No one in this has said that adding "dirt" to your domain name absolves you of liability, either under Section 230 or for any other reason.
What the original court said is that adding "dirt" to your domain name leaves you outside of Section 230's protections from liability.
What the appeals court said is that the original court was wrong, and adding "dirt" to your domain name does not change your Section 230 liability-protection status at all.
And of course, yes, if you are posting libelous comments on your own Website, you are liable for those comments - just as if you are posting libelous comments on someone else's Website, you are liable for those comments.
However, if someone else is posting libelous comments on your Website - the reverse of the latter situation - that person is the one who is liable for them; that is the entire point of the Section 230 liability protections.
Even the first part of that might violate the "available to law enforcement upon request" requirement, and adding in the last part (preventing remote access) definitely would.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Well, clearly not an authorized connection
Given that the default state of the vast majority of devices for many years has been to have the wifi disabled or password protected out of the box, it's reasonable to assume that an open wifi point is intentionally left in that state by the owner.
Actually, this specifically gets at the point I was making pretty well - because while you think it's reasonable to assume that, people on the other side of the argument may very well think it's *not* reasonable to assume that, and/or is reasonable to assume the contrary. (Particularly given that the default state of virtually all devices for a different many years, previous to the years you mentioned, was to be unsecured.)
That difference in assumptions is precisely what needs to be addressed (one side justified and supported, the other side debunked and broken down) if this argument is to be won by any means other than attrition as one side's supporters die off. So far, the only argument I recall having seen presented against the opposing assumption is that "the vast majority of devices are secured by default nowadays", which plainly is not getting the job done.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Well, clearly not an authorized connection
I agree that that is a problem.
But the logic I gave is an (IMO decent) encapsulation of the logic being employed by those who say that connecting to unsecured WiFi "without permission" is, or should not be, allowed.
And yes, this same logic would be - and apparently is - applied to Websites and other servers. It's what underlies things like deciding that modifying a URL to connect to a part of the site you haven't been linked to is "hacking", or that accessing a Web server which does not require password authentication but whose existence is not publicized outside of a small circle can likewise be "hacking" - both of which decisions, if I'm not mistaken, have been made and held up (or at least not overturned) in court.
Understand: I don't *like* this logic, and I'm not happy with its implications.
But I can understand why those who accept, employ, and support it do so - because it is internally consistent.
I'm pretty sure the problem here is one of conflicting underlying assumptions, and unless you can break one or more of those assumptions, you're never going to get the different sides to agree. Breaking assumptions in a context as abstract as this one (where presenting direct, visible, incontrovertible evidence is generally not possible) is very difficult, but in order to do it, you need to at least recognize what those assumptions are - and argue against the *assumptions themselves*.
So far, all I'm seeing presented here is assertions against the assumptions, which are not going to convince anyone whose thinking is based on those assumptions.
What I'm trying to do here, at least as much as anything else, is point out some of those different underlying assumptions, and hopefully help people understand them - hopefully well enough to effectively argue against them, and failing that, possibly well enough to think "maybe the people on the other side do have something of a point", which even if it doesn't advance The Agenda(tm), might help promote understanding and thence comity in a different regard.
That set of simple standards would be the ideal, and I'd support it.
But that's not necessarily the existing understanding - and the existing understanding is what is being (and, arguably but - somewhat reluctantly - IMO, needs to be) applied in existing cases.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Well, clearly not an authorized connection
Your access point is giving permission for people to join it.
Yes, but the question is: does the fact that your access point is giving this permission mean that you are giving this permission?
Because the access point does not have the legal authority to grant permission. Only the owner has that authority.
If the owner has explicitly configured the access point to be open and unsecured, then things get kind of murky; I could make arguments in either direction (or both directions at once) at that point, and most likely the question would turn on the owner's intent in so doing.
But if the access point is open and unsecured simply because that's its default state - which for a lot of "home wireless router"s sold in the past decade, many of which may still be in use, was the case - then that open and unsecured state says nothing whatsoever about whether the owner has granted authorization.
if you're using my WiFi then I have access to every bit that you're sending and receiving. I have made no promises to you about what I will or won't do with those bits.
