Snapchat's entire premise is that images will vanish after a few seconds but that's not true anymore. It had other social things bolted onto that framework later and they always felt bolted on and crappy. Snapchat's app has always been a pain in the ass to use and every iteration made it worse than the last. I made the mistake of reinstalling the app briefly a couple of days ago and I couldn't believe how hard to use it had become. It may be the least intuitive and discoverable UI ever designed in the history of modern GUI-based computing. I wouldn't cry if they went bankrupt and vanished into fat air.
At what point does email just replicate the functions of a web browser and thus is no longer "email?" STOP TRYING TO MAKE MY EMAIL INTO A WEB PAGE. It's like the salesman who won't just drop off his brochure and instead talks to you for ten minutes; it's"engaging and interactive" but in a way that causes URGE TO KILL RISING.
These words are subject to interpretation. I initially jumped to the conclusion that he means encryption; anyone who knows anything about how good encryption works knows that that's just bullshit because math doesn't abide by human law. Then I thought about Uber's Greyball and similar advanced authority-evading tactics and I realized that there is a legitimate point to be made if that's the context he's referring to instead of encryption.
I bring up Kodachrome because the Vox video in particular uses Kodachrome examples to "prove" that film was biased against black people. I know other film stock existed but the point was that Vox was full of it. I have since made a response video to their "racist film" video in which I point out that the 1952 ISO 10/16 Kodachrome shot full of very dark-skinned people is exposed properly and the faces are visible with enough light.
There was a children's book (I forget which, I think it was a Cat in the Hat one) where they turned on "darks" which did the same thing as lights except in reverse.
To be fair, Japanese people (and many East Asian people in general) are relatively light-skinned compared to other Asian races such as Indians.
They (Vox) also spend a lot of time picking on Kodachrome film from Kodak which has a notoriously narrow dynamic range (about 6 stops compared to modern color film's 13 stops) and which was only available up to ISO 16 until 1961. At ISO 16 you have to expose around 6-7 times longer for proper exposure compared to the "sunny outdoors film" of the 1990s which was ISO 100. Kodachrome never made it past ISO 64 until 1986. Gee, I wonder why Kodachrome had difficulty making black people look good...I'm sure the answer is around here somewhere...oh yeah, because they're dark and the film's dynamic range was so bad that if you exposed the dark skin properly you'd blow out all the highlights and over-expose the midtones.
Dark people being dark and throwing off imaging systems is not a problem that can be easily solved. What pisses me off is when people blame it on racist algorithms when the truth boils down to the "racism" of physics. Dark skin is dark. Dark things are harder for a camera to "see." Apparently this is shocking news to some people. What will solve the problem is improving our camera sensor technology to the point that even cheap cell phones and tiny-sensor webcams can differentiate enough features on a black person's face in typical indoor light (with heavy backlighting that usually drives the automatic exposure way too low) to recognize their faces. Adding more underexposed black faces to the machine's data set is not going to help much.
This reminds me of that ridiculous article (and accompanying video) saying that color film was biased towards white people. Around 3:30 in the video they have white and black people stand in front of a face-following camera and it doesn't work for the black people. Everyone acts like this is some sort of Harry Potter wizardry against the black man keeping him down when it's vastly simpler than that.
For progressively darker skin, progressively higher light on that skin is required to reveal its contours. The fundamental problem is that white and light-skinned brown people have their normal skin color shades in the midtones when a scene is properly exposed while darker-skinned brown and black people are closer to shadows. To expose properly for facial recognition of dark brown or black skin, you have to overexpose the midtones to bring up the shadows. Since people rarely take photos on purpose that are exposed for the shadows while blowing everything else out, it should be fairly obvious that facial recognition (and early ISO 32 color film and small-sensor cameras like webcams and phone cameras) will have a very hard time with dark skin. Sure, it could be a lack of data in some instances, but it's far more likely to be the fact that the skin absorbs more light and photographs are generally exposed too low to reveal enough detail for the machines to analyze.
