"You don't get to dictate what the press says about you. You don't get to demand that they only cover things the way you want or to portray the facts only in ways that you approve of."
Yeah, who does he think he is, the federal government?
Law enforcement will complain about this, saying that the public is trying to take away an essential tool for fighting crime, and that doorsteps around the nation are going dark because they don't have access to data...that they never had access to before...when they were still solving crimes.
You know, like with how the country was an untamed wilderness before they were able to coerce data from cell phones.
I think having a camera on the door stoop is a fantastic idea. I even don't have any problem releasing material to the police if it shows a crime being committed. What I have a problem with is being told I have to, regardless of what the footage actually shows, or else they will just subpoena the information as a third party record. And does anybody think that they'll really be THAT specific about the footage that they request. Once again, it's like phone forensics. They'll scoop up as much as they can, and decide later which 0.01% of it they actually needed.
Pretty soon, some of the AT&T guys that work with Homeland and the DEA will start getting job transfers to Amazon to grease the wheels a little.
I find this pretty rich coming from the leader of a political party who, during the Obama presidency, were kvetching left and right that the Democrats were trying to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, laying waste to the First Amendment as we knew it.
Things are always fair when it's your side that's in charge, I guess.
Streaming is not destroying theatres. And even if it were, so what? Once again, just a legacy industry trying to milk their walled garden for every penny they can. In the past couple of hundred years:
Radio and recorded audio entered an area occupied by the live musician
Moving pictures entered an area occupied by stage shows
Television entered an area occupied by radio
The internet entered an area occupied by public spaces
We still have recorded audio. Radio is doing pretty well. Moving pictures are no slouch. Stage shows sell out venues. Live musicians can be found all over town. And there's no danger of public spaces disappearing. I will concede the decline of the buggy whip, though.
In every instance, innovators disrupted an established sector. Later, the progeny of those innovators would become the establishment and the gatekeepers, and the cycle would start all over again.
To paraphrase Elon Musk, if you're not breaking stuff, you're not innovating.
This is really the result of technology advancement. The whole reason for Nielsen to exist in the first place was because television was a one way medium. One signal went out, but after that, the networks had no idea who was actually receiving that signal. In comes a methodology for deduction through the use of "Nielsen Households" and the manually maintained log of viewing habits. This was neither precise (not every household had one) nor reliable (human maintained logs could easily be wrong and imperfect).
Cable came along, and with later DOCSIS versions, companies gained the ability to actually snoop in on what people were watching and on how many TVs. But this was considered proprietary data to each local cable exchange, so those numbers would never reach Nielsen.
Now you have streaming options. Not only can the streaming provider know what you're watching, it can also know how much of it you've watched, and if that viewing led to other shows. With each network launching its own streaming option, Nielsen becomes obsolete. In the end, it really doesn't have anything to do with the expense. Nielsen could provide it for free, and it wouldn't be nearly as accurate or accessible as the numbers the networks have in-house.
The next step of this is going to be that this viewership data will be considered trade secret, and not divulged to the public, a la Netflix. Production companies will just have to take the network's word for it when they say that viewer numbers are down, which can become an unfair negotiating tactic that favors the networks. This where the evolution of the blackout will head: without cable companies as distributors paying retransmission fees, networks will start squeezing the production companies, giving an unfair advantage to their own content.
This is not academic. This is already happening with commercial internet services.
I think the duality of it all illustrates the source of the problem.
1) Content and media companies hate the idea of public domain and open source. They feel like everything should be owned. Otherwise, there's no "business model" behind it to make it successful (forgetting the fact that most ubiquitous internet technologies have been doing fine for decades without a "business model", a term I've always thought was horribly and myopically misused).
2) The public, however, isn't allowed to own anything. Without a constant nickel & dime microtransactional (it's a word, I'm sure of it) revenue stream, those poor waif-like struggling companies like Microsoft and Sony would just fold up and cease to exist.
So the result, ownership is king, as long as only royalty has it. The unwashed masses, however, are filthy thieves, profiting on the back of hard working artists and creators. (I know, I spelled "MBAs" and "trust fund babies" wrong)
This looks like the modern day equivalent of the wild west gunslinger with his gun drawn yelling "dance, monkey, dance!". There was only one way this was going to end, as long as Officer PTSD was calling the shots.
