Our personal data is worth money to others. They don't want their money taken from them.
No, no, you misunderstand. In reality Facebook is selflessly fighting for our rights to remember. They would allow you to delete the data, but they are concerned about freedom of expression being preserved. They said it right here:
Facebook in particular has strong objections to the right to be forgotten, claiming it "raises many concerns with regard to the right of others to remember and to freedom of expression"
Wait... so today it's OK for people to be in control of what happens to their data?
But step back a few stories and when it's a song or movie, it's no longer up to the person who created it whether it ends up copied all around the world for free, and they have no right to stop other people from copying it?
I think the point of this discussion is that European Commission gets to decide on laws in Europe. And U.S. should pretty much stay out of it. This is completely irrespective of what actual rules are being considered.
Extreme lobbying, such as employed in Iraq, etc., etc?
Why is this marked as troll?
U.S. has no jurisdiction or vote or representation in Europe. Any opposition to European laws thus consists of some unofficial threats, right?
Nor is there a legitimate "political" reason. The only reason it might be happening is some companies (Facebook, etc.) are concerned about running into some customer-protection laws which are conveniently absent in U.S.
Why would anyone trust a company that pretends to be a bank, but is not regulated like a bank, and so can disappear your money in an instant and leave you whistling in the wind for YOUR money? Did the government somehow find if difficult to find a company more trusted?
Maybe eBay finally acquired the UK government?
PayPal became a mostly mandatory form of payment after eBay bought PayPal...
They apparently made no provisions in the contract with Apple to continue the service and protect existing Lala customers. They could have required that these existing customers continue to be provided the Lala service for a reasonable timeframe but apparently they did not. Apple was free to shut it down in what looks like 5 months.
Is that really so simple? Does selling a company (with paying customers) free me of all my contractual obligations to these customers? If Apple sold iTunes to Google, Google would be free to shut everything down in 5 months, killing everyone's music collections??
Their customers should have sued them for everything they got in that deal...
if either Holder or Ortiz had hacked systems and exceeded their authorized access as Swatz did, playing a cat&mouse game with sysadmins at their home institutions and JSTOR, they'd have likely faced the same consequences as Aaron.
Because prosecutors are well known to go hardest for other prosecutors (their colleagues!). Nothing builds a career like zealously hounding your colleagues at work.
That's the whole problem -- prosecutors are effectively encouraged to go after people with minimal amount of clout. The conviction rate counts the same, but it comes with lesser risk of jeopardizing their career.
The health effects were well-studied long before they even tried to sell them to the government. They did ensure the health effects were acceptably small,
Do you care to cite a study that back it up? The time to approve/deploy this machines was probably insufficient to do an extensive health study.
but nobody believes them, because it combines the TSA and radiation.
More exactly -- it combines minimum-wage people (TSA) managing medical-grade machines (radiation). The concern was -- if the machine was less-than-perfectly calibrated, no one would notice. A medical device that would trim nose-hair in a hospital would go through a far more rigorous evaluation than those monstrosities have.
This was the test phase. Everyone who went through one of these machines (including myself) was a guinea pig.
Why did you go through those machines? I never have and I fly regularly. Pat down is mildly annoying, but not too bad
From what I understand they might be admitting that the old-generation scanners may not be safe and phasing them out. So... Who is being criminally charged for approving and deploying potentially unsafe scanners to irradiate millions of people?
ToS are not a f**king contract. Almost every ToS "contract" states that it can be changed (by one side -- I'll let you guess which one) at any time. That's pretty much the OPPOSITE of a contract.
In some cases, the ToS can be changed without notification to you. Then it is your responsibility to visit the website and see if they changed it.
Why? I mean seriously why does everything in America have to involve jail. Do you really think that makes us safer? Eventually somebody will do the math
Someone already has done the math
Private prisons are a booming industry (instead of being an abomination that should not exist). Private prison contracts have clauses guaranteeing prison utilization (~90% or ~95%). Some states may be in danger of defaulting on their prison contract... so that's probably why.
How do you deal with that? How do you draw the line between a website that is clearly open to the public and an intranet site that is only open to selected people?
An intranet site that is only open to selected people should have a frigging password protection. Hacking that is presumably a crime on its own accord
Making a public website and putting a ToS file that says "this is a private internal site" should not be the way to go.
If I bought a huge parking lot in the city and put a little sign that said "no trespassing" in the corner of the lot -- is that enough to prosecute anyone who steps across an unmarked border? (i.e. I have no fence marking my lot)
ToS aren't even a viable contract IMHO. No-one reads them, if you edit them the web site rarely bothers to check before accepting your terms and quite often the terms are unenforceable anyway.
