Live data from Hacker News

Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

unionleader.com

61–70 of 336 posts

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#62
post #3

archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20201028172931/https://www.union...

Thanks. I'm visiting the UK, and I'm astonished at how many sites are blocked.

They're not blocked, they're blocking themselves.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#63
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For local news organizations who don't get any revenue from foreign viewers, it's much cheaper (and more profitable) to just block Europeans than to try and comply with GDPR.

this isn't correct, and i wish it would stop being repeated on HN. if you don't target/do business with Europeans specifically, there is nothing to comply with. what jurisdiction does Europe have? however, a lot of "small", local news organisations are actually owned by huge (multi-national) corporations. they might work hard to preserve that small appearance, but do have a reason to fear the GDPR.

They might use an ad network that automatically provides geo-targeted ads to Europeans. I'm not sure if that would qualify at targeting/doing business with Europeans under the GDPR, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#65
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wear a hardhat and carry a clipboard.

I used to participate in a city-wide water pistol assassination tournament. Skipped the hard hat, got white coveralls from Home Depot, pinned my work id to it, carried a clipboard. Got in everywhere I needed to be, including a heliport and a private boat dock. I forget where I read it, but the phrase "just act like you're supposed to be there" has stuck with me a long time, and paid dividends.

What city was this in? Is it in a place where other people have real guns? Is it in a place where the cops have guns?

I both want to play and suspect that it would go really really badly.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A vpn is always an option, and it's commoditized enough. Eventually all regions that pretend to care about their citizens freedom should adopt a GDPR like law.

> Eventually all regions that pretend to care about their citizens freedom should adopt a GDPR like law. But unless they all adopt the same one, the requirements will all be different, which means they'd each have independent compliance costs, which means local news providers like this will still block everybody outside of their own jurisdiction so that they only have to pay one set of compliance costs instead of six…

Exactly. Attempting to regulate the internet will always end in failure, as we've seen again and again. The EU's initiatives are very noble but I think: as they try to keep enforcing their laws and fines, they're just going to end up with less content being available to people in their jurisdiction. You thought copyright region-restrictions were bad.. just wait until Spotify refuses to serve your continent because compliance is costing more than the profits you generate.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#67
post #25

amusingly enough, coming from the EU the site told me: "451: Unavailable due to legal reasons"

Even if any tracking your site does already fully complies with GDPR as does your handling of personal data, it still takes some effort and costs some money if GDPR actually applies to your site. If you are not in Europe, the main thing that determines whether or not GDPR applies to your site is Article 3 of the GDPR, "Territorial Scope", and the corresponding Recitals. A big factor there is whether you are offering…

It's not only offering goods and services but also "monitoring of behaviour" so analytics and tracking, which, strictly speaking, makes the GDPR applicable to most websites on this planet.

In practice, if you don't have high visibility (i.e are small enough, which probably means 90% of websites) and don't have any presence in the EU then just ignore GDPR because no-one is going to go after a website on another continent because it tracks visitors and sometimes people from the EU visit it.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#68

I guess this brings up and interesting issue -- once someone knows the ins and outs of a system, sometimes there are very few barriers internally to check that an order/paperwork is legit. There was a story in WSJ like last week about how the Japanese red stamp / seal still survives and is a barrier to them adopting new technology for practical every day speeding up of tasks. And keeps things like faxes around unnece…

Years ago I was working somewhere and instead of getting a supervisor to approve some minor thing we would just put in a supervisor id that was known to people. Eventually, we got caught because that person had quit working there a few years ago and someone saw her code being used to approve things.

It's surprising when people casually admit to dishonest behaviour as if it's no big deal.

Re: Woman allegedly impersonated prosecutor, dropped charges against herself

#70
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For local news organizations who don't get any revenue from foreign viewers, it's much cheaper (and more profitable) to just block Europeans than to try and comply with GDPR.

this isn't correct, and i wish it would stop being repeated on HN. if you don't target/do business with Europeans specifically, there is nothing to comply with. what jurisdiction does Europe have? however, a lot of "small", local news organisations are actually owned by huge (multi-national) corporations. they might work hard to preserve that small appearance, but do have a reason to fear the GDPR.

GDPR also apply to websites that process personal data to "monitor behaviour" irrespective of whether they target or do business with EU residents as long as the person being monitored is within the EU. So your claim is also incorrect...
Post reply on HN