WhatsApp's illegal
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@sockpuppet7 said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@ixvedeusi these data privacy laws are a
to progressAnd to stalking.
Some people had weirdos track them and spam them even though they changed their phone number numerous times, because whatsapp and faceshit could reveal their new numbers...
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@anotherusername: My address book is stored on Google's and Apple's servers, yet I have not obtained explicit authorization from each and every person in my address book to share their contact details with Google or Apple.
But none of Apple and Google make this an implicit consent also to add your address book into a hugeass directory which any random dudes on the internets can search to their hearts' content. Unless there's a hacking attack, or unless you give your unlocked phone to random dudes, your contacts don't leak to other users.
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Just remember, if you aren't paying for something, then you are the product.
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@stillwater said in WhatsApp's illegal:
132132131 hour
You've spent 150 centuries lecturing someone? I'm impressed.
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@gąska I thought they conveyed the same sound as Щ, that is, a "shch" sound. Which is I guess two different sounds. (Or a very strong sh).
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@admiral_p You're correct. Е, ё, ю and я also sound like two distinct sounds to Polish ear.
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The "I have nothing to hide" argument is, IMO, probably used mostly because of the fact that people don't think things through. Privacy has a value; life is long, do we know for sure that everything of ours, all our data, will not one day be more important to us than we think right now?
I for one am not using WhatsApp at all - tried it, and it wanted access to my address book. When I declined, it wouldn't run, so I am not using it. To me that was a clear signal that they do not care about my privacy as much as I do, and I care about my privacy more than about their app. Simple really.
"Over the last 16 months, as I've debated this issue around the world, every single time somebody has said to me, "I don't really worry about invasions of privacy because I don't have anything to hide." I always say the same thing to them. I get out a pen, I write down my email address. I say, "Here's my email address. What I want you to do when you get home is email me the passwords to all of your email accounts, not just the nice, respectable work one in your name, but all of them, because I want to be able to just troll through what it is you're doing online, read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting. After all, if you're not a bad person, if you're doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide." Not a single person has taken me up on that offer."
-- Glenn Greenwald in Why privacy matters - TED Talk
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@el-dorko Very disingenuous, though, since having someone's email password allows you to do much more, and much nastier, things than merely reading their email. So it's perfectly reasonable for someone who would in fact be happy to let him read all their email to still be unwilling to give him their password.
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@anonymous234 said in WhatsApp's illegal:
Sue them and find out!
Why sue when you can just make a complaint with your local GDPR enforcing agency?
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@scarlet_manuka said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@el-dorko Very disingenuous, though, since having someone's email password allows you to do much more, and much nastier, things than merely reading their email. So it's perfectly reasonable for someone who would in fact be happy to let him read all their email to still be unwilling to give him their password.
We're already way past that point. I remember when years ago, some companies started telling people "we need your email password to import contacts". My reaction was "Whaaaaat?! That's a scammer-level move." Most people around me were "Sure. I don't see any problem with that.".
Of course, now you no longer have to ask people for their password. They'll gladly install any random app on their smartphone, and allow permissions to everything without even batting an eye.
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@gąska said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@ixvedeusi I accept these terms and conditions, or I have no way to talk to my mother who currently lives across the ocean
Because, yeah, as we all know, only WhatsApp can cross oceans. Email, SMS, Facebook, none of those can cross oceans.
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@steve_the_cynic said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@gąska said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@ixvedeusi I accept these terms and conditions, or I have no way to talk to my mother who currently lives across the ocean
Because, yeah, as we all know, only WhatsApp can cross oceans. Email, SMS, Facebook, none of those can cross oceans.
When Facebook started to gain traction, I had a friend tell me "Oh man, this is so awesome, you have to join so we can talk to each other online easily!"
He sent that message over MSN.
I lost 25 IQ points that day...
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@mrl said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@steve_the_cynic said in WhatsApp's illegal:
WhatsApp
FacebookSame thing.
Fair point. But my point about email and SMS remains.
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@steve_the_cynic said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@gąska said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@ixvedeusi I accept these terms and conditions, or I have no way to talk to my mother who currently lives across the ocean
Because, yeah, as we all know, only WhatsApp can cross oceans. Email, SMS, Facebook, none of those can cross oceans.
