Because it isn't Facebook's progressivism so much as it's user's progressivism conflicting with other user's lack of progressivism. And unfortunately there's no "Don't show my content to conservatives." setting for the progressive users to use.
Most of the FCC's rules are around how to deal with content in a medium defined to be child-safe (at least during certain times). The Internet in general is simply not child-safe, never has been, never should be. In fact it's not adult-safe either (I've seen things that make Goatse look like a pleasant daydream), and the variation in users is so great that generating rules for content can only be done on the consumer's end where they only have to satisfy one or a relative few users.
You can file your own brief, but this one's limited in scope to a group that differs from you in one respect: their job literally is to know what the law says. How can an attorney tell his client what's legal and what's not if that attorney isn't permitted to know what the law says? And it's really going to be hard for any judge to say that "attorney" isn't a job that we can just do away with.
I think it's right on point for the current suit in question, it's just that when converted from computer-network to physical terms the situation suddenly looks obviously different from what some people would like it to look like.
If we took your definitions, the CFAA couldn't apply to anything. No, the CFAA speaks to access, not merely physical access. You don't physically enter the computer, but your requests do reach it and you do access it (we even speak of making requests over the network and receiving a response as accessing or "going to" a site, that should be a big clue for you right there).
Perhaps not burglary, but you can charge him with trespassing even if you didn't stop him from coming in the door. In fact, you can't charge him with trespassing until after he comes in the door, since before that he hasn't trespassed.
And you can't charge him with trespassing until after you've told him he's not allowed in and thrown him out, and he comes back in again. Not even if he started a fight at the bar when the signs at the entrances specifically say fighting isn't permitted at the bar. His actions give you grounds to throw him out and bar him from entering, but they don't act retroactively to change the fact that he hadn't violated the rules at the time he entered and you hadn't barred him from entry yet.
There was, but the site hadn't banned her or done anything to deny her access before she'd created that account so they wouldn't have any grounds to make a CFAA claim. That claim is strictly between her and the site accessed, independent of anything she may or may not have done to any other party.
In this particular context I'd consider the CFAA applicable. To put the reasoning in a non-computer context, suppose I own a building and allow access only to people with keys to the building. I'll give out keys to anyone not banned, but I check their identity first to make sure they aren't on the banned list and won't give them a key if they are. I ban you and take away your key so you can't get back in, and tell you you aren't authorized to enter. You still want in, so you go and get a fake ID in a different name made up, disguise yourself, come back and get a key under that false identity. If I catch you in the building, am I limited to just throwing you out again or can I also hold you liable for using false pretenses to gain unauthorized entry? I'd argue I can hold you liable. Had you not falsified your identity you'd never have been allowed in, and you supplied that false identity instead of your real one deliberately with the intent to gain access you knew full well you weren't authorized to have.
This is quite a bit distinct from a building with no locks that you don't have to supply a false identity to get into after you've been banned, or one where even though you're banned they still issue you a new key whenever you ask.
NB: originally the concept also included the provision that company A had taken all appropriate steps to keep the information/items secret, including confidentiality agreements and measures to physically restrict access to the material so it didn't wander off. If it hadn't, then it was out of luck on protection. That's another factor that's gotten slowly written out by the courts when it shouldn't have been.
I believe it was to cover situations where contractor X took confidential information while he was working for company A and handed it over to employee Y who worked for company B. X had a contract with A to not do that so A can definitely go after him for breach of that contract, but Y doesn't have any contract with A so on what grounds can A go after him? Trade secret protection was originally to make it clear that if Y knows X is bound to keep the information confidential then Y (and by extension B) can't wiggle out of being held liable right along with X. It was originally limited to "knew, or reasonably should have known that the information/items were in fact covered by confidentiality agreements".
