Bonum Certa Men Certa

Richard Stallman, Whose Site is Trusted by Greater Manchester, Has Come to the United Kingdom

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 21, 2025,
updated Apr 21, 2025

He doesn't suck up to the Crown, so he'll never be "knighted"

Richard Stallman on a horse

Make way, ladies. He has arrived, gentlemen. He'll be paying with cash and take public transport like trains.

Don't try to stop him.

As mentioned this morning, RMS has landed and he will be giving two talks throughout this week in England. The first one will be tomorrow morning in London. It'll be in KCL, one of the universities where I did my doctorate degree (there was a collaboration across 4 universities, Oxford was among them and Michael Brady led it; he turns 80 next week). Later in the week RMS speaks in Oxford, where I met him a decade ago.

RMS will explain that: "When servers that the users do not control do your computing, those servers control it. So don't entrust your own computing to a program that isn't libre or a server whose operator isn't a loyal friend. For your own computing, instead of a server that might mistreat you, use free software on your own computer."

This topic was discussed earlier today in Techrights. People are going to learn this stuff the hard way. They falsely assume that some things online are free. Nothing is free if it costs money to operate. For that matter, as we mentioned CAs earlier today, later in the same day we said in IRC: "They teach average Joe sites that "certs are free". Well, they were not. And one day they will no longer be free. Meanwhile, based on this lie, "Major Browsers" are building gated access that excludes all those who reject the cert cartel. Eventually only the RICH JOES will be able to "afford" running sites, or have the technical know-how."

We've noticed that stallman.org (shown below) uses a certificate issued by Greater Manchester's Sectigo Limited, not some fake 'free' (and controlled by Linux Foundation) certificate. In Geminispace we use self-signed certificates*.

What's the true worth of truly controlling one's own platform?

Richard Stallman/RMS will give a talk in London

Greater Manchester

____

* To see this run:

$ echo | openssl s_client -connect news.tuxmachines.org:1965 -showcerts  

$ echo | openssl s_client -connect gemini.techrights.org:1965 -showcerts

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