A demonstration of browser events used to monitor online behaviour - <AUTHOR> https://clickclickclick.click <comment><USER3> This reminded me that notch web game[1]. Both kept me interested and I find them a very pleasant form of art.

[1] [http://game.notch.net/drowning/](http://game.notch.net/drowning/)

<comment><USER4> Surprised no one has mentioned Cookie Clicker yet, which I think was what inspired notch to write that game: [http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/](http://orteil.dashnet.org/cookieclicker/)

Notch's game was written in Dart and the source code is simple and elegant:

[http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum- dare-29/?action=preview&uid...](http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum- dare-29/?action=preview&uid=398)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for effectively killing my productivity with that cookie clicker game.

<comment><USER6> Cookies are stupid, kill monsters instead in Clicker Heroes!

[https://www.clickerheroes.com/](https://www.clickerheroes.com/)

(Once you understand the meta-game and the meta-meta-game, it becomes seriously addicting)

<comment><USER7> Finally, a use for my triple-click mouse button!

<comment><USER8> Coolermaster Inferno, by any chance?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Who else feels a sense of horrible dread and frustration that every minutiae of my (and your) online activity is recorded for eternity and exploited to the fullest extent?

What are you going to do about it?

<comment><USER10> Not really horrified. Yes they save it, but they don't seem to be able to use it well. The ads I get on Facebook are sometimes really interesting (i.e. targeted well), on other pages it's mostly stuff I bought a while ago or topics where I don't even have a clue why they think that could be interesting.

And even though they can save it forever, it's outdated pretty quickly. If someone has information that I clicked a button 5 times when I visited a page in '09, this will have zero value now. The information is only valid for hours or days.

I guess most of this information is used to test behavior on pages and to optimize them. And I can only support that. Tracking like this is the reason why popular pages are intuitive. They perform A/B testing extensively to see what works best. I don't see an issue with that.

<comment><USER11> But the goal of that optimization is not to make your life better, it's to make money for them.

They may be pretty bad at it now, but one thing about technology is that it gets better and better, and their goal is to encourage consumption of their product.

I'm thinking about buying a new laptop right now. I'm trying to make a smart choice, weighing the funds I have available, my need for it, the options available, my preferences for various brands and features, and my own desire to have new shiny stuff.

The advertisers can distort this rational decision. Right now they just have a poorly-targeted generic bit of text that I don't really read in the sidebar of certain websites, and I feel comfortable with this level of influence. If they were super-persuasive at selling their product to me Present Me would consider that theft. Future Me would probably be grateful to the advertiser, and that's terrifying.

A Self-Driving, Self-Selling Tesla might show up at my door, perform an inspection of my current car, and, in its silky voice, deliver an irrefutable argument why I must never get in that car again and should instead hop in for a free ride across state lines so I can take out a home equity loan and cash in my 401k to buy it. Yikes!

The optimistic side of this is that maybe they'll eventually move beyond market research and on to individual research to give us stuff that we actually want. "Oh, LeifCarrotson is filtering out our 1366x768 TN panels, doesn't seem to care about thickness, has recently read about the Samsung 960 Pro? Let's build him one with a big 9-cell battery and longer travel keyboard, a good screen, and one of those SSDs. And he seems to be running Linux? Let's swap our default touchpad for one with an open driver, and donate a few percent of the profits to the EFF, that's sure to make him happy."

<comment><USER10> > But the goal of that optimization is not to make your life better, it's to > make money for them.

I don't pay to use services online. They somehow have to make money. Until we start donating/paying for each service we use, we have to expect that people will make money otherwise.

<comment><USER11> I'm not even talking about the free services, though.

I am talking about the ordinary consumer goods manufacturers that buy the ad space that may or may not be sold on free online services. They're the ones who want that ad space, who benefit from the targeting, and who make the whole operation work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It looks like all the audio files are stored as numbered mp3's on AWS, so those interested can grab all of them pretty simply.

My personal favorite is the, "Oh, for fucks sake": [https://s3-eu- west-1.amazonaws.com/clickclickclick.click/Voi...](https://s3-eu- west-1.amazonaws.com/clickclickclick.click/Voice/7030.mp3)

There's a song as well: [https://s3-eu- west-1.amazonaws.com/clickclickclick.click/Voi...](https://s3-eu- west-1.amazonaws.com/clickclickclick.click/Voice/10001.mp3)

<comment><USER13> Why do I know that song? Isn't it in Moulin Rouge or something?

<comment><USER12> Its a pretty old jazz standard by Nat King: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_Boy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_Boy)

There are tons of versions and variations of it

It does in fact show up in Moulin Rouge: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekCvBztYs_A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekCvBztYs_A)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm at work and a Dutch guy is speaking on the phone behind me, and then I hear this guy talk with a Dutch accent. It felt creepy as hell for a moment.

</comment><comment><USER15> Thank goodness for devtools...

        for (var lazyisgood = 0; lazyisgood < 1000; lazyisgood++) { $('a.button').click(); }

<comment><USER16> Subject has run script to click on the button ten times within one second

<comment><USER17> This is as far as i got.. [https://clickclickclick.click/#4650e8c30d3089e27cf1a931bdf06...](https://clickclickclick.click/#4650e8c30d3089e27cf1a931bdf06c96)

<comment><USER18> this seems to have overwritten my session, I now have your score

Lucky I had it open in another browser

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> ryan-c I got "Subject has run script to click on the button 10 times in one second" by using xdotool click --delay 10 --repeat 100 1, wonder whether that's checking timing or just assuming nobody clicks that fast.

<comment><USER19> Suspect it must be checking time, below didn't really trigger anything:

for (var i = 0; i < 30; i++) { setTimeout(()=> button.click(), Math.random()*1500) }

I wish bundle.js weren't minified, it could be fun to read.

<comment><USER20> [http://unminify.com/](http://unminify.com/) might help.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Haha. Well the narrator's accent betrays more than my mouse movements. could it be a dutch / danish white male in his late 20s?

<comment><USER22> Clearly a fairly strong Dutch accent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I used HotJar and it's pretty cool to see the actual website and the user navigating.

This is a video of an actual recording a site owner will see: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Odc4k4KXjc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Odc4k4KXjc)

<comment><USER24> I'm working on a similar project that aims to fully emulate the user's browser, [http://screensquid.com](http://screensquid.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> _Subject has clicked on the button nine times within one second._

Yup, ThinkPads with their dual mice (and mouse buttons!) are cool.

 _Subject has run script to click on the button ten times within one second._

"Wha--" * looks at xterm with "sleep 1; while true; do xdotool click 1; done" in it * "how did you--"

 _Subject has tried to drag the body._

"So I can't select now?!"

Then I ran one of the JavaScript excerpts in another comment which proceeded to make the page continuously open extra tabs (from other links). Task Manager to the rescue...

</comment><comment><USER26> Doesn't seem to load on Safari/macOS. Console error:

        Failed to load resource: An SSL error has occurred and a secure connection to the server cannot be made.

</comment><comment><USER27> What's the difference to the browser between "tripleclicking" the button and "clicking the button >X times in one second"?

ie: why did it respond that I "clicked the button seven times within one second" _before_ it responded that I "tripleclicked the button for the first time"?

See this screenshot for reference: [http://imgur.com/xhWHPQa](http://imgur.com/xhWHPQa)

<comment><USER28> In Windows, at least, on your ie: sentence,

* Single click - <USER2>

* Double click - highlight word

* Triple click - highlight paragraph

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> funny, it can track/sync me from my "normal" chrome window over to the anonymous chrome window, anybody have a guess how it does that?

