Re: The role of FOSS in preventing a recurrence of vehicle emissions scandals

[J.B. Nicholson]

A very effective argument is to look back at what happened under software 
non-freedom. The entirety of https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/ is replete with 
examples of this, often from establishment-serving media which passes muster in the 
computer field. In fact https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-cars.html#M201904150 
covers the Volkswagen emissions scandal and succinctly captures how free software 
would have helped:



Using free software would not have stopped Volkswagen from programming it this
way, but would have made it harder to conceal, and given the users the 
possibility
of correcting the deception.


Multiple large automakers coordinated their actions to exploit the vulnerable 
resulting in "about 11 million cars worldwide"[1] emitting more pollutants than is 
legally allowed in real-world driving.


The punishment for this fraud did not include mandating free software. As far as I 
know, none of the victimized customers ended up with free software car firmware and 
the means to update applicable cars to a libre version of that software (no 
TiVOization allowed). I'm not interested in how many anyone thinks would have used 
it, as that's a side issue and pure speculation. I'm interested in what the public 
should have demanded and what the public should still receive.


Demanding software freedom is eminent sense if we are genuinely trying to "[prevent] 
a recurrence of vehicle emissions scandals" as is the subject of this thread. One 
should want the car owners to be free to run their cars as they wish and to also let 
publishers know that their illegal collusion will be punished by losing that 
proprietary control.


Matt Ivie wrote:

Back in the day, before ECMs and computer control, one could tune their engine 
any
way they chose. If you needed to pass an emissions test you would make sure your
engine was setup to do just that, but then you could change it back after the 
test
was passed.


We can examine history to see what occurred; we can ask "did anyone cheat?". I know 
of no car enthusiasts doing anything comparable to what Volkswagen Group did in 
anywhere near comparable numbers. If there is some other group that pulled that off, 
I'd like to know the specifics including how many millions of cars they modified to 
run in violation of emissions law in real-world driving.


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_scandal

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Re: Wikipedia extolled as an aide for getting history correct

[J.B. Nicholson]

Alexandre Oliva wrote:

[Wikipedia is] definitely not neutral ground.


I concur; there are different groups interested in presenting a particular view of 
things via Wikipedia articles. As I understand it, whose view is seen by many comes 
down to either who is connected to Wikipedia admins or who spends time reverting 
challenging edits.



But then, despite all of its failings, Wikipedia, like democracy, sucks,
though they suck less than the known alternatives.


And, much like Firefox, Wikipedia articles are licensed such that if one wants to one 
could base a new work by copying something that went before and making changes to it. 
Firefox, for all of its problems, is still free software and thus very well-suited 
for being the base for other browsers. TorBrowser is an example of that.


Perhaps someone has done something comparable for Wikipedia as well?

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Should we take steps to reduce Russian access to Free Software? No.

[J.B. Nicholson]

Thomas Lord wrote:
> Setting aside the legal restrictions imposed on speech by the
> free software foundation, who would decide what the FSF view
> of particular armed conflicts between nations should be?
> Who would be alienated?  Who would be in reactionary
> opposition to the statement?

I imagine that strong opposition would come from anyone who objects to any of
the US-backed wars & occupations which receive no such attention of this kind.
Such people might ask why this conflict deserves such a reaction but other
conflicts apparently didn't. It's not clear to me why free software activists
would be asked to side against Russia or Russians here or what sparked this
interest all of a sudden. The timing could also come off as being suspiciously
compatible with establishment media coverage of the Ukrainian conflict.

> Lastly, I would think we'd want free software to be thriving
> in Russian and every society because that gives *users* greater
> freedom to do what they think is best.  If all humans at least
> on average tend towards non-violence and international
> solidarity, my best is on as much access to free software
> as possible, everywhere.

That sentiment sounds correct to me.

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Are there any eBook readers one can use in freedom?

[J.B. Nicholson]

I would like to try reading some DRM-free eBooks with a backlit eBook reader which is 
lighter than using a laptop and less expensively than using a laptop.


I don't need it to be network accessible (no wifi, no Bluetooth needed) so long as it 
has a USB port and a high capacity storage medium (perhaps a compact flash card) that 
I can easily copy eBooks to, install in the eBook reader, and use the eBook reader to 
read files.


File format support should include common eBook formats that one can use in freedom 
(I'd imagine PDFs and epub are reasonable choices).


The device should offer the ability to be recharged, ideally with batteries I can 
replace. It's also okay if the device needs to be plugged in while using the device.


It's fine if the device has no upgradable software on it so long as what's on the 
device works reliably. Editing and/or marking up what I'm reading is not required.


Does anyone know of a recommendable device that would do these things?

I looked in https://ryf.fsf.org/ and https://h-node.org/hardware/catalogue/en and I 
didn't notice anything named "ebook reader" or similar language. If I've overlooked 
something I should consider, please do let me know the URL for that device.


Thanks.

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Paying to improve free software one chooses not to use?

[J.B. Nicholson]

Jim wrote:

In fact this is a good example of how Free Software enables users, even if they
don't code themselves:  it's my understanding that Adam Good, who plays Turkish
music professionally (with NYC band Dolunay among others), raised money to hire
programmers to extend Lilypond to support Turkish. I'm an acquaintance of Adam's
and he typically uses proprietary software, so he's not using Lilypond (with
Frescobaldi) on ideological grounds.  Nevertheless he's seeing the benefit of 
the
GPL (as am I!).


This is highly unusual -- are you saying that Adam Good rejects using Lilypond, the 
free software program he raised money to improve? Perhaps you could expand on that or 
ask him to post here to help readers understand more of what's going on with that choice.


Relatedly, what are the "ideological grounds" to which you refer?

Thanks.

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2010 Trenton Computer Festival breakdown doesn't approach the issues under discussion

[J.B. Nicholson]

murph wrote:

I'd like to share an experience of mine with Richard Stallman, and
some reflections on the current situation.

In about 2010 or so, I went to the Trenton Computer Festival.  Richard
was slated to talk.  It was a treat to have him speak close to home
for me.  I also noticed that he was listed as a leader in Open Source,
and I thought that it would be amusing to see how he would react to
that.  Maybe some witty barbs, and an explanation of the difference
between the Free and Open movements, as a learning experience for the
organizers, as well as the audience.

I was wrong.  It was not amusing.



What was wrong was listing RMS as something that was not then nor is now true. RMS 
has a habit of sending organizations a document detailing terms on which he'll agree 
to speak at functions like this. He's very clear to include verbiage on how to 
properly address his work. I'm guessing that the Trenton Computer Festival organizers 
received a copy and didn't read it or they chose to ignore it.


What would have been more kind to him in your reaction is to understand that 2010 he 
had spent most of his life working on the free software social movement (founding it, 
working on licenses, programs, and books for its benefit, and all along the way 
advocating on its behalf for decades). A better way to find out how he would react 
would be to ask him in an interview what he makes of the open source development 
methodology or to ask him how free software and open source differ.


By 2010 the Trenton Computer Festival organizers and anyone else could have also read 
at least two essays on this topic:


Older essay:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html

Newer essay:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html


When Richard was on stage, and found out about the "Open Source"
moniker, he was outraged.  I don't recall his words of over a decade
ago, but I thought I recall more than a little cursing.  Regardless of
the exact words, it was unbecoming of someone of his stature.  It was
less statesman, and more temper tantrum.



Your reaction in this story contains nothing critical of the Trenton Computer 
Festival. They deserve some bad press on that, particularly for someone who has held 
on to that grudge over a decade later. I see no such indication in your story and I 
find that telling since it was their wrong description that initiated this entire story.


Or how about Linus Torvalds' well-known cursing: I've never seen anyone extend this 
kind of reaction to the Linux kernel or any of its contributors when Linus Torvalds 
said harsh words to programmers who didn't meet Torvalds' expectations for quality work.


Stallman is assigned the burden of having to not only have his work misrepresented (I 
assure you that's not the first time that has happened), but his reaction to the 2010 
Trenton Computer Festival is being used as an excuse to cast aspersions on his board 
membership to the FSF over a decade later. This effectively joins up with an effort 
which, in a completely separate letter from yours, tries to argue for all of us to 
also "refuse to contribute to projects related to the FSF and RMS" which is a huge 
overreach and opportunistic power grab which would end up punishing many others.



I walked away that day, not energized about supporting Free Software,
but instead thinking about the man that was in the front of the room
talking about it.  Was this the right person to further that cause?



Yes he is as are anyone else who actually argues for free software. As to his being 
upset, we'll all have moments where we are flustered and not at our best, and that's 
all you're really describing in your story.


I couldn't name 5 other people who do as thorough a job of speaking about software 
freedom, as consistently, and who take as many bad-faith attacks in the doing as RMS 
has for as long as he's been doing that work. Perhaps those who find such fault in 
him should take up the task of advocating for software freedom (not the 
proprietor-friendly weaker open source) so they can get a taste of the typically 
careful parsing RMS gives his questioners.



I haven't personally seen the abuse that people have reported [...]



None of which has anything to do with how well RMS discusses software freedom. Let's 
not conflate allegations of bad speech here. Speech to or about women, transsexuals, 
and saying things others don't want to read on rape (which are the main points the 
objections) is not the same as getting upset at a conference where RMS appears to 
have been set up with a mistaken (generously described) introduction. Offering this 
story here in this temporal context comes off to me as piling on more clarifying 
anything relevant to the complaints at hand.



[...] I have seen plenty of cringey moments in other talks and at LibrePlanet.


In the 2015 LibrePlanet where the FSF apparently invited Robinson Tryon to speak 
about "Document 

Meaning of "damning the [Electronic Frontier Foundation] organization in absolute terms"?

[J.B. Nicholson]

Thomas Lord wrote:

Having been personally close enough to see how some of the EFF founders 
thought, I
will remain comfortable damning the organization in absolute terms.  Nothing in
their history of advocacy has changed my mind.  Obviously other people without
that direct experience might not have the same sense that blanket condemnation 
of
EFF is well earned, and that's fine.


I don't understand what you're referring to. What, specifically, are you 
referring to?

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Re: “Get rid of digests”

[J.B. Nicholson]

Lori Nagel via libreplanet-discuss wrote:
I used to read digests cause I got too many emails and was on tons and 
tons of email lists about various topics of interest.
You could have chosen to use the filtering capability found in any modern 
email client to sort emails into folders. That approach would automatically 
keep threads organized, let you quickly identify what's active, where to 
focus your attention, and let you do things like mark threads as read when 
that thread became uninteresting (or simply ignore the thread). Then mark 
everything in the folder read to 'catch up' on all of those messages. 
Server-side filtering would let you do this organization into folders as 
well; server-side filtering is particularly handy if you read your email 
account from multiple MUAs. With this approach the number of emails becomes 
a non-issue; you stop reading when you want to knowing the rest of what you 
didn't read is still there in a well-organized and easily accessible 
fashion. The point being that I've not seen such support in MUAs or 
server-side filtering for digests and you can make choices that won't cause 
you to think that it's a burden to handle "tons and tons" of emails.



Now, for a lot of that stuff I just read message forums and don't bother
with email.
Which means you're allowing each forum owner to change what people write at 
any time (even well after their post was made), block messages from being 
seen by you, and generally give forum owners a much greater amount of time 
to exert censorious control over what you're allowed to read and when. I 
don't prefer that tradeoff.


There is just no way I could keep up with the amount of conversation 
that goes on in those communities, and that is why they have forums 
rather than lists.
I can think of reasons some prefer web forums over mailing lists, none of 
which have anything to do with the amount of conversation: some people 
don't really want the administration of hosting any service so they 
outsource that job to a web forum by hosting their discussion to Reddit, 
Facebook, or some other system they don't administer. One thread (perhaps 
it was on this mailing list) encouraged the FSF to adopt a Discuss-driven 
web forum on the basis that it was more liked by (the inchoately described) 
young people. No evidence was given to back up that claim but the claim had 
nothing to do with the amount of conversation.



Lists are really only good for a small group of people that are
frequently writing to each other.
My experiences with mailing lists involving hundreds of people tells me 
otherwise.


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Re: “Get rid of digests”

[J.B. Nicholson]

Dmitry Alexandrov wrote:

Is there something wrong with them per se?  Except, that most of the
people have no clue how to use them properly, I mean.


I find that most MUAs don't handle digests well and this creates needless 
thread breaking. I don't blame the software mishandling on the user. 
Digests also lead to followup posts with excessive quoted material from 
people who don't edit out the superfluous text. That I do blame on the 
user, as they could take time to edit that out, but I also blame on digests 
because the digesting (by its nature) gives users so much more text to work 
with.


I don't believe digests have been in high demand for the past decade or so 
(based on what I have seen of the mailing lists I've administered). These 
days people seem to have no problem getting email accounts with high 
quotas. Storage seems to only get cheaper per volume with time. So I don't 
find storage-related arguments to be convincing. Paying for bandwidth to 
the endpoint also strikes me as a poor argument; people don't seem to 
object to using webmail or mail client protocols which do a good job of 
letting people download the specific set of emails they want to read (IMAP, 
for example, and I think JMAP looks like it will continue in this way).


Taken as a whole, I'm convinced that whatever benefit came from mailing 
list digests has passed and thus support for digested mailing is not worth 
taking on the complexity of "proper" (as you say) implementation or use.


