But you can sue the manufacturer of a hammer if it's sold with a defect where the head appears to be attached and it actually is likely to fly off in normal use, and some guy buys it, uses it, and the head flies off and hits his buddy in the face.

If a professional news reporter or lawyer uses ChatGPT and doesn't check their sources or citations, that's on them, but if some random person tries to use ChatGPT to obtain current news or legal advice, the developers and owners of the service are ultimately responsible, and "how much" is a question of fact, not something that can be decided pre-trial.

(Speaking hypothically about what the law should be. I Am Not A Lawyer...)

For distinguishing between "legitimate advertisers" and "shady, definitely con artists", sure.

For distinguishing between e-mail I actually care about and e-mail I'd like to insta-delete and not see any more, not so sure. On my work account, I get email from supervisors, coworkers, colleagues, external business partners, external salesmen. For the most part, only the generic sales pitches from external vendors have "unsubscribe" links. And on my personal account, I get email from family, friends, open-source collaborators, volunteer-work collaborators, religious associates, former colleagues, businesses I'm dealing with, lawyers I'm dealing with, and recruiters. There as well, the truly personal messages are unlikely to have "unsuscribe" links, while the generic advertisements for things I'm not even interested in often do have a purported "unsubscribe" link.

Both my church and a non-sectarian youth development organization I'm involved with seem to have gotten caught in the spam-fighting crossfire this year. Each had a system that allowed members of the organization to send e-mail to other members; in the church, for local leaders to reach their own congregation; in the youth organization, for "unit leaders" to put items on a calendar, which would send out reminders at a set time before the event. The youth organization's systems were actually put on a well-known spam list, and I've also heard reports from people who just didn't get messages I sent through the church's system. On the other hand, mail from the "unofficial" channel of my personal address to the same people seems to have still gone through during the same timeframe.

Two weeks later, yes the static parts of the website are up, but important functions (including the "Forgot my PIN" login flow) are still broken. And calls to the main Customer Service number listed on the website get a short mesage "We appreciate your patience as we work to upgrade our Customer Care systems as soon as possible..." (in English and Spanish), followed by hangup.

(I am not a Boost customer, but I have a close relative who is. We'll be switching her to a different carrier as soon as we can figure out how to port her number, which was originally her landline number. I did reach a live person by calling an alternate number, but that person said due to the "internal system error" even they couldn't do anything.)

https://xkcd.com/1948/

P.S. have you read the supposed 100 examples of threats of violence that were not removed? I have not, [...]

Well, here are some declarations and attachments to start with... Declaration of Amazon Executive 1 Declaration of Amazon Executive 2 Exhibit D Exhibit E

The Amazon response to the complaint cites about 15 examples taken from the 100 items that had been reported: [WARNING: as should be obvious from the article, this is full of offensive language; and I had to edit it a bit to avoid the "looks too much like ASCII art" filter warning.]

• “Fry’em up. The whole f--- crew. #pelosi #aoc #thesquad #soros #gates
  14 #chuckschumer #hrc #obama #adamschiff #blm #antifa we are coming for you and
  15 you will know it.”
• “#JackDorsey ... you will die a bloody death alongside Mark Suckert---
  17 [Zuckerberg].... It has been decided and plans are being put in place. Remember
  18 the photographs inside your home while you slept? Yes, that close. You will die a
  19 sudden death!”
• acquire targets.”
• “We are going to fight in a civil War on Jan. 20th, Form MILITIAS now and
• “On January 20th we need to start systematicly [sic] assassinating [sic] #liberal
  23 leaders, liberal activists, #blm leaders and supporters, members of the #nba #nfl
  24 #mlb #nhl #mainstreammedia anchors and correspondents and #antifa. I already
  25 have a news worthy event planned.”
• “Shoot the police that protect these s---bag senators right in the head then make the
  senator grovel a bit before capping they a---.”
• “After the firing squads are done with the politicians the teachers are next.”
• 2 “Death to @zuckerberg @realjeffbezos @jackdorsey @pichai.”
• 3 “White people need to ignite their racial identity and rain down suffering and death
  like a hurricane upon zionists.”
• “Put a target on these motherless trash [Antifa] they aren’t human taking one out
  would be like stepping on a roach no different.”
• “We need to act like our forefathers did Kill [Black and Jewish people] all Leave
  no victims or survivors.”
• “We are coming with our list we know where you live we know who you are and
  10 we are coming for you and it starts on the 6th civil war... Lol if you will think it’s
  11 a joke... Enjoy your last few days you have.”
• “This b--- [Stacey Abrams] will be good target practice for our beginners.”
• “This c--- [United States Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao] should be...
  hung for betraying their country.”
• “Hang this mofo [Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger] today.”
• “HANG THAt N--- ASAP”

