Depends who they're kicking out, just like any other private property. I'm not coming over to your house if I hear you've been kicking out anyone you think might be homosexual, but if I hear you've been kicking out Nazis, I'll gladly come help.
It's one thing when we're talking about government censorship, where they might throw you in prison for the rest of your life if they don't like what you've said. But as long as the worst they can do is kick you off their website, I'm not sure I see the problem.
And frankly, I think this whole idea is a large part of what is wrong with our society today. Everyone acts like you just have to let jerks be jerks and you can't say anything or do anything about it. Acting like all that matters is money, and if someone is giving you money, you shouldn't care if you're serving Adolph Hitler himself. Screw morality, it's all about the profits. We collectively need to stop acting like we have to help people who are only trying to screw us over. Yes, you should let people be themselves, let them exercise their human rights, and not try to force them to do or not do something...but you also shouldn't let them force you to do or not do something that you don't agree with either. You think the KKK is going to let someone else publish an article about the benefits of diversity in their quarterly newsletter? Probably not. So why do we feel like we're required to let them publish in ours?
What's the difference, really? Is it because Twitter is a big company? Is it some perverted idea of a "duty to shareholders"? Or just an inability to distinguish between large corporations and national governments? I don't get it...
Re: Re: Just because its there doesn't mean you should use it
I think there is a pretty clear distinction -- Clearview isn't searching for the images online, it's searching for them on its own internal database. Which means these photos have been copied from the original location and included as part of their application, and are then being distributed to various law enforcement departments. IMO it's more like the difference between sending a link to a song on YouTube vs downloading that song and uploading it to a torrent site. In the end it could be the same people getting the same content, but one way is legal and the other is not.
...are you implying that people wouldn't be killing each other if nobody had guns?
The gun analogy seems perfect to me. People kill each other. Some of them use guns, some of them don't. Nobody buys a gun and goes "Well, I wasn't planning on killing anyone before I bought this, but I guess I'll have to now!"
People believe awful things. Some of them get/post those awful things from/to social media, some of them don't. Nobody gets on social media and goes "Well, I wasn't a white supremacist before, but now that I've got Facebook I sure will be!"
I'm a bit curious about the methodology here and what precisely they're looking at.
Facebook's algorithm is obviously tuned to provide whatever will keep you on Facebook. That's profitable for them. In a sense, that's giving you what you want. But what you want in order to keep browsing Facebook is not necessarily the same as what you want in life in general. Someone with a strong enough compulsion to try to correct idiots will stay on Facebook forever if you keep feeding them posts from idiots, but that probably isn't actually how they want to spend the rest of their life. If you start from an assumption that what people want is exactly what they click and spend time viewing, then you're already measuring it wrong.
So, are the studies mentioned measuring what content people actually desire to consume, or are they measuring what content will keep people tethered to their current activity? I don't think these are the same thing, and if they're measuring the same (incorrect) value that social media optimizes for, then obviously their research would indicate that social media isn't the issue.
People can have conflicting desires. People like to be lazy; people also like the sense of fulfillment that comes from being productive. People like to eat double bacon cheeseburgers but also want to be fit and healthy. These things don't have to create desires out of nothing in order to be harmful; they can do plenty of damage simply by amplifying the parts of yourself that you'd rather suppress.
That's not to say I'm in favor of banning social media or anything, although that IS why I haven't really touched it myself in 2-3 years. In my ideal world, we'd all be using diaspora* or something, and could experiment a lot more in terms of what truly makes a good social networking platform. But if we're going to stick with these monopolistic walled gardens, there does need to be some regulation. They're looking very much like a drug to me right now, so maybe we ought to regulate them as one. Not Schedule I -- nothing should be regulated like Schedule I -- but maybe more like Advil.
I have software that worked perfectly fine on Windows 7 that won't run on 10, but you people think stuff from the XP era is the problem??
These days most of my Windows apps run better on Linux with Wine than any recent version of Windows...and since the days of XP I still have not seen a single piece of software that can actually be fixed with a Microsoft compatibility tool. Those things are a joke.
"you think cord cutting is due to a bad experience?"
You don't have cable - right?
It's absolutely about the experience. Getting buried in boxes (each with its own rental fee!) when all you want to watch are the local channels; equipment failures every few months because when they replace a defective device for one customer, they just shuffle it to another; indecipherable bills with fees on top of fees on top of fees; spending hours and hours on hold, day after day, week after week, just to get the service you're paying for; having to cancel and resubscribe every few years or your bill goes through the roof....even when it's about price, it's as much about the pricing tactics as it is about the actual dollar amount.
