lawtalkinghuman

I was being snarky about the quality of the information, but the privacy issue is the important one.

If the key variable is the search engine, then, yes, you probably don't want to be feeding details of your possible mental health problems into Google. Maybe DuckDuckGo would be preferable. Once you've put your symptoms or diagnosis into a search engine, where you end up is going to likely not be the main issue. If you type, say, "autism spectrum disorder" into Google, Google will make certain assumptions about you regardless of whether you end up clicking on a Wikipedia link, an NHS.uk link, some academic paper on bioRxiv, or a TikTok video with someone describing their autism diagnosis.

I'd trust Wikimedia's privacy policy a hell of a lot more than I'd trust TikTok's.

Also, the English Wikipedia article on cognitive behavioural therapy cites Cochrane reviews, psych textbooks and a whole volley of journal articles from prestigious journals like the Lancet and the Journal of the American Medical Association etc. describing clinical trial results, plus guidance from the UK's National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence.

Presumably, the TikTok version makes up for this by having a better dance routine.

In England and Wales, all three types of fraud covered by the 2006 Act have as substantive elements of the offence a requirement that a defendant intends to either "make a gain for himself or another" or "cause loss to another or to expose another to a risk of loss", where gain and loss are defined as only referring to "money or other property".

Note also that the offence is framed in terms of intention to gain or cause loss. Even if no material gain or loss happens, the intention is what matters. (The equivalent mental element for theft in England is that one dishonestly intends to permanently deprive someone of the property being taken.)

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2006/35

This applies to online ad 'click fraud' in both ways—if a publisher fraudulently clicks on adverts to make money, that'd potentially be fraud to make a gain for themselves. If a competitor clicks on adverts to get their competitor to lose money on pay-per-click, that'd potentially be fraud to cause a loss to another.

I can't speak for jurisdictions other than England and Wales but I'd be surprised if a fair number of other jurisdictions didn't also define fraud in a way that covers both gain and loss scenarios.

NYT article came out on Friday, December 4.

By Thursday of the next week, December 10th, Visa and MC had cut them off. Discover had followed the next day, the 11th. The Washington Post article linked below includes a statement from MC which reads:

"Our investigation over the past several days has confirmed violations of our standards prohibiting unlawful content on their site. As a result, and in accordance with our policies, we instructed the financial institutions that connect the site to our network to terminate acceptance."

See: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/pornhub-crack... and https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/12/10/pornhub-m...

As a software developer who just finished law school, I have precisely zero intentions of going into politics.

I have plenty of views on how you could improve things, but elected politics is about as appealling as a skin disease.

The hosting of open source code on GitHub is not some completely selfless act on their part. GitHub's value proposition to commercial users is in part contributed to by the fact it is used by a lot of open source projects and for solo or hobby projects, thus breeding familiarity with the platform.

One is allowed to do both. Human beings are allowed to have opinions and not be walking LinkedIn profiles all day long.

Even if logically two statements are the same, the implication or tone can be important. There are media reporting guidelines on suicide e.g. the Samaritans in the UK provide one, as do the WHO and CDC.

https://media.samaritans.org/documents/Media_Guidelines_FINA...

https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/resourc...

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00031539.htm

Though the Samaritans one lists "took their own life" as actually being okay and warns against phrases like "committed suicide".

> I really don’t want to have the government locking people up for being well-paid fuck-ups.

If you go to a doctor and he fucks up: he (or his insurer) has to pay you. If he really fucks up, he ceases to be able to practice medicine.

The same with nurses, lawyers, accountants, architects and other professionals.

Software's much better—then they point to the "we take no liability for any errors" clause in the contract and everyone carries on as if nothing ever happened.

In the US, yes. Elsewhere, not necessarily.

With respect, I think you've got it quite wrong.

On the question of proving damages, that is the same in England and the US: both make a distinction between libel (or slander) per se and per quod. Libel per se covers statements that require no proof of damage because they are inherently damaging on the face of it. Falsely stating that someone is a serial killer who murdered five women is to say they are guilty of a crime of moral turpitude, one of the criteria recognised as actionable per se in both England and the USA.

In the USA, you have the issue of the application of the New York Times v Sullivan standard which grants First Amendment protection to potentially defamatory statements made about a public figure requiring proof of actual malice. Because of the press freedom protections contained in the First Amendment, statements about a public figure (or a limited purpose public figure) are granted a higher degree of protection. If a person is a public figure, then you would need to show that the person making the defamatory statement knew it was false, but if they are not a public figure, then that requirement does not apply. I think it rather unlikely that the present facts would lead to the Sullivan standard being applied: other than having a small personal website/blog to discuss programming issues, the OP is not a "public figure".

Regarding malicious intent, you don't need to show that in England. It helps if you can: malicious intent undermines a number of defences including honest opinion, and the publication on a matter of public interest defence (s4 Defamation Act 2013, and before that the Reynolds test), but it does not undermine truth as a defence. The burden of proving the truth of a defamatory statement does rest on the defendant in England in a way it may not in other jurisdictions. Malicious intent also goes to remedies. (It also wouldn't apply here: Google's algorithm cocking up is not "malicious intent", it is merely AI—automated incompetence.)

What the post you are replying to was likely referring to is the application of the "serious harm" test under s1 of the Defamation Act 2013, taken along with the requirement that the defamation amounted to "real and substantial tort" under the test established in Jameel v Dow Jones & Co. While I have considerable sympathy for the OP, the serious harm test is hard to find as you'd have to establish how many people actually saw the material and how many people were led to believe he is a serial killer rather than a person who happens to unluckily share the same name as a serial killer.

> Not the good ol boys who support conservative christian causes.

Two words: Peter Thiel.

