I don't want to start some huge side discussion about the EU referendum here, but I'll just mention that the UK's own data protection legislation already covers subject access requests and rights to correct data that is wrong. There is no particular reason to expect that to change whatever the referendum result later this month turns out to be. Even if we vote to leave, it will surely be a few years before things get separated out and any major changes to the legal system get made, as the government will be busy for quite a while just trying to disentangle UK law from dependencies on EU sources and to maintain the existing provisions in the UK. Hopefully this particular business will have failed long before that becomes relevant.
What is worrying me is that I can't immediately see why this would be illegal under current data protection law in England and Wales, because it appears that the prospective tenant is giving their explicit consent to processing the data. Even with sensitive personal data (with the Data Protection Act meaning of the term, i.e., politics, religion and the like) having explicit consent turns off a lot of legal safeguards the subject would otherwise enjoy.
I completely agree with everyone saying this is shady as hell, but since private landlords also have no obligation to offer accommodation to any particular individual, if they all start using this sort of system I don't see that there's much tenants can do about it. They can try to find alternative accommodation that doesn't come with the same intrusion, but that could be difficult in some areas due to the shortage of decent housing, as others have mentioned. They could lobby for better regulation, but historically that has not been very successful in reigning in abusive landlords and the letting agencies they hide behind.
Unless there is a credible case that landlords have made decisions based on personal data that they aren't allowed to consider under anti-discrimination laws or something along those lines, which does seem to make it unwise for this spyware company to pass on that sort of data to landlords in the first place, I'm not sure what there is to actually stop this as the law stands today.
Consideration does not have to be monetary. For example, in the case of the four web sites you mentioned, the service of storing and distributing the user's information is providing something of value to the user.
Ironically, this whole disturbing business might fail before long precisely because younger generations are much more aware of the dangers of over-sharing. The Millenial generation probably is going to suffer for sharing too freely, but at least their kids seem to be learning from their mistakes, and it's going to be fewer of the Millenials and more of their kids who want to rent as time goes by.
True, but those are things that are actually relatively easy to test for.
I'm not sure how true that is; the image recognition problems involved in my red light example are not trivial, after all.
In any case, this still relies on someone thinking to test for all relevant failure cases and writing those tests properly. Unfortunately, almost no-one else in the software industry manages testing so reliably.
With the control software for modern cars being as large and complex as it is, it's hard to imagine that nothing serious will slip through. And with cars, it only takes one sufficiently nasty bug for "fatal error" to become all too literal.
That's a movie plot threat.
Not so much, unfortunately. I picked that specific example precisely because a proof of concept already exists.
It would be nice to think that terrorists are too dumb with IT to actually pull something like that off, but that's like assuming that a 15-year-old script kiddie is too dumb to install ransomware on someone else's system. In reality, the tools to do so are a few clicks away from any number of dubious sites, and they require no great skill or understanding to use.
There is nothing contradictory or fallacious about believing a system can have a lower risk of a failure occurring overall, yet still be more vulnerable to certain types of failure.
Automated vehicle control systems have obvious advantages over human drivers when they are working properly. They don't get fatigued or distracted or irritated by someone else's bad driving. They can look everywhere at once, with much better sensors than human vision. They can respond much faster to the changing environment. In time, when the control algorithms are sufficiently developed, you would expect vehicles using these systems to be safer in terms of accidents.
Automated vehicle control systems also have obvious disadvantages over human drivers if they are not working properly, particularly because many vehicles will potentially be running the same software and that software will lack common sense. An OTA update can't cause 100,000 human drivers to start running red lights because the new image recognition algorithm had a bug, or cause 100,000 human drivers not to brake properly on corners because a buggy sensor response said the surface was slippery and the brakes should be disabled on all four wheels to prevent a skid. The next big terrorist attack is not going to be someone sitting in a motel room and remotely causing 100,000 human drivers to suddenly brake to a halt in the middle of crowded roads for no good reason and cause 100,000 pile-ups. The sheer scale of the potential damage if these sorts of events do happen, combined with the very small number of people who have to make a mistake or act with hostile intent to cause such an event, makes the risk a lot higher than some of us are comfortable with.
