[Facil] [Fwd: [CA] [Fwd: [Rescape-l] La BBC n'aime pas la notice de Stallman]]

Nicolas Marchildon nicolas at marchildon.net
Lun 29 Oct 16:27:49 EDT 2007



-------- Message original --------
Sujet: 	[CA] [Fwd: [Rescape-l] La BBC n'aime pas la notice de Stallman]
Date: 	Mon, 29 Oct 2007 12:17:24 +0100
De: 	Valerie Dagrain <vdagrain at free.fr>
Répondre à: 	Conseil d'administration de FACIL <ca at facil.qc.ca>
Pour: 	Guillaume Blum <blum.guillaume at uqam.ca>, Stéphane Couture
<steph at stephcouture.info>, Conseil d'administration de FACIL
<ca at facil.qc.ca>



-------- Message original --------
Sujet: [Rescape-l] La BBC n'aime pas la notice de Stallman
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2007 21:44:13 +0200
De: Christophe Espern <cespern at free.fr>
Pour: rescape-l at mail.mekensleep.com

Bonjour,

La BBC a demandé à Richard Stallman d'écrire un article.

Richard a donc rédigé un article centré sur le traçage et le contrôle 
d'usage, les DRM, clair et sans concessions, comme à son habitude.

Le porte-parole de Yahoo est pointé comme un promoteur de Big Brother.
Microsoft, Google, Apple et la BBC sont mentionnées pour leur 
utilisation de ce que Richard appelle des menottes numériques. L'article 
se conclue par une suggestion : effacer de la surface de la Terre toutes 
les copies de Windows, Mac OS et IPlayer, le lecteur multimedia drmisé 
de la BBC.

Finalement, la BBC a refusé de publier l'article de Richard avecla 
notice habituelle qui accompagne ses articles. Cette notice autorise la 
copie et la redistribution dans le monde entier, gratuitement, et sur 
tout support, des articles de Richard, tant que la notice est jointe à 
la copie redistribuée.
Richard a donc publié son article sur gnu.org.

L'article en question avec l'explication (copie ci-dessous)

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/computing-progress.html

A +

Christophe

*** Computing “progress”: good and bad ***

by Richard Stallman

The BBC invited me to write an article for their column series, The Tech 
Lab,
and this is what I sent them. (It refers to a couple of other articles
published in that series.) But the BBC was unwilling to publish it with a
copying permission notice, so I have published it here.

Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo proposed here that every object in our world 
should
have a unique number, so that your cell phone can record everything you 
do —
even which cans you pick up while in the supermarket.

If the phone is like today's phones, it will use proprietary software:
software controlled by the companies that developed it, not by its users.
Those companies will ensure that your phone makes the information it 
collects
about you available to the phone company's data base (let's call it Big
Brother) and probably to other companies.

In the UK of the future, as New Labour would have it, those companieswill
surely turn this information over to the police. If your phone reports you
bought a wooden stick and a piece of poster board, the phone company's 
system
will deduce that you may be planning a protest, and report you 
automatically
to the police so they can accuse you of “terrorism”.

In the UK, it is literally an offence to be suspect. (More precisely,to
possess any object in circumstances that create a “reasonablesuspicion” 
that
you might use them in certain criminal ways.) Your phone will give the 
police
plenty of opportunities to suspect you, so they can charge you with having
been suspected by them. Similar things will happen in China, where Yahoo
already gave the government all the information it needed to imprisona
dissident, and asked for our understanding on the excuse that it was “just
following orders”.

Horowitz would like cell phones to tag information automatically based on
knowing when you participate in an event or meeting. That means the phone
company will also know precisely who you meet. That information will 
also be
interesting to governments, such as those of the UK and China, that cut
corners on human rights.

I do not much like Horowitz's vision of total surveillance. Rather, I 
envision
a world in which our computers never collect, or release any information
about us except when we want them to.

Non-free software does other nasty things besides spying. It often 
implements
digital handcuffs — features designed to restrict the users (also called 
DRM,
for Digital Restrictions Management). These features control how you can
access, copy or move the files in your own computer.

DRM is a common practice: Microsoft does it, Apple does it, Google does it,
even the BBC's iPlayer does it. Many countries, taking the side of these
companies against the public, have made it illegal to tell others howto
escape from the digital handcuffs. As a result, competition does nothing to
check the practice: no matter how many proprietary alternatives you might
have to choose from, they all handcuff you just the same. If the computer
knows where you are located, it can make DRM even worse: there are 
companies
that would like to restrict what you can access based on your present
location.

My vision of the world is different. I would like to see a world in 
which all
the software in our computers — in our desktop PCs, our laptops, our
handhelds, our phones — is under the our control and respectsour 
freedom. In
other words, a world where all software is free software.

Free software, freedom-respecting software, means that every user of the
program is free to get the program's source code and change the program 
to do
what she wants, and also free to give away or sell copies, either exact or
modified. This means the users are in control. With the users in control of
the software, nobody has power to impose nasty features on others.

Even if you don't exercise this control yourself, you are part of a society
where others do. If you are not a programmer, other users of the program 
are.
They will probably find and remove any nasty features, such as spyingor
restricting you, and publish safe versions. You will have only to elect to
use them — and since all other users will prefer them, that will usually
happen with no effort on your part.

Charles Stross envisioned computers that permanently record everything 
that we
see and hear. Those records could be very useful, as long as Big Brother
doesn't see and hear all of them. Today's cell phones are already 
capable of
listening to their users without informing them, at the request of the
police, the phone company, or anyone that knows the requisite commands. As
long as phones use non-free software, controlled by its developers and 
not by
the users, we must expect this to get worse. Only free software enables
computer-using citizens to resist totalitarian surveillance.

Dave Winer's article suggested that Mr Gates should send a copy of Windows
Vista to Alpha Centauri. I understand the feeling, but sending just one 
won't
solve our problem here on Earth. Windows is designed to spy on users and
restrict them. We should collect all the copies of Windows, and MacOSand
iPlayer for the same reason, and send them to Alpha Centauri at the slowest
possible speed. Or just erase them.

Copyright © 2007 Richard Stallman

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are permitted
worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this notice is



-- 
Valérie Dagrain

Consultante TIC et Développement Territorial                      -o)
Informatique libre                                                  /\
Site internet: http://vdagrain.free.fr/                            _\_v
T: 02.99.32.16.59 - C: 06.01.97.96.03
E: vdagrain at free.fr - vdagrain at april.org




-- 
Nicolas Marchildon
Tél: 514 578-4775
Jabber: nicolas at linux-quebec.org

I think this bug has been introduced by a design mistake concerning the function create_software_industry(). It should have a variable parameter list rather than a sole pcompany attribute.
			-- Sekt fault, about Ubuntu's bug #1


-------------- section suivante --------------
Une pièce jointe non texte a été nettoyée...
Nom: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Taille: 252 octets
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
Url: https://facil.qc.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/private/forum-facil.qc.ca/attachments/20071029/09e5159e/attachment-0001.pgp 


Plus d'informations sur la liste de diffusion forum