Look, I know Stallman is a public figure who's history means some folks are already rolling their eyes before he gets a word out. But none of the comments here actually address the merit of this thing yet, or the fact that this problem exists to start with.

Regarding the post summary, let's evaluate the current situation. We have a world where media is beholden to advertisers and the public is the product. Injected with "flavor additive content" as tastes dictate, monitored, recorded and demographically categorized for convenient sale to 3rd party interests. I may sound overly dramatic but I don't think I'm exaggerating. The true customers for all ad based media are advertisers. Data aggregators then sell it all onward to corporate and nation state interests. I doubt any right thinking person would say this is a good state of affairs unless they've got vested interests in this particular food chain.

So a solution is necessary. Reading the FAQ blurbs about GNU Taller from the link given though, and as a self proclaimed monetary history and economics buff, I'm not convinced this is the best way forward.

I kind of like how they describe the difference between "sharing" which is anonymous and free as in speech and "transactions" where the income side is somehow not anonymous for businesses. This could be conducive for abolishing income taxation (an immoral action easily evaded by rich people) and moving to a pure consumption tax. Such as:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairTax
Which I would support wholeheartedly. I don't see anything though which would stop GNU Taller from only perpetuating the income tax, which I am morally opposed to.

Lastly I see no mention of micro-payments. We need an anonymous way to issue fractional payments to content creators which doesn't require private details to set up, and which doesn't have service fees that would make arrangements like "a few cents per article" impractical. Bitcoin's upcoming micro-payment channel and side chain ideas are promising, but GNU Taller doesn't seem to touch on this. On this front GNU Taller looks like just more of the same whereby anonymity isn't a real thing: make an account at their site, accept cookies, sign in and be tracked as you use up your deposit.

To get back to the summary of this post, consider this question: Would you give a street musician money if they wanted your name, address and credit card details? No, but you'd toss a little cash in his hat gladly. Some of the improvements planned for bitcoin do have this future in mind, so I'll keep my bets on that square for the moment.

Striek, so long as you deal with YouTube, you are dealing with a multi billion dollar system where essentially zero dollars come from your viewers. The money you seek for creating your videos comes from private business interests, so you should not be surprised when they get to make the decisions about who gets to have their money. To complain about this situation is Quixotic.

My advice is that you should be angry. But you should broadcast the message of how beholden YouTube is to corporate greed instead of the audience. The symptom is a real chilling of free speech, which is horrific I would agree. The sickness needing a cure however is advertiser greed and control.

Analogy time to ensure everyone is crystal clear about what YouTube is:
1. The public is the product.
2. Advertisers are the customer.
3. Google is the market owner taking their cut.
4. What about content creators you ask? They are only flavor additives, injected into the product to distinguish all the varieties so that customers (advertisers) may have options that maximize their gain.

Yes, the flavor additive costs a small amount of money as a routine matter of business, but this small overhead is a good deal for corporate interests. The copyright DMCA thugs of the world are nothing special, they are just very good at gathering and stealing the crumbs of others. So we sit around watching people squabble over content creator crumbs, while for every dollar tossed their way, hundreds in profit are silently passed higher up the pyramid. The public and the content creators are both suckers in this scheme.

In the end, we must seek out new and better ways of conducting our affairs rather than tilt at Google's windmill. This era cannot last forever, where we have allowed middle men with selfish motives to interfere with the creation and consumption of art. Micro-payments directly between the audience and the creators without middlemen (be it music, video, art, books, whatever) is the inevitable long term future. Evolutionary principles seem to dictate this, we just haven't yet developed the right tools.

So the question is if any of us will be alive to see this future when it arrives. And who of us will play a role in enabling it? I'm ready and patiently standing by.

Hey allo, you are right of course. But....

Yeah I've heard this argument before many times, and believe me, i don't go looking for un-trusted code to run! But we now live in a world where NO code can be trusted. The corporations would seek rent in perpetuity, and bad actors can exert their will on open source projects in a number of profound ways; if not through outright deception, then through controlling payroll and funding for developers.

However, i also know that there are things called process trees. Dockers. VM's. To be a functional OS, "something" needs to be tracking at some level which processes have instantiated other process so it can, well, simply be an operating system. This something should grow to a level we can trust in protecting us rather than the current state of unfettered resource access to any code that asks for it.

On the side I was thinking of obfuscation techniques when i was thinking of the cat and mouse problem. Processes hiding their actions and weaseling out of whatever controls the OS is trying to enforce is an age old comp. sci. battle zone. But i still think this is a worthy and beatable computer science problem.
I'd love to hear Mr. Hypponen's take on it.

Since moving to Linux about 8 years ago, there's been one thing I have missed, which i still feel is a regression: The ability to use 3rd party purchased programs to control what local processes may access the network. No operating system makes this default, but in Linux-Land, it seems guys like me get actively ridiculed for suggesting "blocking a port" != "blocking an app", which is a bit annoying. There are some promising projects like SELinux, but to date, they are not able to bring this capability into user space in any meaningful or intuitive way that I've been able to find.

