Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 'Eww, a black person. We don't sell to the likes of YOU.'
If Google has indeed claimed that (any part of) that law should apply to YouTube, I'd be interested in seeing those statements, particularly the specifics involved; do you have a link to a source for their having done so?
Re: Re: Re: "What's this $130K charge on your account?" "Oh that, nothing."
No, I think what's being suggested is:
No such affair occurs.
Woman comes forward falsely claiming that such an affair occurred.
One of three things happens:
Trump denies, in private to his lawyer, that any such affair ever happened. (Truthfully, in this scenario.) Lawyer doesn't believe him.
Lawyer decides that it doesn't matter if the affair happened or not, as the mere accusation would do undesirable damage.
Lawyer assumes that the accusation must be true, and doesn't bother to consult with Trump at all.
Lawyer, on the basis of the previous item, pays $130,000 on his own initiative and out of his own pocket (but with the expectation of being repaid eventually) to make the false accusation go away.
In that scenario, Trump either was never involved at all, or was involved only in (truthfully) denying that any affair occurred. His lawyer didn't trick him into signing over the money; at most, his lawyer expected (possibly with zero basis other than assumptions) that he would later hand over the money, and was unpleasantly surprised when that didn't happen.
If you can believe that the lawyer could be throwing himself under the bus for Trump's sake, more readily than you can believe the accuser's claims, it could even be plausible...
In this case, the "foreign" country with which the newspaper was affiliated is one of the USA's longest-standing and closest allies. (And is a partner in the allegedly-abusive practices which were being disclosed, so a newspaper in that country has just about as much legitimate reason to be interested as one in the USA would.)
As you yourself acknowledge, he also gave the information to multiple US newspapers - including the one best-known for publishing classified information against the government's will. And even then, there are still documents which haven't been published - and probably never will be - because these organizations have enough journalistic integrity to not publish information just because it would be sensational, at least not when that would clearly do more harm than good.
Can you suggest how he should have gone about blowing the whistle on abuses by the US government, when the people complicit in those abuses include the members of the oversight chain all the way up to the top?
Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing means reporting it to the lowest level which you can be sure isn't complicit in the wrongdoing. In the case of the Snowden leaks, all the oversight bodies - up through Congress itself - appeared to be complicit in covering up the wrongdoing; that meant that the only level he could be sure wasn't complicit was the public itself.
Can you suggest any way of reporting the wrongdoing to the American public (as the ultimate supervisory authority in this country) which would not also expose it to the public in other countries? Preferably one which would minimize the risk of actually dangerous/sensitive information (such as the identities of agents, or the how-to details of cracking methods) being exposed?
From what I can see, Snowden appears to have chosen the least bad of the options available for achieving the intended goal.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 'Eww, a black person. We don't sell to the likes of YOU.'
I read that passage as indicating "the law is not based only on what is logical, but also - if anything, even more - on what people feel".
Wouldn't that serve as an argument that the law should bind these platforms in these ways? Clearly, many people feel that it should; the only people arguing that it should not, that I currently remember seeing, seem to be doing so based on A: the logic of what the underlying and existing law says, and B: reasoning out what consequences would follow from its doing so.
(When I do a bulleted-list comment like that, it's generally an attempt to fit a poorly-made - and possibly emotional - argument into the channels of logic, so that it can be more understandable to those who don't share that particular emotional viewpoint or a particular unstated underlying assumption, and can thereby be potentially addressed instead of having people talk past each other. It isn't, usually, a claim that everything is based on logical thinking.)
One objectively supportable rationale for having such officials be appointed rather than elected is that it insulates them from the toxicity which results from having to campaign for office.
We've seen what the political-campaigning environment leads to in other areas, from legislators on out; it's easy enough to see why there would be value in being able to tell certain people "you don't need to worry about re-election, just do your job".
Similarly, needing a vote of the city council - rather than serving at the will of some particular elected official, e.g. the mayor, as various federal officials are at the will of the President - means not needing to worry about being fired the instant someone new gets elected to that office, because you need consensus among a broader group of officials.
The downside is that it does mean less accountability, with consequences such as those which we see here.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 'Eww, a black person. We don't sell to the likes of YOU.'
I think the logic is something like:
* A common carrier is an entity which provides the service of carrying messages to and from members of the public at large. (As distinct from, e.g., "only nobility" or "only businesses" or "only people who are members of such-and-such a trade group" or the like.)
