Richard Stallman's Personal Page Richard Stallman's Personal Site The photo comes from wikimedia.org "Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez I am the Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project and on the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation. You may have heard or read critical statements about me; please make up your own mind. Political Articles | Political Notes | Talks | Airlines | Anti-Glossary | Archive | Ban face recognition | Books | Comics | Empire of the Megacorporations | Fiction | Glossary | GPG Key | Humor | Humorous Bio | Links | Media/Press/Bio | Non-Political Articles | The Four Factors of the Apocalypse | There Ought to Be a Law | Travel Experiences | Travel Photos | How I Do My Computing | RMS personal FAQ | Sayings | Scientific Links | Stallman on Love | Thanks | Send comments/questions about the search engine to: rms at gnu dot org This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman. The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of the Free Software Foundation or the GNU Project. For the sake of separation, this site has always been hosted elsewhere and managed separately. We are currently publicizing many kinds of ongoing protests, making this information available while following our moral commitment not to direct the public to run nonfree software. RSS site feed for the most recent political notes and new material. What's bad about: Airbnb | Amazon | Amtrak | Ancestry | Apple | Change.org | ChatGPT | Cloudflare | Discord | Disney | Ebooks | Eventbrite | Evernote | Ex-Twitter | Facebook | FLIXbus | Frito-Lay | Frontier | Google | Gofundme | Grubhub | In-N-Out Burger | Intel | LinkedIn | Lyft | Meetup | Microsoft | Netflix | Patreon | Pay Toilets | Privatization | Reddit | Ryan Air | Skype | Slack | Spotify | Tesla | Threads | Ticketmaster | Uber | Wendy's | WhatsApp | Zoom | If you want to send me GPG-encrypted mail, do not trust key servers! Some of them have phony keys under my name and email address, made by someone else as a trick. See gpg.html for my real key. Richard Stallman has cancer. Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphoma. Treatment put it into remission, and he can expect to live many more years. However, he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19. FSF Giving Guide Canadians: I suggest you seek election advice at a local chapter of a group that pushes to curb global heating and has the courage to say, "Canada should stop exporting fossil fuel." It will at least use the right goals to suggest who to vote for in your area. Join a Friday climate strike. That page is made by scraping Fridays for Future so you can get the information without running any Javascript code. I would be very glad if they made the information on their own site accessible from the Free World; then we could simply refer people to their site and do without the scraping etc. I am limiting the number of new political notes per day so as not to overload the volunteers who install new notes. If you'd like to help, please write to rms at gnu period org. Is your bank pressuring you to use biometric ID? If so, please write to rms at gnu dot org. It could be useful if you document what is happening. Please join the Free Software Foundation to support its work for your freedom. "They" is plural — for singular antecedents, use singular gender-neutral pronouns. Link Policy The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day. I'm looking for people to learn how to HTML-craft and remotely-install political notes send me examples of how proprietary programs have been designed to be addictive. check a few sites for me regularly and show me any new articles that I would like to see or link to. help me in maintaining stallman.org by occasionally looking for articles on a given point in the news. send me examples of how proprietary programs have been designed to cause programmed obsolescence of products. write site-specific Firefox extensions or local scripts to operate specific web sites. help maintain and operate savannah.gnu.org. experiment to find good ways to attach fruits to a Grav-mass tree. help web sites put free licenses on their Javascript code. If you would like to help me in any of these ways, please write to rms at gnu dot o r g. Civil Liberties Minute Upcoming talks [ no upcoming talks. ] Urgent action items US citizens, call on the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to expand the practice of negotiating lower prices on prescription medicines. We need to counteract massive lobbying by Big Pharma. Deadline for commenting, Aug 17! US citizens: call on your senators to save funding for Medicaid. US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue. To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. Please spread the word. US citizens: call on news media to cover the subpoenas to Breakthrough News as an attack on freedom of the press. US citizens: call on Congress to block the bully's scheme for making deportation profitable for some of his backers. US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue. To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. Please spread the word. US citizens: call on Congress to terminate the bully's NSPM-7 political persecution crusade. US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue. To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. Please spread the word. US citizens: call on Congress to investigate military contracts in which the corrupter and his family would personally profit. US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue. To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. Please spread the word. US citizens: call on Florida's legislature