Richard Stallman's Personal Site
I
continue to be the Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project.
I do not intend to stop any time soon.
Send comments/questions about the search engine to: rms at gnu dot org
Talks
Due to Covid-19, the talks in Spain will not occur on the dates
previously planned, but we will reschedule them for when they can be
held.
TO BE RESCHEDULED: Valencia - Spain
Start Time: TBA
Title: Copyright vs Comunidad
Location: Sala La Mutant - Carrer de Joan Verdeguer, 22 - 46024 València
Sponsor: Asociación de Usuarios GNU/Linux de Valencia / Las Naves
TO BE RESCHEDULED: Alcoy (Alicante) - Spain
Start Time: TBA
Title: Software Libre para tu libertad
Location: Universidad Politécnica de Valencia - Campus Alcoy, Calle
Rigoberto Albors 8 - 03801 Alcoy, Alicante
Sponsor: Asociación de Usuarios GNU/Linux de Valencia / Universidad
Politécnica de Valencia - Campus de Alcoy
TO BE RESCHEDULED: Castellón - Spain
Start Time: TBA
Title: Software Libre para tu libertad
Location: Sala La Bohemia - Calle Císcar 14 - 12003 Castellón de La
Plana, Valencia
Sponsor: Asociación de Usuarios GNU/Linux de Valencia / Sala La Bohemia
RSS site feed for the most recent
political notes and new material.
This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman.
The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of
the Free Software Foundation or
the GNU Project.
For the sake of separation, this site has always been
hosted elsewhere and managed separately.
If you want to send me GPG-encrypted mail, do not trust key
servers!
Some of them have phony keys under my name and email address,
made by someone else as a trick.
See gpg.html for my real key.
In San Francisco: Vote for progressive
Shahid Buttar in the Democratic primary to replace Nancy Pelosi.
In part of Illinois, vote for Marie Newman for Congress over Dan
Lipinski in the Democratic primary.
I am looking for a few more volunteers to help install new
political notes on the site. If you'd like to help me in this
way, please write to rms at gnu period org.
Is your bank pressuring you to use biometric ID?
If so, please write to rms at gnu dot org.
It could be useful if you document what is happening.
Link Policy
The largest part of the site is the
political notes, and they
are typically updated every day.
I'm looking for people to…
-
make a progressive candidate's web site usable in the Free World.
A progressive candidate would like a volunteer to make per
web site work fully in the Free World. If you are
experienced in web
development and want to help, please email rms.
- get info about Delta face recognition.
Delta
Airlines' web
site says clearly that using face
recognition to for departures is optional.
However, there are reports that in the airport they cover this up.
Would someone flying on Delta out of Atlanta please record the
announcements about face recognition for checkin and
boarding? And what the checkin agent says to you about
rejecting the face recognition. Also please take photos of
any signs that talk about the matter. Then please send me
email about what you saw/heard.
-
find articles about games that lure and pressure users
into spending a lot of money on competitive advantages, or letting
their children do so. I've concluded this is a form of malicious
functionality, and I want to make a list to add to
https://gnu.org/malware/. If you know of an article, please email me
the URL.
- send me examples of how proprietary programs have been
designed to be addictive.
- send me examples of how proprietary programs have been
designed to cause programmed obsolescence of products.
- browse various sites and show me
items that I ought to see and link to. If you would like to help me
in this way, please write to rms at gnu dot o r g.
- (in India) make and sell buttons that say, "DON'T BE
TRACKED PAY CASH", in English and/or a local
language, to resist the campaign against
cash. Talk with a local company that makes buttons, buy a
batch of 50 to 500 buttons for a quantity price, then sell
them for 2 or 3 times that price.
- volunteer to post videos of my talks on audio-video.gnu.org.
- help
maintain and operate savannah.gnu.org.
- help web sites put free licenses
on their Javascript code.
- write site-specific Firefox extensions
or local scripts to operate specific web sites.
- develop a Firefox front end to search the Internet Archive
with Javascript disabled (or LibreJS active).
