Has the NYT ever been progressive? At times they’ve brought some very good journalism, but I have the impression that they’ve always been firmly on the side of big business.

A few years ago I had seen a very old (about 1920 I think) NYT article posted on Reddit in which they completely misrepresented what had happened when the powers that be attacked strikers. A straight up hit piece against the strikers & it was not an opinion article. So back then they were firmly on the side of big business, but without any of the journalistic integrity that the paper is now known for.

The only way that I can think of that someone might consider the NYT as a progressive paper, is if factual reporting is considered leftwing/progressive, which is only a relatively recent development in the USA.

Still better than old school linear tv, where you paid to watch things being constantly interrupted by paid commercials.

And I’m not saying that you are. I tried to show with a parable that they do not need to see their machine’s actions to know that some of it’s actions are illegal. That’s what we were disagreeing on: that they know.

I made an automaton. I set the parameters in such a way that there is a large variability of actions that my automaton can take. My parameters do not pre-empt my automaton from taking certain illegal actions. I set my automaton loose. After some time it turns out that my automaton has taken an illegal action against a specific person. Did I know that my automaton was going to commit a illegal action against that specific person? No, I did not. Did I know that my automaton was sooner or later going to commit certain illegal actions? Yes I did, because those actions are within the parameters of the automaton. I know my automaton is capable of doing illegal actions and given enough incidences there is an absolute certainty that it will do those illegal actions. I do not need to interact with my automaton in any way to know that some of it’s actions will be illegal.

You can’t create an automated machine, let it run loose without supervision and then claim to not be responsible for what the machine does.

Maybe just maybe this was the very first instance of their ai malfunctioning (which I don’t believe for a second), in which case the correct response of Brandshield would have been to announce that they would temporarily suspend the activities of this particular program & promise to implement improvements so that it would not happen again. Brandshield has done neither of these, which tells me that it’s not the first time and also that Brandshield has no intention of preventing it from happening again in the future.

If it had been phishing, then going to the registrar would have been the right call, because you want to take that down asap. But according to itch.io it wasn’t, instead it was a a real fansite that was linking to the real website of funko’s game (according to itch.io). Something which most media companies allow since it’s basically free publicity and goodwill, but if they did want it taken down for copyright reasons, then a DMCA takedown request send to itch.io would have been the correct first action.

In the response statement by Brandshield, Brandshield does not deny having send a takedown request for phishing to the registrar (confirming that they did), nor do they dispute itch.io’s statement that it wasn’t a phishing site (confirming that they know that it wasn’t), instead they only speak about “infringement”.

So now we know that Brandshield is knowingly making false accusations that have potentially serious consequences for their victims. And it’s not going to be the first time that they’ve done this, but even this high publicity case will probably not have any legal consequences for brandshield, so it looks like they will continue getting away with it. Unfortunately they’re not alone, it often seems like the entire DMCA industry is rotten.

Why ask the registrar to take down a subdomain of a website?

Those subdomains are not managed or controlled by the registrar, so all the registrar can do is either take down the entire domain or ask their client to take down the subdomain. In this case they asked their client, who took down the subdomain, after which the registrar took down the domain anyhow :D

For a single isolated offence, Brandshield’s first action should have been to report the copyright infringement to itch.io and ask for a takedown of that content, instead they went directly to the registrar and falsely claimed that itch.io was a fraud & phishing site. I suspect that they falsely claim that it’s about phishing and fraud, because otherwise registrars will not take down the site unless there is systematic copyright infringement (like a torrent site). And I suspect that brandshield goes directly to the registrar with their complaint, since that is easier to automate than finding the right contact info on a website.

So my take is that: The registrar was in the wrong for taking down the domain after itch.io removed the problematic subdomain. Brandshield is scum. And Funko is in the wrong for using brandshield.

No real need for further answers from itch.io, nothing new has come to light.

Edit: while under the shower I realized that Brandshield’s posts do contain some kind of news: Brandshield does not deny having used fraud & phishing as reason for the takedown request, thereby confirming that they did. Before we just had itch.io’s retelling of the events, which might have been a misrepresentation by itch.io or due to a cock-up by the registrar, but because of the lack of denial by brandshield, we now have confirmation that it did happen like itch.io said.

Heavily tax buying and owning homes as investments. Also heavily tax vacant homes in regions with a housing shortage.

Basically regulate it so that prospective buyers who are buying a place to live in are significantly advantaged when trying to do so, while at the same time discouraging others from buying up those homes as investments.

I assume that everyone who wants to own a home wants to own a home and many of those aren’t able to. That’s the current reality.

Edit: I reread what I said and I distinctly said that it should be “a right”. Having a right to do something is not the same as having an obligation to do something. Imo home ownership should be a right for everyone, but that doesn’t make it an obligation.

Owning your place to live should be a right. Anyone who holds more housing stock than they personally need and who will only let it out if there’s profit on their investment (because if it’s an investment, then there is an expectation that the line must always go up, which is also very inflationary), tightens the market and makes it harder for other people to become a home owner.

The big difference between renting and paying of a mortgage, is that by paying off the mortgage, the home owner has build up equity and secured a financially more secure future. But if someone is too poor to get a mortgage to afford the inflated house prices (inflated because other people treat it like an investment), then in the current system they pay rent to pay off the mortgage/debt of their landlord and after the renter has paid off their landlord’s mortgage, they’ll still be poor and without any equity themselves.

It’s a very antisocial system. And with landlords building up more and more equity on the backs of people who are unable to build up equity themselves, there’s a good reason why landlords are often said to be parasitic.

As Hexbear becomes increasingly isolated, more and more of their users will start making accounts on other instances. After migrating, they’ll still have their toxic post truth discource, but they’ll be harder to identify at a glance. I’m definitely not against cutting ties with Hexbear, I was in favor of it when Lemmy world did it. But now I’m dreading the thought of those users trickling back into my feed one by one. For my personal Lemmy experience, the existence of Hexbear was great in that it kept so many toxic people contained in a place away from me.