This article is a joke, it's something I would expect to find on some tech/news gossip website. Is this what FSF has become?
> so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other. He has created a network that is first and foremost a gold mine for government surveillance and advertisers.
I would think just about any popular web site would be a gold mine for such information. It has nothing to do with Facebook. Doesn't this sentence hold true if we replace Facebook with Google? This seems like a tinfoil/scare everyone into believing Facebook is evil and out to get you.
> and then maybe relays it to the intended destination, if it suits him. In some cases he does not — witness the recent reports of Facebook's messaging service blocking messages based on the words and links in them, because those links point to services which Facebook would prefer we not discuss.
Comeon, examples/proof please. Is Facebook blocking URLs to competition or child porn sites? There is a pretty big difference here.
I would think that the FSF should be on Facebook, trying to spread their message, gaining support, and discovering new users. They have an interesting problem, a lot of support, and some very big challenges ahead of them... and yet they spend time publishing articles like this and making fancy dislike buttons. FSF you should be ashamed.
What do you mean? This is what FSF has always been like.
They're shockingly zealots in defending absolute gpl-style freedom over all your digital goods.
In all honesty I don't think a decentralized and "Free" facebook would work. The centralization is a feature that most people want; it's part of why it "just work" without you having to become a system (or a network) administrator.
Imagine:
Mom: How come I'm not receiving updates from your aunt anymore?
You: Well, you have to wait for $INSERT_TECHNICAL_TERM to propagate or something.
Mom: Do I have to enter her hash-thing again?
or worse:
Mom: I'm getting a lot of spam
You: You have to install morton anti-spam social-edition
Mom: It won't install.
You: sigh here I come.
It's like email, but much worse because it has way more features, and more ways for things to go wrong.
Plus, I think Mark Zuckerberg actually donated money to the Diaspora project.
Seems like a pretty misguided point of view. Something tells me a sizable amount of the facebook crowd is comfortable downloading torrents, I'm pretty sure that counts as distributed/decentralized. As far as free software, is your mom unable to use any website that uses apache, ngix, php or ruby? Almost everyone has a broadband router that is almost entirely open source. My Mom and Dad both use an open source browser, what do yours use?
Is your point that only companies worth $50bn can build usable web apps, or that anyone that doesn't want to sell your data can't do UX?
That's from 2008 announcing Pirate Bay had hit 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker. That's not total users, that's total online. Take that number and multiply it by 5 to 10 to estimate total users, double it to account for the rest of the global trackers (low?) and increase it by some percentage to account for 3 years of growth and you're in the hundreds of millions of users range, possibly as high as 300M or more.
I'm not a crazy bittorrent fanboy, in fact I'm quite the opposite, but I think it's clear that the number of users of a decentralized system can far exceed any "rounding errors" of facebook's numbers.
By having 12 million concurrent peers on their tracker, aren't they pretty much de facto centralized even if the protocol is theoretically decentralized?
If The Pirate Bay disappears tomorrow do all of those users just switch over to another tracker? Very likely not. They'd just wait around to hear about the next Napster->Kazaa->LimeWire->Pirate Bay from their tech savvy friends, remaining mostly oblivious to the technology being used under the hood.
The pirate bay hasn't actually run a tracker for a year now or so. BT uses a system called DHT (and maybe something else) that lets the peers handle the tracking themselves. The peers do need to boot strap off of something, but it's very minimal afaik.
Even when they did use a tracker it's probably more reasonable to think of it as a directory server more like LDAP or such. At their base even classic decentralized protocols like SMTP rely on DNS as a directory, IP on routing tables etc.
While DHT is indeed decentralized, a central tracker is still preferred since it can quickly give an authoritative list of peers (rather than a probabilistic one).
Private sites tend to disable DHT anyways, since it's much harder to detect cheating without central trackers.
The important thing is that trackers are easily decentralized, since they're a per-torrent URL.
I think you are massively over-inflating your 300M estimate. The typical usage of bit torrent is to leave it running 24-7 to download the 300 torrents you've got queued. I would bet it is is far lower than 5-10 times and I really doubt it has tripled since 2008.
