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Turns out that identifying a problem doesn't help without a workable solution/alternative.
The first step in solving a problem is identifying it.
The whole "don't point out a problem unless you have a solution" trope is bullshit.
I hate this trite and the managers that say "don't bring me problems, bring me solutions" nonsense. I'm not the person to be able to fix it so the solution is make the problem known so others responsible can fix it. If I could fix it, I wouldn't be telling you about the problem. If anything, I would tell you how I fixed an issue in some stand up or other of the many meetings scheduled keeping me from working.
I am only aware of two solutions:

1) proof of identity, tying accounts to real-world things that are hard or impossible to replicate

2) proof of work, tying accounts or actions to the ability to run computations

Proof of identity in theory can solve the problem but at the cost of privacy.

Proof of work can be defeated but has the possibility of preserving privacy.

3) micropayments

There are many issues with those, like the wildly different standards of living across the globe. OTOH anyone can acquire Monero if they want to. But someone from a rich country will likely be able to pay for more fake accounts/visits than someone from a poor country. With the ad market the difference between where the visitor is from is very important. Some ad clicks may cost a dollar if they're coming from a rich country and 0.01 cents if they're coming from a poor country.

I'm not suggesting cryptocurrency micropayments for accessing the web but it's on par with PoW in that it only requires money, not privacy.

Perhaps the way forward is for people to wake up and stop visiting sites that infringe on their privacy.

Fair enough, I didn’t think of that one. I suppose macropayments could be in the same bucket.

Analogous to hardware disparities and POW, wealth disparities make payment a toll but not a roadblock.

>Proof of identity in theory can solve the problem but at the cost of privacy.

All current implementations: yes. I do think there are some privacy preserving solutions, but they're obviously imperfect. But assuming you have a central authority that can validate and sign valid government identification, it seems like some sort of ZK scheme could allow one to verify that they have a valid government issued ID, but without disclosing which one it is.

I still don't love the idea, but it sure seems better than everything else I've seen proposed.

From what I've seen no such solution guarantees privacy to the user if the signing body (or the government) and the website collude to deanonymize the user.
What if the the government signs your private key but doesn't store the list of people who requested this?
Can you elaborate on how that would work exactly? What would the flow be - which party would request what from whom? Would there be technical assurances that no list is stored by the government?
Why are you skipping entirely over good old legislation and law enforcement against offenders, including diplomatic pressure for foreign offenders.

Not everything calls for a purely technical solution.

nonsense on all levels.

RMS has offered broadly solutions/alternatives since the beginning, along with reporting early on trends that other people ignore.

What is his solution to combatting botnets at scale?
His solution would be taking democracy and freedom above interest of couple of botnet attacked websites.
What does that even mean?

I don’t mean to be rude but every single person who references RMS here seems to only have platitudes rather than solutions.

His solution is don't. Why would you? In fact, if you don't block the script that's running on one computer, the script operator won't need to run it on a botnet.

I don't know RMS's solution to spam or DDoS which are the real problems.

> Why would you?

Because controlling a large number of accounts can allow you to manipulate the algorithms on Web2.0 websites. For example, this one. If you don’t combat spammers the front page quickly gets filled up with garbage.

What is RMS’ solution to this problem?
Uncompromisingly insist on only using things you have ultimate ownership and control over, even when that means dramatic and life-altering inconvenience, and where those things don't exist, build them yourself.

Unfortunately, "build it yourself" is relatively easy when it comes to software, and almost impossible when it comes to the hardware running that software. It doesn't matter if you have full ownership of a complete open-source stack if no hardware manufacturer will permit you to run unsigned arbitrary code. The lack of open hardware--chips that you could build in your garage using materials nobody could reasonably prevent you from acquiring--is the lynchpin upon which open source software will wither and die.

There is already plenty of open hardware, it's just not this-year's-top-performance.

In the category of ~1-3 years' performance lag you get Rockchip and friends, which are closed hardware that allows open computation. See computers made by the company MNT as an example.

In the category of ~5 years' performance lag you get "soft" cores, where you buy an FPGA (dynamically reprogrammable hardware) and make it run a CPU you design yourself. If you want to, for example, make your CPU have more cache and fewer ALUs, you can do that by tweaking some files and reprogramming the FPGA. This has a cost in terms of power efficiency and runtime speed, but you can absolutely run a full Linux desktop experience on an FPGA today, and the hardware has no way to try to prevent you from running any software.

You can solve the problem of all the cellular basebands being closed source with either software-defined-radio or using a closed USB/PCIe cellular modem connected to an open processor.

So why doesn’t someone build these chips in their garage then?
Despite my hopes, I somewhat doubt that anyone would accept computing on the sort of chips that one could produce in their garage for less than $10,000 capital investment. You can, probably, with some effort and research, produce something analogous to the original Intel chips from the 70s in your garage using off-the-shelf tools. Sam Zeloof has blazed the trail here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS5ycm7VfXg . And for a less than a million it's not inconceivable that a municipality could produce chips that would be at home in the 90s. Maybe that would be enough for a lot of tasks, especially if you're willing to resort to hardware coprocessors for common tasks like media decoding and encryption, but it would take a huge sea change to get people to accept it, and nearly all of our software would need to be rewritten.
I know what his solution is not. It's not a mechanism that conveniently enables the fine-grained surveillance of people that just so happens to be google's business model.
I specifically asked the question I did because rejecting solutions without proposing your own is a great way to not solve the problem.
In Eve online you used to be able to have people (outside your contacts list) pay some cash in escrow to send you a message.
Root mean square?
richard stallman
Indeed, occasionally hammers do find nails to hit.
Strange analogy considering that RMS got to where he is precisely by finding nails to hit much, much more than occasionally, and much, much more than most hammers.
I think it hits perfectly. He espouses that almost every vendor everywhere is doing something immoral and it will inevitably be used against you. Eventually, some of these predictions come true enough for some part of his audiences.

I don't think you've made a point about his abilities. I do think you've restated his proclivities, which reinforces the basis for the quip.

This is particularly uncharitable to someone that saw around many corners and was articulate enough to warn us about them in advance.

There's a reason there's a subreddit called "Stallman Was Right", and it's not that he was shotgun blasting opinions and landed a few of them. It's because he has a systemic understanding of the incentives our system sets up and is able to project decades into the future about how those incentives will play out.

The analogy works if you think of RMS as a nailgun.
A nailgun hitting nails? This is going nowhere..
Much as a hammer tacker hits tacks internally, so a nailgun strikes the nails within itself.
well it drives nails, we've lost the plot!
If RMS said not to trust Google's self-proclaimed altruism and relationship with open source, yeah. I always assumed that was a backstab waiting to happen. But that only meant I used an iPhone and didn't care that it was more closed than Android, not that I got an Arch Linux phone or something. (And a Mac more importantly, but there's not really a Google counterpart to that.)