Chris-Mouse 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (538)

• On the post: Why Is The Copyright Office Celebrating That All Our Cute Pet Photos Are Locked Up Under Copyright?

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 15 Apr, 2020 @ 12:57pm

  Just out of curiosity, the the US Copyright Office pay the licensing fee for that picture before tweeting it in the first place?

• On the post: Trump Campaign Actually Sues TV Station Over Anti-Trump Ad

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 13 Apr, 2020 @ 11:18am

  As long as those in power see SLAPP lawsuits as a weapon to use against critics, there is no chance at all of getting a federal anti-SLAPPlaw passed.

• On the post: Manufacturers Refuse To Allow Hospitals To Fix Ventilators That Are The Last Hope For Many COVID-19 Patients

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 10 Apr, 2020 @ 08:47am

  Re:

  How about we check some of your 'facts' To start with, the number of new cases reported is still in the hundreds per day. We don't know that the peak need is only 5000 units, because we certainly can't say we're past the peak. Second, at the time Cuomo asked for the ventilators, the number of cases was climbing rapidly. He asked for enough ventilators to meet the worst case projections that were being made at that time. Doing anything else would mean being prepared to let people die if the projection was off. Third, nobody was 'panicking'. They were prepared to waste money to be ready for a worst case situation, rather than preparing to waste lives by assuming an optimistic projection. Contrast that with the federal response that seems to be much more concerned about the amount of money the 1% is losing that the lives that the 99% are losing.

• On the post: Court Explains 1st Amendment To Tulsi Gabbard In Dismissing Her Ridiculous Lawsuit Against Google

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 05 Mar, 2020 @ 10:58am

  It's amazing how many people think that my failure to loan them my soapbox somehow infringes on their ability to step up on their own soapbox and speak.

• On the post: Another Day, Another Bogus SLAPP Suit From Devin Nunes And Steven Biss

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 03 Mar, 2020 @ 10:08am

  Re: One hopes that ...

  Oh good. I've always wanted a Unicorn

• On the post: Surprise! MIT Study Claims Voatz E-Voting Technology Is A Security Dumpster Fire

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 14 Feb, 2020 @ 07:35am

  Internet voting cannot work

  There are just too many conflicting requirements for proper voting. Most of these cannot be verified electronically.

  • Voting must be authenticated to prove you're eligible to vote.
  • Voting must be anonymous so your vote cannot be tracked.
  • Voting must be verifiable so you can trust that your vote was counted correctly
  • Voting must not be provable so you can't easily sell your vote.

  for internet voting you can add in:

  • Voting must be available anywhere you have network access.
  • Voting must not be available anywhere you could be coerced into voting

  Until someone comes up with a way to meet all of these requirements, and do so in a secure manner, electronic voting will remain a disaster waiting to happen.

• On the post: Xbox Chief Says Its Main Competitors Are Now Google, Amazon Rather Than Sony, Nintendo

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 07 Feb, 2020 @ 05:20pm

  Even if Microsoft is wrong about streaming games being the future, there is a lot of truth to seeing Netflix and Amazon especially as competitors. All of those companies are competing to capture as many entertainment dollars as they can.

• On the post: Comcast Says It Will Respond To Cord Cutting In 2020 With…More Price Hikes

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 24 Jan, 2020 @ 06:35am

  What was that definition of insanity?

  It certainly appears that Comcast is trying the same thing again and expecting a different result.

• On the post: LAPD Officers Faked Reports, Added Innocent People To Its Gang Database

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 16 Jan, 2020 @ 05:39am

  Re:

  Given how often the lists are shared and merged, the answers are 'all of them' and 'we can't tell you due to national security'

• On the post: Bill Barr: Apple Is Holding Up This Investigation. Apple: You Waited A Month To Tell Us You Needed More Help

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 15 Jan, 2020 @ 06:06am

  Re: Question about warrants from a non-lawyer

  A warrant forces you to hand over evidence you already have in your possession. Apple does not have a unencrypted copy of the encrypted data on the phone, but they could possibly create a custom version of the operating system that could then be loaded onto the phone and extract the unencrypted data. Apples problem is that the DOJ wants to be able to use a warrant to force someone to actively assist the police even if it is against that person's interest. If the DOJ wins this, it would set a very, very dangerous precedent that goes far beyond the encryption battle.

