Mason Wheeler 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (4010)

• On the post: Facebook To Start Handing User Info To French Government So It Can Start Punishing People For Being Stupid

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 27 Jun, 2019 @ 11:52am

  Re: Re:

  The part you're missing it that the more people talk about how horrible "hate" is, the more strongly they tend to demonstrate that their own actions towards their intended targets are motivated by hatred.

• On the post: Facebook To Start Handing User Info To French Government So It Can Start Punishing People For Being Stupid

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 27 Jun, 2019 @ 11:22am

  Re:

  Don't be silly; this is Europe we're talking about. They'll invent an exemption for themselves.

• On the post: The End Of The Open Internet: Cory Doctorow's Op-Ed From The Future

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 27 Jun, 2019 @ 01:56pm

  the judges who put Facebook on the line for the platform’s inaction during the Provo Uprising

  As someone who lives within 10 minutes of Provo, this amuses me to no end. I can't help but wonder what exactly Cory Doctorow imagines this "uprising" in a super-peaceful, largely Mormon college town looked like...

• On the post: State Judge Prefers Prior Restraint To The First Amendment, Orders Blogger To Delete Supposedly Defamatory Posts

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 27 Jun, 2019 @ 12:42pm

  Wait, so she's named "Narcisi" and is overly concerned about her image?

  Some days the jokes practically write themselves...

• On the post: Facebook To Start Handing User Info To French Government So It Can Start Punishing People For Being Stupid

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 27 Jun, 2019 @ 11:21am

  Once again we see that terms like "hate speech" and "hate crime" are best understood by prepending "I" or "we." France is trying to reduce speech that France hates.

• On the post: Why Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency Is Both More Interesting Than Expected And Less Interesting Than I Hoped

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 26 Jun, 2019 @ 11:31am

  Re:

  Prosecutors in New York said many of its clients had been cybercriminals who had sought to move funds anonymously.

  What?!? A cryptocurrency used mostly for crime and fraud?!? You don't say!

• On the post: Verizon Now Pretending That 5G Will Help Cure Cancer

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 26 Jun, 2019 @ 07:52am

  Re:

  The truly ridiculous part about all this? There's no such thing as "the cure for cancer," and never will be, because there's no such thing as "the" cancer. There are a few hundred different types of cells in your body, and each has its own individual way of going haywire. (Some even have more than one different type of cancer!) Therefore, it's exceedingly unlikely that any one treatment will ever be discovered that will wipe them all out.

• On the post: Why Facebook's Libra Cryptocurrency Is Both More Interesting Than Expected And Less Interesting Than I Hoped

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 26 Jun, 2019 @ 11:20am

  But, to me, the better comparison, rather than Paypal or Venmo, is really WeChat in China. The whole Libra setup (as well as Calibra) seems like a fairly obvious attempt to recreate what WeChat has done. If you're not familiar with it, WeChat is not just like the Facebook of China, it's the everything China. People pay for nearly everything directly within WeChat. Without WeChat in China you basically can't do anything. It seems pretty clear that Libra is an attempt to try to build that kind of functionality into Facebook

  So they're already ubiquitous enough and abusive enough that we need them to be broken up by antitrust, and now they're making a "fairly obvious" play for de facto hegemony?

  That's interesting in a lot of ways

  No, that's not how you spell "horrifying," Mike!

• On the post: University Of Idaho Sends Cease And Desist Over Vandal Beer Business Name

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 26 Jun, 2019 @ 07:57am

  There is something about the beer and liquor industries that seems to attract unfortunate trademark disputes.

  This can be generalized: There is something about a substance known to cause both short- and long-term damage to the brain that causes people to act stupid.

• On the post: Once Again: It's Not Clear The Internet Needs Creepy Targeted Ads

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2019 @ 01:09pm

  Re:

  I know someone who kept getting ads from a certain jeweler after having purchased an engagement ring. If there ever existed something that you can (hopefully, at least!) never have to ever be a return customer for, it's a freaking engagement ring! You would think the algorithms would have some way to distinguish such purchases...

• On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 216: Hawley's Bill Sucks: Let Us Count The Ways…

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2019 @ 01:13pm

  I just have to wonder. If it's "so obviously unconstitutional and doomed to failure" then... why bother? Why spend so much time and effort worrying about it if you believe it's "so obviously" never going to amount to anything?

• On the post: Trump Ponders Banning All Chinese-Made Gear From US 5G Networks

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2019 @ 10:59am

  RWA’s members estimate it might cost from $800 million to $1 billion for them to replace all the potentially affected gear from their wireless networks

  Quick, somebody call the waaaaaaambulance! After nearly half a century of profiting hand-over-fist by outsourcing American jobs to China with no thought either for the damage it was doing to the broader economy nor for the horrific human-rights implications happening a convenient half-a-world away, when someone finally gets around to walking back one of our worst foreign policy decisions of all time just a tiny bit, they start freaking out over how it might cost them money.

