A modern webapp might do that, but "10 years ago" pretty much precludes a Javascript-based client-side React-type application. I'm trying to think of any sort of design that'd result in anything other than the record being viewed appearing in the rendered page, and frankly the only thing that comes to mind is something as stupid as the server code being powered by an Excel spreadsheet using VBA to translate the sheet into HTML (which would require a degree of deliberation and malice that I really don't want to think about).
I almost preferred it when "emojis" were monochrome. It came close to the ideal of "On the Internet, everybody is green on a black background.". Then came color and images and audio and video and all the stupid judgements made based on what someone looked or sounded like, not on the content of what they were saying, and all the workarounds to try and compensate for all the stupid judgements of people who don't want their stupid judgements compensated for... /sigh
Alien passport officer: "Race? Look, do you know how many species there are in the galaxy? And how many sub-groups of those there are who claim to be a different "race" from all the other sub-groups even when members of that sub-group can't tell the difference between sub-groups without already knowing who is what? If we tried to include "race" on the forms, the section would be 800 pages long and you still couldn't make sense of it. So your race is "human" and we really don't care what the melanin content of your skin is, live with it, have a nice day, NEXT!"
Well, if I had any living relatives that needed a health monitor, then about 2 years ago (after a year of knowing about the issue myself and not having heard anything from the monitor company) I would've been calling the company responsible for the monitor asking what their plans were and by when should I expect her to be slated for an update or replacement. At the 1-year-to-go mark, I would've been talking to their doctor and their insurance about replacing the soon-to-be-nonfunctional device. Said talks with the insurance would've also involved the family's lawyer, which I've noticed gets the attention of insurance companies.
As for my garage, if someone broke into it the alarm would go off and the alarm company would've been notified. This may not be the same alarm company anymore, because again about 2 years ago I would've been talking to them about their plans and if I didn't hear a definite date for equipment upgrade/replacement I'd be changing to a different alarm company that didn't depend on a 3G network. My alarm system would have been made unaffected by the shutdown at least a year ago.
Seems to me that AT&T gave sufficient notice to allow these companies to switch networks or switch to newer cel hardware and replace/upgrade existing equipment. So now the companies want more time, despite having not bothered to use the 3 years they were given? The best thing the FCC and AT&T could do is deny the request with a note that these companies should have thought of that 3 years ago when they were told about the shutdown.
"A failure to plan (on your part) does not constitute an emergency (on my part)."
I think it'd depend on the same conditions as the court laid out in this case: how well did the group vet the newcomer before inviting them? It's one thing to invite someone you've met personally and have known for several years (especially if you establish an understanding that what happens there doesn't get blabbed about elsewhere), quite another to invite a random stranger who just walked up to you and asked to be invited.
It's not the FCC bureaucracy that's at fault here. The staff of the FCC are limited by what the FCC's regulations say, and those regulations are dictated by the commissioners and appointed heads of the various offices and bureaus. If you want to find the problems, look to the people at the top because, like in any company, they set the expectations for everyone below them.
The FBI's suggested tactics can easily backfire on them. Defense attorneys who know about them can put their own experts on the stand who'll willingly limit their testimony to what's backed up by scientific research which will gut the evidence the FBI wants left unquestioned. That leaves the FBI with a bunch of unpalatable choices: keep their own experts away and face a big credibility gap, put their experts on and try to explain why their experts insist on testifying to things they can't back up, or try to discredit the defense's experts and in the process discredit their own evidence.
There's two groups that both need to suffer penalties for abuse:
The rights-holders who file claims without doing their due diligence to determine whether they really hold the rights to the material or not. There needs to be statutory damages defined for filing a takedown request for material the filer doesn't actually have rights to, and those damages need to be non-discretionary.
The hosting providers who go along with the rights-holders by default. There need to be statutory damages defined for repeatedly accepting baseless claims, and for continuing to act on claims from rights-holders with a record of baseless or abusive claims. I suggest a three-strikes rule: three baseless claims from a rights-holder and they're subject to statutory damages for every baseless claim, three baseless claims from the same rights-holder against a hosting provider and the hosting provider is subject to the same statutory damages if they continue to accept claims from that rights-holder.
