I definitely DO NOT want more enforced speech laws. As a EU denizern, I already have to suffer the "right to be forgotten" laws ( aka "everyone is forced to forget something in your behalf" laws, if you put it in the active voice ), thank you.
But if somene skirts your TOS without actually breaking it, that is the sign you have a TOS that is a bad fit to the situation in hand ( in that I agree with the article ) and that you need a new one along with by the book enforcing no matter who the user is or is not ...
Well, my take on the issue was pretty much that, given that Trump tweets were considered, like you said, a kind of governemental communication ( IMHO wrongly ), Twitter legal teams reasoned that any ban on Trump account while he was a elected official could be seen as a block attempt in the molds that were judged against and decided to not try their luck. Sure, they could win a hypotetical case of Twitter vs Trump ... or not.
About the National Archives archiving tweets ... well, if those tweets are govermental communications, they should ( in fact most probably they are required to ) archive them. But I assume that neither Twitter ( they definitely do not like third parties archiving tweets , someting that was already discussed here in Techdirt ) or the National Archives would like that ...
Well, they do give themselves a lot of latitude in regarding how to justify a ban ( like all social media to be honest ), but they do mention some specifics , like racial profiling, direct incitation to violence, commiting crimes using the plataform and so on. Those would be hard to argue against, especially with digital proof in hand.
Other stuff ... well , in theory they can ban you for existing if they find your existence a nuisance. But they know that vague wording in theory could be turned against them if someone with resources and patience actually chalenges them legally ( something that could open nasty precents or lead to less favourable laws ), so they tend to stick to the explicitely mentioned stuff.
Well, do not include me in those "people" . IMHO Trump should had been banned long ago along with a lot of people that apparently can't have a civil conversation like the one we're having here and start spewing various stuff that Twitter already has in their TOS as bannable offenses for ages.
And yet, Twitter is full of people that make violating the Twitter TOS a way of ( digitally ) living, IMHO Trump included. All of those people are receiving that "special treatment". And yet, some argue for even more "flexible" aproaches to the issue and even laud all the "special treatment" Trump continues to have from Twitter ( this time in a diferent direction, but still "special" ) as a good thing ...
Special Treatment is special treatment, period. And you don't fix bad special treatment with even more special treatment. You fix it with fairness ... and you can't be fair while playing by ear in terms of rules.
Sure, moderation is hard ( haven't said that before? ) and mods fail ( heavens know how much ), but you know what you do when new rules are needed ? You write new rules ... or in this case make a new TOS and then apply those rules from that point on. It will be not perfect, but then you are not opening yourself so much to accusations of uneveness , just of being a rule nazi, that in this context is a lesser evil. Twitter disagres with that, given their past history of less that TOS-based decisions ( like the whole blue checkmarks thing years ago I mentioned before ) ... and they are wrong ( IMHO ) atleast from a moderation stand.
On the legal Trump thing, while Twitter in theory could had banned Trump anyway, it could be construed in court that banning Trump would automatically remove access to his past tweets in the way a live account has and thus putting Twitter in violation of the order in question. So, while you're technically right, Twitter probably saw that they would probably be in legal hot water and opening precedents they would prefer to keep shut if they actually banned Trump while he was president with a ruling like that in top of them ( just think on the mess it would be trying to balance this and EU laws ( the dreaded "right to be forgotten" ) , for a example ). Like I said, I disagree with the judicial decision anyway , but I can understand why Twitter did not want to go that way.
And you're probably right: Trump most likely should had been banned from Twitter in 2016 based on his Twitter TOS rules ... let's call it skirting, to be charitable. Alongside with a LOT of other people from a lot of sides of the internet that clearly have a bone with other groups and that come to Twitter to vent hate and threats not only in 2016.
Now make yourself a question: why Twitter did not apply their own TOS and banned Trump and all those hateful people ( from both sides of the polical aisle, because no group of humans is made fully of saints )? The awnser about Trump was public : there was a judicial order to not do so ( one that I disagree, BTW ... the Presidency should probably have a unbannable Twitter ( public interest and such ), the person that is President not IMHO ) ... but what about all the others?
Whatever awnser you come about that, Twitter does not appear in a good light. I know, moderation is hard ( been a mod in some fora in another lifetime ) and mass moderation is even harder, but the last thing you want to appear in this kind of situations is unfair, facetious and that you only apply rules selctively or when they are convenient ( that BTW is what the autor of this article is consciously or not defending ). Nothing erodes confidence in that moderation faster than that ... and Twitter is definitely not doing a stellar work in that.
