No, we just need to stop trying to solve social problems with technical solutions.

Domain getting stolen by a registrar? That's a crime, treat it like theft, there ought to be some justice for that theft.

Big business doing something awful/scandalous/inappropriate? Change the laws, and work to persuade people that it ought to be societally unacceptable to violate those laws.

I see this a lot on tech-oriented forums, that you can "fix" social problems with the right kind of code, or you can get out of legal repercussions with the right set of legalese, and really, no, stuff like this will stop happening when people's ethics expand to cover new stuff.

Treating business and law like a black box, or something to be worked around, as though there were sufficient cleverness to solve everything without engaging with larger society, well, no, that's not gonna get you anywhere.

> stuff like this will stop happening when people's ethics expand to cover new stuff.

So you effectively agree that solid ethic opinions help fighting this. Then why you started your comment with "No, ..."? :)

This doesn't have to be an either/or.

Which is, maybe, the reason nobody knows or cares about Richard Stallman and his ideas beyond us tech folk.

He is also a bit of a windbag. He likes to change words because the semantics don't suit his world view. Additionally, his rants are very alienating. The man is a genius in a lot of ways, but he really misses the mark on a lot of things.

That is a dilemma, isn't it? I also don't think it's the most useful or practical way to accomplish a goal.

Pots isn't open source...

It's an open protocol and there are open source implementations of the technology. I can use asterisk to set up a phone system and have numbers routed to me from a provider. It's the same as the Internet in that regard.

It's like saying email isn't open source because it has to have a connection to the Internet to be useful.

Yeah I struggle to think of corporations more "unethical" than ATT and VZN.

I've heard stories from multiple people older than me about ATT physically entering people's homes (typically when their husbands were at work) because they had "illegal" extensions.

How about Volkswagen?