PaulT 's Techdirt Comments

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• On the post: Fox Hit With Sanctions For Withholding Information In Dominion Libel Lawsuit

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 13 Apr, 2023 @ 01:10pm

  Yeah, that's what I mean, sadly... They'll be told to their faces that Fox, etc., were lying to them in order to take their money, but because they were already programmed like that they won't support policies that actually help them. So, they'll fight for billionaires driving them further into poverty while blaming trans and gay people asking for human rights for their problems. I don't know what the solution is here, but I certainly know that Tucker saying on screen "I have been lying and stealing from you" won't change some minds. Which is very depressing.

• On the post: NPR Says Enough Is Enough: Quits Twitter

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 13 Apr, 2023 @ 12:53pm

  Except 1.5 million censored tweets (probably way more than that, no idea really) would be a lot of censorship.

  I'd love to have a citation for the criteria there. In early 2023, there were 450 million MAU, so even if your claim was true it would be a small minority. But, given that most "censorship" is generally just "weak willed snowflake experiencing a different opinion for the first time", I also doubt it counts as censorship. "It’s not a lot of users." Yeah, that's the main problem. There's a small number of weak toxic people who have been over-represented for a long time who think they're being unfairly censored because the people they used to bully have been able to speak up. The fact that they now have a voice doesn't mean that Twitter et al treated them poorly when they told them to GTFO, it just means bullies have to go elsewhere.

• On the post: Fox Hit With Sanctions For Withholding Information In Dominion Libel Lawsuit

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 13 Apr, 2023 @ 12:10pm

  What's sad is that "I'm lying for profit" won't reach the right ears, and if it does they'll deny it. Then they'll attack vulnerable people, because the people they voted for as a result made them poor again.

• On the post: In The Last Six Months Techdirt’s Antispam Algorithm Has Stopped Over A Million Spam Comments; Should We Lose 230 Protections For That?

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 13 Apr, 2023 @ 12:08pm

  The "cloud" probably wouldn't protect anyone if the target of the block was in the same country/state as TD, but that's where 1A/230 come in. The "cloud" means you run software on other peoples' hardware, not that you're immune from its effects. The most important thing is that a venue that doesn't want assholes causing trouble is allowed to block them, and I don't think I've ever seen a venue as lenient online or offline as this one.

• On the post: NPR Says Enough Is Enough: Quits Twitter

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 13 Apr, 2023 @ 11:55am

  " lol not 1%, that’s a lie"

  Then it's surely easy to present the evidence? People don't mock you because you have different ideas, it's because you pull "facts" from your ass... "Meanwhile a Saudi prince company" Is that the one demonstrated to have paid $2 billion to Jared and funded a sizeable part of Twitter, or another? You have to be more specific if others are armed with facts...

• On the post: Now That Elon Musk Is Labeling NPR And The BBC As ‘Government Funded,’ Shouldn’t He Do The Same For Tesla, SpaceX, And Twitter?

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 13 Apr, 2023 @ 04:36am

  "I was never “signed in”, and it posted something like 18 hours after I posted it." In other words, because you've made your personality here to be "abrasive asshole", you keep getting reported, and because the spam filter works properly it takes time for people to manually go through and approve the genuine comments. Did you people ever consider just not being lying assholes? Those of who aren't rarely have the problems you use to further spam the comments with...

• On the post: NPR Says Enough Is Enough: Quits Twitter

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 13 Apr, 2023 @ 04:33am

  "the Liberal run government recently made an attempt to delete a news story off of social media because it gave the government the sads" Yet, weirdly, you fail to give people enough detail to work out which story you're thinking of. I'm not saying you're lying, but one hallmark of people who spend too much time in one type of biased echo chamber is the fact that they assume others will immediately know which story they're thinking of when making a claim, when it's possible that many people they're talking to will never have heard of it. Sometimes that's just vagaries of how little news from places like Canada are broadcast as widely as news from places like the US. Sometimes, it's because the story has actually been out there, but the details of the story aren't what's being pushed by one "side", so it doesn't gain traction with the "side" that knows the full context. I hope you're not in that category, but it's worth stating which story you're referring to when you're using it as a counter-example to something.

• On the post: NPR Says Enough Is Enough: Quits Twitter

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 13 Apr, 2023 @ 04:27am

  "Conservatives suffered from social media “fact check”ing and “context” labels for quite some time" Yes, they did lose their crap over accurate labels quite a lot didn't they? "But within one week of context that NPR is partially funded by the government (which is entirely true!)" Partially = around 1% in this case, as I understand. Why do I feel that you're be crying about unfair treatment if other platforms correctly noted the much higher levels of public investment in Tesla, SpaceX, etc.? "This is why leftists were in tears when the Elon purchase was announced" Nobody was in tears, that's another right-wing echo chamber hallucination. At most, people were annoyed that the things that protected from toxic hatemongers would be removed and a previously useful platform would be reduced to another 4chan. The fact that respected factual reporting outlets are moving away from the platform proves that correct, by the way. Also, it's doubtful that this is the sole reason. NPR most likely looked at the overall landscape, where Musk was inviting back Russian propaganda outlets, racists and traitors to post again while removing verification and moderation for CSAM, and decided that this simply wasn't a battle worth fighting.