Yup, if people had banned anyone by violating their TOS, they would be right. No matter if conservative, liberal or martian . In fact I would argue they should had banned a lot of people from both sides of political spectrum already, along with a lot of less politcally affiliated people. You might argue that it would not be good for business, but that is another question entirely ...
What I'm pointing out is that if you start NOT applying your own rules ( that your legal team surely spent quite a lot of time composing ) and ban/ not ban people based on something besides your own TOS ... well, you open yourself to justified criticism. And this regardless of the banned people actually deserving or not to banned ... that TBH Trump deserved a long time ago ( IMHO ) given his repeated skirting of the Twitter TOS rules.
Worse, if you start doing what is advised in the article and argue that every case is a case, that is just a polite way of saying that rules are made to be ... malleable and just applied when it is convenient to whoever has that power at the moment. And that is not much of rule, isn't it?
P.S. Again, not defending Trump ( not American, couldn't care less for American politics, and definitely not a Trump fan ). Just pointing out that Twitter is acting in a way that if the recipient was not named Trump, there would be more outraged people around here and most likely not a article defending this action in this mold.
Twitter is not wrong in banning Trump ( their plataform, their choice ). But it has skirted their own rules for #reasons ( justified or not ) so many times that adding one "play by ear" decision will surely not make them look more fair.
No, I do not believe that the government should have the right to do what you say.
The issue is that Twitter, while having all the right to have their TOS in the way they like, has been less than stellar following their own rules at times and, in the specific case of Trump, are literally playing by ear ( like the article above states ). Sure, they are entitled to do so, but it does not give a good look to them and definitely does not make them look even handed.
Well, for starters, I couldn't care less for Trump ( not an American , for starters ) and his Twitting antics, but IMHO it is clear that Twitter, while most likely having justified reasons to not wanting Trump in their platform, has been sleazy enough in the last years with their actions to make some people reticent about out of the rulebook actions.
Say, some of you might remember ( Mike will for sure since this issue was covered in here ) when Twitter started making games with their blue checkmarks and removing them of some "undesirables" while stating in their TOS that blue checkmarks were just a confirmation that that account was of the person it was passing to be ( and not some impersonator ) and NOT an endorsement ... and how the issue got so muddled that Twitter have put the whole process of awarding those checkmarks on ice for quite a while. That and other issues really do not paint Twitter as exactly evenhanded, even if they were acting as fairly as they could ( and for sure some think they weren't, otherwise this wouldn't have been a issue in the first place ).
Sure, and back to the article above, every case is a case, but a rule with an exception for every case is not a rule, is at best a statement of intentions, at worse a velvet glove to diguise the iron hand of self interest of whoever is ruling those cases ... and neither of them is a good thing. There is a reason why laws are impersonal, after all, and it would be of good tone of Twitter ( and Facebook, as it was also mentioned ) if they followed that example for their own good ... it would save them of trying to be the conscience of those who have none.
Anyway, good for Github for sending RIAA to eat grass.
Bad for Github for having folded in the first place. Seriously, any reasonable human would know that RIAA was bluffing as high as high comes and still the default position was to fold back and trash the youtube-dl devs.
The issue that made the teams and leagues to acept ESPN and similar entities in other countries behaviour was always the high entry cost and high running costs of maintaning the recording and broadcast equipement and specialized personnel. It was simply cheaper to any team to just make a contract waiving the broadcast rights for a couple of years to ESPN and receive some cash in front than buying the extremely expensive equipment, hire the necessary personnel to install and mantain it and hiring the cameramen + editor team necessary ... and even more, how would they deliver it to the fans homes?
Today ... well, we don't have a lack of streaming sites and the costs to mount a streaming infrastructure are much more managable ( the 10-15k in materials figure I launched above was the estimate I gave a church last year for a fully robotized 4 camera streaming solution ... ). If you, as a team, would receive peanuts from ESPN ( or similar ) because they would only transmit a game or two of yours, even streaming to youtube and getting the paultry ads revenue from it might be a more atractive proposition ;)
Awnsering your question, a NDI-Hx ( basically a bidirectional video-over-internet data protocol ... it also includes metadata, so it can be used to control robotics and the cameras themselves ) 1080p 60fps video stream will typically use 50-100 Mbps . Sure , it is somewhat compressed ,but the streaming sites will compress much worse ( a typical Youtube stream will output near 4 Mbps for the same 1080p 60fps video input ), so that is not a issue.
