Upstream 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (654)

• On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 22 Nov, 2021 @ 06:37am

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

  If you want to talk about "who started it" you should go all the way to the source: the Kenosha cop Rusten Sheskey who shot Jacob Blake, as part of an ongoing pattern of cops using deadly violence, mostly against Blacks, with little or no justification, and also with little or no accountability. You can read about it here.

• On the post: More Than 100 Hertz Customers Are Suing The Company For Falsely Reporting Rented Vehicles As Stolen

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 22 Nov, 2021 @ 02:09pm

  Francis Malofiy

  I knew I recognized that name:

  https://www.phillymag.com/news/2019/02/11/francis-malofiy-led-zeppelin/

  https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180928/18021040739/9th-circuit-never-misses-chance-to-mess-up-copyright-law-reopens-led-zeppelin-stairway-to-heaven-case.shtml

• On the post: 'Anonymized Data' Is A Gibberish Term, And Rampant Location Data Sales Is Still A Problem

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 22 Nov, 2021 @ 10:13am

  Simplify

  And our 20-year effort to have anything even vaguely resembling a useful federal privacy law for the internet era remains mired in gridlock thanks to a massive coalition of cross industry lobbying opposition with a near-unlimited budget.

  ". . . thanks to corruption." would be much simpler. Maybe not as explanatory, but just as accurate.

• On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 21 Nov, 2021 @ 01:49pm

  Re: This is why people hate you you scum

  But they still convicted him of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. Most of the laws restricting rights and eligibility for privileges (like professional licenses*) after someone has completed their sentence and been released from prison need to go away. If someone is still considered dangerous, they should still be in prison. If they have been let out of prison, they should (generally) have all their rights restored, including the right to vote and the right to possess effective means of self defense, ie firearms. There may occasionally be situations where exceptions to this are warranted, but this should be the default baseline. *Whether professional licenses should exist at all is a separate topic.

• On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 21 Nov, 2021 @ 02:33am

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

  a law enforcement officer bill of rights

  Here the confusion is between rights and privileges, and it is completely intentional. The cops and their unions want people to think these absurd privileges are rights, when they are no such thing. Rights are things that everyone has simply by virtue of being fully functioning people. Privileges are things that are granted to certain people by those in power. Much like the difference between rights and powers, the difference between rights and privileges is very important. Without properly understanding these terms and their differences, and applying and using the terms appropriately, we cannot have meaningful discussions of these topics.

• On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2021 @ 02:17am

  Re: This is why people hate you you scum

  Every last one of those assholes should have been fired on the spot(at a minimum)

  Yeah, and then they should have been charged with a litany of crimes, like assault (possibly with a deadly weapon), battery, reckless endangerment, etc, and maybe even attempted murder. Remember, these weapons they used are considered less -lethal. They are NOT non-lethal.

• On the post: Minneapolis Man Acquitted Of Charges After Mistakenly Shooting At Cops Sues Officers For Violating His Rights

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2021 @ 02:13am

  Re: Re: Re:

  . . . countless statues and court cases that give cops extra rights.

  Should be: ". . . countless statues and court cases that give cops extra powers. FTFY Governments, and their agents, have powers. Individuals have rights. It is a very important distinction that you completely missed, here.

• On the post: Fifth Circuit Awards Immunity To Cop Who Thought It Would Be A Good Idea To Jump On A Moving Car And Kill The Driver

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 13 Nov, 2021 @ 03:10am

  Re:

  I have never seen or heard of any correlation between police violence and open carry (or concealed carry). If there were any such correlation, never mind evidence of causation, you can bet that the correlation would be at the top of this list of the reasons the prohibitionists want to ban open or concealed carry. It is not, so we can be quite sure that no such correlation exists. I have heard prohibitionists speculate that the possibility that someone might be legally armed might cause an increase in violent police action, but this is clearly nonsense. Legally armed people rarely commit crimes, and even more rarely try to resist cops with deadly force, and the possibility that someone might be illegally armed exists whether or not carry of any type is permitted.

• On the post: The Corruption Is In Congress: When Your New Bill Exempts The Biggest Employers In Your State, Perhaps There's A Problem

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 11 Nov, 2021 @ 07:48am

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Same old song, just louder

  I just wouldn't be too surprised if the actual freedom of choice was somewhere around russian or chinese standards by now...

  It is very close, though few will admit it. For the last 150+ years, it has been only government sanctioned (R & D) candidates that have been allowed to be viable options. Actual opposition candidates and parties, while not explicitly prohibited, are effectively prohibited, largely by onerous, expensive, and time-consuming ballot access requirements and restrictions. The government sanctioned parties and candidates do not have these requirements and restrictions. As long as opposition parties and candidates are effectively eliminated by the policies currently in place, there is no need for the heavy-handed explicit prohibitions that other authoritarian countries have in place. There have been a few "flash-in-the-pan" exceptions to the above, but nothing meaningful, just one-off attempts that got nowhere and had zero staying power.

• On the post: Clearview Officially Kicked Out Of Australia For Violation Country's Privacy Laws

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 11 Nov, 2021 @ 07:54am

  Copycat?

