Proprietary Software is the Driver of Unprecedented Surveillance: Richard Stallman (factor-tech.com) 197
From a wide-ranging interview of Richard Stallman, president of the Free Software Foundation, programming legend and recipient of at least 15 honorary doctorates and professorships: "The reason that we are subject now to more surveillance than there was in the Soviet Union is that digital technology made it possible," he says. "And the first disaster of digital technology was proprietary software that people would install and run on their own computers, and they wouldn't know what it was doing. They can't tell what it's doing. And that is the first injustice that I began fighting in 1983: proprietary software, software that is not free, that the users don't control." Here, Stallman is keen to stress, he doesn't mean free in the sense of not costing money -- plenty of free software is paid for -- but free in the sense of freedom to control. Software, after all, instructs your computer to perform actions, and when another company has written and locked down that software, you can't know exactly what it is doing. "You might think your computer is obeying you, when really its obeying the real master first, and it only obeys you when the real master says it's ok. With every program there are two possibilities: either the user controls the program or the program controls the users," he says. "It's free software if users control it. And that's why it respects their freedom. Otherwise it's a non-free, proprietary, user subjugating program."
Given the opportunity... (Score:1)
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Given the opportunity, users will fuck up anything and everything. There is a reason we don't give users more than the bare minimum of control that they need. It's because we don't want to spend all of our time chasing our tails in circles trying to patch up everything the ruin.
This attitude is the single biggest reason for bad software that always pisses users off.
Good salesmen tell you: you will be successful when you give people what they want. Not what you think they should want.
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Re: Antifa is a domestic terrorist organization (Score:2, Insightful)
Most people in Antifa cannot even define actual fascism. This is video taken from an Antifa rally. The crowd literally CHEERS quotes from Hitler, not realizing that they are Hitler quotes:
http://tomwoods.com/leftists-accidentally-cheer-hitler-speeches/
I hate fascism. That is why I also hate Antifa.
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You appear to be conflating "supporting Hitler" with "having learned, off by heart, everything he ever said".
If he said 2 + 2 = 4 does that mean the answer's 5?
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You don't know the difference between economics and arithmetic? Must be one of them thar librerlarts majors.
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As pretty much any other dictator. It's quite easy to cut Hitler speeches to support right-wingers as well. I can even do it with Lenin's speeches.
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That said, yeah, guess what, most people are morons. If you deliver a speech with the correct vocal inflections and you use enough big words and complicated
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None of the quotes used by the gentleman in that video were fascist. None of it supported authoritarianism, dictatorial power, nationalism, forcible suppression of opposition nor control of industry and commerce.
Utter nonsense. The very first quote [postimg.org] was about the destruction of capitalism, which theoretically can only be achieved via dictatorial powers (central control by a small group). Read your Marx. Socialism is central control of production, which is by definition "authoritarian". AND nationalism. AND his quote directly speaks to suppression of opposition.
So that's three of your points shot down by the very first quote.
This second quote [postimg.org], "Benefit to the community precedes benefit to the individual", is th
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Nice equivocation. Yes, no movement is immune against some of its members being criminals. Antifa's entire modus operandi, however, is based on violence — For the Greater Good[TM]. They not only don't discourage it, as any half-decent organization would, they openly encourage it [thehill.com]:
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And "fascism" simply refers to "fasces" — or "bundles". Are you sure, you want to argue over semantics?
Your hope is misplaced — whatever the word "antifa" means or is supposed to mean, the organization(s) calling themselves or known as "Antifa" today are violent by nature, admit being violent, and are proud of the violence.
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You are more than welcome to condemn any organization calling themselves antifa that admit to being violent and are proud of that violence. I've visited a number of antifa websites, and they do not admit to
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Of course, it is inaccurate to define terms by the mere etymology. And yet, that's exactly what you did, when you define "Antifa" as simply "anti-Fascist" — a statement I ridiculed so successfully.
It is not just their violence (the forcible suppression of opposition), that makes them pro-Fascism. They are all, to a man, collectivis
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The USA's very existence is based on the same thing - an armed insurrection against the God-anointed King.