  Well, this is the world's smallest violin playing the world's saddest song for them. Maybe if they hadn't built their business model on such a corrupt and blatantly evil foundation, they wouldn't find themselves in this sort of pain when we start looking seriously at fixing it!

• On the post: Once Again: It's Not Clear The Internet Needs Creepy Targeted Ads

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2019 @ 09:49am

  And the "advantage" over other forms of advertising (contextual, brand, etc.) are really not that great.

  This is technically true, but not nearly strong enough to accurately convey the truth: the "advantage" is actually of negative magnitude. It causes more harm to you, in terms of consumers' perception of your product, than you end up gaining by better targeting.

  As soon as you can insist that you'll be able to show data, then people get wowed by it, and think that they've magically solved the "I know that half of my ad spending is wasted, I just don't know which half" problem.

  ...and this is a big part of the reason why. From a human-psychology perspective, the half-my-ad-spending-is-wasted "problem" is actually what makes advertising work at all. If I see two ads for competing products, and one of them signals to me that the people behind it are spending the money trying to reach as broad an audience as possible, that tells me something useful about how much confidence they have in the product. If the other one is clearly targeted at me, that "confidence signal" isn't there. For all I know, I could be the only person seeing this ad, and that means that suddenly I'm not an audience anymore; I'm a mark.

  I know which of the two I'd rather buy from!

• On the post: After Decades Of Demanding China 'Respect' US Patent Law, Senator Rubio Pushes Law That Says US Can Ignore Huawei Enforcing Patents

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 21 Jun, 2019 @ 01:42pm

  how long will it take for China to do effectively the same thing in China to again block US companies from operating and competing there.

  Zero; they've been doing exactly that since pretty much Day 1, and still are. Not sure what you mean by "again;" they never really stopped. They just got a bit more subtle about it.

• On the post: Before Demanding Internet Companies 'Hire More Moderators,' Perhaps We Should Look At How Awful The Job Is

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 21 Jun, 2019 @ 01:37pm

  Before Demanding Internet Companies 'Hire More Moderators,' Perhaps We Should Look At How Awful The Job Is

  Perhaps We Should Consider That It Would Be Less Awful For Everyone If The Burden Were To Be Diluted By Being Spread Around Between More People? (This is true for many--though admittedly not all--sources of awfulness in just about every type of awful job there is.)

• On the post: UK May Have Finally Ditched Its Absurd Porn Filter Plan

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 21 Jun, 2019 @ 07:45am

  the program would effectively be taking effect July 15.

  I think there are more effective ways to phrase that...

• On the post: Polish Government's Legal Challenge To EU Copyright Directive's Article 13/17 Remains Shrouded In Mystery, But Details May Not Matter

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 18 Jun, 2019 @ 11:36am

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Require *governments* to maintain *free* safe-ha

  The problem is now that things have gone from gatekeepers to ordinary people publishing their own content, what are the terms of not having that, which now require a gatekeeper to be paid to have copyright? It won't fix anything if ordinary people can no longer publish because a corporation will legally steal their output.

  First off, your use of the word "steal" does you no credit. But let's look past that. What is this "require[ment of] a gatekeeper to be paid to have copyright" that you mention? Are you referring to the copyright office of the government? Because 1) that's not what the term "gatekeeper" means in this context, and 2) copyright registration isn't particularly expensive--and if its scale is expanded, it's likely to create economies of scale that would drive the cost down further. Also, you seem to be missing a few steps in your chain of logic here. How do we get from "copyright registration is required" to "ordinary people can no longer publish because a corporation will legally steal [sic] their output"? There's no causal link that I can see between the two ideas...

• On the post: Polish Government's Legal Challenge To EU Copyright Directive's Article 13/17 Remains Shrouded In Mystery, But Details May Not Matter

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 18 Jun, 2019 @ 06:27am

  Re: Re: Require *governments* to maintain *free* safe-harbor fil

  the removal of automatic copyright

  Yes, please! This is one of the worst things to come out of the Berne Convention, and fixing it would go a long way towards improving the mess that is the current situation.

• On the post: Pepe The Frog Creator, Infowars Both Claim Victory After $15k Copyright Settlement

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 17 Jun, 2019 @ 09:38am

  Re: Re: Re: Re:

  The present usage of the term to mean "image macro", which is only tangentially related to Richard Dawkins's original meaning of the word.

• On the post: Pepe The Frog Creator, Infowars Both Claim Victory After $15k Copyright Settlement

  

  Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 17 Jun, 2019 @ 07:22am

  Re: Re: Issue closed: not a bug

  There are problems with the moral rights view of copyright. If you base it on moral rights, how can it be moral to allow the copyright to expire?

  Because, given that the author was only capable of creating it [referring to any and all creative works here, not simply this case] by building upon past works by other creative persons, it is not only morally permissible but morally imperative that this new creative work be released into the public domain as quickly as possible, to allow it to inspire new creative works in turn.

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