...Clearly you didn't even bother checking out the link I gave. I gave an article that is chock full of dissenting opinions, and out of 369 comments, the only two that were hidden were done so because of foul language. This makes your assertion false.
"I tried to read this thread on my high-end desktop using a high-speed cable connection, and it too eventually slowed to a crawl, stopped responding, and IE explorer eventually quit working and took me back to Windows' desktop."
Really? Then how come I NEVER have had a problem with this site, and I too am using a high end computer? I can tell one thing you're doing wrong already and that's the fact you say you say you use Internet Explorer.
369 comments. Quite a discussion going on. Going back through it, I see all of 2 comments being hidden, and that was because they were short and had coarse language in them. The debate got quite heated with TD staff weighing in from time to time. If TD were anti free speech, then the prediction is obvious - they should say their piece and then block the comments of all those who disagree with them. Let's check that article? Oh wait, that doesn't happen. There were plenty of people with plenty of comments disagreeing with TD staff and yet their comments WERE NOT BLOCKED.
"On or about August 31,2006, VAN DER KOLK sent an e-mail to an associate entitled "lol". Attached to the message was a screenshot of a Megaupload.com file download page for the file "Alcohol 120 1.9.5 3105complete.rar" with a description of "Alcohol 120, con crack!!!! By ChaOtiX!". The copyrighted software "Alcohol 120" is a CD/DVD burning software program sold by www.alcohol-soft.com."
Mere file-names are not enough in and of themselves to constitute guilt. What if one of the files was named "Hot_Incest_Illegal_Child_Pron.avi"? All that paragraph mentions is a file name and a description by the uploader. It mentions nothing about evidence showing it to be what it is purported to be. The same goes for all the other files talked about in the pdf. I'm seeing file names only and no evidence that they are what they are actually named.
Your comment might have made the slightest bit of sense if you had read the article and come to the comprehension that this article is talking about disabling the use of encryption via EMAIL. So in your insane world, if loads of people use torrent programs to get at unauthorized content, then their ISP should just disable encryption for those same users on their email? Last I checked, people aren't using email to distribute content. Not only that, but this is done without any sort of due process. You are in essence casting a wide net, saying that because a subset of the population infringes copyright, then it's perfectly all right for an ISP to punish all of the population by disabling encryption. And no, VPNs aren't mostly used to infringe copyright. I myself used a VPN - mostly so I could access Crunchyroll's USA catalog. Businesses and industries use VPNs all the time - ATMs use VPNs for one example.
Including the rule that states criminal defendants have the right to a speedy trial? We're about to hit THREE YEARS since the initial raid that began all of this and so far, no trial.
IIRC, that was how the Pirate Bay trial ended, with the four defendants convicted of aiding in copyright infringement. I was always pissed off that not once was there anyone even charged with the actual infringement - it's sorta like saying Person X is guilty of aiding a bank robbery by driving the getaway car, but not charging anyone with doing the actual robbery itself. So unless I'm wrong (correct me if I am) the TPB guys were charged and convicted of aiding a crime that was never legally established to have occurred.
"while being skeptical of everything the government argues"
We're SUPPOSED to be skeptical of anything the government says in a criminal case. That's why there's a thing called due process. The government is a very powerful entity, far more powerful than your average citizen. However, to try and limit this power, (such as when the government wants to charge someone with a crime and lock them up), the government has to go through a trial and present evidence in favour of its argument. Like with the default position of atheists, the null hypothesis. Atheists lack a belief in a god and must be convinced via argument and/or evidence. Same principle applies here: Dotcom is considered innocent until proven guilty. I lack a belief that Dotcom is guilty, precisely because so far, there has been little to no evidence that he is.
...I'm pretty sure Techdirt has reported on stories where the executive branch has circumvented the intent of court orders before, and immunity was not lost. They should have lost it, but they didn't.
"Are not currently on the No Fly List as of the date of this letter"
Knowing the games the DOJ loves to play, this doesn't rule out the DOJ taking them off of the list only for that one specific date, and then putting them back on the day after.
Just because the pages are now redacted doesn't excuse Rightscorp's actions here, in having willingly left the information viewable to anyone. Imagine if I used their logic. Whoops, I left the bank vault door open and someone got in and walked away with millions of euros in cash. Well, let's follow Rightscorp's example and just close the door and call it a settled matter.
This is false, that they took no real action to stop it. All of them had a DMCA policy, at the very least, responding to takedown requests, even Megaupload which was never based in the US and thus never subject to US law.