<comment><USER30> Did you copy and paste the URL? It adds an id on the end, it doesn't track me when I remove the id.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > "Subject is privacy conscious, educated"

1/2

<comment><USER20> I was somewhat unnerved when I heard that -- my reaction being something along the lines of "Uhh, yeah, but who told you that?"

I'm curious how it determines these things, so I'm looking through the unminified JS, trying to understand it.

Now if it were to detect and call out that I was trying to reverse engineer it, that would be truly creepy.

<comment><USER31> I have a bunch of ad and tracker blockers installed, so in a certain sense I am "technically educated", but not classically so. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Turns out this was made not more than 10 minutes walking from where I am right now. Kind of cool to see.

<comment><USER33> and that is...?

<comment><USER34> Eindhoven, Netherlands (Source: [https://clickclickclick.click/credit](https://clickclickclick.click/credit))

<comment><USER10> hmm? Did they just delete that page?

> Cannot GET /credit

<comment><USER32> On the right top you can click on Achievements; then again right top for Colophon. This brings me to [https://clickclickclick.click/credits#](https://clickclickclick.click/credits#) but going there directly doesn't seem to work.

Also, specifically, Strijp-S in Eindhoven.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Is it open source?

<comment><USER36> I'd love to know this as well. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Wow this is very nice. It is like my dream. The inline aggregations are really cool too. Great demo!

EDIT: First saw this on mobile. Didn't realize there was sound. Distracting for me. Wish it wasn't there. (Well done, though.)

</comment><comment><USER38> Is there anywhere I find a huge list of all these new weird domains?

<comment><USER39> Go to the source: [https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/delegated- strin...](https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/delegated-strings)

They may not all be available for registration, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Hmm. Tells me to open on a desktop computer but am on a desktop.

<comment><USER41> Yeah, it's messing with you, don't believe everything it says.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Hug of death? I'm getting loads of 500 errors.

<comment><USER42> It seems to work now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> They should have showed more info from the request headers, like the subject's type of computer and location based on IP.

</comment><comment><USER44> That was interesting. Certainly kept my attention.

</comment><comment><USER45> Looking at the source of the page, its own description is

"A browser-based game on online profiling"

which is even better than the current HN title.

</comment><comment><USER42> Has anybody granted the camera permission?

<comment><USER46> Yep. It took a picture, insulted me then turned off the camera :D

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> How it knows how many cores CPU have?

<comment><USER48> Note that it's how many threads, not cores. I have a this CPU: [http://ark.intel.com/products/84985/Intel- Core-i5-5257U-Proc...](http://ark.intel.com/products/84985/Intel- Core-i5-5257U-Processor-3M-Cache-up-to-3_10-GHz) which the websites believes is 4 cores when really it's 2.

<comment><USER49> It's logical cores vs physical cores.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Surprising omissions: touch events, and zoom events.

Subject develops on a MacOS machine?

</comment><comment><USER51> I would like to see the app equivalent of this.

</comment><comment><USER52> Would be fun to see what other subjects are doing...

</comment><comment><USER53> omg that is fun and freaky at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER54> Awesome work.

</comment><comment><USER18> hi score ?

</comment><comment><USER55> ???? (please turn on your sound) nothing else on the site here.

<comment><USER56> Same happened to me on Firefox first (and worked on Chrome), but then when I tried again in Firefox, it worked there too. Also told me "Firefox! hmmm ... Privacy, alternative etc.." :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> The 'Dutch English' is hugely annoying...

<comment><USER58> Why?</comment></comment>


ADSL over wet string - <AUTHOR> http://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet-string.html <comment><USER2> I linked this to my dad (who's been a network engineer and CIO-type for nearly thirty years) and his response kind of floored me: "yeah, we did this with ARCNET. Brine-soaked twine." So, one, this is Older Than It Looks, and two, apparently my dad might be a wizard?

<comment><USER3> I've often wondered if Ethernet can be ran over brine or wet string, if even only just a few inches. I played with the idea once unsuccessfully but never put more than five minutes into it.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't expect modern 100BaseT or such to work, but probably the older 10Base2 over coax type ethernet i'd expect to work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Years ago, I tried the same thing on ham radio - made an antenna from a piece of wet string and tried to call cq.

It worked a charm, though I had to continously wetten the string as I applied RF power to it.

(21MHz ground plane antenna; eased the top end of the string through a hole pierced in an empty beer can, suspended it from a tree and filled the can with salt water.

Losses were huge, so antenna was easy to tune. Not the best of radiators, though, but I did work twelve or thirteen countries with it.

Cost of string and beer - $4.

"Antenna this end is the proverbial piece of wet string - literally. Back to you." -Priceless.

<comment><USER6> Just got my HAM license and callsign. Gonna try this out.

<comment><USER5> Just make sure not to use too much power - ten watts is plenty to start with.

Oh, and congratulations. You're in for a treat. (Though I would suggest not using wet string as your only antenna. :-))

73 de LB1LF /OddE

<comment><USER7> You _really_ do not want to use too much power because when that string dries up you'll end up frying your end stage if the stars don't align.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Introducing: Verizon's post-net-neutrality definition of Broadband-ready "fiber" lines.

<comment><USER9> New plan to replace aging copper networks.

<comment><USER10> Upgrade your business infrastructure to SaltyTwine™ today!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> For context, this is Adrian Kennard's blog. He's the CEO of AAISP (which I'd highly recommend for UK residents, they're extremely ethical and transparent; although I would not recommend their mobile service for different reasons).

<comment><USER12> I recently switched to AA from Virgin Media due to the unreliability of Virgin's service, but have found AA's to be no improvement.

I currently subscribe to both services and toggle back and forth whenever one of them stops working.

I recommend AA for their philosophy, and the debugging tools in their web interface are second to none, but in my brief experience the quality of their actual service is no better than anyone else's.

<comment><USER11> > _in my brief experience the quality of their actual service is no better > than anyone else 's._

It'll be better simply because they're better at _finding_ issues and following up on them, but like most ISPs in the UK, they do not have their own infrastructure.

There are three networks in the UK: British Telecom (BT, copper), TalkTalk (TT, copper) and Virgin Media (cable). Virgin Media, in my experience, is the most reliable network but unlike BT it is not available everywhere. AAISP use both the BT and TT networks, and will offer you what is available, or let you choose.

But if there are issues with BT/TT, you're outta luck. You can get, if you like, two lines and have a failover or whatever, AAISP will in my experience support you way, way more than any other ISP.

<comment><USER13> > There are three networks in the UK:

It's getting better though. Various smaller towns have access to Gigabit internet at home now, but it's still a tiny percentage of the population (around 1.67%). [https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2017/09/ultrafast- fibr...](https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2017/09/ultrafast-fibre-optic- fttp-broadband-networks-cover-1-1-million-uk-premises.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I once had an issue where my phone line was completely dead, but I was still getting ADSL, just at very slow speeds. In the order of 1mbit.

After the technician came he told me that one of the two phone line wires had been broken off at the exchange.

In other words, there wasn't a complete electrical circuit.

The phone was dead but ADSL still works without even having a complete circuit.

I don't even understand how that can work at all.

<comment><USER15> Did the dog bark just before an e-mail came in?

<comment><USER16> What story is that? Google didn't return anything.

<comment><USER17> >What story is that? Google didn't return anything.

I'm not able to find a definitive source, but it could be the following, which I have also heard from a retired BT employee:

"It's common practice in England to ring a telephone by sending extra voltage across one side of the two wire circuit and ground (earth in England). When the subscriber answers the phone, it switches to the two wire circuit for the conversation. This method allows two parties on the same line to be signaled without disturbing each other.