Perhaps we shouldn't give up on the idea of a more connected world, but we should acknowledge the reality that there is a very long way to go before we know how to build secure and robust systems. Among typical privately owned and operated products, cars might be literally the worst place that such technologies could be introduced at their current level of development. Can you think of any other industry where the equipment is as ubiquitous and as potentially dangerous and that equipment is built by businesses with such a poor track record for prioritising safety over profits?
There's plenty you can do with technology to make cars more interesting or useful. Look at all the modern driver aids, such as traction control or assisted braking. Look at modern navigation systems. Even the lights on modern cars are getting totally redesigned to be more effective.
The point about the Luddites was that they were opposed to technological changes that would potentially make them redundant by doing their jobs better and more efficiently. Nothing about having hopelessly vulnerable control systems attached to vast numbers of heavy, fast-moving vehicles falls into that category.
In extreme cases, yes, historically that has been true.
Unfortunately, I think the real problem we have is not that our government is not listening to its people, but that so many of its people have so little to say. About one in three eligible voters didn't even vote in the last general election, even though it was looking extremely close in the polls beforehand. Far fewer usually turn out for things like council or MEP elections. Far fewer still actually engage with their elected representatives in any substantial way other than voting for or against them every few years.
If we were talking about something like a government refusing to relinquish power after losing a reasonably free and fair election, then yes, some other form of taking power back would ultimately be necessary, but that's not really the case in the UK today and I'm not sure organisations like our police services or armed forces would support such a government for long even if it were. Our system is failing to give smaller parties fair representation, for sure, and personally I believe that should be changed. But we had a chance to do that during the last Parliament and overwhelmingly blew it, again apparently because a lot of people either couldn't or didn't bother to understand the issue and vote accordingly.
So in a way our government is listening to its people. It's just that a large proportion of its people in most cases are saying they don't care. Of course, that is no less unfortunate for the people who do, or probably for the people who don't as well, even if they don't realise it. However, to break the cycle, we need to get enough support at least once to bring in an administration that will effect real constitutional change and rebalance the system to be fairer to those who are willing to participate. In a FPTP system when you inevitably alternate between two big parties most of the time, that's a tall order.
I don't think guns are what we need. What we need is for enough people to care that the current system becomes untenable and a better alternative becomes the only credible option for those making the decisions.
Unfortunately, even the modest change to use AV (i.e., IRV) instead of FPTP was voted down by around 2:1 in a referendum just a few years ago, after a horrible campaign that did the advocates about as much credit as the current EU referendum nonsense both sides keep spouting. The irony is that in the AV referendum, it seems some people voted against AV because they just didn't understand the issue and the alternative on offer, and others voted against AV fearing that if they endorsed that then it would stick forever when what they really wanted to see was more radical change.
The only other major changes in recent years have been around the House of Lords, which is perhaps the ultimate insult to democracy in our country since the monarchy is essentially ceremonial at this point. Sadly, attempts at significant Lords reform have proved to be even less interesting to the general public than attempts at significant Commons reform.
It turns out that people who are apathetic about elections and feel disconnected with the politics of the country are also apathetic about electoral reform, even though it could help to fix the things those people complain about after every election. It's all very sad.
Please remember that at the last general election, even together the Tories and Labour only polled around 67% of the popular vote, and that on a turnout of 66%. That means more people did not vote for either of those parties than did at the last election, and they seem to be the ones whose MPs for the most part supported this bill. And that's with a first-past-the-post electoral system, which realistically means plenty of the votes they did get were probably tactical rather than genuine preferences.
It's hard to vote someone else into office when the system is so biased and the people currently in office have every incentive to keep it that way.
Agreed on both points. It's entirely possible that the logs are correct, but I wouldn't trust that just on the auto company's say-so without independent verification.
I certainly hope they did. What I don't know is whether they would then be honest in reporting their findings. The auto industry has been caught blatantly, knowingly and repeatedly lying to everyone up to and including governments and regulatory bodies in the past, and with the huge fines or recall costs potentially at stake, they have every incentive to continue doing so until the rules are changed.
