> I want to respond to the misleading media coverage of messages I posted about Marvin Minsky's association with Jeffrey Epstein. The coverage totally mischaracterised my statements.
> Headlines say that I defended Epstein. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've called him a "serial rapist", and said he deserved to be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him — and other inaccurate claims — and feel a real hurt because of what they believe I said.
> I'm sorry for that hurt. I wish I could have prevented the misunderstanding.
> I didn’t follow the story. Was Stallman taken out of context?
Yes. This statement of Stallman's:
> We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that
she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was
being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her
to conceal that from most of his associates.
has been reported in several places as Stallman saying Epstein's girls were "entirely willing", completely ignoring that he was not saying they were willing--he was saying that Epstein would have required them to say they were willing.
If you have sufficient power over someone to force them to have sex with whomever you want them to, you almost certainly also have sufficient power over them to tell them to pretend to be doing it of the own free will. Epstein was massively evil, but he wasn't massively stupid, so almost certainly would have exercised such power.
Stallman was talking about Marvin Minsky's sex with a girl at Epstein's island retreat in 2001, which was a few years before Epstein's sexual atrocities became known. Stallman was arguing that from Minsky's point of view, he probably had no reason to suspect that he was not dealing with a consenting girl.
Except for the part where he got taken to a remote island by a billionaire and was presented with a very young woman who immediately wanted to have sex with him.
You mean the island that Epstein regularly invited numerous people to in order to discuss assorted legitimate things, like supporting their charities or their research?
Epstein's island wasn't some stereotypical villain lair where anyone who steps foot on it must be up to no good. It was a place that he conducted the normal business that any entirely legitimate billionaire would conduct, in addition to the villain stuff.
Based on the girl's deposition, it looks like she was there on the record to provide massages to guests, and off the record was forced to make those erotic massages including sex. It is not clear which, if any, recipients of those massages plus sex knew that the sex was something she was forced into. There are no details given on her sex with Minsky other than it happened.
Minsky was included in a list of people that Epstein's assistant asked one of his victims to have sex with (the deposition didn't ask if sex actually occurred). In the deposition the victim couldn't remember the date they received that request, but a third party reported that they saw the victim approach Minsky in 2002 and that he turned her down and complained about it ( https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/339725/ ).
It may be the case that the witnessed event and the content of the deposition were unrelated and at different times, but if not-- the victim was also 18 at the time...
But no one really cares about the facts, this is almost entirely a ceremonial battle over who has the sickest imagination. Because there are essentially no clear details, not even a concrete allegation, everyone is essentially making things up in order to fight over them.
> Epstein’s former neighbor, the psychologist and computer scientist Roger Schank, describes another such event that he attended: a meeting of artificial-intelligence experts, organized by Marvin Minsky and held on Epstein’s island in April 2002. “Epstein walks into the conference with two girls on his arm,” said Schank. The scientists were holding their discussions in a small room, and as they talked, “[Epstein] was in the back, on a couch, hugging and kissing these girls.”
Hindsight is 20/20, scrutinizing our understanding of past events instead of making grandios assumptions is the key to realising justice. Misinterpretting the words of a man because you don't like the way they think is an injustice.
> Stallman was arguing that from Minsky's point of view, he probably had no reason to suspect that he was not dealing with a consenting girl.
"Consenting girl" is a contradiction. A child cannot legally give consent for sex. If he knew she was underage and if he had sex with her anyway, that was criminal.
She wasn't underage. The age of consent was 16 at the time there. It was raised to 18 later, in the Child Protection Act of 2002.
If you are traveling, and there is any possibility you will engage in any sexual activities outside your home area, it is a good idea to check the destination's laws. If you forget this and just assume they are the same, you can get screwed (no pun intended), regardless of if the age of consent is higher or lower at your destination.
If it is higher, you might inadvertently commit statutory rape with someone who is clearly old enough back home and so doesn't trigger your "do an age check" alarm.