I have heard people talking about cutting the cord say some variation of the phrase "I don't mind paying for it, but I just don't want to deal with them anymore" nearly every time.
"And here's the thing, I like the service I get through Comcast, even if there is no viable alternative. When I cancelled my Cable TV I actually increased the speed on my internet to their gigabit service."
They're fine, as long as it works. When something breaks, they won't do a thing for you though. My parents had Comcast a few years ago before they moved. One day, the internet went out. Called support, they said they didn't see any problems, and a few hours later the connection came back. The next day...the same thing happened. Day after day, for months on end, around 5pm the internet went down, and around 9pm it came back on. Finally after dozens of calls to tech support, months of back and forth with them insisting there was no issue, we finally get a tech who decides to do his freakin' job -- he looks up some log file, and says "Oh yeah, I can see in the logs that you're dropping off the network at almost the exact same time every day. That's pretty odd." Eventually scheduled a service visit to replace the modem and everything was fine. Took three months before we could convince them to actually do that though. When the tech arrived he told us that this was apparently a class of issue that was well known -- they claimed a neighbor was likely stealing cable, and the unsupported equipment was causing the signal strength to drop below what the original modem could use whenever the neighbor turned their TV on. But it literally took MONTHS to convince them that we weren't lying about the connection dying EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. and for them to just check their own logs to confirm it. And of course we got no compensation at all for the service being down during prime hours every day for months. Still had to pay full price for that garbage.
I have never heard of a cable bill that high. My internet bill is closer to $50/month for 75megabit symmetric fiber here in RI. I think my parents pay close to $100/month for satellite TV and internet out in the middle of nowhere where satellite is the only option...
"I think it's a question of when, not if, someone builds a full youtube clone into a torrent client like tribler. At which point we'll get the full shitshow where we have to wade through tons of nazi propaganda and alt-right rhetoric without even sensible moderation or relevance filtering applied just so we can get to our silly cat videos..."
Yeah, there's one or two series that I still keep up with (The Expanse being the main one) but 99% of what I watch is probably YouTube and spinoffs (ie, Nebula, Floatplane, Patreon pages, LBRY...stuff I found through YT but now watch elsewhere). There's more stuff that I'd like to watch posted in a day than I could ever hope to actually watch. Nothing's ever out of date, nothing is ever a re-run, and when I DO tune in to something that's already halfway over (because for some odd reason, YouTube does that a lot lately), I can rewind and start where I want.
The only thing that really annoys the crap out of me is these people who still try to do live shows and scheduled premieres and stuff...just post the freakin' video and let me watch it when I want. Nothing worse than getting a notification for a live feed that looks great, only to realize it started nearly an hour ago and you'll have to wait for the recording if you actually want to have a clue what's going on anyway. But then you can't tell when it's actually been posted because YT won't give another notification if you dismiss the first one, but the first one will still say it's "live" even two days later...I just wish at least one of these other services could figure out playlists and feeds
I strongly believe that you misunderstand which "body of knowledge" the dictionaries are referring to.
"This video game improves your memory" isn't part of the body of knowledge that is science. Rather, that body of knowledge contains things like "After playing this video game for m minutes, this research team observed a decrease of t seconds in performing task x for y% of subjects tested." The conclusions drawn from the study are not facts, they are not proven, they are not science. They are interpretations of science. If you want to get REALLY pedantic, I would argue that science ultimately only says that these researchers CLAIMED those results, since you can't necessarily be certain that they performed the study exactly as claimed.
Science doesn't say things like "video games improve your memory". At best, science indicates these things, within some statistical probability.
This does matter. You hear it all the time -- "Science used to say X, now it says Y", often used as a justification to ignore some inconvenient research or discovery. But the truth is that science never said X or Y, the evidence pointed towards X, then we got new evidence that started to point towards Y. Or the people interpreting the science originally screwed up. But the body of knowledge that is science itself never changed. People see it as a complete reversal of a proven fact rather than an increasingly nuanced picture, because someone told them it was a "fact" proven by "science" when it wasn't.
If the elected officials are so eager to screw over their constituents that they'll actually agree to something like that, then do the specific details of the implementation really matter all that much?
"Yes indeed, stupid, uneducated voters do make democracy look bad, and authoritarian dictatorships look like sane and sober leadership. Until the Government goons come for them."
Government goons vs extrajudicial black sites and drone strikes...I'm not seeing much of a difference on that aspect either.
