Mason Wheeler 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Appeals Court Says Google Must Take Further Abuse From AG Jim Hood Before It Can Challenge Hood's Abusive Behavior

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 11 Apr, 2016 @ 10:56am

    Strange sentence

    The court similarly finds Hood's attempt to force the federal court system to resolve this (in his favor) by denying Google the right to bring its challenge of his actions to a federal court -- either at this point or at any point in the future.

    Something seems to be missing here. What did the court find about Hood's attempt?

  • On the post: English Brewer And French Wine Group In Trademark Dispute Over 'Champ'

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 08 Apr, 2016 @ 07:16am

    Actually, the word "champion" is derived from the French root "champ", meaning "field", which is also what it means in Champagne: the Pagne field.

    A champion was a person from an army who would go out onto the field and fight the opposing champion in a proxy battle, an ancient tradition that dates back far enough that David and Goliath were familiar with it.

  • On the post: The FCC Is Pushing A 'Nutrition Label' For Broadband Connections

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 08 Apr, 2016 @ 07:03am

    Fees pulled out of thin air for pure profit

    Charge 'em for the lice, extra for the mice
    Two percent for looking in the mirror twice
    Here a little slice, there a little cut
    Three percent for sleeping with the window shut
    When it comes to fixing prices
    There are a lot of tricks he knows
    How it all increases, all them bits and pieces
    Jesus! It's amazing how it grows!
    -- Thenardier, Master of the House
    Les Misérables theatrical production


    The more things change...

  • On the post: ISPs Now Charging Broadband Users A Steep Premium If They Want To Avoid Usage Caps

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 06 Apr, 2016 @ 08:43am

    Re: Re: Flimsy excuses

    Really? Where do you live?

  • On the post: Baseball Equipment Makers In Trademark Spat Over The Word 'Diamond'

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 06 Apr, 2016 @ 07:11am

    Re: Re:

    Hmm... someone ought to invent a baseball/boxing hybrid sport that is played inside a diamond ring!

  • On the post: ISPs Now Charging Broadband Users A Steep Premium If They Want To Avoid Usage Caps

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 06 Apr, 2016 @ 07:05am

    Re: Flimsy excuses

    This excuse also falls flat under even the most trivial of scrutiny, as if the majority of people don't use that much data, with only a 'relatively few' customers using a significant amount, then the fair thing to do would be to impose restrictions on the 'super-users', such that they don't negatively affect the connection for others, not hit everyone with a data cap that according to their own words wouldn't even be necessary for the vast majority of their customers.

    But isn't that exactly what they're doing? Placing a cap high enough that the vast majority of their customers won't hit, so that it only affects the "super-users", who end up paying more because they're using more?

    I'm all for calling ISPs out on bad behavior, but I don't actually see anything unfair here.

  • On the post: Chicago's New Era Of Transparency Looks Pretty Much Identical To Its Old Era Of Opacity

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 31 Mar, 2016 @ 07:37am

    Remember the parable of the scorpion

    It's not like Rahm Emanuel came out of nowhere. The guy was already a nationally-known public figure when he ran for mayor, and Chicagoans knew exactly what they were getting themselves into, and did it anyway.

    It's hard to have too much sympathy for them when the consequences of their actions become evident.

  • On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 67: The Great Encryption Debate: Should There Be Back Doors?

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2016 @ 12:25pm

    Re: Re: Re: I couldn't even finish listening to this...

    What brand?

    Is it the carrier doing an update, or the OS being upgraded?

    Blackberry Priv. I see updates coming in, both over Google Play and from Blackberry, on a regular basis. I haven't seen anything that appears to be pushed directly from T-Mobile, but I don't know if I would recognize such an update as distinct from the other two if one did some. (Would they use their own updater, or send it via the Google or BB mechanism?)

    Think of all the "breakage" that you are constantly upgrading the JREs / JDKs on desktops to fix. And when they are upgraded, how many of your apps stop working? Do you remember what happened when Java went to 1.6, 1.7, 1.8 ? Do you know what happened to the apps written for the old standard?

    To be completely honest, I'm pretty much entirely ignorant of the mess you're invoking here, because I have never in my life (that I know of) used a Java desktop program, except for a few narrow-purpose coding tools such as ANTLR, which I have never seen break with a Java update.

    I do know, though, that Android does not run on Java as such; it runs on Dalvik, which is a completely redesigned VM that can import JVM code. And recent versions (as of a few years ago) have done away with the Dalvik engine as much as possible, moving to a fully AOT-compiled model instead, so calling it an "interpreter language" is not all that accurate anymore.