But I suppose that was OK.
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The violence of the revolutionaries was aimed at the king's soldiers, not the fellow civilians disagreeing.
No, it was not against the King — it was for Independence. For self-government. The so-called "Antifa" aren't opposing the Federal government at all — they're happy to see its power expand (which, accidentally, makes them Fascist [townhall.com]). They simply don't like the current President, that's all.
Whether that was Ok
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O Rly? [thecanadia...lopedia.ca]
Won't even bother reading the rest, because you're a proven liar and most probably fat too.
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None of it to be praised — most of it to be ashamed of.
More bullshit. The revolutionaries had nothing against the particular king — George III — indeed, with the British monarchy what it was at the time, it made no sense to single out one person, who didn't even have all that much power.
No. The revolution was against the ruling regime — for all the enumerated reasons. Th
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The ones who destroy property and hurt people are called criminals.
And the most successful criminals are called "governments". They're the ones who kill hundreds or thousands of times more people than any serial killer, yet they never get punished; instead, they are loaded with honours and enriched.
"Il est défendu de tuer; tout meurtrier est puni, à moins qu’il n’ait tué en grande compagnie, et au son des trompettes".
("It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers to the sound of trumpets").
- Volt
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Richard Stallman is a pedophile
There is no evidence for that. All he ever did was say that he is "skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children".
Now, I personally disagree with him on that (and many other things), but this statement is insufficient evidence to label him a pedophile. Even if he is, a pedophile is someone who loves children. A pedosexual predator is someone who targets children for their personal sexual gratification. And I don't think Richard Stallman is any of these.
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There is no way you could have any sensible discussion about this topic, forget it.
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Exactly what I'd expect a kiddy-fiddler to say.
Re:Given the opportunity... (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, he's a wealthy and privileged Jew having been raised on the Upper Westside and spent his entire adult life in elite education institutions yet somehow not actually teaching anything or publishing any research.
Why is it that your post makes me feel a sudden surge of affection and respect for wealthy and privileged Jews who spend their entire adult life in elite education institutions?
To say that Stallman has never actually taught anything is an astonishing distortion, given that he has done more than anyone to popularize the benefits of free software. And what do you mean by "publishing research"? What Stallman has done is immensely more useful and practical than any "research" published in some learned journal.
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But secretly it can do all kinds of other, unintended, things he'll never may know of.
Why the FOSS movement is small and obscure (Score:4, Interesting)
The Free Software Foundation requirements are so restrictive that no mainstream Linux distribution qualifies. Stallman is living in a fantasy world where he thinks billions of people are going to start learning command lines and troubleshooting their own comparability issues. This is not reality.
Open source MUST be made easy to use or else Average Joe User will never use it. In the real world, rightly or wrongly, people care about EASE OF USE more than abstract philosophical concerns about free software.
The open source movement needs more businesspeople and fewer armchair philosophers. We do not need yet another FOSS project reinventing the wheel and having 3-5 developers trying to drum up support for their spin on something that has been done 50 times already. We need to see more along the likes of RedHat and Canonical if open source is going to take over the mainstream.
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Being a rich jew also helps.
You're just jealous, aren't you?
Re:Why the FOSS movement is small and obscure (Score:4, Insightful)
The Free Software Foundation requirements are so restrictive that no mainstream Linux distribution qualifies. Stallman is living in a fantasy world where he thinks billions of people are going to start learning command lines and troubleshooting their own comparability issues. This is not reality.
So because all instances of X are bad, we can't strive for better X? Because there's some level of corruption in all countries, we can't strive for less corruption anywhere? Because there's some level of mortality in all healthcare systems, we shouldn't strive for progress in medicine? That's a terrible, terrible view of the world.
Re: Why the FOSS movement is small and obscure (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course we can and should do better, but the point is that if you want FOSS to succeed, it is the job of the engineers and developers to make it do what the users (read: the market) want, and that means it has to be functional and easy.
