I'm not even entirely sure what he's talking about. My best guess is that he's trying for a "Chicken Little" reference, but if so, he's doing it wrong.
To reference an established phrase while changing the words, especially if it's a short phrase, it works much better if you can keep the scansion the same. In this case, "Little" has two syllables, but "Mike" only has one, so the modified version doesn't scan the same way as the original.
It would work much better to use "Masnick" instead; that has two syllables, so it would keep the rhythm of "Chicken Little", and be much more likely to have people recognize what is meant.
Still very much worthy of reporting either way, of course.
For what it's worth, having watched the video, it seems easily possible to me that she could have honestly felt she couldn't breathe, even though she actually could.
I concur that a lot of what she did and said seems to have been theatrics, but I'm not sure all of it was. Even if we assume she was entirely innocent, she certainly didn't handle the situation as well as she could have; at the very least, if she was in as much pain as her screams indicated, there would have been much better ways to convey exactly what was wrong and even potentially get accommodation for that (without halting the arrest).
I don't think the cop handled this perfectly either, despite the relatively hostile audience; for example, it would have been better to have explained what he meant by saying "she was resisting" (with specific examples), rather than simply asserting it as fact. Nonetheless, he certainly handled the fact of the cameras very well, and maintained a commendable attitude in the face of sustained hostility.
I support the right of anyone to resist an unlawful or otherwise illegitimate arrest, and I think there's room to argue for the right of anyone to resist any arrest. There are problems with that idea, however, not least among them the almost inevitable consequences - both of making that a policy, and of choosing to exercise that right - in escalation in use of force.
If I understand the functionality you're describing correctly, there's decent odds that the Thunderbird people would refuse a patch to build that functionality into the core, since it's already available via the Enigmail add-on.
(The Mozilla attitudes towards add-on functionality vs. core functionality are an entirely separate ranty topic, but I can see the argument in many cases, including this one.)
On the other hand, aside from a few quirks related to format=flowed support and rewrapping (especially quote rewrapping), Enigmail itself works quite well...
Re: Does this mean we have to stop calling them "bank robbers"...
...since they only steal money from banks, rather than the actual buildings?
No, because "rob" and "thieve" mean different things.
"To thieve" means more or less the same thing as "to steal", with variation in nuance.
"To rob", by contrast, means more or less the same thing as "to steal from" (though there may be more details involved that I don't recall at the moment, such as the ones which define the difference between robbery and burglary).
Thus, "bank robber" means "person who steals from a bank", but "copyright thief" would mean "person who steals copyright", i.e. takes the copyright away from its previous owner.
That's a terrible point you try to make. Not doing shit, isn't the same as helping a lobbyist - it's apathy.
For one thing, apathy is bad enough.
For another thing, you aren't "not doing shit"; you're arguing in favor of "not doing shit". In other words, you're not just not taking action yourself; you're taking the action of trying to convince other people to not take action.
- I still agree that there needs to be reform of the ECPA, as well as many of our bills that focus on technology and it's uses. That being said, there are many more ways of showing your support for something then signing an online petition.
Quite true - and people are also working on those other approaches; if you want to help further, there's no reason not to take those other actions as well.
But as has already been pointed out multiple times, taking those other approaches is no reason not to also take the "support the petition" approach. However little effect it may have alone, it's more than no effect, if only because it helps show how many people care about the issue.
If you pay attention and compare Techdirt article titles with the matching URLs, you can see that this actually seems to happen semi-frequently - I'd ballpark-guesstimate at least once a week on average.
I'll admit this is the first time I've definitely caught it both before and after the change, though.
I have Comcast Internet access, and it's mostly pretty good.
We have had our horror stories in the past, primarily in recurring periods of ridiculous network latency which repeated rounds of techs couldn't figure out (partly because it often wasn't occurring while they were present), but they did eventually track it down and get it fixed - although it took a few months.
What we actually have is "Comcast Business Class" service. It's somewhat more expensive per month than what we had before (especially given that we have to get our cable TV as a separate package), but it lets us get a static external IP, it exempts us from BitTorrent restrictions AFAIK, and I think it also exempts us from monthly usage caps.