If it is lower, you might run afoul of laws back home against against sex tourism.
(Pay attention to recreational drug laws, too. Sex and drugs are both things that are taken vary seriously. Most other things tourists might do aren't nearly as risky--nobody except maybe Singapore is going to make a big deal of it if you, say, improperly dispose of a food wrapper or something like that. Oh, and also be careful with religion).
The age of consent is 16 in 31 US states and the DC (including Massachusetts). It s 17 in 8 states. It is 18 in the remaining 11 states.
It's 18 in Mexico, 16 in Canada, ranges all over the place from 14 to 18 in South America, 13 to 21 in Asia, 14 to 18 in Europe, and 11 to 18 in Africa.
It also varies widely whether or not places have close-in-age exceptions (also known as Romeo and Juliet laws). Such an exception might, for example, might say that in a place with an age of consent of 18, a 16 or 17 year old can consent to sex if the other participants are under 21. Don't assume that because you are young that you don't have to worry about other young people's age.
Finally, it also varies widely by what kind of sex. There are places where they have close-in-age exceptions, but only for heterosexual acts, and so a 17 year old girl with a 17 year old boy is fine, given an age of consent of 18, but a 17 year old boy with another 17 year old boy is statutory rape by both of them because the close-in-age exception doesn't apply.
> Anyway, he probably should have know better than to weigh in.
That's the problem with the internet today. It's too toxic to hold any meaningful public discussion.
I'd bet that RMS was open to discussing the point he expressed. Because that's what you do on an old-fashioned mailing list. But apparently he got no response to his email. Instead Selam jumped the gun and started, essentially, a shaming campaign on medium.
This kind of attitude essentially hushes people who can actually hold a meaningful online discussion, and perhaps revising their starting opinions after one. Instead we only get to hear the voices of people that are righteous about their opinions—be right or wrong.
Internet has transformed from an open forum to a shouting contest; if you can't join a big enough shouting group, no need to waste your energy participating.
He wasn't attempting to have a meaningful discussion though, was he?
He was defending a 70 year old who had sex with a coerced child by trying to say that the word "assault" shouldn't carry either its everyday English meaning or its more specific legal meaning, but should instead have some other meaning that he created.
I sense a generation gap here. csail-related is a closed mailing list. If you disagree with a point, you are expected to come back with some arguments. Not to leak emails out with zero effort in making a discussion. That's the established mailing list netiquette for almost 30 years.
It's also funny that you complain about RMS twisting the "everyday English" meaning of "assault" while at the same time you call "child" someone who you'd most definitely call a "teenager" or "youngster" if you met in person.
This urge to abuse words in order to sensationalize an already perfectly valid argument is what RMS was pointing out in the first place.
At least in the case of the Daily Beast article by Blake Montgomery, enough context was included that a plain reading of the quoted material makes clear that the surrounding text and headline were radically incorrect. Journalistic malpractice if not deliberate libel. The author has since doubled down. I, for one, won't be believing a damned thing written by the man in the foreseeable future. I encourage you to make your own determination.
Stallman defended Minsky. Judge him for what he said. Don't judge him for a defense of Epstein - he unambiguously condemned Epstein with the rest of us.
Someone emailed an event for protesting Minsky, and Stallman accused her of wrongly inflating the term "sexual assault" when using it to refer to Minsky and Epstein. Stallman bends over backwards for Minsky, saying that he shouldn't be automatically to blame if Epstein forced someone to have sex with him.
It's little different than the absurd pretzel that Lessig bent himself into when trying to defend his friend Joi Ito [0]:
> Q: Doesn’t it make sense to you that people would say someone who is taking money from and cozying up with a guy who is a pedophile and who is targeting young women, maybe he shouldn’t lead an institution that includes women?
> Lessig: I’m not sure it describes the case, and more importantly, what about the institution?
> Q: What do you mean it doesn’t describe the case?
