I've skimmed through the proposed EU Directive and read the dirty bits. It's incredibly heavy-handed, ham-fisted stuff. The biggest issue is that it's all incredibly vague, from start to finish (with one solitary exception).
- - - - -
The Directive isn't clear about what problem it's actually trying to solve. It waffles on forever about the damage to EU businesses and cross-border innovation, but gives no case studies, or even a coherent general example.
I can't think of any example of a genuine problem that these new laws would solve. I'm fairly sure the Directives writers can't think of one, either.
- - - - -
Its definition of a Trade Secret is demented, consisting basically of any information which is: (a) likely to be of commercial value; and (b) secret.
So, in other words, everything a company says is a Trade Secret is a Trade Secret, unless a respondant can prove conclusively that the information was publically available before the alleged infringement.
There's a little bit of fudge that looks like it was designed to inhibit the law from being used as a back-door patent-troll engine, but that's yer lot as far as exceptions are concerned.
- - - - -
The Directive could very easily be called the Immense Collateral Damage Directive. It goes so far out of its way to avoid being specific about almost anything, that viable causes of action are created for almost everything.
Want to tell the Environmental Health Officer that food-poisoning outbreak was caused by the three-week-old steaks in your bosses restaurant? Shut up, they'll sue you.
Want to tell the accident investigators that the rail crash was caused by the cheap, counterfeit components your company bought? Shut up, they'll sue you.
Want to tell the police that the reason half of India is dead or blind is because your employer's been dumping chemical waste full of arsenic into the local water supply? Shut up, they'll sue you.
No attempt is made to shield citizens who comply with normal public health or law enforcement activity.
- - - - -
The one bit of real specificity is thrown out towards the end - and it's so incredibly specific by comparison, I have the distinct impression that it's the Directives sole, real purpose.
It has a Wikileaks clause. A right of action is created to sue any publication containing an infringing Trade Secret. Blocking Wikileaks, et al, from being seen across the EU would now require no more effort than the blocking of the Pirate Bay.
A single trip to a senior court of each country and Bob's your uncle - Wikileaks is banned from that country, entirely ex parte, with no opposition, since ISPs are offered no defense under the Directive.
- - - - -
Not only that, but the Directive enshrines in law that companies whose Trade Secrets have been infringed have the right to see infringing copies destroyed.
This raises the prospect that Wikileaks (and other such sites) can legitimately be made the subject of hacking and malware attacks with absolute legal impunity, providing they can find a friendly judge to sign off on it, somewhere in the EU.
- - - - -
The new laws, even with the tiny, fig-leaf-shaped bit of fudge designed to stop it, will almost certainly create new classes of patent and copyright trolls, with all the deliberately-leaked porn movies, speculative invoicing, litigious fun and censorship that this implies.
Interestingly, a company can claim that an unreleased movie is a Trade Secret. If the Directive becomes law, it's a distinct possibility that destructive malware attacks against pirates will one day suddenly become legal as well, with no due process, warning or legal countermeasure. And here we all were, thinking ACS:Law and Prenda were bad enough.
- - - - -
No attempt is made to balance out the new laws with any part of the rest of EU legislation, beyond a few very short instructions that local legislators must ensure the law is proportionate and compliant with other EU laws.
How local legislators are supposed to do this, when the new law is designed specifically to carve out vast exceptions to all other law, is left entirely to the imagination.
I personally don't imagine the resulting ad-hoc legislative fixes will be particularly fair or proportionate.
Then again, I'm not sure that this new directive is necessarily legal itself, given how badly it rips the guts out of the Human Rights Act.
This is probably the most damaging piece of legislation I've ever read. Let's hope it doesn't survive.
Okay, we've got PIPCU in the City of London and now PoliceScotland setting themselves up as the official Offensive Joke Prevention Squad, north of the border.
Any more late contenders for the UK's Officious Cretins of the Year Award? Just one more day to get your entries in, guys...
When I'm regularly visiting a site like Techdirt, I like a good comments-section as much as I like the site.
If the topic matters to me, I don't want just the reporter's view, which is inherently bound to reflect his or her concerns. I want to hear what other people think and feel about the issue, especially if it's something contentious, where I'm less likely to agree with the reporter.
Closing down comments - or limiting them too heavily, by whatever means - robs a site of a substantial part of its value to me as a reader. I want the truth of things, not one-sided propaganda, however well-intentioned.
There are many sites where I would spend time (or spend more time), but because they don't have good comments, or bury them too deeply under layers of scripts, I just can't be bothered.
