Has the definition of harrassment and creating a hostile workplace culture broadened to include when the offensive activity in question is actively engaged in (through calmly / voluntarily reading a website) by the person who claims being harrassed or antagonized?
No, but the document's existence isn't the problem (I mean its Google, they have access to how many billions of questionable things from around the internet?) the problem is the hostile workplace culture -- the document only exposes the problem.
Does the person who claims being harrassed or feeling antagonized have complete free reign to define what constitutes this and is reasonable for someone to be fired over?
No. The managers, HR and other people in charge of staffing defines this. They may or may not agree with the complainant. In this case they did.
If all of the claims in the "manifesto" were true, does it change whether someone can legally be fired over it? (truth of course is hard to judge)
No. If the manifesto contained a single line "I think all women suck at computers!", it may well be entirely true (I might not agree with what you think, but that doesn't prevent you from thinking it.) But again, the document itself isn't the problem, even if its true -- its the underlying hostility behind the document that's the problem. For all I know the document may have some valid points buried in the misogynist bullshit and Google might affect changes in response to those points. But that still doesn't resolve the hostility problem that already exists.
No, this is assholes taking the conservative name because its sounds better than "the assholes" and "alt-right" has taken on a pretty negative tone recently, even in conservative media.
It must suck to be a decent conservative (or a Republican) these days. All of your valid arguments and viewpoints are grossly overshadowed by bullshit like this, Charlottesville, etc. "Women should stay in the kitchen" or "blacks should still be slaves" are just not really valid political viewpoints anywhere on the spectrum anymore.
Or at least they weren't before the US elected a president who wants to set the country back 200 years in terms of civil rights and basic human decency. It won't be long before China's calling the US out for human rights violations the way things are going.
Probably none. The sender's use of the service entails an acceptance of the EULA and therefore any email sent over their service either: a) grants Google the right to store, read and forward the email, or b) if its a document that would legally require both parties' waiver for Google to perform those tasks, then the liability is on the sender for not understanding how the hell email works, never mind what Google does with the email behind the scenes.
In both cases, Google has no liability when it comes to confidential documents -- if its truly confidential, then the onus is on you to find a more private mode of transmission.
The only way Google could potentially have liability is if you could show that a confidential email went to the wrong recipient due to an actual technical error on their end.
You could have it say, just scan if/when the user attempts to create a public share/link/whatever rather than immediately, and prevent the document from being shared if it doesn't pass muster rather than arbitrarily deleting it.
Of course that's probably still risky in other ways.. a criminal could store private documents on your server rather than his own PC and as long as he doesn't store knowledge of his account anywhere, authorities would never be able to find it (and on the other side, if you store it on your server unencrypted, your potentially opening yourself up to liability if a hacker gets in and starts siphoning peoples' files..)
No matter how they do it though, arbitrarily deleting document seems like a pretty bad practice to me. Even a small chance of false positive and purging say someone's irreplaceable baby pictures because they got marked as child porn seems a bit overkill to me.. the user should always be allowed the chance/opportunity to move the files elsewhere if you don't want to be hosting them (or better yet, prevented from uploading them in the first place, with appropriate notifications so they know what happened before hitting the delete button on their local copy.)
That's quite a ways down the conspiracy hole given that Snowden's release pretty much detailed the extent of the government's electronic spying -- including its limitations (well as of a couple years ago at least.) In particular, rather than setting up these "private" companies to do their bidding, they were having trouble convincing the companies to play ball, to the extent that they were essentially trying to do things like wiretap Google and suck up the data on its way to/from their servers.
At least that's what they want you to believe, amirite?
Pre-encrypt it. Then you get the benefits of cloud storage (much better persistence than your average hard drive, without having to invest in and maintain a full RAID yourself) without them being able to read it (assuming you encrypt it with a secure algorithm.)
Of course there's the downside of having to manually download and decrypt it any time you want to use the data. Nothing's ever easy!
I believe parent knew exactly how it worked, and that was his point: Once you put it on their servers, its no longer "your" data in the sense that you don't have any control over it (hell, even if your theoretical legal control isn't explicitly removed by the EULA, good luck enforcing your rights against the likes of Google.)
Google is collecting much more data than what users intentionally put into their systems
While technically true, most people aren't really all that concerned with tracking cookies. What they're concerned with is who will see it when they save a picture of their junk to Google Drive, or for a more corporate example, who for example has access to their payroll or even customer data.