Proven in court and caused specifically by the electronic control systems? Not that I'm aware of, though there have certainly been sudden acceleration incidents that weren't driver error and related attempts to cover them up, and there have also been cases demonstrating an ability to gain remote control over electronic control systems affecting vehicle movement.
However, as I noted before, there are also plausible explanations involving driver error in a lot of these cases.
That's not a safe assumption at all. Killing the driver's intended acceleration while traversing an intersection or merging with a high speed road would be extremely dangerous, for example.
This is a serious problem when designing safety systems related to cars: in some cases, there is no universally correct safe mode you can fail to if a fault is detected.
Majority voting with three systems has turned out to be dangerous on quite a few occasions.
Any fault in these kinds of systems can be highly dangerous and should be grounds for emergency procedures and taking the equipment out of service as soon as possible. That's as true if you have majority-of-three as it is with just two readings. Systems should still be designed to fail as safely as possible under those conditions, which might still mean assuming the single reading to be the correct one if that would be the safest response under the circumstances.
The problem with both examples you gave is that the emergency procedures did not err on the side of caution and solely trusted the majority equipment. Even if you've got a heavily automated system like a modern Airbus, it is clearly a concern if both pilots can indicate that they want the plane to do something and yet the control systems decide to do something else anyway.
The control systems for a lot of modern cars are far more interdependent than they really ought to be, despite obvious (to someone with the right background) safety and reliability implications. What you wrote there is plausible, but I certainly wouldn't just take a report from the manufacturer at face value in this sort of case. Auto manufacturers don't exactly have a reputation for being honest about these things, particularly when business-destroying liabilities or very expensive safety recalls are on the cards.
That's because in the UK you can only sue for actual losses in copyright infringement
Yes.
Hence the most you can sue for is the cost of the CD/DVD/BlueRay disc(s) which makes it not worth the effort.
No. If you're redistributing, there is a reasonable argument that the copies you're creating could be lost sales.
However, in theory at least, you do have to come up with a reasonable argument for how much the infringement actually cost, not just some hypothetical number. As you say, there's also no provision for additional punitive damages.
It might not have been in whatever they officially call autopilot, but modern cars suddenly accelerating due to control system failure is, unfortunately, not unheard of.
Of course, neither is someone confusing the accelerator and brake pedals while in a panic that the car is suddenly speeding up. We don't know enough to say what really happened here from what I've seen so far.
If you're building a safety critical system, having two sensors won't do you much good. Even if they disagree, you have no way to know which is wrong, only that some fault exists. The best you can do in that situation is try to fail to safe, but in a vehicle where stopping suddenly at the wrong time or in the wrong place could be more dangerous than carrying on until it's safer, there is no perfect failsafe mode.
Having three parallel systems, ideally made with different types components to guard against design defects, gets you something more useful, since you can at least take a majority vote if one of the sensors is out of sync with the other two. Obviously this is also more expensive to implement, though.
(a) Most jurisdictions have some form of small claims process to deal with the $100 issue, often not even allowing professional lawyers to be present. Large organisations like Google can be and have been successfully sued in small claims actions.
(b) As I mentioned in another post, loser pays doesn't necessarily mean the loser automatically and inevitably pays all costs of the victor no matter how disproportionate. In sane jurisdictions, the award is made by the trial judge based on what is reasonable under the circumstances, even if the presumption is in favour of the victor's costs being paid. The kind of acts you mentioned might reasonably be disregarded for the purposes of awarding costs if they appeared to have been calculated to increase those costs as a deterrent to the other party rather than done to support the case being made.
Loser pays the costs means the richest person usually wins.
How so? Compared to everyone paying their own costs, where someone with limited funds can't afford to bring a case or defend themselves in court even if they are totally in the right, loser pays seems to cause far less trouble with this sort of abusive litigation.
In the UK, for example, we don't tend to see things like aggressive letters from IP lawyers saying someone was kind sorta found to maybe be downloading something they shouldn't have, but if they just pay up (average legal fees to defend yourself)/2 in a settlement the lawyers will go away.
