urza9814 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Three Guarantees In Life: Taxes, Death, And Politicians Trying To Destroy The Internet

    urza9814 ( profile ), 10 Oct, 2023 @ 10:56am

    Do you start having a conniption fit in the middle of Walmart when you learn that they didn’t kill the cow to make the steak in-store?
    I don't buy from Walmart either, never have, but at least they have ownership and physical possession of the products they sell. With Amazon (at least last time I shopped there), even when you try to use their "sold by Amazon" or "fulfillment by Amazon" filters you still end up with a load of ewaste shipped direct from China where the only thing Amazon ever handles is your money. Brick and mortar retailers know what they're selling and ensure it complies with local laws. Amazon does neither of those.

  • On the post: Three Guarantees In Life: Taxes, Death, And Politicians Trying To Destroy The Internet

    urza9814 ( profile ), 10 Oct, 2023 @ 10:51am

    I went back to that years ago when I stopped doing business with Amazon after getting burned by scammers -- and having Amazon support actively work to protect those scammers -- one too many times. Buying things online is much better without Amazon.

  • On the post: Three Guarantees In Life: Taxes, Death, And Politicians Trying To Destroy The Internet

    urza9814 ( profile ), 10 Oct, 2023 @ 09:45am

    Kill the platforms

    Good. Kill the platforms; return to the protocol of HTTPS. Why exactly is it so essential to the Internet to allow these massive corporations to skim profits by selling things that they don't even own, lending an air of credibility to any rando selling literal poison by listing it right alongside legitimate products and attempting to conceal its true source? The liability shields that these platforms hide behind are out of control.

  • On the post: Crime In Minneapolis Continues To Drop Despite The PD Losing Hundreds Of Officers

    urza9814 ( profile ), 09 Oct, 2023 @ 01:11pm

    Since when are the stores actually paying for the law enforcement? Generally they get tax breaks for moving into town. Often they won't pay a dime in taxes for a decade or more! WE are the ones paying for these cops. But when WE get robbed, do they care? Do they show up? Of course not! When someone breaks into your home and robs you while you're away, let me know if you can even get a cop to talk to you. They certainly won't around here. Not if it's an apartment anyway...maybe they'll come around if it's some McMansion....and this ain't a new problem, I have a few personal experiences with this going back to when I was in highschool almost twenty years ago...across multiple states, in small towns and larger cities. If you don't have money, the cops aren't helping you. Hell, there have even been multiple court cases where the cops have "proven" that they have no obligation to respond to crimes or to catch criminals -- even if that crime is happening right in front of them.

  • On the post: The Batshit Crazy Story Of The Day Elon Musk Decided To Personally Rip Servers Out Of A Sacramento Data Center

    urza9814 ( profile ), 12 Sep, 2023 @ 11:09am

    Communism is not a monolithic party. By definition communism has no party: "Communism (from Latin communis, 'common, universal')[1][2] is a left-wing to far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology within the socialist movement,[1] whose goal is the creation of a communist society, a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need.[3][4][5] A communist society would entail the absence of private property and social classes,[1] and ultimately money[6] and the state (or nation state)." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism Keep in mind that China has a single monolithic party and they claim to have the same style of government as the USA -- a Republic.

  • On the post: Substack CEO Chris Best Doesn’t Realize He’s Just Become The Nazi Bar

    urza9814 ( profile ), 18 Apr, 2023 @ 10:27am

    Do algorithms/suggestions matter?

    Maybe I'm just too ignorant of the details of Substack...but there's a critical discussion I think is missing here. The thing that makes social media different from infrastructure isn't necessarily about the target market or the UI of the product. It's the single unified community. Is this new product like social media in that it is all one big space and the leftists are getting the same ads and suggested content as the Nazis? Or is it like infrastructure where each creator has their own "siloed" site where they alone are responsible for advertising that content and growing their subscriber base? Because from this article it certainly sounds like it is only going to show me the content I have explicitly subscribed to. And while that doesn't entirely resolve the potential for conflict, I think it does keep it firmly in the infrastructure category. Traditional social media has for the last few years been going out of its way to break the concept of subscription and make the content you see be more dependent on popularity and algorithmic suggestions rather than direct user choice. And that makes moderation a much bigger issue as those moderation policies have a much bigger impact on any individual user's experience of that platform.

