Pseudonym 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: The Fastest Growing Emerging Economies Are Also Those With The Weakest IP Laws

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 20 Dec, 2012 @ 03:44pm

    Re:

    This raises a very important point.

    Not the first sentence; that is a vague statement which relies on how you define "innovation" or "invention". Some of the poorest countries are extremely innovative or inventive, but the problems they're trying to solve are different from those in the first world.

    The first half of the second sentence is the one part that I agree with, and it's very important to understand.

    European economies grew very fast during the industrial revolution, but the wages and conditions of workers were horrible by today's standards.

    Correlation is not causation.

  • On the post: Pundits And Politicans Very Quick To Blame Video Game & Movie Violence For Newtown

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 18 Dec, 2012 @ 04:57pm

    Re: Actually...

    This is why the US can't have a sensible debate on gun control. People on the gun control side think that the gun owners' argument is "we need to allow all guns", and people on the gun owners' side think that the gun control argument is "we need to ban all guns".

    As an aside, I partly blame the NRA for this. The NRA is a lobby group which represents the interests of gun manufacturers, and a few gun nuts. There is no lobby or advocacy group which represents the interests of responsible gun owners.

    It doesn't help that gun control advocates are often quite ignorant about guns, which is why you hear words like "assault rifle" and "automatic pistol" thrown about as if they mean something.

    Most civilised countries in the world have:

    - An upper limit on magazine size. (9 rounds is common)
    - Restrictions on items that would make it possible to circumvent the intent of the magazine size limit in a "mass shooting" scenario, such as revolver speed loaders.
    - An upper limit on handgun caliber (.38 is common).
    - A lower limit on handgun barrel length (4″ or 120mm are common).
    - No concealed carry.
    - Open carry typically only available to those who can show a genuine need for it.
    - Long lists of prohibited weapons. Typical lists include include fully automatic weapons, semi-automatic rifles, and pump-action shotguns. None of these have any realistically legitimate civilian uses. (Repeating rifles are usually okay, by the way; genuine hunters do need to access a follow-up round quickly for humane purposes.)
    - No private sales. (Typically, sale or transfer must be done through a licensed dealer.)
    - Restrictions on how a firearm must be stored in a private property (e.g. no keeping guns loaded when not in use, guns and ammunition to be stored in separate locked containers/cabinets).

    They also typically have strict licensing conditions. Some highlights are:

    - Frequent renewals and automatic expiry.
    - Strong background checks.
    - An exam on proper firearms safety prior to obtaining a licence (much like a driving exam).
    - Bans on owning certain classes of guns (e.g. any handgun at all) unless you?ve used it for a certain amount of time (six months, perhaps) in the context of a licensed gun club, military/law enforcement service or something similar.

    Some of these things are more realistic in the context of the USA than others (you could argue with the specific prohibited weapons list), but the majority of these seem perfectly reasonable, and compatible with the second amendment.

  • On the post: DailyDirt: Caring For Our Pets

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 12 Dec, 2012 @ 05:13pm

    Uhm...

    Let me be the first to note that there are no squirrels in New Zealand.

    Now if someone yelled "rugby ball!"...

  • On the post: Kim Dotcom Cleared To Pursue Case Against New Zealand For Illegal Spying

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 06 Dec, 2012 @ 04:31pm

    Re: Re: Re:

    In this case at least, the built-in mechanisms of institutional recourse seems to be working pretty well.

  • On the post: Google Asks People To Speak Out Against ITU's Attempt To Takeover Internet Governance

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 21 Nov, 2012 @ 07:15pm

    Re: Re: Hang on, hang on...

    Absolutely.

    In case anyone didn't get it, here's the tl;dr version: There are many problems with ITU, especially this cynical power grab. It could certainly do with some reform. But it is not obsolete.

  • On the post: Google Asks People To Speak Out Against ITU's Attempt To Takeover Internet Governance

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 21 Nov, 2012 @ 04:14pm

    Hang on, hang on...

    While I agree that the ITU can't just upgrade its mandate (possibly without a new treaty), saying that it is obsolete and serves little purpose is flat out wrong.

    First off, the ITU manages, and enables cooperation on managing, scarce global resources, such as the cross-border radio spectrum and satellite orbit assignments. Secondly, the international phone network and related standards (e.g. facsimile) are still around and will remain so for some time to come, and these need to be able to inter-operate. The ITU manages those standards. Thirdly, they manage or co-manage the standards for many of the interesting Internet-based standards which affect telecommunication, including VoIP, DSL, ISDN, PSTN/3G, ASN.1, X.509, JPEG, MPEG, and many others. They also oversee global namespaces such as IMSI and ASN.1 OIDs.