In some jurisdictions, I believe the law allows the judge to award costs to the victor, i.e., the loser pays, but as with damages the actual amount is at the discretion of the judge. That means if HugeMegaCorp, Inc. turn up with a "million dollar" legal team to defend a hundred buck trial against a customer who feels they were unfairly treated, and the customer's complaint isn't upheld by the court but the case had genuine merit, the judge can decide to award less than the million dollar legal fees.
Net neutrality does not say "all traffic must be treated exactly the same", it says "all traffic of a particular type must be treated the same"
I think some people would disagree with you on that and argue that any form of traffic shaping is not neutral and potentially undesirable. The purest form of net neutrality is that everyone gets a pipe, and whatever bandwidth that pipe has, they can use to transfer whatever data they want without the ISP examining it at all.
If an ISP wants to adopt your position and shape by traffic type but not by traffic source/destination, customers can probably reduce that to the alternative version anyway by sending all traffic over some sort of encrypted channel that the ISP can't penetrate. VPNs do this all the time. However, doing so does require some technical skill on the part of the customer and some co-ordination between different systems to set up the necessary channels, so it isn't an option for everyone. It also requires the ISP not to de-prioritise any traffic they can't inspect, of course.
Whether that degree of opacity is actually the best way to run things is a different question. It does also prevent potentially useful traffic shaping by ISPs even when most people might consider acceptable, such as prioritising real time services over bulk data transfers at peak times. On the other hand, if your time to complete an off-site back-up is going up by 25% every quarter because many of your neighbours enjoy Netflix and your ISP doesn't want to pay for more bandwidth, you might have a legitimate grievance even then. There are few easy answers in this area, even to questions like what net neutrality actually means and what (if anything) does constitute appropriate traffic shaping.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want to start some huge side discussion about the EU referendum here, but I'll just mention that the UK's own data protection legislation already covers subject access requests and rights to correct data that is wrong. There is no particular reason to expect that to change whatever the referendum result later this month turns out to be. Even if we vote to leave, it will surely be a few years before things get separated out and any major changes to the legal system get made, as the government will be busy for quite a while just trying to disentangle UK law from dependencies on EU sources and to maintain the existing provisions in the UK. Hopefully this particular business will have failed long before that becomes relevant.
What is worrying me is that I can't immediately see why this would be illegal under current data protection law in England and Wales, because it appears that the prospective tenant is giving their explicit consent to processing the data. Even with sensitive personal data (with the Data Protection Act meaning of the term, i.e., politics, religion and the like) having explicit consent turns off a lot of legal safeguards the subject would otherwise enjoy.
I completely agree with everyone saying this is shady as hell, but since private landlords also have no obligation to offer accommodation to any particular individual, if they all start using this sort of system I don't see that there's much tenants can do about it. They can try to find alternative accommodation that doesn't come with the same intrusion, but that could be difficult in some areas due to the shortage of decent housing, as others have mentioned. They could lobby for better regulation, but historically that has not been very successful in reigning in abusive landlords and the letting agencies they hide behind.
Unless there is a credible case that landlords have made decisions based on personal data that they aren't allowed to consider under anti-discrimination laws or something along those lines, which does seem to make it unwise for this spyware company to pass on that sort of data to landlords in the first place, I'm not sure what there is to actually stop this as the law stands today.
Consideration does not have to be monetary. For example, in the case of the four web sites you mentioned, the service of storing and distributing the user's information is providing something of value to the user.
Ironically, this whole disturbing business might fail before long precisely because younger generations are much more aware of the dangers of over-sharing. The Millenial generation probably is going to suffer for sharing too freely, but at least their kids seem to be learning from their mistakes, and it's going to be fewer of the Millenials and more of their kids who want to rent as time goes by.
True, but those are things that are actually relatively easy to test for.
I'm not sure how true that is; the image recognition problems involved in my red light example are not trivial, after all.
In any case, this still relies on someone thinking to test for all relevant failure cases and writing those tests properly. Unfortunately, almost no-one else in the software industry manages testing so reliably.