If so, so many people don't know what a browser is, you can only image how smooth a distributed social network would have to be to work.
Bit torrent works because it's three steps: 1. Download a bit torrent client, 2. Search Pirate Bay, 3. Click on the torrent. Occasionally, you hear the failure mode: why won't this stupid thing download? The only people who say things like "More people need to seed this" are tech literate.
Bittorrent is different. You don't care who the other nodes are, all you care about is you're connected to some nodes, and the client takes care of that for you.
Like others said, the only way a decentralized facebook would work is when everyone uses one (or two) central nodes (site) which will most likely be run by something like Google or Microsoft, and the end result will be the same: big company has access to all your data.
The "Like" button probably wouldn't work though. If you're some external website, which "like" button will you embed? Google's like button? or Microsoft's?
As a developer of a decentralized social networking project (Appleseed), I think you have a misconception of how these projects work. Your mother will never have to manage any of that stuff. She'll just log in to socialsite.com and interact with your aunt, who's on othersite.org.
If there's an issue with communication between them, the administrators of respective sites will deal with them. Your mom won't notice it anymore than when she notices Facebook's internal servers are experiencing a glitch.
And honestly, people don't "want" centralization of social networking any more than they "wanted" the centralization that AOL featured over the decentralization of the web.
Your mother will never have to manage any of that stuff. She'll just log in to socialsite.com and interact with your aunt, who's on othersite.org.
As I said when Diaspora first started making headlines, this is incorrect. Both your mother and your aunt would be signing in to (name of decentralized social service).google.com, just like everybody else except for a handful of geeks who take pride in running their own nodes.
Because, really, the only way decentralized social networking will work is if everybody ends up centralized again on one node, run for free (most likely) or very cheap (not as likely) by some big company they trust. AKA, Google, who'd certainly love to have access to all the types of data Facebook currently has.
Both your mother and your aunt would be signing in to (name of decentralized social service).google.com, just like everybody else except for a handful of geeks who take pride in running their own nodes.
Or Microsoft's node, or Yahoo's node, or Amazon's node or anyone else with the infrastructure to run a huge scale social site.
But all that aside, you don't consider this a better situation than now, where all data is walled off and silo'd and the biggest player is an effective monopoly with much, much less interest in privacy and data security than Google? And geeks have no option whatsoever to operate a social network independently?
If not, what do you propose, other than acquiescence?
You are assuming that a usable FreedomBox¹ cannot exist. I don't believe that. Debian, Ubuntu, Firefox… demonstrate this is feasible. And there's even less of a UI problem: it'll all go through HTTP.
Imagine a plug&play thingy, which you configure by subscribing to one and only one online-looking service. One subscription for e-mail, instant messaging, Blog, "social" thing, and more. No ads, private infos at home, encryption everywhere, no need to trust any big corporation, reliable automatic backup…
The thing about the FSF is that they have been tremendously influential. Facebook runs on quite a number of technologies released under ... the FSF's GPL.
By setting an extremely high bar, they've managed to get a lot of people to move towards that bar. Not as close as they'd like, I'm sure but much closer than they'd otherwise have moved.
The FSF has made a priceless contribution whether or not we're going to see a world that conforms to their vision.
In fact it's very much like email. You're just sending messages back and forth between people. Really, that's all it is. Most people won't leave Facebook - even if you delivered an electric shock every time they hit the FB website. It's where their friends are.
But there is room in the world for a decentralised and distributed social net. I wrote one (called Friendika). There are people who have a need for a social service of their own. There are online communities which still exist and where people send messages to each other and interact.
It is not whether or not they will replace Facebook. It is simply that Facebook doesn't cater to every social need of every organisation on the planet. Other services need to fill the gaps. One day some will realise that they are spending more time on network 'x' than on Facebook. In fact many of us are doing this today. At that point Facebook becomes irrelevant and loses its grip. Most people don't care who runs the servers. They also don't care if it is centralised or not. All they care about is communicating with people who matter. I would like to point out that girls who rejected you in high school that are now on your Facebook friend list - don't matter. If your mom is on Facebook - chances are that it is reluctantly and she'd much rather you just called her on the phone.