    Yes, these could be offloaded to other groups. The "EG"s which created JPEG and MPEG, for example, are actually joint committes from ISO/IEC and ITU. However, ITU is one of the faster-acting standards bodies, which gives them a distinct advantage. All too often, de facto standards are only codified after the event. The ITU is very good at getting these things moving so that interoperability can happen sooner than if it was left up to groups like ISO.

    Yes, I think this is a power grab, and likely a highly counter-productive one; the last thing the world needs is adversarial standards bodies. That can only end badly.

    But it's wrong to think that the ITU's mandate is obsolete. On the contrary, it's more relevant than it's ever been.

  • On the post: Stuxnet's Infection Of Chevron Shows Why 'Weaponized' Malware Is A Bad Idea

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2012 @ 09:32pm

    Re: We live in strange times.

    Suggesting that Microsoft was involved.

    A simpler explanation is that someone at Microsoft leaked a copy of the Windows source code to the malware authors. I hope they were well paid.

  • On the post: Stuxnet's Infection Of Chevron Shows Why 'Weaponized' Malware Is A Bad Idea

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2012 @ 09:28pm

    Re: Re:

    Of course! Attacks by the US and Israeli governments have never resulted in harm to innocent parties.

  • On the post: Stuxnet's Infection Of Chevron Shows Why 'Weaponized' Malware Is A Bad Idea

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2012 @ 09:26pm

    Re: Re: Re: No harm done elsewhere

    I can only imagine what it would be like for Chevron's IT people saying "we haven't done enough to protect ourselves from our own government".

  • On the post: Stuxnet's Infection Of Chevron Shows Why 'Weaponized' Malware Is A Bad Idea

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2012 @ 03:34pm

    Re: No harm done elsewhere

    I hear what you're saying, but I disagree that "it didn't do anything". Chevron was right to reassure people that no damage was done, but it certainly did stuff.

    First off, it cost a considerable amount of time and money for Chevron, not to mention everyone else.

    Secondly, it reduced Chevron's security in a tangible sense. Stuxnet had remote command and control capabilities, through two web sites. Had someone managed to compromise or spoof those web sites before they were taken down, they would have had remote root access to a crapload of machines.

    It's kind of like someone forging a master key to Chevron's buildings, and sneaked in and had a look around, but didn't touch anything. Yeah, they did do something, even if it wasn't as nearly bad as it could have been.

  • On the post: Australian Court: Google Must Pay Guy $200k Due To Image Search Turning Up Gangsters

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 14 Nov, 2012 @ 04:39pm

    Re: Re:

    This isn't a Streisand situation. This guy is a music promoter, and the free publicity (and the chance to tell his story) may have been one of the motivations for suing in the first place.

  • On the post: Australian Court: Google Must Pay Guy $200k Due To Image Search Turning Up Gangsters

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 13 Nov, 2012 @ 11:15pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Highly unusual...

    Underbelly: Don't Be Evil

  • On the post: Australian Court: Google Must Pay Guy $200k Due To Image Search Turning Up Gangsters

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 13 Nov, 2012 @ 11:14pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Highly unusual...

    As we've seen many times over with "big brother"-style government and corporate databases, information that is technically true but misleading can be just as damaging as information that is untrue. And indeed, if you read the story, he raises several examples of real harm done to him because people think he's a gangster, when he's actually not.

    (Of course, it doesn't help that he's a music promoter, which is a career which almost encourages people to think you're involved in organised crime.)

    He probably wouldn't mind it if people knew that he was a victim of the gangland war (free publicity, right?), as long as people knew he was an innocent victim.

    There were something like 35-40 people killed or injured in the gangland war, and only two or tree were "innocent" in the way most people think; everyone else was a gangster or associate, or a former gangster or associate. (Some had become informants.)

    Everyone who followed it, and you couldn't really help following it, knows this. In the mind of the public, that means that pretty much everyone involved with the war was involved in crime.

    It is true that he was a victim of the violence. However, without also pointing out that he was an innocent victim, that information is misleading.

  • On the post: Australian Court: Google Must Pay Guy $200k Due To Image Search Turning Up Gangsters

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 13 Nov, 2012 @ 08:58pm

    Re: Re: Re:

    I was indeed referring to the first one which was probably only 5-10% untrue. That's the nature of narrative television.

    (Yeah, don't get me started on Razor. I didn't make it past the third episode.)

    There has been a version mostly the same as the original screened in Victoria, but you still can't buy the DVDs. But that's what BitTorrent is for.