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I support removing the footer & keep the poster's email address in the From: header

[J.B. Nicholson]

Ian Kelling wrote:

Are there any more people who want the footer removed
here? Right now, the From address gets changed for senders to Someone
via libreplanet-discuss , removing
the footer would allow us to keep the original from address.


I'd like to see both the footer removed and keeping a poster's address in 
the From: header.


Any plans to also get rid of digests (either all subscribers converted to 
undigested subscriptions or new subscribers can't turn digests on)?


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Re: LibrePlanet logo as shown on the LP wiki could use an adjustment

[J.B. Nicholson]

Valessio Brito wrote:

Which browser are you viewing like this? Can you provide more details?


Mozilla Firefox 60.7.2esr (64-bit) on Debian 9.9 64-bit.

There's no need to send feedback to me if you're also going to send it to 
the mailing list. I'll pick it up on the list.


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LibrePlanet logo as shown on the LP wiki could use an adjustment

[J.B. Nicholson]

Valessio Brito wrote:

This email is intended to start a discussion and get people excited
about making improvements to the way we use MediaWiki for LibrePlanet.
I have a lot of ideas, and I can't do everything myself. I would like
to invite you to participate, or to forward this email to someone who
wants to start (or continue) collaborating with the free software
movement.


Here's something someone with the right fonts could probably easily 
correct: the LibrePlanet logo in the upper-left corner is not showing up 
fully. I see "IBREPLANE" instead of the proper name of the effort. I've 
attached a screenshot of this for reference.
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[libreplanet-discuss] Why stay or start an FSF membership? To keep funding software freedom.

[J.B. Nicholson]

Caleb Herbert wrote:

Stallman told me I can best help by becoming a member and being
diligent about making sure they continue to do what they did when
Stallman was still there.
I can believe that and (regardless of who said it) I agree with this 
advice; the perspective of what we should be doing -- working for software 
freedom -- is part of that advice. The irony of who it comes from is also 
not lost on me but the larger goal is the critical point.


Let's hope the FSF's next president has a commitment to software freedom 
which compares favorably to Stallman's commitment. According to 
https://listas.trisquel.info/pipermail/freedom-misc/2019-September/004745.html 
FSF Vice President Alexandre Oliva (of GNU Linux-libre fame) is Acting 
President.


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[libreplanet-discuss] What will we do without Richard Stallman? Push for more software freedom as per usual.

[J.B. Nicholson]

fudmier via libreplanet-discuss wrote:

Forcing human rights and democracy first Icon Stallman to resign..seems
to suggest a bigger plan with roots in a design that has as its object
to deny to the world the open source developer invented products and
instructional expertise.
It would be better not to conflate Stallman or his work with "open source". 
As he (and history) have made clear: he founded the free software movement 
(a social movement) over a decade before "open source" (a development 
methodology). He has mentioned in multiple interviews, articles, and 
virtually every speech I've ever heard him give (including almost all on 
https://audio-video.gnu.org/) that he does not stand for open source but 
for free software. I trust the readership of this mailing list doesn't need 
anyone to recite a long list of links to this end. For anyone new to free 
software: welcome and please do read the essays on 
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ because the issues discussed therein are 
still apropos to the FSF's central mission and what we mainly talk about on 
this mailing list.



Gee, what will we do without Richard Stallman?


You might not have intended it this way, but I hope that this question is 
taken with utmost seriousness. Fortunately for us he's not dead; RMS can 
continue to publish informative, insightful essays & talks on his own. However:


1. RMS is mortal and (like us all) will someday die,
2. the FSF has begun a search for a new president. (per 
https://www.fsf.org/news/richard-m-stallman-resigns),


Because of these things there is a chance someone will become the next FSF 
president who isn't the sharp defender of software freedom RMS has always been.


It would be a shame if the FSF made a compromise where they favored sating 
a desire for identity politics, say, and occasionally gave into proprietor 
pressure groups or ran proprietary software over someone who consistently 
demonstrated unyielding support for software freedom. I hope they'll pick 
someone who is deeply informed about free software, and who possesses a 
sharp, critical stance in defense of software freedom. The mission of the 
FSF doesn't change just because they get a new president.


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[libreplanet-discuss] Taking credit for your own choices and free software is neither anti-commercial nor anti-profit

[J.B. Nicholson]

Steven Sullam wrote:
WTF? I became interested in the libre group as a more human alternative to 
commercial profit driven technology. I am not interesed in reading 
discussions of Richard Stallman's personal life or the lack of ethics in 
his personal behavior here.


Then you should probably have chosen to not read more of this thread when 
you realized you didn't want to read more of it.


However since you're apparently reading this thread, you should know that 
humans engage in commercial profit-driven enterprises all the time, 
including developing free software. In fact, Richard Stallman "encourage[s] 
people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can":



Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you
should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you
should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This
is a misunderstanding.

Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge
as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make
copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising
to you, please read on.


You can read the rest of that essay at 
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html


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[libreplanet-discuss] No, Stallman isn't "nuts" nor does he deserve less freedom of speech

[J.B. Nicholson]

Adrienne G. Thompson wrote:
The record on Richard Stallman underscores that he is driven by ethical 
sensibilities. He's not about to approve of rape anytime soon. So let's 
just tell rms to shut up about the Epstein matter, not to attempt to

defend his idols (some of which I, *personally*, know are not worth
defending) and to get a female FSF colleague to censor all his comments
pertaining to women before these comments go public.


Or you could choose to not tell him or anyone else to "shut up" or accept a 
censorship regime. And you could also reject virtue signaling, sexism, and 
identity politics (regarding the "get a female FSF colleague"). After all, 
for all you know he could select a woman who doesn't agree with your take 
and you'll have nowhere to go because he met your sexist and identity 
politics-driven request.


You could understand that he too gets freedom of speech to say things you 
don't agree with (that's what freedom of speech is for, after all). You 
could choose to continue to use your freedom of speech as you've done while 
also respecting his. Counterspeech seems far more appropriate for this 
situation where Stallman hasn't done anything more wrong than possibly 
hold, share, and change views some others don't like.


His comments across some posts to his personal blog make me think I'm 
getting a poorly-explained half story from others on this topic. 
Considering what he wrote in 
https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September_2019_(Statements_about_Epstein)



I want to respond to the misleading media coverage of messages I posted
about Marvin Minsky's association with Jeffrey Epstein. The coverage
totally mischaracterised my statements.

Headlines say that I defended Epstein. Nothing could be further from the
truth. I've called him a "serial rapist", and said he deserved to be
imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him — and other
inaccurate claims — and feel a real hurt because of what they believe I
said.

I'm sorry for that hurt. I wish I could have prevented the
misunderstanding.

https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September_2019_(Sex_between_an_adult_and_a_child_is_wrong)


Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex
between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.

Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to
understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This
changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I
am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why.


https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#13_September_2019_(Epstein_donations)


Media Lab Director Joi Ito confessed that he had secretly accepted
donations from Epstein after MIT had decided not to do so.

He also accepted funds for some personal activities of his own.

That dishonesty, and conflict of interest, make his resignation
obligatory.

But I fear for the effect on the Media Lab. Under Negroponte, the lab
was notoriously stingy and proprietary. Ito corrected that. I fear that
the next director will undo some of Ito's changes.


https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#11_August_2019_(Jeffrey_Epstein_committed_suicide)


Jeffrey Epstein appears to have committed suicide in his cell. Or
perhaps he was murdered — it is not unusual for prisoners to murder
prisoners accused of sexual crimes.

Epstein was accused of trafficking: bringing people long distances on
false pretenses and then pressured them into sex or prostitution. He
also reportedly raped some of those people. I believe those accusations,
and I think he deserved to be imprisoned.

Some of his victims were legally adult. Some were teenage minors. I
don't think that makes any moral difference. I don't think rape is less
wrong if the victim is over 16.


as well as other posts on that same webpage, I see a consistent objection 
to rape regardless of the age of the victim, and I see public contrition 
for changing a view he held which he now views as wrong. Had we followed 
your censorious recommendations back then (to either "shut up" or to "get a 
female FSF colleague to censor all his comments pertaining to women before 
these comments go public") we might not have been able to read 
https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September_2019_(Sex_between_an_adult_and_a_child_is_wrong) 
today and we'd lack any principled claim on free speech.


Those who choose to conflate Stallman's views with those of the FSF or the 
GNU Project seem to me to be either making a mistake in that conflation or 
be opportunistic (possibly virtue signaling).


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] The most appreciable URL Shortener?...

[J.B. Nicholson]

Thadeu Lima de Souza Cascardo wrote:
The only good excuse I ever had for a URL shortener is a choice of 
technology combination or misuse, like one is browsing on a desktop and 
want to send a message using a mobile containing something they just 
browsed.


I quite agree with the objection to URL shorteners including pointing out 
how technically unnecessary they are.


There's one other instance where it might make no difference to use one, 
however: if the resource being pointed to also hosts the short URL. For 
example, RT.com news stories each have a short URL. It makes no sense to me 
why they have the long URL in the first place, but that's how that site 
works. I believe Atlassian wiki instances also give each article a long 
title-based URL (which users see by default) and a short permalink.


In both of these cases there's no spying risk beyond visiting the site (and 
link tracking is another reason people use URL shorteners; it's an 
unjustifiable reason).


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] resources about mailing lists vs. forums (e.g. Discourse)

[J.B. Nicholson]

U'll Be King Of The Stars wrote:

Usenet was one of my favorite things about the internet.  I would love
for it to be revived.


Usenet is still around and working quite well. Usenet might not be as 
popular as it once was but it's not dead. In fact, I'd say that the 
principled response to hosting discussion forums which respect freedom of 
speech is to encourage people to use Usenet more (or set up any 
widely-distributed newsgroup network and use that too).


This cause should be taken up along side a principled reaction to RSS feeds 
-- a decentralized means of promoting one's own material that doesn't rely 
on adding another possibility for censorship.


Corporate media tells us that RSS is dying[1] but that frame of debate puts 
aside any discussion of whose interests are served by moving away from 
decentralized standards we are all free to use and toward proprietary 
software (sometimes referred to as "walled gardens") such as Apple's 
iTunes. There's quite a pressure to move users away from decentralized free 
standards toward single points of failure and censorship. I'm sure that 
there are some people who stand to benefit from pushing this view with 
email, despite no clear improvement made in doing so. It seems to me that a 
free software discussion on this is needed and should not accept handing 
users over to software proprietors.




[1] 
https://techcrunch.com/2013/03/13/google-readers-death-is-proof-that-rss-always-suffered-from-lack-of-consumer-appeal/ 
for example -- this author wants us to see Google Reader going away in 
terms of giving Google's business desires undeserved primacy, not 
recognizing the lack of software freedom from Google in this, and giving no 
perspective on Google's penchant for continuing services that help it spy 
on users. It's unsurprising that the author tacitly suggests switching to 
other spying mechanisms including Facebook.




At the time I wanted to run my own INN node eventually.  By the time it 
became possible for me to set up anything resembling a 
server-on-the-Internet, Usenet was pretty much over.
I suggest that you help the people at FreedomBox find a way to host an NNTP 
server on FreedomBox. It would be great to have a news network which 
included a lot of FreedomBoxes sharing copies of posts using an encrypted 
NNTP connection. I can't say if INN is the right program to do this job, 
but that's a technical detail. Some free software NNTP server should be 
able to let FreedomBox users easily host some newsgroups with reasonable 
default settings aimed at letting novices easily get started with peers.


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] resources about mailing lists vs. forums (e.g. Discourse)

[J.B. Nicholson]

Michael Downey wrote:

Again, Mozilla is self hosting their Discourse installation.

No idea why you think otherwise.


Apparently I was mistaken, I had understood that the Discourse software was 
making reference to items under the control of discourse.org keeping 
discourse.org in some control over what was delivered to users trying to 
read that information.


You mentioned receiving copies of posts made to a Discourse forum via 
email. Can users post via email as well, and fully participate in the forum 
via email?


Whether they can or not still strikes me as reaching the same conclusion I 
originally reached in my earlier post because nothing structurally has 
changed despite my error, but it would be interesting to know.


Also, I've asked for replies to be sent to the list via the reply-to 
header. I don't need a copy and I can pick up replies on the list, thanks.


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] resources about mailing lists vs. forums (e.g. Discourse)

[J.B. Nicholson]

Michael Downey wrote:

Blaming the Discourse software project ("discourse.org") for the
capacity Mozilla did or didn't build out for their forum would be like
blaming Automattic (builders of WordPress) for my project's site outage
during LibrePlanet that year. It's neither accurate nor fair.


Are you saying that Mozilla decides how the server resources at 
discourse.org are set up?


From what I could tell by looking at some pages on discourse.org (such as 
https://www.discourse.org/copyright) Mozilla is not mentioned as a project 
manager. I'm well aware that Discourse is software and discourse.org is an 
instance of said software. But as far as I could tell Mozilla chose to have 
their forum hosted by discourse.org. Hence Mozilla did not decide to have 
too few server resources set up, the people who run discourse.org did.



BTW, like mailing lists, Discourse users can subscribe in mailing list
mode and receive an email for every post on the system, creating their
own offline cache of information. I've got an individual email in my
Inbox, auto-moved to a special folder, for each reply to the topic in
the forum you link to above.


