YUP! All they face are fines against the department, which gets paid for by taxes. So they openly assault the citizens, and then add insult to injury when they force those same citizens to pay for the damages, and the courts call that justice.
So I can go ahead and break into your home at night -- or even burn the whole house to the ground -- as long as I'm considering making a large enough purchase from you at some later date? THAT is your counter-argument??
If the admins don't want the AIs browsing their site, they have every right to put up those NO TRESPASSING signs. If the billion dollar AI companies choose to ignore those signs, that's a federal crime here in the US. It doesn't actually matter how much money these "users" (who are not actually visiting or using the site in question) might hypothetically be willing to pay at some undetermined future date. While folks like Trump certainly like to think that throwing around enough cash means you're fully above the law, everyone who isn't a billionaire generally agrees that it really shouldn't work that way. (And everyone who is a lawyer agrees that the law doesn't work that way...it's just that corrupt cops and prosecutors often refuse to enforce it properly. Which is not something that most people defend.)
So if AI should go ahead and ignore robots.txt in response to a user's query, should it also look for bugs in login prompts so it can get through those as well?
If you want to argue that site admins shouldn't configure those files for blocking AI I could maybe be convinced; I haven't bothered to put any on my websites...but deliberately ignoring access control mechanisms configured by the webmaster, especially at scale and as what seems to be as a matter of corporate policy, is absolutely not OK. Pretty sure that's a federal crime here in the US under the CFAA. The fact that it's merely a robots.txt file doesn't seem to matter; the law only refers to "exceeding authorized access", and from what I've seen it seems pretty clear that the AI scrapers are DEFINITELY doing that.
A big part of the reason there is so much collateral damage is because so many of the AI companies are deliberately ignoring the orders not to scrape sites. So the admins have to take a much heavier approach. If you just say "No AI", they ignore you and sometimes even change user agents and such to pretend to be something else. The AI companies are intentionally ruining it for everyone else. But you'd rather blame literally anyone else in order to defend the AI companies' industrial-scale criminal vandalism of the web...
Aaron Schwarz died in prison for "stealing" tens of gigabytes of copyrighted data to give it freely to the world for the benefit of us all. These executives "steal" petabytes purely to fill their own bulging wallets and rather than throwing them in prison everyone is bending over backwards to justify and excuse it!
CEOs are not gods. They do not deserve such worship.
He doesn't actually say he saved enough money to buy the game, he just says he "made it happen". That sounds like exactly the kind of phrasing one might use if they had pirated the game. Perhaps he's encouraging Borderlands fans to do the same. If you reallly need to play that game but you can't or don't want to throw $80 at it...just "make it happen."
As with most traditional social media, they don't make money, they don't really have good plans on how to make money, they're just burning through VC funding and when it comes time to repay those loans they'll be scrambling to find a way to extract that money from their users all at once.
And for reasons I detailed above, it's likely there will be no alternative to switch to, no federation they have to maintain ties with. So step one will probably be to drop that pretense and isolate themselves into just another closed social network, so they can more easily impose ads and data mining onto their users.
Of course, they say they won't. From what I can find, they say they're going to sell blue checkmarks just like Twitter, and that this optional subscription revenue will pay for the entire platform -- plus paying off the loans with the massive interest rates that most VC investors expect. And they say they aren't going to paywall any features, they just expect huge numbers of users to pay a premium anyway for...reasons.
That's certainly what the users want, but it's basically the same people who created Twitter, so if you think they wouldn't end up selling to someone like Musk again you're as delusional as the bluesky users...but you seem to actually support Musk so I guess that was obvious!
How is it billionaire-proof when their own enginners say you'd basically need to be a billionaire to create a new node on their federation? (They seem to suggest something in the range of millions or tens of millions per year in server costs.) How is it giving users choice when there is currently only one host to choose from?
The AT protocol is specifically designed to PREVENT a large marketplace of servers. It is designed to PREVENT competing instances and large-scale federation. Their plan seems to be that if this billionaire goes bad a different billionaire can maybe show up and bail you out. Assuming federation is still enabled at that point.