So their attempt to upsell people to higher price tiers is working in our case - but we get service that's at least mostly satisfactory, at a price we can still live with.
I still despise many of their larger policies, but I'm willing to believe that they do honestly care in most cases.
I'm pretty sure that was a case of poor quoting. The first (badly split) paragraph, which included the first line you quoted, was quoted from another comment further up the page; the rest, including the second line you quoted, seems to have been this new AC's response to that paragraph.
You do realise that liable and libel are two quite different words right?
I actually suspect that this may be a spellchecker typo. I.e., the person types "lible", and the spellchecker autocorrects it to "libel", since that's a closer match (swap two letters rather than insert a letter) than "liable".
That's no excuse for not catching it on review before posting, but it would help explain the prevalence of the error.
Alternatively, such dogged insistence of innocence could have another explanation, one backed by that little slip of yours at the end there, '...smear our good name.'
Can you say 'oops'?
Actually, I think this is a misinterpretation.
I think he's saying "[Mike Masnick] will smear the good name of [average joe, horse with no name, and out_of_the_blue] by censoring my comment, but keeping the filth you've written about [those same people] visible.".
Still laughable, but I don't think there's any implication that he's in any way actually associated with the Prendarasts here.
By that same logic, if someone broke into a house and stole a bunch of stuff, it would be the homeowner's fault for having such a valuable collection of stuff in one place, providing incentive for the break-in, which would be insane.
The problem with this analogy is that it is presumptively legitimate for the homeowner to have that stuff in the first place; it's his stuff, it belongs to him.
The argument that appears to be being raised is specifically that it is not legitimate for Google to have, or to collect, this information in the first place; it's not Google's stuff, it belongs to the people Google collected it from.
As such, if the information is stolen from Google, Google can be held at fault for having collected the information in the first place.
There are reasonable objections to that line of reasoning, but on its face it doesn't sound like a completely unreasonable argument, at least to me.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Any re-direct can do this.
First, so? If you don't want to use Google's link redirection (which I hate), don't click google's link. Copy the text of the URL and paste it into your address bar. Google (and the site you're going to) won't know that you you used Google.
Unfortunately, this isn't correct.
If what you mean by "copy the URL" is "right-click on the link and select 'Copy Link Location' or the equivalent", that will just get you the Google-redirect URL.
If what you mean by "copy the URL is "highlight the green-text URL displayed underneath the actual link", although that will work in some cases, there are many cases where it won't. If the actual URL is "too long" to fit in the width of the search-results column, the green-text URL will be displayed with some middle part of the URL elided by an ellipsis.
I spent a good deal of time looking for a way around this problem, specifically so that I could once again "Copy Link Location" and get the actual URL of the search result rather than a redirector. I eventually ended up with a Greasemonkey script for the purpose; nothing else seemed to get the job done.
Re: Schneier How is it he leads the most important debate on democracy?
We are currently wrestling with the wrongly defined issue of Privacy versus Security. Rather we should be asking ourselves how we balance Privacy AND Security.
That's not the correct question either.
The correct question would be something more like "how can we best achieve security without sacrificing privacy?", and/or "how much security can we achieve without sacrificing privacy?".
They are not mutually exclusive.
When security is done right, this is true.
However, doing security right (i.e. in a way which does not compromise privacy) is much harder than doing it in a way which does compromise privacy - and so unless there is heavy, constant pressure put on those trying to provide security, they will always tend to sacrifice privacy in the name of security.
Phrasing the issue in terms of a "balance" leads to questions like "How much privacy should we give up for security?", which is a false equivalency; giving up privacy does not always (or even necessarily often) lead to security, and it is possible - as you note - to achieve reasonable, meaningful security without compromising privacy.
Of course, since the very beginning of this, Feinstein has been insisting at every opportunity that everything done was perfectly legal. If that's truly the case, why would she need to "codify" current practices?
The way I understand it, she's been insisting that it's legal under a (by her standards) reasonable interpretation of existing law - but what she's trying to do by codifying it is make it explicitly legal, so that no interpretation to the contrary has a leg to stand on.