But there's no need to settle for either because both mailing lists and 
online web forums are all single points of censorship and technical 
failure. Newsgroups hosted across many cooperating NNTP servers is a 
well-known, tested, and more resilient structure both to avoid censorship 
and weak infrastructural choices. It could be that power over other 
people's posts is seen as an attractive point rather than something to 
avoid (consider that Mozilla appears to be pro-censorship in their 
community posting guidelines).


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] resources about mailing lists vs. forums (e.g. Discourse)

[J.B. Nicholson]

John Sullivan wrote:

I'm not aware of any, but I think that's a good idea, since I've seen
the same conversation many times too. The libreplanet.org wiki could be
a good place for it?


I see that https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Mailing_Lists_vs._Discourse_Forum 
now points only to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum .


I wanted to bring up one Discourse.org-specific problem I've not seen with 
mailing lists: Discourse.org doesn't seem to design their server layout to 
properly scale up.


Background: Currently there's a problem with Firefox where apparently a 
certificate used with Firefox add-ons has recently expired and now Firefox 
users are seeing their add-ons become disabled.


Current situation: Mozilla has a discourse.org forum to discuss this 
(https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/certificate-issue-causing-add-ons-to-be-disabled-or-fail-to-install/39047) 
and it isn't scaling up well -- the site is returning an error "429 Too 
Many Requests" instead of the discussion.


Until discourse.org increases their capacity nobody gets to read the 
discussion. Whatever sage advice was posted there is flatly unavailable to 
others. A comparable failure could happen with an email server too (perhaps 
too many posts fills up a server's temp storage and the server fails, or 
the list processor has a lot of messages to handle so list responses are 
sluggish) but I'd hardly call discourse.org's current implementation an 
improvement.


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[libreplanet-discuss] Claims about Purism need backing: sources, quotes, further explanation

[J.B. Nicholson]

taii...@gmx.com wrote:

You're right, sometimes I get intensely bothered by them and their
dishonesty, apparent leverage over the FSF, insults of legitimate
companies etc.


I think we all deserve sources and quotes to back up your assertions. 
Exactly what leverage does Purism have over the FSF? Where can we find 
these insults of legitimate companies (presumably made by Purism), and what 
exact text do you find to be insulting?



They sell "libre" laptops that have the hardware init entirely performed
via the Intel FSP binary blob, their website is dishonest and not up
front and even the name "Libre-M" is dishonest. They claim the ME is
disabled although the kernel and hw init code still runs.


I think your point here could use some expansion: is it possible for a 
program running on the OS to get data to and from the ME? If so, how is 
this different from having an ME work like it does on most modern 
Intel-based computers?



They also imply they did more than just run ME cleaner which someone did
the work on.


What's the URL for this and precisely where on that page would we find this 
implication? Please do quote the exact text.



[1](I don't want to up their search ranking)


This pseudo-footnote is not good enough. Your desire to not increase their 
search ranking doesn't free you from an obligation to back up your point.


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] UPS tracking

[J.B. Nicholson]

Cal wrote:

How does one track a UPS package without running proprietary software
on one's own computer?


Have you tried a URL like:

http://wwwapps.ups.com/tracking/tracking.cgi?inquiry1=TRACKINGNUMBER=1

where you replace the phrase TRACKINGNUMBER with your tracking number?

If you get the tracking number wrong you can type/paste in the tracking 
number in the form and press return. I don't know if the page you're 
directed to requires Javascript.


I would have tested this myself before asking the above question but I 
don't have a valid UPS tracking number to test.


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] During LibrePlanet 2019 conference how do you make online information about what's happening at LibrePlanet 2019 even easier to share?...

[J.B. Nicholson]

bill-auger wrote:

https://media.libreplanet.org/


These appear to be the edited clips, not the unedited segments one would 
have saved by using wget on the livestream URLs. So if anyone has the URL 
for an LP livestream archive that would help show what one would have seen 
on the day of the talk.


From what I recall of previous years sometimes the edited archives don't 
include all the talks one would have heard or seen on the livestream.


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] During LibrePlanet 2019 conference how do you make online information about what's happening at LibrePlanet 2019 even easier to share?...

[J.B. Nicholson]

Don Saklad wrote:

During LibrePlanet 2019 conference how do you make online information
about what's happening at LibrePlanet 2019 even easier to share with
uninitiated Officials of Local Governments and novice interns,
students?... including LibrePlanet video/audio.


Sometime after the conference LP usually publishes recordings of some of 
the talks and the corresponding slides. But you could be better off 
recording the livestream (say, with wget) and sharing a copy of the 
relevant segment with someone.


Perhaps someone reading would please post URLs where LP livestream archives 
are available online (I imagine someone has publicly-available dumps of 
livestream data from wget, for instance)?


How might even more be made available?... than what's already at 
https://libreplanet.org/2019

What more are you looking for?

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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Free software is not trusted software

[J.B. Nicholson]

Lyberta wrote:

Today the Internet is filled with malware that is free software:

https://lyberta.net/articles/tech/free_sw_untrusted.html


The article doesn't make it clear to me what is malware in any of the 
listed software. It seems to me that the saving grace of free software is 
that one can remove the malware, run and distribute the rest of the code, 
and retain full control over their computer. This takes effort but at least 
we're allowed to do it.


The article points out that auditing matters and I concur -- there's no 
substitute for auditing by someone one trusts. There's too much free 
software for anyone to do this alone but collectively we can get more of 
this done.


This is also why open source is not the enemy. Proprietary software is the 
enemy. In fact the FSF has long published this in their older article on 
how free software differs from open source:


From https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html

We don't think of the Open Source movement as an enemy. The enemy is
proprietary software.


Proprietary software denies one the freedom to do the vetting that needs to 
be done. Open source may make some indefensible claims about how effective 
the open source development methodology is at reducing bugs and improving 
software, but that's nowhere near distributing malware.


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Recommendations for video chat on mobile phone

[J.B. Nicholson]

Aaron Wolf wrote:

The argument by individuals that they will benefit by following the
crowd is not circular.


They're not following crowds, they're joining a service to distribute their 
work. They're no more likely to be found than if they used a service that 
respects their users wishes for increased privacy and control over their 
own computers. People don't pay attention to them because they're on a 
service, people pay attention because they have something others want to 
read, hear, or see; something they could offer on any or multiple services. 
They argue in terms of losing a popularity they don't have but 
simultaneously seek to gain by joining a service which doesn't actually 
give them the popularity they desire (which most of the time doesn't 
happen). The loop continues for as long as they remain on the service 
despite clear evidence of their continued unpopularity.


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Recommendations for video chat on mobile phone

[J.B. Nicholson]

Caleb Herbert wrote:

Man, XMPP worked great for video and text chat in 2012.  Why did it
just get dumped suddenly? :(


There's been considerable pressure to drop standards for things we're all 
free to implement and reuse. RSS too is (in the untrustworthy corporate 
tech media) said to be less popular now but undergoing a rediscovery.


I imagine this happens in favor of some futile attempt to make private 
areas of influence and control. Some people readily give into those 
pressures citing a circular popularity argument if they don't give in 
(they'll lose "relevance" or somehow become less popular if they don't 
concede to a publisher/redistributor's power). Principled arguments need 
not apply.


But large audio program distributors don't make it easy to publish RSS 
feeds (some don't publish RSS feeds at all). Such is what happens with a 
largely undereducated populace making decisions based on convenience, price 
(weighed exclusively monetarily), and the perception of popularity 
evaluated in their media bubbles.


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[libreplanet-discuss] Archive files of streams and/or slides?

[J.B. Nicholson]

In the past someone used to wget the streams and/or slides from LibrePlanet 
and distribute them.


Is anyone doing this for the current LibrePlanet (2018)?

Thanks.

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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] What's the best URL shortener?

[J.B. Nicholson]

David Paul wrote:

Better question: Should you use a URL shortener at all?

Answer: No. URL shorteners obufuscate the destination of
a link and if the shortening service ever shuts down, all
the shortened URL become dead links to who knows what.


I agree; the only acceptable exception I can think of is if the short URL 
is a permalink (and the longer URL is not) and the shortening service is 
the same as the service being linked to. But this is not common.


For example, there are wikis which have two URLs for each page--one URL 
based on the page title (which changes with the page title thus rendering 
this URL impermanent) and a short URL which points to the same page 
regardless of changes to the page (a permanent link to this page). The wiki 
generates and maintains the table of short URLs; no third-party service is 
involved. Therefore if one of these short URLs becomes useless the page it 
pointed to was deleted, or the wiki is not available at that URL. Either 
way, what visitors tried to get to is unavailable to all.


I don't find tracking visits to be a valid reason for using a short URL. 
I'm more likely to try and defeat such tracking by posting the ultimate 
destination URL in an attempt to get people to skip the redirectors and 
deny them the tracking traffic.


So use the long URL, let the word wrap fail, and live with a line of text 
that doesn't wrap neatly. It's not a big deal. In hypertext it's simply not 
a problem at all and CSS can probably style long URLs to only show a 
portion of the URL in cases where one can only post a URL to make a link.


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Is disroot ok?

[J.B. Nicholson]

Adonay Felipe Nogueira wrote:

Haven't you inverted the words POP3 and IMAP?

I mean, I find it way secure and better to use POP3 because I have all
my email in my own computer, and can yet optionally leave part of the
newest ones in the server.


You never had such security. By the time you can use any means of reading 
the email your mail server has already seen those emails. This is true 
regardless of the protocol involved. Furthermore you can't undo the fact 
that your server got to read that email before your client got to read it.


If you want to keep your emails from an untrusted email server, stop using 
that server. Pick a server you can trust and use GPG plus an anonymous 
remailer. As far as I know that's about the best you can do with email if 
you want to use their resources to convey messages to you but you don't 
trust their system.


So when it comes to POP3 vs. IMAP, it's really a question of whether you 
want to be limited to one connection (POP3) or be able to use multiple 
concurrent connections (IMAP). This is a show-stopper limitation of POP3. 
With IMAP you could easily leave an email client running at home while you 
take a portable device around with you and keep up with your email 
remotely. Any changes to the account get synchronized across the clients as 
the changes occur.


I'm not sure if POP3 will do new email notification during a POP3 session, 
but I know that IMAP will.


There are good reasons why some service providers don't offer POP3.


With IMAP, on the other hand, it can turn out to be very expensive also
for the service provider.


I would need to see your evidence to back up that assertion before I could 
comment on that, however...



I read OpenMailBox's social network profile posts and it seems that IMAP
consumed more resources than POP3.
...this doesn't immediately strike me as your problem so it doesn't seem to 
me that this will lead to a valid objection.


If you choose to host something valuable on someone else's computer, it's 
up to them to manage that resource or stop offering protocols they can't 
adequately manage. I don't know what specific problems OpenMailbox is 
talking about but Dreamhost has lots of accounts across many email servers 
all accessible via IMAP and they work quite well.


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Is disroot ok?

[J.B. Nicholson]

G. Sebastián Pedersen wrote:

Since the radical change in openmailbox.org I've been searching for
new alternatives on email+cloud.

I came up with https://disroot.org

So I was wondering if you guys could give me some advice or opinion.


I'm not sure what you mean by "cloud" (that's part of the problem with that 
term); as far as I know "cloud" computing refers to doing one's computing 
on someone else's computer (obviously inherently unrecommendable) so I'll 
limit my comments to talking about email.


disroot.org doesn't look to be remarkably different from any other email 
hosting provider so long as you avoid using POP3 and keep the total size of 
your mailbox under 2GB (what https://disroot.org/services/email says is the 
size limit).


Use encrypted IMAP for reading mail, encrypt and sign outbound mail with 
GPG, and use an encrypted connection to their SMTP server for sending mail, 
and you'll do about as well as anyone can expect to do with email. Webmail 
interface probably requires Javascript which makes it easy for the server 
side to get you to run nonfree software or run malware.


I don't know how disroot.org's prices compare to other hosters (I didn't 
look that far into their website) but you should consider getting your own 
domain name so that your email address(es) don't change, even if you switch 
hosters. I didn't notice disroot.org offering domain names so if you go 
with disroot.org and you want your own domain name you may have to get the 
domain name somewhere else.


Dreamhost.com might have a better deal for you for email hosting because (I 
think) Dreamhost offers a higher email quota and optional "+" offsets (for 
instance: username+string@yourdomain where you use your username, 
optionally add a "+string" to the end of it to help you identify how people 
got your address or for filtering inbound email), and optional server-side 
filtering (more simplistic than it used to be years ago but still useful 
enough to do what most novices want to do most of the time like moving 
inbound email to a folder). Dreamhost.com also sells domain names and 
offers a JS-based webmail.


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] helping newcomers start blogs - but where?

[J.B. Nicholson]

John Rooke wrote:

Anyone who visited the Daily Stormer prior to its takedown knows that
there is plenty of evidence to vindicate Cloudflare's decision.


None of which you name, point to, nor do you address the issue of this 
being extrajudicial which is the chief problem here. This merely confirms 
the danger in hosting with someone else no matter how righteous their 
statements appear to be or how much they turn on those statements when 
emotions run high.