* YouTube provides the service of carrying messages - of a certain form, i.e., video recordings - between members of the general public, without restricting its clientele to members of a specific class. (By providing the upload interface, the storage platform, and the interfaces by which the public can find and access the stored videos.)
* Because YouTube does what a common carrier does, YouTube qualifies as a common carrier, and must be subject to the requirements which apply to common carriers.
Or to put things a bit differently: the Internet has reached a stage where those operating on the Internet can now provide communication services over the Internet, and those communication services should be considered capable of qualifying (and being regulated) as common carriers, just as the communication services in the lower layers which provide access to the Internet (phone company, et cetera) can.
I'm not entirely sure I'd *agree* with this reasoning, but it does have a certain logic to it.
So her side is ahead of you on that one, and is apparently entirely willing to revoke the agreement entirely, including the side of it which benefits them.
I think the logic is that, since the Constitution says nothing about the right which Congress can choose to bestow being transferable, to conclude that the right is transferable is to grant Congress a power (that of bestowing a transferable right) which is not stated in the Constitution.
And/or that A: the Constitution does not grant Congress the power to bestow the exclusive right on anyone but the author/inventor, B: the right only exists insofar as Congress bestows it, C: the act of transferring the right to someone else is equivalent to the act of transferring the bestowal to that someone else, and therefore D: since Congress does not have the power to bestow the right on anyone but the author/inventor, Congress cannot bestow the right on the recipient, and therefore the right evaporates as soon as the transfer occurs.
Neither logic has been accepted by the courts - ever at all, AFAIK - but they do seem at least internally consistent, and consistent with the wording of the Constitution.
I think that's what he's objecting to: the idea that something the Constituation says may be secured to authors and inventors, can be then sold by those authors and inventors, without the "secured" part disappearing in the process.
I.e., "you're neither the author nor the inventor of this thing, so no authority of the federal government can secure to you the exclusive right to it, regardless of what the author or inventor agrees to".
To the extent that the courts have considered this idea, they have apparently concluded that value of protecting the private right of contract by permitting the sale of such an exclusive right outweighs the value of what would be protected by forbidding such sales - but there's room to disagree with that conclusion, and I suspect that the commenter in question does so.
You do know that the two people above were referring to the person whom the "Chip" persona is parodying, not to the person who posts under that name, right?
(Or I'm reasonably sure they both were, and all but absolutely positive that at least one of them was.)
Technically I think they're both saying "you can't do that in a place which we control"; it's just that Twitter only controls its own platform, whereas the scope of what the government controls is much broader.
Does the difference you see still hold up when the issue is viewed through that lens?
Re: Re: Every day Techdirt shows me things about Liberals of the
That's the thing: in this case, the taxpayers pay for the damage either way.
The only question is whether the burden is to be spread out among the entire population whose taxes fund the agency in question, or borne entirely by the single taxpayer whose property the DEA chose to commandeer for the purpose.
If the people with whom the person wants to interact are not on any of the competitors, but are on Facebook, then abandoning Facebook in favor of one of those competitors is not practical.
I would not be at all surprised if that description fits the situation that "most Facebook users" are in.
The more meaningful difference, IMO, is that it is much more practical to "go without" what Facebook and its competitors provide (convenient interaction with the people who do use that site) than with what Comcast and its competitors if any provide (usefully-fast connection to the Internet).
That would usually be the better course, yes - but in far too many cases, if the owner of the device had enough technical savvy to do that "figure out what each file is and get it back to being open-able again" work, there wouldn't be any need for a repair tech to get involved in the first place.
I certainly don't do it every time (even in the relatively rare cases where I wind up doing such file-restoration work in the first place), but there are times when it's the most appropriate way of serving the customer's needs.
A bit of a tangent, but this reminds me of something I've wondered about recent-ish-ly.
Say you have three pieces of data: 1, 2, and 3. You group them in all seven possible combinations (1, 2, 3, 12, 13, 23, and 123), generate seven distinct but equally-complex keys, and encrypt each grouping with a different one of those keys.
Would it be easier for someone who has all seven encrypted files on hand to break the encryption on at least one such file than for someone who has fewer (e.g., just one) of them?
(The idea here is that you can choose which decryption key to hand over to a given person depending on which parts of the complete data set you want to permit that person to access.)
