> There's no longer any argument in favor of an ad model when you're paying 20-30 dollars a month already
Sure there is. CEO needs a new yacht. He can't afford to leave money on the table. All those subscribers? They must have a lot of disposable income if they can afford to blow it on "journalism". It would be stupid not to advertise to them.
Stallman has always been right. Took me many years to understand just how far he saw into the future. It's mind boggling just how right he was about everything.
The current status quo is corporations and governments are locking the hardware down, rendering free software irrelevant. Sure, you can hack your computer, but if you do it fails remote attestation and is marked as untrustworthy by other computers on the internet. "Tampered with" your machine? Can't access bank account, can't message others, can't stream content, can't even play video games, maybe one day we won't even be able to connect to an ISP. Hackers in control of their systems are marginalized, ostracized second class citizens now. Only corporate and government owned devices can participate in the wider ecosystem now. If you own your machine you're banned from everything.
And it's only going to get worse. Stallman is losing this war. Computing freedom is being destroyed and there's little that can be done about it. We do not have the power. Our values are irrelevant to the wider population. It's a damn shame.
> Our values are irrelevant to the wider population.
This is the saddest part. Things are getting worse for everyone and most people just don't care. They are either ignorant or accept it as inevitable.
I see 2 issues:
1) People don't have real power. There's too many steps between an issue you care about and a solution which requires changing laws. I don't see a solution other than people voting on laws directly and possibly votes weighted by how much they actually know about the stuff. How to implement it at reasonable cost is a very difficult question.
2) You can't make people care. People only start caring once they personally get hurt. Theoretical downsides don't interest most of the population. Freedom of speech is something they've learned at school about and they know they are supposed to cheer for it but when a platform requires spelling fuck as f*ck, that's OK with them - it might be the canary in the coal mine before more sophisticated censorship (analysis of sentiment/meaning, shadow bans) is rolled out but that's a theoretical concern, if they are able to comprehend it at all. And even when they get hurt, they often don't learn from it. I've seen plenty of people lose accounts on various platforms but all they do is switch to another proprietary platform, without looking for real alternatives.
unless the general population somehow freaks into privacy and anonymity and independency, it seems slowly losing (i don't hold my breath, seen enough "freebies" that later turn into highly-paid and noone bothering). Or said in another way, it seems like.. irrelevant?
But you never know. May be garage-made ESP64-meshes will appear, in a parallel "universe". Or whatever. When things get hot..
> May be garage-made ESP64-meshes will appear, in a parallel "universe".
I've been posting this idea for a while. We need a way to manufacture free computers at home, just like we can write free software at home. That's the only way we'll have a chance at winning the war on general purpose computing. Semiconductor fabs cost billions of dollars, they are single points of failure, easily controlled by governments and industry interests. We'll never be free as long as we depend on them for our machines.
If this continues, one day we'll not even be able to buy general purpose computers anymore. Computers are too subversive, too powerful for "mere citizens" to have access to. Give people free computers and they can make a mockery of things like copyright, they can wipe out entire sectors of the economy. Give people free computers and they have access to encryption which is capable of defeating police, judges, spies, militaries. They don't want us having unrestricted access to this powerful stuff. This is similar to the right to bear arms in the USA.
Normal people? They'll surrender all their power and freedom no questions asked. They'll give it all up with literally zero resistance. Corporations tell them they need to own their computers. They need it to stop malware, to stop cheating in video games, whatever. And they believe it. They believe it so much when you try to make a stand for freedom they come and they argue with you about it. They trade freedom for security and convenience every single time. It's so sad.
One sort of "big-picture" idea that I've seen that I think is generally useful is kind of like this: For a VERY long time, Linux was kind of a joke for most.
But I realized that, it being 1% of desktops was still VITALLY IMPORTANT, even when it was never huge -- it provided enough "background pressure" for mainstream things to not screw up overly badly.
I see e.g. "homelabs" and "self-hosting" as doing that right now. And, again, given that Linux won :) -- we will see.
Not only did it provide that background pressure, but desktop software is a complex domain. So it often pushes the bounds of Linux software overall. Systemd is the example I have in mind here, but I’m sure there are others too that I’m not thinking of.
YUP. Old timer here. I remember like having e.g. my Apple II, and somewhat later Stallman saying, e.g. "they're going to be able to reach into your device and burn your ebooks."
And I distinctly remember thinking how absolutely out of his mind PARANOID this man was. Because, you know, books and all are just files. And in what possible universe could you and would you build in the possibility of some other remote person having the ability to hack into the device that's IN YOUR HANDS and do something crazy like that?