Anyway, an elderly lady with several pets called to say that her telephone failed to ring when her friends called; and that on the few occasions when it did ring her dog always barked first. The telephone repairman proceeded to the scene, curious to see this psychic dog.

He climbed a nearby telephone pole, hooked in his test set, and dialed the subscriber's house. The phone didn't ring. He tried again. The dog barked loudly, followed by a ringing telephone.

Climbing down from the pole, the telephone repairman found:

a. The dog was tied to the telephone system's ground post via an iron chain and collar.

b. The dog was receiving 90 volts of signaling current.

c. After several such jolts, the dog would start barking and urinating on the ground.

d. The wet ground now completed the circuit and the phone would ring."

<comment><USER7> I'll bet it was a German dog. German dogs 'bell'.

[https://www.linguee.de/deutsch- englisch/uebersetzung/der+hun...](https://www.linguee.de/deutsch- englisch/uebersetzung/der+hund+bellt.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "As a bonus, fit tin cans to both ends and you get voice as well as broadband on the same wet string!"

Ha!

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm sure Australia's NBN will add this to their 'multi technology' mix any day now.

<comment> King-Aaron Every time it rains, my local copper pit fills with water and my internet drops out.

Maybe they should replace the copper with Damp Twine to the Node.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Take a net, dip it in water, boom! Mesh networking.

<comment><USER21> You're joking, but that was the first application I thought of.

It would be really interesting to create a low-throughput fallback network for neighborhoods using something like this. Though I suppose RF or optical are still quite a bit more practical.

<comment><USER22> Or copper.

You'll never justify your choice of "wet string" as medium of choice when things go south.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hot dogs are also conductive, since they are also filled with salt water. I wonder if you could do ADSL-over-hotdog. Obviously the length would be limited by the length of a frankfurter, so you wouldn't be able to get more than a foot or so, but it would be an interesting experiment.

A pickle might work too.

</comment><comment><USER24> So, now that the concept has been proven, are we going to see a proper RFC proposal to standardize this? There's still 110 days left for submissions. That should be plenty of time to test what string types and electrolytes work best for various applications, to and improve the distance limit.

</comment><comment><USER25> After another 10 ADSL iterations, I think someone will accidentally forget to connect the wires and discover that it works just fine over the air.

<comment><USER26> Broadband without wires? Preposterous.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, how would we charge money for it?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Anyone have a link that explains (ideally with some math) how this works?

<comment><USER29> The pair of parallel conductors (wet string) forms a balanced transmission line[1] just like the copper pair in traditional phone line. The ADSL transceivers at each end automatically adapt to the available transmission line; you'll note that instrument reports that this 2 meter line looks like 4.5km of copper; it is a very poor conductor, so the ADSL transceivers fall back to lower frequency operation, which is apparently sufficient for low speed communication.

I do wonder about impedance matching here. Traditional phone lines apparently have a characteristic impedance of either 600 or 900 ohms. That pair of wet strings look to be separated by about the right distance to produce impedance in that neighborhood, or maybe the line length is tuned to eliminate reactance. It isn't mentioned but I suspect that RevK understood this.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_line)

<comment><USER30> Whilst the impedance of the line under yesterday's test conditions wasn't measured, it was replicated again this morning, and from memory it was around the 900 ohm mark. I'll be testing again tomorrow (trying to run bonded data across two of them) so I'll try and get a recorded measurement of the line's impedance at some point rather than just something from memory.

<comment><USER29> Great! That will be very interesting. It was just guesstimation on my part but the diameter and separation of the strings looked similar to high impedance lines used in SW amateur equipment typically in the 400-600 ohm range. A couple sites I've read state that ASDL actually experiences about 100 ohms impedance as opposed to voice (600 ohms) due to the large frequency difference. If all that is true then bringing the strings closer together will lower impedance which should improve the match.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Perhaps some Australian NBN (National Broadband Network) customers would get improved speeds with wet string over their fibre to the node installations

</comment><comment><USER32> I wish more science were taught using this kind of thing as a starting demo to provoke a lot of wonderment.

</comment><comment><USER33> "salty wet twisted pair", lovely.

</comment><comment><USER34> I once did this with HPNA 1.0

</comment><comment><USER35> Not sure if science or another pro net neutrality piece.

</comment><comment><USER36> _" He got some proper string, and made it wet..."_

<comment><USER36> idk what people thought i was alluding to here, i just thought it was a fun/funny way to talk about the experimental setup. get your minds out of the gutter!</comment></comment>


Can the Law Be Copyrighted? - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/09/can-the-law-be-copyrighted/ <comment><USER4> I had no idea code bodies have been doing this... incredible. Requiring private individuals to pay a private entity for access to the law under which they are bound is unconscionable, to say the least.

The ICC v. UpCodes lawsuit is clearly one important front in this battle. Another potential route to ending this would be for a licensed contractor to sue the government for failing to make freely available the building codes under which he/she is legally bound. The legal argument (and thus the government's legal duty) would be crystal clear in a case like that, especially because both civil and _criminal_ law requires such adherence.

<comment><USER5> So my wife works for general code which was acquired by ICC and she gave me her inside scoop on this. It's a tough gray zone because of how ICC's business model is structured. They are not government funded and to write the codes take a lot of people a lot of man hours. Unlike general code, they write code for the entire state and offset cost to the people who access it professionally.

On the ICC v. UpCodes battle, UpCodes just ripped the content from ICC and used it to create their own app. The ethical gray zone I see is this: if ICC can't fund the process of writing the codes, how will they get written? Can a for-profit company like UpCodes be trusted to take up the reigns on that if ICC can no longer justify creating the codes?

<comment><AUTHOR> The majority of ICC's revenue comes from program services, including consulting, certification, and training, which do not rely on profiting by limiting access to the law.

In addition, the laws are written by volunteers. ICC convenes committees of volunteers who author the law. That's how the run such huge profit margins.

EDIT: Disclaimer - As stated in a couple other spots on this page, I am a cofounder of UpCodes.

<comment><USER5> The committees don't write the code, they consult on what codes they want to see. Those people should be volunteers, otherwise it would introduce conflicting interests. The data they gather is then codified paid employees. They have no profit margin as they are a non-profit and they have highly paid executives because they are enormous in scale.

Stop talking out of your ass.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm glad these guys are working on the problem but I'm sorry this article makes it seem like these guys suddenly discovered this problem.

Jim Warren is the reason all of the California code was opened up and put online in the 1990s.

Carl Malamud has been working on this for decades, and among other things is the reason SEC filings are all online. He's been working hard on building codes for many years too. His nonprofit is Public.Resource.Org

Another nonprofit, free.law, has several programs to free up other legal resources needed to understand the law.

<comment><AUTHOR> UpCodes cofounder here. Fair point, and we definitely don't want to steal any credit from people like Carl Malamud and so many others who have devoted over a decade to this.

We're pretty new on the scene and unlike Carl who's an activist and whose main purpose is to protect the rule of law, we kind of stumbled into this lawsuit. We thought we were in the clear! Especially reading the case law, including the Veeck case (fought and lost by SBCCI which later became ICC) and seeing that Carl has most of the ICC materials on his site. We thought at the very least ICC wouldn't be able to relitigate this issue. It's bullshit.

Anyway, UpCodes wouldn't exist if it weren't for Carl Malamud, Corynne McSherry and Peter Veeck.

<comment><USER7> (IANAL) Good luck in your case, as it appears there is a government-created monopoly at work. I do believe ICC should own and control the copyrights to their work, however.

It seems wrong that local and state governments can both (a) release themselves of their own governing decisions by choosing a sole-sourced third party to write the regulations and (b) allow that third party to control access to the regulations at the same time. However, having myself visited an area in an underdeveloped country which was basically a shantytown, we should all recognize that building codes improve the lives of everyone.