Email and SMS are text only, and Facebook is just as bad (since Whatsapp is Facebook).
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@gąska said in WhatsApp's illegal:
Email and SMS are text only
No. (Though technically an SMS with non-text content is called an MMS so maybe 0.25 of a point to you there?)
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@dkf the SMS/MMS distinction is quite important when one is completely free of charge and the other costs $0.25 per 100kB. And multimedia messages are still very different from calling (though I've seen my teenage sister use Snapchat videos as substitute for video call on regular basis; it's exactly as awkward as it sounds).
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@sockpuppet7 said in WhatsApp's illegal:
Also, limit the amount of the text of law that can be voted in a single day, so we can hope the lawmakers read what they're voting.
Every time this suggestion (or similar ones about laws trying to enforce a maximum bill length or simple wording etc.) pops up here, I like to bring out a programming analogy.
"There are too many bugs in the code that is written and too many unreadable code, un-audited code, un-tested code etc. So to fix all that, we'll pass a law that says that a programmer is not allowed to write more than 10 lines of code per day, or to use variable/class/function/... names shorter (or longer, depending on your point of view, but both have the same result) than 5 characters, or to write less than 1 line of comment per line of code, or to add a new bug in the tracker without closing an older one first, or..."
How long does it take you to see that this is totally and utterly unworkable and will make the problem worse, not solve it?
The same applies to law. Complexity is the symptom, not the cause.
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@remi The problem of emitting laws faster than a reasonable person can read and understand doesn't have any analogy with programming that makes sense for me.
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@sockpuppet7 Try code automatically generated by a code generator.
Also and for a more appropriate answer, is it better if a law is read, but not understood at all, by all lawmakers who vote on it (your suggestion of making laws shorter), or if each part is read and fully understood by a few members, none of which can read the entirety (what the current situation potentially allows)?
I'm definitely not saying the second is always better, but I am however saying that if lawmakers are currently not applying the second, forcing the first will not help in any way. Again, symptoms and cause.
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@remi said in WhatsApp's illegal:
Try code automatically generated by a code generator.
A trusted code generator won't try to sneak malicious code in. Can't say the same for lawmakers. Limiting their productivity would be a good thing, most of the laws they approve is to make things worse.
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@sockpuppet7 said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@remi The problem of emitting laws faster than a reasonable person can read and understand doesn't have any analogy with programming that makes sense for me.
Think of a programmer that would commit 5,000 new code lines per day. How would you do code reviews in this case, and how much would you bet that said code is a mess of copy-pastes from Stack Overflow with no attention to design?
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@sockpuppet7 said in WhatsApp's illegal:
Limiting their productivity would be a good thing, most of the laws they approve is to make things worse.
Again, you're confusing symptoms and cause. Most of the laws make things worse, but not because they are too long, or not even because they are new laws (i.e. because new laws would be intrinsically bad).
Force shorter laws and you'll get less readable laws (more jargon). Force less laws per year and you'll get longer laws or, barring that, again less readable laws, or laws that mix unrelated stuff. For a "readability" criterion (assuming there is even such a way to do that) and you'll get laws that are too vague and full of loopholes. Force a public reading of laws in their entirety and you'll get deliberately long law proposals just to block proceedings.
Give me any suggestion on how to make lawmaking less bad by imposing formal requirements on the laws' text themselves, I'll show you how the current system will horribly abuse it to make things even worse.
Most of the laws are bad because of the whole society around them that pushes the wrong persons to become lawmakers, and gives the wrong incentives to these persons, and asks them the wrong things with the wrong timeframe. Not because the hand that holds the pen is wrong.
If you have bad code because of a stupid boss that is replaced every 2 years by an equally stupid other boss, because of no or ever-changing strategic decisions from the company, because of a culture of promoting those who scream the loudest over any technical ability, you won't fix any of that by changing programming practice (forcing a number of lines of codes or any other metric that you can think of).
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@remi said in WhatsApp's illegal:
Force shorter laws and you'll get less readable laws (more jargon).
I disagree with this prediction, 500 words of jargon is far more readable than 500 pages of whatever we have now (that is already jargon heavy). We could add a limit to the vocabulary in this little fictional system.
