trx302 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (212)

• On the post: Indonesian Court Convicts Woman Of Criminal Defamation For Recording Her Boss Trying To Harass Her Into An Affair With Him

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 11 Jul, 2019 @ 05:00am

  unfair

  In the USA, truth is considered an absolute defense against defamation.

  In Britain and much of the Commonwealth (and Indonesia was once British) it doesn't work that way; even if the accusations are true, you can still sue for damages.

• On the post: Wiretap Report Says Courts Are Seeing Fewer Wiretap Requests, Fewer Convictions Linked To Wiretaps

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 11 Jul, 2019 @ 04:58am

  No problemo. They've probably found it's simpler to just use wiretap information for "parallel construction."

  Remember, "It's not perjury if the prosecution does it!"

• On the post: Court Upholds Conviction Of Cop Who Threatened, Beat, Tased, And Arrested A Man For Complaining About Being Beaten By Him Earlier

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 09 Jul, 2019 @ 07:52am

  Re:

  I am often amazed that they aren't selling more bodycams to citizens.

  Police-type cams are bulky and priced for "other people's money" budgets. I wear a "spy cam" type camera that looks like a fat pen. There are tie-tac-sized ones that will talk to a smartphone via Bluetooth. The problem with carrying a camera is that if it's identifiable as such, it's likely to be smashed or stolen during the encounter. One that streams video to a remote server will eat up your data plan. "You pays your money and you rolls your dice." Those of you who use phone apps to record audio; police are wising up to that, too. Don't be surprised if your phone gets stepped on or mysteriously reset to factory default while it's in their hands.

• On the post: Dumbest 'Gotcha' Story Of The Week: Google, Genius And The Copying Of Licensed Lyrics

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 18 Jun, 2019 @ 08:11am

  Re: Side Question: Aren't Lyrics Poems?

  Lyrics go hand in hand with musical scores, and copyright enforcement goes way back. "Happy Birthday to you!
  If you sing this, we'll sue!
  Because we own the copyright to
  Happy Birthday to you!"

• On the post: We're Apparently Scanning Our TVs For Viruses Now

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 18 Jun, 2019 @ 08:27am

  but it's full of ads that subsidize the price over time and create stable revenue for the manufacturers

  Really? A thousand bucks' worth of viewer information per TV? A lot more, actually, when you deduct the ones in public areas and rooms with nobody watching them. For a TV that lasts, what, three or four years before it croaks or they buy a bigger one?

  Also note the people who watch the most TV tend to be children, the elderly, and the poor; not exactly your top purchasing groups. So for a thousand dollars per TV, with maybe a quarter of TVs in view of anyone who might be a customer, that's about a thousand dollars' worth of marketing information per viewer per year.

  I think that "thousand dollars per TV" is between two and three orders of magnitude larger than the actual marketing value of the information they might collect. It's a scare number to try to browbeat people into buying 1984-style TVs that watch them back, to make them stop complaining about it.

• On the post: Techdirt Sues ICE After It Insists It Has No Records Of The 1 Million Domains It Claims To Have Seized

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 23 May, 2019 @ 12:14pm

  So... 9 years of domain seizings. The average Federal bureaucrat has 262 working days per year. That's 2,358 working days. That comes out to 424 domains seized per day. For an 8 hour working day, less breaks, checking email, meetings, and gossip, that's 6.5 working hours per day. (which is, incidentally, a very generous figure). 65.2 seizures per hour.

  That comes out to seizure of one domain every minute or so.

  My goodness, those are some busy little beavers, aren't they? I'm sure all proper diligence and paperwork are done for each seizure... and note time for reviews, follow-ups, and so forth aren't included.

• On the post: New Data On London Metro Police Facial Recognition Tech Shows It's Still Wrong 96 Percent Of The Time

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 09 May, 2019 @ 09:08am

  The purpose isn't "accurate identification." It's to build up such a bulk of incriminating data that refuting it is pointless.

  Think of the Stasi in the DDR. They knew that the majority of the information they had was either grossly inaccurate or outright faked, but it didn't matter; seeing the boxes full of documents, even people who knew better thought "there there's smoke there's fire." Which was the purpose of building those files in the first place.

• On the post: Chicago PD's Gang Database Is A Horrific Mess Compiled By Horrific Public Servants

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 04 May, 2019 @ 11:21am

  or the fact that it's 91% minorities.

  Given the demographic makeup of Chicago, there's nothing questionable about that.

• On the post: Reverse Warrant For Cell Site Location Info Results In Wrong Man Being Jailed

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 23 Apr, 2019 @ 01:53am

  Re: Hard

  Nah. It's just lazy police work. "Arrest them all and let the courts figure it out." Makes their stats look good even if the arrests turn out to be bogus.Appropriations, raises, and promotions for everyone!

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

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 22 Apr, 2019 @ 06:44am

  So, what, Georgetown Center was just sitting on a pile of paper or keeping files secured on their server?

  Why weren't the documents, scanned if necessary, uploaded to archive.org or one of the other (preferably non-US) archive sites? Or even a few torrents?

