See the DMCA was written in such a way as to shield the people filing the requests. When they wrote the law (and, yes, it was corporate lobbyists who wrote it) they gave themselves a get out of jail free card... so while they are effectively making a sworn statement, all they have to do is say they genuinely believed it was infringing and all is forgiven.
The DMCA is badly written because it was designed to let corporations do anything they want without consequences.
Talking about adding a voluntary system whereby they are held to some level of accountability? Not gonna happen.
Because the people who were on the corporate payroll to pass the laws in the first place only care about what the corporations have told them to do.
Welcome to a world in which governments are basically working to advance corporate interests above all else.
Crap like this is kind of the inevitable outcome of that, and the copyright lobby have bought themselves the keys to the kingdom.
This is what happens when you let industry write your damned laws.
The DMCA was written in such a way as to basically leave a wide trail for companies to totally abuse and misuse it. Because this was the law they bought and paid for to ensure they could do anything they wanted without penalty.
All of these issues were pointed out at the time, and the law got passed anyway, because these days the lawmakers are all beholden to industry and don't give a damn how badly the law has been written.
But nobody at all should be surprised at this crap. Because it is pretty much by design -- they can do almost anything they want with no real accountability. All they have to do is claim incompetence and they're magically forgiven.
It's a broken, lop-sided law which gave the copyright lobby the ability to threaten and intimidate as they see fit.
But don't think for a minute this was by accident. The DMCA is one of the most industry friendly laws in existence, and completely failed to hold them to any standard of accountability.
This is what happens when your legal system becomes co-opted to favor corporate interests above all else.
You know, denying Facebook the standing to challenge the constitutionality of warrants on behalf of its users is a really bad precedent.
This means that the court didn't allow the constitutionality of the warrants to be considered, and instead of having the ability to have blanket protections based on "you're not allowed to do that", now it's a "serve unconstitutional warrant now and let each affected party resolve this later".
Basically this gives the government the ability to use general warrants, or otherwise specious legal arguments to claim any old damned thing... and Facebook (and now nobody else) can say "hey, wait a minute, you can't do that".
This isn't corporations running rampant over the law, this is the law running rampant over your rights and then leaving you on the hook to fix it later. It's a shoot first and ask questions later interpretation where even if law enforcement comes in with a blatantly illegal search warrant Facebook and others can't challenge it.
This is a terrible fucking idea, especially since law enforcement has increasingly decided they don't really give a damn about the constitutionality of anything they do.
Do you want to live in a society in which the government gets to break the law first and then leave it up to individual defense lawyers to resolve that?
A glitch in the beta software misinterpreted the words I spoke. 'It's nice to talk to you' was translated as 'It's f*cking nice to f*ck you,' and other synthesized profanity
I refuse to believe someone didn't do that on purpose.
Honestly, reading the thread... you posted something, got modded down, whined about it, and then got told to stop whining about it, and now you're acting like some outraged fool.
Boo hoo, you got modded down on the intertubes. It's not some horrible tragedy, and your continuing to keep bitching about it makes you sound like a child.
Seriously, grow a pair and stop whining about how tragic it is you got moderated down and then told to stop whining about it.
Is that fucking clear enough? Or do you need a timeout so you can stop acting like a spoiled brat?
Because it's way too damned annoying to see people whining about the injustices of the moderation system, because it tells us you haven't got a clue that it's a bunch of random monkeys banging on keys.
They're using the rare and debilitating disease as a basis to develop treatment for other conditions... the people with the rare and debilitating disease? Not profitable enough to cure.
They're researching how to take someone's illness, leave them untreated, and then use that information to treat someone else.
And, I'm sorry, but this is big pharma, which means they'll patent anything they discover and prevent people from actually working on cures for the people from whom they learned this in the first place.
Never assume drug companies aren't complete bastards who care only for their own profits. They've make cures from ground up babies if they could get away with it.
Judging by the constant complaining on Facebook about whatever the most recent change Facebook made, yes, people did want a new social network. But these days it's cool to hate on Google so any little problem gets blown out of proportion as an excuse not to use G+. Reverse psychology and Stockholm syndrome. And of course lots of "Big brother" excuses, which is my favorite one when it comes to sticking with Facebook
Some of us don't want Facebook either.
I know this is hard to understand, but for many of us the internet "social network" is just more crap to enable analytics and ads, and hasn't got a damned thing to do with anything we want to do.