Reason I ask: I respect the technological challenge this problem poses, but it still just seems like low hanging fruit to by default say: Programs don't get resources unless a user with elevated rights decides to permit this. It's not like it has never been done before. To imagine the potential benefit: Crypto ransom-ware could be de-fanged if one could decide to only whitelist processes they trusted. If malwareX found its way onto your system, but couldn't by default access corporate network file shares then damage would be hugely negated. While we're at it, let's take away default local disk access outside of highly constrained limits.

Yes. It is a continuation of the cat and mouse game, but currently it seems like the good guys working on desktop OS's aren't putting up much of a fight. My Linux smart phone has better permission controls than my Linux laptop for crying out loud...

The question:
Why do you think the computing industry is so trusting of developers and the corporations that feed them, that they by default always give processes unfettered and unquestioned access to the internet? Are the foxes watching the chickens? Do you foresee any improvements coming in our lifetime?

Or are we doomed? Shall we just roll over and trust our new programmer overlords without question?

Agree with Alypius: Ban Inhabitat from /.. I actually like Inhabitat and visit it frequently to see cool green architectural and design ideas, but the journalistic standards are utter crap.

In the good old days they just showed green design and living ideas, and it was great. But they are NOT journalists, and recently, I wish they'd stop trying to do "news". It diminishes what they're good at: sexy photos of cool ideas.

This. Over entitled spy agencies are horribly dangerous as once they are created, they completely overpower legislators with their ability to learn and leak embarrassing details which will get them booted from office. Similar to the military industrial complex combined with a standing permanent military. Once it is sufficiently sized (ours is oversized) if you don't give it wars to fight, it will go create them.

Genie is out of the bottle, nothing short of a drastic and revolutionary change can ever put it back. Not gonna happen until everyone in the world including MP's have been deeply and thoroughly ass-raped by the genie.

The cat and mouse game between black-hats and FOSS developers in the end usually just makes the code better. When I read the original article back in Feb, I kind of thought it would be cool if they found a few Tor vuln's to fix, even if they exploited them for a while before the public discovered them.

But now Putin and his cronies are probably just going to get more aggressive with their anti-encryption stances, if that's even possible. It's all gonna backfire on them one day.

....but over the last years, I've started to really cheer in glee every time there's a horrible breach of sensitive data.

Only after a percentage of people are thoroughly harmed and screwed by the escape of sensitive information, will the world realize that there simply is no sound way to keep secrets safe. It is a logical fallacy for one to think they can make a system that is perfectly secure as every measure has a countermeasure

Therefore, the only option that will remain after a sufficient number of people get fleeced, fucked and flogged will be to never collect it in the first place. To collect it, is to invite evil-doers to an all you can eat buffet.

So celebrate the evil blackhats of the world!! Huzzah! For us to see progress, they must steal their billions, destroy lives, maim murder and pillage! Sure, we technology buffs understand risks and speak loudly about the NSAs, Facebooks and all the other "user abusers" of the world. But we clever geeks can never convince the masses to change their ways because our message is inconvenient.

No sir. Until enough good people are fucked, the assholes of the world will keep winning the minds of innocent fools with lies like "If you've done nothing wrong you should have nothing to hide". How about this one, "We collect your information in order to better serve you". Orwell is spinning in his grave.

Ending my rant: Good people need encryption and privacy the most, but they won't realize this until they've been burned by fire. So burn baby burn.

The Ministry of Truth says you must use your Brother issued memory hole. Remember citizens:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Why would our Brother store knowledge and data? These things are unalways good for Brother. You know the old speaking: those who never learn history are doomed to... Um. Wow, kittens! My speakwrite told me yesterday that Oceania kills kittens, I like kittens, we must destroy Oceania!

We must all be strong. Ignorance is strength. Big Brother is doubleplusgood.

This. Wish I had mod points.

In a perfect world one could be honest and use their real identities online. But we live in this world where shit's messed up at the moment.

Unless you need a public persona for your job, or are really committed to being on the front line of an info-war, you are a naive fool if you don't carefully take all prudent measures to preserve your privacy. The "social" fad has just created human cannon fodder for trolls, corporate identity mining operations and nation state surveillance.

So it is with regret that I must inform you: we need more people like you to keep getting doxxed and screwed as collateral damage until enough people wake up and realize that privacy is a pivotal component of a civilized and free society. Good and honest people have the MOST to hide if they want to avoid getting taken advantage of. Don't buy the lies of the "if you have nothing to hide" argument.

Whatever you were doing on the website which screwed you: it should not have required any link to your true identity. If you provided personal info out of free will, then you only have yourself to blame. Sorry for the sour grapes, but there's no recourse. Take the black eye. Soldier on with your life with lessons learned.

Signed your's truly,
{any name I sign with is false}

P.S. Get a password manager and lots of disposable email accounts. If you feel compelled to participate on a forum (hello Dice), do not reuse credentials, emails or nicknames. And even if the administrator is your best friend who you trust with your life, FOLLOW THESE RULES! It's the blackhat who p0wns his website or the troll who abuses it, who you need to protect yourself from, not your friend.