The only real outcome that fits my IANAL vision of the law is to break up this monopoly and for local governments adopt and subsequently outline the codes themselves. The business could maybe then become selling those codes as a vendor to the government, but the governments themselves are the ones publishing them to their citizens.

<comment><USER8> You could fix this issue by a federal law that says any law or regulation that isn't freely available is unenforceable.

Oh your building code is copyrighted and you have to pay to get a copy? Good news! Legally there is no building code.

<comment><USER9> The federal government forcing a state to enforce a federal statute would definitely violate the 10th Amendment if the state has laws against that. I think most states have building codes irrespective of copyright status.

However, the very scenario is covered generally by statute already. Regulations, even copyrighted ones adopted by an agency, must be publicly accessible to have the force of law. Freely accessible in most cases relate to having physical access to the text in some free way. This seems like something that can be solved very simply on the state level: just redefine publicly accessible to publicly accessible on the internet.

<comment><USER10> You have to be very specific about "publicly accessible on the Internet". This has to mean in a searchable, interlinked, HTML format.

What the NFPA[1] does with its codes is to make them "available" through this horrible Java reader applet that prevents you from printing, selecting, copying and pasting or doing anything except looking at one page at a time. Oh, and half the time it's broken, or you have an incompatible version of Java or some other nonsense. It's a mess.

[1] National Fire Protection Association. They publish the National Electric Code (NEC) among others.

<comment><AUTHOR> Somehow it's not surprising to hear the NFPA Java reader is often broken. There's a perverse incentive: the more broken it is, the more money they make selling the law in book form. And then when they get to court, they can just say they already provide free access.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> So according to my reading - the ICC is an organization that makes building codes. Then they lobby state and federal governments to adopt them into law. Then they make their money by charging people for access to those codes. Talk about twisted incentives. No wonder building codes are becoming complex faster and faster.

<comment><USER12> > _Then they make their money by charging people for access to those codes._

The entirety of ICC's building code as it applies to my state is both freely accessible by the general public on their website, and unlike other complete douchebag SDOs--looking at you, NFPA--it's actually usable. Anecdotally, I leveraged the crap out of the residential building code while contracting extensive rennovations to my home last year.

With so much liability behind them, building codes will always be relatively complex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Either the law forcing you to follow it no longer can force such a thing, or the thing it is forcing you to follow is free to examine and understand. Forced ignorance of the law sounds like an excuse to me.

If "codes" can be held in secret by corporations until you pay them, could any law be a such? Could the rules of the road be shifted from the law books to secret laws too?

Secret laws trouble me greatly. They go fundamentally against the rule of law.

<comment><USER6> Yes you are subject to laws you cannot legally know about. Check out Gilmore v. Gonzales: the case was dismissed as the law was classified so could not be discussed in court!

<comment><USER14> Do you have a source for this claim? I'm only finding sources saying the case was dismissed by the supreme without comment[1], and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals did rule on it (in favor of Gonzales)[2].

[1] [https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/SAN-FRANCISCO- Suprem...](https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-Supreme- Court-rejects-ID-challenge-2658185.php)

[2] [https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-Man- who...](https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/SAN-FRANCISCO-Man-who-wouldn-t- show-ID-at-2523430.php)

<comment><USER6> [https://papersplease.org/gilmore/](https://papersplease.org/gilmore/)

What I described was the court ruling; its appeal was denied by the US Supreme Court.

<comment><USER14> Right, but you said it "was dismissed as the law was classified so could not be discussed in court", but I'm finding nothing that confirms that as true.

<comment><USER6> Check out the court's order: [https://papersplease.org/gilmore/_dl/GilmoreDismissal.pdf](https://papersplease.org/gilmore/_dl/GilmoreDismissal.pdf) (at the time it was Gilmore v. Ashcroft). The important part is buried: "As a corollary, without having been provided a copy of this unpublished statute or regulation, if it exists, the Court is unable to conduct any meaningful inquiry as to the merits of plaintiff's vaguenesa srgument". I was in court for the hearing; the government declined to provide any law or regulation requiring showing of ID yet asserted that showing of ID was required; the judge said (in the section I quoted) that as she couldn't see any law she couldn't make a judgement.

Most of the order is dismissal of the other claims on jurisdictional grounds and the appellate court (which by statute is primary, not appellate in this case) declined to take the case. As it is primary, this seems strange to me.

<comment><USER14> Thank you for the link. It sounds like they are talking about a TSA regulation, and not necessarily a law, though. Still very interesting, however, and I appreciate you following up.

<comment><USER6> Executive branch regulations (though not executive orders) are considered law (called "administrative law"), have the force of law, and are litigated in the courts same as law passed by Congress (unless Congress specifies otherwise, as with the ones the district court said it did not have jurisdiction over).

I was in the courtroom when the case was argued and it was clear the judge was looking for a good reason to throw it out rather than issue a ruling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've run directly into this with regards to the National Electrical Code. As an engineer doing your own home wiring is dead simple, but does require reading the specific practices if you want your work to be "to code", which is a generally good idea for liability reasons and your own safety. Public.resource.org used to have the NEC up, but took it down I think out of prudence/capitulation rather than a hard legal judgment. It's of course still easily available through torrents.

The only sensible model is that in order for a state (or other AHJ) to incorporate a code into law, then it must license it for the purpose of doing so. States would then directly pay code bodies for writing the codes, and could weigh for themselves whether it really makes sense to pay for revisions every 3 years.

Of course the code bodies don't actually want to just do this. What they want to do is the classic rent seeking model of installing their hook into government "for free", and then extracting a toll on each individual user in the form of official code books, prep manuals, etc. But this is directly incompatible with the rule of law, as the case law has been casually demonstrating.

(PS if you want an example of how much sway trade guilds still hold over local governments, check out Ernst Meyer vs Town of Nantucket. It's not about code per se, but about the general right to work on one's own home)

<comment><USER16> Same exact thing for the HIPAA regulations; they're written by a 3rd party who owns the copyright to them.

It's maddening that the government can simply wholesale adopt a code and not make it public. The feds, or at least the states individually, should hire experts to write the codes that are used by the public. Anything else is a travesty.

<comment><USER17> I think its totally acceptable for the states to adopt codes written by an independent organization, as long as in the end, people subject to the codes can access them without restriction.

I think the grandparent is right, the only viable business model is for states to pay a license to incorporate the codes into the law. We'd need to rewrite copyright law somewhat for that to work, because the code-writing agency needs to retain the ability to sell a license to more than one state, and sell a license for updates to the code, and to stop other people from making derivative works and trying to sell those to the states.

<comment><AUTHOR> Most of the organizations are extremely flush with cash and most of it is not from selling the law.

That includes the organization in this article, ICC. The majority of ICC's revenue comes from program services, including consulting, certification, and training, which do not rely on profiting by limiting access to the law. ICC makes a lot of money. Attempting to copyright the law is unnecessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In California, all the codes have an open-access version online ([https://www.dgs.ca.gov/BSC/Codes](https://www.dgs.ca.gov/BSC/Codes)). On the state website, some codes are more user-friendly than others; for example, the ICC Building Code has PDFs of each chapter that prohibit copying and printing, whereas the IAPMO Uniform Plumbing Code is a javascript app that allows you to flip between inaccessible images but not select or copy. Archive.org also has scans of the PDFs ([https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22bsc.ca.gov...](https://archive.org/search.php?query=subject%3A%22bsc.ca.gov%22)) (from Public.Resource.Org, described by other comments here), which allows saving. Up.codes is _much_ more user-friendly than either ([https://up.codes/codes/california](https://up.codes/codes/california)), since it allows you to search for a word and link to a specific code section and is mobile-friendly. I am very thankful that up.codes exists and has been expanding rapidly.

