Google defended themselves by saying that they shouldn't be held responsible for the output of an algorithm that they created.
Yes! That's the crux of the matter. This decision is not some Luddite rejection of the internet, nor merely holding someone liable for citing an offending publication (as the links to infringing copies == infringing copies reasoning does), but merely holding someone responsible for what they themselves publish.
It does not matter in this case that Google didn't write the defamatory material out "by hand," nor that the data upon which their automated publication was based was not their own. The point is they made their own publication (recklessly, as it turns out) based upon that other data, as you say, by means of an algorithm they themselves created.
Tough to be held responsible for the outcome of one's own actions, ain't it?
I see you believe in the "natural law" theory. I think it has some merit as a means of describing the philosophical basis of law, but most scholars now agree that's not really how things work
I think you are going to far in ascribing to OP an adherence to Natural Law theory, which implies the existence of Law, as if bestowed by Divine Providence, entirely anterior to human law making. Rather the judge is charged to discover the law which is "already there in the statutes [and] in the precedents." I think it would be better described as a species of legal formalism.
As far as "how things [really] work," I --being a neo-formalist;) --believe that should be the furthest thing from a judge's mind, who should instead, entertain the pious fiction, that an objective (formal) legal answer (the result of prior human lawmaking) does exist, and which the accepted tenets of judicial interpretation will, almost algebraically, discover.
Thanks for proving GPs point. Hilariously two more dullards have modded this insightful. This oh-poor-victim-me-male attitude is reaching epidemic proportions apparently.
Can you cite any statutory provision which makes posting a "fully-clothed ex with caption" sexual assault when a male is the poster, but not when the female is the poster, from any jurisdiction anywhere on Earth?
Then you have to toggle the soft-button and press the home button again...
It is a pain, but it just goes to show that you shouldn't really be lying in bed with an iPad. Personally I prefer lying with a leggy brunette... problem is, she is actually the one with the damn iPad in bed.:|
..the orientation lock button was WAY more useful than the mute button, maybe not so much on an iphone but definitely on the ipad.
That's perhaps why they took it away! Ie. a moving part getting way more use than the original engineering anticipated. Problem is the software replacement requires a double-click on the (presumably longer lasting) home button a swipe to get to the area where you finally find the software button position lock button. Frustratingly cumbersome.
How does open source help fight security in the short term? wouldn't open source make it easier?... Sounds to me more like a cost savings move than a security move....
Easy. They can inspect the code and and see if any backdoors have been written in and take them out.
The geek's notions of "reasonable doubt" will most likely land him in the slammer.
IAAL.
But do note, I'm not saying that simply leaving your connection unsecured will keep you out of the slammer. I'm saying that securing your connection will give us (lawyers) one less handle to work with.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think that has already been tried and failed.
As a matter of law (judge) or as a matter of fact (jury)? In the case you are not entirely sure exists was the doubt negated by the contents on the drive?
Unsecured doesn't imply incompetent - there are people who happily leave a public WiFi connection to the net which is securely isolated from their internal network.
In fact, if you intend doing anything online which might raise the ire of authorities, "securing" your WiFi is actually quite foolish. What you are effectively doing is removing a reasonable doubt that activity over the connection is your activity.
Again I'm gonna take issue with the one-eyed interpretation here.
No, I've got both eyes fairly open here. Reading between the lines it's not too difficult to appreciate the generality of what actually took place. Assange picked the wrong woman to pull that kind of stunt on.
But you are right, we need at least to entertain the possibility that the complaints are genuine and my point stands whether they are or not. I think it completely unnecessary, however weak the case appears (and it appears exceedingly weak to me), to invoke any conspiratorial motives, CIA connexions &tc, to explain why the women took the action they did.
But you're right; the really fishy part here is not the accusers, it's the way the local law enforcement has moved mountains for them, without ever appearing to give a shit about any of the thousands of other unsolved sex crimes on their plate at the moment.
Well I can't speak about how other sex crimes have been dealt with, but we need to remember that this alleged crime is still in the stage of investigation. In that context, issuing an international arrest warrant; attempting to keep a suspect (or more formally one of a number of witnesses and a witness who has already deposited to boot) in solitary confinement when fairly stringent bail conditions were being applied; not offering to send investigating officers to the UK to complete the interview; all before any charges have actually been laid -- does strike me as excessive and raises the obvious question, why?