As for Chomsky, he may not have "kicked anyone off the internet", but he
has to my certain knowledge, used his power to silence critics.


The problem here is one of attacking character as a means of distracting 
from the underlying point (an issue I should have made more clear in my 
initial response): even if Chomsky had "kicked someone off the Internet" as 
CloudFlare's CEO says he did, that wouldn't render what Chomsky says about 
freedom of speech to be wrong. It's arguing by proxy to point out that 
Chomsky doesn't follow his own line, essentially saying that Chomsky may be 
hypocritical and hoping that the hypocrisy will magically transfer into 
undermining the support for freedom of speech even in the light of 
objectionable messages.


People try this approach with software freedom too -- when they can't make 
a good counterargument for software freedom they argue against a noteworthy 
free software activist, such as Richard Stallman, by pointing to a 
recording where he says something untoward, or one can see him doing 
something one typically doesn't see public presenters do. This doesn't read 
on the underlying argument being made, it's a distraction and attempt to 
graft whatever unpleasantness one finds in the speaker's behavior to the 
idea, thus obviating the need for any discussion of the idea on its own merits.


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] UTF-8 banned from being default in Chrome, Firefox

[J.B. Nicholson]

Nominal Animal wrote:

We've lost another freedom, choosing the default character set encoding
in Firefox and Chrome/Chromium browsers.


That sounds like upstream developers are making something you want more 
inconvenient. We should distinguish between what's going on with Firefox (a 
free software browser) and Chrome (a nonfree browser).


Users aren't losing freedoms either way: Firefox remains editable (as you 
say in your post) and Chrome users never had software freedom with Chrome 
(so they can't lose what they never had).


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] helping newcomers start blogs - but where?

[J.B. Nicholson]

John Rooke wrote:

The example of Daily Stormer is not a good one.  The site was being used
to organise alleged criminal activity up to and including murder.


I think the point stands: intermediaries and proprietors can "wake up in a 
bad mood" and decide to "kick [someone or some group] off the Internet". 
Also, if there's anything to learn from the recent Russophobic attacks by 
the US government and commercial media, allegations aren't good enough to 
support a claim.


The point I'm making in the context of /this/ thread remains the same: one 
shouldn't ignore the power of an intermediary or proprietor when one seeks 
to publish with the intention of being read. Picking any third party to 
handle one's blog is always a risky tradeoff. Today DreamHost.com fights 
the US government in their pursuit of access logs (per 
https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/we-fight-for-the-users/ ), tomorrow 
DreamHost.com could hand over such data to another party without telling 
anyone they did so, or shut down a blog they host that has become (even 
only temporarily) politically uncomfortable. Non-technical users are not 
socially encouraged to think through the ramifications of hosting with 
someone else's computers. I maintain that a right-minded effort to get 
non-technical users their own Internet-based publishing setup should help 
make them aware that no matter how friendly their current hoster appears to 
be, that hoster has the power to cut them off, hand over access logs, and 
domains. If this power is leveraged against some (particularly those whose 
political messages are disagreeable) the same can be done to the rest of us.



It was hardly a case of 'waking up in a bad mood', subsequent to the
death of Heather Heyer.
Then your complaint is properly lodged with CloudFlare's CEO who made the 
glib "wake up in a bad mood" comment and acted apparently extrajudicially 
to "kick them off the Internet" as he put it.



Incidentally, Chomsky is rather less of a libertarian when it comes to
criticisms of his own work.
I'm unaware of Chomsky "kicking someone off the Internet" in reaction to a 
disapproving review.


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] helping newcomers start blogs - but where?

[J.B. Nicholson]

Daniel Pocock wrote:
blogger.com and wordpress are well known platforms for people to create 
free blogs.  Github pages have also become popular with developers

recently.

What are the recommended alternatives for people who want to adhere to
a more free / libre approach?


If you're hosting something on someone else's computer, I recommend picking 
hosting based in either something that carries no nonfree software 
requirement (I think there are multiple template-based blog programs that 
let you process a plaintext file and turn it into a blog post) or something 
that runs with free software client-side software (I'd look into WordPress 
to see if the software they send to the client is free because there are 
multiple places that host blogs with WordPress).


But there's not going to be a great solution to this until people can get 
their own domains, point them at their own box running in their home (ala 
FreedomBox), and host their blogs under their control.


Any third-party hosting can run aground of censorship -- find yourself 
saying something other people don't want to read? Recent events at 
Cloudflare[1] show us that claims to not "monitor, evaluate or judge" 
quickly become "I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick 
them [Daily Stormer] off the Internet.". Quite a ways from Noam Chomsky's 
wisdom and challenge[2] to those who think stopping publication of disliked 
messages is the right way to go.


I recommend buying one's own domain (for easily redirecting users to a new 
blog hoster without making users change their bookmarks) and hosting with 
someplace that hasn't yet censored someone's blog. The problem is I'm not 
quite sure which organizations to recommend on this right now.



[1] 
https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-kicking-daily-stormer-is-bad-news-for-pirate-sites-170817/


[2] "Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was 
Stalin. If you're really in favor of free speech, then you're in favor of 
freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you're 
not in favor of free speech."


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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Libreplanet using Discourse for mailing lists and web-based forums?

[J.B. Nicholson]

Please respect the format of replies being used on this list. Your quoting 
style (including top-posting) is not in keeping with how email or mailing 
list replies elsewhere on this list are done.


Connor Doherty wrote:

No doubt it's hard to manually inspect, again. And that may be the
reality, for now, for today's internet sites that do anything more than
display static info. That said, in this case we don't have those
problems - Discourse is a piece of software you can go and inspect right
now, and it'll be the same code running on any other instance you find
(including the JS) unless they tweaked it a bit (but the FSF's instance
would publish that too).


There are two problems with that bold claim: software freedom means you 
can't predict what any instance of Discourse uploads to the client, and 
users can't be sure the sites they get software from aren't uploading 
malware to them.



While there are certainly many bulky, poorly-optimized sites out there
that slow down old hardware, this is not the case with Discourse. It's
snappy, and the JavaScript features are what really make it a joy to
use.


Some of the Discourse features strike me as undesirable: an editor that 
looks up websites as one puts in the URL, the "Narrative Welcome Bot" 
chatbot, user themes, badges, and more (see 
https://blog.discourse.org/2017/05/discourse-1-8-released/ ). I wouldn't 
choose to have any of that stuff. This also makes me think that Discourse 
hackers don't share my values in judiciously using JS.


I wrote:

"I see "Powered by Discourse, best viewed with JavaScript enabled" on
https://community.cartalk.com/login even though there's nothing about
logging into anything that genuinely requires JS to do that job."


Connor Doherty replied:

Thanks for pointing that out, I didn't realize Discourse works with JS
disabled. Cool! (Not that it matters if you're only interacting via
email)


You've misread what I wrote. I didn't say Discourse worked without JS. The 
community.cartalk.com Discourse instance did not offer to let me login 
because I'm not running the site's JS. This is another example of the 
needless use of JS I referred to earlier.



Actually, the Trisquel forum, where I also spend a bit of time, is
exactly the kind of forum I had in mind when describing the traditional,
clunky forum software that's been around for over a decade.


What you disparage as "clunky" sounds like time-honored and working to me. 
Perhaps it's not doing everything the web side can (even for features a 
mailing list could implement) but I appreciate the effort. Their 
implementation preserves threads too.



I'm not really looking for a "works well enough" solution so much as a
completely improved experience all around, which hopefully Trisquel can
adopt as well.


As Mike Gerwitz said earlier in this thread, "Many of us don't want to see 
it reimagined.  That's the opposite of what many want.". I concur with him. 
I'll need good reasons to justify such 'reimagining' and so far I'm seeing 
unbacked claims of forgoing supporters and risky software execution toward 
ends I don't want or need.



And yes, this isn't either/or, my point was exactly that we keep both
sides of it.


If Discourse is to be the choice (which, as far as I can tell from reading 
this thread, is not a foregone conclusion) I believe Discourse will require 
some work to become a viable replacement for the current mailing list 
hosting. I see multiple problems that I believe ought to be addressed 
before further consideration. Here's some of the problems I've identified:


The Discourse instance at https://community.cartalk.com/ (which I'm 
guessing is typical since it's being pointed to on Discourse's main website 
as a reason to adopt Discourse) has the same multiple source JS problem I 
referred to earlier in this thread -- pages on this site try to load over 
half a dozen JS files hosted on another site 
(cdn-enterprise.discourse.org). This increases the user's risk because if 
either site serves up malware in these files the user's browser will 
blindly download it and run it. This should strike proponents as a problem 
too: if any of the hosts is inaccessible the JS-based functionality that 
script provides isn't there.


Posts on web forums sometimes include pointers to other materials to be 
rendered inline (images, sounds, movies, 3D objects, executables, etc.). 
The user's browser will blindly download these files and do something with 
them (execute the code, run the Flash object, etc.). This is a 
vulnerability unique to using a web browser to read posts or using a 
poorly-written email program that mishandles untrusted input. And the 
material can be hosted anywhere (another instance of the above). Forum 
posts should not include inline references to any kind of data. I'd expect 
Discourse to help with this by restricting what posts are allowed to 
contain inline.


The aforementioned Discourse code pointed to by the cartalk.org site is 

[libreplanet-discuss] Libreplanet using Discourse for mailing lists and web-based forums?

[J.B. Nicholson]

Connor Doherty wrote:

*   Mailman, the software usually used for mailing lists, shows its age,
with an unnecessarily clunky, under-designed web interface.


Two big good things about Mailman 2's web interface: it's optional (one can 
do mailing list management via email) and it doesn't require Javascript 
(it's entirely form driven). I don't know about Mailman 3's interface.


Not using Javascript (JS) is a good thing to me because it means I don't 
have to review code to make sure the webpage isn't trying to do something 
beyond letting me supply an email address to manage my own list details. 
Free software JS doesn't address this concern at all (thus this concern is 
out of scope for LibreJS): This concern has nothing to do with whether I 
can run, copy, modify, or share the JS. I come across too many pages where 
JS is added on because some web developer thinks it's a good idea to 
implement a feature in that way, and along the way (most of the time) the 
web developer has clients loading in JS from various other places and the 
client's security now depends on JS from multiple sources. All of this (and 
the commensurate slowdown due to executing JS) so I can have features I 
probably don't want in the first place (and don't have to deal with at all 
in a mailing list).


I see "Powered by Discourse, best viewed with JavaScript enabled" on 
https://community.cartalk.com/login even though there's nothing about 
logging into anything that genuinely requires JS to do that job.


But as you say with Discourse, I don't see this as an either-or situation: 
the Trisquel GNU/Linux forum is an example of a Mailman-managed mailing 
list and a web forum where posts to either are copied between the two. I 
never use the web forum, and I'm sure there are people who never use the 
mailing list but we discuss things all the same. Whatever software they're 
using seems to work out well enough (perhaps better for the mailing list 
users as I understand the web forum admins can "lock out" a thread but this 
doesn't seem to carry over to the mailing list, thus I can post to any 
thread or start a new thread at any time).



*   More importantly, the mailing list concept has proven bad for
scaling. With tiny projects, the notion of "automatically subscribe me
to every new post to every new thread" for a topic or a slew of topics
might make sense or at least be harmless. But when a community booms,
many find it unrealistic to manage all of the emails in the mailing
list.


I don't see this as a problem. I see this as a feature: I have no problem 
filing the list emails into a folder and reading them when I have time. I 
subscribe to multiple lists and I do this quite successfully across them 
all using an interface I know, scales well to service many people, and 
doesn't require that I learn a new interface to do what I come to a list to 
do -- read and participate in discussions. These days it's easy to get an 
email account with lots of space.



*   The best mailman can do is roll up messages into a "digest". This
makes it harder to reply quickly, and while it might solve growing pains
at the couple-of posts a day scale, it's still useless above that or for
people who don't want another daily email.


I've never found mailing list digests to be handy or wise because they 
break threads and people don't take the time to edit their posts to only 
what's relevant for that post. Posters typically leave a lot of other 
digested posts in their followup. But this doesn't seem like an issue 
on-topic here. Perhaps it's worth turning off digesting for a list in 
Mailman 3.



My suggestion in this regard is a piece of libre software called
Discourse. I apologize if this has already
been suggested elsewhere.


I looked at the instance on https://community.cartalk.com/ and saw some 
top-level threads there. All the discussions seem to take place in one 
thread per discussion. I couldn't easily figure out who was replying to 
whom in any discussion. I hope this is configurable so proper discussion 
threading can be done.



What's relevant here, especially for those afraid of change, is that
while Discourse may be a "fancy web forum", it can [now] be completely
interacted with via email, putting it near feature parity with mailing
list software.


Where can one find an example of this mailing list interface?

I'd like to see where I can find archives of a Discourse-managed mailing 
list and download those archives in mbox format (with no JS required) so I 
can add those archived posts to my email clients and browse the threads.


I'm not going to address the issues you raised with the wiki here because 
those seem to me to be an entirely separate issue from setting up software 
that copies posts between a web forum and a corresponding mailing list.


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[libreplanet-discuss] LibrePlanet talk feed admins: Need help testing streams hosted on http://live2.fsf.org/?

