Joshua Bardwell 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Julie Taymor Blames Twitter For Bad Reviews Of 'Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark'

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 27 Jun, 2011 @ 07:19am

    An editorial comment: I found the number of consecutive "apparently"-s in the first paragraph and the number of consecutive "seem"-s in the last paragraph to be distracting. Thought you might like to know.

  • On the post: Why Is The Federal Government Running Ads Secretly Created & Owned By NBC Universal?

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 10 Jun, 2011 @ 06:30am

    Mike,

    Your outrage is justified, but I hope you're not actually surprised. The government may not run PSA's written by McDonalds, but who do you think writes the FDA and USDA guidelines and regulations? The food industry, in large part. It's true in every industry, from banking, to health-care, to food, to, yes, entertainment and copyright.

  • On the post: Bandwidth Caps Forcing Users To Police Their Own Household Internet Usage

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 11 Apr, 2011 @ 07:54am

    Just to be clear, I don't like bandwidth caps, and I think it's shitty to sell "unlimited" service that is actually capped.

    That being said, I don't think you can have it both ways. The article points out how silly it is to force users to police their own network, but of course, if the ISP starts policing (via application blocking or selective throttling), people scream just as loud. If you operate under the premise that the bandwidth is limited, then somebody needs to do the policing. I'd rather see the user be forced to do it, because then at least the ISP is taking a hands off, content-neutral approach.

  • On the post: Monsanto Sued By Organic Farmers Who Don't Want To Be Accused Of Patent Infringement

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 31 Mar, 2011 @ 10:37am

    Profit

    IMO, the conflation of value with profit is part of your confusion. My (limited) experience supplying my own food, plant and animal, has led me to the conclusion that it's relatively easy (note: I said "relatively"!) to feed yourself and your family, but you have to make a Faustian bargain in order to have one person feed many. Consider by way of example: I just started raising sheep this year, with two ewes, two lambs, and a ram. They subsist almost entirely on the grass and field plants that grow on my property. As close to zero-input as anything I do. Every year, the ewes produce between 2 and 4 lambs, from which I get about 50-70 lbs of freezer meat a piece. All I need to do this is a relatively small fence, or, lacking that, a herd dog, to keep the sheep from wandering off.

    From this simple arrangement, I get to eat, but I don't make any money. And if I tried to sell the sheep for money, it would be hard to make much at all. In order to really profit, I would need hundreds or thousands of sheep, but at that point, the simple, self-sustaining model kind of goes out of the window. I need hundreds of acres of land, I need vehicles and move around the land, I need thousands of feet of fence, and so on. And all of that eats into my profit.

    I think this same model plays out in other aspects of food production. You can grow all the potatoes you and your family want to eat with almost nothing in terms of input or labor. But if you want to profit from potatoes, you have to scale up to a degree that your inputs threaten your profits.

    So, the reason farmers aren't profitable, IMO, is not because we don't respect them (although we don't), but because food production and profit are inherently at odds with each other. And if you see anybody who IS profiting off of food production, you should ask yourself where they're getting that profit from. It is incredibly difficult to ethically, humanely, sustainably, healthfully, with good quality, and profitably produce food. If you see someone who is profiting on food production, ask yourself which of the other factors they're compromising on in order to get that profit.

  • On the post: More Mass Porn Copyright Infringement Lawsuits Get Dumped

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 03 Jan, 2011 @ 06:39am

    To then get upset about alleged infringement of your own work is somewhat ironic.

    Only if you consider torrenting a copyrighted work without the copyright-holder's permission to be equivalent to fair use.

    Listen, I'm as much of a copy-fighter as anybody, but as the law stands now, there's clearly a difference between fair-use parody (which "Batman XXX whatever" is) and torrenting.

  • On the post: Why Voting For COICA Is A Vote For Censorship

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 05 Dec, 2010 @ 08:42am

    Re: Re: Re:

    No, of course not. I don't agree that those were in fact dedicated to infringing purposes when compared to something like thepiratebay.org. And I just don't follow the leap in logic from talking about those technologies to talking about a specific application of a different technology here.

