M. Alan Thomas II 's BestNetTech Comments

Latest Comments (216)

• On the post: Using Content Delivery Networks To Circumvent The Great Firewall Of China

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 04 Dec, 2015 @ 02:11am

  I'd expect to see a push from the Chinese government for home-grown CDNs that don't host (or will internally block) blacklisted content. The most likely route to make that work would be for the government to use a combination of incentives and selective blocking (e.g., slowly rolling out blocks on encrypted connections) to make most major sites transition at least their encrypted content to those CDNs.

• On the post: Toy Maker Vtech Hacked, Revealing Kids' Selfies, Chat Logs, & Even Voice Recordings

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 01 Dec, 2015 @ 11:23pm

  "This opens the organizations up to unnecessary risk. If the words "might", "possible", or "potential" are used in an argument supporting the collection of data, you're about to violate the principle of least data. You should only collect and store data for well understood use.

  Three words: NSA.

• On the post: Pathological: Surveillance State Defenders Use Their Own Failure In Paris To Justify Mass Surveillance

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 16 Nov, 2015 @ 04:27pm

  In the disappeared New York Times article you referred to in a previous post, the claim was that the attackers had communicated with ISIS. That implies that we were collecting information on their communications, but once again we couldn't filter the signal from the noise until we had the benefit of hindsight.
  
  Also, it's ridiculous that they're claiming that we know who's talking to ISIS at the same time as they're saying that encryption makes it impossible to know who the bad guys are.

• On the post: Monkey See, Monkey Sue… Defendants Ask Judge To Toss Out Ridiculous Monkey Copyright Lawsuit

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 09 Nov, 2015 @ 12:59pm

  PETA has even less of a right to the copyright in the photo than Slater[...].

  It's "even less of a right to a copyright" not "the copyright"; the definite article assumes the existence of a copyright, when none such exists.

• On the post: Connecticut Police Announce Plan To Open Unlocked Vehicles And Seize Valuables

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 04 Nov, 2015 @ 01:10pm

  I don't like giving the police abusable powers, but I must admit to liking the idea of cops having to think of their job as helping people rather than just busting them.

• On the post: French Restaurants: Home Cooking Really Is Killing The Restaurant Industry!

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 30 Oct, 2015 @ 02:03pm

  So . . . they're complaining about something very similar to Cuban paladares just because it's a model that they're not used to competing with.

• On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At BestNetTech

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 18 Oct, 2015 @ 08:10pm

  Re:

  Where's your evidence that the government isn't stupid?
  
  "Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory." —Bernard Ingham

• On the post: The Right Way To Stop Piracy

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 18 Oct, 2015 @ 08:02pm

  Re: Simple

  I'm calling Hanlon's razor on this: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
  
  And if you think stupid people don't get to be in charge of things, I refer you to government. Or, to put it another way, "Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory." (Bernard Ingham)

• On the post: BestNetTech Podcast Episode 43: Why Do We Let An 86 Year Old Librarian Decide Who's Allowed To Innovate?

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 22 Sep, 2015 @ 08:32pm

  Re:

  Whoops, forgot my citation:
  http://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2015/06/ala-urges-president-obama-select-librarian-head-library-congress

• On the post: BestNetTech Podcast Episode 43: Why Do We Let An 86 Year Old Librarian Decide Who's Allowed To Innovate?

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 22 Sep, 2015 @ 02:46pm

  Wait, did you just claim that the Librarian of Congress is a librarian? Because outside of his misleading job title, he's not. He does not have the degree or work history or even values. Because he's retiring in January, the ALA is currently trying to pressure Obama into appointing an actual librarian, but that's not what we have now.

• On the post: Authors Guilded, United, And Representing… Not Authors

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 18 Aug, 2015 @ 10:19pm

  The Author's Guild has bragged about how prestigious (read: bestselling) their presidency and governing council are. I think that, for those authors, they're being well-represented in many respects: They're the ones who have benefitted the most through the current system and have the most to lose if consumer purchasing power starts distributing more to the self-published long tail than to them. The problem is not that groups like AG represent the publishers but that they represent the lucky few authors anointed by the publishers rather than the majority.
  
  (They also represent agents of writers' estates, which is not inherently a bad thing—help actively managing an estate is at least likely to result in continued publication vs. abandonment—but obviously estates have no interest in incentivizing anything other than longer postmortem terms.)

