Earlier quoted context omitted.
They meant for identification of leaker. But IMHO it's useless. Anybody could claim they had their laptop stolen.
Only if they have filed a police report...
Okay, not stolen, but attacked with malware.
Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
231–240 of 250 posts
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regulate as utilities/infrastructure. Nobody likes the Ma Bell type of anti-trust because it feels like infringing on private property rights but regulating as utility or infrastructure is much widely accepted and palatable. However if you have poor management then you end up in the P&G situation with blame passing from one generation of management to another and no real improvements.
P&G or PG&E?
PG&E, typo.
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
What good are rights when corporations can just have users sign them away by agreeing with some policy? They already make users waive a lot of rights, including the right to pursue legal action, the right to reverse engineer...
> corporations can just have users sign them away by agreeing with some policy These shrink wrap licences can be legislated away. Lots of EU countries have consumer protection legislation that explicitly forbids/invalidates such imbalanced or unexpected terms in the fine print for consumer-facing contracts -- or indeed invalidates shrink-wrap licence terms outright.
In the US, we do have precedence for rights that can't be waived. The implied warranty of habitability is the first that comes to mind.
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#234Dumb question, but has Barnes and Nobles been better about their behavior with the Nook? I’m slowly weening myself away from Amazon where I can, but I need options.
They print these paper volumes called books, and I've never once read a book on anything other than in paper, or on my computer. I just walked in Barnes and Noble last weekend and spent $44 on real books. Sure I spent double of what I could have spent at Amazon. I voted with my money. Fuck Amazon.
They still have a thing called the Nook.
I’m curious whether they’re better behaved, though.
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can use a Kindle by drag&drop PDF files onto it. If you use it like that, there is no need to connect it to the Wifi at all. I use my Kindle like this.
This is news to me, is that really true for all Kindle models? Can you really load files onto it as a connected storage device? Can you point to any amazon docs explaining this? I was under the impression that this was the big caveat restriction with amazon.
> This is news to me, is that really true for all Kindle models? Can you really load files onto it as a connected storage device?
Yes, all Kindles.
The remaining annoyance is that besides PDFs and a few other document file formats, the Kindles don't read standard EPUB format ebooks, only .mobi or .azw ebooks.
That was kinda sorta okay when the Kindle first came out (Amazon got .mobi through their acquisition of Mobipocket, and .azw is mostly the same format), as at the time practically every e-reader device had it's own proprietary format, but since then everyone has converged on the EPUB standard with Amazon the lone holdout.
Thankfully, Calibre can automatically convert ebooks of whatever format to .mobi when transferring from your library to a Kindle.
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's on the right track, but it's not very helpful if the company is shutting down and out of money anyway.
Make the customers of digital goods first-in-line creditors. It's basically goods stolen from people, at the moment of shutting down - they should be first in line. Most companies don't shut down when they run out of their last dollar; Rather, they shut down when they have more liabilities than assets. The result would be that traditional creditors will demand an escrow for that digital data before giving any money (…
>It's basically goods stolen from people, at the moment of shutting down - they should be first in line
No its not. You've only agreed to RENT a book for an unspecified amount of time. You never owned a thing, and thus nothing was stolen from you.
Ownership doesn't exist in the digital marketplace; if you really wanted to do something so stupid as to OWN a good, you'd pirate it.
Note that for goods like DVDs you're still only purchasing the right to access the data.. you didn't actually take ownership of anything more than the physical disk.
Hence, the OP has lost nothing they had... because they had nothing to begin with !
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#237It's really time for laws which forbid companies to terminate accounts and access to them if they met certain conditions like licencing digital properties. Sure, they can restrict them all they want, as long as a fair stance prevails und people are not ripped of their goods. This strong difference in powers between companies and customers in the digital realm becomes more and more a serious problem. When people are s…
What they need is a legally required termination procedure, so when the company shuts down, or if business with a user is terminated, it MUST supply the user with accessible digital goods equivalent to their library, or else the company is liable for goods not delivered.
Or... just throwing this out here... they could start by selling actual digital goods which they advertise by a "BUY" button, and charge a service fee if you want them to keep a copy around in their cloud. That way you have your own copy, and the convenience of not having to keep track of where you stored those bits, and when the company inevitably dies/goes bankrupt/is sold/merges with Disney they stop charging the service fee and stop providing the service and you go back to keeping track of your own copy of the bits.
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unfortunately, we live in an era where everything that can connect to the Internet will abuse its intended use at some point. This is not an era-problem, this is a culture-problem. Likely an economic-incentives-problem. The culture in both business and consumers . There always seem to be The Assholes who corrupt it all for everyone. It's easy to point at businesses, but few talk about incidents of malfeasance from…
Cultures define eras.
Love your writing and musings. Long-time listener, first-time caller.
Were this only an era problem. Then it would just be a passing fad, even if "passing" was longer than a human generation. I could handle that.
However, there are in this (and other eras) non-dominant cultures of high-trust where the incidence of rough equivalent types of malfeasance or even the expectations of them occurring are noticeably lower. Many rural cultures, for example. So I was trying to concisely express the era doesn't define everyone in every culture.
Now if I could understand why such non-dominant cultures do not scale and dominate, I think it could be the beginning of a beautiful civilization, to cop a line from Rick.
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cultures define eras.
Love your writing and musings. Long-time listener, first-time caller. Were this only an era problem. Then it would just be a passing fad, even if "passing" was longer than a human generation. I could handle that. However, there are in this (and other eras) non-dominant cultures of high-trust where the incidence of rough equivalent types of malfeasance or even the expectations of them occurring are noticeably lower. M…
Fair points.
My friend Woozle noted a few years ago an epistemic paradox:
> Our present epistemic systems are undergoing kind of the same shock that the online community underwent when transitioning from BBSs and Usenet to the commercial web to social media.
> We were used to a very high content-to-BS ratio because it took a certain amount of intelligence and intense domain-interest for people to be there in the first place -- and we've now transitioned to a situation where many people are there more or less accidentally and (the worst part), because of a high percentage of the population being present, there is now substantial power to be had by influencing the discussions that take place.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5wg0hp/when_ep...
Shoshana Zuboff put this more succinctly, in the 1980s, in her Thid Law:
> Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control.
And you can find far earlier examples, say, Sun Tzu's "On the Use of Spies" (book 13), and of course "All warfare is based on deception."
So yes, the practive is not merely modern, and not a passing fad.
"Build it and they will come" turns out to be a curse.
Non-dominant cultures may advance by out-surviving adversaries. The Angles were subordinate to the Romans, the Song Dynasty and Poland to the Mongolian Empire, Egypt and Persia to Macedonia. Direct combat is expensive and risky.
But an utter failure at self-preservation (or in securing suitable patronage) tends to end badly. To invoke another mid-century classic, Huxley's Island. "Here and now, boys!"
Re: Amazon turned off customer’s Kindle account, blocking her from her books (2012)
#240This is why I try to get drm free ebooks when possible or at least breakable drm. I like paying for it so the author gets paid but i don't want some 3rd party being able to revoke my access.
"I like paying for it so the author gets paid " I've been thinking about this: If this is the only reason you use an ebook-store (like the Kindle store), this would be fairly easy to create a 100% competitor for - after all, there's no law against creating a site for giving money to your favourite authors! ...and then you could create a plugin/API for embedding a "pay for book" button onto other sites - like pirate b…
i have seen authors asking people not to do this, because it increases the chance that their publisher will see the book as a failure and not pick up another one of theirs.