More German Anti-Tech Lunacy

[Dreadnaught]

If you don't like being harrassed/groped/raped don't go outdoors. If you don't like being discriminated against, don't apply for jobs. So much choice

Achievement unlocked: Comparing a browser cookie to rape.

[Ominous Gamer]

Achievement unlocked: Comparing a browser cookie to rape.

coming from the guy who thought it was a good idea to quote a batman movie

[Khendraja'aro]

It's the moderators fault that you can't be bothered to maintain a civil discussion?

I'm enjoying your take on personal responsibility.

I myself am NOT the one who constantly denigrates Europe/Germany or compares us constantly to some fascist/totalitarian state. Seriously, I'm tired of it.

Anyway, I'm done with this place.

Bye.

[Loki]

And you almost got the concept of fewer choices.

I didn't realize that companies were required to provide you with extra choices.

If you don't like being harrassed/groped/raped don't go outdoors. If you don't like being discriminated against, don't apply for jobs. So much choice

I have seriously met kindergarteners with a better grasp of reality than you.

[Ominous Gamer]

I didn't realize that companies were required to provide you with extra choices.

If you're going to brag that your stance provides consumer choice, its a good idea that your posts on the subject don't show the opposite effect. Thats all I pointed out.

Not once have I suggested that someone should be able to use "everyone's products on your own terms." Thats just you doing your usual exaggeration thing.

Now i have pointed out that companies are restricting choice when it comes to options that used to be the norm. Especially when its possible to connect that push back to the US government. But we've already had that discussion in this thread.

[Loki]

And my response is too freaking bad. You have no inherent right to use Facebook, especially since you don't even pay for it. If Facebook wants to make changes you don't like, tough. Don't use it. Owners of capital get to decide how it's used, not you. If you don't like it, don't use it. If enough people make that choice, Facebook will either do an about turn or go bankrupt. That's how the market works. Not by angsty fanboys pushing for the government to force private firms to make products the way they want.

[Ominous Gamer]

And my response is too freaking bad. You have no inherent right to use Facebook, especially since you don't even pay for it. If Facebook wants to make changes you don't like, tough. Don't use it. Owners of capital get to decide how it's used, not you. If you don't like it, don't use it. If enough people make that choice, Facebook will either do an about turn or go bankrupt. That's how the market works. Not by angsty fanboys pushing for the government to force private firms to make products the way they want.

so you're not replying in regards to my comment that dread's remark was bullshit. you're on a totally different conversation topic.

not that your stance doesn't leave something to be destired considering how its nearly impossible to use the web at this point without tripping across a facebook button, and how thats raises a red flag with your remark on "Owners of capital get to decide how it's used, not you" and hence the global concerns about privacy, tracking, and cookies.

[Loki]

I can't go to a fast food place that doesn't serve either Coke or Pepsi. Clearly that means I should be able to get the government to force Coke and Pepsico to make products the way I like them. Hey, I like Coke and I like Iced Tea. Better require Coke to carry a mix of the two.

[Echovirus]

not that your stance doesn't leave something to be destired considering how its nearly impossible to use the web at this point without tripping across a facebook button, and how thats raises a red flag with your remark on "Owners of capital get to decide how it's used, not you" and hence the global concerns about privacy, tracking, and cookies.

It's that exact reason that I use a list in my adblocker to specifically block the Facebook like buttons and other similar implementations of other sites.

[Ominous Gamer]

I can't go to a fast food place that doesn't serve either Coke or Pepsi. Clearly that means I should be able to get the government to force Coke and Pepsico to make products the way I like them. Hey, I like Coke and I like Iced Tea. Better require Coke to carry a mix of the two.

What a perfect way to explain how little of this you understand.

[Ominous Gamer]

It's that exact reason that I use a list in my adblocker to specifically block the Facebook like buttons and other similar implementations of other sites.

which is a great program, but the fact that programs like this exist shouldn't somehow mean that other companies should be exempt from answering to governments when it comes to the protection of their citizens. Otherwise that opens the door to believing that its ok to exploit or take advantage of people that are either to ignorant to know how, or are simply unable to protect themselves.

(not that I'm saying that this is what you're suggesting).

[Echovirus]

which is a great program, but the fact that programs like this exist shouldn't somehow mean that other companies should be exempt from answering to governments when it comes to the protection of their citizens. Otherwise that opens the door to believing that its ok to exploit or take advantage of people that are either to ignorant to know how, or are simply unable to protect themselves.

(not that I'm saying that this is what you're suggesting).

I entirely agree. However, when our own state governments (as in the recent case of SC having millions of SSNs and credit card numbers in unencrypted data that were stolen from our Department of Revenue) are inept at protecting even some of our most important information, I see little reason to trust in the state or national government to actually get it right in regards to coming up with a proper set of regulations with how private companies, online and traditional, deal with my information. If I don't want my information to be used, I have to be proactive. It's not as convenient as the government regulating how they handle the data, but as of right now, I can't say that I trust them to do a better job of protecting my information than I can do.