Just an honest question - are you a presuppositionalist christian in the vein of Sye Ten Bruggencate? The reason I ask this is that I've been watching videos on that subject and on that person, and one thing that is always noted by his opponents is his constant repeating of himself, word for word, no matter how many times he is refuted. Just like what you did right now, in demanding, yet again, a reasonable debate (further question, why did you put them in scare quotes?)
So basically, SWAT has just put paid assassins out of business with this latest move. Before, if you wanted to bump someone off, you had to pay a third party thousands, tens or probably millions. Now, you just need a confessed drug addict burglar, while high on his drug of choice, to say he got the drugs from the person he burgled. That's all the justification SWAT needs to go in guns blazing, to kill someone.
Excuse me a mo. I'm going put in a call to SWAT that a certain man of African American origin living in a certain famous house on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC keeps meth in his desk. How do I know he keeps meth in his desk officer? Why, this meth that I'm currently high on and desperately trying to explain the origins of in such a way that I hope will draw attention away from myself was found by me in that desk while I was busy robbing it! Psst. Make sure you bring lots of guns!
"Either you say Google changed the way things work, and you have to face every your mistake that is mentioned in the web, even if inaccurate, inadequate or irrelevant."
Correct. Would it be great if that embarrassing thing I did ten years ago just wasn't mentioned anymore? Great for me, not so great for others. In order for this to work, their speech rights have to be curtailed. Analogy time - Google is the librarian in the library. Information about that embarrassing moment in your life when it made the news is detailed in a few books scattered throughout the library. However, thanks to this law, the librarian, when asked "Which books do you know of talk about Person X Controversial Topic Y, and where are they located?", is forbidden to answer that question. There, their right to tell me what it is they know, has been curtailed. Instead of doing their job and searching for and indexing information that people search for, the librarian now has to spend time and resources processing these RTBF requests and trying to figure out whether or not to grant them. We've already seen similar things happen with the DMCA, where Google now is being told "Link XYZ contains copyrighted material that I have the copyrights for, don't index it" and Google has to spend insane resources to try and figure out whether to grant the demand. Most other companies would panic and just grant these requests, along with RTBF, in order to shield themselves from legal liability. The downside is that speech is being deleted. For you to say that speech actually isn't being deleted is actually worse. Oh it's fine you say that no-one's taking books and deleting the actual information on the page, but what Google has proven since its inception, is that information is useless and might as well not exist if no-one can find it. Not being allowed to return the correct results when doing a search (whether on a search engine or asking the librarian in a library) is just as bad, if not worse, than outright destroying the information itself.
...this doesn't answer my question. Mike runs a website, both him and his site you clearly loathe (yet can't stay away from). Why would you give money to a person whom you are dead set against? Just because he said he needed it? So do I. I need money too. How come you're not giving me money? Is your angle more along the lines of "I'm here to be the lone voice of opposition and critique, to constantly taunt Mike (whom I secretly admire) to try and keep up and raise the quality of his work, so that he doesn't just listen to adoring fans and hence, slide into mediocrity"? If so, that's sorta what I do whenever I'm debating theists - I tell them that I'm there to refute their arguments for whatever religion it is they're espousing and that I want them to up their game, to actually do or say something that will convince me. If so, then you're not the lone voice of opposition and critique. I've criticised Mike plenty of times in the past and so have others here.
Just to preface - I'm off to work after this, so I'm asking the other Techdirtians to carry on after me please?
"Actually we do. In Europe. Not even a matter of discussion ;)" Yes, I'm in Europe too, and this means I'm affected. Notice also that you just keep going on about something that is embarrassing - what about controversial or illegal? If we go by something that is just embarrassing and controversial but not illegal, let's take one example I can think of off the top of my head. Prince Harry, from the British royal family, years ago went to a party dressed in a Nazi uniform and this got plastered all over the newspapers. Stupid yes, embarrassing yes, but does he have the right to tell Google not to link to articles and photos if I search for "Prince Harry Nazi"? What if years in the future, a historian wants to write a biography on Harry, but thanks to this stupid law, any time he uses a search engine in Europe on these keywords, he can't get the relevant information?
Now let's think about illegal activities. What if a politician in an election campaign wants to try and bury some information they think harms their chances at being elected? To me, this is censorship, in that if I were in their constituency, I wouldn't have access to all of the relevant data and thus being unable to make a truly informed decision. Google may not be able to spot why exactly this information is being requested to be taken down.
Yes I looked at the FAQ, and I say Google shouldn't have to make an evaluation like this. They don't have and cannot have all of the data they would need in order to do it.
