It's Steve Wozniak's 75th Birthday. Whatever Happened to His YouTube Lawsuit? (cbsnews.com)
- Reference: 0178636160
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/08/10/1938248/its-steve-wozniaks-75th-birthday-whatever-happened-to-his-youtube-lawsuit
- Source link: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/steve-wozniak-on-fighting-internet-scams/
> Wozniak's lawsuit against YouTube has been tied up in court now for five years, stalled by federal legislation known as Section 230. Attorney Brian Danitz said, "Section 230 is a very broad statute that limits, if not totally, the ability to bring any kind of case against these social media platforms."
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> "It says that anything gets posted, they have no liability at all," said Wozniak. "It's totally absolute."
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> Google responded to our inquiry about Wozniak's lawsuit with a statement from José Castañeda, of Google Policy Communications: "We take abuse of our platform seriously and take action quickly when we detect violations ... we have tools for users to report channels that are impersonating their likeness or business." [Steve's wife] Janet Wozniak, however, says YouTube did nothing, even though she reported the scam video multiple times: "You know, 'Please take this down. This is an obvious mistake. This is fraud. You're YouTube, you're helping dupe people out of their money,'" she said.
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> "They wouldn't," said Steve...
Today is Steve Wozniak's 75th birthday. ( [3]You can watch the interview here .) And the article includes this interesting detail about Woz's life today:
> Wozniak sold most of his Apple stock in the mid-1980s when he left the company. Today, though, he still gets a small paycheck from Apple for making speeches and representing the company. He says he's proud to see Apple become a trillion-dollar company. "Apple is still the best," he said. "And when Apple does things I don't like, and some of the closeness I wish it were more open, I'll speak out about it. Nobody buys my voice!"
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> I asked, "Apple listen to you when you speak out?"
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> "No," Wozniak smiled. "Oh, no. Oh, no."
[1] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/07/23/188218/steve-wozniak-sues-youtube-over-twitter-like-bitcoin-scam
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/steve-wozniak-on-fighting-internet-scams/
[3] https://youtu.be/CLpmjXRQf6k?si=ZsFpLhZ29zLgO2EK
"We take abuse of our platform seriously..." (Score:4, Informative)
Not in my experience. I *frequently* see ads with fake headlines about celebrities who are either a) arrested, b) sacked for revealing a secret. In either case, the link leads to some sleazy investment scam. Sometimes the scammers even use a link which leads to an innocuous fake placeholder website that they yank down after a few days to redirect to the real scam site.
That means that YouTube didn't detect the scam ad, or review it and just sent it straight out there for me & others to see. And if I report the ad, they only bother to take it down about 1/3rd of the time. In the meantime the scammers have rolled a new ad account and are repeating the process all over again.
I do not accept that YouTube gives much of a fuck beyond a minimal box ticking exercise. They could subject new accounts to more security / throttling & geographic restrictions, or require a large security deposit on new accounts which is forfeit for scams, or use humans / AI to review ads, or constantly monitor the ad link for suspicious behaviour, or even use volunteers to review ads in exchange for perks. I am not aware they do any of these things.
Re: "We take abuse of our platform seriously..." (Score:3)
The one instance I've seen an ad taken down after I reported it was an ad for weight loss jabs. It's illegal in the UK to advertise prescription medicines and the Advertising Standards Agency had recently come down hard on another company that was doing this.
If I'm going to be realistic it was probably just a coincidence.
My own pet theory is that Google wants the ads they serve to be as annoying and obnoxious as possible to drive people to pay for premium. I can think of no better explanation for being so t
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Just yesterday the YouTube app was pushing ads for ivermectin without a prescription.
Re: How does youtube benefit from this scam? (Score:2)
Google sells ads. They don't care if they're for scams.
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I have a simple seven second hack that would solve Woz's problems if performed each night just before bed.
Yeah, YouTube should not be allowed to hide behind that S230 defense because I've been reporting scammy ads on the platform for years and almost without exception, those ads never disappear until the advertiser's budget is fully spent. Then they re-appear a few months later.
