20 September 2024
Article published by: wxie
Date of publication: 20 September 2024
title: To control, or to be controlled description: On 2024-09-20 I submit this speech as the draft of my TEDx speech. —
Dear friends,
looking at you, I feel something. I feel that you must all have a smartphone with you. Am I right? Thank you.
If you have a smartphone, you are a software user. Please raise your hands if you think you have control over your smartphone applications?
You are right. Nowadays, you even can’t remove the battery of your smartphone to make sure it really powers off, how could you have control over your applications? You have no control of the software in your smartphone. The software controls you! The software is proprietary software. The software is malware because they have malicious functionalities to control you.
For example, girls, do you like to use “beauty camera” apps? You may think these apps will help you to take beautiful pictures. However, more than 20 “beauty camera” apps that used to be on Google Play had one or more malicious functionalities, such as stealing your photos instead of “beautifying” them, pushing unwanted and often malicious ads on you, and redirecting you to phishing sites that stole you credentials. Furthermore, most of the applications’ user interface was designed to make uninstallation difficult.
If you use them, you do not control them, and you are controlled by them.
Dear friends, do you like that your personal photos are sent to strangers? Do you like to receive ads when you take a photo? I bet you not.
To avoid being controlled and making sure you control the application means you should use free software. Free software is the software that the user has four fundamental freedoms to control the software:
Freedom 0: you can run the software as you wish;
Freedom 1: you can study and modify the software as you wish;
Freedom 2: you can distribute the original version of the software as you wish;
Freedom 3: you can distribute the modified version of the software as you wish.
Free software is not about price. The free is not like free lunch, the free is like free speech.
Dear Friends, freedom means having control over our own life. If we use a program to carry out activities in our life, our freedom depends on our having control over the program. We deserve to have control over the programs we use, and all the more so when we use them for something important in our life.
Today, we are living convenient life with all those smart devices, running smart programs, but without control over the computing we do, we lose the control of own life, we lose freedom. Using free software is the right thing to do, for selfish reasons; but not solely for selfish reasons.
Remember, if you don’t control your devices, they can be used to control you, and the smartest thing you can do with “smart” devices is to avoid them!
To control, or to controlled?
This is the question.
Thank you.
Markdown file for this page: https://wxie.codeberg.page/speeches/speech/control_be_controlled.md
Subscribe to RSS for this site
This HTML page was generated by the Untitled Static Site Generator.