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@remi said in WhatsApp's illegal:
How long does it take you to see that this is totally and utterly unworkable and will make the problem worse, not solve it?
If your programmers are cranking out new code all day without ever fixing bugs in old code or caring about code quality, telling them to stop coding for a week and focusing that time on remaking old code might actually make things better. So might telling them to put more time into the new code.
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@anonymous234 said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@remi said in WhatsApp's illegal:
How long does it take you to see that this is totally and utterly unworkable and will make the problem worse, not solve it?
If your programmers are cranking out new code all day without ever fixing bugs in old code or caring about code quality, telling them to stop coding for a week and focusing that time on remaking old code might actually make things better. So might telling them to put more time into the new code.
If you just tell them "OK, this week I want to see better code" without defining "better", you'll just get the same random crap, just in a slightly different wrapping. If you have a team that produces crap code because it's a dysfunctional team (incompetent coders etc.), any metric for "better" code will be abused. Unreadable comments, several bugs in one ticket, stupid tests that don't test anything or test the same thing (and miss the part that actually matters), coding conventions that are applied to the letter but make the code unreadable... A bad coder in a bad environment doesn't magically becomes a good one because you enforce some arbitrary metric.
If you start actually changing the company culture i.e. not expecting them to churn code as fast as before, then yeah, maybe you can start seeing some changes. But requiring law makers to write less laws or use simpler words is not at all the same as changing company culture.
(which is more or less what I am arguing, btw: to get better code, you need to change the whole process, not just some line-of-code-level metric; to get better laws you need to change the whole process, not just some writing-new-laws-level metric)
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@sockpuppet7 said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@remi said in WhatsApp's illegal:
Force shorter laws and you'll get less readable laws (more jargon).
I disagree with this prediction, 500 words of jargon is far more readable than 500 pages of whatever we have now (that is already jargon heavy). We could add a limit to the vocabulary in this little fictional system.
And then you offload all the hard work of defining the exact and precise meaning of those words to lawyers and judges (*), and you'll get conflicting interpretations of those, and legislating from the bench. We might already get some of that happening, but I really don't see how your proposal will improve it in any way.
Also, you will not do anything with one of the main reasons of the unreadability of laws, which are cross-references ("section 1(a) applies to items defined by the Foo Act, article 42(alpha)(c), except when conditions of the Bar Act, section 3.1 apply"). Actually, you will actually make these worse, as to make laws shorter there will be a strong incentive to split long ones into several smaller ones and cross-refer between them to stitch them into a single body (possibly reusing blocks that almost-look-like-the-one-we-want-but-not-quite to keep laws shorts, resulting in even more Kafkaesque stuff and unpredictable changes... think abusing a 3rd-party lib in your code and what happens when that lib evolves). Frankenstein-laws are not my idea of better laws.
(*) taking an example from this thread, if you make a law about "personal information" without more details about what this means, you'll get endless discussion as to whether a phone number is PI or not. We already have this debate now, but at least GDRP makes it clear that it is PI -- rightly or wrongly is a different question, at least there is no ambiguity in (this part of) the law.
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@remi so we have to ban cross-references too, thanks for your contribution :-)
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@sockpuppet7 You're welcome, but that'll only make things even worse, you will now have to write laws that duplicate those sections, causing all the problems of code duplication (longer, divergence when one is changed etc.).
And in the same way as a bad/lazy/evil programmer will find a way around any formal constraint (read the front page for multiple examples), the lawmakers will find a way around this one.
Let's say they will not say "items defined by the Foo Act, article 42(alpha)(c), except when conditions of the Bar Act, section 3.1 apply" but "Foo-Bar-y items". Is that the same as Bar-Foo-y items? Or are they items of article 42 or 43 or the Foo Act? Who knows, but hey, at least now we only use simple words, very few of them, no cross-references, and the law is therefore better, according to your logic.
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@el-dorko alternatively, ask people if they close their curtains. I don't like people staring at me, even if I'm just sitting at my desk, so I close my curtains at night. Keeping people from tracking you across the internet is just the digital equivalent.
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@remi This is true and goes for any social activity. Laws about lawmaking (or rules about rulemaking) require a higher authority to enforce those laws. And that just passes the buck without actually solving anything.
