keithzg 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (73) comment rss

  • On the post: We're Apparently Scanning Our TVs For Viruses Now

    keithzg ( profile ), 17 Jun, 2019 @ 04:27pm

    Just buy a computer monitor, or a projector

    Admittedly even some projectors are shipping with 'smart' OSes these days, but you can still buy just-a-display, you just can't buy a "TV" that is one.

  • On the post: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: Some Republican Politicians Are Indistinguishable From Neo Nazis

    keithzg ( profile ), 29 Apr, 2019 @ 01:49pm

    More like a true positive, amiright?

    Yeah, Masnick is right in a broader sense to bring up the impossibility of large-scale content moderation without false positives, but in this specific case of flagging Republican politicians as identical content to those from Neo-Nazis, that's not actually an inaccurate result.

  • On the post: Producer Scott Rudin Going Around Killing Off Licensed Community Theater Shows Of To Kill A Mockingbird

    keithzg ( profile ), 01 Mar, 2019 @ 04:01pm

    Re: Missed

    Read this out to my officemate and we both very literally laughed out loud; well played. This certainly deserves first place in the funniest comments of this week, and sure has my vote!

  • On the post: Producer Scott Rudin Going Around Killing Off Licensed Community Theater Shows Of To Kill A Mockingbird

    keithzg ( profile ), 01 Mar, 2019 @ 03:49pm

    The Kavinoky Theatre in Buffalo, N.Y., which had sold around 3,000 advance tickets, will replace Mockingbird with an adaptation of George Orwell's "1984."

    Well played, Kavinoky Theatre, well played.

  • On the post: Does Twitter Have An Anti-Conservative Bias, Or Just An Anti-Nazi Bias?

    keithzg ( profile ), 22 Feb, 2019 @ 04:37pm

    Someone should do an *actual* study

    I strongly suspect there is some bias in Twitter's banning, although not of the anti-conservative variety, but rather towards less popular accounts. I mean hell, a random Twitter friend of mine just got his account seemingly auto-banned because he tweeted a joke to another friend that their cat was going to "kill [them] dead" . . . which also shows pretty hilariously poor automation, since you'd think even an automated system would realize that "kill you dead" is the formulation of a joke rather than a threat.

  • On the post: Daily Deal: The Complete MySQL Bootcamp

    keithzg ( profile ), 01 Feb, 2019 @ 03:19pm

    Re: “the world's most popular open-source SQL database”

    Yeah I think it's probably true that in sheer volume of data throughput, or in terms of where the most important/valuable data in the world stores and passes through, MySQL (particularly if you include MariaDB, which IMHO people should be running instead) is the most popular database software in existence right now, while in sheer number of unique instances SQLite is probably the holder of the crown. (Folks will tell ya that PostgreSQL is the best one out there, and they may well be right; I don't personally know, I inherited a MySQL setup at my work, and have just kept that the same, although I've upgraded/migrated to MariaDB specifically at this point. Meanwhile, the actual software product we sell relies on at its core---you guessed it---SQLite.)

  • On the post: Emma Best's New Transparency Project Targets Russian Leaks She Says Wikileaks Refuses To Touch

    keithzg ( profile ), 24 Jan, 2019 @ 01:53pm

    We could still use a new WikiLeaks

    > DDoS differs from WikiLeaks in that it doesn’t solicit direct leaks of unpublished data—its focus is on compiling, organizing, and curating leaks that have already appeared somewhere in public.

    In that case though, we still need a high-profile organization that can securely receive and vet important leaks that *haven't* already appeared somewhere in public. While this endeavour does sound somewhat useful, in a practical sense it's far less primary. And the lack of this is the biggest reason WikiLeaks's breakdown over the past years has been so lamentable.

  • On the post: Parody Washington Post Leads To Bogus Legal Threat, And A Reminder Of An Old Internet Lawsuit

    keithzg ( profile ), 23 Jan, 2019 @ 12:57pm

    As their masthead says,

    Democracy Dies in expired Domain registration! I never understood it until now.

  • On the post: Sony Released Its Playstation Classic Console In A Way That Makes It Eminently Hackable

    keithzg ( profile ), 14 Dec, 2018 @ 06:35pm

    Ah yes, the wonderful irony of the PS3 hack

    The 360 was hacked so that people could (with some effort) run arbitrary code on the hardware long before the PS3 was. I'm sure someone would have hacked the PS3 eventually, but it's very notable to me that the PS3 went a long while being safe from things like people playing pirated games on it, and then barely a breath after they took away the ability of folks to run Linux on it people finally got around to hacking it!

    And the result was even better than before, since now more of the hardware was available to Linux, but of course it was also worse for Sony since in the process of hacking the PS3 to be able to still run Linux on it, it opened up a big enough crack for people to also play pirated games on it. Which at very least wouldn't have happened as early as it did if Sony hadn't rescinded the OtherOS functionality.

    Delicious, delicious karma.

  • On the post: Atlanta Cops Caught Deleting Body Cam Footage, Failing To Activate Recording Devices

    keithzg ( profile ), 10 Dec, 2018 @ 05:23pm

    Re:

    I've said it before, I'll say it again: police culture is too toxic for anything to work short of firing all of them and starting again from scratch. I've yet to see any proof otherwise.

  • On the post: Indiana Police Chief Promoting As Many Bad Cops As He Can To Supervisory Positions

    keithzg ( profile ), 07 Dec, 2018 @ 05:18pm

    Re: Can't fix this from the inside

    Fire them all. Start from scratch. Anything short of that, and the toxic culture will persist.