[Aimless]

Achievement unlocked: Comparing a browser cookie to rape.

The slippery slope between the two extremes is perfectly clear. As someone who loves slippery slope arguments you should be able to appreciate this one, and I made it esp. for your pleasure, not because I think real names on Facebook = rape.

Facebook is a private company but it's a part of regular everyday life. The position Loki holds is not an unreasonable one--I personally don't think Facebook should be forced to allow fake names--but the principle behind it can be: if you don't like how regular life is, stay out of it. Applying for jobs and working are necessary parts of regular living. You might think it's better to address problems with discrimination in job-hunting with "tough shit", but in other places societies recognise that it's better to just make it illegal so that every member of society can engage in that society a little more freely.

[Aimless]

I didn't realize that companies were required to provide you with extra choices.

See OG's replies about your illiteracy. Btw, in more extreme cases, companies may certainly be required to provide you with more choice, eg. if their practices end up being construed as being anti-competitive as a result of their total (and totally fair) dominance of their market. See, for example, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel.

I have seriously met kindergarteners with a better grasp of reality than you.

Did you understand what they were saying or did you just make it up?

[Aimless]

I can't go to a fast food place that doesn't serve either Coke or Pepsi. Clearly that means I should be able to get the government to force Coke and Pepsico to make products the way I like them. Hey, I like Coke and I like Iced Tea. Better require Coke to carry a mix of the two.

Eh I get the impression you're not grokking how things like the Facebook "like" button on third party sites work

[Loki]

I know very well how it works. I also know very well that it's incredibly easy to block or at least ignore if you're technologically illiterate.

[Aimless]

Do you know what "likejacking" is?

[Ominous Gamer]

at least ignore if you're technologically illiterate.

you ignoring whats tracking you doesn't mean that its ignoring you. Hell, most of these things that aren't supported via a form of social sharing are built to be as unnoticeable and unremovable as possible.

[Dreadnaught]

The slippery slope between the two extremes is perfectly clear. As someone who loves slippery slope arguments you should be able to appreciate this one, and I made it esp. for your pleasure, not because I think real names on Facebook = rape.

Facebook is a private company but it's a part of regular everyday life. The position Loki holds is not an unreasonable one--I personally don't think Facebook should be forced to allow fake names--but the principle behind it can be: if you don't like how regular life is, stay out of it. Applying for jobs and working are necessary parts of regular living. You might think it's better to address problems with discrimination in job-hunting with "tough shit", but in other places societies recognise that it's better to just make it illegal so that every member of society can engage in that society a little more freely.

To me it's unreasonable that once a site becomes popular it must be subject to strict (and often random) regulations that can hurt the site's ability to be popular and/or profitable.

As Loki said somewhere up there, just because you and a lot of other people decide you like using a Web service does not entitle you to change the terms upon which you use that service.

Arguably this boils down to basic property rights, but a lot of those regulatory lines were crossed a long time ago.

[Ominous Gamer]

To me it's unreasonable that once a site becomes popular it must be subject to strict (and often random) regulations that can hurt the site's ability to be popular and/or profitable.

As you've admitted several times, these are new services, new tech, new profit ventures. You can't, and shouldn't, create laws around such items if they didn't exist only a few years before hand. It usually takes a grumbling of abuse of position or information before normal people understand the need to act.

[Loki]

Do you know what "likejacking" is?

And what does that have to do with the firm that operates Facebook?

[Dreadnaught]

My God, what a week...

In Germany, the Europe epicenter of anti-Internet fearmongering, a conference was held to discuss the legislative effort to regulate every piece of data across the entire EU-wide economy...

Firms Brace for New European Data Privacy Law
By KEVIN J. O’BRIEN
Published: May 13, 2013

BERLIN— The effort in Europe to adopt the world’s strongest data protection law has drawn the attention of dozens of lobbyists from U.S. technology and advertising companies.

Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon and I.B.M., individually and through industry groups, have all sought to actively participate in a legislative process that could give half a billion consumers the right to withhold basic personal details while using the Web, putting a major crimp in the financial model that makes those business run.

On Monday, their European counterparts showed up in force at a conference in Berlin to discuss the potential law, which is expected to come to a vote sometime next year. Representatives from European Aeronautics Defense & Space, BMW, Daimler and Rovio Entertainment, the creator of mobile apps like Angry Birds, filled a hotel meeting room and tried to figure out how new rules would affect them.

Even nontech companies like UBS, the Swiss bank, were among the 70 attendees at the Pullman Hotel Scheizerhof near the Tiergarten central park, as the new regulations are expected to affect virtually every type of business.