It's the same thing as Mr. Sensenbrenner is doing. He says it's illegal under existing law (which he wrote in the first place), but people have interpreted existing law to say it's legal - so he's trying to make it explicitly illegal, so that no interpretation to the contrary has a leg to stand on.
I'm an Oregonian. We don't have a sales tax. It's come up for a vote many, many times and been defeated every time. What you're saying is that in addition to my property taxes and income taxes, I should be forced to pay a Federal sales tax on internet purchases.
Actually, what he appears to be saying is that in addition to the property taxes and income taxes, Oregon should be required to impose a sales tax with a fixed rate, exactly the same rate as all other states should be required to use.
The distinction is that this would not be a Federal sales tax; it would be a state sales tax (meaning the money would go to the state, not to the federal government), but with the tax rate determined by federal law.
This may or may not also be a ridiculous argument, and you may or may not have the same response to it (I suspect that you would), but it is at least a different one from the one you were responding to.
I kind of have to split this up into at least two questions.
One is the literal question raised by the headline: Which of the two would be better able to determine whether publishing a given document would be "safe"?
Another is more nuanced: Which of the two can more safely be trusted to make that determination honestly, without bringing in other factors?
There's also a third question: Once that determination has been made, which of the two is more likely to rely only on that determination when deciding whether to release the documents?
On the first question, I have to give it to the government. The skill, experience, other knowledge, and technical expertise they have and/or can call on far outstrips anything the journalists are likely to be able to bring to bear. The government does have the better ability to judge the likelihood of harm from the release of any given document.
On the second question, I have to give it to the journalists. There is no way the government as it is presently constituted (referring to the systems and mindsets that have built up over decades, not to any one political party or the like) can be relied on to be honest, even with itself, about whether any given document is safe to release. If nothing else, paranoia about being wrong would see to that.
On the third question, it's a bit closer, but again I have to give it to the journalists. While they're likely to also give consideration to such concerns as sensationalism and so forth, the government is almost guaranteed to take into consideration questions of politics, ass-covering, face-saving, and preservation of power, among many other factors.
On the post: Malibu Media Sanctioned Again For Bogus Copyright Abuse & Intimidation
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Plus I really am not sure what he's trying to say, et cetera, see previous post.
On the post: Malibu Media Sanctioned Again For Bogus Copyright Abuse & Intimidation
Re: Re:
To reference an established phrase while changing the words, especially if it's a short phrase, it works much better if you can keep the scansion the same. In this case, "Little" has two syllables, but "Mike" only has one, so the modified version doesn't scan the same way as the original.
It would work much better to use "Masnick" instead; that has two syllables, so it would keep the rhythm of "Chicken Little", and be much more likely to have people recognize what is meant.
Still very much worthy of reporting either way, of course.
On the post: Canadian Cop Puts On An Impromptu Clinic On How To Deal With Critics And Cameras
Re:
I concur that a lot of what she did and said seems to have been theatrics, but I'm not sure all of it was. Even if we assume she was entirely innocent, she certainly didn't handle the situation as well as she could have; at the very least, if she was in as much pain as her screams indicated, there would have been much better ways to convey exactly what was wrong and even potentially get accommodation for that (without halting the arrest).
I don't think the cop handled this perfectly either, despite the relatively hostile audience; for example, it would have been better to have explained what he meant by saying "she was resisting" (with specific examples), rather than simply asserting it as fact. Nonetheless, he certainly handled the fact of the cameras very well, and maintained a commendable attitude in the face of sustained hostility.
I support the right of anyone to resist an unlawful or otherwise illegitimate arrest, and I think there's room to argue for the right of anyone to resist any arrest. There are problems with that idea, however, not least among them the almost inevitable consequences - both of making that a policy, and of choosing to exercise that right - in escalation in use of force.
On the post: UK Secure Email Provider Shut Down His Service In January To Prevent GCHQ From Obtaining Encryption Keys
Re: Cyanogen mod coming soon
(The Mozilla attitudes towards add-on functionality vs. core functionality are an entirely separate ranty topic, but I can see the argument in many cases, including this one.)
On the other hand, aside from a few quirks related to format=flowed support and rewrapping (especially quote rewrapping), Enigmail itself works quite well...
