Zipheir 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: New Copyright Trolling Operation Lowers The Settlement Demands And Calls Them Fines To Improve Conversion Rate

    Zipheir ( profile ), 17 Oct, 2017 @ 09:30pm

    Fines vs. settlements

    I’d imagine most people think of a “fine” as something they’re required (by a government or other authority) to pay as a form of punishment, whereas a settlement suggests a negotiated, voluntary agreement between parties. By replacing the latter term with the former, these letters suggest that the recipient has already been tried and found guilty.

    I’m sure this choice of language was completely accidental…

  • On the post: Emails Show ICE Couldn't Find Enough Dangerous Immigrants To Fulfill The Adminstration's Fantasies

    Zipheir ( profile ), 13 Oct, 2017 @ 10:40am

    Re: Re: Confirm our fantasy!

    To paraphrase a Techdirt mantra: “Growing cultures innovate. Declining cultures legislate.”

    Any country that would prefer to get rid of immigrants regardless of whether “they are violent or not, … if they help the country or not" is clearly on a declining path. Laws that require a country to deport citizens who (clearly!) want very much to be here should be changed.

  • On the post: Trump May Not Be Serious About His NBC Threats… But He May Have Violated The First Amendment

    Zipheir ( profile ), 13 Oct, 2017 @ 02:16pm

    (I mean this purely in the context of Mike’s article above—threats that attemps to silence critics make on Twitter are real attempts to censor—and certainly do not mean that criminalizing speech on social media or anywhere else is a good thing.)

  • On the post: Trump May Not Be Serious About His NBC Threats… But He May Have Violated The First Amendment

    Zipheir ( profile ), 13 Oct, 2017 @ 02:11pm

    Twitter threats

    This situation shows how important it is that the validity of Trump’s Twitter statements be legally established. Threats like these might already have resulted in legal or congressional action had they been made in person, but seem to get brushed aside because “it’s just social media”.

    If a joke made on Twitter can be a crime for an “ordinary” citizen, perhaps it’s time that political elites be held to the same standard.

  • On the post: Emails Show ICE Couldn't Find Enough Dangerous Immigrants To Fulfill The Adminstration's Fantasies

    Zipheir ( profile ), 12 Oct, 2017 @ 05:14pm

    Re: Confirm our fantasy!

    Ech, sorry for typos. par. 1: “…the authors of some unfortunate comments on this page.” Last line: “cause of all our crime.”

  • On the post: Emails Show ICE Couldn't Find Enough Dangerous Immigrants To Fulfill The Adminstration's Fantasies

    Zipheir ( profile ), 12 Oct, 2017 @ 04:05pm

    Confirm our fantasy!

    The ridiculous argument “illegal immigrants have broken the law, therefore they are criminals, therefore they are dangerous” seems to have supporters among the authors of some unfortunate on this page. If a government states that “any person caught north of n° North latitude will be considered a criminal”, that decision may carry legal weight. But, as Tim’s article indicates, it has little bearing on whether that person is more or less likely to hurt others.

    Hundreds of arrests were made, but many involved people with no prior criminal record. In the remaining arrests, most of the priors found were minor violations, with the worst being drunk driving.

    In other words, basically what you’d expect from arresting a sample of humans of arbitrary immigration status anywhere on the planet. But people who apparently live in a simple, self-flattering universe need to transform this into some sort of grave danger.

    "The US will be a glorious place as soon as we get rid of those violent illegal immigrants causing all of our crime!

    ...

    (Now let’s go fabricate data showing illegal immigrants are the cause all of our crime.)"

  • On the post: Members Of Congress: Court Was Wrong To Say That Posting The Law Is Copyright Infringement

    Zipheir ( profile ), 06 Oct, 2017 @ 12:27am

    Re: Re: By that logic...

    Anonymous Anonymous,

    Apparently I should have used <irony> tags. :-) I was making what I thought was a pretty transparent reference to a certain very successful user-created encyclopedia, i.e., the kind of thing SirWired seems to think no-one in their right would ever make.

  • On the post: Members Of Congress: Court Was Wrong To Say That Posting The Law Is Copyright Infringement

    Zipheir ( profile ), 05 Oct, 2017 @ 06:28pm

    By that logic...

    but who is going to step up? Because as soon as one government pays, any other government would be able to copy those standards for free. Nobody wants to feel like a chump.
    We should all cheer Elsevier’s efforts to create a paywalled Web-based encyclopedia. Who else is going to step up? What chumps would undertake a massive project when their work could just be copied without royalty?