There's no technical reason why a decentralized system can't work. The main road blocks would be finding a compelling reason for people to switch away to one in the first place.
Email is decentralized. It seems to have worked pretty darn well.
Email is just as much a strawman. Compare how simple email is to all of the features Facebook provides (and don't forget your ability to click on your cows in Farmville).
You say there are no technical reasons why it can't work. That is very akin to the "You can do anything, it's just a simple matter of coding." The reality is that some problems become intractable due to their complexity. Distributed social network may not be intractable (Diaspora will probably figure that out), but it's a hell of a lot harder than email.
Just to clarify, when I said 'technical reason' I meant from the perspective of a user being able to setup/configure their social network settings. Not from the perspective of the internal implementation of the server components
Most people do. Not all.
The point being that you could choose to roll your own if you wanted to.
I bet many people on HN have their own domain and their own mail server. Hell, for a few dollars a month you can get a web hosting company to set it up for you.
For those who care about those things, they can do that and still be able to communicate with people who use gmail or yahoo mail.
And it wasn't that hard to find those examples, was it?
The problem with the statement in the original article is that it's not clear if they're referring to blocking torrent sites, or links to Diaspora. In the age of hypertext, it's just polite to link to examples inline, rather than making people hunt down what you're talking about.
To be fair, there are so many examples that it's not unreasonable to expect that people reading the FSF's pages would be familiar with them. I don't think I listed all or even half of the relevant examples.
Even so, you are correct in saying that it would make the piece stronger.
Facebook could (and probably does) collect the data necessary to track people around the web, whether or not they click on 'like buttons'.
Whether other sites, like Google, can do this too, is immaterial. When people are logged into Facebook, an ever increasing slice of their browsing history can be logged and tied to their real identity. Almost none of the people I know who aren't hackers have any awareness of this.
> Whether other sites, like Google, can do this too, is immaterial.
It's material if the FSF isn't putting up a "Google is evil" page on their website and handing out "Don't google me, bro" buttons, like they are doing with Facebook.
The FSF seems to think it's better to attack Facebook with ideological ad corporatio arguments, rather than concentrate their resources on educating people about how to their services intelligently. Facebook isn't sharing anything about me that I don't want them to know. And I understand that if I'm not paying for it, I'm the product. So I don't give them my address or my phone number or my cat's nickname. And that's what I tell every friend and family member on Facebook. I don't tell them that Zuckerberg is "evil". The FSF has tried that before with other companies and you'd think they would have figured out by now that it simply doesn't work.
Google isn't trying to grab all that data. And Google has worked with them to protect private data, including measures like shortening the time it takes them to anonymize the data they've collected.
Facebook, meanwhile, is working to sell your entire social graph to advertisers for profit. If they're being singled out, it's because they're the worst of the lot.
They maintain a very comprehensive and useful listing[1] of 3rd party licenses which goes over their histories, tradeoffs, and whether they're compatible with the GPL.
And that compatibility is treated independently of whether they consider those licenses to be 'Free'.
Of course they'd prefer use of their own licenses, but this self-interest takes a back seat to helping the overall ecosystem.
They've encouraged developers to use GPL, but they've never said it was bad to use BSD/Apache-licensed software. Their website uses the BSD-licensed nginx.
No (said Google). That's what I mean - you really don't understand. You see, I don't care if people come and look at these hen scratches or not. Maybe they will, maybe they won't. As long as I can sell a few advertisements on that page of my guidebook I really don't care. After all, what better praise for a Guidebook than to help people find out what's wrong with it? Just leave your manuscript with me. I'll look after it.
He held out his hand, imperious now. I felt disheveled after my long night. My brain was spinning. I could see no alternative. In a vain attempt to maintain some self-respect I drew myself up to my full height and pulled back my shoulders, adopting a bearing appropriate for my class. "All right Google. Here you go. Don't lose it now."
"Thank you sir. You can be sure I won't lose it. I never do lose anything you know."
I turned away from him and stumbled down the stairs. I had ended up giving him an order, and he had accepted it. Yet I could not shake the impression, even as he brought me a glass of sherry that evening in my sitting room, placing the silver tray beside me with deference, that Mr. Google - far from being a butler and travel guide - was more a master than a servant.
