SirWired 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Claims Of 5G Health Risks Are Frequently Based On A Single, 20 Year Old Flawed Graph

    SirWired ( profile ), 18 Jul, 2019 @ 09:45am

    The basic physics here aren't that hard.

    Skin attenuates radio signals. Period. End of Story. There is no conceivable mechanism by which 5G could cause health issues at any dose a consumer would be exposed to. The only effects on tissue would be due to simple heating, which are not going to be significant at the small fractions of a watt smartphones run at. I'm not sure what there is to study.

    There might be separate considerations for workers maintaining live transmission towers, which are already accounted for in existing occupational-health requirements.

    (And the strange fixation on brain cancer makes even less sense! If, for the purposes of argument, we pretended that 5G phones emitted, say, x-rays, there are cancer-susceptible organs that would be much more affected than your brain; notably the skin, salivary glands, and thyroid. Your brain is on the other side of your skull, and bone attenuates radiation quite well.)

    P.S. (If you want to read up on the literature about the topic, ignore any text entirely that does not specify frequency, dose, and duration. And if they do specify those three crucial items, actually pay attention. If you do pay attention, you'll see that the research shows a glimmer of an effect at well-in-excess of consumer doses for days. If you don't pay attention, it'll be like proclaiming "Driving past an asphalt plant is bad for you" after reading a study about people cleaning out tanks full of exotic volatile petrochemicals at an oil refinery for years on end.)

  • On the post: Universal Music Cashed In On Insurance After It Let Thousands Of Master Recordings Burn… And Didn't Give Any To Artists

    SirWired ( profile ), 26 Jun, 2019 @ 03:23pm

    RIAA... huh?

    Other than the fact that UMG is an RIAA member, what on earth does this travesty to do with them?

    The entire first paragraph of this article is just transparent axe-grinding that has bupkis to do with the actual story.

  • On the post: Kim Kardashian Deep Fake Video Removed By Copyright Claim

    SirWired ( profile ), 20 Jun, 2019 @ 05:05am

    I'd love to censor All Kardashian Things

    For months, I've been trying to convince Google News to never show me anything about the Kardashians/Jenners to no avail. If only "vapid content about professional celebrities" was a target of cleansing algorithmic fire...

  • On the post: GDPR Concerns Temporarily Result In The Removal Of Trash Cans From Ireland Post Office

    SirWired ( profile ), 14 May, 2019 @ 05:13am

    Might as well be called the Arbitrary Punishment Regulation

    After reviewing GDPR, the conclusion I swiftly came to is that any organization larger than a few people will find perfect compliance impossible.

    And since the regulation makes no provision for scaling the possible penalties based on the severity of the violation, it's clearly just a way for the EU to extract money from any company (or country, for that matter) that they don't like.

    The almost-certain selective enforcement will probably eventually cause some WTO problems, but that'll take many years to resolve.

  • On the post: TurboTax Did Everything It Could To Hide The Free-Filing Its Supposed To Offer

    SirWired ( profile ), 29 Apr, 2019 @ 02:54pm

    And the funny thing is, the stand-alone programs are *cheap*

    I'm waaaay outside of being eligible for Free-File, and I haven't paid more than $30 to file my taxes for years.

    I use the "deluxe" PC version of H&R @ Home, and for no more than $30 (usually $25 on-sale), you get pretty much every single form a wage-earner could possibly need. It includes a State program, and free Federal filing. State filing is over-priced, so I just print it out and mail it in.

    But if you go through the H&R website, it's all going to cost much more. And I'm gobsmacked that TurboTax online is $60 for any situation an entry-level cashier could possibly be in.

    But, yeah, I should't have to do any of this at all. With the increased standard deduction, not a single item of information went on my forms that the feds don't already know.

  • On the post: Could Article 13's Upload Filters Be Thrown Out Because Of The EU-Canada Trade Deal CETA?

    SirWired ( profile ), 17 Apr, 2019 @ 06:07am

    Probably not gonna help much

    I'm going to guess that this is only going to help Canadian companies, and perhaps not even then if it would require the Canadian government to complain to the EU about it. I'm pretty sure courts give great deference to the government of their own country when interpreting their own trade agreements.

    I don't see how a targeted US company (or a European one, for conduct that isn't alleged to be connected to Canada, for that matter) would have a right of action in regards to the trade agreement.

  • On the post: AB/InBev, Jealous Protectors Of Trademark, Pretty Blatantly Committing Trademark Infringement

    SirWired ( profile ), 15 Apr, 2019 @ 11:27am

    I get it; Big Company, Bad, Small Company, Okay.

