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elpool2

463 karma · joined October 12, 2012

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elpool2··on Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music
That seems unworkable because, well, I just don’t want social media to be dumb pipes. Without sites making editorial decisions every site will be full of porn and animal torture videos. The current status quo seems way better tbh.
elpool2··on Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music
Actually, it looks like there is something in the law that only provides DMCA safe harbor to providers that have a policy of terminating accounts of repeat infringers. I'm still not sure if an ISP would even need that safe harbor though.
elpool2··on Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music
I don’t see how it would ever make sense to hold social media liable for user posted defamation.

Look at the recent Afroman defamation lawsuit and consider how YouTube is supposed to know whether that music video was defamatory or not. It took a court 3 years to reach a conclusion but you want YouTube to make that same call instantly, on millions of posts a day. What you’d get is a world where Afroman’s (non defamatory) speech basically cannot be shared on social media at all.

elpool2··on Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music
It seems like you would still have to remove the infringing content, but no need to disconnect or ban the user who shared it.

But if you’re a pure ISP and not hosting content on your own servers, then I guess, yeah DMCA doesn’t really apply to you?

elpool2··on Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors
But there is a difference between “illegal to regurgitate it” and “illegal to remember it”. IIRC in this case that settled the judge had ruled on “remember” (fair use) but not on the other.
elpool2··on Apple violated antitrust ruling, judge finds
As described in the ruling, Apple hired a consulting group to estimate how much value developers get from the iphone platform, which found that

(1) Apple’s platform technology is worth up to 30% of a developer’s revenue. (2) Apple’s developer tools and services are worth approximately 3%–16%. (3) Apple’s distribution services are worth approximately 4%–14%. (4) Apple’s discovery services are worth approximately 5%–14%.

Then Apple claimed this study was how they came up with the 27%, but the Judge basically said nah you guys came up with that number before the study, and you even know it would be a non-starter for almost all developers.

elpool2··on A judge just blew up Apple's control of the App Store
"To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath"

Yikes. I really thought Apple was going to get away with all their crazy restrictions they came up with after the previous ruling (and maybe they still will, who knows) but this looks pretty bad for them.

elpool2··on Google Is a Monopolist in Online Advertising Tech, Judge Says
It would make sense if Apple decided to still have Google be their default, even without the payment. Not sure how likely that is though.
elpool2··on Zuckerberg claims regret on caving to White House pressure on content
Sure, it’s ok for them to decide what kind of content they want on their own platform.

Edit: not ok for govt to coerce them into it though

elpool2··on Stack Overflow simply bans folks who don't want their advice used to train AI
The right to forget is about removing personal information from a site, or removing articles about you from search results. An answer to a Stackoverflow question isn't really personal info.
elpool2··on Blue Ball Machine
I was responsible for drawing 1/25th of this gif back in the day. There was actually way more tiles created but this is one version that went viral. Crazy to see it still pop up like this every couple of years.
elpool2··on Supreme Court Sets Rules for Blocking Citizens from Officials' Accounts
It's fairly accurate though. The preliminary injunction in that case blocked government agencies from even talking to social media companies (though some of that got reversed by the 5th circuit).
elpool2··on Apple terminates Epic Games developer account, calling it a 'threat' to iOS
Do you have a link to the tweet from Sweeney saying he would breach the contract?
elpool2··on Bluesky announces data federation for self hosters
I think everything you said was fair, but you also mentioned Twitter being a conservative cesspool, and a lot these features like federation and composable moderation are designed to help prevent the whole "rich guy buys the company and turns it into something you don't like" scenario.
elpool2··on US Supreme Court declines to hear appeals in Apple-Epic Games legal battle
Thanks and wow, they’re really doing everything imaginable to make it difficult to include such a link. And their rules say the link cannot contain any additional parameters so it rules out the possibility of just linking directly to a payment form. You would have to log in first, then pay.
elpool2··on US Supreme Court declines to hear appeals in Apple-Epic Games legal battle
It will be interesting to see how far the anti-steering ruling actually goes. Will Apple still be able to block links to a alternative payment options? Or what if the link contains a token that logs you in automatically and goes straight to a payment form that’s almost indistinguishable from an in-app form?
elpool2··on You Should Be Concerned About the Bill to Remove Section 230 Protections from AI
What is there to enforce? There are no duties, obligations, or punishments in the law, it just provides an affirmative defense for lawsuits.
elpool2··on You Should Be Concerned About the Bill to Remove Section 230 Protections from AI
The issue is that the way this is written the AI doesn't have to be responsible for the liable content, it just has to be involved. If I post something defamatory on HN, and HN helpfully checks my grammar, then HN is no longer protected by section 230. The language isn't precise enough. Maybe a court would interpret "involved" to mean "materially contributed to the illegal nature of the content", but maybe not?
elpool2··on ‘Blue lights’ flash in sky moments before Morocco earthquake
Yeah but this video is clearly just transformers blowing. A block of street lights goes out the exact same time as one of the flashes.
elpool2··on When tech says ‘no’
They have to pay for showing links, and those links do send traffic to news sites. That is indisputable.