I am curious how far the open access decisions will reach. The building standards are incorporated into the law with amendments, so the state collaborates with the standards bodies to publish them. But these codes also reference many other standards published by ASTM, ASME, NSF, etc. by reference only (e.g. the pipe geometries, thread widths, manufacturing and testing methods). Do open access decisions cover these standards bodies' publications too? I wish they did.

</comment><comment><USER19> Copyright doesnt always mean no-one else has rights to it.

The idea of copyrighting a publication of legal statutes or codes could have some good, but the idea of obstructing the publics access to regulations, laws, or codes, and then somwhere down the line this problem goes away in exchange for money, is absolute despotic kruft.

so finacially challenged people have impaired opportunity to understand the law, its already an issue when there are mainly online disseminations of statues, and no physical text in easy reach. The technically challenged people have no access to the text of law in digital form, furthermore there is an issue with privacy that could come about. No-one should have to Pay, login, sign up or give PII in exchange for access to text of legal statutes, something that is public property and derived from public monies remitted to an elected government acting within its bounds of authority.

<comment><USER20> >The idea of copyrighting a publication of legal statutes or codes could have some good

No it cannot. Copyright grants things called "exclusive rights". They are called such because, absent copyright, nobody is excluded from them. There is no good whatsoever in hindering people from copying, distributing, publicly performing, or creating derived works from existing laws or regulations.

I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish by saying "Copyright doesnt always mean no-one else has rights to it." It's like saying shooting someone's leg doesn't mean you shot their arm. Copyright's sole purpose is to exclude rights from people who would otherwise have them. Pointing out that it doesn't take away _all_ rights doesn't add to the discussion.

<comment><USER19> if the public owns the legal text under a copyright then some 3rd party cant use that text to make money, and eventually claim it as thier own works, due to formatting, and secretarial time requireing offsetting revenue.

<comment><USER21> Why would there be a need to prevent that? The only text that is authoritative comes from the legal branch of the government.

<comment><USER22> The need to prevent that is the same need for any copyrighted work --to protect the economic incentive of the author

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> UpCodes cofounder here, glad to see people care about this! Happy to answer any questions.

<comment><USER23> The idea that someone could copyright the law is completely antethetical to democracy. Good luck, you're on the right side!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, glad to get such a supportive response from folks. After keeping quiet about it for a year and a half, it's good to finally get this lawsuit some attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Under Catholic social teaching (not that it matters here in particular, but using it as an example of a system of thought that's been around for a while), a law that has not been promulgated (i.e., been made generally available) cannot hold the weight of law.

</comment><comment><USER25> Generalizing a bit, it's fascinating that it's possible to break the law without being able to afford knowing the law.

You guys are definitely doing something that is innovative and a win for everyone (except ICC). Best of luck on the lawsuit!

</comment><comment><USER26> The State of Oregon tried to claim copyright on state law:

[https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/apr/19/oregon- clai...](https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/apr/19/oregon-claims-state- law-copyrighted/)

but they decided "not to enforce any" after word got out:

[https://lawblog.justia.com/2008/06/19/oregon-decides-not- to-...](https://lawblog.justia.com/2008/06/19/oregon-decides-not-to-enforce- any-copyright-claims-on-the-oregon-revised-statutes/)

<comment><USER22> Oregon also tried to make it illegal for engineers to point out safety flaws in their red light traps.

[https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic- li...](https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-light-timing- lawsuit/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> If I can't freely access building codes when/where I want them, then I shouldn't have to comply to them. If you cannot know the law, you shouldn't be required to comply with it.

<comment><USER22> There are many required fees if you want to follow the law. Building permits, drivers license, car registration, the list goes on. every bit of it is awful.

<comment><USER27> I'm more angry about accessibility than I am over cost. The law should be freely accessible, and in this day and age, freely available online. I have less problems with access fees for permits/registrations, etc. Though I feel a lot of taxes are generally excessive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This reminds me of another story which came out today: _Congress Is About to Ban the Government From Offering Free Online Tax Filing._ [1] This is a _privatization_ of the government.

[https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to- ban-...](https://www.propublica.org/article/congress-is-about-to-ban-the- government-from-offering-free-online-tax-filing-thank-turbotax)

</comment><comment><USER6> I commented on this down thread but decided it deserved to top level post: when Carl Malamud tried to publish the Georgia civil code he was accused of _terrorism_ : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_States#Federal_and_state_laws_are_not_protected_by_copyright)

</comment><comment><USER29> Who on earth is trying to make any kind of argument that laws constitute creative expression? From the laws I've read, they seem to embody a perfect example of the polar opposite of creative expression.

<comment><USER30> I don't think the idea is absurd on its face. Stuff like the building code or similar engineering standards doc will involve significant judgment in balancing competing concerns, just like a drawing of a bridge.

<comment><USER31> If you cannot read the laws you are subject to, should the government be able to punish you for breaking them?

If the ICC wanted to keep their work papers private, they should not lobby to get the enacted as laws and code. No one is forcing them to lobby their rules to state houses & cities.

<comment><USER30> You can read them, just for a small payment. Before the internet, you might have had to pay to travel to a library. Was that wrong too?

<comment><USER31> If the library charges? Yes.

In the age of the Internet, where data storage and transmission costs are effectively $0 for basic text documents, there is absolutely no excuse for all laws and codes to be 100% public domain.

It's not as if the government has to print a physical book for every citizen.

<comment><USER32> In fact, I would go even further and say that it should be illegal to force somebody to follow laws and regulations that are not publicly and easily accessible. By this I mean that people enforcing this or pushing for it should be punished. It's basically racketeering.

<comment><USER30> Does "having to go to the library" or "paying $10/month for a subscription for doing things most people don't do" count as "not easily accessible"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The ICC seems like a racket.

> _Its model codes and standards are developed by committees made up of > volunteers from its membership and ICC staff. The ICC lobbies for the code > to be enacted into law, and earns revenue by selling code books and running > accreditation programs._

They are the ones that come up with rules to follow, then they lobby the government to make the rules into law, and then sell access to the rules/law. How is this not a racket?

Not only that - aren't they also a monopoly that is abusing their monopoly position?

</comment><comment><USER33> And on the other end of the spectrum the EU has just decided to publish all its documents in CC-BY to avoid any such rights nightmare ..

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, wasn't aware. To our understanding, EU also has relatively homogenous building codes. It's the place we've thought we'd probably expand if we ever go international in the distant future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> There are two cases dealing with a directly analogous issues about to come up for argument in front of the Supreme Court of Canada.

The AG of Canada has taken the position that they're immune to copyright and can do whatever they want. By contrast, some amicus filings indicate they want these types of documentation to fall within the public domain.

It'll be interesting to see what solution is adopted, but I believe that there's a more intellectually-consistent, scaleable solution which is not in front of the courts that addresses the issues directly and with minimal fall- out to other stakeholders. Unfortunately, I only caught the ear of a few of the counsel after their filings were already done, so I don't think the proper solution will even be in front of the court.

That said, there's plenty of hope, and I'm glad the issue is in front of the courts. I do, however, find it strange that UpCodes settled while the founders were named directly but not included in the settlement.

<comment><AUTHOR> UpCodes cofounder here. I'd be interested to hear your solution. Also, can you link to the Canadian case? I'm curious.

In terms of the ASCE settlement, it included us, so the settlement was between ASCE, UpCodes, Inc., and both cofounders.