With the control software for modern cars being as large and complex as it is, it's hard to imagine that nothing serious will slip through. And with cars, it only takes one sufficiently nasty bug for "fatal error" to become all too literal.
That's a movie plot threat.
Not so much, unfortunately. I picked that specific example precisely because a proof of concept already exists.
It would be nice to think that terrorists are too dumb with IT to actually pull something like that off, but that's like assuming that a 15-year-old script kiddie is too dumb to install ransomware on someone else's system. In reality, the tools to do so are a few clicks away from any number of dubious sites, and they require no great skill or understanding to use.
There is nothing contradictory or fallacious about believing a system can have a lower risk of a failure occurring overall, yet still be more vulnerable to certain types of failure.
Automated vehicle control systems have obvious advantages over human drivers when they are working properly. They don't get fatigued or distracted or irritated by someone else's bad driving. They can look everywhere at once, with much better sensors than human vision. They can respond much faster to the changing environment. In time, when the control algorithms are sufficiently developed, you would expect vehicles using these systems to be safer in terms of accidents.
Automated vehicle control systems also have obvious disadvantages over human drivers if they are not working properly, particularly because many vehicles will potentially be running the same software and that software will lack common sense. An OTA update can't cause 100,000 human drivers to start running red lights because the new image recognition algorithm had a bug, or cause 100,000 human drivers not to brake properly on corners because a buggy sensor response said the surface was slippery and the brakes should be disabled on all four wheels to prevent a skid. The next big terrorist attack is not going to be someone sitting in a motel room and remotely causing 100,000 human drivers to suddenly brake to a halt in the middle of crowded roads for no good reason and cause 100,000 pile-ups. The sheer scale of the potential damage if these sorts of events do happen, combined with the very small number of people who have to make a mistake or act with hostile intent to cause such an event, makes the risk a lot higher than some of us are comfortable with.
Perhaps we shouldn't give up on the idea of a more connected world, but we should acknowledge the reality that there is a very long way to go before we know how to build secure and robust systems. Among typical privately owned and operated products, cars might be literally the worst place that such technologies could be introduced at their current level of development. Can you think of any other industry where the equipment is as ubiquitous and as potentially dangerous and that equipment is built by businesses with such a poor track record for prioritising safety over profits?
There's plenty you can do with technology to make cars more interesting or useful. Look at all the modern driver aids, such as traction control or assisted braking. Look at modern navigation systems. Even the lights on modern cars are getting totally redesigned to be more effective.
However, connecting cars wirelessly to anything and everything is foolish with today's technology. There was a story just yesterday about how an OTA update broke the radio and navigation systems on Lexus cars. A couple of days before that, there was a story about how the alarm on a Mitsubishi model could be remotely disabled due to poor wireless security. Paranoia is irrational distrust. It's hardly irrational to be concerned when we've had two major failures so far this week and plenty more before that.
The point about the Luddites was that they were opposed to technological changes that would potentially make them redundant by doing their jobs better and more efficiently. Nothing about having hopelessly vulnerable control systems attached to vast numbers of heavy, fast-moving vehicles falls into that category.
In extreme cases, yes, historically that has been true.
Unfortunately, I think the real problem we have is not that our government is not listening to its people, but that so many of its people have so little to say. About one in three eligible voters didn't even vote in the last general election, even though it was looking extremely close in the polls beforehand. Far fewer usually turn out for things like council or MEP elections. Far fewer still actually engage with their elected representatives in any substantial way other than voting for or against them every few years.
If we were talking about something like a government refusing to relinquish power after losing a reasonably free and fair election, then yes, some other form of taking power back would ultimately be necessary, but that's not really the case in the UK today and I'm not sure organisations like our police services or armed forces would support such a government for long even if it were. Our system is failing to give smaller parties fair representation, for sure, and personally I believe that should be changed. But we had a chance to do that during the last Parliament and overwhelmingly blew it, again apparently because a lot of people either couldn't or didn't bother to understand the issue and vote accordingly.