The current oldest known living person was born in 1903 (Kane Tanaka). I suppose there could theoretically be someone several years older still out there playing games on Steam, but the odds are pretty freakin slim. :)
As mentioned above, some carriers at least DO already offer such protection...but it doesn't work. The attack already relies on social engineering the call center employees to disregard policy. If you can't get them to obey the existing security policies, what are the odds that they'll obey that one?
The title is fairly accurate IMO, as the attack relies on number portability. The FCC requires providers to allow wireless numbers to be portable, but they are not required to allow you to transfer a landline number, and many carriers just won't do it. Since you're far less likely to be able to port a landline number, it's far less likely that this kind of attack would succeed.
They're still going to have experts examining each file, just to make sure they're redacting every single word that they can possibly justify redacting. Not that they're entirely wrong to do that either though -- the law does have some exemptions, and there must be reasons why those exist.
As I'm pretty sure I've already answered that concern, I think you are the one who is not understanding. The problem is absolutely about logistics. I don't care what policies they implement and have their moderators enforce; I care that they actually enforce some concrete policy instead of just taking stuff down essentially at random.
On the post: Time Magazine Explains Why Section 230 Is So Vital To Protecting Free Speech
Re:
Depends who they're kicking out, just like any other private property. I'm not coming over to your house if I hear you've been kicking out anyone you think might be homosexual, but if I hear you've been kicking out Nazis, I'll gladly come help.
It's one thing when we're talking about government censorship, where they might throw you in prison for the rest of your life if they don't like what you've said. But as long as the worst they can do is kick you off their website, I'm not sure I see the problem.
And frankly, I think this whole idea is a large part of what is wrong with our society today. Everyone acts like you just have to let jerks be jerks and you can't say anything or do anything about it. Acting like all that matters is money, and if someone is giving you money, you shouldn't care if you're serving Adolph Hitler himself. Screw morality, it's all about the profits. We collectively need to stop acting like we have to help people who are only trying to screw us over. Yes, you should let people be themselves, let them exercise their human rights, and not try to force them to do or not do something...but you also shouldn't let them force you to do or not do something that you don't agree with either. You think the KKK is going to let someone else publish an article about the benefits of diversity in their quarterly newsletter? Probably not. So why do we feel like we're required to let them publish in ours?
What's the difference, really? Is it because Twitter is a big company? Is it some perverted idea of a "duty to shareholders"? Or just an inability to distinguish between large corporations and national governments? I don't get it...
On the post: Facial Recognition Company Clearview Lied About Its Crime-Solving Power In Pitches To Law Enforcement Agencies
Re: Re: Just because its there doesn't mean you should use it
I think there is a pretty clear distinction -- Clearview isn't searching for the images online, it's searching for them on its own internal database. Which means these photos have been copied from the original location and included as part of their application, and are then being distributed to various law enforcement departments. IMO it's more like the difference between sending a link to a song on YouTube vs downloading that song and uploading it to a torrent site. In the end it could be the same people getting the same content, but one way is legal and the other is not.
On the post: Stop Blaming Algorithms For Misinformation And Threats To Democracy; The Real Problem Is Societal
Re: Re: Re: ... and guns don't kill people.
...are you implying that people wouldn't be killing each other if nobody had guns?
The gun analogy seems perfect to me. People kill each other. Some of them use guns, some of them don't. Nobody buys a gun and goes "Well, I wasn't planning on killing anyone before I bought this, but I guess I'll have to now!"
People believe awful things. Some of them get/post those awful things from/to social media, some of them don't. Nobody gets on social media and goes "Well, I wasn't a white supremacist before, but now that I've got Facebook I sure will be!"
On the post: Stop Blaming Algorithms For Misinformation And Threats To Democracy; The Real Problem Is Societal
The obvious question
I'm a bit curious about the methodology here and what precisely they're looking at.
Facebook's algorithm is obviously tuned to provide whatever will keep you on Facebook. That's profitable for them. In a sense, that's giving you what you want. But what you want in order to keep browsing Facebook is not necessarily the same as what you want in life in general. Someone with a strong enough compulsion to try to correct idiots will stay on Facebook forever if you keep feeding them posts from idiots, but that probably isn't actually how they want to spend the rest of their life. If you start from an assumption that what people want is exactly what they click and spend time viewing, then you're already measuring it wrong.
So, are the studies mentioned measuring what content people actually desire to consume, or are they measuring what content will keep people tethered to their current activity? I don't think these are the same thing, and if they're measuring the same (incorrect) value that social media optimizes for, then obviously their research would indicate that social media isn't the issue.