If newamazingtechblog-dot-com really can't be bothered to ask my opinion, then I'm a lot less likely to want read theirs.
At the opposite end, I can't really be bothered with sites that let the trolls run amok, either. TorrentFreak is the perfect example.
It's a great site, it's where I started commenting online and is, in many ways, an ideal place for me to speak up - but the comments-section has always been over-run with endless, tedious trolls and after being ground down by too many years of reading their bullshit, I absolutely fucking hate it.
Of late, they seem to have disposed of the more obvious trolls (or perhaps the trolls finally bored themselves to death, instead of just everyone else), but it's still beset with endless horseshit-ping-pong masquerading as debate.
There are a few there who's comments I enjoy reading, such as SJD and Violated0, but for the most part I stay away, reading comments infrequently, commenting even more rarely.
Fair's fair, after all: TorrentFreak has made it clear how much they value their readers' views, I can hardly do less in return.
Techdirt, by contrast, is a case study in how to do it right. The comment-section is excellent, very civilised and apparently very well-moderated, unless the trolls just don't visit here so often. The only thing missing is an edit-capability, but I can live without it. Reading (and occasionally writing) comments here is enjoyable and rewarding, worth my time and effort.
That's my tuppence-worth. I'm not sure what my point was, but I had fun getting there and I'll certainly come back for more.
Kudos to Techdirt, for keeping it shiny. Merry Christmas, TD. :)
Yes, your reward is to know that the Great Ritual of the South-East has now been performed in honour of your article.
The Great Ritual's very simple: The right fist is raised in front of the practitioner's face, the index finger points vertically up, the thumb points horizontally.
The hand - which, when seen from ahead, now appears to form a letter-L - is moved backwards and forwards to and from the forehead three times, reaching a distance of no more than nine inches away from the face, while the mystic words are chanted:
"Loserrr! Loserrr! Loserrr!"
I hope you enjoyed your reward, Mr Geigner. You certainly earned it. :)
You know, I like to be diplomatic to people who've generally been on the right side of common sense. Sometimes, I go a bit too far. Like this time, where I think I've been too kind and polite by a country mile.
This is the single most poorly-conceived article I've ever read on Techdirt. It's picking a fight with some poor sod who's done absolutely nothing wrong at all, who's done everyone a genuine good, in fact - and using the most incredibly petty and asinine reasoning I have ever heard of as an excuse.
Mr Geigner, I realise Christmas can be a stressful time, but seriously, what in the nine fucking hells were you thinking, man?
Mr Geigner, you have my sincere admiration. This is the first and only time I've seen such a complete unity of response from Techdirt readers.
I think the dev's quite right and you're quite wrong. If, as he said, he's getting lots of buying-as-a-gift messages from the relatively uninformed, then they actually need to be told that Early Access is not appropriate for everyone. Nothing here prevents the well-informed from making the choice.
This dev's looking out for his customers' best interests and Frontiers is now on my wishlist. :)
First thing is, the thought occurs to me that what he's suggesting may not actually be legal.
If memory serves, Google, et al, are required under UK and EU law to keep user-information confidential, retaining and disseminating data only as required for:
• legitimate business purposes; • responding to a valid law-enforcement or security-agency request; • another purpose, where the user has given explicit consent.
I don't think Cameron's proposal meets any of these requirements - and judging by some of the more condemnatory rulings and assessments coming out of the EU, I doubt the courts will be any less sceptical.
Second thing is, the general picture that's emerged from the Snowden leaks is that the security services across the five-eyes have gained access to virtually every corner of the internet, for the purposes of searching for exactly this information.
It's incredibly unlikely that they don't already have full and near-instant access to what Cameron's asking for - and no-one in the intelligence services can be bothered to do anything useful with it.
In any event, what's the point in Google doing the same search? Intelligence-laundering is hardly likely to fly again.
The Telegraph article doesn't explicitly say where Cameron thinks Google and the rest should report the information - and I somehow doubt that David Cameron has any idea.
Perhaps Google is supposed to crapflood police stations across the country with all the random rubbish his idea would produce.
Google should do it, just for the fun of watching every police station in Britain grind to a complete dead stop, under the weight of thousands of tonnes of useless paperwork. :)
Do we live in the same universe? Does Kosner spend half the year in some strange, surreal parallel reality where Newscorp and the Daily Mail don't exist?
I gave up on print journalism over a decade before I learned to use the internet, because it's a load of crap. They've been referred to as modern-day courtiers to government and it's true. Regurgitating and chewing on state-authorised press-releases is basically all they're good for.
I got better value-for-money and value-for-time reading the news on BBC teletext (simple news summaries via the TV, about the length of three tweets).
