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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.
Boston Area Assange Defense will gather together as press-freedom and human-rights defenders continue to protest the US-unconstitutional prosecutorial pursuit of journalist Julian Assange. Assange is imprisoned in a London supermax prison, awaiting extradition to the US for publishing the truth about US war crimes. Our fight continues with these recent events:
Please join us at Porter Sq, Monday, Sept 25th, 4-5:30 pm!
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.
I'm looking for people to![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
General inquiries: gnu40@gnu.org
For inquiries, mario.havel@paralelnipolis.cz.
Rich people do not have a "right" to keep all the money they alter our laws to direct to them!
If you are invited to phone your representative, that is an effective thing to do. But you don't need to do this by texting from a snoop-phone. You can simply phone 202-224-3121.
If you phone, please spread the word!
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!
The White House comments lines are +1-202-456-1111 and (TTY/TDD) +1-202-456-6213.
If you phone, please spread the word!
*UK mental health charities handed sensitive data to Facebook [with a tracking pixel].*
Let's start the attack on massive surveillance by making it illegal for a server to include a tracking pixel.
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.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
(satire) *Every American Exchanged For Iranian Population In First Successful Citizen Swap Deal.*
Part of Australia requires women prisoners to undergo strip searches to see doctors or their families. The prisoners respond to this practice by avoiding medical and family visits.
Rebecca Solnit explains why many women who have been raped or abused do not report it to the law. It takes a lot of courage to face the multiple punishments they are likely to receive for making the report.
* The Australian government is “missing half the equation” in acting on the climate crisis by backing a shift to renewable energy but having no plan to get out of fossil fuels, according to an author of a new scientific review.*
*European governments shrinking railways in favour of road-building, report finds.*
Biden has launched a program to employ 20,000 young adult Americans to work on climate defense and fire prevention.
Sierra Club gives more information.
However, Biden is simultaneously failing to do the most important things for climate defense. *Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, leaders of two biggest carbon emitters, among those not attending the [UN climate] summit in New York.*
China has launched a campaign demanding the British Museum return all "cultural relics acquired through improper channels" to China. Its supposed star example is a recent pot that the museum bought from the potter who made it.
There are plenty of examples of stolen art that museums should return. But often these conclusions are reached by anachronisticly applying standards for recent times to a world that that didn't have these standards and which these standards did not fit. To decide which standards to judge an old event by calls for careful thought.
US and Brazil warn that powerful oligarchs in Guatemala might hold a coup to stop Guatemala's president-elect from taking power.
The UK questioned a British journalist at an airport, claiming he was suspected of "terrorism", and confiscated his phone and laptop.
He was suspected for his positive coverage of Rojava, the Kurdish state in Syria that stands for equality and unusual systems of democracy.
Rojava was an unofficial ally of the US during the fight against PISSI.
The most horrible thing about these law, and similar British law, is that the crime is not actual terrorism or whatever. It is being suspected of terrorism or whatever.
It is punishment on suspicion, with the bogus excuse that being suspected is itself a crime.
Japan's summer is extending far longer than usual, surely due to global heating.
People around the world must wake up to start envisioning what this will do to their lives after a couple more decades of getting worse.
The UK is again pressuring Facebook and its allied messaging features to delay end-to-end encryption until they snoop for the state.
I sympathize with the goal of protecting children from pressure for sex, but snooping is the foundation of tyranny and that threatens everyone.
I would never use Facebook, because (1) it requires running nonfree software, which never deserves users' trust, and Facebook itself does lots of snooping.
George Monbiot explains how lobbies convince the public to vote to keep the level of disease-causing pollution high.
When extremist Republican Senator Tim Scott threatened to fire workers for striking, he violated US labor law. He was urging for auto workers to be treated this way, but he is an employer himself, and he can't treat workers that way.
So the UAW has filed a complaint against him.
Keeping a dog should require a license, and to get the license you should have to pass a test in how to teach a tog to be friendly rather than aggressive.
There could be alternate tests for training guard dogs, where the trainer would have to demonstrate ability to train a guard dog so that it will keep its actions within the bounds of what is acceptable for such dogs.
Google's search algorithm chose a generated fake image rather than the real photo of Tank Man as the response to a search for "tank man".
Google manually corrected this, but it shows the error-prone nature of its system as operating.
US citizens: call on the judge in the Google antitrust trial to provide a live video feed. It is a matter of showing that the public interest is sufficient to justify it.
Canada reports evidence directly tying Indian diplomats to the murder of Sikh separatist living in Canada under asylum.
Logging companies clear-cut Canadian forests in the 1980s, and replaced them with a monoculture of highly flammable black spruce. Those appear to have been the cause of many of the unquenchable giant wildfires of this year.
US citizens: call on the judge in the Google antitrust trial to provide a live video feed. It is a matter of showing that the public interest is sufficient to justify it.
*Wildfires turn Canada’s vast forests from carbon sink into super-emitter.* This years emissions amount to three times Canada's usual annual emissions, and the fires are not finished yet.
Further global heating is sure to increase the emissions from burning forest in further years — until it is all burned up. This is the sort of tipping point that can cause unstoppable disaster.
The article describes precautions that might be able to reduce the fires in future years.
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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