Many of them also include "we may change this ToS at any point of time", which is pretty much the opposite of a contract. For example, cell-phone companies could not enforce a mandatory fee for a paper-bill, because that technically constitutes a violation of the already established contract.
Even better, some ToS state that it is YOUR responsibility to regularly visit their website to see if they changed it (i.e. they are not even responsible for notifying you of the change). So it better be unenforceable...
If I'm right, that means it will be nigh impossible for any authority to take the data offline in a single action. All Kim needs is a list associating peoples' files with where they are physically stored, and it won't matter to *the users* if the site gets taken down - he can just publish the list and everyone can get their files from the cloud storage nodes directly.
Yes, yes, a joy indeed. Of course it would expose storage-holders to Dotcom-treatment (men in black helicopter in, take your servers and arrest you, even if though charges won't stick a year or two later).
I look forward to signing up for the Dotcom experience by becoming one of the storage nodes.
You don't charge a guy with a 35-year felony if all you want is six months.
Oh, but perhaps you do
I can only assume that if they wanted 5 years, they would trump up bullshit charges that carried max of 350 years. Makes it easier to negotiate a deal -- 6 months kinda _does_ seems lenient compared to the potential of 35 years.
US Federal prosecutors have a vast array of methods they can employ to make it difficult for a defendant to exercise his rights.
I would argue that it is even worse that they are not compelled to bring charges against anyone breaking the law.
They could decide not to go after you, and that's that (comes up a lot when trying to bring charges against police officers or other prosecutors). The fact that they can pick and choose who gets charged in the first place is even worse than their ability to overreach when they do bring charges.
"This is totally worthless without shared, public data, so we plan to completely fuck with our privacy settings a whole bunch before this rolls out so that we can make sure your data is public and shared."
Indeed -- Facebook regularly changes (publicly or quietly) various settings to "streamline" user experience and protect user privacy. But I am yet to see a single example where the default change did not expose additional information that used to be private. You'd think at least one move geared to "protect user privacy" would make something private, yet that never happens.
The idea that europe has "stronger consumer protection laws" is utterly false in practice.
I will admit that I am not familiar with European laws -- but I refer you to this particular article. Europe apparently has a mandatory 2-year warranty that encapsulates Apple products, yes?
I do not believe that the 1-year that Apple provides in US is required by law here. I suspect Apple could cut this down to 3 months if they felt like it (the only concern would be consumer backlash)
Therefore, in this particular case, Europe clearly has stronger consumer protection laws -- but I was wrong to generalize to other cases.
They do not need it to go to court. Megaupload is dead and buried -- and others have probably learned their lesson: piss off the wrong people and you will be wiped out, no matter what the law says.
On this subject, there is a White House petition to Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz.
I should sign it, of course -- but I do wonder if she will get to write a response to that petition (why not, it would be only fair, since TSA director got to respond to the "ban TSA" petition).
Any company that is not obligated to act for it's customers will eventually be obliged to close it's doors.
Oooh, I think you forgot to add "... in Europe", due to their stronger consumer-protection laws. In United States, several larger companies seem to be doing quite well acting for the politicians and sometimes for the shareholders (in that order).
"Do not attribute to malice, what can be adequately explained by stupidity."
I don't know that someone triggering a $12.8 million bonus payout for themselves can be adequately explained by stupidity. I don't know of a lot of Mr. Bean-like millionaires that just stupidly stumbled into wealth
...accused of participating in a book-cooking scheme designed to trigger $12.8 million in bonuses and stocks for themselves at the once powerful Canadian technology giant.
I have seen MacBook Air equivalents, although I didn't pay enough attention to remember who made them.
Please look it up. Note that both the weight and matching screen resolution are non-negotiable. A laptop that's +1lb heavier or relies on 1024x768 max resolution will not count as a MacBook Air equivalent.
The iPod touch substitute is easy. Buy any Android phone and don't put it on a cell plan. Android phones work just fine as wifi only devices.
The iPod touch is significantly thinner than an iPhone (and cheaper). An iPhone does not count as iPod touch substitute, why should an Android phone?
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Our personal data is worth money to others. They don't want their money taken from them.
No, no, you misunderstand. In reality Facebook is selflessly fighting for our rights to remember. They would allow you to delete the data, but they are concerned about freedom of expression being preserved. They said it right here:
Facebook in particular has strong objections to the right to be forgotten, claiming it "raises many concerns with regard to the right of others to remember and to freedom of expression"
Wait... so today it's OK for people to be in control of what happens to their data?