If you want a billionaire-proof network that gives users choice, what you want is ActivityPub. AT protocol seems designed to always be run by wealthy venture capitalists, as Bluesky is currently.
Source: https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/
Funko redirects all the hatred towards BrandShield, but I bet they don't drop their contract. Meanwhile, BrandShield couldn't care less if you and I hate them and yell impotently on Twitter, we will never be their customers anyway. Drawing that anger away from the main brand is one of the biggest values companies like these provide. In a month the BrandShield execs will be touting this on their sales calls as a great example of how valuable their service is for reputation laundering protection.
That's why consultants exist. You certainly aren't saving money by adding an entire extra layer of management, your employees certainly aren't more productive when they have to spend twice as much time on reports because they need one for you and one for the consulting firm. These firms can only save costs by slashing quality. But then if it goes wrong and customers get too upset, the parent company can claim ignorance and blame the consultants. And the consultants will sit there and take it, because that's their job, and because they know their next customer won't care about the "scandal" because they know the deal.
(FWIW, that last bit is based in part on personal experience spending nearly ten years working as a consultant in software dev)
Considering that by far the most likely person to commit such crimes are the child's own parents, perhaps we should just lock up everyone who reproduces?
I thought I was interested but wrong headway.
Wonder why all these companies using the name "Headway" aren't suing each other into oblivion yet...similar enough that I got this ad confused with the Headway that I'm a user of...
They set it as "followers only" -- if you aren't the tagged target and aren't following the racist, you can't see the post. Not sure who thought that privacy setting was a good idea but that seems to be how it works.
As far as I can tell, there is currently only one instances of Bluesky...they currently are not federating and are not decentralized. AIUI, it's also developed in a way that requires centralized services for moderation. Am I not understanding that correctly, or is Bluesky currently just another centralized platform with vague promises of maybe one day being partially federated...while there are already other large platforms with diverse codebases that are fully federated and working great today...?
I think the real question here is if the terms of service is a contract or if it's just a vague non-binding promise.
If it's a contract, then they have to provide precise terms of that contract to all parties. And if they can provide that contract to all of their millions of users then they can surely provide it to the government as well. And limiting how often that contract can be unilaterally changed seems pretty reasonable; I certainly don't have the time to be re-reading a new ToS every goddamn day! Although it is pretty silly to only apply such laws to social media...
These documents are certainly written as though they're a contract. I have to agree to it as though it's a contract -- you don't have to check a box to agree to some vague advertised promise the way you usually do with a ToS. If they're going to make me "sign a document" saying I agree to their terms, then yeah they should be legally required to comply with those terms themselves and they shouldn't be able to change those terms on me every single day or every single hour. I don't see the problem here. Contracts go both ways.
Software companies have spent DECADES trying to get these clickwrap agreements to get treated like contracts; now that the governments are actually doing that they're complaining that it's too burdensome?
I think Bob has the right idea above, but frankly I'd kinda like to see them go with a charge of treason... :)
Firstly, it's "We, the people" NOT "We, the duly appointed government agents." Funny how often you see the "We the people" sticker right next to a blue line one. That ain't what the founders were talking about.
Furthermore, the origin of that phrase is a modification of "thin RED line", where the red was a reference to the red coats of the British army. The very same redcoats we fought our revolution against. That thin blue line flag is literally comparing the police to an occupying foreign army. And they're PROUD of that! And those same morons call themselves patriots...
I absolutely believe this will result in taxpayers paying more than they should -- last year I got a bill from the IRS for a little over $2k. While I was in the process of disputing it I paid because they made pretty heavy threats about what would happen if I didn't. Well, eventually I got it sorted out and determined the bill from the IRS was incorrect. Took a few months to get my money back from them, and many phone calls in which they repeatedly insisted the bill was correct. Here's a tip if you ever find yourself in that situation: Don't ask if the bill is correct, don't ask if their records show that you paid more than you should. The magic word is "overpayment". If you ask "is there any overpayment on my account" you'll have a check in the mail within ten minutes. As far as I can tell, if you use literally any other words to describe that situation, they'll insist your account is perfectly balanced. Also, in the phone tree if you use the options to dispute a bill, they'll keep you on hold for an hour before hanging up on you. Every. Single. Time. The only way to get through is to choose the option to make a payment -- you'll be through to a human in seconds and they'll transfer you to the right department.
