Re: The Internet isn't everything, nor the only thing
Indeed. Tech policy was clearly a very low priority for most candidates in the recent election. Case in point: After pestering the leading House candidate in my district for something approaching an Internet policy, I received a sentence about “<J. Random Candidate> believes strongly in modernizing our nation’s military to deal with emerging cyber threats.”
Techdirt complains rightly that the US Congress is embarassingly (or conveniently) ignorant on most tech issues. But how can the situation be improved when most candidates clearly don’t see any political advantage in knowing, well, anything about these subjects?
I mean, if you do a bare minimum glance at gaming groups you will find more than their fair share led by people that have some extreme right wing views.
It seems that many commentators had some difficulty understanding this article. The UK government is not banning British citizens from using the phrase, but only its own members. Since governments—including, as Tim points out, some of the worst regimes on the planet—have been the worst abusers of the term “fake news”, this is indeed a good move.
Stopping government officials from muddying the waters with garbage phrases like this is, I think, a net positive for free speech. Consider the (first) US Red Scare: if the McCarthy-era government had required officials to use the word “communist” to refer to those and only those people proved to members of the Communist party, would things have been a bit more sane? Quite possibly.
On some issues, some elected officials do try to get things right and serve the people they represent. It's unfortunate that this bill will probably die, but, if it is killed, there will have been at least one congressperson who wasn't pandering to election sponsors.
Rather than trying to win internet points with witty comments about corruption, we should encourage this kind of behavior from representatives.
Even Facebook has been forced to acknowledge that this policy has put users in real danger.
In my mind, the likely scenarios (barring police surveillance) are a) getting caught posting something you probably should have known not to say with your real name attached (e.g. posting negative shit about your boss and getting fired) or b) being one of the people who really does need anonymity because you post about controversial things.
This is extremely narrow-minded. Depending on the country, LGBT people, atheists, activists and those exercising basic free speech rights in criticizing their governments or institutions are regularly targeted for expressing themselves on the Internet. In these places, anonymity is very much a life-or-death issue. It should not be necessary to remind anyone on here of this.
why were you on FB in the first place? Why not Twitter or Instagram or any other social media platform that doesn't have this rule?
The existence of less invasive alternatives does not justify a harmful and unnecessary policy.
People like breaking rules and a handful of moderators per millions of users can't really keep up. We expect this kind of juvenile bullshit from average jerks like you and me, but shouldn't we be expecting more from our public servants?
I understand that this is tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a poor choice of phrasing. It probably goes without saying here on Techdirt, but creating an pseudonymous account isn’t “juvenile bullshit”, it’s sometimes a life-or-death decision. Facebook’s real-name policy is extremely dangerous and has already caused harm to users. As gratifying as it is to see people get caught abusing the service for surveillance, it should be 100% clear that this policy is unacceptable.
Re: First big test, and you suddenly don't like legalisms.
out_of_the_blue,
I’ve finally figured it out. Your peculiar grammar betrays you as Dr. Bronner’s demented brother. Is it possible to order some of your MAGIC Common Law UNMODERATED “Soap” directly?
A perfectly satisfactory ruling: “None of you are doing anything wrong under this law, so relax. In fact, it’s such a clear law that no one could even reasonably accuse you of doing anything wrong! Why are you even here, let’s get a sandwich.”
And tomorrow some other court will rule the other way entirely.
As a side note, did the ex post facto aspect of FOSTA not lift any eyebrows?
Does Apple state that “purchases” made through iTunes are in fact rentals, and that access to content depends on you paying a new license fee each time you move?
No? In that case, they must claw the license fee out of their own funds.
If they’re unhappy with a copyright system that creatues these situations, it behooves them to throw their massive weight behind reform, rather than passing the pain on to their customers.
I believe this non-argument has been used against virtually every whistleblower in recent memory—Manning, Snowden, Drake, Ellsberg, etc. You might consider the slightly less popular “vengeful loner” and “sexual deviant” smears to mix it up a bit.