    The parallel between the VCR, the MP3 player, and the Pirate Bay is so obvious to me that I'm having trouble seeing how anybody could miss it. Hell, I remember Jack Valenti saying that home taping was killing music, at the same time I was calling in requests to my local radio stations so that I could tape the songs off the air. I didn't think of myself as a "pirate." My parents just didn't buy me music, and I was too young to get a job to buy it myself. One of the first things I bought with "my own money" when I got my first job was a CD player and a couple of CDs.

    If you think that the rhetoric about the VCR was any less hysterical than the rhetoric about TPB, you're wrong. I have to wonder if you may just be young enough that you missed it. I can imagine that, to someone who grew up in a world where the entertainment industry had embraced the VCR, the direct parallel between it and TBP may not be obvious.

  • On the post: While TSA Looks At You Naked, Child Finds Loaded Gun Magazine Left On Southwest Plane

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 24 Nov, 2010 @ 07:42am

    Re: Re: Unless the LEO was carrying a M1 Garand...

    It is a common mistake. That's why there are whole web pages devoted to correcting it.

  • On the post: 200 Students Admit To 'Cheating' On Exam… But Bigger Question Is If It Was Really Cheating Or Studying

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2010 @ 01:25pm

    I have participated in the construction of a test bank for a certification exam. In my opinion, if the test bank is correctly structured, having prior access to it should provide only minimal advantage to the student. The test bank I participated in creating has multiple permutations on each question such that it would require extraordinary memorization skills to be able to get the questions right without understanding the topic. Alternatively, some questions were written so that, if you didn't understand the key piece of information that differentiated them, they would not stand out from each other on a test. These weren't "trick" questions per se; the ability to recognize the key differentiator was the knowledge being tested.

    For example, if a question pertained to IP subnetting, you could easily dump forty different combinations of IP address and subnet mask into the test bank. There are simply too many combinations of IP address and subnet mask for a person to memorize every single question/answer pair, especially if you intentionally make the questions similar to each other. Basically, you make it easier to just learn the material than to memorize the test bank.

    The certification exam in question doesn't provide the actual questions to the students, because, well, SOMEBODY out there would memorize all the questions and answers, but it provides sample questions that are comparable to the test questions, with the intent of helping the students prepare better.

    My point is not to weigh in on whether what the students did was ethical or not, but to point out that it IS possible to create test banks that have internal protection against "leaking".

  • On the post: TSA Defending Its Groin Grabbing Or Naked Image Security Techniques

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 17 Nov, 2010 @ 03:05pm

    All this talk about the bomber detonating himself at the moment of discovery seems to miss one crucial detail. Why doesn't he or she just walk away, accept the $10,000 civil suit, and come back in a week and try again? What does a suicide bomber care if the government is filing a civil suit against him or her?

  • On the post: Google Employee Leaks The News That Google Fired Employee Who Leaked Salary Info

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 12 Nov, 2010 @ 09:07am

    Incentive

    "Where's the incentive to improve one's self?" Last I checked, living off of 12k per year, WIC, food stamps, and the public health clinic SUCKED ROYAL ASS. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm sure people who live at or near the poverty line still have happy, fulfilling lives, but I fucking guarantee you not one of them is sitting there going, "shit man, I tell you what, if I lost my public services, that'd be just what I need to get off my ass and get a REAL job." Most poor people I meet bust their ass twice as hard as I do in my corporate job (for which I am extremely thankful) and get paid 1/4 as much.

  • On the post: Officer Bubbles Sues To Find Out Identity Of Anonymous YouTubers

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 18 Oct, 2010 @ 10:24am

    Consequences

    CONSEQUENCES WILL NEVER BE THE SAME.

  • On the post: Best Buy Firing Employee Because He Makes A Funny Video That Doesn't Even Mention Best Buy

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 02 Jul, 2010 @ 12:44pm

    Re: First Admendment Issue?

    What is it about the Internet that makes people not understand how the 1st Amendment works? The 1st Amendment says that the federal government shall not abridge freedom of speech. It has nothing whatsoever to do with a private company (Best Buy) firing an employee. Nothing at all.

  • On the post: How The NY Times Hides Behind Copyright Law To Hoard Information And Weaken Its Journalism

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 17 Jun, 2010 @ 02:13pm

    Anybody who can say without any sense of chagrin that IP is this country's greatest resource has totally lost perspective on where food comes from. Good luck eating IP.

