Yes, I think you were correct originally that this is ultimately a freedom of speech issue. I would have the same argument against free speech absolutism. It just ignores the cause and effect related to communicating information. That’s why we have laws against speech that incites violence. Sometimes the effect of speech can be equal to or greater (by orders of magnitude) than physical action.
Even ignoring the obvious issues with the child pornography stance, this blog post starts out on completely the wrong foot. The idea that data is just arbitrary bits is completely falacious and willfully ignorant. He’s asking us to ignore the fact that those bits represent information, which is more than an arbitrary set of bits. Or else we wouldn’t be sending them.
Not to mention his anthropomorphization of computers, which is also completely inaccurate. A computer “cares” more perhaps even more than us about the precise arrangement of the bits, because that is what allows them to convert those bits into specific actions. A single bit being off could in fact render the entire dataset illegible. Whereas a human who receives a typo-ridden call to arms, for example, may still be able to convert that particular set of bits into an actual act of violence.
I have problems even with the starting point for this ideology.
If I were him, I would be more concerned with my name being attached to this defense of child pornography: https://web.archive.org/web/20130116210225/http://bits.are.notabug.com/
Which OS are you referring to?
I had the same thought, but honestly it’s software for pirated games. Pretty tame in the context of that landscape…
Disagree. The entire post is predicated on the false assertion that data is just a collection of arbitrary bits.