The "danger" of posting in a public forum frequented by people who are likely to expect evidence to support specific claims is that someone will say "How do you know that?"
What specifically is "hugely exaggerated" and in what specific studies? Cites or it didn't happen.
"only because tobacco companies are one of those areas where we are allowed to be abusive be cause no one of significance will come to their defense."
Apparently I've been laboring under the misconception that massive corporations with worldwide presence and billions of dollars in profits didn't need anyone to come to their defense.
Now that I've been enlightened though I can see they're definitely down for the count because of those mean old people who want to keep kids and barmaids safe:
Why it looks like their revenue last year was only $17.4B and they only made $2B. Oh, wait, that's just one tobacco company, isn't it? Those poor, poor, horribly abused little companies. Why I bet that kind of terrible treatment makes the baby Jesus cry and blow snot on his sleeve!
Of course I'm also laboring under the delusion that the tobacco companies still win 60% of the lawsuits filed against them. I suppose that because it's those "health nannies" at the Tobacco Institute who make that claim.
Oh, crap - sorry, I just realized when I turned off the caps lock I accidentally hit Ctrl+Sarcasm.
They don't pay anything at all approaching the actual costs of the myriad of health problems that smoking causes. Just like motorcycle riders who don't wear helmets like the free ride they get for the hundreds of millions in extra medical costs they cause, smokers love soaking the taxpayers for all the extra costs of their addiction. They cost far more than just cancer treatments, there are at least a dozen smoking-related illnesses plus lost productivity (they take more sick days) they often require longer treatment or hospitalization and worse, even if their kids don't smoke, they're still more likely to need treatment for asthma as well as being more likely to require ICU treatment when they get ill with the flu (and probably other illnesses as well).
Smokers cost the public tens of billions annually, but they're perfectly okay with welfare for their benefit. They just don't like it when some out of work single mom gets some.
I disagree. The product is only legal because unlike wrecks involving unsafe cars or airplanes, a specific manufacturer can't be blamed.
Fred Singer (the guy behind the "climate change is fake" scam) always used the fact that the massive number of tobacco-related illness and deaths are "only" statistical. You can't point to a specific cigarette to a specific case of cancer, all you can do is say that the risk of cancer is n times higher for smokers. If a single entity like Ford or Boeing had statistics like the tobacco companies do, their products would not be legal in any country.
I'm all for putting the screws to them in any way possible. They kill people for profit.
Allow them to put their logos on with just one change.
Whenever someone dies from emphysema or the type of lung cancer that is almost always caused by smoking, they keep a tally. Below the logo in large digits is the number of dead smokers who smoked that particular brand. The count gets updated semiannually. Maybe add a 3D bar code that sends you to a website that maintains the current counts for each brand.
Gets the message across with minimal changes and has the added benefit of always driving people away from the best selling (i.e. highest death count) brands which screws all the tobacco companies (though not nearly as hard as they should be)
It's not just corporations, it's just average morons in a hurry
Quite a few years back there was a "free telephone" scammer operating out of Florida. (no surprise, I think more than half the scammers in America live there) Anyway, they had their site set up so that you could just trim the URL to the root directory and view the files. Right there in plain sight is a .csv file. I downloaded it, expecting to see some spamming list with e-mail addresses in it and discover that it contained names, addresses, work addresses, telephone numbers (home and work), bank accounts, social security numbers and credit card numbers!
Several times I sent the link, an explanation and an excerpt from the file to the Florida attorney general's consumer affairs office. They never even responded.
So I removed most of the personal info but left just a part of the mailing addresses and area codes so that it was obvious the data was valid and I bcc'ed it to each of the e-mail addresses explaining to them that they had been suckered in by the spammer and that their personal and credit card info was now an unprotected file on the internet. I also provided the URL for the home page of the site (not the one to the files). It seemed like they'd want to lock their credit reports and replace their credit cards.
The only responses I ever got were people accusing *me* of stealing their personal information, and of being the scammer and telling me that they were going to get police and/or lawyers after me to find out who I was and where I lived.
