kadu

Hasn’t he admitted to changing his opinion after learning about the effects on children?

He did. The argument against him was half based on misquotes and incomplete sentences, but the other half was indeed once his opinion - he argued that age of consent was a dumb concept and that instead it should be based on what the child wants to do and any harm they were subjected to.

He later on said he regretted this view because it was explained to him that there’s no ability to consent and this always causes harm to the child. His original arguments were, in typical Stallman fashion, quite obsessed with definitions themselves, almost as if the subject at hand didn’t really matter he was just bothered about how the definition had some flaws.

But even with that in mind… I can’t feel comfortable knowing he defended this point of view, and it does significantly harm my opinion about him.

Technically illegal where I live.

In Brazil you can’t sell a device with a given feature and then remove said feature in a software update. Even Apple, known for never allowing downgrades, was forced to downgrade and pay a fine to a customer after his iPad 3 updated to iOS 7 and lost an iOS 6 feature.

In other words… every single Android device sold until today in Brazil allows sideloading. Even if a single customer uses a sideloaded app, removing the ability to sideload freely would be illegal, and because the original feature didn’t require a developer signature it can’t be enforced now.

The issue is, as always, if this went to court somebody would have to manage to explain to a tech illiterate judge what a “developer signature” is, how this relates to “sideloading” and so on.

openWRT is fantastic and does indeed give you full control over your router… but not your modem. Modems are a complete mess of patents and proprietary software that nobody can control but a select number of companies.

Whaaat? There’s Android for jailbroken Kindles? Back in my day the only thing you could do with a jailbreak was installing a slow version of KOReader that didn’t really work very well.

The only Organic Maps controversy I’m aware of was the presence of certain closed-source elements on what they claim to be a FOSS app, and that the main developer refused to open up, then partially did, then backtracked and never fully released.

Maybe that’s what that user is referring to? Not sure.

Even if you fixed the issue with drivers…

…your modem runs it’s own firmware with a lot of extremely shady behavior, and you can’t touch that regardless of which OS you install. Even your SIM card can arbitrarily execute Java applets and fetch from the network without your command, but at least it’s somewhat contained. Your modem though, it can do a lot without your control and people like Qualcomm have been caught doing nasty stuff with it (plus, of course, giving the US the data whenever they ask for it).

This is why people like Stallman and Snowden often talk about teaching users how to use libre software on their computers, but rather than pushing for the same with smartphones, they tell you to not touch these at all instead. They’re fundamentally anti-privacy devices, built this way.

Of course I carry one, it’s fairly hard to live without a phone nowadays, but we must be aware of the impossibility of fully containing the data harvesting they do.