That One Guy’s Comments

• Jul 16th, 2015 @ 5:25pm

  An empty promise and $5 will get you a cup of coffee

  on Netflix Now Supports Charter Merger After ISP Promises Not To Screw Up The Internet...For A Measly Three Years

  Any company that feels it needs to 'promise' to behave(for a set amount of time at that) is doing nothing less than admitting that they absolutely plan on acting badly the second they feel they can get away with it.

• Jul 16th, 2015 @ 3:17pm

  Retroactive, no warrant needed long-term tracking

  on Court Shuts Down Government's Attempt To Claim An In-Car GPS System Is A 'Container'

  The state also attempted to use the Supreme Court's Jones decision to defend its actions, claiming this decision only found "long-term" monitoring of movements to be a violation of the Constitution.
  
  Why did they want the data on the GPS device? Because it was location data. Why was that useful? Because it would allow them to construct a timeline of where the car was, and when, the exact same data that real-time tracking would give when looked at later.
  
  Just because it's 'old' does not change the fact that GPS data, and real-time tracking via some other means, both allow one to accurately map out where a person has been or currently is, and I'm glad the court shot down their argument as a result. Both give the same data, and both should be protected.

• Jul 16th, 2015 @ 2:12pm

  Re: You have it all wrong

  on Senators Up In Arms Over State Department Plan To Deliberately Ignore Malaysian Mass Graves Just To Get TPP Deal

  Congrats, you have won the 'Sucker of the Day' award for falling for the oldest trick in the book, 'My tribe vs Your tribe.'

• Jul 16th, 2015 @ 7:09am

  Re: Already sold...

  on Senators Up In Arms Over State Department Plan To Deliberately Ignore Malaysian Mass Graves Just To Get TPP Deal

  I suppose I could give the benefit of the doubt to the ones who voted against FTA, and signed the letter, as perhaps being honest, but those who voted for FTA, and signed the letter? Not a chance, it's pure political posturing, nothing more.
  
  They voted in favor of handing over their responsibilities, whether for political or personal reasons, and now that they're looking bad as a result, they're trying to cover their asses and pretend that they actually care. Yeah, not buying it, if they objected, they should have done so by voting against FTA, rather than acting shocked, shocked I say, that their actions have some seriously nasty consequences for people who aren't them.

• Jul 16th, 2015 @ 7:00am

  Much like an avalanche that buries a town 'undermines' the ability to live there

  on Senators Up In Arms Over State Department Plan To Deliberately Ignore Malaysian Mass Graves Just To Get TPP Deal

  A premature upgrade of Malaysia would undermine the integrity of the TIP report process and compromise our international efforts to fight human trafficking."
  
  That's putting it mildly in the extreme. A decision like this doesn't 'undermine', it absolutely destroys any 'integrity' of the TIP report, by making it clear that all a country has to do to get a 'better' ranking is have something the USG wants badly enough. Offer the right incentives, and those pesky human rights violations will just be overlooked and brushed under the rug.
  
  The move by the State Department didn't 'undermine the integrity of the TIP report process', it completely eliminated the integrity of the entire report, making it utterly worthless at best.
  
  Did a country 'place' poorly because they have a terrible track record of human rights violations, or because they stood up to the USG? Did a country 'place' better because they improved in human rights matters, or because they've got something the USG wants, or followed along with the demands of the USG?
  
  The incredibly disgusting action of the State Department has completely and utterly destroyed any validity the report has now, or could have in the future, by making it clear that they are willing to change the findings in it for purely political reasons.

• Jul 16th, 2015 @ 2:44am

  Well he got it half right at least

  on Shocking: Software Used To Monitor UK Students Against Radicalization Found To Be Exploitable

  He released the vulnerability publicly, but he forgot to do it anonymously.
  
  In an emailed statement to FORBES, Impero director of marketing Nikki Annison claimed the offending party had “maliciously and illegally hacked our product, subsequently making this hack public rather than bringing it to our attention privately and in confidence. No customers have been affected by this and no data has been leaked or compromised.”
  
  Hey, that's a good point, clearly he should have privately gone to them first, I'm sure they would have acted responsibly, thanked him for his discovery, promptly admitted that the vulnerability existed, and got right on fixing it.
  
