• pitninjaEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    Stuxnet itself doesn’t care whose centrifuges it destroys (in fact it doesn’t care or have an awareness that it’s destroying anything at all), it does what it’s programmed to do and is deployed to do by people with political goals. It’s not the same thing as Stuxnet itself being political.

    I did say that I could conceive of one way that software licenses could be considered somewhat political if one’s politics reject the validity of intellectual property. But then again, the software licenses are also not the code itself. If one doesn’t believe in the concept of intellectual property, one is free to accept whatever risk is involved with breaking the license and using it anyway. The software doesn’t care who’s running it.

    I know this is all somewhat pedantic, but I pretty firmly believe no software is inherently political. At least maybe not until we have a computer system that achieves some form of sentience and its operating instructions are subject to its own will.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•1 year ago

      I don’t think this is pedantic at all. This is a pretty reasonable perspective, but I’m not quite sure yet if I agree or disagree.

      What are your thoughts on the death of the artist? I feel like the intentions have some kind of value in all art (or software in this case). It is yet another thing I am fuzzy on.

    • @[email protected]English
      1•1 year ago

      Stuxnet itself doesn’t care whose centrifuges it destroys (in fact it doesn’t care or have an awareness that it’s destroying anything at all), it does what it’s programmed to do and is deployed to do by people with political goals. It’s not the same thing as Stuxnet itself being political.

      This was actually pretty thought-provoking, so thanks for that. It seems like your argument is founded on the idea that non-sentient entities are incapable of being politically charged. In a vacuum where no sentient entities exist to charge them politically, this is trivially true. However, we don’t live in such a vacuum. As such, one must take into consideration that a subset[1] of people do consider a subset[1:1] of non-sentient entities to be inherently politically charged, and since one can’t know who considers what to be politically charged, one must treat all non-sentient entities as (at least potentially) politically charged. Of course, one may choose to ignore that subset[1:2] of people (which itself is a politically charged decision) but that doesn’t change the fact that any given non-sentient entity could be considered politically charged.

      I did say that I could conceive of one way that software licenses could be considered somewhat political if one’s politics reject the validity of intellectual property. But then again, the software licenses are also not the code itself. If one doesn’t believe in the concept of intellectual property, one is free to accept whatever risk is involved with breaking the license and using it anyway. The software doesn’t care who’s running it.

      Sorry, it seems you’ve repeated yourself rather than addressing the specific point I had asked for elaboration on. Would you mind trying again?

      1. Specifically a “non-strict subset” in the mathematical sense ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

      • pitninjaEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        I didn’t repeat myself on the second point. Either one’s politics endorse intellectual property rights, which include the rights of an individual or organization to permit/limit any or all of those specific facets I mentioned previously according to their preference or one does not believe intellectual property rights exist. That’s the only meaningful way I can conceive of software licenses being a political concept, but I’m welcome to hear your take.