sokpuppette 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (177)

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

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 31 Jan, 2020 @ 05:32am

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

  What I'm saying is that trying to make a profit will prevent them from properly providing the service. It has nothing to do with what they "should" or " should not" do. It's simply not possible to make a buck providing an unattackable service.

• On the post: Lindsey Graham's Sneak Attack On Section 230 And Encryption: A Backdoor To A Backdoor?

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 31 Jan, 2020 @ 12:57pm

  I'm having trouble buying the idea that anybody at all thinks the phrase "child porn" carries any implication, or even suggestion, of legality. It's the most famously illegal thing that exists on the Internet.

  As for moderation, I will bet that almost all references to "child porn" on the Internet are in text that condemns it and/or discusses what to do to stop it. And if the pedos are in fact openly using the phrase "child porn" all over the place, what happens when they start calling it "CSAM"?

• On the post: Lindsey Graham's Sneak Attack On Section 230 And Encryption: A Backdoor To A Backdoor?

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 31 Jan, 2020 @ 12:28pm

  "CSAM"?

  What's the actual difference between "CSAM" and child porn, and why is it important to make the distinction? Seems like another random pointless acronym being thrown around and another random pointless terminology change.

• On the post: Spectrum Customers Stuck With Thousands In Home Security Gear They Can't Use

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 23 Dec, 2019 @ 08:21am

  Re: Re: others

  ... ever bought an expensive cell phone that was locked in to a single carrier?

  No. That is, not unless I was absolutely sure I could unlock it without the carrier's help or permission. I've never been wrong about that. Neither should anybody else.

  or an expensive android phone where software updates ceased after 1-2 years?

  No, because I've never bought one I couldn't load a custom ROM on. I have been fucked in 3 to 5 years because of proprietary binary blobs, though. That shit should be illegal. In fact, it should be illegal to distribute any software without source code. That includes firmware and other software bundled with hardware. It should also be illegal to distribute hardware without full register descriptions, and all other information necessary to write a driver supporting all of its features. And if you have any other "internal" documentation, go ahead and throw that in too. No exceptions, and fuck your "trade secrets". And if locking something down so that it will only load signed software is legal at all, there need to be some extremely heavy, legally binding regulations on the conditions under which it is allowed. THat definitely has to include the ability to update software that's gone out of support. In most cases, it should probably also include the ability for the owner of any hardware to take total control of all the software that runs on it. People should be tolerating this kind of abuse any longer. Not only are we suffering from wasteful obsolescence, and not only are enormous resources constantly wasted by intentionally crippled functionality and intentionally hindered interoperability, but there are massive unfixable security problems in all the shit software and abandonware that's being shoveled out. Meanwhile, we should be poisoning the market for this crap by mocking anybody who opts in without being absolutely forced. In the specific case of home control, there were perfectly good open alternatives that these idiots could have used instead.

• On the post: California Governor Signs Bill Banning Facial Recognition Tech Use By State's Law Enforcement Agencies

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 18 Oct, 2019 @ 04:49pm

  Good first step. Now ban all use of it by everybody. There's nothing magically different about state surveillance.

• On the post: Phew: EU Court Of Justice Says Right To Be Forgotten Is Not A Global Censorship Tool (Just An EU One)

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 11 Oct, 2019 @ 11:35am

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

  I need to correct that slightly. That news site just turned off the name and I got a message saying "your screen name has been rejected; choose a new one" or something nonspecific like that. I only inferred that they wanted something that looked like a "real name".