If you think this is "racist" you're saying that the nature of light itself is racist. I don't feel like I should have to explain why that position is really stupid.
...my level of surprise over this does not register on any instruments. I think it died when I learned that simply capturing rainwater from your roof in a barrel is considered stealing from the state in some jurisdictions because it's supposed to end up in a river which damages the river ecosystem or some other ultra-shaky logic that stretches credulity. Water regulations can be astonishingly stupid.
Not trolling: can you link to info or post your story on this? I'm curious (regulatory stupidity is interesting) and I'm sure others will be also. Hell, I just learned this morning that sex with anyone that you're not married to is technically illegal in North Carolina. NCGS 14-189: "FORNICATION AND ADULTERY." It's a misdemeanor to have sex with someone who is not your spouse with no exceptions if you are unmarried, though apparently also unconstitutional to enforce it in that manner.
May as well learn about two stupid legal things today.
Correlation does not imply causation. This is my first thought when I hear that any "study has linked X to Y." It may be true that screen time causes lower happiness but it could also be that they're unhappy already about things like the great recession and automation taking away low-skill jobs and Social Security being a thing they'll have to pay but will never receive and the ever-decreasing value of college degrees in the face of ever-increasing student loan debts and hearing about how much humanity hates one another constantly.
Screen time is often escapist. Perhaps they watch screens to distract from the overwhelming circumstances around them rather than being sad because they use the screens. They may be a symptom and not the cause.
Adobe at some point past CS6 changed their Premiere files from plain text XML to a binary format. What a coincidence, that's when they moved to a subscription model too...
By the way, my creepy Anonymous IP Lawyer "friend," if you're an IP lawyer then you surely know of Pearson Education, Inc., et al v. Ishayev et al from 2011 in which it was explicitly found that hyperlinks cannot constitute copyright infringement:
B. Infringement by Hyperlink
Plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment, as to three of the instructors’ solutions manuals, cannot be granted for a separate reason. Those manuals were accessed by Siewert through hyperlinks emailed to her by Ishayev, as opposed to Ishayev’s having attached digitally copies of those manuals to the emails he sent to Siewert. Such action, without more, is insufficient to establish an act of infringement. A question of fact remains as to whether Ishayev engaged in infringement by other means, i.e., by uploading the infringing material to filesonic.com.
While not a precedent-setting case on an appeals court or national level, the logic used is sound. But hey, as always, feel free to correct me with your own references to case law that says otherwise! I'm always open to learn, and you failed to provide that kind of information in your original creepypost.
I'm more inclined to believe the EFF than an Anonymous Coward "IP lawyer" that decided creeping and making personal assumptions should be a part of the argument. I noticed that you cited zero sources for your authoritative rant; no statutory language, not even a blog post somewhere. Next time you decide to declare you are an IP lawyer anonymously, at least back your statements up with some sort of proof so that people don't think your just talking out of your backside. I've already looked up some information but since it was your job to present that information I'm not doing it for you. I'm not a lawyer and you say you are. Assuming you were telling the truth about being a lawyer, you should be able support your arguments with ease.
Last time I checked, copyright protects against distribution of copyrighted materials but there is no provision I'm aware of that makes personal acquisition or viewing of copyrighted materials that are illegally distributed by a third party an illegal act. Feel free to correct me with references to statues or case law if you think I am wrong. Linking to copyrighted materials is NOT distribution of those materials. You should also feel free to refute that assertion with a link to the statute(s) that says otherwise. I expect that you will suddenly decide that I'm not paying you enough money for you to support your own public statements but I won't complain if you defy that expectation.
I'd be interested if you happen to have a link to info on a court case where someone was convicted of giving out a dealer's phone number without any other simultaneous charges that would force them to take a plea deal, however it's still irrelevant to my original points. This was all an attempt to use an analogy to illustrate why equating hyperlinks and the content they link to is really stupid. Real-world analogies for digital activities are often flawed. Please understand my point instead of taking it literally.
