8 ms·

Steve Wozniak sues YouTube over ongoing bitcoin scams

113 points by Ceezy 6y ago

austincheney 6y ago
I am so ready for law suits to tear down Section 230 and similar legal shields. Web sites should not have unique legal protections just to show outrageous ad content only to plead ignorance when publishing content is the revenue stream. They should be held liable for all content expressed on their platforms like any other publisher. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communica...
- TheAsprngHacker 6y ago
  It is my understanding that website owners (especially owners of small websites) rely on Section 230 in order to host user-submitted content (such as comments), as they cannot feasibly moderate all the content and they don't want to be held liable for anything inappropriate or illegal. Am I mistaken?
  - fossuser 6y ago
    The person you’re replying to is mistaken - 230 protects owners by allowing them to moderate, without it the existing legal precedent would force them to do nothing because any moderation would make them responsible for everything (as was the case before 230). This point is often confused and misunderstood. People think without 230 owners would be liable, but they’d only be liable if they moderated (so they wouldn’t). Without 230 owners would not moderate which would be worse for everyone. https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/ https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/ > “ In other words, the act of moderating any of the user-generated content on its forums made Prodigy liable for all of the user-generated content on its forums — in this case to the tune of $200 million. This left services that hosted user-generated content with only one option: zero moderation. That was the only way to be classified as a distributor with the associated shield from liability, and not as a publisher.” > “The point of Section 230, then, was to make moderation legally viable; this came via the “Good Samaritan” provision” > “In short, Section 230 doesn’t shield platforms from the responsibility to moderate; it in fact makes moderation possible in the first place. Nor does Section 230 require neutrality: the entire reason it exists was because true neutrality — that is, zero moderation beyond what is illegal — was undesirable to Congress.”
    - saurik 6y ago
      I think the argument is that someone merely hosting something horrible on YouTube isn't really a problem if no one can find it? YouTube could still exist without Section 230, and it would work "great": it wouldn't have any "recommendation" or "discovery" algorithms--which we all know have been shown to actively drag people into extreme positions, and are of a class of systems that optimize for "engagement", which isn't even a healthy thing for a user to have--and would feel more like Instagram (without the discover page that doesn't work well anyway, and without the new recommended feed that maybe you like but a lot of us despise), where if you know about someone you follow them and you can see what the people you follow posted and you can get notifications when those person post new videos and if you dislike them you unfollow them... what sucks about all of these systems right now is someone posts something horrible and you then that content is actively pushed at people all while YouTube is making a profit, and then they can choose how quickly they want to respond to different kinds of moderation, and the whole thing is a bit evil :(.
      - fossuser 6y ago
        This is unrelated to 230. 230 is specifically about giving protection to sites so they can moderate their content without being legally responsible for every thing users post. It’s an update to older law that was written pre-internet for older style publishers (where they had more editorial control over what was published because the content wasn’t user generated). It doesn’t have to do with recommendation algorithms. Killing 230 would force YouTube to have zero content moderation beyond removing illegal content. It would be a bad outcome (which is why 230 was created).
        alacombe 6y ago
        > Killing 230 would force YouTube to have zero content moderation beyond removing illegal content. It would be a bad outcome (which is why 230 was created). That actually sounds much better than arbitrary moderation.
        azinman2 6y ago
  - austincheney 6y ago
    The primary interest of section 230 is to allow user submitted content for public exposition without a barrier and typically for an advertising based revenue stream. In this context the profit margins are incredibly tiny and thus utterly reliant upon high transaction frequency. The larger the website the more reliant they are on this protect, because there is more revenue in jeopardy and the cost of moderation scales disproportionately to the profit margin. The immediate consequence of revoking 230 is hindering anonymous user contributions to websites for public exhibition. The liability associated with such can be substantially marginalized by any number of practices that cripple a public facing ad based revenue model.
bb88 6y ago
Why does it not surprise me that bitcoin is involved in this?
Yhippa 6y ago
I'm kind of surprised by these scams. If you're savvy enough to know how to buy cryptocurrency in the first place, how can you get duped by these kinds of scams?
- chriszhang 6y ago
  Do you really have to be savvy to buy cryptocurrency? A lot of people just sign up for an online wallet and buy cryptocurrencies as if they were trading shares online.
- throwlogon 6y ago
  > If you're savvy enough to know how to buy cryptocurrency Savvy enough to know how to buy cryptocurrency, but not savvy enough to not buy cryptocurrency.
- red2awn 6y ago
  Normal sense is thrown out the window when people see a chance to get free money. And it's not that hard to buy bitcoin is it?
- reaperducer 6y ago
  I think the days of cryptocurrency being for the "savvy" are long past. It's been featured in everything from The Today Show to supermarket tabloids. There is no counting the number of crypto buying tutorials on the web. There are crypto ATMs. I've heard retires with no computer talking about it. It's not mainstream the way a savings account is, but it's not the exclusive club the promoters want people to think it is.
  - oivey 6y ago
    Even before it showed up in the mainstream Bitcoin was famous for its scams.
  - blaser-waffle 6y ago