> L: I don’t know about the “cozying up to.”
> Q: Going to his house, being socially in his orbit, taking money from him.
> L: In the context of raising money — just like you would go up there and meet with him in the context of an interview...
> L: When you say that he is cozying up to him, that’s something very different from what I understand actually happened, which is: Joi, in the context of his job for the M.I.T. Media Lab, built a relationship with one of the people he’s raising money from.
I don't begrudge Lessig and Stallman for attempting to apply what they think is logic and rationality in approaching these topics. I absolutely despise them for their hypocrisy in the way they refuse to acknowledge how they themselves are tainted by irrationality when defending their friends.
> It's little different than the absurd pretzel that Lessig bent himself into when trying to defend his friend Joi Ito
It's massively different, because Joi Ito's interactions with Epstein were after Epstein's sexual atrocities were known. Minsky's were in 2001, which as far as I have been able to find is before Epstein was known to be evil.
I wasn't clear. I didn't intend to suggest that Minsky had nothing to do with Epstein after 2001.
Before Epstein was known to be evil, Minsky accepted support from Epstein for science, and also had a sexual encounter with a girl who was ostensibly a masseuse in Epstein's employ but was actually being forced by Epstein to have sex with his guests--it is not clear which of those guests, if any, knew that she was being forced to do more than just give them massages.
It is this sexual encounter that Stallman was defending, and that the poster I was replying to compared to people defending Ito's dealings with Epstein.
After Epstein was known to be evil, both Minsky and Ito did accept support from him. Minsky, as far as I can tell, did so publicly with no attempt to hide it, and I haven't seen any suggestions that he continued to do so after MIT decided to stop accepting donations from Epstein. Ito, on the other hand, appears to have continued to do so, and appears to have tried to keep it secret.
Can you please provide a reliable source for this claim? Last time I checked there is at least one witnessing of him turned down offering of sexual favours in that Epstein case context, and none of the opposite.
You should really read that court deposition. I did and it is not un-ambiguous on the matter, there is plenty of room left to argue there that Minsky never had sex with the girl and one eyewitness who claims he turned her down.
I find this whole thing absurd. How could a Stallman that leverages a US military contractor to do good in one area of rights, exist if he could not bend his own logic into a pretzel in a way that accepts evil money and redirects it based on pragmatic logic?
The US is engaged in finding an equal hated group among the left and right and then attacking anyone who is remotely associatable with them or willing to make any argument that implies a defense of someone associated with them. We have seen this behavior before and it does not ever end well.
It really seems like his real 'sin' is not being neurotypical.
Should he try to have more tact? Sure, of course. But failing that, the correct response is compassion and gentle correction, not a witchhunt. Not driving him out of his jobs.
Matthew Garrett, who served on the FSF board of directors, wrote about the "not being neurotypical" hypothesis two days ago: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52587.html
In particular, he says he did try to do the compassion and gentle correction work, and Stallman had no interest in it.
Stallman's job has a job description - leading the Free Software Foundation. If he's not leading it effectively, it is important for his own cause that he step away, and it is important that the FSF Board do their job by finding someone more effective at it. If he's not suited for it for reasons outside of his control and never will be, that's all the more reason that we should compassionately and gently get him to find another job.
(Also, I think this argument is deeply unfair to the many neuroatypical people in this world who still manage to not say the things Stallman does - which is in most cases not merely a matter of "tact," but even so, many of whom put conscious, learned effort into having tact. I have friends with all sorts of things going on in their brain who are wonderful people and in many cases also wonderful free software authors, and I think this argument does them a disservice.)
Anyone who knows who Richard Stallman is, much less cares about his opinions, could probably be classified as 'neuroatypical' in some regard. I don't think there's any point to discussing the utility of 'neurodivergence' in the context of this scandal.