• On the post: Microsoft Nixes Emulator That Snuck Through The Xbox Store For Series X/S

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 13 Apr, 2023 @ 04:22am

  I can understand people wanting to run emulators, but it's also pretty clear why MS want to keep a sandboxed console environment relatively free from the danger of people modding/hacking/cheating. Saying "if you want to run an emulator, use dev mode or a PC" doesn't seem particularly out of order. Especially when the person at the centre of this is deliberately bypassing the protections already in place. It sucks for people who were using a previously downloaded emulator, but again, there's options available. There's a constant battle between security and convenience, and sometimes the latter loses.

• On the post: Microsoft Nixes Emulator That Snuck Through The Xbox Store For Series X/S

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 13 Apr, 2023 @ 12:37am

  OK, so while it sucks for people who weren't doing such things, it can hardly be surprising that MS took further steps to block an app when the developer is literally using security exploits to get it into the store after being blocked.Even if he has no nefarious intent, he's clearly paving the way for people with bad intentions to follow him if nothing is done to patch the holes. Unless I'm mistaken, people can still use developer mode if they still with to use the console to emulate, it's just slightly more work to set that up and you can't game as normal with standard XBox games while in dev mode (for obvious reasons), though if I understand correctly you can easily switch between modes. More cumbersome than the previous situation, but it seems perfectly understandable even if you wave away the idea of legal threats from others. "This isn’t quite the same as Sony removing a useful feature from its PlayStation 3 consoles via a firmware update" It's nothing like the same, really. OtherOS wasn't just a cool feature, it was an advertised capability of the console which led to some organisations buying hundreds or even thousands of PS3 specifically to access it. Since other features required a more up to date firmware, removing the feature meant losing the advertised feature permanently. I can't think of any marketing that MS made to advertise any emulation outside of its backward compatibility program, and as mentioned it should be possible to regain emulators through the developer mode, so it's nothing like the same situation unless it's the usual Sony fanboy false equivalence based on superficial similarities.

• On the post: NPR Says Enough Is Enough: Quits Twitter

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 13 Apr, 2023 @ 12:18am

  Those are claims that would be taken seriously if reported, backed with verifiable evidence. But, for some reason, the people whining about "fact checkers" are never armed with facts.

• On the post: After Matt Taibbi Leaves Twitter, Elon Musk ‘Shadow Bans’ All Of Taibbi’s Tweets, Including The Twitter Files

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 12 Apr, 2023 @ 03:58am

  "As long as journos remain on Twitter, it’ll thrive" You and I seem to have different definitions of the word "thrive". "There are currently no competing platforms big enough." Another thing I find fun noting is how people define competition with Twitter depending on how narrow their current complain it. Twitter has a great many competitors, some bigger, many smaller. There's nothing that Twitter does that I can't do on Facebook, Reddit, or any other social media or discussion service. The one thing that Twitter offered as a "killer" feature was direct access to people, which used to be driven by their verification model. That is if I want to keep up with what, say, Stephen King is saying, I get direct access to that and I can be confident that what he says under his account is actually being said by him (or an authorised assistant, as some people do, though I don't believe King does), and not an imposter. With Musk killing verification and making its replacement useless for that purpose, that effect is reduced. But, I don't currently have a choice of venue - if I want to read what a person says, I have to go to where they're saying it. I can read about his tweets in r/stephenking, but I don't have the option to respond in a way to engage with King directly. The only fix for that is for King himself to post elsewhere, and this is how the network effect is currently keeping Twitter propped up. Journalists can also go elsewhere, but if the people they need to engage with are still using Twitter, they still have to use Twitter even if they're trying to set up elsewhere. They can make a stand and not use Twitter, but if their subjects and readers don't so the same it won't help anyone. So, no, I do not buy that Twitter has no real competition. There's just not a direct one-click solution to clone everything that Twitter has operated with the same feature set. We will see if there's the same MySpace to Facebook pipeline where everyone abandons it for the same platform, or whether we'll have a more fragmented effect where some go to Mastodon or a similar clone of the superficial feature set, some go to established alternatives like Instagram, some go to a new startup, etc. But, Twitter has plenty of competition, unless you're going to define it to a very narrow set of features rather than "social media where people go to communicate with the people they wish to follow". As with all social media, it's just down to the "network effect" of where people decide to go, and whether people follow them when they do.

