sokpuppette 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: The ADL’s Misguided Attack On Steam

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2025 @ 04:31pm

    The ADL is often really obnoxious... but Pepe the Frog is as permanently (if not quite as strongly) tainted as the swastika. It didn't originally symbolize what it symbolizes now... and that fact is totally irrelevant. If you use that character, you're sending a message, and furthermore you very probably know exactly what message you're sending. If you claim otherwise, I'm going to give you about as much credibility as Elon Musk "throwing his heart to the crowd". "Sigma" isn't a joke either.

  • On the post: GOP Is Quietly Freaking Out About Elon; Time For Them To Take A Stand

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 12 Feb, 2025 @ 08:43pm

    Point of order...

    ... it's not just a Musk coup. I don't think Musk is involved in, say, the shutdowns of Federal grants, or the massive DEI purges and witch hunts. It's a coordinated coup.

  • On the post: Ontario Cancels, Then Restores $100 Million Starlink Contract Over Trump’s Ignorant Tariff Threats

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 05 Feb, 2025 @ 10:41am

    I have no love for Doug Ford, but if he says "this contract is cancelled until X happens", and then X happens, and he reinstates the contract, that means he's doing what's necessary to keep his credibility. He didn't say "The contract is cancelled until Elon Musk stops being a fascist asshole deliberately aiding a coup in another country". Maybe he should have, but he didn't. If Ford just changed his demands all the time, why would anybody comply with any of them?

  • On the post: SCOTUS Tells Steve King To Go Away In ‘Success Kid’ Case Over Legal Fees

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 29 Jan, 2025 @ 02:56pm

    That isn’t a great look in general for the way copyright law is supposed to work (it’s about protecting the work, not suppressing specific types of speech, even abhorrent speech)
    It's her copyright, right? If she wants to let people she likes use it, and not let people she doesn't like use it, how is that different from her doing the same with her beach house or whatever? I mean, if you believe in copyright as presently practiced...

  • On the post: Hi Kids, Do You Like (Police) Violence? Trump’s DOJ Shuts Down Civil Rights Division

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 29 Jan, 2025 @ 02:38pm

    Don't worry, I bet Trump has his own ideas for police "housecleaning". It's just that being a goon isn't going to put you on the new target list. Quite the contrary, actually...

  • On the post: Embodied Is Actually Trying To Release ‘Moxie’ Robots To The Open Source Community

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 31 Dec, 2024 @ 03:30pm

    No normal "consumer protection law" is going to help you. If the company the law makes responsible for operating the system is bankrupt, the system isn't going to get run, period. Are you going to enslave the staff? An effective law would have to require a huge trust fund or something. Which would mean that kind of cloud dependent product would never exist in the first place. Which may actually be the right outcome, but probably isn't the outcome you have in mind. The bottom line is that things on somebody else's computer just aren't reliable, period.

  • On the post: Federal Court Tells Missouri Gov’t That Requiring Sex Offenders To Post ‘No Candy Here’ Signs Violates Their Rights

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 17 Oct, 2024 @ 08:24am

    Suppose they WERE a pathological pedo. Suppose they were the biggest molester ever to molest a molested molestee. What are they going to do, grab a kid and yank them inside their house for a quick molestin'? A kid who's probably gonna scream? A kid who's gonna remember where they live, because remember they did this AT THEIR OWN DAMNED HOUSE? When the whole area is probably crawling with other kids and their parents? Will they use their mystical hypnotic powers to "groom" the kid in the 5 seconds it takes to throw candy into a bag? Or put Viagra in the fucking candy? What's their game plan here? And if they COULD do that stuff, why wouldn't they just do it some other day? Is it that much harder to grab or "groom" a kid off of the sidewalk? The whole thing is just moronic from top to bottom.

  • On the post: Court Quickly Rejects California’s Deepfake Law As Blatantly Unconstitutional

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 03 Oct, 2024 @ 10:10am

    The First Amendment also doesn't contain exceptions for actual defamation, obscenity, commercial speech, or basically anything else. All of the exceptional categories that you seem to accept are pure judicial asspulls. You want to distinguish this from unprotected defamation as defined by case law. Well, fine, you can do that, but why should defamation be unprotected to begin with under any definition? Why don't similar reasons apply to new classes of exceptions? The hard, cold fact is that, although the US generally does unusually well on free speech, none of the tricky parts of US First Amendment jurisprudence have either any textual basis or any basis in any articulable, generally applicable principles. Sure, there are long lists of detailed rules within each of the laundry list of random asspulled exceptional categories, but that doesn't mean there's anything to tie them all together, let alone anything legitimate to tie them all together. From a practical point of view, the rule in effect is that the FA is limited whenever SCOTUS of the moment thinks, or pretends to think, that "they can't have meant that". Which is pretty concerning given who's on the current SCOTUS. It does kind of have to be that way because the FA, like most of the rest of the US Constitution, is so vaguely and sloppily drafted. The natural, obvious facial reading would permit tons of speech that almost nobody is actually prepared to tolerate even if stopping it means a revolution. But you still look silly hyperventilating about people looking for exceptions while accepting a bunch of other random exceptions that have no better justification.

