sokpuppette 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (177)

• On the post: Getty Images Sued Yet Again For Trying To License Public Domain Images

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 01 Apr, 2019 @ 10:55am

  Re: Re: Oh, come the fuck on

  There are nifty handheld XRF guns you can use to detect arsenic in your ice cream, too. Seems like an appropriate amount of due diligence before you put something in your mouth.

• On the post: Getty Images Sued Yet Again For Trying To License Public Domain Images

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 01 Apr, 2019 @ 10:24am

  Oh, come the fuck on

  Trying to sell a "license" to something involves an implicit representation that you have some right to limit its use. In this case, Getty explicitly made such a representation.

  It's 1000 percent certain that the only reason that anybody who pays Getty to use these images is that they think they can't legally use them without Getty's permission, and it's also 1000 percent certain that Getty is intentionally trying to create that impression.

  It's fucking idiotic to expect somebody to do "research" to validate a direct claim from a supposedly credible institution that it controls the rights to something it's selling. That's an insane amount of burden shifting. Saying that "that seems to be on CixxFive. If it didn't do the research..." is exactly as compelling as saying that if sell you a poisoned ice cream cone, and yhou eat it based on my claim that it's yummy, it's on you that you didn't do the research to notice that it was full of arsenic.

  Now, IANAL, but I believe that when you intentionally misrepresent facts to induce somebody to pay you, that's called fraud. I don't know what it's called when you do it negligently, but it's definitely the case that your negligence has caused somebody harm, whatever you call it.

• On the post: Second California Appeals Court Refuses To Review Police Unions' Challenge Of State Public Records Law

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 26 Mar, 2019 @ 06:06am

  Who actually believes that they haven't shredded or "lost" anything vaguely incriminating by now anyway? They've had a long time to "clean up" at this point...

• On the post: ICE Officers Forging Signatures, Deploying Pre-Signed Warrants To Detain Immigrants

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2019 @ 04:59am

  "Supervisors"???

  Wait a minute.

  So what amounts to a fucking police sergeant is AUTHORIZED to sign (what amounts to) an arrest warrant?

  And they can't even fucking handle that?

• On the post: How To Actually Break Up Big Tech

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 12 Mar, 2019 @ 11:53am

  One more thing: invalidate any ToS that requires the user to use any particular client, not to interact with a service in an automated way, etc. Make aggregators and gateways clearly legal as a matter of public policy.

  That lets the existing systems deflate instead of continuing to run on the momentum of their network effects.

• On the post: United States Gifted With 33rd National Emergency By President Who Says It's Not Really An Emergency

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 20 Feb, 2019 @ 10:29am

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

  I intended to reply to this but ended up posting the reply as a separate top-level comment. Sorry about that.

• On the post: United States Gifted With 33rd National Emergency By President Who Says It's Not Really An Emergency

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 20 Feb, 2019 @ 07:49am

  Re: Re:

  If you have 33 active emergencies, that's proof that the checks you have in place don't work. It doesn't matter WHY they don't work. The point is that they don't work and you need to change the system. It's not like "partisan politics" are some unusual phenomenon that you shouldn't take into account when you design the process.

• On the post: United States Gifted With 33rd National Emergency By President Who Says It's Not Really An Emergency

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 20 Feb, 2019 @ 07:26am

  Re: Re: Re: 9/11 was a national emergency

  No, it was fucking not. It was terrifying to see people acting like panicked sheep. It was horrible to see every moronic fascist legislative proposal that had been in every authoritarian's spank bank be thrown together and passed with no meaningful debate. It was mind-boggling to see people seriously spouting Orwellian language like "USA-PATRIOT act" and "Department of Homeland Security". It was scary to everybody yelling about how "the world had changed", when all that had changed was that reality had made itself hard to ignore for ignorant morons. Fuck "coming together".

• On the post: United States Gifted With 33rd National Emergency By President Who Says It's Not Really An Emergency

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 20 Feb, 2019 @ 07:36am

  So, Trump is worthless, destructive scum. He's an idiot, he's a crook, he's completely amoral, he's entirely self-interested, and he's a chaotic, incompetent loose cannon. I sincerely hope he gets impeached, which he deserves on several sets of independent grounds. And I don't give a fuck what happens to him after that.

  ... but there's a problem with the system that gave him the power to do this. The other 32 "national emergencies" are also bullshit.

  A reasonable "national emergency" power would require each and every emergency to be actively confirmed by Congress within 10 days (MAYBE unless it was physically impossible, as certified by an identified court, to convene Congress). And every emergency would automatically expire if not redeclared and reconfirmed at 30-day intervals.

  I get it that Trump is a dumpster fire, but you don't keep laws like that around waiting for somebody like that to get power. Especially not when those laws have been continuously abused before said scumbag gets the power.

• On the post: EU Moves Forward With Agreement To Fundamentally Change The Internet From Open To Closed

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 14 Feb, 2019 @ 06:46am

  It would be easy to work around that and make it unenforceable... in a truly decentralized system using open protocols with multiple independent implementations. On the other hand, systems structured as feifdoms, like YouTube, Facebook, etc, would be seriously burdened and maybe destroyed.