"I'm not sure the event X will not appear if you search PERSON NAME + EVENT X, but they will sure not appear if you search for the Person Name alone."
"I'm not sure the event X will not appear if you search PERSON NAME + EVENT X, but they will sure not appear if you search for the Person Name alone."
It will if the people using the Google search service consistently click on the embarrassing results whenever they search for the name alone. Google's algorithms will notice this, and then prioritize those results to be closer and closer to the top of the page. In other words, it is the users who, independent of each other, cause this to happen.
"Every single time your name comes associated with an old and outdated event that doesn't have any public interest on it (anymore). And you can't do anything about it? Does that sounds right?"
So freakin' what? Dem's the breaks as I say. It's life. Deal with it. People are naturally drawn to famous people, and naturally drawn more and more often to the mistakes, lies, embarrassing moments and illegal activities of famous people. You can't stop that. If you do something that makes you famous, that means being in the public eye. You can't stop it, because stopping it means infringing on the rights of everybody else. You can certainly ask the search engine politely to drop the results, but to have them be obligated by law to do so?
Not only that, but the law is stupid, since it only applies to search engines within the EU. I can fire up a proxy or VPN, search on Google.ca or Google.com and get the results that Google.ie or Google.co.uk are forbidden to show. Therefore, the law is toothless, since it's trivially easy to get around. Not only that, but how far does the law extend, and where will it stop? What if I run a website that solely has links to news articles about embarrassing stories about celebrities? What if I'm told I should shut that down because those people are feeling embarrassed?
"But we have the right that Google doesn't associate us permanently with that bad event"
No we don't and we never should, since telling other entities not to associate us with bad events is restricting their free speech rights. Since I'm very interested in protecting my own speech rights, I'm forced to protect Google's and any other search engines' on this topic. You've acknowledged that newspaper archives aren't being deleted, so...what's the harm with letting Google return relevant and correct results if I search for Person X Controversial Topic Y? At best here, all you're doing is forcing someone to do a bit more legwork to get at the actual records, work that is and would be unnecessary if you'd let Google do it's damned job.
On the post: Megaupload Say US Gov't Is Trying To Steal Assets Based On Crimes That Are 'Figments Of The Gov't's Boundless Imagination'
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On the post: Megaupload Say US Gov't Is Trying To Steal Assets Based On Crimes That Are 'Figments Of The Gov't's Boundless Imagination'
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On the post: Megaupload Say US Gov't Is Trying To Steal Assets Based On Crimes That Are 'Figments Of The Gov't's Boundless Imagination'
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Really? Then how come I NEVER have had a problem with this site, and I too am using a high end computer? I can tell one thing you're doing wrong already and that's the fact you say you say you use Internet Explorer.
On the post: Megaupload Say US Gov't Is Trying To Steal Assets Based On Crimes That Are 'Figments Of The Gov't's Boundless Imagination'
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First, your account is still here, and not blocked. You are not prevented from making new comments. You have acknowledged in the past that it's the USERS of the site who are clicking the report button and not Techdirt staff.
Secondly, here's a TD article I remember very well.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130828/05042724332/man-who-raped-14-year-old-sentenced-to-30-day s-jail-because-girl-looked-kinda-old-internet-is-mean.shtml
369 comments. Quite a discussion going on. Going back through it, I see all of 2 comments being hidden, and that was because they were short and had coarse language in them. The debate got quite heated with TD staff weighing in from time to time.
If TD were anti free speech, then the prediction is obvious - they should say their piece and then block the comments of all those who disagree with them. Let's check that article?
Oh wait, that doesn't happen. There were plenty of people with plenty of comments disagreeing with TD staff and yet their comments WERE NOT BLOCKED.
On the post: Megaupload Say US Gov't Is Trying To Steal Assets Based On Crimes That Are 'Figments Of The Gov't's Boundless Imagination'
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associate entitled "lol". Attached to the message was a screenshot of a Megaupload.com file
download page for the file "Alcohol 120 1.9.5 3105complete.rar" with a description of "Alcohol
120, con crack!!!! By ChaOtiX!". The copyrighted software "Alcohol 120" is a CD/DVD
burning software program sold by www.alcohol-soft.com."
Mere file-names are not enough in and of themselves to constitute guilt. What if one of the files was named "Hot_Incest_Illegal_Child_Pron.avi"?
All that paragraph mentions is a file name and a description by the uploader. It mentions nothing about evidence showing it to be what it is purported to be.
