Griff 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Judge Blocks Former Microsoft General Manager From Working For Salesforce

    Griff ( profile ), 19 Apr, 2011 @ 10:56pm

    Free flow of talent

    I think it's a bit of a stretch to compare a dislike of having your employees spill your secrets to the competition with supporting talented foreign programmers entering the country.
    Not the same thing at all.



    I was once asked to sign a non compete with a small specialised company. No biggie, their competition was a joke and I'd never want to go work for them.

    But my employer got bought by a behemoth who supplied a vast array of products to the life science industry. It was once claimed to me that the non compete now applied to the competition of the new owners. This would force me to leave the entire industry if I ever left.

    I think in the UK you cannot remove someone's means of earning a living. So a court judgement that confiscated a carpenters's tools, or a non compete that ruled out any way to practice the trade the person was qualified for, would be illegal.

    Most of us see non compete's as almost irrelevant because we're simply not important enough.
    - noone would spend the money suing for ordinary folks like us
    - most HR depts wouldn't even know we had gone to the competition if we weren't in mega high profile jobs.

    But in most cases, "forgetting" to sign it from the outset is the easiest policy, because at the beginning they are happy to have you there and don't make a fuss and thereafter it gets forgotten due to HR incompetence.

  • On the post: Robot Journalist Writes A Better Story On College Baseball Perfect Game

    Griff ( profile ), 19 Apr, 2011 @ 10:43pm

    Re: Re: Speaking of robots writing articles

    Surely, if TD updates were scripted it wouldn't go deathly quiet at weekends (requiring new creative ventures such as "Dark Helmet's favourite posts of the week" to satisfy TD addicts).

    (In the interests of disclosure, I'm all in favour of these "meta posts")

  • On the post: Judge Not Allowed To Hide Google's Report About Shutting Down Gmail Account Per Judge's Order

    Griff ( profile ), 19 Apr, 2011 @ 10:25pm

    Re:

    Making available = distribution.

    If I upload a song I have by definition distributed it to the population of the planet, with all the lost sales that this implies. Hasn't the xxAA education campaign taught you anything ?


    Meanwhile, concerning the original story, wasn't the gmail account in question dormant ? Or am I misremembering this story.

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

    Griff ( profile ), 19 Apr, 2011 @ 05:27am

    Re: 2piF/c = wavelength (lamda)

    Interesting suggestion.
    However,

    - Pi being an irrational number is by definition not expressible as a ratio, surely.
    - hex is not base 8
    - you'd actually want something like base 12 as a scale is made up of 12 semitones, not 8 tones.

    But if you did this and the resulting music DIDN'T sound absolutely awful, then I guess that would actually be quite interesting.

  • On the post: TSA Says 'You Might Be A Terrorist If… You Complain About The TSA'

    Griff ( profile ), 16 Apr, 2011 @ 11:21am

    No imagination

    The problem here with the TSA appears to be the stable door syndrome. They are trying to prevent 9/11, but locked cockpit doors and everyone knowing that hijackers don't just want to be taken somewhere will stop that ever happening again.

    9/11 succeeded because they were organised, motivated and had the element of surprise. Apart from some idiotic shoe bomber type incidents (ie poorly organised and no real element of surprise), we don't know of any real attempts at a major attack since 9/11.

    If the next event is as completely unexpected as a mode of attack as the last one was, it won't be prevented by security that works like this.

    The reason I worry is because I have no confidence in law enforcement (or Government)'s imagination.

  • On the post: FBI Hijacks Botnet, With Court Order… Then Issues Kill Signal To Millions Of Computers

    Griff ( profile ), 14 Apr, 2011 @ 09:08am

    Re: Hard Sale for stopping this activity

    So google goes a great spam filtering job but your corporate spam filter costs $10k.

    Hmm. Why not send corporate email through google ?
    Route it in, pop/IMAP it out. One google user each, free.
    KISS as they say.

