On: How Richard Stallman Browses the Internet

[papachito]

Stallman travels a lot, South America, Asia and in these conditions the only way to get internet is to go to a net cafe where they only run windows XP full of virus with IE6. It is a really slow, frustrating and annoying experience, believe me. More than once I wished I had exactly that, a daemon that would download all my stuff so I could get them on my laptop and get the hell out of those net cafe asap. So yes, what Stallman is doing here is not political, it's actually a great, useful hack that unfortunately always gets quoted out of context. It's actually the best way to surf the web when you're travelling in those countries.

[Shorel → papachito]

Three years ago, sure.

But now he can get one of those 3G USB modems and change the simcard in each country.

I don't think he is hacking the network or whatever. He is hacking his time, and his attention, and that's more like meta-thinking.

[KERMIT → Shorel]

His daemon solution actually sounds simpler, and much cheaper...

[papachito → Shorel]

RMS doesn't use cellphones 3G/GSM for privacy reasons.

[AngryParsley → papachito]

If that's the case, can't he use a 3G card but just send all his data over a VPN/ssh tunnel/ssl proxy/whatever?

[kragen → AngryParsley]

No, that doesn't help.

[AngryParsley → kragen]

Why not? With a VPN, anyone capturing data on the wire would see encrypted traffic to a single server owned by RMS or someone he trusts.

[tjr → AngryParsley]

I believe that the issue is that he doesn't want the network service provider to know where he is.

[elai → papachito]

Many net cafes let you connect your own laptop, and those speaking engagements often have internet.

[papachito → elai]

But even then, the net is very slow there, so it's faster to bulk load everything compressed and read it later.