The same goes for all the other files talked about in the pdf. I'm seeing file names only and no evidence that they are what they are actually named.
On the post: Revealed: ISPs Already Violating Net Neutrality To Block Encryption And Make Everyone Less Safe Online
Re: Throttling
...you were saying?
On the post: Revealed: ISPs Already Violating Net Neutrality To Block Encryption And Make Everyone Less Safe Online
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So in your insane world, if loads of people use torrent programs to get at unauthorized content, then their ISP should just disable encryption for those same users on their email? Last I checked, people aren't using email to distribute content.
Not only that, but this is done without any sort of due process. You are in essence casting a wide net, saying that because a subset of the population infringes copyright, then it's perfectly all right for an ISP to punish all of the population by disabling encryption.
And no, VPNs aren't mostly used to infringe copyright. I myself used a VPN - mostly so I could access Crunchyroll's USA catalog. Businesses and industries use VPNs all the time - ATMs use VPNs for one example.
On the post: Megaupload Say US Gov't Is Trying To Steal Assets Based On Crimes That Are 'Figments Of The Gov't's Boundless Imagination'
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On the post: Megaupload Say US Gov't Is Trying To Steal Assets Based On Crimes That Are 'Figments Of The Gov't's Boundless Imagination'
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On the post: Megaupload Say US Gov't Is Trying To Steal Assets Based On Crimes That Are 'Figments Of The Gov't's Boundless Imagination'
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We're SUPPOSED to be skeptical of anything the government says in a criminal case. That's why there's a thing called due process. The government is a very powerful entity, far more powerful than your average citizen. However, to try and limit this power, (such as when the government wants to charge someone with a crime and lock them up), the government has to go through a trial and present evidence in favour of its argument.
Like with the default position of atheists, the null hypothesis. Atheists lack a belief in a god and must be convinced via argument and/or evidence. Same principle applies here: Dotcom is considered innocent until proven guilty. I lack a belief that Dotcom is guilty, precisely because so far, there has been little to no evidence that he is.
On the post: DOJ Finally Tells Short List Of People That They Are Officially Not On The No Fly List
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On the post: DOJ Finally Tells Short List Of People That They Are Officially Not On The No Fly List
Knowing the games the DOJ loves to play, this doesn't rule out the DOJ taking them off of the list only for that one specific date, and then putting them back on the day after.
On the post: Rightscorp's 'Secure' Payment System Exposes Names And Addresses Of Alleged Infringers
Imagine if I used their logic. Whoops, I left the bank vault door open and someone got in and walked away with millions of euros in cash. Well, let's follow Rightscorp's example and just close the door and call it a settled matter.
On the post: If You're Going To Spread FUD About Evil Cyberlockers, Maybe Don't Use Two Debunked Studies As The Basis?
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On the post: If You're Going To Spread FUD About Evil Cyberlockers, Maybe Don't Use Two Debunked Studies As The Basis?
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Just like what you did right now, in demanding, yet again, a reasonable debate (further question, why did you put them in scare quotes?)
On the post: SWAT Team Raids House And Kills Homeowner Because Criminal Who Burglarized The House Told Them To
Now, you just need a confessed drug addict burglar, while high on his drug of choice, to say he got the drugs from the person he burgled. That's all the justification SWAT needs to go in guns blazing, to kill someone.
Excuse me a mo. I'm going put in a call to SWAT that a certain man of African American origin living in a certain famous house on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC keeps meth in his desk. How do I know he keeps meth in his desk officer? Why, this meth that I'm currently high on and desperately trying to explain the origins of in such a way that I hope will draw attention away from myself was found by me in that desk while I was busy robbing it!
Psst. Make sure you bring lots of guns!
On the post: Right To Be Forgotten Hits The NY Times
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Correct. Would it be great if that embarrassing thing I did ten years ago just wasn't mentioned anymore? Great for me, not so great for others. In order for this to work, their speech rights have to be curtailed.
Analogy time - Google is the librarian in the library. Information about that embarrassing moment in your life when it made the news is detailed in a few books scattered throughout the library. However, thanks to this law, the librarian, when asked "Which books do you know of talk about Person X Controversial Topic Y, and where are they located?", is forbidden to answer that question. There, their right to tell me what it is they know, has been curtailed.
Instead of doing their job and searching for and indexing information that people search for, the librarian now has to spend time and resources processing these RTBF requests and trying to figure out whether or not to grant them.