    Or even go the whole hog and move to Google corporate email. Saves you running a mail server too.

  • On the post: FBI Hijacks Botnet, With Court Order… Then Issues Kill Signal To Millions Of Computers

    Griff ( profile ), 14 Apr, 2011 @ 09:05am

    Re: Re: Hard Sale for stopping this activity

    Whitelists ain't much use for new customers.

  • On the post: Latest Issue Of Newsweek Down To Just Six Ads

    Griff ( profile ), 14 Apr, 2011 @ 02:23am

    Comics

    I once traded in some airmiles I was never going to use for about 6 annual mag subscriptions.

    The Economist stuck (though I consume it mainly in MP3 form while walking the dog) but I remember thinking that Time (and especially Newsweek) were basically comics rather than grown up reading.

    I also ended up with a NewYorker subscription because a previous resident at the address never redirected it, and I always learn something when I read it.

    When it's a quality read or offers a good analysis/summary, a magazine has plenty of future. But when it doesn't even itself know of a reason why it should exist then it deserves to die.

  • On the post: Dumbest Lawsuit Ever? HuffPo Sued By Bloggers Who Agreed To Work For Free… But Now Claim They Were Slaves

    Griff ( profile ), 13 Apr, 2011 @ 03:56am

    Let me get this straight

    I commit some terrible high profile crime.
    The reporting of it makes CNN money.
    Without my actions, they wouldn't have the news content.

    Do I deserve a slice of CNN's profits ?

  • On the post: Is Tethering Stealing Bandwidth?

    Griff ( profile ), 13 Apr, 2011 @ 03:43am

    May be missing the point

    I think that a lot of people are (intentionally) missing the point here.

    If (which may not be the case here) you have a flat rate plan, then your supplier of internet bandwidth may have created a business plan that is based on a reasonable amount of data being used, based on average user consumption.

    If (for example) I bought unlimited cable net access, they would have every right to be peeved if I was allowing the whole neighbourhood access to my wireless network and hence using a vast amount more then a single reasonable user would.

    Now, if I do the same with my iPhone, say, and create a wireless access point so that a load of other people can share my connection, that is a similar thing. It could be seen as an abuse of a flat rate plan that was based on a business model taking into account average use of a single user.

    Like offering an all you can eat buffet in a restaurant and then having a large family come and share a plate.


    But hey, if the user is on a "pay per gigabyte" plan, why the hell should they care ?
    Answer - because they'd rather have two customers paying for a gig than 1 paying for 2 gig because there are fixed charges too, and other upselling opportunities.

    I suspect the "tethering" that is objected to is not "using my phone as a modem for me" but "using my phone as open access for the whole coffee shop".


    Often this seems to be enabled on people's devices by default. For a while I found on UK trains I could find a net connection simply by hunting with my bluetooth. Not that I ever use it - that might be illegal...

  • On the post: Sorry, My Brain Accidentally Called You

    Griff ( profile ), 13 Apr, 2011 @ 01:44am

    The ultimate hands free ?

    Sounds to me like a guaranteed car crash - far more distracting than dial by voice.

    99% of the application of this will be for severely disabled.

    There have been many false dawns in the drive to get rid of keyboards and keypads and they have survived because they work fairly well, and they are totally unambiguous.

    For example people would rather use tiny keyboards than near perfect handwriting recognition with a stylus. Why ?

    But I see the DHS rubbing their hands in glee at the polygraph implications...

  • On the post: Politicians Considering Useless Browser Blocks Against 'Rogue' Sites

    Griff ( profile ), 11 Apr, 2011 @ 05:39am

    If they had any sense...

    ... they'd mandate that ISP's did this at the DNS server level. I'd bet 90+ % of average Joes use their ISP's DNS and have no idea what it is.

    (Well, except in the UK where TalkTalk's DNS goes down so often half the population have learnt about OpenDNS)

    Of course, this would allow the technically capable to get round it easily, but hey, so would what they are suggesting.