Of course, I did my taxes with TurboTax, and when I took this up with them under their accuracy guarantee, they basically told me to go deal with it myself. They just said they determined that their calculations were correct (which, in the end, did seem to be true) and therefore I was on my own.
So I dunno if this is will be any worse than the current situation, but I do know that the IRS cannot be trusted to make accurate tax calculations on their own, nor can they be trusted to provide customer service that is not a Kafkaesque nightmare....and this new service is only going to be available for simple filing which generally means lower income individuals -- ie, people who can't afford to fight back when something goes wrong. Although again...is that worse than Intuit? I really don't know...
Also flea markets don't usually sell product themselves. Amazon is trying to be both a traditional retailer and a flea market all in one place. There's a reason you don't see that kind of combination in the brick and mortar space.
I've never been to a flea market where there is one centralized place taking payments...usually each vendor handles all of that themselves -- no different from renting space in a shopping mall. Amazon, on the other hand, has one big store with rented out shelves where they are the ones completing the sales on behalf of all of these other vendors.
Amazon uses https as does every other plaform. Https has no mechanism for processing payments. “return to the protocol of https” in this context is a meaningless buzzword slurry trying to appeal to the language of Techdirt without ever understanding what it means.
Sure, HTTPS has no mechanism for processing payments. And ActivityPub has no mechanism for posting content. Protocols do not dictate the content, they only provide a means to convey it. The point is that we need an open e-commerce protocol rather than a closed platform. And HTTPS already was that protocol for most of the history of the Internet. It is only recently that we have allowed closed platforms to swallow up all of these independent storefronts. It is only recently that we have apparently decided that we need a special monolithic e-commerce platform. And I find that to be utterly ridiculous. The only thing these platforms do is provide some billionaire with extreme amounts of leverage over consumers.
YUP! All they face are fines against the department, which gets paid for by taxes. So they openly assault the citizens, and then add insult to injury when they force those same citizens to pay for the damages, and the courts call that justice.
So I can go ahead and break into your home at night -- or even burn the whole house to the ground -- as long as I'm considering making a large enough purchase from you at some later date? THAT is your counter-argument?? If the admins don't want the AIs browsing their site, they have every right to put up those NO TRESPASSING signs. If the billion dollar AI companies choose to ignore those signs, that's a federal crime here in the US. It doesn't actually matter how much money these "users" (who are not actually visiting or using the site in question) might hypothetically be willing to pay at some undetermined future date. While folks like Trump certainly like to think that throwing around enough cash means you're fully above the law, everyone who isn't a billionaire generally agrees that it really shouldn't work that way. (And everyone who is a lawyer agrees that the law doesn't work that way...it's just that corrupt cops and prosecutors often refuse to enforce it properly. Which is not something that most people defend.)
Access controls are not optional
So if AI should go ahead and ignore robots.txt in response to a user's query, should it also look for bugs in login prompts so it can get through those as well? If you want to argue that site admins shouldn't configure those files for blocking AI I could maybe be convinced; I haven't bothered to put any on my websites...but deliberately ignoring access control mechanisms configured by the webmaster, especially at scale and as what seems to be as a matter of corporate policy, is absolutely not OK. Pretty sure that's a federal crime here in the US under the CFAA. The fact that it's merely a robots.txt file doesn't seem to matter; the law only refers to "exceeding authorized access", and from what I've seen it seems pretty clear that the AI scrapers are DEFINITELY doing that. A big part of the reason there is so much collateral damage is because so many of the AI companies are deliberately ignoring the orders not to scrape sites. So the admins have to take a much heavier approach. If you just say "No AI", they ignore you and sometimes even change user agents and such to pretend to be something else. The AI companies are intentionally ruining it for everyone else. But you'd rather blame literally anyone else in order to defend the AI companies' industrial-scale criminal vandalism of the web...
