Nothing you wrote there about physical harm is even slightly relevant to this discussion.
When you buy a product, you have a clear legal right (at least in my country, which is explicitly where I was talking about) to a product of satisfactory quality in return for your money. This has nothing to do with what kind of product it is or whether anyone died as a result of a glitch. It's just a basic principle of our consumer protection laws, and there's nothing "ridiculous" or "entitled" about enforcing your basic rights under the law if necessary.
In this scenario, a few people boycotting a game that already made a fortune on preorders does not appear to be an effective incentive for the games companies to produce stuff that actually works properly at launch. So, I am suggesting that a more co-ordinated and therefore expensive action, by a significant number of customers who already paid for the game including those who preordered, that effectively yanks that money back because the game quality wasn't good enough, would be a much more effective strategy. Sure, it would probably be a big hassle to organise and that's why I doubt it will happen, but like throwing the elbow, it's something you probably only have to do once.
What is missing in this industry that others often have is clear consumer protection laws and an awareness among consumers that they can enforce their rights. A game's entire value is normally in the entertainment it provides. If it simply doesn't work properly, and as a result that entertainment value is dramatically reduced, then it isn't fit for purpose.
The situation is complicated because these laws vary widely with jurisdiction and over time. For example, here in the UK, there have been several relevant changes to consumer protection laws this year specifically to close gaps and clarify rights in the context of digital content. The bottom line, though, is that like any other purchase, you are entitled to get something of satisfactory quality for your money, and if you don't then the vendor who takes that money will normally have some obligations to replace/repair/refund to fix the problem. (Don't assume you can just go in and demand a 100% refund every time without giving them any other chance to fix things first, though; I don't know any jurisdiction where the law is that one-sided.)
Of course with software there is always a question of what constitutes a reasonable quality since there will inevitably be bugs, but a lot of these games ship with such obvious and sometimes entirely game-destroying howlers that I don't see how the vendors have a leg to stand on.
If someone orchestrated a mass campaign where a significant proportion of the customers of one of these games did actually assert their consumer rights and claim a reasonable fix-or-refund remedy, even just once, I expect the shockwaves through the AAA game business would be felt for a long time.
Unfortunately, that's probably not going to happen, and next year the same hard core group will probably pre-order the next destined-to-fail-at-launch edition of each big franchise, thus further confirming to the games companies that their current practices are commercially acceptable.:-(
Given what they are offering to customers as compensation this time, I wonder whether a substantial backlash against this kind of substandard quality has finally started, perhaps even among the serious gaming community. It certainly seems like Ubisoft might actually be getting concerned about their reputation and future profits now. It's not as if they haven't had launch disasters before, but presumably you only get so many before people stop pre-ordering your next "must have" game, even if the limit is high in this business.
If that's your argument, go after the people publishing the information: newspapers and commercial databases.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can go after the original source with a direct defamation action if they're within the same jurisdictions. All this law means is that just because the original source has escaped to a different jurisdiction, that doesn't give everyone else a free pass to propagate and amplify incorrect or misleading information about someone.
But preventing Google from returning those search results is only intended to hurt Google and to make it difficult for regular folks to get at information.
That's a very cynical viewpoint. One plausible alternative is that it's meant to stop people from missing out on say a job or a mortgage they would otherwise have had just because someone once accused them of doing something inappropriate that they did not in fact do.
Ok, so we have nailed your point of view down to "we can't control the content of the book, but we do control the table of content".
That's not so much my point of view as the entire point of the court ruling.
Don't you think that's a bit like shooting the messenger? Furthermore, don't you think that you're now placing an undue burden on a company that has nothing to do with the content that is being indexed?
No, I really don't. The existence of services like Google's dramatically amplifies the damage that would otherwise be done by sites that publish incomplete or misleading information about people. Google may not be the original source of the problem, but it is still contributing to it, and as such I don't see why it should get a free pass when it has been explicitly notified that it is doing so.
They won't go after the one they need to go after, so they go after the one they can go after.
That's a false dichotomy. In law, you can only ever go after someone within your jurisdiction, and in this case either or both of the original source and a search engine that directs people to it would be required by law to comply if they are within that jurisdiction.
And if you were guaranteed to be provided with complete information and somehow constrained to read through every Google result for your search term to make sure you were fully informed before acting and somehow constrained to act fairly and without unjustified discrimination based on that information, this whole "right to be forgotten" idea wouldn't be relevant.
