The survey was just 21 people "exclusively contacted in BIID internet forums". How many people who cut off a limb and regretted it would stick around the forum that fed their compulsion to do it?
> How many people who cut off a limb and regretted it would stick around the forum that fed their compulsion to do it?
Maybe many more then you would think. First of all of there are others with regrets they are most likely also found there. Second to warn others. Thirdly to vent.
I agree that the evidence is not the highest quality but i have a hard time imagining a more involved study design that would pass by any ethic board.
> First of all of there are others with regrets they are most likely also found there. Second to warn others. Thirdly to vent.
I don't find that the least bit credible. The proposition forum administrators would tolerate someone "warning others" against the core uniting aspect of their community is not realistic. Generally anyone who questions orthodoxy in such niche communities face vitriol and get banned quickly. Apostates do not hang around religious conversion forums talking about deconversion, gender transition desisters are not welcome on transgender support forums etc.
Then one could surely find multiple occurrences of externally archived but deleted forum post showing just that. You are implicitly asking for proof of absence of such censorship. This is an unreasonable standard.
Preventing motivated people from harassing others on a forum is impossible if anyone can join the forum.
I wonder if it's similar to Amazon ratings, where review distributions seem to skew toward people who either love the thing, or hate it? Presumably there's actual research on this. ... Okay here's something about the J-shaped distribution (mostly 5 stars, some 1 stars, little in between) in reviews [1]. (Edit: here's another, more recent summary [2] of polarity in reviews.)
Would we expect the same in something as intimate as amputating pieces of your own body? Hmmm.
Off-topic, but I think the effect is even more pronounced with a binary rating (thumb up/thumb down) vs a 1-5 star rating. I've noticed that really bad or mediocre games will take advantage of the upvote tendency by advertising "90% positive reviews" in an attempt to trick people into thinking they're good.
> Maybe many more then you would think. First of all of there are others with regrets they are most likely also found there. Second to warn others. Thirdly to vent.
And how would you find those posts after they were banned and deleted?
Google tends to cache pages for a long time, banned users usually leave a long trail (and post on sites where they will not get banned) and deleted posts can be resolved by finding and asking the user in question. And usually people with regrets tend to be very, very loud in scenarios like this.
I skimmed the paper and couldn't find where they say they looked for those users and posts that you mention. Maybe I missed it, can you point me to where does it say they make an honest effort to find those people?
I wouldn't say that failing to at least try to look for the less-than-enthusiastic people makes this paper criminally dangerous pseudoscience, but it certainly gives me pause.
oh, I've run into one. a very unpleasant and mentally unwell person - I think his motivation was purely sexual, and not identity-driven. he creeped me out.
I personally know two, one who used the dry ice method to destroy their legs, and another who achieved paralysis. both are quite happy now, except for the pain and suffering they went through (particularly the person who paralyzed herself, since she caused meningitis which led to horrid nerve pain - but even then, months later, she's happier now that it's done.)
I also avoid those platforms but that also means self-exclusion from entire communities. I've seen large groups (DnD groups, gaming/sports clubs, obscure tech forums etc) being swallowed wholesale by Facebook, then Reddit and now Discord. That may not matter for a random game group but unfortunately Twitter is where most of the worlds journalists post and network.
> unfortunately the alternatives to Google are usually not any better in this respect.
I don't that's necessary true. Google (and maybe Facebook) are unique in the size of personal data they hold and they types of data they have access to. If you move email or docs or search to something else, at least that's one less data source for them about you. (Assuming they are not selling it to data brokers Google has access to.)
I also have Youtube left on my list. I also find it a little too addictive. Instead of using a browser, I use RSS to subscribe to the channels I'm interested in. From my RSS reader (newsbeat) I can even directly play the video (via mpv + yt-dlp).
It's difficult to overstate how bad things have been for the past 1.5yrs. Automotive and Industrial microcontrollers and components in particular are impossible to source. I have a friend at one of the big US semiconductor companies. His team exhausted their main competitor's evaluation boards stocks on various sites to strip them for components to populate their own boards (which are hand delivered to selected customers). For non-critical applications they're using grey market Chinese components and even Chinese clones of some of their less complicated parts. Even then it's far from enough.
ASML, who makes some of the most advanced products on earth for semiconductor manufacturing, have apparently purchased washing machines to harvest components. [1]
> ASML, who makes some of the most advanced products on earth for semiconductor manufacturing, have apparently purchased washing machines to harvest components.
Your link doesn’t support this claim. It says that other companies are doing that, not ASML itself.
Hiring lawyers is probably going to cost more than the 7000 dollars taken from him. Large companies probably spend that much on their legal teams per hour.
100% this is the problem with our current legal system. The little guy is going to have to pay, by the hour, for a lawyer. Where as shopify has, I'm sure, an entire team on the payroll. It costs shopify, in effect, nothing to battle this until the heat death of the universe (or the little guy runs out of money, which ever comes first)
IANAL, but shopify is a canadian company not american, so if the seller wins wouldn't they also get legal fees - which makes it harder to bury them under legal fees?
People the British government don't like and who they have subjected to torture and extra-judicial killings, the biggest example being people in Northern Ireland opposing Union with Great Britain.
If the requirement to be narrow and time limited is not codified in law (which afaik it is not) it is pretty much guaranteed such broad searches will happen. All it takes is convincing a judge.
If the past has taught us anything it's that law enforcement will use any tool to the maximium of what is allowed and then beyond (e.g. coerced phone searches, racially motivated stop and search, drug dogs to force vehicle searches, privately sourced licence plate tracking and face recognition, criminal DNA testing from rape kits, forced biometric collection and more).
> no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized
>The FBI's role in the process is a condition of the Federal Communication Commission's equipment authorization issued to the Harris Corporation.
