If that's the case, you, uh, did not speak to very many witnesses at all -- and you certainly did not abide by your mandate to talk with a "broad range of stakeholders."
What are you talking about? I'm sure they talked to stakeholders such as the music industry, the movie industry, the book publishing industry, the software publishing industry... doesn't that sound like a broad range to you?
Re: I'd Think Defining Fake News Should Be Very Easy
If someone beats reality to the punch and makes an intelligent plugin that automatically ignores all news that doesn't have proper vetted real sources, I'd install it in a second.
You're setting a very high bar for intelligence here. Keep in mind that a system as intelligent as a human being would, by definition, frequently get taken in by misinformation, because that's what happens to even very intelligent human beings. So you're basically saying "if we had a system that was smarter than us, it would be smarter than us."
And Facebook's "responsibility" is not to make sure people are "protected" (whatever that means) or that "markets are competitive."
You're right; in both cases, that's the government's responsibility. However, since we're discussing a call for the government to break up Facebook here, that's a minor digression at best in the overall scheme of things.
So let me get this straight: the EU busted a credit bureau on GDPR grounds, and you think that's a bad thing?!?
That's not how this works. If you want people to believe that the GDPR is bad, you have to show how it's harming sympathetic targets that didn't deserve it. A ruling like this, however technically flawed it may be, is more likely to draw cheers from the audience.
The Washington Post, of all newspapers, should know better than to misrepresent Section 230.
To be fair, upon reading the quotation, I don't believe they're misrepresenting or misinterpreting 230 at all. I believe they understand it correctly, but that they're disagreeing with it, saying that it's a bad principle that ought to be changed.
Mike, you seem to be missing the point rather thoroughly when you complain about all the people who responded to the question "do we want a better Facebook or a dead Facebook" with a flat, blunt "dead." It's not that we want new laws to punish Facebook for their misdeeds without regard for the collateral damage or broader implications; heck, creating a new law to punish past misdeeds is specifically forbidden by the Constitution, so that wouldn't work anyway!
It's more like what Cory Doctorow was talking about in the last podcast: they've already done enough bad things that they ought to be killed off, ideally by antitrust law. (I don't agree with a lot of the stuff he said on there, but that one was right on the money!) And if we could find a way to specifically punish the bad actors for their bad actions, then the bad new laws would become unnecessary, so that's really the "best of both worlds" solution.
Thirteen of the City's 77 community areas account for over 50% of Gang Arrest Cards produced.
This is actually not particularly surprising. By the 80-20 rule, we'd expect 15-16 out of 77 community areas to produce 80% of gang problems. The 50% mark being around 13 is more or less in line with that expectation.
Alex Moss, from EFF, has gone through and detailed just how massive a change this proposal would create and what a disaster it would be for companies that actually innovate (as opposed to those that just shake innovators down for money.) On the removal of "new and useful" from 101:
...
It’s especially difficult to invalidate bad software patents under Sections 102 and 103. Because courts and the Patent Office didn’t start granting patents on software alone until the mid-1990s, there is a dearth of patents and patent applications that could be used to invalidate software patents under Sections 102 and 103. And because the code for most software products is not public, it isn’t readily available to others in court challenges.
I wonder if Alex is aware of Ask Patents, a site run by the StackOverflow people that they launched several years ago to address this specific problem, to help find prior art for bad patents and especially software patents.
Re: Re: All ducks are birds, but not all birds are ducks
It's also why help wanted ads now generally require a college degree even if it's for a Janitorial position - it gives a bit of protection from people just itching to get some Go Away money by threatening a lawsuit.
Huh. I'd always heard that that phenomenon was mostly the result of eduflation: exactly like monetary inflation, the thoroughly predictable consequence of the easy availability of student loans is that you end up throwing too many degrees at too few job openings, so jobs end up "costing" more degree than they used to.
Let's encourage others to do it till people like Ms. Wysinger recognise how small the minority of racists is.
Exactly! There was a great article a few years ago that actually looked at the numbers and showed that, by the best guess we can make from publicly-available data, there are something like 10,000 times as many news articles hyperventilating about the "enormous" problem of white supremacists then actual white supremacists in America.
Yes, a few such people do still exist, but they're a ridiculously insignificant minority of Americans, and the most effective thing we could possibly do to fight them is just ignore them and stop giving them attention! Racism in America is as dead as disco: unfortunately not completely extinct yet, but no longer really significant, and everyone knows it's on its way out and has been for a long time now.
Just because someone CAN use a megaphone to flood their neighborhood with noise does not mean that they should be allowed to.
I love that!
That's actually something that happened to my grandfather once. He was a contractor for NASA, working on the early (ie. pre-Apollo) space program. He was living in Spain, where they had an important monitoring station set up. (You want them about every 120 degrees so you don't lose line-of-sight to your rocket as it flies and Earth turns beneath it.)