If you have a Gigabit router and a minimally decent upload speed on site ( youtube will ingest 4 Mbps in average for a 1080p 60fps video stream, like I said above, so having 10 Mbps upload is enough if stable ) , it is very doable to just get some cameras with NDI inside, a decent laptop with OBS, some ethernet cable ( because wired internet is always more stable ) and just stream a game, ESPN be damned.
I would argue that, in a lot of sports, the teams already started cord cutting themselves by streaming their games in more or less generic streaming plataforms , starting by the amateur and lower leagues teams ( that were always the great losers of any negotiation about broadcast rights of sports, especially in sports where the rights are sold in bulk by a Big League ). Just go to, let's say, youtube , and browse your sport of choice. You'll see a lot of stream recordings and, if you do some searching, you'll notice that the quantity of those streams have been increasing over the last 2-3 years ( minus 2020, because ... 2020 )
In the end it is just a classic case of lowering costs opening the game to the excluded. I remember the stories that my father, a telecoms engineer, used to tell me of the weeks of grunt work he had to do every year to install infrastructure to cover the F1 Grand Prix in my contry in the 80's and 90's ( it involved the instalation of tons of extra cables for cameras, comms and such ). Nowadays ... you could do a decent quality cover of a, let's say, soccer game or similar with 4 cameras ( not necessary with cameramen attached, given the cheaper robotization options ), 300m of network cable, a computer and a live editor, 10-15k $ of investment in material and some extra in manpower.
It is just orders of magnitude cheaper to stream a event nowadays and it is clear than the ones that were getting the short side of the stick in the big networks sport channels deals are increasingly opting to simply stream themselves their team events. If this trend continues, it will be not just people being less interested in getting those bulk sports channels, but there will be more teams just jumping out of those to self-streaming their teams ... not only less costumers, but also less content to sell. No exactly a winning proposition, if you ask me ...
Killing the messenger does not kill the message ;)
Well, the title says it all. I mean, people didn't revolted against any governement before the internet, so blocking it should stop them, right? RIGHT? ;)
P.S Better say that the above is sarcasm, in case some tinpot dictator thinks I'm serious ...
Re: How bad is this design? ..... It's Bad, with a capital B ;)
That is exactly how I made my own timed things in my home network ( not animal feeders ... I think I can spare 30s of my life to my pets, thank you ). Stuff follows previous orders until ordered to change. And, from a technical point of view, there is scarcely a reason to make this kinds of timed actions completely dependent of outside signals.
To make things worse, most likely their feeder's brain is most likely a cheap custom-brew Android phone ( or maybe even a Arduino or Raspberry Pi equivalent ), that could cope with that easily ... a company that has a week long server shutdown is not the kind of company that hires competent embebbed systems engineers and uses transient memory devices :P
This story reminds me of a certain Austrian-born German that, when it had enough power , started to burn books, films and newspapers because they were incompatible with the "German" values as he saw them...
What was he called? Oh , I remember .... it was ...
[ Due to fears of demonetization, the rest of the post was redacted. Apologies in advance ]
Well, first of all, I couldn't care less of which of the parts is more guilty .. in real life most of the times no one is completely innocent ( in one hand we have a unsavory commedian, on the other some unsavory people that took offense on the unsavory commedian ... Black pot, black kettle )
That said, Youtube could had kept away of all of this mess and do nothing, but then someone would accuse the company of not being "advertisement friendly" and of enabling/promoting "toxic" behaviour ... and because Youtube, when the rubber hits the tarmac, cares above all about who pays the bills, SOMETHING had to be done, even if idiotic.
I really miss the times when Youtube wasn't trying to be the conscience of the ones with none, TBH ...
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re:
I definitely DO NOT want more enforced speech laws. As a EU denizern, I already have to suffer the "right to be forgotten" laws ( aka "everyone is forced to forget something in your behalf" laws, if you put it in the active voice ), thank you.
But if somene skirts your TOS without actually breaking it, that is the sign you have a TOS that is a bad fit to the situation in hand ( in that I agree with the article ) and that you need a new one along with by the book enforcing no matter who the user is or is not ...
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re:
Well, my take on the issue was pretty much that, given that Trump tweets were considered, like you said, a kind of governemental communication ( IMHO wrongly ), Twitter legal teams reasoned that any ban on Trump account while he was a elected official could be seen as a block attempt in the molds that were judged against and decided to not try their luck. Sure, they could win a hypotetical case of Twitter vs Trump ... or not.