  • On the post: Far Right Troll ‘Ricky Vaughn’ Convicted Of Election Interference For Tricking People Into Voting By Phone

    urza9814 ( profile ), 04 Apr, 2023 @ 02:57pm

    Dude, we've had a candidate for president who literally ran his campaign from a prison cell! Their campaign buttons and such read "For President: Convict No. 9653". Unconstitutionally arrested by his opposition BTW -- sentenced to ten years for merely giving an anti-war speech and criticizing the administration. I mean Trump is certainly no Euguene Debs...just pointing out that a good candidate surely would not be stopped by prison ;)

  • On the post: U.S. Appeals Court: Amazon Has To Go To Trial To See If Public Will Confuse Fire TV Streaming With Porn

    urza9814 ( profile ), 02 Jul, 2022 @ 04:46am

    Amazon sells porn...

    But Amazon DOES sell porn. Go to their site and do a search for 'xxx' and you'll find plenty. So maybe someone hasn't used Amazon for video before except to order some porn, because that's less embarrassing that buying it in person; or maybe they read a lot of erotica on their Kindle...no reason they wouldn't expect Amazon to reccomend porn to them for streaming video too. Seems like that's the only market Amazon is in where they DON'T sell porn. Why would anyone assume that to be the case if they don't have experience with it yet? I do agree that they're kinda shooting themselves in the foot by saying Netflix is in a different market though. And I don't see why they need to. Store brand Ibuprofin always says "Compare to Advil!" and they're clearly in the same market...how is "the Netflix of porn" any different?

  • On the post: Angry Joe Threatens To Sue CBS Over Continued DMCA Claims On ‘Halo’ TV Show Review Videos

    urza9814 ( profile ), 22 Apr, 2022 @ 05:45am

    Meanwhile, my favorite artist (Wrekonize) had his band get famous basically by going viral on YouTube, gets a lot of his money these days from Patreon, and is signed to Strange Music, a fairly mainstream label which, as far as I can tell, as absolutely zero affiliation with those RIAA scumbags. They sell a lot of music on Bandcamp too which generally seems pretty good (at least before the recent acquisition...we'll see how that turns out.) And he got his start by winning a contest on MTV about twenty years ago where the prize was a record contract...but he didn't agree to the terms and told the record company to go F- themselves. And he does not seem to have any regrets over that...he got picked up by someone else pretty quick, there's always another label. There are so many alternatives these days...from small creator cooperatives like Nebula pushing out some excellent exclusive (but admittedly lower budget) content to the big guys like Netflix and Hulu and a few hundred more traditional networks... It is surely possible to do the job that he does while telling asshats like CBS to go F- off. Problem is most people would rather have a Tesla than integrity...

  • On the post: Elon Musk Demonstrates How Little He Understands About Content Moderation

    urza9814 ( profile ), 15 Apr, 2022 @ 12:44pm

    I do route my outbound mail through the domain registrar's (Gandi.net) SMTP servers, as I know a lot of providers will drop anything originating at a "residential" IP address. That seems to work fine. Biggest issue I have is that I tend to use a lot of hyphens is the addresses and a lot of websites use idiotic email validation code that thinks hyphens are invalid, but I just email them with a link to the RFC and they always get it fixed. Even megacorps like Taco Bell understand that they do have to follow those things!

  • On the post: Elon Musk Demonstrates How Little He Understands About Content Moderation

    urza9814 ( profile ), 15 Apr, 2022 @ 12:01pm

    I have and have always had (since I set this up) six email accounts on one domain. I have many addresses. That does not require multiple accounts or multiple domains. These are all on my own domain, running off my own server which sits in my living room. It is not "information warfare" -- it takes exactly zero effort to create a new address, and to dump an address I just add it to a text file on my mail server -- something I've had to do exactly twice so far. The Patreon hack a couple years back was the big one, got a TON of spam coming through after that, but I dropped the address and gave them a different one and it all stopped again.

  • On the post: Elon Musk Demonstrates How Little He Understands About Content Moderation

    urza9814 ( profile ), 15 Apr, 2022 @ 11:25am

    Never use the same address twice, dump any that get leaked. :D

  • On the post: Antitrust Reformers Debate Partnering With Bigots To Take On ‘Big Tech’

    urza9814 ( profile ), 15 Apr, 2022 @ 11:21am

    Your problem is clearly that you refuse to acknowledge that there could ever be more than one way to solve a problem. Your demand that all of society must you YOUR preferred solution, even if others exist. If someone's mind does not match their body...you can change their mind, or you can change their body. We're not so great at that kind of precise brain manipulation, but we're pretty good at plastic surgery. Seems quite logical that some people would prefer to choose the latter option. These people aren't trying to deny reality; they're trying to correct it. That's what humans have done since we first evolved. Would you tell the guy who first learned to harness fire to stop denying the reality of human existance in his time? Go back to your cave.