Unfortunately, that isn't very practical, so we have to look for another solution to the problem of people being damaged by, collectively, those who present incomplete or otherwise misleading information about the victim, those who allow others to find that information, and those who then act unfairly in light of that information. Keep in mind that this can and does happen even if there is good faith on the part of all concerned, because in general no party other than the victim necessarily knows enough to prevent the damage alone.
Attempting to discourage bad behaviour is pretty much the only good reason to pass a law. Your inability to understand that even when presented with a very obvious and uncontroversial analogy is no-one's problem but your own.
That some people, or you, attributed an additional set of meaning to the results is your responsibility.
That's a lovely ivory tower you live in, but in the real world, your position is of little comfort to all the people who miss out on opportunities or suffer harm because someone did a quick web search and leapt to the wrong conclusions about the victim.
What next, I have a right to drive around at 90mph past the school down the road, and the law shouldn't stop be because I'm just exercising my freedom of movement and not necessarily doing any harm to anyone? Of course if I do hit a child, it will be my fault and the law will punish me, but that won't be any consolation to the dead child's parents.
So, you're arguing that due to English schtupidity (pronounce as Clarkson), Google should conceal factually correct data from being discovered while it is perfectly visible elsewhere on the web?
No, I'm arguing that because of human nature search engines should be required not to promote misleading or inaccurate information that may lead to unfair inferences being drawn about innocent people, once the search engines are explicitly made aware that they are doing so.
If one would really want to protect the acquitted, the law should mandate that the article be amended with information regarding the acquittal.
Ideally, yes. Unfortunately from this point of view, there are plenty of places in the world where they will tell you to go hang, because their right to mislead people about you is more important than your right to be treated fairly. This law is the closest we have right now to routing around that problem.
You have the freedom of movement that extends to the border of my properties. Your freedom of expression extends to the right to say whatever you want. Spray painting is not free speech, that would be infringement on my property rights.
Indeed. But if you apply the same logic from the other direction to cases like this, you see why it's important not to promote misleading or incorrect information about innocent people.
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
I suppose the difference is that in the centuries since Jefferson said that, we have learned that the pen is mightier than the sword, the printing press is mightier than the pen, and the Internet gives anyone the power of a printing press that can reach an audience of billions in moments and at negligible cost.
But the law doesn't actually require that references be removed in the situations you described. Search engines may be removing them anyway, and maybe they are taking too cautious a line rather than risking legal action against them. However, they would be free to remove material even without this law, and they could be subject to legal actions in the usual suspect jurisdictions anyway, so I don't see how this is the fault of the law itself.
What on earth are you talking about? Nothing in the BBC article, nor the numerous other serious press reports on this subject so far this year, nor the original court ruling that started the whole debate, nor numerous comments from national data protection authorities within Europe, has ever claimed that the ruling and the various proposed and actual legal positions that have resulted since give anyone an arbitrary right to remove references to everything they don't like.
You don't need 17 sources and a sworn affidavit to prove this. Just consider that some requests for removal have been rejected, which is an existence proof for my position.
If you have issues with content on the web, you should be going after the host of the content, not search engines who just arbitrarily index.
And within the EU you can do that, too.
The "right to be forgotten" rule protects against circumvention of that law by hosting the material outside of the EU's jurisdiction and relying on search engines to make it readily accessible to people within the EU anyway. Given that if we're talking about a victim in the EU, the damage caused by someone reading misleading or inaccurate information is most likely to arise if the reader is also in the EU, this is actually quite a pragmatic solution to a real problem.
As the person initiating the search, I decide what is relevant.
The arrogance betrayed by that comment is exactly why laws like this are necessary.
If you need to search for information about someone then by definition you are not fully aware of all the facts and cannot be in a position to make a fair judgement if you are presented only with partial, misleading information.
They could not legally claim that post you just wrote as against the law now just because they say so and must be deleted. They could do that in Europe.
And their claim would fail. The "right to be forgotten" ruling does not give anyone some universal, arbitrary, unilateral power to have anything they've done but now don't like removed from history. That has never been anything close to the case, though there are way too many ignorant commenters in on-line discussions who just read the title and don't seem to understand what it means.
Correct information itself is never out of date. If someone has been charged with a crime, that fact stays, even if s/he was found not guilty.