    I happen to agree that this is a pretty blatant trademark problem.

    But a while back you wrote about a very similar trade-dress complaint. There, it was Nestle going after a company that made a "FitCrunch" bar, using an identical red/white/blue color scheme (seriously, it looks like they used the same Pantone numbers), the word "Crunch" in gigantic red letters, and it was a competing candy bar, and your conclusion was that the trade dress wasn't, and I quote, "remotely identical".

    So when it's a hippy-dippy clothing company vs. a huge beer conglomerate, it's a legit claim, but when it's an even clearer case and it's a huge food conglomerate vs. a small producer, it's The Mighty Boot of Corporate Overreach.

  • On the post: Hollywood's Kinder, Gentler DRM Didn't Even Last A Decade… And Is Still Screwing Over Movie Fans

    SirWired ( profile ), 01 Feb, 2019 @ 06:26pm

    Err... All UV shifted to MoviesAnywhere

    I have quite a few UltraViolet movies, and they all shifted over to MoviesAnywhere. The migration process took about five minutes, and all the streamer apps that played UV movies seem to also participate in MoviesAnywhere. And as an added bonus, when I buy a movie through a streaming platform, many now cross over to other streamers, and they didn't do that before, and I no longer need a separate Disney account for my digital copies of their movies.

    I love the digital movie codes; they are a nice bonus to go along with my physical media purchases.

  • On the post: Texas E-Voting Machines Switching Votes For Non-Nefarious But Still Stupid Reasons

    SirWired ( profile ), 29 Oct, 2018 @ 08:43am

    Better yet, skip the e-voting entirely

    E-Voting is a solution in search of a problem. Paper ballots, while not completely idiot-proof, (the myriad ways in which people screw them up is astounding) DO have the advantage of being easily auditable.

    A machine that fills out a scannable paper ballot would seem to be the best of both worlds. It gives both a way to check to see if your vote is recorded accurately, has an auditable paper record, while removing all the various ways people manage to fail to follow instructions with paper-only ballots. (And if the machine breaks down, or the voter is feeling paranoid, the old-fashioned way is still an option.)

  • On the post: Documents Show IBM Pitched The NYPD Facial Recognition Software With Built-In Racial Profiling Options

    SirWired ( profile ), 10 Sep, 2018 @ 09:35am

    It's a perfectly normal search constraint.

    "Skin Color" is a perfectly normal thing to search for when trying to find a suspect for a particular crime; it's no more problematic than gender, dress, facial hair, etc.

    Of course it should not be used for "predictive" policing (e.g. "The more brown people, the more officers"), but if looking for a single person, it's perfectly reasonable.

    On another note, the whole bit about IBM and the Holocaust was completely overblown, nor was it any kind of secret. IBM did work on the German census, and religion was one of the questions on said census, but that is a perfectly normal census question. While it's not on the US census, it most certainly is on census questionnaires in many countries even today, including such despotic regimes like Australia and the UK. (This usually comes up when some smart-ass tries to get 'Jedi' included in the official statistics.)

  • On the post: New York State Threatens To Revoke Charter's Cable Franchise For Bullshitting

    SirWired ( profile ), 25 Jul, 2018 @ 08:50am

    I've actually had decent luck...

    I know that TWC/Charter/"Spectrum" rightly get a whole basketful of abuse for their service, pricing, regulatory B.S., etc., but I've actually been pretty satisfied with them as an individual.

    I cut the cord many years ago on TV service and have only been using them for Internet service for years. Over the 15 years I've had that service, the price has gone up 25%, and the speeds have gone up by 15x. That price increase isn't something I'm thrilled about, but I can't argue with those speeds. (Especially since the "competition", AT&T DSL, hasn't budged from a max of 25Mb for years.)

    Service has been ok, with maybe three or four outages requiring a truck roll to my house (all having to do with the rats nest of splitters outside the house, the last tech simply eliminated them entirely); the biggest problem was their crappy contract installer using the wrong kind of cable, and it left a sticky ooze all over my wall.

  • On the post: ESPN Latest To Nix User Comments, Abdicate Its Responsibility For Fostering A Good Community

    SirWired ( profile ), 11 Jul, 2018 @ 05:19am

    A "responsibility"?

    Why does ESPN have a "responsibility" to provide a comments section? Nobody's being "muzzled" here; ESPN is simply no longer providing a service that they judged to be more trouble than it was worth.