I ranked Google+ right up there with if Microsoft decided I needed a Live (or whatever they call it) account to use Notepad... it was self serving crap by a company trying to force me to use something I didn't want or need.
I like some of Google's services, but I sure as hell didn't want them to overstep their bounds and attempt to force everything I do on the intertubes to go through it. But that's exactly what they did.
It was like digital panhandling. Eventually I blocked plus.google.com at my damned firewall.
It was a marketing experiment gone wrong, and it mostly came across as a shrill bunch of assholes saying "why haven't you used my awesome product". It really pissed people off.
Honestly, because we didn't want it, never asked for it, got tired of having it constantly being foisted on us. It was a solution in search of a problem which nobody wanted solved in the first place.
It mostly took the form of Google's services constantly trying to force people to sign up for it, and pissing everybody off in the process. It wasn't anything anybody gave a damn about, but Google was constantly trying to make it mandatory.
Every time I encountered it, I found myself wanting to beat someone at Google with a clue stick.
Because the world isn't about social networks, and we don't give a fuck about the fact that Google wanted to play "me too".
I want to see a map or chat with one of my contacts. I don't want to sign up for your vision of my entire fucking digital lifestyle.
Google+ was the digital equivalent of a Jehova's Witness constantly showing up at your door. It did noting but annoy people.
The reason it failed is nobody wanted it, and people didn't want to be forced into using the damned thing just to make Google believe they'd launched a successful service.
Google really stepped in shit with that stupid Google+.
Between the real name policy, which nobody wants, and everything trying to force you into it at very step... I've basically spent the last few years fighting off Google+.
Nobody wanted another damned social network, and they sure as hell didn't want to be forced into using the damned thing by every one of Google's services.
I'm glad to see that it's finally being disentangled from everything else. Because it was a bloody nuisance.
You would agree to letting your employer remote wipe your device on their whim? Sorry, but no way in hell I'd do that. I'd my damned device, unless it's me and only me who can initiate the wipe.
If they want a device they can remote wipe, they can pay for the damned thing.
Otherwise on the day they decide you don't work there your phone will cease to function.
You know, it depends entirely on how they're used and what the risks are.
I know of some actually secure facilities which are locked down, and an electronic device will get you marched out the door and told never to come back.
But other than places like that, I've never seen any other places which even have policies on the topic. Honestly, if you're using the cellular network, the vast majority of workplaces simply aren't super duper top secret.
If they are, then yes, you need to safeguard that. But your average office? What would be the point?
I think that kind of lock down is probably quite rare.
Or when there's a detour which technically takes you off the road. Or when there's an enormous puddle. Or a half a foot of snow. Or black ice. Or people who drive on your side of the road into oncoming traffic because there's something on their side. Or that guy I saw turn left from the straight lane the other day. Or when that driver next to you drifts into your lane.
The number of corner cases is simply staggering. And the chance they'll miss a bunch is pretty high.
If they just create a little test area for the autonomous cars to drive under ideal circumstances, they'll be a long way from real conditions.
More than that... they need to recruit some of the absolutely terrible drivers we've all seen, and send them into the mix to do their usual random shit.
Because I think it will demonstrate how this stuff will totally fall apart when non-connected vehicles are in the mix, and highlight that there is no way in hell the entire road infrastructure and all cars are going to be updated for this connected stuff.
This stuff all seems to assume the world will change to suit it and we'll spend huge sums of money to make the infrastructure work.
You know, doing it in a real world setting and demonstrating it is a hell of a lot better than continuing to believe the lie these companies have done an adequate job at security.
And, once again, we see that consumer electronics are almost completely incompetent at any semblance of security.
Uconnect, an Internet-connected computer feature in hundreds of thousands of Fiat Chrysler cars, SUVs, and trucks, controls the vehicleâ(TM)s entertainment and navigation, enables phone calls, and even offers a Wi-Fi hot spot. And thanks to one vulnerable element, which Miller and Valasek wonâ(TM)t identify until their Black Hat talk, Uconnectâ(TM)s cellular connection also lets anyone who knows the carâ(TM)s IP address gain access from anywhere in the country. âoeFrom an attackerâ(TM)s perspective, itâ(TM)s a super nice vulnerability,â Miller says.
Which is pretty damned unbelievable if you ask me.
In fact, it sounds like some pretty epic incompetence at security, and reaffirms that corporations need to be held to MUCH higher standards of liability with all of their computers, instead of just saying "oops, we didn't know".