I wonder whether you would take such an unqualified position if you, yourself, were an innocent party who had been maliciously/negligently taken to court. In the real world, having that kind of thing hanging over you despite your complete innocence and having done nothing wrong of any kind can and does destroy lives. For example, there was an infamous case in the UK a few year ago when a paediatrician -- a doctor who specialises in helping children -- was run out of their home by vigilantes who were too stupid to know the difference between a paediatrician and a paedophile.
You are correct, of course, that facts are facts. I would even agree that universal knowledge is, in principle, a good thing if you also have universally rational and fair observers accessing and using that knowledge. For example, historians are typically interested in getting as much complete and accurate information about a period of history as possible, and they place great emphasis on the quality of sources and corroborating evidence. They are unlikely to leap to damaging conclusions based on a single dubious source.
However, in reality the people accessing information on the Internet are only human, and in reality even well-meaning people may come across incorrect or misleading information and make judgements based on it without realising they were in error. That means sometimes it does make sense to conceal information, at least partially or for a limited period of time, in order to protect other humans from unfair harm.
I believe everyone has a basic moral right to fair treatment in this respect, particularly because the damage to a wronged individual if that right is violated will be far greater than the damage to someone who just didn't trivially find out about some possibly incorrect allegations.
I also note that the justice systems in almost every civilised country take a similar view, often such that even actual criminal convictions become "spent" after a time and no longer need to be disclosed. It turns out that sometimes people do change and that encouraging the successful rehabilitation of past offenders makes that much more likely than leaving them with some minor infraction hanging over them for the rest of their lives.
On the contrary, it shows how socialistic nanny-states try to force companies founded in free countries to adhere by their standards.
You and I have very different definitions of freedom. I assume that in yours my freedom of movement also extends to the right to enter your home and my freedom of expression extends to the right to spray paint abusive comments all over it?
Yes, the rhetoric for this week's episode of "Theresa May had an idea" has been particularly silly.
The statistics trotted out over the past week or so make for interesting, if depressing, reading.
For example, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, a very senior officer with counter-terrorism responsibilities, says they've been prevented on average one terrorist attack per year but so far this year it's been 4-5 already. (It's not clear whether this was in the specific context of "lone wolf" attacks, though.)
Just hours apart from that, we have Theresa May herself saying that almost 40 major terrorist attacks have been foiled since the 7/7 bombings, giving an average of about four per year. This means, she says, that the UK is facing the biggest terrorism threat in its history, which might be surprising to anyone who was around during the worst of the troubles with the IRA not so long ago. There are plenty of scary messages played over the PA system when you go through any major London railway station these days, but not frequent closures due to actual bomb threats and the like.
Also on Monday, there was a statement from Met Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley citing 271 arrests resulting from counter-terrorism investigations so far this year. Their Commissioner seemed to be implying in the above statement that all of these had led to charges, too. What they don't seem to have mentioned anywhere in this week's PR campaign is how many such arrests ultimately lead to convictions, nor how many of those convictions (or the arrests or charges themselves) are actually for terrorism offences.
The combined budget for our security services reportedly remains somewhere around the £2B mark, not counting additional funding for counter-terrorism units within other organisations such as the police.
In other news, in 2013 (the last full year for which stats are available) there were 1,713 people killed on our roads, and a further 21,657 seriously injured, not to mention damage to the economy estimated in the £15-30B range as a result of the disruption due to incidents on the road. Would anyone like to guess what's been happening to the annual road safety publicity budget in recent years?
OK, so maybe I spend a lot of time reading Slashdot and want money for it. That doesn't mean you actually owe me anything for reading this post, which I have nevertheless taken the time to write, nor that it is unethical for you not to pay me. I simply don't have any reasonable expectation that by contributing a post and allowing Slashdot to publish it and you to read it, I will then be financially compensated.
It would appear that these professionals with jobs had better learn to deal with moving targets.
Why? There is no commercial advantage in repeatedly expending resources updating your software or intranet sites just to keep pace with the whims of some browser maker.
Whatever certain browser makers would like to happen, as the likes of Windows XP, IE6, and later IE8 demonstrated very clearly, staying with software that works for an extended period is a viable and sometimes very attractive option, even if it comes with significant disadvantages in other respects. Large organisations often work with multi-year roll-out plans for new technologies that will affect many staff or critical business functions, and they aren't going to be the slightest bit impressed by a browser vendor shouting, "But we push new features every six weeks!"
Stability and compatibility no longer exist in the old fashioned way.
Sure they do. They just don't exist if you give your business to organisations like Google, and the kind of web developer that relies on bleeding edge frameworks and joining the dots has no idea how to provide them.
