A cheaper TV - or to go a level deeper, still having the manufacturer in question in the business of making TVs. TVs, and more generally high-unit-volume embedded hardware products, are incredibly competitive. This is particularly true at the price points where Vizio moves significant volume. Margins were squeezed to zero years ago.
> or to go a level deeper, still having the manufacturer in question in the business of making TVs.
As a consumer, that's not my problem. If a commodity company can't survive on their margins, then so be it.
The problem is that even if such "innovation" allows a company to increase its margins (and maybe decrease price), there's nothing stopping competitors from adopting it too, and soon margins are back to near-zero - but the user-hostile crap remains a permanent part of the new landscape. This process needs to be actively opposed, and individual consumers are unfortunately nowhere near powerful enough to do so.
I understand. But understand that from their perspective, as a business deciding whether or not to stay in a particular market, it's also not their problem. They're going to act in their own interest; if the incentives are aligned as they are, the resulting behaviors shouldn't be surprising. Whether they should be condemned or whatnot is perhaps something interested people could debate, but interested they are not.
And, with a $2.2m settlement, the incentives are still solidly weighted towards behavior like this.
There are a number of laws relating to "unauthorized access" of private, digital information. This would seem to fall squarely inside of those, at least in my opinion. Those seem like the low-hanging fruit.
Going out a bit further, you could make a case for fraud or even hacking. Fraud because they are clearly misrepresenting the product and what it does. Hacking because they slipped in an OS update for older TV's that allowed them to have this feature on models that they never intended to have it on.
Also, they admitted to selling this information to advertisers. That's redistributing information they were not legally allowed to have. There are laws regarding profiting from crimes. But even if you leave those out, there is the issue of them selling information they didn't legally own. That could also come with a copyright violation if a lawyer for a class action suit was able to successfully argue that the owners of the televisions owned that information that they stole without permission. That seems like a tough win, though.
So I think unauthorized access, fraud, and the sale of illegally obtained information would be fair charges to apply.
The FTC act is long-standing federal law and NJ apparently has its own strong laws for this kind of activity. The FTC itself states that there are clear violations of at least these laws, at bare minimum.
How about fraud? Why is tricking someone to give you a password and using it enough to go to jail, but recording everything someone watches without their permission and selling to 3rd parties not?
The government still is the only entity that can silence dissenters. All the entities you listed are limited to merely kicking you off their platform. Facebook can't 404 your posts on Reddit, and none of them and none of them can stop you from standing on the sidewalk with a sandwich board.
Saying that social media platforms should be subject to "scrutiny" (which is pretty vague and non-actionable), or are somehow beholden to public opinion, is nonsense. They're beholden to users, at most. And it's not like Google shut down the blog of of someone saying "GOOG's target price should be about $12". Let's see how much backlash they gets from their users over this, ha.
The government still is the only entity that can silence dissenters. All the entities you listed are limited to merely kicking you off their platform.
From the standpoint of the one being silenced, what's the difference?
The fact of the matter is, the Googles and the Facebooks and the Reddits of the world hold a tremendous and frightening amount of control over public discourse and public opinion. I feel less and less comfortable with them wielding that power unaccountably.
You know how we hold companies to a higher and more stringent standard when they reach monopoly status in a market? Perhaps it's time to look into something similar for large social media sites.
- There are time (and money) consuming technical issues in migrating to another platform, and with the dominance of software-as-a-service platforms, it's often not even possible. Can you migration comments? Is the date going to be set correctly? Can you keep your current layout and images? So even on a purely technical level, you can't "easily" get your blog running again on another platform.
- Access to content: I'm hoping he has backups. Of course, if you developed the content on-platform, it may be nebulous what exactly you need backups of. E.g., did you think to include all the images+comments? If his account was deleted, he may simply not have all the data anymore.
- Network effects (this is the big one): a web site isn't just a bunch of bits; it's a place people visit. Being down for any considerable length of time means those visitors will drift away; the attention you've gained will be partially lost permanently. And that's the best-case scenario. In many cases, you cannot keep url intact, in which case even after you restore service, people won't find you. In a very real way, companies like google and especially facebook own your social connections to others - so even if you manage to find another platform, they're not going to give you your contacts back.
