So, essentially they've managed to get themselves a completely one-sided law where if we infringe, they'll ruin our lives... and if they cheat and lie absolutely nothing happens.
Charming, the corporations have won, and have no penalty associated with their bad behavior.
Didn't I see a new story about hitmen taking Bitcoin recently?;-)
Somewhat surprised they still get away with it, and also somewhat surprised there hasn't been a rash of killings of *AA members and studio execs just to get them out of the gene pool.
I mean, I could have people over to my house and play music for them -- and I would be denying studio executives their huge compensation and causing the artists to have to eat their own feet in order to survive.
I could be really subversive and have people over to watch movies, and I would be robbing the studios blind.
My god, I need to go to my nearest Copyright Re-education facility and atone for my sins.
All I can say is it's a good thing we've got just and rational laws like the DMCA protecting us from people like me.
Of course, it then came out that at least one work was taken down by a WB employee, and that employee had done so on purpose, annoyed that JDownloader could help possible infringers download more quickly.
Isn't making a false statement under the DMCA essentially like perjury? And if it is, why isn't someone being charged criminally?
It's gotten to the point where these companies ignore the letter (and intent) of the law at will, and with no penalty.
If your computer system is identifying incorrect stuff, your computer system is faulty. If your humans are illegally issuing take downs for stuff you don't own, that's a criminal act.
And don't tell me it's a civil matter, because the *AAs have gotten enforcement of this ramped up to a federal crime.
To be followed by random Apple bashing, several forms of "can it run Linux", and a whole lot of people saying the entire concept of a tablet is stupid because they can't figure out why they'd have one.
Throw in some sideways swipes at Obamacare, a couple of digs at the Tea Party, and several references to the NSA (with appropriate defense and bashing of Snowden). One or two dalliances into the merits of capitalism, and a couple of vigorous defenses of Haskell, and a full on vi vs emacs flamewar.
And then you'll have pretty much summed up Slashdot these days.
If I drop a rock, it's always likely to fall to the Earth based on past observations.
However, in the event of Really Unusual Circumstances, it could go up. We can't conclusively say things will never go up, but we've seen a large enough sample to indicate that it most likely probably will travel down.;-)
The response email from LG implies the original author agreed to the access when he accepted the terms of service.
Which, quite likely, was in effect as soon as you opened the packaging, and before you got as far as even finding any piece of paper which spells out the terms of service (and which would have been 60 pages of legalese you're incapable of understanding).
And the retailers lately have begun to say you can't return certain things (unless they're defective) because of the software licenses.
So you're pretty much fucked either way unless you a) grill the retailer (who won't bloody well know or care, because they're lying salesmen), b) read the entirety of the license before you plug in the TV (possibly too late since you've opened the packaging, c) don't plug it into the network, or d) don't buy from these companies.
My guess is there is absolutely no way the consumer can know what they've agreed to until it's too late to decide if you wish to agree to it. In fact, they've gone to great lengths to ensure that before you can read the license you've already agreed to it.
Last time I went looking for something as simple as a flash manual switch to use as a flashlight, it took digging through multiple apps to finally find one that didn't want Internet access.
Indeed. My first steps after downloading a new app is to put the device into airplane mode and run it.
If it needs internet connection for something, it gets binned immediately. Especially for something which has no legitimate need for any network access (like a flashlight and most games).
So many of them start up and immediately want to go to an ad server.
What would yours have been? What would Kim Kardashian's have been? What would your mom do? What would Any Kaufman have done?
See, I'll say right up front -- I'm not qualified to be the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company. I can't speak for you, but I'll go out on a limb and say none of Kim Kardashian, your mom, nor Andy Kaufman would have been put in this role. So what we would have done is irrelevant.
Is Elop prepared to say that he's not qualified either? Because otherwise there's an expectation he might actually be supposed to have an idea of what he should have done, and a sound basis upon which to believe it would work (and wishful thinking isn't supposed to count here).
Instead it sounds like he went back to his roots as someone from Microsoft and decided that Windows is the cure for everything -- possibly to the detriment of the company and the shareholders.
but there is nothing staggering about a struggling company accepting a buyout from a company with a perceived strong market position.
No, but there's something fishy when a former Microsoft exec came in, gutted the company, made them entirely beholden to Microsoft, and then watched their market share collapse.
You couldn't construct a better tin-foil hat scenario than a corporate executive making the company ripe to be bought by his former employer.