About the National Archives archiving tweets ... well, if those tweets are govermental communications, they should ( in fact most probably they are required to ) archive them. But I assume that neither Twitter ( they definitely do not like third parties archiving tweets , someting that was already discussed here in Techdirt ) or the National Archives would like that ...
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Re: Re: Re: Mixed feelings ...
Well, they do give themselves a lot of latitude in regarding how to justify a ban ( like all social media to be honest ), but they do mention some specifics , like racial profiling, direct incitation to violence, commiting crimes using the plataform and so on. Those would be hard to argue against, especially with digital proof in hand.
Other stuff ... well , in theory they can ban you for existing if they find your existence a nuisance. But they know that vague wording in theory could be turned against them if someone with resources and patience actually chalenges them legally ( something that could open nasty precents or lead to less favourable laws ), so they tend to stick to the explicitely mentioned stuff.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re:
Well, do not include me in those "people" . IMHO Trump should had been banned long ago along with a lot of people that apparently can't have a civil conversation like the one we're having here and start spewing various stuff that Twitter already has in their TOS as bannable offenses for ages.
And yet, Twitter is full of people that make violating the Twitter TOS a way of ( digitally ) living, IMHO Trump included. All of those people are receiving that "special treatment". And yet, some argue for even more "flexible" aproaches to the issue and even laud all the "special treatment" Trump continues to have from Twitter ( this time in a diferent direction, but still "special" ) as a good thing ...
Special Treatment is special treatment, period. And you don't fix bad special treatment with even more special treatment. You fix it with fairness ... and you can't be fair while playing by ear in terms of rules.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re:
Sure, moderation is hard ( haven't said that before? ) and mods fail ( heavens know how much ), but you know what you do when new rules are needed ? You write new rules ... or in this case make a new TOS and then apply those rules from that point on. It will be not perfect, but then you are not opening yourself so much to accusations of uneveness , just of being a rule nazi, that in this context is a lesser evil. Twitter disagres with that, given their past history of less that TOS-based decisions ( like the whole blue checkmarks thing years ago I mentioned before ) ... and they are wrong ( IMHO ) atleast from a moderation stand.
On the legal Trump thing, while Twitter in theory could had banned Trump anyway, it could be construed in court that banning Trump would automatically remove access to his past tweets in the way a live account has and thus putting Twitter in violation of the order in question. So, while you're technically right, Twitter probably saw that they would probably be in legal hot water and opening precedents they would prefer to keep shut if they actually banned Trump while he was president with a ruling like that in top of them ( just think on the mess it would be trying to balance this and EU laws ( the dreaded "right to be forgotten" ) , for a example ). Like I said, I disagree with the judicial decision anyway , but I can understand why Twitter did not want to go that way.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Re: Re:
And you're probably right: Trump most likely should had been banned from Twitter in 2016 based on his Twitter TOS rules ... let's call it skirting, to be charitable. Alongside with a LOT of other people from a lot of sides of the internet that clearly have a bone with other groups and that come to Twitter to vent hate and threats not only in 2016.
Now make yourself a question: why Twitter did not apply their own TOS and banned Trump and all those hateful people ( from both sides of the polical aisle, because no group of humans is made fully of saints )? The awnser about Trump was public : there was a judicial order to not do so ( one that I disagree, BTW ... the Presidency should probably have a unbannable Twitter ( public interest and such ), the person that is President not IMHO ) ... but what about all the others?
Whatever awnser you come about that, Twitter does not appear in a good light. I know, moderation is hard ( been a mod in some fora in another lifetime ) and mass moderation is even harder, but the last thing you want to appear in this kind of situations is unfair, facetious and that you only apply rules selctively or when they are convenient ( that BTW is what the autor of this article is consciously or not defending ). Nothing erodes confidence in that moderation faster than that ... and Twitter is definitely not doing a stellar work in that.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re:
Yup, if people had banned anyone by violating their TOS, they would be right. No matter if conservative, liberal or martian . In fact I would argue they should had banned a lot of people from both sides of political spectrum already, along with a lot of less politcally affiliated people. You might argue that it would not be good for business, but that is another question entirely ...
What I'm pointing out is that if you start NOT applying your own rules ( that your legal team surely spent quite a lot of time composing ) and ban/ not ban people based on something besides your own TOS ... well, you open yourself to justified criticism. And this regardless of the banned people actually deserving or not to banned ... that TBH Trump deserved a long time ago ( IMHO ) given his repeated skirting of the Twitter TOS rules.