  • On the post: Elon Musk Demonstrates How Little He Understands About Content Moderation

    urza9814 ( profile ), 15 Apr, 2022 @ 10:58am

    I've been running my own mail server for at least six years, and it has never had a spam filter. Have some discipline about who you give your email address to and you won't need one lol

  • On the post: Elon Musk Demonstrates How Little He Understands About Content Moderation

    urza9814 ( profile ), 15 Apr, 2022 @ 10:56am

    I don't think he's missed that at all, really. This guy founds new companies on a whim. If he really thought he could do better, he'd just do it. Surely he knows it would not be that difficult to replicate the platform itself. Wouldn't cost nearly as much as what it'll cost to buy it out. The only logical reason to buy Twitter is to buy the established audience. Their value is not in the platform, it's in the users. Of course, that just leaves us with a whole new set of questions. It is pointless to hypothesize about what he might want to do to the platform; those answers will ultimately be driven by what he wants to do with the users. And that, perhaps, is why his answers here make so little sense and seem so poorly thought out -- that's not the part he's actually spending time thinking about. Or perhaps he's just running a massive pump and dump scam -- promise to solve all Twitter's problems, get people more interested in it, drive the stock price up a bit, and then sell it all. He's already talking about selling it all. Brilliant strategy, he can suck money out of the investors and get them to blame Twitter for not being willing to destroy their platform for him!

  • On the post: Court Says City Of Baltimore's 'Heckler's Veto' Of An Anti-Catholic Rally Violates The First Amendment

    urza9814 ( profile ), 21 Oct, 2021 @ 05:23pm

    Re:

    I highly doubt Trump is capable of such an accurate assessment...

  • On the post: Texas Legislature Has Another Ridiculous And Unconstitutional Content Moderation Bill; Say Goodbye To Email Filters

    urza9814 ( profile ), 14 Aug, 2021 @ 08:43am

    Re: Re: IMPEDING ELECTRONIC MAIL MESSAGES PROHIBITED

    They do. Email also ought to be covered by the "right to petition for redress of grievances". But did they argue that the mailboxes should have infinite capacity or that it should be illegal to delete such messages or that they couldn't hire a third party service to listen to those messages?

  • On the post: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well: Series About Antisemitism Removed By Instagram For Being Antisemetic

    urza9814 ( profile ), 10 Aug, 2021 @ 03:02am

    Faulty premise

    The problem with this whole argument is it's all built upon what I think is likely a flawed premise that this removal was some kind of unintentional collateral damage. Given Face-tagram's history, I find that implausible.

    If you consider the possibility that the moderation guidelines aren't meant to promote "good" content or police hate speech or anything like that, but are instead designed primarily to reduce controversy, then this makes a lot more sense. They don't want to kick out or drive away the Nazis, that's bad for business! They also don't want to be investigated and questioned by cops and government officials. They want a bland, sanitized, advertiser-friendly network. They aren't doing this to push social progress, they're doing it so they can be the place where Nazis and Antifa alike can chat with grandma and wish their college roommate a happy birthday and never encounter anything that might make them too uncomfortable.

    Perhaps, with sufficient public outrage, they'll restore this video. Perhaps they'll decide the controversy of removing it is worse than the controversy of leaving it up. That still won't make them good people though...

  • On the post: Report Again Finds US Government IT Security Sucks, Three Years After Saying The Same Thing

    urza9814 ( profile ), 07 Aug, 2021 @ 07:49am

    Re: Re:

    If they ever bothered to seriously prosecute the negligent corporations that made systems with less security awareness than an average nine year old things would change real fast. But as long as breaches don't actually cost these companies anything at all it would be pretty illogical for them to spend the money for proper security... Next time a sensitive government system gets hacked through some unintentional back door or some undisclosed "support" account, fine them a couple million and give the CTO a year behind bars, it'll be the last time that ever happens.

  • On the post: Report Again Finds US Government IT Security Sucks, Three Years After Saying The Same Thing

    urza9814 ( profile ), 07 Aug, 2021 @ 07:19am

    Go after the negligence!

    Anyone else notice that when there's some massive hack caused by someone putting systems on the open internet with a password of 1234, they act like it's some natural disaster on act of terrorism instead of properly handling it as a simple act of corporate negligence! Security costs money, breaches currently do not.

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