I'd agree with Matthew Garrett here. Some of Richard Stallman's statements in the past have bordered on being outrightly indefensible for various reasons. Not necessarily indefensible as the opinions of an individual, as controversial as they may be, but certainly inappropriate as the opinions of a person representing an organisation. I doubt that Stallman's various eccentricities have done much to hamper the FSF's mission, but Stallman himself would certainly do little to endear it to anyone.
Sure. I know people "on the spectrum," I know people with various forms of PTSD, I know people with bipolar, I know people with ADHD, I know plural folks, etc., and none of them act like RMS. I know very friendly, conscientious, and kind neuroatypical folks. I know brusque and tactless neuroatypical folks with whom it's draining to interact in certain ways. They still don't act like RMS.
So the (implicit) argument "This is just what you expect with neuroatypical people" / "If we want to be welcoming of neuroatypical people, we have to be welcoming of people who act like RMS" is even less true because of how diverse the category is. We know RMS isn't being excluded because of his (hypothetical) neuroatypicality because there are so many neuroatypical people who aren't and wouldn't be excluded.
If you want to argue that the problem with RMS is he is in the narrow category of people who act like RMS (and I would say that not even Linus Torvalds is in this category), that's a fine argument to make, but it's a bit circular to defend his inclusion on such grounds. Is this category the sort of category, like race or class or neurological makeup, that is beyond (or mostly beyond) one's control and has little correlation with whether you can do good work? Or is this a category like "asshole"?
I know a lot of people who's actions, quirks, opinions and beliefs are unique. Stallman is the only person I've ever known to eat toe-cheese, let alone do it in public. The fact that other neuroatypical people I know don't eat their toe cheese does not suggest to me that eating toe cheese isn't behavior attributable to neuroatypicality.
I expect CSAIL is bristling with non-neurotypical people who didn't take this as a good time to come to the defense of Marvin Minksy in such a frankly bizarre way. It's one thing to say I don't think he did it, but to say "if he did it, it would not have been bad, and in this essay I will-" and to then distribute that to the entire CSAIL mailing list!
I'll grant that some of the headlines about what RMS wrote were overblown, but still. You don't have to look outside the four corners of what he wrote to see why it wasn't an excusable thing to blast out to a departmental email. Once you expand from those four corners to his prior comments on pedophilia it gets way worse.
At a certain point, if you have lived as long as RMS has, you should have some knowledge of your own limitations. It would take an absolute master of rhetoric to make his argument and not have it taken badly. He is not one, and he should (at this point) have the barest humility to not subject the entire CSAIL mailing list to his half-baked ideas on how Minsky might be exonerated.
I think Stallman is tactless, and I've thought that for years. That email didn't change anything I thought about him.
I also think that being tactless is not a moral crime. It's aesthetically offensive and counterproductive from a leadership perspective, but being a bad leader doesn't make somebody a bad person.
It's always hard when people who built things you love have flaws. I remember my own reaction to hearing just how bad his behavior was. It's beyond the bounds of acceptable for anyone. Using his position to proposition women, handing it business cards to women he was interested in even in professional settings, defending pedophilia on his website as two consenting people when children can't functionally consent. Do I think he's a bad person? No. I disagree with a lot of what he's said and done and he's definitely pushed boundaries but I've never heard of him breaking boundaries, though it's highly possible. He was completely delightful when I met him in person. He's not the right person to be leading the free software movement anymore. He hasn't taken the steps required to develop the social skills needed for the role. He hasn't learned that there's a time for PR people to do the talking. He hasn't learned that there's appropriate times to not have a debate. These are all logical qualities of a leader that he doesn't have. Logically he should step back, reevaluate, and let what he's built continue to grow. It seems like he's doing that. He'll always have people willing to support him and work that he does.
I was genuinely surprised myself. I've heard many of the same stories, but he was completely patient with me as I gushed my appreciation to him as he got off of a train and treated me with the utmost respect. I am not able to pick up on social cues easily myself but have worked very hard to become good at it. This is why I know it's possible to learn this skill of one puts in the effort.