Long way of saying I think the corporate reaction is just a reflection of the typical moron who works there - ready to lash out at whoever dares to expose their own idiocy/incompetence.
I monitored the file for many months afterwards and it remained up there. I kept sending copies to the FL AG but they didn't give a shit.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Key Word is "Community"
There isn't just one group/type of people requesting changes. People who are requesting it to become yet another dumping ground for commercial spam and opportunists *should* go elsewhere.
There are lots of places on the internet where people can go and post/view commercial ads and crap ads from collectors and junk peddlers. Craigslist is the only site I know of where people can find things they want/need locally.
If people want crap commercial ads they can use oodle or traderonline or kijiji or any of the other sites. They don't need aggregators to do national searches on those sites, they already offer exactly what people claim to be looking for, nationwide searches.
I say claim because that's not what they're actually looking for, they're looking to cash in on the high traffic on craigslist, nothing more.
Call me crazy but http://www.craigslist.org/forums/?forumID=8 looks suspiciously like a discussion forum for folks to suggest/request new categories, new cities, and general changes.
They listen to users - there was lots of discussion and voting on whether HTML should be banned in posts and that sort of thing.
I occasionally volunteered in the cl help forum and it still never ceases to amaze me that when giving an excellent free resource, people complain about it.
It's a free service. Walk away from it. You are out nothing. It doesn't do what you want it to do, so don't use it.
No one says you can't search the various locations and make arrangements to buy whatever you want. What the TOU says is that you can't post your items in *their* communities.
You don't like free and you don't like to pay for it - I don't know of anything in between. Maybe barter for ad space on a highway billboard?
Re: Re: Re: Re: It's for local, face to face transactions
I don't think the knife maker comparison works. In this case the knife maker made a special knife specifically to attack one specific person. (and to stretch the analogy beyond the breaking point) that specific person had a tattoo on his forehead that said "Point a knife at me and I will sue you into tiny pieces: sign here if you agree to those terms".
If he had created a general purpose product that worked on any website and cl sued him because someone pointed it at their service that would be a different story.
A bot does not make craigslist "product" (it's a service, isn't it?) more useful for their target audience, it only makes it easier for the opposite of local community (i.e. opportunistic sleazebags) to spam all the local communities and drive the legitimate users away.
Trying to force a website to change to accommodate whatever a handful of people think it "should be" is a pretty twisted idea to begin with. I think the pope's website is all f'd up. If I wrote software to post porn to it because I think *that* is "more useful" than the way they want it to be, I'd be an idiot if I didn't expect them to come after me with both barrels loaded.
It is sleazy on cl's part to twist the law but I'm okay with the concept of going after the guy for enabling the spammers.
I don't view writing/distributing a bot as a "service". Isn't software considered a product?
If the postings were going through his servers then yeah, he's a provider but the article says he "wrote some software".
I agree that craigslist is guilty of twisting the law into knots in order to apply it, and it sucks because it sets a standard that big corporations and big government will take advantage of. I don't agree that he was a service provider (unless he did handle the web traffic)
The point is that it's not like someone jumped up out of the blue and sued the guy, the restrictions on automated postings are in the TOU. Just because he thought Craig sounded "encouraging" doesn't let him off the hook on agreements he entered into.
I think it would be completely different if the guy wrote a generic bit of software that could be used on multiple sites. In this case the software apparently targeted only one site. It isn't that he was carrying generic lock picking tools and they nailed him for burglary, he made a key specifically to fit one lock.
It's the same as someone designing a piece of software with the sole purpose of automatically posting here in the discussions. How many days of crap bot postings would it take before someone started to lawyer up?
Like it or not, you have to admit that craigslist chose the cheapest/most efficient strategy. Rather than go after the dozens/hundreds of spammers who would use his software to post automatically they went after the source of the problem.
BTW I don't like what craigslist did but I also understand that if they don't defend their site from bots, it would turn into a spammer's paradise within a week. Twisting the DMCA sucks, and yeah it was stretched beyond any reasonable bounds but that still doesn't qualify as "trying to destroy his life".
