Pyxl101 · HackerTrans

It seems like there should be a way to escalate from an ID claim to DMCA -- to reject the ID claim as a content creator and force the claimant to send a DMCA. Then you can dispute the notice if it's issued in error, or counterclaim if they're abusing the process.

Pyxl101

10 年前discuss

The point is not about what percentage they take. The point was their active involvement to coordinate all major participants in an entire industry into a cartel that conspired from the beginning to raise price, as the purpose. The participants in this illegal cartel all didn't "like" the market price, and so agreed on a collective mutual action that they believed would (and did) allow them to raise prices. The thing is, conspiring with a competitor to raise prices is illegal.

Pyxl101

10 年前discuss

> Apple guilty for the high-tech employment agreements, but not for working to make the same terms for their e-book store with all the publishers.

Sorry, you have it all wrong. This isn't about Apple giving the same deal to all publishers. This was about Apple convincing all publishers to give all other retailers the same deal as Apple -- and all at the same time, as a single group across essentially the entire industry, thus resulting in price fixing and price increases.

Imagine the absurdity if the manufacturer of a car (motor vehicle) could dictate the terms at which their cars were sold by all retailers. Essentially, the manufacturer exclusively determines the price that all auto sellers must charge. Does that analogy make better sense? No car dealership can offer a discount because the manufacturer has exclusive control.

Then imagine that it's not just one auto manufacturer: it's all of them, all at once. That's what happened with ebooks - virtually the entire industry colluded. It's not just working to get the same terms for their publishers, it was also getting those publishers to, in concert all with each other, force all of their retailers to do the same thing. Only with the collusion of a cartel could they have achieved this, and the result was illegal price-fixing that harmed consumers.

Competitors are not allowed to collude, and not allowed to collude to raise prices. Competitors have no legitimate business to meet and discuss with each other and make agreements about what price they'll all offer together, as that's an illegal cartel, yet that's what happened as a result of the conspiracy that Apple led.

> The publishers did raise prices, but they just wanted for the possibility to do so anyway

Publishers always had control over the price at which they sold their books to retailers. They just did not have control over the price at which those retailers subsequently resold them to consumers. And why should they? When books were historically sold at wholesale price for 50% of their retail price, why should a publisher stop a retailer from competing on price, by offering (say) a 190% markup rather than 200%, if the retailer has a more efficient operation? Once the book is "handed off" from the publishers to the retailer, what legitimate reason is for the publisher to control that transitive resale -- and why should the publisher have control over all of those resales among all retailers? That is the cartel that Apple brought about.

Imagine if the manufacturer of a toothbrush had the power to force all stores that sell it to have the same price. Why should they have that power? Why can't stores offer a discount if they have a more efficient supply chain, or more insightful pricing strategy? And then suddenly all toothbrush manufacturers in the entire industry did the same thing at the same time? I hope this paints a better picture of what happened with Apple and ebooks, and the reason why they were convicted of illegal collusion to fix prices.

The true reality of the situation, in my opinion, is that with the advent of the Internet, the incremental value of publishing has begun to drop. Authors are increasingly required to deliver fully complete and ready-to-publish manuscripts, rather than handing off a draft to the publisher for editing and typesetting. Furthermore, individual authors are better able to market themselves and generate interest online than in the older days when advertising had a higher cost, and required printing a large order of books up front and buying retail space. It's becoming cheaper and cheaper for authors to offer books online themselves. Consider what's happened with books like The Martian: it was (as I understand it) self-published as an ebook, and then gained a following, and eventually Hollywood bought the film rights. The value added by a publisher diminishes if they're not printing and distributing your physical book - they become a publicist. So, publishers saw the reality for what it was, and saw that their industry was all trending toward undifferentiated "perfect competition". They reacted to the situation by cooking up a collusion across the industry to conspire to keep prices artificially higher than they otherwise would have been, using the combined market power of their collusion to bring it about.

Pyxl101

10 年前discuss

Apple wasn't alleged to be a monopoly. Appled formed an illegal cartel of suppliers, all who agreed to fix their prices simultaneously as part of a scheme to raise prices across the industry - by acting in concert to force everyone (all supplier, all retailers, including non-Apple) to adopt an agency model giving publishers the market power to raise their prices. More details: https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/486701/downlo... - there are clear emails showing how Apple orchestrating the scheme by gaining coordinating and gaining cooperation of all publishers, and then of pricing data showing how consumers were harmed as ebook prices rose as the scheme went into effect. See my other comment in this thread for some choice excerpts from leaders of the companies involved, betraying their conscious involvement.

