Re: What Should Freedom Lovers Do?
Lew Rockwell had written:
The Rothbardian approach to a pro-freedom strategy comes down to the following four affirmations: 1) the victory of liberty is the highest political end; 2) the proper groundwork for this goal is a moral passion for justice; 3) the end should be pursued by the speediest and most efficacious possible means; and 4) the means taken must never contradict the goal, "whether by advocating gradualism, by employing or advocating any aggression against liberty, by advocating planned programs, by failing to seize any opportunities to reduce State power, or by ever increasing it in any area."
This is good advice for cypherpunks as well. We all support the victory of liberty, and we have a moral passion for justice. Whether our means are the speedious and most efficacious may be questionable, but it's not like other forums are seeing vastly greater success. And it's best if freedom lovers push forward on all fronts. Our goals of providing liberty through cryptography are complementary to other efforts to achieve freedom. But the last point is the one I want to emphasize, a continuing theme in my writings for the past several years: that the means must not contradict the goal. Too often have cypherpunks fallen into the trap of advocating violence and aggression as a means to achieve their freedoms. Tim May was the worst of these, wishing for the nuclear obliteration of Washington, cheering the Oklahoma City bombings, even threatening the lives of family members of those who would break their word to him. The destruction of innocents must never be part of the agenda of a supporter of freedom. Of course, if we stick to cypherpunk means, the issue does not arise. Cryptographic anonymity threatens no one but aggressors. It is purely defensive in nature. Using PGP, TOR or Freenet does not harm innocent children or anyone else. Yet these technologies open up new possibilities for freedom of speech today, and hopefully for freedom of contract in the future. In my devotion to freedom, I apparently go beyond the point where most cypherpunks are comfortable, in that I support private initiatives and technologies of all sorts and oppose government regulation of them. I am a supporter and admirer of Microsoft, which has achieved tremendous market success without relying on government support, indeed in the face of steadfast government opposition. I oppose government antitrust efforts in general, and specifically those directed against Microsoft. Yet how many other cypherpunks have spoken up in favor of this widely hated company? Where is your love of freedom, if you can be silent in the face of government infringement of their rights? Re-read Rothbard's fourth point, and understand that support of antitrust actions is exactly what he cautions against. Last year a widely published diatribe against online "monoculture" called for Microsoft to be compelled to engage in all sorts of activities, including rewriting all their software to run on Linux. This homage to statism was authored by, among others, a man who once called himself libertarian: Perry Metzger, moderator of the cryptography mailing list. No one who loves freedom should allow himself to be associated with any such proposal. Likewise, I support privately organized technological initiatives such as DRM and even Trusted Computing. It doesn't matter what the net impact or effects of these technologies will be (although I think they will be overall neutral to positive). The only important point is that these are free and non-coercive, without government regulation. Of course, DRM is presently strengthened by the DMCA, an evil and counter-productive infringement on personal rights, but here it is important to focus on what is wrong and what is right. What is wrong is government restriction; what is right is technology and contract to enforce mutually agreed-upon conditions and permissions. Cypherpunks should take a close look at how they choose which issues to support and oppose. Bear in mind Rothbard's advice against advocating aggression against liberty, advocating planned programs, or supporting the increase in State power in any area. We must be uncompromising in our support for freedom and liberty. If we stick to our goals of building technology to let people communicate privately and anonymously, that will be our contribution to the freedom of the future world. == Read the Unlimited Freedom blog, http://invisiblog.com/1c801df4aee49232/
An Metet wrote:
In my devotion to freedom, I apparently go beyond the point where most cypherpunks are comfortable, in that I support private initiatives and technologies of all sorts and oppose government regulation of them. I am a supporter and admirer of Microsoft, which has achieved tremendous market success without relying on government support, indeed in the face of steadfast government opposition. I oppose government antitrust efforts in general, and specifically those directed against Microsoft.