It sounds like the guy took the "easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" route. Sometimes that backfires.
I'm also a bit suspicious of the images of an "absolutely innocent" programmer and a "bent on destroying" empire. I think the truth lies somewhere in between there.
The specific bits of the TOU that I'm babbling about:
y) use any form of automated device or computer program that enables the submission of postings on craigslist without each posting being manually entered by the author thereof (an "automated posting device"), including without limitation, the use of any such automated posting device to submit postings in bulk, or for automatic submission of postings at regular intervals.
...
8. POSTING AGENTS
A "Posting Agent" is a third-party agent, service, or intermediary that offers to post Content to the Service on behalf of others. To moderate demands on craigslist's resources, you may not use a Posting Agent to post Content to the Service without express permission or license from craigslist. Correspondingly, Posting Agents are not permitted to post Content on behalf of others, to cause Content to be so posted, or otherwise access the Service to facilitate posting Content on behalf of others, except with express permission or license from craigslist.
...and when people agree to the terms of use that's the deal. The TOU very clearly state that automated posting and postings by third parties are not permitted without their express permission.
Local, face to face buyers and sellers don't need automation. Spammers and opportunists do.
There are some companies who do make posting to craigslist easier/partially automated for individuals and the don't get sued. One example is forsalebyowner. They make it easy for folks to post on craigslist - one ad in one location.
That makes sense, an individual (not a business), selling by owner (face to face), posting one ad in the city nearest them. That's what cl is about.
An individual does not need a bot to post for them. If one person has so many ads they need a bot to manage them then they're a business, they can go to a commercial site or start a classified ads site of their own.
There are only 36 for sale categories and 9 real estate categories. Post one ad in each category and there is still less than one page on your craigslist account page. Every post on that page has links for 'edit', 'delete' and 'renew'. Cut, paste, and post, then click on the 'renew' link every couple of days. It doesn't take software to make that "easier".
Businesses, spammers and scammers on the other hand, they're the ones who want/need automated posting.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Craigslist is for local communities, face to face transactions and moderated by the local community. It is not intended to be a nationwide or worldwide shopping site.
The thick is strong in this one.
Using your "logic" no website can require an account or registration because that prevents your poor, abused users from accessing their web pages.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Craigslist is for local communities, face to face transactions and moderated by the local community. It is not intended to be a nationwide or worldwide shopping site.
Ever read the contract you and everyone else agrees to when they use craigslist?
"f. If you aggregate, display, copy, duplicate, reproduce, or otherwise exploit for any purpose any Content (except for your own Content) in violation of these Terms without craigslist's express written permission, you agree to pay craigslist three thousand dollars ($3,000) for each day
on which you engage in such conduct."
I was always under the impression that breaking a contract was something less than legal.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Craigslist is for local communities, face to face transactions and moderated by the local community. It is not intended to be a nationwide or worldwide shopping site.
Straw man. They're not trying to control how others use the internet, only their site.
The previous headline list at the top of the page includes "Saying You Can’t Compete With Free Is Saying You Can’t Compete Period"
So the aggregators are saying they can't compete directly with free (craigslist) by offering their own classifieds service, all they can do is leech off the existing one.
Isn't that saying they can't compete, with a *spuut* at the end? (google "Victor Borge phoenetic punctuation")
A lot of people see value in breaking into stores and stealing electronics. Just because YOU don't see value in that doesn't mean there aren't thousands who do.
A lot of people see value in siphoning gas out of your car. Just because YOU don't see the value in that doesn't mean there aren't thousands who do.
A lot of people see value in generating ad revenue by posting porn flicks on church websites. Just because YOU don't see value in that doesn't mean there aren't thousands who do.
If there's such a huge pent up demand for a nationwide classifieds site then I've got a completely insane, wildly crazy idea. Why not innovate? Why not create a website that services those thousands of people just dying for a way to communicate?