One day, the night before a big launch, there was a carnival in the plaza next to their apartment building, and some obnoxious person was running a raffle, using a megaphone to advertise his tickets, which was keeping a bunch of engineers awake when they needed their sleep. So he went down and calmly, politely asked the man if he could please stop. The man refused, and so my grandfather headed back to his apartment.
Never piss off an engineer.
He and one of his coworkers both had those old-school stereos--you know the ones, big cabinets the size of a sofa with a record player and a radio built in? They brought their two stereos out onto the balcony, facing out at the plaza, wired their speakers together, plugged them in and turned the speakers up to full blast... and then put on a record of a Scottish bagpipe band.
It took about 2 minutes before the man took down his megaphone.
"White men are so fragile," she fired off, sharing William's post with her friends, "and the mere presence of a black person challenges every single thing in them."
Well... yeah. That right there, that's racism and (possibly, depending on the specifics of the definition used) hate speech. It's making an ugly, sweeping generalization about all members of a race of people, one that isn't even remotely close to being true in the general case.
When a problem of inequality exists, the correct solution is to promote equality. Promoting the same sort of inequality in the opposite direction has a tendency, when successful to create far bigger problems than the ones it's trying to solve. (cf. the French Revolution, or the Communist revolution in Russia.)
Once again--and I hate having to say this twice in two days--far be it from me to defend Facebook, but they actually did the right thing in this specific case.
Nor does it change the fact that US gear makers have been trying to have Huawei banned for years for one real reason: they don't want to have to compete with cheaper Chinese kit
And is that really such a bad thing, given that Chinese low-priced products are well-known to be built on the back of massive-scale labor abuse and human rights violations? If they were just trying to not have to compete with a fair competitor on a level playing field, I would denounce them, but that's not what this is, and I'm more inclined to support efforts to shut that down than to get indignant about them.
On the post: Canadian Committee Publishes Ludicrous Fantasy Pretending To Be Copyright Reform Analysis
What are you talking about? I'm sure they talked to stakeholders such as the music industry, the movie industry, the book publishing industry, the software publishing industry... doesn't that sound like a broad range to you?
On the post: And Now The Prime Minister Of Canada Is Threatening To Fine Social Media Companies Over 'Fake News'
Re: I'd Think Defining Fake News Should Be Very Easy
You're setting a very high bar for intelligence here. Keep in mind that a system as intelligent as a human being would, by definition, frequently get taken in by misinformation, because that's what happens to even very intelligent human beings. So you're basically saying "if we had a system that was smarter than us, it would be smarter than us."
On the post: And Now The Prime Minister Of Canada Is Threatening To Fine Social Media Companies Over 'Fake News'
Re:
Exactly. This is what I've been saying for a while now, though I prefer the term "too big to succeed."
On the post: Chicago Cubs Successfully Oppose Iowa Man's 'Cubnoxious' Trademark; Court Cites Obnoxious Cubs Fans
Re: Re: Re:
Sure it does: at 12:00.
On the post: Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Calls For Facebook's Breakup... But Seems Confused About All The Details
Re: Super Friends
Watch The Social Network and Dawn of Justice. I don't think that was a coincidence...
On the post: Facebook Co-Founder Chris Hughes Calls For Facebook's Breakup... But Seems Confused About All The Details
You're right; in both cases, that's the government's responsibility. However, since we're discussing a call for the government to break up Facebook here, that's a minor digression at best in the overall scheme of things.
On the post: GDPR Penalties Prove Why Compliance Isn't Enough—And Why Companies Need Clarity
from the not-helping-your-case dept.
So let me get this straight: the EU busted a credit bureau on GDPR grounds, and you think that's a bad thing?!?
That's not how this works. If you want people to believe that the GDPR is bad, you have to show how it's harming sympathetic targets that didn't deserve it. A ruling like this, however technically flawed it may be, is more likely to draw cheers from the audience.
On the post: It's One Thing For Trolls And Grandstanding Politicians To Get CDA 230 Wrong, But The Press Shouldn't Help Them
To be fair, upon reading the quotation, I don't believe they're misrepresenting or misinterpreting 230 at all. I believe they understand it correctly, but that they're disagreeing with it, saying that it's a bad principle that ought to be changed.
On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 211: Politicians (Usually) Don't Understand Technology
Mike, you seem to be missing the point rather thoroughly when you complain about all the people who responded to the question "do we want a better Facebook or a dead Facebook" with a flat, blunt "dead." It's not that we want new laws to punish Facebook for their misdeeds without regard for the collateral damage or broader implications; heck, creating a new law to punish past misdeeds is specifically forbidden by the Constitution, so that wouldn't work anyway!
