RunawayFixer @ RunawayFixer @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

And I'm not saying that you are. I tried to show with a parable that they do not need to see their machine's actions to know that some of it's actions are illegal. That's what we were disagreeing on: that they know.

I made an automaton. I set the parameters in such a way that there is a large variability of actions that my automaton can take. My parameters do not pre-empt my automaton from taking certain illegal actions. I set my automaton loose. After some time it turns out that my automaton has taken an illegal action against a specific person. Did I know that my automaton was going to commit a illegal action against that specific person? No, I did not. Did I know that my automaton was sooner or later going to commit certain illegal actions? Yes I did, because those actions are within the parameters of the automaton. I know my automaton is capable of doing illegal actions and given enough incidences there is an absolute certainty that it will do those illegal actions. I do not need to interact with my automaton in any way to know that some of it's actions will be illegal.

You can't create an automated machine, let it run loose without supervision and then claim to not be responsible for what the machine does.

Maybe just maybe this was the very first instance of their ai malfunctioning (which I don't believe for a second), in which case the correct response of Brandshield would have been to announce that they would temporarily suspend the activities of this particular program & promise to implement improvements so that it would not happen again. Brandshield has done neither of these, which tells me that it's not the first time and also that Brandshield has no intention of preventing it from happening again in the future.

If it had been phishing, then going to the registrar would have been the right call, because you want to take that down asap. But according to itch.io it wasn't, instead it was a a real fansite that was linking to the real website of funko's game (according to itch.io). Something which most media companies allow since it's basically free publicity and goodwill, but if they did want it taken down for copyright reasons, then a DMCA takedown request send to itch.io would have been the correct first action.

In the response statement by Brandshield, Brandshield does not deny having send a takedown request for phishing to the registrar (confirming that they did), nor do they dispute itch.io's statement that it wasn't a phishing site (confirming that they know that it wasn't), instead they only speak about "infringement".

So now we know that Brandshield is knowingly making false accusations that have potentially serious consequences for their victims. And it's not going to be the first time that they've done this, but even this high publicity case will probably not have any legal consequences for brandshield, so it looks like they will continue getting away with it. Unfortunately they're not alone, it often seems like the entire DMCA industry is rotten.

Why ask the registrar to take down a subdomain of a website?

Those subdomains are not managed or controlled by the registrar, so all the registrar can do is either take down the entire domain or ask their client to take down the subdomain. In this case they asked their client, who took down the subdomain, after which the registrar took down the domain anyhow :D

For a single isolated offence, Brandshield's first action should have been to report the copyright infringement to itch.io and ask for a takedown of that content, instead they went directly to the registrar and falsely claimed that itch.io was a fraud & phishing site. I suspect that they falsely claim that it's about phishing and fraud, because otherwise registrars will not take down the site unless there is systematic copyright infringement (like a torrent site). And I suspect that brandshield goes directly to the registrar with their complaint, since that is easier to automate than finding the right contact info on a website.

So my take is that: The registrar was in the wrong for taking down the domain after itch.io removed the problematic subdomain. Brandshield is scum. And Funko is in the wrong for using brandshield.

No real need for further answers from itch.io, nothing new has come to light.

Edit: while under the shower I realized that Brandshield's posts do contain some kind of news: Brandshield does not deny having used fraud & phishing as reason for the takedown request, thereby confirming that they did. Before we just had itch.io's retelling of the events, which might have been a misrepresentation by itch.io or due to a cock-up by the registrar, but because of the lack of denial by brandshield, we now have confirmation that it did happen like itch.io said.

Heavily tax buying and owning homes as investments. Also heavily tax vacant homes in regions with a housing shortage.

Basically regulate it so that prospective buyers who are buying a place to live in are significantly advantaged when trying to do so, while at the same time discouraging others from buying up those homes as investments.

I assume that everyone who wants to own a home wants to own a home and many of those aren't able to. That's the current reality.

Edit: I reread what I said and I distinctly said that it should be "a right". Having a right to do something is not the same as having an obligation to do something. Imo home ownership should be a right for everyone, but that doesn't make it an obligation.

Owning your place to live should be a right. Anyone who holds more housing stock than they personally need and who will only let it out if there's profit on their investment (because if it's an investment, then there is an expectation that the line must always go up, which is also very inflationary), tightens the market and makes it harder for other people to become a home owner.

The big difference between renting and paying of a mortgage, is that by paying off the mortgage, the home owner has build up equity and secured a financially more secure future. But if someone is too poor to get a mortgage to afford the inflated house prices (inflated because other people treat it like an investment), then in the current system they pay rent to pay off the mortgage/debt of their landlord and after the renter has paid off their landlord's mortgage, they'll still be poor and without any equity themselves.