I think what he's asking for is that the definition of "the intended parties" be expanded to include "anyone the government says is lawfully authorized to access the contents".
Redefining that part of the problem out of existence, in other words.
Which does exactly zip to address the practical problems which such a redefinition would entail, but he doesn't appear to care about those.
Another would be a "unindexed" files recovered from a deleted or partly-corrupt filesystem - which might, in fact, appear to be in unallocated space. Most tools for recovering such files (in fact, all the ones that I know of) don't recover the original filenames, but give the files seemingly-arbitrary meaningless names; in an environment which relies on file extensions in order to know how to open a given file, such as Windows, your ordinary user won't even be able to open the file to check.
In order to figure out what these are, you have to either use a tool like the *nix libmagic (usually via the 'file' program), or open each file individually in various programs to see whether the program can recognize it. Even if libmagic reports that a particular file is e.g. a JPEG image, you may need to examine the file's contents to figure out whether it's stock desktop wallpaper or something from the browser cache or part of the user's collection of landscape photos or what-have-you.
It's entirely reasonable to wind up opening at least a few of the files to check on what they are - and if you happen to see something alarming in the process, well...
(That said, just because it's possible to encounter such things during the legitimate course of a repair tech's business, that doesn't mean that going out of your way to look for such things is any less inappropriate.)
Re: "If you're not shooting first, you might not get to shoot at all."
Not to mention - what would he think of applying that standard to those who are not police officers?
Police officers frequently pose a threat to those whom they're attempting to arrest, or sometimes even to question. If those people adhered to the principle that "if your first response to a possible threat isn't a lethal one, you're endangering your life", we'd probably wind up with a lot more dead police officers.
It's just as bad and as wrong when police officers do it as when anyone else does it. (If not more so.)
On the post: YouTube Shows Dennis Prager's Claim Of Discrimination Against Conservatives Is Laughable
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 'Eww, a black person. We don't sell to the likes of YOU.'
On the post: How Trump's Lawyer's Silly Lawsuit Against Buzzfeed May Free Stormy Daniels From Her Non Disclosure Agreement
Re: Re: Re: "What's this $130K charge on your account?" "Oh that, nothing."
No, I think what's being suggested is:
No such affair occurs.
Woman comes forward falsely claiming that such an affair occurred.
In that scenario, Trump either was never involved at all, or was involved only in (truthfully) denying that any affair occurred. His lawyer didn't trick him into signing over the money; at most, his lawyer expected (possibly with zero basis other than assumptions) that he would later hand over the money, and was unpleasantly surprised when that didn't happen.
If you can believe that the lawyer could be throwing himself under the bus for Trump's sake, more readily than you can believe the accuser's claims, it could even be plausible...
On the post: As Trump Nominates Torture Boss To Head CIA, Congresswoman Suggests It's Sympathizing With Terrorists To Question Her Appointment
Re: Updated
On the post: As Trump Nominates Torture Boss To Head CIA, Congresswoman Suggests It's Sympathizing With Terrorists To Question Her Appointment
Re: Re: Re:
Foreign != enemy.
In this case, the "foreign" country with which the newspaper was affiliated is one of the USA's longest-standing and closest allies. (And is a partner in the allegedly-abusive practices which were being disclosed, so a newspaper in that country has just about as much legitimate reason to be interested as one in the USA would.)
As you yourself acknowledge, he also gave the information to multiple US newspapers - including the one best-known for publishing classified information against the government's will. And even then, there are still documents which haven't been published - and probably never will be - because these organizations have enough journalistic integrity to not publish information just because it would be sensational, at least not when that would clearly do more harm than good.
Can you suggest how he should have gone about blowing the whistle on abuses by the US government, when the people complicit in those abuses include the members of the oversight chain all the way up to the top?
Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing means reporting it to the lowest level which you can be sure isn't complicit in the wrongdoing. In the case of the Snowden leaks, all the oversight bodies - up through Congress itself - appeared to be complicit in covering up the wrongdoing; that meant that the only level he could be sure wasn't complicit was the public itself.
Can you suggest any way of reporting the wrongdoing to the American public (as the ultimate supervisory authority in this country) which would not also expose it to the public in other countries? Preferably one which would minimize the risk of actually dangerous/sensitive information (such as the identities of agents, or the how-to details of cracking methods) being exposed?
