I strongly identify with Agorism, but one common theme I notice in many people who identify as such is that they let their ideological insistence on free markets and profit cloud their thinking. I actually notice this strongly when it comes to security software in particular. In many cases the best security and anonymity solutions are inherently free. Look at Tor and then look at any VPN. Tor works because volunteers donate their resources to a collective of people who are free to use them without any pay. Although it is not strictly speaking communistic due to the fact that nobody is forced to donate resources, it strikes me as having a more communist based ideology behind it than a paid VPN does. The fact that thousands of people volunteer their resources at little to no benefit for themselves allows Tor to be extremely good at providing low latency anonymity. I see a lot of Agorists who are actually not very fond of Tor and highly favor VPNs (probably in part due to the fact that they sell access to VPN's and are pissed off that Tor offers better anonymity than they can in addition to being free). They are also highly focused on creating pay anonymity networks where every byte you transmit comes at a cost that is paid to the node operators who relay for you. Now I have nothing against people being paid for their resources, but from a security point of view I cringe at the idea of adding an entire unnecessary financial payment topology to an anonymity network. Now you need to anonymize the network traffic and the payment for the network traffic. So Agorism is awesome and profiting from your work is awesome, but some things just do not mix well with profit unless you are extremely careful with how you go about it. You can donate cash to the Tor project and even to individual node operators in many cases. They do not make you pay to use their resources though. Truecrypt does not make you pay to use it, the source code is open and it is freely available for anyone to download and audit. At the same time they accept donations and make thousands of dollars. Not as much as the people making closed source proprietary encryption software make, but then again we can be more confident when we use their solution than we can be when we use the solutions from their strictly for profit competitors. Look at FileVault and VileFault for example. We should not put the financial interests of vendors here above the security of everyone else. Vendors who purchase this code are not going to go through it with a fine tooth comb because if they knew enough to do that then they would simply make the program themselves. We need to be practical when we think of situations like these, sure it is possible to run this code completely isolated and be one hundred percent safe. Are people going to actually do this? Probably not. It is almost a strawman to give arguments like this, because in reality the people who would purchase this are not going to isolate it they are not going to audit it etc. Even if the code is one hundred percent non-malicious it doesn't matter because if we don't point out that people should not buy restricted access software from Louis then we have no right to point out that people should not use restricted access software that is offered through SR (or anywhere else) at all. It has nothing to do with Louis as an individual or a vendor, it has to do with best security practices, and the best practice for security would be to not run scripts that 99% of people on the forum are never going to look at, especially when the 1% of people who will pay for them are certainly going to be the people who do not have the skills to audit them. A fair enough point. It is not particularly outrageous. If someone here suggests that we all stop using Tor and start using their for profit VPN, I will be the first to claim that the person is likely a law enforcement agent, Agorism and individual profit be damned.