It's a very antisocial system. And with landlords building up more and more equity on the backs of people who are unable to build up equity themselves, there's a good reason why landlords are often said to be parasitic.

Yes, that was what I was saying: We only know that that shadow is missing because we have the original image. If we wanted to give a doctored image to someone to mislead them, then we would not be giving the original for comparison.

I think we couldn't know that that shadow is missing without seeing the original photo. So imo that's not a mistake.

An example of ill intent on Microsoft's part: https://mashable.com/article/windows-10-upgrade-snafu-analysis

If you haven't used windows in years then you might not know how bad it has gotten, but ... it's bad. Windows update is not just for security updates, it's also there to change users default browser to edge, their search engine to bing, trick them into using onedrive (too bad if the synced files get corrupted), old features get disabled for no good reason, it hijacks other browsers to show messages and change browser settings, ...

All those things are definitely not for security, but rather a way for Microsoft managers to meet KPI, for example: they want more users of a new application, so they remove the old way of doing things and boom, their quarterly report looks prettier. And to top it all off Microsoft doesn't test updates properly anymore in house, so it's the customers who are life testing that shit. And because those users have to keep updating windows for security, Microsoft has them over a barrel.

It's been a while since I used chrome, but I used to use incognito to avoid that from happening. You can log into your services in the incognito session and when you're done and close the incognito session, the temporary folder with your session stuff will get deleted, leaving the normal chrome browser unaffected.

It sounds like republican* atheists are not allowed to make an honest oath. If you have to swear on something that you don't believe in, what value does that oath have?

• Not the usa party kind, but the ones who want an elected head of state instead of a hereditary one.

Except when it isn't. If the price of the locally fermented alcohol is lower than the price of imported methanol (not every country has a chemical industry and some of those countries have a really low GNP), then it's just not going to be the case. And since there have been methanol contaminations in such countries, we know with certainty that it isn't always caused by adding methanol.

Some scientists heard the same argument (that it was added methanol), thought that wouldn't always make sense and then did some research: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5028366/

"This study assessed some traditional fermented beverages and found that some beverages are prone to methanol contamination including cachaca, cholai, agave, arak, plum and grape wines."

I think that would depend on the judge that the next cases land on, if it's a maga judge then doing justice won't be a priority. Jones seems to be playing for time and appears to hope that Trump's next government can change the playing field for him.

Why justice will become less apolitical in the USA: Maga is fascist and fascism is a totalitarian form of government. In totalitarianism there is no room for an independent judiciary. The USA is only at the beginning of it's maga era, so it still has a mostly independent judiciary, but dismantling that independence is already a part of the plan. And that dismantling can go fast, in Poland it only took a few years to do so. After their 2015 election, the polish Law and Justice party (aka pis) rushed the process with a series of illegal coups to get it done asap, I think their reforms were mostly finished by 2018.

In other words, I wouldn't count out Alex Jones just yet.

The colonists really missed an opportunity imo, the USA could have had such great place names as New Fingringhoe, but instead it seems like only the boring names got copied :(

I'd imagine that a conservative professor of ethics would be the one telling doctors in training that when faced with the dilemma of saving the life of the mother or that of her unborn child, that they must then save the life of the child because it is without sin.

This was taught in a Catholic university near me to doctors of my parents generation, but I suspect they stopped doing that here since about the 1990s. In other places of the world the Catholic church is still at it though.

Thanks for the tip, I'll give it a try the next time that the algorithm goes nuts.

I had been using YouTube for years without being presented rightwing propaganda in my suggestions. I mostly just watched strategy gaming, history, technology channels and some peculiar travelling blogs. And my suggested was just mostly those things.

Then one day I used my YouTube account to cast kid shows for my niece for the first time. After that I was suggested more kid shows which didn't interest me personally, but I also started getting suggested cat videos, which I obviously clicked. And the week after that half my suggested feed was rightwing misogynist/racist/culture war misinformation, and it took a lot of "do not recommend channel" to clean it up again.

So now I believe that there is a concerted effort by some malicious actors to train Google's algorithm to assume that if someone is interested in cat videos, that they would then also be open to becoming a misogynist racist prick.

I remember from an older article that it's a very small college and the new republican dean/president/chairman (I forgot what he was) is being paid $ 700 000 per year, about $1000 per student. I'm certain that he isn't the only person making bank from this. It seems to be a grift to funnel tax money into the pockets of friends and sycophants, and while the college board tries to make itself relevant in the eyes of their maga public, the future of the students appears to not be a consideration, because they're not the ones paying for this circus.

Apparently fighting the republican culture war is very profitable for republican grifters.