[S]o it doesn't take a huge leap of insight to see that many such victims won't ever tell their stories unless they first find each other.
Whatever the motivation, the problem is that their reports are now contaminated which should lead any reasonable tribunal of fact to regard them as less than reliable.
Bear in mind that when we remember things, we don't simply recall past events accurately inscribed in the mind. We recreate a narrative of events afresh from the point-of-view of our current situation.
The fact that several hours (indeed days) passed between the "rape" and the report to police must give us pause in accepting the veracity of the report. The fact that action was taken, only after the two women discovered that the man in question was a two-timing rat, ought to make us highly sceptical. Indeed, that fact raises the real possibility that this may not merely be a case where events are being creatively "remembered" through the lens of emotional disappointment, but where the women are deliberately lying.
In any case, the criminalisation of messy relationship problems aside, what is most suspicious is not the behaviour of the women (whose motivation for revenge is only natural), but the amazingly heavy-handed approach to the investigation taken by the Swedish authorities.
Seriously? Someone is using him as a poster boy for a campaign against the paradox of pretrial incarceration in a free society?
That legal ship sailed a long time ago.
Pre-trial incarceration is one thing, but it must be limited. Having your case dealt with promptly by a court is a human right, being left to rot waiting is a human rights violation. You know "justice delayed is justice denied" and all that.
Fer fuck's sake, people with tiny minds have lost what little they had over this junk.
How terribly frustrating -- people have differing opinions!
Forgot to mention that such rigid over-reactions are exactly the kind of jiu-jitsu that Assange is looking for.
Yes, reading Assange's famous essay, this is almost a parodic example of the reaction he expects authoritarian power structures to adopt in response to leaks, in his view, to their own detriment.
Wasn't one of the reasons Amazon used to kick wikileaks the fact that they were getting DDoSed? And that it hurted their business?... I think Anonymous at least proved that the real reason Amazon kicked wikileaks had nothing to do with DDoS.
Proved? What about the possibility that the imperial forces DDoSing Wikileaks are better resourced and organised than our Anonymous freedom fighters?
I think you've missed the point Anonymous is a large group of people, Spartacus was one man. They can all be Anonymous, they could not all be Spartacus.
I think you've missed the point. They were all Spartacus! The point was that you can kill the man, but you can't kill the idea.
If you take one of us out, another will step into their boots.
This is exactly like the guys (in that old movie) saying "I am Spartacus."
Freedom of speech involves freedom from retaliation.
Such as having the methods of funding your organisation cut off at the request of state?
If you choose not to do business with them, that's great. But if you prevent others from doing business with them then you've crossed the line.
But they've crossed the line in the first place. In a market where Visa and Mastercard form a virtual duopoly, they have both made the call to refuse to provide their usual service between a lawful payer and a lawful payee. If you have a competitive market, that doesn't matter, the payer can simply seek out someone else's service. However in the RL, this in effect amounts to Visa and Mastercard making decisions about how their we spend our money. That's a line, it ought not be legal for them to cross.
It is all the worse that the control exerted over our personal expenditure is aimed precisely at shoring up the power of the state by undermining freedom of speech and transparent government.
Corporations should not be afforded the rights of persons.
Sorry but that's nonsensical. The enjoyment of the rights of a person is the sine qua non of the corporate form. What you meant to write is "corporations should be outlawed."
Indeed. Since they're claiming that Drudge is a copyright violator, surely the US government should just steal his domain and hand it over to the lawyers without the hassle of a court case?
What an outrageous suggestion! The US government simply can't afford to behave in such an underhand manner. Far better to send Matt off on a taxpayer funded holiday to Sweden and see how creative we can get with their sexual assault laws...
I predict once again that the prevailing opinion of/. will turn on a dime when the target is someone they don't like.
wikileaks to politicians - "if you aren't dishonest you have nothing to worry about" = good
government to citizens - "if you aren't dishonest you have nothing to worry about" = bad
I know you are trying to argue the patriotic-statist line here, but in this case "the slashdot" (or the libertarian component thereof) is sagacious!"