Now we have the internet, print journalism is yesterday's joke.
Edward Kosner: a name to remember, and an opinion to be forgotten, as quickly as is humanly possible.
I backed E:D - and its satellite Kickstarters, the books and audio books - with all the money I could afford. Not as much as some (there were some who put thousands in), but a lot for me, just over a week's wages in total.
For me, the loss of offline play isn't a deal-breaker, by any means. It's Elite IV and I would've always backed it to some extent. That said, the promises that the final game would be DRM-free and have an offline mode seemed like good things to me and were a part of the reason I backed it as strongly as I did.
That those promises are now ashes is not something I find at all pleasing. But what's done is done and the offline mode is gone.
I don't agree with various suggestions of malicious intent. Looking at the responses from Braben and other Frontier staff, I get the impression it's more a matter of wanting to avoid the inevitable outcome of bad players cheating their way through the offline game and using the knowledge gained to butcher their way through the online multi-player game.
I can understand why they'd want to avoid that kind of hacker's paradise. While there are possible ways of getting around the issue, all require an investment of time and resources that Frontier says it doesn't have. I can understand that, as well.
What I don't understand why Frontier are vacillating over the issue of refunds. They made a promise - and for many backers, it was a key promise that made them back the project - and Frontier couldn't keep it. From the moment such a promise can't be kept, the right thing to do is offer refunds to anyone who still feels aggrieved or mislead.
While it's doubtful that there'll be any regulatory ramifications (it's a Kickstarter, which is a gamble, almost by definition), inventing a slew of procedures that serve to deter backers from seeking refunds seems ethically bankrupt.
There's not much more to be said, really, other than it's sad to see a great developer engaging in such shameful behaviour.
- - - - -
When it comes to supporting game companies, I'm really not having too much luck, of late.
I backed Molyneux's Godus Kickstarter, which disappeared up it's own creators' backside almost immediately. A good game may one day appear, but I'm not holding my breath.
I bought Double Fine's Early-Access game Spacebase DF9, which ended in the most spectacular gaming failure since Rise of the Robots, wrecking Double Fine's reputation and proving beyond any detectable measure of doubt that Tim Schafer's perception of this world is entirely divorced from reality. I'm no psychiatrist, but I suspect he's genuinely mentally ill, which is very sad.
Now Frontier's reputation takes a hit over their most high-profile series and has egg on its face. While E:D is still likely to prove a great game, this entire situation could have and should have been avoided.
I really hope Lord British's Shroud of the Avatar project reaches final release without any major crises.
- - - - -
It's time to take stock. What have I learned, lately?
• Kickstarter and Steam Early Access are still good things, but they really, really need to tighten up their rules, especially Steam, who are currently screwing the pooch like a boss.
• Even if they fix things, it's still always going to be a gamble and a case of caveat emptor, even where the biggest names are concerned.
• If a project offers both mobile and PC versions of the same game, do not back it under any circumstances. One or the other. Never both. With the solitary exception of Chaos Reborn, the results will not be good.
• If a developer has not very clearly articulated which parts of their design plans are guaranteed features and which are merely speculative, do not touch the project with a shitty stick.
• Commitment is everything. If they aren't keen on an idea, right from the outset, take it as read that you'll never see it come to fruition. Half-hearted support for an idea should be regarded as outright lies.
There are almost certainly other alternatives to giving up and shutting down services: legislators are notorious for leaving dirty great loopholes in the laws they build, especially in the USA.
For example, if selling insurance-plus-"inducements" is unlawful, then flip it around: sell the HR software and give the insurance away for free.
If it's not legal, Zenefits might get fined to buggery, but in the meantime, the PR-driven profits will be through the roof nation-wide and the competition will be butchered, which will serve them right. :)
Ehh, no. If memory serves, one of the things surveillance departments everywhere like to routinely engage in is keyword searches for particular words and phrases considered more likely to be used by terrorists and their supporters.
This revealing conversation held by Rigby's murderers did not happen in isolation, there would have been a great deal of chatter identifying them as persons of interest. They were undoubtedly already under observation by anti-terrorism departments in the UK and elsewhere. No suggestion to the contrary is remotely plausible.