Oh, wait. That's right. If you creates that website then you'll actually have to pay for the bandwidth and servers to serve up the ads and there goes the profit margin, right down the toilet.
Aw, fuck it, why not just steal bandwidth from some other website? After all, just because THEY don't see value in their resources being stolen doesn't mean that you don't.
I was born and raised in a different era. Back then they spread fear by telling people they'd be indoctrinated into communism and become communist zombies only capable of repeating whatever was in the little red book, never allowed to think for themselves. I never dreamed I'd live to see the day when people would become capitalist zombies and just repeat whatever the capitalist office line is rather than think for themselves.
To me it looks like an Left For Dead map but instead of just gibbering all the zombies keep reciting "We can make money from it, that makes it right".
On the post: Tobacco Companies Think Their Trademarks Are More Important Than Your Health
Re: Not really
What specifically is "hugely exaggerated" and in what specific studies? Cites or it didn't happen.
"only because tobacco companies are one of those areas where we are allowed to be abusive be cause no one of significance will come to their defense."
Apparently I've been laboring under the misconception that massive corporations with worldwide presence and billions of dollars in profits didn't need anyone to come to their defense.
Now that I've been enlightened though I can see they're definitely down for the count because of those mean old people who want to keep kids and barmaids safe:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/07/22/us-tobacco-idUSTRE66L2PR20100722
Why it looks like their revenue last year was only $17.4B and they only made $2B. Oh, wait, that's just one tobacco company, isn't it? Those poor, poor, horribly abused little companies. Why I bet that kind of terrible treatment makes the baby Jesus cry and blow snot on his sleeve!
Of course I'm also laboring under the delusion that the tobacco companies still win 60% of the lawsuits filed against them. I suppose that because it's those "health nannies" at the Tobacco Institute who make that claim.
Oh, crap - sorry, I just realized when I turned off the caps lock I accidentally hit Ctrl+Sarcasm.
On the post: Tobacco Companies Think Their Trademarks Are More Important Than Your Health
Re: Re: What about fat people?
Smokers cost the public tens of billions annually, but they're perfectly okay with welfare for their benefit. They just don't like it when some out of work single mom gets some.
On the post: Tobacco Companies Think Their Trademarks Are More Important Than Your Health
Re:
Fred Singer (the guy behind the "climate change is fake" scam) always used the fact that the massive number of tobacco-related illness and deaths are "only" statistical. You can't point to a specific cigarette to a specific case of cancer, all you can do is say that the risk of cancer is n times higher for smokers. If a single entity like Ford or Boeing had statistics like the tobacco companies do, their products would not be legal in any country.
I'm all for putting the screws to them in any way possible. They kill people for profit.
On the post: Tobacco Companies Think Their Trademarks Are More Important Than Your Health
Maybe a solution
Whenever someone dies from emphysema or the type of lung cancer that is almost always caused by smoking, they keep a tally. Below the logo in large digits is the number of dead smokers who smoked that particular brand. The count gets updated semiannually. Maybe add a 3D bar code that sends you to a website that maintains the current counts for each brand.
Gets the message across with minimal changes and has the added benefit of always driving people away from the best selling (i.e. highest death count) brands which screws all the tobacco companies (though not nearly as hard as they should be)
On the post: Hanging Out For Free Is Piracy
"I want my twooo dolllarsss..."
On the post: Company Thanks Guy Who Alerted Them To Big Security Flaw By Sending The Cops... And The Bill
It's not just corporations, it's just average morons in a hurry
Several times I sent the link, an explanation and an excerpt from the file to the Florida attorney general's consumer affairs office. They never even responded.
So I removed most of the personal info but left just a part of the mailing addresses and area codes so that it was obvious the data was valid and I bcc'ed it to each of the e-mail addresses explaining to them that they had been suckered in by the spammer and that their personal and credit card info was now an unprotected file on the internet. I also provided the URL for the home page of the site (not the one to the files). It seemed like they'd want to lock their credit reports and replace their credit cards.
The only responses I ever got were people accusing *me* of stealing their personal information, and of being the scammer and telling me that they were going to get police and/or lawyers after me to find out who I was and where I lived.
