The Wanderer 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Hollywood Chamber Of Commerce Trademark Bullies Kevin Smith's Podcast Over Hollywood Sign

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 20 Sep, 2018 @ 09:13am

    Re: Re:

    There's a Hollywood, Maryland, too; it's not far from California, Maryland. Both are in Saint Mary's County, in the south of the state.

  • On the post: Thanks To ISP Bahnhof, We Know Just How Crazy Copyright Trolling In Sweden Is Getting

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 20 Sep, 2018 @ 05:04am

    Re: Do couple and several mean something different in Swedish?

    Actually, by my reflexive interpretation, "a couple is two, "a few" is three or maybe four, and "several" is roughly four to seven.

    I'd be nearly as inclined to raise an eyebrow at the use of "several" to mean "three" as at the use of "a couple" to mean any number other than "two".

  • On the post: How Regulating Platforms' Content Moderation Means Regulating Speech – Even Yours.

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 19 Sep, 2018 @ 08:40am

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    Alternatively, people talk about "doing violence to the [English] language", or to particular words therein, by severe misuse or mispronunciation. I suppose that could be considered "verbal violence", at least when the words in question are verbs.

  • On the post: How Regulating Platforms' Content Moderation Means Regulating Speech – Even Yours.

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 19 Sep, 2018 @ 05:55am

    Re: Re: First Amendment caveats

    My first reaction to that line was "oh, someone just mixed up "libel" and "liable" again". On closer examination I'm not sure that makes any more sense than the other, but I'm not sure it makes less sense either.

  • On the post: Court: Trump's 'Get 'Em Out' Order Directed At Campaign Rally Protesters Is Protected Speech

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 18 Sep, 2018 @ 08:07pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

    Not addressing the rest of the situation (it's complicated, and while I disagree with your perspective on a lot of it, I think you're probably right in some important aspects), but "speaking to bouncers" is a very important distinction vs. "speaking to a large, riled-up, potentially-undisciplined crowd which is already inclined to be hostile to the people in question".

  • On the post: Qualified Immunity Contradicts Congressional Intent. It's Time To Kill It Off.

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 18 Sep, 2018 @ 05:10am

    Re: Re: Re: A decidedly one-sided concern

    True, but it's easier to fix the issue just for police officers than to do so for the public at large, especially when doing so by judicial precedent rather than by explicit legislation - and probably, for the case of police officers, actually less effective. So inertia kicks in, with a sauce of "something must be done, so we might as well do the thing that's easiest to do". And possibly of "the perfect is the enemy of the good", in the form of "fixing the general problem would be so hard that we probably couldn't get it done, especially against political opposition, so we should at least fix the smaller problem we can actually succeed at addressing" - disregarding the negative consequences of that smaller fix.

  • On the post: White House Potentially Exploring Executive Order On 'Social Media Bias'

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 18 Sep, 2018 @ 05:02am

    Re: Re:

    So you have not yet seen him claiming any of the things cited in the last paragreph of Stephen's last reply, above?

    that he alone invented modern email, that his work alone inspired the development of email, that ARPANET had nothing at all to do with creating email as we know it today

  • On the post: Qualified Immunity Contradicts Congressional Intent. It's Time To Kill It Off.

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 17 Sep, 2018 @ 08:23pm

    Re: A decidedly one-sided concern

    I think the idea is supposed to be "we need police officers, and if we permit lawsuits against them at the scale and with the frequency which would happen - even for good officers, who don't actually do anything wrong - without qualified immunity, there would be so much disincentive to become a police officer that we wouldn't have nearly as many officers as we need".

    With a few flavorings of the disincentives which already exist, in the form of "difficult, unpleasant, and dangerous job" et cetera.

  • On the post: White House Potentially Exploring Executive Order On 'Social Media Bias'

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 17 Sep, 2018 @ 08:13pm

    Re:

    We still have plenty of public lands on which people can gather and talk freely.
    This is true, but if those lands are not the places where a sufficiently large fraction of "everyone" hangs out, then - under the given premise and sort-of definition - they are not the public square. Please understand: I do recognize the problems which would accompany labeling a privately-owned platform as a public square, and I agree that they are serious and not to be taken lightly. However, I also recognize the problems which would accompany a disappearance of any effective venue for the types of public discussion which once took place in the more traditional public square. I am not convinced as to which set of problems would outweigh the other; it's even possible (or perhaps likely) that neither set of consequences is acceptable. I just don't have a third alternative which avoids both sets of problems. If you have one to propose - aside from declaring that the private platforms in question have not in fact overtaken the public square, implying or outright stating that they never will, and concluding that it's therefore not worth considering the proposition - I'd be very pleased to hear it. (I'm not happy about the aside in that last paragraph, because it assumes and/or implies things about your position and argument which may well not be true. I don't want to spend half an hour rewriting this comment over and over to come up with something I could be happy with, however, especially not at this hour of the evening.)