The only perfect way to have good laws is to have good people. Not only good legislators, but good regular people, so that everyone trusts everyone else. And in that case you don't need very many laws (only things like "which side of the street do we drive on" that require collective coordination). Even without perfection, high levels of justified societal trust can replace a lot of laws with social norms. Without that trust, you end up making laws to cover laws and it becomes a runaway reaction. There are always ways to game a system.
Wikipedia: link text
All metrics of scientific evaluation are bound to be abused. Goodhart's law (named after the British economist who may have been the first to announce it) states that when a feature of the economy is picked as an indicator of the economy, then it inexorably ceases to function as that indicator because people start to game it.
The US system was designed to impede corrupt lawmaking by creating balanced opposition of interests. In practice it hasn't worked that well. Better than some, worse than others (and differently in different arenas, so it's not a mixed judgement).
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@zerosquare said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@sockpuppet7 said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@remi The problem of emitting laws faster than a reasonable person can read and understand doesn't have any analogy with programming that makes sense for me.
Think of a programmer that would commit 5,000 new code lines per day. How would you do code reviews in this case, and how much would you bet that said code is a mess of copy-pastes from Stack Overflow with no attention to design?
Depends. Are we talking about me - or Paula?
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@benjamin-hall said in WhatsApp's illegal:
The only perfect way to have good laws is to have good people. Not only good legislators, but good regular people, so that everyone trusts everyone else.
The problem with that is that psychological studies concerning that very thing (bad faith actors / trust levels in group settings) suggest that it takes a surprisingly low number of bad apples to massively reduce trust in a system.
I'll see if I can find the article again. I really should reserve a folder in my bookmarks for that type of stuff...
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@remi said in WhatsApp's illegal:
Most of the laws are bad because of the whole society around them that pushes the wrong persons to become lawmakers, and gives the wrong incentives to these persons, and asks them the wrong things with the wrong timeframe. Not because the hand that holds the pen is wrong.
I like most of your post but I don't fully agree with this. For one thing, we'll never agree on which guys are the good guys and which are the bad guys or on the proper incentives. I think it's just a really difficult thing to begin with.
Consider perhaps the least controversial idea for a law: outlawing murder. But then consider all of the caveats. Self defense. How much negligence does it take to make something murder? Etc.
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@boomzilla The Ten Commandments are a good example for this.
You can argue for ages about the implications behind a single word.
To tie in with your example, I've seen arguments that it shouldn't be "Thou shalt not kill" but instead be "Thou shalt not murder".
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@rhywden said in WhatsApp's illegal:
To tie in with your example, I've seen arguments that it shouldn't be "Thou shalt not kill" but instead be "Thou shalt not murder".
Yeah, it's a case of the meaning of words drifting over time. Back in King James's day, "kill" meant what we understand today as murdering someone. Other acts had other names. For example, what soldiers do to opposing soldiers was "slay," not "kill." And then hundreds of years pass and the nuances of language change out from under the written word, making things confusing to modern-day readers.
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@rhywden said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@boomzilla The Ten Commandments are a good example for this.
You can argue for ages about the implications behind a single word.
To tie in with your example, I've seen arguments that it shouldn't be "Thou shalt not kill" but instead be "Thou shalt not murder".
There is no argument. The Hebrew word is murder, not kill. The only people who think there's an argument are people that use a bad translation.
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@dragnslcr said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@rhywden said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@boomzilla The Ten Commandments are a good example for this.
You can argue for ages about the implications behind a single word.
To tie in with your example, I've seen arguments that it shouldn't be "Thou shalt not kill" but instead be "Thou shalt not murder".
There is no argument. The Hebrew word is murder, not kill. The only people who think there's an argument are people that use a bad translation.
To add the details, Exodus 20:12 says "לֹא תִרְצָח" (Lo tirtzach), "You shall not murder". Elsewhere in the Torah, the verb used for killing (e.g. execution) is הרג (Harag).
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@gąska said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@ixvedeusi I accept these terms and conditions, or I have no way to talk to my mother who currently lives across the ocean. It's similar to not agreeing with water prices - sure, I could stop paying my bills and disconnect my house, but then I'd have no water.