  In a letter to Clark dated 13 July, delivered by legal firm Gately, he is accused of breaking the terms and conditions laid out by the firm, including a stipulation that the software not be tampered with; modification is only allowed to achieve “interoperability”, meaning hackers looking for security issues are not welcome. He is also accused of copyright infringement and has been asked to remove all links from Github, Twitter and other channels that point to the public vulnerability disclosure.
  
  ... or not, if their reaction is anything to go by.
  
  Had he done the stupid thing and gone to them first, I have absolutely no doubt they would have accused him of violating the terms of the software, just like they did here, along with including a hefty threat should he go public with his findings.
  
  Once again the message is clear, though apparently this particular researcher forgot it: Always go public with your findings, always do it anonymously, and never try and contact the company in question beforehand. Break the 'rule' and you'll be sued into the ground, and the problem will never be fixed.

• Jul 15th, 2015 @ 7:43pm

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:

  on Judge Orders Release Of Dashcam Footage City Officials Thought They Had Paid To Keep Buried

  That is not you said in the first message, you said they are trained to view the public as a danger and I said of course they are, because there is a chance in every case that the public they are dealing with is lethal.
  
  Or might not have been, if the people they were facing weren't fearing for their lives, faced with someone who can gun them down on a whim and knows it.
  
  A phrase I'm fond of is 'Self-fulfilling prophecy', and it fits this situation quite well. By acting as though the public is the enemy, and treating them as such, the public becomes the enemy, because they can no longer trust that the police have any interest in protecting and helping anyone but themselves.
  
  Their training, and the actions that follow from it, only make things worse for everyone, including the police.
  
  The cop has to treat each case as lethal jeopardy because it might be and to not be ready for that is a death wish.
  
  No, they don't, and in fact shouldn't. By acting in such a manner, they unnecessarily escalate otherwise harmless situations, leading to deaths that could have easily been avoided were they not taught 'shoot first, ask questions never'.
  
  Their job is that of protecting others, putting themselves at risk to do so if needed. If they want to prioritize their own safety over the safety or lives of others, then they chose the wrong job, and need to quit.
  
  That is not a reason for any cop not to be ready to respond to a lethal threat in every case, they can't afford otherwise.
  
  Define 'lethal threat'. Is it someone holding a gun? Someone holding something that might be a gun? Someone who you can't see both hands of? Someone with a hand in their pocket/jacket? Someone acting 'funny'? Someone who takes a swing at them?
  
  The problem with the idea that they should be ready to respond to 'lethal threats' is that it's been expanded such that pretty much anything qualifies these days, leading to a lot of corpses. Should they be ready to defend themselves or others? Sure, but lethal force should be the absolute last resort, even if that means taking a risk on a potential threat.
  
  As your last line notes, just because they can, doesn't mean they should, but these days they absolutely are, and a lot of the reason behind that is because they've been so trained in the idea of public=threat, and act accordingly.

• Jul 15th, 2015 @ 6:41pm

  Re: An evil goal

  on UK Confuses Gullible Reporter Into Believing It Changed Its Position On Encryption

  Oh, but it gets worse. You see, because they can't know ahead of time who is a terrorist(or might be one, or who is accused of being one...), the only possible way to make sure that 'terrorists' have no safe form of communication is to eliminate any form of secure communication, otherwise a would-be-terrorist will simply use one of the secure methods of communication.
  
  The only way to eliminate secure forms of communications for terrorists is to eliminate them for everyone.

• Jul 15th, 2015 @ 5:34pm

  Re: Re: Re:

  on Judge Orders Release Of Dashcam Footage City Officials Thought They Had Paid To Keep Buried

  Cop has no choice in this. If it means that 999/1000 people do not intend him harm, 1/1000 the cop is dead. He has to treat every situation as potentially lethal or know that he will not make it home sometime in his career.
  
  There are plenty of jobs more dangerous than that of police work, yet that doesn't give the ones in those jobs excuse to open fire 'just in case'. As such, I fail to see how cops should get a pass because they might be in danger of suffering significant harm at some point during their career.
  
  A cop wants to make it home alive, fine, I get that and to that extent I don't have a problem with it. It's when they do so by making it so that someone else doesn't make it home alive that I have a problem with their actions.
  