The rampant tribalism in FOSS is why we have countless little projects that cater to a niche crowd, but very few projects that have wide scale adoption. Torvalds and the kernel have been successful because they institutionalized and allied with business. RedHat and Canonica
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More like that in every democracy you must to some degree submit to majority opinion, hence the only ethical solution is anarchy or something like that. RMS is saying that to ethically sell someone a product, you must tell that person how to make it so he can modify it, repair it etc. as they want. Go to a shoe store, try to get blueprints, molds and process/work descriptions on how to make those shoes. Would it be nice? Yes. Do you get it? No. Are those shoe sellers unethical? Maybe if you're RMS. He's hol
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Stallman doesn't support open source shoes. Now open toes [youtube.com], that's entirely different.
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Well unfortunately it comes down to how you can monitize OSS.
1. Selling media: most software today doesn’t have media. So no more selling CD or Tapes.
2. Consulting services: That means the product needs to sufficiently complex and hard to use that you need specialists to figure it out.
3. Grant/Donations: The product will need to be popular enough to get the interest and numbers.
4. Hobbie: Don’t expect wide usage for long because it will only get updated on what is fun and once the product isn
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Don't forget the original income source recommended directly by Stallman: sell open source t-shirts and mugs. Immeasurable wealth is within every open source developer's reach!
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You think average users magically know proprietary software and proprietary operating systems? Just enough to get by, many not even that.
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In the normal world, vast numbers of people are pushed into reliance on proprietary options because it does what they need it to do, and the FOSS options often do not.
What FOSS fails at that keeps many if not most away is interoperability with proprietary software, and that's largely intentional on the part of proprietary software vendors to hamper competition from FOSS and keep what they fear hogtied, assisted by government that also fears software that they can't simply backdoor or otherwise compromise conveniently in central locations like large software corporations. Without proprietary software, many if not most of the NSA/Five-Eyes domestic spying programs revealed
So everyone should use only Firefox (Score:2, Funny)
And then they can't be spied on and tracked via the web, because FF is free software.
Keep dreaming...
Firefox collects and sends out a lot of data. (Score:1)
Everyone who considers using Firefox should read its privacy policy [mozilla.org].
Firefox collects a lot of personal information, and sends it to a variety of organizations/companies, including Google.
The privacy policy dated September 28, 2017 contains awful stuff like:
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Your comment is a great example of the delusion and denial we so often see from Firefox supporters. The GP gave us 20+ clear examples of how Firefox can violate a Firefox user's privacy. And how did you respond? You responded with a sad mix of denial, of ignorance, of equivocation, of excuses, and of pathetically trying to justify the unjustifiable. You have become a slave to ideology. Any thinking person realizes that there's only one way to see Firefox's failed approach to "privacy": as totally unacceptab
Re:So everyone should use only Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Had to run privative javascript... (Score:1)
Meaningless for most users (Score:5, Insightful)
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Reddit had this to say today, "If you people would get even half as mad over Net Neutrality as you did with Battlefront II, we might get to keep our nice internet. [reddit.com]"
Stallman was right from the start, and everyone shut him down as being a crazy loon. I'd re-read 1984, but Amazon deleted it from my eReader.
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And for those of you who haven't read it yet, it's definitely worth several hours of your time.
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Why bother, I can just read the news and get about the same story.
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What's not to get? Can you honestly watch the world and NOT get it?
Re:Meaningless for most users (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people appreciate the freedom they get from Kodi. A commercial app would never allow arbitrary add-ons, and would doubtless force ads in.
A lot of people appreciate open source firmware for phones and routers that would otherwise be bricked.
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A Bit Out Of Touch (Score:1)
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This will never happen.
I don't disagree, if the world were capable of being the way it should be it wouldn't be such a shithole to begin with.
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In other news... (Score:1)
I think water is wet.
With respect to both Stallman and Slashdot, he's been leading this crusade for over three decades with little change to his message. How is an interview where he reiterates his main arguments against non-free software still news?
Re:In other news... (Score:5, Informative)
His previous statements were warnings. This one is an "I told you so."
