I wonder if Big Media is going to be pushing for this guy to be prosecuted heavily for the SWATing alone. If he goes to prison there won't be much point in YouTube continuing their suit, since the injunction would be pointless and he won't have much income to pay any fines with. So it probably wouldn't be worth accruing more legal fees that he wouldn't be able to cover (although perhaps they could seize property if that doesn't all go to someone else)
Media companies abuse these takedown notices too, and they certainly don't want a precedent against doing that...so they might try to have prosecutors throw the book at this guy for anything else, and then probably hold it up later as proof that abusive requests do get punished in order to block future attempts at reform.
First Amendment protects twitter's right to publish (or not) what they choose. The government cannot pass any law requiring them to publish speech that they do not agree with. If this isn't actually what you're proposing then please clarify.
I don't use Twitter, I don't use Facebook, I don't use Google -- they're entirely blocked on my home network (including all subsidiaries such as ReCaptcha and YouTube). I send out my content from a server sitting in my living room. I see no problem with that method; the Internet is far better without those idiots anyway. Granted, my ISP could kick me off, and I'd have to find a new service provider, but I've got not right to demand the use of someone else's property.
...and no wonder I haven't seen it before, looks like it didn't exist until pretty recently -- archive.org has no record of it before last May, which is definitely after the last time I looked for it.
So yeah, DECADES later they finally add that ability...except it only applies to half of the content that it needs to. Typical, Google...
Thanks...haven't seen that before. Unfortunately it still doesn't have any option for reporting the Prager ads -- it lets you report banner ads on the YT site, but it does not have an option for reporting the ads that play before videos.
Prager also seems to spend a large amount of money on advertising on other YouTube videos, if the ads I am constantly seeing are any indication. And I've noticed that a number of those ads violate YouTube's acceptable content policies, but there's nothing you can do about that on paid content. There's no way to flag or block the ads the way you can with a channel. There's no way to report them, there's no contact information for YT, there's nothing you can do. Pay a couple bucks and YouTube will apparently let you spew as much hate and promote as much violence as you want, targeted at the exact audiences you want to target. You can't post objectionable videos, because advertisers might not want to be associated with that, but the advertisers can post all the objectionable content they want and force any channel they choose to be associated with them.
...which is one of many reasons why I'm ditching YT for Floatplane, LBRY, and Nebula.
"In the past, Google and Facebook have shown that they can pivot quickly and that they already have the technology to keep certain content off their platforms. There is almost no pornography on Facebook or YouTube because of sophisticated tools that search for and prevent such uploads."
...what OTHER social network is this guy using which he thinks is actually Facebook? Because that's half the reason I got rid of that friggin' site, I'd get a notification and pop open the app and get flooded with porn. Can't be having that when I'm sitting here at work. Go follow the 'Linux' page in particular for a week or two and THEN we can talk about how "great" Facebook is at filtering this garbage. I used to be seeing it in my feed on a daily basis.
When I took my introductory programming classes, we were taught that something like an SSN should always be stored as a string, since you wouldn't typically do any manipulation on that object. Storing as a number might save a bit of space, but ideally it should be a string and you can (probably should) include those dashes. Although plenty of devs will still use a number to save space or ensure consistent formatting.
The bigger issue IMO is that there's plenty of numbers which are designed to be compatible with SSNs. Penn State University student numbers are the biggest use case I've experienced, but that alone is probably tens or even hundreds of thousands of people/numbers. See, the software was originally designed to just identify students by SSN. But they'd use those numbers, for example, if a professor wanted to post test scores outside their office -- so students could check their score, could compare it to others, but couldn't easily see what another specific student scored. But they eventually realized that posting a big public list of SSNs wasn't a great idea, so they started generating new numbers. They're still formatted like SSNs though because the software and workflows were all designed to use SSNs. Technically the numbers they assign aren't valid (they start with 9) but I can't imagine they're the only ones with SSN clones as ID numbers.
When I went to college, the university (PSU) assigned us all a nine digit student number. The reason these were nine digit numbers is because they originally used SSNs, until a decade or two ago when they realized that was a bit of a security issue. All of their existing systems were designed around using SSNs though, so they created new numbers for everyone which used the same formatting so their existing workflows wouldn't need to be modified.