Pyxl101

10 年前discuss

If you want to know, then here's a starting point: https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/486701/downlo... - it demonstrates clear and specific proof of the leading role that Apple played in proposing the collusion and actually bringing it about. See my other comment in this thread, where I highlight some of the illustrative quotes from the principals involved.

Pyxl101

10 年前discuss

If you look at emails and communication from people involved, it seems pretty clear to me that Apple knowingly and actively participated in a conspiracy to fix prices. They really took the leading role in organizing the publishers and proposing the illegal-price fixing model. I will give you an overwhelming amount of evidence just in one comment, and a link to explore further details.

"From: Eddy Cue

To: Steve Jobs

Subject: Books - Publisher update

Date: Tue, 15 Dec 2009

Steve,

[...] Clearly, the biggest issue is new release pricing and they [the publishers] want a proposal from us. Everyone was estatic to see Apple and what it could mean for their industry."

...

"They decided they had to come up with a way that would move the whole market off 9.99 and they think an agency model is the only way to do it."

"They believe that this is the best chance for publishers to challenge the 9.99 price point ...."

Clearly and explicitly recognizing that collusion is the only way to achieve the price that they desire.

...

"I am told Random House is concerned about the future of e-books and the potentially dominant role played by Google and Amazon. Would it make sense for the 2 of us to have meetings / diner with Markus Dohle, Brian Murray, John Sargent..."

Conspiracy to meet and fix prices. Collusion like this across competitors is illegal price fixing. Competitors do not have a legitimate reason to meet and discuss common pricing.

...

"You are absolutely correct: we've always known that unless other publishers follow us, there's no chance in getting Amazon to change its pricing practices."

...

"It is important to Apple that there be 'some level of reasonable pricing'. They feel the only way to get this is for the industry to go to the agency model." (additional illegal collusion to fix prices)

"When they thought it through, they didn't think anything else would keep the market from its current pricing 'craziness'" (i.e., market prices -- demonstrating conspiracy to fix prices)

"[Eddy Cue, Apple] also thinks that book prices are becoming too low - he is worried about consumer perception. Therefore he suggests an 'agency model'".

...

"To: Carolyn Reidy (Simon & Shuster)

From: Eddy Cue (Apple)

Subject: iTunes

Date: Mon, 04 Jan 2010

"[...] As we discussed, here is what I think is the best approach for ebooks. Just like the App Store, we are proposing a principal-agency model [...]"

The same email is repeated and sent to Markus Dohle of Random House, and then John Sargent of Macmillan, and very similarly to David Young of Hachette Book Group.

"After talking to all the other publishers and seeing the overall book environment, here is what I think is the best approach for ebooks", Eddy Cue wrote to David Young, and to David Shanks of Penguin, and Brian Murray of Harper Collins. He goes on to outline the illegal price fixing scheme which they successfully colluded to implement.

...

Additional points that establish the case:

- Additional emails go on to demonstrate how the model will be forced on all retails and result in the price fixing

- Graphs of data of how prices changed over time as Apple deployed its price-fixing scheme.

- Apple provides information about one competitor's prices and desires to another, explicitly communicating one competitor's pricing desires to the other.

- Evidence of collusion as copy/pasted statements make their way into material from several publishing house leaders, all on the same day following meetings with Apple.

- "Agency is anti-price war territory." Yup.

- Clear recognition by the competitors that they were engaging in illegal price fixing. "We would have to 'get everyone else to go to the agency model'. When I said, 'but of course we can't talk to our competitors', [Eddy Cue] said he didn't mean other publishers, but our accounts - to which I replied, if we make these our terms, then they are our terms." Carolyn Reidy, discussing her deal with Apple to other people.

- Additional evidence of Apple taking an active role in conducting these discussions with publishers and bringing about the actual consensus of getting them all to agree to it. Apple was the common party that actually brought the coordination about by facilitating the conversation and proposing the actual price fixing terms.

- Publishers recognize that their deals with Apple force them to an agency model for all sales.

- One publisher balks about being forced to do this. Apple enlists other publishers to convince them. Further publishers are waiting for other publishes to agree, before they agree to terms with Apple (collusion; they should be making deals independently)

United States of America v. Apple, Inc. - https://www.justice.gov/atr/case-document/file/486701/downlo...