To me, either Nokia was incompetently managed, leading to the eventual purchase by Microsoft -- or this was all part of someone's master plan to make this happen.
And if that person who either incompetently managed Nokia (or masterminded their demise) is a candidate to become the CEO of Microsoft... you have to ask why someone who is either incompetent or dishonest is being considered.
CEOs and executives don't seem to get selected for actually being able to do something, but who they know that can make back room deals. To me, Elop was an abysmal failure at the helm of Nokia, so WTF qualifies him to be at the helm of another?
So, according to their logic, if I came round and kicked their asses, then that's a matter between them and the shop I bought my shoes from?
In this analogy, it depends on the EULA of the shoes you bought.
What they're saying is "you bought this, and accepted the terms and conditions, if you didn't know that it's your problem and take it up with the retailer who didn't tell you about it".
So, if the EULA for the shoes says you're not allowed to come around and kick their asses, then it was the retailer who was supposed to have told you that. And your desire to go around and kick their asses with said shoes is trumped by the fact that you agreed to it.
To me it's a dodgy legal argument, but since courts keep upholding these licenses which in effect say "by using this device you give us the right to do anything we want to, and whatever we like with the data we collect" -- the legal bullshit says "but you consented to us tracking everything you do, it's not our fault".
So, if in this case the shoes you bought had license terms which said you consent to being tracked, or accept that you're not allowed to kick their asses with said footwear... then pretty much yes. Apparently it was up to the retailer to tell you what you've agreed to.
The advice we have been given is that unfortunately as you accepted the Terms and Conditions on your TV, your concerns would be best directed to the retailer. We understand you feel you should have been made aware of these T's and C's at the point of sale, and for obvious reasons LG are unable to pass comment on their actions.
So, once again, it's in the EULA and Terms and Conditions, so we can do any fucking thing we want.
Companies can cramp any opaque license in there they want, and you have no recourse.
Once a company gets a network connection to what you do, they're going to track it, analyze it, and try to figure out how to monetize it. And, if requested, they're going to hand it over to law enforcement.
And this is precisely why I have no interest in having my TV connected to the internet.
The easiest way to avoid stuff like this is to stop giving companies a window into everything you do. Because the reality is, they're going to exploit it whenever they can for their own benefit.
The majority of cops are good or try to do good. They fail because they won't say anything when they do see something wrong being done by other cops
Yes, and "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
If you could solve that problem I think the majority of issues people have with police would go away.
And tracking them with GPS and having them wear cameras would go a long way to achieving that.
If the options are good cops who won't say anything, or monitoring them all -- I'm in favor of monitoring them all. Because when the 'good' cops won't speak up in the case of malfeasance by other officers, they're part of the problem. And are essentially 'bad' cops at that point.
Police are civil servants, and paid for by our taxes. Why not have them completely accountable and visible all the time they are on the job?
And, since in private industry it has been repeatedly determined that you have no right to privacy while on the job, why is a police officer any different?
Nobody else gets to have their privacy respected while driving around in the company car.
Given that they can throw you in jail or shoot you, it's a much higher stakes game than if the delivery guy stops for lunch.
Sorry, but this is no different than what the rest of us have to live with.
The police are the ones who hold all of the power in an exchange with citizens; and there have certainly been cases where police have shot someone (or whatever), claimed it happened in a specific way -- and only when someone's cellphone video surfaces do we realize the cops were completely lying to us.
In fact, we often see that several officers conspired to give us a story to make themselves look better in the exchange. And then the review board reviews it and determines there was no bad behavior.
So, from a perspective of "who watches the watchers", I'm of the opinion that police, government, and agencies like the NSA need to be under really close scrutiny to prevent them from committing widespread abuses.
Us little people have far less recourse when it comes down to our word against theirs. Which means we need to be objectively verifying what they say and matching it with what really happened.
Unless you want to live in a world where the police can be as corrupt as they feel, and generally act like criminals and get away with it -- monitoring what your police officers are doing is far less intrusive on individual rights than just letting them do what they want.
Police can pretty much ruin your life (or take it in some cases). So the stakes of what they're doing is far higher, and needs to be held to a higher standard. And if it requires actively monitoring them to achieve that, then tough for the police.
Between cops who think they can confiscate your camera and delete the images, cops who file an incident report only to have amateur video show what really happened, the fact that they want to have warrantless wiretapping and GPS tracking, and generally a lot of bad behavior -- these days citizens have very little reason to trust cops.
