Casteph 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Sixth Circuit Reaffirms It's A Fourth Amendment Violation To Chalk Car Tires For Parking Enforcement Purposes

    Casteph ( profile ), 09 Sep, 2021 @ 02:52pm

    Re: Re: A victory? Maybe not.

    Yeah, this ruling seems like it will drastically reduce privacy rather than increase it. A tiny bit of chalk on a tire doesn't put a record in a database of your movements that can be aggregated. There is no injury to the tire, which is made to be durable. Whereas forcing PDs to use license plate readers will cost more and diminish privacy drastically.

  • On the post: FTC Decides Maybe It's Time To Start Asking Why McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Broken All The Damn Time

    Casteph ( profile ), 07 Sep, 2021 @ 01:54pm

    Re: Re: Being the underdog doesn't make up for their hypocrisy

    In both cases the companies are reverse engineering to make devices to take away the other companies existing business. Reverse engineering is legal. If either company has patents then they can sue over those. If not? Well, tough.

  • On the post: FTC Decides Maybe It's Time To Start Asking Why McDonalds Ice Cream Machines Are Broken All The Damn Time

    Casteph ( profile ), 07 Sep, 2021 @ 12:59pm

    Being the underdog doesn't make up for their hypocrisy

    I want to see Kytch do well for creating a superior product that helps their customers, but their stance on reverse engineering is ridiculous. It was ok for Kytch to do to Taylor to make their diagnostic device, but not ok for Taylor to do. Kytch can't have it both ways, or at least they shouldn't be able to have it both ways. And neither should Taylor.

  • On the post: Google Has Been Paying Wireless Carriers Billions To Not Develop Competing App Stores

    Casteph ( profile ), 20 Aug, 2021 @ 11:01am

    Re: Have you ever used an AT&T smartphone

    So much this. I'm OK with Google heading off the crApp stores that would have been created by the cell carriers. Remember what the carriers wanted phones to be like? They wanted to sell you ring tones for $4 each. And the actually made phone manufacturers remove the cumulative call timer feature that let you keep track of how many of your monthly minutes you'd used. The kind of apps they'd want on my phone via their app store would be terrible, and they'd want to lock me into their app store, finding a way to keep me from getting the apps I wanted, and to charge me for ones I don't. The cell carriers are not some benevolent force for good - not even as "competitors" to Google.

  • On the post: Daily Deal: Polar Unlimited Cloud Backup Storage

    Casteph ( profile ), 18 Jun, 2021 @ 05:00pm

    If you don't have more than one copy you don't have a "backup".

    The ad copy suggests that you can upload data to this service to save local disk space.

    " Or spent hours digitally rifling through your documents, photos, videos, and more to try and delete a whole slew of files and still can’t free up enough space?"

    Don't do that. If you only have one copy of a file, then it's not backed up. Backing up files means having redundant copies, not a single copy.

    Also, this Service uses Amazon Glacier, which is a service for backups which may never be used. It's not an on-line disk service like drop box. You cannot quickly access your files. Instead it can take days for Amazon to bring them out of the cold storage, and even then you only have limited access to files before they are once again taking off-line.

    Do your research before signing up for an online backup service. Including finding out how quickly you can access the backup come and how often.

  • On the post: Smartmatic Sues Two Trump Lawyers And Three Fox News Hosts For $2.7 Billion-Worth Of Defamation

    Casteph ( profile ), 06 Feb, 2021 @ 12:13am

    Re: Re: 'You said it. ... I did too, but you said it in court.'

    "Actually, "No one takes me seriously," worked pretty well for Tucker Carlson." Too well. But he's an opinion host. But Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo are characterized as news hosts by Fox, so they are up a creek. Jeanine Pirro made false claims of fact, but she might be able to get away with the same defense that Trump and Tucker got away with, which is that they are known liars.

  • On the post: Smartmatic Sues Two Trump Lawyers And Three Fox News Hosts For $2.7 Billion-Worth Of Defamation

    Casteph ( profile ), 05 Feb, 2021 @ 01:54pm

    Re:

    The Fox News hosts might get away with that, but the two lawyers are going to have a much harder time because there is a marked difference between their rhetoric on Fox News where they claimed all sorts of things about smartmatic, and what they filed with courts, which left out their hyperbolic claims about smartmatic if I recall correctly. That damning contrast will clearly show that they did not believe the things they said outside of court were true otherwise they would have included them in their court filings.

  • On the post: World's Worst Copyright Troll, Richard Liebowitz, Suspended From Practicing Law

    Casteph ( profile ), 01 Dec, 2020 @ 05:39pm

    Re:

    Yes, but as an "officer of the court" a lawyer as an obligation not merely to not lie, but also not to suborn lying, and to not bring frivolous allegations. I think the other issue is that many lawyers like Liebowitz and Prenda are largely their own clients serving their own interests rather than that of their putative clients - especially in copyright cases. But, again, it takes years of pulling teeth to reveal such shenanigans and for the lawyers to ever be called to account. I think all lawyers working on commission should be listed as real parties at interest on all legal filings and be treated by judges with that in mind.

  • On the post: World's Worst Copyright Troll, Richard Liebowitz, Suspended From Practicing Law

    Casteph ( profile ), 01 Dec, 2020 @ 01:02pm

    It's stunning just how lenient judges are towards lawyers. It's great that Richard Liebowitz may finally lose his ability to practice, but the amount of flagrant abuse it takes for that to happen is astounding - you almost have to directly taunt the court with a letter asking to please be disbarred for it to happen.

