Live data from Hacker News

The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

cyberlaw.stanford.edu

281–290 of 520 posts

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you writing years as if they are C octals? Standards in communication are important.

Perhaps he's from the future and still has nightmares about the crisis of 9999.

Dear lord … a while ago I had to integrate with a client database that had a required “end date” for indefinite events. They filled the value with the maximum year - December 31, 9999.

Our systems initially supported this. But we found an extremely popular and widely used date parsing library has terrible bug. For some reason (if forgot what) as part of its logic it checks something about the date after the date it’s parsing.

So for users of this extremely popular library the 9999 crisis will actually happen a day early.

I kept trying to alter the non responsive maintainers that there was going to be a major crisis with their product in about 7000.

They never got back to me.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#282
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we have ever had the kind of free society or democracy people think of when they say "we have a free society and a democracy." From jailing anti-war protestors (WWI) to jailing anti-war protestors (Vietnam) to allowing corporations to put serious, nearly life-ruining heat on whistleblowers, to the way the media largely operates by uncritically republishing press releases and communiques, I would say it'…

It's a continuum. Just because Gary Webb "committed suicide" with multiple gunshot wounds to the head doesn't mean the CIA in the 01990s was just as unaccountable as Beria's NKVD, much less just as oppressive. Dan Rather's CBS Evening News was no Wikileaks , much less Wikipedia, but it wasn't Pravda either. Serpico got shot in the face for being the first honest cop in the US, but you could still do business in New Y…

Just FYI the zero-padded date thing is incredibly distracting and weird. (Yes I know there’s some “foundation” pushing this, but still).

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#283
post #73
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a free society and democracy before the internet.

Sort of. Look up Western Unions role in the 1876 US election[1]. Stolen communications to support a specific candidate and a compromise between political parties on military presence sounds like a very precarious position for free society to be in. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/how-the-robber-b... (also referenced in Tim Wu’s The Master Switch)

I heard a story that at the 1864 National Union (Republican) Convention, there was a bunch of haggling about who would be Abraham Lincolns VP.

A telegram was sent offering the position to a well liked military officer named William Rosecrans.

Roseceans agreed, and sent a telegram back. But the telegram never made it.

It’s assumed the Secretary of War used his censorship powers to prevent it from reaching its destination.

The result 18 months later was President Andrew Johnson.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#284
post #220

I've said it before, I'll say it again. The only way this ends with the preservation of encryption as a standard is a bipartisan fappening-style leak of CEOs, politicians, lawyers, etc. Not just sexual content, but intimate content of any and all kinds: financial records, healthcare visits, everyday texts, etc.

I'm in agreement, but how sad a commentary on the state of politics and 'the best governance society has developed so far'?

All I hear from the people at the top is: Me, me, fucking me!

(Would I be any better in a position of power? I don't know, but I'd like to think so).

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#285
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were many attempts by the same people to monitor phone and mail communications.

The international standards do just fine for enabling spying. Take Call Line Identification (CLI) aka Caller ID. Any device plugged into the ptsn phone system which can display caller id has to have v23 dial up modem protocol facilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Regional_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_V.23 This means _anyone_ with access to the ptsn can upload malicious firmware to a tel…

> reddit or twitter does not and regularly on reddit illegal porn (child & animal) is making the front page of reddit before moderators take it down.

I am on reddit multiple times a day for years and I have never seen this happen.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#287
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must not have been around when the government was pushing for backdoors on Telecom products in the 1990s. Before the internet was a thing for most people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip

Thank you. I was trying recall the technology being pushed at the time that would have allowed the NSA to have a backdoor.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#288
post #243
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gov isnt worried about criminals or terrorists: those guys are easy to deal with. The gov is worried about organised protests, like those canadian truckers, because protesters are protected by laws. Encrypted communications is an obvious enabler of such protests.

> like those canadian truckers, I thought the protestors turned out to, by the numbers, prove to be not Canadian and not Truckers. Meanwhile, I'm not sure why you would pick that example. There seem to be more relevant protests in the US you only have to go back a short while. Meanwhile, it's difficult to assess if the US government has a great track record at dealing with terrorists. We're unsure of how many inciden…

> Meanwhile, I'm not sure why you would pick that example.

I think it's pretty clear why the parent poster choose that protest as an example of government tyrrany, and not the, uh, couple of months of gassing, rubber-coated bullets, and beatings that preceded it.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#289
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody thinks they're incorruptible, and they often extend that to institutions they identify with. Very, very few people have ever honestly grappled with their shadow side. Even if you do, you may still prefer your own shadow side to that of whoever your opponents are.

> Everybody thinks they're incorruptible It chafes me a little to see this so often phrased as something "everybody" thinks. There are enough people who feel otherwise in my social circles that it's pretty easy for me to consider this as a shockingly dumb assumption for a person to hold. Though I do acknowledge that you're probably close to right from a purely numerical perspective.

No post body was provided.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#290
post #221
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gov isnt worried about criminals or terrorists: those guys are easy to deal with. The gov is worried about organised protests, like those canadian truckers, because protesters are protected by laws. Encrypted communications is an obvious enabler of such protests.

Of course they're worried about criminals and terrorists, as well as protests; nobody wants to watch their children die in a home invasion or a burning skyscraper, not even politicians, and nobody wants habitual violent criminals to repeatedly victimize innocent people (unless they identify strongly with the criminals). Peaceful protests can be a powerful instrument for change, including taking away government power,…

> Remember who won the elections after the overthrows of Mubarak, the Shah, and the Tsar.

A mostly liberal-democratic provisional government that was violently overthrown eight months later by a Bolshevik coup because it refused to deal with the same problems (war and famine) that caused the Tsar to be overthrown?

Have we all forgotten the February revolution..?

Post reply on HN