Either the perception is they're outright lying to us, or that they're crooked and on the take, or just generally willing to abuse their authority.
I'm sure there are many good an honest cops. But there's also a fair few which seem anything but.
How often has there been an officer involved shooting, which eventually turns out to be a complete misuse of force which we never would have known about without something catching it on video to tell us what really happened?
I'm of the opinion cops should be absolutely tracked on GPS, and should also be wearing cameras to record their interactions with the public. And in a world where the government wants to spy on everything we do, I have no sympathy for police who want to be able to be off the record and leave it entirely to the story they tell us to define the truth.
Often these days one is left with the impression that there's enough cops who are just thugs with badges that you more or less have to assume we're better off by closely watching what they do instead of just taking them at face value.
Because there's been at least half a dozen news stories in the last few years where the police have been shown to be lying, and just circling the wagons to come up with the official story when they do something wrong.
Re:I want Sony to win only so that Microsoft loses
on
PlayStation 4 Released
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· Score: 2
To teach the industry that consumers wont accept being force fed content consumption models that require us to bend over and take it up the arse
I'm sorry, but I have seen nothing in the history of Sony and their behavior to believe you'll see anything different from Sony on this front.
Sony is a HUGE content provider, and is absolutely going to want to monetize everything they can. They're going to be trying very hard to lock you in, get you buying stuff from them, ensuring their DRM is enforced, and generally treating it like it's still their console and not yours.
For me, both of these consoles fall squarely in the "If they're not screwing you now, they will be soon" category.
I don't see Sony beating Microsoft in this generation of consoles being any better for consumers in the long run. In the end, they're all going to be trying to do the same thing.
I bought both the previous Xboxen myself, and I just stopped caring once the homepage advertisements crossed my threshold for tolerance
That was the point at which I decided that the internet connection wasn't benefiting me, but them. I just disconnected it from the network.
My XBox 360 is happily still working without an internet connection. But from the sounds of it both new consoles are still mostly going to demand an always-on connection (and if they're not at launch, they will I assume).
I'm more likely to buy a spare 360 at this point that consider either of the newer offerings from Sony or Microsoft.
I have no desire to play on-line, give these guys a marketing channel, or provide them with my usage data and a camera in my living room. If game consoles stop being something you can run completely off-line, well, I'll stop having game consoles.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I subsequently saw posts to that effect.
So, essentially they've managed to get themselves a completely one-sided law where if we infringe, they'll ruin our lives ... and if they cheat and lie absolutely nothing happens.
Charming, the corporations have won, and have no penalty associated with their bad behavior.
Didn't I see a new story about hitmen taking Bitcoin recently? ;-)
Somewhat surprised they still get away with it, and also somewhat surprised there hasn't been a rash of killings of *AA members and studio execs just to get them out of the gene pool.
I know, right?
I mean, I could have people over to my house and play music for them -- and I would be denying studio executives their huge compensation and causing the artists to have to eat their own feet in order to survive.
I could be really subversive and have people over to watch movies, and I would be robbing the studios blind.
My god, I need to go to my nearest Copyright Re-education facility and atone for my sins.
All I can say is it's a good thing we've got just and rational laws like the DMCA protecting us from people like me.
Isn't making a false statement under the DMCA essentially like perjury? And if it is, why isn't someone being charged criminally?
It's gotten to the point where these companies ignore the letter (and intent) of the law at will, and with no penalty.
If your computer system is identifying incorrect stuff, your computer system is faulty. If your humans are illegally issuing take downs for stuff you don't own, that's a criminal act.
And don't tell me it's a civil matter, because the *AAs have gotten enforcement of this ramped up to a federal crime.
Wait, it spies on my 'unit' now? ;-)
To be followed by random Apple bashing, several forms of "can it run Linux", and a whole lot of people saying the entire concept of a tablet is stupid because they can't figure out why they'd have one.
Throw in some sideways swipes at Obamacare, a couple of digs at the Tea Party, and several references to the NSA (with appropriate defense and bashing of Snowden). One or two dalliances into the merits of capitalism, and a couple of vigorous defenses of Haskell, and a full on vi vs emacs flamewar.
And then you'll have pretty much summed up Slashdot these days.
Not really.
If I drop a rock, it's always likely to fall to the Earth based on past observations.