• On the post: Phew: EU Court Of Justice Says Right To Be Forgotten Is Not A Global Censorship Tool (Just An EU One)

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 11 Oct, 2019 @ 11:31am

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

  I use the name only for commenting on places like this. I have a couple of aliases, although I don't use more than one on the same site. You won't find any of them on my birth certificate. Isn't that technically what a sock puppet is? I use the name to make it clear to the reader that I'm not associating the comments with my "real world" identity. Amusingly enough, one news site decided it didn't like the name because it looked obviously fake, and made me choose one that looked like a "real name". The one I chose wasn't, of course, my actual "real name". I can't imagine what they think they're accomplishing with that nonsense. By the way, although I take strong stances and try to shake up assumptions, I do not write comments that I don't believe, nor do I write comments just to upset people. I really don't understand what pissed people off about that one, since I would think pretty much everybody would agree with it if they thought for 15 seconds. But maybe it touched some taboo or another. My first guess would be the part about the US Constitution being poorly written.

• On the post: Deputy Attorney General Rosen: Companies Like Facebook Are Making Everyone Less Safe By Offering Encryption

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 07 Oct, 2019 @ 07:07am

  Let's not forget...

  It's true that these back doors are very dangerous from a technical security point of view. But they are also bad ideas when they're working as intended.

  If these companies give that kind of access to "the authorities" in the US, they have no leverage to not give it to "the authorities" in $insert_hellhole_dictatorship_here. And even in places like the US, "the authorities" routinely break the rules, overstep their bounds, and create giant unjustifiable oppressive programs. It's stupidly dangerous, to children and everybody else, to concentrate that kind of power.

  They shouldn't have that power, period, even if it could be secured, which of course it can't.

• On the post: DOJ Using The FOSTA Playbook To Attack Encryption

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 03 Oct, 2019 @ 01:37pm

  Wow, I wish Barr would lend his enormous prestige and sterling personal reputation to MY issues...

• On the post: Phew: EU Court Of Justice Says Right To Be Forgotten Is Not A Global Censorship Tool (Just An EU One)

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 24 Sep, 2019 @ 01:22pm

  Re: Re:

  It' a stupid question. If you really try to set up and follow a system of rules that divides all rights, or really all of anything else, into exactly two possible categories of "fundamental" and "not fundamental", with everything solidly on its own side of the line and nothing "not fundamental" allowed to infringe in any way on anything "fundamental", with absolutely no balancing allowed between the categories (and no real guidance on how to do balancing within either category), then you will come up with stupid nonsensical outcomes that cause massive misery. Especially if you try to do it in any document worded vaguely enough to survive a political process. The US Constitution, for example, is horribly vague in most places, and most of the places where it doesn't leave wiggle room are poorly thought out. It's attractive to try to make absolute distinctions, because you feel like maybe you can make a hard law to prevent some obnoxious abuse of power, but if you really try to do it, with no wiggle room at all, it won't work. Especially not if you try to have a lot of absolutes, or if you're arbitrary about which things you make absolute. Assholes will still find a way to be assholes, and sometimes they will be able to recruit your rules to their side. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have clear rules. It means that you have to understand that the approach has limits. I say this, by the way, as a person who doesn't think the US is absolute enough about a lot of kinds of free speech, and who would be very unlikely to support any RTBF rule anywhere in the world.

• On the post: Phew: EU Court Of Justice Says Right To Be Forgotten Is Not A Global Censorship Tool (Just An EU One)

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 24 Sep, 2019 @ 12:27pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re:

  I don't know if it matters to you, but you've abandoned any claims to textualism and are now down in the "I know a fundamental right when I see it" swamp. The US Constitution contains no general right at all to be secure in your person. The phrase appears in the Fourth Amendment, but the scope there is limited to search and seizure, which is not at issue. So apparently you're saying there are other sources of fundamental rights, outside of the text of the document itself, that should have weight in US constitutional law. OK, cool. What are those sources, and how do I know whether I've found such a fundamental right? Maybe the right to be free from the dissemination of irrelevant negative information is one of them. If it's not, why isn't it? You're not allowed to do any balancing in your answer. Bright lines and black-and-white categories only. Also, the child porn restrictions do in fact apply to mere possession, as well as applying to distribution that doesn't involve producing it to begin with. In fact, the main point of adopting the laws was really to get at distribution, and indeed also at possession. Creation involves child molestation anyway, and that was already illegal, therefore less pressing. In the US, the right to possession of protected media is treated as part of the right of free speech. Maybe that's odd, but that really is universal in US law; having and reading it is considered part of the same right as writing or saying it. And, possession aside, distribution sure as hell qualifies as part of the expressive side. So we have a content-based restriction on expression that has nothing to do with the act production (or of how the production is done, for that matter). And any part of the harm that's unique to the porn part, as opposed to the molestation part, is clearly a harm arising solely from that expressive act. That continuing harm does not involve security of the person. It may indeed be emotionally damaging to know that pictures of your past molestation are being distributed, but the damage does not arise from any current, ongoing violation of your actual person. Which, if we don't allow ourselves to look at matters of degree and do "balancing", is really very much like the RTBF case, with the ongoing distribution of irrelevant, damaging information being treated as harmful to the subject. You are going to have a HELL of a time finding a hard-edged, balancing-free distinction between those.

• On the post: Phew: EU Court Of Justice Says Right To Be Forgotten Is Not A Global Censorship Tool (Just An EU One)

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 24 Sep, 2019 @ 11:37am

  Re: Re: 1st Amendment and Balancing

  It's not any less bullshit when Ken White says it than it is when you say it. And he is purely flat out full of shit when he says the US Supreme Court has never approved a content-based restriction. The child porn restriction, for example, is 100 percent content-based. It is officially justified by negative impact on those depicted... even though, ya know, by your own criteria isn't any "fundamental right" not to be traumatized that way. It's very much like the RTBF, actually, in kind if not in degree. The US Supremen Court justifies the restriction on child porn, at the root, in terms a right to have the depicted abuse forgotten.

• On the post: Phew: EU Court Of Justice Says Right To Be Forgotten Is Not A Global Censorship Tool (Just An EU One)

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 24 Sep, 2019 @ 11:31am

  Re: Re:

  Once again, the very creation of those exceptional categories represents a weighing, dare I even say a balancing, of the FA and its guarantees against other concerns. It doesn't matter if a court doesn't use the word "balance". It doesn't matter if the outcome of the balancing test is a bright line test for lower courts to use. In the end you're still balancing, and trying to deny it is sophistry.

• On the post: Phew: EU Court Of Justice Says Right To Be Forgotten Is Not A Global Censorship Tool (Just An EU One)

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 24 Sep, 2019 @ 11:28am

  Re: Re: 1st Amendment and Balancing

  ... and those excluded categories are total asspulls, based on the feeling that SOME things are just too far beyond the pale... that those things are so bad that they, um, outbalance the fundamental right. The First Amendment does not say "except for libel", "except for child porn", or "except for all the other stuff that's magically not protected". Those exceptions are created by balancing the "fundamental" FA right against other rights which may or may not be equally "fundamental". There's no reason you couldn't use the same logic you use to get a libel exception to get an "irrelevant negative information" exception along the lines of the RTBF. There's simply no principled distinction being made.

• On the post: Other Big CJEU Case Says Google Must Put Certain Links At The Top Of Search Results

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 24 Sep, 2019 @ 01:41pm

  It's the court saying that Google is required to make sure that top search results "reflects the current legal position." In other words, if someone was exonerated after being accused of a crime, that must now be the top link.

  Or, y'know, it could be the court not being absolutely perfect in drafting its decision.

  What you quoted could easily be interpreted to mean that if, say, somebody had been exonerated in a criminal case, that link would have to appear first among links mentioning the case. If the criminal case were minor 20-year-old bullshit, all of the links about it might still be on the tenth page, below more relevant material. Or nonexistant, for that matter.

  And even if you don't accept that interpretation, I bet they will correct it quickly if it ever becomes a problem.

  Now, whether it's possible for a computer to meet even that standard is another question. I sure don't know how I'd write code to figure out the current legal interpretation of anything. Maybe they'll accept "best efforts and quick correction". Which is still a can of worms. But why not stick to that real can of worms rather than jumping on things that are almost certainly unintentional and won't stick anyway?