I remember reading about one fellow who put in a setup such that browsing through his open WiFi would work, but all image requests made over HTTP would be redirected to be filled by random images from a porn stash. (Or possibly from a repository of explicit images online, I don't recall in detail.)
The post included details of how he set it up, and it turned out to be not all that complicated in the end.
I believe someone else did a similar image-intercepting arrangement, except that instead of replacing the image outright, they applied an imagemagick script to turn the requested image upside down... again, not terribly complicated in the final implementation.
Actually, if I'm reading this correctly, they are explicitly not saying that.
Rather, they are saying that if you connect to a WiFi router without having been authorized to do so by the owner of the router (an important point, since while the open "please connect to me if you want to" broadcast of an unsecured wireless router can be reasonably read to say that the router is granting authorization, the router is not the one from whom authorization is needed), you may be committing a crime.
I think the idea is that they're trying to ban firearms which should properly not be classified as assault weapons by classifying them as assault weapons.
I largely agree with what others (particularly John Fenderson) have said in response to this, but there's one thing I wanted to focus on:
There is a notion that we grant everything. Simply not true. I cant speak for every area within the Agency or every Examiner, but plenty of applications are never issued. We have this thing called an abandonment. We use it. That being said, I'll admit that I don't think we have a perfect system. We have production, don't meet it and it can cost you your job.
I think there's a pretty strong case to be made that this last point, specifically, is one of the major roots of the problem: patent examiners not being given as much time as is needed to fully review any patent application, however much time that may end up being.
Some patent applications may be obviously rejectable within a matter of minutes. Others may take a few hours. Others may take days, weeks, or even months to fully investigate and review all possible prior art, et cetera - though in that last case, you're starting to get into the level of complexity where a lawsuit and court review is almost guaranteed.
Requiring each patent examiner to process a certain number of patent applications per (hour, day, week, whatever), and approving the application if no reason to reject it has been found by the end of the allotted time, will inevitably result in bad patents being issued. Given those conditions, there's just no way to avoid that outcome.
Allowing each patent examiner to take as much time as is needed on any given patent application would have two obvious downsides: it would decrease the throughput of processing patent applications (thus building up the backlog of pending applications), and it would potentially enable an examiner who is so inclined to just sit around being lazy on the clock rather than actually do a reasonable amount of work.
The latter (lazy patent examiners getting paid to slack off) would be bad, but there are probably other ways to avoid it - other metrics to assess examiner performance, et cetera.
The former (decrease in patent-application-processing throughput, and resulting increase in patent-application backlog) could be argued to be a bad thing for obvious reasons, but it could also be argued to be a good one, for the potential disincentive it could create for filing large numbers of patent applications. However, it's far from clear that such a disincentive would actually appear in practice.
Regardless, there's a reasonable position to be taken that the cost of approving bad patents outweighs the cost of taking a long time to approve good ones. I think I, for one, might be likely to take that position; at the least, I'd like to see the experiment tried.
Re: So, the government can go shopping for warrants now
Well, there's an argument to be made that the only reason the USA could do this to Microsoft is because Microsoft is an American company, operating out of America - albeit with offices and so forth in other countries as well.
Even if we don't go that far, there's also an argument to be made that only a country where Microsoft has a business presence could do this to Microsoft, and the worst penalty that could be applied if Microsoft refuses is to deny Microsoft permission to operate or otherwise do business in that country. That might still result in "any country in the world" being able to do it, but it would at least be a sufficiently logical-sounding limitation that courts - including international ones - might sign off on it...
And apparently there's a reason for that. My (slightly outdated) version of HTTPS Everywhere doesn't automatically convert Bing to HTTPS, and lists it as "Partial, buggy" - meaning that although some parts of the site work via HTTPS, others don't, and the result breaks some of the site's functionality.
So they'd have more work to do than just rewriting the protocol specifiers in their HTML (and HTML generators) - possibly considerably more. For all we know, they might be working on doing that right now...