Long way of saying I think the corporate reaction is just a reflection of the typical moron who works there - ready to lash out at whoever dares to expose their own idiocy/incompetence.
I monitored the file for many months afterwards and it remained up there. I kept sending copies to the FL AG but they didn't give a shit.
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The Key Word is "Community"
There are lots of places on the internet where people can go and post/view commercial ads and crap ads from collectors and junk peddlers. Craigslist is the only site I know of where people can find things they want/need locally.
If people want crap commercial ads they can use oodle or traderonline or kijiji or any of the other sites. They don't need aggregators to do national searches on those sites, they already offer exactly what people claim to be looking for, nationwide searches.
I say claim because that's not what they're actually looking for, they're looking to cash in on the high traffic on craigslist, nothing more.
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: Re: Re: The Key Word is "Community"
They listen to users - there was lots of discussion and voting on whether HTML should be banned in posts and that sort of thing.
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: The Key Word is "Community"
I don't play the troll game. End of interaction.
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: The Key Word is "Community"
It's a free service. Walk away from it. You are out nothing. It doesn't do what you want it to do, so don't use it.
No one says you can't search the various locations and make arrangements to buy whatever you want. What the TOU says is that you can't post your items in *their* communities.
You don't like free and you don't like to pay for it - I don't know of anything in between. Maybe barter for ad space on a highway billboard?
On the post: Craigslist Trying To Destroy The Life Of Someone Who Made Posting To Craigslist Easier
Re: Re: Re: Re: It's for local, face to face transactions
If he had created a general purpose product that worked on any website and cl sued him because someone pointed it at their service that would be a different story.
On the post: Craigslist Trying To Destroy The Life Of Someone Who Made Posting To Craigslist Easier
Trying to force a website to change to accommodate whatever a handful of people think it "should be" is a pretty twisted idea to begin with. I think the pope's website is all f'd up. If I wrote software to post porn to it because I think *that* is "more useful" than the way they want it to be, I'd be an idiot if I didn't expect them to come after me with both barrels loaded.
It is sleazy on cl's part to twist the law but I'm okay with the concept of going after the guy for enabling the spammers.
On the post: Craigslist Trying To Destroy The Life Of Someone Who Made Posting To Craigslist Easier
Re: Re: It's for local, face to face transactions
If the postings were going through his servers then yeah, he's a provider but the article says he "wrote some software".
I agree that craigslist is guilty of twisting the law into knots in order to apply it, and it sucks because it sets a standard that big corporations and big government will take advantage of. I don't agree that he was a service provider (unless he did handle the web traffic)
On the post: Craigslist Trying To Destroy The Life Of Someone Who Made Posting To Craigslist Easier
Re: Re: It's for local, face to face transactions
I think it would be completely different if the guy wrote a generic bit of software that could be used on multiple sites. In this case the software apparently targeted only one site. It isn't that he was carrying generic lock picking tools and they nailed him for burglary, he made a key specifically to fit one lock.
It's the same as someone designing a piece of software with the sole purpose of automatically posting here in the discussions. How many days of crap bot postings would it take before someone started to lawyer up?
Like it or not, you have to admit that craigslist chose the cheapest/most efficient strategy. Rather than go after the dozens/hundreds of spammers who would use his software to post automatically they went after the source of the problem.
BTW I don't like what craigslist did but I also understand that if they don't defend their site from bots, it would turn into a spammer's paradise within a week. Twisting the DMCA sucks, and yeah it was stretched beyond any reasonable bounds but that still doesn't qualify as "trying to destroy his life".
It sounds like the guy took the "easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission" route. Sometimes that backfires.
I'm also a bit suspicious of the images of an "absolutely innocent" programmer and a "bent on destroying" empire. I think the truth lies somewhere in between there.
The specific bits of the TOU that I'm babbling about:
y) use any form of automated device or computer program that enables the submission of postings on craigslist without each posting being manually entered by the author thereof (an "automated posting device"), including without limitation, the use of any such automated posting device to submit postings in bulk, or for automatic submission of postings at regular intervals.