• On the post: Boston Police Commissioner Wants Cameras Further Away From Cops, Criminal Charges For Not Assisting Officers

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 14 Aug, 2015 @ 12:52am

  I believe that a crowd of people "helping" with law enforcement duties is generally termed a "lynch mob."

• On the post: UK Prevent Strategy For Identifying Potential Terrorists Identifies 3 Year Old Because Of Course It Did

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 31 Jul, 2015 @ 03:42pm

  To a lot of Britons, living in Tower Hamlets is evidence of criminal activity at the very least; the crime rate there is historically so high that the guards who live inside the Tower of London—your archetypical high-security zone if there ever was one—have had trouble getting insurance because they're in Tower Hamlets' postcode.

• On the post: Court Realizes That Maybe It Can't Order Cloudflare To Proactively Block Any New Grooveshark From Ever Appearing

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 10 Jul, 2015 @ 01:53pm

  Re: New York. Where the law takes a back door to justice.

  Eh, every district has its bad apples. We just hear about SDNY a lot because they have more assholes in their jurisdiction than most.

• On the post: As Hollywood Lobbied State Department, It Built Free Home Theaters For US Embassies

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 10 Jul, 2015 @ 06:52pm

  At the theater's debut in February, the ambassador's guests were treated to a dark tale of corruption, lobbying and double-dealing in Washington – the Netflix series "House of Cards."

  Wait, the MPAA paid for State to refurbish a screening room and State turned around and used it to play a streaming "TV" show? That's . . . actually kinda hilarious.

• On the post: Court Realizes That Maybe It Can't Order Cloudflare To Proactively Block Any New Grooveshark From Ever Appearing

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 10 Jul, 2015 @ 01:50pm

  I'm tempted to register a domain name about "the grooveshark decision" and put my objections to it there, add Cloudflare as the CDN, then notify UMG and see if they want to suppress unambiguously protected speech.

• On the post: Court Realizes That Maybe It Can't Order Cloudflare To Proactively Block Any New Grooveshark From Ever Appearing

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 10 Jul, 2015 @ 01:44pm

  Committing any acts calculated to cause consumers to believe that the Counterfeit Service or any other use of the Grooveshark Marks is offered under the control and supervision of Plaintiff UMG or sponsored or approved by, or connected with, or guaranteed by, or produced under the control and supervision of Plaintiff
  
  Infringing any of the Grooveshark Marks and damaging Plaintiff goodwill;
  
  Otherwise competing unfairly with Plaintiff UMG in any manner; or
  
  Directly or secondarily infringing Plaintiffs' copyrighted sound recordings via the Counterfeit Service or any variations thereof.

  Each of those involve specific findings of fact—especially where questions such as intent or fair use might arise—but the court is rubberstamping UMG's future allegations before they've even been made. Part of the point of having an independent court system and jury trials is supposed to be that plaintiffs do not get to judge the merits of their own cases. This order throws that out the window.

• On the post: Newsday Editor: Carve Hate Speech Out Of First Amendment, Hold Websites Responsible If Users Post Hate Speech

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 04 Jul, 2015 @ 01:40pm

  It's also much easier to pretend that a problem no longer exists once you've legislated it into hiding. We shouldn't be helping privileged people pretend that what they can't see doesn't exist.

• On the post: Took Longer Than I Expected: Bill O'Reilly Yanks Video Games Into Charleston Massacre For No Reason At All

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 03 Jul, 2015 @ 08:16pm

  Re: Gamers grown up will stop this?

  Video games apparently are destined to fill that role until these idiots retire and the next generation of news people are in place . . .

  . . . at which point history suggests that we—the next generation—will find something new to blame.

• On the post: Creator Behind Crowd-Funded Boardgame That Failed To Materialize Draws Settlement Agreement From FTC

  

  M. Alan Thomas II ( profile ), 15 Jun, 2015 @ 08:38pm

  The value is not on what the order says on its face but in how it alters any subsequent proceedings by the FTC against him. The FTC essentially has a blank check to audit his entire life at will for nearly two decades, and any action they take against him can be railroaded so hard it will make civil asset forfeiture look like due process. To put it another way: This is 18 years of probation with a probation officer who has permission to rifle through the guy's bank account any time he feels like it and take any money he doesn't think the guy really needs.

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