You're assuming they designed the site from scratch and knew everything it was doing, but it's more likely the website owner didn't know this was happening. For example, if they were using Wordpress to run their site they may have had no clue that the theme they picked used Google's web fonts. (This isn't something mentioned in theme descriptions, as it wasn't an issue before.) They may have only discovered it was doing that, and was a problem, after being sued. Then they manually edited the theme so it used self-hosted fonts instead.
This is incredibly common with most content management software on the web. Websites aren't coded from scratch much anymore, even very large companies use CMS software. (Wordpress in particular is everywhere, lots of newspapers use it.) This is basically a ticking time-bomb for websites throughout Germany and the EU. I'm glad I'm no longer running that blog hosting site I used to.
We know that Google & Facebook hire people to review reported images & videos already, and that those people have a high turnover rate and develop psychological problems because of the images they're required to view. (Not just child pornography but graphic and brutal torture, gore, etc.) Apple probably does as well for iCloud, but they'll have to hire a lot more if they go through with this.
Also it should be pointed out that most of the people hired to do this are contractors, not direct employees and don't get the nice benefits normal employees get. Often that includes them not have health insurance through the job at all, as well as being paid close to minimum wage, so they can't even afford to get psychological help to deal with the things the job requires them to view daily. This will help no children but harm a lot of adults.
I'm with you on not calling it CSAM, but child pornography's also often a misnomer as well. The NCMEC database contains a LOT of photos that are simply nudes of children not engaging in sexual activity. That's not what people think of when they hear child pornography, so renaming it to "child sexual assault material" was really uncalled for. They're deliberately trying to make it sound worse than it often is. Whenever you hear someone busted for having CP on their computer has "hundreds" or "thousands" of images, probably less than 10% of those are what people actually think of as pornographic, much less "sexual assault material."
And let's not forget they want 2D drawings banned as CP as well. Those don't involve any actual children, so no children are possibly harmed by them.
The worst parts of this are the machine-learning scanning for sexual images, and that is limited to iOS' Messages app. Teens/preteens wanting to sext without Apple's nanny-state scanning can simply use another app. Seems pretty pointless to me, as that's exactly what teens/preteens will do.
The part about scanning for CSAM is scanning against a database of known CSAM material maintained by the NCMEC. It won't flag the photo a parent takes of their toddler playing in the bath, but the fact that people are assuming it will should worry Apple. People are assuming the worst, and this is going to be a PR nightmare for them because of it.
Most people don't realize this, but that's because the vast majority of the organizations pushing for stronger and stronger laws against "CSAM"¹ have as their root goal banning all pornography of all types. They use the "think of the children" angle to make it difficult for people to push back against the laws. Then once the laws are passed, and people start believing the arguments that merely viewing "CSAM"¹ will make people rape children, they can start arguing that regular pornography must be banned as well. Because clearly, if viewing "CSAM"¹ makes people rape children, viewing adult pornography will make people rape adults.
It's insidious, because it's very hard to argue against without being labeled as pro-child-sexual-abuse. And they simply are not happy no matter how restrictive the laws get. They want 2D drawings banned as "CSAM"¹, even in cases where the characters are 18+, but have "child-like" features. They're very much like copyright extremists in that regard.
They're anti-porn zealots, who don't actually care all that much about actual children. If they did, they'd realize some of the things they insist on cause quite a bit of damage to children. Just ask the teens and preteens who've been charged with production of "CSAM"¹ for sending nude photos of themselves to another preteen/teen. Or ask any of the children who get sexually abused by a family member, while most of society is focused on "stranger danger," because that's scarier and easier to use to get bad laws passed.
¹ The above is why I dislike the term CSAM. To the NCMEC simple nude pictures of children are CSAM. Nude photos are simply not automatically child sexual abuse, as any parent who's taken a photo of their toddler in the bath can tell you. When you read an article about someone being busted for having hundreds of photos of "CSAM" on their computer, most of those are probably nude photos, not actual sexual activity. It lets them make things sound far worse than they really are.