YouTube doesn't care -- the only things that matter to them are revenue and profit -- all else is simply incidental.
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If the SCOTUS believes political bribery is "free speech", then maybe scams are also???
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If google had produced this video I could understand him being mad. but throwing down at google for not preventing the creation of this video by unaffiliated 3rd parties is an insane thing to sue over. But this is the equivalent of suing a newspaper for publishing a negative opinion piece about yourself. Where did they fail in their responsibility? How on earth could youtube possibly police the 'truth' of their content? It's impossible. This is asinine.
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The problem is youtube/google is claiming they practice moderation but they don't. Even after content is reported for being illegal like in this case it gets to stay. Instead google is using moderation as an excuse for practicing editorializing instead which wasn't the intent of 230.
I'm curious what you think "unaffiliated" means, since whatever nefarious party is stealing Steve's likeness is definitely posting content on youtube.
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> It really bothers me the way social media companies use 230 for their own benefit. Initially, when I was young and naive I thought it was about protecting people's freeze peaches, but it's not.
No? Without 230 or something similar, the company hosting the content is liable for it. Since any given defamatory or copyright-violating post could be worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, running such a board would be far too risky and expensive for anyone BUT a large corporation, and they'd have
NOT Section 230 again (Score:1, Insightful)
Do we sue AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or the Bell Companies when scammers use the phone to take our money? No. The medium is not the problem.
Do we sue CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS, Fox, Hulu+, Netflix, etc. when a TV commercial lies to us and we buy crap that doesn't work as advertised? No. The medium is not the problem.
If someone scams us out in the street do we sue the AIR through which they're speaking, the SIDEWALK on which they're standing, the CAR MANUFACTURER in which they get away -- no. The medium is n
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I don't disagree, except for your last sentence.
If I could make a shitload of money by being a lazy bitch, I'd be all over it, like stink on shit.
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Traceability is a large problem with phones, email, social media accounts, etc. A bot in Timbuktu can post anything it wants and it's nearly impossible for anybody to hunt down the perps behind the bot's scams. Sometimes the CIA can do it, but spend like $200k to get results. That doesn't work for smaller fraud.
US won't do anything about this until somebody with influence or power gets bigly schtooped.
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but tracing culprits is harrrrrd
yes, let's kick in the windows of the whole town, the village chief must be in on it and sheltering the infidels
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It shouldn't be hard, but our (non) standards are flocked up.
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They want it both ways. They want to be regarded as a common carrier with section 230 protection from liability, but also want to censor/curate content at will.
Why 'stalled'? (Score:2)
Can anyone comment on why TFA describes the litigation as 'stalled'? You can debate whether or not it's good policy; but Section 230 is relatively clear cut about "you pretty much can't pin liability on platforms for this class of activity", which seems like it would just end the case; rather than leave things open for an indefinite amount of appeals and pondering.
This is bad journalism (Score:4, Insightful)
> Google responded to our inquiry about Wozniak's lawsuit with a statement from José Castañeda, of Google Policy Communications: "We take abuse of our platform seriously and take action quickly when we detect violations ... we have tools for users to report channels that are impersonating their likeness or business." [Steve's wife] Janet Wozniak, however, says YouTube did nothing, even though she reported the scam video multiple times: "You know, 'Please take this down. This is an obvious mistake. This is fraud. You're YouTube, you're helping dupe people out of their money,'" she said.
So this is a reason not to trust CBS News and nicely it's non-political so nobody here should get unreasonably angry about what I'm about to say.
Either Google does take abuse seriously and does take action upon receiving reports, as Castañeda (wonder if that'll get through the Unicode filter...) implies, or it doesn't, as Janet Wozniak explains. CBS chooses to avoid answering the question, instead providing "balanced" journalism by reporting both as equally valid.
The thing is, this leaves the reader uninformed. Is Google lying? Did the Wozniaks take no action and then lie to pretend they did? There's no answer here, just a hand wavey paragraph that reports what each side claims without any serious attempt to validate the statements. And given it's central to a story about whether Google is culpable for failings on its side, it's bizarre to leave it out of the story.
