Ben 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (325)

• On the post: Fifth Circuit: Never Mind Your Lying Eyes, These Cops Who Killed A Woman Deserve Immunity

  

  Ben ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2024 @ 05:56am

  Why rush? The victim won't be any less dead if they got there quickly. /s

• On the post: Court To Cops: There’s No ‘Instinct Exception’ For Drug Dogs Handlers Refuse To Handle

  

  Ben ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2024 @ 06:17am

  Leather

  In the case of our dog, anything made of leather would definitely trigger an 'alert'. Shoes, wallets, bags, you name it. She'd have made an excellent cop dog. (also a very good watch dog... watch, not guard... she'd watch everything!)

• On the post: Head Of Federal Prosecutors’ Association Latest To Ask For Broken Encryption

  

  Ben ( profile ), 13 Mar, 2024 @ 05:28am

  Congress-critters can discuss banning end-to-end encryption when they have taken it off their own phones, browsers and other communications, and those of all the three-letter agencies. Otherwise it's one rule for me and another for thee, yet again.

• On the post: Warner Bros. Discovery Disappears Games People Already Purchased

  

  Ben ( profile ), 13 Mar, 2024 @ 05:21am

  Egcorn time

  "It’s time for another [b]abject[b] lesson in how you don’t" The correct form is "object" lesson. This situation may be an abject object lesson for those affected, but still, Tim!

• On the post: HP Tries Desperately To Make ‘Printer As A Subscription’ A Thing

  

  Ben ( profile ), 07 Mar, 2024 @ 05:35am

  Print paper documents?

  Hardly ever .. and certainly not on the crap HP insist on selling for domestic use. I've not printed a document at home since before 2020, despite working at home through all the lockdowns. So I guess I'll stop costing HP money. I guess that makes me one of their best customers.

• On the post: A Swiftian Solution To Some Of Copyright’s Problems

  

  Ben ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2024 @ 08:57am

  nice idea

  Shame that most (often very young and poor) aspiring musicians who want a recording deal just want to get into the studio and record their magnum opus, then get out and tour it. They are not lawyers (nor am I, for that matter). It's all very well from a position of comfort to say 'read the f'ing contract', but we're talking about a tremendously imbalance power situation. For most of the modern history of popular recorded music, the recording/publishing companies held all the power and they are the ones who determined the deals. It has taken the commercial power of Ms Swift to change that. Even now, the record companies still hold the power, and instead of requiring one to sign over your masters, they put increased re-recording limits and and other dirty weasel language into contracts that would take a $1000/hr lawyer to combat. And who can afford one of them? The record companies, not the musicians.

• On the post: Here We Go Again: Sony Disappears Digital Content That Was Pitched To Customers As ‘Forever’

  

  Ben ( profile ), 22 Feb, 2024 @ 07:55am

  Also a developer of 30 years experience

  Alternatively, rather than requiring a re-factoring of the codebase (which seems unlikely to me), they could just import the records from the Funimation system into the Crunchroll one, setting the expiry date to a looooong time in the future, and the existing code should Just Cope(tm). Someone high up at Sony just doesn't give a shit.

• On the post: False AI Obituary Spam The Latest Symptom Of Our Obsession With Mindless Automated Infotainment Engagement

  

  Ben ( profile ), 20 Feb, 2024 @ 06:05am

  LMGTFY

  LMGTFY

• On the post: Mozilla Unveils (Possibly Futile) Tool That Lets You Request That Data Brokers Delete Your Data

  

  Ben ( profile ), 12 Feb, 2024 @ 07:43am

  DeleteMe

  There are companies out there already advertising this service via YouTube influencers. DeleteMe being just one of them. I don't trust them not to be harvesting the data they proclaim to be deleting, and then selling it on themselves, back to the very same brokers they purport to get it deleted from. Why should I trust the Mozilla Foundation to do any more safely, accurately or securely?

• On the post: America Tires Of Big Telecom’s Shit, Driving Boom In Community-Owned Broadband Networks

  

  Ben ( profile ), 09 Feb, 2024 @ 03:44am

  FUD?

  Spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt... straight out of the corporate handbook for opposing local broadband.