Sorry, but it has the net effect of making every printed document uniquely identifiable.
Which means whatever pretense they used, they can now use it for anything else they damned well please.
You can keep believing your government isn't trying to monitor and control everything you do. But you'd be wrong.
Much like terror laws are being used to piggy back for the rest of law enforcement, despite assurances to the contrary, they can and will abuse any other technology which is made available to them.
There's really no difference between one government spying on everybody and another. The only difference is in how much people believe there's a difference. But if they can get away with it, Western governments are just as likely to do it.
Most North Koreans don't have access to the internet. Most North Koreans don't know a damned thing about Linux. Most North Koreans don't know a damned thing about kernels or spying modules installed on their computers.
Do you really think people are going to compile a custom kernel to get around the brutal dictatorships surveillance and risk their lives for something they probably don't know exists?
Come on, guys, learn a little about North Korea before suggesting the populace just whips up a custom kernel to work around this.
Under a third generation pisspot dictator, the overwhelming majority of North Koreans will only know what they've been told. They're poor, starving, and isolated from much of the rest of the world.
And the suggestion is to go to kernel.org? Pathetic.
If we're using ownership of cars as the threshold, then I'm afraid to tell you in many places the cab driver owns his own car.
So, I'm sorry to tell you, but once again the ways people defend Uber as being inherently different from a cab company are completely bullshit.
A cab is a commercial vehicle for hire. Uber is just a bootleg cab company playing a shell game with the definitions for their own purposes.
Your definition of a taxi not also being a personal vehicle is not real. It may apply in some places, but it most certainly is NOT the actual definition.
I'm betting there's lots of places where the cabs are owned by the drivers. And they sill fall under the regulations around taxis, commercial cars for hire, and the license and insurance required to do that.
Sorry, Uber is a cab company, no matter what they say.
Slashdot Mirror
Except, of course, at 1000 light years away ... there are no EM radiations from us which would have reached there.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
Ha ha ha .. boy are you naive.
See the DMCA was written in such a way as to shield the people filing the requests. When they wrote the law (and, yes, it was corporate lobbyists who wrote it) they gave themselves a get out of jail free card ... so while they are effectively making a sworn statement, all they have to do is say they genuinely believed it was infringing and all is forgiven.
The DMCA is badly written because it was designed to let corporations do anything they want without consequences.
Talking about adding a voluntary system whereby they are held to some level of accountability? Not gonna happen.
Because the people who were on the corporate payroll to pass the laws in the first place only care about what the corporations have told them to do.
Welcome to a world in which governments are basically working to advance corporate interests above all else.
Crap like this is kind of the inevitable outcome of that, and the copyright lobby have bought themselves the keys to the kingdom.
Technically, while it, er, originated in your pants ... it actually 'happened' on the telephone network.
Unless you call the phone in your other pocket, and then you can assume that all parties will keep it private.
But pocket dialing the wife while schtupping the mistress? Not so private.
Are all your pockets in the back? Or are you too unimaginative to realize that not all pockets are over your butt?
In which case I'd guess your familiarity with pants is very limited.
It could be "junk" dialed.
This is what happens when you let industry write your damned laws.
The DMCA was written in such a way as to basically leave a wide trail for companies to totally abuse and misuse it. Because this was the law they bought and paid for to ensure they could do anything they wanted without penalty.
All of these issues were pointed out at the time, and the law got passed anyway, because these days the lawmakers are all beholden to industry and don't give a damn how badly the law has been written.
But nobody at all should be surprised at this crap. Because it is pretty much by design -- they can do almost anything they want with no real accountability. All they have to do is claim incompetence and they're magically forgiven.
It's a broken, lop-sided law which gave the copyright lobby the ability to threaten and intimidate as they see fit.
But don't think for a minute this was by accident. The DMCA is one of the most industry friendly laws in existence, and completely failed to hold them to any standard of accountability.
This is what happens when your legal system becomes co-opted to favor corporate interests above all else.
You know, denying Facebook the standing to challenge the constitutionality of warrants on behalf of its users is a really bad precedent.
This means that the court didn't allow the constitutionality of the warrants to be considered, and instead of having the ability to have blanket protections based on "you're not allowed to do that", now it's a "serve unconstitutional warrant now and let each affected party resolve this later".