[J.B. Nicholson]

I'd be willing to try and download some test camera and audio footage if 
you need someone to help test with before the talks begin (and report back 
to you, of course). I'd bet there are others on this mailing list who would 
be willing to try it out and report back as well.


If this sounds handy, please post a test feed for us to try on 
http://live2.fsf.org/ and we can report back.


Looking forward to livestreaming the talks this weekend, thanks for hosting 
the free software conference again!


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[libreplanet-discuss] LP2017 video, live and/or archived?

[J.B. Nicholson]

Are there live video feeds planned for LP2017?

How about archived videos?

Thanks.

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] talos

[J.B. Nicholson]

Arthur Torrey wrote:

I can buy (or even trash pick) several 'trailing edge' Wintel laptop or
desktop systems, and get them to at least moderately free states for
less than what an EOMA68 costs, let alone the amount needed to get a
functional Talos box


I'd look at EOMA68 (and any other forward-thinking fully-free project, 
including Talos) differently: at some point there will be no more older 
Intel-based computers one could buy and refurbish to turn into usable free 
software computers. What will we recommend to others (even those with very 
modest computing needs met by today's older systems) then?



Basically while the Talos idea is great, I'm forced by personal
economics to say not until it is price competitive with non-free
hardware, and I suspect the same applies to a lot of us...


That day may never come so we will have to value our freedom by paying more 
money for that freedom up front. I too could not afford a Talos, but I did 
buy a refurbished Intel-based Thinkpad and I'd buy another Intel-compatible 
free system if I saw a need.


I don't know how feasible it is to have a smaller Talos-like system -- a 
Librem with Talos hardware inside. I'm no authority on this, so I'm not 
sure if I can clearly convey how to make a Talos-like computer 
(POWER-based, fully-free, but with CPUs that have fewer cores, and no 
slots) which would cost less and attract more general-purpose non-technical 
computer users. The Talos was great for server needs and those who need 
PCIe cards, lots of RAM, many CPU cores, and a development team that 
clearly conveys the need for high-end fully-free systems. Unfortunately my 
budget doesn't allow me to be in that userbase.

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] talos

[J.B. Nicholson]

Fabián Rodríguez wrote:

* Give $10 or $250 - no options in-between


The price gap that mattered more to me was the machine price gap -- $3700 
for a mainboard ("CPU, RAM, power supply, storage drives, and chassis sold 
separately") and $7100 for a working computer without monitor. That's both 
significantly more money than I can afford and there is no small machine -- 
I don't know what could have been reduced to save on costs (I also don't 
know what the options were to achieve that), but I know I don't need a 
server-grade computer even if it is ATX-compatible (and would therefore fit 
in many readily-available cases). I'd like to play high-res videos (2K or 
4K, at most), run an emulator (such as MAME), run many programs at once 
without fear of overheating the CPU and causing it to stop due to thermal 
shutdown, and occasionally encode audio/video for my own projects.


I'd never need so many cores (up to 96 logical cores), more than one 
gigabit ethernet connector, so many slots (I'd have a hard time justifying 
a need for more than one for video and only if the onboard video wasn't 
good enough to do the above). But this was a far more capable computer than 
I'd ever need and quite a risk considering the architecture was not so 
popular (there are free or free-able distros that don't provide precompiled 
binaries for this architecture). Maybe a laptop version of this system 
would be a better fit for my needs (a Librem laptop with this hardware 
inside would be fine and I wouldn't care about ATX-compatibility and with 
this Librem could actually make good on their promise for free firmware).



* No T-shirts, no stickers


This didn't bother me. I would have made my own t-shirts if I wanted one. 
Perhaps projects should clearly license their logos, fonts, and related 
materials so people could make their own non-commercially distributed goods 
(stickers, t-shirts, mugs, and anything else people can readily make or 
have made for them these days).



* 6 months shared SSH-access for 250$?


This pricing made no sense to me but I considered it mostly about donating 
to the project.



* Absurd amount of information to digest in every update (even for me)


I like the detailed info they published, I'd even recommend other projects 
do this because that detail level shows me what project workers (who are 
doing the bulk of the work including all the day-to-day tasks) are thinking 
about and what issues they consider relevant. I don't see how that is at 
all harmful to me because I can choose how much to read and when to read 
the posts. I think a general-purpose audience is not well-served by such 
posts, however. I'd bet non-technical users would appreciate something more 
plainly worded. The technical info should be available, perhaps posted to a 
blog hosted elsewhere on the company's website.


I am concerned that when the crowdsupply.com page goes away, so too do 
these updates which are still interesting information and valuable not only 
for future reading but reference to others.

[libreplanet-discuss] Minifree's Libreboot D16 systems (server, workstation) working normally under computationally intensive load?

[J.B. Nicholson]

Have the Minifree's Libreboot D16 systems been tested under computationally 
intensive loads?


I'm particularly interested to know if the systems will shut down due to 
the CPUs running too hot for too long, or if the system will perhaps slow 
down the system to prevent the CPUs from getting so hot that they'd have to 
do a thermal shutdown.


I've tried a few completely free GNU/Linux systems with lesser CPUs (such 
as the "AMD FX(tm)-8150 Eight-Core Processor" as identified by 
/proc/cpuinfo in the model name field) and thermal shutdown was a real 
problem -- watching a high-res movie (say, a 1080P or 4K movie), running 
multiple FLAC encoding processes, or playing any 3D game would be enough to 
trigger the CPU fan spinning up a lot and then a few seconds later the 
entire system would shut down. The system had to be left alone for some 
minutes before it was cool enough to get all the way through the boot 
process and let users back on the system again.


I've seen videos showing the TALOS libre workstation doing computationally 
intensive things (playing 3D games and screensavers, running VMs, etc. even 
simultaneously) and this did not appear to be a problem, so I thought I'd 
ask about the Minifree Libreboot D16 systems.


Thanks for any feedback you can offer about this.

[libreplanet-discuss] Subtitle on rms Software Freedom Day video needs correction

[J.B. Nicholson]

I've identified what I believe to be a bug in the titling on the video 
currently at 
https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/richard-stallman-explains-free-software-on-software-freedom-day-2016/ 
and there is no clear contact information displayed. I'm guessing 
LibrePlanet is involved in this video, hence I'm posting this here.


Around 13m20s the video shows a title listing the place one can get license 
recommendations. This title is incorrect -- it reads:


  gnu.org/gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations

and it should read

  gnu.org/licenses/license-recommendations

as the extra "/gnu.org" will get the visitor to a 404 error.

Perhaps this can be fixed and the video re-rendered and updated on this 
media.libreplanet.org page?


As a side note, rms doesn't need to say "dot HTML" anymore; the gnu.org 
pages I've tried (including this license recommendations page) appear to 
work fine without that suffix.


Thanks.

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] We need clear advocacy for software freedom, not proprietary greenwashing

[J.B. Nicholson]

arthur_tor...@comcast.net wrote:

I agree, although at least from the evidence we see of users in the
power chair world, a great many don't have any interest is knowing how
their technology works. This seems really strange to me, but is it that
much different from the computer owners that don't care about the O/S,
programs, etc. as long as they can surf the web, look at FeceBook, write
their documents, etc..


Most computer users are non-technical and are not interested in becoming 
programmers. But that doesn't address the issue of inequity involved in 
software freedom -- in proprietary programs, the program's programmers have 
the power to make that program do what they want. Users have no freedom to 
inspect, share, modify, or sometimes even run the program when they want 
to. There's a clear class issue here. Software freedom aims to (and does) 
resolve this inequity between programmers and users by letting anyone with 
a copy of the free program participate fully in its development.


There is a more important ethical issue here as well: it's wrong to deny 
others the freedoms of free software even if one doesn't want to take 
advantage of those freedoms. Software freedom is not and never was about 
compelling users to program. There are good reasons to want to understand 
how things work, and more people than ever before depend on computers in 
their daily lives. But one's unwillingness to learn even simple programming 
has nothing to do with whether such freedoms should exist for all other 
computer users.


It's more than a little disturbing that software freedom needs explication 
or defense on libreplanet-discuss. My understanding was that this was a 
mailing list run by the FSF for discussing free software with the 
understanding that universal software freedom was the goal.



If I go into my chair's Pilot+ controller with the 'escaped into the
wild' OEM level programming software, I get a list of parameters that
let me change the way the chair operates in a multitude of ways, many of
which would make it all but undriveable, and a couple that are
dangerous, but all are at least somewhat documented and predictable...
Going in and changing the actual software runs all sorts of risks of
un-intended and unpredictable results - including possible security
risks if the chair is connected to anything (Mine isn't and won't be,
but many of the new chairs are...)


By endorsing software freedom one runs the risk of being able to let 
programmers (including oneself) locate and fix privacy violations; perhaps 
your chair is surreptitiously uploading data about your movements without 
your consent. It would be good to fix that so tracking data only goes where 
you want when you want that data to be distributed.


By endorsing software freedom one runs the risk of letting security-minded 
free software hackers (using that term in the original sense of 'playful 
cleverness') identify and fix flaws which let outsiders control critical 
devices without the owner's permission. For all you know those security 
flaws you don't want already exist in the chair's proprietary software you 
have now.


But the most important thing one gets from endorsing software freedom for 
its own sake is a constructive community of people who can help themselves 
control their lives and help others control their lives. This is an ethical 
way to treat other people when it comes to computer software.

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] We need clear advocacy for software freedom, not proprietary greenwashing

[J.B. Nicholson]

I posted "Mail-Followup-To: libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org" in the 
headers of my post to this list. Please choose a mail client that respects 
this header and do not send me copies of your mailing list followups. I 
will pick up any replies you post to the list on the list.


Aaron E-J wrote:

I guess where I was going with my line of reasoning is not to limit
information on how to modify a device but actually do the opposite –
make modification be easy and safe.


You can't make a device safe for others to fully own. Safety fears are no 
justification for unmodifiable devices, DRM, half-measures like open 
source, or any other restrictions that stand in the way of owners making 
their device work as they wish it to work. The owner determines how safe 
their device is, this is a part of the freedom of owning any device. It 
should suffice to warn the user in the documentation that this device is 
capable of killing someone and the included software is set up so as not to 
be lethal. Furthermore this should not be viewed as more risky than what 
these device owners face now because the extant proprietary software has 
already been demonstrated to be unsafe despite current unjustifiable 
restrictions on ownership, modification, and use.



To use the car analogy, you need to have a driver's license in order to
drive and in order to do that, you need to know /how/ to drive.


That doesn't follow. One doesn't need a driver's license to modify a car.


If people who get medical devices are also trained in how the device
works, this would have the potential to save lives, regardless of
whether the user has the desire to modify it.


I have no objection to offering training to anyone (such training is merely 
educational and a money-making opportunity for the trainers) but no 
training should be required. We have long established this as acceptable 
with cars which are objectively far more dangerous than devices that are 
capable of injuring or killing the wearer.

[libreplanet-discuss] We need clear advocacy for software freedom, not proprietary greenwashing

[J.B. Nicholson]

arthur_tor...@comcast.net wrote:

There is a very mixed bag situation on medical device hacking, in that
yes, it is definitely possible to cause potentially life threatening
situations if one makes modifications the wrong way...


The problem with this argument is that we wouldn't accept this line of 
logic for any other device. We've already dealt with this level of danger 
and accepted it on a national scale. There's a strong history in the US 
(and I imagine other countries) of people being able to modify their cars. 
This goes back to well before computers were in cars. Cars have long been 
known to be radically unsafe for both the passengers and the people in the 
vicinity of the car (making what we've already accepted objectively more 
dangerous than a medical device such as a pacemaker/defibrillator like what 
Karen Sandler has) and yet we have no problem with car owners changing what 
they like in their cars so long as the end result doesn't break certain 
laws. As a result of car hacking we now enjoy a mix of hobbyists and 
commercial garages some of which came up from people learning by 
experimenting on their own vehicles.


We never let those potentially life threatening situations hinder someone's 
access to fully control their own devices before and we ought not do so now 
that computers and software are involved.



I think that what should be done at a minimum is to allow any
programming parameters to be changed, even if the program itself is more
thoroughly locked down, or more difficult to modify, while providing a
good and accessible set of information and warnings on what they do...
I am far from thrilled by the multiple 'Are you SURE?' checkboxes that
some proprietary O/S's put you through, but could see some level of that
on particularly dangerous parameters


That's not software freedom and there's no reason to set such a minimum. 
What you're describing is indistinguishable from highly-configurable 
proprietary software.


This fight has to be about software freedom, not half-measures like open 
source; open source is a developmental methodology which is okay with 
proprietary software and asking proprietors for a chance to help a 
commercial developer improve a program. The free software movement demands 
software freedom for all computer users on ethical grounds.



In terms of the medical device area, I think that it would be VERY good
to do something on the line of an open source hardware group for medical
devices.  I have had a long time interest in trying to make better
chairs but have been worried about how to handle the regulatory and
liability concerns.  Among other things, a collected knowledge base of
how to do things without getting into problems with the government
bodies dedicated to blocking progress...


Perhaps, if this group was interested in software freedom and not "open 
source" and if membership isn't about identity politics (only people with 
medical backgrounds can be members, for instance, thus negating any chance 
free software activists would represent the group). Otherwise it would 
become important to oppose any such group. Greenwashing (or as Brad Kuhn 
put it, "openwashing"[1]) is a real problem with groups like this because 
they're often corporate shills looking to preserve the status quo in 
service to their interests and the interests of their employers.



