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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman.
The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of
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For the sake of separation, this site has always been
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It is more likely I can actually go if you have funds to cover the additional cost, and a speaker's fee would be nice.
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.
The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day.
I'm looking for people to
I will have a trip to Europe in the second week of October and I am looking for invitations for additional talks in the same trip. If you would like to invite me to speak in that trip, please write to me at rms-invitation@gnu.org with "october" as the subject.
It is more likely I can actually go if you have funds to cover the additional cost, and a speaker's fee would be nice.
US citizens: Tell the Senate to remove the million-dollar deposit requirement for asking for an injunction.
US citizens: Tell the US attorney for NJ to stop prosecuting Rep. McIver.
US citizens: call on the Senate to censure Senator Mike Lee for his contempt towards the assassinated Democrats in Minnesota.
I'm looking for a cartoonist who would like to draw cartoons for me once in a while. If you're interested, please write to rms, which refers to me, at the location gnu period org.
Boycott Chevron, in the name of Steven Donziger.
* Abandoned coalmines and oil and gas wells are now one of the biggest sources of the powerful greenhouse gas methane, new data shows, and little effort is being made to clean them up.*
I expect that the fossil fuel companies to divest themselves from old mines and wells in ways that will avoid liability for them — just as they sometimes disconnect themselves from responsibility for supporting former workers.
So I suggest making it a felony to implement a restructuring of business or assets in a way that is likely to result predictably in strand assets that carry financial responsibilities with no one capable of shouldering the responsibilities.
A pitifully weak attempt to solve a real problem: asking for a federal law that would permit victims of domestic abuse and stalking to demand that data brokers delete information about them.
Data, once collected, will be abused. The way to prevent that abuse is to facilitate refusing to hand it over in the first place.
Here is my proposal for protecting the specific people known to be in particular danger, and everyone else who could be harmed if individuals, businesses or governments use their personal data against them without a search warrant: require services to be available anonymously.
The selfish interest of those who keep trade secrets is rational but antisocial. In many cases the only harm it does is to hold back the general advance of technology. But sometimes it does really nasty things. For digital hardware and software, it often gives companies a way to subjugate their users. Regarding use of toxic chemicals, it endangers public health.
Why would legislators pass laws to "protect" companies instead of protecting the people they harm? I suspect it is partly because these companies are influential and the legislators seek their support, and partly because the legislators ask them for campaign funds.
But it is also partly the result of the mindset of "trickle down", which assumes that the only way to get more funds for the state is to let increase the size of the economy by letting companies have what they want. Unfortunately, what they want is often to be allowed to harm the public.
Most Democrats in Congress got corrupted this way in the 80s and 90s. (The exceptions are the progressive Democrats.) Now in the UK Starmer is guiding Labour into that sort of corruption.
Clearly our laws should say that any public need to know about the presence of toxic substances in a business facility overrides the desire to keep them secret.
Whether the owners are Chinese is a question that there is no need to ask, because the state should never give money to a business "to support it." Instead it should offer to lend money to the company for suitable repayment, or else buy equity at a fair price.
These two ways of supporting a company avoid giving the owners an opporunity to rip off the state -- which the company's owners are likely to try to do, if they can, regardless of which country they are from.
With a policy like this, it wouldn't matter which country the company's owners are from.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
UK courts are increasingly willing to reject proposed "carbon offsets" whose validity is suspect.
US citizens: Tell the Senate to remove the million-dollar deposit requirement for asking for an injunction.
US citizens: Tell the US attorney for NJ to stop prosecuting Rep. McIver.
The UK minister for repression is absolutely determined to label the organization Palestine Action as "terrorist" and ban it on account of a protest where its members sprayed red paint on warplanes in a military base.
If protesters can get access to them to spray paint, someone with violent and hostile aims could get access too. The Royal Air Force should be grateful that its weak security was discovered and reported in this way, and the British government should cease its repression of people protesting against support for Israel's war crimes.
The group's lawyers claim that the proposed ban would be illegal. I wonder whether a court would have a chance to judge whether the ban of the organization is lawful. Or would punishment of its members be automatic, with no consideration of whether the group deserves the name of "terrorist"?
Swedish journalist Joakim Medin visited Turkey and was arrested, accused (and later convicted) of insulting President Erdoğan at a protest in Sweden. He was also accused of terrorism, but it seems those charges were dropped, because he was allowed to leave Turkey.
If anyone can tell me what concrete act constituted the alleged terrorism, I would be grateful, especially if that comes with a URL that I can link to about that.
Global heating is making Britain hotter and dryer.