On the post: Music Industry Paper With '50 Years' At The 'Forefront' Of The Business Details Sentencing Of 'Copyright Thief'
Re: Does this mean we have to stop calling them "bank robbers"...
No, because "rob" and "thieve" mean different things.
"To thieve" means more or less the same thing as "to steal", with variation in nuance.
"To rob", by contrast, means more or less the same thing as "to steal from" (though there may be more details involved that I don't recall at the moment, such as the ones which define the difference between robbery and burglary).
Thus, "bank robber" means "person who steals from a bank", but "copyright thief" would mean "person who steals copyright", i.e. takes the copyright away from its previous owner.
On the post: ECPA Reform Petition Passes 100K Signature Threshold With A Last-Minute Surge
Re:
For one thing, apathy is bad enough.
For another thing, you aren't "not doing shit"; you're arguing in favor of "not doing shit". In other words, you're not just not taking action yourself; you're taking the action of trying to convince other people to not take action.
Quite true - and people are also working on those other approaches; if you want to help further, there's no reason not to take those other actions as well.
But as has already been pointed out multiple times, taking those other approaches is no reason not to also take the "support the petition" approach. However little effect it may have alone, it's more than no effect, if only because it helps show how many people care about the issue.
On the post: Law Enforcement Fails To Pay Telco Bills For Coughing Up Your Info
Re: Re: Title Change?
If you pay attention and compare Techdirt article titles with the matching URLs, you can see that this actually seems to happen semi-frequently - I'd ballpark-guesstimate at least once a week on average.
I'll admit this is the first time I've definitely caught it both before and after the change, though.
On the post: Photographer Sends C&D To Something Awful Over Photo 'Shopped To Add A Butt To A Bird
Re: If THIS is amicable, I'd hate to see adversarial...
On the post: Comcast CEO Thinks Its Customer Service Problem Is Mostly A Matter Of Scale
Re: just out of curiosity...
We have had our horror stories in the past, primarily in recurring periods of ridiculous network latency which repeated rounds of techs couldn't figure out (partly because it often wasn't occurring while they were present), but they did eventually track it down and get it fixed - although it took a few months.
What we actually have is "Comcast Business Class" service. It's somewhat more expensive per month than what we had before (especially given that we have to get our cable TV as a separate package), but it lets us get a static external IP, it exempts us from BitTorrent restrictions AFAIK, and I think it also exempts us from monthly usage caps.
So their attempt to upsell people to higher price tiers is working in our case - but we get service that's at least mostly satisfactory, at a price we can still live with.
I still despise many of their larger policies, but I'm willing to believe that they do honestly care in most cases.
On the post: German Court Tells Wikimedia Foundation That It's Liable For Things Users Write
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: German Court Tells Wikimedia Foundation That It's Liable For Things Users Write
Re: Re:
I actually suspect that this may be a spellchecker typo. I.e., the person types "lible", and the spellchecker autocorrects it to "libel", since that's a closer match (swap two letters rather than insert a letter) than "liable".
That's no excuse for not catching it on review before posting, but it would help explain the prevalence of the error.
On the post: Facebook Needs To Learn It Can't Teach Tolerance By Acting As An Overzealous Censor
Re: Re: I want a button...
The calculation I remember was 6x9.
And if you perform that multiplication in base 13, you do in fact get 42.
(Though Douglas Adams reportedly stated that he was unaware of this.)
On the post: Latest Team Prenda Shenanigans: Arguing Nevis Law Applies In California; Also Mark Lutz Makes An Appearance... Sorta
Re: Re: Re:
Actually, I think this is a misinterpretation.
I think he's saying "[Mike Masnick] will smear the good name of [average joe, horse with no name, and out_of_the_blue] by censoring my comment, but keeping the filth you've written about [those same people] visible.".
Still laughable, but I don't think there's any implication that he's in any way actually associated with the Prendarasts here.
On the post: Privacy Groups Want The Government To Investigate Google Over The NSA's Hacking
Re: Re:
The argument that appears to be being raised is specifically that it is not legitimate for Google to have, or to collect, this information in the first place; it's not Google's stuff, it belongs to the people Google collected it from.
As such, if the information is stolen from Google, Google can be held at fault for having collected the information in the first place.