If it comes down to whether RMS's position at CSAIL amounted to a leadership position or not, I'd venture that it did. Professors have institutional power that everyone else on the CSAIL list who isn't one don't have. Someone who abuses their name and position to blast screeds like that, I can see why CSAIL might not want him around anymore.
He was not a professor. He quit his job at MIT (as some sort of staff researcher/programmer) in 1984 to start the GNU project. He was an unpaid visiting scientist and had an office, although he was rarely in it (he spends a lot of time traveling). He did not have any institutional power beyond his participation as a rando on the mailing lists.
Being a leader of any sort makes it worse, but I don't think it's a necessary condition for justifying his removal.
Each person contributes to the flavor of the community in which they participate. It is within the right of those who lead the community to curate its flavor by adding or removing people when necessary.
In this his case, his removal was well-justified for the cause of keeping the community welcoming and safe-feeling for members of all genders.
MIT is allowed to use whatever behavior criteria MIT likes when determining who gets to participate in MIT.
Also don't be surprised if lots of disparate organizations agree that certain behaviors are inappropriate.
RMS and others are free to say or do whatever they please, but they aren't free from experiencing the consequences (social or otherwise) of their choices.
If Stallman's email made anyone feel 'unsafe', either that person has serious mental issues for such they should seek therapy, or they are pretending/self-generating these emotions as a way of gaining political leverage and power.
In fact, your message here makes me feel unsafe right now. Something needs to be done, call the mods.
From another comment of mine, the specific relevant passage is on page 7. Copied verbatim - line with a '>' is Stallman quoting another e-mail in the thread.
"""
> Giuffre was 17 at the time; this makes it __rape__ in the Virgin Islands.
Does it really? I think it is morally absurd to define "rape" in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.
I think the existence of a dispute about that supports my point that the term "sexual assault" is slippery, so we ought to use more concrete terms when accusing anyone.
His argument in this specific email- as I read it- was a variant of "Your Honor, I had no idea she wasn't willing and 18!" ie that Minsky didn't know and must therefore have been blameless.
I think it's an immoral argument too- Minsky should have known something was going on, and would be culpable. And it's very possible he did know.
But paired with RMS' prior pedophilia apologia, the combination is horrendous.
I downvoted you because both the neurotypical and neuro-atypical suffer from myopia, sentimentalism, favoritism, deficits of empathy, and methods for introducing and justifying moral lapses.
I’m also just sick of hearing about how old nerds just don’t know any better even when people are literally telling them to stop. That the topic is a bad idea. That they will make themselves look bad.
And it’s deeply unfair to people who have issues to simply blame gross behavior in being “neuro-atypical”.
Sure. He recanted those comments two days ago (after espousing them on his website at least between 2006 and 2013), and after his comments on the Epstein case started getting attention, which makes it look more like damage control than a genuine change in opinion.
I'd say recent statements more accurately reflect somebody's current beliefs than old statements. Considering how badly he's been recently slandered by media outlets leaving out context and mischaracterizing his remarks, I am disturbed by your willingness to exclude that context from your previous comment.
As a general rule, I tend to give more credit to consistent and freely offered opinions espoused over years than a sudden conversion immediately after a PR crisis. There's a famous saying: "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."
There's a difference between "unpopular but everyone knows I'm quirky" and "this might be an existential threat to my ability to keep running the FSF etc.".
1. Stallman already has a lifetime of of examples of somewhat poor leadership within the GNU project, resulting in decisions that have compromised GNU and FSF's trajectory (compared to their potential), so once again, these are not new circumstances
So you believe Stallman's statements indicate he's a pedophile, not merely somebody with a long and established history of being tactless? Because I'd say there is a hell of a lot more evidence that he's tactless due to being neuroatypical. Maybe that makes him a bad leader, but it surely doesn't make him evil.
i believe stallman's statements indicate he thinks sex with a consenting child is okay. why does he have to have committed a crime to condemn that view?
