It's Steve Wozniak's 75th Birthday. Whatever Happened to His YouTube Lawsuit? (cbsnews.com) 81
In 2020 a YouTube video used video footage of Steve Wozniak in a scam to steal bitcoin. "Some people said they lost their life savings," Wozniak tells CBS News, explaining why he sued YouTube in 2020 — and where his case stands now:
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."
"It says that anything gets posted, they have no liability at all," said Wozniak. "It's totally absolute."
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.
"They wouldn't," said Steve...
Today is Steve Wozniak's 75th birthday. (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!"
I asked, "Apple listen to you when you speak out?"
"No," Wozniak smiled. "Oh, no. Oh, no."
"It says that anything gets posted, they have no liability at all," said Wozniak. "It's totally absolute."
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.
"They wouldn't," said Steve...
Today is Steve Wozniak's 75th birthday. (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!"
I asked, "Apple listen to you when you speak out?"
"No," Wozniak smiled. "Oh, no. Oh, no."
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)
Re: Sold his stock (Score:4, Insightful)
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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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
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Thus Dell was correct at the time. Apple was suffering an identity crisis in the mid 1990s before Jobs returned. Brilliant people, umpteen side projects that never stuck because of dysfunctional management.
Ironically, they did have the prototype modern iMac back in 1989 with SE/30 running A/UX. Had they stayed the course with A/UX 4 ported to PowerPC (converging with AIX), they could have sidestepped the complete mess that became Taligent and Copland.
Re: Sold his stock (Score:2)
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.
Re: Sold his stock (Score:4)
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)
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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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Knowing how to keep your mouth shut is also an important skill. Especially in that particular environment.
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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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Right, which is why this is a dumb question, and a trick question. Trick questions are horrible for an interviewee, because the person is now asking themselves, "Does he "really" want to know how many gas stations there are and wants me to try to figure it out to see what my "approach to problem solving" is, or is this some dumb trick question to see how I will answer? Up to this point my questions have been about my qualifications to perform the job; now suddenly it's a question having nothing to do with
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Absolutely. That person who walked out is the one person who will brook no bullshit and probably prides themselves in their dedication to accuracy. Sounds like exactly the person I would want on my team.
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And I'm sure those employees who made the right choice and walked out of your interviews don't have space for you.
You can have hundreds on your team and still be an asshole who doesn't know how to treat a potential employee with respect and ask them serious questions. That person who walked out had the right answer... that you were not asking a serious question. Perhaps they handled it poorly, but they dodged a bullet if that is how you manage a team, with clown questions thrown out at random.
If you don't
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I simply responded clear and concisely to what was an unserious question. It sounds like you aren't the sort of person I was responding to, who asked an unserious question.
If you aren't going to hire me because I ask a clarifying question like, "Do you really want to know the answer to how many gas stations there are?" then I in fact would not want to be hired by you.
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This is a horrible question to judge a candidate by, and if you had asked me this question in an interview I would seriously reconsider whether I had made a mistake by applying or taking the interview.
This is a trick question, and shows a lack of professionalism on the part of the interviewer. The applicant is assuming that they is being judged for their qualifications to perform the job for which they applied. Does the job constitute answering trick questions? Are you going to be asking trick questions
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Are. That they are. Not is. Wish this thing would let a user edit a post.
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Post editing is a bit of a tricky proposition. It can certainly cause a lot of confusion if a chat system allows editing posts that have already been replied to (or are in the process of being replied to since someone might be composing a lengthy reply that makes no sense if the edit comes before they post). Generally you should at least have notifications on all replies that the post they are replying to was edited and probably a way to see the original post.
What might be best is some sort of grace period
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How would you have responded to something along the lines of "That's not something I know offhand but..." followed by an approximation method and an approximate answer? You stated that you wanted to hear "I don't know" and would sometimes ask how they would approximate it, but what if the admission of ignorance to the actual facts came along with an attempt to answer anyway?
Alternately, what if the admission of ignorance was less explicit and along the lines of "I can find out, but I don't know off the top
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Spot on.
As I mentioned, there is a right answer, which a quick search will provide. Asking clarifying questions is actually part and parcel of any developer role, and is something that should be happening on a regular basis. That's something *I* look for in an interviewee for my team.