These CEOs ought to be in prison
Aaron Schwarz died in prison for "stealing" tens of gigabytes of copyrighted data to give it freely to the world for the benefit of us all. These executives "steal" petabytes purely to fill their own bulging wallets and rather than throwing them in prison everyone is bending over backwards to justify and excuse it! CEOs are not gods. They do not deserve such worship.
Did he buy it?
He doesn't actually say he saved enough money to buy the game, he just says he "made it happen". That sounds like exactly the kind of phrasing one might use if they had pirated the game. Perhaps he's encouraging Borderlands fans to do the same. If you reallly need to play that game but you can't or don't want to throw $80 at it...just "make it happen."
As with most traditional social media, they don't make money, they don't really have good plans on how to make money, they're just burning through VC funding and when it comes time to repay those loans they'll be scrambling to find a way to extract that money from their users all at once. And for reasons I detailed above, it's likely there will be no alternative to switch to, no federation they have to maintain ties with. So step one will probably be to drop that pretense and isolate themselves into just another closed social network, so they can more easily impose ads and data mining onto their users. Of course, they say they won't. From what I can find, they say they're going to sell blue checkmarks just like Twitter, and that this optional subscription revenue will pay for the entire platform -- plus paying off the loans with the massive interest rates that most VC investors expect. And they say they aren't going to paywall any features, they just expect huge numbers of users to pay a premium anyway for...reasons.
That's certainly what the users want, but it's basically the same people who created Twitter, so if you think they wouldn't end up selling to someone like Musk again you're as delusional as the bluesky users...but you seem to actually support Musk so I guess that was obvious!
No power, no choice
How is it billionaire-proof when their own enginners say you'd basically need to be a billionaire to create a new node on their federation? (They seem to suggest something in the range of millions or tens of millions per year in server costs.) How is it giving users choice when there is currently only one host to choose from? The AT protocol is specifically designed to PREVENT a large marketplace of servers. It is designed to PREVENT competing instances and large-scale federation. Their plan seems to be that if this billionaire goes bad a different billionaire can maybe show up and bail you out. Assuming federation is still enabled at that point. If you want a billionaire-proof network that gives users choice, what you want is ActivityPub. AT protocol seems designed to always be run by wealthy venture capitalists, as Bluesky is currently. Source: https://dustycloud.org/blog/re-re-bluesky-decentralization/
And nothing will change...
Funko redirects all the hatred towards BrandShield, but I bet they don't drop their contract. Meanwhile, BrandShield couldn't care less if you and I hate them and yell impotently on Twitter, we will never be their customers anyway. Drawing that anger away from the main brand is one of the biggest values companies like these provide. In a month the BrandShield execs will be touting this on their sales calls as a great example of how valuable their service is for reputation
launderingprotection. That's why consultants exist. You certainly aren't saving money by adding an entire extra layer of management, your employees certainly aren't more productive when they have to spend twice as much time on reports because they need one for you and one for the consulting firm. These firms can only save costs by slashing quality. But then if it goes wrong and customers get too upset, the parent company can claim ignorance and blame the consultants. And the consultants will sit there and take it, because that's their job, and because they know their next customer won't care about the "scandal" because they know the deal. (FWIW, that last bit is based in part on personal experience spending nearly ten years working as a consultant in software dev)Considering that by far the most likely person to commit such crimes are the child's own parents, perhaps we should just lock up everyone who reproduces?
Which "Headway"?
I thought I was interested but wrong headway. Wonder why all these companies using the name "Headway" aren't suing each other into oblivion yet...similar enough that I got this ad confused with the Headway that I'm a user of...
They set it as "followers only" -- if you aren't the tagged target and aren't following the racist, you can't see the post. Not sure who thought that privacy setting was a good idea but that seems to be how it works.
