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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.
Canadians: I suggest you seek election advice at a local chapter of a group that pushes to curb global heating and has the courage to say, "Canada should stop exporting fossil fuel." It will at least use the right goals to suggest who to vote for in your area.
Join a Friday climate strike.That page is made by scraping Fridays for Future so you can get the information without running any Javascript code. I would be very glad if they made the information on their own site accessible from the Free World; then we could simply refer people to their site and do without the scraping etc.
The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day.
![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
[ No upcoming talks. ]
Requiring asylum-seekers to run a nonfree program on top of that not only fails to excuse the policy, it is an additional separate injustice. Governments must never require people to run a nonfree program.
I see nothing about TikTok that would excuse its existence, but we should ban sites for disrespecting privacy, not for being under the control of China.
Please do not use the EFF's recommendations. for how to contact your Congressional officials. That method depends on running nonfree software, The only ways of doing that which don't treat you unjustly are (1) phoning and (2) sending snail mail. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Then phone your senators and make the same point. The Capitol Switchboard numbers are +1-202-224-3121, +1-888-818-6641 and +1-888-355-3588.
If you phone, please spread the word!
Boycott Chevron, in the name of Steven Donziger.
There should be a law requiring online services, if they close a user's account, to permit the user to continue to download whatever information perse had left in the account.
To be sure, it is foolish to rely on an online service to hold any data for you; you should store it locally, and use online services only as backups (encrypted). Preferably more than one online service in parallel, for redundancy. But we should not allow online services to cite this as an excuse for arbitrarily causing people great avoidable harm.
It should be a crime to knowingly approach a person while maskless inside a building or vehicle.
The extreme of this is represented by the Amazon warehouse, where a worker's every move is controlled by the computer system. This is one of many reasons to refuse to buy from Amazon.
Unfortunately, surveillance of workers is not limited to Amazon. I think states should pass laws to limit surveillance of workers. It should cover independent contractors as well as employees.
The law should completely forbid demanding that workers run any specific software on their own computers (keep in mind that portable phones are computers); the employer who wants that must furnish the computer at no charge.
Now it can cause you to be arrested randomly for walking down the street.
If stores use face recognition inside the store, they should not be allowed to use photos for matching against people in the store except for photos they have taken in that store, and photos of people convicted of theft and fraud.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
US citizens: call on the FDA to use emergency powers to protect access to Mifepristone.
Daniel Ellsberg is dying, but he won't let that hold him back from campaigning for peace and disarmament.
*Manhattan DA who indicted Trump sues Republican Jim Jordan over interference in case.*
The interference consists of demanding to subpoena one of the DA's investigators, trying to find something to accuse him of.
I don't understand the legal issues enough to know whether there was any actual wrongdoing, but in general no one is more likely to lie than a Republican official.
Coffee shops in Ukraine have "security cameras" that should better be called "insecurity cameras", because Russian crackers broke their security in order to snoop on Ukrainian convoys.
Any store that takes pictures of its customers and puts them on a network in real time is making its customers vulnerable.
Rutgers faculty are on strike to call for a raise for all the kinds of teachers at the school.
A billionaire Republican hedge-fund founder tries to buy elections, and perhaps has succeeded. He did succeed in buying the naming rights of Harvard's general graduate school.
I expect the students and faculty will have their say now, and I hope their condemnation of that Republican will live longer than he does.
When the MIT AI Lab moved to the Stata Center, and I discovered that one of the two towers was named Bill Gates, I urged people to refuse to call it by that name. I suggested Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul, but people settled on the innocuous "D Tower" and "G Tower".
I also made a practice of formally saluting the sign that says "Bill Gates", near the outside door of the G tower, with my middle finger.
Methods like this can certainly be used against another billionaire donor who has harmed people's freedom.
*Climate emergency is the biggest health crisis of our time — bigger than Covid.*
Benjamin Ferencz was one of the prosecutors in the Nuremberg war crimes trials, after investigating Nazi concentration camps in the US Army. His obituaries do not mention that he called for prosecution of Dubya and some of his ministers.
Governor DeMentis worked at Guantanamo prison, and was given the task of interviewing prisoners who were going to be force-fed.
DeMentis still claims that the prisoners they tortured were "terrorists", though hardly any of them can be connected to terrorism.
*Report Shows Social Security Expansion is Affordable.*
Some members of the US Congress called on Attorney General Garland to drop charges against Julian Assange.
They were led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib.
The Group of 7 wealthiest countries are converging on a policy of increasing extraction of methane for fuel. This will speed up climate disaster.
Activists are calling on Biden to stop this. Biden is not the most steadfast and reliable of champions for climate defense. The sad thing is that there is no one else to appeal to.
Biden's new rules for fossil fuel consumption of future cars and trucks are inadequate to prevent them from causing climate disaster.
The Australian government has eliminated use of private debt collectors to prevent repetitious of cruel abuses set up by the previous right-wing government by means of them.
Governor DeMentis went to enormous lengths to eliminate the state's one black congressional representative, by gerrymandering and intimidation of voters at many levels.
Los Angeles released information to journalist Ben Camacho for a public records request. Now the city is suing him for publishing it.
Supermajorities enable parties to crush democracy, as Republican parties are doing now in several states.
But these supermajorities did not happen naturally. They result from Republican measures to rig elections — voter suppression and gerrymandering.
US citizens: call on Biden to respect the legal right to ask for asylum inside the US.
Requiring asylum-seekers to run a nonfree program on top of that not only fails to excuse the policy, it is an additional separate injustice. Governments must never require people to run a nonfree program.
US citizens: call on the World Bank's new president, Ajay Banga, to redirect its investments to promote decarbonization and economic equality.
Sea-level rise in the southern US has accelerated. Since 2010 it is rising more than a centimeter per year.
*A home purchased today in Pensacola will be underwater before the mortgage is paid off. This is so scary.*
This augments the damage done by hurricanes, but I think the sea-level rise itself will do more damage, because it is cumulative. Your locality may go 50 years without a hurricane, but it won't go 50 years magically skipped by sea-level rise.
The four factors of the apocalypse:
global heating, global hating,
global eating, global mating.
Copy this button (courtesy of R.Siddharth) to express your rejection of Facebook.
Non-oppressive Commercial E-books
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.
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.
Stay away from certain countries because of their bad immigration policies.
Avoid flight connections in these airports because of their treatment of passengers.
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.
Personal Declaration of Richard Stallman and Euclides Mance on Solidarity Economy and Free Software.
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."Frederick Douglass, American Abolitionist, Letter to an associate, 1849
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.
Richard Stallman's bio and publicity photos, and other things of interest to the press, have been moved to a separate page.
The Free Software Song, by Richard M. Stallman. You can listen to a performance of the song: Free Software Song performed by Thor Here is a variant of this song called "The Free Firmware Song".
A song parody, Colors of the Lisp, by Jefferson Carpenter.
Earth under attack from planet Koch.
On doxing, and how to spell it.
A Spanish cartoon: La Ruleta
Española. 
Here I am wearing my "power tie".
Wine snobs get their comeuppance.
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.
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 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.)
--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.
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.
ESR's favorite programming language: Objectivist C.
No Kludges in Cluj (June 2014)
Made for You (December 2012) (local copy) Esperanto translation
A science fiction story: Jinnetic Engineering (in Portuguese, Farsi, Spanish, Armenian, Russian, French, and Italian).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.
Quantum Theory and Abortion Rights
A proposal for gender neutrality in Spanish, suitable for both speech and writing.
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".
Predicting the attack on Pearl Harbor
I would like to thank:
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