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Journal Journal: Trump Republicans 1

Journal by Cajun Hell

There are still people alive, TODAY, who can talk and walk and pass as everyday normal people, but who still think of Republicans as conservative!

Comment Laws with mission creep (Score 4, Insightful) 148

by Bruce66423 (#66088556) Attached to: US Demands Reddit Unmask ICE Critic, Summons Firm To Grand Jury

The use of the Smoot-Hawley Act to get this information is, as the defendant's argument points out, a weird use of an act with a totally different purpose. As is so often the case, the executive is seeking to get its way with legislation that wasn't intended for their purpose. It's how our freedoms die; laws nibble away at them without it being deliberate. If you can find a witch to hunt with the law, even better; the present growth of live face scanning technology in the UK is being driven by examples of sex offenders being spotted with it.

It's so much easier to rule the country if the population is kept surveiled and cowed into silence.

Submission + - EU parliament fails to renew loophole allowing tech firms to report abuse (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: 'The European parliament has blocked the extension of a law that permits big tech firms to scan for child sexual exploitation on their platforms, creating a legal gap that child safety experts say will lead to crimes going undetected.

'The law, which was a carve-out of the EU Privacy Act, was put in place in 2021 as a temporary measure allowing companies to use automated detection technologies to scan messages for harms, including child sexual abuse material (CSAM), grooming and sextortion. However, it expired on 3 April, and the EU parliament decided not to vote to extend it, amid privacy concerns from some lawmakers.

'The regulatory gap has created uncertainty for big tech companies, because while scanning for harms on their platforms is now illegal, they still remain liable to remove any illegal content hosted on their platforms under a different law, the Digital Services Act. Google, Meta, Snap and Microsoft said they would continue to voluntarily scan their platforms for CSAM, in a joint statement posted on a Google blog.'

Child abuse as the excuse for avoiding privacy protections. Who would have thought it?

Comment Liability laws (Score 1) 47

Now lets bring these requirements into law, permanently, across all industrial and consumer devices.

Any obstacle to repair and maintenance other than the inherent difficulty of the operation is anticonsumerist and in the long run, economically damaging (and many of the inherent difficulties are as well, but we gotta start somewhere).

If we change the "right to repair" laws, we should also change the liability laws. If a home-repaired unit becomes unsafe and injures people, who is responsible?

In the case of farming equipment, suppose a farmer makes a repair to a piece of equipment and then his son is injured or killed by said equipment. Who is liable?

The company would say that the farmer took full responsibility once he modified the equipment, while the farmer could say that his modifications did not affect the safety of the device.

It's also not at all clear whether a physical repair done by the farmer could have contributed to an accident made by software. Lots of things can affect software, such as the alignment of the two welded pieces. The software makes a performance analysis of stopping distance based on information it has, but the repair might have changed those parameters.

People who like to race want to download new parameters into the ECU of their car, but that's illegal. It actually is: the parameters are set to maximize efficiency, and while you can get better performance with different numbers, it would promote climate change, so it was made illegal.

Being able to repair things is good, and it's very clear that open source has driven the software industry forward, but we need to be careful about liability as well. Jailbreaking your phone is one thing, but jailbreaking your EV might have catastriphic consequences. I'm not a fan of ID-tagging headlights (BMW, Mazda), but if an accident occurs because of reduced visibility the company could be held liable.

I'm completely in favor of being able to repair things, and John Deere is the worst sort of predatory behaviour, but just wanted to point out that there's another side to the story and we should be careful.

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