Even Star Trek eventually gave up on the whole money grab.

Perhaps you could clarify how Disney's efforts with Star Wars make it a "money grab" but CBS's efforts with Star Trek isn't a money grab? Last I knew at least two new Star Trek series (Picard and a cartoon series about ensigns) plus another season of Discovery were being released in 2020. None of these Star Trek series are going to the movie theaters, but theaters haven't played a significant role in western entertainment for a decade or so. All of these efforts (and so many others) strike me as attempts to get more money from their paying audiences by further exploiting extant established characters, plot lines, and brands.

The parent post is currently moderated +4 Informative but it refers to something that does not appear to have happened.

Nowhere on Stallman's list of posts for July 2019 through October 2019 will one find a quote that reads "I hereby step down as head of the GNU Project, effective immediately." as the parent post claims (no wonder it was sourceless with no link to where the quote came from). That appears to be a completely made-up quote—fake news—in the parlance of today. That this could escape so many moderators attention shows the /. moderation process confirms that 'moderation' is merely a euphemism for censorship.

Such a claim also stands in direct contradiction to a post Stallman actually made to the GNU-info mailing list in which he confirmed the opposite:

On September 16 I resigned as president of the Free Software Foundation, but the GNU Project and the FSF are not the same. I am still the head of the GNU Project (the Chief GNUisance), and I intend to continue as such.

The GNU Project was years ahead on this in their brief review of the Hacktivismo Enhanced-Source Software License Agreement (HESSLA). It's worth a read as it covers the salient points of what is now identified as "virtue signalling" and how such limitations "would do harm to free software movement and would achieve nothing. Trying to stop those particular activities with a software license is either unnecessary or ineffective.". It's worth one's time to review the GNU Project's license list and various comments about them (one of the biggest contributions that separates the older free software social movement from the younger corporate reaction developmental methodology known as open source) and the philosophy of the GNU Project.

The Internet Archive will host your ISOs of redistributable material, movies, texts, any kind of data in such a way that people can link directly to it. This makes IA totally compatible with the audio and video HTML5 elements and your audience doesn't have to visit a particular site to see/hear/read something, doesn't need a specialized viewer, or a specialized download program like youtube-dl to get a copy of something; an ordinary right-click "Save link as..." will work. I'm grateful to all of the youtube-dl hackers for their incredible work and for licensing youtube-dl as free software! I also enjoy not having the dependency at all.

Circa early 2012 Neil Young told us that 24-bit 192kHz downloads were "uncompromised studio quality" and that we needed this playing in our homes. Xiph's Monty Montgomery disagreed with Neil Young & Steve Jobs. Monty laid out good reasons for his disagreement.

Neil Young recently told us:

Earth will be changed forever when Amazon introduces high quality streaming to the masses. This will be the biggest thing to happen in music since the introduction of digital audio 40 years ago.

Not only because of the obvious hyperbole (making the statement hard to take seriously on its face) but recent history would suggest skepticism is wise.

That's quite an overstatement of his significance. In open source? Sure.

Perhaps this shows how little you paid attention to what RMS has said over the past few decades. He stands for software freedom, he founded the free software movement (a social movement), and he doesn't stand for nor is he a founder of "open source" (a development methodology). He's written multiple essays (older, newer) explaining the difference both philosophically and how that difference plays out on the ground, and history supports his explanations (it's not that hard to see the differences play out even today). This topic is a staple in virtually all of his talks. The open source development methodology started over a decade after he started the free software movement and open source was started as a relatively proprietor-friendly counterreaction to free software. Of all the threads where you could get this so wrong, you've picked quite a bad one to exhibit your ignorance.

I bet if you walk down a busy sidewalk and ask 100 people if they've heard of him, 97 would say "wait, source of what? and why is it open?"

A lot of people might not recognize the name Ralph Nader either but they benefit from his huge contributions to consumer safety. Don't buy into the way corporate so-called 'journalists' want you to think of things—if you're not a household name you're nothing—develop a sharper and much more useful sense of priorities in your life. As your priorities mature you'll understand that pop culture is designed to promote the ephemeral. Pop culture will never stress deeply important ideas or those who fought to bring them to our attention. A lot of those ideas challenge corporate power and are therefore outside the allowable limits of debate. This, by the way, is one of the differences that helps one understand why "open source" gets more corporate news coverage than "free software".