<comment><USER34> There's a few working pieces. There's significant jurisprudence starting as early as Roman times on the idea of 'law like' instruments garnering protections by virtue of their role in public regulation. The UK has a number of very plainly stated cases on the matter that are pursuasive in the US as well.

Some attempt to attenuate copyright's ability to exclude in the case of law- like works by using carve-outs in copyright, but this solution isn't scaleable - Fair dealing and Fair use are consistently under siege, attacked in international-level agreements and interpreted fairly inconsistently between jurisdictions.

Instead, my proposal is to treat law-like documents as being in the public domain but only to the extent that they are being used for their law-like purpose.

Accordingly, even if we change the nature of databased works in the future, we 1) assure the access of the public to codes, regulations, registration documents and other key elements of law, 2) ensure that the government's treating of these documents is not hampered by transmission or duplication restrictions arising out of copyright, and 3) protect stakeholder interests by restricting the scope of use to the areas where there is a public purpose to the dissemination of these works.

I can send the case names privately if you'd like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If the law be copyrighted, I can violate the law without getting the chance of knowing it since it's copyright protected. In that situation, I won't be responsible for the violation since the law is effectively secret to the public.

</comment><comment><USER36> > _" Now ICC has made its codes available online for free. All you need is a > phone in your hand or internet access to know what the codes say," says > Fee._

> _Its codes_

But they aren't the ICCs codes, they are laws. If they were non-legal industry standards a builder agreed to uphold as part of guild membership, then sure, they're ICCs property. But they're not.

Is a lawyer allowed to copy-paste or take screenshots "ICC laws" for use as evidence? One doesn't need private party permission to cite other sections of the law, and it's a damn slippery slope to start treating sections of the law differently.

</comment><comment><USER37> In fact an average citizen or a resident of a particular country usually doesn't know even 1% of its laws and can't get the laws to read for free - <USER2> have to either buy books or a DRM-ed database, all these are copyrighted. I actually find this ridiculous, if a state wants people to comply to its laws it should make all these laws easily available to everybody for free.

</comment><comment><USER38> Another possibility is for the states to publish the codes on their web sites, then the state would pay the copyright holder (out of their state budgets) for each person that accesses the code. Full copyright would still be in force, and per copy royalties would still be sent to the rights holder, yet free access is still available to those who the law applies to.

<comment><USER39> What is the copyright holder contributing in this case? The government is passing laws and providing the access to them. Citizens aren't paying anyone for access. I'm not sure what the third party is doing that it should be getting paid in this situation.

<comment><USER30> What's the copyright holder doing in _any_ case? They're the one that created the work! (Or who bought the right from the one who did.)

I don't even know where your question comes from.

"Yeah, nice. So you wrote a book, blah blah blah. What are you doing for me _now_? Why should I pay you anything? The text of the book already exists? You're just deadweight now."

<comment><USER39> So in the case of copyrighted laws in OP's scenario: The government passes laws (creating the text) and then someone or some company buys the rights to the text of the laws. Then the government (who created the text in the first place) pays the person who paid them to be able to display the text on a website?

And you can't see why I would question such a situation?

<comment><USER30> No, you mischaracterized the scenario. It's more like, a professional association writes their definition of how to build something while being "sure enough" that it won't flood, collapse, electrocute you etc. The government says, "oh, yeah, sounds right. Everyone has to do it that way." And then pays that group royalties whenever someone wants to check that they're in compliance.

That's no different from any other copyright situation, in terms of producing something of value and having to be paid for each copy, except that the government has propped up demand by making it the law and absorbing the royalty cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Not only is it covered under copyright, the vast majority of ours is the intellectual property of UNIDROIT and it's merely licensed to member countries. Our legislators merely approve with the weight of authority, or disapprove, on behalf of their constituents. See Uniform Commercial Code et al.

</comment><comment><USER41> The article suffers from misuse of the term "the law", which throws the wrong focus on things.

In common law countries, copyright developed in England, which has always had a concept of Crown copyright.[1]

Legislation has always been subject to Crown copyright. So the answer to the article's heading is "yes, as has always been the case".

However, the real problem is different: legislation often gives binding force to things not produced by the legislature. This includes texts of international treaties (in common law countries other than the US, legislation is needed to give them municipal effect), and sometimes even laws of other jurisdictions (eg many Australian legislative regimes are based on the laws of one State being "picked up" and applied as if they had been enacted by another State).[2]

The particular problem is when legal force is given to a document that is produced by private parties. That document isn't a "law" in the usual sense, but legal obligations (and rights) can be imposed/created by actual laws by reference to its contents. eg: you must build to a standard, which is defined as a document produced by standards body X, and suffer a penalty or have your building liable to be demolished if you don't.

The problem addressed in the article is when those non-laws are given legal effect by actual laws. It _should_ be the case that a citizen can find the entire contents of laws that bind them. There are areas of discourse in jurisprudence about it being fundamentally unfair if there are "secret" laws that a person may contravene but cannot know about to avoid contravening. The present topic comes close - the person has to pay to know the full extent of the law that binds them.

This is a policy issue, not a copyright one. Private documents like this will be subject to copyright because they are literary works.[3] The question is how to avoid the moral unfairness in one having to pay to know what one is required to do. Many solutions exist, eg compulsory licensing, a payment by the government in exchange for a creative commons style licence, etc.

The counter argument is that it takes expertise, time and money to create and maintain these standards, and if standards don't cover things to do with everyday life (eg obligations for driving, laws about what you can and can't do on the street) but are restricted to things like building or industrial activities (eg earthing requirements for high voltage installations), then these aren't standards that can be contravened by chance, but only apply if you undertake project X. So if someone wants to do project X and needs to comply with a paid standard to do project X, then doing so is a cost of doing project X.

TFA discusses this issue: building codes are relevant if you want to undertake building work. Should there be an extra cost of doing so, noting that you will already incur application/permit costs, inspection costs, etc in addition to the materials and labour?

We have exactly this issue in Australia: things often have to be done according to Australian Standards (which now often also double as New Zealand standards), but these are supplied by a private company that produces and charges for them. eg if you want to buy the standard AS 1926.1-2012 - <USER3> pool safety-Safety barriers for swimming pools, a hard copy is A$152.66 and a soft copy is A$137.39.

So the question is - if someone wants to put in a swimming pool, is it wrong that they have to pay and extra amount to get a copy of the standards that they must build to?

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright) 2\. This is a dark art, and has all sorts of conceptual and practical problems, but it is done. 3\. I leave aside the massive expansion in what is protected under copyright, another policy question but one that content creators have decisively won.

<comment><USER42> In order to understand the Law, we need to know the meanings of words laws are written in. If we follow the logic that some are proposing here, the government would have to license a dictionary and provide it for free to all citizen. That'd be plain silly.

Building codes just provide precise definitions of what constitute safe construction. They aren't laws themselves.

<comment><USER43> Definitions are definitely part of the law when words' common parlance meaning are not used in the law.

The question here is should the cost of writing a technical piece that make up the law be placed on those who must follow it? Or should the cost be spread out to all tax payers?

<comment><USER42> The notion that anything the law references becomes the law is quite absurd. Healthcare laws require insurance companies to cover the latest in preventive cares. Does that suddenly make various medical journals part of the law? Of course not.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> In Australia, the answer is clear. The regulations and standards used by the law ARE PRIVATE.

It costs several hundred dollars to get a standard. The profit margins are similar to Reed Elsevier.

<comment><USER13> [https://www.ag.gov.au/About/Pages/Ruleoflaw.aspx](https://www.ag.gov.au/About/Pages/Ruleoflaw.aspx)

> laws are clear, predictable and accessible > laws are publicly made and the > community is able to participate in the law-making process

Then, in Australia, the answer is clear. Australia lacks the rule of law.