• On the post: Phew: EU Court Of Justice Says Right To Be Forgotten Is Not A Global Censorship Tool (Just An EU One)

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 24 Sep, 2019 @ 10:42am

  things that are not fundamental rights, like "protection of personal data."

  While I tend to be sympathetic, who exactly appointed you to decide which rights were fundamental?

  In the US, for the most part, we've decided that the 1st Amendment doesn't have a "balancing" test.

  Oh, really? What happens to me if I "express" some corporation's trade secrets? What happens to some corporation if it "expresses" something misleading in commercial advertising, using the same sort of innuendo that's allowed in political speech? Where's the government's fundamental right to have classified information.

  US FA law is full of balancing tests, just like all US constitutional law. The balance may be more strongly tilted than in other places, but it's still there.

• On the post: NYPD, Prosecutors Illegally Using Expunged Criminal Records To Perform Investigations, Ask For Longer Sentences

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 08 Aug, 2019 @ 04:08pm

  Silly me. I would have thought that when a record was ordered "expunged", that meant "completely destroy each and every copy that any government agency or anybody else under the court's jurisdiction can get their hands on".

  Only lawyers would set up a system where there was any question of anybody using an "expunged" record.

• On the post: They Grow Up So Fast These Days: Facial Recognition Tech Edition

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 08 Aug, 2019 @ 07:25am

  Waldo's service is completely opt-in.

  Oh, yeah? Who opts into the part where EVERY PHOTO THE CAMP CAN GET ITS HANDS ON is uploaded to the cloud so that this thing can look for pictures of the "opted-in" kids? These idiots have to handle photos of everybody, opted-in or not.

  Here's an idea: the staff takes no photos, period. Tthe kids share the photos they want to share among themselves by whatever means they see fit. If you see a photo you think your parents might want, and if you want them to have it, you ask for it.

  ... and if you do NOT want your parents to see a photo, then you don't show it to them. So that you, as a child, can begin to develop a sense of yourself as an independent human with some fucking agency and some fucking entitlement to exist without being watched all the fucking time.

• On the post: Researchers Build App That Kills To Highlight Insulin Pump Exploit

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 20 Jul, 2019 @ 07:15am

  So, yes, Medtronic's response here is lame and they should feel bad.

  BUT it's also true that pretty much anybody is in a position to kill pretty much anybody pretty much any time. I don't have to hack your insulin pump. I can ambush you with a baseball bat. Or I can poison your insulin. Or any number of other things.

  So it gets kind of old to see this stuff hyped all the time.

• On the post: The End Of The Open Internet: Cory Doctorow's Op-Ed From The Future

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 28 Jun, 2019 @ 09:33am

  Re: Re: Re:

  > "But there are no public platforms"
  There aren't?

  Well, no, not according to what you say in the next paragraph. They're all private property.

  No, you don't get to co-opt someone's private property because it's a popular place for people to go. That doesn't work in the physical world and doesn't work here.

  First, you're shifting the frame. The grandparent just means that the "large private spaces" are assuming all the functions of the old public spaces. There's nothing in that post about what to do about it. But I am prepared to go there. Why shouldn't we co-opt it? Private property is just a social convention. If it ceases to be of value, it can be limited or modified as necessary. In fact, it always has been limited. In the "physical world", you have never, ever been allowed to do just anything you wanted with or on your property. Never. Not in any human society since villages popped up, and probably not before that. There have always been taxes, land use restrictions, zoning, obligations to provide specific facilities if you provided other facilities, adverse easements, nuisance rules, etc, etc, etc. The denser the population has been, the more such restrictions there have been. Do not pretend that private property is or should be absolute in the "physical world". As for when you might want to limit virtual private property, one example might be when a space in which we'd previously recognized a very broad right of private control began to assume the functions of a public space...

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