>"He has created a network that is first and foremost a gold mine for government surveillance and advertisers."
It would be nice for more people to realize this. Really, they're lining up like sheep for government monitoring, and Zuckerberg and Co. are happy to comply. FB seems thrilled with the prospect of being the eyes and ears of Big Brother, actually.
Except they didn't make any money, which is the sad irony of the whole situation. Yes, there are likely many others out there willing to do the work, but the fact that H&W, a DoJ-recommended firm, turned to HBGary et al, who didn't have any real experience doing what they said they could, suggests that this isn't something the gov't is doing regularly...yet.
I'm not saying Facebook employees or executives would literally take pleasure in enabling government surveillance, if that's what you're asking for evidence about.
Recently Twitter was the only large internet company of several to challenge a government request for data. We rarely hear about Facebook, Google, Yahoo or really anyone refusing requests for data, while at the same time there have been reports about the vast amount of requests the FBI and other agencies have made under the Patriot Act. The depth and type of information that Facebook has about so many individuals must be highly desirable to many agencies.
People should just read more. Everything is in Facebook's terms and privacy policy, isn't it? If you can't agree with the terms of service, then you shouldn't use the service IMO.
This mentality should also extend to any sites using the "Like" button...they should all be mentioning that they (and their affiliates) place cookies on your system.
Right from Time's privacy policy:
We use cookies to understand Internet usage and to improve our content, offerings and advertisements. For example, we may use cookies to personalize your experience at our web pages (e.g., to recognize you by name when you return to our site), save your password in password-protected areas and enable you to use shopping carts on our sites. We also may use cookies to offer you products, programs or services. Similarly, as part of an arrangement with our business partners (including, those who present or serve the advertisements that you see on our web pages) we may also access cookies placed by others and allow others to access certain cookies placed by us.
We may also use small pieces of code such as "web beacons" or "clear gifs" to collect anonymous and aggregate advertising metrics, such as counting page views, promotion views or advertising responses. These "web beacons" may be used to deliver cookies that conform to our cookie policy. For more information regarding cookies, please click here.
If you're not cool with that, stop visiting the site or disable your cookies. ;)
This is a good point. I'd imagine that if enough users cared about these sorts of privacy issues then traffic would end up declining enough that companies would have to either dismiss Facebook or Facebook would have to stop tracking users. I personally don't see that happening, except for maybe an uprising of a small minority of users. In which case we have to ask, does this stuff actually matter at all?
If most people don't care or are ignorant of whether they're being "tracked" then does it even matter?
I suppose that if this stuff matters to you, you'll have to just maintain a white-list of sites that you'll allow cookies for... hell, maybe it'll be up to the browser companies to bring this sort of issue to the forefront by touting the idea of cookies being disabled by default as a privacy feature.
Edit: Or maybe this issue is already being covered by some browser extensions a la Ghostery and the ilk. I guess it means that if you care enough about it, it's up to you to protect yourself.
Hasn't this been discussed before? The Person of the Year award is supposed to be given to the most influential person of the year, not the nicest or the most ethical one. Zuckerberg did become a widely recognizable person and you can't say he has not become influential too. Joseph Stalin got the award twice, 'nuff said.
Disclaimer: I'm not comparing, just pointing out that the FSF's reaction is kind of attacking the straw man here.
I do believe Facebook has a tad bit more users than Apple products. I also get then feeling, just walking around the area, that people spend more time on Facebook than Google.
How is Assanage more influential? A lot of the opposition groups behind the mass uprisings sweeping the Arab world credit Facebook as a key tool for organizing their revolutions.
Facebook is seriously changing people's lives on a large scale. Wikileaks has mostly provided diplomatic gossip, with a few things tossed in that will harm people, and a smaller number of things tossed in that will help people.
Facebook appears to have had a tremendous effect on countries like Tunisia and Egypt. The alternatives that FSF lists may not have been as effective because of the technical difficulty for a large number of people to set up such a service.
Revolutions've happened before Facebook. There was some anecdotal evidence that more people went on the streets of Egypt when Internet got shut down and they couldn't anymore just sit in front of the computer and read updates.