From my reading of the story, it looks like the school (or their representatives) *did* write the song, or at least had the copyright assigned to them by whoever did.
(Of course, to completely verify that would require knowing what the original music of the original video was, so that its copyright ownership can be tracked down - and AFAIK that's not mentioned in this article or any of its links.)
You might disagree about whether it should be possible for someone other than the original creator (songwriter) to own the copyright to the song, but the fact is that under current US law it is possible.
Do you have a citation for this? It sounds interesting, and plausible in an "I wouldn't put it past them" sense, but it's an extreme enough claim that I'd like to have some evidence to back it up.
The vulnerabilities were discovered, and are being fixed; indeed, I seem to recall that someone from Techdirt posted that they've already applied the fixes for Techdirt itself.
SSL is not guaranteed absolutely 100% secure, true - not even with the fixes for the discovered vulnerabilities; there could always be more which haven't been discovered yet.
But it's far, far more secure than not using encryption at all, which is the status quo ante, and is still the main alternative.
There is absolutely nothing suspicious about using SSL at this point. Refusing to use SSL, in favor of using no encryption, would be more on the suspicious side.
I think the whole idea of the "right to be forgotten" is to make it so that revealing truthful information *is* in some cases illegal - just as the idea of "copyright" is to make it so that creating a copy of a piece of information is in some cases illegal.
Both "rights" are created only by government and law; if the government and the law says it's forbidden, then it is by definition illegal.
The dispute (or part thereof) is about whether, to what extent, and/or with what penalties or other remedies such things *should* be illegal.
That was about products, though - the slaves themselves being the products; it's illegal to sell them and illegal to own them, just like with most drugs and other controlled substances, but the business models built on the backs of the slaves themselves were not targeted. (They just died as a side effect of prohibiting that product.)
Re: Re: Another possible explanation for how preservation causes loss
Wouldn't help if the process which deletes the information and the process which receives and stores the information are the same process.
Unlikely in a system of the scale of what they're probably working with here, but not entirely impossible. It would just indicate a bad, clunky, and probably fragile / unstable design.
It's not just certain elected officials. It's also a lot of the appointed, or even just hired, government officials, agents, and/or functionaries... who very likely far outnumber the problematic elected officials.
Putting pressure on the specific elected officials (in terms of getting them out of office, not of convincing them to change their minds, since there's no real chance of success at the latter) is still probably the best way of getting something done about this overall. But there's room for concern that doing that alone may well not be enough, against the entrenched and non-elected bureaucracy.
On the post: Phew: Appeals Court Says Having 'Dirt' In Your Domain Name Doesn't Remove Safe Harbor Protections
Re:
No one in this has said that adding "dirt" to your domain name absolves you of liability, either under Section 230 or for any other reason.
What the original court said is that adding "dirt" to your domain name leaves you outside of Section 230's protections from liability.
What the appeals court said is that the original court was wrong, and adding "dirt" to your domain name does not change your Section 230 liability-protection status at all.
And of course, yes, if you are posting libelous comments on your own Website, you are liable for those comments - just as if you are posting libelous comments on someone else's Website, you are liable for those comments.
However, if someone else is posting libelous comments on your Website - the reverse of the latter situation - that person is the one who is liable for them; that is the entire point of the Section 230 liability protections.
On the post: State Legislators Discussing Laws That Will Put Law Enforcement Surveillance Cameras Inside Private Businesses
Re: A solution
On the post: Appeals Court Says Using Open WiFi May Be A Crime
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Well, clearly not an authorized connection
That difference in assumptions is precisely what needs to be addressed (one side justified and supported, the other side debunked and broken down) if this argument is to be won by any means other than attrition as one side's supporters die off. So far, the only argument I recall having seen presented against the opposing assumption is that "the vast majority of devices are secured by default nowadays", which plainly is not getting the job done.
On the post: Appeals Court Says Using Open WiFi May Be A Crime
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Well, clearly not an authorized connection
But the logic I gave is an (IMO decent) encapsulation of the logic being employed by those who say that connecting to unsecured WiFi "without permission" is, or should not be, allowed.