It's more like what Cory Doctorow was talking about in the last podcast: they've already done enough bad things that they ought to be killed off, ideally by antitrust law. (I don't agree with a lot of the stuff he said on there, but that one was right on the money!) And if we could find a way to specifically punish the bad actors for their bad actions, then the bad new laws would become unnecessary, so that's really the "best of both worlds" solution.
On the post: Chicago PD's Gang Database Is A Horrific Mess Compiled By Horrific Public Servants
This is actually not particularly surprising. By the 80-20 rule, we'd expect 15-16 out of 77 community areas to produce 80% of gang problems. The 50% mark being around 13 is more or less in line with that expectation.
On the post: Congress Pushing A Terrible Bill To Massively Expand Patent Trolling
I wonder if Alex is aware of Ask Patents, a site run by the StackOverflow people that they launched several years ago to address this specific problem, to help find prior art for bad patents and especially software patents.
On the post: Impossible Content Moderation Dilemmas: Talking About Racism Blocked As Hate Speech
Re: Re: All ducks are birds, but not all birds are ducks
Huh. I'd always heard that that phenomenon was mostly the result of eduflation: exactly like monetary inflation, the thoroughly predictable consequence of the easy availability of student loans is that you end up throwing too many degrees at too few job openings, so jobs end up "costing" more degree than they used to.
On the post: Impossible Content Moderation Dilemmas: Talking About Racism Blocked As Hate Speech
Re: Re: Re:
Exactly! There was a great article a few years ago that actually looked at the numbers and showed that, by the best guess we can make from publicly-available data, there are something like 10,000 times as many news articles hyperventilating about the "enormous" problem of white supremacists then actual white supremacists in America.
Yes, a few such people do still exist, but they're a ridiculously insignificant minority of Americans, and the most effective thing we could possibly do to fight them is just ignore them and stop giving them attention! Racism in America is as dead as disco: unfortunately not completely extinct yet, but no longer really significant, and everyone knows it's on its way out and has been for a long time now.
On the post: The Wisconsin Supreme Court Gets Section 230 Right
Re: Re:
Are you saying Google's cache does not exist?
On the post: Impossible Content Moderation Dilemmas: Talking About Racism Blocked As Hate Speech
Re:
Hey, cut Hillary some slack here. I give her full credit for being knowledgeable on the subject of super-predators; she is, after all, married to one!
On the post: Why Congress Needs The Office Of Technology Assessment More Than Ever
Re: Re: Re: Political Troll, Correct?
Do you actually expect anyone to fall for such an obvious henway? :P
On the post: Impossible Content Moderation Dilemmas: Talking About Racism Blocked As Hate Speech
Re:
I love that!
That's actually something that happened to my grandfather once. He was a contractor for NASA, working on the early (ie. pre-Apollo) space program. He was living in Spain, where they had an important monitoring station set up. (You want them about every 120 degrees so you don't lose line-of-sight to your rocket as it flies and Earth turns beneath it.)
One day, the night before a big launch, there was a carnival in the plaza next to their apartment building, and some obnoxious person was running a raffle, using a megaphone to advertise his tickets, which was keeping a bunch of engineers awake when they needed their sleep. So he went down and calmly, politely asked the man if he could please stop. The man refused, and so my grandfather headed back to his apartment.
Never piss off an engineer.
He and one of his coworkers both had those old-school stereos--you know the ones, big cabinets the size of a sofa with a record player and a radio built in? They brought their two stereos out onto the balcony, facing out at the plaza, wired their speakers together, plugged them in and turned the speakers up to full blast... and then put on a record of a Scottish bagpipe band.
It took about 2 minutes before the man took down his megaphone.
On the post: Impossible Content Moderation Dilemmas: Talking About Racism Blocked As Hate Speech
Well... yeah. That right there, that's racism and (possibly, depending on the specifics of the definition used) hate speech. It's making an ugly, sweeping generalization about all members of a race of people, one that isn't even remotely close to being true in the general case.
When a problem of inequality exists, the correct solution is to promote equality. Promoting the same sort of inequality in the opposite direction has a tendency, when successful to create far bigger problems than the ones it's trying to solve. (cf. the French Revolution, or the Communist revolution in Russia.)
Once again--and I hate having to say this twice in two days--far be it from me to defend Facebook, but they actually did the right thing in this specific case.
On the post: Both Sides Want The Supreme Court To Review Decision Denying Copyright In Georgia's Law. How About You?
Re: Re: Only Lawyers Need Apply?
...as much as we may wish it were so. :P
On the post: Bloomberg Appears To Flub Another China Story, Insists Telnet Is A Nefarious Huawei Backdoor
And is that really such a bad thing, given that Chinese low-priced products are well-known to be built on the back of massive-scale labor abuse and human rights violations? If they were just trying to not have to compete with a fair competitor on a level playing field, I would denounce them, but that's not what this is, and I'm more inclined to support efforts to shut that down than to get indignant about them.
Next >>