Isn't this a problem common to anything where your work is stored on remote servers you don't control? Whether it be games or email or a web site or documents you've written, if the servers are turned off the work goes away whether you want it to or not. GMail, Google Docs, Dropbox, Adobe's cloud storage for images/documents, any web host's web-based site creator/editor, the DNS name records for your domains stored in your DNS hosting company's database, all of it is vulnerable to this same thing with consequences that can range from highly annoying to utterly catastrophic. Depending on their backup system doesn't help, it's going away when the servers do. You have to have your own backups or copies of everything stored locally to be able to recover.
I think we need to pound into people's heads that this is the way things work and that the only options you have are:
Have your own local copies or backups that you can use to recover your work and restore it elsewhere.
Pay for the service and have an iron-clad, air-tight contract with the service provider making them liable for all costs associated with recreating the lost work plus ruinous damages plus any and all costs you might incur if you have to sue them over any loss. Liabilities high enough and certain enough that it'll be far cheaper for them to move heaven and earth to restore your content for you and that their lawyers won't even suggest doing otherwise.
If you find a company willing to give you #2, let us all know.
I think the problem facing us is that fingerprints have a long history as an identifier, but up until the advent of biometric authentication (eg. unlocking a phone with a fingerprint) they didn't establish ownership of whatever they appeared on. That took additional work by the police to establish, eg. that not only were the defendant's fingerprints on the murder weapon but that either there were no other (even unidentifiable) fingerprints on it or nobody but the defendant could have had access to the murder weapon at the time of the crime. Biometric authentication changes this. Since only the owner of the phone could have set it to unlock using the fingerprint in question, the mere fact that the phone unlocks when presented with the suspect's fingerprint establishes that the suspect owns the phone and the information residing on it and it establishes that the suspect placed the information there (since you'd need the phone unlocked to put anything on it and only the suspect could have unlocked it). Moreover, the police couldn't have shown those things based on any other source since all other methods of identifying the phone don't establish that the suspect had access to it when the data was placed on it (even if you establish that the IMEI and IMSI belong to the suspect's account, he could have lost or damaged the phone before that and you can't prove otherwise just from that).
I'm afraid the only way to attack the forced production of fingerprints is going to be to find an example of physical objects whose mere possession is taken as identifying the suspect as the owner of whatever they open and that the courts have ruled the suspect can't be compelled to produce.
Thing is, what would you bill them for if they aren't linking to the news sites? It's the "use" of the site's content that's the basis for demanding payment, you can't demand someone pay for not "using" your stuff.
Save that that charge would have to be made by the plaintiffs in these cases, which they won't because they've been convinced by these law firms that their cases could win if the courts would just stop rejecting them. The courts likewise are unwilling to take independent action against these law firms absent complaints from their clients the plaintiffs.
So what? Nothing we can say will shift them, so why pander to them? And if they pull that insurrection crap again, treat them with the same attitude police demonstrated with Savannah Graziano.
It'd be fun to add in a change to the language saying that if an ISP indicates an area is "served" and after that time documentation can be produced that an address in that area was refused service because that address is not served, the ISP has committed fraud and the area is deemed "not served" by them.
The big lock-in with GMail (and email in general) is that your address isn't portable. Changing your email address is a lot of effort telling other people what the new address is and updating web sites and such, the only saving grace is that you can usually set up forwarding from the old address to the new so you don't have to worry about missing mail until you completely close the old account. But with the domain in your address being theirs you can't really move it to another service and using your own domain involves paying for business services like Workspace.
I'm not sure what the state of low-cost mail hosting or turnkey personal solutions (SMTP + POP3/IMAP + webmail) is these days.
I think the Justices are all too aware that if they support the states in this one it won't take long at all for the Biden administration to start cracking down on red states' attempts to convince social media sites to favor conservative content.
The limitations sound like a pretty reasonable "you can use this if you file a bog-standard 1040EZ or 1040A without anything fancy on it". The only one that stands out to me is the one about the HealthCare.gov marketplace, the rest are all cases where you'll need to file additional forms.
They'll do it while they're over there gambling at the casinos and visiting the (legal) brothels. The Mormon Church membership pretty much keeps the eastern half of Nevada in business.
Sounds like a reasonable decision. At this point all claims have to be read in the light most favorable to Snap when deciding whether to grant the USPTO's motion. It isn't impossible that a jury might believe Snap's claims, so the judge pretty much has to deny the motion and let it go to trial. Snap's not going to win, but the question of whether "spectacles" is more recognizable as a Snap brand or a generic synonym for glasses is a question of fact not law.