That nothing was done to prevent the murder shows - to my mind - one of four likely possibilities:
• the authorities were unable to respond quickly enough to prevent the attack, perhaps because the murderers moved too quickly, or quicker than expected, once they'd decided to go ahead with their plan;
• the authorities responsible for monitoring did not share the information with the authorities responsible for acting, or someone on the decision-making path sucked his thumb and dithered too long, like a stupid child who can't decide which ice cream he wants;
• the authorities chose to do nothing out of a misguided, Americanesque, bureaucratic-religious belief that doing anything to confirm anything to do with surveillance automagically causes giant terrorist atrocities;
• the authorities were tactically unwilling to respond, preferring to pretend that their monitoring is more limited than it actually is, in the hope of convincing stupid terrorists elsewhere that a bigger plan has a chance of success - effectively sacrificing a soldier so they can perhaps catch a slightly bigger fish later;
• the authorities decided sacrificing a soldier was justified in order to use his death as a basis for legislation that could see them acquire more power and wealth than they have at present.
In the first case, it's sad, but it's the way things go sometimes. There are enough people on the internet making baseless threats that arresting them all would be an impossible task - and one which would bring nothing but harm without leaving anyone the slightest bit safer.
I can't blame the authorities if they genuinely didn't have enough warning of something actually about to take place.
In the second and third cases, incompetence is all too plausible. Our government has always been full of petty fiefdoms run by interfering, cock-blocking imbeciles and I'm sure our intelligence-gathering infrastructure is no exception.
In the last two cases, empire-builders looking to profit at the expense of others are also all too common. The loss of a life represents no inconvenience at all in the face of such selfish and greedy people.
In any event, if the failure to act was deliberate, it's a strong indictment of our surveillance community. They have been given deep-reaching powers of surveillance and action precisely so they can save lives.
If they chose to ignore that responsibility to make a profit - whether by way of a better catch or more laws in their favour - then the powers we've given them are a total loss to the rest of society: there will always be a bigger terrorist waiting in the wings, there will always be stronger laws that they don't yet have.
I know almost nothing of Lee Rigby beyond media reports, but I'm sure he didn't deserve to die - and certainly not so some half-arsed government bureaucrat can puff up his department like a stupid dog who can't stop eating.
Lee Rigby and the people of Britain and the Armed Forces he served all deserve better than that.
Four whole colours? You kids today don't know when you're even born.
When I was a lad, I had a Sinclair ZX-81 for my gaming, no colours, just black and white blocks and letters, no sound of any kind, a wobbly 16KB RAM pack and power lead, both of which crashed the machine if you so much as touched them and if I wanted to play a game I had to borrow a tape cassette player from my dad so I could load the software.
But, you know, we were happier in those days, even though we were poor...
I'm happy to be a pirate, but not for PC games and never for anything by Ubisoft: several years ago, I bought legal copies of a couple of their PC ports which turned out to be bug-crippled unusable messes, even when fully-patched. After that I just couldn't be bothered with them.
Watching them screw over their paying customers with bad ports and bad DRM schemes time and time again, I'm glad I don't waste any of my money or gaming attention on them, regardless of the hype. Commenting on this article is as close as I ever want to get to the company's output.
In this case, the assumption that no-one can be online for a help-forum without being able to update the game is simply false: here in London, there are hundreds of thousands of people - migrant workers especially - who have only limited access to the internet, either via laptops with pay-as-you-go USB dongles or mobile phones.
Usage costs for them are far too high to allow games to suck down multi-GB updates, in the worst cases representing more than the cost of buying the game, if it's been discounted by the retailer. Branding them all pirates because of yet another Ubisoft DRM brainwave just seems like the icing on the dog-turd.
Ubisoft Creative Director Alex Hutchinson and Kotaku writer Luke Plunkett are presumably pleased with themselves. Personally, I think they're a pair of ignorant racist dickheads.
On the plus side, quite a few more people will have learned not to touch anything by Ubisoft with a shitty stick, so it's not all bad. :)
On the post: Global Moves To Give Corporations Yet More Legal Weapons By Strengthening Laws Protecting Trade Secrets
Ouch.
- - - - -
The Directive isn't clear about what problem it's actually trying to solve. It waffles on forever about the damage to EU businesses and cross-border innovation, but gives no case studies, or even a coherent general example.
I can't think of any example of a genuine problem that these new laws would solve. I'm fairly sure the Directives writers can't think of one, either.
- - - - -
Its definition of a Trade Secret is demented, consisting basically of any information which is: (a) likely to be of commercial value; and (b) secret.
So, in other words, everything a company says is a Trade Secret is a Trade Secret, unless a respondant can prove conclusively that the information was publically available before the alleged infringement.
There's a little bit of fudge that looks like it was designed to inhibit the law from being used as a back-door patent-troll engine, but that's yer lot as far as exceptions are concerned.