People can have conflicting desires. People like to be lazy; people also like the sense of fulfillment that comes from being productive. People like to eat double bacon cheeseburgers but also want to be fit and healthy. These things don't have to create desires out of nothing in order to be harmful; they can do plenty of damage simply by amplifying the parts of yourself that you'd rather suppress.
That's not to say I'm in favor of banning social media or anything, although that IS why I haven't really touched it myself in 2-3 years. In my ideal world, we'd all be using diaspora* or something, and could experiment a lot more in terms of what truly makes a good social networking platform. But if we're going to stick with these monopolistic walled gardens, there does need to be some regulation. They're looking very much like a drug to me right now, so maybe we ought to regulate them as one. Not Schedule I -- nothing should be regulated like Schedule I -- but maybe more like Advil.
On the post: Supreme Court Asked To Tell Cops That Consenting To A Search Is Not Consenting To Having Your Home Destroyed
Re:
Zero tolerance for complaints.
On the post: The 'Race To 5G' Is A Giant Pile Of Lobbyist Nonsense
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
I have software that worked perfectly fine on Windows 7 that won't run on 10, but you people think stuff from the XP era is the problem??
These days most of my Windows apps run better on Linux with Wine than any recent version of Windows...and since the days of XP I still have not seen a single piece of software that can actually be fixed with a Microsoft compatibility tool. Those things are a joke.
On the post: Comcast Says It Will Respond To Cord Cutting In 2020 With...More Price Hikes
Re: Re: The price isn't necessarily the problem
"you think cord cutting is due to a bad experience?"
You don't have cable - right?
It's absolutely about the experience. Getting buried in boxes (each with its own rental fee!) when all you want to watch are the local channels; equipment failures every few months because when they replace a defective device for one customer, they just shuffle it to another; indecipherable bills with fees on top of fees on top of fees; spending hours and hours on hold, day after day, week after week, just to get the service you're paying for; having to cancel and resubscribe every few years or your bill goes through the roof....even when it's about price, it's as much about the pricing tactics as it is about the actual dollar amount.
I have heard people talking about cutting the cord say some variation of the phrase "I don't mind paying for it, but I just don't want to deal with them anymore" nearly every time.
On the post: Comcast Says It Will Respond To Cord Cutting In 2020 With...More Price Hikes
Re:
"And here's the thing, I like the service I get through Comcast, even if there is no viable alternative. When I cancelled my Cable TV I actually increased the speed on my internet to their gigabit service."
They're fine, as long as it works. When something breaks, they won't do a thing for you though. My parents had Comcast a few years ago before they moved. One day, the internet went out. Called support, they said they didn't see any problems, and a few hours later the connection came back. The next day...the same thing happened. Day after day, for months on end, around 5pm the internet went down, and around 9pm it came back on. Finally after dozens of calls to tech support, months of back and forth with them insisting there was no issue, we finally get a tech who decides to do his freakin' job -- he looks up some log file, and says "Oh yeah, I can see in the logs that you're dropping off the network at almost the exact same time every day. That's pretty odd." Eventually scheduled a service visit to replace the modem and everything was fine. Took three months before we could convince them to actually do that though. When the tech arrived he told us that this was apparently a class of issue that was well known -- they claimed a neighbor was likely stealing cable, and the unsupported equipment was causing the signal strength to drop below what the original modem could use whenever the neighbor turned their TV on. But it literally took MONTHS to convince them that we weren't lying about the connection dying EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. and for them to just check their own logs to confirm it. And of course we got no compensation at all for the service being down during prime hours every day for months. Still had to pay full price for that garbage.
On the post: Comcast Says It Will Respond To Cord Cutting In 2020 With...More Price Hikes
Re:
$250/month???
I have never heard of a cable bill that high. My internet bill is closer to $50/month for 75megabit symmetric fiber here in RI. I think my parents pay close to $100/month for satellite TV and internet out in the middle of nowhere where satellite is the only option...
On the post: As We Get Closer And Closer To The EU Requiring ContentID Everywhere, More Abuses Of ContentID Exposed
Re: Re:
"I think it's a question of when, not if, someone builds a full youtube clone into a torrent client like tribler. At which point we'll get the full shitshow where we have to wade through tons of nazi propaganda and alt-right rhetoric without even sensible moderation or relevance filtering applied just so we can get to our silly cat videos..."
So...LBRY?
On the post: Traditional TV Enters Its Final Death Spiral
Re:
Yeah, there's one or two series that I still keep up with (The Expanse being the main one) but 99% of what I watch is probably YouTube and spinoffs (ie, Nebula, Floatplane, Patreon pages, LBRY...stuff I found through YT but now watch elsewhere). There's more stuff that I'd like to watch posted in a day than I could ever hope to actually watch. Nothing's ever out of date, nothing is ever a re-run, and when I DO tune in to something that's already halfway over (because for some odd reason, YouTube does that a lot lately), I can rewind and start where I want.
