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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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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
![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
US citizens: Call on the Senate to reject Ed Martinâ as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. His praise for a notorious January 6 rioter should disqualify him from any position in the government; in this position, he will leave Congress exposed to physical violence.
US citizens: call on the Democratic Party to run candidates all across the country in 2026, to take advantage of the hostility and resentment generated by the Republicans that hate our freedoms.
US citizens: call on Congress to reject the bill to undermine the judiciary's power to resist unconstitutional laws.
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.
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.
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.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
*The wrecker's officials create uncertainty to evade court orders rather than comply.*
[The wrecker] *halts construction of big wind farm off New York coast.*
The wrecker is trying to help plutocratist "Christian nationalists" impose their extreme religion on the United States — and to lead them to be more plutocratist.
Deportation thugs lied to Aditya Wahyu Harsono, saying they had revoked his permanent visa weeks before so he was "late" in leaving the US, then pressured his coworkers to fake a work meeting so they could surprise and arrest him.
Those coworkers may be ashamed of this for the rest of their lives. Worse, they may teach themselves to believe the bully's lies so as to convince themselves that what they did was right.
Or they may instead join the resistance to make up for the harm they did.
With the wrecker bullying various countries to demand that they punish China, China is now threatening those countries with similar bullying if they do what the wrecker demands.
US citizens: Call on the Senate to reject Ed Martinâ as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. His praise for a notorious January 6 rioter should disqualify him from any position in the government; in this position, he will leave Congress exposed to physical violence.
*[Senator] Amy Klobuchar calls on supreme court to hold Trump officials in contempt.*
I hesitated to call for that particular action because I was not sure it was tactically wise. It might just play into the wrecker's hand. But if a senator thinks that we have come to this, I suppose it is so.
* Despite such painful lessons of [the Big Spill], we find ourselves once again hurtling toward disaster. The [saboteur in chief]'s personnel and programmatic cuts at science, environmental and safety agencies, and the wholesale rollback of environmental regulations, threaten to unravel decades of progress in safeguarding our nation. These actions aren't just misguided — they're a dangerous rejection of the hard-won knowledge gained from former crises and a gamble we cannot afford to take.*
Melting Arctic ice is a disaster mainly because it is raising sea level, but it is causing several kinds of secondary disasters too.
The UK is putting people in prison for months for sleeping on the street. That is shame-worthy in itself, but it gets worse: sometimes the decision is made in a court hearing where the accused person was not present, has no legal representation, or both.
Proposed new powers to punish people for begging or feeding pigeons are even harsher.
For the man who desperately needs to feed pigeons for company, I wonder if giving him a budgerigar to take care of might have enabled him to feel better while avoiding bothering neighbors.
The persecutor has sent hundreds of Venezuelan refugees to El Salvador which engaged to hold them in prison without trial. Now El Salvador is offering to release many of them to Venezuela in exchange for Venezuela's political prisoners.
Such an exchange might be good, if we could assume that (1) the Venezuelans now in El Salvador want to go to Venezuelans and would be safe there, and (2) the prisoners now in Venezuela want to go to El Salvador and would be safe there.
I can't tell from the article whether any of that would be so.
Ariel Dorfman imagines new kinds of honors that might be bestowed on the bullshitter.
Robert Reich: mass rallies to condemn the bully are a display of courage, which inspires courage in those who felt helpless to resist.
*Tesla accused of hacking odometers to weasel out of warranty repairs.*
Perhaps we should make a legal requirement for odometers to be implemented such that other systems in the car cannot override their settings.
I will speak about free software and computing freedom, and about related issues that affect whether your computing respects your freedom.
This talk will be at King's College, on Tuesday, April 22 in London, England.
There are many threats to freedom in the digital society. They include nonfree software, massive surveillance, and censorship. Nonfree programs are often designed to restrict users, control users or manipulate users. The War on Sharing aims to stop users from sharing copies of published works. Computers for voting make election results untrustworthy.
Other threats come from use of web services, implemented by companies that can impose any conditions whatsoever. Finally, most internet activities (aside from those which existed before 2000) are precarious, dependent on permission from one company. All of these threats originate more or less in the use of nonfree software. That is why free software is the first battle in the liberation of the digital society.
I will give a talk at the Lecture Theatre, on Thursday, April 24 in Oxford, England.
The topic is free/libre software and freedom in the digital society.
We understand that the uses of computing can be unjust. Most do not realize that the mechanisms of computing can be unjust in other ways.
If a program that the users do not control does your computing, it controls your computing.
When servers that the users do not control do your computing, those servers control it.
So don't entrust your own computing to a program that isn't libre or a server whose operator isn't a loyal friend. For your own computing, instead of a server that might mistreat you, use free software on your own computer.
The wrecker has eliminated an agency whose mission is to detect and counter disinformation campaigns, especially Russian.
I suspect this is one little part in the establishment of the axis of dictators, to start with the wrecker and Putin. But it may be more than that. The wrecker depends on disinformation too, and some of that originates in Russia.
*Fears that UK military bases may be leaking toxic "forever chemicals" into drinking water.*
The saboteur in chief wants to expand coal mines, and is cutting programs that try to protect the workers from getting sick from working in a coal mine.
*Musk Is Lying About Waste and Fraud in Social Security to Have an Excuse to Kill 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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