We've already seen similar things happen with the DMCA, where Google now is being told "Link XYZ contains copyrighted material that I have the copyrights for, don't index it" and Google has to spend insane resources to try and figure out whether to grant the demand. Most other companies would panic and just grant these requests, along with RTBF, in order to shield themselves from legal liability. The downside is that speech is being deleted.
For you to say that speech actually isn't being deleted is actually worse. Oh it's fine you say that no-one's taking books and deleting the actual information on the page, but what Google has proven since its inception, is that information is useless and might as well not exist if no-one can find it. Not being allowed to return the correct results when doing a search (whether on a search engine or asking the librarian in a library) is just as bad, if not worse, than outright destroying the information itself.
On the post: Right To Be Forgotten Hits The NY Times
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So do I. I need money too. How come you're not giving me money?
Is your angle more along the lines of "I'm here to be the lone voice of opposition and critique, to constantly taunt Mike (whom I secretly admire) to try and keep up and raise the quality of his work, so that he doesn't just listen to adoring fans and hence, slide into mediocrity"?
If so, that's sorta what I do whenever I'm debating theists - I tell them that I'm there to refute their arguments for whatever religion it is they're espousing and that I want them to up their game, to actually do or say something that will convince me.
If so, then you're not the lone voice of opposition and critique. I've criticised Mike plenty of times in the past and so have others here.
On the post: Right To Be Forgotten Hits The NY Times
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"Actually we do. In Europe. Not even a matter of discussion ;)"
Yes, I'm in Europe too, and this means I'm affected. Notice also that you just keep going on about something that is embarrassing - what about controversial or illegal?
If we go by something that is just embarrassing and controversial but not illegal, let's take one example I can think of off the top of my head. Prince Harry, from the British royal family, years ago went to a party dressed in a Nazi uniform and this got plastered all over the newspapers.
Stupid yes, embarrassing yes, but does he have the right to tell Google not to link to articles and photos if I search for "Prince Harry Nazi"? What if years in the future, a historian wants to write a biography on Harry, but thanks to this stupid law, any time he uses a search engine in Europe on these keywords, he can't get the relevant information?
Now let's think about illegal activities. What if a politician in an election campaign wants to try and bury some information they think harms their chances at being elected? To me, this is censorship, in that if I were in their constituency, I wouldn't have access to all of the relevant data and thus being unable to make a truly informed decision.
Google may not be able to spot why exactly this information is being requested to be taken down.
Yes I looked at the FAQ, and I say Google shouldn't have to make an evaluation like this. They don't have and cannot have all of the data they would need in order to do it.
"I'm not sure the event X will not appear if you search PERSON NAME + EVENT X, but they will sure not appear if you search for the Person Name alone."
"I'm not sure the event X will not appear if you search PERSON NAME + EVENT X, but they will sure not appear if you search for the Person Name alone."
It will if the people using the Google search service consistently click on the embarrassing results whenever they search for the name alone. Google's algorithms will notice this, and then prioritize those results to be closer and closer to the top of the page. In other words, it is the users who, independent of each other, cause this to happen.
"Every single time your name comes associated with an old and outdated event that doesn't have any public interest on it (anymore). And you can't do anything about it? Does that sounds right?"
So freakin' what? Dem's the breaks as I say. It's life. Deal with it. People are naturally drawn to famous people, and naturally drawn more and more often to the mistakes, lies, embarrassing moments and illegal activities of famous people. You can't stop that. If you do something that makes you famous, that means being in the public eye. You can't stop it, because stopping it means infringing on the rights of everybody else.
You can certainly ask the search engine politely to drop the results, but to have them be obligated by law to do so?
Not only that, but the law is stupid, since it only applies to search engines within the EU. I can fire up a proxy or VPN, search on Google.ca or Google.com and get the results that Google.ie or Google.co.uk are forbidden to show. Therefore, the law is toothless, since it's trivially easy to get around.
Not only that, but how far does the law extend, and where will it stop? What if I run a website that solely has links to news articles about embarrassing stories about celebrities? What if I'm told I should shut that down because those people are feeling embarrassed?
On the post: Right To Be Forgotten Hits The NY Times
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No we don't and we never should, since telling other entities not to associate us with bad events is restricting their free speech rights. Since I'm very interested in protecting my own speech rights, I'm forced to protect Google's and any other search engines' on this topic.
You've acknowledged that newspaper archives aren't being deleted, so...what's the harm with letting Google return relevant and correct results if I search for Person X Controversial Topic Y? At best here, all you're doing is forcing someone to do a bit more legwork to get at the actual records, work that is and would be unnecessary if you'd let Google do it's damned job.
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