As a matter of observation, despite your abstract notions of fairness as reciprocity, there exist two extremes of relationships between states and their citizens in terms of privacy/openness. On the one hand you have authoritarian states in which government enjoys a great deal if secrecy (privacy) and the citizens have very little privacy to speak of. On the other hand where the citizens enjoy a measure of privacy, officials, in exercising the duties of government have hardly any privacy at all. Of course there exists neither a govt. that has a camera in every citizen's bedroom, nor one so transparent as to have no official secrets at all, and on this continuum there is a constant struggle by officials who having tasted power want to pry and to conceal, and citizens who wish to increase individual liberty at the expense of state power. And didn't Obama get elected, at least in part, on a promise of greater openness and transparency in government?
Now you may be patriot who would sacrifice your liberty for the benefit of the state, that's your choice. But you have to understand that the desire for greater individual privacy and greater government transparency is neither hypocritical, nor contradictory. Quite the opposite, they are corollaries.
[B]ut the US government surely considers him an enemy.
And most especially those sections of the US govt which are the least transparent.
But that's not the point. The question is whether generalised leaking (remember wikileaks does not exclusively leak US docs), will harm the US or other regimes more.
My world view is that Julian Assange and his supporters are enemies of the USA.
That's a misunderstanding. Assange is an enemy of authoritarianism. He has made the observation the authoritarian powers structures rely more often on secret communications. The idea with leaking is that leaking documents pisses everyone off, but it hurts secretive communication most of all because it makes them fearful of their own internal communications. Leaking therefore alters the information economy to favour survival of open organisation.
For all the things you accuse the USA of, they are still a more open govt. than many of the other regimes around. If Assange is right and leaking does selectively damage authoritarian structures, it is not so much the US, as all the little crackpot dictators it deals with which has most to fear from these kinds of revelations.
No, I think you could be confusing torts (or species of damage) actionable in US jurisdictions with those available elsewhere in the common law world.
I picked it up at a internet law reference site.
A US internet law reference site, or a British one? More to the point, do you have any English curial authority relevant to the tort of "intentional infliction of mental harm."
When I was at Law School the only "mental harm" recognised in English or Australian law was nervous shock, which requires a diagnosable mental illness to present. And that was as a category of damage actionable under the tort of negligence. Psychological distress, in general, not being actionable.
If you could give me the citation for the case which has changed this at England law, I'd be most interested.
Slashdot Mirror
Google defended themselves by saying that they shouldn't be held responsible for the output of an algorithm that they created.
Yes! That's the crux of the matter. This decision is not some Luddite rejection of the internet, nor merely holding someone liable for citing an offending publication (as the links to infringing copies == infringing copies reasoning does), but merely holding someone responsible for what they themselves publish.
It does not matter in this case that Google didn't write the defamatory material out "by hand," nor that the data upon which their automated publication was based was not their own. The point is they made their own publication (recklessly, as it turns out) based upon that other data, as you say, by means of an algorithm they themselves created.
Tough to be held responsible for the outcome of one's own actions, ain't it?
I see you believe in the "natural law" theory. I think it has some merit as a means of describing the philosophical basis of law, but most scholars now agree that's not really how things work
I think you are going to far in ascribing to OP an adherence to Natural Law theory, which implies the existence of Law, as if bestowed by Divine Providence, entirely anterior to human law making. Rather the judge is charged to discover the law which is "already there in the statutes [and] in the precedents." I think it would be better described as a species of legal formalism.
As far as "how things [really] work," I --being a neo-formalist ;) --believe that should be the furthest thing from a judge's mind, who should instead, entertain the pious fiction, that an objective (formal) legal answer (the result of prior human lawmaking) does exist, and which the accepted tenets of judicial interpretation will, almost algebraically, discover.
There isn't such a provision.
Case dismissed.
Thanks for proving GPs point. Hilariously two more dullards have modded this insightful. This oh-poor-victim-me-male attitude is reaching epidemic proportions apparently.
Can you cite any statutory provision which makes posting a "fully-clothed ex with caption" sexual assault when a male is the poster, but not when the female is the poster, from any jurisdiction anywhere on Earth?
Then you have to toggle the soft-button and press the home button again ...
It is a pain, but it just goes to show that you shouldn't really be lying in bed with an iPad. Personally I prefer lying with a leggy brunette ... problem is, she is actually the one with the damn iPad in bed. :|
That's perhaps why they took it away! Ie. a moving part getting way more use than the original engineering anticipated. Problem is the software replacement requires a double-click on the (presumably longer lasting) home button a swipe to get to the area where you finally find the software button position lock button. Frustratingly cumbersome.