Sounds in large part like a lack of understanding/experience on the part of the defendant's attorney. They should have pointed out to the court that the web site didn't send the IP address, nor any data in fact, to Google. The user themselves, or rather their browser, did that when informed it needed a Web font to render the page while it was configured by the user to retrieve Web fonts from where they were hosted. If the user didn't wish to have the font host know about them they should have configured their browser to not retrieve Web fonts, in which case the browser would have used the best font it could find installed as a substitute (at a cost in appearance of the rendered page).
I think there's better defaults than "read everything from everywhere", but it should be the case that the web site says where things need fetched from and it's the user who's considered responsible for the browser following those instructions. And the user should be able to tell the browser how to follow them, eg. "Fetch resources from the same domain as the web site, refuse to fetch resources from anywhere else except places I've explicitly white-listed.".
I don't know, I think I'd like a "refinement" of the rules to clearly state that yes, all enforcement activities must be recorded, no exceptions, and no, no recording of protected First Amendment activity may take place, no exceptions, and that any officer who notes that this would mean no enforcement activity involving protected First Amendment activity is permitted is entirely correct in that conclusion and all officers should act accordingly or face disciplinary action for violating one or both of those rules in addition to any civil rights charges that may be filed against them.
As far back as the early 90s every BBS network out there that was larger than 1 node was moderated. All of Usenet was moderated, even the "unmoderated" alt.* hierarchy (albeit the moderation was unofficial). One thing we learned early is that no matter how careful you are about the initial membership, there's always That One Guy. And sooner or later he invites all his friends over to play. You either plan to deal with it, or you'll be dealing with it without a plan.
I wish we had the equivalent of ByteBrothers to send the trolls to.
It's time for the advocates of police reform to start adopting a "get tough on crime" platform. "Look at how many criminals are being let back out onto the streets just because the cops can't behave themselves for 5 lousy minutes. If these officers insist on making it easy for criminals to beat the rap, it's time to kick them out and replace them with officers who understand how to make arrests that stick.".
If the GOP succeeds in its quest to make Georgia a GOP-only state? Then yes, that would be my advice to them and to any residents with any sense. If your enemy has won, if he's left you no chance of success, then hand him a Pyrrhic victory. The consequences of a mass exodus of minority and progressive residents from Georgia would be absolutely devastating.
Fortunately the GOP hasn't won in Georgia yet. This last election proved it, and while the GOP's making a good play for it it's still possible for the progressive activists to get enough turnout to make the GOP's efforts moot. It'll require a focus on state and local offices, though, not just federal.
At this point I think the only feasible response is "Then let them freeze.". It's become abundantly clear that the power companies in Texas won't do anything to prevent the problem, the politicians won't do anything to force actions to prevent the problem, and the voters won't replace the politicians who fail to act. All anyone with sense can do in that situation is not move to Texas, or get out of Texas if you're already there.
I think one problem there is the standards used. The FCC uses the standard of "no evidence of harm", ie. things are assumed safe until proven otherwise. The FAA's standard is "evidence of no harm", ie. things are assumed not-safe until proven safe. The FCC's standard is fine when the worst that can happen is people are inconvenienced, but when lives are on the line you don't want to hear a company saying "Well, there's no proof our stuff was responsible.".
Well, almost. Harriman had to settle for the moon. Musk is aiming for Mars, which is the gravitational gateway to the asteroid belt and all of its mineral resources.
If the EU regulators really want to be scared, they ought to go read "The Man Who Sold the Moon" and realize that Musk is setting himself up as D.D. Harriman.
First rule of any policy which permits input on decisions from outside sources: the overwhelming majority of input will be from malicious parties attempting to misuse the policy for their own purposes. If your system cannot correctly handle at least 50% of the input being the absolute worst sort of abuse possible, it should be considered unfit for purpose.
Corollary: if you think you've thought of the worst sort of abuse possible, your naivety and innocence are about to be destroyed in the worst possible way.
Re: Re:
A modern webapp might do that, but "10 years ago" pretty much precludes a Javascript-based client-side React-type application. I'm trying to think of any sort of design that'd result in anything other than the record being viewed appearing in the rendered page, and frankly the only thing that comes to mind is something as stupid as the server code being powered by an Excel spreadsheet using VBA to translate the sheet into HTML (which would require a degree of deliberation and malice that I really don't want to think about).
Re: Re: Re:
Yep, but at least it gave everybody the advantages that came with being assumed to be a white male at the same time.