Admittedly, this is a highly unscientific analysis. It leaves out way too many variables, like upload rates, etc. Break.com only hosts around 29,000 videos, and has collected that number over the course of 20 years. At an average clip of just under 4 videos per day, one would think that any moderation they needed to do could be easily accomplished by a single person. I would think that their false positive and false negative rates would be much lower than the average.
And if I remember correctly, Internet Archive also hosts Wayback. Who knows what material might end up in there.
I live in the Tampa Bay area, and my experience with these outsourced call centers here and the people who work in them are that the working conditions in many of them are miserable. Call center employees around here generally tend to fall into two non-exclusive categories: 1) people who have become catastrophically negative and jaded in general, in part or in full because of the job, and/or 2) people who have a great deal of difficulty finding or keeping a job. Some struggle just to get along with people in general. Many centers have an INCREDIBLE rate of turnover, which is why they're generally not picky about who they hire. As long as you actually show up to whatever semblance of a job interview they have, you're almost guaranteed to be hired. Some don't stay open for very long. Either ownership cuts and runs, or they are constantly moving around. It's a shady business.
For what it's worth, according to the numbers at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_hosting_services) on streaming video sites (total number of videos, probably out of date by about a year), and assuming a 99.99% success rate in moderating videos:
Google is far from the only one with a content moderation problem. They're just the largest. I guess it's time to outlaw Vimeo, Flickr and the Internet Archive now. But then again, going after smaller players doesn't get you votes among your decidedly angry, morally panicked, and underinformed constituents.
ps. Purposefully not including Pornhub here, because, well, that would represent a 100% miss rate in Congress' virgin eyes.
This is something I've always wondered about, particular with some of the more egregious patent trolls: why doesn't the concept of patent exhaustion come into play here? Verizon is no saint, but this is gear that they've bought from other parties. Why doesn't stuff like this get thrown out immediately? This is as ridiculous as trolls shaking down offices for using a copier.
Is patent exhaustion more of a concept than a law, or is it actually codified somewhere?
I'm not sure why this shocks anybody in the US. Law enforcement has practically had the same mission statement here for decades: go after the end points, not the producers.
War on drugs? Arrest the users instead of the dealer.
Gun control? Go after the shooter and ignore the seller.
The thing that's always rubbed me the wrong way was that I live in Florida, and there's basically no place that isn't within 100 miles of the border, owing to the peninsular shape of the state. I can remember a few years back that my ex-wife was telling me about CBP searching her car without probable cause at a Tampa Bay area beach, and this was a tiny little beach on the bay itself, not even on the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, it just wasn't something she had the resources to legally fight, which can also be said about the large bulk of the population.
On the post: TV Ratings Sag As Cord Cutting Continues To Surge
GO 2020!!! The year we fell off the "bad examples" list for customer service!!! Woo hoo!!!
Sincerely,
US Internal Revenue Service
Shush up and hold my beer
Sincerely,
2019 Income Tax Filing Season
On the post: Navy SEAL Leader Accused Of War Crimes Threatens Defamation Suit Against NY Times Reporter For Revealing Videos & Text Of Men Who Reported Him
Yeah, who does he think he is, the federal government?
On the post: Robyn Openshaw, 'The Green Smoothie Girl,' Threatening SLAPP Suits Over Mediocre Reviews
Re: Hopefully a new law is named after her
Absolutely. It's called a federal anti-SLAPP statute, and this is a textbook example of why we need one.
On the post: Devin Nunes Demands Satirical Internet Cow Stop Making Fun Of Him... Or Else
For some reason, I think of the Danny Ocean quote in "Ocean's Thirteen":
"First of all, I know the guys you'd hire to come get me, they like me better than you."
On the post: Totally In-Touch NH Lawmaker Blocks Device Repair Bill, Tells Constituents To Just Buy New $1k Phones
It's stupid that this is being framed as a "phone" issue. Does the farmer whose tractor stopped working just throw it away and but a new one?
On the post: Bus Company Threatens To Sue College Newspaper Over Satirical Story
Their next story should be about how Barbra Streisand doesn't like ShortLine's bus service, either.
On the post: Civil Rights Groups Ask Legislators To Block Ring's Surveillance Partnerships With Law Enforcement
Law enforcement will complain about this, saying that the public is trying to take away an essential tool for fighting crime, and that doorsteps around the nation are going dark because they don't have access to data...that they never had access to before...when they were still solving crimes.
You know, like with how the country was an untamed wilderness before they were able to coerce data from cell phones.
