tom 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (374)

• On the post: Registrar Killing Zoho Over A Few Phishing Claims Demonstrates The Ridiculousness Of Having Registrars Police The Internet

  

  tom ( profile ), 28 Sep, 2018 @ 02:33pm

  Sounds like it is time to file a few phishing complaints against Tierranet.

• On the post: No, Next-Gen Wireless (5G) Won't Magically Fix The Broken U.S. Broadband Market

  

  tom ( profile ), 26 Sep, 2018 @ 10:05am

  Re:

  For a sufficiently fast station wagon, yes. But your ping times suck, measured in hours. Great for downloading that wonderful new HD game, but really lousy for playing it.

• On the post: Jeff Sessions Says If You Want More Shootings And Death, Listen To The ACLU And Black Lives Matter

  

  tom ( profile ), 21 Sep, 2018 @ 07:06am

  I think Chicago's problem is that for decades it has been ran by the Daley machine. While the current mayor isn't named Daley, he has pretty much followed the script with similar results. Until that changes, unlikely that mere court orders and study findings will change things.

• On the post: GAO Again Points Out That Terrible U.S. Broadband Maps Drive (Intentionally) Terrible Broadband Policy

  

  tom ( profile ), 21 Sep, 2018 @ 06:56am

  $350,000,000 for a known bad map? There is part of the problem. Wonder how many rural locations that could setup for fiber?
  
  I got lucky in my new rural location and can get 12mb DSL. The tech said if I was a 1/2 mile farther from the fiber ran up the highway, likely no service at all. Yet the whole area is a solid 10+mb speed on the last map I saw.

• On the post: Ron Wyden Wants Federal Government To Do More To Protect Personal Devices/Accounts Used By Senators And Staffers

  

  tom ( profile ), 21 Sep, 2018 @ 06:48am

  Fixing this: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180918/09232040665/congress-fails-to-include-single-consumer-advocate-upcoming-privacy-hearing.shtml
  would be a good start.
  
  Hard to get too concerned about security when the basic business model of far too many companies(campaign contributors) includes being able to monitor, track and data mine the personalized tracking devices most folks carry.

• On the post: Google Fiber's 'Failure' Succeeded In Shining A Light On Pathetic Broadband Competition

  

  tom ( profile ), 19 Sep, 2018 @ 09:40am

  I found it interesting that once Google announced that OKC was on the list to get Fiber, all of a sudden, both Cox and AT&T started pouring a lot of effort into upgrading service in OKC. When Google announced a halt in OKC, almost to the day, both AT&T and Cox radically slowed both upgrades and advertising. The Gigafiber coming soon signs in my neighborhood had just gone up when Google made the halt announcement. They quickly disappeared. AT&T fiber service wasn't made available until this year and started at 50Mb.

• On the post: For Some Reason, BMW Is Asking For More Time To Oppose The Latest Gwen Stacey Character Trademark

  

  tom ( profile ), 19 Sep, 2018 @ 09:34am

  Wonder if they also are trying the Trademark everything for the name Gwen? Gwen is one of the main characters in the NCSoft game Guild Wars Eye of the North expansion. Would think the trying to Trademark anything to do with video games and related saleable stuff might run afoul of existing NCSoft marks and copyrights on Gwen, assuming that NCSoft obtained such.

• On the post: Cop: Screwdrivers And Wrenches Are Drug Dealer Things; Appeals Court: WTF

  

  tom ( profile ), 15 Sep, 2018 @ 07:34am

  Re:

  Better yet, get off your lazy ass and register to vote and then vote. Especially in the local city council/sheriff elections. That is the level where most of the BS police policy gets set. Even better, file for office. Often a cheap way to get the issue into the public eye. Even if you don't spend much for your campaign, the local press will often do a who filed for office and what their platform is line up in the local paper. The filing fee, if any, is often cheaper then even a small ad in the local media.

• On the post: Officer Who Killed Unarmed Man Now Teaching Officers How To Go About The Difficult Business Of Being Alive

  

  tom ( profile ), 11 Sep, 2018 @ 05:40am

  Before folks feel sorry for Mr Crutcher, keep in mind that the autopsy results showed ' "acute phencyclidine (PCP) intoxication" at the time of the shooting'. Plus a presence of TCP, which is reportedly worse the PCP. This pretty much means that Mr Crutcher, prior to parking his van in the middle of the highway and starting his walkabout, had likely put the lives of hundreds or thousands of drivers and pedestrians at risk during his driving while impaired. The family admitted he had a history of drug use and abuse. Sorry to disappoint, but I am glad this danger is no longer driving the roads while high.

• On the post: United Airlines Made Its App Stop Working On My Phone, And What This Says About How Broken The Mobile Tech Space Is

  

  tom ( profile ), 06 Sep, 2018 @ 03:58pm

  This in a nutshell is the problem with the 'App' Internet. A basic website should be able to do anything the App can do and would only require the client have a reasonably modern browser. But companies want to lock folks in with 'Our Wonderful App'. The real reason most likely isn't security but that an app lets the company more easily gather data from the client's phone(personalized tracking device) then a website does.
  
  The App Internet seems to make things far less secure then the older browser based Internet. What is more secure, a single properly patched browser with 100 bookmarks or 100 single use apps each with their own update schedule and policy? Plus it is a lot harder for the end user to set the privacy settings on a hundred apps vs 1 browser.