I can't imagine that they're the only place which did something like that. So if you're filtering nine digit numbers that look like SSNs, you're probably going to get a lot of nine digit numbers that aren't SSNs but are designed to look similar, which is going to cause a lot of additional problems...
"Most people know what cables to put in which sockets on their computer, which would put them at least at "filling the gas tank" level for a car."
...that has not been my experience at all. I know people who have let a brand new laptop sit on a shelf for over a year without even booting it up once because they "weren't sure how to set it up" and were waiting for their techie friend to come deal with it.
In my experience, people who are not technically inclined have Best Buy come set up the computer, have a friend or co-worker show them which buttons to click in which order like it's some freakin' magic incantation, and if one icon moves over half an inch they're calling tech support saying it's "broken". Hell, in my experience even software developers typically outright refuse to read error messages and "don't know how" to reinstall Windows. They could probably figure it out, but they refuse to even try...anything more involved that "click button and get instant gratification" is too much effort these days.
Not that people do any better with things like cars or televisions though...those are just standardized enough that they "learned" it once twenty years ago and have been coasting on that ever since....
Add me to your list of "shills", since apparently losing interest in this site for a couple years is proof of that now?
Although you'll have to dig a bit further than just a user profile page since Techdirt appears to have purged my account at some point and I haven't bothered to re-register yet. Can still find my old posts on Google though! Most recent one (besides those from the past month) that I found was 2010. Must mean I waited ten years just to come back and "astro-turf" about...something...?
Sometimes people leave, sometimes they come back. If you think that alone is proof of a conspiracy, you might want to seek some professional help....sounds like you're having some paranoid delusions.
I did a Neilson survey thing two or three years ago...it was kinda weird.
At that point I hadn't had cable for about eight years already. They sent a log book with instructions to record everything you watched, regardless of if it was TV, streaming, or anything else. They ended up getting a list of my favorite YouTube channels...possibly mixed in with a couple shows that had long since been cancelled (pretty sure it contained at least one BBC show from the '80s...)
I dunno about wireless, but I've got the same kind of deal with Verizon FiOS, and it takes literally one click once I'm logged in to their website to get a breakdown of my bill.
They don't want to pay credit card processing fees, they don't want to be paying for service of people who issue chargebacks or whose cards end up declined, they don't want to be paying postage every month to send out a bill. Seems like a reasonable enough condition for giving discounts, and they certainly aren't the only company that does it that way. Hell, when I moved up here I couldn't find anyone who would give me internet billed to a credit card, they all required direct debit as a condition for getting any plan at all.
Verizon Wireless is, IME, a pretty scummy company...but that particular part seems perfectly reasonable.
That's the thing though...the replacements have already been built. There's about a dozen of them out there at least. The problem is that nobody will use them. Even Google couldn't figure out how to convince people to move away from Facebook. So burning it down to make room for others to grow certainly isn't the worst idea in the world...
"All the internet haters seem to have glommed onto Shosana Zuboff's term 'Surveillance Capitalism' as a sort of shibboleth to the savvy to show that you know (you know) those internet companies are truly evil in their hearts. But taken to its logical extreme, one might as well blame Wall Street."
Well, yeah, that's why it's surveillance capitalism rather than surveillance tech. It's all about the profit motive. That's neither a negation ("But...") nor an "extreme" as far as I can tell; it's just a definition of the term...
As long as companies are willing to dump money into these technologies, it's not going to stop. As long as such companies are profitable (and often even when they aren't), VCs are going to pump money into them.
Now, we can try to regulate that away...but that probably requires some high level of public outrage. Which these kinds of movies might help create, although if the people being outraged don't fully understand the problem, and the legislators aren't understanding the problem (often willfully), then that's still not going to help much. And of course, the companies profiting from this kind of abuse use the profits to hire lobbyists...I don't expect that avenue to yield much success unless the whole damn system gets reformed.