[1] 
http://mirror.linux.org.au/pub/linux.conf.au/2015/Case_Room_2/Thursday/Considering_the_Future_of_Copyleft_How_Will_The_Next_Generation_Perceive_GPL.webm

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] [fsf-community-team] Golden Rule Angle for Libre Software Advocacy

[J.B. Nicholson]

Marcos Marado wrote:

I recently read about a woman who has a pacemaker. It had a software bug,
which frightened her. She knows /of/ it but she doesn't know it, since she
doesn't have access to the software running on her own body. Furthermore,
she found out that there is a functionality in it to accept OTA updates,
which she cannot control. Scary. And this is not science fiction, this is a
real case, current technology.


I'm not sure what story you're referring to, but Karen Sandler (a lawyer 
working with Software Freedom Conservancy, co-host of the "Free as Freedom" 
Oggcast at http://faif.us/ ) tells a similar story: she wears a 
pacemaker/defibrillator[1] due to her enlarged heart which is 3 times the 
size of a normal heart. Her enlarged heart puts her at risk of suddenly 
dying (2-3% annually compounding risk), thus she wears (inside her body, 
screwed into her heart) a $75,000 Medtronic device. She recently had a 
child and found a bug in her device's software during her pregnancy -- 
pregnant women's hearts sometimes race and thus triggered the device to 
deliver a shock to her because her device's software was programmed to 
deliver a shock if the user's heartbeat goes outside an acceptable range. 
This variable heartrate is completely normal for pregnant women, but the 
device is typically only installed in patients who are well past their 
childbearing years (as Sandler's doctor told her when she reported this 
erroneous shock).


When Sandler was first getting this device she tried to get the complete 
source code for the device, even being willing to sign a non-disclosure 
agreement for this source code (look up her name and see/hear any of her 
early talks about her heart to hear the full story on this). But the 
proprietor would not give her the source code. So, like anyone with any 
proprietary software, she is denied permission to fix this problem and has 
to hope the proprietor cares enough about her unusual case to address this 
bug. If the proprietor goes out of business, she's simply out of luck 
possibly undergoing another surgery just to change the device sold by 
developers who care about software freedom or her case.


In a previous talk, Sandler explained that she purposefully did not pick a 
pacemaker/defibrillator device that could accept updates or be read 
wirelessly because she could see how she is not well-served by a device 
programming changing ad-hoc by unknown people, or people reading her 
device's data remotely. She requested an older model which can only be 
reprogrammed and read where the reader device is physically in close 
proximity to her heart. Presumably she would make sure only trusted people 
get this close and thus that would help preserve her life and her privacy. 
But all of the newer devices work wirelessly over greater ranges of 
separation between the device and the reader. This means when she needs a 
new device (the batteries only last for so long, she will need a new device 
if she lives to around 80 years as many women do), she might not be able to 
get the older relatively more privacy-preserving and safer device she prefers.


This understanding of the power of proprietary software versus what society 
needs to operate properly -- software freedom -- converted her from 
"thinking open source was cool" to understanding that "software freedom is 
absolutely essential to our lives, to our society, and to our overall 
framework": "For me, this got me extremely passionate about software 
freedom. Where I previously thought that open source was cool, I have now 
come along to the view that software freedom is absolutely essential to our 
lives, to our society, and to our overall framework. And that has put me 
solidly in the free software space. [...]" (around 5m45s into [1]).


Anyone riding in or being alive near a modern car is in a more similar 
situation to Sandler than they think: when you're in or around any car you 
depend on that car to protect your life. Modern cars use proprietary 
software to govern emissions (hello VW fraudsters!), vet who is allowed to 
get in and drive the car via remote locking, and control how the car 
operates while in use. We're seeing how insecure this code is as people 
provide the public service of breaking into the car (not to steal the car 
or rob what's in the car) demonstrate the insecurity of that software. We 
now understand that car designers don't prevent the software that could 
create distracting & unsafe environments in cars (thus leading a driver to 
spend time fiddling with environmental controls instead of driving) and 
this could create a lethal problem for some innocent passerby when a 
vehicle in motion hits and kills them. Autonomous vehicles look even worse 
-- untrustworthy developers purposefully using proprietary software to 
control where the vehicle goes and how fast, and deal with sudden 
unpredictable changes on the road make me think autonomous vehicles are 
horribly unwise[2]. Then 

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] What do you think about calling free systems as "GNU" systems (even if there is no GNU or Linux-libre)?

[J.B. Nicholson]

Julien Kyou wrote:

Using GNU as a descriptor 'even in the absence of GNU for freedom
respecting distros' feels right to me, its not credit its a brand. GNU =
Freedom, Should be true.


GNU does nothing to stop hackers from porting it to run on nonfree kernels. 
Hence today we have GNU/kWindows (the GNU OS running atop the kernel from 
Microsoft Windows), GNU/kFreeBSD (the GNU OS running atop the kernel from 
FreeBSD), and GNU/HURD (the GNU OS running atop the HURD microkernel).


There's no way to tell which of these are free software by looking at only 
the name. We can be sure that the GNU portion is free software throughout, 
but in the context of a distribution the kernel portion is unknown. 
Distributions will sometimes take a free OS such as GNU, and make GNU run 
atop a free kernel, and then include nonfree drivers. The total end-product 
distributed to users is thus nonfree until the nonfree parts are removed. I 
don't see how there could ever be a way of assuring a user's software 
freedom by only mentioning GNU is included because one will always have to 
do more work to know what else is included in the distribution. Even a 
particular distribution that is free today can include nonfree software in 
its repos, so as the FSF's approved distro list criteria says monitoring 
this requires ongoing vigilance and a mindset of fixing freedom problems.

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] What do you think about calling free systems as "GNU" systems (even if there is no GNU or Linux-libre)?

[J.B. Nicholson]

Fabio Pesari wrote:

I think this happens too often, and saying GNU without anything else
reinforces the notion that the only thing the FSF cares about is getting
credited for something they didn't completely build.


Most operating systems include software the distributors didn't write 
themselves. Apple's MacOS is built on top of a BSD variant which Apple 
programmers did not write. MacOS development software from Apple included 
(perhaps still does) GCC, a compiler NeXT eventually contributed to[1] but 
did not write themselves. Variants of Microsoft Windows included games that 
Microsoft licensed for distribution but didn't write such as the Pinball 
game written by Cinematronics[2]. The Commodore 64 came with BASIC licensed 
from Microsoft[3]. Putting together an OS from programs one can legally 
distribute is commonplace. This doesn't take anything away from the efforts 
of the OS developers. We should give OS developers credit for their work by 
using the name they chose. We should also seek to give credit to the major 
components of the system, so we should call Linux a kernel and avoid 
calling Linux something it isn't and never was -- an operating system.



I think we should find a neutral name for all operating systems (with
any free kernel, from Linux to FreeDOS to *BSD) that are free as in
freedom.


The irony of these examples is that Linus Torvalds' fork of Linux (as 
opposed to the GNU Linux-libre fork) contains nonfree software. In fact 
that's the significant difference between Torvalds' Linux and GNU 
Linux-libre -- GNU Linux-libre omits the nonfree software thus creating a 
Linux kernel one can not only run in freedom but distribute and fully 
comply with the GNU GPL version 2's requirement for distributing complete 
corresponding source code. Good luck getting complete corresponding source 
code to those binary blobs that come with Torvalds' Linux kernel.


As I understand it, multiple BSD variants come with nonfree software in 
their systems as well. The pushover licenses they're distributed under 
don't require distributing free software.



(Yes, I'm half joking in case you didn't realize, but perhaps this
really is the best solution)


I don't think that's compatible with trying to get people to call things by 
their proper names.



[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinematronics,_LLC
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_BASIC

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] helping friends kill their facebook accounts

[J.B. Nicholson]

Serge wrote:

Unless your friends who use Facebook don't actually upload photos of
you and don't talk about you much.


I'm guessing it's pretty easy for organizations to browse the web, find 
images containing faces, index the faces, and tie that to extant records of 
people's identities. There's probably some profit to be had in doing this, 
and with records being increasingly available digitally it's a way one 
could convince others into believing this is a viable way of keeping track 
of someone's movements.



I do realize that rarely happens though.


I don't know how any of us would know how frequently this happens and thus 
be able to back up that assertion.



On the subject line, I think doing what was previously recommended
would be best: personally let friends know, provide contacts and kill
it off. I heard that Facebook permanently deletes all archived data
after the account is kept disabled for a while, but I can't say if that
is true or not.


Given how cheap storage is and how effective databases are at holding 
indexed data, I'd need good evidence to believe any claim that a wealthy 
organization (including Facebook, Microsoft, Google, etc.) whose value 
hinges on data collection and indexing would have incentive to get rid of 
old information. I'm guessing there's going to be more value in being able 
to say something akin to "I know who  was with 20 years ago when 
they were at a work conference in , and I have street photos, 
purchase receipt data, cell phone[1] recordings, and cell phone location 
data to back up this claim.".


A lot follows from that ability to say that; imagine the detail shows like 
"Who Do You Think You Are?" could give future historians and researchers 
with surreptitiously acquired recordings. Mass surveillance on this scale 
is both scary to the public (who don't hesitate to carry their cell phones 
with them everywhere) and short-term profitable in a way big businesses 
won't hesitate to exploit.



Actually, knowing Facebook's practices, it probably isn't, but I am
certain there is a legal way of pressuring them into it if need be.


While I agree with the first part, I would believe the opposite about the 
second part -- I doubt there is any regime that could compel an 
organization to do that and I'd bet there are very easy ways to evade 
effectively deleting such information and verifying such deletions occurred.




[1] A misnomer if ever there was one, a better name is a "tracker" because 
that's the primary value of these devices to their manufacturers and 
service providers. Making phone calls, texts, multimedia recordings, and 
connecting to the Internet are come-ons to get people to acquire one.

[libreplanet-discuss] Publish a test address for people to try tonight?

[J.B. Nicholson]

A suggestion for the LibrePlanet conference group on-site: How about 
testing the video and audio feeds tonight before the big day tomorrow?


It would be great to have a fully-working live audio/video feed and working 
recordings of the entire conference.

[libreplanet-discuss] Please honor the Mail-Followup-To header

[J.B. Nicholson]

Please consider choosing a mail program that honors Mail-Followup-To. I set 
that header in my post and provided a valid destination for followups in 
that header because I don't need 2 copies of followups and I'd like not to 
receive multiple copies. I can read followups on the mailing list. If you 
have switched off honoring this header, please reconsider and switch 
support back on.


You can find more information about this header at 
https://cr.yp.to/proto/replyto.html. If you're following up to 
ksan...@metrocast.net's post, please don't copy me as well.

[libreplanet-discuss] DRM is a real problem

[J.B. Nicholson]

Fabio Pesari wrote:

While I appreciate Magnatune's offer, it is a cultural ghetto (you won't
find The Smiths, Depeche Mode or Nick Drake there), just like Jamendo.


That strikes me as a matter of taste and siding with power; you won't find 
Magnatune's artists or work on the more widely-advertised label releases 
either. I find it more valuable to figure out what I like by listening to 
the music for myself.



I don't doubt there are good musicians releasing music on it, however
most of those artists are necessarily derivative of influential nonfree
music: for example, I can't imagine someone who makes progressive rock
and isn't in any way influenced by Pink Floyd, Genesis or Yes.


I fail to understand what this has to do with the topic of discussion. This 
reads to me as a digression which tries to subtly position more popular 
artists as somehow better than less popular artists without acknowledging 
how derivative artists in general are. I think a better discussion would 
convey how derivation is at the heart of everything humans do, how the 
popular label system is corrupt in that it over rewards the more popular 
artists, and how assessing artist's worth is not valuable to this discussion.



In short, especially if you are a musician, you will have a hard time
connecting with other people with similar musical tastes if you only
listen to music released on Magnatune.


Until you mentioned this twice (once above and once at the end of your 
post), nobody said one had to or would "only listen to music released on 
Magnatune". That is a false dichotomy. However you bring up a point which 
(perhaps inadvertently) puts Magnatune in a better light -- unlike so many 
of the more widely-advertised labels, Magnatune doesn't require exclusivity.



DRM is not the problem, and fighting it is a complete waste of time in
nearly all cases: people actually like services like Netflix and Spotify
because they are cheap, and this will *never* change unless proprietary
software is outright outlawed.


I don't know who you're replying to here, but it's not me. Your post you 
made it seem like I wrote "Everyone has the right freely to participate in 
the cultural life of the

community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its
benefits.". I did not write that and you didn't credit who did write that.

To respond to your point: DRM is a problem for me because I don't run the 
nonfree software needed to get past the DRM in the manner proscribed by the 
publisher. Laws prohibiting breaking DRM (even for personal use or fair use 
purposes) are often part of copyright legislation. Therefore a lot of the 
well-advertised distributors don't allow me to partake of their work 
without accepting what could be malware. I find that tradeoff to be 
completely unacceptable and I blame them for putting that potential malware 
in my way nor do I buy any of the defenses about how unnamed copyright 
holders might balk at having DRM-free distribution to paying customers.