Re: "Manabi" another sparse commenter, two nearly two years gaps
I see OOtB's still as pathetic as ever, and still as stupid and nonsensical. There's one two year gap in my comment history, another one year & four months, and a seven month gap. And I own my full comment history because I made an account, unlike troll baby here who just likes to whine and insult people as an anonymous coward. (；一_一)
It's amazing that you haven't grown up any since 2017 when I was last reading and commenting regularly. To be fair, I guess it's hard to develop when you only have two brain cells, one focused on insults and the other on whining. ( ¬‿¬)
Trying to load the tweet on Twitter gives the "This Tweet is from an account that no longer exists." error message. I'm not sure if that's her throwing the ultimate tantrum ("I'm taking my ball and going home!") or finally doing something smart. After all, it's hard to tweet your foot into your mouth when you don't have a Twitter account to tweet with.
Except encryption, forensics can recover at least some data for all those options. Not that software of course, but there are forensics companies that can take the drive and put the platters in new hardware to recover data (this will work against heat), and worst-case the platters themselves can be scanned and data fragments recovered (this will work against hammers). It's expensive, but since the chances of a huge payout if that evidence is available is very, very high, I'm sure the plaintiff's lawyers will be willing to pay for it.
The odds are the Sheriff's office has shot themselves in the foot here. A competent forensics examiner will find evidence of deliberate deletion, which will lead to the court considering all the missed evidence as against the Sheriff's office. (Due to deliberate evidence deletion.) And a competent forensics examiner will be able to recover much of that video, unless the department did a very, very thorough job of destroying it. Of course if they did manage to destroy it entirely, there's going to be evidence of that, so you're back to the court counting it against them anyway.
It's not tied to academic performance, they get additional points based on the number of credit hours they've taken toward their degrees:
The Tide Loyalty Points program works like this: Students, who typically pay about $10 for home tickets, download the app and earn 100 points for attending a home game and an additional 250 for staying until the fourth quarter. Those points augment ones they garner mostly from progress they have made toward their degrees — 100 points per credit hour. (A regular load would be 15 credits per semester, or 1,500 points.)
Staying until the fourth quarter nets you as many points as 3.5 credit hours worth of classes. (100 for attending, 250 extra for staying until the fourth quarter.) It takes an entire semester to earn those points, whereas you can get the game ones in one day. (Plus the class requires at least three hours a week of class time, as well as homework, tests, projects or papers and maybe lab time.) For students that desperately want to see the championship games, it's easy to see the draw.
I've never been a fan of football, but I was in the marching band so I've been to a lot of football games. That includes the games at The University of Tennessee, in the same conference as Alabama. I know what it's like to be at a game from beginning to end, both the good games and the bad games.
The problem isn't a lack of school spirit, or not bending to peer pressure. The real issue is that one-sided games are incredibly boring. I've been to games like that where it would have been more entertaining watching the grass being mowed. If it's clear the team's going to win easily, by the third quarter they start putting in non-starters. It's not at all unusual to have players out there in the fourth quarter that won't get another chance to play all season, because they aren't good enough to do so yet. They might become better and be a starter before they graduate, so the playtime is valuable for their development, but it's rarely interesting to watch them play at that stage.
With games like that it's not just the students who leave early, even a lot of season-ticket holders will leave early. It's simply not worth watching the insanely boring spectacle on the field when you can leave early and avoid a lot of the gridlock that happens after the game. You'll get home sooner, or get to a restaurant to have a meal before they're all packed, etc.
A competitive game between even middle school teams can be entertaining to watch, a mismatch of college teams that results in Alabama winning by 52 points... isn't.
That's what is going on here, the students are being bribed with tickets to good, exciting games in exchange for risking heat stroke to stay in the stands and being bored to death.
The article did mention that police estimate the actual users was in the tens of thousands, which sounds about right given the graphs showing numbers of posts and number of images shared. But the media will mostly run with the million accounts thing and not include that little factoid.
Nah, CBS has been pretty open that they view *Star Trek Discovery* as a gateway drug for their streaming service. They did it that way to try to drive as many signups as possible, and it sounds like it worked. (Although the fact they refused to provide any actual numbers means we should view their claims skeptically. If they had truly massive numbers of signups, they would announce the number.)