How does open source help fight security in the short term? wouldn't open source make it easier? ... Sounds to me more like a cost savings move than a security move....
Easy. They can inspect the code and and see if any backdoors have been written in and take them out.
The geek's notions of "reasonable doubt" will most likely land him in the slammer.
IAAL.
But do note, I'm not saying that simply leaving your connection unsecured will keep you out of the slammer. I'm saying that securing your connection will give us (lawyers) one less handle to work with.
I'm not entirely sure, but I think that has already been tried and failed.
As a matter of law (judge) or as a matter of fact (jury)? In the case you are not entirely sure exists was the doubt negated by the contents on the drive?
Unsecured doesn't imply incompetent - there are people who happily leave a public WiFi connection to the net which is securely isolated from their internal network.
In fact, if you intend doing anything online which might raise the ire of authorities, "securing" your WiFi is actually quite foolish. What you are effectively doing is removing a reasonable doubt that activity over the connection is your activity.
Again I'm gonna take issue with the one-eyed interpretation here.
No, I've got both eyes fairly open here. Reading between the lines it's not too difficult to appreciate the generality of what actually took place. Assange picked the wrong woman to pull that kind of stunt on.
But you are right, we need at least to entertain the possibility that the complaints are genuine and my point stands whether they are or not. I think it completely unnecessary, however weak the case appears (and it appears exceedingly weak to me), to invoke any conspiratorial motives, CIA connexions &tc, to explain why the women took the action they did.
But you're right; the really fishy part here is not the accusers, it's the way the local law enforcement has moved mountains for them, without ever appearing to give a shit about any of the thousands of other unsolved sex crimes on their plate at the moment.
Well I can't speak about how other sex crimes have been dealt with, but we need to remember that this alleged crime is still in the stage of investigation. In that context, issuing an international arrest warrant; attempting to keep a suspect (or more formally one of a number of witnesses and a witness who has already deposited to boot) in solitary confinement when fairly stringent bail conditions were being applied; not offering to send investigating officers to the UK to complete the interview; all before any charges have actually been laid -- does strike me as excessive and raises the obvious question, why?
[S]o it doesn't take a huge leap of insight to see that many such victims won't ever tell their stories unless they first find each other.
Whatever the motivation, the problem is that their reports are now contaminated which should lead any reasonable tribunal of fact to regard them as less than reliable.
Bear in mind that when we remember things, we don't simply recall past events accurately inscribed in the mind. We recreate a narrative of events afresh from the point-of-view of our current situation.
The fact that several hours (indeed days) passed between the "rape" and the report to police must give us pause in accepting the veracity of the report. The fact that action was taken, only after the two women discovered that the man in question was a two-timing rat, ought to make us highly sceptical. Indeed, that fact raises the real possibility that this may not merely be a case where events are being creatively "remembered" through the lens of emotional disappointment, but where the women are deliberately lying.
In any case, the criminalisation of messy relationship problems aside, what is most suspicious is not the behaviour of the women (whose motivation for revenge is only natural), but the amazingly heavy-handed approach to the investigation taken by the Swedish authorities.
Seriously? Someone is using him as a poster boy for a campaign against the paradox of pretrial incarceration in a free society?
That legal ship sailed a long time ago.
Pre-trial incarceration is one thing, but it must be limited. Having your case dealt with promptly by a court is a human right, being left to rot waiting is a human rights violation. You know "justice delayed is justice denied" and all that.
Fer fuck's sake, people with tiny minds have lost what little they had over this junk.
How terribly frustrating -- people have differing opinions!
Forgot to mention that such rigid over-reactions are exactly the kind of jiu-jitsu that Assange is looking for.
Yes, reading Assange's famous essay, this is almost a parodic example of the reaction he expects authoritarian power structures to adopt in response to leaks, in his view, to their own detriment.
Yes, it's puts a whole new spin on the old "Don't ask me! I only work here." line.
Wasn't one of the reasons Amazon used to kick wikileaks the fact that they were getting DDoSed? And that it hurted their business? ... I think Anonymous at least proved that the real reason Amazon kicked wikileaks had nothing to do with DDoS.
Proved? What about the possibility that the imperial forces DDoSing Wikileaks are better resourced and organised than our Anonymous freedom fighters?
I think you've missed the point Anonymous is a large group of people, Spartacus was one man. They can all be Anonymous, they could not all be Spartacus.