Of course, this is good for those of us who make a lot of money offering businesses better solutions to their real problems using tried and tested technologies. It's not as glamorous, but it sure pays well if you can help your clients get stuff done without technology issues they simply don't care about getting in the way all the time.
TL;DR: Google, Mozilla and their fans wish that professional organisations would see these new developments and choose to adopt Chrome or Firefox as a result. What really happens in many cases is that those organisations see these new developments and say "OK, we'll just stick with IE, which version do we pin at to keep everything working?" and then throw lots of money at organisations like Microsoft that understand the real world needs and provide long term support accordingly.
Cisco has more than enough software devs to remedy this in a years time.
This is a huge problem with this whole debate. People who work on certain browsers want the rest of the world to just dump 20 years of software history, significant amounts of which is still in use and doing its job just fine today, and spend what would collectively be a vast amount of time and money rewriting everything just to run on this week's trendy platform instead.
Newsflash: Professionals with jobs to do value stability and backward compatibility. They probably value their tried and tested software a lot more than a flashy port to your "living standard" platform. They certainly value tried and tested software a lot more than your latest technique for animating SVGs in demos that still doesn't scale up enough to use it in real applications without becoming unusably slow anyway.
See also: Why IE is still so dominant in business browsing, even versions from several years ago, and why neither Firefox nor Chrome got much traction in business at all until they started playing nicely with grown-up sysadmin tools.
This is all too true, unfortunately. Java plug-ins have become increasingly obnoxious about security in recent releases, to the point that software that used to work just fine is now very awkward to use, and both Google and Oracle keep saying things that boil down to "we'll stop it completely, sometime, maybe".
What everyone seems to forget is how many serious/critical vulnerabilities quietly get patched in the major browsers each update. Go ahead and check the change logs. Thinking browsers themselves won't simply take over as the target as they incorporate some of these new features directly is like thinking you're immune to malware because you run Linux.
It is not illegal to be a freeloader it just means that you take without giving back.
Nonsense. I also run web sites. None of them is ad-funded. Some of them don't generate any "revenue" at all beyond good will and sometimes entertaining or useful discussions with others who share my interests.
In short, I "give back" in exactly the way I "take".
The pay cheque isn't the important thing. Experience working in a professional environment is. The difference between how you work on a class project and how you work in a professional environment is vast.
For example, class projects are typically:
- very small
- implemented by a single person or at most a very small team that does not change over the lifetime of the project
- finished within a short period of time
- built with unchanging requirements determined by a single authority and entirely known from the start
- implemented with little need or regard for ongoing maintenance.
Exactly none of those things will be true of a typical industrial software development project. The need to take these kinds of factors into consideration completely changes how you design your software, what tools you use, what processes you follow...
It seems you forgot to quote the later part of that post, where I did acknowledge the problem of content that comes malware-laden... Personally, I don't buy AAA games any more (nor do I pirate them instead). I got bored of the generally poor quality and accompanying malware breaking things a few years ago. Given the comments I see every time gamers' enjoyment of a big new title is spoiled because someone's DRM screwed up again, I suspect my life is still better that way. However, I do miss and would gladly pay for the kind of experience I used to enjoy from the top end games of yesteryear, before everything went downhill when the Internet became an excuse for shipping software that wasn't finished yet (we'll just patch it later, or not) and using ever more obnoxious DRM schemes (of course we can expect gamers to be online with a perfect connection any time they're playing our game).
Of course they are. But the fact is that when the law says things are required to work a certain way, and everyone knows the deal up-front, breaking that law is a different issue to just not doing something entirely voluntary that someone else would have preferred you to do.
Laws may not perfectly follow morals and ethics, but the intent is that they do at least reflect them reasonably well and provide a common standard for acceptable behaviour that everyone knows.
So far, I don't see a lot of that happening. Occasionally I see sites begging you to turn your ad-blocker off, and if they're sites I like then I do have some sympathy.
Unfortunately, from bitter personal experience, ad networks are a threat. There is currently no way to reliably distinguish which parts are dangerous soon enough, so the default safest option is to block the lot.
Very occasionally, I do find a site that doesn't work properly because of the things I block, and then I just go somewhere else instead. Exactly zero sites I need to use have this problem, or rely on ads at all for that matter. It would be sad if all those ad-funded sites went away, but frankly it wouldn't break the Internet and whatever replaced them would probably be a better model for all concerned (except middle-man ad networks).
