Yeah, I’m aware of its history and biases.
Nothing should be really uncritically and without a skeptical eye. But to suggest it isn’t informative despite its ideological leanings, when you can directly compare it to examples that are ideological trash, is stretching things. There’s no such thing as an unbiased point of view, but there are less prejudiced points of view.
I remember getting a lot of push back not too long ago, when I tried telling a group of people that ‘good news’ is something you have to pay for, because it’s difficult to do.
The MSM, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, all that crap is simply the most overt propaganda, tailor made for a mass audience, and free, precisely because it isn’t valuable. A subscription to something like The Economist, beats anything the average person wants to compare it to. Or those one-man progressive outlets on YouTube, who went to community college and left with a degree, run their gig out of a one bedroom studio, and think they’ve got the entire world figured out.
To any user that reads this comment, only install Debian if you can understand this quote, else, you may want to consider otherwise!
This is an unfortunately common misconception. Out of the four freedoms of free software (use, modify, share, share modified copies), only two even have anything to do with source code. You can exercise the other freedoms without touching the source code, and you could even get a community member or friend to modify the source code on your behalf. This is like saying “right to repair” only matters to people who know how to do their own repairs.
I understand what you’re saying. But what I mean when I say that is that for the average user, the deciding factor for them more often than not, isn’t going to be them saying to themselves “this software is open source.” It’s going to be, “oh I like the colors in the application,” or, “I like the UI of this application more;” or something more along those lines.
For the average person, open source doesn’t mean very much. I much prefer it as a bit of a techie, but that isn’t where the debate lies as a matter of what’s important to the common user. People individually have to decide what their point of tradeoffs are between convenience and privacy, and what their intended goals are. If you’re trying to disappear, open source may matter a lot more. If you don’t want every corporation knowing where you live, but the US Marshalls aren’t after you, closed proprietary systems may very well be acceptable.
Arguing with low-intellect, ‘meme’-intellectuals is never fun. But capitalism doesn’t ‘create’ the ‘inherent’ social friction and inequalities between people. Because almost ‘nowhere’ in human affairs, do you find people evenly represented. Even before you had capitalism, you still had the arrangements of ‘commerce’. Which were every bit as greedy and atavistic as the worst excesses of capitalism you find. And even before you had concepts like ‘property’, you had concepts like ‘territory’. I don’t like being a ‘rung’ on the ladder as much as anyone else, but I don’t think it’s a completely fair criticism of ‘capitalism’.
I don’t understand how anyone still trusts any off-the-shelf smart device. Even the companies that explicitly promise not to do something have been found doing it.
They ‘trust’ it for the same stupid reasons anyone trusts bad ideas, uncritically. They don’t think it’ll happen to ‘them’. Same reason people drunk drive. Same reason people smoke. Same reason people have unprotected sex. Same reason they do anything. It only ever exists as an abstract notion until the crosshairs visibly point in their own direction, and they suffer consequences as a result.
I thought I took privacy seriously as a person that’s fairly conscious of it, until I turned my own, ‘advanced’, layman OSINT skills upon myself, and was shocked at what I was able to uncover. In detail; incidentally. And I was never prompted to do that, until I lost a job opportunity which involved an extremely ‘extensive’ background check, that included a ‘highly’ speculative interpretation of a few key events of my life, which were completely inconsequential.
And most people will continue to behave the same way, until something similar forces them to revise their prior thoughts on it. It’s like thinking you’re going to defeat prostitution through moral lectures; and you won’t. Not until people experience loss or pain. Pain’s always a more instructive teacher for people, because pain always raises the question of ‘why’ it’s there. It forces you to think about how you ended up where you are. Unfortunately, most people are just blissfully ignorant.
I agree.