You think you are the 99%? Why not share some of Stallman's opinions with other people to see?

Go to your mother and repeat the joke about Emacs Virgins being women who haven't used Emacs before, and how it's your duty to take their virginity away. Do you think she'll find Stallman's joke funny?

Go to your non-tech worker friends and tell them you think if a 70 year old went to Epstein's private island and has sex with one of his underaged sex trafficking victims it's not assault or rape as long as Epstein made her present herself as willing. Do you think they'll agree with Stallman's take?

Does your mother have a smartphone? I bet she does. Do your friends all have computers and user software and services daily? I bet they do.

The tech industry has grown far beyond a tiny clique of obnoxious nerd culture, and as companies try to lock down the software and devices they sell to the tech mass marker the aims of free software are more important than ever.

If Stallman is unwilling or unable to take this ever growing responsibility as a figurehead of free software seriously, then he needs to step aside and let someone better at it do that job instead.

Stallman isn't a baby, you don't need to keep coddling him like he's a spoiled child who can do no wrong.

Now that tech consumership has become mainstream and companies are trying to lock this mass tech adoption down, the aims of Free Software are more important than ever.

If Stallman is unable or unwilling to take this responsibility seriously and learn to make public statements in a way that won't turn off vast swathes of tech and software users, then he should step aside as a public figurehead for a huge and important organization and allow someone who can to fill that role.

His ego and insistence that he has to be on the top is now getting in the way of free software and hampering the work of the FSF.

Here's the thing.

Stallman isn't arguing that Giuffre is wrong about Minsky.

Stallman is arguing that if Minsky did have sex with Giuffre (which Stallman has "no reason to disbelieve") it wouldn't be assault or rape because "the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing".

As if it's perfectly normal for a 70 year old to go to their friend's private island and have sex with young teenagers who happen to be there as long as they don't ask any awkward questions like who these teenagers are, whether they might be vulnerable young people being coerced, or even if they are of legal age?

Still think it's a perfectly reasonable position to take?

Not to mention that the latest update on Dershowitz's case I can find is that his claim that Giuffre has been extorting her accusers was shown to be false. So don't you think that, given she was molested and abused from the age of 7, was living on the streets from the age of 13 and spent 2 and a half years being trafficked for sex with the rich and powerful, you need to cut her some slack about which one of the numerous powerful people she remembers being raped by and apologize for accusing her of just being in it for the money? They only people at fault for any wrongful accusations are her lawyers for allowing any accusations to proceed in court that could be discounted by evidence.

Right, so he wasn't "calling it r*pe and not sexual assault" at all, he was actually arguing it shouldn't even be called rape? That's also consistent with his views on age of consent, so seems very likely that's Stallman's take on the matter.

It's also irrelevant how much he has attacked Epstein, by trying to excuse those who participated in Epstein's victimizations on the grounds that it would be perfectly normal for a 70 year old to go to their friend's private island and have sex with random teenagers who just happened to be there as long as they don't ask any questions like who these teenages are, whether they are vulnerable young people or even if they are of legal age.

And finally a classic non-apology. A classic sorry for the "misunderstanding". Not sorry for causing any hurt, just sorry because apparently other people just misunderstand him. And it's not like this is the first time. It happens time and time again, and every time it's someone else's fault or *he's* the real victim.

If he is unwilling or unable to learn how do public speaking in a way that does not turn off large parts of the modern tech-consuming public, then he should not be the figurehead of huge and (in the face of private companies trying again to lock the tech industry down) ever more important foundation.

You do know what started this controversy, right? Hint: It's not about Stallman criticizing Virginia Giuffre's code.

Be incredibly bad at public speaking, make comments a large number of people think are offensive and lose the immense privilege of being the public figurehead of a large and extremely important organization?

That sounds rather proportionate to me. If you are bad at your job you lose that job, that's not an inhumane witch hunt, that is not the woke brigade or cancel culture, that is life.

Or how about this take? Stallman is a terrible public speaker and as such, due to the mainstreaming and mass adoption of tech, should stop letting his ego get in the way of the aims of the free software movement in this new mass market, allow people who are better at public speaking to take on that role, and take a more behind the scenes approach?

If he cared about adoption of free software then why would he care if it's him as the figurehead or someone else?

Also the GPL license wouldn't let him or anyone else do that anyway.

Or maybe now that tech consumership is extremely mainstream we need a figurehead who can inspire large groups of consumers and small businesses to act in favour of open source, rather than have someone who will put large swathes of people off by doing things like joking about taking womens' virginity from them and publicly defending Epstein's co-conspirators?

Can you quote him on that? The only mention I can find of "rape" from him is this exchange:

Which, far from Stallman insisting the victimization should be called rape instead of sexual assault, sounds an awful lot more like he is disputing that it should even be called rape.

In the specific case that lead to him resigning, all of Epstein's victims as according to RMS those middle age and old men who slept with the young girls Epstein trafficked couldn't have been expected to think there was anything wrong going on with Epstein filling his private island with a "harem" of teenage girls they can have sex with.

And in a more general sense, all the people he has put off contributing to open source projects and all the times he has derailed the subjects of technical conferences by inserting clearly poor taste, sexists, off-topic jokes into them.

Face it, open source as a whole has grown from a small ideological niche to one of the most important subjects in the whole of the computing and tech industry. If Stallman is incapable of handling that responsibility as a figurehead for such a large and important movement he should stop letting his ego get in the way and allow someone else to be the figurehead who is better at it instead.

Actually I think the media summary here is perfectly balanced between the interesting possibility of it and the likelihood of the result being wrong.

Certainly they're doing a better job than they did with the Venus phosphine life story.

TBH it sounds like anyone knowingly sharing their account will just be able to carry on, as the account owner just has to send them a code -

Exactly, you could use stolen credit cards, prepay debit cards, compromise other peoples accounts, if you wanted to live dangerously you could even slip a vulnerability into your own server then pretend to exploit it from another IP address so you have plausible deniability for why there is malware there.

And please please please look things up before making such sure statements! :)

Well this is embarrassing

https://www.cloudpro.co.uk/clo...

"Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosts the most malware in the world, alongside GoDaddy and Google, a recently published report claims."

This is also embarrassing

https://intl.cloud.tencent.com...

"Tencent Cloud offers two types of IPv4 addresses for private and public network access. These IPs will not change unless you unbind or change them."

Would it have killed you to do at least a cursory bit of research before commenting?