The example in the article is different. The microphone was left inactive. Not waiting for a trigger (motion, schedule) but for a full firmware update. The microphone was not recording nor transmitting anything for years.
So you buy your product, test it, nothing is found short of actually opening the device to physically look for microphone.
Then, a year later, firmware update and "Boom", you're spied on unknowingly... unless you regularly test all your devices just for this kind of case.
That might not work as long as the microphone or camera is left inactive.
Like for a few years, until they sold enough of their spy devices and decide it's finally time to turn them on.
Removing the posts would send the message that since most people don't like it, they're not ALLOWED to say it, which would be against Freedom of Speech.
More seriously, this wouldn't be against freedom of speech. It would be if it's legally mandated, but as long as it's voluntary moderation by the platform and/or its users, that's not a free speech issue.
You could frame that as a snowflake issue, of people trying to make themselves a utopian "safe space" that doesn't exist in the real world, but that would not be a free speech issue.
Re: Myth: Ads are the same as user-created content
That might have been the case before ads were automated like most other content.
Newspaper had to make editorial choice on just about anything, including ads. Nowadays, things are not so simple. Website just subscribe to an ad provider who themselves have content submitted by announcers. Neither the website not the provider have full control over the content, although filtering (read "moderation") tools are provided.
All these myths are based on a single misconception: that content can be evaluated objectively and by itself.
However, nearly all content is evaluated subjectively and requires context (including in-service context, poster-profile context, overall social and cultural context...) Denying this fundamental problem leads to being blind to all the aspects you mentioned. Virtually anything depends on context.
Violence is bad in real-life, but is fundamental to lots of entertainment products.
Sincere hate speech is bad, but can be quoted or parodied for criticism.
Criticizing someone is allowed, as long as you avoid libel/slander, but will make the target feel bad. (Particularly when they are thin-skinned, even more so when orange-skinned.) They might lash out, claim victim-status, pretend the critic is lying... or claim copyright violation.
Nothing is easy to judge as the spin given to the reports of the instance can sway public opinion regardless of the merit of the report. Something is often presented as an "obvious" case despite not being objectively obvious at all. This is done by several means, such as slightly misquoting the content, ignoring context or inversely adding false context, etc.
This makes for lots of cases presented as "black-and-white" issues, whereas the immense majority of edgy cases are often ignored because they are harder to spin as "obvious". This issue, which is pretty common in the media landscape, leads to the biased myths above, that - in short - "moderation is easy".
Warren should decide on a stance. Should FB police its ads or not? Either stance has pros and cons, but this should definitely be decided consistently. No exception to oneself, just because "but I'm lying for a good cause". And if you argue for moderation (as I would), you have to tolerate some level of mistake.
Whatever you think of the question above, I think "being a politician" is an easy way out of being fact-checked. At a minimum, I think they should run the ad through their fact-checker, let the ad run, but append a disclaimer that the ad was found dubious. Let the watcher decide after seeing the ad and the fact-check.
Actually, I'm not sure point 2 above would help because too many people decide that someone "obviously" tells the truth because they are on the same "team" or as "obviously" lies because they are on opposite "teams"... Politics has because a team-sport instead of a governance matter.
Why does America seem to hold people in power to a lower standard of honesty and ethics than the common citizen? In this specific case, why is FB excepting politicians of all people to lie as much as they want without anything to balance the lies? They are among the ones whose lies would have the broadest impact on the watcher... That's really an upside-down world here.
First things first: can this be tricked using a photo?
If so, drop the whole project as useless.
Next, or at the same time, you can start looking into the other points others here and in France have already raised.
From some documents I've read and videos I've watched, lots of police department actively train their officers into paranoia. Officers are taught that danger is everywhere and the only chance they have to be home at the end of the day is pull a Han Solo ("always shoot first").
"Guns are everywhere", "war on police" rhetoric and more add to that training by keeping an atmosphere of animosity all over the country.
Finally, blind defense of bad cops is the last straw that makes this whole system a danger to citizens. After being trained to kill on sight, cops are (mostly) isolated from consequences.
Paranoid cops with no incentives to exercise restraint, what could go ever wrong?
Outside the digital world, none of us would accept the proposition that grown-ups should be permitted to mingle in closed rooms with children they don’t know in order to groom them for sexual exploitation.