to stop the state from spying on wildlife advocates. US citizens: call on Congress to block the Paramount media takeover. US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue. To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. Please spread the word. US citizens: call on Congress to stop the bully's illegal bombing of civilian boats. US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue. To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. Please spread the word. US citizens: call on Amazon to end its contracts with the deportation thugs. See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard. US citizens: call on the House to pass the Stop CHEATERS Act to restore Biden's increased funding to making rich people and corporations pay their taxes. See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard. US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue. To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. Please spread the word. US citizens: call on Tell Congress to defund Flock's Orwellian camera network! See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard. US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue. To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. Please spread the word. US citizens: call on Congress to pass the Social Security 2100 Act. US citizens: Join with this campaign to address this issue. To phone your congresscritter about this, the main switchboard is +1-202-224-3121. Please spread the word. US citizens: call for no Pretend Intelligence data centers on federal lands! See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard. I'm looking for a cartoonist who would like to draw cartoons for me once in a while. If you're interested, please write to rms, which refers to me, at the location gnu period org. Boycott Chevron, in the name of Steven Donziger. Recording of Guantanamero Listen to the recording of Guantanamero, a protest song written in Spanish. The recording is in Ogg Vorbis format. To install an Ogg Vorbis player, see the FSF's Ogg Players page. There Ought to Be a Law * Abandoned coalmines and oil and gas wells are now one of the biggest sources of the powerful greenhouse gas methane, new data shows, and little effort is being made to clean them up.* I expect that the fossil fuel companies to divest themselves from old mines and wells in ways that will avoid liability for them — just as they sometimes disconnect themselves from responsibility for supporting former workers. So I suggest making it a felony to implement a restructuring of business or assets in a way that is likely to result predictably in strand assets that carry financial responsibilities with no one capable of shouldering the responsibilities. A pitifully weak attempt to solve a real problem: asking for a federal law that would permit victims of domestic abuse and stalking to demand that data brokers delete information about them. Data, once collected, will be abused. The way to prevent that abuse is to facilitate refusing to hand it over in the first place. Here is my proposal for protecting the specific people known to be in particular danger, and everyone else who could be harmed if individuals, businesses or governments use their personal data against them without a search warrant: require services to be available anonymously. The regulation of toxic chemicals in the US is hamstrung by laws that enable companies to keep their use and their presence in any place secret. The selfish interest of those who keep trade secrets is rational but antisocial. In many cases the only harm it does is to hold back the general advance of technology. But sometimes it does really nasty things. For digital hardware and software, it often gives companies a way to subjugate their users. Regarding use of toxic chemicals, it endangers public health. Why would legislators pass laws to "protect" companies instead of protecting the people they harm? I suspect it is partly because these companies are influential and the legislators seek their support, and partly because the legislators ask them for campaign funds. But it is also partly the result of the mindset of "trickle down", which assumes that the only way to get more funds for the state is to let increase the size of the economy by letting companies have what they want. Unfortunately, what they want is often to be allowed to harm the public. Most Democrats in Congress got corrupted this way in the 80s and 90s. (The exceptions are the progressive Democrats.) Now in the UK Starmer is guiding Labour into that sort of corruption. Clearly our laws should say that any public need to know about the presence of toxic substances in a business facility overrides the desire to keep them secret. *China-owned British Steel said to have requested £600m of taxpayer support.* Whether the owners are Chinese is a question that there is no need to ask, because the state should never give money to a business "to support it." Instead it should offer to lend money to the company for suitable repayment, or else buy equity at a fair price. These two ways of supporting a company avoid giving the owners an opporunity to rip off the state -- which the company's owners are likely to try to do, if they can, regardless of which country they are from. With a policy like this, it wouldn't matter which country the company's owners are from. More items where there ought to be a law. Quotes Here are some quotations that I particularly like. Most recent Political Notes and News Items (RSS Feed) You can now read the political notes on Mastodon. Urgent: Negotiating lower prices on prescription medicines 14 August 2026 US citizens, call on the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Servic…