• On the post: Washington Court Says Local Pot Dealers Can Hang Up Christmas Lights That Spell 'POT'

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 28 Dec, 2019 @ 05:36am

  Re:

  Making pot legal may not be the best idea, but every other idea that has been tried is worse. The US government discovered in the 1920s that banning a drug merely funnels huge amounts of money to criminal organizations willing to supply the demand. Banning pot, and all of the other 'recreational drugs' has merely confirmed that finding. The "war on drugs" has been going on for 40 years now, and hasn't made the slightest dent in the supply. What it has done is cost a hell of a lot, both in money and in lives destroyed. Pretty much the only way to reduce drug use that has been shown to work is to legalize it, tax it, and treat the addiction problems as a public health issue rather than a criminal issue. That's working with nicotine, and alcohol, so there's no reason it can't work with other drugs as well.

• On the post: DHS Sued Over First Amendment-Trampling Social Media Vetting Program

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 11 Dec, 2019 @ 07:56am

  This is a perfect excuse to keep out 'those' people

  Refusing to reveal your passwords is an excuse to ban you from entering the country. On the other hand, sharing passwords is also a criminal offense, and as such is grounds for being denied entry to the country.
  So when that nice customs agent sees someone he doesn't like,all he has to do is ask for the passwords. No matter how you answer, you get denied entry.

• On the post: DHS Wanted To Add US Citizens To The Long List Of People Subjected To Mandatory Face Scans At Airports… But Has Backed Down For Now

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 06 Dec, 2019 @ 05:23am

  They just want an excuse.

  Facial scanning technology is nowhere near even 90% accurate. Even if they waved a magic wand and got it up to 99.9% accurate it's still not good enough.
  The major airport near me handles about 4 million passengers each month. At 99.9% accuracy, that's still 130 false alarms each and every day.

  What they want to do is use the system as an excuse to harass travelers. It might be that brown skinned individual the racist operator doesn't like, or it might be the pretty woman the pervert operator wants an excuse to grope. It might also be an excuse for the DHS to send more tax money to enrich some corporation.

  Any way you look at it, the facial recognition machine would be better labeled as an excuse machine.

• On the post: Author Tries To Trademark The Word 'Dark' For All Of Literary Fiction

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 05 Dec, 2019 @ 05:58am

  Try a search on Amazon...

  I did a search for "dark" on Amazon, and got 20 pages of books with 'dark' in the title. That's around 300 or so books, and that's just books currently in print and carried by Amazon.

• On the post: EU Tells US: Ban Strong Encryption, And Privacy Shield Data Sharing Agreement Could Be At Risk

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 25 Nov, 2019 @ 10:54am

  Back in the 1980s, the US banned export of strong encryption. The result was that encryption software development moved offshore and continued merrily along. This meant the US completely lost the advantage it had in encryption development.
  If the US bans strong encryption, the results will be almost the same. Except this time the US will not be able to import better software from abroad.

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

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2019 @ 10:02am

  As a matter of fact, I do have a problem with a blanket ban of pictures of naked children.
  You might want to take a look at this picture. I'll warn you, it has full frontal nudity of a pre-teen girl.
  It also won a pulitzer prize and became the World Press photo of the year for 1973.

• On the post: Court Tells Man $172 Red Light Camera Ticket Is Actually Less Than $100 And Can't Be Challenged In Court

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 02 Oct, 2019 @ 05:12am

  Looks to me like the Telecom industry has far more influence over the courts than we previously thought.

• On the post: 'Baby Shark', Derived From A Public Domain Folk Song, Now The Subject Of A Copyright Dispute

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 29 Aug, 2019 @ 12:25pm

  If copyright exists to encourage the creation of works like this, then I have to think that a little less copyright isn't entirely a bad thing.

• On the post: FCC Pats Itself On The Back For 'New' Robocall Plan That Isn't New, Has No Real Teeth

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 13 Jun, 2019 @ 08:15am

  FCC Pats Itself On The Back For Doing Nothing

  Which pretty much sums up the FCC in a nutshell.

• On the post: Whining About Big Tech Doesn't Protect Journalism

  

  Chris-Mouse ( profile ), 10 Jun, 2019 @ 01:07pm

  Newspapers still haven't figured out that they are not, and never have been in the business of 'selling news'. The newspaper business has always been about aggregating reader attention, and then selling that attention to advertisers.
  For the better part of a century newspapers pretty much had a monopoly on advertising. Even Radio and Television didn't put much of a dent in that.
  For most of that time, the big cash cow was the classified ad section of the newspaper. Page after page of ads at ten cents per word adds up to a lot of money, way more than the subscription fees.

  That cash cow is now gone. It's not Google and Facebook that killed the newspaper business model, it's Kijiji, eBay, and Craiglist.

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