To be clear, per Amazon's answer, they brought "content threatening violence" to Parler's attention in November. It would be a stretch to characterize anything I see in Amazon's filings as "planning" an attack.

And it's possible that even in the week leading up to January 6th the absolute number of violence-inciting, electoral-count-related posts on Facebook, or in YouTube comments, was higher than on Parler, just because those platforms are so much bigger. But on Parler, it seemed like the actual majority of comment traffic was either "stop the steal" complaints (with a range all the way from "here's another interesting affidavit" to "bullet to the head"), or memes mocking the appearance and assumed sexual history of famous Democratic politicians including Obama, Pelosi, and AOC, or anti-vaxx/anti-mask attitudes toward the pandemic. I saw all of that on Facebook/YouTube as well, but on Parler there was little else... at least in the comments on the posts of any "influencers" I checked.

I would guess actual "planning" also took place using Discord groups, Telegram/Signal, CB radio, phone calls, regular email, and like-mided people literally meeting in the street and chatting.

And the HORC isn't saying that the FBI shouldn't look at at Facebook and Google and other communication tools; they're just stating the obvious, that Parler is a good place to start and a place the investigators shouldn't ignore.

(By the way, the committee acronym HORC reminds me of the Spanish noun horca, a hangman's gallows. Weird coincidence?)

I went on Parler myself, posted something pro-vaxx and a link to the National Archives, and earned the threat "you better watch your 6 commie, we're coming for you". It was really bad.

I'm not aware of any group of stationery vendors effectively "de-platforming" people in Colonial times based on their politics.

What do you think the stamp act was? But you're right, that was the government, not paper/ink vendors themselves.

... on VHS tapes picked up at a garage sale.

Last night I was talking to my kids about the pandemic, and they asked "How did it start?"

My response was something like the following...

"Probably it started in a city in China where people eat bat-meat. They were keeping bats in cages, and didn't wash their hands after handling them, and they caught the disease from the bats. It didn't help that the local communist party, equivalent to a city or state government in our country, arrested the first doctor who discovered the disease for 'spreading counterrevolutionary propaganda', but the national Chinese government mostly did what they should have. It didn't help that President Trump kept telling people that they didn't need to worry about the disease, and that it would magically disappear, but our governors and mayors mostly did what they should have.

"I saw a story in the news the other day that the C.I.A. is investigating a theory that the Chinese government was trying to make a secret bioweapon, and it leaked out of the lab, infecting first the city where the lab is, then the whole province, and now the whole world.

"If you talk to a random person on the street-corner in Iran or North Korea or Cuba, they will probably tell you, without any evidence, that the American C.I.A. developed a secret bioweapon, and unleashed it by flying secret agents to China and infecting people there.

"If you talk to a random person on the street-corner in Palestine, or Egypt, or Syria, they will probably tell you, without any evidence, that Mossad developed a secret bioweapon, and unleashed it by flying secret agents to China and infecting people there.

"If you talk to a random person on the street-corner in any Latin American country, they will probably tell you, without any evidence, that either their government or their country's most vocal opposition party helped the C.I.A. develop a secret bioweapon, and then the C.I.A. deployed it by sending secret agents to a city in China, from which it spread.

