On the other hand, creating some kind of convoluted, contrived paper trail to claim that mysterious third parties were the ones to have physically pressed the "Accept" button on your 100 fake accounts and so you didn't even know there was a EULA seems kind of like it might actually be fraud.
This is standard practice at large companies when reverse engineering chips, devices and software and seems very similar to the above eula argument.
1a. one team examines the device and products a detailed specification of it
1b. another team works solely off that newly produced specification; this team has zero contact with the actual device
In this hypothetical case:
2a. a third party affiliate accepts the Apple EULA, and gives the Apple IDs to NSO Group
2b. NSO Group uses the Apple IDs as credential to obtain Apple services
Notice that in case 2b, NSO Group has actual contact with Apple in two ways. They used Apple IDs, and that they obtain Apple services. This didn't happen in the reverse engineering case.
A full paper trail would also necessarily disclose the entity that provided those devices, which they may well be loathe to do (since it either drags in a related company, who Apple can then also target, or embarrasses a third party who would rather remain nameless).
However, in practice, a technology engineering firm claiming to have no knowledge of the licensing that applies to the devices in which they also claim expertise, is such a far-fetched statement that it's almost trivially set aside, and earns a rebuke from the bench to boot.
Lots of people negotiated these things and agreed to make commerce happen.
Novel to you does not mean novel to humanity.
As it should be. It doesn’t always work well for all circumstances, but we don’t have a better system
However, "common sense" is also not how it works, so sure, when people rely on what they expect "common sense" to mean, then they too get screwed (the meaning of "common sense" after all varying dramatically from person to person).
Law has its own principles, philosophy, and practices, that's all. And judges, especially senior judges, do not like it one iota when folks try to circumvent the meaning, substance, and purpose of these elements.
That doesn't mean the nerds are wrong to want what they want.
People have a pretty good idea of its mechanisms.
Powerful people break laws that are clear enough and then don't go to jail because of "prosecutorial discretion" or Johnnie Cochran or retroactive telecoms immunity for illegal mass surveillance.
Powerless people break laws that are ambiguous, or most people don't even know exist, or people know exist but they're only enforced against the nameless and poor, and the US has the largest prison population in the world.
This outcome is your great victory for "millennia to work out the kinks in the system and develop practices that are robust in the face of adversarial attack by actual smart people"?
> trail of tears
Really?
> coders can't seem to keep basic services operating in ideal conditions and yet you expect anyone to look to this group when it comes to actual life and death decisions?
We already have code running when it comes to actual life and death decisions. There is code running in aircraft and heart bypass machines, and it works, because then people care that it works. Nobody cares enough that some ad tracking code is perfectly reliable and efficient, so it isn't.
You're also asking for a double standard. The OpenBSD people do a nice job on OpenSSH. It's pretty good, not perfect. There have been vulnerabilities in even that. Then they get patched.
But you can't possibly be claiming that there are no "vulnerabilities" in the law. If that was the case then why do they have to keep passing new ones every year? The ask isn't that it never change, it's that it be changed by the legislature prospectively instead of being in a constant state of superposition until it's resolved by a court ex post facto.