Notices by Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com), page 3
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Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Thursday, 04-Aug-2016 02:56:16 UTC 
Mike Gerwitz
@strype The article mentions nuclear weapons: Trump himself said he won't "take nuclear off the table". Trump wants to build our military, calling it "weak". He insults Gold Star parents, says John McCain wasn't a war hero because he was captured and tortured, and jokes about how easy it was receiving a Purple Heart when someone handed it to him. He supports isolationism. He is a totalitarian bigot that can be set off by a single tweet. It says Trump is not the "great deporter [...] but Obama is"---Trump hasn't had the chance, so such a statement has no meaning. He has talked not only about building this now-rhetorical wall, but also wants to be able to deport _US citizen children_ of foreign families.
The article mentions violence in the US---Trump incites violence; promotes racism, sexism, and xenophobia. He claims to know more about IS than the US government, and somehow promises to wipe them out (yet he talks about destabilization). He doesn't understand that such wouldn't defeat their ideology---but he's going to "see Bill Gates" about "closing that internet up", calling people who cite free speech as "foolish people". He advocates torture, and going after families of terrorists; our own military said they'd refuse Trump's orders. -
Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Friday, 29-Jul-2016 05:23:38 UTC
Mike Gerwitz
@jookia "Free" as in "free software" is codified; it has a formal definition of four freedoms.
@clacke It as long been established that code is speech. As was discussed at length during the FBI v. Apple case, forced disclosure of code is forced speech.
That's not to say that laws can't be passed as regulations for certain fields where free speech isn't infringed upon. For example, mandating that all government programs are Free, or that all medical devices must publish their source code (even if it's not necessarily under a free license). But this is very different than saying "all code that you speak must be free", void of any regulatory domain.
Now, I don't want this to be construed as a defense of proprietary software---it's a consideration of a broader freedom that, if compromised, would be disastrous. I'm all for laws that would address proprietary software in a manner that does not pose a threat to constitutional freedoms.
cc @lxolvia -
Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Wednesday, 27-Jul-2016 03:47:39 UTC
Mike Gerwitz
@lxoliva I believe that proprietary software should be eliminated, and do not accept any justification for it. But to use the weight of law to prohibit it outright---rather than prohibiting specific issues surrounding it---cannot be justified constitutionally. Doing so would have dangerously broad implications. From a political perspective, what makes my position more correct than the position of hardcore capitalists that would seek to make the inspection of _any_ software illegal?
To draw a comparison: I'm not opposed to gene editing, or necessarily GMOs, depending on transparency and methods used. There are those that would like to make those types of things illegal---for perfectly valid reasons. I wouldn't agree with that. What makes their ideals more important than my own? I _would_ agree with bans on specific issues.
"Unjust" is strongly subjective. The presidential race in the US is an excellent demonstration of that. As such, we need to find ways to coexist. -
Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Monday, 06-Jun-2016 03:19:08 UTC
Mike Gerwitz
A touching example of why !privacy is important:
https://np.reddit.com/r/lgbt/comments/4mkggp/the_phrase_if_youre_not_doing_anything_wrong_then/ -
Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Monday, 30-May-2016 16:57:50 UTC
Mike Gerwitz
@gunvolt I don't—I'll have to try that. Last time I tried I didn't have succees, but if I recall, it's because I also block everything with NoScript (I don't trust random scripts, even if they're free/libre). I can try it with LibreJS enabled instead. Thanks. -
Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-Apr-2016 04:45:08 UTC
Mike Gerwitz
I'm pondering how much of my life I have wasted identifying street signs on ReCAPTCHAs because of #CloudFlare.
It's a lot. And I could have been doing many other things in that amount of time. I've started to close tabs if a site presents me with one; it's probably not important enough to waste my time.
Stop.
Normal users are getting screwed by this. Besides, it's crackable:
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~polakis/papers/sivakorn_eurosp16.pdf
If your site is behind CloudFlare, disable this "protection". -
Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Friday, 15-Apr-2016 12:43:44 UTC
Mike Gerwitz
> some bits about how code is run etc and statements that aren't allowed
There's no restrictions on the JS; perhaps you're referring to what it recognizes as "trivial" (and therefore not needing a license)? For example, "trivial" scripts can't define functions.
If it's not working for whatever reason, it's worth asking about it at help-librejs@gnu.org. If it's a bug, then it can be improved upon. -
Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Friday, 15-Apr-2016 12:39:33 UTC
Mike Gerwitz
@mmn @maiyannah The security risk comes from the indiscriminate running of ephemeral, unsigned, untrusted programs. Yes, recognizing a program as free software isn't a solution in itself---that could be a lie to get around LibreJS, or it could still be doing bad things. So this is nowhere near a solution to that problem.
It's very rare that I actually permit a site to run JavaScript, even if I know it's free. But for those who _do_ want to run JS for a site, should they choose to do so, they should be able to have an idea what parts of it are free, and avoid all the rest. -
Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Friday, 15-Apr-2016 01:04:10 UTC
Mike Gerwitz
@arunisaac @mmn #LibreJS-compliant #JavaScript is important, because it's currently the only way to verify that code is actually free software. Even if you're a JavaScript expert, you'd otherwise need a way to verify that all the code served to you is free by correlating it with source, and even still it might serve other non-free code with it.
Making sites work without JS is important---I don't enable JS for 99% of the web, period; even free software can do bad things. But if you write JavaScript and I don't have a way to verify that it's free, then you may as well not write it. At the very least, that includes a license header. And if you have a license header, it may as well be LibreJS-compatible.
https://www.gnu.org/software/librejs/free-your-javascript.html -
Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Thursday, 07-Apr-2016 04:02:42 UTC
Mike Gerwitz
On #GNU/kWindows (#GNU with a #Windows kernel):
https://mikegerwitz.com/2016/04/GNU-kWindows
#freesoftware -
Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Tuesday, 05-Apr-2016 02:43:07 UTC
Mike Gerwitz
If you want to install your own software for your #car, then you're a terrorist, criminal, or malicious cracker:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-police-could-be-controlling-your-self-driving-car-2016-04-02
#selfdriving #wtf -
Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Thursday, 24-Mar-2016 01:38:41 UTC
Mike Gerwitz
@davexunit Sounds like a good way to deprecate npm :)
Is there a page available (yet) describing this project? -
Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Sunday, 24-Jan-2016 19:44:39 UTC
Mike Gerwitz
On that note, !gnusocial should not distribute a #GoogleAnalytics plugin, or even recommend an external one. It already distributes a #Piwik plugin, and that should be enough; GA is proprietary spyware.
I wrote about GA with regards to #GitLab (and their move to #Piwik) here, which states some of the problems:
https://mikegerwitz.com/2016/01/Google-Analytics-Removed-from-GitLab.com-Instance -
Mike Gerwitz (mikegerwitz@social.mikegerwitz.com)'s status on Saturday, 16-Jan-2016 04:13:34 UTC
Mike Gerwitz
I was invited by Al Jazeera International to participate in a roundtable discussion about #privacy and #security as it relates to IoT on the 19th on their show The Stream. Unfortunately, it would have had to have been done via---ironically, given the topic---#Skype (or physically at one of their studios), so I had to decline.
It is important to reject Skype, even if it might help disseminate your message about (say) software freedom, or be good for you professionally. I wrote about Skype back in 2013:
https://mikegerwitz.com/2013/01/Re-Who-Does-Skype-Let-Spy
I encouraged them to raise the issue of Skype during their discussions; this would be a great opportunity for the issue to be highlighted to an audience of non-technical users.
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