sokpuppette 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Interior Department Putting Even More Effort Into Dodging FOIA Request

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 25 Jun, 2019 @ 07:10am

    This stuff is totally predictable

    If you actually want bureaucrats (or anybody else) to comply with a law, you build in personal consequences for failure to do so. A criminal penalty can work if it's actually enforced. In this particular case, a criminal penalty probably would not be enforced. It might actually be more effective to make anybody who willfully obstructs compliance or fails to comply permanently ineligible to work for the government... and then allow any member of the public to sue to have that applied.

  • On the post: The Flipside To Figuring Out What Content Do You Block: Cloudflare's Project Galileo Focuses On Who It Should Protect

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 15 Jun, 2019 @ 06:17am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    I know that tech inside and out from about 30(!) years' experience (OK, only 25 for HTTP). And I have to say that the difference between a caching proxy and a host is pretty tenuous... and probably completely irrelevant from an ethical point of view. If you're deliberately participating in delivering specific content, having chosen that particular content at least to the level that you know this or that site is controversial for this or that reason, then what difference does it make? I could equally apply your argument to paid hosting. If a better host won't carry some content, then it'll still find hosting on a worse one. And , "btw", for controversial content, Cloudflare isn't about "a bit less reliable". It can be the difference between "reasonably available" and "essentially unavailable". The difference between me and the grandparent is that I believe Cloudflare, and paid hosts, and whoever else, probably including large social media platforms, should NOT discriminate on content at all.

  • On the post: Pepe The Frog Creator, Infowars Both Claim Victory After $15k Copyright Settlement

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 14 Jun, 2019 @ 04:37pm

    Issue closed: not a bug

    I'm having trouble seeing how economic interests are in any way better justifications for copyright than moral ones are.

    In fact, I think I'll make the stronger statement that that's bullshit. Either you should have X form of control over my works, or you should not. Your motivations for exercising control shouldn't come into it.

  • On the post: Oversight Says FBI's Facial Recognition System Has Gotten Bigger, But Not Better

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 12 Jun, 2019 @ 08:07pm

    Seems like there's a bit too much concern about accuracy...

    ... and a bit too little concern about whether they should be doing this to begin with...

  • On the post: Amazon, Law Enforcement Joining Forces To Turn Your Front Door Into An Integral Part Of The Surveillance State

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 11 Jun, 2019 @ 02:08pm

    What about the people across the street?

    Do I have any recourse if my neighbor installs a device that spies on MY house 24/7?

  • On the post: One Year Into The GDPR: Can We Declare It A Total Failure Yet?

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 25 May, 2019 @ 09:52am

    "Numerous articles", my ass

    Even most of the things you honestly think are "problems" don't seem to be real problems. It's not that we should accept them to get the good parts, it's that they are good parts. And that ignores the other stuff you tried to sneak in.

    1. Good outcome. Papparazzi add no value and knowing where Prince Whatzisname lives or vacations is of no public interest. Guy has ZERO power over the UK government.
    2. Good outcome. Trash should've been being shredded all along.
    3. OK, not actually a good outcome. The "right to be forgotten" actually predates the GDPR, but the GDPR does codify it. The GDPR should probably be fixed to stay out of the public sphere more.
    4. How is that not an INCREDIBLY GOOD outcome? You claim the GDPR is bad because it conflicts with a TOTALLY INSANE copyright rule? Obviously you didn't think anybody'd bother to check your links, and thought you could get away with using this to pad the list.
    5. Does not appear to be related to the GDPR at all. More weaksauce list inflation.
    6. Getting parental consent = good outcome. Returns issue = obvious misapplication of the regulations. In fact almost certainly an intentional and self-interested misapplication on the part of the retailers.
    7. Amazon shouldn't have 1700 audio recordings of anybody to begin with, and that goes double if Amazon is so fucked up it can't tell whose data are which. I don't know why anybody'd care about Spotify history, but if anybody does care, then Spotify shouldn't have the data either.
      The obvious solution here is not to collect the data to begin with. Which is what the GDPR is supposed to incent. OK, yes, the "platforms" are trying to evade the whole point of the rule, and that results in paradoxical outcomes. Looks like the GDPR should be tightened to prevent them from possessing the information at all.
      And if that means Amazon can't train Alexa, then tough... Alexa is not important.

