jump out of a plane without a parachute, but just don’t die.As this study in the British Medical Journal shows, it's quite possible to jump from a plane safely, and parachutes don't help. If only the same were true of age verification.
I take the password language to mean that they have to give parents a password that lets them read the kid's mail, not necessarily the kid's own password. But I agree that the whole thing is a fetid mix of authoritarian panic and utter incompetence.
Bloomberg and the Financial Times report that Twitter made its $300M quarterly interest payment on the bonds today. There is of course considerable speculation about whether they'll make future ones. Bankers all seem to agree that if they don't, the banks will force Twitter into bankruptcy and take it away from Musk, even though they really do not want to own it.
The 11th Circuit (Florida) opinion is fairly reasonable but the 5th Circuit (Texas) is just nuts. It's been compared to a B- law student paper, and thumbs its nose at the 11th Circuit opinion. This sort of high profile circuit split is exactly the sort of case SCOTUS always takes. It would not be unusual for them to ask for the government's opnion after accepting it, but I agree that in this case they're stalling.
Since it is so totally obvious that what Elon most wants is for everyone to pay attention to him, perhaps this would be a good time to ignore him and Twitter for a while. Like you, I like Mastodon just fine.
It wasn't that it was an all you can eat buffet (those do exist, after all), it was that every item on the buffet was purchased at retail from another restaurant.
Among the many strange things about this bill, where are Google, Facebook, and Apple? They're the obvious targets. It also would be interesting to contact a few of the listed sponsors, see if they are aware that they are listed as sponsors, and if so do they agree that it is a good idea for every web site to demand to know the age of every user.
Musk can appeal to the Delaware supreme court, but unless the chancellor makse a legal error, which seems very unlikely, it won't help.
I think it's likely that Musk will continue to screw around, the court will order specific performance, and he will thumb his nose at them as he has at the SEC. Then what? Can the Cnancery court seize his TSLA stock? Put him in jail until he complies?
According to the Times story, Goolnick is British, and as you may have heard, Britain isn't in the EU any more. The GDPR doesn't protect non-EU people.
You're right, I'd forgotten about the free fillable forms which I don't think many people use. They don't need id.me either, just a simple CAPTCHA.
The Treasury's ID.ME verification is for a part of their web site that lets you get a transcript of previous payments and transactions.
It is not for filing your taxes. You can't file taxes directly with the IRS, only through a tax preparer. If your income is low enough, some of them offer free filing but that is a different story. Still, no ID.ME.
It is also not for checking your refund status. Different part of the web site, much simpler verification using info from your return.
I did the ID.ME verification which was a pain in the rear since most of my IDs including my driver's license have my PO box, not my street address, and my passport picture is so bad I finally had to write on the scan THIS IS AN ACCURATE SCAN, THE PICTURE REALLY IS THAT BAD.
I finally did get an agent on the line who verified that I am me, so it works, for some version of works.
I thought the point of the report was totally clear: for consumers, anything a CBDC can do, a normal bank account can do. Banks will be able to do instant payments with Fednow, and they can provide low-cost easy to use accounts if they can be a little less greedy. On the other hand, in a CBDC account the deposits would all go to the Fed rather than being usable by the bank, which is known as narrow banking, something the Fed has never wanted.
So the message is, hey, banks get your act together and provide fast, cheap, flexible accounts. ''Cuz if you don't, we will, and you wouldn't like that.
The reason their AI tags mass shootings and cockfights as car washes and paintball is that there are a lot more videos of innocuous stuff than dangerous or illegal stuff, and their training algorithms match what they're trained on. It's the same reason that facial recognition s/w doesn't recognize black people, because the training images are mostly white people.
Facial recognition is fixable because training images are easy to collect, mass shootings much less so.
Palo Alto and the Bay Area have about three law firms on every block, but they had to go all the way to L.A. to find a lawyer wiling to sign this complaint. Are they specialists in entertainment law, I.e. fiction?
I looked a the ToS and really, if we can't post pictures of beheadings, what's the point?
As anyone familiar with telecom knows, running wires is a natural monopoly, or in this case duopoly since telcos and cablecos run slightly different wires. There are no legal barriers to overbuilding new networks, only economic ones. If you're aware of ways that NY state can change the laws of economics, I know a lot of people who'd like to hear about it. Actually there is a way, structural separation, but it would have to happen at the Federal level. It works great in Europe where there are zillions of ISPs sharing utility wires.
When you say "copyright isn't about protecting a musician's image," that is true in the U.S. but not in other countries. In 2000 Australia passed a moral rights amendment to their copyright act which includes Right of integrity of authorship:
derogatory treatment, in relation to a literary, dramatic or musical work, means:
(a) the doing, in relation to the work, of anything that results in a material distortion of, the mutilation of, or a material alteration to, the work that is prejudicial to the author’s honour or reputation; or
(b) the doing of anything else in relation to the work that is prejudicial to the author’s honour or reputation.
Given the facts in this case I'd say her moral rights argument under Australian law would be quite strong. Remedies include injunctions and damages.
I would bet serious money that no human looked at that initial letter before it was sent out. It is totally generic, and it is not signed by anyone.
Volokh link
Volokh must read Techdirt; his blog entry now has the link to the decision, too.