ORDERED that pursuant to 22 NYCRR 1240.13, the respondent, Richard P. Liebowitz, a suspended attorney, is disbarred, effective immediately, and his name is stricken from the roll of attorneys and counselors-at-law….
Yes, sure, Vice Media management was bad. Meanwhile they accidentally paid some people who did good journalism, in the pursuit of growth. But was there ever any chance of such fantastical growth being financially sustainable?
But upon what was that excess built? It wasn’t all those award-winning journalists—they got hired, for the most part, after Vice was already on the rise. It wasn’t that Vice went through a period of gangbusters profitability—the most optimistic insiders only ever claimed “intermittent” profitability. In reality, it was bankrolled almost entirely by investors who believed that it was poised for world domination.
Please don't link closed social media posts when there's a perfectly fine open version crossposted on Mastodon: https://social.coop/@mattl/111689343218120753
Only the GLBT Youth Student Plaintiffs challenge this portion of the law, but they are all already “out” to their families and therefore not affected in a concrete way by this requirement.
So, in order to examine the constitutionality of this law, a plaintiff needs to both 1) be a closeted LGBTQ+ member and 2) come forward in a highly public case in court? I guess there might be procedural workarounds, but if the court needs to determine who is (in)sufficiently closeted, does that require them to look into everyone's private life?
I hope it's just some procedural mistake where the association's lawyers forgot to state that not all of their members are out to everybody.
Even if it were possible, ArchiveTeam is not going to dump 240 TB of private files onto archive.org at the cost of some 500 k$.
And if you meant people like certain r/DataHoarder regulars, such crackdowns on unlimited Google Drive storage were instituted in part to stop them from using Google as an infinite storage archive. Probably this fiasco started from someone at Google thinking "oh of course I'll be able to quickly set up a script to identify the nefarious users who dump hundreds of TB of so-called encrypted Linux ISO in order to operate their seedboxes on the cheap, who could possible have a legitimate usage for so much data". But of course they aren't.
[the company] would be run by the CFIUS-approved board that would report solely to the federal government, not ByteDance
Almost like being in administrative receivership? I see they're copying ideas from Russia too (where companies from "unfriendly countries" get new administrators appointed by the government if they're insufficiently aligned, while nominally retaining their owners).
Pity. I've never personally used BlueJeans, but around 2016 it occupied a space where its users felt it had few competitors. BigBlueButton and Jitsi later eclipsed it, but it takes talent to burn it to the ground. I hope at least they sell/migrate the users to some decent competitor.
One of the central points of the AG opinion is that the European Commission already funds most of the work, while sales revenue is almost non-existent. In USA terms you might say the standards are basically work for hire of the government.
First, HTS constitute only a minority of the standards established by ESOs and significant funding of ESOs is provided by the Commission. According to CEN’s submission at the hearing, 4.6% of the standardisation budget comes from the sale of HTS, which equates to approximately EUR 2 million per year, whereas, in CEN’s own words, the Commission’s funding equals ‘some 20% of CEN’s total budget’ (emphasis added). (54) Secondly, it became apparent at the hearing that the EU standardisation system does not actually require paid access to HTS to function (contrary to the findings in paragraphs 102 and 103 of the judgment under appeal); in fact, the payment requirement derives from the contractual relationship and funding arrangements between ESOs and the Commission. For instance, ETSI (which also receives Commission funding for HTS) already allows its HTS to be consulted, printed out and downloaded for free from its website. (55) Furthermore, it appears from legal literature that there are major price differentials between basically the same HTS in different Member States, which is symptomatic of the problems arising from the current access arrangements for HTS. (56)
it's based on the AT Protocol, meaning it won't be centralized
It's "based" on the protocol in the sense that it might one day actually implement it, but it doesn't yet. It might be open-source software in the future, but it isn't yet. It might be less centralized in the future, but it isn't yet.
So we're still in the same place where we've been since 2019: nice words and promises, no execution yet.
See also https://rys.io/en/167.html .
I'm not sure what makes BlueSky more likely to be "mainstream".
In the Tranco list, which considers also the number of DNS requests and therefore partly captures the amount of activity from mobile apps, the main domains (bsky.app, bsky.social) remain at a rank between 500k and 1500k, while mastodon.social alone is orders of magnitude bigger at a rank < 10k.