By focusing strictly on software, we can argue that Stallman mostly won, and I think the mistake would be conflating software freedom with freedom freedom.
Freedom freedom will ALWAYS be hard, no matter what. People who want to take it away will use whatever tools are there to do it. Stallman et al saw that it was special to put guardrails around the very specific notion of "we have general purpose machines that can run any software, the ability to run ANY software must be protected."
And that, today, is overwhelmingly more true than false. You, or groups, can get a computer, hook it to the internet, and run whatever you want. Like "Linux," that doesn't GUARANTEE perfection, but it's an essential step.
AKA, I shudder to think what would have happened if Microsoft had developed AI in house.
> This is because Marco Rubio and a cadre of wealthy elite immigrants who fled communism in the last half century have this grand vision of revenge
Maybe. Combating communism in south america is certainly a noble goal. Maduro is one of many communists that plague this region and his fall will undoubtedly contribute to significant power shifts in south american politics.
But it's not Marco Rubio who holds the power, it's Donald Trump. And Trump absolutely will deal with communists if it's profitable for him and/or the USA. His dealings with Brazil prove it. He embarrassed not only Rubio but various other staff and arguably his entire administration by leveraging tariffs and Magnitsky sanctions into some kind of deal with the communist brazilian president.
Trump could not care less about communism in south america. His past discourse on the matter of Venezuela is entirely focused on oil. He's been talking about seizing the resources for years. It's also easy to see how doing so benefits him and his country greatly.
I was hoping that he'd also end up unwittingly fighting the communists and drug gangs over the course of his war so that south america as a whole might at least reap some benefit but now it looks like even that was too much to hope for.
Your way of life got destroyed by a guy in a cave half the world away, and then a dictator of a small country finished the job with some propaganda and some cash to grease the right palms. A response can be quite effective even if it isn't by men in uniform.
It's not "my" way of life. I'm not american. I'm just saying that it's a basic geopolitical fact that anyone who's actually foolish enough to declare war on the USA is going to get killed.
Military response means men in uniform battling for their country. Terrorism is not a military response, it's one of several ways to cope with the enemy's superior military forces. They can't overtly bomb america back to the stone age, so they resort to tradecraft and clandestine operations.
It actually works, which is why governments pull all the stops when it comes to fighting terrorists. Even this plays into their ideological objective of forcing america to compromise on its founding principles, thereby corrupting it from within.
> I'm just saying that it's a basic geopolitical fact that anyone who's actually foolish enough to declare war on the USA is going to get killed.
That's mostly true. But a bunch of Saudi's got away with it and are still getting away with it.
> They can't overtly bomb america back to the stone age, so they resort to tradecraft and clandestine operations.
> It actually works, which is why governments pull all the stops when it comes to fighting terrorists. Even this plays into their ideological objective of forcing america to compromise on its founding principles, thereby corrupting it from within.
Precisely. So now try to imagine what the effect would be if the USA started to engage in wars on the American continent. You reap what you sow and if you're the biggest bully on the block that isn't going to be any use if you can't protect your backside.
All this talk of invading Greenland, Canada, Mexico, Cuba and I probably missed some is going to backfire spectacularly, and in many ways it already does.
I live in one of Venezuela's neighboring countries. Everybody knows he wants the oil. Everybody knows there's pretty much nothing we can do if he attacks in order to get it. America's military capabilities are so far beyond south america that it's actually pretty sad. There's nothing to do but try to look at the bright side.
Honestly, I was hoping for an actual war against the drug gangs. Had he gone to war and won, he would have taken care of a huge problem for us. I for one would have been extremely grateful. Now it looks like he's going to get his oil without any fighting whatsoever.
> At what point does privacy mean blending in with the crowd and not sticking out?
It's basically rule number one. Tor is all about making all users look like the same user. The so called anonymity set. They all look the same, so you can't tell them apart from each other.
I read here that most of the Tor exit nodes are operated by governments and governments are using parallel construction to keep that information out of legal documents.
Well, yes. They control ISPs and exit nodes, therefore they can correlate entries into and exits out of the Tor network, narrowing down candidate lists until only one user remains. Essentially a nation scale version of the Harvard bomb threat correlation:
As noted in the article, it wasn't the failure of Tor that led to arrest, it was poor OPSEC. Failure to cover, failure to conceal and failure to compartment.
Sure there is. CEO needs a new yacht. He can't afford to leave money on the table. All those subscribers? They must have a lot of disposable income if they can afford to blow it on "journalism". It would be stupid not to advertise to them.
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