Spoiler:

The effort to create strict new online privacy protections in Europe is motivated by a desire to rein in the data use of social media companies like Google and Facebook, said Ian Walden, a professor of information and communications law at the University of London and a speaker at the conference.

“But the problem is this proposal is going to create a whole new layer of regulation for the vast majority of businesses that have nothing to do with social media,” he said. “They are going to see their compliance loads increase greatly with very little benefit.”

The measures would prohibit the use of a range of standard Web tracking and profiling practices that companies use to produce targeted advertising, unless consumers gave their explicit prior consent. The bill would also grant European consumers a fundamental new right: data portability, or the right to easily transfer an individual’s posts, photographs and video from one online service site to another.

The measures, as well as the creation of an E.U.-wide data privacy regulator, were originally proposed last year by Viviane Reding, the European justice commissioner.

They are now contained in a bill sponsored by Jan Philipp Albrecht, a member of the European Parliament from Hanover. But the fate of the bill, meant to revise an 18-year-old statute, remains murky.

The lead parliamentary committee for the bill is struggling to schedule more than 3,000 amendments to the proposal and has already pushed back a vote from the end of this month until June. Negotiators in the upper house of Parliament are at odds over basic concepts, like the requirement for businesses to obtain prior consent before collecting Web data and proposed penalties for violators, which would be set at up to 2 percent of a company’s annual sales.

“I think at this point, there will be a set of new rules, they will be uniform, and they will raise the level of data protection from where it is now,” said Thomas Lehnert, the director of data protection for EADS Deutschland, who participated in the conference.

EADS, which employs eight full-time data protection officers in 17 countries, may have to hire many more such officers in almost all of its jurisdictions, he said. “I think we are talking about a multiple of what we have now,” Mr. Lehnert said.

U.S. interest in the European deliberations remains significant. About a third of the data-protection officials attending the conference were representatives of U.S.-based companies. Exxon Mobil, Aon, Amway and Procter & Gamble were present, as were the global law firms of Hogan Lovells, Taylor Wessing and Latham & Watkins.

Other countries are watching as well. Lawmakers in South Africa are in the final stages of completing a six-year effort to create the country’s first comprehensive data protection laws, which will be tailored to the new E.U. rules, said Robby Coelho, a lawyer at Webber Wentzel, a law firm in Johannesburg.

“South Africa wants to have internationally recognized data protection standards to attract businesses to the country,” Mr. Coelho said.

Likewise in the Middle East, the overseers of international free trade zones in Qatar and Dubai plan to adopt data protection laws that mirror European rules, said Justin Cornish, a lawyer at Latham & Watkins in Dubai, who also attended the Berlin conference.

“There is an expectation that data protection laws around the world are going to become more stringent, and Europe is leading the way,” Mr. Cornish said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/te...ivacy-law.html

Meanwhile, down the road in Berlin, a German judge decided that automatic query completion could be "defamatory". Taken to its logical conclusion, a German-hosted forum could be sued if enough complete strangers start posting "Dreadnaught enjoys fucking llamas" enough times.

German Court Orders Changes To Google Search Hints
by THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
May 14, 2013 9:23 AM

BERLIN (AP) — Google Inc. must respect requests to remove autocomplete entries from its search bar in Germany if they are defamatory, a German court ruled Tuesday.

The Federal Court of Justice upheld a complaint from an unidentified company selling nutritional supplements and its founder, identified only as "R.S." The plaintiffs claimed that when their names were entered on Google's German-language website, it suggested links to Scientology and fraud.

The search suggestions constituted a form of defamation because they wrongly implied "a factual link between the plaintiff and the terms 'Scientology' and/or 'fraud,' which have negative connotations," the court said. The German branch of the Church of Scientology has long been under observation by domestic intelligence services amid worries — which Scientology strongly rejects — that its work conflicts with Germany's constitution.

Google expressed surprise and disappointment at the decision, noting that the autocomplete function merely reflects what other users have searched for.

Spoiler:

The company noted that the court hadn't ordered Google to turn off the autocomplete function or to vet all results in advance. Instead, Google has to ensure that defamatory results are checked, and if necessary removed, as soon as they have been brought to its attention, the court said.

If Google disagrees with a claim that an entry is defamatory, it could have to settle the matter in court.

The verdict overturns a decision by a regional court in the western city of Cologne, which had dismissed the complaint last year. The regional court will now have to reexamine the case and determine if Google failed to meet its duty of care and is liable for damages and legal costs.

The verdict also has implications for Google in the high-profile case of Germany's former first lady, Bettina Wulff, who is suing the company because its autocomplete function suggested searches that included the terms "escort" and "red light past." That case is still pending.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=183849156

The French are pretty good on the absurd regulation front, but they are even better at the generation of absurd tax proposals.

France weighs 'culture tax' for Apple, Google products

(Reuters) - President Francois Hollande will decide by the end of July whether France should impose new taxes on technology giants like Apple and Google to finance cultural projects, a move that could feed into an anti-business image days after a spat with Yahoo!.

