As it stands, law prohibits any one broadcaster from reaching more than 38% of U.S. homes, a rule designed to protect local reporting, competition and opinion diversity from monopoly power. The Sinclair deal would have given the company ownership of more than 230 stations, extending its reach to 72% of U.S. households.
I still don't see how this makes any sense. Who cares if one brodacaster can reach more than 38% of US homes? That doesn't make them a monopolist; being the only broadcaster would make them a monopolist, which isn't happening.
I say, let Sinclair reach 100% of US homes, and let all the other broadcasters do so as well! As Techdirt has said several times in the past, the correct response to bad speech is more, better speech, not censorship and restrictions on speech.
No, I don't mean "historically up to the late 1700s", I mean "historically up to late 20th century, when the World Wide Web came about." It's been that transformative in that short a space of time.
I’m Jewish, and there’s a set of people who deny that the Holocaust happened.
I find that deeply offensive. But at the end of the day, I don’t believe that our platform should take that down because I think there are things that different people get wrong. I don’t think that they’re intentionally getting it wrong, but I think... it’s hard to impugn intent and to understand the intent. I just think, as abhorrent as some of those examples are, I think the reality is also that I get things wrong when I speak publicly. I’m sure you do. I’m sure a lot of leaders and public figures we respect do too, and I just don’t think that it is the right thing to say, “We’re going to take someone off the platform if they get things wrong, even multiple times.”
So far, so good. Then he went back on this and took the stuff down anyway.
It's been said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Here's a bit of history that hasn't been all that widely studied, that we're currently in the early stages of repeating: hate speech laws from a century ago.
It might be surprising to learn that Weimar Germany had very strong, very modern laws against hate speech, and one of the strongest beneficiaries of those laws were the Jews. They used them to fight back against very real discrimination in their day, and the courts did "the right thing" the vast majority of the time.
One frequent target of such laws was a hate-filled guy by the name of Adolf Hitler. He ended up getting smacked down for his serial offenses so much that he eventually got injunctions against him, preventing him from holding further rallies. ("Deplatformed," to use the modern parlance.) Well, that went over perfectly and we never heard from that troublemaker again... right?
Oh, wait, no. That's not what happened at all. It made a martyr out of him. The Nazis were able to point to the way he was being censored and use it as a rallying cry, which ended up being massively successful and we all know where that led.
So yes, there is a massive ethical problem with allowing people to be censored from the modern-day public square, and the fundamental problems involved do not change one whit if those doing so are private rather than state actors. With great power comes great responsibility, and when you become powerful enough to do things that historically only governments were capable of doing, the restraints that we have historically placed upon governments must be applied as well.
How would that work with cel phone voting if the authorities had to verify each voter cast only one ballot, even electronic.
About the same way as it currently works, except that verifying the electronic side is much easier as there are no questions of poor handwriting to deal with.
But that doesn't even address the myriad problems with the integrity of mail-in ballots. Going back to the original quote:
"Mobile voting is a horrific idea," Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told CNN in an email. "It's internet voting on people's horribly secured devices, over our horrible networks, to servers that are very difficult to secure without a physical paper record of the vote."
Hall mentions three security vulnerabilities:
1) the ballot itself on an insecure device,
2) the network over which the vote is sent,
3) the server where it's counted.
With a mail-in ballot:
1) in many cases the ballot is mailed to you, and can be intercepted
2) the ballot is filled out insecurely. (Just imagine how trivial it would be if an abusive husband wanted to steal his wife's vote, just for starters.)
3) the ballot is submitted by mail, where it could be intercepted
4) the ballot may not end up getting counted for various reasons, as noted above
So why do we think that this is a good idea again?
"Mobile voting is a horrific idea," Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told CNN in an email. "It's internet voting on people's horribly secured devices, over our horrible networks, to servers that are very difficult to secure without a physical paper record of the vote."
I can't help but wonder what his opinion of absentee ballots (voting by mail) is. Direct analogues of all those same criticisms apply, but so many people seem to think it's an amazing, awesome thing that's good for democracy...
One of the most fundamental rules of security is Kerckhoffs's principle: "[assume that] the enemy knows the system." It states that a system must be secure even if the entire design (source code, in the case of software) is in the hands of the adversary, and for this to happen, the only part of the system that needs to be kept secret is the cryptographic key.
Kerckhoff's principle tells us that any system that can't be considered secure if everything but the key is publicly known cannot be considered secure, period. Therefore, if any vendor claims that letting the public look at their source code could compromise their product's security, your default assumption should be to consider their product compromised already.
When the reductio ad absurdum has become the real-life example,
What does that even mean? Because this case has nothing to do with the principle of reductio ad absurdum, which is a logical technique to prove that something must be false by demonstrating that if it were true, an absurdity (logical contradiction) would occur.
Evidence for the necessity of DMCA repeal continues to mount. As long as it's on the books, publishing interests will continue doing this simply because they can. The only real way to fix this is to make it so they no longer can.