It wasn't just in the California area, but everywhere. They aired half the pilot episode, loaded it down with an absolutely obscene amount of commercials, and pushed HARD to get everyone to go signup for CBS All Access to watch the second half. The only reason they did it this way was to try to drive many signups for their streaming service. That much worked, time will tell how many people continue past the free trial.
I'm with you, we have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and pay for cable TV. I will not pay for another streaming service to watch one series. Especially one that I don't think I'm going to like based on the half the pilot I got to see.
More info came out a few days later, it's not about the game mode, it's because Epic Games also provides the game engine for PUBG.
But there’s another issue that’s potentially at the heart of this conflict: Bluehole’s fear that Epic could be making engine improvements that benefit Fortnite which won’t be shared with the PUBG team. Seeing as the two companies are now competitions, this could be a problem.
“We’re going to get some technical support [from Epic], and we’re going to work with them to make sure Unreal Engine better supports battle royale gameplay which requires 100 people in one session, and now we’re starting to have concerns that they’re going to develop new features or improve something in the engine to support that battle royale gameplay, and then use it for their own game mode,” the executive elaborated.
The other side of this is that any improvements made by Bluehole internally to Unreal Engine 4 could leak out, benefiting other studios. Bluehole is also not happy with Fortnite using the PUBG name in promo material, with Epic developers citing PUBG as inspiration for Fortnite’s mode.
“It was in their promotional video that was posted on Twitter and they would openly mention that they were fans of PUBG, we wanted to make this battle royale game mode, and that kind of gave the impression that we were officially involved in this,” he added. “[Sic] there were players like, ‘Oh it’s cool, now we get to play PUBG in Fortnite’, and there was nothing we could do about it, because it was depicted that we were officially involved.”
Bluehole's main concern seems to be that Epic is going to screw them over with the game engine now. And their secondary concern is that they felt like Epic was making it seem that that Bluehole was officially involved in Epic's battle royale mode in Fortnight.
I was working at a Wal-mart in the electronics department shortly before that transition really picked up steam. So many people would come in looking for a single for a song they wanted, only for us to have to tell them that they could only get it if they bought the whole CD. Very, very few of them opted to buy the CD. The general response was, "Well, I'll just go pirate it then." The record labels may have kept profits up a bit longer with that strategy, but it was always going to fail. People knew they were being ripped off and were sick of it. Same thing is happening now with cable TV. People know they're getting ripped off and they're sick of it. It's just a matter of when, not if, the current model collapses.
As of that video, she'd taken down 42 videos, and attempted to take down a further 30. In a later video from the same person, she'd also DMCA'd Twitch streamers.
The later video also mentions that some Youtubers are seeing strikes counterclaimed without their taking any actions. So it may be that Imagos and/or Google is working to resolve this situation.
That's exactly what they think. The idea is that growing consumption of media on smartphones and tablets via cellular connections will lead to more overages, thus increasing revenue. And if all the major telcos have limited plans with overage fees, consumers would have nowhere to flee to. Thus ensuring they stay and pay the overage fees.
That's not entirely correct. Most states allow for consensual sex among minors within a certain age range (three years is common). So the law recognizes that kids can consent *with other kids*. Just not with adults. Rape can, and is, charged for non-consensual sex between minors, even if they're inside that age range.
Unfortunately no, as then there'd have been multiple deaths: one (or more cops), Scott, and his girlfriend. She would have been killed in the hail of bullets unleashed when the cops all opened fire into the home.
The actual takeaway is: pray that a cop doesn't come to your door in the middle of the night, so that you may live to see tomorrow.
On the post: German Court Fines Site Owner For Sharing User Data With Google To Access Web Fonts
Re: Re:
You're assuming they designed the site from scratch and knew everything it was doing, but it's more likely the website owner didn't know this was happening. For example, if they were using Wordpress to run their site they may have had no clue that the theme they picked used Google's web fonts. (This isn't something mentioned in theme descriptions, as it wasn't an issue before.) They may have only discovered it was doing that, and was a problem, after being sued. Then they manually edited the theme so it used self-hosted fonts instead.