  The job can be dangerous, I agree, but that shouldn't give them the right to gun someone down unless presented with a clear and present threat to their life or the life of someone else that can only be resolved with immediate lethal force, and it should never give them the right to do so without repercussions. Every death caused by a cop should receive the same scrutiny and treatment that any other death receives, not just brushed aside by clearly biased parties and given a pass.

• Jul 15th, 2015 @ 4:59pm

  Re:

  on Judge Orders Release Of Dashcam Footage City Officials Thought They Had Paid To Keep Buried

  but i cannot understand why it is that at every single incident there always appears to be an officer who is either 'trigger happy', or is so scared he/she cannot help but pull the trigger regardless of what is going on and how the incident is playing out or is so psyched up that they just want to kill someone, even if there is no actual threat, other than the imaginary one in their mind!!
  
  It's thanks to a mix of two factors.
  
  First, police are trained to always see the public as a threat, and are always told by the ones training them and the ones they work with that everyone they meet intends to harm and/or kill them, and therefor they are constantly seeing threats even when none exist.
  
  Second, the system is so stacked in their favor that if you're a cop who happens to want to cause bodily harm or even kill someone for looking at you funny, you can rest assured that your buddies on the force, and the court will have your back, allowing you to literally get away with murder. As you can imagine, this attracts a lot of sadists and sociopaths, eager to sign up for a job where they can pretty much do anything they want and never suffer any real consequences for it.

• Jul 15th, 2015 @ 4:50pm

  AC claiming that murder is fine when a cop does it? Check.

  on Judge Orders Release Of Dashcam Footage City Officials Thought They Had Paid To Keep Buried

  high on meth
  
  Not a 'kill on sight' crime.
  
  one of worst neighborhoods for gang violence in america
  
  Not a 'kill on sight' crime, or criminal at all.
  
  continues to screw with the police after multiple warnings by reaching in pockets
  
  Not a 'kill on sight' crime.
  
  It is fun trying to excuse cold-blooded murder, or are you really that twisted that an action that would be blatantly illegal if done by anyone else is suddenly acceptable when a cop does it?

• Jul 15th, 2015 @ 2:39pm

  Re:

  on St. Louis County Still Considering Bringing Trespassing Charges Against Journalists Police Arrested In Ferguson

  Somehow I imagine the video footage will be, if it hasn't already, suffer a 'technical problem', and be completely unrecoverable.

• Jul 15th, 2015 @ 2:00pm

  "The elephant in the room pays us, so we'll just be ignoring him..."

  on Authors Guild Cements Reputation As Luddites: Hates The Internet And Especially Amazon

  From that article:
  
  In 2004 Random House, which had previously paid 50% of its revenues for e-book sales, anticipated the coming boom in e-book sales and cut its e-rates significantly. Other publishers followed, and gradually e-royalties began to coalesce around 25%. By 2010 it was clear that publishers had successfully tipped the scales on the longstanding partnership between author and publisher to achieve a 75-25 balance in their favor.
  
  The publishers are taking 75% of the profit from sales of ebooks, leaving authors 25%, and the authors' guild is blaming piracy for authors not making 'enough' from ebook sales?
  
  Wouldn't do to blame the publishers though, oh my no, so clearly any 'lost' profits are entirely thanks to piracy, and not due to the parasites taking the huge cuts from sales, or the vast explosion of competition leading to less for individual authors.

• Jul 14th, 2015 @ 5:01pm

  (untitled comment)

  on Rightscorp Claims Its Harassing Phone Calls Safeguarded By Multiple Constitutional Amendments

  By the same logic, restraining orders or 'Do Not Call' lists that prevent you from contacting someone are also in violation of the First Amendment.

• Jul 14th, 2015 @ 4:06pm

  Band-aids for internal bleeding

  on Patent Trolls Strike Back: Trolling Rebounds After Brief Supreme Court-Enabled Dip

  And that's likely because many trolls are realizing that even if their patents are invalid, it's still much easier for many to just settle and pay up than go through with the whole trial process.
  
  And that right there is the key point. It doesn't matter that the patent being used is likely to be ruled invalid(assuming any court other than an E. Texas one), because the vast majority of the time, it never even gets that far.
  