- - - - -
The Directive could very easily be called the Immense Collateral Damage Directive. It goes so far out of its way to avoid being specific about almost anything, that viable causes of action are created for almost everything.
Want to tell the Environmental Health Officer that food-poisoning outbreak was caused by the three-week-old steaks in your bosses restaurant?
Shut up, they'll sue you.
Want to tell the accident investigators that the rail crash was caused by the cheap, counterfeit components your company bought?
Shut up, they'll sue you.
Want to tell the police that the reason half of India is dead or blind is because your employer's been dumping chemical waste full of arsenic into the local water supply?
Shut up, they'll sue you.
No attempt is made to shield citizens who comply with normal public health or law enforcement activity.
- - - - -
The one bit of real specificity is thrown out towards the end - and it's so incredibly specific by comparison, I have the distinct impression that it's the Directives sole, real purpose.
It has a Wikileaks clause. A right of action is created to sue any publication containing an infringing Trade Secret. Blocking Wikileaks, et al, from being seen across the EU would now require no more effort than the blocking of the Pirate Bay.
A single trip to a senior court of each country and Bob's your uncle - Wikileaks is banned from that country, entirely ex parte, with no opposition, since ISPs are offered no defense under the Directive.
- - - - -
Not only that, but the Directive enshrines in law that companies whose Trade Secrets have been infringed have the right to see infringing copies destroyed.
This raises the prospect that Wikileaks (and other such sites) can legitimately be made the subject of hacking and malware attacks with absolute legal impunity, providing they can find a friendly judge to sign off on it, somewhere in the EU.
- - - - -
The new laws, even with the tiny, fig-leaf-shaped bit of fudge designed to stop it, will almost certainly create new classes of patent and copyright trolls, with all the deliberately-leaked porn movies, speculative invoicing, litigious fun and censorship that this implies.
Interestingly, a company can claim that an unreleased movie is a Trade Secret. If the Directive becomes law, it's a distinct possibility that destructive malware attacks against pirates will one day suddenly become legal as well, with no due process, warning or legal countermeasure. And here we all were, thinking ACS:Law and Prenda were bad enough.
- - - - -
No attempt is made to balance out the new laws with any part of the rest of EU legislation, beyond a few very short instructions that local legislators must ensure the law is proportionate and compliant with other EU laws.
How local legislators are supposed to do this, when the new law is designed specifically to carve out vast exceptions to all other law, is left entirely to the imagination.
I personally don't imagine the resulting ad-hoc legislative fixes will be particularly fair or proportionate.
Then again, I'm not sure that this new directive is necessarily legal itself, given how badly it rips the guts out of the Human Rights Act.
This is probably the most damaging piece of legislation I've ever read. Let's hope it doesn't survive.
On the post: New Year's Message: Change, Innovation And Optimism, Despite Challenges
Ta
Much obliged and Happy New Year.
:)
On the post: Police In Scotland Tweet Out Plans To 'Investigate' Any 'Offensive Comments' On Social Media
Re: Re:
On the post: Police In Scotland Tweet Out Plans To 'Investigate' Any 'Offensive Comments' On Social Media
Uhh...?
Any more late contenders for the UK's Officious Cretins of the Year Award? Just one more day to get your entries in, guys...
On the post: Yet Another Website Kills Comments, Despite Study Showing You Can Have Civil Comments If You Give A Damn
Comments
If the topic matters to me, I don't want just the reporter's view, which is inherently bound to reflect his or her concerns. I want to hear what other people think and feel about the issue, especially if it's something contentious, where I'm less likely to agree with the reporter.
Closing down comments - or limiting them too heavily, by whatever means - robs a site of a substantial part of its value to me as a reader. I want the truth of things, not one-sided propaganda, however well-intentioned.
There are many sites where I would spend time (or spend more time), but because they don't have good comments, or bury them too deeply under layers of scripts, I just can't be bothered.
If newamazingtechblog-dot-com really can't be bothered to ask my opinion, then I'm a lot less likely to want read theirs.
At the opposite end, I can't really be bothered with sites that let the trolls run amok, either. TorrentFreak is the perfect example.
It's a great site, it's where I started commenting online and is, in many ways, an ideal place for me to speak up - but the comments-section has always been over-run with endless, tedious trolls and after being ground down by too many years of reading their bullshit, I absolutely fucking hate it.
Of late, they seem to have disposed of the more obvious trolls (or perhaps the trolls finally bored themselves to death, instead of just everyone else), but it's still beset with endless horseshit-ping-pong masquerading as debate.
There are a few there who's comments I enjoy reading, such as SJD and Violated0, but for the most part I stay away, reading comments infrequently, commenting even more rarely.