This is incredibly common with most content management software on the web. Websites aren't coded from scratch much anymore, even very large companies use CMS software. (Wordpress in particular is everywhere, lots of newspapers use it.) This is basically a ticking time-bomb for websites throughout Germany and the EU. I'm glad I'm no longer running that blog hosting site I used to.
On the post: Apple Undermines Its Famous Security 'For The Children'
Re: Re: 'Solving' a sliver by removing the arm
We know that Google & Facebook hire people to review reported images & videos already, and that those people have a high turnover rate and develop psychological problems because of the images they're required to view. (Not just child pornography but graphic and brutal torture, gore, etc.) Apple probably does as well for iCloud, but they'll have to hire a lot more if they go through with this.
Also it should be pointed out that most of the people hired to do this are contractors, not direct employees and don't get the nice benefits normal employees get. Often that includes them not have health insurance through the job at all, as well as being paid close to minimum wage, so they can't even afford to get psychological help to deal with the things the job requires them to view daily. This will help no children but harm a lot of adults.
I'm with you on not calling it CSAM, but child pornography's also often a misnomer as well. The NCMEC database contains a LOT of photos that are simply nudes of children not engaging in sexual activity. That's not what people think of when they hear child pornography, so renaming it to "child sexual assault material" was really uncalled for. They're deliberately trying to make it sound worse than it often is. Whenever you hear someone busted for having CP on their computer has "hundreds" or "thousands" of images, probably less than 10% of those are what people actually think of as pornographic, much less "sexual assault material."
And let's not forget they want 2D drawings banned as CP as well. Those don't involve any actual children, so no children are possibly harmed by them.
On the post: Apple Undermines Its Famous Security 'For The Children'
Re: Re: What about Signal?
The worst parts of this are the machine-learning scanning for sexual images, and that is limited to iOS' Messages app. Teens/preteens wanting to sext without Apple's nanny-state scanning can simply use another app. Seems pretty pointless to me, as that's exactly what teens/preteens will do.
The part about scanning for CSAM is scanning against a database of known CSAM material maintained by the NCMEC. It won't flag the photo a parent takes of their toddler playing in the bath, but the fact that people are assuming it will should worry Apple. People are assuming the worst, and this is going to be a PR nightmare for them because of it.
On the post: Apple Undermines Its Famous Security 'For The Children'
Re: Re: There it is…
Most people don't realize this, but that's because the vast majority of the organizations pushing for stronger and stronger laws against "CSAM"¹ have as their root goal banning all pornography of all types. They use the "think of the children" angle to make it difficult for people to push back against the laws. Then once the laws are passed, and people start believing the arguments that merely viewing "CSAM"¹ will make people rape children, they can start arguing that regular pornography must be banned as well. Because clearly, if viewing "CSAM"¹ makes people rape children, viewing adult pornography will make people rape adults.
It's insidious, because it's very hard to argue against without being labeled as pro-child-sexual-abuse. And they simply are not happy no matter how restrictive the laws get. They want 2D drawings banned as "CSAM"¹, even in cases where the characters are 18+, but have "child-like" features. They're very much like copyright extremists in that regard.
They're anti-porn zealots, who don't actually care all that much about actual children. If they did, they'd realize some of the things they insist on cause quite a bit of damage to children. Just ask the teens and preteens who've been charged with production of "CSAM"¹ for sending nude photos of themselves to another preteen/teen. Or ask any of the children who get sexually abused by a family member, while most of society is focused on "stranger danger," because that's scarier and easier to use to get bad laws passed.
¹ The above is why I dislike the term CSAM. To the NCMEC simple nude pictures of children are CSAM. Nude photos are simply not automatically child sexual abuse, as any parent who's taken a photo of their toddler in the bath can tell you. When you read an article about someone being busted for having hundreds of photos of "CSAM" on their computer, most of those are probably nude photos, not actual sexual activity. It lets them make things sound far worse than they really are.