Basically this gives the government the ability to use general warrants, or otherwise specious legal arguments to claim any old damned thing ... and Facebook (and now nobody else) can say "hey, wait a minute, you can't do that".
This isn't corporations running rampant over the law, this is the law running rampant over your rights and then leaving you on the hook to fix it later. It's a shoot first and ask questions later interpretation where even if law enforcement comes in with a blatantly illegal search warrant Facebook and others can't challenge it.
This is a terrible fucking idea, especially since law enforcement has increasingly decided they don't really give a damn about the constitutionality of anything they do.
Do you want to live in a society in which the government gets to break the law first and then leave it up to individual defense lawyers to resolve that?
I refuse to believe someone didn't do that on purpose.
That's too damned funny to be by accident.
Please fondle my bum
You attribute far too much planning and foresight to the people who implemented it.
Pretty much every metric I've seen like this leads to people trying to maximize their score instead of doing the things being measured in the score.
Think standardized testing, where suddenly teachers are only teaching what you need to pass the standardized test.
Honestly, reading the thread ... you posted something, got modded down, whined about it, and then got told to stop whining about it, and now you're acting like some outraged fool.
Boo hoo, you got modded down on the intertubes. It's not some horrible tragedy, and your continuing to keep bitching about it makes you sound like a child.
Seriously, grow a pair and stop whining about how tragic it is you got moderated down and then told to stop whining about it.
Is that fucking clear enough? Or do you need a timeout so you can stop acting like a spoiled brat?
Because it's way too damned annoying to see people whining about the injustices of the moderation system, because it tells us you haven't got a clue that it's a bunch of random monkeys banging on keys.
Get over it already.
Except, that's not what is happening.
They're using the rare and debilitating disease as a basis to develop treatment for other conditions ... the people with the rare and debilitating disease? Not profitable enough to cure.
They're researching how to take someone's illness, leave them untreated, and then use that information to treat someone else.
And, I'm sorry, but this is big pharma, which means they'll patent anything they discover and prevent people from actually working on cures for the people from whom they learned this in the first place.
Never assume drug companies aren't complete bastards who care only for their own profits. They've make cures from ground up babies if they could get away with it.
Hey, if there's any angry hackers out there, will someone please ruin these assholes lives?
Because if anybody deserves to be fucked with by the internet, it's these clowns.
kthanksbye
Some of us don't want Facebook either.
I know this is hard to understand, but for many of us the internet "social network" is just more crap to enable analytics and ads, and hasn't got a damned thing to do with anything we want to do.
I ranked Google+ right up there with if Microsoft decided I needed a Live (or whatever they call it) account to use Notepad ... it was self serving crap by a company trying to force me to use something I didn't want or need.
I like some of Google's services, but I sure as hell didn't want them to overstep their bounds and attempt to force everything I do on the intertubes to go through it. But that's exactly what they did.
It was like digital panhandling. Eventually I blocked plus.google.com at my damned firewall.
It was a marketing experiment gone wrong, and it mostly came across as a shrill bunch of assholes saying "why haven't you used my awesome product". It really pissed people off.
Honestly, because we didn't want it, never asked for it, got tired of having it constantly being foisted on us. It was a solution in search of a problem which nobody wanted solved in the first place.
It mostly took the form of Google's services constantly trying to force people to sign up for it, and pissing everybody off in the process. It wasn't anything anybody gave a damn about, but Google was constantly trying to make it mandatory.
Every time I encountered it, I found myself wanting to beat someone at Google with a clue stick.
Because the world isn't about social networks, and we don't give a fuck about the fact that Google wanted to play "me too".
I want to see a map or chat with one of my contacts. I don't want to sign up for your vision of my entire fucking digital lifestyle.
Google+ was the digital equivalent of a Jehova's Witness constantly showing up at your door. It did noting but annoy people.
The reason it failed is nobody wanted it, and people didn't want to be forced into using the damned thing just to make Google believe they'd launched a successful service.
Google really stepped in shit with that stupid Google+.
Between the real name policy, which nobody wants, and everything trying to force you into it at very step ... I've basically spent the last few years fighting off Google+.
Nobody wanted another damned social network, and they sure as hell didn't want to be forced into using the damned thing by every one of Google's services.
I'm glad to see that it's finally being disentangled from everything else. Because it was a bloody nuisance.
You would agree to letting your employer remote wipe your device on their whim? Sorry, but no way in hell I'd do that. I'd my damned device, unless it's me and only me who can initiate the wipe.
