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Re: New maintainer


From: David Kastrup
Subject: Re: New maintainer
Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2015 09:36:30 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/25.0.50 (gnu/linux)

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
>> Cc: address@hidden,  address@hidden
>> Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2015 08:15:41 +0200
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
>> 
>> >> From: David Kastrup <address@hidden>
>> >> Date: Mon, 05 Oct 2015 01:20:16 +0200
>> >> Cc: address@hidden
>> >> 
>> >> You might have missed it, but Windows 10 goes ahead nevertheless.  So
>> >> far testers have not been able to find any settings that would not send
>> >> a continuous string of data related to keypresses to Microsoft servers.
>> >
>> > Google did, among its first few hits:
>> >
>> >   
>> > http://www.express.co.uk/life-style/science-technology/603524/Windows-10-Microsoft-Key-Logger-Record-Privacy
>> >   
>> > http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/windows-10-doesnt-offer-much-privacy-by-default-heres-how-to-fix-it/
>> 
>> Ah, but turning those settings off does not really suffice.
>> 
>> <URL:http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/>
>
> Which includes further advice on how to turn the other stuff off.

Have we been reading the same article?  "We've asked Microsoft if there
is any way to disable this additional communication or information about
what its purpose is." ... "if Web searching and Cortana are disabled, we
suspect that the inference that most people would make is that searching
the Start menu wouldn't hit the Internet at all. But it does. The
traffic could be innocuous, but the inclusion of a machine ID gives it a
suspicious appearance."

> Look, this particular point of yours is simply invalid: for any
> problem encountered on Windows, there are always solutions and/or
> workarounds that work.  It sometimes takes time to discover them
> (Windows 10 was released only 2.5 months ago), but eventually they do
> surface.  The enormously large number of people using Windows and the
> basic user desire to solve problems they bump into, coupled with the
> Internet and the efficiency of the search engines, makes any such
> malware-like features easily bypassed for those who don't want them.

Do you or don't you agree that there is a point for an operating system
respecting the user's choices, privacy and control?  Because we are
talking here about the need of a prospective Emacs manager to heed the
policies designed to ensuring that such a system remains available in
future and cannot be watered down easily.  Even while the availability
of such systems depressingly appears to have very little impact on
users' choices, it's the GNU mission to make sure that for those few who
actually care, the choice remains.

With Emacs being a core component of GNU, the maintainer needs to accept
that he is not independently responsible for Emacs but also for GNU.

> But trying to make it easier by representing the issues as
> black-and-white is not TRT, IME, and it will always fail given an
> intelligent enough opponent who knows her ground.  You (not you
> personally, David) can even be accused in trying to con your audience
> by false statements, which then might have far-reaching effect on our
> argumentation in general.

I wish.  Unfortunately, the world is moving away from shades of grey and
rather thoroughly into contrasts increasingly indistinguishable from
black-and-white.  The idea that systems like GNU were needed to keep the
big players in check by offering a free alternative has mostly failed.
It does not help that MacOSX is these days built based on a free but
non-copylefted platform.  And even the Android universe built around a
GPLed kernel is at best a thoroughly mixed blessing and its effective
level of freedom is much more determined by the marketing department of
Google than by the workers on the free software base they are employing.

Oh, and Google, in the course of changing its company name has also
chosen to drop its motto "do no evil" in favor of the fuzzier and less
absolute "do the right thing".

That is the general situation where the FSF with the GNU project tries
to carve out and maintain a harbor of freedom and Emacs is one of the
few core products and resources it has to work with, and so it is
important that the maintainer will respect the aspects of his work
concerned with that.  It's not like they push themselves in the
foreground that often.

In my opinion, _particularly_ if you care about recommending and working
with Windows and MacOSX, you should be concerned about a solid
counterweight that those systems may be held against in their current
downward spiral.  That decline can only be slowed if people start caring
about their rights and privacy, and a viable alternative is the most
important asset for that.

-- 
David Kastrup



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