When I discussed this on Twitter recently, a bunch of people responded angrily that Assange deserves to be in jail because of his role in the 2016 election.
How many pointed out that he deserves to be in prison because of his sexual assaults?
> We can disagree with Zuckerberg's positions/ideas/policies, but your summary is complete and utter bullshit. I think Zuck is not very perceptive, but to argue he is a sociopath is ridiculous.
Why? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
> He's built something where he's in way over his head.
Maybe, but he didn't get there by accident.
> That does not make him evil or a sociopath.
No, but his consistent track record of deliberate actions and expressed attitudes towards those who call him on them do.
It would be a mistake to put the printing press on the same level as Facebook. Despite a few superficial similarities, they could not have sprung from more different origins.
Gutenberg was a benevolent person who wanted to use his invention for the enlightenment of his fellow man, as evidenced by his choice to print Bibles and make them more widely available to the general public. (And if anyone wishes to take issue with this statement, remember the context of time; it makes no sense to judge someone hundreds of years ago by the cultural context of 2018.)
Zuckerberg, on the other hand, is a sociopath who has never bothered to make more than the barest pretenses of not being evil; Facebook is all about private surveillance, gathering data on its users and finding ways to profit off of that data. Mike may not like the phrase "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product," but in this particular case it could not be more accurate!
Also, I was amused by this bit from the podcast:
As the historian Nile Ferguson argues in his book The Square and the Tower: The invention of movable type printing and the unleashing of what is known as the Gutenberg Revolution, created social networks in which two sides countered each other with misinformation (fake news, as we would have it now), the vicious abuse, and (as in our time) all without supervision or a locus of recognizable authority. A free-for-all raging outside of what had previously been structured hierarchies. Because anyone could use the invention, all kinds of bad actors and malevolent hustlers did use it.
Yeah, it was quite a mess, and governments of the day recognized it fairly quickly and intervened to keep the ugliness down. After a few false starts, they came up with a system that worked remarkably well at keeping publishing abuses in check for close to 300 years, until the 1970s when publishers finally started to get the upper hand, perverting the laws and turning them inside out.
That system was copyright. It won't be the solution to the current problems, because social media was invented anyway under the copyright regime, but it does give rise to hope that the problem can be managed with proper regulation and channeled into something positive and good for humanity, as the printing problem was.
On the post: Tribune Kills Merger, Sues Sinclair For Its 'Unnecessarily Aggressive' Merger Sales Pitch
Re: Re:
On the post: Tribune Kills Merger, Sues Sinclair For Its 'Unnecessarily Aggressive' Merger Sales Pitch
I still don't see how this makes any sense. Who cares if one brodacaster can reach more than 38% of US homes? That doesn't make them a monopolist; being the only broadcaster would make them a monopolist, which isn't happening.
I say, let Sinclair reach 100% of US homes, and let all the other broadcasters do so as well! As Techdirt has said several times in the past, the correct response to bad speech is more, better speech, not censorship and restrictions on speech.
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Re: Re: Small point of contention here, but...
Mostly just confusion, TBH.
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
Re: Small point of contention here, but...
On the post: Platforms, Speech And Truth: Policy, Policing And Impossible Choices
So Zuckerberg said:
So far, so good. Then he went back on this and took the stuff down anyway.
It's been said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Here's a bit of history that hasn't been all that widely studied, that we're currently in the early stages of repeating: hate speech laws from a century ago.
It might be surprising to learn that Weimar Germany had very strong, very modern laws against hate speech, and one of the strongest beneficiaries of those laws were the Jews. They used them to fight back against very real discrimination in their day, and the courts did "the right thing" the vast majority of the time.
One frequent target of such laws was a hate-filled guy by the name of Adolf Hitler. He ended up getting smacked down for his serial offenses so much that he eventually got injunctions against him, preventing him from holding further rallies. ("Deplatformed," to use the modern parlance.) Well, that went over perfectly and we never heard from that troublemaker again... right?
Oh, wait, no. That's not what happened at all. It made a martyr out of him. The Nazis were able to point to the way he was being censored and use it as a rallying cry, which ended up being massively successful and we all know where that led.
So yes, there is a massive ethical problem with allowing people to be censored from the modern-day public square, and the fundamental problems involved do not change one whit if those doing so are private rather than state actors. With great power comes great responsibility, and when you become powerful enough to do things that historically only governments were capable of doing, the restraints that we have historically placed upon governments must be applied as well.
On the post: Voting By Cell Phone Is A Terrible Idea, And West Virginia Is Probably The Last State That Should Try It Anyway
Re: Re:
About the same way as it currently works, except that verifying the electronic side is much easier as there are no questions of poor handwriting to deal with.
But that doesn't even address the myriad problems with the integrity of mail-in ballots. Going back to the original quote:
Hall mentions three security vulnerabilities: 1) the ballot itself on an insecure device, 2) the network over which the vote is sent, 3) the server where it's counted.