  Patent trolling has never been about using valid patents to shake people down, it's always been centered around the idea that it's cheaper to settle than fight.
  
  Until that problem is fixed, you can be sure that patent trolls will continue to shake down anyone who looks like they have money, secure in the fact that the validity or lack-thereof of the patents they're using is utterly meaningless.

• Jul 14th, 2015 @ 1:51pm

  'Because we can' doesn't look so well on a FOIA response

  on Laura Poitras Sues US Government To Find Out Why She Was Detained Every Time She Flew

  After this, she filed some FOIA requests to find out why she had been supposedly given a high threat rating in the DHS database, causing such detentions. Not surprisingly, the government refused to reveal any such information.
  
  Well of course they refused to reveal the reason, they're hardly going to publicly admit that she'd getting that treatment because she made the USG look bad, and they're making an example of her in response.
  
  It's all a matter of plausible deniability. Even if the reason for the harassment is blatantly clear, so long as they refuse to provide the reason, they can continue to pretend that it's due to some super secret, can never be revealed otherwise The Terrorists Will Win!(tm) reason, and as a result continue showing what happens to anyone who makes the government look bad.

• Jul 14th, 2015 @ 2:17am

  (untitled comment)

  on Maryland Court Says Police Misconduct Files Can Be Withheld From The Public

  'Further, mandatory disclosure of personnel information related to sustained findings could chill the disciplinary process...'
  
  What 'disciplinary process'?
  
  In the vast, overwhelming majority of the time, the only time an officer is 'disciplined' or 'held accountable' for their actions is if the public gets involved and forces the matter, often via a lawsuit, such that the police can't just brush it under the rug and pretend nothing happened.
  
  The idea that anything the public could do would decrease the odds of police being held accountable for their actions is a joke that's not even close to funny. There's not exactly much room to sink when you're already at rock bottom.
  
  '...rendering those in control less willing to sustain a finding of misconduct.'
  
  Yes indeed, because as everyone knows, if there's one thing that is guaranteed at the police precinct, it's those in charge being willing to hold the officers beneath them accountable for their actions.
  
  You also just have to love their argument here. They're basically saying that police would be less likely to hold their own accountable, if doing so would have negative repercussions for those found guilty of whatever action/activity they are accused of.
  
  From that argument, it follows that they are saying that police are likely only to find one of their own guilty of 'misconduct', if doing so carries no penalty, and that that is how it should be.
  
  That's not just admitting that the system is broken, it's doing so and then endorsing the fact that it's broken.

• Jul 14th, 2015 @ 1:38am

  Yet another nail in creativity's coffin

  on Europe Frees Zorro From Trademark Restrictions

  If people dead for just under 60 years can't make money off of their creations, I just don't know why anyone would even bother creating anything at all.
  
  With this horrendous ruling, the creator of Zorro now has absolutely zero incentive to rise from his grave and create more works, which will obviously have serious repercussions on the creation of more Zorro related movies/books/comics, significantly harming both creativity, and culture as a whole.
  
  Sure I can hear you already, "But others can take the character and create new works around him", but such a claim is the very personification of absurdity. Without incentive for zombie Johnston McCulley to create new works, no real Zorro creations will be made, and given cultural works are only valid when made by the original creator, that means the character of Zorro(and any characters derived from, or inspired by him) is, and will forever more, remain as dead as zombie Johnston McCulley.
  
  Truly a sad day indeed for creativity everywhere.

• Jul 13th, 2015 @ 7:44pm

  Re: Re:

  on Top RIAA Exec: There's No More Music In Africa And The Middle East Because They Need Stronger Copyright

  Nonsense, everyone knows the only possible reason anything is ever created is due to copyright, which is why absolutely nothing was created at all prior to it being introduced into law, and any claims otherwise are heresy of the highest order.

• Jul 13th, 2015 @ 3:03pm

  Re:

  on White House So Desperate To Get TPP Approved, It Agrees To Whitewash Mass Graves & Human Trafficking In Malaysia

  Of course, keep the people busy and distracted by trifles, and you can get away with far worse when they're not looking.

More comments from That One Guy >>