  • On the post: Class Action Lawsuit Launched Against Google, Because Some Woman Didn't Secure Her Own WiFi

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 20 May, 2010 @ 09:27pm

    any unencrypted data you send over that network can be seen by anyone else on the same access point.

    Correction: can be seen by anyone within range of you, regardless of whether they are on your AP, or any AP at all. "Within range" is defined as a function of your transmit power and antenna gain and the snooper's receive sensitivity and antenna gain: to wit, if the snooper has a high-gain antenna and a sensitive chipset, he or she can intercept your traffic at distances that you would not generally consider to be "within range" of you.

    Only way to "secure" your wireless is to set up encryption(with a strong password), dont broadcast SSID, and use MAC filtering. MAC filtering is most important because it will deny access to the router, and stop the method mentioned above.

    Stop at the first comma and you're good to go. Hiding your SSID stops you from appearing in the visible AP list of most client utilities, but any hacker worth his or her salt will still be able to find you via active scanning (Probe frames). Even if you block your AP from responding to blank probe frames, the AP still has to respond to probes from your authorized machines, and the hacker can pick that up. It's happening all the time in the background and there's no way to stop it, so... hiding your SSID? Worthless from a security standpoint.

    Likewise for MAC filtering. Spoofing a MAC address is trivial.

    The bottom line is this: use WPA2 with a strong passphrase or enterprise authentication and call it a day. Anybody who can crack WPA2 is going to blow through your dinky little MAC filtering and hidden SSID, but the reality is that nobody is going to crack WPA2, so why bother with the other stuff?

  • On the post: Duh, Don't Leave A Thumb Drive With Child Porn Plugged Into A Shared Computer

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 22 Apr, 2010 @ 09:24am

    Re: Third Problem....

    Everybody deserves a competent defense. Period.

  • On the post: Maryland Police Confiscate Biker's Computers After He Catches Questionable Activity On Helmet Cam

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 21 Apr, 2010 @ 10:55am

    Re:

    Dumbguy:

    1. Running from cops is not grounds for use of deadly force. I'm not an expert on the force spectrum used by police officers, but I question whether anything the guy did justified the drawing of the officer's gun. I speculate that, in lieu of a uniform and badge, the officer drew his gun in order to have a symbol of authority that would induce compliance.

    2. The cop drew his gun and began giving orders before he identified himself as an officer. If I had been the cyclist, I would have believed that I was about to be murdered. If the motorcyclist had been armed (as many motorcyclists are), this situation could have ended very differently.

  • On the post: But How Could Wikileaks Break A Story Without Traditional Newspaper Backing?

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 06 Apr, 2010 @ 11:01am

    This is bullshit. As Mike has repeatedly pointed out on this blog, traditional news sources get the facts wrong all the time. Their "credibility" doesn't seem to suffer, IMO because nobody ever hears about it.

  • On the post: Court Says President Bush Violated Wiretapping Laws With Warrantless Wiretap

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 31 Mar, 2010 @ 06:52pm

    You either need to give our gov't the tools to fight terrorism or you need to capitulate to terrorists. You can't have it both ways.

    False Dichotomy. Liberty is not the opposite of safety.

  • On the post: School Spying Scandal Gets Even More Bizarre: Student In Question Was Disciplined For Eating Candy

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 22 Feb, 2010 @ 10:50am

    Re: Constitutionality?????

    Even if the student was taking drugs, all information gleaned from that viewing would have been unusable in court and therefore the student couldn't even been questioned about it by the school, or the police, let alone punished. I think you're applying police evidence laws over-broadly. If a cop finds evidence illegally, that evidence isn't admissible in court, but private citizens are not bound by those laws. The Constitution protects me from illegal search and seizure BY GOVERNMENT AGENTS only. If a cop enters my house without probable cause, anything he or she sees is inadmissible. If my neighbor breaks into my house and finds my pot-grow-operation, that he or she was not in the house legally doesn't affect the admissibility of his or her testimony. IANAL, but that's how I understand it.

  • On the post: Awkward Stock Photo Blog Hit With DMCA Claim

    Joshua Bardwell ( profile ), 04 Feb, 2010 @ 10:51am

    It's in copyright law. Fair use. You don't need permission to use someone else's work if it's fair use.

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