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tutts | 7 years ago | on: SpiderOak removes its warrant canary

Miners used to bring canary birds with them when mining. If they hit poisonous gas, the canary would die before the miners, alerting them to the gas.

The government can issue secret warrants to companies that they are not allowed to disclose, requiring them to hand over customer data. A warrant canary is a periodical statement from a company that they have not received such a warrant. The idea is that if they do receive a warrant, they will stop publishing the warrant, and the court can't compel them to.

tutts | 7 years ago | on: What happens to country specific TLD's in a war involving that country?

I once looked into whether it was possible to get a ".ck" domain name, for juvenile and obvious yet potentially humorous domains. It turns out that that's Cook Islands' TLD, and they don't allow direct use of it... instead, they've done the same thing as the UK did, and only allowed domains under ".co.ck".

tutts | 8 years ago | on: YouTube and Reddit roll out new restrictions including channel and sub bans

The first amendment does apply - just, it applies the other way around. The primary function of media sites is to broadcast their users' messages, and in doing so they're exercising their own freedom of speech. To force them to broadcast certain content would be to compel certain speech from them, which would violate their freedom of speech.

(do note that I'm not a lawyer, so this might not be 100% accurate)

tutts | 8 years ago | on: YouTube's New Moderators Mistakenly Pull Right-Wing Channels

Of course it can. Taking this action against someone with a political stance opposite from yours may be a mistake you're more likely to make, but it's still a mistake.

Besides that, the point I was trying to make was less about whether it was a mistake, and more that it's plausible that this was something that was done by an individual against company policy rather than in accordance with it.

tutts | 8 years ago | on: YouTube's New Moderators Mistakenly Pull Right-Wing Channels

Eh. The explanation they offered that they were hiring a large mass of moderators and some of them made mistakes is more than plausible. When they add that many people it's really inevitable that someone would get over-eager or misread the message of a video.

tutts | 8 years ago | on: FlightSimLabs Alleged Malware Analysis

Sure, but what of significance has changed? Every time you run a program, you're trusting the developer not to do nefarious things like reading your Chrome credentials, because the only assurance you have is the developer's word about what the program does. As far as I can tell, that hasn't changed at all. I'm not saying this is okay - there are reasons why this is a bad thing to do, I just don't see how no longer being able to trust the developer not to be malicious is one of them.

tutts | 8 years ago | on: FlightSimLabs Alleged Malware Analysis

"How do we know that FSLabs don’t use this, just because they say so?"

How do you know the main executable doesn't do the same thing? How is trusting them not to run this .exe different from trusting them not to secretly implement this functionality in the actual program?

tutts | 8 years ago | on: Car insurers accused of discriminating against people with Hotmail accounts

Only if "as individually as possible" means perfect prediction. If you assume that there's a limit to how well the future can be predicted, insurance still has value.

Also, car insurance specifically is usually legally mandated. There's a tangible benefit to having it (being allowed to drive) besides the risk mitigation.

tutts | 8 years ago | on: Online platform’s EULA barred software developer from owning copyright in code

I looked up the case [1]. The copyright claims, as well as one of the claims for breach of contract, were dismissed without prejudice, which (as far as I understand) means he failed to allege enough facts to support his claim, but can come back and try again. Of the claims that were dismissed with prejudice, one of them were outside of the statute of limitations, one of them were a claim of breach of contract because his account was terminated (dismissed because the contract explicitly allowed TD to do this), one was a claim of "trespass to real property", which I believe relates to a claim that TD had physically destroyed his hard drive, and one was dismissed because (from what I can tell) it wouldn't apply to the sort of relation the two had.

I'm not a lawyer and so can't say conclusively, but it seems to me the court isn't saying "yeah they're right you don't have copyright here" as much as they're (for the most part) saying "you didn't include enough information in the suit, come back and try again".

[1] https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/alaska...

tutts | 9 years ago | on: Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S.

I don't agree with Trump either, I was trying to question the idea that American politics are based almost exclusively on image and that makes it impossible that this election could have been influenced by actual issues.

tutts | 9 years ago | on: 5900 online stores found skimming

So the sites should drop the safety features because there exists a user who would not be personally inconvenienced by the theft of their credit card details?

tutts | 9 years ago | on: 9th Circuit: It’s a crime to visit a website after being told not to visit it

I disagree. That is, I agree that you should ultimately own your data and have the right to decide what Facebook is allowed to do with it, to have them tell you what data they have, and to have them delete it. I don't agree that you should have the right to force them to provide data-related services to you or anyone else simply because they have your data. If you want another third party to have access to your data, you can provide it to them directly. Don't have a server set up with a popular API for that? That doesn't mean you get to force someone who does to do it for you.
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