"Many years ago I posted that I could not see anything wrong about sex between an adult and a child, if the child accepted it.
Through personal conversations in recent years, I've learned to understand how sex with a child can harm per psychologically. This changed my mind about the matter: I think adults should not do that. I am grateful for the conversations that enabled me to understand why."
I assume that if he was a pedophile we all would knew it yet. If there was anything remotely naughty in the computer stolen from him in Argentina the thief would have reassured that even Santa Claus will hear about that, for a reasonable sum of money.
Absence of of evidence is not evidence of absence, but philosophizing about murder does not make you a murderer
Tact and decorum are how ideas are presented. No amount of tact or decorum would make it possible to defend somebody for sleeping with an underage girl.
He's attempting to find some remotely plausible scenario where the actions of his friend are morally acceptable.
No amount of tact makes that okay, and complete lack of tact just makes it worse.
It was taken directly as the girl being “willing” when what he actually said was that she may have been coerced by Epstein into appearing to be “willing” to Minsky.
It doesn’t help that he has a documented history of fucked up comments in this general area.
Should news outlets and social media personalities who do purposefully take this comments out of context (and I think there can be little doubt that it is done on purpose [1]) be punished?
Clearly. This is a false accusation that damaged his work and reputation. At the very least, these news outlets and media personalities must be compelled to apologize publicly.
Would that somehow absolve Minsky? A "willing" obviously young girl seems to want to have sex with somebody she doesnt know.
If Minsky suddenly find himself in the plot to a porno, and just went along with it, then trying to defend his moral culpability is probably a lot out of the bounds of acceptability.
He was dancing on a tightrope. Whether or not his statements were taken out of context requires a mind-reader to intuit what exactly he, uh, meant by them.
It's not an interesting defense, and given his prior statements on the subject of statutory rape, I'm having a hard time taking it seriously.
> And I can't vouch for all of Google, but regarding location data, Google has been pretty transparent regarding which data is collected and stored; papers like NYT covered it extensively - see [1].
How did you read that article and come away with the conclusion that Google has been "pretty transparent". The story was written after more than a year of other news outlets reporting on law enforcement using Google's location data to fish for suspects. Google has been providing this data for at least two years before the Times reported on it [0].
> And moreover, Google has been consistently on track to store less private data.
Such as credit card transaction data collected without most people's knowledge [1] or location data after you've explicitly told it not to [2]?
Technology companies need to understand that both words "informed consent" are important. We currently have very little in the way of choices when it comes to data collection. It is simply not possible to opt-out anymore without tremendous effort and personal cost. I like this quote from Maciej Ceglowski:
"A characteristic of this new world of ambient surveillance is that we cannot opt out of it, any more than we might opt out of automobile culture by refusing to drive. However sincere our commitment to walking, the world around us would still be a world built for cars. We would still have to contend with roads, traffic jams, air pollution, and run the risk of being hit by a bus. Similarly, while it is possible in principle to throw one’s laptop into the sea and renounce all technology, it is no longer be possible to opt out of a surveillance society."
A big push towards openness and privacy has happened over the last year.
On an individual level, I don't think it's hard to opt out of Google's tracking.
I won't argue with Maciej's quote, though, because, just like with automobiles, people will still opt into the surveillance society willingly: because the utility it brings them outweighs other considerations.
Ask people if they want to be tracked at all times, and they'll say "no".
Ask people if they want to be able to locate their phone when they lose it, and their answer might be different.
Ask them if they'd want be able to cal 911 and ask to come and help them even if they aren't sure where they are, and you'll get a different distribution of answers again.
In the latter case, lack of "surveillance" is seen as a "tragic shortfall" [0], and adding it is a "feature"[1].
So see, it's not the surveillance per se that people object to. It's implementation details. Welcome to Ceglowski's world.