Yes, you do. It's called a church.
Every day, companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint provide law enforcement with targeted lawful access to the content of phone communications in ways that promote public safety — but only after the government has complied with the rigorous requirements of the law, and a judge has authorized access.
Who is he kidding there? After all the news we got about how the warrant requirements are so low, some judges just rubber-stamp them. Sometimes, it's not even a judge, not even an attorney general, but some random assistant.
Not to mention "secret warrants" and cases of parallel construction...
His "rigorous requirements" have been a joke for years and are getting worse by the day. Or the direct access some communication providers offer to government agencies.
He shouldn't be surprised that people and private companies decide to take the matter of securing privacy into their own hands when the government actively fights security and privacy.
As long as "companies are people" and "money is speech", per SCOTUS decisions, this is not going to get better.
Those are not quite the exact terms of their decisions, but they are a pretty good summary of how lobbying has reached the status of "legal bribery" in the US.
These need to be either reversed or overruled with new laws. Obviously, this is going to be an uphill battle as the ones who can change the law are the ones benefiting from the status quo.
There are several laws applicable in war zones too.
Killing of civilians, treatment of prisoners...
You don't get to kill anyone and say "war, no rules apply".
The transcript is - or should be - actually pointless at this stage.
If everyone was honest and principled, the scandal should not even be about Trump's dealings with Ukraine or whoever else. It's the very resistance to oversight that should be the scandal. The fact that this report, that should have been immediately forwarded to Congress, was blocked by the ODNI. Even if the transcript shows nothing, it's not within the ODNI's authority to decide that.
Breaking the law to cover "nothing" should still be seen as law-breaking in its own right. However, given the partisanship that rules the US at every level, we now need the transcript to show cause, otherwise the president's side will still conclude that there is nothing to it.
Maybe we should also look into the "selective enforcement" that "intellectual property" suffers from.
If you "steal" this property in a way that doesn't actually "remove" anything from the "owner", you get sued with the full force of the law, sometimes to absurd extremes. (e.g. "piracy" in general, background music faintly playing in a video of a dancing baby.)
If you "steal" in a way that actually deprives someone else of something, you get ignored by law enforcement, like you never did anything wrong. (e.g. undue claims of copyright, taking down someone else's content.) All the more so if the "thief" is a large copyright corporation. It's even more jarring when the "victim" is the public at large in the case of claims of copyright on public domain content: the law doesn't provide anyone with standing to sue the "thief", so he gets away with it.
This whole thing is upside-down. Those who actually cause harm get sued way less, if at all, than those who didn't.
Given the derision and blowback, one would hope the Ohio State University would now just go away and stop all of this.
Some people know no shame. I don't know about OSU (or should that be TOSU? :D) but we've had examples of people doubling or tripling down at times.
We had to hold our breath on the USPTO's decision, and we still have to hold our breath on OSU's next move.
Current day shareholders would fare poorly on the Stanford marshmallow experiment.
There is definitely a need to change the rules, although I suspect 1. the lobbying will be intense against this and 2. after some time, people will find a way to abuse the new rules anyway.
Shouldn't keep us from trying though.
Funny how they pretend they want to both "eliminate anti-conservative bias" and "prevent dangerous radicalisation".
If they strengthen the conservative position online (which was they truly mean by "preventing anti-conservative bias"), they will reinforce white supremacy, neo-nazi and other extremist movements (religious zealots, racists, anti-lgbt, etc). This will definitely lead to more mass shootings and other lethal actions as those behaviors are tolerated and sometimes encouraged by the executive branch.
If they want to "prevent mass-shooting from extremists", the first to be censored will be the president, closely followed by a lot of extreme conservative voices on the net. They are continuously pushing for division, violence and hate. They are not the only violent ones out there, but they are definitely the most vocal about it.
I don't know for sure what is their priority, but I kind of have a feeling that the second one is just empty words coming from the current administration. They never intended to take action against the current most dangerous form of extremism in the US, which they prove repeatedly by their actions.
You forgot to mention that, since nobody can actually review the list and submissions, a censored website might not know which country and/or which authority flagged them as "pirate".