The Socialist government asked former Canal Plus CEO Pierre Lescure to find new ways of funding culture during an economic downturn, in line with France's "cultural exception" argument that such projects must be shielded from market forces.

While far from becoming laws, the proposals could worsen tension between France and technology giants after Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg blocked an attempt by Yahoo! to buy a majority stake in French video clip site Dailymotion.

The run-in reignited a debate on state intervention in the economy, angered the firm's French parent company and exposed discord between Montebourg and Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici, who denied having approved the move.

Lescure's report said taxes on sales of smart-phones and tablets, namely Apple's iPhone and iPad and Google Android products, could help fund culture because consumers were spending more money on hardware than on content.

Spoiler:

The proposed tax would mirror fees already paid by television users, TV and radio broadcasters and Internet service providers to fund art, cinema and music in France, but which Google, Apple and Amazon are now exempt from paying.

"Companies that make these tablets must, in a minor way, be made to contribute part of the revenue from their sales to help creators," Culture Minister Aurelie Filipetti told journalists.

Hollande's office said in a statement that he wanted lawmakers to review legislation based on the report's recommendations by the summer. Parliament goes into recess at the end of July and returns in mid- to late September.

Filipetti added that the "culture tax", which she said would be "minimal and widely distributed", was likely to be included in a budget law to be submitted to parliament in November.

French officials are also pushing to ensure that French cultural products, and notably the audiovisual sector, remain exempt from free trade rules during talks on a planned trade agreement between the European Union and the United States.

U.S. President Barack Obama is travelling to Europe next month to launch the talks, which would create the world's largest free-trading bloc if they were successful.

After months of public criticism of Google, France in January abandoned trying to make it pay newspapers for publishing links to articles, settling for a pledge by Google to invest 60 million euros in a fund to support news production.

In Germany, publishers Bertelsmann SE and Axel Springer also backed down from a similar push after a court let Google publish links and previews to their content for free.

Last October, Google denied a newspaper report saying it received a 1 billion euro tax claim from the French state.

In Britain, Google has stirred the ire of lawmakers for the way it pays almost no income tax on billions of dollars of UK sales each year.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...94C0HO20130513

[Khendraja'aro]

I'm not quite sure why you consider the Google case in Germany to be surprising. They're already censoring certain autocomplete results like "torrents" but I guess that's a-ok in your books because it's the big companies and money that are behind it, rather than mere actual persons with a life. Don't you also have defamation and libel laws in the US? Oh, wait, you do...

[Ominous Gamer]

I like how Dread cries about the EU wanting to control every bit of data EVAR. but only provides a story that talks about consumer protections on being profiled and tracked, and being able to keep control of their personal digital creations.

[Dreadnaught]

I'm not quite sure why you consider the Google case in Germany to be surprising. They're already censoring certain autocomplete results like "torrents" but I guess that's a-ok in your books because it's the big companies and money that are behind it, rather than mere actual persons with a life. Don't you also have defamation and libel laws in the US? Oh, wait, you do...

I didn't realize machines could defame someone by regurgitating what tens of thousands of people are typing about that person Online.

[earthJoker]

I didn't realize machines could violate copyright laws by regurgitating what tens of thousands of people are typing about that movie.

Yeah, me neither.

[Ominous Gamer]

I didn't realize machines could defame someone by regurgitating what tens of thousands of people are typing about that person Online.

ignorance for what a program "learns" is not against the law. Ignoring it once it is brought to your attention is the problem. You know this, its in the article you posted. Yet you either don't understand, or you understand well enough that if you presented it in an honest way you know you would look like a idiot complaining about it.

Your link also doesn't say this is something that comes about from the searches of tens of thousands of people, and in real life its usually not the result of tens of thousands of people.

[Aimless]

Yeah, me neither.

readnought can't read:

The company noted that the court hadn't ordered Google to turn off the autocomplete function or to vet all results in advance. Instead, Google has to ensure that defamatory results are checked, and if necessary removed, as soon as they have been brought to its attention, the court said.

If Google disagrees with a claim that an entry is defamatory, it could have to settle the matter in court.

[Ominous Gamer]

and while dread complains about defamatory remarks in Germany, in the US we have Nintendo using our copyright system to gather revenue from other's Lets Play videos.

[Khendraja'aro]

I didn't realize machines could defame someone by regurgitating what tens of thousands of people are typing about that person Online.

Understanding fail. Google's defense was that they could not comply with such orders because the search suggestions were created automatically.

That argument falls absolutely flat on its face, however, when one points out that they're already perfectly capable of removing certain search suggestions (hence the "torrents" example). Which means that their defense simply does not exist - they have the mechanism to prevent certain suggestions from appearing and they're already using that mechanism!.