It is not illegal to tell someone how to do something illegal or who they can contact to do something illegal. It is illegal to incite them to perform an illegal act. Example: telling someone how to shoplift is legal while attempting to make someone shoplift is not. (I personally don't think that either should be illegal.) Linking merely tells someone where something is and vaguely alludes to its content; it's no different than a footnote in a paper or a card in a card catalog. A link does not incite someone to break the law. If the site linked to is guilty of copyright infringement then that's that site's legal problem, NOT the site providing the link.
Secondary copyright infringement does not exist under US copyright law and if it were it would be a very dangerous thing that would effectively end the web as we know it. If a hyperlink's destination content changes to something illegal then under secondary copyright infringement you'd be liable for the same offense as the purveyor of the new content even though you had no way to know it changed. Links go dead, park, or change every day by the millions.
If this is allowed to stand, we effectively lock good faith reporting, commentary, and criticism behind a giant copyright paywall. It flies directly and aggressively in the face of the First Amendment protections on freedom of speech and the spirit of the Fair Use Doctrine of US copyright law. You can bet your ass that secondary infringement litigation would not be limited to cases like this; it will be used as a bludgeon whenever possible to stifle speech.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me know when your "black coders" become imaging sensor engineers. You can't just magically code around limits set by the laws of physics.
Snapchat's entire premise is that images will vanish after a few seconds but that's not true anymore. It had other social things bolted onto that framework later and they always felt bolted on and crappy. Snapchat's app has always been a pain in the ass to use and every iteration made it worse than the last. I made the mistake of reinstalling the app briefly a couple of days ago and I couldn't believe how hard to use it had become. It may be the least intuitive and discoverable UI ever designed in the history of modern GUI-based computing. I wouldn't cry if they went bankrupt and vanished into fat air.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\CloudContent]
"DisableWindowsConsumerFeatures"=dword:00000001
At what point does email just replicate the functions of a web browser and thus is no longer "email?" STOP TRYING TO MAKE MY EMAIL INTO A WEB PAGE. It's like the salesman who won't just drop off his brochure and instead talks to you for ten minutes; it's"engaging and interactive" but in a way that causes URGE TO KILL RISING.
Whoa, bringing Aussies into this turns everything upside down.
These words are subject to interpretation. I initially jumped to the conclusion that he means encryption; anyone who knows anything about how good encryption works knows that that's just bullshit because math doesn't abide by human law. Then I thought about Uber's Greyball and similar advanced authority-evading tactics and I realized that there is a legitimate point to be made if that's the context he's referring to instead of encryption.
Don't you just LOVE ambiguity?
I bring up Kodachrome because the Vox video in particular uses Kodachrome examples to "prove" that film was biased against black people. I know other film stock existed but the point was that Vox was full of it. I have since made a response video to their "racist film" video in which I point out that the 1952 ISO 10/16 Kodachrome shot full of very dark-skinned people is exposed properly and the faces are visible with enough light.
There was a children's book (I forget which, I think it was a Cat in the Hat one) where they turned on "darks" which did the same thing as lights except in reverse.
To be fair, Japanese people (and many East Asian people in general) are relatively light-skinned compared to other Asian races such as Indians.
They (Vox) also spend a lot of time picking on Kodachrome film from Kodak which has a notoriously narrow dynamic range (about 6 stops compared to modern color film's 13 stops) and which was only available up to ISO 16 until 1961. At ISO 16 you have to expose around 6-7 times longer for proper exposure compared to the "sunny outdoors film" of the 1990s which was ISO 100. Kodachrome never made it past ISO 64 until 1986. Gee, I wonder why Kodachrome had difficulty making black people look good...I'm sure the answer is around here somewhere...oh yeah, because they're dark and the film's dynamic range was so bad that if you exposed the dark skin properly you'd blow out all the highlights and over-expose the midtones.