Worse, if you start doing what is advised in the article and argue that every case is a case, that is just a polite way of saying that rules are made to be ... malleable and just applied when it is convenient to whoever has that power at the moment. And that is not much of rule, isn't it?
P.S. Again, not defending Trump ( not American, couldn't care less for American politics, and definitely not a Trump fan ). Just pointing out that Twitter is acting in a way that if the recipient was not named Trump, there would be more outraged people around here and most likely not a article defending this action in this mold.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re: Re: Mixed feelings ...
Ok, let me give you a TL:DR
Twitter is not wrong in banning Trump ( their plataform, their choice ). But it has skirted their own rules for #reasons ( justified or not ) so many times that adding one "play by ear" decision will surely not make them look more fair.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Re:
No, I do not believe that the government should have the right to do what you say.
The issue is that Twitter, while having all the right to have their TOS in the way they like, has been less than stellar following their own rules at times and, in the specific case of Trump, are literally playing by ear ( like the article above states ). Sure, they are entitled to do so, but it does not give a good look to them and definitely does not make them look even handed.
On the post: Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter
Mixed feelings ...
Well, for starters, I couldn't care less for Trump ( not an American , for starters ) and his Twitting antics, but IMHO it is clear that Twitter, while most likely having justified reasons to not wanting Trump in their platform, has been sleazy enough in the last years with their actions to make some people reticent about out of the rulebook actions.
Say, some of you might remember ( Mike will for sure since this issue was covered in here ) when Twitter started making games with their blue checkmarks and removing them of some "undesirables" while stating in their TOS that blue checkmarks were just a confirmation that that account was of the person it was passing to be ( and not some impersonator ) and NOT an endorsement ... and how the issue got so muddled that Twitter have put the whole process of awarding those checkmarks on ice for quite a while. That and other issues really do not paint Twitter as exactly evenhanded, even if they were acting as fairly as they could ( and for sure some think they weren't, otherwise this wouldn't have been a issue in the first place ).
Sure, and back to the article above, every case is a case, but a rule with an exception for every case is not a rule, is at best a statement of intentions, at worse a velvet glove to diguise the iron hand of self interest of whoever is ruling those cases ... and neither of them is a good thing. There is a reason why laws are impersonal, after all, and it would be of good tone of Twitter ( and Facebook, as it was also mentioned ) if they followed that example for their own good ... it would save them of trying to be the conscience of those who have none.
On the post: GitHub, EFF Push Back Against RIAA, Reinstate Youtube-dl Repository
Re: Mixed feelings ...
Ok, pressed enter too much...
Anyway, good for Github for sending RIAA to eat grass.
Bad for Github for having folded in the first place. Seriously, any reasonable human would know that RIAA was bluffing as high as high comes and still the default position was to fold back and trash the youtube-dl devs.
On the post: GitHub, EFF Push Back Against RIAA, Reinstate Youtube-dl Repository
Mixed feelings ...
On the post: Cord Cutting Has Utterly Exploded During the Covid Crisis
Re: Re: On the matter of sport channels ...
The issue that made the teams and leagues to acept ESPN and similar entities in other countries behaviour was always the high entry cost and high running costs of maintaning the recording and broadcast equipement and specialized personnel. It was simply cheaper to any team to just make a contract waiving the broadcast rights for a couple of years to ESPN and receive some cash in front than buying the extremely expensive equipment, hire the necessary personnel to install and mantain it and hiring the cameramen + editor team necessary ... and even more, how would they deliver it to the fans homes?
Today ... well, we don't have a lack of streaming sites and the costs to mount a streaming infrastructure are much more managable ( the 10-15k in materials figure I launched above was the estimate I gave a church last year for a fully robotized 4 camera streaming solution ... ). If you, as a team, would receive peanuts from ESPN ( or similar ) because they would only transmit a game or two of yours, even streaming to youtube and getting the paultry ads revenue from it might be a more atractive proposition ;)
Awnsering your question, a NDI-Hx ( basically a bidirectional video-over-internet data protocol ... it also includes metadata, so it can be used to control robotics and the cameras themselves ) 1080p 60fps video stream will typically use 50-100 Mbps . Sure , it is somewhat compressed ,but the streaming sites will compress much worse ( a typical Youtube stream will output near 4 Mbps for the same 1080p 60fps video input ), so that is not a issue.