Now, mention a name like Taylor Swift, 97 out of 100 have at least heard of her. That's popular culture. And certainly not an American icon.

Even by the ridiculous standards of pop culture it's not hard to see that Taylor Swift's popularity will fade into insignificance just as decades of pop stars have in decades past.

Volkswagen, a software proprietor and car manufacturer famous for exploiting a diesel testing regime and selling environmentally harmful cars that wouldn't have otherwise passed the relevant tests, is telling corporate media that they want to unify car OSes. The harm those cars posed didn't just adversely affect the cars ostensible owners, but anyone who breathed the air around the vehicles as well. Why does VW want this? Because "roughly eight different electronic architectures" is considered too many. Volkswagen were able to get away with their deceit to the extent that they did because the software they used was proprietary. This is yet another example of how proprietary software is often malware. Proprietary software (Non-free, user-subjugating software) is not subject to inspection, sharing, and improvement by car owners (making one question whether they truly own the car at all).

Yet here whether they can "compete against QNX" is a leading point of rebuttal?

With software freedom (the freedom to run, inspect, modify, and share published computer software) we can make our cars our own, comply with relevant standards and laws, and do so in a way that can be meaningfully inspected, altered, and shared. A car that runs on free software is a selling point for that car. Freeing the source code to the deceitful diesel cars should have been done when the deceit was discovered and made the subject of litigation, but apparently that was not made a condition of punishment for VW.

Software freedom would let us determine what we want to compete with, and more importantly, determine if such competition is worth considering in the first place.

If you're at all concerned about the privacy of your data, you don't want to leave the default settings in place on your devices -- and that includes anything that runs Windows 10

If you're at all concerned about the privacy of your data you don't run proprietary software including Windows 10. We've already been told that even when told not to, Windows 10 just can't stop talking to Microsoft and plenty of other reports on how Windows 10 disregards user choice and privacy. The worst part of it is no matter how technically skilled and willing the user is, the user is disallowed to study what Windows 10 does, fix whatever the user perceives as a problem with Windows 10 themselves, or share the improved software with anyone else. These are all direct consequences of no software freedom.

FOSS beat Microsoft.

I'm not sure what standard is being used to justify that claim. The power of proprietary software over the user remains a threat and Microsoft remains a chiefly proprietary software distributor. Sure, any serious analysis of the server-side computing would conclude that GNU/Linux is widely used over Microsoft Windows, but many tech people still buy into the points Ziff-Davis started and ended their pro-corporate coverage with (a list of proprietary programs Microsoft now offers to run on a GNU/Linux system and claims that "the momentum is growing"). So whatever software freedom gains were won by running a wholly-free OS are easily lost to a politically naive admin's choice of running proprietary software atop that system.

Some key distinctions are still failing to be made and for easily understandable reasons:

• Microsoft's Mark Russinovich presumably heard what Stallman said at his talk (which was said to be a "mostly standard talk"). Stallman's talk usually includes a clear description of how the free software movement he started predates the open source development methodology by over a decade and stands philosophically distinct as well (old essay, newer essay). Yet Russinovich wrote that Stallman's talk is "OSS-related" which is right in line with why the open source development methodology was started: corporate cooptation of a social movement that poses a real threat to proprietary software. That threat comes in part by challenging proprietary software's unethical underpinnings.
• ZDNet's article continues on this theme at the top and bottom of the article (as to be expected of corporate news which makes up the majority of computer news coverage and repeater/pointer sites like this one):

  Each time Microsoft makes another open-source-related move these days, there are still always folks on Twitter or in comments on blog posts who caution that Microsoft hasn't really changed and never will be a true friend of open source. This change in Microsoft didn't happen overnight, but the momentum is growing.

  Proprietors (including Microsoft) like "open source" instead of "free software" because open source doesn't question proprietary control over the user. Open source poses no threat to proprietary power by questioning running proprietary software on OSes that respect a user's software freedom (the freedoms to run, inspect, share, and modify published computer software).