  • On the post: EU Buried Its Own $400,000 Study Showing Unauthorized Downloads Have Almost No Effect On Sales

    Zipheir ( profile ), 21 Sep, 2017 @ 09:58am

    Re: Yes, people would watch more movies if cheaper and better.

    This study shows exactly what anyone reasonable expects: piracy reduces sales.
    Except where it doesn’t:
    the estimated effect of illegal online transactions on sales is positive—implying that illegal consumption leads to increased legal consumption. This positive effect of illegal downloads and streams on the sales of games may be explained by the industry being successful in converting illegal users to paying users.
    Did you read those and only those the parts of this post that confirm your assumptions?

  • On the post: Shockingly, NY Times Columnist Is Totally Clueless About The Internet

    Zipheir ( profile ), 19 Sep, 2017 @ 09:48pm

    Re: Re: Re:

    aka 1995
    In 1995 the Web was “read-only” for technological, not political reasons.

  • On the post: Shockingly, NY Times Columnist Is Totally Clueless About The Internet

    Zipheir ( profile ), 19 Sep, 2017 @ 12:35pm

    Re:

    Among other things, SESTA would probably accelerate the death of the comment section. Smaller internet organization would likely find it safer to outsource discussion to a social media service with a legal budget, and Serious Business platforms like NYT would have a good excuse to kill off public commentary.

    The read-only Web beckons.

  • On the post: Al Jazeera Gives A 'Voice To The Voiceless' By Killing News Comments

    Zipheir ( profile ), 02 Sep, 2017 @ 10:26am

    Downgrading commentary

    That these sites are rushing to push their comment sections to social media makes another argument: they’d rather have fans than commentators.

    As Karl correctly notes, “join the conversation on Twitter” is basically an invitation to have your thoughts lost in a sheer mass of noise. While this may be a poor way to give a voice to anyone, it does allow Al Jazeera to brag about their growing number of followers and to cherry-pick some inane praise out of the heap.

    Placing a comment section on the same page with your content is a commitment to take your reader’s commentary seriously. Relegating it to social media, at this point, demonstrates nothing but contempt.

  • On the post: Moving On From Obviously Fake News To Plausibly Fake News Sites

    Zipheir ( profile ), 21 Aug, 2017 @ 03:09pm

    Re: The Joy of Unicode

    A boon and a gift to spammers and scammers and baddies of all description.

    And to the very large number of Internet users who do not speak English.

    Any character set can be used maliciously (consider similar ASCII characters like ‘1’ and ‘l’). Blaming this kind of spoofing on Unicode and the need to support non-Latin alphabets sounds a lot like linguistic chauvinism.

  • On the post: State Dept. Enlists Hollywood And Its Friends To Start A Fake Twitter Fight Over Intellectual Property

    Zipheir ( profile ), 05 Jul, 2017 @ 11:12am

    Source?

    A source link would be helpful. As it stands, this letter is _almost_ to absurd to be believed.

  • On the post: Strong Crypto Is Not The Problem: Manchester And London Attackers Were Known To The Authorities

    Zipheir ( profile ), 08 Jun, 2017 @ 10:42am

    Re: Job not done, but we're not done yet

    Thank you for this excellent commentary, Anonymous Anonymous Coward.

  • On the post: Appeals Court Revives Wikimedia's Lawsuit Against The NSA

    Zipheir ( profile ), 24 May, 2017 @ 06:48am

    Defining “dragnet”

    Plaintiffs have plausibly alleged that the NSA surveils most backbone links…

    The court agrees that Wikimedia is likely to have been surveilled—as the post notes—due to the sheer volume of Wikimedia traffic. This admits implicitly that NSA performed/performs mass data collection, as any Internet service of similar scale could make the same claim.

    But the court performs the following dance to avoid an uncomfortable term:

    In the Dragnet Allegation, Plaintiffs must plausibly establish that the NSA is intercepting “substantially all” text-based communications entering and leaving the United States, whereas it’s sufficient for purposes of the Wikimedia Allegation to show that the NSA is conducting Upstream surveillance on a single backbone link.

    As the dissent seems to notice, this is splitting a hair very finely. The providers of a service successfully argue that it has been snooped on the basis of traffic volume alone, and the court admits that the NSA surveils “most” backbones. Either the judge has a poor understanding of the volume of data that can be collected from a backbone, or he/she has an unusual definition of “dragnet”.