The problem is that over years it's gone from that to "should have assumed the originator would have wanted them covered even absent any evidence", which has led to Y being held liable even if he'd never had any contact with X and X had just forgot to pick up the prototype hardware from the table before leaving the restaurant. Under the original interpretation Y would be in the clear since he's got no evidence the items actually are covered by a confidentiality agreement (he doesn't know who left it so he can't know they'd normally have signed such an agreement, as opposed to the case where Y knew the item came from X who as an employee would have to have signed confidentiality agreements). It's that extension that's become the problem, not the original idea.
In the original post I read the author did explicitly make the claim that the airframe was unstable. I'll have to see if I can find the link again.
As for the engineers being ignored by management, that's why I'd start with the engineers and trace the chain up until I found the people at the top responsible for the actual decision about the requirements rather than targeting the engineers at the bottom who, as I said, have the choice of meet management's requirements or lose their job.
I question the article's accuracy because of basic flaws. For instance, the 737 MAX airframe isn't unstable. It's the standard 737 airframe, which is very aerodynamically stable. The new engines also aren't a problem, the plane flies perfectly well with them. Sudden increases in engine thrust cause a pitch-up condition, but no worse than on some other aircraft and well within what a trained pilot can handle. Compensating for that pitch-up condition in software isn't a hard job, as long as the software can tell whether it's pitch data is accurate or not (which is a well-known and solved problem with sensors of all sorts). The failure's at a much higher level than the aircraft design or the software:
At least one airline (Southwest) wanted to have pilots able to fly the 737 MAX using their existing 737 certifications without having to be recertified on the new model. That would let them save money on pilot training. That required that the MAX have the same flight characteristics as the older 737 models, which in turn required that it not be subject to the pitch-up condition the new engines caused.
Boeing management decided to oblige by making the pitch-up compensation a permanent part of the flight-control software which couldn't be easily disabled or overridden. This made detection of failed pitch sensors critical, because that would be the only way for the system to detect that it was trying to respond to faulty data and take itself out of the loop.
To improve revenue, Boeing management (likely a different section) decided to make only a single pitch sensor standard and offer the second sensor as an extra-cost option. This removed the only way for the MCAS to detect a failed pitch sensor, because the failure state of the sensors is indistinguishable from a normal flight condition (level flight).
That was what led to an airplane where the MCAS could command the aircraft to dive into the ground and the flight crew couldn't counteract it even if they were experienced enough to recognize what was happening. I can't even blame the engineers (hardware and software) at Boeing, because the only option they'd've had would've been to quit rather than build to management's requirements which would leave them out of work and wouldn't even stop the plane from being built (Boeing would just hire engineers who were hungry enough to just do the work without arguing).
Were it me making the decisions on how to handle this, I'd start with the engineers and work my way up the chain to the executives ultimately responsible for the requirements decisions. Those are the people I'd be charging with multiple counts of negligent homicide and looking to get life in maximum security prison without possibility of parole for. I'd also track down the DERs who did the certification on the MAX and give them good long sentences in prison too as an object lesson to all the others that their job is defined by the law, not what management says, and there are worse things that can happen than just getting terminated.
It's not the size or scale that makes content moderation hard, it's a basic fact of customer service: the trolls and idiots are louder and more active than the reasonable people. Ask anyone who does forum/content moderation (MMO GMs are a really obvious group) and they'll surely tell you that the majority of the reports of "bad" content are false reports filed by people with an axe to grind. That means that any content moderation system has to be based on the assumption that false positives will always outnumber everything else simply because of who's generating them, and right now none of the systems in place anywhere even address false positives let alone assume they'll be dealing with them in bulk.
Re: Oh, my god. ONE more anomaly of mistaken -- NOT "bogus" URL.
No, it's not a mistake. Even a casual look at the page in question would've told Saregama that the material clearly wasn't any they owned the copyright to. Not just that it wasn't infringing but that they didn't own any copyright interest in the material to be infringed on. They either filed their notice knowing that it was falsely claiming ownership of someone else's copyright, or they failed to check what the content of the targeted page was as the law requires them to do. Either way, it wasn't a mistake.