Re:
I almost preferred it when "emojis" were monochrome. It came close to the ideal of "On the Internet, everybody is green on a black background.". Then came color and images and audio and video and all the stupid judgements made based on what someone looked or sounded like, not on the content of what they were saying, and all the workarounds to try and compensate for all the stupid judgements of people who don't want their stupid judgements compensated for... /sigh
Alien passport officer: "Race? Look, do you know how many species there are in the galaxy? And how many sub-groups of those there are who claim to be a different "race" from all the other sub-groups even when members of that sub-group can't tell the difference between sub-groups without already knowing who is what? If we tried to include "race" on the forms, the section would be 800 pages long and you still couldn't make sense of it. So your race is "human" and we really don't care what the melanin content of your skin is, live with it, have a nice day, NEXT!"
Re: It's not just about the companies
Well, if I had any living relatives that needed a health monitor, then about 2 years ago (after a year of knowing about the issue myself and not having heard anything from the monitor company) I would've been calling the company responsible for the monitor asking what their plans were and by when should I expect her to be slated for an update or replacement. At the 1-year-to-go mark, I would've been talking to their doctor and their insurance about replacing the soon-to-be-nonfunctional device. Said talks with the insurance would've also involved the family's lawyer, which I've noticed gets the attention of insurance companies.
As for my garage, if someone broke into it the alarm would go off and the alarm company would've been notified. This may not be the same alarm company anymore, because again about 2 years ago I would've been talking to them about their plans and if I didn't hear a definite date for equipment upgrade/replacement I'd be changing to a different alarm company that didn't depend on a 3G network. My alarm system would have been made unaffected by the shutdown at least a year ago.
Planning ahead. It works.
(untitled comment)
Seems to me that AT&T gave sufficient notice to allow these companies to switch networks or switch to newer cel hardware and replace/upgrade existing equipment. So now the companies want more time, despite having not bothered to use the 3 years they were given? The best thing the FCC and AT&T could do is deny the request with a note that these companies should have thought of that 3 years ago when they were told about the shutdown.
"A failure to plan (on your part) does not constitute an emergency (on my part)."
Re: I would have thought this was (legally) straight-forward...
I think it'd depend on the same conditions as the court laid out in this case: how well did the group vet the newcomer before inviting them? It's one thing to invite someone you've met personally and have known for several years (especially if you establish an understanding that what happens there doesn't get blabbed about elsewhere), quite another to invite a random stranger who just walked up to you and asked to be invited.
Re: "it's fairly inexcusable"
It's not the FCC bureaucracy that's at fault here. The staff of the FCC are limited by what the FCC's regulations say, and those regulations are dictated by the commissioners and appointed heads of the various offices and bureaus. If you want to find the problems, look to the people at the top because, like in any company, they set the expectations for everyone below them.
(untitled comment)
The FBI's suggested tactics can easily backfire on them. Defense attorneys who know about them can put their own experts on the stand who'll willingly limit their testimony to what's backed up by scientific research which will gut the evidence the FBI wants left unquestioned. That leaves the FBI with a bunch of unpalatable choices: keep their own experts away and face a big credibility gap, put their experts on and try to explain why their experts insist on testifying to things they can't back up, or try to discredit the defense's experts and in the process discredit their own evidence.
Re:
There's two groups that both need to suffer penalties for abuse:
The rights-holders who file claims without doing their due diligence to determine whether they really hold the rights to the material or not. There needs to be statutory damages defined for filing a takedown request for material the filer doesn't actually have rights to, and those damages need to be non-discretionary.
The hosting providers who go along with the rights-holders by default. There need to be statutory damages defined for repeatedly accepting baseless claims, and for continuing to act on claims from rights-holders with a record of baseless or abusive claims. I suggest a three-strikes rule: three baseless claims from a rights-holder and they're subject to statutory damages for every baseless claim, three baseless claims from the same rights-holder against a hosting provider and the hosting provider is subject to the same statutory damages if they continue to accept claims from that rights-holder.
(untitled comment)
Sounds in large part like a lack of understanding/experience on the part of the defendant's attorney. They should have pointed out to the court that the web site didn't send the IP address, nor any data in fact, to Google. The user themselves, or rather their browser, did that when informed it needed a Web font to render the page while it was configured by the user to retrieve Web fonts from where they were hosted. If the user didn't wish to have the font host know about them they should have configured their browser to not retrieve Web fonts, in which case the browser would have used the best font it could find installed as a substitute (at a cost in appearance of the rendered page).