    The difference is that mandating a blacklist on an ISP DNS server is actually feasible and would not attract so much attention - making the world and his wife change browsers isn't.

  • On the post: Is Downloading And Converting A YouTube Video To An MP3 Infringement?

    Griff ( profile ), 08 Feb, 2011 @ 02:50pm

    What about streaming services ?

    I'd have thought the real "concern" among these RIAA types is not that someone will record a youtube vid (someone made it possible to watch listen for free already by uploading) but that someone might make it easy to get a $5 / month Napster subscription and then just digitally record 1000 albums, then end the subscription and keep the MP3's for ever.

    I frequently use TotalRecorder to record dial in conference calls/webinars from Skype so I can listen at my leisure when walking the dog in the woods. Is that fair use ?

  • On the post: Katie Couric And Bryant Gumbel Discover The Internet

    Griff ( profile ), 03 Feb, 2011 @ 06:22am

    Give them a break

    This was, what, 2 years before the netscape browser went mainstream ?

    There was no web to speak of, people like me who were heavily into CompuServe knew the internet as this necessary evil to send mail to people outside CIS but which (without MIME yet becoming widely accepted as the defacto way to attach a file) was a real mess to use for communication and tended to full your screen with horrible headers few could understand.

    At this point "the internet" (Archie, Gopher etc) was for serious geeks only.

    You could argue that they shouldn't have been even trying to do the segment without more research, but to not know what they were talking about in 1994 hardly put them at the bottom of the pile.

    In fact considering there was no real web yet, it was actually fairly prescient for them to be even realising it was worth talking about

  • On the post: It's January, Which Means Congress Promises Patent Reform That Will Never Come

    Griff ( profile ), 12 Jan, 2011 @ 04:30am

    Re: Piracy Coalition

    On the other side there are tens of thousands for companies who use patents to create new wealth, jobs and prosperity.

    Use patents to create new wealth ? I thought they used new inventions for that.

  • On the post: Band Discovers Leaked Song… And Its Response Is To Release A Better Version For Free

    Griff ( profile ), 12 Jan, 2011 @ 03:50am

    Where's the preview ?

    Jeez, went to the band's site and there's the track list but no "listen to a bit of the song" technology.

    Remember when you went into a record store and could listen on headphones before buying. That's not such a new idea is it ?


    Imagine going into a car dealership and being told you couldn't sit in a car to get the feel of it until you'd actually bought it ?

  • On the post: Band Discovers Leaked Song… And Its Response Is To Release A Better Version For Free

    Griff ( profile ), 12 Jan, 2011 @ 03:41am

    Worked for me

    Never heard of the band.
    But now I have the Mp3, c/o of this story

    And I kinda like it.

    Might go and buy an album. Assuming it is available to buy is MP3 not some stupid DRM'd format.

  • On the post: UK Man Convicted Of A Crime For Letting Drivers Know They Should Slow Down To Avoid Speed Camera

    Griff ( profile ), 07 Jan, 2011 @ 02:12am

    Clarifying attitudes

    There's a range of different attitudes to speed cameras.

    Some feel that any speed limits are bogus because "I know I can drive safely at 90 as long as it is away from pedestrians". Unfortunately people's self image as a driver is not always correlated with their actual ability.

    Some feel there are plenty of incidences of needlessly low speed limits. (There's a patch of 50mph freeway near Cardiff, UK, where I live. Why not 70 ? Are they just persecuting motorists ? Turns out they accidentally built central crash barriers with too low a crash speed rating and now have to upgrade the whole stretch. Stupid, but not sinister).

    If you've just left a freeway at 70, 30 feels like you could get out and walk. Without some external persuasion, motorist simply go too fast in these situations. And they are not the best judges of what too fast is.

