life, it would seem). You don't really state what you have against cell phones (beyond the paranoia that all phones are by default rigged to eavesdrop on you while switched off), so can't really comment on that.
Stallman is right about a lot of things (Score:4, Interesting)
He just needs to stop communicating it this way. He's starting to ratchet up the rhetoric to the point where the fight against non-free software resembles a cosmic war.
This is not a good vs. evil zero-sum game, Mr. Stallman. Eliminationist rhetoric has no place in our society.
Re:Open source vs proprietary (Score:5, Interesting)
Another philosophy taken too far (Score:2, Interesting)
Stallman is always such a fundamentalist. Any philosophy taken too far no longer makes sense.
'The existence and use of non-free software [which] is a social problem. It's an evil. And our aim is a world without that problem.
Okay, so my mom uses a program to help her with her quilting. Who in the hell is going to write that for her if no one is paid to do it?
The whole "programmers scratching an itch" model fails rather dramatically in the realm of applications that lack any programmer interest.
Open source and open standards are cool and a great way to manage a part of the software industry, but it seems obvious that there will always be a need to have proprietary software that is sold by the copy.
Stallman's message would be a lot more inteligible and acceptable if it weren't so ridiculously out there.
Re:This time of year already eh? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ahh, yes. Like his fanatical rant about the evils of DRM in books, and how it could be used to control what we were allowed to read, right? glad that one never happened [slashdot.org].
It'd be a lot easier to dismiss RMS as a "nut" if he wasn't right so damn often.
Re:Open source vs proprietary (Score:5, Interesting)
What software, in your opinion, is "better" than MS Office that's available today? It may not be the "best of all possible software packages," but it certainly seems to be the "best office package available on the market today."
I've used OO.o and LibreOffice, and while they do an adequate job for most word processing needs I have, I certainly wouldn't call them any "better" than Office. And then there's also the question of advanced features that Office has - they may only be used by 1% of the company, but when you're making a choice for an "enterprise-wide" package, you choose the one that fits all (or "the most") of your needs - support & rollout costs far exceed the licensing costs, and OO.o/LibreOffice will require ongoing support just as much as MS Office - trying to buy MS Office for the "advanced" users while rolling out OO.o for the basic users also means that:
1) You don't get as good a bulk deal on enterprise licensing;
2) You have to pay to support TWO software packages;
If your company has a need (even in a small proportion of users) for the advanced features of Office, you'll probably end up paying just as much to rollout Office to your whole company as you would trying to rollout and support a blend of MS and OO.o tools.
Re:Open source vs proprietary (Score:3, Interesting)
That is why the law requires a list of the things in food to be on the packet. The process used to create food has be largely open and subject to rigorous standards too.
Okay, people still eat shit for breakfast but look where that has got us. I think most people would accept that making people more aware of what they eat and how to stay healthy and at a sensible weight is a good thing.
Similarly if people don't care that their personal data is being logged and sold or that their phone can be used to spy on them then maybe we should try to do something about it.
Also, WTF Slashdot, modding up the "x is worse than y, therefore who cares about y" argument? Yeah, kids are starving in Africa but this stuff still matters.