If you have a Gigabit router and a minimally decent upload speed on site ( youtube will ingest 4 Mbps in average for a 1080p 60fps video stream, like I said above, so having 10 Mbps upload is enough if stable ) , it is very doable to just get some cameras with NDI inside, a decent laptop with OBS, some ethernet cable ( because wired internet is always more stable ) and just stream a game, ESPN be damned.
On the post: Cord Cutting Has Utterly Exploded During the Covid Crisis
On the matter of sport channels ...
I would argue that, in a lot of sports, the teams already started cord cutting themselves by streaming their games in more or less generic streaming plataforms , starting by the amateur and lower leagues teams ( that were always the great losers of any negotiation about broadcast rights of sports, especially in sports where the rights are sold in bulk by a Big League ). Just go to, let's say, youtube , and browse your sport of choice. You'll see a lot of stream recordings and, if you do some searching, you'll notice that the quantity of those streams have been increasing over the last 2-3 years ( minus 2020, because ... 2020 )
In the end it is just a classic case of lowering costs opening the game to the excluded. I remember the stories that my father, a telecoms engineer, used to tell me of the weeks of grunt work he had to do every year to install infrastructure to cover the F1 Grand Prix in my contry in the 80's and 90's ( it involved the instalation of tons of extra cables for cameras, comms and such ). Nowadays ... you could do a decent quality cover of a, let's say, soccer game or similar with 4 cameras ( not necessary with cameramen attached, given the cheaper robotization options ), 300m of network cable, a computer and a live editor, 10-15k $ of investment in material and some extra in manpower.
It is just orders of magnitude cheaper to stream a event nowadays and it is clear than the ones that were getting the short side of the stick in the big networks sport channels deals are increasingly opting to simply stream themselves their team events. If this trend continues, it will be not just people being less interested in getting those bulk sports channels, but there will be more teams just jumping out of those to self-streaming their teams ... not only less costumers, but also less content to sell. No exactly a winning proposition, if you ask me ...
On the post: Company Owning 'Evel Knievel' Rights Sues Disney Over 'Toy Story 4' Amalgam Parody Character
Talk about haunting ...
On the post: Experts Say Internet Shutdowns Don't Thwart Protests
Killing the messenger does not kill the message ;)
Well, the title says it all. I mean, people didn't revolted against any governement before the internet, so blocking it should stop them, right? RIGHT? ;)
P.S Better say that the above is sarcasm, in case some tinpot dictator thinks I'm serious ...
On the post: PetNet 'Smart' Pet Feeders Go Offline For A Week, Customer Service Completely Breaks Down
Re: How bad is this design? ..... It's Bad, with a capital B ;)
That is exactly how I made my own timed things in my home network ( not animal feeders ... I think I can spare 30s of my life to my pets, thank you ). Stuff follows previous orders until ordered to change. And, from a technical point of view, there is scarcely a reason to make this kinds of timed actions completely dependent of outside signals.
To make things worse, most likely their feeder's brain is most likely a cheap custom-brew Android phone ( or maybe even a Arduino or Raspberry Pi equivalent ), that could cope with that easily ... a company that has a week long server shutdown is not the kind of company that hires competent embebbed systems engineers and uses transient memory devices :P
On the post: EA/Origin Rewards Adopters Of Extra Security By Scaring The Shit Out Of Them
That makes sense ...
EA last good deed was so long ago that they simply don't remember how to make a good deed anymore ;)
On the post: The Impossibility Of Content Moderation: YouTube's New Ban On Nazis Hits Reporter Who Documents Extremism, Professor Teaching About Hitler
Hum, that reminds me of something ...
This story reminds me of a certain Austrian-born German that, when it had enough power , started to burn books, films and newspapers because they were incompatible with the "German" values as he saw them...
What was he called? Oh , I remember .... it was ...
[ Due to fears of demonetization, the rest of the post was redacted. Apologies in advance ]
On the post: The Impossibility Of Content Moderation Plays Out, Once Again, On YouTube
If only Youtube hadn't done anything ...
Well, first of all, I couldn't care less of which of the parts is more guilty .. in real life most of the times no one is completely innocent ( in one hand we have a unsavory commedian, on the other some unsavory people that took offense on the unsavory commedian ... Black pot, black kettle )
That said, Youtube could had kept away of all of this mess and do nothing, but then someone would accuse the company of not being "advertisement friendly" and of enabling/promoting "toxic" behaviour ... and because Youtube, when the rubber hits the tarmac, cares above all about who pays the bills, SOMETHING had to be done, even if idiotic.
I really miss the times when Youtube wasn't trying to be the conscience of the ones with none, TBH ...
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