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing you wrote there about physical harm is even slightly relevant to this discussion.
When you buy a product, you have a clear legal right (at least in my country, which is explicitly where I was talking about) to a product of satisfactory quality in return for your money. This has nothing to do with what kind of product it is or whether anyone died as a result of a glitch. It's just a basic principle of our consumer protection laws, and there's nothing "ridiculous" or "entitled" about enforcing your basic rights under the law if necessary.
In this scenario, a few people boycotting a game that already made a fortune on preorders does not appear to be an effective incentive for the games companies to produce stuff that actually works properly at launch. So, I am suggesting that a more co-ordinated and therefore expensive action, by a significant number of customers who already paid for the game including those who preordered, that effectively yanks that money back because the game quality wasn't good enough, would be a much more effective strategy. Sure, it would probably be a big hassle to organise and that's why I doubt it will happen, but like throwing the elbow, it's something you probably only have to do once.
What is missing in this industry that others often have is clear consumer protection laws and an awareness among consumers that they can enforce their rights. A game's entire value is normally in the entertainment it provides. If it simply doesn't work properly, and as a result that entertainment value is dramatically reduced, then it isn't fit for purpose.
The situation is complicated because these laws vary widely with jurisdiction and over time. For example, here in the UK, there have been several relevant changes to consumer protection laws this year specifically to close gaps and clarify rights in the context of digital content. The bottom line, though, is that like any other purchase, you are entitled to get something of satisfactory quality for your money, and if you don't then the vendor who takes that money will normally have some obligations to replace/repair/refund to fix the problem. (Don't assume you can just go in and demand a 100% refund every time without giving them any other chance to fix things first, though; I don't know any jurisdiction where the law is that one-sided.)
Of course with software there is always a question of what constitutes a reasonable quality since there will inevitably be bugs, but a lot of these games ship with such obvious and sometimes entirely game-destroying howlers that I don't see how the vendors have a leg to stand on.
If someone orchestrated a mass campaign where a significant proportion of the customers of one of these games did actually assert their consumer rights and claim a reasonable fix-or-refund remedy, even just once, I expect the shockwaves through the AAA game business would be felt for a long time.
Unfortunately, that's probably not going to happen, and next year the same hard core group will probably pre-order the next destined-to-fail-at-launch edition of each big franchise, thus further confirming to the games companies that their current practices are commercially acceptable. :-(
Given what they are offering to customers as compensation this time, I wonder whether a substantial backlash against this kind of substandard quality has finally started, perhaps even among the serious gaming community. It certainly seems like Ubisoft might actually be getting concerned about their reputation and future profits now. It's not as if they haven't had launch disasters before, but presumably you only get so many before people stop pre-ordering your next "must have" game, even if the limit is high in this business.
If that's your argument, go after the people publishing the information: newspapers and commercial databases.
The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can go after the original source with a direct defamation action if they're within the same jurisdictions. All this law means is that just because the original source has escaped to a different jurisdiction, that doesn't give everyone else a free pass to propagate and amplify incorrect or misleading information about someone.
But preventing Google from returning those search results is only intended to hurt Google and to make it difficult for regular folks to get at information.
That's a very cynical viewpoint. One plausible alternative is that it's meant to stop people from missing out on say a job or a mortgage they would otherwise have had just because someone once accused them of doing something inappropriate that they did not in fact do.
Ok, so we have nailed your point of view down to "we can't control the content of the book, but we do control the table of content".
That's not so much my point of view as the entire point of the court ruling.
Don't you think that's a bit like shooting the messenger? Furthermore, don't you think that you're now placing an undue burden on a company that has nothing to do with the content that is being indexed?
No, I really don't. The existence of services like Google's dramatically amplifies the damage that would otherwise be done by sites that publish incomplete or misleading information about people. Google may not be the original source of the problem, but it is still contributing to it, and as such I don't see why it should get a free pass when it has been explicitly notified that it is doing so.
They won't go after the one they need to go after, so they go after the one they can go after.
That's a false dichotomy. In law, you can only ever go after someone within your jurisdiction, and in this case either or both of the original source and a search engine that directs people to it would be required by law to comply if they are within that jurisdiction.
And if you were guaranteed to be provided with complete information and somehow constrained to read through every Google result for your search term to make sure you were fully informed before acting and somehow constrained to act fairly and without unjustified discrimination based on that information, this whole "right to be forgotten" idea wouldn't be relevant.
