Posts by C

Anonymous hacks Sarah Palin's Yahoo! account

@ryan's responders

Am I the only one who got the point of that post? He was responding to a post accusing another poster of trolling, all the while tossing around insults. Perhaps a quick visit to dictionary.com to check out the word 'sarcasm' might help.

Oh, and @Peter Timon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_by_country

So, Europe has fewer Christians eh? Exactly where do you live, anyway? And while we are throwing around accusations of groveling, I would like to point out that at least 100% of Americans don't spend significant amounts of time begging for more and more handouts from our governmental overlords, humbly pleading for permission to do things we do as we damned well please.

gg.

California court tilts towards mandating web accessibility

@ Sabahattin

On Cases and Precedent:

Petitions and lobbying are not exactly binding on anyone at all, and the idea that a court case that gives you the result you like in a specific instance is a bit (pardon the unintentional pun) myopic. There are all sorts of negative things that could go along with calling a website a "place of public accommodation." The biggest one is that a person maintaining a website could be on the hook for civil penalties up to $50000, just because this far-from-obvious reading of the ADA was used against them by a zealous California Attorney General. This could, in fact, be quite a lucrative new revenue stream for the state, since someone maintaining a website anywhere in the US could be hauled into Federal court by the California AG because they are maintaining a "place of public accommodation" in California by virtue of their website's accessibility from California. Further, now this would start bringing in all the state laws, since state laws are also an issue in the case and, after all, now a Federal court has asserted that websites are places of public accommodation (not the first time, as I recall, but hopefully the last). All websites will have to be designed to accommodate the disabled according to all the local variations on these laws regarding disabled persons, which could make the life of a webmaster a living hell. There could be different and conflicting methods required by two laws, and different sets of pages may have to be constructed for people from certain states.

It's great that some random blind guy can now use Target's website. That is *totally* worth screwing over a nation of webmasters, subjecting Mom and Pop online shops to fines higher than their family income, and attorney fees for battling it out in Federal court with an AG from a state they have never dealt with.

This is a place for legislation. Write a Congressman. Don't cheer on a court for creating a law where there was none, and using a statute for a purpose it is neither designed nor particularly suited for.

This is ridiculous

I think this is the best example so far:

"We need a case like this to raise awareness if nothing else."

We do NOT need a new interpretation of the law every time someone thinks of something that pisses them off and needs to be changed. This is not about best coding practices, or what would most profit business, or how effective other solutions would be. A state court has promulgated a rule that, thanks to the nature of its subject matter, is going to bind the entire country with a nebulous standard that will be re-litigated over and over again, and has *at best* a tenuous connection to the law they are interpreting. This court has turned a website into a 'place of public accommodation." The sort of corporate website here is, essentially, just an electronic copy of a catalog. The only difference is the medium (electronic rather than paper) and the ordering method (which may be accomplished by ordering electronically). It's illogical and downright silly to claim that a catalog somehow transforms into a "place" simply because it is in electronic form. It's an advertisement, an invitation to the consumer. It is NOT a place. Are television ads going to be required to have an accompanying audio track, explaining everything that is happening on screen? This is the point that keeps being made over and over again here - dragging the law into your opinions on best coding practices affects more than just website design, until and unless there is legislative action to clarify things.

Oh, as for the argument that a blind person might buy a gift for a relative from the binocular shop, I am pretty sure the OP's point was that these transactions are so few and far between as to make it irrelevant to the store's bottom line. If the store spends an extra $2000 on website design changes that net him $100 a year in extra profits, that is a problem. And the choice is not between a compliant website and a crappy website, and that is basically arguing to the absurd I might add. You can have an otherwise perfectly appealing website that is not well suited to blind viewers.

Feds tell (other) feds to kill net neutrality

For Andrew Orlowski

So the Bush Administration tapping phones and monitoring communication without judicial oversight is just my "paranoid imagination"? Do you ever pick up a newspaper? Leave your cave? Does news of our far-flung colony not make it over there?

Here discrimination will most certainly lead to abuse. It's unreasonable and incredibly naive to think it will not. And the old "we are already doing it, how can it be bad?" bit doesn't wash, logically or otherwise, I'm afraid. The fact that something is currently done doesn't magically negate its potential repercussions.

ISPs advertise high speed and make no mention of usage limitation. Cable is the worst offender here - seeing as they fail to mention that its not that your pipe runs at 10mbps, but that it could if nobody else on your block is using it. If providers were forced to sell to individuals only the bandwidth they are actually able to provide that individual, things would generally run a lot more smoothly for the average consumer. To the extent that it does not, it would certainly draw some attention to the status of our infrastructure here. The answer here is not quietly accepting a loss of privacy in order to line the coffers of ISPs and improve service marginally. It's the FCC, or even the FTC, forcing the ISPs to deal honestly with the public. It why the US has such agencies in the first place.

Re: They're all out to get me!

No, actually Company C wants Consumer B to pay them a second time for an already-paid-for service. I don't know what your understanding is of what you pay your ISP to do, but I pay mine to provide me with a connection to the internet. In fact, here in the US, 90% of the advertising by broadband providers is geared toward telling you how much crap you can download with your connection. It is at the very least deceptive trade practices to say to consumers that, having paid for this connection, they must now pay again to actually use the connection for the purpose advertised.

Oh, and to Pete - there is a big problem with your analysis. Bias requires traffic analysis. The 'Orwellian' part you are so dismissive of is the intrusion into the type of traffic and the potential for snooping into the content of traffic. This is far from an unheard of problem in the US at this point, and I think concerns about privacy of data are pretty equally far from unfounded. AT&T is already the subject of an EFF suit over handing over to the government direct access to phone traffic so they can monitor it for type or content. It is reasonable to expect that this new 'service' would be put to the same sort of use. It's interesting that the report in the article is from the DOJ, even if it is the antitrust section.