From what I can see, Snowden appears to have chosen the least bad of the options available for achieving the intended goal.
On the post: YouTube Shows Dennis Prager's Claim Of Discrimination Against Conservatives Is Laughable
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 'Eww, a black person. We don't sell to the likes of YOU.'
I read that passage as indicating "the law is not based only on what is logical, but also - if anything, even more - on what people feel".
Wouldn't that serve as an argument that the law should bind these platforms in these ways? Clearly, many people feel that it should; the only people arguing that it should not, that I currently remember seeing, seem to be doing so based on A: the logic of what the underlying and existing law says, and B: reasoning out what consequences would follow from its doing so.
(When I do a bulleted-list comment like that, it's generally an attempt to fit a poorly-made - and possibly emotional - argument into the channels of logic, so that it can be more understandable to those who don't share that particular emotional viewpoint or a particular unstated underlying assumption, and can thereby be potentially addressed instead of having people talk past each other. It isn't, usually, a claim that everything is based on logical thinking.)
On the post: Police Department With Eight Full-Time Officers Acquired 31 Military Vehicles Thru DoD's Surplus Program
Re: Re: "Well if you don't need the money..."
We've seen what the political-campaigning environment leads to in other areas, from legislators on out; it's easy enough to see why there would be value in being able to tell certain people "you don't need to worry about re-election, just do your job".
Similarly, needing a vote of the city council - rather than serving at the will of some particular elected official, e.g. the mayor, as various federal officials are at the will of the President - means not needing to worry about being fired the instant someone new gets elected to that office, because you need consensus among a broader group of officials.
The downside is that it does mean less accountability, with consequences such as those which we see here.
On the post: Just As Everyone's Starting To Worry About 'Deepfake' Porn Videos, SESTA Will Make The Problem Worse
Re:
I agree that it would have been better if phrased differently, though.
On the post: YouTube Shows Dennis Prager's Claim Of Discrimination Against Conservatives Is Laughable
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 'Eww, a black person. We don't sell to the likes of YOU.'
* A common carrier is an entity which provides the service of carrying messages to and from members of the public at large. (As distinct from, e.g., "only nobility" or "only businesses" or "only people who are members of such-and-such a trade group" or the like.)
* YouTube provides the service of carrying messages - of a certain form, i.e., video recordings - between members of the general public, without restricting its clientele to members of a specific class. (By providing the upload interface, the storage platform, and the interfaces by which the public can find and access the stored videos.)
* Because YouTube does what a common carrier does, YouTube qualifies as a common carrier, and must be subject to the requirements which apply to common carriers.
Or to put things a bit differently: the Internet has reached a stage where those operating on the Internet can now provide communication services over the Internet, and those communication services should be considered capable of qualifying (and being regulated) as common carriers, just as the communication services in the lower layers which provide access to the Internet (phone company, et cetera) can.
I'm not entirely sure I'd *agree* with this reasoning, but it does have a certain logic to it.
On the post: Trump's Lawyers Apparently Unfamiliar With Streisand Effect Or 1st Amendment's Limits On Prior Restraint
Re:
Actually, apparently her lawyer is offering to return the money in exchange for terminating the deal.
So her side is ahead of you on that one, and is apparently entirely willing to revoke the agreement entirely, including the side of it which benefits them.
On the post: Killing The Golden Goose (Again); How The Copyright Stranglehold Dooms Spotify
Re: Re: Re: Preempting whiners some more
And/or that A: the Constitution does not grant Congress the power to bestow the exclusive right on anyone but the author/inventor, B: the right only exists insofar as Congress bestows it, C: the act of transferring the right to someone else is equivalent to the act of transferring the bestowal to that someone else, and therefore D: since Congress does not have the power to bestow the right on anyone but the author/inventor, Congress cannot bestow the right on the recipient, and therefore the right evaporates as soon as the transfer occurs.
Neither logic has been accepted by the courts - ever at all, AFAIK - but they do seem at least internally consistent, and consistent with the wording of the Constitution.
On the post: Killing The Golden Goose (Again); How The Copyright Stranglehold Dooms Spotify
Re: Re: Re: Preempting whiners some more
I.e., "you're neither the author nor the inventor of this thing, so no authority of the federal government can secure to you the exclusive right to it, regardless of what the author or inventor agrees to".