Unfortunately, that isn't very practical, so we have to look for another solution to the problem of people being damaged by, collectively, those who present incomplete or otherwise misleading information about the victim, those who allow others to find that information, and those who then act unfairly in light of that information. Keep in mind that this can and does happen even if there is good faith on the part of all concerned, because in general no party other than the victim necessarily knows enough to prevent the damage alone.
Attempting to discourage bad behaviour is pretty much the only good reason to pass a law. Your inability to understand that even when presented with a very obvious and uncontroversial analogy is no-one's problem but your own.
That some people, or you, attributed an additional set of meaning to the results is your responsibility.
That's a lovely ivory tower you live in, but in the real world, your position is of little comfort to all the people who miss out on opportunities or suffer harm because someone did a quick web search and leapt to the wrong conclusions about the victim.
What next, I have a right to drive around at 90mph past the school down the road, and the law shouldn't stop be because I'm just exercising my freedom of movement and not necessarily doing any harm to anyone? Of course if I do hit a child, it will be my fault and the law will punish me, but that won't be any consolation to the dead child's parents.
So, you're arguing that due to English schtupidity (pronounce as Clarkson), Google should conceal factually correct data from being discovered while it is perfectly visible elsewhere on the web?
No, I'm arguing that because of human nature search engines should be required not to promote misleading or inaccurate information that may lead to unfair inferences being drawn about innocent people, once the search engines are explicitly made aware that they are doing so.
If one would really want to protect the acquitted, the law should mandate that the article be amended with information regarding the acquittal.
Ideally, yes. Unfortunately from this point of view, there are plenty of places in the world where they will tell you to go hang, because their right to mislead people about you is more important than your right to be treated fairly. This law is the closest we have right now to routing around that problem.
You have the freedom of movement that extends to the border of my properties. Your freedom of expression extends to the right to say whatever you want. Spray painting is not free speech, that would be infringement on my property rights.
Indeed. But if you apply the same logic from the other direction to cases like this, you see why it's important not to promote misleading or incorrect information about innocent people.
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
I suppose the difference is that in the centuries since Jefferson said that, we have learned that the pen is mightier than the sword, the printing press is mightier than the pen, and the Internet gives anyone the power of a printing press that can reach an audience of billions in moments and at negligible cost.
But the law doesn't actually require that references be removed in the situations you described. Search engines may be removing them anyway, and maybe they are taking too cautious a line rather than risking legal action against them. However, they would be free to remove material even without this law, and they could be subject to legal actions in the usual suspect jurisdictions anyway, so I don't see how this is the fault of the law itself.
What on earth are you talking about? Nothing in the BBC article, nor the numerous other serious press reports on this subject so far this year, nor the original court ruling that started the whole debate, nor numerous comments from national data protection authorities within Europe, has ever claimed that the ruling and the various proposed and actual legal positions that have resulted since give anyone an arbitrary right to remove references to everything they don't like.
You don't need 17 sources and a sworn affidavit to prove this. Just consider that some requests for removal have been rejected, which is an existence proof for my position.
If you have issues with content on the web, you should be going after the host of the content, not search engines who just arbitrarily index.
And within the EU you can do that, too.
The "right to be forgotten" rule protects against circumvention of that law by hosting the material outside of the EU's jurisdiction and relying on search engines to make it readily accessible to people within the EU anyway. Given that if we're talking about a victim in the EU, the damage caused by someone reading misleading or inaccurate information is most likely to arise if the reader is also in the EU, this is actually quite a pragmatic solution to a real problem.
As the person initiating the search, I decide what is relevant.
The arrogance betrayed by that comment is exactly why laws like this are necessary.
If you need to search for information about someone then by definition you are not fully aware of all the facts and cannot be in a position to make a fair judgement if you are presented only with partial, misleading information.
They could not legally claim that post you just wrote as against the law now just because they say so and must be deleted. They could do that in Europe.
And their claim would fail. The "right to be forgotten" ruling does not give anyone some universal, arbitrary, unilateral power to have anything they've done but now don't like removed from history. That has never been anything close to the case, though there are way too many ignorant commenters in on-line discussions who just read the title and don't seem to understand what it means.
Correct information itself is never out of date. If someone has been charged with a crime, that fact stays, even if s/he was found not guilty.
