Doug Burbidge’s Comments

• Jan 21st, 2022 @ 8:26pm

  Western Australia

  on German Police Caught Using COVID-Tracing Data To Search For Crime Witnesses

  A similar thing happened in Western Australia:

  1. Health department publishes check-in app, asks everyone to use it. Government promises records won't be otherwise used.
  2. Police use records in a murder investigation.
  3. Government says, "What? Stop!"
  4. Police say, "We have a duty to investigate crime -- if it's legal for us to use it, we have to use it."
  5. Government: surprised Pikachu face.
  6. Government passes legislation that they should have passed in the first place, preventing other use of the data.
• Jun 3rd, 2021 @ 10:47pm

  MPA is not MPAA

  on Now That Amazon Has Bought MGM, Will It Turn Against The Internet?

  I think you may be confusing MPA (the Music Publishers Association) with MPAA (the Motion Picture Association of America).

  They're both philosophically similar in that they're rights-holder associations for big copyright businesses, but one's for music and one's for movies.

• Jun 2nd, 2021 @ 11:24pm

  (untitled comment)

  on Washington Post Runs Bizarrely Ignorant Opinion Piece Claiming Florida's Content Moderation Law Is Constitutional

  Does the Washington Post allow user comments? It does? Excellent.

  Step 1: Register as a political candidate in Florida.
  Step 2: Emit continuous stream of hateful bile in the Washington Post comments section.
  Step 3: Profit!

• Feb 22nd, 2021 @ 8:43pm

  Re: The bit that's missing re the ABC

  on Australian News Sites Shocked & Upset To Learn They Don't Need To Rely On Facebook For Traffic!

  Also, it's the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not Company.

• Feb 6th, 2021 @ 5:42am

  GPT-3

  on Senators Warner, Hirono, And Klobuchar Demand The End Of The Internet Economy

  Can somebody who has access to GPT-3 do an experiment? Feed it the 26 words ("No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.") as a seed, and see what it produces. Then see if the ruminations of a neural network are more or less sensible than any of these proposed changes.

  Thanks.

• Jan 7th, 2021 @ 2:38am

  Won/Lost

  on Part Of Apple's Abuse Of The DMCA Against Corellium Thrown Out... But Part Of It Lives On

  "despite the headlines claiming that Apple won"
  should be
  "despite the headlines claiming that Apple lost"

• Apr 16th, 2019 @ 12:51am

  (untitled comment)

  on ICE's Fake University Sting Operation Also Used A Bunch Of Fake Facebook Profiles

  A fake university that had a physical campus potential students could visit and was nationally-accredited

  Was it fake though? If it was nationally accredited, then it would seem to me like it wasn't fake, and therefore none of its students have done anything wrong?