urza9814 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (301) comment rss

  • On the post: Supreme Court Asked To Tell Cops That Consenting To A Search Is Not Consenting To Having Your Home Destroyed

    urza9814 ( profile ), 28 Jan, 2020 @ 09:59am

    Re:

    Zero tolerance for complaints.

  • On the post: The 'Race To 5G' Is A Giant Pile Of Lobbyist Nonsense

    urza9814 ( profile ), 28 Jan, 2020 @ 06:43am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    I have software that worked perfectly fine on Windows 7 that won't run on 10, but you people think stuff from the XP era is the problem?? These days most of my Windows apps run better on Linux with Wine than any recent version of Windows...and since the days of XP I still have not seen a single piece of software that can actually be fixed with a Microsoft compatibility tool. Those things are a joke.

  • On the post: Stop Blaming Algorithms For Misinformation And Threats To Democracy; The Real Problem Is Societal

    urza9814 ( profile ), 28 Jan, 2020 @ 12:41pm

    The obvious question

    I'm a bit curious about the methodology here and what precisely they're looking at.

    Facebook's algorithm is obviously tuned to provide whatever will keep you on Facebook. That's profitable for them. In a sense, that's giving you what you want. But what you want in order to keep browsing Facebook is not necessarily the same as what you want in life in general. Someone with a strong enough compulsion to try to correct idiots will stay on Facebook forever if you keep feeding them posts from idiots, but that probably isn't actually how they want to spend the rest of their life. If you start from an assumption that what people want is exactly what they click and spend time viewing, then you're already measuring it wrong.

    So, are the studies mentioned measuring what content people actually desire to consume, or are they measuring what content will keep people tethered to their current activity? I don't think these are the same thing, and if they're measuring the same (incorrect) value that social media optimizes for, then obviously their research would indicate that social media isn't the issue.

    People can have conflicting desires. People like to be lazy; people also like the sense of fulfillment that comes from being productive. People like to eat double bacon cheeseburgers but also want to be fit and healthy. These things don't have to create desires out of nothing in order to be harmful; they can do plenty of damage simply by amplifying the parts of yourself that you'd rather suppress.

    That's not to say I'm in favor of banning social media or anything, although that IS why I haven't really touched it myself in 2-3 years. In my ideal world, we'd all be using diaspora* or something, and could experiment a lot more in terms of what truly makes a good social networking platform. But if we're going to stick with these monopolistic walled gardens, there does need to be some regulation. They're looking very much like a drug to me right now, so maybe we ought to regulate them as one. Not Schedule I -- nothing should be regulated like Schedule I -- but maybe more like Advil.

  • On the post: Comcast Says It Will Respond To Cord Cutting In 2020 With…More Price Hikes

    urza9814 ( profile ), 24 Jan, 2020 @ 12:05pm

    Re: Re: The price isn't necessarily the problem

    "you think cord cutting is due to a bad experience?"
    You don't have cable - right? It's absolutely about the experience. Getting buried in boxes (each with its own rental fee!) when all you want to watch are the local channels; equipment failures every few months because when they replace a defective device for one customer, they just shuffle it to another; indecipherable bills with fees on top of fees on top of fees; spending hours and hours on hold, day after day, week after week, just to get the service you're paying for; having to cancel and resubscribe every few years or your bill goes through the roof....even when it's about price, it's as much about the pricing tactics as it is about the actual dollar amount. I have heard people talking about cutting the cord say some variation of the phrase "I don't mind paying for it, but I just don't want to deal with them anymore" nearly every time.

  • On the post: Comcast Says It Will Respond To Cord Cutting In 2020 With…More Price Hikes

    urza9814 ( profile ), 24 Jan, 2020 @ 08:38am

    Re:

    "And here's the thing, I like the service I get through Comcast, even if there is no viable alternative. When I cancelled my Cable TV I actually increased the speed on my internet to their gigabit service." They're fine, as long as it works. When something breaks, they won't do a thing for you though. My parents had Comcast a few years ago before they moved. One day, the internet went out. Called support, they said they didn't see any problems, and a few hours later the connection came back. The next day...the same thing happened. Day after day, for months on end, around 5pm the internet went down, and around 9pm it came back on. Finally after dozens of calls to tech support, months of back and forth with them insisting there was no issue, we finally get a tech who decides to do his freakin' job -- he looks up some log file, and says "Oh yeah, I can see in the logs that you're dropping off the network at almost the exact same time every day. That's pretty odd." Eventually scheduled a service visit to replace the modem and everything was fine. Took three months before we could convince them to actually do that though. When the tech arrived he told us that this was apparently a class of issue that was well known -- they claimed a neighbor was likely stealing cable, and the unsupported equipment was causing the signal strength to drop below what the original modem could use whenever the neighbor turned their TV on. But it literally took MONTHS to convince them that we weren't lying about the connection dying EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. and for them to just check their own logs to confirm it. And of course we got no compensation at all for the service being down during prime hours every day for months. Still had to pay full price for that garbage.