"I don't 'know' how it actually started. I'll let you consider the evidence and decide for yourselves. As soon as a vaccine is available, I will make sure we, as a family, all get it. As soon as free testing for people without symptoms or health risks is available, I will make sure we are all tested. Until then, I think we should eat healthy, get exercise, and take advantage of our time isolated at home to study and improve ourselves mentally and spiritually."

Important to note the qualification to the advice in that article:

For those using Zoom to keep in touch with friends, hold social events, or organize courses or lectures that they might otherwise hold in a public or semi-public venue, our findings should not necessarily be concerning.

The other web-conference platforms (WebEx, Skype, Hangouts, etc.) can all be used in such a way that they'd be targets for "Zoom bombing".

As far as I know, the other major web-conference platforms don't necessarily offer "end-to-end encryption" either.

And Microsoft had 4,000 employees in China several years ago, and was planning to hire more.

I have concerns about Zoom's sudden path to apparent monopoly, but some of the recent anti-Zoom pronouncements seem like they might really be attempts to clamp down on personal use of an organization's devices, fueled by competitors' FUD as they try to buy time to make their own products more secure and more user-friendly.

Google registered its domain-name in 1997, incorporated in 1998 and went public in 2004.

A proposal for the GDPR was released in 2012, and it was adopted in 2016.

So when they "entered the European market", GDPR did not exist.

GDPR is nice for those it gives rights to, but a pain to implement even for the best actors. If an organization already has written, well-justified policies and a culture of minimizing retained personal information, that makes compliance somewhat easier, but still tedious and disruptive. But as a general complaint, the premise of the GDPR and other similar new laws (like the CCPA) seems to be that every organization has "a file" of every person they deal with. That might have been true of East German companies under state control, and to a lesser extent by imitation in other European countries; a company like Google has many data streams, some complete, some incomplete, some unreliable, and it's hard work to match them up (or build systems that can do the matching on demand). I suspect there will be cases (if they haven't happened already, just not been made public) where a process-change for GDPR or some other new privacy-law actually increases the risk of fraud, or makes a privacy breach worse or harder to clean up, or on the other hand leads to the loss of important historical or scientific data.

My church responded to GDPR by updating forms and computer-systems to remind people that information submitted would be retained in perpetuity as a vital and historical record. The Boy Scouts of America updated its forms and systems recently for several reasons, but they now include a mention of CCPA rights on the registration-form. (Most members of the BSA are US citizens, and not even residents of Europe, so the GDPR is mostly inapplicable to them.) For all the cries of activists and hungry lawyers, a big multinational organization can probably justify a lot of its data-retention under one or another of the exceptions to the GDPR, and treat any residual fines or imposed compliance-costs as just a tax under another name.

I remember those. I read and reread some on long (interstate) car-trips when I was a kid, checked others out at the school or city library and spent a few hours reading them at home. Some of them I flipped through the book looking for an interesting ending, then did a backward search to piece together the plot to that ending.

I'm not sure if it was the same trademark, but I remember either books in that series or a similar series that had one-page BASIC programs to type in and run for some of the choice-points.

I use HiPER Scientific, just the free version (The paid version allegedly adds graphing and more symbolic manipulation). The layout is a lot like a (Casio?) scientific calculator I used to carry with me everywhere.

Also Google Sheets and WolframAlpha.

Linux and ip6tables supports the DNAT, DNPT, MASQUERADE, NETMAP, SNAT, and SNPT targets for IPv6 since kernel 3.7 (released in 2012). So in 2013 it wasn't uniformly supported, but today it should be. Never mind what one developer might have said, the support actually is there for several years now and it actually works.

They sell Enterprise Content Management software, in other words an alternative ( or various alternatives) to SharePoint. One of their products is Documentum, although as I recall they acquired that and added it to their portfolio. That means they're also competing with Lotus Connections, Google Docs for Enterprise, Box, and the built-in document-management features of every other enterprise software portfolio and SaaS service that's out there.

(Disclaimer: I work for IBM, although not for SWG and IBM sold the Lotus and Rational software lines off a few months ago. I've also been on one project where I helped retire an instance of Documentum.)