Global heating will cause many problems around the world. Either each part of the world can adapt to too little water or too much water, and too much or too little of many other things that global heating will cause, and then do some more of each in a decade or two, or the world can get serious about curbing global heating.
6 million American student loan borrowers are at risk of defaulting in the coming weeks.
This is the persecutor's doing. Biden had allowed the borrowers to stop making payments, while searching unsuccessfully for a way to forgive the loans despite the obstruction by Republicans in Congress.
The US should do what Britain has done, and make repayments conditional on receiving a middle-class salary. Then the loan would not ruin the whole rest of your life if you don't get such a salary.
For comparison with Iran, the history of how Israel developed nuclear weapons.
In the 1950s, 60s and 70s several of Israel's neighbors insisted that they sought to destroy Israel. There are countries that are hostile to Iran, too, but only Israel might seek to destroy it.
Costa Rica allowed the US to deport there 200 migrants from various Asian and African countries. Costa Rica kept them in jail for a few months, but a court has ordered them freed.
Now will come their real problem: how to live in Costa Rica without knowing any Spanish and not be an outcast. Some of them will be able to learn a new language well, depending on their age and health, but some will not.
In 60 years of overfishing, cod have evolved to be half the size.
*Mike German, an ex-FBI agent, said immigration agents hiding their identities [with masks and no badges] "highlights the illegitimacy of actions".*
He also explains how the masks put the public and also the cops in danger — that making it clear you're a cop is the foundation of safety practice. Also, how having thugs from outside ICE deputized to work with ICE can lead them to violate people's legal rights without realizing it, but also enable them to hide the violation.
German worked in the FBI to infiltrate right-wing militia groups. They may have been supporters of the wrecker, and may still be such. I speculate that he was fired this year precisely for having done that job. But I have no way of finding out.
*Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth.*
* Algorithmic wage discrimination doesn't need to use third-party surveillance data: Uber, who invented the tactic, use their own in-house data as a way to make inferences about drivers' desperation and thus their willingness to accept a lower wage.*
Uber stands accused of optimizing its pricing algorithm to manipulate both riders and drivers so that they make out worse and the company profits more.
Note that this is not an injustice of nonfree malware. The software for the pricing algorithm runs in Uber's own computer. It is, I suppose, Uber's private software, but if it were someone else's released free software that Uber used a copy of, Uber would have the right to make the same modifications in its copy.
The app that riders must use to be customers of Uber is nonfree software and does have a malicious surveillance functionality, but the computerized manipulation being criticized here is not particularly related to that.
What makes the manipulation possible is that Uber forces its customers to identify themselves, so it can make a complete record of its dealings with each customer. It has a similar asymmetry of information about each driver (and that could hardly be avoided). The results are unjust because they are dooH niboR at work, enriching the rich owners and pushing down the low-income drivers.
In my view, the lessons are (1) don't assume that all nasty behavior of computing is caused by nonfree software, (2) governments should stop Uber from identifying its customers or requiring them to run nonfree software, and (3 governments should regulate drivers' pay to keep it higher.
Russia and Ukraine have developed mostly autonomous killer drones, and are rapidly researching full anonymity. It could be easy to program one to hunt down and kill a specific individual by recognizing per face.
Negotiations for a UN treaty to ban such weapons are becoming more urgent, bu it is not clear how to make sure all countries, all underground rebel groups and all mafias comply with such a treaty.
Oregon has banned the subterfuge that corporations were using to sneak around the law that a corporation can't own a medical practice.
*Tobacco exposure killed more than 7m people in 2023, study finds.
Researchers say tobacco linked to about one in eight deaths worldwide and numbers rising sharply in some countries.*
*Europe’s pledge to spend more on military will hurt climate and social programmes.* This reflects a policy that prioritizes keeping taxes low for the rich.
(satire) *Israel Claims Slain Palestinian Rescue Workers Didn’t Properly Identify Selves As Human Beings.*
Two Union leaders have quit the Democratic National Committee, criticizing the party for becoming too plutocratist.
I quit supporting the Democratic Party for that reason in the 1990s. Bill Clinton was too plutocratist for me to stomach.
Robert Reich reposts a call to effective resistance from Liz Cheney.
Starmer has yielded partly to opposition within the Labour Party by reducing the planned cuts in support for the disabled. They will, nonetheless, be cuts in support for future disabled people. One Labour MP says he will still oppose it.
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".
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.
A song parody, Colors of the Lisp, by Jefferson Carpenter.
The text to a filk song, Johnny v. N., by Paul Rubin.
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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