  • On the post: Nice Work EU: You've Given Google An Excuse To Offer A Censored Search Engine In China

    keithzg ( profile ), 14 Nov, 2018 @ 06:17pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: technicians running wild

    Yeah, pretty much. I mean they have "ethics" classes which literally teach how to justify immoral behaviour by putting it inside a justification framework.

  • On the post: Nice Work EU: You've Given Google An Excuse To Offer A Censored Search Engine In China

    keithzg ( profile ), 13 Nov, 2018 @ 04:18pm

    Re: Re: Re: technicians running wild

    MBAs really are the worst.

    Source: my father, who spent literally decades as a Prof teaching MBA students.

  • On the post: The Next Level Of Tech Activism: Google Employees Walk Out, Demand Changes From Management

    keithzg ( profile ), 02 Nov, 2018 @ 03:20pm

    Re: And tomorrow's headline...

    That would be an exceptionally idiotic move by Google PR-wise, particularly as they're fighting desperately these days to not be seen as being (or at least becoming) the bad guys.

  • On the post: The Next Level Of Tech Activism: Google Employees Walk Out, Demand Changes From Management

    keithzg ( profile ), 02 Nov, 2018 @ 03:19pm

    left/right

    A largely meaningless label. If you believe you're on the "left", the "right" is everyone you disagree with, and vice versa. Details don't matter, just root for your team.
    While that's true in the abstract, I feel like the self-identified "right" is worse about this than those who self-identify as other political designations, however. In particular, the recurring meme in American political thought lately of "the left is, and always has been the real fascists!" and such is just so hilarious and ahistorical that if I didn't know better I'd think there was something in the water. But yeah, compressing the multidimensional and multirelational facets of human society down to a single one-dimensional continuum is already a nearly psychotically oversimplified way to see the world, and then to further compress that down to a binary value of just two options . . . it's a mindblowingly dumb approach, and yet somehow it's almost taken as a given in much of (certainly American, but even elsewhere) discourse about politics and society. Everything collapsed down to us-vs-them, the home team versus the visiting team, the good guys fighting valiantly against the bad guys in an uncomplicated narrative of heroism and black-and-white morality, with any of the shared assumptions unquestioned but the differences blown up to mythological proportions. (For instance: The "left" side of American politics offers a system where the government arranges a somewhat-regulated health insurance market as if that's anything near a real solution rather than just a band-aid . . . but then anyways the "right" side of the publicly-acknowledged debate decries this minor arrangement of for-profit companies as overt socialism?) And then when trying to go "beyond" that, we mostly just get "bipartisanship" or, on the more critical end, lamentations about "both sides"; even the critiques of the status quo implicitly presume the reality of a binary possibility space for all of organized human endeavors. It's an astonishingly unimaginative worldview, and all the more depressing for its ubiquity, and how it shackles our democratic institutions. Here in Canada, for instance, the Ontario government just prematurely killed an experiment in Universal Basic Income; can't even let the other side gather data about possible programs, never mind the idea of letting people decide what to do with money (rather than the government directly spending it themselves) sounds pretty right-wing to begin with, this is a program started by the Liberal government so the Conservatives will be damned if they let it even have a chance of succeeding in any way . . . But hey, I'm getting off topic, and TGIF right? [sobs uncontrollably]

  • On the post: Harvard Opens Up Its Massive Caselaw Access Project

    keithzg ( profile ), 31 Oct, 2018 @ 04:16pm

    Re-publishing and archiving

    In terms of PACER, I think the main effort has been https://free.law/recap/ ?

    And yeah, I was thinking, someone should definitely coordinate this. I'd certainly run a CRON job on one of my systems to pull down another 500 downloads per day, orchestrated to avoid duplication of effort by some central server like how bitcoin mining pools work.

  • On the post: Harvard Opens Up Its Massive Caselaw Access Project

    keithzg ( profile ), 31 Oct, 2018 @ 04:17pm

    Limericks

    Yeah, it's definitely hit-and-miss, but with some minor reformatting there are some gems. Example:

    "Threes and fours, mostly rejects;
    He questioned all of the suspects.
    A particular bank,
    A cylindrical tank,
    Affirmed in all other respects."

  • On the post: The Bullshit Rewriting Of History To Claim FOSTA Took Down Backpage

    keithzg ( profile ), 27 Sep, 2018 @ 02:04pm

    I see one correction already on the Buzzfeed article; wouldn't hurt them to add another.

  • On the post: Conservatives: Stop Crying Wolf On Tech Bias Or No One Will Ever Take You Seriously

    keithzg ( profile ), 29 Aug, 2018 @ 03:09pm

    Re: Re: Libertarians

    Yeah I read the article on RSS and popped in here to say, saying in regards to conservatives and libertarians that

    Silicon Valley is a very liberal place that doesn't always reflect their norms or values
    seems quite a lot more applicable to one than the other. While there are some ways in which Silicon Valley has (at least performatively) a progressive set of norms and values, in many respects (particularly economically and about broad structural questions) the mindset seems profoundly, often myopically, libertarian.

  • On the post: Court Catches ICE In A Lie As It Tries To Vanish A Mexican Journalist And Immigration Policy Critic

    keithzg ( profile ), 31 Jul, 2018 @ 01:51pm

    Abolishing ICE isn't even enough

    And to think, the Democratic establishment thinks Abolish ICE is too radical of a position to entertain as a policy position. Frankly, I think we should abolish the agency and lock up the now-former members of ICE in their old detention centers, and pass firm laws preventing any such agency from ever existing again. Merely abolishing the agency, that's the centrist compromise.

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