The laws are not accessible nor publicly made. They are privately made and difficult to access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> It sounds like UpCodes is making the argument that access to the building codes shouldn't be restricted so that they can build a business selling access to it. Yes, they will have a free version, but their idea is that people will pay them instead of ICC.

<comment><USER46> I don't think UpCodes is selling "access to building codes" so much as they're selling access to a platform for planning, tracking, and monitoring compliance with building codes. The building codes are a fundamental piece of what they're selling but it's not the entirety of what they're selling.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's right all the codes are freely accessible. Users have to pay if they want to use our search engine and collaboration tools.

We started UpCodes for a couple reasons: one is to make money and build a business, another is because it seemed fun and interesting work, another is because we think this was important that no one was tackling (simplifying compliance, not the lawsuit which was unexpected and very unfortunate).

> their idea is that people will pay them instead of ICC

No, that's not right. Although, I admit I am pretty upset with them, they caused me a lot of personal anxiety of the last 19 months.

But ICC makes most of their revenue from program services, including consulting, certification, and training[1]. We haven't every thought about doing any of that, so their primary revenue stream is very much safe. The also have membership dues which are quite significant too.

[1] page 52 here: [http://media.iccsafe.org/AnnualReports/2015/2015AnnualReport...](http://media.iccsafe.org/AnnualReports/2015/2015AnnualReport.pdf)

<comment><USER45> > But ICC makes most of their revenue

I didn't read through the whole report and I'll admit it's not entirely clear what all the line items are, but (1) the "program/member services" cost more than the revenue the "program services" generate, and if "product sales" does represent their sales of access to the standards it's well above a third of their revenue. IIUC, they're a nonprofit, so those sales, and the potential loss to a competitor are the difference between solvency and insolvency.

> another is because we think this was important that no one was tackling

Maybe I'm just tired of the "disruption" economy, which as I see it is (1) find a way to avoid paying for things that other businesses have been paying for, (2) claim you've found a better business model, (3) profit. c.f, Uber, Airbnb, Monkey Parking.

In the "old days" you would have partnered with ICC, and built a better product together. But that's not exciting enough. Instead, you're doing it "disruption style" and trying to see what you can get away with. But face it, if you're successful, you're ruining peoples livelihoods. AIUI, these code standards are not some lunchtime conversations put together by politicians, they are specific, detailed requirements done by professionals for professionals, and one of the defining characteristic of being a professional is that you expect to be paid for your work.

The question of whether the law can be copyrighted is a valid one. Legal publishing companies have been dealing with this question for a while now (the most common way of citing court cases comes from a private company). But people are also entitled to be paid for their work, and you can't upend the system until you solve that problem too.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Boredom: Is resistance futile? - <AUTHOR> http://kuzujanakis.com/2015/09/08/boredom-is-resistance-futile/

<comment><AUTHOR> I didn't realize that boredom had been classified into 5 categories. Who knew boredom was complicated.</comment>


Libtorrent adds support for the WebTorrent protocol - <AUTHOR> https://feross.org/libtorrent-webtorrent/ <comment><USER2> A while back I built out a proof-of-concept distributed web based on webtorrents - [https://github.com/tom-james-watson/wtp- ext](https://github.com/tom-james-watson/wtp-ext). Once this change makes its way into popular clients, it makes the idea a whole lot more viable.

Unfortunately it looks like Mozilla's interest in the distributed web died when they made redundant the main stakeholders in the project last year - [https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb/issues/109](https://github.com/mozilla/libdweb/issues/109).

<comment><USER3> When I was last looking at the libdweb stuff they didn't have WebRTC support working in the service workers to let you use it from a protocol handler (and they somehow didn't even consider that important as they insisted no one would even want to use WebRTC, which made no sense to me); did they eventually fix that so you could do WebTorrent?

<comment><USER4> You can implement your own protocol + handler with the functionality exposed by the library as far as I understood.

It doesn't really matter anyway since you have access anything firefox can do with webextensions experiments, which was required since libdeweb isn't a part of firefox(and won't be anytime soon because AFAIK most people who were working it has been laid off) and to run experiments you need firefox nightly.

<comment><USER2> Pretty much this. The code runs as an extension - it registers the protocol handler in the extension's background script. That means the code for webrtc has no need to run in a service worker.

<comment><USER3> OK, so as I don't actually do much in-browser development, and because this was also two years ago, "of course" I managed to get the terminology wrong: the issue was that WebRTC wasn't supported in a "WebExtension" (not a "service worker", which happened to be the subject of a massive thread I was reading a few weeks ago on WebRTC not working there either).

Here's the bug I had referred to the libdweb person at the time in November of 2018 (due to comment #2):

> RTCPeerConnection.createOffer doesn nothing in WebExtension background > script

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1398083](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1398083)

This bug had already been resolved in September of 2018 as a duplicate of this bug:

> WebExtension cannot access WebRTC mic from popup.js nor background.js

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1278100](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1278100)

And I now see that bug ended up getting resolved in September of 2019 as a duplicate of this bug:

> Improve getUserMedia permission model for web extensions a bit.

[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1579489](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1579489)

Which was supposedly fixed? I'm honestly a bit concerned still, though, as this bug slowly got dragged from being about createOffer to being about permissions dialogs for audio/video, and it kind of sounds like there's some weird thing where a "foreground page" has to vouch for the extension, which shouldn't be required. Everyone who works on WebRTC stuff in browsers conflates it all with getUserMedia, but all of us distributed web people just want peer-to-peer data channels :/. I take it this is _actually_ fixed then, and you can now use WebRTC in this context?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For some fun confusion, there's this libtorrent library, commonly called libtorrent-rasterbar by distros. And libTorrent by rakshasa, which is used by rTorrent.

I've considered something like this for a web music player I have, but it doesn't seem to have an easy setup for downloading individual files from a torrent. And the latency would add gaps between songs.

<comment><USER6> You can use prioritize_files() combined with the sequential_download flag to "stream" a track (and prioritize_pieces() if you need the last chunk for an m4a file).

Schedule your fetches intelligently and it shouldn't be hard to keep a music player fed. 320kbps is only 40KB/s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Question: why did noone extend the torrent protocol to understand http[s] and speak to servers that support resume?

edit: I'm just now reading [https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0019.html](https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0019.html) and that's exactly what they did. My bad

<comment><USER8> It is supported, it's called web seeding.

<comment><USER9> although from how I understood it, web seeding really assumes you can control the folder structure on the servers.

so you can't just curated a data collection from publicly accessible sources and freely map torrent contents to files on http for bootstrapping/reliability.

too bad, really. it seems like a cool thing to just make a torrent from e.g. public datasets that are hosted on flimsy university servers. make the torrent, distribute it, the swarm keeps the files available and reduces load on the university servers, and the server keeps the torrent from dying even if the dataset is niche.

<comment><USER10> There are two BEPs for web seeding. One is defined in terms of base URL and relative paths the other in terms of pieces and offsets into them. Few clients implement both web seeding protocol extensions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Kind of a tangent, but how large or small is the risk of nefarious sites running torrent nodes without the user's knowledge or consent?

We've seen something similar with using JS to mine bitcoin. That gets you money, so that probably has a stronger incentive, but someone might want to gain access to the resources this would allow.

The WebTorrent FAQ ([https://webtorrent.io/faq](https://webtorrent.io/faq)) says this uses WebRTC and further says:

> _WebTorrent clients running on one domain can connect to clients on any > other domain. No silos! The same-origin policy does not apply to WebRTC > connections since they are not client-to-server._

Does the browser do anything to protect the user against something like this? Is there a permission for network access, and is it allowed or denied by default?