• On the post: We Shouldn't Want Internet Giants Deciding Who To Silence; But They Should Let Users Decide Who To Hear

  

  tom ( profile ), 04 Sep, 2018 @ 11:41am

  If Facebook want's to ban a person or group, it is their right as it is their toy. Where it gets problematic is when they alter the news feeds to favor certain types of news and don't tell anyone or provide an easy way to revert back to all are equal. The result is Facebook is basically misrepresenting what is going on by gaming the news feeds.
  
  Google is notorious for altering search results based on whatever their goals are this week. Yet the end user has little way to know that the reason they are getting so few results this week for X isn't that X is any less popular but due solely to Google changing the search algorithm. The only way the end user can discover this is by using several search engines and comparing the results. IMO, when Google does this, they are lying to the end user about what results are popular or pertain to the user's search request.

• On the post: Research Paper Shows Militarized SWAT Teams Don't Make Cops — Or The Public — Any Safer

  

  tom ( profile ), 25 Aug, 2018 @ 04:17am

  Sadly, for many Police Departments, SWAT stands for Standard Weapons and Tactics, training is minimal, tactics have devolved into bash in the front door and yell conflicting instructions, and the results show it.

• On the post: Nickelodeon Is Opposing A 12 Year Old New Zealand Girl's 'Slime' Trademark For Some Reason

  

  tom ( profile ), 25 Aug, 2018 @ 04:08am

  I think Slimer needs to start haunting the Viacom offices.

• On the post: NJ Courts Impose Ridiculous Password Policy 'To Comply With NIST' That Does Exactly What NIST Says Not To Do

  

  tom ( profile ), 17 Aug, 2018 @ 01:12pm

  Seems we might have identified the bureaucratic lag in NJ at about 10 years as that seems to be when those password standards were last fairly current.
  
  And I have a deep hate for 'Security Questions'. Years ago, we had an employee leave, on good terms, from a remote office. A few months later, we had to call the ISP to change something with the account. They required the correct answer to the Security Question answered several years earlier by the recently departed employee. Ever had to guess the Favorite Restaurant of a former employee that worked in a town 50 miles away?

• On the post: School Board Demands Journalists Be Punished For Reporting On The School Board's Redaction Failure

  

  tom ( profile ), 09 Aug, 2018 @ 07:56am

  Re: Re:

  Sadly, if the school board lawyer had filed a DMCA violation notice on the 'breaking' of the 'protection' on the document that blacked out the redacted text, it might fly. It seems obvious that the document was delivered in digital form with a form of digital protection on the redacted bits. Doing the copy/paste to pull out the text could well count as 'breaking' the digital protection on the document allowing use not intended by the creating entity, thus a violation of the DMCA.

• On the post: Report Highlights How U.S. Telcos Abandoned Rural American Broadband

  

  tom ( profile ), 06 Aug, 2018 @ 04:35pm

  Just moved to rural OK. Got lucky and can get 12/1 DSL. The tech said the line tested to 25m but the fastest service they offer is 12. Oddly, this is twice the speed I got from AT&T in suburban OKC before they yanked out the POTS and replaced with fiber. The base speed after fiber was 50Mb down.
  
  About 1.5 miles from the fiber ran up a state highway. Guessing that is where the magic DSL box is. There might be 10 houses between the highway and my place so unlikely to be cost effective to run the fiber down my road anytime soon.

• On the post: Facebook's Censorship Of Legit Activists Shows The Policing Of Propaganda Is Going To Be A Fucking Mess

  

  tom ( profile ), 05 Aug, 2018 @ 05:10am

  One person's BS report is the next person's legitimate news.
  
  When the US is busy trying to incite government and policy change in Iran and other countries and has been for decades, it is hard to claim indignant concern when an outside power returns the favor.
  
  When the average website tries to run many 3rd party scripts just to load, it will be near impossible to fully figure out what all is being loaded or attempted to load. Made worse when many of those scripts attempt to load still more. And this is for so called legitimate sites.

• On the post: Election Security Has Become A Partisan Issue As Senate Votes Down Funding

  

  tom ( profile ), 02 Aug, 2018 @ 03:21pm

  After the Bush v Gore hanging chad election in 2000, the Feds DID hand out grants to all 50 states to upgrade election systems. That money was spent on the wonderful systems many of the folks are now complaining about. Repeating past mistakes in hopes the states will do better this time would most likely be as much a waste today as it was post Bush v Gore.
  
  Better approach would be to make the states decide what system they want, test it to verify accuracy and security, then let that state apply for Federal funding to help pay for it.

• On the post: DOJ Tells Sheriff To Give It Back The $70,000 In Forfeiture Funds He Spent To Buy Himself A New Sports Car

  

  tom ( profile ), 30 Jul, 2018 @ 12:30pm

  Re:

  My thought was similar, just call it a "High Speed Interceptor" and all should be good. After all, you need something to chase down other cars full of cash.

• On the post: After AT&T Jacks Up Prices Post Merger, DOJ Decides To Appeal Court Loss

  

  tom ( profile ), 15 Jul, 2018 @ 03:56pm

  The DOJ should introduce as evidence the previous statements by AT&T officials and lawyers made under oath that rates would go down. Followed by charges of perjury against said lawyers and officials since rates went up.

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