Dark people being dark and throwing off imaging systems is not a problem that can be easily solved. What pisses me off is when people blame it on racist algorithms when the truth boils down to the "racism" of physics. Dark skin is dark. Dark things are harder for a camera to "see." Apparently this is shocking news to some people. What will solve the problem is improving our camera sensor technology to the point that even cheap cell phones and tiny-sensor webcams can differentiate enough features on a black person's face in typical indoor light (with heavy backlighting that usually drives the automatic exposure way too low) to recognize their faces. Adding more underexposed black faces to the machine's data set is not going to help much.
I'm looking at early color film and the dark-skinned people shown look pretty darn good. The more I look for images of dark skin on early color film the more I find evidence that goes against the assertion that early film was specifically made for "white" skin. Kodachrome seems to make everyone look pretty good.
I'm going to assume that this is supposed to be a joke but the Poe's Law is strong with this one.
This reminds me of that ridiculous article (and accompanying video) saying that color film was biased towards white people. Around 3:30 in the video they have white and black people stand in front of a face-following camera and it doesn't work for the black people. Everyone acts like this is some sort of Harry Potter wizardry against the black man keeping him down when it's vastly simpler than that.
For progressively darker skin, progressively higher light on that skin is required to reveal its contours. The fundamental problem is that white and light-skinned brown people have their normal skin color shades in the midtones when a scene is properly exposed while darker-skinned brown and black people are closer to shadows. To expose properly for facial recognition of dark brown or black skin, you have to overexpose the midtones to bring up the shadows. Since people rarely take photos on purpose that are exposed for the shadows while blowing everything else out, it should be fairly obvious that facial recognition (and early ISO 32 color film and small-sensor cameras like webcams and phone cameras) will have a very hard time with dark skin. Sure, it could be a lack of data in some instances, but it's far more likely to be the fact that the skin absorbs more light and photographs are generally exposed too low to reveal enough detail for the machines to analyze.
If you think this is "racist" you're saying that the nature of light itself is racist. I don't feel like I should have to explain why that position is really stupid.
No, they're saying "octothorpe me too." You gonna get octothorped.
You forgot Alpha.
Now the ten Slashdot readers remaining get to wake up and find out they missed it.
...my level of surprise over this does not register on any instruments. I think it died when I learned that simply capturing rainwater from your roof in a barrel is considered stealing from the state in some jurisdictions because it's supposed to end up in a river which damages the river ecosystem or some other ultra-shaky logic that stretches credulity. Water regulations can be astonishingly stupid.
Not trolling: can you link to info or post your story on this? I'm curious (regulatory stupidity is interesting) and I'm sure others will be also. Hell, I just learned this morning that sex with anyone that you're not married to is technically illegal in North Carolina. NCGS 14-189: "FORNICATION AND ADULTERY." It's a misdemeanor to have sex with someone who is not your spouse with no exceptions if you are unmarried, though apparently also unconstitutional to enforce it in that manner.
May as well learn about two stupid legal things today.
I guess this isn't the best time to remind Mr. FBI about the Clipper Chip near-disaster. The government though they'd force people to use backdoored encryption chips in the 90s that contained a "Law Enforcement Access Field (LEAF)" and it not only compromised security but the LEAF check hash was also easily spoofed plus the Skipjack algorithm used was ripped to shreds by cryptography researchers pretty quickly after declassification. Had we been forced to use the Clipper Chip, we'd have had a major security mess on our hands since it was practically a placebo at its one main job: security.
Correlation does not imply causation. This is my first thought when I hear that any "study has linked X to Y." It may be true that screen time causes lower happiness but it could also be that they're unhappy already about things like the great recession and automation taking away low-skill jobs and Social Security being a thing they'll have to pay but will never receive and the ever-decreasing value of college degrees in the face of ever-increasing student loan debts and hearing about how much humanity hates one another constantly.
