When cars were invented, producing them in large numbers, operating them efficiently and comfortably would have been a major concern while anyone talking about safety would be ridiculed. As it turned out engineering challenges were sorted out by economic incentives but car safety/pollution control had to be legislated.
In case of cars though wrong design choices in older cars could be phased out eventually but in case of online platforms the choices will remain there for more number of people in terms of market penetration given the explosion social networks are having in the last decade. Even if vast majority of people prioritize other things over privacy, vocal and knowledgeable minority need to raise the concerns of the choices unknowingly being made by less knowledgeable people.
Nothing to do with that. This was Supreme Court decision and government will probably challenge it.
Even if Cryptocurrency helps in some dire situation arising out of COVID-19, facilitating cryptocurrency would be lowest of priorities for the government.
Apart from that Common Crawl respects robots.txt (which makes sense) so many sites you expect to see there are not indexed. Netflix, Facebook LinkedIn and many more. If common-crawl sees serious adoption those sites will modify their robots.txt but it's and chicken/egg problem.
Because then you end up in an arms race that the little guy usually does not win.
There are a significant number of crawlers out there that don't respect robots.txt. The usual response to them isn't to roll over dead, it's to get CloudFlare (on the technological end) and/or sic the lawyers on them (for CFAA, IP, or ToS violations).
These are new powers and they are intrusive but they will likely get challenged in the court based on above judgement. Honestly though very few of average citizens care for government to take notice.
Didn't downvote, but here is a short explanation from one of those who prefer images to videos:
Some of us have a high threshold to watching videos. The reasons might vary from person to person (bandwidth, easily bored, firewalls, blocking every video because of autoplaying ads etc) but the fact is if text is not enough and there are no screenshots there is a significant chance I might have already hit the back button.
And before anyone goes off about entitlement: often I'm just reading something quickly while waiting for something else.
If I visit a page hoping for information, and there is a video with no text or other supporting context, I will close the tab immediately. If there is a video and something to read, I will make sure the video is not playing and then read the text. Images are no problem.
I understood these concepts by reading this book. It is great book for anyone wanting to go from intermediate to advanced or may be even beginner to advanced level
You can go on using Javascript for years without understanding some basic concepts like "value of this does not depend on where that function is defined but the way it is called".
I am just trying to understand the difference. But why not consider Javascript extension of server side code. I don't think, anybody is stopping use of websites just because their back-end is not open source.
Is it because we own our desktop and we don't allow non-free code to execute on our machines? If not then it is just issue of proximity, your laptop vs distant data center. If it is more philosophical point that we should not use non-free software then using website running on closed source back-end is as much a problem as obfuscated Javascript.
I actually asked Stallman about this once at a talk. It is precisely because we own our desktop. The analog he used was a food truck. It's fine to eat something from a food truck that somebody else prepares, even if there's a secret sauce you don't know about. The issue is being given the food truck and then being told that you must still use the sauce whose contents are opaque to you.
That being said, I don't really care much about using non-GPL programs. But that's the rationale.
Your recitation of his response does not address the OP's point, and my smarmy comment was downvoted.
So, let's see if we can work up this wishy-washy analogy a bit.
I like to eat food. (I like to use software.)
Much of the food I eat is prepared by vendors who employ 100% documented citizens or immigrants with valid visas. (Much of the software I use is 100% Free.)
Some of the vendors employ undocumented immigrants. (Some of the software I use contains nonFree components.)
My ability to get this food from these vendors depends on a number of other vendors - even a simple sandwich needs bread, meat, vegetables and condiments all sourced from and delivered by companies that may or may not employ undocumented immigrants.
I may purchase a completely prepared meal and eat it at home. (I may install and run boxed software locally on my machine.) I may purchase ingredients and prepare a meal from scratch. (I may obtain source code and locally build software to run on my machine.) I may purchase both raw ingredients and some pre-cooked food to take on a picnic. (Modern software distribution is complex, and "using a website" is a vague reference umbrella.)
In each of these scenarios, to eat my desired meal, I may need to source an ingredient produced by a complex system chain which may or may not have involved undocumented immigrants. Tracking this information down for every ingredient is tedious, but I agree should absolutely be possible.
I could prepare all of my meals myself, in my own kitchen, and source all of the raw ingredients from a small number of vendors whom I trust. I would probably have a limited number of basic ingredients to work with at the beginning. I would probably be able to produce reasonably healthy, functional meals. I would not be able to produce a rich menu that appealed to a variety of tastes, however. (A basic GNU system is pretty functional but you've got to wire up most things yourself.) I would have to work with these vendors frequently and would spend much more time managing the ingredients in my kitchen and preparing meals. I would also likely be limited in what I could produce by my locality and kitchen equipment. (Data must be created locally and hardware must be self-managed.)
I might trust these same vendors to prefabricate side dishes (system libraries) or larger heat-at-home dishes (application source bundles) that I integrate into my day-to-day meals. I may gain some variety because they can prepare dishes that I do not have the skill or kitchen equipment to prepare myself. (The trust that I confer on these vendors for not using undocumented immigrant labor does not prevent me from contracting a case of salmonella. [Heartbleed.])
I can get food in many forms from many varieties of vendors - delivered meals, take-out meals from a restaurant eaten at home, sit-down meals at a restaurant, meals from a food truck eaten on a nearby patio, meals from a food truck eaten at home... (Apps, desktop, websites, servers. Simply browsing the modern web means code runs in response to your every input on hundreds of machines around the globe.)
Sometimes my act of eating employs undocumented immigrants. Crap.
There are plenty of people choosing not to use certain services because of the politics of their companies, business models, and yes software.
The calculus changes when you go from client to server software, but licensing is intimately tied to data ownership and portability.
I often don't subscribe to FSF's philosophy, but the issues they're generally concerned with do enter into my decisions about what services I use and/or trust.
The code that generated the resource you're viewing, regardless of script content, may not be Free. The code running the server may not be Free, and that might not be part of the details of the transmission. There is probably plenty of nonFree code in the hardware that got your packets there and back.
In case of cars though wrong design choices in older cars could be phased out eventually but in case of online platforms the choices will remain there for more number of people in terms of market penetration given the explosion social networks are having in the last decade. Even if vast majority of people prioritize other things over privacy, vocal and knowledgeable minority need to raise the concerns of the choices unknowingly being made by less knowledgeable people.