ShadowNinja 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: SESTA Is Being Pushed As The Answer To A Sex Trafficking 'Epidemic' That Simply Doesn't Exist

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 27 Sep, 2017 @ 10:56am

    Lets assume the 9 billion dollar numbers are accurate.

    The entire US GDP is 18.57 TRILLION dollars.

    So a mere 9 billion is a tiny tiny drop in the bucket of a very fringe industry.

    Especially when you consider how big a thing slavery used to be in the US, which is basically legalized sex trafficking and more (and yes, some people used their slaves primarily as sex slaves).

  • On the post: FBI Misconstrued Content Of Doc Leaker Reality Winner's Jailhouse Calls

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 26 Sep, 2017 @ 12:01pm

    Re:

    Hollywood stuff also encourages bad behavior.

    For example, Jack Bauer often tortures terrorists/etc. to get them to talk, which makes lots of people think torture works. Some politicians have even cited Jack Bauer and the fictional Hollywood show as evidence that torture works.

    But ask actual interrogation experts and they'll tell you torture simply doesn't work, unless you want to be fed a bunch of lies that the person thinks you want to hear.

    Being kind and charming to terrorists and other enemies you're interrogating has long been much more effective at getting valuable Intel from them. During WW2 the British basically treated their Nazi prisoners like royalty, and got a ton of valuable intelligence from them.

  • On the post: Velcro's Hilarious Trademark Lesson Video Actually A Good Lesson In Just How Stupid Trademark Law Has Become

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 26 Sep, 2017 @ 06:37am

    Re:

    Ironically time has basically made Xerox no longer such a generic word anymore. I don't know anyone who even uses the word anymore.

    Velcro on the other hand leaves me scratching my head how it's still protected by trademark.

  • On the post: Appeals Court Tells Patent Trolls' Favorite Judge He Can't Just Ignore The Supreme Court To Keep Patent Cases In Texas

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 25 Sep, 2017 @ 02:00pm

    Re:

    I don't think the SCOTUS can do anything to bad judges.

    Congress can impeach and remove bad judges from the bench however, though it's very rare (I think only a dozen or so have ever been removed from the bench by congress).

  • On the post: How The RIAA Helped Pave The Way For Spain To Undermine Democracy

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 25 Sep, 2017 @ 12:23pm

    How the Spanish government not think that these over the top actions are going to cause a backlash against them in Catalonia?

    Seriously, I imagine if I was on the fence this kind of brutality and political bullying would just push me into the secede camp, and to not even care about the economic/etc. implications of it.

  • On the post: British News Channel Touts Amazon Bomb Materials Moral Panic That Ends Up Being About Hobbyists And School Labs

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 25 Sep, 2017 @ 07:42am

    If we want a moral panic that will actually stop terrorists, lets panic over grocery stores and restaurants.

    Both these businesses are aiding terrorists by feeding them. If they didn't feed the terrorists then they'd starve to death and all our terrorism problems would be solved!

    I'd suggest we take the step of shutting down all grocery store sand restaurants suspected of doing business with potential terrorists so that the terrorists will all starve the death.

    And for those of you who say we'll all starve to death to, I guess you're siding with the terrorists, you freedom haters!

  • On the post: Backpage's Biggest Law Enforcement Critic Doesn't Think He Needs SESTA To Take Down Backpage

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 22 Sep, 2017 @ 10:32am

    Re:

    MegaUpload wasn't really legally taken down however. They trampled on all sorts of rights of Dotcom and the company.

  • On the post: CCleaner Hack May Have Been A State-Sponsored Attack On 18 Major Tech Companies

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 22 Sep, 2017 @ 05:44am

    Re: Re:

    Yes, but ad blockers do protect you from some malware at certain websites.

  • On the post: Turkish President Claims Jailed Journalists Are Actually Terrorists

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 22 Sep, 2017 @ 12:39pm

    Seems to be like an elected leader who's pushing their country closer and closer in the direction of a dictatorship is more of a terrorist then reporters reporting on said elected leader.

  • On the post: Alt-Right Twitter App Developers Sue Google After Gab.Ai App Is Kicked Out Of The Play Store

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 20 Sep, 2017 @ 01:04pm

    Re: "Alt-Right Twitter App"???

    So, 'Conservapedia' isn't a 'Far-Right' alternate to Wikipedia by your logic then?

    (For those unaware, years ago some conservatives got mad at Wikipedia's supposed 'Liberal bias' and decided to start their own alternate wikipedia for conservatives, called Conservapedia. The site was WIDELY mocked across much of the Internet, both for the lack of content, and for just how ridiculously inaccurate many of the articles it had were, especially on articles about anything vaguely political.)

  • On the post: Is There A Single Online Service Not Put At Risk By SESTA?

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 20 Sep, 2017 @ 08:23am

    Re: Re:

    "We're powerless to help you, not to punish you".

  • On the post: Why SESTA Is Such A Bad Bill

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 20 Sep, 2017 @ 08:18am

    Re: Re:

    So of course this will be the one bill the GOP ignores ALEC on.

  • On the post: Moral Muppets At Harvard Cave In To The CIA; Rescind Chelsea Manning's Fellowship

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 15 Sep, 2017 @ 11:46am

    Re: Really?

    This guy wasn't a whistle blower like Snowden, he STOLE top secret documents indiscriminately and threw them out for the world to see
    ...Hate to break it to you, but Snowden did the same thing, just with different documents.

  • On the post: Moral Muppets At Harvard Cave In To The CIA; Rescind Chelsea Manning's Fellowship

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 15 Sep, 2017 @ 11:44am

    Iraq killed way more than a few thousand Americans

    For Havard to rescind its offer to Manning, over false claims of putting US soldiers at risk from a guy who has admitted his own decisions lead to the deaths of thousands of US soldiers, is a total travesty.

