TKnarr 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (871)

• On the post: Section 230 Didn’t Fail Rand Paul. He Just Doesn’t Like the Remedy That Worked.

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 22 Jan, 2026 @ 08:33pm

  If a company is choosing not to moderate, it’s not unreasonable to point out that part isn’t being delivered on as originally claimed.

  230 never promised to get companies to moderate. It promised to give them incentives to moderate by removing the threat of ruinous liability for any imperfection in moderation (see Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.). It's the 1st Amendment that prevents forcing companies to moderate their platforms, no law can get around that.

  Even if his is a bad solution, I do think you need to actually grapple with why he doesn’t think that’s an answer.

  We actually can. There's a long-standing understanding that there are damages that the law simply can't provide a remedy for. People like Rand Paul are rarely on the receiving end of that, but just ask anyone who's had their house trashed by mistake by the cops how much help the law is in getting more than a small fraction of the damage paid for. Or anyone who's had their name smeared in the press over bogus criminal charges and then been told after the charges get dismissed because there's absolutely no evidence supporting them that they can't sue the press for reporting what the cops said and not saying a word about the dismissal.

• On the post: The Measles Outbreak In South Carolina Is Spiraling Out Of Control

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 22 Jan, 2026 @ 09:41am

  I think the phrasing should be "America is broken. Lots of people are trying to repair it, but are stymied by a small group of multi-billionaires and folks who think germ theory is a hoax, miasmas cause all diseases from cancer to the common cold and that if you exercise and eat right you'll never get hurt in an accident.". Ideally with a collection of videos showing RFK Jr. saying exactly those things in public, to help embarrass those who try to claim you're exaggerating.

• On the post: Abolish ICE Before They Kill Again, Impeach Trump & Noem Before They Incite More Murder

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 08 Jan, 2026 @ 06:13pm

  At this point, as an old white cishet guy, I'm assuming that as soon as I see a Federal agent I'm in immediate danger of being fired upon by them. I'm also keeping a copy of the Seattle PD press release confirming case of armed criminals impersonating Federal agents.

• On the post: Trump’s Drone Ban Is Corrupt, Protectionist Nonsense Dressed Up As A National Security Fix

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 31 Dec, 2025 @ 08:56am

  And I'd note that, while all this hand-wringing about DJI drones has been going on, the Chinese government has had people working as contractors for the DoD with legitimate access to classified information. https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts-pentagon-defense-department-china-hackers I think DJI drones are the least of their worries, if they're actually worried about national security.

• On the post: Mike Pence Calls For RFK Jr.’s Ouster…But Not For The Reasons You Would Think

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 17 Dec, 2025 @ 03:48am

  With the list of side-effects, it's not the length that matters so much as the severity and likelihood of them. The ones for mifepristone don't look especially scary to me, especially given what it's being prescribed for. Acetaminophen has a much more alarming safety profile yet is much more commonly used and is available in dangerously high doses in most grocery stores. Even using it according to the directions for extended periods results in liver damage, and it doesn't take much over the maximum recommended dose to cause immediate liver damage. Ibuprofen has a much longer and more alarming list of side-effects, yet again is available in most grocery stores at near the maximum safe dose. Pence's "concern" has nothing to do with safety, or he'd be pushing for the majority of current OTC drugs to be reviewed first. And frankly many of them we use routinely wouldn't pass review under today's standards for safety.

• On the post: Age Verification, Estimation, Assurance, Oh My! A Guide To The Terminology

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 24 Nov, 2025 @ 08:03pm

  I think they do care about the collateral damage. The collateral damage is the whole reason they're pushing this and they care about maximizing it to force content they don't like to go away.

• On the post: Why People Don’t Demand Data Privacy, Even As Governments & Corporations Collect More Personal Info

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 22 Nov, 2025 @ 09:43am

  A lot of it's that people don't have any way of enforcing that demand. In almost every case it's a matter of Hobson's Choice: let them collect everything and do anything they want with it, or do without their product or service completely (which in many cases isn't feasible or, when dealing with the government, legal). Suing over misuse isn't feasible either. The individual damages are trivial compared to the cost of winning the suit and you can't collect costs and fees in such cases, and class-action suits yield similar trivial "compensation" and the penalties are tiny compared to the benefits and are just treated as a cost of doing business. Changing this is going to require reversing the law's viewpoint entirely, making the baseline "You can't collect any private data ever for any reason." and requiring entities to show they absolutely can't provide their product or service in any form, by any method, without collecting specific data and then prohibiting any use of the data collected for any purpose other than just what it was collected for. That'll be a hard fight against every lobbyist in existence.

• On the post: Judge Orders OpenAI To Give Lawyers 20 Million Private Chats, Thinks ‘Anonymization’ Can Keep Them Private

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 13 Nov, 2025 @ 05:21pm

  I can't help but consider this fiasco a good thing, though. It makes utterly clear the problems inherent in the third-party doctrine. Having people's noses rubbed in it might just motivate enough outrage to get that doctrine revisited and replaced with one that recognizes that people do retain an expectation of privacy in records they give to third parties no matter how inconvenient the government might find that.

• On the post: Fox News Desperately Tries To Repair The Broken Simulation

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 07 Nov, 2025 @ 09:44pm

  This is why the saying goes "won the battle, lost the war". And when applied to the Democrats winning, it has to be applied in the context of the entire conflict. It's not just that Democrats won this battle, it's that Republicans won the previous one. They got their Congress. They got their President. They got their Supreme Court who handed them their win in overturning Roe v. Wade. And those wins lost them the war. When the GOP tries to frame things in terms of only this particular moment, when it ignores the events that led to it, it just hurts the GOP more. Now we just need to keep it up. Turn taking the beachhead in Normandy into the race to Berlin.