- experiment to find good ways to attach
fruits to a Grav-mass tree.
Please email rms at the gnu site if you want to volunteer for any
of those activities. For the Grav-mass decorations, please email
only if you come up with a good way.
Civil Liberties Minute:
![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
graphic by Susan Henson
Americans, you may wish to copy this icon to your own page, as a
way of showing what patriotism means to you.
US citizens: call on Gilead Sciences to commit now to license its
COVID-19 drug, if approved, to all qualified producers, in exchange
for a modest royalty.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to establish a right to medical care
for everyone in the US.
If you call, please spread the word!
I am looking for reports of malicious functionalities in Zoom.
Please send me URLs of credible reports — I can't repeat a
mere rumor.
US citizens: call on world leaders
not
to use Covid-19 as an opportunity to deny basic rights.
You will almost surely live to see Covid-19 be eliminated, but if you
surrender any freedoms now without a fight, except in a carefully
limited way, you miss those freedoms for the rest of your life.
*"Temporary" powers in an emergency have a habit of becoming
permanent. In these circumstances, paranoia appears more a necessity
than a delusion.*
*Yet it remains true that technology is not destiny. Politics counts
for more than algorithms. Just as tyrannical governments, from
Hungary to China, are using the pandemic to impose more controls, so
democratic societies
will
need to show a liberal response to the virus.*
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: support the
Universal
School Meals Program bill.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Secretary Mnuchin to
suspend
sanctions on Iran for 120 days.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the House to
pass
the Ban Fracking Act.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to
reject
Stephen Schwartz as a federal judge.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to refuse the demand to suspend habeas corpus. Doing so would allow thugs to arrest people and jail them for
any length of time.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Senator McConnell to stop interfering with who
will have the job of investigating the alleged corruption of
Elaine Chao, Saboteur of Transportation, who is (as it happens) his wife.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call for an investigation of each
congresscritter or senator who is suspected of profiting from Covid-19 by
selling stock based on inside information.
Commentary about this issue.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the House of Representatives to pass the
Ban Fracking Act.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the FCC to use its authority to put a stop to
dangerous Covid-19 disinformation on broadcast TV.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on US governments to release old prisoners and sick
prisoners.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call for many steps to keep people safe from
catching Covid-19 in prison.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the US to remove all military forces from Iraq.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Boston Globe and the L.A. Times to stop
charging for access to coronavirus coverage.
Paying to access an article these days generally requires running
nonfree Javascript code, and tracks who reads the article. I consider
each of those an injustice, and I won't stand for either of them.
Therefore, if an article is thoroughly paywalled, I do without seeing
it.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: 51 Republican senators voted against offering paid sick
leave to additional American workers. If any of them is your senator,
phone per office now and rebuke per.
(Please respect gender neutrality and number agreement together,
by referring to a single person of unspecified gender as
"perse" and "per".)
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on the Senate to reject the political appointment of
John Ratcliffe as DNI.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Facebook to fact-check political ads.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Congress to pass legislation to provide national
paid sick leave. For everyone, that is.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on Louisiana Governor Edwards to implement a rent
freeze and a moratorium on layoffs, evictions and water shut-offs in
the state of Louisiana.
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call on New York Governor Cuomo to end the prison injustices
that make prisoners vulnerable to Covid-19.
If you call, please spread the word!
Residents of Massachusetts: call on Massachusetts legislators to
pass
the moratorium on government use of face recognition.
I gave this personal message:
I urge you to pass the proposed moratorium on use of face recognition
in Massachusetts government activities.
This is only a first step. Systematic use of face recognition technology,
and the systems that can do so, should be very strictly regulated.
The operations of Clearview AI should be illegal regardless of what
sort of entity carries them out, whether it be public or private.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens:
stop
Wall Street from using the coronavirus to
weaken bank regulations.
If you sign, please spread the word!
US citizens: call your congresscritter at (202) 224-3121 and call for
strong action to protect Americans from the effects of the epidemic.