Or you could attempt to contribute something worth reading.
Why would you not draw the crucial distinction between (a) in the interest of catalyzing change, making information on government wrongdoing available to the citizens who elect that government, and (b) secretly handing information to hostile groups--and only to hostile groups--in the interest of harming a country?
If you don't recognize a difference between these two actions, how is 'whistleblowing' possible?
... with the express intent of exfiltrating classified information because she hates her country.
Your use of 'exfiltrating' without an object is revealing. Do you differentiate between releasing information to a journalistic outlet and providing it to a hostile government?
You also imply that Winner released what she did to The Intercept because she couldn’t find something that was not “relatively innocuous”. Do you have a source for this claim?
Furthermore: regardless of your opinion of Winner's motives, her feelings about the US do not make her actions more or less espionage. The crucial point—though obscured by the really awful Espionage Act—is that Winner released documents relating to an issue of public importance (and which did not put any member of the US government in danger) to a news organization. This clearly seems to be the act of someone working in what she considered to be the public interest. Are you arguing that her opinions about the US government make this a criminal act, or is the release itself "despicable"?
Source code is invaluable to hackers because it allows them to examine the code to find security flaws they can exploit.
It’s unqualified claims like this that allow voting machine designers to avoid open-sourcing their products. I’d like to think he’s using “hacker” in the old sense of the word,
but probably not. Either way, this statement is both too specific and misleading. Source code is also invaluable to those who want to understand/audit this crucial software, and making source code publicly available is, of course, good for security.
The idea that, for the public’s safety, voting source code should only be available to some NDA-bound developer priesthood needs to be killed dead.
Thanks very much for this exceptionally informative (re)post. It’s interesting that Facebook’s lack of easy access to social data (for users, at least) is a major factor in locking-in its users. Few articles (and, one might guess, legislators) understand this particular subtlety.
Activity Streams is a fascinating idea. As Kevin notes, the challenge of mapping “activity” between arbitrary platforms is a big one, but this is a concrete attempt to solve it.
Maher’s article makes an excellent case. As she’s a bit short on the details of how Amazon, Facebook, etc. should contribute, her argument does come across as a veiled “hey, send us some donations!”. But there are many other ways in which these companies could contribute—in server space and analytics, for example. Most crucially, if major internet services benefit from the free data produced by these projects, they might respond in kind—by freeing, rather than siloing, the data that they create.
Google Books was, in this sense, an example of a step in the right direction. By creating a very large body of (basically) free/open data, this project has probably fueled hundreds of Wikipedia articles—which, in nice symbiotic style, are used by Siri and Alexa devices to provide quick summaries.
Although I’m sure money and infrastructure would be the most welcome short-term contributions that Google, et al could make to Wikimedia, free data is the lifeblood of commons projects. But far more valuable, in the long term, would be a pledge to reverse the siloization trend (something they’re primarily responsible for, after all) and to open-source their own projects.
This isn't one market destroying another. It could be two complementary markets (ContentID but for product placement of inadvertently featured artists) but IFPI has chosen to treat Twitch as just another Pirate Bay.
This is exactly right. YouTube, for example, is full of comments from interested users inquiring about the background music used in specific videos and asking where to get a copy. Since no-one is actually using livestreams as a free jukebox for copyrighted music, it seems like the net effect of all this could be totally positive for music creators.
On the post: AT&T Ignores Numerous Pitfalls, Begins Kicking Pirates Off Of The Internet
Re: Re: 9 strikes
Exactly.
On the post: Marsha Blackburn Continues To Be Rewarded For Screwing Up The Internet
Re: The Internet isn't everything, nor the only thing
Indeed. Tech policy was clearly a very low priority for most candidates in the recent election. Case in point: After pestering the leading House candidate in my district for something approaching an Internet policy, I received a sentence about “<J. Random Candidate> believes strongly in modernizing our nation’s military to deal with emerging cyber threats.”