And credit card history? I think we're all a little more concerned with Equifax than Google right now when it comes to that one. Not that I'd claim its impossible for us to hear of a Google hack tomorrow or next week or whatever, but Equifax has demonstrated basically no remorse over their hack(s!) and repeatedly demonstrated their lack of ability (and maybe even concern) to prevent future hacks.
Tracking is a fact of life. Its unfortunate and occasionally annoying, but there's very little you can do about it as you say. That's not really in the same category as knowing the actual documents that you're intentionally storing are secure.
The bits are your property. The arrangement of said bits is not your property. You can dislike the law as much as you want, and try to change it if you're really motivated. But just ignoring the law makes you a criminal as things currently stand.
Customers want "OMG Shiny and new! Show off time!"
That's not necessarily the same as what they need. Unfortunately people are dumb, as a species, and we tend to prioritize buying things we want over things we need. And manufacturers know that.
Yep you're correct. You can use that CD as a coaster and the box as a bookend as much as you want. If there's an offline component, you're completely free to continue using that as much as you please as well. You don't get to force EA to keep their servers up indefinitely. That's all purely in the realm of real property.
The IP/copyright part comes into play with regards to emulating EA's servers. If that was all it was, EA might not have much basis. But connecting to the emulated server required making and distributing modifications to the game, and that's getting into the no-no territory.
I mean maybe there's a chance that it could be ruled a fair use. But that would mean a legal battle against EA where even if EA looked like they might lose, they have the funds to simply draw it out until you go bankrupt and are forced to concede. And I'm not even sure its a good chance that you'd get a favorable ruling.
Not everyone is willing (or even able) to upend their entire lives and move to a probably-still-developing country purely for the sake of being able to infringe copyrights. Especially if they aren't making money from their infringement.
If you're waiting for market incentive, it'll be possibly centuries. There's just not much economic incentive to invest in space exploration. We only got to America because some guy with big dreams convinced a queen that he'd find a faster route to India. We only got to the moon in order to beat the Russians. We're only going to see Mars because one really smart guy with big dreams happened into enough money to fulfill those dreams, without any real guarantee of payback.
Historically speaking, major exploration has almost always been driven either by military needs, or by "some guy" who thinks he can do great things and manages to get enough money together to try. Its rarely driven by status-quo businesses and merchants who generally thrive better when the world isn't throwing big paradigm shifts at them.
Because there's such a shortage of FPS games out there.
If those 900,000 players wanted just "an FPS," they could simply buy the latest Battlefield or CoD, or if they want to get off the yearly-upgrade treadmill there's only a few dozen other FPS' with high popularity and probably hundreds nobody's ever heard of.
The point is that they want to play that specific game for whatever reason.
It definitely has a different connotation though. A "handsome" women tends to be thought of as attractive but with a stern appearance, and frequently older (late 30s up to middle age-ish.)
I mean you can technically call a guy "pretty" too, but it tends to have connotations of being feminized and frequently with homosexual overtones as well.
The word "attractive" generally works but doesn't give as strong a feeling as the other two words.
"Hot" is gender-neutral with the stronger feeling attached, but its a slang term and not really appropriate for more formal discussions (including writing, if we discount social media..)
We don't really have a gender-neutral adjective for attractiveness in English that conveys all the meaning you'd want without also inadvertently conveying some additional meanings that you don't intend.
Before claims of being above the law, we should probably find out who did it in the first place. I mean I'm sure there's a handful of most likely suspects around (namely, people with both access to the voting machine as well as ties to the Republican party) but suspicion is not evidence -- its possible that say, the wipe was done by an outside hacker if the machine happened to be plugged into the internet at the time. I don't know enough details to claim that it was or anything.. but these things need to be investigated.
Especially when the surrounding case involves the damned president -- throwing some maintenance guy or security guy under the bus for "negligence" and calling it a day isn't really sufficient in this instance.
There is a difference though: Its easier to ignore words than it is to ignore graphic imagery. Just like your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose, your freedom of speech ends when I start gagging. Your freedoms don't trump mine no matter how much you think they should.
FB and Reddit and other social media sites are not the new town square. In particular, they have liability (even if its just in the form of bad PR) when their sites are abused for distasteful purposes.