Microsoft is much the same as it was before, only the PR campaign has changed from more honest namecalling ("Linux [sic] is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches")—honest in that it betrays what Microsoft actually considers principled competition to be—to appearing warmly welcoming ("Microsoft [heart symbol] Linux [sic]"). They dare not call a complete OS GNU/Linux (which it most likely is in both quotes) because that might bring software freedom to mind (I'll bet Stallman mentioned this as this too is part of every talk he's given on this topic for many years).

What Ziff-Davis called Stallman's "distaste for Microsoft" is clearly understood by hearing Stallman's principled objections based in the facts of how computers work and an ethical examination of how we ought to treat each other with computers. But in corporate media it's necessary to downplay principled examination and explication in order to diminish the severity of the objection. After all, Ziff-Davis like virtually all other computer news coverage out there is sympathetic to "open source".

Microsoft wants users to run a GNU/Linux system as a VM on top of Microsoft's system as that helps Microsoft collect payments (licensing or rent, depending on the details of hosting) and, perhaps more importantly, spy on literally every bit of data that the user's OS deals with. Spying is big business and directly tied to proprietary control over the user. Microsoft offers a service to help users host their VM on Microsoft-owned hardware (so-called "cloud computing") too. Just to show the stark difference: Stallman, by comparison, explained what "cloud computing" actually means and why you should only run VMs on free software systems you own and control.

No, the free software movement has its work cut out for it in terms of getting people to reject proprietary software on principle and in light of how users are (by design) treated unfairly with all proprietary software. So nothing of substance has changed on that ground because ethics are too deeply rooted for any change and computing has only really altered in that more people are being offered computing services more than ever before. Software proprietors are still unmotivated by the same principles that software freedom activists are. Microsoft's change is quite superficial and PR-related. The social harm of proprietary software continues apace.

Of course people are listening to what you say to Siri. There's no other way to train it than to have people listen and then correct it when it's wrong.

The way Apple, Google, Amazon, et al are doing this is not the only way to do the job of transcribing human speech. One should begin by asking questions aimed at putting the user in control of their own computer, questions including which people get to listen and correct the transcription? A privacy-preserving system could let the user train their own voice recognition against a transcript of what the program heard; no network access needed for this activity. A privacy-preserving approach could let the user choose when to not upload recordings. A wise user would have the spine to say no to current implementations until free software—software users are free to run, inspect, share, and modify—implements desired functionality. A privacy-preserving tracker (a more honest name for the device—a tracker that also executes searches and handles phone calls) would let the user control when sensors (including the mic) are on and give the user a clear and trustworthy indicator of which sensors is on and let the user control which sensors are on with hardware switches (so they're clearly independent of any program running). There's no good reason to trust a computer with the sensors modern trackers have when the device is under the control of proprietary (user-subjugating) software. Non-technical computer users are repeatedly taught to value convenience over everything else, even their own privacy interests. It's time more technologists stop joining that effort and start thinking of other ways to do tasks including having ethical principles to stand behind saying "there are some tasks one ought not do because they can't be done with this technology in a way that respects your privacy and dignity".

Newsflash - if you don't want someone to hear it, don't say it.

The issue isn't that "someone" will hear it. The issue is that the user gets no control over who gets to hear it. Proprietary software always means unjust power over the user.

I was curious if the posts on this thread would be as rabidly pro-corporate as so many of the posts were in the stories about Foxconn and Pegatron workers suffering horribly (and in some cases committing suicide—remember the suicide nets) under illegal and unethical working conditions (1, 2, 3, 4). I'm sorry to see that so much of the discussion obscures relevant details or tries to divert attention away from ethical treatment of other people. Framing discussion around whether payment is made at all obscures the amount of payment made (is it a living wage, for instance) and gets away from any discussion of the environment in which workers work. The article says that "Teachers are asked to encourage uncooperative pupils to accept overtime work on top of regular shifts." which suggests that unpaid overtime work occurs and may be against the rules for employing those young people ("Chinese factories are allowed to employ students aged 16 and older, but these schoolchildren are not allowed to work nights or overtime."). That is certainly not a reasonable arrangement, nor a justifiable punishment, but an arrangement designed to benefit the factory and organization that hired Foxconn to do this work (Amazon, in this case, Apple in other cases).

Why do we let them do this?

