sokpuppette 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Secret Service Dubiously Claims, Without Evidence, To Have Uncovered ‘Hidden Telecom Network’ That Could Have Crippled NYC, UN

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 25 Sep, 2025 @ 06:33am

    Oh, come on

    I strongly suspect they stumbled into some mob-connected scam ring or textbot farm, and are over-hyping this for dramatic effect.
    ... as are you. What they discovered is the normal operation of scam communication services. Those services are sold on the open market. Talking about the "mob" makes it sound a lot more romantic than it is. There is no "mob", just a bunch of fly-by-night VOIP and SMS operators.
    While this all sounds scary, it seems extremely unlikely that this collection of 100,000 SIM cards in use over this broad of an area could have ever meaningfully impacted cellular communications in New York City, which sees between nine and twelve million cellular users every day.
    Actually, 100,000 SIMs could probably have run an effective denial of service attack. Those nine to twelve million users don't make new calls constantly at machine speeds. However, as you point out, that's not why they were there. They were there to try to con people out of money, not shut down the damned UN. There were so many of them because the people running them know that if you funnel too many calls through one subscription, it's going to get noticed and cut off. Apparently the SS has lost all competence, much like the rest of the Trump administration.

  • On the post: Gavin Newsom Signs Law Enforcement Face Mask Ban And Everyone Gets Stupid About It, Including Federal Prosecutors

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 23 Sep, 2025 @ 01:16pm

    The problem...

    ... is that California's passed a performative, unconstitutional law that it can't enforce. The Trump regime will throw that into the hopper and use it as fodder to legitimize its own far worse unconstitutional, illegal actions. And that will have some legs with some people who need to be swayed. One of MAGA's favorite tricks is to claim its opponents are doing things that MAGA pioneered and is systematically doing far, far more of, and it seems to work especially well if there's even the tiniest grain of truth in it. ... and the Roberts court will be happy to shut down California's law in record time. Maybe they'll even do another "certiorari before decision". What does this accomplish on the ground? Maybe a few days, or even a couple of weeks, of some ICE agents not wearing masks. Or maybe nothing. This isn't the kind of time when the Good Guys(TM) can afford not to be effective.

  • On the post: Trump Administration Approves New COVID Vaccines… For Barely Anyone At All

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 29 Aug, 2025 @ 06:14am

    Look, RFK Junior is a total moron, a blantant scammer, and an all-around disaster. He should be thrown into an all-natural, unpasteurized wood chipper. Even having a prescription requirement at all is fucking stupid and horrible and will kill people. But there's no need to make things up. It makes you vulnerable.

    1. Will insurance cover the vaccines outside of those approved for groups?
    Most people running insurance companies are not total morons. One actual serious COVID cases pays for a crapton of vaccines. I'm guessing they're gonna cover it. The only reason they wouldn't would be the free rider effect from the huge number of uninsured people. Which is caused by different stupid nightmare policies.
    1. Will doctors be willing to even prescribe them, a necessity now, if they fall outside of those groups?
    Doctors are typically not total morons either, and even the ones who are don't tend to be that kind of moron. They routinely prescribe off-label for other things, and will definitely be doing it for this.
    1. Will there be punishments as a result of not adhering strictly to the FDA approval guidelines?
    There never have been in the past. It would take a lot of changes to the established rules and ways of doing things. Maybe that'll happen... or maybe the stupid and evil energy will get used up on some other stupid, evil thing. You're borrowing trouble and potentially wasting the good guy's time and attention.

  • On the post: Trump Stooges Keep Helping The President Indulge In His Vindictive Crime Fantasies

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 25 Aug, 2025 @ 01:55pm

    Don't wrong Trump

    Because the people who love Trump suck as much as Trump does[...]
    This denies Donald John Trump his due. Some of Trump's supporters match his stupidity, his ignorance, or even his wilfull blindness. A few match his self-centeredness, pettiness, and vindictiveness. A few match his feckless laziness, his weakness of purpose, or his disconcern for duty. Less hampered than he by frailty of mind or will, a privileged handful actually exceed Trump in the comprehensiveness and systematic enactment of their hatred, and indeed one may say that perhaps much of Trump's dangerousness in truth manifests theirs. Surely some of his followers match him in some of his many other faults. Nonetheless, no-one save Trump himself unites these elements, or breathes into them that spark which gives life to Trump's unique apotheosis of suckage. To suck as much as Trump would be to merge with him in his final, embodied essence of suck.