On the post: New Bill Would Force Hardware Makers To Disclose Hidden Mics, Cameras
Re: Re: Re: All I'm going to say about this,
The example in the article is different. The microphone was left inactive. Not waiting for a trigger (motion, schedule) but for a full firmware update. The microphone was not recording nor transmitting anything for years.
So you buy your product, test it, nothing is found short of actually opening the device to physically look for microphone.
Then, a year later, firmware update and "Boom", you're spied on unknowingly... unless you regularly test all your devices just for this kind of case.
On the post: New Bill Would Force Hardware Makers To Disclose Hidden Mics, Cameras
Re: All I'm going to say about this,
That might not work as long as the microphone or camera is left inactive.
Like for a few years, until they sold enough of their spy devices and decide it's finally time to turn them on.
On the post: New Bill Would Force Hardware Makers To Disclose Hidden Mics, Cameras
Re: Re: This time you DO mention GOOGLE because can't avoid it.
"We apologize for our stance as Big Tech shills all those years and are closing down this partisan website today."
:D
Then again, he might be able to rant about this too.
On the post: Top Myths About Content Moderation
Re: Re:
More seriously, this wouldn't be against freedom of speech. It would be if it's legally mandated, but as long as it's voluntary moderation by the platform and/or its users, that's not a free speech issue.
You could frame that as a snowflake issue, of people trying to make themselves a utopian "safe space" that doesn't exist in the real world, but that would not be a free speech issue.
On the post: Top Myths About Content Moderation
Re: Re:
... they're showing you the door.
On the post: Top Myths About Content Moderation
Re: Myth: Ads are the same as user-created content
That might have been the case before ads were automated like most other content.
Newspaper had to make editorial choice on just about anything, including ads. Nowadays, things are not so simple. Website just subscribe to an ad provider who themselves have content submitted by announcers. Neither the website not the provider have full control over the content, although filtering (read "moderation") tools are provided.
On the post: Top Myths About Content Moderation
Summary
All these myths are based on a single misconception: that content can be evaluated objectively and by itself.
However, nearly all content is evaluated subjectively and requires context (including in-service context, poster-profile context, overall social and cultural context...) Denying this fundamental problem leads to being blind to all the aspects you mentioned. Virtually anything depends on context.
Nothing is easy to judge as the spin given to the reports of the instance can sway public opinion regardless of the merit of the report. Something is often presented as an "obvious" case despite not being objectively obvious at all. This is done by several means, such as slightly misquoting the content, ignoring context or inversely adding false context, etc.
This makes for lots of cases presented as "black-and-white" issues, whereas the immense majority of edgy cases are often ignored because they are harder to spin as "obvious". This issue, which is pretty common in the media landscape, leads to the biased myths above, that - in short - "moderation is easy".
On the post: Elizabeth Warren's Feud With Facebook Over 'False' Ads Just Highlights The Impossibility Of Content Moderation At Scale
Warren should decide on a stance. Should FB police its ads or not? Either stance has pros and cons, but this should definitely be decided consistently. No exception to oneself, just because "but I'm lying for a good cause". And if you argue for moderation (as I would), you have to tolerate some level of mistake.
Whatever you think of the question above, I think "being a politician" is an easy way out of being fact-checked. At a minimum, I think they should run the ad through their fact-checker, let the ad run, but append a disclaimer that the ad was found dubious. Let the watcher decide after seeing the ad and the fact-check.
Actually, I'm not sure point 2 above would help because too many people decide that someone "obviously" tells the truth because they are on the same "team" or as "obviously" lies because they are on opposite "teams"... Politics has because a team-sport instead of a governance matter.
On the post: New French Mandate Will Use Facial Recognition App To Create 'Secure Digital IDs'
litmus test
First things first: can this be tricked using a photo?
If so, drop the whole project as useless.
Next, or at the same time, you can start looking into the other points others here and in France have already raised.
On the post: Appeals Court Takes Immunity Away From Cop Who Entered A House Without A Warrant And Killed The Family Dog
Re: Re: don't hire wusses
From some documents I've read and videos I've watched, lots of police department actively train their officers into paranoia. Officers are taught that danger is everywhere and the only chance they have to be home at the end of the day is pull a Han Solo ("always shoot first").
"Guns are everywhere", "war on police" rhetoric and more add to that training by keeping an atmosphere of animosity all over the country.