It's not just in the IoT space, every type of product suffers from a large number of randomly-named brands reselling the exact same low-quality product from the same Asian OEM. Sometimes they don't even differ in the printing on the case. For the most part anywhere you go to buy on-line these "brands" are promoted to the top of the list and you have to filter by brand name to even find the reputable ones. It's gotten to the point where I've abandoned Amazon as a source and only buy directly from a known brand's web site (or their Amazon store if their site directs me to it and even then I'm careful about the exact product being ordered and who's shipping it).
It's an oversimplification, but not much of one. There's a saying in business: "If it's not in writing, it didn't happen.". That reflects the difficulty in proving that an unwritten contract exists and what it's exact terms are. Businessmen with any experience at all know that, so they're careful to make sure any agreements/contracts are in writing with everything spelled out and signatures on it. That removes the problems revolving around the parties arguing over what the contract actually said. The fact that any experienced businessman will get it in writing is why the courts are so reluctant to get into the question of unwritten agreements: the mere fact that there's nothing in writing almost always means at least one party didn't intend to agree to the deal (or at least will state that in court) and the other party is almost never going to be able to produce solid evidence to the contrary.
So, unwritten agreements are pretty much worth the paper they're printed on.
They don't want to come out and say they want to downplay any content that'd cause any controversy. They want nice bland white-bread content that'll attract eyeballs without upsetting any of the advertisers.
Worse for Kramer is that he was working for another Democratic candidate at the time. I'm sure the FTC and FCC won't mind at all a nice high-profile case demonstrating that they'll crack down on attempts to illegally influence the vote no matter which party is doing it. That'll be a nice counter to GOP attempts to paint them as partisan.
That's because you're interested in running your website. The brunchlords aren't. To them any company is just a paycheck, and if it runs out they'll just go down the street to the next one. It's all the same to them, they're just the guy who was hired to run the place.
I'd note that newspapers do have the right to refuse to accept an advertisement they don't want to carry. It's not unlimited (anti-discrimination laws and such) but if they don't want to do business with the American Nazi Party then there's not much the ANP can do to force them to carry their advertisements.
That won't make any difference though. There's too many well-reasoned rulings from too many courts that social media sites are not public spaces by default and it'd take a deliberate action by the federal government to make them such.
Isn't this a problem common to anything where your work is stored on remote servers you don't control? Whether it be games or email or a web site or documents you've written, if the servers are turned off the work goes away whether you want it to or not. GMail, Google Docs, Dropbox, Adobe's cloud storage for images/documents, any web host's web-based site creator/editor, the DNS name records for your domains stored in your DNS hosting company's database, all of it is vulnerable to this same thing with consequences that can range from highly annoying to utterly catastrophic. Depending on their backup system doesn't help, it's going away when the servers do. You have to have your own backups or copies of everything stored locally to be able to recover. I think we need to pound into people's heads that this is the way things work and that the only options you have are:
- Have your own local copies or backups that you can use to recover your work and restore it elsewhere.
- Pay for the service and have an iron-clad, air-tight contract with the service provider making them liable for all costs associated with recreating the lost work plus ruinous damages plus any and all costs you might incur if you have to sue them over any loss. Liabilities high enough and certain enough that it'll be far cheaper for them to move heaven and earth to restore your content for you and that their lawyers won't even suggest doing otherwise.
If you find a company willing to give you #2, let us all know.I think the problem facing us is that fingerprints have a long history as an identifier, but up until the advent of biometric authentication (eg. unlocking a phone with a fingerprint) they didn't establish ownership of whatever they appeared on. That took additional work by the police to establish, eg. that not only were the defendant's fingerprints on the murder weapon but that either there were no other (even unidentifiable) fingerprints on it or nobody but the defendant could have had access to the murder weapon at the time of the crime. Biometric authentication changes this. Since only the owner of the phone could have set it to unlock using the fingerprint in question, the mere fact that the phone unlocks when presented with the suspect's fingerprint establishes that the suspect owns the phone and the information residing on it and it establishes that the suspect placed the information there (since you'd need the phone unlocked to put anything on it and only the suspect could have unlocked it). Moreover, the police couldn't have shown those things based on any other source since all other methods of identifying the phone don't establish that the suspect had access to it when the data was placed on it (even if you establish that the IMEI and IMSI belong to the suspect's account, he could have lost or damaged the phone before that and you can't prove otherwise just from that). I'm afraid the only way to attack the forced production of fingerprints is going to be to find an example of physical objects whose mere possession is taken as identifying the suspect as the owner of whatever they open and that the courts have ruled the suspect can't be compelled to produce.