I used to think Stallman was a nutjob (Score:5, Insightful)
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Maybe he is a nutjob. But he's also right almost all of the time. Those two things aren't mutually exclusive.
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No - he's still a nutjob. Many of the best surveillance tools are in fact open source.
In fact one of the first times I've ever run into a keylogger running on a server was hacked version of bash running on Solaris (but it could have been any OS running bash) back in the early 90s.
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Did that developer share his bash modifications, so that you could maintain the keylogger?
Or were you unable to, due to it being proprietary?
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https://www.stallman.org/archi... [stallman.org]
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."
That's irrational because it's unreasonable to expect children to be able to consent to a sexual act.
Having seen him speak in person he's irrational. His basic philosophy is that if you don't control the source for the s
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Define "child":
And when you're done, what's a good age of consent? Or... don't. Because I can promise you that if this discussion starts, it derails the whole thread because there are two things that no two people on this planet can agree on: What toppings belong on a pizza and what's a good age to start fucking.
There is no chance for a rational discussion about that. You'd rather find people have a level headed discussion about politics, drugs or religion.
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That's irrational because it's unreasonable to expect children to be able to consent to a sexual act.
That's an odd way of phrasing it. The argument is usually not about reasonableness, it's about legality - it's illegal for children to consent to a sexual act, and thus any consent that they may give is legally void. Thus consent is not about ability, it's about permission.
I guess you're trying to imply that the motivation for the law is childrens' ignorance or inexperience or something, and that's certainly... one claim that people make. But setting aside the fact that no one is experienced with somethi
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Re: I used to think Stallman was a nutjob (Score:2)
No reason why he can't be both!
Even free software, (Score:2)
Has crap functions.
Few take the time to research what they are loading, even when offered the choice will load the "Bing search bar" when installing software.
Many lean on "trusted" sources used to be Godfather of software, then became Cnet or Download dot com, then became Google or the IStore.
These entities take only the time needed to profit from offering these softwares, and only remove things that are grievous and give them bad press (when brought to their attention by others).
Laziness and Greed on both
The real reason all software can't be "free" (Score:4, Interesting)
Free/Open Software is an ideal of the STEM community. It is great and I think it is better. However the entire global software user base is not of the STEM mindset. Many companies want to have a business model of selling software licenses. Some sell both licenses and support. Stallman has long preferred the idea that we as a society share information the is easy to copy. He supports a reasonable compensation related to creative works. But puts more emphasis on compensation through continued support of that creative work. He cites situations where people use non-free/open software, support ends for that software and people are then often forced to either discontinue use, increase vulnerability or loss of productivity risks, and/or purchase a new license of what is essentially the same software that has extra non-security related enhancements. For the latter argument it is made that users end up paying not just for the enhancements, but also for the original product as well as a built in support retainer in many cases.
It is my belief that the problem Mr. Stallman really wants to fix is this last business model. For every person in the world to have full control over all the information they are given is a great idea. Reality is that the Human condition of greed, or improving ones self by disadvantaging another, prevents FOSS. It, indeed then, would be enough to mandate software and information not be double charged. That either an ongoing support license for use or a support license retainer built into an original product followed by cheaper enhancements with a further retainer built in be possible. Many companies already do this. It isn't FOSS, it isn't giving the user base full control over information. That isn't possible due to greed. In the same way certain governments such as Marxist Communism really isn't possible.
But, to defend greed just a bit, a sense of bettering ones self does drive many people to do things that are not comfortable, that are above average, that give them a sense of fulfillment in their lives. For those of us that embrace FOSS we are free to continue our scientific sharing of ideas. We should be thankful that those who oppose or seek to abuse FOSS must follow the same rules that protect non-free closed software.
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Very fair, English is hard some days. :-)
The astonishing thing (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's not that nothing's wrong. It's that all the attempts to fix the problem have been half-assed at best, so there is no real alternative.
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The astonishing thing is how many geeks who should know better, see nothing wrong with so-called "smart" so-called "telephones" -- which are the antithesis of what we computer hobbyists were trying to build for all those decades.