I don't let them do that, but I imagine that others do because they don't know much about how computers work, and haven't been taught about the power of proprietary software. Most people's education about computers runs to valuing convenience over everything else and that leaves them ripe for being exploited as you see in this case and as can be shown in so many other cases involving proprietary software. Apparently proprietary software is often malware. The solution is to teach people about software freedom and to speak up for software freedom for its own sake and encourage others to do the same.

The permissions should be detailed, down to the individual data elements [...]

I believe you're getting caught up in a technocratic distraction while missing the fundamental root of the problem. I encourage you to take your well-meaning and entirely justified frustration and turn it into learning about software freedom. Without software freedom it's easy to spend all of your time wrestling with user interface detail. Remember that Microsoft demonstrated in a variant of Windows that it's possible to give ordinary computer users a privacy user interface where all of the controls can be set to maximize privacy but the system still leaks info about the user.

No matter how detailed the prompts are, if you're depending on proprietary (non-free, user subjugating) software to protect your privacy, you're not in control of the computer. This is not a call for everyone to become a programmer or IT expert. It's a call for everyone to gain the permissions needed to run their own lives and behave ethically on computers with others. This requires that all the software you run is free for you to run as you wish, inspect, share, and modify any time you want. This is how you can help yourself and your community thus building the only known defense against being exploited by software that leaks info about you or what's on your computer.

How is forcing WP update even possible,, WP has a built in Back-Door??

Any automatic acceptance of updates is indistinguishable from a universal backdoor. Microsoft Windows' universal backdoor allows Microsoft to run anything they want on that system. Naturally, this includes remotely deleting apps.

The difference between WordPress and proprietary software (such as Microsoft Windows) is that WordPress is free software—software that respects a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify the software. So when free software programmers make changes users don't like (for example, Mozilla changes Firefox to do something a user doesn't like), users are free to make that software behave in a way they approve of and run that version instead. Users can also share their improved copies thus helping their community. The same can't be said of proprietary software no matter the ostensible reason for the backdoor. Proprietary software itself is an injustice against its users, proprietary backdoors are an example of the power of a software proprietor.

So if you don't like the auto-update mechanism in your copy of WordPress (or any other free software), edit it out. Vet the updates in the way you think they should be vetted, adopted, and run. If you do that, you're using your software freedom to make your computer behave in the way you want it to behave.

I'm sure you'll be told that viewing such updates as backdoors couldn't be further from the truth (even attempt to reframe the debate by substituting a discussion of security versus feature updates in its place and chastising programmers for not separating the two kinds of updates). But that view tacitly accepts the idea that a software distributor should be able to change your computer's software without respecting your software freedom. These updates might fix a number of problems but ultimately your computer is something you should control; your control over your own computer requires software freedom. You should be free to run old code, modified code that merely resembles older code, or any other code you like on your own computers. This need not create problems for others and shouldn't be conflated with doing malicious things to others. Attacking someone with insecure code is a problem, but not one we legitimately punish people for without making a case for intent. After all, all complex programs have bugs and even new code has bugs we haven't yet identified and fixed. It's not wise to view this perhaps well-intention push to move people off of insecure older versions of WordPress as a call to drop software freedom talk and blindly accept that whatever the programmers distribute is in our best interest to adopt.

The issue isn't preventing the leak of data once collected (and thus going on about the terms of service), it's allowing the user to choose which data is collected, and by whom. The data isn't "stored in 200 different drive arrays in different data centers", the data is coming from the mouths of people near the computer. Thus the issue is whether the computer collects that data to begin with. The freedom to determine how the user's computer runs requires free software.

There's no way to be sure this will do the job. It's easy for proprietors to ignore user settings and have the software do whatever the proprietor wants that software to do. We can't be sure of what a proprietor will do in the future based on what they've chosen to do or not do thus far. The underlying power is the real issue, the core injustice—users aren't in control of their devices (regardless of technical talent or willingness) if that device runs nonfree software (software that doesn't respect a user's freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify).

We've known this is a problem for decades but Microsoft recently demonstrated this power over its users when Microsoft forced Windows 10 on Windows 7 users including users who had changed a setting ostensibly set to prevent the switch (EFF has more on this). Condé Nast wrote "Even when told not to, Windows 10 just canâ(TM)t stop talking to Microsoft", another example of how users can be tricked into insecurity and a loss of privacy through nonfree software.