  • On the post: The Death Of Google Reader And The Rise Of Silos

    SirWired ( profile ), 05 Jul, 2018 @ 03:00pm

    I can hardly blame Google for this

    Google had a product, a fine one, that nevertheless wasn't making money. They tried something different, it didn't work, so they pulled the plug.

    Google isn't a charity, and they have/had no obligation to keep money-losing products going indefinitely, no mater how beloved. (I'm wondering when Google Voice is going to get killed; other than charging great rates for international calls, I don't see where any revenue comes from there.)

    Google, as a company does a lot of good stuff, but at their core they are still a company that likes to turn a profit. It's foolish for anybody to rely on the parts of their enterprise that don't make money.

  • On the post: Think The GDPR Only Regulates Big Internet Companies? The EU Says It Regulates You Too.

    SirWired ( profile ), 19 Jun, 2018 @ 05:55pm

    Re: Maybe a stupid question

    The ability of the EU govt to enforce an EU regulation against a company with nobody and nothing in the EU to sue or seize is pretty limited.

  • On the post: Think The GDPR Only Regulates Big Internet Companies? The EU Says It Regulates You Too.

    SirWired ( profile ), 19 Jun, 2018 @ 12:37pm

    What a #&*#$&#!! mess...

    I went through mandatory GDPR training a couple months ago, and it's come up several times in my job so far.

    The conclusion I've come to is that due to the massive ambiguity and strict requirements, compliance is pretty much completely impossible. Businesses should just resign themselves to the fact that if they annoy the EU or an individual EU government enough, they might be selected for a GDPR prosecution, which the company will almost surely lose.

    It's not a stretch to guess that the EU will favor non-EU companies for enforcement actions, preferably ones with large-enough EU operations that the company can't afford to just give 'em the finger and cease operating in the EU.

  • On the post: MUSO, Of All Groups, Tells Copyright Holders To Get Their Shit Together And Treat Pirates Like The Customers They Are

    SirWired ( profile ), 07 Jun, 2018 @ 04:51pm

    It's not a given that people would pay for the content

    If the unlimited streaming services had pretty much everything available, it's not a given that this could be offered at a price people would be willing to pay. It's certainly not free to acquire streaming rights. (They are expensive enough that Netflix is shifting over to more of an HBO model vs, the original model of licensing as much content as they could get their hands on.) And Spotify, despite paying a pittance per stream, still can't make money, even without the music from sources that want to be paid better.

  • On the post: Airbnb, Homeaway, And The Importance Of Holding The Line On Section 230

    SirWired ( profile ), 06 May, 2018 @ 06:24pm

    They are more than a disinterested listing agent

    HomeAway and AirBnB both are more than just disinterested listing agents that charge a fee for a successful rental. They also process payments, arbitrate disputes, offer insurance, police listing accuacy, etc.

    While 230 does allow some limited editorial control, these companies are more than just nearly-passive conduits that the law was designed to protect.

  • On the post: Another Federal Court Says Compelled Decryption Doesn't Raise Fifth Amendment Issues

    SirWired ( profile ), 02 May, 2018 @ 06:56am

    This is a reasonable interpretation of the 5th's text

    The 5th amendment says that you cannot be compelled to be a witness against yourself. That is, you cannot be forced to utter a single word that will ever be heard in a courtroom. If they are not allowed to use your possession of the password as evidence (so they must authenticate your ownership during a trial via other means), what part of the 5th do you suppose is being violated?

    The founding fathers certainly could have wrote that you cannot be compelled to assist in an investigation against yourself, but they limited the text to prohibitions against actually producing testimony.

  • On the post: Facebook Ranking News Sources By Trust Is A Bad Idea… But No One At Facebook Will Read Our Untrustworthy Analysis

    SirWired ( profile ), 02 May, 2018 @ 12:54pm

    I have no problem with this

    Given a finite amount of data that is going to pop up in a user's feed, there are going to be SOME criteria over what makes the grade. Some internal measure over how "trustworthy" the source is seems as good a criteria as any.

    It's no different from a search engine ranking search results based on their best guess as to how "useful" the search result is instead of just counting the number of times the keywords show up on the page. Sometimes they'll guess well, sometimes they won't and useful results will be ranked lower than some pathetic spam.

  • On the post: Sprint, T-Mobile Try To Sell The Public On A Job-Killing, Competition Eroding Megamerger

    SirWired ( profile ), 01 May, 2018 @ 04:07pm

    Re: Re: LOL, re: the TechDirt acquisition plan

    Again, if a Telco had cited a similar stat, but talking about similar (wide) range of jobs created due to the merger, TD would totally have made fun of it and talked about how unlikely it was, and how sloppy the stats were.

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