For myself (in the US), I'd smile and nod to the gentlemen from the government, then go and report the issue to the security team at work. I'd also contact an attorney ASAP and fill him in, just in case I "disappear". If it comes to it the attorney's job is to keep the matter from bypassing the courts and my position in the courtroom would be that I was asked to do something I'm not legally allowed to do and I did what I was legally required to do and reported the request to the appropriate authority. Let the government argue with the judge about whether they're entitled to require me to break the law or not.
I think the political solution needs applied to this PD. That solution: ordinary residents starting a campaign for the next election based on the narrative of "This is the current mayor's position: that it's perfectly fine for the police to kill ordinary citizens while not catching any drug dealers. We need a mayor who'll give the police chief and the police a choice: do it the other way around or I'll replace you with someone who will. And since the current mayor won't do that, it's time to replace him with someone who will.". Keep the emphasis on the part the cops like to crow about but that they aren't actually doing, which isn't that hard considering the results they're piling up.
Because LucasFilm, not Disney, owns the rights. Disney owns LucasFilm, but that's a matter between them and doesn't affect anyone dealing with LucasFilm over the rights.
Yes Disney can tell LucasFilm what terms they can offer and LucasFilm has to obey, but Disney can't unilaterally revoke or change agreements LucasFilm's already entered into with other parties. So once LucasFilm set the rules and Toos agreed to them and released his work abiding by them, Disney lost the ability to retroactively change those rules. They could prohibit any future works, but they can't go back and rewrite the contractual past (especially unilaterally without the consent of the other party). If they asserted in court that they could, then LucasFilm could assert the same right to unilaterally and retroactively change the terms under which Disney bought them to give LucasFilm control over Disney and Disney wouldn't be legally able to challenge whether they had that right. Even Disney's lawyers aren't quite that stupid.
Unless of course the game requires a server (and even a lot of nominally single-player games these days require a server for authentication), in which case the game probably won't run unless it's patched to the most current level. And under copyright law as it stands today, patching the game client to bypass the server check is copyright infringement plain and simple (the cases that set precedent in large part stem from just that, patching the client to run without a server or otherwise bypass publisher-imposed DRM).
The fundamental problem is that any eSports league is either run by the publisher and subject to their whims, or it's utterly dependent on a product owned and controlled by someone who may well consider the league to be a competitor.
Underlining is moderately common styling for links these days. Not a consistent standard, but more common than not. Blue as a convention (for unvisited links, purple for visited links) is long gone. The most you can count on is link text being styled differently from the body text around it. And if it's an image, all bets are off because the link border around images went the way of the dodo a good decade ago.
There's another solution to the situation, the same solution that the software industry's "responsible disclosure" farce encourages for handling bugs and vulnerabilities. Instead of sources talking to reporters privately and reporters filtering the information to avoid disclosure of anything not truly needed, sources contact reporters anonymously and mass-dump all the original materials through a service like Wikileaks that allows for large-scale duplication making it all but impossible to shove the documents back in the safe. Then reporters don't need to vet the source, they can vet the original documents and report based on that. If the reporter never knows who provided the information, they can't reveal more than that they don't know the source's identity. The government can go chase the original documents and the original source, but the material's still out there regardless so they won't accomplish their goal. Sources of course need to make sure they're untraceable when uploading the information, but that's what they're having to do already so no major change there.
On the post: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: Facebook Still Can't Figure Out How To Deal With Naked Breasts
Re:
Oh, if only it were that mild. No,
a.s.rw/clusters.On the post: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: Facebook Still Can't Figure Out How To Deal With Naked Breasts
Re: like a dog chasing its tail
Because it isn't Facebook's progressivism so much as it's user's progressivism conflicting with other user's lack of progressivism. And unfortunately there's no "Don't show my content to conservatives." setting for the progressive users to use.
Most of the FCC's rules are around how to deal with content in a medium defined to be child-safe (at least during certain times). The Internet in general is simply not child-safe, never has been, never should be. In fact it's not adult-safe either (I've seen things that make Goatse look like a pleasant daydream), and the variation in users is so great that generating rules for content can only be done on the consumer's end where they only have to satisfy one or a relative few users.