    There was another post on HN just 2-3 days ago, about how an HN-poster was taking a cab in Sydney and the cabbie was talking to him about BTC. Cue the inevitable Joe Kennedy comparison: Kennedy Sr. supposedly got a shoe-shine one day, and had a conversation with the shoe-shine boy about said boy's hot stock tips. Kennedy realized everything was overheated and overhyped, and pulled his cash out of the market; the crash of '29 happened not long after.
orionblastar 6y ago
Bitcoin scams, never send Bitcoins unless you verified the source you are sending them to. Giveaways don't exist and even if they do you should not send Bitcoins in a contest but send a Bitcoin address to the person to send you Bitcoins.
jaimex2 6y ago
With all their recent moderation changes over the years Youtube have stupidly opened themselves up to these kinds of lawsuits and it'll be what opens up oportunity for a competitor to take over. The DMCA take down system was a legal requirement and one that was hands off, submission, manual verification and action. By moderating things like hacking or covid videos automatically they have opened a massive can of litigation smack down on themselves.
- ravenstine 6y ago
  A competitor would have to do a lot, unfortunately, to compete with YouTube. YouTube is so much more than just video hosting, and enough time has passed without any serious competition that YouTube is nearly insurmountable. Sure, you can make a YouTube "clone" easily, but does it support live streaming at large scale? Does it allow for superchats? Can it serve 4k? What about buying and watching shows and movies? The only thing that comes close to competing is TikTok, which is a gimmick and not truly in the same space. There's BitChute, but because that becomes the refuge for all the people kicked off YouTube, it's easy for the media to paint them as "far right"; the same will likely be true for anyone who creates a real alternative to YouTube.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    The technical implementation isn't the the fundamental moat. The real moat is the advertising/monetization. The ad revenue drives content creators and now in 2020 likely the (presumably quite insane) operating costs. Sadly the harsh, Disney-esque moderation appears to have been necessary for this. This is also why it seems unlikely why we'll see an alternative, more open Youtube: It won't be able to able to compete on ad revenue. It has taken Google 14 years to get to this level. I wonder how many 10s of billions of dollars have been spent in the process.
creato 6y ago
These scams are so stupid I can't believe people actually fall for them in significant numbers, let alone after all this time they've been going on. The scams must be part of some kind of bitcoin laundering scheme, I just can't figure out how, it seems more like a bitcoin tainting scheme rather than cleaning.
- Hokusai 6y ago
  > I can't believe people actually fall for them There is people with a high level of trust. They will believe almost anything. Sometimes they are in a vulnerable situation, sometimes it comes with age as cognitive function gets worse, other times maybe people with high stress situations looking for a way out of their problems, they exist. In phishing, the scammer knows that most people will ignore their mails. But, they are trying to get to the vulnerable people, the ones that will bite the bait. "significant numbers" is difficult to evaluate. Maybe it is a very low percentage of the people that is targeted, but when the targeted are in the millions the victims are going to add up. And, in my experience, this is a psychological trait. A kind of opposite to paranoia. A paranoid person will not believe anyone. A too-trusting person will believe everyone. Phishing and other scams prey on the vulnerable.
  - tzfld 6y ago
    > There is people with a high level of trust. They will believe almost anything. The internet must be a hell of a place for these.
  - smlckz 6y ago
    > A kind of opposite to paranoia. You mean, pronoia? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pronoia#Etymology_2 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pronoia#Etymology_2
    - Hokusai 6y ago
      > You mean, pronoia? Yes. (psychology) A belief (sometimes regarded as irrational) that people conspire to do one good. [from 1981] Antonym: paranoia It is interesting how prevalent is "paranoia" in books and movies and how little attention "pronoia" gets. Thank you. I didn't knew that the word existed.
nix23 6y ago
Hello Sir's, we have a new quantum-computer (really fast really safe) send over bitcoins to safe your own. Best regards, QuantumSuperFast ACME Inc. BTW: This is what happens when you reply to spam email | James Veitch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QdPW8JrYzQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QdPW8JrYzQ
- pedrocx486 6y ago
  Ironically, I tried replying to spam to have fun and never got an answer. I assume they know their targets?
  - nix23 6y ago
    I think most of the times it's just to see if the Address is actually used..then sell it as an active email-address.
neurostimulant 6y ago
I set up a bitcoin (and other crypto) payment option for my client a while ago, and it's sad to see it's getting used by less and less customers every month (not even a single customer use it in the last two months). Bitcoin is much more useful in the early days as a payment option. It let me receive money for my small gigs from overseas clients back then when I was a student without getting a major cut from transfer fee, and let me purchase stuff online via reloadable bitcoin virtual debit card or even direct bitcoin payment (back then banks in my country treat online purchase as high risk and disable support for online payment with visa/mc debit cards, and as a student I couldn't get a credit card yet). It did felt like a currency of the future back then. Now it's just another financial commodity used by day traders and get-rich-quick scammers :(
- SergeAx 6y ago
  You said it yourself: sending money from overseas or making online purchases got much easier today, so crypto is being displaced into more shadier areas, where fiat electronic payments are less acceptable, like buying illegal goods or scamming people.
- analreceiver 6y ago
  An explanation might be that its Store of Value proposition is gaining ground over the Currency one
SergeAx 6y ago
I really hope that it's not that percent of retarded (in medical sense) people is growing thru population, it's just that connecting to internet and buy bitcoins became extremely easy and seamless.