E.g. if you switch phone provider, you may keep your telefone number (here, at least, even against the will of the original provider). If you migrate from facebook, you cannot keep your profile url. That's probably a bad thing for society; but it's hardly surprising companies aren't dying to prevent lock-in. Even google, which nominally allows extracting your data, the most valuable assets cannot be transferred (not to mention that the data extraction process results can't be trivially imported elsewhere because there is no standard for these types of things).
It's absurd to suggest the user has much practical freedom when it comes to switching communication platforms. Any freedom he does have tends to mean he must have had the foresight to use only a small subset of the available features, including onerous restrictions such as limited social interaction or interaction via unusual means. More realistically, if you switch platforms, you're likely to lose readers.
I think your comment is just pointing out that freedom isn't free, there are always trade-offs to submitting oneself to the will to any platform.
If "practical freedom", means to get all the best parts of a platform while expecting that you can do whatever you want, then it's not surprising that some will be shocked when such costs suddenly come due having had ignored the writing on the wall. Although most never explore the boundaries of such to make a difference in distinction to them, such "practical freedom" never truly exists in anything we do.
I learned the "hard" way, bootstrapped a company that crowd sourced data seeded from "open" graph, only to get hit with a c & d and "my" facebook used account banned indefinitely 4 years ago. I can still create multi accounts and use them, but I don't think I'll be naive enough to use them in the same way as I did "my" main used account and not expect similar results as before. And if this is related to CP, its not like this is the first time ever someone has been censored by a private entity for this on the internet prior to this account becoming another stat in that book, and considering how general society sees these things, I'd be more surprised if the author is really surprised or just upset because it finally happened to them.
It's false if my point were that he wasn't being inconvenienced. My point is that he wasn't being silenced. If he wants to speak, he can put his voice on another platform. With all the news around the destruction of his blog, he might even reach more people than before if he's quick about it.
> The fact of the matter is, the Googles and the Facebooks and the Reddits of the world hold a tremendous and frightening amount of control over public discourse and public opinion.
They're not even as powerful as the editor of one of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, never mind the man himself.
I never read any articles from Murdoch's newspapers unless they're surfaced to me by one of those services. Do you buy a Murdoch paper, or do you get a link on Google News, your Facebook feed, or your favorite Reddit subs? I'm pretty sure I'm a 90% case, not unique.
Of course, it's all just rich people controlling the discourse. Murdoch can buy pieces of Google, Facebook, and Reddit too.
Now, they just get to micromanage it. Micro-censorship, Micro-surveillance.
Gonna disagree with you there. It's the same kind of power, just with a different (sometimes overlapping) set of demographics. Facebook is one of the most used websites in the entire world. Just the simple act of hiding one story to promote another one changes what millions upon millions of people will see and talk about.
I've gotta say, I just read through the OVH DDOS mitigation docs, and for me the upshot is that if my servers were targeted, I'm in for an unspecified increase in latency, which for a rather large cross-section of use cases is one and the same as the service being unavailable due to the direct action of the DDOS (which is kinda still what would be happening).
It's also not something you can disable; it's mandatory, so as to not impact other customers. I (my employer) use AWS pretty heavily, and we've never noticed our ability to access our resources being impaired by a DDOS on other nodes, so... is it not rather obvious that AWS (and in general, the set of "cloud providers without constant outages on their status pages") have basically the same setup - network is rationed, a given resource will only be allowed so much of the pipe, and your service is unavailable until and unless you have the capacity to handle it. It's not as if it could be any other way.
The other danger seems to be in unexpected bills. Does this happen to people? Are there companies going bankrupt because they didn't notice a DDOS for a couple weeks? I've had AWS support reach out to me several times - without ever having had a paid support subscription - when my costs have gone up, just in the course of adding new functionality and expanding capacity. It's not like you set up one instance and can start egressing petabytes.
AWS does monitor their infrastructure. All accounts have limits from the get-go; you can't run up a bankruptcy-inducing bill without your phone ringing. And in all cases, your exposure below that level is rather directly under your control.
If I happen to have a use case that involves a bunch of random hosts sending me a lot of data, I expect to be able to pay the bill for the bandwidth and the capacity I provisioned to handle it. Or, if I didn't, I max out the bandwidth reserved for my resources and I don't end up seeing all the traffic. I don't see why it'd be helpful (or even meaningful) to differentiate between DDOS vs. legitimate traffic. Wouldn't a published policy on any cost or functionality difference when a DDOS is occurring provide a malicious actor with information they would need to avoid triggering that clause, so as to maximize the damage they're able to cause to your business?