  • On the post: FBI And Half The World Bust Operators Of A Site That Made The Dark Web Searchable

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 08 May, 2019 @ 06:05am

    If Deep Dot Web is the one I remember, it's misleading to call it a search engine. It was more like a news site with advertising.

  • On the post: Game Devs Trolling Pirates Goes All The Way Back To At Least The Playstation Days With Spyro 2

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 04 May, 2019 @ 05:39am

    Playstation? That idiocy goes back to the Apple ][.

    Historical perspective, much?

  • On the post: Twenty-one States Inadvertently Tell The DC Circuit That The Plaintiffs Challenging FOSTA Have A Case

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 02 May, 2019 @ 10:05am

    Re: Why just "every American's interest"

    Well, sure, but, see, you just named an injury you've suffered that's specifically a consequence of this particular law. You were deprived of personal ads by the chilling effect of this nonsense. 'Course, the US courts still wouldn't recognize your injury, but you are indeed injured. So you (ought to) have a different kind of standing, more like the kind the US Government is actually talking about. A US citizen (ought to) have standing to challenge any unconstutional act of the US government purely because the lawlessness it promotes is injurious, regardless of what specific actions it causes anybody to take. That's different. ... although I suppose you could argue that you're also injured just by the dangerous effects of living next to a giant lawless mess, so maybe you should indeed have similar standing.

  • On the post: Twenty-one States Inadvertently Tell The DC Circuit That The Plaintiffs Challenging FOSTA Have A Case

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 02 May, 2019 @ 08:29am

    Re:

    If I grow corn on my farm and feed it to hogs on my farm, it affects the "stream of [interstate] commerce" and subjects me to Federal interstate commerce jurisdiction. If that kind of tenuous pseudo-connection BS works one way, it should work the other. If the Federal government does something to violate the Constitution, then every American's interest in living in a lawful constitutional republic is injured, and that means every single one of them has standing to sue for it. I do agree that the courts are way too supine to apply such a rule, then.

  • On the post: Bloomberg Appears To Flub Another China Story, Insists Telnet Is A Nefarious Huawei Backdoor

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 01 May, 2019 @ 05:47am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: What do you think back doors LOOK LIKE?

    And sometimes a giant throbbing veiny cock is a giant throbbing veiny cock. The point here is that observing an undisclosed Telnet server is consistent with either incompetence or a deliberate back door. The whole premise of this article is that a left-in debugging feature can't be intentional. That's a stupid positon to take. There's no basis to draw either conclusion.

  • On the post: Bloomberg Appears To Flub Another China Story, Insists Telnet Is A Nefarious Huawei Backdoor

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 30 Apr, 2019 @ 07:05pm

    Re: Re: What do you think back doors LOOK LIKE?

    We have almost no good examples of backdoors that were hidden so well we don't know if they are real of accidental,
    Sure we do. We find "accidents" all the time. Some unknown percentage of the "accidents" that we find are back doors. Those are examples. We just don't know which ones they are. That is not evidence that none of them are, or even that few of them are. If you can say we have no examples of "accidents" that are actually intentionally back doors, I can respond that we have no examples that are actually accidents. If you don't know for sure, you can't assume that they're all accidents any more than you can assume that they're all intentional back doors.
    your asking people to ascribe a very high degree of competence in this one specific area to a company that has not shown a high degree of competence in other technical areas.
    Actually I'm asking people to ascribe a very basic level of competence to some individual or small group. Because another thing about competently inserting back doors is that you don't involve everybody in a whole company if you don't have to.

  • On the post: Tired: Insane Patent Verdicts; Wired: Insane Trade Secret Verdicts

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 30 Apr, 2019 @ 08:08am

    Re: Re:

    Oh my god, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder. 200 years? The whole US industrial base was built in the 19th century by systematically ignoring European patents... which anybody remotely qualified to have an opinion would know. The big reason business is done in the US is that the US was relatively undamaged in the two world wars of the 20th century, and parlayed that into economic centrality and imperial status. As anybody remotely qualified to have an opinion would know. During the consolidation of that dominant position, US patent law enforced a far more rigorous standard of novelty and non-obviousness than it presently does. Most of the US' dominance came during a period in which the standard for a patent was literally articulated as "flash of genius" rather than "not obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art". Patents were much harder to get. As anybody remotely qualified to have an opinion. Unfortunatly, stupid and uninformed people don't know those things and still feel free to act superior. You are of course correct that the present regime forces businesses to cling to both patents and trade secrets. If your competitor gets an artificial advantage and you don't take that advantage yourself, then obviously you're much more likely to fail. That doesn't imply that it's a problem to remove the artificial advantage from everybody.