113 points by Ceezy 6y ago

I am so ready for law suits to tear down Section 230 and similar legal shields. Web sites should not have unique legal protections just to show outrageous ad content only to plead ignorance when publishing content is the revenue stream. They should be held liable for all content expressed on their platforms like any other publisher. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communica...

TheAsprngHacker 6y ago
It is my understanding that website owners (especially owners of small websites) rely on Section 230 in order to host user-submitted content (such as comments), as they cannot feasibly moderate all the content and they don't want to be held liable for anything inappropriate or illegal. Am I mistaken?
- fossuser 6y ago
  The person you’re replying to is mistaken - 230 protects owners by allowing them to moderate, without it the existing legal precedent would force them to do nothing because any moderation would make them responsible for everything (as was the case before 230). This point is often confused and misunderstood. People think without 230 owners would be liable, but they’d only be liable if they moderated (so they wouldn’t). Without 230 owners would not moderate which would be worse for everyone. https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/ https://stratechery.com/2019/a-framework-for-moderation/ > “ In other words, the act of moderating any of the user-generated content on its forums made Prodigy liable for all of the user-generated content on its forums — in this case to the tune of $200 million. This left services that hosted user-generated content with only one option: zero moderation. That was the only way to be classified as a distributor with the associated shield from liability, and not as a publisher.” > “The point of Section 230, then, was to make moderation legally viable; this came via the “Good Samaritan” provision” > “In short, Section 230 doesn’t shield platforms from the responsibility to moderate; it in fact makes moderation possible in the first place. Nor does Section 230 require neutrality: the entire reason it exists was because true neutrality — that is, zero moderation beyond what is illegal — was undesirable to Congress.”
  - saurik 6y ago
    I think the argument is that someone merely hosting something horrible on YouTube isn't really a problem if no one can find it? YouTube could still exist without Section 230, and it would work "great": it wouldn't have any "recommendation" or "discovery" algorithms--which we all know have been shown to actively drag people into extreme positions, and are of a class of systems that optimize for "engagement", which isn't even a healthy thing for a user to have--and would feel more like Instagram (without the discover page that doesn't work well anyway, and without the new recommended feed that maybe you like but a lot of us despise), where if you know about someone you follow them and you can see what the people you follow posted and you can get notifications when those person post new videos and if you dislike them you unfollow them... what sucks about all of these systems right now is someone posts something horrible and you then that content is actively pushed at people all while YouTube is making a profit, and then they can choose how quickly they want to respond to different kinds of moderation, and the whole thing is a bit evil :(.
    - fossuser 6y ago
      This is unrelated to 230. 230 is specifically about giving protection to sites so they can moderate their content without being legally responsible for every thing users post. It’s an update to older law that was written pre-internet for older style publishers (where they had more editorial control over what was published because the content wasn’t user generated). It doesn’t have to do with recommendation algorithms. Killing 230 would force YouTube to have zero content moderation beyond removing illegal content. It would be a bad outcome (which is why 230 was created).
      - alacombe 6y ago
        > Killing 230 would force YouTube to have zero content moderation beyond removing illegal content. It would be a bad outcome (which is why 230 was created). That actually sounds much better than arbitrary moderation.
        azinman2 6y ago
- austincheney 6y ago
  The primary interest of section 230 is to allow user submitted content for public exposition without a barrier and typically for an advertising based revenue stream. In this context the profit margins are incredibly tiny and thus utterly reliant upon high transaction frequency. The larger the website the more reliant they are on this protect, because there is more revenue in jeopardy and the cost of moderation scales disproportionately to the profit margin. The immediate consequence of revoking 230 is hindering anonymous user contributions to websites for public exhibition. The liability associated with such can be substantially marginalized by any number of practices that cripple a public facing ad based revenue model.