If you want a "social" media site that hosts hate speech and Nazi propaganda, you're perfectly free to go out and build one. Nobody's stopping you. The internet in general is the town square. Reddit is just the popular coffee house that happens to front the town square but still is perfectly within their rights to limit who comes in their doors.
Except for that little annoying factor called anonymity. Its not really useful for anyone to know that "GayHater328" is a Nazi unless you can link that alias to a person (or even to other aliases that they not want to be associated with that level of negative attitude.)
While true to some degree, there's a difference between
"Just fuckin' kill all those scummy Brits!"
vs
"Defeat the British army and liberate our colonies!"
Right off the top, the latter is specifically dedicated to attacking British soldiers not just any dude who happens to drink too much tea. But more to the point, the first is advocating violence purely for the sake of violence, while the latter is promoting violence for an actual purpose. You may or may not agree with the purpose, but fighting with a cause is generally considered more worthwhile than just being a jerk because you can.
That.. is a good number of decades away. We've only barely touched probes on a couple of comets within the solar system where we have a firm grasp of their location and how to get there. Trying to send a probe to an extra-solar object like this, especially with little or no warning, would be fairly ambitious to say the least.
Its not about not knowing -- we're well aware that crap is hurtling through space and its just a matter of time before something comes our direction. Its happened many, many times in the past including some quite recently (that meteor in Russia a few years ago, for example.)
What its about is being able to detect. If you believe NASA and friends, we have a pretty good detection network for objects more than a few km in size (that is, big enough to cause serious, wide-spread damage if there was a direct impact.) This object is estimated at only 400m -- big enough to perhaps cause localized, but probably not catastrophic damage and more importantly, its probably under the "must absolutely notice it" limit of our technology.
Now the fact that it didn't come from anywhere near the ecliptic plane.. not sure how much that affects our detection rate. I'm assuming we focus more on the ecliptic since most of the junk in our solar system orbits within a few degrees of that plane, but we've seen enough comets and asteroids and whatnot that I'm sure we have at least some full-sphere observations happening.
Slashdot Mirror
Has the definition of harrassment and creating a hostile workplace culture broadened to include when the offensive activity in question is actively engaged in (through calmly / voluntarily reading a website) by the person who claims being harrassed or antagonized?
No, but the document's existence isn't the problem (I mean its Google, they have access to how many billions of questionable things from around the internet?) the problem is the hostile workplace culture -- the document only exposes the problem.
Does the person who claims being harrassed or feeling antagonized have complete free reign to define what constitutes this and is reasonable for someone to be fired over?
No. The managers, HR and other people in charge of staffing defines this. They may or may not agree with the complainant. In this case they did.
If all of the claims in the "manifesto" were true, does it change whether someone can legally be fired over it? (truth of course is hard to judge)
No. If the manifesto contained a single line "I think all women suck at computers!", it may well be entirely true (I might not agree with what you think, but that doesn't prevent you from thinking it.) But again, the document itself isn't the problem, even if its true -- its the underlying hostility behind the document that's the problem. For all I know the document may have some valid points buried in the misogynist bullshit and Google might affect changes in response to those points. But that still doesn't resolve the hostility problem that already exists.
Which is why metamoderation is a thing. Of course that's just one step further down the potential rabbit hole..
No, this is assholes taking the conservative name because its sounds better than "the assholes" and "alt-right" has taken on a pretty negative tone recently, even in conservative media.
It must suck to be a decent conservative (or a Republican) these days. All of your valid arguments and viewpoints are grossly overshadowed by bullshit like this, Charlottesville, etc. "Women should stay in the kitchen" or "blacks should still be slaves" are just not really valid political viewpoints anywhere on the spectrum anymore.
Or at least they weren't before the US elected a president who wants to set the country back 200 years in terms of civil rights and basic human decency. It won't be long before China's calling the US out for human rights violations the way things are going.
Probably none. The sender's use of the service entails an acceptance of the EULA and therefore any email sent over their service either:
a) grants Google the right to store, read and forward the email, or
b) if its a document that would legally require both parties' waiver for Google to perform those tasks, then the liability is on the sender for not understanding how the hell email works, never mind what Google does with the email behind the scenes.
In both cases, Google has no liability when it comes to confidential documents -- if its truly confidential, then the onus is on you to find a more private mode of transmission.
The only way Google could potentially have liability is if you could show that a confidential email went to the wrong recipient due to an actual technical error on their end.