I wonder whether you would take such an unqualified position if you, yourself, were an innocent party who had been maliciously/negligently taken to court. In the real world, having that kind of thing hanging over you despite your complete innocence and having done nothing wrong of any kind can and does destroy lives. For example, there was an infamous case in the UK a few year ago when a paediatrician -- a doctor who specialises in helping children -- was run out of their home by vigilantes who were too stupid to know the difference between a paediatrician and a paedophile.
You are correct, of course, that facts are facts. I would even agree that universal knowledge is, in principle, a good thing if you also have universally rational and fair observers accessing and using that knowledge. For example, historians are typically interested in getting as much complete and accurate information about a period of history as possible, and they place great emphasis on the quality of sources and corroborating evidence. They are unlikely to leap to damaging conclusions based on a single dubious source.
However, in reality the people accessing information on the Internet are only human, and in reality even well-meaning people may come across incorrect or misleading information and make judgements based on it without realising they were in error. That means sometimes it does make sense to conceal information, at least partially or for a limited period of time, in order to protect other humans from unfair harm.
I believe everyone has a basic moral right to fair treatment in this respect, particularly because the damage to a wronged individual if that right is violated will be far greater than the damage to someone who just didn't trivially find out about some possibly incorrect allegations.
I also note that the justice systems in almost every civilised country take a similar view, often such that even actual criminal convictions become "spent" after a time and no longer need to be disclosed. It turns out that sometimes people do change and that encouraging the successful rehabilitation of past offenders makes that much more likely than leaving them with some minor infraction hanging over them for the rest of their lives.
On the contrary, it shows how socialistic nanny-states try to force companies founded in free countries to adhere by their standards.
You and I have very different definitions of freedom. I assume that in yours my freedom of movement also extends to the right to enter your home and my freedom of expression extends to the right to spray paint abusive comments all over it?
Yes, the rhetoric for this week's episode of "Theresa May had an idea" has been particularly silly.
The statistics trotted out over the past week or so make for interesting, if depressing, reading.
For example, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, a very senior officer with counter-terrorism responsibilities, says they've been prevented on average one terrorist attack per year but so far this year it's been 4-5 already. (It's not clear whether this was in the specific context of "lone wolf" attacks, though.)
Just hours apart from that, we have Theresa May herself saying that almost 40 major terrorist attacks have been foiled since the 7/7 bombings, giving an average of about four per year. This means, she says, that the UK is facing the biggest terrorism threat in its history, which might be surprising to anyone who was around during the worst of the troubles with the IRA not so long ago. There are plenty of scary messages played over the PA system when you go through any major London railway station these days, but not frequent closures due to actual bomb threats and the like.
Also on Monday, there was a statement from Met Police Assistant Commissioner Mark Rowley citing 271 arrests resulting from counter-terrorism investigations so far this year. Their Commissioner seemed to be implying in the above statement that all of these had led to charges, too. What they don't seem to have mentioned anywhere in this week's PR campaign is how many such arrests ultimately lead to convictions, nor how many of those convictions (or the arrests or charges themselves) are actually for terrorism offences.
The combined budget for our security services reportedly remains somewhere around the £2B mark, not counting additional funding for counter-terrorism units within other organisations such as the police.
In other news, in 2013 (the last full year for which stats are available) there were 1,713 people killed on our roads, and a further 21,657 seriously injured, not to mention damage to the economy estimated in the £15-30B range as a result of the disruption due to incidents on the road. Would anyone like to guess what's been happening to the annual road safety publicity budget in recent years?
OK, so maybe I spend a lot of time reading Slashdot and want money for it. That doesn't mean you actually owe me anything for reading this post, which I have nevertheless taken the time to write, nor that it is unethical for you not to pay me. I simply don't have any reasonable expectation that by contributing a post and allowing Slashdot to publish it and you to read it, I will then be financially compensated.
It would appear that these professionals with jobs had better learn to deal with moving targets.
Why? There is no commercial advantage in repeatedly expending resources updating your software or intranet sites just to keep pace with the whims of some browser maker.
Whatever certain browser makers would like to happen, as the likes of Windows XP, IE6, and later IE8 demonstrated very clearly, staying with software that works for an extended period is a viable and sometimes very attractive option, even if it comes with significant disadvantages in other respects. Large organisations often work with multi-year roll-out plans for new technologies that will affect many staff or critical business functions, and they aren't going to be the slightest bit impressed by a browser vendor shouting, "But we push new features every six weeks!"
Stability and compatibility no longer exist in the old fashioned way.
Sure they do. They just don't exist if you give your business to organisations like Google, and the kind of web developer that relies on bleeding edge frameworks and joining the dots has no idea how to provide them.