I would very happily make payments to sites i value like Slashdot in exchange for access, but my terms are as follows:
1. Cash. I will not give you my private banking details or credit card number - you do not deserve to know who I am and mine my personal data.
2. PAYG Micro-payments. (Pay as you go) Websites can double or quadruple the per viewed article revenue if I pay direct, and I would still only need to pay a few cents per article. Don't try to get 20 bucks a month from me, just get paid when I consume your product.

Make it easy for everyone to micro-pay and the world will change. Bitcoins give us one possible path towards this, embrace it and end the needless practice of advertising. I mean really if anyone wants to find a product, they have search engines. I'd send Slashdot 20 bucks worth of bitcoins today if it was clear that I would get some fair value from it.

Until then, suck it websites. Your ads will not enter my attention sphere.

As with life, you need to think and act for yourself a bit here. No free and easy answers, but it's unlikely that you're "infected", you probably just have a lot of bloatware apps draining resources and spying on you. Remember, the boundary between malware and adware/spyware is thin indeed, so your best bet is to start at the beginning and re-think your digital life.

Everything we do on our phones fits into one of two broad categories:
1. Personal and work life. Deeply private, sensitive and important communications with friends, family and colleagues. 2. Time Wasting / Entertainment / Infotainment. Reading news, watching videos, games, app-du-jour, whatever.

Given the state of our corporate overlords, there is no reasonable way if you care for your privacy and safety to have both sets of functions combined into one device. You got into your predicament by not realizing this. You seem like a conscientious fellow so here's a tip based on what I do:

Get two devices:
Phone 1: Email, voice and sms communications, photos. Nothing else. It's my life, both business and personal. NO APPS except the few which support these needs. No social crapware either. If posting that photo of my food can't wait until I get to my laptop, then it helps me realize that it isn't worth uploading - nobody wants to see it anyhow. Phone 2: A phablet with a data only 4g sim card (20 bucks a month for 3 gigs). Has apps, games and browsers for boring flights, lunch breaks, whatever. It can get p0wned, i don't care, as it's registered to a disposable gmail account and contains no personally identifying info apart from the 4g account which Vodafone can spy on. I could drop it in the trash and lose nothing but the cash to buy another, and the 3 gigs is plenty for all my time wasting needs each month.

For phone 1, you can only be reasonably confident it is clean if you get the phone new, and discipline yourself to not fill it up with crapware. You may root the phone to remove the factory installed bloat ware, but never to side-load even more sketchy apps. Trust nothing.

For phone 2, it hardly matters what you do as long as you don't fill it up with your private life. Have fun and enjoy if it ever gets malware. Wipe it if it ever gets slow and re-install the apps you enjoyed most. If any of these apps want to make your life "convenient" by tapping into the stuff on Phone number 1: stop. You're welcome.

It is a shit idea to mix the two spheres, because remember, all of the app authors in the world just want to monetize your life. They aren't writing the apps because they love you, or because they are good Samaritans. Every last one of them (with a few notable exceptions) wants a paycheck. So don't be used, be a user.

I don't want to quibble over percentages, but it's not 100% stupid because there is only 1 difference between a missile and a vehicle with a human driver:
One has the will to live.

If we remove the human drivers and pilots, then we'll be living in a world where people and things just become remote operated payload.

And no, a human driving a tow truck won't "deliver" a van full of fertilizer to a crowded event for you without asking pesky questions. FedEx limits the size of the explosives you can deliver to what a guy can carry in a box. Best of all, pesky humans all along the way (the way it works today) might mess up your evil plans at any point, or be witness to something that leads back to you. Committing huge evil is quite inconvenient today - by design.

No. It is an excellent design practice to keep humans involved with their desire for self preservation always present. We should arm humans with all the pedestrian detecting, wakefulness sensing, safety technology we can muster. But keep them in the drivers seat.

The alternative is a distributed massively scaled weapons system disguised as a means of convenient transport.

Sorry Wonkey Monkey, Autonomous Vehicles change everything.

The only important difference between a vehicle with a human driver and a guided missile is that one of them has the will to live.

Remove the will to live from the piloting decisions, and you just become payload in a remotely guided missile. Going back to the main point: that changes everything.

@im_thatoneguy We are happy that you are content to be the revenue generating property of Microsoft.

Just understand that your long rationalization of how convenient and awesome your computer lifestyle is overlooks the blazing moral issues the rest of us are displeased with. What you really are endorsing is a future where the single corporate gatekeeper model is perpetuated with said gatekeepers in a position of power which has never been so concentrated in the history of the world.

All of the large OS and Web Service corporations are gunning for this role: to be positioned such that they will
1. Extract profit on all human purchasing activity
2. Control what you are allowed to see via advertising, search and censorship bubbles
3. Complete awareness of who you are and what your personal motivations are so as to maximize the above while providing value to the nation states in which they must operate who would gladly be given access to the above data treasure.

This is all being sold to you in the name of your benefit and convenience. And you bought it.
This I'm sure will sound alarmist to you, but we see the end game, you don't. Enjoy it while you can.