They can go read the newspapers instead.
They do that too, and many newspapers have taken issue with the practice.
You could have it say, just scan if/when the user attempts to create a public share/link/whatever rather than immediately, and prevent the document from being shared if it doesn't pass muster rather than arbitrarily deleting it.
Of course that's probably still risky in other ways.. a criminal could store private documents on your server rather than his own PC and as long as he doesn't store knowledge of his account anywhere, authorities would never be able to find it (and on the other side, if you store it on your server unencrypted, your potentially opening yourself up to liability if a hacker gets in and starts siphoning peoples' files..)
No matter how they do it though, arbitrarily deleting document seems like a pretty bad practice to me. Even a small chance of false positive and purging say someone's irreplaceable baby pictures because they got marked as child porn seems a bit overkill to me.. the user should always be allowed the chance/opportunity to move the files elsewhere if you don't want to be hosting them (or better yet, prevented from uploading them in the first place, with appropriate notifications so they know what happened before hitting the delete button on their local copy.)
That's quite a ways down the conspiracy hole given that Snowden's release pretty much detailed the extent of the government's electronic spying -- including its limitations (well as of a couple years ago at least.) In particular, rather than setting up these "private" companies to do their bidding, they were having trouble convincing the companies to play ball, to the extent that they were essentially trying to do things like wiretap Google and suck up the data on its way to/from their servers.
At least that's what they want you to believe, amirite?
Pre-encrypt it. Then you get the benefits of cloud storage (much better persistence than your average hard drive, without having to invest in and maintain a full RAID yourself) without them being able to read it (assuming you encrypt it with a secure algorithm.)
Of course there's the downside of having to manually download and decrypt it any time you want to use the data. Nothing's ever easy!
You don't really understand how it works, do you?
I believe parent knew exactly how it worked, and that was his point: Once you put it on their servers, its no longer "your" data in the sense that you don't have any control over it (hell, even if your theoretical legal control isn't explicitly removed by the EULA, good luck enforcing your rights against the likes of Google.)
Google is collecting much more data than what users intentionally put into their systems
While technically true, most people aren't really all that concerned with tracking cookies. What they're concerned with is who will see it when they save a picture of their junk to Google Drive, or for a more corporate example, who for example has access to their payroll or even customer data.
And credit card history? I think we're all a little more concerned with Equifax than Google right now when it comes to that one. Not that I'd claim its impossible for us to hear of a Google hack tomorrow or next week or whatever, but Equifax has demonstrated basically no remorse over their hack(s!) and repeatedly demonstrated their lack of ability (and maybe even concern) to prevent future hacks.
Tracking is a fact of life. Its unfortunate and occasionally annoying, but there's very little you can do about it as you say. That's not really in the same category as knowing the actual documents that you're intentionally storing are secure.
The bits are your property. The arrangement of said bits is not your property. You can dislike the law as much as you want, and try to change it if you're really motivated. But just ignoring the law makes you a criminal as things currently stand.
Customers want "OMG Shiny and new! Show off time!"
That's not necessarily the same as what they need. Unfortunately people are dumb, as a species, and we tend to prioritize buying things we want over things we need. And manufacturers know that.
what about the intellectual property rights of people who bought the game
How many congresscritters do they own? None? Thought so.
.. there's a lot of states with anti-sodomy laws. Of course they've been just about as effective as copyright laws.
Yep you're correct. You can use that CD as a coaster and the box as a bookend as much as you want. If there's an offline component, you're completely free to continue using that as much as you please as well. You don't get to force EA to keep their servers up indefinitely. That's all purely in the realm of real property.
The IP/copyright part comes into play with regards to emulating EA's servers. If that was all it was, EA might not have much basis. But connecting to the emulated server required making and distributing modifications to the game, and that's getting into the no-no territory.
I mean maybe there's a chance that it could be ruled a fair use. But that would mean a legal battle against EA where even if EA looked like they might lose, they have the funds to simply draw it out until you go bankrupt and are forced to concede. And I'm not even sure its a good chance that you'd get a favorable ruling.
Not everyone is willing (or even able) to upend their entire lives and move to a probably-still-developing country purely for the sake of being able to infringe copyrights. Especially if they aren't making money from their infringement.