  • On the post: Comcast Says It Will Respond To Cord Cutting In 2020 With…More Price Hikes

    urza9814 ( profile ), 24 Jan, 2020 @ 08:25am

    Re:

    $250/month??? I have never heard of a cable bill that high. My internet bill is closer to $50/month for 75megabit symmetric fiber here in RI. I think my parents pay close to $100/month for satellite TV and internet out in the middle of nowhere where satellite is the only option...

  • On the post: As We Get Closer And Closer To The EU Requiring ContentID Everywhere, More Abuses Of ContentID Exposed

    urza9814 ( profile ), 24 Jan, 2020 @ 08:14am

    Re: Re:

    "I think it's a question of when, not if, someone builds a full youtube clone into a torrent client like tribler. At which point we'll get the full shitshow where we have to wade through tons of nazi propaganda and alt-right rhetoric without even sensible moderation or relevance filtering applied just so we can get to our silly cat videos..." So...LBRY?

  • On the post: Traditional TV Enters Its Final Death Spiral

    urza9814 ( profile ), 23 Jan, 2020 @ 11:53am

    Re:

    Yeah, there's one or two series that I still keep up with (The Expanse being the main one) but 99% of what I watch is probably YouTube and spinoffs (ie, Nebula, Floatplane, Patreon pages, LBRY...stuff I found through YT but now watch elsewhere). There's more stuff that I'd like to watch posted in a day than I could ever hope to actually watch. Nothing's ever out of date, nothing is ever a re-run, and when I DO tune in to something that's already halfway over (because for some odd reason, YouTube does that a lot lately), I can rewind and start where I want. The only thing that really annoys the crap out of me is these people who still try to do live shows and scheduled premieres and stuff...just post the freakin' video and let me watch it when I want. Nothing worse than getting a notification for a live feed that looks great, only to realize it started nearly an hour ago and you'll have to wait for the recording if you actually want to have a clue what's going on anyway. But then you can't tell when it's actually been posted because YT won't give another notification if you dismiss the first one, but the first one will still say it's "live" even two days later...I just wish at least one of these other services could figure out playlists and feeds

  • On the post: Traditional TV Enters Its Final Death Spiral

    urza9814 ( profile ), 23 Jan, 2020 @ 10:39am

    Re: Re:

    And yet they're still here getting SSL certs all the time...so how well did that work out? ;)

  • On the post: Researchers Scientifically Create Video Games To Benefit Cognitive Function

    urza9814 ( profile ), 23 Jan, 2020 @ 08:32am

    Re: If I might make a few suggestions

    I strongly believe that you misunderstand which "body of knowledge" the dictionaries are referring to. "This video game improves your memory" isn't part of the body of knowledge that is science. Rather, that body of knowledge contains things like "After playing this video game for m minutes, this research team observed a decrease of t seconds in performing task x for y% of subjects tested." The conclusions drawn from the study are not facts, they are not proven, they are not science. They are interpretations of science. If you want to get REALLY pedantic, I would argue that science ultimately only says that these researchers CLAIMED those results, since you can't necessarily be certain that they performed the study exactly as claimed. Science doesn't say things like "video games improve your memory". At best, science indicates these things, within some statistical probability. This does matter. You hear it all the time -- "Science used to say X, now it says Y", often used as a justification to ignore some inconvenient research or discovery. But the truth is that science never said X or Y, the evidence pointed towards X, then we got new evidence that started to point towards Y. Or the people interpreting the science originally screwed up. But the body of knowledge that is science itself never changed. People see it as a complete reversal of a proven fact rather than an increasingly nuanced picture, because someone told them it was a "fact" proven by "science" when it wasn't.

  • On the post: Uber Wins Dubious Honor Of Being First Big Tech Company To Bully A Small Nation Using Corporate Sovereignty

    urza9814 ( profile ), 17 Jan, 2020 @ 01:44pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    If the elected officials are so eager to screw over their constituents that they'll actually agree to something like that, then do the specific details of the implementation really matter all that much?