Of course, this is good for those of us who make a lot of money offering businesses better solutions to their real problems using tried and tested technologies. It's not as glamorous, but it sure pays well if you can help your clients get stuff done without technology issues they simply don't care about getting in the way all the time.
TL;DR: Google, Mozilla and their fans wish that professional organisations would see these new developments and choose to adopt Chrome or Firefox as a result. What really happens in many cases is that those organisations see these new developments and say "OK, we'll just stick with IE, which version do we pin at to keep everything working?" and then throw lots of money at organisations like Microsoft that understand the real world needs and provide long term support accordingly.
Cisco has more than enough software devs to remedy this in a years time.
This is a huge problem with this whole debate. People who work on certain browsers want the rest of the world to just dump 20 years of software history, significant amounts of which is still in use and doing its job just fine today, and spend what would collectively be a vast amount of time and money rewriting everything just to run on this week's trendy platform instead.
Newsflash: Professionals with jobs to do value stability and backward compatibility. They probably value their tried and tested software a lot more than a flashy port to your "living standard" platform. They certainly value tried and tested software a lot more than your latest technique for animating SVGs in demos that still doesn't scale up enough to use it in real applications without becoming unusably slow anyway.
See also: Why IE is still so dominant in business browsing, even versions from several years ago, and why neither Firefox nor Chrome got much traction in business at all until they started playing nicely with grown-up sysadmin tools.
This is all too true, unfortunately. Java plug-ins have become increasingly obnoxious about security in recent releases, to the point that software that used to work just fine is now very awkward to use, and both Google and Oracle keep saying things that boil down to "we'll stop it completely, sometime, maybe".
What everyone seems to forget is how many serious/critical vulnerabilities quietly get patched in the major browsers each update. Go ahead and check the change logs. Thinking browsers themselves won't simply take over as the target as they incorporate some of these new features directly is like thinking you're immune to malware because you run Linux.
It is not illegal to be a freeloader it just means that you take without giving back.
Nonsense. I also run web sites. None of them is ad-funded. Some of them don't generate any "revenue" at all beyond good will and sometimes entertaining or useful discussions with others who share my interests.
In short, I "give back" in exactly the way I "take".
The pay cheque isn't the important thing. Experience working in a professional environment is. The difference between how you work on a class project and how you work in a professional environment is vast.
For example, class projects are typically:
- very small
- implemented by a single person or at most a very small team that does not change over the lifetime of the project
- finished within a short period of time
- built with unchanging requirements determined by a single authority and entirely known from the start
- implemented with little need or regard for ongoing maintenance.
Exactly none of those things will be true of a typical industrial software development project. The need to take these kinds of factors into consideration completely changes how you design your software, what tools you use, what processes you follow...
It seems you forgot to quote the later part of that post, where I did acknowledge the problem of content that comes malware-laden... Personally, I don't buy AAA games any more (nor do I pirate them instead). I got bored of the generally poor quality and accompanying malware breaking things a few years ago. Given the comments I see every time gamers' enjoyment of a big new title is spoiled because someone's DRM screwed up again, I suspect my life is still better that way. However, I do miss and would gladly pay for the kind of experience I used to enjoy from the top end games of yesteryear, before everything went downhill when the Internet became an excuse for shipping software that wasn't finished yet (we'll just patch it later, or not) and using ever more obnoxious DRM schemes (of course we can expect gamers to be online with a perfect connection any time they're playing our game).
Of course they are. But the fact is that when the law says things are required to work a certain way, and everyone knows the deal up-front, breaking that law is a different issue to just not doing something entirely voluntary that someone else would have preferred you to do.
Laws may not perfectly follow morals and ethics, but the intent is that they do at least reflect them reasonably well and provide a common standard for acceptable behaviour that everyone knows.
So far, I don't see a lot of that happening. Occasionally I see sites begging you to turn your ad-blocker off, and if they're sites I like then I do have some sympathy.
Unfortunately, from bitter personal experience, ad networks are a threat. There is currently no way to reliably distinguish which parts are dangerous soon enough, so the default safest option is to block the lot.
Very occasionally, I do find a site that doesn't work properly because of the things I block, and then I just go somewhere else instead. Exactly zero sites I need to use have this problem, or rely on ads at all for that matter. It would be sad if all those ad-funded sites went away, but frankly it wouldn't break the Internet and whatever replaced them would probably be a better model for all concerned (except middle-man ad networks).