On the post: Both Sides Want The Supreme Court To Review Decision Denying Copyright In Georgia's Law. How About You?
Re: Only Lawyers Need Apply?
You can file your own brief, but this one's limited in scope to a group that differs from you in one respect: their job literally is to know what the law says. How can an attorney tell his client what's legal and what's not if that attorney isn't permitted to know what the law says? And it's really going to be hard for any judge to say that "attorney" isn't a job that we can just do away with.
On the post: Facebook Files Questionable Lawsuit Over Fake Followers And Likes
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I think it's right on point for the current suit in question, it's just that when converted from computer-network to physical terms the situation suddenly looks obviously different from what some people would like it to look like.
On the post: Facebook Files Questionable Lawsuit Over Fake Followers And Likes
Re: Re: Re: Re:
If we took your definitions, the CFAA couldn't apply to anything. No, the CFAA speaks to access, not merely physical access. You don't physically enter the computer, but your requests do reach it and you do access it (we even speak of making requests over the network and receiving a response as accessing or "going to" a site, that should be a big clue for you right there).
On the post: Facebook Files Questionable Lawsuit Over Fake Followers And Likes
Re: Re:
Perhaps not burglary, but you can charge him with trespassing even if you didn't stop him from coming in the door. In fact, you can't charge him with trespassing until after he comes in the door, since before that he hasn't trespassed.
And you can't charge him with trespassing until after you've told him he's not allowed in and thrown him out, and he comes back in again. Not even if he started a fight at the bar when the signs at the entrances specifically say fighting isn't permitted at the bar. His actions give you grounds to throw him out and bar him from entering, but they don't act retroactively to change the fact that he hadn't violated the rules at the time he entered and you hadn't barred him from entry yet.
On the post: Facebook Files Questionable Lawsuit Over Fake Followers And Likes
Re: Re:
There was, but the site hadn't banned her or done anything to deny her access before she'd created that account so they wouldn't have any grounds to make a CFAA claim. That claim is strictly between her and the site accessed, independent of anything she may or may not have done to any other party.
On the post: Facebook Files Questionable Lawsuit Over Fake Followers And Likes
In this particular context I'd consider the CFAA applicable. To put the reasoning in a non-computer context, suppose I own a building and allow access only to people with keys to the building. I'll give out keys to anyone not banned, but I check their identity first to make sure they aren't on the banned list and won't give them a key if they are. I ban you and take away your key so you can't get back in, and tell you you aren't authorized to enter. You still want in, so you go and get a fake ID in a different name made up, disguise yourself, come back and get a key under that false identity. If I catch you in the building, am I limited to just throwing you out again or can I also hold you liable for using false pretenses to gain unauthorized entry? I'd argue I can hold you liable. Had you not falsified your identity you'd never have been allowed in, and you supplied that false identity instead of your real one deliberately with the intent to gain access you knew full well you weren't authorized to have.
This is quite a bit distinct from a building with no locks that you don't have to supply a false identity to get into after you've been banned, or one where even though you're banned they still issue you a new key whenever you ask.
On the post: Tired: Insane Patent Verdicts; Wired: Insane Trade Secret Verdicts
Re: Re:
NB: originally the concept also included the provision that company A had taken all appropriate steps to keep the information/items secret, including confidentiality agreements and measures to physically restrict access to the material so it didn't wander off. If it hadn't, then it was out of luck on protection. That's another factor that's gotten slowly written out by the courts when it shouldn't have been.
On the post: Tired: Insane Patent Verdicts; Wired: Insane Trade Secret Verdicts
Re:
I believe it was to cover situations where contractor X took confidential information while he was working for company A and handed it over to employee Y who worked for company B. X had a contract with A to not do that so A can definitely go after him for breach of that contract, but Y doesn't have any contract with A so on what grounds can A go after him? Trade secret protection was originally to make it clear that if Y knows X is bound to keep the information confidential then Y (and by extension B) can't wiggle out of being held liable right along with X. It was originally limited to "knew, or reasonably should have known that the information/items were in fact covered by confidentiality agreements".