However, in the event of Really Unusual Circumstances, it could go up. We can't conclusively say things will never go up, but we've seen a large enough sample to indicate that it most likely probably will travel down. ;-)
I do not disagree with you. Not even a little.
Except, of course, when the government decides they don't care about the privacy legislation and ignore it.
Domestic spying in Canada likely runs afoul of privacy legislation too. And the answer is likely to be "too bloody bad".
Which, quite likely, was in effect as soon as you opened the packaging, and before you got as far as even finding any piece of paper which spells out the terms of service (and which would have been 60 pages of legalese you're incapable of understanding).
And the retailers lately have begun to say you can't return certain things (unless they're defective) because of the software licenses.
So you're pretty much fucked either way unless you a) grill the retailer (who won't bloody well know or care, because they're lying salesmen), b) read the entirety of the license before you plug in the TV (possibly too late since you've opened the packaging, c) don't plug it into the network, or d) don't buy from these companies.
My guess is there is absolutely no way the consumer can know what they've agreed to until it's too late to decide if you wish to agree to it. In fact, they've gone to great lengths to ensure that before you can read the license you've already agreed to it.
Indeed. My first steps after downloading a new app is to put the device into airplane mode and run it.
If it needs internet connection for something, it gets binned immediately. Especially for something which has no legitimate need for any network access (like a flashlight and most games).
So many of them start up and immediately want to go to an ad server.
What would yours have been? What would Kim Kardashian's have been? What would your mom do? What would Any Kaufman have done?
See, I'll say right up front -- I'm not qualified to be the CEO of a multi-billion dollar company. I can't speak for you, but I'll go out on a limb and say none of Kim Kardashian, your mom, nor Andy Kaufman would have been put in this role. So what we would have done is irrelevant.
Is Elop prepared to say that he's not qualified either? Because otherwise there's an expectation he might actually be supposed to have an idea of what he should have done, and a sound basis upon which to believe it would work (and wishful thinking isn't supposed to count here).
Instead it sounds like he went back to his roots as someone from Microsoft and decided that Windows is the cure for everything -- possibly to the detriment of the company and the shareholders.
No, but there's something fishy when a former Microsoft exec came in, gutted the company, made them entirely beholden to Microsoft, and then watched their market share collapse.
You couldn't construct a better tin-foil hat scenario than a corporate executive making the company ripe to be bought by his former employer.
To me, either Nokia was incompetently managed, leading to the eventual purchase by Microsoft -- or this was all part of someone's master plan to make this happen.
And if that person who either incompetently managed Nokia (or masterminded their demise) is a candidate to become the CEO of Microsoft ... you have to ask why someone who is either incompetent or dishonest is being considered.
CEOs and executives don't seem to get selected for actually being able to do something, but who they know that can make back room deals. To me, Elop was an abysmal failure at the helm of Nokia, so WTF qualifies him to be at the helm of another?
In this analogy, it depends on the EULA of the shoes you bought.
What they're saying is "you bought this, and accepted the terms and conditions, if you didn't know that it's your problem and take it up with the retailer who didn't tell you about it".
So, if the EULA for the shoes says you're not allowed to come around and kick their asses, then it was the retailer who was supposed to have told you that. And your desire to go around and kick their asses with said shoes is trumped by the fact that you agreed to it.
To me it's a dodgy legal argument, but since courts keep upholding these licenses which in effect say "by using this device you give us the right to do anything we want to, and whatever we like with the data we collect" -- the legal bullshit says "but you consented to us tracking everything you do, it's not our fault".
So, if in this case the shoes you bought had license terms which said you consent to being tracked, or accept that you're not allowed to kick their asses with said footwear ... then pretty much yes. Apparently it was up to the retailer to tell you what you've agreed to.
I love this lovely bit of weaseling:
So, once again, it's in the EULA and Terms and Conditions, so we can do any fucking thing we want.
Companies can cramp any opaque license in there they want, and you have no recourse.
Fuck LG.
That I can think of off the top of my head probably would have been more accurate.
And your ISP, Netflix, and a half a dozen entities in the middle still know exactly what you're doing.
You've avoided ads, but you've not gained any additional privacy.
I think nobody should be surprised.
Once a company gets a network connection to what you do, they're going to track it, analyze it, and try to figure out how to monetize it. And, if requested, they're going to hand it over to law enforcement.
