[vox-tech] Netflix

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jim Stockford (jim at well.com):

>     how do you know online petitions are not worth...? 
>     if i were in charge of a company or department, i'd 
> make sure y group was attentive to incoming electronic 
> info. i'd at least try to ensure that the filters were 
> sufficiently granular and produced useful statistics. 
>     it's a question: do you have info or are you jaded 
> or some such? 

I suspect he has info -- and that it's the same info anyone 
who's taken a serious look at the history of online petitions 
and e-mail political campaigns arrives at:

1.  The results are dead-easy to fake or alter -- notoriously
so, to the point where Congressional aides politely ignore all
supposed constituent letters arriving via e-mail (especially the
98%+ with oddly similar wording).

2.  Generally, the petitions are venting exercises among people
wanting a vendor to do something plainly not in the vendor's business
interest.  In this case, Netflix takes its marching orders from Our
Lords in Hollywood, who have decreed strong and updatable encryption 
for anything at HD resolution, to control what the sheeple are
permitted to.  Period.  If you get 100,000 people to say to Netflix
'Please provide your proprietary software for Linux x86 without
requiring our machines to be DRM-imprisoned', they will find the nicest
possible way to say no.  And all those people signing petitions will
have wasted their time and energy, having not paid attention to basics.

But I guess they'll have felt a sense of accomplishment at having gone 
begging to a vendor.  People apparently do.