Fair's fair, after all: TorrentFreak has made it clear how much they value their readers' views, I can hardly do less in return.
Techdirt, by contrast, is a case study in how to do it right. The comment-section is excellent, very civilised and apparently very well-moderated, unless the trolls just don't visit here so often. The only thing missing is an edit-capability, but I can live without it. Reading (and occasionally writing) comments here is enjoyable and rewarding, worth my time and effort.
That's my tuppence-worth. I'm not sure what my point was, but I had fun getting there and I'll certainly come back for more.
Kudos to Techdirt, for keeping it shiny.
Merry Christmas, TD. :)
On the post: Game Developer Deploys Interesting Sales Strategy By Telling Fans Not To Buy His Game As A Gift For Others
Re: Re: Congratulations!
The Great Ritual's very simple: The right fist is raised in front of the practitioner's face, the index finger points vertically up, the thumb points horizontally.
The hand - which, when seen from ahead, now appears to form a letter-L - is moved backwards and forwards to and from the forehead three times, reaching a distance of no more than nine inches away from the face, while the mystic words are chanted:
"Loserrr! Loserrr! Loserrr!"
I hope you enjoyed your reward, Mr Geigner. You certainly earned it. :)
On the post: Game Developer Deploys Interesting Sales Strategy By Telling Fans Not To Buy His Game As A Gift For Others
Re: Congratulations!
This is the single most poorly-conceived article I've ever read on Techdirt. It's picking a fight with some poor sod who's done absolutely nothing wrong at all, who's done everyone a genuine good, in fact - and using the most incredibly petty and asinine reasoning I have ever heard of as an excuse.
Mr Geigner, I realise Christmas can be a stressful time, but seriously, what in the nine fucking hells were you thinking, man?
On the post: Game Developer Deploys Interesting Sales Strategy By Telling Fans Not To Buy His Game As A Gift For Others
Congratulations!
I think the dev's quite right and you're quite wrong. If, as he said, he's getting lots of buying-as-a-gift messages from the relatively uninformed, then they actually need to be told that Early Access is not appropriate for everyone. Nothing here prevents the well-informed from making the choice.
This dev's looking out for his customers' best interests and Frontiers is now on my wishlist. :)
On the post: FBI Formally Accuses North Korea Of The Sony Hack
North Korea?
If memory serves, the first rule of investigative journalism is "follow the money".
North Korea gets nothing useful out of this, beyond inconveniencing Sony.
If anything, it loses out, if the USA responds by increasing the money and authority it gives to its cyber-security divisions, as seems fairly likely.
Arch-FUD-peddlars the NSA, along with its corporate partners, are the organisations which stand to gain most from all of this.
I'm a lot more convinced by their clear profit-motive than I am by the vague and circumstantial evidence on display here.
On the post: 3 Silly Years Later, Chik-Fil-A Loses Trademark Dispute Over Kale
Re:
On the post: Search Something, Say Something: David Cameron Asks Google, Yahoo To Be 'Good Citizens' And Report Users Searching For 'Terrorist' Subject Matter
Hmm...
First thing is, the thought occurs to me that what he's suggesting may not actually be legal.
If memory serves, Google, et al, are required under UK and EU law to keep user-information confidential, retaining and disseminating data only as required for:
• legitimate business purposes;
• responding to a valid law-enforcement or security-agency request;
• another purpose, where the user has given explicit consent.
I don't think Cameron's proposal meets any of these requirements - and judging by some of the more condemnatory rulings and assessments coming out of the EU, I doubt the courts will be any less sceptical.
Second thing is, the general picture that's emerged from the Snowden leaks is that the security services across the five-eyes have gained access to virtually every corner of the internet, for the purposes of searching for exactly this information.
It's incredibly unlikely that they don't already have full and near-instant access to what Cameron's asking for - and no-one in the intelligence services can be bothered to do anything useful with it.
In any event, what's the point in Google doing the same search? Intelligence-laundering is hardly likely to fly again.
The Telegraph article doesn't explicitly say where Cameron thinks Google and the rest should report the information - and I somehow doubt that David Cameron has any idea.
Perhaps Google is supposed to crapflood police stations across the country with all the random rubbish his idea would produce.
Google should do it, just for the fun of watching every police station in Britain grind to a complete dead stop, under the weight of thousands of tonnes of useless paperwork. :)
On the post: WSJ Writer: All The Failings Of Print Journalism Are The Fault Of The Internet
Uhh...?
"Traditional long-form journalism—painstakingly reported, carefully written, rewritten and edited, scrupulously fact-checked [...]"