    Often residents have a big say in what the speed limits are. They campaign for camera in and upstream of their distructs. I live on a bend everyone goes round too fast. People frequently lose control and mount the kerb, (luckily not while there was a pedestrian standing there, so far). Once a car misjudged it so badly they smashed through a 5 ft tall brick wall into our garden, throwing bricks onto the kids trampoline 20 yards away.
    If they put a speed camera 100 yards from my house I'd applaud it. But 99% of local drivers would rail against it and call it a revenue raising device.

    If you are one who rails against cameras, ask youself this. If you had a switch you could flick in your car that would automatically ensure your car never exceeded the current speed limit, would you flick it on ?
    What if you had a transparent process for questioning suspect speed limits (and all the "bogus" ones were revised). Would you flick the switch then ?
    What if your insurance would be half price if you had the switch locked in place ?

    (Personally I think such a switch would be dangerous - Some people would drive everywhere with their foot to the floor and blame the state when they rolled the car at a tight corner. But it's interesting to explore how people think.)

    I never cease to be amazed how people claim cameras trapped or tricked them. Speed limits are explicit and extremely easy to obey. Noone should need telling cameras are there.
    There is an argument for keeping their location secret (so people don't exhibit dangerous braking behaviour in their immediate vicinity) but publishing data about how many people were caught in this general area.

    I've been caught myself. No doubt I thought "bastards !" at the time but I was banged to rights and if I can't take responsibility for my own actions then cameras are are the least of my worries in life.

  • On the post: Would Twitter Be Liable For Links To Infringing Material?

    Griff ( profile ), 01 Jan, 2011 @ 07:13am

    Different shades

    Seems we have a spectrum of possibilities for what a link is

    At one end, a link that leads directly to a download.

    At the other end, describing an infringing website in such a way that people can find it and engage in activity with infringing content. Ie the news storty example mentioned above.


    What bothers me is that I could post a link to a blog in jan that started hosting infringing content in feb. Am I supposed to revisit any link I post periodically to see if the target is still valid ?


    There have been various legal analogies posted here, but I feel that "linking to illegal content" is like running a TV ad for an illegal casino. There is clear intent to get people to go there and do something illegal.
    But if you're producing a local free newspaper that lists the local businesses in your high street and you list a video shop that (though this is not common knowledge) sells dodgy vids, you'd hopefully get away with it.
    The difference is whether you have a reasonable chance of having not known that there was illegal stuff there.

    In the casino TV ad case, I'd expect the TV station to respond to a takedown, but not to be prosecuted if they had not actually seen the ad when it ran.

    Google can link to infringing sites with impunity because they have no way of realising till they are told. Robots don't do advanced legel processing. But a person who sets out to post a link to a torrent site has fairly clear intent.

  • On the post: As Predicted: iPad Magazine Subscriber Numbers Plummeting

    Griff ( profile ), 31 Dec, 2010 @ 12:31am

    How could iPad be better than dead tree ?

    The assumption that people would subscribe just to read it on the iPad almost for the novelty value seems to be at the core of the problem.

    if you actually look at the dead tree experience, and ask "how could iPad be better than this" you end up with either
    - sensible stuff (cross links to articles in this or previous issues, or better use of hyperlinks to replace "inset panels" to make reading flow better)
    - hype and nonsense ("make it interactive" whatever that means) which miss the point that sometimes people want to just consume without interacting.

    Advertisers, though, should be salivating. A video ad with a click through to be sent more details while you carry on reading the magazine ? Ads that can feedback WHO turned on the volume for this particular vid. Targeted live ads (this guy likes car ads a lot but hates drug company ads).

    And yet unlike the web, the guy's not sat at a computer - he's in relaxed mag reading mode.

    I'd have said that the real innovation that would make the iPad compelling should be coming from the advertisers, not the main content presenters.


    But regards pricing, there should be a single subscription and you get all formats.
    I get the economist by subscription, and I consume about half on a sat am with breakfast (dead tree), and half as MP3 while walking the dog. The latter REALLY adds value for me, but if I had to pay separately I might not.

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