If you're waiting for market incentive, it'll be possibly centuries. There's just not much economic incentive to invest in space exploration. We only got to America because some guy with big dreams convinced a queen that he'd find a faster route to India. We only got to the moon in order to beat the Russians. We're only going to see Mars because one really smart guy with big dreams happened into enough money to fulfill those dreams, without any real guarantee of payback.
Historically speaking, major exploration has almost always been driven either by military needs, or by "some guy" who thinks he can do great things and manages to get enough money together to try. Its rarely driven by status-quo businesses and merchants who generally thrive better when the world isn't throwing big paradigm shifts at them.
Because there's such a shortage of FPS games out there.
If those 900,000 players wanted just "an FPS," they could simply buy the latest Battlefield or CoD, or if they want to get off the yearly-upgrade treadmill there's only a few dozen other FPS' with high popularity and probably hundreds nobody's ever heard of.
The point is that they want to play that specific game for whatever reason.
It definitely has a different connotation though. A "handsome" women tends to be thought of as attractive but with a stern appearance, and frequently older (late 30s up to middle age-ish.)
I mean you can technically call a guy "pretty" too, but it tends to have connotations of being feminized and frequently with homosexual overtones as well.
The word "attractive" generally works but doesn't give as strong a feeling as the other two words.
"Hot" is gender-neutral with the stronger feeling attached, but its a slang term and not really appropriate for more formal discussions (including writing, if we discount social media..)
We don't really have a gender-neutral adjective for attractiveness in English that conveys all the meaning you'd want without also inadvertently conveying some additional meanings that you don't intend.
Before claims of being above the law, we should probably find out who did it in the first place. I mean I'm sure there's a handful of most likely suspects around (namely, people with both access to the voting machine as well as ties to the Republican party) but suspicion is not evidence -- its possible that say, the wipe was done by an outside hacker if the machine happened to be plugged into the internet at the time. I don't know enough details to claim that it was or anything.. but these things need to be investigated.
Especially when the surrounding case involves the damned president -- throwing some maintenance guy or security guy under the bus for "negligence" and calling it a day isn't really sufficient in this instance.
There is a difference though: Its easier to ignore words than it is to ignore graphic imagery. Just like your freedom to swing your fist ends at my nose, your freedom of speech ends when I start gagging. Your freedoms don't trump mine no matter how much you think they should.
FB and Reddit and other social media sites are not the new town square. In particular, they have liability (even if its just in the form of bad PR) when their sites are abused for distasteful purposes.
If you want a "social" media site that hosts hate speech and Nazi propaganda, you're perfectly free to go out and build one. Nobody's stopping you. The internet in general is the town square. Reddit is just the popular coffee house that happens to front the town square but still is perfectly within their rights to limit who comes in their doors.
Except for that little annoying factor called anonymity. Its not really useful for anyone to know that "GayHater328" is a Nazi unless you can link that alias to a person (or even to other aliases that they not want to be associated with that level of negative attitude.)
While true to some degree, there's a difference between
"Just fuckin' kill all those scummy Brits!"
vs
"Defeat the British army and liberate our colonies!"
Right off the top, the latter is specifically dedicated to attacking British soldiers not just any dude who happens to drink too much tea. But more to the point, the first is advocating violence purely for the sake of violence, while the latter is promoting violence for an actual purpose. You may or may not agree with the purpose, but fighting with a cause is generally considered more worthwhile than just being a jerk because you can.
That.. is a good number of decades away. We've only barely touched probes on a couple of comets within the solar system where we have a firm grasp of their location and how to get there. Trying to send a probe to an extra-solar object like this, especially with little or no warning, would be fairly ambitious to say the least.
Its not about not knowing -- we're well aware that crap is hurtling through space and its just a matter of time before something comes our direction. Its happened many, many times in the past including some quite recently (that meteor in Russia a few years ago, for example.)
What its about is being able to detect. If you believe NASA and friends, we have a pretty good detection network for objects more than a few km in size (that is, big enough to cause serious, wide-spread damage if there was a direct impact.) This object is estimated at only 400m -- big enough to perhaps cause localized, but probably not catastrophic damage and more importantly, its probably under the "must absolutely notice it" limit of our technology.
Now the fact that it didn't come from anywhere near the ecliptic plane.. not sure how much that affects our detection rate. I'm assuming we focus more on the ecliptic since most of the junk in our solar system orbits within a few degrees of that plane, but we've seen enough comets and asteroids and whatnot that I'm sure we have at least some full-sphere observations happening.