  • On the post: Charles Harder Tries And Fails To Censor Another Book About His Most Famous Client, The President

    Casteph ( profile ), 26 Jun, 2020 @ 02:51pm

    Defamation vs. NDA

    Techdirt didn't have an NDA with Harder's client Shiva Ayyadurai, so it wasn't remotely as strong a case. Plus winning the case in the end isn't necessarily the goal. Frequently the goal is to cost the defendant ruinous amounts of money and make them wary about ever talking about his client again. Techdirt lost a huge amount of money and likely came close to bankruptcy. Techdirt has not mentioned Shiva Ayyadurai since the settlement over a year ago. Two years of litigation hell will do that to you.

  • On the post: Charles Harder Tries And Fails To Censor Another Book About His Most Famous Client, The President

    Casteph ( profile ), 26 Jun, 2020 @ 08:54am

    This is going exactly as harder expected

    "Beyond that, they picked the wrong forum for this request...
    Of course, it appears that Harder is planning to just keep going and try again by fixing his mistakes"

    Harder didn't make a mistake. He's an expert on forums. This first court was the one stipulated in the NDA as the agreed forum. So he filed there to check that box so the defendants won't be able to point to that agreed jurisdiction later when he files in the court of his choice. This is going exactly to plan.

    It's very dumb to celebrate this first move as a mistake or incompetence when it is nothing of the sort.

    Harder is the anti-free speech bully to the stars. He's scary because he's good at what he does, and he's always well funded so he can out spend his opponents. He only needs to out last them.

  • On the post: ICANN Board Blocks The Sale Of The .Org Registry

    Casteph ( profile ), 01 May, 2020 @ 10:47pm

    Uh, no

    "I can at least recognize that the people on the ISOC side at least were honestly trying to do what they believed made the most sense for everyone. "

    If the buyer were to pay cash, maybe I could believe that. But a leveraged buyout, where the organization being "purchased" has to take on the debt instead of the buyer? No way. That's not a purchase, that's a straight up multi-million dollar gift to the new owners, and any such "sale" should be considered a breach of the fiduciary duty of the board of directors.

    Why would the ISOC sell a cash cow like the .org registry? It's a violation of it's public interest bylaws.

    Leveraged buyouts need to be banned.

  • On the post: Masnick's Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well

    Casteph ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2019 @ 11:14am

    It's a hypothesis

    It's a interesting hypothesis, but it is not only not a theorem it's not a theory (not in the scientific sense), either. It's a hypothesis.

  • On the post: House Overwhelmingly Votes To Empower Copyright Trolls And To Bankrupt Americans For Sharing Photos

    Casteph ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2019 @ 08:35pm

    More proof that Republicans aren't actually opposed to expanding government bureaucracy, as long as they think it will help big business.

    Granted, Dems voted for it, too. But they don't claim to be for small government.

  • On the post: Intra-Family Trademark Violence: SR Sues JR For Using His Own Name In Law Firm Marketing

    Casteph ( profile ), 20 Aug, 2019 @ 08:48pm

    "All this really screams for is a provision in the law that would allow someone to use their birth-name so long as there was no other attempt to create confusion with another entity holding a similar mark."

    No, your honor, naming our child Amazon Google Smith had nothing to do with our future plans to create an SEO marketing firm in his name. Total coincidence.

  • On the post: San Mateo Dumps Red Light Camera Program After A Decade Of Continuous Failure

    Casteph ( profile ), 29 Jul, 2019 @ 02:11pm

    Re: Bit disingenuous

    "So even while the program as executed did not reduce the number of accidents, it might have reduced the average or even accumulated severity." Given that they could have reduced collisions with a longer yellow and a delayed red/green timing, there is no excuse for using the red light camera at all.

  • On the post: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: Facebook Still Can't Figure Out How To Deal With Naked Breasts

    Casteph ( profile ), 06 May, 2019 @ 10:12am

    " Like a teenaged heterosexual boy, it appears that Facebook has no clue how to deal with naked female breasts."

    You can't blame that entirely on Facebook. Rather, it is society that is erratic on the display of breasts, where male nipples are ok to display in public, but female nipples, even if they look exactly like male nipples, are not. It's not that moderation doesn't scale it's that our societies rules about nipples are ridiculous.

  • On the post: Ironically, Too Many Video Streaming Choices May Drive Users Back To Piracy

    Casteph ( profile ), 05 Apr, 2019 @ 07:46pm

    Re: 'Requirement' is not 'choice'

    "People are't getting more choices, they're seeing what they already have being split up and silo'd away into numerous exclusive services," This ^. The market is fragmented, not filled with "choices". The headline is a bit off.

  • On the post: Scooter Company Bird Sends Absolutely Bullshit Copyright Threat Letter To Cory Doctorow For Reporting On Modifying Scooters

    Casteph ( profile ), 11 Jan, 2019 @ 11:17pm

    That is a thoughtful reply, however it ignores two things, one of which is the headline (which, to the best of my knowledge, are written by the authors at the collective blog rather than a copy editor), which declares the scooters illegal and the linked article cited byt Doctrow, which he is IMO endorsing, that is specifically about stealing the scooters in the two weeks remaining before the city's grace period expires and the scooters are subject to city impound. It's a pretty tall order to justify the scooters as legally "abandoned" before that deadline.

  • On the post: Scooter Company Bird Sends Absolutely Bullshit Copyright Threat Letter To Cory Doctorow For Reporting On Modifying Scooters

    Casteph ( profile ), 11 Jan, 2019 @ 10:58pm

    Another non-reply by you. And unlike you, I have a history on this page that can be looked up.

    Here's the thing you can't get around: Doctorow's link to JWZ's post about stealing Bird scooters for the parts was explicitly about stealing them in the remaining two weeks before San Francisco's grace period expired and the city impounded them, when, presumably, they would no longer be available to steal off the streets.

    You can't plausibly deny that. Which it seems is why you didn't and just made unfounded accusations about me instead.

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