chilldream

"addictions they choose"

The problem is that game mechanics aren't really copyrightable. Pac-Avoid was likely removed for its obvious trademark infringement (oh, the irony) but you can get away with some pretty blatant ripping off by changing all the copyrightable assets.

> Both of those companies made prudent decisions about their brand trademarks by not treading on anyone else.

Actually Apple ran into some trouble with, say, there already being software called IOS before any of the iThings existed. They've been to court over it a few times.

In my case we had a security code on an internal system that was updated in real-time. So the protocol was:

"Hi I'm an employee calling from [X]" "OK, can I get the security code?" (caller gives security code)

Any employee in the company could also request a no-questions-asked reset at any time. I actually had cause hit the big red button once when the call went:

"Hi, this is [employee] calling from [branch]" "All right, can I get the security code?" "Oh, (mutters "security code"), it's $foo"

See, that counted as a compromise because someone in the lobby may have overheard her.

A couple other fun stories:

- Once I called a branch and got transferred to someone else. The conversation at the other end:

Him: "Did you give the code already?" Me: "...are you seriously going to believe me if I say 'Yes'?"

- Apparently there was a phishing attempt where people would call our center opening with:

"Hi this is [person] from the fraud department, before we begin can I get the security code?"

I don't know if it ever worked, but we got several memos warning us not to fall for it.

Why commit yourself to a stronger statement than necessary? As you probably already know, it's just to satisfy laws against recording a phone call without the consent of both parties. It's just a nicer way to say "we will proceed assuming we have your consent to record this call," without promising or revealing anything further.

I suppose I could have hedged a bit with the usual "may depend on the institution" disclaimer, heh. Anyway, I was responding to the apparent belief that someone might look at the inbound number and think "no need to record this one," which I'm pretty confident saying does not happen.

- When I worked in a bank's call center, it would be impossible for such an attacker to gain any information without the (receiving) agent screwing up unless the attacker had already successfully phished a different employee.

- The situation you describe in particular, where one employee might cold transfer to another employee without the receiver verifying whether the customer had identified already...if that is even possible, it's gross negligence.

- Call centers typically record all calls regardless of origin; it's not like a human being manually hits a record button on a case-by-case basis.

At the cost of removing any buyer protection whatsoever.

That's not what "high-risk" means in this context.

One problem is that you can't really copyright game mechanics, at least in the United States. Games are still protected by IP laws in many ways but it's pretty easy to write a direct clone from scratch without infringing anything.

I think a better analogy might be if Fortune magazine tried to claim that because of their (valid) claim to the name "Fortune", no one should be able to start a magazine whose title starts with the letter "F".

This is but a handful of data points, but a lot of the rumblings I've heard about this whole trend have been coming from lawyers who take a specific interest in protecting free speech. This includes Marc Randazza, who was mentioned in the article. This also includes Ken White at Popehat, who has an entire tag devoted to IsAnybodyDown (a knockoff of Moore's site that added more crimes into the bargain). There's definite danger of a badly-drafted law going over the line, but it seems that it's possible to prevent the stalker-enabling crap on these sites without damaging actual speech.

https://www.fpcomplete.com/ is trying to do this

One interesting angle some people have taken in the absence of RP-specific laws is to make copyright claims (since a lot of the pictures are either outright stolen, or self-taken and then later uploaded by angry exes)

Not a lawyer, but it seems like posting the content yourself could ruin a Section 230 defense:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio...

Also, I'm not sure why a quality-review process would lessen culpability if all the illegal stuff gets through anyway.

> all King is doing here is playing ball with current IP legislation

Not exactly. Some of the trademark threats they're making are the kind that would probably go nowhere if they were against corporations who could afford to defend themselves. Suing every game with "Candy" in the title is at least approaching the same respectability ballpark as patent trolling.

-You're parsing that sentence wrong; note the word "ago".

-"social network" is in quotes because while the social networks themselves have been around for awhile, they only became a buzzword and the kind of thing Google would try to clumsily emulate in recent years.

Yeah, you really should have considered what Google would put on their social network when you signed up for an email account a decade ago before "social network" was even a thing.

I love the implication that having something auto-opt you into something and then doing it is the same thing as voluntarily doing it. Like we're supposed to be ok with the companies we do business with behaving like evil genies.

Far and away the biggest problem with all of this is that it's not opt-in. None of it. Not even the decision to have a G+ account at all, unless you posit that everyone who signed up an email account a decade ago before "social network" was even a thing.

To then turn around and call it "user error" when some forced integration has undesired consequences is just abominable.

I don't think this is the fault of sales. It's simply a statement that most games' "full" price is more than it would be rational for you to pay given your priorities.

Don't know enough to know that the current name is optimal, but at least "Monoid" correctly says to the initiated "you don't understand this yet." "Appendable" lies to you and says "you understand this" even if you don't.

In that specific case, I'd submit that the word "average" doesn't belong in a conversation attempting any level of rigor. It only encourages the confusion between median and mean.

To the first, it defaults to "anyone on Google+"

To the second, Google+ is unique among social networks in that large swaths of its userbase didn't voluntarily sign up for it.

Facebook didn't staple their social network onto a non-social-network service after the fact, and then demand you sign up for it. Not everyone on Google+ actually wants to be on Google+.

Man, I hate Google+ as much as the next person, and I was this close to defending them here. They almost did it right. Almost.

The problem is that it defaults to "Everyone on Google+" For those of you mystified that this is pissing people off, it's because not everyone on Google+ wanted a Google+ account precisely because Google is shoehorning it into everything! "Just opt out" misses the point; some of us don't want to have to dig around in settings for a service we didn't want to opt out of stuff like being put on a spammable directory for strangers.

If it defaulted to "Circles" I'd have a hard time complaining about it; people who don't want Google+ don't have Circles. But as it stands, this is "we're quietly opting you into spam." (and for those who say it won't happen, I've already gotten more YouTube spam since the G+ rollout than I have over the rest of the account's lifetime combined, and my YouTube account is old)

I've finished about a dozen MOOCs, even TA'ed a couple and my story is similar. I'm usually enrolled in at least three courses with no intention of finishing all of them.

Yes, and even worse, there's no "Don't ask me again" button, which is actually enough to singlehandedly keep me from ever using G+ voluntarily.

Canned responses work wonders. For me, most of these appeals ended with "Sorry, don't carry cash."

I spent several years traveling only by public transit and running into beggars at least twice a day. During that same period, I also once had a cop pull up to a bus stop, start harassing me and actually threaten to arrest me for standing there (I was waiting for the last bus of the night). Guess which experience was worse?