<comment><USER12> > Is there a permission for network access, and is it allowed or denied by > default?

WebRTC data channels are allowed by default.

> Does the browser do anything to protect the user against something like > this?

A nefarious website can already use the fetch() API to upload or download massive amounts of data if their goal is waste bandwidth. WebRTC doesn't introduce any new vulnerability here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Im not up to date on webtorrent, but if it catches on does that mean a good chunk of the Inter net could be freed from cdns?

<comment><USER14> unlikely. Torrents are slower, in most scenarios, than straight HTTP. With small files, they generate more traffic for chatting/handshaking than the file is actually worth.

It could however lower costs for people who distribute large files, where the final user can tolerate some download latency. I'm thinking browser games that can download a big archive via torrent on first launch, similarly to what Steam does now in their client.

<comment><USER15> A large majority of web clients must be operating on battery now, too. Willingness to burn battery participating in Torrent and other distributed protocols rather than HTTP will be low among those, let alone willingness to leave such a thing operating as a daemon in the background. It's why I don't see much future for these things (distributed file-sharing protocols) except in infrastructure or in applications where many users may be expected to be on desktop.

<comment><USER16> Conversely, every home router or NAS can act as a node in the mesh.

<comment><USER17> With data caps I'm not sure if home users have an appetite for that either.

<comment><USER18> Someone needs to create an app so awesome that the only way to join it is to contribute to it. Hopefully that will happen in my lifetime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I expect enterprise IT will soon want a way to block this sort of thing, if it becomes popular. It risks killing WebRTC for serious applications...

<comment><USER19> One can also forbid Internet or just computers, because one can do a lot of harm with them...

<comment><USER14> Considering SSH is forbidden in most enterprise networks I've seen, your attitude is clearly in the minority.

Enterprise-IT people tend to shutdown first and ask questions later, to cover their ass (and in their shoes I'd probably do the same). If it becomes trivial to torrent via mainstream browsers, I expect they will lock down whichever feature is responsible or apply massive pressure on vendors to remove the feature.

<comment><USER20> > Considering SSH is forbidden in most enterprise networks I've seen, your > attitude is clearly in the minority.

You can't really forbid SSH (on paper only you can) since you can create SSH tunnels via virtually any port.

<comment><USER14> Of course, but they still make an effort (and a policy that will be applied to you if found out). They have to, it's their responsibility. If suddenly half the network is saturated by people using browsers to torrent the latest movies, you can bet that the answer won't be "we need a bigger pipe"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I recently wrote a fun thing using libtorrent-rb: [https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/06/25/nbdkit-with- bittorrent...](https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/06/25/nbdkit-with- bittorrent/#content) It's a way to download, install and upload Linux distros all at the same time.

<comment><USER22> I follow your blog and saw that post a few days ago. I found it an approachable intro to libtorrent-rasterbar — thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is great news and will help lead to wider adoption. I hope that some progress will be made for handling large files since currently it is stored in-memory: [https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent/issues/86](https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent/issues/86)

<comment><USER24> I've been using Webtorrent Desktop for a while now, and really enjoy using it, but there are some glaring issues around random freezes on fast connections, plenty of open issues on it with other users reporting the same experience: [https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent- desktop/issues](https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent-desktop/issues)

I've personally been working around this using a custom fork that messes around with the simultaneous connections settings, and it seems to help quite a bit, but I still get freezing from time to time when I download a large number of torrents simultaneously.

I wonder if an alternative implementation in something like Rust on top of WASM might make those kinds of issues easier to avoid by making more efficient use of resources.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Once WebTorrent is ubiquitous among desktop and headless clients, the networks will become a lot stronger. Especially for applications like BitChute and for anyone who copies their approach. It solves a major problem with the cost of baseline hosting vs. hosting at scale.

<comment><USER26> The problem is that many people will want to run bittorrent over a VPN connection, while they'd like to run their normal browser data over their normal (low-latency) internet connection.

<comment><USER27> You're assuming torrents are intended for copyright infringement which is unfortunately a big part of its usage right now, however if torrents become as seamless as HTTP (like not requiring a separate client) I can see them becoming widely used for totally legitimate purposes.

Torrents can be a great, standardized way of delivering updates for example, and network administrators can easily deploy a platform-agnostic way to deliver & cache updates on their network by just deploying a torrent client somewhere and their fleet would automatically discover them (using local peer discovery) instead of having to deploy multiple proprietary, platform-specific solutions.

<comment><USER28> > You're assuming torrents are intended for copyright infringement

I think they're just assuming that you don't want everyone to know exactly what you're doing online at all times by exposing your IP to everyone and their brother that uploads a resource.

<comment><USER29> This. It's a privacy nightmare. It essentially broadcasts to arbitrary other internet users find out what resources you've accessed. That's… pretty dire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> When opening the javascript codepen demo linked in the article, the video plays immediately, but I noticed HTTP GET requests to [https://webtorrent.io/torrents/Sintel/Sintel.mp4](https://webtorrent.io/torrents/Sintel/Sintel.mp4)

Is this normal ? I know nothing about WebTorrent, but isn't the file supposed to be streamed from pairs, and not requested from a central server in an HTTP request ?

<comment><USER31> One of the Webseeds[1] specified in the Sintel torrent is that URL. That HTTP address basically acts as another peer in the swarm.

1\. [https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0019.html](https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0019.html)

<comment><USER32> And leaks your IP address and makes it possible to pirate content for simply visiting a website. You could target someone with all kinds of illegal stuff.

<comment><USER33> It's already possible for a website to get your browser to download illegal content simply by visiting the page, and expose your IP in the process to whoever they want. You don't even need to use JavaScript to do the downloading (just a image or video tag, for example), and the uploading can be done with xmlhttprequest/fetch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm torn on this one.

On the one hand it means the web moves (or can move) closer to decentralized modes of operation. Bittorrent is tried and tested and Works (TM).

On the other hand, it also means yet one more thing that moves into the freaking browser. We have enough things nowadays that are shoehorned into HTML/JS when really they would have been more usable even if written in tcl/tk.

You win some, you lose some I guess. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER34> Alternatively: every bittorrent client I have used (at least on macOS) is really, really bad. I used to use Deluge, which was buggy and slow to begin with. Then they stopped distributing an installer for it, so you had to install it with pip (!) and run it from the command line. God forbid I `brew upgrade python` or my bittorrent client will probably break.

Transmission crashes for me, and has little activity. Sometimes it just can't open torrent files.

The web doesn't break. You can load a URL, get some decent software with an easily-improvable UI—and assuming you're on a modern browser—expect it to work with no installation, in seconds. And if a site pushes an update, I hit refresh and get the update without needing to run a 45-minute `pip install` command.

<comment><USER9> fwiw, I've used qBittorrent on osx and found it to be usable. I'll admit that was a few years back, so maybe they (read: apple) broke that one in the meantime.

Oh, also, coming out of an hour long intercom session trying to explain to a customer rep how "no, I didn't change anything in my firefox, your site just suddenly doesn't log me in any longer" I'll posit that the web breaks all the time and all over the place, in many small, annoying ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The amount of word feross has put into P2P systems over WebRTC is astonishing.

Thanks feross for your incredibly great work!

</comment><comment><USER36> Is there a good book that explains all the BT technology? I'd like to use or build a robust client/server but most learning materials seem to be trivial or daunting.

<comment><USER12> Not a book, but I gave a talk at JSConf Asia in 2014 where I explain BitTorrent (and WebTorrent) from first principles: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxHRATfvnlw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxHRATfvnlw)

I also recommend just reading the BitTorrent spec. It's quite short and manageable as far as specs go.</comment></comment>