  • On the post: White House Potentially Exploring Executive Order On 'Social Media Bias'

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 17 Sep, 2018 @ 08:57am

    Re:

    To be fair, if all he were claiming was a case of independent invention - of something sufficiently close to qualify for the term - that might be legitimate; opinions may differ on how close it was, but the opinion that it was close enough might well be supportable.

    If he were going beyond that only as far as to claim to have come up with some aspects of modern E-mail before they were incorporated into the systems which gave us the RFCs underlying the modern E-mail system, that too could be legitimate (depending on the timing of various events, some of which I've forgotten).

    His claims don't seem to be limited to that type of independent-invention or first-to-invent, however.

    If I remember past articles (etc.) correctly, he seems to be claiming that the modern E-mail system is descended from his work - that he is the one, true original inventor of the system which evolved into what we use today.

    And there seems to be zero evidence to support that, and plenty of evidence A: that the modern E-mail system is descended from the work of others, who were not even aware of his work and did not draw on it in any way, and B: that his own work dead-ended and died out after not going very far at all from its origins.

    (I'm tempted to draw an analogy to the Wright Brothers, whose work was in some ways a dead end as far as heavier-than-air flight goes, but who are nonetheless famous for having invented the airplane. I'm not sure that analogy would really hold up, however, as their work does at least seem to have inspired those who developed the technology underlying modern flight - whereas those who developed the recorded ancestors of the modern E-mail system don't seem to have been aware of Shiva's work, much less inspired by it.)

  • On the post: EU Continues To Kill The Open Web: Massive Fines For Sites That Don't Censor Within An Hour

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 17 Sep, 2018 @ 06:12am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Americans flee internet fascism by moving to Europe

    I thought "judgment-proof" meant "completely broke / insolvent /etc., so couldn't pay a judgment anyway, and as a result imposing one would make zero difference". Some people certainly are that.

    Agreed otherwise, though.

  • On the post: White House Potentially Exploring Executive Order On 'Social Media Bias'

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 17 Sep, 2018 @ 04:49am

    Re:

    I think the argument would be that that latter point is itself a flaw, in that it means there is no "public square" in which people are free to speak. If I understand matters correctly, the term "public square" would be derived from relatively-ancient history; in a small village, the public square was the part of the village through which everyone in the area passed or in which everyone in the area hung out, and if you could post your signs or speak your opinions there everyone would see or hear them. By analogy to that, the modern public square must be the place where everyone (for sufficiently large values thereof) hangs out, to which some part of everyone's attention goes, et cetera. If the places where everyone hangs out are privately owned, and being privately owned is sufficient to disqualify a place from qualifying as a public square for purposes of speech protections, then there is no public square for those purposes anymore. And for the same reasons protecting speech in the public square was deemed worthwhile in the first place, that does, indeed, seem like it would be a problem.

  • On the post: Plagiarists Or Innovators? The Led Zeppelin Paradox Endures

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 16 Sep, 2018 @ 04:25am

    Re:

    I'm fairly sure there are people out there commenting as "John Smith" in order to impersonate the original person who got a reputation here under that name, and doing so specifically to troll both him and the rest of the site. Thing is, though, that the comments which appear as if they may be from such people tend to themselves be even more worthy of flagging than do the "legitimate" John Smith comments. That said, comments from the original guy do occasionally manage to be non-flag-worthy, and maybe even reasonable contributions to the discussion; I think I saw one like that this past week. So reflexively flagging based on the poster's (apparent) identity is still not the ideal way to approach things.

  • On the post: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile & Sprint Want Even Broader Access To Your Personal Data

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 16 Sep, 2018 @ 04:15am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: who cares

    Rouges are overpowdered.