Please support these proposed actions:
-
Guaranteed paid sick leave for ALL employees
-
Extended Medicaid
-
Immediate one-time payments of $1,500 to every adult and $500 to every
child
-
Suspension of the Trump administration’s “public charge” rule that
enables federal officials to deny green cards to immigrants who use
social safety net programs
If you call, please spread the word!
US citizens: call your congresscritter and say to reject the bully's plan to cut Social Security funds in order to fund response to Covid-19.
If you call, please spread the word!
"Quarantine soirees" and digital freedom: does any of the live streams described here respect freedom?
The usual forms of digital oppression are
-
Requiring nonfree software, often with DRM.
Warning: this may be Javascript code; to check for it,
use LibreJS.
- Identifying people.
- Imposing an antisocial contract ("terms of service").
Experience suggests that all of those streams are oppressive, but I'd like to know if any of them is not.
If you try one and find it to be oppressive, I hope you will not go
ahead with installing that nonfree software, entering your personal
data, or agreeing to the terms. Get a copy of some music which does
not oppress those who listen to it, and listen to that instead.
It would be useful to inform the organization's personnel of your
objections to its computing practices. Keep in mind that they have
probably never thought about these issues, never even heard the idea
that there might be something wrong with the usual practices that they
imitated or were taught by some "expert". So be prepared to explain,
and not in an angry tone.
For streaming, the program they should be using is called IceCast.
Recording of Guantanamero
Listen to the
recording
of
Guantanamero,
a protest song written in Spanish. The recording is in
Ogg Vorbis format. To install an Ogg Vorbis player,
see
the FSF's Ogg Players page.
-
The staff of a Chicago medical organization are suing because it identified
them with fingerprints for each shift.
I think it is bad that the employer has their fingerprints at all.
Is it possible to authenticate people with a biometric that is
normally hidden?
-
10% of the workers in Britain have been captured by
the piecework
sweatshop dis-services.
We must extend all the rights and benefits of employees to cover
these forms of work.
-
Thousands of Americans — perhaps hundreds of thousands
— have been killed because judges sealed evidence of
deadly defects in products and kept the defects secret for years
as more people died. The dangerous flaws of OxyContin, which
spread opioid addiction, were
concealed
for 12 years.
Trade secrecy is always bad for the public.
Occasionally it is deadly, but usually merely harmful. We
should change the law so that no significant problem can be
concealed in this way.
Busineses should not be allowed to enforce an NDA to conceal
mistreatment of workers, customers, or the public.
Agreeing to nondisclosure of generally useful technical
information, such as software, is betrayal of society as a
whole. I refuse on principle to do this.
-
A woman in Alabama has
been charged
with manslaughter for getting shot while pregnant. The
state treats the fetus as a person.
More
information.
This is the natural conclusion of the twisted premises of those
who treat fetuses as sacred.
But the problem may be broader than that. Suppose she had been
shot while carrying a three-year-old child in her arms? Suppose
someone else had shot at her and killed the child.
I don't think people should be prosecuted for the effects of
being shot at.
-
Facebook treats
the video moderators like shit. And that's in addition to
the depression they feel from watching the videos.
The article gives no evidence that Utley's death was caused by
his job, but the way the managers treated it is despicable even
if they did not cause it.
Naturally, these workers are subcontracted, so that Facebook can
deny responsibility for how they are treated. But Facebook is
in fact responsible: it demands contractors offer a low price,
which they achieve by treating the workers like shit. We need
laws to hold companies like Facebook responsible for the
treatment of indirect workers, and give them employee rights
such as sick leave.
It should be a felony for employees of a company to ask a worker
to sign a nondisclosure agreement covering any aspect of the
working conditions, benefits, or pay.
-
Senate Democrats have introduced a data privacy bill which begins, though
just barely, to limit collection of some data.
But it has obvious loopholes. It won't require companies to reveal
the conclusions they have deduced from the personal data they have
access to — because they argue that those are not "the client's
data." It won't, as far as I can see, limit the targeted ads that are
the basis for surveillance capitalism.
And it won't even try to make it possible to buy something over the
internet anonymously. We have the technology for this.