  • On the post: Privacy‑Preserving Age Verification Falls Apart On Contact With Reality

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 19 Aug, 2025 @ 03:03pm

    It’d still be a massive privacy improvement over current implementations, even if the downsides aren’t (or can’t be) mitigated further.
    The "current implementation" is no age verification step at all, which is maximally privacy-preserving, vastly cheaper than any of the things you suggested, and immune to mission creep and misuse.

  • On the post: ‘Hail Satan’ But For Break Rooms, As Trump Issues Guidance For Religious Freedom In Workplaces

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 05 Aug, 2025 @ 07:42am

    While it does seem weird that a park ranger wouldn’t just hang back a bit and wait for the tour to finish praying (rather than joining them and giving them an implicit governmental blessing of their religious expression)
    In almost no cases will the tour group itself even start praying. That's only going to happen if they all came together on the church bus. In many, many more cases, the ranger will start the prayer, lead the prayer, arrange things so the prayer occupies all the reasonable spaces to stand, glare nastily at anybody who doesn't join the prayer (and possibly pray over that person afterwards)... and then call it "joining the tour group in prayer". By the way, the first few paragraphs of that article were kind of content-free and unnecessary. The news isn't how Trump is, and it's not like we don't know anyway.

  • On the post: Everyone Hates Trust & Safety. Everyone Needs Trust & Safety. This Is A Problem.

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 31 Jul, 2025 @ 11:51am

    If what you do, in whole or in part, is to filter, edit, redact, or remove material that doesn't meet some set of criteria, then you are a censor. That may be good or bad, but it's still what you are. The word hasn't ever (in halfway modern English) required that you work for the government. It's never required that you were trying to enforce your restrictions society-wide. It's never implied anything about what particular set of rules you might be enforcing, or about the source of your right to do so. It's obnoxious to try to redefine words because you don't like their connotations. The overwhelming majority "Trust and Safety" has a large censorship component, and most people who work in "Trust and Safety" thus have censorship as a significant part of their jobs. They are censors, and they need to get comfortable with that.

  • On the post: DHS Repurposes Johnny Cash, WWII Film, And The Bible Itself To Pretend God Hates Migrants

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 29 Jul, 2025 @ 08:44am

    "God's gonna cut you down", eh?

    “There’s a Bible verse I think about sometimes—many times" Ezekiel 16:49-50

    49: Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy 50: They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.
    Calling out these people's perversions of "Christianity" is like shooting fish in a barrel.

  • On the post: Financial Censorship and the Love Affair Between Payment Processors and Anti-Porn Campaigners

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 28 Jul, 2025 @ 05:07pm

    It is a love affair that is incestuous by its very nature.
    Wait, they're related? ... and is there porn of it?

  • On the post: Crowd-Sourced ICE Tracking Alerts Aim To Provide Local Communities With Early Warning Of Immigration Raids

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 12 Jul, 2025 @ 04:38pm

    What these guys need...

    ... is some ALPRs and IMSI catchers. Maybe gait recognition. Or facial recognition, for that matter; they probably don't wear the masks all the time.

  • On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 06 Jul, 2025 @ 03:00pm

    We’re funding this with taxpayer money. We’re living in Omelas [...]
    In Omelas, the child's suffering actually kept the rest of the utopia going. We weren't told how, but we were very clearly told that it did, and furthermore that it was the only way to do it. In the USA at the moment, the suffering is just making everything else worse too.

  • On the post: Lindsey Graham Thinks It Should Be Illegal To Identify ICE Agents

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 11 Jun, 2025 @ 03:20pm

    Careful...

    Using apparently completely made-up stats about “increases” in “attacks” on ICE agents, ICE’s enablers justify the complete erasure of public accountability
    It's probably bad to give any ammo by making it a central issue that they're making it up. Even if there were a real spike in attacks on ICE agents, it wouldn't be OK for them to not identify themselves (and prove their identity). That matters because ICE is out there provoking people (partly by not identifying themselves). There almost certainly will be attacks on ICE agents. The Trump administration wants there to be attacks on ICE agents, so the attacks can be used as "justifications" for more draconian and more generalized crackdowns on the populace. If nobody takes them up on their current provocations, they'll keep ramping them up until somebody does. When attacks start happening, ICE will still not be justified in going around masked.