I guess I'll likely change my tune if and when I'm targeted and have to deal with a DDOS (and this sentence is why i went to the throwaway, which is a shame; I'd be happy to put my name to the actual content of this post. But fate is not to be tempted.). In the meantime, though, I'm skeptical of the need, and even the desirability, of service-provider policies that have anything to do classifying the "nature" of traffic flows. It just seems completely out-of-scope for them, and in-scope for myself as the person doing the provisioning.
So. You want prevent, through the use of force and the rule of law, private citizens from taking photographs of people in public places and comparing those photographs with a voluntarily provided corpus?
Enforcing such rules would take nothing short of a totalitarian state.
There was no privacy when we lived in villages, and we will return to that state in the mid-term future. The anonymity of the modern metropolis and the accompanying sensation of privacy in our day-to-day lives is but a temporary aberration in the history of the human experience.
Do not get used to it. It is not long for this world.
Can you explain why it's necessary to prevent people doing those things, or to impose a totalitarian state, in order to prevent identification of random citizen x by random citizen y?
It seems what's actually needed to prevent that is controls on the creation and use of large databases in order to identify faces (except under some list of acceptable uses). People who work in IT often express disbelief that laws like that could work. In fact, factors that humans understand like scale and intent are an important part of law, and laws written in those terms are commonplace.
Re villages: another thing commonplace in the past was brutal violence. In the past, it was obvious that brutal violence was inevitable. Then, we made it illegal, and it largely stopped. We should do that again, in this case.
I'm with you, and I also don't want to breathe the halitosis-infused mist expelled by my coworkers. Seems reasonable to me to have some legislation on the books to require people who work in a shared workplace to brush their teeth.
Yes they have, yes it does, they think the world would be better if everyone Just Said No to DRM and the W3C isn't going along with their grand plan, yes, and because they (correctly) think it'll sound convincing to the target audience (mostly other Just Say No-ers, probably consisting mostly of the EFF and Mozilla. And that's it.)
I'm really getting tired of what seems to be the EFF's somewhat-newfound mission (it's been getting steadily worse over the last couple years) to push the limits of "shrill squawking about nonsense" to new heights.
I'm generally a fan of the EFF's work but I completely agree when you call this "shrill squawking". The lack of any coherent argument or details in this statement reminds me of some the "rally the mob" emails that I receive from Fight For The Future. It's a shame that they take their audience for granted and feel that it's enough to rile people up to send angry emails using nothing more than an appeal to their own authority. That may work for a while but at the expense of their credibility.
The constitution sets forth very real protections for the accused, for defendants. I see very little that could be stretched to apply to a third party that chooses not to comply with a lawfully obtained order because they disagree with it.
Frankly I doubt the Founding Fathers would ever have conceived of a third party daring to issue a bare-faced refusal to comply with a lawfully obtained order. They would surely have expected that this would immediately turn that individual (or corporate person, as the case may well be in this age) into another defendant, for a new crime.
I really don't know what Apple is thinking. They should have set a line in the sand when they legitimately could do nothing to gain access to the data, as they're so close to having completed in recent hardware/OS revs. That would force congress to pass legislation outlawing secure crypto, or give up. That would be an interesting thing to see, no doubt.
But this? They're playing a very dangerous game for very low stakes, and the only obvious rationale for doing it is the one that the government can and probably will argue is at work, which is as a PR move.
And a judge's signature outweighs your stock price any damn day of the week. Stupid/reckless is my first impression, or maybe it is just brilliant PR. But as a general rule, don't fight city hall for bragging rights. The real fight will happen once you say "tough luck, nothing anybody can do, you want to break in, go talk to to the quantum cryptographers".
Apple's response addresses almost every point you bring up, so I'm guessing you didn't read it. Which is probably why you're posting with a throwaway account.
The whole purpose of this litigation is to determine whether the order was "lawfully obtained."
As for drawing a line in the sand, it appears that the limit that they will not cross in cooperating with law enforcement is in actively creating new features that make the phone easier to hack.