And yes, this same logic would be - and apparently is - applied to Websites and other servers. It's what underlies things like deciding that modifying a URL to connect to a part of the site you haven't been linked to is "hacking", or that accessing a Web server which does not require password authentication but whose existence is not publicized outside of a small circle can likewise be "hacking" - both of which decisions, if I'm not mistaken, have been made and held up (or at least not overturned) in court.
Understand: I don't *like* this logic, and I'm not happy with its implications.
But I can understand why those who accept, employ, and support it do so - because it is internally consistent.
I'm pretty sure the problem here is one of conflicting underlying assumptions, and unless you can break one or more of those assumptions, you're never going to get the different sides to agree. Breaking assumptions in a context as abstract as this one (where presenting direct, visible, incontrovertible evidence is generally not possible) is very difficult, but in order to do it, you need to at least recognize what those assumptions are - and argue against the *assumptions themselves*.
So far, all I'm seeing presented here is assertions against the assumptions, which are not going to convince anyone whose thinking is based on those assumptions.
What I'm trying to do here, at least as much as anything else, is point out some of those different underlying assumptions, and hopefully help people understand them - hopefully well enough to effectively argue against them, and failing that, possibly well enough to think "maybe the people on the other side do have something of a point", which even if it doesn't advance The Agenda(tm), might help promote understanding and thence comity in a different regard.
On the post: Appeals Court Says Using Open WiFi May Be A Crime
Re: Re: Trespassing
But that's not necessarily the existing understanding - and the existing understanding is what is being (and, arguably but - somewhat reluctantly - IMO, needs to be) applied in existing cases.
On the post: Appeals Court Says Using Open WiFi May Be A Crime
Re: Re: Re: Re: Well, clearly not an authorized connection
Because the access point does not have the legal authority to grant permission. Only the owner has that authority.
If the owner has explicitly configured the access point to be open and unsecured, then things get kind of murky; I could make arguments in either direction (or both directions at once) at that point, and most likely the question would turn on the owner's intent in so doing.
But if the access point is open and unsecured simply because that's its default state - which for a lot of "home wireless router"s sold in the past decade, many of which may still be in use, was the case - then that open and unsecured state says nothing whatsoever about whether the owner has granted authorization.
On the post: Appeals Court Says Using Open WiFi May Be A Crime
Re: Re: Re: Re:
The post included details of how he set it up, and it turned out to be not all that complicated in the end.
I believe someone else did a similar image-intercepting arrangement, except that instead of replacing the image outright, they applied an imagemagick script to turn the requested image upside down... again, not terribly complicated in the final implementation.
On the post: Appeals Court Says Using Open WiFi May Be A Crime
Re: Re:
Rather, they are saying that if you connect to a WiFi router without having been authorized to do so by the owner of the router (an important point, since while the open "please connect to me if you want to" broadcast of an unsecured wireless router can be reasonably read to say that the router is granting authorization, the router is not the one from whom authorization is needed), you may be committing a crime.
On the post: Law Enforcement Agencies Continue To Obtain Military Equipment, Claiming The United States Is A 'War Zone'
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Forget The FCC: Should We Be Looking To The FTC To Save An Open Internet?
Re: Re: Dear Mikey
I think there's a pretty strong case to be made that this last point, specifically, is one of the major roots of the problem: patent examiners not being given as much time as is needed to fully review any patent application, however much time that may end up being.
Some patent applications may be obviously rejectable within a matter of minutes. Others may take a few hours. Others may take days, weeks, or even months to fully investigate and review all possible prior art, et cetera - though in that last case, you're starting to get into the level of complexity where a lawsuit and court review is almost guaranteed.
Requiring each patent examiner to process a certain number of patent applications per (hour, day, week, whatever), and approving the application if no reason to reject it has been found by the end of the allotted time, will inevitably result in bad patents being issued. Given those conditions, there's just no way to avoid that outcome.
Allowing each patent examiner to take as much time as is needed on any given patent application would have two obvious downsides: it would decrease the throughput of processing patent applications (thus building up the backlog of pending applications), and it would potentially enable an examiner who is so inclined to just sit around being lazy on the clock rather than actually do a reasonable amount of work.