So the other option is to go after the profits directly. Lawsuits might help, although that goes along with the regulatory aspect, probably not going to be enough by itself. Convincing people to stop buying this crap would be the other option, but how do you do that when most people don't know and don't WANT to know how any of it actually works? When everyone USES FACEBOOK to discuss how upset they are with the Cambridge Analytica stuff?
Sometimes I fear we might just be too late. People are too accustomed to using computers without thinking, without reading, without researching...hell, I literally can't get SOFTWARE ENGINEERS that I work with to read THREE FREAKIN' LINES of output from a program. If it doesn't do exactly what they expect with a single click, they tell you it's broken. They don't care how it works, they don't care what else it does, all that matters is the instant gratification.
Of course, sometimes I also think the problem is just a matter of advertising. We've got the technology, we could drop Facebook for distributed social network platforms tonight if a sufficient number of people could be convinced to do so. But years of advocacy doesn't seem to be doing much. Scandal after scandal after scandal convinces approximately zero people to make the switch. So now what...?
I feel like people are going around and around and around discussing minor nuances of what the "real problem" is...but nobody's got a solution...and neither do I. At this point I'm just trying to keep my own network safe from this garbage, and that alone occupies a significant majority of my free time...
So in that post, he argues that one of the major reasons why companies might want to voluntarily break up the platform and build a protocol instead is to avoid liability -- which is exactly what I think this ruling does, as I've explained above. And yet in this post, he seems to also be arguing against the current attempts to hold these platforms liable for their behavior. Apparently they don't need fines, they need competition, and they'll be motivated to create systems that enable that competition when they're held liable for their actions through....some undefined consequence that is not fines, apparently? Or fines for other behavior that is not currently illegal through some unspecified law? I don't see where that argument is supposed to be going.
If you want protocols instead of platforms, then you want to discourage collection of the data in the first place. Punishing a corporation for spreading their massive database of other peoples' information is not the same as discouraging decentralized systems. It's an entirely different kind of sharing. What we need to punish -- and what this ruling DOES punish in part -- is the centralized collection of data. You can't get sued for giving away data if you don't possess the data in the first place. Anything that increases the potential liability for those compiling these huge datastores is a great step forward IMO.
"Playing copyrighted music in a public space without license is not allowed AFAIK. The fascists will be eager to point that out to the cops."
AIUI, Cops don't typically enforce copyright, courts do. It's a civil offense, not a criminal one. So they could contact the rights holder who could then attempt to sue the person who played the music, but that's going to take a while to get through the courts.
Does the library get a copy of these books? Do they get a "subscription"? Do we bulldoze that building and convert it to computer labs? There were a couple books I never purchased in college because they were only required for homework problems, so I just did my homework in the library and used their copy...
On the post: YouTube Sues Guy Who Tried To Extort People Through Bogus DMCA Takedowns
Which prosecution will win...?
I wonder if Big Media is going to be pushing for this guy to be prosecuted heavily for the SWATing alone. If he goes to prison there won't be much point in YouTube continuing their suit, since the injunction would be pointless and he won't have much income to pay any fines with. So it probably wouldn't be worth accruing more legal fees that he wouldn't be able to cover (although perhaps they could seize property if that doesn't all go to someone else)
Media companies abuse these takedown notices too, and they certainly don't want a precedent against doing that...so they might try to have prosecutors throw the book at this guy for anything else, and then probably hold it up later as proof that abusive requests do get punished in order to block future attempts at reform.
On the post: Pushing For Facebook, YouTube And Twitter To Ban Hate Speech Won't Stop It From Migrating Elsewhere
Re: Re:
First Amendment protects twitter's right to publish (or not) what they choose. The government cannot pass any law requiring them to publish speech that they do not agree with. If this isn't actually what you're proposing then please clarify.
I don't use Twitter, I don't use Facebook, I don't use Google -- they're entirely blocked on my home network (including all subsidiaries such as ReCaptcha and YouTube). I send out my content from a server sitting in my living room. I see no problem with that method; the Internet is far better without those idiots anyway. Granted, my ISP could kick me off, and I'd have to find a new service provider, but I've got not right to demand the use of someone else's property.