If they want a device they can remote wipe, they can pay for the damned thing.
Otherwise on the day they decide you don't work there your phone will cease to function.
Hell, no. My phone, not theirs.
You know, it depends entirely on how they're used and what the risks are.
I know of some actually secure facilities which are locked down, and an electronic device will get you marched out the door and told never to come back.
But other than places like that, I've never seen any other places which even have policies on the topic. Honestly, if you're using the cellular network, the vast majority of workplaces simply aren't super duper top secret.
If they are, then yes, you need to safeguard that. But your average office? What would be the point?
I think that kind of lock down is probably quite rare.
Or when there's a detour which technically takes you off the road. Or when there's an enormous puddle. Or a half a foot of snow. Or black ice. Or people who drive on your side of the road into oncoming traffic because there's something on their side. Or that guy I saw turn left from the straight lane the other day. Or when that driver next to you drifts into your lane.
The number of corner cases is simply staggering. And the chance they'll miss a bunch is pretty high.
If they just create a little test area for the autonomous cars to drive under ideal circumstances, they'll be a long way from real conditions.
More than that ... they need to recruit some of the absolutely terrible drivers we've all seen, and send them into the mix to do their usual random shit.
Because I think it will demonstrate how this stuff will totally fall apart when non-connected vehicles are in the mix, and highlight that there is no way in hell the entire road infrastructure and all cars are going to be updated for this connected stuff.
This stuff all seems to assume the world will change to suit it and we'll spend huge sums of money to make the infrastructure work.
And that's simply not true.
So how do we know we can trust the hacking tools designed to tell us if the hacking tools have installed hacking tools?
If this shit isn't proof that giving governments backdoors to security and crypto is a terrible idea, I have no idea what is.
You know, doing it in a real world setting and demonstrating it is a hell of a lot better than continuing to believe the lie these companies have done an adequate job at security.
And, once again, we see that consumer electronics are almost completely incompetent at any semblance of security.
Which is pretty damned unbelievable if you ask me.
In fact, it sounds like some pretty epic incompetence at security, and reaffirms that corporations need to be held to MUCH higher standards of liability with all of their computers, instead of just saying "oops, we didn't know".
Sorry, but it has the net effect of making every printed document uniquely identifiable.
Which means whatever pretense they used, they can now use it for anything else they damned well please.
You can keep believing your government isn't trying to monitor and control everything you do. But you'd be wrong.
Much like terror laws are being used to piggy back for the rest of law enforcement, despite assurances to the contrary, they can and will abuse any other technology which is made available to them.
There's really no difference between one government spying on everybody and another. The only difference is in how much people believe there's a difference. But if they can get away with it, Western governments are just as likely to do it.
Shhhh .... it's not fair to point out how "free" societies try to do the same fucking thing.
It confuses the plebes who still think their own governments aren't actively trying to become fascists too.
Seriously?
Most North Koreans don't have access to the internet. Most North Koreans don't know a damned thing about Linux. Most North Koreans don't know a damned thing about kernels or spying modules installed on their computers.
Do you really think people are going to compile a custom kernel to get around the brutal dictatorships surveillance and risk their lives for something they probably don't know exists?
Come on, guys, learn a little about North Korea before suggesting the populace just whips up a custom kernel to work around this.
Under a third generation pisspot dictator, the overwhelming majority of North Koreans will only know what they've been told. They're poor, starving, and isolated from much of the rest of the world.
And the suggestion is to go to kernel.org? Pathetic.
Do you honestly think the dictatorship makes the source code for Red Star Linux available to its people?
I'm sorry, but what part of dictatorship are you forgetting?
This is the government approved version. That's all there is.
If we're using ownership of cars as the threshold, then I'm afraid to tell you in many places the cab driver owns his own car.
So, I'm sorry to tell you, but once again the ways people defend Uber as being inherently different from a cab company are completely bullshit.
A cab is a commercial vehicle for hire. Uber is just a bootleg cab company playing a shell game with the definitions for their own purposes.
Your definition of a taxi not also being a personal vehicle is not real. It may apply in some places, but it most certainly is NOT the actual definition.
I'm betting there's lots of places where the cabs are owned by the drivers. And they sill fall under the regulations around taxis, commercial cars for hire, and the license and insurance required to do that.
Sorry, Uber is a cab company, no matter what they say.