Two of them are more than a year old, but the practices described in each are ongoing. The third, which describes Google's tracking of users after they've specifically opted not to be tracked is from nine months ago.
> A big push towards openness and privacy has happened over the last year.
After literally a decade of constructing what is very likely the largest database of personal information in the world. Since the late 2000s, when Google purchased DoubleClick, it has worked to collect information without the informed consent of its users. What fraction of your users know that Google purchases their credit card transaction histories?
What is the "big push"? The only things I can think of were the opt-in auto-deletion of a subset of data announced over the last week or two. All the user has to do is pay attention to the tech press, then remember to activate the feature when it launches at an unspecified future date!
What is this "openness"? Working on a censored search engine for China without informing their own head of security?
> ...people will still opt into the surveillance society willingly: because the utility it brings them outweighs other considerations.
Sure, they absolutely do. There can be significant utility gains from large collections of information. But much of the utility could be gained from information collected in a anonymity-protecting matter. In order to have traffic information, for example, Google doesn't need to continuously track your location history.
> Ask people if they want to be tracked at all times, and they'll say "no". Ask people if they want to be able to locate their phone when they lose it, and their answer might be different.
And neither of these require surveillance. The phone could be located either by returning its location on command, or by uploading encrypted location data which only the user has the key to. Whatsapp, for example, shows that end-to-end encryption can be seamlessly integrated.
> Ask them if they'd want be able to cal 911 and ask to come and help them even if they aren't sure where they are, and you'll get a different distribution of answers again.
>
> In the latter case, lack of "surveillance" is seen as a "tragic shortfall" [0], and adding it is a "feature"[1].
Once again, this does not require ubiquitous surveillance, and it is misleading, at best, to imply that it does. Do you really not see the difference between location data provided to assist emergency response from a 911 caller and continuous location monitoring so that Google can serve more profitable ads?
I'm syncing around 90 GB between my server, laptop, and LineageOS Pixel phone. I use it to sync my documents, music, passwords, and archived pictures. I also use it to sync photos taken by my phone camera as they are taken.
Setup:
* Camera: 1.8 GB, 243 files
* Documents: 10.8 GB, 4604 files
* Music: 61.5 GB, 25077 files
* Passwords: 660 KB, 726 files
* Pictures: 16.5 GB, 6450 files
The passwords are managed by 'pass' [0], which is viewable on my phone using Password Store [1]. Cold-launching Syncthing takes ~10 seconds on my phone, but it does it automatically on boot and thereafter runs in the background. Battery impact seems to be negligible.
I've only seen articles that say Google was going to "explore" adding differential privacy to Gboard analytics [0]. Do you know if the feature ever shipped, and is it the only way sends data to Google?
I'm mistrustful of Google's privacy stance, since they have a history of changing their privacy policy, then misleading users about it. Remember when they implemented personally-identifiable web tracking and sold it to users as "new features for your Google account"? Merging Doubleclick's tracking data with my Google account doesn't seem like a feature to me.
No. Fines exist to dissuade illegal behavior. The loopholes that Google (and Apple, and many other multinationals) should be abolished, and any tax evasion should be prosecuted. Antitrust fines do not exist to punish tax avoidance. They exist to penalize companies who use their size to prevent competition and distort markets.
I have many issues with Google's business practices, but punishing them is not worth throwing out the rule of law.
How is that different? The behaviour is made illegal, precisely because it's unwanted... that's pretty much the definition. I don't think there is another source of law in healthy cases/systems.
Not all unwanted behaviors are illegal. Some countries tax soda in order to reduce soda consumption. A behavior is not unwanted iff it's illegal. A behavior is illegal iff it's unwanted. It's not necessary for a behavior to be illegal in order to be unwanted. Illegal behavior is just a subset of the other.
But aside from that, and in this case, I feel the barriers to making it illegal are far higher than fining companies in other ways.