On the post: Pushing For Facebook, YouTube And Twitter To Ban Hate Speech Won't Stop It From Migrating Elsewhere
No class...
So what you're saying is that we need social media to have less class? I don't think that's possible.... ;)
On the post: Dennis Prager Peddles Complete Nonsense About 'Google Censorship' In The WSJ
Re: Re: Re: And YT ignores own policies....
...and no wonder I haven't seen it before, looks like it didn't exist until pretty recently -- archive.org has no record of it before last May, which is definitely after the last time I looked for it.
So yeah, DECADES later they finally add that ability...except it only applies to half of the content that it needs to. Typical, Google...
On the post: Dennis Prager Peddles Complete Nonsense About 'Google Censorship' In The WSJ
Re: Re: And YT ignores own policies....
Thanks...haven't seen that before. Unfortunately it still doesn't have any option for reporting the Prager ads -- it lets you report banner ads on the YT site, but it does not have an option for reporting the ads that play before videos.
On the post: Dennis Prager Peddles Complete Nonsense About 'Google Censorship' In The WSJ
And YT ignores own policies....
Prager also seems to spend a large amount of money on advertising on other YouTube videos, if the ads I am constantly seeing are any indication. And I've noticed that a number of those ads violate YouTube's acceptable content policies, but there's nothing you can do about that on paid content. There's no way to flag or block the ads the way you can with a channel. There's no way to report them, there's no contact information for YT, there's nothing you can do. Pay a couple bucks and YouTube will apparently let you spew as much hate and promote as much violence as you want, targeted at the exact audiences you want to target. You can't post objectionable videos, because advertisers might not want to be associated with that, but the advertisers can post all the objectionable content they want and force any channel they choose to be associated with them.
...which is one of many reasons why I'm ditching YT for Floatplane, LBRY, and Nebula.
On the post: NY Times Publishes A Second, Blatantly Incorrect, Trashing Of Section 230, A Day After Its First Incorrect Article
No porn? Since when??
"In the past, Google and Facebook have shown that they can pivot quickly and that they already have the technology to keep certain content off their platforms. There is almost no pornography on Facebook or YouTube because of sophisticated tools that search for and prevent such uploads."
...what OTHER social network is this guy using which he thinks is actually Facebook? Because that's half the reason I got rid of that friggin' site, I'd get a notification and pop open the app and get flooded with porn. Can't be having that when I'm sitting here at work. Go follow the 'Linux' page in particular for a week or two and THEN we can talk about how "great" Facebook is at filtering this garbage. I used to be seeing it in my feed on a daily basis.
On the post: New Report Further Clarifies Foxconn's Wisconsin Deal Was An Unsustainable Joke
Re:
"Privatizing profits and socializing debt."
On the post: Class Action Lawsuit Hopes To Hold GitHub Responsible For Hosting Data From Capital One Breach
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
When I took my introductory programming classes, we were taught that something like an SSN should always be stored as a string, since you wouldn't typically do any manipulation on that object. Storing as a number might save a bit of space, but ideally it should be a string and you can (probably should) include those dashes. Although plenty of devs will still use a number to save space or ensure consistent formatting.
The bigger issue IMO is that there's plenty of numbers which are designed to be compatible with SSNs. Penn State University student numbers are the biggest use case I've experienced, but that alone is probably tens or even hundreds of thousands of people/numbers. See, the software was originally designed to just identify students by SSN. But they'd use those numbers, for example, if a professor wanted to post test scores outside their office -- so students could check their score, could compare it to others, but couldn't easily see what another specific student scored. But they eventually realized that posting a big public list of SSNs wasn't a great idea, so they started generating new numbers. They're still formatted like SSNs though because the software and workflows were all designed to use SSNs. Technically the numbers they assign aren't valid (they start with 9) but I can't imagine they're the only ones with SSN clones as ID numbers.
On the post: Class Action Lawsuit Hopes To Hold GitHub Responsible For Hosting Data From Capital One Breach
Lots of similar numbers...