Do we live in the same universe? Does Kosner spend half the year in some strange, surreal parallel reality where Newscorp and the Daily Mail don't exist?
I gave up on print journalism over a decade before I learned to use the internet, because it's a load of crap. They've been referred to as modern-day courtiers to government and it's true. Regurgitating and chewing on state-authorised press-releases is basically all they're good for.
I got better value-for-money and value-for-time reading the news on BBC teletext (simple news summaries via the TV, about the length of three tweets).
Now we have the internet, print journalism is yesterday's joke.
Edward Kosner: a name to remember, and an opinion to be forgotten, as quickly as is humanly possible.
On the post: Elite: Dangerous Deletes Promised Offline Mode Just Before Release, Non-Committal On Kickstarter/Beta Refunds
Re:
On the post: Elite: Dangerous Deletes Promised Offline Mode Just Before Release, Non-Committal On Kickstarter/Beta Refunds
Re: Re: Promises
I'm unimpressed by Shadowgate. I have Shadowrun Returns, I forgot it was a KS game, but it is enjoyable.
I'm still not backing any more mobile/PC cross-platform developments, though. :)
On the post: Elite: Dangerous Deletes Promised Offline Mode Just Before Release, Non-Committal On Kickstarter/Beta Refunds
Promises
For me, the loss of offline play isn't a deal-breaker, by any means. It's Elite IV and I would've always backed it to some extent. That said, the promises that the final game would be DRM-free and have an offline mode seemed like good things to me and were a part of the reason I backed it as strongly as I did.
That those promises are now ashes is not something I find at all pleasing. But what's done is done and the offline mode is gone.
I don't agree with various suggestions of malicious intent. Looking at the responses from Braben and other Frontier staff, I get the impression it's more a matter of wanting to avoid the inevitable outcome of bad players cheating their way through the offline game and using the knowledge gained to butcher their way through the online multi-player game.
I can understand why they'd want to avoid that kind of hacker's paradise. While there are possible ways of getting around the issue, all require an investment of time and resources that Frontier says it doesn't have. I can understand that, as well.
What I don't understand why Frontier are vacillating over the issue of refunds. They made a promise - and for many backers, it was a key promise that made them back the project - and Frontier couldn't keep it. From the moment such a promise can't be kept, the right thing to do is offer refunds to anyone who still feels aggrieved or mislead.
While it's doubtful that there'll be any regulatory ramifications (it's a Kickstarter, which is a gamble, almost by definition), inventing a slew of procedures that serve to deter backers from seeking refunds seems ethically bankrupt.
There's not much more to be said, really, other than it's sad to see a great developer engaging in such shameful behaviour.
- - - - -
When it comes to supporting game companies, I'm really not having too much luck, of late.
I backed Molyneux's Godus Kickstarter, which disappeared up it's own creators' backside almost immediately. A good game may one day appear, but I'm not holding my breath.
I bought Double Fine's Early-Access game Spacebase DF9, which ended in the most spectacular gaming failure since Rise of the Robots, wrecking Double Fine's reputation and proving beyond any detectable measure of doubt that Tim Schafer's perception of this world is entirely divorced from reality. I'm no psychiatrist, but I suspect he's genuinely mentally ill, which is very sad.
Now Frontier's reputation takes a hit over their most high-profile series and has egg on its face. While E:D is still likely to prove a great game, this entire situation could have and should have been avoided.
I really hope Lord British's Shroud of the Avatar project reaches final release without any major crises.
- - - - -
It's time to take stock. What have I learned, lately?
• Kickstarter and Steam Early Access are still good things, but they really, really need to tighten up their rules, especially Steam, who are currently screwing the pooch like a boss.
• Even if they fix things, it's still always going to be a gamble and a case of caveat emptor, even where the biggest names are concerned.
• If a project offers both mobile and PC versions of the same game, do not back it under any circumstances. One or the other. Never both. With the solitary exception of Chaos Reborn, the results will not be good.
• If a developer has not very clearly articulated which parts of their design plans are guaranteed features and which are merely speculative, do not touch the project with a shitty stick.
• Commitment is everything. If they aren't keen on an idea, right from the outset, take it as read that you'll never see it come to fruition. Half-hearted support for an idea should be regarded as outright lies.
I govern myself accordingly.
On the post: Utah Wants To Kill Zenefits For Giving Away HR Software For Free
Other options
For example, if selling insurance-plus-"inducements" is unlawful, then flip it around: sell the HR software and give the insurance away for free.
