Liberty and independence as a researcher
The Internet and digital tools are evolving rapidly and can affect our work as researchers. More than ever, we need to reflect on the tools we use to avoid being locked in by large corporations and to maintain our independence.
Here are some trends we should be worried about:
- AI is being promoted and pushed by almost every company, on every website and app, and in every domain, despite the hallucinations and lack of trustworthiness of the results they can provide.
- The premature ending of Windows 10 and the forced update to Windows 11, which is bloated with spyware and starts collecting your data as soon as you install it or open a Word document.
- More and more IT products include mandatory telemetry tools that collect and sell users’ data.
Concentration of power in the hand of the few
A very small number of company control the majority of software that we use everyday. We have collectively allowed them to have such a dominant position, often for no real reason.
The GAFAM (Microsoft, Google, Meta, and others) have changed their policies to massively collect and use any data to train their AI. Their power comes from controlling this data, all gathered in one place, which they can use as they wish. Once our data is in their data centers, we basically have no rights over it anymore. Despite the GDPR and recent court cases, many audits have shown that there is no guarantee that data produced in the EU will not be transferred outside, even when there are written agreements.
Recent attacks by Trump on U.S. institutions, such as the NIH, CDC, EPA, and other research institutions, are threatening datasets of public interest, like remote sensing data from NASA, public NHS studies data, or the PubMed database.
Alternative desktop applications
On your desktop, there is also many alternative to the GAFAM software.
Libre Office is a very viable alternative to Microsoft Office. For graphics, Gimp and Inkscape can easily replace Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. I recommend testing them for a few days and you will probably adopt them.
For web browser, their is no real alternative to Google Chrome, which is embed in almost all browsers, including Safari or Edge. Firefox, and Mozilla, is the only one to maintain their own web rendering engine. Historically they have been very strict in protection user privacy. However recent strategic and developments choices have undermined the foundation aims to fully respect user privacy.
For data analysis, R and python are much more power-full and versatile than older software like SAS or Stata.
Shifting to Linux
The ultimate step one can take is to switch from Windows or macOS to Linux. Linux offers a high degree of customization and robust security features. Considering the large number of distributions, or different flavors of Linux, such as Ubuntu, Fedora, or Pop!_OS, anyone can have a system that suits their needs.
Ultimately, every individual and institution should self-host as many open-source cloud services as possible. In the end, we always need to balance privacy, price, and ease of use.
After using Fedora for many years on my personal computers, I found myself very annoyed by the forced migration to Windows 11 on my professional laptop. The computer feels very slow, with issues like constant high RAM usage, slow program startup, and endless bugs in Teams, Word, and Excel.
After some negotiation with the IT department, I decided to install Linux on it. I will post details of all the steps in a series of posts.