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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.
Richard Stallman has cancer. Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphoma. Treatment put it into remission, and he can expect to live many more years. However, he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19.
I urge you to vote in Democratic primaries for the progressive candidate, if there is one. And in the final election I urge you to vote for Democrats, unless a liberal independent had a good chance of winning.
The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day.
I'm looking for people to
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
If you phone, please spread the word! Main Switchboard: +1-202-224-3121
Boycott Chevron, in the name of Steven Donziger.
It is exciting that SB 976 turns towards restricting recommendation algorithms. But these options should not be limited to minors — every user should have this choice. (Please do not refer to teenagers as "children"; that feeds the US tendency to treat them like children and retard their development.)
However, I suggest taking a step beyond just choosing to use or not use the platform's addiction system. Recommendation algorithms should be completely separated from platforms!
If you want to use a nontrivial recommendation algorithm, you should be able to choose it yourself and use it anonymously. You could send it the URLs you want it to base its choices on. These might be some of the pages you had visited, and perhaps pages you had not visited.
Then it should send you its recommendations. You could pass all, or just some, or none of those recommendations to the platform to look at them.
AB 1949 is admirable because it gives a small boost to privacy for users of all ages, not only for children. It isn't enough, though — users should also be guaranteed the right and possibility to access through the Tor network and to use aliases. And collection of a user's data by the state should require a warrant against the user.
The door plug that blew out of a Boeing 737 Max 9 airplane was missing four bolts meant to hold it in place. They were missing because Boeing maintenance removed them and did not put them back in again.
Some workers actually made the mistake, but they were working as part of a work system that Boeing management was responsible for setting up and running. That's where the real fault is.
I suggest passing a law to require aircraft manufacturing and repair companies to have a certain fraction of licensed commercial pilots on their boards. Perhaps 66%.
Private equity is gobbling up large parts of the US nursing home business. This puts patients in danger since private equity can amass lots of money, create an oligopoly, and get away with abuses.
The study suggests that "regulation may be needed." I will take a stronger stand and call for firm limits — perhaps even prohibiting private equity combinations from owning home nursing businesses.
I'v also proposed prohibiting private equity from buying up lots of rental housing.
It should be illegal for a store to charge different prices to customers depending on whether they identify themselves and/or hand over demanded personal data.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
British physicians are threatened with loss of their license to practice medicine as further punishment for being convicted of climate defense protests.
You can see this as further damage to non-rich Britons by Tories, who don't care about the non-rich, or as further repression intended to keep the drilling for oil and gas going.
Humanity is closing in on the last few areas where wild polio may still survive.
*Climate activists across Europe block access to North Sea oil infrastructure.*
Governments that refuse to recognize that drilling for oil and methane is deadly are showing contempt for the lives of their young citizens.
Increased plutocracy is increasing the income disparity between countries along with income disparity within most countries.
Bullshit generators such as ChatGPT increasingly show racial stereotypes in judging people's employ-ability.
They don't actually understand anything, including the concept of "employ-ability" or "bigotry", so employers should not use them for that purpose.
Singer Olivia Rodrigo became a champion of freedom by distributing condoms and emergency contraception pills at her concerts. But now she has ceased that practice, citing a vague concern about "children" that attend.
I can't tell whether "children" in her statement refers to the people we normally call "children" — pre-teens — or to everyone under 18. But either way, I can't see even a lick of sense in that decision to stop. Whatever a person's age, if person is going to be sexually penetrated, it is good for that person to have a condom available. Whatever a female's age, if she may get pregnant, it is useful for her to have emergency contraception available.
Unless she presents clearly some other reason, I have to think that she has yielded to an incoherent right-wing moral panic.
Advances in brain-machine interfaces are dangerous.
Musk has spoken in favor of fascism more than once. He could make Neuralink implants trigger pleasure in the brain whenever the patient hears words that endorse fascism. If the Neuralink itself is not capable of relaying the sound that the patient is hearing, the apparatus to run it could simply have an internet-connected microphone.
The only way to make them safe is if users have full control over the software that operates them and talks directly with them. They also need to be able to study the circuit diagram and verify that the device was built honestly.
Unofficial groups of Republicans are trying to rig elections by pressuring local election officials in some states to remove voters from he voting lists.
In Michigan, Nevada, and Georgia they have had successes.
George Monbiot: *It's as if Keir Starmer is seeking out all the positive reasons to vote Labour — and deleting them.*
Modi made a campaign promise to Indian farmers, then broke it. When they protested this, they met with repression
of the sort that he had previously reserved for Muslims.
US citizens: call on Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to endorse a global minimum tax on billionaire wealth ahead of the G20 summit.
Congress is considering a bill to demand TikTok to be sold to a non-Chinese owner, in order to keep operating in the US. Yet articles continue to talk about this as a plan to ban TikTok, rather than a plan to disconnect it from China. Why misrepresent this point?
Its intense collection of personal data clearly has the power to increase the harm it does, compared with Facebook. What that suggests is a law to prohibit any company from collecting data in this way. Ideally it would also limit the data Facebook can collect about its useds — that would increase the benefit of the law.
In Rapperswil, Switzerland, Richard Stallman will give a talk. The title of the talk will be Free Software and Your Freedom.
Scotland plans to require owners of large tracts of land to divide their lands among multiple owners.
It is generally a good thing to split up big properties of any kind.
* Location, extent and strength of recent freshwater [melt] events [in Greenland] suggests an unusually warm and dry summer over southern Europe this year.*
*The cries from Britain's struggling CEOs are growing louder — can they survive on a mere £4.4m a year?*
That amount is clearly an average value. To assign that amount to each and every CEO is an oversimplification, and incorrect. Probably some of those CEOs receive a mere £2m per year.
We could feel sorry for them, if we forget about how low-wage workers are suffering in Britain today.
*UK scheme to spur take-up of heat pumps delayed after gas lobby pressure.*
Over and over, the UK government has dropped or slowed its efforts to curb global heating, putting the priority on planet roaster profits.
Phoenix had over 600 excess deaths last summer.
At present levels of heating, many of these deaths can be prevented, but that depends on willingness to spend money to protect the health of poor people — often homeless people. Plutocrats consider that a waste of money that could instead be increasing their investments.
It may also depend on whether workplaces are willing to permit precautions to be taken. The Republicans that control Florida oppose that.
*Automakers Spend Millions to [weaken] EPA's Proposed [limitations on pollution that damages human health].*
* Impact on ecosystems [of geoengineering] must be predicted before technology is used, US atmospheric science agency chief says.*
So far, human geoengineering has been done unthinkingly, as a side effect of actions carried out for other purposes. Some of these side effects are extremely dangerous. Sometimes humans were ignorant of the eventual consequences; in other cases, they corruptly buried the knowledge. Some of them continue the disinformation today.
I see no reason to object in principle to intentional geoengineering. With the knowledge we have learned, and some planning, we could make it less dangerous than unintentional geoengineering has been.
But that should not be an excuse to let the disinformationists win. Reducing the causes of our harmful geoengineering has to be safer than trying to counter one geoengineering with another.
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 download copies of my book, Free Software, Free Society, 3rd edition'.
"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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