But step back a few stories and when it's a song or movie, it's no longer up to the person who created it whether it ends up copied all around the world for free, and they have no right to stop other people from copying it?
I think the point of this discussion is that European Commission gets to decide on laws in Europe. And U.S. should pretty much stay out of it. This is completely irrespective of what actual rules are being considered.
Extreme lobbying, such as employed in Iraq, etc., etc?
Why is this marked as troll?
U.S. has no jurisdiction or vote or representation in Europe. Any opposition to European laws thus consists of some unofficial threats, right?
Nor is there a legitimate "political" reason. The only reason it might be happening is some companies (Facebook, etc.) are concerned about running into some customer-protection laws which are conveniently absent in U.S.
The OP is not that far off.
Why would anyone trust a company that pretends to be a bank, but is not regulated like a bank, and so can disappear your money in an instant and leave you whistling in the wind for YOUR money? Did the government somehow find if difficult to find a company more trusted?
Maybe eBay finally acquired the UK government?
PayPal became a mostly mandatory form of payment after eBay bought PayPal...
I think, like so many other websites, he will have trouble monitizing the service without becoming obnoxious.
I assume he may be going for paid premium accounts
When I use a free (valuable) service, I always consider (and sometimes purchase) the premium account. Seems fair.
They apparently made no provisions in the contract with Apple to continue the service and protect existing Lala customers. They could have required that these existing customers continue to be provided the Lala service for a reasonable timeframe but apparently they did not. Apple was free to shut it down in what looks like 5 months.
Is that really so simple? Does selling a company (with paying customers) free me of all my contractual obligations to these customers? If Apple sold iTunes to Google, Google would be free to shut everything down in 5 months, killing everyone's music collections??
Their customers should have sued them for everything they got in that deal...
if either Holder or Ortiz had hacked systems and exceeded their authorized access as Swatz did, playing a cat&mouse game with sysadmins at their home institutions and JSTOR, they'd have likely faced the same consequences as Aaron.
Because prosecutors are well known to go hardest for other prosecutors (their colleagues!). Nothing builds a career like zealously hounding your colleagues at work.
That's the whole problem -- prosecutors are effectively encouraged to go after people with minimal amount of clout. The conviction rate counts the same, but it comes with lesser risk of jeopardizing their career.
The health effects were well-studied long before they even tried to sell them to the government. They did ensure the health effects were acceptably small,
Do you care to cite a study that back it up? The time to approve/deploy this machines was probably insufficient to do an extensive health study.
but nobody believes them, because it combines the TSA and radiation.
More exactly -- it combines minimum-wage people (TSA) managing medical-grade machines (radiation). The concern was -- if the machine was less-than-perfectly calibrated, no one would notice. A medical device that would trim nose-hair in a hospital would go through a far more rigorous evaluation than those monstrosities have.
This was the test phase. Everyone who went through one of these machines (including myself) was a guinea pig.
Why did you go through those machines? I never have and I fly regularly. Pat down is mildly annoying, but not too bad
From what I understand they might be admitting that the old-generation scanners may not be safe and phasing them out. So... Who is being criminally charged for approving and deploying potentially unsafe scanners to irradiate millions of people?
The Terms of Service are a contract.
ToS are not a f**king contract. Almost every ToS "contract" states that it can be changed (by one side -- I'll let you guess which one) at any time. That's pretty much the OPPOSITE of a contract.
In some cases, the ToS can be changed without notification to you. Then it is your responsibility to visit the website and see if they changed it.
Why? I mean seriously why does everything in America have to involve jail. Do you really think that makes us safer? Eventually somebody will do the math
Someone already has done the math
Private prisons are a booming industry (instead of being an abomination that should not exist).
Private prison contracts have clauses guaranteeing prison utilization (~90% or ~95%). Some states may be in danger of defaulting on their prison contract... so that's probably why.
How do you deal with that? How do you draw the line between a website that is clearly open to the public and an intranet site that is only open to selected people?
An intranet site that is only open to selected people should have a frigging password protection. Hacking that is presumably a crime on its own accord
Making a public website and putting a ToS file that says "this is a private internal site" should not be the way to go.
If I bought a huge parking lot in the city and put a little sign that said "no trespassing" in the corner of the lot -- is that enough to prosecute anyone who steps across an unmarked border? (i.e. I have no fence marking my lot)
ToS aren't even a viable contract IMHO. No-one reads them, if you edit them the web site rarely bothers to check before accepting your terms and quite often the terms are unenforceable anyway.