In many cases they literally can't see those posts, either due to posts not federating or due to the privacy settings chosen by the guy posting it.
Is it actually decentralized?
As far as I can tell, there is currently only one instances of Bluesky...they currently are not federating and are not decentralized. AIUI, it's also developed in a way that requires centralized services for moderation. Am I not understanding that correctly, or is Bluesky currently just another centralized platform with vague promises of maybe one day being partially federated...while there are already other large platforms with diverse codebases that are fully federated and working great today...?
Is it a contract or not?
I think the real question here is if the terms of service is a contract or if it's just a vague non-binding promise. If it's a contract, then they have to provide precise terms of that contract to all parties. And if they can provide that contract to all of their millions of users then they can surely provide it to the government as well. And limiting how often that contract can be unilaterally changed seems pretty reasonable; I certainly don't have the time to be re-reading a new ToS every goddamn day! Although it is pretty silly to only apply such laws to social media... These documents are certainly written as though they're a contract. I have to agree to it as though it's a contract -- you don't have to check a box to agree to some vague advertised promise the way you usually do with a ToS. If they're going to make me "sign a document" saying I agree to their terms, then yeah they should be legally required to comply with those terms themselves and they shouldn't be able to change those terms on me every single day or every single hour. I don't see the problem here. Contracts go both ways. Software companies have spent DECADES trying to get these clickwrap agreements to get treated like contracts; now that the governments are actually doing that they're complaining that it's too burdensome?
Try Treason
I think Bob has the right idea above, but frankly I'd kinda like to see them go with a charge of treason... :) Firstly, it's "We, the people" NOT "We, the duly appointed government agents." Funny how often you see the "We the people" sticker right next to a blue line one. That ain't what the founders were talking about. Furthermore, the origin of that phrase is a modification of "thin RED line", where the red was a reference to the red coats of the British army. The very same redcoats we fought our revolution against. That thin blue line flag is literally comparing the police to an occupying foreign army. And they're PROUD of that! And those same morons call themselves patriots...
Meh...there's no good option here...
I absolutely believe this will result in taxpayers paying more than they should -- last year I got a bill from the IRS for a little over $2k. While I was in the process of disputing it I paid because they made pretty heavy threats about what would happen if I didn't. Well, eventually I got it sorted out and determined the bill from the IRS was incorrect. Took a few months to get my money back from them, and many phone calls in which they repeatedly insisted the bill was correct. Here's a tip if you ever find yourself in that situation: Don't ask if the bill is correct, don't ask if their records show that you paid more than you should. The magic word is "overpayment". If you ask "is there any overpayment on my account" you'll have a check in the mail within ten minutes. As far as I can tell, if you use literally any other words to describe that situation, they'll insist your account is perfectly balanced. Also, in the phone tree if you use the options to dispute a bill, they'll keep you on hold for an hour before hanging up on you. Every. Single. Time. The only way to get through is to choose the option to make a payment -- you'll be through to a human in seconds and they'll transfer you to the right department. Of course, I did my taxes with TurboTax, and when I took this up with them under their accuracy guarantee, they basically told me to go deal with it myself. They just said they determined that their calculations were correct (which, in the end, did seem to be true) and therefore I was on my own. So I dunno if this is will be any worse than the current situation, but I do know that the IRS cannot be trusted to make accurate tax calculations on their own, nor can they be trusted to provide customer service that is not a Kafkaesque nightmare....and this new service is only going to be available for simple filing which generally means lower income individuals -- ie, people who can't afford to fight back when something goes wrong. Although again...is that worse than Intuit? I really don't know...
Also flea markets don't usually sell product themselves. Amazon is trying to be both a traditional retailer and a flea market all in one place. There's a reason you don't see that kind of combination in the brick and mortar space.
Lovely moderation here
I've never been to a flea market where there is one centralized place taking payments...usually each vendor handles all of that themselves -- no different from renting space in a shopping mall. Amazon, on the other hand, has one big store with rented out shelves where they are the ones completing the sales on behalf of all of these other vendors.