I think there's better defaults than "read everything from everywhere", but it should be the case that the web site says where things need fetched from and it's the user who's considered responsible for the browser following those instructions. And the user should be able to tell the browser how to follow them, eg. "Fetch resources from the same domain as the web site, refuse to fetch resources from anywhere else except places I've explicitly white-listed.".
Re: Better than nothing, but not by much.
The law ought to reference RFC 2119 for definitions of terms.
(untitled comment)
I don't know, I think I'd like a "refinement" of the rules to clearly state that yes, all enforcement activities must be recorded, no exceptions, and no, no recording of protected First Amendment activity may take place, no exceptions, and that any officer who notes that this would mean no enforcement activity involving protected First Amendment activity is permitted is entirely correct in that conclusion and all officers should act accordingly or face disciplinary action for violating one or both of those rules in addition to any civil rights charges that may be filed against them.
Re:
As far back as the early 90s every BBS network out there that was larger than 1 node was moderated. All of Usenet was moderated, even the "unmoderated" alt.* hierarchy (albeit the moderation was unofficial). One thing we learned early is that no matter how careful you are about the initial membership, there's always That One Guy. And sooner or later he invites all his friends over to play. You either plan to deal with it, or you'll be dealing with it without a plan.
I wish we had the equivalent of ByteBrothers to send the trolls to.
Get tough on crime
It's time for the advocates of police reform to start adopting a "get tough on crime" platform. "Look at how many criminals are being let back out onto the streets just because the cops can't behave themselves for 5 lousy minutes. If these officers insist on making it easy for criminals to beat the rap, it's time to kick them out and replace them with officers who understand how to make arrests that stick.".
Re: Re:
If the GOP succeeds in its quest to make Georgia a GOP-only state? Then yes, that would be my advice to them and to any residents with any sense. If your enemy has won, if he's left you no chance of success, then hand him a Pyrrhic victory. The consequences of a mass exodus of minority and progressive residents from Georgia would be absolutely devastating.
Fortunately the GOP hasn't won in Georgia yet. This last election proved it, and while the GOP's making a good play for it it's still possible for the progressive activists to get enough turnout to make the GOP's efforts moot. It'll require a focus on state and local offices, though, not just federal.
(untitled comment)
At this point I think the only feasible response is "Then let them freeze.". It's become abundantly clear that the power companies in Texas won't do anything to prevent the problem, the politicians won't do anything to force actions to prevent the problem, and the voters won't replace the politicians who fail to act. All anyone with sense can do in that situation is not move to Texas, or get out of Texas if you're already there.
Re: Re: FCC, FAA, and focus
I think one problem there is the standards used. The FCC uses the standard of "no evidence of harm", ie. things are assumed safe until proven otherwise. The FAA's standard is "evidence of no harm", ie. things are assumed not-safe until proven safe. The FCC's standard is fine when the worst that can happen is people are inconvenienced, but when lives are on the line you don't want to hear a company saying "Well, there's no proof our stuff was responsible.".
Re:
Well, almost. Harriman had to settle for the moon. Musk is aiming for Mars, which is the gravitational gateway to the asteroid belt and all of its mineral resources.
(untitled comment)
If the EU regulators really want to be scared, they ought to go read "The Man Who Sold the Moon" and realize that Musk is setting himself up as D.D. Harriman.
(untitled comment)
First rule of any policy which permits input on decisions from outside sources: the overwhelming majority of input will be from malicious parties attempting to misuse the policy for their own purposes. If your system cannot correctly handle at least 50% of the input being the absolute worst sort of abuse possible, it should be considered unfit for purpose.
Corollary: if you think you've thought of the worst sort of abuse possible, your naivety and innocence are about to be destroyed in the worst possible way.
More comments from TKnarr >>
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by TKnarr.
Submit a story now.
Tools & Services
TwitterFacebook
RSS
Podcast
Research & Reports
Company
About UsAdvertising Policies
Privacy
Contact
Help & FeedbackMedia Kit
Sponsor/Advertise
Submit a Story
More
Copia InstituteInsider Shop
Support Techdirt