The result is that members of the public, judges, and defense attorneys are denied basic information about local cops' use of invasive surveillance gear that can sweep up sensitive location data about hundreds of peoples' cell phones. For example, when we sought information about Stingrays from the Brevard County, Florida, Sheriff's Office, they cited a non-disclosure agreement with a "federal agency" as a basis for withholding all records. When the ACLU of Arizona sued the Tucson Police Department for Stingray records, an FBI agent submitted a declaration invoking the FBI nondisclosure agreement as a reason to keep information secret.
Stingrays are typically warrantless; a very different scenario than this case. Their very nature makes them pretty broadly scoped, too, impacting anyone in range.
(I'm of the opinion they're a Fourth Amendment violation, and quite a few court cases are winding their way through the system. Quite a few judges have already ruled against their warrantless use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_use_in_United_States_...)
It gets fuzzy when third parties are involved. For example, looking at security camera footage seems to require a warrant, but no warrant is generally required if the search is consensual (and most people aren't against sharing video camera footage to aid an investigation of a serious crime as long as it is practical).
This whole system really highlights a flaw in using a 200 year old document as the basis of our legal system. Pervasive surveillance in the form of video cameras, photographs, audio, and now Google search requests wasn't really a thing at the time. I suspect with the present conditions, the authors of the 4th amendment would have put in an even stronger requirement for warrants regarding data from third parties and maybe even searches generally given how non-consensual consensual searches often feel to everyday citizens. Unfortunately, I think textualism is more in vogue with the current SCOTUS.
If we want stronger requirements for warrants regarding data from third parties, we can just pass laws with stronger requirements. The constitution is not a barrier here. Even if had been written 25 years ago it wouldn't have predicted the data dystopia we are in now.
"The Reuters analysis supports Sotomayor’s assertion that the Supreme Court has built qualified immunity into an often insurmountable police defense by intervening in cases mostly to favor the police. Over the past 15 years, the high court took up 12 appeals of qualified immunity decisions from police, but only three from plaintiffs, even though plaintiffs asked the court to review nearly as many cases as police did. The court’s acceptance rate for police appeals seeking immunity was three times its average acceptance rate for all appeals. For plaintiffs’ appeals, the acceptance rate was slightly below the court’s average."
"In the cases it accepts, the court nearly always decides in favor of police. The high court has also put its thumb on the scale by repeatedly tweaking the process. It has allowed police to request immunity before all evidence has been presented. And if police are denied immunity, they can appeal immediately – an option unavailable to most other litigants, who typically must wait until after a final judgment to appeal."
The legislature is ultimately not capable of anything. Passing legislation requires enormous barriers: the House and the Senate (usually by a wide margin) and the President and not having the Supreme Court just sweep it away.
In some cases, it takes only a single Congressman to prevent a law from being passed. If the minority party is dead set a bill -- if only for political reasons -- it often requires absolute unanimity on the other party to pass it, an unreasonably high bar to pass.
Legislation is nearly always trivial. They are only barely capable of passing even the most basic, crucial, mandatory law appropriating funds for the executive branch -- and that's only possible because the filibuster does not apply to appropriations bills. Real legislation is sometimes bundled into appropriations bills precisely to piggyback on that exception.
Theoretically, the legislature can do lots of stuff. Pragmatically, you can't simply say "well, the legislature should act". There is an enormous thumb on the scale in favor of the status quo.
>This whole system really highlights a flaw in using a 200 year old document as the basis of our legal system. Pervasive surveillance in the form of video cameras, photographs, audio, and now Google search requests wasn't really a thing at the time.
A fair point, but the controlling "document" isn't 200 years old. In fact, it's 46 years old[0] and is called the Third-Party Doctrine:
"The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" in that information. A lack of privacy protection allows the United States government to obtain information from third parties without a legal warrant and without otherwise complying with the Fourth Amendment prohibition against search and seizure without probable cause and a judicial search warrant"
The tl;dr is that if you voluntarily give a third party (not the government and not you) information (e.g., web search requests), that information is not protected under the 4th Amendment.
As such, even though the police got a warrant, it wasn't necessary for them to do so unless Google balked at providing the information.
Oh no, they need not convince a judge. Thanks to the Patriot Act, they can surveil and ask for permission ex post facto. Or, surveil and never ask for permission, if the LEOs decide not to request a warrant... again, after the surveilling has been completed.
However, backdoor sunset clauses exist & the bill to reauthorize it have already been passed and sit on the back burner, as Trump threatened to veto it. I suppose when the sunset clause is no longer exploitable, they'll get the sitting POTUS's sig. More in TFA:
> I’m deeply disturbed that you think this form of plagiarism is universal
This thread is an eye opener for me too. Do engineers not get trained on their legal obligations? My company is old and not a tradition tech company but we have been running workshops on the issue for years. Even if they don't, what about their legal teams? Or CI tools to scan for licence violations? Some of the responses here are so naive it's crazy. I hope no one is identifying the companies they work for.
Obviously we do. Don't copy paste 10 pages of source code unaltered and sell it as your own.
But that's something entirely different from small code snippets, changed and adapted to solve the same problem a thousand other people already had. Nothing else are developers doing going on GitHub, StackOverflow or any other website to find answers to their questions. That's not naivety, that's how coding works (partially). If you would have to re-invent the wheel everytime you build something new, good luck.
There isn't a threshold for copyright violation. If you copy a 3 line function from a GPL library, you have to comply with the licence. Tools like BlackDuck will pick it up.
Snippets aren't exactly defined but I see them as more than just a single line like "here's how to flatten a list in Python", it's some functionality - e.g. an algorithm implementation or some task.
