
Richard Stallman is an eclectic character in the software community to say the least. He founded the GNU Project, which lead to the development of the Linux kernel ultimately by Linus Torvalds in 1991. Torvalds is (quietly) a more significant figure in the history of computing, whereas Stallman is a colorful hippy. For those who don’t know, Linux operating systems power the vast majority of the internet and most back-end servers. The Android mobile operating system is a Linux distribution and iOS/MacOS is also Unix-based, which is a closely related predecessor to Linux.
Honestly, the most intriguing thing to me about Richard Stallman is not his contributions to computing nor his wacky political views but rather his website. Stallman is a prolific writer on his website, which looks like its formatting remains largely unchanged since the mid-1990s. To some degree, Stallman’s website inspired my own. At stallman.org, you can learn about everything from his views on gender neutrality in Spanish, to self-authored French poetry, to his love life. He even posts his former romantic personals listing. Oh la la.
Within the website there are a lot of gems but the page that I find funniest is where he describes how he painstakingly uses the internet.
I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me.
If you are a techy, the page will give you a good laugh. Stallman is against just about every useful mainstream website and piece of software nearly to the point of nearly being a luddite because many of these advancements are proprietary. I should not deride Stallman too much because I also am a big believer in free software, privacy, and largely abolishing intellectual property rights.
And now I too will describe how I browse the internet. For starters, I mainly use the Brave web browser, which is a privacy friendly, de-Googled version of Chrome. There are a number of websites that I find myself needing to use Safari for because Brave does too good of a job blocking active (tracking) elements in webpages. On my iPhone, I mainly use Safari out of convenience. DuckDuckGo is my primary search engine, but I occasionally run Google searches. DuckDuckGo conveniently has short codes for accessing other search engines within its own search box (e.g.: “!g” for Google, “!yt” for YouTube, or “!a” for Amazon”). This is particularly useful if you set your default search engine in your browser to DuckDuckGo. More recently, I’ve started to use a VPN, which can shield you from your internet service provider from tracking you. Not as useful against a state actor. For encrypted messaging, I’ve become a big fan of Signal, which I use on a daily basis with many friends. Despite privacy becoming harder to maintain, there is at least growing cognizance about the benefits of privacy.