Finally, blind defense of bad cops is the last straw that makes this whole system a danger to citizens. After being trained to kill on sight, cops are (mostly) isolated from consequences.
Paranoid cops with no incentives to exercise restraint, what could go ever wrong?
On the post: Deputy Attorney General Rosen: Companies Like Facebook Are Making Everyone Less Safe By Offering Encryption
Yes, you do. It's called a church.
Who is he kidding there? After all the news we got about how the warrant requirements are so low, some judges just rubber-stamp them. Sometimes, it's not even a judge, not even an attorney general, but some random assistant.
Not to mention "secret warrants" and cases of parallel construction...
His "rigorous requirements" have been a joke for years and are getting worse by the day. Or the direct access some communication providers offer to government agencies.
He shouldn't be surprised that people and private companies decide to take the matter of securing privacy into their own hands when the government actively fights security and privacy.
On the post: Surprise! Buzzfeed Links Bogus Net Neutrality Comments Directly To Broadband Industry
Re: Legal System?
As long as "companies are people" and "money is speech", per SCOTUS decisions, this is not going to get better.
Those are not quite the exact terms of their decisions, but they are a pretty good summary of how lobbying has reached the status of "legal bribery" in the US.
These need to be either reversed or overruled with new laws. Obviously, this is going to be an uphill battle as the ones who can change the law are the ones benefiting from the status quo.
On the post: DC Court: State Secrets Privilege Trumps Any Citizens' Right To Know Whether Or Not Their Own Gov't Is Trying To Kill Them
Re: War zones and pointer dogs
There are several laws applicable in war zones too.
Killing of civilians, treatment of prisoners...
You don't get to kill anyone and say "war, no rules apply".
On the post: Current Whistleblower Scandal Shows (Again) That The Official Channels Are Useless
The transcript is - or should be - actually pointless at this stage.
If everyone was honest and principled, the scandal should not even be about Trump's dealings with Ukraine or whoever else. It's the very resistance to oversight that should be the scandal. The fact that this report, that should have been immediately forwarded to Congress, was blocked by the ODNI. Even if the transcript shows nothing, it's not within the ODNI's authority to decide that.
Breaking the law to cover "nothing" should still be seen as law-breaking in its own right. However, given the partisanship that rules the US at every level, we now need the transcript to show cause, otherwise the president's side will still conclude that there is nothing to it.
On the post: Intellectual Property Is Neither Intellectual, Nor Property: Discuss
Maybe we should also look into the "selective enforcement" that "intellectual property" suffers from.
This whole thing is upside-down. Those who actually cause harm get sued way less, if at all, than those who didn't.
On the post: THE Ohio State University Loses Its Trademark Application For 'THE'
Some people know no shame. I don't know about OSU (or should that be TOSU? :D) but we've had examples of people doubling or tripling down at times.
We had to hold our breath on the USPTO's decision, and we still have to hold our breath on OSU's next move.
On the post: Potentially Big News: Top CEOs Realizing That 'Maximizing Shareholder Value' Isn't A Great Idea
Current day shareholders would fare poorly on the Stanford marshmallow experiment.
There is definitely a need to change the rules, although I suspect 1. the lobbying will be intense against this and 2. after some time, people will find a way to abuse the new rules anyway.
Shouldn't keep us from trying though.
On the post: THE Ohio State University Applies For THE Stupidest Trademark In THE World
Absurdity
For the past few years, it seems like people decided to take the most absurd jokes of all kinds and turn them real.
...
Fortunately, this last one is not approved... yet.
On the post: White House Once Again Circulating A Draft Executive Order On Social Media Bias
Contradiction
Funny how they pretend they want to both "eliminate anti-conservative bias" and "prevent dangerous radicalisation".
I don't know for sure what is their priority, but I kind of have a feeling that the second one is just empty words coming from the current administration. They never intended to take action against the current most dangerous form of extremism in the US, which they prove repeatedly by their actions.
On the post: WIPO Now Gets Into The Extrajudicial, Zero Due Process, Censorship Act Over Sites It Declares 'Infringing'
Re: Re: WIPO's reply
You forgot to mention that, since nobody can actually review the list and submissions, a censored website might not know which country and/or which authority flagged them as "pirate".
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