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+<!--#include virtual="/server/header.html" -->
+<!-- Parent-Version: 1.77 -->
+<title>Computing &lsquo;Progress&rsquo;: Good and Bad
+- GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
+<!--#include virtual="/philosophy/po/computing-progress.translist" -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/banner.html" -->
+<h2>Computing &lsquo;progress&rsquo;: good and bad</h2>
+
+<p>by <a href="http://www.stallman.org/"><strong>Richard
+Stallman</strong></a></p>
+
+<p><i>
+The BBC invited me to write an article for their column series, The
+Tech Lab, and this is what I sent them. (It refers to a couple of
+other articles published in that series.) The BBC was ultimately unwilling
+to publish it with a copying-permission notice, so I have published it
+here.</i></p>
+
+<p>
+Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo proposed here that every object in our world
+have a unique number so that your cell phone could record
+everything you do&mdash;even which cans you picked up while in the
+supermarket.</p>
+
+<p>
+If the phone is like today's phones, it will use proprietary software:
+software controlled by the companies that developed it, not by its
+users. Those companies will ensure that your phone makes the
+information it collects about you available to the phone company's
+database (let's call it Big Brother) and probably to other
+companies.</p>
+
+<p>
+In the UK of the future, as New Labour would have it, those companies
+will surely turn this information over to the police. If your phone
+reports you bought a wooden stick and a piece of poster board, the
+phone company's system will deduce that you may be planning a protest,
+and report you automatically to the police so they can accuse you of
+&ldquo;terrorism&rdquo;.</p>
+
+<p>
+In the UK, it is literally an offense to be suspect&mdash;more precisely,
+to possess any object in circumstances that create a &ldquo;reasonable
+suspicion&rdquo; that you might use it in certain criminal ways.
+Your phone will give the police plenty of opportunities to suspect
+you so they can charge you with having been suspected by them.
+Similar things will happen in China, where Yahoo has already given the
+government all the information it needed to imprison a dissident; it
+subsequently asked for our understanding on the excuse that it was &ldquo;just
+following orders.&rdquo;</p>
+
+<p>
+Horowitz would like cell phones to tag information automatically, based
+on knowing when you participate in an event or meeting. That means
+the phone company will also know precisely whom you meet. That
+information will also be interesting to governments, such as those of
+the UK and China, that cut corners on human rights.</p>
+
+<p>
+I do not much like Horowitz's vision of total surveillance. Rather, I
+envision a world in which our computers never collect, or release, any
+information about us except when we want them to.</p>
+
+<p>
+Nonfree software does other nasty things besides spying; it often
+implements digital handcuffs&mdash;features designed to restrict the
+users (also called DRM, for Digital Restrictions Management). These
+features control how you can access, copy, or move the files in your
+own computer.</p>
+
+<p>
+DRM is a common practice: Microsoft does it, Apple does it, Google
+does it, even the BBC's iPlayer does it. Many governments, taking the
+side of these companies against the public, have made it illegal to
+tell others how to escape from the digital handcuffs. As a result,
+competition does nothing to check the practice: no matter how many
+proprietary alternatives you might have to choose from, they will
+all handcuff you just the same. If the computer knows where you are
+located, it can make DRM even worse: there are companies that would
+like to restrict what you can access based on your present
+location.</p>
+
+<p>
+My vision of the world is different. I would like to see a world in
+which all the software in our computers &mdash; in our desktop PCs, our
+laptops, our handhelds, our phones &mdash; is under our control and
+respects our freedom. In other words, a world where all software is
+<a href="/philosophy/free-sw.html"><em>free</em></a> software.</p>
+
+<p>
+Free software, freedom-respecting software, means that every user of
+the program is free to get the program's source code and change the
+program to do what she wants, and also free to give away or sell
+copies, either exact or modified. This means the users are in
+control. With the users in control of the software, nobody has power
+to impose nasty features on others.</p>
+
+<p>
+Even if you don't exercise this control yourself, you are part of a
+society where others do. If you are not a programmer, other users of
+the program are. They will probably find and remove any nasty
+features, which might spy on or restrict you, and publish safe
+versions. You will have only to select to use them&mdash;and since
+all other users will prefer them, that will usually happen with no
+effort on your part.</p>
+
+<p>
+Charles Stross envisioned computers that permanently record everything
+that we see and hear. Those records could be very useful, as long as
+Big Brother doesn't see and hear all of them. Today's cell phones are
+already capable of listening to their users without informing them, at
+the request of the police, the phone company, or anyone that knows the
+requisite commands. As long as phones use nonfree software,
+controlled by its developers and not by the users, we must expect this
+to get worse. Only free software enables computer-using citizens to
+resist totalitarian surveillance.</p>
+
+<p>
+Dave Winer's article suggested that Mr. Gates should send a copy of
+Windows Vista to Alpha Centauri. I understand the feeling, but
+sending just one won't solve our problem here on Earth. Windows is
+designed to spy on users and restrict them. We should collect all the
+copies of Windows, and of MacOS and iPlayer for the same reason, and send
+them to Alpha Centauri at the slowest possible speed. Or just erase
+them.</p>
+</div><!-- for id="content", starts in the include above -->
+<!--#include virtual="/server/footer.html" -->
+<div id="footer">
+<div class="unprintable">
+
+<p>Please send general FSF &amp; GNU inquiries to <a
+href="mailto:gnu@gnu.org">&lt;gnu@gnu.org&gt;</a>. There are also <a
+href="/contact/">other ways to contact</a> the FSF. Broken links and other
+corrections or suggestions can be sent to <a
+href="mailto:webmasters@gnu.org">&lt;webmasters@gnu.org&gt;</a>.</p>
+
+<p><!-- TRANSLATORS: Ignore the original text in this paragraph,
+ replace it with the translation of these two:
+
+ We work hard and do our best to provide accurate, good quality
+ translations. However, we are not exempt from imperfection.
+ Please send your comments and general suggestions in this regard
+ to <a href="mailto:web-translators@gnu.org">
+ &lt;web-translators@gnu.org&gt;</a>.</p>
+
+ <p>For information on coordinating and submitting translations of
+ our web pages, see <a
+ href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations
+ README</a>. -->
+Please see the <a
+href="/server/standards/README.translations.html">Translations README</a> for
+information on coordinating and submitting translations of this article.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Copyright &copy; 2007, 2014 Richard M. Stallman</p>
+
+<p>This page is licensed under a <a rel="license"
+href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/">Creative
+Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License</a>.</p>
+
+<!--#include virtual="/server/bottom-notes.html" -->
+
+<p class="unprintable">Updated:
+<!-- timestamp start -->
+$Date: 2014/04/12 12:39:58 $
+<!-- timestamp end -->
+</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+</body>
+</html>