Vox clamantis in deserto

Perhaps I'm a troll........perhaps I'm not......food for thought

http://www.newint.org/features/web-exclusi...lman-interview/

Richard Stallman: ‘Apple has tightest digital handcuffs in history’

One of the greatest hackers of all time, Richard Stallman is something of a roving prophet for the free software movement.

He invented the first ‘copyleft license’ that made the results of his mammoth feats of computer programming free to use, share and change - without falling foul of copyright.

Stallman now travels the world making the argument that software should be treated as public knowledge and warning of threats to civil liberties in an increasingly digitized world.
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Those companies are very powerful. They are cleverly finding new ways to take control over users. Nowadays people who use proprietary software [programs whose source code is hidden, and which are licensed under exclusive legal right of the copyright holder] are almost certainly using malware. The most widely used non-free programmes have malicious features – and I’m talking about specific, known malicious features.
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Digital handcuffs are the most common malicious features. They restrict what you can do with the data in your own computer.

Apple certainly has the digital handcuffs that are the tightest in history. The i-things, well, people found two spy features and Apple says it removed them and there might be more.


When people don’t know about this issue they choose based on immediate convenience and nothing else. And therefore they can be herded into giving up their freedom by a combination of convenient features, pressure from institutions and the network effect.


The rest of the article is a bit philosophical but he's generally right.

None of us in the modern world are truly free in his sense, but at least with Android there is far more freedom and choice.

Can you change the software keyboard on your iThing?