The only thing that really annoys the crap out of me is these people who still try to do live shows and scheduled premieres and stuff...just post the freakin' video and let me watch it when I want. Nothing worse than getting a notification for a live feed that looks great, only to realize it started nearly an hour ago and you'll have to wait for the recording if you actually want to have a clue what's going on anyway. But then you can't tell when it's actually been posted because YT won't give another notification if you dismiss the first one, but the first one will still say it's "live" even two days later...I just wish at least one of these other services could figure out playlists and feeds
On the post: Traditional TV Enters Its Final Death Spiral
Re: Re:
And yet they're still here getting SSL certs all the time...so how well did that work out? ;)
On the post: Researchers Scientifically Create Video Games To Benefit Cognitive Function
Re: If I might make a few suggestions
I strongly believe that you misunderstand which "body of knowledge" the dictionaries are referring to.
"This video game improves your memory" isn't part of the body of knowledge that is science. Rather, that body of knowledge contains things like "After playing this video game for m minutes, this research team observed a decrease of t seconds in performing task x for y% of subjects tested." The conclusions drawn from the study are not facts, they are not proven, they are not science. They are interpretations of science. If you want to get REALLY pedantic, I would argue that science ultimately only says that these researchers CLAIMED those results, since you can't necessarily be certain that they performed the study exactly as claimed.
Science doesn't say things like "video games improve your memory". At best, science indicates these things, within some statistical probability.
This does matter. You hear it all the time -- "Science used to say X, now it says Y", often used as a justification to ignore some inconvenient research or discovery. But the truth is that science never said X or Y, the evidence pointed towards X, then we got new evidence that started to point towards Y. Or the people interpreting the science originally screwed up. But the body of knowledge that is science itself never changed. People see it as a complete reversal of a proven fact rather than an increasingly nuanced picture, because someone told them it was a "fact" proven by "science" when it wasn't.
On the post: Uber Wins Dubious Honor Of Being First Big Tech Company To Bully A Small Nation Using Corporate Sovereignty
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
If the elected officials are so eager to screw over their constituents that they'll actually agree to something like that, then do the specific details of the implementation really matter all that much?
On the post: Bad Ideas: Raising The Arbitrary Age Of Internet Service 'Consent' To 16
Re: Re: Re:
"Yes indeed, stupid, uneducated voters do make democracy look bad, and authoritarian dictatorships look like sane and sober leadership. Until the Government goons come for them."
Government goons vs extrajudicial black sites and drone strikes...I'm not seeing much of a difference on that aspect either.
On the post: Bad Ideas: Raising The Arbitrary Age Of Internet Service 'Consent' To 16
Re: Re: Re:
"some do still exist."
[citation needed]
The current oldest known living person was born in 1903 (Kane Tanaka). I suppose there could theoretically be someone several years older still out there playing games on Steam, but the odds are pretty freakin slim. :)
On the post: Study Shows The Internet Is Hugely Vulnerable To SIM Hijacking Attacks
Re:
As mentioned above, some carriers at least DO already offer such protection...but it doesn't work. The attack already relies on social engineering the call center employees to disregard policy. If you can't get them to obey the existing security policies, what are the odds that they'll obey that one?
On the post: Study Shows The Internet Is Hugely Vulnerable To SIM Hijacking Attacks
Re: Re:
The title is fairly accurate IMO, as the attack relies on number portability. The FCC requires providers to allow wireless numbers to be portable, but they are not required to allow you to transfer a landline number, and many carriers just won't do it. Since you're far less likely to be able to port a landline number, it's far less likely that this kind of attack would succeed.
On the post: Judge Says Chicago PD Must Release Nearly 50 Years Of Misconduct Files Before The End Of This Year
Re: Re: Expense
They're still going to have experts examining each file, just to make sure they're redacting every single word that they can possibly justify redacting. Not that they're entirely wrong to do that either though -- the law does have some exemptions, and there must be reasons why those exist.
On the post: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: YouTube Says That Frank Capra's US Government WWII Propaganda Violates Community Guidelines
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
As I'm pretty sure I've already answered that concern, I think you are the one who is not understanding. The problem is absolutely about logistics. I don't care what policies they implement and have their moderators enforce; I care that they actually enforce some concrete policy instead of just taking stuff down essentially at random.
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