bb88 6y ago

Why does it not surprise me that bitcoin is involved in this?

Yhippa 6y ago

I'm kind of surprised by these scams. If you're savvy enough to know how to buy cryptocurrency in the first place, how can you get duped by these kinds of scams?

chriszhang 6y ago
Do you really have to be savvy to buy cryptocurrency? A lot of people just sign up for an online wallet and buy cryptocurrencies as if they were trading shares online.
throwlogon 6y ago
> If you're savvy enough to know how to buy cryptocurrency Savvy enough to know how to buy cryptocurrency, but not savvy enough to not buy cryptocurrency.
red2awn 6y ago
Normal sense is thrown out the window when people see a chance to get free money. And it's not that hard to buy bitcoin is it?
reaperducer 6y ago
I think the days of cryptocurrency being for the "savvy" are long past. It's been featured in everything from The Today Show to supermarket tabloids. There is no counting the number of crypto buying tutorials on the web. There are crypto ATMs. I've heard retires with no computer talking about it. It's not mainstream the way a savings account is, but it's not the exclusive club the promoters want people to think it is.
- oivey 6y ago
  Even before it showed up in the mainstream Bitcoin was famous for its scams.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  There was another post on HN just 2-3 days ago, about how an HN-poster was taking a cab in Sydney and the cabbie was talking to him about BTC. Cue the inevitable Joe Kennedy comparison: Kennedy Sr. supposedly got a shoe-shine one day, and had a conversation with the shoe-shine boy about said boy's hot stock tips. Kennedy realized everything was overheated and overhyped, and pulled his cash out of the market; the crash of '29 happened not long after.

orionblastar 6y ago

Bitcoin scams, never send Bitcoins unless you verified the source you are sending them to. Giveaways don't exist and even if they do you should not send Bitcoins in a contest but send a Bitcoin address to the person to send you Bitcoins.

jaimex2 6y ago

With all their recent moderation changes over the years Youtube have stupidly opened themselves up to these kinds of lawsuits and it'll be what opens up oportunity for a competitor to take over. The DMCA take down system was a legal requirement and one that was hands off, submission, manual verification and action. By moderating things like hacking or covid videos automatically they have opened a massive can of litigation smack down on themselves.