You’re phrasing is just incorrect, honestly. Linking to a website is not at all taking the site’s “content”. And monetizing search results doesn’t do anything “at the newspaper’s expense”, what expense has a news site incurred by someone sharing a link to their site?

elpool2··on When tech says ‘no’
The part you quoted and called bullshit is factually correct though. CAN has told Meta and Google that if they show links to news sites (which do drive business to those sites) then they have to pay those news sites. It’s not a characterization, it’s what has actually happened. How can you deny that?
elpool2··on When tech says ‘no’
There are different degrees of “secure”, right? Maybe you could give a key to the FBI without China getting ahold of it, maybe it’s still “secure enough”. But you can’t say it’s “just as secure” as not giving it to them. And that’s what law enforcement often asks for: Give us access without making it any less secure.
elpool2··on Zoom CEO says employees can't be as innovative or get to know each other on Zoom
My company has been fully remote since 2020, I agree that collaboration is still easy. The sort of meetings where we used to sit in a conference room and brainstorm on a whiteboard just now happen over Teams with screen sharing.

I do think it's much easier when everyone is remote though. It sucks when half the people in a meeting are in a conference room and the rest are remote. You end up dealing with dumb technical difficulties and its too easy to exclude virtual folks from the conversation.

elpool2··on Meta blocking news links in Canada
Because one of the things the negotiating framework covers is how much money google and meta must pay to news providers when news content is “made available” to canadians, and “made available” specifically includes when “access to the news content, or any portion of it, is facilitated by any means, including an index, aggregation or ranking of news content”. So if the negotiated value is anything over $0 then, yeah, it’s a “link tax”.
elpool2··on Meta blocking news links in Canada
I’m on Google/meta’s side because link taxes are a bad idea for the internet as a whole. That anyone (even Meta, who I generally dislike) should have to pay to link to a news article is morally offensive to me.
elpool2··on Big Tech as the New Big Tobacco
The difference is that smoking is clearly linked with lung cancer, established by heaps of clear scientific data. The link between social media and suicide is pretty weak by comparison.
elpool2··on Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone (2007)
In 2007 the question was "can Apple compete with other cell phone makers". The market for cell phones (even smart phones) was already well established, but Dvorak here says the iphone "will be passé within 3 months". What he didn't know is that Apple had made something far better than all the competition.

Now, with AR/VR I think the skeptics aren't saying Apple's product won't be good, but that even if it's the best product in the category there's still just not much of a market for it.

elpool2··on Apollo will close down on June 30th
Ah, that makes much more sense. But, it could be the case that reddit thinks someone will end up paying their outrageous fees, just not him. It doesn’t necessarily follow that they think Apollo is actually worth that much. Then again, if that’s the case it would be reasonable to work out some sort of discount that reflects the true value of the Apollo user base.
elpool2··on Apollo will close down on June 30th
Not at all. But it seems like the Apollo dev’s argument was “if it actually costs reddit $20m they why not buy Apollo for only $10m”, which doesn’t make sense.

This doesn’t make what reddit is doing any more reasonable though, imo.

elpool2··on Apollo will close down on June 30th
I'm not sure that math is right? If the API access actually costs reddit $20m/year then charging Apollo users $20m/year just offsets those costs. So in the first year they actually lose $10m, and just break even in following years. It only makes sense to buy Apollo if the api costs are low.
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