That example may also be illegal depending on where you live.
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@boomzilla said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@remi said in WhatsApp's illegal:
Most of the laws are bad because of the whole society around them that pushes the wrong persons to become lawmakers, and gives the wrong incentives to these persons, and asks them the wrong things with the wrong timeframe. Not because the hand that holds the pen is wrong.
I like most of your post but I don't fully agree with this. For one thing, we'll never agree on which guys are the good guys and which are the bad guys or on the proper incentives.
I'm not sure I see where you disagree? When I said that the "wrong" people become lawmakers, I did not say that I could define who the "right" people would be (apart from a very philosophical point of view, but I'm not sure I could actually name some people that I would earnestly and deeply trust to do things right), and I'm even less sure that I could agree on that with other people.
That's like me playing armchair sports-critic: I can say that player X is not a good fit in a team or did the wrong thing at a point in the game, but I can't necessarily say who the right player would have been at that point, nor how that action should have been played (again, apart from generic principles such as "don't miss the shot"). And even if I do, another fan would probably disagree with me. Yet it doesn't mean I was wrong to criticize player X or that action.
I think it's just a really difficult thing to begin with.
Absolutely. If it was simple, the solution would have been found literally centuries ago... There isn't a single large-scale civilisation known to history that managed to solve this problem in a way that would be found satisfactory nowadays (i.e., saying "I'm the supreme leader and anyone who disagrees gets killed" does kind of solve the problem, but somehow we don't consider NK as an example...). The Babylonians already had lawyers and complex laws and legal commentaries.
Consider perhaps the least controversial idea for a law: outlawing murder. But then consider all of the caveats. Self defense. How much negligence does it take to make something murder? Etc.
Again, I don't see what you disagreement with me is here. Are you saying that a law on murder is complex, despite being good? Yes, on both counts. But I don't think I argued that all laws are bad, nor that a complex law is necessarily bad. I argued that we get bad laws, and we get complex laws (and that some laws are bad because they are complex) in part because of the way society picks who gets to make laws, and on which topics they will work. But some of the laws we get end up being rather good laws, sometimes because there is a consensus or some flash of genius in lawmakers (after all, it takes hard work to be wrong all the time!), sometimes because the balancing of conflicting interests in lawmakers does work as intended and ends up with something that benefits everyone. That doesn't mean those good laws are necessarily simple.
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@remi said in WhatsApp's illegal:
Again, I don't see what you disagreement with me is here.
I still mostly agree with you on this stuff but I think the particulars about the people involved are less important than you seemed to be saying.
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@masonwheeler said in WhatsApp's illegal:
Back in King James's day, "kill" meant what we understand today as murdering someone
If "murder" is essentially "unlawfully kill" then the law "don't murder" is circular, and you still need to work out the niggly details like what @boomzilla mentioned as to what types of killing are lawful
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@jaloopa said in WhatsApp's illegal:
If "murder" is essentially "unlawfully kill" then the law "don't murder" is circular, and you still need to work out the niggly details like what @boomzilla mentioned as to what types of killing are lawful
Well, at the time, religious stonings were legal...
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@e4tmyl33t I thought they were frowned upon even, and I want to make this perfectly clear, even if they said Jehova
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@jaloopa said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@masonwheeler said in WhatsApp's illegal:
Back in King James's day, "kill" meant what we understand today as murdering someone
If "murder" is essentially "unlawfully kill" then the law "don't murder" is circular, and you still need to work out the niggly details like what @boomzilla mentioned as to what types of killing are lawful
Yes, but the key requirement is that there should be no killing other than in ways that are generally agreed to be acceptable. Which is what the law in this area sets down. You're welcome to think that the law is wrong (and it might be) but but killing people in other ways is definitely wrong and both a lay felony of the worse sort, and a highly serious religious sin.
Which is the point.
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@jaloopa said in WhatsApp's illegal:
@e4tmyl33t I thought they were frowned upon even, and I want to make this perfectly clear, even if they said Jehova
Depends on which time period you mean. Certainly by the 1st to 2nd Century CE, Judaism had ended religious executions. I'd have to do a bit more digging to see if I can find anything about ending them earlier than that.