  These Georgetown people don't sound like the sharpest sporks in the dishwasher.

• On the post: Creator Of Silk Road 2.0 Did Double The Business, Sentenced To Only Five Years In Prison

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 15 Apr, 2019 @ 06:57am

  Re: Re: Re: Re:

  Far too long of a string for most people to peck into their phone's pathetic web browser app.

• On the post: Facial Recognition Tech Now Capable Of Getting You Kicked Out Of The Mall

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 03 Apr, 2019 @ 03:37am

  Re: Re: Surveillance to track spending...

  Better than that; the second-most wanted terrorist in the world walks around with my face. Though we're (as far as I know) of completely different racial and national origin, the genetic dice rolled snake eyes. I'm the elder by about two months. It's MY face, dammit! Someday I'm going to walk into some airport or Federal building, the computers will go "TILT!", and jackbooted thugs will come swarming my way, thinking they have just made the arrest of their careers...

• On the post: 7th Circuit Punts On Border Smartphone Searches; Says Riley Decision Doesn't Affect Anything

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 01 Apr, 2019 @ 08:05am

  Re: You've gotta wonder...

  Flip side... once it's out of your hands and sight, they can put anything they want on there and then "discover" it for the record. Same with tablets, laptops, and other devices. Saves them the hassle of "finding" physical objects in your luggage. Have any confidential government or business information with you? How about HIPAA data in the US, or the several categories of confidential data in the EU? Any business documents that are confidential or under nondisclosure?
  What if the Fed leaves that information on an old hard drive that winds up on eBay? It has already happened a few times.

• On the post: Stupid Law Making Assaulting Journalists A Federal Crime Revived By Congress

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 28 Mar, 2019 @ 12:10pm

  This is the same Swallwell who threatened to attack lawful American gun owners with nuclear weapons.

  "Seems legit..."

• On the post: Thomas Goolnik Again Convinces Google To Forget Our Story About Thomas Goolnik Getting Google To Forget Our Story About Thomas Goolnik

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 27 Mar, 2019 @ 04:25pm

  typing "Thomas Goolnik" into:

  BAIDU: two techdirt story hits midway on first page
  YANDEX: second and third results are techdirt
  BING: second result is techdirt article

  There are other search engines than Google. Though most of the smaller ones are just front-ends for Google.

• On the post: ICE Has Access To ALPR Databases, Bypasses Internal Restrictions By Outsourcing Searches To Local Cops

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 18 Mar, 2019 @ 12:29pm

  That sort of thing is usually handled by "fusion centers", which, being technically private organizations, gather and distribute intelligence to law enforcement.

  Maybe ICE just want to cut out the middleman and root through the databases directly.

• On the post: Can Russia Actually 'Unplug' From The Internet?

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 18 Feb, 2019 @ 07:12pm

  In the early 2000s there were still less than six major gateways from the USA to the rest of the world. Though most were privately owned, all the foreign access points and NAPs are under NSA control as part of their charter, plus the internet originated as part of the US national defense structure; being able to cut off outside attackers easily would be part of the original design.

  Many smaller countries, all international phone and internet connections go through their Postal-Telegraph systems, sometimes with a single choke point.

  Britain, Australia, and China already firewall themselves from the rest of the world, and Pakistan was working on it last I heard. Can't have evil foreign badthink contaminating the citizenry, you know.

  If Russia can't cut itself off from the rest of the world and still operate, it should be able to; it's basic national security stuff. Flip it; what if the rest of the world cut Russia off? They still have to move data packets.

• On the post: YouTube's ContentID System Is Being Repurposed By Blackmailers Due To Its Failings

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 06 Feb, 2019 @ 03:33pm

  Re: Re: Re:

  the government (not the victim) charges them with a crime,

  "And the value of the crime against you property is...?" Some jurisdictions won't even accept a mugging or burglary report unless you can prove - as in paper documents - damages of over $250. Which means petty criminals operate without restriction, but hey, it takes some load off the courts...

• On the post: The 3rd Party Doctrine: Or Why Lawyers May Not Ethically Be Able To Use Whatsapp

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 06 Feb, 2019 @ 03:54pm

  I am a lawyer, and I can't let this information out.

  Do you use Microsoft Windows 7, 8, or 10 or any Apple computer product that's connected to the Internet?

  Ever wonder what the encrypted "telemetry" and "customer assurance" data that they chatter continually back to the motherships might be?

• On the post: How My High School Destroyed An Immigrant Kid's Life Because He Drew The School's Mascot

  

  trx302 ( profile ), 29 Jan, 2019 @ 01:29pm

  > because Alex had just turned 19, and was no longer considered a minor,
  ---
  Funny, in the rest of the country you're no longer a minor when you turn 18.
  
  I didn't notice what his official immigration status was supposed to be. But he was a 19 year old adult, still going to high school, and apparently not real bright; with all the "gang" warnings, he should have known better than to vandalize school property with "the Honduras area code."
  
  At 19 I'd been on my own for a year, a job, a car, and my own residence. I'm not feeling a whole lot of sympathy here.

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