  • On the post: In the Wake Of The Latest Terrorist Attacks, Here's A Rational Approach To Saving Lives

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2016 @ 07:15am

    Re: Re:

    Very good points. The saying is actually wrong - it's not "speed kills", it's "difference in speed kills".

    No, it's not even that. It's "poor safety kills."

    You don't get much more difference in speed than "reckless driver going way too fast" and "wall". But when a driver in Mexico crashed so hard his car went through a wall and crunched into the tree on the other side, and then caught fire, he and his passengers were able to exit the vehicle completely unharmed, because they were in a Tesla Model S, which is a ridiculously safe vehicle even by today's standards.

    https://www.yahoo.com/autos/bp/second-tesla-model-fire-sparked-crash-mexico-141237816.html

  • On the post: Compare And Contrast: Treatment Of Thomas Drake & Hillary Clinton For Having Classified Info

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2016 @ 07:00am

    Re: Re: Re: Let us clarify this:

    Argentina actually does this. In their political system, every citizen is required to vote on Election Day--with a few very narrow exemptions--but it is a valid option to to votar en blanco (cast a blank ballot), which is seen as a protest vote.

  • On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 67: The Great Encryption Debate: Should There Be Back Doors?

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2016 @ 06:59am

    Re: I couldn't even finish listening to this...

    He doesn't have an Android phone, or he would know about update problems ( i.e. "when Hell freezes over!" )

    I have an Android phone and I've never seen any such update problem with it. It gets updates pretty regularly.

  • On the post: DMCA's Notice And Takedown Procedure Is A Total Mess, And It's Mainly Because Of Bogus Automated Takedowns

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2016 @ 12:49pm

    The legacy players have been pushing for a ridiculously stupid concept they're calling "notice and staydown" in which they argue that once there's a notice for a particular piece of content, a platform needs to proactively block any copies of that content from ever being uploaded again. This is dumb and dangerous for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that it would place tremendous burdens on smaller players, while locking in the more dominant large platforms that can build or buy systems to handle this.


    This is dumb and dangerous for a variety of reasons, starting with the fact that it turns our ideals of justice on their head. It has literally created a system in which a person can be legally punished for violating the law on accusation alone, which has always (until October of 1998 at least) been anathema to American jurisprudence!

    I would like to propose an alternative. I've even got a thematically appropriate name for it: "notice and then prove it or go away." The principle is very simple: if you want to take something down, you must first prove, in a court of law, that it shouldn't be up. If you can't do that, or if taking it down isn't worth the expense to you, then you should simply go away.

    ...otherwise known as "the rule of law," a complete no-brainer in any other context. Why is it that when copyright comes into the picture, people start embracing outright insanity without reservation?

  • On the post: FCC Commissioner: Gov't Should Never Interfere In Private Markets…Unless ISPs Have A Chance To Mock Netflix

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2016 @ 12:38pm

    Anyone remember Jim Cramer's appearance on the Iron Man film, trashing Stark Industries as "a weapons manufacturer that doesn't make weapons!!!"?

    Mike O'Rielly reminds me of that scene. This is a regulator that doesn't believe in regulating!!!

  • On the post: Nigerian Government Says Country Needs More Jail Time For Pirates And Control Over Content Of Creative Works

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 30 Mar, 2016 @ 12:33pm

    Years of history suggest rampant piracy is directly linked to the rise of the Nigerian film industry, a.k.a. "Nollywood."

    This should not be surprising; it's exactly what happened in the American film industry. The reason a remote region in the southwestern corner of the USA is today considered synonymous with the film industry is because the people who originally wanted to establish the modern film industry were pirates. They went there to get as far as they could away from Thomas Edison, who had invented the technology for motion pictures and lived in the northeastern US, so they could blatantly violate his patent rights without it being feasible for him to do anything about it.

    Of course, now that they're established, they see piracy as a threat. Hypocrites.

  • On the post: Techdirt Podcast Episode 67: The Great Encryption Debate: Should There Be Back Doors?

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2016 @ 02:07pm

    It's just math: Remember high school algebra? They'd give you problems like "3x + 5 = 29" and you have to find x? Math isn't a philosophical or moral question. If I find the right answer and you find the right answer, they'll always be the same, because math is objective. It works the same way for everyone.