  • On the post: Musk To X Employees: Impress Me For Your Stock Options

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 27 Aug, 2024 @ 01:06pm

    Tesla needs to fire that guy. Probably SpaceX, too. But Twitter's already dead.

  • On the post: Disney CFO Says Company ‘Earned’ Right To Relentless Price Hikes. Piracy Might Have Something To Say About That.

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 20 Aug, 2024 @ 07:31am

    They can do whatever they want with their prices, and I will continue to not consume their product... neither by buying it from them nor by pirating it.

  • On the post: Seventh Circuit Shrugs, Says The Odor Of Legal Weed Can Justify A Warrantless Vehicle Search

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 10 Jun, 2024 @ 06:02pm

    unlit headlights/taillights are indicators of “driving under the influence.
    Well, yes, they are. Forgetting to turn on your lights is just as much a sign of impairment as weaving. I mean, the smell thing is bullshit, but if you see a car driving around with its lights off late at night, there's a real chance the driver is drunk (or whatever; "dangerously sleepy" also causes it). Used to see a ton of them back before most cars started turning the lights on for you. It gets worse when the bars close.

  • On the post: As EU Commission Moves Forward With ‘Chat Control’ Proposal, EU Nations Continue To Push Back

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 09 Sep, 2023 @ 08:48am

    Spread?

    While the spread of CSAM is definitely something to be concerned about,
    What spread? Some organizations, notably NCMEC and the IWF, have been bellowing loudly about large numbers of reports. The reports have pretty clearly gone up because of more thorough reporting (by the same platforms they're now beating about the head and shoulders with the resulting numbers). There's little or no reason to believe that there's actually a bigger problem. This an especially interesting case because of the huge conflict of interest. These are primarily advocacy organizations, with strong interests in exaggerating problems. However, they've also managed to get special legal status for themselves. They are the only official reporting channels and the only people who can legally see all of the reported material. The reports are what they say they are and the reported material is what they say it is, and if you doubt them in any way, tough.

  • On the post: Guinness World Records Did An Automated Copyright Strike Oopsie On YouTubers

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 12 Aug, 2023 @ 01:19pm

    I've always thought...

    ... that there should be a civil penalty in the US for knowingly or negligently filing a false DMCA notice, and that statutory damages for each instance should be set at the same as for sharing a pop song on P2P. Which if I recall correctly is $250,000. And any notice not reviewed in detail by a human should be presumed negligent.

  • On the post: When It Comes To Qualified Immunity, Where Your Rights Were Violated Matters More Than The Fact Your Rights Were Violated

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 26 Aug, 2020 @ 05:35pm

    So....

    While this QI bullshit in the US is clearly based on egregious judicial activism by the Supremes (and after that a lot of apparently intentional inactivism), let's not forget that Congress could eliminate it at any moment, has had over 50 years to do it, and hasn't done so.

    And I'm not a lawyer, but I suspect that individual states could do at least something about it with respect to those officers who operate under their own authority. They haven't done it either.

    It seems like there's plenty of blame to go around for this.

    Basically everybody in any authority in government is terrified that the world will burn down if cops have to follow rules. Or they think their constituents are. So the dereliction of duty is pretty universal.

  • On the post: It's Long Past Time To Encrypt The Entire DNS

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 22 Jun, 2020 @ 06:17pm

    Sorry, no.

    There are two issues here: integrity and confidentiality (aka privacy). These systems are not the answer for either one.

    Integrity is best solved end-to-end using DNSSEC. It's absolutely stupid to try to do it using hop-by-hop cryptography; you're trusting every hop not to tamper with the data.

    ... and just encrypting DNS traffic doesn't solve confidentiality either. It doesn't even improve confidentiality in the large.

    1. The adversary model is incoherent. If your ISP is spying on your DNS traffic, and you deny that to the ISP, then the ISP can just switch to watching where your actual data go. Yes, that may be slightly more costly for them, since otherwise they probably would have done it in the first place. It doesn't follow that the costs imposed on them are enough to justify the switch. In fact, they probably are not.
    2. All the proposals encourage centralization, which means that when (not if) some resolver that a lot of people are trusting goes bad, the impact is huge. Instead of a relatively large number of relatively survivable events, you create a few massive catastrophes.
    3. What this is fundamentally trying to be is an anonymity system (I guess a PIR system). Anonymity systems are HARD. Much, much harder than point to point cryptography. There are a million correlation and fault induction attacks, and in the case of DNS there are a million players in the protocol as well. There's been absolutely zero analysis of how easy or hard these methods may be to de-anonymize using readily observable data. They seem to be being designed by people who don't even understand the basics, and think they're helping when they charge ahead blindly.

    ... not to mention that it's just psychotic to tunnel a nice simple cacheable protocol like DNS over a horrific tower of hacks like HTTP.

  • On the post: The EARN IT Act Creates A New Moderator's Dilemma

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 09 Apr, 2020 @ 03:29pm

    Re:

    ... oh, and even if you weren't a company with any significant infrastructure, they could also come after you for providing software for P2P or other decentralized solutions. "Protocols, not platforms" only works if somebody's allowed to provide the software to speak the protocol...