Thank you!! Because revolutions didn't happen until facebook/twitter were invented. They might have helped, but this was brewing for ummm 30 years or so.
I personally think advertisers knowing more about preferences is better than if they know less.
Every day we are exposed to crapload of advertisement that are in no way related to me and what those ads do is only annoy me. But there is nothing I can do, I cant turn off all the ads on Time Square, or pay the TV network to turn off all of the ads on my favorite tv channels, same for radio (thanks to adblock I manage to get rid of large portion of ads on the web).
If advertisers knew that I am a male ( a no secret, nothing I would hide) it would escape me from being exposed to all of the annoying ads of pads, make up, and other women centric products. that only would be a huge relief.
If advertisers knew I am straight ads for gay social networks would not come up on facebook for me.
I can state at least 10 more points.
The bottom line is, as long as a certain lines are not crossed (like diseases, home address, etc.) letting advertisers know more about us could be good.
"Because so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site"
I thought you had to have a facebook account to "like" something, either on facebook itself or sites with the FB "like" link. Anyone know otherwise?
The "Like" button infrastructure (images, JavaScript) is loaded from Facebook's servers via a cross-domain request. Those servers can theoretically use cookies or IP addresses in conjunction with referrers to do tracking even without clicking Like, for both authenticated and unauthenticated users.
Some content is loaded off of their CDN, which I highly doubt is doing any tracking. The non-CDN pings are quite possibly not doing tracking, but it would be possible for Facebook to enable some tracking with most people never noticing.
facebook has a long history (the entirety of their existence) of being extremely greedy about personal data. Whenever outsiders have had the chance to see inside their thought process on collecting data, it has always been clear they'll collect anything and everything they can. What they're doing with it might not be nefarious; but they love personal data like no company ever before, and go to great lengths to own it.
I'd be surprised if they aren't tracking every request that passes through their servers and gathering usage patterns of everyone on the Internet, regardless of whether someone is logged into facebook or not, and regardless of whether the request originated on a facebook property. That's just the kind of thing facebook does, as far as I can tell. If they aren't doing it already, it's just a matter of time.
I'm speculating that the CDN servers are running stripped-down, static-file-only HTTP servers that don't integrate with a more complex user-identification and logging infrastructure to help with throughput.
I agree that they probably aren't doing complex user-identification...probably no cookies or JavaScript or anything like that happening on their CDN.
But, IP alone would be enough to follow the trail of most people (I know all the caveats about IP!=individual, but that data is still far from worthless), and collecting IP trails would be absolutely trivial and practically free from a performance perspective. The difference in a high performance webserver environment with logging vs. without logging is less than one percent...probably much less.
With a bit of clever data juggling, and logging of user agents and other information about the client, compare that to past visits from the same IP on properties where facebook has more data (from cookies and logged in activity), and identify users by name with pretty good accuracy.
In short: Performance is not a factor for logging, and facebook wouldn't need a large amount of additional cooperation from the client, like cookies or JavaScript bugs, to track users who aren't logged in. They just need to combine the already available log data in useful ways. A big part of the reason all these fancy distributed key/value stores and BigTable imitators exist (and why facebook has developed their own in-house) is for processing exactly this kind of data.
I'm extremely confident that facebook logs everything, though I have no idea what sorts of things they do with the resulting data.
Why wouldn't they be doing tracking? It seems like a big portion of the benefit to them in doing connect/like/etc. They do make their money selling ads, and they are seemingly hot to collect as much information as possible.
It seems like logging enough detail to matter on so many loads would cost more in time and money than the data is worth.
edit: And then I did the math. A 15 byte IP (pretending all IPs are made of four 3 digit numbers) plus a 400 byte URL across 1b accesses is less than half of a terabyte hard drive. Guess we're doomed.
So what if they are tracking? It's a separate issue to whether or not Facebook is controlling data / privacy too much. The same tracking issues with the Like button exist with any technology that is included on a huge number of websites, including advertising networks and Google Analytics (which expressly exists purely to track users!)