    Encryption, for all the complexity involved in getting the details right, boils down to math problems. With these variables, the message and the key, find the cyphertext. With these variables, the cyphertext and the key, find the original message.

    A well-designed cryptographic algorithm is a math problem with three properties:

    1) If you know the key, it is easy to convert between message and cyphertext.
    2) If you know the cyphertext but do not know the key, calculating the value of the message is computationally unfeasible.
    3) If you know the cyphertext but do not know the key, calculating the value of the key is computationally unfeasible.

    Backdoor systems involve weakening point 2 and/or 3 above: finding a way to make it easier to either retrieve the key or retrieve the message without having to possess the key. But the thing is, encryption is a math problem. If one person can solve for X, so can other people, and it doesn't matter whether they're cops, spies, cybercriminals or some hacker kid just doing it for the lulz, because the right answer to a math problem is the right answer to a math problem for everybody.

    Albert Wenger is completely right that we need to be very suspicious of Apple in this, both because their code is un-auditable and also because of their past behavior, but I don't see how any rational person can say "because this is bad, we should do this other thing over there that makes it worse because hey, it's not like it's perfect anyway." At one point Mike said "I think we're talking about different things," and that's totally the impression I got listening to this.

    WRT the "we have this huge edifice and altering one thing will bring it all crumbling down" line, if we're using a metaphor of buildings, any architect can tell you there's a big difference between messing with a common wall and a load-bearing wall. Encryption is a load-bearing member when it comes to privacy and security, in ways that most ordinary system components are not.

  • On the post: Compare And Contrast: Treatment Of Thomas Drake & Hillary Clinton For Having Classified Info

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2016 @ 10:22am

    And I'm certainly not making the argument that Clinton should necessarily face jail time (let alone 35 years or more) for the use of her own email server.

    She shouldn't need to; she and Bill have both done more than enough other things that, if everyone was treated equally under the law, they ought to both be put away for the rest of their natural lives and then some, long before the prosecutors even start looking at this case!

  • On the post: In the Wake Of The Latest Terrorist Attacks, Here's A Rational Approach To Saving Lives

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2016 @ 07:17am

    More strict speed limits is not the answer. I know we've all heard the slogan "speed kills", but that's just not true; it's all in the context. A person could die from being run over at 10 MPH, where 40 would have knocked them out of the way and left them with broken bones instead. And when you're inside the vehicle, surrounded by a few tons of metal armor, it's even less relevant.

    Poor safety kills. You want to save lives? Run programs that encourage people to trade in old cars for newer ones with better safety features. Crack down on aggressive and unsafe drivers, the kind who cause accidents. (If I were writing the rules, I'd have the system treat tailgating in exactly the same way as DUI.) But speed is literally the entire point of having a car, so leave that one alone. It's the only reason we put up with the expense, the maintenance, the traffic and all of the other headaches that being a driver and a car owner regularly brings into our lives: because they are faster than any other way to freely get around. (By "freely" I mean how you can get precisely to wherever you're going, as opposed to taking a plane which only flies from an airport to an airport.)

    If anything, I'd like to see all the speed limits (for highways at least, where the chance of meeting an unarmored individual are negligible) raised by 10 MPH where I live, and see a lot more tailgaters getting pulled over.

  • On the post: DOJ Says That The Crack Of Syed Farook's iPhone Only Applies To That Model Of iPhone

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 29 Mar, 2016 @ 07:01am

    But if that was the case, the DOJ wouldn't have asked for two weeks to "test" the method (even if they only took one week).

    It's known as the Montgomery Scott school of project estimation. It's good to see they at least have some competent techs working for them.

  • On the post: Some Thoughts On What, Exactly, The DOJ's 'Inaccurate Assertion' Might Be Concerning Secret Legal Opinion

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 28 Mar, 2016 @ 08:54am

    Re: Re: Senators and Congressmen are supposed to be duty bound representatives of the people

    There is no origin of authority statement in the U.S. Constitution.

    Huh? It's right there at the very beginning, literally the first thing in the document:

    We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

  • On the post: Namespaces, Intellectual Property, Dependencies And A Big Giant Mess

    Mason Wheeler ( profile ), 26 Mar, 2016 @ 09:34am

    Re: A package that can be a dependency.

    And there's no way to know what is a dependency and what isn't?

    Did they not bother finding out, or was it all registered in some trendy NoSQL database with no referential integrity? Because this has been a solved problem in the relational world for decades. If NPM had been running on a real database, this mess would have been literally impossible.

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