  Looks like Clearview may be trying to emulate NSO Group's business model.

• On the post: The Corruption Is In Congress: When Your New Bill Exempts The Biggest Employers In Your State, Perhaps There's A Problem

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 10 Nov, 2021 @ 07:49am

  Re: Re: isn't "representative" government somewhat obsolete?

  It is a solution to a problem we no longer have

  How do we not still have this problem? Please explain. Last time I checked, the only way all "voting citizens could have their opinions weighed" was by voting. This can be done either conventionally with paper ballots, or electronically. Conventional voting and the counting of the ballots is still a huge, expensive, time-consuming hassle, and, while it does preserve anonymity, it is prohibitively difficult for routine use whenever the "business of legislation requires attention." Electronic voting, while much quicker, easier, and cheaper, can only be authenticated and verified by means of a version of public key cryptography, and the anonymity is unavoidably lost in the process, so this is not a viable option, either. That leaves us with . . . representative government.

• On the post: The Corruption Is In Congress: When Your New Bill Exempts The Biggest Employers In Your State, Perhaps There's A Problem

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 09 Nov, 2021 @ 12:19pm

  Same old song, just louder

  Corruption in Congress has been SOP forever, but this example is a bit more blatant than the usual pork barrel style. I think the telling part is that the Congress-critters no longer feel the need to keep up even the slightest pretense of legitimacy. The odd $$ limit is really quite transparent. The only way it could be clearer is if they actually exempted their home state companies by name.

• On the post: Transparency Activists Dump 1.8 Terabytes Of Police Helicopter Surveillance Footage

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 08 Nov, 2021 @ 01:33pm

  Re: First rule of data transfer?

  If you goto school with a Copy

  In the programming classes I took you got an automatic "F" if you used a GOTO.

• On the post: New Investigation Shows A US Journalist Critical Of The Saudi Government Was Hit With NSO Spyware

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 26 Oct, 2021 @ 01:35am

  Re: At what point...

  At the same point NSO Group stops letting corrupt governments / corrupt government officials use their malware.

• On the post: A Drug Dog's Nose Poking Through The Open Window Of A Car Is Unconstitutional, Says Idaho's Top Court

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 23 Oct, 2021 @ 04:11am

  Re: It's not a search...

  Sniffing your privacy.

  Snuffing your privacy. FTFY. It's an easy typo to make.

• On the post: A Drug Dog's Nose Poking Through The Open Window Of A Car Is Unconstitutional, Says Idaho's Top Court

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 23 Oct, 2021 @ 04:27am

  It's not the dogs . . .

  . . . that are the problem. It's their trainers / handlers that are the problem. And they are a very big problem.

  Detection dogs can range from very good to astoundingly excellent in their abilities, see here, here, here, here, here, and here.

  Here is a quote from the last linked article:

  "The problem with drug-sniffing dogs is not that dogs aren’t capable of sniffing out drugs; it’s that we’ve bred into domestic dogs a trait that trumps that ability — a desire to read us and to please us. If a drug dog isn’t specifically trained to compensate for this, it will merely read its handler’s body language and confirm its handler’s suspicions about who is and isn’t hiding drugs."

  The bottom line is that the weak link is either the training or the handler, whether through incompetence or ill-intent. Trained and handled properly, the dogs do quite well.

• On the post: Missouri Governor Doubles Down On 'View Source' Hacking Claim; PAC Now Fundraising Over This Bizarrely Stupid Claim

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2021 @ 03:02pm

  Repeat after Mike:

  You don't have to be a genius computer science grad to understand that you never ever put SSNs in HTML and that whoever did that is at fault here.

  You apparently do have to not be Missouri Governor Mike Parson.

• On the post: Criminalizing Teens' Google Searches Is Just How The UK's Anti-Cybercrime Programs Roll

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 19 Oct, 2021 @ 12:46pm

  UK's National Crime Agency?

  We have lots of criminal government agencies in the US but none are quite so bold as to self-identify as clearly as this.

  Work sets you free, say the targeted ads.

  Wow. They really said this?

  And . . .

  a co-offending offence

  I wonder if that is anything like pre-crime?

  There is just a whole lot to be disturbed about in this article.

• On the post: New Research Shows Social Media Doesn't Turn People Into Assholes (They Already Were), And Everyone's Wrong About Echo Chambers

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 18 Oct, 2021 @ 12:33pm

  rising inequality over the last decade has been a fundamental driver of political instability in the US and beyond

  Somewhere I read that 40 or 50 or so years ago the top X% of the US population (I don't remember the numbers exactly) made about 39 times what the bottom X% made. Now it is over 900 times as much.

  Here is a short (6+ min) video that illustrates this same idea a bit differently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

  Yeah, I think this is a serious problem. It has recurred many times throughout history, and the end result has never been pretty.

• On the post: University Of Hong Kong Wants To Remove A Sculpture Commemorating Tiananmen; To Preserve It, People Have Crowdsourced A Digital 3D Replica

  

  Upstream ( profile ), 14 Oct, 2021 @ 12:50pm

  Wrong bear

  the big panda in Beijing

  Xi Jinping hates being portrayed as Winnie the Pooh

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