The real problem is copyright laws, because works in the public domain
could be distributed DRM-free by everyone.


Copyright laws certainly are problematic but I think we can continue to 
work on improving multiple issues simultaneously.



An example of their unfairness: Miles Davis recorded his best tunes in
the 1950s and he died in 1991, and copyright on his music in many
countries lasts 70 years after his death (if it's not extended
infinitely by the current holders, the record labels). That's 2061 at
the very least, for music that is considered fundamental for our
culture. How can that be fair?


I believe most popular label artist's copyrights aren't held by the artist, 
I believe that copyright is signed over to the label when the artist/band 
signs a contract with the label. Janis Ian is a notable exception; I 
believe she bought the copyright to her recordings and now holds the 
copyright on them. It would benefit the argument for copyright reform to 
frame the debate in terms of how most media is licensed.

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Buying the rights to proprietary programs to free them

[J.B. Nicholson]

Fabio Pesari wrote:

We hear about companies like Facebook and Google buying out startups all
the time and I thought, why don't we use crowdfunding to buy the rights
to proprietary programs ourselves and release their code under the GPL?
(Of course, we have to be sure all their dependencies are also free).


I believe this has been done before. According to 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_(software)#History Blender, the free 
rendering/editing program, was originally developed at Neo Geo and used 
internally, then later distributed as proprietary software by Not a Number 
Technologies. In mid-July 2002 the "Free Blender" campaign collected money 
to release the Blender source code under a free license with an option of 
also a non-free license. This option was never used and it was suspended in 
2005. A free software Blender was released on August 20, 2003 as version 
2.26. Today Blender remains free software licensed to all under "GNU GPLv2 
or any later".


It's a good idea, and a practical way to get more free software, get more 
free documentation, and when coupled with a strongly copylefted free 
software license (such as AGPLv3 or later), secure software freedom for the 
foreseeable future.

[libreplanet-discuss] Does URL shortening or GNU MediaGoblin have anything to do with LibRay?

[J.B. Nicholson]

Logan Streondj wrote:

I'm wondering if there is a GNU/FSF approved URL shortener, [...]


I'm confused about your question: This post appears as a followup in a 
thread about LibRay. I don't understand what this has to do with LibRay nor 
do I understand how it follows up to anything in the LibRay thread. Does 
GNU MediaGoblin or short URLs have something to do with LibRay?


Did you mean to send a new email to libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org 
(thus starting a new thread) or reply to Kip Warner's post sent to 
libreplanet-discuss@libreplanet.org (thus creating a followup)? I don't 
think you want to hit "reply" just because they're going to the same email 
address. Even if your email client doesn't show you all of the headers the 
two actions aren't the same.

[libreplanet-discuss] LibRay solves what problem?

[J.B. Nicholson]

On fsf-community-t...@gnu.org Tobias Platen wrote :

Bluray has the same problem, therefore LibRay (http://lib-ray.org/) has
been created as a replacement.


Thanks for the pointer, but I'm unclear about what problem LibRay aims to 
solve. I've read http://lib-ray.org/reasons.html but I'm still left 
wondering whom will LibRay help? And how LibRay will help more than 
delivering a Matroska file using free software-compatible (if not free 
software-favorable) codecs?


Is LibRay solving a non-problem by pursuing a physical means of conveying 
movie data when the trend seems (to my mind) to be moving toward 
network-based delivery?

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] FSF's communication, ethical discussion in consumerism, why software freedom matters

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

Thank you very much for those great readings/resources! I love your IBM and
VW examples as well, will use when I talk to others about the subject.


And also add https://www.softwarefreedom.org/ to the list -- Eben Moglen is 
one of the Directors here. There are also a bunch of videos on the site 
from their 10th anniversary celebration. I haven't seen the videos yet, but 
I'm guessing there's many things of interest there.


http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/epa-opposed-dmca-exemptions-that-could-have-revealed-volkswagen-fraud 
is the FSF's blog entry on the VW (and apparently other car manufacturers) 
growing scandal.

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] FSF's communication, ethical discussion in consumerism, why software freedom matters

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

penyuanhs...@gmail.com wrote:

I suspect the same thing. Can you elaborate a bit more on why you think
this is the case? Is there academic discussion on the definition of
consumerism and the ethics (or lack thereof) behind it?? I'd love to
read about this.


I suggest the work of Noam Chomsky, specifically Chomsky & Herman's 
"Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" and the 
1992 documentary "Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media" based 
on the Chomsky & Herman book.


I also recommend "The Corporation", a 2003 documentary. Chomsky is among 
the interviewees in "The Corporation" but there are plenty of other people 
who are featured more. The 2-disc DVD of "The Corporation" has many extras 
you will want to see. And the commentary track is also worth hearing, 
particularly when Joel Bakan explains how limited CEO Ray Anderson (from 
Interface carpet and fabric) is in what he can say and do. The extras add 
to the information you'll get from the documentary. Each time I see "The 
Corporation" I'm reminded of how well put-together it is and how many great 
stories there are to learn from. I think you'll find each story is worth 
digging into on its own.


I'll get into some details on one story as an example: The details of one 
story are the subject of a book, "IBM and the Holocaust" describe the 
details of how one of IBM's earliest customers, the Nazis, dealt with what 
was referred to as a "traffic management" problem -- keeping track of each 
prisoner's reason for being in the Nazi death camps (gypsy, jew, 
homosexual, communist, etc.), what fate had been assigned to them (a bullet 
to the head/the gas chambers, manual labor, suicide, etc.). And IBM had a 
solution: a device that used punch cards (Hollerith cards) and a 
custom-designed code that would allow fast and accurate tabulation of the 
cards to keep track of the data describing all of these prisoners. And back 
then the tabulation devices were huge and immobile; any maintenance work of 
any kind required an on-site visit. So IBM sent out technicians to program 
the system, and IBM was the exclusive provider of the cards (by the 
millions). The consultation profits were recovered by IBM after the war. 
IBM, of course, wants us to believe they didn't know what their customers 
were doing with the IBM equipment. But back then, as Peter Drucker points 
out, IBM only had very few customers. It's not hard to know what each 
customer is doing with so few units in the field. Keep these details in 
mind when you hear the IBM rep talk about how "these particular accusations 
have been discredited". I've used a clip of this documentary in a post 
commenting on a recent "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" segment in 
http://www.digitalcitizen.info/2015/03/10/coca-colas-fanta-history-is-no-mistake-corporations-have-propped-up-fascists-for-a-long-time/. 
You can see Howard Zinn, Chomsky, Edwin Black (author of "IBM and the 
Holocaust"), and Michael Moore talking about collusion between states, 
corporations, and fascist dictatorships.


And Volkswagen seems to do nothing but exist on the wrong side of history: 
allying with Nazi Germany in the '40's, cheating environmental regulations 
since at least 2009. Who knows what else they do that we're not yet wise 
to. But that's another story. I get into how free software fits into this 
in 
http://www.digitalcitizen.info/2015/09/20/vws-fraudulent-software-points-to-need-for-copylefted-free-software/


I find these stories very telling about how business wants consumers to be 
quiet, paying (with money and/or freedom), and docile. As Drucker says of 
Tom Watson Sr. (founding CEO of IBM), Watson probably did know what Hitler 
was doing with the IBM equipment but "Watson didn't want to do it not 
because it was immoral or not, but because Watson has a very keen sense of 
public relations, thought it risky".



I confess I didn't know about this person, but reading your message, and
reading his Wikipedia page, I think I should really check out his work.
Do you have specific recommendations on which of his talks to listen to
first?


I recommend his multipart lecture called "Snowden and the Future" at 
http://snowdenandthefuture.info/ (transcripts and recordings are all 
there). All parts of the lecture are worth your time in repeated listenings 
or readings. But I draw your attention particularly to the segment about 
the difference between transactional law between two parties and 
environmental law where acceptable minimum standards are established and 
defended. This plays a critical distinction when considering services such 
as outsourcing one's email to another party versus running one's own email 
server. This also helps us understand why Moglen is a backer of the 
FreedomBox project. Moglen brings his 'A' game all the time.

[libreplanet-discuss] FSF's communication, ethical discussion in consumerism, why software freedom matters

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

Terry wrote:

The FSF has incredible geniuses who understand code, technologies,
future directions and social implications. Their philosophies are
incredible, however some lack of people skills contributes to remaining
exclusionary through alienating many by not understanding and embracing
people, varying intellects, marketing and rates of comprehensive shifts
to new philosophical adoptions.


I'm not clear on precisely what you're referring to and I don't see 
examples of your point. If you don't like what the FSF says, it would be 
fine to say that you don't agree with it. But you should point to what 
specifically you disagree with and explain why. I don't know how many 
people you are speaking for when you say "many" and I don't see any 
examples of what your criticizing. What did the FSF say when you tried 
telling them specifically what messages you didn't like and how you thought 
they should pose those issues instead? They're hiring a Deputy Director, 
and I think that job would include plenty of chances to explain software 
freedom better.


I've found the FSF to be forthright and to not suffer fools gladly (which 
requires a clarity I appreciate). They rightly speak up about their cause, 
write very clearly, and when people use language that frames an issue in a 
way they don't agree with their representatives point it out. Richard 
Stallman's recent Slashdot interview 
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/09/09/2252212/interviews-rms-answers-your-questions 
has an example of this in the first Q -- a response from Stallman where 
he pointed out what was wrong with framing an issue in terms of 
"monetization". Stallman's response struck me as a well-stated and entirely 
fair rebuttal to an attempt to justify bad behavior because it might make 
more money than earning money ethically. Eben Moglen's talks are 
consistently excellent. They're packed with detail and they really earn a 
re-read/re-listen, but they're eminently understandable even for 
non-technical people I've played them for over the air on community radio 
(or so the listeners who call me tell me). I went to an FSF gathering some 
years ago and Moglen's talk alone made the trip worthwhile for my travel 
companion.


I think most people haven't begun to contemplate software freedom not 
because the message of software freedom was put to them somehow 
indelicately, but because the message of software freedom hasn't been put 
to them at all. It's hard to repeat a message as frequently as the 
billionaire proprietors repeat their ads, or even as frequently as open 
source supporters say some proprietary software is okay.





We're constantly told that our proper role in society is to buy something. 
This immediately circumscribes us as consumers rather than citizens. This 
means reducing people to accepting choices set out for them (if they can 
afford it) and never discussing doing what's just, ethical, and beneficial 
for society such as pointing out systemic corruption (what if all the 
choices are bad?), inequity (what if some people are too poor to 
participate even as consumers?). Consumerism is designed to exclude ethical 
discussion. When I try to behave ethically by purchasing the most ethical 
option available, I usually face greenwashing or I find I'm outspent by the 
wealthy who want unethical results. The narrow terms of debate are set up 
this way on purpose, not by accident, and this makes for a very one-sided 
way to live.


For example, in popular computing my choices come down to two nonfree 
software distributors and a "choice" of which proprietor's interest to 
cater to. When viewed from a perspective of software freedom, that's no 
choice at all. Any differences between the proprietors are overwhelmed by 
the similarities that one is basically picking who gets to keep me from 
having software freedom. All of the important questions about software 
freedom are immediately outside the allowable range of debate when the ends 
are staked out by proprietors. There's simply no room left for a serious 
discussion of ethics; other related issues (such as computer security) are 
off-limits too as one can't have computer security without software freedom.


But I know better things are possible because I can look at history. 
Apparently through hard work and political insistence free software hackers 
built a better system: there was a time when GNU was not a complete 
operating system and I had to run GNU programs on a nonfree OS. Now 
GNU/Linux is a complete self-hosting OS, thanks in part to Linus Torvalds 
distributing the Linux kernel under a free software license, and the 
Linux-libre team for distributing a free version of the Linux kernel. I 
didn't have hardware on which I could run a completely free OS. Now I can 
buy hardware which runs a free BIOS thanks to all the reverse engineering 
and work I'm probably not fully aware of. Sure, I have to accept that 
things take time to develop and I can't use the latest 

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Suggestions for a coding club that is just starting?

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

brendanpmur...@gmail.com wrote:

Teaching coding doesn't involve explaining licences: that is something that
should be instilled by practice and leading the kids to use solutions that
have the appropriate licence.


I disagree; licensing power and responsible use of that power is very much 
something that must be explicitly taught, not assumed to be picked up by 
practice or dismissed as an insignificant detail. Licensing power is as 
much a part of the real world as is code. Therefore to give a practical 
education, teachers must explain how a user's software freedoms are 
retained with copyleft licenses and lost with non-copyleft licenses, else 
one is teaching the "open source" way which (purposefully[1]) does not 
identify copyleft licenses (except perhaps pejoratively) because that 
movement has no interest in software freedom and that movement is merely a 
means for proprietors to leverage programmers' talents toward 
proprietarization (what I believe Brad Kuhn rightly compared to 
greenwashing[2] -- organizations that try to dress up anti-environmental 
behavior with environmentally-sensitive propaganda -- and called 
"openwashing").



Once they grasp the basics through Scratch, many kids prefer to move to web
development. This requires a text editor that preferably supports
colour-coding: Notepad++ (GPL) is a very popular product for this.


Notepad++ is not as good choice of program to teach software freedom 
because Notepad++ depends on nonfree software[3], namely Microsoft Windows. 
GNU Emacs is considerably more capable and can be run on an entirely free 
system.