• On the post: Universal Music Group Pulls Songs From TikTok, Causing Chaos On The Platform

  

  Ben ( profile ), 04 Feb, 2024 @ 08:20am

  Singers and new pop groups won't be affected because they should be singing/playing their own music, unlicensed by UMG in the place.

• On the post: ‘The Messenger’ Implosion Once Again Shows The Real Problem With U.S. Journalism Is Shitty Management By Visionless, Fail-Upward Brunchlords

  

  Ben ( profile ), 03 Feb, 2024 @ 03:46am

  Ad free?

  Ad free news source? Are you willing to pay for it as a subscriber then, because if you're not, it currently seems that ads are the only other realistic way to fund an online-only business.

• On the post: Fractured Streaming Services Don’t Suck Enough To Keep The NFL’s Peacock Experiment From Being A Success

  

  Ben ( profile ), 24 Jan, 2024 @ 04:33am

  And the streaming services hope you'll forget the 'cancel' part before too long as it'll be more of a hassle to remember to cancel, or they'll put minimum contract terms of perhaps 7 days ... enough that most people will conveniently forget.

• On the post: ‘AI’ Exposes Google News Quality Control Issues, Making Our Clickbait, Plagiarism, And Propaganda Problem Worse

  

  Ben ( profile ), 22 Jan, 2024 @ 03:15pm

  full circle

  And so we go full circle back to the beginning of the WWW in the early 1990s: 1. one would maintain one's own home page with a list of interesting bookmarks 2. then we found the indexing sites that organised things better, often hierarchically 3. then someone invented Yahoo! and Alta Vista that provided some curation and searchability within their indexes 4. Google arrived and we didn't need Yahoo! or Alta Vista Time to go back to step 1, except our browsers can store our book marks on their servers such that we can share them between machines... Side note: how long before Google starts to enshittify our bookmark bars with ads? It's just like the old smart client server pendulum.

• On the post: Colorado Journalist Says Fuck Prior Restraint, Dares Court To Keep Violating The 1st Amendment

  

  Ben ( profile ), 18 Jan, 2024 @ 04:19am

  Just keep a copy on your PC, your laptop or your tablet.... it's not on a server, and they've got a PDF back. Good grief, the technical ignorance in those who seek to govern is mind-blowing sometimes. They expect dotted-i's and crossed-t's in everything we say to the court, and get shirty when we expect the same level of accuracy when they stray into our domain of experience. Or is this just malicious compliance :D

• On the post: Techdirt 2023: The Stats

  

  Ben ( profile ), 16 Jan, 2024 @ 01:57pm

  Fark!

  Now that's a blast from the past, and a name that I've not heard in years. IIRC, I originally found TechDirt via Fark, way back in 2009!

• On the post: Cox Distances Itself From Claim It Spies On Users Via Phones, Cable Box Mics

  

  Ben ( profile ), 02 Jan, 2024 @ 05:54am

  Android & Apple

  Surely this is something Android developers and Apple developers should be tackling by making it impossible for the phones to listen without direct, transparent, informed consent of the phone user? Oh wait, I forgot, Google and Apple love our voice data too. Silly me.

• On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of 2023 At Techdirt

  

  Ben ( profile ), 31 Dec, 2023 @ 04:07pm

  Take a hint from the timestamp on your comment. Too late, sucker! 🤣

• On the post: Law Enforcement Officers Crash SUV Into Local Bar, Arrest Bar Owner For Being Angry About It

  

  Ben ( profile ), 28 Dec, 2023 @ 01:40pm

  Or even French (from whence "in lieu" comes), not English.

• On the post: Google Disrupts Geofence Warrants, Says (Most) Location Data Will Be Stored Locally

  

  Ben ( profile ), 18 Dec, 2023 @ 11:26am

  I agree, but...

  here's the thing. Google doesn't give 2c for the user, Google doesn't want the hassle, the bad optics, or the cost of fending off warrants. That's it. This is a legal and compliance department bottom-line issue. Oh, and if they don't need to store location data for millions of Android users for 18 months, that's a massive saving on data centre hardware too. Though that's probably small bananas compared to getting the lawyers a few days off.

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