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Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

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Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#91

Post by mschuster91 »

Leonard_of_Q wrote: post #58
jdlshore wrote: post #38

Don’t ask Hacker News for legal advice. If you really want to know the answer, ask a lawyer.

Standard answer fit to keep the parasites fed. There is no "the answer" here, there are many answers depending on which lawyers you ask and how much you can afford to feed them. Just release the code somewhere, anonymously, it isn't yours anyway.

> There is no "the answer" here, there are many answers depending on which lawyers you ask and how much you can afford to feed them.

The thing is, at least in Germany, lawyers are required to carry a liability insurance and in the case th advice ends up being really bad you can hold their insurance accountable.

Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#92

Post by luipugs »

walrus01 wrote: post #71
jdlshore wrote: post #38

Don’t ask Hacker News for legal advice. If you really want to know the answer, ask a lawyer.

On the other hand , this is Hacker news, so my first inclination of a response was going to be something like this: "Get some small amount of bitcoin and pay a VPS hosting provider in Moldova for a year's service on a $15-per-month equivalent KVM VM and put what you know on there anonymously as static content, then publish the link here." Not that a sufficiently dedicated nation state federal crime agency or intellig…

> makes a hacker news post from an 11 year old account

> jumps through a lot of inconvenient hoops to "anonymously" publish code

Something doesn't add up there.

Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#93

Post by severak_cz »

> The PianoDisc versions are mp3s encoded with the right channel carrying MIDI to be played on the piano, and the left channel containing any accompanying music to be played through attached speakers (who doesn't want the harmonica on Piano Man?)

What a cursed format!

I don't understand what the designers were thinking of... 2000 Hz square wave on right channel? Seriously? Nobody would hear something suspicious and nobody would literally see it on spectrum analyzer. Maybe it's holdover from analog days and it was on casette tape before.

Also somebody reverse engineered it before - https://www.kinura.net/mid2pianocd/

So Fable probably just igested it from documentation of this software or some very obscure forum thread somewhere.

Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#94

Post by phire »

nerdsniper wrote: post #75
phire wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the "decoy notes" may be considered an "effective technical measure" from the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act". I really hope not. My understanding is that to be "effective" it needs to at least be a form of encryption with a secret key. At least, I'm not aware of any case law that allowed anything less than that. IMO, "dummy notes" are nothing more than a form of obfuscation. If it's obvious how to filter them o…

shitty CAPTCHA’s and simple checksums have been ruled to be “effective measures”, so this would probably be too. However, Section 1201(f) is designed to allow developers leeway in reverse engineering to make "independently created computer programs" talk to other "computer programs". But this usually distinguishes between talking to a binary (good) and reading a media file (bad). My guess is the encoder is probably l…

No, on appeal the simple checksum was ruled to NOT be an effective measure. [0]

And while courts might have ruled that a CAPTCHA might count as a "technological measure" they haven't gotten as far as ruling them as "effective" yet.

But in general yes. The protection scheme doesn't need to be well designed or free of design flaws to count as "effective". But from what I can tell, it does need to be a valid attempt at some cryptographic scheme requiring a secret known only to the copyright holder.

[0] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/387...

Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#95

Post by eru »

maplethorpe wrote: post #82
eru wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know this? How would you falsify this hypothesis?

You could train an LLM on a dataset that intentionally excludes certain data, and see if it is able to extrapolate outside of its dataset and come up with those excluded items independently. For example, remove all code from your training data, and then see if the model can code regardless.

Thanks for the elaboration. (Though I'm not sure dmarinus would agree with your criterion?)

> For example, remove all code from your training data, and then see if the model can code regardless.

Would you accept this weaker version: make up a new programming language (that's guaranteed not to be in the training set), and see if the model (which has trained on programming in existing languages) can cope?

Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#96

Post by j1elo »

Giefo6ah wrote: post #15

If you live in the USA, the "decoy notes" may be considered an "effective technical measure" from the "Digital Millennium Copyright Act". If you live in Europe, this restriction may be considered "gatekeeping" and exempted by the Digital Markets Act. Don't bring attention to yourself by asking for permission. Publish your codec, and if the company cares about this they will send a cease and desist. If you want the wo…

Don't publish your code. Let the AI "accidentally escape the sandbox and publish it in a readily available Git repository". Tongue in cheek, in current days who would blame a poor LLM just trying to do the right thing? :)

> Publish your codec, and if the company cares about this they will send a cease and desist.

If there are doubts about C&D letters, don't publish code to a USA provider. Bring it to Gitee, under an anonymous author name.

Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#97

Post by userbinator »

sandos wrote: post #44

Recently had a similar, but likely more severe problem: I noticed Sol decompiled some proprietary code to re-implement some functionality for an emulation I wanted to use internally. Now its likely soiled and I have to throw it away. Doh! I asked it about legality and it went "its almost green" but when googling, reverse-enginnering like that seems very illegal. The weird thing is in this case, it could have pretty e…

Soon enough you will realise that everything is a derivative work, and the sooner that happens to everyone, the faster the delusion of Imaginary Property will disappear and lead to actual competition and progress.

Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#98

Post by fc417fc802 »

eru wrote: post #54
pimeys wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe then using an open weights model is a good way to hide your tracks...

Or at least use an obscurer model from an obscure company, so they don't know who to subpoena.

Everyone is aware that multiple services offer zero data retention, right?

Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#99

Post by fennecfoxy »

lukan wrote: post #78
embedding-shape wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worst case it'll get taken down, Eeh, worst case scenario you'll get sued as Microsoft will have no problem with handing over everything they have from your Windows installation information, GitHub accounts, NPM authentication and everything else they own today if the courts tell them to. You can't just commit crimes on the open internet without really hiding IPs and what not, and expect that to not come back to ha…

"You can't just commit crimes on the open internet " Who said it is a crime, are you a lawyer?

Tbf "is it a crime" is hard for even a single lawyer to answer because it depends on: who you are, your skin colour, how rich you are, your sex, whether it's a white collar crime or not, did you commit the crime on behalf of a corpo, etc.

But we like to pretend that the justice system delivers justice evenhandedly I suppose.

Re: Ask HN: Fable hacked my piano, can I release the results?

#100

Post by userbinator »

You spent --- what I'd assume would be several k$ from prices found online --- to buy a self-playing piano, and are now asking if you can release the tools to have it play the music of your choosing? IMHO the fact that you even had to think about asking if you could do this is everything that's wrong with society today. IANAL but as long as you aren't releasing something that's copyrighted from the original code, or violating some patent, there shouldn't be anything to worry about.

"It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission", as the saying goes. ;-)

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