On the post: CCO Of Activision Blizzard Busy Blocking Everyone, Including Employees, On Twitter Amid Fair Employment Lawsuit
Re: "Manabi" another sparse commenter, two nearly two years gaps
I see OOtB's still as pathetic as ever, and still as stupid and nonsensical. There's one two year gap in my comment history, another one year & four months, and a seven month gap. And I own my full comment history because I made an account, unlike troll baby here who just likes to whine and insult people as an anonymous coward. (；一_一)
It's amazing that you haven't grown up any since 2017 when I was last reading and commenting regularly. To be fair, I guess it's hard to develop when you only have two brain cells, one focused on insults and the other on whining. ( ¬‿¬)
On the post: CCO Of Activision Blizzard Busy Blocking Everyone, Including Employees, On Twitter Amid Fair Employment Lawsuit
Her Account's Been Deleted
Trying to load the tweet on Twitter gives the "This Tweet is from an account that no longer exists." error message. I'm not sure if that's her throwing the ultimate tantrum ("I'm taking my ball and going home!") or finally doing something smart. After all, it's hard to tweet your foot into your mouth when you don't have a Twitter account to tweet with.
On the post: Sheriff's Office That Employed A Deputy Facing 9 Lawsuits And 44 Criminal Charges Says It Has Lost All Of His Dashcam Footage
Re: Re:
Except encryption, forensics can recover at least some data for all those options. Not that software of course, but there are forensics companies that can take the drive and put the platters in new hardware to recover data (this will work against heat), and worst-case the platters themselves can be scanned and data fragments recovered (this will work against hammers). It's expensive, but since the chances of a huge payout if that evidence is available is very, very high, I'm sure the plaintiff's lawyers will be willing to pay for it.
The odds are the Sheriff's office has shot themselves in the foot here. A competent forensics examiner will find evidence of deliberate deletion, which will lead to the court considering all the missed evidence as against the Sheriff's office. (Due to deliberate evidence deletion.) And a competent forensics examiner will be able to recover much of that video, unless the department did a very, very thorough job of destroying it. Of course if they did manage to destroy it entirely, there's going to be evidence of that, so you're back to the court counting it against them anyway.
On the post: University Of Alabama Is Using A Location-Tracking App To Punish Students For Leaving Football Games Early
Re: Re:
It's not tied to academic performance, they get additional points based on the number of credit hours they've taken toward their degrees:
Staying until the fourth quarter nets you as many points as 3.5 credit hours worth of classes. (100 for attending, 250 extra for staying until the fourth quarter.) It takes an entire semester to earn those points, whereas you can get the game ones in one day. (Plus the class requires at least three hours a week of class time, as well as homework, tests, projects or papers and maybe lab time.) For students that desperately want to see the championship games, it's easy to see the draw.
On the post: University Of Alabama Is Using A Location-Tracking App To Punish Students For Leaving Football Games Early
Re:
I've never been a fan of football, but I was in the marching band so I've been to a lot of football games. That includes the games at The University of Tennessee, in the same conference as Alabama. I know what it's like to be at a game from beginning to end, both the good games and the bad games.
The problem isn't a lack of school spirit, or not bending to peer pressure. The real issue is that one-sided games are incredibly boring. I've been to games like that where it would have been more entertaining watching the grass being mowed. If it's clear the team's going to win easily, by the third quarter they start putting in non-starters. It's not at all unusual to have players out there in the fourth quarter that won't get another chance to play all season, because they aren't good enough to do so yet. They might become better and be a starter before they graduate, so the playtime is valuable for their development, but it's rarely interesting to watch them play at that stage.
With games like that it's not just the students who leave early, even a lot of season-ticket holders will leave early. It's simply not worth watching the insanely boring spectacle on the field when you can leave early and avoid a lot of the gridlock that happens after the game. You'll get home sooner, or get to a restaurant to have a meal before they're all packed, etc.
A competitive game between even middle school teams can be entertaining to watch, a mismatch of college teams that results in Alabama winning by 52 points... isn't.
That's what is going on here, the students are being bribed with tickets to good, exciting games in exchange for risking heat stroke to stay in the stands and being bored to death.
On the post: Hotel Owner Files Libel Suit Against Reviewer For Calling Nazis Nazis, Gets Support From Austrian Court
Re: Re: Well...