Thing is, what would you bill them for if they aren't linking to the news sites? It's the "use" of the site's content that's the basis for demanding payment, you can't demand someone pay for not "using" your stuff.
"It's immoral to let a sucker keep his money." -- Canada Bill Jones
Save that that charge would have to be made by the plaintiffs in these cases, which they won't because they've been convinced by these law firms that their cases could win if the courts would just stop rejecting them. The courts likewise are unwilling to take independent action against these law firms absent complaints from their clients the plaintiffs.
So what? Nothing we can say will shift them, so why pander to them? And if they pull that insurrection crap again, treat them with the same attitude police demonstrated with Savannah Graziano.
It'd be fun to add in a change to the language saying that if an ISP indicates an area is "served" and after that time documentation can be produced that an address in that area was refused service because that address is not served, the ISP has committed fraud and the area is deemed "not served" by them.
The big lock-in with GMail (and email in general) is that your address isn't portable. Changing your email address is a lot of effort telling other people what the new address is and updating web sites and such, the only saving grace is that you can usually set up forwarding from the old address to the new so you don't have to worry about missing mail until you completely close the old account. But with the domain in your address being theirs you can't really move it to another service and using your own domain involves paying for business services like Workspace. I'm not sure what the state of low-cost mail hosting or turnkey personal solutions (SMTP + POP3/IMAP + webmail) is these days.
I think my response is "OK Mr. Padilla, you go first.".
I hope the "goons" end up in general population with no special protection.
I think the Justices are all too aware that if they support the states in this one it won't take long at all for the Biden administration to start cracking down on red states' attempts to convince social media sites to favor conservative content.
The limitations sound like a pretty reasonable "you can use this if you file a bog-standard 1040EZ or 1040A without anything fancy on it". The only one that stands out to me is the one about the HealthCare.gov marketplace, the rest are all cases where you'll need to file additional forms.
They'll do it while they're over there gambling at the casinos and visiting the (legal) brothels. The Mormon Church membership pretty much keeps the eastern half of Nevada in business.
Sounds like a reasonable decision. At this point all claims have to be read in the light most favorable to Snap when deciding whether to grant the USPTO's motion. It isn't impossible that a jury might believe Snap's claims, so the judge pretty much has to deny the motion and let it go to trial. Snap's not going to win, but the question of whether "spectacles" is more recognizable as a Snap brand or a generic synonym for glasses is a question of fact not law.
It's not just in the IoT space, every type of product suffers from a large number of randomly-named brands reselling the exact same low-quality product from the same Asian OEM. Sometimes they don't even differ in the printing on the case. For the most part anywhere you go to buy on-line these "brands" are promoted to the top of the list and you have to filter by brand name to even find the reputable ones. It's gotten to the point where I've abandoned Amazon as a source and only buy directly from a known brand's web site (or their Amazon store if their site directs me to it and even then I'm careful about the exact product being ordered and who's shipping it).
It's an oversimplification, but not much of one. There's a saying in business: "If it's not in writing, it didn't happen.". That reflects the difficulty in proving that an unwritten contract exists and what it's exact terms are. Businessmen with any experience at all know that, so they're careful to make sure any agreements/contracts are in writing with everything spelled out and signatures on it. That removes the problems revolving around the parties arguing over what the contract actually said. The fact that any experienced businessman will get it in writing is why the courts are so reluctant to get into the question of unwritten agreements: the mere fact that there's nothing in writing almost always means at least one party didn't intend to agree to the deal (or at least will state that in court) and the other party is almost never going to be able to produce solid evidence to the contrary. So, unwritten agreements are pretty much worth the paper they're printed on.
They don't want to come out and say they want to downplay any content that'd cause any controversy. They want nice bland white-bread content that'll attract eyeballs without upsetting any of the advertisers.
Worse for Kramer is that he was working for another Democratic candidate at the time. I'm sure the FTC and FCC won't mind at all a nice high-profile case demonstrating that they'll crack down on attempts to illegally influence the vote no matter which party is doing it. That'll be a nice counter to GOP attempts to paint them as partisan.
That's because you're interested in running your website. The brunchlords aren't. To them any company is just a paycheck, and if it runs out they'll just go down the street to the next one. It's all the same to them, they're just the guy who was hired to run the place.
Newspaper ads aren't open-access
I'd note that newspapers do have the right to refuse to accept an advertisement they don't want to carry. It's not unlimited (anti-discrimination laws and such) but if they don't want to do business with the American Nazi Party then there's not much the ANP can do to force them to carry their advertisements. That won't make any difference though. There's too many well-reasoned rulings from too many courts that social media sites are not public spaces by default and it'd take a deliberate action by the federal government to make them such.