I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming. Have you examined the actual data? I hope this provides a good starting point.

(These conspiracies to fix prices seem common for Silicon Valley companies, don't they? Apple and other tech companies were similarly involved in antitrust litigation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... )

Pyxl101

11 年前discuss

There is already a huge market for modern, high end mobile phones that passively record the environment constantly, in order to wake up and respond when their user says "Hey Siri" / "Ok Google" / "Hey Cortana". Users tend to carry those with them everywhere.

I see that your company plans to "build[] an open platform for atmospheric data collection using smartphone sensors". It looks like you support Apple and advertise their products on your company's website: https://www.pressurenet.io/blog/iphone-6-has-barometer/

"We’re excited to start including iPhones in our study of the atmosphere!"

If you believe that "every purchase[] is a signal", then what signal are you sending about Apple iPhones?

I have not researched it in detail, but it seems like you're relying on data collection from large networks of smartphones in order to put together accurate weather forecasts. That's cool! But I find it hard to reconcile with the view that smartphone data collection (from people who volunteer to participate, or who use a product that has a collection feature) is invasive.

Pyxl101

11 年前discuss

> Indeed one of the reasons Echo wasn't a huge success is privacy invasion

Most modern phones passively listen to your voice too, and people carry those with them everywhere. They are present in the most intimate situations, rather than (e.g.) just in your living room. So I don't think there's a reason for people to feel differently about Echo than about Cortana on Xbox, or "Ok Google", or any other voice activated interface.

Pyxl101

11 年前discuss

That's true. Wired devices have the power to listen passively indefinitely and to record as much as they want. As I updated my post to mention, Google apparently added Google Voice search to Chrome at one point.

With wired devices, I've comforted myself with the analysis that users could detect subterfuge by looking for unexpected network traffic. A device can't record my voice and transmit it centrally all the time without generating noticeable network usage. It could, however, record for a while and send in a burst later, perhaps concealed within other traffic like a weekly software update. Nevertheless, I think a close examination could detect foul play. I do wonder whether phones could conduct the same type of subterfuge:

Perhaps there ought to be a "phone surveillance challenge" that's kind of like the Underhanded C contest. Each year, contestants submit a phone app that runs in the background on a phone over a 48 hour contest period simulating normal usage. At several points during that period, an important conversation will be overheard. The app that does the best job recording the conversations and remaining undetected is the winner.

Naively recording all audio and storing it will probably drain the battery. It also needs to be compressed, though bit rates as low as 5 Kbps seem to be intelligible. If we record at 5 Kbps, then it will require only 108 megabytes to store 48 hours worth of audio. The compression might eat up CPU, however. Perhaps skilled contestants will find a way to do it cheaply.

If we're a smart contestant, we don't indiscriminately record and store all audio. Instead, we want our contest entry to record the human conversations. I'd hazard a guess that our highly skilled contestants can come up with cheap passive methods of detecting human voice, comparable to the ones that listen for "Ok Google". So our contest entry only wakes up when it hears human speech.

Our contest entry won't transmit anything over the airwaves regularly, since that uses battery. However, we know the phone will be charged at least once in 48 hours. We'll wait until it's charging to upload our recordings. Even better, we'll time our transmission burst to be right after some other network activity, like a daily software update. Or if the phone is plugged into a computer, we can compromise it as well and extract data that way.

Sounds like a fun contest.

Pyxl101

11 年前discuss

"Ok Google" on Android, Siri, and listen all the time too, don't they? That's presumably how I can wake up my phone from a state where the screen is locked and powered off by saying "Hey Siri" / "Ok Google" / "Hey Cortana".

I was taken aback briefly when I first considered it. I realized it must be recording the environment constantly, in order to scan for the code word. Upon hearing the code word, it wakes up and streams the last few seconds of audio remotely, where the real linguistic analysis happens with Siri/Cortana/Google Voice Search. [1]

The difference is my phone is with me virtually 24/7. It's rarely not in the same room. In my opinion, the cat was out of the bag a while ago.

I make a decision to trust the device manufacturers, who claim their devices only listen for the code word. As a scientist and engineer, I know what that means: it's recording everything, all the time, and probably running a simple linguistic analysis sufficient to recognize codewords only. Then on waking up, it streams that audio centrally, which is how it can respond to queries out of the blue like: "Hey Siri, what's the temperature?" Answer: "It's currently 41 degrees Fahrenheit". It must be recording and processing everything, though in a computationally inexpensive way, for the sake of battery life.