The latter (lazy patent examiners getting paid to slack off) would be bad, but there are probably other ways to avoid it - other metrics to assess examiner performance, et cetera.
The former (decrease in patent-application-processing throughput, and resulting increase in patent-application backlog) could be argued to be a bad thing for obvious reasons, but it could also be argued to be a good one, for the potential disincentive it could create for filing large numbers of patent applications. However, it's far from clear that such a disincentive would actually appear in practice.
Regardless, there's a reasonable position to be taken that the cost of approving bad patents outweighs the cost of taking a long time to approve good ones. I think I, for one, might be likely to take that position; at the least, I'd like to see the experiment tried.
On the post: Microsoft Challenges Idea That US Government Can Go Fishing For Emails Stored Outside The US
Re: So, the government can go shopping for warrants now
Even if we don't go that far, there's also an argument to be made that only a country where Microsoft has a business presence could do this to Microsoft, and the worst penalty that could be applied if Microsoft refuses is to deny Microsoft permission to operate or otherwise do business in that country. That might still result in "any country in the world" being able to do it, but it would at least be a sufficiently logical-sounding limitation that courts - including international ones - might sign off on it...
On the post: Microsoft Challenges Idea That US Government Can Go Fishing For Emails Stored Outside The US
Re: Re: Re:
So they'd have more work to do than just rewriting the protocol specifiers in their HTML (and HTML generators) - possibly considerably more. For all we know, they might be working on doing that right now...
On the post: 'Dubious' Copyright Claim That Took Down Drone Footage Of Football Stadium Not All That Dubious, But Still Isn't The Optimal Solution
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
(Of course, to completely verify that would require knowing what the original music of the original video was, so that its copyright ownership can be tracked down - and AFAIK that's not mentioned in this article or any of its links.)
You might disagree about whether it should be possible for someone other than the original creator (songwriter) to own the copyright to the song, but the fact is that under current US law it is possible.
On the post: More Than Half Of All People Want To Ditch Their Cable Provider, If Only They Could
Re: Re: sounds like a Comcast-sponsored study
On the post: The Top 5 Lies NSA Defenders Still Spread: Don't Let Them Get Away With It
Re: Re: Re:
SSL is not guaranteed absolutely 100% secure, true - not even with the fixes for the discovered vulnerabilities; there could always be more which haven't been discovered yet.
But it's far, far more secure than not using encryption at all, which is the status quo ante, and is still the main alternative.
There is absolutely nothing suspicious about using SSL at this point. Refusing to use SSL, in favor of using no encryption, would be more on the suspicious side.
On the post: Former NSA Lawyer Asks Google To 'Forget' All Of Techdirt's Posts About Him
Re:
Both "rights" are created only by government and law; if the government and the law says it's forbidden, then it is by definition illegal.
The dispute (or part thereof) is about whether, to what extent, and/or with what penalties or other remedies such things *should* be illegal.
On the post: Corrupt State Index: Virginia DMV Orders Uber And Lyft To Stop Operating Immediately
Re: Re:
On the post: DOJ Admits It's Still Destroying Evidence In NSA Case; Judge Orders Them (Again) To Stop; DOJ Flips Out
Re: Re: Another possible explanation for how preservation causes loss
Unlikely in a system of the scale of what they're probably working with here, but not entirely impossible. It would just indicate a bad, clunky, and probably fragile / unstable design.
On the post: Verizon Sends Netflix A Cease & Desist, Saying It Can't Blame Verizon For Clogged Networks
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Dear Verizon
The [pre] tag, or (in case it shows up fine if I don't preview first) the '<pre>' tag.
On the post: Big Tech Calls On Senate To Stop NSA's Bulk Surveillance Program
Re: It's not government, it's some elected reps
Putting pressure on the specific elected officials (in terms of getting them out of office, not of convincing them to change their minds, since there's no real chance of success at the latter) is still probably the best way of getting something done about this overall. But there's room for concern that doing that alone may well not be enough, against the entrenched and non-elected bureaucracy.
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