  • On the post: Bloomberg Appears To Flub Another China Story, Insists Telnet Is A Nefarious Huawei Backdoor

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 30 Apr, 2019 @ 01:17pm

    What do you think back doors LOOK LIKE?

    Nobody is stupid enough to put in an obvious back door. A back door always looks like a debug feature that somebody forgot to disable, or even like a bug.

    It may indeed be a screwup, because those are extremely common. But the fact that it's a Telnet server does not mean that it's not a back door or that it's not intentional.

  • On the post: Judge Tells Research Center To Give Back Facial Recognition Documents The NYPD Forgot To Redact

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 22 Apr, 2019 @ 05:25pm

    Re: ... and this is why...

    Hmm. I know somebody is going to miss the point of that, so just to clarify, the point of publishing is to get it out there before they can get an order like this, not to defy an order.

  • On the post: State Investigator Granted Immunity For Hours-Long Detention Of Doctor At Gunpoint During A Search For Medical Records

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 22 Apr, 2019 @ 05:10pm

    Re:

    Doctors who do that can be very scary, very dangerous people, just like any other drug dealer.
    I see somebody watches a lot of TV. ... and, as others have pointed out, doesn't read a lot of actual case material before spewing authoritarian bullshit...

  • On the post: Judge Tells Research Center To Give Back Facial Recognition Documents The NYPD Forgot To Redact

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 22 Apr, 2019 @ 05:24pm

    ... and this is why...

    ... if you happen to get your hands on a government document that's of any public interest, and that document even might be slightly embarrassing to anybody in the government or anybody who might have the ear of anybody in the government, you publish it instantly, widely, and in its entirety.

    If that's inconvenient for government agencies, well, they've brought that on themselves with this kind of behavior.

  • On the post: State Investigator Granted Immunity For Hours-Long Detention Of Doctor At Gunpoint During A Search For Medical Records

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 22 Apr, 2019 @ 05:07pm

    Apparently Andy wasn't along on the raid...

    ... to have a talk with Barney Fife...

  • On the post: Complete Overreaction: Professor Calls For Shutting Down Facebook Live, Post-Christchurch

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 03 Apr, 2019 @ 01:41pm

    So how come you're amplifying random loony cranks?

  • On the post: Welcome To The Prude Internet: No More Sex Talk Allowed

    sokpuppette ( profile ), 02 Apr, 2019 @ 01:55pm

    Re: Re: Re: Is this censorship

    ... and I think you're being deliberately obtuse and hiding in legalisms. The obvious point of grandparent's saying that the FA applies "in spirit" is that the FA is an expression of a supposedly widely held American value that says people should be able to express themselves freely. If you ACTUALLY believe in that value, then you're going to be really, really reluctant to shut anybody down on a "platform" you control, regardless of what's written on a piece of parchment. Maybe you'll do it if you think that their speech will be mistaken for your own opinion. Maybe you'll do it if you find the speech utterly abhorrent. But you won't do it lightly, and you won't do it just because it gets a few people's undies in a bunch. ... that is, if you believe in values that are at least supposed to be universal American values. On the other hand, if all you give a shit about is making a buck, then you'll do it at the drop of a hat. Which is your right, but other people equally have the right to call you a piece of shit for doing it. Hell, for that matter, you could argue that a "platform" does NOT have a free-speech right to control what's said UNLESS it might be taken as the platform's own speech. Which would never happen if it were well known that all platforms were required to carry everything. Compelled speech is definitely not OK, but being compelled to provide a neutral communication service is different. So in fact it seems likely constitutional to compel "platforms" to carry everything, regardless of how much they disagree with it, so long as it's not represented as their own opinion. That'd just be a regulation on the business of "platforming", with no actual effect on any defensible idea of "speech". If we're going to get all legalistic about it, I mean.

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