Someone decided to make some money off of the name, and created a Fucking Hell beer.
On the post: Australian Police Ran A Dark Web Child Porn Site For Eleven Months
Re:
On the post: As 'Star Trek: Discovery' Shows, The Streaming Exclusivity Wars Risk Driving Users Back To Piracy
Re: Re: Only first episode was aired on TV
On the post: As 'Star Trek: Discovery' Shows, The Streaming Exclusivity Wars Risk Driving Users Back To Piracy
Re: Only first episode was aired on TV
It wasn't just in the California area, but everywhere. They aired half the pilot episode, loaded it down with an absolutely obscene amount of commercials, and pushed HARD to get everyone to go signup for CBS All Access to watch the second half. The only reason they did it this way was to try to drive many signups for their streaming service. That much worked, time will tell how many people continue past the free trial.
I'm with you, we have Netflix, Amazon Prime, and pay for cable TV. I will not pay for another streaming service to watch one series. Especially one that I don't think I'm going to like based on the half the pilot I got to see.
On the post: Idea v. Expression: Game Studio Bluehole Gets Its Fur Up Over Epic Games Putting 100 Vs. 100 Player Battle Royale Into Game
It's actually not about copyright or trademark
More info came out a few days later, it's not about the game mode, it's because Epic Games also provides the game engine for PUBG.
Bluehole's main concern seems to be that Epic is going to screw them over with the game engine now. And their secondary concern is that they felt like Epic was making it seem that that Bluehole was officially involved in Epic's battle royale mode in Fortnight.
On the post: As A Streaming Future Looms, ESPN Is Damned If It Does, Damned If It Doesn't
Re: I member....
I was working at a Wal-mart in the electronics department shortly before that transition really picked up steam. So many people would come in looking for a single for a song they wanted, only for us to have to tell them that they could only get it if they bought the whole CD. Very, very few of them opted to buy the CD. The general response was, "Well, I'll just go pirate it then." The record labels may have kept profits up a bit longer with that strategy, but it was always going to fail. People knew they were being ripped off and were sick of it. Same thing is happening now with cable TV. People know they're getting ripped off and they're sick of it. It's just a matter of when, not if, the current model collapses.
On the post: Game Music Composer Goes On DMCA Blitz Against Innocent YouTubers Over Contract Dispute With Game Publisher
Re: Re: Don't forget the YouTube strike system.
Your link got lost, I think this is the one you wanted to link: https://youtu.be/5eTLpjRE8QY?t=85
As of that video, she'd taken down 42 videos, and attempted to take down a further 30. In a later video from the same person, she'd also DMCA'd Twitch streamers.
The later video also mentions that some Youtubers are seeing strikes counterclaimed without their taking any actions. So it may be that Imagos and/or Google is working to resolve this situation.
On the post: Wall Street Still Annoyed That Competition Forced Wireless Carriers To Bring Back Unlimited Data Plans
Re: Idiots...
That's exactly what they think. The idea is that growing consumption of media on smartphones and tablets via cellular connections will lead to more overages, thus increasing revenue. And if all the major telcos have limited plans with overage fees, consumers would have nowhere to flee to. Thus ensuring they stay and pay the overage fees.
No one said Wall Street was nice.
On the post: Congress 'Fixes' Child Porn 'Loophole' With 15-Year Prison Sentences For Teen Sexting
Re:
I believe this is the source article, I Googled some of the quotes to dig it up.
On the post: Congress 'Fixes' Child Porn 'Loophole' With 15-Year Prison Sentences For Teen Sexting
Re: Re: Re: Follow Common Sense Colorado
On the post: Appeals Court Says Right To Bear Arms Isn't A Right If Cops Are Banging On Your Door In The Middle Of The Night
Re:
Unfortunately no, as then there'd have been multiple deaths: one (or more cops), Scott, and his girlfriend. She would have been killed in the hail of bullets unleashed when the cops all opened fire into the home.
The actual takeaway is: pray that a cop doesn't come to your door in the middle of the night, so that you may live to see tomorrow.
Next >>