With a mail-in ballot:
1) in many cases the ballot is mailed to you, and can be intercepted 2) the ballot is filled out insecurely. (Just imagine how trivial it would be if an abusive husband wanted to steal his wife's vote, just for starters.) 3) the ballot is submitted by mail, where it could be intercepted 4) the ballot may not end up getting counted for various reasons, as noted above
So why do we think that this is a good idea again?
On the post: Voting By Cell Phone Is A Terrible Idea, And West Virginia Is Probably The Last State That Should Try It Anyway
I can't help but wonder what his opinion of absentee ballots (voting by mail) is. Direct analogues of all those same criticisms apply, but so many people seem to think it's an amazing, awesome thing that's good for democracy...
On the post: Bill Says US Tech Companies Must Let The Feds Know When Foreign Companies Poke Around In Their Source Code
Or we could just apply Kerckhoffs's principle
One of the most fundamental rules of security is Kerckhoffs's principle: "[assume that] the enemy knows the system." It states that a system must be secure even if the entire design (source code, in the case of software) is in the hands of the adversary, and for this to happen, the only part of the system that needs to be kept secret is the cryptographic key.
Kerckhoff's principle tells us that any system that can't be considered secure if everything but the key is publicly known cannot be considered secure, period. Therefore, if any vendor claims that letting the public look at their source code could compromise their product's security, your default assumption should be to consider their product compromised already.
On the post: As 'DNC Hacked Itself' Conspiracy Theory Collapses, Key Backer Of Claim Exposed As UK Troll
Re: Re: Re: I'm sort of irritated at all those anti-DNC trolls
On the post: Report: TSA's Ground-Based VIPR Teams Are Expensive, Quite Possibly Useless
Re:
On the post: Indian Court Grants PepsiCo's Takedown Request Targeting Thousands Of 'Disparaging' Social Media Posts
Re: Re: Yeah, what are they doing stating hard physical FACT?
Try "exposing to fire" a bunch of soda, and see how well it burns...
On the post: Universal Retracts DMCA On Journalist Video Of Prince Fans Singing Purple Rain
What does that even mean? Because this case has nothing to do with the principle of reductio ad absurdum, which is a logical technique to prove that something must be false by demonstrating that if it were true, an absurdity (logical contradiction) would occur.
On the post: Charter CEO Apparently Unaware He Runs One Of The Most Despised Companies In America
Re: Re: ISPs
On the post: Indian Court Grants PepsiCo's Takedown Request Targeting Thousands Of 'Disparaging' Social Media Posts
This from a company whose principal product is sugar (carbohydrate) laden soda?
On the post: Universal Right Back At It Issuing A DMCA For A Reporter's Video Of Prince Fans Singing 'Purple Rain'
Evidence for the necessity of DMCA repeal continues to mount. As long as it's on the books, publishing interests will continue doing this simply because they can. The only real way to fix this is to make it so they no longer can.
On the post: No Matter What You Think Of Julian Assange, It Would Be Harmful For Press Freedoms For The US To Prosecute For Publishing Leaks
How many pointed out that he deserves to be in prison because of his sexual assaults?
On the post: Listen To Stephen Fry Perfectly Analogize The Moral Panics Around Facebook To The Ones Over The Printing Press
Re: Re: Beware of false equivalence
Why? If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
> He's built something where he's in way over his head.
Maybe, but he didn't get there by accident.
> That does not make him evil or a sociopath.
No, but his consistent track record of deliberate actions and expressed attitudes towards those who call him on them do.
On the post: Listen To Stephen Fry Perfectly Analogize The Moral Panics Around Facebook To The Ones Over The Printing Press
Beware of false equivalence
It would be a mistake to put the printing press on the same level as Facebook. Despite a few superficial similarities, they could not have sprung from more different origins.
Gutenberg was a benevolent person who wanted to use his invention for the enlightenment of his fellow man, as evidenced by his choice to print Bibles and make them more widely available to the general public. (And if anyone wishes to take issue with this statement, remember the context of time; it makes no sense to judge someone hundreds of years ago by the cultural context of 2018.)
Zuckerberg, on the other hand, is a sociopath who has never bothered to make more than the barest pretenses of not being evil; Facebook is all about private surveillance, gathering data on its users and finding ways to profit off of that data. Mike may not like the phrase "if you're not paying for the product, you are the product," but in this particular case it could not be more accurate!
Also, I was amused by this bit from the podcast:
Yeah, it was quite a mess, and governments of the day recognized it fairly quickly and intervened to keep the ugliness down. After a few false starts, they came up with a system that worked remarkably well at keeping publishing abuses in check for close to 300 years, until the 1970s when publishers finally started to get the upper hand, perverting the laws and turning them inside out.
That system was copyright. It won't be the solution to the current problems, because social media was invented anyway under the copyright regime, but it does give rise to hope that the problem can be managed with proper regulation and channeled into something positive and good for humanity, as the printing problem was.
On the post: Appeals Court Tells Lower Court To Consider If Standards 'Incorporated Into Law' Are Fair Use; Could Have Done More
Yes.
That they'd be done more in the open, which is a good thing for everyone involved, except the parasites of course.
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