So far I only see yet another for-profit, loss-making, centralised, USA-centric, proprietary service which has turned a few million dollars in cash and celebrity endorsements into a small niche of users.
Sure, it's "mainstream" in the same sense that VC-backed startup bankruptcy is mainstream: it happens a lot and it's socially acceptable/desirable in mainstream discourse.
Unfortunately, I believe your expectation is way too optimistic.
If spam filters become de facto prohibited (by means of making them a huge legal cost), people will surrender to spam in less visible ways, such as shutting down comment sections, web forums, chats etc. (even more than already happened in the past decade). The few remaining small email providers will vanish. The online communication oligopolies will become even more concentrated and will find other ways to protect their business, such as an increase in pay-to-play.
All this is very harmful, but it's harmful in a way similar to restrictive copyright laws: diffuse harms to nearly everyone, more concentrated here and there, while an extremely small set of people profits handsomely. Those who propose to cause this kind of catastrophe may enjoy it.
All this focus on the "metaverse" always sounded idiotic to me. Decades-old reheated soup. However:
Researchers found that the data they leave behind in virtual reality is more useful than a fingerprint to identify individuals. It also provides significantly more data to monetize, including a user’s height, handedness, gender, potential disability, strength, personal tics, etc.
Oh, so maybe Zuck does know what he's doing. When everyone pointed out Facebook is a massive threat to privacy, a mass surveillance mechanism and a way to sell personal data to advertisers, he went "Oh, all that sounds great! Is there any way to do it even more?". And the answer apparently was virtual reality.
It's not even working: since yesterday, @elonmusk has started losing followers, for the first time in months.
https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/elonmusk
It's not the result of broad-based account deletions, because the number of users followed by @barackobama (a relatively stable gauge in the last few months) has remained constant.
https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/barackobama
This is a problem, because I suspect Musk will only give everyone a break once he feels he has won at Twitter, and for now Obama is still about 5 million followers ahead.
The nonsense reporting stems from the confusing definition of (monthly) active users in Mastodon. It could have been excused last year, but nowadays
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/18920
If Mastodon (the software and the promotional website) had instead promoted the daily active users, the figure would probably have jumped up and down for a while and this confusion would probably have been averted. Instead it went up monotonically for 30 days during the peak and then obviously went down for a while as a portion of the new users didn't login for 30 days (as it happens).
This actually proves that Mastodon and the fediverse are better and healthier than the proprietary services, where any activity statistics are carefully massaged before being made public in order to create a sense of momentum that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Have you checked on whose side Sweden and Finland were the last time a dictator was wrecking Europe? There wasn't much soul-searching around here in Finland either.
In early 2023, Mozilla will stand up and test a publicly accessible instance in the Fediverse at Mozilla.Social.
But I'm not quite sure what that means. It's not "a gmail moment" if they "just" offer it to Mozillans, for example. (But it would still be good! Better probably.)
Have you followed the links? What would be sufficient evidence in your mind? Do you need a photo of some MEP or EU official receiving a big envelope full of cash from a person wearing a "copyright cartel representative" t-shirt?
Anyway.
The publishers believe that a system that provides for the authorisation to make orphan works available online cannot dispense with an a priori diligent search.
From the European Commission's document attached to the legislative file.
https://oeil.secure.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheprocedure.do?reference=2011/0136(COD)&l=en
Liebowitz disbarred
Re: www.governo.it
That's behind Akamai, and CloudFlare has already been blocked at least once, so it's only a matter of time until that's blocked too.
Alternative story by Harry Cheadle
Yes, sure, Vice Media management was bad. Meanwhile they accidentally paid some people who did good journalism, in the pursuit of growth. But was there ever any chance of such fantastical growth being financially sustainable?
https://newrepublic.com/article/179276/vice-magazine-history-layoffs-digital-media-bubbleTechnical solutions for social problems
Or in other words,
https://mamot.fr/@nemobis/110309233465209633 (We discuss this ad nauseam on Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects...)Link Mastodon instead
Please don't link closed social media posts when there's a perfectly fine open version crossposted on Mastodon: https://social.coop/@mattl/111689343218120753
Closeted for standing
Don't hope in ArchiveTeam
Even if it were possible, ArchiveTeam is not going to dump 240 TB of private files onto archive.org at the cost of some 500 k$. And if you meant people like certain r/DataHoarder regulars, such crackdowns on unlimited Google Drive storage were instituted in part to stop them from using Google as an infinite storage archive. Probably this fiasco started from someone at Google thinking "oh of course I'll be able to quickly set up a script to identify the nefarious users who dump hundreds of TB of so-called encrypted Linux ISO in order to operate their seedboxes on the cheap, who could possible have a legitimate usage for so much data". But of course they aren't.