  • On the post: The EARN IT Act Creates A New Moderator's Dilemma

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 09 Apr, 2020 @ 03:26pm

    Hmm. It actually may be worse than that, because it appears to apply beyond what you'd think of as "platforms".

    The recklessness and "best practices" requirements are applied to all providers of "interactive computer services". The definition of "interactive computer service" is imported by reference from 230. That definition is:

    The term "interactive computer service" means any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions.

    The part about "system... that enables computer access" sweeps in all ISPs and telecommunication carriers, as well as operators of things like Tor nodes. And "access software provider" brings in all software tools and many non-software tools, including open source projects.

    Under 230, those broad definitions are innocuous, because they're only used to provide a safe harbor. An ISP or software provider is immunized if it doesn't actually know about or facilitate specific content. No ISP and almost no software provider has any actual knowledge of what passes through or use its service, let alone editing the content or facilitating its creation, so they get the full safe harbor, with minimal or no actual cost to them. And anyway nobody has been after them on 230-ish issues, so including them doesn't hurt.

    Under EARN-IT, those same definitions would be used to impose liability, so now those parties actually get burdens from being inside the definition. That's worse than a repeal of 230. It doesn't just remove a safe harbor; it opens an avenue for positive attack.

    This commission could decide that it's a "best practice" for ISPs to block all traffic they can't decrypt. Or it could decide that it's a "best practice" not to provide any non-back-doored encryption software to the public, period.

    Or, since those might generate too much political backlash at the start, it could start boiling the frog on the slippery slope by, say, deciding that it's a "best practice" not to facilitate meaningfully anonymous communication, effectively outlawing Tor, I2P, and many standard VPN practices.

    Then it could start slowly expanding the scope of that, possibly even managing to creep into banning all non-back-doored encryption, without ever making any sudden jump that might cause a sharp public reaction.

    Back on the platform side, over time the rules could easily slide from the expected (and unacceptable) "best practice" of not building any strong encryption into your own product, to the even worse "best practice" of trying to identify and refuse to carry anything that might be encrypted. Start by applying it to messaging, then audio/video conferencing, then file storage... and then you have precedents giving you another avenue to push it all the way to ISPs.

  • On the post: Cambridge, Massachusetts Passes Ban On Facial Recognition Tech Use By Government Agencies

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 01 Feb, 2020 @ 01:20pm

    "Ban", eh?

    That's a pretty lame excuse for a ban.

    There is no reason that private surveillance camera users should be allowed to have the kind of automated, mass face recognition they're talking about "banning", any more than government users. They're at least as likely to abuse it and even less accountable.

    Nobody should be trying to connect names or any other information to any person who just enters a place where a camera happens to be pointed. Nor should anybody be shouldn't be using the video/images from surveillance to build any kind of face database or any other kind of database.

    Only in the US would people miss the obvious fact that the impact is the same no matter who runs the system.

  • On the post: London Police Move Forward With Full-Time Deployment Of Facial Recognition Tech That Can't Accurately Recognize Faces

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 31 Jan, 2020 @ 11:42am

    Re: Re: creative makeup

    https://www.documentjournal.com/2020/01/anti-surveillance-makeup-could-be-the-future-of-beauty/
    I happened to be playing with the AWS Rekognition demo the other day, and I fed it a bunch of makeup jobs from the CV dazzle site, as well as various other images with "countermeasures" from around the Web. Given a nice clear picture, it found every single face and every single feature on every face. It also did a good job of identifying age, sex and mood, right through some pretty extreme makeup. Try it out. It's available to the public. The problem with the countermeasures is that you never know whether the other guy has out-evolved you. By the way, the good think about Rekognition was that it seems to be crap at actually identifying faces from large groups. They have a celebrity recognition demo, and it did very poorly on pictures lots of people who are in the headlines... including people who ARE in the database. It spotted Marilyn Monroe in one of her really iconic shots, but not in another perfectly clear shot that it presumably hadn't been trained on. Same thing for Einstein. Turning to the headlines, it misidentified Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunburg as random minor celebrities I'd never heard of. In turn it identified random minor celibrities, like members of current boy bands, as different random minor celebrities. It does well on heads of state. And both new and very old pictures of Elizabeth II worked. It may also be OK on Really Big Stars of Today (TM). But that's about it. So I assume it won't really identify a random picture as belonging to somebody in a collection unless said collection has a lot of good, similar pictures of that same person.

  • On the post: Time Magazine Explains Why Section 230 Is So Vital To Protecting Free Speech

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 31 Jan, 2020 @ 05:35am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: I have great hopes for the repeal of 230...

    In a peer to peer system, you bring your own, and you pay for it because you want to participate. Yeah, somebody has to sell it to you, but the equipment and software general purpose, you can't tell what any individual is using them for, and anybody can make them. If necessary, that can be extended to the entire communication infrastructure, but in fact we're not talking about the IP layer of fiber and routers here. We're talking about application layer overlays that can clearly be done peer to peer. Facebook and Google are not infrastructure.

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