  • On the post: Bad Ideas: Raising The Arbitrary Age Of Internet Service 'Consent' To 16

    urza9814 ( profile ), 17 Jan, 2020 @ 11:26am

    Re: Re: Re:

    "Yes indeed, stupid, uneducated voters do make democracy look bad, and authoritarian dictatorships look like sane and sober leadership. Until the Government goons come for them." Government goons vs extrajudicial black sites and drone strikes...I'm not seeing much of a difference on that aspect either.

  • On the post: Bad Ideas: Raising The Arbitrary Age Of Internet Service 'Consent' To 16

    urza9814 ( profile ), 17 Jan, 2020 @ 11:15am

    Re: Re: Re:

    "some do still exist." [citation needed] The current oldest known living person was born in 1903 (Kane Tanaka). I suppose there could theoretically be someone several years older still out there playing games on Steam, but the odds are pretty freakin slim. :)

  • On the post: Study Shows The Internet Is Hugely Vulnerable To SIM Hijacking Attacks

    urza9814 ( profile ), 17 Jan, 2020 @ 11:03am

    Re:

    As mentioned above, some carriers at least DO already offer such protection...but it doesn't work. The attack already relies on social engineering the call center employees to disregard policy. If you can't get them to obey the existing security policies, what are the odds that they'll obey that one?

  • On the post: Study Shows The Internet Is Hugely Vulnerable To SIM Hijacking Attacks

    urza9814 ( profile ), 17 Jan, 2020 @ 10:59am

    Re: Re:

    The title is fairly accurate IMO, as the attack relies on number portability. The FCC requires providers to allow wireless numbers to be portable, but they are not required to allow you to transfer a landline number, and many carriers just won't do it. Since you're far less likely to be able to port a landline number, it's far less likely that this kind of attack would succeed.

  • On the post: Judge Says Chicago PD Must Release Nearly 50 Years Of Misconduct Files Before The End Of This Year

    urza9814 ( profile ), 17 Jan, 2020 @ 07:59am

    Re: Re: Expense

    They're still going to have experts examining each file, just to make sure they're redacting every single word that they can possibly justify redacting. Not that they're entirely wrong to do that either though -- the law does have some exemptions, and there must be reasons why those exist.

  • On the post: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: YouTube Says That Frank Capra's US Government WWII Propaganda Violates Community Guidelines

    urza9814 ( profile ), 17 Jan, 2020 @ 06:43am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    As I'm pretty sure I've already answered that concern, I think you are the one who is not understanding. The problem is absolutely about logistics. I don't care what policies they implement and have their moderators enforce; I care that they actually enforce some concrete policy instead of just taking stuff down essentially at random.

  • On the post: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: YouTube Says That Frank Capra's US Government WWII Propaganda Violates Community Guidelines

    urza9814 ( profile ), 17 Jan, 2020 @ 06:40am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    My citation is the math in my previous comment. And yeah, any site that's going to put in moderation rules needs to have some effective way of actually enforcing those rules. I do use some YouTube competitors, and I pay a monthly fee for the privilege, and they have none of these issues. Floatplane doesn't have this problem; Nebula doesn't have this problem...largely because they've designed a business model from the ground up to avoid those costs.

  • On the post: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: YouTube Says That Frank Capra's US Government WWII Propaganda Violates Community Guidelines

    urza9814 ( profile ), 17 Jan, 2020 @ 06:12am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    I never said it was easy. You act like I said they should just hire ten thousand people by noon today. Of course it's going to take a long time. The point is that they make these massive profits by refusing to hire enough staff to actually get the job done properly. It's not that they can't afford to do it, it's not that it's "impossible", they just don't want to make the investment. And of course they don't, because they're ALREADY essentially in a monopoly position for streaming user content, so they have no real incentive to make their service fair or effective.

  • On the post: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible: YouTube Says That Frank Capra's US Government WWII Propaganda Violates Community Guidelines

    urza9814 ( profile ), 17 Jan, 2020 @ 06:08am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    Yeah, it's easy to make things sound ridiculous when you cut out all of the evidence to show that it can actually be done. Sure, they've been spending many years refusing the hire sufficient staff to get the job done. They have a lot of catching up to do. But they do have enough profits to do it, if they actually tried.

Next >>