The most sensitive personal data about you are where you go during the
day, what you do there, who you talk with, and what what you and they
say. It should be illegal to set up or operate a system which systematically collects any of those data, except when authorized
by a court order targeted at specific people.
I propose a law requiring stores to offer the service of bringing an
item to the store for you to buy later, in exchange for an ordering
fee paid in advance.
-
Tenants in Atlantic Plaza Towers campaigned against installing face
recognition cameras and got the landlord to back down.
It should be illegal to install face recognition cameras in a
residential building, except for cameras installed inside an
apartment by the residents of that apartment.
-
*Amazon will pay $0 in taxes on $11,200,000,000 in profit for 2018.* Precisely how Amazon achieves this is a secret.
How about requiring all corporations operating in the US (or whichever
counry it may be) to publish their full international accounts?
-
*Calls grow for laws requiring firms to reveal links to deforestation.*
I am generally skeptical about systems which expect company A to make
sure supplier B doesn't engage in practice C. The problem is, A has
every incentive not to try very hard to stop B from doing C and
covering it up.
I wonder if it might be more effective to impose on all possibly
deforestation-related products an import tariff whose rate is based the
fraction of deforestation in the country of production since a given
base year. The tariff function could be 1/R - 1, where R is the
fraction of the forest in the year 2000 which still survives. After
90% deforestation, the tariff would be 8 times the exporter's selling
price.
More items where there
ought to be a law.
Quotes
Here are some
quotations that I particularly like.
The four factors of the apocalypse:
global heating, global hating,
global eating, global mating.
[More Cartoons]
Copy this button (courtesy of R.Siddharth)
to express your rejection of Facebook.
E-books
Non-oppressive Commercial
E-books
Don't use Facebook
Facebook's face
recognition demonstrates a threat to everyone's privacy. I
therefore ask people not to put photos of me on Facebook; you
can do likewise.
Of course, Facebook is bad for
many other reasons as well.
No national identity cards
I'd like to make a list of countries that do not require a national
identity card, and have no plans to adopt one. If you live in or have
confirmed knowledge of such a country, please send email to rms at
gnu.org.
Here's my list of countries with no national ID cards
and no plans for one: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK.
Australia's previous government tried to
institute national ID cards, but the Labor government dropped
the plan.
India has mostly finished imposing a national biometric ID number
in a grand act of oppression.
Switzerland has national ID cards which are optional,
but they or some other government ID card are needed for some purposes.
Iceland doesn't have ID cards as such, but they
have ID numbers that citizens are forced to use frequently.
For example, the national ID number is often required to
rent a video or use a gym.
Denmark issues non-photo ID cards with a "person number", and many
services use this card to identify people.
Norway will impose a national
biometric
ID card.
Ireland
- national ID card by stealth.
ACLU: the
five dangers of national ID cards.
Wikipedia has a list of identity card policies by country.
Borders
Stay away from certain countries because of their
bad
immigration policies.
Flight connections
Avoid flight connections in these airports because
of their
treatment of passengers.
The Lifelong Activist
People often ask how I manage to continue devoting myself to
progressive activism (such as the free software movement) for
years without burning out. The best way I can answer is by
recommending a book,
The Lifelong Activist by Hillary Rettig.
I disagree with the book on one theoretical point in the last
part of the book: we shouldn't think of political activism as
being marketing and sales, because those terms refer to
business, and politics is something much more
important than mere business. However, this doesn't diminish
the value of the book's practical advice about borrowing
techniques from marketing and sales.
Disclosure: I am friends with the author.
Bob Chassell
Writing (mostly science fiction) by my
friend Bob Chassell who recently died.
Solidarity Economy and Free Software
Personal Declaration of Richard Stallman and Euclides Mance
on Solidarity Economy and Free Software.
Falkvinge articles
I have reposted some of Rick Falkvinge's articles.
As posted on his site, you can't see them in a browser
without running some nonfree Javascript code which is apparently
non-free. These versions show the same text, without the obstacle.