Techdirt complains rightly that the US Congress is embarassingly (or conveniently) ignorant on most tech issues. But how can the situation be improved when most candidates clearly don’t see any political advantage in knowing, well, anything about these subjects?
On the post: NPR Posits Nazis Are Recruiting All Of Our Children In Online Games With Very Little Evidence
Re:
[citation needed]
On the post: UK Government Screws Head On Straight, Bans Use Of Term 'Fake News' By Gov't Officials
Not censoring the public
It seems that many commentators had some difficulty understanding this article. The UK government is not banning British citizens from using the phrase, but only its own members. Since governments—including, as Tim points out, some of the worst regimes on the planet—have been the worst abusers of the term “fake news”, this is indeed a good move.
Stopping government officials from muddying the waters with garbage phrases like this is, I think, a net positive for free speech. Consider the (first) US Red Scare: if the McCarthy-era government had required officials to use the word “communist” to refer to those and only those people proved to members of the Communist party, would things have been a bit more sane? Quite possibly.
On the post: New Bill Tries To Ban Obnoxious Hidden Fees On Broadband, TV
More of this, please
Rather than trying to win internet points with witty comments about corruption, we should encourage this kind of behavior from representatives.
On the post: Facebook Tells Cops Its 'Real Name' Policy Applies To Law Enforcement Too
Re: Re:
The previous post did provide a citation, which it seems that you did not bother to read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_controversy#Affected_users
Even Facebook has been forced to acknowledge that this policy has put users in real danger.
This is extremely narrow-minded. Depending on the country, LGBT people, atheists, activists and those exercising basic free speech rights in criticizing their governments or institutions are regularly targeted for expressing themselves on the Internet. In these places, anonymity is very much a life-or-death issue. It should not be necessary to remind anyone on here of this.
The existence of less invasive alternatives does not justify a harmful and unnecessary policy.
On the post: Facebook Tells Cops Its 'Real Name' Policy Applies To Law Enforcement Too
Tim,
I understand that this is tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a poor choice of phrasing. It probably goes without saying here on Techdirt, but creating an pseudonymous account isn’t “juvenile bullshit”, it’s sometimes a life-or-death decision. Facebook’s real-name policy is extremely dangerous and has already caused harm to users. As gratifying as it is to see people get caught abusing the service for surveillance, it should be 100% clear that this policy is unacceptable.
On the post: District Court Misses The Forest For The Trees In Dismissing Constitutional Challenge To FOSTA
Re: First big test, and you suddenly don't like legalisms.
out_of_the_blue,
I’ve finally figured it out. Your peculiar grammar betrays you as Dr. Bronner’s demented brother. Is it possible to order some of your MAGIC Common Law UNMODERATED “Soap” directly?
On the post: District Court Misses The Forest For The Trees In Dismissing Constitutional Challenge To FOSTA
The problem with vague laws
A perfectly satisfactory ruling: “None of you are doing anything wrong under this law, so relax. In fact, it’s such a clear law that no one could even reasonably accuse you of doing anything wrong! Why are you even here, let’s get a sandwich.”
And tomorrow some other court will rule the other way entirely.
As a side note, did the ex post facto aspect of FOSTA not lift any eyebrows?
On the post: Apple Didn't Delete That Guys iTunes Movies, But What Happened Still Shows The Insanity Of Copyright
Re: region licenses
No? In that case, they must claw the license fee out of their own funds.
If they’re unhappy with a copyright system that creatues these situations, it behooves them to throw their massive weight behind reform, rather than passing the pain on to their customers.
On the post: How The EU May Be About To Kill The Public Domain: Copyright Filters Takedown Beethoven
Re: Re:
On the post: Reality Winner Will Spend Five Years In Jail For Leaking Info Government Officials Released Publicly
Re: Too bad it was so little...
Or you could attempt to contribute something worth reading.