I think you've missed the point. They were all Spartacus! The point was that you can kill the man, but you can't kill the idea.
If you take one of us out, another will step into their boots.
This is exactly like the guys (in that old movie) saying "I am Spartacus."
Freedom of speech involves freedom from retaliation.
Such as having the methods of funding your organisation cut off at the request of state?
If you choose not to do business with them, that's great. But if you prevent others from doing business with them then you've crossed the line.
But they've crossed the line in the first place. In a market where Visa and Mastercard form a virtual duopoly, they have both made the call to refuse to provide their usual service between a lawful payer and a lawful payee. If you have a competitive market, that doesn't matter, the payer can simply seek out someone else's service. However in the RL, this in effect amounts to Visa and Mastercard making decisions about how their we spend our money. That's a line, it ought not be legal for them to cross.
It is all the worse that the control exerted over our personal expenditure is aimed precisely at shoring up the power of the state by undermining freedom of speech and transparent government.
Corporations should not be afforded the rights of persons.
Sorry but that's nonsensical. The enjoyment of the rights of a person is the sine qua non of the corporate form. What you meant to write is "corporations should be outlawed."
Indeed. Since they're claiming that Drudge is a copyright violator, surely the US government should just steal his domain and hand it over to the lawyers without the hassle of a court case?
What an outrageous suggestion! The US government simply can't afford to behave in such an underhand manner. Far better to send Matt off on a taxpayer funded holiday to Sweden and see how creative we can get with their sexual assault laws ...
I predict once again that the prevailing opinion of /. will turn on a dime when the target is someone they don't like.
wikileaks to politicians - "if you aren't dishonest you have nothing to worry about" = good
government to citizens - "if you aren't dishonest you have nothing to worry about" = bad
I know you are trying to argue the patriotic-statist line here, but in this case "the slashdot" (or the libertarian component thereof) is sagacious!"
As a matter of observation, despite your abstract notions of fairness as reciprocity, there exist two extremes of relationships between states and their citizens in terms of privacy/openness. On the one hand you have authoritarian states in which government enjoys a great deal if secrecy (privacy) and the citizens have very little privacy to speak of. On the other hand where the citizens enjoy a measure of privacy, officials, in exercising the duties of government have hardly any privacy at all. Of course there exists neither a govt. that has a camera in every citizen's bedroom, nor one so transparent as to have no official secrets at all, and on this continuum there is a constant struggle by officials who having tasted power want to pry and to conceal, and citizens who wish to increase individual liberty at the expense of state power. And didn't Obama get elected, at least in part, on a promise of greater openness and transparency in government?
Now you may be patriot who would sacrifice your liberty for the benefit of the state, that's your choice. But you have to understand that the desire for greater individual privacy and greater government transparency is neither hypocritical, nor contradictory. Quite the opposite, they are corollaries.
The first real infowar has started. Who knew that it'd be governments vs. the people?
Which side are you on?
[B]ut the US government surely considers him an enemy.
And most especially those sections of the US govt which are the least transparent.
But that's not the point. The question is whether generalised leaking (remember wikileaks does not exclusively leak US docs), will harm the US or other regimes more.
My world view is that Julian Assange and his supporters are enemies of the USA.
That's a misunderstanding. Assange is an enemy of authoritarianism. He has made the observation the authoritarian powers structures rely more often on secret communications. The idea with leaking is that leaking documents pisses everyone off, but it hurts secretive communication most of all because it makes them fearful of their own internal communications. Leaking therefore alters the information economy to favour survival of open organisation.
For all the things you accuse the USA of, they are still a more open govt. than many of the other regimes around. If Assange is right and leaking does selectively damage authoritarian structures, it is not so much the US, as all the little crackpot dictators it deals with which has most to fear from these kinds of revelations.
Do you think I could make up something like that,
No, I think you could be confusing torts (or species of damage) actionable in US jurisdictions with those available elsewhere in the common law world.
I picked it up at a internet law reference site.
A US internet law reference site, or a British one? More to the point, do you have any English curial authority relevant to the tort of "intentional infliction of mental harm."
When I was at Law School the only "mental harm" recognised in English or Australian law was nervous shock, which requires a diagnosable mental illness to present. And that was as a category of damage actionable under the tort of negligence. Psychological distress, in general, not being actionable.
If you could give me the citation for the case which has changed this at England law, I'd be most interested.