If it's not legal, Zenefits might get fined to buggery, but in the meantime, the PR-driven profits will be through the roof nation-wide and the competition will be butchered, which will serve them right. :)
On the post: Report On UK Terrorist Murder: MI5 Absolved, Facebook Guilty
Re: Hmm...
On the post: Report On UK Terrorist Murder: MI5 Absolved, Facebook Guilty
Hmm...
This revealing conversation held by Rigby's murderers did not happen in isolation, there would have been a great deal of chatter identifying them as persons of interest. They were undoubtedly already under observation by anti-terrorism departments in the UK and elsewhere. No suggestion to the contrary is remotely plausible.
That nothing was done to prevent the murder shows - to my mind - one of four likely possibilities:
• the authorities were unable to respond quickly enough to prevent the attack, perhaps because the murderers moved too quickly, or quicker than expected, once they'd decided to go ahead with their plan;
• the authorities responsible for monitoring did not share the information with the authorities responsible for acting, or someone on the decision-making path sucked his thumb and dithered too long, like a stupid child who can't decide which ice cream he wants;
• the authorities chose to do nothing out of a misguided, Americanesque, bureaucratic-religious belief that doing anything to confirm anything to do with surveillance automagically causes giant terrorist atrocities;
• the authorities were tactically unwilling to respond, preferring to pretend that their monitoring is more limited than it actually is, in the hope of convincing stupid terrorists elsewhere that a bigger plan has a chance of success - effectively sacrificing a soldier so they can perhaps catch a slightly bigger fish later;
• the authorities decided sacrificing a soldier was justified in order to use his death as a basis for legislation that could see them acquire more power and wealth than they have at present.
In the first case, it's sad, but it's the way things go sometimes. There are enough people on the internet making baseless threats that arresting them all would be an impossible task - and one which would bring nothing but harm without leaving anyone the slightest bit safer.
I can't blame the authorities if they genuinely didn't have enough warning of something actually about to take place.
In the second and third cases, incompetence is all too plausible. Our government has always been full of petty fiefdoms run by interfering, cock-blocking imbeciles and I'm sure our intelligence-gathering infrastructure is no exception.
In the last two cases, empire-builders looking to profit at the expense of others are also all too common. The loss of a life represents no inconvenience at all in the face of such selfish and greedy people.
In any event, if the failure to act was deliberate, it's a strong indictment of our surveillance community. They have been given deep-reaching powers of surveillance and action precisely so they can save lives.
If they chose to ignore that responsibility to make a profit - whether by way of a better catch or more laws in their favour - then the powers we've given them are a total loss to the rest of society: there will always be a bigger terrorist waiting in the wings, there will always be stronger laws that they don't yet have.
I know almost nothing of Lee Rigby beyond media reports, but I'm sure he didn't deserve to die - and certainly not so some half-arsed government bureaucrat can puff up his department like a stupid dog who can't stop eating.
Lee Rigby and the people of Britain and the Armed Forces he served all deserve better than that.
On the post: Far Cry 4 Publishers Messing With Pirates By Getting Them To Admit They Are Pirates
Re: Re: Re:
When I was a lad, I had a Sinclair ZX-81 for my gaming, no colours, just black and white blocks and letters, no sound of any kind, a wobbly 16KB RAM pack and power lead, both of which crashed the machine if you so much as touched them and if I wanted to play a game I had to borrow a tape cassette player from my dad so I could load the software.
But, you know, we were happier in those days, even though we were poor...
On the post: Far Cry 4 Publishers Messing With Pirates By Getting Them To Admit They Are Pirates
Ubisoft
Watching them screw over their paying customers with bad ports and bad DRM schemes time and time again, I'm glad I don't waste any of my money or gaming attention on them, regardless of the hype. Commenting on this article is as close as I ever want to get to the company's output.
In this case, the assumption that no-one can be online for a help-forum without being able to update the game is simply false: here in London, there are hundreds of thousands of people - migrant workers especially - who have only limited access to the internet, either via laptops with pay-as-you-go USB dongles or mobile phones.
Usage costs for them are far too high to allow games to suck down multi-GB updates, in the worst cases representing more than the cost of buying the game, if it's been discounted by the retailer. Branding them all pirates because of yet another Ubisoft DRM brainwave just seems like the icing on the dog-turd.
Ubisoft Creative Director Alex Hutchinson and Kotaku writer Luke Plunkett are presumably pleased with themselves. Personally, I think they're a pair of ignorant racist dickheads.
On the plus side, quite a few more people will have learned not to touch anything by Ubisoft with a shitty stick, so it's not all bad. :)
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