The problem is that over years it's gone from that to "should have assumed the originator would have wanted them covered even absent any evidence", which has led to Y being held liable even if he'd never had any contact with X and X had just forgot to pick up the prototype hardware from the table before leaving the restaurant. Under the original interpretation Y would be in the clear since he's got no evidence the items actually are covered by a confidentiality agreement (he doesn't know who left it so he can't know they'd normally have signed such an agreement, as opposed to the case where Y knew the item came from X who as an employee would have to have signed confidentiality agreements). It's that extension that's become the problem, not the original idea.
On the post: Shoddy Software Is Eating The World, And People Are Dying As A Result
Re: Re:
In the original post I read the author did explicitly make the claim that the airframe was unstable. I'll have to see if I can find the link again.
As for the engineers being ignored by management, that's why I'd start with the engineers and trace the chain up until I found the people at the top responsible for the actual decision about the requirements rather than targeting the engineers at the bottom who, as I said, have the choice of meet management's requirements or lose their job.
On the post: Shoddy Software Is Eating The World, And People Are Dying As A Result
I question the article's accuracy because of basic flaws. For instance, the 737 MAX airframe isn't unstable. It's the standard 737 airframe, which is very aerodynamically stable. The new engines also aren't a problem, the plane flies perfectly well with them. Sudden increases in engine thrust cause a pitch-up condition, but no worse than on some other aircraft and well within what a trained pilot can handle. Compensating for that pitch-up condition in software isn't a hard job, as long as the software can tell whether it's pitch data is accurate or not (which is a well-known and solved problem with sensors of all sorts). The failure's at a much higher level than the aircraft design or the software:
That was what led to an airplane where the MCAS could command the aircraft to dive into the ground and the flight crew couldn't counteract it even if they were experienced enough to recognize what was happening. I can't even blame the engineers (hardware and software) at Boeing, because the only option they'd've had would've been to quit rather than build to management's requirements which would leave them out of work and wouldn't even stop the plane from being built (Boeing would just hire engineers who were hungry enough to just do the work without arguing).
Were it me making the decisions on how to handle this, I'd start with the engineers and work my way up the chain to the executives ultimately responsible for the requirements decisions. Those are the people I'd be charging with multiple counts of negligent homicide and looking to get life in maximum security prison without possibility of parole for. I'd also track down the DERs who did the certification on the MAX and give them good long sentences in prison too as an object lesson to all the others that their job is defined by the law, not what management says, and there are worse things that can happen than just getting terminated.
On the post: Twitter Permanently Suspends (Then Unsuspends) Lawyer For Telling NRA Supporters To 'Fuck Off' And 'Own The Death'
Trolls and false reports
It's not the size or scale that makes content moderation hard, it's a basic fact of customer service: the trolls and idiots are louder and more active than the reasonable people. Ask anyone who does forum/content moderation (MMO GMs are a really obvious group) and they'll surely tell you that the majority of the reports of "bad" content are false reports filed by people with an axe to grind. That means that any content moderation system has to be based on the assumption that false positives will always outnumber everything else simply because of who's generating them, and right now none of the systems in place anywhere even address false positives let alone assume they'll be dealing with them in bulk.
On the post: Bogus DMCA Takedown Targeting Indian Copyright Blog Demonstrates The Problems Of Notice And Takedown
Re: Oh, my god. ONE more anomaly of mistaken -- NOT "bogus" URL.
No, it's not a mistake. Even a casual look at the page in question would've told Saregama that the material clearly wasn't any they owned the copyright to. Not just that it wasn't infringing but that they didn't own any copyright interest in the material to be infringed on. They either filed their notice knowing that it was falsely claiming ownership of someone else's copyright, or they failed to check what the content of the targeted page was as the law requires them to do. Either way, it wasn't a mistake.