When I went to college, the university (PSU) assigned us all a nine digit student number. The reason these were nine digit numbers is because they originally used SSNs, until a decade or two ago when they realized that was a bit of a security issue. All of their existing systems were designed around using SSNs though, so they created new numbers for everyone which used the same formatting so their existing workflows wouldn't need to be modified.
I can't imagine that they're the only place which did something like that. So if you're filtering nine digit numbers that look like SSNs, you're probably going to get a lot of nine digit numbers that aren't SSNs but are designed to look similar, which is going to cause a lot of additional problems...
On the post: Consumer Reports Finds Numerous Home Routers Lack Even Basic Security Protections
Re: Re: Re:
"Most people know what cables to put in which sockets on their computer, which would put them at least at "filling the gas tank" level for a car."
...that has not been my experience at all. I know people who have let a brand new laptop sit on a shelf for over a year without even booting it up once because they "weren't sure how to set it up" and were waiting for their techie friend to come deal with it.
In my experience, people who are not technically inclined have Best Buy come set up the computer, have a friend or co-worker show them which buttons to click in which order like it's some freakin' magic incantation, and if one icon moves over half an inch they're calling tech support saying it's "broken". Hell, in my experience even software developers typically outright refuse to read error messages and "don't know how" to reinstall Windows. They could probably figure it out, but they refuse to even try...anything more involved that "click button and get instant gratification" is too much effort these days.
Not that people do any better with things like cars or televisions though...those are just standardized enough that they "learned" it once twenty years ago and have been coasting on that ever since....
On the post: Consumer Reports Finds Numerous Home Routers Lack Even Basic Security Protections
Re: Re: Re: UDP is the new bad guy?
Add me to your list of "shills", since apparently losing interest in this site for a couple years is proof of that now?
Although you'll have to dig a bit further than just a user profile page since Techdirt appears to have purged my account at some point and I haven't bothered to re-register yet. Can still find my old posts on Google though! Most recent one (besides those from the past month) that I found was 2010. Must mean I waited ten years just to come back and "astro-turf" about...something...?
Sometimes people leave, sometimes they come back. If you think that alone is proof of a conspiracy, you might want to seek some professional help....sounds like you're having some paranoid delusions.
On the post: Daily Deal: The Complete Raspberry Pi & Alexa A-Z Bundle
Surveillance capitalism...
Or, if you want to avoid some of the surveillance aspects of Alexa, you could try Mycroft AI.... :)
On the post: After Missing Cord Cutting Trend, Nielsen Falls Apart
I did one once...
I did a Neilson survey thing two or three years ago...it was kinda weird.
At that point I hadn't had cable for about eight years already. They sent a log book with instructions to record everything you watched, regardless of if it was TV, streaming, or anything else. They ended up getting a list of my favorite YouTube channels...possibly mixed in with a couple shows that had long since been cancelled (pretty sure it contained at least one BBC show from the '80s...)
Haven't heard anything from them since...lol
On the post: Verizon's New 'Unlimited' Data Plans Still Have Very Real, Problematic Limits
Re:
I dunno about wireless, but I've got the same kind of deal with Verizon FiOS, and it takes literally one click once I'm logged in to their website to get a breakdown of my bill.
They don't want to pay credit card processing fees, they don't want to be paying for service of people who issue chargebacks or whose cards end up declined, they don't want to be paying postage every month to send out a bill. Seems like a reasonable enough condition for giving discounts, and they certainly aren't the only company that does it that way. Hell, when I moved up here I couldn't find anyone who would give me internet billed to a credit card, they all required direct debit as a condition for getting any plan at all.
Verizon Wireless is, IME, a pretty scummy company...but that particular part seems perfectly reasonable.
On the post: The Great Hack Wasn't A Hack And Big Tech's Problems Aren't Really About Big Tech
Re: Re: Re: Re:
That's the thing though...the replacements have already been built. There's about a dozen of them out there at least. The problem is that nobody will use them. Even Google couldn't figure out how to convince people to move away from Facebook. So burning it down to make room for others to grow certainly isn't the worst idea in the world...