Did CBS ask for evidence Janet Wozniak reported the offending videos to YouTube? I'd say there's a 99% certainty, given the legal implications, that - assuming Janet W did - they had at least some evidence trail, perhaps an automated email acknowledging receipt of the report at minimum. In which case CBS could have more accurately framed the story using a truth sandwich:
> Google did not respond to the Wozniak's repeated requests to take down the impersonated content. When reached by CBS News, José Castañeda, of Google Policy Communications falsely stated: "We take abuse of our platform seriously and take action quickly when we detect violations ... we have tools for users to report channels that are impersonating their likeness or business." CBS has seen multiple reports submitted to Google by Janet Wozniak reporting the scam video, and receipts from Google indicating the reports were received, yet no action was taken.
If a journalist simply blindly reports what both sides are saying, they're being "balanced" but they're betraying their readers by leaving them ultimately uninformed. Balanced, despite being a fetish of the modern mainstream media, is not good journalism. It is not the same thing as impartiality, and it's impartiality and truth, not balance, journalists should strive for.
Taking things seriously (Score:3)
> from José Castañeda, of Google Policy Communications: "We take abuse of our platform seriously and take action quickly when we detect violations ... we have tools for users to report channels that are impersonating their likeness or business."
When I read that, I imagined a room full of people laughing their asses off. Remember that "Power companies don't want you to know" rubber band air conditioning ads that went on for months? Or the JingleBell robot dog? Or all the ED quack nostrum ads? Or the skid mark magnesium ad? Or Trump watches (did they ever come out with one of those 100K wonders?). Now, I did see one once about mining gold from tap water that seemed to have been pulled fairly quickly. I think that was YT. May have been elsewhere.
In my opinion, YouTube ads are more YouTube/Alphabet harassment to get people to pay a subscription than an honest effort to obtain ad revenue. All but a hand full seem to me to be appeals to the gullible and easily scammed. Then again, that is the same opinion I came to in 1996 when I quit watching tv or going to movies. I don't mind there are stupid people in the world, Ghu knows sometimes I qualify there, but I really don't like it when the assumption is that I'm so flipping stupid I'd fall for that spit. It's insulting.
Easy fix (Score:2)
Say it has copyright music on it and they'll take it down immediately. They don't give a crap about any users unless it involves IP law.
Sold his stock (Score:4, Insightful)
Smart man. Great engineer. Bad decision. Happens to all of us.
Had I not sold some of my Apple stock when I did, I'd be worth some $50M right now.
Difference between me and Woz? I'm not a smart man. I'm not a good engineer.
Re: Sold his stock (Score:5, Insightful)
Realizing you are not the sharpest tool in the shed is a sign of intelligence. You clearly have good metacognitive abilities. Cheers!
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> Realizing you are not the sharpest tool in the shed is a sign of intelligence. You clearly have good metacognitive abilities. Cheers!
+1 to this. A dumb man knows everything, a smart man realises just how little he knows.
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and in this case, nobody knows the future. NOBODY. Michael Dell is an objectively good businessman, and in the same business sector. He is worth $134 billion. And it was he who completely wrote off Apple in 1997, with his famous remark about shutting it down and returning its capital to investors.
Re: Sold his stock (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple released the iPhone in June 2007; Forbes magazine cover story in November asks "Nokia: 1 Billion Customers - Can Anyone Catch The Smartphone King?"
Even Betteridge's Law of Headlines couldn't see the future that time
Re: Sold his stock (Score:2)
An idiot would say "oh yeah i know XYZ" and is full of shit. "I don't know" is a sign of self-awareness...
Re: Sold his stock (Score:5, Interesting)
When I hired people (as developers), the last question of the interview was "How many gas stations are there in the United States?"
The answer I wanted to hear was a quick, succinct, "I don't know".
What I didn't want is a long ass rambling answer of whatever contents, as a way of avoiding saying "I don't know".
What I really didn't want is someone who would confidently give me some number, and then try to justify it with some bullshit logic.