• On the post: Someone’s Trying To Copyright A Rhythm

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2023 @ 11:06pm

  Once you've read the dictionary, everything else is just a remix.

• On the post: DOJ, Pentagon Open Investigation After Ukraine War Docs Leak Online

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2023 @ 03:58pm

  To be completely fair, the docs you linked do say this:

  "By default, no logs are enabled, except the error log on Windows"

  But, that's only part of the story. Using a different backend doesn't make you same, and just because defaults are different that doesn't mean logging has not been enabled/disabled by the admin. If MySQL is a juicier target, that's because it's been the default of the LAMP/whatever stacks used for a long time and because it's free in both senses of the word (well, if you use MariaDB), not because people are avoiding logging. Plus, most people won't just be depending on those logs to detect intrusions. VPN and Tor won't completely protect you, but then someone using MSSQL on the backend won't mean someone's looking at logs either.

• On the post: Now That Elon Musk Is Labeling NPR And The BBC As ‘Government Funded,’ Shouldn’t He Do The Same For Tesla, SpaceX, And Twitter?

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2023 @ 03:46pm

  It's always fun when it's this obvious, because they never expect the response of "sure, hang them too". They expect the Trumper response of circling the wagons launching into hypocrisy and contradictions, not an honest response from people who don't play politics as a team game. Sure, Epstein did some evil stuff that apparently involved some Democrats, if someone is gathering evidence and readying a prosecution, go for it. Now, back to the subject at hand which AFAIK only involves a certain set of right wingers (though that wouldn't change my opinion if someone else is involved)...

• On the post: Fox News On Its Way To Finding Out What ‘Actual Malice’ Means In Dominion’s Defamation Lawsuit

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2023 @ 03:41pm

  "This is a defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems. What standing do they have to claim damages from January 6?" I could imagine that it's part of a long-standing pattern, i.e. that since a direct line can be drawn between some of the Jan 6th crowd and what they did on that day, that it can be inferred that it's also possible for there to be such a direct line between Dominion's losses and Fox. But, I also think that's more complicated and requires things the court doesn't want to deal with. At the end of the day, the lawsuit isn't about what some random Trumper thought about Dominion, a company they most likely never heard of until after the election. It's about how the rest of their market reacted when a major network was claiming there was credible evidence that they were involved in fraud. But, AFAIK, the Jan 6th defendants have never been part of the lawsuit, the court order was just to stop the scope expanding since some of them have now admitted to being inspired by the same stories that led to Dominion suing. They're not allowed to enter this into evidence now, but I'm fairly sure they don't need it at this point with the evidence they have from texts, etc.

• On the post: Now That Elon Musk Is Labeling NPR And The BBC As ‘Government Funded,’ Shouldn’t He Do The Same For Tesla, SpaceX, And Twitter?

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2023 @ 02:38pm

  "But whatabout!"... Does that ever work?

• On the post: Now That Elon Musk Is Labeling NPR And The BBC As ‘Government Funded,’ Shouldn’t He Do The Same For Tesla, SpaceX, And Twitter?

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2023 @ 02:34pm

  "any corporation that is funded by investors, public or private, and anything from the government" I'm... pretty sure that's all of them. If you want an exact breakdown that's usually hidden for private corps and obscured for publicly traded ones, but there's info out there (though for tax reasons you'll be looking at shell companies). But, whether it's venture capitalists, small investors or PPP "loans", I think almost all businesses are funded by those things. Which corps are funded directly by government is of course important to know, but the bigger problem is probably knowing which parts of the government are bought by which corporations. But, even that's the wrong question, the real issue is undue influence. There's some corporations that have major investors who don't get involved too closely, there's some where the major investors specifically buy to have board level control. Just knowing the number won't tell you everything.

• On the post: After Matt Taibbi Leaves Twitter, Elon Musk ‘Shadow Bans’ All Of Taibbi’s Tweets, Including The Twitter Files

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2023 @ 01:51pm

  In reference to Stephen King's involvement in all this, the Gunslinger reference is welcomes. Thankee sai

• On the post: After Matt Taibbi Leaves Twitter, Elon Musk ‘Shadow Bans’ All Of Taibbi’s Tweets, Including The Twitter Files

  

  PaulT ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2023 @ 01:50pm

  "If you don’t think the problem can be fixed by reporting on it" No problem can be fixed merely by reporting. But, I've seen beneficial effects by doing so - for example, when Musk's latest boneheaded move regarding a competitor is reported, someone say "oh, I've not heard of that one, let me check it out". Or, something is the actual last straw for someone so they quit. There's no guarantees, but it's actually possible to get these stories out to people who wouldn't read them if they weren't on Twitter.

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