I think having a camera on the door stoop is a fantastic idea. I even don't have any problem releasing material to the police if it shows a crime being committed. What I have a problem with is being told I have to, regardless of what the footage actually shows, or else they will just subpoena the information as a third party record. And does anybody think that they'll really be THAT specific about the footage that they request. Once again, it's like phone forensics. They'll scoop up as much as they can, and decide later which 0.01% of it they actually needed.
Pretty soon, some of the AT&T guys that work with Homeland and the DEA will start getting job transfers to Amazon to grease the wheels a little.
On the post: Bringing Free Speech Back: Trump Promises To Sue CNN Over Its Biased Coverage Based On Dumbest Legal Theory Ever
I find this pretty rich coming from the leader of a political party who, during the Obama presidency, were kvetching left and right that the Democrats were trying to bring back the Fairness Doctrine, laying waste to the First Amendment as we knew it.
Things are always fair when it's your side that's in charge, I guess.
On the post: Ed Norton Calls Out Steven Spielberg & Hollywood For Demonizing Netflix
Yes...and...
Streaming is not destroying theatres. And even if it were, so what? Once again, just a legacy industry trying to milk their walled garden for every penny they can. In the past couple of hundred years:
We still have recorded audio. Radio is doing pretty well. Moving pictures are no slouch. Stage shows sell out venues. Live musicians can be found all over town. And there's no danger of public spaces disappearing. I will concede the decline of the buggy whip, though.
In every instance, innovators disrupted an established sector. Later, the progeny of those innovators would become the establishment and the gatekeepers, and the cycle would start all over again.
To paraphrase Elon Musk, if you're not breaking stuff, you're not innovating.
On the post: Working With The Private Sector And Hundreds Of Law Enforcement Agencies, ICE Has Assembled A Massive Surveillance Network
So much for going dark.
On the post: After Missing Cord Cutting Trend, Nielsen Falls Apart
This is really the result of technology advancement. The whole reason for Nielsen to exist in the first place was because television was a one way medium. One signal went out, but after that, the networks had no idea who was actually receiving that signal. In comes a methodology for deduction through the use of "Nielsen Households" and the manually maintained log of viewing habits. This was neither precise (not every household had one) nor reliable (human maintained logs could easily be wrong and imperfect).
Cable came along, and with later DOCSIS versions, companies gained the ability to actually snoop in on what people were watching and on how many TVs. But this was considered proprietary data to each local cable exchange, so those numbers would never reach Nielsen.
Now you have streaming options. Not only can the streaming provider know what you're watching, it can also know how much of it you've watched, and if that viewing led to other shows. With each network launching its own streaming option, Nielsen becomes obsolete. In the end, it really doesn't have anything to do with the expense. Nielsen could provide it for free, and it wouldn't be nearly as accurate or accessible as the numbers the networks have in-house.
The next step of this is going to be that this viewership data will be considered trade secret, and not divulged to the public, a la Netflix. Production companies will just have to take the network's word for it when they say that viewer numbers are down, which can become an unfair negotiating tactic that favors the networks. This where the evolution of the blackout will head: without cable companies as distributors paying retransmission fees, networks will start squeezing the production companies, giving an unfair advantage to their own content.
This is not academic. This is already happening with commercial internet services.
On the post: Doomed: Bethesda's Classic Doom Re-Releases Are Fixed, But Demonstrate Again That We Don't Own What We Buy
I think the duality of it all illustrates the source of the problem.
1) Content and media companies hate the idea of public domain and open source. They feel like everything should be owned. Otherwise, there's no "business model" behind it to make it successful (forgetting the fact that most ubiquitous internet technologies have been doing fine for decades without a "business model", a term I've always thought was horribly and myopically misused).
2) The public, however, isn't allowed to own anything. Without a constant nickel & dime microtransactional (it's a word, I'm sure of it) revenue stream, those poor waif-like struggling companies like Microsoft and Sony would just fold up and cease to exist.
So the result, ownership is king, as long as only royalty has it. The unwashed masses, however, are filthy thieves, profiting on the back of hard working artists and creators. (I know, I spelled "MBAs" and "trust fund babies" wrong)
On the post: Cop Claims His Shooting Of An Unarmed Man Gave Him PTSD, Walks Off With A Medical Pension
This looks like the modern day equivalent of the wild west gunslinger with his gun drawn yelling "dance, monkey, dance!". There was only one way this was going to end, as long as Officer PTSD was calling the shots.