Screen time is often escapist. Perhaps they watch screens to distract from the overwhelming circumstances around them rather than being sad because they use the screens. They may be a symptom and not the cause.
Adobe at some point past CS6 changed their Premiere files from plain text XML to a binary format. What a coincidence, that's when they moved to a subscription model too...
No, I understood what you said quite clearly. Perhaps you did not express your thoughts correctly. It doesn't really matter.
By the way, my creepy Anonymous IP Lawyer "friend," if you're an IP lawyer then you surely know of Pearson Education, Inc., et al v. Ishayev et al from 2011 in which it was explicitly found that hyperlinks cannot constitute copyright infringement:
B. Infringement by Hyperlink
Plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment, as to three of the instructors’ solutions manuals, cannot be granted for a separate reason. Those manuals were accessed by Siewert through hyperlinks emailed to her by Ishayev, as opposed to Ishayev’s having attached digitally copies of those manuals to the emails he sent to Siewert. Such action, without more, is insufficient to establish an act of infringement. A question of fact remains as to whether Ishayev engaged in infringement by other means, i.e., by uploading the infringing material to filesonic.com.
While not a precedent-setting case on an appeals court or national level, the logic used is sound. But hey, as always, feel free to correct me with your own references to case law that says otherwise! I'm always open to learn, and you failed to provide that kind of information in your original creepypost.
I'm more inclined to believe the EFF than an Anonymous Coward "IP lawyer" that decided creeping and making personal assumptions should be a part of the argument. I noticed that you cited zero sources for your authoritative rant; no statutory language, not even a blog post somewhere. Next time you decide to declare you are an IP lawyer anonymously, at least back your statements up with some sort of proof so that people don't think your just talking out of your backside. I've already looked up some information but since it was your job to present that information I'm not doing it for you. I'm not a lawyer and you say you are. Assuming you were telling the truth about being a lawyer, you should be able support your arguments with ease.
Last time I checked, copyright protects against distribution of copyrighted materials but there is no provision I'm aware of that makes personal acquisition or viewing of copyrighted materials that are illegally distributed by a third party an illegal act. Feel free to correct me with references to statues or case law if you think I am wrong. Linking to copyrighted materials is NOT distribution of those materials. You should also feel free to refute that assertion with a link to the statute(s) that says otherwise. I expect that you will suddenly decide that I'm not paying you enough money for you to support your own public statements but I won't complain if you defy that expectation.
I'd be interested if you happen to have a link to info on a court case where someone was convicted of giving out a dealer's phone number without any other simultaneous charges that would force them to take a plea deal, however it's still irrelevant to my original points. This was all an attempt to use an analogy to illustrate why equating hyperlinks and the content they link to is really stupid. Real-world analogies for digital activities are often flawed. Please understand my point instead of taking it literally.
It is not illegal to tell someone how to do something illegal or who they can contact to do something illegal. It is illegal to incite them to perform an illegal act. Example: telling someone how to shoplift is legal while attempting to make someone shoplift is not. (I personally don't think that either should be illegal.) Linking merely tells someone where something is and vaguely alludes to its content; it's no different than a footnote in a paper or a card in a card catalog. A link does not incite someone to break the law. If the site linked to is guilty of copyright infringement then that's that site's legal problem, NOT the site providing the link.
Secondary copyright infringement does not exist under US copyright law and if it were it would be a very dangerous thing that would effectively end the web as we know it. If a hyperlink's destination content changes to something illegal then under secondary copyright infringement you'd be liable for the same offense as the purveyor of the new content even though you had no way to know it changed. Links go dead, park, or change every day by the millions.
If this is allowed to stand, we effectively lock good faith reporting, commentary, and criticism behind a giant copyright paywall. It flies directly and aggressively in the face of the First Amendment protections on freedom of speech and the spirit of the Fair Use Doctrine of US copyright law. You can bet your ass that secondary infringement litigation would not be limited to cases like this; it will be used as a bludgeon whenever possible to stifle speech.