  • On the post: Google Fights In EU Court Against Ability Of One Country To Censor The Global Internet

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 16 Sep, 2018 @ 04:10am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: First amendment

    If I'm reading that quote from the ruling correctly, blocking access from within France (or French jurisdiction) to the other TLDs (without removing the listings from under those other TLDs) would also seem to satisfy the requirement, although the VPN 'problem' would still apply. I agree that this does mean it's likely that they would make the "but VPNs" argument, and thus reach beyond the limits of their legitimate jurisdiction. I'm still not convinced that they're necessarily doing it yet, though.

  • On the post: Google Fights In EU Court Against Ability Of One Country To Censor The Global Internet

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 15 Sep, 2018 @ 05:05am

    Re: Re: Re: Re: First amendment

    But France is saying that since Google operates in France, then it must take down content that would be visible to anyone in the world if they say so, regardless of what any other country's laws say.
    Are you sure they're saying that? If I'm reading the articles correctly, they're not saying that Google has to take that content down entirely - just that it can't permit that content to be reachable by anyone in France (or, presumably, otherwise under French jurisdiction). That could be achieved juast as well by geoblocking France from accessing all Google domains except the ones where this content is filtered out, as by taking the content down entirely. Now, if Google were to do that, and people in France were to use VPNs to bypass that geoblocking, and the French authorities were to return to court and argue that - since Google should have known people would use VPNs to do that - Google's geoblocking measures were not sufficient to implement the required takedown, then the French authorities would indeed be demanding that the content be taken down globally. Or if the French authorities were to argue that "if someone outside France can access this, then someone in France can talk to that person, and can learn what is supposed to have been forgotten" (which is basically what VPN-based geoblocking bypassing does), then the same conclusion would apply. But based on my understanding of what they're actually demanding / arguing for at present, the assertion that they're trying to have Google take the material down worldwide seems unsupported.

  • On the post: Google Fights In EU Court Against Ability Of One Country To Censor The Global Internet

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 14 Sep, 2018 @ 03:31pm

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    I think the argument is that France is saying to Google "if you want to do business in France, then when a French court orders you to delist material, you have to delist it everywhere you control that can be accessed from within France - not just on the services which you intend to be used from within France". If someone within French jurisdiction can access a Google service which does not comply with the order, then Google is not in compliance with the order. The fact that people within French jurisdiction can access Google search sites which are not under the .fr domain means that simply removing the results from google.fr is not enough to comply with the order. That does not mean that France is claiming jurisdiction over Google's operations outside of France. It means that France is claiming that its jurisdiction over Google's operations within France extends to all Google services which can be accessed from within France, not just to ones which Google intends to be accessed from within France. The policy decision reflected by this claim is a bad one, certainly, for a wide variety of reasons. But it is not a claim of jurisdiction over Google's operations outside of France (and French territories, et cetera). It is merely a claim that the part of Google's operations which are effectively within France, for jurisdictional purposes, is not limited to the .fr domain.

  • On the post: United Airlines Made Its App Stop Working On My Phone, And What This Says About How Broken The Mobile Tech Space Is

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 11 Sep, 2018 @ 09:27am

    Re: Re: Old Versions

    Is the United app using HTML or CSS features that weren't present in the last supported version of Chrome for Android v4?
    Per conversation elsewhere in these comments, it's probably using TLS 1.2 or later, which wasn't (necessarily?) supported on 4.x Android versions. So not HTML or CSS features, but a HTTP(S) feature.

  • On the post: Court Shuts Down Feds' Attempt To Expand The 'Border Search' Exception To Cover Inland GPS Monitoring

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 10 Sep, 2018 @ 09:34am

    Re: Re:

    The thing is, as far as I can tell, nobody - not even the government in cases like this - is arguing that the Fourth Amendment does not apply at the border. Rather, they're arguing that any search pursuant to border enforcement is automatically reasonable - even in the absence of a warrant - and therefore falls within the category of searches which the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit. If you want to oppose their argument effectively, you need to attack that idea of automatic reasonableness, rather than a position for which no one seems to be actually arguing.

  • On the post: DHS Continues Facial Recognition Deployment With An Eye On Expanding Program To All Domestic Travelers

    The Wanderer ( profile ), 10 Sep, 2018 @ 08:13am

    Re: Re: Re: Re:

    To quote - or possibly slightly misquote - (IIRC) a famous sci-fi author:

    "Privacy is not about the right to break the law. It is about the right not to be watched every minute in the expectation that you might break the law."

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