Why the original poster in this would accept "I don't know" as the "correct" answer, rather than the much more accurate "Hang on a sec, lemme look for it oh here it is 160,000." is beyond me.
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As presented, it did seem a bit rigid to me. Now, of course, there may have been leeway in actual practice, which is why I asked about those three scenarios. It's one thing to literally only accept the precise three (four depending on how you count contractions, which I tend to count as two words though the standard seems to be to count them as one) words "I don't know", but another to simply accept the admission that the given answer is just a process to reach an imperfect answer, for example. The original
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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
Re:Sold his stock (Score:4, Insightful)
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 life. Again, for an engineer, that is just the biggest win in the world.
There are still people in the world who just do stuff because they enjoy doing stuff - not for the fame, or the money. But capitalism places no value on such people and in many ways (like you're suggesting here) can't comprehend why they would 'waste their time' doing anything but something that has economic utility value.
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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.
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Woz is worth over 100M. He's not sitting in the poor house.
Re:Sold his stock (Score:4, Informative)
I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.
"We take abuse of our platform seriously..." (Score:5, Informative)
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: "We take abuse of our platform seriously..." (Score:2)
For a brief period when the US bombed Iran and again a couple of weeks ago there was IDF propaganda here on slashdot, served by Adsense, which is operated by⦠Google. I should have taken screenshots.
It's back to the usual temu and fake game ads now.
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YouTube pays kids to assault people. Twitter is mostly just market manipulation. Instagram is a transnational pig-butchering scam, etc...
Profitability without liability always leads to people getting hurt. Removal of Section 230 is the only chance the internet has of surviving.
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Profitability without liability always leads to people getting hurt. Removal of Section 230 is the only chance the internet has of surviving.
Simultaneously though, section 230 is the only reason sites like Slashdot can even exist in today's world. Can you imagine if Slashdot or any other discussion site were liable for the comments of all of its posters? An all or nothing, throw the baby out with the bathwater approach is not the way to go here. Section 230 might need to be more thought out so that it can simultaneously provide some protection from/liability for scams and, regardless of section 230, the scammers themselves need to be caught and
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Section 230 defends platform owners that promote fraud at the expense of the users who end up being the victims. Before Section 230 we had a vibrant and growing communi
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It already has tools to detect scams. And it could train AI on previous scam videos, images, transcripts, urls to detect new ones with a high degree of accuracy. It might still need humans or volunteers to review flagged ads, but the reality is that if they properly policed their platform then scams would be background noise rather than endemic.
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They do take abuse of their platform seriously, but they only consider action abuse when it causes problems for them.
See No Evil Jose claims that they "take action quickly when we detect violations" but neglects to mention that they do everything they can not to detect them.
He says "we have tools for users to report channels that are impersonating their likeness or business" but also doesn't mention that this is the only kind of abuse they care about, and that only because it makes them look stupid when the
Re: How does youtube benefit from this scam? (Score:2)
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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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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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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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Sometimes the CIA can do it, but spend like $200k to get results. That doesn't work for smaller fraud.
I've heard that about petty theft too. On the other hand, I was just reading a story about a mechanic who was sick of rims being stolen from cars on his lot and the police not being able to do anything. So he hit a tracker inside the tire and it led the thief who is being prosecuted for about $30K worth of stolen car parts (which he would have made a lot less selling than the appraised value, of course). That's just what they found at the time but it's almost certain that was just the tip of the iceberg. Th
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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.
Re: NOT Section 230 again (Score:2)
Do we sue AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or the Bell Companies when scammers use the phone to take our money?
Depends. Do they know it's happening? Have they taken any steps at all to prevent it? Your laws may vary.
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?
Noâ¦. But in the UK advertising is regulated by the ASA. TV ads in particular are pre-approved as I recall. The problem is that this oversight doesn't carry over to the Internet. Even if the ads we saw all came from UK companies and the scams etc. were taken down there would be two more piles of AI crap put up before the page has time to reload.
Let's say hypothetically that a broadcaster accide
Why 'stalled'? (Score:2)
This is bad journalism (Score:4, Insightful)
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:
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.
Re: Easy fix (Score:2)