Comments for Airs - Ian Lance Taylor

Comment on Corporate Unions by bje

bje — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 20:09:43 +0000

Having worked for a multinational corporation, it became apparent to me that in recent decades, capital has gone global, but labour has not. It has made national unions toothless in these workplaces. If a single country arm of the workforce was to go on strike, for example, a very large company can work around the “inconvenience”, just as an employer can work around a single employee.

Global unions seem a huge stretch to me. There are very different attitudes to work, different employment conditions, different laws. Getting global union members to agree to anything would be like getting the UN to agree to anything.

Comment on Non-free Services by Ian Lance Taylor

Ian Lance Taylor — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 19:02:30 +0000

It’s easier to hold a single entity responsible for their behaviour through law and public pressure than it would be to hold a million entities responsible.

My longer posts will still be here, but I don’t expect to mirror my small posts here. That doesn’t seem useful.

You should be able to see my Google+ posts without joining Google+, at https://plus.google.com/116100817882149647867/posts . Of course they are mostly just as silly as my posts here, so I don’t know whether I can really recommend that. It should be straightforward to use the APIs to write a script which forwards anybody’s public Google+ posts into e-mail, though I don’t know of any such script offhand.

One unexpected result of this blog post was that I got a bunch more Google+ followers.

Comment on Non-free Services by mjw

mjw — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 10:40:25 +0000

That is indeed a bummer, I liked reading your Programming posts. These centralized software as a service aggregates feel creepy. I rather have a distributed network of friends to share with instead of handing over all data to one of these big corporate entities. And I certainly sympathize with these “hard-core” free software advocates that it is a shame to not be in control of the software that distributes your data to others.

When you say that “there is no way to grant me access to the data, because that would violate the reasonable privacy choices of everybody else using the service”, wouldn’t that also hold for the centralized database that collects all the data? Why is it reasonable to grant one entity access to all the data, but not others?

Hope you will at least mirror your posts here so rss2email picks them up and delivers them in my INBOX, without me having to hand over my reading habits to the googleplex

Comment on Non-free Services by Ian Lance Taylor

Ian Lance Taylor — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 03:50:48 +0000

fche: I agree that the database could be federated. I believe that Wave was designed that way, but I don’t know whether anybody actually tried setting up another server.

There is *some* recourse if a commercial service screws up. Facebook is being sued right now for shifting the privacy bar. But it’s true that it’s not much.

Comment on Non-free Services by fche

fche — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:47:12 +0000

“As both of my faithful readers can see, my blog postings have dropped significantly.”

Bummer!

“Google+ is only interesting when many people are operating out of a single shared data base”

That might not actually be true. It is not too hard to vaguely imagine a federated system doing this sort of thing. There’s just no money in making it happen, because one can’t as easily data-mine it for advertisers.

“… And there is no way to grant me access to the data, because that would violate the reasonable privacy choices of everybody else using the service.”

Dunno about that one. The privacy choices here are involved in posting personal data to a commercial service. They are not even a customer of that service, and probably have zero recourse should the service screw up, or screw them (e.g. facebook privacy fiasco). A lot of this is simple faith in the brand’s honour. And that could be fickle.

“In fact Google+ does have a set of APIs which permit me to retrieve my data.”

I gather google is exemplary in this regard, kudos.