There are reasonable objections to that line of reasoning, but on its face it doesn't sound like a completely unreasonable argument, at least to me.
On the post: GCHQ Used Fake Slashdot Page To Install Malware To Hack Internet Exchange
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Any re-direct can do this.
If what you mean by "copy the URL" is "right-click on the link and select 'Copy Link Location' or the equivalent", that will just get you the Google-redirect URL.
If what you mean by "copy the URL is "highlight the green-text URL displayed underneath the actual link", although that will work in some cases, there are many cases where it won't. If the actual URL is "too long" to fit in the width of the search-results column, the green-text URL will be displayed with some middle part of the URL elided by an ellipsis.
I spent a good deal of time looking for a way around this problem, specifically so that I could once again "Copy Link Location" and get the actual URL of the search result rather than a redirector. I eventually ended up with a Greasemonkey script for the purpose; nothing else seemed to get the job done.
On the post: Bruce Schneier Speculates On NSA Double Laundering Information It Obtains Via Network Infiltration
Re: Schneier How is it he leads the most important debate on democracy?
The correct question would be something more like "how can we best achieve security without sacrificing privacy?", and/or "how much security can we achieve without sacrificing privacy?".
When security is done right, this is true.
However, doing security right (i.e. in a way which does not compromise privacy) is much harder than doing it in a way which does compromise privacy - and so unless there is heavy, constant pressure put on those trying to provide security, they will always tend to sacrifice privacy in the name of security.
Phrasing the issue in terms of a "balance" leads to questions like "How much privacy should we give up for security?", which is a false equivalency; giving up privacy does not always (or even necessarily often) lead to security, and it is possible - as you note - to achieve reasonable, meaningful security without compromising privacy.
On the post: While Congress Looks Set To Push Back On NSA Surveillance, Sen. Feinstein Wants To Codify Current Practices
The way I understand it, she's been insisting that it's legal under a (by her standards) reasonable interpretation of existing law - but what she's trying to do by codifying it is make it explicitly legal, so that no interpretation to the contrary has a leg to stand on.
It's the same thing as Mr. Sensenbrenner is doing. He says it's illegal under existing law (which he wrote in the first place), but people have interpreted existing law to say it's legal - so he's trying to make it explicitly illegal, so that no interpretation to the contrary has a leg to stand on.
On the post: Illinois The First State To Throw Out Laws Making Amazon Collect Sales Tax Based On Affiliates
Re: Re: I don't like to pay sales taxes but...
Actually, what he appears to be saying is that in addition to the property taxes and income taxes, Oregon should be required to impose a sales tax with a fixed rate, exactly the same rate as all other states should be required to use.
The distinction is that this would not be a Federal sales tax; it would be a state sales tax (meaning the money would go to the state, not to the federal government), but with the tax rate determined by federal law.
This may or may not also be a ridiculous argument, and you may or may not have the same response to it (I suspect that you would), but it is at least a different one from the one you were responding to.
On the post: Do You Trust The Government Or Journalists More To Determine If Snowden's Docs Are Safe To Publish?
One is the literal question raised by the headline: Which of the two would be better able to determine whether publishing a given document would be "safe"?
Another is more nuanced: Which of the two can more safely be trusted to make that determination honestly, without bringing in other factors?
There's also a third question: Once that determination has been made, which of the two is more likely to rely only on that determination when deciding whether to release the documents?
On the first question, I have to give it to the government. The skill, experience, other knowledge, and technical expertise they have and/or can call on far outstrips anything the journalists are likely to be able to bring to bear. The government does have the better ability to judge the likelihood of harm from the release of any given document.
On the second question, I have to give it to the journalists. There is no way the government as it is presently constituted (referring to the systems and mindsets that have built up over decades, not to any one political party or the like) can be relied on to be honest, even with itself, about whether any given document is safe to release. If nothing else, paranoia about being wrong would see to that.
On the third question, it's a bit closer, but again I have to give it to the journalists. While they're likely to also give consideration to such concerns as sensationalism and so forth, the government is almost guaranteed to take into consideration questions of politics, ass-covering, face-saving, and preservation of power, among many other factors.
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