  • On the post: ICE, DHS Again Pretend Congress Members Don’t Have The Legal Right To Engage In Unannounced Detention Facility Inspections

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 10 Jun, 2025 @ 11:44am

    I'll go beyond that...

    members need to show identification
    OK, yes, they need to prove they're who they say they are. ... but not to ten successively called in layers of management while everybody else inside scrambles to hide stuff. If you can't trust your first-line door guard to verify identity, then hire a door guard who can. Check their ID. Maybe place one, direct call from the front desk to their office to verify that it's them. Then call somebody else to handle the door, without telling that person why, and take them directly to wherever they say they want to go, by the most efficient route or by whatever route they specify. Do not pass "Go", do not collect $200. Any further barriers along the way to be removed by the nearest personnel who physically have the ability to do so. Not so much as a word to anybody else in the facility or the agency unless they authorize it. When they say they're done, you can then do any further "checks" before you let them out. That should be SOP in every facility. The same should apply to inspectors general, duly appointed GAO auditors, and any other legitimate oversight official.
    and go through screening
    Nope. Too easy for that to be another delaying tactic. Nobody gets to search ICE for contraband when they raid something.
    and can’t bring contraband.
    If they bend over and a nuke falls out of their hat, then sure, you can have 'em arrested.

  • On the post: CDC Decides America’s Children Could Do With More Lead In Their Blood

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 03 Jun, 2025 @ 05:39am

    Well...

    ... it's already well established that many members of the Trump administration would benefit from lead injections, so...

  • On the post: Republican Lawmakers Want To Replace The Community Standard For Obscenity With *Their* Own Standard

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 19 May, 2025 @ 01:34pm

    How does that work?

    I thought the point of the Miller test was to get away from "I know it when I see it" and define obscenity in a way that was compatible with the court's (itself largely asspulled) view of what the First Amendment would allow Congress to ban. Obviously you can't just have Congress arbitrarily override that definition and still expect to get away with banning whatever your new definition says. That would totally nullify the First Amendment. So what does Lee (or whoever's writing for Lee) actually expect to achieve? How will this play out in court? Is it really just an excuse to have the whole issue of the limits on what can be banned relitigated in courts that are more censorship-friendly than the Miller court?

  • On the post: Another Court Says Trump Admin Needs To Stop Randomly Renditioning People To El Salvador

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2025 @ 02:46pm

    "Rendition" is the act of rendering

    There is no such thing as "renditioning". There is no such thing as "gifting", either. Although it is a very old error to treat "gift" as though it were an infinitive form, and although this may seem attractively unambiguous, "gift" is nonetheless itself an infected form of "give". One does not "gift" things. One gives them. I have for the most part abandoned the quest to protect "refute", but nonetheless feel compelled to mention that it does not mean "deny", "contradict", or "dispute". To refute something is to prove that it is false. A writer who says that someone "has refuted" a statement or argument thereby implies that the writer is convinced by the refutation. "Leverage" is not a verb. The correct verb to use in place of "leverage" is "use". Use "use". Don't leverage "leverage". Now there's glory for you.

  • On the post: The Normalization Of Autocracy

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 01 Apr, 2025 @ 04:59pm

    Should it ever have been normalized...

    ... for the press to invite the people they cover to dinner in the first place? Apparently Trump didn't attend these in his first term, and probably wasn't going to attend this one. But I bet he was invited, and previous presidents always did go, and as far as I can see that's excessively cozy. That goes for a lot of other Washington "socializing", too. Starting with "prayer breakfasts" and going from there. In politics, sometimes you're going to find you have to oppose people, so keep those people at work and get some other friends.

  • On the post: What Trump’s Possession Of The Declaration Reveals About His Vision Of America

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 19 Mar, 2025 @ 02:33pm

    With a sharpie.

  • On the post: What Trump’s Possession Of The Declaration Reveals About His Vision Of America

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 19 Mar, 2025 @ 02:06pm

    Mr. Trump is not the person who should be wanting to call too very much attention to some of the text in that particular document, is all I'm a-saying here.

    Mr. Trump is not the person who should be wanting to call too very much attention to some of the material in that particular document, is all I'm saying here.

  • On the post: Appeals Court: ‘Plain View” Also Includes Using iPhone Camera Options To See Through Tinted Car Windows

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 13 Mar, 2025 @ 05:42am

    Thermal imaging is readily available nowadays. It's much cheaper and more capable than it was in 2001. I have an adequate thermal camera in this room. You can buy them on Amazon for a few hundred dollars, and lots of people do.

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