These are my political articles that are not related to the GNU
operating system or free software. For GNU-related articles, see
the GNU philosophy
directory.
You can also order copies of my
book, Free
Software, Free Society, 3rd edition', signed or not signed.
"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are
men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without
thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical
one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never
will."
Here are notes about various issues I care about, usually with links to
more information. The current notes are
here. For all previous
notes, see this page.
See this page for
information on efforts to maintain links in the political notes.
Political notes about the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy are being
archived on their own page.
Media/Press/Bios
Richard Stallman's bio and publicity photos, and other things
of interest to the press, have been moved to a
separate page.
Earth
under attack from planet Koch.
On doxing, and how to spell it.
Futon Physics
A Spanish cartoon: La Ruleta
Española. 
The
Night before M-x-mas
Here I am wearing my "power tie".
Here I am struggling to open a bottle of water.
My application to an join Marian Henley's Ex Boyfriends List
My funny poetry and song parodies
New song (06/2016)
- Si la face ay pale.
My Cartoons
My Puns in English
(Little Leaguer, August 2019).
My Puns in Spanish
(New pun: Apostasía
April 2019)
My Puns in French
(New pun: Microsoft à l'école July 2019)
My Puns in Portuguese
My Puns in Italian
(New pun: Quale pesce fa
starnutire? New 10/2018)
My Puns in German (New 02/2016)
Linguistic Swifties
(Now with: Wintu, Penutian, Cochiti, Taos, and Towa.)
What Republicans Believe.
--Saint
IGNUcius-- The Church of Emacs will soon
be officially listed by at least one person as his religion for
census purposes.
There are no godfathers in the Church of Emacs, since there are no gods,
but you can be someone's editorfather.
Stallman Does Dallas: "I have to warn
you that Texans have been known to have an adverse reaction to my
personality . . . "
The Dalai Lama today announced the
official release of Yellow Hat GNU/Linux.
Pre-Zen Studies.
I found A funny song about the Mickey Mouse
Copyright Act (officially the Sonny Bono Copyright Act) which
extended copyright retroactively by 20 years on works made as early as
the 1920s.
If you are a geek and read Spanish, you will love Raulito el Friki,
who said "Hello, world!" immediately after he was born. Here's
an archive of this now-defunct comic strip.
Sleeping with Stallman at MIT.
Un malentendido gracioso.
ESR's favorite programming language:
Objectivist C.
American
Extremists
My Small Mouth
The huns and the writs.
No Kludges in Cluj (June 2014)
A science fiction story: Jinnetic
Engineering (in
Portuguese,
Farsi,
Spanish,
Armenian,
Russian,
French, and
Italian).
The Right to
Read
Made for You (December 2012)
(local
copy) Esperanto
translation
My book of essays about the philosophy of Software Freedom,
is available from the
GNU Press.
Avec des
chapeaux French song parody.
My radio program of Music from
Georgia, originally broadcast on WUOG in Athens, Georgia on
Oct 13, 2014.
Resolving the trolley
problem
Quantum Theory and
Abortion Rights
A
proposal for gender neutrality in Spanish, suitable for both
speech and writing.
Origin of the POSIX name.
On Hacking: In June 2000, while
visiting Korea, I did a fun hack that clearly illustrates the original
and true meaning of the word "hacker".
My Childhood Sweetheart
Love and Dance
Predicting the attack on Pearl Harbor
I would like to thank:
- Positive Internet for hosting this web site.
- Graziano Sorbaioli for improving the layout of the main
page.
Please send comments on these web pages to rms at gnu period org.
Copyright (c) 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003,
2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013,
2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019
Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire page are
permitted provided this notice is preserved.
Verbatim copying and redistribution of any of the photos in the
photos subdirectory is permitted under the
Creative
Commons Noderivs license version 3.0 or later. You can copy and
redistribute the photo of me playing music to
the butterfly under the
Creative Commons Noderivs
Nocommercial license version 3.0 or later. Any other photos of
me in this (the toplevel) directory may be copied and redistributed under
the
Creative Commons Noderivs license version 3.0