On the post: Reality Winner Will Spend Five Years In Jail For Leaking Info Government Officials Released Publicly
Re: Re: Re:
Why would you not draw the crucial distinction between (a) in the interest of catalyzing change, making information on government wrongdoing available to the citizens who elect that government, and (b) secretly handing information to hostile groups--and only to hostile groups--in the interest of harming a country?
If you don't recognize a difference between these two actions, how is 'whistleblowing' possible?
On the post: Reality Winner Will Spend Five Years In Jail For Leaking Info Government Officials Released Publicly
Re:
Your use of 'exfiltrating' without an object is revealing. Do you differentiate between releasing information to a journalistic outlet and providing it to a hostile government?
You also imply that Winner released what she did to The Intercept because she couldn’t find something that was not “relatively innocuous”. Do you have a source for this claim?
Furthermore: regardless of your opinion of Winner's motives, her feelings about the US do not make her actions more or less espionage. The crucial point—though obscured by the really awful Espionage Act—is that Winner released documents relating to an issue of public importance (and which did not put any member of the US government in danger) to a news organization. This clearly seems to be the act of someone working in what she considered to be the public interest. Are you arguing that her opinions about the US government make this a criminal act, or is the release itself "despicable"?
On the post: Biggest Voting Machine Maker Admits -- Ooops -- That It Installed Remote Access Software After First Denying It
Re: Invaluable to the rest of us
On the post: Biggest Voting Machine Maker Admits -- Ooops -- That It Installed Remote Access Software After First Denying It
Invaluable to the rest of us
Quoth Zetter:
It’s unqualified claims like this that allow voting machine designers to avoid open-sourcing their products. I’d like to think he’s using “hacker” in the old sense of the word, but probably not. Either way, this statement is both too specific and misleading. Source code is also invaluable to those who want to understand/audit this crucial software, and making source code publicly available is, of course, good for security.
The idea that, for the public’s safety, voting source code should only be available to some NDA-bound developer priesthood needs to be killed dead.
On the post: How We Can 'Free' Our Facebook Friends
Good article!
Thanks very much for this exceptionally informative (re)post. It’s interesting that Facebook’s lack of easy access to social data (for users, at least) is a major factor in locking-in its users. Few articles (and, one might guess, legislators) understand this particular subtlety.
Activity Streams is a fascinating idea. As Kevin notes, the challenge of mapping “activity” between arbitrary platforms is a big one, but this is a concrete attempt to solve it.
On the post: Wikipedia Makes The Case For Google & Facebook To Give Back To The Commons, Rather Than Just Take
Contribute by freeing data
Maher’s article makes an excellent case. As she’s a bit short on the details of how Amazon, Facebook, etc. should contribute, her argument does come across as a veiled “hey, send us some donations!”. But there are many other ways in which these companies could contribute—in server space and analytics, for example. Most crucially, if major internet services benefit from the free data produced by these projects, they might respond in kind—by freeing, rather than siloing, the data that they create.
Google Books was, in this sense, an example of a step in the right direction. By creating a very large body of (basically) free/open data, this project has probably fueled hundreds of Wikipedia articles—which, in nice symbiotic style, are used by Siri and Alexa devices to provide quick summaries.
Although I’m sure money and infrastructure would be the most welcome short-term contributions that Google, et al could make to Wikimedia, free data is the lifeblood of commons projects. But far more valuable, in the long term, would be a pledge to reverse the siloization trend (something they’re primarily responsible for, after all) and to open-source their own projects.
On the post: IFPI Nuking Twitch Streamers Accounts For Playing Background Music
Cutting off one’s nose
This is exactly right. YouTube, for example, is full of comments from interested users inquiring about the background music used in specific videos and asking where to get a copy. Since no-one is actually using livestreams as a free jukebox for copyrighted music, it seems like the net effect of all this could be totally positive for music creators.
On the post: UK Gov't To Allow Citizens To Head To Nearest Newsstand To Buy Porn... Licenses
Morality theater
16 digits? Is this the return of the software CD key which did such a wonderful job of preventing people from copying things 20 years ago?
In all probability this system has already been cracked.
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