The problem in a nutshell.The geek thinks the world is full of computer hobbyists. Google. Apple. Microsoft and the rest know that the word is full of people with other interests and values. Think of the perfect storm: The Windows 95 PC with dial-up AOL at a flat monthly rate.
Stallman is an idealist but materialists RULEZ (Score:1, Troll)
Personal experience (email exchanges) have convinced me that Stallman is a nice guy, but his priorities are warped around ideas. As an idealist, I sympathize, but...
The problem is NOT the tools or even who wrote the tools. Not even the financial models underlying the tools, though one of my crazy ideas involves an alternate financial model for more democratic control over software. (Ancient joke time: Lots of detailed suggestions available upon polite (and sincere) request.)
The problem is that the decisions
rms is right but the problem is on the server side (Score:1)
even if all your software on your client device is free software, the issue is the software that actually runs the things that matter is on the server side, where companies and governments run it in private. That is where the most concerning of the privacy-defeating activities happen, and it is beyond the ability of the GPL to fix this problem.
Bullshit (Score:2)
Free software (Linux) drives most mass deployments of software (as used for surveillance) because the marginal cost of the software is so small.
New licensing principles needed (Score:2)
I feel we need a whole new category of licences, ones that do discriminate against different types of usage.
It should not be permitted to USE free software to take away the freedom gained from free software.
Also, there should be a licence that doesn't permit distribution alongside proprietary software, linking or no, but thats a different story.
In the bigger picture the free and open software movement is rotting, any system can be gamed, and thats what has happened, we havent evolved and we need to.
Its prob
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Nonsense, neither the GPL nor BSD nor MIT license deny commercial development use.
Stallman is wrong... (Score:2)
... keeping the population under control and the corrupt in power is the reason for surveillance, surveillance is not some new thing. That was the elites entire agenda since forever.
In his 1970 book Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era, Brzezinski wrote the following.
"The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous sur
I am all for open source (Score:1)
Everything is tracking you now (Score:4, Interesting)
I bought a surround surroundbar from Vizio for my TV. It has an app to allow you to control it from your phone or tablet. It wanted permission to report it's location with the explanation that it would help it to find "wireless networks". Why a glorified remote control would need to find networks is a problem, but reporting home about where I'm at is out of the question. I just refused to install it and used the remote.
People don't care about control (Score:2)
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Consistency (Score:1)
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You can use open source software for just as much spying and lack of privacy.
How we license a product doesn’t dictate what it does or how it is used.
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The difference maybe being that it's trivially easy to remove any and all spying from OSS without compromising functionality.
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I like your faith.
However, I reckon you could easily hide spyware in open source software such that it is very hard to find and impossible for the vast majority of people.
If Ubuntu put spyware in their Linux distribution, how would you find it? And don't say "I'd audit the source code" because, firstly there's rather a lot of it and secondly, you have no guarantee that the source code you have is the same source code from which Canonical built the binaries.
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It's also impossible for the majority of people to crack software. Yet it seems that nobody has ever had a problem getting their hand on it.
The reason for this, as with finding backdoors and spyware in OSS is that it only takes ONE person to remove the part that bugs people, repackage it and release it to those that cannot do it themselves.
And it's also trivially easy to see whether the source code I have is the same that canonical uses to build its binaries. Hash both binaries and see if they come up ident
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Could I use Kali or whatever to spy on other people? Yes, but that's not the issue.
The difference is that with Windows 10 or Chrome, even if I'm not in Soviet Russia, I'm enabling someone to spy on me.
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If you were to try to do that, eventually one of your users would decide they don't like it, fix the software, and their fork would become more popular than yours.
The amazing thing is that you can say something like that, while living in a world where all the malware just happens to be proprietary, and there isn't any Free malware at all. It's like you didn't even notice reality. Even if you lacked the ability to reason out why Fr
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The closest you get to this is Qubes, which is a PITA to run. (I haven't looked at the RCs for v4, which is supposed to be easier.)
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The arguments aren't worth the karma hit to want to login.
This is what's wrong with Slashdot.