  • On the post: Australian Court: Google Must Pay Guy $200k Due To Image Search Turning Up Gangsters

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 13 Nov, 2012 @ 05:50pm

    Re: Re: Re: Highly unusual...

    I lived in Carlton during the worst of the gangland wars. This is very deeply burned in the Melbourne psyche. There are so many perpetrators and victims, some of whom have hard-to-pronounce-and-remember Eastern European names, that pretty much everyone has lost count.

    Someone who has actually researched this period of recent history would know that this guy was an innocent victim of the violence. However, I would argue that a moron in a hurry could easily confuse this guy with an actual gangster based on just such a juxtaposition. The line that separates "reasonable" from "unreasonable" lies somewhere between.

    The connection between Muhamed Haneef and his second cousin wasn't inaccurate, either. But it was misleading and it was defamatory.

    If you try hard enough, you could probably link Kevin Bacon to al Qaeda. That doesn't mean you should.

  • On the post: Australian Court: Google Must Pay Guy $200k Due To Image Search Turning Up Gangsters

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 13 Nov, 2012 @ 05:22pm

    Re:

    Free clue for the non-Australians: Watch Underbelly. You won't regret it. It's just like The Sopranos, only bogan. And unlike The Sopranos, it actually happened.

  • On the post: Australian Court: Google Must Pay Guy $200k Due To Image Search Turning Up Gangsters

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 13 Nov, 2012 @ 05:01pm

    Re: Highly unusual...

    This isn't really that unusual. And if you actually read the details of the story, it's not entirely clear that the decision was wrong, either.

    The court did not find that Google was responsible for defaming Trkulga by simply juxtaposing pictures of him with pictures of Tony Mokbel. That's the impression you'd get from the write-up.

    The court found that they were responsible for refusing to break the link.

    Step back a moment and think about this in the context of big data and the rise of government and corporate surveillance.

    We all know the stories of people being placed on TSA watchlists, arrested, interrogated, and even tortured for having a similar name to a bad guy or being the second cousin of a bad guy.

    People's actions can be chilled or even lives ruined by very tenuous associations in databases. And whether through Paul Erdos/Kevin Bacon game, the assumption that correlation is the same as causation, or plain old coincidence, data mining can uncover associations which are false or misleading, even if they are statistically significant.

    Now we may argue that people shouldn't base decisions on associations made by Google's machine learning algorithms. It is, ultimately, the responsibility of the person making the decision to evaluate the strength of the evidence rationally.

    Nonetheless, given that these databases exist and are used, how much responsibility should be placed on those maintaining the databases for making sure that the contents are accurate, particularly clearing up a mistake when it is pointed out? Is there additional responsibility if the database is accessible to the public?

    It's a very interesting question, and I don't know the answer.

  • On the post: Australian Government Announces That It Is Dropping Mandatory ISP Filtering…But Still Wants Filtering

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 08 Nov, 2012 @ 04:40pm

    Re: Maybe I'm missing something...

    But given I would assume such sites would be illegal already, what exactly is the government wanting done that isn't already being done?

    The Telecommunications Act 1997 has a provision that "persons that are carriers or carriage service providers within the meaning of that Act" are bound by any international convention that Australia is a signatory to, and which the Minister declares applies to these persons.

    Here's the current list according to COMLAW. I'd wager that the actual "change" is that this INTERPOL resolution is going to be gazetted as applying to the "persons" covered by the act, or it already has been and COMLAW didn't get the message yet.

  • On the post: Ed Burns To Make A New Short Film Each Month In 2013, With Help From Twitter Followers

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 02 Oct, 2012 @ 06:45pm

    Re:

    So, tell me, does anyone remember both an artist and a SONG from one of these song a day / song a week things?

    Yes. I've only ever followed one of the "song a week" things: Jonathan Coulton's. I can not only name, but sing, at least half a dozen of those songs.

    Oh, I can also relate many of my favourite jokes from The Show with Ze Frank.

  • On the post: US Military Classifies Wikileaks As 'Enemy Of The United States'

    Pseudonym ( profile ), 28 Sep, 2012 @ 05:11pm

    Re:

    One key thing that you need to understand about modern governments is that they are not conspiring against anyone. They can't, because that would require some degree of cooperation, agreement, and competence.

    If I'm understanding TFA correctly, the US military has declared Assange an "enemy of the state" for the purposes of deciding who you (as a member of the military) are allowed to talk to. That's it. They can't attack Assange on the basis of this ruling, they can only prosecute anyone who works for them and talks to him.

    Everyone in the government probably has their own list of bad guys. There are many like it, but this one is theirs.

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