[1] Google Chrome apparently supported this on the desktop for a while too: http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/11/26/google-brings-ok-goo...

Pyxl101

11 年前discuss

If availability and scale are not important, and you can tolerate having to engage a human in the event of a hardware failure, then sure a $20 VPS might suffice. You could also run a single virtual machine in one zone in the cloud.

But I think you might underestimate the amount of use-cases that do legitimately benefit from and desire a greater degree of reliability and automation. When one of my machines dies, I don't want to be notified, and I don't want to have to do anything about it. I want a new virtual machine to come online with the same software and pick up the slack. Similarly, as my system's traffic grows over time, I want to be able to gradually add machines to a fleet, to handle my scaling problem, or even instruct the system to do that for me.

Plenty of use-cases may not require this, but I'm not convinced that the majority of systems in the cloud do not. Every system benefits from reliability, and it's great to get it cheaply and in a hands-off way. In the cloud, I can build a system where my virtual machine runs on a virtual disk, and if there's a hardware failure, my VM gets restarted on another physical machine and keeps on trucking without my involvement. As an engineer and scientist, I can accomplish a lot more with a foundation like this. I can build systems that require nearly zero maintenance and management to keep running, even over long time scales.

I don't think I disagree with you that some people overengineer systems, but I think I disagree with you about how much effort it requires to achieve solid availability and a high level of automation. It's not a lot of effort or cost, and it's a huge advantage. Once I build a system I never want to touch it again.

A certain segment of users are adopting these technologies because they want to be prepared to scale. One of the advantages of "big data" products even for small use-cases is: all successful use-cases grow over time. If you plan for success and growth, then you may exceed the capabilities of a traditional technology. If you use a "big" technology from the beginning, then you can be confident that you'll be able to solve increases in demand by scaling up, rather than by rearchitecting. As these platforms mature and become easier to use, the scales begin to tip, and they no longer require more engineering time than the alternatives; a strong hosted platform actually requires less time in total, especially when you consider setup and maintenance. Many of these technologies do an excellent job "scaling down" for simple use-cases too. While they have been difficult to use, they're getting easier. For example, MapReduce-paradigm technologies are becoming fairly easy with Apache Hive, and fast with Spark. They're becoming easier to set up due to hosted variants like AWS's ElasticMapReduce or Google Cloud Dataproc, etc.

Pyxl101

11 年前discuss

I didn't see anything in the docs that touches on those subjects in detail (I did skim the docs looking for sections and pages that might contain answers to my questions before I posted), but please point me to the page that does if you know of one and I'd be interested to read it! I trust that your perceptions and information are accurate, but cite-able and reference-able information is also valuable.

Pyxl101

11 年前discuss

> PubSub is also a GLOBAL service. Not only are you protected from zone downtime, you are protected from regional downtime. Is there an equivalent to this level of service anywhere in the world?

Could you point to some of the documentation that describes more about its reliability model and SLA? I glanced through the documentation and couldn't find out any information about this.

It seems like a service that has this kind of global availability would have to make a trade off in latency for writes and potentially reads. If it's a multi-region service, then all writes need to block until they're acknowledge by at least a second region, right? It seems like that will add latency to every request and may not necessarily be a good thing. Similarly, at read time, latency could fluctuate depending on which region you query, and whether your usual region has the data yet. I'm just speculating though, not having read any more about the service. It does sound nice to have the choice to fall back to another region and take the latency hit, instead of an outage. On the other hand, regions are already highly available at existing cloud providers (with zones being a more common failure point).

Is PubSub mature? The FAQ suggests that you should authenticate that Google made the requests to your HTTPS endpoint by adding a secret parameter, rather than relying on any form of HTTP-level authentication.

> If you additionally would like to verify that the messages originated from Google Cloud Pub/Sub, you could configure your endpoint to only accept messages that are accompanied by a secret token argument, for example, https://myapp.mydomain.com/myhandler?token=application-secre....

This feels rather haphazard. If I'm exposing an HTTPS endpoint in my application that will trigger actual behavior upon the receipt of an HTTP request, then of course I "would like to verify that the messages originated from Google Cloud Pub/Sub", so that they're not coming from some random bot or deliberate attacker who happened to learn my URL.

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