It is not inherently evil to track users. What you do with that information decides the morality of the situation. It seems to me that rolling this non-issue into the arguments against Facebook is actually harmful to the FSFs cause - why would they bother telling us about something trivial if they had real concerns to air?†
† I am not saying that there aren't real concerns, or that the FSF isn't airing them - just that airing a non-issue looks bad
Don't look now but Adsense and every other ad network can track your movements online too! In keeping with their Facebook stance, FSF should block the GoogleBot and get off of Google too.
I hate the argument of "Google is doing it too!" Just because someone else is behaving (what I would consider to be) badly doesn't make the behavior any less reprehensible.
That's alright, I wasn't planning on friending the FSF anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that people have the right to their views and their right to licence things and act accordingly, but the zealotry in the FSF is just too much for me to handle.
I believe that with anything the extent that Facebook can do for good equals the extent that it can do for bad. So yes, they have a lot of information that could be used for good, bad, or (more likely) some of both. I certainly don't recall anyone FORCING anyone to click a "like" button nor have a Facebook account. If you are worried about this sort of thing then don't do it. I don't understand why there are so many people attempting to create a rebellion against a service that no one forced them to be a part of.
Does that matter much? The Facebook Likernet is coming, and the FSF will be represented on it, regardless of its preferences.
Also, an FSF fan club without the most doctrinaire FSFers (who refuse to use Facebook) is an interesting syncretic phenomenon in itself, for reasons that both overlap and diverge from the reasons the FSF itself is interesting.
The public at large doesn't care and more to the point and the public at large usually aren't affected by loss of privacy - it doesn't inconvenience them enough to bother them.
Diaspora and other such projects are a complete joke. People aren't going to run their own server. Make it easy, make it fast and get their friends to use it, that's it. Nothing else matters.
Why do people keep repeating this fallacy? People won't have to. None of these projects are focused on single-user P2P approach. For all of 30 seconds, Diaspora insinuated that, but that was before they had actually written any code.
If you feel these projects (including mine) is a joke, I'd love to hear feedback why, but please don't repeat falsehoods about how the software is meant to be used.
Simplicity mostly. People want to be abstracted away from the nitty gritty details. Open ID failed because you couldn't explain it to your grandmother. But you can explain, "oh yeah, you can just click this button and login with your facebook account" Maybe this is just marketing.
If individuals don't run their own server and hold control of their own data, then who does? Whoever is running the node.
I know as nerds, we like to get our geek boners over cool projects that aren't mainstream, and fight the man and all, but people on the street could give a crap less. It means that these are stillborn ideas. Does this mean you should stop fighting the good fight? No, but I wouldn't hold my breath for critical mass.
people on the street could give a crap less. It means that these are stillborn ideas.
People don't need to know what an apache, django or drupal is in order to use a website based on it. It's a fallacy to think that the user has to be aware of what the underlying software is in order for that software to catch on.
> Open ID failed because you couldn't explain it to your grandmother.
Counter example: XMPP/Jabber. People who use Jabber can talk to each other with no problems. Including Google Talk, which is a huge use base. I regularly talk to friends on Google Talk with my account on my local server.
Another large counter example: SMTP. Put someone's address in your email program and it just works. Plenty of people run their own email server, despite them being notoriously complicated to set up.
FSF doesn't like a service that doesn't operate exactly how the FSF thinks they should. Shocking.
I don't take anything they or their pseudo-communist leader say seriously anymore. Back when Stallman started attacking OpenBSD because of their ports tree I knew he had finally lost it.
I expect that by "communism" the poster means "a belief system I don't agree with"[0]. (In fairness, given that there are probably dozens of mutually-incompatible Marxist/socialist/communist philosophies, combined with the poster's use of the prefix "pseudo", means that pretty much any belief can, with sufficient effort, be described as "pseudo-communist".)
[0] (My understanding (I'm Canadian) is that this use of the word is a rather quaint Americanism, and has, fortunately, mostly failed to propagate into other dialects of English.)
because it gives my rant a nice tinge of political edginess.
I view the FSF as software socialists, as in they have a utopian view of how things should be and everyone should buy in and give all of their stuff to everyone else for the good of the community. I also view socialism as an impossible ideal to achieve. In my opinion, all attempts at socialism have ended in communism, where the ruling class tells the people they have socialism but in reality the people at the top of the chain don't buy into it and live much better lives.