So in a way our government is listening to its people. It's just that a large proportion of its people in most cases are saying they don't care. Of course, that is no less unfortunate for the people who do, or probably for the people who don't as well, even if they don't realise it. However, to break the cycle, we need to get enough support at least once to bring in an administration that will effect real constitutional change and rebalance the system to be fairer to those who are willing to participate. In a FPTP system when you inevitably alternate between two big parties most of the time, that's a tall order.
Indeed.
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. -- Winston Churchill
I don't think guns are what we need. What we need is for enough people to care that the current system becomes untenable and a better alternative becomes the only credible option for those making the decisions.
Unfortunately, even the modest change to use AV (i.e., IRV) instead of FPTP was voted down by around 2:1 in a referendum just a few years ago, after a horrible campaign that did the advocates about as much credit as the current EU referendum nonsense both sides keep spouting. The irony is that in the AV referendum, it seems some people voted against AV because they just didn't understand the issue and the alternative on offer, and others voted against AV fearing that if they endorsed that then it would stick forever when what they really wanted to see was more radical change.
The only other major changes in recent years have been around the House of Lords, which is perhaps the ultimate insult to democracy in our country since the monarchy is essentially ceremonial at this point. Sadly, attempts at significant Lords reform have proved to be even less interesting to the general public than attempts at significant Commons reform.
It turns out that people who are apathetic about elections and feel disconnected with the politics of the country are also apathetic about electoral reform, even though it could help to fix the things those people complain about after every election. It's all very sad.
Please remember that at the last general election, even together the Tories and Labour only polled around 67% of the popular vote, and that on a turnout of 66%. That means more people did not vote for either of those parties than did at the last election, and they seem to be the ones whose MPs for the most part supported this bill. And that's with a first-past-the-post electoral system, which realistically means plenty of the votes they did get were probably tactical rather than genuine preferences.
It's hard to vote someone else into office when the system is so biased and the people currently in office have every incentive to keep it that way.
Agreed on both points. It's entirely possible that the logs are correct, but I wouldn't trust that just on the auto company's say-so without independent verification.
I certainly hope they did. What I don't know is whether they would then be honest in reporting their findings. The auto industry has been caught blatantly, knowingly and repeatedly lying to everyone up to and including governments and regulatory bodies in the past, and with the huge fines or recall costs potentially at stake, they have every incentive to continue doing so until the rules are changed.
Proven in court and caused specifically by the electronic control systems? Not that I'm aware of, though there have certainly been sudden acceleration incidents that weren't driver error and related attempts to cover them up, and there have also been cases demonstrating an ability to gain remote control over electronic control systems affecting vehicle movement.
However, as I noted before, there are also plausible explanations involving driver error in a lot of these cases.
That's not a safe assumption at all. Killing the driver's intended acceleration while traversing an intersection or merging with a high speed road would be extremely dangerous, for example.
This is a serious problem when designing safety systems related to cars: in some cases, there is no universally correct safe mode you can fail to if a fault is detected.
Majority voting with three systems has turned out to be dangerous on quite a few occasions.
Any fault in these kinds of systems can be highly dangerous and should be grounds for emergency procedures and taking the equipment out of service as soon as possible. That's as true if you have majority-of-three as it is with just two readings. Systems should still be designed to fail as safely as possible under those conditions, which might still mean assuming the single reading to be the correct one if that would be the safest response under the circumstances.
The problem with both examples you gave is that the emergency procedures did not err on the side of caution and solely trusted the majority equipment. Even if you've got a heavily automated system like a modern Airbus, it is clearly a concern if both pilots can indicate that they want the plane to do something and yet the control systems decide to do something else anyway.
The control systems for a lot of modern cars are far more interdependent than they really ought to be, despite obvious (to someone with the right background) safety and reliability implications. What you wrote there is plausible, but I certainly wouldn't just take a report from the manufacturer at face value in this sort of case. Auto manufacturers don't exactly have a reputation for being honest about these things, particularly when business-destroying liabilities or very expensive safety recalls are on the cards.
That's because in the UK you can only sue for actual losses in copyright infringement
Yes.
Hence the most you can sue for is the cost of the CD/DVD/BlueRay disc(s) which makes it not worth the effort.