...
8. POSTING AGENTS
A "Posting Agent" is a third-party agent, service, or intermediary that offers to post Content to the Service on behalf of others. To moderate demands on craigslist's resources, you may not use a Posting Agent to post Content to the Service without express permission or license from craigslist. Correspondingly, Posting Agents are not permitted to post Content on behalf of others, to cause Content to be so posted, or otherwise access the Service to facilitate posting Content on behalf of others, except with express permission or license from craigslist.
On the post: Craigslist Trying To Destroy The Life Of Someone Who Made Posting To Craigslist Easier
It's for local, face to face transactions
Local, face to face buyers and sellers don't need automation. Spammers and opportunists do.
There are some companies who do make posting to craigslist easier/partially automated for individuals and the don't get sued. One example is forsalebyowner. They make it easy for folks to post on craigslist - one ad in one location.
That makes sense, an individual (not a business), selling by owner (face to face), posting one ad in the city nearest them. That's what cl is about.
An individual does not need a bot to post for them. If one person has so many ads they need a bot to manage them then they're a business, they can go to a commercial site or start a classified ads site of their own.
There are only 36 for sale categories and 9 real estate categories. Post one ad in each category and there is still less than one page on your craigslist account page. Every post on that page has links for 'edit', 'delete' and 'renew'. Cut, paste, and post, then click on the 'renew' link every couple of days. It doesn't take software to make that "easier".
Businesses, spammers and scammers on the other hand, they're the ones who want/need automated posting.
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Craigslist is for local communities, face to face transactions and moderated by the local community. It is not intended to be a nationwide or worldwide shopping site.
Using your "logic" no website can require an account or registration because that prevents your poor, abused users from accessing their web pages.
End of discussion.
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Craigslist is for local communities, face to face transactions and moderated by the local community. It is not intended to be a nationwide or worldwide shopping site.
"f. If you aggregate, display, copy, duplicate, reproduce, or otherwise exploit for any purpose any Content (except for your own Content) in violation of these Terms without craigslist's express written permission, you agree to pay craigslist three thousand dollars ($3,000) for each day
on which you engage in such conduct."
I was always under the impression that breaking a contract was something less than legal.
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: Re: Re: Craigslist is for local communities, face to face transactions and moderated by the local community. It is not intended to be a nationwide or worldwide shopping site.
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Amusing observation
So the aggregators are saying they can't compete directly with free (craigslist) by offering their own classifieds service, all they can do is leech off the existing one.
Isn't that saying they can't compete, with a *spuut* at the end? (google "Victor Borge phoenetic punctuation")
On the post: Craigslist Continues To Be A Legal Bully When It Comes To Aggregators
Re: Re: The Key Word is "Community"
A lot of people see value in siphoning gas out of your car. Just because YOU don't see the value in that doesn't mean there aren't thousands who do.
A lot of people see value in generating ad revenue by posting porn flicks on church websites. Just because YOU don't see value in that doesn't mean there aren't thousands who do.
If there's such a huge pent up demand for a nationwide classifieds site then I've got a completely insane, wildly crazy idea. Why not innovate? Why not create a website that services those thousands of people just dying for a way to communicate?
Oh, wait. That's right. If you creates that website then you'll actually have to pay for the bandwidth and servers to serve up the ads and there goes the profit margin, right down the toilet.
Aw, fuck it, why not just steal bandwidth from some other website? After all, just because THEY don't see value in their resources being stolen doesn't mean that you don't.
I was born and raised in a different era. Back then they spread fear by telling people they'd be indoctrinated into communism and become communist zombies only capable of repeating whatever was in the little red book, never allowed to think for themselves. I never dreamed I'd live to see the day when people would become capitalist zombies and just repeat whatever the capitalist office line is rather than think for themselves.
To me it looks like an Left For Dead map but instead of just gibbering all the zombies keep reciting "We can make money from it, that makes it right".
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