Because if you get it wrong, lots of people die, so you err on the side of caution.

There's a fairly significant difference between the Tuskeegee Experiment, and having to wear a surgical facemask while in a supermarket.

The children should have had the good karma to be born to more responsible parents.

From August 2020.

Government requiring car manufacturers fit seatbelts and airbags is intrusion in the free market. And a good one that saves hundreds of thousands of lives.

Some corporations put up a mixture of Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays signage/messaging etc.

Christian persecution complex hustlers—and Fox News etc. seeking outraged eyeballs—took the existence of people saying "Happy Holidays" as an attack on them because "Jesus is the reason for the season" and then unreasonably inferred that somehow people were banned from saying "Merry Christmas".

This led to some very entitled people shouting "It's 'Merry Christmas' actually!" at some underpaid cashier in Walmart because they'd been led to believing that saying Happy Holidays was a form of religious persecution and an attack on their faith.

For a British example, recall the story of "Winterval", where an attempt by a city council to come up with a brand name to cover a series of events including Diwali, Christmas, New Years and so on that was used in addition to "Christmas" led to a full out culture war where the press misrepresented the whole thing as somehow replacing Christmas due to "political correctness". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winterval

> Outside of HN a lot of people I meet and speak to are super-pumped about W3W.

Lots of people have heard positive media fluff that W3W have paid to have placed, and haven't really thought critically about it at all.

Microsoft is an applicable precedent here - when it was found that they had breached competition law in using bundling with Windows as a way to gain unfair market dominance for Internet Explorer, the remedy was to require that Microsoft offer users a means to select and download competing browsers on first use. The Commission can then fine them a significant amount if they fail to comply with the decision.

Of the options you've suggested, the second seems most likely.

One potential solution that may also work is instead of not taking the 30% fee, to allow Spotify and others to take payment through another channel (e.g. by bouncing users to a web-based payment gateway) - the enforcement there just becomes an injunction to not enforce the app review rules that prevent affected apps from using third-party payment providers in addition to or as an alternative to payment through the App Store.

The difficulty will be where they draw the line. A lot of third party services compete with built-in apps/OS features: for instance, Dropbox/iCloud Storage, Notes/Evernote, Office 365/Google Docs/iWork. The difference between Apple Music and Spotify (and presumably also Tidal and Deezer etc.) is really clear, but quite where you divide up these markets is a real tough issue in EU competition law. An Apple Music user could very easily be a Spotify user and vice versa, but not every iCloud user would necessarily be a Dropbox user.

I miss all those old video games without politics.

Nothing political at all about escaping from Castle Wolfenstein and killing Hitler in the process.

No politics in Final Fantasy 7, just some lively ecoterrorists saving the world from an exploitative totalitarian megacorporation that's destroying the environment.

Or indeed in BioShock, a game that certainly wasn't a satire of Ayn Rand libertarianism of the sort that enchants many a Valley VC/founder.

I miss playing Call of Duty/Rainbow Six/other shooters where you could just grab an assault rifle as a serving member of the US military and shoot a bunch of Bad Guys, which had absolutely no politics in it at all.

It sure is a shame the terrible awful SJWs made games political because they let you play as a girl, or put two gay characters kissing for ten seconds in a cutscene.

I'm going to stop playing games and instead go and read a book I've just bought called 'Animal Farm'. I'm sure it isn't a metaphor for anything. I bet Star Trek hasn't got any politics in it either.

In the long run, you are dead, at which point you probably don't care as much.

Historically, it is because UK government-backed student loans (for English students: no student fees in Scotland after all) are (a) low-interest, (b) only repayable on money earned above a particular salary threshold, and (c) automatically gets written off eventually after a specified period (was 25 years, now 30 years).

(a) is arguably not really true anymore (given some graduates are paying 5% interest), but (b) is even more true now than it was under the old (Plan 1) scheme because the salary threshold is now £27,295 (compared to the old one of £19,985).

What the civil court system desperately needs: more lawsuits from people who got banned from web forums.

There's plenty more where those come from. Society rightly puts limits on what you can do with your property after you are dead. By analogy, there are legitimate limits on what you can ask your successors to do with your bodily remains - and it makes perfect sense to set sensible defaults.

> I think you own your body when you die the same way you own your money: you can specify what should be done with it while you are alive

You have the freedom to specify what exactly should be done with your stuff when you die. Whether those wishes will be legally enforced will depend heavily on what they say.

To test this thesis, go to a lawyer in your jurisdiction and ask them about whether it would be possible to split the proceeds of your estate in equal shares with every man in the Greater London area who wears brown shoes on a Thursday, and prepare for a short explanation of administratively workablity.

Then ask about whether you could posthumously fund some international terrorist organisations. Actually, maybe don't.

This sounds like a very good argument for socialised healthcare. Which, last time I checked, was something the UK has.

> I think asking people this question when they apply for a passport would be a good middle ground

This already happens. When you apply for a driving licence, you are asked whether you would like to be put on the donor registry.

If you can't type on an actual keyboard, touchscreen typing is barely a downgrade from hunting and pecking.

If you can type quickly, touchscreen typing is really fucking awful.

The negative inference comes from the fact that you can't push an affirmative defence at trial that you haven't hinted at during questioning.

So, if you are arrested for beating up X, and you invoke your right to silence, THEN at trial you put forward a defence of "I wasn't there!" without any substantive evidence to back it up, the prosecutor can say "well, look, if there was an alibi, why didn't you tell the police about it?" The judge is supposed to then instruct the jury that they can draw an inference as to your honesty on the grounds you didn't bring it up during police interview.

The legislation that brings that into force are ss34-39 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1994/33/part/III/crossh...