If I LIKED the candidate, and they answered fairly quickly, "I don't know", sometimes I would follow up with something along the lines of, "How would you estimate it?" just to see if they could put together some reasonable basis or thought process for estimating a value for a completely unreasonable question. In that case, I would hope not to hear "Google it."
One time I had this guy....he was doing pretty decently in the interview and may have been a finalist, until we got to the gas station question. He lost his marbles. Out of nowhere, he COMPLETELY WENT OFF on a tirade, along the lines of this:
What kind of stupid fucking question is that? What does this job have to do with gas stations? How the fuck would I know how many gas stations there are? Do you want me to pump gas? I went to (whatever school it was, I don't remember) for computer science, not pumping gas!! What does this have to do with the job anyway?! Did you even read my resume? (and on and on for probably 5 minutes, it was incredible)
Once he shut up, I explained that, "the point is simply to see if someone can admit that they don't know something rather than trying to bullshit their way through a simple question. It also helps me understand how the person handles the unexpected."
He muttered to himself all the way out the door.
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> When I hired people (as developers), the last question of the interview was "How many gas stations are there in the United States?"
> The answer I wanted to hear was a quick, succinct, "I don't know".
IMHO "Hmm.. let me think about how to estimate that" would also be a great [start to] an answer. (Though now that I think of, we have The Internet now, so "lemme google that" might also be a pretty good answer.)
Re: Sold his stock (Score:2)
Approximately 160,000 estimates by U.S. EIA. Vs 292 million gas automobiles. You are shrunk to the size of a nickel and dropped into a blender. Jump out. Gatorade bottles have wider tops easier to fill. Be prepared for long road trips or other situations. Describe your weaknesses. All sorts of mind games.
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If I was asked that I would admit I don't know but then I would also speculate out loud how I would work at finding that information. Still, I definitely look at you side ways for such an odd ball question. I'm sure my face would scrunch up a bit and internally I would be thinking "What kind of stupid fucking question is that?" but I wouldn't say so.
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To be fair an interview is far different from an on the job task. The anxiety level and pressure to look good in an interview is very high and I'd think most people would feel the need to look like they can answer any question and not say they don't know. On a normal basis they'd feel more comfortable saying they don't know.
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But many people do know XYZ but the idiot will come along and claim they cannot know XYZ because the idiot does not know XYZ.
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not so smart, all these people are the same, corrupted by greed, which is stupid, money is power, power corrupts
really intelligent people aren't selfish nor are we greedy, we know too much wealth is toxic which is why we stop before we become excessively affluent, rich people are the problem, and they're all going to hell because of their unethical actions driven by their selfishness and lack or humanity and responsibility, addiction to wealth and power is far worse than drug addiction
classism is wrecking e
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How many gas stations are there in the United States?
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Enough to provide petro to everyone that can afford to fill up.
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Well, let's see: There's Costco. And the tax-free indian stations. And....
I guess I don't know.
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a lot of very intelligent people are greedy as ****. being unselfish the way you describe also requires some amount of empathy
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greed is hardly intelligent ... it's proof of the opposite of course
but hey, self-justification is rampant too
any unethical behavior is stupid and self-defeating, all the greedy people are losers, lost their souls, their humanity, their dignity and the respect of ethical people
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> Smart man. Great engineer. Bad decision. Happens to all of us.
I mean maybe. Or maybe he just wanted the money for other things and isn't obsessed with 'bank account goes up'.
Woz has always come across as pretty level headed. I think he just genuinely likes the fact that people bought the computer he'd designed, and that out of it this giant company has grown that is still very engineering focused. As an engineer, I'd be pretty chuffed with all that.
Beyond that, the financial security he got from it meant he could work on whatever stuff he wanted for the rest of his li
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Sounds like heaven to me. Sold out early and still financially set for life and doing what he wants.
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If you think Steve Wozniak made a bad move, check out Ronald Wayne. He's the 3rd co-founder of Apple (along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak). He provided most of the startup funding.
A disagreement on how to run the company had him leaving and selling his share of the company a year later in 1977.