Beyond this, the kids try all kinds of stuff, including Mobile using
Cordova (ASL) and native, Java, Python, C/C++, etc. running on every
imaginable platform.


One should not treat every "platform" the same way as if there's no reason 
to favor one over another, or to let perceived popularity determine a 
choice of operating system. No phone is free and most phones have their 
users pick software from walled gardens known as "app stores" in which 
censorship and anti-software freedom abound. Good teaching requires careful 
selection, and one should choose a free software system on which nothing 
but free software is installed.


This is not a matter of learning "every imaginable platform" which no 
programmer will ever do anyhow. Programmers pick up what they need to know 
as they go. Good teachers know that students need to know how to learn what 
they need as they go and students require good incentives to make sound 
choices. Ignoring or dismissing ethical, social, and political differences 
teaches students that these concerns are not important, that all they need 
concern themselves with are the technical issues in programming. That 
approach is a recipe for making a naive person who is wholly unprepared to 
deal with the real world and ready to be exploited by some proprietor.



Of course there are many who want to write iPhone apps and there's no
way to avoid proprietary stuff there - while it's great to promote OSS,
we have to be realistic and focus on the goal at hand which is to get
kids to code.


The effort should aim not to "get kids to code" but to teach the human 
rights users of the software ought to have. This includes freedom and 
cooperation, values nonfree software simply do not proffer and the open 
source movement doesn't value outside of benefiting would-be proprietors. 
As https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-why.html rightly points out, "Schools 
should teach their students to be citizens of a strong, capable, 
independent and free society.". Proprietors and their sycophants know how 
much influence schools can have on society. That's why they give such steep 
discounts to schools; give them the trap early and they'll learn to think 
that the trap is the right and proper way to do computing. Proprietors want 
to set the bounds of allowable debate while the students are unlikely to 
question what trap is being set before them. They're teaching dependence 
and either ignoring or denigrating human rights. We must not do the same 
nor should we think the goals are the same.


The goal should not be to "promote OSS" by which I take it you mean "open 
source software". That movement stands against software freedom and while 
its advocates do work with software freedom activists to make great 
software we have the right to run, share, and modify, the open source 
movement's values were designed to never discuss software freedom 
(ostensibly, in an attempt to better speak to businesses, but I think that 
was merely a ploy to convince naive developers a myth that businesses 
somehow can't be spoken to straightforwardly about the terms of accepting 
free software).




[1] Older essay: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
Newer essay: 
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html


[2] 

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Microsoft and a version of R

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

Andrés Muñiz Piniella wrote:

So MS excel is looking to imitate gnumeric which already consults
with R project to get accurate statistics? Why would they need to buy
company to do this? Or did I miss something?


In order to legally distribute a non-free, user-subjugating program 
compatible with R, Microsoft will need to either develop that software 
anew or acquire an organization that has already done this work (such as 
what Tibco claims to have done). Perhaps Microsoft chose the latter 
because it's cheaper  faster for them to buy a non-free R 
implementation instead of developing their own. Naturally, this would 
all hinge on Tibco's work not being a derivative of GNU R, or being 
licensed to them such that Tibco could change the license to whatever 
they want.


Any organization looking to defend the conclusions they reach using R, 
or protect the security of their systems running R would be wise to keep 
using GNU R and dismiss the language found in 
http://spotfire.tibco.com/blog/?p=29291 out of hand for not providing 
software freedom (which is, of course, of value unto itself). Just like 
in any other program, software freedom grants GNU R users opportunities 
non-free software doesn't.

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] The FSF Allows No Derivatives,

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

Ali Abdul Ghani wrote:

http://onpon4.github.io/other/fsf-no-derivatives/


I'm guessing you pointed us to this article because you wished to 
discuss the article. Here are my views on this article.


The article makes a number of claims without any sources; there are no 
links to other pages as one would expect to find (save one to a 278 page 
PDF of Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. 
Stallman). FSF and GNU Project webpages are easy to link to and quote, 
their pages are static HTML and easily readable with text, some offer 
links to sections within the same page (like 
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html which is a list of 
words to avoid). There's no excuse for not providing source material 
pointers in the form of inline links.


Quoting the article:


The FSF's idea is that if people are allowed to modify works of
opinion, they are going to distort it and misrepresent the original
author(s). The FSF claims that this is the only possible reason one
could have for modifying a work of opinion, which is nonsense.


Where has the FSF claimed this? I'd like to read the evidence for this 
claim for myself. Has the author tried to offer translations of articles 
and been rejected? Some FSF and GNU Project pages offer translations and 
that means someone had to write them. It's not clear that this article 
is complaining about a real issue. It's also worth noting that the 
article doesn't respond to the alleged FSF claim at all, besides calling 
it nonsense.


Instead the article inadvertently goes on to show how the alleged FSF 
opinion is quite sensible:



It's even entirely plausible that the work can be improved in some
way; perhaps there's an embarrassing typo that the original author
isn't fixing for some reason, or perhaps rewording a paragraph makes
the point the work is trying to make stronger.


Improving a work is in the eye of the beholder; in other words, 
improvements are subjective. The articles in question aren't functional 
works -- one doesn't use them to get a job done. So it's not clear that 
one needs them to be modifiable. This is a point the article would do 
well to expound upon but doesn't.


The irony of these points (and the reason I consider the article 
'inadvertently' making the FSF's alleged point for them) is that I'm not 
sure the author is conveying the FSF's views accurately (too few sources 
cited). So if I'm not sure this article is getting the FSF's views 
correctly, maybe the FSF is on to something in allegedly fearing 
misrepresentation.


Here's another point the author makes without evidence:


Perhaps the negative effect is large, and perhaps the negative effect
is small, but even if just one person is prevented from doing a
useful translation or adaptation by a no-derivatives license, that is
one too many.


The author should define terms that are quantifiable and then do the 
legwork to look things up. Neither are done here. If the negative 
effect is small the entire point of the article is lost on me as one 
adversely affected translator strikes me as insignificant. If the 
negative effect is large, exactly how many is a large number of 
translators or translations and why were each stopped from publishing 
their translations? Were these authors not capable of writing their own 
essays or giving their own talks citing FSF/GNU Project works as needed 
per fair use?


Another undefended claim -- The FSF doesn't need to insist on free 
culture; in fact, it shouldn't. -- where exactly does the FSF insist 
on free culture and what exactly does this author mean by free 
culture? I'd like to read this source for myself and understand what 
you mean when you say things.


By this point in the article I'm ready to give up reading because the 
article reads like the author is arguing against their own views instead 
of referenced quotes of what the FSF says.


Another point in the article that makes no sense to me:


No-derivatives licenses do absolutely nothing to stop
misrepresentation.


This is true but allowing derivatives would also do absolutely nothing 
to stop misrepresentation of the author. So why bring this up?


The author doesn't discuss how one can quote from the article in order 
to spread the message of the FSF without license (just like I'm doing 
to this article without regard for its license). I've found that it's 
easy to cite passages (entire paragraphs, even) from GNU Project and FSF 
essays, blog posts, and mailing list articles while combining them with 
points I put into my own words. Spreading the FSF's message is assisted 
in this way because I'm using their material as a source for backing up 
my points. This implicitly tells my readers I know what I'm talking 
about and lets them see where I get the backing for my case.

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] opinions please: expanding the definition of software freedom

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

Miles Fidelman wrote:

I've begun to wonder if there is a conflict between software freedom and
key pieces of software that create massive dependency webs.  Or put
another way, vendor lock-in.


I see no such conflict because the freedoms of free software don't 
guarantee software you'll like (clearly you don't like systemd), don't 
guarantee software you must use (you could assemble your own GNU/Linux 
system and not include systemd), and don't guarantee support for 
software (I'm not aware of any obligation to provide you with support).


Vendor lock-in doesn't make sense to me here because systemd doesn't 
have a vendor and doesn't lock its users in. Even if Red Hat employees 
do the majority of systemd development, users can get free software 
(such as systemd) from distributors other than Red Hat and they can get 
systemd non-commercially. Systemd users are free to use and develop 
GNU/Linux systems that don't include systemd or they can replace systemd 
with something compatible they'd prefer to use instead.


But I figure what you really want is for someone to maintain a GNU/Linux 
distribution without systemd you can use so you don't have to do that 
work yourself.



I begin to wonder if programs that create massive dependencies - such as
systemd - directly conflict with freedom 0.


They don't because software freedom says nothing about how much work is 
required to separate the rest of the software from the common 
dependency. Software freedom only says that if you put the work into it, 
you can separate yourself from that dependency. How you'd implement this 
separation is a detail.



One might also argue that systemd, in particular, conflicts with freedom
1 - in terms of feature creep, poorly documented code, changing APIs,
etc., etc.


There is a lot of free software out there. Too much free software for 
anyone to know of the details of all of every free program. Furthermore, 
the free software movement is not a development methodology. Therefore 
I'm sure you could find people who would use the same descriptions 
(feature creep, offering poorly documented code, and changing 
APIs) for other free software. We don't seek to amend the free software 
definition for those programs and we don't look for ways to exclude them 
from being called free because of their suboptimal development.


Trying to get systemd seen as non-free based for software development 
reasons strikes me as ironically shortsighted because of what you'd get 
in the end: the more you lean on the development methodology argument (a 
value of the open source movement, not the older free software 
movement), the more you're speaking to the wrong movement. Open source 
advocates apparently have no problem including non-free software in free 
software OS distributions (hence the need for 
https://gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html). So there's no reason to 
believe open source advocates would put the work into maintaining a 
systemd-less GNU/Linux distribution so long as systemd is convenient to 
include.

Re: [libreplanet-discuss] LP2015 mirrors?

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

I wrote:

Are there any LibrePlanet 2015 mirrors getting reliable feeds of the
conference (which is running as I type this)?


It seems the streams from live.fsf.org are working again. Thanks!

It would be good to know if there are any reliable mirrors in case 
live.fsf.org streams drop out again.

[libreplanet-discuss] Internet of Broken Things on reddit.com is a distraction

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

rysiek wrote:

Rather, Internet of Broken Things:
http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/26722r/the_internet_of_broken_things/

But yes, the question of retaining software freedom in a world of computing
things is a valid one, and a hard one. There is no silver bullet, and the
market will not solve this one (not that it solved any other important
problems). I think our best bet is (*shudders*) regulation.


It seems to me that that reddit.com discussion all too quickly gets 
distracted in a side issue of complexity. People have long lived with 
complexity greater than most people understand (depending on what you 
look at, humans have never really understood everything we work with). 
But this complexity discussion quickly distracts attention away from 
treating each other ethically. Perhaps that's the real value of the 
complexity argument if you look at this from an open source 
perspective (the open source movement was founded to distract attention 
away from software freedom in order to speak to businesses[1]). We don't 
need to understand everything so deeply to understand how to treat each 
other ethically. In software, software freedom is a prerequisite for 
ethical treatment (I imagine I hardly need to explain that here on 
libreplanet-discuss).


The problem of the NSA scandals and Snowden's revelations isn't that 
things are more broken than we realize. It's that people are being spied 
on constantly in ways they don't realize and spying has long been known 
to have powerfully ugly consequences. The spying itself is a direct 
contradiction of the brokenness argument -- spying works quite well and 
that's why so many spies are interested in it. This spying can sometimes 
require nonfree software (such as with DRM); when people have software 
freedom they can and do improve software so programs obey the users and 
no longer obey the spies.


I think the best approach is an old one -- educate everyone, including 
the young, to appreciate software freedom for its own sake and keep on 
doing this for generations. I can't think of anything significant that 
was obtained with a quick (silver bullet) approach or by placating a 
set of rules engineered to reinforce the rule of the currently powerful 
(aka the market).




[1] See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html 
and http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html for 
more on this and on how the older free software movement differs from 
the younger open source movement.

[libreplanet-discuss] Software idea patents on This American Life again; ask them why only MP3?

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

Two years ago the radio show This American Life talked about software 
idea patents:


http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/when-patents-attack

The show asked a number of unresolved questions about the details 
involved in why people sue and threaten to sue others over implementing 
ideas patent holders claim are covered by their patents.


The May 31, 2013 show follows up on the two-year-old show with multiple 
examples of things computer users do every day (using Wi-Fi in a coffee 
shop, scanning and sending documents, etc.):


http://feeds.thisamericanlife.org/~r/talpodcast/~5/1nys4Wh8ptA/496.mp3

or

http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/podcast.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/496.mp3

which, as you'll note from the URL, is (ironically) in MP3 format -- a 
patent-covered format one cannot play with free software in many 
countries without doing something covered by software idea patents.  As 
far as I know there are no alternative formats available; no Ogg Vorbis 
RSS feed.


Thus the show's publishers are, perhaps unknowingly, encouraging some 
people to engage in patent infringement (such as free software users 
without an MP3 player).  Or perhaps encouraging free software users to 
think that their system is broken if it won't play MP3s (probably 
because the OS distributor can't legally distribute an MP3 player) when 
really the problem is MP3's fault.


This looks to me to be an opportunity to ask the show to distribute 
their show in Ogg Vorbis as well.


Have any of you asked This American Life about this issue?  If so, 
what did they say in response?


Thanks.