I agree with everything you've said in your post, including >PRIVATE< DRM measures, but, I disagree that Microsoft should be admired. I've seen far too much evil emminated from Redmond: * from outright theft of smaller companies' IP (i.e. Stacker), * dumping ("We'll help you migrate from Netware to NT 3.51 for free"), * FUD (GNU is communism and Anti-American), * evil contracts (if you sell blank machines without Windows, you have to pay $X more for our software) * stealth funding of SCO's lawsuit against IBM and linux end users, * to lots of needless security holes - some even by design, (i.e. security is a checkbox as a marketing feature, or an afterthought: i.e. this chant: "Active X! Active X! Format Hard drive? Just say 'YES!'") For the final one, I used to work at Earthweb, which ran Gamelan (pronounced gah-meh-lohn, not game LAN), a Java repository. At one point, EW decided to start an Active X repository. Some guy wrote an Active X browser component that shut off your machine if you clicked yes. The component did exactly what it said it did, but it was a good example that it could have done something else. Hence the "Active X! Active X! Format Hard Drive? Just say YES!" chant. Let me tell you, Microsoft tried very, very hard to get us to remove that bit of code from the repository. We didn't, because it did exactly what it claimed to do. More financial damage has been done to the planet by Microsoft than good. Far too many sysadmin/developer hours were lost because of Microsoft. You can certainly count the hours in lost human lives... Hell, just add up the cost of each virus/trojan/worm outbreak which targets Outlook, Office, and Internet Exploiter. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not some knee-jerk Linux Good, Windows bad clueless geek wannabee. I started out as a Novell Netware sysadmin. (Well, I started out as a coder, but fell into sysadming over time.) When NT starting taking over, I picked it up and thought it was cool. It's design was certainly revolutionary, and the NTFS was one of the best designed file systems I've seen, even to this day. NT's borrow a driver from the server printing was beautiful. User management via domains? Sweet! Ok, not too much better than NIS, but hey, very nice. Active Directory? Much, much mo'e better. DHCP? Great wonderful idea. Gateway for Netware Services and Migration from Netware? A bit scummy, but hey it's free with the server, might as well use it*. File and Printer sharing for Macintosh? Cool! - well, except for that one bug with the dancing icons back a few years ago... (* Gateway Service for Netware allowed a scummy sysadmin to bypass the license limitation of Netware servers. A single "user" from the NT server would login to the Netware server and proxy hundreds if not thousands of user requests. You suffered in performance, but one of it's uses was to bypass licensing. If you read NT's license it says something along the lines that you can't use another proxy this way against an NT server.) Registry? Hey, wonderful idea. No, really. Storing all your machine's settings in a single place and having a single editor (ok two of them) to control them was beautiful. Just make sure you (can and do) back it up. No, I'm not being sarcastic, if you know how the registry works, how to back it up, how to restore it, and how to repair it, it's a great thing - much better than lots of .ini, .rc or .conf files everyfuckingwherethankyouverymuch. Ok, in unixen everything lives in /etc. But which /etc? /etc? /usr/local/etc? /usr/local/samba/etc? and the dot files in home directories? ouch! (A regular thing that I do is to backup all of /etc /usr/local/etc just to make sure I can restore them. With Windows, you just run rdisk /s- and copy %SYSTEMROOT%\system32\repair.) At the last job, we had a dead Exchange 5.5 on NT 4.0 server. Its hardware died. I worked for a shitty little dot com. The guy admining it couldn't restore it. We didn't have another motherboard that mached the drivers on that box, so we couldn't just move the hard drive over. Know what I did? I merged the hardware related registry files from the sacrificial machine on the OS of the dead one to get it to boot, then hand reinstalled the network driver and a few other minor things like the video driver. It's not so hard if you know what you're doing, and a registry isn't a bad thing. All of the above features more or less beat the shit out of all flavors of unix when NT 3.5x/4.0 came out. By the time XP was on, Linux and FreeBSD had caught up and then some. Solaris at this point was trying to get Linux compatibility with lxrun, SGI was already gonzo from the art market with Mac taking over. NT was beautiful - in theory, and on paper. Because a lot of it was VMS on steroids. Remote management tools weren't too horrible. Ok, you couldn't ssh into a box, and the command line tools sucked - even after the resource kit, but MMC worked nicely and let you mostly manage boxes remotely if you knew what you were doing. Sure, you couldn't easily launch a program on a remote server, but you could run the scheduler remotely and tell it to run something two minutes from now. But, oh man, the bugs were murder. So were the patches. Things like invisible, unkillable processes, hidden data forks in the file systems that you can't see to back up, worms didn't help my point of view. Reboots after each of dozens of hotfixes, good luck getting your system to work after a service pack. Hell, you had to reboot after changing IP addresses for fuck's sake! Worse yet, with NT 4.0, it would constantly forget about licenses. It allowed you to set the number to whatever you liked, but in a normal environment when you had only 20 users logging on and off, it easily filled up those 20 licenses. Even if you lied and set it to several hundred, it would forget that some logged off and seize up with "Out of Licenses!" At one point, I had set it to several thousand and had an AT job (cron for unix guys) restarting the license "service" twice a day just to prevent users from getting kicked off! Have a software RAID 5 volume instead of a RAID 1 under NT? Was your OS too hosed to get back up and running? Couldn't restore it with last known good or the registry repair? Good luck restoring those RAID volumes after a reinstall! Wasn't impossible, but wasn't easy either. Exchange server? Ouch! What a load of overpriced bloatware! Have fun repairing it's db's or even backing it up without special software plugins. Excel in a financial environment? Have fun with the Bloomberg plug-in crashing several times a day. Multiply by a few hundred guys on a trade floor and welcome to IT HELL! Thanks, but I'd rather flip burgers than deal with that shit again. Yeah, NT/2K/XP's gotten a lot better after Win2K, but no thanks, I won't go to XP. Ever. That NSA back door key didn't exactly win my friendship over either. XP's creepy product activation isn't my cup of tea. Windows Media Player's reporting back to Mama what I play or what codecs I use is a no-no in my book too. Service Packs where I "agree" that Microsoft has the right to stick anything on my machine? Fuck that noise. Microsoft is evil. Cthulhu sized evil. Ballmer and Butt-head aren't nice, warm, pro-liberty guys. Neither are Scott McNealy and Larry Ellison who both attempted to profit from the World Trade Center/Pentagon bombings by offering their idea of a national ID. All of these folks are far, far worse than Tim May with Microsoft being as slimy and evil as the Neo-CONS! You know what? I'm pro capitalism, pro-freedom, pro-making a buck, but I can see how Microsoft deserves far, far, worse than their anti-trust lawsuit. My fight against them? I won't do windows, I won't use windows in any new machines I buy, I won't work in environments where I'm forced to babysit it.
participants (2)
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An Metet -
sunder