• On the post: When AI And Secure Chat Meet, Users Deserve Strong Controls Over How They Interact

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 01 Nov, 2025 @ 08:37pm

  If a third party (person, app, cloud service, whatever) has access to the contents of a secure chat, that chat is not secure.

• On the post: Are Web Browsers With Integrated Chatbots A Paradigm Shift – Or Just Privacy And Security Disasters Waiting To Happen?

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 27 Oct, 2025 @ 05:37pm

  I think they're not going to be widely adopted. There may be a fad for them, but people use web browsers to a) find information and b) access services. GenAI fails miserably at the former, not being designed to provide information. As for the latter, I think it's going to run up against the services' need to control the user experience to maximize the service's revenue. The chatbot would be another middleman sitting between the service and it's users, and the services are well aware of what happens when you permit that because that's their business model. Integrating genAI into the services themselves isn't going to work either, just because of the sheer cost of the compute resources needed for the chatbots. When it's the owners of the chatbots footing the bill to try and build market share, that's one thing. When those owners are trying to sell a service to other services, they're going to want to get paid for all that compute cost and every penny of that will come out of the pockets of the services using the chatbots. Those services aren't going to like that one bit. I think genAI as it's being proposed isn't a solution in search of a problem, it's a problem desperately searching for a bigger problem it can help address and not finding any.

• On the post: Sequoia’s Choice

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 24 Oct, 2025 @ 02:48am

  Correction: replace trailing period with ", or if it wasn't legal and would make them more money than the fines/lawsuits would cost."

• On the post: DOJ Prosecutor Lindsey Halligan Berates Journalist Via Signal, Tries To Claim Whole Thing Is ‘Off The Record’

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 23 Oct, 2025 @ 08:09pm

  It was never a part of Signal's protocol. Sure you can flag a message so that it's deleted from Signal's record of what you said. But nothing in the protocol or the app prevents the recipient from preserving what you said somewhere else (screen capture being the obvious method, but there's others). The only things that are truly off-the-record are things you never tell anyone else ever.

• On the post: Elon Musk Discovers What Hierarchy Actually Means

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 23 Oct, 2025 @ 12:33am

  Musk's finding out the truth of the adage "There's always a bigger fish.". King Louis XVI found that out in 1973. Robespierre in turn found out in 1794. In both cases, the "bigger fish" turned out to be the public at large who got fed up with the abuses and lent their support to overthrowing the leaders in favor of ones who promised more fairness. "No Kings" should come as a warning to Trump and the MAGA faction that public support is not with them and that vowing that reform will come "over our dead bodies" invites the response "Right then, guillotines it is.". If we're lucky it'll be figurative ones rather than literal, but see Louis XVI.

• On the post: Prop 50, The Better Of Two Bad Choices

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 16 Oct, 2025 @ 08:29pm

  This. I phrase it this way: "The rules are the ones the other side chooses to play by themselves. And it is absolutely fair to play by the rules just as hard as the rules will allow. Anyone who claims otherwise is trying to rig the game against you."

• On the post: Against The New Feudalism Of Algorithms And Oligarchs

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 16 Oct, 2025 @ 08:23pm

  I think it's a little more than just that. Even Bannon recognizes that, as bad as Nazis might be, they at least want the nation to continue to exist long-term so they can rule it. The techbros consider nations to be things that can be discarded once they've been drained of all value while the techbros move on to the next target, just like they and their private-equity compatriots do with companies currently.

• On the post: Appeals Court Subtly Lets The Trump Administration Know It’s Just Being Racist By Demanding An End To Birthright Citizenship

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 10 Oct, 2025 @ 10:30pm

  Yeah. Typo.

• On the post: Appeals Court Subtly Lets The Trump Administration Know It’s Just Being Racist By Demanding An End To Birthright Citizenship

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 09 Oct, 2025 @ 07:46pm

  The courts have to remember that with this administration Akene Tendo's mallet would be a "subtle reminder". Actually getting them to notice would involve Kasumi getting angry with them. Making them pay attention? Belldandy getting angry.

• On the post: DOJ Moves Goalposts To Send Troops To Portland, Gets Shut Down By A Federal Court

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 07 Oct, 2025 @ 08:34pm

  I'd note that in an interview the frog guy said that the pepper spray into the air inlet didn't really affect him that much. Made him cough a bit and the pepper smell was a bit intense but he's had meals that were hotter than that. So not only do they look like fools who can't even deal with a costumed mascot, but when they finally do something that might be effective they screw that up too. We need more of this. Bullies absolutely can't handle being made fun of.

• On the post: It Definitely Looks Like I Was Wrong About The Iowa School Superintendent Arrested By ICE

  

  TKnarr ( profile ), 07 Oct, 2025 @ 08:25pm

  He appears to have fooled everyone. But then that includes the Federal government itself, more than once. Aside from anything else in the background check he passed the eVerify check which said he was a US citizen. And he had a Social Security card, which required him to satisfy the government about his citizenship. By all rights the Feds should also be facing a judge's questions about how they screwed up so badly and what they're doing to correct that, and why anyone else should be accepting their word on status documentation when their claim now is that we can't trust their word on it when they issue said documentation. For the charges, only the 1996 one looks at all serious and even it could as easily be "got caught at 17 with a fake driver's license and a bit too much marijuana" as "serious drug dealer". The rest are frankly the kinds of charges three-quarters of PA have on their record amounting to "went hunting and didn't take the clip out of the rifle afterwards".

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