    Why must we be too American focused on this?

    The deaths of American soldiers are frankly peanuts compared to all the other hundreds of thousands of deaths the war caused in Iraq, mainly among the Iraqi's.

    Here's a link with information about the deaths caused by the Iraq War, and the different estimates of casualties.

    The most relevant section about the deaths here.

    Various scientific surveys of Iraqi deaths resulting from the first four years of the Iraq War estimated up to one million Iraqis died as a result of conflict during this time.[1] A later study, published in 2011, estimated that approximately 500,000 Iraqis had died as a result of the conflict since the invasion.[2] Counts of deaths reported in newspapers collated by projects like the Iraq Body Count project found 174,000 Iraqis reported killed between 2003 and 2013, with between 112,000-123,000 of those killed being civilian noncombatants. Updated estimates from the Iraq Body Count Project report an estimated 173,766 – 194,058 civilian deaths from 2003-2017. For troops in the U.S.-led multinational coalition, the death toll is carefully tracked and updated daily, and the names and photographs of those killed in action as well as in accidents have been published widely. A total of 4,491 U.S. service members were killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2014.[3] Regarding the Iraqis (see Tables section below), however, information on both military and civilian casualties is both less precise and less consistent. Estimates of casualty levels are available from reporters on the scene, from officials of involved organizations, and from groups that summarize information on incidents reported in the news media.

    So at best only a mere 174,000 Iraqi's (the vast majority of them non-combatant citizens) were killed in the Iraq war. Likely the number is closer to over 200,000 when counting all deaths, not just Iraqi's. And if the worst case estimates are right and the vast majority of estimates are heavily under-counting the deaths, over a million people died as a result of the war.

    And that's just deaths, it doesn't count all the other many costs of the war.

  • On the post: Free Software, Open Access, And Open Science Groups Join Fight Against EU Copyright Directive's Terrible Ideas

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 14 Sep, 2017 @ 07:47am

    Re:

    But the biggest IP defenders, Hollywood, are the people who make movies. :(

  • On the post: Virginia (Again) Dumps Electronic Voting Devices Over Concerns About Election Interference

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 12 Sep, 2017 @ 12:15pm

    Re: What is so hard about this...

    However... because it is our government we are talking about, these systems aren't chosen on merit, but by who has donated the most money to a congress critter in the area... 'MERICA!
    They really need a law (or better yet a constitutional amendment) against this practice. Even if there's nothing illegal being done, it looks shady as hell to plenty of people. Just look back at 2004, there were plenty of people afterwards saying that Diebald rigged the election for Bush because of the generous donations their CEO made to his campaign. Diebald didn't help themselves either with their constant threats under intellectual property laws to sue anyone who dared even suggest that they might look around at their voting machines to verify it's accuracy & security (including threats to some college professors who were clearly well qualified to be impartial judges on something like this). The mere threat of lawsuits speaks volumes about how Diebald thinks their software would actually do if it were checked for accuracy and/or security. Especially threats against college professors, since what better endorsement could there be for your product than security experts independently verifying your voting machines accuracy and security?

  • On the post: Cop Cleans Out Wallet Of Unlicensed Hot Dog Vendor Just Because He Can

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 12 Sep, 2017 @ 06:41am

    Re:

    Don't forget teenagers are also sexual predators for sexually exploiting themselves and taking selfies of it.

    But adults taking pictures of their genitals for evidence in court to prove the teens are sexual predators are perfectly innocent people obeying the law.

  • On the post: FTC Advice On How To Deal With Equifax Hack: Er… Race The Hackers To Filing Your Taxes Before They Do

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 12 Sep, 2017 @ 10:51am

    Social Security Numbers

    such that merely knowing your Social Security Number and address isn't enough to file tax returns in your name.

    Equifax and the FTC aren't to blame for this. The IRS and Prosecutors and big businesses are to blame for Social Security Numbers being so vitally important and insecure.

    Social Security Numbers were invented by the IRS to track who was who in their system. The IRS never expected them to be used by anyone but themselves, and never made the numbers all that secure because of that.

    It's actually ILLEGAL for most businesses to ask you for your social security number, and to use it as a unique identifier for you in their databases. Only businesses that need to report your income to the IRS (like the company you work for, and a bank or investment firm) should have a real reason to know what your social security number is. Anything beyond that is scope creep, and is ILLEGAL under the law.

    But, this is where Prosecutors and Big Business screwed things up. Big Businesses thought using Social Security numbers to identify customers in their database was a great idea. And prosecutors didn't enforce the laws against doing that, and so now Social Security numbers have become an insecure national ID in effect.

  • On the post: Lawyers Overcome First Challenge In Showing 'We Shall Overcome' Is In The Public Domain

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 11 Sep, 2017 @ 01:14pm

    Re:

    When does fraud on such a massive scale go from civil to criminal liability?

    Warner Chappell's fraud over Happy Birthday should have easily crossed such a line, given the decades of fraudulent income it gave them.

  • On the post: Cop Cleans Out Wallet Of Unlicensed Hot Dog Vendor Just Because He Can

    ShadowNinja ( profile ), 11 Sep, 2017 @ 01:06pm

    Re: Re:

    Yeah, it seems clear that they stole the credit and debit cards to steal the guy's bank account and possibly bill stuff in his name on his credit card (which is fraud and identity theft no matter who does it. Seizing the bank account under asset forfeiture might be legal, but there's no way seizing the credit card account is).

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