On the post: Politicians Queue Up To Make France's Proposed Law Against 'Hateful Content' Far, Far Worse
Here we go again
In a country with such a vivid history of bloody civil uprising predicated on political overreach, you'd think they'd know better by now...
On the post: Google CEO Admits That It's Impossible To Moderate YouTube Perfectly; CNBC Blasts Him
Re: By Comparison
Admittedly, this is a highly unscientific analysis. It leaves out way too many variables, like upload rates, etc. Break.com only hosts around 29,000 videos, and has collected that number over the course of 20 years. At an average clip of just under 4 videos per day, one would think that any moderation they needed to do could be easily accomplished by a single person. I would think that their false positive and false negative rates would be much lower than the average.
And if I remember correctly, Internet Archive also hosts Wayback. Who knows what material might end up in there.
On the post: Before Demanding Internet Companies 'Hire More Moderators,' Perhaps We Should Look At How Awful The Job Is
Working Conditions
I live in the Tampa Bay area, and my experience with these outsourced call centers here and the people who work in them are that the working conditions in many of them are miserable. Call center employees around here generally tend to fall into two non-exclusive categories: 1) people who have become catastrophically negative and jaded in general, in part or in full because of the job, and/or 2) people who have a great deal of difficulty finding or keeping a job. Some struggle just to get along with people in general. Many centers have an INCREDIBLE rate of turnover, which is why they're generally not picky about who they hire. As long as you actually show up to whatever semblance of a job interview they have, you're almost guaranteed to be hired. Some don't stay open for very long. Either ownership cuts and runs, or they are constantly moving around. It's a shady business.
On the post: Google CEO Admits That It's Impossible To Moderate YouTube Perfectly; CNBC Blasts Him
By Comparison
For what it's worth, according to the numbers at Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_video_hosting_services) on streaming video sites (total number of videos, probably out of date by about a year), and assuming a 99.99% success rate in moderating videos:
US
Break.com : 2.9 missed videos
Flickr : 53.2 missed videos
Godtube : 22.3 missed videos
Internet Archive : 456.7 missed videos
LiveLeak : 115 missed videos
Metacafe : 21.3 missed videos
Vimeo : 3930 missed videos
YouTube : 340,000 missed videos
Non-US
Dailymotion (FR) : 9420 missed videos
EngageMedia (DE) : 0.8 missed videos
Globo Video (BR) : 271 missed videos
Niconico (JP) : 2650 missed videos
QQ Video (CN) : 1350 missed videos
Rutube (RU) : 384 missed videos
SAPO Vídeos (PO) : 88.3 missed videos
Tudou (CN) : 105 missed videos
tune.pk (PK) : 341 missed videos
Youku (CN) : 802 missed videos
Google is far from the only one with a content moderation problem. They're just the largest. I guess it's time to outlaw Vimeo, Flickr and the Internet Archive now. But then again, going after smaller players doesn't get you votes among your decidedly angry, morally panicked, and underinformed constituents.
ps. Purposefully not including Pornhub here, because, well, that would represent a 100% miss rate in Congress' virgin eyes.
On the post: Huawei Now Using Patent Claims To Demand $1 Billion From Verizon, As The US Tries To Chase Huawei Out Of The US Market
A Question
This is something I've always wondered about, particular with some of the more egregious patent trolls: why doesn't the concept of patent exhaustion come into play here? Verizon is no saint, but this is gear that they've bought from other parties. Why doesn't stuff like this get thrown out immediately? This is as ridiculous as trolls shaking down offices for using a copier.
Is patent exhaustion more of a concept than a law, or is it actually codified somewhere?
On the post: Australian Federal Police Raid Journalist's Home Over Publication Of Leaked Documents
Huge Surprise
I'm not sure why this shocks anybody in the US. Law enforcement has practically had the same mission statement here for decades: go after the end points, not the producers.
War on drugs? Arrest the users instead of the dealer.
Gun control? Go after the shooter and ignore the seller.
Business as usual 'round these parts.
On the post: CBP, ICE Have No Idea If Their Thousands Of Warrantless Device Searches Are Actually Making The Country Safer
Border Exception
The thing that's always rubbed me the wrong way was that I live in Florida, and there's basically no place that isn't within 100 miles of the border, owing to the peninsular shape of the state. I can remember a few years back that my ex-wife was telling me about CBP searching her car without probable cause at a Tampa Bay area beach, and this was a tiny little beach on the bay itself, not even on the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, it just wasn't something she had the resources to legally fight, which can also be said about the large bulk of the population.
Next >>