Finally, I used the prefix "pseudo" because obviously we're talking about software and not the rise and fall of empires (although Facebook is sort of a digital empire) so I didn't want to attach a full-on label of "communism" to it.
edit: I'm sure someone who has studied politics way more than I have will come in here and point out that I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground, and that's fine. I bitched about the FSF and I feel better so my mission was accomplished.
Yes, vote me down further! PUNISH ME FOR USING WORDS YOU DO NOT LIKE.
I'm sure someone who has studied politics way more than I have will come in here and point out that I don't know my ass from a hole in the ground, and that's fine.
Hello! :)
Socialism, Communism, et all are very broad terms. It would behoove any points you make to not use them pejoratively, because they are simply too broad to use in the way you're using them. Especially utopianism, which no more describes socialists than it describes many capitalists.
You could make an argument that the FSF follows the ideals of a very soft libertarian socialism, but that's a stretch.
The FSF is very single-issue, they don't talk about social equality, they don't even have a critique of capitalism and wages. If they're communists, they're particularly undeveloped ones.
He's against software copyrights (in their current form) but he's not against trade-marks, for example, which are usually included in the vague term "intellectual property".
Stallman repeatedly condemns the use of the term "intellectual property", because it: A) lumps together a bunch of unrelated/dissimilar things (Copyrights, patents, trade marks, trade secrets) and B) because it implies that they are all "property" and should be owned, like property, perpetually.
Consequently, it's not clear to me how it's possible even to have a free market in intellectual work product, as opposed to a free market in labor, without some kind of legally-enforceable rights in intellectual property.
Bias disclosure: I'm an IP lawyer by background.
EDIT: The GPL couldn't exist without IP rights, that is, the right (under copyright law) to haul others into court to force them to comply with the GPL terms or to fine them for failing to do so.
The fair criticism of Stallman is that he is absolutist, idealist, extreme, and uncompromising. Whether those things are positive or negative is really up to how you feel about the relative importance of Free Software vs. other issues.
I am personally willing to compromise quite a bit on the free software issues for other gains, but I think the "right to read" consideration for consuming materials other than code are less ok for compromise. I use and enjoy facebook, but look at their motivations and culture as a company before deciding how much to trust them.
I trust the people at facebook a lot more than a lot of companies, so one of my main concerns with facebook is that third parties might purchase, steal, or compel access to their data to use against users (e.g. Corrupt governments).
Yeah, that was an attempt at sarcasm. Clearly it didn't work.
I was tying to imply that FSF types want all web apps to be accessible via the command line. <sarcasm>Because who needs a fancy tabbed browser when you've got lynx?</sarcasm>
Just for the record, I am well aware of what Unix pipes are and how to use them :)
I don't entirely understand why you would spend your time trying to imply something about the FSF that is completely unrelated to what the FSF cares about. Could you fill me in, perhaps?
I tried to make a joke playing off the stereotype of what some people think those working for the FSF look like. In short that they're all typical unix grey beards and are professional internet curmudgeons. It didn't work. Sorry.
> so many sites — including TIME — use Facebook's user-tracking "Like" button, Zuckerberg is able to collect information about people who aren't even users of his site. These are precedents which hurt our ability to freely connect with each other. He has created a network that is first and foremost a gold mine for government surveillance and advertisers.
I would think just about any popular web site would be a gold mine for such information. It has nothing to do with Facebook. Doesn't this sentence hold true if we replace Facebook with Google? This seems like a tinfoil/scare everyone into believing Facebook is evil and out to get you.
> and then maybe relays it to the intended destination, if it suits him. In some cases he does not — witness the recent reports of Facebook's messaging service blocking messages based on the words and links in them, because those links point to services which Facebook would prefer we not discuss.
Comeon, examples/proof please. Is Facebook blocking URLs to competition or child porn sites? There is a pretty big difference here.
I would think that the FSF should be on Facebook, trying to spread their message, gaining support, and discovering new users. They have an interesting problem, a lot of support, and some very big challenges ahead of them... and yet they spend time publishing articles like this and making fancy dislike buttons. FSF you should be ashamed.