  So with any luck we'll get a good outcome for all the wrong reasons.

• On the post: New Study Says The Removal Of Craigslist Erotic Services Pages May Be Linked To An Increase In Murdered Females

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 06 Feb, 2019 @ 09:48am

  This is not to suggest government officials and lawmakers pushing laws like FOSTA don't care about people's lives.

  What, you mean as compared to protecting themselves from having to examine their prejudices? Or compared to their need to see demonstrations of respect for Authority(TM), preferably their own?

  No, obviously people's lives aren't remotely as important as those things.

• On the post: Court: Qualified Immunity Protects District Attorney Who Lied To State Legislators About A Wrongfully-Convicted Man

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 01 Feb, 2019 @ 07:30pm

  Re: Re: Car equivalent

  Screw that. If I drive a delivery van for Bob's Flower shop, and I run over a pedestrian, there are ways to come after both Bob and me. And if I rough somebody up in the course of my delivery rounds, you can damn well bet there are ways to come after both of us. Even if I had a good faith belief that interfering with floral delivery was a beating offense. There is zero reason for the cop to have any more protection than I have.

• On the post: Don't Throw Out The First Amendment's Press Protections Just Because You Don't Like President Trump

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 09 Nov, 2018 @ 05:00am

  The basic problem is that US campaign finance law is incompatible with the First Amendment to begin with. The FA doesn't say anything about excepting foreign actors. Of course you're going to end up with a mess when you start trying to find exceptions that aren't there.

  Pretty much every choice made in Buckley was the opposite of what you'd want, but the basic problem was that it's ALL unconstitutional. And it's left us with a system that affects relatively small contributors MORE than large ones. Joe Billionaire can set up a PAC and run a billion ads.

  You might be able to convince me that the FA should exempt corporate speech and ANYTHING delivered via advertising, or maybe distinguish between speech and the financing of speech. But that would be hard to write, and it doesn't say that now.

  ... and if the US is going to try to run the world, I don't see why I should be protected from foreign opinions.

• On the post: Another Terrible Court Decision In Europe: Insulting A Religion Is Not Free Speech

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 26 Oct, 2018 @ 04:44pm

  "Ignorant", "silly", "misleading"

  I know it's inconvenient and all, but there is zero historical dispute here.

  The concept of "pedophiles" is a modern one, so let's deal with the factual assertion. The factual assertion is that Muhammad first had sex with his wife, Aisha, when she was about nine years old (and he was somewhere north of 50).

  The first thing to notice is that whether some guy had sex with a nine year old girl 1000 years ago is a lot less relevant to the assessment of Islam as a religion than is the undisputed fact that pretty much everbody in Islam accepted for centuries that their prophet did so The Islamic establishment based all kinds of its rules about what was acceptable on that belief, and in some places still does so.

  It was treated as a simple, unremarkable truth in the Islamic world until it started to look like bad PR. Nobody suggested that Aisha was much older than nine until the 20th century. For that matter, nobody in the Christian world thought the question was all that important until the 19th or 20th century... because frankly it wasn't that big a deal to them, either.

  The distinctly secondary thing is that although you're right that nobody can ever be absolutely sure about what happened 1000 years ago, the evidence on this one is pretty strong.

  It turns out that, because Muhammad was both a powerful ruler and a powerful religious figure, and because he founded an empire that lasted for centuries in one form or another, there are some pretty detailed records about him and those around him. Aisha is a revered figure and people recorded every scrap they could get of anything about her, including much of what she personally said or wrote.

  She said he had sex with her when she was nine, according to a lot of sources many of which seem to be independent of one another.

  Now that revisionism has kicked in, some people claim that by "nine", she meant "nineteen", and that that was a common way of expressing numbers at the time in cases where the real number was obvious. The biggest problem with that, beyond the lack of much evidence of any such convention to begin with, is that the number nineteen wouldn't have been obvious. Marrying and having sex with a nine year old wasn't unusual at the time (as shown by the fact that the many reports about it both from near the time and for centuries afterwards don't treat it as a big deal). If she wanted it to be known that she was nineteen, she'd have had to say "nineteen".

  ... yet nobody disputes that she was an intelligent and erudite woman who was very gifted at making her thoughts understood.

  Then there are people who bring up the point that people in those times didn't keep much in the way of records and weren't very meticulous about numbers. This is of course both true and idiotic.

  Maybe Aisha wasn't sure whether she was nine or ten or eleven (or seven or eight), but she surely knew the difference between a nine year old and a nineteen year old. Even if she considered it COMPLETELY ACCEPTABLE to have sex with a nine year old (which she probably did), she would have known that the difference was biographically interesting and included it in her account. And if she didn't think it was acceptable, then she'd have had even more reason to be clear about the matter.