To the extent that the courts have considered this idea, they have apparently concluded that value of protecting the private right of contract by permitting the sale of such an exclusive right outweighs the value of what would be protected by forbidding such sales - but there's room to disagree with that conclusion, and I suspect that the commenter in question does so.
On the post: Telecom Lobbyists Whine About State Net Neutrality Efforts They Helped Create
Re: Re: Re:
(Or I'm reasonably sure they both were, and all but absolutely positive that at least one of them was.)
On the post: Famous Racist Sues Twitter Claiming It Violates His Civil Rights As A Racist To Be Kicked Off The Platform
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Technically I think they're both saying "you can't do that in a place which we control"; it's just that Twitter only controls its own platform, whereas the scope of what the government controls is much broader.
Does the difference you see still hold up when the issue is viewed through that lens?
On the post: Court Moves Business Owner One Step Closer To Getting Paid Back For Vehicle DEA Destroyed In A Failed Drug Sting
Re: Re: Every day Techdirt shows me things about Liberals of the
The only question is whether the burden is to be spread out among the entire population whose taxes fund the agency in question, or borne entirely by the single taxpayer whose property the DEA chose to commandeer for the purpose.
On the post: Cable's Top Lobbyist Again Calls For Hyper Regulation Of Silicon Valley
Re: Re:
I would not be at all surprised if that description fits the situation that "most Facebook users" are in.
The more meaningful difference, IMO, is that it is much more practical to "go without" what Facebook and its competitors provide (convenient interaction with the people who do use that site) than with what Comcast and its competitors if any provide (usefully-fast connection to the Internet).
On the post: FBI Documents Show More Evidence Of Agency's Sketchy Relationship With Best Buy's Geek Squad
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I certainly don't do it every time (even in the relatively rare cases where I wind up doing such file-restoration work in the first place), but there are times when it's the most appropriate way of serving the customer's needs.
On the post: FBI Director Says It's 'Not Impossible' To Create Compromised Encryption That's Still Secure
Re: Re: Multiple keys to same data
Say you have three pieces of data: 1, 2, and 3. You group them in all seven possible combinations (1, 2, 3, 12, 13, 23, and 123), generate seven distinct but equally-complex keys, and encrypt each grouping with a different one of those keys.
Would it be easier for someone who has all seven encrypted files on hand to break the encryption on at least one such file than for someone who has fewer (e.g., just one) of them?
(The idea here is that you can choose which decryption key to hand over to a given person depending on which parts of the complete data set you want to permit that person to access.)
On the post: FBI Director Says It's 'Not Impossible' To Create Compromised Encryption That's Still Secure
Re:
Redefining that part of the problem out of existence, in other words.
Which does exactly zip to address the practical problems which such a redefinition would entail, but he doesn't appear to care about those.
On the post: FBI Documents Show More Evidence Of Agency's Sketchy Relationship With Best Buy's Geek Squad
Re: Re: Re:
Another would be a "unindexed" files recovered from a deleted or partly-corrupt filesystem - which might, in fact, appear to be in unallocated space. Most tools for recovering such files (in fact, all the ones that I know of) don't recover the original filenames, but give the files seemingly-arbitrary meaningless names; in an environment which relies on file extensions in order to know how to open a given file, such as Windows, your ordinary user won't even be able to open the file to check.
In order to figure out what these are, you have to either use a tool like the *nix libmagic (usually via the 'file' program), or open each file individually in various programs to see whether the program can recognize it. Even if libmagic reports that a particular file is e.g. a JPEG image, you may need to examine the file's contents to figure out whether it's stock desktop wallpaper or something from the browser cache or part of the user's collection of landscape photos or what-have-you.
It's entirely reasonable to wind up opening at least a few of the files to check on what they are - and if you happen to see something alarming in the process, well...
(That said, just because it's possible to encounter such things during the legitimate course of a repair tech's business, that doesn't mean that going out of your way to look for such things is any less inappropriate.)
On the post: Police Union Boss Attacks New DA For Daring To Speak To Police Recruits About Deadly Force
Re: "If you're not shooting first, you might not get to shoot at all."
Police officers frequently pose a threat to those whom they're attempting to arrest, or sometimes even to question. If those people adhered to the principle that "if your first response to a possible threat isn't a lethal one, you're endangering your life", we'd probably wind up with a lot more dead police officers.
It's just as bad and as wrong when police officers do it as when anyone else does it. (If not more so.)
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