No. If you're redistributing, there is a reasonable argument that the copies you're creating could be lost sales.
However, in theory at least, you do have to come up with a reasonable argument for how much the infringement actually cost, not just some hypothetical number. As you say, there's also no provision for additional punitive damages.
It might not have been in whatever they officially call autopilot, but modern cars suddenly accelerating due to control system failure is, unfortunately, not unheard of.
Of course, neither is someone confusing the accelerator and brake pedals while in a panic that the car is suddenly speeding up. We don't know enough to say what really happened here from what I've seen so far.
If you're building a safety critical system, having two sensors won't do you much good. Even if they disagree, you have no way to know which is wrong, only that some fault exists. The best you can do in that situation is try to fail to safe, but in a vehicle where stopping suddenly at the wrong time or in the wrong place could be more dangerous than carrying on until it's safer, there is no perfect failsafe mode.
Having three parallel systems, ideally made with different types components to guard against design defects, gets you something more useful, since you can at least take a majority vote if one of the sensors is out of sync with the other two. Obviously this is also more expensive to implement, though.
(a) Most jurisdictions have some form of small claims process to deal with the $100 issue, often not even allowing professional lawyers to be present. Large organisations like Google can be and have been successfully sued in small claims actions.
(b) As I mentioned in another post, loser pays doesn't necessarily mean the loser automatically and inevitably pays all costs of the victor no matter how disproportionate. In sane jurisdictions, the award is made by the trial judge based on what is reasonable under the circumstances, even if the presumption is in favour of the victor's costs being paid. The kind of acts you mentioned might reasonably be disregarded for the purposes of awarding costs if they appeared to have been calculated to increase those costs as a deterrent to the other party rather than done to support the case being made.
Loser pays the costs means the richest person usually wins.
How so? Compared to everyone paying their own costs, where someone with limited funds can't afford to bring a case or defend themselves in court even if they are totally in the right, loser pays seems to cause far less trouble with this sort of abusive litigation.
In the UK, for example, we don't tend to see things like aggressive letters from IP lawyers saying someone was kind sorta found to maybe be downloading something they shouldn't have, but if they just pay up (average legal fees to defend yourself)/2 in a settlement the lawyers will go away.
In some jurisdictions, I believe the law allows the judge to award costs to the victor, i.e., the loser pays, but as with damages the actual amount is at the discretion of the judge. That means if HugeMegaCorp, Inc. turn up with a "million dollar" legal team to defend a hundred buck trial against a customer who feels they were unfairly treated, and the customer's complaint isn't upheld by the court but the case had genuine merit, the judge can decide to award less than the million dollar legal fees.
Some days, we really need a (-1, Hopelessly Incorrect) mod.
Net neutrality does not say "all traffic must be treated exactly the same", it says "all traffic of a particular type must be treated the same"
I think some people would disagree with you on that and argue that any form of traffic shaping is not neutral and potentially undesirable. The purest form of net neutrality is that everyone gets a pipe, and whatever bandwidth that pipe has, they can use to transfer whatever data they want without the ISP examining it at all.
If an ISP wants to adopt your position and shape by traffic type but not by traffic source/destination, customers can probably reduce that to the alternative version anyway by sending all traffic over some sort of encrypted channel that the ISP can't penetrate. VPNs do this all the time. However, doing so does require some technical skill on the part of the customer and some co-ordination between different systems to set up the necessary channels, so it isn't an option for everyone. It also requires the ISP not to de-prioritise any traffic they can't inspect, of course.
Whether that degree of opacity is actually the best way to run things is a different question. It does also prevent potentially useful traffic shaping by ISPs even when most people might consider acceptable, such as prioritising real time services over bulk data transfers at peak times. On the other hand, if your time to complete an off-site back-up is going up by 25% every quarter because many of your neighbours enjoy Netflix and your ISP doesn't want to pay for more bandwidth, you might have a legitimate grievance even then. There are few easy answers in this area, even to questions like what net neutrality actually means and what (if anything) does constitute appropriate traffic shaping.