> We also shouldn't pretend that the EU justification for fines is purely about citizen protection, they see this as a "tax" as well (though that is of course not their primary motivation). Otherwise, they would work harder on non-punitive approaches towards combating the ills of Google and the like. One would hope education and encouragement of alternatives and other positive-leaning approaches might be prioritized over a gavel.
The fine exists to remove the profit gained from the illegal behavior, otherwise performing the illegal actions would have a positive expected value. The company is also required to provide a list of remedies to ensure that the behavior is not repeated.
As for "non-punitive" approaches, the encouragement of alternatives would have to be non-financial since state aid is barred under EU rules [0]. I suppose they could recommend alternatives, but if it were really that simple to avoid a consolidation of power in the tech industry we wouldn't have such monopoly/duopoly issues.
My comment is more of a general comment about lifting society up rather than what has been made illegal or what is barred. Regulations have their place sometimes as do more open competition environments coupled with an educated populace, and it's often a case-by-case situation which to favor more and work towards harder. In this case (big-tech bogeyman), I think the latter should be favored but both can be employed of course.
I think that this is a fairly common when it comes to technology. The terms and conditions seem reasonable ("we collect some data to provide more relevant ads"), but when you look a bit more closely they build a personal file that contains who you communicate (email/text/call) with and how often, where you go, what you buy, which websites you visit, which videos you watch, etc to the extent that they are able. My mother is very smart, well-educated (she has a PhD), and relatively tech savvy (she works in scientific computing), but she was still floored when I told her about some of the tracking Facebook and Google perform. Google recording her location (which she technically agreed to, but did not realize) was enough that she asked me to help her migrate away from Gmail. She probably would have managed without my assistance, but the barrier would have been much higher.
I'm emphatically not defending them here, but it may make sense from their perspective. They live and die by ad targeting and maintaining their monopoly power over social networks, both which requires large amounts of personal data. Knowing what apps teenagers have installed and how often those apps are used is instrumental in detecting an up and coming social media rival.
Further, their only major competitor in the ads space is Google, which has access to this information via Android and its control over the Play Store.
Plus, what are the teenagers going to do about it? Facebook also owns Instagram. I guess they could use Snapchat...
Yeah it makes sense, but the problem for their shareholders is their business model will constantly turn them into a huge boogeyman and they'll never recover goodwill that keeps their users stuck to the platform when competitors appear. Mass user migrations happen, and they can happen VERY fast. Wait until a whole country goes off of Facebook.
Google Maps Platform is a part of Google Cloud, but not a part of Google Cloud Platform, despite now integrating with Google Cloud Platform's web console for purposes of managing billing and API keys. Yes, this is a branding and communication mess, but nevertheless true.
The basic way to tell if something is part of GCP or another Google product that some marketing whiz managed to have "cloud" tacked onto the name is whether or not you need a GCP project to work with it.
Not true, as far as I know. Many (if not all) Google APIs require a GCP project for access via API key, service account credential, or mobile application.
I'll defend many things about the technical quality of GCP and its appropriateness as a viable choice in many cases, but not Google's branding, external PR, or external perception management.
They've always been bad in those areas and that pattern continues.
(Relevant disclosure I've said in other comments: I used to work for Google, including GCP, ending in 2015. I've never worked for Google PR/comms/marketing and I don't work or speak for Google now.)
The Google Maps API is a good example. They increased prices by an order of magnitude while simultaneously decreasing the free tier with one month's notice. [0]
> I want to respond to the misleading media coverage of messages I posted about Marvin Minsky's association with Jeffrey Epstein. The coverage totally mischaracterised my statements.
> Headlines say that I defended Epstein. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've called him a "serial rapist", and said he deserved to be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him — and other inaccurate claims — and feel a real hurt because of what they believe I said.
> I'm sorry for that hurt. I wish I could have prevented the misunderstanding.
Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2019-jul-oct.html#14_September...