And this is precisely why I have no interest in having my TV connected to the internet.
The easiest way to avoid stuff like this is to stop giving companies a window into everything you do. Because the reality is, they're going to exploit it whenever they can for their own benefit.
Yes, and "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
And tracking them with GPS and having them wear cameras would go a long way to achieving that.
If the options are good cops who won't say anything, or monitoring them all -- I'm in favor of monitoring them all. Because when the 'good' cops won't speak up in the case of malfeasance by other officers, they're part of the problem. And are essentially 'bad' cops at that point.
And, since in private industry it has been repeatedly determined that you have no right to privacy while on the job, why is a police officer any different?
Nobody else gets to have their privacy respected while driving around in the company car.
Given that they can throw you in jail or shoot you, it's a much higher stakes game than if the delivery guy stops for lunch.
Sorry, but this is no different than what the rest of us have to live with.
Well, to me it comes down to "trust, but verify".
The police are the ones who hold all of the power in an exchange with citizens; and there have certainly been cases where police have shot someone (or whatever), claimed it happened in a specific way -- and only when someone's cellphone video surfaces do we realize the cops were completely lying to us.
In fact, we often see that several officers conspired to give us a story to make themselves look better in the exchange. And then the review board reviews it and determines there was no bad behavior.
So, from a perspective of "who watches the watchers", I'm of the opinion that police, government, and agencies like the NSA need to be under really close scrutiny to prevent them from committing widespread abuses.
Us little people have far less recourse when it comes down to our word against theirs. Which means we need to be objectively verifying what they say and matching it with what really happened.
Unless you want to live in a world where the police can be as corrupt as they feel, and generally act like criminals and get away with it -- monitoring what your police officers are doing is far less intrusive on individual rights than just letting them do what they want.
Police can pretty much ruin your life (or take it in some cases). So the stakes of what they're doing is far higher, and needs to be held to a higher standard. And if it requires actively monitoring them to achieve that, then tough for the police.
Plain and simple.
Between cops who think they can confiscate your camera and delete the images, cops who file an incident report only to have amateur video show what really happened, the fact that they want to have warrantless wiretapping and GPS tracking, and generally a lot of bad behavior -- these days citizens have very little reason to trust cops.
Either the perception is they're outright lying to us, or that they're crooked and on the take, or just generally willing to abuse their authority.
I'm sure there are many good an honest cops. But there's also a fair few which seem anything but.
How often has there been an officer involved shooting, which eventually turns out to be a complete misuse of force which we never would have known about without something catching it on video to tell us what really happened?
I'm of the opinion cops should be absolutely tracked on GPS, and should also be wearing cameras to record their interactions with the public. And in a world where the government wants to spy on everything we do, I have no sympathy for police who want to be able to be off the record and leave it entirely to the story they tell us to define the truth.
Often these days one is left with the impression that there's enough cops who are just thugs with badges that you more or less have to assume we're better off by closely watching what they do instead of just taking them at face value.
Because there's been at least half a dozen news stories in the last few years where the police have been shown to be lying, and just circling the wagons to come up with the official story when they do something wrong.
I'm sorry, but I have seen nothing in the history of Sony and their behavior to believe you'll see anything different from Sony on this front.
Sony is a HUGE content provider, and is absolutely going to want to monetize everything they can. They're going to be trying very hard to lock you in, get you buying stuff from them, ensuring their DRM is enforced, and generally treating it like it's still their console and not yours.
For me, both of these consoles fall squarely in the "If they're not screwing you now, they will be soon" category.
I don't see Sony beating Microsoft in this generation of consoles being any better for consumers in the long run. In the end, they're all going to be trying to do the same thing.
That was the point at which I decided that the internet connection wasn't benefiting me, but them. I just disconnected it from the network.
My XBox 360 is happily still working without an internet connection. But from the sounds of it both new consoles are still mostly going to demand an always-on connection (and if they're not at launch, they will I assume).
I'm more likely to buy a spare 360 at this point that consider either of the newer offerings from Sony or Microsoft.
I have no desire to play on-line, give these guys a marketing channel, or provide them with my usage data and a camera in my living room. If game consoles stop being something you can run completely off-line, well, I'll stop having game consoles.
No need, since you've installed the client on your machine they likely have direct access to your keystrokes and can already send them.
You really think Microsoft couldn't easily build this into the Skype client and remotely enable it upon request?