ravenstine 6y ago
A competitor would have to do a lot, unfortunately, to compete with YouTube. YouTube is so much more than just video hosting, and enough time has passed without any serious competition that YouTube is nearly insurmountable. Sure, you can make a YouTube "clone" easily, but does it support live streaming at large scale? Does it allow for superchats? Can it serve 4k? What about buying and watching shows and movies? The only thing that comes close to competing is TikTok, which is a gimmick and not truly in the same space. There's BitChute, but because that becomes the refuge for all the people kicked off YouTube, it's easy for the media to paint them as "far right"; the same will likely be true for anyone who creates a real alternative to YouTube.
- tpmx 6y ago
  The technical implementation isn't the the fundamental moat. The real moat is the advertising/monetization. The ad revenue drives content creators and now in 2020 likely the (presumably quite insane) operating costs. Sadly the harsh, Disney-esque moderation appears to have been necessary for this. This is also why it seems unlikely why we'll see an alternative, more open Youtube: It won't be able to able to compete on ad revenue. It has taken Google 14 years to get to this level. I wonder how many 10s of billions of dollars have been spent in the process.

creato 6y ago

These scams are so stupid I can't believe people actually fall for them in significant numbers, let alone after all this time they've been going on. The scams must be part of some kind of bitcoin laundering scheme, I just can't figure out how, it seems more like a bitcoin tainting scheme rather than cleaning.

Hokusai 6y ago
> I can't believe people actually fall for them There is people with a high level of trust. They will believe almost anything. Sometimes they are in a vulnerable situation, sometimes it comes with age as cognitive function gets worse, other times maybe people with high stress situations looking for a way out of their problems, they exist. In phishing, the scammer knows that most people will ignore their mails. But, they are trying to get to the vulnerable people, the ones that will bite the bait. "significant numbers" is difficult to evaluate. Maybe it is a very low percentage of the people that is targeted, but when the targeted are in the millions the victims are going to add up. And, in my experience, this is a psychological trait. A kind of opposite to paranoia. A paranoid person will not believe anyone. A too-trusting person will believe everyone. Phishing and other scams prey on the vulnerable.
- tzfld 6y ago
  > There is people with a high level of trust. They will believe almost anything. The internet must be a hell of a place for these.
- smlckz 6y ago
  > A kind of opposite to paranoia. You mean, pronoia? https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pronoia#Etymology_2 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pronoia#Etymology_2
  - Hokusai 6y ago
    > You mean, pronoia? Yes. (psychology) A belief (sometimes regarded as irrational) that people conspire to do one good. [from 1981] Antonym: paranoia It is interesting how prevalent is "paranoia" in books and movies and how little attention "pronoia" gets. Thank you. I didn't knew that the word existed.

nix23 6y ago

Hello Sir's, we have a new quantum-computer (really fast really safe) send over bitcoins to safe your own. Best regards, QuantumSuperFast ACME Inc. BTW: This is what happens when you reply to spam email | James Veitch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QdPW8JrYzQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QdPW8JrYzQ

pedrocx486 6y ago
Ironically, I tried replying to spam to have fun and never got an answer. I assume they know their targets?
- nix23 6y ago
  I think most of the times it's just to see if the Address is actually used..then sell it as an active email-address.

neurostimulant 6y ago

I set up a bitcoin (and other crypto) payment option for my client a while ago, and it's sad to see it's getting used by less and less customers every month (not even a single customer use it in the last two months). Bitcoin is much more useful in the early days as a payment option. It let me receive money for my small gigs from overseas clients back then when I was a student without getting a major cut from transfer fee, and let me purchase stuff online via reloadable bitcoin virtual debit card or even direct bitcoin payment (back then banks in my country treat online purchase as high risk and disable support for online payment with visa/mc debit cards, and as a student I couldn't get a credit card yet). It did felt like a currency of the future back then. Now it's just another financial commodity used by day traders and get-rich-quick scammers :(

SergeAx 6y ago
You said it yourself: sending money from overseas or making online purchases got much easier today, so crypto is being displaced into more shadier areas, where fiat electronic payments are less acceptable, like buying illegal goods or scamming people.
analreceiver 6y ago
An explanation might be that its Store of Value proposition is gaining ground over the Currency one

SergeAx 6y ago

I really hope that it's not that percent of retarded (in medical sense) people is growing thru population, it's just that connecting to internet and buy bitcoins became extremely easy and seamless.