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Summary: Dr. Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation’s founder, explains how the press in the US is controlled

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lot of people easily fall for the flawed argument that if you don’t do anything wrong, then you don’t have anything to hide. “Metadata” belongs to the flawed argument that if you don’t know the contents of a conversation, then it’s not violating a person’s privacy. I decided to put some hypothetical history to refute these myths.

• [Search] John Biggs searches Google for “nipple swollen”, clicks on result leading to Wikipedia
• [ISP history] John Biggs visits Web site with medical doctors’ directory
• [Landline history] John Biggs calls Dr. Jones, who specalises in cancer of the breast. Call lasts 15 minutes.
• [Cellphone location log] John Biggs goes to the bathroom
• [Cellphone log] John Biggs places a call from the bathroom, speaks to his wife for 60 minutes
• [Search] John Biggs searches Google for “cancer death probability”, clicks on link pro-suicide forum
• [ISP history] John Biggs spends 2 hours browsing around the pro-suicide forum
• [Cellphone log]] John Biggs sends his friend, Daniel, SMS message stating: “Those suicide folks are crazy. Did you ever visit their sites?”
• [E-mail log]] John Biggs writes to his uncle, who is 3 degrees of separation away (friend of a colleague of a friend) from an American Muslim whom the NSA deems “target” (hence E-mail can be viewed fully). E-mail parsed by semantic analyser and then interpreted by one of the many staff members of the NSA.
• [E-mail log]] John Biggs writes another E-mail in which he mentions ammonia (in relation to a medical drug). The E-mail, which contains detailed description of John’s condition, can thus be read to ensure he is not building a bomb with ammonia.
• [Cellphone location log] John Biggs goes to a chemist, who is also known by a vast database of people to have sold illegal drugs before. John Biggs is now added to the database as a “target”.
• [Cellphone log] In collaboration with the DEA, John’s conversations with his wife can now be listened to in real time.

Just another day in life under Big Brother. But hey, it’s about fighting “terrorism” and it’s all just “metadata”.

Direct download as Ogg (00:05:12, 17.5 MB)

Summary: Dr. Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation’s founder, explains his take on copyright and the artificial restriction being used against sharing

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An epic fail

his rant is about Argos, a British retail giant/chain that can’t get some of the very basics right. Today I was scheduled to receive a wardrobe I had purchased a week earlier. It is a birthday gift for my wife. I paid effortlessly on their Web site (they’re good at taking money) and selected a 5-hour delivery slot 6 days in advance. Well, guess what? Nobody showed up. Then, at the very end of a 5-hour wait that kept me out of bed and out of work they have a robocaller call me to say they can’t deliver. No chance to say a thing, I could not speak to a person.

I phoned a couple of people at Argos (waste of time guaranteed), the latter said he would look into it and promised to call within an hour. Guess what? He never called back.

So I phoned Argos again. They struggled for 15 minutes in vain to just bring up the order on the screen. What a mess. They changed me, did not deliver, and now cannot even find the order by number, search on postcode, search on name, etc.

Don’t buy at Argos. They’re only good at charging people.

Y WIFE and I considered moving into a slightly more spacious apartment, but the people who were supposed to show up and present it never came. They even called in the morning to say the viewing will take place slightly earlier to avid combining us with other viewers. Nobody showed up neither at the original time nor the earlier time.

If you consider advertising a home, choose anything but Jordan Fishwick. It’s just not reliable. Like many agencies it is located at Deansgate, Manchester, but this one is no good. Waste of time.

Direct download as Ogg (00:01:39, 5.5 MB)

Summary: Richard Stallman speaks about US politics and the false notion of “wasted votes” (those going neither to Democrats nor Republicans)

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Direct download as Ogg (00:03:08, 10.5 MB)

Summary: Richard Stallman speaks to TechBytes about ECHELON, PRISM, and other issues that relate to privacy after the NSA leaks

Made entirely using Free/libre software, heavily compressed for performance on the Web at quality’s expense