Takings Clause
Wasted opportunity
Pity. I've never personally used BlueJeans, but around 2016 it occupied a space where its users felt it had few competitors. BigBlueButton and Jitsi later eclipsed it, but it takes talent to burn it to the ground. I hope at least they sell/migrate the users to some decent competitor.
Re: Subsidies
It might help to read before commenting.
One of the central points of the AG opinion is that the European Commission already funds most of the work, while sales revenue is almost non-existent. In USA terms you might say the standards are basically work for hire of the government. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:62021CC0588Re: AT Protocol
Mainstream social
I'm not sure what makes BlueSky more likely to be "mainstream". In the Tranco list, which considers also the number of DNS requests and therefore partly captures the amount of activity from mobile apps, the main domains (bsky.app, bsky.social) remain at a rank between 500k and 1500k, while mastodon.social alone is orders of magnitude bigger at a rank < 10k. So far I only see yet another for-profit, loss-making, centralised, USA-centric, proprietary service which has turned a few million dollars in cash and celebrity endorsements into a small niche of users. Sure, it's "mainstream" in the same sense that VC-backed startup bankruptcy is mainstream: it happens a lot and it's socially acceptable/desirable in mainstream discourse.
Re: Distributed harm
Unfortunately, I believe your expectation is way too optimistic. If spam filters become de facto prohibited (by means of making them a huge legal cost), people will surrender to spam in less visible ways, such as shutting down comment sections, web forums, chats etc. (even more than already happened in the past decade). The few remaining small email providers will vanish. The online communication oligopolies will become even more concentrated and will find other ways to protect their business, such as an increase in pay-to-play. All this is very harmful, but it's harmful in a way similar to restrictive copyright laws: diffuse harms to nearly everyone, more concentrated here and there, while an extremely small set of people profits handsomely. Those who propose to cause this kind of catastrophe may enjoy it.
So virtual reality has something to offer after all
All this focus on the "metaverse" always sounded idiotic to me. Decades-old reheated soup. However:
Oh, so maybe Zuck does know what he's doing. When everyone pointed out Facebook is a massive threat to privacy, a mass surveillance mechanism and a way to sell personal data to advertisers, he went "Oh, all that sounds great! Is there any way to do it even more?". And the answer apparently was virtual reality.Losing even more attention
It's not even working: since yesterday, @elonmusk has started losing followers, for the first time in months. https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/elonmusk It's not the result of broad-based account deletions, because the number of users followed by @barackobama (a relatively stable gauge in the last few months) has remained constant. https://socialblade.com/twitter/user/barackobama This is a problem, because I suspect Musk will only give everyone a break once he feels he has won at Twitter, and for now Obama is still about 5 million followers ahead.
Transparency and confusing activity statistics
The nonsense reporting stems from the confusing definition of (monthly) active users in Mastodon. It could have been excused last year, but nowadays https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/18920 If Mastodon (the software and the promotional website) had instead promoted the daily active users, the figure would probably have jumped up and down for a while and this confusion would probably have been averted. Instead it went up monotonically for 30 days during the peak and then obviously went down for a while as a portion of the new users didn't login for 30 days (as it happens). This actually proves that Mastodon and the fediverse are better and healthier than the proprietary services, where any activity statistics are carefully massaged before being made public in order to create a sense of momentum that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Re: Appeasement
Have you checked on whose side Sweden and Finland were the last time a dictator was wrecking Europe? There wasn't much soul-searching around here in Finland either.
Re: Mozilla.social
I mean, yes, the first line in that article is
But I'm not quite sure what that means. It's not "a gmail moment" if they "just" offer it to Mozillans, for example. (But it would still be good! Better probably.)Mozilla.Social
Copyright lobby
Have you followed the links? What would be sufficient evidence in your mind? Do you need a photo of some MEP or EU official receiving a big envelope full of cash from a person wearing a "copyright cartel representative" t-shirt? Anyway.
From the European Commission's document attached to the legislative file. https://oeil.secure.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheprocedure.do?reference=2011/0136(COD)&l=en