  That argument is particularly amusing because some of those same people are eager to claim that although Aisha and her biographers weren't very meticulous about her age, a couple of third parties were absolutely meticulous about both her sister's age and their relative ages. That lets them use those minor sources to do "exact" calculations to get an older age for Aisha (they manage to get her into her teens somewhere; still pretty damned young by modern standards).

  One of the "exact" facts they rely on, by the way, is an account that Aisha's sister Asma had all her teeth and all her faculties when she died at the nice round age of 100, and another was that Asma was a nice round ten years older than Aisha.

  But, hey, those were exact numbers and are not to be challenged, whereas Aisha was just kind of vaguely rounding off to nine and should be ignored.

  Sorry, no. The non-ignorant, non-misleading fact is that the historical Muhammad very probably had sex with a little girl. And, regardless of what that historical guy may have done, the mythic version of Muhammad that Muslims have been revering for centuries definitely had sex with a little girl, and they've only recently found any problem at all with accepting that.

• On the post: California Eyes Questionable Legislation In Bid To Fix The Internet Of Broken Things

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 13 Sep, 2018 @ 02:53pm

  Sure, legislation is the answer

  Just not THAT legislation.
  
  How about "you are 100 percent liable for all damage to your customer or ANY THIRD PARTY caused by any deliberately induced unintentional or undisclosed behavior of your product"?

• On the post: TSA Decides The Path To Flight Safety Runs Through A Passenger's Prosthetic Leg

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 11 Sep, 2018 @ 10:58am

  If you're going to search everything that could be a bomb, then you do indeed have to search a prosthetic leg. There's a lot of dead space in there that could be used for explosives. A person with a prosthetic is as likely to be carrying a bomb as anybody else, and if that person happens to want to carry one, then anyplace that's guaranteed to be unsearched is an obvious place to put it.
  
  The mistake is in thinking that it does any good to search everything that could be a bomb in the first place. The whole exercise is pointless.

• On the post: DHS Continues Facial Recognition Deployment With An Eye On Expanding Program To All Domestic Travelers

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 06 Sep, 2018 @ 08:23am

  Facial recognition isn't the problem

  The problem isn't that they're collecting faces. They already HAVE faces, because they put them into databases when they issue IDs. There's no reason they shouldn't just delete the airport photos, because they already have better ones.
  
  The problem is that they're collecting a total travel history on everybody. And that's not new; they've been doing it ever since they got a blank check in 2001. This makes it more efficient, but if they can't do facial recognition they'll just continue to do exactly the same thing the old fashioned way.
  
  Worrying about facial recognition is a distraction from trying to roll back the massive abuse that's already there.

• On the post: Fifth Circuit Says No, You Fucking May Not Strip Search A Classful Of Female Students To Find $50

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 03 Jul, 2018 @ 07:47am

  No one was looking for weapons or even illegal drugs.

  And that would have made it OK?

  You know it wouldn't. So stop fueling the knee-jerk panics out there by writing as if it would.

• On the post: Voodoo Brewery Changes Beer Name By Dipping It In Snark In Response To Pitt Trademark C&D

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 30 Jun, 2018 @ 05:16am

  Re: Pitt

  Maybe the school doesn't want to be associated with drunks, since they tend to be kind of a problem on a college campus.
  
  I looked at the original artwork, and it could absolutely lead you to believe the school endorsed the beer. Licensing the trademark WOULD be endorsing the beer.
  
  This is a case where the school was totally in the right from a common sense point of view. I'm not sure about the legalities.

• On the post: Court Says Probation Violations By Teen Don't Justify On-Demand Warrantless Searches Of His Electronics

  

  sokpuppette ( profile ), 21 Jun, 2018 @ 06:32am

  The incident leading to the search began when the student fell asleep during class, which is possibly one of the most ordinary things a student can do. The student admitted he had smoked marijuana the night before (also possibly one of the most normal things a high school student can do), but hadn't smoked any that day or on school property. He was asked to consent to a search and he volunteered he had a knife in his possession. The search uncovered the rest of the "contraband." The 15-year-old was then arrested, detained, and placed on home detention.

  Had that been the end of it, there would have been nothing to write about.

  Nothing to write about.

  Kid falls asleep and that "justifies" the Third Degree. That's something to write about.

  Kid stupidly admits smoking the DKW the night before, and for some reason that justifies searching him now. That's something to write about.

  A search uncovers the following items:

  • A pocket knife. A mundane object that everybody should carry all the time, but has been banned from schools by worthless panicky morons.

  • A lighter. Another mundane object.

  • Rolling papers. An item with some connection to the use of a drug that the government has no legitimate authority to outlaw... and also usable, albeit admittedly not legally by the kid, with a much more dangerous drug that the government for some reason does not outlaw.

  Laws based in psychotic paranoid delusions and monkey-brain lust for punishment make possession of these mundane and/or non-illegal items an arrestable offense that gets you on probation to begin with. That's something to write about.

  All of those are part of the same pattern of moronic tyrranical bullshit as the idiotic and unreasonable release condition. If you don't see the connection, you're not looking very hard.

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