On the post: The Great Hack Wasn't A Hack And Big Tech's Problems Aren't Really About Big Tech
It's "Surveillance CAPITALISM"
"All the internet haters seem to have glommed onto Shosana Zuboff's term 'Surveillance Capitalism' as a sort of shibboleth to the savvy to show that you know (you know) those internet companies are truly evil in their hearts. But taken to its logical extreme, one might as well blame Wall Street."
Well, yeah, that's why it's surveillance capitalism rather than surveillance tech. It's all about the profit motive. That's neither a negation ("But...") nor an "extreme" as far as I can tell; it's just a definition of the term...
As long as companies are willing to dump money into these technologies, it's not going to stop. As long as such companies are profitable (and often even when they aren't), VCs are going to pump money into them.
Now, we can try to regulate that away...but that probably requires some high level of public outrage. Which these kinds of movies might help create, although if the people being outraged don't fully understand the problem, and the legislators aren't understanding the problem (often willfully), then that's still not going to help much. And of course, the companies profiting from this kind of abuse use the profits to hire lobbyists...I don't expect that avenue to yield much success unless the whole damn system gets reformed.
So the other option is to go after the profits directly. Lawsuits might help, although that goes along with the regulatory aspect, probably not going to be enough by itself. Convincing people to stop buying this crap would be the other option, but how do you do that when most people don't know and don't WANT to know how any of it actually works? When everyone USES FACEBOOK to discuss how upset they are with the Cambridge Analytica stuff?
Sometimes I fear we might just be too late. People are too accustomed to using computers without thinking, without reading, without researching...hell, I literally can't get SOFTWARE ENGINEERS that I work with to read THREE FREAKIN' LINES of output from a program. If it doesn't do exactly what they expect with a single click, they tell you it's broken. They don't care how it works, they don't care what else it does, all that matters is the instant gratification.
Of course, sometimes I also think the problem is just a matter of advertising. We've got the technology, we could drop Facebook for distributed social network platforms tonight if a sufficient number of people could be convinced to do so. But years of advocacy doesn't seem to be doing much. Scandal after scandal after scandal convinces approximately zero people to make the switch. So now what...?
I feel like people are going around and around and around discussing minor nuances of what the "real problem" is...but nobody's got a solution...and neither do I. At this point I'm just trying to keep my own network safe from this garbage, and that alone occupies a significant majority of my free time...
On the post: FTC's Privacy Settlement With Facebook Gets Pretty Much Everything Backwards; Probably Helps Facebook
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Backwards...
So in that post, he argues that one of the major reasons why companies might want to voluntarily break up the platform and build a protocol instead is to avoid liability -- which is exactly what I think this ruling does, as I've explained above. And yet in this post, he seems to also be arguing against the current attempts to hold these platforms liable for their behavior. Apparently they don't need fines, they need competition, and they'll be motivated to create systems that enable that competition when they're held liable for their actions through....some undefined consequence that is not fines, apparently? Or fines for other behavior that is not currently illegal through some unspecified law? I don't see where that argument is supposed to be going.
If you want protocols instead of platforms, then you want to discourage collection of the data in the first place. Punishing a corporation for spreading their massive database of other peoples' information is not the same as discouraging decentralized systems. It's an entirely different kind of sharing. What we need to punish -- and what this ruling DOES punish in part -- is the centralized collection of data. You can't get sued for giving away data if you don't possess the data in the first place. Anything that increases the potential liability for those compiling these huge datastores is a great step forward IMO.
On the post: Why A 'Clever Hack' Against Nazis Shows How Upload Filters Have Made Copyright Law Even More Broken
Re:
"Playing copyrighted music in a public space without license is not allowed AFAIK. The fascists will be eager to point that out to the cops."
AIUI, Cops don't typically enforce copyright, courts do. It's a civil offense, not a criminal one. So they could contact the rights holder who could then attempt to sue the person who played the music, but that's going to take a while to get through the courts.
On the post: The Death Of Ownership: Educational Publishing Giant Pearson To Do Away With Print Textbooks (That Can Be Resold)
Library?
Does the library get a copy of these books? Do they get a "subscription"? Do we bulldoze that building and convert it to computer labs? There were a couple books I never purchased in college because they were only required for homework problems, so I just did my homework in the library and used their copy...
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