On the post: Mozilla Says Australia's Compelled Access Law Could Turn Staff There Into 'Insider Threats'
Re:
For myself (in the US), I'd smile and nod to the gentlemen from the government, then go and report the issue to the security team at work. I'd also contact an attorney ASAP and fill him in, just in case I "disappear". If it comes to it the attorney's job is to keep the matter from bypassing the courts and my position in the courtroom would be that I was asked to do something I'm not legally allowed to do and I did what I was legally required to do and reported the request to the appropriate authority. Let the government argue with the judge about whether they're entitled to require me to break the law or not.
On the post: After No-Knock Raid Goes Horribly Wrong, Police Union Boss Steps Up To Threaten PD's Critics
I think the political solution needs applied to this PD. That solution: ordinary residents starting a campaign for the next election based on the narrative of "This is the current mayor's position: that it's perfectly fine for the police to kill ordinary citizens while not catching any drug dealers. We need a mayor who'll give the police chief and the police a choice: do it the other way around or I'll replace you with someone who will. And since the current mayor won't do that, it's time to replace him with someone who will.". Keep the emphasis on the part the cops like to crow about but that they aren't actually doing, which isn't that hard considering the results they're piling up.
On the post: Lucasfilm Steps In After FanFilm That Tried To Follow The Rules Was Claimed By Disney Over Star Wars Music
Re: Does LucasFilm even have a say any more?
Because LucasFilm, not Disney, owns the rights. Disney owns LucasFilm, but that's a matter between them and doesn't affect anyone dealing with LucasFilm over the rights.
Yes Disney can tell LucasFilm what terms they can offer and LucasFilm has to obey, but Disney can't unilaterally revoke or change agreements LucasFilm's already entered into with other parties. So once LucasFilm set the rules and Toos agreed to them and released his work abiding by them, Disney lost the ability to retroactively change those rules. They could prohibit any future works, but they can't go back and rewrite the contractual past (especially unilaterally without the consent of the other party). If they asserted in court that they could, then LucasFilm could assert the same right to unilaterally and retroactively change the terms under which Disney bought them to give LucasFilm control over Disney and Disney wouldn't be legally able to challenge whether they had that right. Even Disney's lawyers aren't quite that stupid.
On the post: Blizzard's Sudden Shuttering Of Heroes Of The Storm Demonstrates Why eSports Needs Its Next Evolutionary Step
Re: Re: Esports Vs Leagues
Unless of course the game requires a server (and even a lot of nominally single-player games these days require a server for authentication), in which case the game probably won't run unless it's patched to the most current level. And under copyright law as it stands today, patching the game client to bypass the server check is copyright infringement plain and simple (the cases that set precedent in large part stem from just that, patching the client to run without a server or otherwise bypass publisher-imposed DRM).
The fundamental problem is that any eSports league is either run by the publisher and subject to their whims, or it's utterly dependent on a product owned and controlled by someone who may well consider the league to be a competitor.
On the post: Buzzfeed Wins Defamation Lawsuit Filed Against It Over Publication Of The Steele Dossier
Re:
Underlining is moderately common styling for links these days. Not a consistent standard, but more common than not. Blue as a convention (for unvisited links, purple for visited links) is long gone. The most you can count on is link text being styled differently from the body text around it. And if it's an image, all bets are off because the link border around images went the way of the dodo a good decade ago.
On the post: Canada Rejects A Free Press: Supreme Court Says Journalist Must Hand Over Sources
There's another solution to the situation, the same solution that the software industry's "responsible disclosure" farce encourages for handling bugs and vulnerabilities. Instead of sources talking to reporters privately and reporters filtering the information to avoid disclosure of anything not truly needed, sources contact reporters anonymously and mass-dump all the original materials through a service like Wikileaks that allows for large-scale duplication making it all but impossible to shove the documents back in the safe. Then reporters don't need to vet the source, they can vet the original documents and report based on that. If the reporter never knows who provided the information, they can't reveal more than that they don't know the source's identity. The government can go chase the original documents and the original source, but the material's still out there regardless so they won't accomplish their goal. Sources of course need to make sure they're untraceable when uploading the information, but that's what they're having to do already so no major change there.
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