Many of them also include "we may change this ToS at any point of time", which is pretty much the opposite of a contract. For example, cell-phone companies could not enforce a mandatory fee for a paper-bill, because that technically constitutes a violation of the already established contract.
Even better, some ToS state that it is YOUR responsibility to regularly visit their website to see if they changed it (i.e. they are not even responsible for notifying you of the change). So it better be unenforceable...
If I'm right, that means it will be nigh impossible for any authority to take the data offline in a single action. All Kim needs is a list associating peoples' files with where they are physically stored, and it won't matter to *the users* if the site gets taken down - he can just publish the list and everyone can get their files from the cloud storage nodes directly.
Yes, yes, a joy indeed. Of course it would expose storage-holders to Dotcom-treatment (men in black helicopter in, take your servers and arrest you, even if though charges won't stick a year or two later).
I look forward to signing up for the Dotcom experience by becoming one of the storage nodes.
15 years ago you could get free calls to any US landline from the browser without even (as far as I recall) requiring a login.
15 years ago everyone thought you could make millions from a business that is losing money as long as you just increase the volume far enough.
You don't charge a guy with a 35-year felony if all you want is six months.
Oh, but perhaps you do
I can only assume that if they wanted 5 years, they would trump up bullshit charges that carried max of 350 years. Makes it easier to negotiate a deal -- 6 months kinda _does_ seems lenient compared to the potential of 35 years.
US Federal prosecutors have a vast array of methods they can employ to make it difficult for a defendant to exercise his rights.
I would argue that it is even worse that they are not compelled to bring charges against anyone breaking the law.
They could decide not to go after you, and that's that (comes up a lot when trying to bring charges against police officers or other prosecutors). The fact that they can pick and choose who gets charged in the first place is even worse than their ability to overreach when they do bring charges.
"This is totally worthless without shared, public data, so we plan to completely fuck with our privacy settings a whole bunch before this rolls out so that we can make sure your data is public and shared."
Indeed -- Facebook regularly changes (publicly or quietly) various settings to "streamline" user experience and protect user privacy. But I am yet to see a single example where the default change did not expose additional information that used to be private. You'd think at least one move geared to "protect user privacy" would make something private, yet that never happens.
The idea that europe has "stronger consumer protection laws" is utterly false in practice.
I will admit that I am not familiar with European laws -- but I refer you to this particular article. Europe apparently has a mandatory 2-year warranty that encapsulates Apple products, yes?
I do not believe that the 1-year that Apple provides in US is required by law here. I suspect Apple could cut this down to 3 months if they felt like it (the only concern would be consumer backlash)
Therefore, in this particular case, Europe clearly has stronger consumer protection laws -- but I was wrong to generalize to other cases.
My guess is this never goes to court.
They do not need it to go to court.
Megaupload is dead and buried -- and others have probably learned their lesson: piss off the wrong people and you will be wiped out, no matter what the law says.
On this subject, there is a White House petition to Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz.
I should sign it, of course -- but I do wonder if she will get to write a response to that petition
(why not, it would be only fair, since TSA director got to respond to the "ban TSA" petition).
Any company that is not obligated to act for it's customers will eventually be obliged to close it's doors.
Oooh, I think you forgot to add "... in Europe", due to their stronger consumer-protection laws.
In United States, several larger companies seem to be doing quite well acting for the politicians and sometimes for the shareholders (in that order).
"Do not attribute to malice, what can be adequately explained by stupidity."
I don't know that someone triggering a $12.8 million bonus payout for themselves can be adequately explained by stupidity. I don't know of a lot of Mr. Bean-like millionaires that just stupidly stumbled into wealth
...accused of participating in a book-cooking scheme designed to trigger $12.8 million in bonuses and stocks for themselves at the once powerful Canadian technology giant.
I have seen MacBook Air equivalents, although I didn't pay enough attention to remember who made them.
Please look it up. Note that both the weight and matching screen resolution are non-negotiable. A laptop that's +1lb heavier or relies on 1024x768 max resolution will not count as a MacBook Air equivalent.
The iPod touch substitute is easy. Buy any Android phone and don't put it on a cell plan. Android phones work just fine as wifi only devices.
The iPod touch is significantly thinner than an iPhone (and cheaper). An iPhone does not count as iPod touch substitute, why should an Android phone?
Apple has serious competition now. Back when they were the only game in town they could do as they pleased.
Apple does not have enough competition for some reason.
Ever try to buy a non-Apple equivalent of MacBook Air? an iPod touch substitute?